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“That includes every weapon we have.” “Mr. President,” a reporter continued. “You said ‘every weapon we have.’ Does that mean that there has been active consideration of the use of the atomic bomb?” “There has always been active consideration of its use,” he answered. It was a time of desperation; MacArthur’s arrogance had not only resulted in a devastating defeat in the field but a psychological defeat for us as well.
A little later, as the meeting was breaking up, Ridgway grabbed General Hoyt Vandenberg and asked him why the Joint Chiefs didn’t send orders to MacArthur telling him what to do. Vandenberg just shook his head. “What good would that do? He wouldn’t obey the orders. What can we do?” “You can relieve any commander who won’t obey orders, can’t you?” Ridgway asked. Vandenberg gave him a long look, both puzzled and amazed. “This was,” Acheson later noted, “the first time that someone had expressed what everybody thought—that the Emperor had no clothes on.” Now a collision course was set.
To Matt Ridgway, the military was not just a career, it was a calling. His sense of duty had a touch of the mystical to it. “He was,” noted a West Point contemporary, Russell Reeder, “a twelfth-century knight with a twentieth-century brain.” Even in the peacetime Army he seemed different—not merely better read and more serious, but more committed than other men. George Catlett Marshall, whose protégé he became, had to warn him repeatedly about pushing himself too hard.
Many soldiers had the impression that he wore two grenades; actually, the other object was a medical kit. From this came his nickname, Old Iron Tits. He was appalled by MacArthur’s distance from the battlefield, by the paucity of division and regimental commanders at the front, and by the lack of daily intelligence on the enemy, a result of not enough patrolling.
As Omar Bradley, not a man who lightly used superlatives, wrote in his autobiography, “It is not often in wartime that a single battlefield commander can make a decisive difference. But in Korea, Ridgway would prove to be the exception. His brilliant, driving, uncompromising leadership would turn the tide of battle like no other general’s in our military history.” In Washington they stopped talking about being driven out of Korea or using the atomic weapon. Years later, noting that America had considered the use of an atomic weapon, Max Hastings, the British military historian, said of Ridgway
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Ridgway finally had to send a message filled with flattery asking him not to come, since it was clear to the Chinese that every MacArthur trip usually coincided with the start of an offensive.
The British were not alone in such suspicions. Omar Bradley wrote that “his legendary pride had been hurt. The Red Chinese had made a fool of the infallible ‘military genius’ ... the only possible means left to MacArthur to regain his lost pride and military reputation was now to inflict an overwhelming defeat on those Red Chinese generals who had made a fool of him.
Truman was furious. It was then that the President decided to fire his general. “I’ve come to the conclusion that our Big General in the Far East must be recalled,” he wrote in this diary. A few days later, MacArthur, who surely must have known what he was doing, drove the last nail into his own coffin. He wrote a letter to Joe Martin, the Republican House minority leader, supporting Martin’s view that Chiang’s troops should be called into this war. MacArthur knew the letter would be released by Martin: It was filled with grand statements about the real battleground being Asia. But the final
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That seemed to underscore the heartlessness of the decision. Still, the scandal was preferable to dealing with a provocative and disobedient commander in the field.
The next day MacArthur told Ridgway, who had come to replace him, that he had been fired because Truman was mentally unstable. He knew this, he said, because he had close friends who knew Truman’s doctor. The President, MacArthur claimed, would not live more than six months. Ridgway found the conversation a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a supreme egotist: In the world according to MacArthur, it was Truman who was irrational.
The driver turned around to look at his passenger. “Aren’t you Dean Acheson?” he asked. “Yes, I am,” Acheson answered. “Would you like me to get out?” It was a story he loved to tell.
It was MacArthur at his most formidable, powerful, theatrical, manipulative, and wonderfully selective with the record. Among other things, he claimed in his speech that the Joint Chiefs agreed with his policies in Korea, which was a boldfaced lie. He seemed to back off from
a direct confrontation with China (“No man in his right mind would advocate sending our ground forces into continental China”), but at the same time he called for a blockade which was an act of war, the removal of restrictions on Chiang, and logistical support so the Nationalists could invade the mainland.
The response seemed to divide along party lines. Representative Dewey Short, a Missouri Republican, said afterward, “We saw a great hunk of God in the flesh, and we heard the voice of God.” To former president Herbert Hoover, MacArthur was “the reincarnation of Saint Paul into a great General of the Army who came out of the East.” Truman, typically, was blunter: “It was nothing but a bunch of damn bullshit.”
“THERE NEVER WAS A country more fabulous than America,” wrote the British historian Robert Payne after visiting America in the winter of 1948–49. “She sits bestride the world like a Colossus; no other power at any time in the world’s history has possessed so varied or so great an influence on other nations ... Half of the wealth of the world, more than half of the productivity, nearly two-thirds of the world machines are concentrated in American hands; the rest of the world lies in the shadow of American industry ...” Driven by the revolutionary vision of Henry Ford, the United States had been
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Unlike the worker who toiled in the coal age, the Hydrocarbon Man was the beneficiary of his own labor. He owned a car and a house and enjoyed a generally improved style of living. In the coal age, Amaya pointed out, many workers worked for small wages to produce giant machines like the steam engine; accordingly, the industrial process enriched only the owner of the factory.
