The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways

by Earl Swift

  " It will," Clay promised, " achieve our objective while entailing no increase in either the Federal tax rates on these items or the national debt limit." At the insistence of the governors, the committee would place only minimal burden on the states; Washington would cover 90 cents of every dollar spent on the interstates.

  By late December, Turner had taken the report through at least three drafts, each written in longhand, augmented by scribbles on White House scratch pads, and typed late at night at home in Arlington. Successive drafts were mimeographed, distributed to the membership, edited, and returned to Turner, who would consult with Clay on any changes. Turner's final draft declared a " safe and efficient highway network" to be " essential to America's military and civil defense" and played up the latter. " Large-scale evacuation of cities would be needed in the event of A-bomb or H-bomb attack," he wrote. " The Federal Civil Defense Administrator has said the withdrawal task is the biggest problem ever faced in the world. It has been determined as a matter of Federal policy that at least seventy million people would have to be evacuated from target areas in case of threatened or actual enemy attack. No urban area in the country today has highway facilities equal to this task."

  A federal role was essential. " State highway departments cannot meet the need for this type of facility," Turner wrote. " At the current rate of improvement, the interstate network would not reach even a tolerable level of efficiency in half a century. It is clearly necessary in the national interest to accelerate the program."

  Had Turner's contributions to the interstates ended there, with authoring the Eisenhower administration's grand plan, he would still be remembered by the program's students. Francis du Pont, vacationing in Europe, dropped Turner a line from Rome to thank him for " the outstanding job you have done for Lucius Clay and I hope posterity." The committee's report went to the president on January 11, 1955; three days later, du Pont, having returned to the States, quit his bureau post to campaign full-time for it.

  But as predicted, the committee's work was in for a rough ride. Congressmen balked at a provision that would reimburse states for the cost of turnpikes they'd already built. Others scoffed at the administration's insistence that the bond financing didn't really count as debt. Still others objected to the $11.5 billion in interest payments due over the thirty-year life of the bonds; that was money, they felt, better spent on actual roads. The new chairman of the Senate's Subcommittee on Roads, Albert Gore of Tennessee, called it " a screwy plan which could lead the country into inflationary ruin." Criticism bubbled up even within the cabinet. Sinclair Weeks passed du Pont a note questioning the need for the Federal Highway Corporation. " A new agency as proposed seems to me unnecessary and undesirable," he wrote. " There are too many independent agencies in the Government already."

  Eisenhower crafted an elegant cover letter to the report, observing that " together, the uniting forces of our communication and transportation are dynamic elements in the very name we bear—United States," and did his best to soften congressional resistance in meetings with leaders of both parties. He made little progress before presenting the report to Congress on February 22, 1955—where, in hearings before Gore's subcommittee, Harry Byrd lived up to expectations. A native of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, Byrd had rescued his family's small-town newspaper from failure and served four years as the commonwealth's governor, guided in both ventures by one hard-and-fast principle: debt was trouble. Public debt was even more so, amounting, in his view, to a mortgage on every house, property, and transaction. Virginia had not borrowed a dime on his watch. In fact, he boasted, it hadn't issued highway bonds since 1835.

  Byrd's testimony, typed single-space, occupied seven legal-size pages. The Clay plan would " destroy sound budgetary procedure," he said. It used " legerdemain" to disguise debt. It removed the government's highway appropriation from annual congressional review. " Nothing has been proposed during my twenty-two years in the United States Senate that would do more to wreck our fiscal budget system," Byrd warned. " As we spend and spend and borrow and borrow, the least we can do for future generations—our children and grandchildren, on whom we would place astronomical burdens—is to keep an honest set of books so they will know what debts we of this generation have incurred for them to pay."

  Among Clay's defenders was treasury secretary George M. Humphrey, who argued that critics were reading the proposal all wrong. The gas tax was a form of toll, every bit as much as one collected in a booth; it was just based on fuel consumption instead of distance traveled. And the $11.5 billion in interest wasn't wasted. " By paying the interest you will have roads for several years when you wouldn't otherwise have them," he pointed out. " Don't say you don't get anything for the interest money. You do get years of use."

