The Individuality of the States

I

I ALWAYS think of my vocation in the terms in which Satan, in the Book of Job, gave an account of himself to the High Court of Heaven — ‘ going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it.’ In my case, these journeyings were restricted within the boundaries of the fortyeight states, though it was not until after many years that I made this segregation of the Union. Originally the country was a mere geographical division of conventional sections,— North, East, South, and West, — interesting principally from the nature and comparative importance of the business done in each section. Enlightenment came to me in a journey I made from northwestern Oklahoma to Louisiana, heading South by East.

My first impressions of Oklahoma were those of a commonwealth without form and void, an inchoate and heterogeneous land that had not yet found itself. It seemed doubly so after the certainty of purpose and fixedness of resolution that marked Kansas, which I had just explored. Gradually there came to me the perception of a definite, human atmosphere, that of the endless, wind-swept plains around me. Something of the spirit of youth; self-reliant, quite sure of itself, but not boastful, keeping company with the older states, but not making obeisance to them. All the while conscious of its ability to work out its own salvation, and with no thought of fear and trembling.

Then suddenly, in the twinkling of an eye, it was borne in upon my consciousness, that the most important discovery that I had made was one whose existence I had not even suspected. Yet it was obvious and fundamental, and my study and observation culminated in something far different and far better than I set out to find. The states were revealed to me as no longer mere geographical expressions, but rather as forty-eight separate, human entities, utterly dissimilar in their heterogeneous statehood, and agreeing only in their homogeneous nationality. This accounts for the deathless grip with which they cling to their rights as something inherent in their being; their sufficiency unto themselves; their passing jealousy of each other. As a necessary corollary of such differing, the matter of business, or any other venture, lies not so much in the nature and extent of their material resources as in the nature and character of their people.

Now it was obvious that the people of the country through which I was traveling had both resourcefulness and endurance, else they had not been able to remain there at all. For it is a thirsty soil on the borderland between the gamble of agriculture, and the somewhat less precarious business of cattle-grazing. It is a land of often scanty rainfall, and of sometime recurring seasons of rainless heat with hot winds that blast all vegetation as with the breath of a furnace. Yet I saw much agriculture along with flocks and herds.

There were drought-resisting plants, alfalfa, Kafir corn, Sudan grass, brought from the arid regions of Manchuria, South Africa, and the Sudan, that man here may cope with an ofthostile nature. Farming in such regions is a venture with Fate; but year by year the tillers of the soil make slow gains and consolidate them as they go.

Further eastward, rainfall is more constant and orderly, the soil more fertile, and there are great discoveries of oil, and of zinc and lead ores, but everywhere there is the same spirit that is neither stampeded by failure nor made overweening by success. Sometimes in the West, where sudden success comes like a thief in the night, the natural tendency is to copy the ways, in a minor key, of the great cities of the East, and to follow the beaten track of expansion and expression that comes from Aladdin-like overnight prosperity. But the urban people here had ambition to do things after their own fashion and in accord with their environment. Successful men who got in the limelight of accomplishment did so in a large way and in a manner that best expressed their own hopes and desires. Gifts, bequests, and endowments were almost invariably for the benefit and advancement of their own community, or for some state-wide matter.

Wherever I went, I saw in full flower that local pride which was constantly the saving grace of an otherwise drab and monotonous situation. Little villages in the oil fields that grew suddenly into thriving cities were often remarkable for fine residences and public buildings erected by those who made fortunes from the oil wells and who, instead of migrating to the great metropolitan cities, stayed at home and built up their own communities. If natural conditions were fundamentally different in the extreme eastern and western sections of the state, it was not so with the spirit of the commonwealth; save in the eastern portions, it was crystallized into more definite form and expression. It had seemingly greater visions of the future of the state as a distinct entity, rather than as to its separate parts, and of what must be done to fulfill these ambitions. The larger cities were all alike, sure of what the future held for them. Any present depression had for them no other significance than of a mere passing incident. Contrariwise, they took their good fortune, where it prevailed, as a matter of course and as merely symptomatic of more that was to follow.

