America Revisited

AMERICA AT MID-CENTURY (357 pp.)-- Andre Siegfried -- Harcourf, Brace ($5.75).

Andre Siegfried, who in 1927 wrote an elegantly incisive book about the U.S. entitled America Comes of Age, has revised his famous but outmoded theme to match midcentury headlines. With his Gallic zest for the provocative generalization unfettered by footnotes, the sprightly old (80) professor now says that Europe's giant "daughter" is moving away from parental traditions so fast that the old folks may soon have trouble recognizing their offspring as their own.

"Geography has triumphed over history, environment over heredity," says Siegfried. "The New World has lost all sense of reality of contact with Greco-Roman culture, which is characteristic of the formation of Europe, and if it remains fundamentally Christian, it is in the Jewish rather than the Greek sense, following the testimony of the Bible rather than critical argument." Today, says Siegfried, "American society appears as a first-class piece of organization ... a collective community with mass discipline and large-scale teamwork," devoted to ever greater production and ever higher standards of living.

Other midcentury Siegfried judgments:

P: Americans live fast but think slow. "This doubtless accounts for the prevalence of nervous breakdowns in the U.S."

P:American parents allow their children "the freedom of a runaway horse."

P:Anti-Communism "after all is only a new aspect of resistance to foreign ferments which might threaten national unity. It is not so much a political barrier against Russian supremacy as rivalry between two economic systems, both of which have been built up on semi-religious convictions."

P: "There appears to be in the American labor movement an indefinable lack of spirit ... no mystical feeling of class consciousness, no revolutionary apostolate, but merely the vocabulary of businessmen."

P: "The part played by European exports and imports in American trade is steadily decreasing . . . The American's first care is to maintain the privilege of a home market, the absorption capacity of which he considers to be limitless."

P:"The Americans have, as far as their international reflates are concerned, remained to a large extent the same as they were before 1914 . . . One must have no illusions . . . it is a purely negative interest which keeps the U.S. on the continent of Europe . . . As Europe exists, it must be defended, but were it to disappear under the sea like Atlantis, one may be sure that America would consider it as a relief."

P: It is certain that America does not want war, "but many Americans in all classes of society are capable of speaking of it with sangfroid, as a thing which can be envisaged. This more than anything else shows the difference which has grown up between Europe and America. As La Rochefoucauld said: 'One cannot look directly at either the sun or death.' That is how we Europeans consider war."

Anyone who tosses generalizations about so freely is bound to miss the mark now and then. Siegfried's essays on American economics seem obvious or dated; his discourses on politics are marred by errors of a sort that never appeared in America Comes of Age. Yet, minor inaccuracies notwithstanding, he can hit off a brisk two-page thumbnail of F.D.R. with a degree of objectivity difficult for an American to attain. France's No. 1 living authority on the U.S. has written the sort of Socratic book about America that, he would argue, America itself cannot easily produce.

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