Another Fine Mess

by Tim Moore

  I ducked off the Natchez Trace at Jackson. This was the first city I’d driven through since Detroit, and by curious coincidence followed Motown as the metropolitan area with America’s second highest black population. After all that parkway velvet, it was painful to readjust to deeply crevassed urban asphalt. The camber was extreme and the potholes depthless; I had repeated cause to thank Henry for the flexible chassis that allowed the top-heavy T to right itself just as it felt set to topple. (A week or so later, rereading the original Mike’s life story more attentively, I learned that Ts did in fact tip over all the time, even in cities and at low speed, and that Dib Fewer’s Mike had suffered precisely such a fate in the incident that broke Pinky Robinson’s arm.)

  Downtown traffic was the one environment where the T didn’t get a free pass, with indulgent waves replaced by honked irritation. My mood and road manners were not improved by one of those hair-shirted radio exposures to Fox News, an ordeal which always seemed to infect me with shouty over-assertiveness. That night I kicked up a truly unedifying fuss at a nice family-friendly restaurant. ‘Yeah, well I wanted to order that second glass of wine before the happy-hour deadline,’ I heard myself snap at the craven waitress who brought me the bill. ‘I suppose it’s my fault that you took so long to come over to my table. Tim Moore – I report, you decide.’

  I’d come to Jackson – an off-piste, deeply Democratic city – to pop in on an old school friend. Richard Grant is a travel writer, would you believe, albeit one of a much bolder stripe, whose missions have involved Mexican drug barons and previously uncharted African rivers. It was twenty-seven years since we’d last met, and he’d spent nearly all of them in the US; Jackson has been his home long enough for him to say ‘Miss’ippi’, the preferred local styling. I left the T dribbling hydrocarbons all over a suburban driveway, then knocked on a door, shook a hand, and watched a man who was two inches taller than me attempt to squeeze himself behind a very old steering wheel. ‘This is ridiculous,’ wheezed Richard, and indeed it was: he looked like a dad wedged in his toddler’s Cozy Coupe. What a blessing that my dimensions tallied with the stunted farmers Henry had designed his T to fit: in the last century, American men have grown by an average 2.5 inches.

  Richard effortfully extracted himself, then showed me into the cool, well-shaded ranch house he shared with his wife and their young daughter. How deeply I envied that spacious and uncluttered office at the end of Richard’s garden, and the age-appropriate diversification he’d masterminded within it, composing thoughtful, prize-winning books on Mississippi’s kaleidoscopic culture and history, and erudite features about jaguars and trees for the Smithsonian Magazine. ‘Struggling to get anything done in the last few weeks, though,’ he said, handing me the first decent cup of coffee I’d had since setting off. ‘Just too much crazy Trump shit going on.’

  We talked about this shit – his neighbour, who kept a collection of colossal military trucks in his yard, was unamazingly a big Trumpite – and then, in what didn’t seem a jarring progression, we talked about racism. ‘It’s pretty ingrained in the south,’ said Richard. ‘There are people on my Facebook feed who have some dreadful opinions, which freaks out a lot of my British friends.’ I was slightly surprised by this, and mentioned that the restaurant I’d shouted in the night before had been conspicuously mixed: black families, white couples, groups of multiracial friends. I hadn’t seen that in Detroit (and in fact I wouldn’t see it anywhere else). ‘Well, racism is pretty ingrained in the north, too, but there’s a difference. Up there, white people are happy for black people to have equal economic status and opportunity as long as they don’t have to be friends with them. Down south it’s the other way round. The saying here is that when a white guy puts his arms round a black guy, it’s just another way of holding him down.’ Not for the first time or the last, I appreciated what a very different trip I’d be experiencing had I been even a bit less white. Or indeed had I been driving an electric Nissan, with my boyfriend.

