Chapter 19
_51._ But even without the newspapers George Thario would have kept me informed. "Piteous if not too comprehensive for small emotions," he wrote in a letter only a little more intelligible than the stuff in his notebooks. "Yesterday I stopped by a small farm or ranch as local grandiloquence everseeking purple justification has it here. Submarginal land the tabulating minds of governmentofficials (spectacles precise on nosebridge, daily ration of exlax safe in briefcase) would have labeled it, sitting in expectant unease on hilltops and the uncomfortable slopes between. Dryfarming; the place illegally acquired from cattlerange (more proper and more profitable) by nester grandsire; surviving drought and duststorm, locust, weevil, and straying herds; feeding rachitic kids, dull women and helpless men for halfacentury.
"The Farm Resettlement Administration would have moved them to fatter ground a hundred times, but blindly obstinate they held to what was theirs and yet not theirs. In the frontseat the man and wife and what remained of quick moments of dropjawed ecstasy, in back unwieldly chickencoop, slats patched with bits of applebox and wire, weathered gray; astonished cocks crowing out of time and hens heads down. Hitched behind, the family cow, stiffribbed and emptyuddered. The grass, deaf lover, had seized the shack, its fingers curled the solid door, body pressed forward for joyful rape. The nesters don't look back but pant ahead; the bumping of the car accommodates the cow.
"Ive had to leave the lodge of course and spend my nights in a thin house with a roof shaped like two playingcards, with the misleading sign, in punishment crippled, half fallen from its support, 'Tourists Accommodated' (if accommodation be empty spaces with mottoes and porcelain pisspots then punishment was unrighteous). I shall move on soon, perhaps for the worse since there is green now, beneath the blue.
"If I can ever come away I shall, but I'd not miss this gladiator show, this retiarii swing.
"Give my best to the Old Boy--tell him I'd write direct, but family feeling makes it hard. Joe."
I showed the letter to the general, expecting him perhaps to be annoyed by Joe's instability, but he merely said, "Boy shouldnt be wasting his talents ... put it in sound ... orchestrate it."
Just as Joe's enthusiasm covered only one aspect of the grass so his retreat from lodge to wayside hostel, to city hotel, embraced only a minute sector of the great advance. Neither moral nor brute force slowed the weed. It clutched the upper reaches of the Rio Grande and ran down its course to the Gulf of Mexico like quicksilver in a broken thermometer. It went through Colorado, Oklahoma and Kansas; it nibbled at the forks of the Platte; it left behind the Great Salt Lake like a chip diamond lost in an enormous setting.
There is no benefit to be derived from looking at the darker side of things and indeed it is a universal observation that there is no misfortune without its compensation. The loss of the great cattlegrazing areas of the West increased the demand for our concentrated foods by the hundredfold. We paid no duty on the products shipped in from our South American factories for they competed only with ourselves and we did the country the humanitarian service of preventing a famine by rushing carload after carload westward, rising above all thoughts of petty gain by making no increase whatever in our prices despite the expanding demand.
_52._ About this time it became indisputable that Button Gwynnet Fles was no longer of value to Consolidated Pemmican. His Yankee shrewdness and caution which enabled him to run the corporation when it was merely a name and a quotation on the stockmarket had the limits of its virtues. He was extraordinarily provincial in outlook and quite unable to see the concern on a world scale. In view of our vast expansion such narrowness had become an unbearable hindrance.
I had permitted him to hold a limited number of shares and to act nominally as secretary in order to comply with the regulations of the Security and Exchange Commission, but now it was expedient to add to our officers directors of other companies whose fields were complementary to ours. Besides, in General Thario I had a much abler assistant and so, perhaps reluctantly because of my oversensitivity, I displaced Fles and making the general president of the corporation I accepted the post of chairman of the board.
