Episode 161: The Creation of America’s Car Culture 

Sarah Goodyear: This episode was produced with the generous support of the William and Helen Mazer Foundation.

Doug Gordon: This is The War on Cars. I’m Doug Gordon. Sarah and I are on the road for our Life After Cars book tour, which kicked off in New York just a few weeks ago and has already taken us to San Francisco, Washington, DC, Seattle for a show with our friend Ray Delahanty of CityNerd, Vancouver, British Columbia, and even the small city of Nanaimo. We’ve had a great time on tour so far, not least of all because we’ve gotten to meet so many listeners and readers who are working hard to help their towns and neighborhoods imagine a life after cars.

Doug: As I record this, we are in Portland, Oregon for two events: the Bike Happy Hour with Bike Portland’s Jonathan Maus, and a book reading and talk at Powell’s, hosted by Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Lillian Karabaic. The Bike Happy Hour is free and open to everyone, while the event at Powell’s requires a ticket. I’m told some are still available, but get yours soon—it’s on the verge of selling out. You can find more information about these and all of our upcoming events, and order the book if you haven’t already at LifeAfterCars.com.

Doug: For this episode, we’re gonna hear from producer Ilana Strauss, who brings us a story we mention in Life After Cars, and goes a little deeper into something that was new even to me. It’s all about the origins of car culture as we know it today, and features friend of the podcast and University of Virginia historian Peter Norton. We hope you enjoy it. Thanks very much to the Helen and William Mazer Foundation, which makes this episode, and a lot of what we do at The War on Cars possible. And please become a Patreon supporter of the podcast. You can sign up at Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod. Thanks.

Ilana Strauss: In 1988, Peter Norton was a graduate student in history at the University of Delaware. That summer, he took a job at the Historical Society of Delaware in Wilmington, working in a windowless basement, cataloging old photos and negatives of the city—some a hundred years old or more.

Peter Norton: And I learned from these photographic negatives that it was a city of dense foot traffic, electric streetcars everywhere.

Ilana Strauss: He saw photos of a bustling city, showing the streets of Wilmington full of people—people walking, people riding bicycles, people riding streetcars. One day, he left the Historical Society and had what he describes as a surreal experience. Even though he had walked them hundreds of times before, those Wilmington streets, they now felt somehow strange and unfamiliar to him.

Peter Norton: I was a time traveler traveling to a science fiction future and maybe a little far-fetched story where everybody’s in a steel box now. The same streets transformed into a world of surface parking lots, fast cars and no pedestrians. A beautiful old synagogue, a church, a theater, schools, residences, all were replaced by surface parking. I was curious, why did we destroy our own cities to make room for cars? It seems crazy. And I really wanted to know why that happened.

Ilana Strauss: Today, most people don’t think about how omnipresent cars are. If they do think about it at all, they assume that Americans’ alleged love affair with cars was something akin to natural selection, with cars having some sort of evolutionary advantage that made them win out over bicycles, streetcars—and even walking. After earning his PhD, Peter became a history professor at the University of Virginia, and he turned the question he’d asked himself on those Wilmington streets into a career obsession, determined to uncover the truth about how cars really came to dominate streets, and why most people today don’t even seem to know the true story.

Peter Norton: We remember what we are taught to remember. And some of us go beyond what we’re taught and dig, but if you don’t dig, you’re not gonna learn much more about it.

Ilana Strauss: Peter’s research brought him back to 1923 in Cincinnati, Ohio. One autumn day, Marietta DV O’Donnell, a 20-year-old singer, took communion and sang in her church choir. Afterwards, she left the church and waited for the trolley. Right at that moment, a thief sped down the street in a stolen car. The driver struck and killed Marietta and fled the scene. He made it just two blocks, and then crashed into a curb. Some 2,000 people quickly surrounded the car and threatened to kill the driver. A policeman finally pulled out his revolver and dispersed the crowd. This was not an isolated incident. More Americans died in automobile crashes in the 1920s than died in World War I. An unprecedented level of carnage that affected people all over the country. Anywhere cars appeared, death and destruction seemed to follow, as did a lot of outrage. People took to the streets and staged massive protests against the growing scourge of cars.

