Another Fine Mess Read online

  The remarkable Model T made Henry Ford famous, but his $5 day left a more profound legacy. Fordism – the mass-production of consumer goods by operatives paid well enough to buy them – was a paradigm shift in the relationship between boss and worker, nurturing an expectation of blue-collar prosperity that swiftly became the American norm. Highland Park workers woke up and found that they’d effectively become middle class overnight. They could suddenly afford to buy the cars they were building. And electric irons, and refrigerators, and phonographs, and radios. By accident or design, Henry Ford had made what should have been a self-evident connection: mass production didn’t make sense without mass consumption. ‘You can’t get rich by making folk poor,’ he said later. ‘They can’t buy your goods, and there you are.’ Millions more people were suddenly in the market for a Model T, so he needed to make millions more of them. Where Ford led, others soon followed. Industrial wages shot up everywhere, and the eight-hour day – which just happened to allow Highland Park to operate three shifts around the clock – became standard. Within a year Ford raised its daily pay to $6, to stay ahead of the game. With consumer goods flying out of factories and off store shelves, workers held all the cards: in due course they unionised, securing paid vacations, healthcare benefits and generous pensions. Fordism democratised prosperity and launched mass-market consumerism, and in doing so set a template for the American Dream and a materialist way of life that spread right across the first world. Ford never called himself an inventor. But he invented the twentieth century.

  The suddenly lucrative appeal of factory work drew migrants to Detroit and its regional industrial rivals from right across the impoverished Appalachians. Turned out you didn’t need an education to make good money after all, as long as you were prepared to up sticks. Towns like the ones I’d been driving through were slowly leeched for fifty years. All the hungry go-getters went north to the factories, and local businesses closed down. So when the Rust Belt started corroding in the 1980s, there was no unskilled work anywhere: no manufacturing jobs to migrate for, and very few left in town. But regrettably that disdain for education lingered, and lingers still, an enduring frustration for the post-industrial employers who periodically attempt to set up shop in Appalachian towns, and struggle to attract applicants with basic skills or any appetite for training. Ford created a whole new class of wealthy workers, but when the good times stopped rolling they were left desperately ill-prepared.

  The desire to out-earn your parents, a driving aspiration throughout American history, evolved into complacent certainty once Henry Ford unleashed the $5 day and blue-collar wages went nuts. But in the last thirty years, it had all unravelled. Most of the jobs vanished and the ones that remained were poorly rewarded: high-school-educated American men now earn 40 per cent less in real terms than they did in 1970. The forward momentum that sustained the American Dream stalled, then slid, and a whole generation became downwardly mobile. Guys in their forties and fifties are battling through on low wages and welfare as their dads live it up on fat company pensions.

  Some of that battling looked pretty relative, it has to be said. Half the listless porch-scowlers had a rusty satellite dish on their roof, and ride-on mowers were parked by most stoops: the right to sit on your arse while cutting your grass is written into the rural constitution. It wasn’t quite The Grapes of Wrath, but nonetheless, an awful lot of middle-aged mojos had been visibly mislaid. These were the first Americans who watched Mike drive by with sullen indifference. Things had gone to shit and it all seemed so unfair. Surveys consistently show that the white working class is the country’s most pessimistic demographic: almost two-thirds of them believe the country has changed for the worse since the 1950s. J. D. Vance, who as a self-declared hillbilly is allowed to say these things, suggests Appalachian men find it increasingly easy to blame everyone but themselves: Obama closed down the coal mines, China stole all our good jobs, Hispanics stole all our bad ones. He quotes surveys that show people living a lie, insisting that they work far longer hours than they actually do, that they borrow less and go to church more. And lo, it came to pass that bitterness, apathy, despair and a towering sense of disillusionment with the status quo did coagulate into the forces that begat the Donald. Bullet-point summary: Trump was all Henry’s fault.

  ‘That a ’twenty-four?’

  It was the first time anyone had guessed right. ‘Those later wheels must fool a lot of people. I’ve got a ’twenty-four and a ’twenty-five, found them both at the back of an uncle’s barn and did a full restoration.’ I was at a mountain-top gas station, and had just met my first Model T guy. He seemed young by the community’s standards, resting a sweet little daughter of about three on his hip as he stood by my car and scrolled through his phone’s collection of T photos. ‘This is my uncle with the ’twenty-five, just after I finished it. He didn’t even know who I was by then, but man, when he saw that car he was just tickled to tears.’ I tried to maintain polite interest but it wasn’t easy: I’d parked too far from the pump, and was straining to jam the nozzle into Mike’s underseat tank orifice with the stout and stubborn hose pulled taut.

  ‘How are your brakes? You got thirty-three bends and a thousand-foot drop coming up just—Honey! Oh my God, honey, did he get you in the face?’

