Made In America

by Bill Bryson

  Almost from the start TAT was dogged with misfortune. Six weeks after services began, a Los Angeles-bound plane crashed in bad weather in New Mexico, killing all eight passengers. Four months later, a second plane crashed in California, killing sixteen. People began to joke that TAT stood for ‘Take a Train’. In between these two crashes came another – that of Wall Street, when shares plummeted on Black Monday, 29 October, marking the start of the Great Depression. TAT’s potential market all but dried up.

  TAT lost almost $3 million in its first year and was taken over by Western Air Express, which itself evolved into Transcontinental and Western Air – TWA. (The name Trans World Airlines was the product of a later, more expansive age.) Within a year, it had slashed the one-way fare to just $160 (though there were no more free pens) and introduced the first stewardess. (Her name was Ellen Church and she chose the job title herself.)

  On 21 October 1936, just nine years after Lindbergh’s daring flight, Pan Am inaugurated regular passenger flights across the Pacific from San Francisco to Manila, with refuelling stops at Honolulu, Midway, Wake and Guam. Three years later, the airline also offered the first scheduled flights across the Atlantic, to Marseilles via the Azores and Lisbon, aboard its Flying Clippers, four-engine, twenty-two-passenger Boeing flying boats. Ocean flights inspired an ominous new term, point of no return, which first appeared in the Journal of the Royal Aeronautics Society in 1941, and quickly moved into the language in various figurative senses.

  The logistics of Pan Am’s Pacific operations were formidable. Wake and Midway were uninhabited, so everything needed on the islands, from pancake batter to spare engines, had to be shipped in. Three complete hotels were built in San Francisco, dismantled, shipped to Midway, Wake and Guam, and there reassembled. By September 1940, Pan Am had extended its Pacific operations, and was advertising flights to New Zealand in just four and a half days. If pressed for time, travellers could instead settle for Midway – ‘an ideal choice for those who seek a restful, carefree South Seas atmosphere’ – which could be reached in just two days. What the advertisements didn’t say was that Midway was a desolate heap of sand and that the few lonely people stationed there spent most of their time shooting rats. In any case, a little over two years later, Midway became a rather less desirable holiday spot when it became the focus of the first great battle of the war in the Pacific.

  Despite the risks and discomfort, the number of airline passengers soared. Between 1930 and 1940 the number of air travellers went from 417,000 to over 3 million.12 World War II naturally acted as a brake on the growth of the airlines, but it also had the benefit of producing huge advances in longdistance aviation, which the airlines were quick to exploit with the return of peacetime. By 1947 Northwest Orient Airlines was boasting a flying time from Chicago to Shanghai of forty-one hours, and from New York to Tokyo of just thirty-nine hours, on its wondrous Stratocruisers, which offered every comfort. Because hotel stops were no longer necessary, they came equipped with beds known, almost inevitably, as Skysleepers. Six years later Pan Am introduced transatlantic jet services, and beds became a thing of the past as the faithful Stratocruiser gave way to the Boeing 707. Instead of names, planes increasingly had numbers – a not insignificant loss to the romance of air travel. (Having said that, Boeing had used numbers since its first commercial plane, the 247, which carried just ten passengers.)

  Jet travel sprinkled the language with new words: jet-hop (1952), jetport (1953), jet set (1960), jet lag (1966), and jet fatigue and jet syndrome (alternative words for the more durable jet lag, both coined in 1968). Also in 1968 came an entirely new type of passenger plane named for, of all things, a circus elephant that had lived a century earlier. I refer of course to the jumbo jet.

  The jumbo became a feature of travel when introduced into service by Pan Am on 21 January 1970. (The first flight, from Kennedy Airport to Heathrow, took off seven and a half hours late because of an engine problem.) The plane’s formal name was the Boeing 747, so called because ever since the 707, Boeing’s jetliners had been numbered in increments of ten in the order in which they came off the drawing-board. Interestingly, the feature that makes the jumbo instantly recognizable, its hump, came about because Boeing feared the plane would not be a success. The feeling in the early 1960s when the plane was being designed was that supersonic jets were just around the corner and that they would quickly render jumbos obsolete as passenger carriers. The decision was taken therefore to design them so that they could easily be converted into freighters. By putting the cockpit out of the way up in a hump, freight could be loaded through the aircraft’s nose.

