Last Sunday night, driving back from Scranton, Pa., it was my bad luck to be caught in a crawling, honking, bumper-to-bumper traffic snarl, and I was reminded again of one of the most famous stories ever published in TIME.
At a time when more Americans than ever before are taking to the nation's highways, I am sure you will enjoy re-reading Writer Paul O'Neil's wonderful account of "The Last Traffic Jam" (TIME, Dec. 15, 1947):
In his long and losing war with machines, modern man has devoted almost as much energy to damning newfangled contraptions as he has to inventing them. He has cursed the power loom, the steam locomotive, the Welsbach mantle, the airplane and the electric shaver with a vehemence calculated to deliver whole generations of mankind to the greasiest fry cooks of nether Hell.
But in half a century of blissful selfdelusion, he has failed to perceive that the family automobile is the most monstrous engine of all.
The average U.S. citizen completely ignores the regularity with which the automobile kills him, maims him, embroils him with the law and provides mobile shelter for rakes intent on seducing his daughters. He takes it into his garage as fondly as an Arab leading a prize mare into his tent. He woos it with Simoniz, Prestone, Ethyl and rich lubricants — and goes broke trading it in on something flashier an hour after he has made the last payment on the old one . . .
In some big cities, vast traffic jams never really got untangled from dawn to midnight; the bray of horns, the stink of exhaust fumes, and the crunch of crumpling metal eddied up from them as insistently as the vaporous roar of Niagara. Psychiatrists, peering into these lurching, honking, metallic herds, discovered all sorts of aberrations in the clutch-happy humans behind the steering wheels.
Some fell prey to a great, dull hopelessness. In Manhattan, where it often takes 15 minutes to go a block through trucks, cabs and darting pushcarts, a taxi driver said: "We're beat. We got expressions just like people in Europe. It used to be you could get into a fight, but now even truck drivers take the attitude: 'If you wanna hit me, hit me.' They don't even get out to look at a fender." But more often, people experienced a wild sense of frustration. Said Dr. J. P. Hilton, a Denver psychiatrist: "The driver behind a traffic crawler gets angry. His reason departs. He wants to ram through, to pass, to punish the object of his anger." Did the doctor feel the same way? "And how," he said, and shuddered. "I dream of wide highways and no automobiles —no automobiles at all." But though postwar motorists were gradually becoming horn-blowing neurotics with tendencies toward drinking, cat-kicking and wife-beating, there were few who did not believe that the traffic evil would soon be corrected. This enormous delusion has been a part of U.S. folklore since the day of the linen duster, driving goggles and the high tonneau.