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America 2050 REGIONAL PLAN ASSOCIATION | JULY 8–13, 2007 1808 – 1908 – 2008: National Planning for America ROBERT FISHMAN T AUBMAN C OLLEGE OF A RCHITECTURE AND P LANNING T HE U NIVERSITY OF M ICHIGAN, A NN A RBOR National planning in this country is widely land to any family that would farm it, while believed to be an un-American activity, an exercise massive federal land grants to the railroads in bureaucratic hubris best left to the French. In financed a national rail system that opened up fact, national planning is as American as the family millions of acres for settlement. farm, the transcontinental railroads, the great hydro-electric dams of the South and West, and Indeed, it was the very success of the the interstate highway system. Not only were these Jefferson/Gallatin vision through the 19th century and other characteristic elements of our culture that prompted the second campaign of national and economy the product of national planning; planning, which began exactly a century after the the federal government itself was created in large Gallatin Plan in 1908 with Theodore Roosevelt’s part to overcome the barriers to national planning great conservation initiatives. Haste had made that existed under the Articles of Confederation. waste, a whole continent of it, as the runoff from Indeed, I would argue that no other nation has bare slopes denuded by massive timber cuts had been so profoundly planned as the United States. turned fertile valleys into floodplains; eroded soil bankrupted farmers and choked rivers; plowing of In this paper I will discuss the two great semi-arid land threatened dustbowls; and a poverty- “campaigns” of national planning that have stricken rural population streamed into the profoundly shaped this country: the 1808 “Gallatin already-overcrowded cities. Roosevelt’s “New Plan” of roads and canals whose themes guided Nationalism” meant a re-assertion of “the common long-term federal policy through the 19th century, good” as the motive for national planning. This and Theodore Roosevelt’s 1908 set of conservation meant a coordinated effort led by the federal and transportation initiatives that guided the 20th government at the scale of the great river valleys. century. My purpose is not merely to correct some Forests in the highlands would be protected (or myths about American history. As we approach the replanted if necessary) to restrain flooding; centennial anniversaries of these two great plans, agriculture reformed to minimize soil erosion; the we might ask: What elements in our tradition of great rivers tamed by dams that would also provide national planning are still valuable and powerful? hydro-electric power. In the West, the dams would Where is the new vision for 2008 that can build on collect water to irrigate millions of acres and thus the achievements of 1808 and 1908 to reshape the spur a new era of homesteading. If the railroads nation over the next century? had concentrated industry and population in the cities of the East and Midwest, a new federal The first great national plan bears the name of system of navigable inland waterways, irrigation Thomas Jefferson’s brilliant Secretary of the and cheap electric power would reinvigorate the Treasury, Albert Gallatin, although his 1808 economies of the South and West to create a “Gallatin Plan” owed as much to Jefferson himself national balance of prosperity and equity. as to Gallatin. It embodied perhaps the most revolutionary vision of any national plan: the As with the Gallatin Plan, the 1908 Roosevelt creation of a truly democratic society through the vision exercised its influence over the long term, planned settlement of a whole continent. The sale eventually drawing on new technologies like the of federal lands would be organized to produce a regional electric power grid and the automobile society dominated by independent farmers, and superhighway to achieve its ends. The climax of this new continent of citizen-farmers would be this era’s national planning came in the 1930s, connected to thriving cities and their world-wide when the New Deal responded to the droughts and markets by a federally-financed network of roads, dust bowls that accompanied the Depression with and canals (and later railroads) to form the world’s a heroic coordinated program of hydroelectric most productive economy. This vision dominated dams, rural highways, electrification and farm the 19th century, reaching its climax during the subsidies that saved the South and West from Civil War years when Lincoln definitively linked catastrophe and made possible their resurgence the Jeffersonian ideal of the citizen-farmer to the after 1945. Perhaps the greatest legacy of New Deal new technology of the railroad. The 1862 national planning is one that is rarely Homestead Act promised 160 free acres of federal acknowledged: the interstate highway program. 