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STUDIES IN MOBILITIES,
LITERATURE, AND CULTURE
Narrating a New
Mobility Landscape in the
Modern American Road Story,
1893–1921
Ambivalence and Aspiration
Andrew Vogel
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Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture
Series Editors
Marian Aguiar
Department of English
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Charlotte Mathieson
University of Surrey
Guildford, UK
Lynne Pearce
English Literature & Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
Editorial Board Members
Peter Merriman
Aberystwyth Univesity
Aberystwyth, UK
David Bissell
University of Melbourne
Carlton, VIC, Australia
Cotten Seiler
Department of American Studies
Dickinson College
Carlisle, PA, USA
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Ruth Livesey
Department of English
Royal Holloway, University of London
Egham, UK
Peter Adey
Royal Holloway, University of London
EGHAM, UK
Nicholas Daly
School of English
Trinity College Dublin
Dublin 2, Ireland
Lindsey Green-Simms
American University
Washington, DC, USA
Tim Cresswell
Institute of Geography
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh, UK
Jonathan Grossman
UCLA
Los Angeles, CA, USA
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This series represents an exciting new publishing opportunity for scholars
working at the intersection of literary, cultural, and mobilities research.
The editors welcome proposals that engage with movement of all kinds –
ranging from the global and transnational to the local and the everyday.
The series is particularly concerned with examining the material means
and structures of movement, as well as the infrastructures that surround
such movement, with a focus on transport, travel, postcolonialism, and/
or embodiment. While we expect many titles from literary scholars who
draw upon research originating in cultural geography and/or sociology in
order to gain valuable new insights into literary and cultural texts, proposals are equally welcome from scholars working in the social sciences who
make use of literary and cultural texts in their theorizing. The series invites
monographs that engage with textual materials of all kinds – i.e., film,
photography, digital media, and the visual arts, as well as fiction, poetry,
and other literary forms – and projects engaging with non-western literatures and cultures are especially welcome.
Editorial Board Members:
Peter Merriman, Aberystwyth University, Wales, United Kingdom
David Bissell, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Cotten Seiler, Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, USA
Ruth Livesey, Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom
Peter Adey, Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom
Nicholas Daly, University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland
Lindsey Green-Simms, American University, Washington, D.C., USA
Tim Cresswell, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom
Jonathan Grossman, UCLA, California, USA
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Andrew Vogel
Narrating a New
Mobility Landscape in
the Modern American
Road Story,
1893–1921
Ambivalence and Aspiration
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for CAT, ride or die
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Praise for Narrating a New Mobility Landscape in
the Modern American Road Story, 1893–1921
“In this important new study of early automobility, Andrew Vogel reveals the
many different forms of work that led to improvements to the American road
between 1893 and 1921. This excellent book traces the enthusiasm and ambivalence surrounding proposals to improve roads, revealing them to be complex cultural and political achievements, as well as material landscapes shaped by conscripted
labour, including that of many homeless men”
—Peter Merriman, Professor of Cultural and Historical
Geography, Aberystwyth University, UK
“Stories about roads have always been stories about who we are and where we may
go. Combining mobility studies’ theoretical richness with a literary scholar’s ears
and a historian’s trove of archival evidence, Andrew Vogel reveals the ambivalence
with which powerful actors viewed the installation of automobility on the US
landscape. Vogel’s recovery of this ambivalence aids us in the crucial work before
us as a nation: composing new stories in which the car is no longer the main
character.”
—Cotten Seiler, Professor of American Studies at Dickinson
College, USA, and author of Republic of Drivers:
A Cultural History of American Automobility
“Vogel provides excellent insights on often overlooked historical events and
debates that shaped the American road narrative. He also looks back and ahead at
how problems of infrastructure and the landscape will continue to be crucial.
Vogel's research is brilliant.”
—Ronald Primeau, Emeritus Professor of English at Central Michigan
University, USA, and the former director of the Masters
of Humanities program. Author of Romance of the Road:
The Literature of the American Highway
“Discussing writers and texts from Walt Whitman to The Wizard of Oz, and many
more besides, Narrating a New Mobility Landscape offers an immensely rich and
provocative work of cultural history charting the American obsession with the
road. Vogel brilliantly explores how the road culture of modern American life was
developed at the turn of the twentieth century, demonstrating deftly how automo-
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bility became essential to modern American life. In doing so, the book also poses
crucial questions for current debates about how to achieve more just and sustainable landscapes of mobility.”
—Andrew Thacker, Professor of Modernism at Nottingham Trent University,
UK, author of several books, including Modernism, Space, and the City:
Outsiders and Affect in Paris, Vienna, Berlin and London and Moving
Through Modernity: Space and Geography in Modernism
“In Narrating a New Mobility Landscape in the Modern American Road Story,
1893-1921, Andrew Vogel brilliantly delineates the historical conditions that fostered US embrace of ‘mass automobility’ as well as the road narratives that spurred
but also mystified a nation’s dependence on the motorized vehicle. This deeply
erudite, theoretically informed, and eminently readable study will serve as indispensable companion reading for anyone seeking to understand the road narrative
in its literary, sociological, and ecological context.”
