Sunday, March 27, 1938

FOUR EDITORIALS

But moreover, we see no reason to pick on this poor woman and her make-up line. Everyone has to earn a living after all. The make-up lady in question, for instance, does exhibit, so far as we can tell, a great knack for culling some rudimentary knowledge and developing a name for having wealth and taste and then applying that name to anything which anyone would like as long as they are willing and ready to fork over the money to the lady to buy her name. A hundred years ago they called that hucksterism. But these days we call it sophisticated. So that is quite alright and grand.

Well, that being said, we think it better that this letter writer look around her own house and leave the make-up lady out of it. PVC pipes have been in use for years in the building industry, since at least the mid-sixties, and while generally they are not used in place of copper for potable water supplies in the home, we have seen it so substituted in rural homes or vacation homes where building codes are not as strictly regulated or don't exist at all. We have also seen it in business establishments as well. And we have even seen water companies using it in the water supplies from the street line to the structure. But that all gets covered with dirt and so what we worry.

Nevertheless, the lady letter-writer may have a general point, and if so, we best not be drinking from these plastic pipes, even though they might well be feeding your hot tub, your swimming pool, and almost definitely your lawn sprinklers, assuming they have been installed in the last 25 years or so. But the lawn water just percolates down into the water table where we no longer see it, so what we worry.

But the make-up lady will keep doing what she is doing anyway because of her many talents. So let's leave her to just do it and worry more about the pipes in our homes and businesses.

Then again, as we long ago decided, the industrial age itself is carcinogenic, which is not to say cynically that there is nothing we can do to make it better. For our part, we shall just dig us a well here utilizing some fancy, modern carbon monoxide producing well-digging equipment and taste some of that lovely pure country ground water which has been running from the chemical plants along our rivers for the last 90 years or so. Plenty of mercury makes us into mercurial messengers after all. Or, maybe less cumbersome, we shall just career on down to the market and get us some of that pure mountain spring bottled water, yum-yum, completely purified of all chemicals, as it tells us plainly on the label stuck on the outside of the bottle made of PVC.

But what we worry. We spend lots and lots of money to protect our water supplies--from them dad-blasted furin terrorists.

Last Summer, during the lull of the sultry months, we played a little game of Silly Season, wherein, from time to time, we recounted the fool things that people did and said. Since then, horror and treachery has smitten so heavily that lighheartedness has been hard to summons.

Still, there is a wry note of comedy out of Europe.

Germany has been consolidated by a man who succeeded where Charlemagne, all the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, Metternich, Bismarck and Wilhelm II failed.

The man who succeeded in doing this did so under a "brush" name, the name he signed to his work as a home and sign painter and aspiring architect. Doubtless the name can be found in the lower right hand corner of many a work of advertising and domestic art. The name is Hitler.

But the fellow's real name is Adolf Schickelgruber. It wasn't good enough for a house painter, but it is just right for declaring the Silly Season officially re-opened.

President Lazaro Cardenas of Mexico assures his people that there is no danger of armed intervention by the United States and Great Britain in behalf of the oil companies whose properties he expropriated last week and goes on:

"We're not going to refuse to pay for what is expropriated. We are acting on a high legal, and moral plane in order to make our country great and respected. We must recognize her promises and obligations.... We must organize in order to start immediately the indemnification for what is expropriated. It would not be just that we leave this debt to future generations..."

Well, certainly Senor Cardenas is right in that first assurance. Armed intervention in Mexico in behalf of the oil companies is about the last thing current opinion in the United States is likely to support. For rightly or wrongly, the idea is very generally held among us that there was a good deal of skullduggery practiced in the acquisition of these properties in the first place.

And, if indeed the companies are to be indemnified on a reasonable basis, there will be no legal ground for protest. For Mexico is a sovereign nation, and as such nobody can deny her right to the exercise of eminent domain. In short, everything seems to be nice and fair--except for one little thing. Despite President Cardenas' brave assurances, those familiar with Mexican finances say that the Mexican government can't possibly pay for these properties now--they will have to have at least ten years to do it. And that seems a pretty long time to wait around for the purchase price when you didn't want to sell in the first place.

What is this Tar Heel Senator, Josiah William Bailey, like, anyhow? Is he, as his more virulent opponents charge, a reactionary and a Tory? Or, as he himself claims, a liberal of a sort? Is his course in the Senate dictated, as those opponents charge, by mere opportunism? Or does it add up to something intelligible and consistent?

Well, the Senator made a speech Friday before the American Academy of Political Science in New York. He called it, "Essentials to Permanent Recovery." But he might as well have called it "What I Believe," for it was an extended exposition of the grounds on which he has acted. And on the basis of that speech, it can be said at once that the Senator isn't a reactionary or a Tory--by any definition which has ever held before now, anyhow. On the contrary he is a liberal of a sort--of the only sort that existed in the Nineteenth century and right on down until after the Great War. He takes his political philosophy from Jefferson and John Stuart Mill, his economic philosophy from Adam Smith. He believes first of all in the individual. The only good political system, he holds, is one in which the right of the individual is the first consideration--one which imposes the community will upon him only so far as is absolutely necessary to civil order and the general welfare. And such a political system he thinks, can exist only in connection with an economic system of free capitalistic enterprise--a system whereunder every man is to save to invest his savings in new undertakings to the end of improving his lot, as far as is humanly possible in society, to be entirely responsible for himself. More--he believes that you can't compromise with it much: that the only alternative is the totalitarian state: that a Planned Economy inevitably requires an authoritarian political system.

Such temporary measures as President Roosevelt's saving of the banks, the refinancing of farm and home mortgages, forcing down of interest and power rates and relief of the hungry: policies like Secretary Hull's attempt to break down foreign trade barriers and such police measures as those of the SEC--all these Bailey says he commends and has supported because none of them is in conflict with the essential American system. But the capital gains tax, the excess profits tax, the increasingly unbalanced budget, the proposal for several TVA's, the farm bill--every one of these he says points straight toward totalitarianism. They are, he maintains, rapidly destroying the system of capitalistic free enterprise by making the people afraid to invest their savings in new undertakings. It is that fear exactly, he argues, that explains the "Roosevelt depression," which began last fall and which is still with us. To avoid plunging into ruin and ultimate totalitarianism, confidence must be restored by balancing the budget, by cutting out taxes unjust to business, and by calling a halt to government competition with private enterprise.

That is what the Senator believes and argues. The argument may or may not be valid. But, in any case, it clearly does add up to something logical and all of a piece.

All-steel pre-fabricated houses that workmen erect in a week, five rooms and bath in a steel frame faced with plywood, steel lathing, wood flooring, and composition roofing, ready for occupancy in less than a fortnight: pre-cut lumber for frame houses that brings the cost of labor down from 65 per cent of the whole to 35 per cent--these are some of the developments in the backward housing-for-America industry that may be, in all likelihood, the first stages of mass production in that field.

There are millions of indecently or inadequately housed people to testify to the need of it. Of all the physical trappings of our industrial civilization, the third essential of them all--a place to live--has received perhaps the scantiest attention of our entrepreneurs. Goods and services of all the kinds that the ingenuity of man can contrive are displayed within tempting reach of our tastes and our pocketbooks--everything comes in cans of cellophane or tied with colored ribbon--mechanical servants hasten quietly to do our bidding; the air is full of voices and the whole energy of an energetic population is bent on selling comfort, luxury, convenience, amusement to one another. And the third essential of them all--a place to live--is still tediously and expensively hand-wrought

Something to eat, something to wear, something to do--take your choice of a thousand and one varieties, ready-made, at your service, in package form. But a place to live? Well, we'll have to see about that.