21 - Titmuss and North America: Early Encounters and First Visit

Summary

Introduction

We have encountered Titmuss's engagement with Africa and with Israel, and, in an era when travelling abroad was not as easy as it later became, he attended meetings in various European countries. He also became an especially notable visitor to the United States, and it was primarily with American colleagues that he built up transnational policy networks. In later chapters, it is argued that Titmuss had an impact on US thinking on social policy, and we have already encountered the favourable review of Essays on ‘The Welfare State’ by one of America's leading liberal intellectuals, J.K. Galbraith, and of Problems of Social Policy by the American authority on public health, George Rosen. A number of Titmuss's American contacts became close personal friends. This chapter discusses his early engagement with the US, culminating with his first visit, in 1957.

Making contacts and making comparisons

One of the earliest honours accorded Titmuss arrived in 1939, although exactly how this transpired is unclear. The Eugene Field Society, based in St Louis, Missouri, informed him that he had been made an honorary member. The society was organised by the National Association of Authors and Journalists, and honorary membership conferred in recognition of the recipient's ‘outstanding contribution to contemporary literature’. Titmuss thus found himself in the company of figures such as the American poet Robert Frost and the English writer Walter de la Mare. Clearly, Titmuss's writings were already reaching an audience beyond Britain. Shortly after taking up his LSE post, Titmuss advised Barbara Wootton on how to handle ‘your argumentative American audiences’ when discussing the still young NHS. Doctors could now, and for the first time, ‘practise good medicine’. Economic and competitive pressures to prescribe had ‘been vastly reduced by the introduction of the National Health Service’, although results would take time, and probably a ‘new generation of doctors’, to materialise. This anticipated some of the issues Titmuss was to address when engaging directly with American readers and listeners.