The New America

The U.S. lay beneath blue skies, benign and contented amid the pageant of the colorings of fall. Aspens turning gold flecked the dense green forests and bleak grey sides of the Rockies; maples turning orange and red spread a magic fire across the dour woods of Minnesota; dahlias glowed purple, pink and coral beside the dark-flowering plums in the gardens of Longview, Wash. By night, the pageant continued amid a blaze of lights of county fairs where Ferris wheels turned and hot dogs sizzled and barkers exhorted.

In two major cities last week--Brooklyn and Milwaukee--the season reached a roaring climax as the Dodgers and Braves fought it out for the National League pennant (see SPORT). Such was the objection of Ebbets Field to Umpire Vic Delmore when he made a bad call on Catcher Campanella at second base that there came a revelation, to hear the New York Herald Tribune's Columnist Red Smith tell it, "that at least 34,022 people in Brooklyn have white handkerchiefs, a fact previously unsuspected." Such was the absorption of Milwaukee in the Braves that the arrival there of Campaigner Adlai Stevenson to deliver a nationwide TV speech was all but ignored.

One day last week Stevenson took his stand amid the pageant and said: "The text of my lecture for tonight is 'Bread and Circuses.'" He harked back to the way the declining Roman emperors had taken Rome's mind off its troubles with gladiators and spectacles; he was disturbed, he said, that the Republicans might be trying to fob off Eisenhower upon "a docile, complacent, carefree people all happily chanting 'Peace, Prosperity and Progress--ain't it wonderful.' " Candidate Stevenson obviously felt he had a point: little outward concern was shown by the nation as a whole for the problems of its parts (in drought-dried Holton, Kans. last week 300 people prayed in the courthouse square for rain); nor was there much patent concern for the maneuverings of Egypt's President Nasser, or for the Communist huddles of Khrushchev and Tito beside the faraway Black Sea (see FOREIGN NEWS). The U.S. has learned to live with its crises with equanimity.

But if the candidates could take time out to see it, there was a point to the pageant engulfing them as they swept from city to town to farm: the U.S., though waxing so prosperous as to create an image of a promised land, is nonetheless energized as never before by its electricity of change. Complacency is stifled in the roar of dozers driving thruways, of cranes lifting the beams for new skyscrapers, of furnaces belching out more steel, of rockets soaring to dizzy heights. Clearly there is in the U.S. of 1956 no lack of interest in the search for the New America. But if there seems to be little interest in it as an election-year issue, it is only because the search is constant and the U.S. is always new.

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