The American Home Front: 1941-1942

The American Home Front: 1941-1942

Alistair Cooke

Language: English

Pages: 336

ISBN: 0871139391

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


From the famous BBC correspondent and television host comes a remarkably insightful and detailed firsthand portrait of America during the early days of World War II. Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Alistair Cooke, a newly naturalized American citizen, set out to see his country as it was undergoing monumental change. Cooke traveled small highways, with their advertising signs and their local topography, in an age before the interstate highway system.

In The American Home Front — a fascinating artifact, a charming travelogue, and a sharp portrait of America — Cooke chronicles the regional glories he encounters and the reactions of the citizens to war, from indifference to grief, from opportunism to resilience under military threat. Filled with touching personal stories of the effects of war, from a Japanese family facing internment that tries to sell Cooke their car, to the experiences of the unemployed relocating in hopes of jobs in a gunpowder factory, The American Home Front is the work of an experienced, talented journalist; it is intelligent, touching, and funny.

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past an irregular row of these shanties. They were all without a single dab of elegance, but docked between the stilts and the flooring of one was a shining 1940 Buick. Down through the foothills the snow was melting into slush, and I leave the coal towns for a string of chemical towns, as grimy as the coal towns, only more pungent. I pass through piles of ore and silica at Alloy, ready to be made into ferrochrome alloy for toughening steels. At Belle a vast ammonia plant, making chemicals from

their unique American context, but by Southerners who take for granted the land that reared them. William March is a brilliant example of a writer who hardly seems to be aware of himself as an intensely American writer. His novels and stories happen to be set against the background he knows, and the dialect is merely what he best recalls. But seen from the outside, the background is the infinitely known landscape of the Deep South, and the language, in all its delicacy and rightness, could be

east from a vertical western ridge. After Sierra Blanca there is more rough mesquite country, by this time so familiar to westbound travelers that it seems devoid of all wartime interest. But swallowed up by the blinding distance and the sage are countless airfields and training schools that the Army Air Corps has established all the way across Texas. Forty miles before El Paso there is a break in the mountains, and across the level valley of brown soil you see much careful farming. This is not

as anything it knew in the days of the Okies. The solution is ready to hand, if the Administration then in office knows enough to believe in it. The solution lies in the unplumbed resources of the great Central Valley – the even distribution of water for which the good soil of the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys cries aloud. It is astonishing how little one hears, in the East, about what constitutes the greatest irrigation project in history. When Westerners talk of the West’s great future,

Oregon City, and as a pie man, gloated awhile over a menu of raspberries, loganberries, youngberries, strawberries, and blackberries, before finally settling for a caramel sundae. From here to Portland it was berry canneries and sawmills and quiet bungalow suburbs all the way. Seen at the peak of the American honeymoon with the Second World War, Portland was the archetype of the war cities I had seen. It had 50,000 men and women in direct war work, 40,000 of them in the Kaiser shipyards. It

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