Thinking Small: The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle

by Andrea Hiott

  The Volkswagen was undoubtedly a German car. And yet it was also an international car, and in a way, some of its ancestors (and its diverse origins) were American. The United States had been the model for designing the car, the factory, and the town. And now Wolfsburg was living “the American dream”—it had gone from rags to riches, both literally and metaphorically. But the United States was still playing hard to get when it came to embracing and buying the car itself. In 1953, even though Wolfsburg was booming, Volkswagen sold only 2,100 cars in the States, and just getting that many sold had been an uphill battle. All the innovations Nordhoff still wanted to implement at the factory would require machines that were made in America. The best way to do that was with dollars, and the best way to get dollars was to sell cars to America, but that just wasn’t happening.

  It was a problem that Nordhoff had already been working on for many years. In fact, not long after he’d arrived on the job, he’d met the Bug-loving Ben Pon and, learning how much Pon had done for exports, he’d asked if Pon would try his luck selling the car to the United States. And so, on January 17, 1949, Pon and the little car had taken the long transatlantic journey, traveling together aboard the MS Westerdam.

  But in America, Pon’s luck simply hadn’t held. Even though a friend of his had arranged a press conference upon their arrival, and although Pon had high hopes, he soon found that the spirit washing over the car in Germany had certainly not reached U.S. shores. People in America still thought of it as “Hitler’s car.” “We got a lot of publicity,”9 Pon said later, “all of it bad.”

  And things had only gotten worse from there. Every dealer Pon encountered rejected it. Not a single American car dealership was willing to take it on. In one story he would tell, Pon drove from New York City to Massachusetts in a snowstorm to see a dealer, and the man wouldn’t even come outside once he’d looked out the window and seen the car!

  Pon had a limited budget on the trip, and since he’d made no sales, he eventually had to sell the car itself, and for well below market price. “I had a big bill at the Roosevelt Hotel,”10 he said, “and I couldn’t meet it. So, in desperation, I sold the car and all the spare parts I had brought with me to a New York imported-car dealer for eight hundred dollars, just to pay that hotel bill.”

  When he returned to Germany—where the car was already being seen in a very different light—Pon had a hard time convincing Nordhoff that things had gone so badly for him in the States. Nordhoff decided he had to see for himself, so he too had flown over to America in 1949. And he too had found it obvious that Americans did not want his car. One customs official had even laughed at the pictures Nordhoff showed him of the VW11: “You want to sell that car here?” he’d asked. “Good luck.”

  As the world had entered the 1950s, the chances of selling the VW in America continued to look grim. Aside from the fact that it came from Germany, in American eyes, the car had another problem. As Ford historian Douglas Brinkley has written: “The VW didn’t look anything like anything—animal, vegetable, or automobile12—ever seen in America.” People wanted big cars because the automobile had become a sign of upward mobility: the bigger, the better, the higher your class. Drivers wanted a big white Buick or a color-coordinated pink-and-ivory Olds. They wanted elongated roofs and tailfins and a wider trunk; they wanted a smooth ride, a big upper-class tent that shielded them from sound. They wanted names like Thunderbird, Corvette, and Starlite, cars that long-legged American cowboys could stretch out in. They wanted an automobile with a team of horses up front. Henry Ford had already given the people mobility. Now they wanted their mobility in a larger-than-life package.

  Or did they?

  Soon it would become obvious that there was a section of America that was hungry for something else. Once again, the little Volkswagen was on the verge of getting caught up in a larger cultural and economic wave of change. And yet again, it would become a symbol of that new world still waiting to emerge.

  George Lois was hanging out a window with an advertisement for matzo in his hand. Goodman’s Matzo, a brand of the crackerlike unleavened bread used for the Jewish Passover, was a new client of DDB’s, and George was on the account. He loved the ad he’d come up with: a white sheet of paper with a giant matzo filling the page and the words “Kosher for Passover” hand-lettered in Hebrew underneath. Unfortunately, Mr. Goodman wasn’t as thrilled about the ad as George was, and he rejected it at the account meeting. Undeterred, George went to Bill and asked if he could repitch the ad to Mr. Goodman on his own. Art directors didn’t usually go to a client’s office to pitch an ad to customers, especially not a client as tough as Mr. Goodman, but Bill decided to let George give it a try. His colleagues said it was a kamikaze move. But George was already off to Long Island City, beloved matzo ad in hand.

