The United States [antikvár]

Introduction Aír. Luce (1898-1967) wrote the follotuing introduction to the first edition of this volume in 1965: Many readers may not have been aware of one principle that has all along guided the editors of the Life World Library in selecting authors for its series. This was that no volume should be written by a national of the country under discussion, and the idea was to establish a cool and consistent series, written by informed outsiders who would be free of nationalist puff or prejudice. Now, in the volume on the United States of America, the editors have asked experts in a number of fields each to do a chapter on his specialty. Following the originál rule, all are foreigners, and this time the impact of that rule will probably hit the reader with considerable force. American readers of this book will, I think, find it, as I did, a rather extraordinary experience. It is like getting a report card from school and finding that you have received much higher marks than you could possibly have expected. To start with the Economics Department (Professor Massimo Salvadori), perhaps it ought not to be a surprise to be told that the materialistic economic performance of the U.S. is so far ahead of any other society that it is in a class by itself. Surely that is an irrefutable fact known to all. But it is a question whether the miracle of our economic achievement is really appreciated by Americans, both pundits and people. Even if a modern American is aware of this fact, he may still be surprised to find that Professor Salvadori attributes the achievements not primarily to favorable material circumstances but rather to the values and ideals that, generation after generation, have been woven into the American way of life. In our daily business of making a living, he says, we have become exemplars of "liberty under law." We have achieved a "remarkable degree of economic democracy" and "the expanding free enterprise economy means greater independence for individuals and groups." Finally, says Professor Salvadori, although poverty and other evils are relatively less serious problems in the U.S. than elsewhere, Americans are more aware of them and complaints are thus louder. In the brief space of this introduction I cannot pay my respects, as I should like to do, to each part of this distinguished report card, nor can I give myself the pleasure of arguing a few points of interpretation. I can only point to what seems to me to be most noteworthy as a theme running through the book. This theme is that the Founding Fathers did their work with a genius unique in history, that the American people are devoted to the principles of government established at the beginning and thereafter consistently developed, and that today they still feel that this nation has a mission in the world. All this adds up to a far more favorable verdict than would be given by a comparable group of indigenous American experts. If there is a contemporary reluctance to praise the American achievement and virtues, I fear this reluctance does not arise altogether from a sense of modesty or a fear of complacency. The question is whether, in our modern sophistication and even morbidity, somé vitai element of devotion to the American proposition is being lost. President Thomas H. Hamilton of the University of Hawaii, quoting a recent syllabus for a seminar on the American tradition, observes that "the analysis of politics has turnéd in a direction completely alien, to all appearances, to that of the early American past. Instead of the terms rights, equality, law, freedom, we find influence, power, elite, class.'1 These later terms do have analytical value, of course. But I would jóin President Hamilton in raising the question as to whether "our social sciences have become too descriptive, too reluctant to deal with values." The writers of this volume are by no means nai've. Widely and deeply knowledgeable, they have, so far as I can see, taken note of every fault and blemish on the American scene. Yet, in the main, they have found that Americans are still characterized by an unusual degree of devotion to the values for which their country has stood. Let us hope that a similar verdict can be rendered 20 or 30 years from now-that even at the height of our achievement and in an era of radical change, this present generation will be able to pass on to its children the quality of devotion so clearly recognizable in our forefathers. Henry R. Luce Editorial Chairman, Time Inc.