ABSTRACT
In the Year 1906 Woodrow Wilson, who was then president of Princeton University, said, “Nothing has spread socialistic feeling in the country more than the automobile,” and added that it offered “a picture of the arrogance of wealth.” When Wilson spoke in 1906, and for years thereafter, the automobile had been a high-hung, noisy vehicle which couldn’t quite make up its mind that it was not an obstreperous variety of carriage. Furthermore, a car was less expensive to maintain than in the days when the cost of successive repairs might mount up to a formidable sum each year. The instalment selling of cars, virtually unknown before World War I, spread so rapidly that by 1925 over three-quarters of all cars, new and old, were being sold this way. The automobile broadened geographical horizons, especially for people who had hitherto considered themselves too poor to travel. The automobile revolution engendered personal pride.
