Coast to Coast (30 page)

What is more, I suspect most Midwesterners admire a man more for his local attainments than for any reputation he may achieve in a wider world. Everyone in Kansas City knows Harry Truman, and sees him walk into his office each day, and has visited his home at Independence. His neighbours are naturally pleased that he became President; but they do not seem to be inordinately interested in the part he has played in world affairs, nor even to realize fully that his responsibilities extended far beyond the forty-eight States of the Union. “You are leaving the house of a master,” said an old man to me as I walked away from Mr. Engebretson’s home in Brodhead. But when I spoke to a group of Kansas City businessmen about my interview with ex-President Truman, “Harry?” said they, “a great little politician!”

T
his sort of unquestioning parochialism is often fostered by the powerful Press of the Middle West. There are no national newspapers in the United States in quite the British sense of the phrase; the nearest equivalents are perhaps the
Wall
Street
Journal,
the
New
York
Times
and the
Christian
Science
Monitor,
all of which circulate widely outside their cities of origin. As a result, the local daily newspaper enjoys great influence and prestige, especially in the Middle West where the distances between cities are considerable but the populations are large. Sometimes the local pride of these newspapers allows them to colour the news to a comic degree. In Des Moines I was shown the front page of the issue of the local paper that recorded the sinking of the
Titanic
. A big black streamer headline announced the loss of the ship across the top of the page; but directly beneath it there was a second headline, almost as big, almost as black, announcing with satisfaction: “No Des Moines Passengers Aboard.”

Oddly enough, though, the Middle West supports many of the best newspapers in America and two or three of the best in the world. The
region is swamped and cluttered with television transmitters. There is scarcely a city where you have not a choice of three or four local channels, and the great television stars of New York or Los Angeles are as familiar as those provincial notables who offer their news bulletins or weather forecasts day by day with the same forceful mannerisms and indomitable interest. But despite this lively competition the newspapers of the Middle West seem to fare prosperously, on the whole, and have maintained their position as presidents of the public conscience. To see their impact most clearly, you must visit a newspaper office in some very small town, so obscure that no big-city paper will take any notice of it, so remote that it is still a close and family-like community. Many are the offices I have visited on my journeys for a chat with the editor (who is also, as likely as not, the reporter, compositor, printer and photographer); for the Middle West journalist is often not only the most liberal and intelligent member of his society, but also much the best-informed. In the popular mind he is an elderly rustic philosopher, a chaw of tobacco in his mouth, an eyeshade on his forehead, his chin a trifle prickly, his drawl slow and pithy; in fact he is often a young graduate who has taken a course at the State University and prefers the independence of his own small newspaper to the excitements of metropolitan journalism. As you sit there talking over a cup of coffee a constant stream of visitors walks unheralded into his room: a farmer with news of a prize bull (to whom you can conveniently tell the story of that prudish English newspaper magnate who unsexed a picture of such a beast, for decency’s sake); a lady with a list of wedding guests, and an interminable and repellent description of her daughter’s dress; a hearty young clergyman with his weekly spiritual contribution, in which he insists upon referring to the divinity as “The Man Upstairs”; the sheriff, who has some baffling political complaint to make; a man selling carbon paper; the owner of the local store, who sinks heavily into a leather chair for a long talk about economic conditions. There is no gentry, to arrive in tweeds with news of the coming garden party; this is a classless society, and if it has a fulcrum or a figurehead, it is the newspaper itself.

Such little country sheets are generally quiet and conservative, but sometimes you find one of pronounced vigour. The most famous in this
genre
was the
Emporia
Gazette,
which became world-famous because of the writings of its remarkable editor, William Allen White. Nowadays they are more often notable for commercial enterprise than for literary ability. In Iowa I crossed the tracks of one little paper that had deftly taken note of the methods of the giant magazines. A funny little country café, thirty miles out of Council Bluffs, announced its identity with a
placard; and underneath its name, in the approved
Life
manner, appeared the phrase: “As Advertised In The
Oakland
Acorn.
”

