February 19, 2015

This week’s ETW Document of the Week is a letter sent from Rex Whitton, the head of the American Association of State Highway Officials, to the chairman of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, Harry F. Byrd, and other Senators in May 1956 expressing the candid views of the state DOTs on the Interstate Highway Act that had just been passed by the House of Representatives.

The first three pages of the PDF file are the letter itself, and the last page is a photograph of a large (two feet by two feet) chart of cumulative financing and several other trends prepared by AASHO on which Congress relied when putting together the bill. (It was too large to fit on the document scanner at the National Archives.)