Fueling the Boom: Gasoline Taxes,
Invisibility, and the Growth of the
American Highway Infrastructure,
1919–1956
Christopher W. Wells
In 1938, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the photographer Dorothea Lange turned her camera
to a mundane feature of the American landscape: a sign advertising gasoline prices. Unlike
most such signs, however, this one broke down its 20½ cents-per-gallon price: gasoline,
5½ cents; state, 5 cents; Uncle Sam, 1 cent; city, 1 cent; railroad, 2¾ cents; agent, 1¼
cents; and “Me,” 4 cents. (See figure 1.) The joke lay partially in what many saw as the
modern equivalent of highway robbery. Yet the humor also depended on another, equally
important characteristic of gasoline prices, which always took the form of a flat, pergallon rate: the rate of taxation was neither listed nor even necessarily known by the seller.
Unlike goods with itemized sales taxes, gasoline appeared to be tax free, even if buyers and
sellers both typically knew this was not the case.
The invisibility of gas taxes is partly a historical accident—the tax has always been an
excise tax collected from wholesalers rather than a sales tax collected at the pump—but it
also symbolizes the significant, yet opaque role that gas-tax revenues have played in underwriting the expansion of the nation’s vast automotive infrastructure. When automobile
ownership began to surge in the late 1910s and early 1920s, gas taxes provided a new,
almost magically large source of revenue that allowed states to embark on aggressive roadconstruction campaigns. But when strapped state governments in the early 1930s
attempted to allocate a portion of gas-tax income to nonhighway purposes, opponents
launched a successful campaign that prompted a growing majority of state legislatures to earmark gas taxes for highway expenditures. This system, coupled with new highway-planning methods that prioritized “self-funding” highways, resulted in a powerful,
self-replicating system in which new highways generated new traffic, which in turn generated new revenues that were legally reserved for more new highways.1
When the U.S. Congress created an inviolate Highway Trust Fund in 1956—into
which federal gas-tax revenue flowed, obligated entirely for interstate highway bills—it
greatly expanded the system by elevating it to the federal level. Yet if the interstates themChristopher W. Wells is an assistant professor of environmental history at Macalester College. He wishes to thank
Ed Linenthal, Brian Black, and the anonymous JAH referees for their insightful comments.
Readers may contact Wells at [email protected].
1
On the creation of the 1956 Highway Trust Fund, see Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics,
1939–1989 (Knoxville, 1990), 90; and Tom Lewis, Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life (New York, 1999), 119. On the broader context of midcentury American tax policy, in which
dedicated funding streams such as the Highway Trust Fund became a prominent strategy for achieving the
economic and social goals of postwar American liberalism, see Julian E. Zelizer, Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills,
Congress, and the State, 1945–1975 (New York, 1998).
doi: 10.1093/jahist/jas001
© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians.
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].
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June 2012
Gas Taxes, Invisibility, and the American Highway Infrastructure
73
Figure 1. This photograph, entitled “Santa Fe, New Mexico. Gas station price analysis,” was taken by
Dorthea Lange in 1938. Courtesy Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Farm Security
Administration/Office of War Information Collection, LC-USF34-019287-E.
selves, like the car-oriented landscapes that they spawned, were quite visible, the underlying system of legally dedicating gas taxes to building an ever-larger, traffic-inducing
automotive infrastructure was not. Indeed, beginning in the interwar period, state and
federal gas-tax policies, coupled with new highway-planning techniques, reconfigured
the American environment by funding the growth of a vast automotive infrastructure
that was designed explicitly to stimulate near-constant growth in American demand for
gasoline.
A Fiscal Deus ex Machina
By the end of World War I, traditional revenue sources could no longer keep up with the
escalating costs of road construction. Before the war, a little over half of all rural highway
funds came from state-issued bonds. Property taxes, another major source of highway
revenue, funded most local government programs and projects—not just roads—and
were already strained to produce sufficient revenue to meet growing highway demands.
