Indianapolis Times, Volume 46, Number 109, Indianapolis, Marion County, 15 September 1934 — Page 7

SEPT. 15, 193J_

It Seem to Me HEYWOOD BBXIN SAMUEL JOHNSON in his dictionary, as everybody 3 remembers, defined patriotism as "the last refuge or a scoundrel" Some modern lexicographer ought to explain * Communist plot** as “the first out of any reactionary Governor."’ These are the days in which the Red menace" has become the straw for every dying dynasty. It is utterly preposterous for Governor Green of Rhode Island to declare that his state is facing “a Communist uprising.” I can not believe that the Governor himself thinks this is true. In my opinion he merely is clutching at a convenient phrase. He is making much wider and more sweeping claims concerning the power and prestige of the revolutionary groups than they ever have advanced for themselves. I think the Governor means to

say that there is violence and the threat of violence in several of the mill towns of his domain and that he has lost his nerve and would like to pass the buck. Obviously, it Ls ridiculous to identify all rough and riotous action upon the part of American workers as being directly inspired by Moscow. Long before Lenin ever had been heard of. union men in this country were the victims of numberless bloody encounters. I say the “victims” advisedly because I must insist upon reaffirming my contention that disorders lie chiefly at the doorsteps of employing

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Heywood Broun

groups rather than working ones. When I picked up a paper Thursday I found on the first page an :.t of the all KJting of eight civilians in Woonsocket. The news story said that an officer of the national guard called upon a group of mass pickets to disperse. When they refused he ordered a volley fired and the eight men in question fell under the barrage. There was further newspaper testimony that windows were smashed and stores were looted. a an What About the Employers? I SEE no reason why anybody should deny that a mob had gotten out of hand. And yet even on the testimony oflered it seemed to me that the defiance of law and order was of a much more minor nature than that indulged in by the manufacturers on the very same day. Only a column away from the story about the Woonsocket rioting I found another headline which read ‘•Employers Defy Bargaining Rule." May I quote the first paragraph from the account in the New York Times? The chair hears no objection. ‘Tits National Association of Manufacturers advised the nation's employers yesterday to ignore the recent majority rule decision of the national labor relations board. The board of directors of the association would have employers disregard it until ‘competent judicial authority' has passed upon the ruling.” Now that seems to me a far more riotous action than anything which occurred in Woonsocket. Rioter in the Rhode Island town broke a few windows anc tossed quite a number of bricks and assorted missiles at members of the militia standing on guard. A good many people who rampaged through the ol Woonsocket that night probably were persons who had no direct connection with either the A F. of L. strike or the Communist j>arty. It always is fun to throw things at people who profess to have authority. But in Woonsocket the attack was not upon our governmental structure as such hoodlums a - iXi after the nature of hoodlums and in the general excitement things were done which could not well be supported under any political philosophy. And the troop 6 fired and eight men went down. And now the jittery executive is pleading for the ending of the regular*. B B B Taking the Cake for Impudence I WONDER why somebody does not get excited about the frank and open revolt of the manufacturers. They said boldly that NRA boards might have authority in other industries, but that it was their purpose to ignore the entire setup. Why not call out the guard, or even the regulars, to keep the members of the National Association of Manufacturers from seceding from the Union? But what made me even more indignant than the notice of open defiance upon the part of the null owners, was a statement which emanated from the same group an hour or so later. Robert L. Lund, chairman of the board of the national manufacturers, had the effrontery to say: "Good government demands that any group exercising power under governmental sanction should submit to supervision by government.” And after establishing that principle. Mr. Lund went on to say, "Yet, these national unions consistently have held through the years that they are a law unto themselves.” That, I think, takes the sponge cake for pure impudence. The head of a group which just has told the government to go chase itself has the hypocrisy to mourn because workers are not more law abiding. I do not want to see anybody killed in any group, but isn't it just about time for some group of governmental supporters to drop a tear gas bomb in order to drive the rebellious manufacturers back where they came from? It would be in interesting experiment. I'm not sure whether it would work. Most of the mill ow tiers haven't been able to cry for years. After all, these are the gentlemen who are still defending the ‘‘liberty” ol child labor. iCoDvnxht. 1934. t>T The Tlmesi

