Morning traffic on a rainy Tuesday is already grim. Then you roll up behind a 2004 Outback with peeling clearcoat and realize you’re about to spend twenty minutes absorbing every one of the driver’s convictions. You didn’t ask where they stand on the school levy, or their rescue dog’s agility ranking, or reincarnation. But there it is, five feet in front of your radiator.
We like to blame social media for turning everyone into a broadcaster. We were doing it decades earlier at 60 miles an hour, inside two tons of steel. A bumper sticker is a public post you can’t delete, shown to an audience that can only unfollow you by changing lanes.
It’s an unhinged way to communicate. It’s also, for most of a century, been one of the most honest records we have of what people care about and what they’ll happily argue about with strangers. Here in Portland, where a Subaru with fewer than three stickers looks underdressed, we’ve had a lot of red lights to study the genre, and at some point we started taking notes.
The screen printer and the general
Before the late 1940s, a message on your bumper was hardware. Tourist stops handed out signs of cardboard or metal that you tied or bolted on, and the Mt. Washington Auto Road was still giving out a metal placard into the 1960s.
The fix came from a screen printer named Forest P. Gill, in Kansas City (which side of the state line depends on who’s telling it). After the war he had two new materials within reach: self-adhesive paper and daylight fluorescent ink, both developed during World War II. So he went out to a parking lot, measured bumpers and printed to fit. His first big order was 25,000 stickers for Marine Gardens, an attraction in Clearwater, Florida. Gill lived to 99, and the company he started is still selling bumper stickers.
Politics found it fast. The 1952 race between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson is the first election with bumper stickers on the record, and “I Like Ike” is the one everybody remembers. By Kennedy and Nixon in 1960 they were everywhere. The first ones were paper and gave up in the rain. By the sixties vinyl had taken over, and the stickers started outliving the campaigns, along with the rest of the road-trip America that gave us Googie diners and See America posters.
What a sticker does to your brain
In 2008 a team at Colorado State, with William Szlemko as lead author, published three studies on aggressive driving in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology. They counted what people had done to their cars: bumper stickers, decals, special paint jobs, seat covers, stereos, even plastic dashboard toys.
16%
more likely to engage in road rage, for drivers with the most personal touches on and in their cars.
Szlemko, Benfield, Bell, Deffenbacher and Troup, 2008, as reported by Nature.
The number of markers predicted aggressive driving better than the value or condition of the car. The message didn’t matter, which surprised us more than the 16 percent did. “Visualize World Peace” counted exactly as much as anything angrier.
The researchers called it territory. Your home is a primary territory, and people defend it hard. The road is public territory, more like your towel on a crowded beach, and the rules are looser. Put enough of yourself on a silver Civic and your brain starts filing it under home. Somebody drifting into your lane isn’t making a small mistake anymore. They’re walking into your living room.
How the highway got weird
Trace the stickers by decade and you can watch the culture lose its composure.
In the fifties and sixties they were mostly souvenirs and endorsements. You survived a mountain road. You saw Rock City. You liked Ike.
In the seventies and eighties they started arguing, and joking. Massachusetts gloated. The whales needed saving. The Christian fish grew legs and became the Darwin fish, a bigger fish ate the Darwin fish, and eventually a T. rex ate everybody. A theological debate conducted entirely in chrome-finish plastic.
The nineties were passive-aggressive and the 2000s were coded. Parents bragged about honor students and other parents fired back. White ovals announced where you spent the summer and how far you could run. Stick-figure families took a census of the minivan.
Lately the mood has flipped again. The preaching has mostly cleared out, and what’s left is irony, absurdity and sincere requests for mercy. Nobody’s trying to convert you at a stoplight anymore. They’re asking you not to honk because they’re having a hard week. Campaign stickers still come back every election season, right on schedule, and most of them are gone by spring. The dog that said hi is still there.
