Unfit for Leadership?

Two pictures wiped the smile off the Truman Doctrine. One showed Viennese workers and angry housewives massed before their old Imperial Palace; the sign they held aloft summed up their complaint in one German word which needed no English translation: "HUNGER."

The other picture showed a mountain of potatoes near Foley, Ala., which had been drenched with kerosene by the U.S. Government to make them unfit for human consumption. Object: to keep the price of potatoes up.

Between these two scenes was an insane discrepancy.

How Can They Understand? Every social system is impelled toward insanities by its own rules. The Soviet State can kill off five million peasants "for the general good" in one swoop of deluded utilitarianism. The U.S.'s oft-repeated folly of destroying food in times of desperate need is far less horrible, no less insane.

Economics, as amoral as science and as flexible as art, offers complicated reasons why it should be done. But the plain people of Europe, faced with an uncertain summer and the certainty of terrible winter, will hardly understand such nonsense. In Germany, gripped by a grave food crisis (see FOREIGN NEWS), potatoes meant life. Britain was still wearily debating whether or not the noted nutritionist, Dr. Franklin Bicknell, had been right when he said that Britons were slowly starving. In France, the daily bread ration had been cut from 10.5 ounces to 8.3 ounces, may be cut again, and Premier Ramadier told striking flour mill hands: "Each day without bread is a step nearer disaster." The Communist Humanite headlined: "It is wrong to have believed in American promises."

Into all these domains of hunger, into the squares of Vienna and Paris, into the courtyards of Athens and the collective farms of Russia, the picture of the potatoes would find its way. The Communists would see to that. It would help to convince people that the U.S. is unfit for world leadership.

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