Sometimes in the larger country towns, big enough to support a daily newspaper, one comes across relics of the true American crusading journalism, a product of brave nineteenth-century days and the old American liberalism. I spent a couple of nights in Madison at the height of the McCarthy controversy, when the name of that unpleasing freak was on everyone’s lips, and when the mere threat of a McCarthy hearing was enough to set the Middle West intellectual a’quivering (whether with fear or with
saeva
indignatio
,
it was difficult to tell. As Samuel “Hudibras” Butler put it:

McCarthy was a native of Madison, or thereabouts, and I asked if there was no one in that delectable city who was then opposing him loudly enough to be heard. Certainly there was, everybody told me: Mr. William Evjue of the
Capital
Times.
I bought some copies of his paper before I called on him, and found that the anti-McCarthy campaign it was fighting was as full-blooded as any Victorian newspaper war, full of rumbustious phrases and startling evidence, pulling no punches and fearing no consequences. Long before the tide turned against McCarthy the
Capital
Times
was exposing those flaws of character that later became his downfall, and was beginning to demolish, with no trace of timidity, his political structure of half-truths, bluffs and innuendoes. Mr. Evjue fitted precisely my idea of a bold reforming editor. He was greying, gay and easygoing, but with a formidable wallop to his conversation; and when he strolled around the square for a coffee everyone knew him and said “Good morning!,” from the street-sweeper to the passing Senator.

They say his is a dying breed, but I doubt it. Everywhere in America I am impressed by the personal quality of the newspapermen, of an undeniably higher calibre and more enviable status than their colleagues in Europe. The temper and tone of the Kennedy administration is set substantially by talented newspapermen, and in the Middle West particularly, if you want agreeable conversation, look for the local journalist. If you admire the astringent in American humour, you will find it most easily in the newsrooms or in those many bars where the newspapermen foregather. There is a story told of an American journalist who was posted by his newspaper to Egypt, but who found the
aridity of Cairo so distasteful that whenever possible he made the trip to Beirut and sunned the days away on the terrace of a seaside hotel. Alas, he always chose the wrong time to take these unofficial vacations, and there he sat in the sun as one crucial event after another occurred in Cairo. Riots, revolutions and sundry convulsions occurred, and always he was away on his terrace; until finally he missed the abdication of King Farouk. The next day a cable arrived from his head office in America, and was handed to him in his
chaise-longue.
“King Farouk has abdicated‚” it said, and added simply: “What are
your
plans?”

So it is always agreeable to sample this flavour of thought by visiting one of the important newspapers of the Middle West. Some of them are produced in conditions of great splendour. The
Chicago
Tribune,
for example (which grows its own trees, turns them into paper, and ships them to Chicago in its own ships), lives in a pretentious skyscraper which was the winning design in an international architectural competition. This newspaper, despite the high quality of many of its employees, suffers from delusions of grandeur, and inserted in the fabric of its office are fragments from the other great buildings of the world—The Houses of Parliament, for example, and the Great Pyramid. Outside its front door there is a figure of some well-known figure of American history whose part in the Revolution (either as a spy for the British or as a shining hero for the Americans) is still a little obscure to me. Many people assume this classic figure to be a semblance of the late Colonel McCormick, who made the paper what it is; others believe that a colossal statue of the Colonel stands on the very summit of the building, so high as to be out of mortal vision. In fact, though the spirit of the Colonel haunts the place, the
Chicago
Tribune
itself is sufficient memorial to him. Not only is it one of the most inanely prejudiced in America; it is also undeniably one of the best produced, and it has a devoted and skilful company of workers who are evidently able to reconcile themselves, by some premature process of “double speak”, to the pervasive malice of the paper. It is easy for anyone to see these people at work, for the news room of the
Chicago
Tribune
has a public gallery, for all the world like Congress or the Church Assembly. Instructed by a guide, you may stand there behind its plate glass windows and look down on the enormous floor below you, a mass of desks, clocks, copy-boys, trays and papers, with the ladies of the social department tidying their hair in the left-hand corner.

