USA > Indiana > The Indiana centennial, 1916; a record of the celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of Indiana's admission to statehood > Part 24
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PUBLIC HEALTH PARADE, OCTOBER 11
On the afternoon of October 11, a parade showing the progress made in the last century in matters pertaining to sanitation and health was given by the public health and wel- fare societies of Indianapolis and Indiana, and the business firms that deal in supplies connected with clean and healthful living. The parade was under the direction of Franklin S. Bridges, chief marshal. It was in two divisions and was headed by Indianapolis policemen and by the Indianapolis Military Band.
Many instructive and entertaining floats appeared in the procession. Attention was called to the typhoid germ by an old-fashioned milk wagon, drawn by a mule and equipped with dingy old cans, and by a huge mosquito, shown as a car- rier of germs from swamps. In contrast with this last ex- hibit was a farmer in a field of corn which was said to have been planted in a drained swamp. An army camping out- fit bore placards telling of the small percentage of typhoid fever in the army since the anti-typhoid vaccination had become compulsory. High school cadets commanded by Colonel Rus- sel B. Harrison appeared wearing the uniforms of Civil War soldiers.
Thousands of school children, members of various school "health clubs" marched. The Boy Scouts formed a bicycle
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squad and also had a float, labeled "In God's Out of Doors," showing a camp in the woods. The playgrounds of 1816 and 1916 were contrasted on another float.
The Indiana State Board of Health was represented by officials of the society in automobiles and by several floats. The latter which related to the care of the baby and to the care of the teeth, were especially effective.
Other organizations represented in the first division were the Indiana Anti-Tuberculosis Society, Marion County Anti- Tuberculosis Society, Indianapolis Board of Health, Public Health Nursing Association, Indianapolis Charity Organiza- tion Society, Children's Aid Association, Indianapolis Summer Mission at Fairview, Indianapolis Humane Society, Local Council of Women, Christamore Settlement, W. C. T. U., In- diana Audubon Society, Indianapolis Medical Society, Flor- ence Crittenden Home, Indiana State Workers for the Blind, Robert W. Long Hospital, Deaconess Hospital, Sisters of Charity, St. Vincent's Hospital, Harley Gibbs Settlement, St. Francis Hospital, Christ Child Society, Graduate Nurses' As- sociation, Flower Mission, Y. M. C. A., Y. W. C. A., Wednes- day Afternoon Club, Faith Home, Indiana Dental College, New Century Club, and Mothers' Aid Society.
The second division, in command of Will H. Brown, had exhibits which were more of an industrial nature. Many manufacturing firms were represented by floats showing the sanitary methods by which their products are manufactured.
CENTENNIAL HIGHWAY DAY, OCTOBER 12
Adopting the slogan "Let us dedicate with newer mean- ing our highways to the memory of the brave pioneers, and so wisely plan for their rebuilding that they shall become a real heritage to all future generations," October twelfth was set aside for the celebration of "historical highway day" in connection with the State Centennial. The date seemed un- usually appropriate since it was a national holiday-Discov- ery Day, a State centennial day, and a state highway day over the old historic National Road.