  That the most successful commercial aircraft in history should be called after a circus elephant is an obvious oddity. People are sometimes surprised to learn that Jumbo the elephant wasn’t called that because he was big, but rather that big things are called jumbo because of him. In fact, when he was given his name – it is a shortening of mumbo jumbo, a term for a West African witchdoctor, which found a separate usefulness in English as a synonym for gibberish – he was just a baby, only recently arrived at London Zoo. No one had any idea that he would grow to become the largest animal ever kept in captivity.

  Most Americans became familiar with Jumbo when P. T. Barnum, the circus impresario, bought the elephant from London Zoo in 1884, a scandal that outraged millions of Britons, and began exhibiting him all over America. Barnum’s handbills depicted Jumbo as absolutely enormous – one showed a coach and horses racing through his legs, with plenty of clearance. In fact, Jumbo was nothing like that tall. Though indisputably the largest elephant ever measured, he was no more than eleven feet seven inches in height. (Barnum was seldom troubled by considerations of accuracy. One of his other lasting creations, the ‘wild man from Borneo’, was in fact a native of Paterson, New Jersey.)13

  None the less, thanks to Barnum’s tireless and inventive promotion, the name Jumbo became associated with largeness, and before long people were buying jumbo cigars, jumbo suitcases, jumbo portions of food, and eventually travelling on jumbo jets. Jumbo’s American career was unfortunately short-lived. One night in September 1885, after Jumbo had been on the road for only about a year, he was being led to his specially built boxcar after an evening performance in St Thomas, Ontario, when an express train arrived unexpectedly and ploughed into him, with irreversible consequences for both elephant and train. It took 160 men to haul Jumbo off the tracks. Never one to miss a chance, Barnum had Jumbo’s skin and bones separately mounted, and thereafter was able to exhibit the world’s largest elephant to two audiences at once, without any of the costs of care or feeding. He made far more money out of Jumbo dead than alive.

  New as nuclear fission and twice as powerful – that’s the new, newer, newest, all-new Bulgemobile!!

  20

  Welcome to the Space Age: The 1950s and Beyond

  In 1959, in one of those delvings into the future that magazines found so satisfying at the time, Newsweek presented this confident scenario for the lucky housewife of 1979: ‘Waking to cool 1970-style music from a tiny phonograph built into her pillow, the housewife yawned, flicked a bedside switch to turn on the electronic recipe-maker, then rose and stepped into her ultrasonic shower.’

  Among the many things Newsweek’s soothsayer failed to foresee was that by 1979 the housewife would be an endangered species. What the world got instead were words like workaholic, drive-by shootings, crack cocaine, AIDS, repetitive stress injury, gridlock and serial killer. We’re still waiting for the ultrasonic shower.

  If Newsweek surveyed the future in 1959 from a somewhat optimistic perspective, we can hardly blame it. In the 1950s life in the United States was about as good as it gets. World War II had not only ended the Great Depression and decked America with honour, but had laid the groundwork for an economic boom almost beyond conceivable proportions. Where the war had reduced much of Europe and Asia to rubble, exhausted national exchequers, destroyed industries, and left millions homeless or even stateless, A
merica was intact. Her twelve million returning servicemen and women came home to a country untouched by bombs. In 1945 the country had $26 billion worth of factories that had not existed when the war had started, all but $6 billion of which could be converted more or less immediately to the production of non-military goods: cars, televisions, refrigerators, tractors, processed foods, steel girders, you name it. And America, uniquely among nations in 1945, had money to spend – more than $143 billion in War and Savings Bonds alone.1 The stage was set for the greatest consumer boom in history.

