by Earl Swift
Then again, the numbers " definitely and conclusively" showed that no demand existed for the six toll roads, anyway. Coast-to-coast traffic amounted to only three hundred passenger cars a day; only about eight hundred traveled to the West Coast from any point east of the Mississippi. That trickle did not justify a huge public outlay.
Indeed, the data testified that not only were the vast majority of auto trips of less than twenty miles, as the bureau's surveys had shown for years, but most were less than five. Thus, only a small percentage of trips could be made on any toll road, which by definition had to limit the points at which one could enter and exit; access would be too widely spaced to suit them. So even on the legs that showed the greatest promise of breaking even, the transcontinental toll roads wouldn't suit their markets. Finally, there was some question as to how many drivers could afford to pay tolls, even if it were convenient; more than half of all cars were owned by families with annual incomes of $1,500 or less.
Toll Roads and Free Roads could have ended there, its case made. But instead came an acknowledgment that " the report should be constructive rather than negative in character" and would therefore offer an alternative to the six tollways: " the general outline of what is in effect a master highway plan for the entire Nation."
That plan comprised the fifty-five pages of Part II, which was all Fairbank. The language, like the man, was spare but elegant, clear-headed, unflinching. As he had for twenty years, Fairbank commuted to the office from Baltimore, but when burdened with a big writing task such as this he tended to tackle it at home; he wrote in longhand on unlined yellow paper, leaving blanks for the statistics that he knew would make his points; his staff, crunching numbers with hand-cranked calculators, would later fill in the blanks.
In such a manner did the bureau propose a 26,700-mile network of free highways that, in terms of its routing, bore a striking resemblance to today's interstate system—actually was the modern system, minus a few legs here and there. Its mileage nearly twice that of FDR's six transcontinental highways, the master plan was " believed to include substantially every major line of interregional travel in the country." It linked " the populous cities of the United States, almost without exception," and it followed " practically every one of the lines along which the population" had traveled to those places.
Most of its legs would not take the form of superhighways. The report hewed to the Chief's belief that roads answer the demand for their use, no more and no less; all that was needed in the open country was a lane in each direction, uncluttered by roadside development—a working version of MacKaye and Mumford's townless highway. Even such improvement, Fairbank believed, would revolutionize automobile travel. " Although in mileage they would represent as a system less than 1 percent of the total rural highway mileage of the country," he famously predicted, " they would unquestionably accommodate at least 12.5 percent of the total rural vehicle- mileage," and they would " effect a greater reduction in the highway accident rate than could be made by an equivalent sum spent for highways in any other way."
The truly revolutionary aspect of Toll Roads and Free Roads, however, was that it emphasized the need for urban freeways, something that Federal Aid legislation, with its fixation on rural improvement, had always taken pains to avoid. The report wasted no time in dismantling any lingering notion that bypasses could ease urban congestion. Not only did they become as cluttered and congested as the cities they were meant to avoid, they attempted to remedy a problem that didn't exist. Congestion wasn't caused by through traffic mixing with local; the bureau's surveys had shown that it was " caused by a multiplicity of short movements into and out of the city"—movements by locals, not out-of-towners.
By way of example, the bureau's data showed that of the 20,500 vehicles entering Washington, D.C., on any given day, no more than 2,269, or 11 percent, were " bypassable." There and in other cities, the remaining bulk of the traffic " will not only continue into, but in large part will penetrate to the very heart of the city," the report read, " because that is where most of it is destined." And on the way to the center, motorists too often found their broad path wither to streets unenlarged from their days as pikes for horse-drawn carts, and their progress confounded by cross traffic and rail lines, by curb parking and rubberneckers on the hunt for places to park.
The answer wasn't to bend a freeway around a town's edges, but to drill it right through the middle. In bigger cities, " only a major operation will suffice," the report concluded, "—nothing less than the creation of a depressed or an elevated artery (the former usually to be preferred) that will convey the massed movement pressing into, and through, the heart of the city, under or over the local cross streets without interruption by their conflicting traffic."
