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Christian Shetter-Gervasi
In 1953, General Motors published How to Plan and Pay for Better Highways, a collection of winning entries for its essay contest by the same name announced the year prior. GM set aside $194,000 (more than $2.2M today)1 in prizes for this contest and established a panel of judges that included current and retired federal roadway officials and a publishing company executive, among others. These men sorted through 44,000 essays to find the perfect argument, one which would be submitted to the federal government in the hopes it would finally make the major investments in automobile infrastructure that GM had been craving.2
The winner of this contest was Robert Moses, the New York City Commissioner of Parks at the time. A perennial urban planner who would become infamous later for his work in Baltimore (which had suggested the displacement of nearly 20,000 individuals in the name of ‘slum clearance’), Moses in 1953 thought it critical to the principles of highway planning that the government use “simple Anglo-Saxon words used and interpreted in the same way by everyone”—an idea that General Motors thought worth a $25,000 endorsement, and one the federal government took notice of.3 This action was just a piece of decades of successful work on the part of General Motors (and auto manufacturers as a whole) to guide the United States towards the adoption of, and eventual dependency on, the automobile. Through corporate propaganda, sabotage of other industries, and the establishment of a close relationship with the federal government, this method of transportation became uniquely associated with the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, as its rapid adoption far outpaced the rest of the world.4 However, the synonymity of the automobile with American culture developed under the influence of another significant factor in the United States at this time: racism.
The history of postwar automobile propagation and infrastructure development is, like much of American history, underscored by racist practices and policies targeting African Americans. However, much of the literature discussing the negative effects of government (in)action on African American citizens and communities during the 1950s—1970s focuses on residential segregation through urban policies such as redlining and urban renewal or suburban policies such as racial covenants and violent vandalism; some literature in this field mentions highways, but it discusses them comparatively little, focused most explicitly on highway construction and residential displacement.5 Highways are more than just a chapter in the story of African American immobility in the postwar United States. Some scholars make highways their main focus. Roger Biles, for example, does a particularly thorough job chronicling the racist impacts of highway construction in major US cities during this period, going into more depth connecting the slum clearance and condemnation policies mentioned in other scholars’ works to this type of infrastructure, though he is not the only scholar to do this.6
These scholars’ works focus on the present reality of highway politics and policies within their time period, but they lack the critical context of automobile development. Literature discussing African Americans’ immobility and unequal access in postwar America rarely makes highways more than an aside. Cotten Seiler’s Republic of Drivers acknowledges the efforts of American corporations to make the nation dependent on highways as causal to African American inequality, but it stands alone. The damage that the majority of scholars write about these highways causing must contextualized by this understanding of how they were enabled and why they exist.7 Each of these scholarly works provides a piece of the puzzle, but their authors have yet to put together the whole picture. The United States became a nation that catered to cars in the first half of the twentieth century, driven not by the US government’s efforts, but those of corporate interests—General Motors and Ford primarily, but not solely—who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on campaigns to make it so. As Americans purchased automobiles, they became part of the nation’s culture. Like many other aspects of American life during this period, however, African American citizens could not participate equally in a society of suburban motorists and were often disparaged when they did. Eventually, federal, state, and local governments began undertaking massive infrastructure projects to accommodate this new mode of transportation, and when they did it was frequently at the expense of urban minority communities. These communities not only suffered from the construction of the highways, but they also found themselves trapped as they were unable to equally access the highways and their destinations, factors which are at least as important in chronicling African American immobility as the residential displacement itself.
Furthermore, existing scholarly literature for these individual topics frequently uses a major US city for its argument: Detroit and Baltimore are two of the most common. Some other literature focuses on these issues at a more national level.8 What many scholars have not done, however, is focus specifically on local issues in smaller cities. Local governments were often the administrators of highway construction projects and were highly influential in stopping some of the most negative ones.9 This paper will similarly examine the efforts made to increase the national need for highways and, the negative consequences of highway development on African American communities as a whole, but will also look specifically at the history of planning and constructing Interstate 83 in York, Pennsylvania. York struggled with racial prejudice, much like its larger contemporaries, but the city managed to avoid being scarred by the limited-access expressways that dominate these other stories.10
Though the highway was not run through York City, there was still segregation, white flight, and even race riots a decade after its construction. I-83 caused similar damage to the segregated expressway system in other parts of the nation, achieved through entirely different means. This bucking of the historical trend observed in larger cities points to the value of a smaller community like York in the story of limited-access expressways and the harm caused by their construction, a story that is still incomplete.
Creating a Car-Dependent America
Highways are not built without a purpose. They are a highly specific type of infrastructure, designed to serve a specific type of US citizen—a US citizen who did not exist in significant numbers at the beginning of the twentieth century. This, of course, would change, but not through the efforts of the government. Policies that negatively impacted minorities and the urban areas associated with them (especially but not exclusively redlining) did exist at this time, but the story of highways begins with corporate interests and the massive amounts of time, money, and effort they put towards developing a successful pro-automobile propaganda campaign.11 This propaganda campaign was far more than simple advertising. Pro-automobile propaganda sought to do something greater. It did not promote the individual purchase of any one automobile (or even one brand, in some cases), but instead was designed to foster an association of the mode of transportation as a whole with human development, utopian futures, and individuality. One such work comes courtesy of General Motors’ executive management in 1932, unsubtly titled The New Necessity: The Culmination of a Century of Progress in Transportation. Written by GM’s vice president in association with one of its top engineers, this entry in the company’s Century of Progress series- “A series of volumes by well-known scholars presenting the essential features of those fundamental sciences which are the foundation stones of modern industry”—encourages the reader to adopt this new industry in several ways.12 Kettering recounts fictional anecdotes of three decades prior, reminding its audience how unprepared people were for the early automobile and how firmly many of them clung to the idea of the horse, only for the automobile to become synonymous with transportation as it “evolved from luxury to a necessity—a necessity not to any specific class but to everybody.”13 He insisted that the 1930s were “the age of automobiles” despite these staunch traditionalist ideas. Kettering credited “America’s greatest industry” with encouraging the construction of modern roads and buildings and being the “leader of our economic forces.”14
Of course, Kettering did more in this work to promote the automobile than simply calling it a necessity and crediting it with much of America’s industrial and economic progress. These claims are difficult to prove, but they are at least somewhat plausible. The desires of Kettering (and subsequently General Motors as a whole) become even more clear when reading further. Kettering’s anecdotes continue, and he describes how once society decided the automobile was “just the thing they had always wanted,” it was only natural that they would find the existing roads inadequate to accommodate them. Here, GM shifted its objective from presenting an objective past to a normative future, one where the existing roadways in 1932 would be improved.15 “If the country were built for automobiles, it would be possible to travel along an express highway around the busy streets of all the towns,” and indeed, Kettering wrote, the country must be built for automobiles—not just for their economic value, but so that they can “liberalize the people of the world.”16 This demand for more highways would continue to be GM’s ethos throughout the rest of its automobile campaigns.
