Indianapolis Times, Volume 47, Number 304, Indianapolis, Marion County, 28 February 1936 — Page 21

It Seems to Me HEVH# BROUN IHOPE it is no secret that this column does not regard Roosevelt as a radical, nor even as a liberal with a well-cefined plan for immediate reforms. Indeed, I Itant to have a chance to support a Farmer-Labor candidate for President in 1936, although the movement has been

slow as yet in taking on momentum. It is not, impassible that I may be among the Presidents severest critics before election Day, but it is very hard to get away from the fact that anybody who throws rocks at Roosevelt just now can not escape embarrassment at the company he must keep. No radical can very well hand Roosevejt much, and yet for a Roosevelt he really is remarkable. Certainly he has gone farther left than any other member of his set

Heywood Broun

who prepared at Groton and who was graduated at Harvard. He is. at least, the Lenin of the Fly Club. OMO University of Contrasts AND I have in mind this annual pilgrimage of the President’s to Ca abridge when I speak of what seems to me a growl * in stature. Harvard, of course, is not justly termed a Tory college in spite of the group which administers its endowments. I suppose no university in the country has produced such extraordinary contrasts. Looking back a little more than 26 ears, one might have witnessed the strange spectacle of John Reed acting as cheer leader for the football team captained by Ham Fish. Only at Harvard could such a thing have happened. But it must be remembered in talking of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that he was a Brahmin from boyhood up. Harvard graduates are fond of saying that their alma mater, unlike others which might be mentioned, does not produce a standardized type. That is a partial truth. The whole rule does not hold good in the case of a lad v ho goes to Groton, lives most of his formative years in college with his prep school friends, moves through a set regimentation of a caste system of clubs culminating in his selection for ti'* Fly and is graduated. I maintain that the man who has gone through this particular conditioning is signed, sealed and delivered into a set holding precisely the same views on all political, economic and social questions. They even like the same jokes. This section of Harvard docs turn out a more highly standardized product than any other educational mill in the country. When Roosevelt went to the Fly Club last week to witness the initiation of his son he went to the house of his enemies. Os the adults there present not one will vote for him. And I say of my own knowledge that some of the men who were there, or eligible to be there, have been among the liveliest of the whisperers about the President’s “health.” 000 “Polio and Politics ” INCIDENTALLY, some eminent doctor or research man—and I suggest Dr. Paul De Kruif—ought to write a magazine piece called “Polio and Politics.” The simple facts about infantile paralysis should be set forth in order to scotch the dirty, lying insinuations that this is a progressive disease involving eventual damage to brain tissue. Os course, the answer is, “It isn’t.” And a good many people who spread the reports know the.„ full well. Sometimes I feel tempted to go out and vote 10 times for Roosevelt in 1936. This impulse seizes me immediately after I have listened to a conversation by somebody who says. “Why, I went to Groton with him. I can't understand what’s come over him. He’s a traitor to his class.” And you can hear just as much about “the class struggle” from the old Groton boys as you 11 ever get in Union Square. Os course, on tempered second thought I realize that Roosevelt couldn’t be a Moses of the masses even if he wanted to be. He started too late. There’s too much in his background to overcome, but he did L. °ak the Groton square, and I think it’s up to those who have every logical reason to feel that they can not help Roosevelt at least not to help the bear. (Copyright. 1936) Assassination Goes With Dictatorships BY RAYMOND CLAPPER WASHINGTON, Feb. 28.—You don’t have to scratch a civilized man. very hard to find a savage. Political murder still is practiced widely among nations which bow at the shrine of scientific progress, much as it was in the brutal days of the Caesars. Weapons have improved. But we use the modern gun for the same purpose that Brutus drew his J agger. We find political murder in the Orient and Occident. Fascist, Communist. Socialist, Militarist, use it.

