| dc.description.abstract | Road Power uses the development of the American highway system to examine the foundations of the federal state. This thesis argues that the highway bureaucracy accrued power throughout the early twentieth century, providing a historical narrative that seamlessly connects the long Progressive Era with the New Deal through an increasingly powerful national state. Road Power uncovers the multi-faceted approach to state development and the federalization of infrastructure development.
The story begins with the institutional components of standardization and oversight, arguing that the federal aid highway legislation, implemented by managerial professional experts, created a national highway authority that marshalled a standardized road program. Following this institutional change, Road Power determines that the highway program fed into notions of American exceptionalism. Both the rhetoric of exceptionalism justifying good roads and the use of roads for foreign economic and policy intervention show how roads assuaged popular anxieties in the early twentieth century. The convict laborers who built the roads underscore the ways in which states ceded labor oversight and control to national directives and campaigns. By connecting convict labor, penal reform, and the national road programs, this study finds a shift from state to federal control that manifested in the roots of the penal state through oversight, regulations, and experimentation. The study closes with the New Deal state, arguing that roads were the dominant political and cultural symbol of the era. The subject of roads offers an analytical tool that frames the road building program of the early twentieth century as a template for the government-directed public works programs of the New Deal’s liberal democracy. | en_US |
