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The Creation of America's Car Culture

The Creation of America's Car Culture

The War on Cars Nov 11, 2025 29 min
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About this episode

Explore the origins of America's car culture through the eyes of historian Peter Norton, who uncovers how the automobile industry strategically reshaped cities and traffic laws to prioritize cars over pedestrians and public transit. The episode highlights early 20th-century protests against car dangers, the defeat of speed governor laws, and the influential partnership between car salesman Paul Hoffman and traffic expert Miller McClintock. Their efforts transformed urban streets into car-centric spaces, laying the foundation for today's automotive dominance and car-dependent cities.

Topics: history of car culture urban transformation pedestrian rights automobile industry strategy traffic engineering speed governor laws los angeles traffic code paul hoffman miller mcclintock car dependency
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Our Life After Cars tour has taken us to some rainy parts of North America, including the
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This episode was produced with the generous support of the William and Helen Mazer Foundation.
This is the War on Cars.
I'm Doug Gordon.
Sarah and I are on the road for our Life After Cars book tour, which kicked off in New York
just a few weeks ago and has already taken us to San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Seattle
for a show with our friend Ray Delahante of City Nerd, Vancouver, British Columbia, and
even the small city of Nanaimo.
We've had a great time on tour so far, not least of all because we've gotten to
meet so many listeners and readers who are working hard to help their towns and
neighborhoods imagine a life after cars.
As I record this, we are in Portland, Oregon for two events, the Bike Happy Hour with Bike
Portland's Jonathan Mouse and a book reading and talk at Powell's, hosted by Oregon Public
Broadcasting's Lillian Karabaik.
The Bike Happy Hour is free and open to everyone, while the event at Powell's requires
a ticket.
I'm told some are still available, but get yours soon.
It's on the verge of selling out.
You can find more information about these and all of our upcoming events and order the
book, if you haven't already, at LifeAfterCars.com.
For this episode, we're going to hear from producer Alana Strauss, who brings us the
story we mentioned in Life After Cars and goes a little deeper into something that
was new even to me.
It's all about the origins of car culture as we know it today and features friend
to the podcast and University of Virginia historian Peter Norden.
We hope you enjoy it.
Thanks very much to the Helen and William Mazer Foundation, which makes this episode and
a lot of what we do at the War on Cars possible.
And please become a Patreon supporter of the podcast.
You can sign up at patreon.com slash the War on Cars pod.
Thanks.
In 1988, Peter Norden was a graduate student in history at the University of Delaware.
That summer, he took a job at the Historical Society of Delaware in Wilmington, working
in a windowless basement, cataloging old photos and negatives of the city, some a hundred
years old or more.
And I learned from these photographic negatives that it was a city of dense foot traffic,
electric streetcars everywhere.
He saw photos of a bustling city showing the streets of Wilmington full of people, people
walking, people riding bicycles, people riding streetcars.
One day, he left the Historical Society and had what he describes as a surreal experience.
Even though he had walked them hundreds of times before, those Wilmington streets,
they now felt somehow strange and unfamiliar to him.
I was a time traveler traveling to a science fiction future, a maybe a little far-fetched
story where everybody's in a steel box now.
The same streets transformed into a world of surface parking lots, fast cars and no
pedestrians, a beautiful old synagogue, a church, a theater, schools, residences.
All were replaced by surface parking.
I was curious, why did we destroy our own cities to make room for cars?
It seems crazy.
And I really wanted to know why that happened.
Today, most people don't think about how omnipresent cars are.
If they do think about it at all, they assume that Americans allege love affair
with cars was something akin to natural selection, with cars having some sort of
evolutionary advantage that made them win out over bicycles, streetcars and even walking.
After earning his PhD, Peter became a history professor at the University of Virginia
and he turned the question he'd asked himself on those Wilmington streets into a career
obsession determined to uncover the truth about how cars really came to dominate
streets.
And why most people today don't even seem to know the true story.
We remember what we are taught to remember and some of us go beyond what we're taught
and dig, but if you don't dig, you're not going to learn much more about it.
