Teal Arcadi is an author and expert on the history of American government. He holds a PhD in American History from Princeton University. His academic and organizing work focuses on issues of participatory democracy, economic power, and provision of equitable public goods. 

 

Arcadi's book, Concrete Leviathan: The Interstate Highway System and State Building in Modern America, is forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press. His peer-reviewed research has appeared in journals including Law and History Review, Modern American History, and Reviews in American History. 

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Concrete Leviathan tells the story of the most expensive and expansive public works project in American history: the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. Despite the ubiquity of this vast grey artifact of American government, few have probed its history to reckon with what it tells us about American democracy. As Arcadi shows, it is a powerful manifestation of the ongoing democratic challenge of provisioning society with infrastructure systems whose benefits and burdens land equitably across the nation’s communities.

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The interstate highway system sprang from the imaginations of a small group of federal administrators in the 1930s and soon spread across the national landscape. It came with promises of national prosperity driven by highway-borne connectivity. But the rising tide of concrete buried as many communities as it lifted. In 1956, Congress gave officials an unchecked funding stream and vast authority to build where and how they pleased. Construction required destruction, especially in poor and non-white areas bulldozed to make way for high-speed traffic. Over the next 50-plus years, community efforts to fight back—in the nation’s streets and courtrooms—were blocked at nearly every turn. Even the reform-rich areas of civil rights law and administrative law proved insufficient to affirmatively structure community input in the work of state building—and unable to produce infrastructural justice in the built environment.

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But the story does not end there. Concrete Leviathan reveals how the federal government constructed an infrastructure of endurance and domination. Yet as the highway system etched official priorities into the national landscape, the result was a tangible expression of deep fault lines running through the foundations of American democracy. As the pavement—and the law—hardened, citizens imagined alternate processes of government and infrastructural development. By the early decades of the twenty-first century, the interstate highway system began to prompt new models for community participation in the work of state building. Bringing together the history of the nation’s largest public works project and the democratic theorization it continues to inspire, Arcadi supplies a roadmap for enhancing the democratic capacity of national government—and its ability to produce truly equitable public goods.