John Bell Rae and the Automobile
Fifty years have now passed since Mel Kranzberg shepherded the first issue of Technology and Culture into print. Fifty years have also passed since John Bell Rae—“the dean of automotive historians,” as he is often called—published his first monograph, American Automobile Manufacturers.1 That first issue of T&C and Rae’s first solo volume are linked by more than happenstance. Rae was part of that storied group of disciplinary misfits that worked with Kranzberg to establish the Society for the History of Technology in the late 1950s, and when Kranzberg assembled the content for the first issue of the new society’s journal in 1959, he included a review of Rae’s new book.2 Over the next twenty-five years, Rae turned out an impressive number of monographs and edited volumes, and his name regularly appeared in T&C’s table of contents as author, reviewer, essayist, and commentator.3 His contributions to the history of engineering, aviation, and especially the automobile influenced a generation of scholars and opened countless lines of inquiry. As a fitting (albeit purely coincidental) bookend to the events of 1959, SHOT would celebrate its first quarter-century and T&C its first 100 issues just as Rae released his final monograph, The American Automobile Industry, in 1984. Today, another hundred issues later, as we continue to reflect on the accomplishments and shortcomings of SHOT’s first fifty years, it is appropriate that we have at long last reserved some space to do the same for the work of John Rae.
The Record
Born in Scotland in 1911, Rae moved to the United States with his family when he was twelve.4 He studied at Brown University, where he received his B.A. in history in 1932, his M.A. in 1934, and his Ph.D. in 1936. His dissertation focused on the history of railroad land grants, but when he took a position at MIT in 1939, he considered himself an economic historian without portfolio. During the war he taught army and navy courses on military and naval history, which nudged him toward the history of technology, but his busy schedule kept him from seriously contemplating his next research steps. After the war he worked with Thomas H. D. Mahoney on a textbook, The United States in World History, which was published in 1949. This project prompted Rae to think more broadly about the role of technology in the development of the United States, as did an early-1950s collaboration with Lynwood Bryant to produce an MIT course reader on the industrial history of Lowell, Massachusetts. By the early 1950s, then, due in part to his work on these classroom texts but also to his everyday experiences teaching and working with engineers at MIT, Rae had very nearly decided to focus his future research on the role of the engineer in economic history.
The clincher came in 1953, when the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard invited him to conduct research on the engineer as entrepreneur. His work at the center—and, notably, his contact there with Hugh Aitken, Arthur Cole, and others working on technological matters— convinced him of the value of the engineer as a subject of historical inquiry. Rae was now certain that he had found his next general area of study, but he still lacked a definite focus. As he later explained, he “was convinced that the best way to proceed was to select a single industry for intensive investigation, one that had a reasonably rapid pace of technological change and could be presumed to have engineers well represented in its management.”5 Notice his dual interest in engineering and management: what Rae was really after was a way to study the relative importance of managerial savvy and technical expertise in the success or failure of industrial enterprises.6 He considered the railroad industry but decided against it after realizing that “every railroad spike in the United States already had at least one book written about it.”7 And so he turned to an area of investigation that was still very much the domain of the amateur enthusiast and largely untouched by serious scholars: the automobile industry.
He published the first of two important articles on the subject, “The Electric Vehicle Company: A Monopoly That Missed,” in Business History Review in 1955. In it he explored the attempt made by the Electric Vehicle Company (EVC) to monopolize the turn-of-the-century automobile industry on the basis of its expertise in electric traction; its considerable knowledge of manufacturing methods, by way of the Pope company; its absorption of electric-vehicle competitors and urban-traction lines; and its de jure, but ultimately not de facto, control of the internal-combustion market through the Selden patent. The EVC was a colossal failure, and Rae placed the bulk of the blame squarely on the shoulders of the firm’s management for committing several “avoidable errors of judgment.”8 Of these, the most important (or at least, the most commented-on in subsequent years) occurred at the firm’s founding in 1899, when its management picked the wrong horse by deciding to focus on electric traction rather than internal combustion or steam. This was an unfortunate but understandable error, according to Rae. For at the time, “the technical future of the horseless carriage was quite uncertain,” and “no one could say with assurance whether steam, electricity, or the internal combustion engine would prove to be the most acceptable substitution for the horse.”9 Electric traction was a viable option in 1899, and no one ought to fault the EVC for having chosen it at that time.
However—and this is the critical point, for Rae—the EVC’s decision to attempt to monopolize the industry on the basis of electric traction at a time of great technical flux, enormous market uncertainty, and minimal barriers to entry was a grave and less forgivable error. And when the internal combustion engine began to demonstrate its superiority to electricity and steam in the early 1900s—both because of its greater range compared with electricity (an important consideration when viewed in the context of an emerging market for personal vehicles based on the expectation of wideranging freedom of movement) and because of its relative simplicity of assembly and ease of maintenance compared with steam—the EVC compounded its electric-monopoly blunder by attempting to use the Selden patent to control the growth of the internal-combustion industry through an ineffective and arguably poorly managed patent pool known as the Association of Licensed Automobile Manufacturers. So for Rae, managerial miscues easily toppled the EVC, for although the firm was blessed with considerable technical expertise, at least on paper, its management lacked a sense of practical and technical balance. Hence its many blunders and its eventual, spectacular collapse.
In 1958, Rae followed up with a brief biographical sketch of William C. Durant.10 Here he momentarily set aside his general interest in the role of technical expertise, using the colorful and controversial career of Durant to explore instead the importance to successful managerial outcomes of a healthy balance between promotional skills and product enthusiasm, on the one hand, and administrative savvy, on the other. (Durant possessed an unhealthy surplus of the former and deficit of the latter.) This insight informed his approach to the larger, book-length project he was working on at the time; so too did the year he spent (1956–1957) as exchange associate professor at the Case Institute of Technology. There he met Mel Kranzberg and became involved in the endeavor to establish an academic society for the fledgling field of the history of technology. Rae, as is often said, had now cast his lot with SHOT. Perhaps more to the point, it was at Case that he completed the bulk of his work on that first monograph, which he finished in 1959 with the assistance of a grant from the Sloan School of Management at MIT. (Shortly thereafter he moved to Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, where he would remain for the rest of his career.)
