Highway to Heaven

Construction began on the Dixie Highway in 1915, and Ingram gives us a thorough overview of how, when it officially passed into history 11 years later, its dirt roads were mostly still dirt, funding debates still raged, roadwork still just washed away after a few hard rains, and, in the Deep South, much of the labor was still performed by unskilled gangs of convicts—usually African Americans—chained together and sweating along the dusty right-of-way.

But that same period also saw thousands of motorists traveling the Dixie, primitive as it was. Their tourist dollars supported hundreds of mom-and-pop businesses that opened up to serve them. Convoys and travel clubs hit the road, presaging decades of enthusiastic motor travel that resonate in American memory and culture to this day. 

Beyond that, the Dixie Highway’s success as an idea, if not as a finished transportation route, demonstrated that roads needn’t—and shouldn’t—be the almost exclusively local matter they had always been. They plainly contributed to the public good—economically, culturally, and socially—and deserved the attention and support of the federal government.

An Indianapolis auto-parts millionaire named Carl Fisher thought the Dixie Highway would be a great first step toward his goal of building a contiguous all-weather motor route that would improve and link existing roads from the Great Lakes to the new tourist mecca of Miami Beach, where (as it happened) he was a major property owner. Fisher was a born salesman who had once shocked Hoosiers by wafting an automobile over downtown Indianapolis beneath a hot air balloon. He was also part-owner of the new Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the Indianapolis 500. Wildly successful as the producer of chemical auto headlamps, Fisher had sold that company and plowed the proceeds into an overgrown sand-spit just off the Miami shore, which he was marketing as a warm and welcoming Eden for Yankees who were sick of vistas of frozen corn stubble.

But when the DHA convened in Chattanooga to choose a route to Fisher’s holiday haven, the meeting quickly devolved into a scrambling donnybrook, as 5,000 boosters from Michigan to Florida thumped to bring the highway and its rolling business through their respective hometowns. There were just too many communities and too little road to include them all. Soon, suspecting that the fix was already in, they went for the organizers.

“People were shouting at each other,” Ingram writes. “All these different communities sent delegations thinking that if they just showed up with a lot of cars, ticker-tape and a big presence, they could sweet talk their way into the project. But everybody else thought the same thing.”

The raucous meeting in the shadow of Lookout Mountain—just 50 years after the end of the Civil War—quickly became known as the Second Battle of Chattanooga. The panel of governors Fisher had recruited to designate a route tossed the hot potato to a study committee. A month or so later, the committee came back with a plan that didn’t so much choose a path for the Dixie as expand it. 

There would be two parallel routes, a western track running south from Chicago through Indianapolis, Chattanooga, Atlanta, and Tampa; and an eastern one from upper Michigan through Cincinnati, Asheville, Savannah, and Jacksonville.

Together with several east-west connectors, this would more than double the mileage of Fisher’s original plan. Though overall this would have been very beneficial—transforming a distinctly limited tourism artery into a more useful network of interregional roads—in reality the DHA’s capacity to get the work done was limited. This was especially true down south, where roads were in the worst shape and funds were almost nonexistent.

Given the broad support for better roads—especially in the form of an organized Good Roads Movement, formed originally by bicyclists but hijacked by motorists and auto manufacturers—the hope was that government money would become available later on. Exactly how that should happen proved to be controversial.

Local officials distrusted federal and state government and supported “pay-as-you-go” gasoline taxes that had a pennywise appeal to cautious citizens. More progressive advocates argued vainly for more remunerative state bond issues. Nervous voters turned these down, time after time. Federal matching funds helped in some areas, but they were often extremely limited in scope. And they were chronically beyond the reach of small, poor, rural counties, which had trouble with the “matching” part.

As various levels of government argued about how to solve the problem, Fisher and the DHA focused on publicity, including printing their own, very popular, illustrated magazine, Dixie Highway. Fisher understood that selling the Dixie meant selling the South as a destination. The magazine’s writers spun idyllic tales of sunny warmth, Smoky Mountain vistas, pecan groves in full bloom, live oaks ragged with enough Spanish moss to beard Sherwood Forest, overflowing peach baskets, and jolly, rolling communities of vacationers.