  Race seems to get entangled in everything that’s ever happened down south. The Confederate battle insignia is still incorporated into Mississippi’s state flag. Richard asked if I was aware that a number of Native Americans had kept black slaves; I told him I wasn’t, and he related the tale of Greenwood LeFlore, a nineteenth-century half-French, half-Choctaw go-getter who straddled both worlds, winding up as chief of the Choctaws and a Mississippi senator, with a parallel career in cotton planting. LeFlore kept 400 black slaves, lived in a huge mansion full of French antiques, and seriously aggravated his tribe by cooperating with their expulsion from the state following the 1830 Indian Removal Act. In consequence, after he died, furious Choctaws exhumed his body and buried it face down in an unknown location.

  And we talked about crime. It’s what city-dwelling Americans do. Richard’s stories were even more awful than my cousin Marshall’s. Two months before, a mother had been carjacked in a local gas station by thieves who drove off with her six-year-old son in the rear seat. Nine hours later the police found the abandoned car, and also the boy, dead in the back with a bullet in his head. Then there was the retired jeweller who answered his door to find a gun in his face, and in due course pressed to the back of his neck as he drove the two assailants to the nearest ATM. When they got there, the old man very boldly whipped out a 9mm pistol he’d had hidden under the driver’s seat: he shot one attacker dead but missed his fleeing accomplice. The accomplice was arrested the next day after posting a detailed account of his evening on Facebook (a British criminal defence lawyer of my acquaintance says this is much more common than people might believe, on account of the typical miscreant’s extremely high stupidity levels). The kicker: both assailants were prison officers.

  I had two more proper coffees – all those insipid diner refills still linger miserably in my mind – then took my leave. As we shook hands Richard thoughtfully pointed out that if we allowed the same amount of time to elapse before our next meeting, we would both be eighty when it took place. And with that dread reflection pinging about in my caffeinated brain, I fired Mike up and set off into the thuggish midday heat.

  South-west of Jackson, heading towards the Mississippi, I soon broached the dishevelled, depopulated heartlands of the former Plantation Belt. Weeds spread eagerly in from the edge of the road, and the bayous cleaved deep through the orange mud were clogged with last autumn’s leaves. There was barely any traffic and the few people about were all black. This was the only part of my route where it had proved impossible to find a red way through: the counties clustered along the lower Mississippi are some of the most deeply Democratic in the US. If you’re poor and black and hope for a better future you vote blue. If you’re poor and white and pine for a prosperous past you vote Trump.

  A gang of stripy-trousered prisoners collecting roadside litter cheerfully mimicked me as I creaked past them, wobbling their hands about on imaginary steering wheels. ‘I like it, man!’ cried one, showing me several gold teeth. ‘That’s clean.’ They didn’t seem busy and I wasn’t surprised. Even in the scabbiest, most run-down areas I barely saw any rubbish blowing about. That’s just not the small-town way. When a rural American opens his car window, you don’t need to worry that he’s going to throw litter out of it. But you do still need to worry, because he’s about to point a shotgun through it and pepper a road sign.

  Americans need to be house-proud about litter because they really do produce an awful lot of it: 2.5kg per head per day, more than anyone else on earth. Every motel breakfast ended with a small mountain of plastic and Styrofoam being tipped into the buffet area’s giant trash bin: fork, knife, spoon, juice and coffee cups, bowl, plate. Even Italy, where fly-tipping is a national sport, recycles more. The food-waste stats are a particular scandal: the US throws away roughly 50 per cent of its produce, $160 billion-worth every year. Once again Donald Trump leads by example. Nearly everything he eats arrives in a disposable fast-food container, and Air Force One is loaded to the gunwales with little sealed packe
ts of Oreos, pretzels and potato chips, few of which are ever fully consumed as the president will only ever graze from a fresh, unopened package.

  In this regard Trump is truly the anti-Ford. Henry despised waste, with a passion that bordered on phobia. At his factories, he had floor shavings processed into formaldehyde and creosote, and used the slag from his steel furnaces to surface roads. Every day, seven tons of garbage from the River Rouge plant was distilled into heating oil and gas. He processed the plant’s sewage into soap. In 1930, the New York Times said that Ford threw nothing away from his factories, ‘not even the smoke’. Everyone sneered at his parsimony back then, but from a twenty-first-century perspective Ford looks very much like an environmental pioneer.

