Storied Road: Ambivalence in the Landscape of American Automobility

Abstract

This introduction to the larger study of early American road narrative draws on an array of archival material to map and theorize the emergence of modern American automobility. The confluence between Henri Lefebvre’s social production of space and Tim Cresswell and John Urry’s reflections on mobility resonate in John Brinkerhoff Jackson and Anne Whiston Spirn’s theories of the language of landscape. This basis helps show that road stories propagated what Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams would call “manufactured consent” to a settler colonial regime of national integration that have never been stable, inevitable, nor universal. Mikhail Bakhtin and Carolyn Miller’s theories of genre provide a way of showing how road story continually renegotiates geographic thinking. In this, American road story is dominated by specific subjectivities, overwhelmingly white and predominantly male versions of five figural types—Agrarians, Progressives, Trailblazers, Vagabonds, and Tramps. At the turn of the twentieth century, these figures formulated and explored competing visions of a new mobility landscape, raising fraught questions of government structure, inclusion and access, frictions between urban and rural environments, and tensions of labor economics. Even the most aspirational examples exhibit dissonances of faith in the national automobility project. So, given the implications and consequences of American automobility in terms of social justice and ecology, scrutiny of its formative justifications becomes all the more imperative.

People train themselves not to see the infrastructure.

—Rebecca Solnit, “Art Seminar,” Landscape Theory, 2008

That feeling, the road opens, a favorite song building, cruising at speed, rhythm in the body, scudding through scenery, expanding consciousness—precious few do not relish it. Contrast it though with the crush and grind of a traffic snarl, or worse, the pounding anxiety of a near miss, or, still worse, an actual collision, injury, loss of life. Acknowledging that, there is hardly a need to further enumerate the mundane and tedious: waiting in line at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, completing insurance forms, bad news from a mechanic. Add road rage, excessive policing, and every form of intimidation. All the while evidence of climate change mounts. There is no denying it—high highs, low lows—automobility imposes an emotionally and intellectually ambivalent complex of experiences on our lives. This is nothing new.

For over a century, American road story has been rife with ambivalences. John Steinbeck opens his classic road book, Travels with Charley, nostalgically recalling youthful travel, but older now, wiser, he sets off on a new road trip with his poodle Charley in a truck he has quixotically dubbed Rocinante, “determined to look again, to try to rediscover this monster land.” However, before he can complete the circuit he had planned, he cuts his trip short and returns home, deeply frustrated and disaffected by the experience.¹ Monster land indeed. Similarly, Dean Moriarty, the hero of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, exuberantly defines that infamous, countercultural mystique of the road as “give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side.” This feeling is, for Dean, the tang of all America’s diverse but confederated places, all linked and bound by the road, yet neither he nor his road companion Sal are able locate that ambiguous “pearl” they sought through travel, and they wind up betraying each other in the end.² Or another example, in Thomas and Beulah, Rita Dove’s poetic biography of her grandparents, Thomas proudly buys a car for a triumphant return to the South of his childhood, but when the family is intentionally run off the road, Beulah derides, “You and your South! … / Don’t tell me this ain’t what / you were hoping for.” Beulah recognizes that Thomas’s desire to return to the landscape of his youth and court danger by flaunting his success by driving a fancy car on an open road is a potently symbolic venture. However, after returning North, losing his job and status in the automobile industry, and being forced by the Depression to sell the car marks a loss too painful to articulate.³ A dynamic of aspiration and ambivalence toward driving is laced figuratively through each of these narratives—Steinbeck’s self-abnegations, the cynical ironies fueling Dean’s maniacal obsessions, and Dove’s pointed depiction of intimidation so often experienced by African Americans on the road.

Remarkably, since the 1920s America’s road stories have generally emphasized three things—the car, the person, and the going—but the road itself goes hardly even noticed. In an era when computer navigation, electric vehicles, and artificially intelligent self-driving cars are changing the ways we think about and experience travel, we should nevertheless remember the basic road—the hard, planned, built surface—for two reasons. First, cars are not practical without roads and, further, because the dubious exuberance for American road travel such as we see in Steinbeck, Kerouac, and Dove contrasts so starkly with the manifold difficulties that curtailed road travel at the turn of the twentieth century.⁴ So, the difference between the late nineteenth-century experience of road travel, which Warren Belasco sketches, “given bad road conditions drivers had to be obsessed with the road,” and the way roads now go almost completely taken for granted, registers one of modern America’s defining social transformations and highlights a set of durable misgivings about road mobility that have curiously gone unassuaged in the building, rebuilding, and maintaining of multiple comprehensive national mobility networks in the twentieth century.⁵

After decades of all but completely neglecting roads, America’s swift and prodigious development of automobility after 1921 evokes several nested questions that, to borrow terms from Raymond Williams, trace residual, dominant, and emergent cultural practices in American life.⁶ For instance, why had the United States not built anything resembling a road network prior to the beginning of the twentieth century when benchmark nations in Europe had? Then, once the United States began building roads, why did it build them so prolifically, particularly given the enormous challenges of scale, terrain, logistics, politics, technology, and economics? More to the point, on what grounds did the United States, a nation that had not made road construction a priority during its first century, decide that nothing less than a superabundance of roadways would suffice in its second? Indeed, how did the cultural climate need to change for a reluctant nation to reinterpret Constitutional precedent and mount an innovative administrative compromise between federal and state governments that led to the construction of millions of miles of roads where they had not previously existed? Tying these together, how did America, as a republic, justify to itself such a massive and complicated reordering of the national landscape, and, crucially, what did the project mean to them as they were undertaking it? Two explanations are commonly advanced to explain America’s rapid adoption of automobility. Both oversimplify the process of developing a transportation system and usually elide any underlying ambivalence about it.

One idea presupposes that mobility is essential to American identity. This notion characterizes the automobile as the apotheosis, so to speak, of an essential trait. As Gertrude Stein distinctly put it:

a space of time is a natural thing for an American to always have inside them as something inside which they are continuously moving… it is something strictly American to conceive a space that is filled always filled with moving.⁷

Likewise, road historian Phil Patton maintains that American roads represent “a literally concrete expression of the central American drives… the mute perspectives and pavements of the highway objectify elements of the American mind.”⁸ Such generalizations, which are all too common, tend to be premised on myths of unanimous and indubitable concord by a homogenous social collective—a harmfully specious notion.

The second popular presumption for America’s profuse approach to automobility is flatly instrumental. For instance, congratulating America’s industrial development, William Kaszynski asserts that “the internal combustion engine on wheels has made the greatest impact, transforming the earth’s landscape and starting new industries.” Similarly, Chester Leibs raves, “cars began streaming from the nation’s auto factories, and the demand for places to drive them soared. Before long hundreds of new highways laced the continent, and countless older roads were widened and paved.” Also, referencing the evolution of automobility in the late nineteen-teens and twenties, Drake Hokanson maintains, “on the now paved highway were cars that had reached a high level of utility, and beside the highway, road-side America was rising. Americans had found a new mode of travel and were now busy creating a landscape to support it.”⁹ In such explanations, individual actors and collective agreements are incidental; technology creates its own momentum, which the population serves. The engine on wheels itself becomes the agent of history, reorienting the course of society and spurring passive human conformity. While casting automobility as inevitable, this sort of instrumental determinism fails to account for the initial reactionary resistance and slow acceptance of automobility. It glosses over the deeply complicated political negotiations involved in planning and actually building roads, much less the fact that the Good Roads Movement that eventually enabled mass-automobility predated the automobile. Machines are not agents. Human collectives create, develop, and apply technologies within cultural frameworks.¹⁰

Both of these versions of America’s embrace of automobility fail to account for diverse human actors operating within a matrix of specific historical contingencies to mutually negotiate and enact changes to their social environment.¹¹ Such foreshortened reasoning disregards the charged political, economic, and ideological conflicts out of which American automobility actually came to be comprised. It ignores the fact that private automobility was heavily subsidized with popular consent by federal and state government at the expense of other modes of transport, such as bicycle, trolley, streetcar, and rail systems.¹² Moreover, it sequesters historical injustices that attended the social construction of automobility in ostensibly unfortunate yet comfortingly distant eras, which tends to pardon any benefit from manufactured advantages assumed by privileged classes of Americans by reinscribing narratives of exceptionalism that have been and continue to be justifications for perpetuated inequities. Adhering to notions of cultural essence or technological determinism not only distorts our understanding of American automobility as a sociocultural system, it also risks ignoring the fact that those citizens consenting to automobility’s domination of everyday life were generally aware of and concerned about questions it raised about governance, social inclusion, shared environments, and the labor/leisure economy, thereby absolving collective responsibility for its massive and entwined political, social, and environmental consequences.

