Travel Not an Excape of Relife, but Discovery
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Route 66
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| Historic photo of Standard Oil Station Odell |
Formative Years: 1926-1932
Route 66 had its official beginnings in 1926 when the Bureau of Public Roads launched the nation'south first Federal highway system. Similar other highways in the system, the path of Road 66 was a cobbling together of existing local, State, and national road networks. Extending 2,400 miles from Chicago to Los Angeles, the new highway wound through eight States and was not completely paved until 12 years after its designation. Many of the merchants in the small and large towns through which the highway passed looked to the road as an economic opportunity to bring much needed exterior revenues into their often rural and isolated communities. Actively promoted in its early on years, the highway rapidly became a popular transcontinental route, because it offered a route with better atmospheric condition than alternative due east-w roadways. As the highway became busier with the nation'due south traffic, the roadbed received marked improvements, and the infrastructure of support businesses, especially fuel, lodging, and nutrient, lining its correct-of-style expanded dramatically.
Spawned by the demands of a rapidly irresolute America, Route 66 did not follow a traditionally linear course in dissimilarity to the Lincoln, the Dixie, and other highways of its day. Its diagonal route linked hundreds of predominantly rural communities in Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas to Chicago, thus enabling farmers to transport grain and produce for redistribution. This diagonal configuration was particularly significant to the trucking industry, which by 1930 rivaled the railroad for preeminence in the American shipping manufacture. In improver to its abbreviated road between Chicago and the Pacific declension, Route 66 traversed essentially flat prairie lands and enjoyed a more temperate climate than that of northern highways, farther enhancing its appeal to truckers. The Illinois Motor Vehicles Division reported that between Chicago and St. Louis trucks increased from approximately 1,500 per day in 1931 to 7,500 trucks a twenty-four hours a decade subsequently. 20-five percent of these were large tractor-truck, semi-trailer outfits.
Highway designers intended to make Road 66 "modernistic" in every sense of the term. State engineers worked to reduce the number of curves, widen lanes, and ensure all-atmospheric condition capability. Until 1933, the responsibility for improving existing highways fell near exclusively to individual States. The more assertive and financially prepared States met the challenge. Initial improvements cost State agencies an estimated $22,000 per mile. In 1929, Illinois boasted approximately 7,500 miles of paved roads, its entire portion of U.Due south. Highway 66. A Texaco Gasoline road report published that same year noted the route as entirely concrete in Kansas, 66% paved in Missouri, and 25% improved in Oklahoma. In dissimilarity, the ane,200-mile western stretch had not seen a cement mixer, with the exception of California'south metropolitan areas. Until the summit of the Smashing Low, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and the desert communities of southeast California had a collective full of simply 64.ane miles of surfaced highway along Route 66.
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| Ozark Trails quondam Dosie Span |
The Bang-up Depression and Globe War II: 1933--1945
Washington's increased level of delivery began with the Groovy Depression and the national appeal for emergency Federal relief measures. In his famous social commentary, The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck proclaimed U.Due south. Highway 66 the "Mother Road." Steinbeck's classic 1939 novel and the 1940 film re-cosmos of the ballsy odyssey immortalized Route 66 in the American consciousness. An estimated 210,000 people migrated to California to escape the despair of the Grit Basin. In the minds of those who endured that especially painful feel and in the view of generations of children to whom they recounted their story, Route 66 symbolized the "road to opportunity."
Re-examining the Great Depression years, contemporary writers plant that thousands of disillusioned immigrants returned home inside months later reaching the Golden Land. Of the more than 200,000 refugees who journeyed due west to California beginning in the early 1930s, less than xvi,000 people from the Dust Bowl proper ended up in California. Despite popular perceptions promoted in Steinbeck'south novel, James Gregory argues convincingly that barely eight% of the "Dust Bowlers" who ready out for California remained at that place. California's total demographic growth between 1930 and 1940 reflected scarcely more than a 22% increase, compared to a 53% growth charge per unit in the following decade.
