Indianapolis Times, Indianapolis, Marion County, 7 August 1937 — Page 11

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The Indianapolis Times

NEWSPAPER)

MARK FERREE Business Manager

(A SCRIPPS-HOWARD

WwW. HOWARD LUDWELL DENNY President Editor

ROY

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EB RIley 5551

Give Light and the People Will Find Their Own Way

Member of United Press, Scripps - Howard Newspaper Alliance, NEA Service, and Audit Buvreau of Circulations.

SATURDAY, AUG. 7, 1937

THE BAKER CONVICTION OEL A. BAKER'S conviction for assault and battery is another blow to the ring which has ruled in Marion County with political intimidation. A Criminal Court jury upheld the State's charge that Baker ordered his close associate, Peter A. Cancilla, to slug Wayne Coy last March in the State House. The jury gave Baker the maximum fine of $1000. Baker has been thoroughly discredited. So have others connected with the terror lobby against reform of the patronage racket in county welfare departments. But Joel Baker was only the front for more powerful forces. If Marion County is to rid itself of what the Indiana League of Women Voters branded ‘“‘gang-controlled politics,” the public must not forget the amazing ramifica-

tions of this case.

FOUR TO ONE—AND WHY HE vote was 64 to 16. Ii is very unusual for the Senate of the United States to pass any controversial measure by a 4-to-1 margin, especially when the measure is an admittedly imperfect compromise, entirely satisfactory to no one, and for which there is little political pressure. The only explanation for the overwhelming vote for the Wagner Slum Clearance and Housing Bill, we believe, is the general recognition of the magnitude and urgency

of the problem which the measure seeks to attack. » »

2 ” ” "

S a bald economic proposition the bill hardly meets the

test. At a time when the Government's budget is far

out of balance and its credit strained, the Wagner program authorizes a $700,000,000 bond issue to finance construc- |

tion and permits the Housing Authority to obligate the

Government to pay rental subsidies of $20,000,000 a year |

for 60 years. As a social enterprise it is far from perfect. The limit

which the Senate voted, of $4000 a family unit or $1000 a | room. would effectively deprive large families of its bene- | - ways there.

fits. To establish an eight-person family in a four-room

apartment certainly would not be providing decent housing |

accommodations.

da We Municipal housing experts say that present building | Mu 1 g pe o | me I got-to cat vegetables.

| the guy that's bringing in the | dough every week and don't you | forget

costs require from $1500 to $1750 a room for satisfactory fireproof structures in large cities. The other side of this argument is that certainly some limit should be stipulated,

because there is a limit to the amount of money the Gov- |

ernment can spend, and because millions of self-supporting

tain these subsidies, are compelled to house themselves on

a much less expensive scale. n »

un ” = ” \ HE measure still has to pass through the House, which

perhaps can find a better solution. But a perfect solu- | | Anyway, brings in the dough around here?

tion need not be expected, for the problem is not one that

will admit easy answers. Good housing is costly. So are bad slums. Those

blighted areas, breeding places of poverty, crime and disease. show up on the cost side of the ledgers in every city’s police, fire and health service. They feed the court dockets and the jails. Good citizens cannot be reared in tenements

and dark alleys.

THE FARM BLOC’S FOLLY FARM belt Congressnien fear that farm prices—especially cotton and corn prices—are headed for the toboggan. They can’t agree with each other what kind of farm legislation should be enacted to prevent this threatened price sag. They don’t want to stay on the job in Washington long enough to reach an agreement and legislate. And they don’t want to go home and face their farmer constituents with prices falling. So the farm belt Congressmen have cooked up a shortorder scheme to make the Government peg prices by lending money on farm commodities at artificially high levels. Thus at one stroke these lawmakers would keep the farmers

happy through the current harvest season, enjoy their own | vacations, and postpone until January a showdown on | the |

| tween states, anyway.

