INTERNATIONAL "Looking Forward"

INTERNATIONAL

"Looking Forward"

The smallest South American nation-- which is also wealthy, salubrious and progressive--played handsome host this week to the Seventh Pan-American Conference.

On the opening day Uruguay's picturesque Civil Guard marched glittering through the streets of Montevideo in uniforms dating from the War of Liberation from Spain (1810). Escorted by galloping lancers Dr. Gabriel Terra, heavyset, heavy-jowled President & Dictator, sped to open the Conference at 6 p. m. Alighting from their limousines in a sudden squall of wind and rain, delegates of 21 American nations clutched their silk hats and fled with flapping coattails up the marble steps of Uruguay's Legislative Palace to take refuge from the weather in its high-domed, multi-marbled and scarlet-trimmed Congressional Chamber. In the excitement the delegates of Paraguay got shunted into the spectators' gallery, failed to squirm out of the fashionable crush before President Terra took the rostrum. Their empty seats touched off pinwheels of rumor that "Paraguay has withdrawn from the Conference! She is afraid it will try to stop her war with Bolivia" (TIME, July 17).

Star delegates of the Conference were silver-haired, sweetly reasonable U. S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull and Mexico's darkling, pugnacious Foreign Minister Puig Casauranc, high-powered salesman of the idea that there ought to be a Spanish American League of Nations to "offset" the Yankees and Canadians. Uruguayan Communists let Senor Casauranc alone--though Mexico does not recognize the Soviet Union--but strewed the path of the U. S. Secretary of State with leaflets reading "Down with Bandit Hull! Down with Yankee Imperialism!"

Mr. Hull had come to Montevideo under the same handicap which bound him at the London Monetary & Economic Conference (TIME, June 19). On Montevideo's agenda, as on London's, were the major problems of currency and tariffs. Because President Roosevelt remains cheerfully opposed to negotiating these problems, Mr. Hull's mission at Montevideo was to carry out what Mr. Roosevelt has called his "good neighbor policy." This Secretary Hull did for several days before the Conference opened by going about Montevideo in an ordinary business suit and calling on the always cutaway-clad Latin-American delegates without previously announcing his arrival--a novelty in violation of diplomatic precedent. Especially flabbergasted were delegates of warring Bolivia and Paraguay when they returned to their hotels one day and found that the neighborly U. S. Secretary of State had called while they were out.

In his speech opening the Conference, President Terra urged the delegates to grapple: 1) with the economic issues: and 2) with the 18-month-old Chaco War of Bolivia and Paraguay.

"The American ideal of peace," cried President Terra, "must not be buried in the swamps of the Chaco." Demanding "solution of the great economic problems" he continued: "We all know the principal one and we must not hide it, because to do so would be cowardly and senseless! It is the policy of isolation by means of tariff barriers. . . . Having been a professor of economics myself, I recognize in President Roosevelt a master of this science. His book, Looking Forward, shows with great vision the appalling consequences of the Hawley-Smoot tariff.

"The Hawley-Smoot tariff has almost completely closed United States markets to our industrial and agricultural products and for three years has made it impossible for us to pay our public and private debts. It has increased our taxation necessary to meet the costs of government and, finally, has closed our factories.

"That statesman, President Roosevelt, who shows that he understands perfectly the causes of the trouble, believes that the reaction must be immediate, that the tariffs of all American countries must be lowered and that it is time to open the doors of trade which have been closed by this Chinese wall."

Since Secretary of State Hull still believes in cutting tariffs, he nodded vigorously at President Terra's words, then appeared to recollect how greatly Mr. Roosevelt's tariff views have changed since he wrote Looking Forward last winter. With the U. S.'s new Recovery and Reconstruction program predicated on maintaining the U. S. tariff wall, old style Anti-Tariff Democrat Hull has plenty to worry about. According to one Montevideo correspondent this week, Secretary Hull "often wears the preoccupied look of one absorbed in his own thoughts."

Prospects at the Conference were for: 1) acceptance of President Roosevelt's indicated offer to ask Congress for $500,000 to be spent in surveying the route for a Pan-American highway 10,000 miles long from New York to Buenos Aires: 2) wrangling over Caribbean proposals to reinterpret the Monroe Doctrine and the Platt Amendment in such fashion as to bar U. S. intervention in Latin-American affairs; 3) adoption of some sort of Conference resolution bidding Paraguay and Bolivia stop fighting; 4) impetus to numerous scholarly undertakings in the realm of codifying South American international law and examining the degree of preparedness of South American women to vote in general elections.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.