Dixie Highway: Road Building and the Making of the Modern South, 1900-1930

by Tammy Ingram

At the turn of the twentieth century, good highways eluded most Americans and nearly all southerners. Introduced in 1915, the Dixie Highway changed all that by merging hundreds of short roads into dual interstate routes that looped from Michigan to Miami and back. In connecting the North and the South, the Dixie Highway helped end regional isolation and served as a model for future interstates. In this book, Tammy Ingram offers the first comprehensive study of the nation's earliest attempt to build a highway network, revealing how the modern U.S. transportation system evolved out of the hard-fought political, economic, and cultural contests that surrounded the Dixie's creation.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

255 pages, Hardcover

First published March 3, 2014

Reviews

[John Bicknell]

Tammy Ingram’s “Dixie Highway: Road Building and the Making of the Modern South, 1900-1930,” is everything a good academic history should be.

It takes a topic – in this case, the building of the Dixie Highway in the 1910s and 1920s – and explains it in terms of the surrounding cultural and political events.

This is a not a road trip narrative or a nostalgic look back at a bygone era of dirt-road travel. It’s a serious examination of the politics of road building at the dawn of the automobile age, and how this new force shaped – and was shaped by – the politics of race, the economics of the rural South and the natural inclination of voters to grow less trusting of politicians and bureaucrats the further away they are from the county seat.

The Dixie Highway was not, like Route 66 or the Lincoln Highway, a single road spanning from sea to shining sea. It was a collection of routes running from the upper Midwest into the South. The brainchild of Carl Graham Fisher, a real estate magnate, auto entrepreneur and a founder of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the road was promoted and –at first – paid for by private interests under the aegis of the Dixie Highway Association. These businessmen promoted the road building, understanding early on that more cars meant more business, faster delivery of products and a way to develop a tourism industry.

Ingram expertly delineates the competing interests.

“By 1921 the politics of highway construction proved to be about far more than just roads,” she writes. “They encapsulated the political growing pains of a nation conflicted over the role of government in a modernizing world.”

Those pains continue to resonate almost a hundred years later.

Rural southerners needed better roads, to get their products to market or simply to be able to get into town.

But the political and financial intervention of others – in the form of federal aid and state bureaucrats making decisions about how to spend it – cast the project in a different light for many in the still-segregated South, where most of the roadwork was done by prison chain gangs, which were overwhelmingly black.

If getting better roads meant losing local decision-making – and losing control over the existing structure of Jim Crow – then it was thanks, but no thanks.

“The growing power of state and federal highway agencies caused many southerners to reexamine their commitment to the Good Roads Movement,” Ingram writes. “Southern voters began to equate that consolidation of power with erosion of local control.”

Georgians rejected such consolidation completely when they elected in a 1926 landslide a governor opposed to using state bond issues to pay for highway expansion, which meant slowing the progress of the road building project just as the Dixie Highway was bearing the fruit its planners had intended. “In many ways,” Ingram writes, “the race between [Lamartine] Hardman and [John] Holder placed the massive success of the Dixie Highway campaign up for a vote, and it lost.”
It was not that Georgians didn’t like roads. They simply didn’t want state or federal bureaucrats making local decisions, and feared that such decision-making would spiral into other areas if control of road building was handed over.

Turns out they were right to have such worries. Eventually the road building came, and along with it came a massive transfer of authority over many other aspects of life.

Some of those changes, like the overthrow of Jim Crow, were unalloyed goods. Others were less clear cut, and we’re still living with the consequences today.

Ingram, a professor of history at the College of Charleston, grew up in rural Georgia and uses her home state to illustrate the broader story. It’s a device that works well and probably avoids considerable duplication, but more of a nod to other jurisdictions might have provided a bit of flavor.

In any case, “Dixie Highway” provides a thorough illustration of a transitional moment in Southern and American history.

[Liz Clappin]

An interesting read, that explores this often overlooked significant piece of history. While the Dixie Highway lacks the sexy nostalgia of, say, Route 66, this puts it into context as groundbreaking in terms of eventually establishing an interstate system. The book is general enough in scope that anyone would find it enjoyable and liberally illustrated to really transport the reader.

[Larry Burfield]

Reads like a court transcript from the 1920's, Dry as a mouth full of dusty Georgia cotton. Don't waste your time on this one.

[Karen]

Very well researched. Interesting information on the use of convict labor to build roads in the South. Dry reading.