A worker paints an insignia on the wing of a Navy plane in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1944.
(Library of Congress)
He was, to americans of a certain age, the urbane, well-bred, well-read, well-connected Englishman who hosted “Omnibus,” a cultural lighthouse that shone over the wasteland of network television in the 1950s. Later, from 1971 to 1992, he presented “Masterpiece Theatre,” the American shop window for the best drama from the BBC.
In Britain, Alistair Cooke was perceived differently. A Lancastrian, born the son of a metalworker in Manchester in 1908, he won a scholarship to Cambridge. In the 1930s he came to Yale as a Harkness Fellow, and for good measure to Harvard as well, ditching his unappealing name of Alfred for a more attractive one. He became the BBC’s film critic and NBC’s London correspondent. His experience in America had shown him his destiny. As European politics withered in the rush to war, he moved permanently to New York, acquiring citizenship in 1941. He remained a continuing presence on British airwaves. His weekly “Letter From America” was broadcast by the BBC for nearly 60 years, ending only weeks before his death, at 95, in March 2004.
Some—including his fiancée, who ended their relationship—questioned his defection to safer shores in Britain’s most perilous hours. In truth, he did wonders for the Allied war effort, interpreting the American character to a British public conditioned hitherto by the likes of Cagney, Bogart, and Shirley Temple. He was as wont to explain the cabals of congressional back rooms as the hardships of an Appalachian miner. He did so with immaculate style, his every sentence an embarkation on a fascinating miniature voyage that would often deliver the rapt listener to an unexpected destination. His voice was smooth, velvety, hypnotic, with an intonation that to Americans sounded patrician British, to Britons that of America’s educated East Coast. His idols of form were H. L. Mencken and Mark Twain, both masters of popular enlightenment through cant-free prose.
The author, several decades before “Masterpiece Theater”
As a child I remember hearing his broadcasts in gray, rationed, bomb-shattered London, describing America in arresting detail. The popular perception, assisted by glimpses of lavish color ads in occasional Lifes and Saturday Evening Posts for foods not seen in Britain for years, and by the bounty of GIs, far from home, an endless source of Life Savers and Hershey bars for grateful children, was that America, with its unbounded generosity, was a paradise that had escaped the harshness of the war that clamped Europe in its ruthless and inexorable grip.
As Cooke realized, it was a misleading, inaccurate conception that even Washington failed to appreciate. He applied for permission to visit war plants and military bases across the nation, intending to talk to hundreds of Americans, from senior administrators to laborers. Rubber was even scarcer than gasoline, but he was granted permission to buy a set of retread tires. Over many weeks he headed south to Florida, then via the Gulf to Texas and the Southwest, up to California and Oregon and over the Rockies to the Midwest, and on to New England.
He found communities whose upheaval was terminal. The little town of Charlestown, Indiana, unrecognizable after the federal installation of a smokeless-powder plant had imported thousands of workers. Deming, a small town in New Mexico where almost all the young men, enlisted together, had vanished when the Japanese overran Bataan. He even gained access to Manzanar, one of several sun-parched desert camps in California where thousands of Japanese-Americans were summarily corralled, leaving homes, businesses, and possessions behind in West Coast cities. “I drove away … none too proud of the showing we had made in running the first compulsory migration of American citizens in American history.”
The resulting book was a unique testimony on how the homeland had coped with the most cataclysmic war in history. But with hostilities over, his publisher thought that the public appetite for such an account had vanished. The manuscript was tossed into a closet in Cooke’s Fifth Avenue apartment. Six decades later, just before he died, it was found. Its historical merit leaped from its pages. Although “long past deadline,” as says the veteran newspaperman Harold Evans in his foreword to The American Home Front: 1941–1942 (Atlantic Monthly Press, 327 pages, $24.00), it nonetheless affirms Cooke’s enduring place as a great twentieth-century reporter.
—George Perry
Why Do We Say...?
Rooster
Rooster is the common term today for a male chicken, and most people utter it without realizing that it is a euphemism, a “good” word employed in place of a “bad” one.