France has had her political assassinations. Germany, both before and under the Nazis, has resorted to political murder. In Russia, Communists have used the rifle as freely as the czars against those who vote no. Assassination, the most primitive form of political persuasion, seems generally to go with dictatorship, the most primitive form of political organization, resting on violence and terror now as in the most primitive tribes. That dictatorship and assassination can flourish in na-

tions noted for their scientific progress only dictates how far behind other arts the art of government has lagged. Man's inventive genius has been applied to everything but government. Politics is the backward child of civilization. a a a THAT we have not found it necessary in the United States to settle our political differences with a gun is undoubtedly a tribute to our form of government rather than to the self-restraint of our people who have shown no lack of ingenuity in using homicide for non-political purposes. That we couW have come through the strain of the depression thus far without violence is the best evidence of the flexibility and the human temper of our institutions. This makes it all the more difficult to understand the unreasoning rage against the President which exists among our better citizens. In private conversation they have said things no different from what the young Japanese army officers must have muttered to themselves as they called their victims out into the snowstorm the other night. It is a disturbing state of mind, and one too closely allied with what has happened in other countries for comfort. The ironical thing about it is that it exists most unreasoningly among the very capitalist class whose system Roosevelt is saving for them. a a a WE hear so much about the waste and inefficiency of government that it is a relief to see the latest report of HOLC. This government corporation has made loans to 990.000 borrowers, whose homes were about to be taken from them by mortgage foreclosures during the depression. Many thought that it would be a costly operation, that borrowers would gyp the government, and defy Uncle Sam to come in and collect on his mortgage. But last month, HOLC collected all except 9.9 per cent of the January payments due on interest and principal. Total foreclosure proceedings to date involve only one of every 172 of these home owners who borrowed from the government. HOLC began under bad auspices. Cheap politicians were installed at the start and the whole venture barely escaped becoming a scandal. But a business man, John H. Fahey, was placed in charge and he has brought the agency through thus far as a business operation of which any private executive might be proud, vindicating the government’s wisdom in stepping in to stop an agonizing, deflationary crisis which private lenders %ere helpless chfrcki

WHAT’S WRONG IN OUR SCHOOLS?

This is the fifth of a series of articles by Arch Steinel, following a comprehensive survey of the Indianapolis schools system. BY ARCH STEINEL Ty/fR. and Mrs. Jonathan Public sit down. The children are abed, too many crowded in a room. Four-year-old Tommy has caught 8-year-old Mary’s cold. The bathroom they’re using isn’t modern. The faulty'furnace and chimney flue are fire hazards. They begin discussing plans for anew dwelling. They have no money in the bank—and just around the corner are two big bills. “But the children’s health must come first. We need that new home. Jonathan,” says the wife. “Yes, and the bigger the down payment on the new one the lower the monthly payments and the less interest we’ll have to pay. Interest, if it’s a lot, will eat up the investment,” retorts the husband. What to do about it? “Guess I’ll have to go to the boss and ask for a raise and then there’s the Army bonus I’m getting that’ll make the down payment big enough to cut down the interest with what we have invested in the old home,” adds the husband. —And that is what building and finance committees of the Board of School Commissioners are planning for the School City—to go to the “Boss,” the taxpayers, and seek a good portion of $2,210,000 to do away with overcrowding. insanitary buildings and fire hazards in the Indianapolis school system. 000 THE plan is for Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Public to give the School City the right to go on a compromise “pay-as-you-go” basis by paying for current needs yearly and borrowing money only when necessary. Where Mr. and Mrs. Public have big bills to meet “just around the corner,” so too the School City is confronted in 1939-1940 with a debt load of $4,901,000 for school buildings and property purchased, in the main, in 1919 and 1920. “What’ll we do about the big debts due, Jonathan?” asks Mrs. Public. “When the time comes, we’ll use savings we have budgeted and about half of the amount we’ll have to borrow. Then we can spread out the new loan over a long period and it won’t be so hard on us,” replies Mr. Public. 000 THAT is what the school city plans to do about the $4,901,000 which is due in the peak of the debt years. Bonds maturing will be paid in part and half of the bonds will be taken up by the issuance of new bonds to replace them. With high school enrollment expected to increase 5000 by 1941, enough to fill two high schools the size of Shortridge and with grade school children forced to attend insanitary and poorly ventilated frame buildings, the School City can not wait to reduce debts but must raise new money while paying off old bills. The School City’s bonded indebtedness is near its limit, which means that it owes $10,020,000, as of Jan. 1, 1936, and that ic can borrow only $71,000 for erecting school buildings. On June 1 the school system’s borrowing capacity will have been raised tb $142,000. 000 THE plan as tentatively outlined by the school board’s finance committee is to use the $142,000, or $120,000 of that amount, toward new additions and modernization of elementary schools. “The estimated cost of additions to Schools No. 44 and 21 is $120,000 and it is possible for the uoard to proceed with construction of these units and still have a balance in bonding power,” says the finance committee, composed of Merle Sidener, Paul C. Stetson, and A. B. Good. Additions and modernization at five other schools, at a cost of $90,000, have been urged by the board’s building committee and the finance committee suggests the use of budgeted funds—money allotted for improvements this year—to modernize Schools 64, 83. and 68. Proposed additions at Schools 47 and 35, at an estimated cost of $60,000, must await new borrowing capacity or a reduction of the School City's bonded indebtedness. 000 WITH minor improvements scheduled in financing, the school board committees turn to. the heart of the “pay-as-you-go” plan by seeking a direct levy of taxes to pay for a proposed $450,000 Irvington high school, an SBOO,OOO school building at Arsenal Technical High School, and additions at George Washington and

