Implementing and sustaining a new approach to transportation in the United States requires much more than shifting appropriations and priorities—it requires the reconstruction of fundamental institutions, including the public organizations and bureaucracies responsible for transportation. If mass transit continues to be financed and managed separately from and in competition with infrastructure for motor vehicles, there is little chance of achieving a more sane and stable balance. However, as an integral function of new institutions designed to support mobility and accessibility with the most appropriate technologies, mass transit could become a significant component of more efficient and equitable local and regional transportation systems than the ones we have today. There are a few exceptions to the overall pattern of anemic, neglected mass transit in the United States, and they coincide with regional institutions that transcend modes. In particular, the extensive and heavily-used mass-transit systems of metropolitan New York and the San Francisco Bay Area benefit significantly from toll revenue generated by local bridges and tunnels.

Institutions are defined by their durability, frequently outlasting any of the physical structures they might produce. Economic and political upheaval can reduce or overcome institutional resistance to change and upset the established balance of power, thereby making significant changes in the administration and financing of transportation services and infrastructure much easier to achieve than under ordinary circumstances.2 Policy makers may now have a rare opportunity to transform transportation policy in the United States. Understanding the status quo, including the assumptions, patterns, and relationships that sustain it, is a crucial first step. This essay traces the development of passenger transport in metropolitan America. It also draws upon the history of four independent public agencies to suggest possible models for place-based systems that link and integrate different modes of transport. Facilities that were originally built by the Port of New York Authority, by the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, by the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District, and by the California Toll Bridge Authority are now generating revenue that supports complementary mass transit serving the traffic corridors where it is generated. In each case, forging these intermodal links required significant political pressure, but they nevertheless demonstrate the potential for supporting integrated transportation systems with local toll revenue.

Establishing Patterns and Policies

Timing was crucial for the political development of transportation financing and administration in the United States more than a century ago. Automobiles appeared on the scene just as a nationwide “good roads” movement was gaining momentum, and its leaders lobbied aggressively to secure subsidies for local and regional road systems. This coincided with a general enthusiasm for public enterprise that was an important component of Progressive Era politics. Support for publicly funded road systems was part of that enthusiasm, which propelled the adoption of gasoline taxes by all forty-eight states between 1919 and 1929.3 Even as mass production reduced the price of automobiles and their popularity surged, the institutional framework for providing infrastructure to accommodate this celebrated new technology was already taking shape. And it was fully, securely public. Gas taxes were paid in small increments, easy to collect, distributed by state officials advised by expert engineers, and protected from “diversion”—at first politically, later legally. Promoted as fair and legitimate, this source of funding for roads and highways was popular among local and state officials and easily adaptable to the collaborative, business and development-friendly “associative state” ideal in the 1920s. Highway engineers, automobile manufacturers, and major industrial and business organizations have supported government-subsidized “free” roads in the United States ever since, not only because they served their financial interests, but also for ideological reasons. Influential policy makers, including U.S. presidents from Herbert Hoover to Barack Obama, have viewed road-building as one of the appropriate ways in which government could promote economic growth and employment opportunities without undue interference in market mechanisms or established business practices.4

In contrast, the institutions of mass transit underwent a very different process of development. Just a few decades made an enormous difference in long-term patterns and outcomes. Electric streetcar systems were built by private firms beginning in the late 1880s and 1890s, a period of governmental spending limits and retrenchment preceding the Progressive municipal-reform movement. Their investors enjoyed actual or effective monopolies, and their transit operations were often an integral part of more lucrative electric power companies or speculative real estate development. Early on, however, the relationship between cities and the street railways they chartered turned antagonistic. A record of corruption and poor service hurt transit executives politically, even as they were suffering from escalating financial difficulties. A combination of factors, including overcapitalization, rising costs, and a rigid, politically sensitive rate structure (specifically, the sanctity of the 5¢ fare) contributed to their decline and often to financial ruin during the 1920s and 1930s. Not the least of their problems was the decoupling of transit systems from other enterprises that they originally supported or complemented.5 Even in a stable context streetcar systems often lost money, and as the level of service declined so did their reputation and political standing.

Of course, the widespread adoption of automobiles, enabled by large public investments in roads and highways, represented the final nail in the mass-transit coffin. By the 1950s, the vast majority of transit companies in the United States had abandoned their streetcars, often replacing them with bus lines that continued to lose money even though they were less capital intensive. State public-utility commissions, which took over the regulation of transit firms in the 1920s but had little inherent interest in maintaining the local service they provided, released many of the operators of these unprofitable and unpopular enterprises from their obligations. The vitality and success of transit was severely limited by institutional characteristics that originated in the very different context of the late nineteenth century.6

By the time municipal officials began attempting to revive bankrupt transit companies or to develop new publicly financed systems, they did so with a degree of well-justified trepidation. They knew that revenues from fares were inadequate to support daily operations as well as to pay for necessary capital investments in infrastructure and rolling stock. Even as state highway departments accepted responsibility for building and maintaining a comprehensive infrastructure to accommodate private automobiles, municipal officials had to choose between spending large sums to prop up mass transit or just letting it languish and die. Little or no outside assistance was available for these operations—this in striking contrast with the urban, rural, and suburban highway systems that regularly received massive infusions of state and federal aid.

By the mid-twentieth century, there was a deep and virtually unbridgeable institutional chasm between transportation technologies that was rooted in the disparate histories of road and rail. In cities, where automobiles and streetcars vied for space and right-of-way on the same crowded streets, the consequences of this divide were especially stark, with drivers winning priority over transit riders. The divide extended well beyond the commuter-oriented facilities in metropolitan areas that are the focus of this essay to affect the outcomes of policy for freight and long-distance travel as well. The institutional development of transportation in the United States positioned modal systems in competition with one another—and in the process defined the very concept of separate modes.7 As rapidly expanding state and federal highway systems brought more regional traffic into cities and financed high-capacity “freeways” that cut swathes through established urban neighborhoods, city governments still had the primary responsibility for local streets that were increasingly choked with traffic. City officials throughout the country tore up or paved over rails to make more room for the relentless crush of private automobiles. Transit was stuck in a losing position, marginalized in the competition for space as well as for state and federal funding.

During the boom years following World War II, it became apparent to many social critics and urban planners that the widespread abandonment or neglect of mass transit was a disaster for the residents of metropolitan areas, who suffered from the persistent congestion and environmental degradation associated with sprawling development and streets jammed with motor vehicles. By the 1960s, a public backlash included significant pressure in favor of revitalizing mass transit. In larger cities, particularly those with powerful business and financial interests invested in central business districts, new public agencies were created to take over and rehabilitate or replace mass transit. Transportation authorities were created in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Chicago to meet the challenge of saving existing systems. In other cities, including Atlanta, Miami, Baltimore, Washington, and San Francisco, large public investments in rapid-transit systems were intended to provide high-quality service to suburban commuters.8 However, the expense of establishing rail systems de novo and providing competitive service in the face of decentralized regional-development patterns was spectacularly high. Today, many of the most ambitious transit projects of this period are frequently cited as examples of misguided public policy, waste, and mismanagement.9 Little has changed since David Jones observed in 1985 that “the transit industry has become structurally obsolete: its form suits the functions and markets that transit served at the turn of the century . . . changes in transit’s basic way of doing business are necessary if mass transit is to play a significant role in the future of urban transportation.”10

To overcome this obsolescence, the varied benefits of transit for property values, congestion relief, environmental quality, and economic development—that is, its benefits to places—must be reflected in its financing and management. Certainly, one of the fundamental problems of mass transit was and remains its position within the larger institutional structures of transportation. When mass transit shifted to the public sector in the mid-twentieth century, it became the orphaned stepchild of cities just as they were facing disastrous budget shortfalls and social and political crises. Highways, in contrast, were the protégé of an expanding, prodigal federal government that favored rural over urban interests with its representational structure and empowered state engineers with its procedures. Efforts to secure federal subsidies for mass transit ran contrary to the patterns and priorities of this system, particularly when they came from gas tax “diversions,” even though the fees and taxes paid by urban drivers had effectively been diverted away from urban areas to fund the construction of rural roads and highways all along. Nevertheless, there are a few important cases in which efforts for cross-modal integration defied the prevailing pattern of institutional separation between automobile facilities and mass transit. They avoided the need for constant appeals for state and federal transit subsidies by using local transportation revenues where they are actually generated, steering clear of many of the complexities and problems of intergovernmental competition and interference. These examples of cross-modal integration are sketched below in the hope that they can provide models for systems elsewhere capable of serving places rather than technologies.

Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and PATH

The creation in 1921 of the Port of New York Authority (later, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) was a critical development in the deployment of public corporations to finance and operate bridges, tunnels, and other transportation facilities. This agency had a broad mission to expand and coordinate the infrastructure of North America’s largest port, which encompassed the territory of two states and was suffering from decentralized management, redundancy, and inefficiency. Large investments were needed to modernize its facilities, not only to accommodate ships and cargo, but also to provide for local and regional transportation and warehousing. The new agency could levy property taxes as well as collect fees for the use of its facilities, but it was its capacity to use its resources to finance new projects that turned it into a regional power. Under the leadership of Julius Henry Cohen, it established a general reserve fund that made its revenues available to secure all of the agency’s debt, regardless of which project it was initially issued to fund. This made it relatively easy to finance the construction of new facilities, even when their potential profitability was uncertain. Port Authority revenue bonds paid for the Arthur Kill bridges and the George Washington Bridge in 1926, as well as the Bayonne Bridge in 1929. Its officials started collecting tolls in 1931, when the Washington and Bayonne spans opened to traffic and they acquired the lucrative Holland Tunnel. The entrepreneurial initiative and independence of the agency inspired the creation of hundreds of new transportation agencies in subsequent decades. Its success also popularized the term “authority,” which is now understood to designate public corporations distinguished by their reliance on user fees and their capacity to issue revenue bonds.11

From the 1930s through the 1960s, the Port Authority’s road-, bridge-, and tunnel-building epitomized the automobile-oriented approach to urban redevelopment. By the late 1950s, it had large surpluses and too much traffic clogging its bridges and tunnels. It also had significant public-relations problems, particularly with New Jersey commuters who blamed its ambitious construction program for putting private commuter railroads out of business. The one remaining trans-Hudson rail system, the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, was decrepit and ill-maintained, and the operator was threatening to shut down entirely just as traffic congestion between New York and New Jersey was becoming a major problem. This situation contributed to a general perception that the Port Authority was an imperial organization whose officials were overly concerned about the bottom line.

In 1958, newly elected New York governor Nelson Rockefeller confronted Port Authority officials with the demand that they take over the failing commuter railroads and the significant financial liabilities associated with their operation. Despite the opportunity this presented to improve the agency’s public image, it took the full political influence of Rockefeller as well as New Jersey governor Robert Meyner to overcome their reluctance. As part of a 1961 deal related to Manhattan construction projects—specifically, authorization for the ambitious plan for the World Trade Center (WTC) complex—Port Authority officials agreed to assume responsibility for the rail system. Automobile tolls from trans-Hudson bridges and tunnels were dedicated to underwriting capital investments as well as operational deficits. In 1962, the Port Authority began building a modern rapid-transit system through a wholly owned subsidiary, the Port Authority Trans-Hudson Corporation (PATH). As much as 10 percent of Port Authority annual reserve was dedicated to supporting PATH operations. The benefits of this deal for the Port Authority soon became obvious: improving transportation service helped the agency politically and bolstered the value of the WTC, avoiding a traffic crisis in downtown Manhattan that would have hindered its further development.12

Despite periodic protests about the need for capital improvements and expansion of service, PATH has been generally successful and well regarded, particularly in comparison to other, poorly maintained New York transit systems during the 1970s and 1980s. In 2001, the Port Authority implemented an “aggressive” variable toll schedule on its automobile facilities and at the same time announced a long-term investment program to bolster its transit operations and facilities, including improvements to Manhattan terminals as part of reconstruction projects at the WTC site. It also contributed funds for capital investments to improve bus and ferry facilities and for the construction of a new trans-Hudson tunnel for rails.13

The Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority and the Metropolitan Transit Authority

Maintaining local transit service within and between New York’s boroughs proved to be more challenging and complex, and the city’s other major mass-transit operator, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, has a more ambiguous record than the Port Authority. Under the jurisdiction of an underfunded city department, the publicly operated subway system was in a state of disrepair and decline by the 1950s. In 1954, the state legislature created the New York City Transit Authority to take responsibility for the system. Its proponents argued that it could achieve more businesslike operation by removing responsibility for the politically difficult task of setting fares away from elected officials. The new agency raised nearly $1 billion to invest in rehabilitating deteriorating facilities and rolling stock. Ridership started to increase by the end of the decade, reversing long-term trends, although the system continued to require major operational subsidies.14

The improvement of the transit system inspired efforts to expand service and to find new revenue. One obvious potential source of funds was the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA). The TBTA had been created in 1933 and was closely associated with its powerful executive, Robert Moses, who used its toll revenue to leverage the construction of a massive automobile-oriented transportation empire that transformed New York City. After three decades, the TBTA had financed and built seven major bridges and two subaqueous tunnels, all of which generated significant toll revenue. Moses operated the agency on strict business principles, investing aggressively in new facilities that could be expected not only to pay for themselves, but also make a profit. These projects largely fulfilled or exceeded expectations, and by the mid-1960s, the TBTA had significant financial reserves and surplus revenues.

