Chapter 1

All Roads Lead to Detroit

In 2001, French paleoanthropologists working in Chad dug up the skull and teeth of a Sahelathropus tchadensis, the oldest known species in the human family tree. They discovered that its foramen magnum, the large opening where the spinal cord enters the cranium, was forward of those of earlier hominids. The location of the opening indicated an upright posture, which suggests that our ancestors first learned to amble on two feet some seven million years ago. Evolution being a slow process, it required another 5.2 million years for Homo erectus to stretch its longer legs and abjure the tree in favor of a bipedal terrestrial lifestyle. For a long while after that, it was common for human males to awake in the morning and depart the cave or some similar place of protection to wander in search of sustenance, returning as the sun lowered to share the spoils of the forage or the hunt with other members of the tribe. Given the limits of human mobility, the males usually confined their hunts well within an area of twelve square miles. Apart from the occasional migration from one twelve-square-mile area to another in search of better food or more security, that constitutes the history of transportation for the vast majority of human existence.

A mere eight to ten thousand years ago, mankind learned to canoe. A few thousand years after that, the horse was domesticated somewhere north of the Black Sea. About 3500 BC, the wheel was invented and large animals were trained to pull people in carts. The Egyptians gave us sailing boats in 3100 BC, and not long after that the sailing ship. Only the fortunate, however, had access to these alternate modes of transportation, which is why so much of the action in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387–1400), arguably the world’s first road novel, occurs on foot. The stagecoach was invented in the sixteenth century and the steamboat in the eighteenth, while the steam locomotive and the first omnibuses, early forms of public transit, made their debuts in the more advanced parts of the globe in the nineteenth century. Still, the vast majority of people got around each day one step at a time, and they continued to do so into the twentieth century even in North America where horseflesh and bicycles were relatively cheap and abundant.

In 1885, Karl Benz built his first Motorwagen powered by an internal combustion engine. He received a patent for it a year later. Many other French, German, and American automobile pioneers built similar vehicles in the 1890s and some sold hundreds of units but it was not until December 1913 when Henry Ford began mass-producing his Model T on an assembly line in Highland Park, Michigan, that the automobile ceased to be a toy for affluent adventurers and instead became a new means of transport for the masses. Cars remained an expensive proposition (the Model T cost $525 in 1913 when 50 cents an hour was a good wage) but between that year and 1930, a mere 0.0000023 percent of human existence, the mobility of the species was revolutionized, particularly in the United States where all but the poorest households acquired a car. In that blink of time, reported the President’s Research Committee on Social Trends in 1933, the automobile had become “a dominant influence” in the life of individual Americans. By their own choice, they had become in a very real sense “dependent on it.”

Between 1913 and 1930, manufacturers, the largest of them clustered around Detroit, sold motor vehicles into nine of every ten households in the land, the fastest rate of adoption of any technology to that time (only four in a thousand urban households owned horses in 1900). Vast numbers of people were now able to travel far beyond their traditional twelve-square-mile perimeter, covering far more ground than could ever have been imagined on foot or even on horseback, and in a fraction of the time. The travel was almost effortless and comfortable even for small groups with large loads. It was inexpensive (once the vehicle had been purchased) and so it could be accomplished again and again. It enhanced the ability of people to do things they needed to do, whether driving to work or running errands, and to enjoy what they wanted to enjoy, whether visiting a friend or seeing the country. By improving the drivers’ opportunities for action at every moment and in every direction, automobiles gave people unprecedented control over time and space and, with that, a personal freedom denied the previous seven million years of hominids.

Of course, there has never been an invention universally beloved of humanity, and the automobile was no exception. Right from the start, a small minority of motoring critics were appalled to find cars roaring along public thoroughfares at high speeds, horns blaring, engines backfiring, trailing dust and fumes as they knocked carriages into the ditch, mangled dogs and chickens, and stampeded defenseless pedestrians. These critics declared cars a public menace and denounced motorists as “a reckless, blood-thirsty, villainous lot of purse-proud, crazy trespassers upon the legitimate avenues of trade.”

Before the Model T made cars ubiquitous, jurisdictions in South Dakota and West Virginia sought to ban the automobile outright. Farmers in Minnesota and Sacramento plowed up roads to block cars from invading their countryside. Stories appeared in Western newspapers suggesting the use of guns against motorists and, while that advice appears to have passed unheeded, stone throwing was common, as was the practice of strewing nails or glass on routes favored by autos and the more dangerous tactic of stringing ropes or wires across roads. Demonstrating their relative civility were Vermonters, who directed cars to approach a town at a crawl preceded by a man waving a red flag, and Iowans, who required drivers to telephone ahead to warn a community of an impending approach. None of these efforts were effective in braking the nation’s headlong rush to motorize itself.

From the moment they began transforming individual lives, automobiles began transforming America. Farm and town were brought closer together. Rural life was relieved of much of its isolation and, with internal combustion engines now powering tractors, much of its drudgery. Cities were liberated, at great benefit to public health, from narrow, crowded streets ankle deep in horse dung. Millions were able to wave off their cramped rental apartments in sooty urban neighborhoods to achieve a dream of home ownership that had long been reserved for their social betters. They commuted to and from affordable, healthful suburbs with single-family homes on plots of grass with gardens and trees. Regardless of where people lived, they were no longer dependent on their family and neighbors for community and support. The young were able to escape the overbearing supervision of parents, neighbors, and clergy, motoring into the city to take advantage of its amenities and entertainments, or out to the seclusion of a quiet country lane. Pre-automobile proprieties and pre-automobile parochialism were everywhere in retreat.

