“The Spice of the Department Store”: The

“Consumers’ Republic,” Imported Knock-Offs from

Latin America, and the Invention of International
Development, 1936–1941
Augustine Sedgewick
University of South Florida

Abstract
Major recent work in US history has credited the New Deal with a dubious double legacy.
One group of historians has shown how Roosevelt’s domestic policies subsidized the
consolidation of a political economy and culture of mass consumption, while another
has described how his foreign policies generated the strategies and institutions of
neoimperialism. Scholars have analyzed these developments in isolation, but this essay
demonstrates that they were linked and synergistic. Working from the Fair Labor
Standards Act of 1938 to the nascent program for multilateral international
development, it argues that an integrated complex of New Deal domestic and foreign
policies harnessed the rise of the United States as a “consumers’ republic” to the forms
of imperialism refined in Latin America in the thirties and forties and deployed
globally after the war. This policy complex rationalized the global production of US
mass-consumer prosperity, displaced the costs of the Keynesian rehabilitation of US
capitalism abroad, and evolved to regulate the metabolism between domestic mass
consumerism and international hegemony after 1945.

“Locke said it as well as anyone and more honestly than most: empire as a way
of life involves taking wealth and freedom away from others to provide for your
own welfare, pleasure, and power.”––William Appleman Williams, Empire as a
Way of Life

I
The New Deal stabilized US capitalism by making unprecedented promises of
welfare and security to workers in key sectors of the economy and electorate,
especially unionized workers in capital-rich mass-production industries. It
financed the costs of fulfilling those promises by excluding other people from
its programs. It is well known that the disproportionately black, Hispanic, and
Asian workers who manned the agricultural food chain were not protected
under the minimum wage and maximum hour bill Franklin Roosevelt signed
into law as the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) in 1938. Yet it is also true,
though it has been overlooked, that the FLSA was specifically designed to
exclude workers abroad, an exclusion that was hotly contested in Congress
and anything but assured at the time, and which had important consequences.
Through the opening that exclusion created, the FLSA linked into a complex

International Labor and Working-Class History

No. 81, Spring 2012, pp. 49– 68
# International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2012
doi:10.1017/S0147547912000038
50 ILWCH, 81 Spring 2012

of New Deal foreign and domestic policies that began to transform the position
of the United States in the world economy. This transformation supported the
ascendant domestic political economy and culture of mass consumption, in
part by expanding the flow of cheap consumer imports into the United States.
This essay works from the FLSA to the trade in manufactured consumer
imports to connect New Deal domestic economic and social policy to a key inno-
vation of New Deal Latin American policy: multilateral international develop-
ment, which reshaped foreign economies in line with evolving US strategic and
economic goals and became a central pillar of the formally liberal postwar world
order that secured US hegemony by recasting particular US interests as univer-
sal.1 Institutionalized in New Deal diplomacy as one panel of the umbrella
“Good Neighbor Policy,” international development comprised an evolving
matrix of industrial, agricultural, and infrastructural projects conceived and
coordinated by a multinational corps of diplomats and bureaucrats, supported
by a raft of financial, social, and cultural programs, and justified by an explicit
promise to increase the standard of living across the Americas.2 Undertaken
in countries from Haiti to Brazil and in collaboration with even “nationalist”
Latin American governments, these projects and programs were variously bi-
and multilateral in principle, but in practice they depended entirely on US
approval and capital.3
Like the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act (RTAA) Roosevelt pushed
through in 1934, international development turned the wealth accumulated in
the US home market into a foreign policy tool. But unlike the RTAA, develop-
ment gave this tool a real shaping edge. The reciprocal trade program was based
on a conventional assessment of economic complementarity. It was designed to
restore and expand international commerce by bargaining down tariffs on com-
modities that were already important US exports and imports, securing outlets
for the surplus domestic product and sources of products that could not be pro-
duced domestically on any practical basis. Naturally it was easiest to seal agree-
ments on these terms with countries exporting tropical commodities. In its early
stages, the trade agreements program centered on the Western Hemisphere, as
the United States wielded its power as the world’s leading market for Latin
America’s leading export, coffee, to refine Latin American markets for its
own staple exports, agricultural and industrial.4
In contrast, the developmental program was organized around a broad-
ened concept of complementarity that was social as well as environmental,
a normative thesis that there were products the United States should not
produce for itself, products that did not suit the changes New Deal pro-
grams––including the FLSA––were making in the US economic and social struc-
ture. Shaped by this idea, development worked simultaneously to enhance Latin
American markets for favored US exports and to create Latin American sources
of two kinds of US imports. On the one hand, along traditional lines, there were
strategically important products, especially tin, rubber, and hemp for naval
rope; and, on the other hand, along new lines, there were labor-intensive mass-
market consumer manufactures, especially handicrafts, housewares, novelties,
The Spice of the Department Store 51

accessories, gifts, and toys similar to those previously imported from Asia and
Europe but also competitive with certain domestic industries. Leather purses,
wallets, work gloves, and shoes from Argentina; imitation Oriental rugs, artificial
flowers, rubber galoshes, and hand-embroidered curtains from Brazil; baskets,
wooden spoons, salad sets, blown wine glasses, pitchers, hand-loomed cotton
tablecloths, pottery tableware, household tinware, and silver jewelry from
Mexico––as the Department of Commerce put it, “the spice of the department
store.”5 In these products a new strategy of international relations was distilled
into so many private, domestic diversions. They appeared on department store
shelves as expressions of the metabolism between the rise of the United States
as a “consumers’ republic” and the “new imperialism” refined in Latin America
in the thirties and forties and deployed globally after the war.6
More than 25 years ago, Thomas Ferguson sketched the connections
between those developments, outlining the ascendant “hegemonic bloc” of mul-
tinational, liberal, capital-intensive business interests––including large retail
interests––vested in “the unorthodox combination” of free trade, collective bar-
gaining, and social welfare at the heart of the late New Deal.7 But what sort of
social relations did that new congress of interests require to establish and sustain
its dominance? Meg Jacobs, Lizabeth Cohen, and others have filled in the dom-
estic picture, arguing that this combination of policies, tending toward high
wages and low prices, appeared less “unorthodox” from a “consumers’ point
of view,” but they have overlooked the important international dimension.8
Using “the spice of the department store” as evidence, I show how New
Deal foreign and domestic policy worked in concert to produce mass-consumer
prosperity in the United States. In effect, the new developmental programs glo-
balized the New Deal by vesting elites and governments in Latin America (and
later worldwide) in the “domestic” New Deal order. Work remains to be done
on the particular contexts and consequences of early developmental programs
across Latin America; here I simply emphasize how development shaped a
international order that supported the rehabilitation of US capitalism. I argue
that the New Deal succeeded in accommodating millions of mobilized
workers within US capitalism, as Ferguson put it, in part by beginning after
1936 to export labor-intensive basic consumer goods industries under the sign
of international development, displacing the social pressures characteristic of
those industries––their reliance on low wages, long hours, unskilled labor, and
closely supervised, often violently enforced compliance––onto workers
abroad. At the same time, reimporting the produce of these industries effec-
tively expanded the set of affordable and desirable products available in depart-
ment stores and subsidized the consolidation of an economics, politics, and way
of life organized around mass consumption.
This argument raises a secondary point. William Appleman Williams,
Lloyd Gardner, and their followers in diplomatic history long ago took apart
Roosevelt’s much-mythologized Good Neighbor Policy. They readily exposed
the distance between its rhetoric of a unitary inter-American interest and its per-
petuation of the old Open Door Policy––which always opened out toward
52 ILWCH, 81 Spring 2012

