OCR Text |
Show 'FREEDOM FROM REGULATION' IS WHAT PAXTON, ILL., WANTS Dislike of Government Rulings and Redtape Evidenced by Citizens of Midwest Community, i By BARROW LYONS j (EDITOR'S NOTE This is one of a series o articles ivritten for this paper by Barrow Lyons, staff correspondent of Western News-1 paper Union. He has just completed an extended trip through the' nation and in these reports gives his first-hand impressions of whatl rural America is thinking as we enter the third year of war and the first weeks of a presidential election year. Any opinions expressed ex-pressed are the writer's and not necessarily those of this newspaper.) PAXTON, ILL. Dislike of Washington and aU its works could hardly be found in more concentrated form than in Paxton, Illinois, a town of 3,200 persons in the heart of the corn belt. Only a few citizens will admit there is anything the New Deal has rlnnp that Viae Violno v,; ,,t- But Ford county holds one of the most prosperous rural communities in Midwestern United States. Before Be-fore the war, in January, 1939, the deposits in Paxton's two banks totaled to-taled $1,631,000; but today they sum up to $4,532,000, an increase of 178 per cent in four years. Paxton is one of the most conservative places in conservative Illinois, which Wendell Wen-dell Willkie has called "the blackest spot on my map." Paxton spurns Willkie as "nothing but a New Dealer." Deal-er." Clothing merchants in Paxton are making more money than at any time since the boom days of the '20s. A farmer recently calculating his income tax figured fig-ured he had made a clear profit before taxes of more than $20,-000 $20,-000 in this crop year on a gross Income of $27,000 and he hadn't sold his 1943 corn crop yet. Most of his income was realized on ( last year's corn he had held. So easy is it for shops to sell what merchandise they can get that advertising is at a minimum. Nevertheless, Nev-ertheless, Paxton boasts both a daily and weekly newspaper. The Paxton Daily Record, a four-page paper, sells enough advertising space to break about even; but the Paxton Record, a weekly, makes money in spite of the fact that national automotive auto-motive advertising has virtually disappeared, dis-appeared, and the oil companies buy only about one-tenth of the space they used to take. Publisher Looks Ahead To Postwar Years Herbert N. Stevens, joint owner with his brother, Harold H. Stevens, of the Paxton newspapers and printing print-ing shop, says they are running their plant now with 13 employees instead of the customary 20. But Mr. Stevens is certain that after the war good times for the printer will Large share of farmers' . income around Paxton comes from corn. return, because there will be sales advertising as never seen before. No depression is in sight for the immediate postwar years. Mr. Stevens Ste-vens is sure so he has just ordered a new press to be delivered when peace arrives. He also feels confident confi-dent that the New Deal regime will be a thing of the past then. He explained: "Ford County has had about as much of Washington as it can stand. I wouldn't say Paxton was just Republican. Re-publican. There are some Republicans Repub-licans around here who have voted for Roosevelt, you know. Party designations des-ignations are losing significance. We are just as anti-Willkie as we are anti-Roosevelt. We think he's nothing noth-ing but a New Dealer. "When the boys come back from the .war you're going to find the greatest bunch of rugged individualists individual-ists you ever saw. We talk to every boy who comes back on furlough. They can't understand why the government gov-ernment tolerates this strike and slow-down business." Mr. Stevens can't understand why the government should want 35 million mil-lion dollars to advertise to get peo- CHiCAGOA J (TAXTONj ind. st.ldujs, ILL. MO. Cj 2j TENN. pie back on the farm, while the United States Employment Service is advertising in his newspapers for men on the farm to work in war industries. Nor can he see why the soy bean processingfactory in Gibson Gib-son City, 15 miles away, can't get all the soy beans it can handle, because be-cause the Commodity Credit corporation corpo-ration directs locally grown beans to cotton ginning mills in Tennessee, despite the fact that the soy bean cake left after pressing out the oil is shipped back to Paxton for cattle feed. These are the things that have turned Paxton people against the New Deal. Mr. Stevens expresses ex-presses vocally what many others, feel. Incidentally, it should be noted that there is not a labor union office in Ford county and the farmers are strongly anti-labor. In the last election elec-tion the Republicans scored about five votes to every two Democratic votes, the latter coming mostly from railway workers, a few craftsmen and some tenant farmers. Carl Shelby, Paxton's grain dealer, deal-er, gave the clearest summary to Paxton's viewpoint He is a business busi-ness man, but his trade concerns the farmer's welfare most closely. 'Too Much Requlation' From Washington "The thing that bothers us most is that there is too much regulation. The farm program has a tendency to tell the farmer exactly what he can do and that applies pretty much to the business man too. These regulations were put on when times were hard and prices low, and conditions con-ditions were benefited by regulation. There seems to be no tendency to drop them when times show improvement. im-provement. The men in Washington Washing-ton made their program so that a man was penalized if he didn't go along with it. He was almost forced to follow to be in good standing with his neighbors. "In the grain business we were forced to take whatever the Commodity Com-modity Credit corporation allowed us to handle, do what they ordered us to do and wait until they got good and ready to pay us for that service. When a fellow is used to doing what he likes, and then someone some-one comes along and tells him what he has to do well, that gets under the skin. "What we liked about the old free competition system was that foresight fore-sight and intelligence were worth something. You might lose money in hard times, but you were allowed to make it in good times, and if you didn't waste it you generally came out all right in the long run. Now they don't let us make money when times are good, and they can't give us any assurance that times will always al-ways be good. If they could do that we wouldn't ' mind giving up some freedom. "When you once start trying to control economic conditions you have to slap on more and more controls ,to cover the situations you couldn't foresee, and the thing grows and grows. That's the direction direc-tion the New Deal seems to be headed in now, and most of us around here think it's time to call a halt and go in the other direction for a while." |