"Our Growing Interstate System"
Published in the February 1968 edition of National Geographic, Robert Paul Jordan’s article “Our Growing Interstate Highway System” offers a glimpse at the development of the Interstate System twelve years after the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act was passed. The legislation Eisenhower signed had originally planned for the Highway System to be completed by October 1972. It would take almost forty years for the Interstate to actually be built; it was declared finished in 1992. Jordan’s article, though, has an optimistic outlook on the developing Interstates. He dismisses critics who claim that the freeways displace people and disfigure neighborhoods, saying that “they may bring badly needed urban renewal” (Jordan). He goes on to quote Federal Highway Administrator Lowell K. Bridwell as claiming that the “good [interstate highways] can do in cities is unlimited, provided we weave them into the economic and social fabric of our urban areas.”
Maintaining that “a drive along the Interstate System provides a vivid lesson in the geography of the United States,” Jordan offers the newly constructed roads as an alternative to the backroads that wound through small towns everywhere and were surrounded by examples of landscape vernacular. He continues, “the new highways cut through brooding forests and silent deserts; they course the endless prairies, skirt rivers that helped shape the destiny of a continent, and knife through high, lonely mountains” (Jordan). What Jordan, and many other supporters of the new highway system, failed to recognize, though, was that by diverting the highway away from small towns and cutting through natural features, the connection afforded by the road, represented in the history and geography of landscape vernacular, was lost to endless concrete and asphalt. This sense of loss and disillusionment resonates with the alienation of the Beats and the coming disenchantment of the hippie generation.