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Older systems of road finance that allowed citizens to “work off” road taxes by supplying
labor, horses, and equipment gradually disappeared as road construction machinery
became more costly and sophisticated and road work slowly professionalized. In addition,
World War I caused construction costs to skyrocket at precisely the same time traffic
demands became overwhelming. As late as 1921 road revenues still came from a mix of
property taxes, general fund allocations, bonds, federal aid, and motor vehicle license and
registration fees. Even with the substantial new income from license and registration fees
(which, almost overnight, had come to account for roughly one-fifth of state highway
revenues), road-related revenues lagged significantly behind demand.2
Gasoline taxes provided a relatively uncontroversial solution to an increasingly contentious fiscal problem. Justified as a highway “user tax” along the lines of license and registration fees, the gas tax had a number of obvious advantages: it targeted the primary users
of improved highways, it taxed motorists roughly in proportion to their use of roads, and
it generated substantial revenue that states could use for road work or as security for bond
issues. Most importantly, it had very low administrative costs, since states assessed a small
number of wholesalers rather than a large and dispersed group of gasoline retailers.3
As state after state became aware of its strengths—in part because the American Association of State Highway Officials (aasho) aggressively championed the idea—the new
tax spread quickly. Five years after the first appearance of the tax in 1919, thirty-six states
had adopted a gas tax; by 1929 all forty-eight had followed suit. Moreover, because the
tax was invisible at the pump and because new oil-field discoveries and booming production in the second half of the 1920s caused oil prices to fall more or less steadily, states
were able to raise gasoline taxes to a national average of four cents per gallon by 1931
without appearing to affect the falling price of gasoline.4 The prices that motorists paid at
the pump actually fell, even as gas taxes inched significantly upward.
As a source of new revenue, the gas tax was substantial enough to underwrite mushrooming state road-building budgets, which, from 1902 to 1927, skyrocketed from
2 percent to 25 percent of total state expenditures. Together, gas taxes and motor vehicle
fees generated an expanding proportion of state highway funding, rising from 20.4 percent
in 1921 to 59.5 percent in 1930. In addition, because politicians justified both gas taxes
and vehicle fees as road-user taxes, most states devoted gas-tax income exclusively to
highways. The result was a de facto segregation of road-user revenues from general funds.
Income from gas taxes exploded from $5.3 million in 1921 to $431.4 million in 1929,
pushing gas taxes past vehicle fees as the primary source of highway revenue. By the end
2
Philip H. Burch Jr., Highway Revenue and Expenditure Policy in the United States (New Brunswick, 1962), 36;
R. Rudy Higgens-Evenson, The Price of Progress: Public Services, Taxation, and the American Corporate State, 1877 to
1929 (Baltimore, 2003), 77–91; John Chynoweth Burnham, “The Gasoline Tax and the Automobile Revolution,”
Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 48 (Dec. 1961), 436–37.
3
Finla Goff Crawford, Motor Fuel Taxation in the United States (Syracuse, 1939), 1–2; Higgens-Evenson, Price
of Progress, 78, 89–90; James A. Dunn Jr., “The Importance of Being Earmarked: Transport Policy and Highway
Finance in Great Britain and the United States,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 20 (Jan. 1978), 42, 48;
Burch, Highway Revenue and Expenditure Policy in the United States, 37.
4
On the significant influence of the American Association of State Highway Officials on the federal highway
program and its cooperative relationship with Thomas MacDonald, the chief of the Bureau of Public Roads, see
Bruce E. Seely, Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia, 1987), 77–80.
Wilfred Owen, A Study in Highway Economics (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), 84–85; James W. Martin, “The Administration of Gasoline Taxes in the United States,” National Municipal Review, 13 (Oct. 1924), 587–600, as reproduced in Richard E. Gift, ed., State Tax Systems under Changing Technology: The Problem of the Roadways (Lexington,
Ky., 1980), 39; American Petroleum Institute, Petroleum Facts and Figures, 1941 (New York, 1941), 156; Burnham,
“Gasoline Tax and the Automobile Revolution,” 445–46.
Gas Taxes, Invisibility, and the American Highway Infrastructure
75
of the decade twenty-one states had eliminated property taxes as a highway-funding
source.5
Motorists had good reasons to support gas taxes during the 1920s. The principle of user
taxes, for example, seemed fair enough, given, in this case, the strains that escalating automotive traffic put on the nation’s highways and the widespread desire among motorists for
better roads. The tax was neither onerous nor obvious—paid a few cents at a time, with the
exact amount unadvertised—and it funded conspicuous, large-scale road construction.