Peter's research brought him back to 1923 in Cincinnati, Ohio.
On autumn day, Marietta D. V. O'Donnell, a 20-year-old singer, took communion and sang
in her church choir.
Afterwards, she left the church and waited for the trolley.
Right at that moment, a thief sped down the street in a stolen car.
The driver struck and killed Marietta and fled the scene.
He made it just two blocks and then crashed into a curb.
Some 2,000 people quickly surrounded the car and threatened to kill the driver.
A policeman finally pulled out his revolver and dispersed the crowd.
This was not an isolated incident.
More Americans died in automobile crashes in the 1920s than died in World War I, an
unprecedented level of carnage that affected people all over the country.
After cars appeared, death and destruction seemed to follow.
As did a lot of outrage.
People took to the streets and staged massive protests against the growing scourge of cars.
This happened in middle class, upper middle class, and working class communities.
It happened in all white communities.
It happened in communities of color.
There was a protest in Queens where they blocked a whole intersection for weeks.
In October 1922, 10,000 children marched through Manhattan to protest crashes.
A procession of open cars carried kids who had been maimed and disabled at the hands
of careless drivers.
Cities erected monuments that looked like war memorials dedicated to the children who
had been killed by automobiles.
And it blew my mind because the message of these monuments was, this is not the
parents fault, this is not the child's fault.
It was a visible, tangible testimony to the view that children have a right to the streets.
And that really took my breath away.
Judges tended to levy harsh sentences and angry words against drivers who harm pedestrians,
especially if those pedestrians were children.
I was then astonished to find court cases that said things like children have a right
to the streets, which, you know, is completely lost today.
Before the rise of cars, streets were for people.
Kids played in the streets, merchants sold products.
There was transportation, sure, street cars, trolleys and wagons.
But for the most part, there was no hierarchy that assumed that anyone had more reason
to be in the street than anyone else.
The pedestrian belongs in the street anytime, anywhere, and has as much of a right to
be in the street as any other street user.
Today, a lot of people assume that the demand for cars came first, and the car industry
merely responded, building the cars, roads and parking to meet that demand.
It was exactly the opposite.
What I kept finding was industry saying, oh no, oh no, people in cities don't want cars.
They think of them as intruders.
They're not buying them.
They're blaming them for everything.
They're restricting them.
And we have no market in urban America, or no big market in urban America, unless we
change that.
By the early 1920s, car sales had actually slowed down.
And this caused a lot of consternation in the auto industry.
All of the companies were wringing their hands saying, a day's coming when everybody
who wants a car will have one, and our only market will be the replacement market.
And that's not good enough.
At the time, there wasn't an organized force within the auto industry to push back.
Marketing, advertising, PR, these weren't really a thing yet.
And motordom, that's the term Peter Norden uses for drivers, automobilemakers and their
allies, had an even bigger problem.
Opponents of cars were starting to get political.
In 1915, Walter F. Pentlarge was driving down a street in Cincinnati when a four-year-old
boy darted onto the street.
Pentlarge hit the boy, who was injured but thankfully survived.
If Pentlarge's actions are any indication, he was deeply affected by the crash.
In 1922, he funded the entire $1,400 budget to start a new committee that would campaign
for something that could stop, or at least reduce, the ability of drivers to harm pedestrians.
Speed governors.
Pentlarge's new committee called for an ordinance that would require every car in the city of
Cincinnati to be equipped with a mechanical device that would make it impossible for
drivers to go faster than 20 miles an hour.
By 1923, the committee had gathered 43,000 signatures from city residents.
That's 10% of the population at the time, more than enough to get the ordinance on the
ballot for an upcoming vote, and to get the attention of MotorDom.
The auto industry groups noticed this proposal and had a total freak out.
I know because I read their conversations.
MotorDom knew that the whole benefit of cars, what makes them better than walking,
cycling, or even horse-drawn carriages, is speed.
So they mounted a campaign of their own to stop the Cincinnati speed governor ordinance
in its tracks.
