The American Cornucopia

Selling the Superhighway

Interrupted by World War II and then the project of European reconstruction, the “Interregional Highways” imagined so compellingly in the Futurama ride did not come into existence until 1956 when Congress passed legislation to begin work on the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Despite the delay, however, Norman Bel Geddes’ vision of a safer, streamlined future had already become deeply entrenched in the American cultural imagination. In Highway Transportation Re-makes America, a 1939 publication of a coalition of truck operators called the National Highways Users Conference, the proposed Interstate system was personified as a beautiful and bounteous Lady Liberty holding a cornucopia spilling over with consumer products while an eager American public clamored for these luxuries of the future:

The new highway transportation is leading the American people on a new avenue of progress. It is adding to the sum of human happiness. It is lowering the cost of transportation of commodities, thereby tending to reduce living costs. It is assisting materially in raising our standards of living. It is creating opportunity. It is providing jobs for millions. (Highway Transportation Re-makes America. National Highways Users Conference, 1939, 31)

The Interstate had come to be imagined as the safer, cleaner, faster mode of transportation that would save drivers time and allow for rapid transportation of goods across the country. Though Geddes’ radio-control transceivers would not become a reality, the multi-lane, divided highways with their curved entrance ramps promised to eliminate collisions caused by oncoming cars and to speed the flow of ever-increasing traffic. The streamlined “jet-age” automobiles of the period, with their wings, fins, and other aeronautical design features, owed their excessive styling to a retro-deco sensibility that promised a return to the technologically optimistic days from before the war; in the cities, stylized overpasses were built, reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Anticipating the 1956 congressional mandate to fund the construction of the Interstate with tax dollars, automotive companies began a media campaign of so-called “educational” films aimed at selling Americans on the Interstate. Automotive companies and many other manufacturers had much to gain. As Tom Lewis reports, lobbyists from “the Association of General Contractors; the National Asphalt Pavement Association; the National Ready Mixed Concrete Association; the American Concrete Paving Association; and the American Road Builders Association” all had a stake in the planning, construction, paving, and driving of tomorrow’s highways (110).

The films of this period, unlike To New Horizons, rely much more on personal narratives to convey their promises of a better future. Many feature individual characters played by professional actors and relate hypothetical circumstances in which these characters would find themselves in the years ahead as they take more and more to the open road. The rhetoric of manifest destiny and appeals to the collective good have been replaced by the allure of individualism, presented in the form of the “average American”—typically white, middle class, and hailing from the heartland rather than the city.  At the same time, the Futurama’s aerial views of sweeping highways, its romantic views of the countryside, and the metaphor of an American public driving into the future on tomorrow’s roads remain regular features in these cinematic descendants of Geddes’ original vision.

The rhetorical aims of these films are clear: to encourage grassroots support for the highway system and, perhaps more importantly, to encourage people to buy stuff, especially cars. These were not educational but rather “industrial” films, what Rick Prelinger has called “ephemeral” films: sponsored advertisements coupled with fictional story lines, characters, and entertaining song-and-dance routines.  A number of film companies sprang up around the industrial film genre—notably the Jam Handy Organization, MPO, and the Coleman Company. Industrial films were sponsored, predictably enough, by the same companies that had so heavily invested in the World’s Fair of 1939: General Motors, Ford, Dupont, and Westinghouse.

While the narrative voices vary widely in these films, the message remains consistent: the automobile and the highway promise to transform the American landscape and with it the fortunes of her citizens. 1951’s Your Permit to Drive (produced in-house by GM Photographic), features a talking drivers’ permit: “I am your permit to drive an automobile. I bring wings to your feet.” Much of the permit’s story revolves around themes similar to Futurama: the collapse of space and time and increases in both leisure activity (in the form of automobile tourism from coast to coast) and, more importantly, commerce made possible by the new accessibility provided by the highway. But rather than a vision of the future, as in the earlier To New Horizons, by the 1950s these sentiments are matter-of-fact statements of the now.

Although, much like its predecessors, Your Permit to Drive begins with a bombastic celebration of freedom and opportunity offered by the open road, the film quickly turns from opportunity to obligation, from the open road to deadly collisions, traffic jams, and impatient, frustrated drivers taking shortcuts on unmarked, unpaved gravel shoulders. Citing the “milling throng” of people in the city streets and its similarity to the traffic jam, the film already begins to create the conditions for an industry-sponsored dissatisfaction with the lack of infrastructure to support the disorderly “throng” of automobiles.