I must say he took a perfectly natural business move with unbecoming illgrace. "It was mine, Mr Weener, you know it was mine and I did not protest when you stole it; I worked loyally and unselfishly for you. It isnt the money, Mr Weener, really it isnt--it's the idea of being thrown out of my own business. At least let me stay on the Board of Directors; youll never have any trouble from me, I promise you that."
It distressed me to reject his abject plea, but my hands were tied by my devotion to the welfare of the company. Besides, he annoyed me by his palpably untrue reference to what had been a legitimate transaction, never giving a thought to my generosity in not exposing his chicanery, nor the fact that the dummy he manipulated bore no resemblance whatever to the firm I had brought by my own effort to its present size.
Leaving matters in the able hands of General Thario, after warning Joe he had better soon return to his father's assistance, I went abroad to arrange for wider European representation. There I found a curious eagerness to be of help to me and almost fawning servility antipathetic to my democratic American notions. Oddly enough, the Europeans looked upon the United States as a doomed country, thinking I, like some members of our wealthier classes, had come to escape disruption and dislocation at home. Only in England did I find the belief prevalent that the Americans would somehow muddle through because afterall theyre the same sort of chaps we are, you know.
After a highly successful trip I returned home the same day the Grass reached the headwaters of the Mississippi.
_53._ William Rufus Le ffaçasé astonished me, as well as every newspaperman in the country by resigning as editor of the _Daily Intelligencer_, a post he had held before many of its reporters were born. When I phoned him to come to my office and explain himself he refused, in tones and manner I had not heard from any man since the days when I had wasted my talents as a subordinate. Having none of the pettiness of pride which makes some men fearful of their position, since he would not come to my office, I went to his. There he shocked me for the third time: a high, glossy collar, a flowing and figured cravat concealed the famous diamond stud, while instead of the snuffbox his hands hovered over a package of cheap cigarettes.
"Weener," he rasped, jettisoning all those courtesies to which I had become accustomed, "I never thought I'd be glad to see your vapid face again, unless on a marble slab in some city morgue, but now youre here, moneybags slapping the insides of your thighs in place of the scrotum for which you could have no possible use, I am delighted to tell you in person to take my paper--my paper, sir, note that well, for all your dirty pawings could not make it anything but mine--and supposit it. I hope it frets you, Weener, for the sake of your sniveling but immortal soul, I sincerely hope it rasps you like a misplaced hairshirt. You will get some miserable lickspittle to take my place, some mangy bookkeeping pimp with a permanentwaved wife and three snottynosed brats, but the spirit and guts of the _Intelligencer_ depart with W R Le ffaçasé."
I disregarded both his illmanners and his bombast. "What's the matter, Bill?" I asked kindly, "Is it more money? You can write your own ticket, you know. Within reason, of course."
His fingers looked for the snuffbox, but found only the cigarettes which he inspected puzzledly. "Weener, no man could do you justice. You are the bloody prototype of all the arselickers, panders, arsonists, kidnapers, cutthroats, pickpockets, abortionists, pilferers, cheats, forgers, sneakthieves, sharpers and blackmailers since Jacob swindled his brother. Do not fawn upon me little man, I am too old to want women or money. The sands are running out and I shall never now read the immortable Hobbes, but I'll not die in your bloody harness. In me you do not see the man who picked up the torch of Franklin and Greeley and Dana where Henry Watterson dropped it. Loose of your gangrenous chains, you behold the freelance correspondent of the North American Newspaper Alliance, the man who will devote his declining years to reporting in the terse and vivid prose for which he is justly famous the progress of the grass which strangles the country as you have tried to strangle me."
Again I put personal feelings aside. "If your mind is really made up, we'll want your stuff for the _Intelligencer_, Bill."
"Sir, you may want. I hope the condition persists."
There being no profit in arguing with a madman, I made arrangements to replace him immediately. I reproduce here, not for selfjustification, which would be superfluous, but merely for what amusement it may afford, one of his accounts which appeared in the columns of so many third and fourth rate newspapers. I won't say it shows the decay of a once possibly great mind, but it certainly reveals that the _Intelligencer_ suffered no irreparable loss.