As a matter of fact, new automobilists at the turn of the century (and the farmers and bicyclists who preceded them) faced a very real and very big challenge in the lack of quality roads. Building roads was extremely difficult business and even more difficult politics in a country unprepared culturally, socially, infrastructurally, and economically for so vast an undertaking. To build roads, individual states and the country as a whole had to develop expensive new engineering technologies that could accommodate and endure the passage of cars and trucks through America’s various terrains. Entire infrastructure economies, public and private, had to be conceived and created. The nation had to revise its political relationships between townships, cities, counties, states, and the federal government. Indeed, early Good Roads activists encountered vehement resistance to any alteration of such a consequential element of political power at all levels of government. Put simply, the great body of the American populace had to become convinced, despite political inertia, general skepticism, and deep-seated wariness that the enormous investment that would make automobility viable was worthwhile and could actually work.¹³ Thus, rather than attributing automobility to national essence or overwhelming instrumental influence, it is more instructive to chart the cultural shift in the collective relationship to material space as observable in narratives of American geographic experience, namely, travel stories, which provides greater insight into the conceptualization and then construction of America’s modern landscape by exposing the conflicted reasoning, the blend of enthusiasm and concern, that propelled automobility’s cultural and material creation.

Stories, the principal medium by which culture circulates through groups, were integral to the rise of automobility because stories provided an ideational space whereby the expense of the investment in automobility could be imagined, justified, and even made desirable beyond substantial doubts. In all the variety of forms they take—fiction, memoir, poetry, speeches, journalism, film, advertising, and even maps—narratives reflect how people think about who they are and the way they live their lives, and thus the close study of them furnishes insight into how people imagine relating to each other in a shared landscape. Susan Roberson, for example, has described travel narratives as “cognitive maps of the self” based on “negotiations” that are “compelled by a situation of contingency and in-between-ness, between familiar and new, between self and place.”¹⁴ Like roads, following patterns of use, narratives guide as much as they represent the ways people imagine themselves inhabiting and moving through shared space.¹⁵

At the turn of the twentieth century, the American people’s ideas about themselves and their world were evolving rapidly. In order to open the way for the colossal investment in automobility, Americans needed to reorient, to re-narrate, their sense of personal connection to national space. As the landscape of automobility replaced the landscape of foot, carriage, wagon train, and railway as the dominant organizer of national space in the popular imaginary, travel narratives worked out for people the significance, benefits, and prospective consequences of public roads for travel in varying and, as often, competing terms. In the literature of the road, the salient order of national geographic meanings and values was realigned, and new sets of cultural and social practices were conceived and exercised. Revising relationships to national space, road narratives cast travelers in modish roles while the landscape was being conceived as accessible, navigable, and meaningful in new ways. In short, road narratives composed landscapes that, in time, crystallized into the material landscape of American automobility while maintaining clear traces of its ideological origins. Cotten Seiler has insisted that “the practices of automobility” emerge from a “specific conception of what it means to be modern and free,” which has cultivated subjective predispositions that collapse automobility and Americanness into one another.¹⁶ The formulation of this idealized landscape encouraged new ways of relating to national space, which allowed individuals to justify purchasing vehicles, traveling cross-country, and voting forward road projects despite underlying uncertainty over what these investments may augur. This ambivalent enthusiasm for the emergent landscape parallels the abiding tenor of modernism that informs American life and attitudes to this day.¹⁷

This study joins a growing body of research that interrogates the history and consequences of mass mobility. As American-style automobility solidified as the dominant framework for American life, and as it has come to be adopted and applied by societies globally, China most recently,¹⁸ the ugly social compromises and devastating environmental consequences increasingly demand critical examination. For obvious reasons, much of the scholarship on the American road and its narratives focuses on the mid and later twentieth century. The early years of automobility require deeper scrutiny because similarities with the present resonate remarkably. Like our forebears, but for very different reasons, we poignantly recognize the imperative for change in our shared landscape, and we are engaged in a protracted debate as to what that change should look like. Many Americans, though not all, presume that some kind of governmental coordination will be necessary to evolve mobility infrastructures and address climate change, yet Americans are also keenly aware that individual responsibility and accountability will be integral to any mandate. In all, Americans continue to share information and tell stories about their travels. The goal of this project, then, is to contribute critical insight to ongoing deliberations regarding the social and geographic shape of a public future for mobility landscapes on a shared planet. Finding a way into new stories demands mapping the old.

What follows in this chapter is a general sketch of the assumptions that organize this study—The Road Shapes Landscape, The Road Organizes a Genre, The Road Conditions Popular Consent, The Road Spurs Mobility, The Road Commands Immobility, The Road Composes Ambivalent Subjectivities, and, finally, The Road Points the Way. Each section is illustrated with texts from the turn of the twentieth century, providing background context for further chapters. The body of evidence compiled here sheds light on the ways that travelers experienced and understood a changing national landscape to begin to answer the questions as to how and why America built roads and embraced automobility in the way that it did. It shows travelers formulating ideas as to the implications of coalescing technologies. Moreover, it shows them jilting into patterns of narrative discourse, genre, in which they (or their characters) assume predictable roles and ways of relating to the nation. Such patterning, ultimately, discloses a process of “spontaneous consent” to a new and comprehensive geographic system.¹⁹ Moreover, the narratives show that the embrace of automobility, although generally willing, was never absolute; uncertainties inevitably came along for the ride, and acknowledging and charting those doubts impel attention now to assuaging those uncertainties as we today revise our mobility future.

2.1 The Road Shapes Landscape

The fact that barely a century ago American cities were, at best, barely connected by rough dirt roads that were generally impassable for much of the year seems almost incredible now, and America’s roads are so naturalized and overlooked that it practically takes a willful act of the imagination to conjure any alternative conception of the landscape. This is not a condition that was dictated autocratically by industry or government, despite the implications made in some quarters. The ultimate ascendancy of automobility is the product of popular covenants binding government, industry, commerce, and the “mandatory” daily behavior of individuals, to borrow further from Cotten Seiler.²⁰ Road story catalyzed this process. Narratives of cross-country travel helped consolidate public interest into political will, and they help historians plot the interplay between people’s direct experience of travel, their geographic conceptualizations of the terrains being navigated, and changes made to physical living conditions.

In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre maintains, succinctly, that “(social) space is a (social) product,” by which he means, simply, that people create their geographic relationships through representation, social activity, and public administration.²¹ While for Lefebvre it is crucial to acknowledge the overwhelming influence of capital, it is clear that each generation must nevertheless choose either to concede and perpetuate or to question and revise received social arrangements. Plainly, the spatial distributions Americans have inherited are neither natural nor inevitable; they were and are produced.

Complementing this description of the social practices that produce spaces is the idea of landscape. Cultural geographer John Brinkerhoff Jackson maps out the interplay between human spatial experience, behavior, and the built environment, which he altogether termed the “vernacular landscape.”²² His definition accounts for the ways that activities of human habitation both adapt to and alter the physical environment. For Jackson, both a community’s subjective understanding of the land and the ways in which habitation alters the physical character of the land are mutually integral to one another. That is, beliefs, habits, and values inform the way people see the world, how they live in the world, and what they make of the world, which can be “read” as it is reflected both in a people’s various representations of the land and in the actual land. Taking up these ideas, Anne Whiston Spirn has described landscape as a language in itself, consisting of a grammar, rhetoric, and poetics: “The language of landscape prompts us to perceive and shape the landscape whole.” To read and speak the landscape fluently, one must recognize the ongoing place-based dialogues, acknowledge the variety of stories, historicize and ultimately enter the conversation.²³ Similarly, Denis Cosgrove has described landscape as an ideological formation “collectively produced, lived, and maintained,” largely by dominant classes projecting its ideas of nature on both shared terrain and subordinated groups.²⁴ Thus, to understand landscapes, particularly emergent landscapes like that of automobility at the turn of the twentieth century, we must closely read the ways travelers and citizens saw, lived in, and worked to alter the shape of their shared ideological and material world. To read road writing from the turn of the twentieth century is to join travelers producing space, composing landscapes.²⁵

With implied narratives, maps from the turn of the twentieth century vividly illustrate the production of the landscape of automobility.²⁶ During Reconstruction, with railroads dominating spatial relationships, the rail line itself, the station or depot, and distances between these sites defined the common experience of the broader nation. According to Wolfgang Shivelbusch, these spaces were “creative,” each “a producer of territories.”²⁷ The Union Pacific Tourist Map of 1888 reflects the spatial curation of a particular experience of the landscape (Fig. 2.1). Spanning a cross section of relative elevations, the rail line in deep red scaffolds imagery of terrain and local color. Pictures of agriculture, ranching, and mining are interspersed with representations of scenic grandeur and recreation, all of which fill in the empty or meaningless reaches of the country. The rail line organizes and ascribes significance to locations, plotting distances and promising rewards for enduring the journey. Comparatively, Owen Wister’s 1902 novel, The Virginian, provides a fictional illustration of this geographic framework. When the narrator arrives in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, he feels lost and lonely as he stands at the station watching his train, which is returning East, wend “its way to the far shores of civilization.” He wonders where he is, where in “this unfeatured wilderness” he is yet going, and how he will get there. He learns that the Virginian, whom he has just met, is to lead him a shocking 263 miles to his destination. Inevitably, the action and themes of the novel are all predicated on their distance from the depot at Medicine Bow and its distance by rail from the “civilized” East.²⁸ Taken together, these examples provide a point of reference for spatial relationships defined by the rail line, the station, and distance from it as a meaningfully produced landscape.

