Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [38]
The numbering system ended the era of named roads. The National Road became Route 40, the Lincoln Highway Route 30, the Dixie Highway Route 25. The passing of the named roads was not unlamented. Ernest McGaffey of the Automobile Club of Southern California complained that the new system substituted “arithmetic for history, mathematics for romance.” But the numbered highways made it much easier to navigate the rapidly expanding road system, and some, like Route 66, even managed to evoke a romance of their own.
During the Great Depression the road trip took on a new meaning as millions of Americans took to the road in search of a better life—or at least a job. “European immigrants moved inland from coastal ports along roads,” wrote Karl Raitz in A Guide to the National Road.
African American migrants moved out of the South to Northern cities, many following bus routes; others drove farm vehicles and well-used cars along the road net. Great Plains Dust Bowl migrants moved to the California cornucopia in a similar manner. Appalachian migrants, too, moved out of the mountains by following the roads leading north to hoped-for industrial jobs.
During World War II, the road trip was put on hold. Only travel deemed essential to the war effort was permitted. To conserve rubber and fuel, the speed limit was reduced to thirty-five miles per hour nationwide, and tires and gasoline were rationed. A mere 139 new cars were manufactured in 1943, and those, of course, were strictly rationed as well.
After the war, the pent-up demand for automobiles exploded. Production leaped from 69,532 vehicles in 1945 to 2.1 million in 1946, 3.5 million in 1947, and 3.9 million in 1948. (Postwar production would peak at more than seven million in 1955.) It was the golden age of the American automobile.
The country’s roads had been badly neglected during the war. Truman recognized the problem. “In recent years,” he said in 1948, “our highway construction has not kept pace with the growth in traffic…. By any reasonable standard our highways are inadequate for today’s demands.” But construction materials were scarce, and the demand for housing far exceeded the demand for new highways. Not until 1956 would the Federal-Aid Highway Act be signed—by Dwight Eisenhower—creating the interstate highway system and ushering in the golden age of the American road trip.
Now you can drive from San Francisco to New York in less than forty-eight hours.
Considering Harry Truman’s love of roads, it must have bugged him that Eisenhower, not he, came to be known as the father of the interstate highway system.
Around eleven o’clock on the night of Saturday, June 20, the Trumans reached Wheeling, in West Virginia’s northern panhandle between Ohio and Pennsylvania. Just outside of town, Harry noticed a crumbling statue of Henry Clay in a park. “Wheeling, for some reason, used to be devoted to Henry Clay,” he later observed, though he confessed he hadn’t the foggiest idea why. That’s surprising, since the statue (long since removed) was erected to honor Clay for his role in extending the National Road westward from Wheeling.
Harry pulled up in front of the McLure House, a hotel in downtown Wheeling. At the front desk, he very much surprised the night clerk, who recognized him immediately and called the manager. “The manager came up and asked why we had not let him know we were coming,” Truman said. “I told them that if I had, the street in front of the hotel would be so full that we would have a hard time getting through. He agreed that I was right.”
The Trumans checked into a room on the fifth floor and called their daughter, Margaret, who was to meet them in Washington the next day. Margaret had apparently been fielding