The OPRRE made as liberal an interpretation as possible and ruled that the direct route could be followed as long as it also substantially followed post routes with gaps of only a mile or two in length.
Yet even with this liberalized interpretation, some of the western States found the post road clause an impossible hurdle to clear. In most of them, the main highways most in need of improvement ran through sparsely populated prairies, deserts, and mountains where there was no prospect of rural post routes being needed or established for decades. Nevada, a State as large as all of New England, had only four rural routes.
The industrialized eastern States were also denied the full benefits of Federal aid by the provision in the Act limiting Federal participation to 50 percent of the cost up to a maximum of $10,000 per mile. Many of the eastern States were beginning to build heavier and wider pavements and these, with wartime inflation, were costing $40,000 to $50,000 per mile.
The States expressed their dissatisfaction with these provisions of the Act at the Richmond meeting of AASHO in December 1917, but the Administration, preoccupied with conducting the war, was unwilling to ask Congress for corrective legislation.
The Rift in the Good Roads Movement
The battle for Federal aid in the 64th Congress had been a contest between the proponents of long-distance improved highways and those who wanted only to get the farmer out of the mud. Neither side was really satisfied with the compromise embodied in the 1916 Federal Aid Road Act, and neither side approved wholly of the OPRRE’s efforts to administer the Act. The post road clause was the major concession in the law for the local roads people, and the OPRRE very obviously was sympathetic to the State highway departments’ efforts to eliminate compliance with it as a requirement for Federal aid.
The long-distance highway boosters regarded the OPRRE’s efforts to get the States to designate highway systems as inadequate to ever produce a national road system. In a number of States the systems were so extensive that it would take decades of Federal aid at the most optimistic rate of appropriation to bring them up to an acceptable interstate standard. And even with the benevolent intervention of the OPRRE, it was difficult to get the States to coordi- nate their systems with their neighbor States. The States were primarily interested in State systems, not national systems.
Before the war was over, the national road advocates decided to cut loose from Federal aid and pressure Congress for a national system under Federal control. They supported the Postmaster General’s motor express route proposal as a step in the right direction. And in October 1918, Senator George E. Chamberlain of Oregon introduced a bill “to provide for taking over, improvement, relocation, construction, and maintenance of a system of National highways and State highways, designed to facilitate the movement of troops, equipment, munitions, and supplies, and to promote the general welfare of the people of the United States.”[1] This bill was buried in the Committee on Military Affairs, but it showed which way some winds were blowing.
In October 1918, the influential Engineering News-Record, which had formerly favored Federal aid, came out for a national highway system, declaring that the Federal-aid projects already approved by the OPRRE were so scattered that there was no hope that they could ever be connected into a workable national system.[2] The editor declared that “The Federal road administration has too long been in a subordinate capacity, lost in a department—that of Agriculture—whose main interests are foreign to road work,” and went on to recommend that an autonomous commission similar to the Interstate Commerce Commission be set up to build and operate national highways.[3]
The Postwar Highway Drive Begins
With the end of the war in sight, practically all of the States began preparations for a postwar road program. The highway atmosphere in late 1918 was entirely different from what it had been before the war. In Pennsylvania, where a bond issue for State highways had been defeated by 40,000 votes in 1913, an even bigger issue for $50 million carried by 180,000 votes in November 1918.[4] Illinois proposed a $60 million bond issue to pay for a carefully selected 4,800-mile system of trunk highways, and it carried by a large majority.[5]
In November 1918, Secretary of Agriculture Houston warned that the unexpended balances from the 1916 Federal-aid act would be inadequate to carry on an effective postwar road program in view of the enormous damage the country’s roads had sustained during the war, and the need for more and stronger roads. He recommended larger appropriations from the Federal treasury.
The postwar road program was the main theme of the Joint Highway Congress sponsored by the American Association of State Highway Officials and the Highway Industries Association and scheduled to be held at Chicago, December 11 and 12, 1918.
The Congress opened under a pall of sadness cast by the sudden death of Logan Waller Page, Director of the Bureau of Public Roads,[N 1] and the foremost highway engineer of the United States. Page had died of a heart attack the night of December 9, 1918, during a meeting of the executive committee of AASHO, to the dismay of the State highway forces who had been counting on him to lead the drive for an expanded postwar Federal-aid program. Page had brought to the meeting a Federal-aid bill that had been drafted by the Administration and had the support of AASHO. It provided for re-wording the post road clause of the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, for authorizing 50 percent Federal participation in the cost of roads with no upper limit and for increasing appropriations by a total of $450 million over a 4-year period. Those favoring the continuation of Federal aid planned to seek the endorsement of the Joint Highway Congress for the Page bill.
- ↑ On July 1, 1918, the Office of Public Roads and Rural Engineering had been elevated to the status of a bureau in the Department of Agriculture.
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- ↑ Cong. Rec. 65th Cong., 2d Sess., Vol. 56, pp. 11, 311.
- ↑ Wanted—A Connected National Highway System, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 81, No. 14, Oct. 3, 1918, p. 608.
- ↑ Post-War Highway Drive Begins, Engineering News-Record, Vol. 81, No. 20, Nov. 14, 1918, pp. 878, 879.
- ↑ Report of The State Highway Department of Pennsylvania, 1917-1920 (J. L. L. Kuhn, Harrisburg, 1922) p. 15.
- ↑ Second Administrative Report of The Directors of Departments For The Year July 1, 1918-June 30, 1919 (Illinois State Journal Co., Springfield, 1919) p. 204.
