THE NATIONS: The Year of the Bullbat

(See Cover)

Convalescence is a nervous time, exuberant, but shot through with real and fancied dangers; a frustrating time, irrational, irascible and full of hope. The world of 1946 was convalescent.

The U.S. Army sent a radar impulse to the moon, heard it bounce back. This was the farthest stretch of human communication. It said nothing whatever.

¶ The U.S. was still (in uneasy probability) the only nation armed with the atomic bomb; the U.S. Army & Navy, before demonstrating it at Bikini, ordered a survey of caves for use in the day when its bombs might not be complete protection against another's.

¶ In India 400 millions, in Burma 17 millions, in Indonesia 72 millions made notable strides toward national independence, without showing much evidence of progress in self-government.

¶ If The French and Italian black markets had plenty in the midst of want. Britain had want in the midst of socialism (which most Britons, nevertheless, were still determined to keep). Russia had pushed out her borders and was, for the first time in history, the strongest nation in Europe; no organized internal political opposition to the Government existed. Yet, so great was their feeling of insecurity that some of Russia's masters spent their time chivvying poets, composers and clowns whose art was deemed subtly out of step with the regime.

¶ U.S college population bulged to 2,000,000 (double that of 1936) without assuring any comparable multiplication of national wisdom. Patients in U.S. mental hospitals also reached 600,000 as against 516,000 ten years ago. In the U.S. divorces were one-third as frequent as marriages; in Egypt, nearly half.

¶ Strikes gnawed bigger bites than ever before in the U.S. economy without increasing the power of the unions or the living standards of the workers. Most dramatic was the rail strike in May, which collapsed when Harry Truman threw the full weight of his presidential office at two men-whom few had heard of before and fewer have heard of since.

Woman of the Year. Though 1946 was unquiet with the drums of war behind and the danger of war ahead, a deeply happy thread ran through its garish pattern; it was a year of homecoming and, therefore, a woman's year. To loyalties older than flags jealous governments had released some 60 million men. (The Americans chafed noisily at demobilization delays, and returned horrified by the scarcity of water closets and breakfast foods beyond the oceans; the Russians returned discontented at the remembrance of fine houses, fabulous watches, and women with soft hands across the Oder, the Danube and the Bug.)

The women of 1946 (most of them) had their men back, a joy tempered by fears of wars to come. The nations were quarreling again; the year's news was dominated by the opposed efforts of Russia's Molotov and America's Byrnes to reap or hold advantage at the peace tables. The women, who wanted peace in their time and their sons' time, anxiously watched as the conflict over lands and lives and faiths took an intricate, peculiarly masculine shape in treaty clauses, commas and semicolons.