The American Automobile: A Brief History

THE AMERICAN AUTOMOBILE: A BRIEF HISTORY. By John B. Rae. [The Chicago History of American Civilization.] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1965. Pp. xiv, 265. $5'95.) DURING the last generation much historical writing on the American automotive industry has appeared in scattered form. It includes the biographies of pioneers, memoirs by leaders in the industry, histories of companies, studies of engineering and marketing, financial histories, and analyses of labor relations and the impact of the automobile on society. General histories of the industry have been few and sketchy. The gap has now been filled, however, by Dr. Rae in a volume at once concise, authoritative, and readable. He has compressed into a moderate-sized book a record covering the multi-farious developments from 1893, when the Duryea brothers sent their one-cylinder carriage clattering over the streets of Springfield, Massachusetts, to our own day of colossal production. His rapid narrative does justice to all the main aspects of the astonishing change. He notes the "historical mystery" bound up in the fact that after the German inventions of Otto, Benz, and Daimler the Americans waited about ten years to reinvent the automobile for themselves. He analyzes the reasons for the triumph of the gasoline motor over the steam-propelled vehicle, the relation of the bicycle trade to the new cars, the extent to which the Model T really put America on wheels, the growing pains of the industry as the four-wheel drive, "silent knight" engine, and electric starter pushed it ahead of the European manufacturers, and its most epochal feat, its really revolutionary triumph when Henry Ford's Highland Park plant gave birth to the complex procedures of mass production and thus altered the world. He shows that in the early history of the industry the chief difficulty was in producing enough good cars to meet the in-satiable demand; that in the decade of the Great Depression the main difficulty lay in selling enough cars to keep the stronger companies alive; and that in more recent years the problem has been to gear the industry to the march of research, to such dramatic shifts in taste as the advent of the compacts, and to the demands of governments faced by urban congestion, traffic maladies, and the thrust of metro-polis into suburbia. The author explains the elimination of company after com-pany until three giant corporations dominate the field. All this and more appear in the book. Rae does not fail to glance at such im-portant subjects as the partnership of the rubber and petroleum empires with the automotive industry. He does swift justice to the part the industry played in helping the United States and its Allies sustain themselves under ordeal; a part valu-able in the First World War, invaluable in the Second. The book is a model of condensed and comprehensive history. Its only important fault is that it is a bit too brief. ALLAN NEVINS, Huntington Library The American Historical Review, Volume 71, Issue 4, July 1966, Pages 1461–1462 ------------------ Writing a brief, authoritative analysis of the historical impact of the Americanautomobile which combines both a high degree of scholarship and broad generalinterest, is a very difficult task. Yet, John Rae's commendable book seems to dojust that. At the same time, it avoids the fault of restricting itself to a mererecitation of absorbing but unimportant and disjointed vignettes about indi-vidual firms within the industry. Popular writers and serious scholars haveattempted similar histories in the past, but no individual in recent times hasmade a greater number of important contributions to academic knowledge inthis field than John Rae.Rae is undoubtedly more familiar with the American automobile and itsimportance to society than almost any other economic historian; as most readersof this Journal are aware, he is the author of an equally important book,American Automobile Manufacturers, published by Chilton in 1959. Both Rae'spresent undertaking and his previous one are particularly well researched andvaluable in their discussions of the industry's early development. For thatreason, the first eight chapters of this book will be of significant interest both togeneral and economic historians alike. . , -Since the landmark studies of Epstein in 1926 and of Seltzer in 1928, almostthe only comprehensive and scholarly research into the economic and public-policy aspects of automobile manufacturing and distribution has been availablein a few capable, but usually unpublished, doctoral dissertations. The valuablecontributions of Hewitt, Pasnigian, and Edwards are almost the only exceptionsto the general absence of recently-published volumes dealing with either theimportant theoretical or the applied economic and political issues relating tothis industry—so important in the process of American economic development.It would seem that the impact of automobile-producer concentration (and itsrelationship to "forcing" and to "dealer requirements" at the retail level) shouldbe a topic of such obvious historical significance that it might have meritedsome discussion in the later chapters of Rae's book. However, either by choiceor because of subject-matter limitations, Rae places little or no emphasis ontracing developments in this area or in discussing the pros and cons of produc-tion-level deconcentration as they relate to consumer welfare and the publicinterest.This informational lacuna is not peculiar to Rae's volume. It would appearthat no book-length manuscript of any significance has yet addressed itself to athorough examination of the increasingly important issue of tight oligopoly inautomobile production and distribution. One would hope that Rae will somedaydevote his tremendous knowledge of the historical and economic aspects of theAmerican automobile to the task of tracing the public-policy problems that havearisen from the industry's present industrial organization.But Rae's book, while not all inclusive, fulfills its major task with distinctionand is a most welcome contribution to the historical and economic literature ofthe field. It is, furthermore, a scholarly summary, which has the added meritof a style marked by verve and imagination. ROBERT F. CROLL, Kansas State University The Journal of Economic History, 26(2), 268-268