This surely would be disruptive, but not necessarily in a bad way; used judiciously, freeways could help reverse the decay gripping the cores of many U.S. cities. Fairbank observed that in his hometown of Baltimore, residents with the means to do so were fleeing to the suburbs, leaving behind neighborhoods nosing into economic tailspins and, over time, stripped of hope, health, and peace; a similar exodus was gutting downtown of its business, and only a " radical revision of the city plan" would stem it. " Such a revision will have to provide the greater space now needed for the unfettered circulation of traffic," he wrote. And what better space than the depressed slums, which could be cut out like a tumor and replaced with life-infusing highways?
Time was of the essence, he pointed out, because " here and there, in the midst of the decaying slum areas, substantial new properties of various sorts are beginning to rise—some created by private initiative, some by public." These new investments could " block the logical projection of the needed new arteries." In short, it would be easier and cheaper to take advantage of the blight before the blight was cleaned up.
To read these passages today, tucked into the dense text of a little-known 1939 report, is to feel a twinge of foreboding, for the urban-renewal formula laid out in Toll Roads and Free Roads was exactly that adopted by cities across the nation a few years later—and because, for all of its clarity and comprehensiveness, the document overlooked an important element of the slum areas it targeted: degraded though they might be, they were home to millions of people.
***
Among those praising Toll Roads and Free Roads was Miller McClintock, the originator of the friction theory, who'd long corresponded with MacDonald; he called the report " an excellent example of economic common sense and practical administrative statesmanship." What he didn't say, but both he and the Chief knew, was that he was involved in a project that was whipping the American public into a frenzy of excitement over long-distance, high-speed expressways to a degree that no government report, no matter how groundbreaking, could approach. McClintock was the technical adviser to " Futurama," the centerpiece of General Motors' " Highways and Horizons" exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair and far and away the event's top draw.
The man receiving McClintock's advice was a brash, supremely unself-conscious showman, actor, author, artist, stage designer, marketer, and visionary named Norman Bel Geddes, a native of Michigan who after a successful career in the theater had refashioned himself an industrial designer, and who in more recent years had decided to become an expert on cities of the future. Bel Geddes had sold GM's brass on an exhibit built around a simulated flight over the America of 1960, with particular emphasis on its highways, and though he busted his budget more than three times over, succeeded so convincingly that fair goers sometimes waited hours in line for the fifteen-minute experience.
He performed his magic with the biggest scale model ever built, a diorama of farm, forest, suburb, and city that covered nearly an acre and featured about half a million individually designed and crafted houses, a downtown bristling with skyscrapers ten feet tall, more than a million tiny trees representing eighteen species, and about fifty thousand streamlined cars and trucks, of which ten thousand moved on roads, bridges, and highways
. Just as impressive was the vantage from which you took this in: a moving conveyor system of six hundred upholstered wing chairs, each fitted with speakers at shoulder height. The conveyor snaked high and low over the model as a male voice, at a volume barely above a whisper, commented on the sights below. In terms of a modern approximation, think Disney's Haunted Mansion.
From outside, the seven-acre pavilion loomed as a modern bunker, its slab sides painted a silvery gray. Sinuous ramps guided you inside, to a giant arcing map of the United States, 110 feet by 60, on which highways and congestion and the solution—a new network of motorways—appeared as lights. You were then directed into one of the conveyor's chairs and glided through darkness as the voice welcomed: " Come tour the future with General Motors! A transcontinental flight over America in 1960. What will we see? What changes will transpire?"
