British thinker Bertrand Russell (1872-1970; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950) used to get mighty hot under the collar when the topic of 1922 American society came up and this report is just one example. On a speaking tour in the United States, the Cambridge Professor opined that
"love of truth [is] obscured in America by commercialism of which pragmatism is the philosophical expression; and love of our neighbor kept in fetters by Puritan morality." He would have none of the thinking that America's main concern for jumping into the meat grinder of 1914-1918 was entirely inspired by "wounded France" and "poor little Belgium" but was rather an exercise in American self-interest. The author of this piece interviews the poet Robert Nichols (1893 - 1944) and finds the writer was convinced that the differences between the two peoples rests in their understanding of the idea of freedom. George Jean Nathan (1882 - 1958) and H.L. Mencken (1880 - 1956) surmised that as the Europeans bury their many dead among the damp, depressing ruins of World War One, America is neither admired or liked very much: "the English owe us money", "the Germans smart under their defeat", "the French lament that they are no longer able to rob and debauch our infantry".
-Read an Article About the First World War and the Gratitude of France- Pio Ballesteros, Proud Spaniard, wrote this editorial in a 1910 issue of Espanña Moderna in which he lamented the long-favored practice of viewing the United States as the "elder sister of the Latin-American republics" and ignoring a strong sensation that all Spanish-speaking people are kin and should be united against the Anglo-Saxons.
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