export markets, foreign investments, and sources of raw materials more easily
than in toward the home market––and judged the Good Neighbor Policy a
failure by its own standards, another tragic case of noble ideals undercut at
the bottom line of business.9 The accounting supporting that analysis is indispu-
table. Undoubtedly the United States continued in the thirties and forties to
take more from Latin America than it gave in return. But such a dismissal of
the Good Neighbor Policy misses the long-run implications of the material
and stylistic shift in the exercise of international power pioneered in the New
Deal’s foray into Latin America. As the history of the early developmental
program makes clear, that shift was halting, limited by war, and proved vulner-
able to postwar retreat from both sides. Yet over time it has come to look less
like a failure and more like the experimental beginning of an economic, political,
and strategic realignment with broad global implications.

II
Doing their best to calibrate that realignment, moving freely between offices in
the capital, the high-rise blocks of Manhattan, and Cambridge, were Roosevelt’s
“corporate liberals” and technocrats.10 Two bureaucracies with overlapping
mandates are of particular interest here: the Executive Committee on
Commercial Policy and the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American
Affairs. Roosevelt created the Executive Committee––chaired by Assistant
Secretary of State and former Harvard law professor Francis Sayre––in 1933
to manage the “intricate task of judging how best a sound domestic situation
may be attained and retained by a proper marking off and fitting together of
the field of American economic activity and the field of foreign economic
activity.”11 The Coordinator’s office, chartered in 1940 and run by Nelson
Rockefeller, worked within the outlines of commercial policy established by
the Executive Committee, using “not-so-hidden hands” to maximize the
returns from international relations––economic, strategic, military––available
in the Western Hemisphere.12 Under Rockefeller, the Inter-American
Development Commission, staffed by men at ease submitting their reports on
Westinghouse Electric letterhead, would manage the trade in new imports
from Latin America.13
Charged as they were with “fitting together” domestic and foreign econ-
omic policy, the members of the Executive Committee looked on anxiously as
the wage and hour bill wound its way through the legislative process. The bill
had important implications for New Deal commercial policy, and they were
contested from the moment of its introduction into the House and Senate in
May of 1937.
The Senate version had evolved over several years under the pens of the
President’s chief legal fixers, Tom Corcoran and Ben Cohen. They worked
directly under Roosevelt, with the guidance of Harvard law professor Felix
Frankfurter and Associate Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, and in
close cooperation with Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins and Senator Hugo
The Spice of the Department Store 53

Black, Democrat of Alabama, who sponsored the legislation in the Senate.14 As

introduced, the Black bill claimed jurisdiction over “interstate commerce,”
defined as “trade, commerce, transportation, transmission, or communication
among the several States or between any State and any place outside
thereof,” where “State means any state of the United States or the District of
Columbia.”15 Syntactically, that definition of scope covered commerce
between states and foreign countries. At the same time, within that broad juris-
dictional framework, the Black bill narrowly defined the processes of pro-
duction to which the bill would apply as those that took place “in any State,”
and it defined the workers to be covered by the bill as those engaged in pro-
duction “in any State.” Under Black’s bill, goods produced domestically for
export into foreign commerce would be covered; goods produced abroad for
import into interstate commerce would not.
The version of the bill introduced simultaneously into the House aimed at a
different outcome. The legislation’s sponsor there, William Connery, Democrat
of Massachusetts––born in the shoemaking town of Lynn, and whose district
included a swath of the old Massachusetts mill belt––made one substantive
alteration to Black’s bill. He removed the words “in any State” from the
clause that identified the production processes and workers to which the bill
would apply, creating an opening in the legal framework for the extension of
any new US labor standards to workers outside “any State” and to imported
products.16 Predictably, given this divergence, foreign labor and imported
goods became a point of contention in the legislative wrangling that followed.
The broad outlines of the prevailing line-up of interests are well known.
Seeking to preserve their positions in the economic order, unionized skilled
workers in the North and low-wage manufacturers in the South opposed the
wage and hour bill; social reformers and advocates of consumer purchasing
power as a cure for depression supported it.17 But there was also a sizable
group of northern manufacturers on the fence. They supported national
minimum wage legislation to counter the advantage of southern industries but
also stood to lose business––in the domestic market as well as export
markets––to low-cost foreign competition, especially if the trade agreements
program continued to erode the tariff wall.18 Hedging, they argued that legis-
lation lifting wages and cutting hours should be paired with some form of
protection for US manufacturers against competition from foreign producers
not obliged to meet the same labor standards.
From their perspective, that argument was both reasonable and realistic.
Clearly basic industries could “runaway” from high wages and regulation:
They had done just that from the North to the South. With more countries
moving into basic consumer-goods industries, especially textiles, in which
they enjoyed a labor-cost advantage over the United States and suffered
from a comparatively small technological disadvantage, there were fewer
obstacles stopping US manufacturers from running away abroad. Moreover,
the type of protection this group of manufacturers was after had a clear
precedent. Four years earlier, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA)
54 ILWCH, 81 Spring 2012

had explicitly authorized import limitations necessary to insulate the balance

of wages and prices it attempted to strike against the fluctuations of world
markets.
Yet the protectionist interest was not as strong as it might have been.
Generally favoring the lower prices and increased consumer purchasing
power promised by freer trade, the leaders of the Congress of Industrial
Organizations (CIO), representing many workers in northern manufacturing
industries, opposed import controls.19 Also in the could-have-been camp was
a group of manufacturers who decided that the threat of increased imports
didn’t merit handcuffing the wage and hour bill to complicated trade restriction.
The upholstery and drapery lobby, for example, interpreted the apparently con-
tradictory action of the Roosevelt administration––pushing at once for higher
domestic wages and lower tariffs––as a lack of coordination, “the right hand”
in State Department falling out of sync with “the left hand” in the Labor
Department, rather than a real shift in economic strategy.20
They were exactly wrong on this count. The members of the Executive
Committee on Commercial Policy, empowered precisely to coordinate foreign
and domestic economic policies, were paying close attention to the scrum
over imports, primarily because they were hoping to stay out of it. The debate
over the wage and hour bill coincided with a push to capitalize on the
Roosevelt landslide of 1936 (interpreted in the State Department as an endor-
sement of trade liberalization) by negotiating new trade agreements with indus-
trialized European countries. Sealing these agreements would entail accepting
increased imports of consumer manufactures––including textiles, shoes, and
pottery––in exchange for agricultural exports.21 With this in mind, and thinking
it best not to stir protectionist interests any more than necessary, the Executive
Committee wanted a wage and hour bill altogether free of language about
foreign labor or imported products.22 But as amendments to restrict imports
were repeatedly raised in Congress, the committee was compelled to act.
Assistant Secretary of State Francis Sayre and his colleagues began to look
into drafting a “clarifying provision” that would exempt imports without
mentioning them specifically.
The issue held interest at the highest levels. Import restriction threatened to
interfere with the larger project of rebuilding an international system of exchange
around the U.S. economy to support its recovery and long-term stability and pros-
perity. A subcommittee, including Sayre, went to “discuss the question of tactics
with the Secretary of State.”23 Cordell Hull suggested some changes to the
draft clarifying provision. The committee worked them up, and Sayre and
company brought the revisions to Senator Black. Black was “favorably
impressed,” but the resulting draft was not the seamless exemption of imports
the Executive Committee had envisioned. It read:

“No provision of this Act shall be applied to articles imported from foreign
countries or the Philippine Islands into the United States (including its territories
and possessions except the Philippine Islands) or to any person, except with
The Spice of the Department Store 55

respect to conditions of employment in the United States (as defined immediately

above).”24

The language could hardly have been less subtle––it was only to be used as a last
resort.
In the event, clarification wasn’t needed. The ambitious architects of the
wage and hour legislation had envisioned working standards that would not
only address social problems, but also stimulate consumer spending. Yet striking
the compromises necessary to muster sufficient votes behind the bill degraded it
from a purchasing-power program into, in effect, a modest domestic
sweatshop-eradication program that would apply only to selected sectors and
help only the lowest earners. As the bill’s scope narrowed, the threat it posed
to the international competitiveness of U.S. business diminished, and the push
for intertwined import regulation failed to win broader support. The final text
of the FLSA included no mention of tariff adjustment among its explicit pro-
visions or imports among its explicit exemptions.25 Workers in and products
of foreign export industries were exempted instead through a peremptory juris-
dictional clause: The new law applied to “trade, commerce, transportation,
transmission, or communication among the several States or from any State to
any place outside thereof,” where the definition of “State” was expanded to
include US territories.26 By extending the new wage and hour standards to
industrial operations across the territorial US empire while exempting
imports, the FLSA opened new space in the domestic market for cheap manu-
factured consumer goods. It would be part of the job of the developmental
program to cultivate Latin American sources to supply that demand.

III
The silence on the topic of foreign labor written into the Fair Labor Standards
Act did not mean that the Roosevelt administration lacked a foreign labor
policy. To the contrary, the final form of the FLSA grew exactly out of New
Deal foreign labor policy and permitted its advancement. The stated foreign
labor policy of the Roosevelt administration, trumpeted before meetings of
the International Labor Organization, was to raise the standard of living of
workers around the world.27 In one respect, this policy helped to insulate
Roosevelt’s foreign economic programs from the shrill criticisms of isolationists
and protectionists, for a rising global standard of living would in principle help to
guard workers in US industries against foreign competition in the domestic and
world market. But at the same time, this commitment to raising global living
standards was necessarily limited, for trade was to be the means of achieving it.
After 1936, trade moved from the margins toward the center of the New
Deal.28 This was in line with a shift in New Deal liberalism more broadly, and
it resulted from the same circumstances that shaped the broader shift: the
failure of the NIRA and its attempt at centralized domestic economic planning,
which heightened the need for planning in foreign economic policy; the
56 ILWCH, 81 Spring 2012

increasing pressure, culminating in the recession of 1937, to balance the budget

and find ways to promote prosperity that did not entail deficit spending by the
federal government; and the growing influence of a bloc of capital-rich indus-
tries that enjoyed a global advantage and had weathered the depression and
the early New Deal comparatively well.29 For all these reasons, within the execu-
tive branch––not only Hull’s State Department but also Perkins’s Department
of Labor––foreign trade was increasingly seen as the natural complement to
efforts to increase consumer purchasing power within the United States. As
Perkins put it before the ILO in 1937, the United States was “contributing . . .
to an increase in the income of its people and of the world through its domestic
policies, as well as through its trade agreements program.”30
Lifting global living standards through foreign trade was an inherently
limited goal, for profitable trade required international inequality. New Deal
foreign economic policy blended the classical logic of liberal international
exchange––which assumed that mutually beneficial trade depended on the differ-
ences between countries, including differences in labor standards––with the belief
that those differences and the system of production and exchange they consti-
tuted could be orchestrated from above.31 The legitimacy of those differences
as the basis of policy flowed in part from the repudiation of armed intervention
and reaffirmation of the juridical equality of sovereign states characteristic of
Roosevelt’s foreign policy generally and of his Latin American policy––
branded as the Good Neighbor Policy––especially. This emphasis on sovereignty
helped to isolate from history and within national boundaries the substantive
inequalities that had resulted from centuries of European and US imperialism,
sovereignty’s practical opposite. By instantiating liberal international law, the
Good Neighbor Policy sanitized those historical inequalities, permitting their
arrangement as so many formally equal pieces into an untainted system of
exchange. In the international division of labor envisioned by the planners of
New Deal foreign policy, the whole was only as great as the sum of the differences
of the parts.32 For the whole to continue to grow, differences would have to
remain. In theory, overall growth would muffle conflicts that resulted.33
The program for Latin American development tailored this global project
to the hemispheric context. It aimed to raise the standard of living across the
Americas by expanding inter-American trade, but it did so in a way that pre-
served the essential advantages of the United States, especially its capital
ownership and its technological superiority. More precisely, Latin America
development was designed to manage the international inequalities, including
differences in labor standards, on which profitable trade relied and to contain
the problems that arose from them.34 In the late 1930s, the principal problems
were three.
First, Latin American governments were increasingly dissatisfied with their
traditional roles as producers of raw tropical commodities for the world market
and were pushing for industrialization. The Depression had vividly demon-
strated the disadvantages of their traditional exports, virtually all of which were
produced across the global tropics on a volume basis that tended to clog
The Spice of the Department Store 57

consumer markets, weigh down prices, and exact high social costs. The price of
coffee, especially––the leading export of seven Latin American countries and a
principal export of seven more––stayed low even after the prices of other com-
modities had begun to recover. In fact it continued on a downward trajectory
from 1928 until it hit an historic low in 1940 with the final closure of the
European market to war.35 Ten million bags a year of the Latin American
crop, about 1.5 billion pounds, foundered on the world market as surplus.36
With losses from coffee and added to losses from other products, Latin
American countries together saw fifty-five percent of their annual export
revenue ready to evaporate.37
This posed two additional problems. First, decreasing revenue from tra-
ditional export commodities not only limited the ability of Latin Americans to
buy the exports of the United States but also made it impossible to pay down
existing debts. And second, it was clear to US analysts that in Latin America
this loss of commerce meant “not merely business depression, but actual
hunger,” which could “be turned into political instability.”38 Political instability
invited fascist influence. For that reason, collaborating in the development of
new industries in Latin America to create viable new sources of revenue was
for the United States not only an economic, but also a political priority. The
odds had “the political line-up” following “the economic line-up” if and when
war arrived in the Western Hemisphere.39
Formatted by these problems and priorities, one set of developmental pro-
jects initiated in the late thirties investigated sources of strategic raw materials.
The United States had no hemp for naval rope, no cinchona for quinine, no tin,
no rubber of its own. All could be produced in Latin America, with time.40 A
thousand acres of hemp in Panama showed promise.41 Sixty to eighty thousand
acres of rubber was planned for Haiti.42 Engineers reconnoitered Bolivian tin.43
But the largest, least poor, most strategically important Latin American
countries had begun to turn toward state-led import-substitution industrializ-
ation, and for them raw materials and export agriculture, whether new products
or old, held little attraction. Mexico was “definitely facing towards industrializ-
ation of all kinds.”44 Argentina, Brazil, and Chile were expanding textile, foot-
wear, and other basic consumer-goods industries.45 The drive to secure export
markets for US-made consumer manufactures had shaped an earlier era of
hemispheric relations, but by 1938 the United States had begun to subsidize
consumer-goods industries in Latin America.46
This was not only a short-term strategy of accommodation, appeasement,
stabilization, and containment. The developmental program also promised long-
term gains. For industrialization would help “certain of the American republics . . .
free themselves from dependency on Europe and Asia for articles which they
consume in everyday life.”47 The intention was not to wall off the hemi-
sphere––isolation on that scale “would obviously be stupid” no matter who
won the war.48 But by promoting Latin American consumer-goods industrializ-
ation rather than trying to compete with Japan and Germany for the “low-priced
field” of consumer exports (especially unlikely after the FLSA) the United States
58 ILWCH, 81 Spring 2012

