Thomas Hine's new book is called The Great Funk, and if a little luck goes his way, that term will be his second excellent addition to the language. His first came from his breakout book, the 1986 volume Populuxe, a friendly, smart study of populist American design of the '50s and early '60s - motel neon, Chrysler chrome, boomerang-patterned Formica and much more.
The book was a minor and beloved sensation, and its title remains the prevailing label for that kind of design, making its way into several dictionaries and many syllabi. Twenty-one years later, he's come out with a sequel, about the considerably less shimmery period when chrome gave way to fake terra cotta.
Yes, The Great Funk is about the '70s, and if you're one of those people who retains a lot of affection for Hine's earlier work, even the idea of this new one is enough to make you smile. Brown shag carpet and wide lapels deserve the same kind of close and thoughtful look that tailfins and amoeba-shaped tables do.
So does the author, who, reached at home in Philadelphia for an interview, is funny and brainy, pretty much the guy you'd expect from his prose. He settled in Pennsylvania after a Yale education, and spent two decades as the architecture critic at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Unfortunately, he does not, as it turns out, live in a perfect '50s rambler with a pink Formica kitchen and a De Soto in the carport.
"This always disappoints people," he said. "I have artifacts that I acquired after I wrote the book, but if I'm any kind of a collector, I'm an ephemera collector rather than a collector of objects." He did admit when pressed, though, that he has a "dreadful closet" that periodically yields a necessary bit of source material. "I've found myself lending toothpaste ads to Colgate," he said with a big chuckle.
Starting with Populuxe and continuing through several books since, Hine has found a sweet spot where the burgeoning academic field of cultural studies met up with affection for the recent past, and he had the writerly skills to occupy that space in an entertaining way. He pretty much avoids remember-the-fabulous-'50s nostalgia, although if your taste runs that way, you'll find plenty of pleasurable moments in Populuxe, which includes lots of snazzy images from ads for chrome dinette sets and the like.
One memorable passage talks about the era's affection for onion-soup-mix-and-sour-cream dip, that staple of postwar parties: "It is probable that few chip-and-dip eaters considered the snack as a purely visual phenomenon, but with decades of perspective it is easy to see how perfectly it fit into their environment ... Formally, it is a very short jump from the standard potato chip to the great double-curving furniture of Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen. And to this manufactured object was added that extra something that was understood to transform it. Serving plain potato chips to guests was not quite enough. But with the addition of dip, the stopgap snack turned into a party."
This kind of playful perception is Hine's specialty, and in The Great Funk he's turning his sights upon the woolly, cosseting aesthetics of the Carter years. It's an era that evokes one of two reactions, depending on whether you're under the age of 25 (in which case it's kind of cool) or older (in which case you're probably rolling your eyes right about now, as an image of a nubby tweed sofa rears up into your mental space).
Hine has a foot in each camp. "When I was writing the original book," he said, "I had this idea in mind that if there were to be a sequel, it would have to be about the '70s. Because the '70s are the period when what happened in Populuxe was undone - that the assumptions that people were making and the expectations that people had during the Populuxe time proved not to work anymore".
Whereas in the '50s we'd had a lot of faith in technology and consumerism to fix the world, the '70s were when people began to realise that it wasn't going to pan out. Cheap gasoline, big cities that could pay their bills, presidents who told the truth (or at least didn't tape-record evidence of their own lies), faith that America would prevail - many things on which people counted no longer were sure bets. We ended up was a pause to reassess. It was a period when Americans pulled in their horns and tried to figure everyday life out on a new scale that was smaller than they'd come to expect.
Since the tokens of modernism, like crisp stainless-steel corporate architecture, weren't looking so good anymore, a lot of people embraced handicrafts. Rustic stuff like macramé crept into their lives. Big ferny houseplants, too. Weighty "Spanish-style" bedroom sets. And my god, the floors! Variegated shag in every unsubtle earth tone, joined by a plague of ugly tile in ceramic and various polymers, crawled across America. It looks so real, goes an ad for fake slate flooring that Hine unearthed, it's unreal! Yes, it did seem that way. "The message of The Great Funk," he offered, "is probably that the acceptance of failure is a kind of freedom that gives you a chance to experiment and discover what resources you have, who you are and what you are".
Paradoxically enough, that may have made it a better time to be alive. "One of the points of Populuxe," noted Hine, "was that it was written at a moment when there was an attempt to define that period as normal, that we needed to get back to that period. And one of the points of Populuxe was that it wasn't normal, it was extraordinary. Very rarely is there such a confluence of events of so much prosperity - so much of the world had been largely incapacitated by World War II for such a long time that America had the world to itself, and that's not a situation that could be expected to continue". The US economy was artificially inflated by the release of wartime savings, and then by immense amounts of Cold War defense spending. Widespread liberation (of women, of gays, even of religious beliefs) was coming, with all the necessary but messy cultural realignment they would entail.
Hine speaks for a lot of people, even conservative people, when I asked him whether he thinks we all had it better before. "Am I glad that it got undone? The answer is, pretty much. I wouldn't want to live in a Populuxe world. Now the choices we have about how to live our lives are just much greater. We're now living in more normal times."
In fact, it's not an explicit thesis of either book, but there's a political element lurking just beneath the surface of all this. (Hine said that although he didn't intend to be ideological, "I made a conscious decision to let it emerge.") Much of the '70s era is about individualism. Hippie culture got as mainstream as it ever got; environmentalism encouraged people to pull themselves off the grid and begin mining the past for discarded good ideas. The best pop music developments of the age - roots rock, followed by punk - were both do-it-yourself movements. Home-design magazines had not yet become the showcases for the megarich and their decorators that most have become today - they were largely about accessible tips for putting together your own rooms.
Most of all, it was an era in which, although faith in the high-tech future was fading, faith in the potential of social progress and self-improvement was on the rise. As people gave up on mass culture, they decided to go it alone, and they either turned leftward or rightward along the way. "I'm not the only one to ever say this," Hine noted, "but, I mean, it's sometimes hard to distinguish between people who went back to the land and built domes out of old cars, and the people who went back to the land and set up fortresses".
That's our country today, split in half and barely budging on either side. The legacy of the Great Funk isn't ugly rugs and fat lapels; it's George W Bush. No wonder it unnerves a lot of people.
