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.The book even included a supposedly serious analysis of how theidentical rows of suburban houses might be relieved of monotony by varyingthe setback of the houses.Since the roadside was understood visually from aviewpoint inside a car, cosmetic ideas of planting vegetation along the road-side or punctuating a visual experience with carefully placed stands of treesor shrubs continued to be an acceptable response.3When President Lyndon Johnson took office in Washington in 1963, theinterstate was growing, adding significantly to its projected 42,500 miles andbillions of dollars to its original estimate of $27 billion.His wife, Lady BirdJohnson, had trained herself to be a powerful and amiable mascot for his|Parallel Networks: Roadsides 114administration, and her women doer luncheons entertained presentationsabout the national parks and interstate highways as well as urban theoristslike Jane Jacobs.Highways became a major focus of the first lady s beautifi-cation program and the president s task force on natural beauty.She is oftenbest remembered for her program to plant wildflowers by the roadside, anapproach that would appear to be largely cosmetic.She was interested, how-ever, in graphically depicting the roadside as a meaningful site, one that wasneither vacant nor neutral but rather offered diverse soils and climates, asevidenced by wildflowers particular to each region.Mrs.Johnson s position about beautification was somewhat contradic-tory since she expressed great pleasure over attractive visual arrangements,but she also felt strongly that the word beauty was inadequate to describeher interests and made the beautification program an easy target for de-tractors.Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson joked about their use of the word beauty since it was often associated with garden clubs or treated as ananachronistic holdover from the turn-of-century days of civic beautification.Lady Bird described herself as a born housekeeper, a comment that for manymight confirm the weakness of her position, but which probably better re-flected her understanding of interplay among different species of informa-tion.She had managed households, businesses, the White House, and evensome of her husbands political chores.However naive in its specifics, her un-derstanding of land management as a complex of problems addressed by adiverse and interdependent economy of solutions was what distinguishedMrs.Johnson s approach.She once said that she wanted to move from the garden club to the hardware stage of the problem. 4 Still, the beautificationmovement was split between attempts to beautify with landscaping andplantings and attempts to deal with the real mechanisms of inner-city blight,or the larger organizations of national land holdings and parks.The beautifi-cation movement was perhaps better understood as a persuasion that gentlyaroused consciousness about issues ranging from land preservation and envi-ronment to urban decay and, in doing so, identified sites like the roadsideright-of-way.Scenic RoadsPresident Johnson s Highway Beautification Act called for the developmentof scenic roads and parkways, and one federal publication, A Proposed Pro-gram for Scenic Roads and Parkways, prepared in support of the legislation|2.3 115was a remarkable artifact of this science of scenic highway design a hybridof traffic engineering and landscape design.The report emphasized fictionsabout the psychological well-being associated with driving from sea to shin-ing sea, and it expressed the ambient sentiment that Americans had a rightto more elbow room. To ensure that Congress would take up its responsibilityto provide this increased freedom however, the report also advanced parallelmotives associated with defense evacuations and increased revenues fromtourism.5Although the scenic highway would supposedly accept variety and cir-cumstance from the terrain through which it passed, the recommendationswere nevertheless born of the systemic science of highway engineering.Asportrayed in the report, traffic engineering was itself a kind of new nature, anatural-mathematical topography composed of contours associated withspeed and vision in motion.6 And when the curvatures of traffic movementwere coincident with the natural topography, (making dynamite unnecessary) environmental highway engineering congratulated itself for its appropri-ateness and even claimed to make scenery possible.Highways created antici-pation and visually enhanced the natural beauty of the scenery.They offered drama by framing nature for the automobile viewing excursion.Highwaydesigners could sculpt a curvilinear alignment that harmoniously integratedthe road into its environment without unsightly scars and relieved the driverof monotony and dullness so that he can enjoy a driving for pleasure experi-ence
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