FAR AND WIDE

by

Douglas Reed

published: 1951

Home Page of Douglas Reed Books

Part One

American Scene

Chapter:01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Part Two

Behind The Scene

Chapter:01 02 03 04 Postscript P.P.S.

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Foreword

ALL ABOARD FOR ALABAM'

My heart never urgently called me Americaward because it belongs to our cradle-land, Europe, and in serener times I would have stayed there. Today Europe is cut in two and, I believe, will either be wholly crushed into a servile oblivion at one more move in the great game, or rise again. The remaining years of our century should decide that stupendous issue of our age (or, as you like it, that petty incident in time and space).

Much power to sway the decision, either way, has passed from Europe to America, so that I felt an urgent need of the mind to go there. The balance of money-power and manufacture-power has greatly shifted thither; and if 'the world is governed by very different persons from what those believe who are not behind the scenes' (Disraeli's words) then America is today the land which they will chiefly seek to divide, rule and use for the completion of their plan.

The plan, I think, is the old one of world dominion in a new form. It is not merely that of one more Wicked Man, like the Hitler who, in Mr. Chaplin's film The Great Dictator, dreamily played with our planet. The political explorer early finds that other men than these spotlighted, evanescent, public figures also play with the globe.

It is, in my belief, the plan of a conspiratorial sect, the members of which wield much power in all countries, seldom openly appear, hold sway over the visible public figures, and are able so to direct the acts of governments, friendly or hostile, peaceable or warring, that these in the end all promote their prompters' own destructive ambition.

This ambition (and today I think it is apparent) is to set up a World State to which all nations, having ruined each other, shall be enserfed. The League of Nations was to my mind a first experiment in that direction and the United Nations is a second one, much more advanced.

A wandering journalist, I have gone through the thick of these events for many years and have no doubt left that this is the shape of things intended to come. Two groups, alien in all lands and powerful in all lands, chiefly promote that great design. The political explorer finds Soviet Communism and Zionist Nationalism in all countries to be forces powerful behind the scenes, and in sum their separate efforts serve a converging ambition.

It is, as I judge, to crush the nations into a flat, brazen servitude between the hammer of revolution and the anvil of gold. The founder of Zionist Nationalism, Theodor Herzl, openly described the method: 'The power of our purse ... the terrible power of the revolutionary proletariat.' It reveals the secret, the great discovery, of politics in our times. Politicians can ever be brought to yield either to the glitter of material reward (perhaps in the shape of votes), or, if that fails, to the threat of agitation and overthrow. Such is the conspirator's road to power, on high and higher to the highest levels.

Today the scene is set for the third act, intended to complete the process. The money-power and the revolutionary-power have been set up and given sham but symbolic shapes ('Capitalism' or 'Communism') and sharply-defined citadels ('America' or 'Russia'). Suitably to alarm the mass-mind, the picture offered is that of bleak and hopeless enmity and confrontation: Black Knight and White Knight. One must destroy the other.

Such is the spectacle publicly staged for the masses. But what if similar men, with a common aim, secretly rule in both camps and propose to achieve their ambition through the clash between those masses? I believe any diligent student of our times will discover that this is the case. He will find that in all countries essential to the plan invisible or half-seen men, whose names are publicly little known, are powerful enough to dictate the major acts of governments at vital moments (President Roosevelt's near-deathbed admission that he signed the fatal order to bisect Germany 'at the request of an old and valued friend', who remained nameless, is a recent case in point).

In the United States, particularly, these powerful men behind-the-scenes have in the last thirty years been able to give such a slant to governmental actions that these went to promote the ends of Soviet Communism and Zionist Nationalism; at least, it looked like that to me from afar and when I went closer the same picture grew only clearer.

Thus I think that out of the smoke and smother of any new war, begun on the one side to 'destroy Capitalism' and on the other to 'destroy Communism', will at the end be produced (if this situation continues) what those managers really want: the Communist-Capitalist Super-State with all the Capitalist-Communist power over people and gold, and all the nations submerged. For the Second War proved beyond further doubt what the First War began to make probable: that aims and causes tossed to the masses at the start of these great conflicts have no relation to the ultimate plans in truth pursued.

In that matter another incident from the Roosevelt era is convincing. At one point during the Second War the British Government found that Mr. Roosevelt entertained massive ideas about reshaping the globe, and these affected British territories, among many others. The British Foreign Minister, courteously mentioning that they included no American (he might have added, or Russian) sacrifices, gently asked about the President's constitutional powers for redistributing the world while it was still at war.

President Roosevelt then inquired of his legal advisers and was reassuringly told that he could do anything he liked 'without Congressional action in the first instance' and 'the handling of the military forces of the United States could be so managed as to foster any purpose he pursued'.

The last sentence supplies the key to the mysteries of these wars. They are not for the ends publicly announced when The Boys set out. The important thing, apparently, is to get The Boys started; then their military operations may be 'handled' to foster 'any purpose' their rulers may pursue. But who are their rulers, today? In the most vital matters, 'old and valued friends', who never emerge from anonymity!

I think the method has become clear, and expect to see it pursued, and any further wars 'handled', until the purpose of setting up the World Servile State is accomplished, or finally fails. Long observation in Europe and Africa brought me to and confirmed these views. America was the essential last stage on my journey of political exploration. I knew all the rest, from Moscow through Berlin to London and Paris, and believed I had a good notion of what went on in America; but the personal experience lacked.

So I went to see for myself, with memories of the two wars and of twenty years of politics in twenty countries in my mind's eye. All those fragments now fitted into the picture of a continuing process, guided by master hands unseen, and I set out to learn how far the American one dovetailed into it. At the end I thought that America, like my own country, was in the business unwittingly but up to the neck. Matters have gone too far for the last great coup, The World State, not now to be tried; only the result, I think, now remains in doubt.

The first part of this book contains the visual picture of America as I saw it at the fateful mid-century during a very long overland journey; my experience is that you need to travel a country far and wide before you try to understand it. The second part contains, for what they are worth, the conclusions which I brought away.

PART ONE

AMERICAN SCENE

Chapter One

WAY DOWN IN DIXIE

The things which captivate the innocent abroad at the outset are those which are new to him and in America these are, foremost, the gadgets. Already in the taxicab from the docks I wondered what sharp, staccato entertainment the car's radio emitted until I realized that its and other drivers were informing some central command-post of their whereabouts and receiving orders, like tank-commanders in Normandy. My driver took a hand microphone and joined in this brisk exchange. 'Seventy-five heah,' he said, 'coming in from the docks, and the commander's voice crisply returned, 'Okay, seventy-five, we want yuh for the deepoh.' 'Okay,' he said, and the operation orders continued: sixty-six was heah, forty-nine was at Bienville Square awaiting instructions, thirty-two was sought and twenty-one reported.

Awed at the start, I came to an hotel where the great glass door opened at my approach, without human help. Later I came to know this door well enough to have fun with it. I would stop as I drew near and it opened, and retreat a step; with smooth courtesy it halted and closed. It was the perfect dancing partner, and late one night, when I saw none about, I tried it with a rumba, which it performed perfectly. I was enjoying this dance (it is my favourite) when I felt that I was observed. Looking round I saw a negro porter watching me, not with disdain but with smiling sympathy.

The lifts, too, were playful. Two served my upper floor and faced each other across a wide landing. They were operated by regresses and were noiseless to the point of stealth. When I rang for and awaited the one I would hear a voice behind me say, in accents of suffering, 'Going down', and would spin round to find the other lift-girl looking at me, with some contempt added to the ageless sorrow of her liquid brown eyes. I tried ringing for one and quickly crossing the landing to the other, but then the one originally summoned would silently arrive and behind my back the deep, accusing voice would say, 'Going down'. At the bottom I said, 'Thank you', and she answered, 'You're welcome'; thus, when I finally left the hotel through the unattended door the last words I heard were those which used to greet the coming guest.

From the hotel into the town I followed the trail of such wonders. With a companion I visited the bank, which in America is often placed high among the seeworthy-things (as the Germans say). It seemed full of telephones, iced-water machines, and busy men in large hats from whose mouths cigars pointed like anti-aircraft guns. They incessantly picked up telephones and spoke into them at once, as if the instrument automatically connected them with the folk they wanted, and between calls they visited the iced-water machines. I thought I caught them sometimes telephoning into an iced-water machine or trying to drink from a telephone, but may have been confused. They greeted all, including me, with a cheery wave of the arm, two outstretched fingers at its end, and 'Howdy, pardner. How're yuh t'daye Nice t'see yer.' I at once became the partner of several leading Mobilians and also an officer in some unknown service ('Howdy, cap'n').

