The news in this publi
cation is released for the
press on receipt.
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA
NEWS LETTER
Pubiished Weekly by the
University of North Caro
lina Press for the Univer
sity Extension Division.
AUGUST 15, 1923
CHAPEL HILL, N. C.
VOL. IX, NO. 39
Etliiorial Buardi B. C. Branson, S. H. Hobbs, Jr.. L. R. Wilson, E, W. Knight, D. D. Carroll, J. B. Bnllitt. H.'W. Odum.
Entered as second-claas matter November 14, 1914, at the Postofficeat Chapel Hill, N. C., under the act of August 24, 1918
VI—A LAND OF RICH FARMERS
The farmers of Germany' are rich,
richer than they ever were before in all
their lives. The vast ^majority are
small, land-owning peasants, settled in
compact village groups—in what the
Germans call dorfer. They are three-
fifths of all the people and four-fifths
of ail the farmers of Germany. They
are grazing on rich commons these
days. They have indeed been knee-
deep in clover for nearly six years.
The signs of prosperity are as plain as
'•print, in every farm village.
Peasants and Poverty
It is safe to-say that to» most pe,ople
in America peasants and poverty are
merely two words for the same thing.
And so they are, in Belgium, England,
Scotland, Spain, Portugal, and portions
of Italy. The farmers of these coun
tries are mainly tenants, and in every
land farm tenancy^'means farm poverty
soon or late for tenants and landlords
I alike. They are not equally poor in
* these different countries, but in all of
them the tenant’s outlook is hopeless,
and hardly less the owner’s. England
is at this minute illustrating the ulti
mate absurdity of farming on a tenancy
basig. The farmer who farms by proxy
is dfestined at last to lose his lands.
The only successful farming is farm
ing by the man who owns the land.
And Germany is today a conspicuous
illustration of this fundamental fact.
If anybody thinks that peasants and
poverty are one and the same thing in
Denmark, Holland, France, Switzer
land, and Germany— all of them lands
of home-owning farmers, or so in
the main—then he has a place in Josh
Billings’s catalog of ‘folks who know a
surprising lot of things most of which
aint so’.
The German peasant is not poor in
purse, possessions, or appearance. The
farmer who greeted me in the church
yard of Winterbach the other Sunday
and ushered me into his seat for wor
ship wore a Prince Albert coat, and a
high-top silk hat—of course along with
other proper apparel. Most of the older
men iii the congregation were similarly
dressed. It is the regulation farmer
rig for church occasions, birthday cele
brations,- weddings, funerals, and cere
monial events in general. It has been
the farmer fashion in Germany for a
half century or more.
Everybody Works
His farm is small, to be sure—around
ten to twenty acres as a rule, and also
as a rule it lies in separate tracts or
parcels, in various directions out from
the farm village. He is bred from
childhood days to back-breaking labor.
He works in his fields and with his
farm animals from daylight to dark,
and everybody in his family works, men,
women, and children. Nobody in the
household is too old or too young to
work. The German peasant is a crea
ture of steady-gaited toil. He is never
in a hurry—nobody in Germany is in a
hurry in any place or in any walk of
life—but he is never idle, summer or
winter. In this land of grain crops
and forage fields, workstock, meat and
milk animals, vegetables, fruits, and
flowers, vineyards, wine and cider
presses, there is something -for every
body to do every day of tne year, and
everybody is busy doing it. He may
be and he commonl^ is slow, dull and
heavy—dummkoph as the Germans say
—but he saves everything and wastes
nothing, no inch of land, no minute of
time, no bit of food on his table or in
his kitchen, no twig or leaf of any tree
he cuts for fuel, and nothing else of
value on his land or under his roof.
A Farm Gold Reserve
Everything is of value to the Ger
man peasant, and the thing of greatest
value is manure, liquid manure in par
ticular. It is the gold reserve of his
little kingdom. His soil is his bank.
In America, we speak of cultivating
crops. Cultivating land is what the
peasant farmer does, first, last, and all
the time, and after a thousand years
of cropping his soil is richer than ever.
Our children'at home say in a familiar
game. What goes up must come down. I
The peasant says of his soil. What
comes out must go back—and some
thing more. His bank account savings
are the increased fertility of his fields.
