Made In America (65 page)

If affordable housing was the first thing most returning GIs wanted in 1945, then without question a car was the second. As late as 1950 some 40 per cent of American households still did not have a car, but that would change dramatically in the next decade as the automobile became not just a convenience of modern life but, for millions, a necessity. In the period 1950-80, America’s population rose by 50 per cent, but the number of cars quadrupled, until the number of cars far exceeded the number of households (because of two-or-more-car families).
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In keeping with America’s confident new age of materialism, cars grew bigger, flashier and more powerful in the post-war years. The man behind it all was one Harley J. Earl, a long-time General Motors designer whose fascination with the Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft of World War II led him to put outsize tail fins on the 1948 Cadillac. The next year, racy portholes called
venti-ports
appeared on
Buicks. The year after that Studebaker produced the sleek, bullet-nosed Champion DXL, which actually
looked
like a plane, and the race was on. By the mid-1950s every car maker was turning out huge, flashy, grinning-grilled, multi-toned, chrome-heavy, monstrously tail-finned road beasts that were the hallmark of the decade – cars that looked, in the words of one observer, as if they should light up and play. The style was called the
Forward Look.

Cars were given names that suggested that these things were not just powerful, but barely under control –
Firedome V8, Thunderbird, Tempest, Comet, Fury, Charger
– and they came with features that promised a heady mix of elegance, comfort and fingertip control. Impressive-sounding features had been part of the car salesman’s armoury for some time – as early as 1940 De Soto was boasting a model with ‘Fluid Drive Simplimatic Transmission’ – but it was really the development of powerful V-8 engines, a direct spinoff of World War II technology, that allowed car makers to provide lots of gadgetry and gave the marketing people the scope to scramble for technological hyperbole. Some actively suggested aeronautic qualities, like the 1955 Buick which came with
RSVP
(short for ‘Really Sensational Variable Pitch’)
propeller blades.
As the ads explained, these changed their pitch ‘like the propellers on an air liner, and what that does to getaway from a standing start – or for a safety-surge when it’s needed out on the highway – is something you can only believe from firsthand experience’. Others, like the Thunderbird with its
Trigger-Torque Power
and
Speed-Trigger Fordomatic Transmission,
sounded as if they might have the capacity to shoot down rival motorists. The next year Thunderbird added
Cruise-O-Matic Transmission,
presumably so that the driver could keep both hands on the gun.

By 1956 cars had features that all but promised lift-off. Chryslers came with
PowerFlite Range-Selector, Torque-Flight Transmission, Torsion-Aire Suspension
and
Super-Scenic
Windshield.
The Packard offered
New Torsion-Level Ride
and
Twin Ultramatic Transmission,
while the Chevrolet Bel-Air had a hold-on-to-your-hats feature called a
Triple-Turbine TurboGlide.
Mercury, misreading the market, could offer nothing zippier than
Dream-Car Design
and
Seat-O-Matic Dial
that remembered the driver’s favoured position, and paid heavily for its technological timidity with lost sales.

The height of this techno-excess came in 1957 when Packard produced a 145-horsepower Super Eight model, which came equipped with everything but a stewardess. The vaunted features included
Prest-O-Justment Seats, Flite-Glo Dials, Comfort-Aire Ventilation, Console-Key Instrument Panel
and
Push-Button Control Wrinkle-Resistant RoboTop Convertible Roof.
Unfortunately it drove like a tank. Five years later, Packard was out of business.

The irony in this is that virtually none of the modern improvements to cars, such as disc brakes, fuel injection, front-wheel drive, torsion bars and the like, were invented in America. Detroit was more concerned with gloss and zip than with genuine research and development, and within twenty years it would be paying for this lapse dearly.
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In 1955, into the midst of this battlefield of technological hyperbole and aerodynamic styling, came a car so ineptly named, so clumsily styled, so lacking in panache that it remains almost forty years later a synonym for commercial catastrophe. I refer, of course, to the wondrous Edsel.