Your Health —B\ UK. MORRIS EISHBEIN

INHERE was a time when the actual education of children began with their first day at school, when they were about 6 years old. Nowadays, we know that the child will do much better in school if it gets the right kind of training before school. There are parents who are happy only when they see their children happy. To get the reaction that they want from the child, they pamper it. keep it constantly in good humor with presents and rewards and eventually make the youngster a tyrant in the home. You can easily recognize a child that lias been spoiled m this manner. It refuses to eat and the whole family spends its time coaxing, scolding and bribing it to take enough food to satisfy the parents of what the child ought to have. The more they coax the more the child postpones his feedings, because he enjoys the attention. B B B SOONER or later, because of constant babying, the child develops an irritable nature and whines to get what he wants. Eventually the parents decide that rigid measures must be adopted and the final conflicts may have a permanent effect on the child's emotional reactions for the rest of its life. The right kind of attention during the preschool penod tends to overcome these difficulties. We now have habit clinics for children of preschool age. where the bad habits that have been mentioned are given careful study and the child trained to overcome them. B B B IT nas Deen found, in such clinics, that the real treatment began with the mother instead of with the child. In many instances, if the mother has a reasonable amount of intelligence, an exp.anation as to the nature of the situation works an almost immediate cure in her case and makes it possible lor her to cooperate suitable in the training of the child. This training is a relatively simple matter. It is Important first of all to determine that the child does f.ot actually suffer from physical defects and that it is not seriously ill. When it is found that the entire situation is mental, the feeding problem can be controlled by permitting the child to go hungry until it is ready tc eat. Sometimes removal from the family is an important measure. Children who will not eat at home learn to eat rapidly when they are seated at a table with other children at a preschool nursery or kindergarten. Under such circumstances they eat because they do not desire to appear backward In relationship to the other children and also because the play element enters into the feeding process.

‘THE COMING'AMERICAN BOOM’

