"U S A"

To record sights, sounds, smells and other phenomena of the U. S. in a manner pleasing to persons who consider themselves to be apart from the national mass in perception and appreciation, there last week appeared a quarterly titled USA. Its progenitors: "The group centering informally around the Centaur Bookshop ( Philadelphia)." Of the first edition, 2,000 copies were printed, price: $1 the copy. Lead-off article for Vol. 1 No. 1 was by Clifton C. Fadiman, editorial chief of Simon & Schuster (Manhattan publishers), contributor to The Nation. With lofty tolerance, he set about denning the Republic's culture and U S A's aim. Said he (italics his) :

"Judged by the standards of the artist, the Saturday Evening Post is clearly a sickening, a nauseating mess of hypocrisy and vulgarity. What I should like to emphasize, however, is simply this: to judge the Saturday Evening Post by such standards betrays two things: an astonishing lack of humor and an equally astonishing ignorance about the United States.

"The American short-story . . . supplies the good citizen with a half hour of pleasant amusement and diversion. The stories are tripe: the editors know it, the authors know it; and, if the public is in ignorance of the fact, I can't see what harm that does. . . .

"To call this process debasing or to talk about it as the product of the machine age is merely unhumorous and professorial. The Saturday Evening Post, the radio, the moving picture do not constitute, except by a poetic extension of the term, our 'national culture.' Our national culture, like that of every other country, is composed of the best artistic writing we produce, the best sculpture, music, etc. The rest is not 'debased art' at all: it is vulgar entertainment for the great majority who have a natural (and therefore perfectly sensible) desire to be entertained vulgarly."

At the pace and on the plane thus set by Critic Fadiman, USA proceeded to present in rapid, sure-fire fashion, a mixture of the nation's cultural foibles and virtues. Readers had no difficulty guessing which material was placed by the editors in which category.

Foibles. On the red-white-and-blue cover appeared a photographic example of that familiar roadside sign: THE HOME-STEAD--TOURISTS. The frontispiece was a photograph of the gingerbread fagade of a standard, middleclass, dwelling house of the 'gos. The caption said: "Residence on Elmwood Avenue. Inhabited, according to U. S. Census Statistics, by 4.6 persons.''

Other Americana which USA exhibited by photographic reproduction: dance marathons; flagpole sitting; California ice-cream stands in the images of derbies, igloos, milk cans, shoes; the Model T Ford; Calvin Coolidge girded for bad-horse riding; George Herman ("Babe") Ruth bussing his wife.

Virtues. Such compliments as U S A had to pay to U. S. culture were chiefly expressed by means of studied photography --arty shots of ballet dancing; a mechanistic fragment of a Ford factory; "a brilliant and precise camera study of a barbed wire fence post." Also there were essays and stories in the modernist manner.

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