1 America 2050 REGIONAL PLAN ASSOCIATION | JULY 8–13, 2007 Theodore Roosevelt’s dream of an efficient organizations like the Chicago Plan Commission national system of inland waterways to break the and the Regional Plan Association of New York monopoly of the railroads was realized on land had already amassed the planning skills that with the interstate highways that Franklin national planning required. Roosevelt first envisioned in the late 1930s (and that Dwight Eisenhower finally funded in 1956.) Alexis de Tocqueville was perhaps the first to recognize the special character of American The interstates completed the regional planning in his classic Democracy in America. When restructuring that was implicit in the 1908 vision, Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s, helping to shift population from the rail-dependent he observed that the country lacked the top-down cities of the East and Midwest to Sunbelt regions government bureaucracies that carried out where systems of federally-financed infrastructure planning in France, and yet, in the United States, (water, electricity, roads, ports, housing) made much more was actually accomplished because the possible the explosive growth that has re-shaped relatively open American system encouraged citizen this country over the last sixty years. Of course, it is activism and cooperation. “Democracy,” he wrote, part of the mythology of the South and West today “does not give the people the most skillful that their growth is due to private enterprise and government, but it produces what the most able “rugged individualism.” The great paradox of governments are frequently unable to create: a national planning is that Americans have practiced superabundant force, and an energy which is it so successfully while continually claiming it inseparable from it, and which may, however doesn’t exist. unfavorable circumstances may be, produce wonders.”1 Indeed, one might argue that the remarkable power of planning in this country is proportional 1808: The Gallatin Plan to the strength of the barriers it must continually overcome. These include the continent-spanning When in 1908 the Inland Waterways Commission scale of effective national planning; the centrality published its landmark Preliminary Report, the of private property and its rights in our economy volume that would set so many of the goals for and culture; and the federal system of government American national planning for the rest of the 20th itself with its complex division of powers. National century, its authors included as an appendix the planning in this country has therefore always been 1808 Gallatin Report.2 This was not mere innovative and opportunistic, exploiting the antiquarianism. Albert Gallatin’s Report on Roads flexibility in the federal system to bypass and Canals had not only achieved over the course opposition while constantly seeking new coalitions of the 19th century the deep influence on the of stakeholders that can advance the goals. country that the 1908 conservationists hoped to achieve in the 20th; but Gallatin’s Report remained When, for example, federal initiatives on the in 1908 (and, I would argue, still in 2008) a model Gallatin Plan in the 1820s-1850s were stymied by of long-term strategic thinking tied to national the conflict between North and South, the policy. The plan clearly identified a set of key initiative passed to the states that actually built the infrastructure investments for the federal canals that Gallatin had envisioned. In the 20th government, and related those investments to what century, Theodore Roosevelt announced his 1908 were perhaps the two most important “policy conservation initiatives at a White House goals” in the history of the early Republic. The first conference that brought together all the nation’s was Thomas Jefferson’s determination that the vast governors with members of Congress, the Supreme lands controlled by the national government Court, and even included such “stakeholders” as beyond the borders of the original thirteen states the industrialist Andrew Carnegie and the populist be sold under conditions carefully designed to William Jennings Bryan. Moreover, to carry out create a nation of independent small farmers. The the initiatives, the federal government drew on the second was George Washington’s determination expertise and support of the great cities, where that the newly-settled lands in the American 2 America 2050 REGIONAL PLAN ASSOCIATION | JULY 8–13, 2007 interior be linked to the markets and Atlantic ports The Constitution is thus in a real sense a charter of the East Coast to ensure that the United States for national planning; the Commerce Clause gives remained prosperous and united. Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce to create, in the words of the preamble, Indeed, one might say that not only the Gallatin a “more perfect union.” James Madison in his Plan but the federal Constitution itself derived Federalist Paper #14 specifically defended the new directly from Washington’s conviction that the Constitution as forming a government that would new nation must have the capacity to engage in unite the country through new roads and canals.

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