Yes! They built them here: Rolls Royce manufacturing in Springfield, Massachusetts

Logo on a Springfield Rolls

Prologue



Had you just returned from The Great War, say around 1919 or so, you would have noticed that the Wilson Administration’s haphazard efforts to rev up the economy to absorb the many doughboys being mustered out were having a negligible effect.  The economic first fruits of what eventually would be called “The Roaring 20s” were still far from ripe, and the sons of America’s great burgeoning middle class were coming home from Europe to marry their sweethearts and to have kids.



The members of their parents’ generation, born in the late 1870s and early 1880s, who may have served in the Spanish-American War, who suffered economic deprivation in the depression years of the “Gay ‘90s,” and who marveled at the American “Can Do” spirit that constructed the Panama Canal, did well during The Great War.  A great many companies, formed during the darker economic days of the late 19th Century, expanded and profited in the early 20th Century.  They were buoyed by the groundswell of trust-busting and prosperity that characterized the “Oughts” and the “Teens.”



The doughboys returned to jobs as farmers, factory workers, clerks, salesmen, and accountants. Some had money in their pockets…but all were suffering from two to three years of pent-up demand.  One savvy engineer in Detroit, a chap named Henry Ford, figured out how to meet that demand.  He devised a way to produce a four wheeled, self-propelled vehicle called a Model T, on a scale so efficient that the end product — a transportation appliance, if you will — started out being sold in 1907 at $850, but could be sold in the early 1920s for the princely sum of $290.

But if you were a member of the elder generation and fortunate enough to be of the ownership class, you were prepared to spend a great deal more on an automobile.  You could afford the best…and you knew that the name of “the best” started with a “P.”   You would choose either a Packard from Detroit, or a Peerless from Cleveland, or a Pierce Arrow from Buffalo.  These were cars of the highest quality in both their design and their construction.  Typically they cost somewhere between five and seven thousand dollars, depending upon the configuration of the car you ordered from the manufacturer.



But, if you were among the truly elect, let’s say from the class of American wealth who’d built the cottages of the Berkshires or Newport, those whose net worth was the envy of the world, you didn’t buy an automobile that started with the letter “P.”  Between 1921 and 1931, you could buy an American automobile with a double name, both of which began with an “R,” because Yes! They built them here.





Act One:  Satan’s Kingdom, November 1977



I have always had a passion for walking in the woods.  Not hunting, not fishing, not camping — simply walking.  I become lost in my thoughts or I spend time noticing little details of what’s bloomed along the path I’m following.  I find it soothing, as if trees themselves are absorbing whatever’s troubling me at the moment.  I always come out of the woods feeling at peace.



It was on a Sunday afternoon during November 1977 that I was on just such a walk in the woods neighboring the Farmington River in New Hartford, Connecticut, the eastern-most town in Litchfield County.  I was passing through conservation land in a section of town known as “Satan’s Kingdom.”  I don’t know the derivation of the name;  but if you were to stop at the post office in New Hartford to ask for “Satan’s Kingdom,” they’d direct you eastward through the hamlet of Pine Meadow, past the old Waring Blender factory, about a mile or two from the Canton town line.



It was a gray afternoon; pure November.  The sky was pewter, the leaves had fallen from the trees and blanketed the floor of the forest, and a myriad of gray trunks lined the rutted dirt road I was walking along.  The breeze had a nip in it and would carry a leaf or two in a swirl around my head.  But I was too busy to notice, choosing instead to mind my footfalls, making sure I wouldn’t trip on the frozen jeep tracks that had hardened in the road, leftovers from a late October rain.



There were no birds to sing in the treetops; they were long gone.  All you could hear was the rattling of oak leaves clinging to the branches that were buffeted by the wind and the babble of the Farmington River as it hurried on its way to the mighty Connecticut.



But hold on!  There was a hum down the road a piece.  Not very loud, mind you, but down around the bend, out of sight.  Sure enough, I saw what it was as I passed over a small rise in the road.  Down the gentle slope, coming slowly around the bend, I could see through the woods some kind of antique automobile, picking its way through the ruts and carefully avoiding the larger of the rocks embedded in the road.



It was a deep green, open touring car with two aboard.  The driver was seated on the wrong side of the car, and his passenger, a woman of a certain age bundled up in a wool coat and scarf with her hair tucked beneath a dark beret, came slowly up the rise to meet me.  I stepped aside and waited for them to pass.



The green automobile was no less than an ancient Rolls Royce, replete with wooden spokes and skinny little tires barely broader than the wooden wheels of a horse-drawn buggy.  It was a lengthy car, with a broad-but-empty back seat.  The driver, wearing a tweed cap and jacket, tugged at his brim with a gloved hand, acknowledging my stepping aside to allow him and his vehicle to pass.  His passenger stared straight ahead, not noticing me in the slightest.



They passed me by, continuing to pick their path along the right-of-way, and passed down the gentle slope on the other side of the rise.  I stood and watched them until the road took another bend, and they disappeared from view.



Months passed.  Winter came and went.  And the following spring, while attending a vintage car meet in nearby Avon, Connecticut, what do you think I saw?  The very same car with the very same couple, lining up with all the other old cars hoping to qualify for a ribbon from the local judges.



I approached the green car, screwed up my gumption, and spoke to the couple.  It was immediately apparent that the woman who’d failed to acknowledge my presence in the woods the previous November was far from impolite.  She was blind.



Her husband was a voluble fellow, who stepped down from his automobile and entertained my questions.  “Yes,” he told me, “this most certainly is a Rolls Royce — a 1921 Silver Ghost, in fact.  But this is no ordinary Silver Ghost, don’t you know.  This one was built in Springfield, Massachusetts.”



“Springfield?”  I asked, rather puzzled.



“Oh yes!” he replied.  “They built them here.”





Act Two:  Exposition



Frederick Henry Royce was the quintessential engineer.  He possessed an analytical and exacting mind and owned an electrical manufacturing firm of some modest success.  In was in his factory in 1904 that he built his first car…which he dubbed a “Royce.”  Within a year he’d sold one to an adventurer and bon vivant by the name of Charles Stewart Rolls, who was the classic salesman — boisterous, generous, “hail-fellow-well-met.”



Though cut from two different bolts of cloth, Royce and Rolls hit it off, and in 1905, the two decided to form a company to produce automobiles utilizing Rolls’ abilities to raise capital through his considerable personal relationships and Royce’s impeccable engineering skills.



In 1905 and 1906 the newly founded company produced 40 vehicles with four cylinder engines that produced an astonishing 20 horsepower.  In the autumn of 1906, Charles Rolls, considered by some to be a marketing whiz, decided to take four cars to America to drum up interest in its rapidly growing market for high-end luxury vehicles.



Rolls was driver and an automobile enthusiast, and during that trip, he took great delight in meeting Wilbur and Orville Wright, whose adventures at Kitty Hawk just three years before had captured the world’s imagination.  The encounter turned out to have more significance, though, than Charles Rolls realized.  He was absolutely smitten with what was then termed the “aero plane,” and within four years he was dead, Britain’s first flying casualty.



But Rolls was delighted by his reception in America.  He sold his first car immediately upon arrival.  The car had barely made it out of the cargo hold before it was sold and was shipped to Texas.  The second of the four was sold in quick time to a local resident in New York, and Charles Rolls hung on to the remaining two.  One appeared at the New York Auto Show, which engendered an order for four more cars and resulted in the creation of the entity that would become the Rolls-Royce American distributor.



But it was the non-auto show vehicle that made the most news.  Charles Rolls took his car to Detroit, where he met with William C. Durant, the general manager of Buick and Ransom E. Olds, the owner of Oldsmobile.  Durant had built a grueling test track for new automobiles.  Not a single car of the era could round the track for more than three hours before breaking down — not a Buick, not an Oldsmobile, not a Ford, not a Cadillac, not even a Stoddard-Dayton, which had been designed from 1906 to be America’s finest example of automotive engineering.  Durant suggested that Rolls try his luck.



The Silver Ghost not only broke the three hour mark; it went on to complete a full 24 hours before it motored away.  The news was electrifying.



