The Evening Star (February 8, 1946)
ON THE RECORD —
Why not use the energies we already have?
By Dorothy Thompson
It would be fine to have atomic energy formulae released to industry, as recommended to military authorities by seven of the top scientists responsible for the development of the atomic bomb.
The releasing of revolutionary energies through the fission of uranium is, as far as I know, the only great scientific discovery initially planned and first used for war purposes. Other inventions have served almost equally destructive ends; in Europe there are children for whom the sight of an airplane is a cause of shivering fear, but aviation did not start as a weapon. Atomic disintegration did, and until people see it in its creative aspects it will be associated in their minds with terror.
Obviously, as scientific and technological knowledge of atomic energy’s possibilities expands, it ought to be the greatest contributor to peace both in a negative and positive way. Negatively it pushes war to its ultimate logic: The total destruction of one combatant is the almost total destruction of the other, whereby if there be any reason in war it is canceled since the victor inherits only an empire of death.
Positively, it should remove, in the course of perhaps a generation, what has been estimated as a chief cause of war: The struggle of “haves” to hold and of “have nots” to gain access to raw materials.
The possibility of inexhaustible power should remove that cause of, or excuse for, war. However, speculations on the world of abundance that can be created through atomic energy ring hollow when we see our economy slowing to a standstill through the disuse of the energies we already have. There is no secret about building homes, custom-made or mass-produced; we have the necessary materials, the ingenuity to create new ones and the labor to build them.
From one end of the country to the other people are living in cellars, shacks, on top of each other in overcrowded apartments, and families are broken up – part with his parents and part with hers – for lack of housing.
Picking up a newspaper in Los Angeles, I am confronted by a picture of a father who, with his four small children, has been living in his old sedan. Yes, sleeping – five of them – washing, and playing on rainy days, in an automobile, there being no other available shelter.
Not a bomb fell on America, but we have a condition similar to that of the “bombed out,” and thousands of veterans, joyfully coming “home,” find that home is landscape without a roof.
Meanwhile, although the housing shortage has been foreseen since the beginning of the war, Congress and the administration still have not come forward with a housing program. Private builders estimate that they can build no more than 400,000 houses per year, whereas we need a minimum of three million per year.
Control over available materials has been abolished. Night clubs, office buildings, and what not, are on an equal footing with dwellings. There are no provisions for subsidies for low-cost housing. There are many housing bills before Congress but no one housing bill.
Workingmen, out for many weeks on strike, are using up the little nest eggs of war savings which many set aside for the purpose of down payments on postwar homes; veterans are wasting their savings for transitory and unsatisfactory cubby holes of dwellings; the “showdown” between management and labor is heartily disapproved by, I should guess, nine-tenths of the public not immediately involved, and the heart is going out of our society.
One of our commentators said the other day, apropos a charge by some member of Congress that the strikes are “Communist,” that strikes are “as American as apple pie.” They are, indeed, but so are pellagra, infantile paralysis and psychoneurosis. They are American, not Communist, and nevertheless disastrous.
In as highly an industrialized and interdependent a society as ours some abstract standards of reference must be established to which labor-management controversies can be referred. The workers are no longer camped in the middle-class society like an alien horde; the rise of the working class is the outstanding fact of the century; and it ought to be established what part of the product of industry should justly go to labor, what part to the wages of capital, and how increased productivity should be distributed and rewarded.
Meanwhile, the possibilities in atomic energy will not create much interest as long as we are not using the possibilities in steel, wood, asphalt, concrete and men’s hands.