The campaign to stop the push for speed governors was spearheaded by the Cincinnati Automobile
Club, led by A.E. Middendorf.
Middendorf raised $10,000 and used the money to mail letters to every car owner
in Cincinnati, warning that the proposal was the most vicious ordinance any community
has ever been asked to vote upon.
To influence broader public opinion, the club bought full-page ads and newspapers,
playing on people's fears that speed governors would turn Cincinnati into a backwater.
Or worse.
They invoked the Great Wall of China and said, you're going to make the USA a backward
country just like China, and this will be like a Great Wall because drivers won't
go there.
Yeah, this is very 1920s.
On November 6, 1923, the day of the referendum, Middendorf stationed 400 people at the polls
to buttonhole citizens and pressed them to cast their ballots against the proposal.
When the final vote on Cincinnati speed governor ordinance was tallied, the proposal, which
had started with 43,000 people signing a petition in support of such a measure, ended
in defeat.
Only 13,511 people voted in favor.
More than 86,000 were against.
As Peter Norton says, it was a great day for MotorDom.
I'm sure they were celebrating, there's no question about that.
Emboldened by their success in Cincinnati, MotorDom decided to aim even higher.
They realized that if they wanted to keep sales booming, they'd have to make Americans
need cars.
They just want them, need them, and they set their sights on the burgeoning automobile
capital of the world, Los Angeles.
By the 1920s, traffic in Los Angeles was already a huge problem.
Plus, LA was a street-car town.
Most people didn't need a car to get around.
That presented a big problem for the auto industry, one that would be solved by
a chance encounter between two men.
One was a 32-year-old car salesman named Paul Hoffman, who had made a fortune selling
Studebakers.
And there was something about this guy, he was one of these people who could sell.
By his, really, his mid-20s, he was a millionaire and the company's most successful salesman.
Hoffman became a hugely influential player in LA.
The Los Angeles Traffic Commission, a private group of automobile interests, made him
their new president.
And it was in this role that he understood that solving LA's traffic problem was the
key to selling more cars.
He was interested in a future where cities would welcome drivers, and he was looking
at the long run.
In 1923, Paul Hoffman was at a traffic commission meeting when he met the other man who would
eventually help him remake Los Angeles.
And eventually, the country.
A Harvard grad student named Miller McClintock.
What was really unique about McClintock was he was literally the first person to be studying
street traffic as a motor vehicle problem and not as a street railing problem or a
trucking problem.
Hoffman knew local governments wouldn't listen to the auto industry.
Just because motor dumb had managed to defeat an anti-car law in one city didn't mean
they'd be successful elsewhere.
Hoffman was worried other cities might not listen to the auto industry about the need
to keep traffic moving, but maybe they'd listen to an outsider, someone smart, someone like
Miller McClintock.
And he's like, this is a guy who can write about the traffic situation, not as an
industry person, but as an objective expert, a guy with credentials, a PhD.
He's going to have a PhD soon.
My name's Tom McClintock.
I'm a member of Congress representing the fourth, the district of California.
That's Miller McClintock's grandson, Tom.
Tom was only a few years old when his grandfather passed away, but he remembers him.
One time, his grandfather took him on a walk through the woods with a poodle.
He handed me the leash, which was a very, very high trust he placed in me.
Cookie, the poodle, took off after a squirrel and I held on for dear life as Cookie
dragged me behind him.
And I do remember my grandfather coming up, huffing and puffing and grabbing the
leash and standing me up and dusting me off and saying, okay, now we don't need to
tell your grandmother about this.
As Tom explains it, his grandfather was fascinated by transportation and would travel the
country studying the ways people moved, developing theories about how it all worked.
One of the observations was that transportation is a series of arcs.
It's either an arc over space or an arc over time, acceleration and deceleration or arcs,
turns or arcs.
And that is essentially the shape of transportation.
It's different kinds of arcs in both space and time.
And the importance of traffic engineering was to make those arcs smooth and efficient.
