The "larger field" was the United States of America--over three million miles of roads, of which just three hundred fifty thousand could be described as "surfaced." When Congress directed the Department of Agriculture to establish the Office of Road Inquiry in 1893, there were more than seventeen million horses and just one automobile. The Office would, Congress said, "make inquiries in regard to the systems of road management throughout the United States." Focusing on "object lesson roads" and bulletins outlining proper road construction and maintenance, the Office operated with modest sums for the next two decades. As more and more people across the United States purchased automobiles, pressure mounted to increase the Federal Government's role in road building. By 1916, when there were three and a half million automobiles, people began to rely on them for their work as well as use them for pleasure. Farmers began to buy small trucks. Congress and the American people were beginning to realize that transportation was essential to the nation's economy. Farmers needed roads as never before. One study commissioned by Congress found that poor roads forced an American farmer to pay 21 cents in labor and time to haul a ton of produce over a United States road, while a French farmer paid just 8. Another reported that it cost more for a Georgia farmer to ship a bushel of peaches twenty miles to Atlanta over bad roads than it did to ship a bushel across the country from California.

On July 16, 1916, Woodrow Wilson signed the first Federal-Aid Road Act into law. The Act gave the new Bureau of Public Roads 75 million dollars to distribute over the next five years, and allowed for the federal government to pay half of a state's costs for road improvement and construction. At the time there were over twenty-one million horses, three and a half million automobiles, and a quarter million trucks. World War I, however, foiled Congress' plan. Shortages forced an end to road work, and civil engineers were drafted from their state highway agencies and the Bureau of Public Roads to serve in Europe. Even more harmful was the destruction brought by military traffic. The army had decided to drive the trucks and materials it was producing in the mid-west to eastern ports and ships bound for Europe. Though the roads were dreadful--the first convoy that left Toledo in mid-December, 1917, took three weeks to get to Baltimore--more than 30,000 trucks made the journey. Following the army's lead, private companies, which had previously used trucks only for local deliveries, now sent them on interstate trips from places like New York, Philadelphia, and Cleveland.

Recognizing that trucks could provide a more convenient service at comparable cost, businesses began to ship goods interstate over roads rather than by rail. As trucks took to the roads, the roads took a pounding. Many tons heavier than automobiles, trucks also rode on unforgiving, hard rubber wheels rather than pneumatic tires. Whatever thin layers of concrete or asphalt there might be quickly crumbled under their destructive weight. One engineer likened the punishment to "the shells a big gun hurls into a fortress." When Thomas MacDonald arrived in Washington in 1919, he found confusion and discouragement in the Bureau of Public Roads and impatience in the Congress. The Bureau of Public Roads had spent only about $500,000 of the 75 million dollars Congress had voted it in 1916, and had built just twelve and a half miles of road. The little money it had spent brought controversy. States complained of restrictive federal regulations that hindered construction, needless delays, and arrogant federal engineers. Since the 1916 bill did not demand that Federal-Aid roads in one county or state connect with those in another, maps often charted short isolated squiggles of improved pavement stranded in the midst of unimproved territory. So frustrated and impatient was Congress by the lack of progress that some representatives and senators, along with a number of powerful road and automobile associations, had proposed replacing the Bureau of Public Roads with a National Highway Commission that would construct three or four federally owned roads across the length and breadth of the country.

