The 50th B-Day of the Interstate Highway

Fire of Liberty
George Will has a good column out today commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of the Interstate Highway System(IHS) and rightly points out the monumental impact that this enormous federal works project has had on this great nation. Now while I'm generally disinclined to raise my hand in support of the federal government spending lots of the taxpayer's money on various projects to solve a specific set of problems, I have to agree with Will's assessment on the impact and success of IHS. I guess I'm so apt to support this because the Constitution specifically enumerates the power to build roads(national defense, printing money and other powers which are found in Article 1: Section 2) I further applaud the development of the IHS after reading the following from Will's column:

The first Republican president began his public life as a 23-year-old candidate for the Illinois General Assembly by telling voters of Sangamon County his "sentiments with regard to local affairs," the first sentiment being "the public utility of internal improvements." The vigor of the Union also was a preoccupation of Teddy Roosevelt, the eighth Republican president, whose great internal improvement, the Panama Canal, was external, although he thought of Panama as America's private property. And Eisenhower's message to Congress advocating the interstate system began, "Our unity as a nation is sustained by free communication of thought and by easy transportation of people and goods."

No legislator more ardently supported the IHS than the Tennessee Democrat who was chairman of the Senate Public Works subcommittee on roads. His state had benefited handsomely from the greatest federal public works project of the prewar period, the Tennessee Valley Authority, which, by bringing electrification to a large swath of the South, accelerated the closing of the regional development gap that had stubbornly persisted since the Civil War. This senator who did so much to put postwar America on roads suitable to bigger, more powerful cars was Al Gore Sr. His son may consider this marriage of concrete and the internal combustion engine sinful, but Tennessee's per capita income, which was just 70 percent of the national average in 1956, today is 90 percent.

The IHS -- combined, as Fortune magazine's Justin Fox writes, with another bright idea from 1956, the shipping container -- made America's distribution system more flexible. This benefited manufacturers, foreign and domestic, especially in America's hitherto lagging region, the South. This is one reason there is a thriving Southern-based automobile industry (BMW in South Carolina; Mercedes in Alabama; Honda in both Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama; Toyota in Tennessee, Alabama and Kentucky). Furthermore, the South is home to some of today's "big box" retailers -- Wal-Mart (Bentonville, Ark.), Home Depot (Atlanta) -- as well as FedEx (Memphis).

So thank you President Eisenhower for such a wonderful gift.