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

A man-made wonder, a connective network, an economic force, a bringer of blight and sprawl and the possibility of escape—the U.S. interstate system changed the face of our country. The Big Roads charts the creation of these essential American highways. From the turn-of-the-century car racing entrepreneur who spurred the citizen-led “Good Roads” movement, to the handful of driven engineers who conceived of the interstates and how they would work—years before President Eisenhower knew the plans existed—to the protests that erupted across the nation when highways reached the cities and found people unwilling to be uprooted in the name of progress, Swift follows a winding, fascinating route through twentieth-century American life.xa0How did we get from dirt tracks to expressways, from main streets to off-ramps, from mud to concrete and steel, in less than a century? Through decades of politics, activism, and marvels of engineering, we recognize in our highways the wanderlust, grand scale, and conflicting notions of citizenship and progress that define America. Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Earl Swift Q: What drew you to writing about the interstate highways? A: Well, they’re kind of hard to miss. They’ve snaked their way into every aspect of our lives — where we live and work and go to school, what we eat, how we view time and distance. They’ve altered the shape and size and character of our cities, and what it means to live in the "country." We see the physical United States differently, thanks to this weave of concrete. Check out the weather map on any TV news program, national or local: the United States is no longer depicted topographically, with rivers and mountains as its reference points, but as a grid of highways. That reflects how we’ve come to see America: not as an expanse of physical obstacles, but as a network of high-speed corridors that are so ubiquitous, they’re taken for granted. The fresh salad you toss at home and the steak you savor at a big-city restaurant wouldn’t be possible without them. The clothes, furniture, electronics, even the house you buy, depend on the speed and access they provide. Building the interstates wasn’t simply a matter of pouring concrete; they helped create the modern American experience. Q: The book’s subtitle mentions the "engineers, visionaries, and trailblazers" who created America’s superhighways, but nothing about presidents. Weren’t the interstates Dwight Eisenhower’s doing? A: Actually, Ike had very little to do with them — which may come as a surprise, seeing as how they’re named for the man and associated with his time in office, alongside coonskin caps and polio shots. In truth, FDR had more of a hand in the interstates. And their origins date back decades before him: they’re the product of an evolution that began before America’s entry into World War I. The real fathers of our modern highway system will be unknown names to most readers. There’s Carl Fisher, who inspired the nation’s first primitive network of motor roads; Thomas MacDonald and a supporting cast in the federal Bureau of Public Roads, who turned that network into the numbered U.S. highway system in the mid-twenties and drew up plans for the interstates in the late thirties; and Frank Turner, who played the starring role in turning that prewar vision into what we have today. Alongside these builders are a host of men and women who helped shape what we got, some of them by resisting the system’s advance — people like Lewis Mumford, a writer who initially championed high-speed roads and later became their harshest critic. Q: Did you know of these players before you started work on the book? A: No, I didn’t. I assumed I knew the basics, that Eisenhower was a major figure in the story. The more I researched, the more I came to see that it wasn’t so. The myth was helped along by Ike himself. In his memoirs he writes about a coast-to-coast trip he took with an army truck convoy in 1919, and how it opened his eyes to the primitive state of American roads; it took the convoy 62 days to drive from D.C. to San Francisco. A quarter-century later, his armies advanced on Berlin using Germany’s autobahns, and he realized that here was the answer — and so it was, he wrote, that building a superhighway network became one of his priorities as president. Ike certainly had both of those experiences, and they may well have fueled his desire for big roads. But by the time he got into politics, the interstates were a done deal. How they are, and where they are, had largely been decided, and they differed in fundamental ways with what he had in mind. Q: Did you drive much of the system in researching the book? A: I’ve traveled about 20,000 miles of the interstates, or roughly forty percent of the total. That doesn’t include do-overs: some legs I’ve driven many times — I-44 and I-40 between St. Louis and L.A., which parallels old Route 66; I-95 between New York and Richmond; I-80 from New York to San Francisco; the 900-odd miles of I-64. Researching the story’s main characters required that I spend a good bit of