The annual American sales of Silver Ghosts went from four in 1906 to 100 in 1913.  But the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 meant there were no more Rolls-Royce chassis to be had.  Instead, owners elected to rebody their pre-war cars, ensuring that they would keep up with the latest fashions.  Therein lies a huge difference between buying a luxury automobile in 1913, and buying a luxury car today.



Were you to walk into a Rolls-Royce showroom in those days, be it in London or New York, you would buy nothing more than a chassis with an engine, steering column, and wheels.  No body, no seats, no accessories.  And it wasn’t cheap.  You’d be plunking down about $10,000.  The corresponding cost for a Peerless, Pierce-Arrow, or Packard was about three thousand dollars less, and you’d obtain delivery of a complete car, just like the one you saw on the showroom floor.



The custom in Europe, including Great Britain, was completely different.  You bought a chassis from a manufacturer, and you took it to a coach builder.



There were coach builders in the United States, too.  In fact, some of the more successful ones were scooped up in later years by the American manufacturers themselves.  In the 1930s, Fischer Auto Body was acquired by General Motors.  Likewise, LeBaron was purchased by Chrysler.



But at the turn of the 20th Century, there were dozens of American coach building companies, each of which was eager to build you a body for whatever frame you had purchased.  In the case of Rolls, the locations of coach makers ranged from Amesbury, Massachusetts to Cincinnati, Ohio.  The most notable of the group was the Brewster Coachworks of Long Island, New York, a company that had started building horse-drawn coaches in the mid-19th Century.



After four long and bloody years, the guns across Europe fell silent.  Though victorious, the British had suffered tremendous losses, and Britain as a nation was exhausted.



Not so in the United States.  Yes, American men died in the fighting after the country entered the war in 1917, but the percentage of the men in the ranks who were killed or wounded paled in comparison to that of the British, the French, the Belgian or the German armies.  Before entering the war, the nation had begun to flex its industrial muscle, producing a soaring economy that barely broke its stride with the advent of hostilities.  And with the Armistice in 1918, America was ready to supply an exhausted Europe both with aid and with goods.



Henry Royce, whose partner had died in a plane crash eight years earlier, recognized that the American automotive market was so large that it exceeded that rest of the world combined.  He also realized that his chassis’ reputation in America had only increased during its four year absence from the market.  Lastly, his business sense told him that the price he’d established in the United States between 1906 and 1914 would yield a far greater profit were he able to avoid paying tariffs.  The only way to do that was to begin manufacturing Rolls Royces in America.



In 1919, Royce dispatched Claude Johnson, his general manager, to New York.  His mission?  To scout out an appropriate location to establish a manufacturing plant.  Johnson before the war had advocated the creation of such a plant, even to the point of renting space in 1913 from the Brewster Coachworks at their facility on Long Island.



This time, however, Johnson had even grander ideas.  He settled on a factory in Springfield, Massachusetts, formerly home to the American Wire Wheel Company.  Springfield made great sense from a business standpoint, as the region was filled with skilled machinists and metal workers who had learned their trade in the armories and factories along the Connecticut River from Vermont to Long Island Sound.  The region, famed for producing everything from Columbia bicycles to Colt revolvers, from Royal typewriters to Winchester repeaters, was the Silicon Valley of its day.



Springfield was also equidistant between Rolls’ two largest markets:  Boston and New York City.  And the American Wire Wheel factory sat alongside a rail line, making it an ideal site for shipping chassis to coachbuilders.



In 1920, no less than Henry Royce himself, along with 50 British managers and foremen and their families, arrived in Springfield to set up the facility.  In short order, after hiring some 400 assembly workers, the factory produced its first Rolls Royce “Silver Ghost” chassis in early 1921.  The company stated firmly from the very start that the output of the Springfield factory was to be the equal of that of its Derby, England production plant. 



The first 25 rolling chassis were identical to those produced in England, in large part because they were constructed of parts manufactured and shipped from the Derby factory.  But as time went on, more and more of the content of the American-made Rolls Royces came from American sources.



By 1921, the Silver Ghost had grown in power and speed.  The engine had evolved from four to six cylinders, displacing 460 cubic inches, and making 80 horsepower.  It boasted a top speed of 70 miles per hour, the likes of which only a sports car like a Mercer Raceabout or Stutz Bearcat could attain before the war.



In 1925, the Springfield manufacturing facility made significant changes in the cars they were producing.  Unlike their British cousins, their engines now featured valve covers.  They adopted the use of drum headlights, sturdy American electrical components, and tubular bumpers.  But the most radical development was creating a car with the steering wheel on the left.  Even the mighty Rolls Royce, which had stubbornly resisted the move for four years, would finally bow to American tastes. 



Yes, many of Rolls Royce’s American customers engaged a chauffeur to maintain and drive their vehicles.  But the percentage of cars termed “self-drivers,” in which the owner him- or herself operated the automobile, was far greater than in Britain, and the figure was growing.  Having a steering wheel on the right-hand side, with a floor-mounted gearshift on the right blocking access to the driver’s seat (as was the practice in Britain), was now considered by American “self-drivers” an impediment to entry.



The year 1925 also saw two important corporate developments for Rolls Royce, one affecting their Springfield facility and the other affecting their factory in Derby.  In America, Rolls acquired the Brewster Coachbuilding Company, enabling the seven factory-owned showrooms in New York, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco, Hartford, and Troy, New York, and the sixteen independently owned dealerships around the country, to offer a standard line of bodies ranging from roadsters to sedans to sedancas, the classic chauffeur-driven design which cosseted passengers in closed comfort while the driver sat in the open, unprotected from the elements.



In Derby, 1925 saw the introduction of the Rolls Royce “New Phantom,” a model meant to supersede the Silver Ghost, which had been in production since 1905.  It was a thorough modernization, introducing an overhead valve, in-line six cylinder engine that was capable of producing 113 horsepower, mated to a newly designed three-speed transmission, and stopped by servo-assisted four wheel brakes.



It would be two more years until the tooling would become available to have Springfield begin the manufacture of “New Phantoms.”  But when they arrived in 1927, they were greeted with great acclaim.  A Phantom could run at speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour.



With the booming American economy, the Springfield plant was producing 12 automobiles a week, and the public was clamoring for more.  They were now commanding $20,000 apiece.



But 1928 saw a weakening of demand.  American manufacturers like Packard, Deusenberg, and Cadillac were producing comparably powerful and equally luxurious cars at a much lower price.  Twelve automobiles per week drooped to nine per week.



Competition in Europe was equally fierce.  Rolls Royce on the continent was being chased by Hispano-Suiza, Mercedes-Benz, Bugatti, and Isotta-Fraschini.  By 1928, the “New Phantom,” introduced just three years earlier, was being eclipsed.  To counter their competition, in early 1929 Rolls introduced an ultra-high tech and thoroughly more sophisticated model dubbed the “Phantom II.”



And then the market crashed.



The nine-per-week production rate of Springfield “New Phantoms,” now termed “Phantom I’s”, dropped to just under three a week, and before long, it went down to less than one per week.



The estimated cost of re-tooling the Springfield factory to produce the Phantom II was thought to exceed one million dollars, and the demand for cars that cost $20,000 a piece had collapsed.  It was clear that given the state of the American economy, Rolls Royce would never recover the expense.



The factory closed its doors in 1931 and was soon sold, but the company honored the last 200 orders for their cars. By 1935, these cars had their coachwork installed on Long Island and were delivered to their customers. 



Today the factory still stands, and is visible from Interstate 290, a stretch of superhighway connecting I-91 to the Massachusetts Turnpike.  It houses Tite-Flex, a division of Smiths Tubular Systems, and its red brick walls have been painted white.  Ten years ago in a freak windstorm, the Tite-Flex sign was blown off the building, revealing the distinctive Rolls Royce logo that had been painted onto the brick surface in 1921.





Act Three:  Ask the man who owns one



There were many notables who owned the cars manufactured in the Springfield Rolls Royce factory.  Former President Woodrow Wilson owned one, as did the Guggenheims and the Bloomingdales.  But arguably the most famous owner of a Springfield Rolls was a fictional character invented by F. Scott Fitzgerald.



Jay Gatsby, the central figure of the novel The Great Gatsby, owned a 1922 Silver Ghost, a cream colored car that Daisy Buchanan was driving back to East Egg when she struck and killed Myrtle Wilson.



