A Drive Down the Highway of History

Ford Motor archives

A 'sexpot' of a car: The Ford Mustang caused a sensation, even though it was built on the chassis of the dowdy Ford Falcon.

The AMC Gremlin was designed on the back of a Northwest Airlines airsickness bag and launched on April Fools' Day, 1970. The plug-ugly car perfectly suited the American "crisis of confidence" that President Jimmy Carter declared at the decade's end.

For Americans, cars have always been much more than a way to get around. Since the rise of middle-class prosperity after World War II, cars have been an extraordinarily reliable window into the country's culture and mood. As went our automobiles (so to speak), so went Americans, through the ups and downs of a tumultuous half-century.

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Take the tail fins of the 1950s, powerful totems of America's peacetime bounty. Ironically, they were inspired by a war machine, the Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter, whose twin tails each supported a vertical fin. General Motors design chief Harley Earl saw the fighter and decided to put fins on Cadillacs for 1948. They were modest, like the tails on tiny tadpoles, but Mr. Earl had set the stage for Detroit's great tail-fin war.

When the Chrysler design chief Virgil Exner adorned his 1955 models with still-taller tail fins, Chrysler's market share rebounded, and its earnings for the first two months of the year exceeded its profits for all of 1954. Emboldened, Mr. Exner put progressively taller fins on its 1956 and 1957 models. "Suddenly, it's 1960!" proclaimed the company's advertising, which also touted its fins as "graceful Directional Stabilizers" that acted as giant rudders, and thus increased the safety of its cars. In December 1957, Mr. Exner gave an endowed lecture at the Harvard Business School, declaring that tail fins reflected "the growing artistic taste of the American consumer…[and] reflect the spirit and character of our civilization."

By then GM was in panic. Shortly before the 1957 Chryslers went on sale, a young Cadillac designer, Chuck Jordan, sneaked around the back of a Chrysler building near Detroit. He saw tall tail fins jutting above the high grass and dashed back to the GM design center to tell his bosses: "You've got to see what I just saw. You won't believe it." It was too late to change GM's 1957 or 1958 models, but the prospect of getting out-finned prompted a crash effort to redesign the 1959 Cadillacs.

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Minivans like the Dodge Caravan quickly became the preferred vehicles of a growing political force: 'soccer moms.'

One of Mr. Jordan's first designs had fins that were taller than the roof of the car. So he toned them down, but only a bit. The 1959 Cadillacs had the tallest tail fins ever appended to a vehicle that didn't fly. "I say if you take the fins off a Cadillac, it's like taking the antlers off a deer," said one exultant GM executive. "You got a big rabbit." It was the apogee of an era. Fins got smaller in the succeeding years, and disappeared entirely by 1965.

By then, extravagance in car design had spawned a backlash. Volkswagen was selling some 150,000 Beetles a year in the U.S. by the mid-1960s. The Beetle's original name was the Kraft durch Freude Wagen ("Strength through Joy Car"), as decreed by the its original sponsor, Adolf Hitler. It was "a rather unwieldy title," sniffed a British magazine.

But amazingly, Hitler's car became the car of the 1960s counterculture. The hippies especially liked the Microbus, a derivative of the Beetle developed after the war. After the death in 1995 of Jerry Garcia, leader of the Grateful Dead and a prophet of the era, Volkswagen ran a full-page ad showing a Microbus, sparsely sketched in pencil, shedding a tear from a headlight. The caption read: "Jerry Garcia 1942-1995."

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The 1959 Cadillacs: a Coupe de Ville had the tallest fins ever appended to a vehicle that didn't fly.

It was typical of the hip, irreverent advertising that gave the Beetle its counterculture appeal. One mid-1960s ad featured the 7-foot-1 basketball star Wilt Chamberlain, trying to climb into a Beetle under the headline: "They said it couldn't be done. It couldn't." Another ad showed a couple in the Ozarks who had bought a Beetle to replace their dead mule, explaining: "It was the only thing to do after the mule died."

The Ford Mustang debuted in April 1964, just as America's first baby boomers were coming of age. The car caused a sensation, even though it was built on the chassis of the dull and dowdy Ford Falcon.

"You can take a girl, put her hair in a bun, add horn-rimmed glasses and low-heeled shoes, flatten out her chest and her behind, and you've got a school librarian," Ford executive Seymour Marshak proudly told the Detroit Free Press. "Take the same girl in upswept hair, contact lenses, spike heels, fill out her figure top and bottom—and you've got a sexpot! We did much the same thing with a car." That analogy, safe to say, wouldn't be used today.

Two executives behind the Mustang, Lee Iacocca and Hal Sperlich, later were fired by Ford CEO Henry Ford II and wound up at Chrysler, which in 1980 was saved by America's first automotive bailout. Chrysler used its reprieve well.

Four years later Messrs. Iacocca and Sperlich launched a vehicle that captivated America's baby boomers again, at yet another critical juncture in their lives. By 1984, many boomers who had been wowed by the Mustang 20 years earlier had gone to college, grown up, gotten haircuts, taken showers, found jobs, gotten married and started families. (Not always in that order, of course.) The stage was set for the revolutionary Chrysler minivan, which could hold mom, dad and the kids and still fit inside the family garage. The minivan quickly became the preferred vehicles of "soccer moms," who were becoming a formidable force in America's political landscape, at least according to pundits.

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Never mind that it was sponsored by Hitler. Volkswagen's Beetle became the car of the counterculture.

In the 1996 presidential election, newspapers sent reporters to kids' soccer games to interview minivan-driving moms about their collective political clout. One mother told the San Francisco Chronicle, "I have to go home and thaw something for dinner. I spend so much time going to soccer games that I don't think I can really be a political force." Bill Clinton won the election and the soccer-mom vote over Bob Dole, and punditry prevailed.

The minivan's popularity ushered in America's love affair with SUVs and pickup trucks, which became political symbols themselves. In early 2010, Republican Scott Brown won a special election to fill the U.S. Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. Mr. Brown had campaigned around the state in his 2005 GMC Canyon pickup.

When President Barack Obama called to congratulate him on election night, Mr. Brown said, "Would you like me to drive the truck down to Washington so you can see it?" That fall, in the midterm congressional elections, a Tennessee candidate for Congress advertised himself as a "truck-driving, shotgun-shooting, Bible-reading, crime-fighting, family-loving country boy." The candidate happened to be a Democrat.

—Mr. Ingrassia is deputy editor in chief of Reuters and a Pulitzer Prize-winning former Detroit bureau chief for the Journal. This essay is adapted from "Engines of Change" by Paul Ingrassia, to be published May 1 by Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2012 by Paul Ingrassia.