It is hard to believe now what high hopes Ford, its dealers and most of America had for this car when it was announced to the world. After the Ford Company’s huge success during its first two decades, it began to falter dangerously, largely because of Henry Ford’s extreme reluctance to offer six-cylinder engines or models with a few curves and a dash of styling. It fell behind not only General Motors, but even Walter Chrysler’s Plymouth. By the 1950s Ford desperately needed a success. A new mid-sized car seemed the best bet.
General Motors had not introduced one since the La Salle in 1927 and Chrysler not since the Plymouth in 1928. Ford’s most recent effort at a breakthrough vehicle had been the Mercury way back in 1938.
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The time was right for a new, world-beating car. In 1952 Ford began work on a secret project it called the
E car.

Huge care was taken with choosing a name. Ford’s advertising agency, Foote, Cone and Belding, drew up a list of 18,000 suggestions, and Ford staff added a further 2,500. The poet Marianne Moore was commissioned to come up with a list of names, and offered such memorable, if unusable, suggestions as the
Mongoose Civique,
the
Utopian Turtletop,
the
Pluma Piluma,
the
Pastelogram,
the
Resilient Bullet,
the
Varsity Stroke
and the
Andante con Moto.

All of these were carefully whittled down to a short-list of sixteen names. On 8 November 1956 an executive committee met to make the final choice. After much discussion it reduced the list to four favoured names:
Corsair, Citation, Ranger
and
Pacer.
Then, for reasons that are much disputed (largely because no one wished afterwards to be actively associated with the choice) the panel members opted for a name not on the list:
Edsel.

It was named for Edsel Ford, Henry and Clara Ford’s only child, who in turn had been named for Henry Ford’s best friend. The name had been considered once before, but had been discarded when consumer research showed that almost everyone thought it sounded like the name of a tractor or plough.

Having signally botched the name, the company went on to botch the design and production of the car. The chief stylist of the Edsel was Roy A. Brown, jun. By all accounts Brown’s initial design was a winner,
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but excessive tampering
– in particular the imposition of a grille that has been variously likened to a horse collar or toilet seat – doomed it. There was also the consideration that the Edsel was not very well made. The publicity department’s plan was to have seventy-five automotive writers drive identical green and turquoise Edsel Paces from Detroit to their home-town dealers. But when the first Edsels rolled off the assembly line they were so riddled with faults that Ford had to spend an average of $10,000 apiece – twice the cost of the car – getting them road-worthy. Even then it managed to have just sixty-eight cars ready by launch day.
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A further setback occurred when the Edsel made its public debut on a live national television special and wouldn’t start.

Edsel had the most expensive advertising promotion of any product up to that time, but the company could hardly give the cars away.
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Two years, two months, $450 million and 110,847 Edsels later, Ford pulled the plug, and the Edsel became part of history.

But the automobile as a component of American life went from strength to strength. By 1963 one-sixth of all American businesses were directly connected with the car in one way or another.
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The production of cars consumed 20 per cent of American steel, 30 per cent of glass and over 60 per cent of the nation’s rubber.
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By the 1970s, 94.7 per cent of American commuters travelled to work by car. About half had no access to any form of public transportation. They had to drive to work whether they wanted to or not. Most in fact wanted to. Today the car has become such an integral part of American life that the maximum distance the average American is prepared to walk without getting into a car is just six hundred feet.

Despite the nation’s attachment to the car, relatively few motoring terms have entered the general lexicon in the postwar years. Among the few:
gridlock,
coined in 1971 but not in general usage until about 1980;
fast lane
in a metaphorical
sense (’life in the fast lane’) in 1978;
drive-by shooting
in 1985; and
jump start
in a metaphorical sense (’jump start the economy’) as recently as 1988. And that is about it.