"Today at Dubuque, Iowa, the Mississippi was crossed. Not by redmen in canoes, nor white on logs or clumsy rafts, nor yet by multiwheeled locomotives gliding over steel bridges nor airplanes so high the wide stream was a thread below. Nature and devastation, hand in hand, for the moment one and the same, crossed it today as Quantrell or Kirby Smith or Nathan Bedford Forrest crossed it, sabers glittering, so many forgotten years ago. But if the men in gray and butternut raided a store or burned a tavern they thought it a mighty victory and went home rejoicing; the green invader is an occupier and colonizer, come to remain for all time, leaving no town, no road, no farm where it has passed.
"A few weeks ago Dubuque was still here, quiet, old and pleasant, the butt of affectionate jokes, the Grass still miles away, the population still hopeful of salvation. And then, because of the panic, the frantic scurry to save things once valuable and now only valued, no one noticed when a betraying wind blew seeds beyond the town, over the river, to find receptive soil on the Wisconsin side. The seeds germinated, the clump flourished. It cut the highway and reached down the banks into the Mississippi, waiting. And while it waited it built up greater bulk for itself, behind and beside. Each day it pushed a little farther toward midstream, drowning its own foremost runners so those behind might have solidity to advance upon.
"Meanwhile from the west the continent imposed upon a continent came closer. The other day Dubuque went, its weathered bricks and immature stucco alike obliterated. The Grass ran out like a bather on a cold morning, hastening to the water before timidity halts him. Although I was watching I could not tell you at what exact instant the gap was closed, at what moment the runners from one clump intertwined with those of the other. But such a moment did occur, and shedding water like a surfacing whale the united bodies rose from the riverbed to form a verdant bridge.
"You could not walk across it, at least no man I know would want to try, but it gives the illusion of permanency no work of man, stone or steel or concrete, has ever given and it is a dismaying thing to see man's trade taken over by nature in this fashion.
"The bridge is a dam also. All the debris from the upper reaches collects against it and soon there will be floods to add to the other distress the Grass has brought. More than half the country is gone now: the territories pillaged from Mexico, argued from Britain, bought from France, have all been lost. Only the original states and Florida remain. Shall we be more successful in defending our basic land than all the acquisitions of a century and a half?"
But why add any more? Dry, senile, without feeling, my only wonder was that his stuff was printed, even in the obscure media where it appeared.
_54._ With twothirds of the country absorbed and a hundred fifty million people squeezed into what was left, economic conditions became worse than ever. No European ghetto was as crowded as our cities and no overpopulated countryside farmed so intensively to so little purpose. An almost complete cessation of employment except in the remnant of the export trade, valueless money--English shillings and poundnotes illegally circulated being the prized medium of exchange--starvation only irritated rather than relieved by the doles of food seized from the farmers and grudgingly handed out to the urban dwellers.
Each election saw another party in power, the sole demand of the voters being for an administration capable of stopping the Grass. Since none was successful, the dissatisfaction and anger grew together with the panic and dislocation. Messiahs and fuehrers sprang up thickly. Riots in all cities were daily occurrences, rating no more than obscure paragraphs, while in many areas gangs of hoodlums actually maintained themselves in power for weeks at a time, ruling their possessions like feudal baronies and exacting tribute from all travelers through their domain.
Immigration had long ago been stopped, but now the government, in order to preserve what space was left for genuine Americans, canceled the naturalization of all foreignborn and ordered them immediately deported. All Jews who had been in the country less than three generations were shipped to Palestine and the others deprived of political rights in order to encourage them to leave also. The Negroes, who except for a period less than a decade in length had never had any political or civil rights, planned a mass migration to Africa, a project enthusiastically spurred by such elder statesmen as the learned Maybank and the judicious Rankin. This movement proved abortive when statisticians showed there were not enough liquid assets among the colored population to pay a profit on their transportation.
