Coast to Coast (31 page)

T
hey used to say that the Middle West was the supreme American crucible, where the temperature of the racial melting pot was at its highest; and it is still a kaleidoscope of elements, where the scattered peoples of Europe find themselves living as neighbours—not only in the cities, where a town-dweller from any country is likely to feel at home, but also in the countryside, in which the lingering rural traditions of one ancient society may find themselves disconcertingly cheek-by-jowl with the folksy customs of another.

So to the American idealist there are few more agreeable experiences than a journey through Wisconsin, for example, where you can see such a bucolic potpourri precariously preserved, and (if your eye is kindly enough, and well-disposed towards the consciously picturesque) you may catch some touching glimpses of antique heritages. There is a cheese-making village in this State where scarcely a corner eludes some reminder of Switzerland—a gable here, a peasant costume there, coffee-shops with Swiss names, picture postcards of yodellers, Alpine hornists and pinkly snow-capped peaks. In the centre of the town there is a spick-and-span new cheese factory, all white coats and scientific packaging. “This is the best Swiss cheese in the world,” says the proprietor with decision, handing you a very small piece of it on a wooden knife. “Much better than the stuff they make in Switzerland. The pasture’s better. The cows are better. The methods are better. Look at this hydromatic semi-sonic electrically operated cheese-swirler. That cost me 8,000 dollars. It’s the only one of its kind in Wisconsin. That machine”—and here he pauses with his hand on a switch for a moment of dramatic effect—“can swirl 18,000 gallons of cream in 24 hours, that means nine litres of cream per kilowatt hour, which is cheap, boy, cheap. Taste it! Isn’t that
real
good?” This same man, so totally immersed in the machine philosophy, likes to decorate his house and his factory with simple and pastoral Swiss designs, and above the door there are paintings of Alpine hornists, pinkly snow-capped mountains, yodellers, and the rest. “I can remember very clearly,” he says, a suspicion of the maudlin entering his eyes, “sitting in my dad’s log house in the mountains, churning the cream by hand. Beautiful memories! Long, long ago! There I would sit beside the fire, turning the handle of the old wooden churner, as my fathers had done before me! I was only a boy! Happy boyhood hours (but it was all
very
unscientific).”

Or not so very far away, in another small town, you may see in the
window of a confectioner: “Pasties Today!” This was once a mining town, and many men from Cornwall came to work here. They built their rugged stone cottages higgledy-piggledy up the side of a small hill, just as they would on the Cornish moors, and they ate their Cornish pasties faithfully. A few of their descendants still live in the town, and at the pastry-cook’s pasties are still made twice a week, Tuesdays and Saturdays. Not many of their cottages are left, but at the foot of the hill there are two which have been carefully restored and which are guarded and inhabited by two young men of antiquarian tendencies. There is the open fire in the parlour, and there are the copper kettles, and the warming pans, the china figures and the big teapots, gathered if need be from Old England herself, and now deposited with an institutional air for the Middle West trippers to admire. “It’s been a truly wonderful experience‚” said one lady to me as we passed on the threshold of these cottages. “This, to me, is truly educational—to know how the English really live, in these truly quaint old houses, and to think that they once lived like that right here in Wisconsin. Oh, but the world’s a wonderful place!”

Farther north in this same State you may find communities of Finns scattered and hidden away among the forests. This is no longer a great lumber country, for its resources were whittled away by the nineteenth-century adventurers; but there was a time when the only people who would work in some of its dark, remote fastnesses were Scandinavians from the extreme north—Norwegians, Swedes, many Finns. To this day, if you motor through the woodlands, among the young second-growth trees, you will from time to time come across a lonely wooden house in a clearing, and hear from its recesses snatches of an obscure Scandinavian tongue, and see a genuine European peasant woman emerge from its door, her head covered in a scarf, her dress longer than is fashionable, in her hand a tray of food for the dog. I spent a night at a small community in Minnesota, south-west of Duluth, and had occasion to examine the local telephone directory. It was issued by a local company, affiliated to one of the great combines, to be sure, but still with its own board of directors and its own intensely regional flavour. The list of names was overpoweringly Scandinavian. There were eighty-one names in all; I chose the letter P to test the racial homogeneity of the place, and found that every subscriber claiming that initial shared, in one form of spelling or another, the good old Nordic name of Peterson. In the twenty years before 1900 one-fifth of the entire population of Norway and Sweden emigrated to America.