  It all derived from a fanatical quest for efficiency, the Model T’s defining principle, and an increasing preoccupation for Henry after his company found itself manufacturing Universal Cars by the million. He obsessed over economies of scale and production techniques in the drive to pare down unit costs. ‘In one case we found that by using two cents more worth of material in a certain small part we were able to reduce the total cost of it by 40 per cent,’ he droned to his long-suffering ghost-writer, Samuel Crowther, in 1925. ‘That is, the amount of material under the new method cost about two cents per part more than under the old, but the labour was so much faster that, under the new method, the cost which was formerly $0.2852 was now only $0.1663. On a 10,000-a-day production [this] meant savings of $1,200 a day.’ It’s said that Henry went right off James Couzens after calculating that his general manager’s $150,000 salary added 50¢ to the price of every Model T.

  A parallel mania propelled Henry’s lust for vertical integration – ever deeper control of the Model T’s supply chain. Ford started manufacturing its own windshield glass, roof canvas, artificial leather, wire and batteries. Henry acquired 400,000 acres of Michigan woodland to provide the Model T’s timber frame and floorboards, then sold the offcuts to a cousin in the charcoal business (Kingsford briquettes remain the US market leader). In due course Henry would run his own iron mines and coal mines, even his own merchant fleet and a railroad. But he spectacularly over-reached himself trying to make his own tyres. In 1927, Ford acquired a concession for 2.5 million acres of Amazonian rainforest, with the intention of creating a rubber plantation and a fully featured city for the people who would work there. Fordlandia – the scheme reeked of hubris from its name down. Some 10,000 workers dutifully built hospitals, schools, railroads and an airport out in the remote jungle, but the crucial rubber-growing side of things proved an agricultural disaster, and the venture was swiftly abandoned. The incurred losses would have ruined many a business, but not one owned by the ninth richest man in human history.

  Presently the world around me was smothered by a heavy green blanket. It was draped over the ruins of old cotton gins and old cotton mansions, over abandoned school buses and houses, over every living thing in sight. Shrouded trees struggled up from stifled meadows; an electricity pylon stood like a mighty green phallus. At length the canopy of shiny leaves leapt over the road, blotting out the sun and trailing tendrils that flicked my windshield. And all because in 1935, somebody decided to tackle soil erosion in the neglected former cotton fields by sending FDR’s Civilian Conservation Corps out to plant a few Asian vines. What could possibly go wrong?

  Kudzu grows a foot a day and is currently annexing 150,000 acres of southern Mississippi every year. ‘The vine that ate the south’ has been shown to thrive when treated with most herbicides, and the few that do kill it take ten years to finish the job. The reckless introduction of invasive species was a bit of a thing in the south around that time. In 1938, Edward McIlhenny – son of Tabasco’s founding deity – elected on some fathomless impulse to import a few pairs of the hideous dog-sized guinea pigs we call coypu (and the Americans call nutria) from Argentina to his family’s Louisiana estate. In one deathless assessment of this whim’s aftermath, ‘McIlhenny was surprised both by their prolific breeding and the difficulties in confining them to their pens.’ As we speak, some twenty million nutria are busily devastating Louisiana’s rice fields, sugar fields and coastal vegetation.

  It was Bill Robinson who told me to visit the Grand Gulf military park. I found his dented, cigar-shaped reason propped on the lawn outside the park’s clapboard museum: a home-made, one-man bootlegger’s submarine, powered by a Model T engine. ‘Someone found it in the Sixties on an island in the Mississippi,’ a curator told me. ‘Whoever ran whiskey under the river had hidden it pretty well.’

  Henry Ford was always tickled by stories of Model Ts put to weird and wonderful use: it tapped into the vein of rustic inventiveness that had inspired him. But as a hardcore liquor-loather he would have been deeply unamused by this application. Henry railed against the demon drink with such passion and regularity that early Prohibitionists urged him to run as president on a temperance ticket. In 1923, three years after Prohibition became law, a reluctant Ford found himself as the adoring public’s favourite for the upcoming presidential election. He eventually gave his endorsement to Calvin Coolidge – on condition that if elected, Coolidge would enforce Prohibition with draconian intensity. Coolidge promised, won, and failed abysmally.

  For America’s Spider Huffs, Prohibition cast a miserable shadow over the late Model T era; for its Henry Fords, the booze ban promised to bathe the nation in a healthy, golden, God-fearing glow. ‘The noble experiment’ was actually a rather Trumpy phenomenon, and not just because the Donald – no matter what that reckless, ranting small-hours Twitter habit implies – doesn’t drink. The driving force behind Prohibition was the Anti Saloon League, a small-town movement whose alco-phobia slotted into its reactionary hatred of urban growth and the spread of corrupt and ungodly metropolitan culture. The traditional, church-based values that still held Protestant rural America together were a bulwark against all those factories full of immigrants, and those office-ponces with their jazz and straw boaters and cocktails. And because rural America, then as now, held the whip hand, in 1920 the Eighteenth Amendment was abruptly enshrined, proscribing ‘the manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States’. Though not, conspicuously, banning consumption – an oversight that heralded a plague of lawlessness which would soon make the temperance movement pine for the wet old days.

  Bootlegging got its name in the 1890s, when entrepreneurs smuggled booze into dry Indian reservations by hiding it in their tall boots. Prohibition-era bootleggers operated on a rather grander scale. Detroit’s proximity to Canada established alcohol smuggling as the city’s second largest industry after car manufacture, employing an estimated 50,000 people. Al Capone is thought to have made $60 million from bootlegging and underground drinking dens; New York’s speakeasies paid out an estimated $150 million a year in bribes to city officials and police. Two-thirds of the fifty million gallons of whiskey that were locked up in government warehouses when Prohibition was declared were found to have vanished by its end. The nation’s murder rate rose by a third.

  Loopholes were eagerly exploited. After doctors found they could prescribe whiskey legally, they did so with abandon, treating ailments from anxiety to influenza and earning $40 million a year in the process. The number of registered pharmacists in New York State would triple during the Prohibition era. Enrolments also soared at churches and synagogues, which had coincidentally been licensed to obtain wine for religious ends. Home brewing was rife, though retailers hawking the raw materials had to cover themselves. Grape growers cleaned up selling ‘grape bricks’, boxed slabs of dehydrated juice that came with splendid nudge-nudge anti-instructions: ‘(1) Do not dissolve contents in a gallon jug of water. (2) Do not leave jug in cool cupboard for 21 days.’ So successful were these kits that the price of grapes rose by almost 4,000 per cent under Prohibition, and the grape-brick boom begat many of California’s best-known wineries. And moonshining thrived, though amateur
dabblings came at a price: tainted home-made liquor killed 1,000 Americans every year.

  Dib Fewer’s dad was a cop, but he still brewed beer in his basement, and Dib’s mom had sent them on their way with a bottle of bootleg bourbon. The original Mike boys made conspicuous detours into Canada and Mexico, and made no bones about the rationale in their letters home: ‘Went into Ontario and bought 4.4 beer at a station (20¢ pint)’; ‘You ought to see Tijuana, what a wide-open place. Every store and stand has a bar. Old Judge whiskey, ABC beer.’

  It’s thought that per-capita booze consumption fell by no more than a third under Prohibition. And the expected upsides largely failed to materialise, crowded out by a welter of unanticipated downsides. Court rooms and jails overflowed with bootleggers and moonshiners, obliging the judicial system to clear its backlog with plea bargains – virtually unknown before then, and one of Prohibition’s most prominent legacies. Countless restaurants and theatres went bust as customers deserted them for the mushrooming speakeasy clubs, at least 50,000 of which sprang up in New York alone. As well as all the redundant brewery and distillery workers, the Depression’s endless dole queues were swelled by Prohibition’s knock-on effect into the haulage and catering industries.