The U.S. auto industry has a history like no other. What started as a cottage industry more than 100 years ago soon exploded into an industrial juggernaut, a glittering showcase for American industrial might and know-how that for decades was the envy of the world.
Then, it all started to unravel, and after years of teetering near disaster, the industry finally collapsed onto itself, a victim of its own complacency and serial incompetence, to be sure, but also a colossal casualty of a rapidly manic global economy that rewarded new and next over hoary traditions powered by historical inertia.
Today, we have two of the three principal players in the U.S. auto industry crawling from the wreckage of excruciating and painfully humiliating bankruptcies, and though their wounds were largely self-inflicted and nearly fatal, the fact remains that this industry—having set the tempo for America’s manufacturing base for decades—is still standing.
But there is still a story to be told—and what a tale it is. From the conniving corporate sycophants and mindless bureaucratic weasels to the legions of self-aggrandizing politicians (who treated the looming disaster as their personal playground, while putting their stunning, maliciously driven biases and incompetence on display for the whole country to see), it is a saga filled with outrage and flat-out stupidity as well as wonder and blatant disbelief.
So here then are the staggering details: How an entire founding industry—the mainstay of the American industrial fabric—came unglued, went down for the count, and eventually pulled itself up by its bootstraps so it could live to fight another day.
