TIMELY TOPICS
THOMAS, NORMAN
By Norman Thomas TIMELY TOPICS Battle Creek, Michigan. It Isn't Socialist Legislation IT will be a mistake if Socialists regard recent legislation on the Stock Exchange or...
...Brown special solid platinum and enamel Blue Eagles...
...My own suggestions for the immediate situation, which in no sense amount to a cure of an intolerable condition, would be as follows: 1. The contracts should be far more strictly drawn for the protection of the share-cropper...
...In a disintegrating capitalism this may mean chiefly that the government will hold the bag...
...It is, however, immensely pertinent to point out that the best you hope by your program is to restore the system of share-cropping to a little better basis...
...4. It should be the policy of your Administration to encourage and not discourage, or permit local authorities to discourage, the fundamental right of organization...
...4. While the share-cropper who stays on the land in his old status may be as well off or a shadi better off than before there was a reduction is acreage, there is a virtually inevitable tendency, at shown in these reports, to drive a great many sharecroppers off the land or to reduce them to the statue of agricultural labor without even such miserable protection as the share-croppers had in the matter of receiving rations...
...j We will excuse Mr...
...Pratt and Mr...
...The principal use of the bills from our point of view would be their possible effect in providing funds for genuine housing corporations set up by cities or states...
...The 34,906 employees in 1982 received on an average $1,716 per year...
...1 go farther and say that I cannot imagine any farreaching cure of them under the capitalist system and our old concepts of landlordism...
...The result of this study is now in your hands...
...They are virtual slaves to the landlord and to his Commissary, and the terrible rate of interest they pay on so-called advances is one of the chains which binds them...
...No wonder, pellagra and illiteracy abound...
...I am sure you will agree with me that it is a social tragedy of the first magnitude, a tragedy that must be repaired, that jve should be reducing a cotton crop when the men who raise it lack a decent supply, of cotton for their families...
...Back in 1928, I made the reasonable suggestion that if I were President I would at least make the findings of the Federal Bureau of Standards available to ordinary consumers for their protection in buying products, but I was told this would detstroy business...
...Pratt and Mr...
...Not as important as surpluses and amortization funds, but still, one must be human, must one not...
...A good many of these plans forget the old-fashioned recipe for cooking a hare: first catch the hare...
...The 4,783 added employees received $1,099,354, OR AN AVERAGE WAGE OF $229 A YEAR...
...Bad as the share-cropper1...
...Of course, the illustration of cooking the hare is inadequate because movements are not dead things for us to cook, but live things for Socialists to try to educate and lead...
...If we go in for this sort of a platform we shall not want to adopt resolutions which by their language or emphasis will defeat the effect of the platform...
...a bill for unemployment insurance...
...Certainly there is nothing in the Bankhead bill of itself to change the situation, and I respectfully inquire what you expect to do to change it under the regulations you are empowered to set up...
...J. A. Brown, Chairman of the Management Committee, display a pardonable prkle, an almost smug satisfaction in rendering their Annual Report for 1933 to their stockholders for their meeting on May 31st...
...food is, and well designed as it is to breed pellagra, at least he did get something to eat at the Commissary...
...Witness the outcry against the Stock Exchange and Securities bills...
...Employee relations embrace employment, education and training, accident prevention, medical service, employee representation, annuities and insurance, job analysis and salary standards...
...Secretary: Following the charges that I made in public speeches Inst winter concerning certain effects of the Agricultural Adjustment Act upon the sharecroppers of the South, you asked Dr...
...Meanwhile, 1 encouraged a local committee in Memphis, Tennessee, and Tyronza, Arkansas, headed by Dr...
...It Isn't Socialist Legislation IT will be a mistake if Socialists regard recent legislation on the Stock Exchange or suggested legislation on housing as in any way Socialistic...
...Pratt and Mr...
...Pratt and Mr...
...Brown will receive well-merited resolutions of thanks As an afterthought, apparently, there is a brief section on the last page of the text dealing with Employees...
...Recovery Gomes at Last to the Socony-Vacuum Stockholders JLIk HERBERT L. PRATT, Chairman of the Hoard of the Socony-Vacuum Company, and Mr...
...Sinrerely yours, NORMAN THOMAS...
...Poor Fist anel Cannibals ALL bills for the protection of legitimate mvestors under capitalism are necessarily bills to protect the poor fish from their cannibal relations or to impose an Emily Post code of etiquette on the way the big bad wolf eats tjie little pigs...
...in my own recommendations...
...Cooperation with federal and state governments and with the oil industry in carrying out the national recovery program is estimated to have added over 5,000 men to the payroll since July I, 1933...
...These things are directly our business and make directly for advance toward the cooperative commonwealth...
...a genuin»-Djll to outlaw company unions, which the Wagner bill in its present form is not...
...There is no sound agricultural progress in such a restoration and little hope for the million and a half farm families who now raise most of our cotton under this system...
