Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Does Everyone Dislike America? SALVADOR DE MaDARIAGA, in the May 6 New Leader, assumes the affirmative of a distinctly debatable point: that the...
...analyze closely whether the United States "practicing democracy ' in foreign polio, a phrase easier perhaps to recommend than to translate into positive action...
...But I have never scon convincing evidence that the reaction to occasional bumptious or obnoxious American travelers (and there are such people of other nationalities, too) has translated itself into burning dislike of all Americans...
...The professor and his wife were speaking German...
...Then there is the marked Americanization of European life: the popularity of the automobile and the snack bar, the universal appeal of the American movie, the throngs that turn out to greet American jazz bands...
...They knew, even if the Government didn't remind them of the fact, that American food aid had saved them from the worst consequences of bad harvests and collective farming: and they were distinctly appreciative...
...But are Americans "disliked everywhere," as Senor de Madariaga asserts as an "indisputable fact...
...Only recently, when feeling in Great Britain was running high on the Suez issue, there was general testimony that Americans as individuals in England were treated as courteously and considerately as usual...
...On the basis of a good deal of personal experience in Europe since the war, I would challenge this assertion as much too extreme and unqualified...
...This indictment seems a little vague and also too sophisticated to account for a supposed sentiment of universal dislike...
...But I still remember the French couple 011 the train from the Belgian frontier to Paris in 1946 who insisted on lending francs lo my wife and myself, complete strangers, so that, as they put it, we would be able to look around and find some francs at the free rate of exchange, which was then about double the official rate...
...These happen to be expressions of American culture in which I take no special pride...
...Quite the contrary...
...I would not be inclined to go to the other extreme and sav that the United States is universally liked...
...Some of the fault is ours, some that of Europeans and Asians, some the probably unavoidable result of a world situation which has precipitated America, without conscious design, into a position of vast international power and responsibility...
...A gifted young German woman student, daughter of a famous economist, grand-daughter of an even more famous philosopher, recently returned to Germany after several years at an American university full of enthusiasm for her experience in this country...
...But for the European masses, if not for the intellectuals, these various manifestations of Americanism are the desired wave of the future...
...They had stopped their car to pick up an Italian family stranded in the rain...
...An American university professor and his wife, natives of Austria, had a similar impression in Italy...
...More recently, during a visit to Yugoslavia, I did not find people shrinking away in disdain and dislike when they learned in park-bench or street-corner conversation in Belgrade that I was an American...
...Franco is supposed to be a seething hotbed of anti-Americanism...
...And there were several incidents which pointed in the other direction...
...in trips to almost every European country outside the Iron Curtain I cannot recall a single case of hostility, incivility or even marked coolness toward me as an American...
...Nor is the educated European always repelled by what he finds in America...
...Of course, ever since Mark Twain wrote Innocents Abroad and probably much earlier, some American tourists have excited amusement or irritation by naive or loud behavior in foreign parts...
...No Europeans would have picked up strangers as you did...
...A few years later, struggling off a crowded train with more baggage than I could handle at Nice, I found some of my fellow-passengers as helpful as Kan-sans might have been in Topeka...
...The United States, he thinks, is a leader that does not lead because in foreign policy it does not practice democracy or imaginative creativeness...
...Only a few sensitive intellectuals, one suspects...
...And her reaction, so far as I can judge, is typical of that of many foreign intellectuals who have been brought to America on cultural-exchange programs...
...I always feel most relieved when I get into some beautiful Swiss resort like Zermatt or Wengen, where no car can penetrate, and I have always regarded jazz as an abomination...
...De Madariaga reduces his theory of "universal dislike" for the United Stales to a single cause...
...There are causes, sound and unsound, for the criticisms of the United States that one sometimes hears across the Atlantic and Pacific...
...My linguistic limitations abroad are so pronounced, unfortunately, that I could hardly be mistaken for anything but an American...
...They were driving a European car...
...But before long one of their Italian passengers remarked: "You must be Americans...
...SALVADOR DE MaDARIAGA, in the May 6 New Leader, assumes the affirmative of a distinctly debatable point: that the United States is universally disliked...
Vol. 40 • May 1957 • No. 21
