The Easter Parade

It was the biggest Easter Parade in Manhattan's history; in the bright, brisk sunlight at noon perhaps a million people were gathered in one decorous, milling, well-dressed throng. Fifth Avenue, clear of buses and motorcars, was packed almost solid from St. Patrick's to St. Thomas', and great eddies of the crowd moved and flowed along streets and sidewalks for blocks around.

The spaces between the clean, stone cliffs of buildings seemed like enormous, breeze-blown gardens of women's hats--they bloomed for blocks in a frothy, flowering profusion of red, yellow, blue and green.

Watching, one observer found it an astonishing spectacle--"a dress parade, not of the few, but of the million ... in which you could not distinguish the rich from the poor." The observer, New York Times Columnist Anne O'Hare McCormick, had spent half a lifetime observing the world's wars and truces, its generals, its despots, and its sad and patient masses. On the steps of St. Patrick's, she thought of one man.

The next day she wrote: "Fifth Avenue on Easter Sunday would probably irritate Stalin even more than he is already exasperated with the United States ... [He would probably be] more annoyed by [it] than by Wall Street ... It will take a long series of five-year plans before the Soviet woman can buy a dress, a hat or a pair of shoes for anything near the price a New York working girl paid for her Easter outfit.

"The distribution of wealth in this country is far from equable or general, but it is wider than anywhere else on earth. The distribution, more than the accumulation [of wealth], irks the Soviet leaders, because it underlines the pregnant fact that there is no communism in the Marxist sense in the Soviet Union, and no capitalism in the U.S. as it was conceived in Das Kapital"

Mrs. McCormick might have added: of all the crowds which strolled Fifth Avenue to show their finery in pleasant idleness, she was probably alone in her reflections. The opulent look of a million people had sprung not only from a system but from a state of mind--the state of mind which took for granted everyone's place in the Easter Parade.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.