Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT: The slogan "taking the problem to the people" nicely summarizes U.S. traffic safety campaigns of the 1950s. It refers to the goal of awareness and self-discipline for drivers through education and law enforcement. A detailed analysis of the campaigns, however, shows a subtler objective of the motor interests that promoted it. They wanted to overcome political indifference through a civic mobilization of drivers as citizens, persuading drivers to lobby for traffic control. The analysis of their efforts leads us to question the role-or lack of role-of politicians in scientific and technological controversies.
Peter Norton proposes in this issue a nuanced analysis of what he calls a "paradigm of control," which "presented incompetence, carelessness, and recklessness as the chief culprits [of accidents]; the car was thereby exonerated from suspicion as an inherently dangerous machine." He builds on a growing literature related to motoring in the interwar period to show that the goal of control through education and discipline involved a large number of organizations, which included automotive manufacturers and the federal government. In 1965, Ralph Nader referred to such a coalition as "the traffic safety establishment."1 Nader contended that auto manufacturers had allied with the federal government to promote a single vision for traffic safety: "Damn the driver and spare the car."2 Nader believed that members of the "establishment" had convinced state politicians to join their movement for traffic control "through lobbying and other close rela - tions with state and municipal administrators."3 My aim in this article is to question the obviousness of such a process and instead uncover an attempt to organize grassroots lobbying in favor of traffic control, as suggested by a common slogan of the 1950s: "taking the problem to the people."4
The analysis calls attention to the social process through which a situation, in this case the number of traffic accidents, is made problematic, in what sense, for whom and by whom. It does not presuppose that political issues surrounding road safety emerge simply as a result of exceeding a certain threshold of pain or suffering. Instead, it leads to the study of "claimmaking," as well as the social trajectories of "claim-makers."5 As sociologist Joseph Gusfield has noted, in the field of traffic safety as everywhere else, "some have...