Americans,” according to Alistair Cooke, “are less aware than other peoples that they are not taken everywhere at their own valuation.”
Cooke wrote that in the mid-1940s, and it illustrates one of the sundry pleasures of “The American Home Front, 1941-1942”: the way it shows how in essential attitudes we have never changed, including “the grandiosity that is to other nations the most unpleasant of all American traits,” and, obversely, in how many respects we have.
It is sobering to realize that readers under 30 may not know who Cooke was, not even as the longtime host of PBS’s “Masterpiece Theater.” Yet before that he enjoyed an extraordinarily long career as a journalist, television personality and observer of America – the BBC broadcast nearly 3,000 of his “Letters From America” over six decades, the last one only weeks before his death in 2004 at age 95 – and it was as a fairly young journalist that he undertook this book.
The incredible fact is that it went unpublished for 60 years. Cooke completed “The American Home Front” in 1945 as the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By that time his publisher reckoned that people would be tired of the war, and the manuscript was put away in a closet, only to be recovered, the current publisher says, shortly before Cooke’s death.
Who knows whether the original publisher was right? What today’s readers will know is that Atlantic Monthly Press is right to publish it now. Six decades on, and it is an engaging and insightful book, and something like reading a history and a historical document at the same time.
At the end of February 1942, two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Cooke set out on an automobile trip to learn how the war was affecting his fellow Americans (born in England in 1908, he was a newly naturalized U.S. citizen). Traveling counterclockwise, he headed south from New York to Florida, across the Gulf Coast into Texas and the Southwest, north through California to the Northwest, then east into the Plains and Upper Midwest, ending up in New England.
“I didn’t know what I was going to look for,” he writes, but he was determined to “trust in unaided observation” to “see what the war had done to people … and to let the significance fall where it might.”
He fully achieves his goal. What strikes him over and over is that ordinary people talk less about war strategy or how the war is going or such grand matters than they do about how the war affects their work.
A government decree can either make or shatter an industry. Sugar maple farmers in Vermont fear the loss of their crop through the departure of their hired help to lucrative defense jobs. Tattoo artists note that requests for “Mother” are up, those for names of girlfriends are down.
There are other changes. Some enterprising women have developed a lively trade in contracting multiple bigamous marriages with servicemen – such as with trainee pilots “whose future is promisingly hazardous” – in order to receive allowances from the federal government for each one.
Everywhere, Cooke’s observation is keen. He visits a cramped little settlement in the back country of Tennessee, “like a bad caricature of a backdrop for the play ‘Tobacco Road.”‘
He follows soldiers from Fort Knox on their lost, dreary rounds on a Saturday night pass in town. He admires “the casual sobriety of the people” in the Great Lakes states.
The writing is, in the best sense of the word, polished – novelists should be as gifted as Cooke at capturing the beauties of nature – with striking, even elegant, metaphors and similes. Washington, D.C., in wartime was “a boom-town based on a gusher of memoranda.”
In describing the roundup and internment of Japanese-Americans, he notes that they traveled “across barren flats where the afternoon sun makes the streaks of salt shine as painfully as turned swords.” Far from being just self-indulgent lyricism, that tells us something explicit about their situation and surroundings.
Finally, the very manner of his journey is itself an indicator of how much we have changed. When he arrives at a rare four-lane highway (then commonly known, tellingly, as a parkway), we become aware that then it was a road for pleasant, swift travel by a relatively few cars in a nation of 130 million, not, as now, a congested speedway for 300 million, each seemingly possessing 2.5 vehicles and driving them all at once.
Roger K. Miller, a newspaperman for many years, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
—————————————-
The American Home Front
1941-1942
By Alistair Cooke
Atlantic Monthly Press, 306 pages, $24
