by Bill Bryson
As volume grew, the brothers constantly refined the process to make the production of food more streamlined and efficient. With a local machine-shop owner named Ed Toman they invented almost everything connected with the production of fast food, from dispensers that pump out a precise dollop of ketchup or mustard to the Lazy Susans on which twenty-four hamburger buns can be speedily dressed. They introduced the idea of specialization – one person who did nothing but cook hamburgers, another who made shakes, another to dress the buns, and so on – and developed the now universal practice of having the food prepared and waiting so that customers could place an order and immediately collect it.
The parallels between the McDonald brothers and Wright brothers are striking. Like the Wrights, the McDonald brothers never married and lived together in the same house. Like the Wrights, they had no special interest in wealth and fame. (The McDonalds’ one indulgence was to buy a pair of new Cadillacs every year on the day that the new models came out.) Both sets of brothers were single-mindedly devoted to achieving perfection in their chosen sphere, and both sets created something from which others would derive greater credit and fame. The McDonald brothers had just one distinction that set them apart from the Wrights. They dreaded flying, which presented a problem in keeping tabs on their expanding empire. So when Ray Kroc came along and offered to form a partnership in which he would look after the franchising side of the operation, they jumped at his offer.
Kroc was, it must be said, a consummate seller of franchises. By 1961, the year he bought the brothers out for $2.7 million, there were two hundred McDonald’s restaurants, and the company was on its way to becoming a national institution. Kroc achieved this success in large part by making sure that the formula of the original San Bernardino McDonald’s was followed everywhere with the most exacting fidelity. His obsession with detail became legendary. He dictated that McDonald’s burgers must be exactly 3.875 inches across, weigh 1.6 ounces and contain precisely 19 per cent fat. Big Mac buns should have an average of 178 sesame seeds. He even specified, after much experimentation, how much wax should be on the wax paper that separated one hamburger patty from another.
Such obsessiveness made McDonald’s a success, but it also led to the creation of a culture that was dazzlingly unsympathetic to innovation. As he recounted in his autobiography, when a team of his most trusted executives suggested the idea of miniature outlets called MiniMacs, Kroc was ‘so damned mad I was ready to turn my office into a batting cage and let those three guys have it with my cane’.6 Their failing, he explained, was to think small. One could be excused for concluding that their failure was to think at all.
As an empire builder Kroc had no peer, but as a dietary innovator his gifts were modest. As one of his biographers has noted: ‘Every food product he thought of introducing – and the list is long – bombed in the marketplace.’7 In consequence McDonald’s menu is essentially a continuing testament to the catering skills of the founding brothers. The relatively few foods that have been added to the menu since 1954 have usually been invented by franchisees, not by headquarters staff, and have often drawn liberal inspiration from the creations of competing chains. The Big Mac, introduced nationwide in 1968, was invented and named by a franchisee in Pittsburgh named Jim Delligatti, though it was certainly similar to, if not actually modelled on, a two-patty, tripledeck sandwich created by the Big Boy chain in California fourteen years earlier. The Filet-O-Fish was thought up by a franchisee in a Catholic section of Cincinnati who wanted something to offer his customers on Fridays, but essentially it is just a large fishfinger in a bun. The Egg McMuffin, originally called the Fast Break Breakfast, came when a franchisee in Santa Barbara developed the prototype, but again it echoed a rival’s product, an eggs Benedict breakfast roll from the Jack-in-the-Box chain.
None the less, the McDonald’s formula has clearly worked. In an average year, all but 4 per cent of American consumers will visit a McDonald’s at least once. Thirty-two per cent of all hamburgers, 26 per cent of all French fries, 5 per cent of all Coca-Cola, and nearly a fifth of all meals taken in a public place are eaten at a McDonald’s. McDonald’s buys more beef and potatoes and trains more people than any other organization, the US Army included. It is the world’s largest owner of real estate. In 1994 it had 13,000 restaurants in 68 countries serving 25 million customers daily.8 So international a commodity has the Big Mac become that since 1986 The Economist magazine has used the cost of a Big Mac in various world cities as a more or less serious basis for an index comparing the relative value of their currencies.
