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Getting the Interstate System Built: Road Engineers and the Implementation of Public Policy, 1955–1985

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2011

Mark H. Rose  and
Bruce E. Seely
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Extract

Study of the origins of public policy has achieved an important place among historical scholars. For instance, historians have published many valuable studies explaining the origins of regulatory agencies in industries such as natural resources, energy, and transportation, including the origins of agencies responsible for enforcing safety standards. Scholars have treated road construction, the subject of this article, in a similar fashion, seeking to comprehend the principal factors informing the origins of state and federal road building programs. Not surprisingly, then, scholarly examinations of the Interstate Highway System, which exercised such a remarkable influence on the economy, as well as on the social and physical landscapes of the nation, have remained focused on explications of the origins of policy.Perhaps this particular preoccupation has been due to what historians Peter N. Stearns and Joel A. Tarr have identified as a tendency to equate policy origins with “a policy message.” But Stearns and Tarr contend that studies of “origins do not carry such an inherent message and subsequent stages of policy development must also be explored. “

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , January 1990 , pp. 23 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 1990

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References

Notes

1. Many studies of public policy consider business-government relations, as that connection often is the locus of policy setting. See, for example, McGraw, Thomas K., Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, Alfred E. Kahn (Cambridge, MA, 1984).Google ScholarStudies that focus on the origins of policy in the transportation industry include Kerr, K. Austin, American Railroad Politics, 1914–1920: Rates, Wages, and Efficiency (Pittsburgh, 1968)Google Scholar; Martin, Albro, Enterprise Denied: Origins of the Decline of American Railroads (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; and Childs, William R., Trucking and the Public Interest: The Emergence of Federal Regulation, 1914–1940 (Knoxville, TN, 1985).Google ScholarHays, Samuel P. has provided analyses of the development of natural-resource policy in Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1959)Google Scholar, and (in collaboration with Barbara D. Hays), Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (New York, 1987).Google Scholar The energy shocks of the 1970s encouraged publication of several books focusing on the origins of federal energy policy, including Vietor, Richard H. K., Energy Policy in America Since 1945 (New York, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Giebelhaus, August W., Business and Government in the Oil Industry: A Case Study of Sun Oil, 1876–1945 (Greenwich, CT, 1980)Google Scholar; Melosi, Martin V., Coping with Abundance: Energy and Environment in Industrial America (Philadelphia, 1985)Google Scholar; and Clark, John G., Energy and the Federal Government: Fossil Fuel Policies, 1900–1946 (Urbana, IL, 1987)Google Scholar, which is an important exception to one of the tendencies of the literature in this area of study because it includes, as the subtitle indicates, an excellent analysis of policy implementation. For public policy and the development of safety standards, see Graebner, William, Coal-Mining Safety in the Progressive Period: The Political Economy of Reform (Lexington, KY, 1976).Google Scholar Finally, see Armstrong, Christopher and Nelles, H. V., Monopoly's Moment: The Organization and Regulation of Canadian Utilities, 1830–1930 (Philadelphia, 1986)Google Scholar, for the origins of public policy in several Canadian industries, including water, telephone, and electricity.

2. Rae, John B., The Road and the Car in American Life (Cambridge, MA, 1971)Google Scholar; U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, America's Highways, 1776–1976: A History of the Federal-Aid Program (Washington, D. C., 1977)Google Scholar; and Davies, Richard O., The Age of Asphalt: The Automobile, The Freeway, and the Condition of Metropolitan American (Philadelphia, 1975)Google Scholar, all of which contain accounts of the origins of the Interstate Highway System. A number of popular indictments of the Interstate program include Mowbray, A. Q., Rood to Ruin (Philadelphia, 1968)Google Scholar; and Leavitt, Helen, Superhighway—Superhoax (Garden City, NY, 1970).Google Scholar The only recent historical analyses are Rose, Mark H., Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1941–1956 (Lawrence, KS, 1979)Google Scholar; and Seely, Bruce E., Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia, 1987).Google Scholar The standard work by economists on American urban transportation as a whole is Meyer, J. R., Kain, J. F., and Wohl, M., The Urban Transportation Problem (Cambridge, MA, 1965).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. “Rarely,” contends Richard Vietor, “do historians of public policy seriously try to understand outcomes…. [Instead] they are preoccupied with the process, not the substance.” Vietor, Richard H. K., “Commentary,” in Greenberg, Brian, ed., Perspectives on Public History (Wilmington, DE, 1985), 35.Google Scholar

