The Charlotte News

Friday, May 20, 1938

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Cash, as usual, was probably dead-on right when he suggested that there were disgruntled "McDonaldites" in the Democratic ranks who, while voicing uniform support for the New Deal, 'neath it wore subtler future intentions.

Well, time for some more g-r-r-r-eat hamburgers...

South Carolina's Senator Byrnes paid a call at the White House yesterday, and came away full of hope and good cheer. He'd gone to ask the President to order that one of the new light cruisers--sleek things of about 7,500 tons each--be built at the navy yard in Charleston, and the President had said that he would be glad to if Congress appropriated the money to build ships it has already authorized to be built.

And a good part of Congress, from Vice-President Garner down, is under obligation to Charleston. Last month a whole special-trainload of Congressmen, their wives, and executives officers of the Government were Charleston's guests at the Azalea Festival. Mr. Garner got kissed by a pretty girl, remember, and jumped up in the air and cracked his heels together. Even Bert Snell, the Republican from Potsdam, N. Y., was made a lion of the occasion, while high-ranking navy officers were showered with attention.

The building of a cruiser would put an average of 900 men to work for more than three years. Employment opportunities look bright in Charleston.

Less than a month ago workers at the Kendall Co.'s mill in Camden, S. C., utilized the change in shifts to hold a little speech-making and express their high regard for Mr. Harry P. Kendall, head of a chain of mills, who happened to be in Camden at the time. With mills closing all around, Kendall Mill employees had a good reason to be thankful that their company made surgical supplies and gauze for a specialized trade and were independent of market conditions generally.

But this week in Newberry, another Kendall mill closed up on account of labor trouble. As the TWOC administrator for the Carolinas explained,

Disabuse your mind of any pro or con labor prejudices for a moment, and ignore the stretchout charge, which, on the word of the commission that went into the textile work load after that 1934 strike, can be ignored for all practical purposes as self-corrective. And you have left a genuine clash of interests which we probably won't be able to reconcile in this article.

It's bad, of course, for men to lose their jobs because a mill has put in new and more efficient machinery. It's terribly tragic to them and their families, especially at this juncture when jobs are hard to find. But the mill--the mill has to strive for the greatest efficiency possible in order to meet competition and stay in business. Mills in New England could tell you about that. Regardless of any wage differential between that section and the South, they couldn't meet bang-up Southern competition with machinery 30, 40 and 50 years old, any more than Southern mills which became outmoded could meet the competition of their new neighbors.

And the first responsibility of a mill, both to its employees and its stockholders, is to stay modernized, to be able to run without going into the red when all around inefficient mills are closing down or simply bumping along. It's an unanswerable argument; and if the TWOC doesn't see it, a unionized South may go through the same travails that brought New England to its knees and to NRA, which enabled them to operate again for a while. But it's an argument that won't cut much ice with superfluous employees such as those fourteen in Newberry who are said to have lost their jobs because those jobs no longer existed.

That was, you will observe by the stories, a very smooth convention the Democrats held in Raleigh yesterday. They met, cooing. Congressman Lindsey Warren, who they say is slated for the fat job of Comptroller General of the United States, got up and made a speech, the sort of speech he was expected to make. He said the Democratic Party was a swell party, indeed. He said the New Deal was a swell deal, indeed. He said that the President of the United States was a g-r-r-r-eat leader. He said that the Governor of North Carolina was a g-r-r-r-eat leader. And they cheered all that wildly. Bob Reynolds was there, and he cheered it. And Frank Hancock was there, and he cheered it.

Darn it, wasn't there a single economic royalist in the whole pack of them, a single anti-New Dealer hot under the collar against the whole Washington administration and all its works? Wasn't there a single McDonaldite there, with the wounds of the last election still festering within him? We tell you confidently, messires, that there were such men there, despite a good deal of effort to keep them out. If you had sat around hotels in the evening when employees let down their back hair, you might have heard them mumbling bitterly over the communal jug.

But, ah, masters, every man there, whatever else he was, was a politician. And this is an election year...

Benito Mussolini's newspapers are all very indignant at France. Benito Mussolini's radio stations are all very indignant at France. They have the most positive proof, they say, that she has been hurrying artillery and tanks and shells and machine guns to the legal government of Spain to use against the rebel general, Francisco Franco. To help kill the Italians who make up the bulk of General Francisco Franco's army. In flat violation of the non-intervention agreement to which both France and Italy are signatories.

Are they lying? For once, they are probably not lying. France probably is sending arms to the Loyalists. One apparently disinterested observer reports that he saw 300 truckloads of arms pass through a French frontier village in a single day. Frenchmen claim, indeed, that they are Russian arms, but they are probably only partly that, at best.

And so--why, Benito Mussolini is naturally indignant. Oh, most naturally. It is very wicked, obviously, for France to do what Italy and her German ally have been doing steadily for nearly two years. To sign a non-intervention agreement--to re-sign and re-sign and solemnly to reiterate your devotion to that agreement--and then to send vast armaments and vast armies to support the side you want to win in Spain--that, as anyone can see, is a privilege which rightfully belongs only to fascist nations.

President Wendell Willkie's annual report to the stockholders of Commonwealth & Southern contains information that ought to be interesting generally. For instance, the corporation, despite its battles with TVA, expended $41,549,637 during 1937 for capital improvements. But except for transmission lines, none of these expenditures was made in the area which TVA is beginning to dominate. Not only that, the Southern subsidiaries were unable to sell securities to finance even the paltry improvements which were undertaken. The parent corporation had taken them off the market.

The Southern subsidiaries, however, have done very well, even in the face of TVA competition, as far as gross operating revenues go. Revenue in 1937 was 14 per cent greater than in the boom year 1929. But their 1937 income, after payment of fixed dividends on preferred stock, was only 37 per cent of comparable net income in 1929. This was due, according to Mr. Willkie, in part to the rising cost of operations and to taxes, but principally it was due--

For that reason, the abiding mistrust of security-buyers, these Southern companies are forced to pay out great sums in interest which, were it not for the menace of TVA, they might conserve and apply to rate reductions. The administration's "cheap money" policy doesn't do much good to these companies which can't obtain any money because of the administration's cheap power policy.