Suggested Research Topics - Highway Hype: Advocacy of The Lincoln Highway Association
In 1913, automobile industrialists, including Roy Chapin and Henry Joy of Detroit, and Carl G. Fisher of Indianapolis, established the Lincoln Highway Association in order to organize their promotion for the first transcontinental highway, from New York City to San Francisco. Chapin, later founder of the Hudson Motor Car Company, and Joy, president of the Packard Motor Car Company, recognized that the fortune of their automobile concerns rested largely on the condition of roadways. While their campaign for roads had been preceded by considerable local success by others in improving road conditions--through the so-called Good Roads Movement--Chapin, Joy, and Fisher initiated a much more ambitious plan to secure commitment to one national road system, with support by state and federal government as well as industrialists. Their challenge was especially formidable in the first years of their Lincoln Highway Association, a formative and uncertain period for the establishment of new government agencies charged with road improvements.
The lobbying strategies for capturing the attention and support of their fellow industrialists as well as public officials are embedded within the papers of Chapin and Joy, which are housed at the Bentley Historical Library. Their speeches, correspondence, and scrapbooks of road tests and journeys are primary evidence of their personal ambitions and responses to the challenge of reluctance and criticism. A study of their papers could address the complaint of historian George May, who laments in A Most Unique Machine: The Michigan Origins of the American Automobile Industry that there are only a few biographical studies of the very dynamic pioneers in the automobile industry. Within the Chapin and Joy papers lie answers to questions about the influence of industrialists in the creation of a nationalized highway system for motorized transportation. The success of their efforts helped stimulate the growth of automobile manufacturing, which became the nation's largest industry by 1925. The deliberations of the association as a whole are well represented in the Lincoln Highway Association collection at the University of Michigan Engineering-Transportation Library.
Examples of Primary Source Collections and Other Resources:
- Roy D. Chapin collection. See unpublished finding aid listing headings of each folder, with a partial calendar.
- Henry B. Joy collection. See unpublished finding aid listing headings of each folder.
- The Lincoln Highway Collection at Special Collections, Harlan Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan.
In an effort to encourage creative thinking about possible research topics for students unfamiliar with archives and their inevitable complexities, archivists and student employees of the Bentley Historical Library have authored "suggested research topics ." The purpose of these is not to define a topic but rather to stimulate thinking about a topic where the holdings of the Bentley Library are particularly strong.