THE KEY TO DEMOCRATIC GROWTH

...The rest of the increase came from greater productivity resulting from improved irrigation, additional fertilizer, and the added zeal which the peasants cheerfully put into the development of the land which now belonged to them...

...Four—A rural credit system with lower interest rates is another important element in community development...

...One of General Douglas MacArthur's first actions was a sweeping land reform designed "to assure that those who till the land of Japan shall henceforth have an equal opportunity to enjoy the fruits of their labor...

...We need to create a more realistic understanding of the complexities and priorities of development among the general public, Congress, and government officials...

...The result has been a spirit of personal opportunity backed by technical skills and good basic education which have produced an abundance of agricultural wealth unprecedented in human history...

...In November, 1917, Lenin called upon the Russian peasants to seize the land, drive out the landlords, and join the city workers in destroying the wobbly new Kerensky government...

...A comprehensive system of community development should have an equally high priority...

...As long as three-fourths of the population in a developing country are denied a full measure of political participation and personal dignity, they will constitute fertile ground for subversion and unrest...

...For most Americans the unrest of Asia, Africa, and Latin America is symbolized by pictures of unruly, shouting students and industrial workers in the streets of great cities...

...In 1932, many rural areas throughout the United States rose in protest against farm foreclosures growing out of the Great Depression...

...Although city-bred Karl Marx failed to understand the importance of the peasants, Lenin and Mao Tse-tung understood it well...

...In the Middle West of the late Nineteenth Century, the Grangers and Populists aggressively organized an effective demand for banking and railroad reforms...

...In the last two years two remarkable documents—the Act of Bogota and the Charter of Punta del E'ste, signed by twenty American nations—have given high priority to programs of land distribution and rural development in Latin America...

...most of the costs can be paid for in local currencies, generated through the sale by local governments of U.S...

...Five—Marketing cooperatives should also be organized on a democratic basis...

...Nineteen thousand such cooperatives have been organized in Japan...

...Six—Developing countries should be encouraged to assign some of their military budgets to engineering battalions modeled on our U.S...

...Two—Again reflecting our own experience, an orderly program of expanded land ownership is a political and economic must...

...The demand for change in rural areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America is insistent and cannot be denied...

...Although it is dangerous to generalize about the specific problems faced by nations in different stages of development, certain lessons emerge from our own development experience here in America, together with that of the Japanese and others: One—Particularly in the early stages, an unbalanced emphasis on rapid industrial growth is likely to increase rather than decrease political unrest in the cities and rural areas as well...

...In poor years the peasant was forced to borrow at inflated interest rates either directly from his landlord or from the local bank which the landlord often owned...

...Such cooperatives will help to reduce the middlemen's profit margins and thereby assure the peasant-producer a larger share of the consumer price...

...THE KEY TO DEMOCRATIC GROWTH by CHESTER BOWLES More than a century ago, John Adams of Massachusetts, second President of the United States, described the development of American democracy as the "opening of a grand design of Providence for the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth...

...Postwar Japan offers a particularly dramatic example of what able planning, coupled with a realistic understanding of public attitudes and needs—particularly in the rural areas—can accomplish...

...Agricultural cooperatives were expanded, strengthened, and organized on democratic lines to reduce profit margins on goods and produce bought and sold by the farmers...

...Seventy-five years earlier, in the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the Continental Congress had laid down the basic principle that every township had the responsibility to provide a proper schooling for its future citizens...

...The effort to organize the peasants into regimented rural communes ended in disaster, and sagging food production coupled with a rapidly rising population is now China's gravest problem...

...The remarkable response to our own Peace Corps, which I believe has its roots in our great rural tradition, indicates that thousands of young Americans are eager to undertake overseas assignments in teaching, agricultural development, and public health...

...The postwar land reform legislation of 1946 dramatically changed all this...

...Such a program should include an agricultural extension service to help introduce improved seeds, tools, fertilizer, insecticides, and the more effective use of irrigation water...

...Simultaneously, the reorganized Agency for International Development set forth a new policy of promoting cooperatives, both producer and consumer...

...A comprehensive rural construction program of this kind presents staggering problems for American policymakers and their counterparts in the developing nations...

...Orderly economic and political growth in the countryside...

...However, once their revolutions had been won, the Russian and Chinese leaders found that the peasant's stubborn individualism made him difficult material for Communism...

