St. Louis Post-Dispatch from St. Louis, Missouri • Page 50

BT. LOUIS -POST-DISPATCH, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 11, 1938. PAGE 2P of the Post-Dispatch -1938 ST.LOUiS POST-DISPATCH Founded by JOSEPH PULITZER DtctmbtT 12. Wi Publuhcd hj The Pulitzer Publishing Co. TWtlth Boulevard and Olive Sticct THE POST-DISPATCH PLATFORM I know that my retirement will make no difference In Ita cardinal principles that It will alwaya fisht for progress and reform, never tolerate Injustice or corruption, always fight demagogue of all parties, never belong to any always oppose privileged classes and pnblie planderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain de-Voted to the pnblie welfarei never be satisfied with merely printing news always be drastically Independent; never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.

JOSEPH PULITZER. April 10, 1807. they must fight to take from each other the good things of life." So run the prophecies In our symposium. 4 Our contributors are agreed that the country is not going back to the conditions of any prior year. As Dr.

Charles A. Beard, the historian, puts it: "To whatever variety of untried and bitter experience we may be subjected, one thing remains certain: we shall never see again the day of Woodrow Wilson or Mark Hanna or William Jennings Bryan. We may stumble backward into the future, but it is the future alone which we can enter." In President Roosevelt's letter to the Post-Dispatch, published on the first page of our special section, is a reference to the platform which this paper prints each day at its masthead. The President says it embodies "the ideal for which all American newspapers should strive." Through the 60 years of Its life, the Post-Dispatch has had as its guide the ideal expressed In this platform. Early editorials, both in the Post-Dispatch and the New York World, which Joseph Pulitzer purchased in 1883, expressed the spirit of the platform and used certain of the phrases which It was later to contain.

For example, the Post-Dispatch, in a salutatory editorial on Dec. 12, 1878, declared: "The Post and Dispatch will serve no party but the people; will follow no caucuses but Its own convictions; will oppose all frauds and shams wherever and whatever they are; will advocate principles and Ideas rather than prejudices or partisanship." Again, the platform in Its present form was foreshadowed in a cablegram from Joseph Pulitzer on Oct. 10, 1889, the day the Pulitzer Building cornerstone was laid in New York. Mr. Pulitzer in that message said: God grant that this structure be the enduring home of a newspaper forever unsatisfied with merely printing news forever fighting every form of wrong forever Independent forever advancing in enlightenment and progress forever wedded to truly democratic ideas forever rTZZ "rT" i A pmmiml An? 1 0mh Sixtieth Anniversary 4878- The Post-Dispatch tomorrow will be.

60 years old. It Is celebrating its anniversary with the publication In this issue of a special section on the theme "Whither America Ten years ago, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the paper, we published a memorable number in which some of the great Intellects of the world reviewed the course of civilization and predicted the future. On the present occasion, our contributors were asked to deal specifically with America to examine the past decade in this country for signs of what the future may hold. "What's past is prologue. It has been a decade of profound change.

In the winter of 1923 the country was still riding the wave of a boasted prosperity which Herbert Hoover, with many others, believed was destined in a short time to wipe out poverty. There were, to be sure, ominous portents for even then there were sick Industries and a too-long roll of unemployed but the voices raised in warning were drowned in the chorus of optimism. How false were the prophecies of continued boom times (prophecies, incidentally, which had no standing among our contributors of 1928) the country began to realize a short year later. The years following the crash of 1929 have seen black despair, the rise of hope after the inauguration of Roosevelt In 1933, renewed misgivings that reached a peak with the "recession," and the burgeoning again of hope but hope, this time, that takes account of the hard realities at home and abroad. Change has been piled on change.

Nineteen twenty-eight is an eon away from the present. of the future? In one important respect, our contributors are alike. Each from his own point of view looks to the future with hotfe. There are no defeatists among them. William Allen White, now as always a hater of "isms' whether of the Right or the Left, Bees the philosophy of the middle way still dominant in the life and thought of the country.

Deep faith In the rock-ribbed character of our democracy shines through his article. James Truslow Adams, the historian, believes that "the past 10 years may well prove to have formed the most important peacetime decade in our history." He is sharply critical of many aspects of the New Deal, but he derives assurance for the coming years from the magnificent way in which New England met its recent great disaster. Sidney Hillman, labor leader, records his conviction that American labor "has no faith in the illusory promises dangled before it by the dictatorships." John L. Lewis and William Green agree that the solution of our basic economic problems can and will be found within the framework of democracy. In the achievements of science.