  Still, Clay's proposal was doomed. The Senate killed it by a two-to-one margin on May 25, 1955, opting instead for a bill written by Gore that provided a third as much money for interstates, spread out over five years. Over in the House, it seemed plain to Rep. George H. Fallon, chairman of the Subcommittee on Roads, that both the Gore and Clay bills were headed nowhere. He decided to draft a compromise and turned to Frank Turner for help.

  Tall, bespectacled, baldheaded, Fallon shared Turner's mild manner and devotion to roads. No other subject so captured the energies of the congressman: his rare floor speeches were invariably about highways, which was what, his colleagues joked, his middle initial stood for. The fifty-two-year-old Fallon's only newsworthy moment had come in 1954, when four Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire on the House from the visitors' gallery, spraying the chamber with about thirty rounds. The Big Man from Baltimore, as he was sometimes known, had been a big target; he'd caught two slugs in the hip.

  Now he and Turner crafted a bill doling out $24 billion for what Fallon renamed the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, and relying on tax hikes on fuel, heavy trucks, and tires to cover Washington's 90 percent share—a " pay-as-you- go" feature to satisfy Byrd and other fiscal conservatives. The bill seemed a winner. Lawmakers were predisposed to like the interstate system—after all, it promised federal money, and lots of it, to every state—and Fallon offered a practical plan to pay for it. Except that the U.S. trucking fraternity cared for neither a doubled tax on diesel fuel nor jacked-up levies on tires; both, it complained, would saddle truckers with a disproportionate share of the system's costs. The industry buried the Capitol in a hundred thousand telegrams, ten thousand of them to Fallon alone. The oil and rubber lobbies were vocal in their opposition to the bill, too. Stout hearts quavered on the Hill, and more trouble, of a parliamentary nature, erupted behind closed doors. On July 27, a short while after they killed the Clay bill, congressmen clubbed the Fallon measure to death by a huge margin, 292 votes to 123. His Democratic brethren abandoned Fallon in droves.

  The defeat came as a shock to the bureau, the press, even congressional leaders. It was crushing to Turner, who between the Clay and Fallon bills had been slaving around the clock on highway legislation for close to a year. Francis du Pont passed his office and saw him sitting, stricken, at his desk. Du Pont hurried to his own office and returned with a high-end watch that he'd bought for Turner on his trip to Europe, and that he'd planned to award him on the bill's passage.

  As he presented it, he explained that time was their ally; Turner's patience and hard work would eventually, inevitably, pay off.

  ***

  Dwight Eisenhower assuaged his disappointment over the events in Congress by fleeing Washington for most of August and September, splitting time between his farm in Gettysburg and his wife's home place in Denver, where on most days he squeezed in a little government business among long stretches of golf at the Cherry Hills Country Club. It was while playing a round with the club pro on September 23 that Ike first complained of what he mistook for indigestion, blaming his lunch—a burger with Bermuda onion—and pesky telephone interruptions from the State Department. In the wee hours of the following morning, Mamie and the preside
nt's doctor drove him to Fitzsimons Army Hospital, where all learned that he was having a major heart attack.

  He was still recovering on January 5, 1956, during his State of the Union message. Ike was relaxing in Key West at the time; a clerk read the address to Congress, meaning that a second of the president's important speeches in which he beat the drum for highways was delivered in absentia. " Legislation to provide a modern, interstate highway system is even more urgent this year than last," the speech read, " for twelve months have now passed in which we have fallen further behind in road construction needed for the personal safety, the general prosperity, the national security of the American people."

  Indeed, travel had jumped by a third since 1950. America was home to 62.8 million vehicles, a fast-growing percentage of them trucks that shared, or failed to share, the nation's skinny numbered highways. The average weighed more than twelve tons.

