Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [37]
Jackson’s journey inspired a frenzy of cross-country motoring. In 1904, a caravan of seventy cars set out from the East Coast for the World’s Fair in St. Louis. “The logistics for such an expedition at this time were formidable,” wrote a Federal Highway Administration historian.
There were no through routes, no reliable road maps, no way of knowing the condition of the roads in advance, no road signs or route markers. Between major cities, getting repairs for a breakdown, or even fuel, was an uncertain business.
Incredibly, fifty-eight of the autos managed to make it to the fair, and their arrival triggered tumultuous celebrations. America’s love affair with the automobile had begun. The St. Louis caravan showed that cars were mechanically capable of making long trips. The only thing holding them back was the woeful condition of the nation’s roads.
In 1915 Harry Truman took what was probably his first long automobile trip. He, his mother, and his uncle Harrison piled into his Stafford and drove to Monegaw Springs, a resort along the Osage River in western Missouri about eighty miles south of Grandview. Typical of the times, it was an arduous journey, which he described in a letter to Bess:
We got within a half mile [of the springs] and ran over a stump. I spilled Uncle Harry over the front seat and threw Mamma over my own head. Neither of them were hurt, except Uncle Harry renewed his profane vocabulary. I backed Lizzie off the stump and ran her into town with a badly bent axle. Mamma and I started for home at 6:00 A.M. on Monday. Got within seventy-five miles of it and it began to rain. Had the nicest slipping time you ever saw. What with a crooked axle and a bent steering wheel I could hardly stay in the road. Five miles south of Harrisonville Lizzie took a header for the ditch and got there, smashing a left front wheel into kindling. I phoned to Ferson and he sent me his front wheel. The accident happened within a half mile of a R. R. station, Lone Tree by name. Mamma and I sat there from 1:30 until 8:00 P.M. waiting for the wheel. It arrived all right and I couldn’t get it on. Then it began to rain in real earnest. I got soaked. A good farmer came and took us up to his house and we stayed all night. Next morning he hitched his team to Lizzie and pulled her out of the ditch.
Harry and Mamma finally made it back to Grandview at 3:00 P.M. on Tuesday. The eighty-mile trek from the springs had required thirty-three hours and incalculable patience.
Despite such deplorable conditions, the popularity of the automobile only grew. In 1900 there were eight thousand in the United States. By 1915 there were nearly 2.5 million, and they just kept getting better, faster, and cheaper. By 1917 Henry Ford was selling his Model T for six hundred dollars.
Traffic engineers scrambled to come up with a road surface that could withstand the deluge of horseless carriages. They experimented with roasted clay, oil-earth mixtures, slag from blast furnaces, wooden planks—even steel. But none was deemed practical enough. Then they tried asphalt, a petroleum product that liquefies at temperatures above three hundred degrees Fahrenheit but hardens when it cools. It worked nicely.
After World War I, the federal government began financing state road-building programs in earnest. Asphalt roads began spreading like tentacles across the country, and by 1925 it was possible to drive from San Francisco to New York—the journey that had taken Horatio Nelson Jackson sixty-three days—in less than a hundred hours. In 1926 federal and state transportation officials organized