The American Scene; #266

I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it. I don't

know how to do it, I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it. I

don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it.

I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it. I

don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to do it. I don't know

how to do it, I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it.

I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it. I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to do it. I think in 1862, we are the only nation in the world that has developed this kind of college, which

started land grant college for this specific purpose, and we're the only one in the world that has agricultural surpluses. So that my point here is that if you want to get development, the way to get it is by developing human resources, people who are trained and knowledgeable about subjects, and that is precisely what's lacking in the underdeveloped countries. There are not very many people who have had experience in running anything, there aren't very many people who have had any kind of education enabling them to think new ideas about this. Now let's get back to where we open, isn't this pointed up in Katanga and in the Congo that say the Belgians move out, and they leave a group of people with a taste for a Western way of behaving politically economically, but without the skills of techniques or strategies to haven't trained the people. That's right, the underdeveloped countries have very quickly adjusted themselves to the ideas, to the idea that they ought to

be in the 20th century, that they all ought to have refrigerators and stoves and water closets and so on. But they have never yet, anyway, paid the price of education and organization, which would allow them to have that kind of development. Are they not paid the price, or they have been allowed to pay the price in the colonial system sometimes? Well, that's true, except that if you take Africa, for example, and take the countries which have not had the colonial system, they too are very far behind. That's true. In fact, you might argue this both ways, I think, you might say that the colonial system has pushed people along further. Yes, Algeria is a good example of it. Algeria would be nowhere to date. I don't want to get into the Algerian mess, but you know, you know, you know what I do, having seen it. They owe everything to France, in terms of everything by everything we mean, the modern way of life.

And here again, as I say, they're quick to pick up the advantages, but they want, again, something they see that goes along with this in the West, which is the kind of freedom we possess. So they want the freedom almost before they're ready to have it. And therefore, it seems to me that we ought much more than we have in the past. Think about how do you develop these ideas and people? How do you free their minds? And my notion is that the only way to do this is to provide dedicated people who will develop educational systems in these countries, who will, to some degree, open up the society. Here, you get into the question of a fluid society where the bright can move up instead of having to be the chief son or the nobility. Well, you got a lot that we need a lot of dedicated people. You mean we need Americans showing out there? Sure. Beautiful Americans and not ugly ones. Well,

the ugly American, you remember, was a good one. He was the one that developed the pump. There wasn't on running on bicycles. And there's another very interesting point that the ugly American illustrated. This fellow developed a pump that was run with the bicycle pedals you remember, which was the next step for them, rather than going to the hydraulic pump where you would need some source of power that they didn't have. He developed something that they did have. And this is difficult for Americans to go abroad and to adapt themselves to whatever it is that's the next step for the people there. This is the question of whether you go from the hand of the cycle to the cycle to the side, the side to the binder and the binder to the combine. What a good many of these countries want to do is to go from the hand to the combine and make it all in one jump. Make haste slowly. Well, I don't know how fast you can go. I wasn't trying to say that you couldn't skip some of them, perhaps you can. But at least you have to recognize that the West has gone through

a lot of steps that the underdeveloped countries have not yet gone through. We can speed up history now. We've gone through the steps. We worked them out. We can help speed it up. But incidentally, did you see in the report the other day, I think it was in Life Magazine, of the situation in India, which the, the brooms, the length of the brooms, you see the untouchable sweep. Yes. And they have to lean way over because the broom handles are so sharp. And the ambassador's wife was annoyed at this and she thought how bad, how bad for them, the dust comes up in their face. So she insisted that she introduced. She, in fact, she put in her own money, introduced in various places, long broom handles. And finally, narrow is behind it. And this may be effective change in the physical appearance of a large class of millions of Indians. Yes. Well, it's absolutely right. And this is what I mean by saying that people must have their minds open to the idea that they can change something. Now, maybe we do this too rapidly in America. The Europeans criticize this because we change our model of car

every year. And so, and there may be something to that. But the problem of the underdeveloped countries is how to get them to change it all. It sounds very easy, this business of going in, furnishing materials and money. But it isn't any good unless you've got this willingness to change. Let me ask a naive question. You made the point, very well taken, that after all, there are a lot of these countries have not advanced on their own. They haven't been able to, they put forth pay for it for themselves. They haven't been willing to. How are you going to make them willing to, if they've had the thousand years to do this, why didn't an industrial development scientific development occur in Africa over the past thousand years? Why did it happen to occur here? Well, this is a very interesting question, a good bit of it. It's pure accident as I say. I think that, well, you and I were talking the other day about Benjamin Franklin. How can you explain a man like Benjamin Franklin? Or how could you explain

that he pushed America head, just the influence that one man probably as much as any other man of his century? Or it hadn't been Franklin, it had been somebody else by the same name, maybe. Well, I'm not so sure. At any rate, now what you're getting, I think, in some of these African countries, is someone does get pushed up to the top, who is a leader. He may be the wrong one temporarily, but at least he then gets replaced because people now in those countries have seen enough of the West. For you, you talked about the Congo. They've seen enough of how the Belgians dress and act and drive cars, so that they want to be like that. Then there is a secret to say they see, they want to imitate. It's an illustration in a way. That's why it's important, I think, for our State Department to have trade fairs. And it's why it's important for us to have demonstration schools in a number of places. This kind of thing, what's the appetite, which has to be stirred first, certainly, before you get any idea of...

