Thinking Small (52 page)

By the end of the 1950s, there were three million cars coming out of Detroit every year. Individual states began to spend money on roads. New highways were built connecting big cities like New York, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, and New Orleans. In the first half of the decade alone, more than 12,000 miles of state-funded roads were built. In addition, the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways Act (often referred to simply as The National Highway Act), a plan
initiated long before he came to office but signed by President Eisenhower in the summer of 1956, used gasoline taxes to contribute $100 billion to building a network of national roads. Eventually, more than 40,000 miles of paved road would come out of the project, giving the United States a new geographical cohesion. It would
also create a new class of suburban commuters, people who moved out of cities and started families. According to journalist Walter
Cronkite, with the Highway Act, the American government “probably created
²
the greatest change in our culture … When [Eisenhower] approved and pushed through Congress this great interstate highway network that we now have, he changed the entire face of America.”

Aside from the growing desire for cars and streets, another factor that helped garner public support for the use of their tax dollars for road-buliding projects came from the perceived Soviet threat: The argument was made that a modern network of streets was necessary in case citizens had to flee during a nuclear strike. These were the years in America, after all, when atomic air raid drills became commonplace in schools all across the country.

With all the new freedom and mobility—alongside the underlying worry and suspicion that came wrapped in the Cold War—there was a feeling of
keeping up with the Joneses
that developed in the 1950s, an attitude that demanded a veneer of stability, a need to appear a certain way under any circumstances. That mood spread unconsciously through middle-class America and worked like a silent scale telling people when they were feeling too much emotion, or
when they were not keeping up appearances as they should. The problem was that people nearly always felt “too much” emotion; and they nearly always felt like they were not appearing as well as they should.

In the fifties, people were supposed to live fairy-tale lives, like the Cleaver family in
Leave It to Beaver.
But it was Beaver himself who everyone loved; it was Beaver who was most American. He was the one questioning and contemplating. He represented curiosity, difference,
the idea.
As kids of that time approached their late teens and early twenties, some started asking hard questions, questions like:
Why are my parents pretending to be happy?
Why do I have to grow up to be something I don’t like? What’s meaningful inside all this accumulation? Have I been tricked?
Thus while their parents experienced the
prosperity of the 1950s in one way, many of their children were experiencing it in quite another: They were curious about what else was out there, and they were ready to break out.

In 1957, a book called
The Hidden Persuaders
was published. In it, author Vance Packard reevaluated all the focus groups and scientific tests that were being done in the name of understanding public tastes. In his view, all the methods, techniques, and research were actually covert agents of manipulation and abuse. The back cover of the first pocket edition of the book states:

The book would eventually sell millions of copies. And while Packard was right about the effect, he was wrong (at least in part) about the culprit. No one group was doing this consciously to anyone else; in truth, it was the whole country that was fooling itself.

By the end of the 1950s, a recession had set in, the first downturn since the Depression, and people were worried. At least the older generations were worried; the young people were ready to act. Mobility is as much about freedom and new vistas as it is about capitalism or the free market, and the young were taking up the former while the elder worried about the latter. Mobility in the 1950s meant prosperity, but it also meant the ability to communicate more widely, to
be exposed to different lifestyles and different views, to get into a car or a bus and experience the country like Jack Kerouac’s character in
On the Road.
Mobility brought adventure, both physical, emotional, and mental. By funding the building of national interstates, the American government was thus connecting the country in unexpected ways. And there would be consequences.

When Carl Hahn joined Volkswagen
in 1954, he was twenty-seven years old. The tall, handsome economist had studied and worked in countries all over Europe, and had done his thesis on European economic unification. The potential in economic interaction between countries thrilled him, and he had a personal
interest in European unity too. As a teenager, he’d been drafted into the Second World War by the NSDAP. A month after Germany had surrendered, he’d found himself in a U.S. prison camp. The Americans had treated him fairly, and he’d eventually been released. But those were early, formative years, and they instilled in him a deep desire to understand other cultures, to look deeply into the relationships and exchanges that structured the world. While he was living in Paris, he wrote to Nordhoff directly and
presented him with an idea for how to export cars in a way he called “Europeanization,” hoping Nordhoff might hire him. Volkswagen was his “dream job,”
¹
he said. He saw it as the perfect place to further explore the economic ties and structures that were possible in a more internationally interdependent world.

Interest in automobiles ran in Hahn’s family. His dad had worked for Auto Union (the same car company that Porsche had once built a famous race car for), and Hahn had grown up surrounded by automobiles. In reaching out to VW, he was looking to bridge his two passions: international economics and cars. But Nordhoff’s response to Hahn’s effusive letter had been curt; he didn’t think Hahn’s idea of “Europeanization” would
work for VW. Still, Nordhoff also said that he liked Hahn’s way of thinking, and if Hahn ever found himself in Wolfsburg, he should stop by. Hahn made sure to “find himself” in Wolfsburg shortly after.

Nordhoff and Hahn immediately hit it off, and Nordhoff eventually offered Hahn a job as his personal assistant. But Nordhoff was the type of man who did everything for himself, and soon
Hahn felt he was not being given enough of a challenge. He threatened to leave, and Nordhoff decided to make a change: Carl Hahn would work in the export department instead.