time with their papers, which are locked away in university archives and libraries all over the country. On one road trip, in the summer of 2008, my daughter and I drove from our home on the Virginia shore to Hot Springs, Arkansas; Texas A&M; Fort Worth; Iowa State; the small town of Montezuma, Iowa; Ottawa, Illinois; and the University of Michigan’s main campus in Ann Arbor. On another research trip, in the summer of 2006, we drove the Lincoln Highway through eleven states. Q: Are you a fan of the system? A: Most of the time I’m on it, yes. But it certainly has its negatives: an interstate exit has more in common with interchanges a thousand miles away than it does with the local countryside; the system amounts to a fifty- first state, a place unto itself — one of unvaried engineering, look-alike architecture, taste-alike food. So driving an interstate through, say, New Mexico is not exactly like visiting New Mexico. You can see it from the highway, but you’re kept at a distance by the interstate’s wide corridor, and the view is blurred by your speed; you’re in it, but not of it. It’s a bit like changing planes in an airport terminal. You can’t really say you’ve been to the surrounding city. For all that, I enjoy driving on interstates. I enjoy their smooth speed; I’d imagine it’s as close as most of us come to piloting a plane. I appreciate their ease and safety. I’m awed by their scale. Some of their approaches to cities offer truly spectacular views. And I’ve had some wonderful moments on them, with company and without. I get a lot of thinking done when I’m on the road. Plus, there’s this: whatever their flaws, whatever unintended ills they spawned, the interstates do exactly what they were designed to do, and do it very well. They account for one percent of our highway mileage. They carry a quarter of our traffic. They’re really pretty amazing. Q: Do you have any favorite routes? A: I always look forward to driving I-81 through Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley — the Blue Ridge looms to the east, the Alleghenies to the west. It’s gorgeous, though you can’t gaze for too long, because the highway’s crowded with trucks. I-40 in the Southwest and I-80 in the Great Plains pass through some austere but beautiful country. There’s a pleasing lonesomeness to those drives. I-10 rides a causeway through the Louisiana swamps; drive it just after dawn, it’s otherworldly. Q: Any bad experiences? A: Oh, sure. Whenever I drive the New Jersey Turnpike or the Long Island Expressway, I can’t say I’m having a good time; they can be harrowing. Same goes for the Capital Beltway at rush hour, which most days seems to last about eighteen hours. I avoid certain rural stretches whenever possible. I-35 between Fort Worth and Waco is weedy, trash-strewn, ugly. The Indiana Toll Road is an eyesore. The road surfaces in Michigan and Illinois are close to lunar. As for moments of real danger, I was in a dozen-car pileup once, on I-44 in southern Missouri. Didn’t get hurt, but it was an eerie experience to see such a lavish piece of engineering rendered unusable; the whole highway was blocked by wreckage. I was rear-ended while stopped at another snow-related accident by a Camaro doing 50; I was in a microscopic Fiat. That was unpleasant, to say the least, but again, I didn’t get hurt. Then there was the time my MG started to overheat as I drove alone across the desert from Needles to Barstow, California. It was blistering out — 110 degrees or so — and I had no choice but to crank up the heater. That stretch of I-40 was the longest hundred miles I’ve ever driven. On any kind of road. "America’s interstate system tied together urban areas, bypassed thousands of small-town main streets, fanned the sprawl of suburbia, and sent millions of baby boomers on road trips with their parents, asking, ‘Are we there yet?’ With a great sense of how this changed the country, Earl Swift has told an intriguing tale of vision, personal sacrifice, and can-do determination." —Walter R. Borneman, author of Rival Rails: The Race to Build America’s Greatest Transcontinental Railroad "Objects in the rearview mirror prove eerily close on every page of this lively, eminently sensible history of the guardrailed monument to American mobility." —John R. Stilgoe, author of Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape "A joy ride. Earl Swift has written the best kind of popular history--one that paints vivid portraits, debunks myths and brings to life the fascinating and appalling stories behind the creation of that massive mixed blessing known as America's interstate highways."—Bill Morris, author of Motor City "Swift has added texture and nuance, as well as narrative economy, to a story containing volumes, and he makes for an ideal traveling companion." — New York Times Book Review "Travelers hitting the highways this summer might better appreciate the asphalt beneath their tires thanks to this engrossing history of the creation of the U.S. interstate system."— Los Angeles Times “Engaging, informative . . . The first thorough history of the expressway system.”