Rediscovered Continent

THE ALL-AMERICAN FRONT -- Duncan Aikman--Doubleday, Doran ($3).

SOUTHWARD Ho!--William LaVarre--Doubleday, Doran ($3).

THE GREAT NATURALISTS EXPLORE SOUTH AMERICA--Paul Russell Cufrighf--Macmillan ($3.50).

If the lost continent of Atlantis had risen streaming from the sea, it could scarcely have attracted more public interest in the U. S. than South America has in the past few years. FORTUNE led the journalistic rediscoverers with a series of articles in 1937-39. In 1938 the Fascist Menace began to loom, Carleton Beals wrote The Coming Struggle for Latin America, and Cordell Hull survived Round One at the Lima Conference. Last year Reporter John T. Whitaker added to the literature of moderate alarm with Americas to the South, and Katherine Carr contributed her excellent South American Primer (TIME. Aug. 14) to the extant sources of information.

Of last week's three books about South America, Duncan Aikman's had the greatest value. A "book journalist" who has also done a job on the equally popular subject of America's Chance of Peace (with Blair Bolles), Aikman has a pleasant dislike of what he calls "prescriptioneering" and a healthy sense of the vastness --historical, geographical and human--of his Latin American subject matter. He has a knack for bringing things home; e. g. (of the wonderful Spanish conquest): "It was as if the North American land mass had been explored from Cape Nome to Florida, the Rockies and the Appalachians prospected, the Mississippi and the Columbia river systems mapped, Klondike and California gold discovered, and Denver, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta and every other American city today above a hundred thousand population founded within 50 years after Jamestown."

Hasty, exuberant, The Ail-American Front was evidently talked into the typewriter. But Aikman's analysis of South American economics, politics and states of mind is based solidly on a vivid air view of the continent (its great mountains isolating nation from nation, slowing trade and intercourse), on a perspective of 400 years of feudalism (the conquistadors having had, unlike North American pioneers, a glut of Indian manpower from the first), and on a good deal of shrewd observation on the ground. He succeeds better than most previous writers in conveying the fact that "our national individualities are shockingly different," and in what the differences consist.

Current signs of amity, Aikman believes, are due to the Good Neighbor policy and the War. "The State Department . . . took its partial defeat at Lima with a minimum of moral pout and snobbery, and at Panama, in September 1939, it had its partial reward. . . . [But] the U. S. . . . came to Panama with the fiscal and economic power to ruin or succor a dozen or more republics whose trade ties and money links with Germany . . . had been completely disrupted by the War . . . Uncle Sam had suddenly become the only banker and grocer on his street." Unchanged remain the bottom facts that: 1) South Americans are culturally attached to Europe, not at all to the U. S.; 2) South Americans still deeply resent being "semicolonials" of U. S. business.

A little modest specification would sometimes help Aikman's survey, for though the reader may learn from him that foreign investment in Argentina is $4,432,000,000, the reader must turn to Miss Carr's Primer for names of U. S. corporations involved (Du Pont and Elizabeth Arden are two). Pertinent and electrifying are the bits of "U. S. Colonial" chitchat that Reporter Aikman picked up over highballs in South American capitals. Samples:

>"One of these days . . . our kind of revolution is going to happen in this republic. And you and I are going up to our hotel room, order a few drinks, and shoot labor leaders from the windows."

>"A sixteen-inch gun is the best Goddamned salesman in Christ's world!"

To U. S. home readers these remarks may seem oldfashioned, but one of the concerns of Duncan Aikman is to show that they are typical, if extreme; that North Americans of branch office calibre are often content (and of course mutually encouraged) to behave like boors and babies in a society too proud, too archaic, too difficult for them to understand. Aikman finds that the universal South American deduction is that the Good Neighbor policy of Cordell Hull and Franklin Roosevelt will be ditched by the first Republican Administration to take office.

Author La Varre has undoubtedly done something in South America in a topee and a pair of expensive boots (a photograph proves it), and he has an ingratiatingly beautiful wife (same equipment), but his tales are in the "Green Hell" category. Gold and other treasure is the goal of most of the adventures narrated; the sexual problems presented by Amazon Indian women in beaded aprons are coy complications in several plots.

In enormous portions of South America there is no question whether animals or humans have the upper hand; no white man has ever moved there, and the Indians themselves hide from the insects, and cross the streams in fear. The world there, in human terms, is scarcely yet begun. The reader who cares to gain a smattering of what does live there, and how, can get an excellent layman's start with Naturalist Cutright's book.

Items:

The sloth can swim milewide rivers. Plants grow on him. A heart, removed from one, beat half an hour. . . . Hummingbirds: there are more than 500 species. They can fly backward. Staple food is not nectar but insects. . . . Fish: bloodthirsty, nightmarishly ferocious, is the footlong, razor-toothed piranha. A school of piranha consumed a whole sheep in 2 1/2 minutes flat. . . . Domestic note: Boa constrictors are used as pets. They are excellent ratters.

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