  I had, and the forecourt was filled with the ghastly, high-pitched screams that proved it. A premature squeeze of the trigger had sent a brief but violent jet of petroleum spirit across my car’s interior and straight between a pair of wide young eyes. I stood helpless and horrified, trigger dangling from my hand, as the father bore his wailing daughter rapidly away into the gas-station store. How did they deal with these things here? This was already the longest I’d spent at a gas station without the local law-enforcers dropping in, so justice would surely be imminent. I pictured a sheriff in mirrored aviator shades pinning me regretfully to the concrete, one firm hand under my chin and the other tensing around the petrol-pump trigger. ‘I’m real sorry ’bout this, sir, but you gonna have to learn yourself a West Virginia lesson.’

  I stood for a long five minutes out there. When at length the father emerged, daughter in arms with a huge wodge of wet tissues over her face, I gabbled a stream of craven apologies. He accepted them with a sort of post-traumatic bemusement, still struggling to comprehend how a fellow T guy, by association an authorised proper man, could be so criminally cack-handed. Or perhaps he felt no need for anger, knowing that the forthcoming descent would prove punishment enough. It nearly meted out a capital sentence. I ground down those swooping curves in low gear and sheeting rain, an impatient armada of headlights massed in my mirror, and suffered a heart-stopping loss of traction at a steeply pitched T-junction in the valley’s fundament. In the battle for control, the steering wheel almost came off in my hands. After that, and for many weeks hence, I had to tighten the big nut in the middle with my fingers every half hour or so. Then the skies darkened, the hills receded and I was looking at my next state across a big, brown river.

  St Mary’s was West Virginia’s last outpost, another worn-out town with a lot of empty buildings looking glumly at each other across the rain-filled potholes. I stopped there to fill up, and was about to feed coins into the gas station’s air machine when a guy in overalls with a splendid twin-pronged grey goatee trotted up across the forecourt: ‘Put those quarters back in your pocket, my friend, I’ve got a compressor in my shop right around the corner.’

  His name was KD; his rendition of mine added an extra syllable that would stretch ever longer the further west I travelled. ‘Well, Teeum,’ he said, ramming an air hose on to my front left tyre shortly afterwards, ‘I guess things have been pretty tough for St Mary’s since the refinery closed.’ KD was a school bus driver who had a sideline building custom hot rods, many of which lay in garish, flame-painted bits around us. ‘My bus route gets shorter every year, just ain’t enough kids these days.’ He let a brief and practised sigh through his grizzled face-forks. I’d already briefed him on my miss
ion and the alarums endured to date, and with some relief he now returned to the topic. ‘But anyway, Teeum, what you’re trying to do in this old beauty is just awesome. I’m real pleased to be a little part of it. Car guys will always help car guys.’

  A car guy? Me? The promotion went straight to my head, pushing out all memory of that petrol-blinded toddler and the shameful ignorance betrayed in those Google searches. As KD stooped down to each tyre in turn, I leaned an elbow on Mike’s bonnet and began to hold forth. ‘Ironically, KD, the distributor that’s been giving me all that trouble was an after-market replacement for the Model T’s famously unreliable coil box,’ I heard myself drone. ‘Though it’s perhaps fitting that it came off a VW Beetle, which of course superseded the Model T as the world’s most numerous production car.’ But KD now had his face pressed very intently to a rear wheel and wasn’t listening.

  ‘Know your left brake had fell off?’

  I bent over and shared his discovery: half of my slowing-down apparatus had dropped from its support bracket and was dangling limp and useless, several inches below the wheel hub. God only knows how long it had been like that. My morning checks, such as they were, had been cancelled that day due to inclement weather.

  ‘Shit,’ I said. This sounded a little bald, so I said something else. ‘Well: good brakes encourage bad driving!’

  It didn’t take long for KD to reattach the relevant bracket and bolt on a lock washer, though he did so in a silence steeped in dismay. The dynamics of our relationship shifted further to my disadvantage when I reversed out of his shop and stalled on the wet gravel outside. Then Mike wouldn’t start: not even a wheezy cough, just stony silence. KD slid underneath on a little wheeled trolley, then slid out, stood up and wiped raindrops off his glasses.

  ‘Battery cable was loose. Try the headlights.’

  I flicked the switch and a flashbulb popped.

  ‘You just blew out the left one.’

  KD rolled back under the car, belaboured things beneath my feet, and re-emerged. ‘Starter motor’s bust,’ he concluded levelly. ‘We’ll have to crank it.’ I wasn’t Teeum any more.

  I jumped out, grasped wet metal and heaved in vain, trying to forget the horrible injuries that were a routine consequence of this process (if a T backfired while being cranked, the typical result was a back-to-front thumb, though Ross had once contrived to snap his forearm in two). KD tried; three passers-by tried. None enjoyed that Excalibur moment. ‘Push start,’ said KD, in something approaching a bark. Four pairs of hands were instantly applied to Mike’s backside; incredibly, I managed to do the right things with all those levers and pedals and he jerked abruptly to life. Less incredibly, I rumbled to the end of the road, realised at the very last second that I was about to turn into a one-way street, veered wildly back on to the gas station forecourt and bucked to a dead, stalled halt with my left fender half an inch from a shiny parked Cadillac.