Indeed, there were many more ways that GM chose to promote their industry to everyday Americans. Following a major exhibit for the World’s Fair in 1933, which highlighted the same themes of progress that their literature had been promoting a decade prior, General Motors descended upon the small towns of America with its Parade of Progress, a futuristic traveling show that ran periodically for two decades. Scholars have described the Parade of Progress as stemming from “a desire—publicly articulated by one of GM’s top executives—to remake the North American landscape so that the automobile was elevated to a required necessity of daily life.” Charles Kettering was the primary supporter of this operation, and through it, he continued to play a central role in selling these ideas to the American people.17
This sales pitch to the consumer public was like no other. While the goals of GM (and other companies such as Ford) did include making Americans dissatisfied with what they already had to promote the purchase of new automobiles, this was not the primary objective of the Parade of Progress.18 The Parade’s objective is better exemplified by works such as designer Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama exhibit at the 1940 World’s Fair. Futurama offered a vision for the future that included an expansive network of overpasses and interchanges that allowed motorists to travel straight through the densest urban centers at highway speeds. Though these ideas benefitted the ideas of all marques and models, General Motors was still more than willing to support them and incorporate them into the Parade of Progress. In this way, the Parade became something of a traveling museum, redesigning itself to appear more futuristic and approaching its audience with massive dioramas and exhibits showing the ever-improving American city. For a time, it was even presented by Kettering himself.19
Although the Second World War halted the Parade of Progress, GM’s efforts to continue trumpeting its pro-highway message resulted in a revival more aggressive than ever before. He may have been the brains behind Futurama, but Bel Geddes was more conservative in his ideals than the executives at General Motors. His plans for limited-access overpasses throughout urban centers also included a sentiment that several-lane superhighways were best designed around cities rather than through them.20 The postwar Parade of Progress dropped Bel Geddes, taking to the streets of America just one year after their “How to Plan and Pay for Better Highways” essay contest. GM made their new champion the contest’s winner, Robert Moses, and it incorporated his designs into its new exhibits.21 The new and improved Parade also took Moses’s advice about televised propaganda to heart by including a promotional film, “Let’s Get Out of the Muddle”—but the idea was hardly new to GM’s Moses era. Use of such types of promotional films on their part dates at least back to 1937; “Let’s Get Out of the Muddle” had already been seen by nearly half a million Americans by the time it was included in the Parade of Progress.22 Depicting all the same people Kettering wrote about—small-town locals marveling at the wonder of modern roadways and suburbs—this version of the Parade of Progress was the final iteration. Once the Federal Highway Aid Act approved congressional funds not just for highway construction but for property seizures and clearance that could make the kinds of urban highways GM had preached to the people a reality, this massive investment into their public image conveniently closed up shop.23
It is important to remember that General Motors openly directed these efforts towards the federal government as much as the American public, a fact GM made no secret of. Bel Geddes and Moses were hardly the only two urban planners from whom General Motors solicited ideas. Other essays included submissions from USAF Brigadier General Lacey Murrow and Cyrus Avery, “the father of Route 66.”24 These men may not have been official representatives of the US government when they wrote these works, but General Motors was attracting its members. Their roles within the government become even more significant when considering the actual content of their essays; despite some variance, lamentations at a lack of national standardization and calls for federal funding are common themes across all three. These essays propose raising millions (or even billions) of federal dollars through redirection of national taxes to fund these highways, with Avery’s essay expressing a “hope that the questions asked by General Motors will create a sentiment in Congress and every state in the United States” in favor of this method.25 Given the influence these men held, it comes as no surprise to learn that the federal government announced a $50 Billion highway plan the year after Robert Moses’s proposal for the same received GM’s $25,000 first prize.26 To accomplish its goals, GM did need these efforts to be focused on the federal government. As desperately as automakers wanted to see their highways, the United States was decidedly not built for them. Personal automobile sales rose incredibly quickly during this time: from 1905—1915, registered autos in the US jumped from 8,000 to 2.3 million. Ten years after that, it was up to 17.5 million. Growth was slower during the Depression, but autos jumped once again from 25.8 million to 52.8 million in the postwar years 1945—1955.27 The Federal Highway Administration’s history admits to this trouble, claiming that the trail road systems from the 1880s “served little transportation need (the George Washington National Highway from Savannah to Seattle) or were routed through dues-paying cities rather than the shortest, best route for motorists.”28 The government had to develop roadways quickly as a result, particularly because GM was in the middle of a plot to limit the ability of alternative transportation to serve this environment. Streetcar companies were failing due to a contract that had locked their fares in a time of rampant inflation, and GM took advantage of this lack of support to purchase these companies and demolish their infrastructure, replacing streetcars with buses in major US cities including Detroit and Philadelphia. Found guilty of criminal conspiracy in 1950 for this plot to make the automobile the only viable form of urban transportation, public or private, GM received little more than a slap on the wrist once the damage had been done.29 By this point, GM had successfully forced the federal government’s hand. Though he expressed a disinterest in the kinds of meticulous urban planning that GM had pitched up to this point, President Eisenhower was still in favor of the resulting highways. It was no secret that Eisenhower was strongly pro-corporation, and so it follows that the consistent lobbying efforts of what scholars have called the “Road Gang,” a group “consist[ing] of the oil, cement, rubber, automobile, insurance, trucking, chemical, and construction industries, consumer and political groups, financial institutions, and media” finally bore fruit during his administration.30 Concerns about government overreach were at the forefront of the people’s minds during the development of the late 1950s, but auto manufacturers were quick to wave them away—insisting (despite a history of their overt campaigns to the contrary) that the highway movement was a grassroots one, developed from the cooperation of millions of everyday Americans.31
Limiting African American Access
And indeed, automobiles had become an integral part of American culture by this point. The development of these postwar expressways under Eisenhower coincided with an increase in other types of construction (residential, commercial, and industrial), access to which was heavily segregated and increasingly critical to equal participation in society.
