The Charlotte News

Tuesday, December 6, 1938

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Average cost of a bomb, $45. Those were the days, 'ey? No wonder warfare sometimes, in some countries, presented itself as a means of bolstering employment and profits in war industries and thus a sluggish economy.

And the Magic Pill to cure pellagra? Nicotine acid. We think we'll stick to eggs and milk, maybe. (As we've indicated before, about the only thing for which we've ever witnessed that Nicotine to be useful, when wetted to leach it, is the neutralization of the sting of a bee; but then, maybe that's instead the Tars.)

For more on Roosevelt's visit to Chapel Hill, see the frontpage story from this date's News.

About the only three things that Frank Graham left out in his citation of the President for his Doctor of Laws degree yesterday were--well, two of them were the Reorganization Bill and the Supreme Court Bill. Otherwise Frank endorsed the whole works, done and yet to be done, leading off with Federal subsidies to the states for education and continuing with PWA and WPA; the Wage & Hour Act; the elastic dollar; soil conservation; TVA; AAA; the Wagner Labor Relations Act; Social Security, including the inchoate health programs; and the income tax.

Frank didn't, we say, specifically laud the Reorganization Bill and the Supreme Court Bill and one other definitive feature of the New Deal. That is the six successive whopping deficits.

That Man From Mars broadcast that set a supposedly adult nation on its ear has finally been disposed of by the Federal Communications Commission. Though for days a furor raged over the astounding effect of the skit and what measures FCC should take because of it, the ultimate decision is notable for its restraint and sensibility:

In fine, this authority resisted the impulse to promulgate an ironclad rule attempting to anticipate every possible contingency and which would have remained on the books to cramp the originality of broadcasting long after the grotesque Martian scare had been lived down.

Doctors and almost everybody else have known for years that the dreadful thing called pellagra is a disease of poverty, not of microbes. It comes from a diet of white flour, polished rice, corn meal, salt pork and molasses. It deranges the mind, covers the neck, elbows and hands with rough scales. The tongue swells and the mouth is fiery red.

But the mind brightens, the scales drop off, the patient is cured when converted heroically to a diet of eggs, lean meat, milk and yeast. And so the cure is known--has been known--without much hope, for the shotgun houses, the shanties of the sharecroppers, and the log huts of the hillbillies, who can't afford this proper, nourishing food?

Pure science brings the answer, one of the most important, we think, that has been offered in all the discussion and probing of the patient known as Economic Problem No. 1, where our most awful disease, even, is essentially a matter of economics. We read the answer in Collier's for next week, in an article by J. D. Ratcliff called "Magic Pill," and we read in it as strange and as a exciting story as Paul De Krief ever set down in his notable battles of bugs versus man.

The work was begun by Dr. Joseph Goldberger, an East Side Jew, who died in 1929. He proved the diet theory. It was carried on by Tom Douglas Spies of Cleveland and Conrad Arnold Floehjem, a Norse-American. And in the end, all their work depended upon a curious little chemical formula, no more than a useless novelty to the Japanese chemist who discovered it.

Mr. Ratcliff tells how Nicotine acid does the work of eggs and milk, lean meat and yeast. Miraculously, within a few hours after it is administered, the pellagra patient perks up, begins to eat--and there are instances in which dying men have been snatched back from the very brink by the new little magic pill.

This is a wonderful thing and means, surely, that in a comparatively short time the South will have rid itself of its most appalling disease, even when we can't afford eggs and milk for every field hand. But there is even greater significance in the story.

To those whose objection to every move for bettering a lot of the poorer people of the Southeastern region of the United States is that nothing can be done (well, about slums, sharecroppers and maternity death rates, for instance) because there isn't enough money to go around, because these people can't afford good food, good rents, good farm lands, good doctors, to these objections the reply is: all right, forget about the money for a moment. Try pills.

The City Council, we see by the papers, has decided to postpone a decision on the establishment of a Housing Authority--"perhaps indefinitely." They did not, it appears, think it advisable to act until they "obtain more information." What this "more information" may be we can't for the life us imagine. Is it the terms on which they may establish such an authority? The North Carolina law on the subject has been in existence for three years. Is it the terms on which the Federal Government is prepared to make a grant? That information has been so frequently set forth in newspapers and elsewhere that even the small boys on the streets can give it to you. There remains but one other thing--

The hearings in this question were called, according to advertisement published by the Council, to determine (1) Whether insanitary or unsafe inhabited dwelling accommodations exist in the City of Charlotte, and--or (2) Whether there is a lack of safe or sanitary dwelling accommodations in the City of Charlotte available for all the inhabitants thereof.

Well, and does the Council need to tell us that it doesn't know the answer to these questions, that it must have "more information" before it can decide them? Didn't the Council read the report of the Mayor's Committee published Oct. 10? Hasn't the Council ever walked along South Church Street or Brevard? Or through Skeeter Hollow or Black Bottom or the maze of streets that debouch from West Trade out beyond the railroad tracks? "More information," indeed! As a matter of fact, not even the real estate men themselves contend that "more information" is needed to prove that we do have great areas of slums and that low-cost housing in the city is at present inadequate.

But the head of the real estate board did say today that "he thought private enterprise here might provide sufficient low-cost housing to meet the municipality's requirements if the proposal to create a housing authority were limited. He explained that the 'fear of subsidized competition' has been one influence against construction here of such housing facilities."

All right, but just how probable is that? The Mayor's Committee reported on Oct. 10:

There hasn't, in fact, been any considerable construction of that sort in ten years. And certainly most of that cannot be charged up to "the fear of subsidized competition," for down until February 1937, the question had never been so much as whispered in the city. We have low-cost housing all right, but it is slum housing for the main part. And if there is now any proposal on the part of anybody to give the people presently living in the slums better accommodations for the money they are now paying, we haven't heard of it.

But suppose that private capital does stand ready to go into the building of decent low-cost housing? Why is that an objection to establishing a Housing Authority? Under the North Carolina law, such an authority does not have to accept Federal grants at all, but may undertake a systematic slum clearance program in conjunction with private capital. And the main restriction imposed is simply this--that rents must not represent exorbitant profits on the investment.

The cost of an explosive bomb, the kind that modern airplanes use as calling cards, is probably somewhere between $20 and $75. Estimates asked of our associates vary according to their distaste for the things. As a guess, let us agree on $45.

Last week five Spanish Insurgent planes flew over Valencia and dropped about a hundred bombs, wounding three civilians and incidentally popping a British ship, but never mind that. The time has passed when you have to mind popping a British ship. At $35, the bill for this little strafing expedition, not counting gas and oil and pilots pay and depreciation, would have come to about $3,500 or $1,100 per minor casualty, allowing the $200 left over for the British ship. And $1,100 per casualty is frightfully expensive. Indeed, we are in grim earnest when we say that no nation in the world, regardless of its humanitarian instincts, can afford these modern wars. Something--and now we are sardonic again--will have to be done to bring the cost of war down within the reach of the peoples.