Published by the Chilton Company—best known today for its automobile repair manuals—Rae’s American Automobile Manufacturers was an attempt to understand the technical and managerial dynamics of the early automobile industry in the United States from its origins in the 1890s through the mid-1930s. More specifically, it was an industry-wide case study of entrepreneurship, and Rae’s central concern throughout its 208 densely packed pages was to highlight the importance of a working managerial balance between technical skill, product enthusiasm, and business savvy. Successful automobile companies (the vast majority of the firms founded in the 1890s and 1900s were anything but) were therefore those that were run by entrepreneurs who understood the technology of the automobile but were not obsessed by it—by those, that is, who were able to channel their enthusiasm and their technical expertise toward the creation of vehicles that could actually be produced and sold at a profit. Too much enthusiasm for a particular idea spelled doom for many a company; conversely, business savvy alone was rarely enough to sustain firms founded on anything but a technically solid basis. Put another way, one had to know cars, one had to know how to produce them, and one had to know how to sell them. Although this may not sound like a particularly profound insight, consider the record: of the hundreds (possibly thousands) of firms that entered the business in the 1890s and 1900s, only a tiny percentage survived for more than a few months, let alone years. Those that did not make it, as Rae carefully documents in his text, were those that did not possess the requisite balance of technical accomplishment and good managerial sense.11
To be more precise, nearly all of those that did not make it were run by individuals with plenty of technical expertise and automotive know-how but far too little practical managerial ability—those who would rather have gone broke building cars than become rich doing something else.12 Sufficient technical expertise was nearly universal among the early companies: this was a critical insight, one which raised serious doubts about the role of the mythical, learn-as-you-go tinkerer at the dawn of the automobile age. To support this point, Rae begins his narrative, following an introductory overview, with two detailed chapters painstakingly tracing the origins of literally hundreds of early automobile firms. Most, he demonstrates, were launched by entrepreneurs who were either accomplished technicians or, slightly less commonly, college-educated engineers.
Clever packaging enabled him to present a wealth of material on these firms and their founders without getting bogged down: chapter 2 covers those which began in the bicycle or carriage business and then moved on to cars, while chapter 3 examines those whose founders started off as machinists or engineers before attempting to move into the automobile business. Subsequent chapters carry the story through the mid-1930s, covering the evolution of the early market for cars and the gradual emergence of larger automobile firms, especially in the Midwest; the EVC and the Selden patent (Selden, Rae contends, was not an evildoer looking to bend the rules of patent law to his advantage, but rather an earnest man whose ultimately advantageous patent-issue delay had more to do with his honest inability to perfect his working model than with anything resembling a nefarious sense of good timing); the formation of the first successful combinations; Ford’s development of mass production and the cultivation of a mass automobile market; the industry’s contributions to World War I; the postwar recession and the declining role of smaller, independent firms; the maturation of the mass market and General Motors’s (read: Sloan’s) eclipse of Ford; and the triumph of the Big Three. Throughout, Rae emphasizes the substantial rate of attrition during the industry’s first forty years and the critical role of managerial savvy, as a counterweight to technological enthusiasm, among the leaders of the precious few firms that thrived.
The book was well received, for the most part. Reviewers responded positively to Rae’s detailed research into the backgrounds of so many individuals, to his documentation of the importance of technical and managerial balance, and to the clear and concise manner in which he presented the story of hundreds of men as they entered into the industry via the carriage, bicycle, and machine trades. One reviewer wished that Rae had been able to include more biographical depth on the many figures mentioned in the book, while another believed that Rae should have tried to use his wealth of empirical material to better address the philosophical question of the nature of entrepreneurship. Perhaps most significantly, one also criticized him for failing to do more to cover the role of organized labor and ordinary workers—for having written a book, that is, which focuses far too much attention on the accomplishments of industry leaders and does so in an overly kind and even glorifying manner.13
Indeed, Rae’s take on the early automobile industry and its pioneers is overwhelmingly positive. It is also openly celebratory in its nostalgia for the freewheeling, largely unregulated, pre–New Deal era of automobility it covers. “The growth of motor vehicle manufacturing in the United States,” Rae concludes, represents “as convincing a case for freedom of enterprise as can be found. . . . The most fitting summation seems to be to paraphrase Patrick Henry and say, ‘If this be Capitalism, make the most of it.’”14 Over the next quarter-century Rae would valiantly stick to his guns on this point, defending the automobile industry, the automobile itself, and the system of automobility they spawned against a rising tide of critics.15 Much more so than anything else, his positive attitude toward the car and his consistent defense of it would serve as an underlying, unifying theme in his three subsequent books on the automobile in American life.
Automobility’s critics remained few and far between in 1965, however, when Rae released his second monograph on the car, The American Automobile: A Brief History. Published in Daniel J. Boorstin’s University of Chicago Press series on the history of American civilization, this book built on Rae’s earlier work on the car and expanded it in two key ways. First, it covered a lot more ground, charging through the Great Depression—where his 1959 book ended—and carrying the story of the American automobile industry through the early 1960s. Second, and more significantly, the book dealt not simply with the automobile industry and its internal dynamics, but also with the automobile and its broader context—in the language of the time, the automobile’s “impact” on American society. Rae achieved all of this in a book scarcely fifty pages longer than his first by masterfully condensing his material from 1959 into the new book’s first seven chapters. This reserved the final seven for material on the New Deal; the automobile industry in World War II; the labor-relations and structural problems of the 1940s and 1950s; the postwar boom in road construction, including the interstates; the era of chrome and tailfins; the role of highway policy and automobile use in the reconfiguration of urban and suburban America; and a concise conclusion examining the road ahead.
The American Automobile is replete with talk of the car’s “impact” and “effects” on American life, but the book does not present a simple determinist narrative. Indeed, Rae normally goes to great lengths, even when writing that “modern suburbia is a creation of the automobile” or lamenting that “the automobile brought blight to the inner city,”16 to explain that the car itself does not and cannot do such things. Instead, the automobile is an enabler, and the widespread availability of automobiles has simply made it possible for Americans to indulge a number of behavioral impulses already present in their psyche. “It would be an exaggeration to say that the automobile made Americans a more mobile people,” Rae explains at one point. “It would be more accurate to say that an already mobile people was given the means to travel farther, faster, and more freely.”17 Thus the accelerated growth of suburbia in the age of the car is simply an extension of a much-longer-term trend toward population dispersal that began in the age of the railroad and streetcar.18 Likewise, the automobile did not simply create a demand for improved roads that was gradually met through the efforts of local, state, and federal authorities. Instead, the road and the car evolved in a mutually influential fashion, or so Rae hints on more than one occasion19 (this point would later serve as the interpretive anchor of his 1971 book, The Road and the Car in American Life). In short, the presentday reader who simply skims this text is likely to come away with the false impression that Rae is writing about a one-way street.