The word rooster is an Americanism, and its appearance in the written record toward the end of the eighteenth century helps signal a major cultural and linguistic change, as people began to be much more fastidious when speaking of sex, death, and their bodies. This is the period when bosom, limb, and donkey replaced breast, leg, and ass; when breeches and trousers became inexpressibles, unmentionables, and nether garments; when died was superseded on gravestones by passed away, laid to rest, and fell asleep; and when the sexually potent barnyard bull was converted into the cow brute, cow’s spouse, and gentleman cow.
The oldest example of rooster in The Oxford English Dictionary comes from the diary of a 12-year-old girl, Anna Green Winslow, who was sent in 1770 from her home in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to school in Boston. A bright and sensitive observer of the contemporary scene, she noted in her journal for March 14, 1772: “Their other dish … contain’d a number of roast fowls —half a dozen, we suppose, & all roosters at this season, no doubt.”
Rooster’s origin is self-evident, referring to the bird’s habit of perching on high (ultimately from the Old English hrost, the spars or rafters of a house). Anna certainly didn’t invent the word; she picked it up from her elders, who had begun using it in preference to cock, the bird’s traditional name for a millennium. The Old English name is innocent enough, mostly likely deriving from the bird’s crowing ku-ku-roo, but it made newly genteel Americans nervous. They couldn’t say or hear the word without thinking of its other, anatomical meaning.
Americans were far ahead of their British cousins in latching on to rooster. Fifty years after Anna’s observation, James Flint still felt that he had to explain to readers back home in his Letters From America (1822) that the “Rooster, or he-bird [is the] Cock, the male of the hen.”
This squeamishness led to a raft of other changes during the nineteenth century. For example, Americans began speaking of haystacks instead of haycocks; of children’s riding horses instead of cockhorses; of roaches and rooster-roaches instead of cockroaches; of rooster fighting instead of cockfighting; of the rooster of a gun rather than its cock; and of weather roosters and weathervanes instead of weathercocks. The nervousness even extended to people’s names. We know the author of Little Women as Louisa May Alcott because her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, changed his surname from Alcox, itself a euphemistic distortion of the earlier, more highly charged Alcocke (in turn, possibly, from Allcock).
Other evasions appear to have been proposed with tongue in cheek, among them roostercade for cockade, rooster swain for coxswain, the doubly euphemistic rooster’s shirt for cocktail, and, a rare triple euphemism, rooster-and-ox story for cock-and-bull tale. The apparent jocularity shows what was on people’s minds, however. And sometimes there was no joking. Well into the twentieth century, inhabitants of the Ozarks were still watching their words very carefully. As Vance Randolph reported in a 1928 article in Dialect Notes, “I myself have seen grown men, when women were present, blush and stammer at the mere mention of such commonplace bits of hardware as stop-cocks or pet-cocks, and avoid describing a gun as cocked by some clumsy circumlocution as she’s ready to go or th’ hammer’s back.”
All this may seem quaintly funny in our present liberated age. Yet we continue to say rooster (as well as donkey and haystack) and, when presented with the rooster’s spouse at the dinner table, we are likely to ask for white meat or dark meat instead of breast or thigh and for a drumstick instead of a leg. Thus we honor our ancestors’ hang-ups. We ourselves have none, of course.
—Hugh Rawson
Now You Can Offer S--- On A Shingle
...To 100 Friends!