4. Stearns, Peter N. and Tarr, Joel A., “Curriculum in Applied History: Toward the Future,” The Public Historian 9 (Summer 1987), 116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Obviously no single statement about so vast a topic as policy implementation is capable of conveying the diversity of treatments. For instance, federal programs aimed at urban renewal and reducing poverty have enjoyed elaborate and sophisticated attention, including studies of implementation at the local and urban levels. Our own focus in this essay, however, is on a technologically-oriented field where, we contend, the general direction of scholarship has been to assess policy origins.

5. Although the emphasis overall has been on the origins of policy at the federal level, several historians have published important monographs that, in part, explore policy-making as well as implementation, even occasionally, including implementation at the state level. See Clark, Energy and the Federal Government; Nash, Gerald D., United States Oil Policy, 1890–1964: Business and Government in Twentieth Century America (Pittsburgh, 1968)Google Scholar; and Vietor, Richard H.K., Environmental Politics and the Coal Coalition (College Station, TX, 1980).Google Scholar

6. The genesis of the 1956 legislation was long and complicated; it can be traced in Rose, Interstate; and Seely, Building the American Highway System; see also Alva, Stewart W., The Interstate Highway System: A Bibliographic Survey (Monticello, IL, 1982); and U.S. Federal Highway Administration, America's Highways, 1776–1976.Google Scholar

7. The federal-aid highway program had rested on cooperative administration between state and federal engineers since 1916, when the program began. The states and the federal government shared costs and responsibilities, with state highway departments planning, building, and maintaining federal-aid highways, while federal officials inspected and approved stated plans and construction.

8. Most highway departments were created between 1900 and 1918 with a mandate to administer road programs under the guidance of technically trained professionals, not politicians. The requirements for receiving federal-aid funds reinforced this arrangement. A study by the National Research Council in 1959 reported little change in this situation, as thirty-seven highway departments were completely or partially independent of gubernatorial control. Moreover, political scientist Robert Friedman found that substantial sentiment continued to exist even in the early 1960s for removing highway agencies “from the mainstream of partisan political decision-making.” National Academy of Sciences— National Research Council, Highway Research Board, State Highway Administrative Organizations: An Analysis, Special Report 51 (Washington, D.C., 1959)Google Scholar; and Friedman, Robert S., “State Politics and Highways,” in Jacob, Herbert and Vines, Kenneth N., eds., Politics in the American States: A Comparative Analysis (Boston, 1965), 420, 423.Google Scholar

9. Pursell, Carroll, “Commentary to the Paper of John B. Rae,” in Roller, Duane H. B., ed., Perspectives in the History of Science and Technology (Norman, OK, 1971), 120. This argument is fully developed in Seely, Building the American Highway System.Google Scholar

10. Ibid.

11. Rose, Interstate, 85–94; Seely, Building the American Highway System, 218–23.

12. See Leavitt, Superhighway—Superhoax, for a critical and tendentious account of the federal highway construction program, which she judged monolithic in policy arenas. Perhaps because Leavitt, like several other critics of the federal road program, conducted research and writing during the late 1960s, she could not yet identify the emerging budgetary shortfalls and the diminution of public enthusiasm for unlimited and unhindered highway construction programs.

13. For two contrary views of the triumph of technocracy, see Winner, Langdon, Autonomous Technology: Technics Out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge, MA, 1977)Google Scholar; and Gunnel, John G., “The Technocratic Image and the Theory of Technocracy,” Technology and Culture 23 (July 1982), 392–416.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a study of reverse modernization in a portion of American politics, which we are labeling devolution, see Rogin, Michael P., The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Specter (Cambridge, MA, 1967).Google Scholar

14. Mertz, W. L. and Ritter, Joyce, comps., Building the Interstate (n.p., c. 1985), 1–15.Google Scholar This volume contains excerpts of articles published originally in American Highways, a monthly publication of the American Association of State Highway Officials, and in Engineering News-Record and Civil Engineering.