...And so they came to feel that the village which traditionally had been run by the land-owning minority was really their village and that the school their children attended was their school...

...In these circumstances, it is natural that the major focus of development should be on industrial expansion, on producing more goods for export and for consumption by the more prosperous urban minority, on more highways, docks, and power plants...

...This edict had broad support from Japanese officials who realized that a modern, politically stable Japanese state could not be based on an angry and embittered peasantry...

...At best the modernization of an old society is a disrupting process...

...with such a program, output per acre, as in Japan, will almost surely be increased...

...When I visited Japan in 1953, these carefully coordinated actions had already begun to create a new dynamism throughout the Japanese countryside...

...Growing progress in education...

...In contrast, our own extraordinary food-growing capacity provides us with a most effective economic instrument in strengthening rural economies in the developing nations...

...Our task is to bring such industrialization into better balance with other elements in the economy...

...Although the importance of this legislation to our national development is dramatic in terms of physical progress, its greatest significance may lie in the way it shaped our national character and gave depth to our belief in the dignity of the individual...

...For two generations a sluggish agriculture has been a major drag on the development of the Soviet economy...

...In relatively underpopulated countries such as Afghanistan and certain new nations of Africa, agricultural machinery has a substantial role to play...

...It was easy to believe the claim that more than one-third of Japanese farms had a television set...

...Army Corps of Engineers...

...We cannot and should not attempt to slow down the pace of industrialization...

...Some seventy per cent of all Japanese farm families now supplement their income from agriculture in this way...

...Additional opportunities for part-time employment were being made available through expanded village industries and fisheries...

...Seven—In assisting developing na-tions to create healthy rural societies, we Americans must realize that not all of our own successful agricultural experience is relevant...

...This year marks the hundredth anniversary of two of the most decisive documents of American history—the Homestead Act of May 20, 1862, and the Morrill Land Grant College Act of July 2, 1862...

...Instinctively we want to see justice done and our development assistance programs used more effectively for the direct benefit of the people in Asia, Africa, and Latin America...

...Part of this income resulted from the almost complete elimination of land rentals, which had formerly averaged forty per cent of farm production costs...

...Since the passage of the Homestead Act, more than 270 million acres of free land have been distributed to American farmers...

...But in India, Pakistan, Ceylon, and most other developing nations where there is a surplus of rural labor, agricultural tasks can be performed most economically with simple tools and the power of bullocks and buffalo...

...There is no evidence, for example, that increased national income in itself produces increased political stability...

...In most developing nations, the best-educated and most forward-looking elements are largely concentrated in the cities, where living conditions are more pleasant and opportunities more promising...

...In the long, bloody war that followed it was they who filled the ranks of the Red armies which overran the cities and ultimately defeated Chiang Kai-shek...

...Before the war nearly seventy-five per cent of the Japanese peasants either owned no land at all or rented a good part of the land they cultivated...

...For the Soviet and Chinese leadership there could be only one choice...

...This is a sobering fact which economic planners in Asia, Africa, and Latin America must take into account...

...Loans at low interest rates were provided to enable him to buy improved seeds, fertilizer, and tools...

...The landlords are politically entrenched, and relatively few of them are prepared to adjust themselves to modern concepts of development...

...Most of them, like the Americans of a century ago, live in rural areas...

...The rural areas are remote, uncomfortable, and often forbidding...

...and that what we now need are guidelines for action in our overseas development efforts that reflect this tradition...

...In several developing nations, a determined effort is now being made to adjust national programs to meet this four-part challenge...

...Land rentals averaged more than half the crop...

...As a result, they were soon forced to repudiate the promises on which they had ridden to power and to herd the peasants into collectives and communes...

...It would be folly, however, to underestimate the difficulties...

...Therefore, the great feudal estates, where they still exist, must be broken up and the land distributed to the people who till it...

...But when we consider the lot of the "slavish part of mankind all over the earth," three significant facts become evident: • Hundreds of millions of men and women in Asia, Africa, and Latin America are today living harsher, more retarded, and less rewarding lives than in John Adams' time...

...The Pentagon has now begun to place:major emphasis on the "civic action" role which military forces could play in helping to bring about genuine rural development...

...Yet the future of these developing continents is more likely to be decided in the remote muddy villages where nearly eighty per cent of the people live, precisely as the course and character of American democracy was decided in our own rural areas, first in New England and the Atlantic coastal states, and ultimately on our Western frontier...

