The 40s: The Story of a Decade (41 page)

T
he word finally came at 7:03 p.m., Eastern War Time, on Tuesday, August 14, 1945. That’s when the message went up on the ticker in Times Square: “Official—Truman announces Japanese surrender.” Rumors and false alarms had been circulating since the bombing of Nagasaki, five days before, and by the time the news flashed, there were half a million people in Times Square. “The victory roar that greeted the announcement beat upon the eardrums until it numbed the senses,” the
Times
reported. “For twenty minutes wave after wave of that joyous roar surged forth.”

Hats and flags were flung in the air; confetti and paper streamers were thrown from the windows of office buildings. Strangers embraced. People wept. By 10 p.m., there were two million men and women jammed into the area from Fortieth to Fifty-second streets between Sixth and Eighth avenues. The celebration went on until after 3 a.m., and continued the next day. Wednesday and Thursday were national holidays. More than nine million men and women under arms were on their way home. The war was over.

The war turned the United States into a world power and New York City into a world capital. Paris had been occupied by the Germans for four years; London, Rome, Berlin, Tokyo, and Leningrad (St. Petersburg) had been devastated by bombs. Hundreds of European scientists, writers, artists, and intellectuals had fled to America, many of them ending up New Yorkers. Apart from a few Japanese fire balloons and inconsequential shellings, the mainland United States had never been attacked. Of the more than fifty million people who had died in the fighting, only some four hundred thousand of them were Americans.

France, Italy, Germany, and Britain were broke: after four hundred years, the age of European empire was coming to an end. The United
States found itself nearly the only healthy economy in a world of damaged states. In the late 1940s, with 7 percent of the world’s population, the United States had 42 percent of the world’s income; produced 57 percent of the world’s steel, 62 percent of the world’s oil, and 80 percent of the world’s automobiles; and owned three-quarters of the world’s gold. Per-capita income was almost double the incomes in the next most well-off nations, and Americans consumed 50 percent more calories a day than most people in Western Europe did. The war economy had pulled the country out of a long depression: unemployment was less than 4 percent. And, as everyone knows, one way Americans found to express their faith in the future was to start having lots of babies.

Harold Ross, who was hypochondriacal about the magazine under the best of circumstances, had worried that the war would ruin
The New Yorker.
Instead, it transformed it. As Brendan Gill put it, many years later, “From a publication deliberately parochial in range and tone, consisting of a few funny drawings, some funny short pieces, an occasional serious short story, and the Profiles, limited enough in both length and intentions to deserve to be called profiles, it became a publication in which it was natural to look for the highest quality of reporting in almost any field of activity, from almost anywhere on earth.”

Among the writers whom Ross brought in to replenish his staff, many of whom had joined the military or been sent overseas to report, was E. J. Kahn, Jr., who did both: he fought in the Pacific while contributing a column, The Army Life. A specialist in detail, he went on to write more than three million words for the magazine. His typically pointillist account of the Berlin airlift of 1948, the first major postwar confrontation between the United States and the Soviets, is included here. Edmund Wilson, Lillian Ross, Richard Rovere, Rebecca West, and John Hersey all joined the magazine’s staff during the war, and all became exemplars of the more serious and sophisticated journalism that characterized the postwar
New Yorker.

Wilson became the magazine’s book critic in 1944, when he was forty-eight. He was hired to replace Clifton Fadiman, and he was one of the greatest book critics of his time, but he had many other talents as a writer. One was reporting. This was surprising to people who knew him. Wilson was a physically unprepossessing and mechanically challenged man. He did not know, for instance, how to drive a car. When Isaiah Berlin met him for the first time, in 1946, he was startled to find “a thick-set, red-faced, pot-bellied figure not unlike President Hoover.” And Gill
wondered, “This short, fat, breathless, diffident man—how did he so quickly gain the confidence of strangers?”

Yet Wilson was a marvelous reporter. His reporting has the same quality that we find in his criticism: he simply saw things more clearly than other people did. In 1945, he embarked on a tour of Europe to assess the state of a ruined continent. (The pieces were collected in his book
Europe Without Baedeker
, published in 1947.) His dispatches from Greece and Crete, in 1946, are masterpieces of the steady, patiently cumulative, slightly understated journalistic style that came to flourish at the magazine under the editorship of William Shawn. The Greeks had been brutalized by the Nazis; they were about to be abandoned by Britain, their Big Power ally; they were facing a civil war involving an indigenous Communist Party—and Wilson begins one report with a long description of the color differences between the Italian and the Greek landscapes.

