Tale of the tail fins defines 1950s car culture

It’s hard to identify cars by their body shapes any more. Chrysler, Ford and General Motors (GM) products get muddled up with the Toyotas, Nissans, Subarus, Hondas and Hyundais. To my eyes, they all look about the same – especially the silver ones. Distinguishing the model year is next to impossible, even for brainiacs.

Times have changed, dagnabbit. I’ll wager that between 1955 and 1959, during the era that Dinah Shore was singing about Chevrolets, that just about everyone across the U.S.A. could pinpoint the car make, model and year of just about every automobile that cruised along the dirt roads and paved main streets of America.

The cars’ distinctive tail fins were signs of the times. GM’s Cadillac line probably had the biggest and best fins, with the grand prize winner being the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz convertible. It clearly out-finned the field, according to Chris Riley, a writer at AutoWise, a consumer-focused website, based in Rogers, Ark.

Riley consulted Jeff Leestma, an automotive design historian. “That’s as large as the fins ever got, on that ‘59 Caddy,” Leetsma said. “They used a lot of chrome and taillamp pieces that visually reflected the jet age. You would think the car was getting ready to fly away.”

Riley commented that the 1959 Eldorado’s “dual-quad tail lights” mounted on the fins made the vehicle “look like an afterburner lifting a jet off the ground.”

Not everyone loved the look. Tony Davis of Motor News wrote that consumer advocate Ralph Nader once said: “The Caddy fin bore an uncanny resemblance to the tail of the stegosaurus, a dinosaur that had two sharp rearward-projecting horns on each side of the tail.”

Rebeka Knott, a writer with the Groovy History website, said that the popularity of the American automobile exploded in the post-World War II economy. The basic design of automobiles in the early 1950s, however, was rather boring. The prevailing style was termed “fastback,” where the car sloped from its roof to its rear bumper. It looked all right on coupes, but not on sedans.

Car buyers in the mid-1950s wanted their rides to have some zip, pep, pizazz and muscle, according to Knott. “They wanted their cars dripping with chrome – the flashier, the better.”

Jordan Grant of the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., said the Cadillac tail fins evolved from the work of GM designer, Franklin Quick Hershey, who pioneered the installation of modest tail fin bumps on the 1948 Cadillacs.

Kevin Ransom of Autoblog, an automotive news and car shopping website based in Birmingham, Mich., defined the tail-fin trend as “jet age one-upmanship, as GM and Chrysler locked themselves into an ‘arms race’ of sorts to see who could bring the biggest, most dashing, most attention-getting tail fins to market.”

Grant stated: “Tail fins were a style with a purpose, and the purpose was simple: sell more cars. In order to keep their financial engines running, car makers had to convince customers to upgrade their vehicles year after year, even if the cars in their driveways were still running fine.”

“The simplest way to push consumers toward new cars was the time-tested practice of ‘planned obsolescence’ – creating products that rapidly became obsolete. Every year, auto manufacturers released a new annual model that differed very little mechanically from the previous generation but did showcase a dramatically different style,” Grant said. “The clearest change year to year was the size and shape of the tail fins on each model.” Nobody did it better than Cadillac.

Chrysler’s tail fin specialist was Virgil Exner. He did some of his finest work on DeSoto models. Riley’s favorite fin design is found on the 1959 DeSoto. Each fin was stacked with three tail lights that “looked like they belonged on a jet.”

By the end of the decade, Chevrolet decided to take the whole fin experience in a different direction with the fins on its Impala model, Riley commented. Instead of the straight, pointed fins, the Impala featured horizontal “gull-wing” or “bat-wing” fins that were paired with “cat-eye” taillights.

“These were voluptuous fins that invoked drama and excitement,” Riley remarked. “They made the 1959 Chevy one of the most easily recognized cars of the entire decade.”