North Carolina's Governor
604 THE COM | NORTH CAROLINA'S GOVERNOR N THE North there is a generally accepted portrait of any governor of North Carolina. He is a gentleman of old family. He is casually interested...
...Meanwhile Dr...
...One thing in its favor is that southern workers are much more hospitable toward the idea of organization than they were formerly...
...Each afternoon, from five to six, he sits on the shady side of his veranda, and considers the affairs of state...
...He is a gentleman of old family...
...It is a matter of suffident congratulation, we think, that he should have spoken now, no doubt to the deep amazement and most utter deep disgust of the Gastonia Gazette...
...To some it may appear that part of the recent troubles might have been averted, or at least modified, if the governor had spoken out so frankly a year ago...
...604 THE COM | NORTH CAROLINA'S GOVERNOR N THE North there is a generally accepted portrait of any governor of North Carolina...
...He has been worried over the ills which have accompanied the social and economic readustment, and he believes that the people of his state have suffered more than was necessary in the change from agriculture to industry...
...Why industry should have been desirable on those conditions is a question asked some time ago...
...But possibly we should not place too much faith in descriptions of company houses written by labor-minded reporters from the North...
...Charles Francis Potter...
...Along with the right of capital to protection goes the right of the laborer to protection plus the security of safety, of freedom to move and live and work in security, whether the moving and living and working are to the ends that you and I may wish or not...
...In several respects it is the plainest common sense, long so familiar to the central tradition of Christendom that it seems unbelievable that anybody could profess to having just hatched it out in profound meditation...
...FAITH ON EASY TERMS T IS curiously typical of the nation's "spiritual condition" that the press notices of what was said on Sunday, September zg, should include remarks as disparate in character as those uttered by Mr...
...It is this: "We cannot build a prosperous citizenship on low wages...
...Whenever a problem of importance is brought to his attention, he shrugs his shoulders, picks up his palm-leaf fan, puts his feet on the rail, and turns to his neighbor, the governor of South Carolina, with a reminder...
...We refer to these declarations primarily because...
...It is through organization...
...But Dr...
...He has something to say, and it is not the celebrated line...
...Woodlock declared: "The notion that religion has been discredited and displaced by science has infiltrated the popular mind from top to bottom...
...But all recent correspondence from the South indicates that the American Federation MONWEAL October I6, 1929 of Labor will have a hard struggle to get established there...
...In both places they are wretchedly poor, in both they receive small return for labor, but on the farms, at least, they had a measure of independence...
...We have now evidence that the portrait is not a speaking likeness of the present governor, O. Max Gardner...
...Although the governor has had nothing to say about unions directly, he must favor organization and collective bargaining if he means anything by these words: "What we want is orderly, restrained struggle for change...
...Thomas F. Woodlock and Dr...
...Addressing a Washington audience of Catholic women, Mr...
...He has been occupied with the really important problems of his administration in a way which suggests that his true characteristics are conscientiousness, energy and public spirit...
...One of the attractions which the South deliberately offered industry was the chance for cheap labor...
...The hostility of southern manufacturers to organized labor has not, we are told, been decreased by recent events, although for a while the influence of the radical National Textile Workers' Union made it appear that the overtures of the United Textile Workers, attached to the American Federation of Labor would be welcomed...
...That man should endeavor to remove the causes of injustice and suffering is hardly a novel ethical formula...
...Potter apparently sees no way of salvaging these truths excepting through proclamations that the supernatural does not exist, that sin and salvation are matters of no importance and that humanity is its own chief end...
...and the fact that there are truths in all genuine religions was relatively familiar even to the Doctors of the Church...
...What we want is freedom in which ideas and opinions may be advanced, and a tolerance which will permit the advancing of ideas and opinions regardless of whether they are in tune with your own thought or mine...
...The natural result is that we hear from multitudinous 'Christian pulpits,' high and low, a demand that outworn creeds shall be replaced by creeds which accord with 'modern knowledge,' or by no creeds at all...
...So far there has been devised only one means for insuring labor that sort of protection...
...He averred that he had started the brand-new "humanism" movement because of "a sense of dissatisfaction with existing religions, growing out of conscientious scruples at trying to twist texts and creeds to fit modern needs...
...We cannot build an efllcient labor force on extremely long hours...
...He is casually interested in books and in outdoor recreations...
...The statement that the workers in the mills are better off now than they were on their mountain farms will not bear examination...
...And what is this "humanism...
...He might have added that there is no possibility of developing a civilization where large numbers of men are required to work sixty or seventy hours every week in order to make a scanty living...
...And they had more livable surroundings...
...Potter was launching a "new religion," and finding that the hall in New York which he had secured for the occasion was too small to accommodate the crowd of curious, inquiring or merely trusting souls who had gathered for the occasion...
Vol. 10 • October 1929 • No. 24
