War Day
Page 25
Although the study covers all phases of agriculture, wheat production is used as a standard to reveal the scope of dimin-
264 WARDAY
ished American productivity. Table Two uses wheat-production data for 1987 and 1991 as a benchmark for demonstrating the effects of the war in 19 critical states.
TABLE ONE
U.S. AND WORLD PRODUCTION OF KEY AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS
1987
1991
U.S.
U.S.
PERCENTAGE
PERCENTAGE
PERCENTAGE
PERCENTAGE
OF WORLD
OF U.S.
OF WORLD
OF U.S.
COMMODITY
PRODUCTION
EXPORTS
PRODUCTION
EXPORTS
Wheat
18.1% 53.0
% 7.9%
Negligible
Oats
18.3 5.1
6.7
Neg.
Corn
49.2 73.2
30.4
Neg.
Barley
7.3 11.9
4.2
Neg.
Rice
2.7 24.4
2.0
Neg.
Soybeans
65.0 87.0
42.3
10.1%
Tobacco
17.1 22.1
14.6
5.2
Veg. oils
28.3 14.0
16.7
.5
Cotton
20.2 37.6
9.4
Neg.
TABLE TWO
U.S. WHEAT PRODUCTION BY YEAR AND SELECTED STATES
WHEAT PRODUCTION IN MILLIONS OF BUSHELS
STATE
1987
1991
Maryland
6.1
less than 1
Montana
181.3
32.2
North Dakota
352.6
67.8
New York
7.6
2.1
WAR
New Jersey
2.5
less than 1
ZONES
Pennsylvania
9.9
3.2
South Dakota
93.2
8.7
Texas
189.4
110.2
Virginia
18.1
7.8
Wyoming
9.2
2.5
ACROSS AMERICA 255
WHEAT PRODUCTION IN MILLIONS OF BUSHELS
STATE 1987 1991
Indiana
68.3
43.2
Iowa
5.1
3.1
Kansas
331.1
170.3
Michigan
46.7
30.2
FALLOUT
Minnesota
160.2
93.2
ZONES
Missouri
125.1
87.7
Ohio
83.4
43.8
Nebraska
115.5
23.2
Wisconsin
7.2
3.7
In 1987, these 19 states accounted for 6 0 percent of all U.S.
wheat production. Combined with the overall reduction in the number of farms since 1988, total American wheat production is approximately half of what it was before the war.
The full report, detailing all aspects of U.S. productivity, is available as it Comprehensive Study of American Agricultural Production, 1987-1991, AG92-S1-8. Copies are available for 250 from the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Los Angeles, California 90047, or from the U.S.
Department of Agriculture in major cities.
I Will
The rich farmland of northern Missouri was dusted brown, the towns were brown, the late-summer trees were hazed with dust.
Each town we passed through granted us a secret glimpse down its streets. An occasional decontamination team could be seen in white coveralls, seeking slowly along the sidewalks, or a cleanup crew with a water truck spraying the pavement. We saw into backyards where people were cleaning clothing, furniture, and each other with hoses.
And everywhere, as passengers came and went, we heard tales of the storm. It was the biggest duster in history. Winds clocked at a hundred and ten miles an hour and more in town after town.
Took roofs, cars, collapsed buildings, reduced a dozen trailer parks to pulverized aluminum.
Despite it all, we found a powerful spirit moving among the people that seemed at moments almost otherworldly, as surprising as sudden speech from a Trappist.
S Y L V I E W E S T , M A R C E l i N E , M I S S O U R I : "I'm goin' up the line to La Plata to see that my mother's okay. We been in Missouri a long time, us Wests. We aren't going anywhere. A lot of people from around here went south, down to Alabama and Georgia and Florida. There's trouble getting into Georgia. But this is good land, and we just decided we'd stick it out. The storm? I've seen dust before."
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ACROSS AMERICA 25 7
Sylvie West was the color of the land, yellow-gray. Her arms were as long and improbable as the legs of a mantis. She was missing her bottom teeth.
GEORGE KIMBALL, E D I N A , M I S S O U R I : "It wasn't all that hot. We got a real low dose in Edina. I'm looking at it this way—I just got myself a whole lot of good black dirt from Nebraska scot-free. Hell no, I'm not goin' anywhere. I stayed right in Edina through the war and the famine and the flu. That's the place for me. I'm a farmer, of course. I guess you could say I like the look of the town, and I like the people. The stayers, that is. The loafers and the new people all went south. But Missouri needs her people now, and I am not leaving,"
He carried a weathered Samsonite briefcase, which turned out to be full of warehouse receipts recertified that morning by the Knox County Radiation Board. He was on his way to Galesburg to present these receipts to the accepting agent for the Agriculture Department's Regional Strategic Grains Allocation Commission.
His wedding ring was on his right hand, signifying his widower-hood.
ALFRED T . B E N S E N , G A L E S B U R G , I L L I N O I S : "I am in the practice of law in Galesburg, Illinois. I have been in my practice for twenty-eight years, and expect to continue until the day I die. I noticed some dust. But I was working through some title questions for a client and I did not have time to deal with it. This is a man who's been able to buy up over sixty thousand acres at auction in the past year. Abandoned farm properties. This man is twenty-eight. By the time he's fifty, you watch. Illinois will have done for him what it's done for millions in the past. It will have made him rich."
