Fair Under Fire

FOREIGN RELATIONS Faith Under Fire

At the weekly White House conference with G.O.P. Senate leaders one morning last week, Senate G.O.P. Policy Committee Chairman Styles Bridges asked permission to read a letter from an irate citizen. The letter, delivered with oratorical flourishes, was a scathing indictment of the U.S. exhibit at the Brussels Fair as a notable U.S. propaganda failure in the cold war. Leaving the White House, Bridges told reporters that the President was "very irritated" at what he had heard. And next day, on the President's urgent order, purse-lipped George V. Allen, head of the U.S. Information Agency and as such, keeper of the world's mental image of the U.S., hopped a plane for Brussels for an official inspection of the major U.S. exhibit.

Down with Abstractions. Cause of the excitement, it turned out later, was Chicago-born Hayes Robertson, 53, onetime Census Bureau clerk and now a lawyer in Chicago Heights, Ill., where he also is board chairman of the Brummer Seal Co. (engine gaskets). In May, he and Mrs. Robertson took in the fair as the high spot of a European tour. "Everybody I talked to was interested in seeing the two largest exhibits, the Russian and ours," said Robertson. "But as I walked through the American exhibit, I didn't see America anywhere." What Robertson saw and did not like broke down as: P: Too much modern art. An admitted fan of Norman Rockwell's Satevepost covers, Robertson did a slow burn at acres of abstract art and blowtorch sculpture which looked, he said, as if it had been put together by a "bunch of neurotics." "When I walked out, my mind was a complete blank."

P: A collection of U.S. memorabilia intended to tell a social history of the U.S., ranging from a cigar-store wooden Indian to an early-model Ford, a chipped plaster statue of Washington and a glass showcase of latter-day examples of Western tumbleweeds. Some of the signs, said Robertson, were embarrassingly inept. Example: an 18th century New England Windsor chair-cum-writing-arm artily labeled in three languages as the model of chairs used in "virtually all" U.S. schools today. "A group I saw," said Robertson, "read the card and burst into laughter."

P: Claims about the American standard of living "so unreal as to cause an observer to dismiss the entire exhibit as false propaganda." For example: a television program showing "a woman coming from the supermarket with a bag of groceries, getting into her private plane and returning by air to her suburban home."

Utterly absent from the exhibit, said Robertson, was any suggestion of "our industrial achievements," any real feeling for how Americans live, any hint of "how we tax ourselves to help the other people of the world."

Wanted: A Point. Last week, as George Allen loped around the Brussels Fair's 470 foot-wearying acres, comparing the U.S. exhibit to those of other nations, European visitors seemed far more approving of the U.S. exhibit than Americans. (One unplanned highlight: the U.S. exhibit offered large numbers of comfortable free chairs for weary visitors.) Americans were in unanimous agreement that the U.S. Pavilion building, designed by Architect Edward Stone (TIME, Mar. 13), was a delight--even Letter Writer Robertson praised it.

But many Americans agreed with Robertson that the U.S. exhibit was a 'hodgepodge devoid of any recognizable theme. The British exhibit, for example, contrasted the symbols of Britain's imperial past with her present progress in science and technology; the Dutch exhibit showed how a thrifty nation wrested land from the sea to become a prosperous agricultural and seafaring power; the Israel exhibit showed how a hardy breed of men created a nation in the desert after centuries of persecution; and even the boastful Russians blended exhibits of Sputnik, industrial machinery and imitative consumer goods to overplay the Soviets as a great industrial power.

Said one American observer, noting that many foreign visitors are first bewildered, then bored by the U.S. exhibit: "Admittedly, developing a coherent theme out of the complex U.S. life is a tougher job than any of these. But it seemed to me the U.S. Pavilion has failed even to make an intelligent try."

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