15. Ibid., 6; [originally in American Highways 37 (July 1957)].

16. This information is based upon interviews with a number of state highway engineers in Colorado, Kansas, and Mississippi. On toll roads, see Dearing, Charles L. and Owen, Wilfred B., Toll Roads and the Problem of Toll Road Modernization (Washington, D.C., 1951); and U.S. Federal Highway Administration, America's Highways, 1776–1976, 166–70. The main point was that even before the Interstate legislation was passed in 1956, state highway departments across the country were preparing to construct a system of high-standard express highways.Google Scholar

17. General information drawn from interviews and from information compiled by Wanda Kerr Dunbar, who was, for many years the editor of Ohio Contractor and served as research consultant to the project sponsored by the Public Works Historical Society.

18. Interviews with Leon Talbert and Bernard Hurst, Ohio DOT.

19. Interview with Ken Shiatte, New York DOT.

20. Interview with Albert Weese, Ohio DOT.

21. Information from notes prepared by Wanda Kerr Dunbar; Ohio Department of Highways, Ohio Highways: Biennial Report, 1957–58; Noble, Charles M., “The Modern Express Highway,” Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers 102 (October 1937), 1068–1179.Google Scholar

22. See Hebden, Michael and Smith, Wilbur, State-City Relationships in Highway Affairs (New Haven, 1950), 203, for the observation that “where highway-user revenues are earmarked in a special highway fund, the legislative delegation of responsibility and authority is so extensive and yet specific that only the minimum of contact with the legislature is needed.”Google Scholar

23. When Colorado was awarded additional mileage for an Interstate connection to the west, cities all along the front range competed to become the terminus of the route, although Denver was quickly chosen. Information from interview with Wayne Capron, Colorado DOT, and also from Interstate Highway File, Box 27118, Papers of Governor Stephen L. R. McNichols; also Governor E. C. Johnson to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 17 December 1956, Box 66079, Papers of Governor E. C. Johnson, both in Colorado State Archives, Denver.

24. Interview with Thomas D. Moreland, Georgia DOT.

25. Interview with Bernard Hurst, Ohio DOT.

26. Interview with Charles Shumate, Colorado DOT; for information on the tunnel, see “Lifelines: The Story of Colorado's Public Road System,” in Christensen, Erin S., Ukockis, Gail L., and Hansen, James E. II, eds. A Challenge to Build: The History of Public Works and the APWA in Colorado (Denver, 1987)Google Scholar; and Wiley, Marion C., The High Road (Denver, 1976).Google Scholar

27. Interview with Douglas Fugate, Virginia DOT.

28. For information on an especially clear case of political involvement in these choices in Texas, see Reed, Leonard, “Public Highway, Private Interests,” D. (The Magazine of Dallas), October 1978, 132–36, 182.Google Scholar

29. Volpe's comment from Mertz and Ritter, Building the Interstate, 2; originally in American Highways 37 (January 1957).

30. Interview with Charles Faulk, Mississippi DOT.

31. Interview with Bertram Tallamy, New York DOT and later FHWA Administrator, and with Warren Cremean and other officials in the Ohio DOT.

32. This support was evident in the extensive positive coverage of the Interstate program in mass-circulation magazines. Typical articles included “Highway Billions,” Fortune, September 1958, 106–11; “Roads: The Web Begins to Grow,” Business Week, 11 January 1958, 36; “These Roads Will Make Driving a Joy,” Good Housekeeping, April 1962, 162–63; “Interstate Highways: A Progress Report,” Changing Times, June 1964, 23–50.

33. For example, Ellis Armstrong, Commissioner of Public Roads from 1958 to 1961, warned about the erosion of public support as early as 1962 in “The Achilles Heel of the Highway Program,” Address to the Western Association of State Highway Officials, 11 June 1962, (mimeographed copy provided to authors.).

