The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways Read online

  Copyright © 2011 by Earl Swift

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to

  Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  215 Park Avenue South,

  New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Swift, Earl, date.

  The big roads : the untold story of the engineers, visionaries, and

  trailblazers who created the American superhighways / Earl Swift.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-618-81241-7 (hardback)

  1. Highway engineering—United States—History—20th century. 2. Highway engineers—

  United States—Biography. 3. Interstate Highway System—History—20th century. I. Title.

  TE23.S95 2011

  388.1'22092273—dc22

  2010043624

  Book design by Brian Moore

  Maps by Kevin Swift

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Excerpts from "The Great American Roadside" by James Agee are from Fortune magazine, 9/1/1934 © 1934 Time Inc. Used under license.

  Excerpts from "The American Way of Death" by Lewis Mumford are used by permission of the Gina Maccoby Literary Agency. Copyright © 1966 by Elizabeth M. Morss and James G. Morss. Originally published in The New York Review of Books.

  Excerpts from "Townless Highways for the Motorist" by Lewis Mumford and Benton MacKaye are used by permission of the Gina Maccoby Literary Agency. Copyright © 1930 by Elizabeth M. Morss and James G. Morss. Originally published in Harper's Monthly.

  For Amy

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Table of Contents

  Map

  Introduction

  PART I

  1

  2

  3

  PART II

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  PART III

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  PART IV

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Footnotes

  Introduction

  I WAS OVERDUE for a road trip. It had been years since I'd last embraced that most cherished of American freedoms: to slide behind the wheel of a car equipped with a good stereo and comfortable seats, and head out into the country, beholden to no particular route, no timetable; to grow inured to the road, the thrum of the tires, the warbling silence and thuds of a big truck's slipstream, the whistle of hot summer past the windows. To live off the contents of a cooler on the floorboards and whatever sustenance the road happened to offer.

  It had to be a long trip, as it might be years more before I got another, so I decided to go west, all the way west, through a thousand towns and across the great sweep of farm and forest and desert and windblown high plain that waited between home and the Pacific. We'd take back roads, I told my daughter, the two-laners of generations past. We'd drive with the windows down so that we could smell the tar of mid-July blacktop, hear the corn's rustle, holler at grazing cows. We'd drive for just a few hours a day, and slow enough to study the sights, immerse ourselves in wherever we were and remember it afterward. We'd make few plans; we'd stop when we were hungry, when we tired, and wherever caught our fancy.

  We'd make a circle of the Lower Forty-eight, first on the old Lincoln Highway, America's Main Street, a ribbon of pavement twisting through twelve states, New York at one end, San Francisco at the other, few big cities between. Then we'd hug the California coast to Los Angeles and turn back east through the desert.

  " It'll be great," I told her. " A month on the road, seeing the entire country. Just you and me."

  Saylor greeted this uncertainly. " Well, I guess," she finally replied. " Can I bring a friend?"

  So we were three: a single father of forty-seven and two sixth-grade girls in a rented Chrysler minivan, its hatch crammed with tents, sleeping bags, a dozen stuffed animals, and enough T-shirts and shorts for the ladies to execute four wardrobe changes before each day's lunch.

  We joined the Lincoln in southern Pennsylvania. Soon after, we came upon a silent gathering of bikers next to the field where a United Airlines jet went down on 9/11, and after paying our respects stumbled into a blinding thunderstorm out of Buckstown. That evening we caught an Independence Day concert in the heart of Ligonier.

  We stuck to the old road into Pittsburgh, crawling from one stoplight to the next amid auto-parts stores and no-tell motels and car washes and timeworn bowling alleys, the air dark with diesel smoke. We passed crumbling factories, crossed into Ohio, stayed true to the Lincoln's original path on narrow lanes through Bucyrus and Upper Sandusky, Ada and Delphos.

  In Indiana the highway bent northward to shadow the Michigan line; along the way, it cut through South Bend and came within genuflecting range of Touchdown Jesus and the shuttered Studebaker works. It grazed Chicago, close enough to capture traffic but little else of the city. We entered a cornfield near the Mississippi and didn't leave it until Omaha.

  The girls passed the hours begging me to stop the minivan to buy them clothes, or candy, or more stuffed animals, and writing notes to each other when I refused. They adopted mock Swedish personas and spoke in what they imagined to be Swedish accents across entire states. They complained that they were bored.

  Out in the Great Plains of western Nebraska, I mired the minivan in soft sand and we spent two hours vainly trying to dig it out before a kindhearted local offered a tow. A couple of hours later, stopping for ice cream, we encountered a stranger so odd and menacing that I kept an eye on the rearview for an hour after. We explored Buffalo Bill's ranch in North Platte. Communed with wild horses on a windswept and dusty government preserve. Wandered a Boot Hill studded with the graves of the overly bold.

