Highroads and skyroads: mountain roadbuilding in U.S. government films of the 1920s and ‘30s

ABSTRACT In the 1920s and ‘30s, the U.S. federal government produced many educational films about national parks and national forests. These films were widely shown in nontheatrical venues such as schools, as well as in commercial movie theaters as shorts before the main feature film. Neglected for decades, these films are of interest now, in the age of global warming, for the way they represent ideas about nature and conservation from a century ago. Significantly, as much as these films depict natural scenery, they also focus on cars, roads, and roadbuilding. This essay focuses on three government films depicting mountains in the interwar years, the first era of roadbuilding in the national parks and forests. These films reveal the state’s role in promoting fossil capitalism and settler colonialism, constructing what was then a new and contradictory idea of ‘wilderness’ in modernity.