Eisenhower changed America with the Interstate

Washington Post:

There were no Wal-Marts in 1956, no Ramada Inns or Best Westerns. Cross-country travel most often meant the railroad and only about two-thirds of adult Americans had a driver's license.

But that America began to change on June 29, 1956, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the law launching a massive federal project that had been his dream for decades: the Interstate Highway System.

To mark the 50th birthday of one of the most ambitious and consequential engineering projects in human history, a caravan of highway figures led by Eisenhower's great-grandson has been traveling across the country by interstate and will arrive in the District of Columbia on Thursday. They have been celebrating a system that includes 47,000 miles of highway with 55,500 bridges, 104 tunnels, 14,750 interchanges and zero traffic lights.

It reaches every state -- plus 13 miles in the District -- except Alaska; in Hawaii the superhighways are designated by an "H" rather than an "I." And it has spawned such basic elements of American life as the suburb, the motel, the chain store, the recreational vehicle, the seat belt, the spring-break trek to Florida, the 30-mile commute and the two-mile traffic jam. Today, nearly nine out of 10 adult Americans have driver's licenses. The interstate system was born when the word "Communism" had the same emotional impact among Americans that "terrorism" has today. Eisenhower argued that the nation needed a road system that could "meet the demands of catastrophe or defense, should an atomic war come."

The atomic war never came, but the interstates -- officially known today as "The Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways" -- have proved their value in catastrophic times.

More than 2 million Gulf Coast residents evacuated inland in the hours before hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck last summer. In the days after Sept. 11, 2001, notes highway historian Dan McNichol, "when every airplane was grounded, we were able to move goods and people on the interstate system and keep the economy moving."

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Dan Holt, director of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kan., said the president's concern about highways began in 1919, when he was part of a U.S. Army convoy traveling by road from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. The trip took 62 days on roads so rotten the Army had to abandon nine trucks along the way.

A quarter-century later, as supreme allied commander in Europe, Eisenhower saw the impact of a modern highway system when his soldiers used the German autobahns -- four-lane divided highways with on- and off-ramps and no traffic signals -- to pursue Hitler's army toward Berlin.

"Germany had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land," Eisenhower wrote later. "After seeing the autobahns I made a personal and absolute decision to see that the [U.S.] would benefit by it."

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Carlo de'Este has a vivid account of Eisenhower's 1919 trip in his biography of the general. It was an interesting exercise for an army that had been reduced to near non existence after World War I. It also highlighted how autos and trucks were becoming an important aspect of military mobility. Unfortunately at the same time this was happening, the Army made George Patton go back to the horse cavalry and was rejecting an improved tank that later became the model for the one the Soviets used against Germany.

History may find that Eisenhower's roads have had a more important impact on the prosperity of this country than all the social programs the Roosevelt and the Democrats devised. Ironically, the Democrats initally opposed the Interstate highway system, until they came up with "trust fund" financed by a tax on gasoline. Look most of their trust funds this one did not really exist and the money went into the general fund and cost of the system were paid from the general fund.