Teddy Roosevelt was the first president to ride in car, a Columbia Electric Victoria in 1902 and was the first president to own a car as well.Roosevelt was not the first President to ride in an automobile. William McKinley was, and he did it at least twice as President, once in Washington, and once in Ohio, in 1899-1900. Roosevelt did take a ride in a Columbia during a parade in 1902. Not until May of 1905 did he use an automobile in Washington, and only briefly. He rarely used automobiles after that, especially not in Washington. His dislike for the technology was known by Americans and accepted as normal.
The First President to officially purchase an automobile was William Howard Taft. Taft loved cars and hated demagoguery, which was behind Roosevelt's avoidance of automobiles. Roosevelt did not want to be associated with what were considered "rich men's toys." Even after Roosevelt bought a car for his home in Long Island, in 1910, he disliked the technology. He could never see its importance, and he loathed its associations with industrialism and social change.
Taft negotiated with Congress to purchase two White House autos to be available the day of his inauguration. His very public endorsement of the technology, by example and in his rhetoric, led to an explosion in automobile use and purchase. Not even Henry Ford, who had the best selling car since 1906 (Model N, then the T in 1909), could keep up with the growth of the industry as a whole, which more than doubled in 1909. That is to say, the growth in the industry cannot be explained by the Model T. It was Taft's forceful promotion of the automobile that brought the nation to it.
I put a web slide show on this from a paper I gave last year that tells the story of the politics of the early motor age:
Early Automobiles & Airplanes: The Cultural LagFor a couple anecdotes about Taft and his cars, see:
The Taft Pages: Autos
The reason I fight to tell this story is not just because, as my father tells me, the world is less imperfect when an untruth is corrected. I want people to understand the dangers of populist, demagogic politics. The anti-automobile rhetoric and example of Teddy Roosevelt hurt America and greatly delayed the coming of one of the greatest advances in human history. Yes, the automobile did come to America. No, it was not because of Henry Ford. The way the automobile came to America was defined more than any others by Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.
Taft's White House Autos (1909)
I fell into this study while writing a book on the history of the limousine. I got to wondering why this fat dumb guy Taft used autos and the supposedly modernist Roosevelt did not. When I took a closer look, a whole new world fell upon me.