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Show THE SALT LAKE TIMES FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13, 1957 Page Three Neglected Railroads Totter Into Republican Depression . The Union won the Civil War principally because their troops and track crews could lay rails faster than Southern cavalry could tear them up, thus keeping the Union forces supplied with a better flow of arms and equip-ment than the Confederates could muster and distribute. The railroads provided depend-able transportation necessary for the opening and settling of the West, and the expansion of our nation to the shores of the blue Pacific. After World War I, there be-gan a steady decline of rural population, upon which railroads depend for their peacetime busi-ness, and many of the roads went bankrupt in the mid-depressi- on years of Herbert Hoover. President Franklin D. Roose-velt began a rehabilitation of the nation's railroads. Soon troop trains were shuttling back and forth across the country, taking starving young men from such impoverished areas as the south-ern states and the eastern sea-board's teeming cities of unem-ployed, into the wide open spaces of the west, where they did a heroic work in conservation, as CCC boys. This gradually eased into a plan for the preparation for the second World War, which was becoming seemingly inevitable, and the railroads began a come-back in earnest that put them into position to do an almost un-believable job of national trans-portation throughout the war years. They continued on through the Korean conflict. But now that we are on an allegedly peacetime basis, a Republican peace, that is, once again the railroads, like the non-ferro- us metal mining industry, have been forced to shift for themselves. Not only that, Republican poli-cies in agriculture have forced a steady diminishing of rural homes and small farms, dotted all along the nation's railroads, from which the roads have in the past derived so much of their traffic and revenue. Still another time, a Republi-can national administration has fumbled the ball, has turned victory into defeat and humili-trie- d and tested old friends as ation, and has let down such the American railroads. n Another great segment of American industry, its railroads, have about slipped over the edge of the Republican economic prec-ipice that already has swallowed up agriculture, agricultural ma-chinery, the non-ferro- us metal mining industry of all western states, and the huge timber en-terprises of the Pacific north-western states. The railroads are struggling valiantly with every means they have at their disposal, but they are fighting a losing battle. Some of the big eastern lines have gone a long way toward merging, in an effort to reduce operating ex-penses and overhead. Most of them have installed the most efficient rolling stock and other machinery possible in a further effort toward efficiency and modernization. But they are still slipping, and have reached the point where they must inevitably fail with-out governmental subsidy, or without definite national eco-nomic planning that will assure them of sufficient traffic to main-tain themselves in a healty con-dition. This is not a new thing. avice, already, in this cen-- j , Republican national ad-- 1 ministrations have allowed the nation's railroads to fall to pieces as their reward for faithful serv-ice performed, also twice, on a, gigantic scale, in the defense of this country. Believe me, it is very much to the advantage of the American people to replace our railroads in a healthy condition and keep them there. Without our marvelous Amer-ican railroad system, we could . easily have lost either or both of the two World Wars in which we were victorious. So heavily did our military establishment lean upon rail-roads for transportation that this factor even entered into our ,Tracks construction. At one Rfie, it was estimated that our barracks needs could be reduced one-four- th because that propor-tion of the personnel of our armed services were perpetually in motion, aboard the nation's trains, either going some place or coming from some place! Likewise, the number of grain cars loaded and in transit was considered a large and fairly stable factor in our national capacity to store wheat. Republicans Utterly Fails! To Encourage Utah Towns! as easily be done in Beaver, or, Santaquin, as in Dallas, Texas, :r Camden, New Jersey, and just as profitably. Then why haven't we done such things? Simply because Republican philosophy in our state admin-istration has been to yell about encroachments upon local gov-ernment, without doing anything whatever to provide the local in-dustries that in turn could bring to Utah the wealth that could support those local governments and the state government, as well. In other words, they have been operating with their heads in the sand, neither willing to go all the way backward to such heroic measures as employed by Brig-ha- m Young to develop Utah in-dustries, nor willing to move forward into today's modern in-dustrial age. By Joseph II. Weston For nine years, successive Re-publican administrations in Utah have utterly failed to obtain or encourage the development of the decentralized small indus-tries that could have kept the state's small towns and rural populations in a healthy condi-tion. Instead, they have encouraged a mad speculation and scramble for wealth in a uranium boom and stock-promoti- on schemes. The solid, secure and steady ad-vancement of basic land prod-ucts and their allied processing industries have been completely neglected. Such encouragement of indus-tries that has been done by the Republicans has served only to further concentrate them in the Salt Lake City area, where ap-proximately half of the state's population is now huddled to-gether, an ideal tsrget from an A-bo- attack from without, or strikes or civil disturbances of our own from within. Because of this undue, unneces-sary and unwise concentration of industry and population in Salt Lake county, a prolonged strike there would almost com-pletely paralyze the entire state's economy. Business would virtu-ally come to a standstill through- - burden, where income cannot in- - crease? I'll tell you why. ' It is because Republican state administrations have looked on state government, not as a power ' that could lift its people out of poverty and lethargy and lead it into a profitable association with ; this modern industrial world, but as a necessary evil. It is because the Republicans have utterly failed to go out into the world ' and bring this state the industrial ideas that are needed. It is be- - j : cause they have seen no necessity ' in sending out salesmen to find world markets for products that can be made from raw materials that abound on every Utah farm and every Utah mountainside. j As an example, the wonderful j industrial field of cellulose plas-- 1 tics has passed Utah by. ' There is no reason why the popultion of such a Utah town as Moroni, for instance, could j not have been profitably cm-- ; ployed for the past five or six years in an industry as the press- - j ing of phonograph records from j vinyl plastics. This work is done j in factories that are set up in small segments. A factory could profitably operate with only one or two pressing machines, or one or two hundred of them. i The molding of plates, table-- ware and thousands of other items of modern commerce could out Utah if a strike in any major arm of industry, such as trans-portation, should last as much as a week. If a war should come, and after the Republican national admin-istration has shown its complete failure to keep us ahead of the Russians, that nation could rea-sonably expect to win such a war, and therefore might be will-ing to start it, half the popula-tion of Utah would be roasted in a nuclear blast that would have to last only a few minutes, or even seconds. Excepting for the uranium and construction boomtowns, where prosperity is at best only tem-porary the small towns and rural areas of Utah continue to suffer economic losses. Young people get up and get out, to states where they have better oppor-tunities. Older people, tired of fighting cold winters, and con-vinced of the fruitlessness of holding onto farms or small businesses that have no future, leave for states that have warm-er climate and a more humanistic attitude toward pensions and so-cial security benefits for those who have reached retirement age. In the meantime, more and more of the raw products of Utah farms are being shipped out of the state to be processed, and the portions of this state that happen to lie outside Salt Lake county are becoming mere rural colo-nies, unimportant appendages of the industrial centers of the west coast. Shades of Brigham Young! Whatever has become of the Utah spirit of .industrial enter-prise? Why cannot modern industry be fitted into Utah small towns? Why must the county govern-ments of most of the so-call- ed "cow counties" of Utah dry up from lack of capitol which they can tax? 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