John Gunther Quotes

It is a proud boast of New York that, what with its enormous pools of foreign-born, any article or object known in the world may be found there. You can buy anything from Malabar spices to stamps from Mauritius to Shakespeare folios. A stall on Seventh Avenue sells about a hundred different varieties of razor blades. Also it is incomparably the greatest manufacturing town on earth; in an average year it produces goods valued at more than four billion dollars.

The effect of World War II is one point worth noting. Almost every victim of lynching since the war has been a veteran. The Negro community is probably more unified today, more politically vehement, more aggressive in its demand for full citizenship- even in the South- than at any other time in history. Roughly one million Negroes entered the armed services. They moved around and saw things; they were exposed to danger and learned what their rights were; overseas, many were treated decently and democratically by whites for the first time in their lives; the consequent fermentations have been explosive. Also since Negroes were presumably fighting for democratic principles on the international plane, it was difficult to keep them from wondering why the same principles were not applied at home. It wasn't easy for an intelligent Negro to accept that he was fighting for democracy- in a largely Jim Crow army. The glaring crudity of this paradox became the more striking as the war went on. One famous remark is that of the Negro soldier returning across the Pacific from Okinawa. "Our fight for freedom," he said, "begins when we get to San Francisco."

One thing, it would seem, is certain. The days of treating Negroes like sheep are done with. They cannot be maintained indefinitely in a submerged position, because the overwhelming bulk of white Americans are, in the last analysis, decent minded, and because of education. It is impossible at this stage to halt education among Negroes. But the more you educate, the more you make inevitable a closer participation by Negroes in American life as a whole. In slightly different terms, this is the problem that the British Empire has faced in various colonial areas; once mass education gets under way the route to freedom becomes open, and the more you educate, the more impossible it becomes to block this road. The United States must either terminate education among Negroes, an impossibility, or prepare to accept the eventual consequences, that is, Negro equality under democracy. There will never be a "solution" to the Negro problem satisfactory to everybody. But improvements, no matter how fitful, must continue if American democracy itself is to survive. Discrimination not only contaminates the Negro community; it contaminates the white as well. There were people in the Middle Ages who thought that the bubonic plague would not spread to their own precious selves. But there is no immunity to certain types of disease. A cancer will destroy the body, unless cured.

If anybody ever doubted that Roosevelt was a good bluffer, events after Pearl Harbor should set the record straight. For almost a year the United States had no fleet worthy of the name in the Pacific, but no one, least of all the Japanese, ever caught on to how miserably defenseless we really were.

More than anywhere else in this book, the author must now steer between Scylla and Charybdis, between saying too much and too little. How can we talk about the Statue of Liberty without seeming ridiculously supererogatory? But how can we omit Brooklyn Bridge and still give a fair, comprehensive picture? One must either take the space to mention something that everybody knows everything about, or else risk omission of things that everybody will think ought to be included. Park Avenue in summer near Grand Central, a thin quivering asphalt shelf, and the asphalt soft, a thin quivering layer of street separating the automobiles above from the trains below; avenues as homespun with small exquisite shops as Madison and streets as magnificent as 57th; the fat black automobiles doubleparked on Fifth Avenue on sleety afternoons; kibitzers watching strenuously to see if the man running will really catch the bus; bridges soaring and slim as needles like the George Washington; the incomparable moment at dusk when the edges of tall buildings melt invisibly into the sky, so that nothing of them can be seen except the lighted windows; the way the pace of everything accelerates near Christmas; how the avenues will be cleared of snow and actually dry a day after a six-inch fall, while the side streets are banked solid with sticky drifts; how the noon sun makes luminous spots on the rounded tops of automobiles, crowded together on the slope of Park Avenue so that they look like seashells; the shop that delivers chocolates by horse- all this is too familiar to mention.

New York is the publishing center of the nation; it is the art, theater, musical, ballet, operatic center; it is the opinion center; it is the radio center; it is the style center. Hollywood? Hollywood is nothing more than a suburb of the Bronx, both financially and from a view of talent. Politically, socially, in the world of ideas and in the whole world of entertainment, which is a great American industry needless to say, New York sets the tone and pace of the entire nation. What books 140 million Americans will read is largely determined by New York reviewers. Most of the serious newspaper columns originate in or near New York; so do most of the gossip columns, which condition Americans from Mobile to Puget Sound to the same patterns of social behavior. In a broad variety of fields, from serous drama to what you will hear on a jukebox, it is what New York says that counts; New York Opinion is the hallmark of both intellectual and material success; to be accepted in this nation, New York acceptance must come first. I do not assert that this is necessarily a good thing. I say merely that it is true. One reason for all this is that New York, with its richly cosmopolitan population, provides such an appreciative audience. It admires artistic quality. It has a fine inward gleam for talent. Also New York is a wonderfully opulent center for bogus culture. One of its chief industries might be said to be the manufacture of reputations, many of them fraudulent.

The threat of Italian naval power in the Mediterranean, the dangerous entrenchment given Germany near Gibraltar as a result of the Spanish civil war, the riotous instalibility in Palestine, above all the Munich "peace" in September, 1938, and its consequences, gravely weakened British prestige, British power too, all over the world, as we well know. As a friend of mine said: "The lion tried to show his teeth, and it was all bridgework." In fact some teeth were still there. Mr. Chamberlain preferred to smile instead of biting- but he may have to bite before too long.

