Image: Library of Congress
More In This Article
Drivers may feel spooked by seeing the first self-driving cars appear in coming years. But the new era could prove far less disruptive and bloody than the automobile's 20th-century battle to push pedestrians off U.S. streets.
The change in American public opinion from thinking of cars as wildly dangerous vehicles to having a "love affair with the automobile" was no accident. Instead, it reflected a serious push by the car industry to change people's psychology. Automobiles had to win the battle for hearts and minds before they could take over streets where people had once swarmed.
"That's not the natural order of things; that's the result of a real struggle," said Peter Norton, a historian of technology at the University of Virginia. "That struggle may have analogies with what we're facing in the future with autonomous vehicles."
One key difference between the two eras of transition may prove to be a huge blessing — the rise of self-driving cars could boost road safety and eliminate thousands of unnecessary motorist deaths in the U.S. each year. That futuristic scenario stands in contrast to the relatively bloody rise of cars in the early 20th century.
A bloody beginning
American hearts and minds did not change easily when cars first appeared. Pedestrians crowded the streets of U.S. cities and towns at the start of the 20th century, walking alongside horse-drawn wagons, carriages and trolleys. Contrary to modern sensibilities, parents thought it was perfectly normal for their kids to play in the streets.
"If a pedestrian strode into a street and maybe a wagon wheel ran over their foot, the law would be on their side," Norton told InnovationNewsDaily. "Judges would say pedestrians belonged there, and that if you're operating a heavy dangerous vehicle, it's your fault."
Car accidents led to injuries and deaths among pedestrians and a strong public backlash against automobiles, Norton said. He found newspapers of the time commonly ran cartoons showing the grim reaper at the wheel of a car running over children — part of his research for the book "Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City" (MIT Press, 2008).
People even pushed for a 1923 law requiring all cars in Cincinnati to have a mechanism limiting their speed to no higher than 25 mph, but car makers gathered enough support to defeat it.
America's affair with the automobile
The automobile industry eventually began waging a psychological campaign to get pedestrians out of the streets. First, it invented the term "jaywalking" (a reference to the idea of jaybirds as loud idiots) to make fun of pedestrians walking in the street as being stuck in the past.
Second, schools helped train new generations of children to avoid the streets when the American Automobile Association (AAA) became the top supplier of safety curriculum for U.S. schools in the 1920s, Norton explained. The AAA also spread the idea of school safety patrols to help keep kids out of the street.
The popular phrase "America's love affair with the automobile" eventually came along in a TV show called "Merrily We Roll Along" as part of the DuPont Series of the Week in 1961 — a time when DuPont owned a large percent of stock in General Motors. American comedian and actor "Groucho" Marx used the phrase in his narration of the show until it stuck in people's minds.
See what we're tweeting about
22 Comments
Add CommentI am a bit skeptical. Sure the auto industry marketed itself -- what industry does not? But I think the main reason is change was not the marketing, but more mundane factors. When the car was the toy of a few rich playboys it was easy to attack it. When non-rich people could have a car and/or became widely used for commercial purposes, then attacking cars became dated. While marketing might have helped, it is not marketing that makes people want to be able to travel more quickly, more easily, more cheaply, etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd certainly the auto industry had an interest in separating cars from pedestrians. But please try to say with a straight face that it was not necessary to do so. You can't possibly think that having cars sharing the same space with children is a good idea? If you don't then don't pretend that it is mere marketing. It would have happened anyways.
I wonder how many people were actually spooked by seeing their first automobile. My grandfather said he was with two brothers and they were amazed and couldn't wait to get a ride in one. He finally got to ride on a postal truck that ran from the train station to a nearby village post office.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisan aside...he also recalled the first time he saw an airplane he couldn't figure out what was keeping it up in the sky. He went on to be an engineer but never flew in a plane until decades later in the 1950's.
Wow. A modern example of yellow journalism. Make a supposition, then continue on as if it is a fact. Can you imagine anyone telling Groucho Marx to keep using a phrase until the public has swallowed it? And if you think children were playing in the streets as coaches full of people, beer wagons, dry goods supplies were all pulled down the street by horses, you are crazy. The streets were dangerous then and now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere's a bit of an anti-car streak in me, despite having owned one for most of my life.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut Michael Stanley is surely correct, and has put it all in perspective.
