99% Invisible - 76- The Modern Moloch

Episode Date: April 4, 2013

On the streets of early 20th Century America, nothing moved faster than 10 miles per hour. Responsible parents would tell their children, “Go outside, and play in the streets. All day.” And then the automobile happened. And then automobiles began … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. If you live in an American city and you walk outside to a major intersection and look into the streets, you know what you'll see. You'll see cars and trucks and buses. You might see a few bicycles trying to sneak their way through the traffic. What you won't see are people, not in the street anyway. Maybe on the sidewalk waiting for their turn to cross and then crossing quickly, hurrying to get out of the way so that the cars can get going again.

In recent times, some of us have come to think the city streets shouldn't just be for cars and trucks. That cars take up too much space and release too much carbon. Just to move a couple of people a short distance. But even those anti-car haters, and I am one, we know the streets belong to our enemy. We look both ways before crossing. We don't let our children play in the streets. We might sometimes jaywalk across the street at the wrong place her time, but we know in our heart of hearts we're in the wrong.

Scott Flos. That's our reporter, Jesse Duges. Because I actually love cars, but just I just don't think they make sense in the city. And this is a story about J-walking. Where that word J-walking came from, and how it was a weapon and a turf war between the people who wanted cars in the streets, and everybody else, you can probably guess who won. Alright, there's a wonderful cartoon in the St. Louis Post dispatch from 1923. It's called the Modern Malok, and Malok was a deity of the Ammonites. And this is Peter Norton, a historian at the University of Virginia who studies city

streets. Malok was a deity to whom the Ammonite sacrificed their own children in return for prosperity. What an image for what the car was because the idea is that you were sacrificing our children in the name of modern technology. According to Peter Norton, there was a time in the 1920s when it looked like public opinion was against having cars in the streets. In this particular cartoon, you see a driver kneeling at an altar, which is the front grill of a car, with a huge bowl full of the corpses of children, offering it up to the

mouth of this machine beast as a sacrifice. It's a very striking cartoon. And it may seem a little bizarre to us today until you recognize that this thing was killing thousands of children every year. Ah! So that was 1923, 90 years ago. But to understand why cars were being compared

to a child eating God, we've gotta go back a few more years. And so if you went back 110 years, I think you'd be amazed to see people just strolling right into the street, any place, any time, sure they'll look, but not very carefully. At the turn of the century, there was nothing moving faster than about 5 or 10 miles an hour in the street. Responsible parents would say to their children, go outside and play in the streets all day. Even after the first cars appeared in the cities, right around 1900, they had to conform to the customs of the day, which meant that traffic moved slowly.

There's wonderful video, like 1905 people walking down Market Street in San Francisco before the earthquake and people are just striding right in wherever they want to go. Children, people carrying you know boards of wood, people going about their business. It's not to say that the street off of the sidewalks for everybody because people prefer the sidewalk. It's not to say that the street off of the sidewalks for everybody because people prefer the sidewalk, it's drier, it's cleaner, it's got less horse manure. And there weren't even really many rules about what you could do or not do. People are solving problems the way they solve problems when you're walking in a crowded hallway, like, you know, in a school building between classes and you have huge crowd of

kids or something trying to find their way. And they start to figure stuff out like, you know, usually keep right while you're walking. There's not like a law, you know, but there's an understanding. You go that way, I'll go this way, I'll keep it right. I'll get that guys. I'm going to go to the right. I'll go to the left.

What are you from England? And I think the closest thing we have to that now is a city park, or maybe a pedestrian mall. You go to a city park and you're mostly guided by understandings, understandings like you can use the park for whatever you want provided. You don't endanger other people. You don't break the law and you don't make a nuisance out

of yourself. And then you're pretty much okay. And it's a lot like that in streets. But by 1922 things changed. For one, cities in America were filling up with people. This was right in the midst of the industrial revolution when Americans were leaving farms to move to cities to work in factories

or maybe in the middle class of their lucky. So the streets were starting to get more crowded. You've probably heard of the other big change, the Model T Ford, the first affordable automobile, introduced in 1908, mass produced in 1913. Price is just falling every year by 1920, a new Model T without any extras, you could get for $300.

