Who gets to draw the map? The contentious creation of the American road/map system, 1917–1926

Abstract

Wittingly or not, Americans use a road/map system when they drive today. This system is a technological arrangement that coordinates routes, roadside signage, and maps for drivers. The American road/map system, for much of the twentieth century, was a government service, but the government’s control of the system occurred only after a struggle between for-profit entities, such as trail associations and map publishers, and engineers in the employ of the state. In vying for the right to designate routes, private and public interests were in effect battling over the market’s ability to provide for public welfare, the role of roads in American nationalism, and the nature of cartography itself. The public sector’s triumph in the contest over America’s highways was an unusual instance in American history in which a technological system’s ability to influence social politics was taken seriously, and it indicates the appeal of progressive reform at the time.

Keywords:

• automobility
• cartography
• Progressive Era
• engineers
• trail organizations

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers, as well as his adviser, Professor Ken Alder, for his tireless assistance and encouragement.

Notes

1. ‘Can Lincoln Highway be Wiped off Map?’, The Lincoln Highway Forum 6, no. 12 (April 1925).

2. I am aware that the period this paper examines, 1917–1926, would be considered by some historians to be outside the closing years of the Progressive Era. Indeed, despite its very real legacy, the Progressive Era has nevertheless been one of the trickiest periods for historians to delineate and characterize. Some historians, such as Bradley Rice and Alan Dawley, limit the Progressive Movement to the first two decades of the twentieth century. Others, such as Daniel T. Rodgers and Doug Rossinow, describe it as a much longer movement lasting from roughly the 1880s to the early 1940s. I place myself in this second camp, because as Rodgers has noted, the administration of Franklin Roosevelt is best understood as a ‘culmination … of a generation of proposals and ideas’ that had circulated among a transatlantic network of Progressive reformers (Atlantic Crossings, 415).

3. See Swift, The Big Roads; Fein, Paving the Way; and Seely, Building the American Highway System.

4. Generally defined, ‘automobility’ refers to people’s use of the cars in solving everyday transportation needs as well as the car’s creation of those needs. See Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 5.

5. As Cotten Seiler has pointed out, behind the wheel and on the highway, Americans felt themselves to be ‘unfettered and self-directing’ agents, i.e. free. See Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 43. Other scholars have remarked upon the freedom that automobiles seemingly granted American drivers; see Friedman, The Republic of Choice, 55; Gudis, Buyways, 41; McShane, Down the Asphalt Path, 148; Mumford, The Highway and the City, 234; Norton, Fighting Traffic, part III; and Volti, ‘A Century of Automobility,’ 667.

6. See especially Seiler, Republic of Drivers, and Akerman, ‘Twentieth-Century American Road Maps’.

7. See most recently Swift, The Big Roads. Also see Seiler, Republic of Drivers; Packer, Mobility Without Mayhem; Akerman, ‘Twentieth-Century American Road Maps’; Akerman, ‘Selling Maps, Selling Highways’; Seely, Building the American Highway System; Bay, ‘The Beginning’; and Highway Planning Survey, A History of Wisconsin.

8. For more on engineers’ growing authority in early twentieth century America see Layton, Revolt of the Engineers, and Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology.

9. Akerman, ‘Selling Maps, Selling Highways’; Bay, ‘The Beginning’; and Buerglener, ‘Creating the American Automobile Driver.’

10. The Lincoln Highway Association, for example, charged a one-time US$5 membership fee, and then expected members to pay the Association 1% of their yearly gross sales. See ‘Lincoln Highway Association Subscription.’

11. Akerman, ‘Twentieth-Century American Road Maps,’ 175.

12. Hiram W. Johnson, Governor of California, to A.R. Pardington, Vice-President of Lincoln Highway Association, 19 June 1914; Governor of Indiana [Samuel Ralston] to Henry Joy of the Lincoln Highway Association, 21 August 1914; John H. Morehead, Governor of Nebraska, to the Lincoln Highway Association, 26 August 1914.

13. Johnson to Pardignton.

14. Shaffer, See America First, 141–4.

15. Occasionally this strategy backfired. One Pennsylvania manufacturer declined to donate to the Lincoln Highway because his ‘ “patriotic inclinations” received a little set-back’ in 1864 during the Civil War when he inherited from his ‘dear Uncle Sam a par of crutches, after serving him for all-most three years.’ James E. Porter to the Lincoln Highway, 10 June 1914.

