Henry Wallace and the Commitment
to Liberal Postwar Policies

Anne Frances Hodgkins

[A letter reprinted from the Henry George News, February, 1944]

SIRS: I attended the Herald Tribune Forum last week and was thrilled to hear Vice-President Wallace include the following sentences in his speech on "Full Production", which I hope students of plans for post-war America will read in full. Mr. Wallace said,

"We must plan our governmental policy so that we are not compelled to give things away to other nations as we did in the peace after World War 1. In peace one, in the years of normalcy, those who insisted that we raise our tariffs thought they were hard-headed business men. They were not. …All of them were impractical and some of them were selfish morons. The tariff subsidized our manufacturers by billions of dollars every year and made it impossible to sell our customary exports of wheat, cotton, pork and tobacco abroad unless we were willing to loan foreigners money. We loaned Europe money. …We rehabilitated Germany. …And the people got it in the neck. …To save peace two we must make freedom from want that reality which is implicit in our resources, manpower and skills. We must resolve that we shall not again produce world-wide explosion by allowing certain private interests to high pressure Congress into higher tariffs while other private interests are financing unsound loans abroad at the expense of the small American investor."

Mr. Wallace's speech had meaning for me because of the second Henry George course which I took this Spring, using "Protection or Free Trade." If America is to build that great new world we want, we who know some of the answers must be militant in persuading thousands of people to enroll in the excellent courses which are offered by the Henry George School.