I got much light upon the trend and quality of native thought from a ranchman whom I chanced to meet at the breakfast-table in the hotel in Tulsa. I opened the conversation by speaking of the country I had just traversed. ‘I know it well,’ he said. ‘I was a cowpuncher in that section before I was married. Did I like riding herd? Yes, it kind er expressed to me what the country is, and why my family and I spend most of our time on the ranch.’ Then it came out by degrees, and in simple phrases — the indefinable charm of the endless plains, their ever receding horizon, their immensity under the silent stars; for cities and their civilization seemed to him cramped and confined, and reeking with all manner of unnaturalness. He was not lacking in education, in a certain amount of reading, and, like most successful Americans, he instinctively picked up, absorbed, and digested all manner of information as he went along. Oklahoma people were his kind. They were willing to try new ventures. The principal impression he had about the East was the way they hung on to the things often past. ‘We have got a great state here,’ he went on. ‘It is n’t tied to the past; we ought to blaze the way for the other states.’ It seemed that he had made money; and I gathered from stray hints in his talk that he was getting into public affairs - sometimes for profit, sometimes because he wanted to see things done for the benefit of the people of the state. Physically, he was a type of many that I saw, strongly built but not heavy, and impressing you by the force and determination of his make-up.

It is but a brief trip from southeastern Oklahoma through a narrow strip of Arkansas or Texas to the Caddo oil fields of northern Louisiana. There are some characteristics common to all oil fields, whether they are in Kansas, or Texas, or California; but I realized before I had been long over the border of Louisiana that I was in another world of thought and feeling, of expression and sentiment, even though the landscape had altered but little in my short journey. I felt the difference at first rather than analyzed it. It grew upon my consciousness with the steadily changing scenery. Yet that did not all account for it. But the dialect of many whom I met, and the foreign-derived names of localities, furnished the key to the difference. It was an Old-World factor of inheritance, seemingly unchanged and unchanging, that gave to portions of the state an atmosphere such as I had not met elsewhere in the Union. In the French quarter of New Orleans it had the flavor of historic interest, but otherwise was a stretch of backwater in the tide of modern progress. Out on the countryside, and in the little towns, it was still an exotic in American life, a derelict from the past, with its flavor of romance, but at odds with the rush of modern days as I saw it in Oklahoma. In the villages, it united with the traditions of the cotton planters and sugar planters to tell of days where it was always afternoon. The mossdraped oaks, the cypress swamps, the palms along the coast, the orange groves, the fields of waving sugar cane, conveyed a far different sentiment from the long-stretching Oklahoma prairies, swept ceaselessly by the winds from the far-distant Rockies. For I had long ago learned that men are largely as their environment and their employment, and that in time these two factors exercise a far more profound effect upon American humanity than do tradition and inheritance. Nor did this truth fail me in this instance.

In New Orleans, the erstwhile citadel of conservatism, redolent with legends of things that once were, I encountered a definite expression of the newborn spirit which is remaking and remodeling the state. I was lunching in the French quarter, in one of those restaurants where both cooking and service are still fine arts. Naturally I expressed my feeling about the cuisine to my host, who was most prominent in the business life of the city.

‘You know, some day,’ he replied, ‘we shall be known throughout the country for matters other than good things to eat, and our natural desire to have our visitors feel welcome. Possibly I am a Philistine, but long acquaintance with many things among us of Old-World inheritance and tradition makes me see the tawdriness, superstition, and deadly inertia underneath the disguise of their foreign-born romanticism and tradition. We have got to that point where we are commercializing these inheritances for the entertainment of our visitors, and that is the last stage, indicating only too truly how the spirit has gone from them. I am of that mind now where I had rather the French quarter were sanitary than picturesque, and where the charm and hope of New Orleans and Louisiana lies in the future rather than in the past. You asked me to tell you of the real spirit of the city and state. Come with me to-morrow and I will show it to you in the making.’