Dr. Arthur H. Compton finds "hope of a new world in which men can co-operate for their mutual benefit instead of the old world In which LETTERS FROM THE PEOPLE A New Era in Farming. To the Editor of the Post-Dispatcb: AS a producer cf foods, I pause occasionally to ponder the immediate future of the American stomach. I doubt if it can be distended enough to hold the avalanche of good things to eat that will soon be dumped into the market basket of the nation.

Surely, we are on the threshold of a cycle of amazing food production, if crop limitation has had its day. The past several years have been years of rest and revitalization for millions of acres of farm lands. Epochal advances in land usage as a result of a wave of erosion control and soil conservation have been made. The average farmer today grows soil-building legumes with the greatest of ease; he now realizes the necessity of limestone and fertilizers in preparation for his legume crops. Hand in hand with the widespread program of soil rejuvenation has gone the development of new crops.

Missouri farmers grow 100 bushels of hybrid corn to the acre and are not greatly excited about such a yield. New bread grains that not only yield more but mature earlier to escape weather hazards have been introduced; plant breeders are offering scores of new and more productive fruits and vegetables. Naturally, our alert manufacturers of machinery have developed new and more efficient cultivating and harvesting tools. Modern farm machinery, the very acme of perfection and streamlined beauty, is actually credited with keeping farm youths on the farm; farm life in a machine era has more interest than the big city. Better land, more intelligent farmers, more productive crops and amazing new machinery can mean only one thing when the throttle is opened wide a cycle of heavy production.

Although we now command 14 times as much goods onri mPTvrp tLS the average person else aspiring to be a moral force forever rising to a higher plane of perfection as a public institution. God grant that The World may forever strive toward the highest Ideals be both a daily schoolhouse and a daily forum, both a daily teacher and a daily tribune, an instrument of justice, a terror toi crime, an aid to education, an exponent of true Americanism. The platform as we have it today was sent to the staff of the Post-Dispatch by Mr. Pulitzer on his sixtieth birthday in 1907. Shortly after his death in 1911, it was published with the editorial postscript: "This was the policy of the Post-Dispatch during Joseph Pulitzer's lifetime.

This will remain the policy of the Post-Dispatch." Post-Dispatch takes the occasion of its six tieth anniversary to repeat that pledge. A MAN OF GOOD WILL PEAKS. are interested in. Moreover, college students are overworked. By grace of Smith, they have their But Not Too Late interludes of 6hovel-leanlng.

where in the world, an even brighter day Secretary of State Hull's speech at the opening business session of the Lima conference is the speech of a man of good will. Emphasis was properly placed on the friendliness of the 21 American nations, upon their fundamental characteristics, Business Approaches the Middle Way Progressive management has come to realise that destiny of business will be shaped by Co-operation with Government, says writer; collective bargaining is being accepted and price policies are being revised under pressure of militant consumers; changed attitude is noted in Wall Street, Main Street and in industrial centers. Books in the News is dawning. Rpfore naxitv with other product! Are there other Smiths in the field Surely, if this is the only studio of Its kind, the Anti-Monopoly Committee has an unsupected inquiry to conduct. groups can be arranged, our farmers may face financial ruin, but they will upon their singular experience which has imbued But what about the cap-and-gowned dignitaries in i them with a passionate belief In the processes of our groves of Academe? Recently one of that fra face it with very full stomaens.

New Haven, Mo. GUY TRAIL. A SPANISH clock tower bears the words, "It is later than you think," and on the eve of the French Revolution someon hastily scrawled the same thought on a wall in Paris. Max Lerner, brilliant young civilization and with a capacity to guard and main ternity, smugging his way through the iniquities of football, told of rumored instances where coaches tain their heritage. "Victor We'bright, Managing Editor, in Survey Graphic.

stimulated players for supreme efforts with hypo The history of the Western Hemisphere was impressively, if calmly, condensed. Adjustment has Opposes Huge Armed Force. To the Editor of the Poat-Dlspatch I LIKED your editorial of Dec. "Preparedness: A Realistic View dermics. That's nonsense, of course, befouled with publicist, thinks the same words apply today, but that their admonition need In neither religious nor revolutionary.

He re- been necessarily a key word In our training. The malice. But Smith's Ph. D. factory, with its far.

re volting implications, should rouse the university There is no doubt that oppression of minorities in dictator-ridden countries "clarify our sense of political timing." f. is a nractice that we find it hard dons to quick and decisive action. THAT CRACKPOT SCENIC HIGHWAY. continuous occasion for adjustment on the scale of physical magnitude and larger difficulty of race to race and creed to creed has been instrumental in teaching us how to develop adjustment of individual to individual and of group to group. "It Is not an stomach.

