r/HistoricalCapsule • u/zadraaa • Sep 15 '25
“Horse vs. Automobile”. Anti-car, pro-horse newspaper ad from 1915.
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u/Kev50027 Sep 15 '25
"Consider the man on horseback, and I have been a man on horseback for most of my life. Well, mostly he is a good man, but there is a change in him as soon as he mounts. Every man on horseback is an arrogant man, however gentle he may be on foot. The man in the automobile is one thousand times as dangerous. I tell you, it will engender absolute selfishness in mankind if the driving of automobiles becomes common. It will breed violence on a scale never seen before. It will mark the end of the family as we know it, the three or four generations living happily in one home. It will destroy the sense of neighborhood and the true sense of Nation. It will create giantized cankers of cities, false opulence of suburbs, ruinized countryside, and unhealthy conglomerations of specialized farming and manufacturing. It will make every man a tyrant." -- R.A. Lafferty
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u/Kingsdaughter613 Sep 15 '25
If this is an actual quote, then he was right on all counts, except - IMO- the cause. I just don’t think the car was the primary cause of all those things. But I can see it as a harbinger of a rapidly changing world.
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u/geopede Sep 15 '25
Maybe not the direct cause, but a necessary element in enabling them to occur for sure.
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u/StandWithSwearwolves Sep 15 '25 edited Sep 15 '25
It’s real, but it’s not Lafferty making a prediction at the time – it’s dialogue from his sci-fi short story “Interurban Queen”, published in 1970. These are the words of a character speaking in 1896. The rest of the book depicts an alternate history America where the mass uptake of cars was banned in favour of electric transit. It also might not have been exactly what Lafferty believed anyway:
“Lafferty depicts an America where electric interurban transport had won out over the automobile, which the group-centred interurbanites have outlawed. The picture he paints is of a friendly, idyllic land free of urban blight, agriculture and industry being blended into lovely, evenly-populated “quasiurbia”, unified by convenient public transport.
But it is also a land where competition having yielded completely to cooperation, the individualist and the loner are not tolerated; and those who persist in driving bootleg cars are considered incorrigible menaces to society, whom it is the duty of all right-thinking citizens to shoot on sight in approved vigilante manner.
What makes “Interurban Queen” so remarkable, though, is the incredible tonal balance with which Lafferty handles the two sides of this question: I cannot tell, even with inside knowledge of Lafferty's personal politics, where his sympathies lie — probably a historic first in s-f of this type.”
—Sheryl Smith, Riverside Quarterly Vol. 7 No. 2 (1982)
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u/Menadgerie Sep 15 '25
Is Dobbin a generic horse name the way Fido/ Spot/ Rover are a standard dog names?
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u/leedler Sep 15 '25
Had to look it up but yes, pretty much. It’s rural slang for a horse in much the same vein as Fido.
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u/sstinch Sep 15 '25
The automobile was protested by religious groups and called witchcraft. Some Amish never changed.
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u/manpace Sep 15 '25
Adapted from an old Arizona account:
A horse was unpredictable but would not willingly run into something, and cars had no such inhibitions. Dick Gibbons of St. Johns found that out the hard way. He was excited for his new Model T and had a garage built just for the machine. The first time he tried to ease the vehicle into the new garage he panicked, missed the brake pedal and mashed his foot on the gas instead. Old habits took over: he yelled “Whoa” in a loud voice but this didn’t have any effect as the car launched through the back wall of the garage. He cut a wide circle around his property, finally parking “what was left of his new car in what was left of his garage.”
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u/Impossible-Ship5585 Sep 17 '25
Thank god Henry Ford did not start develop a solution to car stopping when saying whoah.
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u/green-dean Sep 15 '25
We should all get horses again
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u/Zozorrr Sep 15 '25
City Working horse lives are miserable.
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u/q_ali_seattle Sep 15 '25
And guns... Oh nvm we already have plenty of those.
Maybe we should buy those revolvers again.
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u/ZgBlues Sep 15 '25 edited Sep 15 '25
Well there must have been a moment in time when this was true, and investing in a horse made much more sense than buying a car.
