The country goes on, being beautiful and strange.
In the mountains of North Carolina there is a clear, irregular piece of water, poured between green hills, and called Lake Lure. It compares favorably to Annecy or Garda, but did you ever hear of it? There are the Great Smoky Mountains piled on each other in huge, blue-green waves; the red land of Georgia and the pines; the dunes of Santa Rosa Island like a low chain of snow mountains with the sea glass-green and purple before them; the wild dark forest around Lake Pontchartrain: a land going on forever, changing and lovely.
And the countryside is strange with its own life, and with its lightly anchored, restless people. At the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, some tamed, scrubbed Cherokees live on a reservation that looks like a sanitarium, and sell knickknacks to tourists. The passing white Americans, mainly Southerners, regard the Indians as a picturesque tourist attraction. I wonder if the Indians ever go to a shapeless neighboring town in order to stare at the picturesque whites. They would see the young palefaces waiting around a jukebox until someone produced the requisite nickel for music and then, silent and with expressionless faces, launching themselves into their tribal jitterbugging. These mysterious, not gay, complicated gyrations are obviously a ritual dance. The dancers, instead of feathered headdresses, wear uniforms: the girls in shorts that cover only what is essential by law, and with long, loose shirts; the boys in T-shirts and trousers rolled above their ankles. Why travel to Yucatan or Bali when the natives dance so exotically in every American village?
In Charlotte, a brigade of ladies calling themselves “Does,” who seem to be the female branch of the Elks, were holding a convention. The whole performance, and above all the ladies’ faces, was scarcely credible. There are times when American women seem to form a third sex, something entirely apart, or perhaps they make another race rather than a sex. Dressed in printed silks and often bunched with orchids, they were given over to a fierce and purposeful activity, and the town, a little frightened, made way for them. From Baltimore to Houston, the cities seemed crawling with conventions. Why, isn't this the American system of fiestas, substituting some improbable club or fanciful business for a saint's day?
You are never really let alone in the South. The loudspeakers that carry, onto the streets, unwanted music, advice and recitative are replaced—on the open road—by commanding signs. Drink Fosko (the South surely swallows more colored, sweetened horror than is consumed with safety elsewhere in the world); or Sit on Spratline's Seat Cushions; and finally, and often, one is warned: Prepare to Meet Your God. Preparing to Meet God is no light event. In some unmemorable hamlet, on a stringy main street lined with dusty cars, a man of God stood outside the drugstore and exhorted sinners to step up and be saved. He did this in the blaze of Saturday afternoon, and from a distance he sounded as if he were having a fit or being tortured. Closer to, he made no sense at all and his voice was terrifying as he screamed, threatened and groaned. A young farmer in blue jeans, lounging unconcerned near this dreadful exhibition, opined that “people can get crazy on God just like on likker. Seems they sit alone and think too much and they just get crazy on it.”
At Florala, in Alabama, a freckle-faced veteran owned and operated the bus-stop café. He remembered eating baked octopus in Naples and he remembered Switzerland, where “they had everything under control. They didn't have no black market until the American soldiers came. You couldn't eat more than your share even if you had the money.” He had left a fine, $80-a-week job at Niagara Falls, because of the housing; and returned to Florala, where he was born. He worked from seven in the morning until nine at night, and that way “kept from getting restless.” For restlessness is a disease as definite as malaria and must be steadily fought with all possible sanity precautions.
There at Florala too, on the edge of another delightful unknown lake, a very fat man and his agreeable wife were opening a new hotel. It was the eighth which he had bought, rebuilt, furnished, opened, operated and sold in the course of six years. You could not think they were principally interested in bettering themselves, for each hotel had been a success and offered a life of security and ease. They were interested in moving; or they were impelled to move.
It is charming the way everyone in the South says, “Come back.” This is the regulation farewell at gas stations, soda fountains, general stores, tourist camps. “Come back,” they call, “come back.” Do they feel marooned in one place, lost, needing to believe someone will return to share their exile on the similar main streets, in the varied but always new-looking land?
