Prologue: The Cultural Terrain of America’s Modern Road Landscape

Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century, America went from an almost total lack of navigable roads to a superabundance. This contrast provides a basis to critique of America’s overwhelming commitment to industrialized personal travel—automobility. This prologue locates the woeful disrepair of American roads in the Progressive era in policies that blocked federal support for roadway projects on Constitutional grounds. However, in the years after the Civil War, while the government subsidized railways, a grassroots movement for “Good Roads” emerged through the story telling of farmers and then bicyclists prior to the invention of the automobile. As motorists slowly joined the push after 1893, haltingly developing their own brand of road story, they took up and ultimately redefined the objectives and geography of the existing movement. With road stories operating as a catalyst for remarkable political and social transformation, as evidenced by their circulation in Congressional debates, key legislation that coordinated networked road construction and led to the enshrinement of automobility in national policy was fretfully approved in 1893, 1916, and then 1921. This historical context is backdrop for the larger study of early American road narrative.