Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T07:44:32.987Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Horsepower: Animals, Automobiles, and an Ethic of (Car) Care in Early US Road Narratives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2022

DANIEL BOWMAN
DANIEL BOWMAN*
Affiliation:
School of English, University of Sheffield. Email: djbowman1@sheffield.ac.uk.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

From the mid-1890s to the present day, cars have been fetishized as animal in US automotive culture. This began with automotive periodical Horseless Age, which, in positing the car as a substitute for the horse, decried the material limitations of the “outdated” animal whilst at the same time seeking to coopt its symbolic value. In the first US road trip novels of the 1910s automobiles are described figuratively as animals, simultaneously evoking the horse while symbolically killing it. Examining the intertwined material and symbolic relations between humans, animals, and machines at the dawn of the motor age elucidates the necropolitical position of animals in automotive culture – of the horse in horsepower.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 4 , October 2022 , pp. 613 - 634
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the British Association for American Studies

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Condict, G. Herbert, “The Motor Vehicle in Commercial Operation,” Horseless Age, 3, 12 (March 1899), 14–15, 14Google Scholar.

2 Douglas Brinkley, “Introduction: Theodore Dreiser and the Birth of the Road Book,” in Theodore Dreiser, A Hoosier Holiday (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997; first published 1916), 3–12, 4.

3 For further discussion on the role of the See America First advertising campaign see Vogel, Andrew, “‘Change in Fixity’: Theodore Dreiser's A Hoosier Holiday and the Commitment to American Automobility,” Studies in Travel Writing, 17, 2 (2013), 145–59, 145CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Brinkley, 3.

5 Ibid., 10.

6 Examples of automotive texts from the period which feature symbolic representations of animals include Thomas and Agnes Wilby's On the Trail to Sunset (1912), in which cars are variously described as “cat-like,” “purring,” and “roaring.” Similarly, Beatrice Larnard Massey's It Might Have Been Worse: A Motor Trip from Coast to Coast (1912) describes an automobile as “snorting,” and at one point as “injured.” Emily Post's By Motor to the Golden Gate (1916), too, features descriptions of cars as “injured” and “puffing and snorting.” Significantly, none of these texts engages with the material consequences of automobility for animals, making no mention of roadkill despite the seeming inevitability of colliding with animals on the road in the early twentieth century (see notes 54, 55 below).

7 Imes Chiu, The Evolution from Horse to Automobile: A Comparative International Study (Amherst: Cambria Press, 2008), 83, 85, 135.

8 Nicole Shukin, Animal Capital: Rendering Life in Biopolitical Terms (Minneapolis aznd London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 20.

9 Ibid., 5.

10 Ibid., 116.

11 OED Online, para. 1 of 1, at www.oed.com/view/Entry/200542?redirectedFrom=theriomorphism&; OED Online, para. 1 of 1, at www.oed.com/view/Entry/200541?redirectedFrom=theriomorphic#eid> (accessed 13 Dec. 2021).

12 Steve Baker, Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity, and Representation (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 108. For further discussion of the differences between theriomorphism and anthropomorphism see Claire Parkinson, Animals, Anthropomorphism and Mediated Encounters (London: Routledge, 2020), esp. 33–35.

13 Ingersoll, E. P., “The Horseless Age,” Horseless Age, 1, 1 (Nov. 1895), 7–8, 8Google Scholar.

14 Jennifer Mason, Civilized Creatures: Urban Animals, Sentimental Culture, and American Literature, 1850–1900 (London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 16.

15 This was literally the case for humane publication Our Dumb Animals (1868–1951), which featured on its masthead the image of a draft horse being beaten by an angry driver, with the angel of mercy intervening.

16 Anon., “Woman Whips a Driver,” New York Times, 13 Dec. 1896, 2.

17 “West Sider,” “Treatment of a Tired Horse,” New York Times, 9 Sept. 1899, 7.

18 Cited in Diane L. Beers, For the Prevention of Cruelty: The History and Legacy of Animal Rights Activism in the United States (Athens: Swallow Press and Ohio University Press, 2006), 59.

19 See, for example, anon., “Humane Society Favors Autos,” Horseless Age, 25, 3 (12 Jan. 1910), 96.

20 Anon., “The Automobile”, New York Times, 23 Aug. 1897, 4.

21 Ingersoll, E. P., “The Soulless Machine and the Spirited Animal,” Horseless Age, 1, 2 (Dec. 1895), 9Google Scholar.

22 E. P. Ingersoll, “No Fair Weather Novelty,” Horseless Age, 1, 3 (Jan. 1896), 5.

23 Charles Brady King, “A Timely Suggestion,” Horseless Age, 1, 1 (Nov. 1896), 8.

24 Anon., “The American Motor League,” Horseless Age, 1, 3 (Jan. 1896), 15, my emphasis. The meeting was planned to take place several miles outside the city, with “no provisions made for horses.”

