K arilyn C rockett . People before Highways

When President Dwight Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act in 1956, it was hailed by some as the greatest public works endeavor in American history and perhaps the greatest single feat of engineering ever undertaken. Those assessments might have been hyperbolic, but there is no doubt that the bill enjoyed widespread popularity. The Senate approved this version of the act 89–1. For the better part of two decades in the mid-twentieth century, the American landscape—and especially the urban and suburban landscape—was dramatically transformed by two major federal programs: highways, and urban renewal. The latter, of course, had become a flash point of racial controversy by the mid-1960s and a source of considerable tension in American cities. “Urban renewal means Negro removal,” so the slogan went, and it was uttered on national television by no less a figure than James Baldwin. In truth, the highway projects undoubtedly destroyed at least as many black and impoverished neighborhoods in American cities as urban renewal did, and those new roads probably caused as much displacement of people as well. While it is certainly true that a number of big road projects were shelved or were left incomplete because local opposition mobilized against them, on the whole highway projects did not generate the same level of opposition as that mobilized against urban renewal. James Baldwin did not condemn highway projects with a memorable phrase.

New Deal · Opposition (politics) · Political science · Politics · Popularity · Slogan · American History and Culture · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Public Administration · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies