Friday, 22 December 2017

The Car Was Not Invented in America, But We Invented What the Car Meant

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The car created another kind of comfort, too. When Henry Ford put out the word that he’d pay able-bodied men $5 a day to work in his factory in Highland Park, Michigan, it begat a mass migration out of the agrarian South—upward mobility for the sake of mobility. The wealth created by those factories radiated outward, from the personal to the local to the national. Workers lived near where they worked; spent their paychecks at the bars, bowling alleys, and barber shops near where they worked; and were provided with local medical and dental care, eventually, from where they worked. That expanding wealth created societal prosperity, a middle class of Americans who could pay for the things they made. And those things they made required and stimulated so much commerce, trucking and delivering so many goods to so many places, that they knit the country tightly together into one truly United States.

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