Heritage wheels: Anything but old

I've been reading an article by Bernhard Rieger on the Volkswagen Beetle* this evening as I'm prepping for tomorrow's session of my "Cars, Culture, and Place" seminar at Tufts. I think I like teaching this class for the same reason I like teaching about tourism: car culture and the tourism industry just never fail to amaze me in their inventiveness in making darned near anything into a marketable product, and teaching a course on them is a great way to find out what they've been up to lately. Reading about the history of the Beetle made me decide to go see how VW is marketing the new, all-new, really new 2012 New Beetle on its website, where I found a great example of heritage marketing and how it performs the classic modern trick of selling us the past and the future simultaneously.

On the "Profile Update," just under where it says "Completely redesigned," there's an option for "Heritage wheels," which turn out to evoke the classic style of 1960s Beetle wheels. "Close your eyes and picture the classic wheels," the text says. "They're too iconic to forget, right?"

Then when you click on "Details," you get the having-it-both-ways message: "Now open your eyes and see how cool they look taking us into the future. That’s right, we redesigned the old wheels to be completely cool and anything but old." Old, yet new--what could be better than that?

One of the things that Rieger's article shows is that German VW executives at the home office in Wolfsburg initially resisted the idea of introducing the New Beetle in 1998, not grasping the potential appeal of a somewhat-nostalgic, somewhat-ironic retro-vehicle for American buyers. The roll-out ad campaigns capitalized on this highly postmodern blend, but it struck me that the current promotion for the 2012 model shows how hard it is to sustain the momentum of the nostalgic/ironic impulse over time. Despite the evocation of the Beetle's status as an icon ("Those crisp, clean, curved lines hark back to the original"), there's actually nothing playful, ironic, or--ironically--really new about the way the car is now being marketed.

That sense of playfulness was a big part of the novelty of the original VW ad campaigns, which became almost as iconic as the car itself, and the New Beetle was able to play off of some of that older creative energy. Based on my short cruise through the website tonight, though, VW has turned to a highly conventional approach to promoting the car at this point: emphasizing its cool features and posing it in dramatic settings. Even novelty gets old, I guess--or maybe the real irony is that novelty gets especially old. As Alfred Sloan showed a long time ago when he brought the model year and built-in obsolescence into the car industry, constant change is an essential ingredient of getting people to buy new cars before they really need them. Within that logic, invoking the past is a tactic to be used sparingly, when you use it at all.


*"From People's Car to New Beetle: The Transatlantic Journeys of the Volkswagen Beetle," Journal of American History, June 2010 (pp. 91-115).

Indy at 100

I haven't posted for a while, but couldn't let Memorial Day weekend go by without noting the centennial of the Indianapolis 500. Sport is a highly ritualized activity, where participants and audiences often share a strong consciousness of the lineage and history of what they're doing (in recent years I've gotten tired of hearing the phrase "storied franchise" used in describing one sports team or another, but it does capture that sense of heritage that surrounds so many sports organizations and venues, particularly in an era of increased interest in vintage and retro sports of all kinds). Unlike a lot of heritage activities, there's no distinct break between past and present in sport (except in the cases of defunct franchises, like this one). And car culture, of course, is anything but past. So sport involving cars is a great way to get a sense of how contemporary car afficianados are thinking about the automobile's past.

As I noted in a previous post, they're definitely doing that in a celebratory rather than a questioning way, reinforcing the notion of "heritage" as a realm where it's difficult to bust anyone out of the mindset that accepts the present as a natural extension of a progressive past. With events like the Indy 500 centennial, it's all about veneration of past heroes, participation in folk traditions, and communion with places that have acquired the patina of legend (in addition to its enshrinement in commercial and popular culture, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway has the blessing of the National Park Service with its placement on the National Register for Historic Places in 1975 and the granting of National Historic Landmark status in 1987).

It's also about the commemoration of technological innovations, and not always high-tech ones. For example, the humble rear-view mirror made its first official appearance on the winning car at the 1911 Indy 500 (that's it on the right, at the famous Yard of Bricks that remains from the 1909 brick course). Driver Ray Harroun was unable to find a mechanic to ride along with him and perform the important job of letting him know who was behind him, so he supposedly borrowed the mirror idea from a horse-drawn vehicle he'd seen, although the notion already seems to have been in use by women drivers who used their hand-mirrors in a similar way. This cars-and-history project of mine has kicked up so many juicy metaphors and turns of phrase that I've come to resist all of them as clichéd (driven to the past, life in the past lane, you get the picture). But something about celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the rear-view mirror strikes me as particularly apt for thinking about how automobility's promise of charging forward into the future depends on a keen awareness of a past that's never quite as settled as we'd like to imagine it is.

