Franklin K. Lane

“ There should not be a man who was in our Army or our Navy who has the ambition for an education who should not be given that opportunity—indeed, induced to take it—not merely out of appreciation but out of the greater value to the Nation that he would be if the tools of life were put into his hand. There is no word to say upon this theme of Americanization that has not been said, and Congress, it is now hoped, will believe those figures which, when presented nearly two years ago, were flouted as untrue. ”

“ When the whole story is told of American achievement and the picture is painted of our material resources, we come back to the plain but all-significant fact that far beyond all our possessions in land and coal and waters and oil and industries is the American man. ”

“ We choose, to please ourselves, the link in this chain upon which we place the responsibility for its failure to work; but before indulging ourselves in abuse of arrogant coal barons or dictatorial labor unions, it may lie as well to ask whether we of the public are not responsible in some part for this failure to function. ”

“ There can be do doubt that there is an important sphere of action which the Government must occupy if we are to go steadily forward with the work of continental conquest, and all it implies to the future of the Nation, but in suggesting practicable steps of progress at this time I do not forget the burden of taxation which confronts our people nor the delicate and difficult task which Congress is called upon to perform in trying to keep the national outgo within the national income. ”

“ We simply can not afford to preach economy in oil when we do not promote by every means the use of the internal-combustion engine for its consumption. No other one thing that can be done by the Government, our industries, or the people will save as much oil from being wasted and thereby multiply the real production of the United States. If such engines are delicate of handling and need specially trained engineers, which appears to be the fact, there should be little difficulty experienced in training men for such work. ”

“ He may have a freedom to speak and to worship and to exercise his judgment over the affairs of the Nation. And yet he is the most neglected of our resources because he does not know how rich he is, how rich beyond all other men he is. Not rich in money—I do not speak of that—but rich in the endowment of powers and possibilities no other man ever was given.
Twenty-five per cent of the 1,600,000 men between 21 and 31 years of age who were first drafted into our Army could not read nor write our language, and tens of thousands could not speak it nor understand it. ”

“ The Nation is humiliated at its own indifference, and action must be the result.
To save and to develop, I have said, were equally the expression of a true conservation. What is true as to material things is true [Pg 34] as to human beings. And once given a foundation of health there is no other course by which this policy may be effected than to place at the command of every one the means of acquiring knowledge. The whole people must turn in that direction. We should enable all, without distinction, to have that training for which they are fitted by their own natural endowment. ”

“ Somewhere and sometime, it seems to me, a new system must be devised to disperse the people of great cities on the vacant lands surrounding them, to give the masses a real hold upon the soil, and to replace the apartment house with the home in a garden. Such a system should enable the ambitious and thrifty family not only to save the entire cost of rent, but possibly half the cost of food, while at the same time enhancing its standard of living socially and spiritually, as well as economically. ”

“ I wish now to ask consideration for another matter of home concern to which I gave attention in my last report and as to which the intervening year has strengthened and perhaps broadened my ideas—the development of our unused lands.
It was never more vital to the welfare of our people that a creative and out-reaching plan of developing and utilizing our natural resources should go bravely forward than it is to-day. Ours is a growing country, and as its social and industrial superstructure expands its agricultural foundation must be broadened in proportion. ”

“ The world wants our coal, envies us for having it, fears us because of it. It is not only useful to us, but it has a cash value in the markets of the world. Therefore it should be saved.
In the next place we treat coal as if it were all alike, not selected by nature for specific uses; whereas we should choose our coal with as scientific a judgment as we choose our reading glasses. There is coal for coke and coal for furnaces and coal for house use and coal adapted for one kind of boiler and a different kind of coal for a different kind of boiler. Therefore we should discriminate in coal. ”

“ The coal strike has brought concretely before us the disturbing fact that modern society is so involved that we live virtually by unanimous consent. Let less than one-half of 1 per cent of our population quit their work of digging coal and we are threatened with the combined horrors of pestilence and famine. ”

“ As petroleum is being used as a substitute for coal—and inasmuch as the whole problem of fuel supply is one—we are ultimately compelled to an investigation of the ability of our petroleum supply to meet its present drain and to meet the expansion in its use, which is the most surprising development of our day in the study of power creation. ”

“ Europe, indeed, will sadly learn through this winter how little coal she can live on and how more than perilous is the state of a people who are short of power, light, and heat.
As this country prior to the war sold abroad no more than 4,500,000 tons as against England's 77,000,000, it is quite manifest that here will be a new field for American enterprise, the enterprise being needed not for the winning of markets as much as for finding ways of dealing with the larger phases of a heavy overseas trade with those who are without immediate resources. ”

“ Coming to the use of petroleum in its various forms we find a field of promise. The engine that doubles the number of miles that can be made on a gallon of gasoline doubles our supply. There is where we can apply the principle of true conservation—find how little you need; use what you must, but treat your resource with respect. Has the last word been said as to the carburetor? Mechanical engineers do not think so. Have all possible mixtures which will save oil and substitute cheaper and less rare combustibles therefor been tried? ”

“ New petroleum supplies have become a national necessity, so quickly have we adapted ourselves to this new fuel and so extravagantly have we given ourselves over to its adaptability. To save that we may use abundantly, to develop that we may never be weak, to bring together into greater effectiveness all power possibilities—these would seem to be national duties, dictated by a large self-interest. ”

“ Here is Washington, a city of some 400,000 people, doubtless destined steadily to grow until—a Member of Congress predicts—it may touch 2,000,000 twenty years hence. Already the housing problem is acute, as it is in almost every other large American city. It would be a pitiful thing if the provision of more housing facilities to meet the needs of growing population meant merely more congestion and higher rents, with an ever-decreasing degree of landed proprietorship and true individual independence. ”

