by Vince Beiser
Motor vehicles, however, could not get far without more, and stronger, roads. A car without pavement is like a pair of skis without snow. You can get somewhere using it, but not quickly or easily. The ascent and ultimate dominance of the auto required the deployment of vast legions of sand. Sand and gravel in the form of pavement is the crucial ingredient that made motor vehicles useful, the infrastructure that turned them from a specialized amusement for rich eccentrics into an all-purpose conveyance for everyone.
As the automobile grew in popularity, national organizations sprang up to lobby for “good roads.” The first concrete highway, a 24-mile-long, 9-foot-wide stretch, was laid down near Pine Bluff, Arkansas, in 1913. By the following year, the country had some 2,348 miles of concrete roadways.25
Cars and paved roads fueled each other’s growth, symbiotically supporting each other. The more cars people bought, the more paved roads they wanted. The more paved roads that were built, the more people wanted cars. The cycle has continued up to the present day. By now, in many places roads are pretty much the only way to get around, and people have no choice but to use cars.
As late as 1919, though, as Eisenhower learned on his motorized odyssey, you still couldn’t count on finding a paved road to take you from state to state, let alone across the country.
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It was around the time of Eisenhower’s convoy adventure that Carl Graham Fisher decided to take matters into his own hands. Fisher was a man who loved speed, and was thrilled with the fast-moving new machines on wheels that came into vogue at the turn of the twentieth century—first bicycles, then cars. Fisher did as much as anyone in America to popularize these new inventions, and make it possible for them to reach their full potential, by becoming one of America’s most important early road builders. He sounded a call to arms that mobilized millions of tons of sand into becoming some of the nation’s first highways for his beloved automobiles.
Born in Indiana in 1874, Fisher was the Richard Branson of his day—part forward-looking entrepreneur, part showman-salesman, a high-living capitalist with a daredevil streak and an intuitive knack for making his projects look glamorous. He was fabulously rich and famous in his time, though barely anyone remembers him today.
Fisher dropped out of school at age twelve to put his talents to what he considered better use: making money. By fifteen he was selling newspapers and tobacco on trains. He’d been a daredevil since he was a kid, fond of walking tightropes and sprinting backward at full tilt. The wind-in-your-face, pulse-pounding speed of bicycling—a sport surging in popularity at the time—intoxicated him. Within a couple of years he had saved up enough to open his own business in Indianapolis: a bicycle repair shop.
Fisher made himself into his own best advertisement, grabbing public attention with one crazy stunt after another. “He built a bike so big he had to mount it from a second-floor window, then rode it through the city’s streets,” writes Earl Swift in his history of US highways, The Big Roads. “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 off the 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.”26
Fisher was having a ball, and making a bundle, but like other bikers he was frustrated by the state of the roads. Even in cities, they were often paved with cobbles or brick, surfaces that would set a cyclist’s teeth rattling. Bicycling was exploding at the turn of the century, and riders formed a potent lobby. Fisher joined the League of American Wheelmen, one of several organizations pushing for good roads. His interest grew sharper as he started playing around with even newer riding machines. First it was motorcycles, and then, inevitably, automobiles.
Once he’d bought his own three-wheeled, 2.5-horsepower car, Fisher knew these machines were going to be big. In 1900, he shut down his bike shop and replaced it with the Fisher Automobile Company, one of America’s first car dealerships.27
Fisher and a couple of pals from his bike racing days promoted the machines with appearances at county fairs, where he won bet after bet that his horseless carriage could outrun the fastest horse the locals could find. His dealership did well, but his big break came when he got the chance to invest in a company making the first practical auto headlights. Today it’s known as Prestolite, a multinational manufacturer of auto components.
Fisher used his headlight profits to pursue a couple of pet projects. One was building a speedway outside his hometown to host a giant race he organized—the Indianapolis 500. Another, less sexy but more important, was a campaign to build a 3,400-mile coast-to-coast highway from New York’s Times Square to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.28
The project, which he grandly titled the Lincoln Highway, was of course too big for one man to take on, no matter how wealthy. Leveraging his newfound prestige and connections, Fisher got backing from politicians including President Woodrow Wilson, celebrities like Thomas Edison, and the heads of major car, tire, and cement companies. In 1913, Fisher himself led a thirty-four-day convoy from Indianapolis to Los Angeles to scout possible routes and drum up publicity. The first piece of the concrete road was built the next year,29 in northern Illinois.
Though the Lincoln never made it all the way between the coasts, it came close, building new stretches of road and incorporating and improving on existing ones. By the 1920s the Lincoln had become “the nation’s premier highway,” according to the Federal Highway Administration’s official history. It did a lot to convince federal and local governments, and the public, that a transcontinental road was not only possible but desirable.
