History books have long said that Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the President of the United States during and three years after the First World War, was a huge fan of the automobile. “No more ardent motorist ever occupied the White House than President Wilson,” wrote L. Ames Brown in the September 1916 edition of Northwestern Motorist. 1916 was the year when President Wilson signed the Federal Aid Road Act, the law which saw national money starting to pave America.
What’s far less well known is that Wilson was an ardent cycle tourist, who spent long vacations cycling around Britain, one time in the company of America’s most experienced State Department official, a Washington D.C. insider who spent sixty days a year cycle touring in Europe.
It’s highly probable that Wilson’s interests in good roads started when he was a cyclist, during his earlier career as a law and politics professor at Princeton University.
Wilson spent many vacations cycle touring in northern England, including the Lake District. (His mother was born in Carlisle, north of the Lakes). England’s rural roads of the late 1890s, especially the main ones, were mostly covered in tightly-compacted small stones – the macadam system – and, by and large, were far superior to the roads Wilson would have been used to in America. His cycle tours in Europe would have impressed on him the need for better roads, the clamour for which was led by the Cyclists’ Touring Club in Britain and the League of American Wheelmen in the US. LAW’s ‘Good Roads’ movement – a movement later commandeered by motorists who claimed it as their own – was modelled on the Roads Improvement Association, founded by the Cyclists’ Touring Club and the National Cyclists’ Union in 1886.
Lobbying by cyclists in the 1890s saw many improvements made to roads, although on neither side of the Atlantic was there national administration for roads. Roads were deemed to be of local concern only, something cyclists worked hard to change, long before motorists came on the scene.
Wilson was an avowed advocate for good roads. He wrote the Democratic party’s policy on Good Roads for the 1916 presidential election campaign: “The happiness, comfort and prosperity of rural life, and the development of the city, are alike conserved by the construction of public highways. We, therefore, favor national aid in the construction of post roads and roads for military purposes.” This had been the campaigning and well-funded platform of American cyclists since the early 1890s.
In fact, Wilson didn’t ride his bicycle on the streets of Washington, much for the same reason British Prime Minister David Cameron is no longer allowed to ride his bicycle in London: security reasons.
But let’s go back to that news clipping. Not all Washington high-ups gave up on cycling prior to World War One.
Alvey Augustus Adee was one of America’s longest-serving officials. He was acting Secretary of State in 1898 during the Spanish-American War (President McKinley said privately that it had been ‘Adee’s War’) and he served in the State Department for 47 years, under 22 Secretaries of State.
Adee was known for his annual summer bicycling trips through Europe. On a cycle tour of England and Scotland in 1895 he met Woodrow Wilson, then a mere professor, and the two cycled together for some days.
Adee was one of the last Government officials who eschewed motor cars, preferring his “trusty bicycle” right up until the start of the First World War. No doubt he was seen as rather eccentric to continue cycling when all other officials were ferried in motor cars. But he was part of the old guard, the long-in-the-tooth cyclists who remembered the glory days of cycling in the mid-1890s. Back then the League of American Wheelmen was a highly influential organisation. It was non-partisan, bestowing its favours on whichever politicians would promise to support its Good Roads campaign.
In the 1896 Presidential election campaign, the League of American Wheelmen was the only organisation to have its own room in the campaign HQ of the Republican party.
The League of American Wheelmen never got that Presidential medal and, despite having a US President who was familiar with cycling, the role of cycling in campaigning for Good Roads was soon covered by the sands of time.