But these complaints had little to do with the dispatch of the expedition that summer of 1919. It came about because high officials in the War Department were troubled that they might not be able to use the country’s roadways to move soldiers about in the event of an international conflict.
After the successful conclusion of World War I, American generals were starting to draw up plans to ensure that any forthcoming military confrontation would be handled, logistically speaking, with similar dispatch. One of the many scenarios dreamed up in the war college involved an imagined attack on the Pacific coast by an Asian enemy—unspecified but presumed with some foresight to be the Japanese, as the treaty that ended the first great war of the century, between Russia and a victorious Japan, had been brokered by America and signed in New Hampshire.
The war game advanced by the theorists had this putative enemy attack or invade the coast of California, Oregon, or Washington.* The war gamers needed to know just how quickly fully equipped soldiers could travel from the big army bases on the East Coast to the presumed battlefield in the West.
Railroads were quickly ruled out because they could not carry the amount and type of equipment and matériel required, including the newfangled battle tanks, of which the army was much enamored and which were too heavy for both the trains and the tracks. It was unlikely that sufficient trains could be assembled quickly enough to carry the necessary divisions out to the West, and besides, if the army already had plenty of wheeled and tracked vehicles, why not have its soldiers drive them across the country themselves? There were still a fair number of skeptics in Washington’s military establishment—most of them die-hard old cavalrymen—who clung to their lifelong faith in the horse and the mule. But by dispatching an expedition by road, having men of the motor transport corps drive a convoy of the kind of military equipment and personnel that might be needed to repulse a West Coast invasion, the department could prove once and for all the superior worth of wheel over hoof, and at the same time determine if the roads were better than railways. Indeed, such an expedition would be able to ascertain what America’s roads were truly like.
When Major Eisenhower heard mess-table talk of the trip, he was frankly intrigued. He had long been fascinated by all things mechanical and had trained young men in tank warfare at a camp in Pennsylvania. The experience had shown him a good deal about the design and maintenance of these powerful new machines. Moreover, he also had an abiding love affair with the automobile. He had been born in Texas and grown up in Kansas but knew little of the republic west of the Great Plains. So he volunteered to accompany the expedition as an observer, just for “a lark,” as he put it in a letter; he promptly began the diary that I took along with me when, almost a century later, I took off time to follow in his wheel tracks.
The journey left an indelible impression on the young man. It would also in time leave a truly indelible impression on the country that he traversed, for what the young man learned and remembered from the agonizingly slow progress of the column across America that year led inexorably to the creation, on his watch as the country’s thirty-fourth president, of America’s Interstate Highway System—the greatest engineering project in world history, a vast network of high-speed roads built with the sole purpose of uniting the corners, edges, and center of this vast nation by road.
The convoy gathered at a monument—then temporary but soon made permanent, of granite—by the South Lawn of the White House. The column was three miles long. There were seventy-nine vehicles: thirty-four heavy trucks, oil and water pumpers, a mobile blacksmith shop, a Caterpillar tractor, staff observation cars, searchlight carriers, kitchen trailers, a mobile hospital, and other wheeled necessities. Nine of them were wrecked en route, and 21 of the men were lost as well, leaving 237 soldiers, 24 officers, and 15 observers—Dwight Eisenhower among them—who pulled into Lincoln Park in San Francisco sixty-two days later. They had behaved en route as if the Asian enemy was dogging their every footstep. The condition of the roads—the essential nonexistence of roads west of the Missouri until they crossed into California—meant that, had they actually encountered an enemy along the way, the Americans would most likely have lost any battles that might have been fought.
The expedition was enlightening, a series of teachable moments. It was also, in the simple practical terms of getting a large contingent of soldiers from one coast of the country to another, a complete failure, one that Eisenhower made a part of his life’s work to ensure would not happen again.