In the cities of the Middle West, of course, the races are more intimately
jumbled; but there are still whole quarters, or even whole towns, forming recognizable national enclaves. Thus Milwaukee has people of many nationalities, Poles, Italians and Bohemians, but the Germans have been predominant for so long, and play so leading and enlightened a part in civic affairs, that the place has a distinctive beer-and-sound-sense flavour. This has led,
inter
alia
,
to a particularly sensible approach to the problems of race relations, which (in a region so racially criss-cross and mangled) are often a worry in the Middle West. The Police Department publishes a booklet on the subject for the benefit of officers under training. Milwaukee, it says, contains people of many racial origins who intermingle daily but who are divided “by the fact that our grandparents, or even we, have emerged from differing and alien cultural backgrounds, so that we do not dress, eat and live alike, and, most important, do not look alike”. The booklet’s moral is that such racial and national groups can provoke dangerous and unjustifiable generalizations. “Until we realize that there are just as many different kinds of negroes as there are different kinds of policemen, we shan’t be able to make intelligent and creditable decisions”.

Certainly in the past the sudden unreasoning flare of racial prejudice has been a constant latent menace. Each “un-American” group had its sobriquet—you were a wop, a chink, a polack, a hunky, a kike, a cholo, a chili picker, a jig, a nigger, a hill billy, a cracker, a red neck. Today these epithets are almost forgotten. The melting pot has done its work, and is cooling. The flow of immigration has almost stopped. Generations of Americanization and intermarriage have smoothed the more awkward racial bumps, the wops and the chili-pickers are being absorbed, and there emerges the familiar figure of
homo
Americanus
‚
as the world accepts him. He is
par
excellence
a Middle Westerner, the result of that enforced and feverish patriotism that was necessary to produce a united people out of a gallimaufry of immigrants, venturers and miscellaneous pioneers. Once established, the process of transformation is inexorable. Along comes the succession of little Midwesterners, no longer subject to the loyalties of Europe or the individualities of the frontier, but instead material for a moulding machine that is painfully outdated; in the old days it made Americans out of wanderers, now it makes chauvinists out of Americans.

It is startling how quickly and completely the stamp of the breed can be placed upon a generation. Mom and Pop may be as uncompromisingly Czech as Santa Claus, talking with a thick accent, reading the Czech papers from Chicago, speaking nostalgically of Prague in the
spring, wearing their Central European clothes in a distinctly Central European manner. But Junior and Sis, we may be sure, will be as totally American as Coney Island or Miss Marilyn Monroe; he with his crew cut and gay shirt, she in jeans and sandals, her hair tied with a ribbon, her make-up impeccable, her bosom startling in its definition. It is not merely that their vocabulary has changed; or their way of thought; or their clothes; or their aspirations; their physique has been altered, no less, the very shape of their heads and bodies, by the insidious force of the American mutation. “Assimilation in excelsis!” as Lord Fisher once exclaimed. “The boa-constrictor swallowing a bull isn’t in it!”