Clapper

' Pay-as-You-Go ’ Plan Only Way Out of Tangle, Says Board

BENNY

COUftTY 1i • \\ / ; i A

The Indian anolis Times it

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L. L. Dickerson, city librarian, Is neither a Houdini nor a Samson. He can not be credited with legerdemain nor levitation, so in playing catch in this photo at the Central Library he is merely the victim of a photographer and an artist. But Mr. Dickerson and the Indianapolis School Board officials admit that the building’s size against Mr. Dickerson’s stature is about the equivalent to the actual cost of the structure. In other words if Mr. Dickerson was $1,639,162 instead of being a man in the photo he would be the relation of what the library will eventually cost the taxpayers to its original cost of $625,000. Interest totaling $1,014,162 will have accrued from 1911 and will have been paid before the library can be wrapped up and delivered to the school city taxpayers as “paid.”

Crispus Attucks at an estimated total cost of $750,000. The direct tax levy may mean the inclusion in next year’s budget, which will be made up by July 1, a levy of approximately 10 cents to construct the Irvington high school. The additional levy would increase the present School City tax race from 89 to 99 cents, but would pay for the Irvington school the year it is built without letting posterity or the children who go to the school pay the bill when they grow up and become posterity. Take ‘it back to the family of Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan Public and it means that the Publics are going to quit the practice of their parents and grandparents which left big mortgages on the homeplace for the children to pay off after reaching maturity. 0 0 0 IT means that Mr. and Mrs. Public desire to give their children as much of an unfettered financial start in life as possible, advocates of the plan declare. In buying on the “installmentplan,” Mr. and Mrs. Public know they have had to pay interest charges on their automobile and on household goods. They knots that when they pay cash interest charges are erased. School boards since Oct. 1, 1872, have borrowed money by issuing bonds to the extent of an esti-

WASHINGTON, Feb. 28. There is something intriguing about the tenor of White House mail. Roosevelt’s mail is different from the mail of any preceding President, not only in its greater volume, but because it it largely from people who can hardly spell. Here is a typical letter written in a painful scrawl: “I never saw a president I would write to until you’ve got in your place. But I have always felt like you and your wife and your children were just as common as we are.” Letters like this pour in at the rate of 3000 a day. Most of them are merely plaints about inadequate relief. But enough are colored with praise of the President and his works to have some political significance. Like this one: “The reason 1 have delayed writing is that I consider you the most buisy man of all the presidents we have had, and have did more for the massasses of the people.” 000 MANY indicate that the writer expects personal and direct aid from the President. “I have tryed all I could possibly do—first God and then you, and you are the only one that I trust that can help me.” Roosevelt has planted this idea by his radio talks, and by one or two dramatic, widely publicized

