OCR Text |
Show (BERLIN, WIS., IS PROSPERING; BUT WANTS 'BUNGLING' STOPPEB Coddling of Labor Unions Is Unpopular; Small Business Man Seen as Hope of America's Future. By BARROW LYONS (EDITOR'S ROTE This is one of a series of articles written for this paper by Barrow Lyons, staff correspondent of Western Newspaper News-paper Union. He has just completed an extended trip through the nation and in these reports gives his first-hand impressions of what 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.) BERLIN, WIS. Farmers today are pulling big figure bills out of their pockets to buy the wares of Berlin, Wisconsin, merchants. Never before has such big money been handled in ordinary trade here. During World War I people used $20 j bills but now they use $50 bills. The other day a farmer : brought a check from a grain company for $500 into a Berlin bank and asked for ten $50 bills. Berlin never knew greater pros-1 iperity. Its traditional fur business Us not doing quite as well as usual (because pelts are scarce, but it has j a war plant which employs about 1 600 persons; its leather goods manufacturing manu-facturing is booming with war orders or-ders and the farmers who own some jnf the best dairy farms in Wisconsin Wiscon-sin are prosperous. Altogether this town of about 4,300 persons is thriving thriv-ing extremely well. Berlin, however, is not prospering jiuite as exuberantly as Paxton (111.), because dairying is not as profitable today as raising corn. Cattle have to be fed; and virtually every kind of feed is scarce. "Bootleg" corn corn being sold above OPA ceilings is being bought in and around Berlin Ber-lin at $1.42 a bushel, even as high as $1.65, compared with a legal ceiling ceil-ing of $1.05. Oats are bringing as much as 96 cents a bushel. With this background of prosperity the most prosperous people of Berlin Ber-lin are thoroughly dissatisfied with Washington. Many are convinced that President Roosevelt, or at least "Mrs. Roosevelt and the men who surround the President," are quite deliberately attempting to convert Ihe United States into a socialistic state, and are going about it with diabolical cleverness. They have , ' 'I it V V N 1 P ". v. j Dairy farms in Berlin, Wis., vicinity vicin-ity are doing all right. seen several unfortunate demonstrations demonstra-tions of bureaucratic bungling in their own town, and they feel that Republican farmers of the North are being discriminated against in favor of Democratic farmers in the South. Coddling of Labor Unions Is Unpopular But above all, they feel that strong labor unions have been so "coddled" by the Roosevelt administration admin-istration that they have acquired power out of proportion to their economic eco-nomic importance, and are responsible respon-sible for many of the farmer's ills. Naturally, these generalizations are not universal, but they appear to be generally enough held to be representative. repre-sentative. There is little labor organization in the small industries of Berlin. In a vote taken among the employees of the Berlin-Chapman company, the local war factory, under the auspices of the National War Labor board, neither AFL nor CIO gained standing. stand-ing. People of Berlin still remember remem-ber the granite quarry that closed years ago when employees struck to obtain higher wages for helpers. Workers were forced to accept lower wages in other quarries operated by the same company in nearby towns; and the Berlin quarry never reopened. re-opened. One of the most vocal anti-New Dealers in the town is William H. Patey, editor and publisher of the Berlin Journal, a weekly newspaper. He believes the New Dealers in Washington are today's backward lookers. "Those reactionaries," he declares, de-clares, "now say the people no longer long-er have the mentality to run their own business it must be done from Washington give the farmers a dole, Sberlinv j "S miuwaukeeV lOWA A I III. j ind 1 a subsidy, some form of charity. Those men will be supplanted by a brand of new progressives who have a real faith in the people of America Amer-ica and the calamity howlers will be swept out like autumn leaves." Mr. Patey uses the word bureau-1 cracy a good deal. By that he means the overmultiplication of government govern-ment bureaus by administrators determined de-termined to entrench themselves in public office and increase their political po-litical power. He sees evidence of this on all sides, but the demonstration demonstra-tion given by the National Youth administration in Berlin has made one of the deepest impressions upon him. Big Business Can't Smash Little Fellow As for the place of small business after the war, Frank D. Chapman, owner and president of the Berlin-Chapman Berlin-Chapman company, believes big business can never crush the small fellow. "Matter of fact, a man with real business ability can make more money running a small business himself than he can as president of a great corporation," said Mr. Chapman. Chap-man. "Most of the smartest men I know in business are doing just that." So is Mr. Chapman. Before the war he made machinery for canning factories, having many patented devices de-vices to his credit. Now he is turning turn-ing out machinery for the production of synthetic rubber, high octane gasoline gas-oline and chemicals used in warfare. war-fare. In addition, he is making compressors, com-pressors, which until recently were among the most critically needed of the critical components of war production. pro-duction. But he entertains no warmth for the administration, although al-though in 1932 and 1936 he ran on the Democratic ticket. The local Democrats, who put most of their candidates into office then, could not accept him as a thoroughgoing member mem-ber of their party. "The administration is making a sloppy job of the war," he asserted. "The first New Deal taught people to be bums, and now they're trying to teach them to go to work, but they learned the first lesson too well. Labor leaders came out here and told people to seize the factories. 'Maw' Perkins said she didn't see anything against sitting down. It'll take another generation of Americanism Amer-icanism to get the workers back to working the way they did ten years ago. "The New Deal has seen fit to place its war contracts where it got its votes. It still places them in centers of the United States which are short of housing facilities, labor and manufacturing facilities. The) have closed up shops in Milwaukee. Utah, and one factory in Kansas City; but they are still operating in the East. In my plant, we are not working more than 50 per cenl of maximum capacity, but we have a surplus of manpower and plenty of housing facilities. "The best brains don't go into the big companies, or they get out ol them when they do get in. Small business will survive, despite the growing power of the big boys, as long as it keeps the best brains." |