So if the islands of Europeanism linger on much longer in this American sea, it will be as curiosities; perhaps even, since they have their didactic worth, as minor money-makers. Today there are still sufficient survivors of an older generation to give them some degree of spontaneity, and the monastery of Holy Hill (for example) high on its eminence near Milwaukee, still finds many simple pilgrims to wonder at its relics and miracles of healing. But the old European-Americans are disappearing, and even the religions of the Middle West are acquiring the all-American patina. There is a social as well as a spiritual purpose nowadays in attending the spotless white Lutheran churches that adorn the Middle West landscape; on a Sunday morning their courtyards are thronged with the expensive cars of the farmers, and inside the wives are dressed in their most competitive fineries. Everywhere the American Way is winning. Within sight of some sweet and sleepy farmhouse, standing among its rich furrows like a homestead in a Grant Wood painting, you may find a jazz-ridden, neon-lit roadhouse, and be served by a girl with that standard synthetic smile, while the truck drivers in their peaked caps eat hamburgers, tinned baked beans or two fried eggs (“up and over”).

Passionate though you may be in your hunt for antique survivals, in the Middle West you are overwhelmed by the signs of this metamorphosis. First among them is that unwearying drive for success, position, esteem, wealth, that is so overpowering in Chicago and which one can relate to the violence of American climate and history. The Middle West family is insatiable in its thirst for success—success material and social, financial and personal. To be a high executive at the office, and a popular member of the community—these are the twin ambitions into which, by the alchemy of Americanism, have been translated the hungry and ill-defined desires of the pioneers. To achieve them, the real American must be unrelaxing, casting off relentlessly those old
lazy predilections of his European forebears. “If you don’t wanta get on, move over, bud.”

Then there is the complacent and sometimes alarming chauvinism (no longer isolationism) that has presumably arisen from incessant doses, over the generations, of compulsory patriotism. The intellectuals of the Middle West are exceptionally catholic and enlightened in their tastes, and there are many other Middle Westerners, especially of the middle classes, whose zest for experience and knowledge is delightful; but the ignorance of all too many of these people is only matched by their self-satisfaction, and their hardly-hidden contempt for foreigners is unshakable. This is, I suspect, no longer the symptom of an inferiority complex. Such have been the somersaults of history that the all-American really believes in his own pretensions now, and is no longer battling suppressed envy and self-doubt (unless it be envy of those who are even more American than he is). The genuine Mid-Westerner is not a man of delicacy. He has, for example, by no means dismissed total nuclear war as an instrument of national policy. He does not entertain the possibility that the Russians may be frightened too. He has no faith in Europe, except perhaps West Germany. He considers England, in particular, effete, very likely cowardly, and irresponsibly out-of-date. How often and how tediously have I tried to explain the principles of constitutional monarchy, beginning with the unacceptable thesis that the Queen is no longer entitled to cut people’s heads off, ending (as often as not) by assuring my listeners that we even have television in Britain nowadays: “Yeah, and plenty of time to look at it!” one man in Indiana remarked darkly. An Englishman who came to learn his business in a Chicago store told me that his departmental manager once remarked to him: “Say, do those Lords push you about much over there?”

Queen Elizabeth’s Coronation in 1953 touched off the extremes both of this kind of sentiment, and of that fervent Anglophile royalism which is naturally fostered, among a resolute and slightly snobbish minority, by so determinedly egalitarian an attitude. It was long after the event when I first arrived in the Middle West, but I was shown with pride the programme of a mammoth commemorative banquet organized by the Anglophile societies of Chicago. Scores of English and Scottish names appeared on it, but the usherettes included Mrs. Michael Krezevitch, Mrs. Theodore Markstahler, and Mrs. Edward Schmidt. Among the contributing organizations were the International War Brides Travel Club, the British Honduran-American Association, the Chicago Manx Society, the Orkney and Shetland Literary Social and Benevolent
Society, the Daughters of Scotia, the Daughters of the British Empire in Illinois, and the Welsh Women’s Club. A verse printed at the end of the programme included the pleasant stanzas:

But do not be misled by the lavish enthusiasm of all this. For every member of the Orkney and Shetland Literary Social and Benevolent Society, for every Chicago Manxman who enjoyed his Edinburgh Broth and Commonwealth Salad, a thousand Middle Westerners agreed with the newspaper which greeted the Coronation with the headline: “Wake Up, Fairyland!”