by Earl Swift
It marked the beginning of a federal-state partnership in highway work, still in place today, that was the second vital ingredient of the modern highway network.
Shortly after the Federal Aid Road Act became law, Logan Waller Page called a meeting of state highway officials to craft regulations governing the new partnership's everyday business. Thirty-five states sent representatives, Carl Fisher among them. They debated whether there should be a minimum width for Federal Aid roads (no, seemed to be the majority view), whether right-of-way purchases should be included in a road's shared cost ( " I think it better for the work if the government does not spend any money in the purchase of property to which the government gets no title whatever," Page argued), and the pros and cons of various paving types.
Among the most interesting exchanges was one that came late in the meeting, when Arthur Crownover, chairman of the Tennessee Highway Department, took the floor. " I would like to make a motion," he said, " that the money be expended on interstate highways as far as possible, instead of local roads."
Page replied that the act gave the feds no authority to dictate which roads might be improved. Crownover replied that Tennessee wanted long-distance highways. " If we build roads along that line," he said, " and the people in Alabama, or the people in Kentucky . . . did not take to it, or the people in West Virginia, a great deal of our labor would be in vain.
" We ought to have cooperation between states, and these national highways that we have ought to be looked to."
The discussion ended there, but Crownover had struck on a shortcoming of the 1916 law: though it united federal and state governments in a cooperative effort, it provided them with no sharp goal beyond a vague aim to better the nation's roads. States were free to scatter improvements within their borders, without having those better roads connect to others in neighboring states, or in the same state, or even to other stretches of the same highway. The act did not build a system.
For that, the motoring public would still rely on the anarchic jumble of auto trails—each of which was almost wholly dependent on state engineers who might, depending on local needs, improve one stretch of the trail's mileage but not another. Across a single state, let alone the continent, none boasted a consistently smooth ride. Even the Lincoln remained a necklace of dirt, gravel, and mud; pavement covered just seven miles of its more than nine hundred in Nevada and Wyoming. And while its people might gush about the ease and fun of a long-distance drive, the association's engineer, F. H. Trego, recommended that motorists pack an ax, shovel, and four-foot hardwood plank, fifty feet of heavy rope and sixteen of cable, an extra engine valve, two jacks, two spares, three gallons of oil, and a pile of cooking and camping gear—and " possibly a small pistol of some sort."
A State Department survey judged U.S. road conditions to be " far worse than any other major nation except Russia and China." This, as America became more motorized by the hour: some 3.37 million automobiles were in use in 1916, double the number of two years before. Within a year, there would be a car on the road for every fifth family. In three years, the number of motor vehicles would double yet again. A dozen years before, France had been the world's leading automotive producer and user. Now, close to eight in ten of the world's cars operated in the United States.
State highway officials were eager to get busy. By January 1917, legislators in Indiana, South Carolina, and Texas introduced bills to establish highway departments, and those in at least a dozen others bolstered or revamped their existing departments to meet the law's demands. New departments hired engineers and scrambled to acquire the expertise they needed to propose, design, and build the projects they would bring to the feds.
Page was confident they would find the effort worthwhile, as " the tendency of the Act will be to greatly strengthen and amplify the policy of state participation in road work." It was a slow and often trying process, though, made more so by Page himself. He and his people cast a picky eye on state paperwork, demanded numerous revisions, were thorough to the point of meddling—behaved, in short, more as supervisors than equal partners.
The two sides might have smoothed over these snags in time, but as it happened, that was one thing they lacked. In April 1917, when only a handful of projects were ready for contracts, the United States entered World War I, and practically overnight, road construction became a low federal priority except on the odd section of highway deemed vital to national defense. Before long, the Wilson administration suspended any rail shipments of road-building materials. Every road-related company and agency saw its employees called up for service; Page lost 35 percent of his staff. Construction and maintenance stopped cold.
The roads of the day wouldn't have fared well without regular care under any circumstances, but added to the growing millions of automobiles using them were, for the first time, heavy motor trucks, heretofore relegated to service on city streets of cobblestone, brick, and concrete, the only surfaces that could hold up under their weight and skinny, solid-rubber tires.
Their shift to the open road was an army idea. In December 1917, a military convoy of thirty Packard trucks set out from Detroit for the piers in Baltimore, and ultimately the Western Front, in what the respected journal Engineering News-Record called a " daring adventure." Loaded with spare parts, the trucks bogged down on muddy roads, met heavy snow in the Alleghenies, and took three weeks to cover the 540-odd miles—but all but one of them made it, and over the next several months, thirty thousand trucks followed, a feat inconceivable before the war began and the bellwether of a new era in freight hauling.
But as Carl Fisher had learned in the opening races at Indy a decade before, all but bona fide pavement was unequal to the demands of motor traffic; macadam didn't stand a chance against the weight of the trucks, their four-wheel-drive transmissions, and tires that concentrated tremendous weight on tiny footprints. State highway bosses found themselves the caretakers of shredded roads that they lacked the manpower and material to repair.