Then the conveyor swung into the light, and spread below to the seeming horizon was a vista of farms and small towns and flowing streams, complete with cattle in the pastures, apple trees heavy with fruit, and, most important, vehicles. Man " has forged ahead since 1939,” the narrator intoned. " New and better things have sprung from his industry and genius. Since the beginning of civilization, transportation has been the key to Man's progress—his prosperity—his happiness." With that, your attention was fastened on a mammoth expressway, churning with traffic, that sliced across meadowlands and valleys and a mountain range toward a city you could see drawing near. There, expressways split to merge with others, ran side by side and in stacks, rolled past and through pristine high-rises. You flew over a circular airport, served by its own braid of expressways. Despite the fact that this future city was based vaguely on St. Louis, there wasn't a slum in sight. " With the fast, safely designed highways of 1960, the slogan 'See America First' has taken on new meaning and importance," the narrator said. " The thrilling scenic feasts of a great and beautiful country may now be explored, even on limited vacation schedules."
As the ride drew to a close, your attention was directed to an intersection in an urban shopping district as the voice declared: " All eyes to the future." Bel Geddes described what happened next: " Suddenly the spectator, in his chair, is swung about! He can scarcely believe his eyes. He is confronted with the full-sized street intersection he was just looking down on."
Yes, before your eyes was an exact duplicate of the model, with GM's 1939 models posing as street traffic and additional exhibits waiting behind the storefronts—a running engine fitted with quartz windows, and a Plexiglas car, and a Frigidaire paean to food preservation. " General Motors bids you welcome to this Magic City of progress!” the voice cried. " The attendant will assist you from your traveling chair."
Most visitors found the fair a pretty amazing experience. They could step into a full-scale copy of a Moscow subway station in the Soviet Pavilion, come eyeball to eyeball with the spirochete that causes syphilis in the Hall of Medical Science, get a chest x-ray and a hearing test. Japan's building boasted a Liberty Bell made of cultured pearls, and elsewhere waited the world's largest typewriter, a pair of exceedingly tall Romanian sisters, and Jang, a Malay boy with a six-inch tail. The Loose-Wiles Biscuit Co. exhibited " a galaxy of midget stars dressed in immaculate white."
Fair goers could take in another Norman Bel Geddes exhibit—a mirror show where, the program promised, " a single dancing girl appears to be a whole chorus of World's Fairettes." And there was GM's chief competition: the Ford Motor Co.’s exhibit, starring " The Road of Tomorrow," a spiraling concrete ramp three stories high that, to look at it now, evokes a parking garage; and the Perisphere, a concrete globe two hundred feet in diameter that contained " Democracity," a model of city and satellite towns " pulsing with life and rhythm and music." The display was pretty close to the RPAA's regional city ideal, but viewing it from a pair of slowly rotating balconies didn't compare with the Futurama's on-the-wing thrill.
Then again, the GM extravaganza had been gestating for far longer. It could trace its roots to 1932, when Bel Geddes had published a picture book of his design ideas—an underwater restaurant, and a floating, circular airport for New York harbor, and a theater for staging The Divine Comedy (and only The Divine Comedy) for an audience of five thousand. Horizons had also shown off his sketches of finned and teardrop-shaped cars and buses, along with a future city whose population lived in cookie-cutter skyscrapers ringed by open parks and athletic fields.
Skyscraper housing was a favorite notion of European modernists, most famously the Swiss-born designer and planner Le Corbusier, and Bel Geddes became one of its fervent American proponents. In 1936, he'd been commissioned by a New York advertising agency to produce sketches of possible solutions to traffic congestion for use in a Shell Oil ad campaign. Bel Geddes had hustled to gather data on city planning, auto registrations, and highway design. Enter Miller McClintock.
Not long into their collaboration, Bel Geddes had persuaded his clients to junk the sketches and instead finance a model of his future city, complete with skyscrapers and highways; in addition to McClintock's counsel, it's apparent that he found inspiration in the graceful ramps and twisting interchanges of Fritz Malcher's Steadyflow System. When the wondrously detailed models were photographed for the ads, the results had been both artful and realistic, and Bel Geddes had the wisp of an idea.
