The Southern Frontier

SEPTEMBER, 1946

89th YEAR OF CONTINUOUS PUBLICATION

by GOVERNOR ELLIS GIBBS ARNALL

IN the South politics is a lifetime career. You enter it when you are young, and you remain in it until the undertaker or the voters intervene. I entered politics at the appropriate age; six, to be exact.

It came about this way. There was a Halloween party for the first grade of tho Newnan grammar school and Miss Maggie Brown thought it might inspire her pupils if they drew fortunes out of a wishing-bag. She had the more agreeable occupations written out on small slips of paper in a neat Spencerian hand: banker, fireman, lawyer, preacher, merchant. I do not recall that any slip was labeled “sharecropper,” but Miss Maggie was a romantic, an optimist, and a Southern gentlewoman. My slip said: “Governor you will be.” I would gladly have exchanged it for that which predicted the more gallant and hazardous career of a fireman, but with the fatalism that inhibits the Southern mind, I accepted my unknown lot.

I took it home to my mother, who was appropriately pleased and who explained what a governor was and that Mr. Atkinson, whose house was not so far away and whose son, Bill, was the most engaging younger man of my acquaintance — he is a State Supreme Court Justice now and still the most charming man in Georgia — had been Governor once.

From that time on, in spite of some preoccupation with football and girls in prim summer dresses, I was a politician. When I got out of college, just over twenty-one, I ran for the Legislature from Coweta County and the people elected me because they liked my father and my uncles and my aunts and my numerous cousins.

It seemed to me that it would be a good thing to run for Speaker pro tem of the Georgia House of Representatives. It appeared reasonable that the way to get elected was to visit every member of the Legislature in his home town, and shake hands with him, and tell him what a fine man he was and what a fine man I was and how, because of that, he should vote for me. Sometimes in a battered jalopy that had served in the last year of college and for evening rides on the quiet roads around Newnan, and sometimes hitchhiking, I visited every county in Georgia — all 159 of them. The members of the House were much amused and very kind, and if they laughed at a brash boy who wanted to be an officer of the Legislature, they also agreed to vote for me; and with the good humor and tolerance of men in politics they did vote for me the next January.

My folks didn’t like the expedition too much. The ones who were wealthy, by virtue of owning some stock in one of the cotton mills, thought the jalopy a little outrageous even for 1932, when jalopies had become somewhat commonplace on the roads of rural Georgia. My mother was always concerned that I might get my feet wet or eat something that was not really good for me. The argument that I had the digestion of a razorback hog did not appeal to her and my account of spending the night in a barn near Darien contained no element of humor.

Copyright 1946, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

But, admittedly, there was very little for a young lawyer to do in tranquil and non-litigious Coweta County in the autumn of 1932, and my father did not think that a lesson in Georgia geography could do any great harm.

So I saw Georgia at first hand while I visited all the county seats and the members of the Assembly. I had never seen Georgia before. Its hills were beautiful with their masses of frost-painted leaves. Its coastal plains had harvested the crops, and Georgians, white and black, could be found on the banks of every little creek catching suckers and catfish. There were plenty of Georgians to talk to, for the depression had arrived and there was leisure for conversation.

They told me about the steady slump in the price of tobacco, about the ruinous losses of cotton farmers, who saw no way to settle with the supply men. They talked about the schools where teachers were being paid in scrip, and about the schoolhouses that had not been repaired since the cotton depression of 1920 and the devouring invasion of the boll weevil. They talked about the man who was running for President and who promised a new deal for people like themselves.

They told me how some Negro turpentine workers had broken into a chain-gang enclosure in one county, and concealed themselves, and gone out daily with the prisoners to work on the roads; and how the Warden had winked at his volunteer convicts and allowed them to enlist because he knew that with bankruptcy sweeping the Naval Stores industry, the boys were hungry and the camp offered good food without too much work. It was a very funny story.

