Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age by Brian Ladd (review)

140 Michigan Historical Review contribution to local history. As an examination of the people who ran that industry—and were the public faces of those broadcasts consumed by the masses—it is disappointingly brief, tantalizing readers but not satisfying them. For example, Kiska discusses the late appearance and struggles of African Americans—such as Jerry Blocker, Bob Bennett, Doris Biscoe, Ben Frazier, and Emery King—as television news reporters and anchors, but the topic warrants a more thorough examination than the scope of his study permits. Similarly, Kiska describes WWJ-TV’s 1973 experiment with Betty Carrier as an anchor, and mentions other women journalists, such as Jennifer Moore, Carmen Harlan, and Biscoe, but his discussion of their role is not extensive. But what Newscast is not should not detract from what it is. There is more to be written about Detroit television news, but Kiska’s book is a solid and useful beginning. Stephen A. Jones Central Michigan University Brian Ladd. Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. 227. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Cloth, $22.50. “The abhorrence of cars is inseparable from their appeal” (p. 177). This duality inherent within the automobile is the focus of Brian Ladd’s Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age. Whether one sees in the car the dream of speed or the reality of gridlock, the promise of individual mobility or societal dislocation and environmental degradation, depends on one’s point of view. Ladd’s study examines both individuals’ and societies’ shifting perceptions of the automobile; to accomplish this he follows the discourse between automobile boosters and critics during the twentieth century. A key theme of the book is that criticism of the automobile has existed since its inception; anticar sentiment did not arise solely out of the freeway revolts of the 1960s or fuel shortages of the 1970s, but rather has from the beginning been a parallel trend in the creation of our modern car culture. Though the author devotes considerable space to developments in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, his research also includes Australia, China, Japan, the former Eastern Bloc, and several East Asian countries. The most interesting dynamic at play is the shift Book Reviews 141 in antiautomobile feelings among social groups—peasants often had a negative view of early automobiles, which they sometimes sabotaged during the country excursions of the rich, especially in Europe. The development of Fordism, however, helped create the belief that car ownership was for everyone, democratizing this issue and undercutting much of the antiautomobile sentiment voiced by the working class, because cars offered the prospect of mass mobility. By the 1950s intellectuals had become the most vocal critics of the car. By the time of the freeway revolts of the 1960s and 1970s, which pitted defenders of neighborhoods in the path of construction against road builders and their allies, a clear polarization along political lines had developed. Conservatives championed the “democratic populism” that unfettered mobility by automobile embodied against urbanist “intellectuals” and neighborhood activists who touted the virtues of localism. Unfortunately, Ladd does not place the increased politicization of this struggle between the two views of automobility within the context of the growing polarization of American politics, the culture wars, or the rise of the “New Right.” In the latter half of Autophobia the author explains the effect of automobiles and roads on cities and society as a whole, discussing particularly the demise of public transportation and the course of freeway revolts. Ladd attempts to reach a middle ground, but ultimately he concludes that a consensus between the proponents of unlimited automobility and their critics is not possible. His discussion of induced traffic is extremely well done and offers a clear analysis of how road construction increases automobile use. Perhaps Ladd’s greatest contribution to this subject is his incorporation of path-dependence theory to explain the persistence and expansion of car ownership, arguing that automobility results from a few key governmental decisions and infinite individual choices. This raises the question of whether deviations from a path-dependent course, as demanded by automobile critics, are even possible. In this regard Morris L. Bian’s...