Scholars correctly identify the first and most important of these, the suburbs, as being the product of individual and corporate developers.32 However, the federal government played an active role in making them possible. Prudential Insurance Group, for example, took advantage of a post-World War II housing shortage to lobby in every state in the US for access to real estate development, a practice forbidden by law at the time. This development was primarily in new suburbs, places that scholars acknowledge as specifically made possible by the Interstate Highway Act of 1956.33 Prudential and other companies sometimes did this construction directly, making use of extremely generous federal loans subsidizing the entirety of the cost (and frequently abusing this system to overestimate fees and pocket the difference). Other times they would work closely with other private developers, financing infamous developments such as Levittown, Pennsylvania.34 In both of these cases, the federal government actively worked with developers to assist in financing the development of these sorts of facilities, with the FHA offering approval that guaranteed bank loans often without any inspection of the actual facilities being built.35
Frequently, these massive suburban developments were planned alongside commercial shopping centers. Levittown, for example, razed 55 acres to build a shopping center designed to serve its tens of thousands of future residents.36 As the government pulled back from providing funds to these developers, corporations like Prudential shifted their real estate focus almost entirely toward commercial ventures. They had lobbied for development rights on the promise of resolving the housing supply crisis, but that promise was abandoned in favor of gargantuan shopping centers. The government did not resist this shift, perhaps because the shopping centers were plenty advantageous for them as well, increasing nearby property values and, therefore, city taxes.37 Insurers again took advantage of government-backed loan programs to build industrial parks containing new factories, which provided convenient jobs for those living in newly constructed suburbs nearby.38 All of this, however, came at a severe cost: the abandonment of downtown. The lack of urban real estate for residential, commercial, and industrial expansion coupled with cheap land—recently made available by the highways that corporate interests bear responsibility for creating—made it easy for businesses to leave existing operations in the city behind. Larger operations, of course, meant more opportunities, but only for those who were in a position to take advantage of them.39 This created a pattern best described by scholar Thomas Hanchett: “America’s giant life insurance firms possessed the power to turn a tendency into a certainty. When a company such as Prudential let it be known that it liked large community builders, new suburban industrial parks, or regional shopping malls, those innovations gained considerable momentum. When Prudential refused to lend in older neighborhoods, it helped seal their fate.”40 For some Americans, all of this development provided them with affordable homes, good jobs, and the opportunity to raise their standard of living to heights never seen before by the middle class. But at all levels, this development was segregated by practices both public and private, and African Americans were barred from accessing the destinations of these new expressways.
Easily the most significant and most well-documented of these segregated construction types was the residential sector: suburbs. As the federal government was planning its interstate expressways, they were also in the process of promoting suburban development to combat the postwar housing stock shortage.41 While the rising numbers of automobile owners have been cited as a primary cause of this suburban development (and GM surely knew this), the federal government’s involvement in providing Federal Housing Administration (FHA) and Veterans’ Administration (VA) loans to individuals made it easier for (usually white) recipients to access these homes.42 This is only half of the story, however, as the government was at least as involved in supporting the builders of these homes as it was in supporting their future white residents.
Levittown, Pennsylvania is a nationally recognized name in the scholarly community on the subject. During its construction, the FHA not only approved development plans that included racial covenants (restrictions on homeowners forbidding sale to African Americans), but they withheld approval if they felt these communities weren’t segregated enough.43 Levittown, New Jersey was similarly so dependent on this FHA funding and guidance that a state court deemed it public housing. Still, the development remained segregated.44 This injustice may have been manageable if construction also produced middle-class African American communities, but the few suburban developers altruistic enough to try would quickly find that the federal government refused to assist in the building or buying of these homes. These developments, despite serving the same economic class of people, tended then to be more poorly constructed, offered fewer amenities, and were located in less desirable areas—assuming that African Americans could leave deteriorating urban centers and live there at all, absent any federal mortgage assistance.45 Given that this postwar boom in highway construction and suburban development hit its stride comfortably before Supreme Court cases such as Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States, it comes as no surprise to learn that shopping centers designed to serve these communities were heavily, and usually overtly, segregated as well. Important to note is that shopping centers of this time were more than merely convenient venues for product purchasing. These behemoths of suburban planning were seen by their corporate sponsors as the next community centers, where the ugliness and inefficiency of downtown could be left behind.46 The acreage available and the motorist’s ease of access facilitated the development of centers with massive parking lots, access roads to allow commercial and individual traffic to take separate paths, and recreational facilities that offered opportunities to participate in activities associated with all aspects of life, including but not limited to religious worship, group sports, educational talks and classes, political events, family recreation, and concerts. Some scholars have called these developments “civic centers,” a label that, if anything, understates their importance to American culture at the time.47 All of these services, however, were located only in affluent neighborhoods, where the centers that housed them could develop a reputation as havens for the white middle class. Developers did their best to avoid “‘blighted and slum neighborhoods’” and “‘low-income, Negro shoppers’” who would drive more desirable clientele away to businesses less accessible by African American consumers.48
