The Interstate Highways — the “Interstates” — were conceived at the crest of the liberal era, when the mobile individual, newly forged in the automobile factories, was the model citizen whose rush into the mechanized future extended the national polity coast to coast. Following the Great Depression and despite conservative backlash, a strong federal government was ascendant and large-scale planning was the norm. In this context, and notwithstanding intermittent collectivist leanings, “liberal” does not connote a political or economic doctrine so much as it does a metaphysic, a way of being in which the individual governs. This individual is defined on the one hand by freedoms secured by the state, and on the other, by liberties secured by markets that are also secured by the state. But what is, or what was, this state?
The Tesla System: General Motors, Again?
“What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” 1 As well as anything could, this paraphrase of a corporate dictum describes the governing ethos of the decades immediately following the midcentury world war — decades that arguably represent the central referent of the slogan “Make America Great Again.” Translated, this slogan reads: “Return America to the Age of the Interstates.” To better understand the tributaries that flow from past to present (and now, back) along this route, we need to pay attention to the adverb: again. Because when revisited, the historical road does not necessarily lead where it once did.
The General Motors pavilion designed by Norman Bel Geddes for the 1939 World’s Fair in New York and its centerpiece, the Futurama exhibit, anticipated a system of highways spanning the continent — a monument to the partnership between business and government established during the early New Deal. Visitors could survey an animated model sprawling over 35,000 square feet that showed a landscape both preserved and transformed by highways and interchanges, with vehicles sorted by speed driving to and from the “City of 1960,” and a patchwork of farms, villages, and towns in between. The message of Futurama was simple: the federal government would build the roads, and General Motors would supply the automobiles and the corresponding way of life.
Today, the scene replays. Another automobile company, Tesla Motors, seeks with government support to repopulate those highways with electric vehicles marketed as existentially distinct from GM’s fossil-fueled albatrosses. Laden with postmodern irony, the design of Tesla’s cars resembles the sleek and streamlined look of the machines projected by Geddes in Futurama, which is no surprise given the diffuse influence of streamlined styling in product design since the style’s heyday in the 1930s. The corresponding dictum is likewise repurposed. What’s good for Tesla is good for the country.
