Herewith an outline study prepared for me by Mr. Walker G. Buckner2 (partner in Reynolds and Company at 120 Broadway, New York) on the general subject of building a highway system in the United States as a series of self-liquidating projects.3
Included in the study are suggestions, also, concerning the building of parking facilities in cities, and high-speed highways traversing some of our big cities.
There is mentioned, also, the subject of rent control. And there is a list of the various authorities that Mr. Buckner has conferred with in producing his outline.
The major portion of the study deals with the highway system.
I am personally convinced that, in a number of fields, this Administration will have to come forward, at a reasonably early date, with a constructive program that will be designed to meet, in a well-rounded and imaginative way, the constantly increasing needs of a growing population.
Our cities still conform too rigidly to the patterns, customs, and practices of fifty years ago. Each year we add hundreds of thousands of new automobiles to our vehicular population, but our road systems do not keep pace with the need. In the average city today, many of our streets become almost useless to traffic because of the necessity of home owners for using them for parking.
While this entire subject of vehicular traffic is but a small segment of the great program that must attract our attention, there is nevertheless no reason why we should not proceed to its thorough study so as to have it ready for inclusion into a broad plan to be developed later.
To the greatest possible extent, all these projects should be locally controlled and owned. Ownership could be by municipality in many cases, and by states in others. Some of them could be privately owned. Still others could be under the control of an Authority something on the order of the New York Port Authority.
In appropriate cases, I think the Federal Government could well guarantee bonds, but we should not create a new demand for governmental funds as such. There might be some occasional departures from the rule--but only for reasons so unusual as to make their exceptional character obvious to government.
While we were still in New York, Mr. Buckner gave me a preliminary paper on this matter. I think I already handed that document to you.
I request that you be my representative in undertaking with interested departments of government the kind of study herein roughly indicated. I should like to have plans crystallized and developed so that significant parts of it could be initiated without completion of the entire plan, but with the certainty that the part started will fit logically and efficiently into the whole. By and large, the timing of construction should be such as to have some effect in levelling out peaks and valleys in our economic life.
From time to time, please give me an informal report of progress.4
1 Hauge, a Harvard-trained economist, had been a member of Eisenhower's campaign staff and now served as Administrative Assistant to the President (Galambos, NATO and the Campaign of 1952, nos. 924 and 1053).
2 Buckner had telephoned Presidential Secretary Thomas E. Stephens the week before, reporting that he had completed the study Eisenhower had asked him for and requesting an appointment with the President. He met with Eisenhower this same morning.
3 First discussed in the early 1920s, an interstate system of "superhighways" commanded growing support following World War II. The movements of troops, materiel, and war-industry workers had clearly demonstrated the inadequacies of America's main roads. Participants in the debate over new roads differed, however, on how best to finance them. A government report completed in 1939 had raised doubts whether a transcontinental toll road would pay for itself, and the National Highway Users Conference opposed this recourse. In 1950 Congress considered a bill that would have created a coast-to-coast superhighway, employing state links where they existed and building other stretches of road with money raised from revenue bonds secured by future tolls; the commission would spend no federal funds on the project "except in the form of direct grants to offset the benefit to the national defense." Discussions included plans to apply federal excise taxes on gasoline to the states specifically for improvement of interstate highways according to a new formula based on population, road mileage, and nonfederal land (U.S., Congress, House, Highway Needs of the National Defense, 81st Cong., 1st sess., 1949, H. Doc. 249, pp. 70-89; Wilfred Owen and Charles L. Dearing, Toll Roads and the Problem of Highway Modernization [Washington, D.C., 1951], pp. 41, 139-40, 144, 156-57; and Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1941-1956 [Lawrence, Kans., 1979], pp. 1-67. See also U.S., Congress, House, Interregional Highways, 78th Cong., 2d sess., 1944, H. Doc. 379).
4 Eisenhower attributed much of his interest in U.S. highway improvements to his experience commanding a transcontinental motor convoy in 1919 (see Eisenhower, At Ease: Stories I Tell to Friends [New York, 1967], pp. 166-67). Hauge would send Buckner's study to the Commerce Department, which would participate in the interagency study that Eisenhower had requested. In December an advisory committee would conclude that "wholly self-liquidating toll roads can make a major contribution to the solution of the nation's highway problems." The Commerce Department, however, was of the opinion that "from a strictly transportation standpoint, the Federal Government should not participate financially in the construction of self-liquidating projects of this type. Where such projects are economically feasible and publicly desirable, the States and localities have proven competent to arrange the financing and construction without Federal assistance" (Murray to Hauge, Dec. 23, 1953, and other papers in WHCF/OF 122). For further developments see no. 871.
