One for the Road: Drunk Driving since 1900 by Barron H. Lerner (review)

Like the regulatory groups it examines, Barron H. Lerner’s recent book excels when defining the legal, chemical, and punitive aspects of drunk driving. Well written and passionately argued, the text explores how Americans’ historic “love of alcohol, love of driving, and more abstractly, love of freedom and individual liberties” spawned a complex, century-long, and at times self-defeating battle with drunk drivers (2). Lerner samples from a wide range of characters—including medical professionals, policymakers, businesspeople, drunk drivers, victims, and victims’ rights organizations—who populate the book’s many perspectives and who drive the second and most effective half of the study. While the conclusions drawn from his work are frustratingly ambiguous (ironically, not unlike the policy responses that first appeared in the 1920s), Lerner offers perhaps the single best case study to chart the rise and decline of bellwether grass-roots activist organizations like Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD) and Remove Intoxicated Drivers (RID).

Those familiar with the three-E’s of American automotive safety reform—education, engineering, and enforcement—may recognize that Lerner’s work focuses almost exclusively on the last. This decision makes sense given the illegality of intoxicated driving, but produces mixed results. On the one hand, the questions of penalties, jury trials, technological fixes, and policing certainly play an essential role in how Americans understand the perils of impaired driving. While Lerner provides countless examples of the horrific costs associated with this behavior (the reader will read of at least a dozen such incidents by the time they reach Chapter 6, titled “More (and More) Tragedies”), it was the more subtle shifts in enforcement policy that raised the national profile of drunk driving. Facing a rising chorus of protest, beginning in the 1920s, liquor advertisers began to preach moderation, law enforcement sought to identify the “repeat offender,” and medical professionals isolated the blood alcohol content that now defines such willful recklessness. Prohibition and the high-profile deaths of individuals such as Margaret Mitchell—killed by a drunk driver in 1949—pushed what was once considered merely local tragedies onto the national stage. After a cursory survey of the first fifty years of mass automobility, Lerner looks to “the late 1950s” when “the first voices would emerge characterizing the problem of the intoxicated driver as a public health emergency” (37).

Leaving aside the notion that government only “entered the fray” at mid-century, Lerner capably traces the important role that medical technologies—such as breathalyzer and blood alcohol content measurements—played in tipping the balance against impaired driving. Noting that “it would take a much broader cultural transformation—one that saw automobile crashes not as inevitable but as preventable—to enable [such testing laws] to more effectively punish and deter drunk driving,” Lerner devotes the bulk of his text to a close examination of this change (52–53). The broader campaign for automotive safety reform, led by William Haddon, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and, of course, Ralph Nader, midwifed the transformation and produced zero tolerance initiatives that now define our Risk Society. In Chapters 3 and 4, Lerner deftly traces the institutional histories of MADD and RID and gives much-needed emphasis to the role of organizers like Doris Aiken, Cindi Land, and Candy Lightner as well as the institutional powers—such as the U.S. Surgeon General and the National Commission Against Drunk Driving—that aided them. The result was a broader, national debate on the civic responsibilities of driving and a greater public appreciation for the social construction of the problem. Noting that “lawyers, libertarians, and [liquor] lobbies” fought back, Lerner approaches the debate with an open mind and a sophisticated pen, unwilling to name and castigate villains or to accept, unquestioned, the charges of policy reformers. While the text admits that our current culture remains stubbornly indifferent to the tragic loss of life, it clearly lays out the...