the first classless society in the world. The car gave to the 
democratic cavalier his horse and armor and haughty insolence 
in one package, transmogrifying the knight into a misguided 
missile. In fact, the American car did not level downward, but 
upward, toward the aristocratic idea. Enormous increase and 
distribution of power had also been the equalizing force of 
literacy and various other forms of mechanization. The 
willingness to accept the car as a status symbol, restricting its 
more expansive form to the use of higher executives, is not a 
mark of the car and mechanical age, but of the electric forces 
that are now ending this mechanical age of uniformity and 
standardization, and recreating the norms of status and role.

     When the motorcar was new, it exercised the typical 
mechanical pressure of explosion and separation of functions. 
It broke up family life, or so it seemed, in the 1920s. It