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Show THE BUY AMERICAN MOVEMENT Officials of the importers association are beginning to sit up find take notice of the vvaiy the "Uuy America" movement is growing grow-ing over the United States. Tlie default of certain European nations na-tions on their debt payments has given impetus to the movement. 'I he importer-propagandist gave vent to the old bogey that was raised during the fight on the K moot-1 Lawley tariff to the effect that if we participate as a natkyn in ai movement to buy goods made only in America, foreign countries will retaliate. The import-guild fails to take cognizance of the fact that the movement of buying at home started in Europe and that in Great Britain it has grown so airtight that newspapers, magazines and billboards are full of it. British subjects are spending their vacations on the English channel instead of the Aljeditranean coast, and wherever possible are buying only British produced goods. The movement over there has grown to fine proportions. The other day the newspapers carried a cable dispatch that tobasco sauce has been placed on the blacklist because it has to be imported. Tobasco comes principally from Louisiana, and it is to be expected that the Honorable Huey Long will take due note of this attack on his sovereign sov-ereign state. But why shouldn't British people spend their money at home and why shouldn't people in America do the same thing? The old argument about the ten per cent of our production which goes abroad being more important than the ninety per cetnt we use at home is growing pretty thin. If American industries could have the difference between What they sold at home in 1929 and what they sold in 1932 nnost of them would be willing-to forget all about exports. But if the wishes of the import-bund were followed we would turn over our great home market m the expectancy of getting get-ting a market abroad which exists only in the fertile imaginations of the gentlemen who are seeking to get imported goods into America at a. profit to themselves. Let us by all means have foreign trade but let it be built up not at the expense of the American producer. More than fifty percent per-cent of our imports now come to America duty free. This talk about a tariff wall having been built around America is the bunk. Maybe we would be better off if we had such a wall. At any rate depreciation of foreign currency has destroyed whajt protection the American producer had, in many lines and with need some sort of a barrier until the world money is stabilized. To say that this could be brought about by buying abroad and throwing the rest of our labor out of jobs, is a little too thick to go down. Outside of the die-hard theoretic-all free traders, only one who expected to profit financially by flooding the country with foreign goods would advance it. A paragraph or two from a recent issue of the soundly American Ameri-can Saturday Evening Post very tersely sums up the situation with regard to the Buy-America movement: "England, France and Germany have their interna troubles and dissensions, but when there is an external threat against their trade or their prestige Englishmen line up shoulder to shoulder for England, Frenchmen for France, Germans for Germany. This is as it should be, for it is the lain duty of. every man to consider his own fireside and his own country first. European countries are national to the core where their own affairs are concerned, and are internationalists solely for a national advantage. Only a mind of sugaf-plum sweetness could arrive at a different conclusion on surveying the European scene. '"America must tighten her lines not by way of reprisal but for self-protection. Europe has made the game; two can play it. Think American, buy American." |