People had cars before 1945. My grandparents were born in the 20's, their parents had cars by then.

They were farmers. Before cars, farmers had horse drawn wagons. Do you think they walked home with their groceries from the store ten miles away? Carried 160 acres of corn into town on their backs? Horses were noisy, expensive and polluting. Progressives back then whined incessantly about those, too. Some things never change.

Work horses shit about 30 pounds a day. Large cities would have had tens of thousands of horses. Hundreds of tons a day of shit on the streets. It was almost as bad as San Francisco.