The Encroaching World

...The dreams of Congress are troubled by the spectre of foreign invasion...

...The forward countries cannot escape the drag of their halting neighbors...

...Throughout its long deliberations the disquieting sense of the nearness of other peoples, their ways of living and of doing things and the economic and social problems which confront them, came to the surface of congressional discussion...

...Streams of national culture mingle...

...Congress has met the situation by raising the barriers which stem the tide but the task of warding off foreign encroachments of one kind or another is becoming increasingly difficult...

...If Europe is to take its cotton and wheat, payment must be made in money or goods and if the goods are refused they must be sold elsewhere in competition with the products of American factories...

...The opening of cotton mills in Osaka and Seoul is reflected in unemployment in Lancashire and New England...

...Obviously the United States is becoming more and more a part of the international neghborhood and its affairs are projected in an international perspective...

...A glut of coffee is reflected in a lagging demand in Brazil for the products of American factories...

...Like Alexander it must look to other worlds and find other markets for the surpluses which threaten to block its advance...

...International horizons are shrinking...

...But it is not so easy to shut the door on economic intrusions...

...The inscrutable Japanese were next kept aloof...

...The neighbors can only swallow their pride and go their own ways...

...THE ENCROACHING WORLD By ELMER MURPHY THE Seventy-first Congress began its first session—now a matter of legislative history — by devising a measure to keep out of the United States the products of other countries and ended it by adopting a measure to keep out their people...

...Industry, which for many years was able to follow only at the heels of the pioneers who were pushing westward the economic horizon, now has halted on the shores of the Pacific...

...The old idea of the melting pot has become as obsolete as Horace Greeley's slogan—"Go West, young man...

...Pressure from without is supplemented by the expansion within...

...Later, by the immigration law, the southern European was declared undesirable...

...It has since learned that the United States cannot escape the dismal effects of depression in Europe and other parts of the world...

...Europe is no longer separated from us by a more or less perilous voyage of a month or two...

...The surpluses, according to Owen D. Young, constitute the most difficult problem confronting America...

...A scientific discovery in a Schenectady laboratory closes, perhaps, mines in the Urals or puts a blight upon East Indian plantations...

...If the United States raises its own sugar, it must forego selling its hardware and machinery to Cuba...

...American industry against the economic crossfire of foreign competition, others are sounding a warning that if we wall in our own national dooryard, we are, by the same token, shutting off access to our neighbors...

...More and more persistently they are clamoring for solution...

...The frontier between Canada and the United States, the invisibility of which attested the neighborliness between the two countries, is to be definitely marked by border guards...

...He will exert himself to throw the mantle of protection around the beet farms and the cane plantations in the South and do nothing at all to add to the prestige of the United States in foreign markets...

...From an economic viewpoint and, to a lesser degree, from a social viewpoint the tendency toward equalization of conditions in which peoples work and live is as inevitable as the tendency of water to find a common level...

...It is the antithesis of politics which is national and parochial...

...Besides, the closed door not only keeps out foreign products...

...American business came to the conclusion that a prosperous purchaser was more desirable than a bankrupt competitor nation...

...Democracy, at least as reflected in the congressional attitude, is parochial...

...Postwar experience shattered the theory that prosperity was written in imposing trade balances...

...Deepening shadows cast by the encroaching world appear to have the effect only of spurring Congress to greater activity in rimming the country with defensive breastworks...

...It began by debarring the heathen Chinese...

...A reduction of the wage rate in Belgium upsets the cement industry in America...

...The danger does not lie solely without...

...It found expression in various measures to check the flow of immigration...

...There is conflict between the congressional viewpoint and the viewpoint of the Chief Executive in this respect...

...The words alien and foreigner have been given almost a sinister significance and the tendency to crystallize the definition of the word American into rigid standards has gained impetus...

...From an economic point of view, and to a lesser degree from a social viewpoint, the tendency toward equalization of conditions under which people work and live is as inevitable as the tendency of water to find a common level" says Mr...

...Washington's counsel to hold aloof from the political maneuvering of the older countries has been applied more literally, perhaps, than he contemplated...

...The Slav is suspected by the conservative capitalist as an enemy of the American industrial order...

...In any event the time does not appear far distant when the United States must determine, as a matter of national policy, what course it will take in living with its international neighbors...

...Nevertheless the dilemma is real enough to be a cause of national concern...

...It might be the part of wisdom for the United States to buy sugar from Cuba, where it can be grown much more economically than elsewhere, and sell its manufactured products to Cuba...

...While some of our statesmen are trying by artificial means to safeguard American institutions against the corrosive effects of foreign influences and ideals—or lack of ideals—and to shield Perhaps the recent Congress might be described as a body which met to discuss the problem of American isolation...

