America’s government is spending lavishly to revive manufacturing

At its apogee in the 1930s Ford’s River Rouge complex, just outside Detroit, employed some 100,000 people and produced a car every 49 seconds. Diego Rivera, a Mexican artist, painted a series of murals depicting the heroic workers and futuristic machines, working in harmony to usher in a new era of prosperity.

Almost a century later River Rouge is getting a new lease on life. Construction workers are busily expanding the assembly lines that produce the F-150 Lightning, the electric version of America’s bestselling pickup. There is less clanging than when Rivera visited, and more whirring. Mechanical claws effortlessly whisk vehicle frames from place to place. Self-driving carts glide around the factory floor. Ford is hoping for a surge in sales thanks to lavish new tax credits for people who buy American-made electric vehicles. But it is not just the factory that is enjoying a renaissance: so is the dream that River Rouge once embodied, of an America made prosperous by multitudes of jobs in cutting-edge manufacturing.