But Detroit’s emphasis on impractical design would come to haunt U.S. automakers. As Detroit fixated on frivolous details, its foreign competitors were engineering safer, more reliable, and technologically superior cars with better-performing engines, brakes, suspension, steering, and fuel economy. U.S. consumers began to purchase more automotive products from abroad than they did from homegrown companies, and Japanese and European automakers including Toyota, Honda, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz rapidly gained market share. “Complacency carried a high cost,” noted Flink. “The United States shifted as early as 1967 from being a net exporter to a net importer of automotive products.”
Gas mileage on American-built cars plummeted, a trend that continued into the mid-1970s. Whereas a large Caddy got 20 miles per gallon in 1949, by 1973 American cars averaged 13.5 miles per gallon due to their continued growth in size and weight, and added creature comforts. Fuel economy was hardly a concern during the fifties, when oil prices were at record lows: a vast new infrastructure of pipelines and refineries had been built during World War II to provide a reliable oil supply for the military. The year 1943 saw the birth of Big Inch, a pipeline roughly 1,200 miles long that funneled petroleum from Longview, Texas, to Linden, New Jersey. Little Big Inch, built the following year, was an even longer conduit, extending almost 1,500 miles, transporting oil pumped from Beaumont, Texas (home of Spindletop), to the Northeast. These pipelines revolutionized oil delivery. Less than 5 percent of U.S. oil traveled by pipeline in 1942; just three years later, the volume was more than 40 percent. This expedited distribution system flooded U.S. consumer markets with cheap and abundant petroleum after the war.
In the meantime, Americans were coming to depend on oil in ways that went far beyond the business of getting from point A to point B. Automobiles were quickly and irrevocably shaping not only our preferred modes of transport but also our destinations. The proliferation of cars among mainstream American consumers gave rise to the first drive-in fast-food joint (1921), the first shopping mall (1922), the first motel (1925), and the first drive-in movie theater (1933).
The mainstreaming of cars also influenced rituals of romance. The automobile helped bring about an era of sexual liberation, enabling teenagers to escape the surveillance of their parents and journey to the fabled “lookout point.” Ever the killjoy, Henry Ford allegedly designed the backseat of a Model T to discourage sexual frolicking. “But determined couples found ways to thwart Ford’s intentions,” wrote Flink, “and the automakers came to facilitate lovemaking in cars with such innovations as heaters, air-conditioning, and the tilt steering wheel.” Flink cited a 1967 survey in the magazine Motor Trend showing that of 1,100 marriages, some 40 percent of grooms had popped the question in an automobile. The American landscape in which these young couples would be raising families was, meanwhile, increasingly becoming one of suburbs linked to cities and other suburbs by a sprawling network of highways.
ROAD SCHOLAR
As auto sales boomed throughout the 1950s, American roadways and bridges were in a state of disrepair. The growth in car purchases had far outpaced the growth in infrastructure. Along came Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Born in Denison, Texas, the third of seven boys, Eisenhower was admired throughout his career for coupling a small-town folksy charm with the imposing authority of a five-star general. As a boy, Eisenhower worked the night shift at the local creamery to help put his brothers through school. He aspired to become a professional baseball player until he was accepted into West Point. Serving stateside in World War I, he quickly rose to become a leader of his battalion. He ascended through the ranks during peacetime training military staff, and after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor was tapped by Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall to become a leading architect of U.S. military strategy. By 1944 he had become the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, and supervised the legendary D-Day invasion of Normandy.
Eisenhower, who had trained in tank warfare as a young recruit, was profoundly impressed by the German autobahns, a network of superhighways constructed during the 1930s and later used to facilitate the military maneuvering of Germany’s jeeps, trucks, and tanks in this first fully mechanized war. An autobahn was distinguished by its elevated overpasses, the strength of its bridges, and the breadth of its tunnels. When he returned to the United States after the Allied victory, Eisenhower found American roads in “shocking condition,” and envisioned a network of highways that would rival the autobahns’ high-caliber engineering, but on a vastly greater scale. “After seeing the autobahns of modern Germany and knowing the asset those highways were to Germans, I decided, as President, to put an emphasis on this kind of road building,” Eisenhower later reflected. “This was one of the things I felt deeply about, and I made a personal and absolute decision to see that the nation would benefit by it.”
Eisenhower’s interest in highways was also rooted in an earlier experience. As a nineteen-year-old army recruit, he had joined America’s first cross-country truck convoy, an expedition designed to rally support for the U.S. military. Interstate roads at the time were virtually nonexistent, and Eisenhower recorded a long list of tire punctures, engine blowouts, busted axles, and broken fan belts throughout his trip across the nation’s rutted dirt roads. “Some days when we had counted on sixty or seventy or a hundred miles,” he wrote, “we would do three or four.” His convoy had departed Washington, D.C., on July 7, 1919, and arrived in San Francisco a laborious sixty-one days and hundreds of breakdowns later. It was enough to convince him that a sophisticated road network would be crucial to America’s long-term growth and security.
Before Eisenhower became president in 1953, road building had been largely overseen by the states. America’s highways were patchy and disjointed: only half of the nation’s 3 million miles of roads were paved when Eisenhower took office, and of these just a few thousand miles had been properly maintained. Eisenhower championed Detroit’s great boom in auto sales, arguing that more cars meant “greater convenience, greater happiness and greater standards of living.” But he warned that the level of congestion and the state of disrepair on American roads was dangerous, and could stymie economic growth. The president’s personal conviction would ultimately grow into the biggest interstate highway network in the world, at 40,000-plus miles, and the biggest and costliest public works program in history.
As conservative as Eisenhower’s politics were—he favored states’ rights and small government—he knew that an interstate highway system had to be built with centralized federal oversight. Rallying the political will for such a project would be a huge challenge, particularly given the astronomical cost and accelerated time frame Eisenhower had in mind: $50 billion ($6.6 trillion in today’s dollars) invested over ten years.
Eisenhower intended to stage a dramatic unveiling of his plan at a governors’ conference in 1954. It was held in the wood-paneled rooms of the Sagamore Inn on Lake George in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. The president was unexpectedly detained by a death in the family, so his vice president, Richard Nixon, had to make the appeal. “Our highway net is inadequate locally and obsolete as a national system,” Nixon told the governors, adding that it was a “haphazard” and “arbitrary” road system “designed for local movement in an age of transcontinental travel.” The health risks posed by the system were “comparable to the casualties of a bloody war,” Nixon stated, with some forty thousand Americans dying in car accidents a year.
Nixon next made his plea for financial backing, arousing a din of chatter from the assembled governors: the project would pay for itself if states would approve a gasoline tax and a system of highway tolls—a controversial request coming from a conservative administration. Nixon stressed, above all, Eisenhower’s national security argument: “the appalling inadequacies to meet the demands of catastrophe or defense, should an atomic war come.” Seventy million city dwellers throughout the country would have to be evacuated to safety if a nuclear bomb struck American soil, said Nixon, and the quickest route would be wide, paved superhighways that didn’t yet exist.
Critics of the plan abounded. Urban planners predicted that the highway program would signal the decay of cities, accelerating suburban sprawl and stymieing