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Chapter 7. The Safety-First Movement
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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7 The Safety-First Movement “Willyoupleasetellmewhenandhowthe‘safetyfirst’movementoriginated?”a puzzledNewYorkTimesreaderwrotetothenewspaper’s“QueriesandAnswers” column in 1915.1 That year, the slogan suddenly seemed everywhere. “Think safety first,” declared posters in factories, children’s books, and public places. The movement’s earnest admonitions quickly became a source of jokes and allusions—the sure sign of a popular fad. Princeton University junior F. Scott Fitzgerald contributed the lyrics to a satirical musical bearing that title. A few years later, Harold Lloyd’s comic masterpiece, Safety Last, featured the indelible image of a hapless bumbler swinging from the hands of a giant clock in defiance ofcommonsenseandthespiritoftheage.2 LloydandFitzgeraldmighthavetheir fun, but spreading the message of safety first was serious business for a host of engineers, lawyers, doctors, statisticians, and safety professionals. Fired with thezealofProgressiveErareform,theyaimedtodecreasesubstantiallytheoverall number of accidents through education and engineering. When and how did the safety movement originate? The historically myopic expert from the New York Times declared that it began with the founding of the cumbersomely titled Safety First Federation of America of New York a few months earlier.3 A more accurate answer was, from lots of places, including railroads , streetcars, insurance companies, and the new challenges of living with automobiles. The rise and fall of the public safety movement took place at a moment when the notion of reform was itself in flux. While the movement started among socialreformers ,itsmostavidproponentscamefromtheemergentbusinessclass. 142 i n d u s t r i a l i z i n g r i s k For middle-class reformers, thinking “safety first” promoted efficiency and conservation of resources. In a happy coincidence, safety promised to protect human lives while simultaneously saving money. This orientation toward the needs of corporations helped define the methods and goals of the public safety movement. Regarding government regulation of individual and corporate riskmaking behavior with suspicion, public safety advocates preferred to believe that, properly persuaded, most Americans would voluntarily choose safety first. As historian Barbara Welke astutely points out, safety professionals saw accidents as “the product of habits inconsistent with the modern world.”4 Consequently , changing those habits ranked high on their collective agenda. They acknowledged that technological fixes (or “safeguards” in the language of the day) had a place in guarding and disciplining the public. But as it turned out, systematic research into the use of passive protection for use outside industry lay mostly in the future. Instead, safety experts set about convincing men, women, andespeciallychildrentotakeresponsibilityfortheirownsafety,teachingthem the right way (meaning the safe way) to move through their daily lives. Many of their suggestions became not only part of school curricula and traffic laws but also part of our collective common sense, embodied in habits such as looking both ways before stepping into the street. By the mid-1920s, millions of Americans had heard the message of safety first in one form or another. Yet, the promulgation of information did not lead to a steady decline in the number of accidents. Safety experts who had committedthemselvestothecauseabsorbedahardlesson :justbecausetheyliterally thought about safety first, meaning before everything else, the public was not necessarily convinced to do likewise. Pioneers of Public Safety As spectacular as railroad crashes or steel mill explosions could be, they endangered limited numbers of people. The rapid spread of electric streetcars and interurban traction lines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries , however, threatened anyone who stepped out onto city streets. Streetcar lines traversed dense urban environments characterized by a chaotic mixture of horses,pedestrians,andagrowingnumberofautomobiles.Thetypicalstreetcar accident involved passengers falling as they got on and off cars. Collisions with other vehicles and with pedestrians were less frequent, but still far more common than with trains traveling on dedicated right-of-ways. Beginning around 1908, urban traction companies conducted the first large- [3.227.239.160] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 20:27 GMT) t h e s a f e t y - f i r s t m o v e m e n t 143 scale, community-based safety campaigns.5 The initiators of street railway public safety efforts belonged to a profession already familiar to us—claims agents who labored to protect their employers from the costs of accidents and more particularly from lawsuits. The first electric-powered street railways began to replace slower horse-drawn cars in the late 1880s at precisely the moment that transformations in liability law were changing how corporations thought about risk. The introduction of a contingency fee system allowed poor people to file...