March 17, 2025 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, although President Eisenhower’s name is forever etched upon our interstate highway system, Charles Zug wanted to know if this was true. Zug is an Assistant Professor of Constitutional Democracy and Political Science at the University of Missouri, a Jack Miller Center fellow, and the author of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Federal Highway Act.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Although President Eisenhower's name is forever etched upon our interstate
highway system, Charles Zugg wanted to know if this was true.
Zug is an assistant professor of Constitutional democracy and political
science at the University of Missouri. Is a Jack Miller
(00:32):
Center Fellow. He's also the author of Dwight D. Eisenhower
and the Federal Highway Act. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
When you're driving down a highway in the United States,
there's a good chance you'll see a blue sign with
five white stars in a circle that reads Eisenhower Interstate System.
These signs, which communicate the official name of the US
Federal highway network, reflect the nearly universally held belief that,
in nineteen fifty six, President Dwight D. Eisenhower built the Interstates,
(01:09):
That it was Eisenhower who, through transformative leadership, convinced Congress
and the rest of the American political system that the
country's largest ever infrastructure project was both popular and necessary.
That story is incorrect, or put more modestly, it bears
(01:30):
only a pale resemblance to the truth. Saying that Eisenhower
is responsible for the Interstates is like saying a quarterback
who got benched in the first quarter before scoring any
points is responsible for his team winning the game under
the leadership of a different quarterback three hours later. Did
the first QB play some role in shaping the final outcome,
(01:53):
of course, but was he decisive or even necessary? That's
much harder to say.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
So.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yet, the Interstates did get built, and Eisenhower has, over
the decades, gotten the lion's share of the credit. So
what's going on here? For many Americans, the federal government
is more of an abstraction than a concrete reality. Most
of us know who the president and vice president are,
and maybe some other nationally prominent leaders, such as the
(02:21):
House Speaker or the Attorney General. We might even know
of our members of Congress or our state senators, But
most of the stuff that actually makes up the American state,
all the agencies and departments and bureaus, are too distant
from us to matter all that much. This is an
odd thing because the federal government is immense. In twenty
twenty two, it employed two point eight seven million workers,
(02:44):
nearly two percent of the entire US workforce. Its annual
budget is around six trillion dollars, an incomprehensible amount for
a populace whose median income is around seventy four thousand
dollars a year. For all this, how often, is an
ordinary and likely to encounter the goliath that is the
US federal government directly. For Americans not serving in the
(03:07):
armed services, there are two routine points of contact. The
first is the postal service, which delivers our mail and
provides some other services, and which has been around since
the country's founding at the end of the eighteenth century.
In fact, establishing post offices and postal routes is one
of Congress's explicit responsibilities in the Constitution. The second is
(03:27):
the interstate highway system, and for younger Americans unaccustomed to
sending and receiving physical letters, driving on a federal highway
will be by far the most frequent direct encounter they
will have with the federal government. Unlike the postal service,
federal highways are not mentioned directly in the Constitution, and
for most of our country's history, the federal government played
(03:49):
no direct role in their construction or maintenance. The country
has always had roads of course, but those roads were
the responsibility of state and local governments, or, in some
cases a private contractors hired by those governments. This was
not such a problem when the country was rural and
when people primarily consumed goods that they grew and fashioned
(04:10):
for themselves. But as the country advanced, as people became
more dependent on buying and selling commodities produced by people
other than themselves, there arose a need to transport goods, services,
and the people who used them efficiently from disparate parts
of the country. The federal government did not keep pace
(04:30):
with these developments. In the decades following the Civil War
and leading into the twentieth century, families and businesses struggled
to keep up with the demands of a growing industrial economy,
in a large part because they simply could not buy
and sell goods and transport themselves efficiently. And with the
rise of personal automobiles in the early nineteen hundreds, access
(04:52):
to well built and properly maintained roads became more urgent
than ever. What was the hold up a lot of stuff,
but the chief impediment was tradition, or what political scientists
call path dependence. Since the country's founding the federal government
had played no role whatsoever in road building, which meant
that responsibility had fallen to subordinate governments. But in order
(05:16):
to be effective, road building requires not only money and labor,
but planning and coordination. Someone needs to plan roots that
will help not just a few special groups, but the
largest number of community members possible. In convincing the states
to relinquish control of that power proved very difficult. As
a consequence, the federal government played no meaningful role in
(05:38):
highway building during the first half of the twentieth century.
