Indianapolis Times, Volume 48, Number 54, Indianapolis, Marion County, 13 May 1936 — Page 13

Tt Seems to Me mi BROUN YORK, May 13.—1 want to say a word in defense of newspaper photographers. It seems to me that the Ilearst camera man who shot a bulb in the face of Toscanini was deservedly criticised particularly since the photographers had promised not to take any pictures except before the concert. But It does not seem to me that any public occasion has a right to fly into a rage whenever a camera

man gets an action photograph. Indeed the fraternity of news men might take a horrible revenge upon some of these prima donnas. If they made an agreement anions themselves never to snap any of these stuffed shirts under any circumstances they would soon have the high hats hollering for mercy. Asa conspicious example of bad manners upon the part of a well known public performer I would cite the conduct of Nicholas Murray Butler at the Pulitzer prize dinner. According to the reports, the great educator rebuked a camera man who dared to take

Heywood Broun

a picture while he, the president of Columbia University, happened to be talking. Dr. Butler was quoted as saying, “Why don’t you leave off bread and butter and learn manners?” The good gray toastmaster was neither humorous nor happy in his expression. As a matter of fact, the photographer was engaged in an assignment which concerned his bread and butter just as Doctor Butler’s bread and butter depends on his ballyhoo activities in behalf of his university. a u a Nothing Sacred About Dinner THERE is nothing sacred about the annual dinner £ t which th(f Pulitzer prizes are awarded. Obviously the banquet is a publicity stunt. The prizes could be conferred behind locked doors without the accompainment of lettuce salad with French dressing. But quite shrewdly the promoters of the project have realized that some of the selections are not likely to go down any too well without a good deal of oil. Accordingly, Dr. Butler tries each year to ease the strain of putting square pegs into round holes by making a felicitous address which will send every one home happy, and it is not the design of Columbia that this thing should be done in a corner. The press is invited to attend. The newspapermen are there as guests of Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler. None of them has wandered in just for the fun of it. On the contrary, he is there because the city editor has said, “You’re it.” tt tt tt Forgetting to Watch the Ball DR. BUTLER has a nice easy style. The idea rises sharply with a good deal of backspin, lingers a little at the top of the arc, and then drops dead a foot from the cup. But this time the veteran gag and inspiration man took his eye off the ball. He grossly insulted a guest who was there by invitation to perform the task assigned to hirn. It was no secret to the toastmaster that photographers were present. It would have been a decided blot on Columbia’s penchant for press agentry if none had shown up. Moreover, the prizes which Dr. Butler was awarding w’ere 1 stablished in the will of a great newspaperman. What call has a mere Columbia president to be snooty to a member of that craft? What does this Nicholas Murray Butler think he is? When the awards established by a newspaperman are being conferred upon newspapermen collegiate kibitzers should be seen and not heard. (Copyright. 1936) Borah May Spurn Republican Ticket BY RAYMOND CLAPPER WASHINGTON, May 13.—1 tis an even bet, or possibly better, that Senator Borah will refuse to support the Republican presidential ticket this year. Borah is bitter toward the Old Guard leaders in Ohio, National Committeeman Walter F. Brown and State Chairman Ed Schorr. He considers them allies of Charles D. Hilles and other old line, inside party leaders, whose domination Borah has been fighting. Borah al'o feels that Landon and his manager, John D. Hamilton, have been playing with the Ohio bosses. This further increases his distaste for what is likely to happen at Cleveland, and makes it more probable than ever that he will refuse to support Landon as the nominee. The fact that Borah never has bolted the party is cited to indicate that he will not bolt this time. On the contrary, he has been twitted so much about that, and Old Guard leaders have taken it so much for granted that Borah would knuckle down in the end, that the effect is to goad him into breaking over this time and showing them. Borah intends to go to the Cleveland convention. But he declined to be a delegate. That means he will not sit on the platform committee nor be able to make a fight on the convention floor. He now is fighting the Old Guard group. The probability is that he will fight his Cleveland battle through the press, and wind up with a sizzling denunciation of the convention as a boss-controlled affair, run by the same old crowd that was repudiated by the country in 1932. Borah would thereby sound the keynote for the Democratic campaign, which will devote its attention not so much to the candidate, but to the familiar faces in the background. The Democratic strategy is to keep telling the country that the same old crowd, with a fresh face out in front, is trying to get back into power. If Landon is the candidate, the tendency will be to ignore him as much as possible and concentrate on the Old Guard bosses. tt tt tt There is still a possibility that Landon can defeat this strategy. Landon leaders claim to have brought their candidate to his present prominence not through, but in spite of, the Old Guard bosses. Landon’s defeat at the hands of the Eastern leaders in the recent contest over the keynoter helps support this contention. Yet all of the old line boys, veterans at swinging on the bandwagon, will try to appear prominent and influential in the picture at Cleveland. It is possible that some incident may bring Landon into head-on collision with them and demonstrate to the country that he is not their baby. That would spoil the picture which Borah and the Democrats expect to draw. Republicans face difficulty in drafting their monetary platform planks because of the uncertainty in France over devaluation of the franc. The new French leftist government will be just getting its bearings when the convention meets in June. Republicans want to repeal the President’s power to alter the gold content of the dollar, freezing it at the present value, and to declare for a gold bullion standard. But with European monetary affairs in midair, it would be risky for the Republicans to take a dogmatic position. The Administration insists that the government must have a free hand until currencies in Europe are stabilized. Republican National Chairman Fletcher intimates that Republican mail has been tampered with. Gov. Talmadge has a better story about mail tampering. A Georgia cracker wrote a letter addressed to “The Lord” at Washington asking for S2OO. The letter went to the dead-letter office. Employes took up a collection and sent him SIOO. Witlyn a few days another letter from him arrived in the dead-letter office, also addressed to “The Lord.” It said: “Thank you for answering my prayer. I asked for S2OO but when the letter got here there was only SIOO. I thought I ought to warn you about New Dealers tampering with your mail.” One Southern utilities company, so investigators here discovered, has a rule that when any “policy” matters are to be discussed, officials must not write or telegraph but use long distance telephone, personal messenger, or go in person.