would free up space in Latin American budgets for the export industries the New
Deal favored: staple agriculture, high-value-added consumer goods, and the
capital goods that would be required to get Latin American consumer-goods
industries off the ground.49 In other words, through the developmental
program, the United States in effect authorized and subsidized the early stages
of import-substitution industrialization in Latin America in order to bring
about more favorable patterns of international exchange.50
From the perspective of the Executive Committee on Commercial Policy
and the Office of the Coordinator, “the spice of the department store” was an
ideal class of imports. The appeal of such goods, their spice, grew out of the
hand labor congealed in them, the traces of human touch that brightened
their surfaces. Precisely for that reason, they could no longer be mass-produced
to any advantage in a relatively high-wage economy such as the United States.51
Two other factors compounded the need for a fresh supply of cheap manual
labor: War cut off exports of consumer manufactures from Europe and Asia,
and changes in the structure of the formal US empire put the old unincorporated
territories in flux. The Philippines, a volume supplier of hand-embroidered
clothes and cottons, was set to lose the preferential tariff status through which
these goods had moved into the United States when it gained independence
in 1946.52 On the other side of the world, Puerto Rico’s textile industries, “pre-
dicated on poverty,” had boomed during the First World War to replace US
imports from Europe.53 But the FLSA applied to the 70,000 Puerto Rican
factory and home workers who had previously earned a few pennies an hour
embroidering the “wreaths and spays of leaves, petals and flowers” that
adorned clothes destined for bargain bins at US department and chain stores.
Even though the new minimum wage was eventually pegged lower in Puerto
Rico than on the mainland, the net bump cut into the multi-million dollar indus-
try.54 The flipside of the need for a new Latin American export industry was the
need in the United States for a new source of spice.
In theory then there was “undoubtedly a great market in the United States
for articles manufactured in Central and South America.”55 But as a matter of
practice there were significant obstacles, including the tariff. Though the
RTAA had begun to lower the tariff and open the US market wider to manufac-
tured consumer imports, its concessions, tuned to benefit established European
industries, didn’t help Latin American manufacturers much.56 One developmen-
tal project proposed to cultivate needlework industries in the Dominican
Republic, shipping unfinished textiles from the United States, hand-embroider-
ing them there, and re-exporting them back, but the enterprise seemed unlikely
to pay at going tariff rates, so the idea was shelved.57 Export manufacturing in
Latin America still needed a preliminary boost to get within striking distance
of the lowered tariff wall.
At the high end of the consumer market, the tariff wall had never been
impenetrable. Behind the expansion of US imperial power in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, the trade in exotica boomed. Knick-knacks from
Latin America found a place alongside tchotchkes from Europe and baubles
The Spice of the Department Store 59

from Asia in better homes across the country. Dressing up their domestic lives
with everything from “Argentine lamp shade covers to Aztec relics, Belgian
linen, Bohemian glass, Brazilian hammocks, German cooking ware,
Hungarian pitchers, Javanese batiks, Norwegian pottery, Puerto Rican drawn
work, Singapore Malacca, and Zulu baskets”––and all manner of “Oriental”
rugs, screens, fans, and pottery––the white upper-middle classes marked their
relative sophistication and wealth, fended off the dullness of everyday
comfort by indulging in the fantasies of imperial power imports conjured, and
shored up at once their self-image and their particular racial, ethnic, and
national prejudices.58
But this type of exotica was of little interest to the New Deal strategists
working on the developmental program. The charm of such items came
“mainly from the fact that they are few and far between and uneven in size
and design.” By definition they “could not be developed to a large enough
volume to make any appreciable difference in trade balances.”59 In contrast,
developmental programs were designed to cultivate, a Latin American mass-
consumer goods manufacturing sector tuned to the quantitative, substantive,
and stylistic expectations and desires of US shoppers.
Put another way, the plan was to circumvent the tariff wall by bridging the
information gap. Highly routinized and formalized practices facilitated the trade
in raw materials from Latin America––standardized contracts, predictable
freight rates, published grading scales, hedgeable futures markets. But the
trade in consumer goods, “heretofore unknown,” lacked these basic institutions
of communication, insurance, and security.60 US distributors had no working
idea of what could be manufactured in Latin America.61 For their part, Latin
American producers had never studied the US mass-consumer market.62
This last part was critical. Separating US consumers from the latent foreign
exchange in their pockets required transmitting their preferences back along the
commodity chain and recalibrating production to match. For example, one US
importer explained, “Mexicans make very fine blankets.” But to the US
blanket shopper they were too heavy and not warm enough:

We like plenty of warmth and little weight, and the Mexican blanket weaver will
have to learn what we want and how to produce it. Some of his colorings, too, while
quite suitable in Mexico, are far too flamboyant for us, and they will have to be
modified; moreover, the binding and sizes must be changed to meet the require-
ments and tastes of our women. . ..The silversmiths can be taught to make the
plain English style tea sets and ash trays which we prefer generally to the very
ornamental and arabesque decorations which they use. Beach hats, made in
Venezuela, have to be somewhat changed in height or crown, size of brim,
color, and so on.63

Making consumer goods in Latin America that were imbued with precisely
those qualities of spice appealing to US consumers often meant making Latin
American products look like they had come from somewhere else.
60 ILWCH, 81 Spring 2012

