Somewhere Over The Dashboard

By Howard Chua-Eoan

Let's begin with the tale of the fin, its rise and fall from the American car and the American Dream. The design staff at General Motors copied the first fins off a top-secret U.S. Air Force plane (the Lockheed P-38), quietly grafting them as little bumps on the rear of the 1948 Cadillac. The next year's model was a best seller, and as the 1950s progressed, the fins proliferated. They appeared on Oldsmobiles, on Buicks, on Chryslers, with Fords finally sprouting them in 1957. The fins, fickle as Paris hemlines, grew wide and high, rising to 40 in. off the ground on the '59 Cadillac Eldorado.

These cathedral spires of the highway were gaudy advertisements for an America that owned three-quarters of the earth's cars. Automobiles were the symbols as well as the vehicles of individual and national progress, so why shouldn't Americans have the most ostentatious models--with new fins each year? At the height of fin fashion, American cars (with sticker prices about the cost of a Levittown house) resembled the pagoda-shouldered pottery courtesans in Tang dynasty tombs--exotica from a lost age of extravagance. The 1958 recession sent the style into decline. Fin de siecle.

That is just one parable of the car as an accomplice of history. Other stories are poignant (the Okies on the road in the Dust Bowl), and some are epic (the jeep in the war). The symbiotic ecology of car and economy, which continues to this day, gave rise to the motel (the first chain, Holiday Inn, started in 1952) and to the Golden Arches (Ray Kroc bought the fledgling roadside food chain of the McDonald brothers in 1961). Las Vegas grew out of traffic, with Californians driving in on Highway 91 at the rate of 20,000 a weekend (they're still coming).

Between 1945 and 1955, the number of cars in America doubled from 26 million to 52 million. That boom, along with the highways that supported it, extended the strange and strained realm of suburbia. To absorb this mobility came drive-in theaters, drive-in restaurants, drive-in banks and, most important, the shopping mall--Main Street reconfigured for cars. Society was transfigured: the automobile brought America to a new frontier made up of Tinkertoy communities full of undefined relationships and spaces, with the car itself an extension of living room, playroom, bedroom, with the whole country viewed through the windshield.

"Mama, cars don't behave. They are behaved upon," the son in Driving Miss Daisy tells his mother when she tries to blame her Packard for an accident. But cars are slightly more active participants than that: they bear witness to so much human fame and folly. They reflect opulence (Jayne Mansfield's mink-trimmed Mark II) and understatement (the Volkswagen Beetle's popularity). Cars create heroes (Lee Iacocca, who conceived of the Ford Mustang and later saved Chrysler) and failures (John DeLorean, whose sleek, eponymous brainstorm proved to be an egotistical disaster). And they are the chariots of mythology: from the silver Porsche 550 Spyder that James Dean drove to his death in 1955 to the dark blue 1961 Lincoln Continental phaeton that ferried John F. Kennedy to his assassination to the white Ford Bronco that O.J. Simpson rode to infamy. Cars are America's time machines, moving us forward even as they connect us to the past. The movie Back to the Future figured that out in 1985: its time travelers zip back and forth in a reconditioned DeLorean. There may still be hope for fins yet.