WHY NOT AMERICA TOO?
McMillin, Miles
Why Not America Too? Bv MILES McMILLIN FOR all the sarcasm directed at Henry Wallace's proposed milk route to the Hottentots and the President's schemes to spread the Four Freedoms and American...
...Lilienthal's suggestion has hit this campaign for the "new American imperialism" at its weakest point with de-vastatingly logical force...
...Eussia, he trumpeted in his book, offers great hope for America...
...Lawrence...
...Not long ago Eric Johnston, the streamlined head of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, came back from Russia, where he was allowed to enter the Kremlin and touch Stalin's hand...
...Bv MILES McMILLIN FOR all the sarcasm directed at Henry Wallace's proposed milk route to the Hottentots and the President's schemes to spread the Four Freedoms and American butter all over the world, their big business hecklers really have more in common than in contrast with that policy...
...If you tune out the savage roars from the cheering sections and listen to the signals that the quarterbacks are barking, you'll find that both teams are really playing the same kind of game...
...Why not organize a businessmen's tour of America's still unelectrified millions of farms and her undeveloped but potentially rich river valleys to dramatize the advantage of developing those markets, too, along with the Russian, the Chinese, and the Latin American, for the products of American factories...
...Practically any day you can pick up a newspaper or magazine to read that some traveling business mogul has come back to the United States to announce breathlessly that he has found a new "American frontier" in some distant land...
...If industrial development is in our interest for undeveloped Russia, why isn't it good for under-developed regions of the U. S. A...
...Why don't more of these business men and the national organizations for which they speak give the industrially undeveloped American regions a boost in their fight for freight rate equality 1" And what about the electrification of American farms, Lilienthal asks, pointing out that opposition to rural electrification has come from business men and business organizations...
...McGraw exclaims in a passage that might have been cribbed from one of Henry Wallace's "Utopian dreams...
...We must extend liberal credit terms so that Eussia can develop its resources and provide a market for American-made goods, Mr...
...Both sides are fervent apostles of the doctrine that America's destiny lies almost anywhere but in America...
...Agreeing with the proposition that other countries should be encouraged to develop their resources, Lilienthal expresses his amazement at these same business leaders "who see Russia as a great opportunity and yet oppose development, often on less generous terms, right here at home...
...Amid the fabulous riches of that section of the world is found the "frontier for American enterprise," Mr...
...Congress should inquire into this prejudice against the American people when big business sends its crack lobbyists into action against the river development legislation that is sure to come up this session...
...Mr...
...These are only two of the examples of the endemic plague of "new-worlds-to-conqueritis" that is sweeping our business and political leaders...
...Question From Lilienthal A few weeks ago James H. McGraw, Jr., president of the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, discovered the Orient and its great potentialities and told the readers of Business Week all about it...
...Concluding his comments, Lilienthal offers a suggestion that has our whole-hearted endorsement...
...This is what puzzles me," he said...
...A Tour Of America...
...Now that we have taken a great step toward peace and security at Dumbarton Oaks, he wrote, American workers and business men must recognize "the opportunity and challenge" in the "the mass despair," "countless millions" suffering from starvation, "living standards at the lowest rung of the world scale...
...Why is it good business and good policy to risk our money on the Volga and the Dneiper, but 'wasteful and extravagant' to develop the Missouri Valley, the Arkansas, and the St...
...Johnson told us...
...Why encourage industry with American long term credits in far-off places—in our own interest, mind you—and be actively hostile, as some of the same travelers are, toward measures that will have the effect of encouraging industrial development in Missouri, in Tennessee, Iowa, Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas...
...Re-cently David Lilienthal, who, as the head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, has seen what can be done on some of own undeveloped frontiers, had some pertinent comments to make on the wanderlust afflicting American dollars...
Vol. 9 • January 1945 • No. 5