In 1939, the Department of Commerce opened an effort to get retailers

from Macy’s, Sears Roebuck, and W.T. Grant, among other major stores, in
the same room and on the same page with diplomats from Mexico, El
Salvador, Venezuela, and Haiti, among other countries. The Inter-American
Development Commission took over the project in 1940, creating the
Merchandising Advisory Service to channel demand information to suppliers
in Latin America and supply information to buyers in the United States.64
Once pushed together, it didn’t take long for Latin American producers and
US distributors to coordinate their steps. Before the war, New York commission
agents D. Roditi & Sons had moved European imports through department
stores all over the Northeast. They closed their Vienna and Prague offices as
German armies menaced central Europe in the spring of 1939.65 To replace
the lost business, Roditi turned to Latin America. They sent a specialist in
European fashions to scout sources of products and locations for buying
offices.66 They exhibited Latin American merchandise in their Broadway show-
room.67 And they gave the products they once bought in Europe to Latin
American producers to copy.
For one exhibition, Roditi set up the “European originals” and the “South
American copies” on adjacent tables. “[The Latin American manufacturers]
have not only done a very good job,” an agent from the Coordinator’s office
reported, “but the articles can be delivered in New York for much less than
the prices paid for similar goods from Europe.” Mexican-made French casser-
oles, “using French pastel colors instead of Mexican reds and greens, and with
modern designs substituted for the cactus and donkey motifs . . . much
cheaper than French importations ever were.” Knock-off Dutch upholstery:
“exact copies.” Peccary gloves from Brazil and Mexico: “cheaper than similar
American gloves, even counting the low cost of Puerto Rican workmanship.”
Belts for men and women: “a dollar a piece, with hand workmanship and
good designs. The French imports used to cost from five to ten dollars.”
Brazil-made Calais lace: “cheap lace . . . but the original was too.” French
Lisle socks, from Brazil: “an excellent job . . . never duplicated in this
country.” Even when the copies were inferior, the upside was undeniable.
Molded Brazilian glass, “copied from Lalique designs,” was “good but . . . less
delicate than the French.” The price was also eighty percent lower than the orig-
inal: “astounding.”68
In addition to intricate copies, there were plenty of simpler things
available, too. These were among the most promising items. Wooden salad
spoons: “Macy’s has placed very large orders.” Straw beach mats and beach
bags made in Mexico, “very effective and inexpensive––a vogue for this
could be created easily.” Straw and wicker market and laundry baskets
from Mexico were already in mass production: “the orders . . . are very
large.”69
Latin American industries that got a boost from exiled European labor,
skill, and capital showed particularly well. Such was the case with leather.
Imports from Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, and Argentina made significant gains in
The Spice of the Department Store 61

US stores after 1939. Handbags, gloves, wallets, luggage: not the “expensive”
and “prestige” products that had traditionally come from England and
France, but mass-market items as cheap as domestic products. The new
imports had a clear advantage over domestic merchandise, though, and it under-
scored the potential significance of the new trade in manufactured consumer
goods from Latin America: At identical prices, “imported gloves. . . contain
more hand labor and are superior in design to the domestic.” Because the low
cost of hand labor in Latin America made possible “more embellishment” at
less cost, spice for the price of plainness, imports from Latin America seemed
likely to continue to grow even after European factories came back online.70

IV
The Merchandising Advisory Service generated a million dollars of new
business in 1941.71 Its success proved that “there is an unlimited potential
demand in the United States for many new non-competitive lines of commod-
ities from Latin America” and that “Latin Americans have ample skill and
materials for making them.”72 But if “astounding” prices on labor-intensive con-
sumer goods from Latin America promised to put the spice of the department
store within reach of more shoppers, they also highlighted the thorny political
issue raised in the debate over foreign wages and the Fair Labor Standards
Act.73 New Deal developmental planners were keenly aware that the substance
of astounding prices on imported merchandise was the difference in the wages
US and Latin American workers were in position to demand. Wary of bad pub-
licity at home and abroad––from conservative protectionists and liberal free-
traders alike––they anxiously guarded developmental programs against the
stain of sweated labor even as they eagerly took advantage of these wage dispar-
ities. Negotiating development’s pitfalls to ensure its political cleanliness, they
revealed its inner workings.
So George Urlaub found out. He was the head of the Throwsters Research
Institute, representing US silk hose manufacturers who were looking to get out
from under the pressure of a decade’s worth of strikes, boycotts, and New Deal
regulation. In 1941 he went to the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce
with a colleague, Milton Schiffer, for information about producing needlework
in Latin America. Apparently Urlaub and Schiffer “gave the impression that
what they were looking for in South America was cheap labor that could be
compared with the Chinese.” The Department of Commerce refused to have
anything to do with them, despite the fact that both were active on an industry
committee that had worked closely with the Roosevelt administration. A friend
in Commerce thought they had been treated too harshly and referred Urlaub
and Schiffer to the Inter-American Development Commission and the
Merchandising Advisory Service to see if they couldn’t work something out.74
The men in charge of the Merchandising Advisory Service didn’t scare so
easily. The developmental mandate required an imaginative approach to the
business of connecting buyers and sellers and producers and consumers across
62 ILWCH, 81 Spring 2012

the hemisphere. Anyway, they weren’t planning to “connive at sweatshop prac-

tices” either. They didn’t have to. They took for granted that the “usual wages
would be paid” and that all applicable labor laws would be respected. But that
didn’t mean the manufacturers couldn’t find an advantage in Latin America. For
in some countries “the local money is so cheap in terms of the dollar that regular
wage scales, which represent a decent living locally, seem very small in our
money.” So they were happy to work on behalf of Urlaub and Schiffer, “with
the understanding that talk of local labor costs will not enter into the picture.”
They would simply “give information regarding regions where this work
might be done” and let the two “make their own deals through local
concessionaries.”75
Urlaub’s experience encapsulates the way US planners of multilateral
Latin American development managed the question of imports and foreign
labor. Low wages abroad were the necessary condition that made their develop-
mental programs pay, but they operated behind an “understanding that talk of
local labor costs [would] not enter the picture.” Negotiating this contradiction
required a double move: a particular kind of nonaction with one hand, and a
particular kind of action with the other.
First, the institutions that administered international development were set
up to defer the question of wages to “local” factors and markets, just as the
Merchandising Advisory Service had. For example, at an inter-American
labor conference in Havana in 1939, the CIO called for “fair labor standards”
to apply on Latin American development projects financed by international
loans. Planners in the State Department’s Office of American Republic
Affairs brainstormed plausibly deniable evasions. Their final answer: Loans
from the US Export-Import Bank––the capital of which would be increased
from $200 to $700 million in the summer of 1940, and which was the only
public source of development financing operating at the time––required that
payroll be raised locally.76
At the same time, on the ground, the United States intervened extensively
in “local” Latin American labor markets to ensure the viability of developmen-
tal projects. The Office of the Coordinator managed two types of multilateral
social welfare programs considered to be of “direct consequence” to Latin
American development.77 The first type allocated existing resources in new
ways, matching surpluses to scarcities within the hemisphere with military pre-
paredness, solidarity, and social quietism in mind. For example, programs sent
food to construction companies building the Pan-American Highway and to
areas producing strategic materials, holding down “local” prices and wages at
critical points.78
Developmental social programs of the second type aimed for long-term
changes that would enlarge the “producing power of the people” in Latin
America.79 Most broadly conceived, this included breeding a demographic
expansion, since Latin America “could usefully support a much larger popu-
lation.”80 To that end, inter-governmental agencies extended the work of
private foundations on issues from illiteracy to the familiar “public health”
The Spice of the Department Store 63

