The American Road

Highways and American Political Development, 1891-1956

Katherine M. Johnson

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780700632411
• eBook ISBN: 9780700632428
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Technology & Engineering

In The American Road Katherine M. Johnson develops a bold new theory for how the American highway system has taken on such outsized scale and complexity by emphasizing the emergence of a powerful administrative apparatus in the American federal system. Established in 1914 expressly to intervene in the congressional debates of the era, the American highway bureaucracy consisted of forty-eight state highway officials acting in and through their self-organized association, the American Association of State Highway Officials. Johnson’s central argument is that this new institution occupied a similar position relative to the American state as political parties and courts did. The capacity to organize across a complex constitutional order enabled it to control the purpose and allocation of federal highway aid for the better part of the twentieth century. Johnson investigates this new conception of the American highway bureaucracy, showing specifically where and how that extraconstitutional authority emerged, expanded, and manifested itself in the legislative history, physical dimensions, and geographical reach of the emerging highway system.

The American Road reveals that all of the major highway legislation approved by Congress from 1916 to 1941 was collectively developed and advanced by state and federal highway bureaucrats drawing on the new authority conferred by the system of federal grants-in-aid, which required state legislatures to provide a state matching grant and local governments to relinquish control over decisions of location and design. The capacity to advance their policy aims through both the advice of experts and the will of the states not only secured the new highway program against renewed opposition in Congress in the 1920s but also won the strong support of the motor vehicle industry and set the stage for even more impressive policy gains of the 1930s when highways became the largest category of federal emergency public works. That collective authority, however, required a high threshold of consensus to secure and maintain, producing not just a narrow one-size-fits-all approach to technical issues but also a striking incapacity to respond to changing conditions. Johnson completes her compelling narrative by identifying the source of the interstate highway plan, first proposed in 1939 and finally funded in 1956, in the internal dynamics of and external threats to that extraconstitutional authority.

1. Highways and American Political Development

The primary reason for the rapid spread of motor vehicles around the world is their remarkable utility. The internal combustion engine vastly multiplies the power of draft animals, and self-operation liberates drivers from the fixed schedules of fixed rail, ferries, and buses. In addition, because motor vehicles were designed to operate on regular city streets and country roads, they opened up new opportunities for business, recreation, and social life.¹ The primary condition enabling that spread, however, has been the capacity and willingness of governments to retrofit the public roads for their use. It was quickly apparent that even a small number of motor vehicles posed a major threat to pedestrians on the narrow, crowded city streets of a century ago. They also broke down easily on rural roads designed for draft animals and carts. Everywhere the number of automobiles spread beyond a few hobbyists and moneyed elites, a crisis of public safety and health ensued. Every effort to mitigate those effects enabled more cars to take to the roads, setting off a century of public investment in the management and accommodation of motor vehicles that has yet to abate.²

Though most countries vigorously assumed the task of retrofitting and expanding the public roads for the automobile, nowhere was this effort pushed so far as in the United States. The American highway system today is a vast, dense, functionally differentiated network consisting of one million miles of major roads and expressways that collect and distribute traffic from an additional three million miles of rural roads and city streets, the vast majority of which have also been retrofitted for motor vehicle use.³ On a per capita basis, the American highway system is twice the size of the road network in Canada, a country with a similar history of settlement and economic growth (see figure 1). The network of limited-access expressways alone is 50 percent larger than the twenty-eight states of the European Union combined.⁴ It is widely acknowledged, however, that the way the American highway system was built was unusually destructive of other transportation modes and the built environment. Public subsidies for road construction grew to enormous sums by the time the first trickle of federal aid for urban transit systems began to flow in 1965. The interstate system was designed to accommodate huge traffic flows directly into the cities, bulldozing a vast acreage of city neighborhoods, businesses, and parks. Despite a major shift in priorities since the 1970s, from accommodating traffic growth to promoting an integrated, multimodal transportation system, the imbalance in public policy before the 1970s was so extensive and sustained that even after the US Congress began a major reinvestment in fixed rail, American dependence on the automobile continued to soar, right up to the Great Recession of 2009 (see figure 2).⁵

Figure 1. Lane-Miles per Capita, Canada and the United States. Sources: Federal Highway Administration, table HM-60, “2011 Functional Lane Miles”; Transportation in Canada, table R02, “Length of Public Road Network” 2010; Canadian and US Census 2008.

