Complete Works of Ford Madox Ford, page 1048
Thus, in all these Southern-South districts, as in the Shenandoah Valley and its continuations, as long as cash farming continues to be practicable, capitalized or quasicapitalized — share-cropping — forms of farming will continue to prevail. But I have lately seen the ruin of the South predicted with authority. Apparently the invention of a cotton-picking machine is to give Australia the chance to ruin Southern cotton; ever-increasing tariffs will enable Europe and the East to stop for ever the export of all kinds of Southern tobacco — and the same with rice.... How all that may turn out I do not know.... But I do know that the statistics I may seem to have introduced rather arbitrarily into a work that should be light and entertaining — those statistics prove without any shadow of a doubt that, as far as America is concerned, the whole of the land we are going through from North New Jersey to Memphis, Baton Rouge, Natchez and thence to the port of embarkation for the Madeiras — practically every inch of that great territory is absolutely suited to cultivation by the Small Producer — the combination of Self-Sufficing, Part-Time, artist, craftsman, productivity.... For the new Golden Age.
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Exactly the same climatic and soil conditions prevail — from the average 180 day average growth, 50 to 60 inch average rainfall, on limestone soil of the English South Coast to the 365 day average growth, 60 to 80 inch rainfall, residual-soiled foothills of the Alps in Provence and Liguria we have flitted through and shall flit through again before we are done... exactly the same conditions, then, prevail along the whole of the older part of the Great Route.... I don’t know that the Western loop has not the advantage in that the greater part of its rainfalls takes place in the summer. But I don’t know that that is not counterbalanced by the fact that in Provence, the Narbonnais, the fertile parts of Spain and Portugal, Liguria and all round the
Mediterranean to Jaffa — wherever, in short, the Romans once ruled — we have been for, say, two thousand years evolving a Small Producing frame of mind... and with the appropriate beanfeasts, saturnalia, bull-fights, Andalusian fiestas, bank holidays, feasts of the Church, set all round the year like jewels in a ring.
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For, whatever you may think me, do not think of me as akill-joy. If I were Mr. Wells I should here see a vision... which is difficult because we are just running into Bristol and the spectacle of factory horrors is destructive to visions.... For Virginia too has a few regions of savagery... two or three “largests”... the largest clay-pipe factory in the world, for instance....
But we may here get something to eat before plunging into Tennessee.... There may be something open....
But it was not to be.... By a miracle we arrived on time — at 11.45 — but... The patient New Yorker is making some remarks....
... I had better get on with my vision.
I see then this great band of the northern hemisphere — and naturally other parts of the southern — closely occupied with part-timers, prosperous, contented, industrious but not too industrious, efficient but not by any means too efficient, outside the arts, crafts, or cultures. With relatively little attention to intensive cultivation this band could support and house all the populations of the world.... It is astonishing how little ground can support a man. If one cares to believe the scientists amongst farmers — like the consulting agrobiologist, Mr. O. W. Willcox of Iowa — the whole world could be fed off Central Park.... At least, that is not exactly what he says, but his message may be summed up in the words of his Introducer, Mr. Alvin Johnson.... “The ruthless application to the best lands of the best (agrobiological) methods within our reach would throw more than four-fifths or more of our farm lands out of use and expel four-fifths of our farm population from the open country.”... A vision that I confess to finding disagreeable. And another scientist wrote to me the other day to say that in his twenty-by-twenty backyard he had grown as much wheat as could be produced by ordinary farming methods on fourteen acres of good limestone soil....
Well, we should have to stop short of that.... And it must be remembered that food manured with chemical manures — except guano nitrates — is not the same as food produced by ordinary intensive cultures, lacking flavour and, as a rule, the characteristic consistency of natural products.... Still, I am not to be taken as maniacally opposed to all artificial manuring. I use it occasionally myself in a country where natural manure is, owing to inaccessibility, difficult to obtain... often enough, indeed, to be able to say without any doubt at all that melons, sweet corn, egg-plant, and strawberries chemically manured crop a very little more heavily and are markedly flavourless as compared with the same fruits and vegetables when naturally produced. You will not find these dicta confirmed by scientists or large cash-growers — but I may be taken to be fairly impartial. I mean that I should welcome anything that would rationally reduce the hours of work needed for agriculture on condition that the quality of the food did not suffer as it has hitherto suffered.
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Not overcrowded then — for I must repeat that the only certain remedy for over-population is increasing the standard of living of a population.... Not overcrowded, sufficiently, not injuriously occupied, there is no reason why upon the Great Route the Golden Age should not revive itself — merchants, pedlars, and gipsies and all. I do not see that there would be any necessity to suppress the great towns. A certain metropolitan spirit is a necessity in the world — it is, indeed, Civilization itself. New York, Paris, London, Rome are cultural necessities of the Route and there is no reason except local jealousies why the South itself should not evolve a Metropolis. There would, indeed, be every reason why she should if she is to contain the greater part of the population of the country. But the great cities would become essentially pleasure, night-life and art centres, losing completely their administrative and industrial aspects.... What little administration there was — for we should have reduced that to a minimum in the hands of part-time Administrators chosen by lot or merely hereditary, I don’t care which — might perfectly well be conducted from Washington for the West... and after all, why not Geneva for the East?... It might be as well to have your Administrative centre a disagreeable city in a disagreeable climate — so as to prevent men from too much desiring to become Administrators. On the other hand, home life would be probably so agreeable that it might be difficult to find people ready to assume the ignoble job of Administration. But with Geneva to cure the one type and Washington to attract the others we might do pretty well.
