Earl Swift. The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighway. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. 384 pages.
Even if you don’t use it every day, the interstate highway system affects your life every day. Odds are the food that you eat traveled at least part-way on the national super-roads, as did most of the consumer goods you use. So highways are an important part of American life. But most of us have only the haziest ideas of their origins. Based on what we’ve read at strategic rest stops, we might know that Eisenhower had something to do with it, but that’s about it.
In THE BIG ROADS, Earl Swift addresses that knowledge gap. He’s written a very readable but still detailed history of America’s highway system. Starting in the 1890s with Carl Graham Fisher, a once-household name who today is almost completely obscure, Swift traces the development of private, state, and federal road-building initiatives that culminated in the construction of the interstate highway system, starting in the 1950s.
In place of Eisenhower (who Swift almost goes out of his way to downplay at times), Swift identifies a triad of engineers as the real father of the American interstate: Thomas “The Chief” MacDonald, Herbert Sinclair Fairbank, and Frank Turner. Together, they shepherded the system that would become the interstates through several administrations.
In addition to charting the careers of those who built the interstates, Swift also discusses those who opposed the big roads. He’s strongest in this regard when talking about men like Joe Wiles, who rightfully objected to an interstate spur that was planned to carve through the heart of his neighborhood, and weakest when recalling Lewis Mumford, whose criticisms seem more aesthetic than practical. The author himself admits that a uniform highway system is actually safer and quicker than the alternative, and having the same assortment of fast food choices at each rest stop is, in my own opinion, a small price to pay for having the ability to easily drive coast to coast in three days.
This is a very good book, particularly for anyone who’s driven the interstates and been curious about just where they came from.