The news in this publi
cation is released for the
press on receipt.
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA
MEWS
Published Weekly by the
University of North Caro
lina for its University Ex
tension Division.
JANUARY 11, 1922
CHAPEL HILL, N. C.
VOL. vni, NO. 8
X.li(oriat Board i E5. 0. '5i'ansoii, 8. H. Hobbs, Jr., L. R. WiLson, E. W. Knight, D. D. Carroll,'J. B. Bullitt, H. W. Odum. Ejiterod as second-class matter November 14,1914, ot the Tostoface at Chapel Hill, N, C., under the act of August 24, 1912.
HOME OWNERSHIP IN MILL TOWNS
HOME OWNING MILL HANDS
The value of home ownership by em
ployees in industrial communities, to
both manufacturers and employees, was
clearly set forth in a report by Mr. S.
O. Bondurant, of Rockingham county,
at the last meeting of the North Caro
lina Club at the University, which is
this year making a comprehensive study
of home and farm ownership in the
state and the nation.
According to Mr. Bondurant, there is
growing concern among leading manu
facturers over the home ownership
question, due to its direct relation (1)
to the labor turn-over, (2) to strike
troubles, and (3) to industrial security,
as based on stable, responsible, pro
perty-owning and therefore conserva
tive citizenship in industrial centers.
These considerations are causing a
change in the attitude of some of the
leading manufacturers of the nation
toward home ownership, as is seen by
recent activities in favor of home-own
ing employees by Henry Ford, the
Standard Oil Company, the Goodyear
and the Firestone Rubber and Tire
Companies in Akron, Ohio, The ilimler
Coal Mine Company in West Va., and
"Kentucky, the Endicott Johnson Shoe
P^t.v^gny at Johnson City and Bing-
iJowing-.. -^^^ York State, the N. O.
Nelsontrd^iifeny at LeClaire, Ill., and
the R. J. Reynolds Company in Wins
ton-Salem.
The old attitude, according to Mr.
Bondurant, has been, as a rule, one of
antagonism to home ownership. Indus
trial corporations, he said, have felt
that they and not the employees should
own the mill village dwellings; that
this policy is essential to community
morals, law and order, and in general
to company regulation and control of
employees, that it prevents strikes,
and that strikes when they occur can
be ended by evicting the strikers and
bundling them off the company pre
serves. These reasons for corporation
ownership of village dwellings have
been proven to be without foundation.
Factory ownership of mill village homes
has never yet prevented a strike, so far
as we know, and the eviction of strikers
from company dwellings is one of the
surest ways of provoking violence and
bloodshed in strike situations.
This attitude, he continued, has been
maintained notwithstanding the almost
universal fact that company houses, as
a rule, yield little or no dividends in
rents. They are owned and maintained
with small profits or no profits at all,
and commonly at a loss. As a rule
they are a company liability rather than
a company asset. At best they are
what the corporations call a necessary
evil.
Hints to Mill Owners
But after two centuries of experience
with factory-owned dwellings, industrial
corporations—at least a few of them—
are beginning to realize that home own
ership among their employees means
the possession of three of the greatest
factors that any community, especially
an industrial community, can possess.
First. Home ownership creates a
more stable citizenship, which is of
course advantageous to manufacturers
because it means a decrease of the labor
turn-over. Restless, transient, hobo
mill help is an increasing menace to
industry everywhere.
Second. Home ownership promotes
right reasoning. When a man becomes
the owner of a plot of ground and a
home of his own, his attitude change^
toward almost everything, more espe
cially toward questions the solution of
which involves the valuing of future
pleasures in terms of present sacrifice.
He reasons, and when a man reasons
he ceases to be swayed by trivial im
pulses. Nothing steadies a man’s will
like the ownership of property and es
pecially landed property; and a property
owner believes in peace, which alone
safeguards his possessions. Radical
proposals to dynamite the social order
are the increasing temptation of the
landless and homeless everywhere.
Third. Home ownership promotes
conservative citizenship. Propertyless
people are prone to act upon sudden
impulse. And a person who acts upon
sudden impulse is easily drawn into rad
ical, destructive organizations, and is
much more likely to listen to arguments
promotive of strife than a person who
has felt the steadying effect of home
ownership. Conservatism and home
ownership go hand in hand. Conserva
tive, home-owning citizenship not only
insures the retention of accumulated
property and the use of it for produc
tive purposes with minimum risks and
hazards, but it means a stable, robust,
responsible, self-respecting citizenship
—the kind of citizenship that is essential
to democratic safety and industrial se
curity alike.
