Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
Speaker 1: the show where America is the star and the American people.
Speaker 1: Although President Eisenhower's name is forever etched upon our interstate
Speaker 1: highway system, Charles Zugg wanted to know if this was true.
Speaker 1: Zug is an assistant professor of Constitutional democracy and political
Speaker 1: science at the University of Missouri. Is a Jack Miller
Speaker 1: Center Fellow. He's also the author of Dwight D. Eisenhower
Speaker 1: and the Federal Highway Act. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2: When you're driving down a highway in the United States,
Speaker 2: there's a good chance you'll see a blue sign with
Speaker 2: five white stars in a circle that reads Eisenhower Interstate System.
Speaker 2: These signs, which communicate the official name of the US
Speaker 2: Federal highway network, reflect the nearly universally held belief that,
Speaker 2: in nineteen fifty six, President Dwight D. Eisenhower built the Interstates,
Speaker 2: That it was Eisenhower who, through transformative leadership, convinced Congress
Speaker 2: and the rest of the American political system that the
Speaker 2: country's largest ever infrastructure project was both popular and necessary.
Speaker 2: That story is incorrect, or put more modestly, it bears
Speaker 2: only a pale resemblance to the truth. Saying that Eisenhower
Speaker 2: is responsible for the Interstates is like saying a quarterback
Speaker 2: who got benched in the first quarter before scoring any
Speaker 2: points is responsible for his team winning the game under
Speaker 2: the leadership of a different quarterback three hours later. Did
Speaker 2: the first QB play some role in shaping the final outcome,
Speaker 2: of course, but was he decisive or even necessary? That's
Speaker 2: much harder to say.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 2: Yet, the Interstates did get built, and Eisenhower has, over
Speaker 2: the decades, gotten the lion's share of the credit. So
Speaker 2: what's going on here? For many Americans, the federal government
Speaker 2: is more of an abstraction than a concrete reality. Most
Speaker 2: of us know who the president and vice president are,
Speaker 2: and maybe some other nationally prominent leaders, such as the
Speaker 2: House Speaker or the Attorney General. We might even know
Speaker 2: of our members of Congress or our state senators, But
Speaker 2: most of the stuff that actually makes up the American state,
Speaker 2: all the agencies and departments and bureaus, are too distant
Speaker 2: from us to matter all that much. This is an
Speaker 2: odd thing because the federal government is immense. In twenty
Speaker 2: twenty two, it employed two point eight seven million workers,
Speaker 2: nearly two percent of the entire US workforce. Its annual
Speaker 2: budget is around six trillion dollars, an incomprehensible amount for
Speaker 2: a populace whose median income is around seventy four thousand
Speaker 2: dollars a year. For all this, how often, is an
Speaker 2: ordinary and likely to encounter the goliath that is the
Speaker 2: US federal government directly. For Americans not serving in the
Speaker 2: armed services, there are two routine points of contact. The
Speaker 2: first is the postal service, which delivers our mail and
Speaker 2: provides some other services, and which has been around since
Speaker 2: the country's founding at the end of the eighteenth century.
Speaker 2: In fact, establishing post offices and postal routes is one
Speaker 2: of Congress's explicit responsibilities in the Constitution. The second is
Speaker 2: the interstate highway system, and for younger Americans unaccustomed to
Speaker 2: sending and receiving physical letters, driving on a federal highway
Speaker 2: will be by far the most frequent direct encounter they
Speaker 2: will have with the federal government. Unlike the postal service,
Speaker 2: federal highways are not mentioned directly in the Constitution, and
Speaker 2: for most of our country's history, the federal government played
Speaker 2: no direct role in their construction or maintenance. The country
Speaker 2: has always had roads of course, but those roads were
Speaker 2: the responsibility of state and local governments, or, in some
Speaker 2: cases a private contractors hired by those governments. This was
Speaker 2: not such a problem when the country was rural and
Speaker 2: when people primarily consumed goods that they grew and fashioned
Speaker 2: for themselves. But as the country advanced, as people became
Speaker 2: more dependent on buying and selling commodities produced by people
Speaker 2: other than themselves, there arose a need to transport goods, services,
Speaker 2: and the people who used them efficiently from disparate parts
Speaker 2: of the country. The federal government did not keep pace
Speaker 2: with these developments. In the decades following the Civil War
Speaker 2: and leading into the twentieth century, families and businesses struggled
Speaker 2: to keep up with the demands of a growing industrial economy,
Speaker 2: in a large part because they simply could not buy
Speaker 2: and sell goods and transport themselves efficiently. And with the
Speaker 2: rise of personal automobiles in the early nineteen hundreds, access
Speaker 2: to well built and properly maintained roads became more urgent
Speaker 2: than ever. What was the hold up a lot of stuff,
Speaker 2: but the chief impediment was tradition, or what political scientists
Speaker 2: call path dependence. Since the country's founding the federal government
Speaker 2: had played no role whatsoever in road building, which meant
Speaker 2: that responsibility had fallen to subordinate governments. But in order
Speaker 2: to be effective, road building requires not only money and labor,
Speaker 2: but planning and coordination. Someone needs to plan roots that
Speaker 2: will help not just a few special groups, but the
Speaker 2: largest number of community members possible. In convincing the states
Speaker 2: to relinquish control of that power proved very difficult. As
Speaker 2: a consequence, the federal government played no meaningful role in
Speaker 2: highway building during the first half of the twentieth century.
