Early Automobiles & Airplanes: The Cultural Lag

Back to  Taft Pages or Bromleyisms

Print-format pdf file available here
(20 pages, with citations; no graphics)

Web slide show derived from this paper
 and the speech  by Michael L. Bromley given to the
 SAH/NAAM Conference at Dayton, Ohio, April 2, 2004

Part I

Popular history is obsessed with "firsts." The nation celebrated the centennial of the flight last December 17, the date now most associated with the Wright brothers. In their day, human flight was a mess of dates, names, events, and types. Not until June of 1909 did America fully and officially proclaim the Wright brothers the authors of flight, and even then December 17, 1903 was largely unknown. With automobiles there is no end of firsts. While the Society of Automotive Historians wisely leaves it at Cugnot’s demonstration of his steam-propelled artillery carriage, I like to think of it as an irrepressible, inner conflict of the old Daimler-Benz company. I will say this: with airplanes, I’m with the Wright brothers. As for automobiles, I’m not so versed as to stand for any one first over another, although I am here to explain that, while the Ford Motor Company celebrated its centennial in 2003, the Ford story didn’t take, as with the Wrights, until 1909.

In October of that year -- a year after Orville first demonstrated the Flyer to the War Department and thousands of amazed Washingtonians -- Wilbur Wright flew up the Hudson River from lower Manhattan to Grant’s Tomb and back, circling the Statue of Liberty and soaring eye-level past the bold skyscrapers of lower New York. A million thrilled spectators caught a glimpse of true flight for the first time. They’d seen it before in balloons, gliders, and news photos, but they never knew what real flying was about. It was the coming out party of the Wrights and their revolutionary machine, and the awakening of America to the wondrous future of powered flight. That same year the new Ford Model T became the best selling automobile in the world. Neither the Wrights nor Ford were doing anything essentially different from before. The Wrights were working with four-year old designs. Ford’s new car was a better car but not an essentially different car from his best-selling automobile of the previous three years. What had changed was that in 1909 the automobile and the aeroplane conquered American culture, having finally overcome an insidious political and cultural bias against the technologies.

Had the Wrights not achieved their later success, they’d be today curiosities, not international heros. That is, the Wright fame is a result of their later rather than earlier success. If December 17, 1903 was all we had for the Wrights, they might have fared better in history than the "lawyer aeronaut," Israel Ludlow and his intrepid pilot, Charles K. Hamilton, but not by much. Back in 1905, Ludlow and Hamilton held, for a time, more fame than the Wrights. Over a few months, the pair brought to New Yorkers flying dreams, jokes -- and little actual flight. With a friend’s 80 HP automobile, Ludlow pulled Hamilton into the air in a kite. I like that reference to the fast automobile: this is 1905, and how many cars sport eighty horses in 1905? If true, which is unlikely, awesome! Following each flight attempt -- and inevitable crash -- came hilarious news reports of such things as how Hamilton and the aeroplane went up together and came down a part. More detailed descriptions of Hamilton’s descents noted a certain uncertainty in his movements. He guided the craft by moving around, much like the German aviation pioneer, Otto Lilienthal, in his gliders of the 1890s, but it seems that Hamilton’s movements more followed than directed the craft. He made it down, though, with Ludlow each time declaring himself closer to real flight. The pair then took the act to the river for more room and to attract the attention of the U.S. Navy, with whom Ludlow wanted a sale. The effort was rewarded only in so far as the Coast Guard rescued Hamilton from drowning. The devoted pilot would come out of the water each time, wet, cold, and ready for another go. He bragged once that he got up some 800 feet, which the press discounted. Whatever the height, the damned thing flew, sort of, and quite high, when pulled by boats and cars.

 

Westside heroes: Charles K. Hamilton in Israel Ludlow's Kite Over New York City, 1905

 

Hamilton and Ludlow next took their acts, independently now, to Ormond (Daytona) beach, where certain automobile trials were going on, and, where, the following year, one amazing steam-powered automobile imitated, for a brief moment, an aeroplane and went skyward at well over one hundred miles an hour. Hamilton hooked up his new glider, which he called "The Arrow" -- a name shared by airships and automobiles -- to a 60 HP automobile. It wasn’t enough. The pull of the wind or the kite or the 800 feet of rope, or Hamilton’s weight, or whatever, yanked the car backwards, and Hamilton plunged 300 feet to the boardwalk. He walked away, exclaiming, "Hang it! I lost my cigar." Another attempt landed him in the surf, unhurt again, after the force of now two cars pulling him broke apart The Arrow. Hamilton, it was said, soon took to drink, and no wonder.

 

 Charles K. Hamilton, June, 1910

 

Ludlow, meanwhile, finally applied the courage of his convictions and took to the air. After a few flights, also pulled by automobiles, he fell some 200 feet and was paralyzed at the waist. Both men remained dedicated to the science, or, in their case, the art, of aviation. Ludlow was prominent in aviation circles and Hamilton ended up in 1910 in the Glen Curtiss organization. To critics, these and similar experiments served only to demonstrate the absurdity of flight. The New York Times, a strong believer in aeroplanes, fretted that Ludlow wasn’t making a good case for the concept. Whatever The Times thought, Ludlow and Hamilton made great heroes of themselves among West Side boydom.

New Yorkers were again treated to an aviation freak show in 1906 when Dr. Julian Thompson tried out his "helecopter" on upper Broadway. His "wind wagon" consisted of three-wheels, a bicycle seat, a motor, and a propeller, and looked more "like a windmill" than an automobile or aeroplane. Before a large crowd, Dr. Thompson got the thing moving up Broadway, stopping at 74th Street for a bicycle policeman who demanded to see his license. "Well, you ought to have one," said the cop. The doctor’s sublime and precise reply was, "What’ll I ask for. I don’t know what sort of a machine this is yet." He pushed it back to his garage, whereupon he stated he would next angle the propeller upward to "see whether it would lift the front wheel off the ground." An onlooker proposed that it might be useful to run over ice and snow if attached to a sledge. The next month Dr. Thomas ran his now-licensed machine along 72nd Street, posed for photographs, took questions from the press, and definitively announced that his Wind Wagon was "the machine in which the north pole is to be reached."