Dr. I. S. Harold, whose slogan is quoted above, was ap- pointed State Chairman and to his efforts much of the credit for the success of the day is to be attributed. Luke W. Duf-
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fey was appointed chairman for Marion County. M. E. Noblet, secretary of the Hoosier Motor Club, was chosen as pa- rade organizer and rendered excellent service in securing large delegations from every part of Indiana. Divisional chairmen were appointed for the principal highways of the State leading into Indianapolis. The parade which passed through the down-town streets of Indianapolis on the after- noon of Highway Day was a notable procession in that through mass of numbers it proved to the State and nation that good roads must prevail as a national asset. The boom- ing of a cannon shortly after one o'clock was the signal for the moving of a long line of automobiles from two directions. Good roads advocates for Indiana points east of the Michigan road assembled at Washington and Noble streets. Western Indiana's delegation mobilized at Washington and West streets. The Hoosier Motor Club, the Marion County Good Roads Association, and all Indianapolis cars assembled in Kentucky Avenue south of Georgia street. Carl G. Fisher, chief marshal of the parade, with his staff waited at Meridian and Washington streets. A reviewing stand was erected on the south side of the Monument, to which the Presidential party was conducted after the luncheon given to the Presi- dent by Governor Ralston at the Claypool Hotel. The pa- rade moved in double column from Washington street, pass- ing on both sides of the Monument and on to the Fair Grounds. It was said that there never were so many automo- biles in Indianapolis before; and that it was the greatest as- semblage of people brought together through the interests of good roads; and the event will go down into history as an epoch-making occasion that gave a new impetus to scientific road building in this country ; and it was one of the important factors in securing for Indiana the enactment of a good roads law, and the creation of a State Highway Commission.
As President Wilson had always been a good roads en- thusiast and had encouraged road legislation in Congress and finally a bill was passed appropriating $85,000,000, to as- sist States in building state and national roads, to be known as post roads, it was determined if possible to secure him for the day. A letter was written to him by the Chairman and the Governor of the State. His first answer was rather dis-
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couraging, but after almost continuous negotiations and con- siderable pressure being brought to bear, word was received that he would be in Indianapolis that day for two addresses.
The Presidential train was late, arriving at the Union Sation considerably after eleven o'clock. The reception com- mittee, consisting of Governor Samuel M. Ralston, as Chair- man, Joseph Bell, Mayor of Indianapolis, Senator Thomas Taggart, Dr. I. S. Harold, State Chairman, and Charles Book- walter, Chairman of the General Committee, went on the train to meet the distinguished guests and escort them to the Clay- pool Hotel, where Governor Ralston gave a luncheon to the presidential party, consisting of President and Mrs. Wilson, Joseph P. Tumulty, secretary to the President, and Dr. Cary T. Grayson, the White House physician, to which about one hundred guests were invited. After reviewing the automo- bile parade, immediately following the luncheon, the presi- dential party departed for the Fair Grounds at 2:15 p. m. Before an audience estimated at ten thousand, President Wil- son delivered the following address, after being introduced by Governor Ralston :
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT WILSON
Governor Ralston, My Fellow Citizens :
I am here because I am interested in the cause of good roads, and because I am interested in the State of Indiana.
I was very much interested that this day, devoted to the cause of good roads, should fall in your Centennial Year. It made me think of many of the processes of our national his- tory. Roads have so knit communities together, and communi- ties into counties, and counties into States, and States into the nation, that we must learn how to think, and act, and do things together. This country was built up without any roads; these prairies, these hillsides and valleys were filled with population in advance of which went no roadmaker, but only the pioneer, making his way over the trackless wilder- ness, with only his gun, only a little to eat, only a few compan- ions. And now that you are 100 years old, after these unassisted processes created the State of Indiana, you are turning your thoughts to the necessary means by which you are going to knit the State of Indiana into a unit, and knit her with the rest of the nation, and set afoot processes which will
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make a new spirit, because of the new intercourse through- out the great continent which we have conquered by our en- terprise.
The arguments for good roads from the material point of view, are very obvious. It is true, I dare say, that we had to wait for the rapidly moving automobile to create a large enough number of persons interested in good roads, which would run beyond mere neighborhoods; and I am very grate- ful to the owners of automobiles, and to the members of automobile associations that they should have insisted with such success, upon the creation of highways. I note, inci- dentally, that they use them up almost as fast as we make them, but I will forgive them for that, if they stimulate us to the effort to make them, and to keep them in usable condi- tion. But, after all, the highway is not intended, first of all, and chief of all, for the pleasure vehicle. It is not in- tended for the mere traveler. It is not intended for the mere tourist. It is not made in order that some company of lei- surely people may travel from coast to coast of this great con- tinent. It is made because we need it in all the material uses of our lives. We need it first of all, and chief of all, in order that our resources may be made use of, for they can not be made use of until they are got to market and you can not get them to market unless you can get them from the mine and the farm, to the nearest railway station.