16. Bement, ‘What the Lincoln Highway,’ 1915.

17. Joy, ‘Tightening the Union,’ ca 1915–1917.

18. Shaffer, See America First, 130–1.

19. Theodore Roosevelt to Henry Joy, 2 May 1917.

20. Buerglener, ‘Creating the American Automobile Driver,’ 288–9.

21. Gudis, Buyways, chaps 10–11.

22. See, for example, the map of the Lincoln Highway in Akerman, ‘Selling Maps, Selling Highways,’ 83; also, the map of the National Old Trails Road in Akerman, ‘Twentieth-Century American Road Maps,’ 176; additionally, a map of ‘The Pasear,’ prepared by the Inyo Good Roads Club in 1915.

23. See for example, Scarborough, Complete Road Atlas.

24. Such as step number 27 in northern Indiana: ‘Turn RIGHT, South. Red barns and wind mill on right.’ Rand McNally & Company. Photo-Auto Maps, 70.

25. For example, the Photo-Auto Maps begins at Chicago’s New Southern Hotel at Michigan Avenue and 13th Street, which it describes as ‘the very best hotel in Chicago for automobile tourists. A more delightful place for visitors in Chicago could not be conceived’ (p. 47).

26. For a more complete account of early non-cartographic navigational aides for drivers, see Akerman, ‘Twentieth-Century American Road Maps’; and Buerglener, ‘Creating the American Automobile Driver,’ chap. 4.

27. Seely, Building the American Highway System, chaps 1-2.

28. Fein, Paving the Way, chap. 2.

29. Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology, introduction. The legacy of these engineer–reformers has been a matter of dispute among historians. For some historians, such as Edwin T. Layton, the engineer–reformers took on a conservative, ultimately anti-democratic political posture during the 1920s. Other historians, such as John Jordan, present them as more amicable to democracy and, in the 1930s, the New Deal. As far as the highway engineers that are the subject of this paper are concerned, I would characterize them as somewhere in-between Layton’s and Jordan’s assessments. These men believed in impartial, egalitarian public service, but they also distrusted political actors other than themselves. As Daniel T. Rodgers has found with many Progressive reformers, they sought democratic ends through undemocratic means.

30. Highway Planning Survey, A History of Wisconsin, 20.

31. Hotchkiss, ‘State of the Origin.’ The Wisconsin State Highway Commission is itself part of a larger government by commission movement afoot in the first two decades of the twentieth century. For an examination of the commission movement at level of city government, see Rice, Progressive Cities.

32. Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology, introduction.

33. Brink, History of Rand McNally, 11–12.

34. Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine, ‘He Made the Highways Happy Ways’; Brink, History of Rand McNally, 6–11.

35. Rand McNally and Company, ‘Auto Trails Map, district number 5.’

36. Brink, History of Rand McNally, 18.

37. Akerman, ‘Selling Maps, Selling Highways,’ 85.

38. Akerman, ‘Twentieth-Century American Road Maps,’ 174–5.

39. This activity was not without precedent. Although it is doubtful that Rand McNally staff would have drawn the comparison, their signing of the roads in order to map them is similar to the practice of city directory publishers who in the nineteenth century initiated the use of house numbers. See Rose-Redwood, ‘Indexing the Great Ledger.’

40. For example, Rand McNally published in 1923 Goode’s School Atlas, which constituted a new direction for American geographical pedagogy, and an ‘Aviation Map of the United States Featuring Landing Fields,’ a venture that Andrew McNally III described in the 1930s as a failure. See Schulten, The Geographical Imagination, 195; Ehrenberg, ‘“Up in the Air,”’ 237; and a typed interview in the Rand McNally Archive of Andrew McNally III.

41. Brink, History of Rand McNally, 14.

42. Akerman, ‘Selling Maps, Selling Highways,’ 85.

43. Ibid.

44. Brink, History of Rand McNally, 31.

45. Nissen, ‘Organized and Blazed.’

46. Nissen, ^‘A.E. Nissen to A.R. Hirst, Dec. 15, 1918.’

47. Akerman, ‘Selling Maps, Selling Highways,’ 86.

48. See letters from these clubs to Rand McNally, Rand McNally Archive, Series 3, Box 9, folder 113.

49. Nissen, ^‘A.E. Nissen to A.R. Hirst, Dec. 15, 1918.’

50. Minutes of Meeting of Representatives of Organized Trunk Line Highways at Hotel La Salle, Chicago, Monday 9 December 1918.

