Getting Out of the Mud: The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898–1928

GETTING OUT OF THE MUD

GETTING OUT OF THE MUD

The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898–1928

MARTIN T. OLLIFF

Foreword by David O. Whitten

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2017 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Caslon

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover image: One of eleven automobiles on a pathfinding tour from Birmingham to Mississippi sponsored by the Birmingham Ledger to test a potential new interstate route, ca. 1911–12; courtesy of the Birmingham Public Library Archives

Cover design: David Nees

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-1955-7

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9138-6

Contents

Foreword

Preface and Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. When Roads Were Bad

2. Alabamians Become Wide-Awake to Good Roads

3. State Highways Take the Lead

4. Peering beyond the State’s Boundaries: Named Trails and Interstate Highways

5. Laying the Foundation for a Modern Highway System

6. Alabama Administers Its Highway Program

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Foreword

In Getting Out of the Mud: The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898–1928, Professor Marty Olliff has set out in detail the chain of events and the men and women driving it to create the infrastructure of roads, highways, bridges, and tunnels that positioned the state of Alabama to support its economy in the twentieth century. Scholars have accumulated an impressive collection of studies of the good roads movement nationally, but state-specific analyses are often lacking. In his extensively documented study, Olliff observes how the various groups seeking better ground transportation in Alabama differ from similar organizations in other states, in their efforts and their results, as they dealt with the state’s particular electorate, politics, administrations, needs, resources, geography, and economy. Olliff weaves a unique combination of history, sociology, political science, and economics to create a three-dimensional fabric.

In The Life of Reason (1905), George Santayana wrote, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. That sentiment is particularly applicable to origins of ground transportation development in Alabama and the United States. In the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the achievements of the good roads advocates, who labored between 1898 and 1928, are once again on the national list of problems to be addressed. Every year thousands of miles of US roads and highways and hundreds of bridges and viaducts are abandoned because the money to maintain them is hard to come by as citizens (voters) resist taxes and support politicians who stand for lower taxes and smaller government. Alabamians, like their fellow Americans, separate their demand for government services from the need for taxes. Some states are dealing with the demand for more and better highways, on the one hand, and the refusal to accept higher taxes, on the other hand, by constructing toll roads.

Toll roads may solve some highway problems where the traffic is sufficient to pay for construction and maintenance—interstate highways that carry thousands of vehicles daily. But rural roads cannot make enough from tolls for construction, maintenance, and collection of tolls, as county governments and entrepreneurs discovered when they constructed short stretches paved with dirt (soil surface roads), gravel, wood, rubber, iron, and sometimes nothing and attempted to pay for the work by charging users for passage.

Moreover, the mid-twentieth-century one citizen, one vote doctrine (then called one man, one vote) increased the political strength of urban Americans at the expense of their rural neighbors. The Supreme Court decision in Reynolds v. Sims (1964) ruled that voting districts must be drawn to give citizens equal political power no matter where they live. Before the decision, rural voters had more influence per person than did urban voters. Urban areas of the nation had been long underrepresented in Congress and state legislatures, while rural districts were overrepresented. Opposition to the court order was built on the contention that rural voters were more moral and civic-minded than city dwellers.

One citizen, one vote reduced the political power of rural voters to build and maintain roads and bridges and allowed roadbuilders to concentrate on highways within and between metropolitan areas—the areas where most of the population live. In the early twenty-first century the infrastructure put in place a century earlier is falling into disrepair in the face of insufficient revenue to bring it up to safe standards and, at once, build the new highways demanded by an expanding population of people and vehicles. Highway revenues are being used in high traffic areas while rural roads and bridges are abandoned and closed to traffic.

So, Olliff’s study of how Alabama dealt with serious political and resource obstacles to the construction of a road system that would accommodate economic growth in the twentieth century may offer clues to the resurrection of that system in the twenty-first century. Many of the problems are unchanged over the hundred years between crises: Alabamians demand good roads and a government that has the capacity to build and maintain them at the same time that voters are putting into office men and women who promise lower taxes and smaller government. Farmers are finding it increasingly difficult to make a living where the cost of getting their crops to market increases as the roads built to avoid the mud tax are abandoned and as politicians concentrate on winning votes in the urban precincts that will determine who is elected. The mud tax may win after all.

