Getting Out of the Mud: The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898–1928 by Martin T. Olliff (review)

Today we take for granted that the provision of an interconnected network of hard-surfaced motorways—from county roads to interstate superhighways—is a shared responsibility of local, state, and federal government agencies. In Getting Out of the Mud: The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898–1928, Martin T. Olliff explains how Alabamians took their first tentative and uneven steps toward this bureaucratized transportation system during the early twentieth century. It is a story whose twists may not be surprising to scholars of southern Progressivism and a history with occasionally far-reaching consequences for the national good roads movement.

Olliff's research draws deeply on local newspapers and archival records of voluntary associations, state commissions, and federal agencies. He demonstrates how southern Progressives and good roads advocates employed a blend of economic boosterism and reform-minded support for positive government —alongside unwavering commitment to the preservation of white supremacy—to challenge the power of complacent county politicians. Their successes, most notably the creation of a state highway department dominated by engineers interested in long-haul routes, helped reshape state road-building politics in Alabama. The tale reveals a great deal about the conflicting and often contradictory impulses within southern Progressivism and how Alabama's history of slavery and indigenous conflict weighed heavily on the pursuit of transportation modernization.

For example, until the early twentieth century, Alabama (like other states) relied on an ineffective system of "statute labor," whereby residents devoted a few days a year of manual labor to level a disordered patchwork of county roads (p. 17). But while other states purchased heavy rock-crushing equipment that minimized reliance on manual labor, Alabama instead redirected the state's convict lease system so that prisoners, who were disproportionately black, worked on public roads rather than in private mines or on turpentine plantations. Reduced public revenue from private leasing arrangements meant that, ironically, counties that stopped leasing could not afford the very machinery they needed. The convict lease system was finally abolished in 1928 (the adoption of a two-cent-per-gallon gasoline tax covered lost revenue), but chain gangs, in which prisoners worked public roads and were housed in mobile cages, continued long into the twentieth century. In another instance, Olliff offers a telling profile of Alma Rittenberry. Active in the Daughters of 1812, she was the foremost advocate of improving the Jackson Highway, one of many named trails promoted by voluntary organizations throughout the nation. One of Rittenberry's primary concerns was memorializing the route Andrew Jackson followed through Alabama during the 1813–1814 Creek War, in which her grandfather had participated. Little came of Rittenberry's effort to venerate Jackson's ruthless campaign against the Creek Nation, however, and the highway eventually followed a different route.

Fellow Alabamian and U.S. senator John H. Bankhead proved instrumental in reshaping road-building politics at the national level. A longtime believer in improving rural postal delivery, he forged a middle road between supporters of states' rights and promoters of a national highway system as a principal author of the 1916 Federal Aid Road Act. The act created the modern system of federal grants for highways administered by states but subject to federally dictated oversight, engineering, and routing requirements. Interestingly, Olliff explains that while Alabama was privileged to be first in line with Federal Project Number 1 (a nod to Bankhead), the state almost missed its share of federal largesse due to state constitutional spending prohibitions on internal improvements dating to Reconstruction-era corruption scandals. In time, the state surmounted these obstacles, and, to a degree, the technocratic governance embodied by the Alabama Highway Department prevailed. But, as Olliff's history makes clear, governing systems designed to preserve the racial hierarchy while otherwise steering clear of taxation, centralized control, and other perceived infringements on individual liberty...