And this is really now in the reach of the working class, the people who make the Ford Model T can afford to buy it. That was a principal dear to the heart of Henry Ford. So by the 1920s, cities are crowding with people. And these people are buying cars and driving cars in the streets. Drivers don't want to drive five or 10 or 15 miles an hour. The speed at which street traffic is moved for decades,

they want to drive faster. And the pedestrians and children still linger in the streets, walking casually like its 1906 and every year more people are killed in automobile accidents. The fatalities are rising and you can watch the curve, you know, it's like climbing a mountain. You're just going uphill the whole way. By 1923, you've got about 17, 18,000 people a year being killed by motor vehicles. Three-quarters of those people are pedestrians. And half of the pedestrians killed in the cities are children, under the age of 16. And as far as the public is concerned, it's almost like they died in a war.

Parades are held in dozens of cities to commemorate the dead children. Monuments are built. Mothers of children killed in the streets are given a special white star to honor their laws. And that's why in 1923, we see a cartoon comparing the automobile to Malaq, a god who demands the sacrifice of children for prosperity.

And we get lots of newspaper articles and editorials saying this blood bath has to end, and almost all of them blame the deaths on the automobile, like this from the New York Times. The horrors of war appear to be less appalling than the horrors of peace. The automobile looms up as a far more destructive mechanism than the machine gun. The reckless motorist deals more death than the artilleryman. The man in the street seems less safe than the man in the trench. The greatest single lethal factor is the automobile. It left shambles in its wake as a course to through 1923.

The New York Times of 23rd, 1924. In cities begin to think seriously about restricting the use of cars in the cities. City managers look at outlawing curb parking or forcing cars to make right-angle turns around obstacles and intersections so they have to slow to a crawl. Now by 1923, a whole cottage industry has grown up around the automobile. There are the manufacturers, of course, but also the dealers who have been making a lot of money in the last few years. And there are motor clubs, which were precursors to AAA and make a lot of money selling

memberships. So, according to Peter Norton, there's a moment when all of these interests start to worry the city laws are going to make it so nobody in the city would want to buy a car and have a collective, oh crap moment. Oh, that's really clear. It's really sharp. The oh crap moment is November 1923. I love that. So what happened then?

All right. So Cincinnati residents got a referendum on the ballot to be voted on in November for a speed governor a device built into the engine that would require cars to be equipped with one that would limit them to 25 miles an hour and once the speed governor was there it had a police seal on it if you tampered with it you were in violation of the law. This had lots of popular support. We know 40,000 signatures on petitions. You know, can't swear that they were all real people or so on, but they were 40,000 signatures on the petitions. They had newspaper advertisements saying, vote yes on this. This really woke up people who wanted a future for cars and cities. They were worried that if cities had laws that restricted the use of cars, the people would stop buying them, not for public transportation instead. Cars would be relegated to the countryside where fewer and fewer people lived every year.

And this group of interests got organized, and even gave themselves a name. They call themselves Motordom. Motordom. Actually, that sounds pretty benign to my ears. Anyway. And they start to make distinctions between what they want and what the other safety advocates wanted. So, you start to see, like, in the Cincinnati inquireer, which was sort of a mouthpiece for the auto industry in Cincinnati, they ran a huge amount of their advertising was from auto dealers. The Cincinnati inquirer at one point says the cause of accidents is men not machines.

In other words, cars don't kill people. People kill people, which is reminiscent of an NRA motto that's been around for quite some time. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. It's the same basic idea. You can exonerate the machine if you blame the driver. It wasn't so much about blaming the driver. It was about promoting a subtle but super important distinction. The cause of accidents and deaths and children dying wasn't cars or speed. It was recklessness. Cars could be perfectly safe in the streets. They belonged on the streets. And the beauty of recklessness. Cars could be perfectly safe in the streets. They belonged on the streets.