On another rural-need front, Internet access in twenty-first-century rural America parallels the need for roads and bridges in the twentieth. The Internet defines the early decades of this century; should the United States allow the creation of two nations separated by Internet access, the nation, its population, and its economy, will suffer just as it would have suffered without the rural roads and bridges of the early twentieth century. The same situation exists: Rural Americans want Internet access; urban Americans have Internet access and little concern for the needs of their rural neighbors. Both groups see the advantage of access, but they also agree that taxes should be lower and government smaller. Yet, what is good for part of the nation is good for the entire nation.

A conclusion imbedded in the Olliff work is the capacity of the push-pull politics of a democracy to solve a serious social/political problem despite numbers of different ideas, positions, and opposition. Olliff identifies multiple players in the good roads conflict of the early twentieth century. Some favored federal leadership, but others wanted decisions made at the county and state levels. Good roads advocates often worked at cross purposes, yet the ground transportation system in Alabama and the United States took form, and while less than perfect, it provided city-to-city, state-to-state, and farm-to-market roads that continued to develop after Olliff’s study period and served the nation until the interstate highway system of the Eisenhower administration took shape. The same push and pull will have to solve the problem of declining state and county roads and the deterioration of the interstate system in the twenty-first century.

Dr. David O. Whitten

Preface and Acknowledgments

I only realized recently that this book began when I was a Boy Scout and was spending a great deal of time pondering the mysteries of my father’s topographical maps of Huntsville, Alabama. Two of those mysteries were the dual markings of US Highway 431 as the Florida Short Route and US Highway 231 as the Bee Line Highway. Fast forward a (largish) number of years—past achieving my Eagle badge, college, a nonacademic career, a family, a PhD, and a new job at the Troy University campus in Dothan, Alabama, the southernmost intersection of US Highway 431 and US Highway 231. A mile south of that intersection is a motel called the Bee Line. I traveled US 231 three miles each way between work and home and, in 2008, began thinking anew about highway names. I was also in search of new fields to research and became intrigued by Alma Rittenberry, the principal founder of the North-South National Bee Line Highway Association that gave US 231, among others, its sobriquet.

As I studied the Bee Line Highway and Ms. Rittenberry, the history of the Alabama good roads movement began to appear and suggest itself as a good lens through which to interrogate the Progressive Era, one of those turning points in the history of the United States that is both obvious yet frustratingly vague. Defining what it meant to be Progressive (note the capital P) was like nailing jelly to a wall, and even determining the beginning and the end of the Progressive Era is mired in controversy. Add to that the idiosyncratic history of Alabama during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the history of Progressivism becomes, as the kids say nowadays, a hot mess. Nevertheless, interrogating that history from multiple angles and accounting for multiple complications are important, for the Progressive experiment established the framework for how the United States would negotiate its changing domestic policies and governmental structure throughout the twentieth century.

The way the people and institutions of Alabama responded to the opportunities provided by Progressivism and to the problems caused by an outdated transportation infrastructure is also important, for the Progressive movement and the Alabama good roads movement influenced one another. The good roads movement tracked the historical trajectory of similar Progressive movements, beginning with small advocacy groups and growing into a statewide movement that accessed the power of state government to enact its agenda into law. It also secured federal funding and a strong if small federal bureau to administer both a federal-state funding partnership and common standards for road routing, construction, and maintenance. Then the good roads movement, like Progressivism itself, made itself moot through its own successes and because of the exhaustion of the American polity from a long period of legislative reform.

Getting Out of the Mud traces the history of the Alabama good roads movement and highway administration from the time of the Spanish-American War until the cusp of the Great Depression. It is a story and analysis of the infrastructure the good roads movement created to advocate for road improvement, the federal government created to guide nationwide highway networking, and the state of Alabama created to control and administer its own highways and the federal highways within its borders. All of this took place in a highly racialized, patriarchal society whose economy was slowly shifting away from traditional agriculture. Many things changed over the three decades this study covers; most things did not.

