It was once the mightiest company in America. Its vehicles fanned the flames of the country's love affair with the car, defined their owner's status in life and the industrial heft of the United States. It invented the tail-fin, power steering, automatic transmission and the self-starting engine. Don McClean sang about driving his Chevy to the levee. For decades, General Motors was not just the most high-profile symbol of why the past 100 years was the American Century. General Motors WAS America.

That is why yesterday's declaration of bankruptcy by GM, despite the fact that it has been coming for months, was still a stunning moment for many. Even a few years ago, such a spectacular downfall was unthinkable for the once-mighty “chrome colossus” that dominated global car manufacturing.

P.J. O'Rourke, the satirist, wrote this weekend that the phrase “bankrupt General Motors” had the same shock factor and melodrama for Americans of a certain age as the words “Mom's nude photos”. He was not exaggerating the place the carmaker holds in the nation's psyche and the dismay felt yesterday at its downfall.

GM was founded in 1908 by Billy Durant with the promise of offering “a car for every purse and purpose”. Within three years it had absorbed car brands whose names would come to define the social aspirations and mobility of Middle America as the 20th century progressed: Cadillac, Chevrolet, Pontiac and Oldsmobile.

A job at GM was a job for life, with extraordinary benefits. It pulled tens of thousands of workers and their families into the middle class. Detroit, and Michigan with it, became a boom region. An American's lifestyle and status was often defined by which GM car he drove. As Charles Wilson, GM's president in the 1950s, said: “What's good for GM is good for the country.”

GM had 54 per cent of the US car market by 1954. That has dwindled to only 19 per cent today. It employed more than 618,000 people in America in 1979. That figure had fallen to just 88,000 this year.

The company boasted in a 1980s ad campaign that its Chevrolet was “The Heartbeat of America”. Today Detroit and the surrounding areas are filled with shuttered and shattered factories, chronic unemployment and miles of devastation and urban blight.

The seeds for GM's downfall were sown as far back as the 1960s, but ultimately its management became sluggish and arrogant. It failed to appreciate how successful Japan's incursion into the US car market in the Seventies, with its more reliable and fuel-efficient vehicles, would become. It focused too heavily on expensive, gas-guzzling pick-up trucks and sports utility vehicles, which gained a reputation for being unreliable and prone to rust, and it failed to produce smaller, cheaper “entry-level” cars that would attract young drivers.

By the beginning of this century, GM had too many brands and too many employees. Its “legacy” costs — the generous benefits paid to its retired workforce — were an increasing drain. Its fall, in the end, was swift but the reverberations will be felt throughout the country for years to come.

Chiefs at the wheel

William C. Durant put together several carmakers to form General Motors Company in 1908

Alfred P. Sloan Jr (1923-46) bought Vauxhall Motors in 1925

Harlow H. Curtice (1953-58) built GM's 50,000,000th car

Frederic G. Donner (1958-67) introduced Chevrolet Corvair to take on small European imports

Thomas A. Murphy (1974-80) GM peaks in 1979, employing a worldwide workforce of 853,000

Roger B. Smith (1981-90) Truck, bus and van operations consolidated in 1981

Robert C. Stempel (1990-92) GM loses record $4.45 billion in 1991. Later closes 21 plants

G. Richard Wagoner Jr (2000-09) GM loses $38.7 billion, the largest yearly loss in auto industry history, and asks President Obama for $30 billion

Frederick A. Henderson (March 29, 2009-present) Formerly chief operating officer. Chief executive when GM filed for bankruptcy

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