Immigration ranks with communists, now repackaged as Moslems, conspiracies and Negroes as the great bugaboos that can be trotted out whenever voters get restive. Where I work, the effects of rhetorical posturing have been more pernicious.
I work for a contractor who caters to customers willing to pay for quality, or the illusion of success it brings. Most of our workers speak Spanish. We pay painters less than the large, local union shop, but at least twice the federal minimum wage, and considerably more than any homeowner’s willing to pay who hires unlicensed help.
We recently had two customers whose remodeling projects overran their budgets (or loans), and they expected us to complete their work gratis. In both cases, we pulled our crews until payment issues were resolved. One even demanded our cost structure before he would pay, and he’s now refusing to pay the overheads of the general contractor.
I asked a co-worker if this kind of behavior was normal. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were: in both cases we had wives who kept demanding more without regard to price, and husbands who found it easier to argue with us than them. Perhaps the men didn’t want to restrain their wives, lest it make them seem less worthy; possibly, they badgered us to dramatize they were as powerful as those they considered their peers.
I was told no, it was unusual, and my co-worker went on to suggest that there may be a hint of racism in the response. The owner’s response one day was that he wasn’t sure he liked catering to "whiney millionaires." The next day, he decided the fault was all his, that he had accepted agreements that were too open ended.
I suspect publicity about immigration fuels our customers’ behavior. Propagandists tell us how much less money immigrants are willing to accept, and talk about cheap labor in the big box parking lots. People who’ve already spent $60,000 to $100,000 to repaint their houses feel they’ve been overcharged, and now want us to complete the work with what they’ve heard are the usual substandard immigrant wages.
If we don’t, and we have not cut pay, then we lose money. In one case, since the couple started protesting, we’ve only been able to bill half our direct costs, and none of our indirect ones. In effect, they cut our price by at least two-thirds. The alternative was strained relations with general contractors, and even larger potential losses.
It’s no different than the downward pressure on wages in this country coming from exporting our manufacturing jobs to México or China. Shareholders and customers are often the ones who force plants that can compete in this country to move, because the mere fact they can succeed threatens the pattern they’ve been told to use to judge merit. We know one of the disputing couples is involved with companies who’ve moved their manufacturing overseas.
At the same time we have customers who want to change the terms of their agreements as their jobs near completion, we’re realizing prices we quoted are no longer high enough. During the months we’ve been sending crews to the two house sites, our material costs have risen, costs to drive to them have increased. Our hourly rate for such time and materials jobs covers both, and we’ve just increased it for future proposals, and have had more customers try to renegotiate high bids.
We’re not yet in the position of homeowners looking for help in the big box parking lots who’ve just spent more than they budgeted for materials, and now have to complete their home improvement as best they can. But, we are getting caught in the same economic vise, where our costs are rising but the market won’t let us increase our income to compensate.
Economists who believe the market follows natural laws constantly tell us, the only element that can be controlled is labor. Materials, transportation, other costs are the implacable outcome of market forces that cannot be altered without harming the market itself. They remind us corporate executives don’t get their high pay from wages, but from market mechanisms through options to buy shares at prices lower than the publically traded value.
Recently, investment bankers have advised people the best defense against escalating costs is to buy stock in the offending companies, and thereby earn a rebate from the same market forces. That advice is only helpful for those with financial reserves. For those who can barely afford a house, and could never afford to hire a painter, the advice is superfluous.
Economics never proffer useful answers to those of us whose wages are the one that always need to be managed to keep the markets stable. As Ben Stein recently wrote in The New York Times,
Yes, we do have a very strong economy by many metrics - alas, not including personal hourly income, but that’s for another day.
before reiterating, "We have full employment."
When experts let us down and the mass media reports news that doesn’t match our experience, pressure builds on politicians. There always are some willing to appease our anxieties by appealing to our basest instincts.
Automobile or airline workers may be cynical about the efficacy of limiting immigration because they know the biggest threat to their wages is outsourcing or the availability of underemployed citizens willing to take their jobs for lower wages that still improve their situations.
The more idealistic, the ones who still believe they can improve their lives, are the ones who may be willing to listen to the pundits. Listening and following advice reinforces their sense they still can control their lives, much the way pressuring my boss provides his customers assurance they are still among the better off, still have accumulated wealth and power.
