by Earl Swift
Marston called MacDonald into his office to suggest a subject for his senior thesis. Why not devote it to a new and virtually unstudied problem—namely, Iowa's roads? Everyone knew that they were a mess; gumbo was infamous hundreds of miles beyond the state's borders. But little research existed on the cost of a bad road versus a good one, or on the needs and desires of road users.
They agreed on a two-pronged assignment. MacDonald and another senior would " determine and report the pull or force a team must exert to move a wagon of varying weight over a road of varying condition" and " study and report the needs of the farmers of the county for good roads and the actual value thereof to the farmer in the way of taxes to be paid." With that, MacDonald and Laurence Timmerman Gaylord, an easygoing six-footer, toured the state, interviewing farmers; nearly all identified drainage as the chief trouble with their local roads. The students attached a simple dynamometer to teams pulling wagonloads of sand over roads in Ames and Cedar Rapids. Their data showed that horses had to work seven times as hard on a dirt road as on a hard, smooth rock surface, and that asphalt and brick offered even easier going.
By his 1904 graduation, MacDonald had inherited Marston's near-religious faith in the power of science, of technical expertise, to right the world's problems, and in research as a building block of rational decision making, an " administrative tool of first importance," as he later put it. He continued to learn from his mentor after receiving his diploma. That spring, Iowa legislators decreed that the college would serve as a state highway commission, which until then didn't exist; at the same time, the college created a full-fledged division of engineering, with Marston as its dean. The professor invited him to work for both.
It was an interesting, if not long-term, proposition. Iowa was home to all of 931 automobiles, and it was by no means certain that the machines were anything but a fad. The state was entirely unpaved. Besides that, the legislature had authorized a budget for the new commission of just $3,500; for an engineer, the money was elsewhere.
Marston must have been persuasive. Thirty-five years later, MacDonald credited the professor with setting his life's course. " Had it not been for his vision into the future," he wrote, " I would undoubtedly have chosen some of the more firmly established fields which seemed at the moment to offer greater possibilities."
His highway career started on horseback. MacDonald spread the gospel of good roads in lectures and demonstrations around the state. He visited road construction jobs, where he found waste and shoddy work in abundance; localities often got about a dime's worth of road for every dollar they spent. He eventually turned his attention to bridges, which tended to be wooden and badly built by design; contractors had carved the state among themselves so that each would be assured all the bridge work in a particular territory, an arrangement that cost taxpayers twice—in contracts that were wildly overpriced, and in bridges that demanded frequent replacement.
Quietly, patiently, the straight-arrow MacDonald dismantled the racket and saw to it that one contractor reimbursed the state for inflated charges and sloppy work. More important, he rode back and forth across the state to demonstrate the principles of concrete and steel bridge construction to Iowa's county engineers, showing them—in the midsummer heat, while wearing a suit, his necktie knotted high and tight—how to mix the cement, how to build forms and foundations, how to use corrugated metal or concrete pipe for culverts.
In March 1907, MacDonald married Elizabeth " Bess" Dunham, a former schoolteacher from Ames whom he met while she worked as Dean Marston's secretary, and whom he courted through her subsequent service as right hand to the college president. The wedding made the front page of both local papers. The Ames Times noted they " quietly married" on a Thursday night at the home of the bride's parents, in the presence of immediate family and three friends. The Ames Intelligencer offered a more imaginative telling of the event, explaining it as the work of a charmed silver chain, a " wonderful instrument of Cupid," handed down from one secretary to another and bringing love to each. Records at the county courthouse hint at a more earthbound impetus for the union: the couple's first child, Thomas Jr., was born eight months, fourteen days later.
Charmed or not, the MacDonalds set up house a few minutes' walk from the commission's office. It was a comfortable existence in a progressive little city. They were an easy stroll from restaurants, libraries, and the railway linking Iowa State with the business district. A campanile's melodies drifted over sheep grazing on the campus lawns. And years before he made his mark in AASHO, MacDonald began to build a reputation. He was a perfunctory writer but became a font of magazine articles on the hot topics of highways and automobiles. He was a simply awful public speaker—stiff, unsmiling, a reader who made rare eye contact with his audience and whose delivery forsook anything in the way of inflection or drama—yet he found himself giving one dinner speech after another.
His audiences were eager to learn how he proposed to meet the seemingly insatiable demand for his product. In his first ten years on the job, the state's 931 registered autos ballooned to more than 110,000; motorcars rivaled horse-drawn vehicles not only in Des Moines and other big cities, but in Ames, Montezuma, even the remotest farming crossroads. All of their owners cried for better roads—farmers anticipating the bounty of shopping, schools, churches, and entertainment waiting a few miles away, and urban autoists eager to range farther from home, to tour.
Over time, MacDonald arrived at a solution. If Iowa were to try to improve all of its highways at once, it would have so little to spend on each that it might as well do nothing at all; anything but the most rudimentary maintenance would be out of reach. Real progress demanded hard choices—classifying the state's roads by importance, spending the state's money only on those deemed primary roads, and leaving secondary roads to the counties and townships to worry about.
