United States. Council of National Defense. Highways Transport Committee

“ Good roads and a rural express must be had. If you can help the Government in building good roads for little money or show how a rural express can be most profitably developed, you will be helping in the making of a new America.
And I can conceive of a United States that will be as rich per acre as France; in which the people will be divided into small communities, industrial communities as well as agricultural; for every one [7] of these little places ought to have its own creamery, its own cannery. The farmer is the poorest man in the world to develop any kind of cooperative scheme. ”

“ Now, I think if there is one great fault that industrially we have been guilty of in the United States, it has been the effort to develop quantity at the expense of quality. We have been a wholesale Nation. We have had a continent that was rich beyond any precedent. We did not know what any acre of our land might produce. ”

“ Verdun would have fallen unquestionably if it had not been for the roads that Napoleon constructed and that France has maintained; for all the credit is not to go to the man who conceived and the man who constructed. ”

“ Now, those two fellows are going to be tied together for life, and that is the relationship that will exist between all those men.
We men who are in politics to-day have seen our day. They are going to take charge of the politics of the United States. They are [8] going to take charge of the social problems. They are going to insist upon industrial as well as social equality. We know that this does not necessarily mean that the Nation must be run by them because they were soldiers, not unless they have the quality that gives them foresight and good sense. ”

“ If your old position is not vacant, if you can not go home to the old place and take up the work that you were in, then the Government of the United States, in its wisdom, has provided something which you can do at wages upon which you can live well. ”

“ Men are discouraged and disheartened when they look at the problem of pulling an Oregon fir stump out of the ground. It really requires large capital. Then come farther east and take these lands that are swamp, that need draining, and build ditches and dikes and put these lands into the service of America. This is what I call the making of the nation. ”

“ 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 war the big man came out. The big man inside of us was challenged and he arose at once and responded. And so we found railroad presidents, and bankers, the automobile men, and the business men of the country coming down to Washington and saying we want our opportunity to help. ”

“ We have been extending ourselves because of war in a great many different directions. The Government has taken to itself unprecedented and unthought-of powers because of the necessities of our condition. I say that to meet the problem of the returned soldier we ought to take advantage of this opportunity to do the work now that must eventually be done and reclaim these arid lands of the West. ”

“ Chapin has said, a larger conception has come into the American mind—the conception of the utilization of all our resources. While the railroad has a great burden cast upon it; while it is the strong right arm in this work, still we must remember that the strong right arm must have fingers, and that there should be in a complete physical system a good left arm.
The highways that you are interested in are more than interesting to me for another reason.
[5] I have thought of the men who will come back after the war. Every nation has had a problem to deal with the returning soldier. ”

“ If you will think over that proposition you will realize that what I have said is true, that those parts of this Nation are most backward, where people live most alone, where they develop those diseases of the mind which come from living alone, where they develop supreme discontent with what is done at Washington or what is done in their own State legislatures, where they are unhappy and discontented, and movements that make against the welfare of our country arise, are those parts where there are poor highways and consequently a lack of communication between the people. ”

“ So that you gentlemen who are engaged in the business of developing the highways of the country and putting them to greater use may properly conceive of yourselves as engaged in a very farsighted, important bit of statemanship, work that does not have its only concern as to the farmer of this country or the helping of freight movement during this winter alone, but may have consequences that will extend throughout the centuries. ”

“ There is a work—the work that I have in mind, and for which Congress has made a small and tentative appropriation—the work of surveying this country and seeing how many of this Nation's land resources have not been mobilized and how best they can be used for providing homes for these men who come back, as well as adding to the wealth of the world. There is a work that ties up directly with your work, because I want to have small communities in which men have small acreages of land, not to speculate with but to cultivate ”

“ Now, when this thing is over, our men will begin to come back into the United States. But not all at once. We won't have three or four million men to deal with in a single month. We will have them slowly returning to us through a year or a year and a half. As those men come filtering in through our ports we ought to be able to meet every man at every port with the statement that he does not have to lie idle one single day. We ought to be able to say to the man, "Here is something that you can do at once. ”

“ People are being drawn from the farms, so that one-half of the arable land this side of the Mississippi is unused to-day; so that between here and New Orleans there are 40,000,000 acres of land privately owned and unused; so that in the great Northwest, Minnesota, Oregon, Washington, etc., there are 100,000,000 acres of cut-over lands that are practically unused; and we have a new nation practically in the undrained lands of our rivers and our bays and inlets, lands that are as rich as any that lie out of doors, as rich as the valley of the Nile or of the Euphrates. ”

“ When De Toquevile came over here in 1830 he said the reason democracy was a success in this country was because we were all practically living on farms, living on what we raised ourselves, and standing equally. ”

“ But that man is going to insist upon larger opportunity for himself, and the largest opportunity that he wants is an opportunity to make himself independent, and he is going to have a conception of a social America that we have not had. ”

“ He needs assistance and is always hampered by the lack of capital. But now is our chance to see what can be done; to show it in the building of ideal communities, communities that have good houses, that have good sanitation, that are on good land where there is somebody who can direct them as to what should be planted and what should be avoided, communities which may be connected up with the world by highways, by developing rivers, and by railroads. ”

“ And that spirit if carried out will make this country a new land in which these boys who come back will find they have been cared for; that helpfulness has come to take the place of indifference and cooperation to supplement individual initiative. ”

“ The object of the committee is to increase and render more effective all transportation over the highways as one of the means of strengthening the Nation's transportation system and relieving the railroads of part of the heavy short-haul freight traffic burden. ”

“ Recognizing the national value of our highways in relation to, and properly coordinated with, other existing transportation mediums, and more particularly the necessity for their immediate development that they might carry their share of the war burden, the Highways Transport Committee was appointed by, and forms a part of, the Council of National Defense. ”

“ If the Emperor of Germany has ever had a good look at a photograph of Woodrow Wilson, he has seen a prolongation of a chin that must have confirmed him in the belief that America does not take up a fight unless it puts it through ”