With these rich and glowing colors, the chemists improve on nature.
Yard after endless yard of perfect and flawless material bears ingrained in its
very structure, the colors and designs that will enhance its beauty in the
interior trim of the finest motor cars.
The tire you ride on, born in a Mississippi cotton patch, in a
cane field in Louisiana.
Maybe it started when some of its strange synthetic makings were pumped up from
the ground in California or boiled up from the earth in Texas.
And in the factories of Detroit and Akron and Dayton, men weave and fashion the
basic materials, cotton and rayon, sulfur and carbon, rubber from
trees and rubber from oil wells.
A gripping, springing, live thing, resiliently spry
and untiringly useful.
Sand and flame make glass, but it takes skilled men to grind
and polish glass to optical clarity for safety vision.
And seeing too all of it, then again seeing that the finished product is perfect
for seeing, means yet another long chain of interdependent jobs from
sandpit through factory.
The processing of fine oars into finer steels for the finest of product
brings into play a great range of facilities.
The linkage of jobs to be done along the line is always and infinitely expanding.
From flat stock and sheet metal, bar and rod and ingot come the basic forms to be
forged and pressed, to be cut, to be ground and then polished into many thousands
of interrelated but separate and individual parts in factories located along all
the railways and highways of America.
For the bumpers of your family car, steel from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and steel
from Pittsburgh, California, joined with the copper from Utah and chromium from
Texas for beauty combined with massive protection.
The handy work of men in the mill and men in the smelter makes work for the hands
of men in the casting and forging plants.
Melted and cast into the cylinder block of the valve and head engine are
the gray iron pegs.
Here in gray iron are the tough settings for the bone structure of the finest
transportation for all of us on all our roads and boulevards.
What we harvest, what we dig and what we produce roll into the work days and
paydays and play days of all of us.
Here, gleaming and precise is a differential pinion gear.
It took a miner to get it from the ground and a railroad
man to carry it to the docks.
The crew of merchant seamen cargo the red dust to the blast furnaces.
It took the chemist and the metallurgist to alloy and
temper it before it could be shaped.
Engineers designed it using pencils made in Pennsylvania and
slide rules from New York.
To design and build the phenomenal machine tools to make the machines,
it took men in other plants.
To build these intricate and wonderful machines themselves took other
skillful men in other factories.
To guide and to use the machines takes more men with hands that are
skilled and finely productive.
Behind each such job is the mighty panorama of men at other jobs.
All of us making a living and making a fine product for others and
ourselves and our families.
For all of us who run machines and for all of us who sell other things to other
men who run machines.
Gauges to increase the powers of vision a thousand times, to make the sense
of touch so delicate that it can weigh a puff of smoke, to magnify the
inch a million fold.
Gauges that are marbles of precision extend the senses of men in the conference
comparisons, inspections and tests that finalize the perfection
of each working point.
It takes supreme precision to give us the smooth and effortless
driving that all of us want.
But men and women and only men and women have the judgment to tell right from
wrong, to separate the best from anything less than the best.
Making sure we have done right by all the finest materials America can supply
calls for a whole new category of excellence in service.
Vigilance and devotion applied to the ideal of seeing that only the
best passes inspection.
In the factories locally built giving local employment in
every great area of the nation.
Each factory with its system of communications and inter communications is in
itself a part and portion of other factories.
Which begin where it ends or end where it starts to fabricate or fashion or
finish the fine products of the thousands of suppliers and the thousands of
suppliers who supply those suppliers with all the parts of all the components.
That help to make up the complete automobile.
Today's product of the superbly equipped plants is the life story of
ten thousand engineers.
With hundreds of supporting departments and thousands of supporting suppliers
completed by the master hands of a million factory men who inscribe all
their ideas in metal.
The careful and meticulous attention to every detail of quality and perfection
has resulted in constantly improved performance, efficiency and stamina
through the years.
That is the story told in the rhythm of the wondrously precise machines as
they dance to the mastery of the workers hands.
Each of more than seventeen thousand parts must fit smoothly, accurately,
rightly with some other part.
And the men on the assembly lines know that each part will be there when it is
needed because someone plans it that way and manages it that way.
The men on the assembly lines know that each material will be fitting and each
part will fit because someone builds it that way and someone checks it to
see that it is that way.
And so it is that in the finished motor car, seventeen thousand separate and
individual parts are so well designed and so well combined all
to give us just the qualities we demand in our finest of transportation.
The beauty and the comfort and the fine long life performance
with fine economy.
From all the designs and all the plans, all the materials
from all the processes and all the parts made by all the skills of all the men
and all the magic of all the machines, move through all the pageant of production
in a great orchestration of interdependence one upon another and another
into a fine climactic assembly of the finest products of all of us,
for all of us, for all the farms and all the cities and towns
of all our land.
And the men who inspect the final product know that each part must be a
perfection certified quality first to last.
The harvest of America's finest automobiles keeps rolling off the assembly lines
year after year, every year, finer and finer.
The face of America has been changed. A factory is built out in the open country
and quickly a great city arises around it.
Over broad highways made by and made for the automobile, what Americans have
produced comes back to serve Americans.
So it is that we can live in the country, work in the city.
Life in America has changed. So it is that we can make our living on a farm
and have a home in town.
So it is that we can live where we want to.
The shopping centers now come out to meet us.
The ever expanding involvement of people takes on a new dimension, the great new
dimension of interrelated use.
The new individual transportation means new freedom of movement to all of us,
the dispelling of distance.
And for country dwellers as for city dwellers, a new and far
and wide range of life.
New businesses, large and small, have developed from putting America on wheels.
It has created more jobs for more people, all interdependent on each other, and
all continue to profit from it in ever new ways in each new generation of youth.
Putting America's children on wheels has changed our schools.
It has made possible better education, has built for better training for
tomorrow, and all will profit from it in health and wealth and recreation.
Putting America's workers on wheels now means that there is more work within
ready reach, more work for men to do, and more ways to get to the work
and make more money.
On the money somebody else makes, all of us are dependent for the harvest of
money we make.
In all America, the money we make on any job changes hands many times,
and every time it changes hands, it benefits all of us, the miner and the
farmer and the rancher, all producing the finest materials.
The worker and the machine, all using the finest, the newest processes to do
finely by those finest materials, building the finest and the largest low cost
cars and trucks, for everyone to haul anything, anywhere, and
haul anyone, including ourselves.
And so it is that all of us in interdependence live independently on wheels.
And all this far reaching interdependence is the great secret of why it is
possible to put America's automobile within the reach of so many people.
And all America, all its rock bound beauty,
all its pleasant vistas, all its historic
shrines, and all its ways of living,
all its sports and recreations, all its scenic grandeur,
along all its far flung highways, within the
reach of all.
[...]