This PR shot for a ’58 Imperial caught me a bit off-guard. So…nationalistic. One could imagine it to be a Soviet limo, but for the woman’s dress and the big American eagle. It seems heavy handed, to say the least. But then this was 1958, and America was still recovering from the shock of Sputnik, Russia’s bold first space shot in 1957.
Or am I reading too much into it?
This one’s toned down somewhat.
We have a CC on a 1959 Imperial here, but no ’58. Even more shocking is that we’ve never covered the all-new 1957 Imperial, a true milestone car in so many ways. It’s one of our few major gaps in coverage of post-war cars.
Loving all these “other” brand cars. I’ve been an attendee at car shows since the 1980s and the shows seem to focus on everyone’s favorites. Lots of brand and models that have been ignored over the years in my part of the country.
Indeed…I would pass up all the Tri-Five Chevrolets and 1969 Camaros, especially the fake Z/28s, to see one of these Imperials at a car show.
It’s similar to the Eagle on the side of the Accord wagon in the previous post (in that it’s gold, an Eagle, and in relation to a car).
I think the red background is what’s the most heavy-handed thing here. The lower image is basically the same save for the background and isn’t nearly as…whatever it is.
Sixty years earlier, the US defeated Spain and took control over the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba and went into meltdown politically. Half the US voting population was adamantly anti-imperialist, and the other half, didn’t have an opinion. So, by 1900, we passed the Platt Amendment publicly stating that the US will never govern Cuba, and we will release the Philippines in due time. We did that. We voted out any semblance of imperialism.
So – how could an Imperial represent America sixty years later? We fought Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, and now Chrysler is selling us an Imperial? Gee, wonder why these cars never really caught on? At least Studebaker had the common sense to drop the Dictator name when Hitler showed up.
So – I don’t see Cold War. This brand had been wasting oxygen since its launch thirty years earlier and needed to get ask-canned a generation earlier. As to the eagle, I see an Imperial eagle in tacky gold.
This car’s advertising pre-dates Sputnik, by the way. We can see the evolution of this ad campaign even before 1957. Chrysler had a group of ad guys sell it some malarkey and pocket the loot by the time the brand bombs.
An Imperial automobile represents wealth and capitalism and that’s why it was manufactured and marketed to rich people since 1926. Given your argument I suppose Imperial Margerine introduced Imperialism to American consumers at the dinner table. Maybe the name Cadillac makes more sense because….um, it means nothing? The 1957 model Imperial was the best-selling in it’s entire history. No need to slam a well-engineered and stylish car because you don’t like its name.
Clearly that is not my wedding. Putting a Mercury Topaz in there would not have had the same effect…
We took the subway.
Nine year old ‘86 Chevy Celebrity station wagon for ours. Splendiforous in white with wood grain, red velour and powered by the venerable Iron Duke. 😉
I think the wood grain would have gone well with the giant gold eagle 🙂
’68 Cadillac Coupe de Ville for me in 1994. The CdV was bought new by my dad 26 years earlier. Some critter had gotten under hood and ate some wires, so windows and automatic climate control didn’t work. Took work Taurus on honeymoon. For reception a month later we arrived in a 1978 Crown Firecoach with Los Angeles City F.D. markings on it that belonged to a friend. Great memories.
That Crown sounds awesome. We had an on duty fire engine come to our wedding for pictures, but I would rather have the Crown.
Vauxhall Viva HA at mine.
XE Falcon at mine, borrowed from a neighbour. Don’t have a shot of the whole car, as the photographer focused on the bride, but it was a yellowy-orange with red stripes – definitely no Imperial!
We were lucky…one of my wife’s good friends from high school inherited a 1950 Lincoln that he drove us around in after our wedding.
What a terrific picture! And a cool car – as a little kid I was always fascinated by the suicide doors on a comparable old Lincoln driven by a high schooler in my neighborhood. IIRC they were dead cheap on the used car market within a few years due to the quickly outdated styling.
Thanks! Our wedding photographer actually took this one way back in 1974!
