The Sun 42 WVNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND MONDAY, AUGUST 11, 1930 “UP AGAINST IT”

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1047, 11 August 1930, Page 8

The Sun 42 WVNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND MONDAY, AUGUST 11, 1930 “UP AGAINST IT”

THIRTY-ONE THOUSAND killed; one million hurt. That was the motor-ear toll in the United States last year alone". There were also twelve thousand persons slain by criminals. In addition the increased mortality from self-destruction largely attributable to the colossal stock-market collapse brought the suicide rate for the past decade up to one hundred thousand lives These terrible results in times more or less normal are serious enough even for a great nation with a quick growth of population and a quicker rush for unexampled prosperity, but such happenings may not remain the worst events in America’s experience. Today, the resourceful Republic is within the shadow of an economic calamity. Twelve of its forty-eight States are blistering in a drought without a parallel in a country whose history is a serial story of records and record-breaking. On this occasion Nature controls the score. Tt will be necessary, no doubt, to make some allowance for the American habit of exaggeration. Conditions may not be quite so bad as seen by observers with one eye on sensational headlines in excited, journalism. Still, it appears certain that nearly one-third of the most productive territory in the United States suffers from extreme aridity. Jts plight almost equals Sherman’s description of war. Six weeks’ drought with abnormally high atmospheric temperature day and night already has wrought widespread material havoc. Unless the heavens which have been as brass throughout America’s midsummer answer with a bountiful deluge the prayers of the more righteous*people in the United States, there soon may be a lamentable devastation, followed by pestilential epidemics. And so queer and callously selfish is one type of human mind that even in the face of disaster the Department of Agriculture has been compelled to issue a warning against jubilation over the price of grain. It seems rather a pity that neither the motor-car nor the gangster criminal with a sawed-off shotgun concentrates on slaying profiteers. One outstanding lesson of America’s disastrous experience is the reported paradoxical truth that the cities are probably the greatest sufferers. Their inhabitants are menaced by a shortage of milk supply and drinking water, and a lack of fresh fruit and vegetables. They are unable to help themselves for the simple reason that a great expansion of city life in the United States during the past decade has promoted almost a complete dependence bv tow'ii-dwellers on rural workers on farm and orchard.

Within recent years many people in the United States have been as keen to achieve “the biggest cities record” as other Americans have been to win world championships in sport. And there has been something like an orgy of boasting about big-citv growth. Ten years ago there were twelve cities in the United States with more than a half-million population. Today, the total is the unlucky number thirteen, with Washington only 15,000 permanent residents short of qualifying as the fourteenth. Now, however, five of the thirteen biggest cities have populations exceeding a million, these being New York with 6,601,292 inhabitants, representing almost a million increase in a decade, but still a full million short of Greater London’s mass; Chicago (3,373,573), Philadelphia (1,963,000), Detroit (1,564,397) and Los Angeles (1,231,730), which has more than doubled its population within ten years of uninterrupted prosperity. The smallest increase has been that of Philadelphia, which gained only 9 per cent, in the period, this slow growth (be it poted in Auckland) being ascribed to the pioneering fault in laying out narrow streets and small parks plan, and the failure of modern administrators to make adequate provision for the accommodation of a growing population demanding first-class transport and the amenities of open suburban life.

Many of America’s thirteen big cities today are paying the penalty for their size in a time of drought and threatened famine. Exploitation in foodstuffs is rife, and inferior foods are being freely dispensed. Probably President Hoover, who seems fated to continue as the world’s greatest relief organiser, will exercise his powers and sense of fairness and come down heavily on rogues and knaves. If there should be useful lessons for this country in the disastrous experience of the United States, surely such instruction is to be found in the supreme aids to prosperity—a moist climate, and a wide distribution of population in many small towns throughout the Dominion. Imagine the effect of six weeks’ drought on Province and be grateful for alternate sunshine and plumping rain !