In certain industrial communities
home ownership among the majority of
the employees has already been tried
out—in particular at LeCIaire where
there has never been a strike or a lock
out in thirty years, and at Himlerville, a
strikeless area adjoining Bloody Mingo
in West Virginia.
It has already been proven, said he,
that home ownership is best for em
ployers and employees, and for indus
trial communities as a whole.
Space forbids an account of Mr. Bon-
durant’s constructive remedies (1) for
old and (2) for new mill villages in the
South. His paper will be given in full
in the next Year-Book of the Club.—
J. G. Gullick.
MORE RURAL HOMES
All forward-looking men and women
are agreed that our national security
depends upon the further development
of our rural homes, not that the pro
ducing area of the country needs to
be extended at this time, but that more
men and women should be placed in
possession uf the resources that are
necessary to establish their economic
independence.
Until the deep-seated causes of the
present world-wide distress are re
moved, prosperity can not come back
to us through any struggle that we
might make for industrial supremacy.
The odds are against us. Instead of
spending sleepless nights over plans for
controlling the markets of hundreds of
millions of people too poor to buy, why
not consider plans to prevent our own
people from sinking to the economic
level of the people of Europe? Life in
these perilous times for many, many
millions in the great cities of this and
other countries is most precarious.
Armies and navies can not combat the
forces which threaten the world today.
Other means will have to be employed.
Only by increasing the purchasing
power of our own people and the ex
tension of our home markets can the
economic balance in this country be re
stored. This can most readily be done
through the further development of our
own natural resources, but this must be
in a way wiiich will establish the eco
nomic independence of more people.
More homes must be established, and
these must be rural homes. Their ex
istence will permanently strengthen the
country’s real “first line of defense’’,
which is the happiness, contentment,
and loyalty of the great common peo
ple.—Representative Wm. B. Bankhead,
of Alabama, whose bill in Congress,
H. R. 6048, concerns Federal Aid to
Farm Ownership.
IRISH COMMUNITY LIFE
A quarter century ago Sir Horace
Plunkett and his colleagues of the Irish
Agricultural Organization Society cast
a new economic generalization into the
minds of the Irish people. He advo
cated agricultural cooperation and his
message was so well received, he found
so many enthusiastic and disinterested
helpers, that today many speak of the
ideal Ireland as a cooperative common
wealth.
Already about one hundred and thirty
thousand Irish farmers, and these the
best, are united, in over one thousand
cooperative associations. These were
originally started for some one particu
lar purpose, such as butter-making, the
purchase of requirements, or the sale
of produce, but very soon these societies
for special purposes began to change
their character, toenlarge their objects,
until they became what I might call
general purpose societies.
If this tendency goes on, as I have
no doubt it will, because it is economi-
CHRSSTMAS PEACE
The good tidings of great joy an
nounced by the Heavenly Heralds on
the first Christmas morn was, Glory
to God in the highest and on earth
peace, good will toward men. So
reads the King James version.
And lo, twenty centuries later
twenty million men in arms flying at
one another’s throats with the fury
of tiger cats!
Even the Christmas of the Wash
ington Peace Conference dawned up
on eight million men still harnessed
for war—upon continental Europe
seething with hate—upon France,
Italy, Ireland, Germany, Poland,
Russia, the Balkan States, Greece,
Turkey, upon Egypt, Armenia, India,
China, Japan, upon the islands of
the seas and the ends of the earth
sodden with hate!
“Europe is unbalanced”, says
Georg Brandes. “Europe is half
mad. Every European nation thinks
of nothing but hating other nations.
Wherever you turn there is hate,
hate, hate.”
“The business of Europe is hate”,
says Isaac F. Marcosson. “The
motto on the walls of the business
offices of Europe is, Give us this day
our daily hate.”
Peace was won, they say, three
long years ago, but the Four Horse
men of the Apocalypse are still
scourging the earth with war, hate,
hunger, and pestilence! Three long
years of the pestilence that walketh
in darkness and the destruction that
wasteth at noon day!
What a strange word is Peace in
this year of our Lord, 1922!
The Prince of Peace
Will the Four-Power Pacific Pact
pour oil on the troubled waters of
the world?
Not unless the world can grasp the
meaning of the Peace of the Prince
of Peace. That alone will avail.
The Christmas morning message
two thousand years ago was, Peace
on earth to men of good will. So
reads the Revised Version.
The new version is a true version.
The law it announces is as inflexible
and inescapable as fate itself.
