Aerial view of a Levittown, made up of detached
single family houses in countless cul-de-secs.
Monotony, comformity, and car dependence were the
defining main characteristics of a typical suburban settlement.
Syncronized with the on-going agenda of automotive and oil
corporations, Robert Moses was promoted as a visionary of
regional planning. He became a technocrate more powerful
than most high ranking politicians. His designs for
expressways and his ruthless execution strategies were
to be copied in other cities besides New York.
Car accident - US 66 between Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizona.
Source: Frank, Robert
The Korean War broke off. The cease-fire was signed 3 years later. Although it remained as a low-profile war, the American casualty number within 3 years was about 55,000. It drained a considerable amount of resources and there was no actual winner. This war was one of the factors (surely there were some other important ones) that pushed the realization of Interstate Highway Act until 1956. Although the war had a delaying effect on the Act, it also had a catalyzing role in the passing of that enormous project that shifted the transportation policy towards a heavily highway-biased position. The Korean War strengthened the Cold War’s ominous image that was created in the public mind. Now the Cold War was not that cold. It had its explosive fronts and there were substantial casualties and costs. Moreover, it brought the U.S. closer to a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union. Remembering that the argument for the 1956 Interstate Highway act was largely based on the national defense goals. Fear was an important ingredient in the establishment of car culture and suburbanization and it still is.
1953: Eisenhower Administration is formed. Alfred Sloan was named the Secretary of Defense, who was then the president of GM. Pierre DuPont, a long time loyalist of and a large stockholder at GM, is appointed as the Chief of Federal Highway Administration. Both figures were to be key players in the passing of Interstate Highway Act and thus in the strong establishment of car culture and suburbanization.
1954: President Eisenhower appoints General Lucius D. Clay as the chair of the President’s Committee on a National Highway Program. He also was on the GM board.
1956: Interstate Highway Act of 1956 passed. It is popularly known as the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act. The concepts of metropolitan decentralization and population dispersal for the purposes of civil defense was put forth to convince the nation about the Interstate Highway System at a time of atomic paranoia. From another perspective, however, metropolitan decentralization and population dispersal made the nation severely depended on private motor vehicles and pushed the consumption of products produced by the automotive and oil industries.
The passing of this act also dramatically increased the destruction of many neighborhoods in cities all across the country. Expressways reaped through large neighborhoods, either completely annihilating them or fragmenting them to the point of becoming communally dysfunctional. Robert Moses became notorious for his highway construction projects in and around New York City.
Such inner metropolitan expressway projects displaced hundreds of thousands of residents without adequately replacing their homes. The inner city housing projects that were created following these large-scale road constructions to facilitate the automobile use everywhere soon became segregated prison-like complexes, known as ghettos.
In the meantime, since the end of 1940s, Federal Housing Administration heavily favored and subsidized (under the G.I. Bill) the construction of detached single family houses in the suburbs, which themselves had a tone of segregation for many years to come. “With the financing in place and the highways being built, thousands upon thousands of mass-produced houses rolled out, carpeting the landscape for miles around the great cities. By 1955, new homes in suburban subdivisions amounted to more than three-quarters of all new housing built in the nation’s metropolitan areas” (Gillham 38).
Manufacturing jobs followed the white flight to the suburbs. Among the working classes, whoever got trapped within cities later on became the hapless residents of depressed city neighborhoods.
1959: Robert Frank published his photography book "The Americans". This was a photographic study of America and the Americans during his 1955-56 cross country trip. Besides becoming a very influential idol in the photography art world, "The Americans" is also regarded as an unconventional yet deeply perceptive and honest ethonographic documentary. One of the main themes in Frank's photographs was the status of cars among the Americans and the not-so-happy (but not-talked-about) faces of America.