What is apparent at a glance is that Rae’s assessment of the automobile and the automobile industry’s impact on American life is nearly always positive. To those who bemoan the advent of Ford’s assembly methods for ushering in an era characterized by the “manufacture in quantity of cheap articles, inferior in quality to the product of handicraft methods and acceptable only because they are lower in price,” for example, Rae answers matter-of-factly that “the alleged sacrifice of quality to quantity is a myth.”20 And to those inclined to complain that suburban life is monotonous and its housing numbingly uniform, Rae explains that the impersonality of big city life is far worse than monotony and that suburbanites have by and large been justified in exchanging their crowded urban tenements for individual dwellings sited on small patches of green.21
Likewise, to those for whom mass automobile-based tourism is a blight rapidly destroying the natural beauty of America’s national parks through litter and excessive tireand footprints, Rae counters by pointing to the inherently democratic appeal of mass access and the implicit elitism of those who wish to eliminate it: “it [is] difficult to deplore the social revolution which opened recreational travel to the many instead of the privileged few.”22 And, finally, to those who by the mid-1960s had begun to contend that public investment in mass transit was a more sensible solution to the problem of urban congestion than the construction of additional highway miles, Rae explains at great length that
the automobile will be an extraordinarily difficult contender [for transit] to eliminate. Its disadvantages as a means of commuting between city and suburb can be freely conceded; nevertheless no existing or proposed system of mass transportation offers any real promise of dissuading the inhabitant of Metropolis from using his car if he possibly can. Whether the trip in town is made to go to work or to shop or for entertainment, the automobile allows flexibility of schedule, it avoids the nuisance of getting to and from stations or bus stops, and it is invariably pleasanter than riding in crowded, uncomfortable, and usually dingy public vehicles.23
Flexible in time and space and individually oriented, the automobile is simply better-suited to go where Americans want to go, and when, than any form of transit. Though he admits it has its flaws, the automobile is for Rae the cornerstone of an American way of life that is on balance worth embracing.
When The American Automobile hit the shelves, the reception was mixed—and indeed, the book’s useful life as a “must read” turned out to be remarkably short. One reviewer complained that Rae was once again too brief in his discussion of labor and too kind in his analysis of industry leaders in what is otherwise a well-researched and notable contribution to the field. Another generally liked the book but believed it would have benefited from a more thorough comparison with developments in Europe, a fair complaint, while another simply noted that the book’s great weakness is that it is too concise. At least one other was much less kind, judging that “by far the greater part of the material presented is entirely lacking in freshness,” that “many of [the book’s] interpretive observations are either trite or truistic,” and that “for the business historian or economist there is very little here.”24 Ouch.
Mixed reviews had very little to do with the book’s short shelf life, though. This was due instead to what in hindsight cannot but be judged a most unfortunate matter of timing. Written in the early-to-mid-1960s and released in 1965, The American Automobile appeared at the very tail end of the 1940s–1960s zenith of American automobility. Against a mid-to-late1960s-and-early-1970s backdrop that featured Ralph Nader’s scathing Unsafe at Any Speed (1965); the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act (1966); the advent of mandatory pollution-control devices on vehicles sold in California (1966) and the 49-state market (1968); violent riots (those of 1966–1968, most notably), which took place in the very areas of urban blight Rae attributed to the growth of mass automobility; the federal Clean Air Act (1970); and the OPEC crisis (1973), Rae’s positive appraisal of the automobile as a source of social and economic progress rapidly came to seem far out of step with reality.
Following a brief flirtation with the history of aviation in the late 1960s—begun, he would later explain, under the mistaken impression that the aircraft business was a close technical and managerial relative of the automobile industry25—Rae therefore turned back to the history of the automobile at the end of the 1960s, at least in part to return to its defense. This effort resulted in what is arguably his best-known and certainly his most ambitious book, The Road and the Car in American Life, sponsored by the Automobile Manufacturers Association and published by the MIT Press in 1971. In it Rae broadened the scope of his earlier inquiries into the role of the car in American history by treating the automobile and the highway as a single transportation system. More precisely, his primary goal in this text was to explore the ways in which the state of vehicle technology have influenced the art of road construction—and vice-versa—over time. But this is not a work of co-construction. Instead, Rae leads his readers through a number of historical eras, each characterized by a particular direction of influence in this road–car dialectic: at times the state of road building has spurred innovations in wheeled-vehicle technology, while at others, innovations in the latter sparked improvements in the former. His coverage of this ongoing developmental race between the road and the car begins at the dawn of civilization and runs through ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, and colonial America en route to the late-nineteenthand twentieth-century United States, where the bulk of his tale is set.
The impact of this ongoing race on American development is a central concern of The Road and the Car in American Life. And not surprisingly, Rae’s overall assessment of the social and economic effects of the automobile-highway system is positive—often unapologetically so. He argues that its maturation has been a critical source of economic stimulus and upward mobility in the twentieth century, for example, both because of the expanded opportunities for employment available to a mobile population and because of the greater flexibility in the movement of goods and raw materials associated with shortand long-haul trucking.26 Returning to a theme he addressed in 1965, Rae also praises the road-car system for having opened new possibilities in long-distance tourism and national-park access, for “the growth of such driving for pleasure is certainly a social benefit in that it gives an increasingly urbanized civilization a ready outlet for recreation.”27 Good roads and cheaper, more reliable cars have also transformed rural American life for the better, helping to diminish the rural-urban divide in terms of access to quality health care, education, and broader markets for ideas and goods. Suburban housing, suburbanized industry, and the Interstate Highway System receive glowing coverage as well.28
This is not to suggest that Rae was somehow unaware or unconcerned with what was by 1971 an ever-expanding list of complaints against automobility. On the contrary, The Road and the Car in American Life expands Rae’s earlier coverage of the problems associated with mass tourism and the growing specter of urban blight. It also includes detailed examinations of traffic congestion, air pollution, and other blemishes on his subject’s record. But he wasn’t willing to blame the road-car system for having caused all of these problems, and he certainly wasn’t ready to give up on the system altogether because of those that it had.