In 1907, Ludlow and Thomas represented aeronautics more than the Wright brothers, which added to the general disbelief that so beleaguered the Wrights in their homeland. Flight was about kites, gliders, parachutes, balloons, and that first important step towards guided flight, dirigibles. Aviation enthusiasts hoped to bring it all together in 1907 at the Jamestown tricentennial exposition, where they planned a definitive statement on aerial progress to include,

aeronautic contests for distance... duration, altitude... speed... flying machines with motor and operator, for flying machine models with motors, for flying machines carrying operators without motors, for wind cycles and wind wagons, for man-carrying kites, for kites that carry no operator, and for various aerial devices. Then there will be races between balloons and automobiles, for balloons and airships, both for short and long distances... Besides dirigible balloons and airships, aeroplanes, helicopteres [sic], flapping wing machines, man-driven machines will be shown, as well as pilot balloons, registering balloons, parachutes and various kinds of kites .... in short, there will be nothing left undone that can contribute to aeronautic study in any way.

These ambitions didn’t gel, and only a small showing was made on behalf of aeronautics with balloon launches that served more to scare the locals than to show aerial progress to Americans and their leaders. Ludlow, now graduated from crank to "Director of Aeronautics at the Jamestown Exposition," conceded that a primary goal of the event, to interest the Government, wasn’t successful:

I found that the trouble is not with the Army, but with Congress, which has heretofore refused to appropriate any money without at the same time naming how it is to be spent..

The Jamestown Exposition remains a part of the Wright story, nevertheless, and also for something that didn’t happen. Frustrated over the U.S. Army’s neglect of their inquiries starting January, 1905, the Wrights plotted a publicity stunt that has captivated their biographers. The idea was to fly over the Jamestown ceremonies and over President Theodore Roosevelt himself. The Army couldn’t ignore that one, and, it is presumed, Roosevelt would have set the nation to their fame.

Wright brothers chroniclers ponder why nobody in America gave a damn for the Brothers before their explosive arrival to page one in late 1908 and 1909. Generally it is seen as a combination of circumstance: Smithsonian Secretary Samuel Langley’s publicly funded and spectacularly dismal 1903 attempts at flight created skeptics of Americans and their Congress; the Wrights were obsessively secretive, due to their desire to patent and profit from their invention before sharing it with the world; or, perhaps, people just couldn’t believe it. The U.S. Army, for one, told the Brothers as much when replying to their first appeals to sell their Flyer. Wright historians view Europe’s earlier embrace of the airplane a result of the European arms race, which heightened government and general interest in aeronautics.

Certainly, but these are not the whole story.

Good Americans that they were, the Wrights approached the War Department through their Congressman, who forwarded their letter to the Secretary of War, William Howard Taft. The letter ended up, as a matter of routine, at the Board of Ordnance and Fortification, which had two years before watched its $50,000 investment in Langley sink into the Potomac River. The "official" Wright biographer, Fred Kelly, wrote that the U.S. Government’s reply by way of a form letter was a "rude shock" to the Brothers. So they turned to Europe, conscience clean of patriotic duty submitted and denied. Actually, they were already discussing a sale with the British. It is generally understood that the War Department had no reason to treat the Wrights any differently from the rest of the flying machine cranks. True or not, the Brothers chose not to take their machine to Washington and fly it over the White House. Just the same, the War Department chose not to look into the amazing flights that were going on in Dayton in 1905. It didn’t have to be that way.

Among those who cared, it was an accepted fact that the Wrights had a working aeroplane. Anyone who wanted to know about it could. The Aero Club of America, made up of those who cared to know about such things, declared it so in early 1906. The rest of America saw more of Ludlow and Hamilton and other freak attempts at flight, and, as ever, balloons, kites, and gliders, than of the Wright brothers. That September The Times pondered that history would uphold Cape Breton in Canada as the birthplace of flight. While the Wrights sorted through patents and sales in Europe, aviation eyes were cast northward to Alexander Graham Bell’s unproductive kite experiments along the St. Lawrence River. A little flight over the President at Jamestown would have changed it all, supposedly. Of the possibility, Wright brothers historian Fred Howard wrote, "and the Wright’s idea remains to this day one of the most tantalizing what-if’s of history..." Indeed, there exists through the telling of the Wright story a huge "what if" Roosevelt had been aware -- or more aware, anyway, of the Brothers’ accomplishments. If only the news had reached the White House, he surely would have embraced and welcomed them as they deserved.

The sentiment was shared by Roosevelt’s successor at the White House, to whom fell the honor of celebrating the Wrights in June of 1909. In presenting them with the Aero Club gold medal, President William Howard Taft told them,

It has been said that this is the first Presidential recognition of aeronautics since President Washington. Well, all I have to say is, that I had a predecessor who, if aeronautics had proceeded as far when he left office as they have today, would not only have gone down under the water in a submarine boat, but would have gone up in the air in a flying machine. No one had a more earnest interest, a more active interest, and a greater desire to see into the things that make for progress than my predecessor.

God bless William Howard Taft, but he was wrong. Roosevelt did know about them. Aeronautics had achieved a worthy stage of recognition. The technology was as advanced, as the machine Orville flew at Washington in 1908 was the same design as the machine Wilbur used in Europe, which, while sporting some improvements, was three years old. The problem was that Roosevelt did not view the aeroplane as "progress."

When Taft praised Roosevelt like this he was only doing what was expected of him. He was speaking to the Roosevelt myth that Roosevelt so carefully built of himself as sportsman, hunter, adventurer, and "progressive" thinker. When Roosevelt seized an idea, he was its master. He launched opinions on college football, rifle design, literary portrayal of animals, railroads, industrial conditions, wealth, poverty, conservation, simplified spelling, and so on. He set into the popular lexicon the words, "strenuous," "Rough Rider," "bully pulpit," "nature faker," and "muckraker." When he wanted Congress’ attention, he played it up like no other. When he wanted two battleships, he demanded publicly and loudly for four, and punctuated his demands for a strong Navy by sending the American fleet around the world against congressional sanction. When in 1907 he wanted funding for a revolutionary new naval technology, the American creator of which had been ignored at home before England proved his ideas, Roosevelt arranged a demonstration of it near his Long Island home. He then upped the ante and took a ride himself. The news that the President had gone down in a submarine was sensational.