While Moses and his road-building efforts won praise and inspired emulation in an earlier period, by the 1960s, they had more critics than supporters. Among those critics were powerful business and political leaders including Governor Rockefeller, who had an interest in the continued development of Manhattan and its residential suburbs. It was apparent that Moses’s automobiles-only approach was reaching its limits and that congestion in Manhattan was beginning to hamper economic growth and restrict property values. Not only was city-operated transit service in dire need of reliable subsidies, so also was the state-operated Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), which had been rescued from failure in 1965. Rockefeller and his chief transportation advisor, William Ronan, brokered a deal that merged the TBTA, the New York City Transit Authority, and the LIRR in a new Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). Appointments to the new MTA were made primarily by state officials, in contrast with the TBTA or the Transportation Authority, which had been more closely connected to and dependent upon city government.

New York transit’s financial problems were not over, however. The legislation that created the MTA earmarked toll revenues to secure bonds for capital investments in the subway system. These earmarks were based on the assumption that the MTA would continue to receive significant operating subsidies from the City of New York, but a major, long-term financial crisis during the 1970s led to drastic cuts in the city budget. Mass-transit subsidies were sacrificed early on. Although the MTA received significant amounts of new revenue from bridge and tunnel tolls, much of this was legally restricted to ambitious expansion projects, many of which never actually came to fruition because of cost overruns and delays. The entire system began to decline and patronage fell once again. By the 1980s, there were severe problems with safety and reliability as well as physical deterioration. The solution to New York’s transit crisis came from the state legislature. The 1981 Transportation Systems Assistance and Financing Act, brokered by New York developer and MTA chairman Richard Ravitch, authorized major investments in rehabilitation and modernization by allowing more flexible use of toll revenue. A combination of state-guaranteed bonds, federal subsidies, and MTA-issued revenue bonds made up for years of underfunded operations and maintenance. Service and patronage began to improve once again in the 1990s, and the revived system contributed to the city’s general economic recovery at the turn of the twenty-first century.15

The Golden Gate Bridge, Buses, and Ferries

The Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District was conceived and authorized to build a daring and financially risky bridge in the 1920s even as the New York Port Authority was being organized on the opposite coast. After more than a decade of campaigning by local boosters, the bridge district was incorporated in 1928 with the power to issue bonds secured both by future revenues and by local property taxes. The bridge’s primary intended purpose was to encourage suburban development and tourism in the rural region to the north of San Francisco. Although it initially fulfilled these hopes, by the end of the 1950s, congestion during peak hours had turned the bridge into a traffic bottleneck and an impediment to growth.

As with many other toll facilities, Golden Gate Bridge revenues far exceeded capital and operational costs, and the bridge district accumulated large financial reserves. During the 1950s and 1960s, officials sought state authorization to use toll revenue to finance either the construction of a second automobile deck on the bridge, or a new, parallel bridge to serve a growing commuter population in the North Bay area. However, San Francisco’s 1959 “freeway revolt” inaugurated an era of resolute opposition to any project that would bring more traffic into the city, and neither bridge-district officials nor state engineers had the power to overcome it. San Francisco city and county leaders, backed by a growing environmentalist lobby, opposed any new facility that would contribute to already-severe congestion downtown.16

Initially, bridge-district officials opposed any involvement with mass transit because of predictably high operating costs, as well as fear of a reduction in bridge traffic and therefore toll revenue. However, a much bigger threat to the agency’s security loomed: the original construction bonds were scheduled for retirement in 1971, and many expected the bridge district to be dissolved once the bridge was paid for. Because its officials had a reputation for poor management and corruption and because Golden Gate Bridge tolls were consistently higher than those of other bridges in the area, there was tremendous public pressure to turn the bridge over to the state’s Department of Transportation. Influential businessmen, including Edgar Kaiser, and politicians, including Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, favored this course of action. Nevertheless, bridge-district officials led by San Francisco attorney and ferry-boat enthusiast Stephan Leonoudakis managed to ensure the perpetuation of the bridge district beyond the retirement of its debt by promising to use toll revenues to finance and operate mass transit. The appeal of this promise for transportation-starved suburbs overcame the agency’s unpopularity, and bridge officials struck a deal with local and state politicians to authorize new operations.

Renamed the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway, and Transportation District in 1969, the agency revived ferry service between San Francisco and Marin County, took over Greyhound commuter bus routes across the bridge, and began operating local bus service in Marin and Sonoma counties. Since then, significant state and federal subsidies have supported capital investments in bridge-district mass-transit facilities. However, financial security has often taken precedence over mass-transportation operations in bridge district policy, resulting in cutbacks in routes and service. Nevertheless, toll revenues provide for more than half of the total cost of transit operations in the Golden Gate Corridor.17

The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, ART, and the MTC

Another still-evolving San Francisco Bay Area toll/transit connection provides a promising institutional model for multimodal transportation in metropolitan areas. In this case, several agencies have been pooling resources and planning in collaboration to achieve a more efficient and effective regional transportation system. The California Toll Bridge Authority, renamed and reorganized as the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA) in 1997, represents the financial lynchpin of this effort. The state legislature created the original agency in 1929 to finance and build a bridge between San Francisco and Oakland, and to purchase and take over the operation of all private California toll bridges and integrate them into the state highway system. The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge opened in 1936, and toll revenues were ample to retire its construction bonds in 1952, eighteen years ahead of schedule. Highway advocates and local boosters wanted to use bridge tolls to finance a new span linking San Francisco and Alameda County, and they succeeded in passing legislation to extend the toll on the bridge beyond the retirement of its construction bonds.

However, disagreement over the location and later the advisability of a new bridge stalled progress and ultimately defeated the proposal. In the meanwhile, rapid-transit advocates were developing plans for a new bay crossing in the form of an underwater tube to carry commuter trains. The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) district was created in 1957, its executive committee chaired by Alan Browne, the Bank of America’s vice president for municipal bonds. BART leaders not only had an interest in downtown development, they also recognized a financial opportunity when they saw one. They proposed using toll revenue to pay for a subaqueous tube from Oakland to San Francisco, a critical part of the proposed BART system. Toll Bridge Authority officials agreed to support the proposal in exchange for permission to abandon electric railway service on the bridge’s lower deck, in order to make way for more toll-paying motor vehicles. At the behest of BART officials and with the active intervention of Governor Brown, the state legislature authorized the use of Bay Bridge tolls and reserves to secure $130 million in revenue bonds for the tube.

The remainder of the BART system was financed with $500 million in bonds secured by property taxes in a three-county district, which voters approved in 1962. Although construction commenced two years later, unexpected costs and design changes made refinancing imperative midway through the project. San Francisco legislators sponsored a bill in 1967 to increase toll-funded subsidies for the entire system, but, despite strong support from Bay Area business leaders, it was defeated. Instead, in 1969, voters approved a half-cent sales tax in BART district counties to provide the additional funds needed to complete construction.18 Construction costs were not the most difficult financial problem that BART officials had to address, however; operational expenses posed a much bigger financial challenge after the system opened in 1973. The prospects for BART improved with the passage of the California Transportation Development Act in 1971, which allowed a portion of state gas taxes to be used to cover mass-transit operational costs. Local sales taxes were extended to subsidize operations once the system began service in 1973, and again in 1977 as a permanent source of revenue. Nevertheless, the link that was created between the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and the BART system with the financing of the transbay tube set a compelling precedent. In 1975, the state assembly authorized the use of toll revenue in excess of the operational and maintenance costs of Bay Area bridges for transit operations “to alleviate automobile-related congestion and pollution and to diminish the need for state expenditures on new bridge facilities.”19 The fund was administered by the Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), an agency that had been created in 1971 to fulfill federal regional-planning requirements.

Although very weak initially, the MTC evolved into one of the most influential metropolitan-planning organizations in the country, in part because of its control over toll bridge revenues. Seventy percent of Bay Area voters approved a measure in 1988 that extended and reinforced the connection between bridge tolls and mass transit, authorizing a $1 increase in tolls on seven Bay Area bridges. Part of the money generated by the increase was slated to fund major extensions of BART in the East Bay, as well as a connection to the San Francisco International Airport. More significantly, a long-term commitment to toll-funded transportation was included in legislation authorizing seismic retrofitting of Bay Area bridges in 1997. Quentin Kopp, chairman of the Senate Committee on Transportation, sponsored the legislation, which eliminated the California Toll Bridge Authority and devolved control of its revenue to the MTC, while maintaining ownership and responsibility for operations with the state Department of Transportation. The MTC was strengthened by a closer connection between tolls and transit in the Bay Area and vice versa. In 2004, MTC officials supported a bill to put Regional Measure 2 on the ballot, which voters approved by a comfortable margin. This resulted in another $1 increase in bridge tolls, generating approximately $125 million annually to support a “Regional Traffic Relief Plan” that focused primarily on improving mass transit in the bridge-traffic corridors. Not only did BART receive new funds for a seismic retrofit of the transbay tube and operational subsidies for expanded nighttime service, but a variety of other transportation agencies and programs also benefited, including ferry and bus operations.20

The use of bridge tolls to support mass transit has been consistently popular in the San Francisco Bay Area. In a region plagued by traffic congestion, there is general recognition that improved transit affords benefits to transit riders and drivers alike, and fosters receptiveness to the use of tolls for traffic management as well. The complementary relationships among the BATA, the MTC, BART, and other Bay Area transportation agencies could provide a template not only for regional transportation collaboration, but also for more effective and appropriate regional planning and coordination.

Reconstructing Transportation

Even though institutions linking revenue-generating facilities for automobiles with mass-transit systems that serve the same traffic corridor are rare and remarkable, independent public corporations responsible for metropolitan-area transportation service are not at all unusual. Such agencies, including authorities, commissions, and districts, proliferated over the course of the last century and now comprise an enormous segment of local and regional government in the United States. Many were established to build bridges, tunnels, and turnpikes during the 1950s. Another generation of public corporations took over transit systems, including buses, subways, and whatever street railways remained during the 1950s and 1960s, many of them benefiting from federal programs to support transit established by the Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964.21 Combining the resources and obligations of these entities, or creating new public agencies that merge these responsibilities, facilitates the financing and operation of multimodal transportation systems. While this is a simple idea, it would certainly not be easy to achieve. The officials of toll-funded, financially independent agencies have an inherent interest in protecting their bottom line. The leaders of all of the entities discussed here fiercely resisted modifying their mission to include mass transit, which by the 1960s had become a guaranteed financial liability. In addition, public corporations, especially authorities, have many drawbacks; they originated with Progressive Era efforts to remove public enterprise from the vicissitudes of electoral politics, and they are often criticized for political imperviousness and domination by business and financial interests. Still, it is possible to structure such agencies in ways that facilitate meaningful public input, transparent decision making, and democratic accountability, while maintaining the financial independence and efficacy that have made them so appealing to advocates of public enterprise.22

In metropolitan areas, transportation facilities such as highways, bridges, and tunnels have proven their potential to generate revenues far in excess of their capital and operational requirements. As the cases described in this essay suggest, toll revenues (or congestion fees) do not have to be restricted to the sole purpose of accommodating more vehicles. They can also support integrated transportation systems that serve a single corridor or one well-defined area. The fact that tolls are associated with a specific place makes their use for transit appropriate and compelling—especially since the legitimacy of transit’s claim to gas tax revenue has always been contested. In congested transportation corridors, transit can function in concert with automobiles. Drivers who are not deterred by tolls or fees can subsidize a system that reduces congestion by providing inexpensive transportation for everyone else. With this arrangement, tolls enhance mobility across modes: they can be directed toward supporting place-based systems that provide broad access across the socioeconomic spectrum and even have an overall progressive economic effect. Transportation authorities have the potential to transform transportation finance, harnessing automobile-generated revenues to invest in more sustainable and equitable place-based transportation programs that integrate private automobiles with rail and bus systems, and even with bicycle paths and pedestrian walkways. Recent proposals to rededicate toll revenue for mass-transit facilities include PlanNYC 2030, which would funnel congestion-pricing revenue to buses and subway systems serving Manhattan; a plan to transfer the Dulles Toll Road to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority in order to finance a major extension of the Metrorail system; and the creation of a Massachusetts Surface Transportation Authority with control over a variety of revenue-generating facilities. Still, most toll facilities are controlled and managed at the state level, and their revenues go to maintaining or financing roads exclusively. Devolving their management to local or regional agencies with clear mandates to support mass transit could be a pragmatic first step toward integrated multimodal systems.

