Life of Automobile, The
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By the mid-1920s, cheap cars like the Model T, the Austin Seven and the Peugeot Quadrillette had made motoring available to all. The age of the aristocratic ‘touring’ car, with its open body, was over; now customers expected closed-body saloons, or sedans, designed for everyday wear and tear, whatever the weather. Pre-1914 automobiles often could not bear the weight that closed bodies imposed, as their engines were simply too weak to drive the resultant burden. But more efficient postwar engines made the closed body possible, while improved steel-casting methods, which enabled larger pieces of steel to be supplied to the world’s car makers, allowed saloons’ glasshouses (the car’s window area) to get bigger and bigger. The car of the twenties had come a long way from its carriage-based ancestors.
The car was now more than a luxury; it was an essential form of transport and an incarnation of freedom, equality and escape. It also offered individual independence; after the carnage of the First World War advertisers promoted the ‘joy of the open road’ and, as Motor headlined in July 1919, ‘Freedom Regained’. Two weeks after the Armistice of 11 November 1918, both themes were combined in Light Car and Cyclecar magazine,1 which pictured a woman driving a car ‘Out of the Fog of War into the Light of Peace’.
The car additionally revolutionized holidays – indeed, it almost created them. Vermont was a quiet, remote backwater until the car and its highway came along. In 1911 the Vermont Bureau of Publicity began marketing the state to motorists not just for ‘leaf-peeping’ in the fall but also for the newly popular sport of skiing. Ski resorts and summer camps opened near to the new highways, and 1928 saw the opening of the 262 mile Green Mountain hiking trail, a long walkers’ path whose devotees invariably came by car. In the early 1920s roadside cabins and camps of the sort immortalized in Frank Capra’s 1934 hit film It Happened One Night began to appear all over America, soon to be followed by more sophisticated accommodation. The motel first appeared in California and France in the mid-1920s; the first ‘mo-tel’ surfacing in San Luis Obispo, California, in 1926, while the Halte-Relais Hôtel was unveiled at the 1925 Paris Exposition. Cars also fuelled the interwar craze for ‘auto-camping’, camping by tent or (preferably) wheeled caravan in once remote sites which were suddenly accessible by car. Henry Ford himself was an enthusiastic auto-camper, as was President Warren Harding. Harding’s FBI chief, J. Edgar Hoover, though, condemned the new cabin camps as ‘camouflaged brothels’. By 1929, despite Hoover’s reservations, 45 million Americans were driving to their holiday destinations each year.
By the early 1930s the car had irrevocably changed the way we live. The first drive-in restaurant, Royce Hailey’s Pig Stand, opened in Dallas, Texas, in 1921. The first drive-in movie theatre followed in 1933, at Camden, New Jersey; the site could fit four hundred cars in seven inclined rows, to watch a screen measuring 40 × 50 feet. In 1922 the world’s first car-dependent shopping mall was built outside Kansas City, Missouri – optimistically called the Country Club Plaza. And the first modern-style, self-contained suburban mall appeared in 1931 in Highland Park, Dallas.
At home, garages began to be incorporated into the architectural shell. Le Corbusier’s famous modernist villas of the 1920s, such as his Villa Stein of 1927, gave lots of space and much visual prominence to garages which were now sited at the front, rather than the side or rear, of the home.1 By 1935 progressive architects were designing homes with integrated garages in the modernist idiom, with Le Corbusier-style pilotis screening the ground-floor parking area. But these car-oriented homes did not have to be modernist in conception. C. W. Stephenson’s neo-Georgian ‘motorcentric’ house, built in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1935 by architects Adams and Prentice, gave over the whole, five-bay ground floor to garages; visitors had to ascend a staircase to reach the main rooms. For those who could not afford a garage integrated into the fabric of their house, in 1925 the auto manufacturer William Morris offered two versions of a prefabricated asbestos garage, while in 1928 the US manual Home Builders illustrated sixty different types of free-standing garage.
While individuals began to contemplate adding a garage to their home, cities began to invest in concrete multi-storey car parks, bulldozing whole blocks to accommodate these vast and ungainly edifices. London’s first multi-storey car park arrived in 1906, in Soho’s Wardour Street, and rose to five floors; it was subsequently advertised at the fifth international motor exhibition as ‘The Largest Garage in yhe World’. Hotels, too, began to erect garages at the side or rear, often on the footprint of the stable area. Underground car parks followed in the 1930s; Britain’s first was not in London, but in seaside Hastings, in 1931.
Hydrocarbon man also changed the landscape of whole continents. The creation of suburbs accelerated in the 1920s as the vast increase in car use made downtown living seem irrelevant, cramped and dirty. By 1940 there were 13 million Americans living in car-dependent suburban communities with no form of public transport. Ribbon development linked communities, filling stations and motels along newly widened highways. And suburbs grew exponentially, especially in America. During the 1920s the upmarket Beverly Hills suburb of Los Angeles grew by a phenomenal 2,480 per cent, while its equivalents in Detroit, Grosse Point Park and Ferndale, grew by 725 and 690 per cent, respectively.
Filling stations were a particularly intrusive feature in the cityscape or countryside. Before the First World War, most motorists had carried spare supplies of petrol with them in large cans. By 1910, however, the first kerbside petrol pumps had appeared in the US. In Britain, the first kerbside pumps were installed in Shrewsbury in 1915 by the American pump manufacturers S. F. Bowser & Co., and the first filling station was built at Aldermaston in Berkshire in 1919. Postwar, the Automobile Association opened ten filling stations across the country, each with a Bowser pump and a 500 gallon underground tank. Other entrepreneurs followed with filling stations in urban locations, often with multiple pumps, and in 1921 the oil giant Shell started erecting its own pumps. And in 1924 came the first combined garage-cum-showrooms. (The first built in Britain, the Blue Bird Motor Co. Filling Station of 1926, on London’s King’s Road, still survives, albeit converted into a restaurant and shop.) By 1929 there were over fifty-five thousand filling stations in Britain, with local authorities now empowered to prohibit them in sensitive areas.
These early installations were invariably phrased in comforting architectural idioms to reassure the motorist. Early urban examples were often designed in a stripped classical style, while British rural stations of the 1920s and 30s were sometimes thatched, despite the obvious risk of fire. In 1928 the British government passed the Petroleum (Consolidation) Act, which attempted to regulate the design and signage of filling stations in locations of historic importance, but no other nations followed suit. But in 1931 the Royal Institute of British Architects was still warning of the need to ‘keep hold on future developments’, citing the ‘many awful examples already existing’ of petrol stations and parking garages. In 1933 Bowser offered a service to design and equip oil companies with a ‘typical filling station’, which was invariably phrased in a vaguely modernist-cum-Art Deco (‘Moderne’) style. By 1939 filling stations were being incorporated into new residential blocks in urban areas.
America’s landscape, too, was by 1930 littered with filling stations (or ‘service stations’, as they were called west of the Rockies). The first multi-pump ‘super station’ opened in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921, by which year the US boasted about twelve thousand gas stations. During the 1920s, first Shell and then the other major oil companies standardized their filling stations, plastering them with existing or newly contrived brand logos, from Shell’s eponymous and ubiquitous crustacean (invented in 1930) to Sinclair Oil’s improbable brontosaurus. Service stations now offered free oil and water checks – although employees were forbidden to comment on other aspects of the car’s mechanics, for fear of litigation.
Oil companies began to promote motor tourism as a way of increasing their sales. In Britain, Shell was especial
ly active, launching its ‘See Britain First – On Shell’ pamphlet and poster campaign from 1925. The company followed this with ‘Everywhere You Go’ and ‘Visit Britain’s Landmarks’ in the 1930s, and commissioned poster designs from the leading artists of the day, from Edward McKnight Kauffer and Rex Whistler to Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland. In 1934 the firm launched the first of its Shell Guides to the cultural highlights of Britain’s counties: John Betjeman’s Cornwall. Not everyone was happy with the proliferation of the automobile, however; many agreed with the premise of C. E. M. Joad’s The Horrors of the Countryside of 1931, in which he described in passionate detail how motorists, ‘in no frame of mind for aesthetic enjoyment’, were ruining the English landscape.
Automobile production also created the world’s first ‘motor cities’: Detroit and Coventry. Detroit had been founded by the French at the dawn of the eighteenth century, as Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit. Appropriated by the British in 1760, during the Seven Years War of 1756–63, its name was shortened to Detroit. Its fertile soil made it an agricultural centre, the Great Lakes had an abundance of fish, and its position on the Great Lakes made it a strategic strongpoint. As a result, when the USA won its independence in 1783 the British clung on to Detroit, which was only occupied by American troops in 1796 (and then briefly recaptured by the British in 1812). In the nineteenth century Detroit developed as a centre for mechanical trades, fed by the newly built Erie Canal which linked the Great Lakes to New York. From 1847 until the 1880s the Detroit area led the world in copper production, boasted the largest seed company in the world (D. M. Ferry), and was a major exporter of lead and salt. In 1896 the first refrigerated railcar was made in Detroit, enabling meat and other perishables to be transported across the continent. By 1890 it had become the tenth largest city in the US, and by 1920 the third largest. By 1900 it had also become notorious for the unscrupulous activities of the Employers’ Association of Detroit, whose strike-breaking and union infiltration activities had encouraged a number of companies suffering from labour trouble to relocate to the city; one of these was the Packard Motor Company, which left Warren, Ohio, for Detroit in 1903. Already playing host to a large number of diverse small-scale industrial enterprises, the city was well equipped to offer the embryonic auto industry the cheap, skilled labour and machine shops it needed. It also offered good water transport for the import of coal and iron ore. There was, however, an element of coincidence in Detroit’s establishment as America’s – and the world’s – Motor City: it just happened that most of the early pioneers of the US motor industry, men like Ford, Durant and Leland, either came from or moved to the city. During the 1920s and 30s black workers migrated to Detroit from the impoverished South, attracted by the high wages and steady jobs being offered by Ford and his competitors. By 1922, the year Berry Gordy’s parents made the journey, 3,500 per month were making the trek to Michigan.1
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The role of advertising in selling cars became something that few car makers could afford to ignore by the mid-1920s. Posters and print advertisements were soon supplemented by newer forms of marketing, such as in-house magazines and billboards. And in America, Edward (‘Ned’) Jordan broke the advertising mould when in June 1923 he produced his Saturday Evening Post ad for his (rather unfortunately named) Playboy car:
SOMEWHERE west of Laramie there’s a bronco-busting, steer-roping girl who knows what I’m talking about. She can tell what a sassy pony, that’s a cross between greased lighting and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel and action when he’s going high, wide and handsome. The truth is – the Playboy was built for her. Built for the lass whose face is brown with the sun when the day is done of revel and romp and race. She loves the cross of the wild and the tame. There’s a savor of links about that car – of laughter and lilt and light – a hint of old loves – and saddle and quirt. It’s a brawny thing – yet a graceful thing for the sweep o’ the Avenue. Step into the Playboy when the hour grows dull with things gone dead and stale. Then start for the land of real living with the spirit of the lass who rides, lean and rangy, into the red horizon of a Wyoming twilight.
Sadly for Jordan, few customers wanted to join the lean and rangy lass in the Wyoming twilight. In this case advertising definitely did not work: sales actually fell after this press promotion appeared. Jordan’s company managed to survive through the 1920s, but failed to survive the Depression and collapsed in 1931. Jordan himself descended into alcoholism and was abandoned by his wife. After a stint as an advertising executive on New York’s Madison Avenue, he sought redemption in the rum-fuelled bars of the West Indies. But his revolutionary new approach to promotional copy changed automobile advertising for ever.
In 1922 William Durant astutely predicted that ‘most of us will live to see this whole country covered with a network of motor highways’. Yet twenty years earlier that prophecy would have seemed like the words of a madman. In most places around the globe the car was unable to go fast, owing to the appalling state of the roads, which had been designed for slow horse and carriage traffic. France was the only country in the world with a network of properly metalled roads; everywhere else, the first automobiles had to battle with mud, rocks and tree stumps. In 1903 less than 10 per cent of roads in the US were paved.
America, at least, was quick to recognize the deficiencies of its primitive road network. In 1913 work was begun on the Californian end of the first modern American road, the National Old Trails Highway, later to metamorphose into the National Trails Highway and, more famously, US Route 66 – the legendary east–west route which was brutally removed from the map by the automata at the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials in 1985. The same year also saw the launch of the Lincoln Highway, an ambitious scheme to create the nation’s first ‘high-speed’ road, connecting New York and San Francisco via fourteen states, 128 counties and over seven hundred communities. The man behind the Lincoln Highway was automotive pioneer Carl Fisher, manufacturer of the Prest-O-Lite carbide-gas headlights used on most early cars, who also opened what was possibly the first car dealership in America (in Indianapolis) and was one of the principal investors in the Indianapolis motor racing track. Fisher’s high-profile backers included his friend the legendary inventor Thomas Edison, former US president Theodore Roosevelt, and the current president, Woodrow Wilson, who was the first occupant of the Oval Office to make frequent personal use of the car.1 With their ostentatious public support, money flowed in and work progressed swiftly. The first section, from Newark, New Jersey, to Jersey City, was opened in December 1913, and by 1924 the highway was largely complete. Fisher had maintained that the Lincoln Highway would ‘stimulate as nothing else could the building of enduring highways everywhere that will not only be a credit to the American people but that will also mean much to American agriculture and American commerce’. In this he was largely proved right; by the mid-1930s (by which time it had been segmented into a confusing numerical array of new federal route designations), the road was popularly known as ‘America’s Highway’. Fisher himself had lost most of his fortune in the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and ended his days as an odd-job man in Miami Beach and, ultimately, as a nightclub owner in Key Largo.
Motoring enthusiast President Wilson supported the first tranche of federal funding for America’s highways, declaring: ‘The happiness, comfort and prosperity of rural life, and the development of the city, are alike conserved by the construction of public highways.’ The Federal Road Aid Act of 1916 offered match-funding to states to build car-friendly roads as part of a $75 million highways package; the states raised their half of the funds through gasoline taxes, which most motorists shrugged off (the majority of car owners were still, at this time, comfortably off).
Highway construction gathered pace after the First World War. In New York the Bronx River Parkway, completed in 1925, was the first highway in the world to offer only limited access, with overpasses eliminating potentially dangerous i
ntersections, and the first, too, to separate the two directions of traffic by a central reservation. Three years later Woodbridge, New Jersey, became the site of the first-ever ‘cloverleaf’ junction. And in 1932 Alfred Sloan of General Motors organized the first National Highway Users Conference, which successfully lobbied Herbert Hoover’s outgoing administration to provide 100 per cent federal funding for new national highways. Hoover did not need much persuading; already, like President Wilson, a big fan of the car, he appointed the president of the Hudson Motor Car Company, Roy D. Chapin, as his last Secretary of Commerce.
America’s highways never stopped growing. Roosevelt’s 1938 Federal Aid Highway Act authorized a feasibility study for a national network of multi-lane, limited access superhighways on the model of the Bronx River Parkway. Before these deliberations had been completed, though, the 160 mile Pennsylvania Turnpike opened, on 1 October 1940, as the world’s first long-distance superhighway. (At the grand opening, two black cats were sent across the drying tarmac as a superstitious precaution before cars were allowed to rush down it.) There were tolls on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, but no speed limits; as in Germany and Italy, you could go as fast as your car could manage. Time magazine described the new road with gushing enthusiasm: ‘A 10-foot centre strip, soon to be hedged with small fire trees, divides the four lanes into two. No signboards mar the way or confuse the eye – its only borders are the misty, pine-edged hillsides of the Alleghenies. Ten smart Esso stations, finished Pennsylvania-Dutch fashion in native wood and stone, specialize in restroom toilet seats sterilized by ultraviolet ray after every use.’ In 1944 the federal government followed Pennsylvania’s example and passed a Highway Act to promote a federally funded network of superhighways, which would henceforward be free, although each state could still build its own toll roads.