The effects of the automobile on American commerce were equally profound. The demand for steel, rubber, glass, gasoline, and industrial chemicals skyrocketed. Horsepower replaced horses for the transportation of both goods in trucks and people in taxis, and sprawling fields once devoted to equine silage were converted to more marketable crops. Myriad new industries sprung up to serve the motorist including new and used car dealerships, repair shops, parts and accessory suppliers, automobile insurers, roadside motels, and fast food restaurants (White Castle in 1921 and A&W in 1923). Automobiles enabled factories to leave urban cores and expand in industrial districts. They permitted supermarkets to supplant corner groceries. Retail activity in general was redirected from the vicinity of train stations to highways and commuter routes, a modification that, together with the accommodation of 121,000 fueling stations and innumerable parking lots, played havoc with land values. The auto industry’s methods of mass production and mass marketing were imitated not only by manufacturers of other durable goods such as radios and refrigerators but by makers of cosmetics, tobacco, footwear, and many other consumer products.

All of this disruption strained the resources of local governments, which had to deal with the dizzying problems of high-speed traffic, the decline in demand for urban transit, the consolidation of schools and churches, and the explosion of signage, both commercial and directional, at roadside. New patterns of urban and suburban living, the expansion of towns and cities beyond their traditional borders, caused complicated jurisdictional issues. Tens of billions of dollars in public money was needed to upgrade old roads, build new roads, control traffic, protect pedestrians, provide emergency services, and police delinquent drivers. Courthouses were crowded with motor vehicle cases. Prosecutors, defenders, and judges could not keep up. A whole other set of problems, including the licensing of drivers and the regulation of automobiles, their use, their size, and their equipment, beset state governments which were constitutionally responsible for commerce within their borders.

Critics of the automobile had shifted their arguments by the 1920s. The complaint that cars were an assault on the senses and the public peace, while long-lived, had been overtaken by a more sophisticated claim that they were a catalyst of regrettable social change. Motorization was loosening the bonds of community by making people less dependent on their neighbors, local businesses, and civic organizations. It was hollowing out towns and cities as residents migrated to suburbs or larger urban centers. Family time, serious cultural pursuits, and churchgoing were seen to be taking a backseat to joy-riding. Links were made between cars and the crime rate, cars and delinquent teens, cars and sexual promiscuity. There was an aura of vice about the innumerable roadhouses and motels that had sprung up in service to the automobile. Some intellectuals were repulsed at the sight of the common man jacked up on four wheels, racing around, loose of all restraints, reveling in his freedom, putting on airs. The Sinclair Lewis character George Babbitt was a pathetic businessman and a devotee “of the Great God Motor.” He thought himself a pirate in his automobile and the simple act of parking became “a virile adventure masterfully executed.” This critique was developed and disseminated by the automobile’s detractors in the same blink of an eye that saw it embraced as an indispensable feature of American life. The broader public remained unpersuaded.

The authors of the President’s Committee report in 1933 were astonished at how transformative and liberating a force the automobile had been, how it had quickened change in every corner of the nation to such an extent that it seemed the whole of history could be divided into pre-auto and post-auto phases. This was a common sentiment at the time. Not long after the commission filed its report, James Truslow Adams, the esteemed historian who coined the term “American Dream,” cited the advent of the automobile as “the most important turning-point and change of direction for the common man in all history.”

Adams’s identification of the common man as the prime beneficiary of the automotive age is crucial. This was not a top-down revolution. It was not foisted on Americans by wealthy automakers or government or anyone else. Car owners decided that vehicles would be used for pleasure, convenience, and work. The advantages of motorization were so profound and clear to them that there was minimal public resistance to the comprehensive reordering of life driving required, and none that seriously hampered the automobile’s accommodation and development. The very shape of the automobile was influenced by an informal dialogue between manufacturers and drivers, who, especially in the early decades of motoring, took it upon themselves to tinker with their vehicles, making them faster, more durable, more comfortable, and more versatile. While certain auto executives and government figures would from time to time exert important influence over the industry, most of the time they were struggling to keep up with a burgeoning automobile culture that consistently exhibited a life of its own.

It was a point of pride to American commentators that the automobile came to life in their country, even if it had been conceived overseas. Left in the hands of the Europeans, some said, the car would have remained a rich man’s toy. It was the inventive, mechanical, and commercial genius of free men in a democratic society that had engineered the mass production of automobiles for a mass market.

There was some truth to this jingoism. The American automobile industry was led by risk-taking entrepreneurs such as Henry Ford, Billy Durant, and Walter Chrysler, men who with their own money had placed huge bets on the production of cars and made fortunes (and sometimes lost them and made them again) while rising to dominance in a highly competitive field. Between 1900 and 1908 there were 502 American companies launched to build cars, most using the internal combustion engine (a few relied on steam or battery power). The auto industry was far more entrepreneurial than the rail industry before it, or the commercial aviation industry after it. The former had been dependent on heavy government grants and subsidies while the latter was goosed by government air mail contracts and the development of publicly owned airfields. Government helped the automobile by building and improving roads, but roads were always catching up to public demand, not leading it.

The founders of the automotive industry shared with other great entrepreneurs qualities of strong will and commercial vision. They also possessed a deep appreciation for how the public related to their product, which set them apart from earlier tycoons in railways, oil, and steel, who did most of their business with other businesses. Automobiles were a consumer business, and an ability to speak directly and persuasively to customers was a critical part of the game. Henry Ford led the way in producing a durable, utilitarian, inexpensive car for the masses, meeting in the simplest manner their desire for motorized personal transportation. “No man making a good salary will be unable to own one,” said Ford, “and enjoy the blessings of hours of pleasure in God’s open spaces.”