  " If we are ever to solve our mounting traffic problem," the president's message continued, " the whole interstate system must be authorized as one project, to be completed approximately within the specified time. Only in this way can the required planning and engineering be accomplished without the confusion and waste unavoidable in a piecemeal approach." He repeated the pitch eleven days later in his annual budget message. Authorize the system as a single unit, he urged, " in order that it may be accomplished over a period of approximately ten years with the greatest economy."

  The president's highway fever aside, there was little to give a wagering taxpayer much reason to bet on an interstate bill in the coming session of Congress. But much was happening behind the scenes. Back in the late summer, immediately after the Fallon bill's defeat, the trucking lobby had been exultant—its successful campaign against higher taxes had been a glorious success. It was only after the heady rush of victory dissipated that the truckers came to realize: Hey, wait a minute— we're not going to get highways. And with that came the sober judgment that they would benefit far more from the proposed interstates than they would give up in taxes and fees.

  By January 26, 1956, when George Fallon introduced a new highway bill, the truckers had softened their position, and the naysayers in Congress, having had months to mull over their failure to deliver a boon to their constituents, had done likewise. What seemed a lost cause when Ike had his myocardial infarction was beginning to attract something a lot like optimism.

  Fallon's new bill, again crafted with the help of Frank Turner, was much like the old one. It called for 90 percent federal financing of a forty-thousand-mile interstate system, to be built over thirteen years. Fallon called for pay-as-you-go financing but left the details to a separate bill being stitched together by Rep. T. Hale Boggs, a Louisiana Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee.

  On February 6, Boggs introduced the resulting Highway Revenue Act of 1956, which dictated that road-related taxes be set aside for highway purposes. The following week, treasury secretary George Humphrey testified that to really restrict car-related tax money to roads, the government would do well to " follow a practice similar to the practice that is followed for Social Security." The practice in question was a trust fund.

  Congressmen seized on the idea. For the first time in the automobile age, as Boggs told his colleagues, the American motorist would " pay these taxes with the assurance that he will be the direct beneficiary of every penny which he pays and he will pay with the knowledge that every cent derived from these taxes will be devoted exclusively to his personal convenience and safety." In April, Fallon introduced the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, combining his own bill and Boggs's.

  The debate that commenced on the House floor a few days later offered more friendly banter than rhetorical combat. Freshman Democrat Kenneth J. Gray of Illinois walked to the well with a bouquet of artificial flowers representing Fallon's 1955 bill. " Everything looked rosy last year, until the powerful trucking lobby removed one rose from our bouquet," Gray said. He snapped a rose from the bunch, then did the same for the other interests he blamed for killing the measure. " When we were finished, nothing remained but stems that were completely barren."

  Now, he said, it was up to the House to make amends. He urged his colleagues to pass the new bill, to " transform the barren stems into a beautiful and growing bouquet of roses." With that, he pressed a spring-loaded trigger in the bottom of the bouquet, causing a spray of white roses to burst into view. His fellow congressmen roared.

  Gray was pranking to the choir. When it came to a vote, the bill passed, 388 to 19.

  Over in the Senate, the Fallon-Boggs bill was split in two and the halves referred to different committees. Public Works got Fallon's part, chopped out most of its text, and substituted language from Albert Gore.

  The senator was, of course, father to the future vice president and Nobel laureate. The senior Gore had grown up in the Cumberland River valley of north-central Tennessee, had paid his way through the State Teachers' College by fiddling at barn dances and teaching in the rural schools thereabout, and had attended night law school at the Nashville YMCA. He'd eventually won a seat in Congress but had quit to join the army, and while fighting in Europe had a formative experience not unlike that which Ike would later claim: Gore led an attack on a German outpost only to find, once he'd captured it, that the enemy troops had sped off on the autobahn. " They had left that town very quickly," he later said. " It occurred to me then that our country needed something like that for defense, as well as economic development purposes."

