Tardieu: Internationalizer

Tardieu: Internationalizer

Of all Americans perhaps Herbert C. Hoover has achieved a career most aptly comparable to that of Andre Tardieu in France. Both served during the War among an alien people, disbursing unstinted millions with prodigal but discriminating hands. Perhaps not everyone knows that M. Tardieu, as French High Commissioner to the U. S. spent three and a half billions of dollars upon purchases of War stuffs within two years.

At present, MM. Hoover and Tardieu find themselves respectively U. S. Secretary of Commerce and French Minister of Public Works.

Now M. Tardieu comes forward with an altogether brilliant, witty and understanding book.* If the author's name were Herbert C. Hoover, Americans would know what to think of its authoritative worth. Instead there looms before them the adventure of discovering a statesman able to lay bare the citizens of France and the U. S. to one another as completely and far more deftly than Sinclair Lewis can rip the breeches off a Gantry.

"I neither judge nor criticize; I seek to understand. . . ." writes M. Tardieu. "If Boston could not understand Detroit, shall Paris understand Denver? . . . Ignorance even of the present is unbelievable. Nine Frenchmen out of ten believe that the President of the United States is elected by the Congress and that the Congress can overthrow the Cabinet." Excerpts:

Thesis: "I am well aware that both Frenchmen and Americans are taught--and have been taught for 150 years--that they were born to understand one another, and I see that very often they do not. . . . In 1805 a Frenchman, Perrin du Lac, published a book . . . from which I cull this sentence. . .: 'The guiding principle of Americans seems to be never to do anything as we do.' . . . I prefer this plain admission to any amount of conventional oratory. . . ."

Antitheses: "Whether the executive power be of divine or human origin, Americans have for it none of that respectful confidence which all Frenchmen instinctively feel. Far from considering the central Government as a watchful providence to look after him, the American tinges with distrust what little thought he gives it. . . .

"[In America] with no struggles centring round a regime, no struggles centring around religion, what inspiration is left for political life? Something in which France has rarely taken a supreme interest: economic welfare. . . . I say that American education, like American art, like American literature, like American philosophy, aims not at perfection of man, but at the development of the Nation. . . .

"The American, better protected than the Frenchman in his civil liberty and political rights, is less well armed against social conventions. . . . He likes to agree with the majority which we love to defy. . . ." tie quotes Woodrow Wilson: "In the Middle West and in the West frequently there is no opinion at all."

Debts. "The more Europe begs, the harder America becomes ... a form of homage which Europe has carried to extremes. . . . France received $2,985,000,000 at less than 5% [after the U. S. entered the War]. ... I refer to the fact that the United States having made these advances officially as an associate in a common cause was not entitled after having abandoned its associates [by making a separate peace with Germany] to demand repayment without a thorough revision of the amounts involved. . . ." He quotes Clemenceau: " 'If we had known that we were to be left in the lurch by English ill-will and American indifference [in the now drastically reduced program of collections from Germany] we should not have signed the armistice.' "

Reconstruction: "Lloyd George once said to me, 'France is lucky to have ten devastated Departments." [This is because their reconstruction provided work for so many men that there has not been in France the stupendous British unemployment problem.]

French Aid. "More than a million American soldiers crossed the seas in British ships, and France had supplied all the cannon, 75s and 155s short, all the tanks, 81% of the aeroplanes, 57% of the heavy artillery used by the American army, as well as all the 65,000,000 shells fired by its artillery. . . ."

". . . The War over, bonds slackened and water became thicker than blood. . . ."

* FRANCE AND AMERICA (Simultaneously published in Paris as DEVANT L'OBSTACLE) -- Andre Tardieu--Houghton Mifflin ($3).