North Carolina Praised in Southern Planters' Editorials, February 1945

Editorials in the February 1945 issue of The Southern Planter

NORTH CAROLINA’S OPPORTUNITY

The North Carolina legislature, now in session at Raleigh, has an opportunity to make history for the southern states by (1) enacting a rural health and medical care program in keeping with the magnitude of the problem on farms of North Carolina, as revealed by the report of the Governor’s Commission on Hospital and Medical Care, and (2) defining a State’s responsibility in equalizing health and medical care services for its citizens. We believe that Governor Cherry and leaders in both branches of the legislature will not let this opportunity “knock unbidden”.

No informed person will deny that modern medicine and public health services have not penetrated the rural South. Rural health studies for North Carolina and Virginia establish this fact beyond a shadow of doubt. There is ample evidence to prove that the farm is the most hazardous place to live from the standpoint of health. And, as W. Kerr Scott, Commissioner of Agriculture for North Carolina, said in his able address before the Ruritan National Convention in Richmond, January 16, “As part of our postwar agriculture policy must come a strong rural health program. A healthy farm worker is more desirable than an educated one with a diseased body and mind. Much of the inefficiency on Southern farms is due directly to poor health. A good health program is like a good roads program—you pay for it whether you have it or not. Farm people with poor medical care, where social diseases run uncontrolled, are now paying more than the cost of a good health program.”

DEBUNKING THE POLL TAX BUNK

Self-preservation is the first attribute of a politician. That is why the “machine” politicians in Virginia are fanatically fighting repeal of the poll tax as a voting requirement. The have found in the poll tax their most useful tool for perpetuating their term of office. By disfranchising the vast majority of people and permitting only a pitiful minority to vote, a handful of officeholders in every county, through the influence of their “sisters and their cousins and their aunts,” can swing almost any election. This is a vicious sort of thing in a democratic society.

The very fact that politicians are fighting poll tax repeal is ample evidence that they are afraid to face an unhampered electorate. None of them will admit this, however. Instead, they give as their excuse for opposing poll tax repeal, such bunk as “revenue from the poll tax goes to support the public schools;” “the poll tax keeps the riff-raff from voting;” “it disfranchise the Negro and guarantees white supremacy;” “it insures a sound fiscal policy for Virginia.”Anyone remotely familiar with the problem knows that all of these arguments are bogus.

Divorce the poll tax from the right to vote, universally assess and collect it, and the tax will yield three times its present revenue for the schools. The so-called “riff-raff,” if they be defined as those who permit their poll taxes to be paid in a block by politicians and voted accordingly, can already vote under the present system, while many of our best citizens are being disqualified. The racial issue is pure demagoguery. Of the 10,000,000 Americans who are unable to vote because of poll taxes, at least 6,000,000 are white citizens. Less than a fourth of Virginia’s total population is colored. North Carolina, with a much larger Negro population than Virginia, abolished the poll tax as a prerequisite to voting 25 years ago and that state is a shining example of the South of everything good in government for the common man, of both colors. And as far as sound fiscal policy is concerned, is there anyone who sincerely believes that Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee and Texas, the poll tax states that polled a total of 3,113,082 votes in the presidential election last fall, are operating under a sounder financial policy than the other 40 states in the Union that polled 44,856,706 votes, or 94 percent of the total? The question is as ridiculous as the argument that prompts it.

The whole argument in favor of the poll tax is a foil, a smokescreen to hide the fact that the politicians, now in power, want a small electorate that can be controlled by the officeholders. The poll tax as a voting requirement in Virginia is doomed just as surely as day follows darkness. And the quicker it passes, the better it will be for all the people.