WHEN TIMES WERE REALLY HARD7
By CAPTAIN S. A. ASHE 4
jt is said that the world is in trouble—but
, tjiree vears ago the outlook was worse than it
s no\v. We all remember that our Federal Gov
ernment bought a million bushels of wheat—and
l?ro-e quantity of cotton—-and that there were
millions of families that had no work to do—
j no food to eat. ^ The condition was then
hard—and it still is. We in'this country are fortu
ne in having a sensible President, He said
from the first that we should try to relieve the.
situation. Fortunately he did so, and the whole
country has been benefited. There have been
some unusual happenings—storms, floods, earth
c'uakes"-—and these have intensified the unfortu
nate conditions.
The depression certainly has been great. For
tunately, North Carolina has not been so seriously
hurt as many of the sister states. At present
the Federal Congress is arranging to spend four
billions of dollars to carry on through these evil
times. What is going to be the situation when
ti,at is all spent no one knows. But we can be
hopeful. _ ,
I have some memories. Let us go back just
seventy years ago. The Southern States had
been overcome by the Northern States. The
onlv money in circulation from Virginia to
Mexico had been Confederate money and bank
bills based on Confederate money. There was
nothing else: and that was worthless. Can you
imagine the people of the whole South—with no
monei ! And indeed with but little to sell!
Every family has its recollections—I had a
family of young sisters at Fayetteville—Sher
man's soldiers had destroyed everything to eat.
Fortunately, I had a horse and conveyance, and
had access to some cotten thread. So I would
carry this thread down into a part of South
Carolina where Sherman had not been and
swap my cotton thread, etc., -ofT for bread and
meat. That was my business in life.
Other families had other experiences. After
months, I and a friend made some tar near Fay
etteville. selling it to the North. Then by 1866—
hurrah 1 The authorities of the Wilmington &
Weldon K. R. employed me?° Presently the
A WORLD ADJUSTMENT NOW
NECESSARY.
(Continued from Page One)
products reduced largely to the lefel of home
consumption, it does not necessarily mean pov- -
erty to America, in the long run. But it does
mean a considerable period of readjustments.
There are millions of cotton growers more than
needed; there are millions of textile operatives
more than needed, despite the tact that it is au
thoritatively stated this very week that there are
seven million fewer textile operatives employed
in America than there were a few years ago.
Likewise, as the conditions develop abroad with
respect to other commodities, similar excess
bodies of laborers will be found here and there.
It will he the height of folly to undertake to
retain all this excess of labor in the industries in
which they are no longer needed. The trouble
and th.e hard times come while adjustments are
made to absorb those laborers in other industries
and employments.
Fortunately, we have boundless resources, de
spite the exploitation and waste of them for two
centuries. With land aplenty and machines ga
F-’fe, there is no reason for anybody to be poor in
America. Yet millions are poor and have been
poor all the time, even when our foreign trade
"d> at its height.
The Real Problems Still Home Problems.
fhe 1< s of foreign trade need prove only a
temporary trouble. We have gone on for decades
P1 educing goods for foreign consumption when
0Ur own people needed decent homes, comfort
able furnuure, wholesome food, education, books,
anc| scores of other things for the production of
"hick we have abundant materials and labor go
ln3 to waste.
^ hat has prevented everybody’s having a
plenty all these years will still prevent it unless
'be very axioms oi: economy are recognized and
aPplied in the solution of the problems never
s°h'ed, and unsolvable so long as those axioms
are disregarded.
b'Ut the immediate problem is to provide em
P °yment for the excess of cotton and wheat
Sro"'ers and of textile workers. A little com
®0u senfSe applied would make this no trouble
a| :,b. In the old days when a man had plenty
i land and his income depended upon the num
er of hands he had employed, he would have
°und it no embarrassment to discover that he
,ac a score of able-bodied fellows who were
„ • n£ upon him anyway, and could be sent
L
first sleeping car of the South was running be
, tween Wilmington and Weldon,—and I was the
conductor! Later the sleeping car was‘put on
from Wilmington by Augusta and by Atlanta
to West Point, Alabama. It took two nights
and a day to go, and two days and a night to
return, and I was the “sleeping car conductor”
until December 1, when I resigned and got my li
cense to practice law.
No one can imagine the horrible state of the
entire country at the period—after peace! But
gradually our people got to work and made
something to sell to the Northern people. Later
our tar, pitch and turpentine were helpful. Then
cotton was grown and brought us money. Per
sonally, I was in some measure differently con
ditioned from other young men. A Yankee
naval officer wrote me: “I do not know whether
you are living or not. If you are living you will
need money. I am just back from China. I
have saved $500. I would thke it from you—you
must take it from me.” About eight years after
that I was practicing law. He was to ba mar
ried and I returned him his money—that had
helped to save the lives of some ladies. Such are
some of my recollections of that troubled period.
[Captain Ashe had been a student at the Naval
Academy at Annapolis just before the war;
hence his acquaintance with the young Yankee
Naval officer. His father had been president of
the W.. & W. R. R.; hence his good fortune in
securing the job of conductor. Rut who would
have thought the first sleeping car conductor in
the South is still living and in the person of
Captain Ashe? Tar making' was a common es~
cape from starvation.—Editor.]
During that period the railroads needed
money. So they sought to induce the farmers to
make some things that could be sold in the
North—so that the railroads could get pay for
the transportation. And so the farmers were
induced to have a variety of things to sell. That
had a lasting effect on many farmers in Eastern
.Carolina. Trucking in the southeastern part of
the state has contributed to the welfare of the
people of the whole state._
straight to the fields. That man, as Mr. King,
of whom Claude Moore writes, made practically
all he and his dependents needed. The more
hands at work the more produced.
