by Earl Swift
It remained to standardize the surfaces of the roads themselves. In 1950–51, the bureau had collaborated on a series of wear tests in Maryland and in 1952–54 had undertaken a $3 million test of asphalt surfaces in Idaho, but a program as big as the interstates demanded a more comprehensive effort. It behooved the bureau to nail down what mixes and thicknesses of pavement lasted longest, and at the same time to establish the maximum loads that pavement should bear, a number on which the states had never achieved consensus.* Turner turned to the Highway Research Board for help and, with backing from an old Arkansas colleague, Alf Johnson, who was now executive director of AASHO, devised what still ranks among the biggest civil engineering experiments in history. On the plains west of Chicago, the bureau and its partners built a chain of six looping test tracks, each a quiltwork of paving types, thicknesses, and base layers, 836 test sections in all.
Then they moved a company of army Transportation Corps soldiers into a barracks at the complex, put them behind the wheels of 126 trucks—everything from pickups to big semi rigs, all loaded with concrete blocks—and sent them around the loops. Nineteen hours a day they drove, every day for two years, maintaining a steady thirty-five miles per hour on the straightaways, thirty in the curves. They racked up more than seventeen million miles.
Along the way, the strain the trucks caused was measured by electric gauges, until three hundred million pieces of data had been recorded on punched paper tape. While a big Bendix computer deciphered the readings, the staff of what would be known as the AASHO Roa Test were measuring the pavement's roughness and grading it on a five-point scale, zero being impassable, five being glass-smooth.
What they learned filled six volumes and came down to this: The thicker the pavement and subgrade, the better. And: Trucks wear out roads in a predictable fashion. As Turner later explained, "We got a fairly simplified equation out of the thing, that X number of trips generated Y amount of damage in Z ... period of time."
The test had limits. It was conducted in a single location and climate, over a fairly short period of time, and its science was only as good as the art to which it was married—predicting traffic volumes and the mix of vehicles for a particular stretch of pavement. As Richard Weingroff, the Federal Highway Administration's unofficial historian, points out: "Life has a bad habit of ignoring predictive formulas."
Just the same, the experiment contributed immensely to the interstate surfaces we drive today. And it continues, after a fashion. The four biggest test loops were incorporated into the lanes of Interstate 80, which had been under construction to the east and west while the soldiers drove. But one of the others, Loop 1, survives a mile or so west of Ottawa, Illinois.
This was the only loop on which trucks didn't roll; Loop 1 was intended merely as a venue to study the effects of weather. More than fifty years later, some of its test sections have devolved to loose gravel, and waist-high weeds sprout from the joints in its concrete.
But when I visited the loop in the summer of 2008, I found that here and there, the pavement looked almost new.
Thomas MacDonald didn't get to see his penchant for research so rewarded. Since leaving the capital, he'd embarked on a new career at Texas A&M, building what is today known as the Texas Transportation Institute, among the nation's leading transport think tanks. His official title was "distinguished research engineer," his duties "to think, suggest, advise and guide." He'd hired a staff of research engineers and built a library. He'd become well known on campus for the big $5,000 car he pulled into the lot every day.
He and Caroline Fuller had married in November 1953 and set up house in College Station with Caroline's sister, Jane. They'd traveled a lot together on the highways that both had worked for so long to build; one year the couple drove more than six thousand miles through fifteen states. The Chief had grown comfortable.
But he'd also grown old. Suffering from an undisclosed ailment, he spent time at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota; afterward, he wrote to a friend that the trip "was very much worth while," as the "people at the Clinic inspire confidence and I feel sure we will be successful in overcoming some difficulties with faithful effort."
He'd been similarly upbeat about another illness in an April 5, 1957, letter to an Illinois colleague: "Some weeks ago," he wrote, "some virus bugs moved in and apparently became quite bad tempered over my failure to show them proper respect by calling in any medical treatment, so they established a play ground of infection which has brought the Doctor in and he has taken over decision as to what I can and cannot do."
The condition evidently had cleared enough that two evenings later, the Chief felt up to going out with Caroline, her sister, and another couple. They had a fine dinner, after which MacDonald bought a cigar; while waiting to attend a play in the university's Memorial Student Center, he settled into a sofa to smoke it. And there he died.
The distraught Caroline could not bring herself to accompany his body back to Washington, where he was to be interred beside his first wife. Texas A&M's Gibb Gilchrist went in her place. He and the casket found a large delegation waiting in Washington's Union Station—Frank Turner, Herbert Fairbank, and other bureau employees, state highway officials, industry bigwigs.
They went to breakfast, then stopped by the funeral home to collect MacDonald's children for the ride to Cedar Hill Cemetery, across the Anacostia River in Suitland, Maryland. The Chief had requested little ceremony and no flowers; on this occasion, his men defied him. Two hundred people, give or take, gathered around the grave. Flowers were everywhere.
Turner and Fairbank were among the honorary pallbearers. The Presbyterian minister kept his remarks brief. "This is not the time or place to laud the man," he said. "Rather, it is the place to call on those who follow him to carry on the great work which he has done for the people of his country and the world."
