660 Chapter 24 Postwar Society and Culture: Change and Adjustment
nickel, and petroleum products. It trig-
gered a gigantic road-building program:
There were 387,000 miles of paved
roads in the United States in 1921, and
662,000 miles in 1929. Thousands of
persons found employment in filling sta-
tions, roadside stands, and other busi-
nesses catering to the motoring public.
The tourist industry profited, and the
shift of population from the cities to the
suburbs accelerated.
The automobile made life more
mobile yet also more encapsulated. It
changed recreational patterns and family
life. It created a generation of tinkerers
and amateur mechanics and explorers. In
addition, it profoundly affected the way
Americans thought. It gave them a free-
dom never before imagined. The owner
of the most rickety jalopy could travel
farther, faster, and far more comfortably
than a monarch of old with his pure-
blooded steeds and gilded coaches.
These benefits were real and price-
less. Cars also became important sym-
bols. They gave their owners the feeling
of power and status that a horse gave to
a medieval knight. According to some
authorities the typical American cared
more about owning an automobile
than a house.
In time there were undesirable,
even dangerous results of the automo-
tive revolution: roadside scenery dis-
figured by billboards, gas stations, and
other enterprises aimed at satisfying
the traveler’s needs; horrendous traffic
jams; soaring accident rates; air pollu-
tion; and the neglect of public trans-
portation, which was an important
cause of the deterioration of inner
cities. All these disadvantages were
noticed during the 1920s, but in the
springtime of the new industry they were discounted.
The automobile seemed an unalloyed blessing—part
toy, part tool, part symbol of American freedom,
prosperity, and individualism.
Downtown Scene with Cars, 1911at
http://www.myhistorylab.comHenry Ford
The person most responsible for the growth of the
automobile industry was Henry Ford, a self-taught
mechanic from Greenfield, Michigan. Ford was nei-
ther a great inventor nor one of the true automobileView theImageWould women believe the claims of cosmetics advertisements? “Kissproof” promised to
make a woman’s lips “pulsate with the very spirit of reckless, irrepressible youth.” In a 1927
survey of housewives in Columbus, Ohio, Pond’s Company found that two-thirds of the
women could not even recall the company’s advertisements. Younger women, however,
were more impressionable. When the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency asked Vassar
students to describe cosmetics, they unconsciously used the exact phrases from
advertising copy—proof of its power.
Undoubtedly the automobile had the single most
important impact on the nation’s economy in the
1920s. Although well over a million cars a year were
being regularly produced by 1916, the real expansion of
the industry came after 1921. Output reached 3.6 mil-
lion in 1923 and fell below that figure only twice during
the remainder of the decade. By 1929, 23 million pri-
vate cars clogged the highways, an average of nearly one
per family.
The auto industry created companies that manufac-
tured tires and spark plugs and other products. It con-
sumed immense quantities of rubber, paint, glass,