1914 Indy 500 Pilots

 

A hundred years ago if you subscribed to a magazine entitled Horseless Age: the Automobile Trade Magazine your friends knew that you were a member of the modern set. Few people could envision an age when the horse-drawn hacks and carriages that crowded city streets would be replaced by motorized vehicles. The automobile shook society, redefining assumptions about travel, status, and mobility. It was an age that saw Emily Post include directions on automobiles in her Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home (in case you're interested, according to Ms. Post it is the height of gaucheness to use the term “Auto” in place of “Automobile”). But let's save the aside on manners for another day.

What struck me most as I read the article was the reference to drivers as pilots. It's a marker of the age, nobody knew what to call a driver and literary outlets surely were fumbling for the right word. Reading an article that focuses on how many "foreign" drivers are entered in the Indy 500 also leads to an uncomfortable confrontations with the narrow-mindedness and prejudices of our past, but its nothing compared to most articles of the 1910s. Compared to some of the protectionist, rabble-rousing articles aimed at the burgeoning middle class, Horseless Age’s seems enlightened, but then again they are focusing on what most Americans considered socially acceptable foreigners (the French and British).