Made In America - Bill Bryson [214]
By the early 1950s most American homes had a telephone, television, refrigerator, washing machine and car – items that would not become standard possessions in Europe and Japan for years. With just 6 per cent of the earth’s population and 7 per cent of its land area, the United States by the mid-1950s was producing and consuming 40 per cent of total global output – nearly as much as the rest of the world put together.2 What is particularly notable is how self-contained America was in this period. Throughout the 1950s, imports amounted to no more than 3.2 per cent of gross national product (an Americanism coined in 1946 by the economist Simon Kuznets, who won a Nobel Prize for his efforts) and direct exports to no more than 4.7 per cent. America became the richest country in the world without particularly needing the rest of the world.
It did so partly by being massively more efficient than its competitors. General Motors, with 730,000 employees, made a profit in 1966 of $2.25 billion. To equal this figure it would have been necessary to combine the total profits of the forty largest firms in France, Britain and Germany, which together employed about 3.5 million people. American companies grew bigger than some countries. General Electric’s sales in 1966 exceeded the gross national product of Greece. Ford was a bigger economic entity than Austria or Denmark. IBM generated more turnover than Sweden, Belgium or Spain. And General Motors was bigger than them all.
In short, life in post-war America was bounteous, secure and infinitely promising. The economy was running at full throttle, jobs and wages were plentiful, and stores bulged with consumer goods of a richness and diversity that other nations could simply gape at. America had truly become, in the words of John Kenneth Galbraith’s 1958 book, the affluent society. Only two things clouded the horizon. One was the omnipresent possibility of nuclear war. The other was a phenomenon much closer to home and nearly as alarming. I refer to teenagers.
Teenagers, it hardly needs saying, had always been around, but only recently had they become a recognized presence. So little had they been noticed in the past that teen-ager had entered the language only as recently as 1941. (As an adjective teen-age had been around since the 1920s, but it wasn’t much used.) But in the heady boom of the post-war years, America’s teenagers made up for lost time. Between 1946 and 1960, when the population of the United States rose by about 40 per cent, the number of teenagers grew by 110 per cent as America underwent a massive baby boom (though that term would not be coined until 1978, in an article in the New Yorker).3
By the mid-1950s teenagers were not just everywhere, but disturbingly so. To their elders they seemed almost another species. They dressed sloppily, monopolized the phone and bathroom, listened to strange music, and used perplexingly unfamiliar terms – wheels for a car, square, daddyo, far out, beat, cool and coolsville, what a drag, bad news, big deal, chick, neat and neato, gone, real gone. They had a particularly rich supply of words for the culturally underendowed: loser, creep, weirdo, square, drip, and the much missed nose-bleed. Any stupid joke, particularly if voiced by one’s immediate relatives, was met with a pained expression and a withering ‘hardeeharhar.’ They seemed to take pride in appearing demented and even created a word for the condition: kooky (probably modified