Fig. 2.1

Union Pacific Tourist Map, Rand McNally, 1888. Image courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford University Libraries

By contrast, in 1920 when the National Highway Association published their early road atlas, the representation of people’s conceptual relationship to the country had shifted dramatically (Fig. 2.2). Road atlases presuppose the sky-high view of an objective surveyor that flattens torqued and knobby terrains. The lines on the map of Pennsylvania, indicating State Routes in bright red and all else in thin blue, show scrolling and intersecting road routes flushing forth ambitiously to fill the implicitly significant places of the map. The roads flourish like capillaries feeding the tissue of a body. Convergences identify cities; dots in the blue lines demarcate towns. Although the state’s name is prominently stamped in the upper right, where the abutting map of New York is vacated visually, the names of towns are squeezed and contorted unobtrusively into the empty spaces where no important roads run. Topographic features like ridgelines, valleys, and rivers are incidental to the red and blue lines threading from town to town. If a great river like the Susquehanna is visible, it is because two blue routes and a state route parallel it. Railroads are invisible. In such road maps, the most common maps of twentieth-century America, the road is American space. Everything else is presented as subordinate to it, and the individual is implicitly free to circulate along these routes as he or she may be inclined. To circulate, the map implies, is to know America and be an American. As Kerouac famously articulated at the end of On the Road: “all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going.” The American Road binds and zigzags, giving meaning to the land. The road, the going, the bulge of the land, the car, as the National Highway Association map underscores, is putatively America’s story.²⁹

Fig. 2.2

National Highway Association road map of “Pennsylvania,” Auto Trails and Commercial Survey of the United States (Chicago: George F. Cram Company, 1920), 79. Image courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford University Libraries

Prior to the automobile, however, depictions of cycling capture some of the shifting vernacular perceptions of American landscapes in the era of road reform, particularly with regard to women’s changing relationship to the land. In “Four Plucky Girls Delaware to Massachusetts,” a correspondent for Bicycling World describes a cycling vacation taken with three intrepid friends. At the climax of the tour, the writer exclaims, “the ride was so ideal we almost imagined we were pictures on a bicycle calendar. We had the sun and a slight wind at our backs, and great, glorious old elms shaded the charming coasts. Yes, we surely were in fairy land.”³⁰ The combination of sun, tree shade, an uncommonly good road, and a gentle breeze makes the downhill ride effortlessly invigorating. The fairy land alluded to conjures the Celtic myths of a land beyond the corrupt realities of the world. This framing of the tour suggests that access to this place is both guaranteed by the cycling road and safely accessible to independent women. Relatedly, a Columbia bicycle advertisement also places a lady in the center of a free and invigorating field of experience (Fig. 2.3). The image depicts a man and a woman stopping for a rest on a road-side bench during a tour. The man, standing in profile, directs his gaze on the figure of the woman who lounges boldly under his (and the viewer’s) attention. Sporting a beret, wide lapels, a pinstriped shirt, a smartly tucked tie, and an ankle length skirt, she is fashionably but morally dressed. In her gloved hand she holds a flowering bough, the flowers resting in her lap, and the branch pointed provocatively at her counterpart. She is the image of a confident, independent woman choosing and controlling the features of her life. Their resting place is shaded by a wood, but the road continues over her shoulder. Lined by low stone walls and prosperous farms, it promises a hearty ride punctuated by spectacular views of the distant hills. This illustration, like the written example, represents a new kind of landscape for a new kind of woman, a woman secure in her independence and attractive to progressive and presumably ambitious men. The participation of privileged white women was integral to the Good Roads Movement, and alongside revising gender expectations, the emergent landscape reflects the aspirations of a middle class prosperous enough to eschew domestic tedium and enjoy exercise.³¹ Beyond reflecting a will to escape the industrial city, the cyclist’s landscape registers objective considerations, especially road conditions, yet it actively invokes Romantic notions of the cultivating influence of nature, combining scenic appreciation with progressive commitments to health, fitness, prosperity, and political purpose.

Fig. 2.3

Columbia Bicycle Advertisement from Bicycling World & LAW Bulletin, 1892. Image Courtesy of the Benson Ford Research Center

Contradictorily, Romantic notions about landscape appreciation such as these cyclists shared deliberately avoid acknowledging the exploitative industrialization that makes recreational leisure possible. However, it glares starkly in the contrast between writing by Hamlin Garland and Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa). In “Automobiling in The West,” a 1902 Harper’s Weekly essay, Hamlin Garland’s view of the pleasure grounds of the upper Mississippi charts the tilted economies recasting the landscape, including recreational motoring.³² Glorying in the experience of motoring around this picturesque region, “notwithstanding the uncertainties of the highway,” Garland delights in “whizzing about the country on the auto-car.” While narrating his tour and impressionistically portraying scenery, he reminds his readers that commercial interests (mining, lumber, and shipping) threaten the splendor of the region; yet, he avows, it luckily remains as picturesque as when it was inhabited by the Sioux and Chippewa. As he rides, he speculates that motor touring “should go to heal the trouble and unrest of thousands” suffering in the city. He concludes by predicting, “with growing wealth and greater leisure the new generation are certain to develop every one of the esthetic capabilities of this region. Another generation will listen with unbelieving ears to the tales of the wigwam and the canoe, the sawmill and the boom.” Thus, in emphasizing the modes of use that have shaped modern Minnesota, Garland invokes the conservation arguments of the early century to call for the preservation of the area for educational and recreational purposes. Without a hint of irony, he argues for conservation by making the area accessible to motorcars, all while passing completely over the violent settler displacement of the Native people. Garland’s essay stands in contrast with the closing chapters of Eastman’s From Deep Woods to Civilization, wherein, after assimilating to colonial culture and enjoying a lifetime of travel in a series of careers, Eastman poignantly and perhaps self-contradictorily savors “the sweet roving instinct of the wild that took forcible hold” of him as he explored “the true virgin wilderness, the final refuge” where settler civilization is still held “at bay.”³³ Even in contrast, as Garland and Eastman labor to put a brave, progressive face on destructive trends that they themselves participate in instantiating, they illustrate the aesthetic and material activities that produce a vernacular landscape of automobility.

Similar progressive contradictions surrounded the private construction of the country’s first attempt at a transcontinental automobile road, the Lincoln Highway, which itself contributed to the formulation of modernity’s landscape. Senator Boies Penrose of Pennsylvania gushed over it in 1915:

I look to see a time when people from all over the United States will travel this magnificent Lincoln Highway: when it will be considered that an American has not completed his education until he makes a trip on that thoroughfare.³⁴

Barely a line on a map, this roadway became a lightning rod of Good Roads activists, and, in a peculiar reinvention of the cuvee system, volunteers busily graded sections, school children made and erected mile-markers to help navigation, and women’s clubs planted trees along it.³⁵ Given this context, the Senator’s words bond notions of aesthetics, resource materialism, and patriotic edification to the real effort of citizens upon the material body of the road while reinforcing a settler colonial mindset that excludes particular travelers.³⁶ These values, these ways of seeing the landscape, justify building the road. Proponents imbued the Lincoln Highway with a panoply of progressive notions, which even before any of the road was actually built, were already changing the way people thought about the landscape. Pedestrian, resort-style appreciation of American scenery began to pale in people’s minds. Free roaming autonomy, independent effort, and education, the Lincoln Highway promoters argued, were woven together by the road to elevate the character of travelers. Choosing to accept such justifications, Americans began to make the road and take to the road, thereby altering political structures and manipulating the environment to produce the automobility landscape.

2.2 The Road Organizes a Genre

With narrative as a key catalyst in transforming the shared landscape, adaptations of physical space track with formal innovations in narrating spatial experience, evolving a new genre of travel narrative. Defining the generic boundaries of road story proves daunting, however. Ronald Primeau characterizes the challenge succinctly:

The central problem of genre study remains classification and definition without reduction. Even if we avoid the prescriptive trap and realize that genre rules evolve so they can be used (and broken) creatively, there is still the danger of isolating the genre in tidy categories that seal it off from the community and culture. The road narrative evolves not just as a generic combination of earlier patterns—no matter how innovative the modifications might be—but because the genre thrives in a culture where writers and readers share clearly articulated literary techniques to question, reaffirm, and explore who they are and where they are going.³⁷

Kris Lackey has similarly argued, “any taxonomy” of road stories “will be troubled by a surfeit of grounds for comparing them.”³⁸ Nevertheless, critics have endeavored to locate useful frameworks for organizing and describing road stories. Rowland Sherrill deploys the picaresque to analyze later twentieth-century road narratives’ response to “social and cultural upheaval.”³⁹ Deborah Paes De Barros characterizes road narratives by women as activating “nomadic consciousness” to resist systemic patriarchal conscription.⁴⁰ Expansively examining film, fiction, television, and even videogames, Katie Mills organizes the “intermedia” of road narrative around the idea of a “genre of rebellion,” which Neil Archer has taken up to argue that such genre reinvention illustrates those ways domineering cultural prescriptions can be challenged.⁴¹ Anne Brigham critiques the myth of escape in the road genre, illuminating the ways it inevitably engages “social tensions.” She maintains that in road trips, and the stories told about them, Americans “participate in imagining, recreating, and interrogating the term and terms of mobility.”⁴² All of these approaches can be usefully seen as reflecting Primeau’s framework of “genre memory,” an extension of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of genre and heteroglossia, which is the idea that narratives achieve much of their dramatic energy by syncretizing the clash of diverse discourse registers. Primeau sketches road-genre memory as the set of conventions that have annealed over time, through iteration and reiteration, and ultimately enable road story to become “richly polyphonic.” Emphasizing the popularity of road narrative, he elaborates: “A genre’s memory stores not only the literary conventions but also the social and cultural factors that bring about their expression. The road narrative has evolved into a socially constructed vision of a community defining itself in motion.”⁴³ Road narrative simultaneously integrates a multiplicity of voices within (but not entirely beholden to) definite social contexts, and it is useful as a vehicle of social critique but is open itself to critique through parody. Genre, then, represents the interchange between collectively conceived experience and the built landscape, which conforms to patterns but is never homogenous and always contested.

