Becoming the Motor City: A Timeline of Detroit’s Auto Industry by Paul Vachon (review)

Reviewed by: Becoming the Motor City: A Timeline of Detroit's Auto Industry by Paul Vachon Kevin Moskowitz Paul Vachon. Becoming the Motor City: A Timeline of Detroit's Auto Industry. St. Louis, Missouri: Reedy Press, 2021. Pp. 176. Appendix. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Photos. Hardcover: 39. 95. There is no shortage of history books aimed at the general automobile enthusiast. These books, which often cater to the expert category of readers, often offer more nostalgic fodder than serious historical narrative or analysis. Freelance writer Paul Vachon's Becoming the Motor City: A Timeline of Detroit's Auto Industry does not, from an academic point of view, reinvent the wheel. However, as a history of Detroit and its core industry, Vachon breaks away from the trappings that usually befall "buff books" about automotive history. Instead, the author threads a fine line between engaging a general audience with approachable topics and offering the reader insightful commentary into a history that is, as he puts it, "astonishingly complex. " Becoming the Motor City is divided into two sections. The first, and larger share of the book's contents, is a chronologically organized nine-chapter narrative, extending from Detroit's late-nineteenth-century position as a regional steel manufacturing hub to the post-bailout 2010s. This composition is heavily weighted towards the early years of Detroit's automobile production, with six chapters covering roughly the industry's origins through the end of World War II while the remaining three chapters cover a similar span of time through the present. Each chapter opens with a wide overview of the cultural, political, or economic landscape before narrowing into smaller narratives, usually only a few paragraphs in length. Vachon breaks chapters into short entries that generally focus on one of four subjects: important End Page 99 people, pivotal events, noteworthy models of automobiles, and occasionally places of note. The final section of Becoming the Motor City contains an epilogue speculating on future forms of mobility, a catalogue of various defunct automotive marques native to the region, and an appendix listing every model produced by Detroit's "Big Three. " In this sense, Becoming the Motor City is a history of two discrete things: the American automobile industry and the city of Detroit. However, Vachon's general theme is that Detroit's relationship with the automobile industry forged an inseparable link between the two. The auto industry is at once a source of pride and immense wealth for the denizens of the Motor City, but also the root of the many problems that have long plagued Detroit, and more broadly, American society. For a concrete example, Vachon suggests that the success of "Bomber Road, " the highway built to shuttle workers to Ford's Willow Run plant in Ypsilanti during World War II, geared the Detroit automakers to abandon construction of new factories within the city limits and place them exclusively in the suburbs, precipitating the decline of the urban core. This in turn paved the way for interstate highway development both in southeast Michigan and across the country. Documenting the continent's largest industry over the span of 140 years is no small feat, and Paul Vachon makes the most of 133 picture-laden pages. However, it might have made for a more balanced narrative if the speculative epilogue and appendix were sacrificed for a few additional chapters to fill out the post-war history of Detroit. Most troublingly, Vachon attempts to squeeze forty years (1960–2000) into a single chapter which fails to fully document the decline of the industry in the last two decades of the twentieth century, nor many of the attempts to breathe life into a city struggling with the consequences of sprawl. The impact of foreign competition, rampant cost-cutting, and changing consumer tastes on both the automobile industry and the Detroit region is underdeveloped and forces the reader to fill in large historical gaps. Geographically limiting the scope of automotive history to the Motor City also leaves some odd-shaped edges. While Detroit, even in the early years of motorization, clearly served as a central hub for manufacturing, engineering, and automotive culture, important influences from across the United States contributed significantly to the motorization. . .