Hell on Wheels: The Promise and Peril of America's Car Culture, 1900-1940, and: Mobility Without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship (review)

Although rising fuel prices may give credence to recent reports of runaway road rage, two new books suggest that driver incivility—both perceived and real—has plagued our nation's roads and highways ever since Americans first traveled them. David Blanke's Hell on Wheels examines how America's torrid love affair with the automobile complicated notions of risk and freedom during the first half of the twentieth century. Jeremy Packer's Mobility Without Mayhem takes up the story following World War II and argues that traffic enforcement has long sought to eliminate perceived social threats by extending models of good citizenship onto the road. Despite differing disciplinary footings, both studies take seriously sociologist Ulrich Beck's claims about the centrality of risk in western modernity. Similarly, both contribute to the growing field of automobility studies that seek to loosen our understanding of the automobile's complex sociocultural impact from its usual moorings in the histories of technology and economics.

Blanke brings his historian's tool kit to bear on a remarkable breadth of sources ranging from safety studies to cartoons. He shows us that Americans have worried about safety since the dawn of the auto age and have long worked to craft effective traffic laws. Early debates concerning regulation reveal, however, that our love affair with the car complicated enforcement. Blanke demonstrates that the automobile's suburban promise, its Progressive appeal, and its shear kinetic thrills left us so smitten that we simply could not stand to regulate what, by the 1920s, had clearly become an unacceptably dangerous aspect of daily life. Progressives initially blamed traffic fatalities on inferior drivers bereft of intelligence and civic virtue. Later, blame shifted to the faulty roads, laws, and equipment that made accidents inevitable. Despite declining fatalities, today's proliferation of roadside memorials reminds us that danger is never far. Still, our lack of empathy for accident victims and our unwillingness to obey the very traffic laws we endorse indicates, Blanke concludes, that we are still blinded by our love for the car.

Packer picks up the story by investigating how Americans have reconciled safety demands with thrill seeking in the years since World War II. Grounded in communication studies, Packer trades statistics for media representations of automobility wherein he finds evidence of what Michelle Foucault termed "correct training." When post-war automobility threatened social norms, Packer shows us, state and business interests rushed in to maintain the status quo. Popular films, for example, encouraged women to think of campgrounds as extensions of their suburban domestic spaces rather than as nomadic alternatives. Authorities demonized hitchhiking because it discouraged car ownership and, consequently, subverted capitalist production. Packer discusses the cultural construction of outlaw bikers and renegade truckers in similar terms. Ultimately, he concludes, our willingness to tolerate over-regulation of perceived automotive deviance has rendered us all vulnerable to invasive surveillance in this post-9/11 era of racial profiling and trafficlight cameras.

Despite their topical similarities, these books are very different in method and execution. Hell on Wheels is most remarkable for Blanke's impressive synthesis of primary materials. He provides valuable statistics on automobile use and accidents prior to 1940 (especially in chapter 2); insightful first-hand accounts by drivers, pedestrians, and police; and colorful vignettes on topics ranging from car camping to the bizarre psychological testing of cab drivers. Blanke's evidentiary thoroughness occasionally disrupts his narrative, but overall his writing is strong and his arguments are convincing. Despite good discussions of gender and class difference, readers will expect more here about the influence of racial attitudes on the social construction of risk. Given the relative inaccessibility of automobiles to black Americans during this period, one must wonder how all-encompassing America's love affair with the car really was.

Mobility...