Why Do We Apologize?

November 3, 1958

BRUSSELS—Now that the Brussels World’s Fair has closed, we may take stock of the American exhibit. On net balance it must be set down as a missed opportunity.

Our exhibit had, of course, virtues as well as faults. The American pavilion, from the outside, was a circle of golden beauty, especially at night. And some individual exhibits, like the Circarama, were first-rate, and made one proud to be an American. But that exhibit was made possible by a grant from the Ford Motor Co. Fund.

There were two rational objectives for an American exhibit, one narrow, one broad. The narrower objective would have been to show foreign visitors the range and quality of goods that America has to sell to the world. This would have helped to increase American exports, as well as impressed foreigners with American economic strength, versatility, and skill. This task was hardly even attempted. The only automobile shown was a 1903 Ford. The few industrial exhibits of, say, model kitchens, office machines, TV, radio, etc., were scattered and haphazard, inferior to what one might find in a typical New York showroom. In fact, the American exhibit was notable for wasted space. All this contrasted sharply with the magnificent exhibit put on by the Federation of British Industries.

PEOPLE’S CAPITALISM

The wider objective of our exhibit might have been to display the merits of the American free-enterprise system. It would not have been to show how well off we were, but how we got to be that well off, and how other nations, by following the same policies, instead of the economic dead-end street of statism, socialism, or Communism, could achieve a like result. It would have been to show, in other words, how “people’s capitalism” had provided the American masses with comforts and amenities that a king could not enjoy a century ago.

It would be unfair to say that this objective was entirely neglected. The visitor who went through the American exhibit very carefully could have found small signs telling him that one of the great secrets of American productivity was that American industry had invested an average of $14,500 per worker to provide the tools and machinery responsible for this enormous productivity.

But none of this was dramatized or pictured. The signs were so small that one wonders whether one in a hundred visitors noticed them. On the other hand, great space was devoted to apologies. There were immense black-and-white pictures of New York and Chicago that seemed deliberately intended to emphasize drabness and ugliness. In accompanying signs visitors were told that Manhattan’s buildings are “generally without rhythm in the artless gridiron,” that they “have shot up without reference to any overall scheme—merely in answer to the law of supply and demand, tempered by the owner’s judgment.”

‘PLANNING’ BIAS

Much else reflected this “planning” and anti-free-market bias. The point is not whether such criticisms were warranted, but whether they had any place in an exhibit the primary purpose of which should have been to give the best, not the worst, impression of America. No other nation whose pavilion I visited seemed to have thought it necessary to exhibit its slums and its sore spots, or to make any apology for its shortcomings.

The model for what we should have done was of course not the Russian exhibit, with its display of ruthless power, its obsession with gigantic machines, its blatant propaganda and lies (there were cars on exhibit which the well-informed say will not be in production until 1962), but the British exhibit, which, with a much smaller budget than ours, turned in a thoroughly first-rate job. Ironically, the one photograph at the fair that showed lower Manhattan as a thing of beauty was a large colored transparency at the British exhibit advertising BOAC.

Somehow the United States exhibit at the fair seemed to symbolize an attitude of national apology and mea-culpism that has grown up in our officialdom in recent years in our relations with foreign countries. We are afraid to call attention even to our real virtues for fear that foreigners will think us boastful or will feel offended.