The peripheral role it did play was in the form
of matching funds. If a state highway authority built roads,
the federal government would match whatever expenditures the state incurred, thereby,
in theory, at least incentivizing more construction. The problem was
the Feds put essentially no conditions on these maps funds,
(06:01):
with the result that there was no planning on routes.
In some cases, a highway that should have linked major
cities in bordering states simply ended at one state's border
because the two states had failed to agree upon the route.
Worse still, states that could have benefited the most from
highway construction tended also to be the poorest and consequently
(06:23):
the least likely to receive significant matching funds. Finally, two
World Wars, which diverted domestic resources and manpower to the
battlefields of Europe and Asia, did little to incentivize road
building on a national scale.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
And you've been listening to Charles Zugg tell the story,
the true story, the real story of how our interstate
highway system came to be.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
And what a mess. Right up until the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
You'd had all that money deployed, all that capital deployed
to fight two World Wars, and this whole idea of
matching grants.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
The various states couldn't get together and.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
Figure out what to do or where to put roads
and how to connect them best for the American people.
And then there was that problem of the poor states,
the ones that probably needed roads the most, having no
funds to match. When we come back the problem of
connecting the states, connecting our highway system together, the story
of how the interstate highway system ours came to be
(07:25):
continues here on Our American Stories. Leehabib here the host
of our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're
bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from
our big cities and small towns. But we truly can't
do the show without you. Our stories are free to
(07:46):
listen to, but they're not free to make. If you
love what you hear, go to Alamerican Stories dot com
and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.
Go to Alamerican Stories dot com and give. And we're
(08:09):
back with our American stories and with Charles Zugg, who's
the author of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Federal Highway Act.
He's telling the story of our a federal highway system
came to be the real story.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
Let's return to Charles.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Entered Dwight Eisenhower, who in nineteen fifty two was the
first Republican to be elected president in twenty years. Born
in Texas and raised in Abilene, Kansas, Ike, as he
was popularly called, spent his entire career in the United
States Army, rising from West Point cadet to Supreme Allied
Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during the Second
(08:44):
World War. Apart from a brief stint as president of
Columbia University, Ike had never held a civilian post before
being sworn in as president in January nineteen fifty three.
He was not even particularly close with the Republican Party.
Both parties had attempted to recruit him for president. In fact,
what seems to have attracted Eisenhower to the GOP had
(09:07):
less to do with policy and political philosophy and more
to do with the fact that most of his private
sector friends all happen to be Republican businessmen. All of
this will become relevant in a moment. How did Eisenhower
come to be identified with interstate highway expansion? The relevant
mythology tells us that Ike became fixated on highway building
(09:27):
while serving as general in occupied Germany after World War II.
Having witnessed the German highway system called the Auto Bonden, Ike,
we are told, decided that such an infrastructure program was
both possible and necessary in the United States. There is
precious little to support this just so story in the
relevant archival material. Written statements supporting it appear nowhere in
(09:52):
Eisenhower's papers or correspondents. The smoking gun would seem to
be aligned from Eisenhower's own memoirs, written years after his presidency,
and likely romanticized in order to give coherence to the
otherwise convoluted story of highway expansion. Besides this, there is
no good reason to believe Ike was particularly concerned with highways,
(10:14):
any more concerned than activist presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt,
and Harry Truman, all of whom had at some point
advocated for dramatic road building projects during their presidencies. What
made Eisenhower distinct was not his interest, but rather his
strategy for pursuing a policy innovation that had been popular
(10:35):
and recognized as necessary for a very long time. Shortly
after his election in nineteen fifty two, Eisenhower asked a
Wall Street venture capitalist named Walker Buckner to design a
financing scheme to fund federal highway expansion. Ike's reasoning was straightforward.
