As the leading manufacturer of earthmoving, road building, and construction equipment, Caterpillar Tractor Co. had a lot to gain from the ambitious federal-aid highway program that began in 1956, and they came out in force to support it. This dramatic 1958 ad warned that better federal highways might be Americans’ only hope of escaping nuclear destruction.
The small print below the mushroom cloud reassures readers, “This one was only a test (atomic detonation in Nevada).” The copy reads:
“It has been determined as a matter of Federal policy,” reports the President’s Advisory Committee on a National Highway Program, “that at least 70 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.”
But such highways are coming: the 41,000-mile National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.
This tremendous network of no-stop freeways offers other vital defense benefits, too. Obviously, it will speed the movement of men and materiel. But more importantly, it will encourage the decentralization of our industries. Already more and more plants are following these fine new roads out of congested cities, out into the wide countryside just minutes away by swift, safe freeways.
WHAT EVERY CITIZEN SHOULD KNOW
Don’t allow the Interstate-Defense Highway Program to bog down. Find out how it will serve you, how much it will actually cost, how long it will take to finish. Send today for a free copy of an informative booklet, “The Road Ahead.” Write Dept. 12T, Caterpillar Tractor Co., Peoria, Illinois, U.S.A.
The opening passage quotes from A Ten-Year National Highway Program: A Report to the President (sometimes called the Clay committee report), prepared at the request of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and presented in January 1955. That 57-page report discussed the many potential benefits of an expanded and modernized interstate highway network, among them as an aid to evacuation “in the event of A-bomb or H-bomb attack.”
In March 1955, while Congress was still debating the highway program (and now to pay for it), Federal Civil Defense Administrator Val Peterson, former governor of Nebraska, appeared before the Subcommittee on Roads of the Committee on Public Works to reiterate Eisenhower’s concerns that overcrowded roads “would be the breeder of deadly congestion within hours of an attack” and emphasize the importance of improved roads for civil defense evacuations. Peterson explained:
The attractiveness of American centers of population and industry as target areas is obvious when one realizes that one-quarter of the population of the United States is concentrated in our 12 largest cities and their immediate environs.
Nearly 70 million people live in the 92 cities included in our 70 critical target areas. In the light of destructive forces several hundred times more powerful than the bomb which exploded over Hiroshima, we evolved the policy of evacuation of our cities.
There was no alternative. No one near the point of release of this terrific force can survive. … At present, anticipated warning time would not be sufficient to permit complete evacuation from the densely populated areas of all principal cities. However, even with increased warning time, many cities cannot be completely evacuated because of inadequate highways.
With some 70 million people to be evacuated from probable target areas in case of threatened or actual attack our States, cities, and counties do not have highway facilities equal to this task. The rapid improvement of our highway facilities is therefore, vital as a civil-defense measure.
As an example, Peterson said his agency had commissioned a 1954 study of the possibility of evacuating the metropolitan area of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with a total population of a little over 1 million people.
The above graph shows the study’s estimates for how many people could be evacuated from Milwaukee using existing routes (solid line) and with improved routes (dashed lines). Without improved routes and freeways, the study concluded that it would take at least nine hours to evacuate the entire Milwaukee population, but improved roads could reduce that time to as little as five hours.
Even in the ’50s, expecting to have many hours’ warning of a nuclear strike was fanciful, but Peterson was also anticipating the need to evacuate populations threatened by drifting radioactive fallout. In 1954, Peterson had appeared in “A New Look at the H-Bomb,” a cheerful public service film about the dangers of fallout from the hydrogen bomb.
Over the next few years, Subcommittee on Roads chairman Al Gore Sr. would hear similar statements from various state and local civil defense officials and city mayors, jittery about how their constituency might evacuate in the event of nuclear attack. Judging by the transcripts, Gore grew a little frustrated with these pleas; the federal highway plan was not primarily about building evacuation roads. Gore also pointed out that submarine-launched ballistic missiles, then in development, might give civil defense authorities little or no warning, which Val Peterson admitted was true.
