Like Tammany?

Widespread starvation might or might not come in 1947; if it did, neither UNRRA nor any international agency would be on hand to cope with it. That became virtually certain last week when the U.S. State Department turned down a proposal by UNRRA's Fiorello LaGuardia for a $400 million international relief fund to tide the world over the months between UNRRA's end, next Dec. 31, and the resumption of normal trade.

The State Department's decision was based in part on the belief that a number of Congressmen and plain Americans had become incensed by the "ingratitude" of some of the recipient nations. It was true that of the $3,693,000,000 spent by UNRRA in its three-year life, almost three-quarters had come out of U.S. pockets. More than half of this money had been spent (where it was needed most) in nations firmly within the Russian orbit. Yugoslavia received $429 million worth of food, fuel, commodities, industrial supplies and other necessary aid, Czechoslovakia $270 million, Poland $474 million, Byelorussia and the Ukraine $250 million, and Albania $28 million.

Anyone naive enough to expect that relief shipments to countries in Russia's sphere would produce immediate political results was certain to be disappointed. In the Yugoslav crisis last August, the U.S. public (with some prodding from the Hearst press) cried "ingrate" at Tito's Government, which took and distributed U.S. food, and shot down U.S. planes.

Well aware that other sections of the U.S. public would protest shutting off relief supplies to needy peoples (whether their governments were friendly to the U.S. or not), the State Department proposed an alternative plan: purchase of U.S. food by individual food-short nations. Perhaps significantly, U.S. Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson mentioned only three countries--Italy, Austria and Greece--as examples of possible beneficiaries under this plan; all three are outside the Russian orbit.

Nine out of ten nations speaking in U.N.'s Economic and Financial Committee approved LaGuardia's plan rather than Acheson's. Naturally, Russia was one of the nine. "Food," cried Andrei Gromyko, must never be used by any nation "as a means of reaping political or other advantages." The U.S., he suggested, must tighten its belt.

In the teeth of the State Department denial that under the new relief plan food would be distributed on the basis of political favor, LaGuardia snorted that the plan would work "like Tammany used to in New York." If LaGuardia was right, the U.S. might make a lot more enemies by withholding food than it had ever made friends by giving it.

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