The Charlotte News
Sunday, July 3, 1938
FOUR EDITORIALS
Site Ed. Note: "Germany as a Business" provides us a synopsis of Dave Clark's assay of the comparison between Hitler and Roosevelt. Dave had a rather interesting response in his Textile Bulletin of July 14. We have it, but will provide it for you later, when we get over our redness regarding its pure blue and white content. It was something to the effect that the editor of The News had become inspired by Communists while at the University of North Carolina, and also maintained on the staff an editorialist with plain Communist-leanings (though apparently acquired at that Communist stronghold, Wake Forest).
Dave's magazine was a progressive, forward-peering bastion of published bliss-fits over the cotton and textile industry, with time out for occasional perspicacious, post-modern political editorials from its editor.
In an issue from 1933, for instance, we discover in an ad that one mill sells "colored yarn", that being displayed beneath the floured white-face of a young African-American boy.
Then there was the December, 1938 editorial in which Dave branded the whole University of North Carolina as Communist-leaning, most especially Frank Porter Graham. The reason for the charge, at least immediately, seemed to be that the Commie law school student body had just registered a 70% vote in favor of integrating the Red-inspired law school.
Funny thing about all of that: should we have closed our eyes in 1972, and just listened a bit, we would have thought we had heard old Dave's echo on the airwaves all over again, only from an individual running for the Senate--one who proceeded to get re-elected over and over and over and over again. And essentially on the same progressive, forward peering platform, branding this group or that Communist, and insuring that race had a very definite place in both American life and law, as well as that of the State of North Carolina, a state which existed for a time seemingly largely outside American life and law during this Senator's tenure, to everyone's great and lasting and progressive benefit.
So Dave was very inspirational.
Here also the final installment on the ongoing battle up at Gettysburg.
For the Files
Mainly to have a handy record to refer to, let it be set down that the Federal Government ran up in the fiscal year just closed a deficit of--well, you may take your choice of two figures. If you count in debt retirement, the deficit was $1,574,713,050. If you count out debt retirement--and what are a few millions between friends?--the deficit was $1,459,000,000 and something.
It is interesting to go back and look up the President's serial estimates of what the deficit for this year would be. In his message to Congress of April 20, 1937, he guessed $418,000,000. On October 18, 1937, he estimated that it would be $695,000,000. On January 5, 1938, his revised estimate was $1,066,000,000. After that, he quit saying anything about it, and perhaps it was just as well. The deficit was gaining on him anyhow.
Break for the Taxpayers
To birth control, primarily, Superintendent Harry Harding attributes the fact that fewer children are entering school these days. In 1933-34, for example, there were 6,640 first-, second- and third-graders. In 1937-38, there were 5,997. In 1933-34, 2,551 tykes picked up their light little satchels and started off bravely to see what school was like. Last year there were only 2,063 who took this fateful step.
But Superintendent Harding is convinced that the fad of only wanted children will pass and that in the years to come large families will be the rule again. Well, maybe so. And the meantime, if birth control is actually in general practice, will be a good time for the South to catch up with itself. For the South, on account of its prolific tendencies, has the largest number of children to educate and the least well out of which to pay for education. And this has made it uncommonly hard not only on the taxpayers but on the children as well. In fact, we believe it would be better all around if the South were to put emphasis on quality, both of children and education, instead of quantity, for a change.
The Great Mountain
More than five and a half miles up--29,141 feet--towers the unconquered mountain which we call Everest, after the British scientists who first computed its height in 1841, and which the Tibetans call Chomo-lungma. Situated almost on the intersection of the meridian 67 E. longitudinal with the parallel 28 N. latitude, it is the last outpost of our globe--the last out-thrusting of the earth towards that immensity in which the planets and the stars and the suns have their fantastic being. For many millions of years it has stood there, a vast, mysterious white shadow floating over the land called Nepal, held sacred by the little men at its feet, sighted remotely by caravans making their perilous way across the Roof of the World. But, and though many men have tried, no human foot has ever pressed its summit.
