Drive-Thru Dreams - Adam Chandler Page 0,17

Sputnik-sized Whopper signaled comfort that was both excessive and predictable in an age of conformity and militarized expansion, the dangerous indulgences that Eisenhower would famously bemoan in his farewell address.

The 1950s quietly solidified a status quo—of menacing paranoia and various repressions, of arms races, of American troops stationed all over the world, and of a polity in which the two major political parties were so ideologically squished together they often seemed indistinguishable from each other. The entire country, and especially its industries, internalized this sensate state of war, not just because of a real Communist threat, but also because it all came so naturally. Indeed, through the middle half of the decade, the bestselling book in the United States (second only to the Bible, natch) was Dr. Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking, which married religion with patriotism and capitalism. By the end of the 1950s, Americans were driving cars with fins and fuzzy dice and buying huge hamburgers using legal tender printed with the newly adopted national motto: IN GOD WE TRUST. For many, it seemed as if there was never a better time to be an American.

5 ARE WE THERE YET?

I was fifty-two years old, I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gallbladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns, but I was convinced that the best was ahead of me.

—RAY KROC

In 1956, the long-planned expansion of the Interstate System, which had partially been inspired by Eisenhower’s marvel at the wide, efficient autobahns of Nazi Germany, was officially funded through the Federal-Aid Highway Act. The building out of the system’s nearly forty-seven thousand miles—the biggest public works project in the history of humanity—also reorganized American life into a form that’s still recognizable today. Major cities became linked for trade and travel like arteries, bringing food and goods and people quicker and farther than ever before.*

The highways rose in symbolic and strategic lockstep with the muscular postwar euphoria of US life.* Following the war, the economy boomed. Rationing and austerity were a thing of the past, and beef, steel, gasoline, and credit were cheap. For the first time ever, a majority of Americans became homeowners. Suburbs and babies sprouted up everywhere like weeds and fallout shelters. Women’s participation in the workforce steadily grew and prosperity slowly began to democratize.

The big new interstates formalized and made permanent the full-blown (and uniquely American) emergence of car culture that had begun after World War II. Between 1945 and 1950, annual new car sales in the United States surged from about seventy thousand to 6.7 million, and oil surpassed coal as the country’s predominant energy source. By 1949, roughly three-quarters of the cars on earth drove on US roads. And by 1957, there would be 55 million cars for 172 million citizens. Miles would become measurements of time, cities would become redefined by their loops and beltways and highway numbers, and mobility became a patriotic expression of freedom. Workers took on new commutes on weekdays, and then on the weekends they would pile their families into cars to discover the country.

Nowhere did this insistent, fast-paced sensibility emerge more formidably than in Southern California—that sun-kissed, casual, most honeyed and climate-controlled realization of modern manifest destiny. Even before the war, Los Angeles alone had nearly a million cars, more than in 80 percent of the states. In just a few short decades, Southern California developed into a port of call for Tomorrowland, billions in federal and Cold War defense spending, swimming pools and movie stars, massive American migration,* a new and innovative brand of white supremacy, and countless varieties of drive-in businesses, motels, and hotels to accommodate the auto-centric way of life.

Southern California is where, in 1954, Ray Kroc famously first set his intense Vulcan eyes upon one impressive little hamburger stand. After a few tough decades on the road as a paper-cup salesman, Kroc had incorporated milkshake machines into his Lomanesque sojourns, and he had typically been selling one, or maybe two, of his five-spindle Multimixers to clients across the country. But now everywhere he went, Kroc’s disconnected affiliation of soda jerks and malt shop operators seemed to be whispering about Dick and Mac McDonald, two brothers who were rumored to be using not one, not two, but eight milkshake machines at their outfit in the sleepy desert town of San Bernardino. The possibility mystified even Kroc, a man who had seen just about every commercial kitchen in America during a career of working odd jobs, playing jazz