All other agglomerations except seaports and university, historical and beautiful towns would gradually disappear; towns like Pittsburg or Leeds being assisted in their disappearance.... And, your work for the supporting of yourself being reduced to a minimum, there would be no reason why you should not spend a third or a half or two-thirds of the year in travelling. That would be a mere matter of arrangement with your neighbours.... Or you could spend it in pacing trackless solitudes, galloping on mustangs round stock, baring your he-male breast to the breeze off the waste spaces. Or you could be a member — or the conductor — of a football team on a cup-tie tour in Eastern Persia, or of your local opera troupe to La Scala in Milan.... Or you might even be permitted to gain millions and millions of gold poker chips at Monte Carlo and billions of dollars’ worth of the stock of deceased Utility Corporations on Wall Street. Or, after obtaining the necessary certificates of character and attainments, you might, if your tastes lay that way, become a pedlar and pass your life travelling between Memphis and Cathay....
I think I should put in for that.... And yet...
You know, sitting in this bus between Bristol and Knoxville, in the black night I am surely travelling.... But beneath the pins and needles that have invaded my whole frame goes another tingling.... It is getting on for June.... I start so that the head of the elderly gentleman from Staunton gets a jolt on my knees.... What is that fool doing with my vines?... Over there where it is already dawn long past and the song of the nightingale mixes with the sound of the surf from the Mediterranean.... And even my mustard and cress in the soup-tureen in New York must be dried up by now....
IV. I ASK YOU...
When I for the first time attained to the city of my dreams — and that was not on this journey — the first thing that struck my imagination very forcibly was Mrs. Tate standing in the attitude of the statue of the French Republic — or to the French War Dead — whichever it is that the bus passes in the yard of the Louvre.... The white statue nearest the statue of Lafayette presented to the French Nation by the Ladies of the South....
Mrs. Tate had that same air, compounded of the expression of a Maenad and the attitude of Niobe who, as you remember, mourned for her children... one foot and one arm stretched forward, offering me, not a laurel crown but a small cellophane-enveloped yellow packet. Behind her, in an attitude of scholarly reserve, was Mr. Allen Tate, looking at the ground, and melancholy, one knee bent.... In precisely the attitude of British privates awaiting the order, at a military funeral, to fire a blank volley over the coffin. And Mrs. Tate thrust that packet into my hand exclaiming in a voice that combined tremor, sob, and the high note that characterizes the ladies of the F.F.V. in moments of emotion:
“I ask you!”
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I wish I could manage to tell two anecdotes at once. For if that one narrates my first and strongest emotion in Memphis of the Mississippi, my strongest emotion, after my childhood, in connection with the State itself came to me in France during the first Battle of the Somme. My battalion was marching into the line; the goat — not the magnificent white one with the silver shield between its horns that had been given to the Regiment by Edward VII — but a little, thin, Picardy nanny that had adopted the battalion and ran always in front of us of its own accord — the goat, then, preceded the scratch band we had got together, jumping nowand then into the hedges on either side of the road when it saw a particularly attractive rag or tin can. And suddenly the band dropped giving the drum and fife effect and, just before it was timed to fall out and let us go on, that ragtime collection — and every man sang too... heavens, didn’t they sing! And what voices the Welsh have! — that ragtime collection of musicians burst out with:
“Way down in Tennessee, that’s where I’d like to be, On my old Mammie’s knee; she thinks the world of me.
And when they meet me, when they meet me, just imagine how they’ll greet me When I get back, when I get back...”
Only we sang “if” instead of “when.”... And I assure you the State of Tennessee would have felt complimented if it had known how sincerely we 678 men — who were soon to be not more than 215 — desired to find ourselves within her border.... Not even the professional Tennesseean lady whom I met in Boston and who told me she was dying because she was not in Knoxville and that I had never, never in my life seen such a magnificent sight as the local doughboys marching through Nashville in 1917... not even she could have more wanted to be in Knoxville... than we did.
But isn’t that song a queer instance of how culture travels backwards and forwards along the Route?
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At that time — in July 1916 — I had never been in Tennessee.
I had never, indeed, been further West in Virginia than Staunton, which struck me as the pleasantest city in either the State or the States. I had meant to go on to Lexington. But we had ridden on horseback — yes, it was that long ago — from Charlottesville, and I had watched for a couple of days the representative of a relative, on the local loose floors. He was buying tobacco for the French Régie and I was thinking, then, of going, as the saying was, into tobacco, and it was lots of fun. But the buying took longer than we had expected and we had to give up going on, so it was not till many years later that I saw that Carcassonne of the West.... I mean Lexington. Thus I always imagined it as resembling the place that heard the shot... which is good enough in its way.... And in just the same way Tennessee until four or five years ago was, in my imagination, a scene of innumerable and smiling darkies in a thick tropical vegetation of odd trees and lianas and mangoes and thatched African jungle-huts and gleaming white teeth and eyebrows.... Something steaming and tropical and Swanee Riverish — going to the tune of Dixie.
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So that to plunge straight out of Virginia into her western neighbour is to receive an effect of muted strings — not so much by contrast with the stretch of country between Abingdon — which is a pleasant little place — and Bristol, which isn’t — as because one is slightly dismayed by finding oneself on an upland road with, apparently, Chanctonbury Ring, straight from Sussex in England, on a range of downs perhaps four miles distant. It was here, or hereabouts, that Tennessee made the nearly fatal grab at me that I have recounted in the early pages of the book.... And shooting past the very spot in this hurtling charabanc, I have to shiver a little. Supposing Tennessee should again have a shot at my life.... I hasten to compound with the State by pointing out that, according to Types of Farming, the average rainfall of most of the State is of the normal Great Route perfection and has the advantage of occurring in bulk, mostly in the summer months. But, as to the little corner that contains Memphis itself I have to remain unrepentant. There rain, heat, and the average length of the growing season exaggerate themselves with the result, I suppose, that Memphis is the Metropolis of King Cotton, and the hippoipotamon — the o being long as in the Greek omega — can there tranquilly reproduce their kind... and the rain distributes itself through the year. And there, too, a certain luxuriance appears to creep into Nature and domestic affairs.... I have a vision of a planter’s house... of several planters’ houses, but one in particular just out of Memphis... that was everything that a planter’s house on a great plantation should be to satisfy the European appetite... and me.... A big house dating, I should think for the most part, from since the war, with big rooms, one in particular enormous and lit by large paned windows from both ends, with a bluish atmosphere, and great logs burning in a high fireplace.... It was raining.... And, what was most material, seen through the large plate-glass windows, a perfect wilderness of vegetation — creepers climbing over tall trees that thrust their arms to heaven as if they had been men putting on heavy coats, and a profusion of enlarged European flowers and flowers from the Bermudas and flowers that I supposed were indigenous. And peacocks wandered nonchalantly in and out of the room, and it was quiet, and profuse, and hospitable.... A life seeming to run on wheels in a deep shade.
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But most of Tennessee seemed to me to be by comparison... let me put it... anxious. It was perhaps because the professional Tennesseeans seemed to be too declamatory to be very convincing. Or it may have been that I was making — a possibly very false — historic deduction from the relatively late settlement of the State.... Or perhaps from books that I had read.... Or perhaps it was merely because the State was really passing through a bad time. At any rate, I seemed to feel the whole country as it were abstracted and as if listening... as a farmer sitting by his fireside does not pay much attention to what is going on round him because he is listening for sounds from the barn where a heifer is doing not too well with a first calf... or for any other bad news.
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And it does not seem to me that the states of the South that were, roughly speaking, extensions of the Old Dominion out of which Maryland and Delaware and the Carolinas were carved — that the post-revolutionary States, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and even Georgia, can ever have had the air of settled and tranquil wealth that obtains to-day in all the States of the Old Dominion, except perhaps North Carolina.... Louisiana and Florida were, of course, in another category.
Roughly speaking, Tennessee should have been approaching some sort of settled wealth between 1825 and 1830....
But the Tariff of Abominations was enacted in 1828 and William Lloyd Garrison founded the Liberator in Boston in 1831. The one struck a deathblow and the other sounded as it were the passing knell not merely of the great quasi-feudal estates but of any possible prosperity for the South.
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Let us deal very cursorily with the question of negro slavery before going on to the real Abominations of the world. For, believe me, all the evils from which to-day we suffer came from tariffs — though whether the first malignity between human beings preceded the first tariffs or whether the first tariffs caused the first malignity is as difficult a question as which came first, the hen or the egg....
The question of slavery comes only very incidentally into our immediate purview. It was — or to be more exact the method of its abolition in the South was — one of the contributory causes to the existence of the prodigious stranglehold that the Industrial System has established over our comity of nations. But if the Nordic section of this continent and their sympathizers in the Eastern hemisphere had not at the instance of their commercial subsidizers raised a sort of religious afflatus against the peculiar institution in the South, the Civil War, which was merely a struggle between two commercial interests, would never have taken place. And the war was a very great calamity for all humanity. It gave a tremendous impetus towards mass-production — and it heightened the rate at which humanity was already going towards the belief that murder was the most efficient method of securing for the murderer the possessions of his neighbours, whether fellow-countrymen or beyond the artificial boundaries called national. It rendered Peace impossible.
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Let us begin at once by saying that it is abhorrent that one human being should be the property of another. Let us even premise that it is a natural abhorrence such as all created beings feel for the excrement of their species or all human beings for the reptilia that crawl upon their bellies. That is perhaps going too far, since by all the great civilizations of the past slavery was regarded with equanimity. But let us concede it, for our space grows short. Or let us say that Humanity since then has developed a different moral sense.
