Petersen Archive | Dwight D Eisenhower — Petersen Automotive Museum

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The postwar era was a time outlined by unprecedented prosperity. Following the 2nd Entire world War, returning GI’s came house to a booming overall economy, housing progress initiatives, and support systems like the GI Bill that expanded and cemented America’s center class. By 1950 most factories, like automobile producers, experienced produced the changeover from wartime generation to a shopper-based economic climate, so a lot so that, in that yr on your own, 8 million cars and trucks had been developed, by 1958 extra than 67 million cars would be manufactured and registered in the United States. Having said that, at the commence of the 10 years, most of America’s obsolete streets were being in no affliction to support a significant inflow of site visitors. Pressure for design of transcontinental superhighways experienced been expanding due to the fact the late 1930s, having said that, conflict amongst urban pursuits and rural interests vying for precedence and a deficiency of funding remaining early assignments this kind of as the 1944 Federal-Help Highway Act lifeless in the water. By the 1950’s, in buy to deal with an inflow of new car entrepreneurs president Dwight D. Eisenhower publicly supported an interstate freeway growth method and on June 29, 1956, he signed the Highway Income Act also regarded as the Nationwide Interstate and Protection Highways Act into law. The act marked the major American community functions system of that time authorizing the construction of 41,000 miles of interstate highways equipped with overpasses and constrained-entry belt strains. Eisenhower experienced been intensely affected by his experiences in 1919 as a participant in the U.S. Military&#39s very first Transcontinental Motor Convoy across the United States and his observations of the German audubon highway network through Planet War II. Possessing identified the worth of mobility and efficiency, Eisenhower proposed an American interstate highway program in his Point out of the Union handle in 1954, which he framed as a nationwide defense plan. In an work to motivate a cooperative alliance involving condition and federal officers, retired Basic Lucius D. Clay, an engineer and a very long-time advisor to the president, proposed a strategy in which the federal governing administration would shell out 90 p.c of the value of expressway building the funding for which would appear from an enhanced gasoline tax (now 3 cents a gallon). Interstate money ended up to then be dispersed in the ratio of each and every point out&#39s believed charge of completing the system. The initial project below the Act was the Mark Twain Expressway (Interstate 70) in St. Charles County, Missouri.

The highways ended up meant to reduce site visitors congestion switch “undesirable slum places with pristine ribbons of concrete” as 1 highway advocate set it make coastline-to-coast transportation much more productive and make it easy to evacuate massive metropolitan areas in situation of an atomic attack. Even though transformative, the Highway Earnings Act also mirrored an enduring legacy of Jim Crow period discriminatory insurance policies and systemic racism. Small-value home loans as a result of the G.I. Bill (which was not presented to black GI’s), enabled white families to abandon internal towns in favor of suburban housing as properly as prevent ethnic minorities from carrying out the exact. Federal planners of the interstate highway method routed some highways straight, and often purposefully, as a result of predominantly black and brown neighborhoods to predominantly white suburban neighborhoods. Though the Highway Revenue Act was originally met with prevalent general public guidance, as extra individuals grew to become displaced and ailments in towns deteriorated, activists commenced to brazenly oppose the procedure, some likely as much as forcing building stoppages all through the late 1950s and early 60s. Throughout the 1960s, civil legal rights activists and environmentalists across the place in New York Metropolis, Baltimore, Washington, D.C. New Orleans and other towns managed to stop roadbuilders from dividing and subjugating their neighborhoods, finally however, most of the 41,000 miles of interstate have been finished.

Resources:

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

https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-heritage-of-how-racism-formed-interstate-highways

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

https://highways.dot.gov/public-streets/summertime-1996/federal-aid-highway-act-1956-creating-interstate-program

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