TABLE TALK
'The last best hope'
DENIS BROGAN
The famous plug for the American ex- periment made by Abraham Lincoln is today in the minds of a great many Americans an example of a false prophecy, for what was to be the new paradise has become paradise mislaid if not yet paradise lost. But it is ex- tremely difficult for someone who first went to America forty-five years ago to forget the impression of immense strength and hopefulness which the United States made on me in 1925. True, I fairly quickly began to notice spots in the sun or flaws in the pic- ture. Lowell and Lawrence, the two great Massachusetts textile towns, were as depressed as Airdrie or Port Glasgow. The sign of seizing up and of economic decline were painfully visible. Outside the textile towns of New England, the whole country seemed to be booming. Of course, in the South, one saw a great deal of solidly built-in poverty, but there were many grounds for hope. Indeed, one of the prob- lems facing the United States in the next few years was the reluctance of Americans of all classes to accept the fact that things had gone very badly wrong. Looking back, it was the complacency of the American ruling class which struck me most deeply. I remember a great corporation lawyer in Chicago telling me in 1934 that between twenty and thirty mil- lion people would have to go back to the land and become subsistence farmers. I wondered whether, in fact, the great corpora- tion lawyers and the great bankers who had made such a mess of things might not them- selves be better employed back on the land. One great Boston banking house which did fail had as its chief the father of one of my closest friends, whose fortune was completely wiped out. This was not only economically disastrous, but emotionally shocking, since she discovered that her father had very little competence even in his banking business. The scars of the depression in America were especially hard to endure because the American economy fell off very suddenly from a high cliff instead of sliding slowly downhill as in Britain—particularly on the edge of Britain, in Wales and Scotland. The American loss of faith in American business leadership has never, I think, been fully recovered from.
America, as I first saw it, also struck me in another way. There is a song, 'America the Beautiful', and some parts of America are very beautiful, but some are not. A great deal of the Middle West has very little visible attraction.
The greatest surprise I got in the American landscape was to discover its most attractive feature was not the Rockies, which don't compare with the Alps or, for that matter, with the Sierra Nevada or the Cascades on the Pacific coast, but what was to me a novel and astonishing presence, the great rivers. Even New England had the Connecticut. Going south along the Atlantic coast one came to river after river, wide, often gloomy, but magnificent and impressive as well as depressive. The California rivers such as the Sacramento are, by our standards, very magnificent, and the result of the magnificence of the rivers has been the magnificence of the bridges crossing these great obstacles. I early decided that the greatest triumphs of American architecture are, not the skyscrapers, but the bridges.
When I first went to America in 1925 there was no bridge across the Hudson, and Manhattan was almost a complete island. Now it is joined to the mainland on both sides, by the George Washington Bridge, by the Verrazano Bridge, and by the bridges on the East River linking Manhattan Island to Connecticut and the New York mainland.
This is not to say that there are no at- tractive buildings in America. There are many. After all, the skyscraper is an American invention, and some skyscrapers are very impressive even if absurd. For ex- ample, the not very large oil city of Beau- mont, Texas, had, when I first went to it in 1926 (I have never been there since) several large, impressive, and absurd skyscrapers. Perhaps it is not on Manhattan that the skyscrapers are most impressive, but on the peninsula of San Francisco where they look outwards to the Golden Gate—and Asia.
The most attractive towns in the United States are some of the small cities, small col- lege towns, of which the most beautiful- is Jefferson's University of Virginia at Charlottesville. The elegant eighteenth cen- tury city of Charleston, South Carolina, has been recently restored not only to much greater prosperity but to much greater elegance by very skilled use of architecture and town planning. There are a good many attractive small towns in the Middle West like Marietta, Ohio Walled after Marie An- toinette), seat of Marietta College. One would think it was very simple to live in such towns if one had not read so-many powerful novels about the horrors of living in college towns.
And, of course, there are some public buildings of great charm. For example, Montgomery, Alabama, has a capitol which, inside and out, shows a remarkable degree of architectural sophistication in a building put up while Alabama was half Indian terri- tory. There are other towns a little faked up. like Williamsburg, Virginia, and Santa Bar- bara, California, which are yet extremely at. tractive. I have now got used to the magnificent Gothic structures of Princeton and Yale, and still find the odd mixtures of Harvard as repulsive as I did in 1925. There are even towns I like because of their rich badness, like Indianapolis. But on the whole the United States doesn't compare well with let us say, Italy or France or England for richness of architectural achievement !
My feelings for America are compli- cated by the fact that I am thinking of the United States as a body politic and as an ex- periment of overwhelming historic im- portance. I can remember the sort of piety with which I went to see the battlefield of Gettysburg, the later piety with which I saw the battlefield of Nashville and was shown over all the country from Nashville to Franklin by a prominent business man who was a Civil War 'buff'.
Although at the present moment, my American friends write to me or, coming through London, tell me of the disastrous state of the country, of insoluble problems of race, of the economy, of violence, I have still never managed to drive out of my memory. the impression made in 1925 by this astonishing, booming, growing and magnificent society. Perhaps, as many Americans now think, the United States has passed its peak. After all, some of the greatest Roman monuments were built when we now know that the running down of the Roman Empire was well under way. Perhaps there is some significance in the fact that the great Pennsylvania Station. in New York. imitating the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. has been pulled down and replaced by a much less impressive set of buildings. Perhaps the hopes expressed in the greatest of American orations, Lincoln's Gettysburg address, have been proved to be baseless. Perhaps the pessimism, the sense of guilt in the next greatest American speech, Lincoln's Second Inaugural, are more to the point. Perhaps the United States is paying for its sins, and the Civil War was only the first instalment of the penalty. But I am too old to change my belief that the United States is the last best hope of earth, and if we have not much ground for hope, it may be a universal phenomenon, not merely the fault of the Americans, who have as many faults as other people but possibly no more.
At any rate, reflecting on the years T have spent in the United States (I have been in every state except Arkansas and Alaska, and I propose to visit Alaska as soon as I can), I am not falling back on dramatic despair. as Americans tend to do. I don't quite .see American society collapsing or the United States fragmented really if not formally by 1976 when it will celebrate its two-hundredth birthday. Yet I have always in my mind some of the impressions given by the great Roman ruins of Gaul, a country in which have also spent a great deal of my time, and wonder whether Jefferson was inspired. in a way he did not understand, when he imitated the Maison Carrie at Nimes in designing the capitol at Richmond. In any case, I have invested so much of my time and thought and emotion in both the United States and France that I feel I am too old to give way to the easy pessimism of the young. and I have not totally abandoned the optimism with which I approached both the United States and France in the remote years when I first began to live in these two countries.
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