National Affairs: To Rome

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In Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, two of the standard Communist-propaganda charges against the U.S. are that 1) Americans are materialistic and cultureless, 2) the Negroes are downtrodden. Last week the U.S. Information Agency fended off two stones with one appointment by naming Frank M. (for Martin) Snowden Jr., 43, professor of classics at Washington's Howard University, as cultural attache in the U.S. embassy in Rome. Snowden is a Negro, and he is far from cultureless. He holds A.B., A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in classics from Harvard. As an under graduate (class of '32), he won a classics prize with an essay written in Greek and signed "Plato." Says Snowden, chuckling: "If you look in the Harvard Library index under Plato, you find one card that says, 'See Snowden.' " He reads Latin, Greek, German, French and Italian, and has written learned essays on slavery in ancient Pompeii and the role of Ethiopians in Roman history.

Born in Virginia and reared in Boston, Snowden knows Italy well. He studied there in 1938 as a Rosenwald fellow, and in 1949-50 as a Fulbright scholar. In 1953, as a lecturer for the State Department's International Information Administration, he told Italian audiences, in fluent Italian, about the improving lot of the Negroes in the U.S. From Rome, Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce notified Washington that Snowden's tour of Italy was "a very great success" and subsequently recommended him for the attache post. Remarked an Italian newspaperman last week: "This is the only kind of propaganda that does you Americans any good. It is worth more than 10,000 pamphlets and press releases."