Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure: The True Story of a Great American Road Trip (12 page)

She revealed that Harry had a favorite chair back home in Independence, an old wingback that “creaks and groans when he sits in it; the springs sag, and he won’t let me have it reupholstered—he likes it just as it is.”

Of their road trip Bess said she was acting as chief “navigator, map checker, and road sign watcher…. He’s driving very conservatively on the trip,” she added, approvingly.

Around two o’clock the Trumans said good-bye to the McKinneys—but they would return on their way home. Harry and Bess climbed back into the Chrysler. They picked up Highway 40 in downtown Indianapolis and continued east.

About an hour later, near the town of Greenfield, the Trumans were pulled over by an Indiana state trooper. The state police had set up a roadblock on Highway 40 to hand out traffic-safety pamphlets to motorists. It was part of a program to reduce traffic fatalities and to familiarize out-of-state drivers with Indiana’s motor laws. (At the time, traffic regulations varied widely from state to state. Even road markings were not yet fully standardized.)

The Trumans had passed through the roadblock unnoticed, but as they were pulling away, a state trooper named R. H. Reeves recognized them. Harry was done in by his fastidiousness. “It”—his car—“was so clean that my attention was attracted to it,” Reeves said.

Reeves shouted for Truman to pull over. He did, and got out of the car. “What’re you selling here?” he asked the trooper. Reeves explained the traffic-safety program and asked the former president to pose for a picture to promote it.

“I’m running about two hours late, but I’ll take time for that,” Harry said. “I certainly endorse your program.” While Bess sat and waited inside the sweltering Chrysler, Harry spent about twenty minutes at the roadblock, standing in his shirtsleeves, chatting and signing autographs. Then they were off again. It was nearly four o’clock.

There are no recorded sightings of the Trumans for the next seven hours. In the interim they drove clear across Ohio. Presumably they stopped for dinner. Maybe it was in Columbus. But there are no newspaper reports of their stopping there or in any of the other major towns along their route. Perhaps they finally did manage to travel incognito, at least for a few hours. It’s not impossible. It was a busy Saturday night on Highway 40. One imagines Harry and Bess enjoying dinner in blessed solitude, just two ordinary Americans at last.

Wheeling, West Virginia,
June 20–21, 1953

T
he road trip is a quintessentially American activity. From the earliest days of the republic, Americans have felt compelled to explore their homeland, in search of everything from gold to good vibes.

Meriwether Lewis and William Clark embarked on the first great American road trip. Lewis left Pittsburgh on August 31, 1803, picked up Clark somewhere along the Ohio River, and set out for the Pacific Northwest—accompanied by a crew of more than thirty, including Clark’s slave York. The journey would take more than two years. Fourteen miles was considered a good day’s progress. Occasionally they got lucky and stumbled upon an ancient path worn by Indians, buffalo, deer, or elk. Mostly, though, they were on their own. “We had to cut Roads, through thickets of balsam fir timber, for our horses to pass through,” Joseph Whitehouse, a member of the expedition, wrote in his journal on September 3, 1805.

In 1806, Thomas Jefferson signed a bill authorizing the federal government to spend thirty thousand dollars to build a road on an old pack trail through the Allegheny Mountains. Running from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, Virginia (later West Virginia), the road would connect the Potomac and Ohio rivers and effectively link the eastern seaboard and the rapidly growing Midwest. It was the first expenditure of federal funds on a public works project in American history, and it was not without controversy. Critics said the federal government had no business building roads, that there was nothing in the Constitution that even allowed it. In the end, the bill passed by a narrow margin. Completed in 1818, the National Road, as it came to be known, was a remarkable example of nineteenth-century engineering: thirty feet wide, paved with several layers of crushed stone, ditched, and drained. It proved enormously popular—too popular, in fact. Traffic was so heavy that the road quickly deteriorated. In 1822, Congress passed a measure authorizing the collection of tolls on the road to fund repairs. But President Monroe vetoed the bill, saying the collection of tolls would be an unconstitutional exercise of federal power. “It was one thing to make appropriations for public improvements,” wrote one historian, “but an entirely different thing to assume jurisdiction and sovereignty over the land whereon those improvements were made.” This is a linchpin of federal highway policy to this day: while the federal government helps fund their construction, interstates and U.S. highways are owned and operated by the states.

Monroe’s veto stifled the nation’s nascent road-building movement—but it could not quell its wanderlust. Between 1846 and 1866, a “freighter” named Solomon Young ran at least a dozen wagon trains from Missouri to Utah and California. A typical train consisted of forty to eighty wagons, each requiring a team of twelve oxen and two drivers. The merchandise it carried could be worth thirty thousand dollars or more. Once, Young was gone for two years. His wife and children didn’t know if he would return. The work was dangerous but lucrative. By 1860 Solomon Young was worth fifty thousand dollars, though he soon lost his fortune in the Civil War. As an old man, Young’s tales of his travels would spellbind his grandson Harry Truman.