These amiable forms are not general in America, I found in time. The slow, unhurried courtesy which was once the accepted manner of an American, of whatever station, widely survives in the South, but gives way to an impersonal brusqueness in other places, particularly those under the spiritual influence of New York, where hurly-burly seems to have been rewritten surly-burly. There a pleasant mien is apparently held a sign of weakness and its wearer 'a smoothy'. 'How strange that it should be a sign of affectation, and even of degeneracy, to be well-mannered and well-dressed, to speak English with correctness and live with a certain elegance;' (wrote Mr. Somerset Maugham in A Writer's Notebook), 'a man who has been to a good boarding-school and to Harvard or Yale must walk very warily if he wants to avoid the antagonism of those who have not enjoyed these advantages. It is pitiful often to see a man of culture assume a heartiness of manner and use a style of language that are foreign to him in the vain hope that he will not be thought a stuffed-shirt.' Once, slumped over hot-cakes in a chilly dawn, I saw before me a notice: 'Don't ask us for information; if we knew anything we shouldn't be here.' I wanted to inquire the way somewither, but forbore, wondering nevertheless why people should deny themselves the ancient pleasure of setting a wayfarer on his road.

The South is still unafraid of civility, or even a little blarney. I felt happier to be told by a waitress here, 'Yes sah, Ah'll gladly bring you that', or by a hotel manager there (when I asked for the bill), 'We hate ter do it, but if you must go ...'; and by a museum custodian, who had to deny some small request, 'Ah'm jest as sorry as Ah could be, but that's not allowed'. In Mobile the more elegant quality of the earlier time still showed through the shape of the later one. The America of Main Street does not yet compare to advantage with that which first grew out of the wilderness and the fortified settlements.

Mobile was French first, and France bequeathed to these parts an immortal name, that of the dix-dollar notes, or dixies. Its pleasant old houses, now diminishing, with their lacey metalwork balconies, offer a challenge to Main Street which I found repeated all over America, not only in the South and New England. In a thousand small towns of the interior the pleasant white houses of the 'homes section' were projections of those which the early colonists built along the coast, using the timber of the new continent and the best models of the old. In the same thousand small towns the 'business section' was the projection of something different, incongruous and of poorer intrinsic quality. Mobile's Main Street contained a profusion of moneylenders; they were even more plentiful than pawnshops used to be in Camden High Street.

Exploring the town I first came on those suburbs of delightful white houses which continued to charm me all over America. Then I found the districts where the poor whites lived, and those of the negroes. The poor white trash (the name may first have been given them by the sugarfields darkies, for the residue from cane-crushing is 'trash') earned fifty pounds a month but remained an affront to the other white folk. The negroes lived in cheerful slovenry and their girls spent much time with their own beauty specialists, probably having their hair done.

Hair becomes a major problem for the young negress when she lives among white communities. Her own hair is much longer than it looks but clings so tightly to her scalp that white women's hats, which she admires, are too big for her. She cannot stretch it to its full length by plaiting or beading, as the Zulu warrior or baby sometimes does, but achieves this end by heavy grease. This enables her to attain something like the hair-do of her favourite white film-actress. Another method is to wear a wig, and these are manufactured for a lively market.

Down on the levees I found the darkies dreamily angling. They still looked as if they might have known Uncle Tom or Tom Sawyer, and still the ancient conflict racked their souls: whether to do a chore or go fishing. I believe this is for many of them life's major issue. It still is in the Africa from which their forefathers came. Though cast among white men, they do not fully accept the white man's philosophy. The Red Indian (who is neither Indian nor red) seems to reject it completely; prevented from warring and hunting, he huddles together in small reservations and impassively awaits extinction or unforeseeable revival. The negro prefers a compromise; he will work within limits, to gain leisure for fishing or dreaming. He survives and multiplies.

I landed in the Deep South and, therewith, in the middle of 'the colour problem', and was glad Southern Africa had taught me some rudiments of the matter. The question has four distinct aspects. The first, what the black man truly wants, is ignored by all parties to the great debate. The second and third are the conflicting opinions, between white men who live among black men, about what is good for him within the limits of what is good for them. The division is in my experience not very wide, but is broadened by the parties of the fourth aspect, the political groups far from negro-populated areas who use it to set white man against white man as a means of achieving votes and power. This is the chief aspect. The past hundred years have shown that white folk in New England and Old England may be violently incited against each other and against white folk in warmer latitudes by this means, to the point of civil wars. The American Civil War was the first of these.

The contemplation of sin in others is an ancient human enjoyment, particularly when the beholder is remote from temptation. It is a pleasure much enjoyed by unoccupied ladies at lace-curtained windows in suburban streets. Seated at her New England casement Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe grew wrathful about the goings-on of Simon Legree and the plight of Topsy, far, far away, to such effect that she similarly infuriated millions of other window-sitters and became (as President Lincoln said) 'the little lady who started the big war'. Later, when she saw the ruined South and Uncle Tom, free but bewildered, she wrote in alarm: 'Corrupt politicians are already beginning to speculate on the negroes as possible capital for their schemes and to fill their poor souls with all sorts of vagaries ... It is unwise and impolitic to endeavour to force negro suffrage on the South at the point of the bayonet.'

However, the thing was so enforced, with dire results; Mrs. Beecher Stowe, had she but known, was herself used by corrupt politicians for the furtherance of schemes; and Uncle Tom could not be unwritten when she saw the light. At this mid-century the book is used for new incitement in a land where pale-skinned folk, if not white ones in the true sense, endure a harsher slavery than her characters knew; time, the jester, dances on. Uncle Tom's Cabin, as a play, is a favourite medium of the present rulers in Moscow for teaching their herded masses to hate the Western white man. Moreover, Mrs. Stowe founded a school of writers, now innumerable. Her success led one Anna E. Dickinson to delight New York, in 1868, with a novel, What Answer? depicting the marriage of a rich young white man with a negress and since that day the theme has never been let drop. Its true importance seems to be fractional.

Because of this I found life and talk in the South much like those of South Africa; the same note of unease about the future ran through them. The clamour from outside paid little heed to people who were actually worse off than the negroes, namely, the original inhabitants, the Red Indians (so called by Columbus because he thought America was India, reached by a new route; they appear to be of Asiatic origin and to have reached America in remote ages by some icy trek from Siberia, across frozen seas, to Alaska). Mrs. Stowe never wrote the story of Sitting Bull's wigwam, though her own house may have stood on its site. The surviving American Indians are too few for the 'corrupt politicians' elsewhere to bother with.

With a companion I began to discover America, ranging round the Mobile countryside from the luxurious country clubs and fine Gulf-side houses to the poorer farmers' shacks and the coloured quarters. I felt at once the great wealth and energy of the country, also its disquiet and resentments, from which no moving frontier now offers escape. I was fortunate to meet at the outset a companion who gave me a deep insight into many things, at first puzzling.

He was a remarkable man. Born to a hard lot, he had been all over America, afoot or by thumbed-ride. America was his life and being; he felt it as an enormous experience, the shape of which, nevertheless, he could not comprehend. He was full of its lore and in my room sang to me epic poems of the legendary giants of the wood-axe and the trail, Mike Fisk, Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed and the others, the men who boasted they could outfight, outshoot, outjump and outrun all others. In them you could bear the crash of falling timber, the arrow's hiss, the song of the flatboats floating down-stream and of the conquering steamboats churning upriver. He felt himself the child of titans in a stupendous world and knew not which way to turn. He had made himself, from the raw, into an artist and sculptor of talent and found no field or market. He did not feel boundless freedom but an eroding frustration. What could an artist do in America, how could he even live? He sought an answer in a little room among tall buildings. He saw beauty in the great freight train, with its mile of box-cars, that with clanging bell rumbled straight through the middle of the town. These annihilators of space and distance mean to Americans of his kind something of what ships mean to Englishmen. With him I wandered along the quays, past the darkies daydreamily watching their lines. He knew their soul, too, and put it into his songs. 'Howdy, pardner,' he said to each, 'What you caught?' A sheepish backward grin and 'Nuthin'.' 'What, nuthin'! Gorn, Ah thought you caught a big catfish or somep'n.'

I said goodbye with regret one night and climbed aboard a train. When the midnight choo-choo leaves for Alabam', I hummed as its wheels began to turn. Then I tried to sleep but could not. I had fallen into a trap when a charming Mobilian at the booking-office asked me, 'Upper or lower berth? Upper's cheaper.' Grateful for the hint, I said, 'Upper'.

The sleeping-car was that which England knows as a saloon-car, with a central aisle and sets of seats on either side, facing each other in pairs. By some miracle these were transformed into beds at night, an upper and a lower for each four seats; the aisle remained free, between curtains. The occupant of the lower bed could dress or undress sitting on its edge with his feet on the floor; look out of the windows, sit upright, or even stand by bulging the curtains a little. The upper berth was a windowless cell, only reached or left by a ladder, which was procurable only by ringing for the attendant. The roof of the car was about two feet above the berth itself, so that I found myself undressing and dressing flat on my back in a dark horizontal cubicle, a surprising and difficult predicament. I was glad when, somewhat crumpled, I came to my next abiding-place, a little town in the heart of South Carolina.

