问答题

Henry Ford and the American Automobile

Detroit has some of the most beautiful residential neighborhoods in the USA and at the same time some of the most shocking slums. Detroit owes its rapid growth and one-time prosperity to the automobile, and above all to Henry Ford.
Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, but he was the first man to mass-produce it, and this made it available to the ordinary man. Many automobiles were being built by the hand at the turn of the century and were much too expensive for all but the wealthy. In 1903 Henry Ford's first mass. produced Model T cars cost $850. By the early 1920s he was able to reduce the price to $350. Between 1903 and 1927 Ford manufactured 15 million Model T Fords and earned a profit of $700 million. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionized transportation and American industry. In 1927 he produced his sedan Model A, which was much more comfortable than the open, windswept Model T.
Henry Ford was himself a born mechanic and could build a car with his own hands. So he respected his workers and treated them well. In 1914, when the basic wage for an industrial worker in Detroit was $11 a week, Ford announced that he would pay his workers $5 a day. Ford believed in the dignity of work, and did not wish his men to become underpaid robots. He also built them a special town on the outskirts of the city. He is credited with "Fordism": mass production of inexpensive goods coupled with high wages for workers.
Ford's basic wage of $5 a day caused not only a wage explosion in the city, it also caused a population explosion. Blacks from the south poured into the city, until there were almost as many blacks in Detroit as whites. Other industries connected with the automobile were attracted to Detroit, and more and more factories sprang up in and around the city. Other automobile corporations also made Detroit their headquarters. General Motors built factories in Detroit as did Chrysler. In the 1960s, one in three people who lived in Detroit worked in the automobile industry. Now many plants have been dispersed to other parts of the States, and unemployment, particularly among blacks, has become a serious problem.
But the fortune of the Ford family was already made. As owner of the Ford Motor Company, Ford became one of the richest and best-known people in the world. True to the tradition of the American millionaires, Edsel and Henry Ford Ⅱ gave away half their fortune. They gave $300 million to public education, public television and to social research.
Americans depend on the automobile like no other people. The total mileage traveled by American motorists in one year is about one million million miles. At the moment a revolution is going on in the American automobile world. In the 1960s there was a change in fashion in favor of small cars. Many small and medium-sized cars are still being imported especially from Germany and Japan. Now American automobile manufacturers have followed the trend. They are committed to building smaller new cars, as part of a program of energy conservation. All new cars, too, are built so that they can only take unleaded gas. Some of the most dangerous pollutants are being removed from the air in American cities. It remains to be seen, however, if the American automobile industry will ever again regain its former glory.