AMERICA'S CHRISTMAS
By EDWARD MONTGOMERY New York, December 9th, 1948
AMERICA is in its pre-Christmas frenzy, and few people have time or inclination to think of anything more serious than the annual orgy of buying and selling, of spending and giving, of shopping and wrapping and Christmas-card lists. In New York the great tree, ninety feet high, is already guyed with steel cables into its place in Rockefeller Plaza, and when dusk comes its decora- tions of gaily-painted globes and stars spring into fluorescent radiance under the beams of the hidden flood-lamps. Up the middle of Park Avenue there is a tree for every block-long grass-plot, so that in the evening, if you stand at 48th Street and look north- wards, you can follow the spangled skein of their blue and red and yellow lights stretching as far as the eye can see over the hill at 90th Street. Out of the moth-balled drawers the big department stores have brought the Santa Claus costumes for their doormen, the beards snowily clean and freshly curled. Pretty soon nearly every street corner on the main thoroughfares will have its representative of the Salvation Army soliciting in its annual Christmas drive for funds, the men in Santa Claus costumes with a miniature chimney to receive the pennies and nickels and dimes, the lassies in their traditional bonnets beside a gipsy cooking-pot slung on a tripod of red poles—why a gipsy pot for the lassies is one of those things I've always wondered about—the rattle of the coins making a faint obbligato to the continual ringing of their hand-bells to call atten- tion to their cause.
The shop-windows have gone mad in their efforts to outvie each other in the attractiveness and originality of their decorations. Almost every big store has its own pet and highly-paid designer for its show windows, who will have been working for months on his conceptions for new and striking displays, ranging in motif all the way from the Puritan traditional to the neo-Dali. And no shop, however small, can afford not to make its obeisance to the competitive spirit of the season with tinsel and trimmings and. imitation snow and toy trees. The fact is, of course, that the peculiarly American arts of advertising and salesmanship have found in Christmas their ideal opportunity for exploiting sentiment, and every year their high-pressure efforts to intensify the social com- pulsion to spend and spend and give and give become more insidious and more frenetic.
Out in the country people take Christmas more quietly and more in the old English tradition. But even away from the cities every self-respecting village will have its illuminated tree by the cross- roads or in front of the church or school-house. In the more enter- prising small towns, Main Street will be arched with festoons of coloured bulbs, and you see one of the prettiest sights in America if you drive along a country road at night and come upon a house with one of those little evergreens which Americans are so fond of planting in their front yards decorated with tinsel and brightly sparkling with fairy lights against a blanket of .snow.
This year Americans have been able to give themselves over to the homely delights of preparing for the holidays with more than usual freedom of mind from more serious worries. Since the elec- tion there has been singularly little news of a disturbing character, either at home or abroad. In fact there has been singularly little news of any kind. President Truman has been going about his presidential business quietly, and has shown no signs as yet of exploiting his arresting victory in the election to create any new political sensations. There is trouble in China, of course, but China is ,pretty far away, and anyhow there has always been trouble in China ever since most Americans now alive can remember. Only a few of the more far-sighted are yet awake to the seriousness of the implications for the long-term future of the United States of a consolidation of Communist domination over all of China. Madame Chiang Kai-shek has come to Washington to plead for more help for her husband's. Nationalist Government, and has had to wait more than a week to see the President. She had a long talk with Mr. Marshall in his hospital room, but beyond that about the only person on whom she has so far been able to exert her persuasive charms is Mrs. Marshall, with whom she has been staying.
Mr. Marshall's subsequent operation for an encysted kidney has naturally revived speculation as to his desire and ability to continue as Secretary of State. Mr. Truman was able temporarily to dampen the ardour of the Washington political soothsayers for predicting changes in his Cabinet with his statement•at a recent Press confer- ence that he intended to make no changes for the time being, and that all the members of his Cabinet had agreed to stay on for the present. For a few days most of the political commentators seemed willing to accept that statement at its face value. But Mr. Marshall's operation has set them once again canvassing possible successors. Mr. Averell Harriman seems the most favoured.
But none of this has been calculated to make splash headlines in the newspapers, which have therefore fallen with glee upon the new developments in the Whittaker Chambers-Alger Hiss con- troversy over "who stole the papers." Mr. Chambers, who is now one of the numerous editors of Time Magazine, some months ago, it will be remembered, confessed to the Congressional Committee on Un-American activities that ten years ago he had been a courier for a Communist spy-ring, and in the course of his duties had received secret State Department documents from Alger Hiss, then a fairly highly-placed official in that Department, for tramnission to his Communist Party superiors and thence presumably to the Kremlin. Although all the documents apparently relate to the period 1937-38, various high authorities have testified to the Committee their opinion that it would still be "against the national Interest" to publish these documents. And there the mystery rests for the moment. But at least, it has given the head-line writers something to get their teeth into,
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