Men have flown over it in recent years, however, and photographed it. And there is not much more excuse for the claim of the climbers that they want to scale it for the sake of science. But the attempts will go on just the same. For science never did have much to do with it, really. What is wanted is the dizzy thrill of standing--of being the first to stand--on the topmost spire of our appointed home, with only the mighty void beyond.
Site Ed. Note: And we should be remiss were we not to point out, for those less inclined than ourselves to the collection of arcaniana, that a colour film, dedicated to the memory of Elias Howe, released July 29, 1965, featuring a prominent musical quartet of the time, had as its working title before release, "Everest". (Actually, on second thought, no; our eggs are a bit scrambled; it was that final fall, 1969 album which bore that working title. Nevertheless, golden slumbers knit up the raveled sleeve of care, while silver hammers in the gin eliminate the bolls and keep the vigilant heart on pins and needles--or something like that. Anyway, while we are correcting things, we shall also correct this: it was the August, 1941 National Geographic, not the September, 1940 issue, which had this quote: "Little winged policemen [the parasitic fly and the digger wasp] from the Orient Kill Myriads of Japanese Beetles". The September, 1940 issue had, however, a nice tour of Mexico, and Gibraltar. It's not always easy.)
And, while about it, the quote to which we earlier referred you from Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts is, in part:
The King is in his counting house,
Counting out his money,
The Queen is in her parlour . . ."
All in a hard day's night of work.
White cliffs of Dover?
...Then there is."
Germany as a Business
Dave Clark, in the current issue of his Textile Bulletin, writes himself an editorial entitled "Hitler vs. Roosevelt"--and pretty frankly concludes that Adolf has the best of the comparison.
The operating deficit of the United States since 1930, says Dave, is $20,000,000,000, whereas that of Germany for the same period is only $1,300,000,000. Moreover,
"The unemployed in the United States are now estimated at 11,500,000, or slightly more than when Roosevelt began to spend immense funds as a sure cure for unemployment."
But in Germany--in Germany, according to a recent report, the unemployed number only 338,000, of whom only 37,000 are regarded as employable. Wherefore, concludes Dave:
"We have built up a deficit of $20,000,000,000 and taught our people that the Government owes them a living.
"Germany has spent $1,500,000,000 and finds so little unemployment and such a scarcity of workers that it is forced to make a law under which it can draft labor and force the idle to work.
"We may curse Hitler for some of the things he has done but it is embarrassing to compare progress in Germany under Hitler and Goering with progress in the United States under Roosevelt, Corcoran and Cohen."
As simple as that, you see. And yet--it occurs to us that Dave, in his zeal against the New Deal, is making it a little too simple, and that it is possible that swapping Franklin off for Adolf wouldn't be quite the bargain he appears to think. Not even for Dave.
To begin with, it is about as certain as anything can be on this precarious planet that the Nazi deficit is not in fact any mere bagatelle of a billion and a half smackers. That is only what the Nazi Government says and, like most things that government says, it has neither proof nor probability to back it up. There has been some complaint in our own country about the "juggling" of income and expenditure figures by the New Deal. But at least, we get statements with all the figures there. In Germany they don't. The German Government, alone among the great governments of the world, makes no reports on its receipts and spending, and refuses to divulge any information about them.
What the German deficit may be nobody but a few Nazi officials know. But every competent observer in the world is sure that it is a great deal bigger than the official figure. But still, it is probably smaller than that of the United States, at that? Let's say so, anyhow. And let's say, too, that Dave is approximately right in his second point. The number of jobless in the United States is probably not so great as 11,500,000, and Nazi figures about employment mean nothing. But the new law of July 1, under which every subject of the country becomes liable to forced labor, seems to indicate that unemployment in Germany has pretty well got rid of.