There may presently be a rare window of opportunity to reorganize and reconceptualize transportation financing and administration in the United States. The sorry state of the nation’s “crumbling infrastructure,” and particularly its transportation infrastructure, has become a familiar refrain.23 From the mid-1980s until very recently, leading transportation-policy analysts have focused on securing new sources of revenue, arguing that increasing gas taxes to meet current needs is not politically viable. In 1991, the same bill that authorized the use of a portion of federal gas tax revenues for urban mass-transit operations also established a program to explore the potential for tolling on federally funded interstate freeways: the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) created a “congestion pricing” pilot program under the Federal Highway Administration. In 1995, the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU), included $59 million to fund a “value pricing” program through 2009.24

So far, the thrust of these programs has been to promote private financing and operation of revenue-generating facilities through “public–private partnerships,” including long-term leases.25 President George W. Bush’s appointees to the federal Department of Transportation were ardent advocates of imposing tolls on existing as well as new highways, bridges, and tunnels to support their transfer to the private sector.26 But the most compelling potential benefits of expanding the use of tolls, including encouraging the efficient use of existing infrastructure, could just as easily be realized through public agencies. Despite various problems with toll-facility privatization and the backlash generated by unpopular deals, interest in tolling seems to transcend ideological and geographical boundaries. This federal program could be adapted and reoriented to encourage local and regional programs that link congestion pricing and other tolls directly to mass-transit systems. The time may be right to use toll revenue to fund affordable transit, to manage congestion, and to promote environmental quality, as well as to build and maintain infrastructure for automobiles.

With a resurgent Democratic party at the helm of the federal government and economic crisis spurring changes in fiscal policy, there will be enormous new public investments in transportation infrastructure. The $52 billion authorized in the Recovery and Reinvestment Act in February 2009 is likely to be just a down payment on what is to come. Rather than attracting private capital, the major concern now seems to be which infrastructure should get priority for public investment. In the transportation sector, camps have already been staked out along familiar lines. Federal officials, state engineers, and various industrial groups are leading the campaign for “shovel-ready” projects, mostly the roads and highways that are the primary product and purpose of state transportation departments. They argue that these projects are proven not only to put people to work, but also to produce tangible and immediate physical benefits. Planners and environmentalists of various stripes are arguing that mass-transit and rail projects provide just as much or more economic bang for the public buck, and that the chance to reduce automobile dependence and change development patterns and behavior should not be missed. Pundits and editorialists on both sides seem to be paying little if any attention to the long-term implications of this spending for the institutions of infrastructure financing and administration. There is more at stake than simply the distribution of federal dollars: no matter how funds are divvied up, they will inevitably have long-term institutional effects. Without careful attention, the status quo will be perpetuated and reinforced. Yet strategic federal investments could do much more than simply pay for infrastructure: they could also establish new relationships, patterns, and priorities, securing them by building new institutions.

It may seem natural for the debate about transportation infrastructure to be divided along the lines of modal preference, with conservatives and free-market advocates supporting traditional automobile-oriented projects, and environmentalists and social-justice advocates calling for investments in mass transportation. But this alignment is by no means inevitable.27 It represents patterns that were established early in the twentieth century during another critical period of technological, economic, and social transformation that are now deeply inscribed into political culture, policies, and organizations at all levels of government. Institutions manifest history—they perpetuate the values and relationships at the time of their creation and at critical moments in their development. They shape the decision-making process and determine who must be supplicants (mass-transit riders) and who has entitlements (drivers). With regime change in Washington and an economic crisis spurring enormous new federal spending, it is critical that policy makers heed the long-term institutional implications of their actions. By changing the way transportation policy is defined and implemented, they could realize improvements that endure far longer than anything made of concrete and steel.

1. Transit ridership has been growing steadily since 1995 and dramatically since 2007, both in total numbers and relative to private autos. Nevertheless, as this essay goes to press, transit budgets and services are being reduced dramatically throughout the country; see American Public Transportation Association, 2008 Public Transportation Fact Book, 59th ed. (Washington, D.C., 2008). More detailed statistics are available in the “National Transit Database of the U.S. Federal Transit Administration,” available online at http://www.ntdprogram.gov/ntdprogram/ (accessed 6 April 2009).

2. The nature of institutional change has been the subject of lively theoretical debate among political scientists and economists. However, whether understood in terms of “punctuated equilibrium” or “incrementalism,” resistance to change is a fundamental characteristic of institutions, which include the rules, procedures, ideas, and organizations that shape decision making and the outcome of policy. For a recent discussion, see Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Ann Thelen, “Introduction,” in Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies, ed. Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Ann Thelen (New York, 2005). See also Kathleen Thelen and Sven Steinmo, “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,” in Structuring Politics: Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Analysis, ed. Sven Steinmo et al. (Cambridge, 1992); and Guy Peters, Institutional Theory in Political Science: The New Institutionalism, 2nd ed. (New York, 2005).

3. John C. Burnham, “The Gasoline Tax and the Automobile Revolution,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 48 (1961): 435–59; R. Rudy Higgens-Evenson, “Financing a Second Era of Internal Improvements: Transportation and Tax Reform, 1890–1929,” Social Science History 26 (2002): 623–51.

4. On the development of road and highway policy in the United States, see Bruce E. Seely, Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia, 1987); Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1939–1989, rev. ed. (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990); Owen Gutfreund, Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (New York, 2005); Michael R. Fein, Paving the Way: New York Road Building and the American State, 1880–1956 (Topeka, Kans., 2008); Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City (New York, 1994); Howard L. Preston, Dirt Roads to Dixie: Accessibility and Modernization in the South, 1885–1935 (Knoxville, Tenn., 1991); and John B. Rae, The Road and the Car in American Life (Cambridge, Mass.,1971).

5. The 1935 Public Utility Holding Company Act forced divesture of electric power companies from transit, accelerating an ongoing trend that extended to real estate development companies as well; see George M. Smerk, The Federal Role in Urban Mass Transportation (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 43. On the origins and problems of the 5¢ fare, see Winstan Bond, “The Flawed Economics and Morality of the American Uniform Five-cent Fare,” in Suburbanizing the Masses: Public Transport and Urban Development in Historical Perspective, ed. Colin Divall and Winstan Bond (Burlington, Vt., 2003), 49–78. For an analysis of how this worked out in a specific urban context during the 1920s, see Robert C. Post, “The Fair Fare Fight: An Episode in Los Angeles History,” Southern California Quarterly 52 (1970): 275–98.

6. Important studies of public policy and the rise and fall of mass transit in the United States include David W. Jones, Mass Motorization + Mass Transit: An American History and Policy Analysis (Bloomington, Ind., 2008); Scott Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City (Berkeley, Calif., 1987); Glen Yago, The Decline of Transit: Urban Transportation in German and U.S. Cities, 1900–1970 (New York, 1984); Paul Barrett, The Automobile and Urban Mass Transit: The Formation of Public Policy in Chicago, 1880–1912 (Philadelphia, 1983); Mark S. Foster, From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and Urban Transportation, 1900–1940 (Philadelphia, 1981); and Charles W. Cheape, Moving the Masses: Urban Public Transit in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, 1880–1912 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980).

7. For the institutional and political history of these transportation sectors, see Mark H. Rose, Bruce E. Seely, and Paul F. Barrett, The Best Transportation System in the World: Railroads, Trucks, Airlines, and American Public Policy in the Twentieth Century (Columbus, Ohio, 2006).

8. Smerk, 260–77; Zachary Schrag, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Baltimore, 2006); Jonathan Richmond, Transport of Delight: The Mythical Conception of Rail in Los Angeles (Akron, Ohio, 2007).

9. Critical studies include Alan A. Altschuler and David Luberoff, Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment (Washington, D.C., 2003); J. Allen Whitt, Urban Elites and Mass Transportation: The Dialectics of Power (Princeton, N.J., 1982); Andrew Marshall Hamer, The Selling of Rail Rapid Transit: A Critical Look at Urban Transportation Planning (Lexington, Mass., 1976); and John Robert Meyer, John F. Kain, and Martin Wohl, The Urban Transportation Problem (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).

10. David W. Jones, Urban Transit Policy: An Economic and Political History (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1985), ix.

11. Jameson W. Doig, Empire on the Hudson: Entrepreneurial Vision and Political Power at the Port of New York Authority (New York, 2001); Keith D. Revell, “Cooperation, Capture, and Autonomy: The Interstate Commerce Commission and the Port Authority in the 1920s,” Journal of Policy History 12 (2000): 177–214; Jameson Doig, “‘If I see a murderous fellow sharpening a knife cleverly . . .’: The Wilsonian Dichotomy and the Public Authority Tradition,” Public Administration Review 43 (1983): 292–304; Laurence S. Knappen, Revenue Bonds and the Investor (New York, 1939).

12. Jameson W. Doig, Metropolitan Transportation Politics and the New York Region (New York, 1966); Michael N. Danielson and Jameson Doig, New York: The Politics of Urban Regional Development (Berkeley, Calif., 1982), 171–255. See also Doig, Empire on the Hudson; Brian Cudahy, Rails under the Mighty Hudson: The Story of the Hudson Tubes, the Pennsylvania Tunnels, and the Manhattan Transfer, 2nd ed. (New York, 2002).

13. Mark Muriello, “Toll Road Applications: Perspectives from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey,” in International Perspectives on Road Pricing (Washington, D.C., 2005); Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for the Year Ended December 31, 2007 (New York, 2008).

14. Doig, Metropolitan Transportation Politics; Wallace S. Sayre and Herbert Kaufman, Governing NY City: Politics in the Metropolis (1960; reprint, New York, 1965).

15. Danielson and Doig, 171–255; James K. Cohen, “Capital Investments and the Decline of Mass Transit in New York City,” Urban Affairs Quarterly 23 (1988): 369–88; James K. Cohen, “Structural versus Functional Determinants of New York’s Fiscal Policies Towards Metropolitan Transportation, 1940–1990,” Social Science History 15 (1991): 177–98; Mark Seaman, Allison L. C. de Cerreño, and Seth English-Young, From Rescue to Renaissance: The Achievements of the MTA Capital Program, 1982–2004 (New York, 2004). See also Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York, 1974); Joel Schwartz, The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City (Columbus, Ohio, 1993); and Robert Moses, Public Works: A Dangerous Trade (New York, 1970). For a recent reassessment of Caro’s treatment of Robert Moses, see Jon C. Teaford, “Caro versus Moses, Round Two: Robert Caro’s The Power Broker,” Technology and Culture 49 (2008): 442–48.

16. On San Francisco’s freeway revolt, see Katherine M. Johnson, “Captain Blake versus the Highwaymen: Or, How San Francisco Won the Freeway Revolt,” Journal of Planning History 8 (2009): 56–83; William Issel, “‘Land Values, Human Values, and the Preservation of the City’s Treasured Appearance’: Environmentalism, Politics, and the San Francisco Freeway Revolt,” Pacific Historical Review 68 (1999): 611–46.

17. Louise Nelson Dyble, Paying the Toll: Local Power, Regional Politics, and the Golden Gate Bridge (Philadelphia, 2009).

18. Seymour Mark Adler, “Political Economy of Transit in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–1963” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1980); Seymour Mark Adler, “Infrastructure Politics: The Dynamics of Crossing San Francisco Bay,” Public Historian 10 (1988): 19–41; Stephen Zwerling, Mass Transit and the Politics of Technology: A Study of BART and the San Francisco Bay Area (New York, 1974); U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment, An Assessment of Community Planning for Mass Transit: Volume 8—San Francisco Case Study (Washington, D.C., 1976); Karen Trapenberg Frick, “The Cost of the Technological Sublime: Daring Ingenuity and the New San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge,” in Decision-Making on Mega-Projects, ed. Hugo Priemus, Bent Flyvbjerg, and Bert van Wee (Cheltenham, U.K., 2008), 239–62.

19. Statutes of California, 1975 reg. sess., ch. 1229.

20. S.B. 226, 1997 leg., reg. sess. (Calif.). This legislation created the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA), which is described in the bill as “the same as” the MTC. There is a variety of information related to Bay Area toll bridges available on the MTC website, at http://bata.mtc.ca.gov/reports.htm (accessed 6 April 2009). For an overview, see Bay Area Toll Authority, Bay Area Toll Authority Long-Range Plan (Oakland, 2006).

21. The Housing Act of 1961 provided the first federal aid for mass-transit planning, demonstrations, and loans, but the 1964 legislation provided for the first direct subsidies and permanent programs; see Smerk (n. 5 above), 86–107.

22. On the history of public corporations, including authorities, and their various problems, see Annmarie Hauck Walsh, The Public’s Business: The Politics and Practices of Government Corporations (Cambridge, Mass., 1978); Alberta M. Sbragia, Debt Wish: Entrepreneurial Cities, U.S. Federalism, and Economic Development (Pittsburgh, 1996); Gail Radford, “From Municipal Socialism to Public Authorities: Institutional Factors in the Shaping of American Public Enterprise,” Journal of American History 90 (2003): 863– 90; Kathryn Foster, The Political Economy of Special-Purpose Government (Washington, D.C., 1997); Doig, “If I see a murderous fellow” (n. 11 above); Jameson Doig and Jerry Mitchell, “Expertise, Democracy, and the Public Authority Model: Groping Toward Accommodation,” in Public Authorities and Public Policy: The Business of Government, ed. Jerry Mitchell (Westport, Conn., 1992); Susan Tenenbaum, “The Progressive Legacy and the Public Corporation: Entrepreneurship and Public Virtue,” Journal of Policy History 3 (1991): 308–30.

