outbound
BY MITCH MAC DONALD, GROUP EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
giving credit where it’s due
THERE’S NO DOUBT ABOUT IT. IKE WAS ONE GREAT GUY.
Perhaps one of the greatest Americans of the 20th century. Although
his second administration ended five weeks before my birth, I can
honestly say, “I like Ike.”
Not only was he a masterful military leader, commanding the
Allied forces in Europe in World War II, but Dwight D. Eisenhower
served ably as our 34th commander in chief. Among his many
accomplishments was the creation of our current system of national highways, dubbed “The Eisenhower Interstate System.”
While in Europe during the war, the story goes, Ike developed a
fascination with the German highway system built by the Nazis in
the 1930s. He returned home with a vision of building a similar, but
much larger, system of highways spanning
the United States.
Although Ike gets credit for making the
Interstate Highway System a reality, he wasn’t the first to come up with the idea. The
conceptual foundation of our existing interstate system predates Ike’s vision by at least
four decades.
In July 1913, an entrepreneur named Carl
Fisher formed a public-private association to
create the first “rock paved” transcontinental
highway. Fisher and his team had a simple
vision: Create a “coast-to-coast rock highway” stretching from Times Square in New
York City to Lincoln Park in San Francisco.
After rejecting names like the “Jefferson
Memorial Highway” and “America’s Road” for the project, the team
decided to call it the Lincoln Highway in honor of one of Fisher’s
heroes: Abraham Lincoln, the nation’s 16th president, born 200
years ago this month.
At the time the Lincoln Highway was proposed, America was a
different place. Railroads were the dominant means of transporting
both goods and people. Although decent roads existed in the more
populous regions east of the Mississippi River, the roads in the western two-thirds of the country consisted mostly of a series of old
paths used by pioneers during the great westward expansion of the
19th century. In fact, the roads were so poor that when Fisher and
his team set out in July 1913 to plot the new highway’s course, the
portion of the trip from Indianapolis to San Francisco took 34 days,
many spent pulling their cars and trucks out of mud and sand.
By fall, the final course for the road had been set. With the construction carried out in segments (the work often consisted of sim-
ply linking existing paved roads with a new,
smooth surface), the work continued over the
next 25 years.
During that time, Fisher and his group
staged a variety of what we now call media
events to generate publicity for the project.
One of the more notable publicity stunts was
the movement of a U.S. Army convoy from
east to west in 1919. The journey turned out to
be something of a publicist’s nightmare—
some bridges cracked under the
strain and had to be rebuilt, and
vehicles got stuck in mud. It took
a month, but the convoy reached
California to much fanfare.
Although the intent was to call
attention to the need for road
building, the convoy’s biggest contribution to America’s infrastructure development wasn’t to be
realized until more than 30 years
later. Among the young Army officers on that convoy was none
other than Lt. Col. Dwight D.
Eisenhower. Eisenhower later
acknowledged that the sometimes
difficult trip convinced him of the importance
of good roads and influenced his decision to
make an interstate highway system one of his
administration’s priorities.
Today, the Lincoln Highway is little more
than a memory, although some segments of
roadway still carry the name. While the project may have fallen short of its original vision,
it nonetheless made an important contribution to future highway development. And for
that, we must give credit where it’s due.
