The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921

Overview

The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921 was an act that on its surface further structured the increasing number of plans for a national highway system within the U.S. It was certainly not the first act of its kind, but the act is remembered and praised for organizing the federal agencies and the aid money allotted for highway construction and improvements in the early 1920s. The act arose as a solution to the debate about whether the U.S. government should focus on building long-distance or farm-to-market roads and also offered a remedy to the shortcomings of the earlier iteration of the act, the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916.

The Good Roads Movement & Post Road Advocacy

A long history of advocacy for and debate about road and highway construction preceded the 1921 act, and thus, the act cannot be discussed without it. The Good Roads Movement began in the early 20th century when people noticed a quality disparity between urban and rural roads. With cars, bicycles, trolleys, and most importantly, paved roads arriving in cities, the Good Roads Movement took root with people advocating for building paved roads to connect to rural areas and create equitable transportation access. Up until then, rural roads were usually made of gravel or dirt, making them difficult to traverse and requiring consistent upkeep.¹

Groups emerged to advertise auto trails that ran across the country, such as the well-known Lincoln and Dixie Highways, but the establishment of the National Highways Association (NHA) in 1911 made the most impact on the movement. The NHA proposed more than 150,000 miles of roads as part of a variety of township, county, state, and national road networks.² The work from the Good Roads Movement advocates eventually paid off by helping lead to the passage of acts and laws, such as the 1916 and 1921 acts.

Good Roads Movement advocates also took the angle that improved roads would allow the government to deliver mail daily to each farm or residence in rural areas. Roads developed for postal use were thus called post roads, the first of which was completed by the Office of Public Roads (OPR) in 1914.³ The OPR learned lessons from the post road project that later informed the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916’s creation. The main lesson was that “Federal aid should be dispensed only through the 48 States, avoiding the complexities of dealing with the Nation’s more than 3,000 counties.”⁴

The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916

H.R. 7617 was one of the first bills introduced to Congress in January 1916. Introduced by Missouri Rep. Dorsey W. Shackleford, the bill proposed giving out a total of $25 million annually, of which each state would receive $65,000 at the minimum.⁵ However, the bill, which was drafted by the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO), came with a few major stipulations: each state held the responsibility to create and oversee its projects but would need state approval before receiving funding, and each state needed a highway organization to represent and administer its piece of the program.⁶ The act’s priorities also lay mainly in the construction of rural post roads, roads and trails in national forests, and roads on federally-owned land.

President Woodrow Wilson signed the act into law on July 11, 1916. Immediate issues arose, mainly because many states did not have highway departments in place at the time of the act’s passage, which significantly slowed progress. At the same time, though, the amount of work it would take to connect and increase the quality of roads in some states “would take decades of Federal aid at the most optimistic rate of appropriation.”⁷

World War I also presented difficulties. With a lack of ships and trains for transporting goods and a lack of workers, all of which at the time were devoted to the war effort, the plans for highway building crumbled somewhat and were pushed aside to the point where some felt that “roadbuilding was nonessential work that should be discontinued for the duration of the emergency.”⁸ The trucking industry grew during the war to make up for the lack of other transportation methods, but this led to highways made of dirt, gravel, or clay ending up in disrepair.

Lastly, the debate that began before the act’s passage about whether to focus on building long-distance roads or improving farm-to-market roads continued to rage. However, neither side of the debate was entirely satisfied with the compromises within the act nor what it had accomplished. 

The OPR changed its name to the Bureau of Public Records (BPR) in 1918 and gained a new director, Thomas H. MacDonald, in 1919. With all of this change occurring and discontent with the 1916 act growing, by the time the act’s funding expired in 1921, there was a need for change.

Implementing the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921

With all of these issues with the 1916 act in mind, MacDonald set out to create another version of the act that would address some of them, particularly by strengthening the state highway agencies so that they could better handle all of their funding and road or highway maintenance. There were at least three highway acts introduced to Congress in 1921: one written by MacDonald and the AASHO and presented by Iowa Rep. Cassius Dowell; another penned by Michigan Sen. Charles E. Townsend (who by far was the biggest Congressional advocate for a national highway system); and the final one drafted by Colorado Sen. Lawrence C. Phipps, who was looking to preserve leftover funding from the 1916 act.⁹

By the end of 1921, elements from each act had been combined to form the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921. It passed in the fall with appropriations set at $75 million and was signed into law on November 9, 1921 by President Warren G. Harding.

With this act, Congress returned to the practice of authorizing aid for several years in advance by giving $50 million for 1923, $65 million for 1924, and $75 million for 1925.¹⁰ This made it much easier for state legislatures to plan their road projects for a longer term and allowed the act to work more smoothly.

The act partly served to appease both sides of the highway debate. While it did not create a full national highway system, it limited aid to a specific system of federal-aid highways, which could not exceed seven percent of all roads in the state. Three-sevenths of the highways had to be “interstate in character,” and sixty percent of the aid could be used on interstate roads.¹¹ For advocates of farm-to-market roads, however, the act continued to require oversight from state agencies, meaning local issues remained at the forefront.

