Public Roads—H. S. Fairbank for the Interregional Highway Committee and Francis C. Turner, then Assistant to Commissioner duPont (later to be Federal Highway Administrator), for the Clay Committee. And in each case, through the secretary, came demands on the Public Roads staff for more data or data compiled or summarized in different ways, the pace deliberate in the case of the earlier committee and feverish in the case of the latter.
In developing its recommendations, the Committee not only had the massive array of data already mentioned, but sought the advice and aid of a group of technical experts representing professional groups and associations of users and of the officials of other levels of government. It also received offerings from 22 national associations in hearings covering several days in the fall of 1954. Significant in its recommendations were the recognition of the problem and an estimate of the programs needed to meet it that pretty much corroborated the conclusions of other groups thinking about the same matters. What stood out as markedly different was the proposal for financing the program. Accepting, as did others generally, that the cost should be met by user taxes, it proposed accelerating the program by resorting to a bond issue. And it proposed the establishment of a new and separate Federal corporation to administer the program, the actual construction of which would still be the responsibility of the States and the Bureau of Public Roads.
That the proposal for financing the program was unique should not have been unexpected. For one thing, even in the face of obvious highway needs over many years, adequate funding had not been authorized by conventional methods. For another, the investment banking influence within the Committee, and the fact that Francis V. duPont, then Commissioner of Public Roads, was experienced in the financial world and one not reluctant to break with tradition, argued that since conventional methods had not worked, a different and possibly more dramatic approach might succeed. In any event, the Clay Committee’s report to the President was transmitted with his strong endorsement to the Congress on February 22, 1955, a month ahead of the report called for by Congress in the 1954 Act. And soon after the “Administration bill,” incorporating the recommendations of the Committee, went from the White House to the Congress.
The Clay Committee’s report for the reasons described in Chapter 9 did not receive favorable acceptance in the Congress. But without doubt it did provide the spark that ignited congressional action, and the ultimate authorization of the greatest public works program in history can be attributed more to Commissioner duPont and the Clay Committee than to any other single factor.
Recognizing the upswinging public demand for improving highway transportation, brought into focus by the Clay Committee’s work and its attendant publicity, the Roads Subcommittee (of the Senate Committee on Public Works), under Senator Albert Gore from Tennessee, began hearings early in February. Senator Gore’s hearings were more extensive and more penetrating than any hearing previously held on the highway program. Every interested group was heard, and the Subcommittee went deeply into all facets of the problem, constantly calling for data on one subject after another, and questioning critically all the material supplied. Commissioner duPont assigned Frank Turner to act as liaison with the Public Works Committee, and he participated in virtually all its meetings, open or in executive session. Regularly he called the Bureau at the noon recess to say that the Committee wanted certain information “for this afternoon’s session” and again in late afternoon to say that the Committee “needs this information by tomorrow morning.” Many Public Roads people worked well into many nights to meet these requests!
Eventually came the “Gore bill” authorizing the needed expanded program and calling for its administration by a commission separated from the Department of Commerce. In a very informal session after the hearings, Senator Gore remarked that at the start of the hearings he had been opposed to heavy participation with Federal funds in a program that he then saw as primarily for the benefit of the States, but that the mass of evidence had “turned him around 360 degrees.” Commissioner duPont observed that that could only mean that he was back where he started! But Senator Gore replied that, of course, he meant 180 degrees, for he’d turned completely in the opposite direction. It was in this good-humored atmosphere that the lengthy hearings ended, with the legislative and executive branches together and in harmony. It was planning data that “turned the Senator around.”
The Senate hearings caused some ruffled feelings at the other end of the Capitol, for there it was maintained that highway legislation traditionally originated on the House side and that by jumping into hearings so early, the Senate had usurped the responsibility of the House. So perhaps not to be outdone, the House, not taking the evidence produced by the Gore Subcommittee, held its own and nearly equally lengthy hearings later in the session. And ultimately it, too, proposed a bill, also for a greatly expanded program with heavy Federal participation, but following more conventional lines of administration.
Thus, toward the very end of the session with three alternatives and with apparently some confusion in signals between the White House and the “Hill,” the proposed program, so heavily supported by the public, went down, not so much by defeat as by default.
The highway interests were dejected. It was reasoned that the 2d session of the 79th Congress would be in an election year and that there was little prospect of enactment or approval of a big money bill in 1956. The program, it was reasoned, would have to await the new Congress in 1957. But the seers evidently reckoned without the public, for when Congress reconvened in 1956, pressure to get on with the highway program was obvious and heavy. The representatives had heard from their constituents during their stay at home between sessions. As described in Chapter 9, the Committee on Public Works and the Committee on Ways and Means collaborated in providing the two-titled Act of 1956. The Interstate program conceived by President Roosevelt, planned by the Interregional Highway Committee, galvanized by the Clay Committee, and finally shaped by the Congress, was about to be realized.
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