Since, as ex-President, Roosevelt did go up in an airplane and did buy a Haynes automobile, history assumes that he was friendly to these technologies and that he would have taken to them as President if given the opportunity. Contemporaries assumed the same. While Orville Wright flew the U.S. Army trials outside of Washington in September of 1908, a "persistent rumor" spread that Roosevelt would go up with him. The Times reported,

Mr. Roosevelt is given to the espousal of the unusual. He startled the country only a year or so ago by diving beneath the waters of Long Island Sound in a submarine boat. It is not illogical that he desires to invade another element, and there is little possibility, judging by Wright’s flights, that he will be in any danger. Mr. Wright, however, is not enthusiastic over the matter.

Orville’s crash a few days later put the end to such speculation. It was misguided. All Roosevelt cared about during Orville’s amazing demonstrations was the coming presidential election for his chosen man, Taft, and his own plans for an African safari the next year. Roosevelt was not friendly towards the Wrights’ flying machine, just as he was not friendly towards automobiles. Cars, he said later on, were "distinct additions to the discomfort of living." Just as there were no White House automobiles during the Roosevelt presidency, there was no applause from his White House for the Wright brothers.

The automobile’s transition from curiosity to pariah to acclaim coincided with its turn from curiosity to sport to usefulness. It was a long journey. The automobile was a solution to a problem nobody had. Worse, rather than solving anything, it caused problems. Spanish-American War hero Lt. Gen. Nelson A. Miles was the first major public official to recognize the automobile’s possibilities, including its solution to the problem of roads, of which he spoke in 1901. To everyone else, the automobile ruined roads and endangered farmers. In Roosevelt’s acclaimed Farm Life Commission, a study of rural life that came eight years after Miles championed the future of transportation, the word "automobile" is mentioned not once.

Until automobiling became a solution, its sole use, as generally perceived, was idle recreation for the rich. To the age that invented the word "pragmatism," that was less than nothing; it was an anathema. Automobilists were certain that their much publicized trek to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair would highlight the need for good roads and the utility of the automobile. To the average American of 1904, that sixty-six of seventy-seven automobiles made it from New York to St. Louis meant little more than that sixty-six of seventy-seven rich men’s buzz wagons didn’t get stuck in the mud on the way to St. Louis.

 

Mud: 1909 Glidden Tour  "Pathfinders"

 

Despite the fame of late for Dr. Horatio Jackson, who made it across America in one of Alexander Winton’s machines in 1903, Americans weren’t paying attention. They knew of it, and if they were interested they could read of it. If they were rich enough they could buy a Winton, too, or a Ford, or a fast French machine. To the politically delicate in the election year of 1904, too many automobilists killed too many chickens, pedestrians, and themselves, and their cars cut too many ruts on too many country roads. About the only thing that could have saved the automobile’s reputation was endorsement from, say, the nation’s President and its Congress. Left to their own defense, automobilists became their own worst witnesses.

Meanwhile, the same enthusiasms that led Ludlow to West End aviation fame infected members of the Automobile Club of America, some of whom, along with Ludlow and Dr. Thompson, formed the Aero Club of America in late 1905. The first meetings were held at the Automobile Club, which leant the roof of its building for aerial experiments. The Aero Club, said its most famous member, Alexander Graham Bell, was "a lusty offspring of the Automobile Club." Automobiling and aviation were natural allies, and considered like in technology and purpose.

Beyond those few involved directly with the Wrights, such as Octave Chanute, the biggest believers and most ardent promoters of the Brothers were those gentlemen of the Aero and Automobile clubs. The first public exhibition of anything Wright brothers came at the Aero Club exhibit at the January, 1906 automobile show sponsored by the Automobile Club. When America and its president finally came around to recognizing the Wrights, it was by way of the Aero Club gold medal. When the Brothers returned from Europe in 1909, the headlines read, Delegations of Aeronauts and Motorists Meet Them and Miss Wright Down the Bay.

It didn’t take this proximity between automobile and aviation enthusiasts to conjoin these "sports" in the public mind. It didn’t take the names of famous autoists who took to or promoted aviation, such as Charles Glidden, Courtlandt Field Bishop, C.S. Rolls, and Henri Fournier, a world-famous scorcher who went from bicycle to automobile to aeroplane, or a proximity in headlines and news stories, such as Autos and Kites at Ormond, to link automobiles and aeroplanes. Previous to automobiles, flight was described in those friendly terms of ocean navigation, such as "air ship," "air sailing." and "wind currents" (with occasional reference to the bicycle, as seen by the 1896 term, "air cycle"). Come the automobile, and we have "sky motor," and such talk as this from 1904:

The aeroplane was discussed much after the fashion of some new sort of an automobile, and the speakers dwelt confidently upon the time in the near future when the flying machine would be constantly hitched up to the bay window of the rich man, ready to take him to his downtown office or to Europe.

Phrenology weighed in with the "aeroplane face," a cousin to the "bicycle face" and the "automobile face." The word "machine" itself was used interchangeably between automobile and aeroplane. These all reinforced an existing connection, a natural association that guided the general view of automobiles and aeroplanes as like quantities -- a perception that defined the Wright’s acceptance in America. However prescient or nice a thought it was that one could hitch up an aeroplane to the window and fly to work, the words "rich man," "flying machine," and "automobile" were, by 1904, stuck.

 

Birds of a feather: C.S. Rolls & the Wright brothers.

 

The common mechanical element to the early automobile and aeroplane was, of course, the naptha motor. The 1906 Aero Club exhibit of the Wright brothers consisted of pieces of their first motor. Among displays of balloons, dirigibles, gliders, and photographs of the science were,

the most important from the scientific viewpoint being the original crank shaft and flywheel used by the Wright brothers in 1903 in the first gasoline motor flying machine that carried a man successfully. The air ship flew for only a moment, but that was sufficient to show that the beginning of the problem of aerial flight was being solved.

While aviation historians will scream "control," and while Samuel Langley’s failure was due, in part, to too much attention to propulsion over aerodynamics, it was the motor, be it steam, electric, compressed air, or whatever might turn a propeller, that allowed for the first guided flights, and it was the gasoline engine that invigorated the 1890s bursting quest for powered, heavier-than-air flight. In 1900, The Washington Post declared,

The aerial ship of the near future, there is good reason to assume, will be an adaptation of the automobile, or self-propelling vehicle which of late has so captivated the fancy of men of wealth, as well as of scientists -- that is. It will be mainly dependent for its motive power upon some form of energy -- electric, steam, or gaseous -- which the rage for automobilism has recently brought to a state approaching perfection.

