For some reason while driving yesterday I remembered a little bit of mostly forgotten history: the seat-belt ignition interlock. This was a short-lived 1974 law that mandated that cars wouldn’t start unless all front-seat passengers were buckled up. The main thing I remember about it was my surprise when my dad, who was a pretty straight arrow, had a mechanic disable the interlock immediately after buying a new car. It interfered with my toddler brother’s desire to stand on the front seat between my mom and dad as we rocketed down the road.
This piece of socialism was signed into law by Richard Nixon, the same man who created the EPA by executive order. Can you imagine the Teabagger uproar that would ensue if anyone, Democrat or Republican, suggested an interlock law 40 years later? Of course, since Republican history begins with the election of Jimmy Carter, who ruined America so St. Ronald could save it, Nixon’s support of some pretty aggressive government interventions is almost never discussed.
Immanentize
I have long said that Nixon was our last liberal president. He also instituted energy price caps and believed in strong airline regulations which helped smaller cities. His crime programs funded innovative release and rehabilitation programs — heck, money from the Federal Government even went to defense attorney organizations for training and systems improvements.
But he did love to punch Hippies….
Tissue Thin Pseudonym (JMN)
Except on civil rights, where Republican history begins in 1860 and lasts for exactly 100 years.
PurpleGirl
@Immanentize: I’ve often said that one of the reasons I hated Reagan was that he made me miss Nixon.
Jack the Second
Nixon was also the President during the Moon landings.
Aimai
@Immanentize: we still had the soviet threat ™. If that caused us to overreact and have small vanity wars around the world it still made us quite circumspect with respect to some domestic issues. Progress was not a dirty word but a competitive advantage.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Jack the Second: But he had little influence on the development of the space program. Kennedy started it, and Johnson presided over the bulk of the program.
MattF
Well, even Barry Goldwater, who was the ’60’s version of a crazy right-wing radical, turned out to be a secret librul:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater#Later_life
WereBear
Not long ago my mother recalled the sixties with “Can you believe we let little kids just stand on the front seat? We must have been crazy!”
But when everyone is doing something stupid, it seems normal.
RSA
When I was a younger, before the shoulder harness part of seatbelts became standard, the cars I got into typically had the lap belts already buckled and tucked into the crease of the bench seats. Freedom!
Randy P
Reagan was such a weird way to end the 70s. Nixon was out, the Vietnam War was over, it seemed by 1974 that the hippies had won. Then there were a few empty-headed years where streaking and disco were the big news, and we elected Carter over Nixon’s VP, Ford. Looked like hippie ascendancy again.
And then Reagan.
I remember thinking, how the hell did that happen? And in only 6 years?
Carter-Ford was the first presidential election I voted in, and Carter-Reagan was my second. I’ve been a little shell-shocked at presidential politics ever since.
Sibling Nonspecific Firearm of Random Adjective Followed by a Noun That Describes a Mental State (fka AWS)
But all the neocons and assorted rabble-rousers who keep fucking with progress got their start working for Tricky Dick.
MattF
@Sibling Nonspecific Firearm of Random Adjective Followed by a Noun That Describes a Mental State (fka AWS): Good point. Nixon was always ready to hand off the dirty work to preserve his own reputation.
Mustang Bobby
My 1975 Ford Granada had the seatbelt interlock. Since my habit has always been to fasten the seatbelt before starting the car, I never disconnected it. Passengers got used to buckling theirs, too. I had it disconnected when I sold it.
I’m old enough to remember Nixon as VP and as the candidate in 1960, when I was eight and slowly becoming aware of politics. My parents switched from Republican to Democrat in that election because, as my mom says, “I never trusted that beetlebrowed shifty-eyed little man.” They’ve never looked back, and in their ninth decade, my parents still work the polls at every election.
WereBear
@MattF: Nixon did what was good for Nixon. I’m not sure he HAD any strong convictions of his own, except seething resentment. That’s when the emotion would come out!
Pat Nixon was the first time I remember seeing what I now think of as the Republican Wife Face. Laura Bush had the same one; they could be twins.
Percysowner
And in my house we might as well have had interlock. My dad bought after market seat-belts (no shoulder harness) and installed them in our car. After that, if everybody wasn’t buckled in, we didn’t move. I did the same for my family. To this day the first thing we all do is buckle up. It’s like it’s wired into us.
It was very strange suddenly I had this funny belt protecting me instead of my mom throwing the arm of protection out whenever we hit a stop sign or a red light.
danielx
Nixon was a socialist and a liberal by the standard of today’s Republicans. But he gets a pass for meanness and his propensity for hippie punching®.
