Dan Holt, director of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kan., said the president's concern about highways began in 1919, when he was part of a U.S. Army convoy traveling by road from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. The trip took 62 days on roads so rotten the Army had to abandon nine trucks along the way.
A quarter-century later, as supreme allied commander in Europe, Eisenhower saw the impact of a modern highway system when his soldiers used the German autobahns -- four-lane divided highways with on- and off-ramps and no traffic signals -- to pursue Hitler's army toward Berlin.
"Germany had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land," Eisenhower wrote later. "After seeing the autobahns I made a personal and absolute decision to see that the [U.S.] would benefit by it."
In the days when most southern politicians were Democrats, and southern Democrats feared the expansion of the federal government, Eisenhower had difficulty getting his interstate proposal through the Democratic-controlled Congress. But the late Congressman Hale Boggs (D-LA) broke the impasse by proposing a federal gas tax that would reimburse the states at 90% for the cost of building the highways. The rest is history. And it is safe to say that most of our lives would be very different, for good or ill, if we didn't have the ability to move quickly across the country by automobile.
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