According to family law, he was one of the principal proponents of first separating
opposing flows of traffic, having a uniform set of markers within the transportation system,
basically lanes, and the importance of separating out different kinds of transportation.
Pedestrians needed to be separated from automobiles as well as the horse and buggy,
which he considered to be one of the greatest impediments to traffic efficiency.
I would assume bikes as well.
We're not compatible in the same space as automobiles.
Miller McLendock was born in Nebraska.
As a kid, he excelled at school and eventually went to college where he studied Chaucer.
Here's Peter Norden again.
And then there was some kind of dead end, which one would expect from working on Chaucer.
And he's teaching business English part-time and he has a baby and he's got no job
security and a crummy adjunct job, which is a point of view I could relate to very, very, very well.
Frustrated and at a dead end, Miller moved his family east and enrolled in a doctorate
program at Harvard. There, he chose a new and interesting area of study, traffic.
Traffic engineering did not really exist as a field of study yet.
When he started to study street traffic and he was still an independent scholar,
he was very critical of car domination. He said, this is like turning the city over to a
privileged minority of wealthy people who crowd the curbs with their parked cars and get in
the way of everybody else. In August, 1923, as part of his dissertation, he traveled to
Los Angeles to study the city's already notorious traffic.
He wrote in that dissertation that it would be ridiculous to try to build all of the engineering
that you would need to accommodate all these cars. He also said that it would be a good idea to
forbid parking because that would force people onto more efficient modes of transportation like street
cars. But Paul Hoffman had a different idea. He knew that to keep the market for automobiles growing,
cars needed to move fast. Hoffman and others in Modernum knew that as long as streets were
seen as places for people, then drivers would never be able to have the unfettered access
to them that would ensure more car sales. Even worse, if they ran over and killed people,
they'd get blamed. And that would be very bad for business. Edward J. Marin,
road builder and editor for the Engineering News Record, put it this way.
He says, the obvious solution lies only in a radical revision in our conception of what a
city street is for. So a radical revision in our conception of what a city street is for,
that's an amazing statement. And by that he meant a city street is not for everybody,
which is what it was for. We have to have a city street that is defined as four automobiles.
And that way we can then restrict the use of the street in any way that leads to people
being hit by cars. Above all, this means pedestrian restriction. Hoffman decided that
the only path forward was to convince the city officials that pedestrians needed to be
kept on sidewalks and in crosswalks. For their own safety, of course. So he sent a letter to the
city council saying there was a problem with traffic rules in Los Angeles. There were too many
regulations and many of them contradicted each other. Los Angeles needed a new simplified
code, Hoffman argued. And he offered up the Harvard educated traffic expert,
Miller McClintock, who could come up with a new, better code for free.
McClintock's PhD was not in traffic engineering. It was in municipal government. So there was
some finessing going on. So how did McClintock go from being a guy who was critical car
domination to someone who was willing to work with Hoffman to get pedestrians out of the
way of automobiles? It's actually kind of simple. McClintock was broke.
Hoffman, who was incredibly rich, saw in McClintock somebody who might be willing to
present traffic the way he and Studebaker wanted.
Still, the LA council wasn't interested in Hoffman and McClintock services.
They'd already dealt with plenty of experts and they didn't need another one telling them
what to do. Ignoring the council, Hoffman had McClintock come up with a new traffic code for
Los Angeles anyway. Under McClintock's new code, the idea that everyone had an equal
right to the street was obsolete. In addition to banishing pedestrians to sidewalks and
crosswalks, he proposed eliminating parking downtown during rush hour in order to provide
moving cars more space and requiring the city to post signs explaining the new rules.
Instead of going back to the LA city council, Hoffman and McClintock presented their new code
to auto interest groups who liked what they heard and they let the people in government know it.
The council approved it with a big enough majority to override a veto from the city's mayor,
Georgie Crier. Following the implementation of Hoffman and McClintock's new code, traffic in
LA did start to move faster, so by one measure it was a success. However, in the seven months after
the code was adopted, drivers killed more people than in the same time period the year before.