23. Some important declarations of infrastructure crisis over the past few decades include Pat Choate and Susan Walter, America in Ruins: Beyond the Public Works Pork Barrel (Washington, D.C., 1981); Marshall Kaplan, Hard Choices: A Report on the Increasing Gap between America’s Infrastructure Needs and Our Ability to Pay for Them: A Study (Washington, D.C., 1984); Michael Barker, ed., Rebuilding America’s Infrastructure: An Agenda for the 1980s (Durham, N.C., 1984); and National Council on Public Works Improvement, Fragile Foundations: A Report on America’s Public Works: Final Report to the President and the Congress (Washington, D.C., 1988). The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) issued its first “infrastructure report card” in 1998, a widely cited publication that has been reliably dire ever since. The original plus its 2001, 2003, 2005, and 2008 updates are all available online: http://www.asce.org/reportcard (accessed 6 April 2009).

24. On ISTEA and the persistence of modal imbalances, see Edward Beimhorn and Robert Puentes, “Highways and Transit: Leveling the Playing Field in Federal Transportation Policy,” in Taking the High Road: A Metropolitan Agenda for Transportation Reform, ed. Bruce Katz and Robert Puentes (Washington, D.C., 2005), 257–86.

25. The results of these efforts are easily observed in toll-financed facilities under various forms of private operation in Illinois, Indiana, Virginia, Texas, California, and elsewhere. For information on recent federally sponsored toll-road development, see Benjamin Perez and Steve Lockwood, Current Toll Road Activity in the U.S.: A Survey and Analysis (U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, 2009), available online at http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ppp/pdf/2008_toll_activity_white_paper. pdf (accessed 5 May 2009); U.S. Federal Highway Administration, “Tolling and Pricing Program,” available online at http://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/tolling_pricing/index.htm (accessed 6 April 2009).

26. There is a vast literature examining infrastructure privatization and user fees. Much of this work is inspired by the work of Nobel Prize–winning economist William Vickrey, an ardent advocate of a market-based approach to congestion management. For an introduction, see National Research Council Transportation Research Board, Curbing Gridlock: Peak-Period Fees to Relieve Traffic Congestion (Washington, D.C., 1994); Gabriel Joseph Roth, ed., Street Smart: Competition, Entrepreneurship, and the Future of Roads (New Brunswick, N.J., 2006); and Charles Robin Lindsey, “Do Economists Reach a Conclusion on Road Pricing? The Intellectual History of an Idea,” Economic Journal Watch 3 (2006): 292–379.

27. The late Paul Weyrich, patriarch of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, became a dedicated proponent of new light-rail lines, as well as a partisan of rapid transit and even Amtrak; see Weyrich and William S. Lind, “Conservatives and Mass Transit: Is It Time for a New Look?,” a 1995 study prepared for the American Public Transit Association by the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation (available online at http: //www.apta.com/research/info/online/documents/conserve.pdf [accessed 6 April 2009]).

Louise Nelson Dyble is associate director for research, the Keston Institute for Public Finance and Infrastructure Policy, University of Southern California. She is the author of Paying the Toll: Local Power, Regional Politics, and the Golden Gate Bridge (2009).

Copyright© 2009, the Society for the History of Technology

One sees a man and a machine that is hard to identify: It might just be a big toy—there’s something on the right that resembles a key to wind it up, and a wheel about the size of a tricycle’s—but with a row of flush rivets and a tailfin it looks more like a vehicle designed to go very fast. Of course it could be both. The man is standing on a blanket in booties and zipping up a color-coordinated outfit. All around is what looks like hard sand or ice, or maybe salt, and there are low mountains. Not so immediately evident are long shadows of the sort cast at sunup, the shadows of a handful of people standing off to the left and watching the man and his curious machine. Just a handful, which is in itself curious, as one senses that something dramatic might be about to happen.

The white expanse is indeed salt, the deposit left when what we know as Great Salt Lake receded to its present size in the late Pleistocene. Though diminished now, these salt flats covered a hundred thousand acres in 1835 when they were named for a West Point officer who had led a party of explorers and trappers westward from Saint Louis in quest of beaver pelts, which were considered immensely valuable. But the once-teeming beaver streams of the Mountain West had already been decimated, and the men returned empty-handed, much to the chagrin of their financier, John Jacob Astor. They left behind only a few names on the land, most notably that of their Paris-born leader, Captain Benjamin Louis Eulalie de Bonneville.

The Bonneville Salt Flats have a haunting beauty, with the Newfoundland Mountains shimmering like a distant mirage and sunrises like no place else on earth. They are blazing hot and devoid of wildlife. Salt-mining operations began around the turn of the twentieth century, but the flats were not surveyed until 1926 and never made much news until a hundred years after they were named for the captain. In 1935 they were visited by Malcolm Campbell, an English diamond merchant and veteran of the Royal Flying Corps who had long pursued the so-called land speed record (LSR), first on the Pendine Sands on the coast of Wales and most recently at Daytona Beach in Florida. Bonneville was a far better venue for this sort of thing. It was right on the Lincoln Highway and the Western Pacific Railroad, the salt was like concrete, and there was room to measure off a course thirteen miles long: six miles to accelerate, then electronic timing beams a mile apart and six miles to slow down. A machine racing for the LSR seemed to disappear below the curvature of the earth.

As far back as 1902 there had been American enthusiasts for the LSR, and no less than Henry Ford and Louis Chevrolet each held the record briefly at 91 and 117 mph, respectively. In 1906, one Fred Marriott went 127 in the “Rocket,” a Stanley Steamer. But in the 1920s and 1930s the LSR had become a peculiarly British passion. In his “Bluebird,” Campbell clocked 301 at Bonneville in 1935. Two years later his countryman George E. T. Eyston went 10 miles an hour faster, then on 27 August 1938 he raised his own record to 345. For the next year, Eyston traded the record twice with John Cobb, a Surrey fur broker, until it stood at 367 on 23 August 1939. A week later Hitler invaded Poland and the LSR boys put away their toys.

During the war Cobb flew for the British Air Transport Auxiliary, but two years after the war ended he was back on “the salt,” boosting his record to 394 miles per hour in September 1947. Afterward Cobb turned his enthusiasm to waterborne speed (he lost his life on Loch Ness in 1952), so there the LSR would stand, 6 mph short of 400, until well into the 1960s. It was reminiscent of Gunder Haegg’s 4-minute, 1.4-second mile, long thought unbeatable.

Meantime, a troupe of American hobbyists, young men dubbed hot rodders, had made arrangements with the local authorities to stage time trials at Bonneville. Beginning in 1949 they were scheduled for seven days in August, the annual event to be called “Speed Week.” To sociologists, these hot rodders were a “subculture.” For sure they were different from the lordly Brits (Campbell had even been knighted) with their seven-ton leviathans designed by engineers and powered by supercharged Rolls Royce and Napier Lion airplane engines. Typically they raced stripped-down prewar Ford roadsters with “flathead” (simple valve-in-block) V-8 engines of the sort that had been standard equipment with Fords since 1932. The best of these roadsters were capable of 150 mph. During the 1950s, a few hot rodders fashioned “streamliners” that mimicked the British pacesetters of yore, but at first the very fastest of these were not much faster than Campbell at Daytona in the early 1930s. Even with two or three automobile engines in a row, hopped up to the utmost, they could not command anywhere near the horsepower that had been available to Campbell, or Eyston or Cobb, as much as 2,600.

Before the war, aircraft engines had cost a fortune. By the early 1950s they became “war surplus,” worth only their scrap value, but none of the hot rodders seemed to notice. Or almost none. Enter the man in the photo, Arthur Eugene “Art” Arfons. With his mother Bessie (his Greek-immigrant father Tom, who had Americanized his name from Arfanos, died at age fifty-two in 1950) and his older half-brother Walt, Art Arfons operated a chicken feed mill on Pickle Road on the outskirts of Akron, Ohio. Akron was known for its tire industry and also for its All-American Soap Box Derby, in which youngsters in homemade wooden speedsters would race downhill propelled only by the force of gravity. Ar t naturally had his innings with the derby before enlisting in the navy in 1943 at the age of “almost seventeen.” He ended up as a diesel mechanic in the Pacific theater and was discharged as a petty officer second class after a three-year hitch. At twenty, he was just at the start of a lifetime love affair (there is no other way to describe it) with speed and power. The photo was taken by me in 1991 when Art was sixty-five.

Art initially ventured into a new kind of automotive competition called drag racing, quarter-mile standing-start sprints. At first, most of drag racing’s energy and enthusiasm were concentrated in Southern California, as was most of its innovative spirit. With one big exception. While most Californians were still trying to wring more power out of old flathead Fords and other V-8s, Art Arfons and Walt were availing themselves of brand-new aircraft engines still in wooden crates: Rangers, Merlins, and especially Allisons, the 28-liter V-12s from General Motors that had powered the fabled Lockheed P-38 “Lightning” of World War II, and indeed the majority of all American pursuit planes. In 1953 they showed up at the local drag strip with an Allison-powered dragster, which was immediately dubbed a monster, indeed a Green Monster because Bessie had painted it John Deere tractor green. Ever afterward that name was given to Arfons machines, even when they were not green.

There had been 70,000 Allisons, variously rated between 1,500 and 2,000 horsepower, quadruple the power of even the hottest automobile engine. True, for drag racing there was a trade-off. Drag racing had two performance parameters, independent of one another, elapsed time (et) from start to finish and top speed (mph). Because an Allison engine had so much power, a Green Monster had to be nursed away from the starting line to avoid spinning the tires excessively. But when it came to mph at the finish, nothing else was even close. Concerned that competitors with ordinary V-8s (and Detroit’s Big Three) were miffed about getting upstaged, in 1959 the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA)—drag racing’s primary sanctioning body—instigated rules limiting competition to “automobile engines only.”

The last Arfons Allison-powered machine therefore got diverted to Bonneville Speed Week and clocked almost 314 mph before frying the clutch. Having had a falling-out with Walt, Art was on his own, and he put it up for sale. He did so because he knew (as did Walt) that something better was on the war surplus market: turbojet engines with even more power than an Allison. When Art tested his first jet-powered machine on a back road, the performance was mediocre. But after he added an afterburner, which injected raw fuel (kerosene) directly into the exhaust, it was spectacular. At “outlaw” drag strips not sanctioned by the NHRA, “brutal and brazen shards of fiery horsepower” (as Cole Coonce writes in his atmospheric Infinity Over Zero [2002]) would draw amazed crowds. For exhibition runs with a jet dragster, Arfons could command a thousand dollars or even more, and he began saving up for a return to the salt and for bragging rights that would be priceless.

The Bonneville salt flats had seen some strange things

But the strangest thing yet was a jet without wings

Once as a jet it played in the stars

But now on the ground it’s the king of our cars

While there were no songs about Green Monsters, Art Arfons found sponsorship too, from the STP division of Studebaker and from Firestone Tire and Rubber—tires were more critical than anything else to an LSR effort. But it was not so generous as Breedlove’s from Goodyear and Shell Oil. Always Art Arfons was the “junkyard genius,” the handsome but roughhewn pragmatist whose machinery might lack for finesse but never for sheer horsepower. In 1961 he had located a slightly damaged General Electric J-79 engine from an F-104 Starfighter, the aircraft that held records for speed, altitude, and rate of climb. It had cost the air force $250,000; he bought it for a few thousand dollars (or maybe only a few hundred— accounts varied over the years). With its four-stage afterburner, a J-79 had triple the thrust of a J-47, though not everything was sorted out when Art went to Bonneville in 1962 (he had rebuilt his J-79 without the aid of the printed manual, which was classified) and he clocked only 342.

But from 1963 to 1966 he would engage in a dramatic duel that saw the LSR change hands over and over: A recent article in Air and Space called it “The Bonneville Jet Wars.” A car designed by Walt Arfons held the record briefly, but the main event was Art Arfons and Craig Breedlove. Breedlove went 407 in August 1963, Art went 434 in October 1964. Breedlove went 468 a week later, then 526 in October 1965 with a new machine, totally redesigned. Then Art went 536, Breedlove 555, Art 576, and Breedlove 600. That was on 15 November 1965. A year later, on 17 November 1966, Art was just topping 600 when a bearing froze and he veered off the course and went end over end, and then the Green Monster tumbled and slid and disintegrated for miles and miles. A Sports Illustrated photographer in a helicopter overhead reported that “one of the wheels bounced high into the air toward us and almost went through one of the rotors.” Somehow, Art’s injuries were minor. After hearing from the official timer that “he coulda had the record,” he vowed to be back. But it would take a long time. His baby daughter Dusty (middle name Allison) would be twenty-three years old.

