Dwight Eisenhower had first seen the value of a connected national road system on a 1919 Army transcontinental convoy that took two grueling months to cross the country. He saw the other half of the idea in Germany during World War II, watching how fast the autobahns could move an army — or anybody else.
On June 29, 1956, as President, he signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act and authorized something no country had ever built at that scale: 41,000 miles of interstate highway, over $30 billion, the federal government covering 90% of the cost. It became the largest public works project in American history at the time.
It took decades to finish and employed enormous numbers of construction workers for a generation. It also remade the country built around it. Trucking replaced rail as the backbone of American shipping. The suburbs the GI Bill had started building now had a fast way into the cities where the jobs still were. A factory in one state could reliably sell goods in another, cheaply, on a schedule.
By the time it was substantially finished, the pieces were all on the table at once: steady manufacturing jobs, a growing supply of affordable homes, roads to connect them, and a generation of workers whose college and mortgages the government had already paid to help make possible. What was missing was the last piece — the idea companies would organize themselves around. That’s next.
Sources: Federal Highway Administration, “History of the Eisenhower Interstate System”; History.com, “Congress Approves Federal-Aid Highway Act”.