Yes, you've seen the people of another country out of trade fairs. The people of the street coming in, simply wrapped in this thing, because this touches their life immediately. Imagine having a washing machine instead of going out of the brook and beating your linen against stone. Well, I've been in a lot of countries, you probably have to, where people come up and feel the cloth to see that this really is what it looks like. They can't believe that a suit has made that way. And I remember one night my wife and a friend were lost in Old Delhi in India, and they were completely surrounded by Indians who were looking at them. And they had been dressed up to go to a tea, and they had some pretty fancy clothes, even for them, they were on. But to these Indians, this was a complete fascination. They were almost as if they were at a circus, looking at the animals. And it's this sort of thing, though, that motivates them to want to do something of that kind.

Now, it doesn't always motivate them to want to be like us. I don't mean that. But it motivates them to want to change whatever it is that they have, because they see that there is something better. And it's this kind of motivation that we must stir, or we get nowhere in my view. All right, now you say you've got to have a lot of dedicated Americans going out, and you're talking about when the chief devices is through education. To school, or not even if you don't have to have formal schools, education of a sort, once or another. Well, you're arguing for a big expansion of our State Department program, and there's her what? Well, we're now spending, I know, something like $4 billion a year for foreign aid, some part of that military aid. Well, that's total foreign aid. That's total, yes. Actually, we give a lot of money for things like steel mills, and this is what countries ask for. We give them, in a sense, we really give them whatever they ask for. We never decide what ought to go there. Now, the point I'm making, I think, is that there ought to be a lot more study on our part, and

there's two, of what it is that they most need first. Is it a steel mill, or is it something like just our old country school? Well, we have plenty of examples of they're putting in something like a concrete mill where there's no need for the thing. That's right. This is developed again and again, this sort of thing, because we couldn't dictate, could we? That's right. No, we can't dictate, and this is one of the problems. As a matter of fact, the United Nations has the same problem. This is one of the great difficulties the United Nations program, that even though it knows what a given country most needs, let's call it country apple pie, because I don't want to name any in this respect, it does not dare to say to that country, this is what you most need, even though it has observed from its experience around the world, that a school system would do much more than say, well, use our old example, steel mill, because all of these technical assistance programs are developed on the notion that it is the country itself, which must request the

assistance. And of course, that's where a very good reason, too, because you must have the complete cooperation, the interest of the country itself, if you don't your loss. Well, I know why it's easier, I mean, I will suggest why it's easier to put in a steel mill, or something like that, some gadget, I mean, it would even be a large, or a dam, or something like that, rather than a school system, because a school system cuts into vested interests of the most subtle and complex sort in a society, whereas they don't have any steel mill there, and so they couldn't do it themselves, so you're just putting something down in there, that doesn't really interfere. There's other interferes, and yet it's a more important thing. Well, the business that you've just mentioned of vested interests is terribly important in this, and one of the most difficult things to handle in the underdeveloped countries is that there always is a ruling class, and they are the ones speaking for the government,

and there is no middle class, there are never very much of a middle class anyway, and then the very large lower class people that are never heard from, so that the only place that you get this request, this from this upper class, which wants to maintain, it naturally wants to maintain its own position, that it's sometimes as held for thousands of years. All right, Holly, you go into Apple Pie country, country Apple Pie, and you meet the upper class, naturally going in there as a delegate, and you attend the usual parties and functions, which are given you as you go in, but you must have sensed these undercurrent needs, and it must give you kind of feeling helplessness, you would like to say, look, upper crust, look what the lower crust really needs, what your country really needs, do you have that feeling? Yes, and I think on this particular subject that the United Nations is doing now a pretty good job, because the United Nations has hired a number of experts from different countries to tell countries how development comes most easily,

