National Affairs: The Image of the U.S.

Probably the deepest trouble of the contemporary U.S. is its inability to produce a reasonably accurate image of itself. In plays, movies, novels, it cruelly caricatures its life, parades its vices, mutes its excellences. This tendency, far more than Communist propaganda, is responsible for the repulsive picture of U.S. life in the minds of many Europeans and Asians. Still, the Europeans’ image of Chicago is gangsterism; New York is a fat capitalist, Los Angeles is a Hollywood tart, and the land between the cities is drenched in the bitter lees of The Grapes of Wrath. This caricature is a fact which every American responsibly concerned with U.S. foreign relations must face. A fortnight ago the U.S. Ambassador to Italy, Clare Boothe Luce, had to face it in a concrete form. Invited to attend the annual Venice Film Festival, she found that its program included an M-G-M film, Blackboard Jungle (TIME, March 21), which deals heavy-handedly with juvenile delinquency in U.S. big-city schools. Teenage savagery is a fact, as Al Capone and Fatty Arbuckle were facts—but they are not the U.S. Ambassador Luce did not contend that M-G-M should not have made Blackboard Jungle, or should not have exported it. But as the official representative of the U.S. in Italy, she took the position that the attendance of the U.S. ambassador at a festival that included Blackboard Jungle might seem to acquiesce in the picture of American youth presented by Blackboard.

After that, the festival’s sponsors chose to drop Blackboard from the program. But MGM’s Dore Schary raged: “What Ambassador Luce has done represents flagrant political censorship.” Italy’s Communists, of course, agreed, and, in the ensuing verbal brouhaha, sight was lost of the fact that no censorship had been imposed by either the Italian or U.S. governments. All that had happened was that Europeans had been informed that not all Americans are content to receive their mail addressed to “Tobacco Road.”