Gullible Travels: Corporate Power and the Automotive Consumer

2008 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the Ford Model T. Over its twenty-four year shelf life the device convincingly proved the value of automobility to millions of Americans. Unfortunately for the Ford Motor Company, however, American automobility is poorly periodized by such an ironically fixed landmark. Indeed, in Trust and Power, Sally H. Clarke asks “who would have thought that” Ford, with 55 percent of the domestic auto market in 1921 “would have been brought to its knees in 1927 by General Motors, a company that had nearly gone bankrupt in 1920” (p. 109). Much like other revolutionary technologies, such as the television—where one generally can win a friendly bet by asking if anyone knows when the first commercial TVs were sold (1946)—the confused historical periodization of car use in the United States leaves many scholars talking past each other. Aldous Huxley famously dated his brave new world by the clear and simple epochs of Before and After Ford. Transportation historians, however, are tasked by more exacting and exciting questions: when and where did people drive, how did they understand the freedoms and risks of driving, how was this durable and complex product so reliably marketed and for so long, and to what extent did the power and gravity of big business warp America’s driving culture? The appearance of the first (or last) Model T serves as little more than a starter’s gun. It is the course and running of the race that interest most today.

Historiography, not always the most stimulating of historical narratives, is critical to appreciating Clarke’s finely crafted text. The current history of America’s automotive road trip is undergoing a renovation. Where corporate biographies, legal histories, executive kiss-and-tells, technical and manufacturing innovations, and engineering once drove the debate, now the various functions and meanings of transportation dominate the conversation. Transport scholars are active globally and embrace a variety of themes, including race, gender, the environment, urban studies (probably the grandsire of this generation), foreign affairs, the modern state, and American culture.¹ While current works certainly profit from the earlier “classics,” few benefit as fully or appreciate as keenly these powerful legal and economic realities as Trust and Power.

In fairness to Clarke (and Cambridge), the book is much more than simply a lively historiographical corrective. Her purpose is ambitious, complex, and on balance successful. From 1900 to 1965, she argues, the concept of market trust forged a bond between the “alternating patterns of social bonds and corporate power” (p. 275). This relationship, which Clarke frames as a classical economist would frame political economy, holds that final exchange rates between buyer and seller are equal, regardless of the amount of capital accumulated by either party. The rise of industrial capitalism and its child, the corporation, challenged classical economics by shifting power to the supplier. Through advertising and branding, management and consolidation, hegemony and simple power politics, corporations placed their now all too visible hand on the scales of exchange. The bond of trust, the feeling that a fair deal was struck, was clearly and negatively affected. The rise of a modern regulatory state signaled a new balancing of power, but, significantly, the power of the consumer shrank. Consumer “agency” in the modern world is an extremely limited power. The global economy is in the process of redefining business structures and capital flows just as technology and design are altering consumer satisfaction. Presumably we could trace the current outlines of our trust-power relationships with the market. Clarke’s book certainly suggests it is possible for an earlier time.

The trust and power of the automotive industry, from 1896 to 1965, showed dramatic movement and proves an excellent topic for Clarke’s approach. As rickety runabouts gave way to streamlined cruisers, and as risk transferred from producer to consumer, Detroit sought to redefine “trust” to suit its own ends. “Unable...