The _Intelligencer_, at the start, was vehemently antisalt. "Is there an
American Cato," Le ffacase asked, "to call for the final ignominy
suffered by Carthage to be applied, not to the land of an enemy, but to
our own?" Shortly after this editorial, entitled "Carthage, California"
appeared, the _Intelligencer_ swung to the opposite side and Le ffacase
offered the prosalt argument under the heading "Lot's Wife."
The Daughters of the American Revolution declared themselves in favor of
salt and refused the use of Constitution Hall to an antisalt meeting.
Stung, the Central Executive Committee of the Communist party circulated
a manifesto declaring the use of salt was an attempt to encircle, not
the grass, for that was a mere subterfuge of imperialism, but the Soviet
Union; and called upon all its peripheral fringe to write their
congressmen and demonstrate against the saline project. From India the
aged Mohandas Gandhi asked in piping tones why such a valuable adjunct
was to be wasted in rich America while impoverished ryots paid a harsh
tax on this necessity of life? And the Council of Peoples' Commissars,
careless of the action of the American Stalinists, offered to sell the
United States all its surplus salt. The herringpicklers of Holland
struck in a body while the American salt refiners bid as one to produce
on a costplus basis.
This last was a clincher and the obscurantic antisalts received the
deathblow they richly deserved. The Communist party reversed themselves
swiftly. All respectable and patriotic people lined up behind salt. With
such popular unanimity apparent, the government could do no less than
take heed. A band twenty miles wide, stretching from Oceanside to the
Salton Sea, from the Salton Sea to the little town of Mojave and from
there to Ventura, was marked out on maps to be saltsown by the very same
bombercommand which had dropped the spectacular but futile incendiaries.
The triumph of the salt people was ungenerous in its enthusiasm; the
disgruntled antisalts, now a mere handful of diehards publishing an
esoteric press, muttered everyone would be sorry, wait and see.
_30._ The grass itself waited for nothing. It seemed to take new
strength from the indignities inflicted upon it and it increased, if
anything, its tempo of growth. It plunged into the ocean in a dozen
spots at once. It swarmed over sand which had never known anything but
cactus and the Sierra Madres became great humps of green against the
skyline. This last conquest shocked those who had thought the mountains
immune in their inhospitable heights. _Cynodon dactylon_, uninoculated,
had always shunned coldness, though it survived some degrees of frost.
The giant growth, however, seemed to be less subject to this inhibition,
though it too showed slower progress in the higher and colder regions.
The _Intelligencer_ planned to move from Pomona to San Bernardino and if
necessary to Victorville.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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