June 29, 1956, was a big day in the United States. It was on this day President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956.
This video, narrated by Walter Cronkite and produced by Caterpillar, explains the provisions of the Federal Aid Highway Act and how the interstate highway system in the United States came about. It also delves into how the interstates were received in various towns across the nation, such as Rolla, Missouri, and Allentown, Pennsylvania.
If nothing else, watch this for the cars, trucks, and off road equipment. It’s eye candy of the highest form.
As a Missourian, not only is Rolla (one of my favorite towns anywhere) examined, it also shows how the first interstate highway project in the nation was built in St. Charles, Missouri.
I hope you enjoy this very informative video. Thanks to George Ferencz (formerly Sally Sublette) for sending this to me.
I just watched the first few minutes (I’ll have to save the rest for my lunch break when I actually have time to watch a 23 minute video), but I love how the first car we see on the new, modern, Interstate highway at around 2:27 appears to be a Nash Metropolitan. Not exactly the big American highway cruiser designed for these sorts of roads.
The future was so bright, we had to wear shades.
I was all of not-quite 3 years old when the act was signed, but I remember my dad working on highway construction sites in the early to mid ’60s as the interstate was being built in Arizona. First it was I-10, and then I-19 was built, connecting Tucson with Mexico, 60 miles to the south. I went to a summer camp near Flagstaff in 1963, and the bus went on a network of two-lane highways. The trip took about seven hours from Tucson to Flagstaff. In 1965, I-10 between Tucson and Phoenix wasn’t finished, and it took about three hours to get from Tucson to Phoenix. Now it’s a two-hour drive (if there aren’t traffic jams!). I-17 from Phoenix to Flagstaff, unfortunately, has become often overloaded on weekends, as Phoenicians escape to high country.
Fascinating. This is only 6 years before I was born, but it always seemed to me as a kid that the Interstates had always been there. (I spent much of my childhood on I95 between Philly and Providence, watching the World Trade Center towers being built as we drove by.)
As it turns it they got it wrong about the impact on local businesses (IIRC there’s even a Ray Bradbury story about that), and perhaps the safety, but much of the rest of it came true.
Love the bit about computers to calculate fill volume.
We’re of similar age, but I actually remember construction on I-75 in and around Atlanta (I would not have been more than about 5 years old).
On our recent trip out West to see the Grand Canyon, we purposely avoided interstates as much as practicable, which made for a much more scenic and enjoyable trip, and not too much lost time, either.
The last time I went to Arizona and New Mexico, I tried to follow Rt. 66 as much as I could. The detour from Seligman to Kingman was beautiful and mostly deserted.
Anyone with even a remote interest in the subject (pretty much anyone who reads this site qualifies) should read “The Big Roads” by Earl Swift.
It covers the history of US roads from the early 20th century “Auto Trails” to the enormous politics behind the Interstate Highway System (Spoiler: Ike didn’t like it, and so many times it almost didn’t happen).
I’ve been meaning to contribute a review of the book to this site, but time.
I watched this last night. In our annual summer pilgrames from Iowa City to the Rockies in Colorado, starting in 1961, each summer there would be a bit more of I-80 to take, and get us off the tedious Route 30 or 6, which invariably got badly backed up behind some semi truck doing 45, which was pretty typical back then.
Ironically, when I lived in Iowa again in 1971-1976, I used to make a point to take the old two lane highways instead of I-80. By then they were dead, once one got west of the Missouri, and the trip was much more fun and atmospheric instead of the conveyor belt of I-80. One could find interesting things in the small towns and along the way.
Last October I took 30 to break up the monotony of i80 through a good chunk of Nebraska on the way to Denver. I got off the interstate at Grand Island, took it to a hotel in Kearney, and proceeded the next day all the way to where we could make the 80/76 junction. 30 Parallels the Union Pacific tracks the whole way, with huge back to back freight trains to watch. It probably ate up more time at slower speeds and the road was a bit rough but I’d do it again, and maybe for even longer stretches.