Baud
IIRC, seat belt ignition lock was horribly controversial at the time.
Nixon was “liberal” because we still felt the need to present a positive world image to compete with the communists and because a lot of white people still hadn’t learned that they had to choose between their own self interest and keeping down brown people.
Maude
@MattF:
Goldwater wanted to have his legacy look good. He was always crazy and that didn’t end. It was typical image building. He was a truly nasty piece of work in 1964.
He wanted to die as seeming to be a good man.
Nicole
I have an uncle (right wing) in his late 60s who will still argue about thinking child safety seats are an assault on parent’s right to raise their kids as they see fit. He will agree that they make children safer, but insists parents are the only ones who should get to make the decision to protect their children.
Sigh. He never had kids, though, so there’s that.
I’m glad kids are better protected in cars, but I sometimes feel a teeny bit bad for my own kid that he’ll never know the joy of taking a road trip in the way back of a station wagon. Not enough to risk his safety, though. I did once fly forward in a car and slam into the back of the front seat (I was 8, I think). Banged up, but okay. If I had been in the front seat, it could have ended very differently.
PsiFighter37
Pretty much any Republican looks like a socialist in the context of today’s rabid group of teabagging enthusiasts in the House. Heck, even Newt fucking Gingrich looks liberal – he’s very much for funding more scientific research…the current wingnuts in charge don’t even believe in science.
Matt McIrvin
1974 is remarkably early for that kind of thing, in hindsight. It was ten years before the first US laws mandating seat-belt use, in an era when American norms about seat belts were completely different. I have the same memory as RSA of being physically unable to use the belts in most other families’ cars, because the rear seat belts would be buried somewhere inaccessible in the crack of the rear bench seats.
I guess imposing a fix on the technical side seemed more attractive than just enforcing it with the highway police.
Matt McIrvin
My sister also used to ride standing up on the center hump over the transmission of our Oldsmobile Cutlass, holding onto the corners of the front seats. My parents scolded her about it, but they didn’t stop the car. And kids only rode in special child seats when they were babies (often in the front passenger seat, since there were no airbags, and very likely those baby seats afforded them very little crash protection).
We actually trained ourselves into wearing seatbelts all the time much earlier than most other families did. Sometime in the early 1980s, I remember my aunt feeling mildly insulted by my insistence on wearing a lap and shoulder belt in the front passenger seat of her car; she took it as implying that I thought there was something wrong with her driving. At that point it was still unusual for anyone to use a seat belt in the back, and I think shoulder belts in the rear seats were just starting to appear in a few imported cars.
At some point there was that strange cascade of safety improvements with tragic unintended consequences: front-seat airbags that saved lives but killed children, leading to the new norm for mandatory child restraints in the rear seat, leading to babies and toddlers occasionally dying from being left in rear child seats in hot cars. Still, given the overall trajectory of highway deaths, I think it’s hard to argue that the overall trend has been anything but positive.
But I remember that during the stage of her life when she had to ride in a child seat with a five-point harness, my daughter relished any opportunity she got to ride in a moving vehicle without being heavily strapped in (buses, trains, 5 MPH amusement park car rides).
Baud
MM,
I don’t know if anyone else is experiencing this problem, but the mobile site is borked on android. Sometimes I get the mobile site, sometimes the website, and sometimes what looks like the iPad site. It started after the database problem yesterday.
Thanks for anything you can do.
RSA
@Matt McIrvin: I’ve been talking recently with friends about cases in the news of people forgetting their infants or children in cars, leading to their deaths. (It’s a couple of dozen cases each year, which surprised me.) We were discussing technological changes that could probably help—weight or movement or temperature or oxygen use sensors, an audible signal as you leave your car, a wireless alert button you’d put on your key fob, and so forth. I couldn’t help thinking, though, that mandating even the simplest, cheapest safety equipment in new cars would be met with resistance by people arguing against more government regulation.
RSA
@Baud:
Same problem here. (Also, my name and e-mail address are no longer auto-filled, but I’m guessing that’s on my end.)
Patrick
@Matt McIrvin:
Most of the people in the so called tea party have no clue as to what the word socialism means. They have shown so time after time. Hell, they referred to the ACA as socialism, yet the ACA has absolutely nothing to do with socialism.
These same folks are strong supporters of increased government defense spending, which is the very definition of socialism.
Thus, it is hard to take anything these “good” folks say or accuse others of.
Baud
@RSA:
I have that problem also, but I assumed it was related to the shifting styles.
Matt McIrvin
@RSA: I’ve recently seen people express the same extremely angry reaction Gene Weingarten described in his classic article on the subject, that anyone who would accidentally leave their kid in a car would have to be some kind of evil, stupid or pathologically negligent parent.
