Another Fine Mess by Tim Moore
Across the USA in a Ford Model T
Tim Moore is a travel writer who specialises in coming up with daft ideas, doing them, and then writing about them. Never having driven one before, his daft idea for 2018 was to drive a 1924 Model T Ford across the USA from coast to coast. I’ve never driven one either, but from the book I now know that the controls are absolutely nothing like what we now regard as conventional. It’s said to take 1000 miles or a lifetime, whichever is shorter, to master them.
There’s an agenda behind this trip. Baffled by Americans electing Donald Trump as President, Moore wants to cross the country entirely in Republican-voting areas in an attempt to understand how this could happen. His research found that it was possible to do this – a red line of Republican voting from one coast to the other which determined his route. (But Tim, why NO MAP in the book?)
His journey is a tale of breakdowns, junk food, and a network of ‘old car guys’ who unstintingly help get him back on the road. He gets to know staunchly independent-minded Republican small-town America, populated by polite, friendly, helpful people for whom the American Dream, like Moore’s Model T, has ground to a halt and (unlike the ‘T’ sometimes) gone into reverse.
Into his odyssey Moore weaves two more themes: the history of the Model T and the role it played in changing just about every aspect of life in the USA as million after million units of affordable transport rolled off Ford’s innovative production lines; and the story of Henry Ford himself. Henry was a conflicted man – a pacifist whose ruthless pursuit of efficiency was admired by Adolf Hitler, a perfectionist who preferred to hire unqualified people even for senior positions, a visionary who realised his vision but couldn’t adapt when the world moved on, an authoritarian who employed his own enforcers to spy on and discipline his workforce but who famously created the consumer society by raising his factory workers’ pay to $5 an hour, which meant they could afford to buy the cars they were making.
Probably because of the purpose behind Moore’s journey this book doesn’t have many of the laugh-out-loud moments of others I’ve read by him although the humour is still there. The lasting impressions I have are of the kindness and warm hearts of the people he meets, the impact of the Model T and then its successors on American society, and how the American Dream of ever-increasing prosperity and material comfort went rancid as industry and agriculture, the foundations of the 20th century US economy, stuttered, stalled and declined.
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