Urban problems are universal

I must say that after a break from living in New York, which used to be known for some whimsical reason as the Big Apple and now, after the horror of the blackout, is known as the Bad Apple, I come back with the curious sensation that maybe New York is not the best place to report New York from. How's that again?

Well, you could put it quite simply and say it's another case of not seeing the wood for the trees, but I hasten to say it's not so simple. And, if it were, it would give great satisfaction, not to mention fatuous complacency, to everybody who lived outside New York. 'Is it true,' the cab driver starts, 'what they say about New York?' I used to answer, 'What do they say?' But since I know what's on their mind, mugging, violence, the perils of the streets, I now say, 'No! But it's true about Detroit.' 

On the public violence issue, alone, it's worth remembering the hard facts which came out of a survey of the 30 most populous American cities, it came out less than a year ago. The scale of violence was measured by lumping together the number of crimes of violence, from murder and rape through arson, assault, burglaries, muggings and so on. 

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, New York is pretty much bound to hold the record for arson since the borough of the Bronx, alone, with nearly 3,000 fires in one year out burns any dozen other cities. But in the general tally, New York City appears as 19th down the list. The doubtful honour of being most violent went to Detroit, Phoenix, Arizona – of all desert oases – and not far behind, Baltimore and San Francisco and Los Angeles. And that haven of the comfortably and not so comfortably retired, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. 

Let's talk about Fort Lauderdale since nobody says, 'Is it true what they say about Fort Lauderdale?' I first knew Fort Lauderdale some 35 years ago, which was a time when I first knew hundreds of other American towns because that would take us back to 1942, when I went off for six months on a lonely tour of the United States to see what the war was doing to it. The United States had then been in the war for about four months but it had been girding and revamping its industries for battle, or supplying Britain anyway, for at least 18 months. 

I spent all my days on that long and very educational trip in army camps and parachute factories and naval districts, and in gymnasiums where pigs, snaffled from the fields and sties, were being raised on concrete and given some revolutionary new feed so as to be ready for slaughter in half the usual time. And then I'd spend a night with people making bombsights and dip into the Appalachians and take down obedient notes from a patriot in a factory town which had a practical monopoly on the manufacture of ladies' heels – not bounders but actual wooden heels for ladies' shoes. He was only the first of the odd occupations who swore to me that the war would be won or lost by the production rate of his speciality. 

I remember when I was through St Augustine and Jacksonville at the northern end of the Florida peninsula and was heading south, I remember pulling out the federal guide to Florida, which had been published only a year or two before, and feeling relieved to learn that for the next couple of hundred miles or so there would be no crucial war contribution because I'd be going through fishing villages, marshy coastline sprinkled with cabbage palms and signs saying, 'Do not leave the highway. Beware of snakes' before I arrived, which I was guiltily anxious to do, in the pleasure dome of Miami Beach. 

Well, one of those fishing villages, I guess village is not quite right, it was described as 'a peaceful, small town, a retail centre with a lively fishing population' and the guide said, in the tourist fashion, that it was also 'colourful' which was enlarged by the advice to try and get there on a Thursday afternoon when the Seminole Indians from the nearby mangrove swamps came into town in their blankets and sandals to do their weekly shopping. Very colourful indeed. I made a point of juggling the calendar and I got there on a Thursday and it was true. 

Well, Fort Lauderdale has moved on. In 1942 its population, I notice, was something like 20,000. It's now 620,000. It has more high-rise hotels and condominiums than Miami Beach had ever heard of in 1942. Many of the high-rise – luxury, so-called – apartment hotels (blocks of flats) standing there today like gutted hotels in Beirut. Skeletons. never completed since the economic recession of four years ago. But it's doing, been doing, very well in the crime business and every Easter when the schools and colleges are out, legions of young people descend on the place, find no motel rooms available, don't even want to find them and bed down on the sands and that doesn't help the domestic tranquillity either. 

