Petersen Archive | Dwight D Eisenhower — Petersen Automotive Museum

The postwar period was a time described by unparalleled prosperity. Following the 2nd Globe War, returning GI’s came house to a booming financial state, housing improvement initiatives, and help applications like the GI Invoice that expanded and cemented America’s center class. By 1950 most factories, which include vehicle brands, experienced made the changeover from wartime creation to a customer-dependent financial system, so much so that, in that year by itself, 8 million autos ended up manufactured, by 1958 more than 67 million vehicles would be created and registered in the United States. On the other hand, at the get started of the ten years, most of America’s out of date roadways had been in no ailment to assistance a huge inflow of site visitors. Stress for design of transcontinental superhighways had been growing considering the fact that the late 1930s, however, conflict in between city pursuits and rural interests vying for precedence and a absence of funding left early initiatives this kind of as the 1944 Federal-Help Highway Act useless in the h2o. By the 1950’s, in get to handle an inflow of new vehicle entrepreneurs president Dwight D. Eisenhower publicly supported an interstate freeway advancement application and on June 29, 1956, he signed the Highway Profits Act also regarded as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act into legislation. The act marked the largest American public will work program of that time authorizing the building of 41,000 miles of interstate highways equipped with overpasses and constrained-accessibility belt lines. Eisenhower experienced been seriously influenced by his experiences in 1919 as a participant in the U.S. Army&#39s initial Transcontinental Motor Convoy throughout the United States and his observations of the German audubon highway community through Globe War II. Owning recognized the relevance of mobility and performance, Eisenhower proposed an American interstate highway system in his Condition of the Union tackle in 1954, which he framed as a national defense method. In an exertion to stimulate a cooperative alliance in between condition and federal officials, retired Basic Lucius D. Clay, an engineer and a extended-time advisor to the president, proposed a approach in which the federal government would shell out 90 % of the expense of expressway construction the funding for which would come from an enhanced gasoline tax (now 3 cents a gallon). Interstate money ended up to then be dispersed in the ratio of each and every point out&#39s approximated cost of finishing the process. The to start with undertaking under the Act was the Mark Twain Expressway (Interstate 70) in St. Charles County, Missouri.

The highways were meant to reduce traffic congestion replace “undesirable slum locations with pristine ribbons of concrete” as a single freeway advocate set it make coastline-to-coast transportation much more economical and make it straightforward to evacuate big cities in scenario of an atomic attack. Although transformative, the Freeway Revenue Act also reflected an enduring legacy of Jim Crow period discriminatory policies and systemic racism. Low-expense mortgages by means of the G.I. Invoice (which was not made available to black GI’s), enabled white households to abandon interior metropolitan areas in favor of suburban housing as perfectly as avert ethnic minorities from doing the same. Federal planners of the interstate freeway process routed some highways directly, and generally purposefully, by predominantly black and brown neighborhoods to predominantly white suburban neighborhoods. Whilst the Freeway Income Act was to begin with met with widespread general public assist, as additional folks turned displaced and ailments in cities deteriorated, activists began to overtly oppose the process, some heading as significantly as forcing building stoppages in the course of the late 1950s and early 60s. All through the 1960s, civil rights activists and environmentalists across the state in New York City, Baltimore, Washington, D.C. New Orleans and other metropolitan areas managed to avert roadbuilders from dividing and subjugating their neighborhoods, sooner or later on the other hand, most of the 41,000 miles of interstate were being done.

Sources:

https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/historical past/moment/Federal_Highway_Act.htm#:~:text=On%20June%2026%2C%201956%2C%20the,Eisenhower%20signed%20it%20into%20law.

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-quick-record-of-how-racism-formed-interstate-highways

https://www.theatlantic.com/small business/archive/2016/03/part-of-highways-in-american-poverty/474282/

https://highways.dot.gov/community-roads/summer months-1996/federal-help-freeway-act-1956-making-interstate-technique