As historians and authors know, writing such a story feels like a more isolating experience than it actually is. Certainly, I have spent far too many beautiful days ensconced in my cold office clicking away at my keyboard very much alone by choice. Yet it is the network of supporters and helpers who make this product possible, and I owe them all a larger debt of gratitude than I can pay. First among these are Jim Baggett and his staff at the Department of Archives and Manuscripts of the Birmingham Public Library who gave me exceptional access to the John Asa Rountree Papers and Scrapbooks, which form the solid base of this book, and happily scanned many of the images used herein and in articles and presentations that arose from this line of inquiry. Next are Norwood Kerr and the reference staff at the Alabama Department of Archives and History (ADAH) for their steadfast and competent aid. At Dr. Kerr’s recent retirement reception, former Alabama archivist Ed Bridges noted that many of the works he consulted on Alabama history acknowledged Norwood by name. There is a reason for that, and I am happy to join that crowd. I also thank my former student, Scotty Kirkland, and my longtime friend Dr. Frances Robb, for reading and critiquing a draft of this manuscript at a critical juncture. The Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) has allowed me to use the highway commission minutes, a source that has not been explored well enough even now. I offer thanks to their current legal staff and former ALDOT archivist Christopher Davidson for providing access.

I thank Troy University for its many kindnesses in support of my work. The Faculty Development Committee, History Department, and library granted me a sabbatical in 2013 that allowed me to draft most of this book and decide on a different direction for the post–World War I chapters. The Wiregrass Archives staff, Tina Bernath and Diane Sowell, took up much of the slack for me during that sabbatical as the university opened our Terry Everett Congressional Library and Everett Reading Room. They maintained their regular duties and added on many more, including keeping me informed when I showed up only one or two days per week. I also appreciate the kindnesses shown me by the dean of the Troy Libraries, Christopher Shaffer.

Thanks also go to a number of scholars who guided and encouraged me. Richard Weingroff, unofficial historian of the Federal Highway Administration, shared with me many hard-to-get resources about Alma Rittenberry and has done a remarkable job of making highway history available through multiple Federal Highway Administration websites. Dr. David Whitten, emeritus from Auburn University, is a friend, colleague, mentor, and professor who emerged from his role as an anonymous reader for this manuscript to write the foreword. The other anonymous reader, readers for articles I published in the Alabama Review, and my chapter that appears in one of Dr. Glenn Feldman’s last books, Nation within a Nation, have strengthened my argument and storytelling. In addition, the staff at the University of Alabama Press—former director Curtis Clark, acquisitions editor Donna Cox Baker, and editor in chief Dan Waterman—have been gracious and supportive beyond the call of duty.

My largest thanks of all goes to my sainted, long-suffering wife, Liz, who not only pushed me to write when I had rather not but also endured my constant talk about roads, highways, routes, pathfinders, and the crazy people who agitated for everything associated with our modern highway-based transportation system. She read parts of the manuscript for clarity and readability, and whether she knew it or not, she was the exemplar of my target audience.

Introduction

Roadways are ubiquitous, connecting most of the places we want to go. County, state, and federal highways connect local hamlets, county seats, commercial towns, and industrial cities. Roads of all sizes span county lines, state boundaries, and national borders. Alabama has 101,811 miles of rural roads, of which federal superhighways I-10, I-20, I-59, I-65, I-85, with their spurs and bypasses, constitute only 1 percent. The rest are federal numbered highways, state highways, and 23,537 miles of local roads that the Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) helped counties build after 1944. In fiscal year 2013 alone, ALDOT engaged in 427 active construction projects costing $1.3 billion and took in $1.465 billion from all revenue sources including federal aid.¹

Motor vehicles are ubiquitous as well. The number of licensed cars, trucks, buses, and motorcycles indicates that residents use the roads intensely. Between October 1, 2013, and September 30, 2014, the Alabama Department of Motor Vehicles received 1.56 million applications for certificates of vehicle title and issued 5.39 million vehicle registration tags.² National driving statistics tell a similar story. In 2009, 91 percent of American households owned at least one automobile for personal travel. The average driver spent fifty-six minutes behind the wheel daily and drove 10,088 miles in 2,068 trips annually. Much of that was work related. More than 89 percent of the nation’s 151.4 million workers used personal vehicles to commute an average of 11.8 miles per day.³