The attitude is comforting: it makes it easier to think that something like that could never, ever happen to my kid because I’m better than that. I can only think that most of these parents would have reacted the same way before it happened to them.
matt
in GOP lore, Nixon was the compromiser who broke the Dem coalition and paved the way for all the following successes of the right wing movement.
RSA
@Matt McIrvin: Thanks for reminding me of who wrote that article! I knew there was something I’d read, but I couldn’t dredge it up.
I think you’re exactly right about the attitude.
Matt McIrvin
@matt: And in Democratic lore, Nixon was the Republican who broke the Democratic coalition by harnessing the power of white racism (which had previously worked mostly in the Democrats’ favor) and making the South a Republican stronghold.
Though you could actually see the seeds of it as early as 1948. But it’s pretty clear that Nixon consciously played on it.
WereBear
@RSA: It’s magical thinking: such people must be X, I would NEVER be X, my children are safe.
And yes, such people tend to substitute these mental tricks for actual thinking.
Matt McIrvin
@Randy P:
The political media are still living in that moment, in which everyone realized that they’d been neglecting Southern white religious conservatism as a political force. (They first realized it in 1976, which was an oddball case in hindsight in that all those voters went for Jimmy Carter. But by 1980 most of them were Reagan Democrats. I think that sudden flip made it all far more shocking, but the suddenness of it was mostly because Carter was an anomaly.)
Sloegin
Also Nixon too: Wage and Price controls. Fnord.
Villago Delenda Est
@Matt McIrvin:
You see, the problem here is that Carter is an actual Christian, not a Mammon worshiper. Southern white religious conservatism is about Mammon worship and restoration of the natural order of the universe, where the browns and blacks are the property of the whites, not Christianity.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
I had a friend who bought a Jensen-Healey the first year of the interlock. Being that it was British, with Lucas electrics, the interlock didn’t work too well and the car frequently wouldn’t start. He sold it before the year was out.
Matt McIrvin
And the political situation in 1976 was itself an anomaly: the forces that had led to Nixon’s massive back-to-back wins were still in operation, but the aftermath of Watergate had temporarily distorted everything.
tybee
Lucas, prince of darkness.
they invented the turn signal. by accident.
a friend used to collect XK jags. some of his complaints were hilarious.
do you know why the British don’t make computers?
they can’t figure out how to make it leak oil.
Omnes Omnibus
@tybee: I once saw an MG with a bumpersticker saying “The bits falling off this car are Genuine British Parts.”
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@tybee: My Triumph light switch had 3 positions: Off / Smoke / Flame.
Q. Do you know why the British drink their beer warm?
A. Lucas made all the refrigerators.
Thanks, I’ll be here all work.
ETA: Week, I’ll be here all week.
Honus
@tybee: “A gentleman does not motor about after dark.” -Joseph Lucas
A Lucas headlight switch has three settings: dim, flicker, and off.
srv
Obama passed Nixoncare and Carter deregulated the airlines, domestic oil price controls, trucking, railroads and other stuff – while also starting or continuing every new defense project Reagan got credit for save the B-1.
Woot.
Matt McIrvin
It’s interesting to look at old presidential electoral maps and trace the emergence of what we now think of as the red state/blue state division.
The first election where you can really see something like it clearly, I think, is 1968, though it’s complicated by George Wallace. After that, there’s a period when all presidential elections are Republican blowouts except 1976, which, as mentioned earlier, is an anomaly and has an electoral map that looks more like something out of the late 19th century.
You can see it starting to emerge again in 1988 and it appears more or less full-blown in 1992, though Clinton does better in greater Appalachia than we’re accustomed to seeing. Every election since then has been variations on the same pattern, with the overall balance of votes swinging back and forth.
Tripod
@Matt McIrvin:
My contention is that because of the VRA, 1976 was the first honest election the deep south had had since reconstruction. They were still enough Democrats = Dixie types willing to vote for a southerner, and coupled with the black vote it was enough to carry Carter in the south. Even in 1980 it was still his best region.
pat
I started using the seat belt after we were driving in the Alps, 1974 or so, came around a bend and saw a dead body lying in the middle of the road, where he had landed after exiting his VW bug through the windshield.
Have never driven ever again without a seat belt, even in the back seat of a taxi.
Joel
Public health / shaming initiatives have been much more effective than mandates, as far as safety is concerned (child seats, seatbelts, smoking, etc.)
But I will say there’s no way my son is still going to be in a child seat when he’s 11 years old. And it’s not going to be me that makes that decision.
mellowjohn
@Percysowner: i’m old enough that i still put my arm out. even when there’s no one else in the car.
