Coast to Coast (28 page)

C
hicago has always had, though, a flourishing intellectual and cultivated minority, and it was the centre of the great Middle Western literary and artistic movement which had its heyday between the wars. Around its wide perimeters today there are a number of handsome suburbs which, without having pretensions to intellectual distinction, nevertheless represent a comfortably literate way of living, and have not their exact equivalents or equals, perhaps, elsewhere in the world. The word “suburbia” has not acquired those overtones which taint it in England, but it is superseded, all the same, by a grander eponym: exurbia. In the hubbub of American urban life it is only commonsense to live in a suburb, though some of the more earnest sociologists profess to be disturbed about the movement away from the centres of towns; and the large stores cater for this trend by opening excellent subsidiary versions of their enormous emporia, scattered about the more expensive outskirts of the cities, and enticing the affluent ever farther from the tumultuous ad-mass. So successful have they been, indeed, and so vigorous is this new ex-urban life, that many American cities already feel oddly hollow in the middle, as though the meaning has been sucked out of them. All the energy is in ex-urbia: well-tended, clean, prosperous, complete with its own rich little shopping centres, teeming with clubs, discussion groups and myriad other manifestations of the American social appetite. Old loyalties have been transferred. The Middle West is full of intense local patriotisms, but nowadays they are less often inspired by Detroit or Chicago, say, than by such desirable appendages as Grosse Pointe, Michigan, or Lake Forest, Illinois.

Lake Forest is characteristic of these well-heeled communities. The
best way to reach it from Chicago, if you can endure forty minutes of conviviality, is to persuade some friend to take you on the evening “dub car”. The American railroad, though constantly maligned, can still be surprisingly personal and flexible in its services—as anyone knows who has discussed a trans-continental ticket at Pennsylvania Station in New York. There is none of the monolithic detachment of British Railways about these stubbornly lively enterprises. What the customer wants, he gets (providing it pays). Accordingly it is not difficult, on many American lines, for a group of commuting businessmen to arrange for a private coach to be hitched each morning to the 8.15 and each evening to the 6.38; and quite a modest subscription is enough to acquire membership of such a mobile club, and to share the services of the calm and adaptable negro servant who travels with it every day.

So each evening at Lake Forest, when the club train pulls in, a most cheerful and well-acquainted group of businessmen emerges from its cushioned recesses, and parts with fond expressions of fraternity. How comfortable a process this is, compared with that dreary daily grind from Waterloo to Oxshott! There they sit in their swivel chairs, a glass of bourbon in the hand, a selection of friends round about, an attentive lackey padding among the seats, a stack of new magazines, a whole coach to wander in: instead of those dark Satanic cabinets that are all too often provided by the Southern Region, with their grey and ageing upholstery, their cramped corridors, and the squeezing anxious crowd that presses into them. Moreover, when these fortunate Illinoians reach the little station at Lake Forest, another pleasant circumstance awaits them; for there parked beside the line are the long polished rows of their limousines and shooting-brakes, a well-dressed wife at each wheel, an expectant child or two skipping about the seat, a couple of poodles or a huge lugubrious mastiff peering through the back window. There are probably no commuters anywhere in the world who travel home more comfortably than the burghers of Lake Forest.

But there are disadvantages, not always apparent, to so soothing a progression. The wife in her black nylon looked very nice from the station platform, but inside the car there is a dauntingly purposeful air to her ensemble. The Lake Forester will, however, be more depressed than surprised by her air of impending festivity, for dinner with the Rodney Bells, or the Howard J. Spriggses, the Afschleters or the Edmund Browns is something that befalls him frequently. They need only run back and drop the children while he freshens up; it is rarely black tie in America, and he is therefore able to step with scarcely a pause from club car to cocktails.

