Early 20th Century · 1920s
Automobile (Mass Motoring)
Youth Immorality and Decline of Tradition
By the 1920s, Americans had discovered an extraordinary use for the automobile: a private, enclosed, mobile space well away from their parents. Ministers noticed.
Clergy railed against Americans spending Sundays on joyrides instead of in church, noting that nothing exemplified the era's "irreversible decline in morality" quite like the motorcar. One Princeton dean blamed "the gasoline motor car" for the Jazz Age's collapse in "moral standards," lamenting that Sunday pleasure drives left churches deserted while the nation's youth were shamelessly "petting" in cars and visiting roadside speakeasies (the illegal bars that had sprung up everywhere during Prohibition). Sermons and editorials across the country decried the car as an agent of sin; the freedom of the open road, it was said, was eroding family and community values. Some places reached for the legal toolkit. In Nashville, a 1923 ordinance banned selling petrol or servicing cars on Sundays — the aim being to curb the "wicked" practice of leisure driving on the Lord's Day. These were blue laws: local regulations restricting what could be sold or done on Sundays, a Protestant tradition in American civic life that the automobile had suddenly made awkward to enforce.
The worry was not only pulpit-deep. Denver juvenile-court judge Ben B. Lindsey, in The Revolt of Modern Youth (1925), argued that the automobile had become the venue of a full-blown sexual revolution, with high-schoolers' "petting parties" now routine. A Muncie, Indiana resident quoted in Robert and Helen Lynd's landmark 1929 sociology Middletown — a study that treated small-town America the way an anthropologist might treat a remote village — denounced the car flatly as a "house of prostitution on wheels." The numbers behind the panic were striking. By 1925 some 17 million motor vehicles were registered in the United States, more than doubling adoption in half a decade. The Lynds documented Muncie families skipping meals to keep up car payments, church attendance falling, and parents genuinely losing track of where their teenage children went on weekend nights.
The car did unchaperone a generation. It also extended what young people could do, where they could go, and who they could become. The moral concern was real. The cultural reorganisation that followed was deeper still.
Clergy railed against Americans spending Sundays on joyrides instead of in church, noting that nothing exemplified the era's "irreversible decline in morality" quite like the motorcar. One Princeton dean blamed "the gasoline motor car" for the Jazz Age's collapse in "moral standards," lamenting that Sunday pleasure drives left churches deserted while the nation's youth were shamelessly "petting" in cars and visiting roadside speakeasies (the illegal bars that had sprung up everywhere during Prohibition). Sermons and editorials across the country decried the car as an agent of sin; the freedom of the open road, it was said, was eroding family and community values. Some places reached for the legal toolkit. In Nashville, a 1923 ordinance banned selling petrol or servicing cars on Sundays — the aim being to curb the "wicked" practice of leisure driving on the Lord's Day. These were blue laws: local regulations restricting what could be sold or done on Sundays, a Protestant tradition in American civic life that the automobile had suddenly made awkward to enforce.
The worry was not only pulpit-deep. Denver juvenile-court judge Ben B. Lindsey, in The Revolt of Modern Youth (1925), argued that the automobile had become the venue of a full-blown sexual revolution, with high-schoolers' "petting parties" now routine. A Muncie, Indiana resident quoted in Robert and Helen Lynd's landmark 1929 sociology Middletown — a study that treated small-town America the way an anthropologist might treat a remote village — denounced the car flatly as a "house of prostitution on wheels." The numbers behind the panic were striking. By 1925 some 17 million motor vehicles were registered in the United States, more than doubling adoption in half a decade. The Lynds documented Muncie families skipping meals to keep up car payments, church attendance falling, and parents genuinely losing track of where their teenage children went on weekend nights.
The car did unchaperone a generation. It also extended what young people could do, where they could go, and who they could become. The moral concern was real. The cultural reorganisation that followed was deeper still.
Useful links:
- Encyclopedia.com – Sunday Driving & moral decline (Gale, n.d.)
- Princeton Alumni Weekly – Campus car ban and morals (Nov. 16, 2011)
- Lynd & Lynd – *Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture* (1929; Internet Archive)
- Beth Bailey – *From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America* (Johns Hopkins, 1988)
- Lindsey & Evans – *The Revolt of Modern Youth* (1925; Internet Archive)