  As George tells it, Mr. Goodman was “like a real rabbi rabbi, busy eyebrows, must have been ninety years old, and he had his whole family, his grandchildren and his grandchildren’s grandchildren sitting there with him, ready to hear my pitch.” The young guys were saying: “Hey, gee, Grandfather, I like that poster.” But Mr. Goodman wouldn’t budge: According to George, Mr. Goodman said “I don’t like it” at least twenty times in a row. George knew that after the big deal he’d made of it at DDB, he couldn’t possibly go back without this account. So George decided to jump out the window.1

  In his own words, it went like this: “We were on the third or fourth floor and there was a casement window there, see, so I go to the window and then I go out the window and I’m hanging there and I say ‘Mr. Goodman, you make the matzos; I’ll make the ads!’—that’s a famous line now, by the way’—and he says ’Come back in! oh my God, oh my God, come back in! And then his grandkids start fanning him, and he looks like he’s about to faint …” Suddenly alarmed, George pulled himself back inside and decided to leave from the door instead, thinking of the embarrassment he’d face after his impetuous stunt. But then, “the old guy recovers and stops me. He says ‘Hey, wait, George, you know, if you ever quit advertising, I’ll give you a job as a matzo salesman any day.’ ” In the end, George got his way: The matzo account ran, and it was a huge success. But was it worth hanging out that window? “I’d never do it again,” George says.

  Of course it wasn’t a typical way of getting an account, outrageous even for DDB. And when word got out, some started to feel that DDB was more of a circus than an agency. But in truth, DDB was about as serious as any other agency. What most of Madison Avenue really had a problem with was not the creativity but the trust and risk such creativity required. “If you stand for something,” Bill often said, “you will always find some people for you and some against you. If you stand for nothing, you will find nobody against you and nobody for you.” In the 1950s, DDB was doing well, but it didn’t look like a leader. It was still missing the three hallmarks of big-agency success: a big tobacco company, a Big Three carmaker (GM, Ford, or Chrysler), and a major “personal hygiene” company like Colgate-Palmolive or Procter and Gamble. What’s more, it was still a Mad Men world. No other agencies were following DDB’s example in terms of structure or style; by the end of the 1950s, DDB was still the only place in town that put the art director and the copywriter together in one room. So was the agency’s approach revolutionary, or was their success just a fluke? New York City hadn’t made up its mind yet.

  In 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former general and hero from the Second World War, was elected president. Eisenhower, as a young army officer, had once had to cross America in a convoy, and he never forgot the experience: The cars had to crawl six miles per hour on average, and the majority of the roads the convoy took were unpaved, potholed, and dangerous. In the end, the cross-country journey had taken over two months to complete! Thus, one of Eisenhower’s pet plans as president was to improve and upgrade the country’s network of roads. A good interstate was necessary for travel and for commerce, he realized. And due in large part to Eisenhower’s help, car companies would become the top profi
t-generators for the country; the 1950s was their heyday, a time when more than sixty million vehicles were sold. Many of the pre- and postwar kinks had been worked out; the unions were established and reputable now, and the automobile industry was taking better care of its workers. (In 1950, the famous “Treaty of Detroit” had been negotiated between the UAW [United Auto Workers] and General Motors, for example, in which the union agreed to a five-year contract that allowed for annual wage increases and steady improvements in technology.) Benefits like health care and pensions were becoming standard. And for the first time items like homes, cars, and appliances were attainable by a high percentage of the American population. The middle class had fully arrived.

