The automobile as ‘devil wagon’ – Illinois State Register, 1907

The Illinois State Register compared the dangers of football and automobiles in a page 1 cartoon in September 1907 (Courtesy State Journal-Register)

The Illinois State Register, in an editorial published on Friday, Nov. 8, 1907, reluctantly admitted “the automobile has doubtless come to stay.” But the writer – probably the Register’s longtime editor, Henry W. Clendenin (1837-1927) – wasn’t happy about it.

Here is the full text of the editorial:

The automobile

The multiplication of automobiles in Springfield makes the careful handling of these so-called “devil-wagons” not only important but imperative. There is no valid objection, to any one who can afford it and desires to do so, owning and using an automobile. They are, to say the worst of them, an expensive and not altogether pleasant method of locomotion. There is a certain risk and danger in their operation that makes them attractive to many people, and their growing use is due largely to these facts, and to the exhilaration there is to many in “fast going.”

The speed of which the machines are capable, however, is one of the greatest objections to their use; for it is not safe nor desirable for vehicles to pass over the thoroughfares of a city or through its parks at a speed faster than that of an ordinary trotting horse. If people who own horses should drive over the streets at the rate with which hose carts are propelled toward a fire, the horses galloping at their greatest speed, there would soon be a protest against such driving as would be heard and heeded by the city authorities. But some automobile drivers, and they are not few, send their machines speeding over the streets at a gait that would leave behind the fastest trotter on a race track. This ought not to be permitted.

The work of driving an automobile should never be intrusted to incapable or careless hands. And a responsibility should be required that will practically insure reasonable safety. It is now insisted, and not unwisely, that chauffers (sic) as other engineers should be educated for their work, and have to pass an examination and be licensed. Then when they prove unworthy of their trust their license can be immediately revoked.

Among the disagreeable features of the automobile to the public is the dust which the motors raise as they traverse our city streets and highways. The responsibility fo this, however, should be divided between the automobile and the street cleaners and highway supervisors. Chauffers, in very dirty thoroughfares, should drive their machines slowly, and complain to the supervisors so that the thoroughfares may be improved. The only really permanent and positive relief for abutting owners and residents and pedestrians, so far as we can see for the dust nuisance, is the improvement of the public streets and roads.

The automobile has doubtless come to stay, and the public mind should direct itself to making its stay as safe and pleasant as possible with due regard to the rights, the necessities, the comfort and convenience of those who use them.

Henry W. Clendenin

Henry Clendenin edited the Register from 1881 until his death in 1927, even though glaucoma left him blind the last 17 years of his life.

Henry Clendenin, “completing his autobiography in his 89th year” (Autobiography of Henry W. Clendenin, Editor: The Story of a Long and Busy Life)

Clendenin began his newspaper career at age 15, setting type at the Burlington (Iowa) Hawkeye. As a young man, he worked for a half-dozen papers in Iowa, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania, then served in the Union Army during the Civil War.

In 1881, he and partners Thomas Rees (1850-1933) and George Smith (1827-86) bought the Illinois State Register. Clendenin oversaw the news department, Rees handled business affairs, and Smith supervised production and delivery. As SangamonLink has recounted elsewhere:

The Register was in financial trouble when the Rees group took over, and the first few months remained rough. According to Always My Friend by Andy Van Meter, a 1981 history of Springfield’s newspapers, the partners’ weekly business meetings those first months all ended with the same admonition from Smith: “Let us lock the door, throw the key in the well and get out of town while we still have money enough to pay our fare.”

 Like many newspapermen of the time, Clendenin was a politician as well as an editor. He and the Register were influential in the Democratic Party statewide, and President Grover Cleveland appointed Clendenin Springfield postmaster in 1886.

Clendenin’s service there had an ugly postscript. Republican James C. Conkling replaced Clendenin in 1890 and promptly appointed a Black man, Charles Ellis Sr., as a mail carrier. That was a first for Springfield, and Clendenin’s Register responded with a racist diatribe so extreme that the newspaper published a half-apologetic follow-up the next day. More on that here.

None of Springfield’s white-owned newspapers had anything to be proud of when it came to racial relations in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but the Register generally went to the worst extremes. That may have been related to the fact that, at the time, African-American citizens generally voted Republican, meaning the Democratic Register was free to appeal to the most racist elements of the white community.

It’s reasonable to suspect that Clendenin harbored similar sentiments, but there’s no clue one way or another in his 1926 Autobiography of Henry W. Clendenin, Editor: The Story of a Long and Busy Life. The book covers his family and professional lives, his roles in progressive politics and his views on many local issues. There’s also a couple chapters in which Clendenin does little but list the names of civic leaders, politicians, and journalists with whom he dealt.

There isn’t a word in Long and Busy Life, however, about racial attitudes in Springfield or even about the the 1908 Springfield Race Riot. The only Black person mentioned anywhere in the 426-page book is Lewis Williams, “an aged colored man” who helped Clendenin’s wife Mary (1854-1920) with housework.

Williams attended Mary Clendenin’s wake, her husband wrote.

“(H)at in hand,” Henry Clendenin wrote, Williams “crossed from the dining room to where the casket was placed, and standing with bowed head and with tear-filled eyes wept as he gazed at the sweet form with hands folded across her breast. And so this poor colored man gave evidence of the high esteem and the feeling of true friendship in which all held Mrs. Clendenin.”

In Always My Friend, Van Meter wrote that Clendenin’s glaucoma struck him the morning of Oct. 20, 1910.

Clendenin spent the remaining 20 years of his life functionally blind, unable to read and only barely able to write in a large, nearly illegible scrawl. Despite his disability, the feisty editor kept abreast of current events with the help of readers. He occasionally wrote editorials and continued to oversee the editorial policy of his paper. He even wrote an autobiography.

The Clendenin family shares a showy gravesite at Oak Ridge Cemetery with the family of Henry Clendenin’s Register partner, Thomas Rees.

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