Highways also carried a rapidly increasing number of Americans to their postwar jobs, which were also segregated in many ways. As the automobile became more available to average Americans, industrial employers especially left cities behind. Consumer demand required an expansion of operations that urban centers lacked the available real estate to accommodate. New factories, like new suburbs and shopping centers, could make use of modern but space-intensive designs with plenty of available parking.49 Factories reluctantly extended jobs to African Americans once the production demands of World War II made them desperate enough, but these were usually low-paying, low-skill jobs. Opportunities for career advancement on African Americans’ part usually came through bitter union battles, and even then, progress was exceptionally slow. By the time the unions had moved from refusing to hire African Americans to simply offering segregated unions to being forced by the federal government to integrate, the consequences had been cemented for years.50 As factories abandoned their urban operations at an alarming rate, it was natural for African American employees to try and maintain their hard-won jobs, yet all over the country they found themselves barred from the suburbs that would allow for easier commutes.51
Whether they were egalitarian or simply opportunist, the rare builder made an effort to provide housing for these unions of reliably employed, home-seeking Black workers. Such was the case when Ford moved the United Auto Workers union (UAW)’s jobs into the suburbs of Santa Clara County, California. The union had to find a developer willing to sell to their members and then finance a suburb with no FHA or VA assistance. This was made possible only by relying on the goodwill of MetLife Insurance’s vice president (who still doubted the feasibility of an integrated neighborhood). As soon as word got out of the UAW’s plan, a nearby developer of segregated housing projects pressured the local city council to increase the cost of sewer access for the new development so far above the normal rate that the project was almost abandoned. Eventually, after ten more months of legal troubles and near-misses, the UAW got their development, but the increased construction costs and the delayed development schedule made the neighborhood unaffordable to members, and many of the jobs were being taken by white workers who had no such trouble moving in.52 African Americans who could keep their jobs in factories as similar scenes played out across the nations did so either at the cost of moving into subpar, segregated developments or at the cost of long and expensive commutes from the cities where they were forced to remain.53
Highways were an inherently segregated type of infrastructure. African Americans were permitted to use highways, but their options for destinations (and therefore the value of highways as a whole) were severely limited compared to their white peers. At the same time, these destinations became ever more important to the nation as a whole: Not only was access to decent shelter and employment critical for all Americans, but the services offered by new shopping centers were disappearing from urban areas at the same time.54 At a time when the rising white middle class was becoming increasingly affluent and consumerism was reaching new heights, losing out on this access meant losing out on part of the new national identity. This would be detrimental enough on its own, but for the lucky African Americans who were able to live in suburban areas, access shopping centers willing to serve them, or maintain employment outside of the city, the lack of legislation actively preventing their use of highways did not translate to equal access for two primary reasons: Segregated highway placement and limited automobile access.
By the 1950s, when highway construction hit its stride, local, state, and federal governments had decades of experience in segregated zoning and construction policies. These policies began in earnest with redlining in the 1930s, the practice by which the federal government evaluated the financial safety of urban (and some suburban) tracts of land. Before the FHA and VA, the federal government used the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) to map cities throughout the nation. Each area on these maps was given a color grade, which scaled from green to blue to yellow to red. Seen below is the map of York, Pennsylvania.
Green neighborhoods were considered safe investments; lenders could confidently offer their best mortgages to residents of green areas, who were frequently described as “professional men” and “executives” and were living in recently built areas sure to hold their value. Conversely, red neighborhoods received a recommendation that mortgages not be extended at all, as they were “declining” areas of aging properties whose inhabitants were “laborers” and “lower class.”55 In the latter half of the twentieth century, this sort of language would be used euphemistically to refer to African Americans, but the HOLC had no such reservations. “Obsolescence. Negro concentration” and “Heavy concentration of foreigners” were the notes for some of Baltimore’s red neighborhoods. “Negro low-cost housing project[s]” and the presence of Eastern Europeans guaranteed low grades in Detroit. In Philadelphia, “Infiltration” was the word used to describe minority presences in declining areas.56 The federal government recruited all sorts of individual realtors, and yet this pattern remained incredibly consistent across the entire country. When the FHA developed its guidelines not long after, they included an insistence on keeping neighborhoods racially homogenous: green areas were frequently restricted developments. Even the mere possibility of minority homeowners, whether that was a small nonwhite presence or proximity to a nonwhite neighborhood, was enough for the FHA to officially label them unsafe.57 To avoid this risk, official FHA documentation was happy to recommend that mortgage lenders extend their services exclusively to suburban areas, where highways were not only a means of access, but considered useful as a barrier between the white middle class and the Black middle class, a divide that was not always easy to make.58 When Robert Moses called for “Anglo-Saxon” planning standards twenty years later, he was speaking to an audience that needed no convincing.59 That audience still held these same prejudices in the 1950s, and even if the HOLC and FHA’s redlining maps were not still being actively developed by this point, they were far from forgotten. New expressways were space intensive; building one that offered access to urban centers frequently required a substantial amount of property to be condemned and residents to be displaced. Local governments were generally responsible for the decision about whom to displace for these projects. This was not an easy call to make, but it was certainly made easier by the abundance of maps which effectively showed the concentration of minorities and older housing.60 This was frequently the pattern for other types of urban construction: “Urban renewal” and “slum clearance” programs were also a hallmark of the highway construction period. These inner-city initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s aimed to eliminate older substandard housing and replace them with newer projects—a fine idea in theory, but not so in practice, where these new projects imposed the same kinds of racial restrictions that suburban developments had in place.61 White residents could access new, low-cost, multi-unit housing projects and were given significant consideration during the condemnation