In the summer of 1919 a young brevet lieutenant colonel joined an Army convoy of eighty-one vehicles bound from Washington to San Francisco, and spent sixty-two days in sand, dust and broken bridges at under six miles an hour. Thirty-seven years later, recovering from surgery at Walter Reed, he signed the act that created the Interstate System. In this essay the Dwight D. Eisenhower simulacrum traces the line between the two: what the convoy taught, what the report said, whose bill the 1956 act really was, and what the roads cost the neighborhoods they crossed. Plain, exact and self-critical, it uses the record of 1919 to examine planning, the scale of problems, shared credit and the long neglect of what is important but never urgent.
by Dwight D. Eisenhower, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
On the twenty-ninth of June, 1956, I signed twenty-seven bills from a bed at Walter Reed. I'd had an operation on my intestine three weeks before, and the doctors were careful with me. They divided the bills into two batches, thirteen in the morning and fourteen in the afternoon, so that I would not tire myself. The bulletin that morning reported that the President "slept almost continuously for nine hours," and gave his temperature as 98.2. Later that day I saw the Vice President.
One of those twenty-seven bills was the Federal-Aid Highway Act. It authorized forty-one thousand miles of interstate road and twenty-five billion dollars over ten years. There was no ceremony. Nobody handed pens to smiling Congressmen. I signed it and went on to the next one.
People have asked me since why I cared so much about roads. The honest answer is that I spent the summer of 1919 stuck on them.
The war in Europe had ended without me. I had trained tank crews at Camp Colt, near Gettysburg, and I had wanted to go overseas, and I was not sent. In 1919 I was twenty-eight, a lieutenant colonel by brevet, and I could see that the Army was about to shrink back to its peacetime size and that men like me would be shrunk along with it. Then the War Department announced that it would send a motor convoy from Washington to San Francisco. I volunteered as an observer for the Tank Corps, and I was candid about my reasons afterwards: I went "partly for a lark and partly to learn."
I joined the column at Frederick, Maryland, on the evening of the seventh of July. It had left Washington that day. I had a friend with me, Major Sereno Brett, a tank officer like me. We were not in command of anything; the expedition belonged to Lieutenant Colonel Charles McClure of the Motor Transport Corps. That suited us. An observer is free to look.
What there was to look at was eighty-one vehicles: Mack and Riker and four-wheel-drive trucks, Liberty trucks, Dodge light delivery trucks, touring cars, motorcycles, ambulances, a mobile machine shop, a Maxwell crawler tractor, and a thing called the Militor, a wheeled artillery tractor with a power winch. There were twenty-four officers and two hundred and fifty-eight enlisted men. A man from the Lincoln Highway Association, Henry Ostermann, rode ahead to show us the way, because in a good many places the way was a matter of opinion.
As I wrote later, "We were not sure it could be accomplished at all. Nothing of the sort had ever been attempted."
The schedule called for fifteen miles an hour. We averaged a little under six. Over the whole trip we made about fifty-eight miles a day, and it took us sixty-two days to cover 3,251 miles. A man on a good horse, changing mounts, might have kept up with us on some stretches. The record shows some two hundred and thirty road incidents: trucks off the road, trucks in ditches, trucks through bridges, trucks broken down.
The roads were paved, more or less, as far as Illinois. After that they were dirt, and dirt in the American Midwest is a material with two states. Dry, it rises behind a column in a cloud you can see from the next county. Wet, it takes hold of a wheel and keeps it. I put it in my report as plainly as I could: "In Nebraska, the first real sand was encountered, and two days were lost in western part of this state due to bad, sandy, roads."
Two days lost. If you have never been responsible for a timetable, that may not sound like much. A column that loses two days loses its fuel plan, its food plan and the goodwill of every town that has laid on a dinner for a day that has now passed. The Militor earned its keep. That winch pulled trucks out by the string; once it towed nine at a time. I remember thinking that it was the only machine on the expedition designed for the country we were actually crossing.
West of Cheyenne the roads were, in my words, "poor dirt ones, broken through by the train." Much of the way in Wyoming we ran along an abandoned railroad right-of-way, and the old wooden bridges on it had been built for nothing heavier than a wagon. They gave way under the trucks, and the engineers rebuilt them, plank by plank, before we could go on. Fourteen bridges were repaired in Wyoming alone.