You can not know what the resources of the country are unless the country is covered over with a network of roads which will release all the locked up riches of all our country- sides. Why, there are little pockets in the mountains in some places in America, where there are the richest sort of crops, . where nature has made largest of her gifts of fertile soil and genial climate and abundant rainfall, but where they can never get their crops to market, where they burn their corn, so much of it as they can not feed to their cattle, where they raise what they do raise for the consumption of their fam- ilies, merely, and contribute nothing to the markets of the na- tion.
For a great many years this country was covered over with segregated, separated, isolated neighborhoods, to which in the winter you could not get, because if you tried it your wheels would go to the hub in the mud, and where, conse-
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quently, communities were shut into their own life and to their own separated thought. It is perfectly obvious that you have got to have an intricate and perfect network of roads throughout the length and breadth of this great continent before you will have released the energies of America.
Good roads are necessary for every practical aspect of our lives-to draw neighbors together, to create a community of feeling, to create those arteries which may be compared to the arteries of the human body. The blood of the nation will not flow in harmonious concord unless it can flow in intimate sympathy. And so the argument, the material argument, the argument about markets and crops and the products of the mines, sinks into comparative unimportance when you con- sider the spiritual things that you are doing in making roads.
You know there is an old saying that the lines between sections are obliterated only by the feet that cross them. There is a very genial saying of a great English writer, that he never could hate a man he knew; and I dare say that every man and woman here knows the truth of that. I want to tell you, now, that I have loved some great rascals. I have tried to get them into jail, but I have been very fond of them, and it is very difficult indeed to get close to a man and not find some contact of sympathy and community of thought.
We are all human beings; we all touch each other at the heart; we are all alike down at the bottom. We may have had different environments; we may have been brought up differently ; we may have been trained differently; but when you strip these things off, there, at the core, we are the same kind of people. Sectionalism is based upon the radical danger of every nation, namely, ignorance. The only thing that breeds darkness in the world is ignorance. The only thing that really blinds us is not knowing what we are talking about. The only thing that binds a nation together is the knowledge of its several parts of each other.
My fellow-citizens, I need not tell you that I did not come here to talk politics, but there is one thing that is pertinent in this connection, which I can not deny myself the privilege of saying. Any man who revives the issue of sectionalism in this country is unworthy of the confidence of the nation. He
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shows himself a provincial; he shows that he himself does not know the various sections of his own country; he shows that he has shut his own heart up in a little province, and that those who do not seek the special interests of that province are, to him, sectional, while he alone is national. That is the depth of anti-patriotic feeling.
And so one of my interests in roads is that I want to see that thing carried on which I have seen worked to the bene- fit of this nation in so many parts of it. Take my own State of New Jersey. We have built a great many fine roads in New Jersey. Now, most people know New Jersey only be- tween New York and Trenton. If you look at New Jersey on the map, it is shaped like a bag with a string in the middle and the Pennsylvania railway from New York to Trenton is the string. New Jersey does not lie along that shortest line. It lies among beautiful hills and lakes and streams in the north and interesting stretches of level and watered coun- try in the south, where the characteristic populations of the State are. Now, good roads have discovered the people of New Jersey to the people who live in other States. By build- ing good roads in New Jersey we have made it possible that people everywhere should know the people of the State of New Jersey.
Wherever you have not got a good road you have created a provincial and sectional population. Wherever you have a good road, you have tied a thong between that community and the nation to which it belongs. And that is my interest in good roads, for, my fellow citizens, my present interest is chiefly in the nationalization of America.
