BULLETIN No. 5

 ADDRESS

 BY HONORABLE FRANKLIN K. LANE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR

 AT

 CONFERENCE OF REGIONAL CHAIRMEN OF THE HIGHWAYS TRANSPORT COMMITTEE COUNCIL OF NATIONAL DEFENSE

 WASHINGTON, D. C. SEPTEMBER 17, 1918

 [Illustration]

 RESOLUTION PASSED BY THE COUNCIL OF NATIONAL DEFENSE

 "_The Council of National Defense approves the widest possible use of the motor truck as a transportation agency, and requests the State Councils of Defense and other State authorities to take all necessary steps to facilitate such means of transportation, removing any regulations that tend to restrict and discourage such use. _"

 WASHINGTON GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 1919

 [Illustration: MAP SHOWING REGIONAL AREAS Highways Transport Committee Council of National Defense]

_Recognizing the national value of our highways in relation to, andproperly coordinated with, other existing transportation mediums, andmore particularly the necessity for their immediate development thatthey might carry their share of the war burden, the Highways TransportCommittee was appointed by, and forms a part of, the Council ofNational Defense. _

_The object of the committee is to increase and render more effectiveall transportation over the highways as one of the means ofstrengthening the Nation's transportation system and relieving therailroads of part of the heavy short-haul freight traffic burden. _

_National policies are directed from the headquarters of the nationalcommittee in Washington to the highways transport committees of theseveral State Councils of Defense. These State organizations, which byproper subdivisions reach down through the counties to thecommunities, are grouped together into 11 regional areas, as shown bythe map used above. The State committees of the different areas areassisted by and are under the direct supervision of the 11 regionalchairmen of the Highways Transport Committee, Council of NationalDefense. _

 COUNCIL OF NATIONAL DEFENSE. 

 HIGHWAYS TRANSPORT COMMITTEE. 

 WASHINGTON, D. C. 

 ADDRESS BY HON. FRANKLIN K. LANE, SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR, BEFORE THE CONFERENCE OF REGIONAL CHAIRMEN OF THE HIGHWAYS TRANSPORT COMMITTEE, SEPTEMBER 17, 1918. 

I did not come to-day with the idea of bringing you anything new. Onthe contrary, I have come here to get the inspiration whichassociation with those from the outside gives. There is no hope forthis place unless we can keep in contact with the remainder of theUnited States. In isolation we think in a vacuum, and it is only whenwe know what you are thinking of on the outside that we get theimpulse which leads to construction. I think I can say out of myknowledge of 12 years of administrative work in this city, that wehave to look abroad, go up on the tops of the hills and see the greatvalleys of our country, before we know really what our policies shouldbe. When we live alone or live in isolation and try to deal withthings abstractly or theoretically we make mistakes. 

The problem that you deal with is one that I have never had anycontact with, but I know this from my knowledge of history; that youcan judge the civilization of a nation, of a people, of a continent, or of any part of a nation, by the character of its highways. If youwill think over that proposition you will realize that what I havesaid is true, that those parts of this Nation are most backward, wherepeople live most alone, where they develop those diseases of the mindwhich come from living alone, where they develop supreme discontentwith what is done at Washington or what is done in their own Statelegislatures, where they are unhappy and discontented, and movementsthat make against the welfare of our country arise, are those partswhere there are poor highways and consequently a lack of communicationbetween the people. 

Our eyes are all turned at this time to the other side of the water. Isuppose that there has never been a month in the history of the UnitedStates when so many people were so anxious to see the morning paper orthe evening paper as during the past month. There never has been atime when we have been so thrilled to the very core of our beings. Achievements that those boys over there have made are things that willlive in our memories. 

And why has it been possible for France to carry on for four years asuccessful war against the greatest military power that the world hasever seen? Because France had the benefit of the engineering skilland of the foresight of two men who are 1, 800 years apart--Napoleonand Caesar. Those men built the roads of France. Without those roads, conceived and built originally by Caesar for the conquest of the Gaulsand for the conquest of the Teutons, without the roads built byNapoleon to stand off the enemies of France and to make aggressions tothe eastward, Paris would have fallen at least two years ago. So thatyou gentlemen who are engaged in the business of developing thehighways of the country and putting them to greater use may properlyconceive of yourselves as engaged in a very farsighted, important bitof statemanship, work that does not have its only concern as to thefarmer of this country or the helping of freight movement during thiswinter alone, but may have consequences that will extend throughoutthe centuries. Take the instance of Verdun. Verdun would have fallenunquestionably if it had not been for the roads that Napoleonconstructed and that France has maintained; for all the credit is notto go to the man who conceived and the man who constructed. This isone thing where we have been short always. One thing that the peopleof the United States do not realize. It is not sufficient to pay$25, 000 a mile for a concrete foundation, but you must put aside 10cents out of every dollar for the maintenance of these roads or yourmoney has gone to waste and your conception is idle. And you gentlemenknow, if you continue, as I hope you will, after the war, you willhave not merely a function in the securing of the building of goodroads, but will have a very great function in the maintaining of theseroads as actual arteries in the system of transportation of thecountry. You remember that at Verdun the railroad was cut off, andVerdun was supported by the fact that she had trucks which could go 40feet apart all night long over the great highway that had been builtfrom Paris to the east. 

