NEW U.S. CAPITAL.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 3, 4 January 1934, Page 10

NEW U.S. CAPITAL.

ARCHITECT'S VISION.

SCHEME TO END CRISIS.

CITY ON MISSISSIPPI

John Crowe Ransom, Tennessee poet and author, jrives in thp Peepmber issue of "The American Review an architect's plnn to build a city on the Mississippi to replace the nations present capital as a project to end tbe depression. His article appears, in part, below. I shall describe here a plan which not only looke capable of ending the depression in the United States, but captures the imagination by its own merits as a project besides, a scheme which seems timely now, but would be worth consideration at any time. Since I have had nothing whatever to do with its authorship, I am in a position to furnish it with suitable adjectives; it ie daring, simple and brilliant. What is the cause of depression? It is a foolish question, if it expects a. simple answer. Depression its a bodily state to which innumerable petty acts have .contributed; specifically, many millions of acts of acquisitive private agents over many years. It has not been necessary until now to raise this question seriously. Whatever the cause of depressions, the cure has come spontaneously, as if by an act of Providence. The cure has been substantially the name for them all. Some fresh, largescale enterprise, external* with respect to the given and stagnant fields of industry, has been the curative agent; gathering momentum, attracting to its orbit ever more of the unemployed workmen and the hiding capital, till all the slack has been taken up, and depression hae given way to "boom"; that is, to a condition of productive activity such that even more capital and more labour are wanted than the market can readily furnish. That, we have thought iu the past, is the way "depressions go away; why should wo try to enter into their causes and cure them? Governments may have been made extremely uncomfortable during the depression period, but, knowing little about it, tliey have had the good sense to wait it out, and they have been rewarded as the cure has come duly to pass without the benefit of government. External Stimuli. Here are some of, these external stimuli which are capable of curing depression if they can be applied: (We know them both theoretically, and historically.) i (1) War will do it, if nothing else happens first, for war promotes instantly, from the moment of waging, a period of furious activity, putting a premium on production, maintaining an extravagant rate of consumption, riding over all the little local cores of inertia. But war is too heroic a stimulus, not raueh relished by democracies.

(2) Destruction of those works of man which constitute his fixed capital, by storms, fires, or cataclysms of nature will serve, if their path of incidence ;s wide enough; or destruction by their warlike equivalent, plain sabotage; so that if a few of the great centres of wealth in our country, say, Xew York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, could be suddenly destroyed, there would arise such a necessity of replacement that depression would hd gone before we knew it. (3) A more agreeable stimulus consists of novel forms of production, <as when a lucky piece of engineering skill makes it possible to produce a new commodity, and it is wanted in such volume as to call for capital and labour in proportion to the degree of their unemployment; hence the rise of railroade, of automobiles, or perhaps of a combination of many lesser industries. (4) Or a new value is found for exploitation in nature, the gold or diamonds in the mines, the oil in the wells, a special climatic happiness in Florida or California; the rush begins, participated in by wealth and penury alike, and activity is restored. (5) Or the frontier is extended, a tract of virgin soil is opened to settling in the ordinary manner, and thie settlement uses up the superfluous energies, an*d the whole economy once more functions healthily. Mr. Roosevelt is trying to deal with depression in the hard way; it having proved impossible to wait longer in order that nature might take its course, which would be the easy way. A Brand-new Way. But what if it were not quite necessary even now to try the hard way? What if there were a brand-new largeecale enterprise in which we could all enlist as private citizens, going into business and obtaining the usual business rewards until the depression should be forgotten? Suppose now. that somebody with patriotism and imagination, and at the same time with a sufficient business realism, should devise a project which had a compelling usefulness, and the desired, dimensions, and was an interior project, or one that would leave this country not so much bigger as better when it should be concluded. Such a project would invite participation by those now waiting fora project, and would obtain this participation if it were actually launched; and it might seem worth, launching to Mr. Roosevelt and those determined economic housecleaners who with him are our present political authorities; for it would be a project on the easy order, well suited to go along with and mitigate their project, which is on the hard order. I come then to the plan. It is this: To erect a new capital city for this Union, deep in the interior where our capital city ought to be, and larger, more modern, and more beautiful than any other city on earth. This is the plan which has been advanced by my fellow townsman of Nashville, Tennessee, Mr. Sidney Mttron-Hirsch. He has given it out tip to this point only orally, but a steadily widening circle of lawyers, bankers, and business men have been made acquainted with it and have received it with almost unqualified approval. It is a plan that seems destined to have a large public circulation. The plan is at this stage like a sketch, whose detail is yet to be filled in and permite no end of discussion and elaboration. Naturally it will not be entertained seriously by people to whom it does not seem likely \to compel the public imagination in the first place; but it does not look as if it lacked this faculty. Present Capital an Anomaly. It is a fact that we need a capital city; but it has scarcely appeared before that the creation of a capital city is a work whose virtue it is to profit us in. the act as well as In the consequence.

