By Kevin Nelson
It would be a full-time endeavor to correct all the errors and exaggerations of Michael Moore, so I must content myself with one. In talking about the bankruptcy of General Motors, Moore writes, “One hundred years ago this year, the founders of General Motors convinced the world to give up their horses and saddles and buggy whips to try a new form of transportation. Now it is time for us to say goodbye to the internal combustion engine. It seemed to serve us well for so long.” (See entire text.)
To say that GM convinced Americans to give up horses makes as much sense as saying that McDonald’s made people hungry for hamburgers or Jim Beam for bourbon. If any company put America on wheels, it was Ford, not GM. Henry Ford’s Model T, introduced in 1908, revolutionized transportation in this country, providing a sturdy, reliable, efficient, and amazingly economical car that made automobile ownership an affordable part of the American dream for all Americans.
In its earliest years GM primarily made luxury cars, helping to develop and popularize the electric starter which gave women in particular the ability to drive and be independent in automobiles. Before, with the hand crank, it was physically hard for women to start a gasoline engine. Those such as Moore who romanticize the days of the horse and buggy clearly have never tried to handle a horse. The automobile is one of the greatest labor-saving inventions of all time and it was fundamental to the idea of women’s suffrage. Women campaigned across the nation in automobiles for the right to vote because it showed that just as they could handle a car the same as men, they could handle their business in a polling booth too. And the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920.
It was in the 1920s that GM, under the executive leadership of Alfred Sloan, emerged as an automobile manufacturing powerhouse. Part of its success was due to Sloan’s hiring of Harley Earl, a supremely talented California car designer who helped show that American production cars could not only be useful but beautiful as well. By the end of the decade GM had surpassed Ford in sales and innovation and had become the world’s leading carmaker, a title it held only until recent years when Toyota nicked it for first place.
But even Ford and General Motors combined did not make people around the world fall prey to the sweet enticements of the harlot internal combustion engine. Credit for the invention of the internal combustion engine generally goes to two Germans, Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz, whose companies later merged into a pretty good car company known as Mercedes-Benz. The French led the early development of electric cars, which competed against gas cars in races and for the public’s affection. Also involved in the early development of electric cars was no less an authority on electricity than Thomas Edison. But the Daimler-Benz creation, improved and advanced by the countless inventors who came after them, performed far better than the electrics, and this was why the public-and Henry Ford and GM too-embraced it.
Michael Moore may be ready to write the obit for the internal combustion engine, but I’d say it’s a little premature. The idea of a non-polluting electric vehicle-we’ll forget, for the moment, how the battery is made-sounds good on paper, but that is not the place where cars are judged. Who will win the 21st century race of electric vs. gas? Time will tell but if history is any guide, I would not bet against the latter.
Kevin Nelson is the author of the upcoming Wheels of Change: From Zero to 600 M.P.H.: The Amazing Story of California and the Automobile, to be published in November 2009 by Heyday Books.
Don’t forget, the internal combustion engine cleaned up another source of pollution, road apples. Can you imagine the stench (methane!) and filth (flys!) produced by the steaming horse crap rotting in the streets prior to the internal combustion engine? Now the chief source of this contamination is anything Michael Moore produces.