Coast to Coast (29 page)

I
t is astonishing how accurately the provincial American sometimes reflects the general character of his region. You may be able to tell a Manchester man by his accent, but deposit the chairman of that Cedar Rapids dinner in the heart of the Antarctic, and you would know him for a Midwesterner by the jib of his chin and the merest whiff of his climate of thought. I met two men in the Middle West whom I remember as especially representative of its livelier and more independent elements, and whom an enlightened selection committee might well choose to symbolize it (dressed in dungarees and rimless spectacles) in some patriotic holiday carnival.

I encountered the first of them fortuitously. One pleasant autumn morning I was driving through the countryside of southern Wisconsin, not far from the lovely little State capital of Madison. This is a gentle
and unspoilt country for the most part, with German, Swiss and Scandinavian overtones, its fields wide and well-tended, its farmhouses clean and prosperous, its cattle fat, its milk appropriately creamy. If there is one State in the American interior that fulfils the requirements of a Promised Land, it is Wisconsin; for here there are no deserts, no harsh mountains, and no hideous sprawling wens, but only lakes, woods, green fields and the attractive lakeside city of Milwaukee. The farming people of Wisconsin are not, however, always expressive of their good fortune. They are a taciturn and unyielding lot, so that if you are rash enough to engage one in conversation over a glass of beer you may well extract only grunts and heavy breathing by your enquiries. With their caps and overalls, their countless tractors and machines, they sometimes feel less like farmers than engine-drivers on some remote and uneconomic branch line; though occasionally at a country market, where the women wear their headscarves, the ducks have their legs tied up in sacking, and old men wander creakingly about poking cows with walking-sticks, you might well be back in an antique and unprogressive Europe.

Many of the farms are notable for the magnificence of their barns, unique in America and apparently having both Swiss and Scandinavian architectural origins. They have huge solid walls, peaked roofs and attendant aluminium silos, and they often look much grander and more luxurious than their parent farmhouses. Often and again, as you travel along the country roads, one of these bulky structures rears itself over a distant horizon, apparently alone among the pastures; and as you drive by you can look through its open door and see, in the steamy comfort of its interior, the cows idling in the hay and the long rows of metal mechanisms with which they are soon to be milked.

On this particular October day one of these barns caught my eye as a splash of colour in the fields (there are relatively few trees in southern Wisconsin, and a vivid roof or a bed of crimson flowers can often be seen from miles away). When I reached the structure I found that it was remarkable even among Wisconsin barns; for across the whole of its side, painted in the boldest of colours and the firmest of lines, was an enormous mural. It showed a conventional country scene, with hills, clumps of trees, cows and a little stream, and so gay and guileless was it, and of such an infectious
joie-de-vivre‚
that it dominated the countryside with its cheerfulness. I asked a passer-by who had painted this picture, and he said a Mr. Engebretson did it, or some such name, lived over Brodhead way, a real nice guy, the same as did the picture on the Schmidt farm in Lafayette County.

So I drove to Brodhead to meet the artist. It is a village near the
Illinois border, the very epitome of those small Midwestern towns so often portrayed in the movies, where the beautiful girl arrives off the “streamliner” with her bag, and is welcomed by the lovable old philosopher in the straw hat. Like most such villages, it is a place of white frame houses and unfenced gardens, shaded by groves of big and rather gloomy trees. The houses (or the “homes”, as one must call them in the Middle West) are dotted haphazardly about the place, so that back doors open into front yards and there is a plethora of odd outhouses, potting sheds and carpentry huts.

I would be able to recognize the Engebretson house, a man told me at the store, because outside it there stood one such shed totally covered in one of his murals; and this was the kind of thing, he added reasonably, that one could not easily miss. Sure enough there it stood among the trees, blazing with colour, and I very soon found myself sitting in Air. Engebretson’s parlour eating cheese. The atmosphere was agreeably Scandinavian. Engebretson and his wife are both of Norwegian stock, and their house is full of wooden things and of the savour of plain cooking. Mr. Engebretson is an elderly man with a wrinkled outdoor face, spectacles, and a lively and engaging air, and for fifty years or more his passion in life has been painting. The walls of his rooms are hung thickly with his oils; though his style is simple rather than fashionably primitive, these pictures are vivid and arresting. But it is as a painter of outdoor murals that he has achieved his local celebrity (“and they wrote me up in
Life
magazine too, here’s the clippings”).

