Made In America (35 page)

One of the enduring myths of American travel is that the nation’s superhighways were modelled on Germany’s
Autobahnen.
In fact, it was the other way round. Dr Fritz Todt,
Hitler’s superintendent of roads, came to the United States in the 1930s, studied America’s sparkling new parkways and went back to Germany with a great deal of enthusiasm and a suitcase full of notes. Most people’s first contact with superhighways were the models of Norman Bel Geddes’s hugely popular Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Designed to show the world as it would be – or as General Motors would like it to be – twenty-five years hence in 1964, the exhibit comprised a large layout of model towns, cities, and countryside, all linked by sleek multilane highways along which tiny cars glided with ceaseless speed and ease. It was remarkably prescient. (Futurama also had a linguistic impact. Before long American roadsides were graced with Shop-o-ramas, Fisheramas, a Kosherama or two, and at least one Striperama.)

Within a year, Bel Geddes’s vision was made reality with the opening of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, running 160 miles from just west of Harrisburg to just east of Pittsburgh. Designed primarily to provide work for the unemployed during the Depression, it opened on 1 October 1940. For the first six months it had no speed limits. Motorists could drive the entire length in two and a half hours – half the time it had taken on the old Lincoln Highway – for a toll of $1.50. Features that would soon become familiar all over America – clover-leaf interchanges, long entrance and exit lanes, service areas – astounded and gratified the 2.4 million motorists who came to experience this marvel of the age in its first year.

Two months after the Pennsylvania Turnpike opened, and two thousand miles away, American motoring passed another milestone with the opening of the first true freeway in – it all but goes without saying – Los Angeles when the mayor cut a tape and a procession of cars filled with dignitaries (three of which crashed in the excitement) rolled on to the eight-mile-long Arroyo Seco Parkway. Despite the semi-bucolic name, the Arroyo Seco Parkway wasn’t a
parkway at all but a sleek, brutally purposeful, eight-lane artery designed to move high volumes of traffic at speed. Pleasure didn’t come into it. The age of the
freeway
– a term coined by a lawyer named E. M. Bassett to distinguish this new kind of serious motorway from the poky, old-fashioned parkway – had begun. As if in recognition of this, the Arroyo Seco was soon renamed the Pasadena Freeway. Ironically, it was intended to lure shoppers downtown, rather than help locals flee to the suburbs.

Conventional wisdom has it that Los Angeles’s sprawl is a consequence of its extensive post-war freeway system. In fact, it was because the city was sprawling already that freeways were thought a practical way of connecting its far-flung parts. It sprawled because it had the finest public transportation network in America, if not the world, with over a thousand miles of rail and trolley lines.

Freeways in fact evolved slowly on the west coast, at least at first. As late as 1947, the whole of California had just nineteen miles of them. Then along came State Senator Randolph Collier, from the remote town of Yreka, as far from Los Angeles as you can get in California. For forty years he dominated the California highway programme, not just promoting the construction of freeways, but repeatedly blocking the funding of rail systems (which he called ‘rabbit transport’). By the mid-1950s most Californians had no choice but to take to the freeways. Today one-third of all the land in Los Angeles is given over to the automobile, and the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission has a larger budget ($4.5 billion in 1991) than the city it serves.
⁴⁴

Soon every city had to have a freeway of its own, even if it meant scything through old neighbourhoods, as with Boston’s destructive Downtown Artery, or slicing into a beauty spot like Fairmont Park with the Schuylkill (popularly known as the ‘Sure-Kill’) Expressway in Philadelphia. At one
time there was even a plan to drive a freeway through New Orleans’s French Quarter.

As the freeways remodelled cities, so the new interstates dealt a blow to the old two-lane highways that stretched between them. Had it not been for the distraction of World War II, America almost certainly would have had a network of superhighways much earlier. The idea was really the brainchild of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who saw the construction of a national high-speed highway system as the ultimate public works project. By the 1950s, Eisenhower saw in it the additional virtue of enhancing America’s defence capabilities. Bridge and tunnel clearances were designed not for trucks but for the movement of intercontinental ballistic missiles. During the quarter-century beginning in 1956, America spent $118 billion on interstate highways. It was, as Phil Patton has put it, the ‘last programme of the New Deal and the first space programme’.
⁴⁵