Karl Marx, Amaya liked to say, was the last great philosopher of the coal age; his workers were locked into a serflike condition. Had Marx witnessed the industrial explosion of the Oil Century and the rising standard of living it produced among ordinary workers, he might have written differently.
It was to become an international trend in which America led the way. In the period from 1949 to 1972, American consumption of oil went from 5.8 million barrels per day to 16.4 million barrels per day. In 1949, coal accounted for two thirds of the world’s energy; by 1971, oil accounted for two thirds.
I bring the price down, I can sell a thousand more cars, he bragged. In so doing, he changed the very nature of the American economy. Under Henry Ford that first era of auto production was, most assuredly, Puritan. The Model T was simple, boxy, functional. A buyer could choose a car in any color he wanted, Ford boasted, as long as it was black. There were no frills.
His face would grow grimmer and grimmer, and finally he would ask, “Who did this one?” Some poor assistant designer would finally be forced to admit that the idea was his. “Well, the next time I come in I don’t want to see it because it’s no damn good.” Off he would go for lunch, but beware the poor designer who did not act immediately on such a warning, for Earl was sure to come back in a few hours to check whether the offending sketch had indeed been taken down. If it had not, he would rip it off the wall. Another specialty of his was to peer over a working stylist’s shoulder and say rather
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Cumberford’s close friend Stan Mott had a similar experience: “Listen,” Earl told a group of designers that included Mott. “I’d put smokestacks right in the middle of the sons of bitches if I thought I could sell more cars.”
Thus, during a time when the American car industry might have lengthened its technological lead on foreign competitors, it failed to do so. Instead, the industry fiddled with styling details, raising and lowering the skirts, adding and augmenting fins, changing color combinations. Fins, the most famous automotive detail of the era, represented no technological advance; they were solely a design element whose purpose was to make the cars seem sleeker, bigger, and more powerful.
In the fifties bigger was better, and Americans, it seemed, wanted bigger cars every year. If General Motors assaulted the new American market with ever bigger cars, it was Charles Kettering who was the technological enabler of that era.
Eisenhower’s was the first Republican administration in twenty years, and it promised greater tolerance of big business. For years the biggest limitation at GM in terms of market share had been self-imposed, for fear that if its market share ever went above 50 percent, the Justice Department’s antitrust people would come in and break up the company. Now all such restraints were off. Curtice did not believe in such gentlemanly restraint. If the feds wanted to stop GM, it would have to come and get him: “You never stand still in this business. You either go up or down.” he said.
Owning a house came to be the embodiment of the new American dream. As promised by endless Hollywood films, it represented fulfillment, contentment: confident dads, perky moms, and glowing children, attending good schools and, later, college. A house brought the American family together (at precisely the moment, of course, when cars and television began pulling it apart). If the first great business figure of the American Century was Henry Ford, the second, arguably, was William J. Levitt.
If the slab deprived householders of the ancient right to a dank, dark basement, in which they could store all the things they would never use anyway, it also jump-started the process for the builder. Who needed basements, anyway? Bill Levitt wondered. The ancient Romans had not built basements, he would point out when the question arose, and who was he, Bill Levitt, to question the Romans?
The job of the union, he insisted, could be reduced to a simple idea: the protection of the slowest and least efficient worker. Because of that, Bill Levitt hired only nonunion workers.
Levitt workers often made twice as much a week as those who had comparable jobs elsewhere, but they did it on terms set by Bill Levitt. Levitt bought appliances from wholly owned Levitt subsidiaries, which meant that he had to pay fewer middlemen.
Certain differences were most definitely not welcomed in Levittown, however. Blacks could not buy in—a Levitt policy that lasted for two decades, long after the nation began legally trying to rid itself of lawful segregation.
The move to the suburbs also temporarily interrupted the progress women had been making before the war in the workplace; for the new suburbs separated women physically from the workplace, leaving them, at least for a while, isolated in a world of other mothers, children, and station wagons.
AS MORE AND MORE people were moving to the suburbs, a need was created for new places and ways in which to shop—and also for new things to buy to fill these thousands of new houses. This was no small phenomenon in itself—shopping and buying were to become major American pastimes as the ripple effect of the new affluence started to be felt throughout the economy.
Ferkauf understood his new customers—and how they were different from prewar customers—for in many ways he was just like them. They were young and hungry to buy, because they owned virtually nothing. They were prosperous but not rich. Above all they were confident in themselves and their futures in a way that Ferkauf, growing up in harder times and poorer neighborhoods, found striking. They did not fear debt, as their parents had.