How would Iowans decide which roads were primary? The answer, on a highway commission led by Anson Marston, was obvious: by the traffic they carried. A simple, scientific approach would not only accelerate improvement of the chosen roads, it would keep highway financing beyond the reach of politics. " Iowa has an estimated mileage of 102,000 miles of public highway, but the primary system of roads would probably not exceed ten to fifteen percent of this amount," he wrote in a 1912 article, explaining that with 10,000 to 15,000 miles, " it is estimated that every trading point in the state would be reached from at least two directions by main traveled roads."
He carried this idea an important step further by noting that " the cross-county roads which would form the primary system of any one county could be so determined as to join with the primary system of the bordering counties" to form " the great trans-state roads" he mentioned at the Lincoln Highway dedication.
When Iowa reorganized its highway commission in 1913, MacDonald, now the state highway engineer, started to assemble the system of primary roads he'd envisioned. He left the actual choice of the routes through each county to officials there; these were, first and foremost, local roads, carrying local traffic, and wouldn't be much use to anyone if they didn't answer local needs. The state's role would be to ensure that the roads were worthy of attention from a traffic standpoint, that they connected to the overall network in an agreeable fashion, and that they met uniform standards for construction and maintenance.
" We are not attempting to build up a large central department," as he explained it, " but are leaving as much of the detail work as possible to the district engineers and the county organizations." The result was " a fine organization in which harmony prevails."
By the time MacDonald accepted the secretary's offer, his collaborative, bottom-up approach to choosing and improving primary roads had won over the state. The General Assembly was about to approve a 6,400-mile primary system that connected every town of more than a thousand residents. Iowa had just 21 miles of rural concrete road, but thanks to MacDonald's long concentration on foundation work—on good drainage, gentle grades, and straight align
ments—much of the primary system was already in place and ready for surfacing, an improvement that even the infamous Governor Harding favored. " Seldom has there been such a swing of opinion away from earth roads as exists in Iowa today," marveled Engineering News-Record. " The Governor has turned around completely, and is now an ardent advocate for hard surfaces." MacDonald was as surprised as anyone. " Six months ago," he wrote, " I would not have believed it possible for public sentiment in the state to change as it has."
The Des Moines Capital met the news of his federal appointment with the sort of editorial most bureaucrats only fantasize about. " It would be difficult to enumerate the patient faithfulness of Engineer MacDonald," it read. " In all his works he has obscured himself. He has never carried an advertising ear. His only consolation has been in duty well done. It has been known in the state for some time that Mr. MacDonald would be tendered the place which he has now accepted, but Iowa men have hoped that he might not accept."
He spent his free moments that spring of 1919 exchanging letters with well-wishers. One theme is plain in these notes: he was a true believer in the federal-state partnership. " I know it is not necessary for me to say that I have only one thought—that of placing the Federal work on a cordial co-operative basis with each state department," he wrote to one state highway engineer. The nation's highways, he wrote another, " have reached far beyond the possibilities of any one organization," and only " the cooperation and combined efforts of the States and the Federal Government ... will produce the results which are demanded."
Among the warmest letters was Henry Joy's. " You have had a hard fight in Iowa," the Packard chief wrote on April 2, " but the fruits of your efforts will be coming to the people of Iowa during generations to come." The second half of his note was devoted to an aside about the Lincoln Highway. " You may be amused that I am trying to bring about a trip to the Pacific coast of an Army Truck Train," he wrote, justifying an obvious publicity stunt with the argument that it " would be important for the military ‘brass hats' to know" whether they could drive supplies to West Coast ports, as they had to the Atlantic during the war.
" If the Army would start three loaded truck trains across the country," he wrote, " one for the northwest country, Washington and Oregon; one for the San Francisco Bay area; and one for the Los Angeles and Southern California area; and make the reports public our people as a whole would have a reliable picture." He closed the letter: " More Power to you."
MacDonald replied that he looked forward to working with Joy and was " much interested" in the truck project. " In fact," he added, " if it seemed possible to spend the time necessary, I would feel better prepared to undertake the work at Washington after just such a trip."
As it happened, Joy was persuasive—the army did send a convoy of its trucks across the country, from Washington to San Francisco, on the Lincoln Highway that summer. Among the officers assigned to the mission was a young lieutenant colonel named Eisenhower.
PART II
Connecting the Dots
4
DWIGHT EISENHOWER ENJOYED little promise of a great military future when, in the first days of July 1919, he heard that the army would attempt to drive a train of heavy trucks from the Atlantic to the Pacific; he volunteered to go along as a Tank Corps observer because he had nothing better to do.
He had missed the war. While his West Point classmates earned battlefield reputations in Europe, Eisenhower had overseen a training camp erected on the battlefield at Gettysburg. When he'd finally won orders to lead troops overseas, the Armistice had intervened. Depressed, angry, and convinced that he would be little more than a desk-bound functionary for the rest of his career, he'd seriously considered resigning his commission.