In that interim, men went to the moon, a war was lost, a president resigned, feminism gained, and interest in the land speed record waned, though not completely. A rocket-powered machine clocked 622 at Bonneville in 1970 and a Scotsman named Richard Noble took a jet to 633 in 1983, thereby returning the LSR to Great Britain, where it has remained ever since. (A ten-ton twin-jet machine designed by Noble attained Mach 1.015 in 1997.) As for Art Arfons, his darkest day came in 1971 as three people died when he lost control of a jet dragster in Texas. After a long, desperate struggle to pull himself together, he turned his competitive instincts to a slower, if no quieter, spectacle, tractor-pulling, which would become immensely popular in Ohio and the Midwest. But he continued to feel the lure of the salt. It was much more than a lure, actually; David Finn, the director of a documentary film about Arfons, called it “a Shakespearean obsession.”

Art Arfons, Green Monster No. 27, and the Bonneville Salt Flats, August 1991. (Author’s photo.)

In July 1989 Art’s nephew Craig, Walt’s son, was killed while attempting to set a speed record on Jackson Lake near Sebring, Florida. Two months later, Art and his own son Tim showed up at Bonneville with Green Monster No. 27, a 22-foot two-wheeler that was as dainty as some of his earlier machines had been ponderous, the GE Learjet engine weighing only 800 pounds and the entire vehicle only 1,800. Art drove, sixty-three years of age, triple bypass and all. At 350 mph it lifted the front end and rolled over. Damage was not extensive, and Art returned to Akron to rebuild it in a slightly more conventional configuration. He was back on the salt in 1990, this time with Finn’s film crew on hand to record every moment. Among the large crowd of spectators were Craig Breedlove and Richard Noble, who later expressed his amazement that “Art was allowed to run such a lightweight car.”

Beset with vibrations that made it impossible for him to see his instrument panel or even the course markers, Art only managed 328, and he announced that he was heading home. Did the car require “too much reworking?” asked Tim. “No,” said his dad. “It’s more me. I’m just sorta going to hang it up. Got to stop somewhere.”

And yet, there would be one last hurrah, Speed Week 1991, which was when I took the photo. Art was set up to run a course a mile or so off to the side of where the regular timed runs were taking place. There was no film crew, no fanfare, just a handful of onlookers, most of whom had found out by accident. Among a smaller handful of helpers was son Tim and Jim Deist, who had manufactured Art’s firesuit and the parachute used to slow down. Art had always insisted that he felt no fear before a high-speed run, and I may have been wrong in thinking that he seemed apprehensive. He finished suiting up and squeezed down into the cockpit. Tim helped him with his helmet, cinched up his belts, and fitted the Lexan canopy. Then he took a close look at the wheels (LSR people had long-since decided it was better not to have tires at all), and fired the engine with a small auxiliary power unit. A wave of the hand, and Art moved off toward the horizon at a measured pace.

About a half-mile downcourse he lit the afterburner, which ordinarily would have brought his speed near 400 in short order. But after a moment, only silence; he was coasting. Tim chased after him in the truck they had driven out from Akron. Everything was too far away for me to see what was happening, and I walked away. When I returned to where Art had been set up, later in the day, there was nobody there.

Art had once said, “I can’t wait to get here to race. When I get here I can’t wait to leave, and, after I’ve left I can’t wait to come back.” Usually he couldn’t wait to leave because he envisioned some improvement to make at his shop in Ohio. But this time he never came back, although rumors of the possibility circulated for several years. A lifetime quest for mastery had ended not with a bang but a whimper.

This was also the last attempt at an LSR ever made at Bonneville, by anyone. Noble’s British team, which had clocked 633 and would later break the sound barrier, did so at a remote place called the Black Rock Desert, an alkali playa in northwestern Nevada with a surface better able to bear their machine’s weight. Several different courses could be laid out that were longer than anything possible at Bonneville because mining operations had so degraded the salt. (For the time being, Bonneville still sees record runs on a shorter course by [relatively] slower machines powered through their wheels, not by thrust—records that are separately certified by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile—and several have topped 400 since 1991.)

Art Arfons lived sixteen years longer, competing in tractor pulls along with Tim and Dusty, fussing around his shop, reliving old times with old friends, and accumulating many honors, including induction into no less than five different halls of fame. He died at eighty-one on the third of December 2007, survived by his long-suffering but loving wife of sixty years, June; by Dusty and Tim; and by Walt. As it happened, Art died only seventy-two hours after Robert Craig “Evel” Knievel, whose name had more popular resonance (Google yields him fifty times as many hits). Both men got substantial obituaries in the New York Times. But last words about Evel Kneivel were only a quote about him saying he “could draw a big crowd by jumping over weird stuff.” Small glory compared to the finale for Art Arfons, memorialized as a man “whose Green Monster machines were a triumph of mechanical engineering.” And there was something else. In David Finn’s film, Art comes across as an immensely likable man, self-effacing, thoughtful, even serene. In 1990, when he decided to go home to Akron without even getting close to the record, he realized that he might be depriving Finn’s costly production of a climactic scene. “Are you mad at me?” he asked.

Why would a man care so much about what Art Arfons cared about? It’s a good question, and part of the answer might be found in The Right Stuff (Tom Wolfe, 1979) or even in Susan Faludi’s Stiffed (1999). But no answer can detract from the touching coda in the Times : “Arfons was buried with wrenches in his hands, accompanied by a jar of Bonneville salt and the manual, now declassified, to the General Electric J79 jet engine.”

Bob Post thanks Dusty Spraggins and Tim Arfons for answering his many questions, and Craig Breedlove for a memorable conversation on a California beach many years ago. Post’s previous writings about Bonneville include “The Machines of Nowhere,” Invention and Technology, spring 1992, and “Strip, Salt, and Other Straightaway Dreams” in Possible Dreams: Enthusiasm for Technology in America, ed. John Wright (1992). He tells the story of drag racing in High Performance (2001). In The Business of Speed (2008), hot rodding has found its storyteller in David Lucsko. There is no more enchanting evocation of technological enthusiasm than David Finn’s The Green Monster, which originally aired on PBS in 1999 but is now much harder to find than Hollywood’s Landspeed (2002), a perfectly awful movie. Confirmation that LSR dreams live on in the hearts of old men may be found at www.landspeed.com.

Copyright© 2009, the Society for the History of Technology

Fig. 1 A panoramic view of the city of Kavala, circa 1930. Most of the tobacco warehouses were located on the coastline. (Reproduced courtesy of the Institute of Archeology and the Sciences of Antiquity, Paul Collart Collection.)

In the mid-nineteenth century, Kavala developed into one of the most important tobacco-processing centers in the Balkans, attracting the commercial interest of the Habsburg Empire, England, France, Egypt, and even the United States. A crucial reason for the cultivation of the tobacco crop in this area, then under Ottoman occupation, was that the sultan had forbidden Turks from growing it. Because of this restriction, both tobacco cultivation and the tobacco trade passed into the hands of Greek merchants. Smoking soon became a popular habit among the Greeks and the tobacco trade boomed. Facilitated by ideal climate and soil conditions, the area around Kavala developed into one of the main tobacco-producing centers in the country, and the city became a major export harbor (fig. 1). By 1913, there were sixty-one tobacco companies registered in the city and close to 6,000 workers in the industry. Warehouses of a distinct architectural style were built at that time and still stand as important landmarks, testaments to the close bond between the tobacco trade and the city’s political and social history.1

To honor that history, in 1996 the city’s small ethnographic museum organized an exhibition called Kavala: The Tobacco City of Yesterday. Artifacts related to the cultivation and processing of tobacco leaves as well as photographs and other memorabilia were donated by families of local tobacco merchants and workers. Public attendance exceeded all expectations, resulting in a growing interest in the city’s history. Complemented and enhanced over time, this exhibition became the basis for a permanent museum, and on 5 April 2003, supported by the municipal authorities, the first tobacco museum in the country opened to the public. It was (and still is) housed in a small and generally unsuitable space, the ground floor of the Greek Organization of Tobacco building, a choice dictated by financial constraints. In less than 700 square meters (7,500 square feet), the museum covers more than 120 years of tobacco history and displays artifacts ranging from those associated with the rural production and commercial processing of tobacco to the manufacture of cigars and the culture of tobacco use.2

Fig. 2 The first Greek patented machine for producing cigars, circa 1925. (Reproduced courtesy of the Tobacco Museum of the City of Kavala.)

The museum presents Kavala as the “Mecca of tobacco” in the late nineteenth century, a city that owes most of its recent history to the production and processing of tobacco and to the tobacco workers’ movement of the early twentieth century. The museum’s illustrated narrative of the technological and partly social history of tobacco processing in Kavala conveys a linear view of technological progress and a conventional, nonsociological shaping of technological artifacts. It does, however, succeed in communicating the importance of material objects in people’s lives. Approximately a thousand objects are on display in this cramped space, which unfortunately means that it is all too easy to miss some of them—even though they are all significant artifacts in the story of the tobacco industry. One easily overlooked item of special interest, for example, is a small machine for producing cigars, the first of its kind in Greece, which was patented in 1925 (fig. 2).

Visitors are free to explore the permanent exhibition on their own, guided by very short descriptions placed among the artifacts as well as by several stories told through vivid photographs hanging on the walls. The collection itself is divided into seven themes that are treated in succession in the single floor of the museum. Artifacts related to tobacco cultivation appear first, followed by those associated with traditional tobacco processing in the city’s warehouses; the introduction of the tonga—a new pressing machine for producing the tobacco bales—and the gradual mechanization of the process; the production of sample tobacco bales and their introduction to the market; references to significant local tobacco merchants and their families; quick narratives about the tobacco unions and unionists; and last, artifacts related to finished tobacco products like cigarettes and cigars. A few brief words about some of these sections are in order.

Once past the building’s unremarkable entrance, visitors (who pay no entrance fee) first encounter a number of very well-preserved tools used in tobacco fields during planting and cultivation and in farmers’ storehouses for the preparation of tobacco bales. The stitching of the leaves onto long needles and their subsequent stringing into bundles is reenacted at the end of the first gallery, highlighting the involvement of the farmer’s entire family in the process and their utter dependence on tobacco production. The exhibit walks visitors through traditional growing practices and illustrates the time and care needed to produce tobacco leaves. A wide variety of photographs and additional artifacts provide a broader view of the rural culture of the tobacco cultivator.

Fig. 3 Two tonga presses exhibited next to each other. The tobacco leaves were thrown inside the wooden box and pressed on the top either by a heavy iron object or, later on, by a press operated manually by a winch. (Reproduced courtesy of the Tobacco Museum of the City of Kavala.)

Visitors are then ushered into a gallery that tells the story of the traditional tobacco-production process, which began as soon as the leaves arrived in the city’s warehouses. Until the late 1920s, tobacco was processed entirely by hand. The processing took place on the upper floors of the warehouses, called salonia, where both men and women were employed. The work was divided between the sexes to form two main areas of expertise integrated into a clear hierarchy. The men (the dektsides, or exastratzides) were responsible for the initial division of the tobacco leaves by quality. They sat in pairs on rush mats on the floor next to the windows. Until the warehouses were fitted with electric lighting, positions adjacent to the windows were privileged over all the others. Younger and less experienced pickers were responsible for the second and third selections, and they too sat in pairs, though back-to-back. Each pair of experienced pickers had a female worker (the pastaltzou) sitting cross-legged about half a meter away. She was responsible for the lower-quality tobacco leaves and for stacking the chosen leaves into small piles (pastalia); in other words, she assisted the dektsides in the menial task of stacking the tobacco leaves. Women were barred from becoming dektsides, which preserved gender-based power relations within the workplace.3 This story is told through revealing photographs though with no other direct reference to the gendered nature of the tobacco work, or even to the multiethnic composition of worker’s groups.

Fig. 4 Female tobacco workers separating leaves into five groups by quality. The leaves were then thrown into the tonga press in order to produce the final tobacco bale. (Reproduced courtesy of the Tobacco Museum of the City of Kavala.)

Arranged chronologically, the artifacts that follow depict a period of political unrest, when tobacco unionists clashed with powerful merchants and the state, and it also covers the introduction of technology into the tobacco workplace. The financial crisis of 1929 and the world depression that followed made traditional methods of processing tobacco too expensive and time-consuming. Consequently, most of Kavala’s tobacco merchants attempted to replace their manpower with the more efficient tonga presses (fig. 3). Visitors encounter a rich array of artifacts here as they end their way through a series of reenactments of the tonga process. In the common parlance of the tobacco workers themselves, “tonga” referred not only to the pressing machinery itself, but also to the entire processing method brought about by the introduction of the new technology into the workplace—and often its finished product as well, the tobacco bale. “Tonga” retains the same multilayered significance in later analyses of the tobacco labor movement (fig. 4).