Moreover, gas taxes had strong support among state legislators, and initially even garnered
the support of oil industry executives, who noted a direct link between better highways
and growing gasoline sales. This widespread support for a substantial new tax took many
by surprise—“Who ever heard, before, of a popular tax?” asked Tennessee’s chief tax collector in 1926. Yet in the context of the general prosperity, falling oil prices, and rising
automobile use of the 1920s, many regarded the gas tax as a deus ex machina that saved
state treasuries from bankruptcy and state legislators from having to say no to a growing
motorized constituency clamoring for more, better, and faster road improvements.6
The Great Depression and the Politics of “Linkage”
When the Great Depression struck, most government receipts declined precipitously, but
the gas tax proved remarkably resilient and stable as a source of revenue. Personal and
corporate income tax revenues, for example, both fell in 1932 to just half of 1927 levels;
property tax revenues also plummeted. By comparison, state gas-tax income rose in the
first years of the depression to a record high of $537.4 million in 1931, dipped a negligible 4.3 percent in 1932 to $514.1 million, and then began to climb again, reaching
$948 million in 1941. By that time, gas taxes produced half of all state highway revenues.
Gas taxes proved such a reliable generator of revenue that the federal government introduced its own one-cent-per-gallon levy as part of the Revenue Act of 1932, which for the
next two decades consistently produced more revenue than Congress appropriated as
federal aid for highways.7
The combination of gas taxes, vehicle taxes, and federal spending kept large state
highway budgets intact through the worst years of the Great Depression, despite
massive revenue shortfalls that caused total state and local contributions to highway
expenses to plummet. Federal aid offset part of the difference, and substantial federal
work-relief grants earmarked for road projects offset the rest. Between 1933, when
Franklin D. Roosevelt took office, and 1942, the first full year of U.S. participation in
5
Higgens-Evenson, Price of Progress, 61–63; Owen, Study in Highway Economics, 73; Charles L. Dearing,
American Highway Policy (Washington, 1941), 100, 102–3; Martin, “Administration of Gasoline Taxes in the
United States,” 39; Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics: Summary to 1985 (Washington, 1987),
136; Burnham, “Gasoline Tax and the Automobile Revolution,” 447. Revenues for city streets, however, still relied
heavily on property taxes and special assessments. On the resulting rural-urban imbalance, see Owen D. Gutfreund,
Twentieth-Century Sprawl: Highways and the Reshaping of the American Landscape (New York, 2005).
6
Burch, Highway Revenue and Expenditure Policy in the United States, 37; Burnham, “Gasoline Tax and the
Automobile Revolution,” 449–52, 446. In contrast to motorists, road builders, and politicians who supported the
tax during the 1920s, the petroleum industry soon began to denounce it (after early support from oil company
executives). See Peter D. Norton, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City (Cambridge,
Mass., 2008), 198.
7
Crawford, Motor Fuel Taxation in the United States, 9–11, 13; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical
Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, 1960), Series Y 384-400, p. 722; Federal Highway
Administration, Highway Statistics, 136; Burnham, “Gasoline Tax and the Automobile Revolution,” 456–57.
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World War II, federal work-relief agencies devoted $4 billion to roads and streets and
in the process expanded the parameters of federal aid for roads beyond the traditional
focus on rural highways. Buoyed by stable gas-tax revenue and greatly expanded federal
spending, highway budgets fell only slightly in 1932 and 1933; by 1934, and then through
the rest of the decade, both expenditures and highway income exceeded 1929 levels.8
In that context, many state legislatures began to allocate portions of the large, steady
income from gas taxes toward nonhighway expenses, provoking the first widespread backlash against the tax. Before the depression, this practice, which came to be known as
“diversion,” had been insignificant, claiming between 2.0 and 3.3 percent of total collections between 1927 and 1931. As the depression deepened, however, that range became
even higher (between 15.9 to 18 percent between 1934 and 1937), prompting intense
opposition from the automobile and road-building industries. The National Highway
Users Conference (nhuc), for example, which formed in 1932, became the biggest opponent of diversion. Chaired by Alfred P. Sloan, the president of General Motors, and led