Harry would answer. Now Gene not only discounted, he was determined to give a bigger discount than anyone had ever given before. It worked. People began to pour into the little store on their lunch hour. Soon he was doing more than $500 a day in business. His father was doing $50. One day in April 1948, Harry came in the door. It was a beautiful day. “Why don’t you take the day off and see a movie?” Harry said. With that, Gene threw the keys on the floor and quit.
The pressure was so enormous that Ferkauf found he couldn’t eat, so he took to drinking milk all day long. He had to wear gloves to protect his hands while carrying packages and untying the string that bound them.
He gave this discount even if his profit was only a dollar or two or even nothing at all. It was the volume that mattered, he knew; if he could establish his image as the top discounter in the region, he would get the volume, and with that came the profits.
(Years later, Ferkauf marveled at the brilliant success of Toys “R” Us, a chain that had drawn from many of his ideas and yet added an innovative twist of its own: self-service—letting the customer pick up the goods and bring them back to the counters themselves.)
The McDonalds had understood an important new trend in American life: Americans were becoming ever more mobile and living farther from their workplaces than ever before. As they commuted considerable distances, they had less time and always seemed to be in a rush. Life in America was surging ahead and one of the main casualties was old-fashioned personal service. Their customers wanted to eat quickly.
They did not realize it until much later—during those years they had little time for such reflection—but they had caught the crest of an important new phenomenon: American life was speeding up significantly; the nature of the American family was changing, and so was the family dinner.
Under the new system, if a customer wanted something different on his hamburger, he faced a major delay in service. The McDonalds believed choices meant delays and chaos. After some experimentation—regular heat lamps had failed—they figured out that they could keep the hamburgers hot with infrared lights. “Our whole concept was based on speed, lower prices, and volume,” Dick McDonald said. In front of the drive-in they erected a sign with a chef whose name was Speedy. MCDONALD’S FAMOUS HAMBURGERS, said the sign, BUY ’M BY THE BAG. And larger than the letters of the name was the price: 15
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But as the McDonalds added milkshakes and french fries, they began to be more successful than ever. By 1950, the teenagers had departed to more tolerant hangouts and were replaced by working-class families, who, thanks to the McDonalds’ low prices, could afford to feed their families restaurant meals for the first time.
The children were seen as important from the beginning, and the word was put out that the staff was to be very nice to kids, because kids came equipped with parents. What the McDonald brothers were doing with food was, as John Love pointed out, what Henry Ford had done to automobile manufacturing (and what Bill Levitt had done with housing): They turned their kitchen into an assembly line.
Much of the food was preassembled; the slack time between the rush hours was used to prepare for the next onslaught. Here was the perfect restaurant for a new America, and it was a smashing success. There were long lines at rush hour, and by 1951, the gross annual receipts were $277,000, some 40 percent higher than in the old premechanized days. By the mid-fifties, the brothers were sharing profits of $100,000 a year, a dazzling figure for men selling items that cost fifteen cents apiece.
If the McDonald brothers knew their limits, then Ray Kroc was a man who had always seen his future as limitless.
He was suspicious of college graduates because he thought college tended to separate businessmen from the very people with whom they would have to deal, and, worse, it tended to make them a little lazy.
He boasted, with good reason, of his ability to anticipate mass taste, and he was rarely wrong (although briefly there was an unfortunate sandwich put out by McDonald’s called the Hulaburger, which Ray Kroc loved and which featured two slices of cheese and a piece of grilled pineapple).
Kroc got in line and began to talk with the customers. He innocently pointed out that he had never waited on line for a hamburger before. The regulars, as he had hoped, gave him unsolicited testimonials: The place was clean, it was fast, it was cheap, and the hamburgers were good. Besides, they said, you did not have to tip. That alone struck home with him.
The McDonalds were glad to see him—he was, after all, something of a celebrity in the business. Mr. Multimixer, they called him. They assured him that this was a typical day. Kroc asked the McDonalds when the rush stopped. “Sometime late tonight when we close,” Dick McDonald said. At first, Ray Kroc began to think how good it would be to expand McDonald’s because of what it could mean to his troubled Multimixer business. And the more he thought about it, the more he was convinced he had seen the future and it was hamburgers.
Soon after his visit, Kroc called Dick McDonald. “Have you found a franchising agent yet?” he asked. “No, Ray, not yet,” McDonald answered. “Well then, what about me?” Kroc said. He took over the franchise end at the age of fifty-two, a diabetic who had already lost his gallbladder. Starting out all over in a new field when most men were starting to think about retirement, he was unbelievably hardworking and ambitious, and his ability to outwork everyone in his office was soon a legend.
Years later, he was asked why he went with the McDonald brothers when he could so easily have stolen their system. Part of it was the name itself: McDonald’s simply sounded right to him. He did not think that a chain named Kroc’s would have the same appeal.
He saw immediately that the prime customers were families, young couples, a little unsure of themselves, often with children in tow. They were comfortable at McDonald’s as they might not have been at a more traditional restaurant; they came, ordered, and ate in the car, and if their children were misbehaving, it wouldn’t annoy the other clients. It was an inexpensive, easy night out for the family.