This photo was shown in my previous post:
https://www.curbsideclassic.com/blog/vintage-ads-and-brochures/life-magazine-part-2-the-mopar-edition/
If you’re going to out-Cadillac Cadillac, you’ve got to go all out! Maybe I can do a write-up on a ’57 Imperial. Got to find one first! The 4-door hardtop I remember sticking out of a garage in Morris Plains, NJ in the 1980s isn’t there anymore!
I doubt the Imperial marquee had political overtones. More likely was meant strictly as a prestige word. “The car of Emperors”. The red background was about as blatantly “Commie” as you could get in 58 without having a hammer and sickle, but again, probably coincidence.
So do I. It would seem that looking at a prouder time in American history through the eyes of today’s raucous Cancel Culture is becoming commonplace…and also tiresome.
A proud time indeed; it was the birth of Cancel Culture thanks to Joseph McCarthy.
Thank you, I was about to point this out. The “proud” segment of society was also rather busy trying to cancel incorrect thoughts like feminism and sexual orientation. I’m also quite curious about what he means by “prouder time” when a substantial portion of the citizenry was desperately pushing the Civil Rights Act just to make a dent in the inequity.
I’m far too young to be nostalgic for the 1950s, but I get the strong impression that the strength of the nostalgia is going to depend on what demographic one happened to be born into.
It is a very useful experience for anyone to be a member of a visible minority at some time in their life.
President Eisenhower and the GOP passed the 1957 Civil Rights bill over the strategic opposition of Southern Democrats holding key chairman positions in the Senate and House. It was overwhelmingly supported by Eisenhower’s party and only faced opposition with Democrats outside the North.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1957
Democrats were able to prevent a number of the provisions with the Bill from taking effect until years later. Lyndon Johnson, the Senate Majority Leader, was key to prevent the GOP bill from dividing the Democrats across the US.
As president, Johnson is credited for passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, however it was the GOP Eisenhower bill in 1957 which established the structure of the current Federal system regarding desegregation, the establishment of offices, and the funding for these new agencies.
A final note – Joseph McCarthy was effectively cancelled by President Eisenhower’s GOP by 1954 when the Senator started targeting his administration. McCarthy lost reelection and disappeared, along with McCarthyism.
VM: You’ve conveniently left out the crucial fact that the parties were very different back then, almost reversed. The Southern Democrats were conservative and virulently anti-Civil Rights. The Republicans, still known as the party of Lincoln, was mostly centric and had a significant liberal wing.
Back then, both parties covered the spectrum from left to right. That’s very different than now.
And note that LBJ’s signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was precisely the key moment when everything began to shift. The Southern Democrats never forgave hi for that, and they bailed and joined the Republicans. That was the crux of Nixon’s historic “Southern Strategy”, to blatantly appeal to Southerners who had been Democrats and were angry about LBJ’s passage of the ’64 Civil Rights Act. That was how he won in 1968. Every Republican president since has played up on that endlessly simmering resentment.
And the rest is modern history.
I didn’t mention political party, Vanilla, and Eisenhower’s admirable actions are irrelevant to your attempt to inject present-day partisan politics here because he would have been censured and forced out by the current GOP for insufficient fealty to one man.
But yes, the Dixiecrat misdirection. Again. It’s a favorite fallacy for those attempting to avoid dealing with the present condition of their political party–who is currently running well over a hundred bills at the state legislature level to limit voting access in ways that suppress Democrat-leaning minorities. Voter turnout was bad for them in 2020, if you can’t win them over…make sure they can’t get to the polls.
Apologies for swerving further into the politics we try to avoid here to maintain civility, but that had to be addressed. I’ll shut me big mouth now.
“A final note – Joseph McCarthy was effectively cancelled by President Eisenhower’s GOP by 1954 when the Senator started targeting his administration. McCarthy lost reelection and disappeared, along with McCarthyism.”