I love the ending – “Presented as a public service by Caterpillar Corporation.” Yes, nothing for them in this at all. 🙂
This was fascinating to watch on several levels. The predictions of no more bad accidents and no more traffic jams proved to be woefully off. I wonder if our hightway engineers noticed the lack of guardrails anywhere along those new highways.
And all of those main street businesses did fine, unless they were in towns that were not near the new route. Places like the resorts at French Lick Springs down in southern Indiana died after the new highways bypassed their area of the state. Railroad service to a city proved to be a poor substitute for highway access.
And wow, what a sales job! Just $9 per year for all of this! This was that midcentury business-government coalition at its peak. “We won a war, we can do anything!”
Jim, I showed this video to a highway engineer who lives here in town. His observations…
– The guardrail is indeed sparse. He also had concern (and amusement) about the guard cable tied between wood posts that looked like trimmed down telephone poles. He said while the cable might stop you, you’re hosed if you hit one of those closely spaced posts.
– He noticed the narrow, mountable median in some sections. He compared that to the medians used today, stating any median that narrow would currently have a barrier wall.
– Seeing all the concrete made him happy as it provides a longer life than asphalt.
– The road signs were black with white letters. He said that was obsolete years ago.
– He, too, lived in Rolla for three or so years; I did go to college with him. Not only did he recognize some of the buildings and locations, he noticed the ’55 Ford taxi twice seen in the background. The first time was with the hotel owner, with the second being when the cop was talking.
– The boy in Rolla, who was with his mother, looks a tremendous amount like a guy he knows who lives in Rolla and would be about the same age now.
– From the financial and maintenance side, he told me the feds now contribute 80% on federal aid routes, providing the state has a minimum dollar amount to pony up. If they don’t, no federal aid.
He’s an observant guy. What I noticed was none of the Caterpillar equipment had any type of rollover protection for the operator.
There were also several Studebakers and an abundance of Chrysler products.
I love the ending – “Presented as a public service by Caterpillar Corporation.” Yes, nothing for them in this at all. ?
Ha! An early form of product placement, no doubt!
Lack of ROPS/FOPS notwithstanding, I love the industrial design of Cat equipment from this time period – somewhat art deco-ey, and pretty consistent across very different types of machines.
Right here in Tucson, what was known as the Benson Highway had a whole lot of motor courts and such. I-10 absorbed some of that highway, but in Tucson, it was built more or less parallel, and the motor courts and other small businesses mostly died.
I like films like this. Thanks Jason.
So many points and counter points to debate about this film. We all know about how some communities died by being bypassed by freeways and reducing congestion etc. Here is a photo of the 401 in Toronto in 1958:
http://www.thekingshighway.ca/PHOTOS-7/hwy401-12_lg.jpg
This part of the road is 14 lanes today and as congested. (Check out the website for other fascinating content. http://thekingshighway.ca)
What you can always take away is how some things haven’t changed like truck trailers and trains, how things were built right initially and there has been no need to change design.
Another point is to think of all that happened between 1956 and its projected completion in 1975. Vietnam, Watergate, cities emptying out to the suburbs, the rise of air travel, the space race etc.
In the movie, they feature Service Areas. I thought in the US, the Service Areas were only on toll roads because they are business. Freeways only have Rest Areas because the freeway was to be ‘free’. That’s why there are all the businesses at every exit.
I would love to hear many more points to consider.
I wouldn’t say there have been no changes to the design, although the changes I can think of are more like incremental improvements rather than fundamental changes. Namely, some of these early freeways have very short on-ramps by today’s standards. They may have seemed adequate at the time, but can make trying to merger onto the highway in an econobox kind of scary. And some of the early cloverleaf interchanges had traffic entering the highway sharing the same lane with traffic exiting the highway, which was kind of dangerous.
No time wasted in traffic jams? Hahahahahahaha!
Unfortunately, no planner ever figured that a driver would use the interstate for the local commute, only going one or two exits. They always assumed that anyone who got on the interstate was heading for the next state, at least, and local commuters would keep to the local streets.
Yeah. Right.