In How to Feed an Army: Recipes and Lore From the Front Lines (Collins, $15.95), J. G. Lewin and P. J. Huff survey the solutions to a problem that, as they say, has been vexing our armed forces “from the day Thomas Mifflin took over as the first quartermaster general in August 1775.” Dozens of recipes chart the gustatory history of the American soldier, most of them giving directions on how to feed 100 troops and, should this be beyond the needs of the reader, 10. The offerings include “slow roasted rabbit” from the War of 1812; the famously obdurate hardtack of the Civil War; “Sweet and Sour Frankfurters” from the Vietnam years; and an advanced-sounding delicacy enjoyed by our forces in Iraq, “Zesty Rotini Pasta Salad.” But lest the zest of the rotini beguile us from the bitter realities of war, here is a trio of sandwiches in the War Department’s 1942 TM-405: Technical Manual for the Army Cook: “bean rarebit—baked beans, chopped cheese, chopped onions, salt, pepper, and catsup; nut and raisin—chopped nuts, chopped raisins, mayonnaise; tuna fish and beet—flaked tuna, minced cooked beets, mayonnaise, salt, and also pepper (can also substitute salmon or sardines).”
Book $ale
The Top 10 Treasures From Abe’s First 10 Years
This June marked the tenth anniversary of Abebooks.com, an Internet operation that has made things much easier for American Heritage editors along with countless thousands of other people.
The Canada-based company—Advanced Book Exchange—sells used books —or, more accurately, connects people who want to buy a particular book with a store that has it in stock. Since Abebooks.com’s tendrils extend to 13,500 independent booksellers, it represents a pretty healthy inventory, more than 80 million volumes.
What this means is mirrored in the experience of one of this magazine’s editors. Long ago his father told him that the first book he remembered reading was a turn-of-the-century opus by Ruth Kimball Gardiner called In Happy Far-Away Land. For more than 20 years the editor tried to track down a copy on the most remote shelves of used-book stores and through ads in the trade magazines. No luck. Then the editor discovered Abebooks.com, typed in the title, and instantly found himself with a choice of four copies. He bought one for $22.50 and presented it to his astonished father on his ninety-fourth birthday. (Warning: You won’t always like the book as much as you did when you were a child.)
Bargains abound on Abebooks.com, but for its tenth birthday the company chose to examine the high end of the scale and published a list of the 10 most expensive books it has ever sold. Here they are:
#1 - $65,000 - The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Published in September 1937, this first edition is in its original dust jacket. Only 1,500 copies of the first edition were printed, and they were sold out by mid-December.
#2 - $65,000 - Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing to the Parliament of England, by John Milton
Published in 1644, this pamphlet by the future author of the epic poem Paradise Lost defended the freedom of the press at a time when the English government was suppressing its opponents’ publications.
#3 - $60,000 - (Utopia) De optimo reip. statu, deque nove insula, by Sir Thomas More
More became a Catholic martyr when Henry VIII beheaded him. This 1518 fourth edition outlines his ideal state and pleads for religious tolerance and universal education.
#4 - $60,000 - Poems, by John Donne, with elegies on the author’s
Little written by Donne appeared in print in his lifetime, but hundreds of manuscript copies were circulated by hand. This 1633 first edition was the first collection of his poems.
#5 - $57,500 - Historical, Military, and Picturesque Observations on Portugal, by Lt. Col. George Thomas Landmann
This 1818 first edition is described as “the most beautiful illustrated English book on Portugal of the period.” Landmann fought in the Peninsular War, and his book details sieges and battles.
#6 - $46,061 - Koran
This handwritten version of the Koran was published in the Arabic year of 1152 (1731 in the Western world).
#7 - $38,000 - Historical and statistical
information respecting the history, condition, and prospects of the Indian tribes of the United States, by Henry Rowe Schoolcraf
In 1847 Congress asked Schoolcraft to conduct this survey. The result is one of the most important works about the American Indian.
#8 - $36,059 - Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, by J. K. Rowling
The 1997 first edition
of Rowling’s debut book is hard to
find, as the hardcover print run was just
500 copies.
#9 - $27,582 - Traité d’anatomie et de physiologie, avec des planches...
A very rare medical handbook, published in 1786 in Paris and bound in leather.
#10 - $26,500 - 1984, by George Orwell
Orwell was hospitalized with tuberculosis just after the book’s publication in 1949 and never left the hospital alive, so signed copies are scarce. Some were given to hospital staff; this one is inscribed “For Elly with regards, Geo. Orwell.”