Now I saw my first national service in connection with the InterstateCommerce Commission and I was much impressed by the theory that therailroad men had, which was a very natural theory, arising out oftheir own experience and out of the fact that there was a new force inthe world with which they were playing. Their conception was that thehighway was a mere means of getting from the farm to the railroad;that the waterway was a mere means of carrying off the surplus watersfrom the hills to the oceans. The statement has often been made to methat there would never be an occasion when it would be necessary orpossible to put into competition with the railroads the waterways ofthis country; that it would cost more to use those waterways or to usehighways than it would to do the same transportation work by railroad. And they had obtained figures to show that under conditions ofunlimited competition the Illinois Central, for instance, parallelingthe Mississippi River, could do business at a cheaper rate than itcould be transported by water, considering the cost of bringing it tothe water station and unloading it at the other end. Now, as Mr. Chapin has said, a larger conception has come into the Americanmind--the conception of the utilization of all our resources. Whilethe railroad has a great burden cast upon it; while it is the strongright arm in this work, still we must remember that the strong rightarm must have fingers, and that there should be in a complete physicalsystem a good left arm. 

The highways that you are interested in are more than interesting tome for another reason. 

I have thought of the men who will come back after the war. Everynation has had a problem to deal with the returning soldier. If youread Ferraro's history of Rome, you will find that one of the chiefreasons why the republic of Rome went out of existence and the empireof Rome came into existence was because of the returned soldiers. Theylooked to their general to take care of them on their return, andtheir general found that the way to take care of them was to givethem, as they said in those days, "bread and circuses, " and so theyreached over into Egypt, got the great wheat supply of that country, and provided the great circuses that are historical for the amusementof those people. 

The Emperor of Germany 10 years ago was asked why he was unwilling toagree to a demobilization of his forces or to a reduction of his armyand he said because it would demoralize the industries of Germany. They could not reabsorb so many men without reducing wages andthrowing upon the country so many unemployed that it would makeagainst the welfare of the land. We will have that problem to dealwith. 

The firm, strong position taken by the President in his note publishedyesterday indicates that he is ready to fight this thing out to afinish and that he will show to those on the other side that Americahas a determination to win, and that it is not a determination thatfades quickly. If the Emperor of Germany has ever had a good look at aphotograph of Woodrow Wilson, he has seen a prolongation of a chinthat must have confirmed him in the belief that America does not takeup a fight unless it puts it through; and we are to reach a militarydetermination by whipping them until they say they have had enough. 

Now, when this thing is over, our men will begin to come back into theUnited States. But not all at once. We won't have three or fourmillion men to deal with in a single month. We will have them slowlyreturning to us through a year or a year and a half. As those men comefiltering in through our ports we ought to be able to meet every manat every port with the statement that he does not have to lie idle onesingle day. We ought to be able to say to the man, "Here is somethingthat you can do at once. If your old position is not vacant, if youcan not go home to the old place and take up the work that you werein, then the Government of the United States, in its wisdom, hasprovided something which you can do at wages upon which you can livewell. "

And what should that be? The greatest problem that any country has, tomy mind, is its own self-support. We have come to be independent inour resources, to be strong, and be respected. So long as we areindustrially dependent, agriculturally dependent, somebody has a leverthat he can use in a time of crisis, as against this nation. Longyears ago we were the greatest of all agricultural people, and ThomasJefferson wanted us to remain in that position. He thought that thesafety and security of the United States lay in the fact that we wouldlive on farms. When De Toquevile came over here in 1830 he said thereason democracy was a success in this country was because we were allpractically living on farms, living on what we raised ourselves, andstanding equally. 

To-day the tendency is away from the farm toward the city, towardindustrial life, toward aggregations of people, away from the smalltown to the larger town, and from the larger town to the metropolis. People are being drawn from the farms, so that one-half of the arableland this side of the Mississippi is unused to-day; so that betweenhere and New Orleans there are 40, 000, 000 acres of land privatelyowned and unused; so that in the great Northwest, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, etc. , there are 100, 000, 000 acres of cut-over lands thatare practically unused; and we have a new nation practically in theundrained lands of our rivers and our bays and inlets, lands that areas rich as any that lie out of doors, as rich as the valley of theNile or of the Euphrates. In the far western country, there are atleast 15, 000, 000 acres of land that we can put under water. Underwater, that land produces more than one crop a year, and that anexceptionally rich crop. 

We have been extending ourselves because of war in a great manydifferent directions. The Government has taken to itself unprecedentedand unthought-of powers because of the necessities of our condition. Isay that to meet the problem of the returned soldier we ought to takeadvantage of this opportunity to do the work now that must eventuallybe done and reclaim these arid lands of the West. Turn the waters ofthe Colorado over the desert of Arizona, store those waters in theGrand River and in the Green River, and let them flow down at theright times on that desert so as to raise cotton and cantaloupes andalfalfa. Then come east and take the stumps from these cut-over lands. Do it not as a private enterprise, because that is a slow, slowprocess. Men are discouraged and disheartened when they look at theproblem of pulling an Oregon fir stump out of the ground. It reallyrequires large capital. Then come farther east and take these landsthat are swamp, that need draining, and build ditches and dikes andput these lands into the service of America. This is what I call themaking of the nation. 

