[ALBSA-Info] Noel Malcolm on Sunday Telegraph

[Agron Alibali]

SUNDAY TELEGRAPH(LONDON) 
March 17, 2002, Sunday 
Pg. 13 


Liberte, egalite, automobilite Noel Malcolm wonders how far cars have driven change in the world and how far they have simply changed with the world 

By Noel Malcolm 


Auto Mobile: How the Car Changed Life by Ruth Brandon 

Macmillan, pounds 20, 468 pp pounds 18 ( pounds 1.99 p&p) 0870 155 7222 

ONE OF THE strangest statements ever made about the car was uttered by Woodrow Wilson (then President of Princeton University) in 1906, when he declared, in a public speech: "Nothing has spread socialistic feeling in this country more than the auto mobile." 

It takes some head-scratching to work out what he could possibly have meant. Was he referring, perhaps, to the new ability of Left-wing agitators to tour the country, handing out pamphlets? Or to the camaraderie of the road, the nascent socialism of the driving fraternity? No; his point was that the automobile was an object so intrinsically desirable, yet so extremely costly to make and run - the archetypal rich man's toy - that it could only provoke blind envy (leading to revolutionary fervour) among the toiling masses. With hindsight we can all see how wrong he was; sharp-eyed observers might even have seen it at the time. In 1906 Henry Ford, who had already been producing cars for three years, introduced the Model N at the bargain price of $500. He sold 1,600 cars that year, and 8,243 in 1907. In 1908 he unveiled the Model T, a much better car, at a slightly higher price (which rapidly came down as sales ex panded): three years later he was selling 78,000 of them. Twenty years later his River Rouge factory complex - which took in iron ore at one end and emitted cars at the other - was employing more than 100,000 people, and many of them were driving their own cars to work. 

It is difficult, in fact, to think of any human invention that has been more non-socialistic, or even anti-socialistic, in its effects. Here was an industry that expanded at a colossal rate, making billions for the capitalists and their shareholders; an industry that was under the constant pressure of the marketplace, as competitors struggled to adapt their products to what the customers actually wanted; and, above all, an industry that gave people a type of individual freedom - to travel where and when they liked - which they had never had in the past. No wonder that in ultra-socialist states, such as Stalinist Albania, private car-ownership was forbidden by law. 

Ruth Brandon's enjoyably essayistic account of the automobile industry from its origins to the present is more concerned with social history (it is subtitled "How the Car Changed Life") than with politics; but political implications are never far away. Her special interest is in the impact of the car on city life - the great shift in population from the inner city to the suburbs, where car ownership has become a virtual necessity. Like many a modern commentator, she mourns the passing of neighbourhood street-life and the advent of an "atomised society"; and there is the obligatory reference to "train-hating Mrs Thatcher" and her "great car economy". 

The perennial problem with this sort of broad-brush socio-economic history is the difficulty of distinguishing symptoms from causes, or the facilitating factors from the primary mechanisms of change. The extraordinary densities of population in some city centres before the advent of the car (150,000 per square mile in parts of 1890s London, more than twice that on Manhattan's Lower East Side) were based on systems of labour, such as sweat-shops in the garment trade, that would have declined anyway, with or without automobility. Londoners were moving from the East End to the Essex suburbs long before they could afford to buy cars. 

Similarly, Ruth Brandon puts great emphasis on the effects of Henry Ford's famous assembly-line method, in which the skills of experienced craftsmen were devalued and the premium was on sheer obedience and the endurance of repetition. Ford's factories may have been, for a time, the leading examples of this phenomenon; but, as Brandon notes, he did not invent assembly-lines, or time-and-motion studies, which were features of modern industrialisation more generally. (He did, however, pioneer a successful and highly counter-intuitive antidote to the drug of repetitious labour: he raised his workers' salaries to motivate higher rates of pro duction.) 

In one section of her book Brandon goes so far as to suggest (tentatively) a connection between car-production and Fascism. The obvious link is Hitler's Autobahn project and his sponsorship of the Volkswagen - which was also known as the KdFWagen or Kraft durch Freude ("Strength through Joy") Wagen, after the recreation arm of the Nazi "Labour Front". But she is also able to cite the brief but virulent anti-Semitic campaign run by Henry Ford in his local newspaper in 1920-1, and the fact that our own William Morris (Lord Nuffield) was one of the chief financial backers of Oswald Mosley. 

Is there a pattern here? Yes and no. Nuffield was hardly a supporter of Fascism: he was attracted by the famous protectionist "Manifesto" produced by Mosley when he was still a Labour MP (and signed by 17 Labour Members, including Aneurin Bevan). And while Ford's anti-Semitism may have been, for a while at least, emotionally strong, it did not form part of a larger ideology. 

But perhaps there is some deeper connection. Not the one gestured at by Brandon, who concludes rather weakly that the cases of Ford and Morris "express the defining tragedy of the 1920s and 30s: the ease with which idealism becomes corrupted by power . . ." Rather, it is the connection between some aspects of Fascism and some elements of industrial modernisation: a claim that the new, "scientific" methods of organisation are more efficient than the old, democratic ones, combined with an obsession with harnessing the power of the masses. Once again the car industry seems little more than a symptom of other, broader changes. 

Perhaps it is for some such reason that Woodrow Wilson's dictum seems, strangely enough, closer to being true today than at any time in the last 96 years. When regular car-users tell the opinion pollsters that they are firm supporters of public transport, they are expressing more than mere hypocrisy, more than the (quite logical) desire that other people would leave their cars at home. They are buying into a socialistic nostalgia of a rather attractive kind: a yearning for a world we have lost, a world in which warm, friendly neighbourhood communities and benevolent state provision went hand in hand. 

Sadly, it is not a world that Ken Livingstone's poll tax on journeys is likely to recreate. The truth is that if we ever had such a world, we did not simply "lose" it. We left it of our own volition, voting - on our accelerators - with our feet. 

Noel Malcolm's books include 'Bosnia: A Short History'. 


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