So I’m reading an advance copy of Dan Yergin’s forthcoming book on energy, The Quest, which will be published next week (I’m doing a review for someone), and like the book to which it is a sequel, The Prize, it is full of lovely anecdotes, including this one:
One of the sharpest critics [of the invention of the automobile] was the president of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson. In 1906, seven years before he moved into the White House as president of the United States, Wilson declared that cars were “a picture of the arrogance of wealth” and that “nothing spread socialistic feeling in this country more than the use of the automobile.”
I get it: Wilson hated the competition. Hey–spreading socialistic feeling is my job!
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