Somehow, out of all that, I learned more than geography about Georgia. I discovered the fierce desire in the people of Georgia to educate their children. I think that is part of their Scotch heritage; wherever a Presbyterian preacher settled, back in the early days before the forest had been cut, he set up a little school. Georgia was the first state, in all the Union, to charter a state university. It was one of the first to provide for state support of the common schools. Its colleges frequently were little more than academies and its school buildings often were only oneand two-room shacks of unpainted pine, tended by teachers who had less claim to literacy than to zeal. But how was democracy to be a living thing unless the men and women could read and write and cipher?

Never had people a greater thirst for the magic of the written word than the people of Georgia, both white and Negro; and never had such thirst been so ill gratified. The explanation is simple: the South had more children of school age than any other section and far less wealth with which to pay teachers and construct school buildings.

That there were any schools at all in many communities was due to the perseverance and the community effort of the people, who actually built the inadequate frame structures with their own hands so that their children might go to school. In the South, teaching was not a profession. It was a vocation; the Lord had to call you to it or else you could not have withstood the poverty that accompanied it. The average annual salary of a teacher in Georgia in the year that the depression first struck was $546. Since salaries in Atlanta and a few other large communities approximated the national level, the income of the rural teacher fell far below the average; it would be fair to estimate the annual pay of a rural white schoolmarm at $360; a Negro teacher, with the same classes, made $210, a disparity usually representing a shorter term for pupils in the Negro schools.

In many a Southern town in 1932, property tax collections were negligible and the school system faced virtual bankruptcy. Scrip was the medium for paying salaries, and only the sympathetic and good-humored willingness of merchants to accept the seemingly hopeless risk kept the teachers from becoming universal victims of swindling speculators.

2

NEWNAN is a quiet town, with a courthouse square in the middle and stores facing it on all four sides, and some cotton mills, off to themselves in the background. Its citizens were born in Coweta County or the adjoining counties. When I was a boy the outside world was represented by an Italian family engaged in the wholesaling of fruits and vegetables, a Syrian conducting a merchandise business, a few Greeks, who operated a café, and the ubiquitous Chinese laundryman. The laundryman, who did not come from Canton but from somewhere in California, probably was the sole representative of an American-born Newnanite who did not originate within a day’s ride of the town.

You could explore the history and the mind of Newnan, and bring to light the layers of its years as an archaeologist lays bare the foundations of more than one city upon a single site. You could trace its history from the opening of the Indian country to settlers, through the years when yeoman farmers grew grain and plantation owners grew cotton on the rich land. Then came the shock of war and reconstruction, and the sudden enthusiasm for Progress, spelled always with a capital, and constituting faith in the efficacy of growing more cotton and building more cotton mills, whether the land was impoverished by the crop or whether the cloth could be sold profitably on a market from which Southern products were excluded, as nearly as possible, by an enormous domestic tariff.

Newnan is the South in microcosm. Every poignant paradox that is the South is there: the fierce pride and loyalty, the shivering gentility, the blundering paternalism combined with a graciousness that saves it from the curse of Babbittry and do-goodism.

To understand the people of the South, you must look at their origins. There are English in Virginia, Huguenots in Charleston, French and Spanish in New Orleans, and Salzburgers in Georgia; but the great mass of the South, especially the Southeast, is Gaelic.

It is not literally true that, to the average Southerner, no battle, except King’s Mountain, intervened between Bannockburn and Shiloh. But a glance at the telephone directory of almost any Southern city except Richmond and Atlanta will show the predominance of Scotch names. They are all there; every name in the ballads; every name that Highland and Border know: Bruce, Douglas, Hays, Campbell, Gordon, Jackson, Stewart, McAlpin, and MacIntosh. Yes, and MacGregor too, a name that once, on the other side of the Atlantic, no man might bear and live. In simple truth, the Southeast was the final haven for the wandering Gael, the fierce men of Ulster, the Scotch-Irish.

Subtly their thoughts color the thoughts of the South. Strange Pictish demons walk through the swamps and pine forests of Georgia and the Carolinas, wailing their exile from the highlands and the moors. The little people make fairy crosses and leave them scattered in their rings in the Southern uplands. The involuted talk of the Scot has left its mark upon the Southern idiom, where every kinsman is a cousin. The loyalty to tribe and clan and family, to stream and hill and sky, is as fierce and enduring as on the day when the Bruce hurled his gillies against the proud Edward’s Norman and Saxon chivalry and broke it as a man does a rotten stick for the fire.

