ustxtxb_obs_1962_03_02_50_00003-00000_000.pdf

“, 9 , IA, 1 i —1.___-1 r ,-, 4. t V , a 4 1 4 , …f a t i ‘, ,I A . 11-1 1/4; 1.,= t . -f-,e’: 4., –…-, II … * IT> INTERNATIONALIST WILL CLAYTON ‘Unity of the West Is the Only Way Out’ \(Continued from Page month. The convention studied ways to increase Western unity. Clayton raised his respected voice on behalf of full U. S. membership in the common market in an interview in his office at Anderson, Clayton & Co., the world’s largest cotton merchandising firm of which he is a founder and former board chairman. “To begin with,” he said, “you’ve got to face the fact of the common market. If we stand aside and don’t do anything, we face in time the loss of a considerable part of our exports. . . . It means a trade war between the two sides of the Atlantic. That’s just down the Soviet alley.” As a result of U. S. aloofness, he said, “you would have there a divided West, an isolated United States, and you would present the Soviets with an open road to the winning of the underdeveloped countries.” On the other hand, he said, a common market of Western Europe, the U. S., and Canada, open also to every other free world country that will agree to barrierless trade, would unify the West, improve living standards in the non communist underdeveloped countries by permitting them to increase the exports they live on, and “gradually but effectively .. . erase the differences that now obsess us all and bring about in time a condition of peace that would be very effective.” ‘Elevated Our Economy’ Clayton believes that the United States, by government price fixing, export subsidies on petroleum, lead, zinc, sugar, cotton. and agricultural products, and by other artificialities, has “elevated our economy to an economic plateau that is much higher than the. surrounding world, and frankly I just don’t think we can maintain ourselves there. If we don’t get off voluntarily we’ll get knocked off.” Pessimistic about disarmament but hopeful there will be no nuclear war, Clayton is convinced that the principal danger of communist conquest of the world abides in communist exploitation of the needy countries. He is alarmed by the deep resentment that occurs in such countries when the United States, the richest nation in thei world, erects quotas against their exports. The West, he thinks, has overlooked its fundamental strength, the fact that with a free world common market, “you would have a unified West with a political and economic aggregation so powerful that the Soviets could not attain their cold war objectives.” The common market, he said, is bound to increase internationalism and depreciate national sovereignty. “It will certainly, in the minds of the Individual citizens of all these countries that we’re talking about, focus Vie importance of working together and of interdependence, the interdependence of the whole free world.” He is amazed “how people in this country go along in their daily affairs and take actions which they think are in their own selfish interest without any reference to the world situation.” He agrees with Jean Monnet, the inventor of the European common mar k et, that if economic union occurs, political union is likely to follow. He said that the authors of the Rome Treaty by which the European Economic Community was created in 1958 “expect confidently that these six countries will eventually have one federal government which will be limited in power but will have to do mostly with military defense, international trade, a common currency, and common banking.” Eventually, Clayton said, an open international marketplace among the non-communist nations “might easily” lead to a world common market. “As time went on,” he said, “the Russian satellites would see that conditions were so much better just to the west of them that they would gradually fall away from the Soviet star and that in time, Russia wouldn’t be able to hold them.” Such an evolution would involve trade with communist countries. When he was asked about trade with Communist China, Clayton replied, “I believe in trade. We should exclude from lawful trade with any of the communist countries implements of war. . . . I think that our policy with reference to trade with the whole communist bloc could very easily be modified.” The subject should be a concern of the common market he added. In 81-year-old Will Clayton’s prospectus, therefore, American participation in the new European common market could lead to Atlantic Union, the full political and economic integration of the democracies. The communist nations, confronted by such a powerful cooperating aggregation of non-communist nations, would have to give up on their plans for the conquest of the world through economic hostilities. Out of such a situation might emerge the world common market, the economic basis of a peaceful world society. Liberty Leaguer Clayton was born on a cotton farm near Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1880. He left school at 13 to work for the Clerk and Master of a chancery court; by 15 he was Deputy Clerk and Master. Learning shorthand at night, he went to St. Louis as secretary to a cotton company executive in 1895. He worked with the company in New York from 1896 to 1904, when he and two Andersons who were related to each other by marriage formed Anderson, Clayton & Co. The distinguished Houstonian is an economic conservative in the contemporary nomenclature. He is no enthusiast for government intervention in economic affairs. His advocacy of liberal trade policies proceeds from his faith in the efficiencies of competition, even across national boundaries. His classical liberalism caused him to oppose the New Deal in the 1930’s. In 1935, for example, he gave $6,500 to the anti-New Deal American Liberty League. His wife, saying that at heart he really was a Democrat, once matched his contribution to the Liberty League with one of her own to the Democrats. Within a few years, Mrs. Clayton was proved right about her husband. In 1940 he resigned as board chairman of Anderson, Clayton & Co. to begin seven continuous years of governnlent service under the Democrats. Defending public housing before the Houston city council in 1950, he said, “In order to protect free enterprise, it is sometimes necessary to depart from it a little.” In 1952 he took a full-page newspaper advertisement in Houston endors ing Adlai Stevenson for President. The Claytons have been interesting philanthropists. Among their gifts have been $350,000 to Johns Hopkins University’s school for advanced international studies to endow a new chair for a professorship in international economics, a 184-acre park to the city of Houston, and their home to the Houston public library as a cultural center branch. When Mrs. Clayton died, it was learned that her will contained a bequest to the United States government for application on the national debt. In all his government service, Clayton has never submitted an expense account. Beginning in 1940 he served with Nelson Rockefeller, Co-ordinator of Inter-American Affairs; as Deputy Federal Loan Administrator; as Assistant Secretary of Commerce, and as Administrator of the Surplus War Property Administration. In 1944 President Roosevelt named him Assistant Secretary of State in Charge of Economic Affairs. In this capacity he served on the Interim Committee that recommended the use of atomic bombs on Japan without specific warning. President Truman made him Under Secretary of State in Charge of Economic Affairs in . 