An attempt to oust all Catholics failed also, for the rather odd reason that many of the minor Protestant sects joined in a body to oppose it. The Latterday Saints--now busy building New Deseret in Central Australia--and the Church of Christ, Scientist, as well as the Episcopalians, Doweyites, Shakers, Christadelphians, and the congregation of the Chapel of the Former and Latter Rains presented a united front for tolerance and equity.
An astonishing byproduct of the national despair and turmoil was the feverish activity in all fields of creative endeavor. Novels streamed from the presses, volumes of poetry became substantial items on publishers' lists and those which failed to find a publisher were mimeographed and peddled to a receptive public, while painters working with Renascence enthusiasm turned out great canvases as fast as their brushes could spread the oils. We had suddenly become a nation madly devoted to the arts. When Orpheus Crisodd's Devilgrass Symphony was first played in Carnegie Hall an audience three times as great as that admitted had to be accommodated outside with loudspeakers and when the awesome crescendo of horns, drums, and broken crockery rubbed over slate surfaces announced the climax of the sixth movement, the crowds wept. Even for Mozart the hall was full, or practically full.
In the lively arts the impact of the Grass was more overt. On the comicpage, Superman daily pushed it back and there was great regret his activities were limited to a fourcolor process, while Terry Lee and Flash Gordon, everinspirited by the sharp outlines of mammaryglands, also saved the country. Even Lil Abner and Snuffy Smith battled the vegetation while no one but Jiggs remained absolutely impervious. The _Greengrass Blues_ was heard on every radio and came from every adolescent's phonograph until it was succeeded by _Itty Bitty Seed Made Awfoo Nasty Weed_.
Perhaps the most notable feature of this period was a preoccupation with permanency. Jerrybuilding, architectural mode since the first falsefront was erected over the first smalltown store, practically disappeared. The skyscrapers were no longer steel skeletons with thin facings of stone hung upon them like a slattern's apron, while the practice of daubing mud on chickenwire hastily laid over paper was discontinued. Everyone wanted to build for all time, even though the Grass might seize upon their effort next week. In New York the Cathedral of St John the Divine was finally completed and a new one dedicated to St George begun. The demand for enduring woods replaced the market for green pine and men planned homes to accommodate their greatgrandchildren and not to attract prospective buyers before the plaster cracked.
Naturally, forwardlooking men like Stuart Thario and myself, though we had every respect for culture, were not swamped by this sudden urge to encourage the effervescent side of life. Our feet were still upon the ground and though we knew symphonies and novels and cathedrals had their place, it was important not to lose sight of fundamentals; while we approved in principle the desire for permanency, we took reality into account. We had every faith in the future of the country, being certain a way would be found before long to stop the encroachments of the weed; nevertheless, as a proper precaution--a safeguarding counterbalance to our own enthusiastic patriotism--we invested our surplus funds in Consols and European bonds, while hastening our plans for new factories on other continents.
I'm sure George Thario must have been a great cross to his father although the general never spoke of him save in the most affectionate terms. Living like a tramp--he sent a snapshot once showing him with a long starveling beard, dressed in careless overalls, his arm over the shoulder of a slovenly looking girl--he stayed always on the edge of the advancing weed, moving eastward only when forced. He wrote from Galena:
"Eagle forgotten. The rejected accepted, for yesterday's eagle is today's, the hero is man and man his own hero. I was with him when he died and when he died again and a hundred miles to the south is another eagle forgotten and all the prairies, green once more, will be as they were before men insulted them. O eagle forgotten. O stained prairie, O gallows, thirsty mob, knife, torch, revolver. Contumely, parochialism, the shortvision forever gone; and the long vision too, the eagle forgotten is the national bird, the great merging with the greater, so gained too late a vision and saw the hope that was despair.
