ROADS TO REFORM
Smith, Howard K.
Roads to Reform By HOWARD K. SMITH AS OUR ailing world fumbles for a way out of its misery, it becomes increasingly clear that it is our inability so far to adjust our thinking and behavior to the...
...The third great task, then, that confronts us at mid-century is to find a new relationship...
...Roads to Reform By HOWARD K. SMITH AS OUR ailing world fumbles for a way out of its misery, it becomes increasingly clear that it is our inability so far to adjust our thinking and behavior to the three fundamental changes of the past half-century which is the source of most of our troubles today...
...With at last a margin of wealth to spend on defense, Europe could become strong and Russia would no longer dare to provoke and probe...
...Our only relation with the backwards peoples for centuries has been an imperial one...
...What has begun in Asia will soon spread, there is no doubt, to the Middle East, and to Africa—and possibly even to South America...
...We must discover a new kind of cooperative, equal relationship with backwards peoples...
...For reasons best left to the economists, it seems that the system does not distribute sufficient purchasing power for people to buy up all the goods produced...
...And with volcanic might, Asiatic discontent has exploded...
...Since World War II, we have entered on a period of full employment...
...Every nation has become every nation's neighbor...
...In our half-century, the potential explosiveness of that situation has ceased to be potential...
...Asiatics—the Japanese, for instance—showed that the white man could be kicked around...
...Because it has happened gradually, we have been undisturbed by a very explosive phenomenon...
...III Russia long since recognized the elemental power waiting to erupt and decided to make use of it...
...I believe it was one of the chief causes of World War I: Around 1913, trade crises-shortage of markets—appeared all over Europe...
...kets and sustain her economy by war...
...Over the years, they organized and worked...
...His two books are "The State of Europe" and "Last Train from Berlin...
...In Western Europe, for example, there are in an area half the size of the U. S. sixteen national units, strangling one another to slow economic death—a death only staved off temporarily by the Marshall Plan...
...So we have little time either to make amends for the sins of our fathers—or to pay the wages of those sins...
...it is goods to sell in markets...
...It is no longer markets that are short...
...These three developments have caused all the big characteristic events of our time—such as the opening of an era of world-wide wars on a scale never before known in history and the rise of totalitarian tyrannies of a nature never before known...
...II The second main development of the 50 years springs likewise from our tremendous technical advance...
...If the national frontier were done away with in Europe thousands of uneconomic national industries would wither in the competition, bringing production costs down, and standards of life up...
...The Russians are being aggressive largely because of their fanatical Marxist dogma...
...Or, another index, American annual national income has multiplied eight or nine times...
...We must find a workable new distributive system to fit our changed industrial age...
...Now chief European correspondent for the Columbia Broadcasting System, stationed in London, he has studied developments first-hand in Russia, Germany, France, Italy, the Scandinavian countries, Britain, and the United States...
...No doubt many people will say this old economic argument is out of date...
...The flow of goods from industry has become a flood...
...Europe has suffered no shortage of markets because of a temporary postwar boom in machinery replacements caused by war damage...
...and they must be made to know it is cooperative and equal...
...To sum up, as I read the events of the past fifty years, we have three major jobs to do...
...But in 1950 it is a peanut...
...With a vast Europe-wide federal market available, efficient industries could standardize, rationalize as never before, bringing a further rise in standards...
...This massive power was harnessed to Russia's purposes...
...America has not suffered shortage of markets because we have been able to give goods away via lend-lease, UNRRA, and Marshall Aid...
...In its present feeble state, but with all its potential riches of industry and skilled manpower, it is a constant temptation to an aggressive power...
...Western democracy, they believe, cannot solve this problem...
...The stubborn continuance of the national framework in an age that has outgrown it is, I believe, a main cause of another great event of the half-century—the amazing decline of Europe from world dominance in 1900 to a second-rate status in World War II and to very near collapse a few years ago...
...It was largely the distress caused by this maladjustment that brought Hitler to power in Germany, and therefore caused World War II...
