Copyright
© 1999 by Michael Segers, All rights
reserved
Frank Turner. That's a name
associated with one of the most significant changes in American society in the
twentieth century, but it is not a name that you hear very often. So, riding
along in my sport-utility vehicle recently, I was surprised to hear a radio
report about Francis Cutler (Frank) Turner, a man whom, in its 40th
anniversary issue (1994), American Heritage named one of the ten people
who had most changed our lives.
If you don't recognize that
name, and not many people do, take a minute to consider the implications. What
could he have done to have had such an impact on us all? Unlike so many people I
rave about, he was not involved with computers or movies, although he did affect
the ability of us all to rove. Frank Turner was an important figure in the
world's largest public works project, originally intended to defend, even to
protect our country, which as The New York Times said recently,
"redrew the map of America." Nowadays, however, people say we need to
be protected from that project, which has led to pollution, the decline of the
cities, urban sprawl, fast food, and shopping malls. Francis Turner, a former
Federal Highway Administrator, who died October 2nd, again in the
words of his Times obituary, "is often called the chief engineer of
the Interstate System of highways."
It is not fair to credit or
blame Turner with that highway system. The real father of the federal interstate
system was President Dwight David Eisenhower, who was inspired by his
observations of the Autobahn in Germany. In the 1950's, Eisenhower, for whom
military concerns were always paramount, foresaw a system of highways linking
the far corners of the country to allow the rapid movement of the military and
the rapid evacuation of civilians in case of an attack by the Soviet Union. The
modern interstate highway system was born June 29, 1956, when President
Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which provided for joint
federal and state funding of interstate highways. In acknowledgement of
President Eisenhower's commitment to the federal highway system, in 1990, it was
renamed the "Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense
Highways."
President Eisenhower had
relied upon the input of the President's Advisory Committee on a National
Highway Program, or Clay Committee, named for its chairman General Lucius D.
Clay, which was made up of industrialists, engineers, and labor leaders. The
executive secretary of the committee was Francis Turner, who had been with the
Bureau of Public Roads since the 1920's. Unlike other members of the committee,
Turner knew about the economics and the engineering of highway construction and
provided continuity with the work of the BPR.
There were already federal
highways in use. In fact, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had proposed a
limited federal highway system. The 1956 act provided for a unified system of
42,000 miles of uniform roads with limited access, allowing travel at up to
seventy miles per hour. On November 14, 1956, the first piece of highway
constructed under the FAHA opened, and 27 years later, the final link was
completed.
Originally, Eisenhower did
not want the interstates to pass through major cities; here in south Georgia, we
can see that I-75 does not go through Albany but does go through Tifton. But in
many places, the interstates not only passed through the cities but also divided
them as well. Often, the routes lay through minority areas, disrupting patterns
of neighborhood life that had been important to the lives of the residents for
decades. With the ease of transport by car, many people fled the cities, and
mass transit declined as levels of pollution rose.
According to US Secretary
of Transportation Rodney Slater, Frank Turner "pioneered development of the
nation's surface transportation system as we know it today." But Turner,
Eisenhower, and the other technocrats associated with the origin of the federal
interstate highway system never grasped the human dimensions of the very human
activity of traveling around our country. They were committed to easing the flow
of automobile traffic, not to improving the quality of the lives of the drivers.
Now, forty years later, we are beginning to understand what those giants
wrought. Our foreign policy is shaped, even dominated by our dependence upon
petroleum products, and the Gulf War may not be the last conflict that our
country engages in to support our national addiction. That's ironic, because one
of the reasons given for the federal highway system to begin with was for
military preparedness.
Now that highways have
become part of our way of life, so has commuting, with families escaping to
suburbs, where they have to drive to a "convenience" store, while
corporate planners are moving their offices to equally isolated office parks. In
Sylvester, we've seen a decline in locally owned small businesses, with people
jumping into their cars to drive to regional shopping centers. In Asphalt
Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America, and How We Can Take It Back
(Crown), Jane Holtz Kay coined the term "carchitecture" to describe
the bland, cookie-cutter buildings in which we eat, shop, and sometimes live,
along the highways of America. Some years ago, on a trip from Georgia to
Colorado and back, I spent several nights in small motels in small towns, trying
to get a feel for the distinctive regions I traveled through. Every night,
however, I found that I was in walking distance of a Wal-Mart, and you can guess
which golden arches were never far from view.
People from other countries
reminisce about homes in walking distance to stores, restaurants, and other
amenities, cities built for people rather than for cars. New York City is
sometimes called the most European city in America because it is perhaps the one
city in our country where we can really get around without a car. In fact,
owning a car in New York can be a distinct handicap. When I lived there, a
friend of mine who had a car paid more to rent the garage space where he kept
his car than I paid to rent my apartment.