It is small wonder that witch doctors of the South resorted to the fiery cross of the clansmen as the symbol of their sheeted parody. And the rhetoric of the South is endowed with a Gaelic fire that sometimes burns brightly without illuminating any object about it. At its best, it would inspire the backwoodsman to stand firm against Tarleton’s invincible Redcoats; at its worst it can inspire a mob to smash the doors of a jail.

3

NOWHERE is Southern thought more curiously paradoxical than in the field of civil rights. During the War Between the States, when Burnside was imprisoning citizens casually without warrant and for inexplicable personal whim, James Louis Petigru could speak freely for the Union and against the Confederacy on the streets of Charleston, and, dying, could be accorded the rites of a hero.

One afternoon a friend and a Georgian expressed to me his profound horror at undertaking a trip to New York and Boston. He felt unsafe there, he declared, because of the absence of even rudimentary safeguards for personal liberty. Was it not true that in New York a man had no right to a trial before a regular jury but might at any moment be confronted with a “Jeffreys jury”? And was not there always open season on fishmongers and cobblers in the Bay State, with no Appellate Court of sufficient jurisdiction to right the wrongs inflicted by a hanging judge?

It is possible that my friend, who combines a puckish spirit with a great zeal for fighting all the wrongs of all the underdogs, felt a great shock when the nation’s most populous state turned its back on a thousand years of judicial progress to establish the harlequinade of a “blue ribbon jury” to satisfy the needs of a political prosecutor. He may have felt more keenly the judicial lynching in Massachusetts than those in the East who were more engrossed in the economic and ideological aspects of the case than in the guilt of the victims. But this anecdote illustrates the disparity of thought between the sections of our nation.

The South, in the frenzied years of the turn of the century, enacted none of the weird statutes against aberrant political and social thinking such as led to persecutions in the Middle West. Indeed, the only statute ever passed in Georgia that sought to interfere with freedom of thought and speech in any way was held unconstitutional by a Georgia jurist, when, after fifty years on the statute books without a prosecution, it was brought to light and an indictment returned under it. But the Angelo Herndon case is never cited by those who may be termed professional anti-Southerners. Herndon, a Negro Communist, was convicted under this ancient statute prohibiting the possession or dissemination of subversive printed matter advocating a fundamental change in the government. His freedom was obtained through a writ of habeas corpus.

Part of the South’s paradox is explicable upon the basis of the South’s heritage from its pioneer stock. Part can be explained by the curious intellectual heritage of the South, which draws its political philosophy from two divergent sources.

One source of the South’s point of view is to be found in the line of empirical philosophers, of whom Berkeley, Hume, and Locke are representative, aud who, in turn, drew upon the expressions of absolute liberty developed by the nonconformist sects of the seventeenth century. The profound effect of Roger Williams, Harry Vane, and Algernon Sidney upon this school of philosophy is obvious. Their influence upon the South is indicated by the fact that Locke was one of the planners of North Carolina, and that the theocratic libertarianism of Williams has dominated Southern religious thought since long before the Revolution.

But another source is discernible. The ideas of the remarkable coterie of Tory writers and philosophers of Queen Anne’s day flowed into America. They were profoundly influenced by the Cartesian skepticism of the rationalists. But the humanism of Swift and Pope and Bolingbroke, whatever its source, was to affect American thought far longer and far more deeply than it did the thought of England.

Thomas Jefferson represents the confluence of these two streams of thought. Throughout the many volumes of his papers and letters you may trace the influence of The Bloudy Tenent, of A Modest Proposal, of Leviathan, and above all of Locke’s treatises on government.

Jefferson is at once the best that the South can offer and its most typical. All the conflicts and all the paradoxes that appear in its people appear in his life and his way of thought. It is to the liberal hedonist of Monticello that the South owes its debt for the formalization of its political and philosophical doctrines.