—William Merrill Decker, Regents Professor of English at Oklahoma State
University, USA, author of several books, including Geographies of Flight:
Phillis Wheatley to Octavia Butler
“Andrew Vogel’s meticulously researched study of the early development of the
US highway system sheds new light on how the American road creates and represents specific kinds of material, cultural, and literary spaces. Through an engaging
prose style that will appeal to both academic and general readers, Vogel’s important book expands on previous studies of US road literature to reshape our thinking about the relationship in such texts between space, landscape, mobility, and
identity at the turn into the twentieth century.”
—Gary Totten, Professor of English at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA,
and Editor-in-Chief of MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United
States, author of Travel Narratives from Abroad: Mobility and Cultural
Work in the Age of Jim Crow, coeditor of Politics, Identity,
and Mobility in Travel Writing
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Contents
1 Prologue:
The Cultural Terrain of America’s Modern Road
Landscape 1
2 Storied
Road: Ambivalence in the Landscape of American
Automobility 13
2.1The Road Shapes Landscape 21
2.2The Road Organizes a Genre 29
2.3The Road Conditions Popular Consent 34
2.4The Road Spurs Mobility 38
2.5The Road Commands Immobility 46
2.6The Road Composes Ambivalent Subjectivities 54
2.7The Road Points the Way 57
3 Control
and Consent: Contested Sovereignty on America’s
Country Roads 61
3.1Walt Whitman and the Landscape of an Agrarian Republic 63
3.2Spreading the Gospel of Good Roads: Isaac Potter and the
League of American Wheelmen 70
3.3Hamlin Garland and the Populist Uprising for Good
Country Roads 74
3.4Paul Laurence Dunbar, Black Country Life, and the Road
to Town 88
3.5Dirt-Road Statesmen and Congressional Impasse 90
3.6Conclusion: Contesting Sovereignties, a Nation
of Country Roads 93
xiii
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xiv
Contents
4 Cynicism
and Progress: Gullible Devotion to the Prospect
of National Automobility 97
4.1L. Frank Baum’s Land of Oz and the Humbugs of the
White City101
4.2Louis Henri Sullivan and the Architecture of
Transportation’s Future105
4.3Colonel Albert Pope Charting the “Object Lesson” of
Columbian Roads114
4.4Frederick Jackson Turner on the Settler Frontier of
Transportation Progress121
4.5Congressional Progressives and the Construction of “a
Splendid System of Highways”125
4.6Americans of Color in the White City: Ida B. Wells Barnett,
Simon Pokagon, and Paul Laurence Dunbar130
4.7Conclusion: Inspiring Delusion, the Prospect of National
Automobility133
5 Trailblazing
Modernity: Mapping the Compromises of
Mass Mobility137
5.1Lawmakers Building Pathways of Conquest into a Settler
Road System143
5.2Henry Bourne Joy Pioneering the Lincoln Highway147
5.3A. L. Westgard, Self-Described Daniel Boone of the
Gasoline Age154
5.4Charles Eastman, Ohiyesa, and the Challenge
of Opening a Different Way160
5.5Sinclair Lewis and the Romance of the Modern Trail163
5.6Conclusion: Pioneering Compromises on the Frontiers
of Mass Mobility172
6 Into
the Great Escapism: Vacationing Vagabonds Getting
Nowhere Fast175
6.1John Burroughs and the Nature Poetry of Fordism179
6.2The Songbook of the Vagabond: Bliss Carman and
Richard Hovey185
6.3Emily Post and Effie Price Gladding, Socialites Trying to
Outrun Their Own Prejudice189
6.4Zitkala-Ša, Runaway from All “Semblance of Civilization”199
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Contents xv
6.5Outpacing Pretense in the American Legislature201
6.6Henry James and the Disillusionments of the
American Scene206
6.7Conclusion: Vacant Consumerism and the Modern
Mobility Landscape210
7 The
Freedom of Conscription: Tramps Outcast
on the Road215
7.1Vagaries of Justice: The Hobo Push and the United States
Capitol222
7.2Upton Sinclair and the Road to the Hobo Jungle226
7.3Josiah Flynt Out There Tramping with the Tramps230
7.4Jack London as Tramp, a Player in the Game of
Equivocations233
7.5Vachel Lindsay, Begging and Choosing the Gospel of Beauty237
7.6Samuel Blowsnake, Opening the Road to the Earthmaker241
7.7Theodore Dreiser and the Campfires of Wrath in the
Modern Landscape245
7.8Conclusion: Constrained by Mobility, Life on the Road250
8 Epilogue: The Same Old Story of the American Road255
Bibliography265
Index287
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About the Author
Andrew Vogel is the Honors Program Director and a Professor of
English at Kutztown State University of Pennsylvania, where he listens,
teaches, and walks the hills in the original homelands of the Lenape
peoples.
