President Dwight D Eisenhower and the Federal Role in Highway Safety
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PRESIDENT DWIGHT D EISENHOWER AND THE FEDERAL ROLE IN HIGHWAY SAFETY by Richard F. Weingroff Federal Highway Administration Research Assistant Sonquela “Sonnie” Seabron TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: President Harry S. Truman’s Highway Safety Conferences 2 President Truman and the Action Program 2 The President’s Second Highway Safety Conference 6 The President’s 1949 Highway Safety Conference 9 Highway Safety for National Defense 12 The 1952 Highway Safety Conference 16 CHAPTER 2: A Crusade for Safety 22 The Federal System 22 Business Advisory Committee 26 Federal Charter for the National Safety Council 28 White House Conference on Highway Safety 28 The President’s Action Committee for Traffic Safety 32 Labor Day, 1954 33 Safe Driving Day 34 Congress Considers the Grand Plan 38 Facing Up To The Problem 40 Commission on Intergovernmental Relations 43 Safe Driving Day, 1955 46 Auto Safety Features, 1956 49 National Safety Forum and Crash Demonstration 50 Man of the Year 52 The President’s Regional Conferences 53 The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 59 Highway Safety Study 60 The House Special Subcommittee on Traffic Safety 63 CHAPTER 3: Maintaining the Focus 66 Gimmicks and Panaceas 66 Back the Attack! 67 Safety Features, 1957 71 A Worthwhile Objective 72 President Eisenhower on Federal-State Relations 74 Backing the Attack! 76 Harlow H. Curtice on Highway Safety 79 Mobilizing the Latent Force 80 Williamsburg Conference 83 Aim to Live! 86 Regional Conferences, 1958 87 Tomorrow’s Car 90 Safety Slogan Fatigue 92 Conferences for State Legislators 93 Ike Stops By 94 The Chairman Steps Down 96 Congress Considers Safety 96 CHAPTER 4: The Federal Role in Highway Safety 100 BPR’s Report to Congress 100 Epidemic on the Highways 109 The National System of Interstate and Defense Highways 113 Advancing the Action Program 116 Action/Inaction in Washington 117 The President Maps Traffic Safety Strategy 120 Federal Intervention 121 Joint Federal-State Action Committee 124 National Driver Register 125 The Platforms 128 The Interdepartmental Highway Safety Board 129 A Changed Social Order 130 EPILOGUE: The Changing Federal Role 132 A New President 132 The Roberts Bill 133 The Baldwin Amendment 135 Unsafe at Any Speed 139 On The Hill 149 National Safety Council Responds 155 An Investigation Backfires 159 Moving Out of the Stone Age of Ignorance 161 Overtaken By Events 169 The Aftermath 173 APPENDIX PREFACE This monograph began as a sidebar to my two-part article, “The Man Who Changed America,” in Public Roads magazine (March/April 2003 and May/June 2003). In “President Eisenhower on Highway Safety,” I intended to quote from several of the President’s speeches on the subject to supplement the other online sidebars I had written to elaborate on the President’s interest in highways. The speeches, however, needed context, and as I provided it, I began thinking about one of President Harry S. Truman’s comments during his speech to the May 1946 Highway Safety Conference. The focus of his speech and the conference was on rallying public support and improving State motor vehicle laws and driver licensing and education. After summarizing his unsuccessful efforts as a United States Senator to enact Federal legislation on motor vehicle registration and driver licensing, the President said the Congress was not ready at the time to interfere with what were seen as State prerogatives. He added: At the same time, we cannot expect the Congress and the Federal Government to stand idly by if the toll of disaster continues to go unchecked. Just a few months longer than 20 years later, standing idly by ended. On September 9, 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 and the Highway Safety Act of 1966. The signing ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House marked a transformation in the Federal role in highway safety that had been slowly growing during the Eisenhower Administration, but had finally taken hold as fatalities on the Nation’s highways climbed toward 50,000. The steps taken during the previous 2 decades to reverse the trend had failed and the old “truths”—that highway safety was a State responsibility, that drivers could be convinced or taught to drive safely, and that the automobile industry should set its own rules—were revealed as insufficient in the wake of ever increasing fatalities and injuries. The sidebar grew into “President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Federal Role in Highway Safety,” the story of how this transformation took place. In writing this monograph, I took advantage of the chronological history of the war on traffic deaths and injuries contained in the pages of the National Safety Council’s magazine Public Safety (Traffic Safety beginning in July 1957). Because each issue reflected contemporary thinking as it evolved, the magazine helped tell the story of the transformation