When you’re cruising down one of America’s vast interstates, it’s easy to spot those familiar blue signs proclaiming “Eisenhower Interstate System.” For generations, we’ve believed that President Dwight D. Eisenhower, with his transformative leadership in 1956, single-handedly brought this monumental project to life, connecting our nation with vital ribbons of concrete. It’s a powerful story of vision and action, deeply ingrained in our collective memory. But what if the journey to build America’s largest infrastructure network was far more winding and complex than the legend suggests?
On Our American Stories, we often find that the biggest achievements of our nation have a deeper, more fascinating truth waiting to be uncovered. While the federal government can feel distant and abstract, our Interstate Highway System is one of the most tangible ways most Americans interact directly with this vast system. From the earliest days of our republic, building roads was largely a local affair, and the path to a national network was paved with challenges, traditions, and the slow, often difficult evolution of how America plans and builds for its future. Join us as we explore the real history behind the roads that connect us all, revealing a story of perseverance, politics, and the true origins of this essential American infrastructure.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 2: 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 U.S. federal highway network, reflect the nearly universally held belief that, in 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower built the Interstates. 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 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? Of course. But was he decisive or even necessary? That’s much harder to say.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 2: 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 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 2022, it employed 2.87 million workers, nearly 2 percent of the entire U.S. workforce. Its annual budget is around $6 trillion, an incomprehensible amount for a populace whose median income is around $74,000 a year. For all this, how often is an ordinary and likely to encounter the goliath that is the U.S. federal government directly? For Americans not serving in the 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 18th century. In fact, establishing post offices and postal routes is one of Congress’s explicit responsibilities in the Constitution. The second is 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 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, 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 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 with these developments. In the decades following the Civil War and leading into the 20th century, families and businesses struggled to keep up with the demands of a growing industrial economy, in 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 1900s, access to well-built and properly maintained roads became more urgent than ever. What was the holdup? 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 to be effective, road building requires not only money and labor, but planning and coordination. Someone needs to plan routes 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 highway building during the first half of the 20th 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, 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 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: 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: And what a mess, right up until the 1950s.
Speaker 1: 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: The various states couldn’t get together and…
Speaker 1: 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—continues here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib 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 listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to AlamericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to AlamericanStories.com and give. And we’re 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 how our a federal highway system came to be—the real story.
Speaker 3: Let’s return to Charles.
Speaker 2: Entered Dwight Eisenhower, who in 1952 was the first Republican to be elected president in 20 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 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 1953. 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 less to do with policy and political philosophy and more to do with the fact that most of his private-sector friends all happened 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 while serving as general in occupied Germany after World War II. Having witnessed the German highway system, called the Autobahnen, 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 Eisenhower’s papers or correspondence. 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, 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 and recognized as necessary for a very long time. Shortly after his election in 1952, 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 1952 campaign, Eisenhower had vowed to reduce spending and to work towards balancing the federal budget, which had expanded greatly during the New Deal and 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 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, 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 several different iterations within the Eisenhower White House before stalling out in 1954. Ike’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 the government while keeping that money off of the government’s balance sheets. Things came to a head in the summer of 1954, 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 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 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 1954, the Democrats recaptured both chambers of Congress, making any plan authored by the Republican Millionaires’ Club that 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 1952, the Interagency Committee raised hell. So did the rest of the federal government when, after failing 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 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 1955, followed by the House voting down a hastily written Democratic alternative shortly thereafter, no 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 was under these inauspicious circumstances, 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 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 Gore Sr., Weeks and Humphrey hashed out a bill that significantly raised 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 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 of 1956.
Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to Charles Zugg.
Speaker 3: And he is the author of Dwight D.
Speaker 1: Eisenhower and the Federal Highway Act, and he’s also a Fellow at the Jack Miller Center.
Speaker 3: The Jack Miller Center is…
Speaker 1: …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: And what a story this was!
Speaker 1: Ike 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, 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 Our American Stories.
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