America’s farm problems. Meanwhile, of course, Government—-or rather the taxpayers—would hold the bag. President Roosevelt stands firm against this pressure raid on the Treasury. He deserves the support of the American people, and before the fighting is over, we predict his strongest backers will be the farmers for whose benefit this folly is proposed. To lend money at high price levels so long as crop surpluses are piling up can lead only to a repetition of the Hoover Farm Board fiasco. A waste of the taxpayers’ money and in the end a still further depression in farm prices. America’s farmers have had too much, too recent and too bitter experience with uneconomic price-pegging and overproduction. They have not forgotten that experience. They know that the President is right in insisting that prices cannot be stabilized at profitable levels unless crop production is stabilized at marketable levels. The wanta-go-home Congressmen are on the spot. But, after all, they are hired by the year.

SPEAKING OF GIFTS (CROWN PRINCESS JULIANA of Holland and her new husband, Prince Bernhard, have received from the citizens of the town of Amersfoort a huge stone, weighing about 31% tons. Imported from the Prince's native Germany, the gift is a duplicate of a boulder which, for centuries, has been the pride of Amersfoort. For stones in Holland are as rare as snakes in Ireland. Some may wonder what use the royal pair will find for their 314-ton wedding present. Well, it probably will prove just about as useful as the numerous pickle dishes, vases, tea trays and other ill-chosen whatnots for which our own brides and bridegrooms are expected to be grateful. And at least as ornamental, 7

| it comes to drinking,

| state. | the commotion about tariff?

~ That has

THE INDIANAPOLIS TIMES The Personal Note in Foreign Affairs—By Herblock

(Now That Mussolini and €hamberlain Are Corresponding——)

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Fair Enough

By Westbrook Pegler

Ruminates on Domestic Rifts and Wages Bill as He Drives to Office.

EW YORK, office this morning,

Aug. 7.—Driving to the George Spelvin,

| American, thought as follows:

I guess that'll hold her for awhile. Any time she wants to move out, the door’s alOr I can move to some quiet little hotel and be perfectly happy, and don’t let anyone forget it. Come home when I want, order what I want for dinner and no waiter is going to tell I'm

it, madam. I. got some rights around here, too, and any time you don’t like it, madam, nobody's going to detain you, I'm

: : » : | sure. American families, who will have to pay taxes to help main- |

Get back in line, louse. Oh, to be a cop when some bum like

{ that cuts out of line.

And. another thing, madam, if that bum

| brother of yours does a fair job

of drinking and I notice I always show up at the office on time. who is the one who

Mr. Pegler

She’s right, in a way, I got to admit. made an awful clown of myself, and I shouldn't have told that one about the hiil-billy and his maw. I suppose, in her way, she means well, but never me to take that kind of bawling out. They get to think you can't get along without them and you have to

slap them down.

» Ed ”

ON'T understand this wage and hours thing. New England manufacturers favor bill to raise workmen’s wages in the South. When did those pirates get so big-hearted about any workmen, South, North or wherever? Rotten, leaky slums all through New England and manufacturers’ kids going to luxury schools paying enough tuition to support two families. Still and all, I don’t know. If a man can’t earn 16 bucks a week to support a family down South or wherever, he might just as well give himself back to the Indians. Sixteen bucks a week? You don't know how well you are off, my friend. Youre no Myrna Loy, you know. Maybe you think you are, but I could tell you something if I weren't too considerate of your feel-

ings.

td ® =

OSES! Three minutes to the office and red

lights all over the place. I'm not over the white line, so don't look at me that way, cop. After all,

| I'm paying your salary to do your stuff, not to be

glaring at law-abiding citizens. And suppose that we have the 16 bucks a week law and it does keep cheap labor out of expensive labor states? What of it, if it does? We got tariffs beOne state charges 50 cents a quart for liquor; another charges a dollar. So you can't bring it in from the 50 cent state to the dollar Same about hundreds of things. So why all You got me, brother. One minute to the office and do I feel awful? I guess she is right, at that, although she could be more pleasant about it. It isn't the principle, it's the way she goes about it. But she's a pretty good old girl. I guess I'll ‘call her up after a while. Ah, just in time! Morning, Mr. Dokes.

General Hugh Johnson Says—

Despite Amendments, the Wages-Hours Bill Retains Political O.&.P. U. Feature, and 'Nay' Is Only Statesmanlike Vote Congressmen Can Cast.