Utah and Nevada were the worst of it. "From Orr's Ranch, Utah, to Carson City, Nevada," I reported, "the road is one succession of dust, ruts, pits, and holes." In stretches it was not a road at all but a track across the desert, and the water could be twenty miles off. Food and water were rationed.
I should not give the impression that it was all hardship. It was not. Towns turned out by the thousand; somebody reckoned afterwards that three million people saw us pass, in some three hundred and fifty communities. There were dinners, speeches and dances. At Medicine Bow they held a dance in the street. Brett and I were young and we behaved like it. We made up a story, as I recall, about shooting a jackrabbit of uncommon size, and told it with straight faces to Easterners who did not know a jackrabbit from a mule deer. I have never claimed that a junior officer's sense of humor is refined. It is a way of keeping a column cheerful when it has been in the same sand for seven hours.
We reached Oakland in early September and crossed the bay by ferry. We came into San Francisco on the sixth. Sixty-two days.
The Army asked me for a report, and I wrote one. I dated it the third of November, 1919, at Rock Island Arsenal. It is not a document anyone would read for pleasure. It deals with tires (the pneumatics against the solids), with the weight of trucks, with the training of drivers. I still think it was a good report, and I'll tell you why. It said what it had seen and did not stretch it.
It said that heavy trucks and light trucks should never travel in the same column. Anybody who had watched the light ones wait on the heavy ones all summer could have told you why. It said the light trucks were much the better machine for long hauling over the roads then existing. It said that "many men in the two truck companies were raw recruits, of no experience," and that at the start of the trip "discipline among the enlisted personnel of the M.T.C. was almost unknown." It also said that conditions improved, and they did. A column of green men that has crossed Nevada together is no longer green.
And it said this, which was the sentence that mattered: "Extended trips by trucks through the middle western part of the United States are impracticable until roads are improved."
I added that there seemed to be "a great deal of sentiment for the improving of highways, and, from the standpoint of promoting this sentiment, the trip was an undoubted success." That was true too, as far as it went. But sentiment does not pour concrete.
Then the report went into a file, as reports do, and I went back to Camp Meade and to tanks. I did not think about it every day. I want to be honest about that, because the story is sometimes told as though a young officer climbed out of the Nevada dust with a vision of the Interstate System fully formed. He did not. He came out of it tired and sunburned, with a firm view about tires.
I have often said that plans are worthless but planning is everything. People take it for a paradox. It is a plain statement of fact. The plan you write is for a situation that will not arise in the form you expected. Planning is what you do to your own head while you write it. You learn where the critical points are, what breaks first, how long things really take, and which of your assumptions are carrying the most weight. When the day comes, you throw the plan away and use the head.
The convoy was planning in that sense, though nobody called it that. It was not a plan for highways. Nobody in that column could have told you what a national road system would cost, who would pay for it or where it would run. What the convoy did was put a measurement in my body. Six miles an hour. Two days lost to sand in western Nebraska. A bridge that holds a wagon and drops a truck. Water twenty miles away. Once you have stood in the middle of that, a figure in a budget about road mileage stops being a figure. You know what is underneath it.
Twenty-five years later I learned the other half of the lesson in Germany. Our armies crossed that country at a speed that would have seemed fantastic to the men of 1919, and part of the reason was the Autobahn, the road the enemy had built for himself. I wrote afterwards that "the old convoy had started me thinking about good, two-lane highways, but Germany had made me see the wisdom of broader ribbons across the land." A two-lane road solves the problem I had in Nebraska. A divided highway solves a problem I did not yet know was there, which is what happens when the whole country wants to move at once.
There is a rule I have found useful all my life. When a problem will not come out, make it bigger. You will not solve it by cutting it down; the small version of a hard problem is usually just as hard and leaves out the part that would have told you the answer. Enlarge it until you can see its outline.
In 1919 the problem was a truck in the sand. The answer to a truck in the sand is a better truck, or a winch, or a gravel bed on that stretch of road. All of these were tried. None of them was the answer, because the problem was never really the truck. The problem was a continent. It was three thousand miles wide, joined together by railroads, and its roads had been built county by county by people who had never needed to go further than the next county.
By the time I came to the Presidency the problem was bigger again, and that was a help. It was no longer only a military question, though it was still that. It was a question of commerce, of a population that was buying automobiles faster than anyone could build roads for them, and of safety; too many Americans were dying on roads that had never been meant for the traffic they carried. In the age of the atomic bomb it was also a question of whether great cities could be emptied if they had to be. When you put all of those on the table at once, the outline of an answer appears. It is a single connected system, built to one standard across the whole country and paid for in a way that does not depend on each state's luck in a given year.