Historically people have exorcized immigrants when they were concerned about their own economic security. The fact that politicians believe they can now exploit it for personal gain tells us a great deal less about the border and the number of Spanish-speaking immigrants in the country, than it does about the economy. In a period when inflation measures have been redefined to eliminate destabilizing factors, when the consumer price index does not include food or energy, the willingness to listen to bigots may be the only reliable economic indicator.
Sources:
Stein, Ben. "A Quick Course in the Economics of Confusion," The New York Times, 28 May 2006.
Bad law makes bad citizens. Attempts to control immigration have produced some of our worst laws, with some of the most dire unintended consequences.
I read one reason the Japanese were willing to attack us at Pearl Harbor was they resented our discriminatory immigration laws which were aimed specifically at Japanese and Chinese in California. I don’t remember the source, and so don’t know what evidence, if any, supports that claim.
Certainly prohibition resulted, in part, from our desire to control our German- and Italian-speaking residents, especially during World War I. It was proposed in 1917, and ratified in 1919.
Despite its noble hopes to curb alcohol abuse, it fed, instead, a popular culture that glamorized cocktails, and spread drinking to the middle classes, including women. Since the new drinkers weren’t alcoholics, they didn’t believe their desires for chic social lives were corrupt. This lead to a willingness to circumvent the law, indeed, romanticized speakeasies and bootleggers by reinforcing youth’s natural desire to challenge restraints.
Selective obedience of the law was simultaneously occurring with the federal income tax and state attempts to control the newly available automobiles. Attitudes coalesced into a new view that our government was a system to be outsmarted.
Prohibition created a black market supplied, initially, by men who had previously controlled vice traffic in cities. They expanded into gangs, and then syndicates, and what we now refer to as the mafia.
As activities of rumrunners became more flagrant and led to gang wars, we responded with increased police power, and introduced what became the FBI. It, in turn, found it difficult to collect evidence of criminal behavior, and so found ways to twist the new income tax laws to find grounds to arrest criminals.
Prohibition was repealed in 1933, but too late to curb the lawlessness and the acceptance of lawlessness that it had engendered, especially lawlessness by the state. Those attitudes continue today when we jail users and escalate the force used against farmers, now to the point of dominating our policies towards some Latin American countries.
The consequences of criminalizing natural human behavior, especially when that involves the marketplace, comes to mind when politicians suggest ways to stop immigration should include turning undocumented immigrants into felons and prosecuting those who help them, wither it be with food, housing, or a job.
Attempts to slow immigration have already lead to a new class of criminals, the coyotes who charge to bring people into the country, then leave them to die in unventilated trucks or in the desert. A recent New York Times article described other exploiters, including unscrupulous lawyers.
The requirement that job applicants must show proof of citizenship already puts many in law enforcement positions for which they are not trained and makes all of us prove our legitimacy. I work for a contractor who leases his employees from a head shop that handles payroll and other legal requirements. I send copies of the documents applicants provide to the legal employer.
I have no idea how to tell if a driver’s license or social security card is counterfeit, and I doubt the employer can make any determination from the copies sent to it. I’m not even sure if I’m supposed to check anything, or am only a clerk. The worst of the proposed laws would prosecute me.
Some may respond to the threat of legal action by simply refusing to hire anyone who looks like he or she may be an immigrant, regardless of proof. That puts them in violation of civil rights laws against discrimination based on skin color, language or national origins.
Which law to break to run a business and hire people?
A government of laws depends on citizens accepting the laws it promulgates, and obeying them, regardless of cost or inconvenience. Selective obedience of the law has an honorable tradition going back to Thoreau, if not to earlier religious groups. However, our government has only tolerated it when the issues were ones of genuine conscience, like wartime conscientious objectors, or small religious groups like the Amish.
Every time I’m forced by economic necessity to do something that could be illegal, it makes me ruminate on the nature of the law and our government. The corruption of the body politic is no longer something happening to them, to politicians and lobbyists. When it touches a lowly clerk in a small business who dutifully votes in primaries, then it is forcing every single person not to consider the status of immigrants, but to reconsider their loyalty to their elected government.
It was hard to elevate drinking by our mothers and grandmothers to that level; it will be harder still to indict people trying to run legitimate businesses. The resulting, selective application of law enforcement will lead to a further degradation of our respect for laws and the individuals who uphold or enforce them. The contempt for law is far more corrosive for the American way of life, than the challenge of absorbing one more wave of immigrants.
Sources:
Gary Rivlin, "Dollars and Dreams: Immigrants as Prey," The New York Times, 11 June 2006.
