Could you imagine going on a road trip in the 1930s to somewhere hundreds of miles away using only a paper road map to guide you on your journey? Although most maps show the way to a destination, some do much more than that. The map The American Road: 21,000,000 Passenger Cars, 1931, by Clarence Peter Helck which is on pages 108-109 in Katharine Harmon’s You Are Here is a prime example of this. This map isn’t a map of directions but a map that highlights the explosion of automobiles at the time. The rise of automobiles transformed road maps from insufficient navigational tools into essential guides for exploration and created a new culture.
This map is an interesting piece because of the way it is formatted. The map consists of specific details such as many different records and accomplishments. These accomplishments include a white box with the written accomplishment, over a drawn-out representation of what the accomplishment was. For example, one of these boxes says “779,275 cars visited the 21 national parks in 1930. To Old Faithful in 1931 were driven Model T’s” which was pictured on the map right next to a drawing of the famous geyser in Yellowstone National Park, Old Faithful. People desired to be immersed in nature so they would make the journey many miles away to the national parks. With this information, you may be wondering, how did all of these people navigate to these national parks? And to that, the answer would be road maps.
With road maps being the only way to navigate the country at the time, they were crucial to those who had automobiles. Another landmark on the map consists of a white box next to a huge factory that said “Henry Ford provides 200 acres of parking space for 75,000 cars owned by his workers”. With this detail added to the map, you can see the sheer amount of workers Ford had in his company. These workers were a part of his famous invention: the assembly line. He invented the moving assembly line in 1913, so by the time the 1920s and 30s came around, he had it down to a science. This is important because it meant he was producing mass amounts of cars. The major increase in the production of automobiles meant that they were more affordable to the average person. This made road maps significantly more important because more Americans had cars than ever before.
After this major increase in cars to people ratio, it meant that these Americans needed ways to travel the country. Helck’s map emphasizes the staggering number of cars, 21 million, at a time when the U.S. population was around 123 million, indicating that approximately one in six Americans owned a car. So not only did road maps become more important, but the roads and highway systems became much more important as well. There were millions of cars to be driven, but they had limited places these cars could take them due to the poor road conditions. In the article “American Road Maps and Guides” by Walter W. Ristow, Ristow emphasizes the importance of roads as equivalent to the importance of maps. One of the automobile enthusiasts during the beginning of the automobile evolution said, “Road maps are not very helpful, as they are usually made for wheelmen. A road may be good for bicycles, as they need only a narrow strip, but an automobile must have wide wagon roads”(Ristow 400). All of these Americans who are getting cars have limited travel due to the roads not being worthy. With this in mind, they then went on to make organizations that campaigned for better roads and maps. At first, it started off small, with the road system increasing in small increments at a time, but it led to the whole system we know today.
Additionally, guidebooks became a common tool that included detailed maps to ease the difficult task of navigating the country. Early guidebooks were very informational including “road ordinances, legal opinions on automobiles, lists of road book and maps, etc.”(Ristow 400), but they were missing a key tool. Although these early guidebooks gave a list of maps that would be useful, the maps were not supplied with the guides. This changed for the better in 1901 when the Official Automobile Blue Book, which covered the eastern United States, made its first guidebook. These guides included the same useful information but included the maps necessary to navigate them. This was necessary for those going on long adventures to places they had never explored. “It set a standard and a pattern which was followed by a number of other guidebook publishers”(Ristow 400). With the previous patterns we have already seen, we can conclude that this will lead to guidebooks that include maps being made for the rest of the country. Thus further increasing the ease of traveling the country.
The newly updated and advanced cars, roads, and maps changed the culture of America to be more focused on traveling and exploration. Going back to Helck’s detail on the map, “779,275 cars visited the 21 national parks in 1930”, this reflected a pivotal moment in American travel culture. These newly founded innovations enabled millions of Americans to access previously remote and inaccessible destinations. Americans had a new sense of freedom never experienced before. This is also shown in Ristow’s article where he stated, “As we travel over the miles of excellent highways of the United States today, it seems incredible that less than 50 years ago hard-surfaced roads existed only in and around the larger cities”(Ristow 397). Having Ristow include this thought-provoking statement makes one wonder where we would’ve been without the evolution of cars, roads, and maps.
All in all, both Ristow’s article and Helck’s map emphasize the role of roads and maps in shaping the evolution of America. Cars created the need for better maps, while improved maps made car travel more accessible and navigable. Helck’s map captures moments of national pride in automotive progress by showing off some of the achievements during that time, while Ristow highlights how maps created a new culture centered on traveling and exploration by showing the evolution of roads and highways. The car, road, and map trio symbolize innovation, exploration, and freedom.
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