xvii
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List of Figures
Fig. 2.1
Fig. 2.2
Fig. 2.3
Fig. 2.4
Fig. 2.5
Fig. 2.6
Fig. 2.7
Fig. 3.1
Union Pacific Tourist Map, Rand McNally, 1888. Image
courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford
University Libraries23
National Highway Association road map of “Pennsylvania,”
Auto Trails and Commercial Survey of the United States
(Chicago: George F. Cram Company, 1920), 79. Image
courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford University
Libraries24
Columbia Bicycle Advertisement from Bicycling World & LAW
Bulletin, 1892. Image Courtesy of the Benson Ford Research
Center26
White Steamer Company Route Book of 1907, interspersing
textual directions with images of turns and landmarks. Image
courtesy of the New York Public Library
43
Baldwin Autoguide navigation device. Image courtesy of
Automotive History Collection, Detroit Public Library
44
Jones Live-Map advertisement. Image reproduced by author
courtesy of the National Automotive History Collection,
Detroit Public Library
45
“Automobile Road Indicator” advertisement navigation devices,
Scientific American (February 17, 1906), 155. Image
reproduced by author from original
46
Image of Hamlin Garland posing as an itinerant country laborer
for the cover of an 1892 pamphlet edition of Main-Travelled
Roads. Clearly, Garland had Whitman’s frontispiece of the 1853
edition of Leaves of Grass in mind. Both images evoke the
forthright, pragmatic traveler. Garland image reproduced
xix
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xx
List of Figures
courtesy of Garland website maintained by Keith Newlin at
University of North Carolina Wilmington; Whitman image
courtesy of the Walt Whitman archive maintained by the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
75
Fig. 4.1 Birdseye view of the fair from the Manufactures Building,
resembling L. Frank Baum’s description of Oz. Image
reproduced by author from Photographs of the World’s Fair, 1894 102
Fig. 4.2 Map of the Exposition. The Transportation Building occupies
the bottom right corner. The golden doorway is aligned not
with the walkway running along the Electricity and Mines
Buildings; rather, it overlooks the lagoon. Wood Brothers,
“Ground Plan of the Columbian Exposition,” Columbian
World’s Fair Atlas (Chicago: George Cram, 1893), 15, courtesy
of David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford University Libraries 105
Fig. 4.3 Sullivan’s Transportation Building with the Golden Door
beyond Olmstead’s Wooded Isle. Image reproduced by author
from C. D. Arnold and H. D. Higginbotham, Official Views of
the World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893
106
Fig. 4.4 Sullivan’s famed Golden Doorway, with implied motion in the
circulating patterns of the arches of the entryway and the frieze.
Image reproduced by author from C. D. Arnold and
H. D. Higginbotham, Official Views of the World’s Columbian
Exposition, 1893
107
Fig. 4.5 Golden Doorway reflected in the lagoon with the trees of the
wooded isle in the foreground. Image reproduced by author
from C. D. Arnold, Official Views of the World’s Columbian
Exposition, 1893
112
Figs. 5.1 and 5.2 Jackson in the Vermont surrounded by a crowd and
The Vermont at the end of the road. Announcements of
Jackson’s arrival in New York drew a stream of onlookers to
see the mud-splattered, flag-draped Vermont, the same car that
now holds prominent place in a roads exhibit at the
Smithsonian Institution. Images reproduced by author from
“Ocean to Ocean in a Winton,” Auto Era (July–August 1903) 139
Fig. 5.3 Image of Henry Joy stuck in deep mud, 1915, courtesy of
University of Michigan Transportation History Collection,
Lincoln Highway archives
147
Fig. 6.1 Ford Advertisements depicting access to “God’s open spaces”
in the Model T. Images courtesy of the Benson Ford Research
Center177
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List of Figures Fig. 6.2
Fig. 6.3
Fig. 6.4
Fig. 7.1
Fig. 7.2
Burroughs exploring the countryside in the Model T that
Henry Ford gave him. Image courtesy of Benson Ford
Research center
Gladding’s photograph of a representative Lincoln Highway
sign. Image reproduced by the author from Across the Continent
by the Lincoln Highway, 1915
Post’s photographs of a wagon train and a “real Indian,”
documenting the “real West.” Images collected by the author
from By Motor to the Golden Gate, 1916
“Hobo” News comic depicting a choice, bread lines or
employing Tramps to build roads (April 1919). Image courtesy
of the St. Louis Public Library
Charlie Chaplin’s 1915 film, The Tramp, motor bearing down
on the luckless wanderer. Screenshot taken from Flicker Alley
(video.alexanderstreet.com/watch/the-­tramp)
xxi
182
191
197
219
220
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CHAPTER 1
Prologue: The Cultural Terrain of America’s
Modern Road Landscape
The American who buys an automobile finds himself confronted with this
great difficulty. He has nowhere to use it. He must pick and choose between
bad roads and worse. He finds his route so circumscribed that he can never
realize the definition given to an automobile.
—Colonel Albert Pope, “Automobiles and Good Roads,” Munsey’s, 1903
Many Americans, though not all, excitedly secure the license to drive a car
as they turn sixteen. Considered a rite of passage, this moment signifies a
milestone toward maturity and citizenship, carrying a host of privileges
and responsibilities. Newly minted drivers can pilot themselves to school,
jobs, shops, or social events, and they also inevitably assume and contribute to the risks, the costs, and the consequences of driving. Although by
sixteen most Americans are already deeply habituated to life structured
around cars, as the day they can legally drive approaches, they might start
to think of the act in new ways. Perhaps they will stand at a curb and look
down at the road—an aggregate of gravel, sand, and solidified tar or concrete resting on a durable bed of compacted stone. They may observe that
it leads away, and their minds might begin to reel, cataloging the manifold
places they could travel on it—towns, cities, vast and varying terrains and
climates—and if they descend from their imagination, returning to the
road at their feet, they might sense that so many of the ideas that circulate
about America are bound by a single, unified, mostly smooth surface
1
A. Vogel, Narrating a New Mobility Landscape in the Modern
American Road Story, 1893–1921, Studies in Mobilities, Literature,
and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51179-0_1
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2
A. VOGEL
branching out from that little strip that runs to and from where they are
standing in that moment, for good and bad, the American road.
