Business: THE DEPRESSED-AREA PROBLEM

The Cure Must Begin at Home

THE weather was dreary and drizzling one morning last week as 500 people filed into the silent Ackermann plant of the Wheeling Steel Corp. in Wheeling, W. Va. The men were not workers arriving for the morning shift but guests at a funeral. They came to bid at an auction to liquidate the plant. In 18 hours of bidding, they bought $5,000,000 worth of idle equipment that once had hummed busily under the hands of 1,200 workers. To Wheeling, the auctioneer's machine-gun chant was an old familiar dirge; for years, thousands of its skilled workmen have looked on helplessly as, one after another, the gates of its plants have closed for good. Once-thriving Wheeling is a prime example of an urgent problem: the depressed area.

By Government reckoning, a depressed area is one in which at least 6% of the workers are unemployed and the total has run at least 50% above the national average for four of the last five years. The U.S. has 19 major depressed areas and dozens of minor ones scattered from Washington to Maine, most of them concentrated in the industrial East. They account for more than half a million unemployed workers for whom recession is a year-round, inescapable fact even when the nation's economy is booming. Both parties introduced bills to aid depressed areas in the last Congress, but squabbled them to death. The cost was comparatively small: $180 million for the Administration bill v. $251 million for the Democratic bill. Now President-elect John F. Kennedy has put a depressed-areas bill at the top of his list of must legislation.

The nation's pockets of economic blight are caused by the fact that industries that once provided the major payrolls have either left the area, collapsed or severely cut back their work force under the stress of technological change or competition from more efficient plants elsewhere. The textile industry has moved out of New England for the South's lower wages. In Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky, automation in the coal mines and a national shift from coal to oil and gas have thrown thousands out of work. Modernization of the steel industry, abetted by a slump in steel sales is pushing Youngstown and Pittsburgh toward the depressed category.

Most depressed areas are not economic skeletons incapable of revival; they need only saving infusions of new industry. While they deserve a helping hand from the Government, chiefly in the form of loans and grants to encourage new plant building and new public facilities, it is a fact that Government help can do little, good unless depressed areas first go to work to cure their own problems. Many have already arrested the decline, even made healthy comebacks by aggressively working to attract industry, but others are so badly depressed that they lack even the "seed money" to make a fresh start.