process; in white sections of Detroit, more than three-quarters of residents who had their homes demolished were relocated elsewhere.62 By the end of the peak of urban redevelopment in the late 1960s, only 33% of Detroit’s displaced residents and 26% of Baltimore’s displaced residents were white. African Americans, who were the 67% and the 74% of displaced residents on the whole (with individual projects in these cities sometimes displacing 1000+ families at a rate of 95% families of color), saw no such consideration.63 As a result of these types of policies, African Americans were far less likely to be homeowners in urban as well as suburban environments. Urban renewal projects demolished residential buildings that these tenants needed. While some projects built new housing (even if it was inaccessible), many urban renewal projects went one step further by seeking to eliminate African American housing altogether, and highways were one of the most effective ways to accomplish this. The federal government was aware of this potential use well before the mass of highway construction during the late 1950s. Records of government officials explicitly promoting highways for their ability to decimate majority-Black residential areas can be found as far back as the late 1930s.64 What the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 changed was the scale at which such projects could be done: the Eisenhower administration suggested that highways funded by this legislation could displace more than 100,000 people each year and battled any requirement to assist that number.65
Working closely with corporations, the government supported this development as part of the Cold War; the automobile was a symbol of individualism, mobility, and American capitalism, and this was a cornerstone of Cold War-era propaganda.66 Even the act of developing highways themselves was couched in language about their role in bolstering the nation’s defense.67 However, even as they touted this positive image, the government was demolishing African American communities. In their place was infrastructure designed to provide easier access to locations that served only white citizens. There was little reason for most African Americans to use highways, then, but at least in theory, the roads were an equalizer of citizens. Automobiles do not have races, after all, and there were no systems in place to prevent Black motorists from getting onto highways. However, at this time automobility was becoming more than just the transportation necessity that General Motors demanded—it was becoming part of American culture. Consumerism was taking root in middle-class America, in the form of the shopping centers mentioned above and the general demand to turn luxuries into necessities (and then make those necessities obsolete as fast as possible). In fact, in the late 1950s, Ford and GM executives were quite proud that the average length of car ownership was merely two years.68
Given how important spending had become to participation in society, it was no wonder that many African Americans desperately wanted to join. While they were barred from owning homes in most wealthy areas, they were not barred from owning all of the trappings deemed necessary for middle-class American citizenship. Perhaps this is why Ebony, one of the most popular African-American magazines of the time, equated the upper-class Cadillac brand with first-class citizenry and praised those African Americans who could own one.69
However, car ownership for African Americans was rarely luxurious. An appropriately aspirational vehicle for whites, Black Cadillac owners were quickly negatively stereotyped as “uppity,” “improvident,” and “childlike” for their purchases.70 One 1957 study of Milwaukee’s majority-Black neighborhoods sought to examine the veracity of these stereotypes and saw not only exceptionally few luxury cars, but they found that what luxury cars did exist had a median age of 6-7 years old, compared to the national average of 2. More frequently, the study observed lower-priced automobiles of similar ages, and on the whole, it found African American rates of automobile ownership to be well below the national average (31% to the national 71%).71 York followed this trend as well: 1970 data finds a strong relationship between African American districts in the city and a lack of automobile access, and this same data suggests that conditions for York’s Black residents were more disparate in the 1960s and 1950s.72
Though these reports cover only two US cities, national data suggests that this pattern was similar everywhere: African Americans’ consumer spending increased significantly throughout the 1950s, but it was still well below that of white citizens in all sectors. Automobile spending rose from 7.5% of income to 9% of income, but whites spent 13.3%. Try as they might, most African Americans could not equally access automobiles in the first place—hardly a surprise, given that nonwhite income was a paltry 54.3% of white income in 1947 and had only risen to 59.9% by 1960.73
Even in the 1950s, it was well understood that the Black motorists who did exist in the city (particularly those driving the offending Cadillacs) were there not out of any economic limitation, but because they had been racially excluded from neighborhoods that white of their status could easily afford.74 These relatively rare motorists faced even more challenges when it came to receiving services necessary for travel, either from whites-only clubs like the American Automobile Association (AAA) or from roadside restaurants, hotels, and mechanics which would not always serve African American customers. This required the use of African American publications such as the Negro Motorist Green Book and Travelguide for these drivers to locate safe businesses. Smaller cities could be exceptionally unfriendly—York’s White Rose Motor Club was a chapter of the segregated AAA, and the single York location in the 1956 Green Book was not a business, but a private residence.75 Eventually, larger, white-dominated institutions controlled enough of the printing industry to discontinue such guides, leaving African American motorists totally stranded.76
While highways were not as overtly segregated as other infrastructure during this time, segregation was still an intentional part of their design. African Americans were far less likely to own a vehicle than whites of similar economic status. Suburbs, shopping centers, business parks, and roadside service stations all refused to serve the Black motorists who existed despite their best efforts. These patterns were common to major metropolitan areas and understood by the national government. Recognizing that African Americans had limited access to their new limited-access expressways, governments at all levels explicitly sought to use them as barriers, slashing through majority-Black neighborhoods and condemning large swaths of property, all in the name of creating infrastructure that the people in those neighborhoods were not meant to use. Frequently, no access ramp was even provided, though building one would require the destruction of even more urban property. African Americans were not blind to this intention, however, and individual communities took advantage of the fragmented, localized rollout of highway infrastructure to mount campaigns that could spare their neighborhoods.
