A Day at the Races
Ray, Arthur
Some 200 intellectuals gathered in New York last November to worry the problem: Why is Anti-Americanism so prevalent in Europe? Meeting in the Starlight Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, they...
...Pritchett was followed by Albu, who dropped his diplomatic suavity and excitedly informed Fiedler that Italian intellectuals are frustrated not because they are neurotic, or significantly more neurotic than American intellectuals, but because they see no way out of the poverty and stagnation which grips their country...
...A spokesman for the once greatest imperialist power chiding a young competitor that has surpassed it—and the American intellectuals, bemused or annoyed, unable to see that by accepting Deedes' terms of discourse they have been pushed, unwittingly, into a moral deadend...
...The revolution of our day is happening—has already happened—in the U. S...
...the big-stick, talk-tough methods of the State Department...
...The mists began to deepen as the Hon...
...the insistence of so many American leaders upon seeing the ideological struggle of our time as a problem in the mechanics of advertising...
...But hardly a word about Europe...
...These complaints from inhabitants of a continent in decline were received by most of the Americans with a sort of goodhearted insensitivity...
...This alternative seemed too limited to the Europeans...
...Only the problem remained...
...The very setting revealed more about "the problem" posed by the sponsoring American Committee for Cultural Freedom than anything that was or could have been said...
...The book-burning episode showed a lack of dignity," but "why get upset about what happens to the writings of a cheap fellow-travelling detective writer [Dashiell Hammett...
...Again Fiedler put things frankly: The Americanization of Europe, the invasion of American mass culture, is inevitable—but preferable to the Russian system...
...At this point Leslie Fiedler, an American literary critic recently returned from a visit to Europe, roused the anger of the Europeans 172 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 by referring in a kind of pseudo-psychoanalytical jargon to anti-Americanism in Italy as an expression of Europe's fear of its own future as seen in the image of the U. S.—i.e., anti-Americanism as neurotic self-hatred...
...Even Professor Brodersen, whose speech was pro-American, referred to the displeasure of Scandinavians at the fact that Americans can visit Europe without a visa but that Europeans must have one to visit America, and pointedly mentioned the "concentration camp in front of the Statue of Liberty...
...Our civil liberties are unimpaired...
...When Professor Salwyn Schapiro asked the Europeans, "How can the U. S. be imperialist—where is its India...
...Edward Barrett, former Assistant Secretary of State, called the McCarthy problem "a good outlet for our excess energy...
...Bevan and McCarthy, he declared, vote the same on all major issues...
...The Americans left...
...What was most distressing, however, was the inability of the Americans to provide forthright answers to the questions raised—and raised so modestly —by the Europeans...
...We're frightened because you make decisions concerning our life and death for us—without our having sufficient representation...
...but there was hardly a pressing sense, among either the American speakers or audience, that a vast accumulation of frustration and bitterness lies beneath this mot...
...Some 200 intellectuals gathered in New York last November to worry the problem: Why is Anti-Americanism so prevalent in Europe...
...Meeting in the Starlight Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria, they discussed this question in an atmosphere of gleaming microphones, taperecorders, mink coats and plaster statuary...
...and that anti-Americanism is caused not primarily by cultural or psychological but by political and social difficulties...
...everyone is working, or almost everyone...
...inevitably, it is disliked...
...he seemed as genuinely nonplussed as the rest of the audience upon hearing Pritchett reply, "America's India is Europe...
...Fiedler, the most persuasive pro-American speaker, had finally to resort to such trivia as: "we are not only the creator of McCarthy, we are his critics too" and "our creation of a Babbitt testifies to our vigor...
...A stunning spectacle...
...No wonder Deedes, a Tory, felt obliged to chastize the U. S. from the point of view of an old imperialist nation, his complaint being that the U. S., though young and inexperienced in these matters, was unwilling to learn from the long centuries of British imperialism...
...Not only has Europe become dependent, as Deedes put it, on "a new driver in the front seat," but it does not know where the driver is going...
...America is rapidly becoming a classless society, if also, perhaps, a Lonely Crowd...