complex of disease control, sanitation, and diet.81 Meanwhile, educational

exchanges brought Latin Americans to study medicine, social policy, and indus-
trial relations in the United States.82 In sum, these programs not only helped to
maximize the “producing power” of Latin America––and in turn its potential
contribution to consuming power in the United States––but also laundered
the proceeds from development, smoothing over the contradictions between
its imperative for low wages, its perpetuation of international inequalities, and
its explicit promise to raise the standard of living abroad.83
The ways in which developmental programs went about improving the
standard of living in Latin America matched, supported, and, in some cases, con-
nected directly to the scheme of economic, political, and social organization
favored by Latin American governments pushing for industrialization in the
late thirties and afterward. To foment industry, to precipitate modernity, in
response to workers’ demands and in the name of populist nationalism, govern-
ments across the region introduced social security and welfare programs in the
thirties and forties: subsidized housing, health care, maternity leave, legal
defense, vacations, pensions, and funerals, as well as outright food distribution.84
Together with dominant state-authorized unions, state-run social welfare pro-
grams effectively centralized control of labor markets and smoothed the
forward progress of industrialization in the consumer goods sector.85 In the aggre-
gate, these programs elevated population, life expectancy, and literacy rates
across Latin America. Overall Gross Domestic Product (GDP) rose, but GDP
per capita remained at one-third of the US level.86 Moreover, the gains were
not evenly distributed. Inequality intensified.87 Industrialization always cost the
most for those who had and made the least. Authoritarianism, operating not
only through terror but also with a new battery of incentives, held them in place.88
With the blessing of the State Department and the Coordinator of
Inter-American Affairs, one group of US businessmen got a close-up view of
this emergent configuration of Latin American political economy. Some
members of the group that toured the continent in 1941 to survey the prospects
for investment in industry were dismayed, while others were surprised and
impressed. Those in the first category were put off by the fact that the Latin
American system seemed to “give labor everything but money,” a strategy
“completely opposed” to the emphasis in the United States on high wages
and a strong domestic market. By their thinking, “instead of working out so
many complicated social laws, what they should do is try to increase their
rates of pay so that they could look for some support in their economy from
the people whom they employ, which people today obviously cannot contribute
very much beyond bare necessities.”89
Those businessmen in the second category saw it differently; they saw
industrialization in Latin America as part of a broader transformation of US
capitalism. One member of the group reported a conversation with a “very
high Peruvian official,” who put it this way: Social welfare programs were
“the cheapest way of handling a ticklish situation.”90 For behind social
welfare, wages remained “fantastically low” in Latin America, raved an
64 ILWCH, 81 Spring 2012

executive with North Carolina-based Cannon Mills––probably the largest man-

ufacturer of towels in the world at the time––after the trip.91 His enthusiasm
belied any presumption that Latin American workers should necessarily
consume the new industrial products they made. He clearly had different
buyers in mind, buyers who could afford a bathroom-full of his marked-up fin-
ished product. Given the direction in which US industrial and trade policy had
evolved since 1934, he could have been forgiven for thinking that Latin America
had begun to seem like a commodious future home of the US textile industry.

V
Then, after 1945, the developmental program shifted to adapt to the new bipolar
world order. The Soviet Union had no significant position in Latin America, so
the competition for resources and influence that had given urgency to the devel-
opment cooled. Latin America was certainly never outside the Cold War, but
Europe and Asia were the first open fronts. The United States focused on recon-
struction and redevelopment there––sending resources and capital to rebuild
consumer goods industries in Western Europe and Japan, which quickly recov-
ered their respective positions in the US import market––rather than on creat-
ing a hothouse for new industries Latin America.92
The trade and aid programs that enthroned and extended U.S. power and
interests globally after the war built on the commercial, political, social, and cul-
tural strategies, projects, and institutions tested in Latin America in the thirties
and forties.93 Yet Latin America got nothing like a Marshall Plan. Instead, it got
an invitation to help the rebuilding effort by taking a step back into export agricul-
ture––coffee and the old tropical staples could again be sold around the world.94
That slight fed into a backlash by expanded urban and industrial sectors in Latin
America against the dictators who had served US interests during the thirties and
the war. But as soon as economic reality set in, many Latin American govern-
ments, to pay for the industrialization they were still determined to achieve,
turned to international loans, high tariffs, imposed social austerity, and virulent
nationalism and anticommunism.95 The developmental crackdown was on.
Yet despite the anti-imperial rhetoric deployed by Latin American govern-
ments to justify the socialized belt-tightening that often went along with import-
substitution industrialization, the outcome was not unfavorable to US interests,
from “the business point of view.” Whether proceeding in step with US foreign
policy or in opposition to it, industrialization in Latin America offered US firms
opportunities for sales and investment.96 In the nineteen fifties, private direct
investments from the United States were on the way up in Latin America,
especially in the manufacturing sector, but the region’s industries were still
lagging behind in the global competition for consumer markets.97
The developmental program for Latin America that emerged in the late
thirties and early forties was calibrated to a particular set of short- and
long-run problems and prospects. So it can be no surprise that the same calcu-
lations, executed with a new set of variables, produced a new result after the
The Spice of the Department Store 65

Second World War that made Latin American development seem less exigent––
nor that, in the sixties, when Latin America again emerged as a critical US pri-
ority, the developmental program was reactivated, fortified, and entrenched. As
the Central Intelligence Agency liquidated opposition and the Kennedy Round
of trade talks opened the US consumer market wider to the world’s manufac-
tures, the new US Agency for International Development researched and coor-
dinated economic, technical, and social programs; the Inter-American
Development Bank, stalled on the brink of creation in the early forties, finally
came to life to supplement the World Bank; and targeted bilateral projects,
such as the Border Industrialization Program, perforated the line between the
United States and Latin America with holes through which mass-consumer
manufactures flowed in unprecedented quantities. Just as blankets, artificial
flowers, wallets, and embroidered handkerchiefs were not the ultimate goals
of New Deal Latin American policy, neither were maquilas the end of Cold
War Latin American policy––but they were one of its modalities, international
power in production. And as development has extended its reach in Latin
America and around the world, so have the material forms through which
empire is experienced as a way of life proliferated.

NOTES
1. David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an
American World Order (Princeton, 2009), 72–73.
2. Carl Spaeth to William Machold, May 10, 1941, General Records of the OCIAA,
Central Files (OCIAA:CF), U.S. National Archives Record Group 229.2, Box 148, Folder:
Development Program of IADC; “The Inter-American Development Commission,” n.d.,
OCIAA:CF, 229.2/127/Creation of the IADC; Joseph C. Rovensky and A. Willing Patterson,
“Problems and Opportunities in Hemispheric Economic Development,” Law and
Contemporary Problems 8 (Autumn 1941): 661– 664.
3. David Green, The Containment of Latin America: A History of the Myths and Realities
of the Good Neighbor Policy (Chicago, 1971), 59– 84.
4. Dick Steward, Trade and Hemisphere: The Good Neighbor Policy and Reciprocal Trade
(Columbia, MO, 1975).
5. List: Don Francisco to Paul Nitze, September 4, 1941, OCIAA:CF 229.2/147/Consumer
Goods Available for Import from O.A.R.; quotation: “Means to Increase the Importation of
Manufactured Goods from Latin America,” November 9, 1939, Records of the Executive
Committee on Commercial Policy (ECCP), USNA RG 353.5.7/42/Minutes and Documents 1939.
6. On the first point, Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass
Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003), and note 9 below. On the second, Greg
Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, The United States, and the Rise of the New
Imperialism (New York, 2006), 33–39.
7. Thomas Ferguson, “From Normalcy to New Deal: Industrial Structure, Party
Competition, and American Public Policy in the Great Depression,” International
Organization 38 (Winter 1984): 41–94, quotations: 62, 89.
8. Gardiner Means quoted in Jacobs, “‘Democracy’s Third Estate’: New Deal Politics and
the Construction of a ‘Consuming Public,’” International Labor and Working-Class History 55
(Spring 1999): 34; Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and
War (New York, 1995); Cohen, Consumers’ Republic; Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic
Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton, 2005).
9. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 50th Anniversary
Ed. (New York, 2009), 162–190; Lloyd Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy
(Madison, WI, 1964); Green, Containment; Robert F. Smith, “The Good Neighbor Policy,”
in Watershed of Empire: Essays on New Deal Foreign Policy, ed. Leonard P. Liggio and
66 ILWCH, 81 Spring 2012