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 28, 1936

mated $16,000,C00 and up to today have paid $3,432,000 interest. Before the $16,000,000 in borrowed dollars is paid off, an additional $4,600,000 in interest will have been paid. In other words $13,000,000 in interest will have been paid for $16,000,000, which brings the total cost of school buildings and properties to $29,000,000. The assessed property valuation of the school city is an estimated $20,000,000 or $9,000,000 less than the money spent. It is the same ratio as if the Public family paid sl3 to borrow sl6 and the total cost of the borrowed money is $29. 000 THE debt service lava—interest —that has deluged the school city since 1872 is due in the main to the issuance of term bonds. A term bond is a bond issued and sold which falls due at the *;nd of 20, 30 or 40 years, according to the maturing date of the issue. Interest is paid yearly to investors on bonds and this interest, as it accumulates in payments, will equal the unpaid principal of the total issue of the bonds. Term bonds are not issued in present days of financing. Serial bonds, or money borrowed and paid back in yearly installments, cut the interest. Place the three ways of building an Irvington high school side by side: Direct taxation, term bonds

Washington Merry-Go-Round BY DREW PEARSON and ROBERT S. ALLEN

acts in which he did personally bestow favor. The mail is so heavy that it requires a special staff to handle it. Practically all mail addressed to the President in long-hand goes not to the White House, but to a war-time shack on Constitu-tion-av, where in a large barnlike room known as “Bay 3” there sit 50 clerks who pound typewriters all day. answering mail. 000 r T''HEY are the Correspondence -*■ Division of WPA, under Ben Whitehurst. Every day they turn up letters like this: “Dear Honored Mr. Roosevelt, dear sir, I take pleasure in hands to drop you a few lines of very importance,” or: “My Dear President: You are my big man, you are my buddy, and I am 3’our buddy. I am very glad that you are smarter than President Hoover.” A plea came from a 12-year-old girl: “In the name of the Lord or the Democratic Party send the money. I am 12. I am small to my age. but my mother is dead so I arr. the oldest girl. Will you please send about two thousand dollars and don’t send a check, send it in money already coined out.” 000 LETTERS addressed to Mrs. Roosevelt are sent to the White House for her attention. She wants to see letters that re-

and serial bonds, and the cost is estimated as follows: Terms bonds for a $500,000 building, to mature in 20 years, would cost $425,000 in interest, or a total cost of $925,000. Serial bonds on a $500,000 building, 20 years maturity, would take $208,000 interest, a total cost of $708,000. Direct taxation, a levy of 10 cents, which means that the owner of a S3OOO home would pay $3 more taxes next year, would bring $500,000 and pay for the construction of an Irvington high school and purchase equipment for it without debt service charges in interest as would the other two methods. 0 0 0 SCHOOL boards in 1919-1920 issued a total of $4,865,000 in term bonds and the major portion of these bonds, of 20-year issue, fall due in the two big debt years, 1939 and 1940. Interest on these bonds have totaled $3,471,030 and, put in simple words, it means that 71 per cent of the total amount issued has been paid in interest while $4,476,000 of the principal bonds remain unpaid. An estimated $500,000 in interest may be paid before the bonds are retired in 1939-1940. The major bond issue of 19191920, their amounts and interest paid with the principal, in most cases, still unpaid, follow: Arsenal Technical High School

fleet an unusual need or a praiseworthy struggle. “I have nothing to eat and no table to eat it off of.” “It is a simple thing to die, but a fearful thing to live.” “We have 15 chickens and a little cow helping us.” “I believe I owe five months rent, but I will know for sure when the landlord calls.” “My children are also sticking out of their shoes.” “In the last eight years we have had five operations in our family, and all of them dry years.” 0 0 0 VX/'KITEHURST’S division * * boasts that every letter gets an answer. There is a answer ready for almost every type of request. Ti e commonest reply is, “See your local relief administrator.” But there was no stock answer ready for this one: “I am the father of 16 children and am and have been on relief for some time. Will you kindly send me all available information on birth control. Thank you.” Democratic politicos point out that these letters are from people who have never before felt privileged even to write to a President, and that they represent a great throng who will go to the polls in November to mark “X” beside the name of the “Buddy” they have been corresponding with. (Copyright, 1936. by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.)