Chapter Two

WHITE PILLARS, GREEN PASTURES

These houses were framed in trees that stood like giants; they seemed to grow twice as tall and full as elsewhere. Beneath these overhanging green masses, where blue jays and red admirals sported, and between the pillared, verandaed white houses I wandered, looking at America. Broad roadway, broad sidewalk and broad lawns, all were filled with a tangible hush that seemed not quite peace. The motor car has emptied such residential parts of the walking folk who once enlivened them. To English taste, which might be right or wrong, something else lacked. Americans, from the equalitarian idea or ideal which ever defeats itself, dislike hedges or fences, so that houses rub porches and walls without any line of domain between. That works against the life of gardens, of fathers tending flowers or children playing and the general animation which these pleasant scenes give.

American homes, therefore, somewhat bleakly confront the outer world, usually without any outer, private keep to soften the impact. Later, on Long Island, I saw a private builder's estate of ten thousand small houses where dividing fences were forbidden as a condition of sale. I believe this may cause a spiritual overcrowding, in a huge land, which discomforts many Americans. In a short story about an American girl who sought out her old nurse in England I found the words: 'Frances came upon Ainsty Street and stopped ... What was life here like? These were pleasant cottages ... they were not the facile, blank little homes that American developers grind out all over the landscape. The pride and the privacy of each was contained within walls and behind individual wooden gates.' Similarly a wise Texan in England, Professor J. Frank Dobie (Hammond, Hammond & Co., London, 1946) wrote, 'As for freedom and pleasance, I'll take a hedged-in cottage and its plot anywhere in England rather than many thousands of acres from which the grass that the buffaloes once grazed has all been destroyed and nothing but dollar wheat planted.'

This may be one cause of the lack of a pleasant domestic vivacity in American residential areas generally, but the South, where other things than buffalo lands were destroyed, is a special case and I ascribed also to its particular memories some of the brooding melancholy which I felt in these green avenues. This sadness, as of a dying strain of music, was caught by the title of Miss Mitchell's book, Gone with the Wind. I thought of it as I strolled past quiet white houses and remembered the long queues of people waiting, in London, to see the film that was made from it. They were there before France fell and still there, I believe, when France was freed. It was 'good entertainment' and few of those picturegoers saw anything else in it.

For the South, for the present American Republic, and possibly for the entire white family the Civil War (its true name, I judge) remains of present significance. More Americans were killed in it than in both twentieth-century wars together. Not only for that reason is it a living American reality, whereas the others were more quickly forgotten. Brother fought against brother in it and never knew for what. Few now believe it was fought to free slaves, from whose importation Northern traders once grew rich. The fury of partisanship, on either side, was used to different ends.

It was the first war in which the lot of a third party (and not the aboriginal population) was employed to divide white men against each other in the new worlds they thought to have conquered, and to promote a worldwide revolutionary design. The real aim was to break the political power of the rural South and transfer it to the expanding, industrial North, where the revolutionary forces were strongest. It led to a weakening of the Union, which plainly showed in the Republic of 1950. When that war began America was a country of a homogeneous people, predominantly English, Scottish, Ulster-Irish, German and Scandinavian in origins and recognizably 'American'. In its aftermath, which opened the floodgates of immigration from Eastern Europe, this composition of the population was radically changed. Power passed, not to Northern Americans of the old stock, but more and more into the hands of newcomers. They brought with them schemes for a new Union; that of the world, with America and all other countries servient to it. Like the Republic's tombstone (it has that shape) their headquarters building was rising in New York when I went there; it was called the house of 'The United Nations'.

I think the road to the American Civil War, and beyond, clearly ran from the French Revolution. Today the war against the South continues. It is indispensable to the politics of New York and of the tombstone-building. Crushed in 1865, the South is still too strong. With that obduracy which attends God's processes, it has remained homogeneous, a surviving obstacle to the consolidation of the new power in America and the world.

Travelling in the South Mr. John Gunther (himself of more recent American vintage) remarked in Inside U.S.A.: 'The foreign-born and sons of foreign-born, who have been travelling with us for most of the course of this book, now leave our story to all practical purposes. The South is overwhelmingly of native-born Anglo-Saxon origin ... I might add, "predominantly of Scots-Irish, Ulster or Celtic stock". There are towns in North Carolina almost as Scottish as Aberdeen; there are backwoods in Tennessee and Arkansas as implacably Celtic as anything in Wales ... In every state except Florida and Louisiana 90 per cent or more of the white citizens come of parents who were both American born. The figure reaches 98.7 per cent in Arkansas ... That Arkansas should be one of the most unquestionably backward of American states naturally gives the observer slight pause and makes one wonder what peculiar characteristics the Celts and Gaels, when transported, contribute to a civilization.' (However, this writer recorded a notable contribution of the South to what in their day were presented as wars 'for civilization': 'The South from the beginning and most vividly took the Allied side in both World Wars ... The proportion of volunteer enlistments to conscripts was 85.3 for South Carolina, 92.6 for Georgia, 98.6 for Texas and 123.4 for Kentucky ... One factor in this is obviously the Anglo-Saxon origin of most Southerners ... Still another is the peculiar and ineffaceable persistence of the martial tradition, the fighting impulse.')

Mr. Gunther calls the South 'The Problem Child of the Nation'. This characteristically New York conception that the parent is the child and the child now the parent, is unremittingly suggested into the American mind by newspapers, books, plays, films and radio. Any demur is rebuked as racial discrimination. A reviewer in a New York newspaper, discussing a book called Our English Heritage said: 'One school of thought insists that the immense influx of people from central Europe makes the future of America belong to them. This reviewer does not agree.' Such words verge on punishable heresy in America today, and are rare to see in print.

The transference of power to a newly-arrived minority is, however, possible if the original stock can be kept fairly equally divided by the wedge of some exterior issue. For this purpose the negroes of the South continue to be used. The matter is explained by Mr. Robert. E. Sherwood, one of President Roosevelt's ghost-writers, in Roosevelt and Hopkins: 'Roosevelt said to me' (during the fourth-term election campaign) 'that, if there were some fifty million people who would actually vote on election day, you could figure roughly that some twenty million of them were determined to vote Democratic and another twenty million Republican (give or take a few million either way) regardless of the issues or candidates. This left ten, million or more uncommitted independents who were subject to persuasion during the course of the campaign, and it was to these that the strongest appeals must be made ... A substantial number of negroes was included in the independent minority, as Roosevelt reckoned it. It was obvious that anyone with his exceptionally positive social views would he implacably opposed to racial discrimination.'

The Southern negro thus plays in the 1950s, as in the 1860s, the part of stalking horse in the pursuit of political power. The cry of 'racial discrimination' is not genuinely raised on his behalf, the real meaning is that it would be 'racial discrimination' to oppose the new immigration from taking over the American future, as the intrepid reviewer remarked. The ambition, aspirants and method are not peculiar to America; they occur in England, South Africa and all countries known to me.

In England, for instance, the native masses equate two main parties with their beliefs and hopes. They vote Conservative to ensure the liberty of each man and the survival of the nation, and Socialist if they wish individual men to yield their liberty to the State and the State, then, to merge the nation in some international directorate. In fact they get the same thing either way, merely at a different pace, and in America the position is similar, only the labels being different: Republican for Conservative and Democratic for Socialist. Both parties, in both countries, appear to regard the small, indeterminate mass of votes, between the two main parties, as being in the gift of third groups and they court this support by surrender to the aims of those separate forces, which work for the supreme State, first, and the supreme World State, next.

In America, under this masterly manipulation, the two parties have even changed places, or faces. At the Civil War the Republicans, who cried 'Abolish slavery' (or 'down with racial discrimination') as a means to power were the party of the revolutionaries. The Democratic Party was that of the conservative South, and eventually resurrected it. The Republicans then enjoyed seventy years of power, almost unbroken, a period long enough to turn any party conservative. Seeing that, the revolutionary element transferred to the Democratic Party and proved, when President Roosevelt came to power, to be very strong in it; the last seventeen years have been filled again with the specious clamour of 'down with racial discrimination' and the atmosphere of pre-Civil War days has been reproduced. So strong is the memory of what the Republicans did after that war that Southerners still automatically vote Democratic. The most their representatives can do, when they reach Congress, is somewhat to retard the new campaign against the South; on the whole they promote the aim of the new immigration to 'take over the future of America'. The Republican Party, which now professes to stand for the traditional American Republic, in its turn feels ever forced by the thought of coming elections to court the graces of this overriding group. For the present no escape from the blind road offers to the voter, either in England or America.

The clear trail leading from the Civil War to the present was the first of my surprises in America. Like most Europeans, probably, I was ignorant of that war and when I studied it felt like an archaeologist who finds the original of the Communist Manifesto in Greek ruins. What went with that wind was more than the political power of the South; what came with the new one was the enslavement of white men by Soviet methods. Only the peculiar spirit of the South prevented that condition from becoming permanent. I read the records with growing amazement, because I recognized in them a continuing process of today. 'That the Southern people were put to the torture is vaguely understood' (wrote Mr. Claude G. Bowers in 1929 in The Tragic Era), 'but even historians have shrunk from the unhappy task of showing us the torture chambers ... it is impossible to grasp the real significance of the revolutionary proceedings of the rugged conspirators working out the policies of Thaddeus Stevens without making many journeys among the Southern people and seeing with our own eyes the indignities to which they were subjected.'

