Does the car-workers’ strike threaten America’s industrial boom?

STANTON, TENNESSEE, looks like a place from a bygone age. The town hall quaintly resembles a 1960s grocery store. Next door is a cannery, where townsfolk use communal stoves to make soups and peach preserve for winter. For much of its history, Stanton’s main source of income has been cotton farming, which was so depressed, many smallholders upped sticks and left.

Yet amid the cotton fields something remarkable is taking shape. Ford, one of…