What increasingly changed were the types of cars Americans drove. Until the early 1970s, with the exception of the Volkswagen Beetle and a few incidental European sports cars, American cars were overwhelmingly American. (In 1954, for instance, of the 7.2 million new cars sold in America, only 50,000, well under 1 per cent, were imports.) But then things changed as Japanese manufacturers entered the market.
Made in Japan,
which in the 1950s had been a joke term synonymous with shoddiness, took on an ominous sense of reliability and efficiency. Japanese car makers that few Americans had heard of in 1970 were by 1975 household names.
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American car makers, so invincible only a decade before, suddenly seemed worryingly inept. They continued churning out heavy, often unreliable,
gas-guzzlers
(an Americanism of 1969) in overstaffed factories that were massively uncompetitive compared with the lean production techniques of the Japanese. By 1992 the American car industry was losing $700 million a month. Even those who patriotically tried to
buy American
(an expression that gained widespread currency in the late 1970s) often couldn’t. Of the $20,000 purchase price of a Pontiac Le Mans in 1991, $6,000 went to South Korea, $3,500 to Japan, and between $100 and $1,500 each to suppliers in Germany, Taiwan, Singapore, Britain, Ireland and Barbados.
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By 1988 imports, primarily of cars but also of cameras, televisions, radios and much else in which America
had once been self-sufficient, accounted for over 13 per cent of America’s gross national product, and the country’s annual trade balance had grown to $150 billion – about $600 for every man, woman and child in the country.

By 1990 America’s sense of declining economic prowess generated a volume of disquiet that sometimes verged on the irrational. When a professor of economics at Yale polled his students as to which they would prefer, a situation in which America had 1 per cent economic growth while Japan experienced 1.5 per cent growth, or one in which America suffered a 1 per cent downturn but Japan’s fell by 1.5 per cent, the majority voted for the latter. They preferred America to be poorer if Japan were poorer still, rather than a situation in which both became more prosperous.

Years before America suffered the indignity of watching its industrial advantage eroded, it experienced a no less alarming blow to its technological prestige. On 26 August 1957 the nation was shaken to the core to learn that the Soviet Union had successfully launched a satellite called
Sputnik
(meaning ‘fellow earth traveller’). Never mind that Sputnik was only about the size of a beach ball and that it couldn’t do anything except reflect light. It was the first earthbound object hurled into space. Editorial writers, in a frenzy of anxiety, searched for a scapegoat and mostly blamed the education system (a plaint that would be continually refined and applied to other perceived national failings ever after). Four months later America rushed to meet the challenge with the launch of its own Vanguard satellite.
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Unfortunately the satellite rose only a few feet off the launchpad, tipped over and burst into flames. It became known, almost inevitably, as the
Kaputnik.
A little over three years later, America suffered further humiliation when the Soviets launched a spaceship,
Vostok,
bearing the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, which made a single orbit of Earth and returned safely. A week later, Cuban exiles, with
American backing, launched the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, and were routed. Never had America’s stock sunk so low in the world.

The country’s response was not entirely unlike that of the Yale economics students mentioned above. Without any idea of what the payback might be other than in glory, the country embarked on the most expensive scientific enterprise ever undertaken on the planet with the single ultimate goal of landing a man on the moon before the Soviet Union did. On 20 July 1969 the goal was achieved when Neil Armstrong stepped from his Apollo 11 spacecraft and became the first person to walk on the moon. America was back on top.

The heady first decade of the space programme created, or significantly rejuvenated, a clutch of words, among them
reentry, lift-off, blast-off, mission control, A-OK, thrust, launchpad, orbit, gantry, glitch
(first recorded outside a Yiddish context when spoken by John Glenn in 1966), and
astronaut.
What is perhaps most interesting is how many space terms predate the space age, thanks for the most part to the world’s abiding love for science fiction. Among the words that took flight long before any space traveller did we find
astronaut
(1880),
space ship
(1894),
space suit
(1924),
rocket ship
(1928),
star ship
(1934),
space station
(1936),
blast-off
(
1937
) and
spaceman
(1942).
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