Whose Bold New Program?

April 11, 1949

In his inaugural address President Truman announced what has now become the famous “fourth point”—“a bold new program” for “underdeveloped areas,” a program to “foster capital investment in areas needing development,” to “greatly increase the industrial activity in other nations,” and to “raise substantially their standards of living.”

No sooner was this announced than the brains of Washington bureaucrats began to bubble with grandiose schemes for giving away still more of the American taxpayer’s money to foreign lands. Our government representative put the idea before the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, which adopted a resolution approving it. Now the ECA has set up a “colonial development division.” And Deputy Administrator Bruce says that this new division is intended to carry out “point four.”

Before we go farther with this idea it may be instructive to look into its origin. I do not know who sold the idea to Mr. Truman. But at least the record shows clearly where the idea came from in the first place. The following quotations are from a book published in 1944:

“America can underwrite a gigantic program of the industrialization of Africa, to be launched immediately. . . . It must initiate a general and steady rise in the standard of life of the African peoples. . . .

“Closely related socially, economically, and politically with Africa are the Near Eastern countries of Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Trans-Jordan. . . . Here also a broad regional program of economic development is called for. . . .

“What is clearly demanded by the situation is that the United States take the lead in proposing a common program of economic development of the Latin American countries. . . . For Latin America [such a program] opens the door for an immense leap ahead in progress. . . .

“For the United States especially it contributes a large part of the answer to that all-important question as to whether we shall be able to keep our national economy in operation. . . .

“The government can do it, if ‘free enterprise’ fails to meet the challenge and bogs down on the job.

“Our government can create a series of giant industrial development corporations, each in partnership with some other government or group of governments, and set them to work upon large-scale plans of railroad and highway building, agricultural and industrial development, and all-round modernization in all the devastated and undeveloped areas of the world. America has the skilled technicians capable of producing the plans for such projects, sufficient to get them under way, within a six-month period of time after a decision is made. . . .

“On a world scale the combined projects could be self-liquidating in the period of a generation. They would become the best investments the American capitalist class had ever made in its whole history.”

The book in which this proposal appeared five years ago was Teheran: Our Path in War and Peace (International Publishers). And the name of the author was Earl Browder, then still officially head of the American branch of the Communist Party (temporarily calling itself the Communist Political Association).

We need not point out here everything that is wrong with this proposal on political and economic grounds. We need not point out, for example, that every million dollars of capital we send abroad sets back our own capital development by just that much. And this at a time when President Truman himself insists that “at least $50,000,000,000 should be invested by industry to improve and expand our [own] productive facilities over the next few years,” and when he complains that our own steel, oil, and electrical industries are not being expanded fast enough to suit him.

It is enough to point out for the moment that the idea for the “bold new program” comes straight out of the book of the then head of the Communist Party in this country.