...3. You yourself on behalf of the share-croppen should establish a method for going into court to enforce their rights as those rights are set forth in the contract...
...I presume sharecroppers already driven off the land ought to be returned to it under some form of subsistence farming...
...Whatever their ethical and practical merits, they are part of an attempt to reform capitalism and prolong its life...
...In general, I endorse the recommendations in th* Amberson report which I have not already include...
...My experience convinces me that he has the proper approach and that his practical proposals are substantially sound, although the Convention may wisely modify and improve them after proper discussion...
...I grant that you and the AAA by no means created this situation...
...the increase in employees was not "over 5,000" but 4,783, or 13 per cent...
...It seems to me that both reports confirm the charges I made...
...On the basis of the present program the reports before us emphasize theee facts: 1. The contracts themselves have been too loosely drawn adequately to protect whatever rights the share-croppers are assumed to have in an equable sharing of the benefits, or alleged benefits, of i reduction in acreage...
...Domestic payrolls for 1933 totaled $60,984,758 compared with $59,885,404 in 1932...
...Calvin B. Hoover to make an independent study...
...the Sinclair-Frazier bill for Government agricultural marketing corporations, and bills for a really adequate program of unemployment relief and public works...
...Thus does capitalism condemn itself out of its own mputh...
...Wallace WORKERS everywhere know something of the ™ plight of share-croppers of the South...
...Recovery, what...
...He tries to present in concrete and vivid form what Socialists propose to do in rapid steps in order to give everybody abundance...
...I do not think much can be done until these share-croppers are encouraged to act like fre» men and citizens...
...lit own report that consolidated gross income of their corporalion for the calendar year increased $0,101,427 over 1932...
...This, of course, nets Mr...
...Bills We Should Favor THE sort of laws Socialists should fight for in the present Congress are a genuine Federal AntiLynching law...
...Brown for a slight error in arithmetic...
...The share-croppers in no true sense »re free men...
...2. Representatives of the share-croppers should be put on the enforcement authorities, and in this connection the Negro should be treated on an equal basis with the white share-cropper...
...There are Ave printed pages of teat explaining the steady and gratifying progress of the SoconyVacuum Company, and unless justice and gratitude are quite dead, Mr...
...I have sent the following letter to Secretary of Agriculture Wallace: My dear Mr...
...For instance, the housing bills do not set up housing corporations publicly owned, but merely provide government financing of housing and real estate mortgages...
...Net profits, however, were $22,646,402, as compared with a mere $5,320,282 in 1932 and a deficit of $4,169,248 the previous year...
...The whole country ought to be aroused to the social significance of a situation where an average annual income not for a man but his whole family is nearer $250 than $300...
...The 39,688 employees—including the increased number about whom the directors take such pride —received an average of $1,538 a year, or an average decrease of $176 a year...
...William R. Amberson, Professor of Physiology at the University of Tennessee, to make a local case study...
...Some of them are not likely to help us get an immense movement...
...They would be far more appropriate if we already were leading an immense movement...
...It is this approach to the problem which makes Paul Porter's draft of a Congressional Platform, published in the forthcoming World Tomorrow, so valuable and so suggestive...
...I have now received from him a copy of his report...
...A Platform for Socialism IT is interesting, and on the whole encouraging, to learn by word of mouth and correspondence how many plans- and resolutions for Socialist activity our comrades have proposed...
...I am not sanguine, however, about subsistence farming as any kind of a solution of our problem...
...The company had a surplus at the beginning of the year of $11,732,202.93, which has grown to $67,688,908.03 at the close of the year of blessed recovery...
...3. There is an obvious tendency for landlords further to embitter race relations and to weaken the share-croppers by dividing them through the way in which they reduce acreage and employ tenants...
...What is significant is the way capitalist business howls against every attempt to make it honest even by its own standards...
...My first and grave complaint is that the entire method of land tenure and operation is wrong, that some of the worst examples of landlordism in the world are to be found in the cotton country, and that it is idle to talk about prosperity for cotton farmers as long as these conditions of virtual peonage continue...
...2. The enforcement of these contracts is in tht hands of local authorities recruited from the landlord class or those sympathetic with it...
...This is not true of agricultural Iaboren whose wages run around 50 to 76 cents a day when they work...
...Witness the way the Tugwell Pure Food, Drug and Cosmetics bill has.been mangled at the insistence of advertisers and newspapers...
...It has been a good year, a satisfactory year...
...The number of employees in the United States alone at December 31, 1933, was 39,688 compared with .'14,905 at the end of 1932...
...A Letter to Mr...
...The Board of Directors wishes to express appreciation and thanks to employees for their fine spirit of loyalty, courage and efficiency during these difficult times...
...If conscientious landlords also sometimes suffer, that is so much the, worse an indictment of their system...
Vol. 17 • May 1934 • No. 62
