810.154/1255
The Secretary of State to the Secretary of Agriculture (Wallace)
My Dear Mr. Secretary: Yesterday Mr. Thomas H. MacDonald, Chief of the Bureau of Public Roads, came to see Assistant Secretary Messersmith and left with him a letter addressed to you by Mr. MacDonald dated November 30, 1937,30 making a recommendation with regard to the further expenditure of funds in connection with the construction of the Inter-American Highway. The last sentence of that letter refers to the communication which you sent me on August 14 of this year in which my agreement was requested with regard to a recommendation to be submitted to the President that Congress be requested to appropriate one million dollars for further construction work on the highway.
As I was glad to state to you over the telephone, I am in accord with your proposal to approach the President with a view to obtaining his agreement to request of Congress an appropriation of five hundred thousand dollars. You may inform the President that I shall be glad to give him an expression of my views in the premises whenever he desires. As in the case of the appropriation of one million dollars authorized in 1934, it seems desirable that the expenditure of the funds should be under the general administration of the President, acting with the cooperation of the two Departments as at present. The language of the authorizing legislation might well follow the language of the Act of June, 1934 (Public, No. 412, 73rd Congress).31 I should like to add that I believe the Financial Committee provided for in Article 3 of the Convention on the Pan American Highway signed at the Buenos Aires Conference should be formed as soon as the necessary number of countries have ratified, and that this Committee should render its report at the earliest practicable moment in order that the further financing of highway construction may hereafter be considered as a whole.
I approve action to obtain the authority of Congress to use $34,000 of the already appropriated administrative funds of the Bureau [Page 196] of Public Roads for the maintenance of the engineering organization during the period January to June, 1938.
It is my understanding that the enclosure showing the suggested distribution of funds is not a final decision with regard to allocation but merely indicates what Mr. MacDonald considers a desirable program. It will be necessary, of course, to know which countries will cooperate and precisely what their own desires are before a definite distribution can be determined.
Sincerely yours,