Peter Norton: This happened in middle class, upper-middle class and working class communities. It happened in all-white communities. It happened in communities of color. There was a protest in Queens where they blocked a whole intersection for weeks.

Ilana Strauss: In October 1922, 10,000 children marched through Manhattan to protest crashes. A procession of open cars carried kids who had been maimed and disabled at the hands of careless drivers. Cities erected monuments that looked like war memorials dedicated to the children who had been killed by automobiles.

Peter Norton: And it blew my mind because the message of these monuments was, this is not the parent’s fault, this is not the child’s fault. It was a visible, tangible testimony to the view that children have a right to the streets. And that really took my breath away.

Ilana Strauss: Judges tended to levy harsh sentences and angry words against drivers who harmed pedestrians, especially if those pedestrians were children.

Peter Norton: I was then astonished to find court cases that said things like children have a right to the streets, which, you know, is completely lost today.

Ilana Strauss: Before the rise of cars, streets were for people. Kids played in the streets, merchants sold products. There was transportation, sure—streetcars, trolleys and wagons. But for the most part, there was no hierarchy that assumed that anyone had more reason to be in the street than anyone else.

Peter Norton: The pedestrian belongs in the street, anytime, anywhere, and has as much of a right to be in the street as any other street user.

Ilana Strauss: Today, a lot of people assume that the demand for cars came first and the car industry merely responded, building the cars, roads and parking to meet that demand.

Peter Norton: It was exactly the opposite. What I kept finding was industry saying, “Oh no, oh no, people in cities don’t want cars. They think of them as intruders. They’re not buying them, they’re blaming them for everything. They’re restricting them. And we have no market in urban America, or no big market in urban America unless we change that.”

Ilana Strauss: By the early 1920s, car sales had actually slowed down. And this caused a lot of consternation in the auto industry.

Peter Norton: All of the companies were wringing their hands saying, a day’s coming when everybody who wants a car will have one, and our only market will be the replacement market. And that’s not good enough.

Ilana Strauss: At the time, there wasn’t an organized force within the auto industry to push back. Marketing, advertising, PR, these weren’t really a thing yet. And motordom—that’s the term Peter Norton uses for drivers, automobile makers and their allies—had an even bigger problem: Opponents of cars were starting to get political.

Ilana Strauss: In 1915, Walter F. Pentlarge was driving down a street in Cincinnati when a four-year-old boy darted onto the street. Pentlarge hit the boy, who was injured, but thankfully survived. If Pentlarge’s actions are any indication, he was deeply affected by the crash. In 1922, he funded the entire $1,400 budget to start a new committee that would campaign for something that could stop or at least reduce the ability of drivers to harm pedestrians—speed governors. Pentlarge’s new committee called for an ordinance that would require every car in the city of Cincinnati to be equipped with a mechanical device that would make it impossible for drivers to go faster than 20 miles an hour. By 1923, the committee had gathered 43,000 signatures from city residents—that’s 10 percent of the population at the time, more than enough to get the ordinance on the ballot for an upcoming vote—and to get the attention of motordom.

Peter Norton: The auto industry groups noticed this proposal and had a total freakout. I know because I read their conversations.

Ilana Strauss: Motordom knew that the whole benefit of cars, what makes them better than walking, cycling or even horse-drawn carriages, is speed. So they mounted a campaign of their own to stop the Cincinnati speed governor ordinance in its tracks. The campaign to stop the push for speed governors was spearheaded by the Cincinnati Automobile Club, led by A.E. Middendorf. Middendorf raised $10,000, and used the money to mail letters to every car owner in Cincinnati warning that the proposal was “the most vicious ordinance any community has ever been asked to vote upon.” To influence broader public opinion, the club bought full-page ads in newspapers playing on people’s fears that speed governors would turn Cincinnati into a backwater—or worse.

Peter Norton: They invoked the Great Wall of China and said, you’re gonna make the USA a backward country just like China, and this will be like a Great Wall because drivers won’t go there. Yeah, this is very 1920s.

