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How Did Cars Become Totems for Advanced Industrial
Civilization?
Personal experience from mid-century America
William Sundwick
Origins
It started in Germany. When Gottlieb Daimler and Carl Benz,
acquaintances from a start-up engineering firm, invented a light-weight
internal combustion engine (ICE in today’s parlance), they apparently realized
that it was ground breaking, even in the 1880s. They made early marketing
attempts in Britain, the U.S., and South Africa … all
with some success. There seemed to be widespread nascent demand for
autonomous transportation throughout those parts of the world where there was
enough infrastructure (roads and streets) to support a flourishing bicycle and
carriage trade. It was autonomous, in those days, not because it didn’t require
a human driver, but because it didn’t need a horse!
In the United States, and Europe as well, the ICE was a big
hit early, with a small army of machine shop innovators, all with the same abiding
faith that autonomous transportation would be the game-changer in the next century. They were right, of course.
The environment that encouraged their innovative spirits was far less complex
than the one that we know from Silicon Valley in the late 20th
century. But, like that latter day technological revolution, it needed tools,
and preceding breakthroughs, to facilitate it. Instead of semiconductors and
integrated circuits, the early engineers relied on lubricants and bearings.
Instead of a telecommunications grid, they relied on dense populations geographically
connected by thoroughfares. Developments in both periods required inventors who
were not only creative, but had mastered a concrete body of engineering
knowledge. They weren’t yokels!
Another shared characteristic of both these revolutions, the
early 20th century autonomous transportation revolution and the late
20th century digital revolution, was the existence of a widespread
climate of economic opportunity. The industrial revolution, by the beginning of
the last century, had advanced far enough, in Europe and North America, to
cause governments in all the leading industrialized states to start taking actions
to increase opportunities for entrepreneurship, by freeing capital for younger,
less entitled, participants in those emerging industrial economies. In the late
20th century, we saw similar enabling political momentum through the
release of venture capital.
In both cases, consumer demand was hard to contain once
unleashed. That consumer demand was always about empowerment … the power of enhanced
freedom of movement, or the power of being able to find out so much more about one’s
world, rapidly and without the need to travel (if you chose to take advantage
of it). Today’s FOMO
behavior disorder (“Fear Of Missing Out”) is the result of too much information
being presented all at once, so much that many cannot digest it rationally,
instead panicking, in a fit of nervous thumbing of their smart phone keypads. The
earlier autonomy granted by personal transportation resulted in serious changes
in housing patterns, suburbs, increasing traffic congestion, pollution, highway
deaths, etc. Power is very addicting!
Not necessarily for the common good …
Car Culture
We hear a lot about “car culture” as a sociological
phenomenon of the mid- 20th century, mostly. This was the period
when innovation in the technology was slowing, as the auto industry was
becoming more mature. But, the impact of the automobile on the consumer, the
future car buyer as well as the existing car owner who felt the need to
“upgrade,” began to take the appearance of a bizarre psychosocial game. At this
point, cars became the “totems”
of an advanced, some would say decadent, industrial civilization. Anthropologists
define a totem as a sacred object which represents something dear to the
culture, hence venerated by the entire tribe. Much the same way that
continuously “advancing” personal information technology has become the totem
of decadent post-industrial society in the 21st century. The fix for the resulting addiction is to
continually chase after the next new thing, the next upgrade. The motivator is
social status, or self-image, or some other psychological boost, but never
practicality nor prudence. It is the eternal quest of the aspirant. In
mid-century America, at least, we were, all of us aspirants, indoctrinated into
that quest for upward mobility as the basic “American Way.” If you could afford
it, you had to show it … and compete with your neighbors for the newest, flashiest
extension to your ego.
My personal journey through the “car culture” of the second
half of the twentieth century saw me as a young lad, in elementary school,
wanting to grow up to be a “car designer.” I made endless drawings of
hypothetical cars, based on what I read, even then, in the automotive press,
like the Peterson Publications or Road & Track. As the only child of a GM
engineer, who, like most of the engineering staff in his plant, needed to
maintain corporate and professional standing by trading cars every year, we always
had new cars in our driveway to provide grist for my imagination. We bought a
new Cadillac each year during the mid-50s, enabled by generous corporate
discounts; my father claimed he never lost “much” when he traded each year.
In high school, Dad directed me to read Alfred P. Sloan’s
“My Years with General Motors”, a classic tome in B-school circles, I gather, although
I never pursued that path myself. Sloan impressed upon my young mind the
incredible achievement of General Motors, having invented not the automobile, itself,
but the method for marketing them to the world! It’s not a stretch to say that “car
culture” WAS invented by General Motors in the 1920s!
In Sloan’s view, it was all about the concept now known as market segmentation.
What GM did was to convince the world that they needed a new car … one designed
just for them, to make them whole, and they needed this new car to be changed
out frequently! It was a new car that was a veritable expression of their soul.
And, their soul was different if they chose a Buick, or a Pontiac, or a Chevrolet.
And, as they changed themselves, confronting new challenges, new roles in life,
they naturally needed a new car! The evil genius of it all … an idealized
representation of the striving of all “good Americans”. Clearly, anthropologists
would call the automobile a “totem” for that industrial culture.
