history may be less illustrious (or notorious) than that of the Rockefellers, but it means infinitely more to me; it undergirds a goodly part of who I am, and to be ignorant of one’s forebears is to be forever anchorless, unmoored, “free” only in the sense that one is “free-fallin,” as the song goes. “Grandfather’s chair may be a very humble piece of furniture,” wrote the turn-of-the-century education reformer John Kennedy of good old Batavia, New York, “but it is prized beyond all price because it is grandfather’s chair.” This is why children in the schools of my Upstate New York should be reading Walter D. Edmonds, while young scholars in Camden should enter the fictive world of Jessie Fauset.
A localized Aframerican-centric education would find children of Philadelphia awash in Fauset and the lads at Dunbar High reciting the poetry of the school’s eponym; boys and girls in Rochester would celebrate Frederick Douglass Day rather than Martin Luther King Day, and no one would graduate the Cleveland schools without a thorough grounding in Langston Hughes.
Jessie Fauset’s friend, the poet Countee Cullen, memorably wrote:
Yet I do marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
If it makes our young poets proud of their blackness, their ancestors, their heritage, and it bid them sing, then let us praise Afro-centrism!
Peace in River City
The American Conservative, 2011
Our daughter will be spending the snowy months rehearsing her role as Marian the Librarian in her high school’s production of Meredith Willson’s The Music Man, that tuneful Iowa-placed warhorse—no, parade horse—of community theater. (The flaw in community theater is that while the actors are drawn from the community, the playwrights seldom are.)
It’s been an autumn of imposture, as my wife played the lead in a sharply observed one-act, “Blind Date,” by the late great Horton Foote of Wharton, Texas, whom a friend calls “the last straight man in American theater,” by which she does not mean that he set up punch-lines for comics. The Internet, I learned, is not wholly useless: Lucine created her accent by watching Lady Bird Johnson clips on youtube. You remember Lady Bird: the cuckquean who had the gall to scold Americans about the ugliness of highway billboards while her grotesque husband was ordering the murder of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Americans in Southeast Asia. There are degrees of ugliness, Bird.
In 1966, LBJ appointed Meredith Willson to the National Council on the Humanities, but hey, everybody’s imperfect. And that was the last time Mason City, Iowa, would ever have a voice in government-subsidized culture. Although Meredith had long since lit out for Southern California, the notes in his head were always Iowan. He was said to have been the largest baby (fourteen pounds, six ounces) born in Iowa, which perhaps justified that superfluous L in his surname. Meredith Willson’s father, an attorney, had played baseball at Notre Dame, where he was taught to throw a curveball by the inventor of that pitch, Candy Cummings. Meredith’s sister, Dixie, a literate Ziegfield Follies chorine and silent-movie screenwriter, wrote the oft-anthologized poem that begins “I like the fall/The mist and all.”
So the Willsons were one of those families of talented eccentrics, some grounded and some not, who grow like beautiful weeds whenever small-town America is left alone to develop in its own way, in its own time.
Mason City also gave us Hanford MacNider, national commander of the American Legion in the 1920s and a believer in “Iowa as the Promised Land.” The Legion once was a potent lobbyist for loot, though veterans’ benefits were meager recompense to those who came home legless or armless or blind or insane from the single-L Wilson’s War to End All Wars. MacNider, a banker, introduced the most un-Mr. Potterish “Iowa idea,” which required each Legion post to “make some unselfish contribution to its community’s welfare each year or lose its charter.” I’d say ninety years of sponsoring American Legion baseball teams is a pretty fair contribution.
Peace has long been an Iowa idea as well. Hanford MacNider was given to such craven and anti-American utterances as “I am . . . unwilling to commit my sons or any American’s sons to the policing of the rest of the world.” Traitor! MacNider played football at Harvard and earned a chestful of medals in both world wars, but he had an Iowa isolationist streak that such he-men as Lindsey Graham and Rick Santorum would find suspiciously girlish.
Iowa isolationism was also embodied, in rather different bodies, by the New Left historian William Appleman Williams of Atlantic, Iowa, and by Barry Goldwater-Eugene McCarthy supporter Donna Reed of Nishnabotna, Iowa. (I’ll bet Donna could have thrown a mean curveball, too; watch her fling that rock through the upper window of the old Granville house in It’s a Wonderful Life.)
I devoted a chapter to Iowa’s prewar culture—Grant Wood, Jay Sigmund, Ruth Suckow, Marvin Cone—in my book Look Homeward, America (2006). Its artistically fecund soil was so much richer than barren Manhattan. And it produced worthy political leaders, too, from the cantankerous Old Right skinflint H.R. Gross to the radical farm crusader Milo Reno.
Meredith Willson seems to have been fairly apolitical, though he did, mind-bogglingly, compose a march commissioned by President Ford for that phlegmatic Michigander’s Whip Inflation Now (WIN) campaign. That combination is so far beyond unhip as to propel the WIN March into its own dimension of occult stodginess. Maybe the University of Michigan marching band can thump it out next time the Wolverines play the Iowa Hawkeyes?
I hear tell that there are caucuses, if not crocuses, coming up in Iowa. As far as I know, only two men in the mix—Ron Paul and Gary Johnson—come anywhere near the Iowa Idea. Not that politics is the answer. If the Mason Cities of our country are ever to reflower, they need peace and poetry and music—the mist and all.
The Beats Go Right
The American Enterprise, 1997
The recent deaths of poet Allen Ginsberg and novelist William S. Burroughs occasioned a round of impolite obituaries accusing the dear departed and their Beat Generation pals of being subversive perverts. Yet whatever unconventionalities went on behind closed doors, their politics were squarely American: the Beats were libertarian heretics in an age of statolatry.
Beat icon Jack Kerouac was a Robert Taft Republican throughout his life. In 1952, in the predawn of his notoriety, Kerouac supported the stolid Ohio conservative for the GOP nomination while his buddy Ginsberg, son of a “Communist beauty” mother, talked up plutocratic Cold Warrior Democrat Averell Harriman, of all people. (The Beat “Adonis of Denver,” cowboy drifter Neal Cassady, said “it makes not one whit of difference who gets it.”)
Kerouac’s political comments read like Chicago Tribune editorials. In a 1948 letter, he cursed Harry Truman:
The war scare I think is just for the sake of squeeze-playing Congress into voting Universal Military Training and the Marshall Plan. It’s a dirty administration with dirty tricks-creating “emergencies” for its own political ends . . . I think we should arm and just dare anybody to attack, but I don’t think we should be the aggressors, that wouldn’t pan out.
Kerouac subscribed to and avidly read National Review and once appeared on William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line,” where he drunkenly uttered the immortal words, “Flat-foot Floogie with the floy floy!” He painted pictures of the Virgin Mary and Pope Paul; he disliked the Vietnam War as well as its protesters: “I’m pro-American and the radical political involvements seem to tend elsewhere. . . . This country gave my Canadian family a good break, and we see no reason to demean said country.”
The prematurely