"I named the catalogue of states and the great syllables rolled from my tongue to echo silence. My sister, my bride. Gone and gone; the Conestoga wagons have no more faint ruts to follow, the Little Big Horn is a combination of letters, the marking sunflowers exist no more. We destroyed, we preempted; we are destroyed and we have been thrust out. Illinois admitted to the Union on suchandsuch a date, the Little Giant rubbed stubby fingers through pompous hair heavy with beargrease, the Honorable Abe in Springfield's most expensive broadcloth, necktie in the latest mode but pulled aside to free an eager adamsapple; the drunken tanner, punctual with the small man's virtues, betrayed and dying painfully with so much blood upon his hands; and the eagle himself, forgotten and now again forgotten.
"I move once more. Step by step I give it up, the land we took and the land we made. Each foot I resign leaves the rest more precious. O precious land, O dear and fruitful soil. Its clods are me, I eat them, give them back; the bond is indissoluble. Even the land gone is still mine, my bones rest in it, I have eaten of its fruits and laid my mark on it...."
All of which was a longwinded way of saying the Grass was overrunning Illinois. In contrast I cannot forbear to quote Le ffaçasé, though his faults, at the opposite end of the scale, were just as glaring: "It is in Kentucky now, birthstate of Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of the United States, a country which once stretched south of the Forty-ninth Parallel from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I have been traveling extensively in what is left of Lincoln's nation. 'Dukes,' remarked Chesterton, 'don't emigrate.' This country was settled by the poor and thriftless and now few more than the poor and thriftless remain in it.
"Let me try to present an overall picture: What is left of the country has become a nineteenth century Ireland, with all economic power in the hands of absentees. It is not that everyone below the level of a millionaire is too stupid to foresee possibility of complete destruction; or the middle and lower classes virtuously imbued with such fanatical patriotism they are prepared for mass suicide rather than leave. Because dukes _are_ emigrating and sending the price of shippingspace into brackets which make the export of any commodity but diamonds or their own hides a dubious investment, even the pawning of all the family assets would not buy steerage passage for a year old baby. Besides there are not enough bottoms in the world to transport a hundred and fifty million people. If the Grass is not stopped, except for a negligible few, it will cover Americans when it covers America.
"No wonder a strange and conflicting spirit animates our people. Apathy? Yes, there is apathy; you can see it on the faces in a line of relief clients wondering how long an industrially stagnant country can continue their dole--even though now it consists of nothing but unpalatable chemicals--socalled 'Concentrates.' Despair? Certainly. The riots and lootings, especially the intensified ones recently in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, are symptoms of it. The overcrowded churches, the terrific increase in drugging and drinking, the sex orgies which have been taking place practically in the open in Baltimore and Philadelphia and Boston are stigmata of desperation.
"Hope? I suppose there is hope. Congress sits in uninterrupted session and senators lend their voices night and day to the destruction of the Grass. The Federal Disruptions Commission has published the eleventh volume of its report and is currently holding hearings to determine how closely the extinct buffalograss is related to _Cynodon dactylon_. Every research laboratory in the country, except those whose staffs and equipment have been moved with their proprietary industries, is expending its energies in seeking a salvation.
"Perhaps only in the Deep South, as yet protected by the width of the lower Mississippi, is there something approaching a genuine hope, although ironically that may be the product of ignorance. Here the overlords have gone and the poor whites, unsupported by an explicit kinship, have withdrawn into complete listlessness. Some black men have fled, but to most the Grass is a mere bogey, incapable of frightening those who have survived so much. Now, for the first time since 1877 the polls are open to all and there are again Negro governors, and black legislatures. And they are legislating as if forever. Farm tenancy has been abolished, the great plantations have been expropriated and made cooperative, the Homestead Act of 1862 has been applied in the South and every citizen is entitled to claim a quartersection. There is a great deal of laughter at this childish lawmaking, but it goes on, changing the face of the region, the lawmakers themselves not at all averse to the joke."