To all the disorder and confusion MacDonald applied two central beliefs which he had worked out in the Iowa soil for the past fifteen years: cooperation and technical expertise. They lay at the core of every decision he would make for the next three decades. At the heart of cooperation lay federalism, an active partnership of state and national government. To MacDonald highway building took the concept of federalism as outlined by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay for government and adapted it to actual life. The proper federalist attitude would, he believed, enable states to maintain their sovereignty as to the placement of roads while at the same time promote a policy of road building to federal standards that would best serve the nation's needs. The previous head of the Bureau, an imperious man whose style and directives only served to anger state highway departments, had cost the bureau its direction as well as its ability to compromise. Now consultation and cooperation replaced edicts from Washington. "Those who do not have the qualities of manliness, square dealing, good temper, and ability to get along with people must go," MacDonald wrote to one engineer. "So long as I am in this office, the door will be open." The Chief always linked technical expertise to what he called the "gigantic business" of highway building. Roads served four different but interrelated components of American life, each of which contributed to the economic welfare of the nation: agriculture, farm-to-town or farm-to-city traffic--as well as "social, educational, and religious activities which produce traffic from farms to the schools, to the churches, and to the community centers"; recreation, the practice of combining business with pleasure travel, as well as the increasingly popular motor tour; commerce, the transport of goods between towns and cities about 100 miles apart; and defense, the use of roads for military vehicles. What was good for American life was good for America's defense, too.

Building should proceed along "sane and sound economic lines," and only after a thorough study of road use, MacDonald reported in the Bureau's monthly publication, Public Roads: A Journal of Highway Research. Through his openness and willingness to compromise MacDonald was creating a large network of interrelated groups, each with an interest in building good roads, which functioned like well-oiled parts in a giant machine. Never mind that some of them had favored abolishing the Bureau of Public Roads a few months earlier, each part was now vital to the machine. The Portland Cement Association; the American Automobile Association; the American Road Builders Association; the Association of Highway Officials of the North Atlantic States; the Rubber Association of America; the Mississippi Valley Association of State Highway Officials; the National Paving Brick Manufacturer's Association; the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce and scores of others each had a place. MacDonald incorporated any group into his machine so long as it supported the cause of building Federal-Aid roads on the basis of sound economic and engineering principles. "This is an All-American job." he said, stressing cooperation. "We must recognize the important part that the states have in the work."

The Chief even added parts of his own invention to his machine. One was the Highway Education Board. The Board would overcome resistance to highway building by teaching Americans the value and importance of good roads. Facts generated by the Bureau of Public Roads flowed to the Highway Education Board booklets and, later, films disseminated to schools around the country. Speakers from the Board fanned out from the Washington headquarters to address school assemblies, rotary clubs, and local chambers of commerce. With the help of other individuals running MacDonald's highway machine--men like the rubber baron Harvey Firestone--the Bureau sponsored essay contests for high school students and awarded college scholarships for engineering. Surely the most important part of MacDonald's giant machine, the component essential for its operation, was a seemingly innocuous and stodgy sounding group, the American Association of State Highway Officials, known by its acronym AASHO. In fact, AASHO ranked with the most powerful lobbyists in Washington. As Commissioner of Iowa's highway department, MacDonald had been present at the group's formation in 1914. Now, he used the Association to strengthen the ties between federal and state governments. He realized that each state highway official could cultivate a close liaison with members of Congress, Senators, and their staffs.

While the state officials might not be allowed to lobby formally for votes on legislative matters, their opinions would carry great weight, so great that in 1923, AASHO installed its executive secretary in a Washington office to advise members of Congress about highway matters and sometimes even to help them draft legislation. Along with his belief in federalism MacDonald brought his belief in the superiority of technical expertise. For the Chief road building was a scientific enterprise. Henceforth all decisions about matters like proper building materials and methods as well as the size and location of the roads themselves would be made with detached scientific objectivity. MacDonald ranked in the forefront of a new governmental class of the technocrats just then emerging in Washington. The word was thoroughly modern, a combination of "techno-" the Greek word for "art" or "craft," with "-cratos," the Greek word for "ruler." World War I had taught many Americans that democracy would prosper in the twentieth century only with the help of technocrats' mastery of the scientific and the physical world. The technocratic experts class would ameliorate living conditions in America. Americans believed experts in the Public Health Service would control, if not eradicate, diseases like diphtheria, polio, and tuberculosis. They relied upon experts in the forest service and parks service to manage the land to the best advantage of the country. They looked to experts with the Department of Agriculture to help them get the greatest yield from each acre of farmland and each dairy cow.

