The Carriage Trade: Making Horse-Drawn Vehicles in America (review)

Although 'horse and buggy' usually connotes a quaint icon of the preindustrial world, The Carriage Trade by Thomas A. Kinney shows that horse-drawn vehicles were anything but quaint. Carriage and wagon making was a major nineteenth-century industry, employing by 1890 130,000 employees in 13,000 firms producing $200 million in value (p. 262). These firms were leaders in production, management, and marketing innovations. Kinney's straightforward account shows how mechanization, interchangeability, and rationalization changed the nature of wagon and carriage making from craft-based to factory production. His book is in the tradition of studies such as David Hounshell's From the American System to Mass Production (1984) in the way it challenges traditional interpretations and reveals the complexity and diversity of nineteenth-century industrialization. Moreover, this book reflects current scholarship concerned with the role of consumers in shaping social and industrial change.

Chapter 1, "Rich Men's Vehicles at Poor Men's Prices," provides an overview of the carriage industry during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the development of a trade press and a national association. Chapter 2, "Knights of the Draw Knife," examines the craft process of carriage and wagon manufacture before the antebellum period, breaking the production process down into four distinct branches: woodworking, blacksmithing, painting, and trimming. Chapter 3, "From Shop to Factory," explores how mechanization affected woodworking and blacksmithing but not painting and trimming. The carriage industry emphasized batch production, without approaching the assembly line model of twentieth-century automobile production. Chapter 4, "The Coming of Parts," discusses how the mechanization of "accessory" industries kept many small shops in competition with larger operations. Chapter 5, "An Empire of Taste," and chapter 6, "A Wagon Every Six Minutes," apply the analysis of the preceding chapters to case studies of the Brewster carriage businesses and of the Studebaker Company, respectively, two successful enterprises that illustrate parallel but different paths to industrialization.

The last two chapters are the strongest and most compelling in the book. Chapter 7, "From Craftsman to Assembler?" in examining the experiences of workers, provides a nuanced and detailed examination of how industrial change actually happens. Challenging the Habbakuk thesis that "American labor scarcity prompted mechanization in contrast to England" (p. 232), Kinney argues that the real goal was to maximize production rather than reduce the need for skilled workers. As he points out, "machinery was by no means all of a kind, nor were its effects on the laborer exactly the same" (p. 229). To assess how mechanization affected workers in this industry, Kinney details four distinct categories of machine processes and applies this analysis to the different branches of the carriage industry. Chapter 8, "That Damned Horseless Carriage," discusses why the carriage industry collapsed during the automobile era. Kinney argues that these two transportation technologies were not analogous but "were separated by a technological gulf that most [companies] could not bridge" (pp. 263, 297). By showing how and why the Studebaker Company was able to move successfully into automobile production, he refutes the judgment often made by historians that the carriage industry collapsed due to a failure to adapt to progress.

No review, however positive, would be complete without a list of quibbles. Why are there no horses in a book about horse-drawn vehicles? This is analogous to writing a book about the automobile industry without discussing the internal combustion engine. How were horses and the horse population changing during this time and why? How were vehicles designed with respect to variations in kind, size, and strength of the animals pulling them? Which leads to my next quibble: Kinney's assumes that horse-drawn transportation competed with railroads, street railways, and bicycles. Railroads actually stimulated a dramatic increase in the use of horse-drawn transportation, horses pulled most streetcars until the 1890s, and bicycles did not compete with one of the largest uses of horse-drawn vehicles, namely...