by representatives from automobile, oil, bus, truck, road, and farm organizations, the
nhuc aggressively lobbied Congress to prohibit the practice. It achieved at least part of its
goal with the passage of the Hayden-Cartwright Act of 1934, which reiterated nhuc
arguments almost verbatim, proclaiming it “unfair and unjust to tax motor vehicle transportation unless the proceeds of such taxation are applied to the construction, improvement, or maintenance of highways.” In a huge loophole, however, the law would penalize
a state for diversion only if it exceeded its current rate—grandfathering in the large-scale
diversion occurring in predominantly large, heavily urbanized northeastern states. In
addition, the law had an ironic do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do element: Congress at the time
allocated just 60 percent of federal gas-tax income to highway purposes and diverted the
remainder to the general fund.9
A more significant and longer-lasting legacy of nhuc’s antidiversion campaign can be
seen at the state level. Increasing numbers of state legislatures enshrined the principle of
“linkage”—that highway user–tax receipts should be used exclusively to fund highway
spending. A more extreme form of linkage (and one nearly impossible to reverse), first
seen in Minnesota in 1920, came in the form of constitutional amendments earmarking gas taxes for highway expenses. Sixteen states adopted such amendments between
1934 and 1945, and another nine did so by 1956, thus making linkage a constitutional
requirement in a majority of states. By 1974, forty-six of fifty states required linkage
either by statute or by constitutional amendment.10
What began as opposition to diversion eventually became opposition to higher gas
taxes, dampening further increases in the second half of the 1930s. Between 1918 and the
passage of the Hayden-Cartwright Act in 1934, for example, the gas tax rose more or less
steadily from nothing to a national average of 5.21 cents per gallon. From 1934 until 1941,
by contrast, the average increased less than half a cent. Gas-tax income continued to grow
8
Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics, 136; Rose, Interstate, 10; John Bell Rae, The Road and the
Car in American Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 74; Seely, Building the American Highway System, 88, 90–91.
9
Frederic E. Everett, “Diversion Dangers and Gasoline Tax Evasions,” American Highways, 11 (Jan. 1932), 1–2;
Crawford, Motor Fuel Taxation in the United States, 68–71, 76–78, esp. 76; Rose, Interstate, 9–10; Gutfreund,
Twentieth-Century Sprawl, 31–37; Dunn, “Importance of Being Earmarked,” 42–43; Burch, Highway Revenue and
Expenditure Policy in the United States, 73–74.
10
Burch, Highway Revenue and Expenditure Policy in the United States, 64, 66, 79; Dearing, American Highway
Policy, 106–7, 180–81. See also Dunn, “Importance of Being Earmarked,” 42–43; Gutfreund, Twentieth-Century
Sprawl, 33–34; Seely, Building the American Highway System, 210; and Rose, Interstate, 32–33.
Gas Taxes, Invisibility, and the American Highway Infrastructure
77
on the strength of expanding automobile ownership and rising per-vehicle gasoline
consumption, but steady increases in the tax rate effectively ceased by the mid-1930s.11
Most important, as state after state legally linked the large, stable income from gas
taxes to highway-improvement budgets, highway administrators forged a significant new
relationship between gas-tax revenues and highway planning. As it had with the principle
of linkage, the Hayden-Cartwright Act gave highway planning a big boost, allowing states
to use up to 1.5 percent of federal-aid funds on planning activities. The Bureau of Public
Roads (bpr) pushed states to spend this money on detailed, standardized highway
planning surveys, which began in 1936. The surveys compiled detailed inventories of the
physical characteristics of every mile of road in state highway systems—ranging from
isolated country roads to heavily traveled highways such as the famed Route 66—and
conducted extensive statewide traffic counts. Together, the surveys gave state and federal
highway planners an unprecedented amount of detailed information on traffic patterns
and road conditions across the nation. Just as significantly, the planning surveys included
detailed financial studies designed to identify and classify every dollar of revenue collected
for (and expended upon) roads and streets. These studies, in conjunction with new
systems of data analysis, allowed planners for the first time to develop an accurate picture
of the exact relationships among road expenses, traffic volumes, and highway-user taxes.