The most notable owner of a Springfield Rolls, however, was a fellow by the name of M. Allen Swift of West Hartford, Connecticut.  In 1928, Allen Swift was given a brand new Phantom Roadster by his father as a graduation gift.  Over the intervening years he put 170,000 miles on the car, driving it until October 2005, when Swift passed away at the age of 102.



When he died, Mr. Swift’s Rolls Royce, along with a donation of $1,000,000, went to the Springfield Museums, where today it stands proudly as the centerpiece of a museum display devoted to Springfield’s history as a center of automobile and motorcycle manufacturing.



M. Allen Swift, by the way, owned and operated his Springfield Rolls for more than 77 years. This is the longest amount of time any human being has ever owned and operated an automobile purchased new.





Act Four:  The Satan’s Kingdom Rolls Royce



Given Mr. Swift’s example, it appears that once you own a Springfield Rolls Royce, you become reluctant to part with it.  With the help of the current president of the Modern Car Society of the Rolls Royce Owners Club, a chap named Michael Gaetano of Hopkinton, Massachusetts, I’ve been able to track down that Silver Ghost I saw in the woods 32 years ago.



No longer green, it’s now red, but it’s still owned by the same fellow, John Parker III of North Stonington, Connecticut.  Sadly, his wife, Amy Morgan Parker, passed away in 2008 at the age of 77.  John bought his 1921 Springfield Silver Ghost in 1970, and last September he won best in class at the 44th Annual Bennington Antique and Classic Car Show.  As you’ll see from the picture I’m passing around, he's clearly proud of the fact that "Yes! They built them here."



Photo by Glenn Franco Simmons, used under Creative Commons License

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The Club's historic membership roster, part VI: members joining 1916-1941

Editor's note: No new members joined from 1913 to 1915.  In previous installments of our historic membership roster, we've been able to provide a biographical paragraph on most members, largely thanks to the powers of Google to locate sometimes obscure data sources. It turns out, however, that our members joining before 1920 or so are far more Googleable than those joining in 1920 and later, so some of these bios are very brief indeed. As in prior installments, some of the basic information here comes from Harold Hutchins' research in city directories at the Berkshire Athenaeum. If any reader can supplement the information listed here, we would be much obliged — contact Martin Langeveld, the Club historian/webmaster, at the "Contact Us" link at the top of the right column.

1916

Rev. James Edgar Gregg —Born in Hartford, Conn. Nov. 24, 1875; grew up in Colorado Springs; graduated from Harvard University in 1897; attended Harvard Divinity School 1900-1901; taught school in Rhode Island for three years; prepared for ministry at Yale, receiving a Bachelor of Divinity in 1903. Came to Pittsfield as an assistant to (Club member) Rev. William V. W. Davis at First Church of Christ and was ordained at First Church; became the second minister of Pilgrim Memorial Church in Pittsfield. From there, went to Kirk Street Congregational Church in Lowell; returned to Pittsfield to succeed Dr. Davis at First Church in 1912. Presided over the 150th anniversary observances at First Church. Resigned his pastorate in 1918 to accept an unsought appointment as the third president (then called principal) of the Hampton Institute in Virginia where he served until 1929; received a Doctor of Divinity from Yale in 1918. At historically-black Hampton, he was notably involved in a controversial episode in 1927 in which students revolted with a strike against the perceived overly conservative and paternalistic policies of the white administrators. Gregg retired to Pittsfield and rejoined the Club in 1942. He died in 1946.

1923

Elmer Gerrish Bridgham — Principal of Pomeroy School. Born July 18, 1871 in W. Minot, Androscoggin County, Maine. Attended Hebron Academy, Hebron, Maine. Graduated from Middlebury College in 1897, and taught school from that time until he was seventy years old in Pulaski, New York; Gouverneur, New York; Owego; Princeton, Illinois; Sitka, Alaska; Lenox Massachusetts, and Pittsfield. Author of a history of the Bridgham family. 

1924

Rev. Vincent Godfrey Burns — pastor of South Congregational Church. In 1927, his resignation was reported in Time Magazine as follows (April 24, 1927):

Because his flock did not relish his criticism of U.S. Secretary of State Kellogg's Latin American policy, the Rev. Vincent G. Burns of the South Congregational Church, Pittsfield, Mass., recently resigned his pastorate. Said he: "In a day when hypocritical clergymen are mouthing old theologies, in a day when mammon-worshiping, penny-pinching hypocrites are defending the system that exploits millions and sucks the lifeblood out of the workers around the world, in a day when snobs and aristocrats hold up the iron wall of class and caste, I have dared to stand up and tell the truth concerning these soul-blasting tyrannies."

Burns wrote the introduction to a book by his brother, Robert Elliott Burns, entitled I am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang, originally published in 1932, reissued by the University of Georgia Press in 1997 and still in print as of 2010. The book was a bestseller, later turned into a movie, that recounted Robert's conviction on a minor charge and his sentence to a ten-year sentence on a chain gang, virtually a death sentence in its day, and his subsequent escapes. Eventually, the brothers had a falling-out when Vincent sued Robert for a share of the profits from the book and movie. The film was remade in 1987 as The Man who Broke 1000 Chains for HBO. Vincent became an Episcopal priest and poet, serving as poet laureate of Maryland from 1962 until his death in 1970.

1925

Joseph J. Lawrence — a writer who lived at 39 Harding St.

Lorne B. Hulsman — 1881-1957. Graduated from Boston University in 1905. Listed as principal of Melrose High School in 1916; listed as principal of Pittsfield High School as of 1919. As of 1925, employed at C. D. Parker Co., an investment brokerage located in the Berkshire Life Insurance building in downtown Pittsfield Buried in Elm Street Cemetery, Braintree, Mass.

James M. Rosenthal — Pittsfield city solicitor, partner in the firm of Cummings & Rosenthal. A frequent contributor to the American Bar Association journal.

1929

Rabbi Harry Kaplan — Spiritual leader of Temple Anshe Amunim. Harry Kaplan was born on October 6, 1901 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was educated in the public schools of Minneapolis. In 1923 he graduated from the University of Minnesota, with the degree of Bachelor of Arts, majoring in Sociology and Community Organization. He was a member of the first graduating class of the Minneapolis Talmud Torah, a nationally known Hebrew School. He was ordained as rabbi from the Jewish Institute of Religion, New York City, in 1927, while also receiving a Master of Hebrew Literature, cum laude. He took postgraduate work at the University of Wisconsin, at Ohio State University, and at the Geneva, Switzerland Institute of International Studies. From 1926 to 1935 he was Rabbi at Temple Anshe Amunim in Pittsfield. From 1935 until his death in 1969 he was Ohio State University Hillel Director. In addition he was Midwest Regional Director for the B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation and a member of the National Hillel Cabinet. he was also a member of the Central Conference of American Rabbis and a Rotarian. He was a past President of the Jewish Teachers' Association of the New England Liberal Schools, of the Pittsfield Council of Social Agencies, and of the Alumni Association of the Jewish Institute of Religion. Rabbi Kaplan's articles appeared in Religious Education, The National Jewish Monthly, and The Commentator. Rabbi Kaplan was honored in 1953 with the honorary degree of Doctor of Divinity by Hebrew Union-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1955 Ohio State University gave him an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. Harry Kaplan died on February 7, 1969. He was survived by his wife, Theresa, and four children.

Rev. John Gratton — Born in London, U.K.; naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1922. Studied law in London; in the U.S., worked as a farmhand to put himself through Drake College, Des Moines, Iowa; graduated from Union Theological Seminary in 1922. Served five years at Palisades Park Presbyterian Church, New Jersey; came to Pittsfield to become pastor at First Church in 1928 and served until 1952. While at First Church, he initiated the expansion and renovation of the parish house completed in 1952, the rebuilding and enlargement of the sanctuary organ the same year, and the merger that year of the separately constituted Church and Parish. As well, he presided over the church's 175th anniversary observance in 1939.

