Route 66 was America’s ‘Mother Road’ and ‘Main Street’

How Route 66 came to be known as America’s “Mother Road” is an interesting story.

American novelist John Steinbeck (1902-68) wrote about Route 66 and used the term “Mother Road” in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Grapes of Wrath,” published in 1939.

 

The story describes the effects of the severe drought that struck the Midwest in the 1930s –the infamous “Dust Bowl.”

Travel writer Austin Whittall commented: “Strong winds provoked vast dust storms known as ‘black blizzards’…that blanketed the prairies of Canada and the United States.

 

“More than 100 million acres of once verdant farmland were ruined,” Whittall said. “Farmers lost their crops and cattle. Facing famine, and unable to pay back their bank loans, they defaulted on their mortgages. The farmers lost everything. Move on and find work, or starve.”

“An estimated 210,000 people took to the road and headed west, seeking jobs in California,” he said.

“However, the Great Depression that began with the ‘Black Tuesday’ stock market crash in October 1929 had shattered the economy,” Whittall said.

Still, the farm families from The Plains were determined to move west on a wing and a prayer.

 

Steinbeck wrote: “Highway 66 is the main migrant road…the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map, from the Mississippi to Bakersfield – over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the Divide and down into the bright and terrible desert, and across the desert to the mountains again, and into the rich California valleys.”

“66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and…from the desert’s slow northward invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there.”

“From all of these, the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads, from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.”

Whittall said that for countless families, the journey was pure misery: “Thousands of cars, wrecks along the highway, lack of money, food, no spares, old jalopies, threadbare tires, strained engines, thirst, despair….”

 

(Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” was an instant literary success, and a movie directed by John Ford was shot in 1940, starring actor Henry Fonda.)

 

On the more positive side, one of the chief promoters of Route 66 was Cyrus Avery. He was instrumental in plotting and planning Route 66 from Chicago to dip south and run through St. Louis, Mo.

Avery rationalized: “Like the pioneer days, when they outfitted at St. Louis for all points in the West and Southwest, so today people traveling by auto find themselves coming to St. Louis over the various U.S. roads, and when arriving in St. Louis, by consulting their map, find U.S. 66 is the most direct road to the Pacific coast and likewise to all points in the great Southwest.”

“I challenge anyone to show a road of equal length that traverses more scenery, more agricultural wealth and more mineral wealth than does U.S. 66,” he said.

Avery labeled Route 66 as “America’s Main Street,” and the highway has been memorialized in popular songs and with a television drama series.

 

Two popular movies are also associated closely with Route 66. One is “Easy Rider” (1969), a “landmark counterculture film” featuring Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Terry Southern and Jack Nicholson. 

The other is “Thelma & Louise” (1991), starring Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon. Their “girls’ road trip” into the American Southwest goes from bad to worse.