Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [55]
Traditional patterns of living were also transformed by the introduction of the car. Rural communities were no longer isolated islands surrounded by empty prairies. Children who did not live in towns could go to school, and thus had the chance to create lives different from their parents’. Work patterns changed. Teenagers borrowed their parents’ cars to meet their friends on their own; families went for a drive instead of going to church on Sunday. Social commentators attributed the breakdown of family values and piety as much to the negative influence of cars as to the movies.
Auto-related industries like rubber, oil, steel, petroleum and glass—and the cities they were based in—boomed. Detroit expanded by 126 percent between 1910 and 1920; Akron, Ohio, the tire capital, grew 173 percent in the same period; the wealth and population of oil-producing cities like Houston and Los Angeles ballooned.
With fuel prices reaching record highs in the early 1920s, oil companies aggressively pursued potential new fields in the Middle East, especially in Iraq and Iran, between them dividing regions into the provinces of individual companies and exploiting them ruthlessly. The Government’s noninterventionist policies allowed them to integrate vertically, controlling every aspect of oil production and distribution from refineries to petrol stations.
By 1930 the car industry accounted for a tenth of America’s manufacturing wages and more than a tenth of all its manufactured goods. An English visitor to the States wrote, “As I caught my first glimpse of Detroit, I felt as I imagine a seventeenth century traveler must have felt when he approached Versailles.” The age of steam had been vanquished by the age of petrol.
The self-made pioneers of the motor trade—the Dodge brothers, Billy Durant, John Jakob Raskob, the Fisher brothers, and Walter Chrysler—were hailed as modern-day buccaneers and their work was called “our greatest industry”: “Business has become the last great heroism . . . a conflict of the hard-muscled and strongwilled, for only they will survive.”
One man in particular was credited with developing this uniquely American industry: that irascible, eccentric genius, Henry Ford. Ford had invented the self-starting car in 1912, perfected the assembly-line production method at his Highland Park plant near Detroit two years later, and by 1924 controlled over half the motor industry. Vanity Fair hailed him as a member of their annual Hall of Fame the following year: “Because he has changed the whole rural life of America by lowering the price of motors cars; because he has made some of the most ludicrous statements ever conceived by a public man; and finally because the benevolent paternalism prevailing in his factories is enormously applauded and admired by everyone except his employees.”
Henry Ford’s revolutionary idea was to provide farmers with a cheap, practical car that would replace their horse. The first Model Ts—fondly known as Flivvers or Tin Lizzies—were sold in 1909 for about $850 (by the mid-1920s falling to less than $300), as compared to several thousand for other, more sophisticated marks. His main problem was keeping up with demand. In the year that his assembly-line system was installed at Highland Park, which allowed his workers to put together a car every ninety-three minutes, he produced more cars than every other manufacturer combined. By the time the Ford plant produced its ten-millionth vehicle, nine out of every ten cars on the road worldwide were Fords.
What was later called mass production was the key to Ford’s success. “The way to make automobiles is to make one automobile like another automobile, to make them all alike . . . just as one pin is like another pin, when it comes