The key-words are 'revolutionary' and 'conspirators' and they fit today's situation like a glove. That the North, with its newly-discovered gold, growing industry, command of the sea and increasing population would win that war was plain to clear heads in the South from the start, and did not deter them from a war which, they believed, had to be fought. Just as it ended President Lincoln, whose continued presidency would have meant reconciliation, was murdered. The way to the South was opened to persons recognizable today as the revolutionary conspirators we know as Communists.

Of the twelve years that followed, the miracle is that the South survived. Mr. John Gunther, who seems to have been startled by what he learned when he saw the South, says, 'If you read the history of those days you must inevitably be reminded of contemporary analogies. Atlanta in the 1870s must have startlingly resembled Warsaw or Budapest under the Nazis in the 1940s ... Chopping up the South and ruling it by an absolute dictatorship of the military, while every kind of economic and social depredation was not only allowed but encouraged, is so strikingly like what is going on in Germany at present that the imagination staggers.'

Slightly different comparisons might be more correct. The sufferings of the South compare more closely with those of Budapest, Warsaw and all of Eastern Europe under the Communists after the 1939-45 war ended than even under the Nazis in 1940. It is perfectly true, however, that things happened in the American zone of occupation of Germany after 1945 which strongly recall the years from 1865 to 1877 in the American South. They were chiefly due to the influence, inside the American Army, of the immigration from Eastern Europe and of them Mr. Bowers might today write that 'even historians have shrunk from the unhappy task of showing us the torture chambers'. The American public has not been told much of what went on, nor has the English, though to a lesser extent similar things happened in the British zone. The tale of mock-trials before a black altar, of brutal beatings and confessions extorted in the pretence that sentence of death was already passed, was told by an American Army board of inquiry, headed by a justice, but was not allowed to reach the conscious mind of the American masses. More was revealed in Mr. Montgomery Belgion's Victors' Justice, a book to which reviewers in America turned a strangely blind eye.

The close resemblance between the torture of the South in the years after 1865 and that of Europe in those after 1945 proved, to me, the existence of a permanent revolutionary organization, trained to intervene at such junctures in human affairs and give them a satanic twist. The day after Lincoln's death Ben Butler was appointed Secretary of State. That was a clear omen; he was the Northern general who ordered his troops at New Orleans in 1862 to treat as common prostitutes any white woman there who 'by word, gesture or movement insulted or showed contempt' for them. Outside the government, real power in the Republican Party passed to Thaddeus Stevens, a dying and malignant man. Club-footed, bald but bewigged, of indeterminate origins, clamant for blood and ruin, he was of the type of Marat, Goebbels, Dzherzhinsky or Szamuely. He lived with a mulatto woman at Lancaster, in Quaker Pennsylvania, and this private factor may have helped inflame his violent public demand for 'absolute equality, socially and politically, between the races'.

Stevens pointed the way: 'Hang the leaders, crush the South, arm the negroes, confiscate the land.' He wanted chaos in the negro-populated area as an essential step towards revolution in the North; the same idea was being taught to American Communists (as an apostate once testified) at the Lenin Institute in Moscow in 1930, and is the ruling aim of American Communists in 1951. The negroes were 'better qualified to establish and maintain a republican government than the whites'. The vote should be taken from the whites and given to the negroes. Attacking 'racial discrimination' he forced through Congress a bill 'establishing for the security of the coloured races safeguards which went infinitely beyond what the government has ever provided for the white race' (President Lincoln's successor, Mr. Johnson, vetoed this bill and narrowly escaped arrest at General Butler's demand).

From the negroless North these white men raved for the extermination of the Southern whites. They tried to suspend trial by jury and, when the Supreme Court resisted, to pack this with compliant judges (President Roosevelt was the next to try that). When the victorious General Grant became president the military commander in Louisiana, General Sheridan, telegraphed asking him to declare the whites there 'banditti', saying 'no further action need he taken except that which would devolve on me'. The real aim of all this was, as Stevens said, 'to secure perpetual ascendancy to the Republican Party'. This continuing attempt to transfer power in the Republic to a more recently arrived section of the community is the reality of all politics there today, though it is now pursued by the other party.

Those fantastic years in the South, I found when I went over the ground, are illuminating for the understanding of the present. The mass of liberated slaves, utterly bewildered, returned to the plantations; chronicles of the day record the gratified surprise of the whites at their general behaviour. Some of them, however, received arms and joined with poor whites of the South and 'carpet-baggers' from the North in a twelve-year orgy of ruin and corruption. The carpet-baggers were men of the kind whom the Western Powers in 1945 forced on the countries of Eastern Europe, thus abandoning them to the Communist Empire. They descended on the South like flies on cadaver, making themselves leaders of the negroes and exerting every means to keep the freed men from returning to their former masters or befriending themselves with the whites.

These carpet-baggers offered the negroes the white man's lands, womenfolk and money, and incited them to take those. The moon looked down on wild festivals of drunken intermingling in the idle cottonfields. Negro superstition was exploited and at black masses (a recognisable feature of any such regime) fearful fates were depicted to any who voted the wrong way. On the ruins of State governments macabre Conventions met and carpet-bagger orators, inciting black audiences, disfranchised masses of the whites. In mock parliaments the people's representatives laughed and yelled, passed bills with their feet on the backs of chairs, sent out for cases of liquor and boxes of cigars, and ran up enormous debts; in Louisiana alone one of these sessions cost nearly $1,000,000 as against $100,000 before, some of the largest items being for champagne and other entertainment. One observer wrote, 'It is a monkeyhouse, with guffaws, disgusting interpolations, amendments offered that are too obscene to print, followed by shouts of glee. Members stagger from the basement bar to their seats; the Speaker in righteous mood sternly forbids the introduction of liquor on the floor. A curious old planter stands in the galleries a moment looking down on the scene and with an exclamation, "My God!" he turns and runs, as from a pestilence, into the street.'

Such corruption at the river's mouth could not come from a source less corrupt. Mr. Bowers wrote in 1929 that 'never have American public men in responsible positions, directing the destiny of the nation, been so brutal, hypocritical and corrupt'. Mr. Truslow Adams, in 1931, spoke of 'the most shameful decade in our entire national history' and of 'a moral collapse without precedent and, let us hope, without successor'. Since President Roosevelt reintroduced the 'racial discrimination' issue into the forefront of American political controversy these comments have become apt to the living present.

The wonder is that the South ever lifted itself from that prostration, and by its own bootstraps. During the worst years the minority of misguided negroes was held in check by the Ku-Klux-Klan, which effectively played on superstitious fears. It was in truth a resistance movement, and only when I saw the South did I understand something that formerly puzzled me; why the Communists in 1950 still rail so much about the Ku-Klux-Klan. They fear future resistance movements, not the one of 1865-77. The negro also played a part in the recovery. He was unable, at little more than one remove from the Congo, to look after himself and turned to the white folks. His natural virtues also contributed. To me he seems, in Africa or America, an innately conservative man in the mass. He is not good revolutionary material, save possibly in the moment of ecstatic excitement to which he is prone, and he is often deeply religious. It was a Negro Senator who wrote in 1876: 'A great portion of our people have learned that they were being used as mere tools and determined, by casting their ballots against these unprincipled adventurers, to overthrow them.' That precisely describes the relationship between the negroes and the white politicians who use the racial-discrimination issue today. Mr. Truslow Adams says of the twelve years, 'There is no parallel for the situation in the history of modern civilized nations, and it is almost incredible that it occurred within our own country.' American politics of today, however, are moving parallel with those of 1860 and again, not for the good of the negro but to divide white people.

I was perhaps better equipped than most, by long experience, to relate the story of those years to our today. I was also in a good town and a good house to study them. The town knew the full brunt of the tragedy and by wonder escaped General Sherman's burning. The house once watched the young men go gaily off to fight, but saw few of them return; it knew also the anguished prayer meetings of 1865, when it was filled with weeping women, the South was in ruins, and no future offered. It had survived to know again the presence of a large and happy family in its fine rooms. Yet the -memory of many tears was in it, and all around. I paid a call on neighbours who, I was told, were rich people 'before the war' but now somewhat reduced. I expressed surprise, saying I thought America was richer, not poorer, through the war. 'Ah, I mean the Civil War,' said my companion, and I remembered that in South Africa too 'the war' means the old one, not either of the world wars.

The South has never fully recovered, though it is advancing quickly now. It still has people who have never been able to adjust themselves to the changed order and who live amid furniture and hangings which seem to have 1865 imprinted on them, ancestral portraits then discontinued, and the remnant of family silver, possibly saved by a faithful negro. Like Irish squireens, impoverished but unbowed, they live as in a vacuum suspended in time. Deliberately but without posturing they reject compromise with a time they feel inferior to the one that the wind destroyed. If neighbours arrive from afar these remain 'Northerners, but nice'.

