Terrible Toll

At Bell's Mill, four miles west of Gainesville, Ga., a car sped out of the black night and thudded sickeningly into the bridge. Four were killed. In Manhattan, a coupe skidded wildly across rainswept Third Avenue and bashed into a steel El pillar. Two were killed.

That night, as every night, the toll of U.S. traffic deaths mounted in its accustomed manner: four here, two there. In the past 20 years the automobile had taken more lives (652,412) than all the battles of U.S. history.

The President had called a national Highway Safety Conference, and, speaking to its delegates, Harry Truman departed from his prepared text to lash out with obvious feeling.

"In some States--my own in particular --you can buy a license to drive a car for 25-c- at the corner drugstore. . . . A man or a woman or a child can . . . get behind the wheel. . . . If he is insane ... a nut or a moron does not make a particle of difference. . . . The States . . . take no steps to prevent you or me from being killed by some moron that has no more business at the wheel of a car than he has at the throttle of an engine."

Connecticut's Representative Clare Boothe Luce, whose only daughter was killed in a 1944 California motor accident, spoke as one who had experienced the "heartbreak . . . of such tragedy . . . of needless and useless traffic deaths," and called on U.S. communities to regard traffic violators as "potential murderers."

Safety conference delegates who knew the figures--40,000 killed and 1,400,000 injured in an average year--nodded understandingly. Many a U.S. driver just went on nodding.

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