Almost 75 years ago John Gunther produced his amazing profile of our country, “Inside U.S.A.” — more than 900 pages long, and still riveting from start to finish. It started out with a first printing of 125,000 copies — the largest first printing in the history of Harper & Brothers — plus 380,000 more for the Book-of-the-Month Club. It was the third-biggest nonfiction best seller of 1947 (ahead of it, only Rabbi Joshua Loth Liebman’s “Peace of Mind” and the “Information Please Almanac”). It was a phenomenon, but not a surprise: Gunther’s first great success, “Inside Europe,” published in 1936, had helped alert the world to the realities of fascism and Stalinism; “Inside Asia” and “Inside Latin America” followed, with comparable success — all three of these books were among the top sellers of their year, as would be “Inside Africa” and “Inside Russia Today,” yet to come. His “Roosevelt in Retrospect” (1950) is one of the best political biographies I’ve ever come across, a mere 400 pages long and pure pleasure to read. Like “Inside U.S.A.,” it is out of print — please, American publishers, one of you make them reappear.
Gunther was born in Chicago in 1901, went to the University of Chicago and then on to The Chicago Daily News, where in 1924 he scored with an eyewitness report on the Teapot Dome — not the tremendous scandal but the actual place (in Wyoming), to which no previous journalist had bothered to go. (“Teapot Dome has no resemblance whatever to a teapot or a dome.”) By the next year he was in London for The Daily News, and soon was darting around Europe on missions to Berlin, Moscow, Rome, Paris, Poland, Spain, the Balkans and Scandinavia, before being given the Vienna bureau. It was as if he had been in training for “Inside Europe.”
He managed to find time to marry Frances Fineman, also a journalist, with whom he shared a very long and very tortured marriage, not helped by either her obsessive attachment to Jawaharlal Nehru or John’s wandering eye. (One woman on whom his eye had rested was Rebecca West, who referred to him in a letter to a friend as that “young and massive Adonis with curly blond hair.”) But his most important, if platonic, relationship with a woman was with the famous journalist Dorothy Thompson — hers was the other clarion voice alerting America to the perils to democracy, to civilization, from Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin. The close bond between these two “competitors” never slackened until Thompson’s death, in 1961.
The worst thing that happened to John Gunther was the death, at the age of 17, of his beloved son, Johnny — about which, in 1949, he wrote “Death Be Not Proud,” which still sells thousands of copies every year. The best thing that ever happened to him, apart from his deeply fulfilling career, was his second marriage. Jane Perry — young, pretty, highly educated — became an essential partner in his work until his death, in 1970. (She outlived him by 50 years, dying in 2020 at the age of 103.)
What was Gunther like? It’s a fair question to ask about him, since what people were like was always at the heart of his reporting. (“I had little basic interest in politics,” he wrote in “A Fragment of Autobiography,” “a fault which besets me to this day, but I was ravenously interested in human beings.”) Obviously he was a fanatical worker — his notes for “Inside U.S.A.” approached a million words — although he chose to believe that he was lazy at heart. (“I am not efficient at all, and anybody close to me knows how physically lazy and self-indulgent I am. I waste a preposterous amount of time sitting inert like a blob of protoplasm.”) He loved to laugh. He loved good wine, good food, good nightclubs. He had countless friends — from kings to bartenders, as he liked to say. He was never pompous, never self-promoting, never stuck-up. He made huge amounts of money and spent it all — often before it was actually in hand. And he was unfailingly generous. No wonder everybody liked him.
As for his writing, he would have been embarrassed at the notion that he had a “style.” What he did have was a voice — fluent, personal, casual, snappy. His opinions came across — he was a pro-New Deal liberal — though not through editorializing. He was a reporter — probably the best America ever had. He came, he saw, he wrote. When recently I mentioned to Bob Caro that I was writing about “Inside U.S.A.,” he lit up. “What a book! When I was writing ‘Master of the Senate’ I had it on my desk next to my typewriter, and whenever I needed to check on someone or something, all I had to do was open it up. And the sense it conveys about America in the postwar 1940s! There’s just nothing like it!”