The goals, at least initially, were to account precisely for how all of the many levels of
government spent user taxes and thereby to identify the extent to which user revenues
actually paid to improve and maintain individual highways. How much of each highway,
in other words, did gas taxes (and other user fees) really fund?12
The answers that the studies produced—and the method they used to produce them—
marked a watershed change. The method was startlingly simple: for any given stretch of
road, administrators determined how much “income” it generated by multiplying its
traffic volume by the average per-mile user-tax revenue that each motorist paid. By comparing the resulting figure with the improvement and maintenance costs for the same
stretch of road, administrators could determine, with compelling accuracy, which highways carried enough traffic to “pay for themselves”—and which did not. This simple
calculation allowed planners to create a cost-effectiveness index and classification system
for different types of roads and to justify traffic-service priorities in clear-cut economic
terms. “Highway builders are proceeding on the principle,” explained Thomas MacDonald, the chief of the bpr, in 1938, “that the utilization of the highways must produce
directly the revenues with which to finance their construction.” As long as states did not
make “large diversions of this income to other purposes” or spread them “over an everincreasing mileage,” MacDonald reassured the nation’s politicians, highway planners
could provide self-liquidating highways that would not make unpredictable demands on
state budgets.13
11
American Petroleum Institute, Petroleum Facts and Figures, 156; Burnham, “Gasoline Tax and the Automobile
Revolution,” 449–50; Gutfreund, Twentieth-Century Sprawl, 34–37.
12
On the highway planning surveys, see H. S. Fairbank, “State-Wide Highway Planning Surveys,” Civil
Engineering, 7 (March 1937), 178–81; H. S. Fairbank, “Newly Discovered Facts about Our Highway System,”
[1938], typescript (Ohio Department of Transportation Library, Columbus); Federal Highway Administration,
America’s Highways, 1776–1976: A History of the Federal-Aid Program (Washington, 1976), 268–71; Seely, Building
the American Highway System, 166–69.
13
Thomas MacDonald, “The Trend of Modern Highways,” Motor Transportation, 64 (June 1938), 1138, 1135.
See also Seely, Building the American Highway System, 161, 167; and Burnham, “Gasoline Tax and the Automobile
Revolution,” 456.
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When that formula combined with the new state-level budgetary principle of linkage,
a powerful, self-replicating system emerged: gas taxes funded more and better roads, more
and better roads generated new traffic and longer trips, new traffic and longer trips consumed more gas, higher gas consumption created more tax revenue, and more tax revenue
funded more and better roads. The new plans rested on a majestic vision of self-fueling
growth and promised ever-improved highway facilities. And the entire system rested on
the premise of the steadily growing consumption of a seemingly limitless supply of cheap,
minimally taxed gasoline.
Gas Taxes, Federal Linkage, and the Interstate System
Beginning in the mid-1930s, as the bpr worked to cement its vision of a self-replicating,
self-fueling system of highway expansion, it encountered disagreement over what a
“modernized” national highway system ought to look like. Most highway administrators
had become convinced that it should not look like the existing “primary” highway system,
epitomized by Route 66, the self-proclaimed Main Street of America, whose colorful
roadside commerce and diagonal path across the center of the country gave it a larger-thanlife presence in American popular culture. The endless string of restaurants, tourist cabins,
gas stations, and assorted tourist traps that gave highways such as Route 66 their popular
appeal was also responsible for turning huge stretches of the primary system into dangerous, traffic-choked ribbons of congestion. Long strings of roadside businesses also made
it inordinately difficult (and expensive) to resolve traffic and safety issues by widening
highways, since businesses tended to locate directly on the edge of the right of way,
hemming in expansion. To deal with those problems, some highway officials wanted to
emulate Germany’s new high-speed, limited-access highways, the autobahnen; others
found inspiration in the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a 160-mile, limited-access, toll-financed
superhighway that opened in 1940; still others were motivated less by particular examples
than by the desire to reduce the nation’s appalling accident rate, which in 1935 translated
into roughly 827,000 reported accidents that killed 37,000 people and seriously harmed
105,000 more. Whatever their disagreements, all proponents of better highways faced a
common constraint: limited resources to implement their vision. Because “modernized”
highways almost invariably meant wider highways and frequently meant introducing
limited access, their land requirements—and thus their expense (particularly in urban
areas)—were lavish by prevailing standards. The short-lived popularity of toll roads grew
from their promise of generating project-specific revenue streams and not needing
to compete with other projects for limited funding. In response to growing support for
toll roads in the second half of the 1930s, the bpr issued Toll Roads and Free Roads (1939),
a scathing assessment of the financial viability of toll roads and a counterproposal for a new
system of “modernized” interregional highways to be funded by existing gas-tax revenues.14
14
For an overview of the disagreements, including an assessment of Germany’s autobahnen, see MacDonald,
“Trend of Modern Highways,” 1138. On the Pennsylvania Turnpike, see Wilfred Owen and Charles Lee Dearing,
Toll Roads and the Problem of Highway Modernization (Washington, 1951), 4–10, 14–18, esp. 10; On the nation’s
accident rate, see “Unfit for Modern Motor Traffic,” Fortune, 14 (Aug. 1936), 85. On the role and nature of highway
safety debates, see David Blanke, Hell on Wheels: The Promise and Peril of America’s Car Culture, 1900–1940
(Lawrence, 2007); and Norton, Fighting Traffic. On Route 66, see Arthur J. Krim and Denis Wood, Route 66:
Iconography of the American Highway (Santa Fe, 2005); and Susan Croce Kelly, Route 66: The Highway and Its People
(Norman, 1988). U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, Toll Roads and Free Roads (Washington, 1939), 7–11, 20–21, 89–98,
102–11, esp. 110. For a summary of the report’s key findings, see H. S. Fairbank, “Interregional Highways:
Indicated by State-Wide Highway Planning Surveys,” Roads and Streets, 83 (Jan. 1940), 37–44.