I think I ought to add the lovely satisfaction of my first visit to Miami Beach. As I say, I was quite brazenly looking forward to a little lotus living after my strenuous work with the armed forces, ladies' heels, the Navy men, the Chattanooga Choo Choo business and so on. Just before I got there I had a telegram from the air force whose credentials I was travelling with, along with an OK from the war department, the navy, the FBI and so on, saying that I might get an amusing story out of Miami Beach because, on the following Monday – deep secret – the air force was going to move in and commandeer all hotels. I was told not to breathe a syllable about this invasion. 

I got to Miami Beach and because I had credentials from all these government agencies, and also was the correspondent of the London Times, the chamber of commerce and the chief PR man of Miami Beach were determined to give me a hero's holiday, since they insisted, in spite of my protestations and denials, that I had recently, or two years ago anyway, just waded ashore from heroic rescue operations at Dunkirk. 

They put me in a towering suite at the Roney Plaza which was the, then, the fanciest hotel in Miami Beach (and they, as the idiom used to go), 'they showed me a good time'. I remember a glittering nightclub and large ladies rattling with ice and rocks on their fingers and their bosoms and a cheering audience and Al Jolson still belting out his assurances that he was just 'wild about Harry'. The bars were choking with carefree drinkers, for tomorrow they might die – not they, you can be sure, but their sons anyway. 

And then 24 hours went by and I was told to go along with the chief procurement officer of the air force, one of those marvellous monosyllabic Texans, like Ben Hogan, who eternally belie the popular stereotype of the gabby, showy Texan. We sat down in a large boardroom with the hotel owners of Miami Beach. The Texan wasn't there to bargain or make conversation, he was there to tell them. 

With characteristic Texas courtesy, he wished them well, hoped they were comfortable, said he knew that their first concern was to do right by the nation at war and then he asked them to call off the normal prices they got for their top suites and their single bedrooms. They obliged. 'Well, gentlemen,' he said, 'I can give you an idea of the kind of sacrifice you're eager to make by saying that the air force does not rent rooms or suites. We go by cubic yards, and we're going to give you one cent per cubic yard.' There was a dreadful pause and much frantic scratching of pens on papers and lips chattering with soundless arithmetic. 

The owner of one swank hotel began to foam at the mouth with the discovery that his prize suite would bring him, 'Do you mean to tell me, Colonel,' he put it, 'that our Flamingo Suite is going to be rented to the air force for $3 a night?' 'That,' said the Texan, 'is exactly right, sir.' 

Patriotism was at its lowest ebb that week as the diamonds were packed and the sables folded away and the guests shooed off on their way home. Thousands of air force men moved in. The big suites bedded down a dozen men, the nightclubs were turned into lecture rooms for aerial tactics and a splendid time was had by the air force trainees while the pleasure-doomed took off. It was the most satisfactory thing in my experience that ever happened to Miami Beach. 

Well, this, you may say, is understandable in wartime and then of all times the foreign picture of America is bound to be wrong. But in peace time, well, the thing that's impressed me after a spell in London is that most of the American themes that stud the British papers are British themes too. Most of the things I've talked about in the past several months, and which I imagined to be specifically American problems, are doing very well indeed in London. 

Women are parading about the abortion laws. They are, and quite right too, protesting, as they do in New York, about the leniency or sheer unimaginativeness of judges and magistrates faced with rapists. There is a universal groan from old schoolteachers about the new habit, just as British as American, of giving diplomas or graduating certificates to schoolchildren who have plainly failed to earn them. 

And while Congress is concerned about the private investments of the chairman of the budget department, the House of Commons was concerned about the relations of some of its members with corrupt businessmen. The railroads are, as with us, deep in debt. Old rock heroes are now telling us what we told them 15 years ago, that the drug habit is a sure recipe for misery. Pornography and censorship is an unresolved battle. Sport is being seduced by Mr Moneybags, and so on, and on. 

New York seems, on returning to it, like London writ large and maybe in the next week or two I shall take to reporting London from New York. More often than is comfortable, I now realise what we are both talking about is not the particular troubles of one city but a general malaise of the western world.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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