100 years ago the afternoon paper editorialized on "the deadly auto," comparing its casualties to those in World War I. "It is apparent that the auto is a more deadly weapon than all the paraphernalia of modern warfare."
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| November 29th, 1924 |
It is hard not to think that the piece was prompted by and in response to a piece in the New York Times a week earlier. (Historian Peter Norton observed its 100th anniversary recently.)
That piece in the NYT starts out:
The horrors of war appear to be less appalling than the horrors of peace. The automobile looms up as a far more destructive piece of mechanism than the machine gun. The reckless motorist deals more death than the artilleryman. The man in the street seems less safe than the man in the trench.
Both make the comparison to war, and it does not seem likely they both are responding to a common source. The afternoon paper must depend on the NYT piece. The Commerce Department and Secretary Hoover, which the NYT references, would not probably make that comparison.*
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| NY Times, November 23rd, 1924 |
The piece here, though, already mystifies causes, focuses on individual failures in judgement, and avoids the word "speed." At the same time it points to the machine itself, the "deadly auto," it blames users and bystanders in "reckless driving" and "pedestrian carelessness." Its lack of clarity hides much, displacing and diffusing real causes.
- For more on the AAA's propaganda and reframing, "In 1924 AAA Reframes Safety for Motorist Innocence, with Kids as Intruders on Road"
- And on death cars in mid-1920s literature, "Daisy and the Great Gatsby's Beau Monde: Careless, but not Carless" (2012)
There were other interesting items in the afternoon paper that day.
What appears to be a PR placement from the Studebaker Corporation notes that European tax structures promoted smaller engines and smaller cars. In typical American style, it assumed that "bigger is better"!
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| November 29th, 1924 |
A downtown furniture store advertised with Santa as traffic cop, another instance of Santa keeping up with the times.
- See "From Semaphore to Sign: Traffic Control Develops in 1920s" (2022)
- And on changing images of Santa, "Santa's New Speed: Changing Ads in 1919" (2019), "Keeping Santa up with the Times: Electrification in 1922" (2022), and "Planes, a Train, a Truck: Santa's Conveyance in 1923" (2023)
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| November 29th, 1924 |
Though the morning paper didn't have the same stress, they did have short editorial note on autoism's change to travel distance and trading patterns.
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| November 29th, 1924 |
This might be the first mention of tendency to sprawling land use and to denying the usefulness of proximity and adjacency, pointing to later parking lots and malls. The speed of horse and buggy had dictated the spacing of towns. A trip powered by horse is the distance of Stayton, Silverton, and Independence from Salem. Fixed rail in railroads and streetcars modified some of this, but retained horse and buggy for the last miles. "The automobile has changed all this....The smaller towns have suffered...[and] larger towns profited." This is a local expression of what has been called the "annihilation of space and time."
* The initial report, published in advance of the conference and dated November 25th, 1924, does not seem to discuss war at all, and the authors of it do not make the comparison.
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| Report No. 2, November 25th, 1924 |
Here's a photo of the conference from mid-December, 1924, inscribed to "Senator Mark Hatfield," and currently held in the archives at George Fox. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover is at the center, next to President Coolidge. (It should be remembered that teenage Mark Hatfield struck and killed six year old Alice Lane getting her mail on Skyline Road.)
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| Hoover at center, via George Fox University |
As with the zoning pamphlet, we'll be returning to this later.
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