In 1910, President Taft walked through an aeroplane exhibit at a Washington automobile show (where his predecessor refused to walk) and was heard to say, "I suppose that the more perfect the automobile becomes, the better will be the aeroplanes, for, as I understand, the motor is the vital principal [sic] of both." Granted that the Gee Bee or the F-4, or any other of the ungainly, stubby-winged flying machines that have defied gravity, have proven that with big enough engines even a brick can fly, the association between automobile and airplane is more fundamental than propulsion. Both arise of the great human desire to communicate, to interact, to conquer, to own, to spread, to go places, and to get there fast. This is the wheel, the sailing ship, the sextant, the railroad, the telegraph, the bicycle, the internet... the automobile and the aeroplane. Each is of man’s ageless and fundamental need to interact. Transportation is man. Israel Ludlow’s dream was that of the ancients.

By the time Ludlow and Hamilton were falling out of the sky, human flight was normal. Americans saw balloons at the St. Louis Louisiana Purchase centennial, the Jamestown tricentennial, over Central Park, and in fairs and circus acts the country over, acts that featured trapeze acts and parachutists launched from balloons. We can’t belittle floating around at the whim of the wind, for ballooning was amazing -- I mean, you were up in the air, and how cool is that? With the motor attached to the balloon, we have the dirigible, the "air ship," an important distinction from ballooning in that it was -- supposed to be, anyway -- navigable.

 

Flying bicycles! (c. 1896)

 

Then there was this business of aeroplanes. The power of the wind was well understood by a people who lived closer to the elements than we do today. Birds today are odd things that get about with a flap, and airplanes are machines that get us places one way or another. As we head down the runway with belts on, seat backs up, and the front of the craft surges upwards in that awesome takeoff rush, we feel more the power of great engines than the wind. We entirely ignore the etymology of the thing we’re flying in, or upon, in fact. The word "airplane" is so familiar its origin, the combination of "air" and "plane," is meaningless. It wasn’t so to 12-year old New Yorker George Earl, who in 1908 became a neighborhood hero when his big kite, "a double aeroplane affair," pulled him from a roof and slowly sank him to the ground four stories below.

So, the question is what gave the unique meaning to airplane flight, and when was it won? Even conceding that Kitty Hawk in December 17, 1903 was too remote, that the accomplishment was too misunderstood, or that Dayton 1905, when the Wrights flew circles over Huffman Prairie, was too unpublicized and, as ever, misunderstood (except by the Aero Club), if any moment might have marked in its day the beginning of the Age of Flight in America, it might have been July 4, 1908, when Glen Curtiss flew one and a half miles to win the Scientific American Cup with the first public demonstration of powered flight in America. The flight was monitored and endorsed by experts, watched and accurately reported by the press. Curtiss’s flight ought to have ended the confusion that linked, in the public mind, aeroplanes, airships, balloons -- and automobiles -- as birds of feather. His flight not only might have been, but in fact was, the first emphatic statement of powered flight in America.

 

Glen Curtiss proving to America powered flight, July, 1908

 

Nobody cared. Congress didn’t bound into the Record with heralds and praise. The President didn’t invite Curtiss to the White House. The New York Times put the full story and photograph on page five. Powered flight, rather, was still a question for eccentrics, cranks, and automobilists, and to American culture Curtiss’s little hop was like all the rest that were heard and seen by someone else, while of a certain interest, certainly nothing new.

Making fun of an "Airy Club" conference in 1907, satirist Stephen Chalmers pegged the American perception of flight:

Thousands of outsiders -- mostly cranks -- clamored for admittance to the conference, but they were kept in check by the police .... Presently the conference was wrangling about the construction of the flying machine that was to meet the views of all the delegates. The aeroplane faction refused to be beaten; the gas-bag party insisted on having a balloon attachment... It was a hot session, but a compromise was arranged at last. It was thus. The machine was to be an aeroplane with a balloon attachment, a 40 h.p. motor, and Heer Flounder was to create his vacuum if he could, a matter which was greatly doubted.

Another event that might have brought Americans to appreciate powered flight might have been Frenchman Henri Farman’s very public flights outside of New York City in the summer of 1908. Farman powered his machine into the air above the Brighton Beach racetrack (a horse track converted for automobile use). A thousand spectators chased Farman’s path and surrounded him in congratulations and applause by his machine, a reception no less enthusiastic than that given to Wilbur Wright in France at his first public demonstration five days later. The difference was that Wilbur had an informed audience. Were Farman’s machine superior to the Wrights, few at Brighton Beach would have known it to be any different from what they saw. They were thrilled by Farman’s forty-second little hop and the great sound of the engine.

For the French, the dawning moment of flight came on August 8, 1908, courtesy of Wilbur Wright. By then, Farman had already flown for over fifteen minutes, and, like the Curtiss flight, he won an award and made news world over. But it was more, not new. The shattering, shocking, splashing event was Wilbur’s one minute, forty-five second flight outside of Paris. Little niceties coming from Farman, such as, "There are two things necessary to flight. First you must have a machine, and then you must learn to fly," were rendered stupid. The French machines were ungainly and turned with difficulty. Farman’s 1907 aeroplane was described as "two lemonade booths" taken to the air. Farman’s flights more closely resembled the automobilists’ term for the sport, "aeroplane sailing." Wilbur flew. The sub-headline of The New York Times story described the difference: Under Perfect Control. Wilbur veritably jumped into the air rather than bouncing along, grasping for it like the French machines. Next, and this is what so stunned the informed crowd, Wilbur didn’t slide or balance or maneuver, he steered. Sitting upright, manipulating controls as if in an automobile, he turned the plane with a certainty and grace that left observers in weak-kneed awe. Never had they seen anything like it, something that was far above their expectations, and way beyond their countrymen’s abilities. Wilbur landed near to where he had taken off, and stood high among the roused, thrilled witnesses. (The landing points of Farman and other French aeroplanists were always somewhere else; France’s leading aviation promoter, Ernest Archdeacon, "the well-known automobilist and aeronaut," had to chase after Farman’s record-breaking flight that won the Archdeacon Prize "in a swift automobile.")

Brother Orville’s drama at the Army tests in Washington in September, 1908, was equally sensational but far less revealing. He might as well have flown Farman’s lemonade stand, for Americans had little to compare it to. Certainly, Washington society embraced Orville as a hero. Thousands tramped -- or motored -- across the Potomac to see the show, including, on one day, the President’s eldest son, Theodore, Jr., whose practical enthusiasm for aviation was cut short by his father after a near-miss accident in an Army balloon earlier in the year, and his daughter, Alice Longworth, who ever made the news, and against her father’s wishes, with automobiles. The President showed no interest, not even to express sympathy for Orville after a deadly crash that ended the tests and the life of a passenger. While European monarchs fawned over Wilbur and other aeronauts, aeroplanes never made it into Roosevelt’s public messages, nor, as far as I can find, into his private letters.

