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Getting Out of the Mud - The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898-1928 (Hardcover)
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Getting Out of the Mud - The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898-1928 (Hardcover)
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Martin T. Olliff recounts the history of the Good Roads Movement
that arose in progressive-era Alabama, how it used the power of the
state to achieve its objectives of improving market roads for
farmers and highways for automobilists, and how state and federal
highway administrations replaced the Good Roads Movement. Getting
Out of the Mud: The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway
Administration, 1898-1928 explores the history of the Good Roads
Movement and investigates the nature of early twentieth-century
progressivism in the state. Martin T. Olliff reveals how
middle-class reformers secured political, economic, and social
power not only by fighting against corporate domination and labor
recalcitrance but also by proposing alternative projects like road
improvement and identifying the interests of the rising middle
class as being the most important to public interest. With the
development of national markets in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, Americans began to regard the nation as a
whole, rather than their state or region, as the most important
political entity. Many Alabamians wished to travel beyond their
local communities in all seasons without getting stuck in the mud
of rudimentary rutted dirt roads. The onset of the automobile age
bolstered the need for roadmaking, alerting both automobilists and
good roads advocates to the possibility of a new transportation
infrastructure. The Good Roads Movement began promoting
farm-to-market roads, then highways that linked cities, then those
that connected states. Federal matching funds for road construction
after 1916 led state and federal governments to supplant the Good
Roads Movement, building and administering the highway system that
emerged by the late 1920s. Olliff's study of how Alabamians dealt
with strained resources and overcame serious political obstacles in
order to construct a road system that would accommodate economic
growth in the twentieth century may offer clues to the resurrection
of a similar strategy in our modern era. Many problems are
unchanged over the hundred years between crises: Alabamians demand
good roads and a government that has the capacity to build and
maintain such an infrastructure while, at the same time, citizens
are voting into office men and women who promise lower taxes and
smaller government.
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