INSIDE AMERICA
By D. W.
BROGAN
n NE of the most interesting and profitable of the cultural U enterprises of the New Deal was the employment of out-of- work intellectuals m the compilation of guides, guides to States, guides to roads, guides to cities. The Oxford University Press has recently published a new batch of these guides*, and at a time when interest in America is deeper and more genuine than it has been for a long time, the value of the guides as a key to the American labyrinth is greater than ever.
Their very existence is of symptomatic importance. What British Government would have sponsored a " Writers' Project," would have made work of. this kind for its marginal intellectuals? The British conviction that we have nothing to learn from America in the field of government, that our ways of doing public business are always the best, is one of the main obstacles to Anglo-American understanding. So the problem set by the Federal Guides is worth pondering. More than that ; we are con- vinced for the most part that Americans are a nation of con- genital boosters, and there is enough civic pride, even civic vanity, in these guide-books. But it is doubtful if a British Government would dare to sponsor so critical an account of our local govern- mentoof the appearance of .our industrial towns, of the economic prospects of our great cities, as Federal and State Governments have sponsored.. I should like to see as critical an appraise- ment of my native Glasgow as Cincinnati comes in for. And it is not only the social services or business prospects that are critically handled. There are fairly bold aesthetic judgements too. They are not, perhaps, bold by the standards of a bright young under- graduate fed on the honey-dew of Le Corbusier, but they are much more critical of expensive local monuments than the average town-councillor in these islands would think permissible. The missionary labours of Mr. Osbert Lancaster would seem to be less necessary in America than at home.
But the Guides have another great merit ; they are about the real United States. They devote space and labour and thought to the cities and towns where the majority of the American people live. It is a long time since England was a predominantly agri- cultural community. But the home guide-book treats England and Scotland as rural, picturesque, historical, ignoring the fact that Birmingham is far more important, representative, and worth studying than Stratford, Glasgow than Edinburgh. Here every scrap of historical prestige is indeed saved ; links with Europe are sought and found (although it is characteristic that the level of accuracy in the description of these old-world links is far below that displayed in the description of living phenomena). Youngstown (Ohio) is not Winchester (England) or Arles (France), yet the city is an important unit of American life. It is there that steel tubing is made by " plunging a hole through a solid cylinder of steel to furnish completed tubing far stronger than was possible under the old lap-and-butt 'Welding-process." America was, and is, the great home of inventors, and here they get their due meed of praise. The mouse-trap theory of progress is exemplified again and again. It was the ingenious inventor of the separate collar that made Troy (New York) go ahead faster and farther than Ilion (New York); it was Eastman and the Kodak that clinched the claim of Rochester (New York) to its pre- eminence, -which had once been threatened by Carthage (New York). It was Goodrich whose belief in rubber made Akron (Ohio) a more important city than Terre Haute (Indiana). Even * South Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan. South Carolina had its inventors, including the maker of the first practicable submarine.
Here in the man of ingenuity with a new idea (and in the vast plants where new ideas are welcome) is one of the greatest dangers to the Third Reich. But many Americans who rejoice in that ingenuity would resent its being too closely tied up with the perennial quarrels of Europe. For away from the ports, most of the inhabitants of the States here described are, of were, in- creasingly indifferent to Europe. Gone are the days when the chief rival of Cincinnati as " Porkopolis " was Dublin (Ireland). For the citizen of Columbus (Ohio) 1913, the year of the Great Flood, is more important than 1914, the year of the Great War. To us it is merely an episode in the family history of Mr. Thurber ; to Columbus it is the end of an era.
Yet Europe's shadow is thrown over these pages, more perhaps than the compilers realised. We talk of " the melting-pot," we know that the United States has long ceased to be "Anglo-Saxon," but we do not, and cannot, feel the fact as Americans do. And so we neglect one important and respectable source of American isolationism, the fear that American intervention, even American interest, in the quarrels of the Old World will delay the achieve- ment of national unity in the New. Take Detroit, the most rapidly growing of the great American industrial cities. It has long since forgotten its French origin except as an historical ornament that justified calling cars after La Salle and Cadillac. But it cannot forget the great Polish colony of Hamtranck, the once German village that has grown into the city of 50,000, im- bedded in the territory of Detroit, but firmly refusing to be annexed. There politics and social life, education and religion, athletics and dissipation, all have a deep Polish colour. Ham- tranck in a sense is now what Cracow was in its brief life as the sole free Polish community. There the Polish wedding is per- formed with all its traditional jollity. The only sign of Ameri- canisation is that it is no longer the custom to throw coins into a plate, and, if the plate is broken, to claim the right to dance with the bride. Paper-money is thrown in instead. But at the small town of Posen, which is even more Polish than Hamtranck, there is no mitigation of the old custom, either because of a dislike of breaking dishes or of reverence for paper as apart from hard money. Before 1939 these customs were what " old Americans " love to call," colourful." But in 1941, with the long martyrdom of the Poliih people still continuing, the American citizen may regret a little the closeness of the ties that bind die Polish-Ameri- cans of Hamtranck to their mother-country.
He will the more wonder apprehensively if he is a Catholic, and reflects that Hamtranck is not far from Royal Oak, where the Reverend Charles Coughlin does business. No one has given more glowing testimony to Father Coughlin's love for justice and hatred of iniquity than has Father Coughlin himself, but the Poles of Hamtranck must have noticed that his love of justice never incommodes the policies of the Third Reich, and that their brethren in the faith who follow Father Coughlin with such im- pressive, if not edifying, trust, seem to think that the persecution of Jews is nearly the whole duty of the Christian man, a practic- ally complete substitute for the love of Christians. And when they notice that Archbishop Beckman of Dubuque, Father Coughlin's most august episcopal ally, finds that his ancestral ties with Germany are not strained in any way by the policy he commends to his fellow-Americans, they, too, may be tempted to speak out of place, and interpret their duties as American citizens in an excessively Polish light. The Guides, with their customary and admirable candour, make no bones about it. Such and such a town is predominantly " American," such another is predominantly German or Polish. It was because it was one of the most " American " cities that Muncie, Indiana, was chosen for the investigation made famous in " Middletown." Mr Booth Tarkington's Indianapolis is far more American than Mr. Louis Bromfield's Cleveland. The belief in "Hexen " has survived in a more lively form in rural Pennsylvania than in the Palatinate, and the great Indiana abbey of St. Meinrad, set among the German Catholic villagers, is a safer repository of German Catholic tradition than its mother abbey of Einsiedeln can be today. Yet can the American politician or statesman be sure whether the voters round St. Meinrad, if they remember their origin at all, think of Germany as the country where life in the old traditional fashion is being made impossible, or as the holy land of which they are missionary children?
Yet here they are, Poles, Irish, Germans, Maronites, Jews, Negroes, Welsh (the Eisteddfod is naturalised in more States than one), striving, and on the whole thriving, where a few generations ago the Indian and the coureur de bois alone of humans disturbed the forest. If we think of America too simply, in too great masses, here is the corrective. E pluribus unum indeed, but here are the elements in the compound.
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