February 11, 2006
Metaphor to Our Restless Spirit Passes a Golden Milestone
By David
M. Shribman
Americans
celebrate an anniversary this year of what may be the most significant
domestic development of the last century, a political moment and
cultural marker that affected our language, our arts, our dreams,
our history, our work patterns, our leisure activities and our
daily lives more deeply than perhaps any development since the
telephone and the television. It's the 50th anniversary of the
nation's highway system.
Listen to
the way we talk: We're on the road again. We're going down that
long, lonesome highway. Listen to the songs we sing: "Truck
Driving Man," "Highway of Love." Look at the movies
we watch: "Easy Rider," "National Lampoon's Vacation."
Consider the phrases we use: Information highway. My way or the
highway. Think about what we read: Arizona Highways magazine,
"On the Road." (Aside to our eighth-grade readers: Remember
that poem about the moon being a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy
seas and the road being a ribbon of moonlight, over the purple
moor? It had absolutely nothing to do with any of this. Alfred
Noyes, who wasn't even American, wrote "The Highwayman"
in 1906.)
Right now
the American highway system is regarded as one of the great engineering
feats of history, the greatest public-works project in history,
the most enduring heritage of the Dwight Eisenhower era, and the
physical expression of one of the most ancient American impulses,
expressed by Tom Rush and Joni Mitchell when they spoke of the
urge for going, and not only when the meadow grass was turning
brown.
Americans
have always had the urge for going, and that is why there is an
America in the first place. Even the earliest Americans likely
came here from somewhere else, and the white colonists and conquerors
who followed came here because they were searching for riches,
a second chance or new freedoms, which, when you think about it,
is pretty much what America is anyway, even today. The thing about
the highway system is that it allowed Americans, at a moment's
notice, to scratch that itch for going, both when summertime was
closing down and when winter was closing in.
A road runs
through us, and its pavement is the canvas on which we sketch
our lives. It is the legacy of one of our least poetic presidents.
Dwight David Eisenhower was a plain man, a master of the military
(and, we increasingly recognize, the political) arts. But in many
ways he was the last Everyman president. So he left an appropriate
gift, a way for everyone to do what Americans do: Get where they
are going, and fast. By the time he left the White House and relinquished
office to John F. Kennedy (campaign motto: Let's get this country
moving again), 10,440 miles of American highway had been laid
down and opened to traffic.
The formal
name of the highway network was the National System of Interstate
and Defense Highways, and it was, like Germany's Autobahn, conceived
as a matter of national security, not as a metaphor for the national
sense of searching that animates American life. Eisenhower had
long worried about the difficulty of evacuating major American
cities in the event of a nuclear attack; four-lane highways were
a good answer to that problem.
But the interstate
highway system was also conceived to move military hardware and
personnel; Eisenhower himself had been on the very first transcontinental
military convoy, in 1919, and later, during World War II, he moved
American military units briskly along the roads that Hitler had
built a decade earlier. Good fences make good neighbors, said
Robert Frost ("I have come by the highway home," he
wrote, though long before the Eisenhower years), and good roads
make good mobilizations. It was Jimmy Carter who came up with
the idea of moving MX missiles around the country on truck convoys,
though that is maybe not exactly what Joni Mitchell had in mind
for the highways.
There was,
to be sure, a certain incongruity between Eisenhower's views of
fiscal prudence and minimalist government and his vision of what
he called broad "ribbons across the land." He squared
the philosophical problem by seeing this huge public-works undertaking
as a project with a purpose, not just a public-spending program
like much of the Works Progress Administration projects. And since
the work could be speeded up or slowed down as economic conditions
warranted, the highway-building project could be revved up when
unemployment was high and toned down when it was low.
"By
advocating a highway program on a gigantic scale, Eisenhower was
putting himself and his administration within the best and strongest
tradition of 19th-century American Whigs," wrote Stephen
E. Ambrose, an Eisenhower biographer. "John Quincy Adams,
Henry Clay and the other great Whigs had all been advocates of
internal improvements paid for by the federal government."
The spokesman for the administration was the vice president, Richard
M. Nixon.
Today the
interstate highway system is 46,876 miles long and, in concert
with Republican values, is owned by the states, not by the federal
government. But the ethic of the road is owned by us all, and
it is the heritage of us all.
We have a
highway culture because we're a mobile people and because so much
of our lives involve, in reality and in metaphor, getting from
one place to another. Or, as we sometimes put it, going somewhere.
(When we succeed, we've arrived.) Whether road warriors or someone
who lives by the side of the road (determined to be a friend to
man), we're all highwaymen come riding, up to the old inn door.
The American character is what makes that unavoidable, but it
is the highways that make it possible.
Copyright
2006 The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
