The West Adapts the Automobile: Technology, Unemployment, and the Jitney Phenomenon of 1914-1917

Abstract

n the winter of 1914-1915 a group of innovative westerners gave Americans something to talk about besides the Great War in Europe. These men and women were the pioneers of the jitney movement, adapting the automobile for use as a common carrier. The result, if not actually a revolution in urban transportation, nonetheless permanently altered the thinking of the electric railway industry and its patrons. The jitney represented a perfect marriage between changing technology and public perceptions and desires especially pronounced in the West. Here was a manifestation of the region's resentment of eastern financial interests, the trolley trust in particular. Although dismissed as a fad by some, the jitney was a technological innovation of social significance, introducing many an urban dweller to the pleasures of an automobile ride. For the jobless worker it represented a form of self-help and a continuation of the western tradition of active responses to unemployment-in this case the recession of 1914, which hit the West harder than other regions. The jitney movement ultimately reached far beyond the Pacific Slope where it originated, appearing in eastern seaboard cities like Providence and Norfolk and becoming a topic of conversation second only to the war as well as a fascinating etymological riddle, but its greatest impact remained in the urban areas of the transMissouri West. The phenomenon thus constitutes yet another example of how the West served as a pacesetter for the rest of the nation.'