By Major Lawrence L. B. An gas ..... . . Installment No. 6

la tbc preredinc Inttallacnt Major Ancai dnrrlM how tbc adminiitration'c ronrac In ratline safes helped maintain effective ransomer demand and why. without resort to mach credit Inflation, batineie and employment Improved. INSTALLMENT VI A DMITTEDLY, since March, A 1934. there has been some reaction from the highest points touched, and some now believe that the NRA policy has failed; they whisper that it has now exhausted every possible ruse, and that now anew relapse must begin. especially as numerous strikes are occuring <&) on the part of workers who want higher wages and a larger share in prosperity, and *b) in the hope of getting industrial trade unions established so as to secure a stronger bargaining power for labor in the forthcoming era of reflation. These factors need not, how-ever, cause great alarm. Most of the strikes which have occurred, or oeen threatened, are in industries where profits already have revived, and the workers, not unnaturally. are in search of higher wages. Whereas the attempt to secure pan-industrial trade union recogtion, although new to America, is merely a development which occurred in England eighty years ago. The disturbances caused by all strikes are regrettable, but collective bargaining may economically further the administration’s planif by keeping consumer purchasing power rising somewhat parallel with prices and production. As regards the talk of another new slump now following the recent minor revival, this, I think, can be regarded as merely the talk of uninstructed economic opinion. The truth is that in every trade cycle economic progress takes place not in one steady line, but by leaps, reactions, stagnation and new leaps. Sharp upswings are followed by temporary falls; then after a period of quiescence the upswing is renewed. The United States at the moment appears to me to be nearing the end of a period of reaction, and after a short dormant period a new upswing should commence. a a a IT is true that in actuai practice the recent period of industrial reaction and hesitation has been longer than normal, but then the previous advance in the middle of 1933 was also considerably more rapid than normal. It was, moreover, only to be expected that the rapid upswing, coupled with the jolts caused by new legislation, should have caused considerable price dislocation and industrial disharmony, and led to some friction with labor. The monetary driving forces behind the forward movement, however, are as strong as ever, although to explain the driving forces at work some reference must be made to pure monetary theory. The reader. I hope, will forgive me for this, but money and its flow are really the root of the problem. As explained heretofore, although nonmonetary factors may touch off a slump, depressions in the end always tend to assume an almost purely monetary form. Nonmonetary remedies such as tariffs, rationalization, etc., may do much to bring the country from depression to prosperity; nevertheless in past trade cycles slumps have, as it happens, always have been cured by the gradual growth of a condition of "redundancy of money”; that is to say, by a growing unnecessary “surplus of money” in the passbooks of the public and in the reserves of the banks. In most past trade cycles this redundancy has been brought about “naturally” by declining prices and trade, i. e„ by trade and prices diminishing even faster than bank credit currency is contracted (owing to people hoarding more money through nervousness. and using more of it as a “store of value.”) A similar redundancy can. however, be ‘‘artificially” created by deliberate inflation of bank notes or deposits. o n n THIS “artificial” creation is really the crux of the argu-l ment of this book since upon it depends the vital question whether any government, and Roosevelt in particular, can in fact cure depression by conscious and deliberate enlargement of the supply of money. The general theory of the matter is as follows: If the amount of money in a country, which is all owned by somebody, keeps stable, while trade and fall to say half their forpier scale, people, on an average, will—other things equal—be hoarding half the total money in existence. The hoarded half will be redundant from the point of view of “real business” as distinct from “store of value” requirements. The result is that, if the redundant part were once more spent with its normal velocity, owing, say, to people no longer expecting prices to go on falling, increased buying would take place from the shops, general trade would improve, inventories would decline, and prices would then tend to rise. Latent redundancy of money, in fact, by leading to an increased velocity, would also increase the velocity of goods, and this, by lowering stocks, would tend to raise prices. Conversely—and we are still considering the question of redundancy—if the bank balances of everybody in a country were suddenly doubled, a similar redundancy of money would occur. The owners of the extra money would naturally desire to put it to some profitable use. They would thus tend to buy either income-giving securities, or alternatively, to buy commodities which would give them some physical satisfaction. This, again, would mean increased buying from the shops, a fall in inventories, a rise in prices, replacement orders to producers, and an improvement in trade. It is true that for a period people may go on hoarding either new or old~ money which itself Is redundant, either through nervousness or In the hope or fear of further falls in prices, but eventually there comes a point when the condition of redundancy becomes so great that it induces

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Indianapolis meves ahead . . . And, in the sheer mass of some of the machinery of this movement, the camera s eye finds beauty . . . Here, in the Chapman Price Steel Company, 3000 Shelby street, is one of the machines which take steel at cherry heat and smooth it into sheets for construction work . . . This picture, reproduced through the courtesy of the Chapman Price organization, is one of a series of camera studies of industry being presented by The Indianapolis Times in conjunction with its presentation of -Major Lawrence L. B. Angas The Coming American Boom.” *

The theories of Major L. L. B. Angas, in “The Coming American Boom” are presented by The Indianapolis Times to its readers as a journalistic function of service. Publication of the series of ten articles written by the noted British economist does not imply an indorsement of his views by this newspaper.

owners to spend his surplus, so as to get some benefit from it instead of leaving it idle, and this sets in motion a trade revival. BUB ALL trade slumps require redundancy of money for their cure. In the normal trade cycle it matures automatically and "naturally” through trade and prices falling with a cumulative momentum even faster than the quantity of bank credit is called in and deflated. Redundancy can, however, be created “artificially” by inflation by the government or by the Central bank. I admit that in all cases where redundancy exists it usually takes some piece of good political or economic news to touch off trade revival, but it is, in the main, the previous maturity of the condition of redundancy which makes the good news effective. The return of confidence is of

SIDE GLANCES

fillip j

‘Til bet that waiter wouldn’t be §o uppity, Mr. Wilks, if I told him you were County Clerk for three terms back home.”