In such a Southern town the America which grew out of 1865 has but one outpost: Main Street, with its drugstore, red-and-gilt five-and-ten-cent stores, movie theatre, hamburgeria, jukeboxes and all. Where hitching-posts may once have stood are now slot-machines which sell the parking motorist time for a dime and with moving finger record the length of his absence. The thought of this mechanical conscience is unnerving; you may see a behelmeted and beshrouded lady rush from a hairdresser's in mid-perm to propitiate the machine. These dime-boxes are often the consolation of American policemen; fearing that their superiors may not wish them to interfere with other forms of evildoing, they apply themselves to watching the red needle and the laggard motorist.

In this Main Street, having let my hair grow for a month at sea rather than submit it to an engine-room hand who claimed he could cut it, I sought a barber's shop. It was like a tonsorial church where barber's masses were celebrated. It had rows of high seats for those who only wanted their shoes polished. If it lacked censers with sweet-smelling herbs, it had brazen pots for another purpose, and music, broken only by announcements that it came by courtesy of Cosmic Cosmetics. While your hair was cut a kneeling black acolyte shone your shoes, and if you spread your hands, as in benediction, another, white and female, at once polished the nails. The barber seemed to be invested with some inner authority; as he pressed a lever and tilted me into a prostrate and helpless position I reflected that he had in fact power of life and death.

I asked for 'a light trim' and received a ruthless shearing; when I returned to the vertical I wondered if the old scalping tradition yet fingered. Not long ago a man could earn good money by bringing in a scalp; in 1800 old Thomas Armit of Pittsburgh lamented that his son legally married a squaw whereas in his own day 'ye could have drawed fifty dollars good money for her skelp'; perhaps my barber had scalping-blood in his veins? He said my hair would look nice next time it was cut, then hurriedly added, It looks pretty nice now'. 'I heard you the first time,' I said. 'It sure needed cutting badly,' he said. 'It needed cutting well,' I said, 'I've just made a long sea voyage.' 'You don't say!' he said, 'I was at sea until last fall.' 'An engine-room hand?' I asked. 'Sure,' he said, 'how did you know?' 'I wondered,' I said, 'thank you.' 'You bet,' he said.

I usually try to learn what people read. The Main Street American often says, 'I don't read as much as you could put in your eye'; this self-imposed outlawry from the thought of the ages seemed a lonely thing to me. However, I did not then know this and looked about until I found The Little Bookshop (America has given way to the Quainte and the Olde, a vogue now outlived in England, and I even saw a Gifte Shoppe). The Little Bookshop's large window contained a big stuffed horse; any books must have been in hidden recesses. The main source of literary supply, I later learned, is often the drugstore, which displays racks of paper-covered volumes. These may be classics or shockers, but impartially wear a cover-picture of a girl in a low dress, revealing pumpkin-like contents; I never elsewhere saw books sold exclusively on cleavage-appeal. This seems part of the New America; many planters of the old South had standing orders with booksellers in London and Paris and rare editions are to be found in their houses.

In these early days everything was new, different, delightful, surprising or strange, especially days spent in an American home among young people, all approaching marriage, and their parents. Life moved at speed; the young men came and went by car or aeroplane and the girls rode high-voltage horses, the sight of which made my cracked backbone wince. Had I known, this was to be the last chance of pleasant conversation for some while. In America as a whole time does not suffice for talk.

One girl came, from broadcasting work, late to a meal because she had to deputize for an announcer stricken with hiccups. I thought this was a chance missed, for everybody has heard an announcer without hiccups; he should have been introduced to listeners in suitable words, 'We bring you something you have never heard before, the hiccuping announcer.' Then the hiccuper: 'This programme comes to you, hup pardon, by courtesy of Pepper's Anti-Dyspeptic Pepsin, hup sorry.

(I was glad this amused, for the wayfarer in the Republic, if he is of jesting bent, will leave his ewe-lambs scattered behind him, unrecognized and unwanted. Even my good companion in Mobile was unresponsive to a joke. He first introduced me to the cafeteria, and as he sat down with food and drink asked the negro attendant for a straw. 'No straw, sah,' said the man. 'You don't have a straw!' exclaimed my friend in irritable surprise. 'Perhaps they've used it to break the camel's back,' I said. 'I guess so,' he said, looking at me gravely.)

Now the girl who broadcast told the story of the radio-announcement of the executions at Nuremberg. All the 'ace' American broadcasters strained themselves to outdo each other in dramatic effect, and one fell headfirst over the uttermost brink of hyperbole by crying hoarsely into the microphone, 'Goering cheated death tonight by committing suicide!' This reminded me of a wartime headline in London's Evening Standard when the boxer Joe Louis was enlisted in the American Army: 'My fighting days are over, says Joe Louis.'

There was a bright moment, too, when a son of the house used the word desultory, pronouncing it desultory. He checked himself and asked me if that were right. I said humbly that, for what it was worth, the word was spoken desultory in England; we had been so much intimidated about the word Tory that we instinctively slurred it now. In the South that point immediately took.

One night the negro singers gathered in the music-room, four women and three men. Their faces were still the African ones I knew, though Africa was but a legend to them, like Saxony to an Anglo-Saxon. I often heard negro spirituals before, but found that to be really 'heard' (in the sense the African negro himself uses the word) they need to be sang in an old plantation house of the South which once had its own slaves. In it the most poignant memories of both races mingle; those of the grey-coated young men tightly setting out and the women waiting in fading hope; those of black folk transplanted from their original continent. Perhaps the white man and the black one come nearest together in these songs.

Song was the solitary way in which these people could express their souls when they were slaves and sat in the evenings by their huts, among the cottonfields. A typical figure, at once sorrowful and reassuring, of the American scene today, Mr. Whittaker Chambers, once described the negro spiritual in inspired words: 'It was the religious voice of a whole religious people ... One simple fact is clear: the spirituals were created in direct answer to the psalmist's question, "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" ... Grief, like a tuning-fork, gave the tone, and the Sorrow Songs were uttered.'

That is the arresting truth; these people sang, on a note of abiding faith, to and of the Christian God. They no longer knew what gods, or idols, their forefathers had. Listening, I wondered whither music has fled from many Christian churches. If passers-by heard singing like this come from a spired building in any mean street of London or New York the churches would be ever full, and that croaking raven of our day, the communist cleric, would flap dismally away from their belfries.

I listened in enchantment to the blending of voices, the harmony and variations, the subtle repetitions and interventions:

Nobody knows what trouble I've seen,
Nobody knows but Jesus ...
Sometimes I'm up, sometimes I'm down,
Sometimes I'm right to the groun'.
Glory Hallelujah!

I went to the rock to hide my face,
The rock cried out, 'No hiding place,
There's no hiding place down there!'
The sinner man, he gambled and fell,
Wanted to go to heaven but had to go to hell,
There's no hiding place down there!

Were you there when they crucified my Lord?
Were you there when they nailed Him to the cross?
Sometimes it causes me to tremble ...
tremble ...
tremble ...
Were you there when they crucified my Lord?

Reluctantly, one day, I left this green and white retreat and set out on my further way, along roads marked to commemorate the battles of the colonists against the King's men and then those of the South against the North. They lead eventually, like signposts, to the different America which emerged from them.

Chapter Three

WHERE IT ALL BEGAN

On the wayside tablets famous names showed and were gone: Washington and Cornwallis, Grant and Lee. The countryside was much like England in its contours and spring colouring; the white houses, large and small, continued familiar in shape to an English traveller despite the clapboard walls. The names too: I came to Raleigh, so called after that Sir Walter who had named the first colony for his unmarried queen. Not far away was Roanoke Island where at the third attempt in 1587 he landed 150 men, women and children from Devon. The supply ships, four years later, found only empty huts and a mysterious word, 'Croatoan', carved on a tree (today the Roanoke islanders, in the manner of Passion Play villagers in Germany, re-enact the mystery of those vanished colonists each year). When the next colonists came, in 1607, James was king and they established Jamestown on the James River, a little farther north.

So it all began. Had Drake not sunk the Armada in 1588 the Spaniards might have pushed their civilization northward along this coast from Mexico; had Wolfe not taken Quebec in 1759 the French might have come southward from Canada and clinched their hold on the innerlands. Instead the English spread north, south and west and founded the American Republic.

Raleigh in 1949, was far from all that. Hunger drove me to a drugstore there and I asked for a sandwich. The girl took one readymade out of its wrapping, thrust it into a toaster, and in a recognizable trice a hot sandwich lay before me. I was only starting to learn the stool-and-counter way of eating, the quickfire service, the staccato vocabulary. Soon I knew the 'short stack' and the 'cheeseburger', but never fully accustomed myself to the impersonal haste of it all.

