The Automobile Age by James J. Flink

Abstract

1066 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE that deserves continued scrutiny. In this as in other respects, Grand Plans is a genuine contribution to the history of technology. Howard P. Segal Dr. Segal, associate professor of history at the University of Maine, is the author of Technology in America: A Brief History (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1989), with Alan Marcus; and of “ ‘Little Plants in the Country’: Henry Ford’s Village Industries and the Beginning of Decentralized Technology in Modern America,” Prospects 13 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), part of his current research. The Automobile Age. By James J. Flink. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988. Pp. xii + 456; illustrations, notes, index. $25.00. In this study, his third book on the history of the automobile, James J. Flink has produced a masterful synthesis on the develop­ ment, production, usage, and influence of the automobile. Although he focuses on events in the United States, The Automobile Age is also ambitiously comparative, analyzing developments in Europe and the United Kingdom as well as the Third World. This global perspective enables Flink to set much recent history, such as the appearance of so-called world cars (e.g., the Ford Escort), into broader context. Flink’s concept of the “automobile age,” a period extending roughly from the 1920s into the early 1970s, rests on much more than the cultural enthusiasms, social changes, and geographic consequences that historians have long identified with automobility. He views the car, or more accurately automobility, as being a major protagonist in the historical dramas of the period. In the hard times of the 1930s, for instance, “mass motorization” in the United States “played a key role in creating the most important necessary conditions underlying the Depression” (p. 189). The saturation of the automobile market proved a key cause of the decline in consumer spending that helped to trigger the Depression, Flink believes. During the Second World War, auto­ mobility was equally influential. “The Axis powers stood no chance of winning a war of logistics in which the motor vehicle and mass pro­ duction played the key roles,” Flink provocatively asserts (p. 273). Flink does not build his study around this or any other grander theme or thesis. Rather, he takes a wide-angle look at the history of the automobile industry and its products, both American and foreign, and, to a lesser extent, the patterns and consequences of automobile usage. His handling of these topics is always lucid and at times brilliantly concise. While this approach is broad, it is peppered with perceptive comparisons and insights. To cite just one of them: Flink significantly demolishes the myth, repeated by too many historians, that the American experience with automobiles has been exceptional. He shows, for example, how in all countries early car owners came from the same groups of sportsmen, doctors, businessmen, and TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 1067 engineers. Moreover, he concludes, the “appeals of the car were universal, not culturally determined” (pp. 28—29). A book that surveys such a large subject will inevitably disappoint readers interested in specific topics, most of which get briefer treatment than they would like. Those looking to Flink for insights on the ways automobiles intersected with women’s lives, for example, will find provocative (and, I think, defensible) his assertion that cars “have probably had a greater impact on women’s roles than on men’s” (p. 162). But they will also be frustrated because he devotes only two pages to this topic. Brevity of this sort, however, is to be expected in such a global study, even when it exceeds 400 pages. I myself wish the publisher had encouraged Flink to write a book half again as long, not so that an extra page might have been allocated to describing or explicating the role of cars in women’s lives but so as to make the volume more readable, particularly for a wider audience. Flink’s prose is always clear, but in the interest of covering so much in relatively small compass, he has had to pare his manuscript of almost all description and evocation. This, along with the frequent allusion to statistical or technical evidence in the text, results in a book...