...To end the anachronism of the national frontier in Europe is, I believe, the second great task before the next half-century...
...Perhaps a third of it—the people with white skins—live in progressed, wealthy, modern societies...
...With prosperity, Russia's fifth columns, the domestic European Communist parties, would dwindle...
...The Europeans have done it by occupation and force of arms, and we largely by dollar-purchase...
...When the day comes that all these stimuli are stopped—and they will have to be some day for our economies cannot forever stand the strain—when America must seek markets for what we now give away, when Germany and Japan are back in the world market as full-blown competitors, when this takes place, we shall find the old basic problem of an out-dated distributive mechanism with us again...
...Among the results of that radical shrinkage of the earth is that the old chief framework of social behavior—the national state—has lost its usefulness, and has become, in fact, a frustrating shackle on peoples' strengths and morale...
...In both cases, the essential fact has been that we have taken from them far more than we have given them—and either explicitly or tacitly we have made the impression that we are superior, they inferior...
...Germany, the newest industrial power, sought to win marHOWARD K. SMITH has had a front-row seat at most of the decisive world events during the past decade and a half...
...And we are now paying the price for failing to see the dangers, the impossibility of our old relationship with Asia...
...In no 50-year period in all human history have science and technique made such strides...
...I maintain that in this period our distributive system has merely been souped up artificially...
...Since 1900, world steel production has been multiplied five or six times...
...The first of those three developments has been simply the rise in sheer industrial productivity...
...it is destined to decay, or to seek markets by war...
...The trouble is, we still try to distribute that vastly increased wealth by mechanisms of the market created for a much simpler and less productive age...
...On that reckoning, the world today is only a tenth as big as it was in 1900...
...The other day, I made that trip in 16 hours...
...And they cannot do the job...
...They thus conceive it as their sacred right and duty to seize every vantage point and possible area from us...
...Two-thirds—principally the people with colored skins—have lived in primitive squalor, ignorance, and near starvation...
...They are the source, I believe, of the great depression of the thirties, of the rise of Adolf Hitler, and the spread of Communism, In a sense, they are the cause of the Berlin blockade, the Marshall Plan, the Cominform, and the war in Korea...
...By the laws of power politics, we cannot expect Russia to stop trying to get Europe so long as Europe remains an exposed target due to its unnecessary feebleness...
...In Belgium, one in six workers became unemployed...
...I can see no more urgent problem in the coming years than to break that dogma, and break the faith of ordinary European workers and Asiatic peasants in it—by discovering a new, modern distributive mechanism to fit our new industrial age...
...I believe that our fate hangs entirely on the solution of these three problems...
...An educated stratum has come back from Western colleges to give leadership to discontent...
...The problem, thus, is solved, and is no longer with us...
...the curious, uneven development of life on our planet...
...The consequences of this maladjustment I believe to have been tremendous to our time...
...The white man has weakened himself in two world wars...
...Now, lately, the trend has been checked again by a new, bigger artificial stimulus: Rearmament...
...I deny that...
...Moscow-trained native leaders were sent out...
...The third basic development of the past half-century is the headline in every day's newspapers...
...A certain amount of industrial development has occurred and created native Asiatic managerial classes...
...Our globe was a pretty big planet in 1900...
...I hold this development to be the direct cause of the Great Depression—and consequently of the New Deal—which was merely an organized attempt to distribute purchasing power by other than market means...
...Europe's weakness is another main cause of the Cold War...
...But— a year ago, both those artificial stimuli began to taper off, and the old signs of our basic trouble reappeared: Five millions became unemployed in the United States...
...We must bring an end to the anachronism of the nation-state...
...I maintain, finally, it is a causal factor in the Cold War today...
...Then, the fastest trip you could make over the North Atlantic, the world's chief international thoroughfare, was seven days—or 160 hours...
...In Germany the figure reached nearly two millions out of work...
Vol. 15 • March 1951 • No. 3