  It was a short way west of there, a week into the drive, a point at which I could recite the lyrics of every song in the Backstreet Boys’ repertoire, that I decided we'd no longer stick to the original highway. The Lincoln coincided with U.S. 30 except where a grain elevator or water tower marked a town's approach; there, it usually veered onto narrow blacktop—often as not named " Lincoln Way," straddled by ditches, and the province of sagging pickups and rusted Detroit iron—to dogleg through the settlement's gut. Ages before, the main highway had been shifted to bypass these prairie burgs, and their reliable sameness (Main Street of post office, hardware store, small grocery, consignment shop, long-shuttered bank) came to seem a forgettable delay next to 30's straight-ahead ease and speed.

  So we took up the newer Lincoln, the straightened and wider Lincoln, and pressed up the slow-rising prairie toward the Continental Divide. The towns slid by a half mile beyond the shoulder, behind smatterings of low-roofed stores and diners that had moved off Main Street to lure the bypass's passersby.

  In places, we could see that we traveled the middle of three parallel highways. The old Lincoln wriggled off to our right, narrow and slow; we drove its bigger a
nd less cluttered offspring; and away to the left, across miles of rolling pastureland, ran U.S. 30's own successor, Interstate 80, four lanes of smooth concrete, its speeding semitrailers unfettered by cross traffic or slowpoke tractors, by blind driveways or train tracks.

  It materialized only briefly before the terrain would rise to block our view, but those glimpses made plain that its pilgrims, windshields and chrome flashing in the sunshine, were moving with a speed and purpose that made our own seem puny. On the old Lincoln, we'd tooled along. On U.S. 30, we toured. On I-80, folks were hauling ass.

  In Wyoming, 30 and the old Lincoln peeled away from the interstate and struck north as one, trundling across ridges of dinosaur bone and petrified forest into Medicine Bow. The town was a fossil itself, littered with tumbledown filling stations and abandoned motels, their doors agape, roofs staved, parking lots colonized by waist-high weeds—signals, fast fading, that this once was an important wayside on an important way.

  We curved with the blacktop back to the south and outside Rawlins found that the Lincoln and 30 fused with the interstate, that the newer road's concrete had been laid right overtop its forebears. For the first time since leaving home, I steered the minivan up an interstate ramp.

  The following few hours were downright relaxing. Cruise control set at seventy-five. A couple of fingers on the wheel. Pavement hard and even. Lanes a dozen feet wide, crisply marked and flanked by broad shoulders. Forward visibility of a half mile, minimum, and on most stretches many times that. No grades that required the minivan to downshift. No driveways, no intersections, no roaming cattle, no oncoming cars; after two thousand miles on lesser roads, I-80 seemed well ordered, safe, and so, so easy.

  We spent six days in California before turning for home, and it was on interstates—15, 40, 81, and 64—that we covered most of the distance. Had we pushed it, and not very hard, we could have gone ocean to ocean in five days.

  Back home, I made a surprising discovery as I pored through the digital pictures I'd taken during our month away: I'd snapped hundreds, but only a handful on days we'd traveled by interstate. Wyoming was a blank west of Rawlins, as was Arizona aside from the Grand Canyon. New Mexico? Two pictures of our campsite near Grants. Arkansas was unchronicled; the same went for Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia.

  What's more, I found that while I could conjure up scores of mental snapshots of minuscule towns and interesting sights from my hours behind the wheel, I'd logged almost all of them while driving back roads. I could recall Franklin Grove, Illinois, and the bridge over the Mississippi in Clinton, Iowa, and the quiltwork of farms east of Lima, Ohio, in great detail. Remembered Nevada, Iowa (which a sign at the city limits proclaimed the "26th best small town in America"), and Cozad, Nebraska (where the Lincoln was spanned by a banner marking the hundredth meridian), and cresting a steep mountain pass at the edge of Austin, Nevada, in the silver-blue early morning, on an empty stretch of U.S. 50 that Life magazine nicknamed the " Loneliest Road in America."

  I could especially reconstruct our passage over the Great Salt Lake Desert on two hundred miles of narrow gravel—a traverse on which we saw three vehicles coming the other way in two whole days and passed hour on hour surrounded by sagebrush, shimmering salt crystal, bounding antelope, and an eerie silence broken only by the girls' worries that we'd be eaten by mountain lions.

  Pennsylvania Dutch barnyards, misty Allegheny hollows, the endless green of corn on the rise—all that came back to me with sharp-edged clarity. But the thousands of miles we'd made on the interstates were a blur of far vaguer impressions. I could not call to mind any specific image of New Mexico, or of west Texas, or of the steamy Mississippi bottomlands. Had we really driven through Little Rock and Nashville? We had, we must have, but I couldn't say much about either. The minivan's windshield became a proscenium through which we watched the countryside pass without actually experiencing it; we were in it, but not of it.

