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Uneasy people saw flying saucers in the air. Women, prodded by the dress manufacturers, draped their figures in the New Look which, like all new fashions, was becoming only to the stylish. Race prejudice still showed its ugly head. Senator Bilbo .was stopped at the door of Congress and went back to the South to die, but Willie Earle was lynched in Greenville, S.C., and 31 men who were tried for the crime were freed.
Weight of a Bomb. Beneath its ruffled and fretful surface, however, the U.S. nation was stronger than it had ever been before in peacetime. Aside from its wheat crop, its not-too-good corn crop, and its $231 billion of produced wealth, it had a technology unsurpassed in history. In the atomic bomb—uneasily held—it held title, hopefully exclusive title, to the decisive military weapon. The U.S. had scaled down its once great military establishment, but it had merged its armed services, which promised better military preparation. How long it would take Russian technology to redress the power balance with its own bomb, no U.S. observer could say; estimates ran from two to ten years. But for 1947, at least, the bomb, in the hands of free men, was perhaps the one great deterrent to the authoritarians who only understand force.
The Spirit of a Nation. In the end, U.S. aid to the world would depend on two things. One was the purely selfish consideration set forth last spring by Dean Acheson, then Under Secretary of State. "Measures of relief and reconstruction have been only in part suggested by humanitarianism . . . [it] is chiefly a matter of self-interest." The other consideration: humanitarianism.
Writing in a little British magazine, The Cornhill, Author Geoffrey Gorer, a British anthropologist, said: "If Americans are placed in a situation where they feel they are not loved, their natural tendency is to withdraw. . . . This is one component making for isolationism ... a reproduction on an international scale of the response, 'Let's get the hell out of here.' "
But Americans, if they were not exactly loved the world over, had, in 1947, at least gained a greater measure of respect than they had enjoyed before. They had helped this feeling along by their own actions. They were presenting a different face to the peoples of the world from the inquisitive, patronizing face of the pre-World War II tourist. Most of the Congressmen who had traveled to Europe last summer for a look at things were conscientious and sympathetic men, who had shown Europe a more mature U.S., even as they reflected the spirit of hardheaded humanitarianism which was abroad in their land.
Would the U.S. people stick to their course? The opinion of a visitor may be more pertinent than the guess of a native. This week, in the New York Times maga zine, Barbara Ward, foreign editor of London's Economist, who had made two trips to the U.S. in 1947, wrote: "I believe that the American people—the only people in the world who thought of an ideal first and then built a state around it—will prove in the long run happier, freer, and more creative when they carry that ideal of a free society out into the world, than if they sit at home to hug it to themselves. ... I suspect that Americans will find initiative and action so much more to their taste than any panic-stricken waiting on what destiny may bring."