Coast to Coast in 100 Years

On May 15, 1915, a caravan of five automobiles containing publicity agents, a film crew, and miscellaneous merchants of cars and car products set out from New York City with one long, linear mission: to travel the length of the new Lincoln Highway, through forests and deserts, over mountains and rivers, to San Francisco on the far edge of the nation. Before this highway (which had first been conceived of by some of the men in those cars), there had been no designated, passable auto route across the United States.
     There were no federal roads then, and not that many state roads, so this was a private-sector enterprise. A bunch of businessmen with stakes in the future of auto travel—guys who sold radiators or spark plugs or rubber tires—formed the Lincoln Highway Association to encourage local businesses and governments to improve certain lengths of road that, when all hooked together, would form a twisty but clear line from Times Square to Lincoln Park. (Lincoln Park was hardly San Francisco’s equivalent of Times Square, being a grassy hilltop surrounded by a golf course on the far side of the city, doing service not long before that as a cemetery, so I assume they chose it for the “Lincoln” part.)

     The vision of these men was for a smooth, safe ribbon of rock and concrete all the way, but they were willing to settle for dirt roads through the trackless wastes of the West, as long as the cars of the time could get from one end of the other without breaking an axle or sinking into the sand. It proved to be a very popular idea among people who ran hotels and restaurants in smaller cities and towns across the middle of the country, as well as ambitious men who were thinking of jumping into the very profitable automobile craze, and pretty soon those roads were being worked on.
      The idea and the approximate route of this highway had been announced in 1913, so the Lincoln Highway Association celebrated its centennial last year, with speeches and car shows and fireworks and all that. But as I read about it, I couldn’t help feeling that if I were were going to commemorate the moment when the highway came into being (if, mind you), I’d celebrate the moment when people proved they could actually traverse its whole route.        

     There is an argument for dating that too in 1913. A group of intrepid members of this L.H.A. had pushed their way by automobile all the way across the country even before the project had been officially announced, to prove it could be done, block out a plausible route, and attract some reporters to the launching ceremony. But their cars had to be hauled out of ditches and mud several times by mules, and a few times they had to go far off what would eventually be the actual route because there was no way to get through where they wanted to—and therefore I’d call their effort an impressive one on its merits but not the inauguration of anything you would call a highway.
      So the day I would celebrate (like I say, if) would be the one when that caravan full of highway boosters and filmmakers finally arrived at Lincoln Park (after stopping at the Panama-Pacific Exposition then dominating the city, which made it an even better publicity stunt), August 25, 1915.

      (If you do the math, you’ll see that no one was trying to prove anything yet about the speed of car travel. The caravan covered roughly 3,300 miles in 102 days, so about 32 miles a day. A strong hiker with good boots could almost have beaten them. It must be remembered, though, that they spent much of the voyage giving speeches at Rotary Club meetings, shaking the hands of hoteliers and tire dealers, and shooting scenes for their planned promotional movie. They assured people that the trip needn’t actually take more than two weeks, which made it only about four times slower than the train.)
      No one would claim that their trip was a historical turning point, but it does work as a symbol of some major changes then coming to America. Most obviously, it stands at the beginning of the age of the automobile. But it also represents a new force for turning the sprawling states into a single nation, and a further opening of the vast American interior, beyond what the ribbons of the railroads had done, giving every turnout along every road the chance to compete for tourists and residents with every other wannabe town and city.

     And it shows the birth of a new sort of American boosterism, and with it a way of launching and organizing new industries—businesses, publicists, and consumers collaborating to create a spiraling energy of trendiness and profitability—that’s shaped much of our business culture straight into the age of personal technology. There were no robber barons in the highway-building business. The highway system would make an awful lot of money for the companies that built cars, made their parts, forged steel, vulcanized latex, and distilled gasoline, but their profits were indirect. In the actual making of the roads, the people who made the immediate money were gravel-quarry owners, asphalt mixers, bridge builders, and the adventurers who thought opening a gas station would be more rewarding than selling horse feed.
     There’s personal symbolism for me in that highway, too. I’ve participated in the general affection for Route 66, but really, it doesn’t touch me much. It wound, after all, from Chicago to L.A., from one city I find impressive and interesting to another with which I’m weirdly fascinated, but neither of them feels like my city. San Francisco is my city, literally, and New York is the one I’ve carried a torch for since I was a teenager, the one I keep writing about, keep going back to, keep wondering if I should have moved to before I got too old.

      As if that weren’t enough, my mother grew up along the Lincoln Highway—in Rawlins, Wyoming in the 1920s and ‘30s, near the highest point of the route, where the highway itself was both the main street and the way out of town. I think it was in her reminiscences that I first heard the phrase “Lincoln Highway.” In any case, I know it was in her reminiscences that I first understood what highways meant to people growing up in the towns of the American interior. 
      (Come to think of it, my dad lived just a few blocks from the Lincoln Highway too, when he was very young, although on the far western end of it, as it passed along Foothill Boulevard in Oakland, where it wouldn’t really have had the lustre of a transcontinental highway. Still, it’s intriguing to think of my parents connected by a road, a thousand miles apart, when they were children.)
     If I were to do something to acknowledge the centennial of the first of those great highways (and I’m still clinging to if, but barely), I would set out from Times Square on May 15 of next year and travel for the next 102 days along what remains of the original route, studying its history and immersing myself in the towns it helped bring into existence.          

      And if I were to try to justify the trip to myself and have a chance of covering the costs, I’d write a book about it. Not just a historical tour of the highway—there are already a couple of those, and they’re good—but some way of using the journey as a lens through which to consider how the past hundred years of cars, business, growth, and mobility have shaped the country. And through that to understand a bit better how I, as the son of a daughter of that highway, have been shaped by it too.     
      That gives me nearly a year to figure out whether this is a clever idea or a crazy one. Either way, I’m probably going to do it.