But in that film they said “You’ll be able to live up to 30 miles from work and still get there in half an hour.” So it sounds like they did plan on Interstates being used by commuters, at least for commutes from the suburbs to the city.
Yep, VERY laughable during “Rush Hour.” That’s why I stay away from the Interstate unless I’m absolutely in a BIG hurry. Obviously drivers today have taken too much advantage of that excuse.
Yeah. Four hours from Los Angeles to San Diego, bumper-to-bumper crawl. That’s what we experienced last year, and friends found that to be true this year.
I can fully appreciate the Interstates, as I have very good memories of the family vacations during the second week of July ever year: 1957 was St. Augustine, FL, ’58 was Myrtle Beach, ’59 was a tour of the Catholic shrines in Quebec, forget ’60, ’61 was Nag’s Head.
And all trips (except ’57) were done in whatever mom’s Chevrolet was that year, with two of mom’s sisters along, each had absolutely opposite demands as to whether the windows should be up or down, no air conditioning, and damned few Interstates once you got off the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
I don’t think we had air conditioning in a family car until ’62 or ’63. And that Florida trip was definitely on US1 – because there was no other alternative.
Feels weird to think of that now, since I hit St. Augustine at least twice a year for four day weekends, and am hitting it again next weekend, first long trip on the new Gold Wing. And now my dream is to do Key West to Calais, ME only using US1. Hopefully next year.
On a trip down the east coast from Nova Scotia to Florida in 1969 there were still portions of I-95 not finished in parts of the Carolinas and Georgia. The old two lane highways and small towns, accompanied by Taj Mahal playing on the 8 track, were the most memorable part of the trip.
I have childhood memories of Highway 9 in Maine (the main road between the Canadian border crossing at St. Stephen/Calais and Bangor), being unpaved as late as the early 1960’s. For young kids in the back of a station wagon, several hours on a hot, dusty, gravel road through uninhabited scrubby woodland was torture 🙂
Thanks for posting, Jason! It’s nice to see how the IHS was presented to the public and what intentions/ambitions were (or were *stated* to be). Sure, it was a cash cow for the road-building industry, but what if that big Federal push for a national system had waited even another handful of years?
I’m Paul’s age, and so watched it all gradually fall into place from late-50s onward. I feel o-l-d asking nieces, nephews, or students to image a life without the Interstates……
Watching the film, it brings to mind how the Interstate Highway system made the winners and losers in the towns it affected. And how poor planning on the part of some cities doomed them in the long run. My home town of Johnstown, PA is definitely one of the losers.
It’s mentioned that the Interstate system had to connect up all 209 cities in the US with a population of 50,000 or larger.
When I was a child, Johnstown, PA was a city of 25,000 with another 30-32,000 people living around the town in the suburbs and working in the area. Now, Johnstown was physically set up with a real hard-set class structure. If you were poor, you lived in the city, down in the valley (Johnstown is a mini-Pittsburgh, two rivers come together to form a third) and you worked in the steel mills throughout the valley. If you were well off, you lived in the suburbs on the hills surrounding the city. The suburbs started out due to the 1889 flood, and got a boost by the 1936 flood. By the time I was a child, the dream of most every person in the area was to live on the high ground. Only the poor and ‘undesirable’ for the most part lived in the city itself.
During my late elementary school years there was a real push for “consolidation”. In the late 50’s/early 60’s it was THE political movement of the moment. Bring the suburbs into the city under one government, giving us a city of 55-57,000 people. Making us the 210th city in America of the necessary size. If we had done that I-80 thru Pennsylvania would have been legally forced to dip south and touch Johnstown.
The suburbs fought consolidation tooth and nail, and ensured that all the efforts failed. The suburban residents patted themselves on the back and smugly relaxed that they were still separate from all those poor folks. Those undesirables.
And access to Johnstown continued to be limited to US219 from Somerset on the PA Turnpike heading north, and PA56, a winding cow path from Bedford (again, off the Turnpike) in the east connecting up with US22 in the west. You also had a third alternative, PA271 which went south west to connect to Ligonier on US30. This was an Alpine set of twisties thru the Laurel Mountains, best known as the road where Augie Duesenberg was killed in a car crash.
