Through Darkest America (July/August 1993 | Volume: 44, Issue: 4)

Through Darkest America

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Authors: John Steele Gordon

Historic Era: Era 7: The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930)

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July/August 1993 | Volume 44, Issue 4

As every historian knows, great events are often determined by trivial ones. Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard’s Almanack, noted that, for want of a single horseshoe nail, an entire war could be lost. Franklin was being theoretical, of course, but real examples abound. Had any one of a thousand things happened (or not happened), for instance, the Titanic would have missed the iceberg.

Much of the man-made physical world, too, owes its existence to trivialities. In the 1840s, New York banned the noisy, dirty, spark-throwing locomotives of the day from the built-up areas of the city. They were ordered to stay north of Forty-second Street, then no more than a country lane. As a result, New York is the only city in the world with two completely separate main business districts, one downtown, centered on Wall Street, and another, miles to the north, centered near the train station that was, necessarily, built at Forty-second Street.

Railroads were the great infrastructure project—to use the hot new Washington buzzword—of the nineteenth century. Infrastructure, because by definition it facilitates economic transactions, always has a profound effect on how, where, and why a country as a whole develops.

Being the world’s richest nation, the United States has more infrastructure than any other country. Almost all of it, however, came into existence with little or no overarching vision. Rather, it developed from myriad local pressures and entrepreneurial activity, a fact for which the country seems little, if any, the worse (Washington, D.C., please note).

There is one glaring exception, however, to this general rule: the greatest American infrastructure project of them all, the Interstate Highway System. It was conceived, planned, and financed as a single entity, and it remains the largest public-works project in the history of the world.

 

But even this immense, and notably successful, undertaking owes its existence in large measure to a strikingly trivial event. In 1919 a U.S. Army captain was bored with peacetime duty, so that summer he volunteered for a trip that promised adventure by taking him, in his words, “through Darkest America.”

In the first decades of this century, American roads did not come close to achieving what might even charitably be called a system. Although many relatively long-distance roads had been built or planned early in the 19th century, the railroads had superseded them as carriers of passengers and freight, and by the end of that century, while the country had about two million miles of roads outside urban areas, they were all local roads.

They often terminated abruptly at a state or even county line. As late as 1912, when Henry B. Joy, president of Packard Motor Car Company, was in Omaha and asked the local Packard dealer how to go westward from that city, the man offered to show him and took him out of town until they encountered a wire fence. “Take down this fence,” the dealer told him, “and drive on