The Charlotte News

Monday, January 3, 1938

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: TVA, the case in point cited for suggesting the converse of the argument that the New Deal was threatening the Southern textile industry built on cheap labor by seeking the institution of an undifferentiated national minimum wage scale, as set forth in "Speaking of Differentials", is a government run corporation operating in Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Alabama and Georgia, the bulk of it residing in Tennessee.

It began in 1933 as a means by which the government could coordinate control of flooding in the alluvial plain of the Tennessee River and its branches, through a system of dams and reservoirs, while at the same time improving navigation and, as a by-product, providing power at half the normal rates of private companies to rural customers who could otherwise not afford power or were simply too remote from urban populations and living in too sparsely populated areas for the supply to be had in the first instance from established utilities on any economic basis. The resulting out-migration of poorly educated populations to already overburdened urban areas was another complicating factor which called for its initiation.

The need had come about by the slow erosion during the 19th century of the soil in the valley from consistent deforestation to clear the land for agricultural production as the country steadily grew westward from the original colonies. With deforestation the former root system which absorbed rain water was no longer extant as a natural dam; thus run-off to the rivers over the denuded soil dramatically increased beyond the capacity of the river banks to hold it and flooding resulted, in turn depleting the land of natural minerals, causing crop failures, and finally dust-bowl conditions by the time of the Depression.

Enter TVA to form and coordinate the resulting salutary controls.

It worked with reasonable efficiency for decades and served its purpose well. By the end of the 1960's, it provided power to millions of individual homeowners and farms in the region, notoriously poor by national standards, at affordable rates. Its primary customer, however, was the government's Atomic Energy Commission at Oak Ridge, Tennessee as well as other nuclear power facilities in the valley run by the government.

With greater prosperity brought about eventually in the region from both the post-war boom times and subsequently the eradication of the worst poverty through programs initiated during the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson, a sort of second New Deal, with greater industrialization and standard of living generally in the country, and the long-term stabilization of the land which had precipitated the original need for it, its usefulness has been increasingly debated in recent years. The trend toward smaller government and cutting of government waste, as well as the steadily increasing environmental concerns since the 1970's regarding the wisdom of nuclear power plants has led to a considerable scaling back of operations of TVA in the past 15 years.

For all its criticism over time and faults over time, however, it has provided since its inception and for decades afterward a necessary government colossus which coordinated construction of power dams and fostered flood control in a manner which never could have been accomplished by simple market supply and demand through private utility companies with bottom lines to meet to please boards of directors beholding to stockholders. It stands as testament to the notion that private enterprise may only be allowed to trend so far when corrosive waste finally results systemically from unrestrained economic competition among individuals and companies.

Now, if we could only harness that notion globally to fight global warming for the next six decades. We shall, or likely in some areas be confronted by the middle of this century by a dust bowl which will make the 1930's appear as Eden. And from that new dust bowl and the consequent need and shifting of world markets in basic foodstuffs and clothing, etc., will likely come war on a global scale again--unless we act now, already thirty years and more delayed because of the naysayers who insist that it is the cry of chicken-little, as they ignore melting polar caps and the consequences inherent to our ecosystem as a result. But ask these naysayers one simple question: why is it that our Arctic polar cap has lost 20% of its area since 1979, and at an ever-increasing rate as time passes? Ask them to tell you the alternative explanation for the melting glaciers. Ask them to tell you and explain how our oceans will be able to absorb this rapidly melting ice in such a rapid meltdown--just as the same old big-business Republicans denied and ignored in the 1920's the same sorts of phenomena on a smaller scale in the farm belt, kept encouraging speculation until the bust finally came in October, 1929. Ask them this election year to explain it and in terms other than good ol' boy, aw-shucks talk.

Is it truly a natural occurrence, a trend brought on in 25 years which ought to take ten thousand years, one of slow transition to enable absorption and adjustment by our natural environment? Or do the Republican naysayers propose that we all here in North America become nomadic once again eventually and wander back over the Bering Straits to Asia? What is their solution? Bigger SUV's? Bigger trucks? And what of the oil depletion itself?

Wait a minute. Why should we bother our little heads over such giant and irreversible trends by the powers who know everything? Don't worry; be Happy! Big Business Republicans have the answer!

It's mawnin' in America! Go to the Revival, sing to Jesus and wave the Flag! We'll get our booty by warring on little countries on trumped up charges and notions of spreading democracy! That's it. Crusade! Hallelujah, pass the collection Plate! Free Silver a-gain! Hallelujah! The Man on the White Horse has arrived. Hallelujah! Let's go to Iraq! Praise the Lords a Leaping!

