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THE CAR CULTURE

Return to Prosperity

Americans had suffered through fifteen years of economic hardship and material shortages from the beginning of the Great Depression through the end of World War II. Small wonder, then, that as soldiers returned home and economic prospects seemed much brighter, people were in a mood to buy. During the war automobile production had dropped drastically as automakers were enlisted in the war effort. The number of registered cars on the road plummeted by four million: as they became inoperable, their owners were unable to repair or replace them. Out of the 25.8 million registered cars in 1945, Fortune magazine reported that half of them were at least ten years old. Millions of these cars were ready for the scrap heap.

Production Surge

American automakers were glad to satisfy the pent-up demand for cars, of course, but they could do so only gradually. The process of converting back to civilian production went more slowly than Detroit hoped: only seventy thousand new cars came off the assembly line in 1945, far short of the predicted five hundred thousand. By 1950, however, production surged to a record eight million automobiles. Even at that high level of production the autos were bought as quickly as they reached the showroom. In 1955 there were fifty-two million cars on the nation's roads, double the amount ten years before. The country was in the grip of an "automania" that meant substantial changes in the American way of life.

Commuting

All those cars gave Americans a greater mobility than they had previously had. People were free to live outside of cities, for example, and commute to work or to shop. A 1957 study of urban problems titled The Exploding Metropolis reported that in America's twenty-five largest cities, an average of 60 percent of the people who entered downtown did so by car. New York City, because of its efficient mass-transit system, comprised the low end of this average (17 percent), while in San Antonio a high 78 percent of commuters provided their own transportation. As more cars swarmed into the cities, parking became a serious problem. In the middle of the decade the city of Boston determined that while an average of 150,000 cars entered the city daily, it only had parking space for 110,000 cars. The city's solution was to build parking garages underground; but as more parking became available, more people drove downtown. So the problem remained unsolved.

Pollution

The great increases in traffic also led to serious atmospheric pollution problems over the nation's cities. Smog, the combination of smoke and fog, became a familiar condition to Americans during the decade. Automobile exhaust was by far the largest contributor to these ever-present blankets of haze. In Los Angeles the enormous number of motor vehicles and the city's location—between a mountain range and the Pacific Ocean, in a basin of stagnant air—combined to make the problem especially acute. The city's Atmospheric Pollution Control Board declared frequent smog alerts, during which all nonessential traffic was supposed to stop and people with respiratory illnesses were instructed to stay indoors. But the problem was by no means limited to Los Angeles. In the early 1960s Congress took steps to control the pollution problem by mandating that automakers develop smog-control devices for their cars.

Shopping Malls

As traffic and pollution problems plagued the cities, businesses relocated to the urban fringe. Shopping malls, clusters of stores under one roof, popped up in suburbs across the nation; they offered "plenty of free parking" as a major draw. Some suburban businesses encouraged Americans never to leave their cars at all. By the end of the decade thousands of drive-in theaters and tens of thousands of drive-in restaurants were serving motorists around the country. Other businesses, laundries and even banks, began accepting drive-in customers as well.

Highway System

People also used their cars for more-ambitious journeys than to the store or office. Vacationing by auto was a phenomenon of the decade, encouraged by the National Highway Act of 1956, which provided for the building of forty-one thousand miles of safe modern highways crisscrossing the country. For the comfort of motorists the highways also featured picnic and rest areas. Private businessmen also benefited from the new American wanderlust: travelers could find gas stations, motels, restaurants, and campgrounds at any stop along the way. Several entrepreneurs began earning their fortunes during the decade by catering specifically to the American away from home. Holiday Inns, for example, started by Tennessee architect Charles Kemmons Wilson in 1954, thrived by offering uniform service and lodging to the weary vacationer.

New Problems

With all the services it provided, the car had become an accepted—almost necessary—member of the American family. Still, disenchantment with automobiles had begun to set in. Many objected to the sales tactics of auto dealers, who, as Sen. A. S. Mike Monroney put it, displayed the attitude toward customers one would expect to find at "an Oriental Bazaar." Dealers relied on a variety of tricks of the trade, including the "switch," where buyers are lured in with an advertised special and then pressured to buy a more expensive model. Dealers argued that such tactics were necessary to sell the large numbers of cars and accessories the automakers forced on them.

Planned Obsolescence

Faced with a saturated market in the later years of the decade, the "Big Three" automakers—Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler—had to resort to tricks of their own in order to move their products. "Planned obsolescence," the idea that cars should be built to last only a few years, was one strategy to guarantee regular auto purchases. Another was to make yearly innovations and to advertise them heavily. These innovations had to do with a car's look far more than its safety or efficiency. Ford in 1956 offered a series of "Lifeguard Design" features, and its sales dropped by two hundred thousand cars. The drop could have been due to many factors, but it seemed to confirm the opinion of industry experts: "Ford is selling safety, but Chevy is selling cars."

Styling

During the decade Detroit concentrated on style. The tail fin, that legendary appendage of 1950s autos, made its first appearance on the 1948 Cadillac. General Motors chief stylist, Harley Earl, had borrowed the look from the P-38 fighter plane. On an airplane the tail fins helped stabilize the craft, but on a car they were purely for show. (When touring the United States in 1959, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev pointed at a Cadillac tail fin and asked, "What does that thing do?" The answer, as Khrushchev well knew, was that it did nothing.) Tail fins grew to absurd heights and slanted from the car at odd angles. Decked out with fins and with similarly useless bumper bullets, fake vents, and massive grills and trimmed with a generous amount of chrome, the American auto of the 1950s could be a strange sight. Americans of the decade thought the strangest-looking of the lot was Ford's 1958 Edsel, a notorious model that lost the company a quarter-billion dollars and whose name became synonymous with failure.

Small Cars

After the Edsel, automakers retreated somewhat from big cars with unusual styling; it seemed as if the public had lost its taste for such extravagance. Throughout the decade automakers believed that Americans valued size in a car, despite problems parking such behemoths and keeping them filled with gas. And that was confirmed with high profits. Sales of small foreign cars such as Volkswagens and Renaults climbed steadily during the decade, however, and when U.S. sales reached 10 percent of the market, the Big Three acted. In 1959 Ford introduced the compact Falcon, Chevrolet debuted the Corvair, and Chrysler introduced the Valiant. Consumers responded favorably: Falcon sales topped five hundred thousand that year. Detroit's taste for the exaggerated car designs of the 1950s had passed.