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

by Earl Swift

  Darkness came with hundreds of men marooned on the flats. Cooking fuel couldn't reach them, so those lucky enough to get supper had to settle for cold beans and hard bread. Water was in such short supply that the convoy's commander posted guards around the tanker truck. So the night passed on the best long-distance road in the country.

  After that misery, the rest of the trip seemed a glide. The convoy pulled into San Francisco sixty-two days and 3,242 miles from Washington. Eisenhower's after-action report, submitted to his bosses several weeks later, understated the perils of the desert crossing. " In western Utah, on the Salt Lake Desert, the road becomes almost impassable to heavy vehicles," he wrote. " From Orr's Ranch, Utah, to Carson City, Nevada, the road is one succession of dust, ruts, pits, and holes. This stretch was not improved in any way, and consisted only of a track across the desert. At many points on the road, water is twenty miles distant, and parts of the road are ninety miles from the nearest railroad."

  Some of his colleagues came away with strong opinions about how to fix the situation. Army first lieutenant Elwell R. Jackson reported that he and his fellow officers " were thoroughly convinced that all transcontinental highways should be constructed and maintained by the Federal Government" and helpfully pointed out that a bill then before Congress " provides for just such an undertaking under a Federal Highway Commission." He " earnestly hoped," Jackson wrote, " that this measure may be favorably acted upon at an early date."

  Back in the capital, Thomas MacDonald was imbuing his new office with the old-fashioned formality that had long been his style. The grave, soft-spoken engineer was invariably " Mr. MacDonald" or " Chief," even to his closest friends—even, it was said, to his wife. He was more severe-looking, more unsmilingly intense than ever; photographs depict him glaring at the camera with an evident mix of discomfort and impatience, cadaver-stiff, fists clenched, his expression shouting: Take the damn picture.

  He did not make chitchat. He did not cajole or cheerlead. He often seemed lost in thought; it was best not to speak to him at such moments. In time, his people learned, it was best not to talk to him at all unless he spoke first. Hair thinning, waistline expanding, his suits increasingly snug around the belly, he looked older than his thirty-eight years, which only reinforced the impression that this was not a man with whom one joshed.

  But then, there was little cause for levity in the bureau's offices. In the first months of peace, road projects were hamstrung by a national dearth of railroad cars and a consequent shortage of sand, gravel, and broken stone; by an absence of qualified workers; by leaping prices. States were eager to build and repair roads, but little work was under way.

  So once again, a federal highway system was back in vogue, this time in the form of the bill to which the young army lieutenant referred—a bill introduced to much fanfare by Sen. Charles E. Townsend, a Michigan Republican and chairman of the Senate's Committee on Post Offices and Post Roads. The Townsend bill called for at least two highways through each state, linking to a web of such roads stretching the length and breadth of the country. A five-member commission appointed by the president would oversee the system and take over the federal government's other road-building duties. The Bureau of Public Roads would cease to exist.

  Good riddance to it. As Townsend would explain, " Under the state aid system, as we have it now, there is very little system," just " little patches of roads here and there all over a state, beginning nowhere, leading nowhere, having no system in view." Stick with the current setup, and it " would take a hundred years to get these roads into a system which began and ended somewhere."

  Support for the senator's measure came fast and loud—from the automotive press, automakers, and, not least, from rank-and-file autoists. The American people were impatient for modern highways, and every time they got behind the wheel, they were convinced anew that the existing arrangement had failed to provide them. Never mind that just three years had passed since most states took up scientific road building; never mind that the war had diverted money and material from the industry. They wanted to drive, and to do it at once. If a commission could deliver decent roads, bring it on; if a system of national highways was the fastest solution, by all means, build it.

  The Bureau of Public Roads offered little reason to think otherwise. Its district engineers spent far too much time in the office getting far too little done, and their underlings weren't pictures of industry, either.J.M. Goodell, a former Engineering News-Record editor now working as a bureau consulting engineer, warned MacDonald that the outfit was " notoriously one of the most slack" in government, full of " dry rot and mild faking," of " old hands who have not done a day's work a week these many years."

  But the new boss was up for a fight. Twenty years before, MacDonald had stepped off a train in Seneca, Nebraska, to find that his grandfather's cattle ranch was fourteen miles away. A man in a nearby store told him he could use the gray pony outside for 50 cents, provided he could catch it. So the teenager had walked into the pasture, rope in hand, and backed the pony into a corner. It stood calmly as he stroked its neck. The instant he tried to slip the rope over its head, it tore off.

  MacDonald cornered it again. The pony ducked the rope, fleeing side by side with a bay mare that shared its enclosure. MacDonald cornered the pair again. Once more, both horses bolted. Thirty-one times, as MacDonald would recount it, the sequence played out until, exasperated, he cornered both horses and tied their tails together, then showed them the rope. They took off, tripped on each other's legs, hit the ground. MacDonald threw the rope around the pony's neck and rode to work.

