Wall Street History

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Wall Street History

10/31/2003

Harry Truman

I didn’t have access this week to my normal research materials
due to travel, but I came across two business / trade related
passages from “Where the Buck Stops: The Personal and Private
Writings of Harry S. Truman.” [Edited by Margaret Truman]
It’s a little change of pace from the normal fare and you can also
glean a history lesson or two for today’s environment.

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Harry S. Truman

If I were selecting a place to begin to describe the history of the
American people, it wouldn’t just be the period of the settlement
of the various colonies – it would also be the beginning of the
formation and development of their common attitudes toward
self-government. The people who made up early America, the
British and the French and the Germans and the Dutch and all the
others, brought with them different customs and different ways
of dressing and different languages, but they had two really
important things in common right from the start.

One of these was that so many of them had come to America to
escape religious persecution

The second thing all the colonists had in common was the deep-
seated, let’s even call it urgent, desire of so many of the people to
improve their financial status. The people who came here were
transplanting some of the customs of the British and the Dutch
and the Swedes and the others, but one thing they were
determined not to transplant was the notion that they had to
remain in the same economic class as they’d been in in the old
country. Most of the people who came over were economically
below the class of the people who were running the government,
or at least below the people who had the ear and the friendship of
the people running the government, and many of the men and
women came to the Western Hemisphere with the idea of
perhaps ending up economically in the same position as the
ruling classes in Britain, Holland, Sweden, and the other places.
Everybody felt he could better himself if he could go to a
continent that had not yet been explored and settled and taken
over by the great powers. It was all finally taken over by the
great powers, anyway – Spain and France and Britain eventually
controlled the whole Western Hemisphere, for all practical
purposes – but there was still a very good chance for financial
improvement and even wealth for any colonist who was willing
to work hard for it.

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I’ll never be able to answer completely why it took us so long to
become an economic power or a military power, and I don’t
think anybody else can. I guess, as much as anything, it was
because we had some selfish stinkers during the early periods in
our country who felt that the economic program at home was
something they ought to control, and in controlling it, they dealt
only with the countries that could benefit them and didn’t need
help themselves. It wasn’t decided on ideological grounds, or
because, at least after a while, they didn’t want to get involved in
anything outside our borders. It was strictly selfishness that
made them interested only where they could get the most money.
In South America, the development in those countries was very
small and very light, and our fiscal trade for quite a while was
pretty much confined to Brazil and on the basis of coffee. And
then the United Fruit Company went into Central American
countries for bananas and other tropical fruit that we could use,
and that helped the development. But it took a long time for us
to realize that the resources of those countries were just as great
as the resources we have right here at home.

We also, of course, had a bunch of economic royalists who
controlled much of the trade of the country and wanted to keep
outside trade from coming in and giving them competition. In
that line of thinking, too, it took them a long time to realize that,
in order to maintain our status as a great commercial and world
power, we had to carry on trade with the rest of the world.
Cordell Hull, who was Roosevelt’s secretary of state from 1933
to 1944, the longest period of service of any secretary of state in
our history, helped a lot in that direction, with his Reciprocal
Trade Act in 1934, which increased our trade enormously with
other countries by allowing us to reduce tariffs on their goods in
return for reductions on ours, and with his work on our Good
Neighbor Policy, which increased our help toward our immediate
neighbors, and strengthened our friendship with them and the
united stand of the Western Hemisphere against our enemies in
World War II. Hull received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work
in 1945 and really helped us realize that equality is the only fair
proposition – that what’s fair for one country should be fair for
all others, whether they’re weaker nations or just as strong as we
are. We finally made up our minds that the best way, the only
way, to treat other nations is as equals, and we’ve been doing it
ever since. And I hope we continue that policy even though
there are still people around who would like to see it
discontinued.

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It has been discontinued, to a great extent.

Wall Street History returns next week.

Brian Trumbore

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