Hungry Statesmen & Honest Press

Unlike earnest Russian Reds, the Communists of Uruguay have a highly developed sense of humor. Last week they played a practical joke on the Seventh Pan-American Conference at Montevideo (TIME, Dec. 11). The joke kept august delegates of 21 American nations standing hungrily about in a great marble hall for more than an hour and a half while their dinner grew dry and stale.

The banquet had been tendered by massive President Dr. Gabriel Terra of Uruguay to Secretary of State Cordell Hull and the nine other foreign ministers of American countries at the Conference. To seat the 200 statesman-guests, each jealous of his rank, was the ticklish job of Senor Carlos de Yeregui, mincing-mannered Uruguayan Chef de Protocols. In plenty of time before the banquet Senor Yeregui called his limousine, set out from his office with the 200 precious place cards and the indispensable seating list. Chuckling, Montevideo's merry Communists stopped Senor Yeregui's car, forced his chauffeur to drive down a dark side street and held the frantic Chef de Protocole prisoner for agonizing hours.

Such is the nature of statesmen that without the seating list they could not eat. President Terra is the Dictator of Uruguay in affairs of state but he dared not try to seat his guests for fear of making a faux pas. Secretary Hull, though he had urged "informality" and harped on President Roosevelt's "good-neighbor policy" ever since the Conference opened, did not rise to this emergency with any such suggestion as "Why don't we all just sit down?"

Since nobody knew where the Chef de Protocole was it was solemnly announced that he had been "delayed by illness." When the chuckling Communists let him go at last, he rushed to the marble banquet hall red-faced and spluttering. Dealing the 200 place cards with the speed and accuracy of a croupier at baccarat, Chef de Protocole Yeregui soon had the fuming, famished statesmen safely seated.

"The Bankers." Major work of the Conference week was to organize ten committees, 24 subcommittees and to deal in the Steering Committee with a sensational proposal by pugnacious Mexican Foreign Minister Dr. Jose Manuel Puig Casauranc. He wanted the Conference to declare a six to ten-year all-American moratorium on international public and private debts. As high words began to fly, correspondents pressed their ears to the broad panels of the Steering Committee's door. Scandalized, the Conference secretariat sent Uruguayan Republican guards in blue uniforms with scarlet breastplates, spiked steel helmets and imposing white-holstered revolvers to chase the correspondents away. Thereafter newshawks were held at a distance of two corridors from the Steering Committee.

Secretary Hull was bound to oppose Dr. Puig's moratorium, since it would deal a terrific wallop to U. S. holders of Latin-American bonds. On the other hand he dared not cast the Roosevelt Administration in the role of championing the forgotten bondholder. What Secretary Hull said, speaking without notes in a supposedly secret committee meeting, so enraged Dr. Puig that he roundly flayed the U. S. Delegation as advocates of "secret diplomacy" and praised the "honest press" of Montevideo for obtaining by pipeline methods the text of the U. S. Secretary of State's remarks and printing them three days later in Spanish.

"Permit me to say in the frankest manner," Democrat Hull had blazed, "that the International Bankers have always obstructed the Roosevelt Government with all the forces at their disposal. They continue to do so. Our Federal Government wishes to help both the debtors and creditors. Our Congress intends to make the International Bankers responsible for any losses arising from the sale of foreign bonds to private individuals." But Mr. Hull ended by saying that the U. S. Delegation could not vote on Dr. Puig's moratorium proposal.

Without caring to say so, South American delegates appeared to agree with North America's Hull that the all-American debt structure reared by International Bankers, however diabolical, simply cannot be tampered with by a general moratorium. How to give Dr. Puig's plan a graceful burial was the pressing problem. It was solved by that most arrogantly graceful of old school diplomats, Foreign Minister Dr. Saavedra Lamas of Argentina, who converses in such formal, rounded periods that he always appears to be reading an oration. Dr. Saavedra Lamas remembered that there still exists in Washington a moribund whatnot called the Inter-American High Commission, created by the First Pan-American Financial Conference in 1915. With vast relief the Seventh Pan-American Conference in Montevideo "referred" Dr. Puig's moratorium for consideration to the Washington whatnot.

"Mediocre!" The Conference accomplished nothing else last week, though speeches were reeled off on nearly all possible subjects. Only U. S. Delegate to make a proposal of any sort was Kentucky-born Miss Sophonisba Breckinridge, professor of Public Welfare Administration since 1929 at the University of Chicago. She urged progress in promoting international interchange of bibliographic material. After sitting through a committee session in Spanish on social problems, Sophonisba Breckinridge said: "I don't understand Spanish but I have heard those same arguments so many times before that it was quite nice, just like home."

With asperity Buenos Aires' able Political Colyumist Alberto Gerchunoff declared, "The present Pan-American Conference will probably be known in history as the most mediocre of the lot."

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