Can GM keep its iconic status while casting a smaller shadow?

— -- General Motors' bankruptcy is the fourth-biggest, measured by assets just before filing for Chapter 11 protection, but it's No. 1 in symbolism: An American icon throws in the towel. The inventor of the car payment, the tailfin and planned obsolescence no longer can hack it.

No choice, CEO Fritz Henderson says in the court filing: "In the face of the global meltdown of the financial markets, and a liquidity crisis unprecedented in GM's 100-year history, there is only one way …"

There are GM contributions to celebrate, perhaps as many to vilify. But in either case, it's hard to ignore the sheer impact of the once-colossal U.S. car company. And it's hard not to wonder whether a smaller, post-Chapter-11 GM ever will have as much influence. And if not, if it's just another car company, will it prosper?

"It's sad to see an entity that was synonymous with everything that was great about this country become a ward of the government," says Ken Gross, automotive historian, writer and former director of the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.

"Shame on GM's leadership," says Margaret Reardon in Binghamton, N.Y., who owned Pontiac Firebird muscle cars in the 1970s and '80s because nothing else gave her as much tingle, and now drives a Buick.

The brass "should have been removed" long ago, she says. "This did not happen overnight."

"GM has been here through thick and thin," says Jacqueline Thomas of Marietta, Pa. "It just doesn't seem possible."

Long before it came to this, GM held an exalted position. Charles "Engine Charlie" Wilson, president of GM at the time, and nominated for a Cabinet post, told a Senate hearing in 1953 that he always had believed "what was good for the country was good for General Motors, and vice versa." Wilson is often accused of arrogantly asserting that what's good for GM was good for the country. Both arguably are correct.

Founded in 1908 by William Durant, the holding company that became GM bought Buick, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, Cadillac. In 1919, it created auto loans so more people could buy cars. By the 1950s, it seemed an unstoppable industrial behemoth, owning more than 50% of U.S. new-vehicle sales in 1954, vs. 19% today.

The automaker's seemingly limitless future paralleled the booming optimism of World War II veterans, home and thriving in a country that had put its teenagers into uniform almost without warning and sent them off to defeat Hitler's spit-and-polish Nazis and Hirohito's fierce warriors, helped by GM's war production.

"Both economically and culturally, it's been one of the most important institutions out there," says Michael Davis, who teaches economics and finance at Southern Methodist University's Cox School of Business. He's also a car enthusiast and owns an older Ford Mustang. "We've been a car culture. We just love that stuff," because of GM, he says. "It's part of who we are."