The capital city, which stands on the eastern seaboard, is a political anomaly, which is justly, if mildly, obnoxious to all those sections which have to orient themselves, or look to the East, so arbitrarily. It is surprising that in a nation whose energies are largely dedicated to feats of engineering, which is fond of magnificent architecture, and which politically is filled with powerful sectional jealousies, that we have not already relocated the national capital. But this is especially so now that it has become a common-place of military opinion that a capital on the seaboard of a nation of continental proportions is a mistake. Washington, like Philadelphia, like New York, is exposed to annihilation in the event of war with a firstclass power owning an air fleet; but a capital located anywhere near the geographical centre, or, say, 1300 miles from the sea coast, is as immune to attack as a capital can well be in this world. We must have cities, we shall have them, even if suddenly of late we have become conscious of the squalor, the discomfort, the shoddiness, and the pretentiousness which is in them all as we know them. "Agrarians" may not like cities temperamentally, and talk against the prospects of any big cities in the future, yet they too go to cities and are influenced by cities, and it is a matter of fact that the city focuses all the features of a culture as nothing else docs. , . But there are cities and cities, and it is right' to waiit to make wide, healthful and splendid the city of our election. Tho meanest tillers of the olive groves had an Athens to go to when they went to a city, and its beauty Acquainted them by its persuasive symbolism with tk character of their empire and their civilisation. There is nowhere in the world among "•rcat cities any that ie planned and built with a half-way thoroughness of design; especially is there not any that is modern,'that permits a decent degree of modern mobility to its transportation, that is completely expressive of our living, culture, and mode of life. There is not a city in whose erection the expenditure of love and labour has really been lavish and unstinted. Americans Can Do It. Probably there is no people which is prepared to make such an expenditure upon its national city, ! and not to stop short of whatever perfection ns Vumanly possible for the contemporary generation, unless it i» ourselves. Our national energies could scarcely find a field for prouder expression than in raising a national city which would stand henceforth as the*object of veneration and the symbol of our unity in diversity, our power and our peculiar character. It is Mr. Mitron-Hirsch's thought that the only appropriate site for the city is somewhere along the forested bonks, both banks, of the Mississippi. Nmt stream is perhaps the most distinctive phvsical feature of our territory, and the most beloved and legended. A city .situatecl there would be somewhat west of the centre of population find somewhat east of the geographical centre. Hβ proposes for it an area of 100 miles square, with an expectation of housing 15,000,000 of inhabitants. His idea of the business side of the undertaking is attested by a good many practical men as feasible. It is nothing lees than a Federal project that he has In mind. Let the Government obtain the land by condemnation and purchase, fnd start the construction of the streets, approaches, bridges and public f"' l^"? 8 - Then let the Government sell off the land in detail to private citizens and corporations for their residences and business houses, at whatever price the market will bring; let it also if it pleases sell its franchises to the different sorts of public utilities which would bid for the privilege of doing business there , . The city would thus pay its own way. It would" have cost the Government nothing in the long run. And the fact that the cost of ite construction would have become virtually an aggregate of private expenditures would constitute another fact also, namely, that the depression would have been ended. Ino capital city would be, after all, the expression of our capitalist or private ownership system—operating within such regulations'and constraints as we are no C w in the act of determining that they shall, permanently observe. The plan must be addressed in the last resort, of course, to Mr. Roosevelt. Now, Mr. Roosevelt's unusual competence is only in part the consequence of his training' in the school of realistic polities; it the consequence of his having an imaginative gift that makes him always see more in the issue than appears in its categorical statement. In general, what he proposes is not only to bring us out of depression, but to inaugurate permanently a New Denl. Why should he not want to build a new capital for its safekeeping ?— N.A.N.A.