 1950's Cars: Dream Machines
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Teenage automobile culture
Teenage boys demonstrated their masculinity by associating themselves as closely as possible with automobile culture.
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With the return of prosperity in the early 1920's, the American automobile industry came into its own as the nation's largest manufacturing enterprise. Production of motor vehicles climbed from 2,227,349 in 1920 to a phenomenal high of 5,337,687 in 1929, a figure not surpassed for another 20 years. By 1929, there was one automobile on the highway for every six people in the United States, and Herbert Hoover's campaign slogan of "two cars in every garage" was by no means as ridiculous as it was made out to be by subsequent critics.
Much of the economic expansion of the period, in fact, was a direct consequence of the rise of the motor vehicle. The production and the operation of automobiles absorbed 20% of the country's annual steel output, 90% of its gasoline, 80% of its rubber, and 75% of its plate glass. Moreover, as millions of Americans became automobile owners, they demanded better roads.
The Federal Highways Act of 1921 and the dedication of the Zero milestone in Washington a year later, a ceremony at which Roy D. Chapin was appropriately one of the principal speakers, signaled the launching of a vast program of road building by both Federal and state authorities. The automobile also brought with it a substantial new area of service occupations: dealers and repair shops, filling stations and tourist camps.
The effect of the automobile on recreational habits was often decried in the 1930's: the substitution of a passive amusement for something more active; standardization and regimentation; the moral problem of the parked sedan and roadside tourist camp. The Sunday-afternoon drive was devastatingly described -- the crowded highways, traffic jams, and accidents; the car windows tightly closed against spring breezes; and whatever beauties the landscape might offer lying hidden behind forbidding lines of advertisements. "One arrives after a motor journey," one eminent sociologist wrote, "all liver and no legs; one's mind is asleep, one's body tired; one is bored, irritable, and listless. But what such critics forgot was that the great majority of Sunday and holiday motorists, or even vacation tourists, would have been cooped up in crowded towns and cities except for the automobile.
The country they saw may at times have been almost blotted out by billboards and the air they breathed tainted by gasoline fumes. But the alternative in many cases would have been the movie, the dance-hall, or the beer-parlor. The steamboat and the railroad began a century ago to open up the world of travel and provide some means of holiday escape from one's immediate enviromnent, but until the coming of the automobile, recreation along these lines was a rare thing. The wealthy could make the fashionable tour in 1825, the well-to-do built up the summer resorts of the 1890's, but every Tom, Dick, and Harry toured the country in the 1930's -- thanks to the automobile.
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Oldsmobile
Back Corner of 1957 Oldsmobile Starfire 98 Hardtop
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By the early 1950s, brightly polished chrome on bumpers, door handles, headlight surrounds and body trim had become the main means through which automobiles expressed more than their mere utility functions. Their bulbous pressed steel bodies provided a canvas upon which all sorts of imaginative delights could be portrayed.
While it was a highly capital-intensive exereise to modify the shell itself, it was relatively cheap to vary the amount of chrome detailing in order to provide a range of differently priced models. The fact that General Motors soId automobiles under a range of different brand names - Cadillac, Pontiac, Buick, Chevrolet and OIdsmobile, each aimed at a different sector of the market - meant that it could simultaneously standardize the production of major components and provide different models through varied body decoration.
The main development in American automobile styling of the 1950s was the influence of jet fighter-plane styling and the emergence, by the middle of the decade, of tail fins as expressions of the power, speed, and image of the future that so many consumers clearly felt played an important role in suburban lifestyles. The 1948 Cadillac, designed by Harley EarI, was the first model to move beyond the curved aerodynamic streamlined look - a heritage from the prewar period and adopt a suggestion of tail-fins.
In 1954 sleek, powerfuI, finned, low-priced cars were introduced to the mass market for the first time. The seller's market of the previous years had begun to disappear, and the industry had to concentrate on persuading customers to change their models or on awakening new consumption desires. Earl's 1955 Chevrolet, modeled once again on the airplane - this time the needle-nosed jet-engined Douglas F-4D Skyray - introduced a new visual vocabulary into the automobile which was within reach of almost everyone's pocket.
The heroic period of American automobile styling fell between the years 1955 and 1960, when the tail-fin took on increasingly dramatic propartions, often incorporating taillights within it, and the side profile of the automobile became lower and lower. This last characteristic was offset by the heavy styling of the front, which emphasized weight, a necessary quality of the new luxury status symbol. These frankly commereial symbols of achievement looked luxurious but they were available to everybody and they quickly became essential appendages of the American suburban Iifestyle, representing the aspirations of a mass market which valued, in this area of its life at least, the twin concepts of dynamism and modemity. Price was ultimately less important than status symbolism and consumers were prepared to accept and enjoy stylistic obsolescence as an inevitable feature of mid-20th-century living.
1958 saw a recession of the American automobile industry, however, and it looked as if years of excess were beginning to draw to a close. By 1960 the "big three" companies had each produced a compact car, indicating a reverse trend which, by the 1970s, had become the norm.
The era of the rise of the tail-fin and the general expansion of the fantasy element within the American automobile had represented a special relationship between production and consumption in which large corporations had been forced to sharpen their sales pitches in an all-out attempt to reach new customers.
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1945 - 1960
Periods
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