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Activities: Context Activities Hitting the Road: How Automobiles and Highways Transformed American Life  Back to Context Activities
In 1900, Americans rarely moved or traveled beyond a radius of a few miles from where they were born. However, the introduction and rapid adoption of the automobile as America's primary means of transportation, combined with the development and construction of reliable roads on which those cars could travel, quickly transformed the traditional rootedness and stability of American life. The first American automobile, the Duryea, was produced in 1893 and was little more than a horse-drawn buggy with an engine bolted on, with a top speed of approximately 15 miles per hour. By 1900, there were only about 8,000 cars in the United States. At that time, cars were handmade and cost well over $1,000 each, making them far too expensive for all but the wealthiest of Americans. However, in 1908, Henry Ford ushered in the era of the mass-produced automobile; by using a conveyor belt to move the car frame through each stage of its assembly, Ford was able to cut hundreds of dollars from the cost of building his Model-Ts, while at the same time cutting production time for each car from a day and a half to just 93 minutes. Ford's competitors quickly copied his production methods, and by 1920 millions of cars traveled American roads. It took a while for American roads to catch up to American cars, though. In the early 1900s, the vast majority of roads in the United States were mere dirt tracks that quickly turned to treacherous and rut-filled swamps in the rain, then froze into rough and icy ridges in the winter. Only the most courageous or foolish travelers dared to venture far beyond major cities in their automobiles. As the number of cars rapidly multiplied, state and local governments experimented with an array of paving materials and road designs. During the Great Depression, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), whose purpose was to create jobs for millions of unemployed Americans, and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) did much to improve America's roads. During the 1930s, WPA and CCC workers built 75,000 bridges and constructed or improved nearly 600,000 miles of public roads. It was World War II, however, that finally convinced the U.S. government that it should do more to improve America's roads and enforce quality standards throughout the nation. As the commander of Allied forces in Europe, Dwight Eisenhower saw how Germany's autobahn aided its war effort by allowing it to quickly and reliably move troops, supplies, and raw materials around the country. In 1944, Congress passed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which established uniform design criteria for all U.S. highways. Twelve years later, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 established funding for nearly 45,000 miles of paved interstate highways--the largest peacetime construction project ever undertaken. About that effort Eisenhower would later write: "Its impact on the American economy--the jobs it would produce in manufacturing and construction, the rural areas it would open up--was beyond calculation." Travel has always figured prominently in American literature, beginning with the Puritan trope of an errand into the wilderness and the narratives of Caveza de Vaca and other Spanish explorers to the New World. More recently, automobiles and the highway were important aspects of self-exploration and commentary in twentieth-century American literature. Writers like John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, and Zora Neale Hurston have invoked the highway as a rejection of the familiar and an embrace of the unknown. The advent of cars and other mechanized, high-speed travel has also come to represent the disconnectivity and rootlessness of society and has given voice to fears about changes brought about by technology and modernization. In contemporary Native American poetry, for example, cars are often used as metaphors for wreckage and social dislocation, illustrating one way that cars symbolize the impact of cultural exchange and the influence of technology and white culture upon migration stories and the cultures that produce them. For the writers of the Southern Renaissance, cars symbolized both progress and the possibilities of modernization as well as the threat of industrialization to more traditional practices and values. Together, the mass-produced automobile and a reliable and uniform system of highways reshaped America. The ability of Americans to travel and move long distances broke down cultural barriers and meant that even remote rural areas could no longer remain isolated from the larger life of the nation, and the world. Questions
[4733] Dorothea Lange, Mississippi Delta, on Mississippi Highway No. 1 between Greenville and Clarksdale. Negro Laborer's Family Being Moved from Arkansas to Mississippi by White Tenant (1938), courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USF34-018952-E DLC]. The automobile is an important trope in American literature and culture: in this image the power relations between the workers and the tenant are reflected in their positions in the vehicle. [4789] Arthur Rothstein, Farm along Highway near Dickson, Tennessee (1942), courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USF34-024597-D]. As highways reached rural locations, some worried that small-town and southern values and traditions would be eroded by access to travel and mass culture. [4835] Marion Post Walcott, Negroes Brought in by Truck from Nearby Towns as Day Labor for Cotton Picking. Marcella Plantation, Mileston, Mississippi Delta (1939), courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USF33-030601-M4 DLC]. Cotton was an important but resource-taxing and labor-intensive crop in the South. Although the Southern Agrarians romanticized agricultural life, work on cotton plantations was difficult and rarely lucrative for African Americans. [5170] Marion Post Walcott, Saturday Afternoon, Clarksdale, Mississippi Delta (1939), courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USF33-030640-M3 DLC]. A street scene in the Mississippi Delta. Older black men talking on sidewalk in downtown Clarksdale, Mississippi. Blanche Cutrer, the model for Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, was from Clarksdale. [5594] Anonymous, It Was Common Practice for Small Town and Country Dealers to Bring Radios Directly to Prospects and Customers Alike (1925), courtesy of the George H. Clark Radioana Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Photograph of dealers delivering radios from vehicle. Growth in geographical mobility and mass culture were intertwined. As travel became easier, small towns became less culturally isolated. [6422] Detroit Publishing Co., Highway Construction Equipment, Probably Michigan State Highway Dept., Michigan (1915), courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-D418-629]. The mass development of automobiles and reliable roads altered travel, work, and residence patterns. Automobiles and roads became laden with cultural meanings, such as freedom and adventure. |
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