The potters herald. [volume] (East Liverpool, Ohio) 1899-1982, 1945-01-11

If, in your favorite movie house,
you have seen recently some excellent
shots of three big iron contraptlons
moving through cotton fields, accur-
ately gathering in the cotton with
mechanical fingers, then you have
seen the start of a revolution.
The economy of the South, basically
little changed in all the years, is get
ting itself a new foundation upon
which to rest.
Couple this with IVA and freight
rate revision, and something tremen-
dous looms just over the hills.
Pretty much the whole weight OF
Southern economy has rested upon
the backs of low-paid black and white
labor. Mostly black.
Cotton surely has rested there.
A half dozen years ago there were
stories of the Forthcoming mechanical
picker. Now it comes into the realm
of fact = workable, practical, actual
fact.
lH6 war Has Cdhcll CIlCcP idOOA3
black or white, out of the picture.
What with the men who have gone
into the armed forces and those that
have been moved North, vacuum
has been created, only partly filled by
an import of Caribbean, Mexican and
war prisoner labor.
Agriculture and horticulture, based
on a low wage, has been having one
devil of time.
The pre-war wage rate has been
destroyed, probably for keeps. But
now comes the mechanical picker to
the great cotton fields which pour
their fibers into the textile industry.
The day is coming when the hordes
of cheap workers who labored in the
cotton areas no longer will find a
place there.
An agricultural dustry goes
mechaniZed.
What happened when power came
into factories is going to happen, IN
much the same way, just as rapidly
as power moves into the fields. Power
for preparation of soil we have had;
but power in harvesting is new and
much more devastating to the old
economy!
The battle for revision of freight
rates has been a long one. The North
has fought valiantly to keep the
South in transportation bondage. A
manufactured article that could be
shipped South at a competitive rate,
could not be shipped North at a COM
petitive rate. That strangled Southern
industry.
The change seems just ahead. That
will release the South for factory
competition with the North, in the
South and in the North.
When you load the cotton fields
onto a machine and when you make
freight rates that work alike both
ways, then, ladies and gentlemen, you
have really wrought a revolution.
The North must know that the
basic economy of the South cannot be
changed wi h o u t reverberations
throughout the North.
So, impending change bids fair to
spread it's wings over North and
South alike.
Perhaps something of this coming
economic change is fastening the
South in a studied reconsideration of
it's attitude toward the black man.
Such developments as these would
be important at any time. But COM
ing in the wake of war that has
given us, almost over night, the in
dustrial progress of normal decade
as it has done-no man is wise
enough to forsee what the South will
be like say five years after the war
has been ended.
But bondage to the soil, as the
South has known it, stands today on
the way to oblivion.
1t takes a little thinking to en-
vision the results of putting a power
machine at job that has through all
previous time done by rows upon
rows of bent backs at bare subsistence
wages, with only debt too often the
reward for a whole year of toll.
But the South is doing lot of that
thinking and it will, of course, do
more.
1t is thinking, too, about where the
displaced low wage workers will go,
what they will do, at what wage
and how they will THINK about the
now world into which they have been
thrown. And THAT problem is not
sectional! !-CMW.