Beyond Primeau’s synthesis, Mikhael Bakhtin’s ideas are further useful for thinking about road narrative if also coupled with his theories of spatial representation within genre—his concept of chronotope. In short, chronotope provides a granular way of charting the patterns of plot turns against locations within narratives to index the resonances of cultural beliefs and social priorities in genres. That is, chronotope is the sense of intersection between time and space that is generated by narrative texts, giving the literature of an era and a people distinct formal characteristics. More than setting, chronotope represents all those ways that narratives reflect the matrix of beliefs and experiences that tie people, places, and events together into a meaningful fabric of interaction and exchange. In other words, a people’s understanding of their place in the world will be inflected in the way they organize the telling of their stories, the sorts of adventures that come to be told, and the way they represent their world to themselves. Chronotopes, then, register the way narratives formulate, define, and give meaning to lived time in a definite space of action. In a word, we might say that chronotopes inform vernacular landscapes by organizing their scale and depth in narrative form.⁴⁴ This idea may be inflected in Anne Brigham’s assertion that “the road narrative seems to represent a form that is characteristically, perhaps uniquely, American in the way that it explicitly links the road with a larger national ideal of freedom” and “matches, and even enacts, its thematic focus on movement.”⁴⁵

Bakhtin confined himself to the analysis of literary texts, but he hinted that all narrative types generate patterns of action in conceived space. Following his logic, then, it is useful to assemble and compare the features of various modes of writing that depict a similar activity like travel. For instance, a novel, a poem, a newspaper report, a memoir, and a political speech that all feature travel may invoke comparable generic assumptions and strategies. To illustrate, a contrast of the formal features in depictions of railroad and motor-road travel from the same location reveals concrete differences in the way travel was being experienced and written. Over the Range to the Golden Gate, by Stanley Wood and C. E. Hooper (1904), casts the journey by rail through the California sierras as promising awesome panorama for travelers to appreciate. The highlight is the view from Siskiyou Station. A passage describing the vista situates the reader as implied “viewer” standing on the station platform:

This is the summit of the range, and the highest point on the line, being 4,135 feet above the level of the sea. The mountain view from this point of vantage is indescribably magnificent. To the east is the Cascade Range, extending to the north full for four hundred miles; to the northeast is Mount Pitt, while farther on are Mounts Scott, Threlson, and Diamond Peak—monarchs of the Cascades. To the west are the peaks of the Siskiyou and Coast ranges; to the south are the two sisters, Mount Lassen, and above all imperial Shasta rears his head. Lakes, rivers, valleys lie spread out before us like a map; and in a word, for variety, grandeur, beauty, and extent, this view has no equal on the continent.⁴⁶

The travelers hardly leave the train. They remain on the station platform, letting the scene work on them. Described predominantly with being verbs, the scenic features become the actors in an impressive but static and inaccessible landscape. Viewers merely follow the lay of the land from a distant stationary point. By contrast, in Transcontinental Trip in a Ford (1915), authors George Stevens and James Larmer detail more active engagement with the landscape:

It was a bright sunshiny morning and the air was pure and cool and the best day for motoring we have had on the trip and the most picturesque route. You never know what real motoring is until you cross the Siskiyou Range in California. First you find yourself down on the sea level among a swift flowing stream of pure water, and next, you are climbing a grade, around short curves, amidst wild roses and occasionally a busy little mountain stream gushing out from the side, and you look down on the tops of the tall pines as you ascend the mountains. Looking out through an open space in a bed of flowers you see snow capped mountains. It is certainly a beautiful sight and to appreciate it you have to take the trip. Occasionally you stop beside a little mountain stream and pick a few flowers while your motor is cooling off.⁴⁷

Whereas for Wood and Hooper, the generalized you is an utterly inactive observer, for Stevens and Larmer the generalized you is crossing the range, climbing hills, looking at vistas, ascending a ridge, experiencing the views, and picking the flowers. Both depictions of the Siskiyou purport to be nonliterary, yet they differ in that from the train station the viewer looks at the scene as though surveying a map or a painting and on the road the viewer is an active participant in a living landscape.

Early twentieth-century American road writers ventured and in time established new travel-narrative conventions based on experiments with automobility. Travel is presented in active rather than passive grammar. The shape of the interlude between destinations shifts as narratives shift from carriage, horse, and rail to bicycle and motor. Additionally, the “speed” of events is increased. Sarah Orne Jewett’s Country of Pointed Firs, in which a drive to a family reunion is punctuated by stops to investigate and collect flora, parallels Charles Chesnutt’s conjure stories, where carriage excursions provide opportunities to expound on local history and gossip.⁴⁸ In American Indian Stories by Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Bonin), slow walking between the sunflowers crowding the reservation road beneath new telegraph poles that signal settler encroachment stirs her to sympathy.⁴⁹ These examples contrast with the famous bicyclist Karl Kron’s obsessions with road surfaces and travel distances; they clash with the blurring scenery and rumble of the car that lulls Theodore Dreiser into dreamy meditation in A Hoosier Holiday.⁵⁰ Cyclists and motorists become impatient, anxious to arrive at a destination or move on to the next town, to get back on the road. They become impulsive, changing their plans, routes, and destinations regularly when confronted with weather, detours, or unanticipated opportunities. The new stories register road conditions, relish in shop-talk, comment on ephemera like advertising and directional signage, and they willfully ignore realities to pursue and embrace romantic notions of the American West, revising the potent American mythos of the voyage of discovery, Manifest Destiny, pioneerism, and the patriotic colonial ideology of reaching a promised land.⁵¹ They celebrate scenic grandeur and regional climates as having sublime influence on individuals. The road rejuvenates travelers by providing escape from modern social pressures such as conventions of decorum or the ills of the city. Finally, the road-as-life metaphor, which was central to Bakhtin’s conceptualization of genre, is often a template for the life of the nation itself, and drivers move to identify (and exclude) as citizens. Notwithstanding the ambitiously progressive rhetoric that dominates turn-of-the-century road narratives, depictions of obstacles, difficulties, dubiousness, and general ambivalence over the new geography also create opportunities to register misgivings, frustrations, and even protest. At times, the road is characterized as a contested space where travelers dispute competing ways of using and sharing the land. Finally, the road gets drawn into discussions of national aspiration and disappointment, and road writing all too frequently becomes an occasion to catalogue both national accomplishments and shortcomings.

2.3 The Road Conditions Popular Consent

Road narratives in America participate in the fabrication of identities within a complex of social relationships while outlining prospective frameworks of participation, geography, and land use based on mobility. Rudy Koshar has demonstrated that interacting with any road system constitutes “a semiotic act, an effort at negotiating meaning through the use of a shared code.”⁵² In this way, road stories and automobility mutually constitute one another, which is precisely why it is crucial to closely examine the emergence of both the genre and the concrete highway as coeval constructs. Raymond Williams has characterized any historical moment as being composed of multiple approaches to “political and cultural practices”—simply living life in a world shared with others in economic (and ecological) relationships. Certain frameworks exert general dominance over the majority of people’s lives, others are legacies of previous modes that persist and are tolerated by the dominant mode, while a third category represents new possibilities—residual, dominant, and emergent social formations.⁵³ This formulation of the process by which dominant sociocultural structures evolve and cohere is an extension of the foundational work of Antonio Gramsci, who detailed the way that individuals are prone to “spontaneously consent” to the fundamental expectations of dominant social trends. This, however, should not be seen as merely passive acceptance of either hierarchical preferences or things as they are. The emphasis on spontaneity is critical. Gramsci elaborates, every person “contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought.” Thus, through processes of “participation in practical life” every individual exerts influence on “specific conditions… specific social relations… [and] general social relations,” participating in a sort of “common sense” coercion “effected by public opinion.” Forms of representation, including narrative, whether explicitly political or not, may, he argues, “contribute to the strengthening of specific political currents,” which must look something like “a whole complex of molecular processes.”⁵⁴ Williams clarifies such molecular processes by describing cultural forms as mediating the experience of material conditions and formulating innovative possibilities for how life might be lived differently. Modern automobility, characterized first by the demand for improved roads by cyclists and farmers and then later by motorists, represents an emergent social formation that has attained exceeding dominance since the early twentieth century, replacing the once dominant rail system as an organizer of national space, and road stories featuring a predictable cast of representative subject positions have served as a crucial vehicle in forging collective consent to participate in this landscape.