  By the early 1950s most American homes had a telephone, television, refrigerator, washing machine and car – items that would not become standard possessions in Europe and Japan for years. With just 6 per cent of the earth’s population and 7 per cent of its land area, the United States by the mid-1950s was producing and consuming 40 per cent of total global output – nearly as much as the rest of the world put together.2 What is particularly notable is how self-contained America was in this period. Throughout the 1950s, imports amounted to no more than 3.2 per cent of gross national product (an Americanism coined in 1946 by the economist Simon Kuznets, who won a Nobel Prize for his efforts) and direct exports to no more than 4.7 per cent. America became the richest country in the world without particularly needing the rest of the world.

  It did so partly by being massively more efficient than its competitors. General Motors, with 730,000 employees, made a profit in 1966 of $2.25 billion. To equal this figure it would have been necessary to combine the total profits of the forty largest firms in France, Britain and Germany, which together employed about 3.5 million people. American companies grew bigger than some countries. General Electric’s sales in 1966 exceeded the gross national product of Greece. Ford was a bigger economic entity than Austria or Denmark. IBM generated more turnover than Sweden, Belgium or Spain. And General Motors was bigger than them all.

  In short, life in post-war America was bounteous, secure and infinitely promising. The economy was running at full throttle, jobs and wages were plentiful, and stores bulged with consumer goods of a richness and diversity that other nations could simply gape at. America had truly become, in the words of John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1958 book, the affluent society. Only two things clouded the horizon. One was the omnipresent possibility of nuclear war. The other was a phenomenon much closer to home and nearly as alarming. I refer to teenagers.

  Teenagers, it hardly needs saying, had always been around, but only recently had they become a recognized presence. So little had they been noticed in the past that teen-ager had entered the language only as recently as 1941. (As an adjective teen-age had been around since the 1920s, but it wasn’t much used.) But in the heady boom of the post-war years, America’s teenagers made up for lost time. Between 1946 and 1960, when the population of the United States rose by about 40 per cent, the number of teenagers grew by 110 per cent as America underwent a massive baby boom (though that term would not be coined until 1978, in an article in the New Yorker).3

  By the mid-1950s teenagers were not just everywhere, but disturbingly so. To their elders they seemed almost another species. They dressed sloppily, monopolized the phone and bathroom, listened to strange music, and used perplexingly unfamiliar terms – wheels for a car, square, daddyo, far out, beat, cool and coolsville, what a drag, bad news, big deal, chick, neat and neato, gone, real gone. They had a particularly rich supply of words for the culturally underendowed: loser, creep, weirdo, square, drip, and the much missed nose-bleed. Any stupid joke, particularly if voiced by one’s immediate relatives, was met with a pained expression and a withering ‘hardeeharhar.’ They seemed to take pride in appearing demented and even created a word for the condition: kooky (probably modified from cuckoo). Movies like Rebel Without a Cause and The Wild One, and books like On the Road and The Catcher in the Rye showed America’s youth to be disaffected, wilful, irrational and possibly dangerous. One prominent psychologist, Robert Linder of Baltimore, gravely announced in a series of lectures that young people ‘were suffering from a form of collective mental illness’,4 suggesting that he may have had a touch of it himself.

  An ominous new term, juvenile delinquency, began to fill news pages and excite comment. The Blackboard Jungle, a 1955 movie that dealt with delinquency and other manifestations of youthful angst, was thought so sensational that Clare Booth Luce, America’s ambassador to Italy, led a campaign to forbid its being shown abroad lest people get the wrong impression about America. Apparently she was not worried that they might instead conclude that America no longer believed in freedom of expression. The movie’s theme tune, ‘Rock Around the Clock’, was for most non-teenagers their first experience of the music known as rock ‘n’ roll, a term popularized by a Cleveland disc jockey named Alan Freed, who had studied classical trombone before taking to the airwaves, where he introduced his listeners to the music of Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and other such exotics. He first began referring to the music as rock ‘n’ roll in 1951, though among black Americans the expression was older, having originally been applied to sex and later to dancing.