51. Brink, History of Rand McNally, 38.

52. [John Brink], The Blazed Trails. The pamphlet is unsigned, but the text in many places matches Brink’s unpublished memoir found in the Rand McNally Archive. I follow Akerman in attributing this pamphlet to Brink. See Akerman, ‘Selling Maps, Selling Highways.’

53. In this sense, the for-profit road/map system was like other business initiates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that combined patriotism with tourism (see Shaffer, See America First, and Gudis, Buyways, 187–8).

54. Good Roads, ‘Wisconsin Law,’ 175.

55. Wisconsin Highway Commission, Wisconsin Highway Commission Bulletin 9 (1920), 16.

56. Hirst, ‘The Wisconsin System,’ 28–9.

57. Wisconsin Highway Commission Bulletin 9, 16.

58. Pisani, ‘Reclamation and Social Engineering’; and Radford, ‘From Municipal Socialism.’

59. Stromquist, Re-inventing ‘The People’, 3–5; Norton, Fighting Traffic, part III.

60. Hirst, ‘A.R. Hirst to A.E. Nissen, December 24, 1918.’

61. Hirst, ‘A.R. Hirst to A.E. Nissen, January 2, 1919.’

62. Hirst, ‘Developing a Highway,’ 14.

63. Bay, ‘The Beginning’, 414. Oddly enough, Bay, who was employed by Rand McNally, quotes at length a letter he received from W.O. Hotchkiss of the Wisconsin Highway Commission containing the evidence for Hirst’s conceiving of the numbered routes idea in order to prove his point that the numbered routes was an idea of John Brink. Indeed, there are some sources who attribute the idea of numbered routes to Brink (see Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine, ‘He Made the Highways Happy Ways,’ and Erickson, ‘Even George Washington’), but the evidence linking Brink’s road map and the committee framing the 1917 Wisconsin State Trunk Highway Law is inconclusive.

64. Hirst, ‘A.R. Hirst to John S. Owen, January 29, 1918.’

65. Hirst, ‘A.R. Hirst to L.C. Whittet,’(secretary to the Governor of Wisconsin).

66. Wisconsin Highway Commission, Minutes, 64.

67. Harley, The New Nature of Maps, 47.

68. Nissen, ^‘A.E. Nissen to A.R. Hirst, Dec. 15, 1918.’

69. Hirst, ‘Underlying Principles,’ 45–60.

70. Hirst, ‘The American Highway Problem,’ 9.

71. Babcock, ‘Annual Address.’

72. Ibid.

73. Municipal Record, ‘The Federal Highway Act,’ 411; Heminway, ‘By-Ways Versus Highways,’ 48.

74. Heminway, ‘By-Ways Versus Highways,’ 48; Swift, The Big Roads, 74.

75. Seely, Building the American Highway System, 75.

76. Hirst, ‘Developing a Highway.’

77. Washington Post, ‘10 La Follette Men,’ 5.

78. American Association of State Highway Officials, ‘Resolutions Adopted.’

79. State Board of Public Roads of the State Rhode Island, Twenty-Fourth Annual Report, 27.

80. AASHO Staff, ‘The U.S. Route Numbered System,’ 141.

81. Carson, ‘The Chief of the U.S. Bureau.’

82. Jenkins, ‘Middle West Accepts,’ 27.

83. Weingroff, ‘From Names to Numbers.’

84. Lincoln Highway Forum, ‘Can Lincoln Highway be Wiped off Map?’

85. Lincoln Highway Forum, ‘A.A.A. Urges States.’

86. Excerpt from a report made by Brink to Rand McNally in September 1925 quoted in ‘The Beginning of Modern Road Maps in the United States,’ original typescript by Helmuth Bay. Rand McNally Archive, series 2, Box 14, folder 211.

87. Ibid.

88. Ibid.

89. Brink, History of Rand McNally, 5.

90. Ibid.

91. Weingroff, ‘From Names to Numbers.’

92. Akerman, ‘Selling Maps, Selling Highways,’ 88. In the decade to come the Company gradually shifted its road map marketing strategy to one of selling road atlases directly to consumers, and supplying maps of individual states to oil companies, who in turn offered them for free at their gas stations.

93. Woodworth, ^‘Harmon H. Woodworth.’

94. See Rand McNally & Company, Rand McNally Road Atlas, 1932, 1939, and 1944 editions.

95. The 2009 edition of the company’s road atlas conforms to the principles of the 1926 Atlas. See Rand McNally, The Road Atlas (2009).

96. Cosgrove, Geography and Vision, 168.

97. Winner, The Whale and the Reactor, 10.