Person-to-Person: Ambassadors for the Usis

by LELAND HAZARD

1

THE United States government has been spending about $20 million a year for the lend-leasing and reverse lend-leasing of people. In the fiscal year 1954 almost six thousand persons were involved—students, teachers, lecturers, research scholars, foreign leaders, and specialists. Nearly four thousand people from other countries were guests of the United States. They came to study, teach, do research, gain practical experience, and observe American life in cities and towns in all of our forty-eight states. Americans in about half that number were sent abroad. The purpose of this program, authorized by Congress principally in the Smith-Mundt and Fulbright Acts, is to put America’s best fool forward. With what success, we do not yet know.

Russia is trying a similar program. Our government estimates that in the year 1953 exchange visitors to the U.S.S.R. numbered ten thousand, and this seems to be part of a massive Russian effort for the capture of men’s minds. Perhaps both the American and Russian governments believe there is truth in the saying attributed to the late Will Rogers: “I never disliked a man after I met him.”

My own project involved more than 40,000 miles of overseas and internal air travel and forty principal speaking engagements, all on a rather tight schedule. These exchanges of people are not stripedpants diplomacy. One simply says what he knows about his subject and answers questions. In the hot, moist air of the Philippines and Malaya I often went without coat or tie, and in the Philippines I adopted for social occasions the Filipino barong Tagalog — a shirt of sheer material, ramie or piña cloth, worn outside the trousers with the collar open for “black tie" and buttoned for “tails.” I’he shirt has white or gray embroidery on the front and sleeves, and the undershirt must have quarter sleeves. Of course I am indebted to my wife for insisting that I replace the American jacket with this sensible Filipino garment, popularized by President Magsaysay. She liked the embroidery, and the Filipino men liked me for wearing it.

An exchanged person does not know in advance what his schedule will be. When he arrives, the United States Information Service informs him, and sometimes the information is a bit sketchy. My first appointment in Manila was listed as a luncheon with “some labor leaders.” On arrival I found the Joint Committee of the Philippine Congress, the Department of Labor, and the Industrial Court all assembled, with the Secretary of Labor presiding — about a hundred people.

There is a good deal of residual paternalism in Filipino labor relations; and when I spoke of the importance of strong unions, saying that weak unions are often irresponsible, the discussion period waxed lively. The Secretary of Labor was delighted and his ideological foes were somewhat confounded, but I was doing no more than describing the philosophy which had worked for me in America.

Asians are full of secret, admiration for American “success,” as they call it. But they don’t like to be told about it in a didactic fashion. Who does? Yet they baited me. “What advice have you for us, Mr. Hazard?" the news reporters or questioners in public meetings would ask, referring to this or that problem. “None,” I would say. “I have come here to talk about some of our problems in America and how we try to solve them. Your problems are probably different and I hope to learn about some of them.”

Often I would be invited to informal discussions with management or labor groups. At one plant near Cebu in the Philippines, top management was installing an executive job evaluation plan, and things were hot with the heat which always attends a rearrangement and redefinition of executive functions. My cue in this meeting of some forty supervisors was to listen while they worked off their aggressions.

The meetings are arranged in various ways. In Formosa t he Association for the United Nations and the Rotary Clubs provided several of my meetings; in the Philippines the Jaycees provided the schedule; in Australia, the Australian Management Society; in Malaya my hosts were often the managements of the rubber and tin operations. But back of every arrangement was the United States Information Service, the USIS.

I found the people in this service, which operates under State Department foreign policy directives, almost always alert, hard-working, and competent. I did not find them living plush lives. Quite the reverse: their offices are usually in rented buildings of local design and construction; their transportation is a jeep wagon or some other wagon. It is no exaggeration to say that those who man the USIS are as dedicated in their way as were our early missionaries. Many of them have learned or are learning the language of the country where they are stationed — no small achievement. In the Philippines, for example, the indigenous language is broken into many tongues. Our foreign service officers and representatives are engaged in labors which no cruise-ship passenger would ever suspect, however much he girdled the globe. They know that there is no substitute for mutually respectful human relations rapport .

2

PEOPLE say at home, “What do they think about Communism in Malaya or Singapore or Bangkok — out there?” The plain answer is that millions of Asians at best are neutral. At home in our comfortable, prosperous U.S.A., Communism is an unclean thing — a leprosy which in our opinion threatens the globe. This is not the attitude of Southeast Asia. One has to be there to get the feel of it.

Imagine yourself in Southeast Asia. You are a little farmer on the edge of the jungle in Malaya; or perhaps a Chinese shopkeeper in Singapore, your shop front open to the hot, humid street, your little stock of roots or herbs or fruit or tins exposed to the dust or quickly covered with tattered canvas for protection from the sudden rains. Your cooking, eating, and sleeping are done there — no drive to a cool suburb at the end of the day’s work. There are millions like you. America tells you about democracy and freedom and about the evils of Communism. You listen. It sounds all right, but you’ve got a wife and kids and your little business or your little farm.

Y’ou’re not accustomed to voting. Nothing in your experience is so clean-cut as the difference between a Republican and a Democrat in America. You’ve heard more bullets than you’ve seen ballots in your lifetime. What you want to know is who is going to write the rules under which you have to carry on your struggle for survival next month or next year.

Continue the fantasy. You are a Chinese youth. You live in Malaya or Singapore, but you came there, or your father and mother came there —as our colonists came to America — for better opportunities or for a new life. Therefore you are of vigorous and aggressive stock. You have kept your loyalty to the homeland and to the Chinese culture. There are sixteen million like you — “Overseas Chinese” — and you are influential in the Far East.

Your homeland was invaded by the Japanese; its principal cities were occupied. Then your homeland suffered under Chiang Kai-shek — inflation and corruption on top of droughts and famine. Death has been close to you, or close to someone who belongs to you, always.