Still heritage, not history

This week's New York Times Auto section includes a piece that lists about a dozen automotive museums in and around Detroit, including several fairly venerable institutions founded by, or in honor of, or to house the collections of the American auto industry's great white patriarchal figures (Ford, Sloan, Olds, et al.).  Looking at the list, I was struck by how old-fashioned it all seems in terms of museology and historiography.  Most of these still appear to be essentially industry museums created by companies and hagiographers bent on celebrating invention and achievement, rather than industrial history museums taking a serious look at the very serious subject of cars in America.  They're heritage, not history.

I feel a bit funny saying this, because normally I argue against making too simple a distinction between the two, and I tend to be irked when professional historians use "heritage" to denigrate other kinds of history besides the kind they practice themselves.  But if this list is representative, our current view of automobility's past in the U.S. does seem stuck in a state that hasn't really been touched by the more questioning perspectives that a rigorous historical approach can bring.  There are certainly museums on this list that do work to move their collections in that direction, but the overriding impression I got from looking at the list and the websites of the museums themselves was that uncritical celebration and the veneration of the artifact still rule the day and that the "new social history" of the 1970s and later might as well not have happened as far as most of Detroit's car museums are concerned.

I'm actually not averse to exhibits that let people contemplate an artifact without a whole lot of interpretive apparatus to content with.  But so much of our culture is already set up to support that kind of uncritical, seemingly unmediated contemplation of and communion with automobiles.  It would be nice to see at least a little more sign that the museums of 2010 were working to create a counter-space for some different ways of seeing the car--and not just through the usual "here's the cool car of the future" endings to automobile exhibits, either. 

(I was also struck, looking at the list of inductees to the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn, by the virtual absence of women.  I spotted only three among the nearly 350 names:  race car driver Shirley Muldowney of "Heart Like a Wheel" fame, driver and sportswriter Denise McCluggage, and our old friend Alice Ramsey, the first woman to drive across the U.S.  If you want evidence of what a global Old Boys' Club the car industry is, look no farther!)

Hog Heritage

A recent LA Times article by motorcyclist and journalist Susan Carpenter notes that Harley-Davidson’s sales are down due to high fuel costs, and that this poses something of a dilemma for a brand built on power, noise, and a robust disdain for such bourgeois concerns as fuel economy.

Carpenter quotes Harley’s CEO, James Ziemer, as saying that owning a Harley is “not about transportation, it’s about an experience.” The selling of experience is nothing new in the vehicle industry—in Auto Mania: Cars, Consumers, and the Environment (Yale University Press, 2007, p. 79), Tom McCarthy notes that when the U.S. car market began to reach the saturation point of an average of one car per family in the mid-1920s, manufacturers turned to creating new models and brands which could be linked to differing social statuses and aspirations and promoted through the growing advertising industry. But what happens to a gas-guzzling brand when more and more people are seeking the experience of actually saving on fuel?

Rather disingenuously, Harley seems to be trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, it is promoting its smaller models, like the Sportster and the Buell Blast. But as Carpenter points out, giving in too much to demands for efficiency threatens to erode the core brand itself. Harley’s solution to this dilemma seems to be a turn toward more forceful marketing of its own heritage.

Take, for example, the current lead ad spot on Harley-Davidson’s website, which has also been popping up recently on Facebook and elsewhere. It reads:

America, please don't buy a Harley because it gets 50 mpg. Mpg describes riding like biology describes sex. History has shaped this tank, not the whims of foreign oil. Let's ride to parties like rock stars. Let's fill the tank that gives back more than we put in. So screw it, let's ride.

The implication, of course, is, “Do buy a Harley, because it gets 50 miles per gallon—isn’t that great?” (It doesn’t seem so impressive to someone whose diesel Jetta gets at least that, but that’s another story.) But having made that point, the ad then shifts to plausible deniability: only a limp-wristed foreigner would actually care about fuel economy. That’s not the reason to buy a Harley. It’s a classic heritage move—inviting us to experience the past (in this case, the pre-oil-worries, pre-climate-change past) from the perspective of a more comfortable, more advanced, or more responsible present, without really having to resolve the tensions or contradictions between them.

All of which leads me to think that Harley’s heritage turn is in fact fostering a type of historical reenactment, in which riding a hog becomes a conscious way of connecting to a lost or vanishing past when Detroit was dominant and Americans didn’t have to worry about miles per gallon. It strikes me, in fact, that this may be an early sign of the coming of a post-petroleum age. Archaic forms of transportation, like other aspects of culture, have always been “heritagized” when they’ve been superceded—think horse-and-buggy, steam boats and trains, trolley, or, more recently, Detroit muscle cars. Given that the time lag between original experience and heritage experience seems to be shorter and shorter in our “experience economy,” the official turn to Hog Heritage may be one more canary in the mine as Americans start to realizing that our petroleum-based way of life is likely to cave in on us sooner rather than later.