The act prioritized highways into two categories: primary (interstate) and secondary (intercounty).¹² It also required states to match federal funds and be fully responsible for maintaining the federal-aid roads. If they did not, then the federal government could come in to oversee maintenance and improvements of the roads using funds the state would have received through the act. 

One perspective on states’ support of the law came from I.W. Purdom, the chairman of federal laws for the Georgia Federation of Women’s Clubs, who advocated in The Atlanta Journal for Georgia citizens to support the act and the state of Georgia to maintain the state highway department. She approached from a safety angle, saying, “The federal highway act is not an infringement of state’s rights, but on the contrary is a practical security of the most important right guaranteed to the states by the constitution… that the United States shall protect every state against invasion.”¹³

On the flip side, however, an article published in the Duncan Banner describes how the backlash against the act, mainly from citizens wanting a voice in the finances and materials used, prevented Oklahoma from receiving their federal funding. The article states that the citizens viewed this as a win. One of them, W. D. McBee, said, “It means that the federal government realizes that we, the people who are putting up the money, have a right to some sort of a say in regard to the letting of the contracts. The idea of the state department receiving bids on just one kind of road is too ‘high-handed.’”¹⁴

The debate about long-distance roads versus farm-to-market roads reflects a larger conflict between the old and the new within society during the 1920s. The 1920s largely brought much change and growth, financially (at least for some) and culturally. Many of these cultural changes brought modern ideas that pushed back against the more conservative way of thinking that stemmed from the Victorian era. Lynn Dumenil discusses this in “The Acids of Modernity: Secular and Sacred Interpretations” chapter of The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. She mentions that women’s emerging role in the workplace and politics, shifts in social organization because of new mass culture and technology, a rise in urban culture, and an increase in bureaucratization challenged the older worldview that allowed and encouraged order and hierarchy as well as racism, sexism, and nativism.¹⁵

Almost immediately after the act passed, MacDonald requested that all states submit recommendations of which roads needed improvement and where new ones needed to be constructed. These maps made it easier for the BPR to coordinate road plans beyond state lines, and by November 1923, the BPR published a national map with designated highway systems for all 48 states.¹⁶

Each state had individualized needs, however, because of their unique finances, traffic patterns, and population. For example, western states could get away with using gravel for primary roads that consistently carried less traffic than secondary roads in eastern states. States, such as Pennsylvania and North Carolina, used their funding to build secondary roads with better materials and higher standards than the federal regulations.¹⁷ This ended up paying off in the long run because as highway projects progressed, the general standards for road design and materials increased.

The act made major strides in highway construction and improvement between 1922 and 1925. In 1922 alone, 10,247 miles of construction had been completed, but by 1925, more than a quarter of the highway system, or 46,486 miles, had been made “a reasonably travelable standard.”¹⁸

The 1921 act did not come without its issues, though. The act certainly succeeded in providing more structure and allowing states, such as Maryland, Delaware, and Rhode Island, to grow their highway systems and improve roads so quickly that they qualified for extra aid by July 1923.¹⁹ However, the BPR did not account in their plans for how quickly vehicle ownership and traffic would increase during the 1920s. Car sales increased from around 2 million units in 1921 to 4 million in 1923 and slightly over 5 million in 1929, and vehicle registrations rose from 10.5 million in 1920 to 26.7 million in 1929.^{20 21}

Dumenil described consumers purchasing cars more frequently in the 1920s as one of the “symbols of the new order” because of how it impacted the need for improvement to road infrastructure.²² Additionally, because more people had the means to drive farther around the country, they needed well-maintained cross-country roads to travel, many of which were not instated until the 1921 act. Thus, the creep of modernity in the 1920s influenced the need for highways, federal funding for highway construction, and, therefore, the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921.

A 1924 report from the Committee of the National Tax Association expressed that even though an estimated $900 million was spent each year between 1921 and 1923 on road and highway construction and management had been well worth the investment, “highway construction and provision for proper maintenance have in general lagged behind traffic needs.”²³ The committee predicted correctly that road usage and traffic would only grow in the years that followed and expressed concern that a crushing financial burden would fall on state and local governments, which may have informed future highway aid acts afterward.

Significance

The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921 not only accomplished a lot while it was active, but it set the stage for many of the U.S. highway acts and systems that followed. The introduction of the numbered highway system in 1926 was one of the largest highway reforms after 1921, and the 1921 act played a major role. MacDonald had used his connection with the AASHO to his advantage. Starting as early as 1922, MacDonald heard complaints about inconsistent signage for cross-country highways and asked the AASHO to develop a reliable numbering system for highways. The AASHO, in turn, coordinated 50,137 miles of highways under one system.²⁴ The numbered highway system was one of the most impactful innovations for U.S. highways, so much so that many aspects, such as the black and white shield symbol, still exist in the current highway system today. Many of the highways there to number in the mid-1920s stemmed from the 1921 act, proving its impact.