34. Typical of the chorus of complaints that appeared after 1965 were Wing, W. G., “Concrete Juggernaut,” Audubon Magazine, July/September 1966, 266–72, 294, 360–67Google Scholar; R. Starnes, “American Outdoors: Mortgaged to the Road Gang,” Field –15; O'Neil, P., “Kill the Hill! Pave that Grass!” Life, 10 October 1969, 126–27Google Scholar; “Hitting the Road; Fighting the Highway Movement,” Time, 19 April 1965, 48Google Scholar; “Hardnosed Highwaymen Ride Again: Interstate Highway Program and Route Planning,” Life, 4 April 1967, 4Google Scholar; Dunhill, F., “Expressway Named Destruction: New Orleans,” Architectural Forum, March 1967, 54–59.Google Scholar

35. Interview with Ken Shiatte, New York DOT; see also Weiner, Edward, Urban Transportation Planning in the United Stated: An Historical Overview (New York, 1987), for a presentation of the increasingly complex legislative environment within which state road departments operated after 1965.Google Scholar

36. Hays and Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence.

37. Interview with Wayne Capron, Colorado DOT.

38. Interview with Charles Shumate, Colorado DOT. The Glenwood Canyon case is discussed in greater detail below.

39. Ibid.

40. Interview with Wayne Capron, Colorado DOT.

41. Interview with Ralph Tropani, construction engineer in charge of the Glenwood Canyon project. We are indebted to the research assistance of Erin Christensen and Karen Waddell, Western Public History Associates, who conducted these interviews and helped prepare a chronology of events on the construction of this segment of the Interstate system.

42. Interview with Billy Brittain, Virginia DOT.

43. Interview with Wilson Magee, Mississippi DOT.

44. Interview with Wayne Capron, Colorado DOT.

45. Interview with Byrd Finley, John Ellis, and Albert Weese, Ohio DOT. During the 1960s, then, the environmental movement encouraged road engineers to construct an explicit rationale for reshaping nature, whether in its prestine form or in the larger cities. Highways, especially express highways, many argued, improved access for millions of Americans to the most scenic portions of the nation. By the 1970s, points out A. Q. Mowbray in Road to Ruin, 95–97, members of “Environmental Action formed the Highway Action Coalition to ‘bust the highway trust.’ “As Rosalind Williams suggested in personal correspondence to authors, 2 February 1989, the appropriate historical question, which we cannot answer, is at what point did “a gash through the landscape once viewed as progress become viewed instead as desecration?” See also Hays and Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence, 466. Finally, the classic account of technology and its intrusion on the landscape is Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York and London, 1964). In turn, this volume led to an impressive corpus of literature; see Segal, Howard P., “Leo Marx's ‘Middle Landscape1: A Critique, a revision and an Appreciation,” Reviews in American History 5 (March 1977), 137–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46. The work of Harland Bartholomew, perhaps the best-known planner in the country and an influential consultant whose ideas were reflected in many cities, embodied this approach. They were also visible in the innovative efforts to restore the “Golden Triangel” in Pittsburgh. See Rose, Interstate, 55–67.

47. See Barnett, Joseph, “The Highway in Urban and Suburban Areas,” in Labattut, Jean and Lane, Wheaton J., eds., Highways in Our National Life: A Symposium (Princeton, 1950), 145–51Google Scholar; and Drew, Donald R., Traffic Flow Theory and Control (New York, 1968), 388–417Google Scholar, for the conventional emphases of road and traffic engineers on traffic service, even within the areas surrounding the nation's central business districts. The state highway engineer was William Bugge, speaking at the opening of an important highway testing program. See Mertz and Ritter, 11, originally in American Highways 37 (October 1957).

48. Interview with Warren Cremean, Ohio DOT.

49. See Leavitt, Superhighway—Superhoax, and Mowbray, Road to Ruin, for two of the more vitriolic accounts of the perils of highway construction.

50. Interview with Dugan, Dale, DOT, Kansas. A similar situation is described in Robert Caro's account of Robert Moses's construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, in The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York, 1974), 850–958.Google Scholar

51. This project won the American Society of Civil Engineers award for the outstanding civil engineering project of the year in 1980, largely because of the compromises and design features intended to ameliorate the road's impact on a park, golf course, university campus, and drainage basin. See Lindholm, Raymond H., Jr., and Steinberg, Malcolm L., “San Antonio Freeway: Social-Impact Landmark,” Civil Engineering 50 (June 1980), 80–82.Google Scholar

52. Interview with Warren Cremean, Ohio DOT.

53. Matson, Theodore M., Smith, Wilbur S., and Hurd, Frederick W., Traffic Engineering (New York, 1955), 606; interview with Dale Dugan, Kansas DOT.Google Scholar

54. This pattern was identified in several papers presented at the Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Reno, Nevada, in April 1988. See Raymond A. Mohl, “Interstate 95 and the Black Community in Miami”; Ronald H. Bayor, “Expressways, Urban Renewal and the Relocation of the Black Community in Atlanta”; and John F. Bauman, “The Expressway, Urban Renewal, and Public Housing: A Blueprint for Postwar Philadelphia, 1943–1960.”