Similarly situated is Uncle Sam. He has
plenty of land,, plenty of tools, and of everything
else to keep everybody busy and to make enough
for everybody. Fine enough. But it takes an
overseer, a planner too, to keep those hands s
profitably busy.
With Col. King planning, there was plenty toi
all; crops were produced in their due proportions.
Provision for crops to he sold to secure goods not
producible upon the plantation was made. Yet
even this wise farmer probably produced much
that went to waste while he was failing to con
serve the land that had fallen into his hands.
Uncle Sam is wiser, or should be. He must plan
to produce everything we need to use, with no
great surpluses of this or that and an utter lack
of that or this. And he must also not only con
serve his resources, but seek to restore the re
,sources that were so rutmessly exploited aunug
one to three centuries. He must estimate the
need of things unproducible on his domain and
plan to produce those things that may be ex
changed for what we need from other nations.
If Colonel King had left it for every son and
every slave to pick his own land, choose his own
'crop, and work when and as he pleased, it is
probable that the Yankees would have got very
little when they came to the plantation home.
Planning Necessary.
To °et everybody in America at work for his
own good and the common good, planning is .ab
solutely necessary, and John Q. Annonymous s
much prized individuality must surrender to nec
essity. It has never been any great success at 1 s
best There have been five underlings produced
by the method to every self-secured householder.
It is an impossible scheme for the future. _
The problem is td discover the method ol co
operation which will prove effective in securing
the comforts of life for every American citizen
with as little loss as possible of those blessings of
individual liberty of enterprise. • -
A co-operative scheme may be accepted as nec
essary and at hand. Thought should be turned
immediately as to the method of that co-opera
tion And the. one big idea is to assure that no
small group- becotne lords of the whole manor.
Yet it would be hard to find another system that
would place the mastery of America s economic
fate in as few hands as have controlled it in ye*frs
not long past.
i-t
'i_LL2.il
AT THE CROSS-ROADS
OF DECREPITS.
I had never sheen on a hospital bed till two
weeks ago. But in a short while I found I was
at the cross-roads of decrepits and their families
and friends.
Here come those who, like candidates for ap
pendectomy, expect to return home within' a few
days well and immune to other attacks. Here,
come those who expect never to leave alive.
Others come who are to receive sentence to per
petual pain and inactivity.
I myself got off with an order to reduce from
high to low gear and even then to expect at times
nigh (and finally wholly) killing pains.
If a native of Sampson county wishes to see a
cross-section of the county’s society, let him go
to one of the Fayetteville hospitals (or .better
both). It is hardly believable how many old
neighbors, there with patients from their homes
• or over to visit their ill friends, found I was there
and called by to pay their respects. The fourth
floor seemed almost‘entirely occupied by my old
home folk.
Across the hall lay my cousin William Peter
son’s little daughter, Myrtle, who had undergone
an operation for appendicitis. Rooms were as
scarce as in Raleigh at a State Convention. Yet
it happens that the two Petersons were located
on the same floor. Myrtle’s oldest sister is a sen
ior student nurse, at present serving in the lab
oratory. She it was who whirled me along on a
stretcher to the X-Ray room and helped manipu
late the machines. These two girls and their. ,
father and brother and my own folk themselves,
made a considerable home group. But there was
Cleveland Pope, one of the 1884 Cleveland crop
and reared within a* mile of my old country
home.
Only a few weeks ago* his second daughter
had come for an appendectomy. As the opera
tion was ending, her life went out like a candle.;
I had talked to Cleveland about the heart-rend
ing bereavement only ten or twelve days earlier
—a bright, even a talented, child she was, as most
clearly indicated by a poem which she had writ
ten and left unshown to her parents, and which
they could hardly believe she had written* ;
though the elder sister declared she saw her sis
ter write it.
And here now was that elder sister expecting
to be operated upon on the very same table upon
which her sister had expired a few weeks before!
Would you blame her if she were frightened?
Would you blame the surgeons if they should
hesitate ?—And I rather believe she was hoping to
get by without an operation when I left the hos
pital.
On the same floor was Howard McKinnon’s
boy—another appendix case. And here are Mr.
and Mrs. Will Bethune and Mrs. Holmes, How
ard’s sister, and Mrs. Ferd Johnson, all drop
ping in to noway tneir oia neignoor. Ana xvev.
Mr. Somers, Presbyterian pastor, whom I had
long desired to meet, also came in.
But now—what is stranger than all the above
—on the same floor and recently having under
gone a major operation, was our recent next-door
Dunn neighbor, Mrs. Remsburg—fortunately on
the way upwards from great depths.
The fathers and grandfathers of many of the
people I have mentioned and scores of others
would scarcely have heard of a hospital if it
handn’t been for “the war”. I run over in my
mind those who died in our neighborhood in my
childhood and youth and, with the exception of
children, practically all who died, died as old men
or women or of consumption or typhoid fever, or
of some other now largely preventable disease. I
am positive that no one died of anything that
could have been deemed appendicitis.
Evidently it was a case of the survival oi me
fittest. The weaklings among the children were
not able to survive the ordeal of being brought
up. Those who survived required consumption,
or some other deadly disease, or the Wear and
tear of a long life to kill them. •
More Power Will Be Needed
Washington hears, with great federal power
projects under way, that most sections of the na
tion are critically short of electric power. The •
Federal Power Commission recommends that
construction start on new plants aggregating 3,
000,000 to 4,000,000 kilowatts, costing about
$300,000,000. Increasing domestic consumption,
little construction since 1930, and worn-out
machinery explain the condition. Haste is called
for. Normal industrial resumption would go -
power hungry—A sudden big demand, as by, a
war, would find the country far from sufficiently
prepared.—Christian Science Monitor, ; . . j