A History of '93'
The United States in World Affairs,. 1931. By Walter
Lippmann. in collaboration with William 0. Scroggs. (Harpers. 12s. (Itl.)
MR. WALTER LIPPMANN has been entrusted by the. American Council on Foreign Relations with an interesting but ex- tremely difficult task. He and his collaborator have been asked to compile a narrative of contemporary world events within a few months of their occurrence. It is true that they have not been asked to write a world history for 1931. The present volume claims no more than to be a history of the foreign relations of the United States during the third session of the seventy-first Congress (December 1st, 1930) until the first session of the seventy-second Congress (December 7th, 1931). The authors have, however, construed their terms of reference somewhat widely and have attempted little less than a statement of the course of events during the year in all the principal countries in the world. Nor is it easy to con- tradict their implicit opinion that all these events have affected, and are affecting, the United States. The effect of trying to cover so vast a field has been, however, to make the book in some places little more than a summary. Any attempt at comment or evaluation was no doubt doubly difficult, because of the nearness of the events which are described and of the avowedly non-partisan character of the institution which had commissioned the work. All the same it cannot be denied that the result has been to make rather a dull book.
Inevitably in dealing with such a year as 1931, the authors have given great attention to economic factors. Their early chapters relate informatively how the steadily deepening de- pression began to sap and finally destroyed the American doctrine of economic self-containment." The English reader will turn for enlightenment on a subject on which he is often unfortunately ignorant to Chapter V, which tells of the numerous revolutions which occurred during the year in South America. There were revolutions in Bolivia, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Chili and Cuba, and they were successful in all except the last named of these States. But the reader will look in vain, it must be admitted, for any great elucida- tion of either the causes or the effects of these uprisings.
Perhaps Mr. Lippmann's best chapter is Chapter VIII, which analyses the German economic situation just before the breakdown of the last summer of 1931. Here, for example, is Mr. Lippmann's admirable analysis of reparations payments, in which he brings out the often neglected fact that Germany in the years 1924-1928 enjoyed a boom in many ways more pronounced than that of the United States : "Between 1924 and 1928 the production index for Germany rose 45 per cent., as against 17 per cent, for the -United States and 5.5 per cent. for Great Britain. Factories were modernized, railways rehabilitated, the merchant marine replaced, the housing shortage eliminated, and various ambitious social services and public works inaugurated. But by the middle of 1928 the boom had passed its peak, and the reaction which then set in proceeded with accelerating violence. Germany was, in fact, the first country with a highly developed industrial organization to experience the world-wide depression : the decline began a full year earlier than in the United States."
Mr. Lippmann then goes on to show the close connexion between reparation payments and foreign borrowing. He tells us, however :
"It over-simplifies the case for example, to say that whatever Germany paid out as reparations was first borrowed from her creditors. The transactions actually occurred somewhat after this fashion: In order to snake the huge outpayrnenta, Germany levied taxes or placed specific charges on the railways and industry, and the payments passed out of the country as deliveries in kind or in foreign exchange. These funds were withdrawn from the pockets of the German people, and the result was a depletion of the domestic supply of liquid capital, followed by various corrective processes to restore an equilibrium."
This seems to us an excellent piece of economic analysis, and it is followed up by an account of the crisis itself which is both
full and clear.
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