One for the Road: Drunk Driving since 1900

CHAPTER 2 Science and Government Enter the Fray

It might sound crude, but it is reasonable to call the 1950s and early 1960s the “golden age of drunk driving.” One person who might have agreed was the New York Yankees’ all-star center fielder Mickey Mantle, who was not only a heavy drinker but thought nothing of driving home after a binge. Like most drunk drivers, he got lucky for a while, but in 1963, a drunken Mantle, speeding at over 60 miles per hour, crashed into a telephone pole, ejecting his wife, Merlyn. Happily , she only required stitches. Mantle, thanks to sympathetic police officers, paid $400 to replace the pole but was never charged with DWI. The crash never made it into the papers.1 Even though many Americans during these decades personally witnessed the carnage produced by intoxicated drivers, and others heard stories through the media, the cultural, political, and economic factors that directly or indirectly promoted drinking and driving simply overwhelmed efforts to identify, arrest, convict, and punish offenders. These factors included postwar prosperity, the growth of suburbs, a new interstate highway system, declining restrictions on alcohol sales, and clever marketing by the beverage industry, particularly of beer. In Mantle’s case, fame also helped. It was not until the 1960s, when a workaholic government bureaucrat named William Haddon Jr. tried to reconceptualize drunk driving as a public health problem, that change would begin to occur. Among Haddon’s first self-appointed tasks was to get people to stop using the word accident to describe an event caused when someone got drunk, chose to drive, and crashed his or her car. Returning to the story of Margaret Mitchell can convey some of the barriers chapter two Science and Government Enter the Fray Science and Government Enter the Fray 39 to controlling drunk driving during the postwar era. Gravitt did wind up going to jail. The local prosecutor had originally asked for a murder charge. However, the grand jury returned only an indictment for involuntary manslaughter because it believed that Gravitt’s acts were “strictly unintentional.” In November 1949, a jury convicted him of this charge, for which the penalty was 12 to 18 months in prison with the possibility of early parole. Gravitt eventually served 10 months and 20 days for killing Margaret Mitchell. Not only was this a lenient sentence, but the judge did not even bother to revoke Gravitt’s license when he let him return home for several days to get his affairs in order prior to his imprisonment . Sure enough, Gravitt was involved in another crash while driving his personal car, this time hitting a truck. Ironically, he was hospitalized for his injuries at Grady Memorial, where his earlier victim had spent her last days.2 Despite Gravitt’s repeatedly bad behavior, there was also a remarkable degree of sympathy for him. One crucial issue was that—as was often the case in drunk driving–related fatalities—the victim was not the drunk driver himself. Thus, while Margaret Mitchell was dead, Hugh Gravitt was very much alive. For example, an editorial in the November 19, 1949, Atlanta Journal stated: “For Gravitt as a person we have the utmost sympathy. He surely did not intend to kill anyone and tragedy will haunt him as long as he lives.”3 This characterization was promoted by Gravitt’s lawyer, who claimed that the police were victimizing his client by falsely asserting that he must have been drunk at the time of the crash. Gravitt firmly stuck to his story that he had drunk only one beer four hours prior to hitting Mitchell.4 For his part, Gravitt did all the right things. When Mitchell was lying in a coma, he told the press that he was praying for her recovery and “would give anything” if it could have been him, rather than Mitchell, in front of his car. Gravitt’s mother-in-law was quoted as saying, “We are Christian people praying for her every minute.” Most remarkably, however, Gravitt and his wife actually showed up at Grady Memorial Hospital on August 15, 1949, after he’d been released on bail. They brought both red roses and a calling card, on which had been written “Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Gravitt—Came by to see family.”5 Although the family apparently declined the offer, the Gravitts’ gesture spoke volumes about public understandings of drunk driving crashes in this era. Rather than laying low because of shame and guilt, Gravitt treated the event primarily as unfortunate...