One more popular belief must fall before anything like a sound economic policy can be achieved by the United States. It is the belief that, as a nation, we are self-sufficient—that, if need be, we could draw into our continental borders, erect an imaginary Chinese wall around ourselves and continue to live and thrive. It is a belief that is nine parts delusion.
It is a fallacy that is supported on the surface by many facts. The economic position of the United States today is the envy of the world. Our fabulous crops of wheat and food stuffs, our leadership in the manufacture of steel and the products of steel, the growing of sixty per cent of the world’s cotton and the existence of a million cotton spindles, the refining of three-fourths of the world’s petroleum and the mining of half its copper all lend color to the general feeling of self-sufficiency. We have an excellent organization for the production of many of the necessities of life, good transportation and communications within our borders and perhaps the strongest financial position the world has yet seen.
Above the material things of life, but making for our prosperity, are a sound constitution and a workable democracy, an intelligent electorate, a good average of physical fitness, a high standard of living, and a growing understanding between capital and labor. None of these things is, of course, perfect but all are far above the average for the world as a whole.
Indeed, with the exception of Russia, we are more nearly self-sufficient than any other great country. But even that leaves us far from being self-sufficient.
Our annual production, according to figures given in the 1925 American Year Book, is around $80,000,000,000. Our exports for the same year were over $4,864,000,000, or six per cent of the total production. It is not difficult to see, therefore, that, approximately, six per cent of our 50,000,000 of citizens who are listed as gainfully employed by the United States census are dependent for their livelihood on our foreign markets. Three millions of our inhabitants and their families would be deprived of their living should our foreign commerce suddenly disappear, an event that is almost impossible to conceive, but it serves to illustrate the error of those who fatuously proclaim that as a nation we are self-sufficient.
With 3,000,000 of unemployed our whole economic life would be subjected to a strain with its concomitants, depression or panic, hard times, suffering, discontent.
The curtailment of one or more of our foreign markets would adversely affect a number of our people in proportion to the size of that market.
Of course the burden of the curtailment or the destruction of our foreign markets would fall more heavily on some classes and some regions than on others, but the prosperity of all would be diminished.
Bound up in our growing trade is the prosperity of the farmer, manufacturer, transporter, middleman, retailer, and laborer.
Our cotton crop averages around $1,500,000,000 each year and over half of this finds a market overseas. While we consume most of our grain at home, the ten per cent that is sold abroad is an important factor in making the price. Foreign buyers of meat and animal products form twenty per cent of the total and the foreign market enters substantially into the totals for many other farm products.
As we come to manufacturing the figures are no less impressive. According to the 1923 figures—the last available—the United States has sixteen billion-dollar manufacturing industries, so called because they produce annually more than $1,000,000,000 each. Among them are the industries producing motor vehicles, iron and steel, packed meats, foundry and machine-shop products, cotton goods, refined petroleum, lumber and timber, electrical machinery, clothing and shoes, printing, and flour. Together they employ over 3,500,000 wage earners whose employment and high standard of living are vitally dependent upon the sale of surplus products in foreign countries.
But it is not only the six per cent of our people engaged in producing goods for foreign markets who are dependent on foreign trade. No one of the industries above named could long continue to operate on an economical basis were it not for scores of articles imported from other countries.
William C. Redfield, former Secretary of Commerce, has recently shown in his book, Dependent America, that imports intimately touch the lives of every American. They are in our food and our clothing; in our furniture and our houses; in our automobiles, telephones and lights; in our warships and materials for national defense; in our newspapers and the type that prints them; and in the fertilizer for our farms. . These are not luxuries. They are essential in harvesting and shipping our crops, in building our great bridges, in making the rails on the curves of railroads which must stand the hardest strain, in providing safe axles and steering-rods for automobiles and in providing tires for them. From our morning toothbrush to our evening pillow we utilize, in one form or another, literally hundreds of imported articles or articles finished with the aid of imports.
The United States War College has made a study of essential war materials not produced in the United States or which are produced in quantities insufficient even for peace-time requirements. They include chromium and manganese, essential in the production of high-grade machine steel and armor; hemp, jute and manila fibre which have a thousand uses but the most important of which is in harvesting crops. Antimony, nickel, platinum, quicksilver, tin and tungsten are some of the metals essential to the great age of machinery upon which the United States is dependent. They do not occur in quantities to suffice a fraction of our needs.
Wool and silk are textile materials in the same class. Coffee and sugar are foods which a war-time population might do without but the Army lists them as essentials. Essential medicines of which we have no native supply are opium, quinine, camphor, and nux vomica. Few of these materials have satisfactory substitutes. They are needed by every one of the big sixteen industries and ninety-five per cent of all other industries for peace-time production as well as for purposes of war.
If the American people ever realize their dependence on foreign trade they will see the futility of leaving ocean transportation in the hands of our commercial rivals. The possible consequence of our present practice of leaving the bulk of our foreign commerce to ships under alien flags is illustrated by the situation which arose the latter part of 1914 when the great shipping powers were preoccupied in moving troops and supplies, following the outbreak of the world war. Our docks and depots were piled high with goods, our freight yards congested with material for which there was a ready market abroad, but troops and supplies in the strategic theaters were even more important to the warring countries. The United States had few ships. The cotton farmer was bankrupt. A nation-wide “Buy a bale of cotton’’ campaign was instituted to save him from permanent ruin. And similar effects were felt in many other fields.
It is sound economic policy to own that bridge beyond the railroads which reaches out to foreign lands and insures the uninterrupted flow of goods and markets vital to the American people.
Not only is it sound as a measure of protection, but a merchant marine under the United States flag would create wealth for the country. Direct sailings to the principal markets of the world would enable American farmers and manufacturers to sell in those markets whereas roundabout sailings and trans-shipment close many of these markets to our products. The carrying charges, insurance premiums and seamen’s wages involved in our nine billion-dollar foreign trade would be sufficient to add shipping to the big sixteen billion-dollar industries.