Still, nuclear evacuation and civil defense was such a hot-button issue that Section 108 of the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which Eisenhower signed into law in June 1956, officially named the highway system the “National System of Interstate and Defense Highways,” declaring it of “primary importance to the national defense.”
Surprisingly, that free booklet Caterpillar urged people to request, “The Road Ahead” (which you can read via the Internet Archive), made no mention of the specter of nuclear devastation. The booklet instead emphasized that the federal highway program was “the greatest construction job in history—and your greatest bargain.” It proclaimed:
For the first time in 25 years you will have a highway system matched to the capacity of your modern automobile. For the first time, you will get full benefit from the large investment you have made in your family car.
This would be achieved, according to the Bureau of Public Roads, at a per capita cost of less than $9 per year, which would be repaid by a reduction of one cent per mile in “traveling costs.”
Caterpillar also produced a 23-minute “The Road Ahead” short film, hosted by Walter Cronkite, that promised a new world of fast, effortless highway travel, with innumerable social benefits: reduced congestion; shorter commutes; fewer highway deaths; lower insurance rates; “stable or increased property values”; lower auto depreciation; and even “better tempers, calmer nerves” — “improving the very patterns of our lives.” It was a great sales pitch for the late 1950s.
The object of this expensive campaign was not to get people to buy Caterpillar products, but to promote political support for the federal highway program. “The Road Ahead” booklet urged readers:
If there is a public hearing held near you, attend it. Help fight for controlled access roads [i.e., freeways] to save lives and money. If your state legislators are considering laws to help speed the road building program in your state, let them know you are behind them. Rally your friends and the organizations to which you belong in support of such legislation.
(The booklet explained that there would be thousands of public hearings, since federal law required them in every community to be passed through or bypassed by federal highways.)
Within a few years, the highway program was well underway, and I’m sure Caterpillar got a lot of business out of it. However, by the ’60s, the civil defense aspect of the program received less and less emphasis. By 1977, it didn’t rate even a single sentence in America’s Highways 1776 to 1976, the Federal Highway Administration’s 553-page official history of the federal-aid highway program.
It wasn’t that the nuclear threat had gone away — far from it — but that there was no longer even a fool’s hope of evacuating major urban centers in the event of a large-scale attack. The transit time for intercontinental ballistic missiles was now less than 30 minutes from launch to detonation, and, as Al Gore had pointed out back in 1955, sub-launched missiles could arrive even sooner than that. Modern strategic nuclear doctrine also calls for ringing urban targets with multiple independent warheads, making evacuation a moot point except maybe for a few VIPs.
Over time, many of the promised benefits that Walter Cronkite described in that old Caterpillar film proved to be wishful thinking. Whether the interstates are safer is arguable (considered in a death-rate-per-100-million-vehicle-miles sense, they may be, but the total highway death toll continued to rise until the early ’70s, and the net health impact on urban neighborhoods was harsh). However, the highway program certainly didn’t save us from traffic congestion, long commutes, parking problems, or higher insurance rates — and it was always unlikely to save us from the Bomb.
Related Reading
The Automobile and the American Highway (by Jim Grey)
Vintage Snapshots: Freeways And Highways In The ’50-’60s (by Rich Baron)
CC Humor: A MAD Look At Wild Life On Our Highways (by Ex Eugeniac)
The economics of the interstate system was huge. The number of business’s that would be bypassed and the ones that could afford to build at the exits.
Great article Aaron. Thank you.
Yeah, and I guess that’s maybe the difference between me – who was introduced to the whole Civil Defense thing in the mid-to-late 1960s – and someone 10 years older. The thing that I could never wrap my head around when it came to air raid shelters, evacuation routes (I recall signs posted along highways and early Interstates claiming that they were Civil Defense Evacuation Routes), and big drums of drinking water that would conveniently double as emergency toilets while we survivors waited for the threat of annihilating radiation to pass. Who in their right mind would believe that anyone would make it to one of those shelters to eat the “air raid cookies” (as I called them in elementary school) or to get in the car and drive out of town. To where?
