But there was more to it than that. The Edsel was a failure by other standards. The oval grille set vertically in the front end, with the aluminum letters EDSEL emblazoned in it, was not a success. Its designer had adopted the idea from contemporary European automobiles in the hope that it would give the car cachet. It didn’t, partly because it was inconsistent with the rest of the front design, and the public’s negative reaction to it was the first blow against the auto’s success. One writer likened it to an egg. Others described it as a horse collar, Bugs Bunny, and—this may have been inspired by malicious counter public relations of General Motors or Chrysler—a toilet seat.
Even worse, fully half of the first Edsels to go on the market were lemons. Brakes failed, push buttons didn’t work, oil pans fell out, trunks wouldn’t open, hoods stuck, transmissions froze, paint peeled, hubcaps fell off, batteries died, doors wouldn’t close—the list of defects seemed to have no end.
On E plus 3 the theft of an Edsel occurred in North Philadelphia. There were virtually no others. It was a sign of the car’s diminishing glamour that it didn’t even seem to be worth stealing. After the bloom wore off nationwide sales plummeted until the sales chart in Dearborn resembled a ski slope. Dealers were selling fewer than one-fifth of the number necessary if they were to break even. The promotion became defensive, frantic:
1959 Edsel. Looks right! Built right! Prices right! Makes history by making sense. Exciting new kind of car! A full-size practical beauty. Roomy without useless length. Soundly engineered. Powered to save. And priced with the most popular three!
On January 14, 1958, the Ford Motor Company merged its Edsel and Lincoln-Mercury departments. The new car had lost 400 million dollars. It was finished, and the entire country knew it. The time had come to throw in the towel. Unfortunately that was not yet possible. Just as new cars need a long lead time, so does a cessation of production. The Edsel’s new models had been designed long ago; the steel dies had been cut, and the 1959s were plonking down at the end of their assembly lines. Finally, having sold fewer than 1 percent of the cars bought during their time on the market, the Edsel’s manufacturers discontinued manufacture on November 19, 1959. Viewers of Wagon Train, a Western TV series sponsored by the car’s advertising agency, were invited to participate in a contest. The purpose was promotional, but the prizes weren’t Edsels. They were ponies.
TWENTY-FIVE
The Crusade Falters
In 1958 Mike Todd’s Around the World in Eighty Days entered its third year as the movie industry’s greatest box office sensation since the arrival of the tube. Part of its appeal lay in the realization that in the late 1950s, as in Jules Verne’s early 1870s, transportation was big news. The globe was growing noticeably smaller, and not only because of the satellites. British Overseas Airways Corporation introduced jet airliners for trans-Atlantic flights on October 4, 1958, and two months later, on December 10, U.S. jetliners made their first domestic appearance on the National Airlines New York to Miami run. The St. Lawrence Seaway was opened to traffic on April 25, 1959. U.S.S. Wisconsin, at that time the U.S. Navy’s last battleship, was put in mothballs as Mamie Eisenhower christened N.S. Savannah, the first atom-powered merchant ship. Nuclear submarines surpassed Verne’s wildest, 20,000-leagues-deep dream, circling the globe underwater and crossing the North Pole by passing beneath the Arctic ice cap. In June 1959 the 110-million-dollar sub George Washington slid stern first into the Thames River at Groton, Connecticut, carrying solid-fuel Polaris missiles, a guarantee that Russia could never level all U.S. nuclear bases in a sneak ICBM attack.
The American Telephone and Telegraph Company now had 100 million telephones in service, half the world total. Direct distance dialing (DDD), which had been introduced in Englewood, New Jersey, on November 10, 1951, was now being extended to overseas calls. Ocean telephone cables, radiophone, and over-the-horizon radio—soon to be joined by Telstar, the Bell System’s first experimental communications satellite—linked Americans with 190 nations and territories overseas. Mark Cross, manufacturer of alligator handbags, provided some insight into the global character of modern American business when it announced a grant of financial aid to Zululand for the propagation of the crocodile species. At the same time, shrinking trade routes brought American auto dealers new competition from abroad. Foreign cars were accounting for 10 percent of all automobile sales in the United States. The leaders were West Germany’s Volkswagen (1958 sales were 102,035), France’s Renault (47,567), Italy’s Fiat (23,000), and Britain’s Hillman (18,663). Japan, Sweden, and Holland were about to enter the American market with other small cars, and Detroit, in a gesture toward reality, at last prepared to make little American autos. To distinguish them from automobiles made overseas they were to be called “compacts.”