James J. Martin (Colorado Springs, 1976). David Rock, “War and Postwar Intersections: Latin
America and the United States,” in Latin America in the 1940s: War and Postwar Transitions,
Rock, ed., (Berkeley, 1994), 15– 40, mirrors the argument from the Latin American perspective.
10. Generally, Ferguson, “Normalcy to New Deal”; Gardner, Economic Aspects, 194–205.
11. “Report of the Committee on Commercial Policy,” December 22, 1933, ECCP, 353.5.7/
41/Minutes and Documents 1933.
12. Quotation: Gardner, Economic Aspects, 194–199; for a more detailed bureaucratic
taxonomy, Green, Containment, 59–84.
13. See for example George Magalhaes to Nelson Rockefeller, December 12, 1941,
OCIAA:CF, 229.2/127/Oreamuno-Magalhaes––Trip to Mexico.
14. George E. Paulsen, A Living Wage for the Forgotten Man: The Quest for Fair Labor
Standards, 1933– 1941 (Selinsgrove, PA, 1996), 68–81; William Lasser, Benjamin V. Cohen:
Architect of the New Deal (New Haven, 2002), 77–80.
15. “S. 2475 as Introduced by Mr. Black, May 24, 1937,” Collected in Fair Labor Standards
Act 1938, Volume 2, US Federal Legislative History Library, HeinOnline, http://heinonline.org/;
(accessed March 8, 2010). Emphasis added.
16. Compare “S. 2475 as Introduced by Mr. Black, May 24, 1937,” p. 8, to “House Report
7200 as Introduced by Mr. Connery, May 24, 1937,” p. 8. Collected in Fair Labor Standards Act
1938, Volume 2, US Federal Legislative History Library, HeinOnline, http://heinonline.org/;
(accessed 8 March 2010). Emphasis added. See also, US Senate Committee on Education
and Labor, and House Committee on Labor, Joint Hearings on S. 2475 and H.R. 7200, Parts
I-III: June 2 –22, 1937, 75th Cong., 1st sess., (Washington, 1937), 44.
17. Paulsen, A Living Wage, 98–130; also Steve Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman
and the Rise of American Labor (New York, 1991), 391– 412.
18. Joint Hearings, 75– 77.
19. Testimony of Sidney Hillman, Joint Hearings, 955– 958.
20. Statement of Harvey Wilson, Joint Hearings, 509.
21. Michael Anthony Butler, Cautious Visionary: Cordell Hull and Trade Reform (Kent,
OH, 1998), 163–180; “The Trade Agreements Program: A Recommendation by the
Committee on Trade Agreements,” September 8, 1937, Records of the Interdepartmental
Committee on Trade Agreements, Committee Meeting Minutes, USNA RG 353.5.7/5/Volume 21.
22. Minutes, June 14, 1937, ECCP, 353.5.7/41/Minutes and Documents 1937.
23. Minutes, June 18, 1937, ECCP, 353.5.7/41/Minutes and Documents 1937.
24. Minutes, June 25, 1937, ECCP, 353.5.7/41/Minutes and Documents 1937.
25. Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, Public Law 718, 75th Cong., 3d sess. (June 25, 1938).
26. Compare “S. 2475 as Introduced by Mr. Black, May 24, 1937,” and “S. 2475 as
Reported to Senate, July 6, 1937.” Collected in Fair Labor Standards Act 1938, Vol. 2,
HeinOnline, http://heinonline.org/; (accessed March 8, 2010). Emphasis added.
27. See “Speech of Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins in Opening the World Textile
Conference, Washington, DC,” April 2, 1937, Box 49; and Frances Perkins, Untitled Address
at ILO Conference, June 1938, Box 50, both in Frances Perkins Papers, Columbia University,
New York, NY.
28. Ferguson, “Normalcy to New Deal,” dates this shift to 1934, but the trade program was
then still in its most conservative, conventional phase.
29. For the domestic shift, see Brinkley, End of Reform.
30. “Speech of . . . Frances Perkins in Opening the World Textile Conference.”
31. Gardner, Economic Aspects, 194– 213.
32. As Williams notes, citing Gallagher and Robinson’s concept of free-trade imperialism:
Tragedy, 173– 175.
33. Charles S. Maier, “The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International
Economic Policy after World War II,” in Between Power and Plenty: Foreign Economic Policies
of Advanced Industrial States, ed. Peter J. Katzenstein (Madison, 1978), 45.
34. Green, Containment, 59– 84.
35. Paul R. Olson and C. Addison Hickman, Pan American Economics (New York 1943),
364– 369; V.D. Wickizer, The World Coffee Economy (Stanford, 1943), 173.
36. To Jones and Pierson, August 3, 1940, Records of the Office of American Republic
Affairs, Miscellaneous Memorandums, 1/4/38 to 9/12/47 (OARA:MM), USNA RG 59.3.3,
Box 64, Folder: Economic Cooperation––Vol. 1, January 1940––November 15, 1940.
The Spice of the Department Store 67