nationally as the Federal Government moved gradually, even reluctantly, from rallying public support to legislating changes. Throughout the monograph, I relied on fatality, injury, and other statistics reported in the magazine. Aside from the consistency this approach provided, I adopted it because these statistics were used by all sources in speeches and articles at the time of the events described. Final statistics accepted by the U.S. Department of Transportation vary, often significantly. See Appendix 1 for fatalities, VMT, and fatality rates, 1950-2002. I want to thank the U.S. Department of Transportation Library for the resources it made available for this monograph. As always, its staff was consistently helpful and productive—as well as patient when I held magazines and publications beyond the due dates. Loretta A. Hoffman, Manager of the Circulation and Interlibrary Loan Services, was especially helpful (and patient). Sherie A. Abassi and Barbara D. Day in the FHWA’s Office of Chief Counsel were also helpful in tracking down obscure information about laws and resolutions passed many years ago. I also want to thank Sonquela “Sonnie” Seabron for her invaluable research assistance at key points. On several occasions, she went to the Library of Congress with only a barebones description of what I was looking for and found exactly what I had in mind. She also used her research skills in the U.S. Department of Transportation Library and the Martin Luther King Jr. Public Library with equally useful results. In addition, Sonnie used her computer skills to provide the illustrations that accompany this monograph. Richard F. Weingroff September 2003 INTRODUCTION In explaining his support for highway improvements, President Dwight D. Eisenhower cited several factors, including the growing number of fatal accidents on the Nation’s roads. For his Grand Plan speech on July 12, 1954 (delivered to the Nation’s Governors by Vice President Richard M. Nixon), Eisenhower’s notes included safety among several penalties resulting from “this obsolete net which we have today.” He said: Our first most apparent [penalty is] an annual death toll comparable to the casualties of a bloody war, beyond calculation in dollar terms. It approaches 40 thousand killed and exceeds one and three-tenths million injured annually. He also referred to “all the civil suits that clog up our courts.” Half the suits, he estimated, “have their origins on highways, roads and streets.” Although the Grand Plan launched the fight for the Interstate System, President Eisenhower’s campaign for highway safety began even before he took office. In a late 1952 statement to the Hearst Newspaper chain, which was then involved in a massive campaign in support of better highways, President-elect Eisenhower emphasized the need for good roads in view of the “appalling problem of waste, death and danger.” He added: There were 37,500 men, woman and children killed in traffic accidents last year, and those injured totaled another 1,300,000. This awful total presents a real crisis to America. As a humane nation, we must end this unnecessary toll. Property losses have reached a staggering total, and insurance costs have become a real burden. During his 8 years as President, Eisenhower would return to these images periodically— and attempt to do something about them. CHAPTER 1 PRESIDENT HARRY S. TRUMAN’S HIGHWAY SAFETY CONFERENCES President Truman and the Action Program President Harry S. Truman, who had been a road builder as a young man and an avid motorist his whole life, had also been concerned about the growing traffic safety problem—and with good reason. Fatalities had reached 39,969 in 1941 before restrictions on driving during World War II (such as rationing of gasoline and tires and reduced speed limits) and the departure of many motorists for military service resulted in reduced highway deaths of 23,823 in 1943 and 24,300 in 1944. After the restrictions were lifted after the war ended in mid-1945, highway deaths increased to 33,500 in 1946. On December 18, 1945, President Truman wrote to Major General Philip B. Fleming, Administrator of the Federal Works Agency (which included the Public Roads Administration (PRA)), to express concern about “the extent of traffic accidents on the Nation’s streets and highways which have increased alarmingly since the end of gasoline rationing.” The loss of lives, bodily injuries, and property destruction were “a drain upon the nation’s resources which we cannot possibly allow to continue.” The President said: It is my intention to call into conference at the White House next spring representatives of the States and municipalities who have legal responsibility in matters of highway traffic, together with representatives of the several national organizations which have a primary interest in traffic safety. I hope that additional means may be devised by such a conference to make our streets and highways safer for motorists and for the public before the beginning of the automobile touring season of 1946.