TRANSPORT: Terrible Toll

At Bell’s Mill, four miles west of Gainesville, Ga., a car sped out of the black night and thudded sickeningly into the bridge. Four were killed. In Manhattan, a coupe skidded wildly across rainswept Third Avenue and bashed into a steel El pillar. Two were killed.

That night, as every night, the toll of U.S. traffic deaths mounted in its accustomed manner: four here, two there. In the past 20 years the automobile had taken more lives (652,412) than all the battles of U.S. history.

The President had called a national Highway Safety Conference, and, speaking to its delegates, Harry Truman departed from his prepared text to lash out with obvious feeling.

“In some States—my own in particular —you can buy a license to drive a car for 25¢ at the corner drugstore. . . . A man or a woman or a child can . . . get behind the wheel. . . . If he is insane … a nut or a moron does not make a particle of difference. . . . The States . . . take no steps to prevent you or me from being killed by some moron that has no more business at the wheel of a car than he has at the throttle of an engine.”

Connecticut’s Representative Clare Boothe Luce, whose only daughter was killed in a 1944 California motor accident, spoke as one who had experienced the “heartbreak . . . of such tragedy . . . of needless and useless traffic deaths,” and called on U.S. communities to regard traffic violators as “potential murderers.”

Safety conference delegates who knew the figures—40,000 killed and 1,400,000 injured in an average year—nodded understandingly. Many a U.S. driver just went on nodding.