There never has been, nor ever
can be,, nor ever ought to be any
peace for any man of bad will, or
for any race or nation with bad will
toward other races and other na
tions.
Harmony within groups and fair
play between groups is a law of the
higher life that races and nations
must learn. It is the essential law
of amity and comity—the law of co
operation and collusion instead of
collision and contest. If men and
nations cannot or will not obey this
higher law then the end of civiliza
tion is easily in sight.
, Jungle life is a tooth-and-claw,
beak-and-talon struggle for survival
and supremacy. Jungle life is the
life, more or less disguised and re
fined, that Christendom has lived
for twenty unavailing centuries. The
inevitable result was a world war,
and after it “a peace of darkness
and peril”, to use the phrase of Sen
ator Lodge—a counterfeit peace of
the sorriest sort.
Somebody once asked Henry Ward
Beecher if Christianity wasn’t a
failure. I don’t know, said he, we
have never tried it.
Verily it is a sad truth, not a mer
ry jest. But the world must try it
or civilization—that curious mixture
of good and evil that men have called
civilization—will pass into a scrap
heap.
If this war isn’t the last, said
Lloyd George, the next will land the
world in ruins.—E. C. B.
cally beneficial, we shall find rural Ire
land in the next generation with endless
rural communities, each covering an
area of about four or five miles around
the center of business, all buying to
gether, manufacturing together, and
marketing together, using their organ
ization for social and educational as
well as for business purposes.—George
W. Russell, Editor, The Irish Home
stead.
TESTING PATRIOTISM
If you desire to test the sincerity of a
man’s protestations of patriotism, ask
him how active he is in the government
of his home town. That tells the secret.
If he does not vote in the elections of
his city’s rulers, if he takes'no interest
in how they rule, he does not love his
country. If he does not concern him
self with that which is at his front door,
he does not trouble hiu^scir with things
farther away. It is in vain for him to
say that he pays his taxes—for he does
that because he has to—or that he con
tributes to civic movements—for he
does that from other motives than love
—or that he went to war—for he did
that from the fear of ridicule. You can
not be totally indifferent to that which
you love. You cannot love your home
town as long as her governmental af
fairs bore you and get nothing out of
you.
So long as you refuse to vote in the
municipal elections, so long as you are
ignorant of what is happening in city
I politics, you are doing yourself and your
! neighbors a frightful injustice. You
' are surrendering to the machinations of
• meddlers and mischief-makers. You
1 are throwing away your God-given right
1 to keep your community in order. You
' are laying yourself, your family and
your friends open to the assaults of in-
: justice and the abuses of tricksters and
time-servers.
Worst of all, if you do not train your
self to love and serve your home town,
“Americanism” is a thing for mockery.
You can not be anxious for the welfare
of Pennsylvania or California if the
demands of North Carolina’s garden
spot move you not at all. You have no
real interest in the deliberations of the
National Congress when you dismiss the
meetings of the City Commissioners as
unimportant. Patriotism, like charity,
begins at home. Study the wants of
your town. Study the city government
under which you live. If there were
more real patriotism in Asheville, Ashe
ville would be even more beautiful than
she is today.—James Hay, Jr., Ashe
ville Citizen.
by the lack of hotel accommodations at
Chapel Hill.
Recently, there has been considerable
agitation of this subject in university
circles, but apparently no plan for re
lief has taken definite form. Perhaps
it will come soon. University alumni
are said to have displayed unusual in
terest in the matter of late, and if they
should take it up in earnest the result
would probably be an early announce
ment of building plans. —Wilmington
Star.
OF STATEWIDE IMPORTANCE
The Greensboro News makes the
timely observation that “the need of the
town of Chapel Hill for an adequate
hotel is a matter of statewide import
ance. ’ ’
It is true, as the News remarks, that
there should be a closer acquaintance
between the state and the university,
and the proper development of this
contact will never be possible while
the visitor at Chapel Hill has no place
to stay.
The need is evident, and grows more
pressing with the enlargement of the
university program for making its life
and work a part of the life of the peo
ple. A degree of isolation is inevitable
under present conditions. There must
be more of the personal touch be
tween the university and those who
claim it as their own; this touch, as our
contemporary emphasizes, is out of the
question unless they are able to see the
university with their own eyes. This
opportunity is being denied to thousands
OUR COUNTRY TOWNS
Collective neighborliness marks the
country town for its own. Death,
poverty, grief, tragedy visit the city,
and few friends hurry in to heal the
wounds.