...Our greatest difficulty is in finding able men and women who are willing to work under difficult conditions in the often remote village areas of the developing continents and who are sensitive to the deeply rooted prejudices, hopes, and fears which characterize the people of such areas...

...The increase in the farmers' real income was swift and substantial...

...As their confidence grew, the former tenant farmers began to be constructive participants in local affairs, rubbing elbows with the former landlords on the local agricultural commission, the cooperative board, the village council, and the school board...

...Since the farmers have seen with their own eyes what can be achieved by democratic planning, cooperation, and self-help, the extremes of Left or Right have little appeal...

...As the farmers' income increased, a rapidly expanding market was provided for the production of Japanese factories...

...consequently, political controls were given priority...

...Nor have American farmers ever shown any hesitancy in fighting for what they believed to be right...

...In one sense, Japan is a special case...

...Such a system enables the peasants to by-pass the money-lenders and secure funds on reasonable terms for the purchase of fertilizer and simple farm implements...

...commodities such as wheat, rice, powdered milk, fats, and oils...

...These favorable conditions underscore the difficulties which face less well-endowed new nations in their effort to modernize their economies within the framework of stable political institutions...

...Among most Americans their protests strike a responsive chord...

...Roads were being extended, new schools built, and public health improved...

...Such projects will contribute far more to to the orderly political growth of the village than a better constructed school or road provided by the government with no local involvement...

...Washing machines and other electrical devices were already commonplace in rural homes...

...This underlines the need for significant progress in education and improved city housing to support industrial expansion...

...As in much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America today, our rural tradition has always been marked by a radical strain of protest against exploitation or injustice from any source...

...In the emerging new countries of other continents the "slavish" rural millions are now politically aroused against landlords who take three-fifths of their crop, against money lenders who charge as much as forty per cent interest, against profiteering middlemen who absorb most of the profits in trade, and against corrupt, indifferent, far-away governments...

...A community development effort should also encourage local initiative in building schools and roads with freely contributed local labor, improved health standards, and the encouragement of village self-government...

...Shay's Rebellion shortly after the Revolution was a protest by western Massachusetts farmers against what they believed to be unfair taxation...

...In China, where there is less than two acres of arable land per rural family, the impact has been even more drastic...

...This imaginative legislation opened up half a continent to American farmers with a sense of individual freedom and possibility that came from possessing their own land...

...Even in a good year this left him a net share of not more than twenty to twenty-five per cent of the crop...

...It is my belief that the American democratic experience of which John Adams spoke is closely related to the challenge of our present-day world...

...Although its rural people before the war were largely poor and exploited, the literacy rate was far higher than in the developing nations with which we are now concerned, and a competent administrative system was available...

...Since then, American democracy, with all its imperfections, has given the American people a degree of opportunity and dignity that has been unequalled in the long history of man...

...In recent years these millions of people have been awakening to the opportunities of a new kind of world and are now grimly determined to demand their proper share...

...Unless land reform is supported by a community extension program of this kind, it will almost certainly lead to lower production...

...When I re-visited Japan last autumn, I found the Japanese rural revolution well launched on a second phase...

...As long as they lack the capacity to buy anything beyond the bare essentials, industrial output in the urban centers will remain hopelessly stifled...

...Yet because the existing injustices are so deeply rooted in traditions and prejudice and so imbedded in the existing power structure, the obstacles to change remain formidable...

...When they responded, he triumphantly and rightly asserted "now the Bolshevik Revolution has become irrevocable...

...In doing so, we should pay particular attention to the political implications of development...

...In these deeply rooted principles of individual land ownership, democratic self-help, and the balancing of governmental power against that of privileged private interests, lies the decisive key to a successful United States development policy in Asia, Africa, and Latin America...

...We are now a highly developed nation, and most of our people have lost touch with our rural tradition...

...What does this mean in terms of John Adams' hopeful assertion...

...The Morrill Act led to the creation of sixty-eight great public educational institutions, still committed largely to the development of rural America...

...Many of them have indicated a desire, once their Peace Corps service has been completed, to continue in other phases of this crucial effort to bring the billion or more peasants of the world into the mainstream of Twentieth Century life...

...It is our response to the awakening peasant in these vast areas of the globe that will largely determine the direction the world will follow in the last decades of our century...

