Two-Way Street

With the slowdown in the U.S. economy, U.S. high-tariff advocates have been creeping out of Washington woodwork like termites swarming in spring. Their target: the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, now up for a five-year extension. By tunneling out the heart of the act with amendments, they hope to convert it from a strong, proved instrument for gradually freeing and expanding world trade into a 1958 version of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act. which is often blamed for turning mild recession into a riproaring, worldwide depression.

Last week, thoroughly alarmed friends of the foreign-trade program held a counterswarm. Into the glittering grand ballroom of Washington's Sheraton-Park Hotel jammed 1.500 representatives of organizations as diverse as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the United Steelworkers and the Y.W.C.A. On hand to urge Congress to extend the act--with authority for a further 25% cut over five years in U.S. tariffs--were spokesmen for 128 manufacturing, labor, agricultural, retailing, and consumer groups. Among the speakers: Vice President Nixon. Secretary of State Dulles, Minnesota Democrat Hubert Humphrey. Kansas Republican Frank Carlson, Adlai Stevenson and Dwight Eisenhower.

As chief lunchtime speaker. Stevenson noted wryly that such a meeting should not even be necessary: it was. he said, a "melancholy reflection upon our faltering position in a perilous world--a world grown dubious of our leadership." Stevenson then went on to draw a disturbing historical parallel to 1930. Then as now, said he. protectionists used the number of jobless as a pretext for building high tariffs. To avoid repeating that "fatal miscalculation." said Democrat Stevenson, the U.S. must realize that "the world is not our oyster. It is not our colony. It can get along without us. But can we get along without it--the shrinking world where, among other things, 250 American bases exist upon the sufferance of others, where we are the largest producers, the largest creditors, the largest traders, the largest investors? We cannot be at once political internationalists and economic nationalists."

In the climactic evening speech, televised to a national audience, President Eisenhower turned the appeal-to-recession argument 180DEG around and fired it back at the protectionists. Those who want to scuttle reciprocal trade because of current business conditions overlook certain facts, said the President. Among them: last year the U.S. sold nearly four times as much manufactured goods on the world market as it bought. It also exported more than half of its total wheat, cotton and rice production, a fourth of its tobacco, etc. Total exports exceeded the value of all U.S. consumer purchases of furniture and household equipment.

Protect Which Jobs? About 4,500,000 workers--one in 14--depend on foreign trade for a living. Since foreigners must sell to the U.S. in order to buy from the U.S., it follows, said Ike, that "the defeat of the trade agreements program would destroy far more jobs . . . than it could possibly ever preserve." But the President was not willing to rest his argument on self-interest. "It may be trite to say that trade is a two-way street, but is it trite to say that cooperative security is a two-way street? By no means. Allies are needed, [and] sturdy allies need progressive economies, not merely to bear the burden of defensive armament but also to satisfy the needs and aspirations of their people."

The word has got around, said Ike, that his request for a five-year extension of the reciprocal trade act was just a bargaining point. "I would like to set the record straight. It is a proposal dictated by the facts." Among the facts: six principal nations of Western Europe are embarked on a program of tariff reduction that will result in a tariff-free common market expected in 1962--and the U.S. will need the powers set out in the reciprocal trade act to bargain with the common market area to mutual advantage.

To the President, the fight for reciprocal-trade extension without crippling amendments involves a national choice in which "every American can have a part." If enough U.S. citizens make themselves heard. Congress will listen. On the one hand, the nation can choose the way of "economic isolationism" and "cower behind new trade walls of our own building," abandoning the rest of the world to "those less blind to the events and tides now surging in the affairs of men." Or it can refuse to take the downward path and push "forward strongly along the clear road to greater . . . security and opportunity in a friendlier world for this and succeeding generations."

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