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CHAPTER 1
First in America: Coming of Age in Automobiles
In modern America, growing up has meant getting the driver's license, buying, driving, and maybe crashing the first car; the ritual of being picked up for the date and "making out" in the front or back seat; even the pleasures of repairing, customizing, or racing that car. Like so many others, I remember vividly getting my "learner's permit" at fifteen and a half; having to endure my mother's anger when I nervously turned into cross traffic, thinking somehow that I had the right of way; nearly flunking my driver's license test when I knocked down a pole in the parallel-parking portion of the exam, but later enjoying the thrill of driving just a little fast up and down a two-lane country road with "Hey Jude" playing loudly on the radio; and, yes, the embarrassment of rejection when I clumsily took a "back road" with my date to the prom, not too subtly trying to con her into "parking" with me.
The automobile and the teen come together in the transition from the dependency of childhood to the responsibilities, freedoms, and frustrations of adulthood. The car has shaped generations of American teens. So important is this car ride into adulthood that the automobile culture has become a stand-in, a shortcut, in what millions of Americans remember about their coming of age. Around the automobile is often built a romantic nostalgia for youth, especially for men, and even more for white working-class men — a first love of a machine and a first love in it.
This was nearly unique to the United States, a place where by 1930 personal vehicles were mass-produced and quickly passed on to a used-car market, cheap enough for even sixteen-year-olds to buy. Elsewhere, teens walked or took buses or trains. Even in industrial Europe, the lives of youth were confined to family neighborhoods and mass-transit routes. During the Thirties, by contrast, older American teens, except in large cities, were beginning to have access to cars, even if many of those vehicles were beat-up jalopies. Even those down the income scale, especially the white working-class male youth, could own one of these powerful machines.
For those who grew up with automobiles, this appears natural, even matter-of-fact. But it was hardly so before about 1930, and it appears no longer to be so true at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the car was an expensive toy of the rich, and youth was a time of subjection. The idea that teens — especially those from families of farmers, factory workers, and shopkeepers — would have access to, much less possess, these novel, expensive, and powerful machines seemed absurd. No one then considered the possibility that some of these youths would actually transform the look, use, and meaning of the automobile.
In fact, the origins and significance of teen car culture are shrouded in mystery, with practically no mention of them in any of the standard histories of the automobile. And early witnesses almost entirely ignore the subject. Likewise, studies of an emerging teen peer society in and around high schools mention the automobile mostly in passing. Yet the dramatic increase in the number of American teens attending high school from the 1930s created a youth-dominated consumer culture, the center of which was the used automobile. The car and the modern teen experience emerged together; their stories were linked by the confluence of economic and social forces that were particularly American.
The First Cars in the United States
An invention imported from Germany in 1886, the internal-combustion motor vehicle was a plaything of the rich for more than a decade after the Duryea brothers first manufactured it in the United States in 1893. An oft-quoted 1906 comment of the future president, Woodrow Wilson, sums up a common opinion about the car in these early years: "Nothing has spread socialistic feeling in this country more than the use of automobiles. To the countryman they are a picture of arrogance of wealth with all its independence and carelessness." Car prices averaged at $1,784 in 1905, while annual wages averaged about $500. And this mean price included unreliable surrey-type cars (tiller-steered, motor-under-the-seat horseless carriages) as well as more luxurious models costing $4,000 or more. Until the late teens, virtually all cars were purchased with cash. And no doubt Wilson was right that farmers and small-town dwellers were upset when their horses and buggies encountered the new high-end touring cars with protruding front engines that gave the vehicles an aggressive, even sexually alluring appearance. Most of those cars came from the posh parts of town and belonged to well-to-do professionals, merchants, and industrialists who sometimes displayed their wealth and power by parading their fleets of automobiles. Often these "swells" sped along roads designed for horses and wagons, seeming to threaten the lives and limbs of those deprived of the power of internal combustion. And elites in those early years were anxious that the car remain a thing for the privileged; they resented additional traffic and doubted that the hoi polloi had the finances to afford these machines or the temperament to drive them safely. No one anticipated ordinary teens at the wheel.