The Lincoln wasn’t Fisher’s last foray into road building, however. Just a few years after that highway launched, Fisher built another one. This road stretched from Chicago all the way to another American institution Fisher built from scratch. It was a new resort town called Miami Beach, and it, too, was literally made from sand. We’ll meet up again with him there later.
Spurred in part by Fisher’s project, the federal government threw its weight into road building. In 1916 it created the Bureau of Public Roads, endowed with $75 million to hand out to states to help build intercity highways.30 In a stirring speech to a gathering of regional highway builders in 1918, Interior Secretary Franklin Lane compared their efforts to those of Napoleon and Julius Caesar, telling them that they were “engaged in a very farsighted, important bit of statesmanship, work that does not have its only concern as to the farmer of this country or the helping of freight movement during this winter alone, but may have consequences that will extend throughout the centuries.”31
One of the central difficulties in building those first highways was getting the armies of sand to where they were needed. Each mile of paved road required around 2,000 tons of sand and 3,000 tons of gravel.32 Hauling all that aggregate out to the rural areas where most of the new highways were being built was no small feat; after all, at the time there were hardly any trucks, and no existing roads on which to transport the aggregate from the mines to the new roadbeds. Builders had to rely on horses and wagons, or build special rail lines to bring trains to the roadbeds. Locomotives would haul in carloads of rock, sand, and cement to be mixed on-site.33
Still, with federal money priming the pump, the project moved forward rapidly. The nation’s surfaced road mileage nearly doubled from 1914 to 1926, from 257,291 miles to 521,915 miles.34 Yet the road builders were barely keeping up with the need. The number of auto
mobiles by then had reached nearly 20 million. Even the Depression barely slowed down the automobile. “By 1939, automobile driving had long since passed from an amusing activity for the enjoyment of the indolent and wealthy to become an essential part of American life. Even the Joads in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath drove to California in their own truck,” writes Tom Lewis in another history of American roads, Divided Highways.35
Roads became a major industry unto themselves. Hundreds of thousands of men worked building them (including chain-ganged prisoners forced to break rocks for roads).36 More jobs were created in the gas stations, repair shops, restaurants, hotels, and motels that grew up alongside the new highways. Hundreds of other businesses grew fat supplying the raw materials to the road makers—cement, asphalt, gravel, and of course, sand.
You may recognize the name of Henry J. Kaiser, or at least his last name, in those of the gargantuan enterprises he founded—Kaiser Steel, Kaiser Aluminum, the Kaiser Permanente health system, and the Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser was one of the twentieth century’s most powerful industrial moguls, but he started out literally at ground level, as a supplier of sand and gravel to the road-paving trade.
Born to working-class German immigrants in New York in 1882, Kaiser quit school at thirteen and headed west to seek his fortune. He wound up in Washington State working for a gravel and cement dealer. One of his earliest big projects was building a new sand and gravel mine. Never short on confidence, he struck out on his own, taking over a failed road-building business and reviving it, landing contracts to construct streets in Vancouver and other Canadian cities. But he soon began looking farther south. When the new Bureau of Public Roads began doling out millions for highway building in 1916, Kaiser saw the vast potential of booming California.37 He relocated to Oakland, and in 1923 scored a contract to build a road through the nearby Livermore Valley. The valley turned out to be rich in easily accessed gravel and sand, so Kaiser simply bought up tracts of farmland, stripped off the topsoil, and mined the aggregate. There was enough to not only build his road but also a business. Thus was born Kaiser Sand and Gravel, supplier to the local construction industry38 and a foundation block of Kaiser’s empire.
During this time, Kaiser also forged an alliance with an inventor named Robert LeTourneau,39 who developed some of the earliest heavy road-building equipment—giant mobile machines that could move tons of dirt and sand far faster than any work gang with a pack of mules. Those machines helped Kaiser become a major builder and materials supplier in the West. In the late 1930s, he won the job of providing the 11 million tons of sand and gravel needed to build California’s Shasta Dam. Kaiser figured it would be simple, since he already owned a sizable aggregate mine near the dam site north of Redding; all he had to do was load it up on trains and pay for the transport. But the local railroad quoted a price Kaiser thought too high. So he came up with an audacious work-around. He built a conveyor belt nearly ten miles long, the longest the world had ever seen,40 to carry a thousand tons of sand and rock per hour up and down rugged hills and across several creeks to the dam site. Later, Kaiser parlayed his expertise with aggregate into a prize gig as one of the main contractors building the Hoover Dam.
Meanwhile, in Europe, while Germany’s politicians—including an ascendant Adolf Hitler—were horrifying the world, their engineers were winning applause for the nation’s new autobahn, the first superhighway. The autobahns premiered some of the key features that still define modern freeways. They were one-way roads at least two lanes wide, kept apart from their twins coming the other way by a wide median. Their curves were banked to allow higher speeds. They were separated from regular roads and accessible only from limited on- and off-ramps. And they were surfaced with solid concrete. They were the smoothest, fastest roads ever built.
