When you visit any city in America today, it’s a sea of cars, with pedestrians dodging between the speeding autos. It’s almost hard to imagine now, but in the late 1890s, the situation was completely reversed. Pedestrians dominated the roads, and cars were the rare, tentative interlopers. Horse-drawn carriages and streetcars existed, but they were comparatively slow.

So pedestrians ruled. “The streets were absolutely black with people,” as one observer described the view in the nation’s capital. People strolled to and fro down the center of the avenue, pausing to buy snacks from vendors.

Things changed dramatically in 1908 when Henry Ford released the first Model T. Suddenly a car was affordable, and a fast one, too: The Model T could zoom up to 45 miles an hour.... and as they began to race through the streets, they ran headlong into pedestrians—with lethal results. By 1925, auto accidents accounted for two-thirds of the entire death toll in cities with populations over 25,000.

It was time to target not the behavior of cars—but the behavior of pedestrians. Motordom would have to persuade city people that, as Hayes argued, “the streets are made for vehicles to run upon”—and not for people to walk. If you got run over, it was your fault, not that of the motorist. Motordom began to mount a clever and witty public-relations campaign.

Their most brilliant stratagem: To popularize the term “jaywalker.” The term derived from “jay,” a derisive term for a country bumpkin. In the early 1920s, “jaywalker” wasn’t very well known.