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At the turn of the twentieth century, a grassroots movement for the improvement of rural roads and highways swept across the United States, laying the groundwork for the highway systems that shape American life today. The reformers and bureaucrats who advocated for better roads did more than tout the economic benefits of improved mobility. They articulated a gospel of infrastructural progress that redefined roadbuilding as a missionary endeavor whose purpose was to civilize and spiritually redeem the American landscape, from its urban centers to its rural margins.
Apostles of Asphalt reveals how and why members of the good roads movement used the language of religion, civilization, and redemption to achieve their goals. Focusing on the movement’s influential Southern branches, Isaiah Ellis shows how white Southerners who became involved in the movement brought its religious and moral message increasingly in line with the Jim Crow regime, aiding broader efforts to sanctify the Confederate past and revitalize the doctrine of Manifest Destiny for the twentieth century. Ranging from the mountains of North Carolina to the swamps of Florida, Ellis offers a fresh perspective on the ideas at the foundation of the American highway system. In so doing, Apostles of Asphalt challenges the easy equation of infrastructure development and the common good.
— Paul Harvey, author of Christianity and Race in the American South: A History
Roads and highways seem like neutral parts of the manmade landscape—ubiquitous, easy to overlook, and used by everyone. Ellis dismantles this myth by examining the religious roots of the popular but contested Good Roads Movement at the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing on what he calls “the religious politics of roadbuilding,” Ellis shows how road builders in the South drew on religious ideas to promote their projects, infusing them with very specific, and often exclusionary, ideas about progress, prosperity, and how American life should be organized. His account is an indispensable addition to the scholarship on road building, an ambitious and highly technical process cloaked in missionary purpose that left an indelible impact on secular forms of power.
— Tammy Ingram, author of Dixie Highway: Road Building and the Making of the Modern South, 1900–1930
In Apostles of Asphalt we witness a wild period in the making of the US, when proponents of the Good Roads Movement built a particular religious and racial politics into the very bedrock of the country. Ellis compels us to recognize that roads are more than corridors for cars, they are the pathways from the Progressive Era to the American culture we now navigate.
— Jenna Supp-Montgomerie, author of When the Medium Was the Mission: The Atlantic Telegraph and the Religious Origins of Network Culture
This remarkable book shows that achieving modern roads required religious politics. This included not only religious people's affirmation of asphalt as a means for mud management but also the persuasion of the public that asphalt was religiously necessary. Apostles of Asphalt represents the best of religious studies, teaching us how myths became ritualized as social infrastructure.
— Kathryn Lofton, Yale University
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Internal Improvement: Public Religion and Public Works in Antebellum America
2. From Internal Improvement to the Gospel of Good Roads
3. “The Rock of God’s Providence”: From Existential Mire to Providential Pavements
4. Heavenly Curves and Rolling Greens: Infrastructure Planning and Spiritual Leisure in the North Carolina Sandhills
5. The Civilizing Road: The Global Imperium on the Southern Frontier
6. “Tropical Florida Is Now Here”: Utopians, Boosters, and the Building of the Tamiami Trail
7. Good Roads and Bad Men: Race, Reform, and the Labor of Improvement
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index