Neylam Plan

Many a big poker game ends up in pistol shots, especially when one player has snaffled all the chips. Often the big winner, though honest, gets hurt, or his good friend does. To suggest that the big winner redistribute some of the chips among the losers so that the game can go on and no one get hurt, sounds boy-scoutish. Yet if the game must go on, what suggestion could be more practical?

Thus reasoned a lanky, hardheaded Californian whose Irish blood fears no fight but whose humanist mind hates folly. Lawyer John Francis ("Jack") Neylan, onetime political and financial reporter, was until 1937 lord high chancellor of the Hearst empire. Before that (1911-17) he was chairman of the State finance body which put California on a budget. For eleven years he has been a regent of the University of California. He is a director of great National City Bank (Manhattan). Nowadays he commutes to San Francisco from his ranch in the mountains to the south. Last fortnight Jack Neylan appeared before a patriotic meeting on San Francisco's Treasure Island and, well aware that he was sticking out his neck, suggested:

1) That Franklin Roosevelt has certainly committed the U. S. to an active part in the next world war.

2) That it would be far cheaper to "buy peace" beforehand than to pay for such a war during and after it.

3) "Why not take from our gold hoard of $15,000,000,000 the sum of $5,000,000,000 and with this sum sit into a conference of nations to redistribute the sources of raw materials?

"If we are going to regulate the affairs of Europe ... do it on a common-sense basis and in addition to saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent young men . . . save about $25,000,000,000."

The editor of the San Francisco Chronicle thought and said that Jack Neylan must be pulling legs. So Mr. Neylan wrote a letter which clearly established the Neylan Plan as a perfectly serious though startling proposal, reminiscent in its visionary aspect of Henry Ford's high-minded Peace Ship effort of 23 years ago.

Elucidated Planner Neylan: "In spite of all the propaganda that can be churned up, a projected war will be one of sordid materialism devoid of any vestige of idealism. The objective is raw materials. . . .

"We have buried in the ground in the United States $15,500,000,000 of the world's gold supply, with more of it being hurried across the ocean. Instead of being utilized as the basis of a world credit structure . . . this mass of metal has been transmuted into a burden.

"The German mark is a questionable currency based on some microscopic amount of gold. The Italian lira is practically fiat money. The Russian ruble is a bootleg product. The French franc has had a precarious existence. . . .

"I have expressed myself in relation to Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin too often and too explicitly to have even the most prejudiced think I have any sympathy for them or their doctrines. . . .

"Instead of promising Europe more guns with which to commit suicide, instead of making promises to join in the destruction of civilization, it would be far more intelligent for us to bring to them the means of salvation in the form of an absolute gift. . . ." Planner Neylan pictured the world shock which such a gesture would deliver, how all hands would drop their guns to scramble for the money.

"The gift should be administered by a commission which would command the respect not only of our own people but of all people." Mr. Neylan named Cordell Hull, Henry Morgenthau, Charles Evans Hughes, Herbert Hoover, James H. Perkins (National City Bank).

"An obvious step will be the affording to each nation of a sufficient gold base through a central agency for the establishment of a sound national currency. . . . Obviously, also, a large portion of the fund would be used for compensation in relation to the transfer to the 'have-not' nations, large and small, of the necessary sources of raw material. . . . The disbursement of the fund would be linked to progressive demobilization and demilitarization. . . ."

Concluded Planner Neylan: "Any suggestion which does not fit in with the conventional jargon of diplomats and the sabre-rattling of those who will not be in the front line trenches will be considered bizarre and Utopian. . . .

"While I prize the spiritual values involved in the suggestion, I have been conscious that in a practical and cynical world, an activity which is reflected in a surplus on the balance sheet commands more present respect than those for which credit is to be given in the hereafter. . . .

"There will never again be so fruitful an opportunity to put our gold hoard to work in the interest of humanity in general and ourselves in particular."

When Jack Neylan gets an idea, into it he sinks his teeth. This week he was trying out the Neylan Plan on the hardest-boiled top men of the U. S., politicians mostly excluded. His first finding was obvious: pigs is pigs. Giving away five billions sounds like lunacy.

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