Dr. Floyd Smith — Pittsfield's first pediatrician

Charles H. Wright — Assistant District Attorney, Massachusetts Legislator. Born in Hinsdale, Mass. Sept. 12, 1870; attended Pittsfield High School, Williston Seminary, 1888; Williams College (A. B.), 1892; George Washington University (LL.B.) 1894; private secretary Congressman Wright in 1892-5; lawyer in Pittsfield beginning 1895. Common council 1897-8; alderman 1899; board of health 1900-08 (chairman); commission to revise city charter 1903-04; assistant district attorney 1906-14; appointed examiner of titles in Land Court 1898; trustee western diocese Episcopal church. Masons (past master Crescent lodge) Scottish rite; Elks (P. E. R. Pittsfield lodge; P. D. D. western Massachusetts); Trustee of St. Andrew's church, Washington, D. C.; Park and Country clubs. On committees on pardons, charitable institutions and prisons; finance, accounts and warrants; State House; military and naval affairs in Council of 1915-16.

1930

Dr. John Blanchard Thomes — physician and surgeon. Born in Cumberland, Maine August 9, 1870; graduated from Dartmouth Medical School in 1895; died Portland, Maine, April 18, 1977.

Maurice A. Levy — Pastor of the First Baptist Church. Graduate of Newton Theological Seminary; previously served the First Baptist Church of Hingham, Mass.; chaplain of the Pitttfield Lodge of Ancient Free and Accepted Masons.

1931

Thomas Nelson Baker — Baker was born a slave in Northampton County, Virginia in 1860; he graduated from the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Hampton, Virginia in 1885; from the Mount Hermon School for Boys in Gill, Mass. in 1889; and from Boston University as valedictorian in 1893. He earned a Bachelor of Divinity in 1896 and a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1903 from Yale University, the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy anywhere in the United States, and the first former slave to do so. (No other African-American earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale until 1946. One earlier Ph.D. in Philosophy was granted to an African-American by a university in Belgium.) His doctoral dissertation was entitled "The ethical significance of the connection between mind and body."  After his ordination he took charge of the Dixwell Avenue Congregational Church, a black church in New Haven, and came to Pittsfield in 1901 as the second minister of the Second Congregational Church.  (The first was the Rev. Samuel Harrison, chaplain of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment during the Civil War.) He married Lizzie Baytop, an 1884 graduate of Hampton, who served as its librarian. He died in Pittsfield Feb. 25, 1941. His son, Thomas Nelson Baker Jr., born in Pittsfield in 1906, became a professor of chemistry at Virginia State College. See also "Not Pity But Respect," a 2013 Monday Evening Club paper by Robert G. Anderson about T. Nelson Baker.

Dr. Modestino Cricitiello — 1894(?)-1982. Physician and surgeon in Pittsfield. Born in Avellino, Italy, came to the United States with his parents at the age of 9. Graduated from Princeton University in 1917 and from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1921. He served during World War I with the Army Medical Reserve while attending college, and during World War II he was chief of surgery with the 1000-bed 117th General Hospital near Bristol, England. He was discharged in 1945 as a lieutenant colonel. He came to Pittsfield in 1922 and opened a practice in medicine and surgery; was associated with the Pittsfield Department of Health, campaigning for the pasteurization of milk. He developed the clinical pathology department at St. Luke's Hospital in 1926, establishing there one of the first schools for laboratory technicians in western Massachusetts. He was a fellow of the American College of Surgeons and a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society.

1932

Dr. Horace K. Richardson — Assistant medical director, Austen Riggs Foundation, Stockbridge. Co-author with Austen Riggs of "The Role of Personality in Psychotherapeutics." Later active in Baltimore. Born about 1880, died 1962.

1933

Merle Dixon Graves — Born October 13, 1887 in Bowdoinham, Maine (son of Rev. Lucien Chase Graves and Annie Dixon Graves); graduated from Amherst College, 1908; graduated from Harvard Law School 1912; married Clara Cooley Stevenson; lawyer; member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives 1921-1924; owner of "Gravesleigh," an estate on Williams Street. Much of this property is now the Canoe Meadows Wildlife Sanctuary operated by the Massachusetts Audubon Society.

Arthur M. Robinson — Lived in Williamstown; Register of Probate and Insolvency, North Adams; later a probate judge; served on the Mt. Greylock State Reservation Commission.

Rev. George A. Tuttle — pastor of South Congregational Church. Earlier pastor of Second Congregational Church, East Amherst, Mass.

1935

Rev. Henry Gordon Ives — Pastor of the Unitarian Church. Previously pastor of the Amherst Unitarian Universalist Society, 1919-1929, and earlier at the Congregational Unitarian Society, Andover.

Francis Harold Henshaw — librarian, Berkshire Athenaeum. Native of Indiana, graduate of Occidental College. Worked as assistant librarian in the Los Angeles Public Library, then obtained a master's degree from the Columbia University School of Library Science. In 1946, he became State Librarian of Texas, serving until 1950.

1936

John J. O'Connell — manager at Pittsfield Electric Company

1937

Gardner Flick Knight — Born in Somerville, Mass., April 22, 1901. Attended Cambridge Latin School; graduated from Harvard University 1922. Became a Fellow of the Actuarial Society of America in 1935. Assistant to the state actuary of the division of Savings Bank Life Insurance, 1925-1927; examiner and assistant actuaryof the Massachusetts Insurance Department, 1927-1935; appointed associate actuary of the Berkshire Life Insurance Company; actuary in 1938; vice president and actuary in 1942; senior actuary in 1960. He was a charter member of the Boston Actuaries Club and did not miss a single meeting from its formation in 1931 until his final illness. Served as chairman of the Community Chest and on the board of the Girls Club, Salvation Army and the Red Cross. President of the Berkshire Harvard Club in 1948. Member of the First Baptist Church and lay preacher for the Berkshire Union Chapel; past president of the Pittsfield Area Council of Churches. Married to Elsie. F. Nelson. Died in Pittsfield, April 13, 1962.

1938

William S. Annin — Berkshire Eagle editorial writer; Richmond selectman and teacher; dairy farmer in Richmond; longtime "Our Berkshires" columnist.

Herbert C. Dunkley — born 1908, died 1986. Born in Earls Barton, England, Dunkley moved from Canada to Pittsfield to become assistant actuary for the Berkshire Life Insurance Company. From Pittsfield, he moved to Minneapolis as actuary for North American Life and Casualty Insurance Company. Later he became a consulting actuary in California. He maintained a dual career as an organist, performing as a radio organist for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. He was a member of the American Guild of Organists and of the American Theater Organ Society.

1939

Rabbi Saul Habas — replaced Rabbi Kaplan at Temple Anshe Amunim in 1935. Health problems necessitated his resignation from this position in 1943.

1940

Stuart C. Henry — curator of art at the Berkshire Museum beginning about 1932; director beginning in 1939 as successor to Laura Bragg.

Charles W. Kellogg — writer for The Berkshire Eagle.

1941

Charles W. Butler — teller, Berkshire County Savings Bank.

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The bed of Procrustes: Norman Rockwell on education in the Soviet Union, circa 1965

Presented to the Club in 1965 by Norman Rockwell.

Norman Rockwell was a member of the Monday Evening Club from 1961 until his death in 1978.  In this paper, delivered about 1965 following Rockwell's visit to the Soviet Union in December 1963, Rockwell concludes by saying that he "never did paint" the picture he intended to do, juxtaposing U.S. and Soviet country classrooms. However, in 1967 he completed for Look magazine a picture called "Russian Schoolroom," (above) which later was stolen from a gallery in Missouri in 1973. In 1989, it turned up in the collection of film director Steven Spielberg (a noted Rockwell collector and longtime supporter of the Norman Rockwell Museum), and eventually became the subject of a complex legal tangle with possible connections to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. The case was resolved in 2010 with the painting being awarded to Newport R.I. art dealer Judith Goffman Cutler. 

This paper is transcribed from an undated manuscript in the collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. The title "Bed of Procrustes" is written on the envelope in which it was originally contained, along with the words "ad lib."  In this transcription,  spelling and punctuation is generally left as it is in the original.

 

The Club is grateful for the assistance of Corry Kanzenburg and Jessika Drmacich of the collections staff at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass. for providing access to the manuscript of this and other papers Rockwell presented to the Club, to the museum's director, Laurie Norton Moffatt, for alerting us to their existence (via a Facebook comment!) and to the Norman Rockwell Licensing Company for permission to publish the papers. 



Licensed by Norman Rockwell Licensing, Niles, IL.

