WhilAt the end of the nineteenth century, the automobile industry was small and unattractive.More than 500 automakers in America competed in turning out handmade luxury cars that cost around $1,500 and were enormously unpopular with all but the very rich. Anticar activists tore up roads, ringed parked cars with barbed wire, and organized boycotts of car driving businessmen and politicians. Woodrow Wilson caught the spirit of the times when he said in 1906 that "nothing has spread socialistic feeling more than the automobile' He called it "a picture of the arrogance of wealth?'