Stephen Greenblatt’s theory of cultural poetics buttresses this model in the way that it traces the circulation of “social energy,” shedding light on the granular historical processes by which customs attain meaning. Defined as “the collective making of distinct cultural practices,” social energy enacts the collective negotiation and persuasion that galvanize into custom.⁵⁵ Rhetorical theorist Carolyn Miller similarly argues that patterns in genre coalesce through “recurrence,” an “intersubjective phenomenon” of making meaning energized by rehearsing familiar verbal patterns in evolving social situations.⁵⁶ Gramsci described the same process as “passive revolution,” a series of “molecular changes which in fact progressively modify the preexisting composition of forces, and hence become the matrix of new changes,” which is why the element of spontaneity is central to his model.⁵⁷ Thinking through genre, Miller explains, “we learn to adopt social motives as ways of satisfying private intentions through rhetorical action.”⁵⁸ In Greenblatt’s mind, cultural narratives ride on waves of social energy, circulating through a society by means of material and symbolic exchanges, influencing and inspiring participants through repetition and reinforcement. Social energy can be traced, therefore, by its effects, its ability “to organize collective physical and mental experiences” such as journeys, genres, or landscapes.⁵⁹

The idea of social energy might be analogous to a conversation where certain ways of thinking and representing experience gather concord through exchange and repetition.⁶⁰ This parallels the concept of genre memory, which, Bakhtin argues and Primeau maintains, is dialogic, meaning that multiple chronotopes, to invoke that term again, may be in play in any given text, interacting with and competing against one another.⁶¹ Kris Lackey has argued that charting genre is no mere taxonomic exercise; rather, historicizing the road genre exposes the pressures that “ideological prejudice” can “exert on the trajectory of road perception” while simultaneously revealing the ways that such “mental habits are veiled” within formal conventions.⁶² So, the road genre, like all genres, is predictably intertextual with the whole range of active society’s symbolic codes, a point made by Roman Kabelik.⁶³ Moreover, Lackey’s contention regarding the road genre’s coercive properties underscores the necessity of making the effort to parse, categorize, and interpret them closely and critically. Because narratives cobble together and allude to a variety of voices, grammars, images, and themes reiterated intertextually from a variety of sources, they reflect the residual, dominant, and emergent desires, anxieties, and dreams of the people, gathering consensus and exerting powers of inclusion and exclusion. So, turn-of-the-twentieth-century road stories draw on earlier geographies, adapting residual and dominant geographic narratives to a variety of new travel activities and experiences. Indeed, twentieth-century American road narratives inherit all the Western geographic, travel, quest, and adventure genres, particularly the exercise of discrimination, domination, and displacement inherent in colonial practices, and they draw those traditions through dominant popular consent into the forms, grammars, and vocabularies of the modern era.

The novel Professor How Could You (1922), by Harry Leon Wilson, provides one example of the circulation of social energy and reflects spontaneous individual (re)mediation of spatial relationships. The novel follows a midwestern professor who simply wanders away from his life one afternoon. Trusting to happenstance to escape the bafflements of his privileged, bourgeois life in a car, Wilson’s professor exclaims, “straight into the west our dusty gray road led us. And assuredly beyond, though yet invisible, were those Rocky Mountains whose noble crags had so long beckoned me on.”⁶⁴ This passage anticipates Kerouac’s On the Road and echoes Mark Twain’s Roughing It, as Wilson’s professor becomes an unlikely and Quixotic pioneer setting out for the frontier, romanticizing, appropriating, exploiting, and displacing Native cultures.⁶⁵ Parodically evoking Horace Greeley’s directive, “Go West young man, and grow up with the country,” the novel ironically draws the settler colonial ideology of Manifest Destiny into a new mobility paradigm. For Wilson’s staid professor, who winds up costumed in Native American garb as part of a snake oil scheme, all that’s needed is a little dumb luck, an automobile, and the assumption of Native trappings to play out the freewheeling adventure that supposedly characterizes the American West, while, of course, his efforts are ultimately a deliberate farce. Upon returning home, he is scolded for his absent-minded inconsiderateness, and the absurd association between rough pioneering and modern galivanting is satirically disclosed, which underscores the discriminatory myopia that has gone too often uninterrogated in both Twain’s deprecations and Kerouac’s ironically self-conscious enthusiasm.

Borrowings and repetitions like Wilson’s lace familiar tropes into modern road narratives, providing a familiar genre and ideological foundation upon which the enormous infrastructural commitment of automobility could be imagined and evaluated by wary citizens, sometimes favorably, but as often quite anxiously. In this case, Wilson’s mordant road story suggests that the various sorts of road-travel imagery that circulated through the public sphere between 1893 and 1921 created a multivalent cultural paradox by which Americans believed that a road system existed and yet were continuously surprised to find that the roads they followed did not comfortably lead them to places that they thought they wanted to go. Through frequent repetition, even such paradox contributed to generating the social energy necessary to give infrastructure reform an urgency it would have otherwise lacked while also implicitly acknowledging persistent misgivings surrounding the entire enterprise.⁶⁶

2.4 The Road Spurs Mobility

Notwithstanding America’s periodic political grandstanding around infrastructure compromises, it is easy to see why the material road goes so easily taken for granted. As we drive, the road itself disappears continually into its own function—mobility. Nevertheless, the fundamental nature of the road in interlacing mobility systems cannot be understated, and substantial new scholarship is being committed to examinations of mobility as a category of modern human activity, as John Urry has documented.⁶⁷ Echoing Lefebvre’s critique of produced space, Urry confirms that mass mobility today has developed into a form of capital rooted in deep and abiding ideological assumptions that demand scrutiny. The system of automobility, enabled as it is by far-reaching road networks, has attracted so much attention because it commands a predominant and increasing influence around the world and in the United States in particular.

Tim Cresswell has succinctly defined mobility as “socially produced motion” that is practiced, experienced, and embodied as an empirical reality that unfolds in dynamic interaction with varieties of cultural representation. Like Urry, Cresswell’s formulation also repeats Henri Lefebvre’s model of socially produced space, where mobility is not a mere abstraction but a social creation that accrues significance and value through the active participation of social groups. He explains, “human movement is made meaningful in social and cultural contexts,” because the differential mobilities afforded to various social groups have material consequences.⁶⁸ As Joanna Latimer and Rolland Munro formulate it, “driving, as a form of incorporation, elicits particular kinds of relations and ways of being in the world” that once established are practically impossible to escape.⁶⁹ Roman Kabelik relates this premise to representation, stating, “Discursive forms of mobility are cultural practices that make movements meaningful under systems of power.”⁷⁰ Illustrating this, Cresswell outlines the influence of the law on the “production of meanings for mobility, as well as the practices of mobility that such meanings authorize or prohibit” through the “threat of force.” By describing mobility as a social construction produced within “conditions of systematically asymmetrical power relations,” Cresswell subverts the dominant notion that mobility is a natural right afforded by the technology of the automobile.⁷¹ In this, Cresswell and Urry are joined by a host of researchers energetically asserting that, given the accelerating pace of climate change driven in no small measure by technologies of mobility predominantly located in the developed world, it becomes increasingly critical to question both informal and official logics used to justify mobility paradigms. Lynne Pearce and Peter Merriman have shown that archival work and textual analyses play an important role in dismantling received ideologies of mobility, which, following Steffen Böhm, Campbell Jones, Matthew Paterson, and others, can help clear the ground for more deliberately critical decision-making processes for adapting mobility investments, technologies, and practices for an uncertain future.⁷²

To illustrate, with both automobility and Max Weber in mind, John Urry has described the car as “the literal ‘iron cage’ of modernity.”⁷³ However, archives of the early history of travel in automobiles show just how uncertain and yet desirable mechanically assisted autonomous mobility was for enthusiastic early adopters. Lacking both infrastructure and maps, early motorists experimented with a great variety of approaches to navigating national space. Because the railroads connected station to station, extant roads radiated out from depot towns but too infrequently connected in between, and both farmers and road tourists consequently found distance travel exceedingly expensive and difficult. Useful maps were scarce, and they were so because they had been unnecessary. For instance, an 1887 promotional brochure for a tour published by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company Tourist Agency advertises beautiful scenery and pleasurable excursions in highly embellished, informative prose, yet no map shows the routes of the journey.⁷⁴ By contrast, an 1893 report in Bicycling World represents cyclists’ desire for usable maps, lauding the efforts of the United States geological survey that will eventually “show the topographical features of the entire surface of the country,” including “highway systems.”⁷⁵ The article urges cyclists to pressure Congress to extend funding to complete the survey despite concerns over its cost. By voicing the need for maps that could help travelers navigate routes between destinations, cyclists were working at the intersection of behavior, administration, and representation to produce a new social space, a new mobility-based landscape.

Motorists followed suit. In 1903, Hrolf Wisby would recommend laying tracing paper over geological surveys to draw road maps that could be rolled around a pair of dowels and set into a glass-topped box so that a driver could turn one dowel and keep the pertinent portions of the improvised map visible while driving.⁷⁶ In another telling example, the 1903 Automobile Club of America map of the Hudson River region affects a very detailed, authoritative, and convincing appearance; however, small print on the cover admits that the map is based on outdated geological surveys, making it impossible, “without an actual survey to compile an accurate map.”⁷⁷ Similarly, the 1915 Motor Age map of the Lincoln Highway confidently depicts the route of the Lincoln Highway and several other named trails; yet, while Emily Post is contemplating a coast-to-coast drive a friend warns her that the line drawn on those maps is “an imaginary line, like the equator.”⁷⁸ Like cyclists, motorists quickly learned to distrust maps that represented every road as equally viable.