THE INDIANAPOLIS TIMES

course a vital factor, but confidence itself at the bottom of a depression is itself re-created by the maturity of monetary redundancy, for the simple reason that the fact that there is “more money about” makes people feel richer because they have more money to spend, and the eventual spending of the redundant balances resulting from this feeling tends to touch off better trade, and to improve confidence. If increasing the total money, i. e., the average man’s bank balance, by 10 per cent does not have this effect, doubling or increasing it one hundredfold will. Usually, however, even a small increase like 15 per cent will begin to prove effective, especially if further increases are anticipated. Monday—llow government by devaluing gold increased potential cash reserves by over 53,000,000,000, and by borrowing from banks widened basis of credit. (Copyright. 1934. by Simon and Schuster, Inc.; distributed by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.) Baptist Clergy to Meet The Rev. B. R> Johnson, Downey Avenue Christian church pastor, will speak on “The Ministers’ Attitude Toward Organized Labor” at a meeting of the Baptist minister of Indianapolis at 10:30 Monday morning at the First Baptist church.

By George Clark

- The DAILY WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND By Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen—

PRIDE, Ala., Sept. 15.—The department of agriculture, way up In Washington, is staging a losing fight with Seth Holt and his two sons and their •watermelon. There is no law in this state to keep a man from eating watermelon, but to the government there is some significance in the fact that this is the principal occupation of Seth and the two grown boys as they sit in the shade in the midst of their worn-out cotton acres.

The government has a material interest in the life of the three Holts and the thousands of other • “share-croppers” of the cotton belt, for through the AAA it has poured out the vast sum of $163,624.878.56 in the last year in an effort to save the cotton crop from a ruinously low price and cotton farmers from destruction. The Holts live in a bleak, unpainted shack that stands by the dusty road a mile west of here. The shack is not their own, nor did it belong to the family who lived there last year, nor the family before that. The fact that the windows have neither sashes nor shutters will not trouble them next winter, for they will not be „here. Indeed, there is reason to doubt if they will last through the present month and into the picking season. A man can’t live on watermelons. B B B “'T'ROUBLE is, some of ’em do x not give you no furnish in the growin’ season. They take care of you long as you’re workin’ on the crop, and then they shut down on you.” The older Doy was speaking, quite without bitterness. He held a red cube of watermelon on the end of his knife, took it into his mouth, calmly spat the seeds at a hound dog stretched out in the dust. “If you can’t get through to pickin’ season, you have to move on, and he gets everything—the whole crop.” The “furnish” about which he talked is the system of “furnishing” and “deducting” food and keep during the season. It is the curse of the Holts and all their kind in the deep south. Never out of debt, they are kept by landlords who provide them with “furnish” and deduct the cost, plus high interest from the proceeds of the cotton crop. B B B TWO questions, particularly, trouble officials of the AAA. One is the fact that many croppers and tenant farmers last year did not receive their full share of government bounty for plowing under their bursting acres. The money was sent to the landlords, but if it was passed along, it suf- j sered first from a wholesale attack of the "deducts.” Second is the fact that the AAA cotton program has increased the evictions of tenant farmers, added to unemployment. “Usually shiftless and migratory. this was one year when the tenant farmer wanted to hold on. The price of cotton was high, he wanted to stay to enjoy the fruits of his labor. But acreage had to be reduced by 40 per cent. The