The whole concept of nuclear war civil defense was – and is (even if your “civil” is just your fantastically rich pals who you can share a bunker in Costa Rica with) – hopelessly naive. I guess maybe it was believable for a generation of people who believed that nuclear war could proceed at the pace of a planned, logical, incursion. But then we woke up.
None of that has anything to do with the ultimate merits, or downsides, of the Interstate Highway system (in my mind). It’s just kind of a shame that debate on the construction of the system couldn’t have focused on more substantive social and economic issues…rather than illusions that were pretty much out of the window well before the thing ever was completed.
“.. Who in their right mind would believe that anyone would make it to one of those shelters to eat the “air raid cookies” (as I called them in elementary school) or to get in the car and drive out of town. To where?”
I always wondered that myself.
I thought everyone knew you could just Duck & Cover under a grade school Desk.
🙂
Incidentally, Val Peterson was the one who came up with the Duck and Cover campaign, with its mascot, Bert the Turtle.
Greg Strietelmeier is correct about the economic benefit being huge. Had the interstate system (for whatever purpose) not been built, the economy of the US would look much different.
A few years ago, in the middle of Missouri, the I-70 twin bridges over the Missouri River near the town of Rocheport were due to be replaced. For the width and span needed, they were not going to be cheap. Part of the preliminary research included a study showing the expansive reach of that bridge. With I-70 crossing the middle of the nation, thus I-70 being a good route for long-distance movement of freight with that bridge being in the middle the system, I remember something about vehicles that had crossed the bridge had traveled to every other continental state, plus some provinces in Canada, within 24 or 36 hours. Sure you could do that with the 1950s era highway system, but how much longer would it have taken? And it wouldn’t have been as safe.
That is the benefit of the interstate system. Interstate highways are inherently safer than other types of highways given the restricted access, grade separations with intersecting highways, and a lesser speed differential. Access points, intersections, and speed differential are all problems on other highways.
Death rate is an unpleasant topic but relevant. The number of vehicles on the road has increased since, say, 1970 as has the number of vehicle miles traveled. The “per 100,000 vehicle miles traveled” levels that out. Plus, vehicles are being built with more focus on safety and there are more safety related features on highways (guard cable, rumble strips, breakaway guardrail terminals, quality of road markings and signs, that sort of thing) than there was in 1970. The flaw in all this is the human element as, to sound really morbid and cold, people can always find new ways to injure themselves.
Another to consider is capacity. Interstates were built for a traffic prediction of 20 years beyond time of construction. We are well past that 20 year window, and have been for a long time, and many interstates are running at capacity, which is why there is more congestion now than there had been. I’ve seen distinct differences in traffic volume on the same interstates over the past 20 years. There is a reason I-70 is being expanded to three lanes from St. Louis to Kansas City, with many other states having done similar since the interstates were built.
The growth in traffic volumes on the interstates does touch upon what Walter Cronkite spoke to in the video (I have seen that video, but it was a while back) about road user costs. Potholes, delays, road surface condition, and traffic volume all cost drivers money by way of fuel consumption, suspension wear, brake wear, and the simple truth of time being money. Given the sheer amount of time that has elapsed, such things are now much more of a reality on interstates than they had been.
Have there been some unfortunate things happen as part of the interstate system being built? You bet. But that is part of any type of road being constructed. In many locations, I sense new roads aren’t being built so much as portions of existing facilities are being relocated in finite areas or are being expanded modestly in length. The wholesale construction of roads as happened with the interstates is something I doubt any of us will see in our lifetime.
Greg Strietelmeier is correct about the economic benefit being huge. Had the interstate system (for whatever purpose) not been built, the economy of the US would look much different.