In less than two decades, America’s modern interstate highways drained the life from thousands of towns. No longer was it necessary – and before long often not even possible – to partake of the traditional offerings of two-lane America: motels with cherishably inane names like the Nite-E-Nite Motor Court and the Dew Drop Inn, roadside diners with blinking neon signs and a mysterious fondness for meat loaf and mashed potatoes, two-pump gas stations built in the cosy style of a rustic cottage. Today in western Nebraska the old Lincoln Highway, or Route 30, is so little used that grass grows in its cracks. At the state border with Wyoming, it disappears altogether, abruptly and unceremoniously buried beneath the white concrete of Interstate 80. Like Route 66, the Dixie Highway and other once great roads, it has become a fading memory, and what a sad loss that is.

To the first Pilgrims, the gustatory possibilities of the New World were slow in revealing themselves. Though the woods of New England abounded in hearty sustenance – wild duck and turkey, partridge, venison, wild plums and cherries, mushrooms, all manner of nuts and berries – and though the waters teemed with fish, the Pilgrims showed a grim reluctance to eat anything that did not come from their dwindling stockpile of salt pork (which they called ‘salt horse'), salt fish and salt beef, hard tack (a kind of biscuit baked so hard that it became more or less impervious to mould, weevils and human teeth), dried peas and dried beans, ‘almost preferring', in the words of one historian, ‘to starve in the midst of plenty rather than experiment with the strange but kindly fruits of the earth'.
¹
Or as another put it: The first settlers had come upon a land of plenty. They nearly starved in it.‘
²

Lobster was so plentiful that ‘the least boy in the Plantation may both catch and eat what he will of them', but hardly any did. John Winthrop lamented in a letter home that he could not have his beloved mutton but only such impoverished fare as oysters, duck, salmon and scallops. Clams and mussels they did not eat at all, but fed to their pigs. To their chagrin the colonists discovered that English
wheat was unsuited to the soil and climate of New England. The crops were repeatedly devastated by a disease called smut. For the better part of two centuries wheat would remain a luxury in the colonies. Even their first crop of peas failed, a consequence not so much of the challenges of the New England climate as of their own inexperience as farmers. With their food stocks dwindling and their aptitude as hunter-gatherers sorely taxed, the outlook for this small group of blundering, inexperienced, hopelessly under-prepared immigrants was bleak indeed.

Fortunately, there were Indians to save them. The Indians of the New World were already eating better than any European. Native Americans enjoyed some two thousand different foods, a number that even the wealthiest denizen of the Old World would have found unimaginably varied. Among the delicacies unique to the New World were the white and sweet potato, the peanut, the pumpkin and its cousin the squash, the persimmon (or ‘putchamin' as the first colonists recorded it), the avocado, pineapple, chocolate and vanilla, cassava (source of tapioca), chilli peppers, sunflowers and the tomato – though of course not all of these were known everywhere. Even those plants that already existed in Europe were often of a superior variety in the New World. American green beans were far plumper and richer, and soon displaced the fibrous, chewy variety previously grown in Europe. Likewise, once Europeans got sight and taste of the fat, sumptuous strawberries that grew wild in Virginia, they gladly forsook the mushy little button strawberries that had theretofore been all they had known. The Indians' diet was healthier, too. At a time when even well-heeled Europeans routinely fell prey to scurvy and watched helplessly as their teeth fell from spongy gums, the Indians knew instinctively that a healthy body required a well-balanced diet.

Above all, however, their agriculture had a sophistication that European husbandry could not begin to compete with.
They had learned empirically to plant beans among the corn, which not only permitted a greater yield from the same amount of land but also replenished the nitrogen that the corn took away. As a result, while Europeans struggled even in good years to scrape a living from the soil, the Indians of the New World enjoyed a constant bounty. That a single tribe in New England had sufficient surpluses to support a hundred helpless, unexpected visitors for the better part of a year is eloquent testimony of that.