McDonald’s, like so much else of modern American life, from the supermarket to the shopping mall, was a creature of the two great phenomena of the post-war years: the car and the suburbs. Together they transformed the way Americans live.
Suburbs were hardly new in the 1950s. The word dates from as far back as 1325, and both suburbia and suburbanite have been current since the 1890s. Before the American Revolution most cities had their suburbs – places like Harlem, New York, and Medford, Massachusetts – but they weren’t dormitory communities in the modern sense. Until about 1850, a suburb was defined as ‘an undifferentiated zone outside the city limits’.9 They were largely self-contained communities, and often the sites of noxious enterprises that were ill suited to the confined spaces of cities.
Of necessity, most people in colonial America lived densely packed together in cities – in 1715 Boston’s 15,000 inhabitants shared just 700 acres of land – and went almost everywhere on foot. Walking was such an unquestioned feature of everyday life that until 1791, when William Wordsworth coined the term pedestrian, there was no special word to describe someone on foot. (Interestingly, pedestrian in the sense of dull or unimaginative is significantly older, having been coined in 1716.)
Not until the development of the steam passenger ferry in the 1830s did the possibility of retiring at night to a home in a separate (if invariably close by) community begin to take root. The passenger ferry transformed a few places like Tarrytown, Stony Point, and Brooklyn, New York, but the expense, limited carrying capacity and slow speed of ferries kept their overall effect slight. The history of suburban living in America really begins with the railways. Starting with Naperville, Illinois, in 1857, railway suburbs began to pop up everywhere. Orange and Secaucus, New Jersey, Oak Park, Lake Forest and Evanston, Illinois, Scarsdale, New York, Darien and Fairfield, Connecticut – these and hundreds of other communities were either created or wholly transformed by the railways. Even California, a state not normally associated with railways, spawned a number of such communities, notably San Rafael and Pomona.10 As railway suburbs grew, two new words entered the language, commute and commuter, both Americanisms and both first recorded in 1865.11
The growing popularity of the railway suburbs inspired an entirely new type of community: the model suburb. As the name suggests, model suburbs were purpose-built communities, primarily for the well-to-do. Where railway suburbs had grown willy-nilly, often absorbing existing communities, the model suburbs were built from scratch, and offered not just handsome residential streets, but everything else their well-heeled citizens could require: parks, schools, shopping districts and eventually country clubs. (The Country Club, built in the Boston suburb of Brookline in 1867, appears to have provided both the name and the model for this most suburban of social centres.) Among the more venerable of model suburbs are Beverly Hills, California, Shaker Heights, Ohio, and Forest Hills, New York.
The development of the streetcar in the closing years of the nineteenth century provided a new boost and a measure of democratization to suburban living with the rise of streetcar suburbs, which pushed cities further into the countryside and offered the prospect of fresh air, space and escape from the urban hurly-burly for millions of office and factory workers and their families.
Even taken together all these early types of suburbs never added up to more than a peripheral feature of American life. Two factors conspired in the 1940s to make the subu
rbanization of the country complete. The first was the need for cheap, instant housing immediately after the war. The second was the rise of the automobile in the early 1950s.
In 1945 America needed, more or less immediately, five million additional houses as war-deferred marriages were consummated and millions of young couples settled down to start a family. The simplest and cheapest solution was for a developer to buy up a tract of countryside within commuting distance of a city and fill it with hundreds – sometimes thousands – of often identical starter homes. The master of the art was Abraham Levitt, who began scattering the eastern states with his Levittowns in 1947. By making every home identical and employing assembly-line construction techniques, Levitt could offer houses at remarkably low cost. At a time when the average house cost $10,000, Levitt homes sold for just $7,900, or $65 a month, with no down payment, and they came equipped with major appliances.
Soon housing developments were going up along the edges of every city. By 1950, one-quarter of Americans lived in suburbs. Ten years later the proportion had risen to one-third. Today over half of Americans live in suburbs – more than in cities, farms and rural communities combined.
