Every product sells itself with a story. The story Ford tells us is that its cars are America.
Ford has described itself as the most American automaker. They make their cars in America, and have since Henry Ford developed the automobile assembly line and used it to build the Model T in 1913. So American is it that the Japanese prime minister recently parked a Ford F-150 truck outside the venue for her meeting with President Donald Trump in an attempt to curry favor. (“That’s a hot truck,” Trump said.)
So effective and evocative is Ford’s myth-making that it has even influenced the narratives of economic policy. Part of the subtext of Trump’s tariffs is that they were going to bring back the America of Ford’s glory days, the one where strapping blue-collar men worked good factory jobs and could provide for their families. (Ford CEO Jim Farley has said the tariffs will actually drive up Ford costs.)
But the America that Ford is selling has changed over time. Watched in succession, Ford ads tell us the story of what America is ready to pay money to believe itself to be. If we look at Ford right now, we’re seeing what America thinks it can sell in a moment with a powerful amount of anxiety over what American is all.
“Opening the highways to all mankind”
One of Ford’s most iconic early ads came in 1924. As sales of the Model T sank, Ford aimed to reenergize their market by publishing a series of lavish oil-painting spreads showing the great infrastructure the company was building: their factories, their foundries, the benefits they offered employees. They would teach America that Ford was not just the maker of an affordable car but the maker of Fordism: a capitalist, consumerist way of life that was new and distinctly American.
The campaign failed, and Model T sales kept going down, but one of the ads from that period was so optimistic and romantic that in 2013, amid an attempt to revive the faltering Lincoln Town Car brand, Ford republished it as the center of a rebranding campaign.
“Opening the highways to all mankind,” the repurposed ad said, over a painting of a nuclear family piling out of their Model T to gaze across the sunset-tinted vista of the great land Ford had made available to them. “Back of all the activities of the Ford Motor Company,” the ad went on, “is this Universal idea — a whole-hearted belief that riding on the people’s highway should be within easy reach of all the people.”
The angle here was populist and democratic, an American ideal at its heart. Travel should be within the reach of the middle class. It should not be the sole province of the rich. Taxpayer money went to building the highways, so taxpayers should get to use them. That was the American dream.
The ad also told us what America wasn’t. America was a land where people traveled in their little family units, not mingling together on trains, as they did in Europe. It was a land where the social unit was the nuclear family — mother, father, and two children — not intergenerational groups or any other kind of kin. And it was a land that belonged to the straight, white, and middle class.
Most importantly, though, that early Ford ad shows a company and a country that is looking forward. Ford is actively opening up the highways — new highways that Congress had only legislated into existence three years earlier. America was unfolding itself, coming into the American century, and Ford was part of what was going to get it there. The future was bright and it was America’s and Ford’s for the taking.
“Making history all over again”
In the optimistic, cosmopolitan Obama era, Ford was once again selling us an America on the upswing. “What’s next?” a 2015 ad asked. It answered itself: “Things you never saw coming.”
In this utopian world, everyone had access to the machismo of a Ford Mustang — including women. One 2013 ad informed us that “everyone has an inner Mustang” as a little girl in a pink tutu stared, transfixed and adoring, at a black Mustang.
Another from 2015 depicted a woman of fashionably indeterminate ethnicity driving confidently across a city as Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” blasted in the background. This ad came before Hillary Clinton chose the song for her presidential campaign. Nonetheless, it expresses a country in which feminism had become briefly chic enough to be considered a great way to sell cars, and the elite consensus was that America’s next president would surely be a woman.
“We aren’t handed anything”
Today’s Ford ads aren’t exclusionary, per se. Brief representational TV spots make it clear they are happy to take money from Black women, Black men, Latinos, and liberal women in general. Still, Ford ads today come with an overwhelming emphasis on culture war signifiers that tend toward the right.
There are Ford ads about how the modern world and its decadent cities have corrupted us away from the beauties of rural life, but Ford can reconnect us. There are Ford ads contrasting feminized email jobs with the honest manual labor done by Ford customers. There is even a five-minute Ford documentary about the making of the Truckle, a Western-style cowboy belt buckle — “handcrafted by lifelong Ford Truck owner, rodeo legend, and master buckle maker Andy Andrews” — designed to not only hold your pants up but also to hold the key fob to your Ford F-150 for you.
What characterizes this moment in Ford’s iconography most strongly, though, is a sense of defensiveness, even resentment. One 2024 ad, built to commemorate the Detroit Lions’s entrance into Ford Field for the NFC Championship game, makes much of the toughness of Detroit brands. “Up here, we don’t have the luxury of stumbling into a winning season,” goes the voiceover from actor Jeff Daniels. “We aren’t handed easy victories. We aren’t handed anything. We have to reach and grab and fight, because there are no shortcuts here.”
On one level, the language is a congratulations from one scrappy Detroit underdog to another. On a different level, it’s speaking to a sense of resentment that has characterized Trump’s America: All that I was promised has been taken away from me, I have been given nothing, and so I have had to scramble tooth and claw for all my many victories.
That story of resentment is what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls “the deep story…a story in which you lift away facts and moral judgment and just find the story that feels true.” In 2011, attempting to understand the rise of what was then known as the Tea Party, Hochschild visited Louisiana’s conservative bayou country to understand the deep story that people there were telling each other. In 2016, she summarized it to Vox like this:
Think of people waiting in a long line that stretches up a hill. And at the top of that is the American dream. And the people waiting in line felt like they’d worked extremely hard, sacrificed a lot, tried their best, and were waiting for something they deserved. And this line is increasingly not moving, or moving more slowly [i.e., as the economy stalls].
Then they see people cutting ahead of them in line. Immigrants, blacks, women, refugees, public sector workers. And even an oil-drenched brown pelican getting priority. In their view, people are cutting ahead unfairly. And then in this narrative, there is Barack Obama, to the side, the line supervisor who seems to be waving these people (and the pelican) ahead. So the government seemed to be on the side of the people who were cutting in line and pushing the people in line back.
Since Trump first took office, Hochschild’s “deep story” has animated more and more of conservative rhetoric, regardless of its relationships to the facts on the ground. It’s behind Trump’s fixation with the idea that he is self-made, the obsession with elites who have not had to work as hard as you have and look down on you even so, the apparent belief that getting rid of immigrants will fix everything. Most of the ideas underpinning these preoccupations are not true, but they feel true enough to power a whole political movement.
If Ford is selling the idea that its cars are America, the America Ford is selling us today is no longer blazing with industry, rose-tinted and forward-gazing. Now, it is closed-in, self-regarding, self-hating, furious. It is a country that is no longer willing to buy optimism.
