This research examines the sociology of the American automobile industry, in particular attributes of the industry's connection with and impact on the city of Detroit, Michigan, and the race-related issue fronts that have surfaced uniquely in that area. To see the connection it is important to set the auto industry's realities in context. Excitement generated by Internet-related enterprises in the 1990s and energy- and finance-related businesses in the 1980s was not at all unlike the excitement generated by the automobile industry in the first years after Ransom E. Olds and Henry Ford applied the principles of mass production to the concept of an assembly line in basic industry. Ford's mechanization innovations enabled that company to revolutionize productivity numbers, and that in turn made automobile transportation economically feasible for mass-market consumers. Equally, the mechanized assembly line--distinguished chiefly by the conveyor belt that brought vehicles in the process of being assembled to stations designed to complete the construction of a car--transformed the character of employment in such a way as to create a new basic industry on the scale of steel mills, railroad manufacture, and shipping. An industry that in 1904 was employing some 3,000 workers nationwide was so transformed by Ford's innovations in Detroit that by the end of World War I it was providing some 75,000 jobs, just in the Detroit area (Winter, 1996).
The savings in production costs wrought by the moving assembly line "were so huge [Ford] was able to double wages, cut the workday from 10 hours to eight and simultaneously slash vehicle prices. He would later recall it as his most 'momentous' year" (Winter, 1996, p. 101). Ford's competitors incorporated its principles into their production lines. In the mid-1950s, 95% of all cars sold in the US were American-made, and most of those we made by the so-called "Big Three." The enormous historical success of...