The newspaper comic is among the most ephemeral of art forms, but for almost 30 years a mural featuring cartoon characters has been lovingly preserved by the owners of a bar in New York City. The longtime showpiece of Costello’s, at 225 East Forty-fourth Street, was a wall decorated by America’s most famous cartoonists, but when the bar’s owner sold it earlier this year, the mural seemed in danger of going the way of yesterday’s crossword.
With American Heritage approaching its 50th birthday in December 2004, we asked five leading historians and cultural commentators to each pick ten leading developments in American life in the last half-century. In this fifth installment, Phil Patton—whose books include Made in USA: The Secret History of the Things That Made America and Bug: The Strange Mutations of the World’s Most Famous Automobile —selects the ten biggest changes in the realm of innovation and technology. In previous issues, we presented our other authorities’ choices of the half-century’s biggest transformations in politics, business, home and the family, and entertainment and culture.
50 Years Ago
August 11, 1954 Zhou Enlai, China’s foreign minister, announces his country’s intention to attack Taiwan. On August 17 President Dwight D. Eisenhower says that any such invasion “would have to run over the Seventh Fleet.”
September 8, 1954 In Manila the United States and seven other countries form the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO). America promises to defend the region in case of communist aggression.
September 30, 1954 The USS Nautilus , the world’s first nuclearpowered submarine, is dedicated at Groton, Connecticut.
175 Years Ago
August 8, 1829 America’s first steam locomotive, the Stourbridge Lion , makes its initial run near Honesdale, Pennsylvania, at an average speed of 10 miles per hour.
On September 24, 1929, Lieutenant Jimmy Doolittle made the world’s first completely “blind” flight—taking off, flying a prescribed course, and landing on instruments only. He was in a Consolidated NY-2 “Husky” biplane with two cockpits. Doolittle flew it from the rear cockpit, which was covered in canvas so that he could not see out. In the front cockpit was a safety pilot, Lieutenant Ben Kelsey, who could take over if necessary. Kelsey held his hands in the air during the flight to show that Doolittle was controlling the plane.
The 60s ended for me one Parents Day at a New England prep school. On that brilliant October morning 20 years ago, I sat in an oak-paneled classroom, one of a small group of adults holding the nervous gaze of a young history teacher. Sitting next to me was Joan Baez. Her hair was cut short; her clothes were dark, slightly artsy, perhaps, but subdued. Could this be the heroine of the counter-culture we'd seen defiant and pregnant at Woodstock? And could her child really be, with my daughter, a member of this history class? We smiled politely at each other, and I wanted to say, “How did this ever happen? How did we get from there to here? How can one lose such certainties?”
I would rank development of hybrid seeds as the number one change in business in the last half-century, rather than putting productivity down at sixth place and agricultural increases as only part of that (“50/50,” by John Steele Gordon, June/July 2004). It was the hybrid seeds that made those agricultural improvements possible by allowing the development of plants able to resist drought and disease, while increasing production at rates higher than any other industry. This in turn released many people from the drudgery of food production, allowing them to go to college and help invent computers and the other nine categories. The results of hybrid seeds are present on every supermarket shelf and every dinner table.
Your “50/50” series of the biggest changes since 1954 inspired me to compile a list of 10 things that came along during (or rose to prominence in) the last 50 years that have contributed most dramatically to my own life. Having become a teenager in 1953,1 well remember those heady days of early rock ’n’ roll, blockbuster films, and cake mixes. The items I have chosen, however, have to do with daily life: