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. (2) Getty Services; Historical Chrysler archives; Motor Ford top: from Clockwise 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. Cortner David 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. The data improved after the 1769 across the fiery disc of the sun. expeditions to see the transit from In- stoical Le Gentil decided that nothing Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche, faced transit, with astronomers putting the Not only is this one of the rarest as- dia, the Arctic Circle, Siberia, Tahiti, would prevent him from observing the freezing temperatures and deep snows distance between 92.9 million and 96.9 tronomical events—the next one will Newfoundland, Baja California and second in June 1769. To make sure, he when he traveled from Paris to Siberia million miles—very close to today’s not take place until December 2117—but many other places—all of this when a waited for eight years in the region and for the first transit. Eight years later, in measurement of 92,960,000 miles. in the 1760s, this heavenly rendezvous letter posted in Philadelphia took two eventually returned to Pondicherry— Baja California, he measured the second The most important result of this ef- spurred the first international scientific to three months to reach London. again in French hands after the war’s transit from a typhus–infested Jesuit fort, however, was the successful col- collaboration, laying the foundation of The French astronomer Guillaume Le end—with plenty of time to get ready mission. Delirious with fever, he died laboration of an international commu- modern science. Gentil left first, in 1760, for the French and to build an observatory. hours after recording his final data. nity of scientists—a precedent that has Transits of Venus always arrive in port of Pondicherry in India. Beset by After weeks of clear skies, a howling Everywhere across the globe astron- served humankind well. As we look sky- pairs, eight years apart. Then they enemy attacks, hurricanes and dysen- wind woke Le Gentil on the night be- omers were encountering dangers and ward this June to see a planet almost don’t recur for more than a century. As tery, he finally saw the Indian coast at fore the big event. Clouds, sand and obstacles. Britain’s Royal Society as big as our own dwarfed by the im- the transits of 1761 and 1769 ap- the end of May 1761. With only two dust hid the sun; he could see nothing threatened Charles Mason and Jere- mensity of the sun, we might pause for proached, astronomers believed that by weeks until the transit, Le Gentil of the transit. A few hours later, after miah Dixon—later famed for the Ma- a moment to remember the hundreds recording their exact time and duration learned that the British had taken Venus had passed, and as if the heavens son-Dixon Line—with court martial for of men who watched the exact same they could answer one of the most Pondicherry and that he would have to were mocking him, the sun returned. Le mutiny when they refused, after a spectacle some 250 years ago. pressing scientific questions of the age: see the transit from the sea, on a roll- Gentil declared himself “doomed.” By bloody French attack, to continue on the distance between Earth and the sun ing boat, making precise observations the time he returned to Paris in 1771, their way to Sumatra to record the Ms. Wulf’s new book, out May 1, is and, by extension, the size of the solar impossible. his heirs had declared him dead and di- transit. They resumed their journey but “Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure system. But this endeavor would only Having failed to find an appropriate vided up his estate. unbeknown to the Royal Society ob- the Heavens.”