The importance of Route 66 to emigrating "Grit Bowlers" during the Depression years received wide publicity. Less is known about the importance of the highway to those who opted to eke out a living in economically devastated Kansas, Oklahoma, West Texas, and New United mexican states. During this time, U.S. Highway 66 and other major roads in America had integral links to President Roosevelt's revolutionary New Deal programs for work relief and economical recovery. Road improvements and maintenance work were fundamental features of the New Deal'due south Noncombatant Conservation Corps (CCC) and Works Project Administration (WPA) programs. From 1933 to 1938, thousands of unemployed male youths from virtually every Land were put to work as laborers on road gangs. Because of this monolithic effort, the entire highway from Chicago to Los Angeles had pavement by 1938. In Gregory'south terminal analysis, Road 66 afflicted more Americans on Federal piece of work relief than people who used it during the famous exodus to California.
As the Depression worked its baleful effects on the nation, information technology as well produced an ironic outcome along Route 66; the vast migration of destitute people fleeing from the privation of their erstwhile homes actually produced an increased book of business organisation along the highway, thus providing commercial opportunities for a multitude of low-capital, mom-and-pop businesses. The buildings synthetic for these businesses reflected the independence of the operations, a general absence of standardization, and a decentralized economical structure. At the same time, information technology became clear that life along Highway 66 presented opportunities not available to the nearby towns and businesses that lost traffic to the of import highway and who suffered accordingly. At a very early point it was axiomatic that a major nearby highway could both bring business and accept information technology away.
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| Rio Puerco Historic Truss Bridge congenital c. 1933 |
Completion of the all-conditions capability of Route 66 on the eve of World War II was particularly pregnant to the nation'southward war effort. The experience of a young Ground forces captain, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who institute his control bogged down in spring mud near Fort Riley, Kansas while on a coast-to-coast maneuver, left an enduring impression. The War Department needed improved highways for rapid mobilization during wartime and for national defence force during peacetime. At the showtime of American involvement in World State of war II, the War Section singled out the W every bit platonic for military training bases, in part because of its geographic isolation and especially because it offered consistently dry weather for air and field maneuvers. The section invested over $230 million in new military bases in Arizona alone. Several military installations, including Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, Fort Wingate Ordnance Depot in New Mexico, Navajo Ordnance Depot in Arizona, and Edwards Air Force Base in California, were established on or near Route 66.
America'southward mobilization for war afterwards Pearl Harbor underscored the necessity for a systematic network of roads and highways. The War Department's expropriation of the nation's railways left a transportation vacuum in the West that just the trucking industry could fill up. Automobile manufacturers suffered critical shortages of steel, glass, and rubber during the war years, and plants in Detroit converted to the production of tanks, aircraft engines, ordnance, and troop transports. Co-ordinate to 1 government source, the product of new cars dropped from 3.seven meg in 1941 to 610 in 1943, because of rationing.
At the same fourth dimension, production of trucks capable of hauling loads in excess of 30,000 pounds increased to keep pace with wartime demands. Studies past the Public Roads Administration betwixt 1941 and 1943 showed that trucks rather than trains transported and delivered at least 50% of all defense force-related material destined for America's war product plants. Because Route 66 was the shortest corridor between the west declension and the industrial heartland across Chicago, mile-long convoys unremarkably moved troops and supplies from ane military reservation to another along the highway.
Route 66 helped to facilitate the single greatest wartime mobilization of labor in the history of the nation. Betwixt 1941 and 1945, the government invested approximately $70 billion in capital projects throughout California, many in the Los Angeles-San Diego area. This enormous capital outlay underwrote entirely new industries that created thousands of noncombatant jobs. Past 1942, with the exhaustion of available local labor in most areas on the Pacific Coast, war contractors began a frantic search for skilled and unskilled workers from across the United States. Under the provisions of the West Coast Manpower Plan initiated in September 1943, contractors prepared to offer jobs to 500,000 men and women to meet the production demands of global war.
In February 1942, Public Roads Assistants Commissioner Thomas MacDonald announced that existing rails and double-decker transit facilities could arrange just a small fraction of the x one thousand thousand workers required to operate the defense force plants. The residuum would have to move in private automobiles. They moved in unprecedented numbers. The net result of this mass migration was the loss of more than one meg people from the metropolitan northeast between 1940 and 1943. Three Pacific Coast States--California, Oregon, and Washington--increased 38.9% in population (measured against a national average of 8.7%). Route 66 played a disquisitional role in this vast movement of Americans to meet the demands of war.
Adapted from Route 66 Special Resource Study and Road 66 Corridor National Historic Context Study.
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