“ And again we have shown little willingness to dignify coal by seeking to draw out by improved mechanical processes all the stored content of heat in this lump of carbon. Instead we content ourselves by giving it a mere pauper touch, driving off the greater volume of its value into the air. ”

“ I have gone only sufficiently far into this whole question to realize that it is as fundamental and of as deep public concern as the railroad question and that it is even more complex. No one, so far as I can learn, has mastered all of its various phases; in fact, there are few who know even one sector of the great battle front of power. ”

“ I am convinced that there will be a reaction against the intense industrialism of the present, but as it must be agreed that the race for industrial supremacy is on between the nations of the world, America may well take stock of her own power possibilities and concern herself more actively with their development and wisest use. ”

“ And then we naturally ask, Why this long haul over mountains and through tunnels and across bridges and along streets and into houses, by railroad, truck, and on the backs of men, when at the very pit mouth, or within the mine itself, this same coal might be transformed into electricity and by wire served into factories and homes 100, 200, 300 miles from the mine? ”

“ In a time of stress it is not enough to be able to say that the United States contains more than one-half of the known world supply of coal; that we, while only 8 per cent of the world's population, produce annually 46 per cent of all coal that is taken from the ground; that 35 per cent of the railroad traffic is coal; that in less than 100 years we have grown in production from 100,000 tons to 700,000,000 tons per annum ”

“ After every other war in our history the work of internal development has gone forward by leaps and bounds, and our people have thus quickly made good the economic wastes of the conflict. The needs of to-day are different from those of the past and require different treatment, but they are by no means beyond the reach of enlightened thought and action. ”

“ More coal produced would not sell more coal, but more coal demanded would result in greater coal production. With the full demand met by men working two-thirds or less of the time in the year there can not be a longer year given to all the miners without more demand for coal. This seems to be manifest. Therefore the miners must remain working but part time as now, or fewer miners must work more days, or market must be found for more coal and thus all the miners given a longer year. If we worked all of our miners in all of our mines a reasonable year, we would have a great overproduction. ”

“ The two ways by which coal in greatest volume can be saved are the discovery of the method by which more power can be taken from the ton and the discovery of what kind of coal is best fitted for any particular use.
It has been everyone's business to save coal, hence.... The railroads have experimented with some success. They get perhaps 10 per cent of the heat energy from a ton shoveled beneath the locomotive boiler, 10 per cent of the total in the ton. They use one-quarter of all the coal mined. Next to labor this is the greatest expense which our railroads have. ”

“ In a train of 40 cars, the last 8 are dead load that might better have been left in the bowels of the earth. No less an authority than Martin A. Rooney states: "Every fifth shovel full of coal that the average fireman throws into his furnace serves no more useful purpose than to decorate the atmosphere with a long black stream of precious soot. At best one-fifth of all our coal is wasted."
The first requisite toward effecting fuel economy is to secure cooperation between owners, managers, and the men who fire the coal. ”

“ But if coal operators themselves had not carried over the statistical machinery developed during the war, we would have been forced to the humiliating confession that we did not know facts which at the time were of the most vital importance. ”

“ Whether on land or sea, fuel oil is preferred to coal because it requires fewer firemen, and back of that, in the man power required in its mining, preparation, and transportation the advantage on the side of oil is even greater. So, too, the substitute for gasoline in internal-combustion engines, whether alcohol or benzol, means higher cost and larger expenditure of labor in its production. ”

“ We have a great fund of natural resources in the very oldest States, from Maine to Louisiana, which invite and would richly reward the constructive genius of the Nation. It is claimed by those who have specialized for years on the subject of reclamation that the control and utilization of flood waters now wasted would produce within the next 10 years more wealth than the entire cost to the United States of the war with Germany. ”

“ Although we are sometimes alarmed because those deposits nearest to the industrial centers are rapidly declining and we can already see within this century the end of the anthracite field, if it is made to yield as much continuously as at present, yet it is a safe generalization that we have sufficient coal in the United States to last our people for centuries to come. An extra scuttleful on the fire or shovelful in the furnace does not threaten the life of the race, even if some Russian or Chinese of the future does not resolve the atom or harness the hidden forces of the air. ”

“ In an age of machinery the measure of a people's industrial capacity seems to be surely fixed by its motive power possibilities. Civilized nations regard an adequate fuel supply as the very foundation of national prosperity—indeed, almost as the very foundation of national possibility. ”

“ With substantially the same number of mines and miners working this year as last, the accumulative production for the first 10 months of this year is 100,000,000 tons less than that mined in the same period last year. This 25 per cent loss in output means that both plant and labor have been less productive, and, in terms of capital and labor, coal cost the Nation more this year than last. For in the long run both capital and labor require a living wage. ”

“ We therefore must have a longer miners' year and fewer miners or a longer miners' year and additional markets. One or the other is inevitable unless we are to carry on the industry as a whole as an emergency industry, holding men ready for work when they are not needed in order that they may be ready for duty when the need arises. There are too many mines to keep all the miners employed all of the time or to give them a reasonable year's work. This conclusion is based on the assumption that we now produce only enough coal from all the mines to meet the country's demand, which is the fact. ”

“ Already we are importers of petroleum. We are to be larger importers year by year if we continue—and we will—to invent and build machines which will rely upon oil or its derivatives as fuel. Our business methods have been and doubtless will continue to be developed along lines that make a continuing oil supply a necessity. Some of that oil must come from abroad, as nearly 40,000,000 barrels did last year, and for that we must compete with the world. ”