This is not what happened. McCarthy did not lose re-election. He was re-elected to the Senate in 1952 and died in office at age 48 from alcoholism in 1957. And McCarthy specifically targeted the US Army in 1954 because he wanted favors for his protégé G. David Schine. He essentially self-destructed on camera during the Army-McCarthy hearings that year. Eisenhower worked behind the scenes with Army leadership to choreograph a pathway to entrap McCarthy into losing his credibility before a national TV audience and the drunken bully McCarthy fell right into it. That gave the Senate the power to censure him and the media to ignore him.
The national leadership of the GOP did very little to combat McCarthy as they were much too afraid of his base. This was true of many Democrats as well; JFK refused to vote for his censure because McCarthy was very popular among Irish Catholic Democrats in Massachussets, was a friend of the family, and received major financial support from Joseph Kennedy, Sr. One could argue that McCarthy’s political base never disappeared but became more powerful over time, culminating in electoral triumph after triumph in recent years. One of McCarthyism’s chief architects was Roy Cohn and he reached beyond the grave to provide a strategic plan for Trump to win in 2016. Watch Matt Tyrnauer’s excellent documentary “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” for that story. And read Larry Tye’s superb biography of Joe McCarthy to understand what really happened.
An interesting thread, if perhaps on the wrong website, my takeaway after reading it is that many/most of the people that vote a particular way because their daddy and their grandpappy etc did the same all the back to Lincoln’s time are now voting for the exact inverse of what all that was about and stood for in the first place. This explains some things to me as I had been wondering how the “Party of Lincoln” could be the same one currently trying to take away minorities’ (as well as anyone else not looking just like party leadership’s) rights all over the place as another commenter pointed out. I can see it in some of my kids’ friends that aren’t old enough to vote yet still (already) partake of a particular view but can’t articulate it whatsoever when asked simple questions which is depressing, especially when the subject is one of several that would directly threaten them.
And that whenever someone starts down one lane of the political thread, the vast majority of statements are either completely off base, total misinformation, skip over critical facts that changes the perspective 180 degrees, or contains flat out wrong and easily checked and refuted statements such as if the subject of the discussion was re-elected or not. I suppose it helps to check readily available sources instead of just parroting some parrot-head on TV. Fake news, indeed.
This whole thread needs to be tossed, sorry. Or, actually, leave it up for posterity I guess. It’s embarrassing though.
Have you ever read Robert Caro?
A Democrat and the authoritative biographer of LBJ
no modern President was more racist than LBJ and his plan for the Great Society was a plan that Patrick Moynihan predicted would destroy the Black family yet it was a mere political calculation for LBJ
Caro revealed that in his own life – to the end – LBJ had Black men in his employ who he refused to call by their Christian names using a pejorative term that denied their manhood and when asked why he did that he answer was sickening
“his”
unfortunately LBJ owned Imperials through thr fin era.
FWIW, I think Michael Corleone rode around in the back of one of these.
You’re right, Rudiger. It’s briefly seen in the Lake Tahoe winter shots. (I cheated, of course; I found it on the Internet Movie Car Database.)
Its a ’58, 57-58 both used 58 grille, but 57 used 57 bumpers and 300 hubcps, 58 used 58 items
So maybe having the Imperial eagle (and car) in front of the red background is kind of like saying “Up yours, Russia!?
This advertising mimics the Cadillac advertising of the day. The Cadillac car was displayed in an elegant setting below a close up picture of jewelry, often in V-shape.
This Imperial advertising follows the Cadillac layout very closely, with only a golden bird replacing the jewelry. I recall Imperial often used a stylized bird in their ornamentation. I don’t think it’s cold War posturing, it’s more trying to keep up with Cadillac.
That is my thought. It looks as though Chrysler was trying to “out Cadillac” the “Standard of the World.” The overall look and feel of these shots is similar to Cadillac ads from that time.
With a chassis tuned for better handling, and its superior TorqueFlite transmission, the Imperial was more of a “driver’s” car than the Cadillac. Too bad Chrysler didn’t figure out a way to highlight those advantages, which would have made more of an impression than this imitative approach.
