"Buy American"

"Protect Your Home Markets from Cheap Alien Competition--Buy American!

"Buy American Made Goods! Keep the Home Fires Burning!"

"Buy Uncle Sam!"

Hearstpapers. advertisements, handbills, letters, posters were spreading these slogans throughout the land last week. Organizations to boost the "Buy American" idea, adapted from the "Buy British" movement-(see p. 23), have been mushrooming for the last half year. When the Saturday Evening Post featured an exhortation by Samuel George Blythe to "Buy American" early last month, the movement assumed nation-wide proportions. And last week in its behalf William Randolph Hearst turned on his big publicity machine.

Mr. Blythe based his arguments for "Buy American" squarely on the fact that countries with depreciated currencies, low wages or both are able to manufacture goods, ship to the U. S., pay a stiff tariff and still undersell the products of U. S. industry. Czechoslovakia, he cited, can lay down rubber boots in the U. S. at $1.16 a pair. They cannot be duplicated by the U. S. for less than $1.48. Japan sells celluloid combat $11.06 a gross against the best U. S. price of $25.86. Certain grades of European steel are so cheap that even if all labor cost was eliminated, U. S. steel mills could not compete, etc., etc., etc. The results, said Mr. Blythe, are closed factories and unemployment. Furthermore, he insisted, the products are of inferior quality.

Among the first to challenge the article was The New Republic: "[It is] almost a world's record for bad thinking and economic misinformation. It is the quaint notion of Mr. Blythe and the Saturday Evening Post that foreign trade consists exclusively of foreigners selling goods here and taking our money away, as its cartoons show us, in bales. . . . Have these gentlemen 'any suggestions as to how foreigners shall pay for the goods they buy from us?" That, most responsible economists agree, is the biggest flaw in "Buy American." Even last year the U. S. exported about $1,500,000,000 of farm, factory, mine and forest products. Foreign countries must sell to the U. S. goods or services of an equal value or pay in gold. And foreigners have already paid so much gold that many of them have been forced off the gold standard. Japan cannot buy Texas cotton unless she sells electric light bulbs in Boston.-

Publisher Hearst, who dotes on British and French antiques and who buys most of his newsprint in Canada, was helping himself last week to almost all of Mr. Blythe's facts & figures. He sent his newshawks scouring the land for prime examples of factories closed from foreign dumping, rounded up politicians and tycoons to endorse his campaign. "Buy American" slogans were slugged liberally throughout the makeup of Hearstpapers. First tangible result was that the City of New York agreed to specify domestic steel in all future building contracts. The buy-at-home idea has spread to States and even cities. Many States insist on state-made products in public works, give preference in supply buying.-So marked has this movement become that the Saturday Evening Post, three weeks after it ran Mr. Blythe's article, devoted its lead editorial to deploring "The New Sectionalism": "To set up barriers . . . against the freest possible interchange of goods between States shows economic and historical illiteracy." While necessary under present conditions for a nation to create foreign trade barriers, it pointed out, the same type of thing was unthinkable within a nation. The New York Times agreed thatthe logical conclusion would come "when we gave up buying & selling altogether and went in for spinning our own wool on Park Avenue and rendering our own tallow candles on Michigan Boulevard." But said the Times: "Can it be that Buy-Illinois and Buy-Kentucky crusades are themselves the logical result of Buy-American movements, such as the weekly publication referred to Saturday Evening Post] has perhaps heard of?" *

*The "Buy British" campaign has not been successful. When patriotism is advanced as the principal argument for buying a certain article, the impression is created that, aside from patriotism, the article is not the "best buy." Many of the stamp-canceling machines in British postoffices which brand envelopes with "Buy British" were made in the U. S. -On grounds of patent and trade mark infringement General Electric Co. obtained an injunction in San Francisco last week, restraining Heyman & Co. from importing Japanese electric light bulbs, announced that it planned similar action against other importers.

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