Made In America - Bill Bryson [112]
In 1912 Fisher proposed spending $10 million on a gravelled two-lane road from New York to San Francisco, and to raise the money through donations. Thousands of people sent in money – President Woodrow Wilson patriotically gave $5, though Henry Ford refused to cough up a penny – and by 1915 the pot was sufficiently full to make a start. Two problems soon became evident. The first was what to call the highway. A good name was important to galvanize support. Fisher’s proposed name, the Coast-to-Coast Rock Highway, was apt but rather short on zip. Fisher toyed with the Jefferson Highway, the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway or the American Road before finally settling on the Lincoln Highway, which had a solid patriotic ring to it, even if it alienated many southerners. The second problem was that even with all the donations, there wasn’t nearly enough to build the necessary 3,389 miles of highway. Fisher hit on the idea of constructing what came to be called ‘seedling miles’. He would find a section of dirt road roughly midway between two towns and pave it. The idea of building a mile of good road in the middle of nowhere may seem odd, but Fisher reasoned that once people got a taste of smooth highway they would want the whole concrete banquet. Soon towns all along the route were enthusiastically raising funds to connect themselves to that tantalizing seedling mile. A new slogan arose: ‘See America First.’
In 1923 the Lincoln Highway – the first transcontinental highway in the world – officially opened. For the next forty years, it hummed with life as a daily cavalcade of cars and trucks brought commerce and the intoxicating whiff of a larger, livelier world to the hundreds of little towns (it mostly avoided cities) standing along its pleasantly meandering route. Almost overnight it became, as the postcards proudly boasted, America’s Main Street.
Eventually the federal government decided to make money available for interstate highways, though it continued to consider the matter such a low priority that it handed the task to the Secretary of Agriculture as something to do in his free time. With the help of federal money, other great roads were built: the Jefferson Highway from Detroit to New Orleans, the Dixie Highway from Bay City, Michigan, to Florida, the William Penn Highway across Pennsylvania. The Dixie Highway was yet another Fisher inspiration, though here the motivation had more to do with self-interest than patriotism. In the late 1910s, Fisher became seized with the idea that Miami Beach – or Lincoln, as he wished for a time to call it – would make a splendid resort.
The notion was widely held to be deranged. Florida was, as far as anyone knew, a muggy, bug-infested swamp a long way from anywhere. But Fisher envisioned a great utopian city linked to the outside world by his Dixie Highway. The costs and logistics of building a resort in a distant swamp proved formidable, but Fisher persevered and by 1926 had nearly finished his model community, complete with hotels, a casino, golf courses, a yacht basin and a lavish Roman swimming pavilion (which featured, a trifle incongruously, a Dutch windmill). Then a hurricane blew it all down. Barely had he absorbed this blow than the stock market crashed in 1929 and the market for vacation homes dried up. Miami Beach did of course become a success, but not for Carl Graham Fisher. He ended his years living in a modest house on a side-street in the city he had built from nothing.36
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