AN AMERICAN LOOKS AHEAD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 232, 3 December 1943, Page 14

AN AMERICAN LOOKS

AHEAD

AVE you ever made or helped to make ciderwatched a case of apples transformed in the press to dust and a cup or two of juice? Some- _ thing like that happened when I interviewed Professor Allan Nevins, He is so simple, so friendly, direct, and frank that you think the interview is going famously. Then you say good-bye and realise that he has been interviewing you-that he has squeezed you dry and yet not got enough out of you to leave you compensated even in your vanity. For he is one of those terrifying people who carry facts in their heads. He is not vague when the questions come from you, and he has an uncanny knack of asking you to tell him the things you don’t know accurately. For-example: Does land in New Zealand descend from father to son? If it does, what is happening to the farms in area? What happens when a stationowner dies leaving three or four sons? Or again: Do New Zealand writers go to America for inspiration or to Britain? To Hemingway, Steinbeck and Saroyan, or to Auden, Spender and T. S. Eliot? You try to recover the initiative by asking about the Middle West or Concord’s Sleepy Hollow. Is it true, you ask, that the Middle West dominates America culturally? But there is no dominant culture in America, he tells you at once. If there were, it would not come from the Middle West. The Middle West could, perhaps, be regarded as setting the average standard, if there could be any such thing as an average in culture. But it does not dominate the theatre, or the art world, or music, or literature. Hemingway certainly worked in a newspaper office in Kansas City, but no one would call him Middle Western. Pearl BuckYou interrupt desperately to ask if it could have been political domination that was meant. "Well, if it was, it meant nothing. The two outstanding Middle Westerners in the States to-day are Henry Wallace and Wendell Willkie, and they are both hot gospellers against isolation." "And isolation, you say, is dead?"

He pauses, looks at you for perhaps half a second, then replies. "Quite dead. I have no doubt about it. There are still little centres of isolation, diehard groups here and there, but America as a whole has accepted the international facts. Isolation is lunacy, and the Americans are sensible people." "You mentioned Willkie. Is he genuine or an opportunist? We have just received One World in New Zealand. Has he thought himself into the position he takes there, or is it a pose? Does he mean what he says?" "Don’t make any mistake about Willkie. He is a big fellow-well. educated, intelligent, courageous. He means it." "But he is a Wall Street lawyer?" "He has been; and a good one. But he is a statesman to-day. One World is his own report, not something cooked up for him." "And Wallace? Has he a following?" "Henry Wallace is a different man altogether. He is an idealist-very sincere and quite disinterested. His chief interest in a sensible world would be farming. For three generations the Wallaces have conducted an agricultural journal known all over America." Food And Nationhood "How successfully is America feeding itself?" : "In general, very successfully, but there are some shortages-eggs, butter, and beef. We don’t go without these things, but we get less than we are accustomed to. In short, we suffer about enough to make food a frequent topic of conversation." "Well, professor, to take a wider sweep still, would you say that the biggest American experiment of all is succeeding? Are the Americans a nation?" He smiled, but admitted that there were some things Americans themselves were not sure about. "We would have been in trouble in this war if we had not closed the door in 1920." "Trouble with fifth columnists?" "Yes. But we have had a generation in which to make Americans out of the last Germans and Italians admitted, and they are now with us almost to a man. I don’t think one in a thousand of the Germans who have taken root in (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) America-even of the latest arrivalshas any sympathy for the Nazis." "But it was necessary to close the door. You could not have gone on accepting immigrants as fast as they came?" "No. That was beyond our powers of assimilation. But if we had any ‘aliens’ left when the war started, we haven’t any now. Pearl Harbour put an end to them." "You mean that you are now one people?" ; "So far as the war is concerned, we certainly are. How completely we are unified in other ways-culturally, for example-we don’t really know. But the process is going on all the time." The Colour Problem "What about your colour problem?" "Tt is big and nasty, but will yield to time." "You can really see daylight through it?" "Yes, if you allow me to talk in centuries." "It ig as difficult as that?" "Yes, I’m afraid it is. The problem of negro adjustment i$ being met by a series of forward steps, and each important step necessarily brings some friction. What is important to remember is that this friction is a sign of growth and improvement, not a token of repression. But the ultimate solution of the negro problem lies centuries ahead. Some people talk of sending the negro back to Africa. Of course, that is neither possible nor desirable. The negro landed in America before the Pilgrim did. He is an American as any of the rest of us. The questions of revolt, racial selfassertion, conquest of poverty, and cultural development which face the negro will have to be dealt with by white and black in friendly co-operation. Meanwhile, all thinking whites are proud of negro educators like Booker T. Washington, negro poets like Paul Lawrence Dunbar, negro novelists like Walter White, megro musicians like Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson, negro scientists like George Washington Carver. Meanwhile, we have to lift the living standards of the negro and improve our own conduct towards him." "Which you are doing, if I understand your President." "Yes, we are doing it slowly. There is no other way. But we can at least say that we are moving in the right direction. By the way, how about your Maoris? Is your practice as good as your doctrine with them?" "No, it would be ridiculous to say that it is. But they are of course entitled to all our legal privileges, and have some that the pakeha doesn’t share." "T don’t meet them in hotels and clubs." "You could. There is no discrimination against them, but their welcome is not always ardent." "You inter-marry?" "Quite often." "And the white partner does not lose caste?" "Not at all. Sometimes there is a gain -if, for example, the Maori member is of high rank. But mixed marriages are the exception of course and not the rule. "How many Maoris are there?" "About 80,000, or five per cent. of our population. In another century or two there will be no pakehas and no Maoris but only, New Zealanders." "If you keep the Japanese out." "Yes, of course. It was the Japanese . menace that brought us face to face at this lunch table. War has its compensations."