easiest way for the landowner was to “send a few croppers down the road.” Desk men in the AAA say: “We anticipated that and have put a clause in the cotton contracts to prevent it.” But the clause is toothless. It states that the owner “shall, insofar as possible, maintain on this farm the normal number of tenants.” So while King Cotton, higher in price than at any time in a decade, continues to rule the south, Seth Holt and an increasing number of landless croppers spit out their watermelon seeds and move on to the next town. (Copyright. 1934. bv United Feature Syndicate. Inc.) MUSIC STUDENTS TO REGISTER AT SCHOOL Seventh Annua! Session to Open at Conservatory. Registration for the seventh annual session of the collegiate department of the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music will be held Monday and Tuesday on the main campus at 1204 North Delaware street. The collegiate department, affiliated with Butler, offers academic degrees in music, dramatic art and dancing. Instruction for the 1934-35 school year will begin next Wednesday and continue on the same schedule as that of t*ie university. Max T. Krone, director of the conservatory; Mrs. Blanche Harrington, business executive, and Miss Evelyn Green, registrar, will have charge of enrollments. TWO SUSPECTS HELD IN SHOOTING EPISODE Arrests Made on Complaint of Chicken Dinner Farm Owner. Police today were holding two Morgantown men on vagrancy charges while they investigated the alleged “shooting up” of a chicken dinner farm operated by Miss Rose Lamar on the AllLsonville road. The men—Frank F. Sattler Jr., 28, and T. W. Woods—were arrested last night by deputy sheriffs on Miss Lamar’s complaint. She told the officials, police say, that the men had visited her farm on an earlier occasio nand had shot out a window light at that time. Last night, she said, the men returned and, when she recognized their car, she notified the deputies. The deputies say they found a dynamite fuse 1 nthe car.

Fair Enough moim LIKE the fire which wrecked the Morro Castle, the truth, after a slow, smoldering start, is breaking into flames in several places. It rapidly is getting beyond the control of the lawyers who tried to stifle it and of officers who escaped death at sea to perish even more horribly on the witness stand. Those who lost their lives in the disaster soon were oyt of their agony and there are men ashore in New York today who often will wish to God in years to come that it had been their good

hick to die and be done with it, too. Incidentally, at a time when some people have been toying with the idea that the press is not worthy of the freedom which it demands, newspapers and reporters have been largely responsible for the disclosures which now are being recorded. The reporters working around the dock canvassed the survivors while their impressions were still fresh and got to them before they could be reached by counsel for the prospective defendant Ward line. The detailed coverage on the Morro Castle story has