As the leader of the technocrats in the Bureau of Public Roads, MacDonald always kept the larger vision of what America's road system should be. It was never a single road he was building but a federally-financed network of roads that would span the country. The network would serve not only a commercial purpose of enabling goods to be moved from one place to another, but a defense and cultural purpose as well. The aura of technocracy that extended throughout the Bureau of Public Roads was most visible in the area of research. To be sure, from its inception the Bureau had conducted research and published its findings in a series of pamphlets. After the wartime truck convoys pulverized road pavements, the Bureau redoubled its research efforts. What was the optimum sand to use with cement when making concrete, and in what ratio? The optimum mixing time and pouring conditions, and curing time? The optimum reinforcing steel and its placement? The optimum joint fillers? The questions were far more complex than they might at first appear. On the Bureau's test farm in Arlington Virginia (at the site of the present Washington National Airport), engineers laid control sections of pavement and tested each with a variety of pounding machines. Away from the test farm, the Bureau conducted research on various heavily traveled roads. On the Benjamin Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia, it investigated the strength of different pavement compositions. Bureau economists toiling in the Washington office analyzed the effect of gasoline taxes on highway building and income that communities and states derived from motor vehicles. Working with the National Bureau of Standards and AASHO, the Bureau determined the best shapes, colors, lettering, and placement of road signs. In conjunction with the National Academy of Sciences, MacDonald established and helped finance the Highway Research Council in 1920 to study matters such as the economics of highways, traffic analysis, maintenance, and materials.

The results appeared regularly in Public Roads, which highway builders and officials across the country read avidly. Wrapped as they were in the mantle of technical expertise, MacDonald and the highly skilled professionals he marshaled at the Bureau of Public Roads, along with the information generated by state highway departments and the National Board on Highway Research earned the respect of Congress and presidents for the quality of their arguments, their attention to facts and details, and the thorough analysis that went into their decisions. Americans' faith in technocracy extended to road building. Prior to this time rural communities held weekend road repair parties where those who were farmers could have a portion of their county taxes forgiven if they graded the section of road that ran in front of their farm. It was a chance for neighbors to get together and swap stories, but do little other than spread gravel. Sometimes officials left road building and heavier repairs to an unskilled prison chain gang working under the sharp eye of a shotgun-toting sheriff. But farmers and criminals could not do the job of building and maintaining a "modern" road. County officials knew they must yield to road-building technocrats who operated on scientific principles. MacDonald quickly capitalized on this new faith, realizing that it, too, would help to keep his highway machine well oiled. Technical knowledge would enable the government to build stronger and safer roads wherever they were needed.

The knowledge would save the government money and help to increase commerce. State highway departments followed the Chief's lead. They established their own research laboratories which often conducted tests of conditions particular to their region of the country. With his emphasis upon cooperation and his belief in technocracy, the Chief combined regularity, formality, and extraordinary energy. In his first months in office, MacDonald seemed to be everywhere. He spoke to dozens of organizations and met frequently with senators and representatives. He got results. Within a few days of his arrival, he arranged for the government to transfer 130 million dollars of surplus military trucks and equipment to state highway departments. He cemented the ties between good roads and defense by charting with General Pershing the routes across the country essential for military operations. Known as the "Pershing Map," the document may be viewed as a prototype of an interstate system. No detail seemed too small for MacDonald. When a shortage of railway cars threatened the supply of cement and stone for road building, the Chief smoothed the way with the Interstate Commerce Commission to secure a quarter of a million more cars. Most important, with the end of the war MacDonald was able to release federal funds for highway building. By the end of 1921, the Bureau could cite miles of completed highway and another miles underway. Congress knew it could rely upon the Chief as someone who would get things done. It dropped the idea of a National Highway Commission, and in 1921, passed a new federal-aid highway bill that gave MacDonald everything he wanted. In two years since he arrived in Washington, Chief MacDonald had taken complete control of the federal-aid highway program.