Folklorists always feel a frisson when they discover an artist working within a recognizable tradition. They’re as scarce as talent ever is, and especially rare in modern corporations. Indeed, I’ve only met one man who bridged his family’s tradition and his work environment. His life and work demonstrate that before there is art, there’s a habit of mind.
Doc Hopkins was a Harlan County, Kentucky, banjo player who moved to Chicago to work the National Barn Dance radio program in 1930. His son, Howard, was a computer programmer at Mark Controls in Evanston when I worked there in the late 1970s. He’s since died of cancer.
Howard betrayed no signs of a southern folk tradition. He was interested in classical music, especially opera and piano. When he talked about his family, he would attribute his and his daughter’s talents to their Welsh heritage. But he also talked about his Catholic education, like the time he joked about business ethics as taught by Jesuits.
He had a storytellers knack for setting up a situation, then leaving it to the listener to complete the tale. He once talked about the time he was at Kraft when they brought people together to announce layoffs. He happened to be holding the company payroll tape at the time. He said, he looked at the speaker, looked down, then looked back up, then looked down.
When he mentioned his father, who was named Doctor Howard because a seventh son was supposed to be gifted, it was so he could improvise the conversation that would occur between two doctors when the older man was in the hospital. He only mentioned the Barn Dance once, and then in a conversation that seemed to disparage country music. To a stranger, he was a cosmopolitan, almost Renaissance man.
In those years, before computer graphics were widespread, the typical computer folklore was a calendar or greeting card made by spacing X’s in a report line. The technique was reminiscent of cross stitch embroidery, and both shared their origins with the cards used to run mechanical looms that were one of the first applications for computer programs.
Howard discovered ways to use IBM’s job control language (JCL) to create dialogues for data entry clerks to enter run time parameters like dates into files read by batch programs. He then played with the macros to produce a primitive flip-book cartoon that was consciously derived from the house that Jack built tradition.
First the word CAT appeared in a single line and started to move across the screen, as he changed it's location in the display line for each display.
Then, the word DOG appeared and followed the word CAT at a few spaces as the word CAT changed it's display location.
Next, the word car appeared and ran into the word DOG as he decreased the spacing between the words as he changed the location, so it became CARDOG
Finally a TRUCK appeared with a hook to haul off the car as TRUCK ¬ CAR
He said, he would try to use the full screen editor next, but couldn’t decide if he wanted to do the sunset from Gone with the Wind or the Red Sea parting.
I’ve only known a few other programmers like Howard who could read a user manual and figure out how to use the commands for new purposes. Most of us can barely read a manual, and go no farther than getting an immediate answer. He certainly would have figured out how to recreate his cartoon within the limitations of HTML as it's constrained by this blog site.
I’ve known one other person who would go the next step, and experiment with the tools for artistic purposes, but he came after graphics were common and anything was imitation, not innovation. His efforts were labored and self-conscious, more concerned with proving what a cleaver fellow he was. Howard’s work always betrayed an enthusiasm for the objects themselves, and he was never the object to admire.
I’ve also knew one other person who could turn anecdotes into folk tales. He was a Texan, who never wasted his narrative talents on computer programs. But woe to his boss who went deer hunting with the boys and talked about what a great day they had holed up in a cabin in the rain reading girlie magazines. Jack had gone hunting with a guy who took to shooting rattlesnakes basking on the rocks. Jack was much tried.
Howard’s the only person I’ve known who like to play with the world of business, not to wax profoundly about bureaucracy, but to find the fanciful. He would say, everything made him hungry. Inventory turns became turnovers. General Ledger roll ups became jelly rolls.
I’m sure the thing that sparked the cartoon, that brought the disparate elements of his heritage together, was the existence of the alien ¬ key. It sat there taking up real estate on the keyboard, with no name. It had to have a purpose, and if he could find no logical one, then he would invent one.
Tradition and creativity are often juxtaposed, the one conservative, the other looking for the new and unexpected. In Howard, the two were combined, with the one structuring the form of the other. Unlike his father who made records, he left no permanent body of work. But then, before electronic media, that was the fate of most oral traditions, when only the structure and subject survived, but not the imaginative performance.
Howard shows folk tradition can exist in the modern world, use it for its context, but not be part of any surviving folk tradition. His creations never spread through the company, would never have been remembered. So far as I know, that company had no shared narrative traditions, no unique culture.
In his way, Howard was sui generis.
