Petersen Archive | Dwight D Eisenhower — Petersen Automotive Museum

The postwar period was a time described by unprecedented prosperity. Following the Next Environment War, returning GI’s arrived household to a booming financial state, housing advancement jobs, and aid systems like the GI Monthly bill that expanded and cemented America’s center class. By 1950 most factories, which include automobile brands, experienced manufactured the transition from wartime creation to a customer-based mostly financial system, so significantly so that, in that year by yourself, 8 million vehicles ended up developed, by 1958 far more than 67 million vehicles would be generated and registered in the United States. However, at the commence of the ten years, most of America’s obsolete streets were being in no problem to assist a massive inflow of visitors. Force for construction of transcontinental superhighways had been escalating due to the fact the late 1930s, having said that, conflict amongst urban interests and rural passions vying for priority and a deficiency of funding still left early tasks these kinds of as the 1944 Federal-Aid Freeway Act dead in the water. By the 1950’s, in buy to take care of an inflow of new vehicle entrepreneurs president Dwight D. Eisenhower publicly supported an interstate freeway improvement application and on June 29, 1956, he signed the Highway Income Act also regarded as the Nationwide Interstate and Defense Highways Act into regulation. The act marked the most significant American community functions software of that time authorizing the design of 41,000 miles of interstate highways equipped with overpasses and limited-obtain belt traces. Eisenhower experienced been closely influenced by his experiences in 1919 as a participant in the U.S. Military&#39s initially Transcontinental Motor Convoy across the United States and his observations of the German audubon highway network during Planet War II. Owning recognized the value of mobility and efficiency, Eisenhower proposed an American interstate highway technique in his State of the Union deal with in 1954, which he framed as a national defense program. In an exertion to encourage a cooperative alliance among point out and federal officials, retired Standard Lucius D. Clay, an engineer and a lengthy-time advisor to the president, proposed a approach in which the federal federal government would pay 90 percent of the value of expressway building the funding for which would come from an increased gasoline tax (now 3 cents a gallon). Interstate money were to then be dispersed in the ratio of every single state&#39s approximated price of completing the process. The first task under the Act was the Mark Twain Expressway (Interstate 70) in St. Charles County, Missouri.

The highways had been intended to do away with targeted traffic congestion swap “undesirable slum regions with pristine ribbons of concrete” as a person freeway advocate put it make coast-to-coast transportation much more successful and make it effortless to evacuate massive metropolitan areas in case of an atomic assault. When transformative, the Freeway Earnings Act also reflected an enduring legacy of Jim Crow period discriminatory guidelines and systemic racism. Reduced-expense mortgages by the G.I. Bill (which was not provided to black GI’s), enabled white people to abandon interior metropolitan areas in favor of suburban housing as nicely as avoid ethnic minorities from undertaking the exact. Federal planners of the interstate highway method routed some highways straight, and often purposefully, through predominantly black and brown neighborhoods to predominantly white suburban neighborhoods. Although the Freeway Revenue Act was in the beginning satisfied with widespread general public help, as extra people today grew to become displaced and conditions in towns deteriorated, activists began to openly oppose the process, some going as far as forcing development stoppages during the late 1950s and early 60s. Throughout the 1960s, civil rights activists and environmentalists throughout the country in New York Town, Baltimore, Washington, D.C. New Orleans and other metropolitan areas managed to avoid roadbuilders from dividing and subjugating their neighborhoods, sooner or later having said that, most of the 41,000 miles of interstate had been accomplished.

Sources:

https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/background/moment/Federal_Freeway_Act.htm#:~:textual content=On%20June%2026%2C%201956%2C%20the,Eisenhower%20signed%20it%20into%20regulation.

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-quick-history-of-how-racism-shaped-interstate-highways

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/03/function-of-highways-in-american-poverty/474282/

https://highways.dot.gov/general public-streets/summer-1996/federal-assist-freeway-act-1956-building-interstate-method