To complicate matters, asking directions of locals could not be any less helpful than a bad map. Hrolf Wisby’s self-made maps obviated the necessity of “consulting ‘people you meet,’ who, as a rule, don’t know any more about the country they live in than the average New Yorker knows about New York.” J.M. Murdock provides a telling example of exactly this problem with his 1908 cross-country trip. The map he had tried to use was a popular, pocket-sized reduction of geological survey maps that turned out to be useless, compelling him to ask directions. Not surprisingly, all trace of the road he was advised to follow disappeared, and he became desperately lost.⁷⁹ The travails of his narrative are offered as an appeal to build a system of connected, marked, and mapped roads, advancing the production of automobility by stressing the relationship between roads, maps, signs, and machines.

Experiences like those of Wisby and Murdock detail the challenges that travelers confronted due to a lack of centralized administration. Given realities on the ground, such as unreliable maps, poorly marked roads, and questionable local informants, other methods of navigation would become necessary. One solution, exemplified by the official Road Book of the Michigan Division, League of American Wheelmen, is a pocket-sized catalog of cycling routes around Michigan that work against the central-place logic of the rail-depot landscape by offering textual (rather than graphic) descriptions of trips in a tourism network. Typical directions read, “Leave Detroit via Michigan Avenue, and continue on this road direct to Ypsilanti. From Ypsilanti take toll road to Saline. From Saline, follow the telephone poles to Tecumseh.” Cyclists are cautioned to watch for trains when riding railroad tracks.⁸⁰ Such textual descriptions of routes and landmarks would have been preferable to maps, and information compiled by an affiliated group like the LAW would be far more reliable than local informants unaccustomed to such travel. Later, automobile guides followed this pattern, which is hardly surprising considering that the first popular road guide for motorists, the Blue Book, was originally produced by the Columbia Press, affiliated with Albert Pope’s Columbia brand cycles before the company took up building electric cars. In time, innovations on the textual guidebook were developed to make navigation more manageable for motorists. For example, the White Steamer Company included pictures of turns and landmarks alongside textual directions (Fig. 2.4). In their 1907 guidebook, Rand McNally condensed the textual directions, charting routes picture by picture. The 1910 AAA Tour Book tried to standardize an easily recognizable symbology for common directions like left, right, fork, uphill, curve, follow telegraph lines, and so forth. Employing an array of models, tourists and entrepreneurs devised various methods for navigating a tour while driving or riding. The Baldwin Auto Guide was a device that bolted onto the steering wheel of a motorcar with a wire connecting to an odometer on the front axle. A scroll connected to the odometer would turn as the car moved through the route, raising into view the most pertinent and immediate directions (Fig. 2.5). Similarly, the Jones Live Map arranged textual directions around a disk that rotated with the odometer, bringing directions under the driver’s eye at the appropriate moment (Fig. 2.6). In 1906, Scientific American published notice of a similar device in which a map would scroll along mechanically to keep the driver abreast of impending landmarks (Fig. 2.7). These various navigation strategies show road travelers developing touring practices while publishers and engineers endeavored to overcome skepticism and foster faith in touring by organizing and representing practicable touring experiences while advocating for sturdy, interconnected roads.⁸¹

Fig. 2.4

White Steamer Company Route Book of 1907, interspersing textual directions with images of turns and landmarks. Image courtesy of the New York Public Library

Fig. 2.5

Baldwin Autoguide navigation device. Image courtesy of Automotive History Collection, Detroit Public Library

Fig. 2.6

Jones Live-Map advertisement. Image reproduced by author courtesy of the National Automotive History Collection, Detroit Public Library

Fig. 2.7

“Automobile Road Indicator” advertisement navigation devices, Scientific American (February 17, 1906), 155. Image reproduced by author from original

Such activities reflect the ways that negotiations contributed incrementally over time, trip by trip and narrative by narrative, to a shared conception of prospective mobility, out of which new infrastructures and geographies could be assembled. The textual directions helped travelers navigate an unmarked route, which they could not visualize, by one course and only one course. Missing a turn, a driver could end up hopelessly lost. A survey map, by contrast, might show multiple possible routes, but if the driver guilelessly followed an overestimated route, then what amounted to a prominent ink line on the map could easily peter out in a quagmire, hopelessly stranding them. Taken together, these maps, guidebooks, and narratives produced ideations of desirable road-travel experiences that eventually crystalized into public capital investment in infrastructure, carriage, and routing technologies. Moreover, changes in the rituals and representations of travel translated into demand for political leaders and engineers to address discrepancies between the prospective and the actual landscape. In the century since, lines marking roads take prominence over all other kinds of information on the maps that most Americans regularly use, such as the National Highway Association road map cited earlier, and including digital navigation systems, because the American people have consented to cede the road a dominant position in their experience of space, and these early attempts to narrate and chart this space in a way that could be used by the average citizen shed light on the creation of that defining social system of mobility.

2.5 The Road Commands Immobility

The American road, as the basis of a far-reaching mobility system, conditions people to particular relationships to the national landscape and the greater social whole, yet it should not be assumed that the road has been experienced equally by everybody it unites.⁸² Differential conditions of privilege, opportunity, access, surveillance, and law enforcement have historically defined disparities in how, where, and why Americans of different classes and demographic experiences travel. Tim Cresswell, for one, has observed, “the way people are enabled or constrained in terms of their mobile practices differs markedly according to their position in social hierarchies.” He elaborates:

The production of mobilities is an activity that occurs in a context of social and cultural difference within a systematically asymmetrical field of power. Mobility as a social and cultural resource gets distributed unevenly and in interconnected ways. One theme that connects mobilities, in other words, is not essential similarity, but the role mobility plays in the differentiation of society.

So stating, he sharply underscores the “social justice” perspective on the social construction of mobility.⁸³ Numerous mobility scholars have made this generalization more specific, noting that the generic profile of the American traveler is white, male, and heterosexual, which affirms that historical privileging “does real violence by occluding the diverse plurality of subjects through which mobilities become enacted,” a point that Peter Merriman advances, averring that automobility commingles “racialized, gendered, sexualized, nationalized, globalized, and localized processes and narratives of exclusion and inclusion, stereotyping and identity formation.”⁸⁴ Deborah Clarke maintains, “Cars do more than reflect American identity. Cars can determine a kind of American citizenship. Particularly for those perceived as outside of the mainstream based on race, class, gender, and ethnicity.”⁸⁵ Christof Mauch and Thomas Zeller succinctly state that roads are commonly a space of “social discrimination,” a fact that is particularly evident in the United States, which Rudy Koshar develops: “the automobile and suburbia aided whites’ persistent efforts (already widespread before the age of cars) to isolate themselves from blacks, immigrants, and blue-collar workers” such that “highways and roads served not only to link driving with the intense commodification of daily life but also with social and racial segregation.”⁸⁶ Obviously, both mobilities and immobilities are socially manufactured. In fact, much of the history of American roads has counterintuitively been as much a story about exclusion from or control over the destinations and the means of people’s travel as it has of freedom, access, and possibility.⁸⁷

For American automobility as it was being propounded then (and as it exists today) to even be possible, vast tracts of land had to be cleared of sovereign native nations and communities. Populations and entire ways of life had to be relegated to constrained territories of mind and place so that the way could be cleared for settlers who could then wish for and actualize free and convenient mobility for themselves, and this is not a process that concluded with the so-called Indian Wars in the 1890s.⁸⁸ The automobility system has played no small role in solidifying settler control over great swaths of sovereign tribal land. Lorenzo Veracini has mapped out the ways that settler populations will modify the landscape, arguing as they do that they are making “improvements” to cover what ultimately amounts to regimes of violent coercion and assimilation.⁸⁹ Walter Hixson references the same process, explaining, “Settler colonialism emerges in the context of nation building. Constructions, hierarchies, and inclusions and exclusions pertaining to race, class, gender, religion, and nation enable settler communities to cohere.”⁹⁰ Applying the same premise, Georgine Clarson concludes, “Essential to settler colonialism is both the potential and actual capacity of newcomers to roam as sovereign subjects across the territories they claim as their own and, conversely, to deny, circumscribe and control the mobilities of indigenous populations.”⁹¹ So to tie this back to narrative, it is important to note, as Veracini puts it, “settler colonialism persists in the remarkable success of settler colonial popular narratives” and “metaphors we live by.”⁹² Walter Hixson, similarly, maintains that “distortion and denial” are integral to settler colonial histories as they legitimate the displacement of indigenous histories and populations.⁹³ Road narratives, accordingly, participate in circulating the justifications and apologias for settler colonial power and privilege, particularly when displacements of indigenous peoples and the overriding of indigenous sovereignties are not directly but rather implicitly referenced and present themselves as traces of ambivalence, such as in the Hamlin Garland and Harry Leon Wilson texts cited previously.