For most of the twentieth century, the primary explanation for the outsized dimensions of the American highway system was a deep-seated cultural disposition of the American people. The open road is a metaphor for the frontier in the interpretive histories of Frederick Jackson Turner and Louis Hartz. As Phil Patton explains, American highways are a “concrete expression of our national obsession with mobility and change, with the horizon, with the frontier.”⁶ The automobile was not just a popular machine in this view, enabling ordinary citizens to express that drive, but an easy revenue source. It was the widespread, uncontested adoption of the gas tax and automobile registration fee in the early twentieth century that launched the transformation of the nation’s aforementioned three million miles of rural roads.⁷ The sense that some deeper cultural force was at work was especially strong in the 1920s, when automobile registrations more than doubled to one for every five people in the United States and paved mileage doubled to almost one million miles (see figures 3 and 4).

Figure 2. Paved Mileage versus Motor Vehicle Use. Sources: Federal Highway Administration, table VM-1, “Annual Vehicle Distance Traveled”; and table M-200, “Total Road and Street Mileage.” Road mileage data does not include additional lanes.

It returned with even greater force after World War II as millions of American families bought new homes on that highway grid beyond the reach of trolleys, buses, and sidewalks. That postwar American landscape, however, was also backed by huge federal subsidies for housing and highways, making it difficult to distinguish cultural choice from simple economic calculus. Culture was even further muddied as a causal force in the late 1950s when Congress authorized the construction of a 41,000-mile overlay of superhighways on the existing highway grid—justified, at least in part, as a means of civil defense. As President Dwight D. Eisenhower explained in his transmittal letter to Congress on February 22, 1955, unless this additional investment was made, that existing network “would be the breeder of a deadly congestion within hours of an [nuclear] attack.”⁸ The huge scale and accelerated timetable of that project also provoked the first sustained dissent from the cultural consensus as large parts of the American landscape were transformed into construction sites. Freeway revolts not only stopped the highways in many cities but also played a major role in the passage of the nation’s first environmental laws, whose requirements for public input and environmental review began to slow highway construction to a crawl even before the Oil Crisis of 1973 revealed strategic vulnerabilities that the Eisenhower administration did not take into account.⁹

Figure 3. Production of Roads and Cars, 1920s versus 1930s. Sources: Federal Highway Administration, table MV-1, “State Motor Vehicle Registrations”; and table M-200, “Total Road and Street Mileage.” The data does not reflect mileage that consists of more than two lanes.

In the wake of the freeway revolts and the cascading changes in the nation’s transportation and environmental policies that ensued, two more encompassing explanations for the outsized dimensions of the American highway system emerged. The first, advanced by a wave of journalists and policy activists close on the heels of the freeway revolts, was the pervasive influence of a powerful “road gang” of motor vehicle manufacturers, truckers, and road contractors, all bent on securing the public infrastructure on which their profits relied.¹⁰ That thesis was challenged, however, by a new group of scholars who dove more deeply into the historical record. Gary Schwartz’s legislative history of highway policy blames private industry for the near demise of the interstate highway proposal in 1955.¹¹ Mark Rose’s broader take on the policy debates documents the rise and fall of a powerful lobbying group of motor vehicle manufacturers, truckers, and automobile users, which broke up in nasty infighting two years before Congress took up the interstate highway bill.¹² What that new group of scholars did find, however, was the pervasive influence of a small federal agency: the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR). In Rose’s account, the BPR’s 1939 plan was the unvarying bottom line in the otherwise heated debates of 1954 to 1956 over the scope and funding of the Interstate highway plan.¹³ In Gary Schwartz’s account, it was the BPR that orchestrated the final political coup that pushed the legislation over the top: it hastily mapped out the final 2,200 miles of urban interstates, placing a copy on each congressman’s desk that highlighted which roads would go through their districts.¹⁴ This finding was significantly extended by Bruce Seely, whose history of American highway policy documents the central role of the BPR and its predecessor agencies in all of the major episodes and policy events of American highway history, beginning with the original good roads movement of the 1890s.¹⁵

Figure 4. Automobile User Fees as Share of All State Revenues. Source: Historical Statistics of the United States, Series Y 710–735, “State Revenues by Source.”

