Transportation

The 1930s and 1940s brought dramatic changes in the transportation of goods and people in the United States.

A number of significant developments in automobiles, aircraft, and railroads combined to change the way Americans moved freight and passengers on local, national, and international levels. These changes contributed to the important role of transportation in supporting economic and military mobilization and interstate migration during World War II.

Although the United States possessed a relatively extensive transportation network when the Great Depression struck in 1929, New Deal programs of the 1930s expanded this network. Beginning in 1933, the Public Works Administration, directed by Harold Ickes, embarked on a nationwide campaign to create and upgrade roads, dams, airports, bridges, subways, tunnels, and harbors. Given the rising importance of four-wheeled transportation to the economy, highway construction received much of the agency’s funding. In 1935 the Works Progress Administration headed by Harry Hopkins, expanded on prior commitments to enhance the national transportation infrastructure, so that by the time projects ceased in 1943, it had constructed, repaired, or improved 651,087 miles of highway, roads, and streets; 124,031 bridges; and 853 airports. One of the most memorable accomplishments was the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which opened in October 1940 as an ultramodern, four-lane concrete highway that presaged superhighways of the 1950s. Other notable accomplishments were La Guardia Airport, New York, and the Lake Shore Drive, Chicago. Fortuitously, this government emphasis on infrastructure upgrades could not have been better timed, for the nation found itself well-equipped to handle the mammoth transportation issues associated with World War II logistics and production.

In the interwar years, America’s railroads faced new competition for business from automobiles, buses, and trucks. Automobiles allowed people to travel at their pleasure rather than at times and by routes dictated by the rigid schedules of the railroads, and railroad passengers and passenger mileage declined in the 1920s, while automobile travel increased. The early years of the Great Depression reduced passenger traffic still further and, by causing American industries to curtail production, also reduced shipments of raw materials and finished goods. From 1929 to 1933, the number of railroad passengers fell from 786 million to 435 million, passenger miles fell from 31.2 to 16.4 billion, and freight tonnage fell from 1.34 billion to 699 million. In those four years, American railroads went from a net income of $977 million to $27 million (after net losses of $122 million in 1932).

The problems besetting railroads proved so endemic that Congress tried twice to directly intervene on their behalf with appropriate legislation. In 1935 it passed the Motor Carrier Act to address competition from the trucking industry by setting uniform, minimum freight rates

Pictured here is the McDonnell Douglas DC-3, the workhorse of commercial aviation in the 1930s. (Library of Congress) but it had little effect. Consequently, in March 1938 the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) and several other government departments convened to survey the status of railroads and appointed a Committee of Three to seek possible remedies. Their projected solution was to continue funding cheap equipment and credit loans to the railroads through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation while consolidating the entire industry to promote greater efficiency. Whatever the plan’s economic merits, it had the immediate net effect of angering railroad unions and brotherhoods, who felt that many jobs would be eliminated outright. The proposal was then highly modified to appease them, and when the Transportation Act of 1940 finally passed Congress in March 1940, it granted ICC oversight to coastal, inland waterway, and contract water carriers but left the entire issue of railroads unaddressed.

Federal regulation prevented the railroads from raising rates and abandoning routes to stem the loss of income, so a new way of increasing revenue had to be found. On September 29, 1932, the Burlington Railroad and a Philadelphia metal maker began construction of the first streamlined train, the Burlington Zephyr, as part of the railroad’s plan to regain passengers lost to cars and buses. The streamliner provided fast transportation for its passengers in air-conditioned comfort and at lower cost to the railroad. The streamliners so enchanted the public that the Zephyr had to turn away passengers during its first year of service. Soon other railroads introduced new diesel streamliners of their own, or streamlined their older trains like the New York Central’s 20th Century Limited, and the Baltimore and Ohio’s Royal Blue. Passenger travel and revenue rose slowly after 1933.

With the outbreak of World War II, railroads experienced a rapid resurgence of their freight traffic as defense plants began to produce war material that needed to be moved from the factories to embarkation points along the coasts. On December 18, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Office of Defense Transportation to coordinate all transportation for the war effort. Railroad freight traffic, both raw materials and finished products, increased during the war. So did rail passenger traffic when gasoline rationing made traveling long distances by automobile impractical and millions of GIs and defense workers and their families had to move across the country. Soon, American railroads were transporting war material, supplies, soldiers, and civilians in unprecedented volume. In 1944, railroad passenger miles peaked at their all-time high of 95.7 billion as railroads carried more than 900 million passengers, and freight tonnage reached a new record 1.5 billion. The net income of American railroads also reached new levels during the war.