and they can advise them much more readily than say the United Nations because this is coming from the United Nations where there isn't the tendency to say, well, this, they want to be imperialized or something, the power image of the people of America is canceled. So I think there is progress being made on this, but as you say, it's held back by the feudal society now existing in most of these places, and the anxiety to protect the vested interest, whatever it may be. How are you going to loosen up this class stratification? Well, my feeling about this again is that education is going to have a few answers. In an educational system you get a chance for the bright to come up to the top. When you don't, I've often thought, for example, in some of the Middle Eastern countries that you had all of these very bright boys, undoubtedly, around in all of these Quranic schools where they learn only the Quran, but nobody ever finds out which are the bright ones. They don't go beyond four years

of education anyway, so there's never this chance to pick them out as we have here where they go through a public school system and then have a chance to go to a college or university if they're bright. This pushes the society along. Therefore, I think education, a system of education, universal system of education, would be one of the best ways or is one of the best ways to keep society fluid. You don't mean education simply by schools, although that's a primary institutional form, but education going in there with programs is an educational form. This broomstick operation or this pump operation is an educational operation fundamentally. But the school system itself, that will, if you can get in a democratic school system. That's right. But how are you going to get a democratic school system into an Arabian country? Well, I think what you have to do first, probably, is to get a number of Arabs to go to some other country and see the school system there. The exchange programs will do that, and then when they go back, particularly if they are in the class

structure at a point where they can be important, they will motivate this kind of thing. I've seen that happen before, and I know it can happen again. In other words, a good bit of exchange back and forth between Middle East and Europe, Europe and the United States, Asian, the United States, Asian, Europe, and so on. That helps a lot. Now you have a problem here. We're going to go in with all the tact in the world. We're much greater tact than some people think we have, perhaps, and try to bring them into the 20th century. But you are running against religious views, tax structures, education, and so on. And you're running against land holdings. In many cases, tremendous land holdings where the only possibility of any kind of free society is to have agrarian reform. Where you have other situations where the hierarchy of religion controls the country. You have other situations where India would be an example where you have Hinduism making

cows sacred, which does really harm the diet of Indians. They sometimes said facetiously that India is the country where cows are treated like human beings and the human beings are treated like cattle. I don't want to make anything of that, but it is true, I think, that unless a good many of these customs are changed and changed gradually, they can't be changed quickly. You never can get to the kind of government, social, political, and economic system which will allow a development of industry, a developed country with which we're familiar. You break, you have to break this stratification, and you have to break stratification of all kinds of social, political, and economic. Well, you just have to keep pushing and pushing. Pushing, I think, for

example, immigration is one good way to break up class structure too. Some of the South American countries, Guatemala, is an example, bringing in a certain number of Germans each year because they need their technical ability. But this also brings an influence into that society which breaks up the old society, in effect. Argentina is an excellent example of a country which has brought in many different nationalities, and because of that has had many new ideas and customs. Well, Argentina is a good example also of a country where you've had a pretty widespread educational system. And here you can contrast that with a country like Brazil which has more in the way of resources than the United States by far, natural resources, but which has never been able to develop these natural resources. This is because it has not developed its human resources. This is a great problem. Yes, how do you develop the human resources? Well, as I said before, how would you think I'm just beating on one engineer here? The only way to

do this, I think, is to develop an educational system. And that in itself will do many of the other things that we've talked about. Let me give you an illustration from Europe, if you have time. Yes. The two countries in Europe with the highest standard of living are Switzerland and Denmark, and they have almost no natural resources, those two countries. But they have a very, very good educational system, and they've developed themselves to a very high degree on their human resources. You could illustrate this same point in many other ways, but they're the England. England herself, England herself now, my dear. I'm not talking about the empire, has very few natural resources comparatively speaking, but she's been able to make a goal of it by using the rest of the world. That's true. That's true. But if you take the countries of the world which have large natural resources, I think you could say they're at least five or six, that have as much in the way of resources as the United States. There would be Russia,

China, Brazil, I mentioned before, great Britain with its possessions, France with its possessions, Australia's practically the same size of the United States. All of these countries can, and at one time or another, in case of England, France at one time or another have, been at the forefront by developing human resources. Well, we still have an answer how we're going to say in a country like Brazil, get the human resources you'd love. I think it's happening. I mean, a few signs I've seen, they're just an establishment of Brazil, the great town, and giving a new national pride and things like that. You've got to steer the affections, and I don't mean just the like, you've got to steer the effective side of people to give them the true motivation to change. And you're getting a good bit of this now, because more than ever before we can go by playing to see another country quickly, we see motion pictures which illustrate what another country is doing. Can we do see machinery all the time that, well, breaks down in the underdeveloped country and rusts out in the sun, but at least they know what

it's like and how it did work. And motion pictures, of course. And motion pictures have done a lot, I think, in this respect. So that it's something that takes patience, but my main point, I think, is that we ought to give a lot of thought to how to do it. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Holland, for coming and talking about this American image and the American problem. Thank you.