The crash did nothing to dampen enthusiasm for Orville and his brother, who carried on with his stunning trials in France. Nor did it put a stop to Aero Club plans to honor them with gold medals. The Club invited the President to present the medals to the Brothers at the Club’s headquarters upon Wilbur’s return from Europe, presumably that February. Roosevelt consented, but demanded the ceremony be held at the White House. It was the first and last time in his presidency that Roosevelt would have anything to do with the Wrights, for the presentation was delayed to June while the Brothers went about the lucrative business of airplanes with their eager partners across Europe. We will never know what Roosevelt would have said at the medal presentation. The occasion fell to Taft, who took to it with enthusiasm.

As late as February 1909, well into the Aero Club plans to celebrate the Wrights, their triumph was still considered one of Europe, to where Orville traveled to join his brother. Following the June presentation of the Aero Club medals, Taft’s military aide wrote,

...for years, [the Wrights] were considered to be half cracked, and that it was not until of late, after Europe had crowned them as victors, that they were taken seriously. Indeed, the President referred to this himself, and wondered when the time would come when America would accept its own without waiting for the verdict of the rest of the world.

Part II

The hardest thing to convey in writing history or teaching history is that nothing ever had to happen the way it happened.

- Historian David McCullough

President William McKinley welcomed the Motor Age with at least two automobile rides, including one in Washington in November of 1899, in a Locomobile with F.O. Stanley at the tiller. The contemporary reaction was spoken by The Horseless Age, which crowed, "Now that the horseless carriage has won the approval of the Chief Magistrate, its popularity will gain a decided impetus." And it did. The following year, it was claimed that one hundred automobiles had invaded Washington -- not a bad number that.

In 1902, the National Capital Automobile Club bragged that it could gather two hundred automobiles in the city. The club president was General Miles, a member of the Automobile Club of America, an indefatigable friend to the automobile, and, coincidentally or not, a political enemy of President Roosevelt. Whether or not that mattered in Roosevelt’s attitude towards Miles’ beloved automobile, his fellows at the Automobile Club were mostly new rich millionaires whom Roosevelt privately loathed and publicly derided as "malefactors." He expressed this attitude at a small White House dinner with, "While Pittsburgh is vulgar and common, it is not so sordid as New York." He was not talking about steel workers and file clerks.

Miles first spoke for military use of "motor wagons" in 1895. He was dedicated to the technology throughout his life. As part of the Washington automobile show, in April, 1902, Miles led a parade of sixty motor cars through DC streets. His fellows included Senator Clark of Montana in his "$10,000 French Flyer," Larz Anderson in his "French machine," and Colonel Albert Pope himself, one who knew a thing or two about promotion. At the Capitol building they saluted a group of Congressmen who gathered to view them, then headed to the White House area, where the notable event was not a reception by the President but the arrest of three drivers for speeding. An automobile parade would not be welcomed at the White House until after 1909.

The common version of the Roosevelt story on automobiles has it that in 1905, on his second ever automobile ride, his chauffeur was stopped for speeding, and he abandoned the machines in disgust. Roosevelt’s first automobile ride was in a Columbia Electric buggy in a parade in Hartford in 1902. Occasionally, he rode in automobiles that were provided by hosts during his travels, including in Puerto Rico in 1906, where he tried out the drivers seat. Except for a brief spell of automotive joy in May and June of 1905, back in Washington he avoided the machines. On that first exception in May of 1905, a photographer tried to record the event. A White House policemen blocked his camera. A Secret Service man followed by bicycle, getting, according to a news report, "more exercise than he has had for a long time." His next auto ride was combined with a "strenuous" walk of thirteen miles "at a good gait." Out again a few days later, his car was stopped on the Conduit Road by bicycle police for speeding. The chauffeur claimed he thought the pursuing bicyclists were Secret Servicemen, and he only wanted to give them a little chase. Roosevelt took responsibility for it, and went on his way. The importance of these rides lay not in the President’s use of the automobile but in his quick abandonment of it. It was not for another three years that he was seen in an automobile in Washington, and when it happened it was said to have been his first ever ride in a machine. Otherwise, it was all carriages all the time.

"President Roosevelt’s dislike of automobiles is well known," wrote The Washington Post in 1908. "So pronounced is his hatred of the ‘buzz car’ that he has on many occasions made known his views frankly." Of the effect of his attitude on automobiling in Washington, the AAA magazine noted that Roosevelt’s "intense loyalty to the horse... put a damper on all forms of motoring enthusiasm... [He] went so far as to almost never ride in an automobile." In 1908, the Washington Ford dealer bragged that there were 200 Fords on city streets. Think about it -- the best selling car in the nation’s capital was the Ford runabout, and there were only a couple hundred of them to show for it, and that out of a total of some 2,000 cars in all (numbers that included Virginia and Maryland motorist who registered in DC in order to run cars there), and out of almost 200,000 registered cars nationwide. Things automobile had not progressed since the days of McKinley.

Then, in 1909, something happened. That year the city’s automobile population about doubled. It was skyward from there. Tag 2549 was the first number of 1909. The last tag of 1912 was 12868, by which time Washington had the most automobiles per capita of any American city. For the rest of America, it was the same story. Automobile registrations jumped from 194,400 in 1908 to 305,950 in 1909, with industry production going from 63,500 to 127,731 units. By 1912 there were 902,600 registered automobiles in the United States, over four times as many cars in four years. Nobody saw it coming. In late December of 1908, The Automobile predicted the next year’s production would be 65,000 cars, and, the editors declared with great optimism, 125,000 cars a year could be produced five years hence. Something happened in 1909. And it wasn’t the Ford Model T.

 

U.S. Automobile production 1905-1911

To get there, we must return to February of 1906, a month after the Aero Club displayed parts of the motor to the Wright flying machine at the automobile show. That month, one of the leading minds of the day, Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton University, gave a speech entitled, The Young Man’s Burden. Coming, without irony, at the Waldorf-Astoria, he warned,

Nothing has spread Socialistic feeling in this country more than the use of automobiles. To the countryman they are a picture of arrogance of wealth with all its independence and carelessness.

