29th President Warren G. Harding “Second Annual Message” (State of the Union) December 8, 1922
It would be folly to ignore that we live in a motor age. The motor car reflects our standard of living and gauges the speed of our present-day life. It long ago ran down Simple Living, and never halted to inquire about the prostrate figure which fell as its victim. With full recognition of motor-car transportation we must turn it to the most practical use. It can not supersede the railway lines, no matter how generously we afford it highways out of the Public Treasury. If freight traffic by motor were charged with its proper and proportionate share of highway construction, we should find much of it wasteful and more costly than like service by rail. Yet we have paralleled the railways, a most natural line of construction, and thereby taken away from the agency of expected service much of its profitable traffic, which the taxpayers have been providing the highways, whose cost of maintenance is not yet realized.
The Federal Government has a right to inquire into the wisdom of this policy, because the National Treasury is contributing largely to this highway construction. Costly highways ought to be made to serve as feeders rather than competitors of the railroads, and the motor truck should become a coordinate factor in our great distributing system.
Source: The American Presidency Project Warren G. Harding: “Second Annual Message,” December 8, 1922. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29563
President Warren G. Harding died on August 2, 1923. Read his obituary from the New York Times. Calvin Coolidge became the 30th President. He was given the oath of office by his father in Plymouth Notch, Vt at 2:30 am on August 3, 1923.
Read more about Harding and Coolidge in Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents
Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents (2012)
(From Hyperion and Random House Audio)