But the evening is likely to be an agreeable one. The guests will find themselves in one of two kinds of houses: a comfortable and well-preserved little mansion built by some complacent plutocrat in the early years of the century, and having a park-like garden and an atmosphere if not actually horsey, at least distinctly doggy: or a house of uncompromising modernity, with mobiles floating about the drawing-room, a hostess who keeps Abyssinian cats, and a host who talks about the G-factor of the roof. Few American households have servants. The wife cooks the meal herself, slipping a crisp and colourful apron over her dress, and inviting her women guests (as the men drink their cocktails) to join her from time to time in the kitchen. If she is unlucky she may be burdened with an epicurean husband, for “knowing about cooking” has become as popular an esoteric exercise among American men as it has among British (though probably no American takes it quite so seriously as the Oxford don who subscribes to
Le
Figaro
for its daily recipes). If so, it is the husband who leads the way into the kitchen, placing his Martini on the top of the refrigerator as he demonstrates his techniques. He is sure to have acquired the very best equipment: rows of heat-proof dishes, rolls of aluminium foil, and an oven at shoulder height, so that he need not strain his knees bending for the joint. The Americans do not take their eating lightly, and there is no dishing up an old stew or reaching for the sausages when Lake Foresters entertain.

Among many of them, on the other hand, there is a determined rejection of formality, a vestigial relic of frontier times or an inherited reaction (which they would fervently disclaim) against the imperial splendours of Europe. There are many houses in Lake Forest where you can rely upon polished oak tables, monogrammed napkins and candles; but you should be prepared, when you accept an invitation, to eat your dinner literally on the floor. It is the custom to serve the meal in the manner of a buffet, the guests queueing a little self-consciously while the host and hostess, at the head of the serving table, ladle the soup or give encouragement. Having received your portion, you must then dispose yourself about the house to eat it; and for some reason or other—I am never quite sure whether it is intentional or not—there are not enough chairs to go round, so that the more girlish of the ladies, and the more resigned or flirtatious of the men, must sit on the carpet. I know of few less relaxing exercises than that of eating a plate of curried prawns with one hand, clutching the support of a neighbouring chair leg with the other, trying to avoid destroying a priceless china dog with one’s feet, and discussing the Meaning of Truth with one’s companion.

For the conversation is unlikely to be entirely frivolous. You cannot
depend upon an evening of utter escapism, as you can in England; you will meet no girls, however anxiously you search, of an utter emptiness of intellect, and few men whom you can trust implicitly not to talk about the next war. The Middle Westerner has reached his apogee of creature comfort by a commendable gift for labour and application; and he is still, beneath a veneer of sophisticated congeniality, an earnest and a serious person. So is his wife. I remember all too clearly a conversation I had with one Lake Forest woman, sitting on just such a floor, eating just such a curry, in which she displayed some anxiety to arrange in corresponding order the Kings of England and the Presidents of the United States; and in which, while she rattled through the Georges and the Williams, hesitating only over the details of a year or two, I floundered distressingly among the Presidents. Who was the fifth President of the United States? For that matter, who was the fourth? Was Van Buren a President? Who was Millard Fillmore? Luckily she did not notice my inadequacies; for the conversation spread, and soon the entire company was busy discussing the relationship between Catherine de Medici and Bonnie Prince Charlie. There is always an encyclopaedia in such a house as this; and the children, poor things, sometimes seemed to me to be weighed down with reference books and inducements to learning. It is an atmosphere healthily demanding accuracy of mind. Though you can survive the wildest opinions, you should try to avoid errors of fact; unless, that is, you are an expert, for expertise is sancrosant, the specialist is never doubted, and a few technicalities interlarded with authority will make almost any statement acceptable.