And everywhere, from the beaches of North Carolina to Biloxi and Lake Pontchartrain, the not-rich people were vacationing. Americans have a habit of thinking that foreigners do not work, that some hereditary laziness prevents them becoming rich and thus causes them to stir up endless trouble. But I have never seen any country where so many people took so much time off to have fun.
We are a wildly energetic people in our pursuit of pleasure, let alone in our pursuit of money, and we are very odd to look at as we go about our lives. Someday, no doubt, foreigners will come to watch us, as—in our time—we streamed from Oberammergau to Pekin, watching them. They will find the country beautiful beyond belief and the natives peculiar enough to make the trip worthwhile.
We were impressed by the number of schools, perched along the roads, all spanking new, with fine hygienic windows, and the playgrounds loud and bright with children. The road signs say “School—Slow,” with great frequency; and the school buses chug about in laudable numbers. This wealth of schoolhouses does not correspond with the Jeeter Lester preconception of the South any more than does the striking prosperity.
Besides the schools, there are many colleges, looking like spreading country houses under their old trees. It would seem that people in the South are hipped on education and, judging by buildings alone, they ought to be a very learned set of people. This would scarcely appear to be the case. I have the impression that reading is an occupation suitable only for the sick or bedridden; and that the expression of ideas, the effort for articulate thought, is considered unnecessary. Most of the citizenry have not troubled to study grammar, despite the pretty schools. They speak English, on the whole, as if they were still learning it with some difficulty.
On the other hand, we saw two institutions of learning which seemed remarkable because the students evidently felt their education was a great and serious privilege. These rarities were Black Mountain College and Tuskegee Institute.
Black Mountain College, if nobody has bothered to tell you, is a collection of unattractive and scarcely comfortable buildings set alongside a bright, small lake, with mountains ringing it, and a lovely morning mist and a purple-soft evening sky. The young who attend this place are as lively a bunch as I ever saw, very merry with their Borsodi-communal life, wonderfully earnest about the world they live in and as intellectual as all get-out. I suppose their great human experiment is the mixing of colored and white students, in the heart of the lynch country. But it seemed to me, perhaps inaccurately, that there was a self-consciousness about this, an excessive consideration for the Negro students because of their color. The experiment will become successful when they can all treat each other with cheerful, friendly rudeness, irrespective of pigmentation. Obviously the white students and faculty cannot forget their sense of outrage against the injustice that is visited on the Negroes, economically and socially, since they live in constant contact with this injustice. When we were there, little groups of white students were walking the streets of Black Mountain, getting signatures to a petition for space for colored people in the local movie house. It is certainly an inalienable right of Americans to go to the movies, even if only in Jim Crow seats.
In a rural way, Black Mountain is the nearest thing I have seen in America to the café life of students in Europe. By this I mean that it has been a long time since I heard young people talking steadily and with such passion about Art, Love, Life and Politics. I th
ink these kids will turn out to be fine, if slightly unhappy, citizens. Not for them the abiding love of things and the comfortable herd minds of their countrymen. It would be interesting if they would settle, like human time bombs, in the South.
Tuskegee is a big, rich, handsome place: the Negroes have made their own world here and made it fine. George Washington Carver's laboratory is open to the public and it was moving to see, not only because of the audacious, selfless and determined mind that worked there, but because it is a shrine. Two stout, brightly dad colored ladies, panting in the heat on the laboratory steps, gossiped together in the lovely voices Negroes have. They were not of the privileged group which studies here—they were the poor ones without education—but they had the joy of ownership and the right to admire. Colored school children, looking awed, obedient and bored, filed through the big room, shepherded by their teachers. Young men studied the exhibited test tubes, with reverence. Everyone was proud: Dr. Carver was theirs; this great campus was theirs; and—freed of the intolerable condescension of the whites—they seemed to stand straighter, walk faster and to be happy, not in the way of the poor Southern Negroes, a mindless, chuckling happiness that is almost resignation, but happy because their world looked good. The young people who graduate from Tuskegee also will become fine, if slightly unhappy, citizens. The country has not grown up to them.
