Inventing Green

The bicycle, quite literally, paved the road for automobiles. The explosive popularity of the human-powered, two-wheeled vehicle sparked road construction across the Western world’s cities. The League of American Wheelmen was a major vector for the political will necessary to build better roads with more than one million members (out of a mere 75 million people) at its peak. Sure they engaged in silliness like racing and bicycle polo (!) but at heart, the group was a potent, progressive social force that inadvertently helped bring about its own end by getting roads paved, thus making long distance “touring” possible in automobiles.

Historian Peter Hugill of Texas A&M attributes a lot of Good Samaritanism to the League of American Wheelmen.

“The League of American Wheelmen not only agitated for good roads but also published touring maps and guides, erected road signs, and identified inns and hotels that provided appropriate accommodations for middle-class and upper-middle-class urban tourists who were seeking the pleasures of the American countryside,” he writes in his article Good Roads and the Automobile in the United States: 1880-1929. “That level of organization and the emphasis on the conveniences of touring formed the groundwork for the automobile owners when the automobile superceded the bicycle as the means to see the United States.”

It sounds kind of bourgeois, but they weren’t all policy wonkery and the desire for a nice B&B. They also provided referees for racing and wrote incredible pamphlets like, “The Gospel of Good Roads,” in which the state of American roads is compared, through a long and hilarious anecdote, to a drunk-ass husband. Luckily for all involved, Google scanned this volume, so I can present the story to you, in full.

I have heard of a very clever woman whose otherwise excellent husband disturbed the felicity of the household about twice in each year by making himself very drunk. The good wife, despairing of the common and commonly hopeless remedy of moral suasion, applied her wits to the discovery of a newer and more effective means of appealing from Philip drunk to Philip sober. On the occasion of his next debauch, when he was brought home in a condition of maudlin helplessness, with clothing smeared and torn, eyes bleared and face inflamed by drink, she sent for the photographer and caused a life-size picture of her limp lord to be taken, which was duly finished in appropriate colors, framed and hung in a place of honor in the family reception room, where she insisted upon keeping it for a period of three months, and made known her vow to double the term whenever the offense should be repeated. That picture was a silent and successful preacher.

It has seemed to me that if national errors could be reflected in the same forcible way; if some power could and would “the giftie gie us, to see ourselves as others see us” we should get to the end of many of our difficulties. The dirt roads of America are heavy drinkers. They lead a staggering and uncertain course from town to town; smear themselves with thick mire; for four months in the year are unfit for the company of respectable people, and less than eighteen months ago got themselves regularly indicted by the grand jury.

The appeal that these city boys, the League men, make to the farmers appears to be that it costs them money to have bad roads. But really, they play on the deeper fears held by the countryside bumpkins that they are being left behind by progress. And that roads, like the reaper before it, will transform their lives for the better because that is what technology does.

In all kindness let me remind you that in other years you and your good neighbors have opposed many great improvements which were intended for our common benefit, and which the lapse of time has placed in the highest niches of human advancement. You do not forget that when the first railroads were projected you appeared before the legislature of your State and opposed the granting of franchises to all such iniquitous schemes. You said that the locomotives would burn your crops and set fire to the wool on the backs of your sheep; that the gases from the smoke stack would poison your family and your farm stock, and that travel in a railroad car at the frightful speed of twenty miles an hour would be fatal to many passengers and dangerous to all. You opposed the telegraph and ridiculed the mowing machine. You took the sewing machine on sufferance and regarded the patent thresher with a suspicious eye; and I might almost say there is no great invention of commercial or agricultural value which was cheered at its birth by the warmth of your approval.

The message is clear: those that stand in the way of progress will be swept aside. Despite the farmer’s opposition, improvements were made and they helped farmers. Do you really want to be on the wrong side of history again, the pamphlet’s author implicitly asks, on the question of better roads? A road, after all, the author argues is just another piece of technological progress. “Did it ever occur to you that this road is part of the machinery of agriculture?” he write. “That your farm wagon is a machine, pure and simple, and that the road bears the same relation to your wagon that the steel rail bears to the railway car ?”

The League of American Wheelmen won the battle for Good Roads, of course, but the farmers didn’t benefit all that much. Since the real political will for the roads originated in the city elite — the famers were mostly just in the way — the spoils of the roads went to the city folk who got roads connecting them to other big cities as the farmers wondered why their tax dollars were going to fund statewide highway programs. It’s key to remember here, too, that it was these connecting roads that made touring, that is to say, long distance driving as opposed to local commuting around cities, such an attractive activity to early car owners. And gasoline powered cars, with their energy dense fuel and thus long range, were best suited for exactly the kind of trip made possible by the nice new roads. Within a city, electric cars could compete. Outside of them, the internal combustion engine won, hands down.

You can’t lay all the blame on the bicyclists, but their enthusiasm for long stretches of paved highway at just the right moment might have given gasoline powered cars the boost they needed to knock out their competitors.

A QUICK BICYCLE POLO NOTE: Somewhat unrelated, we find this gem in the Library of Congress oral histories collection collected by the Federal Writers Project:

“They used to make the ‘Eagle’ bicycle up in Torrington. That had the big wheel in back and a small one in front. Back in ninety-three I was down in Washington, D.C., time they had the convention of the League of American Wheelmen,” says old-timer Francis Donovan of Thomaston, Connecticut. “They was three-four fellers stayin’ in the same hotel with me from Springfield, had those Eagle wheels. One mornin’ they got an old tomato can and got out in the street in front of the hotel and batted that thing around with their wheels just like they were playin’ polo. Boy, I tell you they was good at it. They’d practiced it to home, you see. They had a crowd of people around watchin’ ‘em before they got through.”

@kristazala writes in to inform me that the bicycle pictured below is a “Penny Farthing.”

[Images: 1 &2: New York Public Library Digital Holdings 3: Library of Congress]