And the beauty of recklessness is that you could also be a reckless pedestrian. This is really important. What Moderna did by suggesting that pedestrians could be reckless could be the cause of accidents with start a turf war. A street fight. The Ocrap moment in 1923 creates a clear sense in

Moderna that they have to change the problem from how do we control cars and drivers into how do we make streets places where cars belong and where pedestrians don't belong. Moderna needed to market the idea that accidents could be the result of reckless pedestrians, and even that there was such a thing as reckless pedestrians, which people weren't ready to accept yet. One judge in particular angrily denounced the idea that you could ever have such a thing

as a reckless pedestrian. So to sell the idea of reckless pedestrians, Moderna invented a new word, J-Walking. Well, actually, they didn't invent it. Moderna repurposed a word that had been kicking around for a couple of decades. They transformed it from a slaying insult to a legal term. In the 1910s, J, J-A-Y, was a word for country bumpkin.

Therefore, a J-Walker is somebody who walks around the city like a J from the sticks. Well, the first actually clear illustration of what the word means that I found is from Kansas City 1911 and there it's describing, and they actually have a cartoon that shows a J Walker. They're describing the J Walker there as exactly that, the person from the countryside who's in the big city and is so dazzled by the show windows, the lights, the tall buildings, the salesmen and so on, that as they're walking on the sidewalk they're constantly stopping to look and thereby obstructing other pedestrians. So their J. Walker is really a nuisance

to other pedestrians. So Moderna took this word that had meant a kind of annoying pedestrian and gave it a new meaning, a pedestrian who breaks the traffic rules, who enters the streets in the wrong place or at the wrong time. They did this by publishing editorials about J-Walking. Auto clubs and auto dealers got boy scouts in a number of cities to hand out little cards that would say something like, did you know you were J-walking? And we know that people don't know what the word meant because it was carefully explained on the card with diagrams and information. And at first the efforts to get people to stop doing

something they had done for decades just didn't work. There was even an incident where according to a newspaper, women struck police officers with their parasols for trying to control how they crossed the street. The lesson for Moderdum was, you can't do this by law. But finally, Moderdum hit upon a winning strategy, devised by... E.B. Leperts. E.B. Leperts. Enemy of J. Walker's everywhere.

He was the head of the automobile club of Southern California, and I think he was ahead of his time a real public relations genius, a guy who realized before most others did that you can't just change behavior by punishing people and putting laws up. You have to reach them through psychology. Leffert's created a PR campaign in Los Angeles explaining what J-walking was, and he helped get an anti-J-walking ordinance passed in 1924. But here's the really clever part. He told the police not to arrest J-walkers. Leffert's wanted the police officer not to arrest the J-Walker, which would only

make the J-Walker indignant, but to attract ridicule. And he uses the word ridicule. Oh, it's a damp and a traffic. Not just pop over to the drugists for some cannabis. Here we are. Hey you, out of the street, don't you realize you're Jay Walker? Hey, Jay Walker! What a joke, what me?

Jay Walker? Oh, my mother think! Lefferts wanted the pedestrian ridiculed as a form of psychological control. And to Lefferts, it was more important that the onlookers see this person being ridiculed than that you actually convert this individual to correct crossing behavior. The onlookers are going to witness this ridicule and think, I don't want to get that ridicule so I'm going to cross carefully.

That's fiendishly clever. Yeah. It's a little hard to relate to now, because J. Walker is sort of a benign word, like loitering, but in 1920s America, it was a real term of abuse, and actually several judges and newspaper editors objected to the use of such an insulting term for pedestrians.