In some organized way the town’s
good will touches every family. The
belief that if you are good to somebody,
somebody will be good to you, distin
guishes Americans from the rest of
mankind. And it is not the product of
our great cities, and not primarily a
farm product. It is made in our country
towns.
The Chamber of Commerce today in
the American small town and in the
American city is the leading exponent
of altruism in the community. It is not
a wide interurban altruism that the
Chamber of Commerce fosters; it is
Higginsville first. But it is for Hig-
ginsville all the time.
The Chamber of Commerce modifies
the innate cussedness of the average
selfish, hard-boiled, picayunish, penny-
pinching, narrow-gauged human porker,
and lifts up his snout; makes him see
further than his home, his business,
and his personal interest, and sets him
rooting for his copimunity.-William
Allen White, Collier’s.
HURRAH FOR GEORGIA
One million dollars raised by public
subscription in thirty days is a complete
denial of the so-called hard times in the
South. The hard times may be here,
but the alumni of the University of
Georgia have steadfastly refused to ad
mit it, and as a result they have added
one million dollars to the resources of
their alma mater.
Friends of the University said it
couldn’t be done, but the campaign
committee went ahead with its plans
and piled up the fund within the thirty
days they allotted for the task. To
carry out the task an extensive organi
zation was built up under the direction
of G. 0. Tamblyn, of New York, which
embraced nineteen states outside Geor
gia and returns were secured from 28
states.
The million dollars will provide the
University of Georgia, the oldest state
university in America, with several
new buildings, and will build a student
center—an Alumni Memorial Hall—in
honor of 45 University men who lost
their lives in the world war.
It is the first step in a $3,500,000
building program. Harry Hodgson, a
well-known Georgian, was chairman
general of the campaign, and Dr. R. P.
Brooks, dean of the School of Com
merce, acted as executive secretary of
the alumni.—Atlanta Constitution.
FARM TELEPHONES IN 1920
States ranked according to ratio of farms reporting telephones to all farms
in the several states. Based on reports of the 1920 Census as published in the
federal Monthly Crop Reporter, Nov. 1921.
In the United States at large 2,608,002 farms, or 38 9 percent of all farms,
reported telephones. In North Carolina the country homes with telephones
were 33,218 or 12.3 percent of the total, and 41 states made a better showing.
Department of Rural Social Science, University of North Carolina.
Rank State
Pet. of
No. of
Rank State
Pet. of
No. of
all farms
telephones
all farms telephones
1
Iowa
... 86.1
183,852
25
Oklahoma....
....37.3
71,613
2
Kansas
....77.9
128,753
26
Nevada
. ,. 35.5 ,
1,122
3
Nebraska ....
... 76.4
95,050
27
Idaho
....32.9
13,837
4
Illinois
...73.2
173,647
28
Texas
,.,.32.2
140,234
6
Indiana
....66.4
136,140
29
New Jersey...
.. 31.9
9,484
6
Missouri
...62.2
163,643
30
California
... 31.7
37,309
7
Ohio
...,62.1
169,478
31
Wyoming
....28.3
4,449
8
Minnesota ...
...62.0
110,668
32
Delaware
... 27.3
2,763
9
South Dakota
...59.4
44,327
33
Kentucky ....
....27.0
73,145
10
Wisconsin ....
.. 59.1
111,798
34
Maryland
24.5
11,765
11
Vermont
.. 57.6
16,752
34
Utah
....24.5
6,295
12
Connecticut...
...61.8
11,738
36
Arkansas
... 22.7
62,869
13
Massachusetts
.. 61.7
16,537
37
Tennessee....
....22.6
56,880
14
Oregon
...60.6
25,351
38
Virginia
....18.0
33,482
16
Michigan
49.8
97,874
39
Alabama
....17.4
44,619
16
New Hampshire...49.6
10,166
40
Montana
...,17.0
9,781
17
Maine
...49.0
23,632
41
Arizona..
... 16.4
1,638
18
New York,...
...47.6
91,973
42
North Carolina.
. .12.3
33,218
19
North Dakota
...46.8
36,349
43
New Mexico.,
.. 11.3
3,359
20
Pennsylvania..
...43.5
87,887
44
Mississippi...,
....10.4
28,260
21
West Virginia
...43.3
37,789
45
Georgia
....10.1
31,231
22
Washington ..
...42.2 '
27,952
46
Florida
.... 8.4
4,524
23
Rhode Island .
...41.3
1,685
47
Louisiana
.... 6.4
■8,599
24
Colorado
...39.5
23,685
48
South Carolina
.... 6.7
' 10,943