There is no understanding 20th century America without being acquainted with the nation’s mid-century interstate highway expansion.
The massive cross-country freeway linkage was the crowning achievement of President Eisenhower’s eight years in office, and has forever been championed by historians as equivalent to the Great Wall of China, the Moon Landing and polio vaccines.
Maybe historians are right, which also means maybe they’re wrong. I think they’re wrong.
Let’s reimagine America’s plunge into modernity as among the worst things we could have done. Not the very worst of course, not if we consider 20th century architecture, Vietnam, Communism or the Spice Girls.
What brought about the freeway expansions? 1) America’s growing love of automobiles, and 2) General Eisenhower’s infatuation with road systems in Europe. When he saw how traffic flowed he thought it was The Future, and decided America ought not be left behind. So he came home, got elected and built a big highway for us.
What he overlooked was the USA had the finest railway system in the world. We had an interlocked series of lines and trains, rails and stations connecting us with both coasts and everything, and I mean everything, in between.
Cities, towns, villages and townships all had depots for passengers and freight located in convenient spots because, obviously, the trains had arrived many decades before the first Model T came wobbling out of a shack in Detroit.
Parts of Europe may have had better highways in 1945, but not better rail service. We made the wrong choice. We forfeited our longtime advantage when we abandoned tracks in favor of four, or sometimes eight, lanes of concrete. Within a decade rail service dwindled, then disappeared.
But America didn’t just lose her trains. The spread of freeways from Pawtucket to Ukiah also doomed small towns across the land.
All those unique, picturesque, charming and lovely cities and villages would still be standing, still robust and healthier than ever. Instead they were steadily eroded until turning into boarded up joints half a mile from the intersection of Highway 666 and Forgottenville, victims of bypasses and off-ramps and Kwikee Gas Marts.
Drive into any of these once-thriving towns and what we find are Dollar Stores, empty streets and big old beautiful houses at prices to shame us, and that left our great grandparents broke and homeless.
Absent the curse(s) of Highway 70, Highway 80, Highway 40 and a dozen more, the USA would have developed high speed bi-coastal trains decades before they were invented. We would have had rail service from here to there faster than your Oldsmobile could drive and more convenient than Pan Am could fly.
By the 1980s high-speed rail would evolve into bullet trains, and by the 21st century Elon Musk’s Boring Company would have subways beneath big cities all across the country
Just imagine: We’d have been able to take fast, efficient train service to Omaha, Miami and Bakersfield. We could also have driven the two- and four-lane roads from one small happy village to the next, staying at the Starlight Motel or the Bide-a-Wee Resort.
I can almost see the friendly pink and blue neon, the blinking, flashing little lights. The three uptown diners, hardware store, Ed’s Silver Dollar Saloon, a bookstore, Mac Nab’s Men’s Wear, fireworks and souvenir stands and various tourist options (“See the Underwater Caves! Climb to the top of the tallest cliffs in Kansas, 25-cents. Children Free”).
We lost it all. We lost the beating heart of America, the pulse that kept us connected with one another, the links that made us what we were and could still have been.
Instead we traded it for another truck stop, another on-ramp, another franchise food outlet and another set of signs that say “East Gone Village, 1/2 mile.
“No services.”
(North Carolina is nice this time of year, especially for those of us who thrive in 14 degree weather. Tom Hine, a Buckeye, does yard work shirtless while TWK works on next Sunday’s column. And Happy New Year, y’all!)
Thank you. As compendious, as painfully accurate as any analysis of the misadventure I’ve ever seen. It was not simply an innocent miscalculation, of course; great gobs of wealth were transferred from here to there, and those who stood to gain made sure the politicians and the national media were on board with the foolishness.
The Interstate Highway system was presented and sold as an economic and transportation web tying the country together. It’s design criteria were based on what would support tanks and military vehicles, with the implication of the military waging a land war within the United States. A scary thought given what the current Administration is unleashing on American cities.