Made in the U.S.A: Corporate Responsibility and Collective Identity in the American Automotive Industry

Introduction[Corporations] cannot commit treason, nor be . . . outlawed, nor excommunicate [d], for they have no souls.1Americanism is to the American not a tradition or a territory, not ivhat France is to a Frenchman or England to an Englishman, but a doctrine . . . .2 3Americanism can appear like a form of make-up, a superficial foreign fashion?It is 1988 and a non-descript, middle-aged, neatly dressed, white man stands on a well-lit soundstage. In a smarmy, nasal voice, he explains that he will describe the difference between the Isuzu Trooper, a sport-utility vehicle, and a "Cherokee."4 Behind him, instead of the popular Jeep Cherokee 4x4, a dark-skinned man sits on a horse in traditional, Native American garb.5 During the thirty-second television spot, the suit-clad pitch-man plays on the Native American's outdated means of transportation and inability to speak English to sing the praises of the Trooper and mock the competition's shortcomings.6 For instance, unlike the horse (and presumably the Cherokee 4x4), the advertised vehicle comes with standard power steering.7Viewed through a contemporary lens, the 1988 truck commercial appears highly dated. Overt racism (at least at the expense of Native Americans) is generally considered sufficiently tasteless to be unacceptable for mainstream television advertising. And the idea of promoting a car by showing it immobile on a soundstage has largely been rejected by an advertising culture that values frenetic camera work, action-shot montages, and vignettes that emphasize the vehicle's assumed appeal to certain demographic or social groups.8In light of the Trooper commercial's obvious American cultural references (Native Americans and disingenuous car salesmen), what is most striking is that the Trooper is not an American car. The advertisement was part of a hugely successful campaign by Japanese manufacturer Isuzu Motors Limited to market trucks and sport-utility vehicles to an American market by appealing to the quintessentially American automotive culture by creating a stereotypically sleazy Anglo car salesman, "Joe Isuzu."More than twenty years later, Joe Isuzu no longer sells cars to American consumers.9 In fact, Isuzu has withdrawn from the American passenger car market.10 The Jeep Cherokee is no longer on the market; it has been replaced by smaller, more fuel-efficient or larger, more family-friendly alternatives.11 Also, Native Americans on horseback are not popular with the twenty-first century marketing machine, having been replaced by different stereotypes and cultural outsiders. What remains the same, however, is the domestic success of non-American automobiles and the drive to appeal to American consumers; in fact, with the rise of global capital markets and increased trade with other industrial and manufacturing hubs in the wake of the Soviet Union's demise, there has been an influx of non-American automobiles.12 Where Isuzu was fighting an uphill battle against a well-established, firmly ensconced, domestic truck market in the eighties, trucks and sport-utility vehicles produced and marketed today by Asian corporations have sold widely, winning over numerous American consumers.13 One thing has remained constant during this period of upheaval in our consumer culture: the drive to appeal to the American buyer on the buyer's own terms. In other words, it may be that today's consumers have shown themselves willing to buy vehicles made, designed, assembled, or financed abroad, but the subscript (or perhaps superscript) of the car as the "American" product and the car company as the "American" corporation has not lost its significance.As one of the central recurring tropes in American automotive advertising, "Americanness"-whether in the form of Presidents' Day sales,14 patriotic vehicle names,15 or even nationally directed apologies or product recalls16-is a crucial component of our understanding of how we, as a society, conceive of the corporation as a cultural and sociolegal entity. …