Elsewhere
Japan made the car sticker a law
Every new driver in Japan has to put a green and yellow mark on the front and back of the car for their first year. It’s the shoshinsha mark, also called the wakaba, the young leaf, and it tells everyone else to give them room. It has escaped the road entirely: some companies put it on new employees’ name badges, video games use it to mark tutorials, and it’s on your phone as an emoji. 🔰
Older drivers got a mark too, introduced in 1997: an orange and yellow teardrop called the momiji, the autumn leaf. Some people called it the dried leaf or the fallen leaf instead, which is exactly as rude as it sounds, and in 2011 it was replaced by a four-leaf design in the colors of every season. Today it’s encouraged at 70 and required at 75.
A spring leaf for beginners and an autumn leaf for the old guard. We have never seen a government get this poetic about traffic.
The field guide
Fifty stickers, grouped by what they’re up to, with commentary where we couldn’t help ourselves. Bumper stickers are vernacular design, in the same family as the walking men on crosswalk signals. Most of the time, nobody knows who made them. Where we found openly licensed photos of the real thing, we used them. Everywhere else, we set the words in the type and materials of their era, from Day-Glo paper to the die-cut vinyl of right now.
I
Nos. 1 to 8
The old guard
Souvenirs, endorsements and the first rolls of Day-Glo paper.
I Like Ike
No. 01“I Like Ike” (1952). The first presidential race where bumper stickers show up on the record. Three words, two of them nearly the same, and a nickname doing all the work. Someone later printed the sequel: “I Miss Ike!”
No. 02“This Car Climbed Mt. Washington.” The original survivor badge, from a New Hampshire road that opened in 1861 and calls itself the oldest man-made tourist attraction in the country. Until the 1960s the souvenir was a metal placard. Now it comes with the toll, and for the road’s 150th birthday in 2011, every car wearing one got to drive up again for free.
Baby on Board
No. 03“Baby on Board” (1984). Michael Lerner saw signs like it on cars in Germany and started a company, Safety 1st, to sell them here. He moved 10,000 in September 1984 and was selling around half a million a month by the end of 1985. By one 1986 count, the parodies outnumbered the real thing five to one.
No. 04“See Rock City.” Before it was a sticker it was a roof. Starting in 1935, a painter named Clark Byers lettered more than 900 barns in 19 states for a garden on Lookout Mountain, Georgia. The stickers just carried the job onto the interstate.
No. 05“Ask Me, I Live Here!” (1962). Made by AAA for the Seattle World’s Fair, with the brand-new Space Needle on it. It turned every local driver into an unpaid information booth, and it might be the friendliest bumper sticker ever printed.
Save the Whales
No. 06“Save the Whales.” A global conservation movement, carried for years on the back of some of the slowest vehicles on the road.
The red STP oval
No. 07The STP oval. Technically the logo of an oil additive. In practice, a free racing stripe for anyone driving a primer-gray Nova.
No. 08“Don’t Blame Me, I’m From Massachusetts.” Massachusetts was the only state that voted for George McGovern in 1972. Then came Watergate, and these appeared by the thousands. The greatest I-told-you-so in bumper sticker history!
II
Nos. 9 to 17
The stoplight sermons
Faith, doubt and world peace, argued one tailgate at a time.
No. 09The Jesus fish. The ichthys, two curved strokes the early church used as a quiet signal, revived as a chrome car emblem in the 1970s. Understated, and the accidental opening move of a very long argument.
No. 10The Darwin fish (1983). Al Seckel and John Edwards gave the fish legs and the word DARWIN, and Atheists United in Southern California started selling it in 1983. Decades of tailgate theology followed.
A big fish labeled TRUTH, swallowing the Darwin fish
No. 11The fish that eats the Darwin fish. If you can’t agree on where people came from, show your fish eating theirs.
A T. rex, eating all of the fish
No. 12The T. rex. Then a dinosaur showed up and ate everybody. Nobody has topped it.
No. 13“COEXIST” (2000). Polish designer Piotr Młodożeniec made the original for an art competition run by the Museum on the Seam in Jerusalem. It became the most familiar sermon on the road, and before long, a template.
FICTION, spelled in religious symbols
No. 14“FICTION.” The atheist reply to COEXIST, for anyone who felt the original needed an edge.
Visualize World Peace
No. 15“Visualize World Peace.” Earnest, hopeful, and very often parked outside a food co-op.
Visualize Whirled Peas
No. 16“Visualize Whirled Peas.” The pun that punctured it. Possibly the most effective piece of criticism ever applied to a Volvo.
