AMERICA REVISITED

...We found, repressed, stunted, and in jeopardy, but still here, the kind of anarchical love of liberty that a great big rich wilderness breeds, a love that, in the form of economic piracy, is the ruin of society while, in the form of standing up on your hind legs against the government, or against the church, or against the mob, is society's salvation...

...If you want to be in a batch, or work in a batch, or just go along for the ride, you can find out the facts at the Council on Student Travel, 179 Broadway, New York 7, N. Y. The Council charters ships like the Kulm—most of them in somewhat better condition—or pieces of ships and arranges the travel of European students and teachers to America and vice versa...

...Nobody is, and the chauvinism of national anthems does not make them true...

...The seven hundred kids on the Kulm were on their way, from every west and south European country, to seven hundred different towns and cities in the United States, to attend high school and live in American homes...

...They were smart kids, the smartest...

...The American promise—(or, if you would be much more cynical than they or I am, the American pretense) is still so great that the kids aboard the Kulm were moved by it to judge America hard, in advance of their being here, against that promise or that pretense...

...We were home...

...The 18-year-old European of 1956 is no yokel...

...An immigrant ship, with prefabricated smells...

...What will they love...

...And when the American youngsters go to Europe, on the return half of the program, to live for a year, again America supplies the buck...

...Director aboard the Kulm...

...The buck that would house and feed them and send them back was an American buck...

...I do like it here...

...The best I can do now is say, "I'm trying...

...Grandeur they got it at home...

...Everybody talks about Russia, but nobody goes there for more than thirty days, and, as you all know, it takes thirty days to learn a foreign language perfectly, and without the language you can't find out anything else...

...They have what in my time was called It...

...I didn't know it existed, and a few months ago I told a fellow it should, and he told me it did...

...These kids have their national heroes, but Jefferson and Lincoln look like heroes to them too...

...He does not believe that there is a Land of the Free...

...So, no matter what the discussion was, one of the young Europeans would begin the baiting by asking what the difference is between the Republican and the Demrocratic Parties, or how many political parties there are in America, or where you can find out what the political principles are...

...They would be appalled, these crowded kids, at the empty spaces of a land which will not take immigrants, appalled and angry...

...They would be appalled—as who wouldn't be but an American or a Russian?—by the great stretches of wasteland, urban as well as rural, owned by a people who always have money enough to move on and are hell-bent to do it, leaving the litter of the cities for the suburbs and the dry holes of Montana for the Gracious Living Belt of California...

...When I asked a big group of them if they knew anybody who owned two automobiles, there was silence, and then a boy from Spain said, "The government...

...they would still, they thought, be rolling in the lettuce...

...But what they expected to find, in all that vastness, they won't...

...They had all been screened and rescreened and sifted and scrubbed for the petty little louse of communism, which governs half the world and runs rampant all over the other half except here...

...He respects power...

...If, in their countries, you don't like the one-party system, you don't vote for either branch of the party...

...He's been to the city, ridden the tram, and seen the gas-lights...

...This was an Educational Question, and I was the Educational MILTON MAYER recently returned from a year in Europe, where he gathered material for articles and produced a series of interviews with Europeans for the National Association of Educational Broadcasters...

...But seven hundred European kids, bound for a year in America, are wonderful...

...What do 700 European high school seniors expect to find in America...

...Bourgeois as most of them are, the children of Europe's more fortunate, they did not come from homes which had automobiles...

...His whole life has been lived within two decades of power, power, power...

...They are the kids who at home are voted Most Likely to Succeed— at what, nobody ever says...

...that is, where the Labor and Socialist or Monarchist or Communist Party represents something unmistakable...

...A semi-converted garbage scow, the Kulm is owned by a Swiss with an Italian name, sails from Belgium, and flies the Panamanian flag...

...But how had the reality got itself so uniformly exaggerated among them...

...What did he say...

...Nobody loves the rich and powerful, and these kids come from a Europe which now sees an America that is rich and powerful and nothing else...

...The fact of racism is so ridiculously minimized by the American Propaganda Ministry—the U. S. Information Service, so-called—that the bright and imaginative European, who knows that racism exists and is dreadful and serious, reacts by imagining that it is much worse than it is...

