Control and Consent: Contested Sovereignty on America’s Country Roads

Any road system must span country districts, and farmers were early advocates for Good Roads, but they were reluctant to assume new taxes and cede control of road development to central government. In “Song of the Open Road,” Walk Whitman took up a national vision of agrarian democracy served by quality roads as outlined by Thomas Jefferson and J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. Following Whitman, Good Roads advocates Isaac Potter and Hamlin Garland voiced an emphatic call for rural citizens to prosper by embracing the public nature of the road. Meanwhile, however, legislators debating road laws formulated compromises that might ultimately jeopardize the sustainability of independent family agriculture. In a divided political era, these writers more and less equivocally represent the road as a place where a return to the agrarian roots of America’s founding must be realized if the country would ever live up to its promise, yet all of them openly ignored the uncertainties of African American citizens seeking a sense of place anywhere in America, as represented in Paul Laurence Dunbar. Drawing on Sudhir Chella Rajan and Cotten Seiler, this chapter demonstrates that the challenges of reconciling competing visions of the landscape reveal inherent ambivalences about who the roads would be for, how they risked sacrificing local sovereignty, whether they would degrade the rural environment, and what affect they would ultimately have on farm labor.