As people flocked to the suburbs, jobs followed. Between 1960 and 1990, five of every six jobs created in America’s thirty-five biggest metropolitan areas were in the suburbs. Instead of pouring into the cities by day to work, millions of Americans hardly went into the cities at all. In the thirty years from 1960, the number of people who commuted across county lines – in effect, lived in one suburb and worked in another – tripled to over 2.7 million.12 The suburbs had taken over.
As early as 1955, the phenomenon was noticed by the writer A.C. Spectorsky, who coined the term exurbia for this new kind of community that was emotionally and economically independent from the metropolis that had spawned it, but it was not until 1991, when a Washington Post reporter named Joel Garreau wrote a book called Edge City, that this vast transition in living patterns gained widespread notice.
To qualify as an edge city by Garreau’s definition, a community must have 5 million square feet of office space, 600,000 square feet of shopping, and more people working there than living there. America now has more than 200 edge cities. Los Angeles and New York have about two dozen each. Almost all have been created since 1960, and almost always they are soulless, impersonal places, unfocused collections of shopping malls and office complexes that are ruthlessly unsympathetic to non-motorists. Many have no pavements or pedestrian crossings, and only rarely do they offer any but the most skeletal public transport links to the nearby metropolis, effectively denying job opportunities to many of those left behind in the declining inner cities. About one-third of all Americans now live in edge cities, and up to two-thirds of Americans work in them.13 They are substantial places, and yet most people outside their immediate areas have never heard of them. How many Americans, I wonder, could go to a map and point to even the general location of Walnut Creek, Rancho Cucamonga, Glendale, Westport Plaza, Mesquite or Plano? Anonymous or not, they are the wave of the future. In 1993, nineteen of the twenty-five fastest-growing communities in the United States were edge cities.
If affordable housing was the first thing most returning GIs wanted in 1945, then without question a car was the second. As late as 1950 some 40 per cent of American households still did not have a car, but that would change dramatically in the next decade as the automobile became not just a convenience of modern life but, for millions, a necessity. In the period 1950-80, America’s population rose by 50 per cent, but the number of cars quadrupled, until the number of cars far exceeded the number of households (because of two-or-more-car families).14
In keeping with America’s confident new age of materialism, cars grew bigger, flashier and more powerful in the post-war years. The man behind it all was one Harley J. Earl, a long-time General Motors designer whose fascination with the Lockheed P-38 Lightning fighter aircraft of World War II led him to put outsize tail fins on the 1948 Cadillac. The next year, racy portholes called venti-ports appeared on Buicks. The year after that Studebaker produced the sleek, bullet-nosed Champion DXL, which actually looked like a plane, and the race was on. By the mid-1950s every car maker was turning out huge, flashy, grinning-grilled, multi-toned, chrome-heavy, monstrously tail-finned road beasts that were the hallmark of the decade – cars that looked, in the words of one observer, as if they should light up and play. The style was called the Forward Look.
Cars were given names that suggested that these things were not just powerful, but barely under control – Firedome V8, Thunderbird, Tempest, Comet, Fury, Charger – and they came with features that promised a heady mix of elegance, comfort and fingertip control. Impressive-sounding features had been part of the car salesman’s armoury for some time – as early as 1940 De Soto was boasting a model with ‘Fluid Drive Simplimatic Transmission’ – but it was really the development of powerful V-8 engines, a direct spinoff of World War II technology, that allowed car makers to provide lots of gadgetry and gave the marketing people the scope to scramble for technological hyperbole. Some actively suggested aeronautic qualities, like the 1955 Buick which came with RSVP (short for ‘Really Sensational Variable Pitch’) propeller blades. As the ads explained, these changed their pitch ‘like the propellers on an air liner, and what that does to getaway from a standing start – or for a safety-surge when it’s needed out on the highway – is something you can only believe from firsthand experience’. Others, like the Thunderbird with its Trigger-Torque Power and Speed-Trigger Fordomatic Transmission, sounded as if they might have the capacity to shoot down rival motorists. The next year Thunderbird added Cruise-O-Matic Transmission, presumably so that the driver could keep both hands on the gun.
