Hell on Wheels: The Promise and Peril of America’s Car Culture, 1900–1940 (review)

Far from being a pure symbol of individualism, the automobile was once the basis for a social contract championing progress and equality. Why did this contract break down? Employing an impressive range of automotive periodicals and archives, Blanke traces the puzzle’s answer to a conflict over the fast-growing incidence of automobile accidents during the first half of the twentieth century. For him, popular belief held at the time that safe driving had to be the individual’s civic achievement, whereas reformers called for common measures instead. This opposition of views excluded any possibility for the citizens to agree with bureaucrats on the collective discipline needed to enhance traffic safety.

Blanke centers his argument not on a chronological frame but on a thematic three-part analysis. He begins by showing how the core characteristics of a widespread “automotive love affair” developed during the early age of the automobile (3). More precisely, he emphasizes that driving quickly became “the standardized test of modernity” in the country (40). This deep-rooted fascination with automobiles plays a central role in Blanke’s story. He argues in Chapter 2 that in the first two decades of the twentieth century, most Americans shared experts’ early belief that a few unsafe drivers caused accidents and had to be removed from the road. In the following chapters, however, Blanke highlights a growing tension between the popular perceptions of safety and that of the reformers. For him, experts’ notion that deviant drivers were symptomatic of deeper “structural problems” led to a rationalization of public intervention (93). As illustrated in the last part of the book, the new plan of action denied concerns about people’s intimate relationship with their automobiles in favor of a proposed universal treatment of the problem. This strategy stymied any emerging social contract between officials and citizens; the bureaucrats effectively subjugated the informal experiences of drivers to the formal necessity to “hold individuals accountable for collective safety” (173).

Blanke’s analysis, however, may overlook the kinds of conflict between pro- and anti-automobile sensibilities that McShane and Norton describe.¹ Scrupulous readers can indeed remain skeptical about Blanke’s reliance on data from prominent pro-automobile lobbying groups to analyze popular fascination with the automobile (47–50). The American Automobile Association, for instance, published reports and statistical analyses not only to describe but also to promote America’s love affair with the automobile, as it appears in other parts of the book (73–74, 169–170). To provide an example, Chapter 2 perfectly documents an important overall growth in car ownership, but it does not explicitly show what diminished the strong resistance to the dissemination of the automobile throughout the country. One can still wonder, therefore, if certain economical forces were instrumental in unifying the popular opposition to the new expertise.² From that perspective, a study of the process of national consensus building against public intervention would have probably given more force to Blanke’s analysis.

Blanke, nevertheless, shows great skill in highlighting that accidents deserve to be treated as a major theme of historical research. His book will undoubtedly raise curiosity and interest about a topic underestimated for too long in American history. Through the history of traffic safety, researchers may indeed discover social perceptions of life and death, as well as their political uses by progressive reformers.