Speaker 2: The peripheral role it did play was in the form
Speaker 2: of matching funds. If a state highway authority built roads,
Speaker 2: the federal government would match whatever expenditures the state incurred, thereby,
Speaker 2: in theory, at least incentivizing more construction. The problem was
Speaker 2: the Feds put essentially no conditions on these maps funds,
Speaker 2: with the result that there was no planning on routes.
Speaker 2: In some cases, a highway that should have linked major
Speaker 2: cities in bordering states simply ended at one state's border
Speaker 2: because the two states had failed to agree upon the route.
Speaker 2: Worse still, states that could have benefited the most from
Speaker 2: highway construction tended also to be the poorest and consequently
Speaker 2: the least likely to receive significant matching funds. Finally, two
Speaker 2: World Wars, which diverted domestic resources and manpower to the
Speaker 2: battlefields of Europe and Asia, did little to incentivize road
Speaker 2: building on a national scale.
Speaker 1: And you've been listening to Charles Zugg tell the story,
Speaker 1: the true story, the real story of how our interstate
Speaker 1: highway system came to be.
Speaker 3: And what a mess. Right up until the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: You'd had all that money deployed, all that capital deployed
Speaker 1: to fight two World Wars, and this whole idea of
Speaker 1: matching grants.
Speaker 3: The various states couldn't get together and.
Speaker 1: Figure out what to do or where to put roads
Speaker 1: and how to connect them best for the American people.
Speaker 1: And then there was that problem of the poor states,
Speaker 1: the ones that probably needed roads the most, having no
Speaker 1: funds to match. When we come back the problem of
Speaker 1: connecting the states, connecting our highway system together, the story
Speaker 1: of how the interstate highway system ours came to be
Speaker 1: continues here on Our American Stories. Leehabib here the host
Speaker 1: of our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're
Speaker 1: bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from
Speaker 1: our big cities and small towns. But we truly can't
Speaker 1: do the show without you. Our stories are free to
Speaker 1: listen to, but they're not free to make. If you
Speaker 1: love what you hear, go to Alamerican Stories dot com
Speaker 1: and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.
Speaker 1: Go to Alamerican Stories dot com and give. And we're
Speaker 1: back with our American stories and with Charles Zugg, who's
Speaker 1: the author of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Federal Highway Act.
Speaker 1: He's telling the story of our a federal highway system
Speaker 1: came to be the real story.
Speaker 3: Let's return to Charles.
Speaker 2: Entered Dwight Eisenhower, who in nineteen fifty two was the
Speaker 2: first Republican to be elected president in twenty years. Born
Speaker 2: in Texas and raised in Abilene, Kansas, Ike, as he
Speaker 2: was popularly called, spent his entire career in the United
Speaker 2: States Army, rising from West Point cadet to Supreme Allied
Speaker 2: Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during the Second
Speaker 2: World War. Apart from a brief stint as president of
Speaker 2: Columbia University, Ike had never held a civilian post before
Speaker 2: being sworn in as president in January nineteen fifty three.
Speaker 2: He was not even particularly close with the Republican Party.
