Edgar Chambless

“ Start out in the morning, number your every minute’s occupation, watch what your neighbors are doing. The man on the stairs, the wagon on the street, the rumbling subway train in a three million dollar a mile right of way, the elevator in the skyscraper, the office boy at beck and call—it is all transportation. Run over in your mind the work of the office and brain workers in a city business section, how many of them are engaging in planning, directing and accounting the various forms of transportation. ”

“ But these people have failed to realize the comprehensiveness of the Roadtown project. Indeed, should I have promoted the Roadtown as a monopoly for private gain I would have unquestionably been the meanest man on earth, for in me and my backers would have been combined all the despotism of the landlord, the railroad magnate, the factory slave driver, the wasteful middle-man, the extortionate retailer and half of the commodity trusts. The private owners of the Roadtown would be absolute master of the inhabitants in every phase of life. ”

“ But home is a place for companionship as distinct from the swirl of business and the jostle of the crowds; nor is all companionship necessarily human. A lawn to keep and some chickens and garden to care for are far closer to the essence of home than the gable on one’s cottage.
In the first place the Roadtown will be freer from noise than either city or village. There will be no lumbering vehicles and no tramp of either horse or man upon unshielded pavement. ”

“ Indeed, for some months it has been my feeling that I had no higher duty than that of helping as best I could, by the word of good-will, the handclasp of friendship, and the listening ear of personal faith, one of the few men I have ever met in my experience who was truly laying down his life for the sake of a great and unselfish idea. ”

“ Every Roadtown home will have a boiler for hot water, a chafing dish and as much more cooking apparatus as may be desired. The wealthy matron of to-day keeps alive the sentiment of mother’s cooking by making the tea, frosting the cake or making the salad dressing. The Roadtown mother can do the same, and as much more cooking as she likes, but once the opportunity is given for people to find the actual economy of coöperation and to see the folly of heating up a whole house to do one family’s cooking, the amount of cooking mothers will do will be decidedly limited. ”

“ ROADTOWN MAKES CO-OPERATION PRACTICAL IN the modern world there is no such thing as an absolute individualist, or an absolute coöperationist. The most rabid enemy of socialistic and coöperative movements sends his children to a coöperative school, puts his mail in a coöperative post office, and pays the coöperative preachers; he drinks coöperative water and uses the coöperative sewage system and drives his automobile on a coöperative road. On the other hand, the most enthusiastic socialist wants to write his own books and paint his own pictures and sign his name to them and get the glory. ”

“ Would you prefer to go five miles to that field every day for fifteen or twenty days, or even take a tent with you and go twenty miles and camp there, and for the rest of the year enjoy the coöperative and waste eliminating features of the Roadtown home life, or would you live in a frame house on the land and wash your face in cold water and get up winter mornings to start a fire and drink impure water from a polluted well and make your wife a kitchen scullion, isolated and lonely, and send your children two miles through the storm to an inefficient country school? ”

“ There is no better illustration of the need for a proper combination of transportation and housing than that of the human body. The baby’s first task is to learn to use its transportation devices, otherwise its house or body is useless. Life is full of lessons of the necessity of the harmonious combination of the functions of transportation and consumption. ”

“ The present system of keeping a child from all work until his body and mind are formed and then plunging him into industrial life is only exceeded in folly and cruelty by the child slavery system commonly known as “child labor.” ”

“ In this age a minority of mankind produce for the entire population. A constant stream of people from the farm pours into the city. These people produce nothing26 and expect to live by distributing goods to each other; but congestion of population in large cities introduces insolvable mechanical difficulties in distribution, until railroads, ware houses, trucks, wholesale and retail stores, delivery wagons, grocery boys and dumb-waiters, become congested; the machine clogs and thus the growing efficiency of modern production is lost through a more rapidly growing waste in distribution. ”

“ The saving in coöperative buying and selling is going to be the means of throwing many men out of employment, just as has been the case with the inventions of all labor saving machinery and methods. When a man in middle life has to fill a new occupation it is indeed a serious matter, but one against which it is useless to fight. ”

“ The industries that use machines were forced out of the homes and into the factories. There was no alternative. The steam driven machines produced goods so cheaply that the hand power, or home machine could not earn its owner a livelihood. Thus the factory system developed, partly because of the mechanical necessity of concentration where the power from one engine could by the use of shafts and belts be made to run a great number of machines, and partly because of the natural tendency of the man with the most money to acquire possession of the factory and have others work for him. ”

“ Such a house would not be limited by the stresses and strains of steel;20 it could be built not only a hundred stories, but a thousand stories or a thousand miles—in short, I had found a workable way of coupling housing and transportation into one mechanism, and a human way for land-moving man to live—I would not cure the evils of congestion by perfecting congestion as is the case with the skyscraper—I would build my city out into the country. ”

“ The only further sense that attaches to the idea of home is as a protection from the poverty of old age. A plan whereby the Roadtown corporation will give permanent rent to a person who has paid a sufficient sum into the corporation treasury may be developed co-operatively by the tenants. But a place to live in is only half insurance against poverty of old age, and we can hardly doubt that a community trained in coöperation, as the Roadtown community will be trained, will not only ultimately insure its aged inhabitants’ rent but a sufficient sum to keep them in decent comfort. ”

