How The Auto Industry Carjacked The American Dream | Climate Town

In 1968, the Beatles released a song-- Okay,

let's not shoot this in the literal middle of the road, Jesus Christ.

In 1968, the Beatles released a song called "Why Don't We Do It in

the Road," which asked,

"Why don't we do it in the road?"

fifteen times, and it's a bad song, but it's an even worse question,

because everyone knows you don't do it in the road,

because that's where cars live,

and one might come along

while you're in the middle of doing it

and kill all three of you.

Remember, this is the Beatles in the '60s.

They're putting up Chamberlain numbers; three is being conservative.

But before the 1920s,

getting your rocks off in the middle of the street was just a regular-type

bad decision and not an explicit death wish,

and that's because the road wasn't for cars, it was for people.

Then the fledgling auto industry realized what an insane amount of money it could

make if it could just take over the roads

and remove any other way of getting around

that didn't involve a car.

All they'd have to do is use front corporations to buy up street car

companies,

only to rip up the track and shut them down,

use racist advertisements and pay off politicians to shoot down laws that regulate cars,

and launch PR campaigns to make it illegal for people to be in the

street,

like this one: And, believe it or not,

they leap in front of moving cars.

Most of them suffer from an anxiety overdrive, a mania for achievement.

And more, obviously, this is just the intro.

I mean, look at the length of this video, there's a ton more.

I'm Rollie Williams, climate science grad student and happy just to be nominated,

and this is the story of how the auto industry carjacked the American dream.

Welcome to Climate Town.

And, yes, freshman year business majors at Duke University,

I get that's how business works.

In business, you try to outmaneuver your competition.

When you do that, well, you make a ton of money,

and when you make enough money, you buy a boat.

That's business.

I'm not mad at the auto industry for business,

but I do think

that they saw an opportunity to kind of Trojan horse their way into the

American infrastructure,

and their version of the US is the version we're living in now,

and that, boating enthusiasts, is the thesis of thi-- In the nineteen-aughts,

the streets of America were crammed full of dirty kids taking their pet hoops

for a walk,

the occasional horse-drawn carriage, a street car or two,

and all sorts of people named Clarence or Guthree or Phyllis.

Whoa-ho, same street, baby!

That's what I'm talking about.

Anyway, the streets were mostly public spaces for walking

or setting up shop

or taking a swing at someone for calling you a drunk.

I mean, even if you are a drunk,

it was rude of them to call you one.

All that changed in the 1910s, when Henry Ford hit the "make cars" button,

and mass production put over a million cars on the road

and subsequently hundreds of thousands of people under the wheels of those very cars.

Here's a little stat for you:

more Americans were killed by cars in the four years after World War I

than were killed fighting in World War I.

Yeah, cars are better at killing Americans than the German soldiers,

and they were actually trying!

That's not exactly fair, German soldiers were trying to kill American soldiers,

and cars were killing mostly -- checks notes -- children.

New York, baby!

And, sure, if a kid is hit by a car nowaday-- oh.

And, sure, if a kid is hit by a car nowadays,

we might think something like, "well, where were their parents?"

But back in those days, it was more like And America agreed.

In the event that a pedestrian was hit by a car,

the driver of the car was almost always held liable,

because they were a car and they hit a kid.

The problem got so bad

that cities started voting on legislation

that would limit a car speed to twenty miles per hour in city centers,

so cars would stop hitting kids by, ironically, the boat load.

It all came to a head in 1923,

when a full ten percent of the city of Cincinnati -- 42,000 people --

physically signed a petition.

And this wasn't some kind of change.org petition to outlaw the word "slacktivism" online.

42,000 people signed this thing,

like, with a pen!

And not a good pen, a pen from the 1920s!

So at this point,

car companies had to listen to the will of the people

and-- I'm just kidding,

they launched this series of racist ads attacking Cincinnati and successfully killed the mandate.

Is this good for sound?

I think it's actually going to pick up some of that.

But the auto industry was after permanent custody in the streets,

not some kind of weekends and holidays visitation rights.

Unfortunately, by 1924, so many people were getting killed by cars Such a sum

is difficult to comprehend

That Calvin Coolidge,

AKA the President America forgot,

asked his then-Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover to please do something, anything,

so people would stop getting killed by cars.

