The Mystery of the Car and America

The invention of the twentieth century that truly changed America was the mass-produced automobile. While other countries rely heavily on public transportation, Americans have a love affair with their cars. On this day in 1913, Henry Ford started mass producing cars in Highland Park, Michigan. Because of production techniques that revolutionized manufacturing, Ford reduced the cost of a Model T from $860 to $250 and America became a mobile society. When asked how he knew what people wanted, Ford is quoted as saying, “If I had asked people what they wanted, we would have made faster horses.”

The automobile enabled travelers to travel distances throughout our country and a necessary infrastructure followed. The interstate highway system envisioned by President Dwight Eisenhower connected rural and urban America. Thanks to the generosity of Mel Kejr, a Salina friend, I was able to drive an original 1927 Model T in a parade last Saturday. It would be easy to assume that a car made 98 years ago would be simple to operate. That would be an incorrect assumption.

 The Model T has essentially an automatic transmission with two speeds. It is controlled by foot pedals. A third foot pedal is a brake, and a very obnoxious lever disengages the entire apparatus. To control the engine, you have to balance fuel mixture, timing and a throttle that refuses to be predictable. Many of the features of the Model T are now incorporated into modern cars but are controlled without you even thinking about them.

General Colin Powell is quoted as saying, “The secret to driving is to spend more time looking through the windshield than at the rear-view mirror.” We might use that as an illustration for life. Notice in the quote that General Powell does not say we should not use the rear-view mirror. It is important for us to know where we came from. We should never forget the history of our family, our community, and our country. It helps us gain perspective and direction. Just like driving a Model T helped me to appreciate the beginnings of the automotive age, glancing in the rear-view mirror (or camera now) enables us to appreciate the past.

The true focus, though, as Powell would say, is looking ahead to what awaits future generations. We have driven hard as a nation to be our best for over a century now. It is easy to feel like the process of growing industry is a means to an end. The truth is that the ends are the means. A significant value of us moving forward is that we learn how to utilize the process of progress. Sometimes it seems that the values which enabled our country to become successful were discarded as soon as “we got there.” If we abandoned hard work, creativity, honesty, love for our fellow man, and humility before God when we arrived, then in truth we are worse off than when we started.

The lesson of the Model T then is to move forward without forgetting where we started. To the casual observer America is a country without a culture. In truth our culture is rooted in the idea that freedom of religion is actually the exact opposite of freedom from religion. We have believed that the individual should be the expression of morality, not the state. To continue to grow as a country we need to each recommit to lives that don’t just live for the here and now, but for the generations to come.