How We Looked to London

...Since the publication of America and the British Left, the Suez crisis has reminded us that anti-American propensities are not confined to the Left (which, indeed, on this occasion enthroned President Eisenhower at least briefly as its new hero...

...British left-wingers were tardy to recognize the New Deal and rather prompt to abandon hope of it, but there was a period when it made a deep impression in contrast to the do-nothing policies of the inter-war governments in Britain...

...Reading this book reminds me how much our two nations owe to the rather small minority of British publicists who have taken the trouble to see America whole, both the good and the bad...

...British radicals of the same century saw the United Stales through rose-colored spectacles and in llieir enthusiasm tended to ignore tho political corruption which increasingly infeeled the young republic...

...The propaganda of deeds —and particularly of deeds of the scope, imagination and generosity of which the American people are capable at their best—is immeasurably more effective than the, propaganda of words...

...British conservatives in the first half of the 19th century, for example, culled from de Tocqueville the passages which underlined their warnings of the dangers of too much democracy...

...When I found that the political polemics of De Leon and Debs were shared by so loved an author as Jack London, the effect on my mind was profound...

...Aneurin Bevan's testimony is typical of many: "As I was reaching adolescence, toward the end of the First World War, I became acquainted with the works of Eugene V. Debs and Daniel De Leon of the U.S.A...

...I recall one Labor Party Conference at which Ernest Bevin solemnly announced that, should any American government embark upon a preventive war, those two great trade-union movements, the AFL and the CIO, would cast it out of office...

...Henry M. Pelling, Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, has written an instructive and entertaining book which reminds us that Anglo-American colloquies like that between Norman Thomas and Bertrand Russell in ¦recent issues of The New Leadkk have been taking place for almost two centuries and that the tendency of British observers to see America "as if in one of two distorting mirrors, either convex or concave" of which Samuel Gompers complained in 1909 is a long-standing one...

...I can myself recall, for example, how often in the bleak years between Roosevelt's death and the Marshall Plan friends of America cited the Tennessee Valley Authority as proof that the United States was not simply a sink of reaction...

...It has not been an easy thing to do...

...Such ideas are worth millions of words explaining why this, that and the other aspect of our infinitely various country is good, or is at least not quite so bad as it is represented...

...The Marshall Plan likewise made a profound impression...

...Indeed, the tendency to see America in terms of Jack London and the early Upton Sinclair still persists, but the United States has enjoyed fleeting periods of popularity with the British Left...

...In their effort to break the alliance between the trade unions and the Liberal party and win them for socialism, British socialists before and after the turn of the century found much ammunition in the books of the "muck-rakers" and rebel writers such as Jack London...

...Even today, social scientists find that the tendency of foreign travel is too often to reinforce the prejudices with which the travelers started out, and throughout the history of the United States British commentators seem to have selected out of a complex reality those aspects which would best support their arguments in their own domestic political debates...

...America, in fact, has stood highest in the eyes of the British Left when it has been identified with some bold, generous and simple idea—democracy in the early years, the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, Point Four...

...The Americans present were left speechless with astonishment—but some of them reflected afterward how very difficult it was to explain why such fears, then common among British Laborites, were groundless...