Hoosier Honda

How things have changed. In the mid-1970s, anybody found driving a Japanese car in Michigan was in danger of ending up with a tire slashed or a door keyed. Today, mention one of the Big Three U.S. auto-makers -- GM, Ford or DaimlerChrysler -- at a blue-collar Midwestern honky-tonk and you'll hear groans. Everybody in the Midwest these days is begging Honda to come into their hometown. It is no longer viewed as a "Japanese" company, but a "pro-American-worker" corporation flush with jobs, jobs, jobs.

Earlier this summer, Honda announced its plans to open a $550 million plant in Greensburg, Ind., a community of 10,260 that is 47 miles southeast of Indianapolis. While Detroit decays, Honda is creating a manufacturing and distribution hub along Interstate 74. The new Greensburg facility -- which will produce 200,000 cars a year and employ 2,000 workers -- isn't far from Honda's Ohio plants, which are currently manufacturing 680,000 vehicles a year combined.

Everywhere you travel in Ohio, in fact, you'll find automobile supplier outlets catering to Honda's needs. Since 2000, Indiana has lost 98,000 industrial jobs. Ohio has lost 149,885 over roughly the same period. Flashing a Ford Motor employee badge these days means unemployment is coming your way. A Honda badge, on the other hand, glitters blue skies ahead; you're an employee on the rise, part of a high-tech company undergoing a $1.18 billion global expansion.

In order to lure Honda to Greensburg, Indiana state officials offered the company over $140 million in incentives, including tax credits and interstate upgrades. Just last month the Detroit Free Press ran an op-ed piece bannered "Why Not a Honda Plant in Michigan?" fulminating that it "hurts" to see all those jobs going to Greensburg. "You can't say there's no future in the motor vehicle business," the Free Press rightly noted. "But it's going to look quite a bit different than in the recent past."

That's for sure. Metro Detroit really only had one thing going for it in the mid-'70s; their cars and trucks were manufactured in the Midwest. Members of the World War II generation bristled at the thought of buying a Japanese car. It was a matter of principle. They refused to forget Midway or Iwo Jima or the Bataan Death March. Imported Japanese cars, while fuel-efficient, were nevertheless deemed "foreign made," and slogans like "Buy American" became popular in Big Three country.

A writer from Forbes called the onslaught of Japanese cars being sold in the U.S. in the mid-'70s "an economic Pearl Harbor." Indeed, no matter how hard Ford or GM tried to turn profits in the '70s, Japanese cars were getting in the company's way. But there was a reason why the great American middle class, the children of parents who only drove all-American cars, especially Fords, were embracing Toyota, Nissan-Datsun, Honda, Mazda and Subaru. It was because of their sterling economical design, safety features and gas efficiency.

Hondas, for example, manufactured in Japan's Wako City and Suzuka City became popular no-frills cars in the American Midwest in the 1970s. They were manufactured from identical Japanese build-sheets, which simplified production and kept the sticker price down.

While Detroit was designing big cars, Honda went small. As then-Honda President Kiyoshi Kawashima astutely understood, not all American customers thought of a new car as a fashion item -- the middle class looked upon it as a tool of transportation, which was how the elder Henry had started marketing the Model Ts in 1908. Honda had co-opted Henry Ford's mass production modus operandi. Henry Ford II confessed to a reporter: "We may become a service nation one day because our manufacturers could not compete with foreigners."

Then the big moment came. With virtually no press coverage, Honda opened its first U.S. plant in 1979 in Marysville, Ohio. While jingoists constantly complained about Japanese imports, Honda simply started setting up factories all across America in small towns -- eventually employing over 100,000 workers. In recent years, while Ford has been closing assembly plants in Michigan, Honda opened two in the neighboring Ohio communities of Anna and Russells Point. While General Motors is currently in cutback-mode, Honda is handing out high-paying blue collar jobs aimed at producing 1.6 million vehicles a year in America.

Thanks to companies like Honda, auto making in America will be taking place in less unionized regions of the country than metro Detroit. Honda has been constructing its behemoth factories outside of big cities in largely rural communities like Greensburg where the United Auto Workers Union's political clout is weak, and land is plentiful. (The new Greensburg plant will be built on 1,700 acres of prairie.) As Detroit stumbles, the Honda Corridor in Ohio-Indiana is sailing forward into the future with Sousa bands welcoming them down every Main Street U.S.A. The days of "Remember Pearl Harbor" and Honda monkeywrenching are long over, part of a protectionist past.

Indiana once had a proud automobile history. You can learn about it in the Studebaker Museum in South Bend. Quite suddenly, it's on the rise again near the Ohio border, courtesy of a stunningly successful Tokyo-based company. The match makes perfect sense. Greensburg has everything going for it -- good schools, near-zero crime, clean air, excellent medical services. Hoosiers lucky enough to be employed by Honda will once again have a chance at the American Dream.

Turning farm fields into factories, that's what Henry Ford used to do. Today, in the heartland, it's being done by Honda -- a company that doesn't manufacture imports but builds American-made cars.