“ But before the first Roadtown has been built out ten miles into the wilderness, it will have become an object-lesson before which all foes will gladly transform themselves into friends, and all critics become eulogists. Aviation has a mighty future: but the grand step forward in Twentieth Century civilization is Roadtown, for not only is it an incomparable benefit in itself, but it affords all other useful inventions their best medium toward perfection. ”

“ Transportation in Nature.
The game of life in wild nature is but the getting of food and water to the consuming plant or animal, or getting the more adaptable animal to the food or water or some warm spot, or the society of his fellows. So the life of man, whether it be the family with the single house or the city with its many houses, shows a similar relation—things needed by the inhabitants,24 things taken from the place where they are and to a place where we want them—that is transportation. ”

“ Once Roadtown becomes an established fact, single workers, little groups of workers, and whole armies of workers will be seen leaving the old system for the new. It will be a strike for all time, a strike from which the hiring of strike breakers will be an empty retaliation, for the Roadtown worker will not only work better but his products will be less destroyed in the mill of competitive selling—he can undersell the strike breaker, being employer, and because the food and house and things he buys of the other workers will cost him less and serve him better ”

“ The entire Roadtown will be in connection by the loud speaking telephone, and folks can call on each other on a stormy night without so much as getting out of their comfortable rockers, but, for that matter, while there will be more to keep a Roadtowner at home, there will be less to keep him from going away from home when he wants to. If anyone is lonesome in Roadtown, it is simply because he has no friends, and if he has no friends, it can scarcely be anyone’s fault but his own. ”

“ Be that as it may, certainly there is no denying that he who opposes coöperation, in an attempt to preserve wasteful or unnecessary operations is a malpracticing economic physician. To the man Roadtown throws out of a job, it offers a chance to engage in productive labor where one cannot get out of a job, because so long as men receive the full fruits of their toil, with free and untaxed exchange, over-production as an economic calamity is an absolute impossibility. ”

“ Experts, not accustomed to being swept off their feet by bursts of enthusiasm over chimerical ideas, have testified that it is. As to whether his conception will solve all the problems of social life which he says it will solve, I again cannot say. Experience teaches that every original idea has revolutionary possibilities.
But as to Mr. Chambless himself, I can say, and say with enthusiasm, that he is a man deserving of the confidence of men. Mr. Hawthorne commends Roadtown to the earnest consideration of all thoughtful persons for itself. I commend Roadtown in a similar way for its inventor. ”

“ It is upon the roof that the Roadtown will be upon dress parade. Here maids with their lovers will stroll of evenings and matrons with their baby carriages on Sunday afternoons. It is here that children will have never ending sport. Skating and cycling can have an unprecedented opportunity to develop for health and pleasure. It is here that Easter hats will be shown and neighbors’ crops discussed and new acquaintances made and local pride developed. ”

“ The Roadtowner’s home is his castle in the truest sense of the word, and more private, notwithstanding the close proximity to neighbors, and hence more consecrated to family life than any previous style of dwelling known.
The Roadtown will have no streets because it will need none. As it is built through the country, there will, of course, be roads as well as streets to cross. Here the monorail will run under, and the roof bridge over the roads. At such road crossings and such other places where roads are built back into the country, stables and garages will be provided. ”

“ The railroad is a great civilizer. It carries with it all the material aids to civilization that can be hauled in a freight car. The Roadtown carries into the home what the railroad takes162 only to the freight and express office, and it carries in addition the civilization of pipes and wires which the railroad cannot transport. It would have been a wonderful vision for a man of the first quarter of the last century to have attempted to picture the ultimate effect of the railroad—but his vision would have fallen short of the reality. ”

“ Roadtown education will apply to all ages of both sexes. The whole living scheme of Roadtown will be a vast school. The modern school, a place where we send our children to be herded in immense droves under the care of girls who use the teaching profession as a makeshift until an opportunity of marriage arrives, is far from perfection as a means of127 child development. The disciplinarian system of education which crushes out individuality and molds all children in the industrial-political virtue of being bossed, is likely to vanish as a population is freed from economic slavery. ”

“ The trouble in grasping the possibilities of Roadtown agriculture comes from the difficulty of renouncing our old viewpoint. The typical farmer with his house in the middle of a quarter section of land, half of which is fallow, and on the other half of which he carelessly grows food for live stock of which only 6 per cent of the nutriment is recovered in the form of meat, will be inclined to make light of the idea of farm houses being built touching each other. ”

“ In the Roadtown, this problem, old as civilization, will be solved, not by bringing in outside workers to break up family life, but by sending most of the present work out of the home and simplifying that which must remain until the task becomes so light that each member of the family will perform his share of the housekeeping just as he now dresses himself, or walks to catch the trolley car. ”

“ Every labor saving invention in the history of man has thrown someone out of work. The grain binders were broken and burned by the old fashioned harvest hands. The hand type-setters opposed the introduction of the linotype. But the economic invention came in spite of this opposition. The Roadtown is a new arrangement of civilization, a new plan for all commerce and all city building; it will do for the entire programme of transportation what the linotype did for the type setting industry. ”