One of the things that makes it so alive is Gunther’s curiosity about his own country; he knew Latin America, he knew Europe, he knew Asia, but he didn’t know America. “The United States, like a cobra, lay before me, seductive, terrifying and immense,” he wrote. “‘Inside U.S.A.’ was the hardest task I ever undertook.” He was yet again an outsider, looking in. “Not only was I trying to write for the man from Mars; I was one.”
Gunther begins his discovery of America in California — “the most spectacular and most diversified American state, California so ripe, golden, yeasty, churning in flux. … at once demented and very sane, adolescent and mature” — and he proceeds around the country, state by state, until he arrives in Arizona, next door to where he began. Sometimes he devotes an entire chapter to a single person — the perpetual presidential candidate-to-be Harold Stassen; the great industrialist Henry Kaiser; New York’s colorful (to say the least) Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who is probably best remembered for having, during a strike of newspaper deliverers, read “the funnies” aloud on the radio so as not to disappoint the city’s kids.
The La Guardia chapter is not, however, about the mayor’s adorableness; it’s an extraordinary tour de force in which Gunther shadows his subject for more than 10 hours, mostly spent perched near the corner of his desk recording the mayor’s activities almost minute-by-minute and revealing a staggering degree of vigor, administrative genius and robust thinking. “Meeting of the Mayor’s Committee on Race and Religion … points discussed: pushcart peddlers and a new Harlem market; problems involving pickles in fancy glasses; Coney Island; what’s the best municipal library in this country; housing problems for families who live on less than $2,500 a year; savings bank mortgages and their relation to housing projects; discrimination against Negroes in employment; the numbers racket; origin of Irish and Italian gangs; how to build a proper community spirit.” One highlight: “10:28. … I asked him about the big trough of files. ‘I’ll tell you a little story. Files are the curse of modern civilization. I had a young secretary once. Just out of school. I told her, “If you can keep these files straight, I’ll marry you.” She did, and so I married her.’”
And then there’s an inspiring chapter about the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority: the fierce battle between the private sellers of electricity and the determination of President Roosevelt, in his very first months in office, to tame the Tennessee River for the benefit of the citizens of seven states — possibly Roosevelt’s greatest domestic achievement. “A final common denominator about T.V.A. is the simple tablet that each of its units wears: BUILT FOR THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES.”
In counterpoint to these extended essays and profiles are hundreds and hundreds of short takes, seemingly chosen at random, culled by Gunther’s eagle eye as he scoured the country. Here are mundane conversations overheard; meetings with governors and senators; quotes from lunatic right-wing newspapers; the uninhibited talk of millionaires and sharecroppers.
Here, we come to believe, is America:
“Los Angeles is Iowa with palms.”
“Everything goes in Los Angeles, so it may be thought; but here are some things forbidden by city ordinance, as itemized by H. L. Mencken in ‘Americana’: Shooting rabbits from streetcars. Throwing snuff or giving it to a child under 16. Bathing two babies in a single bathtub at one time. Making pickles in any downtown district. Selling snakes on the streets.”
“The Pacific Coast is the end of the line in the westward trek across the continent. The hills around Ventura, let us say, are the last stop; California is stuck with so many crackpots if only because they can’t go any further.”
Example of the prose style of Hiram Johnson, then running (successfully) for governor of California, attacking Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of The Los Angeles Times: “He sits there in senile dementia with a gangrene heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy … disgraceful, depraved … and putrescent.”
The “ghost town” Virginia City, in Nevada, is a “fragrant tomb.” “Never have I seen such deadness. Not a cat walks. The shops are mostly boarded up, the windows black and cracked, the frame buildings are scalloped, bulging, splintered; C Street droops like a cripple, and the sidewalks are still wooden planks; the telephone exchange, located in a stationery shop, is operated by a blind lady who had read my books in Braille.”
Oregon and Washington “look as much alike as twin peas or marbles. But … there is a tremendous difference between the two states otherwise. Nowhere else in the country can the extraordinary tenacity of state characteristics be better observed, the deep-rooted instinct of a state to grow its own way without regard to its neighbor. Oregon and Washington are, except in physiognomy, almost as different as Maine and Florida.”
“Why … should Texas have what seem to be the prettiest girls in the world? … Walk across the campus at Austin, or roam the downtown streets of Dallas; there are more Miss Americas per square yard than anywhere else in the country per square mile.”
