A YEAR AGO, at this time, four hundred and five men, women and children, along with millions of other Americans, were looking forward to summer's last big outing--the Labor Day weekend. Three days later, these 405 were dead.
They died in holiday traffic accidents just as similar accidents had taken 480 lives the year before, and 461 the year before that.
I have just been given a grim forecast. The experts say that, over this Labor Day weekend, before our people go back to work on Tuesday, 390 people will lose their lives in this needless way.
Do we have to let this happen? Have we reached the point where we are helpless in the face of a prediction that almost four hundred of us will kill ourselves or someone else over a weekend?
To everyone who gets behind a steering wheel during the Labor Day weekend I make this appeal:
Let's be careful this weekend. Let's stay alert. Let's remember the simple rules of the road. Let's fool the experts. Let's all be alive next Tuesday.
Note: This statement was released at Lowry Air Force Base, Denver, Colo.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Statement by the President on Highway Safety During the Labor Day Weekend. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/232586