Local Resistance
In his winning entry to GM’s contest, Robert Moses admitted that urban highway construction would be “difficult and costly,” but if anything, this was an understatement.77 Though the federal government was convinced to provide a significant amount of funding for highways throughout the nation, administration of their construction usually fell to local, or in rare cases state, governments. Yet despite the differences across these governments, the primary cities scholars choose to examine all faced similar predicaments during the highway construction era of the late 1950s and into the 1960s. Some present their message in such a way that might be summarized thusly: Highway planners targeted African American communities. Though these communities often recognized this fact, they were unable to stop the destruction. However, this is an oversimplification.78 Local highway construction was almost always met with resistance, but the intensity of the resulting battles and their aftermath varied from city to city. Scholars have well-documented accounts of the anti-highway conflicts gripping some of the nation’s largest metropolitan hubs. Detroit was among the cities hit hardest by these actions. The motor capital of the United States saw freeways bearing the Ford and Chrysler names slashing through its Black districts, handing down warnings of mass building condemnation that depressed property values and discouraged activity in the area long before construction even began.79 African Americans, displaced by the thousands, made appeals to public officials, but in Detroit, these fell on deaf ears, particularly due to the mayoral election of Albert Cobo in 1949, a man who had made no secret of his love for expressways years prior.80 Cobo made highway construction into his primary electoral platform, and as mayor, he pressed an exceptionally aggressive program that demanded more funding and faster schedules than the rest of the nation, primarily intending to bring more traffic into a failing downtown.81 Highways under Cobo were not only particularly prevalent, but they were also intentionally designed to be less effective people movers. Cobo had taken advantage of African Americans’ lack of personal transportation and denied all recommendations that Detroit’s expressway system include railways to facilitate use by public transit.82 The “price of progress” (Cobo’s words) was an inhuman degree of displacement, particularly due to his demand for these highways to access the city directly—Cobo’s administration was responsible for the Gratiot project, which displaced nearly 2,000 Black families living in low-rent tenant housing (the largest amount for any urban renewal project in the city by more than 1,000) to make room for an addition to the Chrysler Freeway.83 Despite the aggravation of an existing housing problem, this caused, along with a universal understanding that “‘slum removal equals negro removal’” within the area, Cobo continued to blaze the trail of highway development at an exceptionally high cost to Detroit’s African American residents. Baltimore is also a popular subject of study in the scholarly community for its heavily scarred nature. At first glance, some of its highways may seem particularly egregious— State Route 40, for example, has become infamous as the “road to nowhere.” This two-mile stretch of concrete routed directly through a middle-class Black community has absolutely no connection to the rest of the Baltimore interstate system, which manages to carve out plenty of the city on its own.84 However, further investigation reveals that the original plans for State Route 40 were much worse. Partially because of the communities displaced and partially because of the timing, Baltimore residents were able to develop organized resistance movements to prevent highway destruction: The Relocation Action Movement (RAM) convinced Department of Transportation officials to require more reasonable payouts to owners of to-be-demolished homes in the Rosemont neighborhood, and not long after, Baltimore planners stopped routing highways through it. This success snowballed into several more local groups, who ultimately slowed the efforts of highway development enough for federal guidelines protecting communities from being ridden roughshod over by road planners.85
Scholars have made other cities the objects of their focus as well, but in all cases, these are major metropolitan areas.86 Highways exist in and around smaller urban centers as well, including in York, Pennsylvania. York is sometimes mentioned in scholarly works for its segregated and racially charged nature throughout the twentieth century, but the history of its highway system remains largely unstudied.87 As a comparatively small city with a well-established East-West highway already present, York did not need much postwar expressway development. The proposed route was a North-South construction, known then the Susquehanna Expressway and today as I-83.88 The Susquehanna Expressway had multiple development plans, the first of which was proposed in 1945 and is shown below. This plan showed a surprising amount of concern for the city’s residents: It made room for two interchanges on the city limits, closely followed existing roadways and the path of the Codorus Creek, and would have required very little demolition, particularly in residential areas.89 It seemed like a fine solution to York’s highway needs. It is not clear exactly why York’s city council changed its development plan three years later, in 1948, but the decision was quite significant. Instead of placing the access ramps to the Susquehanna Expressway along the city limits, York’s 1948 plan (see below) was routed over Codorus Creek to place access directly in the city, next to its existing travel hub which was Market Street. This plan would have required the demolition of homes on Duke and Queen Streets to allow this access, and the bridge to connect with the rest of the planned route would have also cut over additional areas.90
Though the 1945 plan saw little reaction, residents of York made their displeasure known when this route was proposed. One draft of a 1949 letter to the City Council from various property owners in this area expressed an understanding “that some changes are inevitable and certain persons must sacrifice in the interest of progress and for the benefit of the majority,” but for fear of the condemnations making property unlivable, worsening the existing housing crisis, and making worse the slum problem the city claimed it was trying to clear out.91 Though these residents are unknown, 1950 housing census data suggests that many of them—most of them, in fact—were white. Hence, their claim that “such a highway through York is not for the best interests of the majority” may have carried more weight with the city.92
Local residents were not the only ones outraged. The School Board of the City of York wrote a similar letter to the council, insisting that this plan, on the opposite side of the Codorus Creek from the 1945 design, would be exceptionally harmful to the city. Chief among their concerns was that this plan cut into Small Athletic Field, which was used by schoolchildren. The school board held that a highway constructed here would be both dangerous for the children and harmful to the taxpayer, who had indirectly invested in the public facility.93 By 1953, the York Gazette and Daily reported that “strong sentiment…is seeking to have the expressway by-pass York,” and the Rotary Club of York, an influential community organization to this day, penned in 1954 this same desire for the expressway to avoid the city entirely.94 Even local merchants were opposed to highway infrastructure directly in the city, as their concerns for increased traffic outweighed any desire for additional business.95
This local opposition was not insignificant, but it was less present than in other major cities. But come 1959, the York White Rose Motor Club (an official branch of the whites-only AAA) was proudly celebrating the dedication of the new expressway bypass, which skirted York City entirely.96 The new bypass fulfilled Yorkers’ requests, but this was likely not its purpose. At the time the final plan was drawn, planners were already looking for a way to lessen traffic in the city.97 When given the opportunity for a limited-access expressway that would not only skirt the city entirely but also provide convenient service for the new Haines Acres suburb and shopping center, York’s engineers took it.98 As a result, African Americans in urban York were safe from the hazard of demolition, but their known lack of automobiles, low rates of property ownership, and severely disparate incomes left the vast majority of them (91% of York’s Black population) confined there. The future of York City under these conditions was bleak, as its older housing stock was allowed to deteriorate further, African American incomes continued to be depressed, and racial tensions rose.99
These consequences are common in the story of the concerted postwar effort to immobilize African Americans. It is a well-documented one by scholars, particularly within the last two decades; however, it is a story frequently told through the lens of racial violence, government segregation, inequality of opportunity, and later, civil rights movements. In overviews of this story, highway construction deserves to be treated as more than a mere chapter. It has been correctly identified as a powerful tool that completely razed African American neighborhoods, and its close relationship with redlining policies has been pointed to as evidence of deliberate government planning to achieve that effect. Rarely does the story of corporate America enter this conversation. Despite their lack of a direct hand in planning highway locations, General Motors and its industry contemporaries successfully urged the nation to develop a dependency on the personal automobile by any means necessary. When it came time to create that infrastructure, corporations proudly pioneered new designs for limited-access expressways that would have completely changed the US, and they did so with the help of highly influential individuals who understood the racial implications of their work. Governments at the federal, state, and local levels may have used road construction to segregate their cities, but it was the lobbying interests that knowingly gave them that tool.
