Auto Opium: A Social History of Automobile Design by David Gartman

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 377 xenophobic anxieties and growing sense of nationalism to their need to find comfort in a rapidly changing world by softening the hard edges of technology. Changing and conflicting values inherent in this tension between the old and the new are an underlying theme of the book. As the home eroded as the center of social life and cultural development during this period, the meanings behind domestic objects subtly shifted and, in fact, the very purpose of the home was brought into question. Women’s roles altered dramatically and, since it was usu­ ally their artistic expression that was most evident in the home, wom­ en’s values and attitudes are central to this story. The Arts in the American Home adds new insight and scholarship to the study of family life and domestic material culture in the early 20th century. Combining primary source documentation with mate­ rial culture evidence, the authors consistently discuss not only the changes that occurred but the reasons behind these changes and how people of the time responded to them. Donna R. Braden Ms. Braden is a curator at Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, and has published widely on topics relating to domestic life and leisure history. She spoke on family pastimes at the 1989 McFaddin-Ward conference. Auto Opium: A Social History ofAutomobile Design. By David Gartman. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Pp. xvi+264; illustra­ tions, notes, index. $17.95. The automotive industry’s annual model changes provided late summer excitement during the 1950s. We always enjoyed being the first in our Detroit neighborhood to have pictures that Dad brought home of Ford’s new models. I did not question then this show of chrome and paint any more than I questioned the Mickey Mouse Club. It was fun to watch both pageants and to identify the stars— whether Mouseketeers or car models; it seemed that this all danced before us without pain or harm to anyone. Since then, many of us have questioned, sometimes bitterly, the many costs of those promotional entertainments. David Gartman, too, could identify all car models in the fifties; now in Auto Opium he asks why that once seemed so important. In analyzing the pageant and its underlying causes, Gartman focuses on how and why automo­ bile aesthetics evolved as they did, correctly recognizing their cen­ trality to the dynamics of making and marketing automobiles in the United States. Gartman finds the root cause in the relations ofproduction: Amer­ ican workers have been so degraded and depressed by their labors 378 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE that they turned to “the individual palliative of consumer goods like autos” (p. xiv), while producers designed to sell enough volume to profit from their mass-production technologies. Not at all passive victims in this, consumers “actively struck the best deal possible” (p. xiv), seeking excitement, identity, and power from their cars, based on the allurements that marketers learned to provide. The opiate of automobile design masked workers’ pain with an aesthetic that “concealed rather than revealed the marks of the production process, allowing them to temporarily forget the demands ofwork” (p. 61). To show how automobile designers tried to meet this “demand for obscuring aesthetics” (p. 62), Gartman interweaves accounts of technological capabilities, such as sheet-metal fabrication and fin­ ishing, with those of economic considerations, such as decisions to share a chassis among many models, with discussion of institutional politics, such as the constant power plays between stylists and engi­ neers. He analyzes design aesthetics by attending both to producers’ intentions, such as creating the Mustang to be a “youth wrapper” around existing components (p. 197), and to his own sense of con­ sumers’ symbolic interpretation of designs, such as streamlining’s “illusion of progress, unity, and hygiene” (p. 103). Untangling the complex interactions of engineers, designers, and marketers on one hand, and consumers on the other, is no small task. Gartman’s thesis that “automobile design was fundamentally shaped by the dual exigencies of capitalist competition and class con­ flict” (p. 12) sometimes furthers his task and at other times overpow­ ers it. For instance, blaming Fordism for all the ills of...