Although most of us complain that commuting speeds are frustratingly slow, the average commuter drove along at almost twenty-nine miles per hour. Speeds on limited-access superhighways are a bit higher. The automobile navigation system maker TomTom reported in 2010 that the average driver traveled superhighways at close to the posted maximum speed limits. Mississippi drivers were the fastest, averaging just over seventy miles per hour in zones posted at sixty-five to seventy miles per hour, while Washington, DC, drivers were the slowest, cruising along at forty-six miles per hour. It will surprise any Alabama driver pinned behind a Sunday Driver in the right lane because a speed demon is barreling down on the left to discover that TomTom found that Alabama drivers averaged almost exactly seventy miles per hour along the interstates.⁴

This is a dramatic change from the early twentieth century, when the idea was unfathomable that almost everyone would own a car and travel extensively on roads at speeds of more than one mile per minute. Most people traveled at three miles per hour, the speed of walking or riding in animal-drawn conveyances, and most traveled only a few miles from home. Bicycles increased travel speed to twelve miles per hour, but they had a limited market and rarely appeared in rural districts, where most Americans lived. Even at the height of the bicycle craze of the 1890s, builders produced only 1.2 million units per year, and in 1897 they exported half of those. By 1909 bicycle production had fallen to 160,000 units, because consumers considered them toys for the young rather than a legitimate form of mass transportation. Another transportation marvel, railroads, increased travel speed to twenty miles per hour, creating a cult of speed among the financially well off throughout the Western world and supplying almost all the long-distance passenger and freight service in Europe and North America until the middle of the twentieth century. Finally, motor cars scorched faster yet, but they did not appear in significant numbers until after World War I. In 1908 Henry Ford introduced his Model T, which would account for almost half the automobiles in the world by 1929, but it took him until 1916 to produce a total of one million units.⁵

Like other Americans, few Alabamians rode a bicycle, a train, or an automobile before World War I. Rural Alabamians traveled by foot or draft animal because they lacked access to mechanical transport. Even those who could afford bikes or cars faced travel speed and distance limits because roadways were short and poor. Rural roads ran only a few miles from railroad towns into the surrounding countryside and generally were so badly made and poorly maintained that they were unpassable much of the year. Alabama’s roads were almost worthless except for foot and animal traffic and were passable for any distance only during certain times of the year.

How did Alabama get from short-distance, mud-bogged dirt roads to our contemporary network of paved county, state, and federal highways engineered for safe and rapid automobile travel? We take roads and highways for granted, rarely considering how they came to be; but improving local roads and then erecting an entire system of state and federal highways was a tremendous undertaking that required the energy of thousands of people over dozens of years. Road making on the grand scale that the people of Alabama and the United States did it in the twentieth century changed the way they thought about the role government played in their lives. In the state and across the nation, civically engaged citizens changed their basic mode of transportation and with it their basic conception of government. We call this the good roads movement.

Interestingly, when Alabamians hear the label good roads movement or its associated motto, Get Alabama Out of the Mud, they often think of Governor James Big Jim Folsom’s post–World War II campaigns to pave the state’s rural roads. Big Jim’s highway department simply paved existing roadbeds without straightening the roads or reducing their grades. The hard work of routing that winding road system and building even those inadequate roadbeds came from the efforts of the Progressive Era good roads movement. From 1898 to 1928, wide awake citizens agitated and educated their fellow Alabamians to demand that their government build both all-weather local roads that enhanced the travel opportunities of farm families and long-distance trunk-line highways that start[ed] somewhere and end[ed] somewhere. Eventually that agitation led the state to appropriate funds to aid road improvement and create a permanent bureau to administer the program. Soon thereafter, good roads advocates secured federal funding for state road improvements; by the eve of World War II, building and maintaining roads became the largest and most expensive function of Alabama government.⁶

