Hell on Wheels: The Promise and Peril of America's Car Culture, 1900-1940 by David Blanke (review)

Book Reviews 141 address white supremacy and acknowledge the power and privileges of whiteness, these introspections were too painful and too radical to last. Barber argues SDS's refusal to address the underlying problem of organizational racism splintered the students into three groups: the Weatherman, the Revolutionary Youth Movement II, and the Progressive Labor Party. The great irony in this rupture is that during the unprecedented student rebellion that took place after the Kent State shootings in 1970, the SDS was so fractured it could not respond to the uprising. Barber makes no effort to disguise his disappointment as he depicts SDS's initial promise, convincingly documents its racism, stresses its ultimate failure to address the organization's internal acceptance of white supremacy, and illustrates how he feels these mistakes currendy affect America. Although Barber's analysis of the organization's shortcomings does not suffer from his condemnatory perspective, one slight drawback is his overly idealistic portrayal of the Black Panthers and the Viet Cong, whom he touts as "real activists." However, this subjectivity does not discredit Barber's important study of the New Left's internal racism and how this shortcoming ultimately destroyed SDS. Elise Wagner Michigan State University David Blanke. Hell onWheels: The Promise and Peril of America's Car Culture, 1900-1940. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. Pp. 266. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $34.95. Automobiles killed about a half-million Americans before 1940. Until recendy, though, historians have found few signs of social distress. They were looking in the wrong places, however. In Down the Asphalt Path (1994) Clay McShane, examining local sources in New York, found outrage and even minor riots in the wake of motorized mayhem. Since then, attention to early automobile accidents has been growing slowly. A recent contribution is David Blanke's Hell on Wheels. Blanke finds an "odd early response to auto safety" (p. 185), in which Americans accepted high collective risks because of a tendency to measure safety individually. Because of their "automotive love affair" 142 Michigan Historical Review (p. 3ff), Americans resisted collective approaches to safety, preferring instead to seek safety through a code of individual driving expertise. The "love affair" is thus central to Blanke's case, and this invites difficulties. The metaphor's history complicates its scholarly application. Almost unknown before the mid-1950s, the metaphor sprang into general circulation in 1961, when NBC television broadcast Merrily We Roll Along as the Du Pont show of the week. Du Pont (which incidentally owned a 23 percent share in General Motors and to which it sold varnishes and fabrics) promoted this "affectionate report" as "the story of America's love affair with the automobile" (New York Times, October 23, 1961, 53), and the host and narrator (Groucho Marx) repeated the metaphor (and variants) in the program (in Groucho's usage the motorist was a man, the car a woman). The phrase has been a ubiquitous all-purpose explanatory device ever since. Like other rhetorical inventions, it is apt to obscure as much as it reveals. Blanke spends most of the first three of his six chapters reviewing familiar material on the "love affair." The new and valuable material begins in chapter four, where he draws on primary sources (chiefly from the national popular press) to shed light on the dangers of automobiles and Americans' responses to them. At his best, Blanke documents accidents and cultural responses to them in detail?as, for example, when he gives us a victim's personal account of a crash (p. 183). Local sources, however, are scarce, and without them Blanke can seldom give his readers such a close look at specific accidents and their social aftershocks. In local newspapers, for example, Blanke would have found an ongoing affair of hate with automobiles, including organized campaigns to limit them to preautomotive speeds. The rural "devil wagon" and its urban cousin, the "death car," are absent, and we do not clearly see the people and organizations competing to shape definitions of the accident problem. Too often, "Americans" is used when "motorists" ismeant, a conflation that becomes defensible only later in the twentieth century. Hell on Wheels is valuable as a step toward...