Urban congestion, for example, existed long before Model Ts, White trucks, and eight-lane superhighways. If the road-car system has indeed made urban traffic worse, he explains, this has been due not to any fundamental flaw in the theoretical ability of the road and the car to move people and goods efficiently. Instead, it is due to the blunder made by earlytwentieth-century urban officials when many of them, especially in older cities, failed to grasp the revolutionary potential of motorized transport. We would not be in the mess we’re in, that is, “if the nature of automotive transportation had been recognized sooner and if prompter measures had been taken to adapt to it. Instead motor vehicles were expected to merge into existing traffic and transportation patterns and to share the same streets with trolley cars, wagons, bicycles, and pedestrians,” leading to makeshift solutions to regulate the flow of traffic that have prevented us from realizing the full potential of the road-car system.29 This lapse into counterfactual speculation—rare for Rae—does of course beg the question of why metropolitan areas that grew up in the age of the automobile (Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta, Detroit) aren’t the free-flowing motorized utopias envisioned by the enthusiasts and boosters who laid out their extensive networks of highways and roads.
Rae returns to the question of urban congestion several chapters later to discuss the range of proposed solutions bandied about in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Here his analysis is commendably evenhanded. He begins by explaining that, because urban congestion is a problem dating back long before the advent of the automobile,30 one then-popular proposal to ban automobiles from urban areas altogether is likely to do little in the long run to alleviate congestion. It might help alleviate the urban air-pollution problem, but it won’t make getting from point A to point B in and around our cities any easier. Instead, he argues that what we need is a more balanced approach that aims to limit the number of cars entering a central business district on any given day without restricting the flow of cars so much that easy access to the urban core is jeopardized. Public transportation can and should play an important role in this, he explains, especially in older areas where extensive transit infrastructure already exists. And for metropolises built up during the age of the road-car system, he suggests that buses are a better option than rail-bound transit because they are cheaper and better able to meet the transportation needs of a dispersed population. More careful attention to the regulation of automobile traffic is important as well, and here Rae recommends improvements ranging from functionally separated streets to intelligent signals and reversible lanes. Whatever policies we choose to adopt in the years to come, however, Rae cautions that none of these solutions should be forced on an unwilling public. “In a free society, public acceptance of a policy is a vital element.”31
Here he is harking back to a key argument he introduces a few chapters earlier in his discussion of suburban development. Responding to those who criticize suburban America and claim that we would all be better off if tract housing and cul-de-sacs had never materialized, Rae admits that suburbia has its drawbacks in everything from community and aesthetic values to metropolitan-area taxation policies. But he remains convinced that “none of this can alter the plain fact that American suburban life is here, that it is a major and integral part of American society, that this is so because a sufficient number of people prefer suburban existence as a way of life, and that it is a way of life with positive qualities,” particularly when compared with densely packed urban living. His conclusion? “Americans who wish to live in apartment clusters close to public transportation should certainly have the option of doing so,” but the preferences of those who “vote decisively for suburbs” must be respected as well. The key, that is, is to allow for the development of a natural balance in urban policymaking, a balance grounded at all times in individual free choice rather than political manipulation.32
In his concluding chapter, however, Rae’s evenhandedness recedes, and he adopts a bold and decisive stance in defense of mass automobility the likes of which would rarely appear again in academic texts on the subject:
There is nothing automatic about the growth of modern highway transportation. It is neither an inevitable consequence of inexorable, impersonal forces, nor is it the end product of a sequence of unrelated accidents. It is the result of human activity responding to unsatisfied or insufficiently satisfied needs, and its phenomenal growth has been due to the fact that it has filled these needs better than anything else that has appeared so far.33
Returning to the theme of egalitarianism a few pages later to better explain his point, Rae claims that in the automobile’s unique ability to satisfy our transportation needs, “there is more than just convenience” at work.
The mobility conferred by the automobile has benefited ordinary people most. The wealthy could afford coaches and carriages and so had some freedom of movement, . . . [but o]rdinary people seldom ranged any distance from home; if they did, they had to go by some form of public conveyance, provided it was available, or they walked. This is where the automobile has been an instrument of social revolution, first in the United States and now extending throughout the world. Perhaps this social revolution explains the distaste of so many self-appointed “elite” groups for the automobile, or more accurately for automobile ownership by people other than themselves. It is one thing to profess concern for the “common man” but quite another to have to accept him on terms of actual equality
. . . . In this whole general attitude there is a curious affinity between the “old guard” and many of those who identify themselves as “intellectual liberals.” The affinity may well arise from the fact that both groups consider themselves to be elites, better qualified to judge what is good for the common man than the common man himself and therefore entitled to impose this good regardless of how the recipient may feel about it.34
“The individuality of automobile transportation,” he concludes, “is something that Americans, and others, are not going to give up except under a degree of compulsion completely unacceptable in a free society.”35 Like it or not, Americans tend to prefer the road-car system to any of its alternatives. And this, he argues, is a fact with which politicians, academics, and other pundits need to come to terms—assuming, of course, that they actually believe in the democratic values they publicly embrace.