Outrage over people dying continued but in diminished form. With the traffic moving
better than before and the continued influence of motordom, it became harder and harder for
people to get all that worked up over pedestrian safety or at least for them to find sympathetic
ears in the halls of power. Hoffman's plan had worked. So Hoffman got a lot out of LA and out of
his daring venture with McClintock such that he was promoted directly to vice president of
Studebaker, so he's moving up rapidly. And McClintock understood that his partnership
with Hoffman meant that he could write his own ticket to success.
And Hoffman comes to him and says, I'd like us to work together for the long haul,
and I want you to tell me what you would like from me. Name it. McClintock thinks about it
and says that in his fantasy world he would be the head of his own traffic planning agency.
Everybody's got their own fantasy, so I guess we won't judge that one, but that was his dream job.
Hoffman funded a new traffic research department at UCLA and appointed Miller McClintock to lead it.
After getting things up and running at UCLA, McClintock would eventually move back to Harvard.
That provided an even bigger level of prestige as Hoffman and McClintock
advanced their agenda to take their success in LA and spread it to the rest of the country.
And for another 15 years, Miller McClintock's like, yay, cars, let's do anything to accommodate cars.
Eventually, the duo would convince cities around the country to scrap their existing
traffic codes and replace them with ones that would favor automobiles over transit,
cycling, and walking. It is why if you were to show up in a random city,
in a random state in the USA, you could probably accurately list things that are in the traffic
ordinance of that random city. And that was just the beginning. Hoffman had another idea to share
with Miller. We can't sell cars to some kinds of people who can afford them. People who live
in large cities are not buying cars. Even though people in a place like Chicago
made more money than people in Indianapolis, people in Indianapolis were buying more cars.
Hoffman's research showed that the public transportation in dense Chicago was a lot
better than in the more spread out Indianapolis. So much better than most Chicagoans didn't need cars.
And so what Hoffman said in writing is, wouldn't it be great if we could make
Chicago like Indianapolis? Well, you know what? That's exactly what these people did.
They took the density of cities like Chicago and then rebuilt these cities so that they could
be like Indianapolis. Today, most people don't know who Hoffman and McClintock were,
nor do they know the impact they had on how we get around and who has the right to be on the
road. All they know is that cars dominate. And assume that's just the way things were
meant to be. But Peter knows the history tells a different story. I'm just trying to say that
Americans did not come to a state of being sort of dominated by automobiles thanks to democracy
and the free market. Definitely not. It was corporate strategy. It's not even me arguing
that. The automobile industry itself, in the 20s especially, they said, hey, fellas, if we
don't change the narrative in the newspapers, we're doomed. And sure, plenty of people liked
having cars even back then. But as Peter says, in those early decades, not a whole lot of Americans
ever thought they'd need to have a car. There is ample evidence that they never wanted
car dependency. By that I mean a world where you have to have a car or you can't get to
work. You have to have a car or you can't get groceries or things like that.
Those two guys, Hoffman and McClintock, they took people off the streets.
And it was a real transformation in the city street. And it's the transformation that we all
have lived with since we arrived in this world, the one where we learned from childhood that
the street is for cars, that if you want to walk, you have to essentially defer to cars everywhere,
except in a crosswalk. And even in a crosswalk, you have to be careful. So it's a transformation
that gave us, to a great degree, the automotive city that we have today.
That is it for this episode of The War on Cars. Thanks to producer Alana Straus for bringing us
this story. Special thanks to Willow Belden for her editorial feedback and to Peter Norton
for his research and wisdom. The War on Cars is produced with the generous support
of the Helen and William Mazer Foundation and by listeners like you. Subscribe today
by going to patreon.com slash The War on Cars pod. We also want to shout out our sponsor,
Cleverhood. For 15% off the best rain gear for walking and cycling, visit cleverhood.com
slash war on cars and enter code be a giver at checkout. The supervising producer for this
episode was me. The War on Cars theme music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. I'm Doug Gordon,
and on behalf of my co-host Sarah Goodyear, this is The War on Cars.

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