In the opening years of the twentieth century, Europeans especially identified the automobile with the rich. The car offered the elite machine-driven speed and personal power that contrasted with the lot of those people still stuck in the ancient biological world of the horse and the newer world of the annoyingly crowded and track-dependent railroad. The car symbolized the social superiority of the urban bourgeoisie, and this remained true in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century as the rich pushed for car-friendly roads, often to the disadvantage of those on foot or in horse-drawn wagons. As late as 1962, only 27.3 percent of West German households owned a car.
But the United States took a different course that ultimately made the car a vehicle of mass/individual mobility. It also became a critical prop in the rites of passage to adulthood. After 1905, Henry Ford, among others, sought to expand the market for cars. In the American context, this was almost inevitable. Demand for luxury cars was limited, and competition for selling these vehicles was stiff. More important, given the relatively high disposable household income of average Americans, manufacturers had an incentive to reach out to a broad middle class of consumers. By 1905 this market had already been explored by producers of low-quality, often outdated vehicles (for example, a high-wheeled surrey-type car sold through Sears's catalogs). But these cars were underpowered (some with inefficient chain drives); they lacked suspension and pneumatic tires, and relied on wooden parts that seldom lasted more than a couple of years.
Henry Ford is usually credited with introducing a new type of vehicle: a cheap but sturdy and reliable car in the Model N in 1906 (a fifteen-horsepower runabout) and then the Model T (1908–27), complete with lightweight vanadium steel construction, a forward four-cylinder engine rated at twenty horsepower, a drive shaft, a planetary two-speed transmission, pneumatic tires, a flywheel magneto for electricity, and even acetylene headlamps. It was also very simple. The Model T lacked water, fuel, and oil pumps and a gas gauge; and of course it required manual crank starting and a mastery of tricky controls, which included a "spark advance" lever for starting and an accelerator lever, both of which were mounted on the steering wheel, and three floor pedals: one for first and second gear, a second for reverse, and a third for braking. Its top speed was forty-five miles per hour.
The initial cost of $950 was still out of reach of many farmers and middle-class townspeople. Nevertheless, by 1916 the Model T comprised half of the American car market, largely because of Ford's progressive decrease in the price: $360 that year. By 1927 the cheapest version of the Model T cost merely $290. The secret to this drop in nominal and real price was, of course, the assembly line, fully operative by early 1914 at Ford's Highland Park plant. This innovation eliminated customized and nodal production methods, but was too costly and complex for even the British to implement fully until 1934, at Morris Motors. Lower prices also met a growing middle class. Between 1925 and 1929, average wages were about 60 percent higher in the United States than in Britain, and roughly two and a half times the purchasing power of French workers. The Model T became the car of the "great multitude," in Ford's words, even with only intermittent advertising and without car-company financing.
Not only did the Model T democratize automobility, but in America it was surprisingly easy to drive motor vehicles legally. Despite the power and thus danger of even the earliest cars in the hands of unskilled operators, driver's licenses at first required no testing. In 1904, Milwaukee authorities demanded only that drivers have the use of both arms (and, curiously, that they be eighteen years old). As cars became faster and more plentiful, auto clubs favored stricter rules on licensing to keep incompetent drivers off the road. Still, driving tests came only about 1906, years after being adopted in Europe. As late as 1909 only twelve states required licenses, and there was no regulation in South Dakota until 1954. The car became a symbol of democracy and freedom accessible to many, ultimately even to inexperienced youth.
Car ownership increased dramatically from 1910, shortly after Wilson's unprophetic warning. The ratio of cars to population dropped from 1 to 201 in 1910 to 1 to 5.4 in 1930. Much of this change occurred outside cities as the car's utility became evident and prices decreased. While in 1910 only 17 percent of American farm families owned cars, by 1930, 53 percent of rural households possessed a motor vehicle (half of the 23 million registered that year).
Americans stood out. In 1929 there was one car for every 5.4 Americans, but only one car for every 43 Britons and one for every 335 Italians. In fact, the United States was responsible for 81.6 percent of global production of vehicles in 1927. This American output led to a vast used-car market in the 1930s, despite the Depression, which in turn made the car available to those down the income scale, even teens without rich parents.
