This article in the New York Times today, about the 1919 Eisenhower auto convoy across the United States, has me thinking.  If I read it correctly, it is suggesting that the infrastructure Ike put in place in the 1950s--the Interstate/superhighway system--is the crucial part of a larger travel infrastructure that altered American economy, society, and culture decisively.  Consider: while the US had long been a nation of migration, I suspect it had not been a nation so much of _circulation_.  The interstate system emerged in the late 1950s, soon after the culture began to produce a series of cultural artifacts--the song (and then TV show) "Route 66", the novel ON THE ROAD, and the like--that suggested value to long-distance driving, not for settlement reasons but for driving itself.  When did train travel decline?  The rise of a teen market for cars in the 1950s, as well as cheap gas, probably aided this too.  Maybe the highway system is related to the rise of the "generation gap" that emerges after the war as well?  Correlation not causation here, folks, don't worry.  All I'm really saying is this: perhaps the interstate highway system created (or participated in the creation of) a new kind of America, the America most of us have known our whole lives.  Perhaps this America is quite different than the ones that went before it--the difference between a "train-networked" America and a car-networked America is interesting.

These changes could be deep and wide.  This paper on the deep history of US "occupational mobility" (not quite the same thing that I'm discussing above, but nearby it) is interesting.  Seems that in fact American "mobility" has been declining since sometime after 1920.  Presumably some of that was due to the Great Depression and World War II--though why afterwards there wasn't a flood of mobility is interesting as well (though perhaps there was, and then it snapped back down to lower levels).  The paper suggests one of the causes might be the rise of the welfare state, which allowed people to "shelter in place" in the case of economic crisis in their locality (because they had unemployment relief and the like).  But I wonder also whether something of this is due to the rise of the highway network and the cultural changes that that effected.

Finally, are we leaving this age now?  Are we now in an age of electronic communication, virtual travel, and air travel?  Will there be a new infrastructure-building spurt?  Perhaps it has already happened with the internet and air deregulation.  And yet hasn't trucking really increased decade over decade?  What will drones do for that?  All sorts of interesting questions arise here.