The quieter South fell behind and I met the busy roadside life of the teeming central region. The gaps grew ever smaller between filling-stations, drive-in theatres, diners, cafés, roadhouses, trailer-courts and tourist-camps, stalls and booths. The first entry into a city of size, Richmond, was bewildering. Awed by innumerable signs forbidding the traveller to stop, pause or turn, I was swept along in a traffic-stream from which I could conceive no escape. However, these problems of the newcomer do solve themselves and at nightfall I found myself in an hotel bedroom. Tired out, I put my shoes in the passage and fell asleep. At two in the morning I was wakened by loud knocking and shouts of 'Bellboy, sah, yoh shoes is outside the door'. I opened the door to a smiling negro whose grin plainly said, 'Lawdy, how drunk you musta bin!' Too sleepy to be intelligent, I said the shoes were there to be cleaned. 'Ah never heard of that,' he said in patent disbelief, and waited expectantly. I saw he thought he had saved my shoes from theft and remembered a remote inn in the Carpathians where I suffered such loss.

These are all minor frustrations, for the stranger. Later I realized that shoeshine parlours would complain if shoes were cleaned in hotels, and that hat-blocking parlours might fail if hats were brushed in them. The charm about people is that they are different; Americans seem to feel the day ill begun if they have not had a hat blocked, while I have spent my adult years trying to reduce mine to a devil-may-care shabbiness, always being defied by their obstinate selfwill. Once I rescued one from the debris of a bombed cleaner's in London, thinking its dents would now stay in and its brim remain down, but it was more arrogant than ever. I put three intolerable hats on a rose bush in a Sussex garden during a drenching rainstorm once, hoping to break their spirits. The vicar, calling on a new resident, saw them there and was curious, so that I explained; his visit seemed brief, even for a duty call.

Presumably Richmond-on-James was named from Richmond-on-Thames, a royal town. Had the South won the Civil War it might be the American capital today. Had the war ended in reconciliation under a living Lincoln, its spirit and influence, with those of an earlier Washington, might have been greater in the shaping of the new America, which is its opposite. The line of the violent break is clear in the picture of America today.

It is particularly plain in Richmond. I looked at Capitol Square with sensations of recognition and pleasure. Thomas Jefferson took the Maison Carrée at Nîmes as model for the Capitol itself, while fine old English-type houses surround it. Here is dignity and, what puzzled me at first, the feeling of age. Later I realized that New England and the South are older than their buildings, because these, through their models, include the best of former centuries. The earlier Americans turned their faces towards, not from, the two thousand years of European civilization; they meant to improve on and not to deny it. This attitude towards life was expressed also in the lives of Americans of that time. The break came with the end of the nineteenth century and the United Nations building in New York is the symbol of the new philosophy.

Washington's statue prompts a question: were men better then, or merely sculptors? What could any sculptor make of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler or Mussolini? Does that which is bred in the bone come out in the bronze? This statue is as near truth as can be, for it is a portrait, to measurement, of a man of fifty-two, over six feet tall, of noble appearance, who saw it when Houdon finished it. The one in Trafalgar Square is a cast from it. Another, in Grosvenor Square, shows an American president erect who in fact could not stand alone. The subject of truth in statuary is of some interest.

From old Richmond I turned to new; Main Street. This was the biggest Main Street yet, though smaller than many yet to come. I found in time that they all reproduce each other; Henry James, who did not like Main Street and its intersections, wrote of 'the dreadful multiplied numberings which seem to reduce the whole place to some vast ledger-page, overgrown, fantastic, of ruled and crisscrossed lines and figures'. Their variety of merchandise is immense, and the personal touch is now that of a vanished hand.

In Capitol Square, Richmond, I felt as I would feel in the Place de la Concorde or Pall Mall. In Main Street, Richmond, though it is but a corner's turn away, I felt as if I were in an Eastern bazaar; and indeed Main Street is an Eastern bazaar that runs from New York to Los Angeles, and puts out branches left and right. There I first felt the speed of life in today's America, that philosophy of pace at any price which the people adopt, either to reach or escape from something. The South has effectively resisted it, and Richmond is very much the South; but its Main Street, like all the others, belongs to New York. In the roadway State Troopers whizzed past on screaming motor-bicycles and as they went talked by microphone with some equally audible Chief, no doubt steely-eyed and iron-jawed, at police headquarters. On the sidewalks a tomboyish vogue reigned for the moment and the young girls set out to look as if they came straight from a shakedown, not from a make-up; they wore tousled and tumbled hair, a tough air, and crumpled shirts loose outside rolled-up and stained blue jeans, the ensemble being called 'Sloppy Joe'. They looked for the nonce like orphans of the Bolshevist Revolution but soon were to change, at the Garment Centre's next dictate, to the opposite cult of perfect neatness. The men remained recognizably Southerners, the young ones personable and deferential, the older ones quiet and easy-mannered.

By chance I was in Richmond on Army Day and saw a military parade which, to me, vividly symbolized the story of the Republic. It was led by detachments of two famous regiments, the Richmond Grays and Richmond Blues, in their historic shakoes and tailcoats. They fought, in their time, under Washington, with the British against the French and Indians and next, still under him, against the British; then for the South against the North, and later wherever opportunity offered. They were fine lads in the spotlights and marched across Capitol Square towards a question mark: the future. If they and their kind had the making of it the answer would be reassuring, but that was the doubtful point. Next to me a lady watched them with love in her eyes and chatted about them. Though of great age she was in the first fine careless rapture. She put in fourteen hundred hours of war work in the first war, she said, and in the second taught four hundred people how to knit; her simple faith seemed to be impaired by no misgivings about the results of those two wars, and in it she was plainly ready to spring to her knitting needle again at any alarm.

I remember Richmond for a quite different spectacle, too, that offered by a Human Cannonball. I was interested in Human Cannonballs because, many years ago, I met a pretty one in Berlin who said her painful profession frustrated all maternal hopes, so that I asked why she didn't get herself fired. That left me with an idea, never pursued but never quite abandoned, for a novel about a Human Cannonball. I saw it as a story of frustrated love and motherhood, of a feminine Pagliacci flying ever above the gaping crowd with aching heart behind the goggles and crash helmet, as it were; how could a girl aspire to settle down to conjugal joys, with all those bruises! Now I went to watch Richmond's Human Cannonball. A lover of fireworks, I was enthralled by the great howitzer, the fine explosion, the smoke and the white figure flying over the wheel to the net. Best of all, I found that my unwritten comedy had a happy ending. Despite the bruises (which are the least injuries to be feared in the calling) this Human Cannonball was the mother of two fine children; I hoped my earlier acquaintance, who by now must have put her projectile days behind her, similarly found her fears empty and her arms full.

Within a few jumps of Richmond are the still older places from which it, Virginia, the group of English colonies, the American Republic and today's heterogeneous Union all sprang. This region, even more than New England to the north, is the cradle of the giant who has now reached adolescence and, on that brink, looks uncertainly into what lies beyond. First comes Williamsburg, the colonial centre before Richmond rose. Its historic Colonial Capitol and Sir Christopher Wren's College of William and Mary have been restored to complete beauty by Rockefeller money, and stand monuments to the quality of the early pioneers and a challenge to the present. Next door to it is Jamestown, where all began, with the ivy-covered ruin of an English church. A little farther on is Yorktown, where Comwallis surrendered to Washington and the second stage in the American odyssey began; the fortifications of that siege remain.

This is the perfect route for the understanding of America. Richmond, Washington and New York are the successive tiers of the edifice. Richmond was the capital-city of the thirteen Colonies; Washington was that of the Republic of thirty States which grew out of them and pushed inland from the eastern seaboard; New York is the real capital of today's transcontinental empire of forty-nine States. Whose is the inheritance? Were the War of Independence and the Civil War but two wars of the succession, which new pretenders are following with a third, possibly unarmed one, in the twentieth century?

The process looked to have that shape. A new struggle for power in the Republic was in progress. I set out for Washington, through a hundred miles of history as momentous as Napoleon's hundred days.

Chapter Four

CAPITAL OF THE CONTINUATION

Bracing myself against the shock, I plunged into the maelstrom. To travel in America with sleeping berths, rooms and air-liner seats fore-booked is one thing; to explore it alone and humbly is another. I was carried through and out of Washington, then back and out again, and at the third attempt, like an unwelcome guest repeatedly re-entering swing-doors from which he has been thrown, contrived to turn quickly into a parking-lot with one vacant place. Then, blessing the three Rs, I set out afoot to unravel the lettered or numbered streets and find a particular conjunction. Arrived, breathless, I fell into a seat and ordered a coffee. A pleasant young man at once appeared and asked if I would try a camel. While I still wondered how one could help me, in Washington, he handed me a packet, said 'It's a mild smoke, sir', and vanished.

These initial encounters with American cities are major experiences. The traveller's feeling of hopeless homelessness changes to triumph when he succeeds in dodging the hooting pursuers, doubling up and down side streets, sighting a lodging, and being accepted. It deepens into a fugitive's misery when he enters a crowded convention city at dusk, is whirled along by a Mississippi of motor cars, and finds any door he can reach closed against him.

