Good Conglomerate

THESE FOREIGNERS--William Seabrook --Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

Except during his seven months in a mental hospital, which he described in Asylum, big, credulous, 52-year-old William Seabrook has never found in the U. S. the kind of people he likes to write about most--devil worshipers, whirling dervishes, cannibals. In These Foreigners, a study of foreign-born Americans, Author Seabrook finds a suitable compromise. Popular, readable, with a minimum of round-figure footnotes, his book picks only the "non-statistical, humaninterest" highlights.

Author Seabrook got the idea by looking around at his foreign-born neighbors in the Hudson River's Rhinebeck Valley, where he owns an eight-acre farm., In his boyhood days in Maryland and Kansas these neighbors would have been called dumb Swedes, squareheads, Dagos, Polacks, Heinies, wops, troublemakers, agitators and so forth. In Rhinebeck they were just neighborly Americans, Republicans, Democrats. Seabrook had a hunch that elsewhere in the U. S. the foreign born were equally good citizens. He decided to take a look for himself.

In Minnesota, among the Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, Finns, rich & poor alike, he found a thrifty, hardworking, hospitable, good-natured people, whose few so-called Reds were only followers of peaceable Norman Thomas. His major discovery was that "they are like electric cookstoves and concert violinists. They get hot slowly . . . but when they get hot they're volcanic." In the Little Italics of Manhattan and California he interviewed priests, millionaires, anarchists, labor leaders--all good Americans, who admired Roosevelt and Mussolini as they once admired Washington and Garibaldi. Again he found few authentic Reds, only Latin sound & fury. The central fact about an Italian, says Seabrook, is that he is "a go-getter, interested more in construction, material welfare and money than in anything else." Of German Americans, he estimated, only 1% are obtrusively Nazi. He calls the Germans "the most important, and most admirable, and generally loyal, but least lovable of all our foreign-language race groups." Poles, everywhere happy & contented, "dream at night of planting wheat and cabbages," detest Communism and Fascism as they do their hereditary enemies Russia and Germany. Among the White Russians of Westbury, Long Island, Seabrook was surprised to discover that not all Russian emigres are married to U. S. heiresses.

At anti-foreign alarmists in general Author Seabrook wags his finger: "You can find more 'parlor reds' per capita in Harvard, Smith, Vassar, Barnard . . . than you can find actual revolutionists among any foreign-language race group in America. . . ., The Melting Pot is a real thing. It boils and bubbles. It gives off a lot of steam and some scum, but what remains is a good conglomerate."

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