The British philosopher 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.