Ilana Strauss: On November 6, 1923, the day of the referendum, Middendorf stationed 400 people at the polls to buttonhole citizens and pressed them to cast their ballots against the proposal. When the final vote on Cincinnati’s speed governor ordinance was tallied, the proposal, which had started with 43,000 people signing a petition in support of such a measure, ended in defeat. Only 13,511 people voted in favor. More than 86,000 were against. As Peter Norton says, it was a great day for motordom.

Peter Norton: I’m sure they were celebrating, there’s no question about that.

Ilana Strauss: Emboldened by their success in Cincinnati, Motordom decided to aim even higher. They realized that if they wanted to keep sales booming, they’d have to make Americans need cars—not just want them, need them. And they set their sights on the burgeoning automobile capital of the world, Los Angeles.

Ilana Strauss: By the 1920s, traffic in Los Angeles was already a huge problem. Plus, LA was a streetcar town. Most people didn’t need a car to get around. That presented a big problem for the auto industry, one that would be solved by a chance encounter between two men. One was a 32-year-old car salesman named Paul Hoffman, who had made a fortune selling Studebakers.

Peter Norton: And there was something about this guy. He was one of these people who could sell. By, really, his mid-20s, he was a millionaire and the company’s most successful salesman.

Ilana Strauss: Hoffman became a hugely influential player in LA. The Los Angeles Traffic Commission, a private group of automobile interests, made him their new president, and it was in this role that he understood that solving LA’s traffic problem was the key to selling more cars.

Peter Norton: He was interested in a future where cities would welcome drivers, and he was looking at the long run.

Ilana Strauss: In 1923, Paul Hoffman was at a traffic commission meeting when he met the other man who would eventually help him remake Los Angeles—and eventually the country: a Harvard grad student named Miller McClintock.

Peter Norton: What was really unique about McClintock was he was literally the first person to be studying street traffic as a motor vehicle problem and not as a street railway problem or a trucking problem.

Ilana Strauss: Hoffman knew local governments wouldn’t listen to the auto industry. Just because motordom had managed to defeat an anti-car law in one city didn’t mean they’d be successful elsewhere. Hoffman was worried other cities might not listen to the auto industry about the need to keep traffic moving, but maybe they’d listen to an outsider, someone smart, someone like Miller McClintock.

Peter Norton: And he’s like, this is a guy who can write about the traffic situation not as an industry person, but as an objective expert, a guy with credentials, a PhD. He’s gonna have a PhD soon.

Tom McClintock: My name’s Tom McClintock. I’m a member of Congress representing the 4th district of California.

Ilana Strauss: That’s Miller McClintock’s grandson, Tom. Tom was only a few years old when his grandfather passed away, but he remembers him. One time his grandfather took him on a walk through the woods with a poodle.

Tom McClintock: He handed me the leash, which was a very, very high trust he placed in me. Cookie, the poodle, took off after a squirrel, and I held on for dear life as Cookie dragged me behind him. And I do remember my grandfather coming up huffing and puffing, and grabbing the leash and standing me up and dusting me off and saying, “Okay, now we don’t need to tell your grandmother about this.”

Ilana Strauss: As Tom explains it, his grandfather was fascinated by transportation, and would travel the country, studying the ways people moved, developing theories about how it all worked.

Tom McClintock: One of the observations was that transportation is a series of arcs. It’s either an arc over space or an arc over time, acceleration and deceleration, or arcs, turns or arcs. And that is essentially the shape of transportation, it’s different kinds of arcs in both space and time. And the importance of traffic engineering was to make those arcs smooth and efficient.

Tom McClintock: According to family lore, he was one of the principal proponents of first separating opposing flows of traffic, having a uniform set of markers within the transportation system, basically lanes. And the importance of separating out different kinds of transportation—pedestrians needed to be separated from automobiles, as well as the horse and buggy, which he considered to be one of the greatest impediments to traffic efficiency. I would assume bikes as well were not compatible in the same space as automobiles.

Ilana Strauss: Miller McClintock was born in Nebraska. As a kid, he excelled at school, and eventually went to college, where he studied Chaucer. Here’s Peter Norton again.

