Grime and heathens
Henry Fairlie
Washington It has long been my belief that if the Roman Catholic Church still cared to protect the secular power, it would have removed Edward Kennedy from the American political scene by making him a cardinal. But the Pope came to Boston and did not take the opportunity. It seems likely to be the only disappointment which his visit here will have for the faithful and the unfaithful alike. As he leapfrogs across the mid-West, there is a spirit of carnival to it all.
Only President Carter would have chosen this week to make a televised addr.ess to the American people about the presence of Russian troops in Cuba. He had already had to postpone his address for 24 hours because the Jews pointed out that he would be addressing the nation when they were beginning to celebrate Yom Kippur. Just because Baptists do not have any feast days or a leader who can draw crowds of 1,500,000 people, does he have to do without a calendar?
As the Pope headed from Boston to the great Catholic cities of the North-East and the mid-West, one hopes that the White House put aside its polls and drew a political lesson from life. Not only Catholic cities, they are ethnic cities. Cities of the Poles, and the Irish, and the Italians, and who not else? Name a Catholic people in southern and eastern Europe, and here are their corresponding communities in America. Working-class cities; blue-collar cities. Are they Kennedy cities? Should Carter concede them? Whether he should or not, in effect he is doing so. For they are also what the authors of an excellent new book call 'gritty cities'. Their book is about the smaller industrial cities of the North-East, but they say that their inspiration came from walking round Baltimore. You either like a gritty city or you flee it. I used to like them in Britain — Birmingham, Warrington, Rochdale, Leeds — and I like them here as well. But if you come from Plains, Georgia, they must seem very foreign. Dirt, smoke, gin — and heathens: that is how they must seem to Carter. Gin if only as a metaphor. I am sure that if he were shown one of Hogarth's prints of Gin Lane, he would immediately think of some impenitent industrial city in Pennsylvania. They must be heathens even to live there. The larger commercial cities are to him veritable Babylons. I have often said that one cannot imagine what he and Rosalynn Carter would do if they spent a' weekend in New York. But the smaller ones are to him no less wicked.
I am not criticising him personally for this. I like the great open space of America. Whenever I see a picture of Carter on his peanut farm, leaping from furrow to furrow, there is the great bowl of the American sky behind him. Every landscape painting of America is properly nine-tenths sky. No wonder that when he looks down the back streets of Detroit, or even of a small town in Connecticut which still makes pins, he thinks only of the sullen and heathen souls that live there.
What was the behaviour of the Georgia members of his White House staff when they first arrived here but that of country boys who had just come into town? Who but they would think that it is one of the privileges of being a presidential assistant that one can get into as boring and uncomfortable a bar as Studio 54? The press has never made any allowance for them, and has indeed been very unfair to them. But what is at the root of it all is an encounter of deep rural America with the city life that bursts at its seams.
There is even more than that, and Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, drew attention to it this weekend. As a New York Jew, he wrote what I believe will come to be regarded as a classic essay in the New York Times weekend magazine. He said that the election of Carter in 1976 was welcomed as a sign that the South had at last been reabsorbed into the nation. He himself then thought so. But now he is convinced that it reflected a much wider conquest of the North by a steady cultural and litemy infiltration from the South.
Naming a score and more of what he 'calls 'Southerly' writers, who have come to New York in the past three decades, he traced various of their influences. Their entanglement with the problem of 'the blacks in the South — and their relief that the South now seems comparatively 'liberal — has enabled them to depict the racial problem in the North as just the same. They talk of black ghettoes in the North, said Podhoretz, because ,they ignore the other ethnic communities.
• He accused the Southerly writers of a false pride, hypocrisy, and a wholly mis taken reading of the North. But behind it all lay his main charge, like a time-bomb which has been waiting for its hour, that everyone of them is a WASP. How can they understand the ethnic populations in the North? How can they understand the urban middle-class values for which the immigrants and their descendants have striven? How can they understand the industry and the commerce? How can they -understand, he might have added, the grime and the heathens?
The essay is a classic one, as I say, and in a very American sense. It strikes a pile through every political, cultural, social, And literary layer in society and shows that they are one. The English used to be very good at this, from Coleridge to Arnold to Orwell, but the tradition now seems to me to be weak. Podhoretz could move from William Faulkner, to Allen Tate the critic, to Willie Morris, the former editor of Harper's, to Truman Capote, and still be talking about Jimmy Carter at the same time.
' He was able to point to the agrarian populism of the South and its persistent hostility to big business: and it is a hostiljty to industry and commerce as such Which is native to the south. I once spent a delightful time with the mother of William F. Buckley, Jr., at her home in the lovely and charming small town of Cam:en, South Carolina. Buckley himself had said that I should go there if only from • sociological interest. He was right. She explained it all to me.
Du Pont had just moved one of its factories there, and one of the Du Ponts had even moved there in person. She pointed out his house. 'I have nothing against them personally', she said, 'but I'm not sure we want those kind of people here'. It would be hard to place one's finger on an American family with a much longer ' pedigree than the Du Punts. They are -even the only family who, in Delaware, virtually own an entire state. But to 'Camden they were nevertheless 'those kind :of people'.
She was not talking of them only as ' Yankees, She was talking of commerce and big business. She was talking indiiectly of the cities. Who cannot in Camden sigh with her? In that unspotted place, what means the teeming life? It was the same with Barry Goldwater when he once flew into a Republican convention in his private plane. When he had gone to bed the night before, he said, the desert air in Arizona had been thick with dust. But during the night there was a desert storm, and when he woke the air was clean again.
Was it not time for a desert storm to sweep the nation of America clean again? he asked, and no one had any doubt that he was referring to the turmoil in the cities at that time. Carter does not have the metaphor of the desert to use, but what he really wants to do is cleanse America, to exorcise from it all the sin which the cities have brought. That is why he is happiest when he is jumping off paddleboats on to landing stages on the Mississippi.
A Polish Pope of a Roman Church can go into the cities and draw to him the hearts of millions. They are his parishioners, he would say. Carter has shown little inclination in almost three years to find any parishioners of his own in the cities. One looks again at his White House staff. Apart from the Georgians of whom too much is written, the rest of the staff is predominantly WASP. The Democratic Party with its immigrants' soul has never had such a leader since McKinley. For one must remember that politically both Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt were bred in New Jersey and New York,
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