A little national pride is a good thing, if you’re surrounded by a cesspool of teeth grinding enemies. Chauvinist extremism, on the other hand, is not. Take the best, discard the worst. Don’t reject excellent culture as “cultural appropriation”. Everybody jump, everybody use it. You are reading a tad too much into the era I grew up in. The Imperial was truly a desirable object of cultural appropriation by those who could afford it. And we were, maybe, unbeknownst to the average clown, ugly, warlike, but at the same time, free, and charitable Americans.
This seems to be a direct appeal to government officials, not to ordinary wealthy folks. That’s why it feels Soviet-ish. It wouldn’t have worked. Caddy owned the government market in ’58, simply because Caddy still made limos in quantity and the other two luxury brands didn’t.
Caddy owned the luxury-car market overall. I remember discussing this with the owner of a ’59 Imperial at a show, he named the car “Miss Drysdale” because it was sold new in Beverly Hills, I pointed out that meant there was a nonzero chance the first owner was the star, producer or director of a show with Mopar sponsorship.
You’re referring to the Beverly Hillbillies, correct?
Yep – that show was chock full of Chrysler vehicles, save for Jed Clampett’s 1921 Oldsmobile.
Actually, it was Cousin Pearl’s truck. “Jethro could drive you, out(to Californy)in my truck…”
The 1958 Rambler Ambassador also had a rather “nationalistic” emblem:
I don’t see overtly nationalistic overtones. It does seem that the ad is imitating the Cadillac jewelry spread type advertisements. The eagle has been the Imperial trademark for many years prior to this. Cars at this price point were represented to be purchased by the American elite. While many of the elite drove these type of cars, most were purchased by less prosperous Americans.
In the Car and Driver test of the ’78 Coupe de Ville (CC 9/23/2015) the author wrote that earlier Cadillac advertisements were more of an assessment of the buyer’s qualifications, not anything that would tell you about the product, and help in selecting an automobile. In the 1950’s the obvious lavish lifestyle of High Society Balls and activities were featured. Later, in the 1960’s besides the world of Big Business, they featured the leisure life of Country and Beach homes. The obvious message is that cars of this nature are a proper and comfortable fit in this lifestyle.
I wouldn’t know about that, but all this was a fabrication of the advertising agency anyway. I grew up in Oakland surrounded by Cadillacs of all kinds, and I grew to love them myself. The drivers of those cars were never represented in any ads that I saw.
I have never before thought about the genesis of the eagle used as an insignia on the Imperial. It was not on the early versions and I don’t think it showed up until the Virgil Exner era.
This would be an interesting dive if I had the time. A crown seemed to be the long-running insignia up through the early 50s. If I had to guess, this would have been inspired by insignias of the Roman Empire. A good choice, I suppose, as both the Roman Empire and the Imperial brand ended about the same way. Sic transit gloria mundi.
look at thre hood ornamebt on the 53-54 Imps a diving eagle, was a crown beforfte
Love those whitewall tires.
Back then if you didn’t have them on your car you were poor, as evidenced by the imports.
I’m not sure that lead-handed nationalism could be assumed to be the exclusive province of the Soviet Union only (and indeed, the scary-scale eagle here seems uncomfortably close to the Reichsadler towering over old Adolph himself at Nuremburg), but this pic IS a bit startling. The golden eagle has landed, backed by an implication of overwhelming rivers of blood – or in truth, rivers of squeaky red vinyl. Buy or die, maybe? Most unclear.
Oh well, at least it’s not the ’70’s.
The eagle would be extinct, and humans would all be wearing the red vinyl.
The eagle was always featured as part of the Imperial’s advertising, emblems, and even interior upholstery. M y1956 Imperial sedan, a one-off European example assembled by Facel Metallon in Paris for the Paris auto show, had a silk brocade interior with embroidered eagles. I’ve had dozens of Imperials, 1950 – 1967, and I can’t think of a single one that didn’t have an eagle on it somewhere.