Books: Gunther’s America

INSIDE U.S.A. (979 pp.)—John Gunther—Harper ($5).

Sooner or later, it was bound to happen: Journalist John Gunther, who has made a tidy fortune exploring the “insides” of Europe, Asia and Latin America, would some day try to get “inside” the U.S. He has, at last—about as far inside as he ever gets. His conclusion (in a phrase he picked up from Robert E. Sherwood): the U.S. is “lousy with greatness.”

To his publishers, who are using all the paper they can find to print it (they expect Inside U.S.A. to be the biggest-selling $5 book ever published), and $40,000 to promote it, Gunther’s book is the event of the year. It is unlikely to outlast the year. Like a large proportion of bestsellers, this is journalism between boards. It will shove neither Bryce’s American Commonwealth nor the WPA State Guides off the shelf; it is neither as penetrating as the one, nor as useful as the other.

John Gunther, the most successful living practitioner of his kind of journalism (a mixture of Burton Holmes, Drew Pearson, Walter Winchell and the World Almanac) is highly readable. His writing is brisk and breezy. It is also glib, superficial, exaggerated, full of impressions passing as insights and facts palmed off as truths. This is probably the best of his books, certainly the best since Inside Europe, which had some excellent eyewitness reporting of Austria in the turbulent days of Dollfuss.

On the Run. Blond, hefty (225 lbs.) John Gunther has developed a rapid-transit system for writing books. His field trips for Inside Asia (1939) took a mere eleven months, for Inside Latin America (1941) only five. Now he has explored the 48 states on a jaunt lasting slightly more than a year. He has written a lot of letters (including one to every governor), interviewed many, and pumped a lot of local newsmen, some of whom are very helpful in the Gunther System, and apt to be highly flattered by such attention from one of journalism’s most renowned panjandrums.

Gunther starts his zip-clip saga in California, the Golden State (“ripe, golden, yeasty”), swings a great northeasterly arc across the Middle West to the Atlantic, drops south into the Cotton Belt, winds up down Texas-New Mexico-Arizona way, scattering his judgments as he goes. Samples:

Cleanest U.S. city: Phoenix, Ariz. Most romantic cities: San Francisco, New Orleans, Boston, San Antonio.

Dirtiest city: Indianapolis, “unkempt . . . unswept . . . a terrific place for basketball . . . auto racing . . . the American Legion.”

Most turbulent cities: Chicago, “as full of crooks as a saw with teeth”; Kansas City, Mo., “the best boogie-woogie town” in the land, “a kind of middle-western Babylon.”

Ugliest city: Knoxville, “intense, concentrated, degrading ugliness,” mixed with a backwoods piety that allows no hard liquor, no Sunday baseball, no Sunday movies.

Bawdiest city: Butte (“with the possible exception of Amarillo, Texas”). “Whole neighborhoods [in Butte] are moldy, whole streets are rotten and decaying. The bars are preposterous and prodigious. I saw grandmothers teaching six-year-old kids to play slot machines.”

Detroit, packed with “Southern white hillbillies, [motor] company thugs, ex-Bundists, and Ku-Kluxers,” is “the most explosive town in the Western Hemisphere.” Gunther finds words of praise for Arizona’s Governor Sidney P. Osborn, Oregon’s Senator Wayne Morse, Ohio’s ex-Governor Frank Lausche, Minnesota’s Harold Stassen, pours scorn on Old Guard Republicans, Negro-baiters and anti-Semites.

Along the way, Gunther gleaned many a curious fact. The annual per capita Coca-Cola consumption in New Orleans is 120 bottles; in New York City, six bottles. The names of the New England towns of Berlin, Calais, Paris and Peru are locally pronounced Berlin, Callus, Pay-rus, Pee-ru. Los Angeles (“Iowa with palms”) is the world’s second largest Mexican city.

Gunther also made a point of chinning with political hopefuls and has-beens as he went along. He writes of them vividly. He found New York’s Governor Dewey “as devoid of charm as a rivet . . . able, dramatic . . . a man who will never try to steal second unless the pitcher breaks his leg.” Taft is an amalgam of “brain power . . . sincerity . . . majestic wrongheadedness . . . Brobdingnagian bad judgments.” Gunther on Bricker: “Intellectually he is like interstellar space—a vast vacuum occasionally crossed by homeless, wandering clichés.” Gunther finds U.S. public life full of “poltroons, chiselers, parvenus . . . politicians bloated with intellectual edema.” But after all, he says, the U.S. is the “craziest, most dangerous, least stable, most spectacular, least grownup, and most powerful and magnificent nation ever known.”