Suchergebnisse

The purpose of this article is to outline a fresh approach to America's economic relations with the non-Communist world. These proposals envisage a direct attack by the United States and its allies on the structural distortions which have persisted since 1945 in the non-Communist world economy. The chronic dollar shortage of our major allies is taken to be, essentially, a symptom of these more basic structural distortions. The proposals would end, after a transition period, the system of annual Congressional grants to our allies and would substitute for it the combined operation of investment and financial pools. These pools might be built up from the present International Bank and the International Monetary Fund, although they would require operations different in scale and purpose from those now conducted by these institutions. The proposals would apply a common approach to the problems of both the industrialized portions of the non-Communist world and the underdeveloped regions, and would thus combine or coordinate U.S. economic efforts in Europe, Japan, and in underdeveloped areas. It is believed, also, that they would mitigate some of the more serious political friction between the United States and other non-Communist countries and strengthen the non-Communist world as against the Soviet bloc.

It has now become quite axiomatic to say that United States participation in the United Nations system is having an effect upon the substance I of United States foreign policy. What is not so well known as yet is that this participation is the cause for the creation of a new piece of machinery I for aiding the conduct of our foreign policy. Established in 1946 as the United States Delegation to the United Nations, this new outpost of the Department of State illustrates in its organization and operation many of the changes which have come about as bilateral diplomacy has given way to multilateral, "conference-type" United Nations diplomacy. Located at the headquarters of the international organization in New York City, the permanent Mission and its work are symbols of the importance and endless variety of problems posed for American foreign policy by our membership in and support for the United Nations. Since it is still in the process of development, the following study of the organization and role of the United States Mission to the United Nations should be taken as a preliminary analysis.

Executive monopoly in government has a long history in Latin America. In Mexico the facultades extraordinarias, or extraordinary decree powers, have been used by the executive to legislate personally on matters not remotely concerned with national emergency. The president becomes not only an executive but also a legislator. This is consistent with the Latin American tradition of strong presidents and weak legislatures. Nor has a traditionally ineffective judiciary sought to restrain executive power. Therefore, much important legislation has been done by executive decrees. Criticism has resulted in some modification of these practices. A growing sense of executive responsibility may facilitate the progress of democratic government in Mexico through a broadening of the political base and the maturation of executive-legislative relationships. E. Scott.

'One of the most neglected aspects in the social-psychological treatment of opinion and behavior until recent years has been power relations.' Two empirical types of power relations may be observed: (1) direct and imperative; and (2) indirect-although the two types overlap to a large extent, especially in a democratic society. Power relations are involved wherever group structure and status relations are studied. Conformity to norms may not require continual coercion or use of brute force by leaders. The major norms of the group are internalized and are key factors determining behavior. In the socialization process these norms are incorporated into the ego system. 'It is through involvement of the ego, as it is formed at the time, that power can be exerted without being recognized as such, and conformity in experience and action achieved without direct imperatives from external sources.' This principle may be utilized in the study of the influences of the mass media. The authors also discuss interrelationships among power structures. Behavior can be explained adequately through intergroup as well as intragroup relations. The state of intergroup relations affects the opinions and behavior of members of an in-group toward other groups and also affects the status structure of the in-group and its norms. American minority groups, for example, are oriented to the norms of the dominant group. Only limited understanding of behavior can be achieved if participation in group interaction is studied as though the in-group setting was complete in itself and unexposed to power relations other than those developing between the leader and other group members. E. Scott.

When the United States stumbled into possession of the Philippine Islands in 1898, Americans had not operated a military government since Reconstruction, and the task of ruling a populous alien colony was an unprecedented one for them. Because of the insurrection waged by Filipino guerrillas after February 1899, martial law could give way to civil control but gradually. The long transition provoked a civil-military conflict which, because the chief antagonists were famous fathers of now famous sons, has recently acquired a new interest. But the rivals of 1900–1901 should be judged for their own deeds. How and why did Major General Arthur MacArthur and Commissioner William Howard Taft fall out?

The seizure of power in Cuba by Fulgencio Batista on March 10, 1952, is a classic example of a complex method of organizing and changing governments in Latin America known as the cuartelazo. The classic pattern is: (1) the treason of a single barracks; (2) the pronunciamiento, manifesto, or grito; (3) the march on centers of communication, sites of military supplies and government headquarters; (4) announcement to the public of the change of government; and (5) appointment of a patriotic junta to govern in the interim period. The cuartelazo requires great skill in execution. It depends upon the support of important segments of public opinion. Force and violence as instruments of political policy in Latin America are derived from the institutional traditions of Iberian culture. E. Scott.

"The best thing about diplomatic life," Joseph C. Grew once confided to his diary, "… is that one never knows when some event or development of prime importance is going to occur. We pursue the even tenor of our ways for weeks and months and then, often suddenly and unexpectedly, we find ourselves in the midst of a maelstrom of hectic activity, working day and night, rushing telegrams, drafting press communiqués and speeches, dashing from place to place, doing useful work." Turbulent Era, the account of the forty years he spent as a career diplomat in the American Foreign Service, is convincing evidence that Joseph Grew was present on an extraordinary number of occasions when something of importance broke and that, above all, he was always doing useful work for the country he served so faithfully and so well.