While highway planning and construction were fragmented across the nation, with individual localities responsible for their own operations and any resulting resistance, there remained a surprising amount of uniformity. Expressways were expensive and highly detrimental to urban communities, particularly minority communities whose residents were more likely to lack automobiles, more likely to rent their homes, and less able to access new affordable housing projects—all by design. Local resistance to freeways cropped up, but its scale and its success varied from city to city; even when residents in Baltimore stopped miles upon miles of construction, they could not escape the encroachment of the highway.
Yet, in smaller communities like York, the pattern is different. The same threat of a destructive expressway existed, but there is no record of significant, organized protest. It took only the effort of a few letters from a few small groups to completely change the plan for Interstate 83, a process that occurred much quicker than in larger cities. The bypass seemed to spare York’s residents at first, but the city’s African American population still suffered the injustices brought about by community deterioration and white flight. While York’s use of the limited-access expressway as a tool to cause destruction without actually being routed through the city is unique compared to larger national scholarship, a greater understanding of highway history in smaller cities across the nation will reveal the true scale of this tactic.
Footnotes
- “CPI Inflation Calculator,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, April 2023, https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm ↩︎
- Robert Moses et al., How To Plan and Pay for Better Highways (Detroit: General Motors, 1953), Hathitrust, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/ien.35556038320636. ↩︎
- Raymond Mohl, “Stop the Road: Freeway Revolts in American Cities,” Journal of Urban History 30, no.5 (July 2004): 674-706; How to Plan and Pay for Better Highways 17; “GM’s Better Highways Award,” Highway History, US Federal Highway Administration, last modified June 27, 2017, https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/gmaward.cfm. ↩︎
- Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 162-3. ↩︎
- Robert K. Nelson et al., “Mapping Inequality,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, accessed April 6, 2023, https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=5/39.1/-94.58; Digital Scholarship Lab, “Renewing Inequality,” American Panorama, ed. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers, accessed April 6, 2023, Hanchett, “Financing Suburbia: Prudential Insurance and the Post–World War II Transformation of the American City,” Journal of Urban History 26, no. 3 (2000): 312-328; Lisabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003); Peter Levy, The Great Uprising: Race Riots in Urban America during the 1960s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017). 6 Roger Biles, “Expressways before the Interstates: The Case of Detroit, 1945–1956,” Journal of Urban History 40, no. 5 (2014), 843–854; Roger Biles and Mark Rose, (2020). “At the Intersection of Race, Class, Gender, and Highway Politics,” Journal of Urban History 46, no. 3 (2020), 677–684; Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit STU (Princeton University Press, 2014), JSTOR, https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.ycp.edu:8443/stable/j.ctt6wpzvr?. ↩︎
- Roger Biles, “Expressways before the Interstates: The Case of Detroit, 1945–1956,” Journal of Urban History 40, no. 5 (2014), 843–854; Roger Biles and Mark Rose, (2020). “At the Intersection of Race, Class, Gender, and Highway Politics,” Journal of Urban History 46, no. 3 (2020), 677–684; Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit STU (Princeton University Press, 2014), JSTOR, https://www-jstor-org.ezproxy.ycp.edu:8443/stable/j.ctt6wpzvr?. ↩︎
- Seiler, Republic of Drivers; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier. ↩︎
- Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis; Johnny Miller, “Roads to Nowhere: How Infrastructure Built on American Inequality,” The Guardian, February 21, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/feb/21/roads-nowhere-infrastructure-american-inequality; Biles, “Expressways Before Interstates;” Mohl, “Stop the Road”; Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier; Nathaniel Walker, “American Crossroads: General Motors’ Midcentury Campaign to Promote Modernist Urban Design in Hometown U.S.A.,” Buildings & Landscapes 23, no. 2 (2016): 89-115. ↩︎
- Mohl, “Stop the Road.” ↩︎
- The limited-access expressway design consists of a multi-lane road that requires the use of specific on- and off-ramps. Frequently, these were built within urban areas as overpasses that had few or no access ramps within city limits. ↩︎
- This essay will focus primarily on the efforts of General Motors, but this is not to mean that the Ford Motor Company (or other interests such as concrete and rubber) were not also involved in this story. ↩︎
- Charles Franklin Kettering, The New Necessity: The Culmination of a Century of Progress in Transportation, Baltimore: The Williams & Wilkins Company, 1932. Internet Archive, 2006, https://archive.org/details/newnecessityculm00kettrich/page/n5/mode/2up, 4. ↩︎
- Kettering, The New Necessity 14. ↩︎
- Kettering, The New Necessity 15. ↩︎
- Kettering, The New Necessity 18. ↩︎
- Kettering, The New Necessity 21-22. ↩︎
- Walker, “American Crossroads” 90-92. ↩︎
- Walker, “American Crossroads” 91; Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic. ↩︎
- Walker, “American Crossroads” 101, 103. ↩︎
- Walker, “American Crossroads” 97. ↩︎
- Walker, “American Crossroads” 106. ↩︎
- Walker, “American Crossroads” 106; General Motors, How to Plan and Pay for Better Highways; Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic 19-20. ↩︎
- Walker, “American Crossroads” 109. ↩︎
- How to Plan and Pay for the Safe and Adequate Highways We Need,” Oklahoma State University, https://cdm17279.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/Avery/id/117. ↩︎
