Inside the USA by John Gunther 1947 First Edition

John Gunther's Inside series were among the most popular books of reportage of the 1930s and 1940s. For Inside U.S.A., Gunther set out from California and traveled the entire country. His frank, lucid observations along the way--on race relations, labor, the Tennessee Valley Authority, farm life, the politics of the big cities, and much else--yield fascinating insight into life fifty years ago.America," Winston Churchill said, "stands at this moment at the summit of the world." The moment was August, 1945. Nazi Germany had fallen, the atomic bomb had been dropped, imperial Japan was about to surrender, the European Allies were battered and spent, and the United States bestrode the narrow world. It was a new America, hardly known to the world--or to itself. This was the America that John Gunther portrayed in the vivid and acute reportage of Inside U.S.A., which is to be reissued this month by the New Press.This book, now half a century old, is an astonishing tour de force. It presents a shrewd, fast-moving, sparkling panorama of the United States at this historic moment of apparent triumph. . . .Inside U.S.A. does not pretend to be a profound analysis of American civilization, in the manner of Tocqueville and Bryce. But Gunther had his own quiver of penetrating questions. His objective was to identify the forces that made "this incomparable Golconda of a country" move. Wherever he went, he asked, Who runs this state or city? What are the basic and irreversible sources of power--social power, economic power, political power? He interviewed more than 900 people and emerged with more than a million words of notes. And he did it all himself, without professional researchers or stringers. . . .