America! America!

America! America!

Dwight Macdonald writes: “America! America!” was written early this year as a New York letter to Encounter. The editors accepted it, then a month or so later rejected it, then almost immediately reaccepted it, and finally after another six weeks definitively rejected it. These shifts reflected the attitude of Encounter‘s “front office,” the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris, which publishes the magazine with funds supplied by several American foundations. The people in Paris felt the Letter was exaggerated, one-sided, unfounded, and in bad taste, and they feared it might cause American foundations to cut off supplies. The editors did what they could—hence the shifting—but ultimately yielded. Perhaps they felt that Paris (and its moneyed foundations) was worth a mass. Or a mess. I’m sorry to feel obliged to make all this public, because I like Encounter’s editors (and even its front-office Metternichs) and because I very much enjoyed the year I spent in London on Encounter. But I do feel obliged, because I think readers have a right to know when a magazine makes an editorial decision for extraneous reasons, especially this kind of reason, But I must also state that (a) the Paris office is not ordinarily consulted about manuscripts (mine apparently was shown to one of the Paris boys merely as a matter of interest—the editor thought he’d enjoy it!) and also that such intervention is extremely rare. I can recall no such pressure from Paris while I was there.

When I came back to New York last fall, just in time for the Sputnik, after a year in London and two months in Tuscany, I felt I had crossed a boundary much wider than the Atlantic. We are an unhappy people (I felt), a people without style, without a sense of what is humanly satisfying. Our values are not anchored securely, not in the past (tradition) and not in the present (community). There is a terrible shapelessness about American life. These prosperous Americans look more tense and joyless than the people in the poorest quarters of Florence. Even the English seem to have more joie de vivre.

No nation in history has been richer or has had a more equal distribution of wealth, and since 1940 there has been a fantastic increase in the wealth and a considerable decrease in economic differences. It Socialism be the equal sharing of plenty, then we are far along the road. We have more of everything a human being can conceivably, and inconceivably, want than Fourier, Proudhon, or Marx could have imagined possible. According to Fortune (June, 1954), we spend over $30 billion a year on pleasure (“The Great Fun Market”): sports, travel, hunting and fishing, books and magazines, liquor, gardening, home workshops, movies and television, etc. Yet we are, I insist, not happy. Why not? Let me put down a few impressions.

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