He may be slow-witted but he sees this
fundamental fact in farming and sees
it stark and whole. ■
Land Economy
We have in North Carolina thirteen
million acres, cleared and cultivated
once upon a time, but now abandoned
to scrub pines, black-jacks, sassafras,
broomsedge and briars. That amount
of butchered, abandoned land cannot
be found in Germany from one end of
it to the other. The reason lies in the
fact that, compared with any Old World
country, land in America is Still abun
dant and cheap, and it is not in human
nature to economize what is plentiful
or to save in seasons of plenty. In
Central and Western ^urope land is
scarce and dear, and a peasant farmer
has only a chance or two in a whole life
time to buy more land at any price.
Knee-Farming
The peasant farmer works in ways
the American farmer is never likely to
adopt, or not at least until America
feels the pressure of population on land
and the food supply, and farm life is
reduced to the lowest terms of toil as
in Europe and all the East. He is a
knee-farmer, so called because much
or most of his work must be done on
his knees, with simple hand-tools or
with his bare fingers. Or rather his
wife and children are knee-farmers,
for it is they who do all or most of the
field work of this sort. The field crops
just now breaking through the soil are
poppies which are grown for the oil of
the seeds, and lentils which are a
variety of pease as old as the Pharaohs.
I myself must stoop to distinguish the
faint frail leaves of these young crops
from the grass and weeds of the rows.
The grass and weeds must be cleared
out so as not to destroy these crops in
the early stages of growth. And it
takes knee-farming with bare fingers
to do it. It is therefore work for
women and children. On yesterday
afternoon on my way back to Engel-
berg from the Farm Fair in Stutt
gart, the fields as far as the eye could
reach on both sides of the railway were
alive with women &nd children down
on all-fours weeding the rows of poppy,
lentils, and other delicate young crops.
Heavy Work for Women ■
Edwin Markham has sung The Man
with the Hoe, but nobody\has yet sung
The Peasant Woman on her Knees in
the Fields. I see the men and older boys
doing the heavier work of getting out
the winter supply of fuel in the forests,
but commonly it is the women and
children who drive the ox-team home
with the loads—dr the cow-teams, for
cows in Wurtemberg are dual-purpose
animals, that is, they are both milk
animals and work animals. The men
swing the scythes in the meadows and
clover patches, but the women and
children do a man’s work pitchforking
the hay into the wagons. It is the men
who tie up the vines in the vineyards,
but it is the women folk who must lug
up the steep slopes the heavy bundles
of willow wythes the men use in the
process. The men must do the plow
ing, but here again the women share
this hard work with the men. They
even do the heavy work of spading the
stiff soils of this region—at least, I see
them at it in large numbers every day.
The weight of work rather than the
burden of age warps their frames and
makes them old twenty years ahead of
time. It is pathetic beyond words.
A War-Time Development
Women and children have always
worked on the peasant farms of Europe
but not in such disproportionate num
bers as now. So because the Great
War took toll of the men in every fifth
household on an average; and further
because the young men are now mov
ing out in great numbers, to i^outh
America mainly. The death roll in the
little village of Winterbach was 107,
and the emigrants since the war are
nearly as many. They go, they say,
because their souls are sick unto death
of war and rumors of war. And so the
women and children must work if they
KNOW NORTH CAROLINA
Tobacco Industry
In the tobacco industry North Ca
rolina sits at the head of the -table.
She leads the world in thejmanufac-
ture of tobacco. We manufacture
one-third of all the tobacco manu
factured in the United States, and
we pay one-third of all the tobacco
taxes of the Union, two most re
markable facts.
North Carolina is also one of
the largest tobacco growing states
in the Union, ranking first in acre
age and first in the value of the crop.
She was among the first of the
states, as is well known, to engage
in tobacco manufacture on a factory
basis, and showed a marked advance
ment in operations. Twenty years
ago there were 96 tobacco manu
factories in the ^ate. Ten years
later the number had been re
duced to 43, with an annual out
put valued approximately at $36,-
000,000. Fifteen plants in 1922
reported the value of manufactured
products at $214,830,000, an increase
of 497 percent over 1909. The value
of tobacco manufacturing plants
reported for the year 1922 is $20,-
116,000 with a yearly payroll pf over
$14,000,000. This includes, of course,
those establishments which are en
gaged in the manufacture of cigars,
cigarettes, chewing and smoking
tobacco and snuff.
More Than $93,000,000
in Taxes
North Carolina paid in tobacco
taxes to the federal government for
the year ending June 30, 1922, the
enormous sum of $.93,189,086.92 while
New York paid $45,000,000, New
Jersey $23,000,000, Pennsylvania
$21,000,000, Virginia $19,000,000,
Ohio $12,000,000, and Missouri $10,-
000,000. The total receipts in the
entire nation for tobacco tax for
the year ending June 30, 1922,
was $270,759,000, in round numbers,
of which amount North Carolina paid
$93,000,000.