Ruckus
I always asked people what the caused the regulation to be rescinded?
My answer was when the first senator bought a new car that year and had to put on his seatbelt before starting his new car. Senators didn’t care that we were inconvenienced but for fucks sake never let them be. Somethings never change.
SiubhanDuinne
@Percysowner: That “arm of protection” must go along with the xx chromosome. I have never had a child, but if I have to brake suddenly when I have a passenger, my right arm slams across his chest, automatically. My carpool partner laughs at me, since he is always belted and shoulder-strapped in.
Makes me wonder, if I were driving in the UK, would my left arm automatically go into action?
StringOnAStick
I had a patient once who had the oldest dental implant I’d ever seen; 40 years ago, implants were not at all common. She had 2 teeth left, one all titanium and used to clip a lower denture to. Lost all the rest thanks to a steering wheel and not wearing her seatbelt because it wrinkled the front of her dress. She’s made it a life mission since to explain why seat belts are important and wrinkled clothes much less so.
I have known a couple of full-tilt wingnuts from my geologist days who disabled every seat belt system they’d ever owned because there was no damned way they were going to wear something that the gubmint insisted on. Considering how many miles a typical field geologist drives and how fast most of them do, I figured their species would have died out by now, but no. According to the geologists I still know (granted, not many) the Seatbelt Resistance Front appears to have crumbled with this current generation and all those long, flat , boring roads in North Dakota.
WereBear
I find this basically inexplicable… YOU are such an extraordinary driver you will elude the Laws of Physics?
But what they don’t like is the constant reminder that they are not in charge of their destiny. That a bad thing like a car accident COULD happen to them. This flies in the face of the lies they love which says it’s always the fault of the one bad things happen to.
So they pretend. And thus make it more likely bad things will happen.
The Moar You Know
@Ruckus: An urban myth about a woman being chased down and raped because she couldn’t get the car started in time.
Urban myth aside, I thought the interlock was stupid. In most cases, I’m not a fan of a mechanical system overriding my decisions.
A Ghost To Most
@SiubhanDuinne: I concur with the XX thing. My wife does it to me, even when I am driving. It interferes with my ability to steer, and drives me batshit.
Temporarily Max McGee (soon enough to be Andy K again)
@Comrade Scrutinizer:
Eisenhower created NASA (and if you want to get really technical about it, Taft started it by founding the National Aerodynamical Laboratory Commission in 1912). Project Apollo was conceived (in 1960, while Eisenhower was still in office) before any Mercury launch. Kennedy’s famous speech, an effort to get the funding for Apollo, came in May of ’61, when only Alan Shepard had gone up on a Mercury launch.
Of all the politicians involved, LBJ was probably the most important in that he did a lot of the cat herding in Congress even before he became Veep. Nixon was never in a position to have much influence over Apollo or Skylab (I suppose he could have killed them), but he was the POTUS when both the Apollo-Soyuz project and the Space Shuttle program were conceived and funded. Had Nixon won the presidential election in 1960, he might have made a speech similar to Kennedy’s in ’61.
CaseyL
I don’t remember the interlocks, but I do remember the more-recent shoulder harness strap that automatically slid into place when you closed the door. I love those, but for exactly the wrong reason: they’re funny as hell because it’s like the car is plotting to kill you by strangulation.
I do remember the joys of riding in the “wayback,” and of riding in the bed of a pickup truck. Great fun, and I feel bad that both are now Forbidden, even though I understand the reasons.
My mom had one of the first Barracudas. When she and my dad took us to drive-in movies, my brother Carl and I camped out in the “wayback”: pajamas, pillows, sleeping bags and, by the end of the evening, a litter of empty popcorn/soda/hamburger containers. Carl and I would then conk out on the drive home, snug in our little sleeping area. Those were good times. When I see the same old ‘Cudas at car shows, I get all sentimental and sniffly at them.
j
The first time I encountered that ignition interlock thing was in a grocery store parking lot. I put my bag on the passenger seat and tried to drive home. The damn car wouldn’t start! Someone saw me opening the hood and checking the wires to the starter, and noticed the bag on the seat and told me I had to buckle up the food.
(Duh).
fuckwit
I’m fucking tired of this stupid meme.
Nixon was a liberal, FDR was more liberal, bullshit bullshit bullshit. Totally wrong. They weren’t.
IF THE PEOPLE LEAD, THE LEADERS FOLLOW.
The “leaders” respond to pressure of the threat of them being dragged through the street by and angry mob and decapitated. Always have. FDR and Nixon among them.