What's that? It ain't worth a tinker's dam? We're losing? The ice caps are still melting while we sit doing nothing about it? Well, you really are certainly a Pawty poopa.

The Japanese cabinet, according to the dispatches, has laid it down as a cardinal policy for 1938 that great care must be taken to maintain friendly relations with the United States. And the Japanese cabinet, you will recall, was so exercised lest the Panay impair friendly relations with the United States that it not only apologized over and over and abjectly, but even made bold to bring the responsible war lords to taw. Well, and why? Because Japan is generally filled up with kindness toward us? Probably not.

The Washington Merry-Go-Round, written by Drew Pearson and Bob Allen and appearing on our front page each day, probably gave the correct answer last week. According to it, the reason was that the Panay incident almost persuaded the United States and Britain to adopt the plan of blockading Japan at Singapore and the Panama Canal--a plan of blockade that the military experts agree would bring Japan to her knees within a few months, since she must have supplies that pass eastward through these two key points. Japan, in short, must maintain friendly relations with the United States if she is to have any hope of carrying her scheme of conquering China through.

The Tennessee Valley Authority has announced that unskilled workmen employed by it will hereafter be paid 47.5 cents an hour instead of 45--thus bringing the wage up to the general level paid in the valley. And Madam the Secretary of Labor, Francis Perkins, has stipulated the wages which, under the authority vested in her by the Walsh-Healy Act, must be paid to unskilled workers quarrying granite to be used in government contracts running to more than $10,000.

The curious thing about all this is that the wage which La Perkins has ordained for New York, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut is 57.5. That's ten cents more an hour, you'll observe, than the TVA is paying in the South. And more than that, the wage which Madam has ordained for unskilled dimension granite workers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Arkansas, and Texas--in the South--is only 32.5 cents an hour! Twenty-five cents an hour, or 43%, less than is paid in New England and New York, that is.

Maybe those Southerners who are excited by the fear that the New Deal plans to destroy the so-called Southern wage differential have ground for it. Nevertheless, it is to be observed that here are two principal New Dealers who, like the celebrated Messer Harry Hopkins in the WPA, are not only preserving the differential, but preserving it with a decided vengeance.

The absolute impartiality of Justice, before which all men come as equals, seems to be strangely missing in the preliminary stage of law enforcement. For instance, last week in the city there were two--what shall we call them; accidents, mischances, tragic occurrences?--which set the processes of the law in motion. A Negro driver ran over a small boy, injuring him grievously. There was, however, no indication of negligence on the driver's part except that he had no driving permit. He did not run away from the scene of the accident. Nevertheless, he was placed in jail, pending a report on the boy's condition. The hospital tells us this morning, we are glad to state, that the lad is coming along nicely.

At about the same time of this automobile accident, a Negro got rough with the driver of a taxicab, attacking him, according to the driver's account, with a flashlight. Whereupon the driver pulled his gun and shot at him. The Negro walked away and the driver went to police headquarters and reported the occurrence. And was he held either while the police investigated or "pending report on the Negro's condition?" He was not. It was not until the Negro died a week later that he was notified to appear and post bond.

In neither of these instances recounted, it will be noted, is there any intimation of culpability. The first appears to have been an accident, the second a case of self-defense. But the difference in treatment is striking. The Negro driver was placed in jail, the white taxi driver let to go his way without hindrance. We think there ought to be a rule which would apply regardless of color.

Site Ed. Note: Put another way, since the population at this time in the nation's history was about 130 million, of which about 55 million were available for employment, the unemployment rate based on the assumed 10.87 million figure was about 20%, substantially better than in 1933 when the New Deal took over from the laissez-faire Hoover debacle, with 16 million unemployed, a third of the available work force, but still astronomical by any standards acceptable since the end of World War II.

The report on the unemployment census, delivered by Administrator Biggers to President Roosevelt in time for the opening of Congress today, is remarkable in many ways. Most remarkable of all is that now, for the first time in more than eight years of acute unemployment, the country has some idea of the nature of the problem it must solve. There are 7,889,912 unemployed persons, both male and female, reportedly able and willing to work; and cross-sectional tests made to check the accuracy of the voluntary census show that there are about 3,000,000 more who did not step up to be counted. To this theoretical sum total of 10,870,000 unemployed at the time the census was taken, between November 16 and 20, must be added others who have lost their jobs in the recession that has come on since.

