Abstract
The scholarship on American highways has grown substantially in recent years, thanks to important studies that have demonstrated the importance of highways to the physical, social, economic, spatial and political history of the United States. Katherine Johnson has written the most recent of these, a volume that connects the growth of the U.S. highway program to the scholarly approach identified with Stephen Skowronek, now labeled American political development (APD). Johnson states that “For APD scholars, it was the effort to carve out a separate administrative sphere free from the stranglehold of parties and courts that explains the extensive administrative experiments of the Progressive era.” (p. 9) The development of such extraconstitutional authority in the form of the American highway bureaucracy is the focus of this study. Johnson presents the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO), a professional organization representing the road building community of state highway engineers and officials, as the party responsible for developing the policy approaches that resulted in the American highway system of the 20th century. Hers is a novel assertion.
Johnson lays out her argument in six chapters. The introduction offers a brief historiographical overview and critique of current highway scholarship, an outline of the argument summarized above, and a quick synopsis of each of the five remaining chapters. The second chapter explores the development of the American highway program from the 1910s through 1920s, examining the politics leading to the pivotal legislation passed in 1916 and 1921, laws that still furnish the foundation for the U.S. highway program. Johnson argues that the members of AASHO deserve credit for pressing for the federalist structure of American road construction initiatives, challenging the emphasis that earlier historical accounts placed upon the engineers of the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR). Indeed, she asserts that Thomas MacDonald, the long-serving head of the BPR, was not the central actor in the policy development or implementation process. Rather, she argues that state highway officials were the key figures and MacDonald “consciously conformed his role to the interests of the states…” (p. 37)
This line of argument continues in the next chapter, which examines the shifts in highway policy that emerged during the Great Depression. Johnson traces the efforts of state highway bureaucrats to secure funding and support from the inaugural work-relief efforts, to avoid being subsumed under the massive federal jobs programs of the New Deal, and later to articulate approaches to highway policy that matched the emergence of a conservative counterweight to the New Deal in the late 1930s. Her argument is that the patterns of the highway program were on a “collision course” with the New Deal. (p. 41). Thus she demonstrates how highway officials helped thwart FDR’s efforts at executive reform and how they successfully fought a Keynesian-influenced attempt to adopt bond financing of public works such as highways as a fiscal lever for achieving full employment, retaining formula-driven biennial federal-aid appropriations.
The fourth chapter moves from the late 1930s into the 1940s, as the highway bureaucracy failed to adopt a united front on the priorities facing the nation’s road builders. As has every scholar reviewing American highway policy during the 1930s, Johnson recognizes the importance of the Bureau of Public Roads document, Toll Roads and Free Roads, which for the first time articulated the importance of intercity, and even intra-city, highways, and provided the initial vision for what became the Interstate Highway System. But while the mostly urban states in the northeast favored such a system of high-volume roads between cities, rural states in the south and west preferred to emphasize rural road networks. Those tensions also animated questions about the slow progress by western states on their portions of the national primary road system approved in the 1920s. These disagreements were not resolved before World War II, when national roadbuilding stopped except a few new routes serving the national defense program. Discussions about the future priorities of the highway program continued during the war and the 1944 highway bill authorized, but did not fund, the Interstate highway system.
The fifth chapter follows the development of highway policy into the postwar era, as Johnson examines the 12-year period between the 1944 legislation and the actual funding of the Interstate program in 1956. The tensions between rural and urban states, as well as postwar inflation and the Korean War, continued to hamper the passage of new overarching highway legislation. In addition, Johnson tracks the emergence of toll-funded superhighways in many states, connecting this development to Wall Street financial interests, whose role threatened state highway department control over highway building. In the end, as Johnson shows, the 1956 legislation removed the threat of toll roads and by harnessing the gas tax to the very expensive national program of high-standard roads, provided a mechanism for funding the highway system in rural and urban states while maintaining the basic structure of U.S. highway policy since 1921. She notes that the gas tax was recognized by informed observers as inadequate to meet the full cost of that road program, but pressure to get moving on road construction, aided by arguments about the civil defense potential of the new Interstate system, finally led to passage of the legislation. Johnson also argues that this legislative package returned the state highway officials to the position of controlling the terms of the nation’s highway program, once again pushing Congress, which had been the locus of policy developments since the late 1930s, into the background.
