Tailfins, Fifty Years After

    The automobile tail fin ended with the decade of the 1950's.  In no model year were fins larger than that of 1959. The soaring tailfins of the 1959 models marked the end of an exuberant decade with an exclamation point. 
    Tailfins were built on the metaphor of driving as flying and many of them were attached to vehicles that put more emphasis on a floating, cloud like ride than on handling or braking.
 
“Tailfins embodied a feeling of prosperity and jet-age excitement,” said Jeffrey Leestma, president of the Automotive Hall of Fame.  “General Motors and Chrysler became involved in a game of one-upmanship in fins,” Mr. Leestma said. “And they grew to a huge extent by 1959. By 1963 or so they were completely gone.”

The cars set into the ground at the Cadillac Ranch near Amarillo, Tex., chart the growth of the fins that sprouted on ’48 Cadillacs. Harley Earl, the legendary G.M. designer, was inspired by the sight of a twin-tail P-38 fighter plane during World War II. It was a symbolic moment: a spark of inspiration passed from one of America’s greatest practical designers, Kelly Johnson of Lockheed, to Earl, the man who brought Hollywood glitz to Detroit.

Tailfins gave customers an "extra receipt for their money in the form of a visible prestige marking,” Earl said. Fins moved down the G.M. line from Cadillac to the iconic 1957 Chevrolet. But by the late ’50s G.M. had made plans to trim its fins even as Virgil Exner, the top Chrysler designer, pushed them to new heights with his Forward Look.

A G.M. designer largely responsible for the flamboyant ’59 Cadillac, Chuck Jordan, recalled how Chrysler’s 1957 cars influenced the G.M. models that followed. In interviews, he has recalled driving to a Chrysler factory where he stared at rows of big-finned Plymouths.

In a 2006 interview with Motor Trend, he said: “I’m looking through the fence and all I could see were fins, fins, fins. And I thought, ‘Wow!’”

Mr. Jordan and other young designers warned Earl that the company was about to be outfinned, and G.M.’s planned 1959 designs were tabled in favor of new ones — with bigger fins.

Referring to the iconic Cadillac, he said: “The 1959 was like letting a tiger out of the cage — saying, ‘go!’ Then we got sobriety.”

Even station wagons grew fins, as did car-truck combinations like the Ford Ranchero and Chevrolet El Camino. Compact cars like the Rambler had fins, too. Soon, fins spread overseas. Mercedes-Benz got them, as did the Amphicar that doubled as a boat. In the Soviet Union, ZILs and Moskviches were not immune to the trend.

Fins evolved: the upright planes of the ’57 Chevy became flatter, wider and more horizontal by ’59, suggesting the wings of a dragon.

Most of the fins of 1959 were accented with rocketlike taillights, their conical red lenses suggested frozen thrust. The Cadillac had a pair of thruster lamps on each fin; the De Soto had three apiece.

The shapes of the fins were echoed in drive-ins, motels, and Las Vegas casinos. Clothing and even eye wear echoed the shape of fins — eyeglasses unveiled at a British motor show were designed to match the rear end of a 1959 Chevrolet.

Fins were seen as a symbol of the prosperity in the 1950s. A Cadillac was displayed in 1959 at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, the trade show where Richard Nixon met Nikita Khrushchev in the famous kitchen debate. Khrushchev pointed to the tailfin, according to some accounts, and asked: “What does that do?” But before long, even Soviet Zils had fins, along with Volvos and by 1961, Mercedes-Benz.

The shapes of the fins were echoed in drive-ins, motels, and Las Vegas casinos. Clothing and even eye wear echoed the shape of fins — eyeglasses unveiled at a British motor show were designed to match the rear end of a 1959 Chevrolet.

Virgil Exner of Chrysler was the King of the Fin. His extreme concept cars like the Dodge Dart were only slightly toned down in production cars, from the Plymouth Fury — think Stephen King’s “Christine” — to top of the line Imperials, with sight ring accent lights. The shapes were as extreme as advertising lines: “This baby can flick its tail at anything on the road!”

While current pop culture cartoons the decade of the fin as a happy time of doo-wop and “Grease,” at the time, tailfins were seen more darkly. Mike Wallace, interviewing Eleanor Roosevelt for CBS, worried that the country’s main preoccupations seemed to be “bigger and better tailfins on automobiles, westerns on television and sex-drenched movies.”


The poet Robert Lowell was heir to a New England literary tradition that included Herman Melville, a connoisseur of the metaphor and the metaphysics of finned creatures. In “For the Union Dead” in 1960, Lowell saw something sinister, even sinful, in the tailfin:

““....Everywhere,

giant finned cars nose forward like fish;

a savage servility

slides by on grease.”


Tail fins grew more like rockets than airplanes through the decade.   They suggested space travel, as seen in Life or Collier's magazine visions of the future, with text by Werhner von Braun and paintings by Chesley Bonestell. But in the vacuum of space, it turned out, fins were unnecessary. When astronauts landed on the moon, a decade after the fin reached its apogee, it was not in a finned craft, settling down on thruster power, but in a stubby commuter vehicle. A Volkswagen advertisement juxtaposed the lunar landing module with the line: “It’s ugly but it gets you there.”

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The cars set into the ground at the Cadillac Ranch near Amarillo, Tex., chart the growth of the fins that sprouted on ’48 Cadillacs. Harley Earl, the legendary G.M. designer, was inspired by the sight of a twin-tail P-38 fighter plane during World War II.

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