Petersen Archive | Dwight D Eisenhower — Petersen Automotive Museum

The postwar period was a time described by unprecedented prosperity. Following the Next Globe War, returning GI’s came home to a booming economy, housing growth tasks, and assist plans like the GI Monthly bill that expanded and cemented America’s center class. By 1950 most factories, including auto brands, had produced the transition from wartime creation to a customer-dependent overall economy, so substantially so that, in that 12 months by itself, 8 million vehicles had been developed, by 1958 more than 67 million autos would be produced and registered in the United States. However, at the start of the 10 years, most of America’s out of date roadways were in no problem to aid a substantial influx of website traffic. Pressure for building of transcontinental superhighways experienced been growing given that the late 1930s, nonetheless, conflict involving urban pursuits and rural passions vying for precedence and a absence of funding remaining early projects this kind of as the 1944 Federal-Assist Highway Act dead in the water. By the 1950’s, in purchase to manage an influx of new automobile owners president Dwight D. Eisenhower publicly supported an interstate freeway progress plan and on June 29, 1956, he signed the Freeway Earnings Act also identified as the Nationwide Interstate and Defense Highways Act into law. The act marked the greatest American public performs application of that time authorizing the development of 41,000 miles of interstate highways fitted with overpasses and minimal-entry belt traces. Eisenhower had been intensely affected by his activities in 1919 as a participant in the U.S. Military&#39s first Transcontinental Motor Convoy throughout the United States and his observations of the German audubon freeway community through Entire world War II. Obtaining identified the importance of mobility and performance, Eisenhower proposed an American interstate freeway process in his Condition of the Union tackle in 1954, which he framed as a countrywide protection method. In an energy to encourage a cooperative alliance involving state and federal officials, retired Normal Lucius D. Clay, an engineer and a long-time advisor to the president, proposed a program in which the federal government would fork out 90 % of the expense of expressway design the funding for which would arrive from an greater gasoline tax (now 3 cents a gallon). Interstate funds had been to then be distributed in the ratio of each and every point out&#39s believed expense of finishing the method. The first task under the Act was the Mark Twain Expressway (Interstate 70) in St. Charles County, Missouri.

The highways ended up intended to remove targeted visitors congestion substitute “undesirable slum areas with pristine ribbons of concrete” as one freeway advocate put it make coastline-to-coastline transportation much more productive and make it effortless to evacuate massive cities in scenario of an atomic assault. Though transformative, the Highway Revenue Act also reflected an enduring legacy of Jim Crow period discriminatory insurance policies and systemic racism. Minimal-expense home loans by means of the G.I. Bill (which was not supplied to black GI’s), enabled white households to abandon inner metropolitan areas in favor of suburban housing as perfectly as avoid ethnic minorities from doing the similar. Federal planners of the interstate freeway system routed some highways instantly, and often purposefully, by way of predominantly black and brown neighborhoods to predominantly white suburban neighborhoods. Though the Highway Income Act was at first achieved with prevalent general public help, as additional people grew to become displaced and disorders in cities deteriorated, activists commenced to brazenly oppose the program, some heading as much as forcing construction stoppages through the late 1950s and early 60s. All through the 1960s, civil rights activists and environmentalists across the country in New York Metropolis, Baltimore, Washington, D.C. New Orleans and other towns managed to protect against roadbuilders from dividing and subjugating their neighborhoods, sooner or later on the other hand, most of the 41,000 miles of interstate ended up completed.

Resources:

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

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

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

https://highways.dot.gov/general public-roads/summer months-1996/federal-help-freeway-act-1956-creating-interstate-procedure