That land should tie up with all other land. Means of communicationshould be a part of that general scheme. We should have as good roadsbetween the little farms in Mississippi or in South Carolina or inNorthern Minnesota as we have in Maryland or in California. There is awork--the work that I have in mind, and for which Congress has made asmall and tentative appropriation--the work of surveying this countryand seeing how many of this Nation's land resources have not beenmobilized and how best they can be used for providing homes for thesemen who come back, as well as adding to the wealth of the world. Thereis a work that ties up directly with your work, because I want to havesmall communities in which men have small acreages of land, not tospeculate with but to cultivate; and these acreages are to center insmall communities where men can talk together and profit by their ownmistakes and their own successes and where those small communitieswill be tied up with all neighboring communities, so that there willbe easy access between all parts of the country. Good roads and arural express must be had. If you can help the Government in buildinggood roads for little money or show how a rural express can be mostprofitably developed, you will be helping in the making of a newAmerica. 

And I can conceive of a United States that will be as rich per acre asFrance; in which the people will be divided into small communities, industrial communities as well as agricultural; for every one ofthese little places ought to have its own creamery, its own cannery. The farmer is the poorest man in the world to develop any kind ofcooperative scheme. He needs assistance and is always hampered by thelack of capital. But now is our chance to see what can be done; toshow it in the building of ideal communities, communities that havegood houses, that have good sanitation, that are on good land wherethere is somebody who can direct them as to what should be planted andwhat should be avoided, communities which may be connected up with theworld by highways, by developing rivers, and by railroads. 

Now, I think if there is one great fault that industrially we havebeen guilty of in the United States, it has been the effort to developquantity at the expense of quality. We have been a wholesale Nation. We have had a continent that was rich beyond any precedent. We did notknow what any acre of our land might produce. A man might go on it outin Oregon and think it was a fir land, think it was good for nothingbut timber, and find first that it was the richest kind of dairyingland, and find next that it contained a gold mine or a chrome mine. Wehave never known, and we do not know yet, what the riches of theUnited States are, and we won't know until we have put study andthought and money into the problem of making this country what it canbe by the application of thought, energy and investment. 

The United States is not going to be after the war as it has been. That is a thing that you sober men of business are already thinkingabout. We are never going to return to the idea that was. The man thatcomes back from this war will be treated by us with distinguishedconsideration, because he has taken a risk that we have not taken;that we have not had the opportunity to take, I am sorry to say. Butthat man is going to insist upon larger opportunity for himself, andthe largest opportunity that he wants is an opportunity to makehimself independent, and he is going to have a conception of a socialAmerica that we have not had. This war is a leveling force. When weadopted the draft, under the leadership of that man over there(Senator Chamberlain), we did a thing that was of the deepest and mostfar-reaching consequence. We did a thing that put the millionaire'sboy and the lawyer's boy and the Cabinet official's boy alongside ofthe bootblack and the farmer and the street-car driver. It was themost essentially democratic thing that this country has ever done, andthe spirit of the draft is going to continue after this war. Thoseboys are always going to look upon each other as brothers in arms, sympathetic toward each other. 

Yesterday Mrs. Lane established a little hospital for convalescentsoldiers, and as she was gathering up the 10 men she was taking intothe hospital, one of the men from out West said: "Won't you take mychum? We left Colorado and went out to California together and took upa piece of land. When the war came on we went into the war together, and we fought together in France, and when we were making the chargetogether I saw him fall, struck by a bullet. I ran to pick him up andI got mine. " Now, those two fellows are going to be tied together forlife, and that is the relationship that will exist between all thosemen. 

We men who are in politics to-day have seen our day. They are going totake charge of the politics of the United States. They are going totake charge of the social problems. They are going to insist uponindustrial as well as social equality. We know that this does notnecessarily mean that the Nation must be run by them because they weresoldiers, not unless they have the quality that gives them foresightand good sense. But now we should prepare for them. We must realizethat these men are all comrades, that they are going to work together, and we ought to spread this feeling throughout the entire country. Thefighting men themselves ought to get the feeling that we who have beenleft behind are also in the service of the country, trying to dosomething large for the making of this Nation along real lines. 

You know that there is a big man and a little man in each one of us;and the little man had his day. He was the selfish, egotistic, narrow, money-making fellow. Just as soon as this country went into the warthe big man came out. The big man inside of us was challenged and hearose at once and responded. And so we found railroad presidents, andbankers, the automobile men, and the business men of the countrycoming down to Washington and saying we want our opportunity to help. It was not selfish; it was noble. And that spirit if carried out willmake this country a new land in which these boys who come back willfind they have been cared for; that helpfulness has come to take theplace of indifference and cooperation to supplement individualinitiative. 

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