...We wanted— and still want.—to go for a year...

...The idea is to spend twelve days with seven hundred kids asking seven hundred questions in seven hundred languages...

...Those who were going west, when they were told that they would fly all day long at 300 or 350 miles an hour to where they were going, could not stop wondering if it were really true...

...For these kids, bourgeois west Europeans, the buck, or the franc or the lira, is the big thing, since it is in short supply in Europe...

...Being people, just like the rest of us, they liked Ike, but, like the rest of us they didn't know why...

...No sooner was the political discussion terminated than a kid jumped up, from Spain or Sweden or, with a certain very special kind of malice, from Germany and asked about racism...

...The Arosa Kulm is a great little ship...

...He does not believe—especially after the oath and the finger-printing —that America is the Land of the Free...

...But we haven't wrecked ourselves yet, and Europe has...

...It was several hours before the human cargo was discharged, and in the interval I meandered forward to see what there was to see...

...They expected, too, to find opulence, but, as in the case of the vastness, the reality would transcend their imaginations...

...Lynching is a reality, segregation and discrimination are realities, Autherine Lucy is a reality...

...They wanted to know what the principles were—, something we don't want to know...

...And the Americans aboard were flattered by being pushed around for their country's failure to live up to its high and holy promise...

...said a Norwegian high school senior standing next to me...

...Not grandeur...

...Vastness and opulence they will find...

...The sixteen to eighteen-year-olds aboard the Kulm were typical, not of Europe, but of bourgeois western Europe...

...Thus their emphasis on racism, which, outside Germany, which had it good, they don't have at home...

...Coming back home after being in Europe for a while, and crossing the country by fast hamburger, we found the things we love and the things they will love...

...It's the old home place...

...We found, repressed, stunted, and in jeopardy, but still here, the sense of the unfinished business of building a society...

...They had all studied American politics, and they know that there is no such a thing as politics, in the true sense, in America...

...It's uphill work...

...America, for these kids, still embodies the legend of liberty, liberty not wrested from tyrants and lost again and wrested back, but liberty bred in the national bone...

...The buck that was bringing them to America Iras an American buck, raised to finance their trip by local service clubs or schools or churches...

...Not much cheaper, but a little, and not so very much worse, at that...

...so, along with his contempt, he has respect, but the kind of respect he has is the kind you and I don't want for our country...

...In another way, trying to explain America isn't hard, either...

...Then, when we come back, and the man in the audience says, "If you don't like it here, go to Russia," I could say, "I've been...

...We are not the last best hope of earth...

...Already well warped, she was warped in at the dock and her human cargo readied for discharge...

...It represents forty or fifty other such agencies, religious and educational, and ferries kids back and forth, in big batches, over the seas...

...He isn't buying the Brooklyn Bridge...

...the bipartisan handiwork of the Truman Democrats and the Eisenhower Republicans...

...It's the way to go, and a little bit cheaper, if a lot worse, than steerage...

...They will remember it, but they won't love it...

...Politics, to them, is a matter of life and death...

...there is only the Great Game of Ins and Outs, without any distinction whatever in principles, policies, or platforms between the opposing parties...

...We were still waiting, after a year, for the Russians to let us into Russia for a year, and the Russians were still waiting to get an agency established that could do it...

...Grander grandeur, too, when you compare the Empire State Building with the cathedral at Cologne, and just as grand when you compare the Rockies with the Alps...

...Europe supplies the bodies and America supplies the buck...

...So, although these kids were the relatively rich of Europe, they share the poor man's secret hatred of the rich and his secret hope that the rich will fall on their faces...

...They had got it, in part, from reality...

...Mac," I said, "he's beefin' 'cause dey ain't no pickle...

...They had all had to swear, not that they were decent or honest, but that they were anti-Communist...

...These kids had the most fantastic notions of the extent and intensity of racism in America...

...But he's cynical, too, as they were not...

...They were able to say that a great revolution is going on in America, the revolution of desegregation, and they were able to mean it...

...Partly, it became clear as the Arosa Kulm wallowed along, from the equal and opposite exaggeration of the American propaganda agencies, official and unofficial, in Europe...

...The idea belongs to the Council on Student Travel, which is itself a great idea...

