Radio Script #39
Little Talks On Common Thimgs
October 23, 1949
Little troubles — troubles about common things, not world problems -are worrying most of the people of the world. Devaluation of the currency, balancing of exports and imports, management of foreign loans and gifts, are questions over the heads of the vast majority of the world’s population.
A survey made by one of our American economic organizations shows that people in foreign lands are talking and worrying about just the same sort of things that we ourselves talk and worry about: homes and jobs, family budgets, the high prices. In London, if people talk at all about devaluation of the pound, it is only in terms of its effect on prices — prices of the necessities they must have to keep alive. If the British worker ever mentions American aid, his ideas about it are very fuzzy, for he usually thinks of it as a loan that must some day be repaid with interest, whereas three-fourths of it is outright gift. But anyway the whole business is too complicated for the average Englishman. He is sufficiently occupied with his personal anxieties.
How can he make both ends meet on an average industrial wage equivalent to $28 a week? Even before the devaluation of the pound, food prices had risen since last April so as to increase a week’s food cost as much as a dollar for a family of four. As winter approaches, there is increasing worry about housing and fuel.
Frenchmen this autumn are moody and short-tempered. As they see the throng of tourists depart, what the French people worry about is not the latest world crisis, but the sudden renewed rise of food prices and the wretched weather. The most serious drought since 1921 has crippled electric power, reduced the crops, and brought back the hated black market. In Western Germany, in spite of the news reports about political interest and party strife, the average citizen has just one concern: how to get cash for the immediate wants of life. Strangely enough, this is a new problem for Germans in the American and British zones. Only a year ago they had plenty of cash, but nothing to buy. Now the shops are full of food and clothing, but the prices are out of the average earner’s reach. The people seem not all that grateful for American aid. We aren’t doing it to help them, they say, but just to ward off Communism. And anyway, they insist, what difference does it make, if they can’t get the work to earn the money to buy shoes and bread?
In Italy the people are so disinterested in politics that the political parties are driven to sponsoring local fairs and sporting events to get a crowd. Politics is nothing compared with the problem of finding a way to make a living in a country where two million are without work and where no one sees any possibility of new jobs even keeping up with the birth rate.
In Japan the idea before the war was that an employed Japanese was sure of a job for life. The Japanese worker now has a new problem — job security and he is much more concerned about it than about American occupation, democratic government, or the status of the Emperor. In South America also people are much too absorbed in making a living to worry about the state of the world.
In Buenos Aires one hears little talk about anything except the high prices and the shortage of apartments. In short, go the world around and you will probably find that everywhere self-preservation is the first law of nature. The basic, animal needs come first for people everywhere.
Great changes in history do not come about by great mass movements of humanity. They occur because a few people — few, but tremendously important take the long, not the short, view, are concerned not merely with bread and butter, but with what Whitehead called “the adventure of ideas”. It is not merely a spiritual leader, but a very wise man, who said: “Man does not live by bread alone.”
That long serial poem signed Sagittarius, printed in a Maine newspaper in the 1890’s was not the only attempt to put the Wiscasset and Albion narrow gauge railroad into verse. From another old scrapbook in the possession of Mr. Charles Crosby comes a poem, not about controversy over the road’s western terminus, but a kind of idyllic ode, singing the praises of the little, two-foot line. Let me read you just a part of it:
“On steamer wharf, by the calm, smooth bay,
We jump on board our new railway;
Up Sheepscot Valley away we go,
By rocky ways where the waters flow,
Such varied scenes oft turned the lyre
Of Walter Scott with a poet’s fire.
By ancient church on the distant hill,
Through Alna cut, o’er the smiling rill,
And fair Whitefield, ‘mong daisies wild,
Charming the eye of woman or child.
At Coopers Mills may we tarry long,
For maidens fair inspire our song.
On Windsor soil, by the shady groves,
And cooling founts where the squirrel roves,
Our fiery horse with a smoky tail
Holds back his way on the iron rail;
Where swelling notes of the Crosby band
Roll o’er the track on pigeon Plains,
For next we stop where Homer reigns,
A lonesome spot in the wilds of Maine,
But booming now with flour and grain.