Yet, in the end, it’s all there: the sharply observed distinction between the Socialist enthusiast and the Communist fellow traveler; the portrait of the deafness and decadence of the British imperial mentality; the sketch of the opportunistic American businessman whose kind will soon replace the British; a verbal picture of the vague, widespread, probably hopeless hope in a democratic and egalitarian future. Not long after Wilson left, fears of the Communist threat in Greece, along with anxieties about Soviet intentions in Turkey, became the justification for the announcement of the Truman Doctrine—in effect, the declaration of the Cold War.

The idea of women reporters made Ross uncomfortable, but, like many people trying to run a business during the war, he was obliged to find women to fill positions that had been vacated by men who left to join the war effort. In 1945, he (or, rather, Shawn, his deputy) hired Lillian Ross. She began as a Talk of the Town reporter, but quickly discovered what became her most famous beat, Hollywood. In common with
New Yorker
artists like Helen Hokinson and Peter Arno, Ross was brilliant at taking the air out of stuffed shirts, a species of which Hollywood has its share. Her method was just to let self-important people talk. All she usually had to do was write down what they said. Her story on the industry’s reaction to the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigation into Communist influence is funny and lacerating, as is “Picture,” her celebrated anatomy of the making of a John Huston movie, published in the magazine, in five parts, in 1952.

Lillian Ross’s writing has some of the insouciance that had characterized the tone of the prewar magazine. In 1948, a little insouciance was still possible. As it was in France and even in Russia, the immediate postwar period in America was a giddy time. The world seemed ready to begin anew; anything seemed possible. After a world war, it was hard to take congressional witch-hunting (as in Ross’s piece) or subversive-tracking G-men (as in Richard Rovere’s report on a tour of the F.B.I. headquarters, in Washington) entirely seriously. They must have seemed slightly farcical remnants of wartime anxieties, rather than what they turned out to be: the official face of Cold War America, the dark cloud that accompanied postwar prosperity.

Rovere, too, was a Shawn hire. He joined the magazine in 1944, when he was twenty-nine. Harold Ross had little interest in Washington, D.C.; he thought it was a boring city. Although he ran Janet Flanner’s Letter from Paris and Mollie Panter-Downes’s Letter from London every two weeks, he could bring himself to publish a Letter from Washington only once a month. Rovere began filing his column in December 1948, and he quickly grasped the importance of anti-Communist hysteria. He was one of the first journalists to take on Joseph McCarthy, and he wrote the Letter from Washington until 1978, the year before he died.

The magazine as a whole soon took politics, national and international, seriously enough. But the war also changed national psychology: it deprovincialized the millions of men and women who had gone overseas. A magazine that was identified by its name and its tone with America’s most cosmopolitan city, a place that, more than any other with the possible exception of Hollywood, had flourished thanks to the influx of European artists and thinkers in the 1930s and ’40s, was nicely positioned to reflect back to its readers their new sense of themselves as citizens of the world.

NOVEMBER 1, 1947

T
his magazine traffics with all sorts of questionable characters, some of them, no doubt, infiltrating. Our procedure so far has been to examine the manuscript, not the writer; the picture, not the artist. We have not required a statement of political belief or a blood count. This still seems like a sensible approach to the publishing problem, although falling short of Representative J. Parnell Thomas’s standard. One thing we have always enjoyed about our organization is the splashy, rainbow effect of the workers: Red blending into Orange, Orange blending into Yellow, and so on, right across the spectrum to Violet. (Hi, Violet!) We sit among as quietly seething a mass of reactionaries, revolutionaries, worn-out robber barons, tawny pipits, liberals, Marxists in funny hats, and Taftists in pin stripes as ever gathered under one roof in a common enterprise. The group seems healthy enough, in a messy sort of way, and everybody finally meets everybody else at the water cooler, like beasts at the water hole in the jungle. There is one man here who believes that the solution to everything is proper mulching—the deep mulch. Russia to him is just another mulch problem. We have them all. Our creative activity, whether un- or non-un-American, is properly not on a loyalty basis but merely on a literacy basis—a dreamy concept. If this should change, and we should go over to loyalty, the meaning of “un-American activity” would change, too, since the America designated in the phrase would not be the same country we have long lived in and admired.