...A dock-walloper on the dock tossed a big paper bag aboard, and a dock-walloper aboard caught the bag, emptied it of paving-stone hamburgers, put his head into the bag, and then called out, "Wheah's duh pickle...

...If, in their countries, you think that capitalism is un-Christian, you vote against capitalism, no matter what the Man Next Door calls you...

...He's smarter than his father, and much smarter than his grandfather...

...But in some part the emphasis on racism—it kept coming up from the floor, and always in the form of ostensibly dumb questions—was some more baiting I have alluded to...

...It operates a similar program for immigrants, most of whom, since we haven't got any sense any more in this country, go to Canada, where they are not only welcome but subsidized...

...If we can shrink our own heads and find out how to be the first people in history who knew, not how to use power (which nobody knows), but how to get rid of it before it blows us up, we can still beat the game...

...That program is run by the American Field Service, and there's another one something like it run by the Experiment in International Living, and so on...

...Vastness is what they expected to find here and, brother, they will find it, coming, as every one of them does, from a crowded square inch of a society that is laid out by inches...

...The man in the audience does not understand...

...Trying to explain America isn't easy...

...It was built in 1922, which was not a vintage year...

...The Americans aboard the Kulm had an easier time than usual with the racism question...

...They had all had to be finger-printed...

...They were rocked on their heels when they were told that they would spend 35 cents for a milkshake and a buck for a movie, but their incredulity persisted...

...What there was to see was a dozen dock-wallopers lounging about the forward hold and another dozen playing laconic choo-choo with the winches...

...Coming, as they all do, from freer countries, where these indignities do not exist, they were all sore at America, right from the start, or, perhaps more properly stated, contemptuous of it Their soreness, or contempt, took the form, at all of our discussion sessions, of innocent questions...

...They were able, thereby, to take some of the wind out of the Europeans' sails, but the Europeans had the last word: "So your schools are becoming free, like ours...

...Every one of these kids comes from a country where politics is a matter of principle...

...On shipboard, both ways, it conducts an orientation program, telling the Europeans what they want to know about America, and of course, again vice versa...

...I like it so much I am trying to keep the man in the audience from changing it around...

...And that's not the idea, anyway...

...and being young and intelligent, they thought they liked Adlai better, but they didn't know why...

...If you want to move kids around, or borrow one or let one out, and make little men and women of the world out of them, or if you want to be a kid yourself, no matter how arthritic you are, write to the Council on Student Travel...

...He isn't buying anything...

...They will want it, but they won't love it...

...Where had they got their exaggerated picture...

...And they will find an openness, a degree of personal trust and personal readiness, a genuine friendliness (instead of an educated courtesy) that goes with the big new rich frontier that none of them ever saw, or ever will see, in Europe...

...It does make a difference, as it doesn't here, who is governing, because different people there have radically different ideas, as they don't have here...

...They will be impressed by it, but they won't love it...

...They expected to find the same carefully cultivated little charm that characterizes their ancient villages and their ancient cities...

...They were being given twelve American bucks a month to spend, above their room and board, and they could not figure out how they would manage to spend that much in a month...

...It had bred, over thirty-four years of close breeding, its own variety of cockroach, cucaracha sinuosa, with rubber ribs, because there isn't room aboard the Arosa Kulm to go from here to there in a straight line...

...We've got an idea here—-not a unique or original idea, to be sure, but a unique and original laboratory for its demonstration—and if we can get the sin of segregation off our shoulders in the South, and discrimination in the North, and then get the still greater sin of war (the sin that, without racism, ruined Europe) off our shoulders, we can still squeak through and, by living the American dream, maybe pull Europe through with us...

...It's a non-profit agency, organized by people who so love the world that they give their only begotten lives to it, sacrificing not only their sons, but their wives and daughters, to the low wages they get for doing it...

...The cargo consisted of 700 European high school seniors, getting their first look at the New World, and the Mayer family, getting its first look at the Old Country in a long, long time...

...Insofar as they are typical of western bourgeois Europe, they are atypical of everywhere else except America...

...heading for Oregon, Minnesota, or Maine, they expected it to be the first and most persistent problem they would encounter...

...If there is any hope in bourgeois western Europe, these kids are it...