Pewee Ob ONG UT ee ToleN 31 
fication including removal of billboards, has been bitterly opposed by the 
highway interests and almost always defeated. 
“Highway interests’ of course include state highway officials as well 
as most state, county and city politicians. Since 90 per cent of Interstate 
highway construction money comes from this fund, the smell of pork is 
too powerful for all but a few to resist. “I don’t know who the highway 
lobby could be except the 205 million Americans who want to travel more 
efficiently than they do today,” said John A. Volpe, President Nixon’s 
Secretary of Transportation in March 1969. Mrs. Leavitt tells who the 
“highway lobby” is, naming the American Automobile Association, the 
American Association of State Highway Officials, Associated General Con- 
tractors, Automobile Manufacturers Association, American Road Builders 
Association, Automotive Safety Foundation, American Trucking Associa- 
tions, Highway Research Board and National Highway Users Conference, 
along with innumerable associations of oil, steel, cement, asphalt and con- 
struction equipment manufacturers, and societies of engineers. Incidentally 
but not unimportantly, Volpe was formerly president of Associated General 
Contractors. 
Mrs. Leavitt goes further and points out connections lobbyists have 
with Senators and Congressmen in key positions that relate to highway 
legislation. One example: Jennings Randolph of West Virginia, Senate 
Public Works Committee Chairman, for ten years treasurer of the American 
Road Builders Association and while sitting in the Senate an honorary 
member, was introduced at a convention of the A.R.B.A. as “not only our 
friend; he is one of us.” Between 1966 and 1968, the Truck Operators Non 
Partisan Committee, an arm of the American Trucking Associations, do- 
nated (as campaign contributions, assuredly) $40,000 to “friendly Congress- 
men.” In this hand-out, popular Illinois legislators were not left out: $3,000 
went to John C. Kluczynski, roads sub-committee chairman of the House 
Public Works Committee; the late Everett M. Dirksen, Senate Public Works 
Committee member, received $1,000. 
— R. M. Barron 
WILDFLOWERS OF NORTH AMERICA 
By Robert S. Lemmon and Charles C. Johnson 
Hanover House, Garden City, N. Y. 280 pages. $9.95. 
This beautiful book shows—in full color on heavy glossy paper—over 
400 wildflowers of North America in their unspoiled natural habitat and at 
the peak of their charm. It represents a bird’s-eye-view of the favorite 400 
of the more than 20,000 kinds of wildflowers in America north of Mexico, 
distributed over six million square miles. 
But it began with Charles Johnson in the back-country of his native 
New Hampshire. His first few dozen transparencies so faithfully reflected 
the spirit of the forests and hills and wetlands that a continent-wide scale 
of photography was planned. This elegant volume (easy to hold—9% inches 
x 614) takes you cross-country to the wildflowers of the woods, the prairies, 
the mountains, the deserts, and the coasts. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson covered 
more than 200,000 miles to obtain the full-color plates in this volume. Of 
all my flowers books, from the big tonnage ones to the field guides, this is 
the most beautiful. And it has an intriguing text by Robert Lemmon. 
— Betty Croth 