Asked what Americans might expect to find when they reached the moon, Edward Teller replied grimly, “Russians.” In early January 1959 the Soviets launched Lunik I, a spectacular 3,245-pound satellite that came within 5,000 miles of the moon. Their head start in space exploration continued to be a tremendous advantage, though the United States had begun to take the first steps toward catching up. Cape Canaveral crews finally put a tiny American satellite in orbit with an Army Jupiter-C rocket. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 provided federal aid for improved teaching in science, mathematics, and foreign languages. In 1958 Congress also created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). To test human endurance in space, Air Force Captain Joe Kittinger took the longest parachute jump in history, bailing out at 76,400 feet, falling twelve miles before a barometric device on his parachute blew it open, and landing safely in the New Mexican desert. Front pages on April 10, 1959, introduced the country to a new category of celebrities—the Project Mercury astronauts. All were veteran test pilots aged thirty-two to thirty-seven. Their names were Alan Shepard, Walter Schirra, Virgil Grissom, John H. Glenn Jr., Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, and Donald Slayton. Each was white, a father, a native of small-town America, and a Protestant. Six of the seven had crew cuts.
The oceans on either side of the United States, which had been so comforting to isolationists in the 1930s, seemed at times to have shrunk to fordable streams. In August 1958 scientists debating the threat of fallout agreed that the bones of all Americans could be affected to some extent by any nuclear explosion anywhere on earth. Remote Indochina became less remote on July 10, 1959, when two American military advisers were killed and a third wounded at Bien Hoa, Vietnam, twenty miles north of Saigon. They had been watching a Jeanne Crain film, The Tattered Dress, on a home projector in a mess hall. Terrorists had surrounded the building, and when a sergeant switched on the lights to change reels, they had opened fire.
The first Eisenhower administration now belonged to the past, and some notable figures had vanished with it. Joe McCarthy died of drink on May 2, 1957. (“He was discouraged,” George Sokolsky wrote. “He regarded himself as betrayed. He particularly felt that he was betrayed by Vice President Nixon, whom he had always trusted.”) His widow, Jean Kerr McCarthy, continued to live in Washington; four years later she married a member of the Civil Aeronautics Board. Frank Lloyd Wright died at eighty-nine, leaving a time bomb of controversy over his last major work, New York City’s three-million-dollar Solomon R. Guggenheim museum. Deaths in the entertainment world included Errol Flynn, Mario Lanza, Maxwell Anderson, and Lou Costello. John L. Lewis resigned as president of the United Mine Workers. Dave Beck of the Teamsters went to jail, leaving his successor, Jimmy Hoffa, locked in a desperate struggle with John F. Kennedy, a member of a Senate investigating committee, and Robert F. Kennedy, the committee’s chief counsel. Maria Callas, thirty-five, left an Italian millionaire, Giovanni Meneghini, for the shipping czar Aristotle Socrates Onassis. Some gossips thought that at fifty-three Onassis was too old for her.
Increasingly the decade was being compared with the 1920s. Zany as they were, the 1950s had witnessed nothing comparable to the ukulele or flagpole sitting until 1958, when
the deficiency was spectacularly remedied by two young toymen in San Gabriel, California. Richard Knerr and Arthur Melin, co-owners of an enterprise called the Wham-O Manufacturing Company, had started making slingshots after World War II with less than $1,000 capital. In 1957 they had racked up their first big score with Frisbees, light plastic saucers which could be skimmed slowly through the air from one thrower to another. At a New York toy fair in March 1958 an acquaintance told them that large wooden hoops had achieved swift and startling popularity in Australia; children rotated them on their hips. Back at Wham-O, Knerr and Melin went into production with wooden hoops. After twenty or so they stopped; they didn’t like wood and wanted to experiment with plastics. In May they had what they wanted: three-foot hoops of gaudy polyethylene tubing which could be marketed at ninety-three cents each, representing a 16 percent gross profit. Wham-O’s new toy was christened the hula hoop.
Patenting the hoops was impossible and by Labor Day a dozen other firms were turning out imitations under other trademarks. Even so, by early September Wham-O had sold two million hula hoops for a net profit of over $300,000. Then adults started using them for calisthenics. Wham-O’s bookkeeper couldn’t keep up with the production figures. Workers went into three shifts. Counting the copiers at home and abroad, hula hoop sales that autumn were reckoned in the tens of millions. So widespread was their use that European medical journals warned of injuries which might be sustained by enthusiasts. It was a long list. In Leiden, Holland, a Dutch woman was being wheeled into surgery for removal of her appendix when her physician found that what was really wrong with her was a torn abdominal muscle, the result of strenuous gyrations inside a hoop. In England, where a quarter-million hulas had been sold, the British Medical Association cautioned, “No one with a known heart disease should try it, and anyone who is out of training should not go hard at it right away.” Japanese emergency wards were filling up with hoopers suffering from slipped discs and dislocated backbones. After a child was killed chasing a runaway hula the hoops were banned from Tokyo streets. Nevertheless sales there passed the three million mark. Lines of Japanese waiting to buy more stretched down the Ginza for blocks, and Premier Nobusuke Kishi received one as a gift on his sixty-second birthday.
Queen Mother Zaine of Jordan, returning from a visit to Europe, included a hula in her luggage. That should have been a guarantee of respectability, but some toymakers were nervous just the same. One of hooping’s attractions for adult spectators was its suggestiveness on some hips. An unexpected pleasure at football games that autumn was a view of winsome drum majorettes pumping their loins in a frenzy of excitement as thousands cheered. A French manufacturer of hoops, Jacques de Saint-Phalle, was afraid the church might notice and object. Saint-Phalle had a reputation to safeguard; in hoopless times he made his living manufacturing plastic tubing for hospitals and laboratories. To protect himself he persuaded French celebrities to be photographed hooping, Finland solved the same problem by staging marathons in which participants had to keep three hulas going, at the neck, hips, and knees.
Elsewhere the American fad swept on, whatever watchers with coarse minds thought. In Germany it was popularized by the prizefighter Max Schmeling and his wife Anny Ondra. Germans who had no children, and therefore no easy explanation for buying toys, avoided embarrassment by having stores deliver them, wrapped, at night. A party of Belgian explorers leaving for the South Pole disclosed that twenty hoops were in their baggage; the expense was charged to morale. In some countries hoop shortages were serious. Correspondents in Johannesburg, where hulas were retailing at sixty-five cents, reported that only white customers could afford them; the natives were restless until charitable organizations started distributing free hoops. Het Vrije Volk of Amsterdam noted that Dutch industries requiring plastic tubing were at a standstill, and in Warsaw a weekly newspaper for young Poles observed, “If the Ministry of Light Industry and the Chamber of Artisans do not embark upon the production of hoops, we will be seriously delayed in hula hoop progress, especially on the international level.” The ministry and the chamber continued to be dilatory, so hulas were smuggled in through East Germany.
The craze receded as quickly as it had spread. By the summer of 1959 discarded hoops had begun to pile up in city dumps, but the rage had been a singular illustration of how great a grasp even the trivia of American mass culture had on the rest of the world.
***
In Europe, Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay had blamed Dulles for the Suez disaster; in Washington, a number of members of the Eisenhower administration were inclined to agree with them. Given the Mideast as it was after Suez, however, there were no two minds about what Washington’s next move should be. It was an article of cold war faith that every desirable part of the world must belong to either the Communist world or the Free World. Sherman Adams wrote in 1961:
The defeat of the attempt by Britain and France to settle the Suez Canal controversy by military force temporarily destroyed the prestige and political power of those two nations in the Middle East…. Unless the United States undertook to fill the vacuum and made clear to the world the intention to do so, the President said, the Soviets could be counted upon to move into the Middle East and we would find ourselves in an intolerable situation.