The story of this first good roads movement in Alabama has been lost almost completely. Elementary and secondary school Alabama history textbooks mention roads, often discussing antebellum roadbuilding and occasionally noting that paved roads were necessary in the twentieth century. College textbooks and general histories of the state are more inclusive but still cover the movement only in passing. This situation exists because there are so few sources on the state’s good roads movement. Howard Lawrence Preston devotes a chapter of his 1991 Dirt Roads to Dixie to John Asa Rountree, one of the most prominent Alabama good roads leaders, but concentrates on Rountree’s leadership of the nationwide United States Good Roads Association and the Bankhead Highway Association rather than on the state’s overall good roads movement.⁷

Getting Out of the Mud seeks to close this gap in the historical literature, and it pursues three goals. The first is to tell the story of the Alabama good roads movement. That movement began in 1898 when a small group of boosters developed a rudimentary program to promote improved roads and organized into the Alabama Good Roads Association that secured state funding for county road improvement, an Alabama Highway Commission, and, at least on paper, a state highway network that linked county seats together. Soon thereafter, many Alabama good roads advocates turned their attention to the federal government to improve state roads and connect them into an interstate highway system. The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 (championed by Alabama senator John H. Bankhead) and the Federal Highway Act of 1921 provided significant funds to states for approved road construction projects. These laws cemented the position of states’ highway administrations as well as the funding relationship between states and the federal government. By the late 1920s, the Alabama good roads movement had aroused public interest in better rural roadways, established a state-level bureau to take charge of a state highway network, and secured federal money and engineering expertise to make Alabama part of a nationwide highway system. When Alabama removed its last convicts from the coal mines and put many of them to hard labor on the public roads in 1928, the good roads movement achieved its final goal. By then it had surrendered its mission to the Alabama Highway Department and faded away.

This book’s second goal is to analyze the Alabama good roads movement’s thirty-year history, examining both how activists organized it and how they changed from advocating for improved local roads to calling for highways funded and built with state and federal aid. This trajectory was neither linear nor neat. Instead, it was complex, exhilarating, agitating, disturbing, messy, and convoluted because its members were ambitious, headstrong, and willing to take advantage of the fact that they lived in an era of rapid change and heightened opportunity. In addition, the good roads movement in the nation and the state contributed to a fundamental shift in how citizens viewed the role government played in daily life. Since the nation’s founding, Americans had feared government as a power that required restraining. In the twentieth century, partly because of their experience with giant corporations during the Gilded Age, reinforced by Progressive Era crusades like the good roads movement, many Americans began to demand that government make a positive impact on their lives, or at least mitigate the disruption brought about by industrialization and associated changes.⁸ The good roads movement institutionalized the idea that the government should coordinate transportation projects in the name of the people as long as such institutions insured that the people had a voice in decision-making and that those decisions were fair. The good roads movement gave the United States its modern transportation system, for good and for ill. It defined roadbuilding as a public trust rather than a private enterprise and led state and federal governments to create administrative agencies to build and maintain highways into the twenty-first century.

This analysis extends to the role male and female Alabamians played in the national good roads movement. Senator John H. Bankhead, John Asa Rountree, John Craft, and Alma Rittenberry, among hundreds of others, built the movement in Alabama from the bottom up, organizing citizens to secure passable local roads from their local governments, a model they exported when proposing state and national highways. Rountree and Rittenberry organized multistate associations to route and construct long-distance highways. They saw themselves as potential national movement leaders, but their county-by-county organizational model was out of step with modernization and centralization. Rittenberry lost control of her original interstate association, and Rountree kept control of one of his by the slimmest margin. John Craft led the Alabama movement but showed no interest in attaining out-of-state recognition or followers. Senator Bankhead had the most prominent national profile, and his successful championing of the 1916 Federal Aid Road Act set the pattern for federal support for highway building and road improvement.

