Automobile in American Life and Society is valuable but badly needs updating

(EXPANDED FROM 12/6/2021)

Our discussions about Ford Motor Company internal politics drew me to reread some oral histories at a website called the Automobile in American Life and Society. Interviews with George Walker, Eugene Bordinat, John Najjar, L. David Ash and Gordon Buehrig offer a great deal of insight into Ford’s postwar inner workings.

As with any oral history, one would do well to not accept at face value every factual detail. This is partly because recollections may have been limited by fading memory. In the 1980s David Crippen of The Henry Ford Museum conducted interviews with top executives and designers from U.S. automakers.

In addition, personal biases will have all but inevitably colored the recollections. That’s why one is likely to get a more balanced understanding of the intense political rivalries at Ford by reading as broad of a range of interviews as possible.

Here is where the Automobile in American Life and Society can raise expectations but then disappoint. More than 100 interviews are listed on its “Oral Histories” page, but less than two-dozen include a link to a transcript. Did the project run out of money before it was finished? If so, I would imagine that at least a few automotive historians would be willing to offer support to get the rest of the transcripts posted (I certainly would).

Website addresses issues avoided by buff media

In addition to the oral histories, the Automobile in American Life and Society includes articles about a broader range of topics than you will typically find in the car-buff media, such as on labor relations, race and gender as well as the automobile’s impact on the environment.

The content was developed through a partnership between the University of Michigan at Dearborn and the Benson Ford Research Center, so the writing has an academic tone. This can be more intellectually enriching than the pop-culture vapidity of so much of the car-buff media if you can deal with its dry prose.

Also see ‘1953-70 Chevrolet Corvette ads gingerly showed changing gender roles’

As a case in point, Margaret Walsh (2021) offered an overview of how women’s increasing participation in the American workforce in the late 20th Century led them to start using the automobile at similar rates as men: “The gender gap in drivers’ licenses, access to vehicles, and miles driven had narrowed considerably, and women and men had similar opportunities to make their automobiles into a second private space. In the age of more equal opportunities, many women made shorter and more multitasked trips than men because they remained more involved in domestic tasks. But they were as much tied to personal automobility as were men.”

1955 Dodge Le Femme advertising — *1955 Dodge La Femme marketing (Old Car Brochures)*

Meanwhile, Martin V. Melosi (2021) documented the automobile’s role in spurring urban sprawl — which began well before World War II:

“In 1920, the average density of urbanized areas (cities, suburbs, and towns) in the United States was 6,160 people per square mile; in 1990 that figure was only 2,589. In fact the average density of developments built since 1960 was only 1,469 people per square mile. These figures, however, vary widely from region to region. In the late 1990s, Northeast cities, which generally predate the automobile age, generally have triple the density of Midwestern cities, and six times the density of Western cities.”

Missing from Melosi’s analysis is a discussion about the automobile’s role in climate change. Is this a sign that scholarly independence only goes so far? Or that the website’s content has not received much updating in many years?

Website appears to have lost institutional support

The Automobile in American Life and Society looks like it was once an ambitious project that was abandoned. Indeed, a few years ago I noticed that the website went offline — and I had trouble finding someone who knew anything about it. Eventually I was able to contact a University of Michigan faculty member who had previously worked on the project. They apparently reached out to the university’s IT folks to fix whatever was broken. However, I got the impression that the website no longer had any institutional champions.

Also see ‘Wheel spinning happens when car buffs and scholarly historians don’t collaborate’

That’s too bad. The Automobile in American Life and Society has a good foundation that all but begs to be updated and expanded. Here I am not just talking about adding content, such as more oral history transcripts and articles. The website could be more useful if it were given a more modern — and readable — format.

I hope that this project receives a burst of new energy. Today the automobile may not be as trendy as high tech, but it still plays an important role in American life. This website is an all-too-rare academic resource that deserves to be brought into the 21st Century.