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Martin T. Olliff recounts the history of the Good Roads Movement that arose in progressive-era Alabama, how it used the power of the state to achieve its objectives of improving market roads for farmers and highways for automobilists, and how state and federal highway administrations replaced the Good Roads Movement.Getting Out of the Mud: The Alabama Good Roads Movement and Highway Administration, 1898-1928 explores the history of the Good Roads Movement and investigates the nature of early twentieth-century progressivism in the state. Martin T. Olliff reveals how middle-class reformers secured political, economic, and social power not only by fighting against corporate domination and labor recalcitrance but also by proposing alternative projects like road improvement and identifying the interests of the rising middle class as being the most important to public interest.