If you like statistics (and Gunther does), here are some about the Grand Coulee Dam (the “largest single structure built by man”): “It cost about $200 million to build and required more than 10,000,000 cubic yards of concrete, 20,000,000 cubic yards of excavation. One can have fun with figures like these. A writer in Fortune has calculated that this amount of concrete would build a highway completely encircling the United States; Stuart Chase points out that the structure weighs 23,000,000 tons, three times as much as the pyramid of Cheops; Bruce Bliven mentions in a recent New Republic that the whole population of the United States would fit into the space of the dam … and that ‘the poured concrete would put a floor over three states as big as Pennsylvania.’”
Seen from an airplane flying into Spokane, “Some fields looked like maple leaves and some like richly scrambled eggs. Think of all the redheaded girls you ever met; they are all down there in the wheat — auburn, russet, titian, chestnut, sandy. Then throw in the blondes.” This is far from being Gunther’s only salute to blondes.
“I found two eye-opening drinks in Montana that I had never seen before. A Black Spider is a combination of rum, Coca-Cola and crème de menthe. A Presbyterian is bourbon, ginger ale and dry soda. Nor had I ever heard a short Scotch described as a Gazooni, or bourbon and water as a Ditch High.”
“The remarkable thing about Denver is its ineffable closedness; when it moves, or opens up, it is like a Chippendale molting its veneer. This is not to say that Denver is reactionary. No — because reaction suggests motion, whereas Denver is immobile.” It “is Olympian, impassive and inert. It is probably the most self-sufficient, isolated, self-contained and complacent city in the world.”
“Extraordinary as it is to tell, travel between the two states [the Dakotas] is difficult in the extreme. When I was there no bus or airlines connected them at all. … In a manner of speaking railroads do exist, but you will not thank me for the suggestion.”
Nebraska. “Some early villages were so small that, for a time, each had only one church; Catholics and Protestants worshiped in the same room, with half the pews facing an altar at one end, half a pulpit at the other.”
“Basically most farmers do not like subsidies; they would much prefer getting a good price in the open market without government support. … But here we encounter one of the most typical of all manifestations of what might be called American ‘psychology.’ Unanimously, farmers talk about the evils of government ‘control.’ But I never found one who didn’t accept the checks the government sends out.”
In 1936 a Black college graduate named Lloyd Gaines was refused admittance to the University of Missouri law school. He sued the university, and after the case went to the Supreme Court, the state “was forced to set up a branch of its law school, for Gaines alone, in St. Louis! — in order that the campus at Columbia should continue to remain lily white. This must be the only case in history of a school designed for a student body consisting of one person.”
“Col. McCormick’s [Chicago] Tribune reminds me of … Soviet Russia, which it has such a brilliantly good time attacking. It is, like Russia, big, totalitarian, successful, dominated by one man as of the moment, suspicious of outsiders, cranky and with great natural resources not fully developed; it has a compelling zest to fight for its own. Col. McCormick even goes in for paternalistic reforms. Every Tribune employee has his teeth cleaned free twice a year.”
“Religious advertisements fill whole pages of the Indianapolis dailies. One boasts of a ‘Great Singspirational Rally Featuring Bishop Marston and the Girls’ Trio.’”
“Basically [Henry Ford] is a wily but simple-seeming peasant with an excessively developed mechanical skill. … What will happen to old Henry’s fortune? About this there is as much mystery as anything in Detroit. Something exists known as the Ford Foundation.”
Detroit “has two outdoor swimming pools — for 1,623,452 people” and, “in 1945, on the opening day of school, 30,000 children could not get in, because there wasn’t any room.”
“One famous remark about [Senator Robert Taft] is that ‘he has reached more wrong decisions more ably’ than any other man in public life.”
Massachusetts “announced in 1946 that it was preparing to take legal action to clear the names of those wrongly accused of witchcraft in Salem in 1692.”
An old statute in Maine has it “that every teacher must give 10 minutes a week to instruction in kindness to birds and animals.”
“I have mentioned frugality. Let me quote from a recent news story, describing how new curtains, drapes and furniture are being installed at the [Vermont] Statehouse in Montpelier. ‘The drapes … will replace those hung 85 years ago [italics mine]when the Statehouse was rebuilt following the fire of 1857. Cost of the new drapes … will be $760, slightly less than the $768.75 paid to curtain the same windows in 1859.’”