The Indians' single most important gift to the colonists – apart from not wiping them out – was corn. Corn began as a wild grass, probably in the Tehuacán Valley of central Mexico. Converting a straggly wild grass into the plump and nutritious foodstuff we know today was possibly the greatest of all precolonial achievements. Corn will grow almost anywhere, and by 1620 was a well-established crop throughout the New World. To the original colonists, ‘corn' signified any common grain, as it still does in Britain. So they adopted the Spanish name
maize
(after a West Indian Taino word,
mahiz).
Since maize was in effect the only type of grain there was, ‘corn' gradually came to signify it alone. Corn has been domesticated for so long – some seven thousand years – that it is now totally dependent on humankind for its continued existence. Left on its own, the kernels of each cob – its seeds – would be strangled by the husk. Even in colonial times it was a far more demanding plant than the colonists were used to. With their usual vexing ineptitude the first colonists tried sowing it by broadcast method, as they did with other grains, and were baffled that it didn't grow. It took the natives to show them that corn flourished only when each seed was planted in a mound and helped along with a little fish-meal fertilizer.

By the early seventeenth century, many New World foods were already known in Europe, though not necessarily to the early English colonists. The first Pilgrims may have heard of,
but almost certainly had never tasted, two New World foods: the tomato and white potato. Nor did they get the opportunity in their new-found land since these plants were unknown to the eastern seaboard. The Indians of the east coast did, however, have the sweet potato, and for almost two centuries when Americans talked of potatoes that was what they meant.

The white potato had reached England, via Spain, in the sixteenth century but suffered a crippling setback when the queen's cook, with that knack for culinary misapprehension with which the English have long distinguished themselves, discarded the tubers and cooked the leaves. For well over a century, the white potato was grown strictly as an ornamental plant until Europeans at last began to appreciate its manifold possibilities as a foodstuff. The Irish developed a particular attachment to it, not so much because of its agreeable versatility as because it was one of the few plants that would prosper on Irish soil. Elsewhere in the British Isles it remained largely unknown. It made its first recorded appearance in the American colonies in 1719, in Boston, though it was not until a gentleman farmer in Virginia named Thomas Jefferson tried cultivating the white potato – which he called the Irish potato – that it began to attract any attention in America as a potential food. Jefferson also appears to have been the first American to serve French fried potatoes – rather a daring thing to do since it was generally accepted that the tubers were toxic and that the only way to avoid a long and agonizing death was to boil them mercilessly. Until well into the 1800s almost no one dared to eat them any other way. It appears that the whole of Europe's potato output at this time came from just two plants brought back by the Spanish; this lack of genetic diversity is very probably what led to Ireland's devastating potato blight in the nineteenth century, with obvious consequences for American immigration. The word
spud,
incidentally, comes from the
kind of spade with which potatoes were dug out. Though the word itself dates from the Middle Ages, it became associated with potatoes only in the 1840s.

The history of the tomato (from
tomatl,
like so many other food words a Nahuatl term) in the New World is strikingly similar to that of the potato. It was carried to Europe from South America by the Spanish, widely regarded as poisonous, treated for two centuries as a decorative curiosity, and finally rescued from obscurity by the ever industrious Thomas Jefferson, who made the first recorded mention of it in North America in 1781. He referred to it as the
tomata.
Until well into the nineteenth century it was regarded as dangerously exotic on its native soil, though a degree of caution is understandable since the tomato is after all a member of the nightshade family.

The colonists were, however, well acquainted with a New World food that abounded along the eastern seaboard: the turkey. A not unreasonable question is how a native American bird came to be named for a country four thousand miles away. The answer is that when turkeys first appeared in England, some eighty years before the
Mayflower
set sail, they were mistakenly supposed to have come from Turkey. They had in fact come from Spain, brought there from Mexico by Hernan Cortes's expedition of 1519. Many other European nations made a similar geographical error in naming the bird. The French thought they came from India and thus called them chickens
'd'Inde,'
from which comes the modern French
dindon.
The Germans, Dutch and Swedes were even more specifically inaccurate in their presumptions, tracing the bird to the Indian city of Calicut, and thus gave it the respective names
Kalekuttisch Hün, kalkoen
and
kalkon.
By the 1620s, the turkey was so well known in Europe, and its provenance had so long been assumed to be the Near East, that the Pilgrims were astounded to find them in abundance in their new-found land. A similar linguistic misunderstanding
was obtained with another native American food, the Jerusalem artichoke, which is not an artichoke at all – indeed it doesn't even look like an artichoke – but rather is the root of the sunflower
Helianthus tuberosus.
Jerusalem is merely a corruption of the Italian word for sunflower,
girasole.