The Road and the Car in American Life was widely received precisely as Rae must have intended: as a controversial slap in the face to automobility’s knee-jerk critics, especially those in the academy. At least one reviewer welcomed the book’s intervention, “at a time when there is a strong tendency to emphasize the adverse features of highway transportation,” for providing “a more balanced view of its benefits, without denying the crucial concerns of the critics of automotive transportation.”36 Others also praised the book’s balance, especially for the way it covers the disasters attributable to the car (urban blight and the deteriorating state of the national parks, most notably) while also demonstrating that the auto-centric world of the early 1970s exists precisely because people have chosen to make it so.37
Others were less convinced that Rae was aiming for balance. In Technology and Culture, Reynold M. Wik pointed out that the book’s origins in an Automobile Manufacturers Association grant were likely to raise doubts about its objectivity. Wik also noted that automobility’s critics would find little of value in Rae’s assessment and recommendations, “which seem to promise more cars, more concrete, more black top, and more Chamber of Commerce speeches”—more of the same. Wik’s review concluded with the observation that the problems associated with mass automobility were far more serious than Rae admits. Solutions “rooted in the political clout of governmental agencies” were therefore likely to remain the demand of a public increasingly fed up with the car and its ill effects, regardless of whether or not that same public also preferred individual mobility.38
James J. Flink’s assessment was more damning. Writing in Business History Review, Flink began by praising Rae for “treating the road and the car . . . as an integral unit, integrating two distinct bodies of historical literature to the mutual benefit of both.”39 He also wrote that Rae is correct in his overall evaluation that “mass automobility has been on balance beneficial,” and that “any viable transportation system for the foreseeable future must be based primarily on the road and the car.”40 But Flink was deeply troubled by Rae’s defense of automobility and his inattention to the arguments of its critics. Too much of Rae’s perspective is based on “traditional, valueladen assumptions,” he wrote, assumptions that ought to be thoroughly questioned, including “the primacy of consumer need” and “the existence of consumer democracy.” That is, even if consumers have freely chosen automobility over its alternatives (and Flink hints strongly that this choice was in fact not made freely), then we still must question whether this preference actually outweighs the need to deal with its unanticipated consequences. More condemning was Flink’s dismissal of one of Rae’s most important critiques of the road-car system’s foes.
Professor Rae . . . seems fairly oblivious to the decimation of the scenic beauty of the American countryside and our free-flowing streams and remaining wilderness areas by the incursions of the road and the car. His lopsided view of the benefits of urban sprawl and his simplistic characterization that people are undemocratic who protest against the threat that uncurbed automobility poses to our national parks illustrate this.41
Flink nevertheless concluded by recommending The Road and the Car in American Life because it promised to “raise the quality of debate over the faults and merits of the American automobile revolution.”42
And for a brief while it did. But in the end, this was a debate that the automobile’s critics were all but destined to win in a decade marked by worsening pollution, reprehensible behavior on the part of the Big Three, economic stagnation, and two major oil crises. The 1970s would belong not to Rae and his optimistic defense of the road and the car, but to those like Flink, whose personally and politically charged condemnation of the automobile, The Car Culture (1975), ended with the suggestion that nothing less than a cultural revolution was necessary if the shackles of the age of the car and all it entailed were ever to be shed. For Flink, the automobile belonged to an era of “self interest, greed, and waste,” whereas the automobile-free society of the future would be one of “true community and expanded democracy, free from . . . privatism, materialism, escapism, and exploitation.”43 Clearly Rae and Flink did not agree on the meaning of the word “democracy,” Rae preferring an interpretation in which individual choices and individual lives are paramount and Flink one valuing community and collective effort instead.
Flink mellowed out a great deal by the time he produced what came to be the first truly long-lived and nearly universally assigned synthesis of American automobility some years later, 1988’s The Automobile Age. Prior to that book’s appearance, though, John Bell Rae took one more crack at the elusive goal of producing an enduring synthesis with The American Automobile Industry, published in Albro Martin’s Twayne series on the evolution of American business in 1984.
With this book, Rae returned to where it all began for him two-and-ahalf decades earlier by producing a volume focusing squarely on the automobile industry. The result is not entirely devoid of social context, but it is demonstrably less ambitious than his contributions of 1965 and 1971. And, unlike his narrowly tailored 1959 examination of the industry’s first forty years, The American Automobile Industry endeavors to carry the story through to what was then the present. Divided into four chronologically oriented sections—the period of origin and growth (chapters 1–5), the period of American dominance (chapters 6–9), the period of governmental regulation and foreign competition (chapters 10–12), and the then-current era of the “international automobile industry” (chapters 13–14)—the book seeks above all else to highlight what Rae saw as the industry’s chief contributions to global business: its techniques of mass production and its innovations in the realm of business organization. The book also revisits some of the major concerns of Rae’s prior work on the industry, most notably its long-term trend toward oligopoly and the importance of individual personalities to its early growth and maturation.
By far the biggest departure from his earlier work evident here, apart from a more ambitious chronological breadth, is the book’s effort to place the American automobile industry within an international context. This was due in part to what Rae learned while writing a history of Nissan’s presence in the United States—a project the firm commissioned on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of its involvement in the North American market in 1980, and which McGraw-Hill published in 1982.44 Thus one finds a great deal more here than in his previous volumes about the early American industry’s growing export trade in the 1920s and its decision to work around German, British, and French import restrictions by establishing or acquiring European subsidiaries (Ford of Europe, for example, and GM’s Vauxhall/Opel).45 One also finds a much more satisfactory discussion of the first American “compacts” of the late 1950s, developed as a half-hearted response to American market-share gains by Volkswagen and Renault, among others, as well as an informative look at the ways in which Japanese brands managed to nudge aside VW as the imported-car leader in the American market in the 1970s.46
Perhaps most intriguing is Rae’s chapter on “the international industry” of the 1980s. Here he recaps the international expansion of Americanbrand production into Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Australia during the 1920s and 1930s, as well as similar moves by VW into Latin America, South Africa, and the United States in the 1970s. Beginning with Nissan’s Smyrna, Tennessee, plant, Japanese manufacturers followed VW’s lead in the early 1980s by establishing plants of their own in the United States. All of this resulted in the emergence of a truly international industry, Rae concludes, one in which the market for cars “has come to transcend national boundaries completely.”47 He explains that this is most clearly evident in the emergence in the 1980s of the so-called “world car,” a philosophy of manufacturing in which a single model of car is designed globally, produced at numerous plants, and sold for use throughout the world. In his discussion of the world car concept, though, his choice of the Ford Escort as an example is unfortunate, for the Escorts sold in North America differed notably (in powertrain and in body design) from those sold elsewhere.
