The Reporter at Home
WE learn from a recent number of The New Yorker that Mr. John Gunther has got tired of being asked when he will do Inside Gunther. We have reason to be glad that he has not shrunk from the equally formidable task of doing Inside U.S.A. For it was a task to have frightened even a fairly resolute man. To give the Americans the low-down on Europe, Asia or even Latin America was nothing compared with the risks of daring to tell nearly every American something about his home state and ;home city. For no state and few cities of any size were not visited by Mr. Gunther and praised, blamed or dismissed. The citizens of Indianapolis will not like the candid description of the dirt of Hoosier capital, and the citizens of Knoxville and of northern Tennessee will object to the reiterated emphasis on the ugliness of their metropolis. Indeed, in this case
I think that Mr. Gunther is unjust; there are American towns uglier than Knoxville and, less positively, dirtier than Indianapolis, but being less resolute than Mr. Gunther I will not name them.
A great deal of this very long book would make an excellent travel book—justice is done to the astonishing appeal of the state of Wash- ington, for instance—but Mr. Gunther has seen his job, not as a des- cription of places but of communities, of men, of institutions. "What makes you tick ?"is the question he asked such diverse societies as Butte and Boston, San Antonio and Philadelphia. Who runs the politics and who runs the business ? How far is the state or city living up to its opportunities ? Where is it going, if anywhere— uphill or down ? This " chiel amang ye talcin' notes" was in general well received, and we have now nearly a thousand pages of first-hand and first-class reporting-on the present state of that society on whose movements, generosity and wisdom so much depends.
Of course, Mr. Gunther's method has its drawbacks. He begins and ends with a general summing-up, but in the main the reader is left to draw his own conclusions from a great mass of detailed informa-
tion about geographical regions. One consequence of this is that the reader from folly, party spirit or the vagaries of memory may concentrate, more or less unconsciously, on those parts of the composite picture that have remained most clearly in his mind. He may remember the TVA and Wisconsin, or the darkest side of the Deep South or the most savage side of American industrialism as shown in Butte. This is a risk, but it is worth running, for the good side of Mr. Gunther's method is that it allows the more open- minded reader to appreciate the great diversity of America, its aston- ishing range of wealth, civilisation, natural character. True, America, the United States that is, is astonishingly uniform for its size. It is a country where it is sometimes impossible, at first sight, to know where you are ; so many American towns are almost identical, whether in drabness or in the agreeable calm and elegance of parts of New England and Ohio. As Mr. Gunther puts it, "America is the country that is at home no matter where it goes." But no matter how uniform, for its size, the United States may be, it is very big and so far less uniform than any European country outside the U.S.S.R. And this variety is illustrated in a hundred ways in this fascinating survey. The native ingenuity of the people is, if you like, pretty widely distributed, but the results of that ingenuity are often startlingly different. And one gratifying result is that there are all sorts of oddities, odd char- acters, institutions, traditions, industries. Mr. Gunther likes odd pieces of news; so do I, ind anyone who shares our tastes will have a fine time here.
But Mr. Gunther's interests are fundamentally serious, liberal, humane. He can take time off to illustrate the exclusiveness of American " society " by 'giving an account of the St. Cecilia Society of Charleston (South Carolina), but he is more interested in the future of the cotton industry in that state and even in that remarkable and attractive reactionary, Mr. W. W. Ball. The semi-petrified society of Philadelphia gets attention; so does the infamous water supply. The politics as well as the pranks of California are dis- cussed. The hierarchical aspects of the New Orleans Mardi Gras festival are noted. (Jews, it is asserted, leave the city during the annual beano, as they are excluded from the clubs that run the parade.) But more attention is paid to the rise and fall of the Huey Long machine. There is no "Gone with the Windery " in the general and grim account of the South, harassed by the Negro ques- tion, the exhaustion of the soil and the coming of the mechanical cotton-picker (of whose probably beneficent results Mr. Gunther more confident than I am). The glories of the Kentucky Derby do not keep Mr. Gunther from being deeply critical of the common- wealth—and, again, I don't think all his statistics are as damaging as he does.
Debt, syphilis, lynching, violence in general, intolerance, dirt, Mr. Gunther conceals nothing; and if he does not set down in malice, he does reveal the anger of a good American at so much waste and at so much indifference to the national needs and to the best in the national traditions. But his very candour makes his general optimism the more impressive. "Time's noblest offspring is his last," might be his motto—even though that offspring is ffir less noble than it should be and though in this grim new world there may be a new prophetic ring in the line, "The fifth shall close the drama with the day," for among the things described is the turning of ploughshares into swords, the role of the eminently pacific and progressive Tennessee Valley Authority in the making of the atomic bomb.
D. W. BROGAN.
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