Mr. Gunther Discovers America
by ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR.
1
IT WAS inevitable that John Gunther should end up by exploring the United States. And it is fortunate that he should have done so after having surveyed and digested Europe, Asia, and Latin America first. For this experience reduces the provincialism which is the besetting sin of most reporters of the American scene. Moreover, he has not allowed familiarity to dilute the inquisiliveness, the persistence, and the excitement which a good foreign correspondent brings to a strange land. He writes about the United States as if he had just discovered it. In reading Gunther, many of the natives of this odd and wonderful country may partake of this process of discovery and, in so doing, may renew their own sense of its potentialities.
It cannot be said that Gunther’s attack on the United Slates has proceeded with the same dispatch as his overseas campaigns. Europe, Asia, and Latin America were each haltered, subdued, and imprisoned in a single volume. The United States proves less tractable. After 907 packed pages comes the author’s agonized cry: “But I have had to leave out so much!” And Inside USA is but the first of two volumes. It covers the states, the local politicos, the industries, the crops, the natural settings, the prejudices, dialects, folklore, the food and drink. The next volume (Inside Washington?) will contain the national figures and the national generalizations. Thus, Inside USA will tell you about Mayor Lapham of San Francisco, or the TVA, or the braggadocio of Texas, or the gambling halls of Las Vegas. For Mr. Gunther’s comments on Truman and Eisenhower, Congress and the Supreme Court, or his conclusions on such vexed problems as labor and agriculture, reaction and liberalism, big business and bureaucracy, or foreign policy, we must await Volume II.
The postponement complicates life for the reviewers who like to quibble with generalit ies, but it should not deter the reader. For Mr. Gunther’s special qualities as a reporter have never had better play. His writing is relaxed, informal, lucid. He has a talent for sharp and sensitive observation, a relish for people and portraiture, and a knack of compressing intricate analyses into brief (and conveniently numbered) paragraphs. He is never jaded; he seems to have the happy gift of rolling on and on without letting the sights blur his eyes or the sounds deafen his ears. He imparts the thrill of discovery to his readers and, with the natural writer’s instinct for a change of pace, manages to sustain his high pitch without losing his audience.
Above all, he is tireless. He began to think about the book in 1936, and he started intermittent research in 1940. He has read indefatigably; his pages are sprinkled with quotations from Tocqucville and Dickens, from Bryce and Brogan and Myrdal, from local experts like Joseph Kinsey Howard and Carey McWilliams, from WPA guidebooks, from Life and from the Hapevillo (Georgia) Statesman. From 1944 to 1946 he savored the country, visiting all 48 states, 38 of the 43 cities greater than 200,000 in population, and, one would judge, a good deal of the intervening countryside. He appears to have talked to everybody. “ My ideal day was to spend the morning with the First National Bank and the afternoon with the CIO.” Everywhere he asked a few standard questions: what makes your community distinctive? what does it contribute to the nation as a whole? who runs it? and, for individuals, what do you believe in most? Somewhat ingenuous questions, perhaps, but Americans are somewhat ingenuous people; and ingenuousness is often closer to wisdom than is sophistication.
If Inside Europe was a study of nationalism, Inside Asia of imperialism, and Inside Latin America of colonial politics and economy, Inside USA, Mr. Gunther says, is a study of “democracy in action.” It is a social Baedeker to “the greatest, craziest, most dangerous, least stable, most spectacular, least grown-up and most powerful and magnificent nation ever known.” The conducted tour begins with California (it is only one of Gunther’s triumphs that he avoids making the restof the United States seem an anticlimax), proceeds northwest, reaching New England via Chicago, then swings south and back again to a final halt in the southwest.
Inside USA does not pretend to be a profound analysis of American civilization in the manner of Tocqueville. It is rather a lively, gaudy, intelligent panorama of American life: cities, topography, personalities, wisecracks. There are some brilliant set pieces: a day in the life of La Guardia, for example, or the delightful account of the Chicago Tribune. There are appreciative sketches of men whom the nation should know better, like Sumner Sewall of Maine and Sydney Osborn of Arizona. There are perceptive accounts of the men of the future like Walter Reuther, Harold Stassen, Wilson Wyatt, and Ellis Arnall. Some of the anecdotes are excellent: Gunther, indeed, has achieved a compendium of contemporary political wit — for instance, all the best Dewey stories are worked into a compact and fair-minded sketch of New York’s ambitious governor. There are some fine Gunther phrases: “Los Angeles is Iowa with palms”; or a superb description of the mind of John Bricker: “Intellectually he is a nothingness, like interstellar space — a vast vacuum occasionally crossed by homeless wandering clichés.” And the detail: it comes in a relentless flow, some of it amusing or picturesque, some of it totally inconsequential. Everything is framed with data; if the book weighed less, it would be an invaluable companion for tourists.