More expansive eulogies came later. The Washington Post wrote that the Chief "left an inheritance to his fellow Americans which will stand enduringly as a monument to his memory," that everyone "who drives a car or truck, for business or for pleasure, across the face of America stands indebted to this quiet, forceful public servant who earned the title, 'the father of all good roads in the United States.'" AASHO's Alf Johnson figured him "more responsible for the United States leading the world in highways and the use of motor transportation than any other one man."
Fairbank delivered his tribute later in the year, when he was named the first recipient of AASHO's Thomas H. MacDonald Award, the organization's highest honor. The Chief's old deputy was ailing himself; while vacationing in Italy with his sister in the summer of 1954, Fairbank had contracted an illness that the doctors could not identify and that he could not shake. It had forced his retirement in 1955 and continued to limit him.
"Any award made in the name of Mr. MacDonald would have for me now a heightened significance," he said, "because I have been devoting a substantial part of my time during the last six or seven months to a study of Mr. MacDonald's life and work." Fairbank had been examining the Chief's accumulated papers, he said, "from the beginning of his career in 1904, at the very dawn of the modern era of highway building, in the early infancy of automotive transportation, until the moment of his passing from us seven months ago, at the very moment when all he had worked for and hoped for through more than half a century of his life was coming to fruition, a great fruition, that he so clearly and so long foresaw.
"From this review," Fairbank declared, "I have gained, as never before, the conviction that if ever a man deserved the name of prophet it was he. If ever a public servant could truly boast of an administration of the people's business virtually without flaw, it was he. If ever in any man there can be combined just that conjunction of the qualities of the able engineer, the perceptive political economist, the skilled diplomat and the sure and faithful administrator, that it takes to make a great highway engineer, it was in Thomas H. MacDonald that these qualities found their rarest blending."
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BY THE 1956 ACT'S first anniversary, the bureau had reviewed and OK'ed about thirty-two thousand miles of the system's routing. Construction was under way or about to begin on nearly two thousand miles of highway, and contracts had been awarded on more than a thousand bridges. Nearly $2.6 billion had been committed to the work. "We have progressed at a gratifying rate," wrote Bert Tallamy, who by now had assumed command of the Federal Highway Administration, "and we are on schedule."
On paper, the program seemed to be moving briskly. But it didn't always look that way to a public salivating over the prospect of driving faster, farther, more. For most Americans, getting by without wheels had become not only unthinkable, but repugnant. Indeed, with gas cheap and wallets fat, the country's demand for everything automotive seemed unquenchable. Drive-in movie theaters sprang up by the thousands. So did drive-in banks, drive-in laundries, and drive-in restaurants, which often served beer along with burgers, even to patrons behind the wheel.
Detroit could barely keep up. For years, the most optimistic industry forecasts had shortchanged the demand for new iron: 5.8 million cars sold in 1953, 5.5 million during the recession of 1954, a record-breaking 7.4 million in 1955. By the time the Clay Committee convened, there was a car registered for every 3.5 citizens, a truck for every 18—enough rolling stock, Science Digest claimed, to form a nose-to-tail string of autos two hundred thousand miles long.
Those purchases, and the subsequent cost of keeping cars on the road, devoured an ever-greater share of the family budget: 7.3 percent of the average worker's after-tax income by 1956, and the percentage was rising. Cars gobbled vast stores of steel, lead, zinc, rubber, corn, and beeswax; each year the auto industry further consumed the wool of seventeen million sheep, the hides of a half-million cattle, and a mountain of ground walnut shells, which were put to use in automatic transmissions.
With the interstates still on the drawing board in most places, the flood of new cars pouring onto the already choked U.S. highways brought spectacular jams. The Hollywood Freeway, designed for one hundred thousand cars a day, carried half again as many a year after it opened. Eight-mile backups were not uncommon on the San Francisco—Oakland Bay Bridge. Snarls at New York's George Washington Bridge were traced back eighty-four miles—seriously, eighty-four miles—to Monticello, New York.
By one estimate, tie-ups cost New Yorkers more than $1 billion a year in fuel, engine wear, lost productivity, missed sales; a quarter of all the gasoline consumed in American cities was burned, it was said, while motorists sat in traffic. Another forecast held that by 1970, New Yorkers would have to make an overnight trip to reach open country. Travel by horse and buggy had been faster.
No surprise, then, that the new highways couldn't come fast enough. Americans loved everything about their cars, loved driving, loved that they could follow an impulse to go wherever they chose, without a thought to routes or timetables. They loved that they lorded over their surroundings while they did it. They were cocooned, protected from the world, even as they were free to explore it. They could ride in silence or with the radio blaring, need never surrender personal space to a sweaty, foul-smelling stranger, need not suffer inane chatter.
They thrilled to the sensation and sound of movement, the buffet of air through an open window, a big engine's growl and punch. They embraced the status reflected in chrome trim, the subtext each model offered as to income and station and sex appeal.
What wasn't to love about the car? Americans took to it not only willingly, but with gusto. They did not have an automotive life foisted on them; they did not buy homes far from work, or forsake mass transit, or pave over their cities because they were manipulated into doing so by Detroit fat cats, or a government-industry conspiracy, or anyone else. No such subterfuge was necessary. The people chose their path. They wanted what they were getting.
