Dixie Highway: Road Building and the Making of the Modern South, 1900–1930 by Tammy Ingram (review)

One of the most overlooked periods in the history of the American South has been the early twentieth century. Seeking to understand this peculiar region, scholars have focused on the events that marked it most visibly: the Civil War and Reconstruction, the implementation of segregation and disfranchisement at the turn of the century, and the rapid changes of the post-World War II period, including the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of southern Republicanism. Yet the early twentieth century was a critical period in the history of the South, a time of entrenched segregation and political and social conservatism that was, nevertheless, marked by the beginnings of economic modernization. In Dixie Highway, College of Charleston history professor Tammy Ingram joins a growing number of southern historians interested in highlighting the changes that shaped the region’s economy in the years between the turn of the century and World War II. In her history of the Dixie Highway, she demonstrates that road-building, and particularly the effort to organize and improve a highway stretching from Michigan to Miami, was “a crucial linchpin in the transition to the modern South” (p. 2). In pursuit of the highway, sold as a way to bring vacationers and developers into the region, southerners fought over funding and location, they debated the nature of and implications for state and federal aid, and they struggled to hang on to the social hierarchies and inequalities that marked southern life.

Ingram begins with the best-studied period of southern infrastructure improvement, the Progressive-era “Good Roads Movement” in which southerners dedicated their own time and money to improve the roads that traversed the countryside. Yet southerners could not agree on the scope or purpose for automotive transportation; even as citizens came to an agreement on the need for better roads, farmers demanded farm-to-market connections while drivers, and later economic developers, envisioned a network of improved highways connecting the region and its products to manufacturers and markets across the country. Southerners also divided over funding for road projects, uncertain whether the use of federal or state funds would unduly burden communities with change and oversight. When the Midwestern businessman Carl Fisher proposed what would become the Dixie Highway, a privately planned and marked route connecting North and South, such divisions came to a head.

Focusing her attention on Georgia, the state with more mileage, fiercer debates, and more vocal boosters than any of its southern neighbors, Ingram delves into the decisions that shaped the highway’s route and its impact. Southerners understood that a major road might bring commercial development and reduce their reliance on cotton and agriculture, and as a result, civic and business leaders scrambled to present their communities as essential to the route of the highway. The outbreak of World War I provided further impetus as Dixie Highway boosters used the defense effort to highlight the need for federal funding for what might become a “military highway” in emergencies. The war ended too quickly for boosters to realize a federally funded military road network, but as Ingram notes, it did provide southerners with a brief glimpse into the necessity of federal funding and organization. Moreover, the wartime experience of road-building debates in Georgia was a foundational moment in the career of Dwight Eisenhower, who was stationed in the state during the war, and who would go on to implement that very vision of federally-funded and organized highways with the modern interstate highway system when he became president.

For southerners, federal funding for infrastructure projects was both a blessing and a curse. Such outlays allowed southern communities and states to avoid taxes and tolls that might otherwise be necessary for such expensive projects, but funding also meant that the federal government might employ greater oversight into the methods by which southerners preserved political, economic, and social inequality...