Honest Traveler

A SOUTHERNER DISCOVERS NEW ENGLAND -- Jonathan Daniels -- Macmillan ($3).

"The whole procession of the American years," says Jonathan Daniels, "has been illumined--or at least inflamed--with the works of men who hastened from the North to describe the South. Unfortunately there has been scarcely any perceptible movement from the opposite direction."

Mr. Daniels, 38-year-old editor of the Raleigh, N. C. News and Observer, author of A Southerner Discovers the South (TIME, July n, 1938), took the road north a year ago this spring. Gifted with a distinctly non-Northern journalistic ease, he has written an honest, flavorsome book about New England.

Often Traveler Daniels says in his velvety way that he didn't like it. Of the modern motor highway: "Instead of Connecticut, the rider sees mile after mile of identical right of way prettified with a million dollars' worth of grass and tree. ..." He has a quiet eye for the significantly grotesque: "A gymnasium which looks like a cathedral backs up in New Haven to a dark yard where boys play ball beside a huge garbage heap where first base ought to be."

Such personal notes are not random but related steps in a study of New England society, the old with the new, as searching as it seems casual. Southerner Daniels put up at the St. Botolph Club in Boston for well-preserved cultural atmosphere. Shivering in a New Hampshire April, he talked to tough farmers and foresters about the Government's work in timber salvage, learned that New England produces less than a fourth as much high-grade timber as it could and should. In Concord, N. H., he watched the State Legislature in session ("the people themselves seemed to have come to Concord, and they looked poor as the land from which many of them came").

In bleak Manchester, N. H., and in muddy Fall River, Mass., he talked to men on park benches, men in committee offices about the death of New England's great mills, the difficult struggle to get small industries into the empty buildings. Against the small Jewish manufacturers, whom he guessed to be more like the Yankees of old than the Yankee descendants are, he saw race prejudice growing among the misled unemployed poor. "The poor who hate seem to me as sad as the pitiful who are hated. It is the seashore and schoolhouse anti-Semites who make me sick."

Of New England's polyglot labor he heard from a rich, sardonic old Yankee in Groton:

"Look at the workers in the Dan River Mills [Danville, Va.] and then look up here. We're down to the Syrians."

"What about the Irish?"

"They're Ambassadors to England."

Elsewhere Daniels heard New Englanders boast of their skilled men, found plenty of them in the aircraft industries at Bridgeport and Hartford. At Harvard he rather oddly saw no trace of the "Harvard man of supercilious and pernicious legend." Other things he liked and respected: Exeter Academy (though "a school cannot maintain strength where biology does not"); Nan tucket ("without benefit of archaeologists, the fishing town is truer in persistence than the colonial capital [Williamsburg, Va.] in restoration"). When he heard New Englanders talking about "quality" as their competitive asset, he was able to agree. He left, he says, "openly and frankly full of admiration."

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