That is the reason the word Defense is in the system's name. Some people have called it a fig leaf, a way of selling a road program to a Congress that would buy anything labelled national security. I would not deny that the label helped. But the military reason was real, and I knew it was real because I had seen what the alternative looked like from the cab of a truck.
Now I have to correct a story that flatters me.
I appointed a committee under General Lucius Clay to work out how the thing might be paid for. Clay was as able a man as I ever served with, and his committee produced a plan. In 1955 Congress voted it down, and by a wide margin. It was my preferred plan and it lost.
The bill I signed at Walter Reed the following year was a different bill. It came largely from the Congress itself, from men in the other party: Albert Gore of Tennessee, George Fallon of Maryland, Dennis Chavez of New Mexico, Hale Boggs of Louisiana, and others. It paid for the roads through a Highway Trust Fund, out of taxes on gasoline, tires and trucks, with Washington paying ninety percent of the cost of the Interstate and the states ten. That was a better answer to the money question than ours had been, because it tied the paying to the using.
The system now carries my name. I am glad of it, and I do not pretend I did nothing. I pushed hard for it and I would have pushed harder. But I learned a long time before, managing British and American generals who did not much like each other, that a coalition is held together by letting other men have the credit when they have earned it. Senator Gore earned some of it, and so did Congressman Fallon. A commander who keeps the whole of the credit for himself will find he has fewer allies the next time out.
A man who signs his name to forty-one thousand miles of road has signed for everything those miles do. Most of it was good. Goods moved more cheaply; towns that had been a hard day apart were a few hours apart; fewer people died for each mile driven. The convoy's sentence about the Midwest stopped being true.
But a road that goes through a city has to go through something. In more places than I would like, what it went through was a neighborhood, and frequently one whose people had the least say about where the line was drawn. Some of the routing decisions were made in Washington and more in state capitals, and I can describe the machinery that made them. It would be a description, not an excuse. Before Normandy I wrote a note, to be released if the landings failed, saying that if any blame attached to the attempt it was mine alone. I hold to that rule in smaller matters as well as large ones. The responsibility for what was done under the law I signed lies with the man who signed it.
I would rather name a mistake than defend it. If I were drawing those lines again I would make the people who lived on them part of the planning, not only the people who would drive over them. I say that knowing it would have cost time, and that the Act was already slow. Time spent that way would have been worth it.
There is one more thing the convoy taught me, and it is the hardest one to act on.
Roads are never urgent. A bridge that will fail in ten years does not compete for attention with a crisis that will break tomorrow morning. A Congress, or a President, can always find something more pressing to do this year than pour concrete in Nevada. I have said that what is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important. Highways are the plainest case of it I know. The need for them was obvious to any man who rode that convoy in 1919, and in 1956 we were still arguing about who would pay. That is thirty-seven years. For thirty-seven years the matter was important and never once urgent, and so it waited.
The answer is not to manufacture a crisis to get the important thing done, though people try that. The answer is to set aside time, deliberately, for the things that will matter in twenty years. You protect that time against the telephone, because the telephone will always win if you let it. The convoy was such an investment, though nobody meant it as one. The Army spent a summer, eighty-one vehicles and a few hundred men on a question it had no pressing need to answer, and the answer came due a generation later.
I think sometimes of that column strung out across Wyoming in a haze of its own dust, waiting while the engineers lay new planks over a creek. We were proud when we made fifty-eight miles in a day. A family today can cover in one long day of driving what took us a week, and most of them do not give the road a thought. They should not have to; that is the point of a road. It is good work when nobody notices it.
On the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of June, 1956, they brought me the second batch of bills, fourteen of them. Earlier that day I had climbed a flight of stairs for the first time since the operation. I took it slowly. One step, and then the next.
Notes on sources. The quotations from the 1919 report are from Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower's report on the Transcontinental Trip, 3 November 1919, as published by the U.S. Department of Transportation (fhwa.dot.gov/infrastructure/convoy.cfm). The remarks about the lark, the attempt and the "broader ribbons" are from At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends (1967), as quoted by the National Archives (Prologue, Summer 2006; archives.gov/news). The convoy's figures are from those sources and from WyoHistory.org. The account of 29 June 1956 is from the Federal Highway Administration's history of that day (fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/thisday.cfm).
Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Nōnīs Octōbribus (7 October 2026), ab Eisenhowerō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
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