In the face of such dire prognostications, motoring interests rallied. Embracing the emerging techniques of public relations, they launched a prolonged crusade to reshape public views, in ways still felt today.

To overcome the public outrage about pedestrian deaths, the industry created the idea of the “jaywalker.”

In the Midwest slang of the time, a “jay” was a bumpkin or a hick, a hayseed unaware of city etiquette. The word had previously been applied to “jay drivers,” people who didn’t understand that, in the metropolis, they couldn’t drive their carriages as they did in the boondocks. In the 1920s, dealers and auto clubs began using “jaywalker” for pedestrians who still believed in the old right to share the road. Local car firms paid boy scouts to distribute cards explaining the concept of jaywalking to people on the street, while the American Automobile Association promoted “safety patrols” to warn children off the street.

In many places, the industry staged elaborate pageants to ridicule “jaywalkers.”

In a safety demonstration in New York in 1924, a clown was employed to caper in front of a slow moving Model T as it repeatedly rammed him, while the Packard Motor Car Company created and displayed gravestones with the name “Mr J. Walker.” In a performance in Buffalo, an actor was arrested, cuffed and made to wear a sandwich board labelled “I am a jaywalker” before being carted off in a police vehicle covered in anti-pedestrian slogans.