Beyond that, the Dixie Highway’s success as an idea, if not as a finished transportation route, demonstrated that roads needn’t—and shouldn’t—be the almost exclusively local matter they had always been. They plainly contributed to the public good—economically, culturally, and socially—and deserved the attention and support of the federal government.
An Indianapolis auto-parts millionaire named Carl Fisher thought the Dixie Highway would be a great first step toward his goal of building a contiguous all-weather motor route that would improve and link existing roads from the Great Lakes to the new tourist mecca of Miami Beach, where (as it happened) he was a major property owner. Fisher was a born salesman who had once shocked Hoosiers by wafting an automobile over downtown Indianapolis beneath a hot air balloon. He was also part-owner of the new Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home of the Indianapolis 500. Wildly successful as the producer of chemical auto headlamps, Fisher had sold that company and plowed the proceeds into an overgrown sand-spit just off the Miami shore, which he was marketing as a warm and welcoming Eden for Yankees who were sick of vistas of frozen corn stubble.
But when the DHA convened in Chattanooga to choose a route to Fisher’s holiday haven, the meeting quickly devolved into a scrambling donnybrook, as 5,000 boosters from Michigan to Florida thumped to bring the highway and its rolling business through their respective hometowns. There were just too many communities and too little road to include them all. Soon, suspecting that the fix was already in, they went for the organizers.
“People were shouting at each other,” Ingram writes. “All these different communities sent delegations thinking that if they just showed up with a lot of cars, ticker-tape and a big presence, they could sweet talk their way into the project. But everybody else thought the same thing.”
The raucous meeting in the shadow of Lookout Mountain—just 50 years after the end of the Civil War—quickly became known as the Second Battle of Chattanooga. The panel of governors Fisher had recruited to designate a route tossed the hot potato to a study committee. A month or so later, the committee came back with a plan that didn’t so much choose a path for the Dixie as expand it.
There would be two parallel routes, a western track running south from Chicago through Indianapolis, Chattanooga, Atlanta, and Tampa; and an eastern one from upper Michigan through Cincinnati, Asheville, Savannah, and Jacksonville.
Together with several east-west connectors, this would more than double the mileage of Fisher’s original plan. Though overall this would have been very beneficial—transforming a distinctly limited tourism artery into a more useful network of interregional roads—in reality the DHA’s capacity to get the work done was limited. This was especially true down south, where roads were in the worst shape and funds were almost nonexistent.
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