...Last year Congress wrote these very principles into our own economic assistance legislation...

...Let us consider how our own long rural tradition relates to the current problems of the billion or more villagers in rural Asia, Africa, and Latin America...

...Although we have made a good beginning, there is much more to be done...

...Increasing capital investment, domestic and foreign...

...The impact of this peaceful rural revolution was felt in Japan's cities...

...The price has been heavy...

...Was the development of American democracy truly the "opening of a grand design of Providence" for human freeCHESTER BOWLES, who has had many recent opportunities to observe conditions in underdeveloped countries firsthand, is Special Representative and Adviser to President Kennedy on Asian, African, and tatin American Affairs...

...One horn of the Communist dilemma is the political need to curb the peasant's sense of independence...

...Three—Although widespread land ownership is vital to the creation of a stable rural society, it is only one element in the process...

...An independent peasantry would undercut the Communist power structure at a particularly vital point...

...These units can play an important role in building bridges, roads, schools, and clinics and at the same time establish close relationships with the rural people whose freedoms they are seeking to defend...

...Under this program land was purchased from the great estate owners with government bonds and then divided among the former tenants...

...Equally important, it suggests the need to slow down the movement to the cities by improving education, roads, and secondary employment through small industries and crafts in the rural areas...

...In Latin America, national per capita production ranges from a high of more than $1,000 in Venezuela to a low of $55 in Bolivia, with no pattern of growth in political stability or democracy between these extremes...

...the other, the economic need to encourage him to work from dawn to dusk to provide the increasing agricultural production which is basic to the growth of every economy, whether it be Communist or capitalist...

...In almost every Japanese farmyard I saw mechanical power of some kind, saving labor and energy for other tasks...

...Moreover, the political effect of Japan's rural revolution has been marked...

...Cuba under the dictatorship of Batista had the second highest average per capita income in Latin America...

...The maximum amount of land that could be owned by one family was set at seven and one-half acres...

...To encourage each farmer to follow the most productive methods of farming, rural extension services were greatly extended...

...dom...

...Yet unless a reasonable balance can be struck between all elements in the society, industrial growth may widen the gap between the rich and the poor, and lead to a still greater sense of injustice...

...The tenant paid for the fertilizer, implements, and seeds...

...Peasants who do not own their own land have little incentive to develop their farms and to put in the longer hours and hard work necessary to expand their production...

...Yet the obstacles that the Communists face in dealing with the rising expectations of the one billion Asian, African, and Latin American peasants may be even more formidable...

...When the Nigerian, Brazilian, or Indian peasant son leaves his father's farm for the promise of a factory job in a distant city, he exchanges the familiar trees, hills, and family which have given him a sense of belonging for a small cash wage, life in a crowded city slum, and often personal insecurity and frustration...

...This harsh treatment reflected a deeply rooted conflict within Communism itself...

...Or are we Twentieth Century Americans now so cut off from the mainstream of humanity by the very extent of our own success that we are destined only to sit on the sidelines as the "slavish part of mankind" struggles toward dignity and freedom...

...Funds with which to compensate the landlords can often be provided by increasing the extremely low land taxes which now normally prevail in nations where the land is in the hands of a small minority of powerful families...

...Special attention was directed to "programs which reach the people who are engaged in agrarian pursuits or who live in the villages or rural areas...

...The landlord paid only a modest land tax...

...This raised land ownership from twenty-five per cent of all rural families to ninety-four per cent...

...In the late 1920's Mao began to rally the Chinese peasants with his promise of land to the tillers...

...A vital first step in Japan's extraordinary resurgence was the rural revolution launched by the United States Military Government in Tokyo immediately following World War II...

...In comparative terms, rural development requires only a modest investment in foreign exchange...

...and because of its economic role as producers and consumers...

...The peasant majority in Asia, Africa, and Latin America is important for two reasons: because of its potential political power...

...Successful development rests on four closely interrelated factors: Growing competence in government...

...The costly and complex farm machinery on most American farms, for example, is designed primarily to reduce the cost of labor, rather than to increase the output per acre...

...Modern industry and the infra-structure to support it are essential to the growth of prosperous societies...

...Regardless of the fairness of such compensation, however, a really adequate program of land distribution will be bitterly opposed by the landlords, who are likely to carry substantial political influence...

...A key test for the governments of many developing countries will be their courage and ability to cope with the resulting pressures...