Posted by Bruce Berman
Filling station in New Mexico. Boys pulling water from a well,
photograph by Russell Lee
Essay by Mary Lamonica
Cars. By 1929, more than 26.5 million automobiles cris-crossed American roads. Between one-third and one-half of all families owned a vehicle when the stock market collapsed in October 1929.
Although many Americans lost homes and jobs during the Great Depression, those who could hung onto their automobiles and their radios. Both brought dreams of a better life, but cars might actually be able to get people there.
Cars, therefore, were more than mere vehicles of transportation during the depression years. Cars were hope. Cars were freedom. Cars often were homes, too, as abundant FSA photographs attest. It’s not surprising that so many people developed a bond with their cars during the 1930s.
The Great Depression forced other Americans to move backward, away from the burgeoning car culture. The FSA photographers frequently captured images of horses or mules hitched to wagons, headed down rural roads and main streets. Not everyone could afford (or maintain) Henry Ford’s $300 Model T (or a Dodge or an Oldsmobile) when jobs became scarce.
America’s car culture had far-reaching effects by the time of the Great Depression. Cars meant mobility, certainly. But cars also meant jobs, and not just for assembly-line workers in Michigan. As automobile ownership shifted from the province of the wealthy in the early 1900s and into the realm of the middle- and working classes by the 1920s, whole industries sprung up. Oil workers, service station mechanics, and attendants were needed. Roads had to be improved. Hotels and restaurants sprang up, seemingly overnight in some places, to meet travelers’ demands. Russell Lee photographed many such places as he traveled the nation’s new byways.
Repairing an automobile motor, market square, Waco, Texas, 1939 by Russell Lee
The demand for roads was so great that Congress passed a comprehensive public highway law in 1925. Earlier transportation laws had been passed in 1916 and 1921. These laws saw the creation of Route 60, Route 66, and many similar highways. The changes to the nation were profound. Rural communities now were connected with urban markets. Travelers no longer had to rely on trains to travel long distances. When the Great Depression struck, an estimated 210,000 dust bowl migrants and others bound for California saw the highways as roads to a brighter future. Opportunity beckoned.
Not everyone displaced during the 1930s had a vehicle, however. Many folks had to thumb a ride. Hitchhiking became so commonplace that Hollywood immortalized the practice in movies like 1940′s “The Grapes of Wrath,” and the earlier, 1934 Clarke Gable-Claudette Colbert film, “It Happened One Night.”
Highway 60, like its more famous cousin, Route 66, passes through New Mexico. The celebrated Route 66 weaves and bobs through the landscape in snatches today, supplanted in many places by interstate highways. By contrast, Russell Lee’s road, Route 60, is still whole from Virginia Beach, Virginia to Quartzsite, Arizona. It used to go clear to Los Angeles, but was replaced by Interstate 10 and California Highway 60 in the 1960s. “Route 60 . . . hasn’t been made redundant by any larger road. It still takes you places,” says Thomas Beller, a writer for Travel & Leisure Magazine. Russell Lee, the dust bowl migrants, and the former and present citizens of New Mexico would agree.
Link to Travel and Leisure article: