America was at the high tide of prosperity by the mid-1960s. The gold year was 1964—three years into the expansion but before Vietnam and rising inflation cast a pall. Scanning the pages of Time Magazine, one finds signs of confidence and optimism everywhere. America’s major steel makers, facing little foreign competition, were announcing ambitious plant expansions. 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.
Corporations were coming out with a raft of exciting new products – the Boeing 727, the IBM System 360, a “peculiar and promising product called Teflon,” and an inexpensive sports car from Ford Motor called the Mustang. The brainchild of 39-year-old executive Lido Anthony Iacocca, the Mustang cost just $2,368. Firms that made electronic gear for the Pentagon had just developed something called “micro-circuits.” Time reported that, “At 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.” The first heart transplant, from a chimpanzee to a human, was performed (it didn’t work). The Wall Street Journal reported that “in a few years” something we now know as the VCR would be on the market. (It was more like 20 years.)
The U.S. was also in a building boom in 1964. 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. On college campuses, new buildings were springing up like mushrooms. 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.
At the top of the best seller list was the late President Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. The sexual revolution was in progress, but Nelson Rockefeller’s recent divorce was still considered a liability to his Presidential ambitions. At the movies Peter Sellers played three separate roles in “Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” which contained such memorable lines as “You can’t fight in here, this is the War Room.” In sports, the NFL Championship—there was not yet a Super Bowl—was won by George Halas’ 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. The baseball season kicked off with Willie Mays (the highest paid player in the sport at $105,000—per season, not per game) hitting seven homers in nine games.
Living standards were rising rapidly. The color TV was becoming a standard luxury; RCA and Zenith could not make them fast enough. J.C. Penney started to sell a $5 shirt. High rollers in New York were buying $100 suits. Chevrolet reported that 75% of its Corvair sales now were the top-of-the-line Monza model. Central air conditioning, once a luxury, was fast becoming commonplace; 25% of new homes had it.
The press still loved President Lyndon Johnson, whom they would be tearing to pieces in a couple of years. Time said his State of the Union message, pressing for a tax cut in the midst of this boom, “had oratorical flourish without sounding strident.” A reporter marveled how in just a single week LBJ “…made 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’s end his right hand was puffed and bleeding.” LBJ’s 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. But Vietnam was still a worry, not a crisis, in 1964.
The apotheosis of 1960s overconfidence was the 1964 New York World’s Fair, built by Robert Moses in Flushing Meadows. The fair was, as Time noted, a “boast” of American prosperity, “a showcase of entertainment mounted by America’s most sophisticated and free-spending entertainers—its captains of industry.” 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. AT&T’s exhibit featured 1400 novel devices called “touch-tone phones” with push buttons instead of dials. General Electric offered a “carousel of Progress,” General Motors built a “futurama,” and floating over the World’s Fair assembly hall was one of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes.
The World’s Fair expressed an expansive, exuberant, free-spending confidence in the future—a confidence shared by Washington, Wall Street, and corporate America alike. 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. 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. Perhaps today’s uber-pessimism is misplaced as well.