As I pulled away from Gettysburg on that wet September evening, I was bound west along a small and uncrowded two-lane road. For most of the coming days, I would stay on small roads much like this, passing steadily through farmland and villages or stopping briefly at traffic lights in the center of scores of the small overlooked cities that the roads connected. The Interstate Highway System might well have been born as a consequence of this old expedition, but the mighty expressways weren’t anywhere to be seen nearby. The entire route of the 1919 adventure seems today to have been preserved in the amber of its own history.
After leaving Washington in 1919, Major Eisenhower took twenty-two days to reach Omaha; after I set off to follow on the same small roads his expedition had taken, in the late summer of 2011, it took me ten days, none of them plagued by any particular difficulty. I had none of the mechanical problems suffered by the military convoy. A Mack truck ran into a ditch in Chambersburg; a Dodge blew out a cylinder head in East Palestine; dirty gasoline in Bucyrus forced the drivers to stop to adjust their carburetors; a Cadillac truck got a puncture outside Fort Wayne; a motorcycle crashed while going over the Mississippi. Setbacks litter the pages of Ike’s diary, but all are mentioned without drama, in the manner of a soldier.
By the time the expedition reached California, the future president had recorded 230 accidents and emergencies of one kind and another. According to the summary report, “forty-two hours were spent in the most heroic efforts in rescuing the entire convoy from impending disaster.” Back in 1919, the roads ran out at Omaha, where the myriad troubles and trials of the expedition properly began.
The young Dwight Eisenhower traveled as an observer on the U.S. Army Transcontinental Convoy of 1919, sent to find out how quickly soldiers could get across the country by road. West of Omaha the troops met one mishap after another on nearly nonexistent highways: it took more than two months to reach San Francisco. This, in Ike’s mind, was when the interstate system was born.
For me, it was all a little different. The approaches to Omaha, for instance, had a certain sweet nostalgia to them.
Some forty years before, I had spent a couple of summers on a farm on the plains of central Iowa, near the town of Ames. (Ike’s diary records that when the convoy passed Ames, “Garford’s connecting rod cap bolts sheared off,” but things got better when a local church “served ice cream.”) The Judges, the farm family, had generously housed and fed and watered me; Tom Judge taught me how to run a combine harvester to help him bring in the 1975 corn crop. I assumed that they had retired, moved, or worse. But why not look for them? It was just a short detour from the Eisenhower route, and I was in no particular hurry. So I left the country road and spent the next hour driving dustily up and down miles of section roads, along wide avenues lying between rows of genetically modified corn eight feet tall, to see if I might recognize the old property. I never did; the farms all looked the same, all built with severe Midwestern regularity on the square, with corn hiding everything.
But then I stopped at a post office and asked. Sure, said some old-timer sitting in a shaft of sunlight by the window. Pat and Tom Judge? They’re in the same place they’ve always been. George Washington Carver Street they call it now. No more than a mile away.
George Washington Carver’s is a story to melt men’s hearts. He was born into slavery in Missouri circa 1864, was given his owner’s name, was kidnapped, was turned away from school because of his race, then homesteaded and plowed untold acreage himself and stea
dily became America’s greatest expert on alternative crops—peanuts, soybeans, sweet potatoes—that might replace the destructive cotton monoculture of the Deep South. He taught agriculture for forty years at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, is said by many to have invented peanut butter, and has been honored as prolifically since his death in 1943 as he was during his long and decent life.
It was entirely proper that the Judges lived on a road that memorialized so great a man, for they were die-hard Democrats, something that never came up when I stayed but was on very evident display when I knocked at their door all these years later. They looked just as one might expect retired farmers to look: nut-brown, strong, slim, fit. Their fields—a half section, 320 acres—were now rented to a neighbor; they doubted that it would be practicable or profitable to farm so small a lot these days, with many of the neighbors having 5,000 acres or more and living their lives more as industrialists than as dedicated farmers, steering their combines with GPS and listening to Rush Limbaugh as they harvested.