I do not imply that they have sustained no change. The impact of the long political quarrel over the slave issue, which inevitably produced certain schizoid traits among the people to whose history and ideology slavery was instinctively abhorrent, and the calamitous aftermath of the longest military occupation in modern history upon its economy, modified the fervor if not the dogmatism of Southern beliefs.

Moreover, the Southern scene contains, and the Southern mind at times is obsessed with, the Negro. He makes up a third of the Southern population and half of the Southern poverty. His presence is not a problem, for a problem assumes the existence of a solution. He is profoundly an American phenomenon and obviously typical of the paradox that is the South; for his presence represents both asset and liability.

4

THE South has had its share of demagogues. They can be divided into three species. The first, and most common, is a charlatan, dedicated to the interest of absentee overlords; he is a Quisling; he is like a sheep trained to lead the lines of its fellows to the slaughter pen. The second is merely avid for power; usually a former member of the current political hierarchy, he seeks to build himself an individual and personal following by painting upon his face the symbols of a painful and righteous indignation and by stomping like the dickens. The third deserves sympathy: he begins as the honest, sincere, well-intentioned politican who wishes to right obvious wrongs, and who fails to awaken the interests of the people by a simple assertion until, finally goaded to despair, he utilizes the tricks of the mountebank and attains to power. Sometimes he dies of a broken heart, sometimes of an assassin’s bullet, and sometimes of drunkenness upon the power that he has bought at a price his conscience regards as somewhat excessive.

To whichever group he belongs, the demagogue is recognizable by three obvious traits. He promises a vague Utopia in which milk and honey shall flow more opulently than in the New Jerusalem. He is flanked by a company of jackals who pluck the corpse of the state’s treasury to dry bones. He selects as an object of attack some religious or racial group that is weak and relatively defenseless, and loads upon its back the sins of the people, preparatory to driving it into the wilderness as a sacrificial goat.

To a demagogue on the Pacific Coast, the scapegoat very likely will be the Nisei. When he lived in Germany, before he put a bullet through his brain, his scapegoat was labeled “Jew”; his soul goes marching on in Boston, where he suppresses books, and overturns the monuments in graveyards, and writes filth on the walls of synagogues, and waylays little Jewish paper-carriers on their way home at evening. In the South he hates “niggers.”

But wherever he lives he fears schools and colleges and teachers and students. He feels that they are engaged in a single gigantic conspiracy against his rule, his person, and his way of thought. His instinct is both sure and accurate: they are.

But he is a good showman, whether at Nuremberg before a youth congress, or in Georgia at a political barbecue. He knows the tricks of the ham actor, the gestures, the tones of voice that can arouse passions. Always he dresses himself up as the little man, the common man, come to life, grown to Brobdingnagian stature and become the Duce, or the Leader or, maybe, “Ploughboy Pete.”

In 1941 a considerable calamity overtook the oldest chartered state university in America. Through the whim of the incumbent Governor of Georgia, Eugene Talmadge, who purged from the Board of Regents a number of distinguished citizens and appointed his own relatives and henchmen to the vacancies created, the University System, with its twenty institutions, had fallen into the bad graces of the accrediting associations.

Although the war was breaking in the Pacific, the repercussions were felt everywhere throughout Georgia: in the larger places, on isolated farms where more prosperous tenants were struggling to send a girl to normal school or a boy to the college of agriculture, on every campus and in every college town.

I decided to run for Governor, promising to free Georgia’s educational system, schools and colleges alike, from every vestige of political interference. I had learned something in the ten years that had intervened since my optimistic journey from county seat to county seat, running for Speaker pro tem of the House. I knew that the odds were very great against my election. The incumbent governor had possession of all the patronage in Georgia. He had authority to dismiss any State employee, even in the independent agencies, without giving a reason. He was an experienced campaigner, with eight state-wide compaigns under his belt. He had an almost bottomless war chest, and alliance with most of the local political machines in Georgia.

But I had not been politically idle. In the interval I had become Attorney General of Georgia. Between bringing successfully the first antitrust action ever filed in a United States court by a state government, carrying on the routine duties of the Law Department, providing opinions officially and unofficially for almost every unit of government, and speaking at school exercises over the state, there had been many occasions for making political contacts in every county — and I had made them.