  As Tennessee's junior senator he had a second epiphany, this one in the company of Frank Turner. " He invited me to see a new federal highway about a hundred miles from Washington," Gore said, recalling that the journey posed " no big trouble as we went down.

  " But we came back at night and every little piece on each side of the new road there was a honky-tonk or a service station," he said. " In three years there had been so many wrecks that it had been nicknamed ‘Suicide Alley.’ This drove home to me the absolute necessity of the cloverleaf."

  Now he offered a bill that differed only in minor respects from Fallon's. The Boggs half of the House bill, meanwhile, was sent to the Senate Finance Committee, which held two days of hearings on the measure. Again, Treasury Secretary Humphrey testified, and again he made a major contribution. He endorsed the bill with enthusiasm, he told the committee, but according to his projections, Washington's obligations to the states could exceed the trust fund's balance about six years into the program. The feds' regular payments into the kitty would generate a surplus early on, and again at the program's end, but might fall short in the middle, as construction kicked into high gear. He offered a simple solution. And so the bill acquired what became known as the Byrd Amendment, which limited spending each year to the cash expected in the fund. If the treasury secretary projected a shortfall, the payouts to each state would be reduced proportionally to balance the books.

  The amended bill passed both houses on June 26. " It is hereby declared to be essential to the national interest to provide for the early completion of the ‘National System of Interstate Highways,’” Section 108(a) of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 opened. " It is the intent of the Congress that the Interstate System be completed as nearly as practicable over a thirteen-year period and that the entire System in all the States be brought to simultaneous completion. Because of its primary importance to the national defense, the name of such system is hereby changed to the ‘National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.’”

  The finished document extended the interstate system to forty-one thousand miles, all of it designed and built to uniform standards and to accommodate the traffic projected for 1975. It authorized spending $25 billion on the roads over thirteen years, with the biggest outlays in the program's middle, from 1960 to 1967. It further boosted the taxes on gas, diesel, and tires, as expected, as well as the sales tax on trucks and buses; applied a new tax on the camelback rubber used in tire retreading; and imposed an annual registration fee on heavy t
rucks.

  In other words, it bore little resemblance to the bill Ike had sponsored; the chief contributor to the system's financing in the executive branch wasn't the president, but Frank Turner. Eisenhower was back in the hospital, this time recovering from surgery for ileitis. He signed the bill into law in his room at Walter Reed, without witnesses or fuss, on June 29, 1956. Eighteen years after Thomas MacDonald and Herbert Fairbank first committed them to paper, a dozen after Congress formally created them, the interstates were at long last on the way.

  Frank Turner's hand in the success was plain to everyone in the bureau. " Mr. Turner completed his many arduous assignments of a widely varying nature through application of great administrative wisdom, tact, and diplomacy," Cap Curtiss, now the bureau's chief, wrote in a May 1956 performance evaluation. " In addition, he contributed unselfishly of his own personal time to the interests of Public Roads, working long days and weeks continuously.

  " Specifically, his assistance to the committees of Congress considering highway legislation was superb inasmuch as his technical guidance was unusually sound and his personal associations with members of Congress were so well conducted that he added materially to the prestige and confidence of Congress in the Bureau of Public Roads."

  Even before the final votes, Curtiss presented Turner with a $750 check, the largest that the Department of Commerce had granted one of its own as part of a civil service incentive program. The quiet force of Turner's opinions had helped frame committee discussions. His humility, along with his ability to provide the members with virtually any useful statistic, cemented their trust. His obvious devotion to public service earned their respect.

  And he'd had another weapon in his arsenal. All through the previous year, while the Clay Committee had finished its report and the White House had greased the skids for its release, while Congress had debated and killed the highway bills placed before it, planners in the bureau had remained focused on refining the network's routing. In January 1955, the bureau had requested that the states submit requests for interstate mileage in their cities, to be parceled out from the 2,300 leftover miles authorized back in the forties but still unassigned.