PLOWING THE FIELD

While Senator O'Mahoney and his western colleagues are sputtering to the press for the benefit of friends back home, the State Department is quietly proceeding with its plan to "feed the navy on foreign beef." Argentina offers a product at 9 cents; American producers ask 23 cents; the navy begins to buy from Argentina. Obviously a subversive and un-American transaction. . . standard of living doomed . . . Japan; now Argentina. But more important than the patent stupidity involved in such typical protectionist reasoning is the fact that such Congressional utterances constitute destructive opposition to the far-reaching policy of Pan-Americanism.

Ignorance of Latin American problems is not confined to Congressional circles. On every hand are heard oversimplified versions of "good-neighborliness" varying from the heights of altruism ("We will set the world an example of peaceful, democratic relations") to the opposite extreme of dollar diplomacy ("We want to sell them goods and ideas and stop Hitler from selling his"). Of the long-range political and economic complexities, little is heard. There is in the United States a superabundance of capital ready willing, and able to be invested. There is in south and Central America ample opportunity to put this money to valuable use, for it has been estimated that in undeveloped raw materials alone, this area is--not excluding Siberia--the richest in the world. Benefits from the potential investment would accrue to both halves of the American continent. But the risks to private capital arising from unstable political equilibrium and the record of debt repudiation in the past make it unlikely if not impossible that under normal circumstances this capital would ever be put to work.

That in the simplest terms, is the fundamental dilemma the good neighbor policy is attempting to resolve. In spite of the grudging support or open opposition of American financial interests, it is attempting to plow the field has been inordinately rocky, as has the Mexican; and while on the latter front Mr. Donald R. Richberg is performing--apparently with increasing success--the hereculean task of reconciling Standard Oil and Mr. Cardenas, the State Department is proceeding space with canned corn beef. Such policies, fragmentary in themselves, add up in the long run to the political "atmosphere" in which American intervention in behalf of investments is either acceptable or unnecessary; and it would be highly unfortunate if short-sighted opposition from the representatives of special interest groups in Washington were allowed to defeat even a portion of such a constructive program.