Down to Earth_Nature's Role in American History

by Ted Steinberg

  “THIS CAR NEEDS ETHYL”

  The makers of Ethyl gasoline touted the power and pickup that came with the use of its product but chose not to highlight the lead that was one of its main ingredients. (Time, November 20, 1933)

  Not that public transportation was without problems. Streetcar companies throughout the nation were buckling under from debt. They were saddled with municipal regulations that forced them to keep fares low and often prevented the elimination of unprofitable routes. In addition, unionized transit workers compelled the companies to pay high wages. The combined effect of all these trends placed the industry in jeopardy before 1920, but they alone did not lead to its demise. It would also take the collective actions of the auto, truck, tire, and oil companies, in league with the federal government, to help accomplish that.18

  In 1932, GM launched a plan to buy up urban transit systems throughout the nation and replace the trolleys with buses, another one of its product lines. One theory has it that the company did this not so much to destroy mass transit as to create a market for its diesel buses. Joining forces through a complex interlocking directorate with a group of jitney companies—the streetcar’s competition—GM spent 18 months in the mid-1930s putting New York City’s trolley system, one of the world’s largest, out of business, substituting buses in the process.19

  In 1936, GM formed National City Lines, a consortium made up of Firestone Tire and Rubber, Phillips Petroleum, Standard Oil of California, and Mack Manufacturing, the truck company. Over the course of the next decade, the group took control of almost 40 transit companies located in 14 states. It also acquired a controlling interest in a number of other companies located in four additional states.20

  Eventually the federal government caught on to the National City scheme and in 1947 a grand jury indicted the company and its affiliates—GM, Firestone, and the others. Prosecutors brought suit against the consortium for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890), which prohibits companies from conspiring to restrain trade. The government argued that the National City group required the streetcar companies to pledge never to use electric trolleys and forced them to buy supplies—buses, tires, and so on—exclusively from the consortium. The case dragged on for eight years; in the end the government triumphed. Although acquitted of the more serious charge of conspiring to restrain trade, the court did find that the group had entered into a “collusive agreement” to monopolize the transit market. It was, however, a hollow victory. GM alone sold buses to National City worth roughly 25 million dollars, and yet it and the other guilty companies walked away with fines of 5,000 dollars each, the convicted executives with just a one-dollar penalty.21

  Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, meanwhile, was funneling huge amounts of money into building roads but little into mass transit. As far back as 1916, the Federal Road Act made funds available to states to establish highway departments. Legislation passed in 1921 set up the Bureau of Public Roads and outlined a plan for a network of highways linking cities with more than 50,000 people. But it was under the New Deal that road-building in America began in earnest. Nearly half of the two million people employed in New Deal programs worked constructing roads and highways. During the decade of the 1930s, the total amount of surfaced roads doubled, to more than 1.3 million miles, while mass transportation languished. Public transit commanded just a tenth of the funds that the Works Progress Administration expended on pavement.22

  America was well on its way to becoming what one critic has termed an “asphalt nation,” as a variety of forces—serious weaknesses in the streetcar industry, GM’s quest to sell buses, and the state-sponsored building of roads during the Depression—limited the choices available to consumers. No outright conspiracy worked to defraud the American public; people had a certain measure of control over the autocentric decisions they made. Indeed, many no doubt enjoyed the pleasures that came with driving a car. But that said, for all the freedoms that accompanied automobile culture, it was (and is still) the case that they often distracted people from the larger economic forces shaping their lives.

  TO BUILD IS HUMAN?

  Were it not for World War II, the automobile’s rise to power no doubt would have continued unabated. The war, however, put a dent in American auto culture. The production of cars for civilian use ended, temporarily, and gas rationing began. Posted highway signs read “Victory Speed 35 Miles Per Hour” in a further attempt to save both oil and rubber to aid the Allied cause. Mass transit ridership increased, while the number of miles Americans traveled in cars fell from 334 billion to 213 billion between 1941 and 1944.23

  Indeed, the war years emerged as a moment of ecological and social possibility, a brief period of innovation that bucked the trend toward more automobiles and roads. In the Los Angeles area, a place now known for its love affair with the car, arose a housing development that shunted the automobile to the periphery. Completed in 1942, Baldwin Hills Village consisted of garden apartments built around inviting expanses of open space. Planners and architects created a pedestrian-friendly community that turned out to be one of the city’s most vibrant neighborhoods.24

  But once the war was over, the nation’s romance with the car reemerged to take command of the American landscape. On July 3, 1945, the Ford Motor Company, which had suspended civilian production in 1942, built its first new sedan for domestic use. It took just a month for the assembly lines to gear up to raise production to 25,000 cars per day. Soon thereafter the nation’s roads and streets became choked with traffic. “AVENUE TRAFFIC IS TIED UP BY CROSS-STREET CONGESTION,” proclaimed one New York newspaper, a headline that would seem silly today.25

  “RIDE TOGETHER, WORK TOGETHER”

  In 1942, the Japanese blocked American access to Asian rubber, stimulating a call for carpooling to conserve this precious resource. (Library of Congress)