This book offers a new explanation for the outsized dimensions of the American highway system that focuses on a basic condition that all the preceding explanations have so far missed: the institutional complexity of the American state. It draws, more specifically, on three established bodies of knowledge. The first is the organizational turn in sociology known by the somewhat dated label “the new institutionalism,” which conceptualizes institutions as a distinct layer of social reality not reducible to the rational calculations or emotional catharsis of the people situated therein.¹⁶ The second is the subfield of political science known as American political development (APD), whose specialty is precisely the institutional complexity of the American state.¹⁷ And the third is the philosophy of social science known as critical realism, which rejects the implicit positivism in most of the causal explanations noted earlier in favor of a layered ontology, epistemology, and methodology. As I will elaborate, the first two bodies of knowledge allow me to reconceptualize the American highway bureaucracy as a uniquely powerful institution in the American political system, whose authority extended across all three levels of government in this policy realm. The third body of knowledge provides a rigorous method of inquiry that guides the project more generally. It also informs the brief extension of the argument from an institutional to a structural level of analysis in the final chapter.¹⁸

In the rest of this chapter I develop the argument, summarize the findings, and provide a brief outline of the chapters, which apply this reconceptualization of the American highway bureaucracy in the rest of the book.

The American Highway Bureaucracy

The empirical starting point of this new study of the outsized dimensions of the American highway system is the most extensively documented finding of highway historians : the outsized influence of a small federal agency, the Bureau of Public Roads (“the BPR thesis”). The theoretical starting point, however, is the assumption that something else was at work. This is informed by three basic problems with the BPR thesis. First is its failure to gain much traction against the other accounts noted previously. Studies of American highway and transportation policy still routinely describe the BPR as a captive of the “road gang,” conforming its policy initiatives to the needs of private industry.¹⁹ Studies of the Cold War continue to identify the interstate highway system as the kind of large-scale initiative that only a generation facing large-scale geopolitical threats could achieve.²⁰ The second problem with the BPR thesis is its overreliance on the causal force of technical expertise. This is the type of reasoning that Max Weber famously warned (more than a century ago) could become an end in itself.²¹ This problem is most apparent in the work of Bruce Seely, who attributes the outsized influence of the BPR to its rigorous adherence to scientific reasoning—the disposition, he argues, that allowed it to steer a messy democratic process through the complex policy issues occasioned by the advent of the automobile.²² It is also the dominant explanation in accounts that take a less heroic view of the BPR. For Jonathan Gifford, the BPR’s technical expertise consisted of a rigid set of administrative and design principles that did not cut through debates so much as fix that narrow technocratic rationality in concrete. For Louis Kemp, the influence of highway engineers on the messier work of city planners in the 1940s and 1950s reduced urban freeway design to “a limited program of landscaping palliatives and tools for predicting traffic demand.”²³ Mark Rose splits the difference, arguing in his later work that the same technical expertise that reconciled policy elites in the 1950s became the object of popular vilification in the 1960s and 1970s.²⁴

The third problem with the BPR thesis is that it raises a question not well addressed in any of these accounts: how could such a small agency have such a big influence? The federal Bureau of Public Roads was not just small—for most of its life it was the line equivalent of the Bureau of Home Economics in the US Department of Agriculture—but its statutory authority was encased in rigid formulas and funding caps. Though Max Weber also argued that ideas can act “like a switchman” shifting social forces on to new tracks, his classic formulation of bureaucratic rationality was tightly bound to the coercive apparatus of the state, where the ability to convince is grounded in the capacity to compel.

As the new histories of American highway policy were being written in the 1980s, the new subfield of political science known as American political development also made its debut. Two insights of this body of work are directly relevant to the BPR thesis. First is the fact that the American political system, with its separation of powers and many checks and balances, puts a premium on strategic agency at all stages of the policy process. Captured by the term “bureaucratic entrepreneur,” this insight highlights what is implicit in the more heroic versions of the BPR thesis noted earlier: federal highway bureaucrats were not just technical experts but policy activists who, though committed to scientific reasoning, did not hesitate to jump into the political fray when their policies were at stake.²⁵ The second insight of this subfield relevant to American highway policy i...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Highways and American Political Development
• 2. Public Roads
• 3. Public Works
• 4. Public Utility
• 5. Public Authority
• 6. The American Road
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover