From: elaine warne <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Drink driving
Date: Saturday, February 12, 2000 10:37 PM

I am wondering if anyone has done any work on drink driving in the 1920s
and
1930s. Temperance groups were quite certain that alcohol was connected to
driver impairment and road fatalities, but in the absence of an accurate
'drunkometer' they found it hard to convince the wider community. Do you
know of any work which explores this, or gives some useful analysis of how
people viewed their 'right' to drink and to drive  without regulation in
the
1920s and 1930s?
        Ellen Warne, Department of History, University of Melbourne,
Australia.

----------

Hi Ellen...

Good question!  I don't know of such a paper but I hope one exists or that
you'll write one!  You're certainly correct that temperance groups saw
drunk driving as partly responsible for traffic fatalities.  The general
moral topography of the drinking and driving situation was undoubtedly
rather different from what it is today.  And yes, much depended on the
development of the technology for measuring blood and breath alcohol
levels.  (This technology was incidentally one of the scientific
preoccupations of Howard W. Haggard's Laboratory of Applied Physiology at
Yale  -- see for instance Leon A.  Greenberg's lecture to the Yale Summer
School ["The Concentration of Alcohol in the Blood and Its Significance
with a Demonstration of the Alcoholometer"] as rendered in _Alcohol,
Science and Society_ [1945, pp. 45-55].)

In the U.S., there was a flurry of drunk driving research just after the
repeal of national prohibition in 1933 -- arising out of a concern that
renewed and expanded legal drinking combined with faster and more powerful
post-Repeal cars would make for much higher traffic fatality tolls.  Tracy
Camron's (1977) review of the drunk driving literature included four or
five research citations dating from the mid-1930s.  The issue is
interesting in that it was not disputed "public problem" territory -- like
the bootlegger problem, both drys and wets wanted to minimize drunk driving
in post-Repeal America.  A 1938 announcement of the neutralist Research
Council on Problems of Alcohol pronounced drunk driving and alcoholism as
two islands of dry-wet accord in a sea of otherwise contentious differences
between the two camps.

Drunk driving was one of the alcohol-problem areas post-Repeal drys
monitored in order to show that Repeal was "failing."  John Haynes Holmes,
for example, published articles in _The Christian Century_ offering
successive annual reviews of the heightened problems flowing in Repeal's
wake.  In his list of post-Repeal woes in the first of these articles ("One
Year of Repeal," 7 Nov 34, pp. 1403-1409), JHH wrote:  "3.  _Drunken
driving has become a momentous problem_.  Official reports _without
exception_, in every part of the country, demonstrate a frightful increase
of this evil under repeal.  In an automobile age, this incidence of danger,
against which no man, woman, or child is safe, must be regarded as a matter
of first and immediate public importance" (p. 1406).

The prevailing impression of drunk driving's contribution to traffic
fatalities may have been quite different and much lower however.  For
instance, in JHH's third-year review of Repeal (_TCC_, 26 Nov 36, pp.
1555-1558), JHH's essay included the following estimates, credited to the
National Safety Council: "In 1933, 5 per cent of the drivers and 6 per cent
of the pedestrians injured had been drinking.  In 1934, the percentages
were 6 per cent and 8 per cent; in 1935, 7 per cent and 9 per cent.  Thus
the barometer goes up.  Repeal is certainly effective -- in the wrong
direction!" (p. 1556).  These numbers were much lower, of course, than
estimates that became familiar to Americans after the rise of MADD in the
1980s.  Technologic change was also part of the story here, too.

Good hunting!

Ron Roizen