Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States

Abstract

Users as Agents of Technological Change: The Social Construction of the Automobile in the Rural United States RONALD KLINE AND TREVOR PINCH Historians and social commentators generally assume that the au­ tomobile has transformed American society. There can be little doubt that America has become a “car culture.” But rather less at­ tention has been given to how American society shaped the car— particularly rural society. Although historians usually mention the farm background ofHenry Ford and describe the importance of the rural market in the diffusion of the automobile in North America, they have, by far, concentrated on the history of the car in urban settings. Most authors relate the technical, business, and social his­ tory of the automobile in terms of urban inventors, urban manufac­ turers, city pleasures, city traffic jams, and suburban sprawl.1 Those Dr. Kline is associate professor of the history of technology at Cornell University, with a joint appointment between the College of Engineering and the Science and Technology Studies Department. Dr. Pinch is professor of the sociology of science and technology in the Science and Technology Studies Department at Cornell. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the workshop on “The Car and Its Environment: The Past, Present and Future of the Motorcar in Europe,” University ofTrondheim, May 6-8, 1993. The authors are grateful to participants at the confer­ ence for their comments on that version, and to Michael Dennis and the Technology and Culture referees for comments on other drafts. They would also like to acknowl­ edge the research assistance of Chris Finlayson, Simon Cole, and Miranda Paton; Suzanne Moon for conducting oral history interviews in New York state; and Terry Hoover, Bob Casey, and their coworkers at the Henry Ford Museum for their assis­ tance. Research for this paper was supported by National Science Foundation Grant Number SBR-9321180. 'See, e.g.,John Rae, TheAmericanAutomobile: A BriefHistory (Chicago, 1965);James J. Flink, America Adopts the Automobile, 1895-1910 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), The Car Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), and The Automobile Age (Cambridge, Mass., 1990); David L. Lewis, The Public Image ofHenryFord: An American Folk Hero and His Company (Detroit, 1976); Lewis and Laurence Goldstein, eds., The Automobile and American Culture (Ann Arbor, 1983), which has one chapter by Reynold Wik on rural life; Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming ofthe Motor Age (New York, 1991); and Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York, 1994), pp. 176-80.© 1996 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/96/3704-0003$01.00 763 764 Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch who have studied the automobile in the American countryside have concentrated on the social “impact” of the car and the fascination of rural people with Henry Ford and his Model T. Most have seen the car as an “external” force that transformed rural society, usually by urbanizing it.2 They have described in passing how farm people used the car or modified itfor purposes not intended by manufactur­ ers. But these actions have taken a backseat to a form of technologi­ cal determinism evident in most rural as well as urban automotive histories, in which autonomous technological forces drive social change.3 In this essay, we turn these assumptions around and argue that users of technology acted as agents of technological change. By treating farm people as active participants in the social construction of the automobile, we seek to extend recent work in the history of technology that shifts the field’s traditional focus from the “produc­ ers” of technology (e.g., inventors, engineers, and manufacturers) to the “users” of technology (e.g., laborers, factory owners, home­ workers, and consumers).4 Within this growing body of scholarship, 2The major works are Reynold M. Wik, Henry Ford and Grass-Roots America (Ann Arbor, 1972); Michael L. Berger, The Devil Wagon in God’s Country: The Automobile and Social Change in Rural America, 1893-1929 (Hamden, Conn., 1979); Joseph Interrante , “You Can’t Go to Town in a Bathtub: Automobile Movement and the Reor­ ganization of Rural American Space, 1900-1930,” Radical History Review 21 (1979): 151-68...