On the Fourth of July, the campaign began in earnest. It was tobacco marketing time in South Georgia, and I visited each of the towns where the huge warehouses held the bright leaf that had replaced cotton as the cash crop of the section. In each warehouse I shook hands with every farmer who stood beside his piles of tobacco. Every day I made two or three speeches from the stump, and at least once each week reported on my campaign through a radio hook-up that covered the entire state.

My opponent’s endeavor was to play the role of indulgent elder statesman, amused at the efforts of a negligible contender. But it soon became obvious to the State machine that here was revolution; the women’s clubs, the parent-teacher groups, the newspapers, the students themselves canvassing house-to-house in many Georgia towns and farmto-farm in most of Georgia’s counties, constituted a menace to things as they were for a highly conservative administration which had close Eastern affiliates.

There was but one last recourse. “Nigger! Nigger!” they cried. “All teachers is nigger-lovers. All newspapers is subsidized by nigger-loving Yankees.”

It is a cry that the South had heard before — in Mississippi, in Texas, in South Carolina. The liberal educator is usually rather naïve; he is an easy butt for jokes; he tells hard truths, and there are many who prefer to listen to gaudy lies.

There was a day in the South when the educator was assailed for heresy, but after Poteat of Furman challenged the bigots and summoned the shade of Roger Williams to his defense, that form of attack lapsed. But the racial brand of demagogic attack continued, and in a sense, the educators fostered it by suggesting eradication of hookworm, typhoid, tuberculosis, and syphilis among the Negroes. Since the educator deals in a circumambulatory terminology, too often understandable only by his colleagues, it is easy for the demagogue to accuse and almost to prove him to be an advocate of miscegenation upon the basis of a recommendation that Negroes be provided with sanitary privies.

Let me engage in a parenthesis of educator-baiting myself. The science of semantics includes being understood as well as being definite, and a great many volumes offered by educators contain a professional jargon uninterpretable by the layman. I do not challenge the right of the candidate for a doctorate to write his thesis in doctorese, or in Lithuanian, Flemish, or Hittite if he desires. I will defend to the death his right to do so; but he would save his defenders a considerable amount of inconvenience if, for popular publication, he translated his work into English.

Seizing upon some of the professors’ harmless statements torn from their context, and on a few misquotations that were unintelligible enough to be exciting, my 1942 opponent flayed the educator and the Negro with almost equal zeal and with equal want of effect. When the ballots were in he had lost by eighty-nine counties to sixty-nine with a tie in one; and by a three to two margin in popular votes. And I had inherited twenty colleges that had lost their accredited status with the educational world.

Georgia’s Legislature undertook in the next January an experiment in liberating the institutions of higher learning, and the common schools as well, from every vestige of political control. A constitutional Board of Regents for the University System, and a constitutional Board of Education for the common schools, have the complete control and direction of education. The Governor cannot remove members of these boards, nor can the Legislature dismiss them except through impeachment.

This is an experiment which will depend for its success upon the flexibility of mind of the boards’ members. For the average educator, however, it guarantees freedom to teach and places a buffer between him and the demagogue.

5

THERE are many Souths, and it is easy to write about any of them if you have no special regard for accuracy.

There is the South of magnolia blossoms and spacious white verandas; of houses like transplanted Greek temples; of fields white with cotton, where gay workers pick the fleece as they sing happy but plaintive melodies; of mockingbirds having no moment to stop from their song even to catch the early worm. There is the South of squalid unpainted tenant shanties on eroded non-productive acres; of once splendid hills where forests, leveled by the axe, have turned into gully-ridden desolations; of rivers running red as blood with the soil from ruined farmlands.

Somewhere in the South great mansions exist. Very few of them, I fear, are heritages from the Old South; but belong, rather, to wintering Easterners or to the sons of the men who built the earlier Southern textile mills. Somewhere, too, the shanties exist. Lamentably there are a good many of them in the soil-depleted portions of the old cotton belt. But neither mansion nor shanty, Marse Chan nor Jeeter Lester, julep-sipper nor turnip-gnawer, is actually representative of the South. These are confined to the antithetical cliques born of the romantic sentimentality of the South. And the romanticism of Hopkinson Smith and of Faulkner derive from common sources; the Colonels, Carter and Sartoris, are brothers under their skins.