The next day I saw the true New Orleans and the true Louisiana, which are here, and are yet even more to be. Innumerable beautiful residences and their grounds, with a charm and character, and an absence of modern conventionality, such as I had not met before. The beginning and growth here and there of the ways and methods of higher education. The many fine country roads that took you out into most enchanting scenery. The great canal that is to make easier access from the city to the sea. The cut over cypress swamps that were being transformed from malaria-breeding morasses to cultivated fields. Finally, at Chalmette I got my first comprehensive view of the mighty Mississippi rolling its mighty flood to the Gulf, and bearing on its bosom the commerce of one of the great seaports of the nation. As always in this country of ours, the herald of better and newer ways and thoughts in social and political life is the stirring of the commercial spirit along ambitious and untried lines.

This curious mixture of age that told of past glories, and of youth that thought mostly of the future, got new interpretation in the brief stop I made at Baton Rouge, the site of the State University, in whose grounds I saw the Varsity football team practising with the Freshman team. Rugby football is a comparatively new sport in Southern colleges, but it was welding the English, French, and Spanish strains of the youths into a compact fighting machine for the glory of their Alma Mater and their natal state. The players were of that tall, rangy type so common in the South. They were quick and agile, rather than of that Western brawn which holds for four downs on the one-yard line. As I watched, I got the story of how fast they were.

The Varsity back had the ball, and instantly was through the line, and flying through the broken field like a racing steed. The waiting guard came at him with a fierce, lunging tackle; they went down together, the back on his knees; then staggering to his feet, he fell over the goal, still clinging to the ball. You understood then how Pickett’s men went up the slope of Cemetery Ridge, and how Lee’s ragged gray line died in their tracks at Cold Harbor. As I headed north toward the Mississippi line, I had a new conception of the spirit of a state, whether in the making, as in Oklahoma, or being made over, as in Louisiana, but ever-changing, pervasive, intangible, felt rather than seen, yet definite and, in all its phases, telling the story of its birth.

II

From Natchez northward to Memphis stretches the Mississippi Delta, a strip of alluvial soil of inexhaustible fertility, and the embodiment of the story of Cotton, and of the South, for the two are interlaced and interwoven. The first impression I got was of the transplanted life of the South Atlantic States in the days before the Civil War. There were great plantations that perpetuated the ways and methods of cotton culture, and are the economic and agricultural stumblingblocks of the day. There were spacious Colonial mansions, groups of cabins about the negro ‘ quarters,’ that told of times when Cotton was king, and all other forms of agriculture were of small account.

Until a generation ago, this persevered unchanged and unchanging, Like some ancient form of historic life stranded amid the evolutionary results of the day. Then came the invasion of the cotton boll weevil, and the labored fabric of the past fell into sudden and generalruin. Later, ensued the great discovery that cotton could still be raised, if not so exclusively as before, yet with even greater success as the integral and central factor in new methods of diversified farming. It was again the story of the break-up of old economic ways of thought that changed likewise the social and political face of the state. I saw the outward and visible signs of this great revolution in town and country, in the modern dwellings, each with accompaniments of lawn and garage, and all the things of sanitation and comfort. There were fields of grain where once only cotton grew.

Evidences of the new life in agriculture and in business multiplied as I went up away from the river, and up into the hill countries, where flocks and herds came more upon the scene, and dairy cows were a common feature of the landscape. In a little city of some few thousands, the modern hotel was cheek by jowl with an ancient Colonial mansion, sadly in need of repair. The stately structure of the recently erected bank faced an old-fashioned, elongated store such as now they build no more, On the outskirts of the town, on the fine gravel road leading out into the country, was the pride of the community, the splendid high school, just finished and in use.

