A Brief History of Motion by Tom Standage

Author:Tom Standage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

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Car Culture

The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad and incomplete in the urban compound.

—MARSHALL MCLUHAN, UNDERSTANDING MEDIA, 1964

THE INVENTION OF THE TEENAGER

In December 1944 Life magazine introduced its millions of American readers to the customs and culture of a group of exotic creatures, under the headline “Teen-age Girls: They Live in a Wonderful World of Their Own.” The word teen-age had been around for a few decades. But it caught on in America in the 1940s because it referred to a cohort of young people who were seen, for the first time, as a distinct age group between childhood and adulthood. American teenagers of the 1940s were the first generation to grow up in a world where cars were commonplace; they never experienced a world without them. The cultural tropes that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, as cars changed the way people socialized, ate, and shopped, went on to spread around the world, reshaping Western popular culture.

The emergence of teenagers was the result of the confluence of three factors. The first was that in America, unlike in other rich countries, sixteen-year-olds were more likely to be in school than employed, thanks to Depression-era laws barring young people from jobs that could be done by adult men. The proportion of American teens attending high school had risen from about 50 percent in 1930 to 70 percent in 1940 and reached 90 percent by 1960. Because teenagers spent most of their day in one another’s company at school or in school athletics or other extracurricular activities, they developed their own social rules distinct from those of the home or workplace. Second, labor shortages during the Second World War, and an economic boom after it, ensured that after-school jobs were plentiful—and teenagers in the 1940s were generally allowed by their parents to keep their earnings. This gave them significant spending power.

The third factor was the car. The minimum driving age in most American states was sixteen, and secondhand vehicles were cheap and readily available. The importance of cars in the emergence of teenage culture is evident from Life’s 1944 photo story. The lead image is of a group of teenagers gathered around a 1927 Ford Model T. The caption reads, “Gang of teen-agers push boyfriend’s Model T to get it started. Car is 17 years old and can hold 12 boys and girls. Favorite ride is out to football game.” That brief caption evokes the whole universe of American teen culture in its classic form: hanging out with friends, cruising in cars, footballers and cheerleaders, school proms, and so forth. American teenagers had the freedom and space to develop a distinctive set of behaviors that subsequently became a potent cultural export. Cars were central to this new teenage culture because they provided independence from parents and a private space beyond their prying eyes.

In particular, cars accelerated a change in the nature of courtship that had been under way since the 1920s. The tradition, in middle-class

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