RESETTLEMENT—WHAT IT MEANS * " " Moving of Thousands From Poor Land to Fertile Farms, Is Aim

The wide field covered by the Resettlement Administration and its manifold activities are described in a series of stories by Rodney Dutcher, NEA Service and Times special writer, this being the second of the series. tt tt tt BY RODNEY DUTCHER (Copyright. 1936. by NEA Service. Inc.) 'Yy/'ASHINGTON, May 13.—Various studies indicate that something like 100,000,000 acres of land in this country is being misused or poorly used from an economic point of view. Hundreds of thousands of farmers are tilling soil where successful crop farming is impossible. The government is buying 9,343,000 acres of that submarginal land and wiU"convert it into forests, park land, grazing land, wild life refuges, and similar non-farming projects. Through the Resettlement Administration, the traditional policy of disposing of the public lands without regard to what became of them is being reversed. Land is being taken back from private hands to bo used for public purposes. Eventually, these projects will be turned over to the states. Thousands of families now on submarginal land will be established, if they desire, on good land in rural resettlement projects with Federal aid. Others who sell their land will be able to relocate themselves. This process of land acquisition, land utilization, and

rural resettlement will be continued as long as there is sufficient support for it in Congress. In its curernt program, Resettlement Administration has bought 1,780,000 acres at $4.22 an acre and more than 8,000,000 acres are under option. Total cost will be nearly $50,000,0000. About 6000 families on this land, will be resettled with RA aid. tt tt tt ' I 'HE rural resettlement phase aims at the long range goal of bringing about a permanent adjustment of people to land resources, although projects are now in general imited to areas where relief need is pronounced. In addition to families taken from purchased submarginal land, at least a thousand tenant families will be placed on leased land and given a chance to acquire their own farms through long-term payments. This resettlement program, establishing rural communities, infiltration projects, camps for migratory labor and farmer subsistence homesteads, now has 92 projects completed, under construction or with final plans approved, and will provide more than 10,000 homes. Total cost is estimated at $51,000,000, of which little has been spent. More than a hundred other such projects are planned. Former subsistence homesteads have been covered in under this phase of the Resettlement program. These community projects will be villages of from 50 to 500 homes, which will be the center of fields and pasture lands. Cooperatives will be encouraged for growing, processing and marketing crops and there will be cooperative canneries, cotton gins and similar establishments, as well as stores and schools. tt tt tt 'T'HE general plan calls for a 40-year payment plan with 3 per cent interest on the mortgage loan and 1.3 per cent a year for amortization. In the infiltration projects, Resettlement will settle individual farm families in existing farm communities, on more or less similar terms. An example of how the general program works is the project at

LET'S EXPLORE YOUR MIND BY DR. ALBERT EDWARD WIGGAM

Mo wsewomi id feel you know /W gummy cL alla&ouTW* are- jjgg special eu&ikfp y\ \\ . -9*o jou* UC-Uo JU ■m *LL& CO.