At the war's end, some 572 Federal Aid projects had been approved for construction, but only 5 had been finished. More than two years of federal-state partnership had netted 17.6 miles of road. Page did his best to put things in a positive light, arguing that completed mileage wasn't nearly so important as the progress states had made in setting up their departments. Disenchanted state officials were having none of it. They needed relief. They needed trunk highways that could withstand the battering effects of ever-heavier traffic. They wanted to streamline the process of getting them.
A federal highway network, built by a federal highway commission, seemed the answer. A matter thought settled—the old argument over whether to build a national system of highways or a system of national highways—returned to the fore.
A month after the Armistice, a showdown over the question loomed in Chicago, at a five-day joint congress of AASHO and an alliance of state engineers, automakers, and building suppliers called the Highway Industries Association. Page arrived with proposals that promised to snip away a lot of the red tape the states endured in their dealings with the feds, and promised a huge boost in federal roads spending in the coming four years.
It wasn't enough to quell agitation for federal highways, however. Put Washington in charge of the interstate highways, have a presidential commission decide where they should go and oversee their construction, and the country would be done with all the parochial dithering the states introduced to the process—so said Coleman and other national roads proponents. A federal commission would make highway routing decisions based on America's needs, not the individual wants of forty-eight feuding fiefdoms. There would be no question about a highway in one state connecting to another; it would be decreed. If the host states didn't like it, too bad. As for accountability, it would rest with the handful of people on the commission. Credit and blame would be easily assigned. The American people would know the names and faces of those to whom they'd entrusted their tax dollars and expectations for a great cross-country ro
ad system.
Page and like-minded state highway officials countered that for all their flaws, state-based highways benefited everyone who used them, locals as well as long-distance travelers. If you routed a highway so that it best answered local needs, and connected it to other highways that did the same, and they to others, you'd end up with a cross-state highway; and if you linked that highway to those developed in the same way in adjoining states, why, you'd soon enough have a highway across the entire country—and it wouldn't be an arbitrary slash of pavement, serving only " through" traffic, but a road woven into the communities through which it passed.
Besides, the Federal Aid advocates believed national highways would actually take longer to build. States would no longer match every federal dollar, meaning the feds would have to double their spending to achieve the same mileage of improved road—which nobody believed would happen—or double the time it took to do the job.
The debate was settled without Page. On the first of the congress's five days, the forty-eight-year-old bureau chief fell ill at dinner, retired to his room, and was found dead there later that night. AASHO gathered the next morning with the membership in shock and the Federal Aid side now lacking its chief advocate. Into the void stepped that same glowering fellow from Iowa, Thomas MacDonald, and when a vote came on the creation of a national highway commission, it was a deadlock, 20 to 20. A recount came out the same way. A single additional vote for a national highway commission, and American roads might have developed along a profoundly different, and presumably far less successful, course.
Having twice arrived at a stalemate, the membership decided to drop the matter. Though it later approved a resolution calling for " a Federal body or officer with adequate power or funds to administer all Federal and Federal-aid highway laws," a critical passage added that the states remained the initiators, builders, and owners of the roads; any " federal highway system" the resolution advocated was simply another label for the state roads granted Federal Aid.
There now loomed the question of who should succeed Logan Waller Page. In the weeks following the Chicago convention, David F. Houston, the secretary of agriculture, narrowed the search to two state engineers. One earned $10,000 a year, which Houston couldn't match. The other was the quiet, all-business engineer from Iowa, MacDonald.
No highway man enjoyed a better reputation. In nearly fifteen years on the job, he'd painstakingly built a web of intercounty roads, gravel-topped in places and well engineered throughout, with concrete bridges and culverts, drained surfaces, shiftless beds, and few sharp curves or steep grades. " The hills are being cut off and dumped into the valleys," the Lincoln Highway's Henry Joy said of the work. " Oftentimes the cuts are thirty feet deep."
He'd accomplished this with next to nothing. For most of his tenure in Iowa, the highway commission's entire staff had consisted of three full-time and two part-time employees, and as late as 1913, the state roads budget was just $10,000. Next door, in Illinois, it was ten times as much, and in Minnesota, commissioners had $150,000 for engineering alone.
He'd survived Iowa's lunatic politicians, too. The legislature had balked at the fifty-fifty spending imposed by Federal Aid's passage in 1916—or, rather, at raising the state's share; bond issues for roads had become central to Iowa elections that year, especially the race for governor. In a state that was home to an automobile for every seven residents, among the highest ownership rates in the country, it was the " mud roads" candidate, Republican lieutenant governor William L. Harding, who prevailed.
Harding is still remembered nearly a century later for all the wrong reasons—most infamously, his wartime edict outlawing the public use of any language but English, which the governor persistently referred to as " American." The so-called Babel Proclamation was interpreted to include any conversation involving two or more people, even on the phone, and if he'd been able to take it further, Harding might have. He insisted, for the record, that God didn't hear prayers uttered in foreign tongues. At his instigation the General Assembly had taken up a vote on whether to junk the highway commission and disband its entire roads effort. It came to a 54-to-54 vote five times before the matter was dropped.