Hoover started the First National Conference on Street

and Highway Safety and kicked the whole thing off with some pretty terrifying statistics.

Over the past year alone,

America had suffered an estimated $600 million in economic losses from death

and injury. 22,600 deaths

so far that year,

and 678,000 serious injuries caused by cars.

And let's just take a quick peek at the list of organizations Hoover gathered

to figure out the best way to stop cars from killing pedestria-- oh,

it's car companies.

It's jus-- it's almost all car companies!

Okay!

But I'm sure putting a bunch of proverbial foxes in charge of metaphorical hen

house security didn't have any lasting impac-- Oh,

the conference laid the foundation for the 1928 Model Municipal Traffic Ordinance,

a set of the strictest anti-pedestrian rules in America.

Okay, that's not fair.

It gave people the freedom to do whatever they want in the road,

as long as what they wanted was to cross the street in only a

tiny little designated area

and only at right angles.

Go around!

Go around!

Cars, man.

"Problem solved," thought the auto industry,

until they found out

that people weren't obeying the law they worked

so darn hard to get passed,

and judges weren't convicting people for the obvious crime of being in the road.

So they did three things: number one,

they made fun of people who got killed by cars.

Do you wonder at the gentle chuckling of the undertaker?

Out they rush, running, jumping, and skipping across the street.

Don't take foolish chances.

Don't jaywalk.

They even spent money popularizing the term "jaywalking."

See, back in the 1900s, a "jay" meant, like,

a doofus or a country idiot, so by officially labeling the term "jaywalking",

car companies cemented the idea that only idiots get hit by cars.

They aren't pedestrians at all!

They're jaywalkers with a capital J.

See, if a person got hit by a car,

it was probably the car's fault.

But if that person was, say, some kind of fugly dipsh*t, well,

then it was probably their fault.

I mean, they were basically asking to be hit.

One-track minds just blundering stubbornly ahead.

Number two, in 1928, the American Automobile Association, or AAA,

took over road safety education for children,

and they forced kids to sign a pledge promising they'd never jaywalk.

Another abstinence-only program that's sure to have no negative repercussions later in life.

Hey, I wonder why these tickets were so cheap.

It's horribly cold up here.

It's, like, nine degrees.

We're whipping across the streets of New York,

wind blowing off New Jersey smelling like a big pile of trash, my god.

All right.

Okay, where were we?

And number three, the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce built

and paid for a national wire service

that allowed newspapers to report on car accidents,

but if they didn't like what you wrote about the cars,

they could take your wire service away,

giving your competitors a huge advantage over you.

It'd be like if you got kicked off of Facebook just for writing,

"I got home last night

and Mark Zuckerberg was in my house going through my closet," even

if it was true!

Oh man, unkillable Applebee's.

Pandemic rolls right through, construction on the street, nothing.

This guy's jaywalking!

We got a jaywalker, move it in, boys.

All right, you ready to hop off?

But people weren't the only ones the auto industry needed to kick out of

the streets.

There were also public street cars and urban railways,

a government regulated public transportation system

that required reasonable fares

and that lower income areas be connected

and served.

Well, after some lobbying, cars were just allowed to drive on the tracks,

and with hundreds of cars constantly cutting off public transportation left and right,

it got pretty impossible for the trains

and street cars to make their stops on time.

Now fewer people wanted to take public transit,

and some of those people bought cars, which made the problem way better.

Oh, I'm sorry, uh, worse.

Oh, so much worse.

Think of it this way: a bus can hold maybe sixty people.

Cars... can hold five?

Usually hold one, maybe two.

The amount of space sixty cars takes up is-- you're looking at it,

I mean yo-- it's way more, right?

And all of this is maybe just the nature of competitive business?

I mean, maybe cars are just the result of the product consumers want, sure,

maybe.

But the part that is maybe not okay is the part where the auto

and fossil fuel industry hired front companies to buy up public transportation

and then ripped out the tracks

and purposely destroyed the businesses to give the road to cars I mean,

it would maybe be illegal for a monopoly to buy up

and destroy the competition.

It would be and it was, and in 1949, Firestone Tire,

Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, GM,

and Mack Trucks were all convicted of conspiring to monopolize.

Luckily, the regulators had enough power to force GM to pay the unfathomably high

sum of five thousand dollars.

And the GM treasurer himself was forced to pay a fine of one dollar.

