One for the Road: Drunk Driving since 1900

CHAPTER 3 The MADD Mothers Take Charge

In thinking about the rise of MADD and drunk driving activism after 1980, it is tempting to ask why no one aside from J. Marse Grant had previously thought about using the tragic stories of victims—particularly children—to attract public attention and further the cause. This question is, of course, ahistorical. Events occur in a particular historical context. It was not until 1980 that the political and cultural climate was conducive to the angry, moralistic, and media-driven campaign that would, for a brief time, make drunk driving one of the country’s preeminent social issues. The first salvo was fired in Schenectady, New York, in 1978, when journalist Doris Aiken, appalled at the deaths of two children she knew, began Remove Intoxicated Drivers (RID), a grassroots organization devoted to getting drunk drivers off the road. Two years later, Candy Lightner, a California realtor, and Cindi Lamb, a manager for Tupperware in Maryland, both of whom had experienced personal tragedies involving their own children, joined forces as leaders of Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD). Other organizations would form as well, but MADD became the centerpiece for an activism campaign that figuratively dropped a bomb in the previously sedate worlds of drunk driving policy and research. That these new activists were women, mothers, and nonprofessionals in the field made all the difference. The early, heady days of this new crusade would peak in 1982, when President Ronald Reagan condemned the “slaughter” caused by drunk driving and appointed a presidential commission to study the subject. Driving while intoxicated , wrote Newsweek, was a “socially accepted form of murder.”1 True, there chapter three The MADD Mothers Take Charge The MADD Mothers Take Charge 65 would be jostling of the various players and interest groups from the start, and this conflict would intensify over the next decade. But early on, MADD’s powerful and seemingly uncontestable message made it among the best-known and best-loved charities in America. Perhaps the most perceptive insight into drunk driving circa 1970 comes not from MADD but from Mad—Mad magazine, that is. In its 1970 collection Sing Along with Mad, among the song spoofs was one entitled Deck the Bar, to be sung to the tune of Deck the Halls.2 Like any good satire, the spoof contained elements of both hyperbole and truth. Not everyone celebrated Christmas by driving drunk, but lots of people did: Deck the Bars with Xmas drinking Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! See the people all get stinking Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! Though their brains are half corroded Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la, Still, they try to drive home loaded Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! See the busy intersection Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! See them come from all directions Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! See the carnage as they’re meeting Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la. What a novel Xmas greeting Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la! Drunk driving was also seen as inevitable. As one man candidly remarked, “People are going to drink and people are going to drive. And if you’ve gotten to a bar, there is only one way to leave and that’s by your car. I don’t think there is anything that can be done about it. There’s no way that you can help it.”3 But also in 1970, a controversy emerged that demonstrated the growing fragility of the coalition—the National Safety Council (NSC), academic researchers , and the alcohol industry—that had essentially called the shots about drunk driving prevention since the end of Prohibition. It arose from an advertisement in national magazines that seemed to suggest that it was acceptable to drive after having had up to three drinks on an empty stomach. 66 One for the Road The ad was the brainchild of the Licensed Beverage Industries, one of the industry’s public relations groups. In the years after its founding in 1946, the LBI had generally been cautious in its pronouncements about drinking and driving. But by 1970, due in part to Robert Borkenstein’s data ostensibly showing that low BACs were not harmful, it was actively pushing its new slogan “Know your limits” to social drinkers. The full-page ad, which...