During the nineteen fifty two campaign, Eisenhower had vowed to
(10:58):
reduce spending and to work towards balancing the federal budget,
which had expanded greatly during the New Deal in the
Second World War. That foreclosed deficit spending as an option
for financing highway construction. On the other hand, Eisenhower had
assured prominent Republicans that he would also avoid raising taxes
(11:20):
and also seek to lower taxes where possible, another priority
of the postwar GOP establishment. These twin constraints left Ike
with few options for pursuing what would need to be
a massively expensive, yet politically popular highway building program. The
plan Buckner came up with, which Eisenhower circulated within his administration,
(11:43):
proposed borrowing funds without actually counting those funds as part
of the federal deficit. It would be like convincing another
person to take out a car loan for an automobile
that you would actually use. That person would be obligated
to pay back the debt, while you u would derive
the benefits of the new car. This plan went through
(12:04):
several different iterations within the Eisenhower White House before stalling
out in nineteen fifty four. Iike's advisors appreciated the need
to avoid deficit spending while also keeping taxes low, but
as political professionals, they also had a hard time wrapping
their brains around a scheme that would raise money for
(12:24):
the government while keeping that money off of the government's
balance sheets. Things came to a head in the summer
of nineteen fifty four, when, after having his Vice President,
Richard Nixon announced a major new highway program which did
not in fact exist. Eisenhower authorized the creation of two
distinct committees within his administration to study the issue and
(12:47):
actually come up with a plan. One committee, called the
President's Advisory Committee, would actually write a plan, while a second,
called the Interagency Committee, would give expert advice. The first
committee was made up of private sector business officials, all
save one Republican millionaires. The second consisted in government officials
(13:10):
with authority and expertise that connected them to highways. These
two committees hated each other, sometimes actively working to undermine
the other's mission. Matters were not helped when in nineteen
fifty four, the Democrats recaptured both chambers of the Congress,
making any plan authored by the Republican Millionaires Club that
(13:32):
was the Advisory Committee unlikely to receive a warm reception
by the legislature. When the Advisory Committee ended up endorsing
a plan more or less the same as Buckner's original
from nineteen fifty two, the Interagency Committee raised hell. So
did the rest of the federal government when, after failing
(13:53):
multiple times to meet a self imposed deadline, the administration
finally sent the Advisory Committee's plan to Congress, it met
with incredulity Senate Finance Chair Harry Byrd, whose committee would
control the fate of any highway funding scheme. Lambasted the
plan as illegal and got Ike's own Comptroller General, the
(14:15):
chief accountant of the federal government, to publicly testify against
the Eisenhower plan before a Finance committee meeting. When the
House and Senate both voted down the administration plan in
the spring of nineteen fifty five, followed by the House
voting down a hastily written democratic alternative shortly thereafter, no
(14:37):
one should have been surprised. Finally, when it seemed like
things couldn't get much worse for the President's agenda, poor
Ike suffered a heart attack while vacationing in Colorado. Needing
to recuperate, the president delegated most significant responsibilities to his
cabinet under the leadership of Vice President Nixon. Counterintuitively, it
(14:58):
was under these inauspicious circums stances, with the president's sidelined
by health problems and the administration's highway plan up in flames,
that a few determined members of the Washington establishment decided
to seize the moment. Two members of Eisenhower's Cabinet had
also been members of the Marginalized Interagency Committee. Treasury Secretary
(15:21):
George Humphrey and Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks decided that highway
expansion was worth the hard choices that Eisenhower had been
unwilling to make. Working behind the scenes with key members
of Congress, including al Gore's father, Tennessee Senator Albert GORESR,
Weeks and Humphrey hashed out a bill that significantly raised
(15:44):
taxes to pay for highway expansion, but only those that
highway users would pay, such as taxes on gasoline, diesel,
and truck tire components. In the end, the feature that
made the bill most attractive was that highway user taxes
would in turn be segregated from other tax revenues into
(16:07):
a special account modeled after Social Security, known as the
Highway Trust Fund. That fund would supply building and maintenance
money for the interstates based on estimated user revenue from
the following year. Appreciative of the program's fairness and transparency,
Congress passed it with overwhelming bipartisan majorities in the summer
(16:30):
of nineteen fifty six.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to
Charles zugg And.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
He is the author of Dwight D.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Eisenhower and the Federal Highway Act, and he's also a
fellow at the Jack Miller Center.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
The Jack Miller Center is.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
A nationwide network of scholars and teachers dedicated to educating
the next generation about America's founding principles and history. To
learn more, visit Jack Miller Center. And we've done a
whole lot of storytelling with this great organization.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
And what a story this was.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
I gets all the credit, but in the end, it
was these players behind the scenes, the Commerce and Treasury
Secretary picking up the remains of well a doomed plan
from the beginning, and what they came up with was
something brilliant. The user tax, that is, if you use
the highways, you pay for the highways gasoline taxes, tire taxes,
(17:29):
and a variety of others that go into a highway
trust fund for that use. And as often as the
case here on this show, we love to get at
the real history, not the mythological history that we learn
sometimes in our textbooks. The story of how the Federal
Highway system came to be the real story. Here on
(17:50):
our American stories,
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Although President Eisenhower's name is forever etched upon our interstate
highway system, Charles Zugg wanted to know if this was true.