The evening is likely to be dominated by women. This is not surprising, for not only are they generally more intelligent, but they form a closely interwoven society of their own. Miss Freya Stark refers in one of her books, describing some very different society, to “the universal sisterhood of women”. In the well-to-do suburbs of the Middle West this nebulous mystery is reinforced by the American women’s invincible urge to join things. The impression you take away with you from the dinner party is likely to be that while the male guests had not seen each other for a month or two, the women had spent most of that day together, and the day before too, and would be meeting again tomorrow morning if not for breakfast, at least for morning coffee. The highly integrated social activities of these ladies are naturally not quite so straightforward as those of the ladies of Cranbury, New Jersey. There must be Presbyterians in Lake Forest, but they are a great deal more subdued, and I have heard religious opinions expressed there that would lead to agonizing reappraisals of social standing among the simplicities
of Cranbury. The fêtes are smarter and more expensive; the discussion groups more inclined to talk about Lawrence Durrell and less likely to read
Ivanhoe
aloud in relays; the dance committees much more anxious to secure a foreign title or two for effect. For it cannot be denied that many of the people of Lake Forest, though in theory thorough democrats, have at the back of their minds some slight yearning for a more aristocratic form of society. Many are the obscure English baronets or German princes who are paraded in their drawing-rooms or casually introduced to envious neighbours. Subtle indeed are the means by which the arrival of such a worthy is made known to the social columns of the local paper, or even to the gossip pages of the Chicago Press. You can meet your thrusting self-made Americans in Lake Forest, proud embodiments of the old legend about office boy to high executive; but you can meet at least as many who will drop a hint about “the old place” in England, or assiduously preserve the faintly European accent they acquired at Harvard, or drive about in an English sports car, or wear clothes of unmistakably Savile Row ancestry. I was once walking down a road in Lake Forest when I heard from over a garden wall the beguiling wail of bagpipes. Could it be, I wondered, that the Stockyards Pipe Band of Chicago, a well-known Middle West institution, had come out to Lake Forest in charabancs for some fashionable carnival? Or was it the band of some ancient regiment of the line, shipped to the Middle West by the ever-active British Information Services, as they once shipped two London buses complete with drivers and direction plates to Hackney Wick? I looked over the garden gate and there, marching solemnly up and down the lawn, were the pipers, two young men in kilts who happened to be identical twins. They were watched by an elderly lady of distinguished appearance, dressed in tweeds, who sat in a chair at the head of the lawn surrounded by admirers, as if she was ordering the sea to retreat, or was expecting the head of John the Baptist. This was a characteristic Lake Forest occasion. The lady was Dame Flora Macleod, head of the Clan Macleod; the twins were her two grandsons; and they had come to America to meet members of their clan and invite them to visit the ancestral castle in Scotland, a prospect of sublime appeal for those many Lake Foresters to whom the lure of ancient stones and immemorial titles is irresistible.

Lake Forest, indeed, has its own nobility, inhabiting the fine houses that stand along the shore of Lake Michigan. Some of these houses are very posh indeed, beyond the means of all but the most successful Italian marquises, and of a state of preservation and convenience utterly beyond the ambitions of the average English Duke. One such house has
a splendid staircase leading down to the water, embellished with a series of Grecian figures; and such is the rudeness of the Chicago climate, and such the conscientiousness of the owner, that when these statues are not being used, so to speak, they are enveloped in transparent containers, and stand there modestly and mysteriously muffled, ghosts in shrouds of cellophane. Lake Forest, like a hill station in the evening of an Empire, has its own subtle social tiers, its own barons, landgraves and caciques. It has its sporting club, too, to which in the long summer evenings the commuters are whisked for parties, just as the Colonel, home from evening stables, would be conveyed to Gezira for dinner with the Lauries of the 9th. This tight little community, living so comfortably among its trees and shady lawns, no longer feels the magnetic pull of the big city, nor the call of the land, but has evolved its own polished and intricate civilization. It has its failings of pretension, perhaps, but it shares a grace and an easy style that is one of the more attractive American contributions to social progress.

S
ome other such contributions have been more extreme or experimental in character. “We tried Communism,” a man from a refrigerator factory observed to me one day, “but we decided to change over to capitalism, and I guess it’s working pretty well, on the whole, like it usually does.”

There are very few places in the world where a man of business could make such a remark as this, and not many people, asked to guess where the refrigerator factory was, would plump for the Middle West of America, the prime forge of free enterprise and the competitive system. Nevertheless, in the history of the United States there have been many examples of little communistic settlements which were established on American soil, flourished for a few years, and then faded into obscurity and oblivion. In the days of the old American individualism such expressions of ideological belief were regarded as religious heresies rather than subversive activities, and many were the economic cranks and political visionaries who were welcomed to America and permitted to establish their vestigial Utopias as they pleased. Because of the dates of its settlement, the Middle West absorbed many of these experiments (just as Chicago received many of the German liberals who left Europe after the 1848 revolution), and from time to time as you wander through its States you may come across relics of their fervours, crumbling communal halls and dwelling-houses, estates of geometrical design, in
villages that have long since abandoned such high intentions and cheerfully subscribe to the maxim that business is the business of America.