But he was unaccustomed neither to setbacks nor to overcoming them. Eisenhower's affable, smiling, upbeat manner masked a stoic core. Raised in Abilene, Kansas, squeezed into an 818-square-foot house with his parents and five siblings, the young Dwight had devoured military histories and thrown himself into sports; he'd sought an appointment to West Point more for a place on its football and baseball teams than out of a thirst for martial glory. After lettering in football his first season at the academy, he'd injured a leg, snuffing his athletic career—a blow that robbed him of ambition until he was encouraged to coach the junior varsity squad. His football players responded to his leadership style. It was his first command, and it went well.
After graduation he'd been stationed at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, where he coached a local military school team and met Mamie Doud. They'd married in 1916 and had bounced among stateside postings since—an increasingly frustrating period during which Ike strove, he said, " to perform every duty given me in the Army to the best of my ability and to do the best I could do to make a creditable record, no matter what the nature of the duty."
A road trip would be, if nothing else, a break from the slow, stultifying routine of Camp Meade, Maryland, so on the afternoon of July 7, the twenty-eight-year-old Ike left the base to join the motor truck train at its first encampment, forty-six miles into its journey. Seventy-two vehicles made up the caravan, sixty-five of them trucks, bearing two companies of army truckers, units of mechanics, engineers, and medics, and fifteen military observers—in all, 260 soldiers and 35 officers. They aimed, their commanders said, to test the army's equipment, collect data that might be useful in the future training of its Motor Transport Corps, and investigate the viability of long-distance trucking. They hoped to excite the Good Roads Movement. They might pick up some recruits along the way.
They were also engaged in a risky bit of on-the-job training, because most of the enlisted men were raw recruits with virtually no experience driving heavy machines, which at the time required even more skill than it does today: some of the beasts were giants, the biggest weighing eleven tons empty, with touchy gearboxes and springs overmatched by washboard roads.
The trucks had trundled out of Washington after a late-morning ceremony on the Ellipse, just south of the White House and a few blocks from Thomas MacDonald's new office, accompanied by a flock of civilian hangers-on. It took seven hours to reach Frederick, where Eisenhower reported for duty, ready, he admitted later, for a summertime lark. Instead he got " a genuine adventure."
The convoy joined the Lincoln Highway in Gettysburg and grunted up its twisting, steeply graded path over the Alleghenies. The greenhorn drivers took the Midwest's rough roads too fast, stripped gears, gunned engines until their radiators boiled over. Breakdowns were frequent. The trucks crushed scores of bridges—fourteen in one day, by Eisenhower's count—which trailing soldiers scrambled to rebuild. But the expedition encountered nothing truly unexpected, and though long hours and summer heat and seemingly unending repairs wore on the men, that held true until the convoy reached the desert southwest of Salt Lake City.
Headed out of town, the Lincoln hugged the southern shore of the Great Salt Lake, then turned south into sparsely populated Tooele County. The turn marked the end of civilization, as it existed in 1919; here began the highway's rough passage across mountain and desert on the old Pony Express trail, for two-hundred-odd miles little more than a pair of grooves worn into sun-seared and shadeless hardpan. The Lincoln end-ran the desert's salt flats—a vast, shimmering plain of dirty white crystal that hid, below its brittle crust, a briny sludge as deep, sticky, and black as the worst of Iowa's gumbo—but its more sure-footed route had a downside: it added miles to the desert crossing, miles that translated to hours spent under a broiling, potentially lethal sun.
So the Lincoln Highway Association had committed to trimming the route. In November 1916, Carl Fisher had donated $25,000 of his own money toward a shortcut through a narrow mountain pass west of the town of Tooele, and in 1918, Goodyear's Frank Seiberling, having succeeded Henry Joy as the association's president, had convinced his company to pony up $100,000 for a seventeen-mile causeway across the salt. This straight shot was to be elevated on a rock and earthen grade, much like a railroad track.
The association signed a contract with Utah officials to build what it called the Seiberling Cutoff in March 1918, specifying a completion date of July 1, 1919.
Once the convoy had become a sure thing, the association had discussed scheduling a dedication ceremony to coincide with the trucks' arrival but couldn't pin down a date that worked for everyone. Just as well. The road over the pass, now named for Fisher, was finished with time to spare, but not so the causeway. Only seven miles had been surfaced with gravel; its eastern end was a berm of loose dirt.
On the morning of August 20, 1919, the truck train crawled over Fisher Pass without incident, only to flounder in hip-deep dust on the downhill; no rain had fallen for eighteen weeks, and one vehicle after another spun its tires until its frame bottomed out. It took all day and most of the night to jack up the trucks, stuff the holes beneath their tires with sagebrush, and ease them on their way—after which they all too often restuck themselves. That was mere prelude to August 21. The convoy broke camp early, its soldiers eager to get the desert behind them—and, finding the Seiberling Cutoff impassable, set off across the salt.
This would have been a risky move in a light runabout. In a giant cargo hauler, the consequences were inevitable. Every truck that ventured onto the flats broke through and became helplessly mired; even a caterpillar tractor failed to achieve any traction in the stinking goop that lurked beneath the crystal. The convoy's commanders had but one option: they harnessed up teams of soldiers, as many as one hundred, and, in a torturously slow and difficult feat of muscle and will, had them tow the stranded vehicles over the desert by hand.
