The First Impact  12282

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• The New York skyline at epitomising America (01:00)
• His origins in the UK, at Cambridge, getting his scholarship to Yale in 1932 (01:30)
• As a boy in seaside town in the north of England in the First World War; American soldiers of the time, and the American Constitution on billeting in English houses. (02:11)
• His preconceptions of America (03:00):
  • Skyscrapers (leading to pale figures)
  • Prairie, with Mississippi river (steamboats, gamblers, Mark Twain)
  • Plains, Rockies, San Francisco
• Arrival in New York (03:30)
  • New George Washington Bridge
  • 1930s Depression (04:19) – tarpaper shacks
  • Spectre of a revolution
• FDR inauguration (05:00)
• New Orleans: King Oliver, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines (05:58)
  • Alistair Cooke plays jazz piano
  • What Brits will tell Americans to look at, but they will go see the Changing of the Guard, anyway
  • 12-Bar Blues: depression, infidelity, taking train to greener pasture you know isn’t there
  • Prostitution
    • Blacks at the bottom of the underworld
    • Josie Arlington at the top of the underworld – advertised in a Blue Book, Jelly Roll Morton in her brothel; Cooke’s encounter with him “If you want to play the blues, boy, just chords … and cut out that picture show right hand”
  • House closed when she got religion. Grand tomb in the cemetery.
• Yale and the following autumn in Vermont (11:16)
• Difficulties of farming in Vermont
• Architecture, including courthouse in Newfane, VT
• The Fall colours (12:00) … explanation of how this occurs due to the sap and the poor rocky ground of VT; Barber’s Adagio for Strings, “burning out of what is poor in the soil and bitter in the leaf”; “it is essentially death that causes all the brave show”
• Chicago first stop on his grand tour of the West on first vacation; World Show; gangsters
• Prairies (15:00)
• “Get Up and Go”
• Rochester, Minnesota: Capital city of world medicine
  • His interest in medicine partly due to inheriting medical library and being a hypochondriac
  • Sioux Indians denied food allowance and rioted
  • William Mayo took care of locals
  • Medical equipment: microscope as great rarity; poor cleanliness; amputation; operating tools; Lister in the future
  • Sons taking degrees and reading
  • Writing and hearing of experiments in Munich, trying operations in Le Seuer … world’s doctors eventually coming to Rochester
  • Now 250,000 patients to Rochester Mayo Clinic every year to this small town; self-endowed and supporting clinic
  • Henry Plummer and filing system for the maximum possible time of doctor with his patients; and their greater use for research
  • Teaching hospital while they operated: ceiling mirror
  • Cooke’s medical: scars of TB from unpasteurised milk
  • Pasteurisation of milk – Mayo’s difficulties in getting local farmers to accept this: demonstration farm founded by Charlie.
  • Think again about the Prairie and its human products
• “Whatever is square comes from the mid-west; nothing but corn and bigotry” … Andrew Jackson to Henry Clay to Abraham Lincoln, William Jennings Bryan, Mark Twain and in our own time Senator Norris, Eisenhower, Admiral Nimitz, Frank Lloyd Wright, Sherwood Anderson … “If you don’t like the heat stay out of the kitchen” + “the buck stops here”: Harry Truman
• 27:00 Between Prairie and San Francisco
• William Randolph Hearst and fear of the Reds
• Sea Otters and Real Russian Invasion in 1760s of Monterey Bay – New Spain
  • gorillas v guerillas in South America joke
  • Spanish holding coast of California
  • Mustard seed they scattered along their march reminder every spring
• San Francisco: everyone falls in love with (29:10)
  • Golden Gate Bridge
  • Cable cars
  • Hills and lack of frost
  • Easy tempo of life because of hills
  • Series of hilly villages; huge but unforbidding towns
  • Polyglot: Chinese for railroads, plus other nationalities for gold rush
  • Tolerant city: co-existence; Ralph Waldo Emerson “do their own thing”
  • “Still the least monolithic of American cities” because of rebuild in hurry after 1906 earthquake
  • Sex
  • Alcatraz
  • Funeral for a dog: belonged to Joshua Norton, English eccentric trader in gold rush in 1849, went broke and mad. Self-Proclaimed Emperor of the USA. Allowed to eat and drink free in all restaurants, and had own currency and seats at the theatre. Two dogs, one of whom died. Reviewed troops at Presidia. Own foreign policy. Amicable Anglo-American resolutions. Commanded Lincoln to marry Queen Victoria. Proposed League of Nations, ordered building of a great bridge, and reclaiming land … all considered preposterous, yet all came to pass. Grave “Norton I: Emperor of the USA, Protector of Mexico”
  • Theme song of San Francisco as Bellow of fog-horn
  • Metereology of fog and average temperature in the 60s with little variation
• 39:00 Went to Harvard to study the American Language. Invitation to eat crab with H. L. Menken
  • Son of German immigrant in Baltimore
  • Coolidge and sleeping; Mencken – “How do they know? … He had no ideas and was not a nuisance”
  • Campus followers carring “The American Mercury” as avidly as the Chinese carry Chairman Mao
  • Destroy “marshmallow gentility” of then American literature: open doors to realists … Theodore Dreisler, James T. Farrell, James M. Cain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neill, Sinclair Lewis. Launched first body of genuinely first rate American literature.
  • Cooke amalgamated all Menken’s dislikes: englishmen, radio broadcasters, Methodists, golf
  • Very mild and courteous in private, preferred an opponent “who fights like a gentleman in a duel to a sailor cleaning out a waterfront saloon”
  • … No such thing as ideological truth; “to the extent that a reporter is a liberal reporter or a communist or a conservative or a republican reporter, he is no reporter at all”
  • Menken floored by depression … Could jeer at politics when it was less grave. So retired to complete “The American Language” before returning to cover party Presidential nominating conventions, including Philadelphia Henry Wallace 1948 convention … invaded by posse of radicals looking for Mencken; got them to sing “God Save the King” to their guest and then gave them beer and sandwiches. Stroke and then surrounded by ocean of books, unable to write again. But while alive “skinned everything in America that he thought pretentious, shoddy, pompous and glossily second-rate, and when high gifts are at hand, nobody can skin America like an American. He didn’t give a damn and he couldn’t be bought, though he was offered fortunes to do someone else’s bidding.” Died listening to Beethoven. Lifelong atheist “and we don’t know where he is now”. He said “If I do fetch up with the twelve apostles, I shall say ‘Gentlemen, I was wrong'”.
• 47:00 The West. Canyons. National Parks. Zion and Bryce Canyons. Geologist’s heaven. “Fossils of trees, snails and dinosaurs” but we simply stand dumb-founded before their grandeur. Plays J. S. Bach. “Here, man himself is a Johnny come lately”. This is where settlers from Asia first made their homes; to be explored

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