The point of view is broadly humane and liberal, with the humanity generally triumphing over the liberalism when the two threaten to clash. Mr. Gunther obviously finds it practically impossible to dislike anyone with whom he has had an affable interview. This kindliness gives his portraits warmth and sympathy; but it seems at times to make his judgments undiscriminating, if not gullible. He seems unreservedly delighted by Clare. Boothe Luce, for example, and will talk about Harry Byrd’s “long, suave, and distinguished public career.” An excess of amiability has surely led him to a pretty uncritical estimate of Frank Lausche of Ohio, and the fact that he is clearly fond of Leverett Saltonstall should not have persuaded him to accept Saltonstall’s feeble excuse for his political cowardice on the birth control issue.
Gunther is often shrewd, if sardonic, on people whom he seems not to have interviewed, like Leo Crowley and Gene Talmadge, or people who are dead, like Huey Long. But it took Senator McKellar really to break through Gunther’s imperturbable generosity. Following an innocent query as to what should be seen in Tennessee “aside from TVA ... the aged senator rose from his desk, turned a color between a prune and a plum, and forthwith ordered me to begone. Short, squat, rubicund . . . McKellar is a wonderland creature out of another age.”
2
THE alert reader will doubtless detect errors and omissions. One misses, for example, an adequate discussion of cross-filing in the California primaries, or an account of the New Bohemianism of Wilhelm Reich and Henry Miller, or an explanation of why the most vigorous and promising New Deal nucleus is made up of Kentuckians. Then Mr. Gunther has an unfortunate whimsey about a man from the moon, or Mars, or Moscow, which occasionally interrupts the narrative. He has also an odd devotion to the wit of Howard Brukaber and a penchant which amounts to affectation for such futile words as “fogram,” “mucid,” “retrorsed,” and “saprogenically.”
The richness and speed of the subject matter have produced a book which is kaleidoscopic in its over-all effect. Nevertheless, it does touch upon a few fundamentals. While reserving his conclusions for the next volume, Gunther reveals some of his misgivings about the American future. The three principal questions, as he sees them, are how to maintain a democratic system if the economic machine breaks down; how to use America’s military might to further world organization and peace; how to reconcile special interests with the public welfare in a democracy.
Gunther is inclined to anticipate “a temporary period of very definite conservatism or even of reaction.” But he feels that the “permanent durable ground swell” is progressive; “the next New Deal will make the last New Deal look mild.” The great danger, as he correctly perceives, is another depression. “Let there be twenty million unemployed again, and blood can smear and spot the streets.” And the related danger is that those who most fear revolution are at the same time those who “oppose most bitterly the government planning and controls that seek to fend off disaster.”
Through all the “proliferating variety of special interests,” Gunther finds, there runs a common denominator—the “propertied class.” This class, he argues, and he includes in it the workman with his tools and the widow with her trust fund as well as the men of Alcoa and General Motors, is the “single biggest factor making for national unity.” But the failure of this class in many of its duties, responsibilities, and obligations, he adds, is “the greatest single impediment to unity and the chief force making for discontent.“ He does not in this volume grapple directly with the question of the character of the propertied class and the durability of its economic base. On lirst glance, one would propose substituting “business community” for “propertied class” and leave out the workers and widows, who only confuse the issue. But maybe Volume II will clarify what ought to be a central conception in the book.
The road to salvation is also left obscure. “The greatest danger to American democracy,” Gunther writes, “may well reside in that group most particularly pledged to espouse it, the professional politicians, since it is their own incompetence and ineptitude if coupled with financial depression that is most likely to cause a breakdown.” Yet, as he well knows, there is wisdom in the old maxim about a people having the government they deserve. The problem becomes one of matching American desire with American ability, so that our dynamism does not destroy the world and go up in smoke. The problem of leadership is crucial and unresolved. Gunther ventures no prediction in this volume as to the results of the race between American luck and American blindness, American productive ingenuity and American political incompetence. But the America that he describes is a nation bursting at the seams with vitality and driven on by an instinct for happiness. This country faces the most serious and magnificent of challenges. It may collapse before the responsibilities of greatness. It may rise to the challenge, organize its limitless resources of imagination, integrity, and genius, and assume a leading place in the world and in history.