ASHINGTON, Aug. 7—There is no great opposition to putting a ceiling over the workweek and a floor under wages. The scrap is how to do it. What amounts to three separate-bills have been considered in hardly more than as many weeks—the original Administration Bill, the same bill as Senator Black and his committee hastily amended it, and the measure now being slapped into new shape in the House Committee under the management of William Green. Each shows some improvement, but the basic vice still stands—a political O. G.P. U, with power to barge into each occupation in the country and set the limiting wage and hour scales at its own discretion. It is said that NRA did this. NRA did not. NRA had to get the agreement of an overwhelming majority of employers in each mdustry to do anything at all. » = = OTHING of that kind is proposed here. This gives a board of five men a power to prescribe pay rates for any or every employer and to send him to jail if he doesn’t accept. Such a board has authority to make or break whole regions. Whole regions will; therefore, be there with bells on to dragoon its decisions, already Agriculture is pow- . labor,

Must have |

The Hoosier Forum

1 wholly disagree with what you say, but will

George Spelvin Average Citizen | defend to the death your right to say it.—Voltaire. | ' 1

| | MEN BETTER FITTED TO DO HOUSEWORK, CLAIM

By E. A. E. A traitor to his sex has arisen in the person of Dr. Robert Hoppock, assistant to the National Occupational Conference of New York, who told 1500 members of the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs at their Atlantic City convention that cooking, washing clothes and housecleaning might better be done by men than | women.

Note that Dr. Hoppock did not say these things might be done better by men. Had he said that, a | | chorus of masculine approbation | | would have echoed his words. For many a husband knows that, by ap- | | plying to home tasks the intelligent | and systematic methods he employs | | in business or industry, he could get | | through them in half the time and with less than half the mental and physical stress they exact from his | wife. (Statistics show that the husbands who know this most certainly are

to cooking a family dinner, doing a

| spring housecleaning.) What Dr. Hoppock did say was this: “The vocational psychologist, were he free from the restraining influence of long-established tradition, and from his own rationalized desire to perpetuate the special privileges of the male sex, would be more likely to assign such work to men, since it frequently involves a physical strain which men, better than women, are able to endure.” And that, of course, is a lot of language. The vocational psychologist may hide behind this fiction of being enslaved by tradition and a rationalized desire for special privileges, if he pleases. The rest of us men will seek no such flimsy excuse. Acknowledging our superior strength, we would like nothing better than to lift from the shoulders of the little women the household burdens they find so heavy. And we'd do it, too, if—well, if we weren't so frightfully busy.

2 ” 5

ACCUSES TIMES

read some of the unanswerable | | arguments

| cation and

| Roosevelt will carry on. | pose justice and progress, just re-

| move in their courses are against you and defeat awaits you just

(Times readers are invited to express their views in these columns, religious con. | troversies excluded. Make | your letter short, so all can | have a chance. Letters must be signed, but names will be withheld on request.)

form our opinion. Our opinion is that The Times wished to appear | fair without being fair in fact. Why did not The Times ask us to

of Dr. Harry Elmer | Barnes, Broun or some other writer | who refuses to prostitute his edu- | intelligence? | But with or without your help, As you op-

member that the very stars that | around the corner.

2 = ” |

ARTICLES ON SYPHILIS |

medical treatment. The press has at last forgotten timidity of the subject, so we may get some place. What about helping pass the proposed law of a physical examination before a marriage license? ” n ” ABANDONED GAS PLANT CALLED WASTE By W. E. Evans, 3211 Kenwood Mr. and Mrs. Citizen, as you drive west on Fall Creek Blvd. at Northwestern Ave., you will see there an | abandoned gas plant, a gloomy mass against the evening sunset. It is not old, but it is abandoned. It is a spike fence set up because it bears the stigma of Indianapolis gas ownership. It cost our million | and a half ‘dollars, Mr. Luckless | Citizen. It has nice nickle-plated | gadgets throughout, the very latest | in efficient gas machinery. | But here is the point—it isn't paid | for yet, and it is piling up fixed charges in the way of depreciation and obsolescence, which you are

| my ambition to become a captain of finance.

the ones who haven't yet got around | | By a Sincere Reader

ARE COMMENDED [your gas hill. You are paying, and

|so will your children pay for it and

| paying as an invisible tax added to |

| Monday washing or undertaking a |

OF PREJUDICE

newspaper that asks us to read just and one side of an argument and then | Rochebrune.

direct and indirect, has therefore from the bill. But if the principle of the bill is

out power in the board to vary it.

schedule preserving long established

ships.

sary for workers in a rag-baling plant, why isn’t it equally so for workers in a cotton-baling plant? The answer is that political pressure is reversed and Congress must respond. But if Congress must respond to political pressure to violate a principle, ‘what will a politically appointed board do?

