Time to take a stroll drive back to 1914, when “automobility” was young but surging in the USA. Here’s total car and truck registrations by state that year, from an old issue of The Automobile1:
What I’d like to point out here is the remarkably high registration counts in what we might consider rural states: Nebraska is showing about half the vehicle count as California! (In the present day the ratio is about 25:1 in favor of The Golden State.) What’s up here?
Well, of course back then our population was much more rural: California in that year had about twice as many people as Nebraska, whereas now the ratio is twenty to one. So we’d expect the car count to be closer back then, too.
Yet there is something else going on, and that is the relatively high rate of personal vehicle purchases in the hinterlands, in the early years of the automobile. For one thing, the cities had excellent forms of mass transit (trams, etc.), which depressed demand somewhat. And cars in the cities were still seen as trophies for the wealthy: in the same issue of The Automobile we can see that 56,000 of New York’s 146,000 registrations were for chauffeured vehicles (about 40%).
But in farming areas across America initial rejection of the car shifted rapidly.
The initial rural hostility to the car was great. As historian Allan Nevins wrote: “For years most farmers had shown a stubborn dislike for automobiles, which scared horses, killed poultry, and sometimes (as Woodrow Wilson noted in a speech made when he first entered politics) flaunted idleness and conspicuous consumption in the faces of hardworking, hard-pinched men.”2
But by 1924 one-third of all cars in America were owned by farmers.3
What happened? The Ford Model T is what happened, which began shipping in 1908 and by 1914 was one out of every two cars made in the USA (precisely 260,722 Model Ts made in 1914 versus 286,770 of all other car models combined4). The Model T single-handedly converted American farmers from automotive skeptics to enthusiasts.
Its rugged construction and high ground clearance made it well-suited for navigating rough, unpaved rural roads and fields, allowing farmers to travel to town for supplies, visit neighbors, and attend social gatherings with ease. Its simple design and interchangeable parts made repairs and maintenance achievable for the mechanically inclined farmer (which was pretty much all of them). Farmers found countless uses for their Model Ts, adapting them to perform various tasks around the farm. They used them to pull plows and harrows, transport crops and livestock, and power improvised machinery like saws and pumps. The engine could be removed and used as a stationary power source, driving irrigation systems, churning butter, and even generating electricity for farmhouses. I think it is not hyperbole to say that this car became a symbol of progress and prosperity for rural America. Thus our map, above.
Is there a modern-day moral to this story? It might be a stretch, but I think this story reiterates the “Swiss Army knife” theme: that the automobile is not the best at any one mobility task, but it is good at all of them. A commercial truck carries more cargo, but the car or pickup can carry quite a bit. A bus carries more people, but the car can typically carry half a dozen. A bike is more maneuverable and less polluting, but a Fiat 500e is small and agile and has no tailpipe emissions, at least. A plane can easily go 2,000 miles, but a car will get you there too, over time.
However, we will probably never see a car as flexible as the Model T: it is safe to say that no one has yet tried to churn butter with a Lucid…
(I am indebted to the Society of Automotive Historians, of which I am a member, for information, sources, and inspiration for this post!)
Available from various online sources, such as The Smithsonian.
Nevins, Allan, Ford: The Times, the Man, the Company, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954. with the collaboration of Frank Ernest Hill, page 396.
McKee, John M., “The Automobile and American Agriculture,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1924, 116 (1), 12–17.
Nevins, op. cit., page 488.