My refrigerator man, though, lived in a community that has only recently forsaken Communism, after an experiment that lasted almost 100 years. The Amana of Iowa are members of a community of German origin which crossed to America in the 1840’s and set up a benevolent autocracy in New York State. They prospered there, found themselves outgrowing their land, and moved in 1854 to Iowa, where they built six villages, acquired their own railway station, wove their own cloth, and soon had a flourishing religio-Communist settlement with a distinctly German flavour.

Physically, the Amana villages have changed relatively little since then. Their red brick houses are plain and handsome, with stout wooden doors, square chimneys, and gardens full of vegetables, grape vines and fruit trees. Their farms are clean and spacious, their barns gentlemanly. Their inns are famous for good food and beer, and have check table-cloths and genial blonde maids. Their cemeteries are suitably equalitarian, in that the grave-stones are of uniform size, and there are no gilded urns, obelisks or fortified mausoleums. Their drawing-rooms are full of solid local furniture, slightly enlivened by embroidered cushions and speckled sofas. Sometimes in the pleasant streets of these villages one sees a lady in a poke bonnet, or a group of women (on their way to church) wearing the traditional dark shawls over their heads. In the shops there are splendid hams and jams; in a few modest workshops craftsmen still make chairs, rugs and wooden figures by antique methods.

But if in general the Amana externals remain much the same, the basic pattern of life in the villages changed with revolutionary abruptness in April, 1932. The old leaders of the Community of True Inspiration had been good men, but egalitarians of dedicated intensity. Worthy and pious indeed were the tenets of their faith, and no inner caucus of the Kremlin holds its adherents under closer rein than did the early Amana Church hold its hapless congregation. The sharing of pleasures and labours was a strictly compulsory blessing; indeed, a divine revelation (not unlike those sacred manifestations which, from time to time, encouraged the Crusaders in their strategy) made it clear that any opponent of the system would be shamed and disgraced, and his unfortunate children would “suffer want and be unblessed in time and eternity”. The rule of the thirteen elders was rigid and terribly sensible, and the villagers were led firmly down the paths of communal virtue. Drab were the clothes they wore, and eminently sedate the society they shared. The women did their cooking in big communal kitchens, carrying
food home in baskets to the men, who had been busy all day milking the communal cows, working the communal looms or keeping the communal ledger. Prudence and diligence were the watchwords of life. Even the gardens of the houses must grow no flowers, but only nutritional plants, so that edible creepers grew up the cottage walls, and the lovelorn girl at her bedroom window would dreamily finger a bean-pod or pluck the blossom of a vegetable-marrow. Dutiful Brothers and Sisters went to Church eleven times a week.

But to the intense joy (one can only suppose) of the entire community, the system failed miserably. The beginnings of the Iowa settlement were successful enough. The Inspirational Church, taking a spiritual interest in every aspect of Amana life, organized affairs with some efficiency. The Amana Society prospered, its hams and woollen goods selling all over America, and its individual members, sharing the profits with scrupulous integrity, did not do at all badly. But the years passed, the quality of the divine inspiration seemed to be degenerating, and the villagers, basking in fair-shares-for-all, grew lazy. In defiance of the old rules, labour was brought in from outside to do some of the less congenial work, with deplorable economic results. The big woollen mill was destroyed in a fire. Production fell, and the old devotional unity relaxed, leading to petty internal squabbles and rivalries. The depression of 1929 hit the Community of True Inspiration much as it hit less enlightened segments of society, and by 1931 the colony was on the brink of bankruptcy.

