Grand Jamboree

Sleek Frenchmen, great-throated Germans, hearty Englishmen, voluble Belgians, blond Swedes, good-natured Austrians, ill-tailored Czechs, pompous Italians, hungry Letts, solid Dutchmen, bland Danes, swarthy Poles, incomprehensible Lithuanians, dour Spaniards, excitable Serbs, fish-eating Finns, bony Norwegians, polyglot Swiss, egregious Estonians and 100% Americans--all these to the number of 4,000 assembled last week in Berlin. Greatest of them all were the Americans, 1,000 in number. They were most plentiful because they considered themselves and are considered the world's foremost exponents of the meeting's subject--advertising.

It was the World Advertising Congress of 1929, repeating the great assemblage of 1924 in London. Dr. Hans Luther, onetime (1925-26) Chancellor of the Reich, welcomed the delegates. Charles C. Younggreen, big chief of the U. S. delegation made answer:

"I shall not take your time with a panegyric of advertising. It needs none. . . . Yet was our youth a glorious one, for we had vision and energy and vitality and we had set up a noble goal."

Hardly a U. S. adman reached Europe without his wife. In addition there were some 300 female delegates. So Kate Kleefeld Stresemann, wife of the German Foreign Minister, came forward, chairman of a special committee, took the ladies by the hand. That was a pleasure for alert Frau Stresemann. There in a body she could study the genus U. S. woman, of which Berlin women have read in the works of Sinclair Lewis, who lately sojourned in Germany with eclat. As advertising goes, the Foreign Minister's wife could have asked for nothing more explicit than this gathering of U. S. women from New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles. Dallas, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Cleveland. It was equally edifying for the U. S. ladies to meet the wife of a Foreign Minister, no hausfrau, but a young, elegant, cosmopolite, English speaking Jewess, a woman equipped with the conversation of the polite world, equal to parlor or nightclub.