Recently, Prof. Tom McCarthy has argued that Wilson was merely stating a reality, that automobiles were a menace that only the government could harness. With its "good roads, good laws, and good behavior" pledge, the Automobile Club of America agreed. The automobile was unruly and in need of rule. It was "independence," and "carelessness." Automobilists were "a picture of arrogance of wealth." Guilty as charged. But did the automobile have to throw the nation into socialistic envy?

To the politically correct mind of 1906, socialism was a product of the excesses of capitalism. In early 1905, Governor Hoch of Kansas blamed John D. Rockefeller for "doing more to multiply Socialists and make Socialism popular than all the professional propagandists," one of whom, writer Jack London, told Yale students in early 1906, "If people object to our [socialist] programme because of the Constitution [read here: "property rights"]... to hell with the Constitution!" The rhetoric was defended in a letter to The Times of February 5, 1906, from Upton Sinclair, socialist, who was just then promoting his tome on the creed, The Jungle. Sinclair’s book, which history has credited for reforming the meat packing industry, was not about tainted beef. His idea was that socialism cured all ills, from bad meat to alcoholism to criminality. President Roosevelt snagged the outrage and launched upon Congress the Pure Food and Drug Act, which, Sinclair later complained, entirely missed his purpose.

Roosevelt viewed it his role to mediate the radicalism of the age, left and right. In the recent book, Murdering McKinley, author Eric Rauchway argues that Roosevelt’s progressivism was empowered by the anarchist’s bullet that murdered President McKinley in 1901. Roosevelt, Rauchway writes, used the assassination as an excuse to advance social reform in order to "prevent the emergence of men with such awful conceptions of their political obligations." The idea is that Roosevelt adopted some of the radical agenda in order to defeat its end game, the destruction of property rights. Secretary of War Taft in 1907 defended this policy:

The Administration has been thus far successful in showing that dangers from individualism can be effectively regulated and that abuses in the excesses of private property can be restrained. Thus a great conservative victory has been won, and the coming of Socialism has been stayed.

Wilson interjected automobiles into the debate by associating them with those capitalist excesses that so offended London, Sinclair, and the American President. That Wilson said it didn’t make it so. That automobiles were in-your-face capitalism and reckless individualism was an assumed proposition. Automobile hating was freely expressed in Congress, especially by Thetus Sims, Representative of Tennessee mule country, and representative of mules and horses everywhere. On the House floor, to the Congressional Record, and to the American people, Sims castigated the president of the Automobile Club of Washington, just then formed (the 1902 club died to the city’s motorphobia). You automobilists, Sims scolded, were,

rich, reckless, dare-devil young men, driving automobiles simply for pleasure, [who] violated the police regulations of the District of Columbia with impunity and paid their fines as a matter of levity, and went wild in their reckless career. Upon investigation I found that there was no law in the District authorizing imprisonment for violation of this regulation.

 

"Simply for pleasure..." & fomenting socialism? This is how automobiles looked to PC America in 1906.

 

The Automobile tried to spin the speech by pointing out, "This is the first time in the history of the country that the motor car has been the subject of extended comment in the national legislature." It didn’t fly. The closest Congress came to automobile sympathy that year was over an hysterical notion originating in petroleum-deficient Germany that automobiles could be fueled by distilled corn. Corn-fed automobiles might just be farmer-friendly. The President gave his "hearty sympathy" to the idea. It went no where, and not only because it didn’t work. The agitation was about Standard Oil, not automobiles. State and local governments, meanwhile, pulled the automobile leash ever tighter, and the good roads movement remained decidedly against the automobile, destroyer of roads.

At the 1906 Good Roads Conference at Denver, the president of the local automobile club apologized for his presence. "The old horse and mule still holds the road and are of really more importance than the automobile," he told the Good Roaders. "I am not here to advocate the automobile... I am trying to keep a little in the background..." In his prepared speech, keynote speaker Logan Page, Chief of the U.S. Office of Public Roads and the representative of the U.S. Government, mentioned automobiles not once. Only in extemporaneous talk that brought up automobiles did he discuss them, and not without the necessary apology for the horse. "My sympathies are naturally with the farmers," he said while explaining that "truck farmers" (skipping the key words, "automobile" or "motor") can get their produce to market faster and make more money. Political correctness and Government policy precluded Page, who would champion roads for automobiles after 1909, from endorsing automobiles, much less speaking their name.

1906 might have been the year of the automobile. To automobilists of the day it was to be the banner year. Sales were up, registrations were up, and large makers were making huge profits. Automobiles proved their social worth in the awful San Francisco earthquake, and, if you listened to the trade magazines, automobiles were the savior of the farm, deliverers of doctors, conqueror of hills, and could stop quicker than horses. That January, The Automobile surveyed industry leaders for their views on the coming year. Amidst discussions such as the Need of Adequate Brakes, Points About Tops, and 1905 Remarkably Successful Year, came a stunning letter entitled, Arranging to Build 20,000 Runabouts. Denying that, like the bicycle, the automobile was a passing fad, Henry Ford wrote,

The greatest need to-day is a light, low-priced car with an up-to-date engine of ample horsepower, and built of the very best material. One that will go anywhere a car of double the horse-power will; that is in every way an automobile and not a toy; and, most important of all, one that will not be a wrecker of tires and a spoiler of the owner’s disposition. It must be powerful enough for American roads and capable of carrying its passengers anywhere that a horse-drawn vehicle will go without the driver being afraid of ruining his car.

And so on about proper weight, simplicity and day-to-day usefulness, leading to the conclusion:

We are to-day in a position to build and deliver 10,000 of our four-cylinder runabouts. I am now making arrangements whereby we can build and deliver 20,000 of these runabouts, and all within twelve months.

Ford’s latest biographer, Douglas Brinkley, quotes the letter in the context of the genesis of the Model T. But Ford wasn’t talking about the Model T, or any other farmer’s, everyman’s, universal or whatever dreamed-of automobile. He was talking about what was to become the best selling car in the world the next year, the Ford Model N -- and 20,000 of them! What shocked his contemporaries was not the type of car he described. No argument there. What shocked was that fantasy of 20,000 of them. What shocks -- or ought to shock -- the historian of today is that in 1906 the extent of Ford’s ambition was all of 20,000 cars.