Other Middle West newspapers, too, admirably suit their premises to their personalities. The
Milwaukee
Journal,
for example, a distinguished liberal organ, has offices of the most enlightened modernity. This paper
is partly owned by its employees, and there is thus a feeling of intense corporate pride and enthusiasm. Everybody seems to have had a say in the design of the building, and it is all labour-saving, convenient and clean. Such offices are more than the headquarters of a newspaper. They are focal points of civic activity, centres of advice and general information, where you may just as easily pick up a town plan or some statistical information as place an advertisement in the personal column. But to my mind the queen of Middle Western journalism (if she will forgive my relegating her to that generally unromantic region) is the
Louisville
Courier-Journal
‚
almost a paragon of honest opinion, good writing, and healthy local influence. I wrote a light-hearted report for this newspaper on the Kentucky Derby; and having written my piece, a little hastily, I handed it to the news room and went off to attend one of the myriad parties with which Louisville celebrates its day of fame. During the evening there was a telephone call for me. It was the duty editor of the
Courier-Journal.
He thanked me warmly for my report, which was (he said) just what they wanted of me. There was, however, just one small thing. The horse I had named, with a flurry of high writing, as having won the race in fact finished seventh. He had been reluctant to bother me, said the editor, but he just wondered, would I like him to correct it, or should he leave it as it stood?

This is a gentlemanly approach to newspaper work (though I need hardly add that the capable sub-editors of the paper had corrected it hours before) and the whole flavour of the
Courier-Journal
is witty and urbane. Its principal stockholder and editor-in-chief, Mr. Harry Bingham, is different from most American newspaper proprietors in that he has a deep personal knowledge of Europe; and his newspaper always actively supported the European cause in the days when the stoppage of a cheque from Washington could send proud capitals headlong into oblivion. Mr. Bingham’s circumstances are, to be sure, more Southern than Midwestern. He lives in a splendid mansion on a wooded hill, from which (during the hot summer evenings) you can watch the tow-boats passing on the Ohio River, and even hear the insistent pulse of their engines. Nevertheless the instrument he has helped to mould speaks for the enlightened Midwesterner rather than the citizen of the New South. Its temper is that of the liberal intellectuals who fostered the Middle West renaissance in the 1920’s and who still (if you can find them) give some of its conversations a maturity and inherent cynicism that is as refreshing as anything in America. The
Milwaukee
Journal
sometimes has a slight feeling of slickness about it. The
St.
Louis
Post-
Dispatch
has been a reforming virtuoso for so long that its progressive
virtue has acquired a slightly sticky and self-conscious manner, like a blistering evangelist who has long ago mellowed, written his best- sellers, and become a party lion. But the
Courier-Journal
is at once vigorous and dignified, and even sometimes funny; and I know of no more stimulating American group than the editorial conference which assembles each morning in its pale-panelled board room, to discuss the news with a combination of gaiety and erudition.

Such a big paper as this probably has its own radio and television stations too, and there are many instances in the Middle West of companies which have a near-monopoly of all media of information. Sometimes such a joint operation has disadvantages for its employees. Colonel McCormick, for example, used to deliver a weekly lecture on his broadcasting station, Station WGN (for “World’s Greatest Newspaper”), in which he meandered for half an hour or more through devious and obscure pathways of history. The next day the
Chicago
Tribune
was statutorily obliged to print a verbatim report of this turgid delivery, to the constant chagrin of the technicians responsible for producing the paper. Sometimes the logic of the lectures was so confused as to be hypnotic, and I have seen men in trains puzzling over their sentences for minutes at a time, determined, if only for the personal satisfaction of it, to make some kind of sense out of them.

On the other hand sometimes, if the control is wise and kindly, a paper which is master of several channels of information can make its presence powerfully felt to the good of the community. In Des Moines, for instance, a medium-sized industrial city in Iowa, the liberal Republican influences of the
Des
Moines
Register
and its associated radio and television stations have helped to create an oasis of good sense and moderation. Still, in general the mental climate of the Middle West is something less than enlightened, and for this the Press of the region must carry a share of the blame. The individual newspapermen of the central States are delightful to meet; the best newspapers are almost unsurpassed; but it remains true that many of the papers educate the ignorant with ignorance, and guide the prejudiced with prejudice. In the whole of America there is no spectacle quite so degraded as that of the British Sunday Press; but frequently the Midwestern newspaper is marked by a deadness of outlook and narrowness of aspiration that is exactly matched by the character of its readership. The dull jingoism of the all-American is reflected in these columns, the complacency and self-righteousness, the patronizing contempt for older or weaker societies, the materialism and aridity of thought. Such journalism has played its potent part in the slow transformation of America.