  Above all, what separated America’s teenagers of the 1950s from previous generations was that they were rich. By mid-decade, as one historian has noted, ‘America’s 16.5 million teens were buying some 40 per cent of all radios, records and cameras, more than half the movie tickets, and even 9 per cent of all new cars. Altogether they were worth over $10 billion a year to the economy.’5

  Much of their wealth came from, and often returned to, another phenomenon of the age, the hamburger joint, which provided employment for thousands of teenagers and a haunt for most of the rest. Though the hamburger had been part of the American diet for half a century, it underwent a kind of apotheosis in the 1950s. As late as 1950, pork was still the most widely eaten meat in America, and by a considerable margin, but over the next two decades the situation was reversed. By 1970 Americans were eating twice as much beef as pork, nearly a hundred pounds of it a year, and half of that in the form of hamburgers. One company more than any other was responsible for this massive change in dietary habits: McDonald’s.

  The story as conveyed by the company is well known. A salesman of Multimixers named Ray Kroc became curious as to why a small hamburger stand on the edge of the desert in San Bernardino, California, would need eight Multimixers – enough to make forty milk-shakes at a time, more than any other restaurant in America could possibly want to make – and decided to fly out and have a look. The restaurant he found, run by the brothers Maurice and Richard McDonald, was small, only 600 square feet, but the burgers were tasty, the fries crisp, the shakes unusually thick, and it was unquestionably popular with the locals. Kroc at this time was fifty-two years old, an age when most men would be thinking of slowing down, but he saw an opportunity here. He bought the McDonald’s name and began building an empire. The implication has always been that the original McDonald’s was an obscure, rinky-dink operation in the middle of nowhere, and that it was only the towering genius of Ray Kroc that made it into the streamlined, efficient, golden-arched institution that we know and love today. It wasn’t entirely like that.

  By 1954, when Kroc came along, the McDonald brothers were already legendary, at least in the trade. American Restaurant magazine had done a cover story on them in 1952, and they were constantly being visited by people who wanted to see how they generated so much turnover from so little space. With sales of over $350,000 a year (all of it going through one busy cash register) and profits above $100,000, McDonald’s was one of the most successful restaurants in America. In his autobiography, Kroc makes it sound as if the McDonald brothers had never thought of franchising until he came along. In fact, by the time he visited them they had a dozen franchised operations going.

  Almost everything later associated with the McDonald’s chain was invented or perfected by the brothers, from the method of making French fries to the practice of trumpeting the number of hamburgers sold. As early as 1950, they had a sign outside announcing
‘Over 1 Million Sold’. They even came up with the design of a sloping roof, red and white tiled walls and integral golden arches – not for the San Bernardino outlet but for their first franchise operation, which opened in Phoenix in 1952, two years before Kroc came along.

  The McDonalds were, in short, the true heroes of the fast-food revolution, and by any measure they were remarkable men. They had moved to California from New Hampshire (or possibly Vermont; sources conflict) during the depression years, and opened their first drive-in restaurant in 1937 near Pasadena. It didn’t sell hamburgers. Then in 1940 they opened a new establishment at Fourteenth and E Streets, at the end of Route 66, in San Bernardino in a snug octagonal structure. It was a conventional hamburger stand, and it did reasonably well.

  In 1948, however, the brothers were seized with a strange vision. They closed the business for three months, fired the twenty carhops, got rid of all the china and silverware, and reopened with a new, entirely novel idea: that the customer would have to come to a window to collect the food rather than have it brought to the car. They cut the menu to just seven items – hamburgers, cheeseburgers, pie, crisps, coffee, milk and pop. Customers no longer specified what they wanted on their hamburgers but received them with ketchup, mustard, onions and pickle. The hamburgers were made smaller – just ten to a pound – but the price was halved to fifteen cents each.

  The change was a flop. Business fell by 80 per cent. The teenagers on whom they had relied went elsewhere. Gradually, however, a new type of clientele developed, the family, particularly after they added French fries and milk shakes to the menu, and even more particularly when customers realized that the food was great and that you could feed a whole family for a few dollars. Before long McDonald’s had almost more business than it could handle.