Fu-- The family's automobile,

which they will probably trade in for a new one next year,

not only helps keep the automobile industry thriving, but continually supports the gasoline station,

the service garage, the tire dealer.

These moves worked wonderfully to reorient people to a cars-focused version of their own

streets,

but the auto industry wanted to be woven into the fabric of every city

in every state in America,

and that meant highways

that criss-cross-applesauce all over the US

and especially through the dense urban centers.

In the early 1930s, there were a bunch of privately-owned toll roads,

but that wasn't going to get every American to buy a new car every

year,

so in 1932, the president of General Motors, Alfred P.

Sloan, and some other auto industry groups created the National Highway Users Conference to,

in their words, "protect highway funding sources from Depression-born demands."

Oh, these poors with their demands all the time!

Well, it became clear to them

that they needed to fund highway spending through a more socialist kind of method,

so they successfully lobbied to fund roads using a national tax on gasoline.

Ever heard the term "freeway"?

Well, the "free" refers to the fact that it wasn't a toll road,

and the "way" is for the way that it actually wasn't free at all,

and it was, in fact,

subsidized by the government when the gasoline tax didn't cover the cost.

There was a 1939 Congressional report called Toll Roads and Free Roads.

It really lays out exactly what the auto industry was hoping for

and -- spoiler alert -- almost exactly what they would get.

But most people don't read Congressional reports, so in 1939,

GM sold their dream of highways chopping apart American cities

and connecting everything by cars by sponsoring a gigantic diorama of their idea of

the future of America.

And I know what you might be thinking:

how could a diorama possibly do something like that?

Easy!

You do it at the 1939 New York World's Fair, babyyy!

Oh, the World's Fair.

Imagine you live in a world with no cell phones, internet, or cargo pants.

There's no color TV or modern medicine,

and you and everyone you know just went through the Great Depression.

And then you get to go to a future-themed amusement park-slash-Coachella.

I mean, it was like if ecstasy did cocaine.

People were getting emotional whiplash just from walking in the front gates.

The New York World's Fair was a banger,

and the bangin'est exhibit was GM's Futurama,

a sixteen-minute immersive diorama-slash-ride showcasing the future according to General Motors created by the

legendary designer Norman Bel Geddes.

At an ever-accelerating rate of progress, a greater world.

A better world, a world which always will grow.

1.5 million handcrafted buildings and trees, fifty thousand model cars,

a fourteen-lane highway with moving miniature vehicles, and no public transportation.

Here is an American city replanned around a highly developed modern traffic system.

People flew along the diorama in chairs attached to a series of tracks

and were absolutely blown the f*ck away by what GM was showing them.

In America, there was no cohesive understanding of what the future could even look

like.

Within the first three months of opening,

two million people had seen the exhibit and were convinced this was the future.

Sprawling interstate highways, a car for everyone, no public transportation,

lots of people living in the suburbs,

and basically exactly what America ended up looking like by the 1970s.

It was so good

that Walt Disney admitted to ripping it off

when he created EPCOT,

the most culturally sensitive destination in America.

It was an acid trip inside a crystal ball inside of a General Motors

commercial,

and GM had now successfully incepted their dream of the future inside the minds

of millions of Americans.

And, for the record,

I'm not saying this is a big conspiracy

or a shadowy cabal of deep state lizardmen,

but after World War II,

countries in Asia and Europe invested in their public transit infrastructure,

and America invested in roads.

So,just in case you're out there wondering why any of this matters

or what America is actually missing,

it's this.

By 1941 -- excuse me, excuse me -- GM had a new CEO,

a man named Charles Wilson.

But not this Charles Wilson.

Or this Charles Wilson.

This Charles Wilson, CEO of GM,

and majorly influential in crafting the National System of Interstate Highways plan in 1947.

Charles Wilson was forced to leave GM

when President Eisenhower selected him

as Secretary of Defense in January of 1953.

The former General Motors president stirred a controversy in Congress During a hearing,

Congress asked Charles Wilson

if he could make a decision

that went against GM's interests,

and he said he couldn't possibly think of a situation

because -- and I'm quoting here -- what was good for our country was

good for General Motors

and vice versa.

Okay, guys, come on!

Just because GM started

that group to get highways funded

and then they popularized the idea of a car-centric America,

and then GM's new CEO helped craft a plan to make highways cut through

every part of America

which would result in a huge spike in car sales,

and then he became one of the most powerful people in the government,

the secretary of the Department of Defense,

the very department that would divert funds in order to actually build the highway,

doesn't mean there's a conflict of interest!

Secretary of Defense Wilson with other administration officials to discuss the nation's defense budget

for the year ahead.

Secretary Wilson is urging a two billion dollar increase in military spending.

Anyway, in 1956, the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act passed,

which directly funded the biggest system of highways the world has ever seen.

Eisenhower had always been hot on highways

as a way to transport troops around America,

so he ensured it was almost completely paid for with federal funding.

And just to be clear,

no special interest group could have single-handedly gotten highways built,

but did one particular industry have an outsized hand in getting the job done?

So, with Americans bought in, and Congress and the President pushing hard,

construction began immediately.

After serving as Secretary of Defense,

Charles Wilson retired to teach conflict of interest ethics at Harvar-- no, I'm sorry,

he joined the board of directors at GM in 1957.

So, a little different.

And so they built the highways according to the plan from 1947.

They built them across states, but more terrifyingly, they built them right through cities.

Some neighborhoods even got demolished just to put a highway in.

Guess which ones?

Guess who lived in the neighborhoods that got demolished?

I'll give you a hint: uh, it was the 1960s and 70s,

and politicians called it "urban renewal" to "remove blight."

Guess who lived there?

Yeah.

Yeah, it was people of color.

So they built highways straight through non-white areas,

sprinkling health problems like Johnny Asthmaseed just to make a handful of people a

big bag of money.

Oh and when GM wanted to do another diorama for the year 2000,

Norman Belgetti said he couldn't do it

because there'd be no more gas-powered cars by

then.

Well, that actually wasn't going to work for the auto and fossil fuel industry,

so they used the twin guns of power

and influence to destroy any technology

that looked like it was going to affect their bottom line.

I did a whole video about it, but long story short,

GM kinda *shhk* and here we are.

And by "here", I mean a world where cars completely own the streets,

public transportation is on life support, cities are borderline inaccessible without a car,

and people who live along highways -- who are disproportionately people of color --

are more likely to get asthma,

heart disease, childhood leukemia, and a whole host of other health ailments.

Yikes.

Okay, well, I skipped over a ton,

but let's get to the ending

so you can get back to doing whatever it is

that you're supposed to be doing.

One thing you can do right now without any help from anybody else is

dream your own dream of what a fair

and equitable society looks like.

According to multiple studies,

access to transportation is the single greatest factor in an individual escaping poverty.

We're currently living in the auto industry's dream,

but what does a future look like for someone who's not a rich dude

trying to buy a boat for his boat?

You can also support some of the initiatives

that are trying to take city streets back from cars

and improve public transportation

that I linked in the bio We're actually in the middle of a potentially

very big public investment in infrastructure,

so, you know, fingers crossed for that going well.

But above all, we've got to get educated about how the infrastructure

and policies we live with directly contribute to climate change.

Consider taking a peek at the Green New Deal

and see what that thing has to say about equity

and the future of America.

Now is the time to get involved,

because we've got to make some huge changes to America's infrastructure.

We jus-- we have to do it,

and if we're looking for a good place to start, I mean,

why don't we do it in the road?

Well, that was about four minutes longer than it needed to be, huh?

Seriously, thank you so much for watching, I really appreciate it,

and I'm going to keep making more videos.

But if you do want to support the channel,

I just started a Climate Town Patreon page,

and the link is in the bio.

Wait, people have to pay for these videos now?

Oh no, they're still all on YouTube for free,

this would just be if you wanted to, like,

help me make them faster and better.

Oh, also, uh, exclusive behind-the-scenes content and interviews and, like,

stuff that gets cut from the final videos.

So you want people to pay for the stuff that's not good enough to

be free?

I am just hoping that a few people might want to send, like,

five bucks a month, uh,

my way because you appreciate what could be described as highly-researched, low-budget,

super try-hard climate comedy. *pfffft* Climate comedy?

Like edutainment?

No, like infotainment.

And you have to pay for it?

Only the bad stuff, the good stuff is still free, right?

Okay, this-- I feel like this really went off the rails.

Hey man, don't look at me.

You're the one trying to get people to donate to your climate comedy Patreon

page and the link is in the bio.