“The Greatest Public Works Program in the History of the World”

Interstate 95 near Richmond, Virginia, in 1965.

(Charles E. Rotkin/Corbis)

Fifty years ago today, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, recuperating in the hospital from intestinal surgery, ducked photographers as he signed without fanfare 27 recently passed bills. One of those measures was destined to change the course of American history.

The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 would create what Eisenhower’s secretary of commerce called “the greatest public works program in the history of the world.” The bill authorized the building of the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways—turning the word interstate into a noun while radically and permanently altering the American landscape.

Two formative experiences had made Eisenhower a staunch advocate of a national system of superhighways. The first came in 1919, when as a young Army staff officer he accompanied a cross-country motor convoy meant to determine how the nation’s roads would accommodate the newly motorized armed forces. Struggling along roads that he described as “from average to non-existent,” the 81 cars and trucks took 62 days to cross the country, averaging 5 miles an hour.

By contrast during the occupation of Germany after World War II, the future President saw firsthand the Reichsautobahnen, the national high-speed highways that Hitler had ordered built beginning in 1933. Besides accelerating commerce, the roads had proven a boon to the German army. Eisenhower became convinced that America needed something similar.

The roots of the push for better roads in America stretched back to the 1880s, when bicyclists and bicycle manufacturers had begun to clamor for improvements. With the arrival of the automobile at the turn of the century, car makers and drivers added to the chorus. By 1916 the government had set up a federal Bureau of Public Roads and begun to funnel money for improvements to the states, in the form of matching grants.

Some highways were built during the 1920s and 1930s; but without large-scale federal funding and systematic planning, progress toward a national network languished. In 1937 President Franklin Roosevelt proposed a system of six toll highways crossing the country from three east to west and three from north to south. Four years later the successful Pennsylvania Turnpike spurred the building of parkways and turnpikes in a number of other states. But Thomas H. MacDonald, who headed the Bureau of Public Roads from 1919 to 1953, opposed toll roads and pushed an alternative plan that called for toll-free highways including links to inner cities.

All this thinking came together in 1944, when Congress officially recognized the concept behind the Interstate Highway System, a nationwide network linking major cities. But that year’s bill failed to provide the needed funds or a strategy of implementation to make the system a reality.

As the debate dragged on, the postwar automobile boom kept pressing lawmakers from behind. By 1956 Americans made up 6 percent of the world’s population yet owned two thirds of its cars. A million and a half workers were employed making cars, pumping gas, or building roads. Demand for some kind of interstate system became irresistible.

Though the interests of lobbyists—they ranged from the Automobile Association of America to rubber manufacturers—were economic, the implications of the highway system for national defense became the trump card. Eisenhower appointed retired Gen. Lucius Clay to be head of a commission to evaluate the nation’s highway needs. Clay, who also happened to sit on the board of General Motors, reported in early 1955 that an interstate system was an urgent necessity. The country needed a way to evacuate its cities in case of a Soviet missile attack and to mobilize its armed forces in any emergency. Few Congressmen were willing to oppose such purposes.

The act Eisenhower signed on June 29, 1956, set out the same basic plan that had been proposed in 1944. But accompanying legislation also established a Highway Trust Fund, which would take the money from federal taxes on gasoline, tires, and oil and dedicate it to highway building. The funding for the interstates would not be at the dollar-for-dollar federal-state matching-grant level of most highway aid; Washington agreed to pick up 90 percent of the cost of the massive project. Building a staggering 41,000 miles of highways was projected to cost $25 billion and take until 1972.

The act laid out exactly what the nation wanted from its new highway system—in a word, speed. All the highways would have at least four lanes 12 feet wide, with 10-foot paved shoulders and 22-foot medians. Prescribed grades, curves, sight distances, and controlled access would all contribute to comfortable cruising at 70 miles an hour. The money continued to pour in—the final cost reached $129 billion—as the construction of the tens of thousands of miles of roadway, 16,000 entrance and exit ramps, and 55,000 bridges and overpasses proceeded. The system was largely completed by the early 1990s.

The historian Lewis Mumford had predicted in 1956 that Americans in 15 years would regret “all the damage to our cities and our countryside . . . that this ill conceived and preposterously unbalanced program will have wrought.” At the time he was a voice crying in the wilderness, but his words proved prophetic.

By the early 1970s Americans were beginning to realize that the benefits of the interstates came with unexpected costs. The highways had been a contributing factor in the blighting of American cities, as funds for public transportation and other urban improvements were sucked into the highway maw, which mainly benefited rural and suburban residents. Looking for cheap right-of-ways, engineers callously scarred or obliterated the neighborhoods of thousands of poor city dwellers. The national effort to subsidize automobile travel altered the tenor of American life in ways that many found appalling. “Thanks to the interstate highway system,” the television commentator Charles Kuralt observed, “it is now possible to cross the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.”

There was worse to come. U.S. petroleum production having peaked in 1970, the country was importing 36 percent of its oil by 1973. That year the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries showed that the oil spigot could be a potent weapon. Americans, whose speedometers could register 120 miles per hour, found themselves inching along in gas lines to buy scarce fuel. And the list of complaints associated with the interstate system kept growing. They included air pollution, traffic congestion, noise, and the homogenization of the national culture.

In 1991 the completed system was officially named for President Eisenhower. By then Americans could easily drive across the country in six days without ever encountering a stoplight. The grand project had bound the country together and touched the lives of every American even as it fueled decades of growing productivity.

Today, with the nation dependent on foreign suppliers for more than half its oil and faced with the increasingly ominous prospect of global warming, the age of superhighway-building may be over. In years to come, the monumental effort begun 50 years may possibly come to remind us both of the farseeing vision of a generation and, at the same time, of that generation’s shortsightedness.

—Jack Kelly writes often for American Heritage magazine and is the author of Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, and Pyrotechnics—A History of the Explosive That Changed the World (Basic Books).