Notes From the Hard Shoulder - James May [54]
Living and working in Detroit must have seemed fantastic. Prosperity and hope were bolstered by the progress of the car, production of which occupied a quarter of the city's populace by 1929, a population that had grown five-fold since 1904 to 1.6 million. In 1911 Ford began building his Model T in a way no one had tried before, and in 1913 he brought production to a halt for the day to photograph his entire workforce of 12,000 outside the Highland Park factory. Times must have been good, for this may just be the world's most expensive photograph. A pristine example of the T is on display in the museum and, unusually, you are allowed to sit in it. Of this ground-breaking car Steve notes: 'The lofty driving position is spoiled by pedals that are too close together, like the Lamborghini Diablo's, and poor weather proofing. The controls do not fall easily to hand.' None of this stopped Ford producing 15 million of them by 1927. In 1920 half the world's motor vehicles were Model Ts.
The lure of Detroit was immense. A photograph surviving from the century's first decade shows a Ukrainian family of four with a few small suitcases. They have just stepped from the train, drawn halfway round the world by the promise of a new, better life in the bosom of the motor industry. After the first war, black families of the southern states flocked north in their thousands for the same reasons. An alarmist telegram to Henry Ford in 1923 reads: 'We are advised that rumors are in circulation throughout the entire south that the Ford Motor Company is seeking labor.' But then, Ford had doubled his standard labour rate to create the five-dollar day. Today, African-Americans make up around three quarters of the city's population.
Great edifices trumpeting the success of the city, such as the original GM headquarters and the neighbouring Fisher building, rose omnipotently from the low-rise sprawl. The motor barons were the heroes of the day; a picture of the youthful Alfred P Sloan shows a dashing fellow wearing the expression of a man possessed. In 1934 Clyde Barrow stole a Ford V8 for bank robbing and felt compelled to write to Henry Ford: 'Even if my business doesn't seem strickly legal, it don't hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8.'
Even the Depression could not knock Detroit off course. Labour unrest in 1936 and '37 caused the famous sit-in strikes at GM's factories by the newly formed Union of Automobile Workers of America, but this, too, is recorded positively in the history books as the most beneficial labour movement of the century. It certainly didn't prevent Detroit becoming 'the arsenal of democracy' during World War II. Thousands more streamed to the city to make, among other things, 92 per cent of the vehicles, 75 per cent of the aero engines and 56 per cent of the tanks used by the US forces. Tens of thousands were drafted to build the B24 Liberator alone, which at one point was taking to the air at the rate of one an hour.
All of this, of course, simply left Detroit better equipped with skill and plant to begin, post-war, a new era of car building. This was the indulgent age of affordable muscle cars and Harley Earl's tailfins, themselves inspired by the warplanes that Cadillac had helped build through its work on Allison aero engines.
To many, the following 30 years are the golden age of the American car. My favourite exhibit in the Henry Ford Museum – not a collection of old Fords, but the legacy of the old man's efforts to record the history of the American people through the things they made – is Chrysler's obscure 1964 turbine car. Commercially it was not a success, but stylistically it is a masterpiece, festooned with turbine imagery in such details as its vaned headlamp bezels and wheel centres and the nozzle-like