Needed: a Reformation

At midcentury, the U.S. was fully embarked upon the greatest task in its history: to sustain, and maintain, the non-Communist world until it was able to sustain itself. To help light the U.S. and its businessmen along this rocky path, FORTUNE last week devoted its 20th anniversary issue to the problem of linking the U.S. with the economies of the rest of the world.

The job, as FORTUNE'S lead article denned it, called for nothing less than "a vast Reformation in the world's ways of earning its living." Europe would have to drop its notion that the American concept of "service as the path to profit" is "either sheer folly or gross hypocrisy." The world's backward areas needed a good deal more than American know-how and vague talk about Point 4. The U.S. had to export the American concept of business.

"Our business economy," said FORTUNE, "pervades American life and nearly every one of 150 million Americans are in it. . . Most of our 'know-how' works only in a business economy ... In most of the world, business activity does not touch the mass of the people . . ." As an example of what could be done, FORTUNE cited Sears, Roebuck's new stores in Brazil. To keep the stores going, Sears men had to go about Brazil persuading local manufacturers to make stuff for them to sell. "Sears has linked formerly separated Brazilians into new business currents with one another. This, in a small but significant way, is Reformation."

In such small ways, said FORTUNE, the American system has demonstrated its adaptability to foreign cultures. "It is therefore a model instrument for the reformation of other economies; for far from imposing an alien pattern on them, it is constantly reforming itself from within. Not only will foreign countries modify the American system to suit themselves; they will also inevitably contribute elements of useful reform to the fundamental proposition . . . The American Business Economy is neither a closed nor a fixed system. By its nature it must remain open and changing or perish."

But it is a mistake, said FORTUNE, to assume that economic development "can be a first line of defense against Communism." The first line must be statesmanship and military power. They might hold the line "by great effort of will on our part for, say, ten years. By then it is both possible and essential that our American Business Economy shall be well on its way to accomplishing the Reformation. By then . . . the peoples of the world [may] find in their rising standards of living and in the health of body, mind and spirit which goes with it, the enthusiasm and fortitude to cast out the cancer of Communism and to unite all men, including the Russians, to the ways of peace and prosperity and freedom under law."

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