Homage to America - Alistair Cooke's American Journey reviewed in the Saturday Telegraph

15th July 2006

Harry Mount applauds a unique document of war from the master of the avuncular fireside chat

After Alistair Cooke died aged 95 in his Upper East Side apartment in 2004, his leg bones were plundered by an East Harlem mortuary and sold as part of a job lot of implants for £4,000. It was just the sort of hot news story Cooke loved. As he writes in this account of his trip across America in 1942 – a hidden gem discovered by his secretary in that New York apartment just before he died — Cooke considered himself a newsman first and foremost.

Over a half-century of Letters from America, he developed an avuncular, fireside-chat style, his Cambridge-educated vowels rounded by his years across the Atlantic. He also liked to envelop painful details with the soft mattress of his attractively purple prose – when he witnessed Bobby Kennedy's assassination in a LA hotel in 1968, for example, he described the bloodied face staring up from the kitchen floor "like the stone face of a child's effigy on a cathedral tomb". But, despite Cooke's sentimental prose style, its marrow contained hard facts – he drew attention, for instance, to Roosevelt's polio-induced limp long before the American press admitted to it.

The story of this trip – from Washington to Florida, along the Gulf Coast and the Mexican border, up the Californian coast and back to New England via the Rockies and the Great Lakes – is full of hard facts. It's like a mammoth newspaper article built out of a hundred interviews with ordinary Americans and a thousand hours staring out of his Lincoln Zephyr.

The effect of this rigid observation is the effect of good journalism: to explode clichés, in this case clichés about wartime America. America was neither complacent nor ignorant about the war, as Blitzkrieged Britain thought. Instead, when Cooke set off on his trip a few months after Pearl Harbour, the country was in a blind panic. Californian beach bums took to the hills for fear of a Japanese attack. There were anti-aircraft guns up and down the Pacific coast. The San Diego seafront was wired off by Marines, and only commercial fishermen were allowed out to sea.

They had reason to be worried. German submarines were sinking oil tankers off New Jersey and Japanese submarines lurked near Santa Barbara. Nor was America gorging on the fat of the land. The rubber shortage was so acute, cars in junk yards were stripped of tyres. Fifth Avenue was empty of cars. Cooke couldn't even get hold of a Coke in West Virginia or a road map in Georgia.

Hollywood also tightened its belt – film sets were made of cotton with hardly any nails; battleships torpedoed in war films had to be salvaged; snow scenes were cut. Yes, Americans never had it so bad as the British, but they didn't know they wouldn't be attacked again after Pearl Harbour. There is something acutely poignant about Southerners in Atlanta following blackout orders for air raids that never came.

That does not mean they behaved like comic-book heroes, though. Long before Saving Private Ryan, Americans were taking the praise for British success. British raids on Germany were reported under the headline "American Bombers Blast Ruhr" without explaining that "bombers" meant just the planes, not the sitting ducks in the cockpit.

Cooke's interviewees didn't concern themselves much with Europe, either. Like most of us, they thought about themselves, and how the war would affect their jobs or crops. In Kansas, wheat farmers said the war saved their livelihoods. It was boomtime for American prostitutes, too. Particularly chilling were the women in a Texas army camp who married officers just before they were sent off to die. The widows then picked up their dependency pay, changed names and remarried.

Cooke occasionally falls prey to Eskimo complex, a common affliction among journalists. Just as Eskimos use up every bit of the whale, Cooke is afraid to discard his extra fat. The book sometimes becomes an agricultural Kinsey Report, with too much detail about orange and peanut yields. But that’s the only criticism of this unique document of war.

It's easy to think of Cooke as an old man bashing away at his typewriter in a fug of cigarette smoke, unable to see beyond Central Park. He was in fact feeding off 70 years spent criss-crossing America's enormous interior. As you read this book, you forget that Cooke was born in Manchester. He had become as knowledgeable about his adopted country as any of its natives.