Horseless Carriages, Horses, and American Youth
It was not just the quantity of cheap vehicles that paved the way to the kids' car. It was what the automobile meant. The car in America was not a mechanical extension of the luxurious carriage, as it was in Europe, but rather, the successor to the common horse that millions of Americans had long owned and to which they were often introduced at a young age. While in 1904 the Vanderbilts paraded their luxury touring cars at their summer mansions in Newport, just as they had previously shown off their elaborate carriages, a decade later cars were carrying farmers and tradespersons on daily chores, much as country horses had once done. In fact, in 1900 Americans transferred attitudes about their horses to their cars. As historian Steve Gelber notes, the first cars had "horselike willfulness and unreliability," with the need to hand-crank the "temperamental" engine to start it, and the frequency of breakdowns. Moreover, the car, like the horse before it, became an object of personal pride as well as of necessity, especially in the countryside where isolated farms prevailed.
As often noted, by the 1930s, with few and diminished public transportation alternatives for many Americans, the car was a psychological as well as an economic necessity. As the horse had done, the automobile also provided owners with the quintessential display of status and marker of personal economic progress. Prestige and identity came with General Motors's full line of cars that offered a rising scale of vehicles, from the Chevrolet to the Cadillac. Almost everyone could tell the difference between them. The auto promised both mass access and class distinction that simultaneously democratized American life and reinforced a status system.
By 1930, while almost everyone could read the code of car consumption, it was a game played mostly by men. This, too, reinforced the link with the horse. As Gerber notes, in the nineteenth century "men wanted their horse to project a public image of themselves as powerful, knowledgeable and shrewd." And, as in Thorstein Veblen's observation about conspicuous consumption: "A fine horse, like a fine wife, was a public representation of male wealth and power." Still more, the possession and control of cars, like that of horses, gave the man physical dominance. Accordingly, Paul Nystrom wrote in 1919, there was "the pleasure of knowing that the machine beneath him will respond to his touch. There is a sort of enchantment in being able to control so easily a thing so powerful." Men even adapted traditions of horse-trading to the buying and selling of cars, by bargaining and rejecting the fixed-price model of most corporate consumer goods. All this became part of the teen car culture.
Horse culture abided in the car age in still other ways. Despite the technological advance of the internal-combustion engine, the car was often linked to nostalgic dreams of pioneer-era individualism, especially the cowboy on his horse. It was an alternative to the crowd experience and clock- and timetable-watching of train passengers. The auto offered the man freedom of choice and an opportunity "to extend one's control over his physical and social environment," notes the historian James Flink. Especially in an era of corporate conformity and the dehumanized assembly line, the car in the parking lot was a gift of freedom after work. Sitting behind the wheel and a powerful engine gave the same feeling as sitting atop a horse, reins in hand, but with a lot more "horses" in control. As the historian Cotten Seiler observes, the car culture was a throwback to the individualism of the nineteenth century, restoring men's "formerly and naturally authoritative, robust, creative, and mobile traits." Men compensated for a loss of artisan, agricultural, and business skill in an age of salaried employment when they mastered knowledge about and upkeep of their cars. A man at the wheel was the opposite of "the stereotypical ... subservience of women and slaves."
Women (and nonwhite men) challenged all this when they drove cars. But men, and especially males down the power and income scale, tried to hold on to their sense of superiority by making fun of women drivers, despite significant female mastery of early automobiles and their operation. Working-class men, especially, preserved a measure of dignity behind the wheel and under the hood. The car's delivery of power on command was merely the prelude to the ultimate enhancement of the self: the freedom of the "open road," freedom from the constraints of family, neighborhood, work, and even one's own cares.
Yet those feelings (both on the horse and in the car) often were illusory or temporary, especially for the increasingly dependent and insecure worker, clerk, or salesman. Peter Ling defines "motoring as a therapy which adjusted individuals to the strains of modern life while tying the people concerned more tightly to the existing order." This went beyond economics. The ecstasies of motorized power and freedom were countered by the fact that cars crashed (and horses less often did). The need for constraint challenged the promise of speed. As noted by Seiler, automobility offered the semblance of freedom and choice, but only within a tight regime of rules and regulations designed to minimize crashes: the "driving subject moves along grooves created, surveyed, and administered" by a complex apparatus of regulation. Little in daily life is so constrained by laws and so subject to police surveillance and prohibition as is driving a car. American "citizenship," says Seiler, meant both personal liberty and public regulation. And this right of citizenship was defined by the drivers' license.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Machines of Youth"
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