Zug is an assistant professor of Constitutional democracy and political
science at the University of Missouri. Is a Jack Miller
(00:32):
Center Fellow. He's also the author of Dwight D. Eisenhower
and the Federal Highway Act. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
When you're driving down a highway in the United States,
there's a good chance you'll see a blue sign with
five white stars in a circle that reads Eisenhower Interstate System.
These signs, which communicate the official name of the US
Federal highway network, reflect the nearly universally held belief that,
in nineteen fifty six, President Dwight D. Eisenhower built the Interstates,
(01:09):
That it was Eisenhower who, through transformative leadership, convinced Congress
and the rest of the American political system that the
country's largest ever infrastructure project was both popular and necessary.
That story is incorrect, or put more modestly, it bears
(01:30):
only a pale resemblance to the truth. Saying that Eisenhower
is responsible for the Interstates is like saying a quarterback
who got benched in the first quarter before scoring any
points is responsible for his team winning the game under
the leadership of a different quarterback three hours later. Did
the first QB play some role in shaping the final outcome,
(01:53):
of course, but was he decisive or even necessary? That's
much harder to say.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
So.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yet, the Interstates did get built, and Eisenhower has, over
the decades, gotten the lion's share of the credit. So
what's going on here? For many Americans, the federal government
is more of an abstraction than a concrete reality. Most
of us know who the president and vice president are,
and maybe some other nationally prominent leaders, such as the
(02:21):
House Speaker or the Attorney General. We might even know
of our members of Congress or our state senators, But
most of the stuff that actually makes up the American state,
all the agencies and departments and bureaus, are too distant
from us to matter all that much. This is an
odd thing because the federal government is immense. In twenty
twenty two, it employed two point eight seven million workers,
(02:44):
nearly two percent of the entire US workforce. Its annual
budget is around six trillion dollars, an incomprehensible amount for
a populace whose median income is around seventy four thousand
dollars a year. For all this, how often, is an
ordinary and likely to encounter the goliath that is the
US federal government directly. For Americans not serving in the
(03:07):
armed services, there are two routine points of contact. The
first is the postal service, which delivers our mail and
provides some other services, and which has been around since
the country's founding at the end of the eighteenth century.
In fact, establishing post offices and postal routes is one
of Congress's explicit responsibilities in the Constitution. The second is
(03:27):
the interstate highway system, and for younger Americans unaccustomed to
sending and receiving physical letters, driving on a federal highway
will be by far the most frequent direct encounter they
will have with the federal government. Unlike the postal service,
federal highways are not mentioned directly in the Constitution, and
for most of our country's history, the federal government played
(03:49):
no direct role in their construction or maintenance. The country
has always had roads of course, but those roads were
the responsibility of state and local governments, or, in some
cases a private contractors hired by those governments. This was
not such a problem when the country was rural and
when people primarily consumed goods that they grew and fashioned
(04:10):
for themselves. But as the country advanced, as people became
more dependent on buying and selling commodities produced by people
other than themselves, there arose a need to transport goods, services,
and the people who used them efficiently from disparate parts
of the country. The federal government did not keep pace
(04:30):
with these developments. In the decades following the Civil War
and leading into the twentieth century, families and businesses struggled
to keep up with the demands of a growing industrial economy,
in a large part because they simply could not buy
and sell goods and transport themselves efficiently. And with the
rise of personal automobiles in the early nineteen hundreds, access
(04:52):
to well built and properly maintained roads became more urgent
than ever. What was the hold up a lot of stuff,
but the chief impediment was tradition, or what political scientists
call path dependence. Since the country's founding the federal government
had played no role whatsoever in road building, which meant
that responsibility had fallen to subordinate governments. But in order
(05:16):
to be effective, road building requires not only money and labor,
but planning and coordination. Someone needs to plan roots that
will help not just a few special groups, but the
largest number of community members possible. In convincing the states
to relinquish control of that power proved very difficult. As
a consequence, the federal government played no meaningful role in
(05:38):
highway building during the first half of the twentieth century.
The peripheral role it did play was in the form
of matching funds. If a state highway authority built roads,
the federal government would match whatever expenditures the state incurred, thereby,
in theory, at least incentivizing more construction. The problem was
the Feds put essentially no conditions on these maps funds,
(06:01):
with the result that there was no planning on routes.