When Greece’s largest tobacco-processing firm, the Gar y Tobacco Company of Kavala, introduced the first trial machinery into its commercial salonia in 1930 in collaboration with the American Tobacco Company, the workers did not balk. They still harbored the illusion that the introduction of the new production technology would not affect their jobs. The prevailing sentiment, bolstered by the opinions of the tobacco technicians themselves, was that the new processing machinery produced a more perishable product, because tobacco leaves carelessly pressed by tonga machines were more prone to retain moisture. After the initial trials of 1930, however, the tonga machines reappeared in July of 1933, at which point the companies also decided to bar male workers from the new production process and allow only women to tend the tonga machinery. The benefit of this decision for the firms was twofold. The great majority of the male workers was unionized, and workers’ demands and strikes had caused the tobacco merchants a great deal of trouble in the past. Employing women therefore eliminated the lingering threat of labor unrest; it also cut processing costs in half due to the lower wages that could be paid to female workers. The museum tells this story of technological change and gendered employment practices through displays featuring the actual tonga presses as well as photographs, portraits, and other documents.4

Larger items such as sieves of tobacco leaves, bulky weighing balances, and a mechanical tobacco press—what the president of the museum’s directive board, Ioannis Vyzikas, calls the “magic box”—convey the notion that one production technology superseded another.5 By the 1960s, most of the companies had introduced humidifiers for automatically moistening the tobacco and electric presses for preparing tobacco bales. Functioning examples of these machines only act to reinforce a linear understanding of technological change in the tobacco industry, for visitors cannot help but be impressed with the size and efficiency of these later machines.

The museum could not avoid presenting displays of finished tobacco products as well, including cigarettes and cigars produced in the small tobacco factories of Kavala. A wide variety of smoking paraphernalia—tin and paper tobacco boxes, cigar cutters, knives, and a couple of tools for preparing tobacco for snuffing—is presented in the museum’s showcases. The tour ends with a number of portraits of prominent tobacco merchants displayed close to the exit and next to notable furniture from local tobacco factories.

What sort of audience does the Tobacco Museum attempt to attract? The museum’s director was pretty clear on this point: it is intended to appeal primarily to the adult citizens of Kavala in the hope that the exhibition’s artifacts and photographs will spark their memories, since many of them were tobacco workers in their youth. The museum also strives to attract groups from local schools, aiming to educate children on the importance of preserving historical memory and maintaining local knowledge of tobacco processing. The museum seeks not only to be an exhibition collection, but also to provide an interactive experience for its visitors. In the summer of 2008, for example, it arranged, for the first time, for the on-site production of commercial tobacco samples, hiring experienced tobacco workers to display and teach this largely forgotten method to interested visitors (fig. 5). A yearly writing contest on tobacco and its history aimed at the cit y’s schools also brings local children and their families to the museum and makes it a vivid part of the city’s life.

Fig. 5 Experienced tobacco workers produce commercial samples of tobacco in the museum, an artful skill that has almost been lost, summer 2008. (Reproduced courtesy of the Tobacco Museum of the City of Kavala.)

To a more specialized audience, such as historians of technology, the museum is a treasure. Those with a strong interest in mechanical detail have the chance to see all of the artifacts in use, for in the presence of the museum staff, visitors are welcome to turn on any of the apparatuses on display, even the electric tobacco press and the sieve. Visitors will also find machines and objects displayed here that rarely appear elsewhere—such as in North American museums, for example, due the overwhelmingly negative attitude toward tobacco that prevails there.

One potential group of visitors that might be disappointed, however, are serious researchers. True, the museum does own an impressive collection of archival materials, including 1,100 photographs, 900 books, newspapers, series of tobacco journals published as early as the 1900s (i.e., Revue des Tabacs), the entire archives of the National Tobacco Board, the Tobacco Merchant’s Union of East Macedonia and Thrace, and the Greek Tobacco Exporters Federation, and several archives from local tobacco companies. But none of these collections have been cataloged or digitized, and thus they are difficult for historians and other scholars to access. In addition, the museum’s lack of space and financial support turned this precious material into an object of dispute between the local authorities and other interested parties. Although the museum is scheduled to move into larger quarters at an old warehouse at the center of the city, the move has been delayed for technical and financial reasons.

Rather than dwelling further on the details of its displays and interpretations or on Greek attitudes toward technological history, I wish instead to note in conclusion that my own visit to the museum was a revelation. Both of my parents came from tobacco-farming families, and as a child I witnessed several times what the museum presents as the traditional rural practices of tobacco farming and processing. But I was born and lived in the city for years, and thus, what impressed me the most was the photographic collage of old warehouses—some of which no longer exist—close to the museum’s exit, a collage which serves to remind us of how the city looked only a couple of decades ago. In a world in which sophisticated displays using interactive software techniques and housed in marvelous buildings have become the norm, the Tobacco Museum of Kavala, established and maintained by the personal efforts of many individuals, seems to be a part of the very historical narrative it has put on display.

1. Maria Rentetzi, “Configuring Identities Through Industrial Architecture and Urban Planning: Greek Tobacco Warehouses in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century,” Science Studies 1 (2008): 64–81.

2. See the Tobacco Museum of the City of Kavala’s website, at http://www.tobacco museum.gr (accessed 27 April 2009).

3. Efi Avdela, “The Socialism of ‘Others’: Class Struggle, Clashes between Ethnicities, and Gender Identities in post-Ottoman Thessaloniki,” Ta Istorika 18/19 (1993): 171–204 (in Greek).

4. Since the 1940s, because of World War II and the American tobacco industry’s policy of opening up new markets, Greek tobacco exports have fallen sharply. By 1954, the tobacco workers’ movement had virtually disappeared. Its demise was hastened in 1952 by the repeal of 1933 legislation requiring at least 50 percent of the workforce of tobacco concerns to be male. The mechanization and simplification of processing methods, coupled with moves to relocate the tobacco-processing centers in an effort to curb the interwar trade-union movement, finally led to the abandonment of the warehouses. Today, almost all of Kavala’s tobacco warehouses are empty or have been redeveloped for other purposes. New images of tobacco factories have been displayed in an interesting photographic exhibit by Kamilo Nollas; see the exhibit’s catalog, Tobacco Factories (Athens, 2007). See also Lois Lambrianidis, “The Distribution of the Tobacco Industry and Tobacco Trade in Greece: A Tale of Increased Centralization,” Poli kai Perifereia 7 (1983): 11–40 (in Greek).

5. I would like to thank Ioannis Vyzikas for his warm welcome to the museum and for the two hours’ tour and the long interview he gave me on the morning of Christmas Eve, 2008. Vyzikas has played an instrumental role in collecting artifacts and archival material, establishing and maintaining the museum by investing his time and enthusiasm.

Maria Rentetzi is assistant professor at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece. She teaches the sociology of science and technology, with a special focus on gender. She is the author of Trafficking Materials and Gendered Experimental Practices: Radium Research in Early Twentieth-Century Vienna (2008).

Copyright© 2009, the Society for the History of Technology

Actually, the stool has three legs: First Kranzberg hired at Case, then his founding of SHOT and T&C, and third the publication in 1967 of a two-volume text, Technology in Western Civilization, volume 1 titled The Emergence of Modern Industrial Society, Earliest Times to 1900, and volume 2 titled Technology in the Twentieth Century.3 Even though these volumes appeared almost a decade after the founding of SHOT and the publication of the first issue of T&C, their organization, the range and background of the authors, their contributions, and, above all, the editorial direction provided by Kranzberg and his colleague Carroll Pursell—who joined the Case faculty in 1963—set the character of a society and journal that are now entering their second half-century. For me, returning to those volumes, after years during which they sat, unread and unopened, on my bookshelf, has been a revelation—a revelation of how much Kranzberg and Pursell laid a foundation upon which historians of technology have subsequently built.

Members of SHOT are blessed many times over. Mel Kranzberg was a prolific correspondent and saved copies of nearly all his letters throughout his long career. The result is a detailed picture of the emergence and evolution of our discipline, seen through the eyes of its principal founder. Kranzberg’s papers have been preserved and catalogued by the Archives Center of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, which made them available to me in the course of writing this essay. From these records we can trace the genesis of the two-volume Kranzberg and Pursell text. The initiative came from the United States Armed Forces Institute (USAFI), a branch of the Defense Department charged with furthering the education of uniformed personnel, many of whom had only a limited college or secondary school education. The USAFI had been founded during World War II for the benefit of Army enlisted men [sic], primarily by means of correspondence courses, no matter where in the world they might be stationed.4

By the 1960s the USAFI’s students included officers as well as enlisted personnel, and, for those stationed in the United States, its correspondence courses were being supplemented by classes offered at local universities. Its charter had also been extended to the other armed services (but did not include the service academies or the National War College, which were administered separately). During World War II the instruction had primarily been at the high school or junior college level, but now college-level courses dominated the curriculum. The headquarters of the USAFI was in Madison, Wisconsin, and it was headed by Edward L. Katzenbach, a former Marine officer.5 The origin of the book project is not completely clear, but obviously there was a growing perception at Defense that the thousands of uniformed personnel needed grounding in the technological basis of the civilization they were being asked to defend.6 At an address to a conference 6 of armed forces educators in Baltimore on 11 December 1962, Norman S. Paul, assistant secretary of defense, asked: “Could we not devote a greater portion of our time and effort to courses devoted to the history of technology so that our young men and women in the Services will at least appreciate science’s impact on the changes wrought in our times? Would it not be possible to develop courses on the impact of technology on politics and on international relations?”7 The contemporary reader will immediately note the term “impact” and its implication of technological determinism, but we shall see that Kranzberg and Pursell, while not avoiding terms such as “impact,” managed to shape a work that was anything but a paean to determinism.

In January 1963 a colleague sent Katzenbach copies of programs from recent annual meetings of SHOT and also a program for the American Association for the Advancement of Science that had included a session on the history of atomic energy. At about the same time, Ripley Sims, the head of the USAFI’s Instruction Division, asked Kranzberg, as secretary of SHOT, for a list of colleges and universities that offered courses in the history of technology. Kranzberg responded in his usual enthusiastic fashion with a detailed letter, and out of this exchange of correspondence there grew an agreement that historians and social scientists would develop a two-semester, freshman-level course.8 With Katzenbach’s support, the project ultimately transformed itself from a freshman syllabus into the two large volumes published in 1967. In a little more than four years, Kranzberg and Pursell solicited contributions from seventy authors, discussed with them the overall approach to their topics, cajoled and pleaded with laggards, and edited the submissions (sometimes drastically). A number of chapters were written by the two editors themselves. They also found a new publisher, rejecting the University of Wisconsin Press in favor of Oxford University Press, which they knew could provide a much wider market. Kranzberg and Pursell had secretarial help, although many of their letters were obviously written on manual typewriters in hunt-and-peck fashion. All this was taking place while both of them held full-time teaching positions, with Pursell moving from Case to the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the middle of the project.

Not long after the initial exchange of letters, in the spring of 1963, a group of historians gathered for a workshop at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where the USAFI was located and where, coincidentally, Thomas Parke Hughes was in residence as a visiting professor.9 The catalyst for this meeting was Paul J. Grogan, chair of the department of engineering at the University of Wisconsin Extension Division, and Grogan would be listed, along with Donald F. Kaiser—who was the publications specialist at Wisconsin’s University Extension—as executive editors for the completed volumes. Led by Hughes, the group surveyed the state of the field and noted that the few texts then in print, particularly the five-volume A History of Technology, edited by Charles Singer and three colleagues, and its abridgement, A Short History of Technology, were ill-suited for the course they were proposing.10 Although based on sound scholarship, neither those works nor any others dealt to any extent with technology developed in the twentieth century. Nor did they look at technology in its cultural context, as Kranzberg, Hughes, and their colleagues emphasized. Although this approach is familiar to today’s practitioners, in the early 1960s the history of technology was either about the invention and design of specific machines, or about the biographies of engineers and inventors. Economists and economic historians had also been writing about the history of technology, but for them it was typically a one-way street, the story of the machine’s impact on society, never the other way around. And whereas the engineers writing history focused on the internal workings of the machines, economists and economic historians often treated technology as a black box, not caring how or why it worked. The participants in the Madison workshop were eager to change that situation, and they found a willing ally at the Armed Forces Institute.11

Thus from the beginning of this project we can see what later would be called Kranzberg’s Laws put into play: whether technology was inherently good or bad, the central place for the history of technology in a liberal education, the complex interplay between invention and the social milieu in which it takes place.12 Also evident at this workshop, and reflected in the two-volume history that resulted, was a tension one still finds among SHOT members who judge submissions to Technology and Culture or papers proposed for SHOT annual meetings. This was an assumption that while technology is synonymous with the emergence of human civilization, the recent history of technology is the most important of all, with everything that happened before 1900 as “prologue” to the advances of the twentieth century (the current version of this notion moves the date forward from 1900 to 1945). The Armed Forces Institute certainly held to this view; after all, its students were being trained to operate and maintain nuclear reactors, radar equipment, jet aircraft, and guided missiles: twentieth-century inventions with little connection to military technology from an earlier age. Partly at Katzenbach’s urging, 1900 was chosen as the date separating the two volumes. Some historians who participated in the workshop resisted, Eugene Ferguson especially, but Kranzberg was not opposed to this divide, and that was how the two volumes ultimately were set apart from one another.

