Made In America (33 page)

It is not easy to conceive from this remove just how improbable was the success of the car. In 1900 cars were costly, unreliable and fearsome. ‘You can’t get people to sit over an explosion,’ remarked one observer sagely. Being in control of several hundred pounds of temperamental metal was a frightening challenge that proved too much for many. On her first attempt to drive, Mrs Stuyvesant Fish, a wealthy Boston socialite, switched on the engine and promptly ran over a servant who had been stationed near by should she required assistance. As the man struggled dazedly to his feet, Mrs Fish threw the car into reverse and backed over him. Panicking, she changed gears and mowed him down a third time. At this Mrs Fish fled to the house in a pique and never went near a car again. I suspect the servant didn’t either.

All the infrastructure necessary to support an automotive society – petrol stations, traffic signals, road maps, insurance policies, drivers’ licences, parking lots – was entirely lacking in the first years of this century. Cars were not just unnecessary but, since there was almost no place to go in them, effectively pointless. As late as 1905, America possessed not a single mile of paved rural highway. Such roads as existed were unmarked dirt tracks, which became swamps in the wet months and were hopelessly rutted for much of the rest. In many parts of the country even a dirt track would have been welcome. To drive through Nebraska or Kansas often meant to cross a trackless prairie.

Those who made long journeys were deemed heroic or insane, often both. In 1903, the year that the Ford Motor Company was incorporated, Dr Horatio Nelson Jackson of Vermont, accompanied by a mechanic named Crocker and a dog named Bud (who, like his companions, wore goggles throughout the trip), made the first transcontinental crossing by car in a two-cylinder, open-top Winton. It took them sixty-five days, but it made them heroes. For the most part, cars of the period simply weren’t up to the challenge. Those who
tried to drive through the Rockies discovered that the only way was to back up them; otherwise the fuel flowed away from their engines. Not only were there almost no decent roads but no prospect of them. The federal government long refused to provide highway funds, arguing that it was a matter for the states, and the states likewise showed the deepest reluctance to subsidize what might be a passing fad. In 1912, twenty of them spent not a penny on highway construction.

But the absence of highways didn’t stop anybody. America’s 8,000 motor vehicles of 1900 had jumped to almost half a million by 1910 and to 2 million by 1915. Infrastructure began to appear. Licence plates made their first appearance in 1901. Four years later, Sylvanus F. Bowser invented a workable gas pump and, with some prescience, called it a Filling Station (though the term would not become common for gas stations until the 1920s). In the same year, the Automobile Gasoline Company of St Louis began the first chain of gas stations – already people were casually shortening gasoline to gas – and people everywhere were singing Gus Edwards’s ‘In My Merry Oldsmobile’:

An exciting new vocabulary emerged. Not everyone could yet afford to go
autobubbling
(dated to 1900, a racy if short-lived term for a pleasure spin), but soon most people were bandying about expressions like
road-hog
(a term originally applied to bicyclists in 1893),
self-starter
(1894),
station wagon
(1904),
spark plugs
(1908),
joy ride
(1909),
motorcade
(1913),
car crashes
and
blowouts
(1915),
to step on the gas
(1916),
to jaywalk
(1917),
jalopy
(1924),
hitchhike
(1925) and
rattletrap
(1929).
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As early as 1910 people were
parking
in order to
neck
or
pet
(words that date from the same period). As time went on, slightly more sinister linguistic aspects of motoring emerged.
Speeding ticket
entered the language in 1930,
double-parking
in 1931 and
parking meters
in 1935. (The first ones were in Oklahoma City.)

Some words came into the language so quickly that no one seems to have noticed where they came from.
Jalopy
– in the early days often spelled
jolopy, jaloopy
and in many other similar ways – is wholly unexplained. It just emerged. Much the same is true of
Tin Lizzie
(1915) and
flivver
(1920).
Flivver
was sometimes used in the general sense of being a failure before it became attached to Henry Ford’s Model T. Mary Helen Dohan notes that ‘human flivver’ appeared in the novel
Ruggles of Red Gap
in 1917,
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but that would appear merely to muddy the question of how it originated and why it became attached to a car that was anything but a failure.
Tin Lizzie,
Flexner asserts, arose because Lizzie was a common name for maids, and both maids and Model Ts were black and made to look their best on Sundays.
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If this is so, then it appears to be unattested. An alternative theory is that it may be connected in some way to
lizard,
a kind of sledge. Nobody knows.

