Making and Selling Cars: Innovation and Change in the U.S. Automotive Industry (review)

In this broad overview of the American automobile industry in the twentieth century, James M. Rubenstein surveys a wide terrain, ranging from the development of Henry Ford's production methods to the impact of globalization on automobile markets at the end of the century. Along the way, he pulls off the main road for brief tours of some of the distinctive features of American automotive history, such as Henry Ford's erratic despotism, the triumphs and failures of William Durant, the Flint sit-down strike and the rise of the United Auto Workers, and Ralph Nader's tangle with General Motors (GM) over the Corvair. Throughout, the prose is clear and accessible. Rubenstein has the eye for a telling statistic and the ear for a pithy quotation.

Rubenstein structures the book as a series of "then and now" paired chapters. The first three pairs deal with production, focusing on manufacturing processes, procurement, and labor. The next three cover changing patterns of market segmentation, dealers and distribution methods, and the shift from a national market dominated by the "Big Three" to global competition. This structure effectively emphasizes contrast and change, so much so that it comes as a surprise when Rubenstein states in his conclusion, "Producing and selling motor vehicles changed remarkably little in the United States through most of the twentieth century" (p. 353), though he modifies this to suggest that the crucial changes took place in the second half of the century.

Several of his contrasts are particularly revealing. For example, his treatment of backward vertical integration at both Ford and GM and the late-century change to buying preassembled modules from independent suppliers blends a view of the broad shift with telling details about important but little-known parts manufacturers. In the chapters on auto dealers, I learned the fascinating fact that negotiating the sales price of new cars did not become a general practice until the 1950s. Rubenstein provides an informative though somewhat inconclusive survey of the forces challenging the dominance of conventional independent dealers in automotive retailing.

Contrasting the past and the present at times has the inadvertent effect of blurring chronology. The initial chapters of the pairs may be describing Henry Ford's production methods for the Model T in the 1910s and 1920s or the Big Three's marketing practices at mid-century. The chapters dealing with the "present" similarly mix together decades-long trends with reports on very recent phenomena, such as the introduction of gas-electric hybrid models. In addition, Rubenstein's paired contrasts sometimes come at the expense of detailed treatment of the process of change. Thus, chapter 5, "From Deskilling the Work Force . . . " ends with unionization at Ford in 1941. The next chapter, ". . . To Reskilling Labor," dashes quickly up to the 1980s and 1990s and focuses on new forms of work design at Toyota and other foreign-owned assembly plants. To his credit, Rubenstein points out that one could describe the vaunted flexibility and worker empowerment in these factories as "management by stress" (p. 170).

The book has few endnotes. Citations are largely to secondary sources and printed primary documents. For recent years Rubenstein makes heavy use of the trade publication Automotive News. The author is a geographer, which may account for the absence of some prominent historians' works from his bibliography. He does not refer to the works of Alfred Chandler, Tom McCraw, or Richard Tedlow. In the field of labor history, Sidney Fine's Sit-Down (1969) and books by Nelson Lichtenstein and Stephen Meyer are absent. Despite these lacunae, however, Making and Selling Cars does justice to the historical topics it treats.

If this book were a car, it might be a full-sized sedan. Capacious and comfortable, it covers a lot of ground smoothly. Historians, geographers...