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UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA GRADUATE COLLEGE ROAD POWER: THE POLITICS OF AMERICAN HIGHWAY DEVELOPMENT, 1900-1939 A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE FACULTY in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS By ALEXANDER FINKELSTEIN Norman, Oklahoma 2018 ROAD POWER: THE POLITICS OF AMERICAN HIGHWAY DEVELOPMENT, 1900-1939 A THESIS APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY BY _______________________________ Dr. David Wrobel, Chair _______________________________ Dr. Kathleen Brosnan _______________________________ Dr. Anne Hyde © Copyright by ALEXANDER FINKELSTEIN 2018 All Rights Reserved. iv Acknowledgements Writing a thesis is no easy task, but the people around me have made the process smooth, meaningful, and, enjoyable. I am eternally grateful to my thesis committee for engaging with me and helping me mature as a person and scholar. David Wrobel ensured I never lost sight of my goal or the bigger picture. I am indebted to him for the continuous advice and his willingness to engage with my many (and oftentimes unwieldy) drafts. Kathleen Brosnan taught me how to express my ideas clearly and probe my ideas for deeper meaning. Though this is perhaps not the shortest thesis ever produced, “concision and precision” has and will continue to guide my writing. Anne Hyde helped make the transition to graduate school as seamless as possible. I thank her for always being willing to bounce ideas off of and reminding me to remember the human aspect of the story. Beyond Drs. Wrobel, Brosnan, and Hyde, I have found a community at the University of Oklahoma of my fellow graduate students and the professors that have unceasingly continued to push me to grow and work harder. Lastly, I owe a great intellectual debt to those whose work influenced my own, and my bibliography really serves as an extension of these acknowledgements. Every scholar knows that this process is impossible without supportive librarians and generous patrons, and I owe a debt of gratitude to both. Across my archival travels, I have been helped and encouraged by many archivists. I must thank the librarians of: the Carl Albert Congressional Research and Studies Center, the Western History Collections at the University of Oklahoma, the Cushing Memorial Library & Archives at Texas A&M, the Colorado State Archives, the Benson Ford Research Center, the National Archives and Records Administration (both in College Park and Washington, v D.C.), and the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation and Archives at Cornell University. Those archival visits and my tenure at OU would not have been possible without generous support from: the Merrick Family Foundation, Dunham College, the Robberson Travel and Research Grants, the OU History Department, and the OU Graduate Student Senate. Lastly, I am grateful to my many friends and family that have kept me sane throughout this process. I especially appreciate the Californians who visited me in my new home in Oklahoma—mom, dad, Jason, Tony. I could not have gone through this process without the support and love of my family—thank you for supporting my idea to become an historian! And I appreciate the friends who continuously support my endeavors and are willing (although perhaps uneagerly) to hear an excited monologue on the highways. My friends, family, supporters, and advisors have made this process both uncomplicated and exciting – thank you. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements / iv Abstract / ix Introduction / “Without Which This Country Could Not Exist” / 1 One / The Seeds of Institutional Power / 14 Two / The Power of Expertise and Standardization / 66 Three / The Rhetorical Power of American Exceptionalism / 115 Four / Hemispheric Power through Foreign Infrastructure Intervention / 163 Five / The Penal State’s Convict Road Power / 209 Conclusion / “The Only National Agency Actually Organized to Execute” / 255 Bibliography / 276 vii List of Figures 0.1 / Government Automobile on Dirt Road / 3 1.1 / Inaugural Public Roads Cover / 24 1.2 / Good Roads Train Advertisement / 27 1.3 / First National Highway Map, 1923 / 47 1.4 / Uncle Sam Political Cartoon / 53 1.5 / Alabama Good Roads Bond Pamphlet / 58 2.1 / Cartoon Advocating for Centralized Planning / 72 2.2 / BPR Testing Road Section / 81 2.3 / Contrast Uniform versus Scrambled Legislation / 92 2.4 / Cartoon Showing Tools of State against Traffic Accidents / 98 2.5 / AASHO Uniformly Numbered Interstate Highway Map / 109 2.6 / USDA Numbered Highway Map / 109 2.7 / BPR Promotion of Uniform Road Signage / 110 2.8 / “Mud at the State Line” / 114 3.1 / Appian Way in Italy from Southern Good Roads / 127 3.2 / Highways, Yesterday and Tomorrow / 135 3.3 / Cartoon Portraying Military Necessity