Like the Twelve-Bar Blues

The world, a little uncertain whether to expect fun or disaster, eagerly watched another one of those strange American tribal customs--the Republican National Convention. A corps of 45 foreign correspondents tried its baffled best to explain the proceedings to the folks back home. Wrote the Manchester Guardian's Alistair Cooke: "The art of conveying to a European audience the rules of the convention game eludes us all. Like baseball or the twelve-bar blues, it is seemingly too fluid a thing to be grasped . . ."

Europeans, to whom politics is grim and often deadly business, were puzzled by the rowdedow. Said one Frenchman: "I understand opera singers come and sing popular songs . . . Surely you cannot consider it sound to nominate a President by singing songs?"

Yet even the baffled knew that the man who won the strange games at Philadelphia could be as important to them as their own rulers. Maybe more so. "Whether the next U.S. President is isolationist or internationalist,"* wrote Tokyo's Asahi, "will have far more effect on the actual livelihood of the Japanese than the question of whether the next [Japanese] Premier is Shigeru Yoshida or Hitoshi Ashida."

Though many foreign observers had been rooting for Arthur Vandenberg because they knew where he stood, they conceded that Tom Dewey would not be too bad. Moscow, of course, stuck with damaging loyalty to Henry Wallace and denounced Dewey as a "prophet of imperialism." Le Parisien announced the governor's victory thus: "Tom Dewey is only one meter 56 centimeters tall, but his voice is the most radiophonic in the U.S."

Some Europeans had a deep sense of the human import of the Philadelphia story. Wrote Rome's II Tempo: "What portends there--elephants, bands ... a gigantic circus? [It] is a manifestation of that peculiar exuberance typical of American democracy . . ." A more thoughtful analysis came from Britain's Rebecca West, who was covering the convention for U.S. and British papers, but even Miss West seemed a little out of breath. "I cannot see these demonstrations . . . these sudden bursts of songs and dance as undignified or irrelevant," she wrote. "That is what they used to do in the Middle Ages when Kings and Popes were chosen . . . Well, now you are choosing a President, and the people are just as excited . . . Almost nothing in this convention seems as good as the people, the ordinary people."

The last word came from one Franca Giustiniani, a Roman cafe society belle. "I am so happy," she cried when she heard that Dewey had been duly nominated. "He is a Republican and his wife is so good-looking. It will brighten the picture at official functions."

The world was learning about the U.S., but to most of its people an elephant was still only an elephant.

* Republicans in particular, and Americans in general, might say until they were blue in the face that U.S. isolationism is dead--the world had not yet come to believe it.

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