In his autobiography, Ford claimed for himself the idea of the mass market car, staking as his own not only the history of the cheap automobile but its original intent. He was neither the only one nor the first to say, think, preach, or try it. Next to the ambitions of Charles Duryea, Ford and his 20,000 Model N’s had no imagination. Duryea was convinced of automotive democracy, and he spoke of a market of five millions. Ford’s problem in 1906 was timing. The nation wasn’t just not ready for it, the nation positively didn’t want it. No, in 1906, automobiles excited black flag socialism, not a glorious revolution in transportation and society.

History has endowed the Model T with every property of success. In a discussion of early anti-automobilism and Wilson’s "socialism" statement, Brinkley concluded that Ford’s "thrifty Model T would change minds by fulfilling the promise that, as company billboards declared, ‘Even You Can Afford a Ford.’" Well, the Model N’s initial price of $500 was more affordable than the Model T prior to 1914. Something other than price or quality moved the Model T. Ford biographer Allan Nevins got it more accurately. The Model T, he wrote, was "the right car at the right time." The T was a better car than the N (and its Model R and S variants) by degree and not in concept. With more seats and improved mechanics, the T was the correct improvement. The N was already the idea of the T as we know it, just as Ford promised readers of The Automobile in January of 1906. The Model N was the right car at the wrong time.

 

1906: the  buggyabout craze.  If it looked like a buggy, maybe the farmer would buy it...

 

Ford’s 1906 announcement coincided with an industry craze for the everyman’s car. Automobiles must serve the farmer, dammit, and the cheap, high-wheeled "buggymobile," "buggyabout," "power carriage," or whatever it would be called, would finally bring the automobile to the carriage market, which in 1905 added up to a million add-ons to the horse. It didn’t work. The low-priced buggymobile was just that: a buggy with a motor attached. It kept too much horse. The only true automobiles in the under-$1,000 category were the four-cylinder Model N and the single and two-cylinder models of Cadillac, Reo and Buick. Neither these nor the buggymobile met the cause, for the multitudes weren’t interested.

The difference between European and American attitudes toward motors and aeroplanes was that European governments led the movement to adopt the technologies. This audience will readily name the various monarchs who were Europe’s most prominent automobilists. These were not folks who looked sympathetically upon the abolishment of property and its associated ideas. More importantly, of all Europe, its sole republic was the most enthusiastic nation to embrace the automobile and the aeroplane. American automobilists looked upon it with envy. In 1902 The Automobile complained,

The French are justly proud of the intelligence displayed by their highest government officers in lending the dignity of a State function to the festivals which mark the victories of automobilism.

Of France’s attention to the aeroplane, The Automobile, in May of 1903, half a year before December 17, 1903, lamented,

While most other nations still held back from serious consideration of the problem of air navigation, the French Aero Club has already gathered a great deal of material which will be of high value...

The complaints carried through Roosevelt’s term. In November of 1908, The Washington Post wrote,

As is well known, the President of France is a great patron of the automobile industry. He has a number of them in his private garage, and he recognizes the importance of the automobile industry in France by officially opening the annual Paris automobile show.

In 1907, the president of the Aero Club of America belittled his country’s progress in aviation:

Our own country has yet scarcely passed the experimental stage in this form of navigation, and without the aid and patronage of the Government or of some of our very rich men it is not probable that we shall advance much further .... In Europe there is a much greater interest taken in the subject both by Governments and by individuals.

 

 

Motor Age President Fallieres of France, 1908

 

The American President possesses greater powers of publicity than Europe’s elitist rules. American leaders are uniquely susceptible to popular attentions, which is why, for example, a certain well-off corporate attorney from Springfield, Illinois, pretended to be a farm boy when running for high office in 1860. In the great book, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville explained it:

In the United States, the more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people; on the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes...

In ignoring the automobile, Roosevelt represented a dominant attitude of his people. Woodrow Wilson merely expressed it openly. Of vile automobile scorchers, he said, "I am a Southerner and know how to shoot." (Maybe there is, maybe there is not, a connection between that attitude and a rash of incidents that prompted the Aero Club in 1908 to post a reward for information leading to the arrest of anyone shooting at balloons.) Imagine, instead, had the President of 1906 replied to Wilson, and said,

The automobile, the manufacture of which has become one of our leading industries, is destined to assume a very important part in the economic welfare of the world.

or,

We live in the Age of the Automobile.

or,

...the automobile coming in as a toy of the wealthier classes is going to prove the most useful of them all to all classes, rich and poor.

Imagine had that President of 1906 not only taken to using automobiles everywhere he went, but freely allowed himself photographed in them. Imagine that his preference for automobiles was so pronounced that wherever he went citizens eagerly greeted him with their own cars in order to show off their enthusiasm for the technology and their prosperity in owning them. Imagine had he forced his will upon Congress for a full White House garage. Imagine had he exalted his automobiles by placing upon them the Presidential Seal.

Instead, that President of the United States had upon the gate to his private home, the "Summer White House" -- a very public locale during his stays there -- a sign that read,

No Automobiles Allowed.

Had President Roosevelt any understanding of the progressiveness and the potential of the automobile he ought to have put up with the smoke and the noise of motor cars just as he put up with the clack of horseshoes and the splat of horse exhaust that endowed his automobile-free front drive. As Henry Ford bragged about selling 20,000 cars, and only managed to hawk that number in three years, the President of the United States in 1907 made headline news for his new team of horses and his coachman’s colorful livery.

That same year Roosevelt invested his considerable enthusiasms towards reform of lazy army brass. Field officers would have to prove their vigor with annual 3-day, 30-mile marches, or, it was added later, three times the mileage by horse in a third the time. Field officers rarely had access to automobiles, so the marches were not negating existing policy. It did, however, suppress any further movement towards motors, and affirmed a Quartermasters report that declared the automobile "practically useless for military purposes." Roosevelt concluded his order with,

I should also like as much encouragement given to the cultivation of horsemanship in the army... on government horses...

He punctuated the sentiment in January of 1909 by himself proving that 90-miles in a day by horse was no big deal. Sore butt and all, and several teams of horses, he rode ninety miles across a frozen Virginia countryside. Known thereafter as "The Ride," it was Roosevelt’s John Henry against the machine.

Unlike other aspects of the Roosevelt presidency, especially his many pronouncements and enthusiasms on this or that, history has ignored the meaning of his statement upon the automobile. Automobilists knew it at the time. Complaining of his inattention to them, The Automobile noted that he "has not been at all averse to committing himself on some irrelevancies..." The problem with Roosevelt’s damning silence on automobiles, and with Woodrow Wilson’s vocal damnation of them, is that it was dirt poor leadership and backwards thinking.

