THE AMERICAS: A Great Joy

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Only two U.S. Presidents, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, ever made long tours of South America, and both trips yielded great dividends of good will. Hoover made his trip as President-elect, traveling by battleship (much against the wishes of outgoing President Calvin Coolidge, who tried to get him to go in a cruiser, because "it would not cost so much"). His reception in Buenos Aires was so tumultuous that the Argentine President had his tailcoat ripped up the back. Hoover also journeyed into Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, met Bolivian government chiefs on a U.S. warship in the Pacific, was the target of an abortive bomb plot by anarchists in Argentina. During his trip. Hoover coined the historic phrase "good neighbors," and later he speeded the end of U.S. armed intervention in Latin America.

Franklin Roosevelt, who picked up the good-neighbor idea in his 1933 inaugural address, proposed an Inter-American Peace Conference in Buenos Aires three years later, and after his first re-election went (by cruiser) to open the meeting. F.D.R. breezed successfully through Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, fell speechless only once, when a newsman asked him in hesitant English to relate "a small moral anecdote for the edification of the young." From aboard the U.S.S. Indianapolis, F.D.R. scribbled a hasty note to his wife: "You have been given a huge silver tea set by the Brazilian government, very old Brazilian hammered silver! And not at all bad looking. I really think the moral effect of the Good Neighbor Policy is making itself definitely felt."

Easy as ABC. Now it is President Eisenhower's turn to make the grand tour. He first spoke of the idea while flying to Acapulco last February to visit President Adolfo Lopez Mateos; when he returned from his Europe-Asia-Africa trip last month and found Latin Americans complaining that the U.S. President had time for everyone but his neighbors, he decided definitely to go. Last week the itinerary was set (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS).

As the best places to visit in ten days Ike chose the traditional ABC countries, Argentina, Brazil and Chile, plus neighboring Uruguay; among them, the four nations account for 50% of Latin America's people. Brazil, under destiny-conscious President Juscelino Kubitschek, is surging with a great industrial spree, marred by a possibly ruinous inflation. In Argentina, President Arturo Frondizi, sacrificing popularity and his oldtime leftist principles, is taking Argentina along the harsh, bitter road of hard work and self-denial, back from the handout, statist economics of Dictator Peron. In Chile, bachelor President Alessandri is trying to get Chile back to financial solvency by raising production and cutting away government deadwood. The runaway welfare state of Uruguay, pushed by Benito Nardone, a new face on its nine-man government council, is keeping its famed democracy while winning its way back to a sound economy.