A common denominator is, of course, imperialism. The root reason why the colonies exist is exploitation. The British are there to get something out of being there. But exploitation is paid for by a variety of services; the British bribe the natives whom they exploit to enjoy the process of exploitation as a double reward: first, attention to such matters as public health, public order, education; second, by gradual training of the people toward self-government. No British colony is a slave state, though political mastery may be complete. In most British colonies the eventual result of British imperialism is held to be freedom from the strictures of that imperialism. Obviously the process thus envisaged is an extremely gradual one. Development of self-governing institutions is never allowed to interfere with the immediate demands of empire. Ask Mr. Gandhi or Mr. de Valera. They will confirm this view.
One psychological factor helping the British in their imperial rule is their innate, impregnable unassimability. Once an Englishman, always an Englishman. I have met British officials, British merchants, who have lived in Malaya or Baluchistan for forty years; for all the effect on their character, their habits, they might have spent all that time in Nottingham or Bournemouth. The British Empire is the furthest possible remove from a melting pot. The British do not Mix.

New York City has more trees (2,400,000) than houses, and it makes 18,200,000 telephone calls a day of which about 125,000 are wrong numbers. Its rate of divorces is the lowest of any big American city, less than a tenth of that of Baltimore for instance, and even less than that in the surrounding countryside. One of its hotels, built largely over railway tracks, has an assessed valuation of $22,500,000 (there are 124 buildings valued at more than a million dollars in Manhattan alone), and it is probably the only city in the world that still maintains sheriff's juries and has five district attorneys. New York City has such admirable institutions as New School for Social Research, the Council on Foreign Relations, Cooper Union, the Museum of Modern Art, and a black market in illegitimate babies. It has 492 playgrounds, more than 11,000 restaurants, 2,800 churches, and the largest store in the world, Macy's, which wrote 40,328,836 sales checks in 1944, and serves more than 150,000 customers a day. It has the Great White Way, bad manners, 33,000 schoolteachers (average pay $3,803) and 500 boy gangs.

I went down to the City Hall the other day and had an hour with O'Dwyer after not having seen him for several years. He is a shade grayer, a shade stockier, and still a grand man to talk to- easy-going, bluff, friendly, and informal. He wore a light brown sports jacket; he was as relaxed- working a fourteen-hour day- as a character in A Crock of Gold. O'Dwyer has heavy, very short, blunt fingers, a decisive nose, and expressive, eloquent blue eyes. He is full of Irish wit and bounce. Also he is very modest. Mostly we talked about things personal. But occasionally there were remarks like, "How the hell does democracy work, anyway?" This was not, I hasten to add, said with any lack of faith. The mayor is a very gregarious man, and he loves people; especially he loves those who have fought their way out of a bad environment. What he hates most are stuffy people.

Fiorello H. LaGuardia is one of the most original, most useful, and most stimulating men American public life has ever known.

Mr. Gandhi, who is an incredible combination of Jesus Christ, Tammany Hall, and your father, is the greatest Indian since Buddha. Like Buddha, he will be worshiped as a god when he dies. Indeed, he is literally worshiped by thousands of his people. I have seen peasants kiss the sand his feet have trod. No more difficult or enigmatic character can easily be conceived. He is a slippery fellow. I mean no disrespect. But consider some of the contradictions, some of the puzzling points of contrast in his career and character. This man who is at once a saint and a politician, a prophet and a superb opportunist, defies ordinary categories. For instance, his great contribution to India was the theory and practice of non-violence or civil disobedience. But at the very time that non-violence was the deepest thing he believed in, he was supporting Britain in the World War. The concept of non-violence is a perfect example of Gandhi's familiar usage of moral weapons to achieve practical results, of his combination of spiritual and temporal powers. India, an unarmed state, could make a revolution only by non-violent means. Non-violence was a spiritual concept, but it made revolution practicable.

If you look at a map of the British Empire, neatly colored pink by tradition- an odd color to choose, when you come to think about it- the temptation is great to consider it as a unit, as something uniform. As matter of fact the British Empire, wih its 485,000,000 people, its 13,290,000 square miles, is very far from being uniform. Its vast "mixture of growths and accumulations" is by no means governed by a single law.
The Empire includes dominions like Canada and Australia, which are self-governing, sister states of Britain virtually independent since the Statute of Westminster, except for the common bondage of the Crown. It includes the colossal subcontinent of India, itself sub-divided into British India and princely states, which we shall deal with soon. It includes some crown colonies which are administrative dictatorships, and some which have constitutions and legislatures. It includes "free states" like Eire, mandated territories like Palestine, protectorates like the hinterland of Aden, condominums like the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, territory held jointly with France like the New Hebrides, and political curiosities such as Bhutan or Sarawak which fit into no normal categories. There are even regions ruled by charter companies like the old East India Company.

Roosevelt was a man of his times, and what times they were!- chaotic, catastrophic, revolutionary, epochal- he was President during the greatest emergency in the history of mankind, and he never let history- or mankind- down. His very defects reflected the unprecedented strains and stresses of the decades he lived in. But he took history in his stride; he had vision and gallantry enough, oomph and zip and debonair benevolence enough, to foresee the supreme crises of our era, overcome them, and lead the nation out of the worst dangers it has ever faced. Roosevelt was the greatest political campaigner and the greatest vote getter in American history. Thirty-one out of forty-eight states voted for him each of the four times he ran. His influence, far from having diminished since his death, has probably increased. When Mr. Truman won his surprising victory in 1948, which was made possible in part by the political influence left behind by FDR, it was altogether fitting that a London newspaper should head its story, "Roosevelt's Fifth Term."

There are at least four main points to be made about the Lone Star State all at once. It does not properly belong to the South, the West, or even the Southwest; it is an empire, an entity, totally its own.