“Few people, unless they read the Congressional Record carefully, realize what a good congresswoman Mrs. [Clare Boothe] Luce was; she was at a disadvantage most of the time in that she became a victim of her own reputation, versatility and beauty; her long hours of conscientious work never got in the papers; the wisecracks did.”
How to explain Thomas Dewey’s unpopularity? “Most Americans like courage in politics; they admire occasional magnificent recklessness. Dewey seldom goes out on a limb by taking a personal position which may be unpopular on an issue not yet joined; every step is carefully calculated and prepared; … he will never try to steal second base unless the pitcher breaks a leg.”
Manhattan “has 20 bridges, roughly 100,000 out-of-town visitors a day, 915 nightclubs, Columbia University and Central Park, which many people think is the most satisfactory park in the world, with its 840 acres spread out like a carpet for the skyscrapers to tiptoe up to.”
“The great law firms of Wall Street still pick the best brains in the country. They have consummate power, ability and intelligence. … One thing to reflect on, though, is their inhospitality to Jews. … For a Jew to get into a good legal firm below Chambers Street is almost as difficult as to get into the Ku Klux Klan. The upper reaches of the law in Wall Street are the last frigid citadel of Anglo-Saxon Protestantism.”
“New York has a birth every five minutes, and a marriage every seven. It has ‘more Norwegian-born citizens than Tromsoe and Narvik put together,’ and only one railroad, the New York Central, has the perpetual right to enter it by land. It has 22,000 soda fountains, and 112 tons of soot fall per square mile every month, which is why your face is dirty.”
“A wonderful glimpse” of the political philosophy of A. Harry Moore, mayor of Jersey City three different times, “may be gathered from his opposition to Social Security on the ground that ‘it takes romance out of old age.’”
In reply to his asking a group of Philadelphians “what, if anything, descendants of Benjamin Franklin might be doing in Philadelphia these days,” “one answer was (I report it literally): ‘We consider Mr. Franklin to have been of a somewhat shady family.’”
“Delaware … maintains a good deal of individualistic legislation; for instance it still has the whipping post, though it is only rarely used.”
The Committee for Kentucky, with a membership of 350,000, found, among many other things, that “42,000 Kentucky farms had no toilets or privies of any kind in 1940, and 97 percent of all farms have no toilets inside the house”; that “in one area a single doctor serves 11,500 people”; that “100,000 Kentuckians have syphilis”; that out of the 114,000 children who in 1932 had started first grade, not fewer than 100,000 had had to drop out by the end of high school; that “34 percent of all Kentucky farms are worth less than $300, only 25 percent have electricity and only 16 percent have telephones”; that the “average teacher’s salary is $1,014.”
The South came as a tremendous shock to Gunther. An “almost unbelievable figure is that 11 million Southerners have annual cash incomes of $250 or below. … The rural slums of the South are almost beyond doubt the most revolting in the nation.” As for the “dry” South, “never in Port Said, Shanghai or Marseilles have I seen the kind of drinking that goes on in Atlanta, Houston or Memphis every Saturday night — with officers in uniforms vomiting in hotel lobbies, 17-year-old girls screaming with hysteria in public elevators, men and women of the country club category being carried bodily off the dance floor by disinterested waiters.”
“There are do-nothing governors in the South today who are little more than nimble ferrets; some have as much spine as an Eskimo pie. Sprinkled through the South are soapy miscreants who want a war with Russia for the fun of it.” But “the South has a good many first-class liberals too. The notion that the area is a debauched hinterland occupied exclusively by reactionaries is as far from the truth as the notion that everything above the Mason and Dixon line is progressive.”
In a chapter called “Negro in the Woodpile,” Gunther acknowledges that “I had heard words like ‘discrimination’ and ‘prejudice’ all my life, but I had no concrete knowledge, no fingertip realization of what lies behind them. I knew that ‘segregation’ was a problem; I had no conception at all of the grim enormousness of the problem.”
“Atlanta is supposed to rank fairly high among Southern cities in its attitude toward Negroes, but it out-ghettoes anything I saw in a European ghetto, even in Warsaw. What I looked at was caste and untouchability — half the time I blinked remembering that this was not India.”