Remnants of the 1921 act can even be seen in the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which introduced the U.S. interstate highway system as it is known today. The offerings of the act (the federal government paying ninety percent of the construction costs) and requirements (states having to include at least four lanes and no ground-level crossings) looked different than in the 1920s, of course, but the guideline of delegating these tasks from a federal to state level is generally the same as from the 1921 act.²⁵

On a broader note, the 1921 act “launched a basically unending engineering project,” meaning that the principles of highway maintenance and improvement that it upheld reverberated throughout the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st century.²⁶ While much has transpired and changed about U.S. highway systems since the 1920s, the basic ideas set forth by the act about consistently updating roads to be in the best shape and the most practical materials continue. It has come to the point where there is no escaping highway construction anywhere in the country, a constant reminder of the impact of the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921.

Citations

Footnotes

1. Meagan Snow, “Maps of the Good Roads Movement,” Library of Congress Blogs, Library of Congress, April 14, 2022, https://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2022/04/maps-of-the-good-roads-movement/. ↩︎
2. Snow, https://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2022/04/maps-of-the-good-roads-movement/. ↩︎
3. Federal Highway Administration, America’s Highways 1776-1976: A History of the Federal-Aid Program (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Transportation, 1976), 83. ↩︎
4. Federal Highway Administration, 83. ↩︎
5. Federal Highway Administration, 86. ↩︎
6. Congressional Research Service, “Federal Aid to Roads and Highways Since the 18th Century: A Legislative History” (CRS report, Washington, D.C., 2012), 5. ↩︎
7. Federal Highway Administration, 101. ↩︎
8. Federal Highway Administration, 93. ↩︎
9. Federal Highway Administration, 108. ↩︎
10. Federal Highway Administration, 113. ↩︎
11. Richard F. Weingroff, “From 1916 to 1939: The Federal-State Partnership At Work,” Federal Highway Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation, 1996, https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/summer-1996/1916-1939-federal-state-partnership-work. ↩︎
12. Congressional Research Service, 12. ↩︎
13. “Federal Highway Act Is Indorsed by G.F.W.C,” The Atlanta Journal (Atlanta, GA), Aug. 5, 1923. ↩︎
14. “Oklahoma To Get No Aid Until She Settles Squabble,” The Duncan Banner (Duncan, OK), Aug. 24, 1923. ↩︎
15. Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 88. ↩︎
16. Federal Highway Administration, 109. ↩︎
17. Bruce E. Seely, Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 74. ↩︎
18. Federal Highway Administration, 113, 109. ↩︎
19. Federal Highway Administration, 109. ↩︎
20. Federal Highway Administration, 115. ↩︎
21. Seely, 73. ↩︎
22. Dumenil, 88. ↩︎
23. Jacob Viner, et al, “THE PROBLEMS OF HIGHWAY FINANCE: Report of Committee of the National Tax Association,” Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Taxation under the Auspices of the National Tax Association 17 (1924): 411–32, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23401269. ↩︎
24. Seely, 78-80. ↩︎
25. Richard F. Weingroff, “The Greatest Decade 1956-1966: Part 1 Essential to the National Interest,” Federal Highway Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation, June 30, 2023, https://highways.dot.gov/highway-history/interstate-system/50th-anniversary/greatest-decade-1956-1966-part-1-essential. ↩︎
26. Seely, 71. ↩︎

Bibliography

• Congressional Research Service. “Federal Aid to Roads and Highways Since the 18th Century: A Legislative History.” CRS report, Washington, D.C., 2012.
• Dumenil, Lynn. The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.
• Federal Highway Administration. America’s Highways 1776-1976: A History of the Federal-Aid Program. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Transportation, 1976.
• Seely, Bruce E., Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987.
• Snow, Meagan. “Maps of the Good Roads Movement,” Library of Congress Blogs. Library of Congress, April 14, 2022. https://blogs.loc.gov/maps/2022/04/maps-of-the-good-roads-movement/.
• Viner, Jacob, Thornton Alexander, A. J. Brosseau, C. C. Converse, Maurice Groshon, W. H. Maltbie, and W. G. Query. “THE PROBLEMS OF HIGHWAY FINANCE: Report of Committee of the National Tax Association.” Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Taxation under the Auspices of the National Tax Association 17 (1924): 411–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23401269.
• Weingroff, Richard F. “From 1916 to 1939: The Federal-State Partnership At Work,” Federal Highway Administration. U.S. Department of Transportation, 1996. https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/summer-1996/1916-1939-federal-state-partnership-work.
• –. “The Greatest Decade 1956-1966: Part 1 Essential to the National Interest,” Federal Highway Administration. U.S. Department of Transportation, June 30, 2023. https://highways.dot.gov/highway-history/interstate-system/50th-anniversary/greatest-decade-1956-1966-part-1-essential.

More Resources

• Swift, Earl. The Big Roads: The Untold Story of the Engineers, Visionaries, and Trailblazers Who Created the American Superhighways. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.
• Weingroff, Richard F. “Creation of a Landmark: The Federal Aid Road Act of 1916.” Repository & Open Science Access Portal. U.S. Department of Transportation, Sept. 27, 2016. https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/72569. 
• Paxson, Frederic L. “The Highway Movement, 1916-1935.” The American Historical Review 51, no. 2 (1946): 236–53. https://doi.org/10.2307/1839581.