The Highway Establishment and How it Grew and Grew and Grew
All roads have to go somewhere; but it could be that roads in Texas are going the wrong way.
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Some of them, of course, represent highway-oriented economic interests wearing another hat. Many of the local chamber of commerce officers, for example, have a personal economic interest in some aspect of road-building. Others may have a different sort of self-serving interest: Very few county commissioners have ever been hurt by having a road built in their precincts, and there are still a few who stay in office by tipping off their friends about the paths of new rights-of-way. But most of the laymen are exactly what they seem: well-respected, public-spirited citizens who honestly believe that the welfare of the state depends on a good network of highways built by a Highway Department unblemished by political chicanery. They are not money-seekers, not crackpots; they are the bedrock Establishment of Texas. To an impressive extent, TGRA commands their loyalties. These laymen are indispensable to TGRA’s purposes. Without them the Association is naked, a straightforward phalanx of powerful economic interests. With them, it is something grander than a lobby: it is a movement, a personification of the Texas automobile-highway-mobility ethos. No other lobby in the state has so successfully camouflaged its basic economic motives.
Impressively framed on a reception-room wall in its Austin headquarters is a striking, hand-lettered gubernatorial proclamation issued by John Connally in honor of Highway Week, 1964. The visitor reads:
Highways are derived from vision, and vision is rooted in the people.
The TGRA has actually done much to create the ethos it personifies. Its relationship with the Texas news media is nothing short of amazing. From the day its founders chose an influential editor as the first president, the Association has diligently cultivated good press relations. Journalists have figured prominently in its hierarchies. Among the ablest is Weldon Hart himself, a former aide and confidant to Governor Allan Shivers whom even a political adversary described as “a brilliant writer, a genius.” (He also has a sense of humor: one of his recent articles in Texas Parade was titled, “The Glory and Splendor That Is Highway Week.”) Hart ran the TGRA from 1965 to 1972. Partly as a result of his work, it now counts among its members 23 newspapers and publishing companies, including the Dallas Times Herald, the Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, the San Antonio Light, the Express Publishing Company [San Antonio Express and KENS-TV], the Midland Reporter-Telegram, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, and others from Abilene to Longview and Denison to Victoria.
When the dedicated fund is threatened, as it has been in this year’s Constitutional Convention, the TGRA can expect prompt and vigorous editorial support for its viewpoint—sometimes by the very next morning in certain member newspapers. But the media can be even more cordial. A set of six TGRA advertisements praising the highway network and defending the dedicated fund was published 150 times last year in Texas newspapers as a “public service announcement,” free of charge. Radio and television stations give free air time to its 20- and 60-second “spots.” These promote rail, air, water, and pipeline transportation in addition to highways, and the message in some of them bears an intriguing similarity to the paid advertisements of oil companies that help to finance the TGRA. Texas Parade Magazine, which was the TGRA house organ for decades, now publishes an article a month prepared in cooperation with the Association “as a valuable contribution to public education.”
In the communities, the TGRA promotes the highway ethos in a variety of ways. Part of it is simply good organization work: the Association has area chairmen in 40 cities and a board of directors in each of its 25 districts (the districts themselves coincide precisely with the Texas Highway Department’s own districts). The directors constitute a good start toward a “who’s who of Texas.” For the local, district, and state leaders, there is an endless round of speeches to Lions Clubs, Rotary Clubs, and Chambers of Commerce—spreading of the gospel to revive the loyalties of fellow laymen and win conversions among unbelievers. The Association has produced a documentary film called “Turning Point,” which, according to a TGRA spokesman, “has been used by television stations in most Texas cities—and is in constant use by civic and service clubs each day.” Cultivation of lay support never really stops. But organization, even good organization, has its limits. In the end the special strength of the TGRA comes from the fact that its members participate personally to an unusually high degree in the power structure of Texas. Said one former legislator: “it’s not that they contribute so much in campaigns; it’s more subtle than that. They belong to the right country clubs, the right power elites.”
