Order out of chaos: Automobile safety, technology and society, 1925 to 1965.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the way experts in the United States, using the rhetoric of science and the rationale of safety, controlled access to and shaped the character of the automobile and road as a technological system. Mass automobile ownership in the 1920s freed individuals from the tyranny of timetables and the prison of rural isolation. But to many observers, the annual tens of thousands of traffic fatalities and the millions of collisions and injuries were grim evidence that Americans had become too free and were mixing dangerously, including across the lines of race, gender, ethnicity, class, and age. The study centers on four groups of experts: traffic engineers, traffic police, forensic psychiatrists, and driving educators. This network of safety experts established driver control as the cornerstone their effort. Laws governing driver behavior were developed by traffic engineers and enforced by increasingly sophisticated police forces. Police treated traffic transgressions as vice crimes and as the cause of most accidents. Drivers deemed accident-prone were sent to forensic psychiatrists who measured their physical, emotional, and intellectual suitability for road security. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of court clinic records shows that these evaluations were biased against the oldest and youngest drivers, as well as African Americans and the foreign born. The work of early safety experts was instrumental in establishing the belief that imbuing drivers with a proper attitude toward society would reduce collisions. Their Progressive ideology sought to balance individual freedom with social control. Progressive educators therefore used driver education not only to make automobile travel safer but as a powerful tool for adjusting young people to modern life. This study offers further evidence that large-scale technological systems embody the societal outlook of their creators. History shows that safety policy is only partly motivated by lifesaving. It provides a new approach to automotive history which emphasizes both the new freedoms and the new controls brought on by automobility. Finally, it shows that safety policy has been, and still is, controlled by a narrow collection of experts working with a particular view of the relationship between the individual and society.