What Is The Bronx?

What is The Bronx? Is it a State?

Haven't you really any aristocracy?

How do you clean the flues in the Empire State Building?

Why are all the books on the Civil War about the South?

Did close harmony originate in America? Are the singers in pain? If not, why not?

These artless British queries were inspired by the presence of thousands of U.S. fighting men in Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand. OWI undertakes to answer such questions in a weekly radio program called Answering You. In England the program has risen to fourth place on BBC's "inspirational" list, with an estimated audience of 5,000,000.

The $64 Question. According to the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, the favorite Australian poser concerning the U.S. is the Negro problem. Sydney folks wanted to know whether a Negro could become President, how the U.S. proposed to settle the Negro problem "in view of the coming recognition of the equality of other races with the white." They also wanted to know whether Mary Pickford was still married, what the Statue of Liberty represented, how much to believe of the Hollywood version of the U.S., whether the people prefer nightclubs to churchgoing, etc.

OWI has received more & more queries from matrimonially minded women ("Would I enjoy living in Kansas?") and others startled by the love-making of far-from-home U.S. soldiers ("When I go out with an English boy, he might want to kiss me, but . .. the American soldier!").

Double Talk. The larger questions are often hard to handle. Lacking any clear-cut answer to the Negro problem, for instance, OWI has put Paul Robeson and other "experts" on the air to talk around and about it. Inconclusive as this is, OWI has at least tried to make a fair presentation of the issues.

Once, at least, OWI has been glad to fall back on deliberate double talk. That was when a bewildered Australian asked what double talk was. OWI dug up a fluent Bronx taxicab driver named Elmer Zittenfeld. Elmer explained that he was about to show the English how to wriggle out of losing a political argument. Said he: "Well, the way I see it is this. If President Roosevelt refuses to greetscong the mendefresh on lend-lease, the Treasury Department will be forced to reconstram all war bonds issued since the 18th of frammish. On the other hand, if you analyze this from a sedenian point of view, a publicate of the fidicium might prelegude the whole election."

OWI hoped that Elmer's explanation would not wholly discombobulate a program seriously intended to inform.

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