The Indianapolis times. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1922-1965, 1935-12-10
THE SEAMLESS WEB"

IN addressing the farm federation in Chicago yes
- terday President Roosevelt stressed point that
is too often ignored in arguments about AAA-how
the program affects city jewellers.
Developing his seamless web" theme of economic
interdependence of agriculture and industry, the
President explained in simple language how the
vastly increased farm income has pumped new pur-
chasing power into the city.
Farm equipment employment has jumped from
q per cent of the average in October 1892 to 116
per cent in October 1885
Employment in the motor car industry which
has found some of its best markets on farms and in
small towns has increased from 40 per cent to 105
per cent.
And from the increasing pay rolls in farm
equipment and automobile industries there comes
stimulation in other lines
only a few days ago. noted an item in the
papers" said the President (which thought very
significant. 1t told of increased activities in the
textile mills. One reason, said the newspaper &C
count, the demand for textiles in the manufac-
ture of automobiles. There you have the complete
chain. The cotton growing South with more money
to spend, buys automobiles. The automobile
makers buy more cotton goods from manufacturers
in the Northeast and these manufacturers in turn
go into the market for more cotton Goods
ing again. and goods are moving so is money
moving once more, and as it flows millions of farm
and city families getting bigger share of the
national income"
VT should be we'll worth while, here, to Se-
l. examine the national economic fabric woven in
the "twenties" and to what flaws in the warp
and wool of that decade be traced the rawlings
of the depression And we may ask whether there
would have been so many shreds of human misery
had those who guided the loom followed the pattern
of the seamless Web
The decade that followed the World War was a
decade of so-called prosperity which, in fact, while
it lasted city prosperity but in which the farms
OF the nation did not share. The Administrations
of Harding, Coolidge and Hoover were confronted
constantly with the farm problem
Those Administrations recognized it's existence,
wrestled with it, admitted its disastrous effects in
the rural regions but did nothing successfully to
check it. Forty millions of our total popuation-one.
third-sufTered While giddy times were going
where the bright lights shone.
Finally and suddenly the urban prosperity blew
up.
1t might have been another story had those 40
million farm jewellers enjoyed an adequate purchas-
ing power during those years.
The result Mr.. Roosevelt described wildly in his
picture of conditions in 1882 and 1888:
Your sufferings-those sufferings of rural Amer
lea were not because you not producing-for
your granarieS and storehouses were bursting with
the products of your labor-but because things in
city and country had both got out of balance and
purchasing power had declined to the point where
people in the cities did not have the money to buy
farm produce and people on the farms did not have
the money to buy city products"
HAD the seamless web" pattern of our national
existence been in the ''twentes" We might
have achieved good times that real and last
ing. But it wasn't and We didn't.
Now that the validity of the seamless web" is
proclaimed in high places and our economic policies
are being so directed that farmers as we'll as city
folk sharing in recovery, why can not we rea-
sonably hope for much greater and much sounder
prosperity?