Henry A. Wallace, America Must Choose

Selected Works of Henry A. Wallace

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America Must Choose

Henry A. Wallace

An excerpt from Wallace's 1934 pamphlet America Must Choose.
From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 78.

Much as we all dislike them, the new types of social control that we have now in operation are here to stay and to grow on a world or national scale. We shall have to go on doing all these things we do not want to do. The farmer dislikes production control instinctively. He does not like to see land idle and people hungry. The carriers dislike production control because it cuts down loadings. The processors dislike it because of the processing tax. The consumer dislikes it because it adds to the price of food. Practically the entire population dislikes our basic program of controlling farm production; and they will do away with it unless we can reach the common intelligence and show the need of continuing to plan. We must show that need of continuing if we are to save in some part the institutions which we prize.
Enormously difficult adjustments confront us, whatever path we take. There are at least three paths: internationalism, nationalism and a planned middle course. We cannot take the path of internationalism unless we stand ready to import nearly a billion dollars more goods than we did in 1929. What tariffs should we lower? What goods shall we import? Tariff adjustments involve planning just as certainly as internal adjustments do. Even foreign loans might involve a certain amount of planning. When we embarked on our terrific postwar expansion of foreign loans, we did not plan. We plunged in blindly, and soon any reasonable observer could predict that the whole thing was bound to blow up.
We did not then in our boisterous youth have the same view that England had after the Napoleonic Wars. Rather consciously Great Britain placed its loans with a long-time program of imports and an exchange of goods in view. Our own adventure was only from the short-time profit consideration. What tariffs to lower? What goods to accept? How readjust our own farming operations and industrial operations to the planned inflow of foreign goods? We scarcely gave such things a thought.
I shall here try to sketch the probable price—in terms of the actual and psychological pain of readjustment—of following the national, the international, or a rigorously planned middle trail out of the woods.
As a foundation and framework of a new American design, we have undertaken to put our farmland into better order. What we have done has been frankly experimental and emergency in nature, but we are working on something that is going to be permanent.
If we finally go the whole way toward nationalism, it may be necessary to have compulsory control of marketing, licensing of plowed land, and base and surplus quotas for every farmer. Every plowed field would have its permit sticking up on its post.
I have raised the question whether we as a people have the patience and fortitude to go through with an international program when the world seems with varying degrees of panic to be stampeding the other way. It is quite as serious a question whether we have the resolution and staying power to swallow all the words and deeds of our robust, individualistic past, and submit to a completely armylike, nationalist discipline in peacetime.
Our own maneuvers of social discipline to date have been mildly persuasive and democratic. I want to see things go on that way. I would hate to live in a country where individual thought is punished or stifled, and where speech is no longer free. Even if the strictest nationalist discipline reared for us here at home, exclusively, a towering physical standard of living, I would consider the spiritual price too high. I think, too, that this would be pretty much the temper of the rest of the country; but there is no telling. Regimentation without stint might, indeed, I sometimes think, go farther and faster here than anywhere else, if we once took the bit in our teeth and set out for a 100 percent American conformity in everything. The American spirit as yet knows little of moderation, whichever way it turns.
A surprising number of farmers, after a year of voluntary production control, are writing me letters insisting that hereafter the co-operation of all farmers be compelled absolutely; and that every field, cotton gin, cow, and chicken be licensed; and that the strictest sort of controls be applied to transportation and marketing. I believe they mean it, but I wonder very seriously whether they are ready for such measures, and if they really know what they are asking for.
The middle path between economic internationalism and nationalism is the path we shall probably take in the end. We need not go the whole way on a program involving an increase of a billion dollars a year in imports. There are intermediate points between internationalism and nationalism, and I do not think we can say just where we are headed yet. We shall be under increasing difficulties, no matter which way we tend, as our people become more and more familiar with the discomforts of the procedure.
My own bias is international. It is an inborn attitude with me. I have very deeply the feeling that nations should be naturally friendly to each other and express that friendship in international trade. At the same time we must recognize as realities that the world at the moment is ablaze with nationalist feeling, and that with our own tariff impediments it is highly unlikely that we shall move in an international direction very fast in the next few years.
There is still another trail—I mean the back trail, letting things drift, trusting to luck, plunging on toward internationalism as sellers and trying at the same time to huddle behind nationalist barriers as buyers. Even this, probably the most painful trail of all, is worth mentioning, for thousands of our people vociferously yearn to head that way; and the number of such people is likely to increase rather than diminish, I am afraid, in the next few years.
Whether we are prepared at this time to engage in a genuinely scientific nationwide discussion of the tariff, as it affects agriculture and other elements in a long-time plan for the whole nation, I have little means of knowing; but I suspect that the desperateness of the situation has done a great deal to make realists of us all. And I have faith that we can arouse from the ranks of our democracy, in city and country alike, a leadership that will address itself to fundamentals, and not simply blow off in the empty and prejudiced emotional bombast which has characterized such discussions in the past.
I lean to the international solution. But it is no open-and-shut question. It needs study, and above all dispassionate discussion. I want to see the whole question examined by our people in a new spirit.

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Selected Works of Henry A. Wallace

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