196 TWENTY-SECOND ANNUAL YEAR BOOK— PART III 



Des Moines gives us through your words here this evening. I be- 

 lieve, gentleman, that this is the fourteenth annual gathering of the 

 Iowa Fair Managers in Des Moines. The men who came here on 

 this fourteenth event came with an anticipation greater than any they 

 had ever had before because they knew of the greater welcome and 

 hospitality that greeted them here. I again thank you Honorable 

 Mayor in behalf of our organization. 



This afternoon we were favored with a very excellent address by 

 Hon. H, C. Wallace, secretary of the United States Department of 

 Agriculture, and you will remember in that talk he mentioned the 

 necessity of the farm and the city working together. We have on 

 our program this evening a gentleman who represents an organiza- 

 tion here in this city that is doing that kind of work. They have not 

 been doing it long but I understand that they are getting along very 

 nicely. I am pleased to introduce to you Joseph F. Leopold of Des 

 Aloines, general secretary Iowa State Chamber of Commerce. 



Mr. Leopold: Mr. Toastmaster and Gentlemen: A fair is perhaps the 

 oldest gathering of human beings we have outside the family. It has been 

 said in the olden days when our ancestors crawled down from the trees 

 that the first thing we formed in the fashioning of things was the family 

 and by tracing back through all the history that lies extant upon the 

 Vv^ritten pages before us we find the earliest gatherings of mankind that 

 they might do business on the swap and buy and sell were done in central 

 fairs that were later termed as fairs themselves, where people met in a 

 great aisled place, and placed their wares before all who might come that 

 they might look and buy and learn what their neighbor had done and 

 then perhaps buy of something that had been made or produced, and that 

 old time institution has been brought down, down through the ages of some 

 five or six thousand or more years to the present time, and like other lines 

 of endeavor and co-operative movements has grown and grown, until we 

 see it in every county, in every district, in every community in "the United 

 States that possesses a group of citizens who have any vision or who are 

 thinking of the welfare of the people who live in that territory. It is not 

 primarily to benefit the men who are in these enterprises, but all who live 

 in Iowa, that we are most interested. 



We have been working for some years, those of us who live in towns, 

 wondering how we might build the cities, and we have made a very 

 grievous error, particularly those of us who have termed ourselves city 

 builders, because we have built some cities, built great market places and 

 great communities largely at the expense of the rural area, and without 

 going into any long detailed discussion we are admitting there is no denial, 

 we have only to look at the shifting population figures to realize there is 

 something doing along that line, and if a stop is not put to it that a grave 

 economic question will face us in the next twenty-five to fifty years. 

 There was a time in the history of this nation when approximately eighty- 