— Washington Post "The book is a road geek’s treasure—and everyone who travels the highways ought to know these stories." — Kirkus "Readers interested in urban planning as well as engineering will find a well-told story about a defining American feature." — Publishers Weekly " EARL SWIFT is the author of three previous books, including Where They Lay , a 2003 PEN finalist. He lives in Virginia with his daughter Saylor. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1 It started with mud , and manure, and Carl Graham Fisher. Today, that name is virtually unknown outside of a couple of far-flung American cities, and it’s not well known in those; but a century ago, Fisher was a regular in the sports and business pages of newspapers from coast to coast and, for a spell before World War I, close to a household name. He was a man of big ideas and the energy to see them through, and one of his inspirations was ancestor to the great tangle of highways binding the continent. Trace today’s interstate highways back to their earliest incarnation, and there stands Fisher, pushing the idea while Dwight Eisenhower was still at West Point, a full forty years before he gained the White House. When Fisher was born in Greensburg, Indiana, in 1874, the automobile’s American debut was still two decades away. Overland travel was the province of the train. Look at any map of Indiana from the period — or any other state, for that matter — and you’ll see tangles of thick black lines converging on the major cities; smaller settlements are reduced to dots on those lines, indistinguishable from those marking their neighbors, the size and character of each less important than its status as a station stop. Most of the old maps don’t depict a single road. They were there, but hardly in the form we think of them. The routes out of most any town in America were "wholly unclassable, almost impassable, scarcely jackassable," as folks said then — especially when spring and fall rains transformed the simple dirt tracks into a heavy muck, more glue than earth. In Indiana, as elsewhere, people braved them to the train and back, or to roll their harvest from their farms to the nearest grain elevator. For any trip beyond that, they went by rail. Such was the world into which Carl Fisher arrived, the son of a hard-drinking country lawyer and his tough, determined wife. The couple separated when Carl was young; Ida Fisher moved her three boys forty miles to Indianapolis, where the boundlessly energetic Carl quit school at twelve and set out to make a fortune. He was bright-eyed, talkative, a natural salesman. And he was disciplined: at fifteen he landed work as a news "butcher," hawking newspapers, books, candy, and tobacco aboard intercity trains; at seventeen, he’d squirreled away $600, a goodly sum at the time, and decided to open his own business. Choosing a line of work came easily, because for a couple of years Fisher had been caught up in a national craze for bicycles. The streets of Indianapolis, like those of every major city in the country, were busy with "safeties," the forerunners of modern beach cruisers, and with older, far more dangerous "ordinaries," which had enormous front and tiny rear wheels, and saddles perched as high as five feet offthe ground. Fisher opened a shop to fix both. He advertised the business by spending a lot of time on an ordinary himself and developing a reputation as borderline crazy. He’d always been an athletic, daring kid, handy at walking tightropes, able to sprint backward faster than friends could do it face-on, and enthralled by speed, especially by the hell-for-leather, white-knuckle speed of an ordinary, which was essentially brakeless. On steep downhills, the best a rider could do was brace his feet on the handlebars, so that if he crashed, which seemed a good bet — the bike stopped cold, with calamitous results, if that big front wheel encountered an obstacle — he’d at least go flying right-side up. It didn’t much faze Fisher that he was half-blind with astigmatism and had so many wrecks that his friends dubbed him "Crip." Just climbing onto one of the machines gave him a thrill. Racing them was intoxicating. In short order he landed a spot on a traveling race team led by a speed demon named Barney Oldfield and toured county fairs throughout the Midwest. The shop thrived. By and by, Fisher decided to branch into sales. Impressed with Pope-Toledo bikes, he took the train to Toledo and asked their maker, Col. Albert A. Pope, to make him the brand’s Indianapolis distributor — and to help get him started by parting with a boxcar of bikes at cost. Pope agreed, which provided Fisher enough of a profit margin to give away fifty. He had a friend make a thousand toy balloons, then took out newspaper ads announcing that the balloons would be loosed over the city, fifty containing numbered tags that could be exchanged for a new bike. The stunt created a sensation. The sale of Popes spiked across the state. Fisher was just getting started. He built a bike so big he had to mount it from a second-floor window, then rode it through the city’s streets. Indianapolis ate it up. He announced he’d ride a bike across a tightrope