The South is not even a “cotton empire.” Certainly Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida no longer rely exclusively upon cotton as the chief cash crop. Georgia was the last of these to break with the cotton tradition, but last year almost 40 per cent of each farmer’s dollar came from livestock against 32 per cent from cotton. The threat of eventual mechanization of cotton production hangs so heavily over the old belt, where yeoman farmers again are becoming predominant, that the trend to other crops is overwhelming.

Many of the Southeastern states can make the transition from one-crop agriculture without prolonged dislocation of their economic system or personal calamity to the families displaced. But the mechanical cotton-picker may mean temporary catastrophe to many tenants and sharecroppers in Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, and other resources of these states must be developed to provide employment for the displaced agricultural workers.

In view of the riotous exploitation of Southern timberlands and the retarded position of Southern mining, the outlook for many areas is not bright. But the picture is not altogether bleak. The textile industry will tend to become wholly Southern. Heretofore, at a great loss to the South and to the nation, mills below the Potomac have been precluded from the manufacture of finer fabrics because of an internal tariff.

In the new decentralization of American industry, the manufacture of all classes of textiles will center in the Southern states. For example, it is obvious that America’s woolen mills must be largely rebuilt. All are outmoded and inefficient by world standards. Their reconstruction may be delayed because even submarginal mills can operate at a profit until full production is resumed in France, Britain, and Germany; but to attain a competitive position in the world market in normal years, the industry must be almost completely rebuilt. Much of the woolen industry will move to the Southeast.

Most of the wartime industries that came to the South were temporary. The great modern plants built by the Federal government went to sections already overindustrialized. But the production of synthetic rubber was concentrated in this section, and since most of the tire fabric is a product of Georgia and Alabama mills, a gradual transplanting of this industry will result. New industries that rely upon wood pulp and plastics will center their production in the South, unless artificial barriers to their development are erected.

The industrialization of the South is a certainty in the next two decades. The form it will take depends upon the national policies that are adopted in the next few years and upon the course of our diplomatic and economic relations with Latin America.

If trade with the republics of South America is to be important to the United States, the harbors of the Southern states must be utilized for shipping, and Southern industry must be expanded, especially in the fields of textiles, appliances, light metal products, ceramics, and other consumer goods that can be exchanged for the fibers, vegetable oils, lumber, fruits, and ores that will be imported in exchange. Industrialization of the South depends, in part, on South American commerce; but trade with South America must involve the South if it is to be profitable to the nation. Much depends upon the diplomatic policies of the future, and upon whether the relationship with South America that is associated with Cordell Hull’s “good neighbor policy” is continued or is displaced by a proposed system of imperialism.

The vision of an industrialized South has been received by Southerners with mixed emotions. There is bitter disagreement below the Potomac on the subject. To one group, Industrialization means Progress; but neither Industrialization nor Progress suggests to the mind of the dissenting agrarian a graven image in the form of a machine. The cult of industry is served by many who have no hesitation in proposing to turn the already exploited South into a mechanized slum, although there is force in their retort to the agrarians that cotton farming, especially in the one-crop areas, is a form of outdoor mass production indistinguishable from widget-making. It is true that the Southern agrarians live in the never-never land, that their imaginary farmers bear less resemblance to the depressed sharecropper or the flourishing yeoman farmer than to Dresden figurines of shepherd and shepherdess, but they have scored some points in the debate.

The South will not become, of course, either a single great factory or the habitation of thirty million cheerful peasants engaged in subsistence farming. Neither idea has attracted the Southern mind, which rebels instinctively against either form of monotony. The South is one of America’s last remaining frontiers. Its development is consequential not only to the millions who live there but to the other hundred and ten million Americans who are fellow citizens in a common country.

6

I HAVE tried to give you a glimpse of the Southern mind, the Southern scene, and the Southern problem, as a prelude to presenting some suggestions about a course that Americans must take if our country is to escape the multiple perils that await it in the next generation.

