OUR GLOBAL REPUTATION
Our Global Reputation AMERICAN newspaper columnists and radio commentators are fond of portraying their country as the villain in the drama of world diplomacy. Most of them picture the United...
...Most of them picture the United States as hesitant, selfish, isolationist, and as unwilling to accept its responsibilities as a principal actor on the global stage...
...But the most melancholy evidence of our diminishing strength and popularity around the world comes right in this Western hemisphere...
...Every year, for the six years since GTA was established, these farmers have reinvested their savings in their cooperative, to strengthen it against the fierce attacks of the private operators...
...We are not here concerned with the strength or weakness of the Roosevelt-Hull proposals, but rather with the fact of their proposing...
...Marquis Childs, the syndicated columnist, noted last month that "our prestige in Latin America has been slipping—and slipping fast...
...The quotation we carried last week from George Bernard Shaw merely confirmed the judgment of many other observers that our failure to help feed the starving children of Europe and our mass bombing of the continent are making us cordially hated in large areas of Europe...
...This year, with a net worth of more than $5,000,-000, and^ handling 100 million bushels of grain a year, GTA is in a position to meet any contingency...
...George Bernard Shaw summed up one phase of our obligation when he noted that "nothing can save us but a conspicuous humanity in all our dealings with the victims and the vanquished...
...Those who have watched developments at Moscow at close range were not surprised by these disclosures...
...Or take India and the Orient...
...This flogging of "selfish and isolationist America" has gone on even during the past three months or so in which first Mr...
...This is money that will make the anti-co-op blustering of such outfits as the Tax Equality Association and other groups tremendously unpopular among the farmers in the Northwest...
...They have recognized right along that Joe Stalin and his associates were playing the global game close to their vests—far closer than ever did the much berated United States Government...
...We are confronted here with a situation which has explosive possibilities...
...Almost every returning correspondent and American official, military or political, has emphasized either publicly or privately that we are dissipating our good will by becoming too closely identified there with British imperialism, that we are being associated in the minds of the masses with the reconquest of an empire rather than the liberation of a people...
...Nor is it conscience money from the speculators in grain shares...
...Hull and then Mr...
...Welles mentioned...
...America's influence in the world—Wendell Willkie called it our "reservoir of good will"—is being rapidly impaired, not because of any fancied isolationism, but because our cold-blooded actions bear little or no relation to our noble pronouncements...
...This is the first year that far-sighted farmers will receive money from their marketing co-op for their own individual use...
...This aggressive leadership by the United States Government has gone largely unnoticed in the dissertations of the "blame everything on America" columnists and commentators...
...And so the farmers of the Northwest are receiving their patronage dividend for the first year...
...Roosevelt took the lead in proclaiming United Nations' objectives and calling for inter-Allied conversations to chart the course of the postwar settlement...
...2. The Soviet Government is at peace with Japan and does not want to participate in conversations in which China is a party, even though the topic of discussion is planning for postwar preservation of the peace...
...The reluctance of the Soviets to commit themselves on paper regarding the peace and their refusal to confer with Chinese officials — ironically during the week which marked the beginning of the eighth year of Chinese resistance to Japanese aggression — makes it crystal-clear that we are dealing with realistic advocates of a "Russia First" policy which makes our own "America First" proponents seem sometimes to be wild-eyed internationalists...
...A Washington dispatch to the New York Times disclosed that the Soviet Government is reluctant to engage in an exchange of views with Britain, the United States, and China because: 1. The Stalin regime does not want to "commit its postwar peace plans to paper ahead of time...
...Co-op Farmers Collect AGROUP of farmers in the grain belt of the Northwest will receive in the next few weeks more than a quarter of a billion dollars in cold cash...
...Shaw summarized it this way: "We must realize that the Anglo-American alliance will come put of this war with a terrifying reputation, not only in enemy countries, but in Allied ones...
...There are danger signals flying in Europe and Asia, as well as the "many parts of the New World" that Mr...
...But most of all, it is money that means freedom—freedom from the price strangulation of the monopolistic grain speculators in the pit...
...We are being judged around the world not by our lofty pronouncements about a world organization and the preservation of peace, but by our specific acts in specific situations...
...A peace of revenge, hate, and dismemberment, no matter how cruelly enforced by a world police force, would only add to our reputation as world villain and hasten the day when we must fight again...
...Take the countries of Europe, for instance...
...This is money that will find its way into the shops on Main Street and not the vaults on Wall Street or the roulette tables in Miami Beach...
...Last week they were all looking the other way when it was revealed that the Soviet Union, and not the United States, has been holding up exploratory conversations on the formation of a world organization to enforce the peace...
...The quarter of a million represents pure savings —savings made by the farmers themselves through cooperative marketing of their own grain in the great Farmers Union Grain Terminal Association...
...This money is no gift from a paternalistic government paying them for not producing...
...Commenting on this report, former Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles reluctantly agreed that we have been abandoning the Good Neighbor Policy, that "the danger signals are flying in many parts of the New World," and that unless there is a return to the practice of Good Neighbor relations, "the deterioration in inter-American relations which has already set in cannot be arrested...
...NOW the American commentators and columnists who cast the United States in the villain's role are closer to the truth than they suspect—but not for the reasons they advance...
Vol. 8 • July 1944 • No. 29
