Automobile (Horseless Carriage)

As the automobile spread across America in the early 20th century, a great many people saw it as a menace to civilised life. Newspapers called cars "devil wagons" driven with a "reckless disregard of public safety," and locals complained that Main Street had become a deadly speedway. Before cars, streets in American cities were shared space: pedestrians, children playing, horse carts, vendors, trams, all mingling at the pace of legs and hooves. The automobile simply barged in at thirty miles an hour and started killing people, and the initial public reaction was roughly what you would expect.

Letters to city papers decried the "tyranny of the automobilist" and urged the formation of an "antiautomobile league" so that the "common people" could reclaim the streets from the "auto-hogs" who "think their rights are supreme." To many Americans, early motorists were road tyrants infringing on everyone else's basic rights — "dangerous intruders" who "deprived others of their freedom." Rural hostility went beyond editorials. Farmers strewed nails and broken glass across country roads, hurled stones at passing cars, and stretched wire across routes at neck height. In one 1913 incident near Berlin, a trip-wire decapitated a motoring couple.

And then the auto industry counterattacked. As the historian Peter Norton documents in Fighting Traffic (MIT Press, 2008), motoring groups led by the Packard Motor Company manufactured the very concept of "jaywalking" in the 1920s, shaming pedestrians rather than drivers. The word itself is the giveaway: a "jay" was period slang for a bumpkin or country rube who didn't know how cities worked. Packard's 1922 Detroit publicity stunt is a small masterpiece of the genre. The company staged a mock funeral procession, with a float carrying a tombstone "To the Memory of Mr J. Walker," and handed out cards explaining that pedestrians who crossed streets mid-block rather than at designated crossings were being foolish, backward and a danger to themselves. The event was covered as news. Within a decade, crossing the street where you liked — something people had done for centuries — had been rebranded as a minor crime committed by idiots.

The panic over devil wagons didn't vanish. It was managed, deflected, and eventually reframed as the pedestrian's fault. The worry wasn't wrong that automobiles would reshape public space and cost lives. What it lost was the authority to name the problem, once the car industry did the naming for it.