Know Your Friends

In reporting U.S. news, British dailies are more apt to deplore than explore the society that exports such provocations as rock 'n' roll, Cohn 'n' Schine, and Billy Graham. Last week, in one of Fleet Street's infrequent attempts to examine the U.S. in depth, London's sober, influential Daily Telegraph (circ. 1,076,000) published an astringent 16-page supplement aimed at telling where Americans are headed, where they came from--and why the hurry.

"Just as the enemy you know is less dangerous than the enemy you don't," said a Page One editorial headed KNOW YOUR FRIENDS, "so the friendly country you know in the round is likely to prove more valuable than the country about which you know little more than the circumstances of its birth, the size of its bank balance, and the highly colored Hollywood snapshots it chooses to show."

Ranging from education to the economy, the Telegraph swallowed its Tory pride and gave readers what, for a foreign journal, was a rarely balanced, indeed respectful, view of the U.S. In an admiring survey of American industrial progress, New York Correspondent Edwin Tetlow wrote: "They seem to have been injected with some magic stimulant which prompts them to go on and on--improving, experimenting, maneuvering, and increasing--regardless of the demands this makes upon health, private life, or anything else." Other contributors had kind words for the "high professional finish" of U.S. drama, the Administration's "economic steersmanship," and for the "dynamism" of American TV. While the Telegraph's Washington Correspondent Denys Smith noted slyly that the U.S., "without acknowledging it, has picked up the 'white man's burden,' " he traced approvingly the emergence of a responsible foreign policy.

Having promised to avoid "old legends and half-truths," the Telegraph also squeezed some lemon in its transatlantic tea. Daniel Bell, Columbia University sociology lecturer (and one of the editors of FORTUNE), reported that the U.S. labor movement is "large, fat, sleek and smug," and "has reached a saturation point." British Anthropologist Geoffrey (Exploring English Character) Gorer commented that ex-Communists have been allowed to wield such widespread "power and influence" in the U.S. that "Marxist habits of thought, suspiciousness, contempt of 'objective' legality and so on have achieved far greater permeation and acceptance in the U.S. than in any other country not under Communist domination." With this thought, Gorer, who has written scathingly of U.S. folkways in the past (TIME, March 29, 1948), fell into step with the Telegraph and concluded: "Americans want to be liked, well-liked; and in response, they will give more, and demand less, than any other dominant nation recorded in history."

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