We in America wish to do all that is humanly possible to alleviate The peculiar mania of our age is the spending of their condition. But I. for one. am not In favor building: un a tremendous armed force Those who have watched the rapid rise of Mr. Lerner as an assistant editor of tha Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, later as an editor of The Nation, now a professor at Williams College, will find in his first book, "It Is Later Than You Think" (Viking Press, New York), fulfillment and promise of still more to come.

Mr. Lerner wants democracy to survivi and prove effectively its infinite superiority to the repressive dictatorships which hav placed democratic procedure on the defen to be used eventually to stave off Hitler or rescue minorities. Let us see to it accident that the American nations have been peculiarly interested in the development of international law. The relationships of the American nations are impossible unless rules of international conduct are carefully defined and fully accepted, and become that we do not. in our eagerness to res cue the minorities in Europe, destroy civilization.

G. W. K. governing." Such acceptance, the speaker declared. "is the essence of civilized order in the international Since the Days of CockerilL To the Editor of the Post-Dlspatcn: sive, ne is urst 01 an, inereiore, crat.

But because he believes that de life of the world." If the detached serenity of a Marcus Aurelius OBSERVE that you are celebrating 1 your sixtieth anniversary today. adorns Mr. Hull's utterance, there was no lack of want to extend my congratulations on the progress you have made over these years. I went to work for the company I still work for as a boy of 14 in the fall of 1882, and among my duties, I frequently had to call at your paper and place want ads, etc. mocracy's survival depends altogether on broadening of its base, he is also a kind of collectivist Put the two together and yoa have a new type of liberal now emerging, the democratic collectivism What does the new species believe? First, that democratic government and culturt must do more for the masses of the people; that they must do it by evolving an economic program of democratic socialization; that they must accept unionism as a cultural base as well as a device for improv Ing purchasing power; that they must worit their changes gradually, always within th frame of constitutional processes.

This new type of liberal is not satisfied with the New Deal's "temporizing and blundering." It sees instead that "only a concerted effort at economic planning that has the massed power of the people behind You were then located on Market street, between Fifth and Sixth, on the north side of the street, across from the old Grand Opera House and, if my mem ory serves me right, your editor was John A. Cockerill and your paper con sisted of four to six pages. I have been a constant reader of your paper over all these years and continue to read it and regard it as one of the outstanding ones of the country. 1 ex realism, no blinking of the mood of things, no evasion of facts. The destructive philosophy rampant In the world was candidly accounted in these scrupulously weighed words: Mankind is tragically confronted once more, by the alternatives of freedom or serfdom, of order or anarchy, of progress or retrogression, of civilization or barbarism.

Dictatorship proceeds In various ways its tyrannies to accomplish: by force of arms, by economic penetration, by, propaganda. Against all its threats the Americas must be prepared if we are to retain our solidarity and erect "an enduring structure of peace." The gravely courteous message of the gentleman unafraid. A PH. D. FACTORY.

A man who appears in the news under the alias of George Hitchcock Smith has established a going concern in New York. He is a professional ghostwriter. His clients are not the illiterates or lnar-ticulates who purport to write stories, usually In the sports field, under their own names. Smith's customers are star college students; he describes them. Some of them are candidates for the higher degrees.

This year, for example, Smith's office has turned out seven M. A. and three Ph. D. theses.

Behold, then, these Masters of Art and Doctors of Philosophy, each of them wearing his badge of press the hope that in the years to come it will continue its greatness. You have my very best wishes for your every suc poses militant action by democracy and hf. Government money. No scheme for emptying the public treasury is too bizarre, and its appeal is often in direct proportion to its inutility and impracticability. Thus we see a group of civic promoters beating the drum for a $561,000,000 highway to extend along the Mississippi River from Minnesota to New Orleans.

The highway, admittedly, is not needed for traffic purposes. Good highways already extend along both sides of the river, as close to it as it is practicable for them to be: built. So they call the proposed new road a "scenic highway" and recount the esthetic thrill of motoring along while divfding your vision (somewhat perilously) between steering your car and viewing the Father of Waters. But the simple and obvious fact is that a scenic highway cannot be built close enough to the river to afford a continuous view, unless It be so winding as to be utterly impracticable as a commercial highway. The Mississippi, moreover, is a Btream given to the wanderlust.