Then in a characteristically American
volte-face,
the people of Amana decided to switch to a modified form of capitalism. The church withdrew from its position of supreme authority and a stock cooperative was established. Each member of the old society received stock in it, and younger people had a right to acquire their share when they came of age. Almost at once (so the villagers told me) the spirit of capitalism had its usual invigorating, if not supremely altruistic, effect. The villages, which had begun to look a little seedy, were spruced and painted. The housewives, relieved of the intolerable duty of sharing a kitchen with all their neighbours, distributed the kitchen utensils among themselves and pushed them proudly home in wheelbarrows. Churchgoing became a less insistent routine, and the congregations lost a little of their solemnity and earnestness of bearing. Electricity was brought to the villages, people voted in elections, there was a dance in 1933, a young man called Willie “Zum Zum” Zuber became a famous pitcher for the New York Yankees.

At the time of this startling transition Amana common stock was
valued at 50 dollars; today it is probably worth ten times as much. The Amana people have proved to be astonishingly adept free-enterprisers, previous experience apparently being unnecessary, and they have turned their trim villages into a high-powered business operation. The woollen mill, first established by the original Amana settlers of Iowa, is not only selling large quantities of its excellent woollen materials, but is also producing synthetic fibres. The meat markets still cure their hams in the time-honoured Westphalian manner, but nowadays the finished hams are packed in cellophane, stamped with sundry trade marks and mystic signs, and generally made to conform with the exigencies of the Kleenex age. Ten thousand of these hams are shipped out of the Amana villages each Christmas; and one of the most agreeable experiences that can befall the traveller in the Middle West is to wander into one of the Amana inns, all brown wood and warm comfort, and to be served at the polished counter with a sandwich, delectably prepared, containing sizeable slices of these delicious meats.

The most astonishing result of the Amana’s idealogical conversion has been the rise of the refrigerator factory. There are now seven Amana villages—West Amana, South Amana, High Amana, Middle Amana, East Amana, Amana and Homestead (they remind me of the menu chalked outside a Louisiana country restaurant: “Fresh Catfish: Broiled Catfish: Fried Catfish: Ice”). Of these, the most urban is Middle Amana, where there is not only a print shop, a winery, a lily pond and a cemetery, but also one of the most profitable refrigerator factories in America. It is an extraordinary fact that the Amana community, which has so recently blossomed out of its rigid sectarianism, makes more “home freezers” than any other single producer in the world. Amana Refrigeration Inc. produces about one-fifth of all such freezers made in the United States, and it also makes air-conditioning equipment. This concern has made the name of Amana a household word all over the country. When the Amana people abandoned Communism in 1932 two members of the community began making beer coolers, as their modest contribution to the new economy. Their enterprise, transferred first to the ownership of the Society, then to the control of a group of outside investors, has developed into this great industry. The factory is surrounded by fields, cottages, gardens and country living; but the firm spends at least a million dollars a year on advertising, and produces something like 1½ million freezers annually.

I need hardly stress how satisfying it is for Midwesterners to be able to recount this story, proof positive of the superiority of their chosen system over the alien ideologies of Europe. The Amana Society is still
not an example of complete American capitalism, for it has something of the flavour of a particularly well-to-do welfare state. The doctors and dentists of the villages, for instance, are paid by the society, and when a member takes a prescription to the chemist he pays only the cost of the materials. This means that the motives of the Amana villagers are still slightly suspect to some of those fervent opponents of creeping Socialism who dominate the medical profession of the Middle West. (If you would have an evening of controversy, or sense something of the latent savagery of this country, or if you enjoy baiting a tied bear, or taunting a retreating warrior, try discussing socialized medicine with a Middle West doctor. There is no topic more galling to his soul and no antipathy he can more clearly or more revealingly express.)

Nevertheless, the Amana villages are a source of pride among Iowans. Not far away from these pleasant places is the city of Cedar Rapids, a characteristic Middle West manufacturing town, where they make (in particular) breakfast cereals. I was a guest at a business dinner in this thrusting and uncompromisingly materialistic town, and was tactless enough to remark that in some ways the few years of Socialist Government in Britain had been of great benefit to us all. There was, for a moment, a hush around the table, only a faint thud of mastication penetrating the silence. “Well, we tried Communism in Amana,” said the man from the refrigerator factory, as a logical progression of thought, “and I guess we find capitalism suits us better, yes sir, though that may not go for you British.…”