At Orange, on the Sabine River, we entered Texas. At once, you felt that every man was out for himself and in a hurry about it. All charm disappeared, to be replaced by cactuses, oil wells and a climate like living under a vast hair-drier. There is too much land here and it could do with an influx of new blood. When you think of all the people rotting in DP camps, it seems a crime that southern Texas should waste under the sun.
We fled through Texas, through Beaumont and Houston, with its outer fringe of Luna Park and gaudy tourist camps, its oil-boom crowdedness, through all the ugliness and grab, longing to be gone. But in Houston there was a man who should be mentioned— he seemed a phenomenon; he was kind. He ran a parking lot and enjoyed doing kindnesses to strangers. In this he was well out of the swim, for no one else in that part of Texas would have had time for such fantasy. He was loaning money to a woman, a hitchhiking waif who needed an operation; helping repair a shabby car belonging to some travelers who could not afford a garage mechanic; and trying, in an unaccented, easy way, to be decent to his fellow men. They should elect him mayor, for my money.
After all the miles and all the weeks, there is still no conclusion to draw from driving through America. It is beautiful and strange. It has also a great quality of unreality, because the reality of most of the world now is hunger and desolation, gutted houses and factories, the car that lies pocked with bullet holes and rusting at the side of the road, the burned-out tank, the ration tickets, the devious anguish of black markets, the hopelessly repaired clothes, the cracked shoes and the wretched allotment of coal. I do not see how anyone can make that reality clear to Americans, because they have not felt it and experience is not communicated through the mind. But if Americans could understand and feel that reality, someone should tell them to be generous quickly, to be impractically and imprudently generous, since it is not safe for one nation alone to be so blessed.
Cry Shame
THE NEW REPUBLIC, October 1947
The fierce lights of the newsreel cameras beat on a bald head and a pudgy, bewildered face; a photographer crouched four feet away; the press crowded at tables to the right; on the left sat the counsel and his aides; above, the four inquisitors lolled in reasonable and comfortable shadow. It looked like a cluttered stage set up there in front, but the rest of the big House Caucus Room was empty except for a few dozen people who seemed to have wandered in, casually, as one might into a Trans-Lux theater between trains. And it was quite a show, and free too: the Un-Americans putting on a flawless travesty of justice.
Robert E. Stripling, the permanent counsel for the House Committee on Un-American Activities, was the chief actor. Stripling, of the sharp voice and sick, spiteful face, did most of the talking because Hanns Eisler, the other leading character, was not allowed to cross-examine, or call witnesses, or even suggest witnesses, or read a statement: so naturally he did not have as much to say. For a while it was rather dull and then suddenly the word “communism” was pronounced. The four Un-Americans, sitting on their raised dais, woke up, moved, leaned forward. For now we had the clue, the thing the plot hung on, the horrid syllables that gave everyone his position and his fame and his power and his swelling sense of virtue. We had, in short, the delicious smell of blood.
And Stripling made a point: 21 years ago Eisler had applied for membership in the German Communist Party. Eisler said he had not paid his dues (maybe he forgot or didn't have the money), nor gone to meetings (how boring a musician would find political gatherings with nothing to listen to but voices), and had, in effect, never been a “real member” of the party. Stripling clearly did not believe this; he would have no possible way of understanding the emotions and actions and spontaneities and carelessnesses of a man who loves music. Nor would Stripling know, or try to imagine, what Germany was like in 1926. Stripling was obviously enjoying himself with this dumpy, perspiring foreigner who speaks such accented English.
Stripling, like all the Un-Americans, is a devoted and exclusive reader of the Daily Worker. (No other newspaper is seemingly credible enough to be cited in evidence.) He produced an antique prewar clipping from his favorite paper: a picture of Eisler being greeted by a band of people—students, musicians, or someone— all giving the clenched-fist salute, and Eisler affably giving it back. Eisler observed that really this was the salute of all kinds of European workers and always has been, but Stripling, impatient of such balderdash, told Eisler curtly to identify himself in the picture. Then Stripling said, show the committee what you were doing; and innocently Eisler raised his arm with the fist clenched. The cameras clicked like teeth snapping shut, there was a ripple of triumphant amusement in the Caucus Room, and Stripling turned away with a sly and satisfied smile. . . .