After any heavy flood, some portions of the highway would be found on the opposite side of the main channel from that on which they were built. Where this did not happen, the highway would be so undermined by the high waters as to require gigantic sums for Its repair. The amount proposed to be spent on this visionary scheme is sufficient to build 12,000 miles of good concrete highway over an ordinary terrain In sections of the country where it would be of service both to local communities and as a connecting link for existing regional highways. It would build 74,000 miles of gravel farm-to-market roads, or an average of more than 1500 miles of such roads for each state In the Union. If we are determined to spend a half-billion dollars on a big highway project," let's put the roads where they will be of practical use and not along a river bank which would be better preserved in its natural state.

DR. TOWNSEND SHAVES HIS PLAN. Has the princely generous Dr. Townsend turned traitor to the old folks? No categorical Yes may be hissed, but, surely, a front-page story may be repeated without a breach of confidence. The story In the New York Herald Tribune Is that Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts has proposed a compromise to which the doctor has agreed in principle.

The Lodge plan would provide $60 a month, $40 from the Federal Government, $20 from the tween labor and industry for which he has striven all his life. In public statements exchanged between the administration and Charles R. Hook, president of the National Association of Manufacturers, business and government have called a halt to "saber-rattling." And, as if to confirm this current amity, prominent industrialists and Government experts are co-operating through the National Economic Committee erroneously described as the anti-monopoly committee composed of Senators, Representatives and administrative experts. The present social trend is so unmistakably clear that there is no reversing it. A prominent St.

Louis business man, Sidney R. Baer, writing in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently, described himself as a conservative by heritage and "by reason of my place in the economic picture," then went on to say: "Inequalities which are a part of life in all Its aspects must from time to time be lessened, unless catastrophe is to be the result. No sensible person desires revolution or upheaval, but at the same time realizes that where progress stops, reaction sets In. Increased purchasing power must be more widely diffused among the masses." In the interest of private enterprise business is becoming reconciled to the extension of social security through insurance, to pensions for the aged and to the wage and hour law to improve incomes which are unduly low.

There are indications that certain sections of business are attempting to produce more goods at lower prices for the higher level of wage-earner incomes. Consumer co-operatives will find their level in the business scene, as they have done in Sweden and Great Britain, as they are now doing In our rural districts. The features of business which are obsolete are doomed to go the way of the canals. The things which are of too great public interest to remain in private hands will have to go the way of the turnpikes. Progress is the great liquidator as the history of many corporations demonstrates, often to the confusion of Marxists, who prefer to think in terms of compound interest fortunes growing like snowballs.

In the face of inexorable progress, and the gradual socialization of essentials, certain acute minds in industry now seem determined to carry on very much as1 Britain's Tories did with Lloyd George's liberal reforms In the years right after the war. Some of them admittedly aspire to leadership more active than perfunctory co-operation with other elements of society. Of course, there will be many who will rightly question the conversion of business leaders who have hitherto been skeptical of social evangelism. But, for the time being, we have to take our Industrialists as we take our consumers and our workers as they are. 4 The problems of finance, taxation, underproduction, faulty distribution, unemployment, relief, foreign policy, must be approached by Americans who are determined to make America a better place to live in.

Unless private enterprise can give its workers, and the people who buy its products, a constantly better bargain IV will stall and die. That is the challenge that progressive business management la accepting in full knowledge that the get-rich-quick days are gone forever. IF business continues to adapt itself to changing times, the United States may escape the frightful cleavages, the social senility, the impasses, that elsewhere are almost universally setting the stage for authoritarian government. Organic America, in contrast with most of the world, can remain an evolutionary example that spiritual and material well-being go hand in hand. At the Seventh International Management Congress, recently held in Washington, executives discussed social responsibility as a business frontier almost to the neglect of their former preoccupation with efficient short cuts to profits.

Time and again vital directors of American industry at that meeting conceded that they were willing to assume obligations beyond the immediate technical and financial success of their corporations. Not only the formal program but the group thinking included employes, consumers, community, country and indeed the world, as' well as the factory, transportation and distribution. Now it was not so long 'ago that progressive business leaders, whenever they urged forward-looking recognition of the political situation, were, in the words of one well known liberal manufacturer, "in the anomalous position of seeming to defend the calumniators of business." As this man put it to me, "As public sentiment Itself began to recognize the Injustice of some of its earlier indictment of business and the tension lessened, the progressive groups in business began to assert themselves." In his opinion there has not been a great shift from reaction toward the light by large numbers of business leaders, but a strengthening of the progressive elements by the very trend of events. For example, in the field of employe relations, it is interesting to note that, for the first time in the history of a slump, collective bargaining contracts with organized labor have multiplied. The AFL and CIO factions of labor may be poorer and wiser; but organized labor, despite its schism at the top, is too strongly intrenched in industry to be dismissed as ephemeral.

