First Taste of Freedom: A Cultural History of Bicycle Marketing in the United States by Robert J. Turpin (review)

The clean-cut paper boy on his bicycle dutifully delivering the news to his suburban neighbours. The image is easy for most of us to conjure—a potent symbol of boyhood in mid-century America. But how and why did this figure come to be? What is the historical context of this boy and his bicycle? Robert J. Turpin’s First Taste of Freedom offers a rigorous examination of how the bicycle industry cultivated a close association between the boy and the bicycle as part of its marketing strategy in the twentieth century. Turpin extends his investigation more broadly to consider how the industry prompted and, in most cases, reacted to important cultural shifts from the 1890s to the 1990s in its quest to keep cycling popular and relevant to a changing demographic. But the text’s key contribution to the field of cycling history is in its careful examination of how and why the bicycle became inextricably linked with childhood between the 1910s and 1960s.

Turpin arranges his text chronologically from the advent of the bicycle in the mid-1800s to the introduction of BMX and mountain bikes in the 1990s. In Chapter 1, “Cycling’s Rise and American Manhood,” he presents a useful overview of the invention of the bicycle and its widespread popularity during the boom of the 1890s. In Chapter 2, “Automobiles and a World at War,” Turpin discusses how the First World War brought potential customers to the industry by promoting cyclists as embracing a patriotic sense of sacrifice, while the automobile undermined the bicycle by fundamentally changing the way Americans experienced mobility and “conferred a hierarchy of movement in which the car was king” (p. 41). Chapter 3, “Cooperation and Confusion,” explores the bust the industry experienced in the first decades of the twentieth century and its various attempts to recover a market that resembled the golden years of the 1890s bicycle boom. Disorganized and appealing to everyone and therefore to no one in particular, the industry failed to make up lost profits and symbolic power in a changing cultural landscape. However, with Chapter 4, “The Child Consumer,” we see the industry’s successful cultivation of the boy consumer and the salvation of the industry in the interwar years. With Chapter 5, “The Postwar Slump,” Chapter 6, “The Safety of Cycling,” and Chapter 7, “Surviving the Great Depression,” Turpin digs deeper into the historical context surrounding the growth of the child bicycle market, including a particularly devastating economic slump from 1921–1922, the beginnings of suburbanization in the 1920s, and the Depression era’s newfound support of leisure activities. Chapter 8, “Bicycles in the Age of Affluence,” serves as the crescendo of the romance between the boy and his bike, explaining how and why in the post-Second World War American suburbs, the bicycle becomes synonymous with boyhood. In Chapter 9, “High-Risers and Multi-Geared Redeemers,” Turpin describes the return of adult cyclists with the “Great American Bicycle Boom” of the 1970s and the rise of BMX and mountain bikes in the 1990s.

Throughout his text, Turpin traces the ways in which white, middle-class manhood is closely associated with the bicycle, first as a way to confer masculinity to adult male riders of high wheel cycles, and later to prepare boys to be strong American men. After the First World War, and with the automobile gaining popularity, the bicycle was no longer capable of competing with the car for faster speeds and greater distances. But it could prepare boys for an automotive future and offer them mobility and independence. The symbolic meaning of the bicycle did not require significant alteration; instead of signifying white, adult masculinity, “the bicycle became an initiating device in which boys attained adolescent forms of masculinity and thereby prepared for manhood” (p. 88). Thus, Turpin demonstrates, the bicycle enjoyed nearly 100 years of a close association with...