...You are still too naive— and not cynical enough...
...3) The posed alternatives—false to Europeans—of either with (and like) the U. S. or with (and like) Russia...
...Between the Europeans and Americans one sensed a subtle but unde niable breach which neither politeness nor diplomacy could effect...
...the changing social and cultural relations between the continents, with Europe suffering the strain of moving into a clearly dependent status...
...174 • DISSENT • Spring 1954 Everything ended politely...
...You are a romantic nation...
...4) The deep concern felt in Europe about the encroachments upon civil liberties in the U. S., restrictive immigration and passport policies, etc...
...Instead of trying to make that imaginative identification with Europeans which is an essential element by which an American can understand the world today, they looked at America and found it well...
...You think you have a destiny...
...They mentioned such familiar yet indisputable and essential themes as: the coexistence of growing U. S. wealth and European impoverishment...
...but Spring 1954 • DISSENT • I71 of this almost everyone, except, no doubt, the Europeans, was unaware...
...Lionel Trilling, his prose never more elegant, discussed the relationship between culture and politics: The choice confronting mankind is cultural, politics is becoming culture, culture is becoming politics, the division between Republicans and Democrats is a cultural division, we are losing the sense of what culture and politics are...
...America's insistence on hand-outs and economic protectionism instead of trade...
...and it fears a collision that will destroy it while the driver enjoys the comparative security of his separate continent...
...As Albu tartly remarked, too many Americans believe that "ideas can be sold like buttons and that selling ideas is the best business there is...
...Seemingly oblivious to the changes of method and tone from "traditional" to modern imperialism, the Americans could not be convinced by the Europeans that the gradual decline of direct political rule in colonies does not mean an absence of social and economic domination by great powers over small ones...
...If Europeans dislike a bad Hollywood movie, it need not be because of selfhatred— but simply because it is a bad movie...
...the trauma of a "liberation" brought about by mass destruction...
...As to its international position, a powerful nation can't expect to be loved...
...Whatever their other differences of opinion, all the Europeans agreed on several basic points: 1) The terrible fear in Europe of atom and hydrogen bombs...
...There is no reason to consider yourself neurotic because you make a moral judgment...
...And then Peter Viereck...
...William Deedes, Tory MP, Henri Peyre, Professor of French at Yale, and Arvid Brodersen, Professor of Sociology at the New School--focused, with whatever hesitation, on the stated problem...
...This casual acceptance of America's role as a dominating power, this comparison between the British Empire of yesterday and American dominion of today, was perhaps the most striking and disturbing point upon which the American speakers agreed...
...the invasion of mass culture which they identified, somewhat too easily, with the United States...
...This no doubt is an xaggeration, but it profoundly reflects, at least, the true feelings of many European intellectuals who cannot be accused of the faintest sympathy for Stalinism...
...V. S. Pritchett immediately accused him of having "a technician's approach to problems...
...The Europeans—who included V. S. Pritchett, the literary critic, the Hon...
...You analyze the intellectual as if he were a machine...
...The Europeans left...
...2) The feeling that the social problems of Europe are not even understood in the U. S. Henri Peyre expressed this idea best when he pointed out that the French Communist Party, while cynically manipulating the French workers for its own ends, was nonetheless exploiting a universal desire for a solution to the problem of poverty—a situation, he added, that was hardly improved by American propaganda not very intellegently concentrating on a coarse negative anti-Communism and an insensitive comparison between European misery and American well-being...
...Great Britain Spring 1954 • DISSENT • 173 never paid much attention to what others said, and perhaps America must take the same attitude...
...The tension of the reality was for the moment dissolved in the suavity of "cultural understanding...
...Austen Albu, Labor MP, the Hon...
...He seemed appalled at the gay laughter, or perhaps embarrassed laughter, his remark evoked...
...V. S. Pritchett remarked: "Like all big bosses, the U. S. and USSR will get to like each other and to be like each other more and more...
...The Europeans talked about the problem, the Americans about themselves...
...A favorite slogan in Europe today, remarked Albu, is "No annihilation without representation...
Vol. 1 • April 1954 • No. 2
