Coast to Coast, my first book, was first published more than half a century ago. It is not long in geological terms, but it is quite a chunk in the life of a nation, and since 1956 the passage of history has transformed the subject of the work, America.
The United States has experienced such triumphs and such traumas since then, such colossal challenges, such tragic and marvellous adventures, such shifts of confidence and reputation, that it has virtually reinvented itself. It has sent its rockets to Mars and the Moon! It has been humiliated in war! It has been loved and loathed, admired, abhorred, envied and distrusted. And in the years after I wrote the book the USA became so incomparably rich and powerful that it was the only Great Power on earth.
None of this I foresaw when, in 1956, I ended a year’s travelling fellowship in the United States, and offered Coast to Coast to my sponsors in lieu of the report I was obliged to present. I had come from a Britain that was still war-scarred, poverty-stricken and disillusioned. I found an America bursting with bright optimism, generous, unpretentious, proud of its recent victories, basking in universal popularity but still respectful of older cultures. I did not know it then, and nor did America, but chance had brought me across the Atlantic at the very apex of American happiness. I doubt if there has ever been a society, in the history of the world, more attractive than this republic in the decade after the Second World War.
Of course it had its downsides. Crime and corruption was rampant. Racism was ugly. The bigot Senator McCarthy was on the prowl. But it was a simple, innocent time for most Americans. Television was in its infancy, personal computers were inconceivable, McDonalds and Starbucks were unknown, drugs were hard to come by, and the same popular music had a guileless appeal for almost everybody – the song ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ was the theme tune, so to speak, of my introduction to the Great Republic.
Can you wonder that Coast to Coast was written in enjoyment? That year’s wandering in America, in the prime of my youth, through a country so buoyant with success and generosity, was one of the very best presents of my whole life. I have been back there every year since, and if the United States of America is not always so beguiling today, is not always regarded around the world with the same grateful affection, nevertheless I love it still, and look back to my first journeys there as to a dream of young times and aspirations.
No matter that the America of this book exists no longer. In my mind its soul goes marching on!
Trefan, 2009