The third goal of Getting Out of the Mud is to use the lens of the Alabama good roads movement to examine the nature of Progressivism in the early twentieth century. This follows an observation by Howard Preston in Dirt Road to Dixie that the good roads movement in the South and Alabama was Progressive only to the extent to which it supported the Populist agenda of improving county farm-to-market roads. When it began to support trunk-line highways across the state and nation, he maintains, the good roads movement abandoned Progressivism. The catalyst for this change was the potentially lucrative northern tourist market that began in 1910 and led Southern business leaders, real estate developers, and New South prophets . . . to become more involved in the quest for better roads. The movement jettisoned its ideals about improving roads to ameliorate the problems of farm life in favor of the tawdry commercialism of selling cars and promoting a car-based lifestyle.⁹ Furthermore, the movement’s support of trunk-line highways directly harmed farmers, whose taxes built and maintained rural roadways regardless of length or purpose. With the advent of heavier-duty highways that linked towns and cities, farmers were no longer the principal beneficiaries of public expenditures on roadways. Rather, middle-class urban and small-town businesses benefitted, as did automobile owners. Automobilists, as they were called, were the butt of much disdain throughout the era. In 1906, Princeton University president and future United States president Woodrow Wilson claimed that automobilists epitomized the arrogant wealth that inspired class envy and even socialism. Using similar imagery fifteen years later, Alabama senator Cotton Tom Heflin scolded automobilists as people who want to gallivant around the country for joy riding instead of producing the wealth of the nation.¹⁰

Preston builds his case that the movement was boosterist rather than Progressive by tracking not only John Asa Rountree’s United States Good Roads Association but also Leonard Tufts’s Capital Highway Association, Carl Fisher’s Lincoln Highway and Dixie Highway associations, and the American Automobile Association (AAA), all of whom supported interstate highways to increase their personal wealth or market their organization. Preston contrasts them with farmers, who felt abandoned by the good roads movement and its new leadership.¹¹ Tammy Ingram’s Dixie Highway updates and supports Preston’s analysis. The good roads movement, she writes, had been spearheaded by urbanites who wanted good roads to promote recreational travel, on the one hand, and farmers who wanted rural free delivery of the mail, on the other. They were, however, too weak to revolutionize the country’s transportation system one county road at a time until they joined automobile promoters like the AAA and national-level interstate highway promoters like Carl Fisher. Ingram chronicles how Fisher’s dream of a long-distance highway from the cities on the Great Lakes to his new tourist resort of Miami Beach became the driving force in the Georgia good roads movement.¹²

For his part, Preston undervalues the role boosterism and economic improvement played in southern Progressivism. Most southern Progressives believed in the promise of economic development as a panacea for many of the social ills plaguing the region, and better roads were one manifestation of that belief.¹³ Southern Progressivism’s economic ideals extended the New South vision of prosperity and stability. Where the New South had become corrupted by heightened inequality and the depredations of a semicolonial economy that withdrew industrial profits from the region to enhance shareholder value in the financial centers of New York and London, southern Progressives promoted ways to return that cash to improve their lives. Again, road improvement was one way to mobilize local capital and draw national capital back, even if that meant using the federal government to redistribute funds by opening the public treasury in support of state infrastructure projects.

More importantly, Preston conflates two different types of boosterism that were present in the good roads movement, though admittedly they were fluid and seeing their differences required more studies than Preston could access in 1991. One type of boosterism is decidedly modern and industrial—the top-down good roads association built by a single business titan or small group of experienced corporate officers working with powerful state and local officials designed to complete a long-distance highway with little concern for the effects its presence had on localities. This certainly was an abandonment of the Populist agenda, and Getting Out of the Mud argues that such boosterism was not Progressive at all. The other type was much more democratic, with roots in small business management and local political organizing. Even when local, state, and national boosters decided to build long-distance highways, they generally were unable to marshal sufficient economic or political resources of their own to complete the project. Instead, they rallied local activists to pressure county and state officials to complete local stretches of roads that joined into a highway.

Alabama’s good roads movement demonstrates this dynamic. Rather than being energized and focused by wealthy industrialists to construct multistate highways, the movement was organized by local advocates and, to be sure, local boosters who supported county road improvement at first and then highways constructed by linking county roads to their neighbors’. The Alabama movement actually split into three camps based on differing objectives and funding schemes. These groups sometimes worked together, sometimes