Sales of new cars by the automobile industry collapsed early in the depression, plummeting from nearly 4.5 million cars sold in 1929 to a low of 1.1. million sold in 1932. Nevertheless, the automobile became still more popular during the 1930s because of the personal freedom that it gave to travelers. Despite widespread economic hardship, Americans did not give up the cars they already owned, and passenger vehicle traffic held roughly steady early in the 1930s and then increased significantly in the second half of the decade; the number of vehicle miles traveled in 1940 was nearly 50 percent higher than in 1930. As travel for pleasure increased in the late 1930s, it sparked the development of the nascent motor court industry. Automobile sales picked up after 1932, but just as they neared predepression levels in 1940 and 1941, the automobile industry had to switch to military production because of World War II.

During the 1920s, efforts to improve road surfaces across America gained momentum in order to facilitate the growing use of trucks to transport goods over short and medium distances as well as automobile and bus traffic. When the Great Depression hit, road-building projects suffered as state and municipal finances were strained. But President Roosevelt’s New Deal funded federal highway projects such as the Pennsylvania Turnpike and U. S. Route 66, while more local “farm to market roads” were built to assist farm recovery efforts as part of the Works Progress Administration. These roads were to make up for the loss of railroad transportation that had previously served farmers’ shipping needs, and they enabled farm products to be shipped cheaply to the market via trucks. During the war, such roads facilitated the transportation of goods, especially of foodstuffs from farms to canneries and packing plants and then on to markets and ports for shipment to war zones.

Railroads and automobiles also facilitated population migration, especially during the war years. Although the early years of the Great Depression greatly reduced population movement, migration picked up in the second half of the 1930s as people moved away from the rural Midwest, Southwest, and South toward metropolitan areas and the Pacific Coast in search of work. An unknown but highly visible number of Americans became hoboes, taking to the rails and riding freight trains in the hope that they would be taken somewhere where work was available. Whole families left the dust bowl of the Midwest and Southwest and headed to California in their family cars looking for a better life. Later, with the need for more workers in factories during World War II, millions of Americans headed to the war production centers of the industrial Northeast, Midwest, and West, and joined military personnel on the crowded trains and buses of the war years.

While the automobile and railroad industries had become fairly well established in America, the aircraft industry was still in its infancy at the beginning of the depression. There were few customers for new airplanes, especially for large commercial aircraft. However, as the 1930s progressed and the speed and convenience of air travel became more obvious, more and more people began traveling by air. Not only did cross-country air travel increase, but international flights also enabled more and more people to fly across the oceans for pleasure and business. In 1930, the aircraft industry transported fewer than 400,000 passengers; in 1940, it carried more than 2.5 million passengers. Twenty-three million paying passenger miles were flown in 1929, 56 million in 1935, and a recordbreaking 110 million paying passenger miles were flown in 1940. Despite such dramatic increases, particularly late in the decade, passenger traffic in commercial aircraft in the 1930s was dwarfed by travel on railroads and automobiles. After the war, however, and the enormous wartime expansion of the aircraft industry, airplanes took an increasing share of the railroads’ long-distance passenger traffic, while automobiles took many of the local passengers. Moreover, the large and capacious multiengined transport aircraft previously developed for the military, such as the Douglas C-54 Skymaster (DC-4) and Lockheed C-69 Constellation, were readily adapted by civilian airlines, which granted them unrivaled carrying capacity and greater passenger comfort. With such craft, the U. S. airline industry was poised for leadership in global aviation throughout the postwar period.

Further reading: Robert J. Dilger, American Transportation Policy (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003); William L. Garrison, The Transportation Experience: Policy, Planning, and Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Owen D. Gutfreund, 20th Century Sprawl: How

Highways Transformed America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Mark H. Rose, The Best Transportation System in the World: Railroads, Trucks, Airlines, and American Public Policy in the Twentieth Century (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006).

—Nicholas Fry and John C. Fredriksen