What Is The Matter With Our Country? 1932

“What Is the Matter With the Country,” from the editorial page of the Brevard News, Thursday, July 14, 1932. James F. Barrett, editor, and Mark T. Orr, associate editor.

This question has been asked, orally and mentally, millions upon millions of times during the past few years.

“What is the matter with everything here?”

One answer to that question can be found in the Winston-Salem affair that is now so much in the limelight. A 20-year-old boy’s death, resulting from a gunshot at the end of a “party” given by him and his second wife, gives answer to the question of what is the matter with our country.

That boy, one of the heirs to the millions represented in the estate of the late R.J. Reynolds, was a living, and is now a dead answer to the question.

Ask the tobacco farmers who toil from sun to sun and whose work is never done, who receive for their tobacco scarcely enough to pay fertilizer bills, and they will tell you the answer to the question as to what ails this country of ours. While these farmers toiled and slaved, trying to educate their children, trying to pay off the mortgage, trying to pay taxes to keep their homes from being sold, the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and similar organizations were building up estates for worthless sons like that boy who met violent death down at Winston-Salem.

Ask the workers in the tobacco factories, whose scant wages were barely sufficient to keep body and soul together, and they can tell you what is the matter with this country. They will tell you that the policy of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company and similar organizations, keeping these workers going all the time on niggardly wages in order to create ONE big fortune in each of these industries for the worthless children in those families to spend in revelry and riotous living, contributes largely to the deplorable conditions now existing in this country.

In other words, it is the segregation of wealth in the hands of a few, and widespread poverty for the masses, that has in large measure brought upon this country a period of stagnation and human suffering.

If the tobacco farmers were given a fair price for their tobacco, and the factory workers were given a fair wage for their labor, and the tobacco companies were content with a fair profit on their investment, then prosperity would be more general.

But in this land where the dollar mark is the only sign of aristocracy, where a few boys and girls live like the Reynolds boys have lived, while the countless thousands of boys and girls in the homes of the factory workers go in want and without the actual necessities of life, there can be nothing but trouble.

As long as the sons and daughters of tobacco growers are handicapped because of lack of money, due to low prices on their crop, to prepare for life; so long as factory workers go on half rations due to low wages paid in tobacco factories, while the sons of the tobacco manufacturer can encircle the globe, marry and divorce one woman and give her a million dollars, and marry another woman, all before he is 20 years of age, then that long will there be trouble and more and more serious trouble.

The Reynolds affair has brought to light much that is wrong with this country.