It carried the connotation of idiot. I think if you were trying to sort of have a public safety campaign that involved calling people idiots, you would find a similar kind of reaction today. You know, people would really object to that. Or imagine something even more contemporary. Oh, it's a damp and a traffic. Not just pop over to the drugist for some cannabis. Here we are. Hey you, out of the street, don't you realize you douchebagging? What did you show me? What me? A douchebag? What would my mother think? The thing is, the ridicule worked. Newspaper reports show that just after a few weeks, pedestrians in LA got the message,

and the streets were cleared for cars. Peter Norton says, Moderna could declare victory by 1929. Coincidentally, or maybe not so coincidentally, this was the year the first clover leaf interchange was built in the United States, cementing the country's future with automobile. Incidentally, that's around the time that you find that people stop objecting to the term J-Walker, including J-Walkers themselves, and you know, judges are no longer resisting that. And new city streets are built with cars in mind. The streets get wider to accommodate more cars. New businesses are required to provide parking lots. Crosswalks become compulsory, and cities start building expressways to make it easier to get cars in and out of cities.

And it's worth thinking a moment to reflect on how this story has been told. Uh, George Orwell explained that, uh, history is written by the winners because in writing the history, you justify yourself. So a history of the automobile has been written not by any single individual, but collectively over time, that predominantly is a winner's history of the automobile. And that's the history that says this was inevitable, and it has to do with America's love affair with the automobile. And those early years it hardly seemed that America had a consuming passion for the automobile. It certainly wasn't love at first sight. In fact, you know what, Facebook and to make the car popular? The same thing that made some girls popular.

They got a reputation for being fast. In 1961 there was a TV program called the DuPont Show of the Week, which represented itself as a documentary TV show. And DuPont at that time had a one-third interest in general motors, so the two companies had a lot in common. And so they wrote an episode called Marily We Roll Along, which was a history of the automobile in the United States. They got groucho marks to host it, and in this show, groucho marks introduced Americans to

the thesis we've all heard, which is that there's an American love affair with the automobile. We sang blively about automobubbling through life together together and started out on the long honeymoon with our new sweetheart If he had any fault, it was a slight crankiness So um that's the love affair thesis and the genius of it is that by saying we have a love affair with the car We are saying that our relationship is irrational and not subject to logical judgment that a relationship is irrational and not subject to logical judgment. If that isn't marriage, I don't know what is. We've been through two wars together in a depression. She's carried us through the air age and into the atomic age.

Wherever we're headed now, it'll be in something like this. It may be nuclear power, radar control, gyroro state and vitamin enriched. But it'll have license plates from the back, headlights and a horn, and once in a while we'll still have to get out and give it a shove. So, merrily we roll along. And even critics of cars, including me, we've bought into this idea of an American love affair with the automobile. Because the critics of the automobile could say, you know, look, this love affair, this

cultural attachment we have to the automobiles, the problem, which completely distracted them from the fact that the actual story of the transformation of the 1920s was a lot more complicated, and in fact involved a lot of hate of the car. I mean, you see real demonization of the car in the 20s that's been totally forgotten. Nobody remembers the memorials to the car. Nobody remembers the monuments, nobody remembers the parades with Satan driving a Model T, nobody remembers the cartoons, the editorial cartoons that routinely compared cars to the Grim Reaper and Milwaukee and Juggernaut and all that. And it's true that Americans love cars. But part of the reason we love cars so much is our cities have been rebuilt with cars in mind.

We have parking, we have expressways, we don't have a lot of pedestrians getting in our way and slowing us down, and it may be changing, but for the moment, we still seem to like it that way. [♪ Music Invisible was produced this week by Jesse Duke's Sam Greenspan and me Roman Mars. Special thanks to the Snap Judgment radio players for their mad historical and not-so historical, re-enacting skills, Pat Misee de Miller, Nick Vanderkulk, Anasusman, Stephanie Foo, Julia DeWitt, and Will Urbina.

You guys listening to this all, listen to Snap Judgment, right? Of course you do. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco, and the American Institute of Architects in San Francisco. You can find 99% invisible on Facebook. I tweet at Roman Mars, but we'll have the modern malloc cartoon of fascinating film of Market Street before the J-walking taboo, and a link to the video of Groucho Shilling Radio tapio. From PRX.