Ike Looks Back

Excerpt from Mandate for Change by Dwight David Eisenhower, 1953-1956 (New York: Doubleday, 1963) 548-549.

On June 26, 1956 I signed [the Federal Aid Highway Act] into law. It was not only the most gigantic federal undertaking in road-building in the century and a half since the federal government got into this field by improving the National Pike between Cumberland, Maryland, and Wheeling, West Virginia -- it was the biggest peacetime construction project of any description ever undertaken by the United States or any other country.

... the big feature of the act was the amount it earmarked for the widening and improving of our interstate and defense highway system, a forty-one thousand-mile network of roads linking nearly all major cities with a population of fifty thousand or more. ...

The amount of concrete poured to form these roadways would build eighty Hoover Dams or six sidewalks to the moon. To build them, bulldozers and shovels would move enough dirt and rock to bury all of Connecticut two feet deep.

More than any single action by the government since the end of the war, this one would change the face of America with straightaways, cloverleaf turns, bridges, and elongated parkways. Its impact on the American economy -- the jobs it would produce in manufacturing and construction, the rural areas it would open up -- was beyond calculation."