of Good Roads / 155 4.1 / Standard Oil Map of Pan American Highway / 163 4.2 / Wall Map of Carretera Pan. Americana in Guatemala / 171 4.3 / Pan American Highway Improvement, Northern Section / 180 4.4 / Pan American Highway Improvement, Southern Section / 180 4.5 / American Road Machinery in El Salvador / 191 4.6 / PAH Road Sign in Nicaragua / 194 4.7 / Pan American Exhibit of World Horizons by General Motors / 198 4.8 / Chile’s Local Water Supply / 207 4.9 / MacDonald Posing Triumphantly / 208 5.1 / Map Contrasting Honor and Guard System States / 220 5.2 / Warden Thomas J. Tynan / 223 5.3 / “Real Life Making Real Men” / 230 5.4 / “Prison Labor and Prisoners’ Families” by Jane Addams / 233 5.5 / “The New Penology” by Theodore Roosevelt / 233 5.6 / Convict Honor Labor in Montana / 245 viii List of Abbreviations AASHO / American Association of Highway Officials ASTM / American Society for Testing Materials BPR / Bureau of Public Roads CCC / Civilian Conservation Corps CWA / Civil Works Administration ERCA / Emergency Relief and Construction Act FERA / Federal Emergency Relief Administration FWP / Federal Writers Project IAH / Inter-American Highway IRC / International Road Congress NCSHS / National Conference on Street and Highway Safety NIRA / National Industrial Recovery Act NRA / National Recovery Administration OPR / Office of Public Roads OPRRE / Office of Public Roads and Rural Engineering ORI / Office of Road Inquiry PAH / Pan-American Highway PAHC / Pan-American Highway Congress PWA / Public Works Administration RFC / Reconstruction Finance Corporation USDA / United States Department of Agriculture WPA / Works Progress Administration ix Abstract Road Power uses the development of the American highway system to examine the foundations of the federal state. This thesis argues that the highway bureaucracy accrued power throughout the early twentieth century, providing a historical narrative that seamlessly connects the long Progressive Era with the New Deal through an increasingly powerful national state. Road Power uncovers the multi-faceted approach to state development and the federalization of infrastructure development. The story begins with the institutional components of standardization and oversight, arguing that the federal aid highway legislation, implemented by managerial professional experts, created a national highway authority that marshalled a standardized road program. Following this institutional change, Road Power determines that the highway program fed into notions of American exceptionalism. Both the rhetoric of exceptionalism justifying good roads and the use of roads for foreign economic and policy intervention show how roads assuaged popular anxieties in the early twentieth century. The convict laborers who built the roads underscore the ways in which states ceded labor oversight and control to national directives and campaigns. By connecting convict labor, penal reform, and the national road programs, this study finds a shift from state to federal control that manifested in the roots of the penal state through oversight, regulations, and experimentation. The study closes with the New Deal state, arguing that roads were the dominant political and cultural symbol of the era. The subject of roads offers an analytical tool that frames the road building program of the early twentieth century as a template for the government-directed public works programs of the New Deal’s liberal democracy. 1 Introduction: “Without Which This Country Could Not Exist” At the turn of the twentieth century, the automobile transformed America. The automobile offers a window into much about the early twentieth century: how society was structured, the changes in production and labor patterns, new ideals of consumerism and path dependence, the rise of environmental and wilderness movements, and the understanding of tourism and regionalism, among other topics. Scholars and auto enthusiasts alike have illuminated the special relationship between Americans and their cars, and we now are gaining a more holistic understanding of both the lore and the impact of the auto in America. The car, though, did not transform America alone. Without roads, cars would be rendered virtually ineffective. As automobiles restructured Americans’ lives, highways redrew the national map and reconstituted the American state. Historians sociologists, economists, and geographers have examined how the car reorganized individual and collective behavior in the twentieth century, with one scholar defining the automobile simultaneously as both the “great glor[y] of the modern age” and the “scourge of civilization.”1 By affecting urban planning and zoning, the car changed how Americans conceived of time and space. By bringing Americans closer to the wilderness, cars inaugurated the nation’s first nature movement