VI. ROADTRIPPING: Not a Vacation
Here’s my theory: Until the early 1950s, the words "roadtrip" and "vacation" weren't equated.
This post is part one of an ongoing series, “ROADTRIPPING,” where I analyze the origin and developments of the century-old American Road Trip phenomenon against the backdrop of an ever-dimming American Dream.
Missed the last post? Go here.
In America, the word “roadtrip” usually incites one of two images: 1) young people in a dope Volkswagon under desert stars or 2) an intact family unit en route to a national park. Both pictures imply independence, prosperity, whimsey. Economic and political pressures dissolve in the rearview and ahead stretches The Road.
However.
Roadtrip Wave One
Consider America at the turn of the twentieth century. The federal government acquires new land with righteous fervor, outlandish inventions appear in general stores, electricity brings unparalleled indoor lighting, a burgeoning industrial system emerges, freedom of speech, and press reign. These social strides endow citizens with the sense America is an exceptional nation and its resources are near-infinite. Even families who live in less-than-favorable circumstances embrace a swelling national pride which promises Americans a prosperous future--in the west, just past the horizon.
The earliest road trips proved perilous, sensational. I recommend “Horatio’s Drive: The First American Road Trip” for all the juicy details. In the event of a wreck or breakdown, repair costs and medical bills ran high. And as if rural dirt roads weren’t hazardous enough, cities proved equally deadly. “As early as 1908, auto accidents in Detroit were recognized as a menacing problem,” says the Detroit News, “In two months that summer, 31 people were killed in car crashes and so many were injured it went unrecorded.”
The drivers steering American Roadtrip Wave One were more often than not relatively wealthy adventurers who were (pun intended...) ahead of the curve. More on the early auto industry here.
Roadtrip Wave Two
Pure desperation gave birth to the second roadtrip wave. In this phase, most extended trips usually only occurred on the heels of some extenuating circumstance.
My great grandparents, Otis and Christine, were among those who participated in the Dust Bowl-era migration from the midwest to California. They quite literally fit all their belongings in a suitcase, bought bus tickets, and headed for San Diego. They made a pit stop at a coal mine in Arizona, working long enough to pay the bus fare remainder. After a few grueling months, they met up with my great-great-grandparents in Carlsbad, California (who had just recently moved from Oklahoma as well), and lived a few minutes from the briny coast until they day they died.
Rural Migration News provides some quantification: “In the 1930s, farmers from the Midwestern Dust Bowl states, especially Oklahoma and Arkansas, began to move to California; 250,000 arrived by 1940, including a third who moved into the San Joaquin Valley, which had a 1930 population of 540,000. During the 1930s, some 2.5 million people left the Plains states.”
John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath depicts the pure agony inherent in this migration. Not only were these roadtrips long (my great-grandparent’s trip spanned 1,475 miles), but they were phenomenally arduous. Either dust storms or government-funded bulldozers had chased these families from their homes. Other practical factors compounded the problem:
A larger average family size (not including extended family members)
Fewer paved roads and gas stations through rural areas
No air conditioning (or heat)
Automobiles not designed for cross-country travel
Slim financial options (no wifi for remote work in 1935)
The final and perhaps most influential factor in the migration was a growing Western Mythos. In Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck describes false advertisements promising (sometimes verbatim) “a land of milk and honey.” Posters like these were only one facet of an unstoppable fascination with whatever lay due west, where the sunset. Within every tale of the Pacific Ocean, tantalizing fruit, or well-paying jobs lay a notion that the west was riddled with some kind of magic. Mystery.
Alexis de Tocqueville unpacks early manifestations of this notion in his timeless work, Democracy in America. The nation’s enchantment was its vastness. Limitless opportunity. Land. This sense of “horizonlessness” affected the way settlers saw both the land and their political opportunity. The west was a land without limits, and it lured white settlers relentlessly from the relative comfort, convenience, and community of the east coast.
I would argue the American Dream (that of the government and that of The People) converged upon the midwest and pushed its citizens on their ominous passage west.
Ooh, I love this one a lot!!!