America on Trial

Since its birth in 1946. France's slick Realites Magazine (circ. 125,000 monthly in French, 65,000 in English) has harbored persistent doubts about the U.S.'s continuing vitality and sense of purpose. In 1953 the magazine sent a team across the Atlantic to take America's pulse; the report was generally favorable. But the French can be only so charitable about U.S. culture, and the misgivings remained. Now Realites has produced another exhaustive study of the U.S., the result of a five-month, 19,000-mile tour. Prognosis, as reported by Realites' personable Editor Alfred Max, 48: "The American volcano has not been extinguished."

The examination was conducted with Gallic thoroughness. Editor Max led off by consulting his old friend and former employer, Dr. George Gallup, director of Princeton's American Institute of Public Opinion, deployed a journalistic crew of seven in accordance with Gallup's advice. All told, Realites' writers asked 25,000 questions in more than 3,000 interviews. On the Eastern seaboard, Reporter Pierre Marchant spent two weeks talking to 60 U.S. educators, business executives, politicians and clergymen. He posed to them all the single leading, loaded question: "Is there anything about the U.S. that worries you?" With only this priming, some of Marchant's subjects talked for four hours. From his miles of tape recordings, Realites' Marchant discovered "a great sense of impotence" in the U.S. about the fear of atomic annihilation and "this war before us which does not depend on us."

To probe the mysterious Midwest. Realites selected Galesburg, Ill. (which was crowned "an all-American city" by the National Municipal League in 1957), sent Reporter Danielle Hunebelle there to spend three weeks in the home of Galesburg Car Dealer Norman H. Weaver and his wife and four children. Mystified by the Weavers' un-Gallic ways, Reporter Hunebelle let them do their own talking, stitched together a series of candid Weaver monologues that runs for eleven pages in the magazine. She got to like them, though their pious earnestness and indifference to food were trying. "Generally speaking," she said, "they have a lot to learn in the realm of the senses," and she was astonished to discover that the Bible and the telephone directory were about the only books Weaver had read. "Yet his relative lack of culture may explain his simple soul and limited imagination--that is, his happiness." Even so, Realites' second examination of the U.S. inspired in Editor Max a new optimism about "our partner." Said he: "It seems that American society, after passing through a long stage of materialism and fascination with the dollar and the good things it buys, is gradually growing toward an aspiration for culture, art, ideas, perfection and enrichment in the intellectual and spiritual domains." Apparently the U.S. is still entitled to a passing mark.

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