Harley-Davidson’s recently-opened corporate museum in Milwaukee is clearly designed to support this heritage move. In a post entitled “Some of our Best Exhibits are in the Parking Lot,", museum blogger Bill Rodencal describes how the museum was created with only a glass wall between the exhibit floor and the parking area, so that museum-goers' own bikes could be incorporated visually into the Harley heritage on display.

The current advertising campaign seems to break the “fourth wall” in much the same way, making Harley ownership into a “place to play” (one commenter on the blog post wrote, “H-D did not so much build a museum…[as] build a new club house we can all call home!”) that is strikingly reminiscent of the use of historic sites by military reenactors playing out their own visions of the martial past. I know that muscle car clubs et al. have been doing this for many years – but what seems new is the corporate involvement in pushing this heritagizing process along. Is Harley creating an imagined/remembered/fantasy space for Americans who know they need to wean themselves from oil but can’t quite let go of their own image of the country or themselves as they do it? Maybe this is a first unconscious step toward turning the ritualized weekend Hog club ride into the kind of transportation heritage display that we usually associate with draft horse pulls and Mississippi steamboat rides. As with all heritage, the question is whether this helps to facilitate a needed change or just slathers a layer of nostalgia over the bigger questions that might prompted by all of this!

(And since I ended my last post by talking about vehicular sound, I feel like I should add this link to a site that describes how the signature Harley thunder sound is crafted. Aural heritage on the hoof!)

About this blog

I’ve worked through a lot of ideas about history and heritage in the past dozen or so years, but the car part is new. Here’s my basic position on how history and heritage get produced (and this is far from original, by the way—it’s built on the thinking of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Dean MacCannell , and many others):

* We can never make a simple or straightforward retrieval of anything from the past—there are always present-day mechanisms of collection and interpretation that shape what we know about the past.

* We give this knowledge different names—“history” and “heritage” are two of the main ones—depending on who is doing the retrieving and interpreting, and why.

*We usually want the mechanisms for creating knowledge about the past, like the mechanisms for producing tourist experiences, to be somewhat if not completely invisible. Modern humans have a huge thirst for “authentic” or unmediated experiences, and we’ve developed immensely complex infrastructures to provide them for us!

Those mechanisms, which have been studied in increasing detail over the past couple of decades, include museums, folklife displays, tourist attractions of all kinds, reenactments, parks and preserves, monuments and memorials. One component of all this that remains largely invisible, though, is the role of the internal combustion engine in shaping the contemporary landscape of heritage production. (The Centre for Mobilities Research—CeMoRe to its friends—is beginning to address this question, among others. This isn’t surprising, as this is the home base on British sociologist and influential tourism theorist John Urry. Click here for a paper by him on cars and other kinds of what he calls “weightless mobilities”).

I actually started out looking for ways to study the role of the car in American culture more directly, rather than thinking about it in relation to heritage production. I wanted to do some kind of engaged social scientific research that would contribute some useable knowledge to the current widespread attempt to unplug from our petroleum-powered economy and society. And on the list of things we would need to change radically in order to accomplish that unplugging, it has seemed to me that our use of cars is among the most intractable items. So much of our physical world and so many of our behavioral patterns are shaped by the car, particularly in North America. Remaking these landscapes and behaviors feels like one of the more overwhelming tasks on a long list of overwhelming tasks. Faced with what feels overwhelming or baffling, my typically egg-headed response is usually to design a research project about it.

So this blog represents a first step toward bringing together the intractable social/spatial question of how to shift our car culture for a post-carbon world with the ever-intriguing (well, to me, anyway) set of questions about how we construct our knowledge about the past. How many historic and heritage sites wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the automobile? How does the creation of a North American heritage infrastructure relate to the construction of a car culture, and to the development of various national, regional, and local identities? How do we display and memorialize car culture itself? How is all of this changing (or is it changing?) as the environmental, social, and economic consequences of our reliance on cheap, abundant petroleum become clearer and clearer to us? Is there any way to mobilize heritage display itself to help make the changes that we’re going to need to make?

Those are the kinds of things this blog will address, in the context of looking at some specific roadside attractions. (Note: This isn’t the only “History on Wheels” project – this one is a military vehicle museum in the U.K., and this is a vintage motorcycle club in India, while there are several that are more straightforward projects taking history “on the road” in some way. To my knowledge, though, this is the only “History on Wheels” project looking at the automobility and heritage production combo.)

It’s a new adventure for me to be putting out my field- and research-notes in a more or less public format like this one. But it seems to me that understanding and changing our automobility is a mammoth challenge that demands collective effort and pooled resources on many levels. So I’m putting my thoughts-in-progress into the mix, for whatever they’re worth. I hope to hear others’ in response!