  His first memo to bureau staff read like that of a man confident about the days ahead. " This is an all-American job," he wrote. " Through enthusiastic endeavor we will try to justify the confidence that has been reposed in us by Congress.

  " There is no work more worthwhile. I have yet to know any man who has devoted a considerable period of his life to the building of roads who is not conscious of having accomplished results whose returns to the public in service can scarcely be measured."

  MacDonald's differences with the Townsend bill went beyond his own job security. He was positive that the federal government could not afford to build a system of long-distance highways and, from the same tight treasury, provide for state roads that would serve local populations. The latter were more important, on a daily basis: roads were, first and foremost, economic tools, as he told AASHO in December 1919, the first of the group's meetings that he attended as the bureau's boss. Those that filled no economic need were unnecessary, while those " laid out along sane and sound economic lines," he said, would " eventually produce systems of highways suited to the special needs of each locality, and yet be entirely adequate to meet" the demands of long-distance travelers.

  The trick to fostering such networks was taking the same " basic and fundamental" step he'd advocated since early in his Iowa tenure: classification. Primary routes would be those that eventually joined to form what he'd called the " great trans-state roads" back then; secondary would link farms to markets, a county's small towns to one another, and other strictly local destinations.

  Most states' primary highways would account for " in the neighborhood of five to seven percent of their total mileage," he estimated—a refinement of his thinking in 1912. " The step which seems necessary now is a definite plan of cooperation between the states and the federal government, which will insure that the primary systems of each state are connected up with the primary systems of the adjoining states."

  How he arrived at the " five to seven percent" figure has never been fully explained. Competing theories hold that it originated with a pair of U.S. senators trying to work out what percentage would guarantee their western states a major highway in each direction, or with MacDonald's own experience in Iowa.

  Other speeches followed, dozens of them; with both Townsend and Federal Aid getting a lot of attention from the press, MacDonald was much in demand. Traffic's overwhelmingly loc
al nature, he told the pro-Townsend U.S. Chamber of Commerce, had been confirmed " by scientific study of the character, origin and destination of highway travel." The small percentage engaged in the long haul certainly had to be accommodated, " but it is not necessary to build an especially chosen national system to reach this desired end."

  The importance of his topic usually trumped the failings of his delivery, and a good thing. As he had in Iowa, he tended to read his carefully typed speeches in a flat-line drone, lifting his eyes from the script only to insert the odd parenthetical remark that often spun into a long and complicated tangent; sometimes, like a comet returning on its eccentric orbit, he found his way back to the main narrative, but with painful regularity he did not and skidded into an oratory dead end. Those moments of tension were public service, really, because staying awake in the stuffy, smoky banquet rooms of the day must have been hell.

  He spent hours talking on the phone, meeting congressmen, and dictating letters aimed at creating consensus among state commissioners. When he broke for lunch, it was usually at the Cosmos Club, an exclusive, all-male fraternity of political and industry leaders on Lafayette Square, where he continued his quiet, persistent lobbying amid cigar smoke and wood paneling.

  The matching state money required by Federal Aid doubled every dollar that Washington spent on roads, he stressed. The answer wasn't to cut the states out of the national highway scheme, but to better focus the combined spending.

  After two long and anxious years, his campaign paid off.

  Had the Townsend bill come to a vote in 1919, at the postwar highway program's darkest moment, it almost surely would have passed. But Townsend failed to get his bill out of the headlines and onto the Senate floor. He fiddled with it continuously, held a seemingly endless parade of hearings on each new version, and in the meantime, the country's highway program made a U-turn. The wartime paralysis, the postwar supply problems, all passed; by 1921, a million men labored on the nation's streets and roads. " Picture a pile of gravel and stone twice as high as the Washington monument and of equal length and breadth, and you will have a fairly accurate notion of the quantity of material required for the Federal aid roads under construction and completed" that year, MacDonald wrote in an uncharacteristically vivid magazine essay. " To haul that material from the quarry or pit to the road requires a million freight cars. Now place alongside of your stone pile another pile four hundred feet high and a little more than four hundred feet in width and breadth and you will have some idea of the amount of Portland cement required for the same roads."

  With the turnaround, MacDonald could claim that Washington had appropriated more in five years of Federal Aid than it spent on the Panama Canal, the standard for monumental work—and the outlay in Panama had been spread over a full decade. The state-federal partnership looked good again, and it got another boost when AASHO's executive committee drafted a highway bill of its own in 1921. It was pure MacDonald: Each state was to designate a system of roads on which all Federal Aid would be spent, and which did not exceed 7 percent of its total highway mileage. The state was to classify its Federal Aid highways as primary or secondary, the former being roads of an interstate nature, the latter connecting county seats—and the wording was such that the bulk of each state's federally subsidized system would comprise these strictly local roads.

