When I got back to this country last fall, after spending most of the past thirteen years abroad, people kept asking me what changes I saw in America. And I kept telling them that so far as I was concerned America hadn't changed not in essentials.

There were lots of terrific new buildings and super-highways, and several million more automobiles than when I went away. But I felt that if no one were looking I could easily slip back into the life I was leading in 1938 and pick up the threads as though I had never left.

The lack of change in essentials seemed astonishing to me because in the meantime Europe had been transformed, and very painfully.

The Drug Store Stool

I found it thrilling to savor the commonplace of American life again: to sit on a drug store stool, with a slight aroma of pharmaceuticals in my nostrils, and suck through a straw at a chocolate malted milk with an extra scoop of ice cream. Just watch that fellow dig the stuff, creamy and smooth, out of the bucket. Beyond any doubt ice cream is America's national food. When Americans came back from prisoner-of-war camps at the end of the last war there was one thing they all asked for: ice cream.

Or to struggle through a department store and marvel at the producing and consuming power of the American public . . . . watch two hundred American housewives assault a table plled high with chemises, and leave it bare and deserted fifteen minutes later. (The house detective thought I was a shoplifter.)

Or to go to dinner and feel I really should volunteer to help wash the dishes--because nobody has servants--and then watch my hostess pop the dishes into a washer which made Niagara Falls noises and turned them out clean and dry a few minutes later.

Or to stand on a street corner and watch Americans on the move: hunched behind the wheel, zooming off the mark, not a split second lost. Walking fast, self-assured, purposeful, well-fed, healthy. WOW, what a people!

Even The Ads

I went traveling, and loved the friendly gas station men, and the clean, convenient motels (they were a new idea in 1938), and the handy lunch counters. I even enjoyed listening to the radio commercials and watching the Burma-Shave advertisements go by--at first.

I talked to a lot of people, and gradually I realized that there had been some changes in America, changes of spirit.

When I departed in 1938 the United States was climbing out of the Great Depression. Roosevelt's New Deal was in full swing. Liberal, progressive forces were in the saddle.

In 1951 I find the United States riding the tail end of the post-war boom and the beginning of the rearmament boom. Harry Truman is in his sixth year as President, and his Fair Deal has run down, run into the sand and disappeared. Liberal and progressive forces are in retreat. I found Americans who wondered whether it would be healthy for them to write what they really thought, whether associating with certain acquaintances might not get them into trouble. This was shocking. Undoubtedly just a temporary faltering of the American spirit. But nonetheless shocking.