  By the end of the 1950s, there were three million cars coming out of Detroit every year. Individual states began to spend money on roads. New highways were built connecting big cities like New York, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta, and New Orleans. In the first half of the decade alone, more than 12,000 miles of state-funded roads were built. In addition, the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways Act (often referred to simply as The National Highway Act), a plan initiated long before he came to office but signed by President Eisenhower in the summer of 1956, used gasoline taxes to contribute $100 billion to building a network of national roads. Eventually, more than 40,000 miles of paved road would come out of the project, giving the United States a new geographical cohesion. It would also create a new class of suburban commuters, people who moved out of cities and started families. According to journalist Walter Cronkite, with the Highway Act, the American government “probably created2 the greatest change in our culture … When [Eisenhower] approved and pushed through Congress this great interstate highway network that we now have, he changed the entire face of America.”

  Aside from the growing desire for cars and streets, another factor that helped garner public support for the use of their tax dollars for road-buliding projects came from the perceived Soviet threat: The argument was made that a modern network of streets was necessary in case citizens had to flee during a nuclear strike. These were the years in America, after all, when atomic air raid drills became commonplace in schools all across the country.

  With all the new freedom and mobility—alongside the underlying worry and suspicion that came wrapped in the Cold War—there was a feeling of keeping up with the Joneses that developed in the 1950s, an attitude that demanded a veneer of stability, a need to appear a certain way under any circumstances. That mood spread unconsciously through middle-class America and worked like a silent scale telling people when they were feeling too much emotion, or when they were not keeping up appearances as they should. The problem was that people nearly always felt “too much” emotion; and they nearly always felt like they were not appearing as well as they should.

  In the fifties, people were supposed to live fairy-tale lives, like the Cleaver family in Leave It to Beaver. But it was Beaver himself who everyone loved; it was Beaver who was most American. He was the one questioning and contemplating. He represented curiosity, difference, the idea. As kids of that time approached their late teens and early twenties, some started asking hard questions, questions like: Why are my parents pretending to be happy? Why do I have to grow up to be something I don’t like? What’s meaningful inside all this accumulation? Have I been tricked? Thus while their parents experienced the prosperity of the 1950s in one way, many of their children were experiencing it in quite another: They were curious about what else was out there, and they were ready to break out.

  In 1957, a book called The Hidden Persuaders was published. In it, author Vance Packard reevaluated all the focus groups and scientific tests that were being done in the name of understanding public tastes. In his view, all the methods, techniques, and research were actually covert agents of manipulation and abuse. The back cover of the first pocket edition of the book states:

  In this book you’ll discover a world of psychology professors turned merchandisers. You’ll learn how they operate, what they know about you and your neighbors and how they are using that knowledge to sell you cake mixes, cigarettes, cars, soaps and even ideas.3

  The book would eventually sell millions of copies. And while Packard was right about the effect, he was wrong (at least in part) about the culprit. No one group was doing this consciously to anyone else; in truth, it was the whole country that was fooling itself.

  By the end of the 1950s, a recession had set in, the first downturn since the Depression, and people were worried. At least the older generations were worried; the young people were ready to act. Mobility is as much about freedom and new vistas as it is about capitalism or the free market, and the young were taking up the former while the elder worried about the latter. Mobility in the 1950s meant prosperity, but it also meant the ability to communicate more widely, to be exposed to different lifestyles and different views, to get into a car or a bus and experience the country like Jack Kerouac’s character in On the Road. Mobility brought adventure, both physical, emotional, and mental. By funding the building of national interstates, the American government was thus connecting the country in unexpected ways. And there would be consequences.

  When Carl Hahn joined Volkswagen in 1954, he was twenty-seven years old. The tall, handsome economist had studied and worked in countries all over Europe, and had done his thesis on European economic unification. The potential in economic interaction between countries thrilled him, and he had a personal interest in European unity too. As a teenager, he’d been drafted into the Second World War by the NSDAP. A month after Germany had surrendered, he’d found himself in a U.S. prison camp. The Americans had treated him fairly, and he’d eventually been released. But those were early, formative years, and they instilled in him a deep desire to understand other cultures, to look deeply into the relationships and exchanges that structured the world. While he was living in Paris, he wrote to Nordhoff directly and presented him with an idea for how to export cars in a way he called “Europeanization,” hoping Nordhoff might hire him. Volkswagen was his “dream job,”1 he said. He saw it as the perfect place to further explore the economic ties and structures that were possible in a more internationally interdependent world.