1952’s Key to Our Horizons, created by Jam Handy for GM’s Chevrolet brand, begins where Your Permit to Drive implicitly leaves off—with the population explosion of cars. The number of cars is put into perspective with animations featuring cars driving bumper-to-bumper seven times around the equator. Echoing 1939’s To New Horizons, the film pronounces that the car has “opened up new horizons in our way of living,” and proceeds to show some of the beneficiaries of this explosive new automotive industry—not just those using cars, but those producing them as well. The film claims that, at the time, one in seven U.S. workers was involved in car manufacturing, from those producing raw materials to such comical new professions as the “toot tester,” men who make sure car horns are tuned to the right musical key. Key to Our Horizons also plays on (and perhaps tries to allay the public’s fears of) the connection between the new manufacturing base of the American economy and the older agricultural base, praising the farmer who “grows automobiles” and the miner who “mines automobiles” by harvesting raw materials for their use in auto manufacturing.

In addition to encouraging the development of suburbs and extended commutes (since “being able to drive out into the country makes people want to live in the country”), the film markets cars as essential for facilitating all kinds of businesses working at the intersection between commerce and the natural world: from little Jimmy’s roadside vegetable stand to the traveling tree trimmer. The pioneer narrative, conquering the empty landscape, was even harnessed as an information graphic: in a somewhat comical attempt at expressing the number of jobs created by the automobile, the film shows an animated sequence of all those people driving west to fill up virtually every state (the largest and most sparsely populated, of course) west of the Mississippi.

Despite its overwhelmingly optimistic depiction of the current state of automobile economics and infrastructure, the film ends with both a promise and an implicit caution: “[all] of us share in the responsibility of safeguarding the benefits it has brought. If we plan for the future, if we look ahead to clear all obstacles and roadblocks, if we recognize the importance of this great individual freedom of movement, the motorcar will be the key to our ever widening horizons of tomorrow.” The “key to our horizons” may be automobiles, but it is crucial, the film suggests, that there must be nothing standing in the way of America’s prosperity and freedom.

Appealing to the Citizen

While Key to Our Horizons referred obliquely to “clearing all obstacles and roadblocks” from the path of progress and prosperity, films created to sell taxpayers on the idea of the superhighway were not always so subtle. 1954’s Give Yourself the Green Light opens with a sweeping view of busy freeways. But, explains the narrator, “[t]hese wide lanes of reality actually measure out to just a few miles scattered far apart across the friendly face of our land.” 

In order to create a groundswell of demand for more, wider, and better roads, Give Yourself the Green Light aims to balance a fine line: people must be convinced both that cars are our future, making America great, and at the same time that they are increasingly crowding the highways. The structuring metaphor of the film was the red traffic light, bringing to mind Key to Our Horizons’ “obstacles and roadblocks.” Somewhat bemusedly, as if taken by surprise, the announcer says, “We’re running out of roads!” This pronouncement is followed by the tragic realization: “We didn’t dream big enough.”

Highways and roads are unfinished, out of date, too narrow, and too crowded. They are also, the film warns, unsafe. Like Key to Our Horizons, Give Yourself the Green Light features “interviews” with working- and middle-class people, this time testifying not to the economic benefits of the automobile but to the sad lack of infrastructure needed to support our increasing dependence on it. An engineer bemoans the state of the highways, saying “[w]hat we need is to invest more money in good new roads.”

More actors appear, the school bus driver and small merchant, who claim that people would bypass the town if they couldn’t find a place to park; thus the best investment a town could make is more parking lots. “Ask Mrs. America,” the film suggests, who finds the town too crowded to shop because there is insufficient parking. In this segment a perfect Mom and her housewife-in-training daughter search in vain for a place to park. In addition to the red light and the red flag of the roadway engineer we now have red “no parking” signs and red fire hydrants. Frustrated commercial drivers exchange words: “Hey buddy, what’s the deal?!” “Just keep loading and unloading, buddy.” The traveling salesman is late for every appointment.  The morning rush is labeled “agony alley.” Anxious drivers stuck in traffic long for the green fields and peaceful suburban environments promised by the Futurama narrative.