He is a house painter by trade, and his first barn mural was an advertisement showing a group of Holstein cows; it was so much admired that soon, when farmers wanted their barns painted, they would simply ask him to do one of his murals, covering the whole of the barn wall and thus combining aesthetic stimulation with practical economy. These huge murals, sometimes ninety feet long, are as near to a folk-art as you can find in the modern Middle West, and luckily Wisconsin is one of the few States in America where Mr. Engebretson would find a ready recognition. The State University at Madison is enlightened enough to employ a Resident Artist, supplying him with a studio, a salary and materials, and helping him with liberal encouragement. John Steuart Curry was one holder of this happy office, and during his tenure he fostered a vigorous rural art movement in Wisconsin. Many are the farmers and housewives who now contribute every year to a rural art exhibition in Madison, and many are the amateur artists who (like Mr. Engebretson) have been helped and advised. There are many places in the Middle West where an artist-farmer would still be decidedly suspect:
Curry himself, at his home in Kansas, used to be followed through the village streets by the cry of derision: “Sissy-pants Curry paints pictures! Sissy-pants Curry paints pictures!” Mr. Engebretson certainly suffers from no such stigma. Not only are his murals in constant local demand, but he is to Brodhead rather as Mr. Sinclair Lewis was to Sauk Centre, to the north, or even as Mr. Faulkner is to aromatic Oxford, Mississippi. Every visitor to the town is taken to see Mr. Engebretson’s murals, and they have been described or pictured in many publications, from
The
Times
of London to the
Prairie
Farmer.
The artist is understandably pleased by this modest accumulation of fame, and readily shows you his cuttings and discusses the value of his work. “Mind you, they won’t last,” he says cheerfully. “Some of them’s fading already. If you paint a house you don’t expect it to last for ever, do you? You’ve got to keep repainting it. Same with my murals. If they don’t get re-painted, they’ll fade. Paint on a wall—that’s all they are!” What with painting the originals, making requested alterations, and re- painting those whose owners are farsighted enough to commission him, Mr. Engebretson estimates he has executed two miles of mural—which is, as an admiring neighbour remarked to me, “a powerful lot of art”. I hope his big pictures are not allowed to fade, for they are the product of a true country craftsman, and bring the unsuspecting traveller close to those great days of the Middle West when it was still a country of pioneer individualists.

If Mr. Engebretson is well-known in Brodhead, Mr. Harry Truman is scarcely less prominent in Kansas City, Missouri, for he has grown up with its brashness, matured with its brazen politics, and formed an essential part of its fabric since the turn of the century. It is true that he has gone off to Washington now and again, has decided the fate of nations once or twice, and for a time (with the vast fleets and armies under his direct command) bestrode this narrow world as an unlikely Colossus; but he is still unmistakably and unashamedly a Missouri boy. There is, of course, an element of homespun skull-duggery to Washington itself, even in the Kennedy era; behind its symbolisms one can still perceive, as in a haze, a vision of distant country conventions and the beer-stained green of billiard tables. Twelve years ago, when the capital was a good deal less sophisticated and urbane, Mr. Truman must have fitted easily enough into the Washington scene; but he slips even more smoothly and satisfyingly into the
milieu
of Kansas City, a highly political stockyards town.

Most people think of Kansas City politics in terms of “Boss” Pendergast (with whom, as the more virulent Republicans like to recall, Mr.
Truman had some professional association). There is a place in the city where you may see a small stream, meandering pleasantly through the public garden. This is Brush Creek, a stream of little consequence except for one strange circumstance; Mr. Pendergast had interests in a cement factory, and when he gained political control of the city he caused the city authorities to pave the whole of Brush Creek with cement; so you can see it now, looking rather foolish with its immaculate bottom, a memorial to an era in American politics. Pendergast was a representative of his times, and for the sordid and corrupt in politics Kansas City in the 1930’s must have been unsurpassable. Nowadays its atmosphere is robust without being generally criminal, and it is a handsome city. A network of great parkways surrounds it and connects its wealthy suburbs; its principal hill, high above the Missouri River, is crowned with a complex of stout skyscrapers; at the entrance to the stockyards stands a mammoth figure of a Hereford bull, perched on the top of a column, the Nelson of Kansas City. “K.C.”, as it is known in the Middle West, still has a quality of excitement, for it is an energetic railway and market town, and a hub of communications. From the very centre of the city you can look down upon its busy airport; by some vagary of real estate, the municipality was able to build it in a loop of the river only a minute or two from the city centre, so that only West Berlin, among all the cities of the world, has an airport more conveniently situated. Kansas City is no haven of rest; but if you can bear for a time with the tiresome push and brawn of the Middle West, you will find it pleasant enough to visit.