That night, after supper, in the house of my host, I got a vivid impression of the new-found spirit of the slate. My host was at once a cotton planter and a merchant, and like many intelligent men in small towns and cities, much of a student and a thinker. His talk was of the present, and of the problems which the future held. He had the instinct of men who lead simple lives of facing facts, however unpleasant or unpalatable. First his own community claimed his thought and interest as one of the necessary incidents of his daily toil and duty. Beyond that loomed the changing scene in the state, which he knew well and to whose progress he had given much patient thought and study. What direction this progress would assume was perfectly apparent to him, for he was familiar with all the factors in the equation. Succeeding time has shown how true was his vision. In his conversation there was scarce a trace of the once prevalent fashion of his people of dwelling upon the charms and glories of the past as of halcyon days never to return. He struck an entirely different note, that of pride in his forbears, in their ways and their accomplishments, measured by their environment and their opportunities, and with the consciousness that there were giants in those days. Yet to his thought, to project the ways of the past into the present, was a mere anachronism, and could meet only with failure.

As he talked, there crystallized in my mind the true source of the changing spirit of the state, that of transmuting the past into the present by the process of adapting the early pioneer spirit to the new problems of the day. Nothing better illustrates this transmission and inheritance than that the apparent obsession of the past as to raising cotton and practically little else besides was in reality the stubborn consciousness of the planters of those days that it must perforce always be the great money-crop of Southern agriculture and nothing else could ever take its place. This is as true to-day as it was a hundred years ago, the only difference between now and then being the modification of the onecrop idea into that of diversified farming, with cotton still holding the centre of the stage.

It is but a night’s run from the cotton fields of Mississippi to those of southeastern Missouri. Wherever cotton is grown there are certain inalienable characteristics which pertain to its culture, and to those who raise it. There is not the same tendency and custom to rotate it with other crops that is found in other agricultural staples. No amount of damage by weather, or hostile predacious insects, ever causes the growers to abandon entirely its cultivation. It possesses the man who raises it and absorbs his thoughts and interest. It is not alone a vocation, but a lifelong and incurable habit.

Yet, withal, cotton culture in Missouri is not just the same pursuit as in Mississippi. For in the latter state it is a matter of generations, and in the former a thing comparatively modern. Not so long ago the eight counties that are known as Southeast Missouri were largely swamp lands and, since the days of drainage districts, they have taken on new life and spirit. Now they typify that curious commingling of incongruous elements in the spirit of the state that puzzles and interests you from the moment you come in from the Arkansas border until you go out into Iowa. It is an innate conservatism, temperamental rather than mental, the result of tradition and inheritance in general, and only in part caused by environment, and often in utter defiance of it. In contradiction to this are the number of localities where intense modernism and progress are the distinguishing traits of the people.

Southeast Missouri illustrated both of these phases. In the days of swamps it was reckoned as the backwoods portion of the state. In the present times of drainage it is in the van with all manner of outward and visible signs of advancement and progress. Good roads, fine schools, towns, farms with every convenience and every invention and discovery in sanitation, and community life, were found wherever I went. One little city of some twelve thousand inhabitants has constant visits from the symphony orchestras of the West, and they rally crowded audiences which, for intelligent attention and appreciation, match any I have ever known. Not far away were the Ozarks, peopled by the mountaineers of Tennessee and Kentucky, and in whose recesses there are still some spinning-wheels in use, and there hangs over the fireplace the old squirrel rifle that was known to Dan Morgan’s men. Means of communication are not many or good, as yet, in much of this hill country; but ever and anon you run across charming villages, pictures of cleanliness and thrift, where everything modern is to be found. It seems that all that is needed is some sudden impulse, some stirring of the dormant desire for better things, and the mental attitude of conservatism falls away like a garment. The people have only ‘to be shown’ and the deed is done.

