A year of Fords and flight
AMERICA 1908:
The Dawn of Flight, the Race to the Pole,
the Invention of the Model T
and the Making of a Modern Nation
By Jim Rasenberger
307 pp. Scribner $27
Reviewed by Jack D. McNamara
All in all, 1908 was not a great year. But the 366 days of America 1908 are notable for the continuity of great themes, themes which developed in glory and horror throughout the remainder of the century. Jim Rasenberger efficiently and competently carries us along through those days, and I would buy the book if I hadn’t been sent a review copy. I am a sucker for historical narratives, from Thucydides to Victor Davis Hanson.
In 1908, Henry Ford introduced the Model T automobile, the first successfully mass-produced vehicle ever. An advertisement from the Harper’s Weekly of October 3 shows the Model T in splendid profile. Large print tells us that we might obtain “The Ford Four Cylinder, Twenty Horse Power, Five Passenger Touring Car ...” for $850. The Model T was developed in secrecy; it was Ford’s third try at producing an automobile that was both durable and cheap. Rasenberger writes that by 1915 there were more than two million cars on America’s roads. Half of them were Model T Fords.
America was in technological motion in 1908. At the same time Henry Ford was developing the automobile industry, which came to dominate the industrialized world, Wilbur and Orville Wright were tinkering with machines that would fly. Rasenberger quotes the contemporary magazine, Scientific American: “ In tracing the development of aeronautics, the historian of the future will point to the year 1908 as that in which the problem of mechanical flight was first mastered.”
On December 31, 1908, Wilbur Wright took off over Le Mans, France, and flew for two hours and twenty minutes, a distance of ninety miles. Wilbur Wright won a French prize worth about $4,000 that frigid day. The Wright brothers had established their dominance of the world’s other flying machines.
In the process they managed to kill one of their first passengers, Army Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge. The lieutenant thus became the first airplane passenger to die as the result of flight.
Rasenberger carries the story of the automobile and the airplane throughout the book. That narrative spares the reader a tedious chronological slog through the year’s events. The book’s other narrative lines recount two expeditions to discover the North Pole, one mounted by Frederick Cook and a second by Robert Peary. Both expeditions demonstrated heroism in the face of incredible hardship. But it is unclear whether either man ever found the North Pole.
Perhaps the most significant political event of 1908 is the voyage of the “Great White Fleet,” sixteen American battleships that circumnavigated the globe. Other than during the fleet’s port visit to Japan, Rasenberger describes America’s battleship fleet almost exclusively from the U.S. perspective. The U.S. Navy was at the time the third most powerful in the world, behind only Britain and Germany. Ironically, however, the U.S. fleet was on the cusp of obsolescence in 1908. In December 1908, Britain recognized a sudden surge in new German battleship construction. The “Naval Scare of 1909” set off an arms race in Dreadnought battleship building, a story marvelously told in Robert Massie’s Dreadnought. Battleship building set the stage for the great cataclysm that was World War I.
That is, of course, a problem with books which focus on one year only. We always know there is something just off stage in the near future which the actors of 1908 could not know, but which we know all too well.
The irreplaceable Rough Rider Theodore Roosevelt was completing his last year in the presidency in 1908. His designated successor, Republican William Howard Taft, was on his way to an easy election over the great Populist, William Jennings Bryan, and Socialist Eugene Debs.
Roosevelt wittily characterized the 1908 election. “The nomination of Mr. Taft was a triumph over reactionary conservatism,” he told reporters, getting in a dig at the old guard of his party, “and his election was a triumph over unwise and improper radicalism.”
None could know in 1908 that Roosevelt would soon disavow his successor and run in 1912 at the head of an invigorated Progressive Party. Roosevelt’s “Bull Moose” candidacy, which split the Republicans and delivered the presidency to the professorial Democrat Woodrow Wilson.
If we might have any lingering doubts concerning the topicality of 1908, anarchist Selig Silverstein blew himself and an innocent bystander apart in New York’s Union Square.
We are familiar with other books devoted to a single year—Paris 1919 by Margaret MacMillan and 1968 by Mark Kurlansky. Those were years marked by momentous historical change. But while the MacMillan book was a great success, the book 1968 was somewhat superficial and therefore unsatisfying. America 1908 was disappointing, too, in some regards but that is always a problem in books that attempt a circumnavigation of a single year. Given the constraints Rasenberger set for himself it is a good effort.
The Ford Model T ad is worth the price of admission. Look at it before you buy your next Japanese car.
Jack McNamara is the publisher of The Nimby News.
(Photo by Richard Grabman.)
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