Hahn’s new appointment at Volkswagen happened around the time that the United States was finally beginning to take a second look at the little car that it had rejected and ridiculed for so long. By the mid-1950s, while most adult Americans still identified the car with Hitler and the war, there was now a new generation that had come of driving age who had less connection to the car’s turbulent history. Even so, the American market was generally not very
open to foreign cars. The British had enjoyed some initial success in exporting to America, but that trend had quickly faded as Americans found it increasingly inconvenient to track down parts and get the right maintenance on the British cars. Nordhoff learned a lesson from those problems, and he combined it with another lesson he’d learned from Henry Ford. In the early days of the Model T, Ford had sent representatives
to all the states to introduce the
cars to people, and to cultivate a feeling of familiarity between the average American and this new growling machine. He’d shown farmers how they could use it in their daily work. He’d gone to all kinds of communities, regardless of class. And he’d also set up service shops, places that could sell and repair parts. It was the beginning of the modern dealership, and it was a strategy that worked. Now Nordhoff was ready to bring that same strategy back to
America.

Service shops and easy access to parts had been a founding tenet of the Volkswagen company in Germany and in Europe, so it made sense to Nordhoff to proceed in that same way in America too. In that spirit, Nordhoff sent over a complex man named Will Van de Kamp, a man who reportedly had the temper of a preacher and the zeal of a missionary. It was Van de Kamp’s job to bring the Volkswagen to the driveways of American homes. Van de Kamp was in love with both the
little car and its company, and his eccentricity and intense energy were very useful. He found a team of people to do just what Henry Ford’s team had once done, to travel through the states and introduce the car to people, to set up service centers and dealerships wherever they could. Van de Kamp was adamant that the new dealerships strictly adopt “the Volkswagen way”—a way focused on quality and service, putting customer service concerns above concerns
with sales. Throughout the mid-1950s, he and his team drove in a special VW bus all through America, setting up shops and hanging that lollipop VW blue-and-white sign on the doors. The dealerships were all built to have the same look so they could be recognized immediately.

Van de Kamp’s love for the car was contagious, and as he and his team traveled the country, they began converting people, especially young people. The car certainly had its advantages: It could get thirty-five miles to the gallon, and if something broke down, the design was so simple that people could usually repair it themselves. But a person had to have a thick skin to drive a VW in those days: The car got strange looks on the street, and it
wasn’t unusual for drivers to get ridiculed. Perhaps because of this, however, owners began to feel protective of their cars, to think of them as special and unique. And they really were: At the time, the VW was the smallest, oddest-shaped car on any American street, the very antithesis of the sleek, glamorous cars coming out of Detroit. It did not blend in.

One of the men Van de Kamp found himself working with in America was Max Hoffman. Hoffman had met Ferdinand Porsche at his last Paris Auto Show in 1950. Though it was the Porsche 356 Hoffman had fallen in love with, the connection between the two men turned out to be Ferdinand Porsche’s last gift to his little Volkswagen as well. Through Hoffman, the Porsche brand would soon make its way into the States and start its own great journey there. But Ferry and
Nordhoff’s contract meant that they shared dealerships, and so, in 1950, as Hoffman began selling the Porsche, he had no choice but to let the little VW tag along too. The Bug’s sexy sister got all the attention, but Hoffman pawned off some VWs on dealerships in the process; thus a very slight pickup in sales occurred for the VW in 1950: out of the nearly 7 million cars that were sold in America that year, 330 of them were Volkswagens. But as the years wore on, and as
Van de Kamp and his team made their rounds and spread the word, some of the dealers that had gotten “stuck” with their VWs would come to find that the beetle-like car was selling even faster than the Porsche.

While most Americans might not have been comfortable with foreign cars yet, in the 1950s, thanks to new innovations in passenger planes, it became much easier and much more affordable to travel to Paris or London or Rome. Americans began thinking of themselves as cosmopolitan, and while West Germany wasn’t really considered a part of that cosmopolitan world, perceptions of the country were much different than they’d been in 1946. With the Truman Doctrine,
the Marshall Plan, and the Soviet threat, West Germany was being seen not as Germany (in
the old sense), but as a friend. Events like the Berlin Airlift, which took place for nearly an entire year under Truman’s presidency, made Americans feel connected to West Germans. At the time of the Berlin Blockade in the summer of 1948, General Clay cabled his superiors in D.C. and said “…  the world is now facing
³
the most vital issue that has developed since Hitler placed his political aggression … Only we have the strength to halt this aggressive policy here and now. It may be too late the next time.” And the American government listened to him. American planes flew in food and raw materials, providing Berlin with everything from bread to electricity, when the Soviet
Union cut off the city’s basic supplies. One American who flew supplies to West Germany at this time—in a typical example of how events like the Airlift were changing American and German perceptions of one another—felt hostile about having to help the Germans, having ideas of the
Übermensch
of Nazi propaganda in his mind. But when his plane landed in the American Sector, that whole view he’d built up suddenly dissolved: A German man about
his own age came running to his plane with tears in his eyes, unable to speak English but conveying his gratitude quite clearly. “I couldn’t understand what he was saying,”
⁴
the American pilot said, “but I could understand the feeling.”