Harry Truman
Brian Trumbore
President/Editor, StocksandNews.com

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