He sat rigidly against his seat, his dark blue suit shiny from many ironings. He spoke as if he had memorized his lines, and been waiting for years to deliver them. Once I noticed him looking long and carefully at us, through brown, slow eyes.
G O R D O N L O C K H A R T , L A S A L L E , I L L I N O I S : "We got a little dust, but most of the blow was south of here. I am an International Harvester dealer. As of December of this year I will be able to sell you a tractor, a combine, just about any piece of equipment you want.
What Harvester did was very smart. They just went out, over the past few years, and repossessed all the abandoned IH equipment 258 WARDAY
they could lay their hands on. Meanwhile, they were getting the factories running again. Nobody was getting paid, but the company organized an employee barter co-op, so Harvester people didn't starve, either. We have company doctors and now a company hospital, so the triage doesn't mean a thing to us. IH people are a big, rock-solid family. We are going to make this land work for us again, maybe better than it did before. No question. Better."
A moment later he was asleep, sno
ring, his head thrown back, the midmorning sun full in his face. One of the trainmen came and tried to get him to eat some soup, but after he was awakened he spent the rest of the trip staring out the window.
J O H N S A M P S O N , J O L I E T , I L L I N O I S : "We got the prison here, and a sure sign that things are picking up is that we got more inmates.
Robbers, second-story men, mostly. No more drug dealers. That kind of petered out. Nobody wants to import drugs into a country where the money's worthless. We don't have many murderers, either. No car thieves. Joliet's kind of quiet. About half the bunks are filled. We got the electric chair back, and once in a while somebody gets the juice. Illinois abides by the U.S. Supreme Court rulings, even though there isn't any Supreme Court anymore. We still work under the old laws, just like before Warday. Why shouldn't we? This is part of America, and it is going to stay that way."
The other passengers kept away from Mr. Sampson. It might have been better for him to travel in ordinary clothing. His Joliet prison guard's uniform made his fellow passengers uneasy, and he had a lonely trip.
Twenty-five miles from the Loop, we began to pass through Chicago's suburban and then industrial outlands. The suburbs are mostly depopulated. People have moved into the city centers or rejoined the small-town economy rather than contend with the difficult transportation problems of suburban life.
Just as Chicago's skyline appeared ahead of us, we passed a tremendous sign, red letters on a white background: C H I C A G O , T H E " I W I L L " T O W N
HAVE WE GOT A J O B FOR YOU!
A C R O S S AMERICA 259
I had again that sense of strangeness, as if I had come upon the spirit of the past alive and still moving in the land. It was a little frightening, but it could also fill me with the reckless energy of boosterism gone frantic.
We moved through a sea of factories with names like Ryerson Steel, Kroehler, Burlington Northern, and Nabisco. Some of these establishments were empty, but others were running—Nabisco, as it turned out, on what must have been an all-out schedule. A fifty-car freight was sided there, being loaded. People were swarming along the loading bays where trucks once came and went, hauling boxes on trolleys to the new rail siding. Another brand-new sign was in place here: N A B I S C O F E E D S A M E R I C A . I remembered them as a cookie manufacturer, but a passenger whose brother worked there explained that the company was now producing high-protein baked goods of all kinds: breads, biscuits, noodles, and other basic foodstuffs. I could not resist asking about Oreos. The answer:
"Available on a limited basis."
By the time we reached Union Station, we had been thoroughly indoctrinated. Word had spread through the train that we were writing a book about the present condition of the country. "We're sick of the 'devastated Midwest' clich6," Tom Walker of Chicago said. "You guys make sure you see the real Chicago. Stay in the Loop. The Loop is Chicago."
This is true, but not in the way he meant. From our own estimates, it appears that the city has lost perhaps half of its population in the past five years. Considering the destruction of agriculture, the famine, the flu, the lack of transportation, the economic chaos, and the massive depopulation, it is amazing that the city has retained such a strong governmental organization. All that's left is the Loop. But the Loop is a good town.
Seeing the Loop, one would never know that Chicago had lost a single citizen. It has none of the subdued intensity of San Francisco or Los Angeles. The Loop is exploding with energy. The El works, and where it goes, the city works too. In the Loop there are buses and trolleys, seemingly by the thousands. At times it seemed hard to cross a street without stepping into one.
We are quite frankly at a loss to explain why this city, in the 260 WARDAY
middle of what is arguably the most harmed area in the country, is so very much alive—or why the rural population we met on the train was so uniformly determined to reconstruct. We might have felt better about it if the energy of the place had seemed deeper and stronger. There is a frantic, gasping quality to it, as if the city were a runner who is beginning to know that, no matter how much he wants to succeed, he is going to have to drop back.
People who stay in places this badly hurt do so because they are in love with them. I suspect that the only people left here are the passionate.
A lot of prewar Chicago shops are closed. Jim stated this observation to a woman on Upper Michigan Avenue. She replied, "Sure.