shop, powerhouse and Schools 22 and 26—Bond issue of $1,645,000. Interest paid totals $1,141,520. Arsenal Technical main building—s7oo,3os bond issue; $499,143 interest. Manual Training High School auditorium and site for new Shortridge High School—s39o,ooo bond issue; interest, $288,728. Arsenal Technical shop building—ssss,ooo bond issue; $404,431 interest. Manual Training new building —5225,000 bond issue; $165,761 interest. 000 /~\NE example of costly financing by term bonds is cited by the school board’s finance committee as the main building of Indianapolis Public Library, St. Clair and Meridian-sts. The building, when the final payment on it is made in 1955, will have cost taxpayers more than twice as much as its assessed valuation of $732,000. The Central Library’s bill, because of financing in 1911 and 1915 through the issuance of longterm bonds, is shown as follows: The term bonds issued in 1911 comprised a $125,000 i. c ,sue at 4 per cent interest. The interest paid to date on this issue totals $119,116.25. The bonds issued in 1915 comprised a $500,000 issue at 4!4 per cent interest and the interest paid to date on that sum totals $424,362.50. The total interest paid thus far is $543,528.75. The interest to accrue is listed at $470,633.75, a grand over-all total cf $1,014,162.50. The bond issue was for $625,000 and so the total cost of the building rises to the amazing sum of $1,639,162.50. 000 TERM bonds have not been issued since 1925. The school boards of 1919-1920, which created the huge debt load in term bonds, induced the Legislature, through their attorney, Albert Baker, to pass a sinking fund law for school cities. The law, al 1 hough it did not become effective until 1925, is the sole life-saver for the present school boards in hoping to retire one-half of the $4,901,000 debt mountain that falls due in 19391940. The sinking fund places 5 per cent of the annual bonded indebtedness aside for the retiring or taking up of bonds issued for new construction. In other words the sinking fund is a savings account ordered by law to force the school city to apportion its debt-load over the years and have funds on hand to pay the debt principal when it is due. Committees of the Indianapolis School Board in attempting to end overcrowded conditions in schools, and remove fire and health hazards, see in the “pay-as-you-go” plan a final method of extinguishing a school city’s debtload to a cash-and-carry basis. NEXT—What citizens say of the pay-as-you-go plan.

By J. Carver Pusey

Second Section

Enfrcd as Second-’'"!*** Matter at PostofTice. Indianapolis. Ind.

Fair Enough rail PEfiIER PRAHA, Czecho lovakia. Feb. 28.—The most pathetic victims of Adolf Hitler’s slow massacre of the Jews in Germany are the children of the Jews who are too young to know what it is all about. These children are subjected to a method of torture far worse than the baby killing which was charged against the German infantry in the early days of the great war in cartoons depicting little bodies wriggling on the bayonets of the marching armies. It will be impossible for the Nazi Germans of the

present time to deny the atrocities which are being perpetrated on Jewish children under the orders of Adolf Hitler as a policy of the German government today. The Chinese have a method of torture known as the death of a thousand cuts, in which the executioner is rated according to his ability to hack and mutilate the victim without permitting him to die until the maximum of suffering has been inflicted. They have a very good photograph of an execution by this method in the chamber of horrors in Madam

