IN THE year 1906 Woodrow Wilson, who was then president of Princeton University, said, “Nothing has spread socialistic feeling in this country more than the automobile,” and added that it offered “a picture of the arrogance of wealth”. Less than twenty years later, two women of Muncie, Indiana, both of whom were managing on small incomes, spoke their minds to investigators gathering facts for that admirable sociological study of an American community, Middletown. Said one, who was the mother of nine children, “We’d rather do without clothes than give up the car.” Said the other, “I’ll go without food before I’ll see us give up the car..’ And elsewhere another housewife, in answer to a comment on the fact that her family owned a car but no bathtub, uttered a fitting theme song for the automobile revolution. “Why,” said she, “you can’t go to town in a bathtub!”
The Automobile Revolution
Published