  The House approved the AASHO bill and delivered it to the Senate, where the nature of highway building, the question of top-down versus bottom-up planning, and Thomas MacDonald's fate all at last came to a decisive vote. The Senate wasted little time. On August 19, 1921, it backed the Chief. As Engineering News-Record observed, it was " an overwhelming vote of confidence for the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads."

  The Federal Highway Act of 1921, signed into law that November 9, was the foundation for modern highway building in the United States; it remains the single most important piece of legislation in the creation of a national network—far more so than the later interstate highway bill, which would not have been possible, or necessary, without it. Until its passage, America had no grand plan for its roads, and the federal government no legal interest in what the act termed " an adequate and connected system of highways, interstate in character." It brought into being what until then was a fantasy: an improved route into every county seat in the country and every town of decent size, connected to other improved roads, and they to others, enabling a motorist virtually anywhere in the United States to reach any other place of even minor importance without getting mud on his fenders.

  The act preserved the best parts of its 1916 predecessor. The states remained the source of highway plans, and the federal government the enforcer of design, construction, and maintenance standards. It called on the states to choose the " seven- percent" highways but gave the secretary of agriculture final approval of those choices, as well as the type of construction to be used. Once the individual states and feds agreed on the routes, and no later than November 1923, the Department of Agriculture would publish a map of the whole network, and on those roads and only those roads would the federal government's money be spent. America would at last have a highway system.

  This wasn't necessarily recognized as momentous at the time. The New York Times devoted five lines of type, deep inside the paper, to the House's approval of the conference bill. President Warren G. Harding's signature earned a paragraph at the bottom of page 21. MacDonald, however, saw the new law for what it was. " Those who are a part of these organizations have the good fortune to be engaged in their chosen field when the greatest development that can ever come is taking place," he told AASHO members at their annual meeting in Omaha a few weeks later. " This body of individuals and their associates will determine the efficiency of the highway systems of the future."

  Choosing the participating roads was the most serious responsibility they would ever have, he told the state engineers. " Here is an opportunity to do a big, basic work, such as comes to few in the course of a lifetime," he said. " The individual who fails to vision the importance of the task has no moral right to hold a position of authority in its performance."

  5

  NOW CAME THE TASK of choosing the Federal Aid highways and ensuring that all of the far-flung pieces connected into a coherent system. The first step of the process was already completed; while the tussle was still on over the Townsend bill, MacDonald had met with the army so that he could incorporate its needs into any future bureau decisions about which roads got top federal priority.

  From the start, he and the generals had agreed on a few guiding principles, the foremost being that civilian roads and military should, with rare exception, be one and the same; neither favored a segregated highway network for troops. Nor did they see much value in a " transcontinental road which merely crosses the continent," as the army put it; better were " roads connecting all our important depots, mobilization and industrial centers, which, as thus connected, will give us a transcontinental route."

  Once they'd dispensed with these basics, MacDonald had ordered the preparation of detailed state highway maps on which military leaders could identify the routes they considered most vital to their needs. The army had used them to produce what became known as the " Pershing Map," which identified better than seventy-five thousand miles of road as strategically important, emphasizing coastal and border defense and links to major munitions plants. It had some curious omissions. The Deep South was largely ignored and southern Florida left a blank; in the army's eyes, it was too swampy for any foreigners to invade.

  But if nothing else, the process had produced those forty-eight state maps, which the bureau now distributed to the various highway departments so that they could ink in their candidates for primary and secondary Federal Aid highways. MacDonald wasn't content to wait on the states; he figured that the bureau ought to have its own model for what a 7 percent system should look like, so that it could better judge the states' selections and, one hoped, encourage a stronger, more rational grid. A small commi
ttee led by engineer Edwin W. James was assigned the task of mapping the model.

  James was to be one of a handful of associates on whom the Chief would heavily rely over the next three decades. Born in Ossining, New York, educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he'd joined the bureau in 1910, after engineering stints in the Philippines and with the Army Corps of Engineers. MacDonald had come to value his clear head, engineering skill, and, not least, his diplomacy. It was James whom the Chief had dispatched to Little Rock early in 1921 to sort out a messy highway financing scandal there, and whose report had prompted the bureau to briefly suspend Federal Aid to Arkansas. It was James whom the chief had deployed later in the year, again to Arkansas, to account for more than $2 million in missing road-building equipment that had been donated to the state as part of a postwar military giveaway; when James asked the state highway boss where the gear was, the man had taken a sparkplug and a wheel lock from his desk drawer and told him that was it—which had led to Arkansas' suspension from that program.

  Now James and two other bureau engineers rounded up population figures for every county in the forty-eight states, along with four key economic indicators from the census for each—agricultural production, manufacturing output, mineral yields, income from forest products. They assigned a value of 100 to each state's total population, and a number to each county based on its percentage of the statewide whole. They repeated the process for each of the economic statistics. The result was a quick-and-dirty gauge of county wealth and importance.