Local governments played a notable and somewhat neglected part in the American movement for internal improvements. Their activities in aid of canals and railroads varied greatly in scale and method and in the scope of planning involved. They ran the gamut from the far-flung projects of great commercial cities striving for the dominance of the trade of vast areas to the donations of obscure rural townships trying only to make sure that the promised railroad should pass through their village rather than the adjacent crossroads. Among the greater cities, none played a more notable role than Baltimore in the promotion of internal improvements. Its total of railroad subscriptions, loans, and bond endorsements was about twenty million dollars—a figure of municipal contribution only exceeded by Cincinnati's investment in a city-owned railroad. Baltimore was in the field of internal improvements well before Cincinnati and remained in it long after such early rivals as Philadelphia had withdrawn. Baltimore's first investment in the Baltimore and Ohio was audaorized in 1827, and its last loan to the Western Maryland was made in 1886. It continued to vote stock and to appoint public directors to the board of railroad corporations until it sold its interest in the Baltimore and Ohio in 1890 and in the Western Maryland in 1902.

The opportunity to talk to The Economic History Association is asflattering to an international lawyer as it is unexpected. I have never been entirely clear on how economic historians select their materials in order to distinguish their product from political history, a subject with which I am supposed to be more familiar. The future historian of the period in which we live will, I am sure, encounter unusual difficulty in making this distinction. America's foreign policy seems to center around economic aid to allies and economic boycott of potential enemies. The New Deal made economic welfare of the people a domestic policy until the outbreak of war compelled the national economy to become an instrument for achieving unconditional surrender of foreign enemies. It cannot be said that the present administration, with proposals for more social security, continued foreign aid, and continued agreements for reducing trade barriers, is moving very fast in unscrambling economics and politics.

In Veblen's own critique of other economists—andtion of his theory is just that—he relied securely on quasi-Marxist a major por-simplicities concerning causation. Other economists "got that way" because they were members of or sycophants of the kept classes, aristocratically disdainful of the actualities of production. Their theories, if they were classicists, were "superstructural" in the sense of being both above and behind the battle, for Veblen was one of the pioneers in the use of the culturallag concept which has done so much to confuse the understanding of the relations between technology and society. If they were American classicists, such as (in Veblen's view) J. B. Clark, diey were likely to couple a pallid reformism with their "fine-spun technicalities," offering palliatives at the level of pecuniary theory for evils rooted in the very divorce of the pecuniary culture from its industrial base. And this reformism Veblen saw as a leisure-class product, along with female philanthropy, the arts and crafts movement, social work, and vegetarianism—the archaic by-products of the sheltered life of the better-off and the better-educated strata whose menial and hence life-giving work was done for them by others. Reformism was archaic because it was pre-evolutionary, pre-Darwinian; for Veblen, "A.D." meant "After Darwin." His emphasis on the datedness of economic theory—a charge to which Americans are especially sensitive since we like to be progressive and up-to-date—led Veblen to express recurrent hopes for the "younger generation" of economists, whom he wanted to make less literate and theoretical, less parasitic and less sanguine, less refined and more machine-minded. For Veblen as for Rousseau, what was young was less likely to be corrupted and spoiled.

The influence that short-time economic fluctuations in western Europe presumably had on the development of the Swedish timber trade during the latter half of the nineteenth century must, to an American audience, seem to be a rather specialized subject, and I think a few introductory words giving a background might be useful.

Tradition depicts American business as the chiefexploiter of our national free immigration policy during the latter defender andhalf of the nineteenth century. The contribution of immigrant labor to the building of the American industrial empire is much discussed. The interest of employers in recruiting cheap labor and strikebreakers from Europe is a familiar story. That industrialists and their allies in the years of rapid expansion and mechanization of the American economy stood to gain as much as any other group, even including the aliens themselves, from the maintenance of large-scale immigration has appeared so obvious as to demand little careful investigation. Historians have ordinarily described the succession of laws after 1882, gradually narrowing the "open door" the United States offered to Europe and pulling in the welcome mat as well, as a series of labor and nativist victories in the face of dogged resistance by the business world. Yet such an interpretation fails to explain the fact that the period which saw the growth of strong anti-immigrant feeling among native workers witnessed a strikingly similar development in the ranks of businessmen. During the 1880's and 1890's, while labor leaders protested the competition of alien workers, business publications were criticizing no less bitterly the impact of immigration upon American society. When nativists sought financial support for their efforts to restrict immigration they found many businessmen in sympathy with their aims. Measures presented to Congress for regulating and limiting the admission of aliens were frequently concurred in by prominent business leaders. Indeed, a notable development in American business thought after 1880 was the rise of hostility toward the swarms of cheap foreign laborers which employers had long considered essential to their own, and the nation's, prosperity.

The activities of the General Managers' Association of Chicago in the great strike of the American Railway Union in 1894 are well known, but the earlier history of this association has remained obscure. Even the most scholarly writers on the Pullman strike have accepted statements made in testimony before the United States Strike Commission that this association first participated in a labor conflict in 1893. As a matter of fact, it originated in a strike, and early in its career it set precedents for many of its exploits a few years later.

Since the days of Queen Elizabeth, emigration has been a habit with the British people. But it was the nineteenth century, when almost seventeen million persons emigrated, that witnessed the United Kingdom's most extensive exodus: approximately eighty per cent of the emigrants went to North America. A broad, historical explanation of the forces that motivated British subjects to abandon their homeland can be found in numerous works. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to view in greater detail one small facet of a not uncommon, yet entangling, subject. A series of specialized studies producing greater exactness of information would perhaps lead to a fuller and more complete understanding of a topic that has been open to much conjecture.

In a long list of publications since 1923 Harold Innis with industry and insight set a pattern for the study and interpretation of Canadian economic history. The University of Toronto, the Dominion Government, and Canadian learned societies in their various fashions paid tribute to the high quality of this achievement. His career, moreover, was a refutation of his own generalization, perhaps playfully formulated, that no Canadian scholar could secure recognition in the United States. He was a charter member of the Committee on Research in Economic History, the second president of the Economic History Association, and at the time of his death president of the American Economic Association.