Like many another oriental potentate, the late Reza Pahlevi, Shah-in-Shah (King of Kings) of Persia, combined forthright admiration for Western social and industrial progress with a darkly suspicious opinion of the men who make it. As a result, he brought his 628,000-square-mile empire (about one-fifth the size of the U.S.) some mixed blessings. When the old Shah wanted railroads, for instance, he got railroads—but not always where his foreign advisers thought they would do Persia the most good.
After the old Shah was deposed in 1941, and his son, Mohamed Reza Pahlevi, ascended the throne, things were put on a more businesslike basis. A year ago, the young Shah hired Overseas Consultants, Inc., an eleven-member combine of U.S. industrial consultants and engineering firms,* to blueprint a seven-year plan to develop and industrialize Persia.
Point Four & Plan. The combine was first organized 2½ years ago at the suggestion of the U.S. Government to conduct a survey of Japan. Named as president was Clifford S. Strike, 46, president of Manhattan's F. H. McGraw & Co., which built, among other World War II projects, the $36 million Bermuda air base. Last week in a green-carpeted office on Manhattan's East 42nd Street, O.C.I. President Strike and Board Chairman
John R. Lotz, chairman of Manhattan's Stone & Webster, announced the plan for Persia. In five bound volumes of 1,250 pages, O.C.I, provided the King of Kings with a blueprint for economic revolution, and U.S. and Western European businessmen with a guide to a vast new area of relatively untapped markets.
Although started long before President Truman's Point Four program, the big-scale plan might well serve as a model for Point Four planners.
Soap & DDT. By U.S. standards, Persia is an incredibly backward nation. Its population of 17,750,000 is riddled with disease (an estimated 5,000,000 cases of malaria annually and at least 7,000 cases of leprosy). Its infant death rate is estimated at more than 50 per 1,000 live births. Its schools are few and poor. Of some 125 million acres of potentially arable land, only one-tenth is farmed and that with primitive tools.
O.C.I, will start eliminating this abysmal misery not with steel mills and hydroelectric plants, but with cheap soap and DDT. Among the report's specific recommendations for the first year: spray DDT in barns, homes, under sleeping quilts and on the Persians themselves; hire 200 vaccinators and send them out to the villages; begin immediate instruction in elementary midwifery. At Karaj, where the old Shah wanted to build an integrated steel mill, O.C.I, recommends instead a small blast furnace and foundry to produce the pipe which Persia will need during the plan's first phases.