Address by Honorable William C. Redfield, Secretary of Commerce at Conference of Regional Chairmen | Page 3

came into the world a new tool--the internal-combustion engine--destined to work almost as great a change in the human life as the steam engine in its time, making possible a tool for the waterway that the waterway had never had before, making it possible to use for the highway what the highway had never had before, making necessary the alteration of the highway to suit the new tool built for it. It has never been true until now; it has just now become true that the waterway and highway have been, as regards the tools for their use, on a technical and scientific level with the railway. The Government is just putting in operation this month the first great barges for the Mississippi River intended to carry ore south and coal north, made possible because of the internal-combustion engine. The tool has come, the internal-combustion engine is altering the face of the marine world. So that we do not really need but over 6 feet of water in the northern Mississippi to carry 1,800 tons of ore in one boat. We look upon the development of the New York State barge canal with a certainty of its profitable use for the Nation, for with a 12-foot draft we know we can carry 2,500 tons in any vessel constructed for the purpose, driven by internal-combustion engines. The tool for the job and the way made ready for the tool.
I go into my shop to put up a hammer. What is the essential feature of my hammer's operation? The foundation. It may be the most powerful hammer made, but unless given a sufficient sub-structure it can only be destructive. So for the waterway, so for the highway. You may have the most perfect equipment for their use but the instrument must work in a proper environment. So the waterway, then, the last few years--in fact, very recently--has come rapidly into its own. It is within 18 months, gentlemen, that I stood upon the first load of ore going south on the Mississippi River and saw it enter the port of St. Louis. It was only yesterday that I sent to the Senate my formal report urging Government ownership and operation of all the northern coastal canals from North Carolina to New England, with the certainty that adequate and efficient vessels could be provided for their use.
Now, these three ways of transporting developed to their full are not hostile to each other. In the days of our ignorance we thought they were. In other times the railroad bought canals to suppress them. But we have learned a larger outlook now and the congestion so recently as a year ago taught us that there are certain kinds of goods, certain types of transportation, that the railways of this country can not afford to do. Certain great items of bulk freight they must always carry. We should starve for steel if we had to depend upon our railroads to bring the ores from Minnesota to Pittsburgh, and the Northwest would be in a hard case if we had always to send coal to them by rail from the region of the East. We are learning that there is a differentiation in transportation. So these two enemies of the past are likely to operate as friends to-day. It is not a strange thing that the internal waterways of the country are at this time being operated by the Railroad Administration. It means an advance in thought.
I told the Director General of Railways that two-thirds of the job was fairly well in hand, but that he had left out one-third, and that I thought he would not get his unity complete until he made it a trinity by taking in the highways. I told him that the highways as a transportation system and their development both as to roads and as to means of using the roads were quite as essential to the country as the other two. In reply he suggested that it was a larger job than he himself could undertake, with the railroads and the waterways on his hands, and asked me if I would not do it. To my regret I was obliged to refuse. The law does not give me authority. I should have been glad if I could have had more of a part in it, because, given your perfected railroad--and I speak as a friend of the railroad and a friend of the waterway, which I think is also coming into its own--I am convinced that neither will reach its normal place as a servant of the people unless linked up with motor-truck routes.
There is a steamboat line running from New Haven to New York. At New Haven lines of motor trucks radiate out in several directions. From this radius