Car Country: An Environmental History

1. Roads and Reformers

5 one roads and reFormers isaaC Potter Was a man on a mission. by 1891, he anD a small but growing group of like-minded reformers had been agitating for a decade to improve what they saw as the deplorable state of American country roads. Their efforts had run into staunch resistance from American farmers, however, who generally regarded the prosperous city dwellers who dominated the road-improvement crowd as unwelcome interlopers into rural affairs. Potter, who was trained as an engineer and whose zeal for better roads had grown by the early 1890s to an almost fevered pitch, had finally had enough. He agreed to edit a new magazine, Good Roads, which began publication in January 1892. In advance of its first issue, he sat down to pen an essay titled “The Gospel of Good Roads: A Letter to the American Farmer,” which, in addition to running as the lead article in the new magazine, was also widely distributed as a stand-alone pamphlet. “In these years, when the voice of your complaint is loud in the land, and a thousand partisans are declaiming a thousand theories to account for the ‘decline of agriculture,’” he began, “I will try to write you a letter, in which, I Roads before and after dragging, Sac County, Iowa, March 1905. From Iowa State Highway Commission, The Good Roads Problem in Iowa, Bulletin No. 6 (Iowa State Highway Commission, June 1905), 14. 6 || roads and reFormers believe, I can make it appear that the greatest remedy for the cure of unprofitable farming lies in your own hands.”1 This greatest of remedies , of course, was better roads. George E. Waring was also a man on a mission, though of a slightly different sort. Stepping into the grandly named position of commissioner of the Department of Street-Cleaning of New York City on January 15, 1895, he assumed leadership of a thoroughly embattled branch of municipal government. The city’s newspapers had for decades offered routine reports on the city’s wretched street conditions, in general , and on the failures of its street-cleaning department, in particular , especially during the winter when snow piled high on top of heavy accumulations of refuse. Describing the conditions in front of one block of tenements, the New York Times spared no condemning detail, declaring that the street “from curb to curb looks like a well-patronized dumping ground. Ash heaps, kitchen refuse, decayed vegetables, and straw, chips, old crockery, cans, &c., are spread all over the street, mixed with the dirty snow.”2 Residents were “loud in their complaints of the negligence shown by the Street-cleaning Department,” another article reported.3 In March 1893, fed-up members of the City Club had launched a campaign to document the problem, collecting affidavits and taking photographs of appalling street conditions all over the city, with the aim of having the street-cleaning commissioner, Thomas Brennan, removed from office for dereliction of duty. Waring was the second reform-minded commissioner to follow Brennan, and he was determined to succeed. “It is utterly hopeless,” his wife told him after seeing the city’s streets for the first time, imploring him to step down. “You will only disgrace yourself by trying to do it.” Ignoring his wife’s plea, and with an enthusiasm for clean streets that matched Potter’s zeal for good roads, Waring reorganized his beleaguered department, outfitted his street sweepers in bright white uniforms, and sent them forth to do battle with the city’s piles of garbage.4 Potter and Waring were but two amid a legion of American reformers during the 1880s and 1890s aspiring to completely remake the roads and streets of the United States. These late-nineteenth-century campaigns displayed a number of key characteristics of the forces that remade the United States into Car Country over the first half of the twentieth century. In particular, they reflected a strong willingness roads and reFormers || 7 to use government resources to completely reengineer landscapes to solve environmental problems and to advance various social and economic goals. Far from being a response to automobiles, however, these diverse reform efforts arose before automobiles appeared in the United States. The first American automaker, for example, opened its doors for business in 1895, and as late as 1900 there were a meager eight thousand automobiles nationwide—many of them frail prototypes or foreign imports. The story of Car...