Tailfins, V-8s, Corvettes: The wake of an icon

— -- For generations, General Motors fueled America's love affair with the automobile, building cars that defined their owners' status in life and the industrial might of the nation. But less than a year after entering its second century, the company that survived wars, international rivalry and even the Great Depression is being driven by the government into bankruptcy court.

The GM that helped move the world from horses to Chevys and Cadillacs is expected to file for bankruptcy protection Monday. The new GM that emerges sometime in the future will be leaner — unsaddled from much of its debt and labor cost disadvantages that contributed to tens of billions of dollars of losses. It will also be almost three-quarters owned by U.S. taxpayers.

It will be a fraction of what was once the mightiest corporation in the world.

"We throw around the word iconic way too much these days, but General Motors really does deserve that name," said Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University professor who studies American popular culture. "General Motors has become a metaphor, in many ways, for the industrial era of the United States."

The company that Billy Durant started on Sept. 16, 1908, with the Buick nameplate quickly absorbed other carmakers — Oldsmobile, Cadillac, GMC, Chevrolet and what is now Pontiac— within three years. Saturn, Hummer, Saab and other brands were added over the years.

GM introduced the fully automatic transmission, dropped the first V-8 engine into Chevy and put tailfins on the Cadillac. The ultimate muscle car, the Corvette, was introduced in 1953. Its engineers even developed the first mechanical heart-lung machine.

GM inspired crooners to sing, "In My Merry Oldsmobile" and "GTO." When Burt Reynolds outfoxed Jackie Gleason's bumbling southern Sheriff Buford T. Justice in the 1977 movie "Smokey and the Bandit," he did it in a black Pontiac Trans Am with a gold firebird on the hood. And Don McClean drove a Chevy to the levee in "American Pie."