1.8 On the Road

Just as the railroad would help to unite the country, enabling tourists and travelers to journey from one end of the nation to the other, the rise of the automobile would transform the American landscape, which began to fill with paved roads, interstate highways, and gas stations. To feed, board, and entertain Americans traveling by automobile, entrepreneurs built restaurants, bars, drive-through coffee and sandwich shops, motels, and roadside attractions. Some families built roadside cabins for travelers, while others started boarding houses or let rooms in their homes.

From 1900 to 1929, the number of automobiles manufactured in the United States rose from around just over 4,000 to 23 million. In 1903, a doctor and mechanic completed the first transcontinental drive. The trip from San Francisco to New York, which took over two months, required these pioneers to traverse rough-hewn roads, frequently filled with holes and scattered with debris. Blowouts and engine repairs proved constant companions. To meet the need for safer travel, a good roads movement began to sweep the nation and the American Automobile Association (AAA) was founded. It launched the magazine American Motorist, which printed images and articles that promoted transcontinental touring. Organizations, companies, and individuals invested in the good roads movement, began to depict transcontinental travel as a patriotic duty and roads as a way of binding the nation.

In 1914, the Page Company launched its “See America First” series, eventually publishing 21 guides that crafted a simplified, Anglo-centric national narrative. According to an American Studies scholar,

The [“See America First”] guides presented American history in a series of stages: Indian life in harmony with nature, Spanish exploration and colonization, English colonization and settlement, the founding of the American Nation, Anglo-American conquest of the Indians, expansion westward, and present-day progress. This narrative served to delineate the origins of and the evolution toward the achievements of the Progressive era. Interestingly, these guides were written during a time of increasing black migration to northern cities, institutionalized Jim Crow laws, and rising nativism and immigration restriction. (Schaffer, 2001, p. 199)

The Lincoln Highway, which stretched from New York City to San Francisco, was completed in 1915. In 1926, American Motorist featured a series of articles showcasing the nation’s most scenic roads.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, roadside lodging was still hard enough to come by that travelers took to camping at state and national parks, a trend further fueled by the Great Depression. Travelers increasingly took to the road with tarps, army surplus tents, canned goods, and cooking equipment. Companies maneuvered to create camping amenities. The Colman Lantern Company, for example, began to sell gas camping stoves. By the late 1930s, trailer companies hit their stride, manufacturing campers replete with fold-out beds, stoves, and sinks. With no designated camping spots aside from the National Parks, the millions of Americans who took to the road, sleeping under tarps and tents and inside of trailers, began to settle themselves on the side of the road. Makeshift camps proliferated and garbage and human waste created by campers began to mar the countryside. The great camping boom was fueled, in part, by the Great Depression, which forced many Americans into tents and camping trailers on a permanent basis. In response to nationwide financial distress and unemployment, President Franklin D. Roosevelt inaugurated the New Deal, which put millions of Americans to work building highways, bridges and state parks with designated campgrounds, restrooms, and garbage cans. The New Deal also put 6,600 writers, editors, and researchers to work through the Federal Writers Project (FWP). It employed the literary likes of Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, and Zora Neale Hurston. Among the many projects undertaken, the American Guide Series would become the most celebrated, with over 10,000 writers from around the country working on the project from 1935 to 1943. Led by Henry G. Alsberg, a journalist who covered the Russian Revolution, the project created guides covering 48 states and the territories of Puerto Rico and Alaska, a handful of major cities (Washington D.C., New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia), scores of towns, and, even road touring guides (U.S. 1, Oregon Trail, and Ocean Highway). The guides canonized American life, providing travel information alongside essays on American architecture, folklore, history, ethnic studies, nature, and geography. As historian and American studies scholar Margarite S. Shaffer summarizes:

In collecting and codifying American history and traditions, in celebrating economic and industrial development, in documenting everyday people and their work across the American landscape, the guides tapped into a rising tide of cultural nationalism that sought to revive American culture during a moment of crisis. (2001, p. 219)

The final volume in the American Guide Series, published in 1943, would mark the beginning of the end of prescriptive travel writing.