Indeed, this points toward a more substantial shortcoming of Rae’s analysis of the international industry: notably absent here is any real discussion of the many ways in which government regulations and market preferences gave rise to major differences between a given car as sold in the United States and as sold, for example, in Western Europe. This was true even of cars much more similar in their international variations than the Escort, everything from the humble VW Beetle to the exotic Lamborghini Countach. Market-specific differences in these vehicles were many, though the most common were variations in bumper structures and shapes, seat contours, ride heights, headlight configurations, exhaust systems, and engine displacement and tuning. Rae is not alone in overlooking marketspecific variations, of course—the same basic oversight mars Flink’s The Automobile Age, too—but given the importance Rae attributes to the international character of the 1980s automobile industry, it is an unfortunate stumble.48
The American Automobile Industry ends with a return to some of Rae’s trademark arguments regarding the indispensability of the car to American life, including the familiar refrain that “no form of public transportation, existing or in prospect, can compete with the private automobile in economy or . . . door-to-door convenience.”49 But he seems to lack the same sense of conviction that was evident in his earlier monographs.50 Thus, while he clearly reaffirms his belief in the future of our auto-centric society, he also at least hints that the automobile itself is due for a makeover, at least in terms of our choice of fuel.
Twenty-five years and one SUV boom later, a revolution in fuels does at long last appear to be in the offing: electric vehicles are beginning to reappear, and hybrids and clean-diesel power at least seem to promise a future for the automobile not characterized by a gluttonous appetite for liquefied dinosaurs. Interestingly enough, however, our best present-day solution to the problem of battery range—a critical electric-vehicle bottleneck Rae emphasized in his 1955 article on the EVC and also toward the end of The American Automobile Industry twenty-nine years later—appears to be the use of an auxiliary gasoline engine to recharge short-lived electric cells on longer trips (as in the much-ballyhooed and much-delayed Chevrolet Volt). One wonders what Rae might have thought of this and many of the other trends within the present-day industry not evident in the mid-1980s, but in the end, The American Automobile Industry would be his final word on the subject; John Bell Rae passed from this life on 24 October 1988.
The Legacy
While working on this essay I obtained a copy of John Heitmann’s new synthesis, The Automobile and American Life. Reading through its introduction, I was not surprised to find that Heitmann’s goal was to produce a new industry-standard volume to replace James Flink’s long-in-the-tooth The Automobile Age on undergraduate and graduate reading lists. Flink’s text is after all the standard go-to volume, the one book on cars that everyone involved in the business, technological, economic, and cultural history of the United States is likely to have on his/her shelf—and, by extension, the one book most are likely to recommend as a point of departure to students eager to learn more about the history of the car. And this has been the case for more than twenty years. (Gus Giebelhaus and Steve Usselman both recommended Flink’s survey to me when I was cutting my teeth at Georgia Tech in the 1990s.)
What was a bit surprising as I worked my way further into Heitmann’s text is that his first mention of John Rae’s work appears in his twenty-eighth footnote, well past his introductory coverage of the historiography and well into his detailed discussion of the early automobile industry. A quick glance at Heitmann’s bibliography revealed entries for four of Rae’s books—his monographs of 1965, 1971, and 1984, as well as his edited volume on Henry Ford from 1969—and a more thorough examination of his footnotes did reveal a number of nods to Rae’s work. But Heitmann’s references to Rae all deal with matters of detail rather than historiographic significance. And this observation in turn prompted me to wonder what the authors of some of the other volumes and papers on the automobile currently occupying valuable real estate on my office shelves actually have to say about John Rae’s work. What exactly is his legacy?
The shelf- and cabinet-emptying exercise that followed was neither quantitatively precise nor comprehensive. But it did suggest that with a handful of exceptions, most of which date to the 1970s and 1980s, Rae’s body of work on the automobile has by and large been relegated to the status of deep-background reference—it has come to be recommended for its strength as a general starting point, that is, rather than for its specific historiographic contributions. The exceptions largely prove the rule. Flink engages Rae extensively in his first two books, for example.51 Bruce Seely does the same when setting up Building the American Highway System (1987), while Clay McShane, in Down the Asphalt Path (1994), lumps Rae and Flink together as important contributions which nevertheless smack of technological determinism.52 And then of course there’s the work of David A. Kirsch and Gijs Mom on the history of the electric car, work in which they chastise Rae both for characterizing the turn-of-the-century electric car as a technological dead end and for concluding that the EVC was a monopoly that was destined to fail.53 Bruce Epperson takes Rae to task for misreading Albert Pope’s attitude toward electric and gasoline power as well.54 But the vast majority do little more than point to Rae for a bit of background reading here, or for a specific point of fact there.55 Indeed, more than one recent survey fails to mention Rae at all.56 Why this essay, then? Why revisit John Rae’s work as “classic” if its long-term relevance appears to be on the wane? I could opt for the easy way out and simply say that Rae’s work warrants mention among the classics because he got the ball rolling in the realm of automotive history and, in the words of James J. Flink, “legitimiz[ed] automotive history as a specialized field of scholarly inquiry.”57 Or I could simply point once more to Rae’s place among the founding figures of our field. Both, I think, are valid justifications.
But for me it’s the substance of John Rae’s work itself that has earned it a place among the classics. Speaking as one who was raised, literally and intellectually, long after the American automobile’s heyday had come and gone and long after skepticism and on occasion outright disgust had come to be the norm in discussions of the car and all that it has wrought, I must confess that there is something inherently appealing about Rae’s progressive optimism. And I think I know why. Read against the backdrop of more than forty years of negativity, Rae’s work brings a welcome measure of balance to the discussion. This is why I think it’s a shame that Rae’s books aren’t read all that closely anymore. Are they behind the times on more than a few points of fact and interpretation? Certainly, as most works of history in their third, fourth, and fifth decades are apt to be. Are they overly optimistic? Perhaps, if read in isolation. Are they worth the effort required to arrive at a level of historical and sociological imagination sufficient to appreciate them as they were intended? Absolutely.
Call the man’s work what you will—dated, naive, romantic. I call it classic. And if this be scholarly treason, to return to Henry, then I plan to make the most of it.
1. John Bell Rae, American Automobile Manufacturers—A History of the Automobile Industry: The First Forty Years (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1959). Rae’s first book was a joint enterprise—a textbook coauthored with Thomas H. D. Mahoney—that had appeared ten years earlier: The United States in World History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949).