Johnson’s final chapter examines a very important point—the uniqueness of the American highway policy structure. Her account holds that the key explanation is the state-level highway bureaucracy, embodied in the American Association of State Highway Officials. Importantly, Johnson’s discussion situates the postwar highway program into the much larger political context of federal programs for housing, as well as the debates about bond financing. Her discussion of the role of large financial and banking institutions in infrastructure discussions is significant, as most other histories of American highway have not explored this issue in detail.
The American Road makes an important contribution to discussions about the American highway program. Perhaps because of the author’s background in geography, the question of rural and urban differences in the states comes to the fore more than in some other historical accounts. And those differences are then woven into Johnson’s discussions of the larger political environment within which highway policy was made in the late 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s. Here she makes a very important contribution, by bringing into view the politics of the New Deal. This included not only the rural-urban question, but also the debates about the roles of the executive branch and Congress in the arena of fiscal policy. Furthermore, she tracks how the highway program was linked to debates between New Dealers and more conservative Democrats and Republicans by the late 1930s, debates which foreshadowed the postwar discussions about bond financing and big government. The overall result is a different perspective on the American highway program, one deeply grounded in politics.
I think it is also significant that Johnson links the American highway program and the policies that enabled it, to the scholarly tradition of Stephen Skowronek and others exploring the development of political administration in the U.S. Other historians, myself included, clearly linked the road program to the reforming mindset of the Progressive Era, but Johnson’s connection to the scholarship focused on American political development links highway policy to newer threads within American historical scholarship. And that linkage also prompts Johnson to argue—correctly in my estimation—that the American highway program was unique in its administrative approach. I had long ago reached that conclusion, after not being able to identify any federal program that resembled the approach to building roads in the U.S., but had never explored the question directly as Johnson does.
I am less convinced concerning Johnson’s explanation of how this unique structure came to be. Her claim, to reiterate, is that the state-level highway bureaucrats, working through the American Association of State Highway Officials, were the key to creating the extraconstitutional mechanism behind the nation’s road program. Her argument quite deliberately challenges the consensus of several historians, myself included, who credit the Bureau of Public Roads, headed for 34 years by Thomas H. MacDonald, more than the states and AASHO. 1 Both Johnson’s and my book cover exactly the same time periods: 1890–1956. They focus on the same state and federal roadbuilders, and the development of the same key highway policies during those years, although my account also explored the process of building the federal-aid highway system.
Our interpretations differ in part due to our scholarly backgrounds, Johnson’s in geography, mine in history of technology and engineering. But I believe a much larger factor stems from the sources we relied upon. I relied largely upon the records of the Bureau of Public Roads, as well as a couple of state highway departments. Later, I examined the records of President’s Roosevelt and Eisenhower. Johnson, on the other hand, drew most heavily on Congressional hearings, and on newspaper accounts of the politics of highways. From the hearings, which I also utilized in my research, it is quite clear that state highway engineers frequently introduced the biennial highway bills that AASHO’s executive committee had drafted. That situation certainly supports Johnson’s claim concerning the leading role of AASHO in developing the extraconstitutional structure of the American road program, and her conclusion that Thomas MacDonald was less a leader and more a follower of ideas emerging from the states.