The two million cars of 1915 rose to ten million five years later. By 1920 Michigan alone had more cars than Britain and Ireland. Kansas had more cars than France. Before the decade was half over, America would be producing 85 per cent of all the world’s cars and the automobile industry, which hadn’t even existed a quarter of a century earlier, would be the country’s biggest business.

Most of the credit for this can go to a single person, Henry Ford, and a somewhat oddly named vehicle, the Model T. Ford always used initials for his early cars, but in a decidedly hit-and-miss manner. For reasons that appear to have gone
unrecorded, he disdained whole sequences of the alphabet. His first eight models were the A, B, C, F, K, N, R and S before he finally produced, on 1 October 1908, his first universal car, the Model T. (When, nineteen years later, he ceased production of the Model T, he succeeded it not with the Model U, but with another Model A.)

By 1912, just four years after its introduction, three-quarters of the cars on American roads were Model Ts.
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Ford is often credited with introducing the world to the concept of the moving ‘assembly line’ in 1913. Though the word may be his, the idea wasn’t. For decades scores of other industries, from vegetable canning to meat wholesaling, had used assembly line methods, but had referred to them as ‘continuous process manufacturing’ or ‘flow production’. Ford simply adapted the idea to a much larger manufacturing process.
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With his revolutionary methods and by keeping the car basic – ‘You can have any colour you want as long as it’s black’ was his oft-repeated quip – Ford cut the time it took to produce a Model T from fourteen man-hours in 1910 to just two man-hours in 1913,
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and with it of course the price fell. The first Model T cost $850 and rose the next year to $950, but after that, with Ford’s novel and wondrously efficient production lines and increasing economies of scale, the price fell continuously. By 1916 a new Model T cost as little as $345. Even so, that was far more money than most people could get their hands on. A new system of financing arose and with it came a raft of ominous new expressions:
instalment plan, time payments, one-third down, downpayment
and that perennial invitation to ruin,
buy now, pay later.

A month before the first Model T was produced, another great name of the industry was born: General Motors. The company, which had begun life as the Flint Road Cart Company, was founded by William Crapo ‘Billy’ Durant, a mercurial figure described by one friend as ‘a child in emotions, in temperament and in mental balance’. Durant
knew nothing of engineering and was not a gifted innovator. Indeed he wasn’t even a particularly astute businessman. He was simply a great accumulator. He bought companies indiscriminately, not just car makers, but enterprises that were involved with the automobile business only tangentially, if at all – companies like the Samson Sieve-Grip Tractor Company (which built tractors steered by reins on the dubious grounds that farmers would find them more horse-like) and a one-man refrigerator company that would eventually become Frigidaire. Many of his automotive acquisitions became great names – Buick, Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Chevrolet – but many others, like Cartercar, Sheridan, Scripps-Booth and Oakland, were never more than highly dubious. His strategy, as he put it, was to ‘get every kind of car in sight’ in the hope that the successes would outweigh the failures. They didn’t always. He lost control of General Motors in 1910, got it back in 1916, lost it again in 1920. By 1936, after more bad investments, he was bankrupt with debts of nearly $ 1 million and assets of just $250.
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Many of his best people found his imperiousness intolerable and took their talents elsewhere. Walter Chrysler left to form the Chrysler Corporation. Henry and Wilfred Leland departed to create Lincoln (which later came back to the GM fold). Charles Nash went on to build Nash-Rambler. Others were dismissed, often for trifling transgressions. In 1911 Durant hired a Swiss mechanic/racing driver named Louis Chevrolet. Unfortunately for them both, Durant couldn’t abide smoking. When, shortly after joining the company, Chevrolet wandered into Durant’s office with a cigarette dangling from his lips, Durant took the instant decision that the only thing he liked about the Swiss mechanic was his name. He dismissed Chevrolet, who thence dropped from sight as effectively as if he had fallen through a trapdoor, but kept his melodic moniker and built it into one of the great names of automotive history. (Durant was also responsible
for the Chevrolet symbol, which he found as a pattern on wallpaper in a hotel room in Paris. He carefully removed a strip, took it home with him and had his art department work it up into a logo.)

