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Book Events American Argument, by Pearl S. Buck with Eslanda Goode Robeson. New York: John Day Company. §3.00. Reviewed by William Henry Chamberlin. . Anti-American Argument might have been a better title for this book. For Amer- fean political and American institutions and ideas are subjected to violent attack by Mrs. Robeson and get very feeble and faltering defense from Mrs. Buck. Mrs. Robeson is the wife of the famous singer, Paul Robeson, whose talent in his art is combined with what must be a world's record for joining Comminist front organiza- tions. There is, to be Sure, Some pattern of argument in the book. Eslanda Robeson is e vehement, dogmatically convinced collectivist. Pearl Buck is an apologetic, defensive individualist. So on this very important issue of individualism versus Statism one gets the impression of a sham verbal conflict because Mrs. Buck does not seem to know how good her case is. Mrs. Robeson might not recognize the phrase; but she is in sympathy with Rousseau'sS conception of the volonté générele, that mystical overriding popular will which the Jacobins invoked as justification for setting up the guillotine as the post effective means of dealing with dissenters. When the two women get around to Russia, Mrs. Robeson discusses the subject in an atmosphere of dogmatic ignorance and fellow traveler euphemisms and clichés. Mrs. Buck offers timid reservations which are largely vitiated because of her obvious lack of precise factual knowledge. Mrs. Robeson is quite ready to take "*liquidation® in her stride. °I‘’m not 80 afreid of liquidation as you are*, she says. “I regret it, of course, I would avoid it if I possibly could. I like dogs, but I wouldn’t hesitate one moment to liquidate a wad dog.® Just who is to decide the rather important question of who is to be the liquidator and who is to be the liquidatee and who is fair game as a “mad dog* remains obscure. There is the further suggestion from Mrs. Robeson that it would be an improvement “to switch over to @ good dictatorship, in order to make things more democratic®. Here, of course, is the supposed justification for every totalitarian regime since World War I; Lenin's and Stalin's, Hitler's, Mussolini's and al] their minor satellites and imitators. . Ho reasonable person will dispute that American Negroes and Americans of Mexican, Oriental and other ethnic strains sometimes suffer from unjust discrimi- natory treatment. But she very much overstates the case in this field. She never asks herself, and Mrs. Buck never asks her, why, if Negroes and other °minorities® are so desperately badly off in America, they do not pack up and move to the Soviet Union where liquidation and everything else are so admirably ordered, in Mrs. Robeson's opinion. Whatever may be America's faults, it is not and never has been a jail or a concentration camp for its own citizens. Ome of the many missed points in this informal dialogue is that, apart from the Negroes, who were the victims of @ great historical wrong -- the legalization of human slavery =~ every other ®*minority® group came to America of its own free will and, by and large, found better conditions and more opportunities here than it left behind. Pearl Buck is less dogmatic than Eslanda Robeson. But her mind seems to operate in a haze of wishful thinking and high sounding phrases and she overworks intuition as a Substitute for precise knowledge. It is a more stab in the dark to Suggest that all our troubles began because we sent "little men" to the San FPrancisco Conference. Equally wide of the mark is her thought that “the Third World War began with Churchill's speech at Fulton, Missouri". There was a rather long series of Soviet aggressive actions that preceded this speech. This book 15 more valuable for the dissent it should inspire in readers with reasonable ..nowledge of the American Scene and the world situation than for any contribution it wakes to objective understanding of either. 1710 RHODE. ISLAND AVENUF, No W., WASHINGTON 6, D.C