By 1956 cars had features that all but promised lift-off. Chryslers came with PowerFlite Range-Selector, Torque-Flight Transmission, Torsion-Aire Suspension and Super-Scenic Windshield. The Packard offered New Torsion-Level Ride and Twin Ultramatic Transmission, while the Chevrolet Bel-Air had a hold-on-to-your-hats feature called a Triple-Turbine TurboGlide. Mercury, misreading the market, could offer nothing zippier than Dream-Car Design and Seat-O-Matic Dial that remembered the driver’s favoured position, and paid heavily for its technological timidity with lost sales.
The height of this techno-excess came in 1957 when Packard produced a 145-horsepower Super Eight model, which came equipped with everything but a stewardess. The vaunted features included Prest-O-Justment Seats, Flite-Glo Dials, Comfort-Aire Ventilation, Console-Key Instrument Panel and Push-Button Control Wrinkle-Resistant RoboTop Convertible Roof. Unfortunately it drove like a tank. Five years later, Packard was out of business.
The irony in this is that virtually none of the modern improvements to cars, such as disc brakes, fuel injection, front-wheel drive, torsion bars and the like, were invented in America. Detroit was more concerned with gloss and zip than with genuine research and development, and within twenty years it would be paying for this lapse dearly.15
In 1955, into the midst of this battlefield of technological hyperbole and aerodynamic styling, came a car so ineptly named, so clumsily styled, so lacking in panache that it remains almost forty years later a synonym for commercial catastrophe. I refer, of course, to the wondrous Edsel.
It is hard to believe now what high hopes Ford, its dealers and most of America had for this car when it was announced to the world. After the Ford Company’s huge success during its first two decades, it began to falter dangerously, largely because of Henry Ford’s extreme reluctance to offer six-cylinder engines or models with a few curves and a dash of styling. It fell behind not only General Motors, but even Walter Chrysler’s Plymouth. By the 1950s Ford desperately needed a success. A new mid-sized car seemed the best bet. General Motors had not introduced one since the La Salle in 1927 and Chrysler not since the Plymouth in 1928. Ford’s most recent effort at a breakthrough vehicle had been the Mercury way back in 1938.16 The time was right for a new, world-beating car. In 1952 Fo
rd began work on a secret project it called the E car.
Huge care was taken with choosing a name. Ford’s advertising agency, Foote, Cone and Belding, drew up a list of 18,000 suggestions, and Ford staff added a further 2,500. The poet Marianne Moore was commissioned to come up with a list of names, and offered such memorable, if unusable, suggestions as the Mongoose Civique, the Utopian Turtletop, the Pluma Piluma, the Pastelogram, the Resilient Bullet, the Varsity Stroke and the Andante con Moto.
All of these were carefully whittled down to a short-list of sixteen names. On 8 November 1956 an executive committee met to make the final choice. After much discussion it reduced the list to four favoured names: Corsair, Citation, Ranger and Pacer. Then, for reasons that are much disputed (largely because no one wished afterwards to be actively associated with the choice) the panel members opted for a name not on the list: Edsel.
It was named for Edsel Ford, Henry and Clara Ford’s only child, who in turn had been named for Henry Ford’s best friend. The name had been considered once before, but had been discarded when consumer research showed that almost everyone thought it sounded like the name of a tractor or plough.
Having signally botched the name, the company went on to botch the design and production of the car. The chief stylist of the Edsel was Roy A. Brown, jun. By all accounts Brown’s initial design was a winner,*33 but excessive tampering – in particular the imposition of a grille that has been variously likened to a horse collar or toilet seat – doomed it. There was also the consideration that the Edsel was not very well made. The publicity department’s plan was to have seventy-five automotive writers drive identical green and turquoise Edsel Paces from Detroit to their home-town dealers. But when the first Edsels rolled off the assembly line they were so riddled with faults that Ford had to spend an average of $10,000 apiece – twice the cost of the car – getting them road-worthy. Even then it managed to have just sixty-eight cars ready by launch day.17 A further setback occurred when the Edsel made its public debut on a live national television special and wouldn’t start.