Some 2,000,000 persons, included in the figures foregoing, are on WPA, NYA and CCC, at a cost to the Federal Government of about $1,800,000,000 annually. Hence, if made work were to be provided for all the unemployed, the bill would come, roughly, to ten billions a year, which would be almost 20 per cent of the 1937 estimated national income, and itself alone would exceed the Federal Government's total annual revenue by three and a half billions, without regard to other vital expenditures for military purposes, interest on the public debt, subsidies of various kinds and administrative overhead.

From which it is plain, we believe, if facts are to be faced without blinking, that any Federal unemployment relief program can be no more than a sop to reality under our present economy, and that private business, far from showing any capacity to absorb these unemployed millions, is at the moment exhibiting an incapacity to hold its own.

Site Ed. Note: This piece was not the first, nor would it be the last, in which Cash would make reference to the Greeks of Homer and the other mythologists and mithridatists of the pre-Christian world. He would often plant the figures both playfully, as with "Penelope", December 28, 1939, and "In Ecstasy: Hymn Done in Imitation of the Dithyrambic Manner", November 18, 1940, and, by metaphor, in a serious vein, as with the pointed reference to the British ship, Ajax, in the shortly preceding "Sea Fight", November 14, 1940, or as in the ironic "Odyssey", December 13, 1939, re the circuitous "escape" of the German ship Bremen from waylaying American suspicions of espionage, or yet again in "Goliath", December 27, 1939, relating, by various such analogies, the invasion by the Soviet Union against the outnumbered but bravely contesting Finnish.

Anyone so bold and fearlessly individualistic as Odysseus or Jason, however, seeking to place through these devices consistent connections of some Freudian variety, a subliminalized, congruent code, if you will, of coordinates on a plane, to afford straight-line understanding by the use of these figures across the various pieces employing them, would find the sailing not only rough, but ultimately a consummate shatter on the rocks. It does not exist in that way, we venture--at least insofar as it exceeds only a literary custom for each piece unto itself, a consistency in that mode to afford the reader of each piece human perspective on the aggressive fight-or-flight instinct, the realization of the timelessness of man's inherent tendency to find glory in cause and sword wielded against the goat to vindicate the perceived individual or collective wrong, to gain, as by-product of the glory, booty for the captains of commerce, a complex common to man through the mirror of time and place back to the present--not to excuse it or necessarily to judge it, though judgment would be cast in other pieces in the face of contemporaneous outrages to this end, both at home and abroad, but rather on the whole to understand this human endeavor, the benevolent and the heinous, the reasoned art of contemplation juxtaposed in contrast to the emotive disregard of rationality to wit's end, the unwaveringly truculent and the perseveringly compassionate, so as hopefully, manfully, bravely, individualistically, to ameliorate and civilize its worst attributes, the residual barbarian traits. And in that, so that such retrograde characteristics inherent in the gene trails of each and every human being would not ultimately conquer the likewise inherently genteel and once again be considered by the common horde, their foisting generals, and their promotive, ends-justifying captains of commerce, to be necessary rites of passage, to protect the gate to insure the keep against the ever-invasive, plotting enemy, always stationed in stealth just the other side of the moat.

The Scaean gate, they are saying now, has been found--by an archeological expedition from our own Cincinnati University. Fifty years ago, old Heinrich Schliemann unearthed four successive cities at Hissarlik in the Troas and one of these he was sure was the site of the "topless-towered Ilium" of Homer and Virgil and Kit Marlowe, as he was sure that certain huge bones he found were those of great Agamemnon. He was wrong, but they have uncovered nine cities there now, and one of these, the sixth, is certainly the Troy of old Anaeas, actually destroyed, according to sober archeological testimony, by a Greek expedition somewhere about 1184 B.C. But down to the present there had been doubts that the Scaean gate ever really existed. But there it stands revealed at last, only a great gaping hole now.

The Scaean gate! How deathless its name rolls through the poetry of the world. Here was the post of Helen of the Fair Hair as she gazed upon the thousand ships come to fetch her home. There on the plain under its shadow, the sun was a blinding red glory on brazen helmets surmounted with crests of horse-hair. There brazen spear thundered on brazen shield. There fought mighty Agamemnon and Menlaus, he of the antlers, and Old Nestor and wily Odysseus. Out of it came Hector of the Glancing Helm to encounter avenging Achilles, done at last with sulking among the black ships. There Aphrodite of the Foam and the goddess of the white arms contended in the clouds over the plain for their champions, and there at last Aphrodite lost and Hector fell "and his armor clanged upon him." And there at last, too, as the legend has it, deep death fell upon the sight of swift-footed Achilles himself, and after him, upon Ajax, fleeing headlong from the shame of his madness in the sheepfold and the cattle-pen.