The Association’s public pronouncements exist on two levels. The first is a calm, sober, and straightforward enunciation of the view that highway transportation is intrinsically good for Texas. “This vital transportation resource,” says a sample TGRA resolution, “... is essential to the State’s business, dustry and emergency requirements and to the mobility, welfare, and recreational needs of its citizens and visitors.” Without the dedicated fund, the argument goes, irresponsible legislators would allow construction to slump into an unpredictable series of peaks and valleys. Highways, “a perishable product,” require an average lead-time of eight years from the planning stage to completion, and any skimping on funds one year would have an impact eight years later. The highway industry itself also likes to know the total dollar value of contracts to be awarded in a given year; the security of the dedicated fund relieves them of the anxieties that trouble other industries dependent on the uncertainties of legislative funding. Says the TGRA:
“The contractors who build the state’s highways must depend on a ‘core of expertise’ to get the job done. These are key employees who are permanent, so long as there are contracts to be executed. But if there is a drought of funds ... then the state’s major highway builders must let their key personnel go —and the loser, in the final analysis, is the highway user himself.”
The Association’s foremost precept is the belief that revenues collected from highway users should be spent only for “costs ... directly related to highway construction, maintenance ,and improvement.” The campaign of “educational publicity” starts from this point.
But there is a second, much more emotional level, in which the dedicated highway fund is viewed as the fountain-head of all good things, and those who would change it as either anti-social knaves or starry-eyed fools. [See “We the People,” Texas Monthly, January 1974]. Two years ago, Eugene W. Robbins, then the TGRA vice-president, warned an audience in Gonzales that a “conspiracy is afoot in the United States to stop all highway construction. The plot was hatched in the densely populated Northeastern megapolis but its disciples are spreading throughout the land —including Texas.” He described the members of this “conspiracy” as “pseudo environmentalists, rail mass transit zealots, politicians and bureaucrats, and social planners with active support from some news media.” Robbins himself, now the president of TGRA, is a mild and personable man, and a visitor to his office who hears him speaking genially and knowledgeably about the state’s highway system is likely to wonder just what gets into him (and other TGRA spokesmen) when he stands behind the podium of a small-town meeting hall. Perhaps such rhetorical excess is possible because the Texas highway ethos is so pervasive, leaving the speaker with a sense of freedom to speak his mind because he feels he is among friends who think as he does, far away from the zealots and social planners who inhabit foreign territory. Or perhaps it is something more: a sudden reminder of the fundamental gulf that separates the laymen from the economically self-interested side of the TGRA, a ferocious expression on behalf of those who know that if Texas changes its highway priorities they themselves have a fortune to lose.
The gulf is there. It is too wide to paper over indefinitely, although the TGRA has done a remarkable job of doing so for the past four decades. That is why the Association prefers to speak in glowing generalities that submerge the blunt economics of profit and loss beneath the rhetoric of high public purpose.
How the Well Was Won
THE TGRA WON ADOPTION OF the Good Roads Amendment in 1946 by using many of the same techniques it uses today. If ever there was a broad-based effort to change state policy, the campaign for this amendment was it. Charles Simons, who was executive vice-president of the TGRA at the time, recalls that it had “virtually unanimous support” from political figures. “Governor [Coke] Stevenson was real strong for it. Allan Shivers—he was a senator then—carried it in the Senate, and Neville Colson carried it in the House.”
The “layman” members of TGRA were concerned equally with making sure that the highway industry had a steady flow of public funds and with preventing monkeyshines and corruption in the Highway Department. Critics of the dedicated fund today tend to underestimate the extent to which Texans of that era feared political favoritism in the Highway Department. The farmer was still in the mud in those days; inter-city road travel left a lot to l^ be desired; and the prospect that important highway construction would be carried out to suit the needs of some politician’s career instead of the logical traffic requirements was abhorrent to many influential citizens. The issue in 1946 was not whether a particular road should be two lanes or four: it was whether that road would be paved.
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