HE best plan would be a Federal law to give the national market to states of highest labor standards. If that is out—as it seems to be—we should try to get the best possible bill under the impossible

principle of the present monstrosity. There is no insurmountable objection to a fiat, statutory 40-hour week without exception and with-

in fixed wages. What the latter requires is a statutory

dustrial differentials with the actual rates specified in the law and with authority in the board to grant exceptions and modifications only upon a clear showing, in a public hearing, of great and unusual hard-

The House Bill, as it stands with the Green amendments, is so grossly incompetent and so ter-

Recently your paper has published |

| interesting as well as startling facts

on syphilis. My own ignorance was astonishing, but no more so than

the persons I have discussed it with, since I read the articles. I want to recommend an article by Dr. Thomas Parran in the August issue of Ladies’ Home Journal. There is a story in the same issue, “The Blue-Muslin Sepulchre,” which truly brings out the danger of ignorance on this subject. We must stamp out this disease; the only way is intelli- | gent knowledge and immediate

EVENTIDE

By JAN LUCAS Eventide—you bring Her again—in pantomime Truth and Love Reincarnate.

Eventide—this heart Has faltered when she smiles And shadows play across her lips.

Years have gone Others prosaic I have found And across Convention's Gulf I am bound For she has beckoned from across the Great Divide—Eventide.

DAILY THOUGHT

For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and cleave to his wife, And the twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh. —Mark 10:7, 8.

HEN a man and woman are married their romance ceases their history commences. —

been exempted

wise and neces-

' at-large for both and a very much

Davis brothers.

The trouble lies regional and in-

born in Bedford

By Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen ASHINGTON, Aug. 7.—When Ewin Davis was appointed to the Federal Trade Commission in | 1938 he was derided by some news commentators as a lameduck Congressman who couldn’t get a job anywhere else, and upon whom President Roosevelt had taken pity as a favor to his brother, Norman Davis. Norman Davis at that time was commuting across the Atlantic in feverish attempts to disarm the world and negotiate debt agreements. He was ambassador-

But in the years that have passed, the see-saw of fate has somewhat reversed the status of the two Norman no longer is in the limelight. Ewin, as a member of the Federal Trade Commission, has become a real power in business, and one of the most against monopoly.

T is unique that one small corner of Tennessee should have turned out three brothers, all of whom were to make their mark on the nation. They were

brother being Paul Davis, Nashville bank president and Federal Reserve Bank director. Ewin dipped into Tennessee politics, and when 34 became judge of the Seventh Judicial Circuit of Tennessee. It was as a judge that Davis let drop the Judge

your children’s children. When you pay $12 per ton for your coke next winter, you are doing your bit to pay for a million and a half dollars of wasted capital.

» w LONG FLIGHTS MAY BE AIR THREATS

By Suspicious News from Tokyo is that Japanese aviators are preparing to attempt a nonstop flight to New York in a “wonder plane,” designed and built in Japan, which is capable of flying at least 10,000 miles without refueling. The airline distance, Tokyo to New York, is about 7000 miles—a few hundred miles farther than the distance from Moscow to southern California, which a Soviet plane recently negotiated by way of the North Pole. The Japanese are said to be eager to surpass the Russian record. One purpose of the Soviet flight, it has been reported, was to show Japan what Russian aviators might do to Japanese cities in the event of war. Now, apparently, Japan is determined to stage a counter-demonstration. And that, it seems to me, puts a new light on these superlong distance flights to the United States. Perhaps we should be glad that the Russians and the Japanese aren't trying to scare us—at least I hope they're not. But if, instead of sending us winged ambassadors of good will, as they say, these countries are using our space on the globe as a terminus for flying threats against each other-—well, maybe that’s an activity that we should not encourage too enthusiastically.