If MacDonald could survive that, he might do all right in Washington. The offer came just after the new year, when Houston called MacDonald to D.C. " and took up with me the proposition of Mr. Page's successor," MacDonald recalled later. " When he asked me if I would consider such an appointment, I was entirely unprepared, as I had never considered myself fitted for this place."
MacDonald initially turned Houston down, citing the position's salary—it amounted to a pay cut. The secretary took more than two months doing it, but he met the engineer's asking price. " Tender you the position," he wired MacDonald, " and hope that you can come in a very short time."
MacDonald accepted the job on March 20, 1919. A third ingredient of America's highway future fell into place.
3
THOMAS HARRIS MACDONALD earned his place in history less as a visionary than as a relentless refiner of the existing. He was an engineer's engineer, a man gifted at recognizing a problem and developing a methodical plan for fixing it. He did nothing " on spec," took no gambles; his decisions were founded on careful research, overlaid arguments, numbers—and accompanied by charts, measurements, cost figures, traffic counts. All of which made him the perfect man for the nation's top roads job in 1919, because the American highway system was a chaos of overlapping auto trails, disconnected state highways, dead ends, and doglegs, and MacDonald was order personified.
He didn't much discuss his past, but it's known that he was born in a log cabin in Twin Lakes, Colorado, thirty miles southwest of Leadville, in July 1881. That his father, a Canadian carpenter by the name of John MacDonald Jr., had crossed the border with his father and brothers ten years before to rebuild Chicago after the great fire, and had moved on to a new town, Montezuma, springing from the Iowa prairie. That John had met Sarah Elizabeth Harris, whose family owned Montezuma's dominant grain and lumber business. That the couple had married and ventured to Colorado during the silver rush of the 1870s, and that young Thomas was three when they returned to Montezuma to stay.
He'd grown up in the embrace of a slew of relatives, in a family enterprise that included grain elevators, offices, ranches, warehouses, and lumberyards, in a bustling little county seat of 1,300. MacDonald had been a typical Iowa teenager of the 1890s, in some respects. He was one of eleven in his class at the town's four-room high school, which had electric lights but outdoor plumbing. He enjoyed debate and was thought good at it. He earned pocket money by driving a grocery wagon, hunted the woods outside town for hickory nuts, endured long Presbyterian sermons and Sunday afternoons on which the Scriptures forbade fun.
But from early on, MacDonald showed himself an odd kid, too —distant, unnaturally formal, compelled to keep his emotions in check. His typical expression was tight, even grim; family photographs depict him erect and glowering, his neck braced by a high paper collar and bow tie. By his teens, he had four younger siblings. He insisted that they address him as " sir."
Montezuma was a self-contained place, with its own opera house, two newspapers, two hotels. It had to be: mud was a complaint all over America; in Iowa, where it took the form of a black paste called " gumbo," it was paralyzing. For weeks, sometimes months at a time, it marooned the farming families outside town and every spring and fall forced MacDonald's father to all but suspend his business.
Iowans had come to view gumbo as inevitable, as much a part of the calendar as full moons, and a small price to pay for a greater gift: the goo that snared their wagons also grew the finest crops in the world. If MacDonald felt differently, he kept it to himself. In 1899, when it was time to choose a college, he let his mother and grandfather talk him into the Iowa State Normal School in Cedar Falls.
The campus, today's University of Northern Iowa, turned out teachers. MacDonald was miserable there, both in and out of class, and decided to dec
amp for the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts in Ames, where the instruction promised to better square with his exactitude, his comfort in mathematical certainty. He had months to kill before the new school year started. He spent them in Nebraska, where he punched cattle on his grandfather Harris's ranch in the Sand Hills.
Examine just about any photograph ever taken of MacDonald, and it's hard to picture him as a cowboy. At nineteen, he stood five foot seven. He wore his dark hair short, parted down the middle and shellacked to his skull, which accentuated his very large and slightly pointed ears. His pale blue eyes, drilled deep under beetle brows, were almost comical in their intensity. He was sure to have looked ridiculous in a Stetson.
It turned out, though, that he was at home on the range. He reveled in riding fence and branding cattle, the austere beauty of the country, and, not least, his solitude in it—he passed his nights in a sod house with a single book, Booth Tarkington's Monsieur Beaucaire, on which he later claimed to be the world's foremost expert. He found that the ranch's quiet, its absence of idle talk, of chitchat, of distraction, enabled him to think, to recharge.
He arrived at Iowa State in the fall of 1900 ready to work, and demonstrated as much with a heavy load of math, library and military science, drawing, and lettering. He did well, excelled in a couple of summer internships, continued to impress when, in his junior year, the curriculum veered to railroad engineering and mechanics. And if it didn't happen sooner, it was probably at this point that he drew the notice of the college's senior engineering professor.
Still in his thirties, Anson Marston already enjoyed a formidable reputation as a pioneer designer of water, sewage, and flood-control systems and was forming some of the foundational theories of culvert and underground pipe design. Most important, in terms of his influence on young MacDonald, the professor was a classic product of the Progressive Era. He viewed technical expertise as the keystone to addressing the world's problems, experimentation and fact gathering as vital to social progress; not only did they offer apolitical solutions to complex ills, but they encouraged new questions and untried answers.