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

After all the ink spilled on the automobile industry by scholars and enthusiasts, we finally have an essential and authoritative "prequel" on the car's wheeled predecessors. In eight fluidly written chapters, Thomas Kinney has provided a detailed history of the construction of horse-drawn vehicles in the United States. From its colonial origins, Kinney explores in full detail the variegated nationwide industry of the Gilded Age, and then chronicles its sudden death by motorcar. Demonstrating full mastery of the relevant technologies, this is a work of industrial history that extends the literature on flexible specialization into a new field. Gracefully written, the book also deserves a wide reading by all fans of the surries, landaus, wagons, and buggies that once moved a nation and its goods.

The plan of the book is straightforward. Chapter 1 surveys the industry as a whole. Its particular strengths are cogent reviews of carriage terminology (unfortunately not supported by illustrations), the trade press, and the carriage trade association created in 1872. Chapter 2 examines the small craft shop, drawing on examples across antebellum America. Chapter 3 is an overview of how industrial change—specifically an advanced division of labor, powered tools, and new distribution methods—transformed wagon and carriage manufacture. The narrative in chapter 4 details the rise of mass-producing parts specialists, makers of spokes or springs or axles who drove down component prices and improved quality. This chapter is particularly good in tracing backward linkages from parts specialists to makers of specialized woodworking equipment or sewing machines. Their special-purpose machinery powered the burgeoning output of the parts specialists. Moving back to the craft shop, chapter 5 is largely a business history of the Brewster Carriage Company across the nineteenth century. Started in New Haven, this firm dominated the New York City luxury carriage market by the 1840s, a position Brewster's heirs maintained for a half-century even as they fell into fratricidal competition.

No such sparring troubled the Studebaker family. As recounted in chapter 6, the four brothers guided their eponymous Indiana factory in building a new wagon every six minutes. This capsule business history extends our understanding of interchangeability and delineates an approach to mass production that resulted in batch output of a diverse and ever-shifting product line. On the other hand, Kinney is silent on how Studebaker's workers responded to the intrusive demands for faster, cheaper, better.

The worker is the focus of chapter 7—"From Craftsman to Assembler?"—which follows out the implications of chapters 3 and 4 to present a labor-process analysis of motives for mechanization and its effect on workers' skills. Among the good points the author makes here: firms mechanized to boost output (not to decrease a reliance on skilled labor); the advent of mass-produced components bolstered the efficiency of small shops as well as large factories; apparently the large vehicle makers achieved some economies of scale; and industrial methods changed the skill mix in small shops but did not wipe out the craftsman's role. Kinney's discussion of Gilded Age union movements in the industry does give a sense of workers' views and grievances.

Chapter 8 moves into fresh territory in detailing the carriage industry's response to the automobile. Few carriage firms had any concern about the car before 1900, and few had the resources to react after that. Catering to its loyal, conservative, and wealthy clientele, Brewster achieved a temporary stay of execution by building custom coachwork for automobiles. Studebaker did better, transitioning into electric and gas vehicles largely by astutely acquiring a young and capable automaker, EMF. Studebaker's 1910 output of one hundred thousand horse-drawn vehicles provided a revenue stream to innovate, while its deep marketing experience and assets also eased the transition. But Kinney scores a vital observation: most carriage makers failed in the switch to autos partly because they assumed the transition would be easy. Experience...