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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, April 21 - 22, 2012 | C3 REVIEW A Drive Down the Highway of History From tail fins in the prosperous ’50s to the pickup trucks of today, cars tell the story of America Two executives behind the Mustang, BY PAUL INGRASSIA Lee Iacocca and Hal Sperlich, later were fired by Ford CEO Henry Ford II and THE AMC GREMLIN was designed on wound up at Chrysler, which in 1980 the back of a Northwest Airlines air- was saved by America’s first automotive sickness bag and launched on April bailout. Chrysler used its reprieve well. Fools’ Day, 1970. The plug-ugly car per- Four years later Messrs. Iacocca and fectly suited the American “crisis of Sperlich launched a vehicle that capti- confidence” that President Jimmy vated America’s baby boomers again, at Carter declared at the decade’s end. yet another critical juncture in their For Americans, cars have always lives. By 1984, many boomers who had been much more than a way to get been wowed by the Mustang 20 years around. Since the rise of middle-class earlier had gone to college, grown up, prosperity after World War II, cars gotten haircuts, taken showers, found have been an extraordinarily reliable jobs, gotten married and started fami- window into the country’s culture and lies. (Not always in that order, of mood. As went our automobiles, so course.) The stage was set for the revo- went Americans, through the ups and lutionary Chrysler minivan, which could downs of a tumultuous half-century. hold mom, dad and the kids and still fit Take the tail fins of the 1950s, pow- inside the family garage. The minivan erful totems of America’s peacetime quickly became the preferred vehicles of prosperity. Ironically, they were in- “soccer moms,” who were becoming a spired by a war machine, the Lockheed formidable force in America’s political P-38 Lightning fighter, whose twin tails landscape, at least according to pundits. each supported a vertical fin. General In the 1996 presidential election, Motors design chief Harley Earl saw newspapers sent reporters to kids’ soc- the fighter and decided to put fins on cer games to interview minivan-driving Cadillacs for 1948. They were modest, moms about their collective political like the tails on tiny tadpoles, but Mr. clout. One mother told the San Fran- Earl had set the stage for Detroit’s cisco Chronicle, “I have to go home and great tail-fin war. Clockwise from top: Ford Motor archives; Chrysler Historical Services; Getty (2) thaw something for dinner. I spend so When the Chrysler design chief Vir- much time going to soccer games that gil Exner adorned his 1955 models with I don’t think I can really be a political still-taller tail fins, Chrysler’s market The counterculture force.” Bill Clinton won the election and share rebounded, and its earnings for car: Volkswagen’s the soccer-mom vote over Bob Dole, the first two months of the year ex- TKTK Beetle and punditry prevailed. ceeded its profits for all of 1954. Em- The minivan’s popularity ushered in boldened, Mr. Exner put progressively America’s love affair with SUVs and taller fins on its 1956 and 1957 models. pickup trucks, which became political “Suddenly, it’s 1960!” proclaimed the symbols themselves. In early 2010, Re- company’s advertising, which also publican Scott Brown won a special touted its fins as “graceful Directional election to fill the U.S. Senate seat of Stabilizers” that acted as giant rud- the late Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. ders, and thus increased the safety of its cars. In December 1957, Mr. Exner gave an endowed lecture at the Har- Baby boomers grow up: Tail fins were powerful vard Business School, declaring that tail fins reflected “the growing artistic totems of America’s taste of the American consumer…[and] peacetime prosperity. One reflect the spirit and character of our civilization.” proposed Cadillac design By then GM was in panic. Shortly be- had fins that were taller fore the 1957 Chryslers went on sale, a young Cadillac designer, Chuck Jordan, than the roof of the car. sneaked around the back of a Chrysler building near Detroit. He saw tall tail fins jutting above the high grass and Mr. Brown had campaigned around the dashed back to the GM design center to state in his 2005 GMC Canyon pickup. tell his bosses: “You’ve got to see what When President Barack Obama called I just saw. You won’t believe it.” It was to congratulate him on election night, too late to change GM’s 1957 or 1958 Mr. Brown said, “Would you like me to models, but the prospect of getting out- drive the truck down to Washington so finned prompted a crash effort to rede- was selling some 150,000 Beetles a a Microbus, sparsely sketched in pencil, boomers were coming of age. The car you can see