The "car-ocracy"
of our country is a complex creation, and there are no obvious solutions, either
simple or complex to the problems that our love/addiction to personal vehicles
have caused. Tom Lewis, author of Divided Highways; Building the Interstate
Highways, Transforming American Life (Viking Books), who was interviewed for
the National Public Radio report, said that Turner never understood the
criticism of the highways. He always felt that what he had done was for the good
of the country. Since, as Lewis emphasized, Turner was a man of
"extraordinary probity," who never took advantage of his knowledge of
where highways would be routed and intersections located, knowledge worth a good
bit of money, my reference to him as a "highwayman," a kind of thief
(used in the recent film Plunkett & Macleane) is unfair. In the
literal sense of the words, however, Turner was a man of the highways, from
Alaska to the Philippines, the only Federal Highway Administrator to rise
through the ranks and to bring a firsthand knowledge of the gritty realities of
highway construction to the office.
But, Lewis remarked that
Turner was a "great engineer, not a man of great imagination." And so,
we get to the Internet—you knew I would get there some way, didn’t you? We
are building a new kind of highway, an information superhighway, as it is
called. This time, Sylvester isn’t being bypassed. With Peanut.org, we are
located firmly at the intersection of Past and Future. But, as we members,
sponsors, friends, and users of Peanut.org continue this great adventure, we
need folks who are not just great engineers, great technocrats. We need people
of great vision, great imagination, and great heart, so that we don’t end up
with a lot of pollution, noise, and broken neighborhoods in cyberspace. The
traffic merges here.
It's a historical
coincidence that both of the leading candidates for president in the 2000
election have family connections to the birth of the federal interstate highway
system. Both Senator Prescott Bush, grandfather of Governor George W. Bush, and
Senator Albert Gore, Sr., father of Vice-president Al Gore, were in the Senate
at the time of the Clay Committee's report and supported the development of the
highway system.
And your humble rover and
raver has a family connection to Frank Turner's work as well. In the early
1940's, Turner was in charge of the completion of the AlCan (Alaska-Canada)
Highway. Less than a decade later, a young couple from Georgia drove from
Alaska, where they had been married, back to Georgia, part of their route taking
them along the AlCan Highway, which was in stretches not much more than a gravel
trail. That couple soon had a son, and I am that son. If Turner's road had been
a little less bumpy, perhaps my prose style today would be a lot smoother.
There was a time when I
would have used Frank Turner's death as an occasion to rave about the damages
that the cars and the highways have done to us as a society and as individuals.
Maybe, with a few more miles behind me, I am mellower. Maybe, it's just that,
since I now drive a sport utility vehicle, I am looking for a twelve-step group
where I can stand up and say, "My name is Mike, and I, too, am addicted to
asphalt and petroleum." No matter what highways of our country and our
Internet you rove on or rave about, keep your feet dry, your tires appropriately
inflated, your seatbelt fastened, and your heart full of noble thoughts of
people like President Eisenhower and Francis Turner, who dared to do great
things, things that have had a greater impact on our lives, perhaps, than they
ever imagined.
There were four sources of
information that I especially drew on to write this article. The original
inspiration was the report of Frank Turner's death on the National Public Radio
program, All Things Considered. Now, please don't think that I was able
to listen intently and take notes as I drove along a particularly treacherous
stretch of Frank Turner's masterpiece. No, I was able to listen to that report
again on the Internet at--
http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/cmnvs02fm.cfm
These two articles provide
background on the federal highway system The first is from the Turner-Fairbank
Highway Research Center (TFHRC), named for Francis Turner, and the second is
from About.com:
http://www.tfhrc.gov/pubrds/summer96/p96su10.htm
http://geography.about.com/education/scilife/geography/library/weekly/aa052499.htm
The New York Times
obituary provided specific information on Turner, but to access articles in the
archives of the Times, you have to pay. If interested, however, you can
find The New York Times at the first address and its archives at the
second:
http://archives.nytimes.com/archives/
The Federal Highway
Administration can be found at:
As I looked for information
about Francis Turner with various web search engines, I was surprised to get
repeated references to poetry. Coincidentally, "Francis Turner" is the
name of one of the characters and one of the poems in The Spoon River
Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters, which, like Thornton Wilder's play Our
Town, is a celebration of life in small town America. You can find a
student’s discussion of the poem at the first address and the complete text of
Spoon River at the second:
http://www.mcps.k12.md.us/schools/springbrookhs/spoon/FRANCIST.HTM
http://www.mcps.k12.md.us/schools/springbrookhs/spoon/sprvr10.html
Years ago, "The
Highwayman," by Alfred Noyes, appeared frequently in textbook anthologies
of poetry. It has fallen in disfavor, recently, as we're gotten stricter about
what we allow the little ones to read about. A gory suicide, a glorification of
a criminal and a politically incorrect title (not "The Highwayperson")
all keep it in the outer darkness, together with Huckleberry Finn and Playboy
interviews with Minnesota governors. It is still a rollicking good read,
however, and you can find it at:
http://www.johnlockhart.com/docs/highwayman.html
One line in the poem just
may have some connection to our current topic: "He did not come in the
dawning. He did not come at noon." Perhaps he was stuck in traffic.