Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [58]
His engineering team, in particular, flourished under Chrysler’s guidance. The first Chrysler car they created was a tribute to his high standards and commitment to the consumer’s needs. It was stylish, luxurious, quiet, smooth-driving and easy to handle—but although reasonably priced it was still in the midrange bracket as too few could be produced each year.
Chrysler was determined to capture the low-price market dominated by General Motors and Ford, while giving the customer a high-quality car. “The person who prefers to drive a small car is entitled to every consideration that can be given him,” he said, “comfort, roominess, easy riding and long life.” To this end he brought out the affordable Plymouth in 1928. Hoping for it to appeal to women as well as men, Chrysler invited the aviator Amelia Earhart to launch it in Madison Square Garden.
The name Plymouth was chosen to evoke the “endurance and strength, the rugged honesty, the enterprise, the determination of achievement and the freedom from old limitations of that Pilgrim band who were the first American colonists.” To underline the message, Chrysler salesmen were sent Pilgrim costumes in which to promote the new car.
As manufacturers like Chrysler realized, advertising and marketing were crucial elements of retailing success. Entranced customers were sold freedom, speed, glamour and romance along with their motors. Perhaps the most famous car advertisement of the 1920s was for the Jordan Motor Company. It showed a girl in an open Jordan racing a cowboy through wilderness, her scarf flying out behind her. “Somewhere west of Laramie,” read the tagline, “there’s a bronco-busting, steer-roping girl who knows what I’m talking about. She can tell what a sassy pony, that’s a cross between greased lightning and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel and action when he’s going high, wide and handsome. The truth is—the Jordan Playboy was built for her.”
Celebrity endorsements also attracted valuable consumer attention. Cadillac was famous for the bullet-proof limousine it built for Al Capone. Movie stars commissioned custom-built cars in striking colors and finishes. Pola Negri liked to be driven around Hollywood in her white velvet-upholstered white Rolls-Royce, complete with white-liveried driver—except when it rained, when he wore black.
In January 1928, Walter Chrysler made a public declaration explicitly linking car-owning and road-building to prosperity and progress—to the march of civilization itself. “My associates and I have looked ahead and we failed to see any reason for change [in current levels of growth]. We could find no economic justification for cycles of depression. All the indicators we could see were that times were good and would continue good.” It looked as though the pro-business attitudes of the U.S. Government, and indeed of the country as a whole, had triumphantly succeeded in creating an economy that could not fail.
But even in the years of what felt like unbridled prosperity, cracks were beginning to show. Partly because cars made possible the development of the suburbs, reached by newly built roads, property was another booming industry, funded by new methods of financing. Florida, made newly habitable by air-conditioning and refrigeration, was its epicenter; vacationers and investors rushed to purchase property there. Developers began converting Florida’s salt-water swamps into a web of streets and houses. Addison Mizner, creator of Boca Raton, built ever more extravagant houses in a style that came to be known as “Bastard-Spanish-Moorish-Romanesque-Gothic-Renaissance-Big-Bull- Market-and-Damn-the-Expense.” There were 30,000 people living in Miami in 1920. Five years later that number had soared to 75,000—of whom it was said that a third were estate agents.
Stories of the money that could be made abounded. One man had bought a building lot near Miami for $25 in 1896 (when Miami had only had sixty inhabitants) and sold it in 1925 for $150,000; another cursed himself