It is estimated by the Collector
that the amount of tobacco taxes^
which will be paid in North Carolina'’
for the year ending June 30, 1923,
will run considerably over $110,000,-
000.
Winston-Salem is the center of
the industry, reporting over three-
fourths of the value of the tobacco
products of the state, while Durham
ranks second, with Reidsville,
Greensboro, Statesville and other
towns coming along in order.
More cigarettes are made in Wins
ton-Salem than anywhere else on the
globe. —G. A. Webb, before the
Convention of Tobacco Men recently
held in Asheville.
Why so much excitement over a
state deficit which can easily be
overcome?
would live—even the old men and the
old women. As for the older boys and
younger men who remain, they have
swarmed out of the fields into the fac
tories that dot the map everywhere in
South Germany.
Peasant Thrift Rewarded
The ingrained industry and thrift of
the peasant farmers of Germany have
their reward at last. The German
peasant has at last come into his own
and nobody who sees him at clo^ range
is in any doubt about it. He is rich
not because he is a miser, but largely
because he has a canny money sense.
Nobody fools him out of a single mark.
When the bottom dropped out of the
currency of his country nobody knew
better than he how to play the game
and keep on the safe side of the dead
line. He has no respect for paper
marks but he does not hurry to throw
them away in silly indulgences. The
first thing he did was to pay off his
mortgage—with cheap money, and his
little farm is today as clear of debt as
it is of weeds. And the next thing he'
did was to buy another acre or two of
land wherever such a thing was possi
ble; or another work animal or wagon
or farm tool; or to repair his house and
install conveniences and comforts; or to
build a brand new bigger dwelling. The
signs of sense of this sort impress the
observer in every farm village. No
matter how much or how little the
mark may be worth—and today a fifty
mark bill is worth less than a sheet of
good writing paper—what the peasant
farmer buys with it is productive prop
erty and a bigger chance at life. He
knows little or nothing about economic
doctrines in books, but he knows the
difference between * the consumer’s
goods he has to sell, and the capital
wealth he wants to buy as fast as ever
he can. And he cannot be fooled into
buying anything else. He is taking no
gambler’s chance in marks or in stocks
of any sort.
Enduring Values
We stopped the other day to ask a
German peasant the cost of his hand
some new house. Eight million marks,
he said. Which at the time was $241
in American money. We found another
farmer with a newly purchased horse,
a big Westphalian draft animal that
looked like a young elephant. The
price he paid for it was twelve million
marks. A horse costs more than a
house in farm regions of Germany, but
a horse is pr(»ductive property and
every farmer senses this essential fact
by instinct. He knows that under pres
ent conditions enduring values lie in
substantial capital wealth and not in
paper marks. He is therefore willing
to pay any number of marks for the
things that can be directly used in the
production of other things of value.
Digging In
There are millions of fools, young
and old, who are gambling on the rise
and fall of marks and stocks and other
evidences of wealth in Germany, but it
is safe to say that not a half-dozen of
them are peasant farmers. They are
not putting money in their purses, they
are putting productive properties on
their farms.
The small land-owning farmers of
Germany are reckoning as Falstaff
fought — by instinct. Exactly
Stinnes, Thyssen, Krupp, Cuno and the
rest are thinking about mines and fac
tories, ships and water power sites, the
German peasant is thinking about farm
lands, farm animals and farm tools,
and the wood lots, clay beds, sand pits
and quarries on his farm.
In the last analysis, who owns these
productive properties in Germany will
own Germany and everything in it.
The farm owner is even more strongly
entrenched than the mine owner or the
manufacturer in Germany. He has
not sold his birthright for a mess of
marks. On the contrary he knows per
fectly well what place he holds in the
scheme of things entire, and for the
last six years he has been digging in on
the ground floor. —E. C. Branson,
Schlossgut Engelberg, May 15, 1923.
ASSEMBLING RECORDS
The University Library is interested
in completing back files of North Caro
lina periodicals, documents, reports,
proceedings of societies, etc., for the
North Carolina Collection. ^Some of
the state documents to be completed
are listed below. The Librarian will
be glad to hear of available issues of
these publications.
Documents Needed
Laws of the State of North Carolina:
Private, 1871-2; Public, 1916.
