ABSTRACT
The photograph in Figure 4.1 was taken in 1902 when cars were still a curiosity in the United States. It shows a man sitting behind the wheel of a Toledo on the edge of the Grand Canyon. There is no road in sight, nor any other sign of human civilization. How he got there is not clear, but the scene conveys an air of normality. It suggests that he simply got in his car and drove there, right to the edge, where he could look out over the vast canyon. His elevated gaze expresses control, power and individuality. In the first decades of the last century, countless Americans must have believed what this picture so vividly suggests: the car provides the freedom to go anywhere whenever you want. The great attraction of the car in the 1920s and 1930s was the idea that people could go places where the railroads could not take them, that they could choose not only their own itinerary, but their own tempo as well. Trains, which had once been praised for their reliability and speed, were now experienced as a coercive rather than a liberating means of transport. The first generation of car travellers considered the slow speed of their car as an advantage, because it enabled them to enjoy the landscape at ease and up close, instead of watching it rushing by from behind the windows of a speeding train. In 1907, the American writer Edith Wharton wrote that the car brought back ‘the romance of travel’ by ‘freeing us from all the compulsions and contacts of the railway, the bondage to fixed hours and the beaten track, the approach to each town through an area of ugliness and desolation created by the railway itself’ (cited in Withey 1997: 335).
