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As auto sales boomed throughout the 1950s, American roadways and bridges were in a state of disrepair. The growth in car purchases had far outpaced the growth in infrastructure. Along came Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Born in Denison, Texas, the third of seven boys, Eisenhower was admired throughout his career for coupling a small-town folksy charm with the imposing authority of a five-star general. As a boy, Eisenhower worked the night shift at the local creamery to help put his brothers through school. He aspired to become a professional baseball player until he was accepted into West Point. Serving stateside in World War I, he quickly rose to become a leader of his battalion. He ascended through the ranks during peacetime training military staff, and after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor was tapped by Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall to become a leading architect of U.S. military strategy. By 1944 he had become the supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, and supervised the legendary D-Day invasion of Normandy.

Eisenhower, who had trained in tank warfare as a young recruit, was profoundly impressed by the German autobahns, a network of superhighways constructed during the 1930s and later used to facilitate the military maneuvering of Germany’s jeeps, trucks, and tanks in this first fully mechanized war. An autobahn was distinguished by its elevated overpasses, the strength of its bridges, and the breadth of its tunnels. When he returned to the United States after the Allied victory, Eisenhower found American roads in “shocking condition,” and envisioned a network of highways that would rival the autobahns’ high-caliber engineering, but on a vastly greater scale. “After seeing the autobahns of modern Germany and knowing the asset those highways were to Germans, I decided, as President, to put an emphasis on this kind of road building,” Eisenhower later reflected. “This was one of the things I felt deeply about, and I made a personal and absolute decision to see that the nation would benefit by it.”

Eisenhower’s interest in highways was also rooted in an earlier experience. As a nineteen-year-old army recruit, he had joined America’s first cross-country truck convoy, an expedition designed to rally support for the U.S. military. Interstate roads at the time were virtually nonexistent, and Eisenhower recorded a long list of tire punctures, engine blowouts, busted axles, and broken fan belts throughout his trip across the nation’s rutted dirt roads. “Some days when we had counted on sixty or seventy or a hundred miles,” he wrote, “we would do three or four.” His convoy had departed Washington, D.C., on July 7, 1919, and arrived in San Francisco a laborious sixty-one days and hundreds of breakdowns later. It was enough to convince him that a sophisticated road network would be crucial to America’s long-term growth and security.

Before Eisenhower became president in 1953, road building had been largely overseen by the states. America’s highways were patchy and disjointed: only half of the nation’s 3 million miles of roads were paved when Eisenhower took office, and of these just a few thousand miles had been properly maintained. Eisenhower championed Detroit’s great boom in auto sales, arguing that more cars meant “greater convenience, greater happiness and greater standards of living.” But he warned that the level of congestion and the state of disrepair on American roads was dangerous, and could stymie economic growth. The president’s personal conviction would ultimately grow into the biggest interstate highway network in the world, at 40,000-plus miles, and the biggest and costliest public works program in history.

As conservative as Eisenhower’s politics were—he favored states’ rights and small government—he knew that an interstate highway system had to be built with centralized federal oversight. Rallying the political will for such a project would be a huge challenge, particularly given the astronomical cost and accelerated time frame Eisenhower had in mind: $50 billion ($6.6 trillion in today’s dollars) invested over ten years.

Eisenhower intended to stage a dramatic unveiling of his plan at a governors’ conference in 1954. It was held in the wood-paneled rooms of the Sagamore Inn on Lake George in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. The president was unexpectedly detained by a death in the family, so his vice president, Richard Nixon, had to make the appeal. “Our highway net is inadequate locally and obsolete as a national system,” Nixon told the governors, adding that it was a “haphazard” and “arbitrary” road system “designed for local movement in an age of transcontinental travel.” The health risks posed by the system were “comparable to the casualties of a bloody war,” Nixon stated, with some forty thousand Americans dying in car accidents a year.

Nixon next made his plea for financial backing, arousing a din of chatter from the assembled governors: the project would pay for itself if states would approve a gasoline tax and a system of highway tolls—a controversial request coming from a conservative administration. Nixon stressed, above all, Eisenhower’s national security argument: “the appalling inadequacies to meet the demands of catastrophe or defense, should an atomic war come.” Seventy million city dwellers throughout the country would have to be evacuated to safety if a nuclear bomb struck American soil, said Nixon, and the quickest route would be wide, paved superhighways that didn’t yet exist.

Critics of the plan abounded. Urban planners predicted that the highway program would signal the decay of cities, accelerating suburban sprawl and stymieing the development of mass transit—concerns that have only escalated today.

But the Eisenhower administration wasn’t about to give up. The highway network, argued the president, would benefit average Americans not just by making them safer but by creating scores of jobs, making the growing American economy more robust and efficient. Billions of dollars, he said, had already been squandered because of perilous and congested road transport. Moreover, the highway network would further unify a nation that had recently drawn together to emerge successfully from world war: “Our unity as a nation is sustained by free communication of thought and by easy transportation of people and goods…over a vast system of interconnected highways,” Eisenhower wrote in a 1955 appeal to Congress. “Together the united forces of our communication and transportation systems are dynamic elements in the very name we bear—United States. Without them, we would be a mere alliance of many separate parts.”

While politicians bickered over the particulars of financing the highway plan—should tolls, for instance, be placed on the travelers who would use the roadways or taxes levied on the industries that would profit from them?—business leaders did their best to speed the project along. Automobile makers, truckers, car dealers, oil companies, rubber and cement companies, trade unions, and real estate developers collaborated in an alliance known as the “highway-motor lobby.” This secretive and amply funded group, which had been working for decades to advocate road building, helped wage a political blitzkrieg to win congressional votes in favor of the national highway network.

Lobbyists argued that new roads would stimulate the growth of their varied industries. Real estate development would spring up alongside the thousands of miles of freshly paved highways. Greater car use would increase tire manufacturing and demand for oil and gas. Mail order and product delivery services would enjoy a boom thanks to more rapid and reliable transportation, as would cement and asphalt production for the roads themselves and the production of aluminum and paint used for highway signage.

“Obviously we have a selfish interest in this program, because our products are no good except on the road,” James J. Nance, president of the Automobile Manufacturers Association and Studebaker Packard, testified before the House Public Works Committee in 1955. “Unless we know that there is going to be an expansion of the roads in this country…it is very difficult for us to plan over the next ten years as to what our expansion is going to have to be.” Nance was describing an outgrowth of the stunning chain of events set off by Ford’s discovery of mass production—a vast network of enterprises that all connected to and abetted one another, all expanded and enhanced the American dream, and all dangled from the same invisible thread of cheap oil.