Nothing on earth quite compares to it—this vast, interconnected, multipurpose system that physically links countless locations distributed far
and wide across North America. Consider the Brooklyn Bridge, the
Lincoln Tunnel, the Golden Gate Bridge, The Ted Williams Tunnel in
Boston, the numerous spans that link East and West across the Mississippi
River, the Seven Mile Bridge to Key West Florida, the iconic Bill Keene
stacked interchange in Los Angeles, the ALCAN highway, and all the
more and less modest connections that make it possible for people to
travel autonomously and with minimal physical effort throughout the
variable spaces and places of an expansive nation. From its faltering beginnings to its most grandiose developments, and despite the rapidly expanding automobility systems in China, Brazil, and India, the American road
system remains the world’s largest public works project in terms of scale,
ambition, and implementation.1 Many millions of people from all walks of
life have conformed to its planning, construction, maintenance, functionality, and use, affirming John Urry’s observation that the twentieth century was “the century of the car,” especially in America.2 Yet, along with
Urry, Peter Merriman and Nigel Thrift, and many others, pointedly contend that automobility must be recognized as both “historically novel”
and fundamentally unsustainable.3
This enormous network thrives upon a concerted social commitment
to personal, mechanized, mostly motorized, mobility. Commutes, errands,
personal and social networks, so many of the quintessential features of
American life are coordinated around and conditioned by automobility—
interstates, highways, commercial strips, fuel stations, toll stations, radio
stations, drive-thrus, residential streets, parking lots, parking meters,
motels, street signs, road maps and navigation software, license plates and
driving licenses, as well as traffic laws, traffic police, licensing agencies,
insurance companies, mechanics, autopart and tool retailers, delivery
1
“Country Comparisons: Roadways,” CIA World Fact Book online, accessed July 7, 2023,
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/roadways/country-comparison/.
2
John Urry, “The ‘System’ of Automobility,” Automobilities, eds. Mike Featherstone,
Nigel Thrift, John Urry (London, Sage, 2005), 28-33.
3
Peter Merriman, Mobility, Space and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2012), 63, 70;
Nigel Thrift, “Driving in the City,” Automobilities, eds. Mike Featherstone, Nigel Thrift,
John Urry (London: Sage, 2005), 44.
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1
PROLOGUE: THE CULTURAL TERRAIN OF AMERICA’S MODERN ROAD…
3
fleets, car dealerships, public busses, and the list goes on. By definition,
automobility comprises the total system of industries, infrastructures,
social investments, and cultural representations that sustain voluntary personalized travel.4 Automobility has been developed to be so predominant
in America that it has overwhelmingly subverted other modes of transportation—public, rail, bicycle, pedestrian—and most Americans struggle to
even imagine conducting their lives without automobility or according to
alternative ­mobility systems. Indeed, many Americans treat the inheritance
of a fully integrated system of vehicles and modern national roads as
though it were perfectly natural and had always been inevitable, a manifest
destiny. This may indicate why Americans have permitted the transportation infrastructure they depend upon to degrade, believing that its supposed inevitability guarantees perpetual maintenance and sustainability.5
This may further explain America’s failure to tackle the well-documented
damage imposed by automobility on the environment and climate.6
This condition makes it imperative to acknowledge that just a little over
a century ago America’s extraordinary automobility system would have
been practically inconceivable. In 1904, the new Federal Office of Road
Inquiry conducted the first comprehensive survey and assessment of the
4
John Burnham, “The Gasoline Tax and the Automobile Revolution,” The Mississippi
Valley Historical Review (December, 1961), 435-459; John Rae, The American Automobile:
A Brief History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); John Rae, The Road and the
Car in American Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971); James Flink, The Car Culture
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1975); Cotten Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of
Automobility in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); John A. Heitman,
The Automobile in American Life (Jefferson: MacFarland, 2009); Automobilities, eds.
Featherstone, Thrift and Urry (London: Sage, 2005); Against Automobility, eds. Steffen
Böhm, Campbell Jones and Matthew Paterson (Malden: Blackwell, 2006); John Urry,
Mobilities (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).
5
“Introduction,” Routledge Handbook of Mobilities. eds. Peter Adey, David Bissell,
Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman and Mimi Sheller (New York: Routledge, 2014), 13; Peter
Merriman, Mobility, Space and Culture, 66; Roger Casey, Textual Vehicles: The Automobile in
American Literature (New York: Garland, 1997), 14. John Urry, “The ‘System’ of
Automobility,” 28; Steffen Böhm, Campbell Jones, Chris Land, Mat Peterson, “Impossibilities
of Automobility,” Against Automobility (Malden: Blackwell, 2006), 4-5. Marian Aguiar,
Charlotte Mathieson, Lynne Pearce, Mobilities, Literature, Culture (Cham, Switzerland:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 25. “Roads,” Infrastructure Report Card, American Society of
Civil Engineers, accessed July 2023, https://infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/roads/.
6
Jan Fuglestvedt et al. “Transport Impacts on Atmosphere and Climate: Metrics,” and
Elmar Uherek et al. “Transport Impacts on Atmosphere and Climate: Land Transport,”
Atmospheric Environment (2010), 4648-77 and 4772-816.