It’s utterly inconceivable to actually imagine them not having been built. Every developed country in the world has freeways. Even though Europe is much less car-centric that’s the US, they have excellent freeways. If they hadn’t been started in the US in 1955, it would have been absolutely obvious and necessary to start them a few years later.
It’s not like interstates started it all either; there were quite a few freeways and toll highways already in use at the time (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, etc..). California had a number of them, including the later renamed Pasadena freeway built in 1940. And quite a few in the east too.
A modern freeway system had been seen as an essential development for decades earlier. GM’s Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair helped further that in the populace.
I suspect that the whole defense issue was largely just a way to clear the decks politically.
I so agree. It’s also interesting how in some cases the interstates supplanted (at least parts of) existing federal routes. Jim Gray’s adjacent piece talks about old US 40, which was supplanted by I-70; US 66 was replaced (in part) by I-44; US 61 (again, in part) by I-55. No doubt there are other examples that I’m unfamiliar with.
Chances then states would have built more toll roads/turnpikes/thruways/tollways. I saw a site archived on the Wayback Machine who show a list of some toll agencies who have once more bigger plans for tollways.
https://web.archive.org/web/20001024005419/http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~mn2n/tollroads.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20001030171449/http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~mn2n/tollun.html
The 1977 America’s Highways book I linked above has a fairly extensive discussion of the debate over toll roads in the development of the highway system.
Growing up during this time was interesting. I remember the air raid drills, the siren tests etc. I was in one of the prime East Coast targets, Norfolk VA. Where you have Naval Operations Base Norfolk as it was called in the 50s and 60s, Norfolk Naval Air Station adjacent, Little Creek Amphibious Base, all in or adjacent, Norolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth. Across Hampton Roads (the large mouth of the James River) you have Langley Air Force Base, Fort Eustis, Army training base, Newport News Shipbuild and Dry Dock Company, at that time still a major contractor for USN ships, now the sole source of aircraft carriers and one of two yards supplying Submarines to the Navy.
We had the drills, where we went out into the hallways at our elementary school and knelt down put our heads between our legs and as the pundits put it kissed our a** goodbye. Tidewater VA essentially had a giant bullseye on us for a Soviet missle.
Anyone who has lived here and seen the royal mess created by a hurricane evacuation warning, fully understands what would happen in the event of a war driven evacuation. From Newport News, going West (one of the major routes inland) Interstate 64, The older highway that used to be US168 and the railroad all pass through a lovely narrow stretch where one small non-nuclear bomb can pretty much block that whole area from travlling West, and the US17 crossing over the York river, could also be easily destroyed. Further East you have the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, connecting Virginia Beach to the Eastern Shore (long pennisula comming down from Delaware and Maryland). Again, one well aimed conventional bomb, and Virginia Beach is cut off from one evacuation route.
Since my family moved back into Norfolk in August 1955, I have seen the congestion increase and the almost contiuous construction on Intersate 64 since it was first opened.
I live near Washington, DC, and this Caterpillar ad resembles many ads we see/hear around here these days (usually on radio or on the Web) from industries or trade groups urging passage of specific laws… laws that would, of course, be favorable to the companies paying for the ads. They always use some form of scare tactic… we don’t see many nuclear bomb references these days, but the general idea of this ad is still current.
Part of the issue in convincing the public (and elected officials) about the Interstate Highway System’s merits back in the 1950s was that States were still considered to have supremacy in road building, so there had to be a lot of cajoling to get people to accept the federal government’s role in this. National defense and civil defense were more acceptable policy angles than just pure transportation progress (like Paul wrote above, “to clear the decks politically”). It’s interesting how the Defense aspect of the Interstate system was de-emphasized as soon as the system was actually built.
Regarding evacuation routes, here in Virginia, the state still maintains an evacuation route map that’s updated every five years. The section of State Code requiring this was amended fairly recently too (in 2020), so it’s something that still gets some attention. I’m not sure if this is somehow required by the federal government (i.e., tied to transportation funds, or because all of those routes would likely be Interstate or US highways). But it is, of course, all fantasy. Our roads are clogged by daily commuters, so to expect an orderly evacuation in the case of a large-scale life-or-death emergency is preposterous.
