The Fifties

by David Halberstam

The postwar economic boom may have benefited many Americans, but no one benefited more than General Motors. By rough estimates, 49.3 million motor vehicles were registered when the decade began, 73.8 when it ended; by some estimates, an average of 4.5 million cars, many of them that might have stayed on the road in a less prosperous economy, were scrapped annually. That means as many as 68 to 70 million cars, ever larger, ever heavier, ever more expensive, were sold, and General Motors sold virtually half of them. The average car, which had cost $1,270 at the beginning of the decade, had risen to $1,822 by the end of it; that rate, Edward Cray noted in his book Chrome Colossus, was twice as fast as the rest of the wholesale cost index.