Chapter 19
In 1900 there were approximately 8,000 cars cruising on the meager patches of paved road available. By some counts, there were at least 100 different brands of horseless carriages, with many costing in excess of $1,000. They were four-wheeled signifiers of wealth then, the way Russian cigarettes with gold filters, private jet timeshares, and kidnap insurance are today.
Exhibitions mirrored this “Mad Max” infrastructure and “Upstairs, Downstairs” class divide. The National League for Good Roads had been founded at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and held its first conference that same year, expanding quickly into a national convention in 1900 in Chicago. By the time of the 1903 National Good Roads Convention in St. Louis, the titular issue exerted such gravity that then-President Theodore Roosevelt and serial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan appeared at the expo, their presence conferring an official benediction on smooth thoroughfares.
(In 1909, the construction industry held its first show in Columbus, Ohio, with 40 exhibitors and about 1,000 attendees. At the time it was considered a hazardous experiment, with some of the exhibitors displaying new and perhaps risky devices that could do the work of 15 horse-drawn carriages. Eventually changing its name to ConExpo and later joining forces with ConAgg in 1996, ConExpo/ConAgg is now the largest trade show in North America, taking place once every three years.)
Still, driving was an automotive Ironman competition with perhaps 1 percent of the nation’s 2,151,570 miles of roads surfaced adequately for cars at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Even then, they were rampant with inclines that would discourage a Sherpa, and, in New York alone, a pungent maze of 450,000 tons of horse manure and 15,000 horse carcasses that had to be swept from the city streets yearly. Accordingly, at the Automobile Club of America’s First Annual Automobile Show, the nation’s earliest car expo in 1900 at New York’s old Madison Square Garden, 69 companies presented 160 vehicles, encircled by a 20-foot-wide track where exhibitors held demos of their cars’ road-handling prowess. (Evolving from an iteration of a bike show called the Cycle and Automobile Exhibition, it would ultimately morph into the New York International Auto Show.) Nearly 48,000 attendees paid 50 cents each to explore steam-, electric-, and gas-powered vehicles—and the derring-do of Joseph McDuffee. McDuffee, issued the country’s first driver’s license and, in due course, the first speeding ticket, tested the brakes and acceleration of the steam-powered Locomobile on a wooden 200-foot outdoor ramp 20 times a day. McDuffee chuffed up the ramp and down, even performing the stunt in reverse, astonishing the onlookers since automobile brakes could rarely effectively halt a car moving backwards.
The vehicles displayed ranged in price from $280 (well more than the half the average annual nonfarm income of $450 to $490) to $4,000. They were, in short, the Hermes bags of the day, a braggable toy and status symbol for the affluent whose newly acquired mobility offered a novel measure of visible wealth. Yet the cars were often driven not by their owners but by their hired help—chauffeurs, the term having derived from the French word “chauffer” in 1899, meaning a “stoker,” a toiler who stirs up the steam-driven engines of early autos. Exhibits at the auto shows like New York’s often placed chauffeurs, dressed in full livery, in model cars to show off their various mechanical virtues.
National Automotive History Collection, Detroit Public Library
These newly minted servants behaved like anything but. Adept at servicing and maintaining malfunction-prone vehicles (an early Cadillac ad promised, “When you buy a Cadillac, you buy a round trip.” Meaning, it didn’t break down at warp speed.), they earned $25 to $50 a week, often doubling their previous salaries or better. In an age before nationwide dealerships and auto repair shops abounded, such a vacuum channeled great power to these transporters. Insolent, impudent, and insubordinate, chauffeurs squeezed kickbacks from garage owners, borrowed their employers’ cars for Edwardian-era hot-rodding, and exhibited a brazen disregard for deferring to their betters. Armed with more practical knowledge of a cutting edge and complicated technology that was running over the world, chauffeurs often treated their employers with the singular contempt that an IT department heaps on middle-aged managers. This tension was elevated into a class skirmish, if not open warfare, and was bronzed as the “chauffeur problem” by the New York Times in its 1906 story, “Chauffeurs Lord It Over Their Employers.” Boiling over with gobsmacked aristos complaining bitterly, the article sounded like an episode of “Downton Abbey” where the help sang “The Internationale” on karaoke night. “My chauffeur acts as though he were conferring an honor upon me in consenting to drive my car,” fumed one patrician. A kind of ventriloquist’s dummy for the upper crust, the article’s author bemoaned that chauffeurs did not appreciate dressing in Third World dictator–style livery, polishing the cars’ brass fixtures, or assisting ladies from their plush car seats to their plusher homes. The crux of the problem, the piece concluded, was that owners “are actually afraid to reprimand [chauffeurs] severely.” As a consequence of this social chaos, the chauffeur “naturally overestimates his own importance.” Kings of the road with their own magazine—the London-published The Chauffeur—these arriviste drivers and their reign of effrontery were fleeting. Ransom Olds and Henry Ford soon mass-produced cars that lowered the prices dramatically and raised mechanical reliability radically, consigning chauffeurs to the vocational limbo of bowling alley pinsetter, and lamplighter.