“Foreign Aid” to Brazil from Private U.S. Sources

At every recent session of the United States Congress foreign aid has been debated, criticized, and eventually enacted into law. Unfortunately, results of the foreign aid program have been less miraculous than its proponents anticipated. Instead of free, happy and productive allies, we find that discontented, disappointed and even resentful nations are recipients of U. S. “foreign aid.”The frustrations and failures inherent in a governmental foreign aid program were publicized by the best-selling polemic, The Ugly American. The authors insisted that much of the trouble with foreign aid was to be found in the naïvete of its originators, the ignorance and incompetence of its administrators, and the general insensitivity of Americans toward peoples of other lands. The indictment provoked angry denials from advocates of foreign aid, and managed to obscure the positive achievements of two decades of assistance by the United States government to many countries where ignorance, poverty and disease were considered to be ineradicable.