Appropriately, Warren began the best book about American populism, his novel based on Huey Long's Louisiana career, with a rolling sentence about a road. Time was, infrastructure — roads, especially — was a preoccupation of populists, who were mostly rural and needed roads to get products to market, and for travel to neighbors and towns, which assuaged loneliness. Today, there is no comparably sympathetic constituency clamoring for “internal improvements,” as infrastructure was known in the 19th century when canals, and then railroads, transformed America.
What rural electrification was eight decades ago, broadband access might be today: a blessing not widely enough enjoyed. But infrastructure spending will not have the economically and socially transformative effect that it had before America became a mature urban society. Princeton University historian James M. McPherson writes that before all-weather macadamized roads, it cost the same to move a ton of goods 30 miles inland as it cost to bring a ton across the Atlantic. The person who would become the 16th president began his public career advocating canal construction in Illinois, and in 1849, before he became a prosperous railroad lawyer, he received U.S. Patent No. 6469 for a device to facilitate boats' passages over sandbars and shallow water.
Read Full Article »