It so chanced, early in my travels, that I found myself at the state capital, at the banquet board with representatives from commercial organizations all over the state. On my left was an interesting personality, that of a preacher, who had developed political aspirations, as any Missourian is liable to do at most any stage of his existence. He told of the elemental people he knew ‘up the Creeks’; of the descendants of the original French settlers in the eastern portions of the state; of the atmosphere of old-fashioned ways and customs, and modes of speech and thought. How both their native and inherited conservatism still clung to them, although their ‘foreignness’ was nothing now but mere veneer; while a little farther north were scattered German settlements of those who fled from Europe in the days of 1848. Yet how innate was the conservatism that still clung to them, in spite of their modern ways in farming and in every form of industry.

‘It is curious,’he said, ‘how apparently contradictory elements still tend to produce in us that doubtingThomas state of mind toward new and untried ways of thought and life. This is a true analogy,’he went on, ‘for once being assured, we are afterwards most eager and progressive converts. You probably discovered in your travels in Oklahoma that the natural tendency of the people is to say “Yes” to new things, while ours is to say “No.” They illustrate that tendency by voting amendments to their Constitution, while we mostly defeat such proposals, apparently on general principles. The gentleman on your right is a fine example of Missouri progress and conservatism.'

And so in truth I found him. A sturdy wholesome man, just past middle age, and from the rich lands north of the Missouri River which, in the early days, were settled from the aristocratic commonwealths of Virginia and Kentucky. He told me how he found in his travels through Missouri the deep-rooted convictions of the people as to the fundamental truths of the principle of the Republic of the days of Washington and Jefferson. How these convictions yet went along with the utmost enterprise and modern spirit as illustrated in his own college town, which was one of the most progressive and the most charming in the state. He was the founder of one of the many little colleges which dot the central portion of the state. ‘It gives me courage,’he said, ‘to note the eagerness for learning among the rural communities. How one of their unceasing demands is always for better schools, and how each little town has more pride in its high school than in any of its other possessions.'

I had opportunity to see what the real spirit is on that score in the little city of Columbia, the site of the State University. It was the day of the annual football game with the dearest foe of the home team, their ancient rival from a neighboring state. There was nothing else in all the world that day but the game. All business houses closed at noon to witness the parades of the two teams, each led by its student band; and the stadium was packed at two o’clock by thousands who came from all over the state, and an immense crowd of students from the far-away university of the rival commonwealth. All the Western state universities are coëeducational, and the girls sang and cheered along with the boys after a fashion that disposed effectually of the delusion that I once entertained as to some things that women cannot do as well as men. Every state university is known by the name of its state, and not by that of the town or city where it is located. So the Alma Mater and the football songs come unconsciously to blend the state and the university as one, thus following the general trend of education at these institutions, which has for one of its principal objects that of sending forth budding citizens whose ambition is to make their state a better place to live in. So the last phase of this great function was illustrated, when the game was over, as the vast throng stood bareheaded and sang their Alma Mater hymn, ‘Missouri.'

One ever-present element of the state spirit was the deep-seated feeling for personality rather than for things, and the regard for the individual oftener than for policies, or even principles. Certain men in history and in the present seemed to typify the virtues and glories as well as the peculiarities of the people — men of strong convictions and of forceful character, of courage and of determination, and always very human; men who embodied the robustness, the vigor, the independence of the American of lineage and history.