A year ago last December my wife and I journeyed to Moscow.  I was going as a specialist for the United States Information Service [sic — actually the U.S. Information Agency].  My job was to work with our half of an exchange exhibit of graphic art.



I had a project.  This of course, was in addition to my work with the graphic show.



My project was to illustrate with a picture, or pictures, the elementary schools of Russia.  Look magazine was definitely interested so I made my inquiries among our personnel at the exhibit and also at the American embassy.  They, in turn, put in a request that I meet the minister of education in Moscow.



Things move slowly in Moscow — at least for an American with a project.  Not only is there a vast bureaucracy, but there is an amazingly devious procedure that just can not be cut short.  Then, too, there’s an atmosphere of mutual distrust.



After some weeks I was given an interview with the assistant minister and stated what I wanted to do.  I told him I wanted to paint a small country school, and its students, that would be comparable to just such a school in America, and that I wanted to do it honestly and fairly, as a way toward mutual understanding.  His associates were most smiling and amiable, and said that there were no small country schools near Moscow, but that they would arrange that I should visit an  elementary school.  I was very happy, we all bowed, and I left the massive building which was just off “Red Square.”  Two or three weeks later I hadn’t heard.  Then I talked to my embassy and exhibition friends and they laughed and said, “You’ll never hear from them.” But I was sure they were wrong because the officials had been so amiable and cooperative. Then another week went by and I began to get a bit restless.



By accident, at the Metropole Hotel, I met an American television director and his crew, who, after two years of intense negotiations, were going to make pictures in a school the next day. When I told Mr. Powers my predicament, he told me to meet him the next morning at eight o’clock and he would take me to the school as one of his assistant camera men – well, really not a camera man, I was to be disguised as the man who carried the cameras for the assistant camera man.  Next morning we piled into the television bus and arrived at the school as it opened.  It was a school that emphasized the teaching of English.  Once I was inside, there were no restraints whatsoever.  I listened and watched and sketched and measured everything.  Nobody questioned or interfered with me.



When I got back to the hotel that night I had a notice that the assistant minister of education had arranged that I could go with my wife, an interpreter, and a photographer to a very fine Moscow school (somehow or other he knew I had been to a school that day) — and it was a very find school. In fact, it was their showpiece.  The Russians have a sort of inferiority complex and want you to see only the best.



Physically, it could have been a large American city school, except for the inevitable giant statue of Lenin out in front.  Externally, it was of white concrete block construction.  Inside, it was light and spacious, with many plants and bulletin boards.  I was fascinated by the children's clothing: every child wore a uniform.  The girls wore identical brown dresses under identical brown pinafores.  The boys wore ill-fitting gray jackets and long gray trousers.  Almost without exception, everyone wore the red handkerchief of the “Young Pioneers,” who are, of course, the boy and girl scouts of Russia.  The only variation, which was amusing, was the shoes. They were of every type, color and condition.



The majority of the children wore their good conduct medal, which was a “Baby Lenin” button—a good-sized button, gold colored with a bas-relief of a curly-haired baby Lenin.  It was only to be worn when their conduct was ideologically and otherwise perfect.



Another thing that struck me was that every room had its Lenin corner with a white marble statue of Lenin, and behind it the red flag with hammer and sickle and fresh flowers laid on the base of the statue.  Also repeated everywhere were Lenin’s favorite words to students: “Study, study and study in order to become a good communist.”



We were very fortunate that at our all-Russian hotel there was a group of four American doctors.  Naturally we got acquainted, and we found that they were not doctors of medicine but Ph.D.’s in the field of education and were making a third trip to Russia for the American comparative education society, as guests of the Russian trade union of education, culture and science.  The outstanding member of the group was a Dr. Rudman of the University of Michigan [sic — this was Herbert C. Rudman, actually a professor at Michigan State University].  He spoke Russian and is one of the three greatest experts in America on Russian education, and is the author of a number of books and articles on the subject.  He was most affable, and most of this paper is based on what we learned from him directly and from books and papers he has forwarded to us.



To begin with, the Russian system of education is monolithic.  Every official is answerable to the central power, every act must fit itself to a master plan.  Decrees which establish the plan come directly from the presidium and central committee of the Communist Party, and become operative when consented to by the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., and the council of ministers of the U.S.S.R.



Now I come to the title of this paper:



The Bed of Procrustes



As you doubtless remember, “Procrustes,” in Greek legend, was a robber of Attica, who placed all who fell into his hands upon an iron bed.  If they were longer than the bed he cut off the redundant part: if shorter, he stretched them till they fitted it.  Hence any attempt to reduce men to one standard, one way of thinking, or one way of acting, is called “placing them on Procrustes’ bed.”



As Procrustes fitted every victim to his bed, so is every child molded to fit the Russian educational system, which is designed for one end: to give each child those qualities which will best serve the state.  The students are channeled through a common course of study in such a way as not to lose sight of individual occupational talent, and the system provides for increasing specialization in the senior year.  However, once the choice of specialization is made, the curriculum is rigid.  There is no opportunity for choosing elective subjects, and practically no one ever changes from one special course to another.



Since the revolution there have been four master educational plans, though all have been founded on the same three purposes: politically, to teach the principles of communism and to establish preference for it above all other systems; economically, to make the U.S.S.R. most productive of all nations; and culturally to give everyone access to all the glories of the Russian tradition and to educate them in the materialism of Karl Marx, which says that man owes everything to his control of material forces which are always in motion, and has no need of a universal spirit.  In 1931, there was a strong reaction against the system that had first been adopted.  It had been influenced by so-called progressive ideas and particularly by John Dewey.  The Russians were completely disillusioned and threw it out lock, stock and barrel, in favor of a traditional academic plan.  In 1958, Khrushchev announced that production was not increasing satisfactorily, that intellectual snobbery was gaining ground, and that labor was losing respect.  He drew up a new system, it was approved in 1958, and the change-over was supposed to be complete in 1965.  It is this plan that I will tell you about.



It provides for optional pre-school, with a small tuition fee, and for eight years of free compulsory elementary school, from ages 7 to 15, with increased emphasis on vocational work.  It envisaged two years to follow this of occupational work, primarily in factories and on collective farms, but apparently this has been only partially enforced.  Various ways are designed for students to return to senior elementary work.  On-the-job training is provided in factories and on collective farms, and night schools and correspondence schools are available.  Those who wish, return to full-time general education or vocational school, or to schools preparatory for professions and sciences.  In addition, there are special schools, some of which reach back into earlier years.  These are provided for the handicapped or for special training in ballet or art, or they emphasize military training.  Much has been heard about Russian boarding schools.  In practice, however, they seem to be chiefly for those without adequate supervision at home, or for problem children.  Even in special schools, however, a hard core of prescribed curriculum common to all schools is required.



Each republic of the U.S.S.R. has its own ministry of education.  There are some local variations, chiefly with respect to local languages or dialects.  As education becomes more vocational in character, local, economic and occupational conditions affect the schools more closely.  In actual practice, the ministries of all the Russian republics model themselves on the ministry in Moscow.



The purpose of all ministries is to assure results as designed by the central directive.  The Russians are very firm in the presupposition that all children have equal ability, though they recognize that tastes and special talents may vary.  Therefore, any failure to succeed is due o one of three causes: the students are lazy or bad, the teachers are inadequate, or the parents fail to give proper supervision.



Through a system of inspectors, directors, principals, class monitors and class meetings every effort is made to have all students succeed.  I’d like to mention briefly two further institutions that differ rather sharply from anything we know.



The first is the parents’ committee.  It differs from our parent-teachers association in that its purpose is wholly to assist in work that the school deems important.  Of the various sub-committees, that of teaching and upbringing is least like ours.  It provides supervision for those who do not have enough supervision at home.  The following passage from Dr. Rudman’s book [possibly Structure and Decision-making in Soviet Education] shows how it is involved in the discipline of the students:

If a child receives more than two marks of “2” in a week, the teacher or the director may give the parents’ group his name.  This subcommittee may then call the child to the school—to take him to task and warm him to study better.  Parents are also warned that their child is not doing as well as he should.  If this does not produce the desired result, the parents’ subcommittee may inform the trade union or party committee at the place of work of the parents.  The party or trade union then may call a meeting, where the parent of the pupil is publicly shamed for his failure as a parent and where advice is volunteered by his comrades as to how to make his child succeed in school.