Peter Norton: And then there was some kind of dead end which one would expect from working on Chaucer. And he’s teaching business English part time, and he has a baby, and he’s got no job security and a crummy adjunct job, you know, which is a point of view I could relate to very, very, very well.

Ilana Strauss: Frustrated and at a dead end, Miller moved his family east and enrolled in a doctorate program at Harvard. There, he chose a new and interesting area of study: traffic.

Peter Norton: Traffic engineering did not really exist as a field of study yet. When he started to study street traffic, and he was still an independent scholar, he was very critical of car domination. He said, “This is like turning the city over to a privileged minority of wealthy people who crowd the curbs with their parked cars and get in the way of everybody else.”

Ilana Strauss: In August, 1923, as part of his dissertation, he traveled to Los Angeles to study the city’s already notorious traffic.

Peter Norton: He wrote in that dissertation that it would be ridiculous to try to build all of the engineering that you would need to accommodate all these cars. He also said that it would be a good idea to forbid parking because that would force people onto more efficient modes of transportation like streetcars.

Ilana Strauss: But Paul Hoffman had a different idea. He knew that to keep the market for automobiles growing, cars needed to move fast. Hoffman and others in motordom knew that as long as streets were seen as places for people, then drivers would never be able to have the unfettered access to them that would ensure more car sales. Even worse, if they ran over and killed people, they’d get blamed, and that would be very bad for business. Edward J. Maron, road builder and editor for the Engineering News Record, put it this way …

Peter Norton: He says, “The obvious solution lies only in a radical revision in our conception of what a city street is for.” So a radical revision in our conception of what a city street is for. That’s an amazing statement. And by that, he meant a city street is not for everybody, which is what it was for. We have to have a city street that is defined as for automobiles, and that way we can then restrict the use of the street in any way that leads to people being hit by cars. Above all, this means pedestrian restriction.

Ilana Strauss: Hoffman decided that the only path forward was to convince the city officials that pedestrians needed to be kept on sidewalks and in crosswalks—for their own safety, of course. So he sent a letter to the city council saying there was a problem with traffic rules in Los Angeles. There were too many regulations, and many of them contradicted each other. Los Angeles needed a new simplified code, Hoffman argued, and he offered up the Harvard-educated traffic expert Miller McClintock, who could come up with a new, better code for free.

Peter Norton: McClintock’s PhD was not in traffic engineering, it was in municipal government. So there was some finessing going on.

Ilana Strauss: So how did McClintock go from being a guy who was critical of car domination to someone who was willing to work with Hoffman to get pedestrians out of the way of automobiles? It’s actually kind of simple: McClintock was broke.

Peter Norton: Hoffman, who was incredibly rich, saw in McClintock somebody who might be willing to present traffic the way he and Studebaker wanted.

Ilana Strauss: Still, the LA council wasn’t interested in Hoffman and McClintock’s services. They’d already dealt with plenty of experts, and they didn’t need another one telling them what to do. Ignoring the counsel, Hoffman had McClintock come up with a new traffic code for Los Angeles anyway. Under McClintock’s new code, the idea that everyone had an equal right to the street was obsolete. In addition to banishing pedestrians to sidewalks and crosswalks, he proposed eliminating parking downtown during rush hour in order to provide moving cars more space, and requiring the city to post signs explaining the new rules. Instead of going back to the LA city council, Hoffman and McClintock presented their new code to auto interest groups who liked what they heard and they let the people in government know it. The council approved it with a big enough majority to override a veto from the city’s mayor, George E. Cryer.

Ilana Strauss: Following the implementation of Hoffman and McClintock’s new code, traffic in LA did start to move faster. So by one measure, it was a success. However, in the seven months after the code was adopted, drivers killed more people than in the same time period the year before. Outrage over people dying continued, but in diminished form. With the traffic moving better than before and the continued influence of motordom, it became harder and harder for people to get all that worked up over pedestrian safety, or at least for them to find sympathetic ears in the halls of power. Hoffman’s plan had worked.

