Welcome to the second installment of CR4's celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. We began on Monday, with "A Giant Nationwide Engineering Project". Check back with us all week as we cover "The Politics of Passage", "Adventures in Civil Engineering", and "The Road Ahead".
Two hundred years ago, most Americans lived east of the Appalachian Mountains and within 50 miles of the Atlantic Ocean. The nation's dirt roads served citizens who rarely traveled beyond farm, church and market. In 1806, Congress authorized the construction of The National Road, a highway that would follow a path trod by George Washington during the first French and Indian War. Five years later, work on the federally-funded project began in Cumberland, Maryland. By 1818, the road had reached the Ohio River at Wheeling, then a part of Virginia. Work during the 1820s pushed The National Road across Ohio and into Indiana, until a lack of funding halted construction near Vandalia, Illinois in the 1830s.
For long-distance travelers and freight haulers, trips along the nation's waterways also provided a means of transportation. In 1807, Robert Fulton's steamboat made its maiden voyage from New York City to Albany in a trip that lasted 32 hours. A year later, the state legislature funded a survey for a canal that would connect the Hudson to Lake Erie. Although the project was derided as "Clinton's Big Ditch", a reference to then-Governor Dewitt Clinton, the Erie Canal was completed in 1825. Four feet deep and 40 feet wide, it included 18 aqueducts, 83 locks, and a towpath for farm animals. By 1830, steamboats dominated the nation's rivers. By 1840, the United States boasted 3,326 miles of canals. The decades before and after the Civil War marked the rise of the railroad. Unlike The National Road and the Erie Canal, early railroad surveys and construction projects were financed mainly by private investors. Although short-haul rail lines struggled, the steam-powered locomotive eventually crushed the canal companies. By 1860, the nation boasted 31,000 miles of track, concentrated mainly in the Northeast. Two years later, a wartime Congress enacted the Railroad Act of 1862 and laid the groundwork for a transcontinental railroad. By the end of the decade, North and South were reunited and the Union Pacific joined with the Central Pacific at Promontory Point, Utah.
The turn of the century marked the advent of the automobile and the start of a new chapter in the history of transportation. In 1903, a Michigan-born engineer named Henry Ford began building a few cars a day in Detroit. Five years later, he introduced a design called the Model T. By 1918, half of the cars in America were mass-produced in Ford's factories. Soon, motorist organizations such as the American Automobile Association (AAA) demanded better roads. In 1925, Congress passed the first Federal Aid Highway Act, legislation that replaced named highways with numbered roads. Standardized black-on-white shields replaced the colored bands that had decorated telephone poles to identify named roads such as the Lincoln Highway (now U.S. Route 30). By design, the new system was to be administered by the states - not by private organizations or the federal government.
Congressional action suited a young lieutenant colonel named Dwight David Eisenhower. In 1919, the future President had traveled with the U.S. Army's Transcontinental Motor Convoy from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco. A procession of 81 vehicles covered 3,251 miles in 62 days to test the feasibility of moving a motorized army across the American continent. Half the distance was over dirt roads, desert sands, mountain trails, and alkali flats. Vehicles that sank in quicksand or struggled on impassable roads had to be pushed and pulled by weary soldiers. Along the way, the Army recorded 230 roadside accidents and retired nine vehicles from service. Nearly 90 wooden bridges and culverts were damaged by a convoy that averaged just 58.1 miles per day and 6.07 miles per hour. Remarkably, nearly 1,300 miles were logged at altitudes between 4,000 and 6,000 feet.
Although millions of Americans read about the progress of the Transcontinental Motor Convoy, many more lost their jobs – and their ability to afford automobiles – during the Great Depression. During the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a system of six transcontinental highways, mainly to provide jobs for the unemployed. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1938 directed the head of the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) to study the feasibility of such as system, but Congress refused to fund a project that one critic called "another ascent into the stratosphere of New Deal jitterbug economics.
Ultimately, Word War II changed the nation's priorities and perspective. Before the war's end, Dwight D. Eisenhower, now the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, studied how German forces used the Autobahn to move men and material to the front. Back in Washington, Congress renewed the Federal Aid Highway Act in 1944 and authorized the construction of a national system of interstate roads. The law directed state highway departments to identify projects, but did not provide federal leadership or funding. In 1952, Congress appropriated $25 million in matching funds; however, road construction still moved slowly as the states concentrated on local concerns.
When President Eisenhower took office in January 1953, the states had built only 6,500 miles of interstate highway. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1954 increased federal spending to $175 million, but failed to meet Eisenhower's calls for a systematic approach that would finish the work over 10 years at a cost of $25 billion. "The whole interstate system must be authorized as one project, to be completed approximately within the specified time," Eisenhower told Congress during his State of the Union Address in 1956. "Only in this way can industry efficiently gear itself to the job ahead. Only in this way can the required planning and engineering be accomplished without the confusion and waste unavoidable in a piecemeal approach."
Resources:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/ONTHEMOVE/exhibition/exhibition_1_2.html http://www.nps.gov/fone/natlroad.htm http://www.eriecanal.org/ http://nationalatlas.gov/articles/history/a_railroads-p1.html http://www.gbcnet.com/ushighways/history.html http://www.classbrain.com/artteenst/publish/article_113.shtml http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/1919.htm http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/dl/1919Convoy/1919documents.html http://www.gbcnet.com/ushighways/history.html http://nationalatlas.gov/articles/transportation/a_highway.html http://www.tfhrc.gov/pubrds/summer96/p96su10.htm http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/reichs.htm http://www.vlib.us/amdocs/texts/dde1956.htm
Click here for our third installment "The Eisenhower Interstate Highway System: The Politics of Passage."
The Eisenhower Interstate Highway System: Roots of the Roads
Don't forget the Interurban Trolley System