Even the United Automobile Workers of America, though shot through with internal strife, -has got a personal hearing from Henry Ford himself. After a carefully planned interview with Homer Martin, president of the union, Harry Bennett, personnel chief for Ford, was quoted as saying: "Mr. Martin Bays he wants to help the unskilled working man. I believe, from what I found out about him, that he is sincere in this." Late in September dozens of labor unions and big corporations reserved tables alongside one another in the ballroom of the Astor Hotel In New York for a dinner in honor of Edward F. McGrady, a former labor organizer, lobbyist and mediator, now an officer and director of Radio Corporation of America.

Mr. McGrady was presented with a medal by the American Arbitration Association for his services to industrial peace through mediation and arbitration. There was ungrudging applause from labor and business tables not only for Mr. McGrady but for the spokesmen of the AFL, CIO, industry, government and the public. It was apparent that all present were there not only to testify to a regard for Mr.

McGrady, but to indorse the understanding be cess. J. A. A Birthday Card. To the Editor of the Post-Dispatch: YOU are celebrating your sixtieth anniversary and I have read your paper sounds a rallying cry, but what he envisiu is a collectivism as far away as the poles from that which comes on blood-tipped wings of violence.

Fascism war and capitalist depression are all routines in the death dance of civilization, Mr. Lerner writes. Dictatorship Is the easy way; as he puts it, men hav always found it easier to be governed, ta surrender to one-man rule, than to govern themselves. Self-rule, that is what hard. And as self-rule requires popuW ohfoU ho tnbea a firm stnnrt for the part' for 52 years.

I lived a long time In St Louis, but have been in this town for 29 years. I would rather have my Post-Dispatch in the evening than my supper. I am a widow, 81 years old, and alone. MRS. LENA BROOKS.

Waterloo, 111. system, and. for an alert opposition to majority in control. A Sonnet Upon Arriving in St. Louis.

Where the Trains Eater toe Terminal Backward. To the Editor of the Post-Dispatch: BIRTHDAY GREETINGS. From the St. Louii County Watchman -Advocat ON its sixtieth birthday, we congratulatj the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Since our hi Anrl siihtiv nldpr brother has con scholarship which he has bought with money and deception. Would those fellows crib in an examina t- AST night I left New England and tion? On the evidence, they would if they had the XJ its fogs. The stony farms, the melancholy sea- tributed much to the progress and success nerve. As it is, they are moral fathoms below the hard-pressed idler or dumbbell who runs the risk Today the landscape, rich in corn and of St Louis and St. Louis County.

hogs, Illustrates what a continent can be. of being caught in order to get by. These parvenus Although I love the tense, astringent air are education's untouchables who wangle spurious distinction by cowardly cheating. tions for other thing3 besides serving a growing throughout the past 60 year Throughout that time it has stood for prop ress and reform, opposing corruption demagoguery, remained unprejudiced, i 1 tn hetterins With a staff of three assistants and six typists, this counterfeiting plant, now in Its seventh year, uas CAtl lcu an its juiiueiito conditions, helping make life more free is presumably prospering. Handicapped as he must be by no scruple, Smith defends his enterprise.

The liberty more valuable. n( iA. free and uncensored press is ou'. sovereign state, and let Joy be unconflned among the elders. That is a precipitate revision downward, from $200 to $60, but before denouncing the doctor Of Boston with its intellect and cod.

As I move west, I do not seem to care; I worry less leave rather more to God. For, once the Mississippi's left behind so it seems to travelers from the East), Tis a man's heart that matters, not his mind, The outward form's the thing that matters least; And so the train, with ill-concealed elation. Backs up "informally into the station. STRANGER. the bulwarks of democracy.

An inaep merchandise he produces relieves his buyers of the drudgery of digging through "stuffy books" and collecting and collating a mass of facts with which ent newspaper is the best soldier a6B" 4 em a il ontla thot ivau irt enslave the Pco as a laise-neartea villain, ana Dranaing senator Lodge a penurious Yankee, might not this query be pie of the nation. The made an enviable record. On its to document their essays. Thus emancipated from the sweaty labor of research, these "bright men and women" are enabled to concentrate on subjects they posed: Isn't a hors d'oeuvre In the hand a Jollier birthday, its little brother of a mere summers wishes it continued success bit of nourishment than a hypothetical banquet?.