| Publication Overview Cooke's Tour
An early voyage around ordinary Americans illuminates like no other
The American home front in the second world war has been the subject of many admirable studies - few more illuminating perhaps than Washington Goes to War, by David Brinkley, journalist and broadcaster, and No Ordinary Time, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, biographer, historian and political scientist. Yet neither compares with Alistair Cooke's American Journey, written during the war, before he started his weekly radio column Letter from America in 1946. The manuscript, lost for many years, was only by chance discovered by Cooke's secretary in a cupboard weeks before his death in 2004.
It is not an exaggeration to say that no book on America's home front resembles Cooke's. His comments on Franklin Roosevelt and the Washington scene will, of course, interest readers. But far more important are the reports he gives of the long transcontinental trips he took during the war, of the conversations he had with ordinary men and women forced to adjust to conditions so different from those they had previously known. Cooke, an incomparable journalist, was searching not for state secrets - he disdained what today would be called investigative reporting - knowing that a far more important story could be gleaned from using his eyes and ears to report what no other journalist found it necessary to tell.
With his superb intelligence, Cooke revelled in the glory of the ever-changing American landscape, never doubting the importance of geography, but also of history. If the south scarcely resembled the mid-west or the west, and if Atlanta could never be mistaken for Houston or Los Angeles, it was even more important to dwell on the very different conditions for blacks and whites, for Gentiles and Jews, for those who vacationed in Florida, searching for the sun, and those who had migrated to Michigan in search of work. The war was a transforming experience for all America, slowly recovering from a depression that had devastated the lives of so many.
As interested in the lives of farmers as in those of workers, knowing that no generalisations could be made about either, Cooke recognised the genius of the US in its capacity to gear up quickly for war, to become the "arsenal" that would help sustain two very different allies, Great Britain and the Soviet Union. Never a romantic, he saw the less than salubrious quality of American politics, as evident in the Georgia of Governor Talmadge as in the mistreatment of blacks and Mexicans in suddenly oil-rich Texas.
Writing of black markets and rationing, prostitution and patriotism, shortages and hoarding, Cooke knew better than simply to praise all the Americans he met, but this never led him to become cynical or harsh. He recognised that some he met were too sanguine and used the war principally to profit themselves; others were excessively worried about the possibility of Japanese warships bombing the cities of the Pacific coast. He knew that American servicemen were often ill-treated, taken advantage of in the cities they visited on their nights away from their military camps, searching for women and sex. Yet, beyond all the tragic and unseemly aspects of the war at home lay a condition he never failed to emphasise: the humour and high spirits of so many of those he met. Reproducing their language, often using the dialects they were still wedded to, he gave a picture of the home front more telling than those who chose to dwell only on events in the nation's capital.
Many will be instructed by Cooke's comments on Americans once celebrated, now largely forgotten, such as Cordell Hull and John L. Lewis, Alf Landon and Harold Ickes. They will note how little mention Cooke gives to famous women; not even Eleanor Roosevelt or Frances Perkins figure greatly in a period when journalists concentrated their attention almost exclusively on men, whether civilian or military.
Recently, the less than gifted though celebrated French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy repeated the journey made by Alexis de Tocqueville that led to the publication in 1835 of what is perhaps the greatest work ever written about the culture and politics of the US, Democracy in America. It would be more useful for some American or British journalist to repeat Alistair Cooke's journey, to show how the US is faring in today's war, how the bombast and truculence of its macho president is seen by Americans, why their rancid patriotism is creating no great sympathy for them abroad. The new industrial and technologically advanced US, so different from the agricultural-commercial world Cooke describes, cries out for sympathetic analysis. A US remembered only by those now very aged, but illuminated by Cooke's brilliant account, has been quite transformed, and it is reasonable to inquire into what has replaced it.
Stephen Graubard
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