Mr. Truman’s home is in Independence, a large suburb which is of sacred significance to many Mormons, because they believe it will one day be the capital of a Sacred Kingdom. He has an office, however, in one of the main thoroughfares of Kansas City, in a block which was once the scene of a spectacular bank robbery. “Shall I need security clearance?” I asked when I was invited to visit him there. “And how shall I identify myself to the policeman on duty?” “Lord bless you, Harry doesn’t have any policemen,” I was told indulgently. “Does Maisie’s drug store have a policeman? Harry just walks into his office like anyone else. Take the elevator up, his secretary will show you in.” I was welcomed without great ceremony at the building. “Mr. Truman? Sure, this elevator,” said the smart young woman who presided over the lifts. “Mr. Truman? Certainly, he’s expecting you,” said the pleasant secretary upstairs; and in a moment there was his familiar figure, sitting at a big polished desk and silhouetted against a window. Mr. Truman was busy preparing his memoirs and collating his papers
for deposition in the Truman Memorial Library at Independence. The ante-room of his office was therefore filled with rows of huge filing cabinets, securely fastened; and this obscure building in a provincial Middle Western city consequently contained material of incalculable historical value. “It’s a lot of work,” says Mr. Truman in his flat Missouri voice, “but I regard it as my duty, as former President of the United States.”

Nobody could accuse this misleading man of an apathetic approach to greatness, for he is clearly sharply conscious of his place in the history books and of the extraordinary nature of his career (“The Accidental President”, he has been called). Beside his desk there stands a large and splendid globe, in a frame stand, and from time to time during our conversation Mr. Truman would spin it idly or point to parts of it in a manner that I can only describe as proprietorial. Sometimes he would casually toss off some such revealing phrase as: “When I altered the foreign policy of the United States, in …”; and sometimes he would talk with a most agreeable enthusiasm and interest of the other potentates of his time, the Churchills and the Stalins who shared the stage with him. “There now‚” he said, handing me a menu from a banquet at the Yalta Conference, which had been signed by all the distinguished Allied leaders present. “There now,” said he, rather in the manner of a nannie asking why the chicken crossed the road, “see if you can find Stalin’s signature in
that
lot!” Alas, I knew exactly where to find it, scrawled in diagonal arrogance across the card, for I had seen a reproduction of the thing in a magazine; but I played my part as best I could, if only to see Mr. Truman’s evident delight at having to point it out.

One often feels of English politicians, as they parry the election meetings or summon their transitory charm at garden gates, that they are riding serenely over the surface of local life. They may be locally bred, but have long ago discarded parochial loyalties and affinities, and come back to their own country smoothened and aloof. Or they may, indeed, have no local associations at all, and find themselves chosen because it is a safe seat, or a resistant constituency, or because they need experience, confidence, or a good lesson. The American politician, on the other hand, even at the Congressional level, usually seems positively symbolic of his region, like the State Flag, or the State Bird, or the State Anthem, or the State Motto, or the State Crest, which so belabour the patriotism of American schoolchildren, and so befuddle the efforts of ill-informed heralds. The recognized nickname of Missouri is “The ‘Show Me’ State”, implying a certain inquiring distrust and suspicion,
such as is common among crusty country shopkeepers. I can well imagine Mr. Truman using this very phrase, when confronted with seme high-sounding international commitment, or asked to swop a sphere of influence. His roots are still deep in the Missouri soil. His standards are still Missouri standards. He has a fine stock of regional jokes and regional allusions, and his experience of high diplomacy has never blunted his appetite for local politics.