SIX WEEKS IN AMERICA

Manawatu Standard, Volume LV, Issue 227, 23 August 1935, Page 16

SIX WEEKS IN AMERICA

AX ESTIMATE OF OPINION. SIGNS OF RECOVERY. The following are extracts from recent articles in the Times, London, by Sir Josiah Stamp:— ! In a six weeks’ tour in America I have just covered a distance of 10,000 miles by railway and 2000 miles by road, passing through 28 States and stopping at 20 cities and a number of smaller places. In each city, apart from public engagements, I have had an opportunity of meeting groups of the leading business men, bankers and industrialists for the private interchange of views, and have also been able to make contact, with a dozen widely different universities lor different purposes. Friends in New York at the close of the tour were able to assure me that no one within their knowledge had had an opportunity in recent months ol gauging opinion on so wide a scale. Although travellers’ impressions are notoriously untrustworthy, and my impressions are offered only for what they are worth, I doubt whether twice the distance or thrice the length of time would have made any material change in the general conclusions reached.

INTEREST IN THE JUBILEE. American thought at present is naturally very self-centred, but there were three matters relating to Britain in which interest was shown—in two of them a very marked interest. The first was certainly the personalities ot the King and Queen and their Jubilee. It is difficult for anyone hero to realise the widespread and almost proprietary sentiment about our King and Queen. The solicitude shown in omnibus and car and train several years ago during the King’s illness was revived on this occasion, and the general feeling that Their Majesties offer the finest example of public.service, rendered with great simplicity and dignity, shows itself in a hundred wavs.

In an ordinary cinema, for example, while the President’s picture will receive a round of applause (not so great. I am told, as it used to be), the clapping which attends the King and Queen will l>e four times the volume. I was attacked, almost with a note of resentment, when the story came across that the King had been allowed to run the risk of catching cold by undue exposure. When I had concluded my Commemencement Address to 8000 people in the Greek Theatre at the University of California, Berkeley, the orchestra broke in with the British National Anthem, an item not on the programme. BRITAIN’S RECOVERY.

The second detail of British interest which occurs early in any conversation is our industrial and economic recovery. It is, if anything, a trifle overdone, because it tends to ignore our unemployment problem, our derelict areas, and the number of industries still struggling to hold their own. Moreover, its main origin is clearly political for it is used as a stick to beat the home Government, and to show how Britain, by quite different and more old-fashioned means, has made a speedier recovery than the United States. The third matter in which there is great interest, but even more surprise, is tire extent to which we have introduced measures of Governmental control or guidance into industry and agriculture. This topic hardly ever failed to stimulate much cross-examination. The general impression to be gained from the country, if one heard no speeches, read no newspapers, and studied no statistics, would be one of well-being. America has her share ol slums, for frame-houses do not always wear well, but there are few signs ot poverty. In striking contrast to May, 1933. I did not encounter a beggar until well west of Kansas City, when occasionally, on stopping at a wayside station, one of that class would come to the end of the Pullman, tell a story about a long march, and ask for a “quarter” for the next meal. They were also to be seen perilously perched on freight cars—tree travellers with whose assumed prerogatives the railway officials now hardly dare interfere.

Even the smallest Mid-West towns swarm 1 with motor-cars —most of winch have never seen a garage—but owing to the much greater length of the road system, and also frequently q greater width, nowhere outside the big cities does the density of traffic seem to be so great as at home. The fine residential suburbs of Chicago, Kansas City, Pasadena, Houston, and similar cities look as properous as those round Amsterdam, and exceed, in the appearance of well-hejng, any corresponding areas in Britain. Road-making, widening, and other relief works are in progress in many parts, but do not suggest greater activity than would attend fairly normal development. The most conspicuous feature of objective distress is in the desert States, such, for example, as a 600-milo tract in North-West Texas, where a country fertile enough with a most moderate rainfall has been without any rain for over two years, and is fast slipping back, with its desperate inhabitants, into desolation. Dust storms must be seen to be believed. In El Paso a real estate agent declared that he no longer took his clients out to see the “lots” on sale —“we sit here and watch them blow by.” THE LAW AND N.R.A.

But when one passes from the visible picture to statistics of production and innumerable articles and speeches on trade, doubts multiply as to the absolute stage of recovery now reached, and as to the rate at which recovery is proceeding. That there is on balance an improvement during this last year. I feel sure, but it is probably of the general order of 5 to 8 per cent, which is difficult to see with the naked eye, or to discern as a growth. The present legal situation of the N.R.A. seems to be uncertain. The President could admittedly reconstruct so much of the compulsory CocVs as might fall definitely within the Supreme Court principles. He might then proceed to exliort business men to complete voluntary action for the remainder, but, in so far as flip Sherman Anti-Trust Law has not been repealed, voluntary action of this kind may well bo illegal. While I found the Codes in detail no longer attracting much active attention, the subject of greatest importance was the 4.800.000,000 dollar expenditure in the President’s hands. But interest was not centred in the real economic effect of this expenditude, either in retarding or exhilarating private business or “priming the pump,” or even in its effect upon public credit. The emphasis was rather upon the effect upon the individual voter in his political, psychological, and moral attitude towards the Government. The most frequent phrase was A 1 Smith’s salty wisecrack: “No one shoots Santa Claus round Christmas 1” Socially, there is the same warmhearted generosity, spontaneous reception of ideas, invitation to flagellating criticism, astonishing appetite for the spoken word, as ever. There is a surprising absence of all alcoholic beverage from public lunches and dinners of aIL sizes and all descriptions. Be-

yond the cocktail before the meal, water alone generally appears on the table. There is ah even greater disregard than ever of distance, and of prescribed times in the movements of ordinary daily life. A hundred miles out to a dinner seems to surprise no one.

I left America again with the impression that a country so rich in resources. so active in thought, so experimental, so irrepressible, so undaunted by disaster, cannot but rise superior to any wounds inflicted upon itself by a mistaken or overhasty treatment of its ailments. America is “coming through”—not perhaps quite as it has planned, but by sheer force of its own momentum, and the richness of its gifts.