The automobile market reacted in kind. While steadily growing, neither sales, nor expectations were enthusiastic. The buggyabout didn’t take, and roads remained for the horse. Three years after his amazing prediction of selling 20,000 cars, and much tempered, Ford announced that he would sell all of 25,000 of his new Model T in 1909. The Automobile replied that it "remains to be seen." Ford’s ambitions for the great Model T were about the same as for the N, and even less if we account for the three lost years in between.

In January of 1909, President-elect Taft demanded that Congress purchase automobiles for his use at the White House. Not only that, he wanted the funding immediately so that he would have them by his first day in office. As part of a larger deal with Taft, the House agreed, although not without bitter argument. The Senate rejected the funding, again with denunciation. The Conference Committee restored the funding, and Taft had his cars. He and his wife rode to the inaugural ball the night of March 4, 1909 in a White House limousine.

 

Taft's 1909
Pierce-Arrows

Had the President made a similar statement in 1906, I would venture that demand for the Model N would have exceeded Henry Ford’s then crazed fantasy. Do I go too far? Perhaps. Or not. In 1908, Washington, DC automobile dealers thought so. Of the news that the incoming President was bringing automobiles to the White House, the first thought was to sales: "It is believed President-elect Taft’s recognition of the automobile will give the American industry a decided impetus." Indeed. Following its leader, America took to the automobile.

To illustrate the power of Taft’s endorsement of the automobile, and Roosevelt’s disdain for it, we can look to what Taft did similarly for golf and baseball. During the 1908 election, Roosevelt criticized Taft for his golfing, which, he said, would offend westerner voters. "I never let a photograph of me in tennis costume appear," Roosevelt said. "Besides, you never saw a photograph of me playing tennis. Photographs on horseback, yes, tennis, no, and golf is fatal." Taft wouldn’t have any of it. In the way he handled it, we can see how his views and actions on the automobile changed America. Rather than hide his golfing and apologize for its patrician reputation, Taft turned the argument around. Nothing more than golf, he said, was "democratic." National interest in the game exploded during the tenure of the golfing President, including a movement for the building of public courses.

 

"This is a good test of my philosophy" -- Golf democratic?

 

It went the same with baseball. Roosevelt heartily endorsed amateur baseball, and allowed games on the park south of the White House. However, he refused to visit a professional game, something the Washington American League team desperately wanted of him. Baseball was not acceptable to Roosevelt because baseball players were professionals, which in that day meant the hired help. To Roosevelt’s mind, that is, they were not legitimate sportsmen. The irony is glaring: unlike and contrary to his attitude toward automobiles and golf, when it came to baseball Roosevelt’s patrician code overruled his populism. Baseball’s fragile hold in Washington was such that in 1904 a governmental order extending the hours of clerks past the starting pitch was thought likely to kill the team. Then, when President Taft started showing up and became the sport’s Number One fan, baseball came to America. "I'll never forget the first time President Taft appeared at our ball park," Walter Johnson recalled, "...our players got so excited that we booted the game away to the Red Sox." No less than Fenway Park, Comiskey Park, Tiger Stadium, Griffith Stadium, the Polo Grounds, Ebbetts Field and Crosley Field were built or inaugurated during Taft’s presidency. In 1912, the president of the Chicago Cubs wrote him, "All persons interested in baseball appreciate the many good things that come to the sport because of the recognition received from you as chief ruler of the nation."

 

 

"See Taft," went the team's billboards promoting the presence of America's No. 1 Fan at a Pittsburgh game.

 

As with baseball and golf, so with automobiles. I appreciate that it may seem a stretch to think that putting automobiles in the White House changed America, and launched, as I have written, the Motor Age. Wasn’t the automobile coming anyway? Wasn’t the Motor Age, if not already upon us, inevitable? Another way to conceive it is to think if Taft had not won the presidency, and that Roosevelt or William Jennings Bryan, also known to be "partial to horses," or some other anti-automobilist was there on March 4, 1909 riding a carriage to the inaugural ball. We cannot say what Roosevelt or Bryan might have done, but we can say that had the incoming President of 1909 not demanded his cars, Congress would not have passed the first ever Federal law to assert the automobile; had he not set the example, the American people would not have been awakened to the Motor Age as they were in 1909; and, had he not championed it, roads would not have been remade for automobiles instead of horses, which was an anathema prior to Taft.

The essential question was if automobiling and aviation, the motor sports, were useful to society. Before March 4, 1909, the answer was no. Afterwards, as President Taft told the Wright brothers in presenting them with the Aero Club medal, America, like Europe, could now celebrate them and make use of their invention. Similarly, to those pesky, millionaire automobilists, Taft told them they would have to share their motoring joy with the rest of the country, socialism be damned. So let’s straighten out those quotations that might have so helped advance the automobile in 1906:

The automobile, the manufacture of which has become one of our leading industries, is destined to assume a very important part in the economic welfare of the world.

- William Howard Taft, 1908

We live in the Age of the Automobile.

                                        - President William Howard Taft, 1910

...the automobile coming in as a toy of the wealthier classes is going to prove the most useful of them all to all classes, rich and poor.

                                        - President William Howard Taft, 1911

Fat, boring, conservative, bewildered, stuck-in-a-bath tub, mediocre... and all the rest that history has stuck to Taft and his maligned reputation must take stock of what he did for the nation and for progress by unleashing the Motor Age. None of his biographers recognized it, and neither have, of course, Ford or Wright historians. Taft himself, as most of his contemporaries, didn’t know it either (the exception being the automotive press, which hailed his adoption of the automobile). He just thought he was doing good.

 

1907's  Celebration of transportation, the new Union Station at  Washington; no mention of automobiles and airplanes (this photo from 1920s.)

 

One thing that history has right is that Taft was his own worst publicist. While he played no notes for himself, he trumpeted the things he believed his nation should know and have -- and without the insidious filter of populism. Taft didn’t just put cars in the White House. He didn’t just deliver a medal to the Wright brothers, or just watch an airplane land on the White House lawn. He championed aviation and automobiles and thereby helped make them happen. And he did it purposefully and for the benefit of all.

 

The view of 1910: "20th Century Transportation,"
now including automobiles and aeroplanes.