And a lot of them are open, too." It would be outrageous to fault Upper Michigan for being less grand than it was before the war.
Gucci and Hermes are closed, as are Neiman-Marcus and Bonwit Teller. I. Magnin is selling suits for two paper dollars, and other no-nonsense apparel. They had a good selection of imported per-fume, but all of it was priced in gold. This was generally true of imports throughout the store. The two exceptions were Canadian furs and British clothing. The British sell soft goods for paper dollars; they get their American gold through direct transfer for government services and such things as the sale of automobiles.
Judging from the aggressive British presence in the store, the program of tax incentives for accepting dollars, which Number 10
Downing Street announced last summer, is beginning to work. Jim and I both hope that Neiman's in Dallas (which is very much open) will have some British things by the time we get back.
The Gold Coast is densely populated, but it does not glitter as it once did. Many of the high-rises have a noticeable proportion of boarded windows. Glass is in short supply locally, as it is almost everywhere.
Lake Point Towers has had especially severe problems in this regard, and is no longer the uniform bronze color it once was. In addition to boardings, there are many areas of differently tinted glass, some of it even clear.
The Tribune, which we were told by a number of people missed only six days after Warday, is much in evidence. The paper I ACROSS AMERICA 261
bought for a penny was in one section of sixteen pages. Here are the front-page headlines for Wednesday, September 29,1993: DUST STORM STRIKES MIDWEST. WINDS TO 110 MPH. RADLEVEL MEASURES LOWER THAN EXPECTED.
TRACTION SCANDAL. NORTHSIDE TRACTION BOND FRAUD THREATENS TO
STOP THE TROLLEYS.
BODY FOUND IN TRUNK OF CAR. FIRST WARD COUNTS ITS SIXTH FOR THE
YEAR.
BOARD OF TRADE RIOT. DUST CAUSES BIDDING FRENZIES IN WHEAT, CORN. "NO LIMIT" PRICES TRIPLE IN MINUTES.
MAYOR INAUGURATES FAR-REACHING ART RECLAMATION PROJECT AT
ART INSTITUTE CEREMONIES.
The last story went on to explain that the Chicago Art Institute had joined with museums in Boston, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh to reclaim and restore paintings and other works of art abandoned in New York.
This project has been undertaken in response to the removal by many European museums of works by their national artists from New York galleries. A team from the Louvre even dismantled the Chagall murals from the Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center and took them to Paris.
At the Art Institute, we stood looking at a painting from New York. It was Van Gogh's Starry Night, taken a week before by the Chicago reclamation team. It is grayed by soot, but beneath the haze there remains the extraordinary vision of the heart of the sky.
While at the Art Institute, we met a member of its board of directors, Chandler Gayle. He informed us that the reclamation project was essential not only to forestall further losses to Europe, but also to protect the paintings themselves, which were deteriorating rapidly.
Dr. Gayle, it turns out, is director of the Nonspecific Sclerosing Disease Research Facility at the University of Chicago. We eagerly made an appointment to interview him about NSD later in the day.
By the time we were finished at the Art Institute, it was nearly 262 WARDAY
eleven-thirty. Jim and I agreed that a visit to the Board of Trade was essential, especially in view of the headline in the Tribune.
We took a bus across Adams to La Salle and walked down to the weathe
red Art Deco structure.
Things have changed since the war. We asked a guard about this. "Better than ever," he snapped.
The first sign of change is the number of messengers running in and out of the building. This area is not nearly as heavily rewired as is, say, California, and the most reliable method of con-veying information from rural communities about the state of farm output is by hand. These messengers would pull up in orange Americars and Consensuses with CBT markings on the doors and rush inside, bearing their field information in briefcases similar to the one carried by the farmer on the train.
The whole length of La Salle was taken up with their cars, so much so that some of them had to scramble over the roofs to get to the building. A few had walkie-talkies, but most were without such sophisticated equipment. Inside the exchange were more runners, from the big trading houses and from individual traders on the floor. The Agriculture Department is also a major trader, using such warehoused grains as it has to attempt to stabilize prices.
As we entered the gallery and looked out over the Wheat Pit, a shout rang out: "Aggie's out! The bull's buried Aggie!" A split second of stillness, and then there was a renewed frenzy of trading, and the clerks began racing back and forth, changing their prices on the big chalkboards that have replaced the electronic quotation devices of prewar days. November wheat went from thirty cents to thirty-two to thirty-three-and-a-half in minutes.
I noticed that some of the traders wore green hats with what looked to be a bite taken out of the rim. Later I found out that this had to do with the war. Traders so decorated had been present on the day after Warday. (The Board had already shut for the day when the nuclear exchange took place.) On that day, with no electric power and the Board's electronic devices out of commission, trading was active but extremely difficult. About noon, the Bond Pit closed for lack of information. Then a rumor swept the pits that there had been a nuclear exchange the afternoon before. Communications were so bad that Washington had been destroyed and ACROSS AMERICA 263
New York burning for eighteen hours before Chicago learned about it.
The rumor precipitated a massive run-up in prices until one of the Board managers sounded the gong and entered the pit. The exchange was closed. At that moment the pit's oldest trader, Willie