  Interest in automobiles ran in Hahn’s family. His dad had worked for Auto Union (the same car company that Porsche had once built a famous race car for), and Hahn had grown up surrounded by automobiles. In reaching out to VW, he was looking to bridge his two passions: international economics and cars. But Nordhoff’s response to Hahn’s effusive letter had been curt; he didn’t think Hahn’s idea of “Europeanization” would work for VW. Still, Nordhoff also said that he liked Hahn’s way of thinking, and if Hahn ever found himself in Wolfsburg, he should stop by. Hahn made sure to “find himself” in Wolfsburg shortly after.

  Nordhoff and Hahn immediately hit it off, and Nordhoff eventually offered Hahn a job as his personal assistant. But Nordhoff was the type of man who did everything for himself, and soon Hahn felt he was not being given enough of a challenge. He threatened to leave, and Nordhoff decided to make a change: Carl Hahn would work in the export department instead.

  Heinrich Nordhoff and Carl Hahn.2 It was often said that Hahn was like a son to Nordhoff. (photo credit 48.1)

  Hahn’s new appointment at Volkswagen happened around the time that the United States was finally beginning to take a second look at the little car that it had rejected and ridiculed for so long. By the mid-1950s, while most adult Americans still identified the car with Hitler and the war, there was now a new generation that had come of driving age who had less connection to the car’s turbulent history. Even so, the American market was generally not very open to foreign cars. The British had enjoyed some initial success in exporting to America, but that trend had quickly faded as Americans found it increasingly inconvenient to track down parts and get the right maintenance on the British cars. Nordhoff learned a lesson from those problems, and he combined it with another lesson he’d learned from Henry Ford. In the early
days of the Model T, Ford had sent representatives to all the states to introduce the cars to people, and to cultivate a feeling of familiarity between the average American and this new growling machine. He’d shown farmers how they could use it in their daily work. He’d gone to all kinds of communities, regardless of class. And he’d also set up service shops, places that could sell and repair parts. It was the beginning of the modern dealership, and it was a strategy that worked. Now Nordhoff was ready to bring that same strategy back to America.

  Service shops and easy access to parts had been a founding tenet of the Volkswagen company in Germany and in Europe, so it made sense to Nordhoff to proceed in that same way in America too. In that spirit, Nordhoff sent over a complex man named Will Van de Kamp, a man who reportedly had the temper of a preacher and the zeal of a missionary. It was Van de Kamp’s job to bring the Volkswagen to the driveways of American homes. Van de Kamp was in love with both the little car and its company, and his eccentricity and intense energy were very useful. He found a team of people to do just what Henry Ford’s team had once done, to travel through the states and introduce the car to people, to set up service centers and dealerships wherever they could. Van de Kamp was adamant that the new dealerships strictly adopt “the Volkswagen way”—a way focused on quality and service, putting customer service concerns above concerns with sales. Throughout the mid-1950s, he and his team drove in a special VW bus all through America, setting up shops and hanging that lollipop VW blue-and-white sign on the doors. The dealerships were all built to have the same look so they could be recognized immediately.

  Van de Kamp’s love for the car was contagious, and as he and his team traveled the country, they began converting people, especially young people. The car certainly had its advantages: It could get thirty-five miles to the gallon, and if something broke down, the design was so simple that people could usually repair it themselves. But a person had to have a thick skin to drive a VW in those days: The car got strange looks on the street, and it wasn’t unusual for drivers to get ridiculed. Perhaps because of this, however, owners began to feel protective of their cars, to think of them as special and unique. And they really were: At the time, the VW was the smallest, oddest-shaped car on any American street, the very antithesis of the sleek, glamorous cars coming out of Detroit. It did not blend in.