Tussaud’s Museum in London, but most people coming upon it unsuspectingly turn away revolted. Only the most morbid visitors linger for a second glance. 000 Ingenious Torture TTITLER S torture of the Jewish children is even A more ingenious, however, for he has invented a way to convert the period of childhood into a term of unrelieved sorrow, fear, dread and suffering. It is commonly accepted among the civilized peoples of the world that any man who would inflict suffering on a child wantonly or for the purpose of avenging some offense, real or imaginary, attributed to the child's parents, or for any other raeson, is not quite right mentally and ought to be put away. Hitler’s little victims are not allowed to die. They ha\ e no such luck. Hitler keeps them alive, and they suffer day after horrible day at the hands of a nation as a matter of national policy. The German child whe is a Jew is compelled to listen to the most unspeakable vilification of the parents, and the child’s first attempts at spelling out public notices on the billboards will Inform him that he is not a human being, like other children, but a child whose parents were not human beings, either, but loathsome animals. If the child lives in a country town where there are not sufficient Jewish children to warrant the establishment of a Ghetto school in which to segregate little Jews, then the tort Ore of the victim is even more artistic. In that case the child may be compelled to sit in the classroom and pay attention while the teacher explains that little Isadore or Rosie is a vile creature, a species of vermin and a menace to the German nation. If the teacher so desires the Jewish child may be dismissed from the.room during the lecture. In that case the Aryan children, with characteristic cruelty of children, plus the sadistic delight in the infliction of pain which is now being fostered in young Nazis, will catch the young Jew after class and tell Isadore or Rosie what the teacher said. If the radio is turned on in a Jewish home, the children will hear an orator somewhere in Berlin or Munich expaining that their parents are a species of beast and that they are little beasts themselves 000 Pity Brings Beatings ALONE Jewish child in a small community must play alone, for the true Nazi children, of course, will not admit him to their company, and a Gentile child with pity in its heart would be afraid to offer the victim any sympathy. They might both be beaten up. And then, of course, it is fair sport for the Nazi children to kick and beat and throw rocks at the little Jews, because that is preliminary training for one of the highest functions of Nazi citizenship in days to come. All children have a trusting attitude toward grown people, and a harsh word may leave an ineffaceable scar on the soul of the young one. The souls of the children of the Jews in Germany will be cross-hacked with a thousand cuts, for they never will know anything in childhood but insults to themselves and the foulest aspersions on the only adults to whom they can turn for comfort—their parents and other relatives. It is absolutely certain that their childhood, the few hours of innocence which are given to all of us and which civilized people try to invest with beauty and joy, has been destroyed by a man with a mustache (adopted from the makeup of a famous comedian) who has been seriously nominated by some of his followers not for king, not merely for ruler, but for God the redeemer of the German race It would be a mistake to call him a babykiller You can’t torture a dead child.

Gen. Johnson Says—

WASHINGTON, Feb. 28.—News dispatches headline the retirement of Gen. Hagood as the personal act of the President in retribution for the general’s recent criticism of WPA. The official order read “By direction of the President,” but that is the customary wording of all such orders. This was the individual action of Malin Craig, recently appointed chief of staff. This isn’t the first of Hagood’s excursions “off the reservation” of military amenities. From schoolboys to private soldiers, and (it seems) to generals, the obstreperous always seek to "try out the new boss.” This is Craig’s answer. Freedom of speech, like trial by jury, is a constitutional right—but not for Army officers. They have to be tried by court-martial, and they are expressly excepted from the jury right in the Constitution. As for the right of free speech, the Army is for defense and not for dialectic. The minute it becomes a debating association in the public press it is no good for fighting. a a a “'T'HEIRS not to reason why” may sound harsh, X but it is an absolute necessity to prevent military degeneration to the garrulity of an Old Ladies Knitting Society. That doesn’t mean that any officer is deprived of his freedom of opinion or of adequate channels for its expression—always excepting throwing public mud-balls at the boss. I have seen both industrial and military discipline. It is my experience that fighting positions can be taken in the inner councils of the general staff with a lot more freedom from persecution than in the inner councils of industry'. But .the rule is that if you have made your fight and lost it, you accept the decision of the umpire and go on playing ball. Anyway, Hagood is sitting pretty. He will retire on three-quarter pay, and under the law he would have had to do that anyway in two years. (Copyright. 1936. by United Feature Syndicate. Inc.)

Times Books

WILL IRWIN, veteran reporter and author, ip a book “Propaganda and the News” (Whittlesey House), expresses the fear that truth crushed to earth may some day be counted out instead of rising again. Mr. Irwin is a friend of truth and our liberties. He thinks truth makes democracy work. His study of propaganda down the ages to the era of Charles Michelson winds up with a plea for the avoidance of any repressive measures upon the dissemination of unbiased information. His story is the reporter's story of the things that have happened, many of his own eyes, to distort what reporters' eyes have seen.

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Westbrook Peglet