Peter Norton: So Hoffman got a lot out of LA and out of his daring venture with McClintock, such that he was promoted directly to vice president of Studebaker. So he’s moving up rapidly.

Ilana Strauss: And McClintock understood that his partnership with Hoffman meant that he could write his own ticket to success.

Peter Norton: And Hoffman comes to him and says, “I’d like us to work together for the long haul, and I want you to tell me what you would like from me. Name it.” McClintock thinks about it and says that in his fantasy world, he would be the head of his own traffic planning agency. You know, everybody’s got their own fantasy, so I guess we won’t judge that one. But that was his dream job.

Ilana Strauss: Hoffman funded a new traffic research department at UCLA and appointed Miller McClintock to lead it. After getting things up and running at UCLA, McClintock would eventually move back to Harvard. That provided an even bigger level of prestige, as Hoffman and McClintock advanced their agenda to take their success in LA and spread it to the rest of the country.

Peter Norton: And for another 15 years, Miller McClintock’s like, “Yay, cars! Let’s do anything to accommodate cars.”

Ilana Strauss: Eventually, the duo would convince cities around the country to scrap their existing traffic codes and replace them with ones that would favor automobiles over transit, cycling and walking.

Peter Norton: It is why, if you were to show up in a random city in a random state in the USA, you could probably accurately list things that are in the traffic ordinance of that random city.

Ilana Strauss: And that was just the beginning. Hoffman had another idea to share with Miller.

Peter Norton: We can’t sell cars to some kinds of people who can afford them. People who live in large cities are not buying cars.

Ilana Strauss: Even though people in a place like Chicago made more money than people in Indianapolis, people in Indianapolis were buying more cars. Hoffman’s research showed that the public transportation in dense Chicago was a lot better than in the more spread-out Indianapolis—so much better that most Chicagoans didn’t need cars.

Peter Norton: And so what Hoffman said in writing is, wouldn’t it be great if we could make Chicago like Indianapolis? Well, you know what? That’s exactly what these people did. They took the density of cities like Chicago and then rebuilt these cities so that they could be like Indianapolis.

Ilana Strauss: Today, most people don’t know who Hoffman and McClintock were, nor do they know the impact they had on how we get around and who has the right to be on the road. All they know is that cars dominate, and assume that’s just the way things were meant to be. But Peter knows the history tells a different story.

Peter Norton: I’m just trying to say that Americans did not come to a state of being sort of dominated by automobiles thanks to democracy and the free market. Definitely not. It was corporate strategy. It’s not even me arguing that. The automobile industry itself, in the ’20s especially, they said, “Hey, fellas, if we don’t, you know, change the narrative in the newspapers, we’re doomed.”

Ilana Strauss: And sure, plenty of people liked having cars, even back then. But as Peter says, in those early decades, not a whole lot of Americans ever thought they’d need to have a car.

Peter Norton: There is ample evidence that they never wanted car dependency. By that, I mean a world where you have to have a car or you can’t get to work. You have to have a car or you can’t get groceries or things like that.

Ilana Strauss: Those two guys, Hoffman and McClintock, they took people off the streets.

Peter Norton: And it was a real transformation in the city street, and it’s the transformation that we all have lived with since we arrived in this world, the one where we learn from childhood that the street is for cars, that if you want to walk, you have to essentially defer to cars everywhere except in a crosswalk. And even in a crosswalk, you have to be careful. So it’s a transformation that gave us, to a great degree, the automotive city that we have today.

Doug: That is it for this episode of The War on Cars. Thanks to producer Ilana Strauss for bringing us this story. Special thanks to Willow Belden for her editorial feedback and to Peter Norton for his research and wisdom. The War on Cars is produced with the generous support of the Helen and William Mazer foundation and by listeners like you. Subscribe today by going to Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod.

Doug: We also want to shout out our sponsor, Cleverhood. For 15 percent off the best rain gear for walking and cycling visit Cleverhood.com/waroncars and enter code BEAGIVER at checkout.

Doug: The supervising producer for this episode was me. The War on Cars theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. I’m Doug Gordon, and on behalf of my co-host Sarah Goodyear, this is The War on Cars.