1. In a study of the similarities and dissimilarities in habits, dress, interests, likes and dislikes of a large group of college men chums and college women chums, Ruth Bogardus and Phyllis Otto found that men chums were more like each other than women chums in liking for sports, going to football games, going to church (!) in “determination,” and slightly higher in having similar standards and ideals. Women chums were more alike in going shopping, in studying, fondness for children, attitudes toward smoking and drinking and especially in the number of hours spent together end in talking to each other. The women exceeded the men in total similarities. 2. Arthur Hirose in Advertising and Selling declares that every indication shows that people once again are liking home.. They are staying home and spending their money for home workshops, knitting, home movies, home pastimes of all sorts; also they, are installing,

The Indianapolis Times

Ida Valley, Va. The government bought a large Tract of the Blue Ridge for the Shenandoah National Park on which were about 450 families which must be resettled. Many of these families lived in one-room windowless shacks. Ida Valley is a project, similar to others in the area, where 20 of the families will live. Each family will have a 10-acre piece of land, a plain five- room house with bathroom, vegetable and meat house, pig house, poultry coop, small barn, and piped-in water. There’s a 40-acre community pasture and 100 acres of wooded land. The government paid S3O an acre for the resettlement land and the homesteads cost about SSOOO apiece. * tt tt tt 'T'HE difference between Ida Valley and the agricultural communities which Tugwell plans, however, is that the resettled families there can’t be self-sufficient on their 10-acre lots and must, in addition to income from raising cattle, pigs, and crops, find further cash income by working at national park jobs or in farm and orchard work at nearby farms. Ida Valley was one of the Subsistence Homesteads experiments, inherited by Tugwell. Future Resettlement agricultural communities will be planned to provide each family with a farm of sufficient size to enable it to make a living and meet payments. The submarginal land purchase program began under FERA. Aim of this program is officially stated to be directed against waste and destruction cf land, low rural living standards and excessive costs to counties of roads, schools, and relief in the poor land regions. Resettlement Administration will take over “ghost towns,” in the former forest regions of the Southern Appalachians, the northern Great Lakes region, the Pacific Northwest, and in cut-over pine lands in the far South. In northern parts of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin a third of the land has been abandoned as a result of timber destruction. Resettlement will return some of it to forest use. tt tt tt LARGE purchases have been made in the “dust bowl” area and the dry areas in a 250 to 300-mile belt in the West,

as never before fixtures and gadgets for home work—washing, cooking, refrigeration, as well as oil burners, radios and pianos, in short, planning really to live at home. Furthermore, home building in 1935 was nearly $500,000,000 as compared with $249,000,000 in 1934. No, professor, the American home hasn’t “gone” yet by a long shot. 3. As Robert F. Black, head of the White Motor Cos., said recently, “When a man convinces himself he knows all there is to know about a subject he is on his way out.” He might have added “down and out.” It means he has lost that divine curiosity to search for further knowledge which has made all science —indeed about all progress. The manager who thinks he has learned all there is to learn abo*n> his business will soon either lose his job or be passed by his competitors. Tomorrow: Should colleges make rules for girls or give them complete freedom?

WEDNESDAY, MAY 13, 1936

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From squalid shacks like the Virginia mountain dwelling shown above, the Resettlement Administrc tion hopes to rescue thousands of families, to place

which stretches from Canada to Texas. RA has acquired title to half a million acres there and will buy 800,000 more. Dead mining areas in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, southern Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Alabama, Arkansas and Oklahoma are also affected by the program. Resettlement publicity stresses the fact that people on submarginal land often average no better than SIOO a year in cash income, exist in leaky shacks with bread and fat pork, their children weak, undernourished, and uneducated. The development program for

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

TT7" ASIIINGTON, May 13. ▼ The tiny republic of Santo Domingo would seem a long way from the post toasties which brought fame and fortune to Mrs. Marjorie Post Hutton, but the two have been very close recently. In fact Santo Domingo has enabled Mrs. Hutton’s new husband, Joe Davies, to support her in the style to which she is accustomed —at least for the time being. Davies is the adviser of President Trujillo, dictator of the republic. Also important, Davies is an old friend of President Roosevelt, knew him when the latter was assistant naval secretary and Davies was a member of the Federal Trade Commission. Some time ago, President Trujillo wanted to extend the suspension of payments on Dominican bonds held by United States citizens. Since the bonds are guaranteed by Dominican customs and since Roosevelt appoints the collector of customs, Joe Davies went to his old friend in the White House. The bond payments were suspended. Joe’s fee in payment was the neat sum of $480,000. About this time he and his first wife were divorced and he married Mrs. Hutton, with whom he went on a honeymoon trip on her million-dollar yacht Hussar, built in Germany. En route they anchored off Santo Domingo. President Trujillo came aboard, inspected the vessel, said that he thought he would buy one, too. Note—A relative of Trujillo’s by marriage, Luis De Lanfuente, has been indicted by a New York grand jury for the murder of Sergio Benscombe, a Dominican exile from Trujillo’s wrath. Lanfuente returned to Santo Domingo after the indictment, and although lacking military training, immediately was made a lieutenant in the army. tt tt e PINT dresses of unique design seem to be the fad among Washington society leaders. Mrs. Roosevelt has come out with a print dress featuring the letters “PAX,” while the conservative Mrs. Robert Imbrie has blossomed forth in a brown and white print featuring the merry-go-round. tt tt tt SENATOR METCALF, shy millionaire Senator from Rhode Island, has become something of a poet, is contributing poetry to the Sheboygan (Wis.) Weekly, advertised by its juvenile editor as “The World s Smallest Newspaper.” Here is one of the Senator’s contributions:

them in small, comfortable houses of the type shown under construction in lower photo. For this program, land is taken from private hands for public use.

the purchased land has $15,000,000 with which to work and may get more later. It covers 137 projects, is employing about 65,000 men, and will employ 80,000 eventually. The present program is one of 137 projects, but more are on tap. Os 207 projects mapped out, 97 would be for forestry and grazing, 32 for migratory waterfowl, 47 for parks and recreation, and 31 for Indian reservation development. tt tt tt EMPHASIS is placed on forestry because about 60,000,000 acres of American timber land has been devastated and industry

AMERICA 1936 My country, ’tis of thee, Land of lost liberty, F. D. I sing! Land where my pigs have died, Land where the professors tried To take me for a ride— Let freedom ring! The editor comments: “The editor wants to thank Senator Metcalf very much for sending in this nice poem. If any other Senators have any nice poems, please send them in.” tt tt tt 'T'HE Rust Brothers, inventors of the cotton-picking machine which threatens to revolutionize the South, have been urged to incorporae their new company under an act of Congress. The incorporation would state that whereas this new machine may throw several thousand people out of work; whereas it must be developed for the best interests of the country; therefore, it shall be leased only to cotton producers who make proper restitution to their workers in hours and wages for the savings accomplished by this machine.

GRIN AND BEAR IT + + by Uchly —and my ambition is to wash Morn behind the earsL*

now uses twice as much timber each year as the nation grows. Dr. Tugwell proposes both to save millions of acres from erosion and make the same land useful under public ownership. All this work is only now beginning to speed up. Os $80,000,000 available for land acquisition, development and rural settlement little more than $11,000,000 has been spent. The rural resettlement phase especially has been, lagging from the point of view of land acquisition and construction. Next Subsistence homestead dreams and what has happened to them.

WHEN President Roosevelt dedicated the new Interior Department Building, he laid the corner stone with a trowel used by George Washington. This, he said in his speech, was “a good augury.” However, when a transcript of the proceedings of the ceremony was sent to Rep. Maury Maverick for insertion in the Congressional Record he noticed that the word “augury” had undergone a transformation. In the manuscript it read “a good orgy.” The Texan first corrected it, then wrote the President a stern note of reprimand, chiding him for his laxity of speech. “This carelessness,” he said, “might easily have precipitated a Roman holiday of derision from Republican jeerers.” The next day Maverick received a reply from the White House. “I don’t see why you changed it, Maury,” the President wrote. “I think the speech was much better uncorrected. After all, people would be much more interested in an orgy than in an augury. However, I suppose you know best.” (Copyright. 1936. by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.)

Second Section

Entered ns Second-Cliiss Matter at Pnstnffiee, TndianjipoTis. Ind.

Spendthrift America BY RUTH FINNEY (Westbrook Pegler Is on Vacation.) WEDNESDAY, May 13.—1f all the money spent by President Roosevelt were placed alongside a sum representing the loss suffered through the waste of America’s forests, the New Deal’s expenditures would be dwarfed by the contrast. A comparatively small part of the Roosevelt spending has gone into forest conservation, but the saving to the nation, if it could be put into

dollars and cents, would be staggering. To measure the cost of tha wanton destruction of’ forests under preceding administrations it is necessary to compute not only the loss of timber where acres have been so carelessly cut over and burned that forests will never grow there again, but also: tt tt tt Other Costs, Losses I—The cost of the floods that result from forest destruction, the top soil washed away by waters that should have been held back in forests, the farms that have been made unfertile, and the havoc wrought by drought and dust storms.

