IN 1896, TWO ILLINOIS BOYS WHO HAD set up a factory in Springfield, Massachusetts, built and sold thirteen automobiles (two seats and a two-cylinder, six-horsepower engine with 138-cubic-inch displacement: $1500). Thus Charles and Frank Duryea inaugurated our automotive industry. The fact that Barnum & Bailey bought one of the cars from this first of all model years suggests how enthralled Americans were by the device a century ago; the world around you suggests how enthralled we remain.

Detroit has spent the year celebrating the anniversary of the enterprise with which the city is synonymous, and, in this issue, American Heritage does too.

When I told our indispensable contributor John Lukacs over lunch the other day that we were doing a special issue on the automobile in America, he said, “I hope you won’t make it too”—a diplomatic pause—“rosy.”

This brought me up short. I hadn’t planned to make it rosy, but a quick mental review of the contents failed to come up with a single article that reflected the atmosphere of disapprobation toward the car that had surrounded me for most of my life. I was eleven years old in 1958 when John Keats savaged the creature in his book The Insolent Chariots , and I went to college in the late sixties when the auto industry was in complicity with every other high element of the American establishment to do evil (as my classmates and I shrewdly perceived) for the simple joy of it. Then the oil embargo came at a convenient time when American cars averaged— averaged —twelve miles per gallon. Then Japan and Germany, which between them couldn’t have built a motor scooter just thirty-five years earlier, made us look like fools. And later, while the country was gearing up for the Gulf War, signs blossomed all over my neighborhood saying: ARE WE GOING TO MURDER OUR SONS TO PROTECT A WAY OF LIFE THAT’S DESTROYING THE WHOLE WORLD? (My neighborhood is Greenwich Village.)

And yet. Toward the end of his life Henry Ford was holding forth to a young visitor about the virtues of oldfashioned schooling. Finally the boy, frustrated by what he took to be very archaic views indeed, said, “But, sir, these are different times, this is the modern age and—”

Ford broke in. “Young man, I invented the modern age.”

The boast is preposterous—and true. Impelled by mechanical skill, organizational genius, and a bone-deep loathing of farm life, Ford had found a way to give virtually every American who wanted one a machine that not long before had cost as much as a house, and that, promiscuously deployed, did away forever with the country in which he had grown up. Ford got wistful about that country later on, as we all do from time to time: It can look very pretty. But, as John Steele Gordon’s essay that opens this issue makes clear, it had its failings.

The past