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The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways Kindle Edition
It’s become a part of the landscape that we take for granted, the site of rumbling eighteen-wheelers and roadside rest stops, a familiar route for commuters and vacationing families. But during the twentieth century, the interstate highway system dramatically changed the face of our nation. These interconnected roads—over 47,000 miles of them—are man-made wonders, economic pipelines, agents of sprawl, uniquely American symbols of escape and freedom, and an unrivaled public works accomplishment.
Though officially named after President Dwight D. Eisenhower, this network of roadways has origins that reach all the way back to the World War I era, and The Big Roads—“the first thorough history of the expressway system” (The Washington Post)—tells the full story of how they came to be. From the speed demon who inspired a primitive web of dirt auto trails to the largely forgotten technocrats who planned the system years before Ike reached the White House to the city dwellers who resisted the concrete juggernaut when it bore down on their neighborhoods, this book reveals both the massive scale of this government engineering project, and the individual lives that have been transformed by it.
A fast-paced history filled with fascinating detours, “the book is a road geek’s treasure—and everyone who travels the highways ought to know these stories” (Kirkus Reviews).
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMariner Books
- Publication dateJune 9, 2011
- File size6421 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
How did we get from dirt tracks to expressways, from main streets to off-ramps, from mud to concrete and steel, in less than a century? Through decades of politics, activism, and marvels of engineering, we recognize in our highways the wanderlust, grand scale, and conflicting notions of citizenship and progress that define America.
Amazon Exclusive: A Q&A with Earl Swift
Q: What drew you to writing about the interstate highways?
A: Well, they’re kind of hard to miss. They’ve snaked their way into every aspect of our lives — where we live and work and go to school, what we eat, how we view time and distance. They’ve altered the shape and size and character of our cities, and what it means to live in the "country." We see the physical United States differently, thanks to this weave of concrete. Check out the weather map on any TV news program, national or local: the United States is no longer depicted topographically, with rivers and mountains as its reference points, but as a grid of highways. That reflects how we’ve come to see America: not as an expanse of physical obstacles, but as a network of high-speed corridors that are so ubiquitous, they’re taken for granted.
The fresh salad you toss at home and the steak you savor at a big-city restaurant wouldn’t be possible without them. The clothes, furniture, electronics, even the house you buy, depend on the speed and access they provide. Building the interstates wasn’t simply a matter of pouring concrete; they helped create the modern American experience.
Q: The book’s subtitle mentions the "engineers, visionaries, and trailblazers" who created America’s superhighways, but nothing about presidents. Weren’t the interstates Dwight Eisenhower’s doing?
A: Actually, Ike had very little to do with them — which may come as a surprise, seeing as how they’re named for the man and associated with his time in office, alongside coonskin caps and polio shots. In truth, FDR had more of a hand in the interstates. And their origins date back decades before him: they’re the product of an evolution that began before America’s entry into World War I.
The real fathers of our modern highway system will be unknown names to most readers. There’s Carl Fisher, who inspired the nation’s first primitive network of motor roads; Thomas MacDonald and a supporting cast in the federal Bureau of Public Roads, who turned that network into the numbered U.S. highway system in the mid-twenties and drew up plans for the interstates in the late thirties; and Frank Turner, who played the starring role in turning that prewar vision into what we have today.
Alongside these builders are a host of men and women who helped shape what we got, some of them by resisting the system’s advance — people like Lewis Mumford, a writer who initially championed high-speed roads and later became their harshest critic.
Q: Did you know of these players before you started work on the book?
A: No, I didn’t. I assumed I knew the basics, that Eisenhower was a major figure in the story. The more I researched, the more I came to see that it wasn’t so.
The myth was helped along by Ike himself. In his memoirs he writes about a coast-to-coast trip he took with an army truck convoy in 1919, and how it opened his eyes to the primitive state of American roads; it took the convoy 62 days to drive from D.C. to San Francisco. A quarter-century later, his armies advanced on Berlin using Germany’s autobahns, and he realized that here was the answer — and so it was, he wrote, that building a superhighway network became one of his priorities as president.
Ike certainly had both of those experiences, and they may well have fueled his desire for big roads. But by the time he got into politics, the interstates were a done deal. How they are, and where they are, had largely been decided, and they differed in fundamental ways with what he had in mind.
Q: Did you drive much of the system in researching the book?
A: I’ve traveled about 20,000 miles of the interstates, or roughly forty percent of the total. That doesn’t include do-overs: some legs I’ve driven many times — I-44 and I-40 between St. Louis and L.A., which parallels old Route 66; I-95 between New York and Richmond; I-80 from New York to San Francisco; the 900-odd miles of I-64.