Gas Taxes, Invisibility, and the American Highway Infrastructure
79
Highway planners spent the war years expanding this blueprint, which they unveiled
in Interregional Highways (1944). The report recapitulated the main points of Toll Roads
and Free Roads, emphasizing the plan’s traffic-service priorities, its rejection of tolls, and
its call for an updated interregional highway system. New in the report was the proposed
size of the system (which grew from 26,000 to 39,000 miles), the recommendation that
the entire system have restricted access, and a proposal to build parking facilities near
traffic interchanges on the edge of big-city downtowns. In Congress, protracted wrangling produced the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944, which, at $500 million per year
for three years, was at the time the largest-ever federal highway bill. Moreover, and of
enormous significance, it authorized—but did not dedicate any specific funding to—a
new 40,000-mile system based on the proposals in Interregional Highways, which it named
the National System of Interstate Highways.15
For the better part of a decade after its creation in 1944, the new interstate system plan
limped along underfunded and largely unexecuted, but in the early 1950s two key developments transformed it into the most wide-ranging, landscape-altering public works
project in U.S. history. The first was the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1954, which
earmarked the first money specifically for the interstate system ($175 million) and raised
total federal aid to highways by roughly 50 percent for 1956 and 1957 so that for the first
time highway expenditures matched federal gas-tax income. The second development
began when President Dwight D. Eisenhower became actively involved in highway
politics, declaring his intention to create a new transcontinental system that would
solve the nation’s increasingly well-publicized highway woes. The resulting maneuvers,
countermaneuvers, plans, and counterplans are among the best studied in American
highway history and ultimately culminated in the passage of the momentous Federal-Aid
Highway Act of 1956 and the Highway Revenue Act of 1956.16
In addition to expanding funding for the federal-aid program, these two acts upgraded,
slightly expanded, and fully funded the interstate system that Congress originally approved
in 1944, officially renaming it—in a sop to Cold War politics—the National System of
Interstate and Defense Highways. The legislation differed notably from previous federalaid acts in three areas. First, the “new” interstate system was the same transcontinental
highway network established in 1944, with the exception of adding one thousand miles
to the system and formally reviewing the urban routes designated in 1947.17 However, by
stipulating that the entire system be built to uniformly high, multilane superhighway
standards—even in locations where traffic volume did not justify them—Congress greatly
15
National Interregional Highway Committee, Interregional Highways: Report and Recommendations of
the National Interregional Highway Committee (Washington, 1944), 55–71. Seely, Building the American
Highway System, 187–91; Rose, Interstate, 23–28; Federal Highway Administration, America’s Highways,
152–53.
16
Of the many notable works covering these events, see Federal Highway Administration, America’s Highways,
171–74; Rose, Interstate, esp. 69–94; Seely, Building the American Highway System, 208–18; Lewis, Divided
Highways, 95–123; David J. St. Clair, Motorization of American Cities (New York, 1986), 136–70; Helen Leavitt,
Superhighway—Superhoax (Garden City, 1970), 20–51; Richard O. Davies, The Age of Asphalt: The Automobile, the
Freeway, and the Condition of Metropolitan America (Philadelphia, 1975), 16–27; and Rae, Road and the Car in
American Life, 187–94.
17
On the designation of additional urban mileage, see U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, General Location of
National System of Interstate Highways, Including All Additional Routes at Urban Areas Designated in September, 1955
(Washington, 1955). This document, also known as the Yellow Book, played a key role in garnering congressional
approval for the legislation.
