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the gas station about halfway between West Egg and Manhattan. That’s where Daisy Buchanan, driving Gatsby’s car back from the city, runs down Myrtle Wilson, the wife of the gas station owner (and her husband’s mistress). At the end of the book, Carraway decides, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it wasthat kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made …”
    The nation’s great novelists may have seen cars as symbols of the dangers of conformity, materialism and industrial society, but the general public sure didn’t. Even as the Roaring Twenties ended and the Great Depression began, Americans didn’t give up their wheels. New-car sales did plummet, but gasoline consumption dipped only slightly. And many real people did exactly what the fictional Joad family did in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath : drove to California in search of a better life. The Soviets, hoping to discredit American free enterprise and make the peasants feel better about life, showed newsreels about those fleeing the dust bowl. The plan backfired; when the Russians saw the films, their reaction was, “‘They have cars!’”
    After the Second World War, military men returned home looking for a job, a wife and a car—not necessarily in that order. At the same time, older people had more money because of the upswing in the economy, women who’d worked while the men had fought were feeling increasingly independent and even teenagers with part-time jobs could afford used models. Freed to once again produce cars instead of military vehicles, the automakers were initially unable to meet the demand.
    Advances in technology and the economic benefits of war soon catapulted America into the future predicted by the 1939 World’s Fair with its “The World of Tomorrow” theme. The promotion of science and technology as the path to prosperity and personal happiness was as naive as it was optimistic, but influential nonetheless. One of the fair’s highlights was Futurama. Designed by Norman Bel Geddes and sponsored by General Motors, the exhibit took people on a ride through what the world would be like in 1960—a future dominated by cars and highways. Cities would separate their residential, commercial and industrial areas for the sake of efficiency and the suburbs would sprawl. (Alas, this all came to pass.) Futurama’s “express motorways,” engineered toimprove safety while increasing speed, helped to sell Americans on the idea of superhighways, though the interstate system the government started building twenty years later did not include the automated radio control system to keep cars a safe distance from each other.
    By the mid-1950s, American culture and car culture were becoming almost synonymous. And the automobile was taking on greater meaning, according to cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken. In “When Cars Could Fly: Raymond Loewy, John Kenneth Galbraith, and the 1954 Buick,” an essay collected in Culture and Consumption II: Markets, Meaning and Brand Management , McCracken focuses on the style known as the “Forward Look,” the distinctive appearance of mid-century cars. “The Forward Look was not very streamlined, forsaking the ‘least possible resistance’ for the greatest possible show,” writes McCracken, who describes it as imposing, dramatic and heavy with chrome. “Consumers might be embracing modernist simplicity in their homes, offices, clothing, and appliance designs. But when it came to cars, they wanted something else.”
    Many experts—including industrial designer Loewy and economist Galbraith—hated the style, deriding it as vulgar and gaudy and a triumph of marketing over engineering and common sense. But everybody else loved the tail