It is instructive to inquire how and at what price these things have been accomplished. Here are some of the ways:
1--Increasing the German army tenfold--fiftyfold on the basis of the two-year universal military service and reserves.
2--Placing all arms and war-equipment factories, all factories which feed them, shipyards, etc., on a basis of war-time production, and building many more such units to be placed on that production basis.
3--Organizing the jobless young men not in active military service into forced labor battalions for the service of the army and the Nazi state.
4--Removing women from industry and forcing them to enter labor camps or become domestic servants or farm laborers for their keep.
5--Turning the Jewish population out of their jobs, organizing them into latrine squads, etc., and forcing some 150,000 of them to leave the country.
That is, unemployment has been got rid of by turning the German land into a vast military training camp and a vast establishment for the production of goods fit for nothing but to kill. By that and the practice of barbarous persecutions.
If all this has been done without piling up a deficit as great as that of the United States, why, then, it has been done by taking it out of the hides of the people.
Hours of industrial labor have been lengthened. The standard work week is now 60 hours, with overtime pay totally abolished.
Wages have been lowered. A weaver in a German cotton mill makes $8.74 for his 60 hours. But $1.92 of that is deducted for social security, and so his net wage is $6.82.
But even that net wage is only nominal. For each worker pays a head tax of 30 cents a week. And--income taxes begin with wages of $225 a year, the basic levy being 10 per cent. Take $1.17 from $6.82, and you get $5.65. But not even that is the real wage of the German weaver. Other taxes absorb about one-fifth of what remains.
Ah, but living costs are ridiculously low? Like heck they are! A pound of butter in Germany costs 60 cents, the cost of meat to 80, a dozen eggs 50, and all these commodities are strictly rationed for the benefit of the army. Rationed, too, is the kind of bread you can eat. The German poor, indeed, are living almost entirely on ersatz foods, that is sympathetic substitute products which have the merit of filling a hungry belly but which have little more real food value than so much sawdust.
But it is not only labor's hide out of which the German government has been taking the price of its accomplishments. It is also the farmer's. The peasant in Germany plants what he is told to plant. He cultivates what he is told to cultivate. He harvests what he is told. He hands it over to the government at what price he is told to take. More, he can't sell his land without permission and can't mortgage it. Worse yet, if he fails to produce the quota assigned him by government officials as what his land ought to produce, he is adjudged unfit to own land and must sell it to another at the price the government fixes.
Maybe, though, Dave wouldn't mind all that. If not, there's more to come.
It isn't only labor and the peasants who pay the price of Adolf's game. It is also capital. A committee for the particular industry to which he belongs--a committee appointed by the government and carefully controlled by it tells a mill owner in Germany what and how much he must make. It tells him what he shall charge for it, too. And if that leaves him without profit--with a loss? If he wants to shut down to head off ruin for himself? He can't, without permission from the Nazi government. He can't sell it without that permission, either, or mortgage it. He can't hire or fire anybody without government permission, and if the government sends him a batch of new laborers he has to keep them and pay the standard fixed wage whether he thinks he needs them or not. More, if the government officials don't like the way he runs his business, they can force him to change to another way. Indeed, they can, and sometimes do, remove him as active manager and replace him with a man of their own choice. But, anyhow, he does profit by the longer hours and the cheapened labor? He doesn't. The Nazi government levies on him for what it judges to be the excess profit represented by these changes.
More still, a recent decree provides for direct and absolute control or ownership by government, whenever the Nazis adjudge it desirable. On our desk as we write lies an Associated Press dispatch from Vienna on June 29:
The bulk of Austria's privately-owned electrical, steel, and automobile industries passed into the government's hands today to be incorporated in the new state-owned Hermann Goering Steel Works.
What that means can better be grasped by imagining it turned into American terms, like this for instance:
"The bulk of the South's privately owned cotton and hosiery mills passed into the government's hands today to be incorporated into the new state-owned Tommy Corcoran Textile Works."
We betcha Dave wouldn't like that.
Framed Edition
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