For any man to profess to speak without either prejudice or bias is for him to assert that he grew up without contact with other men and with the world that surrounds him; it is to assert that he is formed of different clay from his fellows and cast in a finer mold. I have told you about the South, about the little town of Newman with its modest courthouse square and its Confederate monument and its merchants and farmers and textile workers, because it is from that vantage point that I see the world. It is with their eyes that I look at a changing America. It is with their emotions that I feel pain and hope and sadness and joy. I do not profess a detachment that I have not; only those who have been uprooted and left to dry in the noon sun are truly detached.

But Newnan and Georgia and the South are a part of the great experiment that is America. It is important to all of us that the experiment succeed. Too many lives, too much treasure, too much work, and too many dreams have been expended upon it for it to be abandoned.

I am convinced that the experiment should go on, in the nation, in each of the forty-eight states, in the thousands upon thousands of communities that together sum up the population of our country. Though this optimism may derive from nothing but the ebullient romanticism of my Georgia neighbors, I am convinced that somehow we can make an America free of fear and want — and keep it free from boredom and monotony, too.

The first needful thing, of course, is to regard the United States as a common heritage for all its citizens, wherever they were born and wherever they live. The exploitation of whole regions, under a colonial system more wasteful than that practiced by the most greedy of European powers in Africa or the Pacific, must end. Our natural resources, which are not so great as they were before they were depleted in winning two wars, must be conserved. The oil reserves of the West, the copper and lead of the Mountain States, the very soil of the South, must not be wasted.

Our human resources must be conserved. Oil and copper will store in the earth, but the time wasted in unemployment cannot be used some later day. A program for the utilization of the highest skill of every American worker, all sixty million of them, is imperative. That it must involve guarantees by all of society to each member of society is inescapable.

The right of the individual to make his own choices must be kept free. Individualism has taken much criticism, as a creed, in recent years, because ineluctably it is the defense of the greedy when confronted with their own antisocial conduct. But it is obvious that society as such has no rights except those that are the sum total of the rights of the individuals who compose it. Individual initiative is a phrase of contempt in the mouths of those who advocate one or another form of authoritarianism.

The surest safeguard, at least economically, that can be adopted on behalf of individual enterprise — “free enterprise” if you like that phrase better — is the rigid enforcement by society, in self-protection, of statutes against monopoly.

The discriminations against the Southern and Western regions of our country must be abated, both in the freight rate differentials that prevent their normal industrial development and in the distribution of Federal funds for highways, education, and public health. If these injustices are not remedied, the people of the South and of the West will become no more than hewers of wood and drawers of water to imperial masters in the East. Federal funds should be distributed on a basis of need and not on a basis of ability to “match.”

Control over the economic life of the nation through monopolistic conspiracies, or through monopolies attained through misuse of the patents granted by the government as a reward for inventive genius, must be ended.

Industry in America must be decentralized. Enforcement of the present inadequate and ineffective laws against monopoly would do much in this direction, but more positive action is needed. Both to attain nation-wide prosperity and as an essential element in national defense, industry must be fieldsown in the United States instead of crowded together in an Eastern hothouse.

A public works system embracing every region and community of the country and admitting of immediate activation in case of need must be prepared and ready for any economic emergency. This is an expensive counterbalance to the free enterprise system in industry. It will be less needful as decentralized industry eradicates the economic plague spots of America.

Control over corporate enterprises must be restored to ownership. The most dangerous present menace to American business is not a handful of pinkish dissenters from our economic orthodoxy, but the erection of an irresponsible bureaucracy of management, more involuted and pernicious than any governmental bureaucracy ever to haunt the nightmare of a high-tariff Republican.

Attention must be given to farm problems, and to this I shall address myself in my next article. The medication of subsidies and allotments was an unavoidable necessity during the depression illness, but some less drastic remedy should keep the patient in health hereafter.

The enumeration of needs appears to be entirely upon the economic side. There is no specific mention of civil liberties or of states’ rights. The answer is that the civil liberties of our people are in no immediate danger of violation; they risk only the erosion incident to poverty and the political weakness that accompanies it.