In another example, the narrative of Oglala Sioux spiritual leader Black Elk, as rendered by John G. Neihardt, represents roads in a variety of ways, first as “great roads” interconnecting a spiritual landscape with the material landscape and uniting the Sioux people even as they are harried year by year into ever tighter circuits of reservation by the United States Army. In later chapters, Black Elk’s sense of helplessness is displaced into new regions as he recounts deeply disorienting travel by train and steam ship throughout America and Europe as an at least partially reluctant performing stereotype with Bill Cody’s Wild West show, with his movements being paternally coordinated and constrained by white circus organizers. Then at the end of the text, Black Elk leads Neihardt to Harney Peak—now Black Elk Peak—in South Dakota, to demonstrate to him the communion between the Sioux spiritual and material worlds. Neihardt’s text reports that the trip “was arranged and a few days later we were there,” never mentioning that the party drove there.⁹⁴ Presumably, in Neihardt’s mind representing Black Elk as smartly making decisions about his own travel with the performance troupe and willingly joining in a road trip of pilgrimage would clash with the portrait of a noble, fallen people he was so carefully cultivating. Implicitly, against the backdrop of a fading relationship to the landscape, any mobility Black Elk might enjoy can only be fostered by generous and sympathetic white handlers.

In addition, American mobility has historically been contingent upon the foreclosure of African American travelers from the privilege of access to places and infrastructures of mobility through everything from customs of unwelcome to Jim Crow segregation laws to the blatant terrorism of sunset towns. Before the turn of the century, the call to travel as an exercise of freedom for formerly enslaved people came under attack, especially in the South, where any person of color, a stranger particularly, could be implicated in any crime, usually the conveniently malleable charge of vagrancy, and set to work on convict-lease farms or chain gangs or, far worse, brutally lynched.⁹⁵ Mia Bay firmly observes, “American identity has long been defined by mobility and the freedom of the open road, but African Americans have never fully shared in that freedom.”⁹⁶ Michael Ra-Shon Hall describes this discrimination as the paradox of freedom and confinement that Black Americans experience as “racial, ethnic, and gendered restrictions and impasses to their free movement.”⁹⁷ So because roads and mobility, exercised as a form of capital, were not planned or built inclusively, legalized structures of immobilization have operated as active strategies of marginalization and disenfranchisement. Whereas certain privileged travelers may enjoy encouragement and even the expectation to participate in almost frictionless ease of passage and breadth of access, as Paul Gilroy has illustrated, many intersectionally determined identities have often faced varieties of opportunity disadvantage, discouragement, closures, intimidation, or outright terrorism that constrain or curtail movement.⁹⁸

Even though African Americans did travel through the turn of the century, published travel narratives by Black writers are all too rare, a glaring absence.⁹⁹ What is extant reveals a pattern. Throughout the 1890s, The Christian Recorder, a black newspaper, published travel accounts, mostly by clergy visiting religious conferences. They detail the various ways that the writers stood up to the indignities of shifting state-by-state laws under the Jim Crown regime.¹⁰⁰ Following suit in the early twentieth century, The Crisis, edited by W. E. B. Dubois, frequently represented travel and did occasionally include road narratives. In the summer of 1914, for instance, DuBois himself devoted multiple articles to a national tour taken by train. The difficulties of Jim Crow restrictions are detailed, and the focus of the articles is not surprisingly on evidence of black prosperity in Western cities during the Great Migration. Notably, photographs in “Colored California” depict “Colored Los Angeles” turning out in motorcars to greet “The Crisis.” The article references a brief but enjoyable leisure tour, but the overall focus remains African American achievement despite Jim Crow, and unlike dominant narratives, it never drills down into problems with roads or makes appeals to build roads. In the summer of 1912 and again in 1916, The Crisis published features on vacationing. Both articles dilate on the fact that African Americans hardly have the time or resources to travel, and when they do they are met with discrimination at every turn. An “evening car ride” is referenced, but the actuality of motor vacations is at best implied but not detailed in any way in “Vacation Days” and “Idlewild,” the strong implication being, given the social context, that road travel of any kind must be undertaken very carefully: “for persons of modest income who must, therefore, stay near home and at the same time avoid the ever-recurring race discrimination it is a puzzling query as to what to do with vacations.”¹⁰¹ Both of these articles recommend patronizing specific, black-owned facilities, anticipating Victor Green’s Green Book by 40 years. Of course, Dubois was not alone in his representation of travel. Ida B. Wells Barnett, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and other African American citizens traveled widely. Nevertheless, before the 1920s their writing about travel experiences concentrates on confronting Jim Crow and combatting the scourge of tacitly acceptable violence against Black communities.¹⁰² In his multi-genre analysis of America’s racial divide, Darkwater, Dubois develops this theme and forcefully illustrates the disincentives to travel experienced by African Americans during the nadir of race relations in America with a strained snippet of dialogue. When obtusely questioned, “Why don’t black folks travel,” the answer, silently reflecting on the manifold indignities and dangers, is, too politely, “No… We don’t travel much.”¹⁰³

In a final example, the renowned Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay accompanied two white friends on a tour of New Jersey, but they were prevented from taking any rest because no place would serve them as a party, and numerous such examples can be traced through the twentieth century, such as Isabel Wilkerson’s depiction of Robert Forster’s Harrowing drive West to California, Martin Luther King’s pointed reference to sleeping in cars when traveling for lack of accommodation, down to the present-day patterns of harassment and violence inflicted on black drivers.¹⁰⁴ Any reference to automobility as a universal right of access rooted in national essence or technological fate, rather than a protected and policed privilege, ignores America’s painful history of these exclusions and impositions. The salient point here is that both the energy and the reasoning of the Good Roads Movement that predated the mass embrace of petroleum-based automobility was advanced on arguments of the ultimate benefits to all of improved roads and mobility; however, with very few exceptions, the archival record of road narrative is all but completely dominated by privileged white men and to a lesser extent privileged white women. It is a pivotal fact that the Good Roads movement coincides with and excludes the Great Migration, the early Civil Rights efforts against Jim Crow and the social terrorism of lynching, as well as settler encroachment on Native reservation lands. Not the marginalization but the near total absence of Indigenous, African, and Asian perspectives on road travel in popular circulation through the turn of the twentieth century amounts to a silencing that resonates at least as loudly as the clamor from the era about the possibilities of road travel. John Culbert pointedly remarks, “narratives can dramatize structuring absences,” and “those foreclosed narratives include displacements of native populations by differently mobile colonial settlers, waves of immigrant populations of various classes and different fortunes, and the emergence of mass popular culture, mechanized travel, and the rise of the modern tourist industry, all of which can only be glimpsed in the margins.”¹⁰⁵ While outspoken white supremacists actually proposed outlawing African Americans from driving or actually building a segregated road system, moderate and even accepting proponents of the democratic possibilities of automobility will reveal, particularly in their silence, the understanding that in practice mobility in America did not rise to inclusivity or conform to their ideals, but they still went everywhere they wanted to go, trusting, evidently, to time to sort the issue out.¹⁰⁶ It obviously has not. The overwhelming conclusion to be drawn is that the paucity of published travel narratives by minoritized citizens from the early era of automobility reflects multidimensional systemic impediments to inclusion in conversations defining American life and culture, including work and wage discrimination, exclusion from essential service facilities, as well as opportunities to join the public sphere through both travel and access to literacy education and publishing.

2.6 The Road Composes Ambivalent Subjectivities

Naturally, through time and use, iteration and circulation, the American road story would settle into predictable patterns featuring a regular cadre of character types. Miller maintains that genre represents a form of social knowledge rooted in shared notions of exigence that results in stable character types with which people identify through processes of interpretation and repetition.¹⁰⁷ Bakhtin, likewise, suggests that the grounding of a people’s narratives in historical experience will necessitate the recurrence of character types that define genres of national literatures.¹⁰⁸ Katie Mills has similarly observed that road stories become “a pop cultural forum for imagining a fluid self” relating to the social whole.¹⁰⁹ Automobility composes subjective experiences that are “all or in part conditioned by the knowledges they develop and enact.”¹¹⁰ Unsurprisingly, turn-of-the-century American road stories manifest a stable cohort of generic character types, which are used to organize the chapters that follow—Agrarians, Progressives, Trailblazers, Vagabonds, and Tramps. Briefly, the Agrarian character represents independent citizens, often farmers, who remain staunchly self-sufficient but maintain an interest in the roads that bind them in place relative to familiar neighbors and to a primarily local market town, and their road stories voice skepticism over the tradeoffs national mobility. Progressives embody forward-thinking cyclists and motorists who bought into propaganda of a proud yet cruelly imperialist future of prosperous cities connected by durable roads. Trailblazers are modern inheritors of America’s settler mentality who invent new mechanisms of travel and lay out new roads to (re)shape the landscape in regrettable ways. Vagabonds exemplify glad, modern-romantic tourists who try to travel the roads to supposedly cleanse themselves of the dispiriting influence of urbanity by escaping to wholesome natural settings, which they contradictorily need to buy bikes and cars to do. Tramps, because they live on the road (and are often conscripted to work on roads), represent the nation’s dispossessed, yet their liminal position enables them to bear witness to the iniquities of a corrupt social landscape.

Rooted in various facets of the American ethos and ideology, these characters and the narrative patterns they would navigate circulated through the public sphere in the Progressive era, emphasizing road and landscape questions, gathering social energy with each exchange, and pushing the national transformation that defined modernism. Crucially, these narratives were neither merely literary nor confined to popular or political discourse. They are reproduced in an array of cultural artifacts, and the dialogue between narratives circulating in the public sphere and the political discourse of the era affirms contributions to the shape of automobility made by private citizens. Jakle and Sculle have observed that in an “era of transition” government was slow to address public demands for coordinated highway construction; it followed the requirements of the people.¹¹¹ Throughout the era, Agrarian, Progressive, Trailblazer, Vagabond, and Tramp narratives were taken up by public servants from across the full ideological spectrum, and by 1916, as legislators were drafting the Federal Aid Road bill, they incorporated these stories into their legal arguments.