it?” That fall, in the mid- sign the 1959 Cadillacs. year in the U.S. by the mid-1960s. The shedding a tear from a headlight. The caused a sensation, even though it was term congressional elections, a Tennes- One of Mr. Jordan’s first designs had Beetle’s original name was the Kraft caption read: “Jerry Garcia 1942-1995.” built on the chassis of the dull and see candidate for Congress advertised fins that were taller than the roof of durch Freude Wagen (“Strength It was typical of the hip, irreverent dowdy Ford Falcon. himself as a “truck-driving, shotgun- the car. So he toned them down, but through Joy Car”), as decreed by the advertising that gave the Beetle its “You can take a girl, put her hair in shooting, Bible-reading, crime-fighting, only a bit. The 1959 Cadillacs had the its original sponsor, Adolph Hitler. It counterculture appeal. One mid-1960s a bun, add horn-rimmed glasses and family-loving country boy.” The candi- tallest tail fins ever appended to a vehi- was “a rather unwieldy title,” sniffed a ad featured the 7-foot-1 basketball star low-heeled shoes, flatten out her chest date happened to be a Democrat. cle that didn’t fly. “I say if you take the British magazine. Wilt Chamberlain, trying to climb into and her behind, and you’ve got a school fins off a Cadillac, it’s like taking the But amazingly, Hitler’s car became a Beetle under the headline: “They said librarian,” Ford executive Seymour Mr. Ingrassia is deputy editor in chief antlers off a deer,” said one exultant the car of the 1960s counterculture. it couldn’t be done. It couldn’t.” An- Marshak proudly told the Detroit Free of Reuters and a Pulitzer Prize-win- GM executive. “You got a big rabbit.” It The hippies especially liked the Micro- other ad showed a couple in the Ozarks Press. “Take the same girl in upswept ning former Detroit bureau chief for was the apogee of an era. Fins got bus, a derivative of the Beetle devel- who had bought a Beetle to replace hair, contact lenses, spike heels, fill out the Journal. This essay is adapted smaller in the succeeding years, and oped after the war. After the death in their dead mule, explaining: “It was the her figure top and bottom—and you’ve from “Engines of Change” by Paul In- disappeared entirely by 1965. 1995 of Jerry Garcia, leader of the only thing to do after the mule died.” got a sexpot! We did much the same grassia, to be published May 1 by Si- By then, extravagance in car design Grateful Dead and a prophet of the era, The Ford Mustang debuted in April thing with a car.” That analogy, safe to mon & Schuster. Copyright © 2012 by had spawned a backlash. Volkswagen Volkswagen ran a full-page ad showing 1964, just as America’s first baby say, wouldn’t be used today. Paul Ingrassia. served the transit in Cape Town. Benjamin Franklin masterminded the A Celestial Event THE TRANSITof colonists’ effort from London, commis- Venus (marked by sioning telescopes and other instru- white circle) across the ments for his friends at Harvard Uni- sun in 2004. versity and the American Philosophical That Sparked Society in Philadelphia. On the day of the transit, the Pennsylvanian astrono- mer David Rittenhouse became so over- excited that he fainted, missing the be- A Revolution ginning of the most important scientific event of his life. In Hudson Bay, one observer endured such cold that brandy froze in his glass, while a In early June, Venus will cross in front of Swedish astronomer faced armed Rus- sian rebels in a border conflict in Lap- the sun as it did 250 years ago, helping to land. Russia’s Catherine the Great dis- patched eight expeditions across her create global scientific teamwork vast empire. During each of the two transits, work if scientists combined the obser- around 250 official observers at more BY ANDREA WULF vations from viewing stations in the than 100 locations recorded data, tran- Northern and Southern Hemispheres. scending national boundaries. Once the ON JUNE 5 AND 6 (depending on The calculations would be valid only if results were compared, it became obvi- where you live), we are likely to be the the astronomers traveled to far-flung ous that an optical phenomenon called last people now living on Earth to wit- corners of the world and then shared the black-drop effect had distorted the ness a transit of Venus. If it is a clear their results. David Cortner results, and the 1761 calculations of the day, we will be able to watch the Amid the global Seven Years War, distance between the Earth and the sun brightest star of the night march for a hundreds of astronomers from the bel- varied widely—by some 20 million few short hours as a small black dot ligerent nations joined together to plan perch for the first transit of his era, the Another French astronomer, Jean- miles.

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