Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Butler Calls on Newspapers to Promote North Carolina, 1914

“North Carolina Sloppy With Opportunities: What Can the Press Do in Developing Them?” by Byon H. Butler, from the Thursday, July 23, 1914, issue of the High Point Review. Butler’s presentation from the N.C. Press Association was printed as an editorial in this issue.

Recently I said one day in the News and Observer that North Carolina is sloppy with opportunity. That expression has been brought back to me to set the pleasant task of pointing out some of those opportunities and telling how the newspaper men may help in the development of them.

Thirty-two years ago this summer I caught my first glimpse of North Carolina. At that time I had seen enough of the industrial development and progress of the United States from Texas, Kansas and Minnesota east to New England to appreciate what development means and to recognize the opportunity for development where it appeared. Fifteen years of my newspaper work was passed as a writer of progress of the big industrial expansion in Pittsburg territory where big things are done. That gave me a further insight into what opportunity is and what it is worth. It is more than 20 yeas ago that I commenced to write in the Pittsburg Times stories of opportunities in North Carolina. In that 20 years I have been showing people what I see here, and in going out to show them I continually fall over more things to show. I did not discover North Carolina all of a sudden. It has been a gradual finding of new possibilities until it is easy to see that no State in the Union today can present so much of opportunity as North Carolina. This is said in all deliberation for unsupported claims are of no use to anybody. It is folly to deceive ourselves. I make this claim after an acquaintance with almost every community of any consequence in the United States.

The chief factors that are putting North Carolina in the front are climate, rainfall, waterpower, transportation, convenience to the markets of the United States and of the world, the permanent supply of raw material for factory use, and a population of intelligence and upright character. I do not include those temporary resources like timber, mineral deposits, etc., which are valuable in themselves, and of great importance, are still temporary and not in the class with those permanent things that are of everlasting worth.

In hunting a place for a permanent home for myself and family I picked North Carolina deliberately from all the rest of the country because it offered a bigger inducement in natural advantages. It has the best climate and the best rainfall. Climate makes a State fit to live in. Rainfall and mild climate makes it an agricultural possibility. Soil is a factor, but fertility can be made. Kansas and California and other States of the West are not so fertile now as when I first knew them. North Carolina is more fertile. Fertility is under the control of man, climate and rainfall are not.

Therefore we must regard North Carolina as one of the foremost agricultural possibilities on earth. The story of the last 15 years bears this out. In the last census period the State more than doubled its farm products. In the last five years, it has almost doubled again. This surprising record if kept another 10 years will put North Carolina among the first three or four States of the Union.

Mill development is fully as rapid. Fourteen years ago the State factories produced about $86 million worth of goods. Now they make three times that value. Factories are springing up to build the widest variety of products. The factories are diversified to scores of different lines. They will diversify more because they have the power. In a dozen years the development of waterpower in North Carolina has been one of the marvels of the industrial world. What is ahead nobody can guess, but also most any guess seems safe enough. The State is gridironed with power wires now and in that respect has no peer on the globe.

Ours is one State that is self-contained and self-providing. It has the farms on which to feed the people, the factories in which to employ them, the power to run the mills, the yearly crop of raw material for the factory, the river and sea to carry the freight to market, the railroads in all directions, besides the surplus of product eagerly sought by other States.

Rising in the highest mountains east of the Rockies, North Carolina rivers have more fall to the sea, a greater distance to the sea, a greater annual rainfall to carry down, and a greater area to drain water from than any other State of the East. How much power that means is pure guess. It is a limit we cannot overtake for years. We have no idea of our ability to produce cotton for the ever growing North, or anything. We have no idea where we are going, but we are headed somewhere, and are running away on half a dozen roads at one time.

It is no use to me to point out to you the opportunities of North Carolina. Five thousand people could find opportunity in Jones county to go raising cotton. As many more could go to the mountains and raise cattle. As many more could go to Guilford to raise corn, to Moore, to raise scuppernongs for the grape juice plant starting there, to Henderson to raise apples, to Robeson to raise cantaloupes, to Cumberland to raise tobacco, peanuts for oil, sweet potatoes to make starch for the cotton mills and alcohol for the arts and for the automobiles when gasoline is scarcer.

Every county in the State could place 10,000 people as fast as they could come and opportunity would await them. One of the greatest of advantages is that our resources are so distributed that in every township in the State it is possible to establish a varied industry. Here is one State that has power available in every locality, raw material in every locality, transportation in every locality. We do not have to bunch our industries in cities where coal and iron and shop room can be had, as is the case in other States where the utilities must be assembled. We are not compelled to crowd into centers of population. Look at the cotton mill development that lines the Southern Railway from Virginia boundary to the South Carolina frontier. It is a continuation of mill communities with their farm settlements about them. At the last census North Carolina ranked eight among the States in its rural population. Only seven other States are developed all through the rural regions more than ours. In city population this State ranks 31st, but we are practically alone in having farm and factory property development scattered over the entire State.

The farm where it can feed the factory and supply such raw material as cotton and tobacco, and the factory where it can benefit by the farm, and find labor and subsistence and afford a market. North Carolina is sloppy with opportunity. I can no more tell you the limit of the water of the ocean out there in front of us. The one single thing of electrical development that has commenced in the State means a revolution in industrial things, with North Carolina as a cradle of expansion and training ground. Ten years from now the electrical atmosphere of industrial North Carolina will be a marvel.

