Address by Honorable William C. Redfield, Secretary of Commerce at Conference of Regional Chairmen | Page 5

to push the

rural free-delivery and the parcel-post service just one step forward. I
have had motor trucks put on the Pribilof Islands, in the Behring Sea.
They are building the roads to run on before they can run on them. And
there, 250 miles north of the Aleutian Islands, we can make motor
trucks pay for themselves in a single year by the force they add in
effective transportation. We have a seal rookery 13 or 14 miles from
the village of St. Paul Island. We have not been able to kill seals there,
because we could not get skins down to the village. Now a couple of
motor trucks bring them down without the least difficulty, and in order
to get the road there they carried down materials to build the road. So
in the same way we have a great many fishery stations isolated. You
can not put fish hatcheries in towns. We get them as far off as
practicable. The problem is to get sufficient water and isolation, and so
those stations are rather difficult to reach. In those places to-day we
have put motor trucks. Here with these important stations 6, 8, 9, and
10 miles and sometimes more away, it was perfectly obvious that the
best, simplest, and quickest means of access was necessary and for
several years now we have been putting little Ford trucks in there, if
you can call them trucks, and I presume some of you anyway still do.
They have changed the effectiveness of the whole thing.
That is all very simple. I imagine that one great difficulty in this world
is that the simple things are sometimes very hard to bring about. It is
true in a certain sense that if we bring to a man something that is
difficult and complex it catches the mind by its very complexity and
strangeness. But if we come to him and say that mud is one of his worst
enemies it seems hard to him that it could be as bad as it really is, as he
is sort of friendly toward the mud. So many are familiar with the
automobile--not as familiar, I believe, as they are going to be--that it
seems hard to think it can work as revolutionary a change in their life
as it is going to do. But I am perfectly certain that there abide these
three elements of transportation--railway, water way, and highway--that
they are one, and that none of them will reach its full value to the
community without the other, and that each is the friend of the other.

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