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4
A. VOGEL
national roadways in a century, showing that the preponderance of “road”
miles at the time amounted to dirt tracks.7 Most roads were, as transportation historian John Rae has put it, “uncomfortably dusty in good weather
and usually impassable in bad,” which, given that wagons, bikes, and cars
do not work all that well without solid roads, confirms why Americans
rarely traveled any distance from their homes before automobility was
broadly established.8 So the contrast between the national landscape of the
early twentieth century and that of the early twenty-first century represents how thoroughly the United States transformed itself in only a few
decades and provides insight by which we might contend with the negative implications of this key factor of American modernity.
While the dominant understanding of the development of American
automobility remains an ideology of national destiny, the fact is that the
flourishing of automobility at the turn of the twentieth century was far
from certain. Before anything like an automobile infrastructure existed,
the American people began experimenting fitfully with various means of
travel and found themselves perpetually frustrated by numerous obstacles
and ultimately dependent on the railroads. Nevertheless, they composed
and circulated stories about their efforts, forging the lattice of an emergent genre and galvanizing what can be characterized in Michele Foucault’s
terms as a “discourse” of road literature.9 In these stories, they confronted
new social arrangements and conformed their experience of national space
around new patterns of subjectivity. Counter to received histories and ideologies that represent automobility as fated by American exceptionalism, a
closer look at these narratives shows that as Americans haltingly took up
motorized automobility, even the most grandiose and aspirational
7
John Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845 (New Haven: Yale, 1982), 109;
D. W. Meinig, The Shape of America v2 (New Haven: Yale, 1993), 313. A survey of all transportation infrastructure had been conducted during the Jefferson administration.
8
John Rae, The Road and the Car, 32-3; John Jakle and Keith Sculle, Motoring: The
Highway Experience in America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008), 57; Pete
Davies, American Road (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), 15; Norman Moline, Mobility and
the Small Town 1900-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 37.
9
Peter Merriman, “Rethinking Mobile Methods,” Mobility and the Humanities, eds. Peter
Merriman and Lynne Pearce (New York: Routledge, 2018), 131; Michel Foucault, The
Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 127,
164. In Foucault’s formulation, discourses crystalize around customs of formal reasoning
and representation. Thus, road narratives speak to and resonate with one another as much as
with the social realm and material terrain as a salient but not exclusive manifestation of the
discourse of automobility.
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1
PROLOGUE: THE CULTURAL TERRAIN OF AMERICA’S MODERN ROAD…
5
narratives reflect persistent apprehensions over shifting power balances in
government, concerns about both the natural and the built environment,
questions of access and diverse social inclusions, and issues over destabilized class dynamics. These road narrative patterns would be taken up and
repeated by legislators eager to establish the signal political achievement
that it was presumed would define the era, and, not surprisingly, legislators’ narratives reflect the same ambivalences, subverting the powerful ideology that petroleum-based automobility represents some kind of
apotheosis of American essence or values. Infrastructures are “political
creations,” as Eric Monkkonen contends, and as American citizens began
to vociferously lament the lack of capillary infrastructure, before the
motorcar, road-travel narratives were already winching political innovation through a fraught process that eventually enacted the concerted construction of durable roads in support of national automobility.10 The
ambivalences at the heart of these narratives would continue to pulse
through the culture of American modernity, and, not incidentally, they
abide in American life and culture to this day. Studying them can galvanize
efforts to evolve sustainable, socially constructive, and inclusive landscapes
of mobility.
Looking back, it is surprising that building roads was so obdurately
controversial at the turn of the twentieth century. The Federal Office of
Road Inquiry, which had coordinated the 1904 roads survey, was only
created begrudgingly by Congress in 1893. Situated within the Department
of Agriculture, it could not build roads, as its designation pointedly underscores, but it studied them. At the time, federal involvement in road construction was understood to be unconstitutional. Even though prominent
figures such as Jefferson’s Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin and later proponents of the American System, John C. Calhoun, Henry Clay, and
Daniel Webster, all interpreted the “general welfare” language of the
Constitution to imply a charge to build interstate roadways, Presidents
Madison, Monroe, and Jackson had all vetoed road construction projects,
citing the risk of ceding unenumerated powers to the federal government.
As a result, road construction and maintenance fell to local communities,
and road commissioners were usually inexperienced farmers performing a
proud but obligatory civic function. Rather than planning and funding
construction, most road projects followed lines of parochial necessity,
10
Eric H. Monkonnen, America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities & Towns
1780-1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 167.
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6
A. VOGEL
applying the cuvee system, by which work on local roads was performed by
neighbors living along them in lieu of paying a monetary tax. Such a system, which John Jackle and Keith Sculle have characterized as “extreme
localism,” could hardly coordinate quality infrastructure.11 The term haphazard would be more apt. Thus, by the end of the century, most Americans
recognized that the road problem needed to be addressed and joined in
one way or another the various efforts in the Good Roads Movement.
American farmers understood better than anybody how badly the
country needed to reform road policy. In the years following the Civil
War, they keenly felt the tightening power of railroad and financial monopolies. The difficulty of hauling their produce to market on muddy roads,
which they had to maintain, only exacerbated their hardships. First the
National Grange and then the Populist uprising advocated for greater
national support for the construction and maintenance of rural roads.
Later, the grassroots Country Life Movement took up the call in the name
of preempting country youth from crowding into overpopulated cities.12
Agrarian interest in road-policy reform laid the foundation of the Good
Roads Movement, and eventually the breakthrough legislation that would
lead to a national network was justified in farmers’ names without necessarily meeting rural needs.
