“Americans are not particularly good at sensing the real elements of another people’s culture. It helps them to approach foreigners with carefree warmth and an animated lack of misgiving. It also makes them, on the whole, poor administrators on foreign soil. . . . if Americans should have to govern large numbers of foreigners, you must expect that Americans will be well hated before they are admired for themselves.”
Alistair Cooke spoke those words on May 6, 1946, in a radio piece titled “The Immigrant Strain.” Reading them today through glasses colored by distrust, dislike, even hatred of Americans on the part of much of the Arab world, one has to ask what magnificent combination of genetics, education and instinct allowed this distinguished British observer of the American psyche to so pinpoint its essence.
Cooke perhaps was best known on this side of the Atlantic Ocean as the eloquent presenter of British imports to American television, most notably PBS’ “Masterpiece Theater.” But the inhabitants of his native land knew him as an expert character witness in the case of their American cousins.
More than one obituary and newspaper commentary that remarked upon Cooke’s death last year at age 95 likened him to an earlier foreign observer of democracy and all things American, Alexis de Tocqueville. It was and is an apt comparison.
Cooke’s voice may be silent, but the world is not without his legacy, a compilation of 58 years of his BBC broadcasts titled “Letter From America: 1946-2004” (Knopf, 516 pages, $34).
From national holidays to political contests to summers by the sea in the Hamptons, Cooke detailed and explained issues and events — large and small — to his British listening audience. He was particularly drawn to describing American personalities, among them Fred Astaire, Duke Ellington, Charles Lindbergh, H.L. Mencken and Martin Luther King Jr.
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Readers of this anthology will be enriched not only by Cooke’s command of the language but also by the Englishman’s kind-spirited and powerful love for his adopted country.
In a day when this great nation is often described as more divided than at any other time in history, Cooke’s Oct. 16, 1969, broadcast is worth reading:
“In a self-governing Republic — good government in some places, dubious in others — three thousand miles wide, eighteen hundred miles long, with fifty separate states which in many important matters have almost absolute powers — with two hundred million people drawn from scores of nations, what is remarkable is not the conflict between them but the truce.”