37. “An Economic Program for the Americas,” June 10, 1940, OARA:MM, 59.3.3/64/
Economic Cooperation––Vol. 1, January 1940-Nov. 15, 1940.
38. To Jones and Pierson, August 3, 1940.
39. Cordell Hull quoted in Williams, Tragedy, 163– 164.
40. Rovensky and Patterson, “Hemispheric Economic Development,” 661 –662.
41. “The Position of Agriculture in Inter-American Trade Relations,” November 9, 1939,
ECCP, 353.5.7/42/Minutes and Documents 1939.
42. Minutes of the General Advisory Committee of the Division of Cultural Relations,
May 9, 1941, Records of the Interdepartmental Committee on Cooperation with the
American Republics, USNA RG 353.3/29/General Advisory Committee Minutes.
43. Green, Containment, 102– 103.
44. Magalhaes to Rockefeller, December 12, 1941.
45. “Year’s Gains Made in Latin America,” New York Times, January, 4 1937, 62.
46. Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion (Ithaca,
1963), 112–121; Green, Containment, 44–48.
47. “The Inter-American Development Commission.”
48. To Jones and Pierson, August 3, 1940.
49. Rovensky and Patterson, “Hemispheric Economic Development,” 662; Hanson to
Friele, March 20, 1941, OCIAA:CF, 229.2/148/Developmental Program of IADC; Gardner,
Economic Aspects, 195; Green, Containment, 74– 80.
50. Sylvia Maxfield and James H. Nolt, “Protectionism and the Internationalization of
Capital: U.S. Sponsorship of Import-Substitution Industrialization in the Philippines, Turkey,
and Argentina,” International Studies Quarterly 34 (March 1990), 57.
51. “Means to Increase the Importation”; and Eileen Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood
and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (Cambridge, 1994), 201– 301.
52. U.S. Tariff Commission, Post-War Imports and Domestic Production of Major
Commodities (Washington, D.C., 1945), 1215–1219.
53. James Dietz, The Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist
Development (Princeton, 1987), 224– 226.
54. Eileen Boris, “Needlewomen Under the New Deal in Puerto Rico, 1920–1945,” in
Puerto Rican Women and Work: Bridges in Transnational Labor, Altagracia Ortiz, ed.
(Philadelphia, 1996), 33– 54.
55. “Means to Increase the Importation.”
56. Alfred E. Eckes Jr., Opening America’s Market: U.S. Foreign Trade Policy Since 1776
(Chapel Hill, 1995), 147– 157.
57. Magalhaes to Rockefeller, December 12, 1941.
58. Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumer’s Imperium: The Global Production of American
Domesticity (Chapel Hill, 2007), 1–56; quotation, 22– 23.
59. Finley to Collado and Duggan, November 1, 1939, OARA, Memorandums Relating to
General Latin American Affairs, 1/4/37 to 12/31/47 (OARA:GM), USNA RG 59.3.3/3/June
1939 to December 1939, Volume I.
60. “The Inter-American Development Commission.”
61. Charles E. Egan, “Demand Growing for Latin Goods,” New York Times, June 9, 1940, F7.
62. “Means to Increase the Importation.”
63. Frank Heinus, Latin American Trade: How to Get and Hold It (New York, 1941),
85–86.
64. “IADC M.A.S. Bulletin No. 5,” n.d. [1940– 1941], OCIAA:CF, 229.2/128/M.A.S. of the
IADC.
65. “Store Agents Close Office,” New York Times, June 10, 1939, 24.
66. “To Develop Resources for Latin Merchandise,” New York Times, January 21, 1941, 37.
67. “Shows Latin Goods,” New York Times, October 11, 1940, 32.
68. “In pottery, glassware, fabrics, etc.. . .,” n.d. [1940–1941], OCIAA:CF, 229.2/128/M.A.S.
of the IADC.
69. “In pottery, glassware, fabrics, etc.”
70. U.S. Tariff Commission, Post-War Imports, 1244–1251.
71. Machold to Nitze, August 11, 1941, OCIAA:CF, 229.2/148/Developmental Program of
IADC.
72. “Project Evaluation Report: M.A.S. of the IADC,” November 2, 1944, OCIAA:CF,
229.2/128/M.A.S. of the IADC.
68 ILWCH, 81 Spring 2012

73. Also see Dana Frank, Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism
(Boston, 1999), 56–101.
74. McQueen to Phipps, August 12, 1941, and McQueen to Phipps, August 15, 1941, both
OCIAA:CF, 229.2/128/M.A.S. of the IADC.
75. Ibid.
76. Memorandum of Conversation: Beulac and Briggs, 28 November 1939, OARA:GM,
59.3.3/3/June 1939-December 1939, Vol. 3.
77. Machold to Nitze, August 11, 1941, OCIAA:CF, 229.2/148/Developmental Program of
IADC.
78. George Soule et al., Latin America in the Future World (New York, 1945), 176 –177.
79. Rovensky and Patterson, “Hemispheric Economic Development,” 666.
80. Merson to Spaeth, October 8, 1941, OCIAA:CF, 229.2/134/Reports Misc.
81. Spaeth to Machold, April 7, 1941, OCIAA:CF, 229.2/148/Development Program of
IADC; Soule et al., Future World, 182– 185; Claude C. Erb, “Prelude to Point Four: The
Institute of Inter-American Affairs,” Diplomatic History 9 (July 1985): 250–267.
82. Soule et al., Future World, 194–199.
83. Hanson to Spaeth, April 1, 1941, OCIAA:CF, 229.2/148/Developmental Program of
IADC; standard of living: Adolf Berle quoted in Green, Containment, 81–83; Rovensky and
Patterson, “Hemispheric Economic Development,” 662.
84. For country-by-country descriptions, Soule et al., Future World, 200–229.
85. Generally, Simon G. Hanson, Economic Development in Latin America: An
Introduction to the Economic Problems of Latin America (Washington, DC, 1951), 492– 516.
On Mexico, Michelle Dion, “The Political Origins of Social Security in Mexico During the
Cárdenas and Ávila Camacho Administrations,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 21
(Winter 2005): 59–95. For Brazil, James M. Malloy, The Politics of Social Security in Brazil
(Pittsburgh, 1979), 51–82. For the consumer goods sector, Victor Bulmer-Thomas, “The
Latin American Economies, 1929–1939,” in Latin American Economic History Since 1930,
ed. Leslie Bethell. (New York, 1998), 101.
86. Rosemary Thorp, Progress, Poverty, and Exclusion: An Economic History of Latin
America in the 20th Century (Washington, DC, 1998), 13– 45.
87. Victor Bulmer-Thomas, The Economic History of Latin America Since Independence,
2nd ed. (New York, 2003), 250.
88. Ian Roxborough, “Labor Control and the Postwar Growth Model in Latin America,” in
Rock, ed., Latin America in the 1940s, 248–262; Kevin J. Middlebrook, The Paradox of
Revolution: Labor, the State and Authoritarianism in Mexico (Baltimore, 1995); Hobart
Spalding, Organized Labor in Latin America: Historical Case Studies of Workers in Dependent
Societies (New York, 1977): 94–206; Malloy, Social Security in Brazil, 51–82.
89. H. H. Schell, “Report of H. H. Schell,” in Report of Nineteen Members on National
Research Council Tour of Industrial Exploration of South America, 1941, OCIAA:CF, 229.2/150.
90. John D. Gill, “Comments on the Economies of Five South American Countries:
A Condensation of More Important Findings, 5/31/41,” in Report of Nineteen Members.
91. Frederic A. Williams, “National Research Council South American Tour: Report of
Frederic A. Williams, 6/1/41,” in Report of Nineteen Members.
92. For postwar imports, Eckes, America’s Market, 157–159, 167–176. For the abandon-
ment of Latin American development in favor of Europe and the Far East, see Rock, “War
and Postwar Intersections,” 30–35.
93. Jules R. Benjamin, “The New Deal, Cuba, and the Rise of a Global Foreign Economic
Policy,” Business History Review 50 (Spring 1977): 57–78; trade: Carolyn Rhodes, Reciprocity,
U.S. Trade Policy, and the GATT Regime (Ithaca, 1993), 53–78; aid: Erb, “Prelude to Point Four.”
94. Green, Containment, 201– 208; Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, “The Postwar
Conjuncture in Latin America: Democracy, Labor, and the Left,” in Bethell and
Roxborough, Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944– 1948
(New York, 1992), 20– 22.
95. Bethell and Roxborough, “The Postwar Conjuncture”; Roxborough, “Labor Control.”
96. Green, Containment, 178–179.
97. Thomas F. O’Brien, The Century of U.S. Capitalism in Latin America
(Albuquerque, 1999), 108, 124– 130; George Wythe, Industry in Latin America, 2nd ed.
(New York, 1949), 63.