2 The cost of dredging out the rivers that have been filled with silt, of filtering their waters to make them potable, and of replacing machinery destroyed by the silt. 3 Many incalculable losses caused by the effect on climate of loss of moisture in the air, and the intangible loss of wild life and recreational areas. Once there were 800 million acres of virgin forest in the United States. Now there are not more than 100 million acres. Counting full growth timber land, second growth, cord wood and cut-over reas, approximately 615 million acres are classified as forest land today. President Roosevelt’s National Resources Board reports that the forest on 308 million of these acres exerts a major influence on stream flow and erosion, and that on an additional 141 million acres it exerts a moderate influence. In addition the reforestation of 22 million acres of abandoned crop and pasture land is considered necessary to prevent continued disastrous erosion. Public agencies own less than a third of the country’s forest land. Some 490 million acres are owned by individuals and exploited as they choose. Most of them have chosen to “mine” the forests instead of cutting them scientifically and growing anew timber crop for the future. The United States Forest Service estimated in one of its reports shortly before the New Deal that “of the 83,000,000 acres of devasted or poorly stocked forest land, 74,000,000, or nine-tenths, is privately owned-. . . J “Os the 850,000 acres devastated each year about 95 per cent are in private ownership. . . . About 98 per cent of the area burned annually during the last few years is privately owned.” tt it a A Lagging Growth T>ETWEEN 1925 and 192$ forest growth amounted ■AJ to only about half the timber of all sizes taken out Os the forests, and to about one-fifth of the sawtimber drain. The board warns, also, that the United States is supplying less than half its total requirements in pulp wood. It estimates that each year we are losing mors fertile soil through erosion than Japan requires to sustain her population. It estimates the cost at $400,000,000 a year. It finds that already 35 million acres of good land have been destroyed for farming—an area as large as Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Connecticut combined. In addition the rich top soil has been removed from 125 million once fertile acres, and 100 million more is beginning to become depleted. One whole segment of the New Deal was working on prevention of soil erosion, even before the AAA was turned into a soil conservation program, and the CCC has done more to safeguard public forests from destruction by fires, insects and disease than had been done in the previous decade. But the problem of conservation on privately owned land remains. NEXT—Our Metal Resources. Gen. Johnson Says— WASHINGTON, May 13—We ought not to cease dunning for the war debts. It is the strategy of the debtors that, in the lapse of time, we shall probably become less and less insistent and, in the end, forget—even if we never formally forgive. There is neither sense nor equity in this. The debtor countries use that money to balance their budgets, to pay for dangerous armament and to support their trade against our interest. We should make anew settlement. If we agreed to forego future interest and accept payments spread over 50 years, the total annual charge on them all would be about $200,000,000, or only about 16,000,000 pounds a year from England, the largest debtor—scarcely 2 per cent on the British budget. tt tt u IF $200,000,000 income a year, were assured, we could make a special issue of $10,000,000,000 of money to be retired at the rate of $200,000,000 a year, and use it to knock almost one-third off the public debt. That sounds like fiat money, Father Coughlin, etc., but it isn’t It is a self-redeeming currency based on specific value. Some of the most conservative financial authorities have expressed an opinion that it would be sound. Ths only danger is that having done it once, with a redemption feature, the temptation would be strong to issue money without that feature—pure printing-press currency. Isn’t that danger always present anyway? Would it be any more threatening because we had issued a novel kind of money which really is more sound than our present issues? Os course, all this depends on making that kind of settlement with our debtors. People recently returned from abroad say that is not at all a hopeless project, although for the moment not so promising with France in her present crisis. Certainly, we should keep the subject always alive and pressing. (Copyright, 1936, by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.) Times Books WHEN the last of the great cattle companies passed from the Western range a few years ago, the cowboy—one of America’s most romantic figures disappeared with them. He was essentially a rough-riding, square-shooting philosopher, individualist, and friend. Philip Ashton Rollins in his youth learned to know and love many of these cowboy characters. Several years ago he published a book about them—“THE COWBOY.” It was strictly a definitive work, tracing the terminology found in the business. And now Rollins, fearing that the real character of this figure might be lost in the inaccuracy of the pictures presented today in westerns and “pulp” magazines has expanded his book. “The Cowboy,” revised (Scribner, $3), is a painstaking review of the whole cattle industry, dating back to its Spanish origins. It is, moreover, a valuable historical document, depicting the everyday life of this out-of-doors fellow who wore high-heeled boots and drank water from his hat. You get a fine understanding of the cowboy's character, for instance, in passages like this: “Charity is sure a good thing, but there’s no use makin’ a damn hog of yourself an’ overdoin’ it.” Mr. Rollins spent years in the collection of hi* “cowboyiana,” if it can properly be called that. The result is a very human book. ,(B. C.j

Ruth Finney