AN AMERICAN ABROAD

...BEFORE 1914 Americans were distinctly Innocents Abroad in their attitude toward foreign affairs and Mowrer received instructions from his paper to cut down on serious news and concentrate on picking out the best jokes each week from the French funny papers...

...Roosevelt's economic philosophy at that time...

...Reviewed by William Henry Chamberlin PAUL SCOTT MOWRER is one of the more thoughtful of the American journalists who have gone in for the writing of autobiography...

...As he remarks, with the dry humor that often livens up his reminiscences: "I did my best on the jokes, but it was little enough, for all the funniest French jokes were of a sort that could not be printed in a family newspaper...

...THE author is obviously a vigorously opinionated individual and the book abounds in stories of conflicts of opinion and viewpoint between himself and his editors and colleagues, in which he usually comes out victorious...

...Mowrer saw something of the preview of World War I in the Balkan War of 1912-13, and his descriptions of nationalist fanaticism on one hand and filth, misery, and epidemics on the other is only too accurate a survey, in miniature, of the general consequences of war...

...the years of struggle and carnage from which Europe never actually recovered...

...In this reviewer's judgment he is too uncritical in his endorsement of French policy after World War I, and some of his figures and interpretations on the question of reparations are certainly open to question...

...And finally there was the futile aftermath of World War I, the fumbling efforts at reconstruction which were swept away by the torrential flood of the economic crisis which engulfed the whole world in the late twenties and early thirties...

...His gift of satirical comment is reflected in the following bit of comment on the Economic Conference: "The delegate who attracted the most attention was Sen...

...he was intelligently interested in the European unfolding panorama...

...There was the incredibly distant carefree atmosphere of pre-1914 Europe, an old civilization dancing on the brink of an abyss...

...The only profiteers of this crisis were the advocates of desperate remedies like Hitler...

...Key Pittman of Nevada, who, as people said, never took a drink before noon, because he never got up before noon...

...What amazed foreigners was the blatant way in which Pittman, as representative of a silver-producing state, kept insisting that the whole world buy more silver...

...His leisurely, sometimes rambling account of his life from an Illinois boyhood to the time when he returned from two decades of newspaper work in Europe to take over the editorship of the Chicago Daily Neios is a keen, observant record of three phases of the changing European scene...

...This juvenile attitude toward foreign affairs unfortunately outlived World War I. During the twenties a leading American news agency sent a crisp message to one of its overseas hirelings, "Think Stuff Unwanted," and on another occasion supplemented this negative command with a passionate plea for "more stories like girl suiciding in Argentina because her lover called her a hippopotamus...

...and his book makes instructive and entertaining reading, even though it could have undergone a moderate slimming process to advantage...

...He covered the London Economic Conference in 1933 and performs a useful service in recalling how isolationist was Mr...

...He occupied a ringside seat at the Paris Peace Conference and his story of the brawls and bickerings at the Conference and its subsequent meetings is a pretty faithful anticipation of the present state of relations among the Big Three...

...Then came the catastrophe...

...But he was not the kind of correspondent who picks up all his news and views in bars...