  Mind you, that's not a complaint. I knew what we'd get when I turned up the ramp, and the interstates delivered. They carried us without incident, without drama. They offered up food and lodging with minimal fuss. They carved the shortest path all the way home.

  And we made very good time.

  At nearly forty-seven thousand miles long and at least four lanes wide, the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways, as it's formally known, is the greatest public works project in history, dwarfing Egypt's pyramids, the Panama Canal, and China's Great Wall. Its construction saw forests felled, mountains leveled, and rivers bridged, tunneled, or picked up and moved, and it incorporates nearly three hundred million cubic yards of concrete, enough to fill sixty-four Louisiana Superdomes to the rafters.

  It has smoothed what was once rough country, enabling us to cruise at a mile a minute across desert and bog, rangeland and Appalachian hollow, to dive eight cars abreast under Baltimore's harbor and drill through the Rockies at more than two miles above sea level—and to do it all with less chance of injury than on any other type of road, in this country and most others.

  It is a vast and powerful economic engine that provides millions of jobs, gets goods to Dakota ranchers with the same speed they reach big cities back east, and puts fresh greens on dinner tables a thousand miles from the farms that grow them.

  It has its problems. It is so big, and its components so expensive, that maintaining the beast has become a real quandary. It represents a spectacular investment in a mode of transport that will wither without new fuel sources. It is clogged with rush-hour traffic that approaches the tie-ups it was intended, in part, to ease. And it has been blamed, and rightly, for a pox of unforeseen consequences: for hastening the messy sprawl of U.S. cities, carving up neighborhoods, gutting a thousand small-town shopping districts, and fostering an interchange glut of motels and fast-food joints as predictable as the roads themselves.

  Like it or not, the interstates " changed the face of America," as Eisenhower would comment after leaving the presidency. They are intrinsic to our everyday life, to the modern American experience, to what defines the physical United States. They form the nation's commercial and cultural grid, binding its regions, bridging its dialects, snaking into every state and every major city in the Lower Forty-eight. They've insinuated themselves into our slang, our perception of time and space, our mental maps.

  In fact, they've grown so central to life in a country utterly beholden to the car that they're almost invisible to most of us, one of those features of the landscape that we take for granted even when we're on them. For most of the population, they've always been there—D.C. has always had a Beltway, Los Angeles the 5 and 405, Atlanta its Perimeter, St. Louis a confluence of interstates in the shadow of the Gateway Arch. It's a stretch to imagine Dallas–Fort Worth without its great, dumbbell-shaped array of loops and connectors, or Long Island without the LIE, the Whitestone, the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

  We've come to so rely on this triumph of engineering—and make no mistake, that's what it is—that to embark cross-country on any lesser road, any Blue Highway, is viewed as nostalgic adventure, or escape, or eccentricity, a journey with an ulterior motive.

  Which makes it all the more remarkable that most Americans are oblivious to how this behemoth came to be, and why it was built how and where it was. The conventional wisdom usually figures the system a product of the fifties; the public imagination places it alongside Telstar, coonskin caps, and polio shots. But as our road trip on the Lincoln hinted, that's a myth, like so much of what we think we know about the interstates. They're not nearly as new as we imagine; they are the progeny of older road networks that were, themselves, descended from even older paths, and they from older ones still.

  And despite their official name, they didn't spring, fully formed or otherwise, from Ike or his lieutenants. By the time Eisenhower signed the bill that financed the system, in June 1956, most of its physical details were old news. Its routing had been committed to paper for eighteen years. The specifics of its
design had been decided for twelve. Franklin Roosevelt had a greater hand in its creation than Eisenhower did, truth be told, and the system's origins go back much further than him.

  Its true parents were career technocrats, anonymous outside their fields. If it were to bear the name of the man most responsible for its existence, it would be called the Thomas H. MacDonald System of Interstate and Defense Highways, MacDonald being the man who, with his staff, conceived of the network and proposed its construction before World War II.

  Odds are you've heard of neither him nor his quiet and persistent protégé, Frank Turner, who translated that prewar concept into the swooping ramps, mountain cuts, and stacked interchanges that we know today. These guys, more than any others, made it happen. Their supporting cast included auto executives, scientists, inventors, freelance designers and futurists, and no shortage of oddballs. Opponents, too: Lewis Mumford, a respected critic of art and architecture, helped whet the public appetite for superhighways, then morphed into their harshest critic. A quiet family man named Joe Wiles despaired at a highway boring through Baltimore, as did thousands of men and women in dozens of cities, and decided to fight the juggernaut before it destroyed a home and neighborhood he'd worked years to build. Both helped to shape what we got.

  But to begin at the beginning, one must go even further back than MacDonald—back to the dawn of the motor age, when America's cross-country roads, where they existed at all, were no more than rutted cart paths.