10
CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
of it! The queue was opposite our home, in front of a bakery.
Old men and women—the young men were either at the
front, in hospitals, or dead—waited for hours under a driving
snow for a tin of hot stew and a stale crust of bread. Fifteen
years later I saw the same sight in the United States. What
was happening to America? I asked—in this proverbial land of
plenty. I gathered extensive notes and photographs to write
a book, but never did so. Instead—fresh out of college—
I tramped the streets, and visited and revisited the employment agencies, as did twelve million others, looking for a job.
I returned briefly to Mineola, but I knew I had outgrown
it. I went to New York City, where I worked and lived, for a
time supporting myself on five dollars a week as a newspaper
reporter, sleeping in a cold-water skylighted room and eating
fifteen-cent meals at Bernarr Macfadden's Pennyteria. What I
had seen and felt made me what some might call a radical.
An American radical, yes, and somewhat of a reformer; but a
revolutionist, a Communist, or a fanatic agitator against the
American way of life, never. I am happy now that my faith in
democracy was so deeply rooted that I took no stock of any
promises other than those of my adopted country. Later, it
pained me to read of those native-born Americans who, having devoted themselves passionately to Communist pursuits,
recanted publicly—amid loud, commercialized fanfare.
New York helped complete my education in the world of
realities. Here were the headquarters of the German-American
Bund and the equally notorious Christian Front. New York
was a symbol of an America that was being corrupted daily by
the same cancers that had made a living graveyard of most of
Europe. It was in New York that I saw murder, flop-houses,
Fascism, Communism. In New York I undertook my undercover investigations for Fortune magazine—investigations that
led ultimately to the writing of my first book. New York
proved a grim tutor.
And I saw that those evils of Europe which my parents
came here to avoid were now following us to our new home,