The introduction of the automobile followed by the building of a national highway system began to shift the ideology of tourism from one focused on nationalism and nation-building into one celebrating American individualism. No other travel narrative represents this shift more powerfully than Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957). Kerouac hitch-hiked and drove back and forth across the nation, getting to know the working classes, the hobos, and the downtrodden of the nation. In doing so, he helped inaugurate the countercultural movement, which openly rebelled against nationalism and promoted anti-establishment beliefs. Despite its anti-establishment stance, On the Road presents an unadulterated celebration of white male virility—an American modern twist on the Grand Tourist. Rather than hobnobbing with the European elite, Kerouac embraced the common American, working alongside field hands, jumping on trains to sip liquor with hobos, and thumbing his nose at mainstream middle class American culture.

Yet another segment of the United States was represented by The Negro Motorist Green Book. Published from 1936 to 1966, the Green Book provided an updated list of places where African American travelers could safely sleep, eat, and visit without fear of being arrested or violently attacked for traveling after dark. Examined in juxtaposition, On the Road and The Green Book illuminate one another and the United States in striking ways. One tale celebrates white male privilege and the freedom of the open road and the other book was developed to help combat the subjugation, violence against, and segregation of African Americans from mainstream historical narratives and mainstream American culture, which literally forbade African Americans from occupying public facilities alongside whites.

Driving while Black was so dangerous in the 20th-century that Victor Hugo Green published an annual guide to help African Americans navigate the United States, which was pockmarked with sundown towns—the name for towns that passed laws making it illegal for Black individuals to be in public between sunset and sunrise. Some sundown towns actually rang gongs to alert Black workers it was time to leave or risk being arrested or, in worst cases, lynched. The Negro Motorist Green Book provided an essential life-saving guide for Black drivers. Green and his wife Alma compiled and published the annual editions, which listed places where Black travelers could eat and sleep. Often these were homes where drivers could spend the night and dine on a home cooked meal. The guide also listed other black-owned businesses where travelers would be welcomed, including gas stations. In the 1930s, Victor Green struck a deal with Standard Oil to sponsor the Green Book, which sold many of the 15,000 copies published annually (Harlem World, 2020). In a pioneering move, Standard Oil not only sold the Green Book at its Esso gas stations, but also hired Black workers and sold hundreds of Esso gas station franchises to African American entrepreneurs (Sorin, 2020). Despite Standard Oil’s sponsorship of the Green Book and Black-owned Esso franchises, however, not all Esso stations serviced African Americans. Nonetheless, the Green Book helped travelers navigate to safe gas stations throughout the country. Eventually Victor and Alma Green began serving as travel agents, planning vacation cruises to Africa, South America, Europe, Canada, and the West Indies, enabling African Americans to escape the racism of their home country (Sorin, 2020).

Although African Americans could travel freely abroad, they were often terrified while traveling within their own country. Sorin (2020) recalls that in her own childhood, her family never visited national parks, as “the idea of hiking without protection of any kind brought to mind white lawlessness an even lynchings” (p. 216). As Sorin explains in Driving While Black, however, the mobility provided by automobiles coupled with the safe accommodations, eateries, and entertainment listed in the Green Book helped fuel the Civil Rights Movement. Like the railroads, cars enabled the exchange of ideas and forged strong transcontinental connections, uniting African Americans in their fight for desegregation.

Just as Cleveland’s Majestic hotel featured in the annual Green Book, so, too, did many of the restaurants and hotels that housed civil rights leaders and activists as they galvanized forces across the Jim Crow South. Martin Luther King Jr. held countless meetings at the A.G. Gaston Motel in Birmingham, Alabama. The Gaston served as a de facto local headquarters during the 1963 Civil Rights Birmingham campaign to boycott businesses and galvanize mass protests against one of the most violently racist cities in the world. As peaceful protests were met with increasing police violence, the Ku Klux Klan held rallies, police arrested and jailed Black children, and King sat in jail having been arrested for violating Alabama’s law against mass protests. From there King wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which summarized his decision to mobilize masses in the public streets of the city. It also served as a reply to the criticism he faced from religious leaders who urged him to hold back the protest and wait until negotiations could turn the tide of violence. King wrote to all those who opposed the protest:

when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim … [;] when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see the tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky …[;] when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking in agonizing pathos: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?” when you take a cross country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you… —then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. (King, 1963, p. 6)

On May 11, civil rights advocates and local white leaders reached a truce, and the protests were called off. The next day a bomb was detonated at the A.G. Gaston Motel and at the home of King’s brother. Fourteen months later Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In 2017 President Barack Obama designated the motel as part of the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument (Sorin, 2020).