Unlike Key to Our Horizons, Give Yourself the Green Light is notable for its concrete call to citizen action, charging viewers to “give yourself the green light” rather than waiting for someone else to do it. The film makes use of the GM-sponsored national “Better Highways Awards Contest” to suggest that public demand and public ideas are crucial to the building of a national highway system. The winner of the contest was Robert Moses, sponsor of the 1939-1940 World’s Fair and engineer (often to the detriment of inner-city residents) of the much-lauded New York system of parkways. The compelling visual and rhetorical tropes first displayed in the Futurama continued to be effective for capturing the American imagination in film. The narrator of Give Yourself the Green Light muses of engineers who can “pour miracles of concrete through the air” and the “fabulous futuristic forms” of the Hollywood freeway, combining a streamlined aesthetic vision with a new understanding of democratic citizenship.

But the power of the Futurama narrative as a primary way to motivate people was slowly taking a back seat to “civic duty.” In 1939, according to one historian, Geddes attempted to enlist the support of Robert Moses at an annual meeting of civil engineers, but Moses rejected Geddes’ plan, describing the vision laid out by Futurama as “bunk” and a “work of the imagination” (Meikle 208).

Whereas Geddes’ plan for the superhighway aimed to allow Americans to travel smoothly and swiftly on cross-country journeys, Moses held firmly to the belief that the primary purpose of expressways should be to support commerce and to make internal traffic run more smoothly. Moses’ comment prompted a series of contentious public exchanges, marking a turf war between the two men who today are regarded as the primary visionaries of tomorrow’s highways. In the end, as Moses garnered more and more support from corporations and local governments for his aggressive approach to urban planning, Geddes’ futuristic vision lost ground.

Moses, insisting that expressways were needed to ease traffic in cities rather than between them, concentrated on the engineering and economic challenges facing the development of a national highway system rather than the grander narratives of technological progress and conquering the landscape. His sly comment in his acceptance speech that “no magic will suddenly produce roads commensurate with cars” expressed his ongoing wish for gradual weaning the American public off of the misty dreams of the Futurama’s pastoral landscapes in favor of a more practical system of expressways and parking lots. The visual elements of the Futurama—aerial views of highways, happy countryside drivers—remained, as did rhetorical appeals to “the future” and the wonders of modern technology, but economic growth and individual consumer satisfaction took on new emphasis as the cost-intensive Interstate System that Moses and others were proposing began to be debated in Congress.

Media Within Media: Documentary and the Highway Hearing

Give Yourself the Green Light’s call to the citizenry and Moses’ call for an “aroused American people” were echoed in1955’s Freedom of the American Road (MPO for the Ford Motor Company), which appealed to Americans’ sense of grassroots community and individual action. Prefaced awkwardly by Henry Ford II, Freedom of the American Road focuses on a pseudo-scientific “study” of American roads. Like Give Yourself the Green Light, the film appeals to “the people,” private citizens tired of heavy traffic, car wrecks, and rural isolation. The film claims to narrate “democracy in action” in the shape of grassroots movements in Pittsburgh, Palo Alto, Boston, and rural North Carolina. In the film’s reenactments of community action, private citizens write letters to newspapers and create petitions, and local government responds to their concerns by widening and updating roads and highways.

In more rural communities, the film promises, roads will connect “the life of the farm with the life of the town,” and facilitate going to football matches, riding safely to new “modern schools” and shopping centers, and driving on safe, low-traffic roadways.

Although the film’s narrative was familiar, the form of the industrial film was becoming more sophisticated as filmmakers took advantage of the media saturation experienced by Americans in the 1950s. Freedom of the American Road is a highly structured “documentary” based on a “study” of the same name commissioned by Ford. The film makes full use of multiple media formats: film, poster boards, animated maps, newspapers, radio communication, reenactments, and photographs. Rather than sticking to a single story line narrated by a hidden voice like its predecessors, Freedom of the American Road jumps through several on-camera narrators who address the audience directly. Henry Ford II, who provides the introduction, passes off the film to Westbrook Van Voorhis, a prominent voice actor of the period. Van Voorhis reports from the “traffic safety and highway improvement department” and uses maps to segue into film footage of San Francisco and the Bay Bridge.

Within the film footage, Van Voorhis introduces “the managing editor of the Palo Alto Times, Gene Paulson,” who also addresses the camera, showing photographs and starting to read an editorial on the dangers of the Bayshore Freeway. This film-within-film and narration-within-narration structure continues, with another segue in which the editorial is now being read aloud by a woman at home to her husband. A letter written to the newspaper is spoken by an off-camera voice purporting to be the writer himself, while Paulson sits at his desk reading the letter and Van Voorhis narrates over the top.

