Public Outcry Against Auto Racing - 1906

Just one example of minds born of nineteenth century sensibilities struggling to get wrapped around the realities of not just a new century but also the industrial age comes in the reactions of so many to the dangers of auto racing. People accustomed to mastering the strength of a single horse wrestled with the concept of these contraptions called engines containing the power of 10, 20 and even upto 100 of those beasts in a metal block about as big as a typical travel trunk.

The big, thick chains and gears that transferred the power to the tall hickory wheels must have looked complex and bewildering. There were reports of people strangling themselves when a long scarf fluttered back from an open cockpit to become entangled in the exposed drive train. People of a past era literally had to redefine their sense of even spatiality in a world redefined by the proliferation of machines.

These things called horseless carriages or automobiles traveled at unthinkable speeds that, as they said in the day, "annihilated" distance. That was the whole point, really. How do people do things faster and become more productive? In an era when most people still thought of a day's travel accounting for just a few miles the idea that a person could cover 20 or 30 miles in just an hour was astonishing. "We live in a fast age," Barney Oldfield was well-known for saying.

The people who raced these cars were called "scorchers" by newspapermen and onlookers. Most people marveled at their exploits and their daring. Others shook their heads - and their fingers - at the needless injuries and loss of life. The scorchers were dirty, grease-covered maniacs.

This yin and yang was very much the case by 1905 after several accidents took the lives of not just drivers and their riding mechanics but spectators as well. A lot was going by May 1906 - the month that shook off the frost in the northern United States and people could finally start racing in earnest.

Activists calling for the ban on auto racing were especially incensed by the activity of cars on horse tracks. The reality was that this is where the sport was truly growing. Yes, there was the Vanderbilt Cup and there were speed tournaments on beaches but with the lack of paved public roads in the United States the horse tracks at virtually every fairgrounds in the country had found a new way to spin turnstiles - and that meant money.

Among those tracks was Brighton Beach in New York. Famous as a host to the treacherous "grinders," those round-the-clock goes the manufacturers valued for clear evidence of the performance and reliability of their products, Brighton Beach may have been best known as the host to this genre. 

In May 1906 officials attempted to reassure doubters that they had taken the right steps with bright gas lamp lighting throughout the dark hours and combined that with a carefully graded running surface to ensure safety to drivers. They also promised adequate policing to protect foolhardy spectators from themselves. The term, "railbird" entered the lexicon as people ignored warning signs and police reprimands to perch on the wooden rails originally designed to contain race horses. While they served that purpose they were like matchsticks against errant 1,500-pound race cars running a mile-a-minute or more.

So it would be at Brighton Beach during the early morning hours of May 15, 1906 when Marion team driver Hubert Anderson lost control. The car rolled and in the process crushed the life out of his riding mechanic William Bradley. Fortunately no witnesses were tangled up in the carnage.

Check out a collection of articles on the Brighton Beach event, including one that interviews Will Brown, a vice president at Overland-Marion. In his interview Brown discussed the tenuous future of the sport and its importance to developing the automobile. Below is nationally recognized political cartoonist Robert Carter's chilling portrayal of the grim reaper driving a car to lead a parade of horse-drawn hearses presumably filled with the corpses of drivers, mechanics and fans who lost their lives to what seemed a senseless, bloody pastime analogous to gladiatorial contests of ancient Rome.

I hope you see this as a special window to the past that not only provides you with facts but also an understanding for how people of the era interpreted events. Historical context is so important to understanding developments and decisions of the past. You'll find a ton of it at First Super Speedway.