The America that Ford is selling has changed over time.

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........

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