Halls of History — What have you done to beautify the world?

What have you done to beautify the world?

On this day in 1965 — I was just ten years old and living in Brigham City, Utah — President Lyndon Johnson signed the Highway Beautification Act. I didn't pay much attention to it at that time because ten-year-olds don't do a lot of driving on the highways.

The purpose of the act was to restrict outdoor advertising, specifically billboards, and to encourage America to clean up, meaning to get rid of all the junkyards and automobile dumps that were growing along the highway. Those I do remember!

As President Johnson said at the signing ceremony:

"Beauty belongs to all the people. And so long as I am President, what has been divinely given to nature will not be taken recklessly away by man."

Highway and city beautification was actually a pet project of the President Johnson's wife, Lady Bird Johnson, who left her legacy throughout the state of Texas with her many years of devotion to cleaning up America and planting flowers and trees to at least hide the visual blight that was necessary. Her thinking was that beauty would have a positive effect on everything else. In her diary, released after her death, she said,

"The subject of Beautification is like a tangled skein of wool. 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."

Although urban activitists supported Mrs. Johnson's efforts, Republicans, businesses, the Outdoor Advertising Association, and many lobbyists for them, succeeded in watering down the Act, and companies that owned billboards were well-compensated for removing them. Enforcement was also lax, but the results of the Act can still be seen today. Its premise, that nature of all sizes is worth preserving, still holds sway today.

I still see a lot of billboards and outdoor advertising, but I can't remember the last time I saw any sort of junkyard along the freeway. What have you done to beautify the world?

For other chapters in this series, see Halls of History.

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