Property owners steamrolled by highwaymen. (Flashback).(Interstate Highway System)(Brief Article)

Candy-maker and John Birch Society founder Robert Welch was labeled nutty as a fruitcake when he suggested that Dwight Eisenhower was an "agent of the communist conspiracy." But in one area, Welch's crazy charge contained a nugget of truth.

You see, Ike fathered the Interstate Highway System. His administration's flacks proudly called it the "greatest public works project in history," and maybe it was. But the Interstate program was also a socialist melding of industry and military that did more than almost any other act of government to uproot Americans.

Like so many of Leviathan's projects, the IHS was conceived in wartime. In 1944, Franklin Roosevelt's Interregional Highway Committee recommended that the federal government build a 41,000-mile interstate system. (As though Washington wasn't busy enough.)

General Eisenhower came home from Europe having been deeply impressed by Hitler's autobahn. A decade later, in June 1956, President Eisenhower would sign into existence the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways to build an American autobahn.

As the bill's name suggests, the plan to pave over America was cleverly sold as a critical Cold War weapon. The Interstate was "vitally essential for national defense," said the President. The four-wheeled patriots of Detroit revved their engines in agreement. (Ike's Secretary of Defense, "Engine Charlie" Wilson, came from General Motors, just as President Kennedy's man in the Pentagon, Robert McNamara, rolled off the Ford assembly line.)

Limited-government types knew they were in trouble when the house skinflint of the Eisenhower administration, Secretary of the Treasury George M. Humphrey, burbled, "America lives on wheels, and we have to provide the highways to keep America living on wheels and keep the kind and form of life that we want."

The Interstates dramatically altered patterns of domestic commerce and residency. They forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of persons. They uglified vast stretches of America. And hardly anyone in a position of power raised a peep. Scattered farmers, New Englanders, and poets tried to slow ...