BETWEEN WAR AND ABUNDANCE 229The interstate highway system remains the most
ambitious infrastructure project in American history.
It originated just after World War I, when Lieutenant
Colonel Dwight Eisenhower was assigned to an
army convoy traveling across the country on the
Lincoln Highway. The convoy was organized in part to
publicize the poor condition of the nation’s roads—
especially in the West—and the experience made an
impression on Eisenhower. Twenty-five years later
General Eisenhower observed firsthand the German
autobahns, four-lane “superhighways” that ranked
among the best in the world and that ultimately
facilitated the Allied invasion that ended the war.
As president in 1956, Eisenhower authorized
41,000 miles of interstate roads through the Federal-
Aid Highway Act. Yet after five years only 8,000 miles
had been completed, and public support for the
project began to waver. The main obstacle was fiscal:
in 1961 the gasoline tax of four cents per gallon,
which had generated billions for the program, was
set to drop to three cents. This decline in revenue was
compounded by the trend toward smaller and more
fuel-efficient cars such as the Volkswagen Beetle.
In response, Federal Highway Administrator Rex
Whitton launched a public relations campaign in
1961 to stimulate support for the project. He
promised that the entire system would be complete
by 1972, as originally scheduled. As he told one
interviewer in 1962, drivers would soon be able to
go from coast to coast without a single stop light.
(Decades later, Charles Kuralt quipped that one could
drive from coast to coast on the interstates without
seeing anything at all.)
At the same time, President John F. Kennedy
urged Congress to renew the gas tax and find other
sources of revenue to complete the highway system.
To make his case, Kennedy echoed Eisenhower,
arguing that the interstate system was essential not
just to economic growth but also to civil defense. In
times of national emergency, such a network would
HIGHWAYS AND SUBURBS
Caterpillar Corporation, “A Progress
Report on the Interstate Highway
System,” Saturday Evening Post,
April 22, 1961
facilitate transportation to all parts of the country.
At the height of the Cold War such words were a
powerful lever to action. The private sector also
lobbied vigorously for the highways, as petroleum
and trucking companies, civil engineers, and home
builders were all directly affected by the project.
The Caterpillar Corporation, which produced heavy
construction equipment, issued this advertisement
in 1961 to pointedly measure the progress of the
highway system. In Caterpillar’s rendering, even
cities are secondary to the central feature of the
landscape, the web of highways across the country.
The campaign worked: in June Congress extended the
gas tax and expanded funding for the highways, and
within three years half of the system was finished.
The Federal-Aid Highway Act was among the
century’s most consequential legislation.
It expanded and realigned settlement, made the
automobile the essential form of transportation, and
stimulated several new regions and markets. Equally
consequential were its effects upon American cities.
In Miami, Nashville, St. Paul, and New Orleans, the
routes of these new highways went directly through
poor and powerless neighborhoods, many of which
were predominantly Latino or African American.
Kennedy himself estimated in 1962 that each year
over 15,000 families and 1,500 businesses were
displaced by interstate construction. Some wealthier
and more organized communities resisted, such as
the residents of San Francisco who successfully halted
construction of the Embarcadero Freeway. But for
the most part, the interstate dictated subsequent
patterns of growth and decline.
The casualty was the nation’s urban core.
As interstates penetrated the cities, funding and
ridership of mass transit fell and many people began
to move to the suburbs. These trends further isolated
the low-income residents who were left behind. In
Chicago, the Dan Ryan Expressway separated a large
public housing project that was home to thousands
of African Americans from the white neighborhoods
to the west. The interstate highway system sparked
mobility as well as congestion, optimism as well as
blame, prosperity as well as poverty. It shifted people
from the Northeast to the Southwest, and from cities
to outlying areas. It also superseded the older highway
system shown on page 196. Route 66 was surpassed
by Route 40, and in countless other areas small
towns became ghost towns.