America Through Alistair Cooke’s Eyes and Words
Until my first trip to London in1985, I knew Alistair Cooke primarily as the host of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre. So, it was late on a Friday night on that first visit that I turned on the radio in my hotel room to explore what was on the air. Iwas jetlagged and as an American, all I was expecting to hear was music. However,
what I happened upon on was Cooke’s weekly Letter from America, on Radio 4, a 15-minute radio essay in which he explained an aspect of life in American—current events, politics, traditions, quirks, or whatever he was interested in or thought was important that week. His was an interesting perspective, a different one that prompted me not only to give more thought to how events in the US lookedfrom outside the country but also to listen for ways that Cooke’s interpretation indicated subtle differences between the US and the UK.
Between May 1946 and February 2004, Cooke recorded 2,869 broadcasts of Letter from America on BBC Radio (called the Home Service until end of the 1967 when it was become Radio 4). Not surprisingly for that period of time, the BBC archived very few of his recording until the 1990s. Many of the older ones were thought lost until last year when two radio fans, David Henderson in Wiltshire and Roy Whittaker in Newquay, presented the BBC with over 650 lost recordings they had made separately during the 1970s and 1980s. The men retrieved the boxes of tapes from their attics, from their cellars, even from a fertilizer spreader. (The BBC is currently restoring them and they will all be released at the website: www.bbc.co.uk/letterfromamerica.)
Recently, I’ve had two opportunities to listen again to many of Cooke’s letters.In 2013 I presented a BBC Radio 4 Series called InAlistair Cooke’s Footsteps(www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01npjsg).For this radio series, Bill Law (the producer) and I took a road trip, starting in New York and then stopping in Pittsburgh, Chicago, New Orleans, and Washington DC. I revisited some of the themes about America that Cooke returned to in his letters—immigration, jazz, sports, the American Dream, race, social issues, and more.Last month I recorded another BBC radio program in which other panelists (American and British) and I commented on Letter from America recordings about important events in the US in the 1970s, including women’s liberation, Watergate, Richard Nixon Muhammad Ali, Patty Hearst, and Elvis Presley (www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03zj367www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03zj367).
The letters I’ve listened to offer more than an interesting summation and insightful commentary about then-current events. The archive isintriguing both for what it includes and for what it leaves out. Repeatedly Cooke shows amazing prescience about certain issues, for example the evolution of the press’s appetite for new(real and speculative) in the US. Yet consciously or unconsciously, he failed to pay attention to other events and movements that were reshaping culture and US. For example there is no commentary about the incredible music of that time or how black culture was becoming part of the mainstream in America, helped substantially by the British music invasion. Looking back, it seems odd that a British person like Cooke would ignore this. It does seem like the “Sound of Young America” was out of his earshot and his social interactions.
Sometimes I agreed with Cooke’s thoughts in his letter; at other times I thought he must live in some well-to-do person’s romantic myth of life in the US.Then I recalled his personal circumstances. Cooke was an aspiring immigrant in the US. He wanted to achieve the American Dream of success. That meant fitting in—i.e. using silence to let people in the peer group you aspire to assume that you agree with some of their peculiar and perhaps disturbing views. Being a dedicated, curious and thoughtful journalist, Cooke had the freedom to discuss and challenge his peers on many issues, but not on all. Cooke’s particular dilemma is reflected almost perfectly in where he lived—on Fifth Avenue on the north side of 96th Street. At the time this location was referred to as the “hem of Harlem.” I wonder how many times during the 1970s, and even in the 1980s Cooke came out of his building and went uptown, instead of downtown.
