Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age (review)

Some books are not well-served by the titles their publishers give them, and not because the titles don’t necessarily invite closer inspection and possible purchase. Rather, it is because the true scope of the book is not fully revealed. This is such a book. Instead of “Love and Hate in the Automotive Age”—which invites many interpretations—the subtitle for Brian Ladd’s work should really be taken from a key sentence in his introduction: “This history tries to capture the voices of some of the snobs, romantics, iconoclasts, and passionate idealists who denounced the plague of automobiles.” This is, the reader discovers, a perfect description of the book that follows, with automobility’s failures and discontents arranged, as Ladd writes, “more thematically than chronologically in view of the recurrence of attitudes across the century [of automobility].”

If capturing those voices was all this history achieved, Autophobia would be notable. But Ladd does much more in the five thematic chapters devoted to the capturing: He puts the “voices” in context, often contrasting them with the opposing views and the facts of the development of automobility. Ladd attends most closely to the voices of the autophobes regarding the influence cars have had on cities, because the need to accommodate the automobile in urban areas so transformed these places and changed the lifeways, willy-nilly, of city dwellers. He likewise casts his voice-capturing net worldwide, because automobility itself is worldwide.

A historian contemplating the writing of a serious study like this one might well imagine that accomplishing the mission in as few as the 188 pages that comprise the body of Autophobia would be impossible. Not so, for the voices and themes and context are all well chosen here, and, even if this book might be thought a summary of the autophobes’ claims and complaints, rather than a detailed compendium, it achieves its goals and satisfies the reader as few similar works do. The satisfaction of reading it does not emerge from the mountain of evidence (cited in endnotes, not footnotes) so much as from the wry, witty style of Ladd’s writing, which defines “accessibility” as few works of serious history do.

As a reference work for historians of technology, Autophobia has obvious appeal, but because of Ladd’s careful, evenhanded balancing of the book’s voices railing against the automobile and its effects with other voices defending it, the book will not be of much use to polemicists on either side of the century-long arguments about automobility. Ladd’s interpretation of the evidence does show a consistent leaning toward the “con” side of the argument—hardly unexpected, given the costs automobility has thrust upon us—but he continually reminds readers of the benefits. Ladd also reminds us that the two sides of the argument continually “talk past each other,” and he concludes that we who live with the automobile have never agreed about whether it is a fundamentally benign (or desirable) tool “and never will.”

That conclusion is entirely justified by the historiography that precedes it. Constrained by contemporary craft standards, can any historian do more than Ladd has done in Autophobia? It seems unlikely. Yet his splendid capturing of the anti-car voices throughout the century represents not the end of the investigation of why automobility has so polarized people, but a kind of beginning. Throughout his work, we encounter people who have been addicted to cars not so much because of what they seem to be but because of what they are: machines that deliver much more than mere transportation. Speed and acceleration unlike what anyone experienced prior to automobility (at least in individually operated devices) obviously affected this addiction, and, as sensation-seeking research has shown, looking for or avoiding the excitements that cars deliver clearly influenced and still influences people in their choices of where to live and how they think about whether cars are good or evil. Thus Autophobia might be thought...