Blood and Smoke by Charles Leerhsen

Author:Charles Leerhsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

IT IS TEMPTING to think of Carl Fisher as now standing at a crossroads. Certainly a more normal person after launching an auto racing speedway and then winding up in similar straits might have seen himself trembling before two large and conflicting arrows labeled Bail Out and Plunge Ahead. Ego and momentum would naturally incline the creator of a project toward the latter option, but those strong forces were counterbalanced in this case by the weight of conventional wisdom, or perhaps it would be better to say national outrage, which might easily have broken the spirit of a saner man. First the Indianapolis debacle, and then a pair of deaths during a 24-hour race at Brighton Beach a week later, had newspaper editorialists spewing indignation, spiced at times with sarcasm for added bite. “Seven killed in five days is a record any speedway can be proud of!” said the La Crosse Tribune. Suggesting that the Speedway had been greedy in taking so many lives so quickly, the Fort Wayne Sentinel said, “One or two dead and five injured ought to be regarded as a fair sprinkling of bones and blood in a short season!” The Detroit News wondered, “What is the significance of these seven deaths?” and said that “Spectators of these events have time and again demonstrated that it is the human lust for blood that calls them to the big track meets. This is the final straw. The blood of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway has probably rung the knell on track racing in the United States.”

The Piqua (Ohio) Daily Call noted that “One would think that such foolhardiness would become unpopular and be stopped by the common sense of people. But this country is going stark crazy about automobiles and we can expect almost any kind of demoralization amongst the people until the craze wears out.” The Lima Daily News saw the careless attitude toward life at the Speedway as becoming contagious, infecting society as a whole. The paper said that cars came down Lima’s Main Street as frequently as once every half-hour these days, many piloted by “Speed Maniacs” who occasionally “crushed a tot of the city” and then kept going, the local authorities being too lily-livered to track down the scorchers. “No good,” said the paper, “can come from making a mile in 40 seconds.” Even the Indianapolis News now turned on Fisher, publishing a front-page editorial cartoon that showed the pathetic scene of a dead driver’s wife and children huddled before the hearth—never mind that it was late August—and waiting in vain for his arrival.

It wasn’t just heartland journalists who were so irate. The Los Angeles Times said that “Auto racing to a moderate degree is considered a necessary escape for a certain flow of animal spirits and energy characteristic of the American people, which must have such a blow off or find their outlet in evil ways, possibly”—but wondered why this couldn’t be accomplished with races at distances “within the bounds of reason.” In

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