55. Interview with Ken Shiatte, New York DOT.

56. Interview with Ken Shafer, New York Thruway Authority.

57. Remarks of Robert Hunter, retired chief highway engineer from Missouri, at the Public Works Historical Society/American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials seminar on the Interstate Highway System, Washington, D.C., November 1987.

58. Interview with David Randles, New York DOT.

59. Most state engineers reported good relations with their federal counterparts, although they also added that relations were not always smooth. But after his retirement as chief of the Bureau of Public Roads in 1953, Thomas MacDonald told an engineer at Texas A“We thought we knew the best solution,” one of them observed, “but we were looking at it from one perspective.” Interview with Alan Kenyon, New York DOT.

62. Interview with Albert Weese, Ohio DOT.

63. Interview with Ken Shiatte, New York DOT, who discussed the study performed in Buffalo, noting that “we … coded stuff to specific geographical areas…. We used the Chicago trip distribution model, which was (a so-called opportunity model), which had a lot of (finesse)…. We knew where every intersection of the system was, right down to a gnat's eyebrow.” Others who spoke in similar terms were Roger Creighton, also at New York DOT.

64. Interview with Ken Shiatte, New York DOT; and see, as well, Oi, Walter Y. and Shuldiner, Paul W., An Analysis of Urban Travel Demands (Evanston, IL, 1962), for an illustration of traffic engineering emphasizing household size, work, and shopping-trip generation, and several of the other variables that traffic engineers, such as the group in New York, were taking into consideration.Google Scholar

65. The following information is based on an analysis of interviews with state highway engineers in several states; see also Kemp, Louis Ward, “Aesthetes and Engineers: The Occupational Ideology of Highway Design,” Technology and Culture 27 (October 1986), 759–97, for a broad overview of the intellectual, aesthetic, and political themes that affected highway design among road builders and their critics.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

66. Hays and Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence, 3.

67. This phrase is drawn from anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology (New York, 1983), 167.Google Scholar

68. See Seely, Building the American Highway System, 30–35.

69. Many state road engineers claimed that it would be impossible to build the Interstate system again, while others contended that only urban sections could not be constructed. The prevailing sentiment was that about all the nation could expect in the way of highway programs in the future was reconstruction and rehabilitation rather than a major construction program.

70. Interview with Charles Shumate, Colorado DOT.

71. Some engineers were especially troubled by the pattern of kickbacks and bribes uncovered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the 1980s. See Interview with Wilson Magee, Mississippi DOT.

72. Interview with John Tabb, Mississippi DOT.

73. Interview with Robert Tierney, Massachusetts DOT.

74. Interview with John Shafer, New York Thruway Authority.

75. Interview with Gideon Picher, Maine DOT.

76. See Kevles, Daniel, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (New York, 1979), 393–426Google Scholar; Meehan, Richard L., The Atom and the Fault: Experts, Earthquakes, and Nuclear Power (Cambridge, MA, 1984)Google Scholar; Richard Hirsch, “Engineers as Managers: The Electric Utility Industry Experience,” paper read at the annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology, Raleigh, North Carolina, 30 October 1987; Warner, John Harley, “Power, Conflict, and Identity in Mid-Nineteeth-Century American Medicine: Therapeutic Change at the Commercial Hospital in Cincinnati,” Journal of American History 73 (March 1987), 934–35CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Burnham, John C., “American Medicine's Golden Age: What Happened to It?” Science 215 (19 March 1982), 1474–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Culliton, Barbara J., “Politics of the Heart,” Science 241 (15 July 1988), 283.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

77. Burnham, John C., How Superstition Won and Science Lost: Popularizing Science and Health in the United States (New Brunswick, 1987)Google Scholar, argues that in the popular mind superstition has replaced science.

78. Haskell, Thomas L., ed., The Authority of Experts: Studies in History and Theory (Bloomington, 1984), ix.Google Scholar