In some cases, there are councils of aid on a district wide basis.  They are responsible for registration of all students.  Each member has a case load of five to seven students and arranges, if necessary, for supervision of their homework and special tutoring.  It also arranges meetings where students and parents become acquainted with one another’s work.  On bulletin boards in the schools, and also in the factories or collective farms, the pictures of parents and children are posted if all have done work of special merit.  If any member of the family fails to keep up his record, all pictures of that family are removed.  Further pressure is brought to bear on parents through newspapers, meetings of trade unions, occupational superiors, and even dismissal.



All that has been said heretofore is true, but I can’t help wondering does the title, “The bed of Procrustes” quite fits.  He tortured and amputated his visitors.  So, too, have Russian children been molded and disciplined to fit the design of the Russian state.  In my five weeks there in Moscow, I naturally saw many children on the streets, and then those two days in the schools I saw them being molded.  But, if I am completely honest, they seemed like normal children, maybe more stolid in their expressions, but certainly healthy, and what seemed to be normally happy.  This is what puzzles me.  Realizing the disciplines and regimentation they nave been under, compared with our system which allows for so much more freedom of the individual in choice and behavior, why is there so little difference in the appearance of the children?



May I add a short postscript?



My original theme was to promote mutual understanding by picturing the similarity of the American and Russian schools, but this theme was destroyed by what I had learned about the narrowness and repressions of the Russian system.  On the other hand, the narrowness and repressions were belied, from a picture standpoint, by the apparent normal and happy appearance of these Moscow children.



So I never did paint the picture.



[Note: see introductory section above regarding "Russian Schoolroom" later painted by Rockwell in 1967.]

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A voice in the wilderness: A call for safer cars predating Ralph Nader's "Unsafe at Any Speed"

Presented to the club by Roger B. Linscott in early 1965. Roger was, for many years, the associate editor of The Berkshire Eagle, Pittsfield's daily newspaper. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his editorial writing in 1973, and died in 2008 at the age of 88, having been a member of the Club since 1950.



This paper predates by about nine months Ralph Nader's seminal book on the same subject, Unsafe at Any Speed, which was published November 29, 1965, but could well have served as an introduction to it.



Like most newspaper offices, ours is a regular port of call for a large and varied assortment of cranks and crackpots who fancy us to be the appropriate mouthpiece for their maledictions against mankind or who hope to find in us a willing vehicle for promoting whatever harebrained schemes they wish to foist upon the public. Some of these earnest but offbeat promoters can be put down as harmless eccentrics, and some are quite obviously psychopaths who belong in institutions.



In the latter category is one local character who, because I made the mistake of listening sympathetically when he first visited the Eagle, has made me his particular confidant. He comes to the office perhaps once a month, and his message is always the same: He is convinced that the Hotel Wendell building is top-heavy, and is in imminent danger of falling down with catastrophic consequences. Moreover he feels there is a conspiracy among our leading citizens to conceal this danger from the public, and he suspects that the conspirators are determined to silence him by fair means or foul.



Ordinarily I have an extremely difficult time easing this fellow out of my office, especially as he has a rather wild-eyed, hysterical manner which makes one hesitant to treat him brusquely. But on his most recent visit, two weeks ago, the problem took care of itself. Midway in his peroration he suddenly stopped short, announced that he had forgotten to put a nickel in his parking meter, and bolted out the door.

In my relief at being rid of him so easily, it was some moments before an obvious thought struck me. This man, a certifiable nut with clearly paranoid tendencies, owned an automobile and was apparently licensed to drive it on the highways and byways of the commonwealth. This bothered me. But what bothered me even more was that when I mentioned the incident to several other people, it seemed to bother them not one whit. The typical reaction was a chuckle and a shrug of the shoulders, accompanied by a remark to the effect that if all the persons unfit to drive were ruled off the road there might be precious few licensed drivers left.



More recently another episode brought home to me once again the extraordinary indifference of the average person toward the problems to highway safety. On Christmas Eve an elderly Lee (Mass.) couple and their daughter were killed in a singularly gruesome two-car accident on the Pittsfield-Lenox Road. The driver of the car which the police said caused the accident submitted in district court to findings of wet driving, drunkenness, operating to endanger and driving an unregistered car. He was sent to Northampton State Hospital for observation on the basis of testimony that he had been under mental treatment for some 20 years.



But the far more remarkable aspect of this case was the disclosure that this person had been issued a Massachusetts driver's license in November, six weeks before the fatal accident, notwithstanding the fact that during the previous four months he had received four district court convictions for motor vehicle violations, all of which had been reported to the Registry of Motor Vehicles, and had been involved in two other accidents which had also been duly reported. Wondering how a person could obtain a license with this record, I inquired of the Registry and was told that he had failed to mention his mental record or court convictions on the application form, and that it is not customary for the Registry to check its [own] files in order to verify an applicant's statements before issuing a license.



Once again what bothered me most about the episode was not the laxity of the licensing procedure so much as the evident indifference to the laxity. The Registry official I talked to seemed quite unconcerned. When I was moved a few days later to comment rather caustically on it in the editorial column there was no evident public response. Individuals with whom I discussed it shrugged it off as neither surprising nor particularly shocking. Several of them pointed out to me that it is no more disturbing than the Registry's longstanding practice of restoring suspended licenses at the request of the offending motorist's legislator — a practice which is universally engaged in by even the most conscientious legislators and apparently condoned by their constituents.



My point in citing these two episodes is not to indict the Registry of Motor Vehicles, negligent though it often is, but rather to illustrate the curious ambivalence of the American public's attitude toward carnage on the highways. Outwardly, of course, we all deplore it, we preach against it, we write editorials about it, we heartily endorse safety campaigns designed to make us more aware of it; but we don't actually want to do much about it. We talk about the need for stricter licensing and for periodic re-examination, but we don't demand it with any vigor. We pontificate on the evils of driving after drinking; yet an astonishing number of otherwise responsible and law-abiding citizens think nothing of driving home from a cocktail party after four or five drinks. We complain about lax enforcement of speed limits, which most of us freely violate, and we complain about inadequate policing while denying to state and local police establishments the funds they need to do even a rudimentary job of highway patrolling. We in this room tonight represent, I expect, a singularly sober, staid and law-abiding segment of our community. Yet I venture to say there is not one of us does not on occasion violate the motor vehicle laws of the commonwealth, and without any discernible pangs of conscience. The motor car has made scofflaws of the best of us.



This ambivalent attitude is all the more extraordinary when one considers the truly staggering dimensions of the highway safety problem in both human and economic terms. In 1962 the highway death toll passed the 40,000 mark for the first time in U.S. history; in 1963 it reached an all-time high of 43,000, and although final figures are not yet available, it is believed that the record for 1964 was even worse [Editor's note: it was 45,645], despite the fact that our doctors are steadily becoming more proficient in keeping accident victims alive. Moreover, the traffic deaths tell only part of the story; for every person killed, 125 are non-fatally injured, and the total number injured on the highways each year is climbing almost astronomically. In 1963 alone, it is estimated, more than 4.5 million Americans were injured on the highways, and approximately 200,000 of these suffered permanent disabilities. In a sense, the most tragic aspect of all this is that by far the heaviest death and disability toll is in the younger age brackets — particularly males from 15 to 30 years old. Today more young people die from automobile accidents than from any other cause.



The byproducts in economic and legal terms are almost equally awesome. In 1958, when the highway toll was considerably less than today's, the National Safety Council estimated that traffic accidents cost the nation approximately $1.5 billion in lost wages, $1.8 billion in property damage, $150 million in medical expenses, and $1.7 billion in overhead insurance outlays — a total of about $5.3 billion in direct costs. In legal terms, highway accidents are making a mockery of our ideal of speedy justice by clogging court calendars to an increasing degree. In Massachusetts, which is not untypical, motor vehicle cases now comprise nearly two-thirds of all jury trials, notwithstanding the fact that the great majority of cases never actually go to trial. As an unhappy footnote to this it should also be observed that our claims procedure tends inevitably to be unfair in practice, however just [it is] in theory. Claims for minor injuries are generally settled quickly and often overgenerously, while payments for those who are killed or seriously injured on the highways are usually long delayed and relatively inadequate, especially in the case of low-income families which are economically in no position to hold out for a more favorable settlement.



