Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future. Amanda Little

the growing American economy more robust and efficient. Billions of dollars, he said, had already been squandered because of perilous and congested road transport. Moreover, the highway network would further unify a nation that had recently drawn together to emerge successfully from world war: “Our unity as a nation is sustained by free communication of thought and by easy transportation of people and goods…over a vast system of interconnected highways,” Eisenhower wrote in a 1955 appeal to Congress. “Together the united forces of our communication and transportation systems are dynamic elements in the very name we bear—United States. Without them, we would be a mere alliance of many separate parts.”

      While politicians bickered over the particulars of financing the highway plan—should tolls, for instance, be placed on the travelers who would use the roadways or taxes levied on the industries that would profit from them?—business leaders did their best to speed the project along. Automobile makers, truckers, car dealers, oil companies, rubber and cement companies, trade unions, and real estate developers collaborated in an alliance known as the “highway-motor lobby.” This secretive and amply funded group, which had been working for decades to advocate road building, helped wage a political blitzkrieg to win congressional votes in favor of the national highway network.

      Lobbyists argued that new roads would stimulate the growth of their varied industries. Real estate development would spring up alongside the thousands of miles of freshly paved highways. Greater car use would increase tire manufacturing and demand for oil and gas. Mail order and product delivery services would enjoy a boom thanks to more rapid and reliable transportation, as would cement and asphalt production for the roads themselves and the production of aluminum and paint used for highway signage.

      “Obviously we have a selfish interest in this program, because our products are no good except on the road,” James J. Nance, president of the Automobile Manufacturers Association and Studebaker Packard, testified before the House Public Works Committee in 1955. “Unless we know that there is going to be an expansion of the roads in this country…it is very difficult for us to plan over the next ten years as to what our expansion is going to have to be.” Nance was describing an outgrowth of the stunning chain of events set off by Ford’s discovery of mass production—a vast network of enterprises that all connected to and abetted one another, all expanded and enhanced the American dream, and all dangled from the same invisible thread of cheap oil.