Outside major cities, where streets might be paved with stone or brick, nineteenth-century roads were little more than rutted dirt paths that turned into quagmires when it rained. In 1896 a popular magazine even gave readers helpful tips on what to do when a horse got stuck in the mud. (“Steady and support the horse’s head, and excite and encourage him, with hand and voice, to rise.”)

It wasn’t until a new mode of transportation emerged that the so-called “good roads movement” finally took hold in the United States. That new mode was … the bicycle. The invention of the “safety bicycle”—the kind we know today, with equal-sized wheels and pneumatic tires—spurred a bicycle craze in the 1880s. Bicyclists successfully lobbied state and local governments to impose taxes for the construction of paved roads. (Motorists should keep this in mind the next time they get stuck behind a bicycle in traffic.) In 1893 Massachusetts became the first state to organize a highway department, and by 1905 thirteen other states had started one.

But it was the automobile, of course, that turned that trickle of road building into a torrent.

In the late spring and early summer of 1903, a doctor named Horatio Nelson Jackson became the first person to cross the country in an automobile. Talk about a road trip. To win a fifty-dollar bet, Jackson and his chauffeur, Sewell K. Crocker, drove a twenty-horsepower Winton touring car from San Francisco to New York in just sixty-three days, in spite of miserable weather and horrendous roads. At one point, the intrepid motorists ran out of spare tires and were forced to wind rope around the wheels to keep going. (Exactly fifty years later, when Harry and Bess made their trip in considerably more favorable conditions, Dr. Jackson was eighty-one and comfortably retired in Vermont.)

Jackson’s journey inspired a frenzy of cross-country motoring. In 1904, a caravan of seventy cars set out from the East Coast for the World’s Fair in St. Louis. “The logistics for such an expedition at this time were formidable,” wrote a Federal Highway Administration historian.

Incredibly, fifty-eight of the autos managed to make it to the fair, and their arrival triggered tumultuous celebrations. America’s love affair with the automobile had begun. The St. Louis caravan showed that cars were mechanically capable of making long trips. The only thing holding them back was the woeful condition of the nation’s roads.

In 1915 Harry Truman took what was probably his first long automobile trip. He, his mother, and his uncle Harrison piled into his Stafford and drove to Monegaw Springs, a resort along the Osage River in western Missouri about eighty miles south of Grandview. Typical of the times, it was an arduous journey, which he described in a letter to Bess:

Harry and Mamma finally made it back to Grandview at 3:00
P.M.
on Tuesday. The eighty-mile trek from the springs had required thirty-three hours and incalculable patience.

Despite such deplorable conditions, the popularity of the automobile only grew. In 1900 there were eight thousand in the United States. By 1915 there were nearly 2.5 million, and they just kept getting better, faster, and cheaper. By 1917 Henry Ford was selling his Model T for six hundred dollars.

Traffic engineers scrambled to come up with a road surface that could withstand the deluge of horseless carriages. They experimented with roasted clay, oil-earth mixtures, slag from blast furnaces, wooden planks—even steel. But none was deemed practical enough. Then they tried asphalt, a petroleum product that liquefies at temperatures above three hundred degrees Fahrenheit but hardens when it cools. It worked nicely.

After World War I, the federal government began financing state road-building programs in earnest. Asphalt roads began spreading like tentacles across the country, and by 1925 it was possible to drive from San Francisco to New York—the journey that had taken Horatio Nelson Jackson sixty-three days—in less than a hundred hours. In 1926 federal and state transportation officials organized this patchwork as numbered U.S. Highways, with east–west roads given even numbers from north to south, and north-south roads given odd numbers from east to west (hence Highway 1 runs from Fort Kent, Maine, to Key West, Florida). The system originally comprised nearly ninety-seven thousand miles of roads, 3.3 percent of the total mileage at the time.

The numbering system ended the era of named roads. The National Road became Route 40, the Lincoln Highway Route 30, the Dixie Highway Route 25. The passing of the named roads was not unlamented. Ernest McGaffey of the Automobile Club of Southern California complained that the new system substituted “arithmetic for history, mathematics for romance.” But the numbered highways made it much easier to navigate the rapidly expanding road system, and some, like Route 66, even managed to evoke a romance of their own.

During the Great Depression the road trip took on a new meaning as millions of Americans took to the road in search of a better life—or at least a job. “European immigrants moved inland from coastal ports along roads,” wrote Karl Raitz in
A Guide to the National Road.

During World War II, the road trip was put on hold. Only travel deemed essential to the war effort was permitted. To conserve rubber and fuel, the speed limit was reduced to thirty-five miles per hour nationwide, and tires and gasoline were rationed. A mere 139 new cars were manufactured in 1943, and those, of course, were strictly rationed as well.

After the war, the pent-up demand for automobiles exploded. Production leaped from 69,532 vehicles in 1945 to 2.1 million in 1946, 3.5 million in 1947, and 3.9 million in 1948. (Postwar production would peak at more than seven million in 1955.) It was the golden age of the American automobile.