I could go on for many, many pages citing other manifestations of the highway safety problem, but that is not the point of this paper. The one aspect of the problem that every one readily agrees upon is that its dimensions are staggering; where agreement is conspicuously lacking is on the question of what can be done about it. And here we find an astonishing thing. Although the automobile has been with us for more than 70 years and has been a major factor in our mortality rates for more than half that period, traffic safety has been the subject of an almost negligible amount of consistent, systematic research. In the words of Daniel P. Moynihan, former chairman of the New York Traffic Safety Policy Committee and now Assistant Secretary of Labor [later U.S. Senator 1976-2000; note also that Ralph Nader was an assistant to Moynihan at the time], "Automobile injuries reached epidemic proportions a generation ago — yet our efforts to control the problem are still largely based on a hodge-podge of suppositions and inferences derived from assumptions we have never verified and which, more significantly, we have never tried to verify."



Any systematic approach to the problem, it seems to me, should begin with a recognition of the two basic variables in the traffic equation: the individual driver, and the vehicle. Obviously both are closely interrelated; but considering them separately gives some useful clues as to what approaches are feasible and what ones are not.



At present the bulk of our effort to control traffic mortality is directed toward the first variable: the driver. On the face of it this seems a reasonable place to concentrate our efforts, since most accidents obviously involve a degree of human failure — but in practice the results have been pathetically unsatisfactory.



We have tried, and on a massive scale, the technique of exhortation. Enormous amounts of time, energy and money have been expended on traffic safety campaigns. Billboards and newspapers and radio stations have preached the message endlessly; the National Safety Council has spent millions promoting the slogan approach — "Slow Down and Live" — "The life you save may be your own!" — and has received abundant publicity for its periodic lugubrious predictions as to how many deaths and injuries will result from every holiday weekend.



Yet the exhortations have been largely ignored by a motoring public which, as I noted earlier, is shockingly indifferent to the problem, except on the discussion level. Why this indifference, this immunity to exhortation? Basically, it would seem, for two reasons: first, the average person's firm belief that he himself is a superior driver and that the exhortations are not for him but for everybody else; and second, that most Americans are incurable optimists, to who the prospect of death or serious injury on the highway seems remote and impersonal. You can tell him — quite accurately — that 50 percent of the cars now on the road will be involved at some time or another in an injury or death-producing crash, but he will remain sublimely confident that his car is one of the 50 percent who won't be.



Along with exhortation, we have tried, of course, to control the human element in the traffic safety equation through police action and criminal prosecution — to the tune, in fact, of some 20 million traffic court cases a year in the United States. Obviously this has an enormous deterrent effect, and would have a great deal more if traffic laws were enforced more efficiently and adjudicated more sternly. But just as obviously, the threat of punishment has not served to reduce the dimensions of the problem. The most one can say for it is that the situation would presumably be rather worse without it. Indeed, I would even be hard put to verify my statement that more rigorous enforcement of the motor vehicle laws would necessarily have any greatly beneficial effect, for the sober truth is that there are many indications to the contrary — such as the much-publicized crackdown on speeding which then-Governor Ribicoff instituted in Connecticut in 1955 and which was followed by an appreciable increase, rather than the hoped-for decrease, in the number of accidents and injuries per passenger-mile.



There are several plausible reasons why the threat of punishment has proved incapable of halting the increase in highway accidents. One is that traffic laws, of necessity, often violate the precept that a criminal law should be clear and comprehensible — such terms as "reasonable speed" and "all reasonable care" are vague to the point of virtually inviting violation and inequitable enforcement. Another problem is that accidents are often the consequence of inadvertent factors — an icy stretch of pavement, for example, or a brake failure — which do not involve any infractions of the law. And finally, disregard for traffic laws on the part of many otherwise responsible citizens tends to be encouraged by the arbitrariness with which they are often enforced, the haphazard fashion in which punishments are meted out, and the notorious ease with which tickets can be fixed in most localities.



Another aspect of the attempt to deal with the human element in the highway safety equation is through driver education — and here the results have been even less satisfactory than in the field of enforcement. Driver training programs are based upon the assumption that technical skill in operating a car decreases the likelihood of accidents — but unfortunately a growing body of evidence indicates that personality traits and emotional factors are far more important elements in one's driving performance — and these are elements which no amount of driver training is likely to change. There is, to be sure, some favorable correlation between driver training and accident rates — but this is probably attributable to the fact that the type of person who takes driver training is less likely to have an accident in the first place, and vice versa. Indeed, there are some skeptics who suggest that high school driver training courses may actually increase accident rates by encouraging teenagers to obtain their licenses earlier than they would otherwise.



The same complications which tend to nullify the value of driver training in the highway safety problem also militate against the effectiveness of stricter licensing requirements. As I remarked at the beginning of this paper, we can and should be much tougher than we are in ruling obviously unfit drivers off the road. But I would be the last to suggest that this is any sort of cure-all. For one thing, very few emotionally unstable drivers can be readily identified as such; "accident prone-ness," insofar as it exists, is usually detectable only after the damage has been done. For another thing, the political obstacles to a really stringent licensing policy are probably insuperable in a society where a driver's license is for most persons virtually an economic necessity, popularly regarded less as a privilege than as a cherished right. And finally, physical impediments are not really a major factor in the total accident picture. Statistically, after all, our worst drivers are young men in the prime of life who are both mentally and physically fit.



So much for the human factor in the highway equation. What I have tried to show in the preceding paragraphs is that, whatever the benefits derived from our heavy concentration on this facet of the problem, they have not served to bring the problem under control. Nor are they likely to, given the enormity of the problem, the complexity of the psychological and political obstacles, and the sheer impossibility of changing human nature to any significant degree. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that if the driver were the only factor in the equation we would have to throw up our hands and resign ourselves to a continuing rise in highway casualty rates and all of the vast problems which they bring in their wake.



Happily, however, the picture is not that bleak. For along with the driver, the other major variable in the highway equation is the vehicle; and here we are dealing with an inanimate and relatively tractable element. If we can't do much to make drivers safer, we can at least do a great deal to make automobiles safer. If we can't prevent accidents, we can at least make them far less costly in both human and economic terms by better automotive design.



Our failure to have done so long ago is, in my opinion, a tremendous indictment of the automotive industry and, more particularly, the American motoring public, which after all has the last word in how automobiles are designed. A recent issue of Traffic Safety magazine quoted Col. John Strapp of the Air Force as saying that "the automobile industry is the only one whose product can still be sold after killing thousands and injuring millions of its customers every year." [Editor's comment: Except for the tobacco industry.] Several months ago Prof. J. Douglas Brown of Princeton University, addressing a national convention of engineers, put the point in the form of a question: "If engineers can design space ships to go to the moon, why can't they design a safer automobile?"



The answers, of course, is that they can. A vastly safer car. Some engineers estimate that if all cars incorporated the safety features that have already been developed and proven, the number of annual highway fatalities could be cut from 40,000-plus to 10,000 or less, with a proportionate reduction in serious injuries. And this without adding prohibitively to the cost of the product.



There are two aspects to the safety design problem. First are improvements designed to help prevent accidents from happening. Second, and even more important, are what might be called "fail-safe" features designed to keep bodily injuries to a minimum when a collision occurs, the car stops short, and the passengers keep traveling at the speed of impact until they are stopped by the instrument panel, the steering wheel, the windshield or, possibly, the pavement via an open door.



In the first category — accident prevention, the faults of most present-day automobiles are numerous and well-documented. To cite but a few: the heavy emphasis on "low silhouette," which often seriously impairs the driver's vision and could be, but isn't, partially remedied by vertically adjustable seats; or the widespread use of tinted windshields, which are promoted as a deterrent to daytime glare but are actually a safety hazard because of the dangerous extent to which they impair nighttime vision; or the non-standardized and generally inefficient arrangement of instrument panels, often compounded by a hood over the panel so that the instruments can not be read without taking one's eyes off the road for longer than desirable; or the tendency to excessively insulated and cushioned interiors which cut the driver off from the "feel" of the movement of the car, from his sense of speed, and from sensing an incipient skid or roll; or the failure to provide as standard equipment on most models independent braking systems for front and rear wheels, so that if one fails the car can still be brought to a stop.



