The postwar years of the 1950s proved to be the apex of the US car industry, with workers enjoying lucrative union contracts as sales boomed. Life was good for workers like these ones checking Plymouth cars in 1959.

Storm clouds were gathering, however. As the war-torn economies of Germany and Japan bounced back, so did their car industries, introducing cheaper and more efficient models than the US was producing. Coupled with rising steel prices, persistent recessions, and an oil crisis in the 1970s, the US automobile industry, arguably America’s greatest ever, would never hit those heights again.

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