- General Motors, “How to Plan and Pay for Better Highways”; Moses’s essay and Murrow’s essay; “How to plan and pay for the safe and adequate highways we need”. ↩︎
- Seiler, Republic of Drivers. ↩︎
- Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier 162. ↩︎
- “From Names to Numbers: The Origins of the U.S. Numbered Highway System,” Highway History, Federal Highway Administration, updated June 27, 2017, https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/numbers.cfm. ↩︎
- Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier 170. ↩︎
- Seiler, Republic of Drivers 90-94. ↩︎
- Seiler, Republic of Drivers 94-5. ↩︎
- Hanchett, “Financing Suburbia;” Rothstein, The Color of Law; Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier. ↩︎
- Hanchett, “Financing Suburbia” 312. ↩︎
- Hanchett, “Financing Suburbia” 317. ↩︎
- Rothstein, The Color of Law 71. ↩︎
- Hanchett, “Financing Suburbia” 318. ↩︎
- Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic 266. ↩︎
- Hanchett, “Financing Suburbia” 322; Rothstein, The Color of Law 9-10, 13. ↩︎
- Rothstein, The Color of Law 8-10 ↩︎
- Hanchett, “Financing Suburbia” 323. ↩︎
- Rothstein, The Color of Law; Hanchett, “Financing Suburbia” 314. ↩︎
- Hanchett, “Financing Suburbia” 312; Rothstein, The Color of Law 59-76. ↩︎
- Rothstein, The Color of Law 71. ↩︎
- Rothstein, The Color of Law 72. ↩︎
- Rothstein, The Color of Law 73-74 ↩︎
- Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic 262-3. ↩︎
- Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic 263-4. ↩︎
- Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic 265-6. ↩︎
- Rothstein, The Color of Law 9; Hanchett, “Financing Suburbia” 322. ↩︎
- Rothstein, The Color of Law 158-61. ↩︎
- Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier 275. ↩︎
- Rothstein, The Color of Law 116-121. ↩︎
- Rothstein, The Color of Law 10. ↩︎
- Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic 262-3; Hanchett, “Financing Suburbia” 323. ↩︎
- Nelson, “Mapping Inequality” ↩︎
- Nelson, “Mapping Inequality” ↩︎
- Rothstein, The Color of Law 65. ↩︎
- Rothstein, The Color of Law 65, 131. ↩︎
- General Motors, How to Plan and Pay for Better Highways. ↩︎
- Mohl, “Stop the Road”. ↩︎
- Rothstein, The Color of Law 127. ↩︎
- Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis 48. ↩︎
- Nelson and Ayers, eds., “Renewing Inequality”. ↩︎
- Rothstein, The Color of Law 127. ↩︎
- Rothstein, The Color of Law 131. ↩︎
- Seiler, Republic of Drivers 80-81. ↩︎
- Richard Weingroff, “Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956: Creating the Interstate System,” Federal Highway Administration, Summer 1996, https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/summer-1996/federal-aid-highway-act-1956-creating-interstate-system. ↩︎
- Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic 294. ↩︎
- Seiler, Republic of Drivers 113. ↩︎
- Seiler, Republic of Drivers 114; “Color and Cadillacs” 98 ↩︎
- Irwin Rinder, “Color and Cadillacs: Some Evidence about a Stereotype,” The Midwest Sociologist 19, no. 2 (1957): 99, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25514982. ↩︎
- “Percentages and Ranks of Socioeconomic Indicators by Census Tracts,” in York County, Pennsylvania: Population, (Washington, D.C.: Department of Housing and Urban Development, 1970). ↩︎
- John Connor, A Guide to Negro Marketing Information (Washington, D.C.: US Department of Commerce, 1966), 5, 22. ↩︎
- Rinder, “Color and Cadillacs” 100. ↩︎
- James R. Wilson, editor, White Rose Motorist, November 1959, York County History Center Archives, file no. 00696.003; Gordon Freireich, “York had ‘Green Book’ listings of safe havens for Black travelers in days of segregation” (2019), York County History Center Archives, file no. 00.630.003.002. ↩︎
- Seiler, Republic of Drivers 108-9, 115-125 ↩︎
- General Motors, How to Plan and Pay for Better Highways 12. ↩︎
- Rothstein, The Color of Law 128 – 131. ↩︎
- Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis 47-8. ↩︎
- Beiler, “Expressways before interstates” 846-7. ↩︎
- Beiler, “Expressways before interstates” 847-8. ↩︎
- Beiler, “Expressways before interstates” 848. ↩︎
- Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis 50; Nelson and Ayers, eds., “Renewing Inequality”. ↩︎
- Miller, “Roads to nowhere”; Mohl, “Stop the Road” 698. ↩︎
- Baltimore’s highway construction continued into the late 1960s, well past Detroit’s peak. It also impacted more mixed communities as opposed to solely Black ones. See Mohl, “Stop the Road” 698; Mohl, “Stop the Road.” 86 Eric Avila, “L.A.’s Invisible Freeway Revolt: The cultural politics of fighting freeways,” Journal of Urban History 40, no. 5 (2014): 831-842. https://doi.org/10.1177/0096144214536857. ↩︎
- Retzlaff, “Connecting Public School Segregation with Urban Renewal and Interstate Highway Planning: The Case of Birmingham, Alabama.” Journal of Planning History 19, no. 4 (2020): 256-280; Roger Biles and Mark H. Rose, “At the Intersection of Race, Class, Gender, and Highway Politics,” Journal of Urban History 46, no. 3 (2020): 677–684. ↩︎
- Rothstein, “The Color of Law” 280, Levy, The Great Uprising. ↩︎
- Gazette & Daily 9/29/53 ↩︎
- Michael Baker, “Master Plan: A Part of the 1945 Comprehensive City-County Planning Report” (York, Pennsylvania: York City Council, 1945), York City Archives. ↩︎
- “Study for North Entrance to City of York, PA” (York, Pennsylvania: July 16, 1948), York City Archives. ↩︎
- “Petition” (York, PA, September 26, 1949), York County History Center, file 00696.003. ↩︎
- “Petition” ↩︎
- School Board of the City of York, “Resolution” (York, PA, February 16, 1949), York County History Center, file 00696.003. ↩︎
- Gazette & Daily, 9/29/1953; J. Emory Seitz, “Proposal” (York, PA: Rotary Club of York, September 1954), York County History Center, file 00696.003. ↩︎
- Gazette & Daily, 1953. ↩︎
- White Rose Motorist, November 1959. ↩︎
- R. P. Turner Jr., “Discussion: One-Way Street System for York” (York, PA, May 5, 1947), York County History Center, file 00117.009. ↩︎
- Conversation with Michael Shanabrook, York City Archives, March 21, 2023. ↩︎
- “Percentages and Ranks of Socioeconomic Indicators by Census Tracts”; The Great Uprising. ↩︎
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