You realize the opportunities. How can the press help to develop them? By becoming thoroughly familiar with what is here. We know of many opportunities, but there are many opportunities we have overlooked. We must become familiar with as many as possible, and get our people to know and appreciate them. My people laughed at me for an enthusiast when I told them North Carolina has the best climate in the United States. I showed them the weather statistics which tell that in every State along the Canadian frontier except New York and New England the thermometer goes higher in summer than in North Carolina. They are surprised when I tell them the Catawba has power enough to turn all the wheels in Connecticut, a prominent factory State, or that one big dam building on the Yadkin would run two-thirds of all wheels in Vermont. The newspapers put these things before the people vigorously. In the North and East North Carolina is an unknown region, almost as far out of public knowledge as Roosevelt’s river of doubt in the Amazon country.* Every North Carolina newspaper should have several exchanges in the North and in New England that what is printed might be passed along to people elsewhere.

The newspaper must be a clearing house for information concerning the State, county and the town. Every new farm, every new factory, every new thing that tells of development and expansion should get a place on the first page with a two stack head. I figure that in our paper that building a dozen new tobacco barns on Pinebluff farm is of more consequence than the vote of the candidate for Congress or Governor.

An example of this helpful enthusiasm is the Southern Pine Tourist, one of the most aggressive development factors in the State, as well as a model village newspaper.

I don’t mind tell you a trade secret if you will go home and profit by it. Every time we start something new over in Hoke county we try to tell it to the Observer, the News and Observer, the Star and all the other newspapers that want to know what is going on in the State. They can’t keep a secret and they tell it to their readers and every few days you notice something new is breaking loose in the sandhills. I don’t know whether our section is any better than yours, but we go on the theory that our section is the best on earth, and our bird is not the American eagle but the wise old hen who makes a note of the occurrence very time she lays an egg, and alludes to it several times during the day, before and after laying it. We believe in advertising.

It is useless to enumerate the opportunities in North Carolina. We could accommodate in this State many millions of people. People is what we lack. We lack people because the rest of the country, which is supplying settlers for all the United States and Canada, does not know North Carolina. Within the next year, and nearly every year, a million or more Americans will hunt new homes. They will not find anything better than North Carolina, but they will go elsewhere for what of knowledge of North Carolina. You who print papers in the tobacco belt should get some of your papers into the hands of people in the tobacco section of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and elsewhere.

You in the corn counties should be in touch with people in the corn country of the North and West. The climate of the North and West is fierce and people are running away from it constantly. Our climate is one of our greatest assets and when it is known what a climate we have and what other advantages we will get the people.

We should have an aggressive publicity bureau in the association. The Western States spend hundreds of dollars to settle their country which is not half so attractive as ours, but they settle it, and get their money back in their increased business. They get marvelous and rapid results. If California, with the hustle those folks have should unite the rainfall of North Carolina and the climate to their hustle they would make 5 million bales of cotton a year and spin it. On the sandy lands of this State could be made cotton to clothe millions of people of Europe if farmers were here to use the available cheap land. The United States makes 15 million bales of cotton a year. The cotton States of the South constitute the only part of the globe that makes enough cotton to satisfy its needs. In the United States we, each one of us, use an average of about 30 pounds of cotton a year. In most of the world the average amount of each individual is not above 3 pounds. To provide the world liberally with cotton would take a crop of a 150 million bales a year. North Carolina is the safest cotton State on earth, and raises more to the acre than any other State. Half the world has never yet had half the clothes to be comfortable because there was never enough. North Carolina is making more cotton goods every day, and every day the commerce of the world is expanding into the figures of gigantic importance. The work is to be done. We need more people to do it. As far as we can see we will never reach our limit in this State. We have land enough to stagger our conception. What we lack is people. We need to show people that anything that can be done in any section of the United States can be done to a little better advantage here with few exceptions. We can make as good cantaloupes as Colorado, and a thousand miles nearer market. Yet Rocky Ford melons are known everywhere and Scotland county melons sell for Rocky Ford.

Thinks what rainless Montana or Idaho would do with our rainfall and convenience to market. Yet those people are no more intelligent or industrious than our people. They simply have to pump or drown out there, and they pump and show other people they can pump. The Lord has been too good to this State. Here it is not so necessary to pump, and we overlook the amazing advantages. We do not appreciate them sufficiently to talk of them to others.

I think you understand as well as I can tell you that here is a land of boundless possibilities. How many people could North Carolina sustain in comfort? I would say that Belgium sustains 13 times as many people to the square mile as we do, and they seem to live in comfort, and not so much of natural advantage to depend on. Using Belgium as an illustration I would say that 13 times as many people as we have now, or about 25 million, would be about the figure I would recommend to start with. When we get that many we could figure on how many more to think about. Belgium has about as much territory as the coastal plain of North Carolina, and as many people as both the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland, which is all that needs to be said about the room for people in this State.

To promote development we must get people. I don’t count myself an old man, yet I remember when we spoke of Ohio as out West. From the day when this government was established it has been an average of only a little more than three years between new States. The people make new States are increasing faster now than ever. The new States are all made. The people will go on making farms and factories and towns and communities, and they will follow the lines of least resistance in finding the place if they know where the places are. To show them is our task. To get those people is our need. There are plenty of them to be had.

The first part of the work is to become thoroughly familiar with the work ourselves, then to show our home people that we have here something that should be made known to those of the big worked who are looking for a chance to do something for themselves. We must arouse our own State that it will help us to attract attention. Then we must go after settlers. The papers must furnish information. The papers must arouse the enthusiasm of the people. Then the papers must lead the campaign of publicity.

You must, each one, constitute yourselves the aggressive agent of development of your county and your community, make your paper its enthusiastic organ, and then as one of my darkies said one day while wrestling with a piece of obstreperous beef, you must chaw for godsake.

When you get your job started, stay with it. Of all the remarks that have been made about me as along as I can remember, the one that pleased me most was that of a man who said to me, “That man never knows when to quit.”

Friends, let us go home determined to cut out the muffler, open the throttle wide, advising the rest of the world to excuse the dust as North Carolina whips by.

Former President Theodore Roosevelt

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