Long before motorcars began to crash their way out of tinkers’ sheds,
bicyclists had joined the Good Roads Movement that was initiated by the
Grange. The bicycle was popularly introduced to the United States in
1876, and by 1887 local cycling clubs organized nationally under the aegis
of the League of American Wheelmen (LAW) to celebrate and share their
pastime. Yet not everyone was as enthusiastic about bicycles as the
Wheelmen. The high-wheeled cycle of the time alarmed pedestrians, carriage drivers, and farmers alike. Prejudicial road laws began to emerge, and
to fight these laws the LAW evolved from a hobbyist’s club to a lobbying
organization. Upon winning fair-use road legislation, they then confronted the further constraint to their sport—road conditions. The
Jackle and Sculle, Motoring, 41.
William Bowers, The Country Life Movement in America (Port Washington: National
University Press, 1974), 16-22, 39, 63-64, 77 and 112; Hal Barron, Mixed Harvest (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 19-42.
11
12
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PROLOGUE: THE CULTURAL TERRAIN OF AMERICA’S MODERN ROAD…
7
Wheelmen formed the National League of Good Roads (NLGR) and lobbied Congress to create the Office of Road Inquiry.13
The introduction of the automobile, also in 1893, complemented and
complicated the LAW’s efforts. The Wheelmen had encountered fierce
resistance from reactionary village councils to their pleas for good touring
roads. Farmers who often built and maintained the roads running alongside their properties believed that the road’s primary purpose was to carry
their produce to market, certainly not to satisfy the whimsy of transient
tourists in bizarre costumes astride strange and apparently dangerous contraptions. The loud and erratic motorcars only amplified these antagonisms. Colonel Albert Pope, founder and president of Columbia Motors
(previously Cycles), complained that support of road projects by automobile interests would become “the strongest objection” to their efforts.14
So, following the course mapped out by the LAW, motorists likewise
worked to lobby oversight of road construction up administrative ladders
to the federal government, which would demand new legislation and a
reinterpretation of the Constitution, a fact underscored by the Supreme
Court in 1907.15
Political debates surrounding good roads legislation simmered for
decades, and conflicts over the particulars of road laws grew intense
because everybody involved felt that something was going to be done and
harbored anxiety about it. Competing interpretations of the Constitution
were marshaled to reconcile various proposals with Madison’s decisive
1817 veto of “internal improvements.” Farmers generally wanted nodal,
farm-to-market roads, which they believed could be justified under the
Post Roads clause. Progressives wanted long-distance interstate roads that
connected population centers under the Defense and Commerce clauses.
These disputes divided the country and stymied progress. Cagy politicians
jockeyed to persuade one another, reconcile local fealty with national
interest, and influence the final outcome. Arguing for compromise,
13
Philip Parker Mason, The League of American Wheelmen and the Good Roads Movement,
1880-1905 (PhD diss, University of Michigan, 1957), 23, 37, 146-9; Stephen B. Goddard,
Colonel Albert Pope and His American Dream Machines (Jefferson: McFarland, 2000), 76;
James Longhurst, Bike Battles: A History of Sharing the American Road (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 2015); James Longhurst, “The Sidepath Not Taken: Bicycles, Taxes, and
the Rhetoric of the Good Roads Movement,” The Journal of Political History (2013),
557-586; Carlton Reid, Roads Were Not Built for Cars: How Cyclists Were the First to Push for
Good Roads & Became the Pioneers of Motoring (Washington: Island Press, 2015), 174.
14
Colonel Albert Pope, “Automobiles and Good Roads,” Munsey’s (1903), 168.
15
Richard Weingroff, “A Vast System of Interconnected Highways: Before the Interstates,”
The Interstate System, Federal Highway Administration, updated Feb 3, 2022, accessed July
2023, https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/highwayhistory/interstate.cfm, 79-80.
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A. VOGEL
Representative Thomas Miller complained that “too much of the city versus the country” stalled progress.16 Seeking unity, Representative Thomas
Schall insisted, controversially, that “all the people should help pay for all
the roads.”17 Representative Solomon Prouty concurred, “Every man’s
house faces on a road that connects with every other road and leads to
every other man’s house and to every marketplace throughout the land.”18
Such rhetoric shows that more than the Constitutional question had to be
overcome. The implications of entrenched regional jealousies and power
arrangements resonated through misgivings over competing senses of sovereignty, control of the landscape, the privilege of access, and costs associated with labor.
Notably, despite the fact that the existence of the car and the application of automobility was a factor in the capitol deliberations, many legislators vehemently stated that they were not fostering good roads for
automobiles. Robert Page insisted, “It is an idle dream to imagine that
autotrucks and automobiles will take the place of railways.”19 Senator
Gallinger deplored motorists who were running a “juggernaut over the
roads.”20 William Cary proposed taxing “the horsepower of automobiles,”
and William Fields actually proposed banning automobiles from “the public highway” altogether.21 William Cox excoriated “the great automobile
manufacturers and automobile owners” for conducting a “strenuous campaign” for roads “on which the ‘idle rich’ can spend their ‘idle time.’”22
Thetus Sims promised that “no highway commission in Tennessee” would
16
64 Cong. Rec Ses. 1, v. 53 ps. 2–12 (January–June 1916), Apx 211, http://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/archive, accessed February 14, 2024.