From this furious chase I took brief, happy refuge in Washington. Standing, like Belgrade, where two rivers meet, it is of the world's fine cities, and plainly a cousin of the European ones. Here the era of the Colonies merged, without violent change, into that of the Republic just as the Corinthian columns grew on to the Southern mansions. These splendid white buildings and memorials descend from Greece and Rome, like those of Munich. The formal gardens and vistas speak of Fontainebleau and Versailles. Likewise, the surrounding countryside, and Washington's house there, reflect the firm dignity of domestic architecture in seventeenth-century England. In Washington the symbols of the Republic's unexampled rise run to and from each other across shining river and green parkland in a straight line, itself symbolic: the Capitol, Washington's obelisk, Lincoln's temple, Lee's house. With them the straight line fades into an enigmatic future. If it is to be prolonged to the tombstone building in New York, that is a sharp turn to the left and a leap into obscurity.

Of Athens, Cicero said that its glories in stone delighted him less than the thought of the great men who lived, worked, debated, disputed, died and were buried there. In Washington the feeling of a group of great men, Washington, Jefferson, Lee and Lincoln, is tangible and the buildings express their quality. The question mark at the end of them is equally palpable. Great presidents may make a great republic, but what happens if the noble breed gives out? The four-yearly election is not merely that of a prime minister, but of a head of State. Henry Adams thought 'the succession of Presidents from Washington to Grant is almost enough in itself to upset the whole Darwinian theory' and Mr. Albert Jay Nock in 1943 added: 'Had Adams lived to see the succession extended to the present time he would perhaps say it was quite enough.' Mr. Nock did not see the events of 1944-50; he died calling himself A Superfluous Man in an American era which alarmed him.

Despite the still living echo of Northern armies tramping along Pennsylvania Avenue to crush the South, Washington remains a Southern city; the memory of great Southerners and their works fills it. It owes much of its beauty to the original plan, which was the child of L'Enfant, a French military engineer. Urbane charm often grows better in towns laid out for defence than in those conceived on draught-boards by civic planners. L'Enfant designed long, broad boulevards, similar to those of Haussmann, which intersected each other at circular junctions; from these round-points the military could mow down invaders or rioters from all directions.

Time plays its pranks. The result is a delightful place to live but one indefensible against today's infiltrators, who may arrive at Capitols and government departments, in Washington or Westminster, by limousine, and be saluted by janitors as they enter. L'Enfant's roundabouts today impede only the American motorist, and tunnels are being made beneath them so that he may gain the world a few seconds quicker. The beauty of Washington cannot be impaired in its basic quality, but is much blurred or masked by the enormous mass of traffic, moving and standing. I could see no final answer to the parking problem, unless by some new device of claws or grappling hooks, cars become enabled to scale tall houses and hang themselves from the window-sills.

The human scene of the city, at this mid-century, was not congruous to the classic dignity of its inanimate shape. The effort to dethrone Washington, with all other national capitals, in favour of the super-national committee in New York gave the tone to life in it and all the political intrigues of the world seemed to have moved into it. Congress, when I looked down on it, was a pleasant place, but in its lobbies prowled the 'fixers' and priority-pedlars, who courted politically influential men with flattery and gifts, usually small. In Washington, as in London, committees inquired into such practices and, again in both capitals, missed the important point, which was not that of petty venality or of 'priority' gained for 'a project' of the fixer's friends. Politicians, once caught in such toils, may later find themselves under pressures, then less easily resisted, in major affairs of State, especially foreign ones. The political affiliations of well-known 'fixers', in Washington and London, might be instructive if they were more publicly known, but this aspect of the matter is never examined by the commissions which, in both capitals, are periodically charged to investigate the evil.

Congressmen and Senators seemed unaware of the fish that might be fried at barbecues and cocktail parties given for them by newcomers to the capital. Political Zionists, Communists, Irish Republicans and others wooed the powerful by flattery or covert intimidation. At the top level Political Zionism looked like a ruling power; to express doubt about its undertakings was like confessing heresy before an inquisition. Beneath the surface, the Communists rose by permeation to ever higher levels. Always denying their real allegiance, they had in twelve years come to infest the capital. Partial disclosures were recurrently made of this fermenting mass at the Republic's centre and each time some master hand pulled down a blind between the matter and the public gaze. Washington was become rather like the medieval courts of Naples, on a greater scale. I later learned, from one of these fragmentary exposures, that a drugstore where I sometimes drank coffee was a clearing-centre between Washington's Communists and Moscow, where papers purloined from official files were handled.

This corrosive influence displayed itself in curious ways, alien to the Christian principles on which the Republic was founded. In a busy street I saw a large covered vehicle from which a loud, mechanical voice invited all to 'come in and see Goering's treasures', and as admission-fee to make a donation to the United States Marine Corps League. The United States Marines (like the Royal Marines) are an elite corps of the highest tradition, whose recruiting posters say:

First to fight for right and glory
And to keep our honour clean,
We are proud to bear the title
Of United States Marines.

Washington was filled with a kind of whispered, muttered tumult, that of the world's conflicting political ambitions, nearly all pursued behind the cloak of other purposes. In this conspiratorial hubbub a quiet spot held me most absorbed. I liked to eat in a restaurant facing Ford's Theatre, where Lincoln was murdered. From my table I looked across at the door through which he was carried, to a house adjoining the restaurant, where he died. I went into the theatre and saw the door of the box in which he was shot. I began to study the event itself and soon felt again like a man who finds unexpectedly familiar things in an old tomb. This was not something that merely happened seventy-five years ago, but part of something that continued today. I drove to the Anacostia Bridge, over which the murderer fled, and followed the line of his flight to the Potomac River. Then I read the accounts of the crime and the evidence.

Here was something I recognized ...

Chapter Five

OF MURDER AND MOTIVE

The man, like the victims of other comparable crimes, was a unifier and reconciler. He fought the South to preserve the Union, not to abolish slavery: 'My paramount object is not to save or destroy slavery ... If all earthly powers were given me I should not know what to do with the existing institution' (of slavery). Though he unwillingly issued the slave-freeing Proclamation he never departed in conviction from the original, declared aim of the war: 'It is not for any purpose ... of interfering with the rights or established institutions of the Secession States but to preserve the Union with all the dignity, equality and rights of the several States unimpaired.' He intended to defeat only the claimed right to secede;[1] then to restore the Union and leave the legal institution of slavery to be gradually modified into abolition by judicial courts.

In that policy the Leftist Republicans around him saw the danger of the conservative Democrats returning to power. They introduced the false issue of slavery into the war to perpetuate the Republican Party in power by taking the vote from the Southern States and the Southern whites and giving it to the negroes, of whom not one in a hundred could then read. (Similarly the aims of the Second World War, when it was half run, were changed from the liberation of countries overrun and the restoration of parliamentary governments to 'the defeat of Fascism', which meant their re-surrender to Soviet Communism.)

Lincoln's Republican Party contained the mass of Leftists, who were near to dominating it. Lincoln knew that they raised the bogus issue to inflame passions and prolong the war; his own Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton (who with Thaddeus Stevens headed this group), said so: 'The great aim of the war is to abolish slavery. To end the war before the nation is ready for that would be a failure. The war must be prolonged and conducted so as to achieve that.' (The Second World War was similarly prolonged, through wasteful detours, to achieve 'the defeat of Fascism', but not the original aim.) Lincoln was an obstacle to the forces of destruction in his own party.

Such was the man. The moment of his murder was that at which he was about to fulfil his policy of reconciliation and accomplish the declared aim of the war. Two days before Lee at last surrendered and Washington was lit up. At the very moment Lincoln's emissary, General Sherman, was negotiating with the Southern leaders a truce following Lincoln's constant line: no confiscation or political disablement, recognition of the Southern States governments if they took the oath to the Constitution, reunion, conciliation. (That was as if President Roosevelt, at Yalta, had upheld the war aims originally understood by the Western peoples, instead of surrendering half of Europe to a regime resembling that endured by the South after Lincoln's death.) At Lincoln's last cabinet meeting, on the day he was killed, he said he was glad Congress was adjourned; the extremists in it would not he able to hinder the work of reviving State governments in orderly fashion. 'There must be no bloody work', he would have no part in hangings or killings; the task was 'to extinguish resentments'.

At that moment the man was killed. In the choice of time and victim the crime startlingly resembles four others, which also struck down unifiers and conciliators just when they seemed likely to impede the process of universal revolutionary destruction. Alexander II of Russia emancipated twenty million serfs in 1861 and pursued his work of reconciliation until he was murdered in 1881; of that crime Soviet Communism and Political Zionism were born. In 1913 the Archduke was killed at Serajevo; he had the reputation of a unifier and conciliator who might have saved the Austro-Hungarian Empire from war and disintegration, had he lived. In 1934 Alexander of Yugoslavia was killed at Marseilles; he was a unifier who could not have been turned from his throne by an ally, as his little-known eighteen-year-old son Peter was in effect in 1945 by Mr. Churchill, and a Communist dictator set in his place. In 1948 Count Bernadotte was murdered as he completed a plan of truce and pacification in Palestine.

