What is American culture? Historically, we are the land of refuge. Indeed, the absence of an obvious, unique culture is what makes the United States a welcoming place. Yes, some may have just scoffed hard enough to choke on their own tongue, but it’s the explanation all the same. America has size and unlike similarly sized nations, America is entirely habitable. We go all across our nation because there is reason to go all across the nation. New Yorkers want to go to California, Texans want to go to Washington, D.C. and Missourians want to leave Missouri. This mobility—while always an element of our collective ideology—became possible, predictable and just wildly profitable in the second half of the 20th century because our nation fell in love, and that love’s name was the automobile.
Cars were a part of American society before World War II but much in the way the Internet was a part of American society before the millennium. That is, both were immediately useful to peripheral sectors of American culture—some trading, military services and vice. And as most people know, WWII helped lift America, if not the entire world, out of the global depression. Specifically though, it meant that the federal government starting buying vehicles (jeeps, tanks, trucks, airplanes and numerous short-lived amphibious endeavors). This meant a huge boom to the few car manufacturers that existed, but not just in having the biggest buyer of all time. For the United States actually paid car manufactures to build more factories because—and this is truly American logic—why not buy two for twice the price? More than just the factories built, the government also paid the manufactures to create test vehicles and ultimately let the corporations keep ownership of the factories and all patents developed for the war efforts, as a thanks for the patriotism.
Well, (spoiler alert!) the Allies won the war (end spoiler) and the car companies had way more supply than there was demand, so they made the demand by buying up mass-transportation systems in the late forties. Not unlike Chevron buying carbon credits as early as the 1990s, these businessmen showed how rampant capitalism could motivate the devastatingly smart among us. The car companies destroyed their competition buying them, and then pushed for the creation of Levittowns.
Levittowns were the original name of what we now know as sub-urban areas—neighborhoods of single-family homes built outside of big cities. Because these neighborhoods were built for individual families, nothing was within walking distance anymore. Just a generation earlier, people went their entire lives without owning any transportation, but now, with no consistent public transportation, such a life was impossible. The Levittown homes were cheap and promised to go up in value, as original locations were ideally placed and each neighboring area would become father away from, yet still outside of, the city and major roads.
Majors roads may have been an understatement. President Dwight Eisenhower’s proposed Federal Highway Defense Act was the largest development of infrastructure ever undertaken by any nation—only to be bested over the last couple of years by the Nigerians (just kidding, it’s actually the Chinese and we’ll come back to this). But in the 1950s, Eisenhower was adamant that America fix the highway system that took his convoy 16 days to transverse from Oregon to D.C. in the 1930s (and two months to transverse in 1919). Keep in mind, Congress was suffering a little bit of a spending hangover since FDR’s New Deal 15 years earlier (helluva hangover, right?) but—and this is also pretty American—Congress always opens its purse for defense spending. In fact, Congress will usually just add on an extra zero or two for any defense budget just to prove to the American public that they care just that much.
Eisenhower, in probably his most political maneuver ever, argued that an Interstate Highway system would allow the U.S. to move troops and supplies across the country in lightning speed in the (inevitable?) event of a USSR invasion. In some respects, the German autobahn influenced Eisenhower in that the Germans really did use their highway system to facilitate the Blitzkrieg attacks on Poland and France. So, you know, thanks for the idea, Hitler. Regardless of influence, America connected dozens of major cities with 41,000 miles of new road…road that needed to be conquered.
And if something can be conquered by flamboyant consumerism, you can bet the Baby Boomer Generation bought it, used it, forgot about it, found it, repackaged it and sold it back to Generation X—who would sarcastically deride it. The car was a necessity in the immediate years after the war, but then it became a sign of upward mobility. Cars weren’t a luxury by 1960, but rather an expectation. A rite of passage into adulthood. They were mobile, miniature apartments—if not extensions of the driver themselves. This was a freedom of spatial mobility more unifying, social, and unique than cars before WWII or horses before that.
All of society felt reverberations from the auto-boom. Fast food became faster with drive-thrus. After eating dinner in your car you could watch a movie in the car at a drive-in movie. Car got dirty? Drive through a car wash. Still bored? Race other people with cars. Or just use your car as a hang-out location and drive around the city in endless loops finding other people doing the same because cars provided that feeling of “doing something” with the freedom to listen to rock and/or roll music, or use curse words. Feeling romantic? Drive to a make-out location. Need a bed? Most cars were intentionally built wide enough for a person (or two) to lie length-wise across the seats. Feel like you’ve done everything you could do in life in your car? Well, you’re in luck because eventually people could just use their cars to commit suicide.
“Thank God we have a car or this would have sucked.”
So where does this all take us? Well, history may not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes. Because as mentioned earlier, China’s highway system has ballooned for the last decade—much in the vein of America in the 1960s. Similarly, Chinese cities seem to be growing outward at the rate of America’s waistline and they have a growing middle class that will require, and then eventually just want, cars. For the comparison to go much further, though, China will need to move away from grand displays of choreographed automatons and just allow the people to authentically create art. Perhaps I’ve strayed from the point.
But back in America, we are living in a backlash reaction to this love affair with cars. The American Dream still exists but it doesn’t involve owning a home anymore. It doesn’t involve moving out of the city, but rather (more and more) moving into the city. And this may spell the decline of suburbia in a generation and, with it, car ownership.
Most simply, Pixar’s “Cars” are more like Andy’s toys than they even know.
Best review of Cars 2 I've read yet.
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