Conspiracy is a popular explanation for events. However, the theory seems to have little basis in reality.
We’ve witnessed several genuine conspiracies in this country, but refused to use that term. During the civil war, John Wilkes Booth plotted with fellow confederate sympathizers to murder Abraham Lincoln and other union leaders. We dismiss it as an act of war, or the isolated act of an egotist. Perhaps we’ve clothed the horror of that war in the romanticism that drove us to fight in the first place, and dare not look beyond.
More recently, we’ve seen groups of individuals working through informal networks to replace the existing government with roots in the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt with a model from before the progressives, perhaps the world of William McKinley. Journalists have identified the individuals who financed the conservative movement or who founded various groups, and documented how the disparate groups began to cooperate to reach their varied goals.
Yet, when Hilary Clinton referred to her husband’s opponents as a "vast right wing conspiracy" she was ridiculed by journalists who themselves were being used by that network.
The reason. It was easier to identify her as a villain than a network of unknown people.
Even though the term conspiracy refers to the workings of a group, our popular image is drawn from Goldfinger and The Godfather. We expect conspiracies to be organizations run by single, omnipotent individuals. As such, our view of a conspiracy is a mythic view of a paternalistic past, not a realistic view of how things operate in the present.
Conspiracy theories are neither universal nor constant in American history. They appear when people’s experience contradicts what they’ve been raised to believe. They resurfaced when Jack Kennedy was murdered because we believed we’d reached a level of civilization where such things no longer happened. They were part of the Communist world, or South America, but not here.
We knew there were still deranged individuals, but we believed our society and its institutions had evolved to protect us from such random acts. Our focus turned to groups who were supposed to protect us, the CIA, and to those who were expected to explain such events, special commissions with experts like Arlen Specter.
Our conspiracy theories do not explain things that work, like the election of George W. Bush. They attempt to explain things that fail.
Tales about complicit policemen, always unnamed, explain the failure of the municipal government. Rumors about people keeping their jobs because they have the goods on someone rationalize the failure of an organization to keep itself vital.
In an earlier age, those failures would be attributed to witchcraft or the evil eye, and trials would be proposed to restore order. When Lincoln died, the more secular Walt Whitman mediated on death, the great obsession of the 19th century. Our scientific age requires a rational, causal explanation. When none exists, people can only induce one from bits of their experience, the small group interactions of family, church and public school where they know the actors well and cliques and feuds are the rule.
The solution follows from the explanation. If failure is caused by a single villain, then the answer is a more powerful hero. At my last employer, where the failures of management became so obvious no one could protect anyone, people replaced the conspiracy theory that no longer worked with a new savior story, the belief that it was only a matter of time before the customer, the government, would act to punish the evil doers by canceling the contract.
Companies are rarely like Shatterproof Glass, where a single person runs the company, and is recognized as doing so by every single employee. In most places, the head is a faceless name, the lines of genuine communication hidden. If Shatterproof failed, everyone knew it was because of the pigheadedness of the old man. People at my last employer still believe the government or its corporate agent would act effectively.
Both assume someone, somewhere is in charge. Most people who vote in local elections are more cynical. They don’t expect a new mayor or school board member to improve police protection or the quality of education or address violence in the schools. The unease that led to conspiratorial whispers cannot be allayed the way it can when there’s still faith someone can act.
Ever since United States Steel and Chrysler had problems in the 1970s, auto companies, air lines, other corporations with problems, know the government thinks they deserve what has happened to them and will refuse to help. If my last employer loses the contract, its parent corporation will blame the CEO who’s so busy firing people to show he can act in a crisis. If GM fails, how can anyone say it was Alfred P. Sloan’s management method when it worked so well so long? How can you or I say it’s Rick Wagoner, when he helped the company survive 10 years ago?
How can you have hope after Ross Perot made rousing speeches against GM, but did nothing? The one place still has hope and a new narrative. Detroit is disillusioned, and can find no heroes. Some stockholders may hope Kirk Kerkorian will be the one who finally saves GM from itself, but most remember his role in the sale of Chrysler to Daimler-Benz.
Folklore arises when there is a need and an explanation, like Shatterproof and the last employer. When there is a need, but not enough knowledge to develop an explanation, conspiratorial thinking appears like those who’ve given up on city politics. When there is a need, but experience no longer suggests an explanation, there is superstitious repetitions like GM.