Speaker 2: Both parties had attempted to recruit him for president. In fact,
Speaker 2: what seems to have attracted Eisenhower to the GOP had
Speaker 2: less to do with policy and political philosophy and more
Speaker 2: to do with the fact that most of his private
Speaker 2: sector friends all happen to be Republican businessmen. All of
Speaker 2: this will become relevant in a moment. How did Eisenhower
Speaker 2: come to be identified with interstate highway expansion? The relevant
Speaker 2: mythology tells us that Ike became fixated on highway building
Speaker 2: while serving as general in occupied Germany after World War II.
Speaker 2: Having witnessed the German highway system called the Auto Bonden, Ike,
Speaker 2: we are told, decided that such an infrastructure program was
Speaker 2: both possible and necessary in the United States. There is
Speaker 2: precious little to support this just so story in the
Speaker 2: relevant archival material. Written statements supporting it appear nowhere in
Speaker 2: Eisenhower's papers or correspondents. The smoking gun would seem to
Speaker 2: be aligned from Eisenhower's own memoirs, written years after his presidency,
Speaker 2: and likely romanticized in order to give coherence to the
Speaker 2: otherwise convoluted story of highway expansion. Besides this, there is
Speaker 2: no good reason to believe Ike was particularly concerned with highways,
Speaker 2: any more concerned than activist presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt,
Speaker 2: and Harry Truman, all of whom had at some point
Speaker 2: advocated for dramatic road building projects during their presidencies. What
Speaker 2: made Eisenhower distinct was not his interest, but rather his
Speaker 2: strategy for pursuing a policy innovation that had been popular
Speaker 2: and recognized as necessary for a very long time. Shortly
Speaker 2: after his election in nineteen fifty two, Eisenhower asked a
Speaker 2: Wall Street venture capitalist named Walker Buckner to design a
Speaker 2: financing scheme to fund federal highway expansion. Ike's reasoning was straightforward.
Speaker 2: During the nineteen fifty two campaign, Eisenhower had vowed to
Speaker 2: reduce spending and to work towards balancing the federal budget,
Speaker 2: which had expanded greatly during the New Deal in the
Speaker 2: Second World War. That foreclosed deficit spending as an option
Speaker 2: for financing highway construction. On the other hand, Eisenhower had
Speaker 2: assured prominent Republicans that he would also avoid raising taxes
Speaker 2: and also seek to lower taxes where possible, another priority
Speaker 2: of the postwar GOP establishment. These twin constraints left Ike
Speaker 2: with few options for pursuing what would need to be
Speaker 2: a massively expensive, yet politically popular highway building program. The
Speaker 2: plan Buckner came up with, which Eisenhower circulated within his administration,
Speaker 2: proposed borrowing funds without actually counting those funds as part
Speaker 2: of the federal deficit. It would be like convincing another
Speaker 2: person to take out a car loan for an automobile
Speaker 2: that you would actually use. That person would be obligated
Speaker 2: to pay back the debt, while you u would derive
Speaker 2: the benefits of the new car. This plan went through
Speaker 2: several different iterations within the Eisenhower White House before stalling
Speaker 2: out in nineteen fifty four. Iike's advisors appreciated the need
Speaker 2: to avoid deficit spending while also keeping taxes low, but
Speaker 2: as political professionals, they also had a hard time wrapping
Speaker 2: their brains around a scheme that would raise money for
Speaker 2: the government while keeping that money off of the government's
Speaker 2: balance sheets. Things came to a head in the summer
Speaker 2: of nineteen fifty four, when, after having his Vice President,
Speaker 2: Richard Nixon announced a major new highway program which did
Speaker 2: not in fact exist. Eisenhower authorized the creation of two
Speaker 2: distinct committees within his administration to study the issue and
Speaker 2: actually come up with a plan. One committee, called the
Speaker 2: President's Advisory Committee, would actually write a plan, while a second,
Speaker 2: called the Interagency Committee, would give expert advice. The first
Speaker 2: committee was made up of private sector business officials, all
Speaker 2: save one Republican millionaires. The second consisted in government officials
Speaker 2: with authority and expertise that connected them to highways. These
Speaker 2: two committees hated each other, sometimes actively working to undermine