Kranzberg and Pursell recognized that the second volume would have to be framed differently, more as a series of case studies than as surveys of individual topics. As a result, the two volumes are quite different, and yet each one still retains much of value for a present-day reader. The first volume, based on solid scholarship, can be profitably and enjoyably read today as an introduction to the history of technology. While of course dated, its chapters hold up well. I would not hesitate to recommend it to newcomers to the field of the history of technology, or to newly-hired professors looking for an overall framework for a freshman-level course. Even though it is no longer suitable as an assigned text, subsequent attempts to replicate its sweep and level of detail—its “large canvas”—have come up short, in my view, an indication of how difficult such an overview really is. (The original Oxford publication is long out of print. Used copies are available from several on-line book dealers, and the volumes may be accessed electronically from the American Council of Learned Societies.)13

When reading this volume today, and the second volume as well, one has to be mindful of the times in which it was written. Both volumes make exclusive and frequent use of the pronoun “man” when referring to human beings. That may be excused, although it is annoying. The chapters themselves, all written by men, make no acknowledgment of the contributions of women to the history of technology. There is a bias toward Western Europe, with little treatment of technology from Asia or the Middle East. In an otherwise-masterful essay on “Technology in the Middle Ages,” Lynn White jr. writes that “. . . the Muslims, while they borrowed useful skills from other cultures . . . did not make notable contributions, so far as we now know, to mankind’s technical repertory” (p. 67). Neither White nor any other contributor discusses the Islamic world’s role in the transmission of mathematical, medical, and astronomical knowledge to the West. Geographic and gender biases, and the way the volume moves too quickly through antiquity until it arrives at medieval Europe—these are the first volume’s principal weaknesses. Nevertheless, I stand by my recommendation. The reason is the caliber of the contributors, and here again we see a manifestation of Kranzberg’s vision and energy, along with a touch of good luck.

At the start of the project a series of letters were sent to authors and scholars at the very top: to Lewis Mumford, C. P. Snow, Alfred Chandler, Robert Merton, and Jacob Bronowski, among others. Although these letters went out under Paul Grogan’s signature, there could have been no realistic expectation of response without the personal efforts of Mel Kranzberg, almost always a phone call. As has been recounted elsewhere, while at Case Kranzberg did more than build up a program in the history of technology; he cultivated relationships with leading figures in a variety of fields that intersected with his vision.14 When the time came to solicit authors, these contacts proved of immense value. Pursell writes that “no one else could have picked up the phone and recruited most of the leading experts in the field to contribute to a textbook.”15 Even though many of those whom he called and who received letters declined to contribute, nearly everyone responded with a gracious note and only a few never answered at all. Most cited overburdened workloads and other writing commitments they all seemed to be late in fulfilling.16 Among those who turned down a request to contribute was Mumford, who replied in a handwritten note that while he could have written an essay “in 1934,” he could not do so in 1964 because “many tendencies that seemed hopeful to me then have turned out otherwise.”17 But Mumford’s refusal, and that of other senior figures, often turned out to be a blessing in disguise, for Kranzberg was able to solicit a new generation of writers whose views on the contextual analysis of the history of technology meshed with his own, and whose careers were either just beginning or at midpoint, not near an end.18 Had Mumford agreed to contribute and then submitted a pessimistic essay similar to his other writings from the 1960s, Kranzberg might have been forced to reject it. It also seems likely that other eminent writers would have submitted little more than a reworking of ideas that had already appeared in print in many other venues by the mid-1960s.19

Those who did accept, with rare exceptions, pursued new approaches that have well served SHOT to the present day. And the $400 fee they received—equivalent to about $2,500 in today’s dollars—was more welcome to this cohort of scholars than it would have been to the most senior people. Many of them—Lynn White jr., Cyril Stanley Smith, Eugene Ferguson, Carl Condit, Robert Multhauf, Bernard Finn, John Rae, Bern Dibner, and of course Carroll Pursell—were already or soon would be major contributors to Technology and Culture, would serve as officers of SHOT, or would play critical roles in shaping the discipline. (Perhaps most notably missing from the list of authors was Thomas Hughes, who, after helping initiate the project, turned down a request to contribute.)20

The biases of the first volume, mentioned above, were offset by the breadth of the topics covered. Thus there is not just a chapter or two on the Industrial Revolution, but a whole section on “The Background of the Industrial Revolution, 1600–1750,” which keeps the term while setting the “revolution” in economic, political, and social contexts. Other chapters deal with the Industrial Revolution’s social impact (chapter 18 by Eric Lampard), its spread (chapter 30 by Herbert Heaton), and its economic consequences (chapter 31 by Nathan Rosenberg). Chapter 19, “The Invention of Invention,” by John Rae, covers ground that is familiar to historians today, but at the time it was a definite break from typical writings about the role of the inventor that could be found at mid-century. Rae’s chapter further hints at the “systems approach” to the history of technology, an approach that shows the influence of Thomas Hughes even if he was not present in the pages of the book. The systems approach is developed further and indeed becomes a central theme of the second volume.

That volume, Technology in the Twentieth Century, is a different matter altogether from the first. Obviously it is dated. At the time of publication one-third of the twentieth century still lay ahead. There is nothing about the Space Shuttle, the Asian challenge to American manufacturing, or Microsoft, to name a few twentieth-century topics we currently study intensively. Yet precisely for that reason, the second volume is still of interest. Today when one thinks of the mid-1960s one thinks of the cold war and the threat of a devastating exchange of nuclear weapons with the Soviet Union. The authors are all aware of that threat, but what comes across most strongly is a belief that technology, properly managed, can be a source of good. They were writing a short two decades after the cities of Germany and Japan had been reduced to rubble by Allied bombs. By the mid-1960s those countries had not only recovered and rebuilt their cities, but they were also establishing a prosperous economy based on advanced technology. That rapid reconstruction was due to the hard work and sacrifice of their citizens; it was also due to assistance from the United States through entities like the Marshal l Plan and the International Monetary Fund, through which a group of mainly American experts directed the recovery.

The first volume ended with accounts by those who believed that the rapid advances of nineteenth-century technology would usher in an era of world peace and prosperity. Yet everyone knew that such optimism faded quickly after August 1914. The contributors to the second volume could not see into the future, but they shared in a renewed sense of optimism, and in doing so they had no sense of being naive. Furthermore, they saw themselves as agents of change, who would help bring about such a world through the application of their expertise. Although much has been written about the Technocracy movement that flourished in the 1930s, the tone of the second volume reveals a more recent version of a technocratic vision from the 1960s, one that deserves more study.21 This time, economies would be directed not by a “Soviet of Technicians,” as Thorsten Veblen called them, but by an elite (if not a “soviet”) of social scientists and historians of technology. In this context, the alliance between Kranzberg and the U.S. military establishment, which might have caused concern among a later generation of historians of technology, seems natural and appropriate.22

Thus the second volume begins with an optimistic essay by Kranzberg and Pursell on “The Promise of Technology in the Twentieth Century,” followed by an address to mass production and its twin, mass consumption. In chapter 9, Robert Theobald writes of “The Crisis of Abundance,” in which he discusses with some prescience the beneficial effects of automation and the computer—this at a time when computers were programmed with punched cards. Theobald’s argument for a guaranteed income for ever y American, which he calls “Basic Economic Security” (p. 113), is somewhat similar to Great Society welfare plans developed in the 1960s and to income credits now embedded in our tax code and embraced by liberals and conservatives alike. What is interesting is not so much the details of his plan; rather, it is that Theobald is but one of many contributors to the second volume who was not a historian or engineer (his biography on page 745 lists him as a “British socioeconomist who is now an economic consultant in New York City”). Whereas most of the contributors to the first volume were professors of history or engineering, many of those contributing to the second were sociologists, professors at schools of business administration, government economists, and political scientists. This is a cohort that SHOT has unfortunately lost over the past fifty years.23

Volume II of Technology in Western Civilization suggests that the decade in which it was written and published represented a high-water mark for a particular kind of social science, one with which the history of technology was aligned. It was a time when political scientists such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, and sociologists such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, were moving into high levels of political power in both parties.24 One of the volume’s final essays is on “The ‘ Two Cultures,’” by Kenneth E. Boulding, professor of economics at the University of Michigan. C. P. Snow turned down an offer to write something on this subject, but here again fortune smiled on Kranzberg and Pursell, as Boulding’s star was ascending and would even eclipse Snow’s in my view. The essay that Boulding contributed is one of the finest in the book, even if it does not directly address the history of technology in a narrow sense. After summarizing the Two Cultures debate, he moves quickly into the meat of his essay, a section entitled “The Role of the Social Sciences.” He wastes no time in stating that the “. . . increase and spread of knowledge in the social sciences, of a testable and cumulative kind, can meaningfully affect the decision-making processes of governments, businesses and large organizations, and of individuals and households” (p. 692). For Boulding, and by implication for Mel Kranzberg too, here is the way to harness technology without the horrors of the two technology-intensive world wars that characterized the first half of the twentieth century. Boulding brings up the threat of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union, but he does not despair of a way out.

Boulding’s view has fallen from favor, as has the place for social scientists in positions of influence. But that does not diminish the appeal and interest of his and similar essays in the second volume of Kranzberg and Pursell. This volume reveals something about the history of SHOT that to date has been little discussed: the society’s founders hoped that the history of technology would not just be the most “relevant” history of all, as Kranzberg’s Fifth Law states, but that it would also provide an entrée for historians of technology into policy and decision making at high levels of government. Pertinent to this belief, although not mentioned in these volumes, was Kranzberg’s central role in establishing another organization, ICOHTEC, which he hoped would be as influential in diplomatic circles as SHOT would be in economic and regulatory circles.25

Correspondence in the Kranzberg Papers thins out once the volumes appear in print, but already we can see why that vision was not fulfilled. The reviews were good, and sales were decent although not what Oxford had hoped for.26 The Armed Forces Institute did not follow through on an implied commitment to purchase copies for its coursework, a reversal attributed to the growing unrest over the war in Vietnam.27 When Kranzberg was initially lining up contributors, one or two turned him down because of its military sponsorship, but, had he contacted potential authors in 1967, not 1963, there would have been a lot more refusals.28 By 1967 technology’s dark side was more evident, in spite of efforts to control its effects by those, including Kranzberg, who had seen its horrors first-hand during World War II. In the two decades that followed publication of Kranzberg and Pursell, anti-technology sentiment would grow more intense As it did, SHOT managed to adapt, but rarely again did members of the society set forth the sort of views seen in this 1967 volume.

One final note. In the initial stages of the project, Kranzberg and Pursell had offices adjacent to each other at Case, so there is little in the way of a written record between them; they must have spoken to one another all the time. After Pursell moved to Santa Barbara in the summer of 1965, that changed. Kranzberg was not happy about his coeditor being so far away, but one positive result was that we now have a written record of the details of the book’s editing process. The project was in its final stages by then, but the work of editing the submissions was still substantial. Some of the manuscripts came in clean and needed only minimal attention. Others were less suitable and required a lot of rewriting, work that fell mostly on the shoulders of the junior editor. In correspondence with the contributors, Kranzberg was always gracious, even charming. In correspondence with Pursell he was often candid about work that did not measure up to his expectations.

Some of that correspondence deals with what was to have been the final chapter of the first volume, an overview of technology and culture at the end of the nineteenth century written by Charles L. Sanford, professor of language and literature at Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute. Sanford began by describing the marvels of engineering that were transforming the western world at that time, but he quickly moved to a discussion of those who saw the dark side of this transformation, including Henry Adams, William Morris, and above all Friedrich Nietzsche. Kranzberg was not pleased with what Sanford had written, even if he agreed with his analysis of Nietzsche, and he told Donald Kaiser that he could not possibly allow the first volume to end on such a negative assessment of technology. In early 1966, Kranzberg asked Pursell to write an extra chapter. Pursell agreed, and this was published as an epilogue under their coauthorship. The epilogue summarized the first volume briefly, mentioning technology’s critics but ending on a much more positive, though less dramatic, note.29

That correspondence, along with the note from Mumford and other letters exchanged between the editors, reveals something that many members of SHOT assume but seldom question. SHOT members revere Kranzberg’s First Law: “Technology is neither good, nor bad; nor is it neutral”— it has even been printed on a t-shirt and on a poster (a poster that is still available, by the way). It is a serious and profound statement. But Melvin Kranzberg himself, along with most of those involved in a society that is his “lengthening shadow,” believed that technology has done more good than harm. That is the essence of these two volumes, and it is a core belief of SHOT, however much current members are aware of the less beneficial effects of technology. Perhaps the next time the t-shirt or poster are printed, there can be an asterisk, as Major League Baseball did to Roger Maris’s home run record. Better to leave the First Law as it was written, but we should remember the context in which Melvin Kranzberg formulated it. For those wishing to find a clear and comprehensive statement of this belief, there is no better place to look than these two volumes.

