On Sunday, George Will offered a tribute to the Interstate Highway System, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this summer:
Eisenhower’s message to Congress advocating the interstate system began, “Our unity as a nation is sustained by free communication of thought and by easy transportation of people and goods.”
No legislator more ardently supported the IHS than the Tennessee Democrat who was chairman of the Senate Public Works subcommittee on roads. His state had benefited handsomely from the greatest federal public works project of the prewar period, the Tennessee Valley Authority, which, by bringing electrification to a large swath of the South, accelerated the closing of the regional development gap that had stubbornly persisted since the Civil War. This senator who did so much to put postwar America on roads suitable to bigger, more powerful cars was Al Gore Sr. His son may consider this marriage of concrete and the internal combustion engine sinful, but Tennessee’s per capita income, which was just 70 percent of the national average in 1956, today is 90 percent.
Meanwhile, a 3-ton slab of concrete fell inside Boston’s Big Dig tunnel, killing a passenger in a car. Evidently, this is not connected to the Big Dig concrete fraud case. But after going $12 billion over budget, you can imagine that corners had to be cut somewhere, right?
Will’s reading of history is bizarre.
Calhoun’s 1816 legislation was part national defense bill and part bill to encourage business *where it had already sprung up* because of war embargoes against the British — not a broad bill for industrialization. This didn’t doom America to regional paths of infrastructure development; soil exhaustion, the existence of a regional culture dependent on slave-ownership and an open western border did. No amount of federal investment was likely to have altered this course, and the protectionist tariff by which it was to have been funded would have had deleterious effects long term (Will of all people should know this, and probably does).
Will also ignores military investment and natural regional recovery as the primary causes for the restoration of southern economies.
I don’t think anyone, even “scolds,” deplore the interstate system as much as they question its excesses and the proportion of investment in it and air travel.
Oh, all of a sudden you demonstrate expertise outside of the worlds of comics and basketball. It’s as if you have a family history in the train business or something!
Which is to say: good points.