Revival of the Rate Debate

One of the oldest political debates in the U.S. was huffing & puffing last week just as steamily as in prewar days. War had given new life to the old fight over differential freight rates, which, Southern and Western businessmen have claimed time out of mind, discriminate against them in favor of the industrial East.

Two weeks ago a council of southeastern Governors meeting in Florida (TIME, April 5) raised the perennial charge. Last week New York's trim Governor Thomas E. Dewey denied it in a memorandum to ICC, said that any change in rates would hurt New York's manufacturers. Said he: "New York State can only view such a result with the greatest concern."

Back cracked Senator Tom Stewart, Democrat of Tennessee: "I predict that the words uttered by the little Governor, self-admitted Presidential timber, will live to haunt him. ... It is indeed unfortunate the young man should net have a national viewpoint instead of the narrow and provincial one. . . ."

In Indiana, Governor Henry Frederick Schricker told the ICC his State had already lost four big industries--pulp-board, limestone, furniture, stoves--to southern competition. Governor Schricker then urged that the Commission exclude all sectional politics, thus echoing many a previous Midwest Governor.

To the Commission, meanwhile, came an 82-page report from the Tennessee Valley Authority, their third on the subject in six years, urging uniform freight rates throughout the nation. The report, entitled Regional Freight Rates--Barrier to National Productiveness, blasted the present rates as a major "economic maladjustment," standing in the path of U.S. postwar expansion. (Author of the first TVA report to this effect was J. Haden Alldredge, an ex-TVA economist, .who has since been appointed to ICC, and in fact became its chairman on Jan. 1.)

Midwest Editor William Allen White noted the real irony in the newest revival of the old debate. He philosophized: "Who would have said ten years ago that this great experiment in Socialism, the Tennessee Valley Authority, would be able to command a respectful hearing from all parts of the West and South? Certainly . . . the changed times make strange bedfellows."

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