been a great feat of newspapering and many of the stories which were turned up in interviews with passengers and sailors scattered over a great area have served as leads for the investigation. Reporters and photographers flew out over the wreck in bad weather before the Morro Castle ever went on the beach. Reporters and photographers went aboard the hulk in the breeches buoy when the plates in some parts of the boat still were red hot and the gas was so bad that they had to wear gas masks. They had to pay $5 per head to board the ship and $5 to rent the masks. The expense wasn't important but the spirit of the thing was as ghoulish as that of the go-getters of Asbury Park who were claiming the relic as a resort attraction before the last bodies had been moved out of the hull. \ B B B Just a Company Man r I'\HERE was something suspicious in the alertness Aof the Ward line’s lawyers to surround the skipper and other sailors of the Morro Castle, who had remained aboard until the ship was abandoned. The attorneys would not let them talk until they took the witness stand and in the meanwhile, had twenty-four hours to work on them. The newspapers were pretty hard-boiled. They analyzed the grounds upon which Captain Warms, fresh from the hands of the lawyers, based his suspicion that the fire had been “set” and found them silly and said so. It may have been just a coincidence that Captain Warms, who never left his bridge to investigate the fire and long refrained from calling help, came into court, after conferring with the attorneys, with a theory so strongly in the company's interest. As Captain Warms came ashore, the coast guard skipper who made him abandon the ship praised his bravery in hanging on until the disaster was complete. But bravery wasn’t all that the situation called for. He had been a company man, not a passengers’ man. He was under the pressure of the salvage law and he knew that if he called for help his own future either was lost or indefinitely postponed. In trying to serve the company and his own interests, he floundered and failed. It was a horrible predicament for a man just called to the command of a big vessel. It is being said that, at the worst, he was guilty of nothing but bad judgment and bad timing. But it was more serious than that. He showed more regard for the company’s money and his own career than for the lives of his passengers. B B B Let’s Dehctionize the Sea ALTOGETHER, the human race has little to boast of its conduct. As the stories of the Morro Castle and the President Cleveland come out, sailors are revealed bickering, gossiping and conspiring. The dead skipper of the Morro Castle, Captain Willmott was a radio nut w r ho liked to tune in on crooners and police calls. He took a dislike to George Alagna, the assistant radio man, and was going to have him beached. But when the pressure was turned on, Alagna was the bravest man on the ship and the calmest with the exception of George Rogers, the chief radio man. Alagna finally wrung out of Warms permission to call for help at the last possible instant and, when the call had been sent, dragged Rogers through the fire to the forecastle deck. On the President Cleveland, the deck officers ganged up on their master, Captain Robert E. Carey, and by previous arrangement blackened his reputation before the inquiry. They said he was slow to put out his boats and might have rescued people who died. These are not the sort of sailormen that fiction tells about, but maybe it would be a good idea, while the inquiry is going to defictionize the sea and seafaring. Kipling, Conrad and McFee nave led people to expect much too much of men who are only harddriven employes of soulless corporations whose first interest, when disaster happens, is to get the lawyers down to the dock. (CoDvrlsfht. 1934. bv United Feature Syndicate. Inc.l

Today s Science BY DAVID DIETZ

THE semi-annual meeting of the American Chemical Society opened in Cleveland this week Just as the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science was drawing to a close in Aberdeen, Scotland. It is interesting to compare certain aspects of these two meetings, aspects which represent the two sides of modern science. Important announcements came with rapidity at the American Chemical Society meeting. There was, at the start, the announcement of the discovery of anew deadly poison gas by Dr. George H. Cady. Three Cleveland chemists from the laboratory of the National Carbon Company announced researches upon the nature of the carbon arc which fix for the first time in history the exact temperature at which carbon turns from a solid to a vapor. This work is expected to have important industrial uses, eventually, perhaps, leading to an arc light brighter than the sun itself. Dr. Aristid Von Grosse of the University of Chicago announced the isolation of the radio-active metal, protactinium. b b n THREE chemists from the Mellon Institute of Pittsburgh announced researches which may yield a drug which is a specific for pneumonia, killing the pneumococcus or pneumonia germ. The chief item of interest at the meeting of the British British association was the presidental address, delivered by Sir James Jeans, famous astronomer and cosmogonist. Here was the other side of modern science. Sir James dealt with a speculative and theoretical subject, the nature of reality. He discussed the trend of modem theoretical physics and its philosophical implications. The conclusions which he expressed were that the only reality was mental and that the universe existed within our consciousness. u b a IT seems a long way from Sir James' speculations about the nature of reality to the shining bit of protactinium in its little glass tube Yet they are closer together than the layman might suspect. Both men made use of the same knowledge of atomic behavior in arriving at their results. The fact of the matter Ls tha„ speculations lead to practical results and practical results lead to new theories. The ancient Greeks speculated upon the nature of matter and dreamed of atoms. Today we manipulate atoms in the laboratory to obtain practical results. The Mellon Institute chemists, striving to make a drug to conquer pneumonia, are manipulating atoms. By chemical means they change the molecules of the drug, knocking*off one group of atoms, adding another. The theoretical work of Clerk Maxwell, who sought to explain the nature of light, led to the discovery of radio waves by Professor Heinrich Herts. Without Maxwell and Hertz, there would have been no Marconi.

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