  Even before the war, some city planners had discovered that building more roads to solve traffic problems did not always work. In fact, under some circumstances adding a new road to relieve congestion actually made the traffic move even more slowly, a condition known as Braess’s paradox after the German mathematician—Dietrich Braess—who first explained the problem in 1968. Although the theory behind the paradox was still unformulated in the 1940s, New York City planners watched firsthand as new bridges and roads went in only to find that they worsened traffic, as motorists jammed both the new and the old routes.26

  Such complexities, however, were lost on Robert Moses, a road builder to match any in history. Born in 1888 and raised amidst great wealth, Moses went on to hold a long list of public appointments, including stints as the head of New York City’s Park Commission and the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. For four decades, Moses wielded power in one capacity or another in New York, using his influence to help reshape the city and the surrounding areas into the megalopolis that it is today. His achievements were colossal. Just about every major highway that exists in the New York City area was a Moses creation: the Van Wyck, the Bruckner, the Major Deegan, the Whitestone, the Clearview, the Cross-Bronx, the Staten Island, the Brooklyn-Queens, and the Long Island expressways. He also was responsible for building 416 miles of parkways, roads that barred trucks and that stretched out into the surrounding Long Island suburbs, plus major bridges such as the Triborough, the Verrazano, the Bronx-Whitestone, and the Throgs Neck, among others.

  Before Moses came along, rarely was a highway built within the confines of an American city. There were roads, to be sure, that connected one city with another, roads that existed on the outskirts of urban areas, but few roads barreled straight through the heart of a metropolis. The expressway, however, was Moses’s stock in trade. To the question of what to do with the people and buildings in the way, Moses had a simple answer. In his own words: “You can draw any kind of picture you like on a clean slate and indulge your every whim in the wilderness … but when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis, you have to hack your way with a meat ax.” Moses, an expert ax wielder, disloca
ted an estimated 250,000 people from their homes to build the roads he said the city needed. “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” he was fond of saying.27

  But Moses did more than just uproot a quarter-million people. His environmental legacy has been even more profound. The roads he built, with nary a thought given to mass transit, brought suburbanization, following furiously, in its wake. And because the suburbs had fewer people per given unit of space than higher-density cities, they were unable, until far into the future, to support a mass transportation system. This made roads a self-fulfilling prophecy. As a result, places such as Long Island became giant parking lots, with commuters inching back and forth between suburban homes and jobs in New York City.

  The road that did more than any other to transform Long Island into a huge stretch of suburban auto-centered sprawl was the Long Island Expressway (LIE). In 1955, the year workers fired up their bulldozers to make way for the LIE, approximately 90,000 drivers made the commute from the island into the city. In the next 30 years, went the prediction, population growth would double the number of commuters. The LIE was originally designed as a six-lane road—three lanes in each direction. A single lane could handle roughly 1,500 automobiles per hour, giving the road a capacity of 4,500 cars in each direction. The road, in other words, would be able to handle just five percent of the island’s 1955 commuter population.28

  Recognizing that the numbers did not add up, some foresighted planners advised setting aside the center of the expressway for mass transit. Such a rapid transit system would be able to accommodate 40,000 people each hour, nearly 10 times what the road would accomplish. One study estimated the cost of the mass transit option at approximately 21 million dollars, a minuscule amount compared to the 500 million dollars earmarked for the expressway. Moses, however, would hear none of it. He forged ahead with the expressway before the mass transit study was even completed, making it impossible to add the track without spoiling the work already accomplished. Moreover, by failing to acquire the rights of way (the space necessary to build such a mass transit system), Moses foreclosed it as a future option. Whenever planners returned to study the feasibility of increasing public transportation, they discovered that acquiring the land on either side of the expressway—now densely packed with homes and businesses—was prohibitively expensive. Moses built his road, and commuters to this day are paying the price. (Although the Long Island Rail Road predated Moses, by the time he left office in 1968, it had become dilapidated and so thoroughly trounced by competition from the new highways—which, once built, had nowhere near the labor costs involved in hiring railway conductors and engineers—that one reporter described it as “the kind of train that, if smaller, would make your little boy cry if he found it under his Christmas tree.”)29

  Moses—who, ironically, never learned to drive—was surely an extreme example of where the obsession with automobile travel could lead. But what happened in New York was hardly unique. Beginning in the 1950s, planners throughout the country began ramming highways through cities, linking urban centers with surrounding suburbs and shortchanging mass transit in the process. The driving force behind all the road-building and suburban expansion was a set of federal programs that had one thing in common: They conceived of cities as primarily dinosaurs and sought to help residents escape them.30

  Nothing worked to encourage the flight to the suburbs more than the Interstate Highway Act of 1956. By the 1950s, a number of special interest groups lined up to support federal funding of more roads—the automobile industry, truckers, bus operators, oil companies, the asphalt and construction industries, plus various labor unions. And if this coalition of powerful lobbying groups was not enough, the Cold War gave legislators another reason to support an elaborate road network. The reasoning went as follows. The threat of a nuclear attack made it imperative for the nation’s population not to congregate in large urban agglomerations. Small-scale cities and low-density suburban communities connected by a vast network of superhighways would thus help ward off the Red Menace.31

