This is a PDF of the stenographer’s transcript of the hearings held on October 7 and 8, 1954, by the President’s Advisory Committee on a National Highway Program. (The panel was often referred to as the “Clay Committee” for its chairman, General Lucius Clay.) The committee was set up to provide President Eisenhower with a plan to finance the proposed Interstate Highway System.

This is a large file (299 pages, 60 MB). (In order to make it that small, we had to optimize the PDF so that you must have Acrobat Reader 10.0 or later installed on your computer in order to view it.)

Many stakeholder groups testified at the hearings, the transcripts of which were never published and have never before been available on the Internet. (The Eno Center copied them from the Clay Committee files in the Eisenhower Presidential Library in July 2016.) If you don’t want to read the whole thing, committee staff director Frank Turner’s confidential 16-page summary of the issues raised at the hearings can be read here.

Groups testifying, in order (with the appropriate page of the PDF file – not the page numbers from the hard copy), were:

October 7

Automobile Manufacturers Association (p. 7)

The National Grange (p. 13)

American Farm Bureau Federation (p. 27)

U.S. Chamber of Commerce (p. 42)

Independent Advisory Council to the Trucking Industry (p. 46)

U.S. Conference of Mayors (delivering a statement authored by Robert Moses) (p. 50)

American Road Builders’ Association (p. 55)

National Parking Association (p. 67)

Automotive Safety Foundation (p. 73)

National Association of County Officials (p. 80)

October 8

American Automobile Association (p. 89)

National Association of Township Officials (p. 94)

Associated General Contractors of America (p. 102)

American Trucking Associations (p. 117)

National Association of Motor Bus Operators (p. 132)

American Petroleum Institute (p. 150)

American Association of State Highway Officials (p. 170)

Association of American Railroads (p. 185)

Private Truck Council of America (p. 236)

American Municipal Association (p. 249)

Truck-Trailer Manufacturers Association (p. 276)

American Toll Ways Authority (p. 295)