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OCR
THE
Eighty
Joseph D. Oliver knows full well that good
roads mean prosperity for the farmer-and
more plows.
Many a farmer pays more to get his product
from his farm to the station than he does to
transport the product from the station to the
distant market.
It costs thirty cents a ton to pull a ton a mile
on an average good country road. On a brick
road you can pull a ton a mile for ten cents
with horses, and with a motor-truck at half
this. But there are vast sections of the most
productive country in America where the
roads are impassable six months of the year.
In other places it would cost a dollar a ton
and more a mile for transportation.
At Keokuk, Iowa, a man by the name of
Hugh L. Cooper has just built a dam at an
expense of twenty-five million dollars. The
business of this dam will be to produce the
electric current. This current can be carried
two hundred miles to advantage. Saint Louis
will be the chief customer of Hugh L. Cooper
and his juice.
Cooper foresees a day when electricity will in
a great degree supersede gasolin<%but that is
another story. In any event, Hugh L. Cooper
stands ready to light four hundred miles of
this road, to recharge the batteries of half a
million cars to run on the national highway,
and he is now fitting up accordingly.
Cooper is this new type of American, the
businessman, the scientist, the philosopher,
the man who can laugh, work, play and study,
and mix all in right proportion, and flavor the
whole with love.
How many people in the United States ever
heard of Hugh L. Cooper and the Keokuk
dam, built at a cost of twenty-five million
dollars, just to utilize the power of the flowing
Mississippi? And the dam will utilize this
great force as long as the Father of Waters
flows unvexed to the sea.
So besides the Automobile Industry, proper,
this national highway will receive the appro-
bation, the encouragement, and, best of all,
the tangible support of some of the biggest
and best men in America today.
' That Lincoln Fund
Ev7N the United States Treasury, there is
pi lying idle a sum of money in excess of
six million dollars collected to build a monu-
ment or memorial to Abraham Lincoln. Some
of the chief donors have grown weary by the
December
FIZFI
way and dropped out of sight with the passing
years. They were unable to agree on what
the monument should be and just what form
it should take.
A roadway as a monument is practically a
new thing. But now we are beginning to
believe that we could not do better than to
show our faith and our gratitude and our love
in the undying memory of Abraham Lincoln
than by calling this great highway “ The
Lincoln Memorial.” And Congress stands
ready to vote the fund for road purposes, if
it seems the wish of the people.
In one way this is a happy stroke. It relieves
the situation of the danger of advertising any
one living man in an undue degree.
The fact is this great project could not be
carried through by any one individual. It is
only through consummate co-operation that
the thing is possible.
And while we say that Carl Fisher originated
the idea-which he did in one sense-you
will have to go back to Thomas Jefferson for
the original germ of the thought.
The Lincoln Memorial Highway
H ULIUS CZESAR was a great road-
builder, but he built roads for con-
quest. His roads were military roads. He did
the work well and thoroughly. We can well
take a lesson from the late Julius Caesar.
But this roadway will be no one-man’s idea.
(I It is a graceful and gracious thing to call
it “ The Lincoln Highway.” The road will
bind the nation together in a unit and union
indissoluble. And the word “ union ” was the
one word that leaped most easily from the
tongue of the Emancipator.
“ Though passion strain, it must not, it will
not, break our bonds of friendship.”
A roadway above all things stands for friend-
ship. Sellishness has no place and no part in
either its construction or its use. No one
individual will profit by this highway.
Carl Fisher, Jim Allison, C. A. Bookwalter,
Joe J. Cole, and all of those other strong and
earnest men who are putting their heart’s
blood into the thing will make no money out
of it. It will be an expense to them in time,
money and vitality. Their reward, if any, will
come indirectly. They are laying hold on the
age to come, building a monument to them-
selves which the people of the future may
“COSMIC, and yet may not-as for that, it
makes no difference, anyway.
3’ .,-...