But I respectfully suggest, based upon the archival records, that Johnson overstates the role of AASHO. It is not that they were unimportant. But the highway bureaucracy, to which Johnson frequently refers, included state AND federal officials. They worked together in what has been labeled the federal-aid partnership, a model of federalism. The BPR was often the senior partner, but MacDonald, who was present at AASHO’s founding as the highway commissioner of Iowa, labored to build and maintain a shared approach to road building. AASHO was the agency that presented legislative policy initiatives, especially the highway bills going to Congress. AASHO also was the face of pivotal programs such as the development of a unified numbering system for the U.S. highways, and the setting of construction standards and materials specifications. But BPR officials staffed every AASHO committee and helped shape the outcome of the technical reports that AASHO committees actually released. AASHO and its committee were an essential forum that facilitated regular communication and discussion on potentially divisive issues, and enabled BRR advocacy of certain approaches.
This approach can sound as if the BPR manipulated the states, when in fact, the reality is a model of federalist activity. Moreover, the states were never a monolith in terms of their organizational capabilities; and they were never in complete agreement about highway policy. Johnson notes this explicitly when describing the political events of the late 1930s and 1940s. In fact, BPR participation within AASHO’s committees often provided the glue that helped AASHO function, overcoming both regional differences and disparities in the political strength and effectiveness of state highway organizations. Indeed, BPR officials constantly pushed for strong state-level agencies, especially with testing and research organizations. 2 Johnson interprets the fact that state officials usually introduced highway funding legislation at Congressional committee hearings as evidence of MacDonald’s secondary position in the process. BPR records demonstrate the opposite, documenting the vital role drafting those bills played by MacDonald’s staff within AASHO’s executive committee. Furthermore, Congressional committee chairs often sought MacDonald’s opinions on legislation, while presidents asked his opinion before signing the bills that BPR and AASHO jointly had originated. Placing state officials in the committee spotlight illustrated the BPR’s deep commitment to a road network and united policy front, not MacDonald’s secondary status.
Johnson tracks how state unity broke down in the late 1930s—a thread in my study as well. And she shows how the 1956 legislation not only ended the divisions between rural and urban states over highway policy priorities, but also restored state officials to a leadership role in the country’s highway program. But again, Johnson misses the BPR’s continuing role behind the scenes, albeit in concert with state officials. Francis Turner, one of the engineers who led the BPR after MacDonald retired in 1953, played a crucial role in developing the Congressional compromise behind the 1956 legislation, a compromise that retained the federalist structure of U.S. road building rather than plans for bond-and-tolls financing.
This long-lived AASHO-BPR partnership addresses a concern Johnson raised early in the book. She asserts that it is implausible that the tiny Office of Public Roads of the 1910s and the not-much-larger Bureau of Public Roads after 1921 could have exercised dominant influence over the nation’s highway program. She is certainly correct that the BPR alone could not have shaped U.S. highway policy—but her own discussions of the policy-deliberations of the late 1930s and 1940s show that MacDonald was much more than an agent of the state officials. The reality is that neither the BPR or AASHO could have shaped U.S. highway policy without the other. MacDonald acted in concert with the state officials the BPR sought to strengthen and with AASHO, which the BPR worked to support. I submit that this description of American highway policy fits more comfortably into the APD framework than Johnson’s vision of AASHO alone as the pivotal extraconstitutional mechanism. The federal-aid partnership clearly crossed institutional boundaries between several levels of government.
So in the end, Katherine Johnson’s book provides an important account that adds a great deal to our understanding of the politics of shaping American highway policy. Its strength lies in the presenting an overall framework drawn from the scholarly interests in American Political Development, and in its broader view of national politics, especially in Congress, during the years 1938–1956. But rather than accepting her description of the role of the American Association of State Officials as the source of the administrative innovations behind American highway policy, I find it more useful to meld her account into existing descriptions of the vital role of federal engineers in the BPR, whose influence rested upon a foundation of respect for technical expertise. The result is a more detailed description of the politics behind the federal-aid partnership that guided the nation’s road building program from the 1890s onward.
Bruce E. Seely is a retired historian of technology at Michigan Technological University. His research interests have included the history of transportation and transport policy.
