Divided Highways

By Tom Lewis
Viking, $27.95

ISBN 067086627X


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Review by Roger Miller

I read a good chunk of Tom Lewis' "Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life" while driving from northeastern Pennsylvania to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to visit a brand-new grandson. To be precise, and to reassure nervous fellow motorists and vigilant state troopers, my wife was driving, I was reading.

B U I L D I N G
The book and the place of its reading were well matched, doubly so. First, Interstate 80 is the main transcontinental highway across the United States today. It stretches from the approach to the George Washington Bridge in northern New Jersey to the Oakland Bay Bridge in northern California. It connects with every major north-south Interstate. From it 20 spur highways spin off to connect with cities. The facts and statistics concerning it would make a list almost as long as its 2,904 miles, a list that would be representative of the thousands of (mostly engaging) facts and statistics in this thought-provoking volume.

T H E   I N T E R S T A T E   H I G H W A Y S
Second was the fact that I could and did read, rather than wanting or having to pay attention to the road or the surroundings. Though the Interstate system with its 42,799 total miles amounts to, as Lewis writes, "the greatest and longest engineered structure in the world," we Americans long ago came to take it for granted. Though it is so immense that, along with the Great Wall of China, it can be seen by orbiting astronauts, we are indifferent, and at times hostile, to it. The Interstate system has become indispensable and vexatious while being sort of invisible.

T R A N S F O R M I N G
But Lewis' story does not begin with the Interstate system. Essentially it begins with Thomas Harris MacDonald, an earnest Iowan who in 1919 became chief of the Federal Bureau of Public Roads and whose "momentous decisions" in that capacity "transformed the American landscape and affected the daily lives and movements of almost every citizen."

A M E R I C A N   L I F E
There was no road system when "The Chief," as he came to be called, took over, but rather a chaos of independently laid out (and rarely connecting) state and county roads -- and few of them. Over the next three-and-a-half decades, under the relentless pressure of ever-growing numbers of cars needing something to ride upon, he dispensed billions of federal dollars for the building of hundreds of thousands of miles of federal-aid highways. By the end of the 1930s he had become "the most important highwayman in the world."

There were rivals. Robert Moses with his elegant Long Island parkways, for one. A more serious rival was a road itself -- the Pennsylvania Turnpike, opened in 1940. A toll road, a concept that MacDonald disdained, it was the first challenge to the authority of his bureau in two decades. Seeing its financial success, other states also began building turnpikes to bring in money. (The Pennsylvania Turnpike was supposed to become free once it had paid off its bonds, but that was quietly forgotten by the Turnpike Commission.)

However, the core of "Divided Highways" is the Interstate system, launched in 1956 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, whose initial immediate motivation for it was as a public works program in case of a national economic downturn. Its launch was enthusiastically greeted on all sides save one, the critic Lewis Mumford, who foresaw "the damage to our cities and our countryside" and to "the efficient organization of industry and transportation" that others increasingly have been grousing about ever since.

The author covers all of this, as well as the arguments over various issues, such as whether I-roads should go around or through urban areas. "Through" obviously won, though not completely: A lengthy chapter tells of a successful battle to keep a detested highway out of New Orleans.

Lewis also remembers to include the details that give the telling of history its tang. One of the tangiest: the proposal, by engineers who in 1963 were laying out a route for I-40, to nuke their way through the Bristol Mountains in California. Conventional blasting eventually was decided upon, to the disappointment of at least one civil engineer curious years later to know how it might have worked.

While reading a brand-new book can't compare to the joy of seeing a brand-new grandson, nevertheless "Divided Highways" is a strong runner-up. Despite some repetition of material and a few pesky errors -- Sinclair Lewis was not a Hoosier and Gloria Blondell was not Peg Riley on "The Life of Riley," for instance -- it is an enjoyable and informative book, wherever you may choose to read it, on the road or in the house.

Roger Miller is a freelance writer in Lopez, Pennsylvania. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com.

©1997, ProMotion, inc.

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