2. On Rae’s role in SHOT’s formative years, see Thomas Hughes, “SHOT Founders’ Themes and Problems,” Technology and Culture 50 (July 2009): 594–99, and Robert C. Post’s essay in this issue of Technology and Culture, “Chance and Contingency: Putting Mel Kranzberg in Context,” 839–72. Rae’s 1959 book was reviewed by K. E. Boulding on pp. 104–5 of the first issue of T&C.
3. In addition to his coauthored work of 1949 and the aforementioned monograph of 1959, Rae published the following books in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s: The American Automobile: A Brief History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); Climb to Greatness: The American Aircraft Industry, 1920–1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968); (as editor) Great Lives Observed: Henry Ford (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969); The Road and the Car in American Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971); The Development of Railroad Land Subsidy in the United States (New York: Arno Press, 1979), which was based on his 1936 dissertation; Nissan/Datsun: A History of Nissan Motor Corporation in U.S.A., 1960–1980 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982); and The American Automobile Industry (Boston: Twayne, 1984). At the time of his death in 1988, Rae was working with Rudi Volti on a history of the engineering profession, which Volti completed and published several years later (Rae and Volti, The Engineer in History [New York: Peter Lang, 1993]). Leaving aside his many reviews and comments, Rae’s contributions to T&C include “The ‘Know-How’ Tradition: Technology in American History,” Technology and Culture 1 (spring 1960): 139–50; “Science and Engineering in the History of Aviation,” Technology and Culture 2 (autumn 1961): 391–99; and “Presidential Address: Engineers Are People,” Technology and Culture 16 (July 1975): 404–18. Significant contributions that appeared in other journals from the early 1950s on include “The Great Northern’s Land Grant,” Journal of Economic History 12 (spring 1952): 140–45; “The Railroad Land-Grant Legend,” Journal of Economic History 15 (March 1955): 112– 13; “Engineering Education as Preparation for Management: A Study of M.I.T. Alumni,” Business History Review 29 (March 1955): 64–74; “The Electric Vehicle Company: A Monopoly That Missed,” Business History Review 29 (December 1955): 298–311; “The Fabulous Billy Durant,” Business History Review 32 (autumn 1958): 255–71; and “Financial Problems of the American Aircraft Industry, 1906–1940,” Business History Review 39 (spring 1965): 99–114.
4. On Rae’s background I am drawing principally on John B. Rae, “John B. Rae: An Intellectual Autobiography,” Technology and Culture 22 (July 1981): 564–69, and James J. Flink, “Memorial: John Bell Rae (1911–1988),” Technology and Culture 30 (July 1989): 718–22.
5. Rae, “An Intellectual Autobiography,” 567.
6. His early publications on the automobile industry, discussed in detail in the pages that follow, bear this out.
7. Rae, “An Intellectual Autobiography,” 567.
8. Rae, “The Electric Vehicle Company,” 298.
9. Ibid.
10. Rae, “The Fabulous Billy Durant” (n. 3 above).
11. Indeed, Rae explains in his introduction (p. 3) that part of what attracted him to the early automobile industry was the fact that records of failed companies are abundant. This, he explains, made it possible to determine not simply what successful firms seemed to share in common, but also what those that failed shared. Failures were extremely common; lowball estimates of the total number of firms that tried to get into the business of automobile production stand at about 750, while highball estimates (such as that which Rae cites in this book, on page 5) stand closer to 2,900. Of these, Rae closely examined the fate of more than 500 in preparing this book.
12. This is a point on which Donald Finlay Davis would later build in his work on the technical and social—as opposed to purely profit-seeking—aspirations of the industry’s early pioneers. See Conspicuous Production: Automobiles and Elites in Detroit, 1899–1933 (Philadelphia, 1988), esp. 2–3.
13. Reviewers included Thomas C. Cochran, who critiqued Rae for failing to include more detail on the hundreds of individuals mentioned in the book (Business History Review 33 [autumn 1959]: 454–55); George Maxcy, who critiqued the book’s inattention to labor and its overly celebratory tone (Economic History Review 12, no. 2 [1959]: 344– 45); A. K. Steigerwalt (Mississippi Valley Historical Review 46 [December 1959]: 548); Harold G. Vatter (Journal of Economic History 20 [March 1960]: 137–40); and K. E. Boulding (n. 2 above), who critiqued Rae in T&C for failing to do more to tackle the nature of entrepreneurship.
14. Rae, American Automobile Manufacturers (n. 1 above), 206.
15. He also came to be a consistent (but when appropriate, skeptical) defender of the notion that technological change can and often does lead to material progress; see, for example, his comments on the occasion of SHOT’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 1984: “What Did We Expect SHOT to Wrought?” Technology and Culture 25 (October 1984): 731–34.
16. Rae, The American Automobile (n. 3 above), 220 and 226.
17. Ibid., 92.
18. Ibid., 92, 220–21, and 228.
19. Ibid., esp. 107 and 179.
20. Ibid., 53.
21. Ibid., 228.
22. Ibid., 195.
23. Ibid., 225.
24. Reviewers included Glen A. Niemeyer, who complained of its pro-business and anti-labor slant (Journal of American History 53 [June 1966]: 145–46); Asa Briggs, who noted its dearth of international context (English Historical Review 82 [July 1967]: 636– 37); Allan Nevins, who complained that the book was too brief (American Historical Review 71 [July 1966]: 1461–62); and Dwight E. Robinson, author of the scathing review quoted at length here (Business History Review 40 [spring 1966]: 121–24).
25. This flirtation resulted in a critically acclaimed and for many years definitive study of the American aircraft industry, Climb to Greatness (n. 3 above). For Rae’s take on the motivations behind (and the end results of) his brief shift into the world of aviation, see Rae, “An Intellectual Autobiography” (n. 4 above), 568.
26. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life (n. 3 above), chaps. 5 and 6.
27. Ibid., chap. 7 (quote on 141).
28. Ibid., chap. 8 (rural life), chap. 11 (suburban life), chap. 12 (suburbanized industry), and chap. 9 (interstates).
30. However weak his aforementioned explanation for the worsening traffic problems of the twentieth century, he is certainly on solid ground on this more basic point.
31. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life, 276.
32. Ibid., chap. 11 (quoted material appears on 246–47).
33. Ibid., 359.
34. Ibid., 361–62.
35. Ibid., 371.
36. Harold F. Williamson, review of John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life, in Journal of American History 59 (June 1972): 195.
