The man who created the "interstate" routes did as much as Henry Ford or Alfred Sloan to put America on wheels. He had funneled billions of federal dollars to the forty-eight states to build roads. His momentous decisions had transformed the American landscape and affected the daily lives and movements of almost every citizen. Yet few in America in 1939 knew his name or even his office. Today, almost no one does: Thomas Harris MacDonald, Chief of the Federal Bureau of Public Roads. Small wonder that Thomas Harris MacDonald was unknown, for he rarely courted publicity. Photographs of MacDonald show a man of complete formality and propriety. His 5 foot 7 inch, thickset frame always stands erect. His dark, suit jacket--usually single-breasted--is buttoned neatly over a vest and dark tie. His hands always seem tense at his side, while his eyes stare directly and intensely into the lens. His round face, marked by taut lips, a high forehead, and thinning hair, looks imposing and cold. Such photographs typified the man. Thomas Harris MacDonald rarely appeared without a coat and tie, even when fishing or horseback riding as he did occasionally on vacation in Nebraska. Colleagues and subordinates described him as reserved, austere, dignified, and cool, and often spoke of the severe stare of his cobalt blue eyes.

"When you were in Mr. MacDonald's presence you were quiet. You spoke only if he asked you to," one subordinate remembered. "He came as close as I could come to characterize what I would call royalty." Subordinates, colleagues, his closest associates always addressed him as "Mr. MacDonald" or "Chief"; never "Thomas" or "Tom." To his wife, even in the private intimacy of their home, he was always "Mr. MacDonald." In accordance with a demand he had made in his youth, his brother and sisters called him "Sir." Exotic labeling notwithstanding, little of the place where Thomas Harris MacDonald spent his childhood suggested romance. Pioneers named the spot about 50 miles east of Des Moines, Iowa, after Montezuma, a place of victory in the recent war with Mexico. The name of the fabled sixteenth-century Aztec emperor suggested romance. The soil--far richer than could be found in New England or the Northwest Territory--lured the first settlers to the south central part of what became Poweshiek County with the promise of great harvests, much as Cort‚s had been drawn to the Aztecs by the promise of gold. After the Civil War, the Rock Island and Missouri and St. Louis railroads established branch lines to the town, the first reliable connections its 1200 citizens had with the rest of the state. For up to a third of the year Montezuma was isolated by mud. The same thick soil that yielded the abundant harvest of crops became a giant quagmire whenever it rained. Iowa natives regarded their state's mud with the same respect and dread one might accord some uncontrollable primeval force. It swallowed horses up to their knees and wagon wheels up to their hubs. "It has the consistency of thick and sticky horse glue," MacDonald's daughter remembered. "When it rained, you were stuck, your wagons, your feet, you just stayed in your house until it dried. That could be two, three weeks, a month."

Though 27 railway companies with nearly 10,000 miles of track criss-crossed the state, and few farms were more than 6 or 8 miles from a depot, rain made travel to the station impossible. As a boy living with his brother and two sisters in Montezuma and working in his father's lumber and grain store, MacDonald saw first hand how farmers struggled with the roads and how the town's commerce came to a standstill whenever it rained. In 1900, when he turned nineteen, MacDonald announced that he would attend the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in Ames. He intended, he said, to become a civil engineer. There was little doubt about his commitment. Years later the family remembered his expression was assured; his will was implacable. The foresight of a conservative Republican congressman from Vermont, who had quit school at age 15, enabled Thomas MacDonald and thousands like him to attend college. In 1862, Representative Justin Smith Morrill introduced a bill granting public lands in each state for the "endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college...to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts." The Senate approved the measure, and President Lincoln signed the Morrill Land Grant Act into law. In 1890 Congress passed a second Morrill Act (the octogenarian Vermonter, now serving in the Senate, knew nothing of term limits). It provided money to colleges and universities, the first federal aid for education. As a result of Morrill's act, western American states in the closing years of the nineteenth century blossomed with agricultural and technical colleges. They were past due.

Prior to 1862, there were just six schools of engineering in the United States--including those at the military academy at West Point, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Harvard, Yale, and MIT. By 1872 there were 70, and most in land grant colleges. People from the west like Thomas MacDonald, who likely would not have ever considered attending a college or university, now had a chance. Armed with their practical education, many went on to careers in American industry, like petroleum, steel, and of course automobiles. Still others built modern America's great civil engineering works--its bridges, skyscrapers, subways, tunnels, and roads. The Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts at Ames, established in 1868, stood as a testament to Justin Smith Morrill's foresight. While the college stressed the mechanic arts, it also took care to include the "other scientific and classical studies," as stipulated by the Land Grant Act. In additions to physics, chemistry, mathematics and civil engineering (29 courses), the curriculum also demanded four terms of English, and two each of Latin, military science, and library. MacDonald's grades hovered about 3.85 on a 4 point scale, more than enough to qualify him for honors. At Iowa State, MacDonald fell under the tutelage of the school's dean, Anson Marston, who taught courses in road building and was an early and important advocate of the "good roads" movement. At the turn of the century the term "Good Roads" stood as a mantra for many in the United States. It had been popularized by a manufacturer of shoe forms and union veteran of the Civil War, Colonel Albert Augustus Pope, who introduced a "safety bicycle" in 1878. Pope's machine made bicycling the rage. Sedentary town men, and later women, joined together to tour the countryside on weekend afternoons.