1. Bruce E. Seely, “SHOT, the History of Technology, and Engineering Education,” Technology and Culture 36 (October 1995): 739–72.

2. Melvin Kranzberg, “At the Start,” Technology and Culture 1 (Winter 1959): 1–10; Melvin Kranzberg, “The Newest History: Science and Technology,” Science 136 (11 May 1962): 463–68.

3. Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll W. Pursell Jr., eds., Technology in Western Civilization, 2 vols. (The Emergence of Modern Industrial Society, Earliest Times to 1900 and Technology in the Twentieth Century) (New York, 1967).

4. Col. Miles R. Palmer, “The United States Armed Forces Institute,” Public Administration Review 15 (Autumn 1955): 272–74. In this reference, as throughout the Kranzberg and Pursell volumes, the male pronouns are used almost exclusively, although there is no evidence that women in the uniformed services were excluded.

5. Katzenbach was the brother of Nicholas Katzenbach, deputy attorney general from 1962 to 1965 and later President Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general and then undersecretary of state.

6. “You’re In the Classroom Now,” Time, 17 January 1964, 72, copy in the Kranzberg Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Collection 266, Box 301, folder 1.

7. “A Resume of Background Information Concerning Development of a Course on the History of Technology,” 28 January 1964, unsigned, but probably written by Kranzberg, Kranzberg Papers, Box 301, folder 2.

8. Ripley S. Sims, USAFI, to Melvin Kranzberg, Society for the History of Technology, 25 January 1963, Kranzberg Papers, Box 301, folder 2.

9. Besides Hughes, other participants in the workshop included Cyril S. Smith, Carl W. Condit, Eugene S. Ferguson, Thomas J. Higgins, and John B. Rae.

10. Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall, and Trevor Williams, eds., A History of Technology, 5 vols. (New York, 1954–1958); T. K. Derry and Trevor Williams, A Short History of Technology from the Earliest Times to 1900 (New York, 1961).

11. “Report on the History of Technology Workshop,” May 24–25, by Thomas P. Hughes, University of Wisconsin-Madison, typescript, Kranzberg Papers, Box 301, folder 2.

12. Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws,’” Technology and Culture 27 ( July 1986): 544–60.

13. See http://www.humanitiesebook.org/titlelist.online.date.26.html (accessed 17 April 2009).

14. Bob Post, “Chance and Contingency: Mel Kranzberg Before SHOT and ICOHTEC,” keynote address, International Committee for the History of Technology, University of Victoria, British Columbia, 5 August 2008.

15. Carroll Pursell, “In Memoriam, Melvin Kranzberg (1917–1995): Case Years,” Technology and Culture 37 ( July 1996): 407–12, quote at 410.

16. Kranzberg Papers, Box 301, folders 4 and 5.

17. Mumford to Kranzberg, undated, ca. summer 1964, Kranzberg Papers, Box 301, folder 4.

18. Not all senior scholars turned down an opportunity to contribute; Abbott Payson Usher was the author of chapter 14, “The Textile Industry, 1750–1830.” Usher passed away as the volumes were in press.

19. Besides Kranzberg and Pursell, the authors of volume 1 were Silvio A. Bedini, Georg Borgstrom, Lynwood Bryant, Roger Burlingame, Rondo Cameron, Shepard B. Clough, Carl W. Condit, Bern Dibner, Aage Gerhardt Drachmann, Eugene S. Ferguson, James Kip Finch, Robert James Forbes, G. E. Fussell, Anthony N. B. Gar van, Alfred Rupert Hall, Herbert Heaton, Arthur M. Johnson, Eric E. Lampard, Robert Multhauf, Thomas A. Palmer, Derek J. De Solla Price, John B. Rae, Nathan Rosenberg, Charles L. Sanford, Harold I. Sharlin, Cyril Stanley Smith, Thomas M. Smith, Abbott Payson Usher, Sam Bass Warner, Lynn White jr., Harold F. Williamson, and Robert S. Woodbury. Authors of volume 2 were Jack Baranson, Jack Barbash, Georg Borgstrom, Kenneth E. Boulding, James R. Bright, Robert C. Davis, Peter F. Drucker, John A. Duffie, Eugene M. Emme, Eduard Farber, Bernard S. Finn, Leslie H. Fishel Jr., Robert H. Guest, Richard G. Hewlett, Forest G. Hill, Irving Brinton Holley Jr., Aaron J. Ihde, Edward L. Katzenback Jr., W. David Lewis, Roy Lubove, Theodore F. Marburg, Donald N. Michael, Bruce Carlton Netschert, James L. Penick Jr., John B. Rae, Wayne D. Rasmussen, Theodore Ropp, Richard Rosenbloom, Melvin M. Rotsch, Ralph Sanders, Morgan Sherwood, Thomas Malcolm Smith, Donald C. Swain, Robert Theobald, Charles R. Walker, Reynold M. Wik, and Earnest W. Williams Jr.

20. Melvin Kranzberg to Thomas Hughes, 29 July 1964, Kranzberg Papers, Box 301, folder 4.

21. On the Technocracy movement of the 1930s, see Howard P. Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago, 1985), especially chap. 6.

22. One could cite many examples of the changing attitudes toward the U.S. military among younger historians, e.g. Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). Carroll Pursell notes how protests against the war in Vietnam began at Case as he and Kranzberg were working on the project (Pursell, private communication to the author, 22 March 2009). Whatever his personal views were, Kranzberg was always supportive of young scholars, whose work took them in directions not foreseen at the time of SHOT’s founding.

23. The founding of Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) in 1975 has in part compensated for this loss to SHOT, but 4S has evolved in a direction quite different from that implied by the contributors to this book.

24. Among Brzezinski’s writings from that era was Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York, 1970), in which he coined a term that suggests the merger of classical mechanical and electrical technology with the new technologies of electronics and digital computers.

25. ICOHTEC’s website is http://www.icohtec.org (accessed 16 May 2009).

26. Reviews appeared, among other places, in Science 157 (15 September 1967): 1295–96; Isis 59 (Summer 1968): 207–10; Journal of Economic History 29 ( June 1969): 366–68; and Agricultural History 43 ( January 1969): 208–9. The title of this essay is borrowed from R. A. Buchanan’s extended review in Technology and Culture 9 (July 1968): 468–76. Although reviews were favorable, many of them criticized the American-centric bias of the second volume. That is a valid criticism, but it must be understood in the context of the theme of the volume and also in the context of USAFI sponsorship.

27. Byron Hollingshead, Editor-in-Chief, Oxford University Press, to Mel Kranzberg, 27 December 1968, Kranzberg Papers, Box 302, folder 16.

28. One such refusal came from Paul Goodman, who initially agreed to write an essay but later, after repeated queries from Kranzberg about the lateness of his submission, decided not to contribute because of the USAFI’s role. Kranzberg Papers, Box 302, folder 12.

29. Kranzberg to Pursell, 18 January 1966, Kranzberg Papers, Box 307, folder 64. Although the epilogue was published under both editors’ names, Pursell did most of the writing. See also Kranzberg to Donald Kaiser, 12 July 1966, Box 307, folder 63.

Paul Ceruzzi is Curator of Aerospace Electronics and Computing at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C. The phrase “a large canvas” is quoted from R. Angus Buchanan’s review in Technology and Culture (n. 26).

Copyright© 2009, the Society for the History of Technology

There are two schools of thought on the decline of mass transit and the rise of mass motorization in the United States. The first developed in the 1960s, when economic historian John Meyer, economist John Kain, and several followers explained these phenomena in terms of rising personal incomes. More income provided middle-class Americans more choices for travel and places to live, and middle-class Americans overwhelmingly chose to buy cars and live in large, single-family homes in the suburbs. Such choices greatly stimulated traffic growth, to which federal and state governments responded into the 1970s by building highways thought to have sufficient capacity to alleviate congestion.

The second school coalesced in the early 1970s, when Bradford Snell, counsel to the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, argued a counterthesis that some scholars embraced and that was popularized by a Hollywood movie, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and a public television documentary, Taken for a Ride. Snell and his followers blamed the demise of mass transit and the subsequent mass motorization of American society on corporate and government manipulation of transportation supply in contravention of middle-class American demands. They told how General Motors and other auto interests had set up holding companies that bought up viable street-railway systems throughout the nation and replaced them with GM diesel buses whose service was so inferior to that of streetcars that Americans turned to private automobiles and stopped using mass transit. Federal and state highway policy sought to enhance demand for autos with a massive interstate highway system and urban freeways that ultimately lured Americans and their jobs out of the cities and to the distant suburbs where mass-transit service could not possibly be provided. According to this view, one has only to look to Canada and to western Europe to see where different government policies toward highways and mass transit have resulted in different and more socially benign cities and travel behavior.

Jones’s historical narrative speaks to the two theses, though with insufficient credit to their originators, as it weaves together relationships among various statistics from the United States, Canada, and several European countries over the span of roughly thirteen decades. These statistics include real per-capita income, transit investments, transit ridership, transit profitability, automobile ownership, annual vehicle miles, and auto industry output and profitability, among others. Informed by a limited number of interviews with government transportation specialists, Jones compares trends indicated by these statistics. He also sets the trends against transportation policies of the various countries while commenting on the plausibility of the two explanations.

Numerous points that generally refute the Snell thesis and affirm the Meyer thesis emerge from the narrative. For example, the streetcar industry went into the red during World War I, two decades before automotive interests began purchasing operating companies. When automotive interests did show interest in streetcars, there were no competing interests against which they had to bid, because streetcars had become hopelessly unprofitable. Even during the prosperous 1920s streetcar patronage fell in all but the largest U.S. cities as auto ownership soared. At the same time, beginning with adoption of the income tax and the simultaneous exemption of interest on home mortgages in 1913, auto-oriented suburbs grew at an astounding rate. Jones makes a convincing argument that consumer choice was the underlying determinant of these patterns, three decades before highway policy precipitated metropolitan regions with networks of freeways. Jones also shows that auto adoption at particular levels of per-capita income occurred just as fast and in some cases faster in Canada and various European countries than in the United States, albeit usually two to three decades later.

Jones does see transportation policy influencing behavior on the margin, however. Per-capita income in Canada and several European countries is close to and may reach that in the United States, but Jones reasons that auto ownership and usage in these countries will remain somewhat lower. What will make the difference is governmental policies that restrain construction of urban freeways while maintaining or expanding high-quality rail-based transit systems. Jones sees a possibility for some U.S. metropolitan areas achieving similar results from investments in light rail and a commitment to operating-cost control.

While Jones’s narrative is generally convincing, there are several factual errors and important omissions. The freeway revolt is slighted, for example. The devastating impact that urban freeways had on neighborhoods and parks they traversed sparked revolts in San Francisco, Boston, New Orleans, Portland, Oregon, and other cities. It altered consciousness everywhere, ultimately changing U.S. policy toward regional planning, transit investment, and the acquisition of right-of-way for urban roads. In another example, Jones’s argument that the abandonment of streetcar systems stemmed from lack of investment in such systems during the 1920s and 1930s also is missing some important detail. The industry indeed was in financial distress during those decades, but even so, it made substantial investments in infrastructure. It also made major investments in rolling stock, including the purchase of 5,000 radically modern PCC streetcars, which continued in some cities into the early 1950s. That such investments were made and then almost immediately abandoned suggests that Jones’s explanation for the end of street railways needs some finessing.

There are other problems as well. In some parts of the text, Jones conflates attitudes or events from one time period with those in another. He states that the Southern Pacific Company, for example, shifted investments in the Pacific Electric Railway from passenger to freight shortly after purchasing that company in 1910. Actually, this did not happen until the 1950s. Jones also claims (correctly) that Snell got his facts wrong in his case study of the alleged takeover of the Pacific Electric by a General Motors–backed holding company. But in attempting to set the record straight Jones further muddies the water. He conflates the actual takeover that happened in 1953 after the company had already converted most of its passenger-rail operations to buses with a minor takeover of some local Pacific Electric lines in California cities like Pasadena and Long Beach that happened in 1940.

Despite these problems with his narrative, I believe that Jones describes the big picture correctly and points his policy recommendations in the right direction. He sees a future where motor vehicles will continue to satisfy the mobility needs of the vast majority of the urban population. Motoring will be more costly, however, and at the same time more benign. Motorists will encounter hefty road pricing as they drive electric cars on new urban-friendly arterial roads not unlike the parkways of the 1920s. Mass transit still will exist for a small minority of travel demands, much as in Europe today. In the median of parkways there will be regional light-rail lines whose stations will be the center of dense agglomerations of mixed-use development. The various parts of the regional bus and rail transit network will be contracted out in order to control costs.

Overall, I recommend Mass Motorization and Mass Transit for classes on transportation history and transportation policy. It offers a solid foundation for debating alternative theses that seek to account for technological change.

Dr. Thompson is a professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at Florida State University, where he teaches courses on transporation planning.

Copyright© 2009, the Society for the History of Technology