An Economic Policy for the South - Page 5

Speech reflecting on challenges facing the American South-5- Justin Miller, says that the way to get satisfactory results in the crime drive is to improve your educational opportunities and your social conditions, so that this vast army of youngsters who are turning to crime will be happily adjusted. Now it is apparent that the South's trouble is poverty, and until we agree on that and resolve to reduce it, ultimately to abolish it, we will be following an inadequate economic policy. Starving children in a flood or famine win sympathy. Dramatic means are resorted to for saving them. Children starve sometimes by degrees. Let's stop that sort of starvation. Remember, the percentage of those who live upon the borderline of poverty may be as high as 80. You and I can find our company in the upper stratum where poverty is not an immediate threat, and the distress of the poor is not always before us. Nevertheless, that condition constitutes a form of insecurity for all of us. Poverty was not always an anomolous thing in society, though it is in ours. Through long ages before man's mastery of his physical surroundings the problem of scarcity was considered beyond his ingenuity. The machine has changed it. To state it accurately, our problem is not poverty, but "poverty in the midst of plenty." There will be no economic salvation for the South unless agriculture prospers and we can think of Southern agriculture strictly in terms of cotton. I am not foolish enough to believe that will always be true. Some pretty wise men are prophecying that the new cotton picking machine may give the Southwest an advantage over Alabama and other Southeastern states, and that your agricultural economy may be modified. If that time comes, that is, if the states west of the river, with superior advantages for use of the cotton picking machine in large scale operations, take the cotton business away from you, it will be found that we are, nevertheless, bound by a common interest. There is more than a commodity involved in the problem of establishing regional and national policies. The real division is not between cotton and non-cotton growing states, nor between agriculture and industry, but in the age-old problem of giving to those who produc