The St. Louis Post-Dispatch made the case in 1923 that even when a child darted unexpectedly into traffic, the “plea of unavoidable accident in such cases is the perjury of a murderer,” according to “Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City.” “The message you get from the newspapers is that any driver who injured or killed a pedestrian was just loathed,” said the book’s author, Peter D. Norton, an assistant professor of history at the University of Virginia. “Juries and judges certainly well into the ’20s were on the...