In the first in-depth study of the good roads movement in Alabama, Martin T. Olliff situates the state within regional and national contests over road building and state building alike. While other historians have acknowledged the contributions of prominent Alabamians like Senator John Hollis Bankhead, publisher Asa Rountree, and writer and clubwoman Alma Rittenberry to the movement nationally, Olliff uses them and other homegrown good roads activists to put the state at the center of Progressive Era debates over the shift from local road construction to state and federal administration of long-distance highways. More reform minded than reactionary when it came to the state's anemic economy and abysmal transportation options, Alabama good roads supporters banded together to pull the state out of the mud and into the new century.

Although Alabama adapted itself to a national movement, Olliff argues that the state's road-building campaign was unique because it was controlled by ordinary citizens rather than the wealthy industrialists who lobbied for highway funding in other states. Alabama's road activists included cash-strapped rural Alabamians who opposed new road taxes yet supported state and federal funding for modern roads and highway networks as well as elite “nationalizers” (7) like Senator Bankhead, who were instrumental in helping to secure state and federal aid. But while Olliff acknowledges the roles of diverse constituencies in the good roads movement statewide, he emphasizes the influence of the middle-class white reformers he identifies as its progressive leaders. He bases his assessment on an evaluation of the Alabama Good Roads Association (AGRA), whose members were younger and more solidly middle class than those in good roads clubs in many other states.

This distinction between Alabama reformers and the wealthy industrialists who dominated many good roads clubs and named highway projects elsewhere is the basis of Olliff's main argument, which is that a genuinely progressive reform impulse, not profit-driven boosterism, fueled the good roads movement in Alabama. This distinction primarily challenges one important study of progressive road building, Howard Preston's Dirt Roads to Dixie, but it adds much to what we already know about how ordinary citizens in the Deep South supported a vitally important national campaign to plan and fund modern roads and highways, even though they did not always agree with one another on what the movement's priorities should be.Footnote ¹ In rural states like Alabama, the high cost of bad roads inspired a more ambitious highway agenda than one might assume. The state was among the first in the nation to establish a highway commission in 1911, and both AGRA members and state officials supported expanded powers and aggressive funding for the highway commission even before the first Federal Aid Road Act of 1916 provided them with matching funds. A decade later, when most southern states relied only on gasoline taxes to fund state highway projects, Alabama voters overwhelmingly approved $25 million in highway bonds. Olliff's analysis of the bond referendums in 1920 and 1922, outlined in Chapter Four, shows how Alabamians embraced the progressive argument in favor of big spending and big highways and undercuts pervasive beliefs about southerners' conservative attitudes toward state and federal intervention.

Important distinctions set the Alabama movement apart from campaigns in other states, but as Olliff concedes, the state's good roads movement differed very little overall. The story of the good roads movement in Alabama will be familiar to scholars who are familiar with the trajectory of the movement nationally. As it was nearly everywhere else, the movement enjoyed broad-based civic support, despite some divisions; made the transition from local to state and federal aid in a relatively short time span between the 1910s and 1920s; and grappled with occasional public backlash against spending, especially when it involved state highway bureaucrats, whose ballooning budgets and seemingly slow progress by the mid-1920s frustrated ordinary citizens who were impatient for an efficient, automobile-based transportation system.

Getting Out of the Mud does not blaze new historiographical trails, but it expands our understanding of the limitations of the mainstream progressive movement, especially in the Deep South. Olliff's emphasis on middle-class white progressives is fairly conventional, as is his argument that southern progressivism “moved slower [and] achieved less” (9) than progressivism in other regions. However, these arguments underscore the fact that the spaces where the good roads movement played out, from good roads clubs to the ballot box, were reserved for white men. This helps to explain the popularity of the good roads movement nationally but especially in the Deep South. As Olliff explains, disfranchisement of African Americans following the collapse of the biracial populist coalition of the 1890s made state politics in Alabama “racially and politically safe” (9) and political leaders more receptive to incremental reforms that might otherwise have seemed threatening to the political status quo. The good roads movement introduced white southerners to new taxes and larger bureaucracies, but neither undermined Jim Crow state making. In fact, as historians from C. Vann Woodward to Alex Lichtenstein have argued, progressivism shored up white supremacy in the South. Olliff's analysis bears this out, but he could have pushed this argument even further by addressing the ways in which “reform” measures that expanded the use of convict labor served both the good roads movement and the racial imperatives of Progressive Era Alabama politics.

Olliff's accessible writing and careful organization make Getting Out of the Mud one of the most readable books about Progressive Era highway politics. He skillfully traces the ways in which politicians, middle-class reformers, and ordinary citizens in Alabama marshaled limited resources in support of a very ambitious and expensive reform agenda and pressed state and federal agencies to centralize control over road building and develop networks of long-distance roads and highways. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the good roads movement in the South and a timely lesson in the frustrations and the triumphs of political coalition building.