He does, though, see signs that in some respects segregation is beginning to break down. “I saw Negroes and whites standing together in lines at post office windows and at Western Union counters, and while I was in Atlanta, The Journal, for the first time in its history, gave a Negro woman the title of ‘Miss.’”
“Segregation … has one aspect sometimes neglected, that thousands upon thousands of good white citizens never have any contact with Negroes except with servants and employees in the service trades; … whites and Blacks of similar professional interests almost never meet. There are 55,000 Negro college graduates in the United States. Most Southern whites have never seen one.”
“Roughly one million Negroes entered the armed services [during the war]. Many were treated decently and democratically by whites for the first time in their lives; the consequent fermentations have been explosive. … One famous remark is that of the Negro soldier returning across the Pacific from Okinawa. ‘Our fight for freedom,’ he said, ‘begins when we get to San Francisco.’”
Knoxville is “an extremely puritanical town, serves no liquor stronger than 3.6 percent beer, and its more dignified taprooms close at 9:30 p.m.; Sunday movies are forbidden, and there is no Sunday baseball. Perhaps as a result, it is one of the least orderly cities in the South — Knoxville leads every other town in Tennessee in homicides, automobile thefts and larceny.”
Governor Arnall of Georgia told Gunther that while “talking to Mr. Roosevelt one day, he remarked, ‘We don’t really have any Negro issue in the South; it’s white agitators from the Nawth that make the trouble.’ Mr. Roosevelt (who liked him), turned to him with that well-known twinkle: ‘You mean, Eleanor?’”
A Navajo chief Gunther encounters “is now 85 and has held the post for 61 uninterrupted years, though he was not a Navajo by birth. His father was killed by raiders as far back as 1862, and he does not know who his mother was. But his own son went to Harvard, married a white girl and is now an Indian Bureau official. I know no more stimulating example in America of the variety of experience possible to a man in a lifetime.”
No other country, Gunther says, “could have headlines like WAR WITH JAPAN PERILS WORLD SERIES … or the sign on the Success Cafe in Butte in 1932, EAT HERE OR I’LL VOTE FOR HOOVER, or another headline, one from a New York tabloid about a woman soon to be electrocuted, SHE’LL BURN, SIZZLE, FRY!”
What motors Gunther’s astounding energy, focus and recall is his almost demented curiosity. “Inside U.S.A.” is a voyage of discovery for him as much as for us, and after 900-plus pages his curiosity is unsated, as he regrets all the things he didn’t get to explore and reveal. “There is nothing in this book, and now it’s too late to put it in, about how airplanes spray trees with DDT in Oregon or why Pullman washbowls have the water tap set in so close. … I haven’t even mentioned that there were 72,000 G.I.s named Smith … or children in scarlet mufflers patting their scarlet mittens together and listening to Santa Claus out in the snow in a Vermont public square; or college fraternities and sororities and their adolescent hocus-pocus; or the lonely red railway stations and their water towers and greased switches in northern Minnesota; or people as authentically part of the American scene as Little Orphan Annie, Terry and the Pirates, Blondie and Superman.” And on and on and on. You can sense him mourning the fact that he doesn’t have another 900 pages to fill.
And then there is America’s future to ponder. “There is no valid reason why the American people cannot work out an evolution in which freedom and security are combined,” Gunther concludes. “In a curious way it is earlier, not later, than we think. The fact that a third of the nation is ill-housed and ill-fed is, in simple fact, not so much a dishonor as a challenge. What Americans have to do is enlarge the dimensions of the democratic process. This country is, I once heard it put, absolutely ‘lousy with greatness’ — with not only the greatest responsibilities but with the greatest opportunities ever known to man.” Finally, “Inside U.S.A.” is an unintentional account of a man falling in love with his crazy and wonderful country.
"all" - Google News
June 26, 2021 at 04:00PM
https://ift.tt/3gX2Q7N
Robert Gottlieb on the Man Who Saw America (And We Mean, All of It) - The New York Times
"all" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2vcMBhz
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Robert Gottlieb on the Man Who Saw America (And We Mean, All of It) - The New York Times"
Post a Comment