In the second category — the "fail-safe" features designed to minimize injuries when crashes do occur — the deficiencies of most contemporary cars are even more numerous. Again, to mention only a few, we find doors without safety locks, which fly open on impact; cardboard-like roof structures designed for appearance rather than strength; poorly anchored seats which easily become dangerous missiles; protruding dashboard control knobs and door and window knobs, all sources of lethal injury; jutting metal dashboards and chisel-like rearview mirrors; and, of course, non-collapsible steering wheels neatly designed to impale the hapless driver. An orthopedic surgeon writing in the American Medical Association Bulletin recently remarked that to speak of the interior design of most automobiles as "faulty" is "actually a gross understatement, as there is almost no feature of the interior design that provides for safety. It is surprising anyone escapes from an automobile without serious injury."



The deficiencies are not, of course, limited to the interior. Most bumpers today are principally ornamental — so much so, indeed, that several makes and models actually put bumper guards on their bumpers. Yet a tough, energy-absorbing bumper of hydraulic design could have an enormously healthy effect in reducing the rate of deceleration on impact, and bumper-resistant frames along the sides of a car can provide vitally important resistance to lateral impact. From the viewpoint of the pedestrian — who is the victim of almost half of the automobile fatalities in urban areas today — the exterior design of the typical Detroit dreadnaught is particularly menacing. According to one standard textbook on preventive medicine:

If one were to attempt to produce a pedestrian-injuring mechanism, one of the most theoretically efficient designs which might be designed would closely approach that of the front end of some present-day automobiles. When the pedestrian is struck in a typical encounter, the bumper fractures the lower leg; the needless headlight hood or other protuberances rupture the liver, spleen or kidney; and commonly, his head strikes an ornament or outside mirror o the car's hood, causing a punctured skull. Then, he is often thrown against the windshield, where he is likely to meet a passenger on the way out.

In any event, it can be stated as unassailable fact that death and injury on the highways can be drastically reduced — perhaps by as much as 75 percent — through better automotive design and by better packaging of the driver and passengers. The obvious question is why hasn't this been done? The answer, quite simply, is that Detroit is in the business of selling automobiles, not selling safety. It tailors its product to the marketplace; and the American auto buyer is primarily interested in appearance and power, not safety. One industry spokesman estimated that "less than 3 percent of new car buyers look under the hoods, and fewer still ask questions as to construction or reliability." Another spokesman — the top safety official of Chrysler — has likened autos to "women's hats, which must have a special attractiveness that inevitably leads to compromises with function and safety." The result is that vast sums are spent on automobile styling, while (relatively speaking) nickels and dimes go for safety engineering. And this, of course, suits the industry's short-run profit goals very well; for, as one observer has remarked, "the industry is built on calculated, non-functional obsolescence — the appeal of the new color, the new gimmick, the new silhouette, the added horsepower or wheel base or wheel track. What else is it that induces a motorist to turn in his '63 model for a '64 or a '65?"



And in all candor, it must be added that the auto industry has not been at all hesitant about catering unabashedly to the frivolous and often dangerous tastes of the marketplace. If the public is overly enchanted with excessive speed and horsepower, it is certainly part of the result, as well as the cause, of the industry's excessive emphasis on these factors in its promotion. Consider, for example, this piece of copy from a magazine advertisement: "All new! All muscle! All glamor! That's the '63 Buick Wildcat! American's only luxury sports car ...  with an almost neurotic urge to get going. Very definitely for the sportsminded male and his equally adventurous mate. There's a Wildcat at your dealer's just rarin' for someone like you to give it a brisk workout." Or this advertising headline: "Pontiac's new, big-bore Strato-streak V-8 with a terrific thrust of 227 blazing horsepower." Or the two-page magazine ad showing a long blurred streak of color and the caption: "9.1 seconds ago this Plymouth was standing still." Or consider some of the names which Detroit gives to its various models in order to suggest speed, power and danger: Thunderbird, Spring, Comet, Meteor, Rocket, Tempest, Fury, F-85, Dart, Lancer, Sting Ray. These, one might justly suspect, are not names selected by an industry eager to convert the public to the idea of safer and more sensible transportation.



It is true, of course, that the industry has made some concessions to safety in response to its critics. All cars now come equipped with anchorage for seat belts, for example; and some cars make available such features as padded dash boards and even collapsible steering columns. But here, two points must regretfully be noted. First, the provision for seat belts was the result not of any initiative in the auto industry but rather of state legislation compelling it — legislation which the industry initially opposed with considerable vigor. Second, the other safety features which have been introduced in recent years are almost all optional extras rather than standard equipment and in many cases fall short of reasonable safety standards in performance, being designed more to give the appearance of safety than to ensure it. Meanwhile, to quote another critic, the industry goes right on designing cars capable of going 140 miles per hour, even with the knowledge that as cars are presently designed, no one would come out alive from a 40-mile-an-hour crash into a barrier."



So much for the indictment. What is the remedy? In the absence of any concerted public demand for a safe automobile, is there any likelihood that the industry will regulate itself in this respect — will it make safety a matter of primary concern regardless of the vicissitudes of the marketplace?



I think not, and most persons who have studied the problem more exhaustively seem to agree. the auto industry is so intensely competitive that even if the manufacturers were genuinely eager to subordinate style and appearance to more sensible considerations they could not afford to add to the cost of their cars for the sake of safety without risking disastrous consequences in the frantic competition for the sale.



What, then, is the answer? Like many others, I believe — and now I belatedly come to the main point of this paper — that the only sensible and realistic answer is for the federal government to establish and enforce safety standards in automobile design, just as it has long established and enforced safety standards in the design of trains and aircraft. And lest anyone protest that this is a socialistic notion, I would point out that passenger cars are the only form of interstate travel which is not regulated by the federal government for purposes of safety.



That regulation of auto safety would be well within the constitutional authority of the federal government is beyond dispute. On this score, it is relevant to recall that some years ago a number of deaths caused by the suffocation of children in abandoned refrigerators cuased Congress to pass — over initial opposition from the manufacturers — a law requiring refrigerators to be equipped with a safety device enabling them to be easily opened from the inside. And this notwithstanding the fact that only 39 deaths had been attributed to this cause during the previous three years. The vastly greater justification for safety regulation of a product which kills more than 40,000 persons a year hardly need be pointed out. In the case of the railroads, the death toll among passengers and, particularly, train crews, was a national scandal until the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act gave the federal government the power to require the installation of two basic safety devices — air brakes and the automatic coupler — which had long been available but had not been voluntarily adopted by the industry. In the case of aircraft, private as well as commercial, stringent federal regulation of safety standards has long been taken for granted, with highly salutary results.



Necessarily, federal promulgation of automobile safety standards would have to be accompanied by an etensive and continuing program of safety research, comparable to the research programs that have long been carried out by the federal government in other areas of public health. In more than half a century of experience with the motor car we have acquired surprisingly little firm knowledge about how to make it a less deadly product, largely because we have made no massive effort to do so. But i would submit that the grim and growing highway toll makes it more clear every day that such an effort is long overdue. The idea of federal regulation of automotive safety standards may sound radical today. But a generation hence I think we will be astonished that it took so long to come about.



Editor's note: While it took a few more years after this paper was written for the highway death rates to begin declining, we think Roger would be pleased to learn that in 2009, the death toll on U.S. highways, 33,808, was the lowest in more than 60 years, and that 2010 is on track to come in even lower. More impressively, the 2009 death rate was 1.13 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, compared with 5.39 in 1964, just before this paper was written. In absolute number, the peak year for fatalities was 1972 with 55,589, but even then the rate per 100 million vehicle miles had dropped to 4.40. A rate below 1 per 100 million now seems possible, perhaps even in 2010 or 2011.





However, it's interesting to note that even in 1965, when viewed in the context of total miles driven, the automotive death rate, at about 5 per 100 million vehicle miles, was far lower than it had been historically. In the early 1920s, when vehicle-mile records begin, the rate was more than 20 per 100 million vehicle miles; in the 1930s it gradually dropped from 15 to about 11; in 1946 it fell below 10 for the first time. (Data source — PDF link)

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