| Few developments have more dramatically reshaped “built America” than large public works projects. Those related to America's transportation revolutions have been especially transformative. This dissertation uses New York State's road building program as a case study in American political development during the years 1880 to 1956. It argues that the modern American state cannot be understood without a fuller understanding of the link between public power and public works.; State highway programs were products of a political culture in transition. They came in the wake of the privately funded transportation systems of the nineteenth century, but they preceded the ascendancy of the national highway infrastructure in the late twentieth century. They involved changing conceptions of the American polity, the enlarged role of experts in politics, the rise of an increasingly consumer-oriented, motorized economy, and the impact of an expanding suburbia.; When good roads advocates first publicized their cause in the 1880s, New York still administered its rough country roads in a near-feudal fashion. Seventy years later, on the eve of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Interstate system, the state was letting millions of dollars in contracts a month to produce an integrated system of over 80,000 miles of public roads, including a 14,000-mile primary highway system, and the pathbreaking New York State Thruway. The construction of these highways had enormous consequences for the people and for their political order.; In its broadest terms, this study sheds light on the historic problem of federalism: how the polity should share public power, especially when dealing with policy issues national in scale, yet state and local in implementation. The history of New York's public works response to the automobile is a case study in government at all levels confronting a massive infrastructural challenge. It suggests how critical was the interplay between public policy and evolving patterns of governance. In jointly examining road building and state building, this history illuminates the path by which the modern American state ascended, the obstacles it surmounted, and the new problems it engendered. |