These figures should not be presumed to be archetypal or universal. They certainly represent familiar global patterns, but they are observed here as deeply rooted in the specific context of America at the turn of the twentieth century, and the patterns are neither internally coherent nor mutually exclusive. Vagabonds occasionally articulate Progressive rhetoric. Tramps harbor Agrarian aspirations one minute that they criticize the next. Agrarians admire Trailblazer ambitions but resent the implications of them for their communities. These figures are generally, although not entirely, gendered male and marked racially as white, which further reveals the exclusions upon which the dominant order of the American landscape has been and, astonishingly, remains dependent.¹¹² These character subjectivities and the cultural work that they perform are not strictly chronological. They become invoked or deployed at different moments in shifting contexts, so, likewise, citation of them here does not follow any timeline but, rather, follows the energy of concord toward frictions of ambivalence within the textual conversation. Finally, all the narratives in which these various characters explore and experience the American landscape reflect both the enthusiasm and the ambivalence that attended the revisions of America’s mobility regime, and these frameworks have proven to be forcefully persistent, laying down pathways for a century’s worth of road narratives to follow.

Because the ambitious element of these narratives predominates, it becomes imperative to bring the abiding qualms into focus. Peter Merriman has observed that in the early-automobility era “motoring starts to become associated with an apprehension,” adding, “these changes were not always welcomed or embraced as positive or progressive experiences.”¹¹³ Going further, Sudhir Chella Rajan demonstrates that the personal car, so frequently valorized as a symbol of personal license, has to a greater extent come to demand subservience, a striking contradiction of the Enlightenment liberal commitment to ensuring personal freedom against “tyranny.”¹¹⁴ Our roads and the discourses supporting them are freighted with this incongruity and its perplexing ironies. Such discomforts illustrate the kind of ambivalence that is shown throughout this study in cognitive dissonances, contradictory logics, blatant avoidances, and mixed emotions arising around the prospect of new forms of mobility inherent in modern roads and mechanized travel such as bicycles, motorcycles, and automobiles. Throughout the narratives analyzed here, the ambivalences are voiced in the stories that participate in conceiving the new system of mobility as they invoke the implications of the changes taking effect, and they would not evaporate as the new system would become dominant.

Moreover, ambivalences should be seen as inherent to manufactured consent since every dominant cultural regime exists in dynamic tension between former and emergent orders, but to be more specific, early twentieth-century road narratives are run through with four distinct modes of ambivalence. First, in unranked order, concern over inclusions and exclusions of the new road system, including where the roads will go, who will be using them, and what they will be using them for, was a controversy that was never fully resolved. Second, people questioned the way that the new road system would prompt change in the shape of sovereignty, including both personal freedom and administrative checks and balances among local, state, and federal governing bodies. Integral to this pattern of ambivalence is concern over both access and exclusion of nonprivileged individuals. The third ambivalence amounts to worry over the environment, particularly access to and encounters with wild nature, as well as ongoing tensions and instabilities between terrains, flora, and fauna and built structures that could pollute and would require constant maintenance. And finally, frictions of class status measured in dynamics between work and leisure would be revealed by road travel, and this too was inflected with racialized tones. None of these ambivalences would prove to be monological or one dimensional. They were rather nested into complexes of concern among the multiplicity of facets of American life that the emergent system would touch and distort.

2.7 The Road Points the Way

Perhaps the core contradictions at the heart of automobility must be masked to perpetually produce communal consent to the system’s demands. Observing tourists in scenic Yosemite National Park, Rebecca Solnit has remarked that “people train themselves not to see the infrastructure” in the landscape.¹¹⁵ This study follows Solnit’s insight, aiming to counter that tendency. Moreover, I have endeavored to follow through on Anne Brigham’s charge to recognize “the road [as] a geographical construct” and “develop an approach to it that goes beyond viewing it as a metaphorical and physical space outside of social reality and structures.”¹¹⁶ Inflecting processes of spontaneous consent to a far-reaching system of social integration, road stories are inherently dialectical as they register attempts to render in language the intellectual and physical will to navigate the landscape within particular and competing cultural frameworks. They blend promise and peril, amazement and judgment, and they ultimately lead to unanticipated places. Beyond the obvious way that roads run in two directions (East–West or North-South), our relationship to them moves in two ways. A road is simultaneously a material fact, a compacted bed of ground running through a physical terrain, connecting places, and it is also an idea, a picture in the mind that promises motion, displacement through distance, discovery, diversion, escape, encounter, and attainment. Drivers manufacture all these interrelated vectors, both individually and collectively. The road becomes real because it is pervasively cultural, a product of the mind. Road writing demands examination, therefore, because it registers the intersection of objective material reality, subjective abstraction involving ideological valences, and vectors of egress through a landscape shared with others (human and nonhuman organisms alike).¹¹⁷ The infrastructure must be recognized in the story and, conversely, story (or stories) observed in the infrastructure. After all, a road is a story, and a story a road. This commonplace metaphor points to potent cultural resonances that are rooted in concrete historical facts with, we now know, dire consequences.

This book ultimately aims to uncover the interplay between ideologies and ideations of American national space at a pivotal moment of transition to make sense of the produced space of mobility, simultaneously material and cultural, within American modernism. As a medium of social engagement, narratives bond themes, ideas, and ideologies together, connecting them to formulations of the material landscape, which in turn mold experiences and conceptions of spatial possibility. The road, to name only a few of its conflicted valences, is a story of license, opportunity, distance, discovery, adventure, encounter, prosperity, and, as often, prejudicial discrimination. The road is a story of who people are, a story of identity. Defining who goes where and by what means, Americans tell their road stories to learn what and who may be out there beyond the horizon of their immediate experience and to share in the formulation of their sense of themselves. So by creating new subjective geographies through the formulation of new kinds of travel stories, Americans reimagined and recreated themselves as a new cast of modern characters playing out an evolving national drama. Yet new identities come with new anxieties, and these new stories were not embraced without apprehensions and trepidations. Doubts as to the implications of change and the shape of things to come creep into the exchanges that energize modernist road stories. As road stories take shape into a genre, repeating and reinforcing notions of liberty and solidarity, they also cultivate anxieties over the changing shape of government power, new kinds of access and diversities of social inclusion, a radically changing environment, and shifting dynamics of labor and leisure that undermined measures of class status, not to mention more familiar signs of modernity such as the effacing of regional distinctions, the pressure and moral degeneracy of modern progress, and the decay of traditional values and customs.

The mixed emotions referenced here still resonate. Even now, when the grip of automobility is so pervasive that Americans and many others around the world can hardly imagine conducting their lives without regularly driving, serious misgivings about costs, traffic, tedious commutes, sacrifices of personal freedom to regulatory agencies, and varieties of pollution accompany the undeniable joys and conveniences associated with automobility. In asking the question, how did America (and the world) convince itself to build its modern mobility infrastructures, the evaded and the sublimated threads of the narrative are as significant as the celebrated, perhaps more so. We need to understand our stories deeply in order to understand our spaces and ourselves. The close readings submitted here aim to provide new insights and reveal the infrastructure latent in certain influential cultural narratives, as well as the narrative ideologies present in our infrastructure. The road is an American story because Americans have made it their story. With only modest hyperbole, it can be said that road story is the very body of the road itself, that the built road is only an expression of the stories that it represents because it is the stories that have justified and perpetuated the road’s creation and existence. Reflecting, therefore, on the construction of our road landscape, specifically the frictions that forged it, sheds light on the ways in which modernism reflects aspiration muddled by antithetical uncertainties, which must be recognized not in any single example or cultural artifact but can be best discerned in the dynamics and exclusions of the archival aggregate.

Attaining clarity on the historical ambivalences that surround the mobility system that defines our lives today prepares us to confront and actively transform those relationships to shared space. So, in an era of rapid technological innovation, accounting for our persistent ambivalences over a domineering system allows us to begin narrating a new set of stories representing how we want to live together in our landscape(s) and change that system. We can begin to think about, debate, and design a mobility system that is actively inclusive, use accessible, multimodal, and environmentally sustainable. We can push conversations not merely about carbon neutrality but about carbon-negative industrial and mobility practices that can begin the long work of cleaning and cooling our atmosphere. We can, further, galvanize an intentionality to recalibrate local, regional, national, and global regulation of mobility needs, systems, and costs with an eye to both environmental and economic equity. We can imagine and depict mobility arrangements that serve and do not degrade or destroy neighborhoods, fostering livable community spaces. The critical histories that this study engages allow us to reflect generatively and (re)formulate transportation systems that pursue balances between patterns of residential space, agricultural lands, and the conservation of diverse wild habitats. As importantly, this work enjoins us to bring an anti-colonial mindset to narrating our landscape and mobility futures, one that actively respects and even collaboratively expands native wisdoms and sovereignties. The cultural work that forged our existing system, with all its ambivalences and predictable outcomes—positive and negative—took decades to conceive, but it also solidified quickly. There is a lesson in that.