"France has discovered Lafayette in this age only because America never forgot him"
This article reports that the Marquis de Lafayette (Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette, 1757-1834), who seemed heaven-sent when he appeared in Philadelphia in order to aid the Americans in their revolt against the British, had been largely forgotten by the French in the Twentieth Century. Indeed, the French were baffled to hear his name invoked as often as it was during the period of America's participation in the Great War. It was said that some disgruntled wit in the A.E.F. woke up one morning in the trenches and mumbled: "Alright, we paid Lafayette back; now what other Frog son-of-a-bitch do we owe?" Oddly, there is no mention made whatever of that unique trait so common to the Homo Americanus- "selective memory": during the 1870 German invasion of France there seemed to have been no one who recalled Lafayette's name at all. 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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