Corporate culture takes many forms, but genuine narrative traditions are rare. At Shatterproof Glass and my last employer, folk tales formed in irrational environments where management occasionally acted in ways that benefited employees. The paternalistic company produced a trickster tradition to explain the old man who ran the company, while the caste bound company fomented a conspiratorial belief that any incompetent who survived did so only because he, or she, had the goods on someone.
At the second company, the most egregious example was the manager caught with pornography on his computer who not only was not fired, but went to work for our customer. It was no mere rumor. I know people who were forced to see it, when the investigators who found it needed witnesses. I know the woman who was curious when everyone denied it existed and hacked into the computer to discover the pictures were girls the age of the man’s teenage daughters. What other explanation could they find for someone who broke every rule, violated every taboo, and was protected?
No one was particularly curious about what someone knew or how someone survived. "He must know someone" simply became the explanation for the inexplicable. When there’s no interest, there can be no tale. But that doesn’t mean a shared culture doesn’t exist signaled by a proverb without form, a moral without a story. Wisdom without explanation was distilled into a motif, the nub of the narrative tradition.
The ubiquity of the superstitious explanation for survival became apparent when peopled acted on the belief that blackmail and extortion were the ways to survive. The man, who reported the flawed bookkeeping at the end of the previous fiscal year, believed he could save his position because he knew what had been going on, and contacted higher up managers to remind them. The deputy general manager ignored him, and publicly gave his support to the transgressing CFO.
A few months later, the whistle blower began to say, his friends would take care of him. And, in the end, that’s what happened: one of the customers who was aware of the fiscal year-end shenanigans found him a job. Within a month of his transfer, our CFO laid off everyone he dared who knew what had happened. He later let people know he waited until the customer’s protégé was safe, that is, until there was no one left for the laid off to know.
A supplier demanded payment the same day his invoice was offered, even though the contract stipulated 30 days. When the purchasing and payables departments refused to do his bidding, he threatened to go higher. The message came down: pay the invoice the day it is received. When the manager who had responsibility for overseeing that supplier’s contract tried to exercise some authority, the message came down. Oversight was transferred to the deputy general manager, and the CFO was given notice. In this case, acting on the belief in veiled power worked; the supplier always hinted he had connections.
The underlying culture in this company may have arisen from doing construction for the government: each world is rife with rumors of power and kickbacks. More likely, it arose from its caste structure. In a normal bureaucracy, The Peter Principal tells us, people are promoted until they no longer are promotable. Caste societies have layers of permissible movement that tend to hinder promotions to levels of incompetence. When the normal bureaucratic dynamic appears in the caste world and someone rises who is incompetent, an explanation must be found.
Our local caste system also had very limited channels of communication between its layers. When I first worked for the company, the finance manager was a retired supply sargent who cultivated moles to keep him informed. In my department they happened to be members of the CEO’s church. The church provided an alternative, self-selective social group that crossed corporate castes, and provided an acceptable venue for identifying go-betweens.
The computer operations supervisor was seen as a timeserver who protected his position by consistently giving each of his employees a bad review. Those reviews allowed his manager to allocate the budget for raises to others. The good workers with the bad reviews told me, the supervisor must know something and he made his intercaste contacts through his lodge.
The source for tattletales varied with individual managers; but the perception that that was a means for favor continued. The most recent CEO and CFO each hired consultants to talk to employees. While some had initially been willing to talk to the new owners, the consultants were distrusted before they appeared. The fact that each round of consultants resulted in a round of demotions or layoffs reinforced the distrust between castes, and again the need to explain why less competent people were kept at the expense of the more competent.
The narrative tradition disintegrated when everything harmful that could possibly be known about someone was public, and men still kept their jobs. The CFO lied to the customer and his superiors about the financial health of the contract and kept his job. Men at the customers were accused by the media of severe derelictions of duty, and only a few tokens were punished. Alcoholics and womanizers were retained. Faith in blackmail cannot exist when there’s nothing to reveal.
Narrative traditions, no matter how truncated, are comforting, for they provide explanations. When they are lost, they leave people defenseless; when the myth is gone, rituals cannot function.
As the situation at my last employer disintegrated, people stopped testing their belief in the value of extortion as a way to survive and turned to conspiracy’s handmaiden, paranoia. People began to exchange information on slights and strange comments that could foretell the next victim. The sudden willingness to talk, the openness to full narratives, defined the culture that was dying. When people fear their co-workers as possible informants, they either do not talk to one another or do so in cryptic ways that only the trusted can understand. When no peer has power to harm, then it’s safe to talk. Whispered allusions no longer are needed, and a folk tradition expires.
