Highways to Heaven: The Auto Biography of America by Christopher Finch

Abstract

192 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE innovation in car design and construction. Well-managed railroads looked constantly to improve their efficiency through cars that were larger and more specialized, and possessed more advanced features. But a powerful contrary force impeded these good intentions. As rail fleets grew ever larger, so did the urge to standardize cars as a cost-effective measure for everything from parts to repair facilities to ease of interchange. In one sense this conflict pitted efficiency against cost effectiveness. Safety, too, was no simple question of technological improvements and right thinking. White shows in detail how complex the question of incorporating new safety devices like air brakes and Janney couplers became and how the workmen who were supposed to benefit from them often resisted their introduction as strenuously as the railroads that had to pay for them. Even the casual reader will marvel at the amazing diversity and ingenuity of those inventors and designers who poured forth solutions to one technical problem or another—whether it be a more perfect wheel, the ideal balance between weight and strength, or the most functional design for an all-purpose or highly specialized car. In each case, White exhumes the sprawling graveyard of lost brainstorms with surgical precision, outlining the problem, showing the range of pro­ posed solutions (usually with drawings), and analyzing why they failed to catch on or endure. The production values match the high quality of the scholarship. This handsome, oversized work is printed on glossy paper for excellent photo reproduction, and contains hundreds of photographs, drawings, and other illustrations to sate the technical appetite of buff and expert alike. A word of caution: Some books weigh heavily on the soul; this one weighs heavily on the lap. Your greatest challenge will be to find a comfortable reading position. Be assured that the rewards will more than repay the effort. Maury Klein Dr. Klein is professor of history and director of the honors program at the University of Rhode Island. Highways to Heaven: The Auto Biography ofAmerica. By Christopher Finch. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. Pp. 416; illustrations, bibliography, index. $25.00. Christopher Finch has written a “Duesy” of a book. This once-popular slang term, meaning something very impressive, derived from the Duesenberg, a powerful, finely engineered, flamboyantly styled—and incredibly expensive—American automobile. In the late 1920s and 1930s, the Duesenberg was one of the best cars in the world. Highways to Heaven, though lacking the notes and sustained engagement with other TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 193 historians of more scholarly studies, is nevertheless a similar highperformance effort, one that contributes significantly to our under­ standing of the American experience with automobiles. Like James Flink’s magisterial history, The Automobile Age (1988), which this work nicely supplements, Finch’s study also embodies a comparative perspective, noting parallels to or divergences from Ameri­ can practice in Europe and Asia. Unlike Flink’s book, however, Highways to Heaven emphasizes not the automobile industry, the car’s role in the economy, or automotive technology—although the narrative touches on these subjects when appropriate. Rather, Finch’s primary interest is on the car as a producer and product of 20th-century American culture. Three themes dominate: the automobile as an object of design; as a tool that has shaped American space; and as locus of experience, real and imagined. No single argument unifies Finch’s essay, but it offers dozens of penetrating insights and provocative speculations on the car’s place in American culture. I will mention only a few. His discussion of the heavy traffic of automobiles in American imaginative life, so to speak, em­ braces comic strips and cartoons, fiction, films, and even erotic fantasy. Finch writes sensibly about automobiles as sex objects—for example, gently chiding the glib psychologizing of every phallic and breast form characteristic of much automotive writing since the 1950s. “It was the curvaceousness of the car’s ‘body,’ after all,” he nonetheless argues, “that made it such an object of desire” in that period. Regarding desire, Finch observes an interesting gender reversal created by popular rhetoric. When static on the showroom floor or in a driveway, the automobile was feminized: it became...