In some cases, a highway that should have linked major
cities in bordering states simply ended at one state's border
because the two states had failed to agree upon the route.
Worse still, states that could have benefited the most from
highway construction tended also to be the poorest and consequently
(06:23):
the least likely to receive significant matching funds. Finally, two
World Wars, which diverted domestic resources and manpower to the
battlefields of Europe and Asia, did little to incentivize road
building on a national scale.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
And you've been listening to Charles Zugg tell the story,
the true story, the real story of how our interstate
highway system came to be.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
And what a mess. Right up until the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1 (06:51):
You'd had all that money deployed, all that capital deployed
to fight two World Wars, and this whole idea of
matching grants.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
The various states couldn't get together and.
Speaker 1 (07:01):
Figure out what to do or where to put roads
and how to connect them best for the American people.
And then there was that problem of the poor states,
the ones that probably needed roads the most, having no
funds to match. When we come back the problem of
connecting the states, connecting our highway system together, the story
of how the interstate highway system ours came to be
(07:25):
continues here on Our American Stories. Leehabib here the host
of our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're
bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from
our big cities and small towns. But we truly can't
do the show without you. Our stories are free to
(07:46):
listen to, but they're not free to make. If you
love what you hear, go to Alamerican Stories dot com
and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.
Go to Alamerican Stories dot com and give. And we're
(08:09):
back with our American stories and with Charles Zugg, who's
the author of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Federal Highway Act.
He's telling the story of our a federal highway system
came to be the real story.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
Let's return to Charles.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
Entered Dwight Eisenhower, who in nineteen fifty two was the
first Republican to be elected president in twenty years. Born
in Texas and raised in Abilene, Kansas, Ike, as he
was popularly called, spent his entire career in the United
States Army, rising from West Point cadet to Supreme Allied
Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during the Second
(08:44):
World War. Apart from a brief stint as president of
Columbia University, Ike had never held a civilian post before
being sworn in as president in January nineteen fifty three.
He was not even particularly close with the Republican Party.
Both parties had attempted to recruit him for president. In fact,
what seems to have attracted Eisenhower to the GOP had
(09:07):
less to do with policy and political philosophy and more
to do with the fact that most of his private
sector friends all happen to be Republican businessmen. All of
this will become relevant in a moment. How did Eisenhower
come to be identified with interstate highway expansion? The relevant
mythology tells us that Ike became fixated on highway building
(09:27):
while serving as general in occupied Germany after World War II.
Having witnessed the German highway system called the Auto Bonden, Ike,
we are told, decided that such an infrastructure program was
both possible and necessary in the United States. There is
precious little to support this just so story in the
relevant archival material. Written statements supporting it appear nowhere in
(09:52):
Eisenhower's papers or correspondents. The smoking gun would seem to
be aligned from Eisenhower's own memoirs, written years after his presidency,
and likely romanticized in order to give coherence to the
otherwise convoluted story of highway expansion. Besides this, there is
no good reason to believe Ike was particularly concerned with highways,
(10:14):
any more concerned than activist presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt,
and Harry Truman, all of whom had at some point
advocated for dramatic road building projects during their presidencies. What
made Eisenhower distinct was not his interest, but rather his
strategy for pursuing a policy innovation that had been popular
(10:35):
and recognized as necessary for a very long time. Shortly
after his election in nineteen fifty two, Eisenhower asked a
Wall Street venture capitalist named Walker Buckner to design a
financing scheme to fund federal highway expansion. Ike's reasoning was straightforward.