  In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower formed a committee to explore the nation’s need for roads. Its chairman was Lucius Clay, who held a seat on the General Motors board of directors. The committee recommended—no doubt much to Clay’s delight—what ranks as the most formidable public works project in the nation’s history. It consisted of a massive road-building program that became the basis for nearly all the suburban sprawl that has come to define the geography of modern America. The passage of the Interstate Highway Act provided 50 billion dollars over 10 years—figures suggested by Robert Moses, who played a major role in designing the legislation—to build 41,000 miles worth of interstate highways. The government would assume 90 percent of the cost, with individual states making up the balance.32

  “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country, and vice versa,” Charles Wilson, GM’s president, announced the year following the passage of the act. Such self-serving comments aside, there is no question that the federal highway legislation boosted the bottom lines of America’s automakers and the other special interests, from oil to asphalt, that lobbied for its passage. Mass transit continued on its relentless downward spiral, while expressways stretched out toward the horizon. Not only did the 1956 legislation earmark billions for roads, but it also set up the Highway Trust Fund, which allowed the government to tax gasoline and tires for use in building more roads. Just one percent of the money in the fund has gone to support mass transit. Is it any wonder that, as early as 1970, an automobile-centered city like Los Angeles managed to devote a third of its total land surface to roads, parking lots, and driveways?33

  Never did the prospects for suburban expansion look brighter than in the postwar period. Not only did the federal government provide funds for roads, but it also established an entire host of programs and policies that inspired the building of homes in auto-dependent suburbs. The impetus for this move was the postwar baby boom, which strained the housing supply. To deal with the shortage, the U.S. government, prompted by builders, guaranteed low-interest Veterans Administration and Federal Housing Administration mortgages. Just as important, the federal tax code was changed in the 1940s to allow homeowners to deduct both mortgage interest and property taxes. Renters—and the vast majority of big-city dwellers were renters—were given no such deduction. The tax break amounted to a huge federal giveaway that fostered suburban homeownership at the expense of low-income renters in urban areas.34

  In 1950, America’s suburban population stood at 36 million. Twenty years later, the number had doubled to 74 million. In 1970, there were more suburbanites than city dwellers or rural folk. The rush to the suburbs came largely as a result of the U.S. government and its road-building and house-building programs. The price of suburban life has been amortized to taxpayers across the nation, with the benefits going mainly to those affluent enough to buy cars and to live amidst the sprawl, not the poor and minority residents left behind. Urban decay and suburban sprawl remain two sides of the same coin.35

  THE PERILS OF SPRAWL

  In 1946, the Levitt family, whose name has since become synonymous with suburban growth, purchased 4,000 acres of what had once been potato farms on Long Island and turned it into a town with over 17,000 houses. They named their creation Levittown. The Levitts did for housing what Henry Ford did for cars. They figured out how to mass-produce homes and bring them within reach of the multitudes, especially working-class and newly married couples. Time magazine dubbed Levitt and Sons “the General Motors” of housing.36

  BACKYARD BLUES

  Suburbanization led to a major decline in open space, a trend that especially affected children. In 1962, Scott Turner, age seven, sent this letter to President John F. Kennedy. (U.S. Department of the Interior, The Race for Inner Space [Washington, DC: Division of Information, 1964])

  First they brought in bulldozers, a technology developed during World War II, to level the landscape and remove whatever tree cover remain
ed. Then the Levitts divvied up the production process into 27 separate steps, from concrete foundation to landscaped home. From their start on Long Island, the Levitts branched out to colonize old spinach and broccoli farms outside of Philadelphia. They also constructed tract housing in Willingboro, New Jersey. Their success transcended the bounds of these individual communities and ultimately inspired similar residential developments across the nation, in cities such as Boston, Portland, Los Angeles, and Houston, to name but a few.

  During each year of the 1950s, developers encroached on an area one million acres in extent—larger than the size of Rhode Island. As they attempted to maximize profits, builders left very little open space. In the New York metropolitan area, subdivisions built after World War II had just a tenth the amount of space reserved for parks that communities developed prior to the war possessed. As early as the 1960s, planners predicted that Los Angeles County would confront a shortage of recreational open space on the order of 100,000 acres by 1975.37

  Eager for more fresh land, developers entertained the idea of building on marshlands, floodplains, and even hillsides. “With level land near cities getting scarce and costly,” House and Home magazine disclosed in 1953, “many builders are taking to the hills. Big islands of rolling land left high and dry in the first waves of expansion are getting a second look for development. New earth-moving equipment and techniques are making hill building possible as never before.” Split-level homes, developed in the 1950s to accommodate steep grades, proliferated. In the foothills and more mountainous areas of Los Angeles County, for instance, bulldozers made way for more than 60,000 homes. Suburban expansion in places such as southern California, however, entailed significant risks. As Los Angeles developers pressed ever harder against the San Gabriel Mountains, residents paid the price. In 1969 and 1978, for example, the geologically active mountain chain released a torrent of debris—tons and tons of mud and boulders, some the size of cars—that turned quiet suburban life into a nightmare.38