strung between a pair of downtown high-rises and, against all reason, actually did it while a crowd watched, breathless, from twelve stories below. Now a minor celebrity, Fisher put out word that he’d throw a bike offthe roof of a downtown building and award a new machine to whoever dragged the wreckage to his shop. This time the police tried to stop him, planting sentries outside the building the morning of the stunt. They were no match for the budding showman; Fisher was already inside and at the appointed hour tossed the bike, then escaped down a back staircase. When the cops showed up at his shop, a telephone call came in. It was Fisher, with word that he was waiting at the precinct house. As sixth-grade dropouts go, he was doing well. But not well enough to suit him: aiming to have the grandest showroom in Indianapolis, he called on another leading bike maker in Columbus, Ohio. George C. Erland was so charmed by the brash young man that he bankrolled Fisher to the tune of $50,000, a fortune then, and sure enough, Fisher soon had the biggest store in town, with all brands for sale up front and a dozen repairmen working in the back. It became a gathering place for the city’s cycling fraternity — members of the local Zig-Zag Cycle Club, among whom Fisher had several close friends, and of a national organization called the League of American Wheelmen. And on any given day, the conversation came around to cycling’s most urgent need: roads on which to ride. A spin on even a safety bike was likely to be a jarring experience in the 1890s, when city streets were paved, assuming they were paved at all, with cobblestone, brick, or uneven granite block and snarled with carts, buggies, and horsemen. Outside the business districts, roads dwindled to little more than wagon ruts. In suburban Indianapolis, as out in the sticks, a sprinkling of rain could turn them to bogs; their mud lay deep and loose, could suck the boots offa farmer’s feet, prompted travelers to quit the established path for the open fields. Some swallowed horses to their flanks; the unfortunate buggy that ventured down such a muddy lane soon flailed past its axles in the ooze. Even on hard-packed roads, mud formed dark rooster tails behind surreys, spattered long skirts, caked shoes. American business was conducted in mud-soiled suits, as were law, medicine, and church services. And mixed with the mud was a liberal helping of manure, for city and country alike were dependent on the horse. The situation was grim enough in small towns, where the population might number a few hundred humans and a few dozen animals. It was far nastier in Fisher’s Indianapolis, which despite bicycles and electric streetcars was home to a horse for every 14 people, or Kansas City, which had a horse for every 7.4. Boston’s Beacon Hill, one observer recalled, had a "rich equine flavor." Crossing a street could be an unsavory affair. In New York City, by one estimate, horses left behind 2.5 million pounds of manure and sixty thousand gallons of urine every day . That amounts to roughly four hundred thousand tons of manure a year — enough to float three Nimitz -class nuclear aircraft carriers and a half-dozen navy destroyers. Forget the smell and mess; imagine the flies. Cyclists thus found their hobby not as pleasant as it could be, to say the least, and the League of American Wheelmen committed to doing something about it. A year after Fisher opened his store, the league launched a magazine, Good Roads , that became an influential mouthpiece for road improvement. Its articles were widely reprinted, which attracted members who didn’t even own bikes; at the group’s peak, Fisher and more than 102,000 others were on the rolls, and the Good Roads Movement was too big for politicians to ignore. Yes, the demand for roads was pedal-powered, and a national cause even before the first practical American car rolled out of a Chicopee, Massachusetts, shop in 1893. A few months ahead of the Duryea Motor Wagon’s debut, Congress authorized the secretary of agriculture to "make inquiry regarding public roads" and to investigate how they might be improved. So it was that in October 1893, agriculture secretary J. Sterling Morton created the Office of Road Inquiry and appointed to head it one Gen. Roy Stone, a Civil War veteran, civil engineer, and vociferous good roads booster from New York. His appointment was the sort of circular affair — a lobbyist pushing for government action that he winds up leading — that wouldn’t fly today but was business as usual in the nineteenth century. Stone considered it "settled" that Americans "have the worst roads in the civilized world," and that their condition was "a crushing tax on the whole people, a tax the more intolerable in that it yields no revenue." Spending nothing on bad roads cost more than spending money to make them better, he argued, in squandered productivity, spoiled crops, high food prices. A chorus joined in. Prominent magazine editor and opinion shaper Albert Shaw noted that bad roads "are so disastrously expensive that only a very rich country, like the United States, can afford them." The solut... Read more