L.A. and the Birth of Car Culture ON DARRYL HOLTER AND STEPHEN GEE’S “DRIVING FORCE” By Gary Cross This article and review of former CNCDA Board Member Darryl Holter’s book, “Driving Force,” was previously written by renowned Historian and Professor Gary Scott Cross for the Los Angeles Review of Books. We are accustomed to thinking of the car as an inevitable fit for America and Americans when it appeared around 1900. A spreadout people, already accustomed to personal travel by horse, with an often-noted aversion to crowds, made the conversion to mechanical automobility easy. Nowhere was this more evident than in the region of Southern California. In 1900, Los Angeles was a new city, free from the density and labyrinthine streets of the old walking towns of Europe or even New England; it had attracted settlers (and developers) expecting personal space but also the easy access to work and shopping the car alone could provide. The city had weather that accommodated early roofless and unheated vehicles that in New York might have needed to be stored during winter. Even the early LA trolley system paved the way for the car by fostering dispersal and the subsequent need to fill in the gaps between the web of trolley lines with cars and roads. But, as Darryl Holter and Stephen Gee’s recently released book “Driving Force: Automobiles and the New American City, 1900-1930” claims, Los Angeles as the United States’ quintessential car town cannot be reduced to such abstractions. People, even individualistic people, made it happen. Most books about the people in this field have focused on heroic inventors and manufacturers like Henry Ford and Alfred P. Sloan, the workers in automotive factories and their union led by Walter Reuther, or even promoters of highway and freeway construction like Robert Moses in New York. Interestingly, these figures came from — and gained fame from — their activities in the East. This seems odd, given the size and impact of cars on the West, especially in Los Angeles. Even odder, this attention to manufacturing and infrastructure ignores a most vital fact: At the beginning of the car industry, Americans had to be won over by cars. In retrospect, this seems obvious, but it was not so in 1900. Not just cars but a vast array of new consumer goods that were mass-produced had to be sold to a sometimes reluctant populace. Advertising and new labeling may have impelled American men to buy Gillette razor blades and mothers to purchase Jell-O, but cars were different. They were complex, often unreliable and, most of all, expensive machines (costing in 1900 about twice as much as the average yearly wage). Crucially, they demanded skilled operators on poor and often dangerous roads. Winning a commitment to such devices required enthusiastic and persuasive salesmanship, but also repair services and even financing. And carmakers provided none of this. The driving force of car consumption was much more than just an American “natural” love of automobility (or even their promotion, via massive advertising). The vanguard of the new consumer culture was the car, and its leading edge was arguably the car dealer. And “Driving Force” argues that Los Angeles was home to some of the most important retail innovations. The car dealer has long been written off as the mere gobetween, or else maligned (especially in used car sales) as at least a slightly shady operator, certainly not in the mold of the heroic inventor Ford or the corporate genius Sloan. Yet it seems that these men (and, as noted in the book, also some women) shaped and made possible the revolution from hoof and rail to automobility in the early 20th century. It is no surprise that this scholarly topic arrived as late as it has. And perhaps such a book could only be written by Darryl Holter, a scholar whom I have known for decades but also someone who has decades of experience in car retailing and dealership management on Los Angeles’s Auto Row on Figueroa Street. Holter took over his fatherin-law’s business in middle age. Not only has he enjoyed 24 California New Car Dealer Quarterly
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