"Freeways for Free Enterprise and the Failure to Make Small Business Work in the Cold War West, 1940-1965"

In the Southwestern United States, where the federal government had invested heavily in defense-sector industries during the Second World War, the lack of good roads remained a liability for attracting corporate investment well into the Cold War. While the State of Oklahoma now touts Route 66—and the bypasses lamented in Disney’s Cars (2006) as its chief tourist draw— officials in Tulsa and Oklahoma City launched one of the most ambitious turnpike building programs in the nation during the 1940s-50s. This conference paper, however, challenges popular memories of the Mother Road. I demonstrate how small-business owners committed to the family wage actually lobbied against these toll roads and for the freeways that would be completed under the auspices of Eisenhower’s 1956 “Interstate Highway and Defense System Act.” Using oral histories, newspaper articles, and collections of cultural ephemera, this paper follows Jack and Gladys Cuthbert out of Clinton, Oklahoma as they tried to hold the U.S. Highway 66 Association together: him, the only salaried employee, from the road, and her, from a desk in their home. Although their booster network comprised one special interest allied in the struggle for greater federal support for public highways, this paper ultimately reveals how the freeways intended to stabilize their rural communities eventually, and unexpectedly, led to their undoing.