As the opening years of the twentieth century ticked by, two things became clear: America desperately needed better roads and they weren’t going to be paid for with government money. Into this seeming impasse stepped Carl Graham Fisher, one of the most remarkable go-getters of his or any other age. A former bicycle and car racer (for a time he held the world speed record over two miles), founder of the Indianapolis 500 Speedway, hugely successful business-man,and perennial daredevil – he once rode a bicycle along a high-wire stretched between two of Indianapolis’s tallest buildings to publicize a business venture – Fisher was, as you may surmise, something of a dashing figure. His fortune came from the Prest-O-Lites car headlight company – early cars didn’t have sufficient oomph to run headlights, so these had to be powered, and purchased, separately – but his fame came from creating America’s first coast-to-coast highway.

In 1912 Fisher proposed spending $10 million on a gravelled two-lane road from New York to San Francisco, and to raise the money through donations. Thousands of people sent in money – President Woodrow Wilson patriotically gave $5, though Henry Ford refused to cough up a penny – and by 1915 the pot was sufficiently full to make a start. Two problems soon became evident. The first was what to call the highway. A good name was important to galvanize support. Fisher’s proposed name, the Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway, was apt but rather short on zip. Fisher toyed with the Jefferson Highway, the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway or the American Road before finally settling on the Lincoln Highway, which had a solid patriotic ring to it, even if it alienated many southerners. The second problem was that even with all the donations, there wasn’t nearly enough to
build the necessary 3,389 miles of highway. Fisher hit on the idea of constructing what came to be called ‘seedling miles’. He would find a section of dirt road roughly midway between two towns and pave it. The idea of building a mile of good road in the middle of nowhere may seem odd, but Fisher reasoned that once people got a taste of smooth highway they would want the whole concrete banquet. Soon towns all along the route were enthusiastically raising funds to connect themselves to that tantalizing seedling mile. A new slogan arose: ‘See America First.’

In 1923 the Lincoln Highway – the first transcontinental highway in the world – officially opened. For the next forty years, it hummed with life as a daily cavalcade of cars and trucks brought commerce and the intoxicating whiff of a larger, livelier world to the hundreds of little towns (it mostly avoided cities) standing along its pleasantly meandering route. Almost overnight it became, as the postcards proudly boasted, America’s Main Street.

Eventually the federal government decided to make money available for interstate highways, though it continued to consider the matter such a low priority that it handed the task to the Secretary of Agriculture as something to do in his free time. With the help of federal money, other great roads were built: the Jefferson Highway from Detroit to New Orleans, the Dixie Highway from Bay City, Michigan, to Florida, the William Penn Highway across Pennsylvania. The Dixie Highway was yet another Fisher inspiration, though here the motivation had more to do with self-interest than patriotism. In the late 1910s, Fisher became seized with the idea that Miami Beach – or Lincoln, as he wished for a time to call it – would make a splendid resort.

The notion was widely held to be deranged. Florida was, as far as anyone knew, a muggy, bug-infested swamp a long way from anywhere. But Fisher envisioned a great utopian city linked to the outside world by his Dixie Highway. The costs
and logistics of building a resort in a distant swamp proved formidable, but Fisher persevered and by 1926 had nearly finished his model community, complete with hotels, a casino, golf courses, a yacht basin and a lavish Roman swimming pavilion (which featured, a trifle incongruously, a Dutch windmill). Then a hurricane blew it all down. Barely had he absorbed this blow than the stock market crashed in 1929 and the market for vacation homes dried up. Miami Beach did of course become a success, but not for Carl Graham Fisher. He ended his years living in a modest house on a side-street in the city he had built from nothing.
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