So Johnstown, in it’s suburban smugness, managed to cut itself off from the rest of the state – an attitude shared by a lot of the residents. And in the 70’s and 80’s the steel mills and neighboring mines started shutting down. Then came the 1977 flood which delivered the town a kick that it’s never recovered from. If you’ve ever seen the 1981 Tom Cruise movie “All the Right Moves”, that’s Johnstown. Picked for the location because we had the highest unemployment in the country at that time.
For the next twenty five years the town survived on Congressman John P. Murtha’s rampant pork-barreling. Some of you may remember back in the 90’s when the news media picked on him as being the worst example of government waste in Congress. That attitude looks a lot different when you’re counting on the guy to keep your town alive. By the time I was living in Virginia, and going back a couple of time a year, I could see both arguments.
I finally moved south in 1998, realizing that there wasn’t much left for me in town other than motorcycle clubs, bars, and an incredibly insular attitude on the part of the residents. And while I could support myself there without a job, I’d probably be heading for alcoholism out of sheer boredom.
By 2017 Johnstown has pretty much been named the poorest and least desirable place to live in Pennsylvania. Unemployment is high, opiate addiction is a major problem, the population is aging because what young people are being raised there move out as soon as they finish high school (those that do, mind you) because there hasn’t been anything for them in the town for the past thirty years.
All because, sixty years ago, the rich folks on the hillside wanted nothing to do with the poor folks in the valley. And didn’t particularly want all that traffic that a massive highway would bring.
“We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” – Benjamin Franklin
I’m noting that the 1936 flood and the 1889 flood were separated by 48 years and that the 1977 and 1936 floods were 41 years apart. They’re due for another one within the next 10 years if the trend holds.
I’ve noticed that topic come up lately on some of my Johnstown Facebook friends. If it does . . . . . . at that point you might as well just bulldoze the town off the face of the map (the city/valley part, anyway), because at that point we’re going to start making rural West Virginia look prosperous.
I haven’t been back to Johnstown since 2014. The place is just getting too depressing to see anymore.
A fascinating subject. One (interesting to me anyhow) point is that if America were ever to have become a nation commuting by rail rather than by car, the possibility of it happening passed away the day the interstate bill was passed. The railroads had huge power and so I wonder how they agreed to permit the building of a system that caused them to lose out to the interstate trucking industry. Perhaps they didn’t recognize the interstates as threat for competition in shipping freight, but rather as a solution to their most hated problem: carrying people. Certainly, the day of the passenger train was dead by 1968 or so when my grade school teacher took our class on a (short) trail trip because she believed that “it would be the last chance in our lifetimes to ride on a train”.
The people who wail about trains and trolleys being killed by GM never seem to know that there isn’t a passenger train service in the world that I know of which turns a profit, outside perhaps a few minor train lines in Japan.
As for trains and freight, perhaps they’re making a comeback, but I had experience in the late 1980’s with the opening of a 1.8 million square foot retail distribution center. We had 44 receiving docks for trucks, and 66 docks for shipping, and -one- rail siding which allowed for 10 cars to be pulled inside for unloading. After a year we abandoned use of the rail siding because the railroads were simply too unreliable. We never knew when a set of cars would arrive; they might be off schedule by weeks. Further, we could never get the railroad to come and pick up the emptyed boxcars. Perhaps with computer identification of individual cars, things have gotten better these days, but for our business, which involved merchandise with a seasonable shelf life rail was worthless – only good for coal and corn which didn’t have to be anywhere on a specific date
The other thing about highway building, particularly in/around built up cities, was that all too often, the right of way was through poorer (often where the residents were people of color) neighborhoods where they didn’t have the clout to resist the highway to slice up their neighborhood.
Perhaps lack of clout was a contributing factor, but I would submit that there were bigger, more practical issues that contributed to what we now refer to as “disparate impact.”