During the nineteen fifty two campaign, Eisenhower had vowed to
(10:58):
reduce spending and to work towards balancing the federal budget,
which had expanded greatly during the New Deal in the
Second World War. That foreclosed deficit spending as an option
for financing highway construction. On the other hand, Eisenhower had
assured prominent Republicans that he would also avoid raising taxes
(11:20):
and also seek to lower taxes where possible, another priority
of the postwar GOP establishment. These twin constraints left Ike
with few options for pursuing what would need to be
a massively expensive, yet politically popular highway building program. The
plan Buckner came up with, which Eisenhower circulated within his administration,
(11:43):
proposed borrowing funds without actually counting those funds as part
of the federal deficit. It would be like convincing another
person to take out a car loan for an automobile
that you would actually use. That person would be obligated
to pay back the debt, while you u would derive
the benefits of the new car. This plan went through
(12:04):
several different iterations within the Eisenhower White House before stalling
out in nineteen fifty four. Iike's advisors appreciated the need
to avoid deficit spending while also keeping taxes low, but
as political professionals, they also had a hard time wrapping
their brains around a scheme that would raise money for
(12:24):
the government while keeping that money off of the government's
balance sheets. Things came to a head in the summer
of nineteen fifty four, when, after having his Vice President,
Richard Nixon announced a major new highway program which did
not in fact exist. Eisenhower authorized the creation of two
distinct committees within his administration to study the issue and
(12:47):
actually come up with a plan. One committee, called the
President's Advisory Committee, would actually write a plan, while a second,
called the Interagency Committee, would give expert advice. The first
committee was made up of private sector business officials, all
save one Republican millionaires. The second consisted in government officials
(13:10):
with authority and expertise that connected them to highways. These
two committees hated each other, sometimes actively working to undermine
the other's mission. Matters were not helped when in nineteen
fifty four, the Democrats recaptured both chambers of the Congress,
making any plan authored by the Republican Millionaires Club that
(13:32):
was the Advisory Committee unlikely to receive a warm reception
by the legislature. When the Advisory Committee ended up endorsing
a plan more or less the same as Buckner's original
from nineteen fifty two, the Interagency Committee raised hell. So
did the rest of the federal government when, after failing
(13:53):
multiple times to meet a self imposed deadline, the administration
finally sent the Advisory Committee's plan to Congress, it met
with incredulity Senate Finance Chair Harry Byrd, whose committee would
control the fate of any highway funding scheme. Lambasted the
plan as illegal and got Ike's own Comptroller General, the
(14:15):
chief accountant of the federal government, to publicly testify against
the Eisenhower plan before a Finance committee meeting. When the
House and Senate both voted down the administration plan in
the spring of nineteen fifty five, followed by the House
voting down a hastily written democratic alternative shortly thereafter, no
(14:37):
one should have been surprised. Finally, when it seemed like
things couldn't get much worse for the President's agenda, poor
Ike suffered a heart attack while vacationing in Colorado. Needing
to recuperate, the president delegated most significant responsibilities to his
cabinet under the leadership of Vice President Nixon. Counterintuitively, it
(14:58):
was under these inauspicious circums stances, with the president's sidelined
by health problems and the administration's highway plan up in flames,
that a few determined members of the Washington establishment decided
to seize the moment. Two members of Eisenhower's Cabinet had
also been members of the Marginalized Interagency Committee. Treasury Secretary
(15:21):
George Humphrey and Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks decided that highway
expansion was worth the hard choices that Eisenhower had been
unwilling to make. Working behind the scenes with key members
of Congress, including al Gore's father, Tennessee Senator Albert GORESR,
Weeks and Humphrey hashed out a bill that significantly raised
(15:44):
taxes to pay for highway expansion, but only those that
highway users would pay, such as taxes on gasoline, diesel,
and truck tire components. In the end, the feature that
made the bill most attractive was that highway user taxes
would in turn be segregated from other tax revenues into
(16:07):
a special account modeled after Social Security, known as the
Highway Trust Fund. That fund would supply building and maintenance
money for the interstates based on estimated user revenue from
the following year. Appreciative of the program's fairness and transparency,
Congress passed it with overwhelming bipartisan majorities in the summer
(16:30):
of nineteen fifty six.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to
Charles zugg And.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
He is the author of Dwight D.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
Eisenhower and the Federal Highway Act, and he's also a
fellow at the Jack Miller Center.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
The Jack Miller Center is.
Speaker 1 (16:48):
A nationwide network of scholars and teachers dedicated to educating
the next generation about America's founding principles and history. To
learn more, visit Jack Miller Center. And we've done a
whole lot of storytelling with this great organization.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
And what a story this was.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
I gets all the credit, but in the end, it
was these players behind the scenes, the Commerce and Treasury
Secretary picking up the remains of well a doomed plan
from the beginning, and what they came up with was
something brilliant. The user tax, that is, if you use
the highways, you pay for the highways gasoline taxes, tire taxes,
(17:29):
and a variety of others that go into a highway
trust fund for that use. And as often as the
case here on this show, we love to get at
the real history, not the mythological history that we learn
sometimes in our textbooks. The story of how the Federal
Highway system came to be the real story. Here on
(17:50):
our American stories,
Host
Lee Habeeb
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