John Gunther - Inside U.S.A.

JOHN GUNTHER

75th Anniversary Edition

FOREWORD BY

Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

1946, 1947 by John Gunther.

1947 by The Curtis Publishing Company.

Foreword to the 1997 Edition 1997 by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 96-72011
ISBN 978-1-56584-358-5

Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 1997 Distributed by Two Rivers Distribution

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Chapter

List of Maps

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.

WALT WHITMAN

France was a land, England was a people, but America, having about it still the quality of the idea, was harder to utterit was the graves at Shiloh, and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

I like Americans.

EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY

Now the dark waters at the bow

fold back, like earth against the plow;

foam brightens like the dogwood now

at home, in my own country.

MALCOLM COWLEY

Showing States if area were proportional to population (Population 1940 census131,669,275)

NATIONAL OPINION RESEARCH CENTER; UNIVERSITY OF DENVER; COPYRIGHT, 1945

A MERICA, Winston Churchill said, stands at this moment at the summit of the world. The moment was August 1945. Nazi Germany had surrendered, the atomic bomb had been dropped, imperial Japan was about to give up, the European allies were battered and spent, and the United States bestrode the narrow world. It was a new America, hardly known to the worldor to itself. This was the America that John Gunther portrayed in the vivid and acute reportage of Inside U.S.A..

This book, now half a century old, is an astonishing tour de force. It presents a shrewd, fast-moving, sparkling panorama of the United States at this historic moment of triumph. Sinclair Lewis called it the richest treasure-house of facts about America that has ever been published, and probably the most spirited and interesting. At the same time, in its preoccupations and insights Inside U. S.A. foresees dilemmas that were to harass and frustrate Americans for the rest of the century. And, in this age of collective journalism, one is permitted to marvel that Inside U.S.A. is a one-man production.

John Gunther was forty-two years old in the summer of 1944 when he set out on his exploration of America. He was already the best known of the brilliant generation of foreign correspondents that educated an isolationist America about the outside world in the years between the two great wars. Their names are mostly forgotten nowVincent Sheean, Raymond Gram Swing, Dorothy Thompson, Edgar Snow, Harold Isaacs, Paul Scott Mowrer, Edgar Ansel Mowrer, H. R. Knickerbocker, Negley Farson, William L. Shirer, Edward R. Murrow, Leland Stowe, William H. Stoneman, George Seldes, Edmond Taylor, Jay Allen, and many others. They were a venturesome crowd, audacious, irreverent, resourceful, hard-playing, hard-drinking, and hardworking, and their ardent dispatches brought home to Americans the personalities, ambitions, intrigues, and dangers that were putting the planet on the slippery slope into the Second World War.

Many, like Gunther himself, came from the isolationist heartland, the Middle West. Gunther was born in Chicago in 1901, graduated from the University of Chicago in 1922, and later that year made his first trip to Europe, in the style of the times, on a cattleboat. After a stint back home as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, he returned to Europe in 1924 and soon, as a Daily News roving correspondent, was covering stories in a dozen European countries. By 1930, he was head of the Daily News bureau in Vienna, with Central Europe and the Balkans as his beat. In 1935, he was transferred to the papers top job in Europebureau chief in London.

He was a big man, six-feet-two, blonde, handsome, spirited, generous, gregarious, upwardly mobile, with expensive tastes, boundless charm, boundless curiosity, and boundless energy. Rebecca West, whom he interviewed in Chicago in 1923, described him as a Gothic angel with the vitality of seven cart-horses. (Meeting again in London in 1925, they became lovers.) He was a mans man, too, well liked by fellow reporters.

The 1930s, Gunther later recalled, were the bubbling, blazing days of American foreign correspondence in Europe. Most of us traveled steadily, met constantly, exchanged information, caroused, took in each others washing, and, even when most fiercely competitive, were devoted friends. We were scavengers, buzzards, out to get the news no matter whose wings got clipped.

But Gunther was not a conventional correspondent. He had little interest in spot news or in scoops; he thought it silly to break his neck trying to beat the competition by a few minutes on a story that everyone would have in an hour. His early hope had been to succeed as a novelist. His novels made little impression. Rebecca West told him that his fiction was awful. But his journalism, with characters supplied by life itself, was the work of a novelist manqu. I had little basic interest in politics . he said, but I was ravenously interested in human beings. For good or ill, I instinctively think of myself as a novelist. And his preferred form was not a dispatch but a book.

In 1934, Cass Canfield, of the house of Harpers, persuaded him to try his hand on a country-by-country survey of Europe. Carrying on his newspaper job during the day and working nights, weekends, and holidays on the book, Gunther somehow turned out Inside Europe in seven months. The book, published in February 19365, was immensely readable, packed with high-level gossip and striking personality sketches, packed also with solid facts presented in a lively manner. It was an instant success, enabling Gunther to retire from daily journalism. As a freelance writer, he began to apply the