Speech by Senator Harry S. Truman to the Traffic Club at Springfield, Missouri

SPEECH BY SENATOR HARRY S. TRUMAN TO THE TRAFFIC CLUB AT ell SPRINGFIELD, MISSOURI MAY 8, 1940 ellá at I have been asked to talk to Fou about transportation. It is a very large subject. Hauling freight and passengers has been the most im- portant business since governments began. Rome's roads made her great. Britain's sea control has made her great. Fast transportation and instant communication across a whole continent made the United States of America a great nation. In the year of 1607 a handful of English came to the mouth of the James River in Virginia and founded a colony. It took them some three months to make the trip. A few days ago a passenger plane made that trip in twenty-seven hours. From 1846 to 1854 my grandfather was in the freighting business from Independence, Missouri, to Salt Lake City, Utah. It was customary for him to start from Independence in March or April and arrive on his return from the round trip in September or October -- from three to four months for the one way trip. The transcontinental planes make that trip in nine hours or a little less. When John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay went to Ghent to negotiate a treaty with Great Britain after the War of 1812, it took them three months to make the trip, and they were not able to communicate with James Madison, the President of the United States, at all while the negotiations were in progress. When Woodrow Wilson was in Paris negotiating the treaty of Versailles, everyone in the United States was familia with all that went on as soon as it happened. It has been said that the inventor of the wheel W as the creator of the greatest boon to mankind. No one knows who he was, but he certainly contributed to the ease of getting from one place to another. In 1854 the Pony Express was the swiftest method of communication. Now, you or I can lift a telephone receiver from the hook and talk to San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, or almost any place else in the world in five minutes. Evolution is taking place all the time in this fast-moving machine age of ours, and our greatest difficulty is to prevent the machine from mas- tering us. The sailing ship and the oxcart were the freight carriers at the birth of this nation, as they had been for all mankind for six thousand years. George Washington spent a fortune in an endeavor to link the Potomac and the Ohio by a canal. Water was the best and swiftest means of moving freight and passengers in the early days of the Republic. When Andrew Jackson as elected President, he journeyed to Louisville, Kentucky, from Nashville, Tennessee, by coach; boarded a steamboat at Louisville and w ent up the Ohio River to Wheeling, Virginia, where he again rode a stagecoach to Washington. The steamboat and the steam engine were epoch-making inventions in transportation. About the time Jackson was winding up the second New Deal National Administration (Jefferson's was the first), the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was built from Baltimore to Washington. It was not long until railroads were being constructed all over the country. It had been the policy of the Federal Government to build post roads for the purpose of carrying the mail and for the use of stagecoaches. The most famous of these roads was the National Road, constructed with Federal funds, from Cumberland, Maryland, to Vandalia, Illinois, then the c apital of this great commonwealth. Cumberland was the end of the Chesapeake and Potomac Canal. Abraham Lincoln succeeded in getting the last Federal appro- priation for expenditure on that road while he was a Congressman from this State. When Alabama, Mississippi, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri were admitted to the Union, it was a part of the compact of Union that the Federal Government would build a post road to and through the capital of each of those: states connecting them with Washington. TRUMAN (OVER) NARA