BACK FROM AMERICA

Hokitika Guardian, 16 January 1920, Page 1

BACK FROM AMERICA

MONEY—MOTOR—MOVIE MANIA

(By Frederic William Wile, the Able American Writer, and for many years the famous “Daily Mail” Correspondent in Berlin.)

There are 20,000 more millionaires in the United States than before the war. About one-half of all the diamonds in the world, estimated to be worth £200,000,000, are owned in the same country. Importations of pearls jumped from £400,000 in 1912 to over £2,000,000 in 1917. Considerably more than 50 per cent of the world’s gold—some estimates place the amount as high as 75 per cent—is held in American vaults. In the State of Pennsylvania there is a motor-car to every twenty inhabitants. Now Y r ork City contains 6,000,000 population and 100,000 private cars. The United States to-day is struggling with the adversities of the most fabulous prosperity in the history of nations.

Money-mad is the only accurate description of America to-day, unless it be alliteratively supplemented and termed motor-mad and “movio”-mad besides. The Republic recks with wealth. It contains only two classes of inhabitants—the rich and the less rich. There is not a man, woman, or child who needs to be poor, for there is absurdly well-paid work for all. Labour of all kinds earns the fattest wages oh record. A charwoman in New York or Chicago gets 14s 6d a day. Housewives in the cities often advertise in vain for general servants, to whom they are eager to give £l4 to £l6 a month. To cajole prospective “help” to reply, advertisements plaintively seek “ladies willing to assist in housework.” Conditions in smaller towns are even worse, for servants succumb to the lure of the cities, with their bigger wages and brighter “movies.” ' THE NEW POOR GROWING.

It must not be assumed that everybody in the United States is in Easy Street. There is ah immense and growing New Poor class, just as there is in England. Incomes of £I,OOO mean at least 50 per cent less than they did five years ago. Food, clothes, rent, pleasures, everything, cost from 25 per cent to double .what they used to. Blit the amazing fact of four years, was the omnipresent wherewithal to meet the new price of existence. The situation in the United States seems to be that if you lihye anything to sell—literally any-thing-—you can dispose of it at your own price, and no questions asked. There is an orgy of buying and spending that infects all classes asd affects all commodities. Merchants and manufacturers no longer “cater” to customers. Would-be buyers now come to them, humbly asking to have orders filled. 11l many branches of trade it lias ceased to be necessary to send out travellers. “Drummers” (comrifercial travellers) still on the road are patrolling familiar routes merely to keep them intact for the day when abnormal conditions will vanish and sane times come again.

“Mad, mad, mad!” exclaimed Air Frank A. Vanderlip, the famous New York financier and economist, when I asked him in his offices on the 37th (or 47th, I forget which) floor of the Equitable Building to diagnose life in the United States to-day. “Last night,” he explained, “I happened to be walking in Broadway through the aftertheatre crowds which surge through the Great White Way between 33rd and 59th Streets. Having packed the pic-ture-palaces and the' playhouses earlier ill the evening, they were now looking for cafes and restaurants and cabarets and dance-halls where they might spend still more money. “The spectacle was America in composite at this hour—a concentrated, irresistible determination to burn up as much money as possible as quickly as possible and is as many different ways as possible.”

Mr Vanderlip spoke feelingly, for his war work consisted of a campaign to inculcate thrift in the American people. It was a hard job. CONTRAST WITH LONDON.

I asked a fellow-Ameriean who crossed with me in the Mauritania what strikes him as the otstanding'difference between London and New York. He said: “London looks down at the heel.” lie thinks that people in the streets and tube-trains are shabby. He finds the shops, with the exception of a few lux-

urious establislnnnts in Bond-street, sordid and tawdry. The omnibuses and taxicabs impress him as being thirdrate, the buildings neglected, almost everything unkempt—all of’ this, as compared' with glittering, gorgeous, flamboyant New York. On" the' United States, too, the war had had effects, but of what a vastly different kind! Barring our army of heroic dead, 70,000 odd, and our host of wounded and maimed, another 250,000, the sole effect of the war on America was to make her embarrassingly rich. Now that khaki and navy blue aro disappearing from the streets, it is almost impossible to detect any visible signs that, as far as the U.S.A. is concerned, there ever was a war. New York screams wealth at you, whichever way you turn. Fifth-avenue, with its endless stream of luxurious motor-cars, and ravishing; shops, and queenly dressed women' and girls-, shouts at you day

and night that never since Time began was there so much money in one place in all the world. Pi'ices in hotels and restaurants arc grotesquely high, yet paid in a spirit of humility and gay resignation that bn Hies understanding. T have remarked before that New York is not America, hut it is America on a large scale so far as riches, prosperity, and extravagance are concerned. In Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, St Louis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, oven in “provincial” Washington* conditions arc relatively the same. They aro the same in the still smaller places, where there is

a successful effort to emulate tlie money-spending liabits of New York. In these communities, too, everything is expensive; everybody has a car, and the war-worn prosperity of the nation is in evidence in some direction or other.

TIIEi DAY OF BECKONING. Well may thinkers like Mr Vanderlip wonder where it is all going to end. Few Americans think the bubble will not burst. Those who have not been bereft of their reason by the nation’s inordinate and incomparable “boom” are conscious that a day of reckoning is coming. Wise ones are busily and systematically ordering their affairs so as to be fortified when it arrives. Not all the money in America is being spent and wasted on ephemeral baubles. In many communities—East, West, and South—there is a new civic spirit born of the country’s superabundant wellbeing. Municipalities are prevaring to construct “cities beautiful.” There is plenty of money now for the carrying out of- cherished projects for the public welfare.

1 Road-building is in progress that will eventually make America the motorists’ Paradise. States like New York and Pennsylvania think nothing of floating £20,000,000 bond issues for the construction, of motor-car highways. Soul-sickening as the atmosphere of America is to-day to Americans who have lived out of it for sonie time, one’s faitli is firm that matters will right themselves long before disaster threatens. Capital and Labour will emerge from the debauch of prosperity in which botli are now wallowing. An America is in the making that will recognise its obligation to invest its Europe-derived wealth in Europe. AVhcn the call comes, comes concretely and comes urgently, America will not be found wanting by the impoverished Old AVorld, on whoso misfortunes she has waxed fat.