Well, sort of. There had actually been a major about-face among state governors just shortly before Eisenhower’s highway plan was introduced. In 1953, the Governors Conference had actually demanded that the feds get out of the highway business and stop imposing federal excise taxes on motor fuel. In 1954, Eisenhower went to the conference and pitched his tentative ideas for a massive new highway program, which was well-received — basically, the governors decided they were in favor of it as long as they didn’t have to pay for much of it. The Clay committee report, which I linked to above, proposed a 95/5 cost split.
I had sort of assumed that the civil defense angle was a sales pitch to get states invested, but it was actually a very small part of the Clay committee plan. That report is 57 pages plus appendices, and the evacuation issue takes up exactly one-half of one of those pages, which are mostly concerned with economic benefits. Civil defense officials like Peterson were much more focused on the prospect of evacuation, but neither the administration nor the people in Congress who introduced the actual bills seem to have been trying very hard to sell that part.
An interesting take on how the Interstate system was presented to the public. I’m sure the powers that be knew even then that evacuating a city before a nuclear attack was a pipe dream.
I have always admired the system and how it was built, here in Canada it is still impossible to travel from coast to coast on a 4 lane highway let alone an actual freeway. There are a number of locations here in BC where one serious accident can stop all travel for hours with no alternative route (unless you want to add maybe 12 hours to your trip). Up until the 80s it was still possible to build big things here without a decade of fighting and navel gazing (from all sides of the political spectrum), and we missed our chance. Americans are fortunate that they did not.
I wonder how long it took before that 50 mph commute into the city to turn into a 10 mph crawl?
Not long! The thing the glossy advertising version didn’t take into account was that the number of cars on the road was increasing faster than population in many places. Because Peterson talked about their projections for evacuating Milwaukee, I looked up some numbers on that — over the next five years (1955 to 1960), the population of Milwaukee increased about 6½ percent, but the number of registered cars and trucks on the road increased by 12.7 percent.
Interesting how the world has changed in the last 70 years. I was always told the Interstate system was pitched as a way to move troops and equipment quickly in a crisis. In ’55 that was probably true. I live on the I-81 corridor, the bridge I cross every day was finished in ’64. I bought this farm in ’80 and while traveling back and forth to return and visit family over the next 10 years there would be stretches where there’d be a mile or more between cars. Now I-81 is so congested, to have more than a tractor trailer length between vehicles is rare. In the 30 mile stretch from Harrisonburg to Staunton there is at least one wreck every day and traffic will be backed up for miles in a few minutes. In a crisis the LAST place you want to be is on the Interstate and the locals never get on 81. Remember what happened on I-95 in Va last winter when people spent days stuck on the Interstate.
Nuclear threat or not, those Autobahns made an impression on Gen. Eisenhower.
Also making an impression on Ike was the 1919 transcontinental Army convoy. His diary makes interesting reading. It even had a portable machine shop for repairs.
As for strategic relevance, nothing can move an armored division like a railroad.
Good article ;
I was scared by the 1950’s duck and cover drills, we’d seen the films of atomic bombs, who thought anyone would survive ? .
Still glad they built the interstate roadway system but man .
-Nate
Ahh yes, the magic word of the 1950s: “defense.”
Defense Production Act of 1950
Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950
Defense Housing and Community Facilities and Services Act of 1951
National Defense Education Act of 1958
Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 (“…to provide for a National System of Interstate and Defense Highways…”)
I was actually more interested in the basis for their ad I recall those air raid drills. Yet the only way Russia could deliver a weapon would be by plane in 1955. Not missile capable till 1957 which was the very first ballistic missile. Whether accurate across thousands of miles would have been questionable in 1957. But oh the fear.