There Might B

Gib ey VASA SN

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—————

It Seems to

oe n——

Columnist's Utopia Would Permit Gambling, and Give Everybody the Opportunity to Wager on Horses.

ARATOGA SPRINGS, N. Y., Aug. 7.— Whenever I show up at a race track, par ticularly one as swagger as that of the Spa, I get kidded. Someone who knows me well or ill pipes up and say, “Why, Mr. B., I see you've become a capitalist.” Now, as a matter of fact, such flings as I get in playing horses most certainly do not advance me in It just happens that win or lose I like® horse racing very much—and it is mostly lose—but there comes a time in the life of every man when he wants to get away from ideas for a week-end, Even his own ideas, I might add. Still, since I didn’t bring the subject up, there could be interest ing speculation as to the place which horse races would take nn an ideal co-operative community, As far as I'm concerned, the ale most, perfect state would hardly be that if there were no tracks. And while I think that a 3-year-old coming down the stretch is one of the loveliest sights on earth, I'll still admit that you can’t run horses without betting. So my particular sort of Utopia would permit and encourage gambling.

» »

AM afraid no place could be made, for the terrifie plunger, but at least the $2 bettor would have his rights, and there should also be 5 and l0-cent limit poker games. Indeed, I think that wise socialism would permit 25-cent roodles after a full house, Dick Watts of the Herald Tribune has told me that they have horse racing and betting in the Soviets, but I did not get a very clear picture from him as to the precise manner in which the sport is administered. Certain changes would be superficial and easy enough. For instance, it would be no great trouble to transform Herbert Bayard Swope from Racing Commissioner to Racing Commissar. That could be done overnight. Indeed, I rather think that Mr, Swope would very much enjoy the new title. n » »

HE thing which would require a lot of working out would be the question of the ownership of the horses. I don't quite see how you could have socialism and big private stables. I guess the system would be to have the horses owned jointly by various trade unions and other co-operative groups. Thus the big race of the year would be the match between the

By Heywood Broun

Mr. Broun

30", a

colt of the C. I. O. and the gelding of the A. F. of L.

Quite possibly the Turf Writers’ Association would have a few fillies running in its colors. There might even be a jockeys’ guild, which at times would have a horse entered for the mutual profit of all the riders. Indeed, I believe that arrangements not unlike this last one have sometimes been effected at smaller outlaw tracks. Naturally, no such thing would be either possible or desirable right now at a well-supers= vised track such as that in Saratoga. But all kidding aside, I think that quite a few people are hostile to all radical notions because they fear that any progressive economic philosophy is in some way tied up with a passion for gaunt and bleak Puritanism. Nothing could be further from the fact. All the radicals I've ever known have been men and women eager to crowd more joy into the world. Betting on race horses is a lot of fun. Some day we'll have a world in which everybody has a chance to do it.

The Washington Merry-Go-Round

Ewin Davis, Crusading Chairman of Federal Trade Commission, in Line

For Radio Post on Basis of

Presidents Hoover and Roosevelt, limelighted man.

world of American orthright crusaders

County, the third and youngest

you boys

Fight Against Monopoly in the Industry,

against monopoly during the 14 years he was in Congress. There he was chairman of the Merchant Ma«rine and Fisheries Committee. It was as a member of

this Committee that Davis fought Warren Harding's ~ ¢

move for a ship subsidy—a move in which Mr. Roose« velt now has been more successful. It was also as a member of this Committee that Judge Davis waged the first legislative battle against the big radio com= . panies and their drive for monopoly within the

industry, ” » n

T was this experience in framing radio legislation which may cause the President to move Judge Davis from the Feceral Trade Commission, which is functioning smoothly, to the Federal Communications Commission » » » To Judge Davis not only the letter of the law but the spirit of the law must be obeyed. once when a large mail-order house was found to be selling goods to retail stores at a price cheaper ° than they sold to wholesalers, Judge Davis made the case his pet. The Commission's chief counsel had ruled that although this was a very unfair trade practice, nevertheless, there was nothing in the Rob= inson-Patman Act which made it’ illegal. “» Judge Davis broke oyt: “You say there's nothing in the law which makes that Ee he we'll see about that, You let me write the on that point. The trouble with is that you don’t know the law.” ;

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