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In The American Road Katherine M. Johnson develops a bold new
theory for how the American highway system has taken on such
outsized scale and complexity by emphasizing the emergence of a
powerful administrative apparatus in the American federal system.
Established in 1914 expressly to intervene in the congressional
debates of the era, the American highway bureaucracy consisted of
forty-eight state highway officials acting in and through their
self-organized association, the American Association of State
Highway Officials. Johnson's central argument is that this new
institution occupied a similar position relative to the American
state as political parties and courts did. The capacity to organize
across a complex constitutional order enabled it to control the
purpose and allocation of federal highway aid for the better part
of the twentieth century. Johnson investigates this new conception
of the American highway bureaucracy, showing specifically where and
how that extraconstitutional authority emerged, expanded, and
manifested itself in the legislative history, physical dimensions,
and geographical reach of the emerging highway system. The American
Road reveals that all of the major highway legislation approved by
Congress from 1916 to 1941 was collectively developed and advanced
by state and federal highway bureaucrats drawing on the new
authority conferred by the system of federal grants-in-aid, which
required state legislatures to provide a state matching grant and
local governments to relinquish control over decisions of location
and design. The capacity to advance their policy aims as both the
advice of experts and the will of the states not only secured the
new highway program against renewed opposition in Congress in the
1920s but also won the strong support of the motor vehicle industry
and set the stage for even more impressive policy gains of the
1930s when highways became the largest category of federal
emergency public works. That collective authority, however,
required a high threshold of consensus to secure and maintain,
producing not just a narrow one-size-fits-all approach to technical
issues but also a striking incapacity to respond to changing
conditions. Johnson completes her compelling narrative by
identifying the source of the interstate highway plan, first
proposed in 1939 and finally funded in 1956, in the internal
dynamics of and external threats to that extraconstitutional
authority.
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