Speaker 2: the other's mission. Matters were not helped when in nineteen
Speaker 2: fifty four, the Democrats recaptured both chambers of the Congress,
Speaker 2: making any plan authored by the Republican Millionaires Club that
Speaker 2: was the Advisory Committee unlikely to receive a warm reception
Speaker 2: by the legislature. When the Advisory Committee ended up endorsing
Speaker 2: a plan more or less the same as Buckner's original
Speaker 2: from nineteen fifty two, the Interagency Committee raised hell. So
Speaker 2: did the rest of the federal government when, after failing
Speaker 2: multiple times to meet a self imposed deadline, the administration
Speaker 2: finally sent the Advisory Committee's plan to Congress, it met
Speaker 2: with incredulity Senate Finance Chair Harry Byrd, whose committee would
Speaker 2: control the fate of any highway funding scheme. Lambasted the
Speaker 2: plan as illegal and got Ike's own Comptroller General, the
Speaker 2: chief accountant of the federal government, to publicly testify against
Speaker 2: the Eisenhower plan before a Finance committee meeting. When the
Speaker 2: House and Senate both voted down the administration plan in
Speaker 2: the spring of nineteen fifty five, followed by the House
Speaker 2: voting down a hastily written democratic alternative shortly thereafter, no
Speaker 2: one should have been surprised. Finally, when it seemed like
Speaker 2: things couldn't get much worse for the President's agenda, poor
Speaker 2: Ike suffered a heart attack while vacationing in Colorado. Needing
Speaker 2: to recuperate, the president delegated most significant responsibilities to his
Speaker 2: cabinet under the leadership of Vice President Nixon. Counterintuitively, it
Speaker 2: was under these inauspicious circums stances, with the president's sidelined
Speaker 2: by health problems and the administration's highway plan up in flames,
Speaker 2: that a few determined members of the Washington establishment decided
Speaker 2: to seize the moment. Two members of Eisenhower's Cabinet had
Speaker 2: also been members of the Marginalized Interagency Committee. Treasury Secretary
Speaker 2: George Humphrey and Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks decided that highway
Speaker 2: expansion was worth the hard choices that Eisenhower had been
Speaker 2: unwilling to make. Working behind the scenes with key members
Speaker 2: of Congress, including al Gore's father, Tennessee Senator Albert GORESR,
Speaker 2: Weeks and Humphrey hashed out a bill that significantly raised
Speaker 2: taxes to pay for highway expansion, but only those that
Speaker 2: highway users would pay, such as taxes on gasoline, diesel,
Speaker 2: and truck tire components. In the end, the feature that
Speaker 2: made the bill most attractive was that highway user taxes
Speaker 2: would in turn be segregated from other tax revenues into
Speaker 2: a special account modeled after Social Security, known as the
Speaker 2: Highway Trust Fund. That fund would supply building and maintenance
Speaker 2: money for the interstates based on estimated user revenue from
Speaker 2: the following year. Appreciative of the program's fairness and transparency,
Speaker 2: Congress passed it with overwhelming bipartisan majorities in the summer
Speaker 2: of nineteen fifty six.
Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling
Speaker 1: by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to
Speaker 1: Charles zugg And.
Speaker 3: He is the author of Dwight D.
Speaker 1: Eisenhower and the Federal Highway Act, and he's also a
Speaker 1: fellow at the Jack Miller Center.
Speaker 3: The Jack Miller Center is.
Speaker 1: A nationwide network of scholars and teachers dedicated to educating
Speaker 1: the next generation about America's founding principles and history. To
Speaker 1: learn more, visit Jack Miller Center. And we've done a
Speaker 1: whole lot of storytelling with this great organization.
Speaker 3: And what a story this was.
Speaker 1: I gets all the credit, but in the end, it
Speaker 1: was these players behind the scenes, the Commerce and Treasury
Speaker 1: Secretary picking up the remains of well a doomed plan
Speaker 1: from the beginning, and what they came up with was
Speaker 1: something brilliant. The user tax, that is, if you use
Speaker 1: the highways, you pay for the highways gasoline taxes, tire taxes,
Speaker 1: and a variety of others that go into a highway
Speaker 1: trust fund for that use. And as often as the
Speaker 1: case here on this show, we love to get at
Speaker 1: the real history, not the mythological history that we learn
Speaker 1: sometimes in our textbooks. The story of how the Federal
Speaker 1: Highway system came to be the real story. Here on
Speaker 1: our American stories,