Obviously, state and city officials usually didn’t want highways to be routed through thriving downtowns, which were used by people of all colors. Whenever possible, it made more sense for routes to run adjacent to urban centers. When the FAHA was signed in 1956, the less expensive housing (typically occupied by the less influential of all colors) was often closest to the noise, congestion and pollution of the city. Since these properties were less valuable, it made securing right-of-ways less costly to the government. And finally, these properties tended to be older and perhaps not as well-maintained, so politician could make hay over these efforts in the name of “Urban Renewal.” So like many complicated issues – such as why Americans favor certain types of vehicles – there is no one, simple reason; it’s a cacophony of laws, motives, and economic factors at play.
Interestingly, my office is at the intersection of two Federal High-Priority Corridors, and I’m watching as rows of 21st century suburban McMansions are being bulldozed to make way for a controlled-access US highway. Meanwhile, modest bungalows on small lots near the urban center – occupied by unassuming, working-class folks who bought them for $30k to $50k – are fetching mid-six figure sums. So we’ve kind of come full circle where I live…
That reminds me of that early 1950s film about Quebec highways in French.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZVIKZXJcU0
At 13:35 you see a vintage view of a interchange of Sherbrooke and Notre-Dame streets at Pointe-aux-Trembles replaced by a roundabout.
At 14:01 the St-Hubert rond-point replaced since by an interchange at the junctions of PQ-1 and PQ-9 now known as PQ-112 and PQ-116.
16:13 vintage view of Blvd Talbot (PQ-54 now known as PQ-175). Today it’s being 4-laned thru the Laurentides Park.
That’s a great clip, thank you.
Canada doesn’t have a broad freeway infrastructure network comparable to the US. Largely because of the harsher climate heading northward, much of our population lives in a long wide ribbon spanning coast to coast immediately north of the US border. The Trans-Canada Highway still has many stretches that are only two lanes. And I recall construction of bypasses, to avoid congestion in smaller communities along the route, didn’t happen until the 1970s in many cases.
The 401 in Southern Ontario is the busiest in Canada, and the busiest highway in North America when it passes through Toronto.
I have driven the 401 between Montreal and Toronto on a few occasions, most memorably in the late 1970’s when there were no posted speed limits on long, straight stretches between villages. I ran those at a steady 90 to 100 miles per hour in my 1967 Barracuda and was passed a few times like I was standing still by guys in Porsche 911’s. Very exciting indeed, but it’s my recollection that a 100 k.p.h. speed limit was imposed shortly thereafter after there were a few horrendous, high speed crashes with multiple fatalities on it.
I’ve enjoyed reading everyone’s comments today (learned a lot from Syke’s especially). There were studies to reassue the local business/hospitality owners (like those in Rolla, MO in the film) that their businesses wouldn’t be hurt by being “bypassed”—did anyone project that the new restaurants/gas/motels would start appearing right out at the interstate junction?
So, let’s figure some reasonably far thinking individual adds in to the movie a section about how, within five or six years, some big monied (non-local, too!) individual is going to buy up land right off the exit ramp (before traffic gets into town) and puts up a restaurant and hotel much better than what’s already in town. And this is going to happen at every significant interchange on the whole interstate system.
Now, how many letters are going to appear in the local congressman’s office within a week (followed by those incredibly expensive long distance phone calls) from the local merchants, who will straight-facedly claim that we don’t need better roads THAT badly? No at the cost of our personal livelihoods dammit! And you better stop this project real fast, or we’ll elect someone next year who will!
Let’s be honest. This entire film was a propaganda exercise to head off anybody thinking the above and organizing some form of resistance. All those examples they brought up were in areas where the local bypass was small, convenient, and there wasn’t enough impatient traffic to wholeheartedly ignore the town completely. Or worse, pull off and spend their money with somebody new located more conveniently than the town.
This was an interesting movie, and I’ve always admired the US Interstate system. Here in BC it is impossible, in 2017, to drive across the province on a 4 lane road let alone a controlled access freeway. 1960 highway system with 2017 traffic once you get east of the Okanagan Valley. It’ll never change either, as we are at the wrong end of the country for anyone who doesn’t live here to care, so a lot of the issues referenced at the start of the movie are all too familiar.