Sources:
Last employer, see "Culture Consultants - Part 2 - Sociology," 26 March 2006 and "Takeover" series, 19 February 2006-5 March 2006.
Peter, Laurence J. and Raymond Hull. The Peter Principle: Why Things Go Wrong, 1969.
Shatterproof Glass, see "Corporate Culture - Part 1 - Trickster Tales," 12 March 2006.
Graffiti represents the failure of the state in its most fundamental roles. Cities fail the young when they give them no vested interest in the community, then fail the adults when they refuse to protect their property.
Rightly or wrongly, I’ve always assumed graffiti is sprayed by young men, usually in small groups, sometimes in groups that have coalesced into gangs. Young folks want to change the world, want adventure, want something grand. An aerosol can is a weak tool for energies that could be harnessed for something better.
Graffiti is expensive to remove. Where I live, it’s usually sprayed on fences or stuccoed walls that need to be sanded or resufaceded, but a metal cattle barn and van have been attacked. Some hire crews to repair the fences, but the barn remains a year later. The county and utilities do nothing to clean their painted over signs and boxes, leaving ugly, provocative reminders even when residents clear what they can.
More important than losing money or a pleasant neighborhood, people lose their sense of security when they walk to the mail box in the morning and see graffiti has been sprayed a few feet from their bedroom windows while they were sleeping.
Indeed, people take evasive action to avoid potential threats. Those who can move. When I had my fence put up, I had it stop ten feet from the road so it would be less inviting. I didn’t put up my fence to keep out trespassers, but my neighbors’ weeds and chickens. That unaesthetic choice was good enough, and perhaps was unaesthetic enough not to draw anyone’s attention or envy.
My freedom of choice was circumscribed by the threat. My apprehension taints the community as much as the graffiti itself.
Petty vandalism has always been with us. As a teenager, I remember tales of smashed mailboxes, stolen apples, tipped over outhouses. They often carried with them the recollection that some adult stepped in and made them make amends in some ways. The memorat was both a recollection of fun in challenging the limits of the permissible and an acknowledgment that order must be restored.
Now when I ask, why don’t the adults do something, I’m usually told the cops know very well who the perpetrators are because they’re their own sons. I’ve heard that explanation in different parts of the country in communities with very different demographics.
In my neighborhood, graffiti isn’t random and it isn’t constant. It seems to attack some individuals, and skip others. The latest burst happened during an election campaign when some posters in yards were defaced. A few days later, more posters, a fence and wall.
One begins to speculate about political gain, if politicians suggest certain signs be damaged, and once emboldened and in the neighborhood, young men add other targets. From there, I sometimes wonder if it’s like arson in the New York boroughs in the late 1960s when land speculators forced turnover in stable ethnic neighborhoods. The van and the house with the defaced wall were both for sale, and now will sell for a lower price unless money is spent for clean up.
The actual explanation for graffiti probably does not involve conspiracies and probably is not fodder for a detective novel.
Law enforcement agencies simply don’t want to do the boring things we want them to do. Policemen who won’t bother to pay attention to the young, to gangs, are no different than an FBI that prefers to spy on citizens rather than solve a domestic violence crime like the death of Jon-Benet Ramsey. The CIA would rather overthrow a government than interpret intelligence reports. George W. Bush would rather send the army to Iraq than have its Corps of Engineers fix levees.
When institutions that should provide role models for young men refuse to obey the will of the citizens, put their own desires for adventures above mundane tasks that must be done to perpetuate a commonweal, it’s no wonder rudderless young are open to suggestions that spray cans are actions.
It’s also no wonder we listen to conspiracy tales that assure us we are not looking at a failure of our public institutions. Policemen who won’t act to protect their families are easier to accept than policemen who refuse to act. Predatory speculators are easier to accept than predatory public officials.
Racing is controlled chaos; Detroit automakers are mature organizations that banished anarchy decades ago.
They maintain an ambiguous, older brother relationship with racing. It needs the publicity it generates, but doesn’t want to be too near anything quite so disreputable. Marketing men support racing teams, but hope desirable customers for luxury vehicles won’t notice.
They may accept Bunky Knudsen’s adage that they can sell an older man a young man’s car and can’t sell a young man an old man’s car, but they still lust for predictable sales to those with steady incomes, the bigger the better.
