THE CABINET: Culture Division

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No secret to the U. S. State Department has been the penetration, economic and intellectual, of the German and Italian dictatorships in Latin America. Secretary Hull's reciprocal trade treaties with Latin America are a move to meet Europe on economic grounds: largely because of them U. S. trade increased from 40% to 90% in a year as compared with a 30% increase for Germany, 1½% for Italy. Except for Franklin Roosevelt's sensational selling tour in 1936, however, the U. S. has been too sensitive to the cry of imperialism at home and abroad to organize a U. S. export trade in ideas.

Not without misgivings Assistant Secretary of State George S. Messersmith appeared two months ago before the House Appropriations Committee to ask Congress to enable his Department to do something "we would perhaps prefer not to do." What Mr. Messersmith asked for and got was money to establish two new State Department cells, a Division of Cultural Relations and a Division of International Communications, both aimed straight at "relations with our Latin American republics." Last week Secretary Hull and Under-Secretary Welles announced that the Division of Cultural Relations will be launched forthwith. Duties: "The exchange of professors, teachers, and students . . . cooperation in the field of music, art, literature . . . international radio broadcasts . . . generally, the dissemination abroad of the representative intellectual and cultural work of the U. S." First year's appropriation: $27,920.

The modest size of this kitty, said Mr. Welles, was proof that the new Division "is not a propaganda agency." Further proof was the State Department's choice of a Cultural Relations chief: Dr. Ben Mark Cherrington of the University of Denver. A onetime University of California football coach whose size (6 ft., 200 Ib.) is calculated to impress Latin Americans, white-mopped, genial Dr. Cherrington, 52, is no doctrinaire. Twelve years ago when Capitalist James Henry Causey, his conscience stricken by the violent Denver tramway strike of 1920, undertook to finance a Foundation for the Advancement of Social Sciences at the University of Denver, he picked Ben Cherrington from a YMCA student job to direct it. Director Cherrington began by asking 150 serious thinkers, including Louis Dembitz Brandeis, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Jan Smuts, Harvard Law Dean Roscoe Pound, Ramsay MacDonald, Herbert Hoover: "What would you do?" Consensus was to tackle international problems, and Dr. Cherrington did, with endless lectures, seminars, model League of Nations assemblies, dinners and luncheons which after twelve years make visiting foreigners wonder why landlocked Denver is so world-minded. A few Denver intransigeants call Director Cherrington a Communist, but real Communists call him a "pantywaist." To Mr. Hull he was recommended by his able expositions of the Hull trade agreement program.