We have created a great people; at least, if I may put it so, we have brought together all the elements, all the com- ponent parts, all the necessary characters and industries and material resources of a great nation, and we suddenly find that we are face to face with the problem of assembling these elements, in the sense in which the mechanic assembles the parts of a machine, and, having assembled those elements, to put them together for the creation of one incomparable force, to which the world shall hereafter look for most of its for- ward impulse, for most of its ideal principles, for most of its example in the practice of liberty; and, therefore, the thing that I am more interested in than anything else in these
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days is the forces that make for drawing America together into a great spiritual unity.
You will notice all sorts of eddies in our life. Here the stream seems to be turning about; there the stream seems to be running forward; here there is an obstacle; there a free channel, and it sometimes looks as if this turning, whirling movement of our life merely made of us a whirlpool in which every conceivable element out of every population of the world constituted a part. Men look upon it with confusion. They say: "What is the pattern of this life? Whither does it tend? Where are we going?"
Now, my fellow-citizens, we have had time and opportunity until the present to do pretty much what we wanted in Amer- ica, and to do different things in different parts of America, but just so soon as this great European war is over America has got to stand for one thing, and only one thing in the world, and she must be ready with united forces. We can not play with the elements of our life any more.
We can not first combine them this way and then combine them that way. We have got to combine them in one way, with one definite purpose, and then we can go full steam ahead under expert leadership along the new line of a new age; but so long as we are playing with the elements, so long as we have contrary sympathies, so long as one body of us is pulling in one direction and another body in another direc- tion, we can not do anything either for ourselves or for the world.
America came into existence, my fellow-citizens, not in order to show the world the most notable example it had ever had of the accumulation and use of material wealth, but in order to show the way to mankind in every part of the world to justice, to freedom and liberty. So that the words I want you to carry in your mind in connection with this good roads cause are these :
First, Nationalization-Getting all the fibers of this great vital people united in a single organism.
Second, Mobilization-Getting them so related to each other, so co-ordinated, so organized, so led, so united, that when they move they move as a single great, irresistible con- quering force; and the third word that I want you to consider
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is the word that I suppose affords the key to doing these things; that word is the word "cooperation."
I wish that every one of us could fix in his mind the dif- ference between the way we have been trying to do things and the way we ought to do things. We have been trying to do things by combining, by setting off one powerful group against another, by setting up groups in particular industries or spheres of our life, which try to exclude all other groups by the power or by the method of their destroying competi- tion. That is not the way to build a nation together; that is the way to build it into warring elements. Instead of ex- clusive combination, I want to see universal cooperation.
There are good signs in the air. Have you not noticed how almost every great industry, every great profession every year holds a congress of some sort. Why, even the ad- vertising men, whom we thought were the sharpest competi- tors in America, have a national association in which they cooperate. For what purpose? For the purpose of getting ahead of each other? No. For the purpose of guiding one another and setting up standards; and the chief standard they have adopted is the word "truth," that they won't fool the people to whom they address advertisements; that they will tell the truth and prosper on the truth.
Then you will find men in highly competitive engineering industries who hold their annual conventions to tell each other the secrets of their success, to make a great profession which is united in the use of the most efficient and intelligent means of achievement. And so, in profession after profes- sion-the most reticent, so far as I can see, being the legal profession-in profession after profession, men are getting together by way of cooperation instead of by way of mutual destruction.
I hold this to be a happy omen. I see the growth in America of this conception of solidarity, of the interest of each being the interest of all, and the interest of each grow- ing out of the interest of all.
There is one field in which we are particularly sluggards. in respect to this. I mean the relations between capital and labor. Nothing can be for the interest of capital that is not for the interest of labor, and nothing can be in the interest of labor which is not in the interest of capital. If men want to
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get rich, they must have human relationships with those who help them to get rich. That is a lesson that men have been exceedingly slow to learn-slower than any other lesson of cooperation in America. I pray God that their eyes may be opened and that they may see that the future of this country lies in their cooperation, open, candid and cordial, and not in their antagonism, and that if they will once get together and plan in the same spirit the same thing, the industry of Amer- ica will go forward by leaps and bounds such as we have never yet conceived.