No. 17“War Is Not the Answer.” Younger than it looks. Quakers at the Atlanta Friends Meeting made it a yard sign after 9/11, borrowing the line from Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 speech at Riverside Church. The Friends Committee on National Legislation has handed out more than two million signs and stickers since 2002.
III
Nos. 18 to 24
Suburban warfare
The school pickup line, conducted entirely in vinyl.
My Child Is an Honor Student
No. 18“My Child Is an Honor Student.” The opening shot in a long, quiet war conducted entirely in the school pickup line.
My Kid Beat Up Your Honor Student
No. 19“My Kid Beat Up Your Honor Student.” The reply, from a household with different priorities.
My Dog Is Smarter Than Your Honor Student
No. 20“My Dog Is Smarter Than Your Honor Student.” The moment a lot of people admitted the golden retriever was the easier child.
I Was an Honor Student. I’m Not Sure What Happened.
No. 21“I Was an Honor Student. I’m Not Sure What Happened.” The honor student, twenty years later, still driving the same car.
No. 22The stick-figure family. A census in white vinyl: parents, kids, the cat, the soccer ball. The real one in our photo comes with a twist nobody planned for, a figure labeled EX, lying off to the side.
Your Stick Figure Family Was Delicious
No. 23The T. rex and the stick family. The parody arrived right on schedule. The best version shows a dinosaur and keeps the message short.
One stick figure, no minivan, bags of cash
No. 24The child-free stick figure. One figure, no kids, a lot of money. A census of a different kind.
IV
Nos. 25 to 31
Highway stoicism
Philosophy for people stuck in traffic.
Shit Happens
No. 25“Shit Happens.” Two words and a complete philosophy. Possibly the most honest thing anyone has ever stuck on a car.
No. 26“Mean People Suck.” A full moral code in three words, and still in circulation. Our photo is from Occupy Wall Street in 2011.
Don’t Take Life Too Seriously. You’ll Never Get Out Alive.
No. 27“Don’t Take Life Too Seriously. You’ll Never Get Out Alive.” Bleak, cheerful wisdom from someone who has been trying to merge for forty minutes.
Well-behaved women seldom make history
No. 28“Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.” Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote the line in a 1976 scholarly article about Puritan women. Drivers turned it into a slogan, and in 2007 she published a whole book named after it.
The More People I Meet, the More I Like My Dog
No. 29“The More People I Meet, the More I Like My Dog.” Hard to argue with after four cars in a row change lanes without signaling.
Born to Fish. Forced to Work.
No. 30“Born to Fish, Forced to Work.” The Friday afternoon prayer of anyone within fifty miles of a boat ramp.
My Karma Ran Over Your Dogma
No. 31“My Karma Ran Over Your Dogma.” A pun so good it outlived whatever argument it was part of.
V
Nos. 32 to 39
Secret codes and tribal handshakes
Stickers for people who already know what they mean.
OBX
No. 32The white oval (OBX, ACK, MV). Under international road treaties going back to 1909, a white oval with black letters told border guards where a car came from. American summer towns borrowed the look: OBX for the Outer Banks, ACK for Nantucket, MV for Martha’s Vineyard.
26.2
No. 33“26.2,” “13.1” and “0.0.” So the car behind you knows you were out running in the rain before sunrise. And then, inevitably, 0.0, in solidarity with the rest of us.
No. 34“Keep Portland Weird.” Austin had it first, and Portland says so. Terry Currier of Music Millennium, the record store in our photo, brought the slogan north in 2003 after a friend who owns Waterloo Records in Austin suggested it.
Salt Life
No. 35“Salt Life.” A fishing brand that a meaningful share of drivers still misread at a glance.
The Grateful Dead’s Steal Your Face skull
No. 36The Steal Your Face skull. A signal that whatever is drifting out of the cracked window is not herbal tea.
A cartoon boy, relieving himself on a rival truck logo
No. 37The peeing cartoon kid. Bill Watterson refused to license Calvin and Hobbes for merchandise, so every one of these is a bootleg. Someone traced Calvin from a 1988 strip where he was filling a water balloon, and by the mid-nineties he was peeing on Ford logos from the back window of every Chevy, and the other way around. His syndicate has spent decades losing that fight. Then the bootleggers made a version where he kneels to pray!