It worked. Travelers hit the road in droves, with 7,000 cars carrying 27,000-odd children, grandmothers, mothers, and fathers to the Southland during the winter of 1916-1917 alone. They spent nearly $3 million, roughly $400 per car, boosting the chronically depressed southern economy and spurring the creation of untold numbers of quirky roadside businesses.

But as travelers raised clouds of dust on the Dixie Highway, the standoff between state and federal road officials and local politicians continued, especially in the South. There, Ingram writes,

Southern resistance in Congress led to compromise road bills that, in 1916, “provided $75 million in federal money over five years but .  .  . left control over construction, improvements, and maintenance of roads and highways to state governments rather than to thousands of county governments.”

Demand for good interstate roads had simply outpaced the government’s ability to produce them: “The full vision of a federally funded interstate system was, in 1916, too radical and too foreign a project to garner congressional support,” Ingram writes. 

Dixie Highway could have used a bit more discussion of the ins-and-outs of this conflict in Congress—who the roadblocks were, so to speak—but that absence is easily balanced by attention to the local and state scene, especially in Ingram’s native Georgia. Ingram focuses extensively on the 1926 Democratic gubernatorial primary in Georgia that pitted two avowed members of the Good Roads Movement against each other.

Georgia Highway chairman John Holder advocated more aggressive state-level road financing, such as through bond issues. Opposing him was Lamartine G. Hardman, a wealthy planter and physician who instead campaigned for pay-as-you-go gasoline taxes. Hardman won, partly on the strength of frugal voters’ distaste for bond issues, but also because he was able to paint Holder as possibly corrupt and a supporter of road crew shovel-leaners, the kind of thing that, even today, can trigger behind-the-wheel muttering by impatient motorists.

No doubt, it was pleasant to vote against state bonds for somebody’s idle brother-in-law; but the bottom line was that road work was simply too expensive for many jurisdictions to manage on their own. Grading and smoothing a rutted country lane into a dirt roadway could run $1,000 to $2,000 per mile, while rural counties typically had only $300 to $600 to spend. And even that, complained one southern highway commissioner, was “washed into the gutters with every rain.” Federal matching funds to install more durable and (in the long run) less expensive brick or other hard-surface roads were beyond the reach of such poor countryside counties.

As a result, the Dixie Highway didn’t last all that long as a named entity, at least formally. In 1926, the federal government, in the form of a temporary panel of state and federal road officials appointed by the Bureau of Public Roads, finally stepped in and stripped “marked trails” such as the Dixie of their unitary, named status. Instead, they designated east/west roads with even numbers and north/south roads with odd numbers. It’s the same system still in use.

Unfortunately for the Dixie, where parallel routes and several connecting segments meant portions ran every which way, the government ruled it ineligible for a single-number designation throughout its length. Pieces ended up as US 41, US 17, US 1, and others, although some sections retain the Dixie Highway name in local usage to this day.

The change effectively formalized what had been a creeping transition away from local control of highways that had evolved as Congress (and voters) failed to come to grips with the question of who would manage road development. It was a bureaucratic solution to the polarization that had developed as pro-local and pro-federal activists maneuvered for control within the Better Roads Movement. 

In a larger sense, it was another example of America’s ongoing, and possibly permanent, balancing act between a strong central government and robust local independence, both key elements of our country’s animating spirit. In the end, it was the thousands of travelers voting with their feet, or, rather, their frequently patched tires, that forced this extra-legislative settlement. The demand for good roads simply outweighed the continuing inability to deal with the problem—call it gridlock—and a shortcut had to be found. 

Put another way, it wasn’t the success of the Dixie Highway that prepared the ground for a useful national road system, but its failure.

Daniel Lee is a writer in Indiana.