{"id":183,"date":"2012-10-04T18:26:38","date_gmt":"2012-10-04T18:26:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/?p=183"},"modified":"2012-10-05T12:55:56","modified_gmt":"2012-10-05T12:55:56","slug":"the-pulse-of-prosperity-1964","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/?p=183","title":{"rendered":"The Pulse of Prosperity: 1964"},"content":{"rendered":"

America was at the high tide of prosperity by the mid-1960s.\u00a0 The gold year was 1964\u2014three years into the expansion but before Vietnam and rising inflation cast a pall.\u00a0 Scanning the pages of Time<\/strong> Magazine<\/strong>, one finds signs of confidence and optimism everywhere.\u00a0 America\u2019s major steel makers, facing little foreign competition, were announcing ambitious plant expansions.\u00a0 Detroit enjoyed record auto sales and controlled all but 5% of the U.S. auto market; Chrysler and GM were building major new assembly plants.<\/p>\n

Corporations were coming out with a raft of exciting new products \u2013 the Boeing 727, the IBM System 360, a \u201cpeculiar and promising product called Teflon,\u201d and an inexpensive sports car from Ford Motor called the Mustang.\u00a0 The brainchild of 39-year-old executive Lido Anthony Iacocca, the Mustang cost just $2,368.\u00a0 Firms that made electronic gear for the Pentagon had just developed something called \u201cmicro-circuits.\u201d\u00a0 Time<\/strong> reported that, \u201cAt Texas Instruments, which shares leadership in the micro-circuitry field with Motorola and Fairchild Camera, engineers have developed a piece of silicon the size of a split pea into which they have fused the equivalent of 38 transistors, five capacitors and 26 resistors.\u201d\u00a0 The first heart transplant, from a chimpanzee to a human, was performed (it didn\u2019t work).\u00a0 The Wall Street Journal<\/strong> reported that \u201cin a few years\u201d something we now know as the VCR would be on the market.\u00a0 (It was more like 20 years.)<\/p>\n

The U.S. was also in a building boom in 1964.\u00a0 The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced plans to build not one but two towers that would be the tallest buildings in the world.\u00a0 On college campuses, new buildings were springing up like mushrooms.\u00a0 The Smithsonian Institution built a huge new Museum of History & Technology while the Museum of Modern Art built a new wing and enlarged sculpture garden that doubled the number of works of art on exhibit.<\/p>\n

At the top of the best seller list was the late President Kennedy\u2019s Profiles in Courage<\/strong>.\u00a0 The sexual revolution was in progress, but Nelson Rockefeller\u2019s recent divorce was still considered a liability to his Presidential ambitions.\u00a0 At the movies Peter Sellers played three separate roles in \u201cDr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,\u201d which contained such memorable lines as \u201cYou can\u2019t fight in here, this is the War Room.\u201d\u00a0 In sports, the NFL Championship\u2014there was not yet a Super Bowl\u2014was won by George Halas\u2019 tough but colorless Chicago Bears, who shut down the flashy offense of the New York Giants, spearheaded by quarterback Y.A. Tittle and his three ace receivers Del Shofner, Frank Gifford, and Aaron Thomas.\u00a0 The baseball season kicked off with Willie Mays (the highest paid player in the sport at $105,000\u2014per season, not per game) hitting seven homers in nine games.<\/p>\n

Living standards were rising rapidly.\u00a0 The color TV was becoming a standard luxury; RCA and Zenith could not make them fast enough.\u00a0 J.C. Penney started to sell a $5 shirt.\u00a0 High rollers in New York were buying $100 suits.\u00a0 Chevrolet reported that 75% of its Corvair sales now were the top-of-the-line Monza model.\u00a0 Central air conditioning, once a luxury, was fast becoming commonplace; 25% of new homes had it.<\/p>\n

The press still loved President Lyndon Johnson, whom they would be tearing to pieces in a couple of years.\u00a0 Time<\/strong> said his State of the Union message, pressing for a tax cut in the midst of this boom, \u201chad oratorical flourish without sounding strident.\u201d\u00a0 A reporter marveled how in just a single week LBJ \u201c\u2026made nearly two dozen speeches, traveled 2,983 miles, held three press conferences, appeared on national television three times, was seen in person by almost a quarter of a million people, [and] shook so many hands that by week\u2019s end his right hand was puffed and bleeding.\u201d\u00a0 LBJ\u2019s boundless energy would soon land his presidency hip-deep in the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta, dodging the bullets of both the Vietcong and the corrupt, ineffectual South Vietnamese forces.\u00a0 But Vietnam was still a worry, not a crisis, in 1964.<\/p>\n

The apotheosis of 1960s overconfidence was the 1964 New York World\u2019s Fair, built by Robert Moses in Flushing Meadows.\u00a0 The fair was, as Time<\/strong> noted, a \u201cboast\u201d of American prosperity, \u201ca showcase of entertainment mounted by America\u2019s most sophisticated and free-spending entertainers\u2014its captains of industry.\u201d\u00a0 U.S. Steel donated a giant stainless steel globe called the Unisphere, which you can still admire while stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway.\u00a0 AT&T\u2019s exhibit featured 1400 novel devices called \u201ctouch-tone phones\u201d with push buttons instead of dials.\u00a0 General Electric offered a \u201ccarousel of Progress,\u201d General Motors built a \u201cfuturama,\u201d and floating over the World\u2019s Fair assembly hall was one of Buckminster Fuller\u2019s geodesic domes.<\/p>\n

The World\u2019s Fair expressed an expansive, exuberant, free-spending confidence in the future\u2014a confidence shared by Washington, Wall Street, and corporate America alike.\u00a0 It was diametrically opposed to the fretful, fearful spirit of 2012, when Europe is foundering, China is slowing, the Mideast is seething, the U.S. economy is stuck in first gear, Washington is paralyzed by partisanship, and investors feel trapped between a fiscal cliff and a mountain of Federal debt.\u00a0 But extreme confidence was not justified in 1964; stock prices rose only 40% over the next eight years and then went nowhere from 1972 to 1982.\u00a0 Perhaps today\u2019s uber-pessimism is misplaced as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

America was at the high tide of prosperity by the mid-1960s.\u00a0 The gold year was 1964\u2014three years into the expansion but before Vietnam and rising inflation cast a pall.\u00a0 Scanning the pages of Time Magazine, one finds signs of confidence … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[27,28],"class_list":["post-183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-1960s","tag-prosperity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=183"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":188,"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183\/revisions\/188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wallstreetandkstreet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}