TABLE TALK
The apple that corrupted Eve
DENIS BROGAN
Des Moines, lowa—'Could you tell us when the World Series begins? We're sorry to bother you.' The speakers were two hand- some, blue-rinsed 'girls' (that is, American matrons about sixty). I was forced to tell them they couldn't have applied to a less well- informed observer of the American sporting scene. I knew (br thought I knew) that 'the Mets' had got into the equivalents of the semi-finals of the World Series after year after year in the doghouse, which was even more remarkable than Glamorgan's winning whatever it was they won at cricket, for I had always associated Glamorgan with rugger and the Met with Grand Opera or high art. So I was forced, over again, to realise how little I knew of this country on which I have spent much time (and even thought) in studying.
And as always, I have been forced to revise my views. For in the old American tradition, possibly obsolescent, Iowa has some claims to being the most representative American state. There is a common English view (com- mon, that is to say, among the English who have heard of Iowa) that it is flat, dull, merely fertile like the ploughed up prairie soil of Illinois, which naïve English immigrants were the first to dare to hreak. It is not. It is mainly rolling country, with fine trees (its elms, alas, doomed by the Dutch elm dis- ease), with creeks (or cricks) that recall English brooks, and, on its eastern border, the Mississippi in one of its most magnifi- cent stretches.
It is also magnificently farmed country ; only East Lothian and East Anglia can give a more impressive display of the basic art of tilling the soil. (I hasten to include Lincoln- shire in East Anglia.) But the day of the far- mer is passing even in Iowa. And perhaps the most sacred Iowa names, or symbols, today are provided not by evocation of where the corn (in the English or American sensergrows tall (it now grows, thanks to modern tech- nology, short), but the sacred names of May- tag and Better Homes and Gardens (pub- lished in this city). There is, of course, a lot of old Iowa still around, some of it not attractive. It was in this state that the courts took the child of a widowed husband from his father's custody because the father was an 'artist' and so couldn't be trusted to bring up a child.
For Iowa, like all of the United States, is deeply divided. It has no record of glamorous crime. There is in its past no Billy the Kid, or that better shot and more interesting charac- ter, John Wesley Hardin. Bonnie and Clyde may have driven across the state but they weren't killed here any more than that emi- nent Quaker farm boy, Dillinger, was. Yet there is a real crime problem in this onetime Arcadia. People are not as frightened about their own city as about neighbouring cities ; the scarifying stories usually happened else- where, but many of them do happen, even in Iowa ; and there is a sombre feeling about that perhaps the crime situation is incurable, except by methods so drastic that civil liberties would vanish (with much more) in the enforcement of law and order'.
There are other divisions and worries. Even a visitor who has gone on an American 'trip' as often as I have is startled (not shocked) to find himself in a country so formally and, in many ways genuinely, religious. Most of the inhabitants of Iowa are church members
and most of the churchgoers are, if n fundamentalist, certainly not regular reade of Bishop Robinson or of the Catholi rebels who distress Pope Paul vi so much. great part of the population is of Scandin vian or German origin and much mo devoted to traditional Lutheranism than a
either the Swedes or Germans of today. Th Catholics are more German than Irish (
truth neglected by Washington correspon dents of the London press) and the dominanc of the German Catholics is not based on th theology of Father Rahner Si or Profess Hans Jung. That they are dominant demonstrated by the fact that Dubuqu the seat of the archbishop and the city fro which the New Yorker's old lady didn come, has a large brewery but no distille Yet even Iowa moves. That admirabl journal, the Des Moines Register, a day two ago, sent a reporter to accost six citize of this city and to ask them the highly rel vant question in these times, was ma naturally good? All the people accoste young and of both sexes, plumped for t natural goodness of man. I didn't expect the to plump for the total depravity of man b the total disappearance of the belief summ up in the New England primer (or the Short Catechism) was startling.
'In Adam's Fall We sinned all.' N apparently, in modern Iowa. Of course, it is long time since it was written of eighteent century Boston, the Boston from wit' Franklin escaped, that 'a man who has be born in Boston has no need to be born agai Yet the optimism of the Boston Unitaria (an optimism that Jefferson shared) pros baseless. The mass of the Air erican peop refused to accept the dry if intellectually i pressive creed of the Boston Unitarians. Es today, the union of the Unitarians (u thought they were too good to be damne and the Universalists (who thought God ‘s too good to damn them) hasn't made mu impact on the great mass of Americ Protestantism which 'would rather listen Billy Graham or even Bob Jones or 0 Roberts than to the most enlightened spot man for the Unitarians who, it is sourly so 'believe in one God at most'.
The vague adherence to the 'old ti religion' often emptied of its content produ speculation. The ability in this horrible cc tury to exclude even a momentary cont plation of the possibility that the doctrine
original sin, that 'great original catastrop as Newman called it, is true is discomf ing. I recall the story of the bitter Asquith Liberal who accosted an lo
Asquithian, E. S. P. Haynes, head, am other things, of the Rationalist Press Ass ation, in Fleet Street and asked him, 'Do still refuse to believe in Hell?' Yes."E when you think of Lloyd George?' Haynes was shaken—as he admitted. So today it was with pleasure that I re in 'the World's Greatest Newspaper' (oth wise known as the Chicago Tribune) a P1 from an orthodox divine, Dr Harold Bla Wallcer, for acceptance of the desirability little faith in natural goodness. True, I d think that the Constitution is sufficiently C vinist to suit Dr Walker, and the Dec tion of Independence is very unsound ind.e But in an age of worry, despair combin with a belief that round the corner is not tot depravity but total salvation by social other machinery, there is something refr ing in Dr Walker's belief in original si
even if one suspects that he thinks it is ni deeply rooted in Democrats than in con vative Republicans.
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