American's love affair with the automobile is really American's love affair with obesity. The mere concept of efficient mass public transportation reintroduces the possibility of walking to the bus stop or train platform. This threatens all those enamored of their own widening waist line with that old-fashioned form of exercise known as walking.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEven with automation, cars need a safe following distance that expands with increasing speed. This means that, after you do the math, a lane full of buses can carry 20 to 50 times as many people while passenger railway can carry 100 to 1000 times as many on a single track. Cars will always remain woefully inefficient both in fuel consumption and overall carrying capacity in regions with high populations and sprawl. Adding more lanes to a highway in lieu of improving public transportation is the social correlative to buying a series of bigger belts and suspenders for holding larger pants up against the increasingly forceful alliance of fat and gravity that wants to push any belt line below crotch that isn't safely and expansively secured above the bulging belly.
So, it isn't about loving cars so much as lovingly protecting those flapping folds of flab by minimizing steps between couch and junk food aisle in the supermarket or drive up window at bust-a-belt burger. Never mind about the traffic jams. Pass the chips and soda while we sit and breathe deeply our share of particulates and fumes while creeping along the ironically named "freeway". We'll even go so far as to send our military on murderous campaigns to protect our laziness and gluttony. If that isn't love, then show me the face that can launch so many ships, planes, and drones into territories full of hostiles whose only distinction among the many who would dance on our graves is that they could threaten that supply of foreign oil upon which our profligate vices depend.
Martin,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI like my car...in a few minutes driving to go fishing.
The car was like the Internet for generations of people. It opened up all types of access to possibilities in life.
Martin
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have have an interesting history book about railroads at home and it explains very well how the governments over regulation of the railroads did not allow for them to raise fares to cover expense so the trains had to cut back on other things like maintainence and adding tracks so the railroads became unreliable and unsafe so people and shipping companies switched to cars and trucks for the shipping. Now freight railroads that are not run by the government, thanks to Regan, are doing great however the government run Amtrak is still a joke
There is definitely evidence that the automobile industry waged a campaign; no different than today I guess. However many of the changes were almost inevitable. The saddest part about the automobiles rise to center stage in America is that almost all the prosperity it has given us, it is going to take back. I guess nothing is really free in the end.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMost people do not realize what a city was like when there were so many horses in the streets. Horse manure was a real problem and many cities welcomed the automobile.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBertO
BertO ,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAbout the horses and manure in the streets, I have often wondered why that intelligent form of Humanity called Women wore long dresses that dragged along it the manure.
Perhaps thats why sidewalks were invented.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFor another perspective on why we are so dependent on cars and other road-based transportation, please see:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://bostonreview.net/BR34.5/chomsky.php
where Noam Chomsky writes:
"While new technologies are essential, the problems go well beyond. We have to face up to the need to reverse the huge state-corporate social engineering projects of the post-World War II period, which quite purposefully promoted an energy-wasting and environmentally destructive fossil fuel-based economy. The state-corporate programs, which included massive projects of suburbanization along with destruction and then gentrification of inner cities, began with a conspiracy by General Motors, Firestone, and Standard Oil of California to buy up and destroy efficient electric public transportation systems in Los Angeles and dozens of other cities; they were convicted of criminal conspiracy and given a slap on the wrist. The federal government then took over, relocating infrastructure and capital stock to suburban areas and creating the massive interstate highway system, under the usual pretext of 'defense.' Railroads were displaced by government-financed motor and air transport.
[...]
"While state-corporate power was vigorously promoting privatization of life and maximal waste of energy, it was also undermining the efficient choices that the market does not provide—another destructive built-in market inefficiency. To put it simply, if I want to get home from work, the market offers me a choice between a Ford and a Toyota, but not between a car and a subway. That is a social decision, and in a democratic society, would be the decision of an organized public. But that is just what the dedicated elite attack on democracy seeks to undermine."
See also:
http://boiteaoutils.blogspot.com/2010/07/obscure-history-of-suburbia.html
"NC: It [suburbia] was created in the 1940s by the biggest state social engineering project in history under the Eisenhower administration –beyond anything they did in Russia. The specific goal was to eliminate public transportation, destroy the inner cities, forces everyone to use cars, trucks. And in the 1940’s there was an authentic conspiracy, a real one, between General Motors, Firestone Rubber, and Standard Oil California to buy up the public transportation, destroy it, and force everyone into buses and cars. The conspiracy went to court and they were convicted and fined –I think $5000 or something. Then the government moved in and took it over, under cover of defense."