The Judges were glad they had left farming when they did. They worried about their country and thought that maybe they had lived during its best times. They loathed the industrialization of farming yet thought organic farming financially unsustainable, and they recognized the cruel paradox. They refused to use Roundup pesticides. They admired frugality; when Tom Judge’s mother and father died recently and he auctioned his parents’ possessions, as farming families do in these parts, they realized less than a thousand dollars. “And when we sold up when we retired,” said Tom Judge with a sardonic grin, “what all our stuff made wouldn’t buy us a new tractor.”
Next on the Eisenhower route was Council Bluffs, then the Missouri crossing, and Omaha the following day, but the old road had taken the 1919 expedition to a small western Iowa town named Denison (“Sunday rest period. Baseball game in afternoon: Denison 15, Convoy 1. Band concert in courthouse in the evening, also movies at the Opera House for the Convoy personnel. Dirt roads. Heavy dust.”) I wanted to go to Denison—not because of the opera house or the sound of remembered music in the courtroom but because a girl named Donna Mullenger had been born there and I had been in love with her for all my adult years.
She had been born in Denison in 1921 and had first wanted to become a teacher but had no funds to pay for school. She took off instead for Los Angeles—the familiar dream—and once there performed onstage, had a screen test, and was signed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1941. She was given the stage name Donna Adams, but after the moguls found the name tricky to say, she was renamed Donna Reed. The rest is all trajectory.
In 1946 Miss Reed starred as Mary Hatch, along with James Stewart as George Bailey, in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. As part of the story, she married, and as Mary Bailey she became the most beloved American film star of the day—and to my fevered mind, the most beloved of all time. And her adorable nature had been crafted and nurtured in Denison, Iowa, where Dwight Eisenhower and his brother officers had happily listened to a Sunday band concert in the summer of 1919.
Would that Denison had been as favored as its most famous child. It is a pretty enough place, with a scattering of well-crafted old wooden houses—and on a mantel in one of them stands Donna Reed’s Oscar (which she won not for It’s a Wonderful Life but for From Here to Eternity). The old German opera house has been turned into a Donna Reed Performing Arts Center. A soda fountain first installed in 1907 inside Fat Moe’s Deli in Chicago was trucked down to Denison and reinstalled, a perfect replica of the one in Capra’s fictional Bedford Falls.
But that aside, Denison stinks. Or at least it did on the day I visited. Everywhere I went there was a malodorous sickness in the air. In places it was visible: a low yellow mist hung over the Union Pacific tracks, drifting in from a vast cattle feedlot nearby. It was a miasma of chemical sprays, cattle waste, powdered feedstuff, and atomized drugs. It suffused the town, lying over it in a fetid slump, like an old dog blanket. Feedlots are just one aspect of the industrialization of American agriculture, so derided by Tom Judge back on George Washington Carver Street in Ames. They ruin and despoil the countryside, and where they merge with towns, they despoil and pollute them, too.
There were floods up and down the Missouri; most of the bridges were closed. The floods were caused by the melting of enormous snowpacks up in the Rockies, as well as by heavy rains in the northern plains. The Army Corps of Engineers, which superintends the dams, had opened many of the gates to release the impounded waters in the great man-made lakes of the Dakotas, and the consequent rush of floodwaters had caused immense damage and inconvenience, in places forcing people to drive a hundred miles to cross from one side of the river to the other.
I had planned to cross a sleek new concrete span with an ancient triple-arched iron railway bridge beside it, both leading to a small Nebraska town named Blair. The bridge was closed, however, and for the first time since leaving Washington, I had to drive on Interstate highways—I-29 southbound to Council Bluffs and then I-80 high across the river into Omaha. The detour turned out to be happily counterintuitive, for although both Omaha and Council Bluffs are cities with histories firmly wedded to the railway—and, as will be seen, to the new digital future—they can fairly be said to have played an essential role also in the birth of the new generation of roads that connect America so comprehensively today.