...International social currents might move more sluggishly but they sweep relentlessly away from poverty and toward affluence...

...For this reason the Briand plan of an economic European concert of nations is regarded more with approval than alarm and the proposed trade union of the autonomous states of the British Empire arouses no great misgiving...

...The currents of trade cannot flow continuously in one direction...

...The smoke of British, Belgian and German factories blows across the American sky...

...Congress has gradually tightened the barriers it has built around the country as improvements in transportation and communication have brought nearer the threat of foreign invasion...

...In the background are certain grave social facts and tendencies...

...The movies, the steamships, the railroads, the radio surmount the obstacles and bridge the gaps that lie between us and far corners of the world...

...Much as has been said about the adaptability of individual Americans to an alien environment, they are as a body curiously suspicious of the foreigner...

...Congress looks after local interests...

...Increasing productivity has brought the larger corporations face to face with the problem of maintaining access to foreign markets to get rid of the threatening surpluses and this cannot be done by building a wall around the domestic market...

...A reduction of the wage rate in Germany stiffens the competition which the American workman must meet...

...There is a hint of panic in other measures proposed in Congress to keep the alien under surveillance, to require him to register and to put him out of the country if he fails to conform to its ideals and customs...

...Strangers are clamoring at the gates—to come in or to send their goods in...

...The President considers national interests...

...If Congress is to be taken at its word, the security of that older day, when other peoples and their troubles lay far beyond the horizon and the empty prairies provided illimitable elbow room for expansion, is done...

...The barriers which enabled the United States to keep to itself have crumbled...

...His paper may not evoke agreement on all sides but it is suggestive.—The Editors...

...The Catholic is regarded as something of a menace by the Klansman because the Church to which he belongs is distorted by ignorance into something alien to America...

...At any cost the United States must walk alone...

...If it decides to shut the door in the face of its neighbors, the gesture is at most ungracious...

...It cannot avoid them much longer...

...By the border patrol act it attempted to ward off social inequalities prevailing in other states...

...The passing of the bobbed hair vogue in the United States might bring prosperity to the Chinese village that found its livelihood in making hair nets...

...Economically it is finding itself more than ever a part of the international household...

...The airplane, wireless and improved steamship facilities have, in effect, brought almost to the national doorstep countries once lost in the haze of distance...

...Shadows cast by the encroaching world are, apparently, falling across the splendid isolation in which America has gloried, safe behind the ocean barriers which, until recently, have shielded it against the turmoil and alarms of old Europe and the strange peoples that come out of the still older Orient...

...To make these decrees more effective the border patrol has been organized...

...The stranger is suspect...

...To these measures exception cannot be taken...

...Obviously a nation as well as an individual has the right to manage its domestic affairs as it chooses...

...The national doctrine of self-sufficiency rests upon a precarious basis and there is danger of nurturing our prejudices in going to extremes in safeguarding our virtues...

...The phonograph breaks into the crooning murmur of the South Seas...

...The backward countries feel more acutely the spur of progress...

...But Congress clings to the traditional isolation policy, so far as any consistent policy is apparent in its deliberations...

...The government has been concerned with the tariff, with immigration, with missionary alien idealism...

...Some of the perturbation of Congress might be based on delusion and such exaggerated fears as have been let loose by the Ku Klux Klan and other ioo-percent organizations...

...The problems growing out of the closing in of the encircling world are many and intricate...

...It keeps domestic products in...

...The wine-drinker of Europe is anathema to the American Anti-saloon Leaguer...

...But the member of Congress is interested in local industry and not in foreign trade...

...Markets are world-wide...

...It holds to the idea that if natural barriers no longer suffice to keep out the disturbing foreign influences, social and economic, that are lapping the national doorstep more persistently than ever before, artificial barriers must supplement...

...Even far away Muscovy, half-brother to the mysterious East, carries a portentous threat of revolution and a special committee of the House of Representatives is following in this western hemisphere the sinuous thread of Communism which can be traced to the Kremlin...

...Politically the United States stands more firmly than ever by its tradition of isolation and exclusion...

...It appeared in the misgivings over the naval treaty...

...Now it is proposed to keep out the Mexican and the Canadian...

...By the tariff bill it essayed to safeguard the industry of the nation against economic changes and irregularities in other parts of the world...

...In their wake is deposited the detritus of ideas and customs from an alien source...

...Business cannot be enclosed in political compartments in spite of the traditional belief of Congress that the United States is economically self-contained...

...It was reflected in apprehension over sagging foreign markets to which America looks with growing concern...

...Economics, in other words, ignores national boundaries and border patrols...

...Murphy...