196 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
IN SEARCH OF FREEDOM ON THE OPEN ROAD
“The Great American Roadside,”
Fortune (September 1934)
Before World War I, the average American worker
would have had to spend two years’ worth of wages to
purchase an automobile. This changed dramatically
with Henry Ford’s mass production techniques: by
1925 a Model T was rolling off the assembly line every
ten seconds, and by the end of the decade the same
worker needed only three months’ salary to buy one
of the 26 million cars that were now on the road.
As early as 1920 the automobile business
employed 4 million workers and accounted for
10 percent of the nation’s wealth. It stimulated the
market for glass, rubber, gasoline, and construction,
and generated a new form of advertising: the
roadside billboard. The automobile extended the
distance between home and work and created
Sunday drives and auto camping. Even dating rituals
were transformed, for young people were no longer
confined to the front porch or parlor. Entire cities—
most importantly Los Angeles—were structured
around the automobile, with growth irrespective
of an urban core. As Donald Meinig once observed,
Detroit may have invented the car, but Los Angeles
taught us how to use it.
Even in the Great Depression, Americans rarely
sold their cars. The automobile had become a
symbol of freedom and possibility, evidenced by the
ever-growing number of road trips taken during the
1930s. Well before the advent of interstate highways,
auto vacations spawned roadside attractions and
amenities across the country. Fortune magazine
predicted that roadside businesses would gross $3
billion in 1934. The American road trip had become
not just a rite of passage but an emerging and
profitable market.
Among the earliest transcontinental roads was the
Lincoln Highway, first billed as a national heritage
tour from New York to San Francisco. Though the
route was determined more by commerce than by
history, it held out the promise of rediscovering
America through the auto. This ideal even influenced
the public works projects of the New Deal, for among
its best-known legacies are the American Guide
Series produced by the Federal Writers’ Project.
Each of these state guides is organized around auto
tours and itineraries designed to showcase local
color, regional identity, and history. Ironically, as
the automobile and the highway homogenized the
country, the road trip was idealized as a way to access
the “real” America beyond the realm of mass culture.