SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



Getting out the wood is rough, rugged work. In the 

 lumber camps the draft boards found few physical 

 rejects and they made no occupational exemptions. 

 What they started, the shipyards finished. Swinging 

 the shipwright's mallet is child's play to holding up 

 your end on a crosscut saw, and the rip-roaring tradi- 

 tion of Paul Bunyan was no charm whatever against 

 pay of fifty-seven cents an hour instead of the minimum 

 legal wage of forty cents. 



Looking back on the war experience, it seems a 

 wonder that any men stuck to lumbering although 

 wages doubled and sometimes trebled. For getting out 

 as much wood as possible, these high wages were a 

 questionable help. Whoever knows the Southern Negro 

 knows that when he is paid a couple of dollars or more 

 a day, he simply quits work after he has earned his 

 modest needs of five or six dollars a week. In these 

 materialistic days this easygoing philosophy has a good 

 deal to commend it, but not to a woodlands superin- 

 tendent hounded to make a quota so that the mill can 

 keep up the schedule of imperative Army and Navy 

 orders. 



The Southern paper mills were caught tight in a bad 

 jam. On the one side were more orders than ever be- 

 fore for kraft paper that must be sold at a ceiling price 

 no matter how costs rose and time pressed. On the 

 other side less labor was being paid higher wages. 



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