SUPPOSED WEALTH OF AMERICANS.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18441, 6 December 1929, Page 13

SUPPOSED WEALTH OF AMERICANS.

A VISITOR’S CORRECTION. Dr. Eastman, professor of religious literature and drama at Chicago, writes to the London “Times”: — There is an idea abroad in England that all Americans are rolling in wealth these days. The idea is false, and has a divisive effect in Anglo-American friendship in so far as it makes for popular misunderstanding and lack of sympathy. Without doubt many American industries are enjoying a period of prosperity, but that prosperity is neither so general nor so well distributed as to give basis fqr the English belief that poverty and struggle have become strangers to the United States. On the contrary, we have more than enough of both. We have, to be sure, an idiot fringe of rich fools who come to Europe and squander their money in all sorts of ways; but it is a pity that the American people as a whole should suffer because of the antics of &uch.

The arguments advanced oy Englishmen I have met in the course of three delightful months in your country might be summarised as *cllows: — All Americans are wealthy because: — (1) One hundred thousand came to England this summer on holiday. Answer: True, but probably from 75 per cent, to 85 per cent, of them are teachers and preachers and small business men who have saved their money for ten to twenty years to make this one trip. They have been brought up on English literature, English history, and English ideals. They have wanted to see the Mother Country. An Englishman who takes for granted Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s and Canterbury and a hundred other such shrines may not know what this means. But let him walk through the Abbey on a summer day and see the numbers of American teachers whose emo- , tions boil over in tears as they gaze ' upon the memorials to Tennyron and Browning, Wilberforce and Livingstone, and he will begin to understand. You can’t teach about these men for a cjecade or two without something happening inside you when you stand near their tombs. (2) High wages prevail in America. Answer: In the unionised trades, yes. But only about 10 per cent, of American labour is unionised. About 90 per cent, of English labour is unionised, I am told. You seem to hear in England only the wages of the upper 10 per cent, of our workmen. The revelations of starvation wages in the non-union mills of the south tell a different story, and one almost as harrowing as that of the Welsh miners. (3) American workers, even unskilled, have automobiles. Answer: The workmen can buy a used cheap car for from £5 to £lO. Petrol ip most States averages about lOd or less per gallon, often as low as Bd. Distances are great, and a cheap car is often the family’s only insurance against unemployment, in that it provides a quick means of getting from one factory or section to another. (4) American industries are working full blast. Answer: Seme of them are, thank heaven. But others are not. More than 3,000,000 men were out of work last winter. Six hundred and forty thousand farmers left their unprofitable farms in 1927; 3,000,000 have left farms since 1920. Of the 100.000 American tourists who came here this summer probably not one in twenty has a servant in his home. And not one home in five is without mortgage. All in all, we have .so much in common with our English brethren in the way of economic struggle, as well as in ideals and history and literature, that there is every reason why we should work in sympathy with one another. The notion that all Americans are wealthy is as erroneous as it would be for Americans to get the idea that all English are wealthy because so many live in stone houses and have servants.