One of its key elements was his future expressway, which had seven lanes in each direction—four to handle traffic cruising at fifty miles per hour, two for those doing seventy-five, and one for hundred-mile-an-hour, long-distance travel. Grassy strips or concrete walls would separate the sections, and eighteen-inch steel dividers would keep everyone in his own lane. At night, fluorescent strips built into the dividers would light the way.
GM hadn't been sold on Bel Geddes' vision at first; the company planned an assembly-line mockup similar to its exhibit at the 1933 fair in Chicago. Bel Geddes peddled his wares to Goodyear, but the tire maker decided against exhibiting at all. Bel Geddes returned to GM with a last-ditch second pitch, asking the company's bosses whether they could afford to create the impression that they'd had no new ideas in five years. He walked out with a $2 million budget.
This was in May 1938, just eleven months before the fair opened. In that time, Bel Geddes and his people not only built the model but engineered the 1,568-foot conveyor, on which the rubber-wheeled chairs moved at 103 feet per minute and turned at orchestrated points to face highlighted features of the diorama, each chair doing so independently of the other 599. The sound system delivered 150 overlapping copies of the narration, so that the words you heard always corresponded with what you and your three nearest neighbors were seeing.
Bel Geddes and his staff devised myriad little tricks to boost the model's realism. Airplanes in flight cast shadows. Waterfalls were shrouded in spray. Clouds of real water vapor hung over the mountains. Theatrical lighting brought on dusk, drew the eye to specific targets, manipulated mood. And the highlight, the motorway, whizzed with motion.
Not everyone was charmed by Bel Geddes' highways. Among their critics was Lewis Mumford, who in the years since cowriting the second townless highway piece had risen to fame as an author and social critic. Mumford's most recent book, The Culture of Cities, on the evolution of human settlement from medieval town to megalopolis, had been hailed by Newsweek as " one of the most significant works of creative scholarship to come out of America" and had landed him on the cover of Time. Eight years as a columnist for The New Yorker had given him a reputation as the country's toughest and most clear-eyed judge of architecture. Mumford found Futurama little but window-dressing on musty ideas, a preposterous glorification of big, of more, that reminded him of " the tinny world of a Jules Verne romance."
" Mr. Geddes is a great magician, and he makes the carrot in the goldfish bowl look like a real goldfish," he allowed, but " the future, as presented here, is old enough to be somebody's grandfather." Futurama's overbuilt expressway, he wrote, with what now seems prescience, would " prevent a motoris
t from enjoying anything except the speed of his journey and the prospect of getting to his destination soon."
The Chief wasn't impressed, either, and thought Bel Geddes a crackpot; the last thing the country needed was fourteen-lane bands of concrete crisscrossing the hinterlands. MacDonald was deeply annoyed when the White House hosted an informal stag dinner for the designer in late March 1939, shortly before the fair opened—even though much of the discussion centered on Toll Roads and Free Roads.
Perhaps sensitive to such doubts, GM's high command emphasized in public comments that Futurama was not intended as a literal forecast of the roads to come, but, in the words of company president William'S. Knudsen, " to give expression to our belief that such development will take place on an important scale and perhaps within a shorter period of time than many people now realize."
Without question, the exhibit made MacDonald's job easier—nothing he did could have so whetted the public's appetite for modern urban highways. And the exhibit's timing couldn't have been much better, coinciding as it did with the release of the bureau's opus. Still, the Chief avoided acknowledging Bel Geddes. When he was called on to speak at a dinner with GM officials in November 1939, he chose a narrow path for his praise: Futurama had been good publicity for the highway industry. " Those of us who are in the highway field, as public officials, have lacked a public relations department to sell that idea to the public on the scale that you are selling it here," he said. " On behalf of the Public Roads [administrators] in the Government, and my associates in the highway field, we express our profound thanks to General Motors for doing this public relations job for us, and for doing it so well."