1946. Late in 1947 he resigned and returned to Houston. He has consistently championed the common market idea since the ’40’she could be called the American Monnet. Testifying on his appointment as Assistant Secretary of State during the war, he told senators, “I think we should do everything we can to aid and assist an expansion in the world economy.” He argued that the industrialization of other countries would improve their standards of living and therefore increase the markets for U.S. goods. The government’s artificial support of cotton prices, he said, would eventually lose U.S. export markets to foreign cotton. In 1949 Clayton helped form the Atlantic Union Committee. “There is only one way to stop Russia short of war,” he said that year. “In economic terms, democracy works when people have more to eat, more to wear, and better homes in which to live. This rising standard of living can be realized only in the modern world by raising the world’s productive capacities through striking off the shackles of economic nationalism and by reducing armaments . . . An economic merge of the democracies would solve much of the world’s ills.” Federal union of the democracies was Atlantic Union’s stated goal. Clayton did not flinch from this vision. “The communists are organized as one and the free world is divided into separate sovereignties, but in certain limited respects it must also organize as one if it would remain free,” he said. “There is only one effective way of doing this, and that is by federal union, just as the 13 American colonies formed a federal union in 1787.” ‘No Texan’ He proposed that the union would maintain armed forces, conduct foreign relations, and regulate currency and commerce between its members and the non-member nations. He said he could not see how such a union could be used as a gun against anyone’s head. “Today’s guns will be lowered when the world’s standards of living are improved,” he said. Clayton’s way-out stance attracted some abuse. In 1951, for example, Cong. J. T. Rutherford of Odessa in West Texas, Was quoted accusing him of advocating the abolition of the United States. “You’ll never be known as a Texan,” Rutherford was quoted. \(That same year President Truman named Clayton one of the five commissioners of the National Security Training Commission, which prepared plans for the sixmonth reserve forces training program that was subsequently In 1958 Clayton came forward with a public criticism of the oil industry, a bold act for a Houston Texan. In a forthright, controversial statement, he opposed the restriction of oil imports. “Oil import restriction will benefit a minority group at the expense of the nation as a whole and will help destroy the unity of the free world,” he stated. Pressure for such restriction was an “understandable, human impulse to choke off competition and protect prices and profits,” but, he said, the quotas were damaging to other oil-producing nations. “Are we going to make all these areas mad just to maintain high prices and big profits for oil producers?” he inquired. Competition Needed Clayton, still a handsome man of imposing bearing despite his eight decades of active life, emphasized the American economy’s need of competition in the Observer interview before he left for Paris. “The technological revolution has so telescoped the world into so small an area, it means that every free world country is going to have to compete with every other free world country. It’s that competition that we need, we need it desperately . . . as the electric exposures proved,” he said. While he would expect the U.S. to associate itself with the common market on a basis limited to its trade aspects, Clayton advocates full U.S. membership. If the U.S. joins on the basis on which Britain plans to enter, he said, the U.S. would have to “reduce tariffs across the board annually until in the end they wereeliminated.” \(The common market countries reduced tariffs 10% in 1959, 10% in 1960, and 10% in 1961. Graduated reduction of tariffs until in the end they were eliminated is the basis of the common ‘Join Completely’ “I believe that we should join completely, just as Britain is negotiating to go in, but on the condition that it has an open end so that every other free world country could join if it would agree to the conditions. \(Of course, Cuba’s already announced they “It would be unfortunate if the Western Hemisphere formed a common market just among themselves without any connection with the European common market,” he said. “Nearly one third of Latin-American exports go to Western Europe. That is one of the great dangers in the present situation, because the common market already includes quite a few Latin-American competitors in exports of raw materials and tropical products. If the French colonies and former colonies and the British commonwealth have free access to Western Europe, that will be highly prejudicial to Latin-America . . . “Of course,” he also said, “it is highly important to give attention immediately to the underdeveloped countries not from the point of view of giving them something. We proceed on the theory if you give enough or lend enough money you can accomplish anything. That just isn’t true.” To improve the living standards of the underdeveloped countries, he said, “the industrialized West would have to see to it that both the value and the volume of their exports would be increased. They live on these exports, the raw materials and tropical products against which many Western nations have high tariffs.” Product by product, Clayton