The Journal of American History
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June 2012
expanded the plan’s scope and stepped beyond the longstanding engineering principle
that traffic demands alone should shape the nation’s highways.
Second, the legislation funded the construction of the entire interstate system, treating
it as a single project to be finished in a designated period. This conceptualization broke
with a basic understanding that had guided both federal aid and the various federal-aid
highway systems since at least 1921. Disbursing federal aid for highways had always been
an ongoing process of dividing available money among states, not a program designed to
build a fixed, predetermined highway system. In contrast to the 1956 legislation, earlier
federal-aid systems had existed primarily to ensure that limited expenditures would not
be dispersed in an uncoordinated way.18
Third, and crucial to its political success in Congress, the legislation formally enshrined
linkage as federal policy. To meet the 90 percent federal share of the interstate system’s
cost, Congress raised the federal gasoline tax by one cent and created new excise taxes on
tires and vehicles. That revenue, along with other existing highway-user income, flowed
into a new Highway Trust Fund, the sole purpose of which was to pay interstate construction bills. The Highway Trust Fund effectively insulated its revenue from political
debates over appropriations, even after cost estimates for completing the system began
to balloon—rising from $27 billion to $39.5 billion between 1954 and 1958 alone.
Meanwhile, rising gasoline consumption, coupled with another one-cent hike in the
federal gas tax in late 1959, kept Highway Trust Fund coffers full. With the contents of
the trust fund “linked” to interstate construction, the system’s completion was guaranteed
even after the winds of antihighway sentiment began to blow with growing force in future
decades.19
The implications of these interrelated developments for the history of oil in the United
States have been profound. The linkage of federal gas-tax revenues to interstate construction cemented a version of the self-fueling system that was on an even grander scale than
the one highway planners first conceived of during the Great Depression, which coupled
the nation’s expanding automotive infrastructure to its expanding gasoline consumption.
As a result, the principle of dedicating ever-growing gas-tax revenue to highways became
a cornerstone of the American political economy for the next half century. Even after
opponents finally “busted” the Highway Trust Fund, securing some of its revenue for
other purposes such as public transit, the revenues reallocated have been small enough to
have the effect of reinforcing, rather than challenging, the dominance of highways in
American transportation policy.20
Equally important, and central to how the self-fueling system operates, has been the
concept of invisibility. It has played a role in the form of invisible taxes, duties paid by
gas wholesalers and therefore never seen by consumers. Invisibility has also helped the
Federal Highway Administration, America’s Highways, 173.
On the politics of linkage, see Seely, Building the American Highway System, 214–17, 222–23; and Rose, Interstate,
85–117. As construction proceeded, costs swelled and deadlines moved back. According to the final official estimate
in 1991, total costs amounted to $128.9 billion, of which the federal government paid $114.3 billion. See “Interstate
faq,” n.d., U.S. Department of Transportation: Federal Highway Administration, http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/
faq.htm#question6. On the difficult politics of construction, see Mark H. Rose and Bruce E. Seely, “Getting the
Interstate System Built: Road Engineers and the Implementation of Public Policy, 1955–1985,” Journal of Policy
History, 2 (no. 1, 1990), 23–55. On later freeway “revolts,” see especially Raymond A. Mohl, “Stop the Road: Freeway
Revolts in American Cities,” Journal of Urban History, 30 (July 2004), 674–75; and Brian Ladd, Autophobia: Love
and Hate in the Automotive Age (Chicago, 2008), 97–138.
20
On the “busting” of the Highway Trust Fund, see Lewis, Divided Highways, 211–37.
18
19
Gas Taxes, Invisibility, and the American Highway Infrastructure
81
self-fueling system in the political world: the legal linkage of gasoline taxes to road budgets has shielded car- and highway-centered transportation policy from the regular discussion and debate that typifies the allocation of general funds. And finally, from an
environmental standpoint, the repercussions (aside from smog) of burning gasoline in
staggering quantities have been difficult to see, despite the ubiquity of gasoline-burning
vehicles in the United States. Even the ecological effects of fundamentally reconfiguring
the landscape to make travel by automobile easier have tended to recede into the background, since car-dependent environments have become the norm, dominating the places
where most Americans live their lives. Visible or not, however, in the United States oil has
been and remains pervasive: fueling vehicles, spurring economic growth and, not least,
underwriting the massive costs of building and maintaining America’s vast automotive
infrastructure.