"Economic Statesmanship"

When spectacled, studious John M. Cassells (a onetime Rhodes Scholar, later a Harvard instructor) was a youth, he worked in a wholesale fruit house. One of his functions was to mix bad peanuts with sound ones. He found the job particularly disagreeable because he was a Sunday School teacher. Mr. Cassells became interested in consumers' problems. Year and a half ago, when the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation gave Stephens College in Columbia, Mo. about $40,000 a year to found an Institute for Consumer Education, Stephens took John Cassells, then 37, from Harvard, made him director of its Institute (not to be confused with New Jersey's Stevens Institute of Technology).

By that time Mr. Cassells had decided that consumers needed to know more than how to tell good peanuts from bad. Soon he had his students not only sallying forth on practice shopping expeditions and investigating advertising, but also studying economics, banking and even Plato's Republic.

Now the unofficial capital for a new study spreading rapidly through U. S. schools, Stephens' Institute last week held the first national conference on consumer education. To it went some 600 teachers, admen, editors and merchants. The conference was not devoted entirely to cheering. Said Rockefeller Foundation's Stacy May: "In the world of politics, the consumer is a blind beggar of gigantic stature, who stands on the corner of Paradox Street and Pressure Group Lane with little to sell but his woe. Potentially he would seem to be immense. Actually, he is all but completely impotent."

Most ringing speech made to the consumer educators was by Harold S. Sloan (brother of General Motors' Alfred P. and head of the Sloan Foundation). He declared that Stephens taught consumers to practice "economic statesmanship" by reminding them that each time a consumer chooses between a hand-made and a machine-made product, between American and foreign goods, he casts a vote for a particular kind of economic system.

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