37. Peter D’A. Jones, review of John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life, in American Historical Review 77 (December 1972): 1516–17, and S. B. Saul, review of John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life, in Economic History Review 25 (November 1972): 736–37.
38. Reynold M. Wik, review of John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life, in Technology and Culture 14 (April 1973): 310–11.
39. James J. Flink, review of John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life, in Business History Review 46 (spring 1972): 123.
40. Ibid., 124.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. James J. Flink, The Car Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), 233. A glance at Flink’s dedication to this 1975 volume reveals why an academic responsible for the evenhanded and well-received America Adopts the Automobile, 1895–1910 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970) would turn out such an explosive polemic five years later: his young niece was struck and killed by an automobile on his thirty-ninth birthday.
44. Rae, Nissan/Datsun (n. 3 above).
45. Rae, The American Automobile Industry (n. 3 above), chap. 6.
46. Ibid., chaps. 10 and 12.
47. Ibid., chap. 13 (quote on 175).
49. Rae, The American Automobile Industry, 185.
50. At least a couple of reviewers took note of this; see Stuart W. Leslie, review of John B. Rae, The American Automobile Industry, in Technology and Culture 27 (October 1986): 892–93 (esp. 893), and Joel W. Eastman, review of John B. Rae, The American Automobile Industry, in Business History Review 59 (autumn 1985): 503–5 (esp. 505). Charles K. Hyde, on the other hand, believed that Rae’s take in this book remains decidedly optimistic (review of John B. Rae, The American Automobile Industry, in Journal of Economic History 45 [June 1985]: 506–8 [esp. 507]).
51. See Flink, America Adopts the Automobile (n. 43 above), 5 and 296, and especially Flink, The Car Culture (n. 43 above), 158–59 and 212.
52. Bruce E. Seely, Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia, 1987), 298, and Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York, 1994), xi.
53. See especially Gijs Mom, Geschiedenis van de Auto van Morgen: Cultuur en Techniek van de Elektrische Auto (Deventer, 1997), esp. 165; David A. Kirsch, The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History (New Brunswick, N.J., 2000), 4, 20, and 170; Gijs P. A. Mom and David A. Kirsch, “Technologies in Tension: Horses, Electric Trucks, and the Motorization of American Cities, 1900–1925,” Technology and Culture 42 (July 2001): 489–518 (esp. 490n2); and Gijs P. A. Mom and David A. Kirsch, “Visions of Transportation: The EVC and the Transition from Serviceto Product-Based Mobility,” Business History Review 76 (spring 2002): 75–110 (esp. 75–76).
54. Bruce Epperson, “Failed Colossus: Strategic Error at the Pope Manufacturing Company, 1878–1900,” Technology and Culture 41 (April 2000): 316.
55. Among the many references I found are Warren James Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910–1945 (Baltimore, 1979), which cites Rae’s 1965 and 1971 volumes as deep background; Jean-Pierre Bardou et al., The Automobile Revolution: The Impact of an Industry, trans. James M. Laux (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1982), which cites Rae’s 1959, 1965, and 1971 contributions in its bibliography but refers directly to his work in but 1 of its 149 (admittedly quite sparse) footnotes; Donald F. Davis, “The Price of Conspicuous Production: The Detroit Elite and the Automobile Industry, 1900–1933,” Journal of Social History 16 (autumn 1982): 21–46, which cites Rae’s work on the Selden patent; T. C. Barker, “The International History of Motor Transport,” Journal of Contemporary History 20 (January 1985): 3–19, which cites Rae’s 1959 and 1965 volumes as important background reading; Carlos A. Schwantes, “The West Adapts the Automobile: Technology, Unemployment, and the Jitney Phenomenon of 1914–1917,” Western Historical Quarterly 16 (July 1985): 307–26, which cites Rae’s 1965 book on a specific matter pertaining to jitneys; I. B. Holley Jr., “A Detroit Dream of Mass-Produced Fighter Aircraft: The XP-75 Fiasco,” Technology and Culture 28 (July 1987): 578–93, which cites Rae’s 1959 and 1965 books as deep background; Davis, Conspicuous Production (as discussed in note 12 above); John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, The Gas Station in America (Baltimore, 1994), which cites Rae’s 1965 and 1971 volumes as important background reading; Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch, “Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States,” Technology and Culture 37 (October 1996): 763–95, which cites Rae’s 1965 book alongside Flink’s contributions in its coverage of the historiography; Robert Lewis, “Local Production Practices and Chicago’s Automotive Industry, 1900–1930,” Business History Review 77 (winter 2003): 611–38, which cites Rae’s 1959 book as deep-background material; Rudi Volti, Cars and Culture: The Life Story of a Technology (Westport, Conn., 2004), which cites Rae in its bibliography; Kathleen Franz, Tinkering: Consumers Reinvent the Early Automobile (Philadelphia, 2005), which does not deal with Rae in its introduction but does cite his work on a number of occasions on specific points; Robert C. Post, The SAE Story: One Hundred Years of Mobility (San Diego, 2005), which opens with an epigraph from Rae’s 1965 book; David N. Lucsko, The Business of Speed: The Hot Rod Industry in America, 1915–1990 (Baltimore, 2008), in which I cite Rae’s books as deep-background material and also inadvertently do Rae’s 1965 book a disservice by failing to list it among the handful of academic works that take note of hot rodding (Rae mentions the phenomenon on pp. 215–16); Jeremy Packer, Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship (Durham, N.C., 2008), which cites Rae’s 1971 book as deep background in its bibliography; and Cotton Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago, 2008), which cites Rae’s 1965 and 1971 books in its introduction and goes on to cite his work on several specific points. Again, let me emphasize that this brief list is by no means intended to be read as anything remotely resembling a comprehensive enumeration of Rae’s footnote appearances over the years. It is instead a qualitative sample intended to hint at (but certainly not to definitively prove) a more general pattern.
56. I cannot locate a single reference to Rae in either Tom McCarthy’s Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment (New Haven, Conn., 2007) or Brian Ladd’s Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age (Chicago, 2008).
57. Flink, “Memorial” (n. 4 above), 720.
©2009 by the Society for the History of Technology.
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