Granite State

Toward the close of a meeting of the New England Council in Boston some weeks ago, up rose big, bald, beaked Milan A. Dickinson. He asked to speak, not as chairman of the Council's New Hampshire division, but as chairman of that State's press-badgered Recess Tax Commission which had tried and failed to introduce a State income tax. Said he, looking wickedly at the press table: "Nearly every paper in our State has preached as a cure-all for many of our ills--Economy. . . . Now I want to offer them the opportunity of doing some constructive work. . . . [Let a committee of editors] make specific recommendations as to just what expenditures should be reduced or abolished. With their intimate knowledge of the State's financial affairs it ought not to be a long task. . . ."

Three weeks ago, in the handsome new office of the Concord Monitor, was called the first meeting of a New Hampshire editors' Committee of Seven (only four were present) to tackle the job that had staggered many a commission, many a tax expert in the past decade. Present was bustling, go-getting Chairman Harry Chase Shaw of the Keene Sentinel. He alone was fired by a belief that a committee of journalists could discover new economies for a State so thrifty that it spent last year only $15,000,000, nearly half of which was on highways.* Present also was shrewd, cynical James Langley of the Monitor & New Hampshire Patriot whose paper was the only important one to support the Tax Commission's program, and who ventured that whatever the editors' committee might learn about State finance and taxation would be "so much velvet." Absent was Managing Editor William Theophilus Nichols of the Manchester Union, arch-enemy of the tax program. He was gravely ill, died the following week.

Last week Editor Shaw explained the Committee's task to the New Hampshire Weekly Publishers' Association, meeting in Boston. Said he: "It is not [our] intent to oppose legislation but to accentuate it through the medium of accurate figures on what we get for what we spend. . . . The Committee does not contemplate any time-clock study to determine whether Bill Jones earns his pay spreading tar in highway repair work or whether a department head is worth the salary . . . paid by the State. It has a much broader plan." The assembled publishers cross-examined Editor Shaw for more than an hour, conceded that he had a "good idea."

While Editor Shaw was speaking in Boston last week, proponents of the old tax-revision program were reintroducing it to a Legislative committee. In its behalf spoke Single-Taxer George H. Duncan, veteran member of the House and hard-working clerk of the Recess Tax Commission. He stoutly denied the stock argument of the opposition: that the proposed taxes on incomes and gas & electric franchises would merely provide increased revenue to encourage State extravagance. They would be offset, he insisted, by elimination of other taxes, notably the tax on finished goods and the "pernicious and confiscatory" tax on standing timber./- So heavy is that burden that timbermen have been forced to slash off and sell their timber prematurely; and they cannot afford to reforest. The result has been deforestation and impoverishment of some 2,000,000 acres of woodland and farmland, marked by a great population shift from farm and forest to the industrial towns (see map inset). Hardest-hit section of abandoned lands is in the belt running across the State from Hanover to Rochester. An immediate remedy proposed for timbermen is substitution of a single "severance tax" of 10% at cutting.

There is also disturbing evidence of a general drift of young people away from the State. The average age of New Hampshirites is 34. seven years older than the average for the whole U. S.

In New Hampshire, as everywhere else, there, is unemployment; about 10,000 out of 200,000. But there is less talk about it than elsewhere. There are few glaringly visible effects, no breadlines. The industrial towns, gradually recovering from the textile strikes of ten years ago, had no 1929 peak of prosperity from which to tumble. Thoughtful, spiritual Governor John Gilbert Winant favors quiet, efficient charity rather than flamboyant efforts to make jobs by rushing public works. More concerned is he with the fact that New Hampshire's workers in forestry, farming & manufacture are growing fewer, while the "service-producers"--domestics, tradesmen, transportation men and the like--are increasing. Much of the support of the latter classes comes from New Hampshire's rich harvest of summer visitors. And because that is bound to fall off as a result of the Depression, New Hampshire's "service" workers will feel the pinch next.

Aware of an economic instability, New Hampshire's economists would like to see all of the State's timber (timberland covers four-fifths of the State area) developed as its spruce has been developed by the famed $70,000,000 Brown Co. of Berlin (since the War, pronounced Ber-lin). When production of newsprint became unprofitable, the Browns imported a staff of chemists, now headed by famed Hugh Kelsea Moore, to discover other uses for the wood. Their products now number 77, including rayon, chloroform, electrical conduit, high grade wrapping paper.

New Hampshire's great industries, as everyone knows, are textiles (notably the Amoskeag Mills of Manchester, Nashua Manufacturing Co. of Nashua, biggest world producers of blankets), and famed Indian Head cloth; shoes (International Shoe Co., Manchester; J. F. McElwain Co. of Nashua, makers of Tom McAn and John Ward shoes); granite (at Concord, Milford, Conway); power (notably the $32,000,000 generating plant at the 15-mile falls near Monroe, owned by Grafton Power Co., indirect subsidiary of International Paper & Power Corp.); boxwood (notably at Nashua, Keene and Rochester--where last fortnight bells were rung in celebration of the "Dryness" of the Wickersham report [TIME, Jan. 26]).

Some minor industries:

Christmas trees, for which 700,000 spruce and balsam fir were sold last year. Average price to the grower is 6-c- (in the cities the retailer gets 50-c- to $10). Last season a group of growers in Coos County marketed cooperatively, tagged their trees with special holiday labels, realized as much as 15-c- per tree.

Efforts have recently been made to emulate Vermont in maple-syrup production, now far below its possibilities.

In Manchester R. G. Sullivan Inc. makes "7-20-4" cigars, so-named according to legend because Founder Sullivan got his start in business with the winnings of a lottery ticket numbered 7-20-4.

In Concord is the famed Rumford Press, printers of more than a score of national magazines, among them: Asia, Spur, Forum, Harper's, Polo, Atlantic Monthly, Yachting, Sportsman, House Beautiful.

Near Wilmot is the garnet mine of Harvardman Norman Davenport, whence Henry Ford and General Electric Co. get the garnet used in fine abrasion, glass-polishing.

Near Rumney Depot is the Ruggles sheet-mica mine, oldest in the U. S. Found in combination with mica are beryl, feldspar.

Farmers are swinging away from the traditional New Hampshire crops--hay & forage--and raising fruit and vegetables for the city markets. Proud is New Hampshire of its shiny red Mackintosh apple, especially proud of Farmer Ed Sawyer's "best apples in the world" at Salisbury, where Daniel Webster was born.

Once an important industry was ship-building at Portsmouth. A ship under construction is the motif of the State seal. But because no ship has been built in New Hampshire since the War (and not because the barrels in the seal-picture contained rum) there is a persistent movement to change the seal to New Hampshire's famed "Old Man of the Mountains."

If New Hampshire editors fail to unsnarl in a day the financial tangle of a century, New Hampshirites can still recall with pride the two great journalists whom the state produced: Horace ("Go West") Greeley and Charles A. Dana (New York Sun). Or if the present-day lawmakers and tax experts are to be taken to task, it is yet true that New Hampshire, one of the 13 Original States (which-neighboring Maine & Vermont were not) has given the U. S. many a famed statesman. Among them: Josiah Bartlett, "Signer"; Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln; Governor John A. Dix of New York; Governors Butler, Cox of Massachusetts ; Secretary of War John Wingate Weeks; U. S. Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone; Major General Leonard Wood.

*New York State's total expenditures: $600,000,000.

/- Practically unchanged since 1783, the New Hampshire tax system now imposes 80% of the cost of government upon real estate.

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