[This letter, like one last week, is the text of a news article that was kindly sent to us by a reader named James Ayers. This one is a letter to the editor, written by Republican congressional representative Edwin A. Hall to Catskill Mountain News on December 22, 1940.]

Without doubt, one of the hottest bits of controversy in the coming session of Congress will be over the Reciprocal Trade Agreements. There is a strong element in Congress fiercely opposed to allowing the President to continue to dictate his personal policies through the State Department, in making trade agreements with other nations. Many feel that Congress sacrificed an important prerogative when it gave the Chief Executive the right to fashion trade relations as he desired.

Personally, I feel that recent treaties have given outsiders distinct advantages over American agriculture and industry. Perhaps they have been designed to help large American interests in those foreign countries. Whatever the objective, it is certain for example, that the influx of Cuban sugar and Argentine beef has done domestic beet sugar manufacturers and western cattle raisers extensive harm. Such action has placed unnecessary competition in their way.

All of which raises this question: Is the President attempting to aid large Wall Street interests and big financiers at the expense of our farmers and their local bankers? Is it not true that our financiers have invested heavily in Latin American states, and that lacking cash, these little nations have had to meet the interest on their loans in kind? By bringing consumer's goods and agricultural products into our markets, these states may be meeting their own obligations to big investors, but are they not inflicting hardship upon our agriculturists and industrialists and the local bankers who have financed them?

To look at the situation in this light, it becomes apparent that the American public is not the first consideration of the men responsible for these trade agreements. Arrangements like the one mentioned would never be brought about if representatives in Congress with the particular needs of their localities in mind were allowed to decide what our foreign trade policies should be, rather than an executive and his staff (the State Department), bent upon pleasing outside interests. After all, the well being of a great nation is dependent upon the success of its economic subdivisions just as much as the health of a man is predicated upon the permanent soundness of his limbs and viscera.

James Ayers

Kerhonkson