Then the Communists took your homeland and suddenly the whole world paid attention to China. Congressmen and Senators in the United States debated over whose fault it was. Britain recognized your homeland. The United States did not. Your land became the subject of discussion, motions, and parliamentary procedures in the United Nations. Your homeland went to war with the United States and the United Nations in Korea, and Chinese troops fought the great powers to a standstill in Korea. (Make no mistake about it — we suffered loss of prestige in the outcome of the Korean episode.) You begin to conclude that your ancient China is at long last a great power and it all seems to have happened under the Communists.

The Communists ask you to come from Malaya, Singapore, Indonesia, or Thailand — they offer free education. You have no way of knowing how good the promises are. You want to escape from the endless round of work, from the seeming vicious circle of your life. You identify yourself in your dreams with the power your homeland seems to have attained under the Communists— and you go.

In Singapore I read an account of a Chinese father literally snatching his daughter from the gangplank of a ship bound for Red China. In Kuala Lumpur, as my wife and I sat on the wide veranda in the tropical night, the British Adviser told us of eleven Chinese boys and girls who had left the city that day for Red China. In Taipei, the capital of Free China on Formosa, officials estimated that ten thousand Overseas Chinese youths had voluntarily entered Red China in the preceding year.

But Dorothy Whipple, the USIS Cultural Affairs Officer on Formosa, told me that Free China makes great efforts to dissuade its people from entering Ked China for education, and, she believes, with some success. She said that the number of Overseas Chinese coming to Formosa for education is increasing. Although the Communists capitalize on the hunger and the yearning of many in the Far East, some of Asia is not in distress and has an objective interest in American ways. Formosa, for example, is not hungry and certainly is politically friendly to the United States.

The capital, Taipei, now also the capital of Free China, lies in the north. In the south is Kaohsiung, an important port and industrial city. There I was taken by the director of USIS to speak at a Rotary luncheon. My audience, although it filled the seats provided, was a scant twenty-five. After a night on the train the rather bleak room, the tiny group, the si range faces, the sense of unfamiliarity, left me most uncertain. Should I stick to my subject, the story of Pittsburgh’s redevelopment — we had torn down many buildings better than any I had seen in Kaohsiung — or should I improvise some innocuous pleasantries?

Fortune guided me. I told the story much as I had told it in Detroit, St. Louis, or Boston, and left without the ringing applause so dear to a speaker’s heart. Within the year the USIS had its reward and I my lesson. Harold McConeghey, the devoted, Chinese-speaking USIS director at Kaohsiung, wrote me that the “city officials of Kaohsiung, the directors of the industrial water system, and the Chinese Navy have created an area-wide water authority . . . to rationalize and greatly improve water service to the Navy, the industries, and the city of Kaohsiung.” He added, “It was the continuing interest in the idea of an ‘authority’ which you introduced when you spoke before the Rotary Club of Kaohsiung that led to this development.” I shudder to remember how close I came to talking down to that little audience.

3

THE program of the United States Information Service, although standard in some respects — a library, documentary films, a place for meetings and discussions — necessarily varies from place to place. It counts for its success not only upon the formal meetings but also upon the informal exchanges and the continuing relationships. In Kuala Lumpur my wife and I were invited to a meeting of the Arts Council. I was asked to speak on how money is raised for the arts in the United States. After explaining how we divide up the cards and beg money from each other for the arts, I closed by saying that the arts will always be relatively poor as they were in Samuel Johnson’s time and as they are now, no less in the United States than elsewhere. Then I took out two memberships in the Arts Council and made a contribution to the Piano Fund.

From Kuala Lumpur a British business manager still writes me news of his project to launch cocoa production on a commercial scale in some part of the four fifths of Malaya which is still jungle. I did not succeed in securing a subscription to the capital required for this venture, but on last report my friend had raised all the money in England. The payrolls created by this private enterprise project in Malaya will be worth a great many speeches on democracy and freedom.

In Australia the hotels are not good. There is scarcely a hotel in which the service is equal to that of a second-or third-rate hotel in the United States or in Europe. I always frankly mentioned this fact in small groups of businessmen with whom I was invited to discuss management problems. Some months after my return I had a cablegram asking that I arrange appointments for an Australian builder with American hotel architects and managements. When the representative of the contracting firm arrived, I found that he had not known that we have in the United States a famous school which devotes itself exclusively to the techniques of hotel management.

As part of the USIS program, we maintain on the coast of the Philippines looking toward Asia the most powerful radio station in the world, from which we broadcast daily in English, Amoy, Mandarin, Cantonese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Burmese; a short-wave transmitter carries the same languages and, in addition, Russian, Indonesian, Korean, and Japanese. We hope that the words fall on receptive ears. We do not know.

Some say we should fight Communism with capital investments and technology and engineering, with hydroelectric projects and electrification of the vilages, and so we aid a little in that. Some say we should do it with labor relations, and so our embassies have labor attachés, and in some places there are projects to teach American concepts of labor-management relations. Some say we should do it with health services, as many frustrated missionaries concluded many years ago. (Often the only hospital, or the best hospital, is of missionary origin.) Some say we must talk more about freedom and not so much about democracy. Some say that we should build roads, so that the Filipinos or the Malays can trade internally with each other; others, that we should frame our foreign trade policies to buy more of their products and thus relieve the ever-present dollar shortages of our allies. Many panaceas are proposed, but the plain truth is that we have no sure conviction of what to carry abroad. While we are coming to that assurance, a little goodnatured visiting by ordinary Americans, modest and earnest about what they know and eager to learn from the black and the brown, will do some good. “I never disliked a man after I met him.”