Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [36]
In 1806, Thomas Jefferson signed a bill authorizing the federal government to spend thirty thousand dollars to build a road on an old pack trail through the Allegheny Mountains. Running from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, Virginia (later West Virginia), the road would connect the Potomac and Ohio rivers and effectively link the eastern seaboard and the rapidly growing Midwest. It was the first expenditure of federal funds on a public works project in American history, and it was not without controversy. Critics said the federal government had no business building roads, that there was nothing in the Constitution that even allowed it. In the end, the bill passed by a narrow margin. Completed in 1818, the National Road, as it came to be known, was a remarkable example of nineteenth-century engineering: thirty feet wide, paved with several layers of crushed stone, ditched, and drained. It proved enormously popular—too popular, in fact. Traffic was so heavy that the road quickly deteriorated. In 1822, Congress passed a measure authorizing the collection of tolls on the road to fund repairs. But President Monroe vetoed the bill, saying the collection of tolls would be an unconstitutional exercise of federal power. “It was one thing to make appropriations for public improvements,” wrote one historian, “but an entirely different thing to assume jurisdiction and sovereignty over the land whereon those improvements were made.” This is a linchpin of federal highway policy to this day: while the federal government helps fund their construction, interstates and U.S. highways are owned and operated by the states.
Monroe’s veto stifled the nation’s nascent road-building movement—but it could not quell its wanderlust. Between 1846 and 1866, a “freighter” named Solomon Young ran at least a dozen wagon trains from Missouri to Utah and California. A typical train consisted of forty to eighty wagons, each requiring a team of twelve oxen and two drivers. The merchandise it carried could be worth thirty thousand dollars or more. Once, Young was gone for two years. His wife and children didn’t know if he would return. The work was dangerous but lucrative. By 1860 Solomon Young was worth fifty thousand dollars, though he soon lost his fortune in the Civil War. As an old man, Young’s tales of his travels would spellbind his grandson Harry Truman.
Outside major cities, where streets might be paved with stone or brick, nineteenth-century roads were little more than rutted dirt paths that turned into quagmires when it rained. In 1896 a popular magazine even gave readers helpful tips on what to do when a horse got stuck in the mud. (“Steady and support the horse’s head, and excite and encourage him, with hand and voice, to rise.”)
It wasn’t until a new mode of transportation emerged that the so-called “good roads movement” finally took hold in the United States. That new mode was … the bicycle. The invention of the “safety bicycle”—the kind we know today, with equal-sized wheels and pneumatic tires—spurred a bicycle craze in the 1880s. Bicyclists successfully lobbied state and local governments to impose taxes for the construction of paved roads. (Motorists should keep this in mind the next time they get stuck behind a bicycle in traffic.) In 1893 Massachusetts became the first state to organize a highway department, and by 1905 thirteen other states had started one.
But it was the automobile, of course, that turned that trickle of road building into a torrent.
In the late spring and early summer of 1903, a doctor named Horatio Nelson Jackson became the first person to cross the country in an automobile. Talk about a road trip. To win a fifty-dollar bet, Jackson