Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Let no man say it cannot be done.”

I have proposed that we convert our car culture into a mass transit culture.  I believe that this is the right thing to do for many reasons, and now is the right time for one reason:  economic survival. 

The American auto industry, the backbone of our manufacturing capability, is slipping into an abyss of bankruptcy and uselessness.  Why?  Because they lost the business to Japan and Germany.  Look around the highways and parking lots.  Look in your own garage.  How many Ford Tauruses and Chevrolet Caprices do you see out there?  Camrys or LeSabres?  Escorts or Civics?  Lincolns or Mercedes?  Not even close.

Our manufacturing leaders were too arrogant and short-sighted to see that the very countries that provided a significant portion of their market share were steadily building auto industries of their own.  They were using intensive market research (which in American was used only for advertising purposes) and advanced manufacturing techniques and theories (like Demming) made in America to produce the cars that people wanted at prices they wanted to pay.  Lately the Koreans have made still more inroads, and China is already gearing up.  Mr. American Car Industry, you’re dead.   And your young protégé did you in.

The good news is, as our Hindu friends tell us, that death can be a reincarnation to a higher ground.  For the auto industry, it could mean that it is reborn as the mass transit industry.  There is precedent for this kind of turnaround.  And economists and writers like Lester Brown, in his book Plan B, are already drawing the parallels and pointing the way.  

Congress, lead by Democrats, have declared that the companies that have been leading the charge into the abyss are too big to fail.  They’re right about that.  It’s an economic and human catastrophe waiting to happen.  But propping them up on a life support of taxpayer capital won’t save them.  It will only delay the inevitable, impoverish the country, and set the stage for a truly desperate crisis that might dwarf The Great Depression.

Call me a socialist, but it’s time to stop playing free market patty cake when then only solution to “saving an industry” is to put US Treasury capital to work.  These industries are too big to fail, but they need a new business.  Mass transit should be the “strings” attached.

When our nation’s survival was threatened by Fascist aggression in the late 1930’s, Franklin D. Roosevelt mandated that the auto industry would turn 100% of its resources to military production.   The auto companies resisted, insisting that they could add military production and make cars.  But Roosevelt prevailed and no new cars were made between 1942 and 1945.  Instead, American became the manufacturing engine to produce the tools of victory over Nazi world domination.

In his State of the Union address on January 6, 1942 — one month after Pearl Harbor — President Roosevelt announced ambitious arms production goals. The United States, he said, was planning to produce 60,000 planes, 45,000 tanks, 20,000 anti-aircraft guns and 6 million tons of merchant shipping. He added, “Let no man say it cannot be done.”

By war’s end Americans had not only achieved these targets, but far exceeded them, winning a war of survival at the same time.  The converstion is well explained in Doris Kearns Goodwin book, “No Ordinary Time.”  From the beginning of 1942 through 1944, the he auto industry in partnership with the aircraft industry turned out 229,600 aircraft.  Hard to imagine but the auto industry supplied some 455,000 aircraft engines and 256,000 propellers.  Assembly was accomplished by the aircraft industry.  Kearn’s book tells of Merry Go Road makers who turned out gun mounts; toy makers who turn out compasses; a corset making turning out grenade belts as so on and on.  As we all know now, The Greatest Generation was on a mission, united by the need for survival, and this generation exceeded goals that no one thought possible. 

It seems to me that we are at such a time again.  We cannot sustain our dependence on automobiles, and the loss of this sector of our economy might arguably be premature, but it was always its destiny.  Everybody on the planet can’t have a car!   We can’t even have as many car owners as we currently have.  No matter how fuel efficient.  Fuel efficiency is the bridge to a new economy that is based on thriving mass transit industry which is supported by a host of sustainable manufacturing operations that will help America once again rise to preeminence in manufacturing.  If we let the Chinese become our manufactures, they will eventually become our masters as well. 

That’s the way it worked after World War II when American rose to dominate the world with its manufacturing superiority.  Things haven’t changed that much.   My state capital’s motto is “Trenton makes, the world takes.”  That was true once, but Trenton doesn’t make much these days, and a drive around that city will tell you what that means. 

Comments

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It's cool, I love the Americans!

May the U.S and China a good friendship!