GREAT BRITAIN: In Nye's Eyes

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GREAT BRITAIN In Nye's Eyes After a two-week trip to the U.S., where he saw President Eisenhower, Secretary Dulles, and assorted liberals of more or less his own stripe, Laborite Aneurin Bevan summed up his impressions in London's News of the World:

"The frame is more magnificent and glittering than ever, but the picture inside is shallow, unrewarding and in places even tawdry."

The "dominant note" in the U.S. social climate, said Nye, is fear—"fear that you will fall behind in the display of ostentatious personal expenditure, fear that dandruff or body odor might lose you your sweetheart, fear of this, fear of that, fear for your job, fear that you might be thought to hold views repugnant to your employer."

Bevan also found "hate," contributed by the period of political witch-hunting known to history as McCarthyism—hate of Communism, hate of Socialism, hate of Radicalism, and hate of anything could be regarded as tainted by any of these.

t is against this background that we must appreciate the impact upon America of the launching of the two Russian satellites. " Americans, he said, took the Russian success as "a blow in the heartland. It will be a long time indeed, before the American people can be brought to forget what they regard as a deep humiliation." So saying, Nye the observer waddled, without fear, from his typewriter.