The Highway Beautification Act was actually a project of the first lady, Lady Bird Johnson. Beauty, she believed, had real social utility: Cleaning up city parks, getting rid of ugly advertisements, planting flowers and screening junkyards from view, she thought, would make the nation a better place not only to look at but to live.
“The subject of Beautification is like a tangled skein of wool,” she wrote in her diary. “All the threads are interwoven—recreation and pollution and mental health and the crime rate and rapid transit and highway beautification and the war on poverty and parks … everything leads to something else.”
Many urban activists, along with a number of other people who were beginning to think seriously about the consequences of the nation’s poor environmental stewardship, supported Mrs. Johnson’s efforts.
Business groups, polluters and advertisers, on the other hand, were not so thrilled. Lobbyists for the Outdoor Advertising Association of America and their Republican allies managed to water down the highway-beautification bill significantly. Companies that had to take down their billboards were compensated handsomely by the government.
Still, Johnson’s bill was important: It declared that nature, even just the strips of nature along the country’s roadsides, was fragile and worth preserving, an idea that still holds great power today.