I was also think about the public transportation conspiracy. Growing up in a small city (big town) in Oklahoma during the 1950s, I could never understand what happened to the streetcars, since their rails still ran through the downtown streets. With a population of only ~40,000, it might not have taken much of a conspiracy to replace streetcars with buses - one good sales pitch with a cost/benefit analysis might have done the deed. Still, I have little doubt there was a concerted effort from Detroit to capture the public transportation market... All the streetcar engineers would certainly have considered the move to be a communist plot against America!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisStill, municipalities sank a lot of capital into streetcar & other public transportation equipment (while Detroit was busy making tanks & such). Somebody (taxpayers or Detroit) had to pay down that debt or cities might have been bankrupted!
There was no concerted effort to push cars anyomore than there was electricity, the internet, television,radio, etc. Society's dynamics take over.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this'The' city that 98% of people actually lived in before cars was smelly, noisy and dirty. A photo of a downtown street was not the city. Suburbs may in retrospect seem like some blight to the romantic... but life was no can of cherries before that in cities where most folks lived with their 5 kids in a few cramped rooms in a dingy tenement or in a one-window flat over a store.
It's not just Americans who love cars. In the 1960's, not many Europeans living in big cities saw a need for cars, but they've now become standard. The same thing continues to happen in Asian countries. Personally, I prefer walking and public transportation, but most people seem to prefer the independence and feeling of control one has in driving.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso, I bet there will be plenty of hand-wringing over the first accident caused by a self-driving car, despite the tens of thousands caused every year by humans.
Good points. For more on how General Motors, Firestone, and Standard Oil conspired to destroy their competition:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe StreetCar Conspiracy
How General Motors Deliberately Destroyed Public Transit
http://www.lovearth.net/gmdeliberatelydestroyed.htm
What silliness. The idea that streets were safe for pedestrians is just ridiculous. The advent of self driving cars is just another way that autonomy is being lost by people. Self driving cars could prevent you from going to a political demonstration or rally that the government didn't want you to attend. Self driving cars could prevent you from going anywhere that was deemed unsafe or undesirable. We need to ensure that we maintain the right to travel where we wish, how we wish. This is just another example of how "safety" can trump freedom.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour comparison has no merit. There are many fit people who drive cars. Comparing trains and buses to cars is making the assumption that everyone has the same destination and schedule. Forcing people into public transportation is a basic loss of freedom. We need to maintain the right to go where we want, when and how we want. Individual transportation is central to that freedom.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYour comparison has no merit. There are many fit people who drive cars. Comparing trains and buses to cars is making the assumption that everyone has the same destination and schedule. Forcing people into public transportation is a basic loss of freedom. We need to maintain the right to go where we want, when and how we want. Individual transportation is central to that freedom.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this75% of our public space in cities is devoted to car transportation and storage. Low property values by arterial streets reflect our distaste for the noisy and dangerous automobile world, which destroys community interactions, like ball games in the street. Anyone with young children can understand this.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is sad that any discussion about the annoyance of cars is met by closed minds who have no other reaction than to suppose that living without some modern devise requires that we go back to the dark ages.
Martin!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe voice of sanity! Yes! Tell those spoiled brats!
You don't believe you've been forced into driving through the design, engineering, and funding choices of the past? Loss of choice is loss of choice, independent of the form of transportation you prefer. The right "to go when, where, and how we want" that you describe doesn't hold up if the streets I pay for with my tax dollars are designed only for one mode so I can't go "how I want". (And yes, everyone pays for streets whether or not they drive; drivers only pay for about 60% of the cost of providing their infrastructure and this doesn't begin to address the externalities of single-occupancy vehicle use. For more see this Brookings piece: http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2009/02/26-vehicle-miles-traveled-puentes)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI ride a bike for the majority of my transportation; take a bus when the snow gets too deep; and drive only when I must. I still want streets there to serve me and I'm not anti-car, but I can see quite clearly how the system is weighted against other modes.
I too want freedom of choice. The current transportation design doesn't offer that. For those too young to drive, too old or disabled to drive safely, or too poor to drive, lack of public transportation and bike/pedestrian infrastructure equates to a total lack of both choice and mobility. The "individual transportation" you want doesn't have to mean "my own car"--it can mean "a network available to me given my mode of choice," which may include a car. But if it HAS to include a car because no other modes are available, I have lost freedom of choice. How un-American.