Researching the story’s main characters required that I spend a good bit of time with their papers, which are locked away in university archives and libraries all over the country. On one road trip, in the summer of 2008, my daughter and I drove from our home on the Virginia shore to Hot Springs, Arkansas; Texas A&M; Fort Worth; Iowa State; the small town of Montezuma, Iowa; Ottawa, Illinois; and the University of Michigan’s main campus in Ann Arbor. On another research trip, in the summer of 2006, we drove the Lincoln Highway through eleven states.
Q: Are you a fan of the system?
A: Most of the time I’m on it, yes. But it certainly has its negatives: an interstate exit has more in common with interchanges a thousand miles away than it does with the local countryside; the system amounts to a fifty- first state, a place unto itself — one of unvaried engineering, look-alike architecture, taste-alike food.
So driving an interstate through, say, New Mexico is not exactly like visiting New Mexico. You can see it from the highway, but you’re kept at a distance by the interstate’s wide corridor, and the view is blurred by your speed; you’re in it, but not of it. It’s a bit like changing planes in an airport terminal. You can’t really say you’ve been to the surrounding city.
For all that, I enjoy driving on interstates. I enjoy their smooth speed; I’d imagine it’s as close as most of us come to piloting a plane. I appreciate their ease and safety. I’m awed by their scale. Some of their approaches to cities offer truly spectacular views. And I’ve had some wonderful moments on them, with company and without. I get a lot of thinking done when I’m on the road.
Plus, there’s this: whatever their flaws, whatever unintended ills they spawned, the interstates do exactly what they were designed to do, and do it very well. They account for one percent of our highway mileage. They carry a quarter of our traffic. They’re really pretty amazing.Q: Do you have any favorite routes?
A: I always look forward to driving I-81 through Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley — the Blue Ridge looms to the east, the Alleghenies to the west. It’s gorgeous, though you can’t gaze for too long, because the highway’s crowded with trucks. I-40 in the Southwest and I-80 in the Great Plains pass through some austere but beautiful country. There’s a pleasing lonesomeness to those drives. I-10 rides a causeway through the Louisiana swamps; drive it just after dawn, it’s otherworldly.
Q: Any bad experiences?
A: Oh, sure. Whenever I drive the New Jersey Turnpike or the Long Island Expressway, I can’t say I’m having a good time; they can be harrowing. Same goes for the Capital Beltway at rush hour, which most days seems to last about eighteen hours.
I avoid certain rural stretches whenever possible. I-35 between Fort Worth and Waco is weedy, trash-strewn, ugly. The Indiana Toll Road is an eyesore. The road surfaces in Michigan and Illinois are close to lunar.
As for moments of real danger, I was in a dozen-car pileup once, on I-44 in southern Missouri. Didn’t get hurt, but it was an eerie experience to see such a lavish piece of engineering rendered unusable; the whole highway was blocked by wreckage. I was rear-ended while stopped at another snow-related accident by a Camaro doing 50; I was in a microscopic Fiat. That was unpleasant, to say the least, but again, I didn’t get hurt.
Then there was the time my MG started to overheat as I drove alone across the desert from Needles to Barstow, California. It was blistering out — 110 degrees or so — and I had no choice but to crank up the heater. That stretch of I-40 was the longest hundred miles I’ve ever driven. On any kind of road.
Review
From the Inside Flap
A man-made wonder, a connective network, an economic force, a bringer of blight and sprawl and the possibility of escape the U.S. interstate system transformed America. The Big Roads presents the surprising history of how we got from dirt tracks to expressways in the space of a single lifetime.
Earl Swift brings to light the visionaries who created these essential highways as well as the critics and citizens who questioned their headlong expansion throughout the country, including:
Carl Fisher, the irrepressible car-racing entrepreneur who spurred the push for good roads in the early years of the automobile, built the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and made a fortune creating Miami Beach, only to lose it all
Thomas MacDonald, chief among a handful of driven engineers who conceived of the interstates and how they would work, years before President Eisenhower knew the plans existed
Lewis Mumford, the critic whose crusade against America s budding love affair with the automobile and the ever-bigger roads it required now seems prescient
Joe Wiles, an African-American family man turned activist, one of thousands of ordinary citizens in dozens of cities who found their homes and communities targeted by the concrete juggernaut and were unwilling to be uprooted in the name of progress
In mapping a fascinating route through the dreams, discoveries, and protest that shaped these mighty roads, Swift shows that the interstates embody the wanderlust, grand scale, and conflicting notions of citizenship that define America.
