AMERICA'S OPPORTUNITY
America's Opportunity THE nation's powerful military lobby brought Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower all the way back from Germany to testify for its pet legislation— universal peacetime military...
...The representatives of 47 nations participated in the framing of that agreement...
...Take the case of the Bretton Woods agreement for international monetary and economic cooperation...
...The Council proudly proclaims that it induced big business men to invest "more than one billion dollars in advertising space" during that period...
...7. Provides that war housing may be sold to communities...
...What the Council doesn't reveal is that most of these business men didn't have a thing to sell...
...Dwight D. Eisenhower all the way back from Germany to testify for its pet legislation— universal peacetime military training—but the general's testimony was a stale rehash of the "papa knows best" argument of the brass hats...
...IT was nearly six months ago that the delegates at San Francisco completed their blueprint for a United Nations Organization...
...3. Authorizes a five-year $50,000,000 program to encourage local planning...
...As a matter of fact, this advertising campaign was one of the most shameful performances of the war period...
...It didn't come out of their pockets...
...It came out of Uncle Sam's pocket at a time when Uncle Sam was in desperate need of money...
...Congress Must Act THE nation's housing shortage is growing more "critical every day, and, according to John B. Blandford, Jr., administrator of the National Housing Agency, the situation will be even more desperate in 1946...
...The business men who squandered the money so urgently needed by their country, and the publishers who eagerly pocketed it, were in a real sense guilty of sabotage—and that is a very mild term to apply to their conduct...
...Frankly, we're getting thoroughly fed up with this line of chatter, whether it comes from a five-star General of the Army or a two-bit politician...
...The fact that the bill is sponsored by leaders of both major parties and men of sharply differing political and sectional viewpoints strengthens the hope that Congress may act soon and favorably...
...Now that the San Francisco 'and Bretton Woods proposals have been duly ratified by the United States and just as duly deposited in the archives as dust-absorbers, the same crowd which assured us that approval of these agreements would prove to the world that we were no longer nasty isolationists, blithely marches on under a new banner...
...8. Provides for an annual inventory of housing...
...CERTAINLY this is a modest enough start to fill a vast and urgent need in the nation...
...Everywhere in America, in big cities and small towns, the cheerless sign, "No Vacancies," tells the same grim story...
...The three Senators—Robert Wagner of New York and A. J. Ellender of Louisiana, Democrats, and Robert A. Taft of Ohio, Republican—have introduced a bill which: 1. Creates a single national housing agency...
...It was nearly five months afterward before the rest of the Big Five signed on the dotted line, and even now there has not been a single meeting of the organization which was to keep the peace...
...6. Authorizes construction of 500,000 low-rent public housing units over a four-year . period...
...If the members of Congress are as keen politicians as they like to think they are, they know that the country is in no mood to take "no" for an answer...
...Both houses approved the measure by overwhelming votes despite the fact that the United States must assume most of the financial load...
...Nearest thing to a new "argument" was Eisenhower's assertion that American failure to build a conscript army would rekindle Europe's fear that America is returning to isolationism...
...But now—nearly six months afterwards—not a single one of the other 46 nations has ratified the Bretton Woods Agreement...
...We have a bale of clippings in our files warning Congress that unless it passes the enabling legislation in no time flat, it would be wrecking the hope of world peace and prosperity and proving to the world that we were mean old isolationists...
...A concrete plan has now been laid before them by three Senators who were part of a Senate committee which conducted a painstaking' inquiry into the whole housing problem...
...This huge advertising bill was charged up against expenses and deducted from the profits of the big munitions makers...
...Congress, dawdling for weeks now on other phases of the vast problem of reconversion, must snap out of its atomic funk and act promptly and decisively on a national houshigjirogram if we are to avoid a major disaster...
...If the money came out of their own pockets they wouldn't have spent 10 per cent of it...
...The U. S. Senate ratified the plan in record-breaking time with only two dissenting votes...
...A Wasted Billion (From Labor, publication of the Railroad Brotherhoods) THE War Advertising Council has made public a report covering its activities "during 1,307 days of the world conflict—January 15, 1942, to August 14, 1945...
...5. Authorizes Federal loans of $500,000,000 to localities for slum clearance projects...
...This time we must adopt the totalitarian program of universal peacetime conscription to prove we are not isolationists...
...If the money hadn't been squandered on useless advertising, 90 per cent of it would have gone to the public Treasury to help support the war...
...Congress responded...
...4. Sets up a home loan plan providing for a 32-year amortization period...
...Thousands of returning veterans, many of them newly married, spend their first weeks at home tramping the streets looking for shelter, and countless displaced war workers have returned to their home towns to find themselves locked out...
...2. Authorizes a five-year $12,500,000 program for housing research...
...IF America must still prove that we believe in international cooperation to preserve peace, we have a magnificent opportunity to lead the way with a common man's crusade for the worldwide abolition of conscription and the reduction of armaments...
...No nation on earth has been as prompt in fulfilling her international obligations and leading the way toward world cooperation as has the United States —with all its faults...
...Eisenhower's alternative—to prove our internationalism by regimenting a mass conscript army—seems to us an insult to the intelligence of all Americans who sincerely believe in world cooperation, not world coercion by a few military powers armed to the teeth...
Vol. 9 • November 1945 • No. 47