17
64 Cong. Rec. Ses. 1, v. 53 ps. 2–12 (January–June 1916), Apx 213, my emphasis, www.
congress.gov/congressional-record/archive, accessed February 14, 2024.
18
63 Cong. Rec. Ses. 2, v. 51 ps. 1–13 (December–August 1913–14), 3082, www.congress.gov/congressional-record/archive. Representative Edward Browne echoed the identical formulation: 64 Cong Rec. Ses. 1, Apx 1316, and Frank Park had earlier voiced a similar
formulation, 63 Cong. Rec. Ses. 2, Apx 123, accessed February 14, 2024.
19
63 Cong. Rec. Ses. 1, v. 50 ps. 1–3 (March–August 1913), Apx 371, www.congress.
gov/congressional-record/archive, accessed February 14, 2024.
20
62 Cong. Rec. Ses. 1, v. 48, ps 1–7 (January–May 1912), 2468, www.congress.gov/
congressional-record/archive, accessed February 14, 2024.
21
64 Cong. Rec. Ses. 1, v. 53 ps. 2–12 (January–June 1916), Apx 177; 63 Cong. Rec. Ses.
2, v. 50 ps. 1–3 (March–August 1913), 3090, www.congress.gov/congressional-record/
archive, accessed February 14, 2024.
22
63 Cong. Rec. Ses. 2, v. 51 ps. 1–13 (December–August 1913–14), 3153, www.congress.gov/congressional-record/archive, accessed February 14, 2024.
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PROLOGUE: THE CULTURAL TERRAIN OF AMERICA’S MODERN ROAD…
9
ever promote “a system of roads chiefly beneficial to automobile owners.”23
Others were more moderate. James McLaughlin opposed “the construction of roads for joy riding or for automobiles alone,” and Charles Edwards
reasoned that “what the people want are good roads for all purposes.”24
Even moderates register the ambivalence surrounding automobility by
explicitly granting precedence for roads to functions other than motoring.
As prospective legislation came into focus, doubts continually erupted
over whether government could credibly or responsibly deliver a comprehensive system of roads. Detractors repeatedly warned of ballooning costs
and the threat to government solvency. Bertrand Snell, for example, railed
that his colleagues had gone “absolutely stark mad” to waste the people’s
money.25 Senators Martine of New Jersey and Pomerene of Ohio scoffed
that one proposed bill would only “fill up mudholes,” and Henry Cabbot
Lodge agreed, going further to warn his peers that the government was
already “overridden” with new bureaus.26 John J. Rogers and James
McLaughlin worried that a new road law would prompt “a horde” of
federal regulators that would overrun the states, and Charles Thomas
feared that they might permit “the entering wedge” that would lead to
“an ever growing army of Government” agents spreading “like locusts”
across the land.27 While these reservations were voiced in the register of
legislative histrionics, they were clearly also rooted in serious misgivings
about fundamental changes to political control, altered environments,
social inclusion, and labor economics that were collectively seen as potential consequences of modernizing the roads. Perhaps good roads promised
ease of travel over greater distances, but they worried that such convenience would demand the sacrifice of regional independence to conformity with national standards. This would mean the erosion of local culture
under the pressures of national integration. It would risk social integration
that enfranchised and privileged white Americans unequivocally feared. It
23
64 Cong. Rec. Ses. 1, v. 53 ps. 2–12 (January–June 1916), 178, http://www.congress.
gov/congressional-record/archive, accessed February 14, 2024.
24
64 Cong. Rec. Ses. 1, v. 53 ps. 2–12 (January–June 1916), 1527 and 1460, http://
www.congress.gov/congressional-record/archive, accessed February 14, 2024.
25
65 Cong. Rec. Ses. 3, v. 57 ps. 1–5 (December–March, 1919), 3782, http://www.
congress.gov/congressional-record/archive, accessed February 14, 2024.
26
64 Cong. Rec. Ses. 1, v. 53 ps. 2–12 (January–June 1916), 6879, http://www.congress.
gov/congressional-record/archive, accessed February 14, 2024.
27
64 Cong. Rec. Ses. 1, v. 53 ps. 2–12 (January–June 1916), 1365, 1528, 6567, http://
www.congress.gov/congressional-record/archive, accessed February 14, 2024.
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A. VOGEL
would fundamentally alter the environment, lashing half the country in
the dust of a motorized landscape and ditching the rest under its speeding
wheels. In short, each argument made in the name of national roads
invoked a mixture of modernist ambition and ambivalence about the far-­
reaching implications of such grand change.
As the years wore on pressure mounted, bill after bill was proposed,
discounted, and revised. Members of Congress drilled deeper into the
minutia of policy, yet they continuously buttressed their evolving positions
by telling travel stories along the patterns that had emerged in popular
road narrative. As a means for reimagining the national landscape, such
narratives became touchstones, and their use suggests that national leaders
were taking up the terms of the problem from their constituencies as they
struggled to measure and serve the will of the people in an uncertain cultural climate. As the tide moved in their favor, early proponents of federal
intervention reminded colleagues how radically thinking had changed
during their careers. In 1914 William Cox recalled being “denounced” on
the floor of the house as a socialist and anarchist for advocating national
projects.28 In 1916, John Langley reminded peers that he had been “ridiculed” while his colleagues argued that Federal involvement in road work
was “entirely unconstitutional.” Now, Langley gloated, “it is marvelous
how their interpretation of the Constitution has changed.”29 By paying lip
service to populist spleen and by linking the need for well-maintained,
trunk-line roads to postal, commercial, and military needs, in 1912 Good
Roads advocates would win a Post Office appropriation with money earmarked to improve postal routes. This led to tense conflicts between state
and federal authorities and ultimately had minimal effect on road conditions for most Americans. Meanwhile, many states invested in piecemeal
road building without federal involvement, and likewise many private
good roads initiatives made tangible, if scattered, improvements, but these
achievements only proved that federal coordination was essential to foster
a cohesive system of roads that would enable mass automobility.