Sometimes it is necessary, in order to arrest attention, to pull men up with a round turn and say, "Stop, look, listen," because presently, if you don't, the great forces of society will correct the things that have gone wrong. Society is the jury. The parties are not going to settle; the nation is going to settle, and I am counsel for the nation.
So, my fellow-citizens, you see how this little plant of the cause of the good roads spreads into a great tree, bearing upon its boughs the fruits of the savor of life. We have got to know each other; we have got to cooperate with each other; we have got to stand together; we have got to have the same conception of our life and destiny ; we have got to think the same thoughts and purpose the same purposes. That is all that politics is for. As a contest for office, it is contemptible, but as a combination of thoughtful men to accomplish some- thing for the nation, it is honorable. If I could not be as- sociated with a congress that did something, I would quit. If I did not think that making speeches contributed a little bit to the common thought, that had nothing to do with selfish purpose, but had everything to do with combined purpose, I would not make any speeches. Speeches are not interesting because of the man who makes them or the words he uses. They are interesting in proportion as the people who hear believe what he says.
I remember once, after a meeting in which a good many men who were more or less insurgent against society were gathered, a great, hard-fisted fellow came up to me and took my hand and said: "Well, sir, I didn't agree with a word you said, but I thought you meant it."
I said: "What do you mean? Do you mean that most of the men that come here do not mean what they say?"
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"Yes, sir," he said, "I mean just that; they talk through their hats."
Now talking through the hat ought to be a dead industry. It ought to be discouraged by silence and empty halls and every man ought to have as a motto over the stage from which he speaks these simple and familiar words, "Put up or shut up."
I am ready to take my own medicine. If I don't put up, I am ready to shut up. (Calls of "go ahead, you are all right.")
You know, we were talking about good roads and you are getting off the road. I want to leave a very solemn thought in your minds. America is about to experience her rebirth. We have been making America in pieces for the sake of the pieces. Now we have got to construct her entire for the sake of the whole and for the sake of the world; because, ladies and gentlemen, there is a task ahead of us for which we must be very soberly prepared. I have said and shall say again, that when the great present war is over, it will be the duty of America to join with the other nations of the world in some kind of a league for the maintenance of peace.
Now America was not a party to this war, and the only terms upon which we will be admitted to a league, almost all the other powerful members of which are engaged in the war and made infinite sacrifices when we apparently made none, are the only terms which we desire, namely, that America shall not stand for national aggression, but shall stand for the just conditions and bases of peace, for the competitions of merit alone and for the generous rivalry of liberty.
It is now up to us to say whether we are going to play in the world at large the role which the makers of this great nation boasted and predicted we should always play among the nations of the world. Are we ready always to be the friends of justice, of fairness, of liberty, of peace and of those accommodations which rest upon justice and peace? In these two trying years that have just gone by we have fore- borne; we have not allowed provocation to disturb our judg- ment. We have seen to it that America kept her poise when all the rest of the world seemed to have lost its poise. Only upon the terms of retaining that poise and using the splendid force which always comes with poise, can we hope to play the
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beneficent part in the history of the world which I have just now intimated.
So, my fellow countrymen, build up these new roads in the construction of which the federal government is now to play so large a part, in the spirit of nationality, the spirit of co- operation, the spirit of liberty, the power which only a free people know how to exercise.
Following the address at the Coliseum the President was taken to Tomlinson Hall where he delivered an address, upon the urgent request of the farmers of Indiana, on the Farmers' Loan and Credit Bank. He was greeted here by an audience which filled the hall to overflowing, and he was greeted with applause which lasted several minutes. From Tomlinson Hall the President went direct to the Union Station, leaving In- dianapolis at 5:45 p. m.
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