The President told the congressional leadership, “I just do not believe that we can leave a vacuum in the Middle East,” and to a joint session on the Hill he asked for authority to use U.S. troops there “to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political integrity and political independence of… nations requesting such aid against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by International Communism.” This was the Eisenhower Doctrine. Like FDR’s undeclared war of 1940–41, Truman’s decision to send American soldiers to Korea without consulting Congress, and the Formosa resolution of 1955, the doctrine was another long step toward presidential authority to use U.S. armed forces anywhere.
Adams put his finger on one weakness in the Eisenhower Doctrine. “The difficulty in any American attempt to stop the spread of Communism abroad,” he wrote, “was in trying to prove that an internal upheaval which posed as a nationalist struggle was really under the direction of Moscow.” The resolution supporting the doctrine passed the House easily but ran into trouble in the Senate. As in the Formosa resolution debate, critical senators were divided. Some believed the White House was trying to share responsibility for what should be an executive decision; others thought Eisenhower was asking for the right to make war. Richard Russell of Georgia and Fulbright of Arkansas were particularly apprehensive. Russell told Dulles, “We are being asked to buy a pig in a poke.” Dulles replied that the issue was one of loyalty. He said to Russell, “If we are going to pinpoint everything, if Congress is not willing to trust the President… we can’t win this battle.”
But where was the battle? Britain and France having laid down their arms, the only Mideast danger spots were disputes between Arabs and Israel in the Gaza Strip and the Gulf of Aqaba. After two months of debate the Senate approved the resolution 72 to 19. “During the following year,” Adams wrote, “there were a series of explosive developments in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, and all involved, directly or indirectly, the application of the Eisenhower Doctrine.” In reality they mostly involved its inapplicability. Trouble in Jordan arose in a classic Mideastern form: anti-Israel Arabs rocked Amman, forcing the resignation of young King Hussein’s premier. The king then appealed to Eisenhower, claiming that the crisis was “the responsibility of international Communism and its followers.” Dulles endorsed this motion, and the President sent the Sixth Fleet to make a whiff-of-grape demonstration in the eastern Mediterranean. In the shadow of the guns Hussein selected a loyal government. The rioters having dispersed, the new premier survived. There is no evidence that the outcome would have been different without the warships.
The Syrian blowup came next, and it had an opéra bouffe air. Dulles was eager to show the flag in Damascus, but the Syrians weren’t buyin
g that. The government favored the Soviet Union; the opposition consisted of anti-American officers; each preferred to be left alone with the other. King Saud of Saudi Arabia assured Eisenhower that ideology had nothing to do with the feud, that no true Arab could be a Communist. The President replied that he had heard that one before; de Gaulle had told him that “no true Frenchman could be a Communist.” “Obviously, the turmoil was Communist-inspired,” Adams wrote, “but, in contrast to the situation in Jordan, the Syrian government wanted nothing to do with any assistance from the West, and there was therefore little that Eisenhower could do about it. This was an example of the weakness of the Eisenhower Doctrine.”
On the morning of July 14, 1958, Washington awoke to learn that the Middle East was in the throes of one of its periodic convulsions. During the night pro-Nasser Arab nationalists in Iraq had seized the Baghdad radio station, post office, cable office, and the bridges over the Tigris River. Advancing on the royal palace, they put the king and the crown prince to the sword. Premier Nuri as-Said tried to escape disguised as a woman, but he, too, was captured and slain. This knocked out the central prop holding up Dulles’s Baghdad Pact, which was only six months old.1 It also panicked President Camille Chamoun of Lebanon. Earlier Chamoun had accused Arab Communists of a massive infiltration of his regime. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld had personally led a United Nations observation team investigating the charge. They had found no evidence supporting Chamoun’s fears. Now, convinced that he was next on Nasser’s list, he formally requested the dispatch of American troops to Beirut. Eisenhower consented.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 123