  Ten minutes and another push of shame later I was behind the wheel at the other end of the forecourt, with the throttle set at a thunderous idle. ‘The Pacific Ocean, right?’ yelled KD, with misgiving and the frankest incredulity writ large across his sodden visage. I couldn’t muster more than a pale nod, features settling into the gormless befuddlement that would become a default mask in adversity: my Stan Laurel face. How had so much gone wrong in one go? I could barely stop this car, and now I couldn’t start it. In bucketing rain I barrelled over a girder bridge and into Ohio. The one silver lining to this whole, raging shitstorm: I had a full tank of gas. And I’d need it, because although help was at hand, that hand was 111 non-stop miles away.

  The rain was fearsome, relentless, insane, machine-gunning the roof and sweeping across the asphalt in squally waves. I could barely make out the road through the raindrops crazily sperming across the glass. The dashboard drips swelled into unbroken streams that quickly drenched my knees and feet. A steady waterfall cascaded from the ignition switch. So much water was now flying into my eyes through the top of the screen that I put my sunglasses on. It seemed utter madness to drive on, in a spindly-tyred museum piece with one headlight and no wipers, but I was too scared to pull over and risk stalling. Instead, I slowed to a sloshing crawl, watching headlights cluster and dance in the mirror, until at length they were replaced by a billion-watt flash of red and blue and a hair-raising BWOOOOOP blared out.

  I pulled over, a sodden, red-shoed foreigner with no legal claim to the one-eyed antique he was wobbling about in. Mike was now two states away from his registered home and the only insurance and title documentation I could offer were a couple of blurry scans on my phone.

  Someone later told me that state troopers were the meanest of all law enforcers, humourless, unbiddable and pernickety. But the female trooper who now presented herself at my parted kerb-side curtain seemed no more than mildly petulant, and didn’t even request my driving licence. I had a strong feeling her main focus was on minimising personal exposure to precipitation, and the thunder-gutted idle I’d set the engine at.

  ‘Could you shut that off?’

  I very loudly explained why I couldn’t.

  ‘OK, well, you got a line of eighteen cars behind you. I’ve been tailing you since Coopersville. You gotta speed up, or you gotta pull over.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I lied. ‘Ma’am.’

  She nodded sceptically, then leaned in.

  ‘And you might think about taking those sunglasses off.’

  Well, I made it. The rain relented, and after 111 stall-free, non-stop, bladder-busting miles I roared up a grand driveway on the rural outskirts of Granville, Ohio, and wearily killed the engine. The many buildings grouped around me, and the landscaped grounds in which they were marooned, belonged to a man who had made contact a couple of days before through the Model T Ford Club of America. I’d joined the MTFCA many months before setting off: they were the world’s largest T owners’ club, so large that I wasn’t even its only Tim Moore. When my membership came through I posted up my ambitious intent on their internet forum, spawning responses that had progressed in stages from derision to enthusiastic support. Now club member Paul Griesse had opened up a whole new front of amenability, by offering to put me up for the night. But things had moved on a little since he’d emailed that invitation, and I would be taking the most extravagant advantage of his good nature. One night became three, and in the intervening days Paul would drive me 150 miles to source a replacement starter, spend hours and hours masterminding its installation, feed me like a big fat king and share head-swimming sundown doses of fine bourbon. Paul and his wife Linda dispensed their hospitality with relaxed conviviality, putting me so literally at home that I was given my own house: a multi-bathroomed affair built over one of their many garages. What very excellent people.

  Paul was extremely big on Fords. At the age of seventy-four he’d recently whittled down his collection of fifty classics to half a dozen Ford favourites, including two Model Ts and a Model A he’d owned for more than forty years. His passion ran right back through the company’s bloodline to its founding father. One afternoon, leaving my half-fixed T hydraulically aloft in his garage, Paul led me into a little side office that was a bona fide shrine to Old Man Ford. There were photographic portraits of Henry everywhere, young Henry at the tiller of his Quadricycle, old Henry steering the fifteen millionth T off the production line. The shelves groaned with Henry-centric literature. Paul, like so many of the old T guys I came to depend upon, was a helpless Fordaholic: when he talked about the Model T production line or Henry’s $5 day, he shook his head gently, still in awe of what the great man had achieved.

  In 1917, an especially pithy newspaper columnist compiled a ‘Brief History of the US’ that ran: ‘Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Ford!’ Henry’s fame had by then blossomed into full-blown hero worship. The $5 day was already the $6 day, and he’d just handed his workers the first slice of a shared-profit bonus that would split $48 million amongst them in the next four years. No less incredibly, he’
d made good on a promise to post a $50 cheque to everyone who bought a Model T in 1914 if Ford sold more than 300,000 cars that year, a pledge that cost his company more than $15 million. He was the richest man in the land, accumulating wealth at $20 million a year, but he was also one of their own: a farm boy made good, who never forgot his roots and those Midwestern values. ‘America is not about Chicago and New York,’ he declared, ‘it is out there among the old village sites, the small towns and the farms. God made the country; man made the town.’ Henry had quite the eye for an everyman catchphrase. ‘When a man’s hands are calloused and women’s hands are worn, you can be sure honesty is there.’ ‘It is a disgrace to die wealthy.’ ‘Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.’ ‘I’m just a teenage dirtbag, baby.’