What Sloan didn’t anticipate, and would not become apparent
until the late 20th century decline of GM, were the limits to the
growth of aspirations … at least within the realm of personal transportation.
People just got bored with their cars, and everybody else’s cars, too. Cars
became appliances, practicality ultimately trumped sex appeal and ego. Car
culture died.
Flint, Michigan
I read Sloan’s words at a time when I was desperately trying
to have a bigger impact on my world. I wanted to impress, not just the cute
girl in my chemistry lab, but my peer group in Flint, Michigan. My tribe. Theirs
was, to be sure, a culture of “gearheads,” in
the early ‘60s. Quite a different group were those that I considered my real peers, far too nerdy to get any attention
from girls in those days. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but we all would eventually
do just fine, once leaving the culture of Flint. At the time, we saw no hope for
Flint, even in those prosperous days of the sixties. However, the culture
continued to haunt me long after leaving the area, to join the “bicoastal
cosmopolitan elite” in the DC metro region. Even now as I write, I think of
relatives left behind. I may even occasionally shed a tear for those who never
had the opportunity to get out, to grow like I did. Is it survivor’s guilt? Or,
what about the distinct possibility that many (including my relatives)
voluntarily chose to stay in Flint! Perhaps there was more to the community
than cars and upward mobility. I believe they would say so. Thinking of all
this, it seems the least I can do is pay homage to those totems of that bygone
culture, as though I were still a believer in the religion …
My experience leaves me, then, with real pangs of nostalgia.
I think of those left behind. I think of the better times my hometown knew when
there were simply more gearheads around. I think of my first car, a 1956
Pontiac with its paint job from factory hijacked 1963 Buick Riviera sliver
fleck custom color (unusual to see silver cars back then). I think of its
racing carrier rear axle (4.11:1, not designed for fuel economy!). I think of
jack rabbit starts from traffic lights, to “beat out” the high school friend in
the next lane, driving his mother’s station wagon! Power. I think of going to dragstrips in
Florida after college, just to watch … and hear the sounds, and smell the
smoke. I never had the courage to compete in junior stock classes, with my 1969
Opel Rallye Kadett, but could vicariously experience it in the gallery. The earlier
childhood dream of becoming a “car designer” had given way to a more impersonal
fantasy of simply imagining, and making lists, often with detailed description,
many different real cars, current and historic, equipped and modified in real
(or, realistic) ways -- knowledge of which I gained mostly by reading, and from
oral histories related to me by high school friends and college buddies, and
older relatives back in Flint.
It was a rich world of my imagination, with the cars
becoming literal characters in some primitive drama. I was totally enthralled
by the film “American Graffiti.” It seemed to represent that fantasy world of cars,
almost perfectly. I probably identified most with Ron Howard’s character, Steve,
exactly as George Lukas would have intended.
After “American Graffiti”
I was lonely in those days! Since I had not yet grasped the
meaning of human intimacy, it seemed that cars were the closest approximation. But,
they weren’t exactly sexy to me, they were just there, with individual
characters and personalities … like people. Like people in my life. I continued my childhood practice of touring
all kinds of auto dealerships, at new model introduction time, collecting
brochures, trying to convince salesmen that I was truly in the market, but not
seriously (“early looking”, but this posture was not possible for luxury make
dealers, since I was much too young to be convincing for that market). I went
to auto shows, where I could touch and sit in even those luxury and exotic makes.
I went to museums, and classic car shows, where I could commune with those historical
origins of car culture.
Then, after finally deciding to “get a life”, I managed to
briefly recreate my enthusiasm by channeling my oldest son -- when he, too,
seemed to pass through a “car nut” phase in adolescence. Perhaps the enthusiasm
was mutually supported. He picked it up from me, I renewed it through him. To
this day, he proudly promotes Subaru, and its branding, to friends and in-laws.
He and his wife have now owned three “Subies”, and he claims to have convinced
his sister-in-law to get one, too.
Stay Tuned
The Internet was here in a big way, now. It would not be
possible to avoid diving into the world of cars once again, images and blogs from
many different sources, instantly available …. different kinds of cars: classic
cars, antiques, customs, hot rods, exotics, even advertising copy for ordinary
cars (automobile marketing remains a discrete field unto itself, I maintain).
The logo for this “Totems” page of my blog is an example of
advertising copy for the 1942 Willys Americar (downloaded from TOCMP). Willys is a make that most
people alive today remain totally unaware of. They built passenger cars for the
mass market from the 1920s (as Willys-Knight or Overland) into the 1950s.
Always located in Toledo, that wonderful rust belt city is still home to the
successor brand, Jeep. But, the Willys brand always struggled, never built any
market share, except through the “Jeep” nameplate, which outlived the parent
company by several decades! Just a taste
here of posts to come.
My library of automotive images will likely be the subject
of future posts. An individual photo, or small collection, would be the
starting point for an essay on some obscure corner of the world of cars. Or, the
hot topics for the 21st century; e.g., we now have a different
definition of autonomous transportation. How about alternative fuels? Can’t
wait? Stay tuned …
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