From Rural Roads to Peacock Alleys: Culture Clashes along the Dixie Highway

From Rural Roads to Peacock Alleys: Culture Clashes Along the Dixie Highway traces some of the major cultural, political, and regional debates surrounding the planning and building of the country’s first interstate highway system between 1915 and 1925. Originally conceived as a single route from Chicago to Miami, the Dixie Highway evolved into an elaborate network of rural roads strung together to form a 6000-mile interstate highway system that looped through major cities and rural villages throughout the South and Midwest. The process of piecing together countless rutted country roads into automobile-ready routes—expensive highways that farmers derisively referred to as “Peacock Alleys,” where wealthy auto owners showed off their fast new machines—was fraught with divisions even as it united Americans North and South, rural and urban in an ambitious plan to promote centralized state and federal funding for highway construction. My paper will focus on the impact of the Dixie Highway in Georgia, the largest Deep South state whose road mileage (and Dixie Highway mileage) surpassed its neighbors. There, the juxtaposition of a weak, conservative central government and an extensive transportation network threw the links between road building and state building into sharp relief. The parallel struggles of wealthy automobilists and ordinary rural Georgians to expand and improve roads sheds light on the cultural and political conflicts that eventually fractured the Good Roads Movement and stalled major infrastructure development in the South for another two generations.