From the Back Cover
st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } At nearly forty-seven thousand miles long and at least four lanes wide, the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways is the greatest public works project in history .º.º. The interstates changed the face of America. From The Big Roads
PRAISE FOR THE BIG ROADS
America s interstate system tied together urban areas, bypassed thousands of small-town main streets, fanned the sprawl of suburbia, and sent millions of baby boomers on road trips with their parents, asking, Are we there yet? With a great sense of how this changed the country, Earl Swift has told an intriguing tale of vision, personal sacrifice, and can-do determination. Walter R. Borneman, author of Rival Rails: The Race to Build America s Greatest Transcontinental Railroad
Objects in the rearview mirror prove eerily close on every page of this lively, eminently sensible history of the guardrailed monument to American mobility. John R. Stilgoe, author of Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape
A joy ride. Earl Swift has written the best kind of popular history one that paints vivid portraits, debunks myths and brings to life the fascinating and appalling stories behind the creation of that massive mixed blessing known as America s interstate highways. Bill Morris, author of Motor City
About the Author
Rob Shapiro is a voice-over artist, musician, and composer who got his professional start with the Children's Theatre Company & School of Minneapolis.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Product details
- ASIN : B004X7TM14
- Publisher : Mariner Books; Reprint edition (June 9, 2011)
- Publication date : June 9, 2011
- Language : English
- File size : 6421 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 401 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #169,709 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #82 in Transportation (Kindle Store)
- #109 in General Technology & Reference
- #122 in History of Technology
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Journalist Earl Swift has written seven books and hundreds of major features for newspapers and magazines, all distinguished by evocative language and deeply immersive reporting. Since 2012, he has been a fellow of Virginia Humanities at the University of Virginia.
Swift has a 26-year-old daughter, Saylor, who is his neighbor in the Blue Ridge mountains west of Charlottesville.
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Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
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"The Big Roads," seemed to help fill the gaps for me that "Divided Highways" left. First off, I feel that Earl Swift's narrative is much more comprehensive and approachable; and while I do think that in some cases, both books can be considered companions of one another (they both have a very similar outline; including a case study of a populist movement to thwart the building of an interstate), The Big Roads seems to offer a much more linear, concise story than Divided Highways.
The Big Roads takes introduces you to the identification of the "problem," i.e., the need for more roads to satisfy the nations increasing desire for personal transportation, the offering of a solution, and the implementation of that solution over many, many years. As some may not expect, the interstate highway system named after Eisenhower actually pre-dated his term of presidency by many years. From there, Swift describes the public's initial idolization of, and lust for more, big roads, up through the public revolt that was brought about by favoring engineering over social and political realities, and the effects that high speed roads had on many areas of the country that were either in its path, or bypassed in favor of other routes.
Not only does Big Roads deliver in terms of a historical narrative, it also made me pause to consider the pitfalls of unchecked road building; something I had not considered before. If nothing more, it's worth understanding how the current interstate system has evolved from its very early beginnings.
Swift's discussion of the political issues that emerged, inevitably, as expressways pressed against and through established neighborhoods is particularly thorough, sensitive and fair. Swift's telling of those debates conjures a tantalizing what-if scenario. What if America's superhighways in the '50s through '70s were kept largely to connecting regions (as some advocated earlier and at the time) and not as extensively and bluntly injected into already-developed urban areas? It can rightly be argued that the political erasure of many planned highways had the direct effect of engendering today's soul-killing gridlock, but would highways be as burdened with antipathy if they had been ORIGINALLY conceived with greater sensitivity to the human context? Given the load they carry, the safety they provide, the time they save, it is peculiar how unloved and ignored America's highways are. I believe there is a strong correlation, and the unhappy history Swift relates makes even the most enlightened highway plan today quite challenging to design and build.
While I thoroughly enjoyed the book, one major criticism: Swift rightly made much of various nationwide and major regional maps, but he included only a few sketches of the Baltimore plans. This lack made it much harder to envision what he was discussing. Also, the photos of Carl Fisher and other pioneers were good, but I found the later shots to be underwhelming. Excellent rather than poor-to-middling graphics would have made this very good book truly great.
Overall, an excellent telling of an undertold and underappreciated story.
Top reviews from other countries
Dennoch ist das Buch allen zu empfehlen, die gerne hinter die Kulissen des politischen Enstehungsprozesses dieses gigantischen Projektes schauen sowie die erzeugten Widerstände näher kennen lernen wollen. Die technischen Aspekte von Planung, Bau und Unterhaltung der Interstates wreden hier jedoch kaum berührt.
Der Verlag behauptet auf dem Umschlag vollmundig , die Geschichte der Interstate Highways wäre noch nie erzählt worden. Dabei wird geflissentlich das bereits 14 Jahre zuvor erschienene Buch von TOM LEWIS, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life (Verlag Viking, New York 1997, ISBN 978-0-670-86627-4) übersehen. Es hat einen ähnlichen Umfang wie die hier vorgestellte Arbeit, setzt aber andere Akzente und ist tendenziell weniger ausschweifend.