GM would rather publicize the Corvette as the pace car for the Indianapolis 500, than announce a Chevrolet driver won the NASCAR championship in 2005.
Pace cars are much more predictable. The company knows the car will perform, and will still look good for photographers when it’s done. Executives can go farther and bring it, or its clone, to track parties and let well-heeled supporters look under the hood, kick the wheels, even take rides. Race teams are much more protective of their vehicles.
But more, it’s harder to predict who will win a race, and the car crossing the line may no longer be a good advertisement for high performance road safety. Since 1970, GM has supplied the pace car to Indianapolis 31 times; Chrysler has had three vehicles, and Ford two. In contrast, GM vehicles won the NASCAR championship 26 times; Ford and Chrysler each five times.
Racing’s contribution to the automotive industry is more than publicity and brand loyalty. In the early days, before the Model T made automobiles affordable, racing was a way to attract the interest of the wealthy. Indeed, when Henry Ford needed backers in 1901, he raced against Alexander Winton at Grosse Pointe. The next year, he used bicycle racer Barney Oldfield, and started haunting race meetings.
Ford got more than money from racing. The man who designed his assembly lines, Charles Sorensen, was a woodworker who worked with a bicycle racer in 1902.
In Florida in 1905, Ford scavenged a piece from a wrecked French vehicle because he wanted to know why European cars were lighter and stronger. According to Robert Lacy, he had the part analyzed and discovered it was a vanadium alloy. He located a company in Canton, Ohio, to produce the metal for him, then organized his own steel company.
Despite pressure on auto makers to distance themselves from juvenile delinquents and dragsters in the 1950s, racing continued to provide the industry with experimental materials, innovative styles, and new manufacturing methods.
When Ed Cole was asked to produce a cheaper vehicle with newer, lighter weight materials, he introduced the Corvette. It didn’t sell well until he hired Zora Arkus-Duntov to improve performance for the 1956 race at Daytona. Arkus-Duntov had worked with race teams in Europe and liked to say he had driven race cars himself.
After Corvettes and Chevrolet engines took over racing, Ford upgraded the Mustang, and like Ed Cole, reached out to a former driver for ideas. However, Carroll Shelby wanted a contractual relationship, did not become an employee. When he retired from racing, he had developed his own sports car, the Cobra, and retained ownership of his ideas, set boundaries on his influence at Ford.
Racing and the Big Three diverged with the gasoline shortages of the 1970s and the need for lighter, stronger materials and safer vehicles. Solutions for the track, like carbon fiber parts that disintegrate on impact, were no longer transferable to the highway.
Since, designers for Formula One and Indy cars, with their exposed axles, have pursued aerodynamic shapes beyond anything that can be adopted for a family vehicle. NASCAR requires vehicles maintain the shape of street vehicles, but the materials and assembly deviate widely. Neither can provide new styling ideas for Detroit.
New materials, experimental engines are still transferable, but both are more expensive than the car makers think they can invest for performance cars geared to young men.
The most important thing the industry got from racing was an attitude towards risk taking. Despite ruminations that fans go to the track to watch crashes, drivers and their teams do not go out each weekend courting death. They know it’s a possibility, but they use ingenuity to reduce the risk. It’s that ingenuity in the face of impossible odds the automobile industry has lost.
When the Fiero developed handling problems in the 1980s, GM had no managers like Ed Cole to keep the car alive and hire men to solve them. Indeed, it had been frightened by the legal costs of Cole’s other introduction, the Corvair. While it may have sent a Fiero to Indy in 1984, the 1983 pace car was a Buick Rivera, and the 1985 one an Olds Calais.
When SUVs developed handling problems, Jacques Nasser looked for someone to blame, didn’t look to see if Ford had anyone who could find solutions. GM sent an Oldsmobile SUV to Indy in 2001, then reverted to Corvette pace cars.
The companies’ attitudes toward racing are a consequence of their inability to experiment. They’ve reduced racing to something predictable, a marketing ploy to reach certain customers. When it comes to genuine risk, they prefer wall street consultants to help them fend off attacks by a different breed of gamblers, men like Kirk Kerkorian and Steve Miller, Carl Icahn, and Wilbur Ross, who bet a system, not a game. They don’t care if they win a specific race so long as they accumulate enough points to win the championship. Racers never settle for just the money; they want the car that wins.
Sources:
Lacy, Robert. Ford, The Men and the Machine, 1986.