Now they wanted the barriers to their automotive pleasure lowered. They wanted interstates, and damn it, they wanted them pronto.
Among the few voices raised against this almost universal enthusiasm was that of Lewis Mumford, who a quarter century before had teamed with Benton MacKaye to call for townless highways and who, in the intervening years, had grown into a celebrated critic of art and architecture, a force for deliberate city planning, and a thinker and writer of national renown.
His rise had been unlikely, at best. Born out of wedlock, raised by a drifty and self-obsessed mother, plagued by rotten teeth and bouts with both malaria and tuberculosis, Mumford had abandoned his formal education after a brief flirtation with college, choosing instead a course rare even a century ago: he fashioned himself into a self-taught man of letters, an intellectual without academic credentials, taking his schooling from books, mentors, a circle of brilliant friends, and from firsthand observation on his travels both near and far from home.
Beginning with walks. They were a habit formed in his early childhood, when his retired step-grandfather had taken him from his Upper West Side apartment on daily explorations—to Central Park, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the American Museum of Natural History; to the west along Riverside Drive, a promenade lined with shade trees and big, fine houses overlooking the Hudson; through an Upper West Side still sprinkled with loose chickens and vegetable gardens. By the time he started school, Mumford had encountered a few backfiring, clattering horseless carriages. He responded the way pretty much every city kid did at the turn of the last century; he yelled, "Get a horse!"
As the years passed, he'd ranged farther from home, almost always on foot, past workers erecting early skyscrapers, among block on block of Irish tenement, down streets echoing with the clop-clop-clop of hooves on cobblestone. New York had been an intimate city, by today's standards. Smells filled the air—of cooking, and manure, and slaughterhouses—and shouts, too, of merchants and teamsters, arguing couples, children playing in the street.
Before his eyes, it all had changed. Electric streetcars pushed the city's edges outward. On his forays beyond the East River, into Queens, Mumford had found truck farms, bogs and untidy forest studded with surveyor's stakes, and trolley tracks dissecting open ground that soon would sprout houses by the hundreds, by the thousands.
Digging the subways had started in 1900; within a few years, trains ran underground from the Battery to beyond Harlem and into the Bronx. Manhattan underwent spectacular change, ever-taller buildings colonizing the island's middle, chicken pens giving way to new housing. And everywhere came cars and trucks, and the din of horns, engines, and brakes, the burps of choking exhaust.
Mumford had gained a framework for his observations in the fall of 1914, when while browsing in a library he encountered a slim book titled Evolution, its coauthor a lanky, bearded Scot named Patrick Geddes—no relation to Norman Bel—most often remembered today as the father of modern city planning. Actually, Geddes was a biologist who defined his science broadly. He believed that one could not study an organism, man included, without exploring the context in which it lived and whatever mechanisms for living such a creature devised. In the case of humans, the greatest of mechanisms was the city, which in Geddes' view was as much a part of the natural world as a bear's den, a rabbit warren, or a beehive, and which was best judged by whether it enriched the lives of its occupants. Cities "worked" not just when they balanced their books, or kept crime off the streets, or picked up the garbage in a timely fashion, but when they fulfilled their more important function of facilitating human interaction—which was, after all, the reason people gathered in cities in the first place.
By extension, good architecture incorporated as much sociology as it did engineering or design. A building's scale and orientation, its relationship to its neighbors, the mood it created in those who beheld it, could fuel a neighborhood's vitality or hamper it. The width of streets, the presence of trees, the press of high-rises—all were part of the agar in the municipal Petri dish.
Mumford had become an enthusiastic disciple. After a brief stint in the navy at the close of
World War I, he'd offered a short essay on housing ideas to the Journal of the American Institute of Architects. It owed much to Geddes but boasted Mumford's own sure and elegant writing voice; articles followed for the American Mercury, the Freeman, and the New Republic, and he'd landed a short-lived position on the staff of a small socialist magazine called the Dial.
He'd also fallen hard for its editor's dark-eyed secretary, Sophia Wittenberg, whom he married after a long and uncertain courtship. The same year, 1922, he'd hit on the idea for his first book, a history of utopias. He'd researched it by the end of March and turned in the finished manuscript in June; it was in stores by the year's end.
The turning point of Mumford's career had come in 1931, when the college dropout was a visiting professor of art at Dartmouth College and published a well-received book, The Brown Decades, that chronicled the flourishing American arts in the wake of the Civil war; among the architects, visual artists, and writers it celebrated was landscape genius Frederick Law Olmsted, who, seventy years before Radburn or the townless highway, had used underpasses to separate pedestrian and carriage traffic in New York's Central Park.
The same year, Mumford had embarked on a project that would consume him for the next two decades: a series of four books in which, he would later say, he hoped "to bring together, within a common frame, the ideas I had so far formulated on machines, cities, buildings, social life and people." The first volume, Technics and Civilization, recounted man's early flirtations with machines and his evolving relationship with them since; Mumford came across as an optimist about technology's potential for bettering everyday life.
