Sea Wall

The Western Hemisphere is half the world; in it are 21 republics who want no part in World War II. Last week 21 men assembled in Panama to chart a course of continental neutrality--and, from that, continental solidarity.

They met in realization of a heroic vision a shag-haired 19th-Century revolutionary named Simon Bolivar lived for--the cooperation of the American countries as equal and sovereign states forever at peace. And from seat No. 19, where sat Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles, came a proposal that the Americas guard their seas from the new war (see map).

But a wall keeps things in, as well as out. With that in mind, the first emergency conference of the Western Hemisphere's nations moved swiftly to build within that wall not only a "citadel of democracy" but a joint economy. With overseas markets wiped out overnight or too dangerous to reach, the 21 representatives agreed to establish in Washington for the duration of the war a committee empowered to act rapidly in all emergencies to lessen the war's effects in the Western Hemisphere--and, more significantly, to give counsel to their Governments on joint means of stabilizing currencies, of developing untapped resources, of acting generally like Good Neighbors.

This underlay the sensational proposal, quickly adopted, that the navies of the Americas patrol their seas in a defined "security belt" around all of the Hemisphere but Canada. With the aid of air fleets the ships would police the territorial waters to a distance averaging 300 miles offshore, would bar all European submarines, allow belligerents' surface warships only the legal 24 hours' entry.

First thought went to the practical obstacles : sum total of all South American navies comes to about 70 warcraft, excluding gunboats, and South America has 8,500 Atlantic seacoastmiles, 5,300 Pacific. Must the U. S., with an adequate one-ocean Navy, build one big enough to patrol four seas?

Delegates left this enormous detail to be settled in good time, embarked at once on a round of cocktail parties, formal dinners, golf-matches, swimming (behind the shark net at Fort Amur's beach). But in between festivities they labored hard on this intensification of the Monroe Doctrine, this deliberate abandonment of the freedom of the seas. At Sumner Welles's announcement of definite financial aid, proving the solidity of U. S. intentions, Latin-American diplomats leaped. Shortly

Welles cabled to Washington a recommendation that $2,000,000 be loaned to Bolivia, with future tin sales as security, hinted a larger loan to Colombia. (Bolivia, in default now on $60,000,000 of dollar bonds, mostly bought by U. S. citizens, in 1937 seized U. S. oil properties worth $17,000,000, has refused to settle.) But bygones and bargains were secondary with Sumner Welles; he was concerned with a sea wall for the Americas--a wall to keep death out and let life flourish in the great continents within.

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