NATIVE, with a state outline
No. 38“Native,” with a state silhouette. Regional gatekeeping, usually aimed at whoever has California plates.
COEXIST, spelled with gun logos
No. 39“COEXIST,” spelled with gun logos. A peace sticker, remixed by the Second Amendment crowd.
Start your own tailgate
If this list has you eyeing your own bumper, we carry a handful of vinyl decals from Draplin Design Co. in Portland.
Pacific Northwest Decal
Aaron Draplin’s studio is a few miles from here, and this is our bumper in one sticker: tall timber, heavy slab type, a lot of moss.
$4
Wilds, Pink/Orange/Yellow Decal
Draplin’s Wilds badge turned all the way up. Good on a cooler, better on a tailgate that already has some history.
$4
Chaos Arrows Decal
Arrows pointing every direction at once, for drivers who have fully joined the age of mercy.
$4
Portland Sunny Day Decal
Portland under an actual sun. Rarer than a Subaru with no stickers.
$4
VI
Nos. 40 to 45
Defensive driving
Notes for whoever is following a little too closely.
If you can read this, you’re too close
No. 40“If You Can Read This, You’re Too Close.” The original proximity sensor. Best printed very, very small.
My Other Car Is a Broom
No. 41“My Other Car Is a…” Porsche, broom, Millennium Falcon. A sense of humor about your car payment.
Horn Broken. Watch for Finger.
No. 42“Horn Broken, Watch for Finger.” New Jersey, in five words.
0 to 60 in 15 Minutes
No. 43“0 to 60 in 15 Minutes.” Quiet pride from anyone coaxing a Westfalia up the Columbia River Gorge.
Student Driver
No. 44“Student Driver.” Teenagers use the magnet for six months. Nervous forty-year-olds leave it on forever. Japan, as you saw above, decided this one shouldn’t be optional.
Don’t Honk. I’m Doing My Best.
No. 45“Don’t Honk, I’m Doing My Best.” Vulnerability at an unprotected left turn.
VII
Nos. 46 to 50
The age of mercy
Please be gentle. Everyone is having a week.
Please tell your dog that my dog said hi
No. 46“Please Tell Your Dog That My Dog Said Hi.” The current champion of traffic calming. Nobody stays angry at this car.
Don’t honk at me, I will cry
No. 47“Don’t Honk at Me, I Will Cry.” Fifty years of bumper machismo, undone in seven words.
Honk if you’d rather be watching Shrek
No. 48“Honk If You’d Rather Be Watching Shrek.” Hyper-specific nostalgia for whoever is stuck behind you on I-205.
We’ve been trying to reach you regarding your car’s extended warranty
No. 49“We’ve Been Trying to Reach You Regarding Your Car’s Extended Warranty.” Years of robocalls, returned to sender at 60 miles an hour.
Only ugly people tailgate me
No. 50“Only Ugly People Tailgate Me.” Vanity as a safety feature. We have no data on whether it works.
Read my bumper
Build a bumper and we’ll read it, using the Colorado State math. Nothing is saved, and nobody is judging you except us.
Read My Bumper is interactive, so it only works on the site. Come build yours at mossandfog.com!
The last democratic billboard
Almost everything we read now arrives through an algorithm, sorted and served to people who already agree. A bumper sticker is stubbornly analog. You can’t block it or swipe past it.
For two minutes at a red light you share space with a stranger who felt strongly enough about something to glue it to their property. You might laugh. You might judge their parenting. But it’s hard not to like somebody who put “Don’t Honk at Me, I Will Cry” on a car they’re still paying off.
Where this came from: the road rage study is Szlemko et al., Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2008. Bumper sticker history from the University of Delaware Library, AAA Northeast and Stuckey’s. Mt. Washington from Roadside America and the Boston Globe. “War Is Not the Answer” from the Friends Committee on National Legislation. “Baby on Board” from Snopes. Massachusetts from WBUR. The peeing cartoon kid from MEL Magazine. Japan’s marks from 99% Invisible and Wikipedia. More design history lives in our guide to the design that shaped how we live.
