I’ve been reading Stephen Goddard’s Getting There: The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Century
Seeing to advance these watershed ideas, yet wary of the power of the highway coalition, FDR set up the urban-oriented Interregional Highway Committee (IHC) in 1941. He borugh traditional engineers and visionaries together and named his osmetime-nemesis MacDonald its chair. Its mix of disciplines led the IHC to the pregnant conclusion that highway building was not merely an end in itself but a way to mold the declining American city while reviving it. At the core of the concept was a twofer: by cutting a selective swath through “cramped, crowded and depreciated” cities and routing downtown highways along river valleys, Washington could eradicate “a long-standing eyesore and blight” while easing gridlock. The autobahns may have inspired the interregional highways, but on one element they differed fundamentally: the German roads sought to serve the cities, while the American roads aimed to change them. The variance would become startingly apparent a generation later.
To the highwaymen, the Roosevelt administration’s visionary proposals were anathema. Michigan Representative Jesse P. Wolcott warned that a “small coterie of individuals who would socialize America” were taking control of American highway policy. A member of the House Roads Committee decried the NRPB’s “cradle to the grave” recommendations, under which Americans’ lives were “mapped out, and planned and controlled and regimented.”
Of course, the old highwaymen were themselves practicing a brand of socialism – the roads they built might have taken in small user fees in the form of gas taxes, vehicle registration fees, and the capital costs of owning an automobile, but they were (and indeed still are) relieved of general tax obligations and much of the land costs, so say nothing of being insulated from the competitive pressures of of opportunity costs by virtue of their socialist allocation.
But the idea of one highway advocate accusing another of socialism reminds me very much of today’s road advocates at places like Cato and the Reason Foundation, who levy the charge of statism (essentially a less politically charged accusation of socialism, or general state interventionism) at New Urbanists and smart growth-inclined planners, while at the same time holding up places like Houston as a paragon of free market urbanism and refusing to acknowledge the massive state intervention in favor of the automobile. Of course, that doesn’t mean the New Urbanists and liberally-inclined planners in general aren’t guilty of much of what they’re accused of – after all, their designs may be different than what we have now, but they’re no less totalitarian.
Anonymous says
April 26, 2011 at 6:38 pmStephen,
You (and other libertarians) frequently lose broader support for your agenda and proposals, when you use scare words like “totalitarian” to refer to various public infrastructure projects which have been in place in the (small-D) democratic West for nearly a century. Government funding of infrastructure may well be a bad idea (I disagree, but I consider this a perfectly reasonable subject for debate); it may or may not constitute “socialism” (a term which also is being overused into irrelevance)–but totalitarianism? Abducting citizens in the night is totalitarianism. Constructing gulags and concentration camps is totalitarianism. Encouraging children to inform on their parents, or neighbors to inform on each other, for acts of perceived disloyalty, is totalitarianism.
Building public roads and railways with tax money may be many things, but it is not totalitarianism; especially in a society where the people are entitled to vote on such matters. Even the worst abuses of public roadbuilding (the deliberate levelling of many African-American neighborhoods to build freeways during the past century; and the blatant disregard for property rights now observed in China’s infrastructure campaigns) isn’t totalitarianism (though China’s mistreatment of those who object may well be).
Equating modern democracic government (with all its warts) with the worst abuses of the world’s undemocratic police states, may sound like good rhetoric for those who consider the state itself to be the genesis of society’s problem–but for the rest of us, who do not see government (or its abolition) as an end, but merely as a means–it just sounds dumb. Neither the highway department nor the local transit authority does anything that even remotely resembles “totalitarianism”, and to suggest otherwise strips the word of all meaning. I reject wholly the implied notion that there is little distinction (or only a matter of degree) between governance in the US and other modern democracies, and places like present-day North Korea or Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany.
Stephen says
April 26, 2011 at 7:39 pmMy mother escaped from communist Romania, I know what totalitarianism is. I didn’t call it “totalitarian,” I just said it was “no less totalitarian.” As in, the smart growthers’ vision seems to be just as narrow as that of the mid-century Corbusians – the totality of their plans is equal, though different. Not that they’re entirely “total” – I suppose they still let you choose between glass and brick (well, if you’re lucky!), even if they’re dictating things like “meaningful cornices” and 14-foot ceilings.
Rhywun says
April 27, 2011 at 12:37 am“the American roads aimed to change them (cities).”
What could possibly go wrong??
kas says
April 27, 2011 at 10:10 pmCan you please stop aligning liberals with New Urbanism? Not all of us “liberal planners” buy-in to New Urbanism – especially the smart ones.