Interstate Fact of the Day
George Will, Part 4 of 4: In a column celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Interstate System (published as “Interstate Ribbons of Progress” in The Washington Post on July 9, 2006), George F. Will explained that since Hawaii gained statehood in 1959, the United States had experienced its longest period of geographic stability in history. “Since then the Nation has become, in a sense, smaller through the annihilation of distance and, to some extent difference.” He added, “An important part of the groundwork—literally, it covered a lot of ground—for today’s America was begun 50 years ago this summer. A conservative Republican president who grew up in a Kansas town where hitching posts for horses lined unpaved streets launched what was, and remains, the largest public works project in the Nation’s history—the Interstate Highway System. Its ribbons of concrete represent a single thread of continuity through the Nation’s history.”