The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 partially resolved these conflicts by
establishing state highway agencies staffed with engineers who would execute federal standards on rural post roads but emphatically not
28
63 Cong. Rec. Ses. 2, v. 51 ps. 1–13 (December–August 1913–14), 3151, www.congress.gov/congressional-record/archive, accessed February 14, 2024.
29
64 Cong. Rec. Ses. 1, v. 53 ps. 2–12 (January–June 1916), Apx 2247, http://www.
congress.gov/congressional-record/archive, accessed February 14, 2024.
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PROLOGUE: THE CULTURAL TERRAIN OF AMERICA’S MODERN ROAD…
11
interstates.30 Although the appropriation would be laughably inadequate
to achieve anything like the vision propounded by the most ambitious
Good Roads advocates (not to mention America’s impending turn to the
war in Europe), this legislation marks the signal turning point in a transformative era. Though modest, the 1916 law set the precedent for the
1921 Federal Aid Road Act, which refined the terms of state-federal collaboration, vastly increased the expenditure, and cemented coordination
of interstate road projects within the federal government, anticipating the
Federal Interstate Highway system. It became the legal basis for the infrastructure that molded American modernity.31 Representative James Good
cheered that “5 miles” would no longer be “the limit of a man’s vision in
this country.”32 Even those like Good who voted forward this legislation
understood that the work they were doing would radically alter America’s
geographic and political life, and their deliberations grapple with the same
ambivalences seen in popular discourse while endeavoring in each iteration
of the narrative to resolve uncertainties with a new script.
Between 1893 and 1921 the United States established a pervasive and
far-reaching social transformation to initiate a revolutionary mobility landscape without overcoming stubborn misgivings about the potential consequences. This study marks an effort to more fully map the cultural terrain
upon which America’s modern landscape was built by charting those narratives Americans used to commit themselves to building a vast infrastructure of personal mobility. Because the need to address the road crisis was
broadly felt and numerous competing solutions were ventured, the road-­
travel story became a potent catalyst, permitting citizens to both recognize the true extent of the road problem and imagine alternative and
competing solutions. This survey of road stories from the era reveals a set
of genre patterns based on particular subjectivity experiences that run
through both popular and political discourse, and analysis of these patterns sheds light on the tense and faltering process by which the American
people persuaded themselves to begin developing the largest public works
30
Richard Weingroff, “Federal Aid Road Act of 1916: Laying the Foundation,” Public
Roads (Summer, 1996) Federal Highway Administration, accessed July 2023, https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/summer-1996/federal-aid-road-act-1916-building-foundation.
31
“The Trailblazers: Brief History of the Direct Federal Highway Construction Program,”
Highway History, Federal Highway Administration, updated September 28, 2017, accessed
July 2023, https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/blazer01.cfm.
32
64 Cong. Rec. Ses. 1, v. 53 ps. 2–12 (January–June 1916), Apx 37, http://www.congress.gov/congressional-record/archive, accessed February 14, 2024.
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A. VOGEL
project to date. To borrow Antonio Gramsci’s terms, this study aims to
uncover the logics of the American people’s “spontaneous consent” to
join in building a landscape that would overwhelmingly conform to the
exigencies of mass automobility.33 By putting various modes of travel story
that deliberate landscape questions into analytical conversation with one
another, this study plots popular and literary road-travel narratives of all
types against legislative political discourse to show that the national conversation leading to automobility was more uncertain than it has come to
be popularly understood, and it demonstrates that early discussions of
automobility were characterized as much by dissonant, dubious, and
ambivalent enthusiasm as by optimistic aspiration, which characterizes the
fundamental timbre of American modernity to this day. Turn-of-the-­
century road stories reveal the fragile and uncertain process whereby the
American people imagined new roles with new social and political arrangements all shaped by new ways of relating to one another and the environment in a new national landscape, which all now helps us not only to
better understand the road story as a genre but mobility itself and, moreover, to establish principles that address and assuage these durable ambivalences about the way Americans (and the world) live in and share the
landscape. Lynne Pearce has argued that automobility as it is known and
practiced today is not sustainable and must soon change, making it crucial
now to recognize it as a defining but unsustainable feature of twentieth-­
century life.34 With that in mind, and given both the persistent injustices
experienced by minoritized Americans and the pervasive ecological damage incurred by only a century of automobility, the insights gained by this
study may also shed light on the processes by which republican social
orders manufacture collective consent for social infrastructure, and the
enlarged perspective might empower citizens today to reflect locally,
nationally, and globally on the current state of our infrastructures and
thereby participate actively in narrating the development of more just and
sustainable landscapes.
33
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and
Geoff Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971), 12, 195-6.
34
Lynne Pearce, “‘Driving-as-Event’: rethinking the car journey,” Mobility and the
Humanities, eds. Peter Merriman and Lynne Pearce (New York: Routledge, 2018), 94.
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