Ford? Tough!
The tragic end of an era for American cars
FORD has announced that it’s going to stop selling sedans. It’ll continue to sell SUVs and its hugely popular F-series pickups, but it’s stopped producing its Taurus, Fusion and Fiesta sedans in North America. And it’s breaking my heart. Ford has been a major part of American history since it launched the Model T in 1908. “You can have any color you want,” said Henry Ford, “as long as it’s black.” But the cars were mass produced, and Ford sold 18 million of them from the assembly lines it pioneered.
Ford’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Mich., was the world’s largest factory when it opened in 1928, offering its workers $6 a day for an eight-hour shift. Top wages back then, but the Rouge plant was also the scene of a famous union battle in 1937, when the UAW’s Walter Reuther tried to organize the auto workers. Reuther and his union colleagues were punched and kicked, and that’s an important part of our labor history.
During the Second World War, Ford was a crucial part of what Franklin Roosevelt called the “arsenal of democracy.” The company went into full military production, turning out tanks, jeeps and armored cars. The Willow Run plant produced one B-24 Liberator bomber an hour. It would’ve been a different war without Ford.
Our idea of America is built around images, and so many of those images have a Ford in them. The old jalopies turned into hot rods.
Robert Mitchum’s Ford in Thunder Road (“thunder was the engine and white lightening was the load”). The Lincoln Continental ferrying presidents about, and taking John F. Kennedy through the streets of Dallas. The Mustang introduced at the 1964 World’s Fair, with a back seat made for necking.
Ford will continue to produce the Lincolns and Mustangs, but it’s abandoning the sedan market to Japanese and Korean automakers, the Hondas, Toyotas and Hyundais. I know, that’s creative destruction and a sign of economic health, with new firms replacing old ones that have had their day. We don’t want an economy where one firm stays dominant forever, and new upstarts get shut out. Ford has had a good run with its sedans, but now it’s time for milk biscuits and beddy-byes. All the same, I still get sentimental about the news. I can remember driving around in a ’53 flathead Ford that we got for $100 and that could do 110 miles per hour. It got me kicked out of boarding school, and for that I’m eternally grateful. I can also remember, as a teenager, dodging cops in a Ford Galaxie with a case of 24 beers in the trunk.
Back then, we divided ourselves according to our NASCAR heroes and the cars they drove. My friends liked Junior Johnson, who drove a 426-cubic-inch Galaxie, built “Ford Tough.” Tom Wolfe called Johnson the “Last American Hero,” and President Ronald Reagan pardoned him for his moonshining conviction.
I liked Plymouths, however. One of my proudest moments was persuading my parents that a 383-cubic-inch Sports Fury was a sensible family car. You didn’t have to touch the accelerator. You only had to think of touching it, and already you were at the next block. So I liked Richard Petty in his 426-cubic-inch Hemi. Mopar Forever!
Back then, owning a car was the first of the stages that brought one to adulthood. You’d get your learner’s permit at 15, and cruise down the Miracle Mile to the A&W. It wasn’t about the root beer — it was about checking out the girls. That was our first step on life’s way, and from it would follow jobs, marriage, houses and kids, in an ordered and accustomed manner.
But now the customs and the ceremonies we’d thought so stable, so eternal, are changed, and different habits take their place. The first step is no longer cars. Perhaps it’s a bicycle, but more likely it’s a video game, and from there one progresses from internships and hook-ups to a room in your parents’ basement.
If that’s where we are, it’s a sign of economic decline. There’s no longer a market for our kids, even as there’s no market for the Fusions and the Tauruses. The jobs aren’t there for them, and the student-loan burden makes debt slaves of them. We’re not going to bring back the Ford Sedans, but we’ll be judged as a society on whether we bring back our kids to the prospect of jobs, families, homes and children of their own, to all the things that civilize us. Maybe fast cars, too.