Journals of the General Assembly:
Any issue dated before 1800, and issues
for 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803, 1806, 1811,
1812, 1813, 1816, 1817, 1818, 1819, 1820,
1821, 1822, 1826, 1826, 1829, 1830, 1861
(1st extra session), 1891 House, 1895
House.
Public Documents of North Carolina:
Issues for 1891, 1916. '
Adjutant-General’s Report: Issues
for 1881, 1882, 1883, 1884, 1886, 1887,
1888, 1897, 1912.
Agricultural Experiment Station Re
port for 1909-10.
Report of Commissioner of Agricul
ture for 1905-6.
Auditor’s Report for 1880-1.
Report of Board of Public Charities:
Issues for 1871, 1873.
Bulletin of State Board of Charities
and Public Welfare: Vol. 4, Nos. 1 and
2.
Climatological Data (N. C. Section):
Issues ranging from 1896 to 1910.
Report of N. C. Institution for the
Deaf and Dumb: 1869-1861; 1870-71;
1891-92.
Democratic Hand-Book: 1890, 1892,
1896.
N. C. State Fair Premium List: 1875-
77, 1883, 1889-90, 1892, 1894-95, 1899,
1911, 1912, 1915.
Report of Fisheries Commission
Board.
Governor’s Inaugural Address: Any
in pamphlet form.
Governor’s Message: Any in pamphlet
form.
Bulletin of Board of Health: Vols. 1,
3, 7, 27.
VI-OUR CHEMICAL INDUSTRY
Gas, Cohe, and Tar
One of the greatest conveniences in
city heating is gas, whether natural or
manufactured. How many of us real
ize where this gas comes from? Does
it come from the oil fields, or is it made
from coal?
The gas used in North Carolina for
heating and lighting purposes is manu
factured, being largely of two varieties:
water gas and coal gas. The former is
made by passing super-heated steam
over white-hot anthracite coal or coke.
The resulting gases, called carbon
monoxide and hydrogen, are formed
through the action of the white-hot
coals on the steam. These substances
are odorless and burn with a pale-blue
flame; one of them, carbon monoxide,
is a deadly poison. Since leakage of
these gases could not be detected by
odor, other gases are added to give t^em
odor and to color their flame. These
latter gases, called illuminants, are
made by spraying crude petroleum on
hot bricks, thereby “cracking”-it.
Coal gas is made by heating coal in
large air-tight retorts or stills. The
coal is split up into various products,
among which are gas, tar, and ammo
nia. The gas is purified by washing and
is then ready for use, though it may be
enriched by the addition of the same
illuminants as used with water gas.
The coketand tar manufactured are
merely by-products of gas manufac
ture. The residue left in the furnaces
and retorts is coke; the tar resulting
from coal gas manufacture is the ordi
nary coal tar of commerce. Tl!e value of
these industries to the state is shown by
the fact that the sale of their products
brings approximately $1,600,000 annual
ly. The companies employ approximately
250 men and have a combined pay-roll
of $350,000.
Another type of gas with which all
travelers on our railways were very
familiar a decade ago, and which is
still being produced by two plants at
the present time, is “pintsch gas”.
This gas is the product of excessive
“cracking” of petroleum, the nlore
volatile portigji being compressed in
cylinders for use in railway coaches.
The first gas plants incorporated in
1889 were the two pintsch gas com
pressing plants, still in operation. The
other plants are of recent origin, hav
ing been built since 1910. Since the
gases thus produced are products of
destructive distillation in varying de
grees, the operation and control of gas
plants is placed in the hands of •chemi
cally trained men.—Contribution from
the Division of Industrial Chemistry,
Department of Chemistry, University
of North Carolina, by L.V. Phillips.
THE MIGRATORY TENANT
A million and a quarter farms or ap
proximately one out of every five,
changed occupants in 1922, if we can
give credence to a survey made by the
United States Department of Agricul
ture. Some of these farms changed
ownerships, but most of them merely
changed tenants. And it may be taken
for granted that most of these tenants
did not change their post office address
es. They merely moved from one farm
to another in the sdme neighborhood.
These figures constitute a graphic argu
ment for the long-time lease and the
partnership between the owner and the
renter. The tenant ought to get (and
give) a square deal, and then he ought
to “stay put” unless there is a very
real reason for his moving. It’s hard
for the family to have a real home if he
jumps about from farm to farm when
ever spring moving day comes around.
— Farm Life.