Back when cars were a rarity, people ruled the streets

How the public relations industry engineered our brains and made the world safe for automobiles.

Middle-class families scooped up affordable and speedy Model Ts. As they began to race through the streets, they ran headlong into pedestrians—with lethal results. (illustration by Kyle Bean)

via Back when cars were a rarity, people ruled the streets.

 By Clive Thompson

Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe
December 2014

When you visit any city in America today, it’s a sea of cars, with pedestrians dodging between the speeding autos. It’s almost hard to imagine now, but in the late 1890s, the situation was completely reversed. Pedestrians dominated the roads, and cars were the rare, tentative interlopers. Horse-drawn carriages and streetcars existed, but they were comparatively slow.

So pedestrians ruled. “The streets were absolutely black with people,” as one observer described the view in the nation’s capital. People strolled to and fro down the center of the avenue, pausing to buy snacks from vendors. They’d chat with friends or even “manicure your nails,” as one chamber of commerce wryly noted. And when they stepped off a sidewalk, they did it anywhere they pleased.

“They’d stride right into the street, casting little more than a glance around them…anywhere and at any angle,” as Peter D. Norton, a historian and author of Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, tells me. “Boys of 10, 12 or 14 would be selling newspapers, delivering telegrams and running errands.” For children, streets were playgrounds.

At the turn of the century, motor vehicles were handmade, expensive toys of the rich, and widely regarded as rare and dangerous. When the first electric car emerged in Britain in the 19th century, the speed limit was set at four miles an hour so a man could run ahead with a flag, warning citizens of the oncoming menace, notes Tom Vanderbilt, author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us).

Things changed dramatically in 1908 when Henry Ford released the first Model T. Suddenly a car was affordable, and a fast one, too: The Model T could zoom up to 45 miles an hour. Middle-class families scooped them up, mostly in cities, and as they began to race through the streets, they ran headlong into pedestrians—with lethal results. By 1925, auto accidents accounted for two-thirds of the entire death toll in cities with populations over 25,000.

An outcry arose, aimed squarely at drivers. The public regarded them as murderers. Walking in the streets? That was normal. Driving? Now that was aberrant—a crazy new form of selfish behavior.

“Nation Roused Against Motor Killings” read the headline of a typical New York Times story, decrying “the homicidal orgy of the motor car.” The editorial went on to quote a New York City traffic court magistrate, Bruce Cobb, who exhorted, “The slaughter cannot go on. The mangling and crushing cannot continue.” Editorial cartoons routinely showed a car piloted by the grim reaper, mowing down innocents.

When Milwaukee held a “safety week” poster competition, citizens sent in lurid designs of car accident victims. The winner was a drawing of a horrified woman holding the bloody corpse of her child. Children killed while playing in the streets were particularly mourned. They constituted one-third of all traffic deaths in 1925; half of them were killed on their home blocks. During New York’s 1922 “safety week” event, 10,000 children marched in the streets, 1,054 of them in a separate group symbolizing the number killed in accidents the previous year.

Drivers wrote their own letters to newspapers, pleading to be understood. “We are not a bunch of murderers and cutthroats,” one said. Yet they were indeed at the center of a fight that, clearly, could only have one winner. To whom should the streets belong?

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By the early 1920s, anti-car sentiment was so high that carmakers and driver associations—who called themselves “motordom”—feared they would permanently lose the public.

You could see the damage in car sales, which slumped by 12 percent between 1923 and 1924, after years of steady increase. Worse, anti-car legislation loomed: Citizens and politicians were agitating for “speed governors” to limit how fast cars could go. “Gear them down to fifteen or twenty miles per hour,” as one letter-writer urged. Charles Hayes, president of the Chicago Motor Club, fretted that cities would impose “unbearable restrictions” on cars.

Hayes and his car-company colleagues decided to fight back. It was time to target not the behavior of cars—but the behavior of pedestrians. Motordom would have to persuade city people that, as Hayes argued, “the streets are made for vehicles to run upon”—and not for people to walk. If you got run over, it was your fault, not that of the motorist. Motordom began to mount a clever and witty public-relations campaign.

Their most brilliant stratagem: To popularize the term “jaywalker.” The term derived from “jay,” a derisive term for a country bumpkin. In the early 1920s, “jaywalker” wasn’t very well known. So pro-car forces actively promoted it, producing cards for Boy Scouts to hand out warning pedestrians to cross only at street corners. At a New York safety event, a man dressed like a hayseed was jokingly rear-ended over and over again by a Model T. In the 1922 Detroit safety week parade, the Packard Motor Car Company produced a huge tombstone float—except, as Norton notes, it now blamed the jaywalker, not the driver: “Erected to the Memory of Mr. J. Walker: He Stepped from the Curb Without Looking.”