Early in 1950, the London Economist's Geoffrey Crowther, a footloose editor with a nose for news, made his annual inspection trip of U.S. industry. "I came here expecting to see a boom," he said, "but nothing I had read prepared me for this. The very air smells of boom. For the firsttime, the U.S. is beginning to smell like 1929 again."
There was certainly a lot of 1929's heady, champagne flavor about the U.S. in 1950, right down to the biggest bull market in 20 years. Gold-Digger Lorelei Lee was a reigning musical-comedy queen; F. Scott Fitzgerald had not only been enthusiastically revived, but was the hero of a novel that led the bestseller lists. Nightclubs were jammed, theater tickets occasionally went for $50 apiece, and useless luxuries—men's garters trimmed in 14-carat gold, mink scarves for three-year-olds, diamond-studded car keys—were salable items again. In an offhand manner, a Houston oilman sent a new Cadillac to Europe to have a $5,000 custom body put on its chassis, with instructions to "throw the old body away."
But these were only the wasteful surface symptoms of a boom which had a diamond-hard foundation based on production and efficiency. The U.S. had worked so hard, produced so much and expanded so fast in 1950 that it had met its most serious challenge: the creation of a strong and flexible economy thoroughly capable of switching over to full-scale rearmament. In the fight against Communist slavery, this was a more important fact than the intervention in Korea or the Brussels conference.
In 1950, by pouring out the greatest abundance of goods in history, the U.S. fashioned gigantic new standards to measure its new industrial might:
¶ The automakers, who had scarcely expected to match 1949-8 record-smashing production of 6,500,000 trucks and cars, rolled out about 8,000,000 units, at a rate of 15 a minute—about five times more than the rest of the world combined.
¶ In the greatest housing boom in history, builders started 2½ new houses a minute. The 1,360,000 begun during the year (v. 1,020,000 in 1949) were enough to house a population as big as Chicago's.
¶ All year long, in the sky over Pittsburgh, Youngstown and a dozen other steel towns, there was a pillar of smoke by day and the glow of fires by night, as the mills worked at capacity. They ladled out 97 million tons of the metal, almost 10 million more than in the peak year of World War II, and twice as much as all the steel mills in the rest of the world.
¶ The U.S. productive machine popped out more than 7,000,000 television sets, almost triple 1949; 7,212,000 electric irons, 4,525,000 electric toasters, 4,212,000 washing machines, 1,830,000 ranges, 890,000 home freezers, more than 1,000,000 Hopalong Cassidy suits, and enough nylon stockings to give every woman in the U.S. eleven pairs.