License and Registration, Ma’am

Abstract

License and Registration, Ma’am Virginia Scharff (bio) Sarah A. Seo, Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019. 339 pp. Abbreviations, notes, acknowledgments, and index. $28.95. Back in my reprobate days, I made an intermittent and stressful living playing music in honky tonks. The only sure thing was that no matter how large or hard-drinking the crowd, the management would find a way to cheat you of your cut of the gate. I wrote and published a handful of country songs before I ever pushed my first prosy scholarly maunderings into print. My heartstrings thrummed to the simple, perfect formulas of the great songwriters, to the way that Willie Nelson and Tom Petty captured something mythic about American life. And I cannot tell you how many songs I sang about taking to the open road, from Haggard’s salute to “White Line Fever” to Kristofferson’s entry in the great American songbook, that bit about freedom being just another word and so forth. Gram Parsons’s “Return of the Grievous Angel,” all about going down twenty thousand roads, was and remains my anthem. Of course, a few years of graduate school showed me how much more complicated it all is when we are talking about roads and cars and freedom and American culture. As I researched and wrote a dissertation and then a 1991 book about the making of the American car culture, I hypothesized that freedom—as embodied in the automobile and the open road—was always complex and contingent, hedged and hegemonic, not a thing in itself but a thing existing in context and tension with all kinds of other things. In the end, perhaps, freedom was actually constraint. That made for fairly stodgy poetry, admittedly, but it was, in its hemming and hawing way, less bombastic and more precise than your favorite country song. My specialty was thinking about how gender structured Americans’ use of cars. I concluded that the results were, well, mixed. If the car was supposed to free people to go where they wanted, as far as they wanted to, when they wanted, the automobile failed to deliver on its promise for women in particular. Even as they claimed the right and the capacity to drive (despite cultural and economic pressures) and even though their use of the automobile shaped the American landscape in profound ways, gender still constrained and restrained their use of cars, particularly as [End Page 299] real estate developers, policymakers, and the consumer public committed to a spatial program of suburban sprawl. It’s complicated. I have nonetheless maintained an inexplicable attachment to the idea of that fabled open road. On some level, I have never given up the idea that lighting out for the territory would somehow set me free. So it was with some dread, I confess, that I approached the task of reading and reviewing Sarah A. Seo’s Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom. I suspected where this foray would lead. The tip off was the first word of the title: policing. Seo’s book, I feared, would be a venture into a Foucauldian hellscape of surveillance and punishment, of red bubblegum lights in the rear view, of the slow slide to the shoulder and a guy in mirrored aviator shades sauntering up to the driver’s window. License and registration, ma’am? I was not wrong; it is that. Indeed, you never even need to open the book to know; the cover photo is exactly what you would see in that rearview mirror if you were a mid-twentieth-century motorist who’d been traveling a wee bit faster than the posted speed limit and gotten busted by the fuzz. As the adrenaline flows through your veins, you wait while the town trooper in the leather jacket and badge-festooned hat calls in your information, standing outside his patrol car, watching your every move. Surely Seo will give us the story of such encounters, of citizens whose false sense of freedom withers under the crush of such interventions. But this book is so much more. The best history shows us how taken-for...