"Go South, Young Man"

The busy U.S. State Department was not too busy to keep a sharp, hopeful eye last week on the peaceful village of Williamstown, Mass. On Williams College's leafy campus was brewing an experiment in improving U.S. relations with Latin America. Its hopeful sponsors called it "a plan for a century." Seventeen picked young college graduates were in training to go to Latin America--not to represent U.S. corporations, or to make a good-will tour, but to live there as ordinary citizens. It was a start toward a U.S. attempt to beat the Germans at the game of making friends with Latin Americans by sharing their life and customs--not with the Nazi object of later using such penetration as a tool for conquest, but with the democratic object of developing a genuine community of interest with U.S. neighbors.

The Williams project, though encouraged by the State Department, was unofficial. Its sponsors were Dr. Halfdan Gregersen, dean of Williams College; Jacob K. Javits, a Wall Street lawyer; Dr.

Enrique Sanchez de Lozada, onetime Bolivian diplomat, now a Williams professor; Dr. Carlos Garcia-Mata, an Argentine businessman; and Roger W. Riis, son of the late social worker, Jacob Riis.

Dean Gregersen picked out his students at Yale, Harvard, University of Chicago, Smith, Bennington, other colleges. The 17 gathered at Williams' Delta Phi House where Dean Gregersen taught them Latin American literature, music, history, languages. When they complete their course at Williams this week, they will go to Mexico for a finishing course. Then they will be placed in jobs in Latin America--as businessmen, journalists, teachers--through an Association of Committees for Inter-American Placement (A.C.I.P.) organized by the same group.

Said A.C.I.P.:

"The most obvious weakness of the United States in the other American republics is that there are very few Americans living there, as against several millions of Germans and Italians. . . . Heretofore relations between the American republics have been based almost entirely on the contacts of diplomacy and big business. . . . The philosophy behind the present plan is that modern international relations can only culminate fruitfully if there are direct ties among the masses of people in the countries concerned."

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