What was going on in the 1970s when Nixon was doing all this supposedly liberal stuff? Oh, kids were RIOTING IN THE STREETS, blowing up ROTC offices, surrounding the White House, throwing rocks and Molotovs at police. That is why Nixon did what he did. HE HAD TO.
What was going on in the 1930s when FDR was supposedly doing all this liberal stuff? We had a functioning Socialist party, and they put up viable candidates for election. There were unions everywhere. Around the world, mass popular movements like Communism and Fascism were taking over everywhere. FDR and his 1% allies were shaking in their boots. FDR saved capitalism. Had he not done that, his upperclass cronies would have been lynched.
It can be done peacefully too, witness MLK and the Civil Rights movement, and the work Latinos did a few years ago to pressure Congress to back down on some anti-immigration pogrom they were on. But the point is: the government MUST be scared of the people.
It’s the people who make these preznits do shit, or not. If the people lead, the leaders follow. That’s how it works, how it always works, and how it always will work.
Mnemosyne
@SiubhanDuinne:
I’m a woman in my mid-40s, have never had children, and yet my arm will shoot out like that if I have to brake hard with someone in the passenger seat. I don’t know if it’s imprinted from years of my parents doing it or what.
RSA
@CaseyL:
For me it would be the Austin America hatchback that my parents drove. Funny, I never see those at car shows. :-)
Jeremy
@fuckwit: I agree. Nixon obviously governed domestically like a moderate republican and FDR governed as a moderate liberal. But they governed during different times when people demonstrated for change, and they were able to push politicians to take more bold action.
FDR was a great president with great ideas who also made mistakes. The guy had the support of the people and vast politicians to make substantial changes but the guy still took a more moderate approach than many people wanted.
Richard W. Crews
Early in The Crazy, there was the Sagebrush Rebellion, a land mis-use group that didn;t want to pay their own way or follow any sustainable ranching practices because of Freedom!
Helen Chenoweth of Idaho became a prime representative of the bunch, and was a Representative from Congress. She pretty much championed the rape and pillage of her own country, misunderstanding science and Nature.
But she knew Freedom, and was killed in a one car rollover with her not having her government mandated seat belt on. Freedom!
But she had her infant niece in her arms as she flew threw the windshield, a niece that wasn’t severely injured. I wrote then that Helen’s carcass should have been scraped up and tried for child endangerment.
Freedom requires responsibility and an awareness of one’s impact on others. She died an irresponsible law-breaker, but Free!
as if I’m not.
with my seat belt.
Richard W. Crews
People that throw their right arm out to restrain something are taking their hand off the wheel precisely when they should have two hands on the wheel. A bad habit.
Scott P.
Nixon just wasn’t that interested in domestic issues, and he had a Democratic Congress. If he had had a congress of Tea Party types, he would have just as happily signed all their nonsense into law.
Mustang Bobby
@CaseyL: I belong to the local antique car club here in Miami. My antique is a 1988 Pontiac 6000 LE Safari station wagon, complete with fake wood grain and a wayback. (Yes, 1988 cars qualify as antique under the rules of the Antique Automobile Club of America.) I’ve owned the car since it was new. A lot of people wonder why the hell I hung on to a car like that, but it’s an icon of the bygone era of family trips to Michigan or hockey practice or picking up dogs from the vet. Our family had a whole string of Country Squires from the 1950’s on, even into the gas crisis of the 1970’s.
I take it to car shows and I hear all the stories of the adventures of the wayback. My Pontiac is my talisman of those days. And even with over 250,000 miles on it, it still runs like a top and gets 25 mpg on the highway.
RobertDSC-PowerMac G5 Dual
@Mustang Bobby:
Love that. Thanks.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@RSA: You’ve seen Austin Americas, you just haven’t recognized them. Out there in the parking lot, there is most likely a sizeable oil stain. If you see rust embedded in it, that was once an Austin America.
Older
When my oldest daughter was very small, she was sitting in one of those booster seats that hooked over the seat back. At a sudden stop (not even a crash), she went gracefully up and over the front of the kiddy seat and landed on her head.
We promptly consulted the ad pages of the car restoration magazines we read all the time, and ordered a Rose Safe-Hi seat belt harness. A wonderful thing! It buckled around the chest and shoulders, and the legs and hips, of the child and could be secured by an adult belt or its own belt installed separately.
When we had more kids, we bought more harnesses. We also bought harnesses for ourselves, drilled the holes ourselves, installed them in our cars, before they were available from the auto companies. We made people use them, too, and we heard the same thing from our relatives. They didn’t want to wrinkle their clothing. This was back in the 50’s. Now, I find it strange to think that I grew up without seat belts.
sparrow
@fuckwit: Amen.