America is lucky that these freeways were built when they were, as I suspect they’d never be able to do it today for reasons beyond just cost.
All over the country, there are still shells of 50-year old motor courts that couldn’t withstand the loss of traffic and the rise of hotel chains. As a kid, i liked the panoramic variation of the two lane, the desperately inventive signage of small businesses along the way, and rooting for Dad’s next multi-car pass.
On the other hand, it took much longer to get between roadside attractions. The interstates changed that. Games like license plate poker or counting the orange styrofoam Union 76 (or was it 76 Union?) balls on car antennae were invented to fill the long hours on the highway. In the days before window film or ubiquitous A/C, families entertained themselves by comparing each other’s station wagon “situations” while passing. Mom had the final word. Any squished down, sardine packed family hauler was awarded her patented catchphrase, “Boy! are they LOADED!”,
Either way, we didn’t stop for local or interstate lunch opportunities. Every morning’s preflight included making a couple of dozen baloney and American cheese or Velveeta sandwiches that were carefully packed in a steel Coleman cooler with bags of cubes from the motel ice machine.
Yep, we did the same.
And being a devout Byzantine Catholic family, EVERY day’s travels had us saying the rosary within the first twenty miles of travel.
Man, I hated that.
Thank you for posting the video. The business owners in the bypassed communities were certainly sold a bill of goods. That is progress.
Enjoyed this a lot. Definitely interesting to see where the assumptions were wrong – overall it was progress though, and certainly reshaped the country even more than this suggested, I would say. And think of all the missed revenue for states if they couldn’t give out speeding tickets on interstates now, let alone gas tax revenue…
Some states keep it sane. In Pennsylvania, only the State Police are allowed to patrol the Interstates, and they’re the only ones who are allowed radar.
Virginia, on the other hand, allows every ticket-hungry local deputy both . . .
And you can’t have a radar detector there.
Thoroughly enjoyable! I’m surprised no one has brought up the story I was always taught: that the primary reason for building the interstate highway system was to facilitate the movement of our military equipment and troops around the country in the event of a war. Anyone ever hear of that?
Yes, that is true, Ike wanted the I’s to connect urban areas, but not go through cities.
“…we don’t need better roads THAT badly?”
And, sure, there could have been some more opposition, but there’d also be other communities saying “build it here, then” to get the new businesses. At the same time, with short multilane tollways/turnpikes built before 1956, there was public demand, just “not in my back yard”.
Grandparents loved the new highways once got more built in the 60’s, could go to St Louis and beyond easier.
And we have come full circle. In three weeks, I’m looking at heading out to a racetrack northwest of Pittsburgh for the MotoAmerica Superbike races. To get there from Richmond, it’s I-95, Capital Beltway, I-270, I-70 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Except that I’m using US17 north of Fredericksburg, because there’s no way in hell I’m driving the section of 95 between Fredericksburg and DC.
Yep, back to the old main roads, just to miss the traffic.
I drive on Hwy 99 in the Wilamette Valley to to avoid the left lane blockers and the road damage on I-5 whenever possible. Hwy 14 between Vancouver and where I-82 crosses the Columbia is a much more pleasant drive than I-84.
ravenuer: “I’m surprised no one has brought up the story I was always taught: that the primary reason for building the interstate highway system was to facilitate the movement of our military equipment and troops around the country in the event of a war. Anyone ever hear of that?”
Eisenhower used that rationale with Congress and he was impressed with Germany’s autobahn. But he offered a military rationale primarily because it would work with many tight-fisted Congressmen from the Taft wing of the Republican party who otherwise opposed domestic infrastructure spending.
This is an interesting film and great discussion. I appreciate the collective wisdom and memories of the OP. I think the IHS contributed enormously to the overall well being of the country despite some negative consequences. It is sad to think how difficult if not impossible it would be today for a President and Congress to agree on an infrastructure project of this magnitude. Personally I long for the return of a functional federal government.