Back in 1919 this was the place where Dwight Eisenhower’s transcontinental nightmare began, and with it the epiphany that forty years later would change the face of America. His diary records the moment. It was early August. The party had crossed the hundredth meridian just outside the small town of Cozad, and were now in one of the driest parts of America, beyond the grassland of the Great Plains, in a place of sand, bones, and tumbleweed. On August 3, they left Gothenburg, a town founded by a Swede who had worked for the Union Pacific and for some reason, despite growing up in a mountainous country close to the sea, had opted to settle in a prairie as distant from the ocean as possible. The weather was cloudy and cool; the roads were sandy with, ominously, “some quicksand.” The convoy arrived in North Platte on August 4, the men so tired and the vehicles so overworked that all agreed to spend a day resting—“forced to suspend movement,” the future president wrote. They left town the next day. There is much technical talk in the day’s diary entry, but the gist is clear:
Nine miles west class B Machine Shop #414319 sank in sandy road and was pulled out by 3 class Bs. One mile beyond Class B #48043 sank in soft sand, both right wheels and differential being buried. After five unsuccessful attempts this truck was finally rescued by the combined efforts of the Militor and the Tractor, the cargo having first been removed. All trucks, except the FWDs and some of the Class A trucks had to be pulled thru this 200 yd stretch of quicksand. The Militor handled 16 trucks, the Tractor 10, and in 8 instances the combined efforts of both the Militor and Tractor were required. Delay 7 hours 20 minutes. Five small bridges were damaged during the day. Between Paxton and Roscoe 2 smaller sand holes were encountered, one on an up-grade, only the FWDs and Militor going through unassisted. Civilian automobile ran into Mack #51482 east of Ogallala. Fair and warm. Roads soft, sandy gumbo. Made 53 miles in 16½ hours. Arrived Ogallala, Nebraska, 11 pm.
The army and Dwight Eisenhower had discovered what back in the capital they had long suspected, that the American West had essentially no roads worthy of the name.
And yet the road they were on had in theory a long history and, as roads went, was supposed to be a good one—it had once been the Oregon Trail. For little more than a year, it had also been the route of the Pony Express. But now it was a mere byway for men and horses, with the trains on their permanent way just a few yards off, the locomotives snorting contemptuously past, the engineers sounding their whistles at the soldiers in Ike’s party in friendly derision. This was not a track ever designed for motor vehicles. It was not suitable anywhere in Nebraska or Wyoming, and it was worse than useless in Utah. Most of Nevada was a near-trackless waste
where the expedition got itself hopelessly lost as some of those waiting at the journey’s far end briefly suspected dire happenings.
Only when the party reached California did matters improve, and beyond the state capital of Sacramento, the roads swiftly became so good—with a macadamized surface, proper drainage, traffic police, rules of the road, gas stations aplenty, tire-repair depots—that the morale of men who had been lauded as “the flower of the motor transport corps” began to soar.
They were feted and feasted after they ground noisily into Sacramento. They were treated to a triumphal banquet with the governor and a small armada of dignitaries. The menu featured olives and almonds, a chowder of razor clams, Sacramento River salmon, country-fried chicken, corn and sweet potatoes, Turkish melon, Overland ice cream, coffee, California nuts, fruits, and raisins, and cigars. There was entertainment. (“Uncertainty of time of your arrival made arrangement of this programme a bit difficult. There will be these, and more!” said a note with the menu.) The San Francisco Jazz Trio played; a soprano trilled happily; the soldiers were said to have enjoyed a ukulele player; there was a performance by the Whistling Doughboy; the Allabads did a turn called “Just a Touch of the East”; and the men were offered the services onstage of one Violet MacMartin, who was billed with a mixture of triumph and uncertainty as an Entertainer De Luxe.
But all this cut no ice with Eisenhower. This great convoy, called into action to deal with a supposed threat to the country’s West Coast, had crossed 3,251 miles of the country at an average speed of only 5.6 miles per hour. The vehicles were in fine shape, Eisenhower concluded. The men were brave, intelligent, and snappy. But the roads were execrable. If nothing else, he wrote, the experience of the expedition should spur the building, as a national effort, of a system of fast, safe, and properly designed transcontinental highways.