25 Bunce, Theodore D., “The Charging and Care of Automobile Batteries,” Horseless Age, 4, 26 (27 Sept. 1899), 12–13, 12Google Scholar.

26 Chiu, The Evolution from Horse to Automobile, 83.

27 The term ‘necropolitics’ is defined by Mbembe as “forms of subjugation of life to the power of death.” For more detailed discussion see Mbembe, Achille, “Necropolitics,” trans. Meintjes, Libby, Public Culture, 15, 1 (2003), 11–40, 39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 David Buffum, The Horse: His Breeding, Care and Use (New York: Outing Publishing Company, 1911), 6.

29 Ibid., 41.

30 Ibid., 46.

31 For further discussion of the antivivisection movement in this period see Buettinger, Craig, “Women and Antivivisection in Late Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Social History, 30, 4 (Summer 1997), 857–72, 867CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Anon., New York Times, 13 Dec. 1935, 25.

33 Dana, Charles Loomis, “The Zoophil-psychosis : A Modern Malady,” Medical Record, 75, 10 (March 1909), 381–83, 383Google Scholar.

34 Singer claims that it is the characterization of animal rights activists as “animal lovers” that has “had the effect of excluding the entire issue of our treatment of nonhumans from serious political and moral discussion.” Regan similarly contends that animal rights campaigners must make “concerted effort not to indulge our emotions or parade our sentiments. And that requires making a sustained commitment to rational inquiry.” See Peter Singer, Animal Liberation (London: The Bodley Head, 2015; first published 1975), xvi–xvii; Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), xii, my emphasis.

35 Josephine Donovan, “Animal Rights and Feminist Theory,” in Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams, eds., The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 58–86, 59.

36 Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams, “Introduction,” in Donovan and Adams, 1–15, 3.

37 Robert Sloss, The Automobile: Its Selection, Care and Use (New York: Outing Publishing Company, 1910), 66, my emphasis.

38 Harold Whiting, The Gasoline Motor (New York: Outing Publishing Company, 1913), 7.

39 Vogel, “Change in Fixity,” 158, indicates, however, that the Lincoln Highway does not follow the route laid out by Fisher in 1913, but one laid out on a separate trip led by Henry Joy, president of Packard Motors.

40 Theodore Dreiser, A Hoosier Holiday (London: Constable & Co Ltd, 1932; first published 1916), 122. Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text.

41 Louise Closser Hale, We Discover the Old Dominion (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1916), 297. Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text.

42 Brinkley, “Introduction,” 10.

43 Sinclair Lewis, Free Air (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2018; first published 1919), 7. Henceforth cited parenthetically in the text.

44 Defined as the attribution of machine characteristics to a human or other animal. See Peter Marsh and Peter Collett, Driving Passion: The Psychology of the Car (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1987), 142.

45 Ibid., 142.

46 F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and the Manifesto of Futurism” (1909), in Lawrence Rainey, ed., Modernism: An Anthology (London: Blackwell, 2005), 3–6, 4.

47 Stewart Elliott Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 39–40.

48 Borg, Kevin, “The ‘Chauffeur Problem’ in the Early Auto Era: Structuration Theory and the Users of Technology,” Technology and Culture, 40, 4 (1999), 797–832, 797CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Guthrie, 5, claims if we see something as “humanlike, we can try to establish a social relationship.” Whereas if we only animate, rather than anthropomorphize, our options are limited to, for example, “stalk or flee.”

50 See note 45 above.

51 E. P. Ingersoll, “A Word to the Word Coiners,” Horseless Age, 1, 3 (Jan. 1896), 5.

52 Roger M. Knutson, Flattened Fauna: A Field Guide to Common Animals of Roads, Streets, and Highways (Toronto: Ten Speed Press, 1987), 4.

53 Ibid.

54 Dayton Stoner, cited in Michael L. Berger, The Devil Wagon In God's Country: The Automobile and Social Change in Rural America, 1893–1929 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1979), 20.

55 Berger, 20.

56 Simmons, James R., Feathers and Fur on the Turnpike (Boston: Christopher Publishing, 1938), 9Google Scholar.

57 Anon., “In the Workshops,” Horseless Age, 1, 4 (Feb. 1896), 6.

58 Francis H. Rowley, “The Buggy Means the Horse,” Our Dumb Animals, 47, 10 (March 1915), 148.

59 Emily R. Kilby, ‘The Demographics of the U.S. Equine Population,’ in Deborah J. Salem and Andrew N. Rowan, eds., The State of the Animals IV: 2007 (Washington, DC: Humane Society Press, 2007), 175–205, 176.

60 Katherine C. Grier, “Provisioning Man's Best Friend: The Early Years of the American Pet Food Industry, 1870–1942,” in Warren Belasco and Roger Horowitz, eds., Food Chains: From Farmyard to Shopping Cart (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 126–41, 130.

61 Forrest, Susanna, The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey through Human History (London: Atlantic Books, 2016), 239Google Scholar.

62 Grier, 130.

63 Shukin, Animal Capital, 87.

64 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 40, emphasis in original.