Trailblazing Modernity: Mapping the Compromises of Mass Mobility

For automobility to develop, somebody had to survey and build roads. In 1903 Horatio Nelson Jackson was the first person to cross the continent in a motorcar, supposedly proving that cross-country motor travel was possible, but sixteen years later a military convoy on a propaganda exercise struggled to follow basically the same route. Between these two events, numerous self-proclaimed Trailblazers threw their shoulders into the Good Roads project. Henry Joy, President of Packard Motors, spearheaded the Lincoln Highway campaign, and A. L. Westgard published stories of his adventures mapping motor roads throughout the country. Eager legislators delighted in narratives of hardscrabble travel like Joy and Westgard’s, which justified new laws that would mold the future of automobility around a settler mentality. However, Sioux doctor Charles Eastman charted an alternative landscape with more compassionate and inclusive priorities. Meanwhile, the modern-pioneer characters in early novels by Sinclair Lewis fretfully illustrate that, no matter how high flown the rhetoric, more roads would lead not to personal freedom so much as they would crowd modern life with unsavory and restrictive obligations. Drawing on Rudy Koshar’s insight into the cultural significance of travel, this chapter demonstrates that the promoters and legislators who paraded as political pioneers charting pathways to a bright mobility future actively suppressed their own doubts over the erosion of independence, persistent social injustice, and ecological degradation that would attend exponential increases in motor traffic with each new mile of highway.