Following a more conventional voice-over discussion of two cities and their need for freeway improvements, the film continues with the story of a typical rural town and the benefits that new highways have brought. It ends with Van Voorhis discussing the actions of community groups lobbying for better roads, and promoting a book, also called Freedom of the American Road, leading us to wonder whether the film is based on the book, or whether the book was invented to give credence to the film.

This layered, multimedia technique represents an intensification of media technologies. Gone is the omniscient, distant figure of the anonymous narrator presenting a singular vision of the future to a mass public; instead, dialogic voices in multiple layers of media engage audience members, addressing each as a discrete individual with a civic obligation to defend this new freedom. Rather than “the future” being something that will inevitably happen with the help of a few all-knowing engineers, it is now something that citizens must “make happen” by having their individual voices heard. Depictions of a manifest destiny of an entire people have been replaced by a vision of the atomic individual: a single person driving in the family car. Nowhere is there mention of public transportation, and the highway is, fundamentally, designed to serve the individual.

While many of the road lobbying films of the period were often simplistic and jingoistic advertising messages, 1956’s Highway Hearing (producer, Dow Chemical Company) represents a significant departure from its precursors.  It continues to rely on the visual and narrative tropes of To New Horizons (progress, prosperity, etc.), and like Key to Our Horizons, Give Yourself the Green Light, and Freedom of the American Road, the film calls for individual and community action. 

However, unlike these earlier films, Highway Hearing uses a completely fictional narrative to provide the framework for its message. Citizens of the quaint American town of Connorsville attend the opening of its newest stretch of highway, reflecting back on the contentious town hall meetings that made the highway happen.

Rather unconventionally, the film features skeptical characters voicing often-spoken doubts and suspicions about the impact of superhighways on small communities.  In this way, the film dramatizes a community conflict that was happening all over the country as people were waking up to the unintended consequences of superhighways that bypassed small towns, plowed through urban communities, and replaced rows of crops with lanes of asphalt.

The film employs two narratives, one embedded within the other, to frame its inspirational tale of community conflict giving way to progress. Retrospective scenes mark the beginning and end of the film in which townspeople watch the celebratory opening of a new section of the Interstate passing through their town, and reminisce over the way their community came together to debate and eventually approve the project. Using this framing technique, Highway Hearing presents the construction of the superhighway as a fait accompli, showing (mostly) satisfied citizens well before the film suggests that there was any community opposition during the initial planning phase of the highway. By structuring the film’s narrative in this way, any concerns the fictional citizens might voice later in the film have already been preempted by the clean and happy outcome of the highway’s opening day parade. As one disgruntled opponent of the project observes, now that the “majority will” has been followed and the highway has been built, citizens must accept the new road system and hope for success rather than root for failure.

Another noteworthy framing device employed by Highway Hearing is the film-within-a-film. Unlike Freedom of the American Road, in which the viewer is passed seamlessly from section to section and from film fragment to film fragment, Highway Hearing features an engineer showing a complete film reel to townspeople, and then documenting their response. The film the engineer shows, “Highway Challenge,” bears an uncanny resemblance to industrial propaganda films that viewers were likely to have already seen. It argues that the highway creates jobs, saves time, reduces accidents, and collapses space and time for farmers who now have access to new markets and can enjoy faster driving times that prevent the spoilage of crops.

However, within the context of the fictional town hall meeting in which skeptical townspeople argue against the highway, “Highway Challenge” seems overly optimistic and even jingoistic. Far from undermining the film’s message, however, this embedding strategy works because it provides a counterpoint to the “realistic” civic debate that follows. The hearing shows a supposedly fair, democratic consultation of the people, the illusion of a considered response to highway building wherein skeptics are given their time on the stand, and then a discussion in which a majority of the townspeople are “convinced” by the film and the engineer.

Thus Highway Hearing is not only significant for its meta-use of film and its appeal to community involvement, but also for the way it recuperates dissent by creating the illusion that, at least in one small town, the will of the people has won out.

This recuperative strategy is all the more significant given that such a seemingly earnest celebration of civic discourse and democracy falls flat when considered against the hard politics and political strife that went into getting the 1956 legislation passed, as well as the actual community efforts already heating up in cities across the United States to block highway construction (Mohl).

Fittingly, Freedom of the American Road and Highway Hearing represent a kind of end to the future-forward optimism of Geddes’ Futurama. The engineer’s film in Highway Hearing, with its enthusiastic portrayal of the wonders of the road, has been subsumed by the more complicated narrative of community and individual action, in large part because, by 1956, the moment when American tax payers must “pay their way” had finally arrived.