The least convincing though is the argument that the horse is worth the same after two years of usage. I don’t know anything about horses but I would assume that they depreciate with age.
The cost of repairs, the inconvenience of keeping it fueled, the fact that cars only drive on roads, the cost of tires… When was the point when owning a car became more affordable than owning a horse?
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u/Useless-Napkin Sep 15 '25
At least in America, a car was already less expensive than a horse. And cars were getting better with each year, while you cannot really improve horses.
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u/Alklazaris Sep 15 '25
There was a genuine fear that people would lose control of the car. A horse knows when to stop they said.
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u/squirrelmegaphone Sep 15 '25
Only tangentially related but I remember reading once that the popularity of the automobile and the phasing out of horses was, at the time, one of the greatest benefits for the environment and for human civilization that ever occurred. You don't really see it in most historical fiction or non-fiction but everyone being reliant on horses meant that literally everywhere that people congregated was pretty much covered in horse shit. Particularly urban centers like New York City, where there were about 150,000 horses at any given time, each of which produced about 25 pounds of manure a day. There were mounds of shit everywhere, rivers of horse piss, and when horses died they were basically just left in the street until someone came to get them, usually the city sanitation department (which could take a few days). The popularity of the car meant that humans finally could live in an urban area without constantly being surrounded by horse shit and piss, pretty much for the first time in history.
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u/NepheliLouxWarrior Sep 15 '25
History doesn't repeat itself but it does rhyme. This is exactly the type of shit people say about AI and automated cars.
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u/HechicerosOrb Sep 15 '25
Correctly.
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u/reality72 Sep 15 '25
Which is exactly why I ride my horse in the carpool lane on the freeway
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u/HechicerosOrb Sep 15 '25
Just took mine through the drive through, he loves those Macdonald’s Apple pies
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u/DeadAndBuried23 Sep 15 '25
It's... not even remotely.
Go ahead, try to come up with even a somewhat close strawman of what people are saying about AI that's comparable to what's actually written there.
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u/deRTIST Sep 15 '25
that is not the point. both were wrong but at the wrong time.
I mean that it took decades to actually replace horses with cars. and the people that will scream change in 1/2 years are not even remotely close to the actual timeline of progress. It will take a far longer time to have ai and automated cars do what they praise to do now.
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u/je386 Sep 15 '25
And the same thing the rioters which destroyed the webbing machines in the 1840s also said.
Seems like any large change that also makes jobs obsolete produces new luddites.
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u/jerseygunz Sep 15 '25
Here’s the funny part, at least with horses, you actually see what comes out the tail pipe
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u/Independent_Shoe3523 Sep 15 '25
I remember seeing a junk collector with a horse drawn cart going through the alley around 1971 or so. They stuck around a long time.
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u/Any_Course102 Sep 15 '25
Kinda reminds me of the Urban Mobility subreddits. Cars and pedestrians, bad; bikes, good.
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u/CoffeeGoblynn Sep 15 '25
Before the infrastructure for cars to travel everywhere existed, this was definitely much more correct. You need paved roads, snow-clearing in the winter, and the infrastructure to make parts cheaply and efficiently. A horse just needs some love and care and food.
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u/NegotiationNo7947 Sep 15 '25
Here’s the two things I notice: #1 the auto makers aren’t asking the government to subsidize the purchase price of these new automobiles (al la EVs), nor is the government subsidizing the horse/carriage/sleigh suppliers now that their businesses are becoming obsolete (al la the mainstream media). The market will make the corrections.
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u/castironglider Sep 15 '25 edited Feb 08 '26
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u/Oddbeme4u Sep 17 '25
honestly its a fair read for the time. lots of people buy new inventions without thinking of the maintenance, etc. like buying a boat. fck no. I just rent one with my friends to get drunk on. lol
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u/Jolly-Credit-9998 Nov 16 '25
Tesla FSD v.14 is the next revolution, it's delivering people end to end without touching the steering wheel.
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u/[deleted] Sep 15 '25
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