Now China Lake lies glassed below,
As down the grade we coasting go;
Sorrow and care will not hover o’er
That pure, white church on the pebbly shore.
By Lovejoy Pond with its cooling breeze,
Where balm is found mid evergreen trees,
Our puffing steed runs o’er the rail
By Crosby’s house in the pleasant vale.
The waving corn on Albion hills,
The lowing herd by cooling rills,
The leafy trees and the thorny thistle
All hear the sound of the Crosby whistle.”
The economic prophets tell us that one of the sure signs of business depression is a decrease in the marriage rate. They point out that, at the bottom of the big depression in 1932, the number of marriages in the United States failed to reach a million for the first time in twenty years.
Whichever is the cause and whichever is the effect, the relationship between the two phenomena is evident. Fewer marriages mean reduced demand for wedding presents, household furnishings, and other goods and services accompanying the formation of new families. Recent statistics seem to belie the impression one gets by glancing at the society pages of the newspapers. Those pages give us the idea that marriages are now more prevalent than ever. But such is really not the case.
The war boom made 1946 a record high year for American marriage, the number then reaching 2,291,000. In 1948 it had dropped to 1,992,000 and the statistical prediction for 1949 is 1,600,000. Reduced number of marriages means a reduced birth rate, and that is something which lowers the demand for industry’s products for many years to come.
What about the effect on our schools? Educators have rightly pointed out that the rising war-time and immediate post-war birth rate has even now placed a heavy burden on already overcrowded schools. The peak will be reached in 1952 or 1953, when those 1946 babies enter the schools. But after that, in the elementary schools (the grades below high school) the enrollment will steadily decrease until about 1970, when the 1946 babies are likely to increase the marriage rate and produce a new crop of potential school enrollment.
In all the heated talk about socialized medicine it seems to me one important point is being overlooked. That is the time-honored, intimate relation between physician and patient. Even the clustering of doctors in the cities at the expense of the rural districts and even the intense medical specialization of our day, have not erased the cherished relation between the doctor and the person who comes under his care. The family doctor is still the family’s friend, advising on all sorts of non-medical problems. The relationship is one based on confidence and trust in a person, not a system. It is something the proposed assembly-line, impersonal process of socialized medicine can never replace.
When the noted Hindu scholar, Dr. Sarkar, was in Waterville recently, he made a significant statement: “While it is true that European peoples from England to Greece are grateful for American aid, that aid has made them hate Americans. In every European nation today Americans are really hated.”
Dr. Sarkar went on to explain that we Americans exercise noticeable lack of tact and diplomacy in our dealings with foreign peoples. We talk about the Marshall plan as charity and a dole for other nations instead of a means to assure an outlet for American goods. However grateful an object of charity may be, he deeply resents being such an object, and not infrequently he comes actually to hate the giver.
Even in England the common man in the street resents American aid, and the resentment is making him blind to his real troubles. His nation is far from self-sufficient. She must import a third of her food, and all of her oil and cotton. To pay for the imports she must export heavily_ But she cannot do that unless she can produce goods at a cost that will meet the competition of world markets. She is finding that she cannot meet that competition if, to the normal costs of production, she must add an ever-rising cost of “cradle to the grave security”. Foreign buyers will not pay higher prices for English goods than they have to pay for the same goods in other countries, even to make a socialist dream come true in England.
The English common man is seeing the cost of government become outright prohibitive. Taxes in 1949 take over 40 per cent of total income. That the cost of government must be carried by production and must be covered in the selling price of goods is a simple economic reality. How then can British goods possibly meet foreign competition?
Life in the socialist manner simply costs more than England can afford to pay. If the British people want a socialist type of government, that is their business, but they have no right to ask people of a non-socialist country to pay for it.
Do you recall the statement once attributed to Lenin: “The united States will spend itself out of existence~? Well, it is interesting to note that European nations dependent upon us for aid are afraid of just that happening. An American professor, who spent last summer in Europe, writes:
“In every country that I visited informed and thoughtful persons repeatedly said that the worst catastrophe that could happen to the world would be a serious depression in the United States. Those people know that a contributing factor to such a depression would be the renewal of deficit spending by our government. Rather than have that happen, those Europeans would prefer to see aid to their own countries scaled down.
Year: 1949