Iowa is a disappointing state as to impressive characteristics, if you judge it only from the train, for it is a long rolling prairie, with not many rivers of moment and scarcely any continuous forests. The scenery is mostly agricultural, and you are not surprised when you learn that the principal products are hogs and corn; and the reason came to me when I stopped over at the State Agricultural College at Ames. We are apt to think of most industries as embodying in their operations the inventions of science and genius, and the latest and most intelligent methods of efficiency, but of agriculture as being learned only by experience and hard work, and not to be acquired after any other fashion. So it was something to realize, at this pioneer among the agricultural colleges, that hogs and corn were the study of all that science and intelligence and experimentation could bring to bear upon the subject; and that this little community of five thousand students was a microcosm of the state and its people; so that when the young men and women went back to the countryside from which most of them came, they were equipped for the business of life on the farm after such fashion as their forbears had never dreamed; that such homely things as selecting seed corn so that it germinates with certainty when planted, and how to feed hogs so as best to fit them for the market, lay at the foundation of the wealth and prosperity of the commonwealth, and also that it was the foundation of its widespread intelligence. For, expressed in figures, if the few Negroes and foreignborn be excepted, the percentage of illiteracy in the state is about one half of one per cent. This intelligence had the rare ability to see the fact that the things it could do best lay close at hand — products of a soil of rare fertility; for other than this, the natural resources of the state were not many compared with more fortunate commonwealths. Yet Iowa has far outstripped some of these more richly endowed sisters because of the ceaseless intelligence she applies to her problem.

On my way back to Des Moines, I drifted into conversation with a farmer and his wife who had been to Ames to see their youngest daughter, who was to be graduated the coming summer. Their eldest son was a member of the State Legislature, along with a number of other graduates of Ames and of the University of Iowa. It came out incidentally that the two lived near a small town of some twelve hundred people in the northern portion of the state. That they were well-to-do seemed to be due to a knowledge of farming, which Ames had done much to impart. Evidently from their conversation they knew their own country well. ‘Yes, we have traveled a good deal,’ they said in answer to my question. ‘Mostly in our Ford.’ They had been up through Wisconsin in the summer-time, and over to Chicago more than once. Last summer they went out to Glacier Park and the Yellowstone. Sometimes they followed the Ames football-team into other states, taking their daughter along. ‘It ‘s good to get home, though,’ said the farm woman, ‘for Iowa is a pretty good state to live in.’ And it developed that among the good things of Iowa were widespread means of education, simple wholesome living, and intelligent companionship.

Once more in the way of figures, Iowa makes larger appropriations to her State University and Agricultural College than Western states having greater wealth and larger populations. The distinctive spirit of the state differed essentially from that of any other state in my journey, in that it was not easily felt or perceived, but had to be sought for with care and discrimination. When once found, it was obvious that it had been in full sight all the time, but had escaped discovery because of preconceived opinions which, having eyes, see not. In a word, it is a form of intelligence with whose expression we are mostly unfamiliar, and which, therefore, we fail to recognize. We are apt to think of culture and education as the finest flowering of civilization, and expressed often in rare and unusual forms, sometimes in fantastic manner, sometimes in the originality of genius, and sometimes in learned and scholarly fashion.

I found the key to the Iowa problem of culture in a little city of some six thousand inhabitants, which had everything in the way of fine buildings, wellpaved streets, handsome residences, stately churches, the invariable high school, parks, and recreation grounds that you look for in a great metropolis. Nor was there wanting a finely appointed hospital, with an adequate and competent staff. I spoke that evening before the local Commercial Club, which included in its membership not only business men, but likewise women, lawyers, doctors, the bar, the bench, and the clergy. The Western states are acquiring songs these days; and that of Iowa tells of ‘where the tall corn grows,’and it was sung by the entire audience as the climax of the evening. It was the song of a people of widespread education and intelligence, much-traveled and much-read; of an unpretending democracy of higher learning that found its best expression in the development of the state and in the welfare of its people. It had a wholesome air, like the breath of the west wind over the prairies of its own state. It was wholly natural and essentially progressive, like the spirit of each state I had visited, yet unlike them in all things save one; and that common bond is the spirit of nationalism that grows with the expansion of the state spirit and as its unfailing accompaniment. That is why such states resent the purblind and Pharisaical criticism of the unknowing, who see in intense local state pride only the self-absorption of narrowness and provincialism, when in truth it is the one abiding characteristic which saves the commonwealths from being mere provinces, instead of living and separate entities in the great union of the forty-eight commonwealths.