National Affairs: THE FREE AMERICAN CITIZEN, 1952

• Share

TIME often has to report bad news, but it likes good news better and when such windfalls drop into its lap, it is happy to share them with its readers. The tree this particular windfall dropped from is Commentary, a monthly magazine financed by the American Jewish Committee, and edited by Elliott E. Cohen, who wrote for its current issue the article excerpted below. He states the proposition that the U.S. has an exportable commodity more precious than guns and butter. TIME hopes its readers will find his prospectus of what the world might get from "the free American citizen" good and heartening news indeed.

A European View of the U.S.

EUROPE'S hostile disrespect [is] due to no unfamiliarity with things American. There is a reasonably abundant flow of facts and goods and people across the Atlantic; if we are strange, it is not because we are strangers. Rather, it is as if there hung between us, more formidable than any Iron Curtain, an invisible distorting lens that has skewed the American social landscape and its inhabitants into fantastic shapes . . .

There was a myth about America . . . and what a myth!—one rubbed one's eyes at the crude stereotypes that stood for the characters, and the vulgar comic-book drama that passed for the plot. . .

This myth was no monopoly of the uneducated masses, or of those under the sway of Communist propaganda or commitment. The highest luminaries of arts and letters were responsible for some of the silliest absurdities. Jean-Paul Sartre's fabulously successful play about our South, The Respectful Prostitute, presents only more nakedly the whole creaky paraphernalia of America as seen and believed, in one degree or another, by the European intelligentsia from Kafka to Kingsley Martin.

The hand of the Machine . . . a sullen population of robots chained to the belt line, ridden by fear, bullied by threats and propaganda, and cozened by the vulgar mass arts and mechanical gadgets . . . a police state, ruled by Finance Capital through venal, illiterate political bosses, the FBI, and the generals, under the form of a sham democracy in which the population, given a meaningless paper franchise and deprived of all rights and liberties, finds itself helpless either to stay its own increasing victimization —see the charred black corpse swinging at every crossroad!—or to brake the suicidal careering of its production-and-profit-mad economy toward the imperialistic enslavement of all peoples, total war, and an apocalyptic holocaust and collapse . . . It is, in essence, the myth of the Frankenstein monster, the machine built to be man's slave, and which enslaved him . . .

The Answer That Is Not Made

Why don't we speak up about what we have to offer in the realm of politics?

How may a people be governed so that it can produce and share among its members the goods sufficient to their needs, while enjoying those freedoms and human dignities as vital as bread and shelter, and maintaining the strength and unity to protect itself from its enemies, "foreign and domestic? This is the prime question to which the suffering peoples of the world today seek an answer—challenging us to offer an alternative to the Kremlin's confidently asserted formula.