Minnesota and America's Bully Boulevard

America entered the twentieth century flexing its muscles, bursting with energy, and ready for the most vigorous leader in its (or perhaps in any country's) history, President Theodore Roosevelt. At the same time, at least outside cities and often even within them, it was a land mired in the mud. For the first three decades of this century and even beyond, the idea of rapid transportation by automobile throughout the United States was hardly less visionary than a similar idea about national transit by monorail or levitated trains would be today.1 But automobiles were developing rapidly. It was road development that was lagging behind. There had been different kinds of hard surfaces, but according to most authorities not until 1909 when Detroit pioneered the way by paving a mile of its Woodward Avenue, had there been a serious use of concrete (Making Michigan Move). The first attempt at a trans-- continental route did not come until 1913, well into the twentieth century, when construction began on the Lincoln Highway (Hokanson). The intention had been to create a route from New York City to San Francisco, but it was not fully realized during the era of named highways. When U.S. 30 was designated, the new numbered route west of Philadelphia superseded much of the old named one, but not until the creation of Interstate 80 was there a roadway that completely fulfilled the hopes of the Lincoln Highway's promoters. In 1919, an enormous military convoy had crossed the country-largely on the Lincoln Highway-and had taken sixty-two days to cover the 3,310 miles. Among the group was a young army major, Dwight Eisenhower. Along the way, "they fell through and rebuilt no fewer than one hundred bridges," and the roads became progressively worse as they made their way west (Hokanson 83-85). The bridges may have been adequate for automobiles, which were lighter than many of the military vehicles, but it was immediately apparent that they needed improvement-which the military provided. Roads had long been almost exclusively a local matter, as they were when the automobile burst upon the scene. A "Good Roads" movement had begun to eliminate many barriers to state activity, but progress was slow. It was not until 1905, for example, that Michigan amended its constitution to eliminate a prohibition against "using its money for internal improvements," and specifically against using it for building roads (Mason 7, 13). The Good Roads movement actually began before the automobile, having been encouraged by the "League of American Wheel men," a popular organization for bicycle tourists that had been founded in 1880. Within a decade of its founding it had become "the world's largest athletic association" (Hornung 256). But it was the increasing popularity of the automobile that eventually brought dramatic improvement in America's roads. "Auto trails" had immediately sprung up to accommodate the new vehicles, but for some years they accommodated them only in the best of weather-and even then none too well. Still, it was only a matter of time. The automobile surged into American culture with a force that nothing yet has been able to withstand. By the 1920s, there were hundreds of named roads, or trails. Adventuresome motorists who dared to undertake cross-country trips-and at the time they had to be adventuresome to do so-could choose from as many as nine transcontinental highways that were "in some way deserving of the title" (Hokanson 95). The American Automobile Association continued to recognize a large number of these as late as 1959 (AAA). The northernmost, the most extensive, and the one with the most varied landscape emerged from the vision of a group of civic leaders in Duluth, Minnesota. It was the Theodore Roosevelt International Highway, which involved both new construction and the incorporation of existing roads and auto "trails" into what both promoters and users described as the world's most scenic roadway. …