While it lasted (and it didn't last very long--the fins and stuff were pretty much gone by 1962), what a glorious, outrageous display of unregenerate automotive enthusiasm it was. And it was not entirely an exercise in mass-produced bad taste.

A case could be made, for example, that the last of the big-finned Chryslers got it right, striking that rare balance of mass and implied movement that you always find in great car design. It's not perfect (the heavy vertical ends of the wrap-around windshield are clumsy and intrusive), but it's a pleasurable exercise in proportion:

Chrysler 300 (1961).

So we got to that rather high point, and then Detroit backed off, really fell asleep for two, almost three decades. (It was nearly fatal, this neglect not only of design, but of engineering, manufacturing, and marketing, as the Japanese and the Europeans picked up the ball and almost ran away with it--but that too is another story.)

Finally we get to the sociology. You can also see Detroit's little golden age of design exuberance in the 1950s as a precursor of the Big Decade that was coming fast, the 60s.

Don't let anybody kid you. Design matters (even more than size), and it matters a lot. Who was riding around in the back seats of those be-finned, three-toned greenhouses in the 1950s? You bet your Earth Shoes, it was the small human beings who a decade later would be singing their hearts out, taking the sins of the world on their shoulders and the drugs of the world into their bloodstreams.

Immerse children in simulacrums of the future at their own risk. They're likely to grow up asking why the whole world isn't like the family jetmobile that they grew up with. Which is not to say that car design caused Hippies. But it was all of a piece, no doubt about that. Car design of the 50s was a crystal ball showing the outburst of social exuberance, conscience, and activism that was to come in the 60s.

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Magellan's Log VII

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