Highway to US history
By Tom Vanderbilt |
July 17, 2011, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
WHEN "On the Road" was published in 1957, it may have seemed a rousing dawn chorus for an awakening generation of postwar seekers, but it was also an encomium of sorts - for the year before, construction had begun on the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways in the United States. "You can't do what I did anymore," Kerouac would later say. And as noted in "Why Kerouac Matters," by the New York Times reporter John Leland, even as Kerouac was writing, the author glimpsed that his kind of rambling "may soon be obsolete as America enters its High Civilization period and no one will get sentimental or poetic anymore about trains and dew on fences at dawn in Missouri."
In place of poetry we had standardized efficiency, not just the new Esperanto of green highway signs speaking to us at 65-mile-per-hour Highway Gothic - the same tongue from Maine to Montana - but the whole experience of travel itself. "With the modern car on the modern freeway," former journalist Earl Swift writes in "The Big Roads," "the modern traveler was left with practically nothing to celebrate but the ever-briefer time he had to devote to getting from one place to another."
It's not easy to write about infrastructure: how does one bring to life vast, many-tentacled, technically abstruse and almost unknowable systems, particularly those, like the Interstate highways, that took decades to build? Swift, though he occasionally delves into the wonders of macadam, wisely swaps bitumen for biography, building his narrative around, essentially, a triumvirate of men who at different periods were central to the highways' creation. Carved into this Mount Rushmore of mobility are Carl Fisher, an Indianan who helped make the Lincoln Highway a "real road," as its sponsors boasted, that would "permit a traveler to average 20 miles per hour;" Thomas MacDonald, an intense engineer from Iowa who helped devise the nation's proto national highway system; and, most prominent, Frank Turner, an engineer from Texas who tamed Alaska before overseeing the Interstate program.
Writing about the people who build infrastructure can have its own challenges. Turner, for example, was a shy Baptist teetotaler, a man who, on a trip to the Taj Mahal, was moved to remark in his diary, "Road fairly well aligned." The highway builders tended to be conservative, ramrod-straight men who, as one wit once put it to me, had the whiff of concrete and polyester about them. But Swift commendably humanizes them, drawing out their polyvalent selves and hinting at their contradictions. In one speech, Turner, a strident mass-transit advocate, linked the 1960s urban opposition to the highway program to wider social unrest and "the breakup of the home," even as his Interstate project was leveling urban neighborhoods – many of which were quite stable, contrary to the usual depiction.
"The Big Roads" is not quite the "untold" story its subtitle promises: Tom Lewis's "Divided Highways" (1997) covers a lot of the politics and development of the Interstate System, Phil Patton's "Open Road" (1986) explores its cultural impacts and Matt Dellinger's recent "Interstate 69" provides what may be its obituary. Still, Swift has added texture and nuance, as well as narrative economy, to a story containing volumes, and he makes for an ideal travel companion - engaging, not too didactically chatty.
In place of poetry we had standardized efficiency, not just the new Esperanto of green highway signs speaking to us at 65-mile-per-hour Highway Gothic - the same tongue from Maine to Montana - but the whole experience of travel itself. "With the modern car on the modern freeway," former journalist Earl Swift writes in "The Big Roads," "the modern traveler was left with practically nothing to celebrate but the ever-briefer time he had to devote to getting from one place to another."
It's not easy to write about infrastructure: how does one bring to life vast, many-tentacled, technically abstruse and almost unknowable systems, particularly those, like the Interstate highways, that took decades to build? Swift, though he occasionally delves into the wonders of macadam, wisely swaps bitumen for biography, building his narrative around, essentially, a triumvirate of men who at different periods were central to the highways' creation. Carved into this Mount Rushmore of mobility are Carl Fisher, an Indianan who helped make the Lincoln Highway a "real road," as its sponsors boasted, that would "permit a traveler to average 20 miles per hour;" Thomas MacDonald, an intense engineer from Iowa who helped devise the nation's proto national highway system; and, most prominent, Frank Turner, an engineer from Texas who tamed Alaska before overseeing the Interstate program.
Writing about the people who build infrastructure can have its own challenges. Turner, for example, was a shy Baptist teetotaler, a man who, on a trip to the Taj Mahal, was moved to remark in his diary, "Road fairly well aligned." The highway builders tended to be conservative, ramrod-straight men who, as one wit once put it to me, had the whiff of concrete and polyester about them. But Swift commendably humanizes them, drawing out their polyvalent selves and hinting at their contradictions. In one speech, Turner, a strident mass-transit advocate, linked the 1960s urban opposition to the highway program to wider social unrest and "the breakup of the home," even as his Interstate project was leveling urban neighborhoods – many of which were quite stable, contrary to the usual depiction.
"The Big Roads" is not quite the "untold" story its subtitle promises: Tom Lewis's "Divided Highways" (1997) covers a lot of the politics and development of the Interstate System, Phil Patton's "Open Road" (1986) explores its cultural impacts and Matt Dellinger's recent "Interstate 69" provides what may be its obituary. Still, Swift has added texture and nuance, as well as narrative economy, to a story containing volumes, and he makes for an ideal travel companion - engaging, not too didactically chatty.
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