Ford Ads: 100 Years Uncovered

The image of America that Ford promotes has shifted through the years.

Each item is marketed with a narrative. The tale Ford imparts is that its automobiles epitomize America.

Ford has presented itself as the most distinctly American vehicle manufacturer. Their production happens in America, and has from the time Henry Ford innovated the car assembly line and employed it to construct the Model T in 1913. Its image is so associated with America that the Japanese premier recently parked a Ford F-150 pickup in front of the location for her meeting with President Donald Trump in an effort to gain favor. (“That’s a cool truck,” Trump observed.)

Ford’s tale-spinning is so compelling and meaningful that it has even impacted the stories surrounding fiscal strategy. A portion of the veiled implications of Trump’s import taxes is that they would resurrect the America of Ford’s celebrated period, the one where robust blue-collar workers held stable factory positions and could support their families. (Ford CEO Jim Farley has mentioned the tariffs will genuinely inflate Ford expenses.)

However, the America that Ford portrays has evolved over the decades. Viewed one after another, Ford advertisements convey to us the account of what America is willing to spend money to accept itself to be. By examining Ford currently, we discern what America assumes it can promote during a time characterized by immense trepidation concerning the complete essence of American identity.

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“Opening the highways to all mankind”

Ford’s noteworthy 1924 advertisement ran in the Saturday Evening Post and Country Gentleman periodicals.

An early, unforgettable advertisement from Ford appeared in 1924. As sales of the Model T dwindled, Ford sought to reinvigorate their consumer base by disseminating a sequence of opulent oil-painting advertisements showcasing the important infrastructure the company was constructing: their manufacturing plants, their foundries, the perks they furnished to employees. Their goal was to educate America that Ford was not merely the manufacturer of an inexpensive car but the originator of Fordism: a novel and uniquely American form of capitalist, consumerist existence.

The endeavor was fruitless, and Model T sales continued to fall, but one of the advertisements from that era was so hopeful and evocative that in 2013, during an effort to revitalize the declining Lincoln Town Car brand, Ford reissued it as the anchor of a rebranding campaign.

“Opening the highways to all mankind,” the revamped advertisement proclaimed, over an image of a nuclear family descending from their Model T to observe the sunset-hued landscape of the great land Ford had offered to them. “Back of all the activities of the Ford Motor Company,” the advertisement continued, “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 focus here was populist and democratic, a deeply rooted American ideal. Travel should be accessible to the middle class. It should not be exclusively for the wealthy. Taxpayer funds supported the building of the roads, so taxpayers should have the chance to use them. That was the essence of the American dream.

The advertisement also indicated what America was not. America was a country where people traveled in their limited family units, not interacting on trains, as was the custom in Europe. It was a country where the central social unit was the nuclear family — mother, father, and two children — not multigenerational groups or alternative forms of kinship. And it was a land that catered to the heterosexual, white, and middle class.

Most crucially, however, that original Ford advertisement displays a company and a nation that is looking ahead. Ford is actively unlocking the highways — new highways that Congress had only sanctioned into reality three years prior. America was revealing itself, entering the American epoch, and Ford was instrumental in achieving that. The prospect was promising, and it belonged to both America and Ford for the taking.

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“Making history all over again”

In the optimistic, global Obama era, Ford was once again trying to sell us an America that was improving. “What’s next?” a 2015 advertisement questioned. It replied to itself: “Things you never saw coming.”

In this idealized setting, everyone could access the powerful appeal of a Ford Mustang — including females. One 2013 advertisement declared that “everyone has an inner Mustang” as a young girl in a pink tutu stared, mesmerized and enamored, at a black Mustang.

Another from 2015 portrayed a stylishly ambiguous woman driving confidently through a city as Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” played loudly in the background. This advertisement was released before Hillary Clinton adopted the song for her presidential drive. Nonetheless, it symbolizes a nation where feminism had momentarily gained enough cultural cachet to be considered an effective technique for selling cars, and where the prevailing opinion held that America’s next president would undoubtedly be female.

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“We aren’t handed anything”

Current Ford advertisements are not overtly exclusive. Fleeting, representative TV spots indicate their willingness to receive money from Black women, Black men, Latinos, and generally liberal-minded women. Nonetheless, Ford advertisements nowadays include an overwhelming emphasis on cultural conflict symbols that lean rightward.

There are Ford advertisements discussing how the contemporary world and its morally degraded cities have estranged us from the enchantments of rural existence, but Ford has the ability to reconnect us. There are Ford advertisements contrasting demeaning email occupations with the genuine manual labor carried out by Ford clientele. There is even a five-minute Ford documentary detailing the creation of the Truckle, a Western-style cowboy belt buckle — “handcrafted by lifelong Ford Truck owner, rodeo legend, and master buckle maker Andy Andrews” — devised to not only secure your pants but to also house the key fob for your Ford F-150.

What most noticeably describes this period in Ford’s iconography, though, is a sense of defensiveness, possibly even animosity. A 2024 advertisement, produced to commemorate the Detroit Lions’s entrance into Ford Field for the NFC Championship game, focuses considerably on the resilience of Detroit trademarks. “Up here, we don’t have the luxury of stumbling into a winning season,” recites 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 congratulatory message from one determined Detroit underdog to another. On another level, it is articulating a feeling of bitterness that has defined Trump’s America: All that I was assured has been taken away from me, I have been given nothing, and so I have had to compete intensely for all my numerous successes.

That narrative of discontent is what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild names “the deep story…a story in which you lift away facts and moral judgment and just find the story that feels true.” In 2011, while endeavoring to comprehend the proliferation of what was then termed the Tea Party, Hochschild visited Louisiana’s conservative bayou area to grasp the profound narrative that people there were conveying to one another. In 2016, she summarized it to Vox as follows:

Envision people standing in a lengthy queue that extends up a slope. And at the summit of that slope is the American dream. And the individuals waiting in line perceived that they had toiled exceptionally hard, made numerous sacrifices, tried their utmost, and were awaiting something they merited. And this line is progressively either remaining still or advancing more slowly [namely, as the economy stagnates].

Then they observe individuals cutting in front of them in line. Immigrants, blacks, women, refugees, public sector employees. And even an oil-coated brown pelican obtaining precedence. In their perspective, individuals are unfairly cutting in line. And then, in this account, there is Barack Obama, positioned on the periphery, the line supervisor who appears to be signaling these individuals (and the pelican) forward. So the government appeared to be supporting the individuals who were cutting in line and pushing the individuals in line backward.

Since Trump initially assumed office, Hochschild’s “deep story” has fueled more and more of conservative expressions, regardless of its alignment with the verifiable details. It underlies Trump’s preoccupation with the concept that he is self-made, the fascination with the elites who have not had to labor as rigorously as you have and who disparage you regardless, the perceived notion that eradicating immigrants will resolve everything. Most of the theories supporting these fixations are untrue, yet they resonate sufficiently to empower an entire political movement.

If Ford is advertising the perception that its vehicles represent America, the America Ford is currently displaying to us is no longer vibrant with industry, optimistically inclined, and forward-focused. At present, it is enclosed, self-absorbed, self-loathing, and irate. It is a nation that is losing the inclination to embrace optimism.