I had then seen as much of the show as I could stand, and I left. Besides, I had seen this show done before, but by real professionals; here in the Caucus Room it was after all a little Peoples’ Court for beginners.
The one legal accusation against Hanns Eisler is that, in 1940, he evaded the law which excludes from permanent entry into the United States such aliens as advocate, or belong to organizations which advocate, the overthrow of the United States Government by force or violence. This statute has been construed by the State Department and the Un-Americans to embrace Communists and the Communist Party. But no one has proved that Hanns Eisler was a Communist in 1940, or at any time subsequent to the wandering application for membership in the German Communist Party in 1926.
However, the committee apparently feels it can discern what goes on inside a man's heart, despite what the man may say to the contrary. To prove their divining-rod theory that Eisler has “communistic beliefs,” they submit as sole evidence some flattering excerpts from the Communist press, the fact that Eisler has written “Red songs” (not titled by him; he is a musician only) which were sung by many anti-fascists as well as Communists, and the undeniable existence of his, shall we say, awkward brother. This is all, this pitiful and ignorant gossiping.
When Eisler said he had never been a “real member” of the Communist Party, that is exactly what he meant. His technically false answer (that 1926 application for membership) will perhaps fix Eisler in the end. Yet those of us who are only human beings and not law-givers can understand this: that a person, driven by despair, hope or anger, makes a brief gesture, changes his mood, wanders off, forgets. And if the Un-Americans were realists, instead of a hunting pack, they would recognize that to be a “real member” of the Communist Party, you have to earn your C by Communist standards, which no one has ever denied are both long and tough and highly unsuited to men who are chiefly interested in sonatas, cantatas and the t
heory of counterpoint.
However, as Norman M. Littell, lawyer for George Messer-smith, stated: if the committee thought Eisler was a Communist, the evidence should be turned over to the Justice Department for prosecution. For there are laws and courts of law, and an accused man has the right to a fair and free trial: at least as long as this country stands on rock. But the Un-Americans are not a law court, and do not have to prove anything. They can say what they like, armored with subpoenas and safe behind their extraterritoriality which spares them suits for slander. So it was possible for Stripling to announce that Eisler is the Karl Marx of the music world, a remark of such grotesque and childish silliness that anywhere else it would make people yawn or laugh their heads off. It was also possible for Representative John E. Rankin (D, Miss.) to say that testimony indicated that “Mr. Eisler certainly is following the Communist line and serving the Comintern just as effectively as if he were a member of the Communist Party.” In the minds of the Un-Americans, We the People must be a bunch of fools or cowards, for we are seriously asked to shiver at the thought that Eisler's songs menace our way of life: on a note of music, apparently, the whole structure will topple to pieces. If We the People do not believe our nation and system of government to be more secure than that, we ought to migrate like the lemmings, plunging solemnly into the sea. . . .
Supposedly, an agent of the Comintern does something; he can't just sit around telling himself in a sinister fashion that he is an agent. But no one bothered to say, let alone prove, what Eisler, the alleged servant, has been doing in this country since 1940 to undermine us all. Eisler had visited Russia long before the war; the committee forgets that in the almost unimaginable past a lot of people went everywhere and it was not regarded as criminal. There even used to be, if you can believe it, plain commercial tours to the Soviet Union and anyone who had the fare could go, provided they wouldn't much rather have a bang-up time rollicking around Paris, France, and Rome, Italy, and other places which were also easy to reach. The committee says that Eisler was one who planned the International Music Bureau, apparently a dream on paper, which got its letterhead (and never went farther) in Moscow when Eisler was not there to consent or advise. But oddly enough, in those distant days before the war, music and books and painting flowed around quite freely between all except the fascist nations and this used to be considered a good thing.
The View from the Ground Page 10
