“The Automobile in American Life,” an Exhibit at Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan

Abstract

Exhibit Reviews “THE AUTOMOBILE IN AMERICAN LIFE,’’ AN EXHIBIT AT HENRY FORD MUSEUM, DEARBORN, MICHIGAN CHARLES K. HYDE “The Automobile in American Life,” which opened in November 1987, occupies 65,000 square feet of floor space, or nearly one-fourth of the Henry Ford Museum’s vast main floor, and cost over $6 million. Albert H. Woods Associates of New York City designed the exhibit, working in close conjunction with the museum’s curatorial and exhibit staffs and with outside historical consultants. Planning began in 1984, and the installation commenced only a year before the opening. The exhibit will yield two publications as well.1 Visitors and reviewers alike should not lose sight of the radical change this exhibit brings to the Henry Ford Museum. For many years, the automobile display was a thicket of more than two hundred old cars, tightly packed together, arranged in rough chronological order. Some cosmetic changes were made in 1979, when the display was thinned down to 180 vehicles, but it still had the look of an over­ crowded used car lot filled with vintage automobiles (fig. 1). The new exhibit has 100 motor vehicles and a dozen horse-drawn vehicles, with nearly one-quarter of these being new additions to the museum’s collections. The other newly acquired objects incorporated into the exhibit are impressive: a large Texaco service station; a 1946 diner; a 1937 tourist cabin; a Holiday Inn room from the mid-1960s, as well as the neon sign that would have directed travelers to it; an enormous Dr. Hyde is associate professor of history at Wayne State University. His interests include the history of the American automobile industry and the effect of the auto­ mobile on American society. 'James J. Flink of the University of California at Irvine and George S. May of Eastern Michigan University were the principal historical consultants. The Ford Museum ex­ hibits manager, Thomas Elliot, supervised the removal of the old exhibit and the erection of the new. The first publication is a souvenir book, a heavily illustrated guide to the exhibit. The second is a scholarly history of the automobile and its influence on American life, which should be completed by late 1989. Authored by George May, it will consider the same general themes addressed by the exhibit.© 1989 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/89/3001 -0005$01.00 105 106 Charles K. Hyde Fig. 1.—The former transportation exhibit at Henry Ford Museum. (All photos courtesy of Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village.) 1960 McDonald’s sign (fig. 2); a flashing neon drive-in theater sign; and dozens of additional signs and other roadside paraphernalia dat­ ing from the 1910s through the 1960s. Hundreds of photographs, pieces of advertising literature, and other paper objects are incor­ porated into the exhibit. Taken together, these artifacts make “The Automobile in American Life” visually exciting and memorable. In an exhibit purporting to interpret a topic as complex as the effect of the automobile on American life and culture, errors and omissions are inevitable. The effect of the automobile on residential and com­ mercial architecture needs to be considered. Little or no space is devoted to the automobile’s effect on rural life or its role in trans­ forming cities and suburbs alike. The exhibit does not address the role of the automobile and urban expressways in the postwar growth of suburbs and suburban shopping malls, along with the simultaneous decline of central business districts. Critics will complain that the negative effects of the car and the grotesque failures of the American automobile industry over the past two decades are ignored. Granted, the main spine of the exhibit in- “The Automobile in American Life” 107 Fig. 2.—A 1960 McDonald’s “Speedee” sign and a 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible in “The Automotive Landscape.” eludes a display case entitled “Government Steps In,” which considers the safety and environmental issues that emerged in the mid-1960s. But the human carnage that the automobile has caused is not ad­ dressed. The growing popularity of Japanese cars in the early 1970s is explained merely as a short-term response to the energy crisis...