Americans soon started copying the style, building freeways like the Pennsylvania Turnpike and Los Angeles’s Arroyo Seco Parkway. The Los Angeles Times ran a front-page story41 about the 1940 opening of that “impressive boulevard,” breathlessly noting that the Rose Queen had untied the red silk ribbon to officially open the six “glass-smooth miles” of “six-lane highways, important to traffic, history and national defense.” California’s governor Culbert Olson declared that it would whisk motorists from the heart of Los Angeles to central Pasadena in as little as seven minutes “in easy, nerve-free comfort and safety.” Nearly eighty years later, the parkway still carries people from downtown LA to downtown Pasadena. The trip takes a whole lot more than seven minutes, though, and not one of them is glass-smooth or nerve-free.
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Among those deeply impressed by the German autobahns was Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose career had come a long way since that cross-country convoy. He had risen to become commander of the Allied forces in World War II, an exalted perch from which he saw how quickly German forces could get around on their well-designed highways, and how much more resilient the road network was compared to rail lines. Trucks can drive around bomb craters, after all, but trains can’t get past damaged track. (The Nazis knew sand was important for more than roads, incidentally. During the war, the Germans built specially designed tanks to spread sand on icy roads so that military vehicles could use them.)42
Eisenhower was elected president in 1952, and he took those lessons with him to the White House. “After seeing the autobahns of modern Germany . . . I decided as President to put an emphasis on this kind of road building,” he later wrote. “The old convoy had started me thinking about good, two-lane highways, but Germany had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land.”43
Luckily for Eisenhower, much of the political and administrative groundwork for such a project had already been laid. Thomas Harris MacDonald, the longtime head of the Bureau of Public Roads, had spent years cultivating support for a national highway system, helping to wring billions of dollars out of Congress to support state road-building efforts and coauthoring a major report advocating a nationwide toll-free highway network. Lobbyists from the asphalt, concrete, contracting, automobile, and oil industries gave their support.44 So did many of the 72 percent of American families that owned cars by the mid-1950s.
Even so, it took a couple of years and several unsuccessful attempts to get Congress to agree to fund the proposed National System of Interstate Highways. Tweaking the routes of the proposed highways so that they ran through carefully chosen cities in every state helped secure many representatives’ votes. Others were swayed by the promise of all the construction jobs the project would create. There was also the Cold War argument that the roads were essential for national defense. If the Russians sent nuclear missiles screaming toward American cities, the theory went, big freeways would help millions of civilians evacuate quickly. To make sure Congress got the point, the project was renamed the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.45
Congress finally passed the bill to fund interstates in 1956. The act allocated $25 billion to build a highway system stretching 41,000 miles. All of the roads would be limited-access divided highways, with twelve-foot-wide lanes and sight distances to permit speeds of up to 70 miles per hour. The bill also raised taxes on gasoline, diesel fuel, and tires to help pay for the project. Federal planners expected the whole enterprise would be completed by 1972.
Roads engineered to such specifications would require a phenomenal amount of sand and gravel. In addition to all the grains embedded in the eleven inches of concrete on the roads’ surface, a further 21 inches of aggregates were needed for the underlying road base. At the outset of the project, the Federal Highway Administration estimated that, all told, the interstate would consume enough sand, gravel, crushed stone, and slag “to make 700 mounds the size of the largest Egyptian pyramids.”46
Naturally, as construction got under way in earnest, the demand for sand to pave all those miles soared across the country. Consumption of sand and gravel in the US hit a record high of nearly 700 million
tons in 1958, a figure almost twice the 1950 total. By then, according to a federal Bureau of Mines report, so much had already been used that “sources of aggregate were limited in some states” and “nearly depleted in other areas.”47 Entire new types of monster dump trucks, capable of carrying huge loads off-road, were designed to meet the need to move all that aggregate.
At the same time, commercial jet airplanes were coming into everyday use. They required enormous runways, much longer and wider than their predecessors, as well as expanded airports—all of which sand and gravel would be called upon to build. With lucrative contracts for highways and runways being offered across the country, contractors surged into the paving industry. Major corporations decided they wanted a piece of the action, and started buying up sand and gravel companies. Remember Henry Crown? His Material Service Corporation merged with the mammoth defense contractor General Dynamics during this period. (It was sold off in 2006 to global giant Hanson for $300 million.)
The soaring demand for sand also meant major business for the hundreds of smaller local outfits run by men like Ralph Rogers, an eighth-grade dropout who got his start in 1908 crushing rocks by the side of the road near Bloomington, Indiana. His company grew as a supplier of aggregate for military bases, but its big break came when it became one of the first to supply the interstate system in the 1950s. That set what is now the Rogers Group on a trajectory that has made it one of America’s largest privately owned aggregate companies, with 1,800 employees and more than a hundred quarries in six states.48