Books: Hope of the World

IMAGE OF AMERICA (277 pp.)—R. L. Bruckberger—Viking ($4.50).

America, you’re better off

Than this old continent of ours . . .

Thus Johann Wolfgang von Goethe saluted the new nation across the seas. In the century and a half since then, Americans have become much more accustomed to polemic peltings than to poetic praise from Europe, but the latest literary mail carries an eloquently Goethian fan letter. Dominican Raymond Leopold Bruckberger’s love for the U.S. is not blind: in the last decade, the French priest, author (One Sky to Share), artist and Resistance hero, has traveled all over the U.S. Inevitably, some of what he has to say has been said before, but rarely has it been said more forcefully or feelingly.

His Image of America is a kind of missionary tract for disbelieving Europeans: “There are those who have begun to despair of the West. It is for them that I am writing . . . Either America is the hope of the world or it is nothing.’

The Bed of Utopia. What is it that the U.S. has to teach Europe? Paradoxically, says Bruckberger, it can teach Europe to be non-puritanical in its politics. Europe has consistently sacrificed man in the flesh to theory in the abstract. The French and Russian Revolutions were Procrustean; if human beings did not fit the bed of Utopia, their heads were chopped off. The American Revolution, on the other hand, assumed that the state was made for man. The founding fathers, suggests Bruckberger, had the uncommon sense to recognize that the people “have no right to deify and worship themselves.” Thus the U.S. was spared the terrible idolatry of the 20th century’s false god, the totalitarian state.

Another U.S. revolution from which Europe has everything to learn is the social and industrial one. According to Bruckberger, the U.S. has defanged and debunked the class struggle. Europe’s classical capitalist economists, e.g., Adam Smith, Ricardo, held that the worker was forever doomed to a ”minimum subsistence wage.” Karl Marx said, in effect: ”Sheep of all countries, unite! Together we shall bring about the Revolution of the sheep and . . . eat the wolves.” Quite apart from the typical European unrealism of this notion, Bruckberger points out, what the Russian people did, in reality, was to trade one set of wolves for an even more ravenous lot. In a fascinating confrontation of personalities and social aims, Bruckberger argues that Henry Ford was a greater revolutionary than Karl Marx.

Ford’s manifesto was the $5 wage for an eight-hour day. Says Bruckberger: “I consider that what Henry Ford accomplished on January 1, 1914 contributed far more to the emancipation of workers than the October Revolution of 1917.” Though

Ford was scarcely to be a model of good labor relations, he set the stage for what Bruckberger thinks of as maritally minded U.S. capitalism. Like any married couple, U.S. capital and labor argue, but the goal is cooperative fertility, with more wealth and a better life for all. This is the U.S.’s “third way” out of Europe’s venomous class-struggle impasse.

A Faith to Sell. Why are these lessons neglected and demeaned in the contemporary world? The U.S.. Bruckberger argues, has forgotten how to sell itself. The image of America is marred by the treatment of the Negro and by the fact that the U.S. calls itself “capitalist,” a word much of the world finds synonymous with exploitation. Yet it is not Marxist theory that enables Russia and China to pose as saviors of underdeveloped lands but the application of U.S. technology. As Bruckberger sees it, the U.S. should back its know-how with a proselytizing faith.

Writes he: ”Americans, Americans, return to the first seed you sowed, to that glorious Declaration of Independence . . . You must now help solve the social problem between proletarian and capitalist nations, and the racial problem between white and colored peoples. The West would be doomed, and you eternally shamed, if you proved incapable … of bringing that hope to the rest of the world.”