Each of these events changed the course of history for the worse. Together with the wars and annexations to which they led and the revolutionary movements which profited by them, they produced the state of affairs with which the Western world finds itself faced at this mid-century. In each case the men marked for death were ones who stood for reconciliation, unity, orderly judicial reforms and 'the extinguishing of resentments', as Lincoln said. In each instance (save that of Count Bernadotte, where no pretence of justice was done), nondescript individuals were publicly presented as the culprits. On each occasion a powerful organization obviously stood behind those puppets and each time all was done to prevent its exposure.

None can doubt today that Lincoln was removed to prevent the reconciliation of North and South and the consolidation of the Union. Though the wound did seem later to heal, the events of today show it still to be raw, so that the conspirators' aim of 1865 cannot yet be said, in 1950, to have failed. Time has yet to show this result, with all others.

The culprits displayed to the populace were the usual group of obscure individuals, who clearly could not have carried out the deed unaided. Lincoln's killer, the actor John Wilkes Booth, escaped for a while. A benchful of generals promptly executed one Lewis Paine,[2] a youth called David Herold who accompanied Booth in his flight, a mysterious German, George Atzerodt, and a woman boarding-housekeeper, Mrs. Suratt. Pending trial, the prisoners were kept in solitary cells, with empty cells on either side, and made to wear thick padded hoods, with small holes for nose and mouth, over head and shoulders. The only plausible explanation is that communication with any other person whatsoever was to be prevented. These four, and four men sent to a remote island, all knew Booth and his associates. Men who helped him escape, but did not know him before, were not even charged.

That looks as if the capital offence was to be in possession of information about Booth's movements and acquaintances in Washington. For that the State prosecutor seems to have demanded death and the four men sent to an island only escaped it because the generals shied at wholesale hangings without evidence of complicity. Studying this aspect of the matter, I recalled van der Lubbe, the vagrant found in the burning Reichstag. I believe he was kept drugged during his trial and until his beheading; he alone could have said who put him in the Reichstag. The demeanour of Rudolf Hess, at the Nuremberg Trial, was similar to that of van der Lubbe; none but he could publicly explain the wartime mission on which he was sent to England.

The circumstances of Lincoln's murder speak for themselves. Booth fired the shot into his neck as he watched the play. The door of the box was unlocked, but on the inner side of it someone had placed a wooden bar and a mortice, so that Booth could ensure that none entered it after himself ! At the door should have been Lincoln's armed bodyguard, a Washington policeman, recently enlisted, called John F. Parker. Only his empty chair was there and no word survives in the records to say why he was not in it ! This collapse of protective vigilance was a feature of the Serajevo, Marseilles and Jerusalem murders. President Lincoln's danger was well known. That very afternoon he asked his Secretary of War if Stanton's stalwart aide, a Major Eckert, could accompany him to the theatre for his protection. Stanton refused and Eckert, asked by the President himself, also declined (on the next day Stanton telegraphed to General Sherman that he too was in danger 'and I beseech you to be more heedful than Mr. Lincoln was of such knowledge').

The missing bodyguard, Parker, was appointed less than a fortnight before the murder, during Lincoln's absence from Washington, so that the usual presidential confirmation of his appointment was never obtained. In three years service serious complaints of 'neglect of duty' were several times made against him and in April 1864 he was dismissed. In December 1864 he was reinstated and in April 1865, immediately before the deed, allotted to the President's personal protection ! After the murder he was again charged with 'neglect of duty'; the trial was secret, the complaint was dismissed and the records of the hearing have vanished from the files. Three years later he was once again charged with dereliction, dismissed, and at that point vanishes from history !

Thus Booth walked into an unguarded box, shot the President, jumped on to the stage, ran through unguarded wings to the back door, jumped on a waiting horse and rode away. He caught his spurred boot on some bunting as he jumped, fell awkwardly and broke a small bone in his leg.

This alone seems to have prevented him from getting clean away. He rode across the Anacostia bridge and along the well-known route to Virginia which the Southerners, throughout the war, used for spies and communications with the North. Behind him galloping cavalrymen were sent to scour the country, north and west, which he obviously would avoid. This one southward route, which a flying Southerner would clearly take, was left open long enough for him to escape. His unforeseeable injury prevented that; unable to go on the actor went into hiding.

If his escape was desired, this naturally threw up a new problem. After a few days his whereabouts became known and the chase was converging on him when the military Provost Marshal, who led it, was suddenly recalled to Washington and the pursuit entrusted to the head of the secret service, one Colonel Lafayette C. Baker. He was given 'twenty-six cavalrymen' commanded by 'a reliable and discreet commissioned officer', Lieutenant Doherty. This officer, however, was placed under the orders of two of Colonel Baker's detectives, his cousin, ex-Lieutenant Luther B. Baker, and an ex-Colonel Conger, who 'by courtesy was conceded the command'. Whose courtesy is not recorded, though Lieutenant Doherty's chagrin is. This force eventually surrounded the barn where Booth lay hidden, with strict orders to take him alive. Of the twenty-nine men none could clearly say later who fired the shot which killed him. Baker thought Conger did; Conger denied it.

Clearly Booth would have escaped but for his damaged foot. With his death none remained who could tell the whole truth; those who knew most were quickly hanged or exiled.

Thus the man, the moment, and the apparent murderers. The motive today seems as clear as the organization behind it remained, and remains, obscure. It was to remove Lincoln because he was an obstacle to the destruction of the South. The student from afar, who finds Lincoln honoured equally with Washington, on deeper study learns how lonely he was when he died. To the collapsing South he was the destroyer; to the North he was the enemy of further destruction. Today's traveller may perceive a great flaw in the array of memorials erected to Lincoln in his country. Suggestively, they commemorate his [ed: him ?] as the slayer of slavery, first and foremost. It is the continuation of a falsehood; that was not his primary aim, he was against violent demagogic actions, preferred judicial gradualness, and had at heart only the unity of the Union. Thus his memory is misused today in the further pursuit of ulterior schemes; the false issue, the falsity of which he saw, is raised in his name and his words and monuments are presented as its also.

In the South the news was received as a last unaccountable blow of destiny. In the North different feelings were expressed. Clerics, frequently thirsty for a vengeance claimed by God, avowed that the deed must be a divine act, albeit mysteriously performed. A Republican Congressman, Mr. George Julian, later recalled that his party met the day after the murder 'to consider a line of policy less conciliatory than that of Mr. Lincoln'; while everybody was shocked the feeling of the meeting was overwhelmingly that the accession of a new President 'would prove a Godsend to the country'.

Mr. Truslow Adams's Epic dismisses 'the conspiracy of a handful, led by a half-madman, which destroyed the one man who stood between his country and the powers of evil and plunged us all into a sea of infamy and misery'. The description of the deed and its effects is accurate, but the theory of the recurrent madman grows thin. Coincidence did not drop Gavrile Princep at the spot where he could kill the Archduke, Vlada the Chauffeur into a Marseilles street as King Alexander went by, and the deadbeat van der Lubbe into the Reichstag (I saw him and his trial and can vouch for that). Even if coincidence's arm were so long, it could not always reach to the suppression of inquiry in these cases.

This is a chapter by itself in our times, and in my opinion the most important. I remember how governments combined, at the League of Nations in 1935, to shelve the inquiry into the complicity of other governments in the murder of King Alexander. The same thing happened in the case of Count Bernadotte; the United Nations dropped the matter of its own emissary's murder as if it were a hot coal. The truth is not, as American writers put it, that 'history shrinks' from exposing these things. Politicians recurrently cover them up and conceal the continuing process. The study of Lincoln's murder did more than anything hitherto to convince me that it is a continuing process, with an enduring organization behind it. It shares identical and recognizable features with the later series of murders, which all led to the spread of the area of destruction. These conspiracies cannot he improvised; obviously the experience of generations, or centuries, lies in the choice of moment, method, line of retreat and concealment. The little folk who are trotted out after each such deed may be 'the handful', but the hand is never seen. Particularly in this matter of covering-up is Lincoln's murder of present-day significance in America. The same resolute and efficient methods are used to defeat public curiosity about Communist infiltration into government departments, the public services and high places. In America (and for that matter in England and Canada), a cat sometimes slips out of the bag, a Dr. May, a Dr. Fuchs, a Mr. Alger Hiss. But then the bag is tied more tightly than before, and the public mind forgets.

Booth was not a madman. He kept a diary and the entries he made while he lay hidden show a sane man, even though pages were apparently removed before its existence became known, two years after it was taken from his body ! He wrote among other things, 'I have almost a mind to return to Washington and in a measure clear my name, which I feel I can do' (the anonymous bullet effectively prevented his return to Washington). A Congressman asked, 'How clear himself ? By disclosing his accomplices ?' A parliamentary commission also set about to find who were the persons 'many of them holding high positions of power and authority ... who acted through inferior persons who were their tools and accomplices'. Nothing much came of that in 1865, or of similar efforts in 1950.

Among high persons of that time the eye of today's curiosity falls chiefly on Edwin Stanton. As Secretary of War in a country at war he was almost supremely powerful. All communications were under his personal censorship. All acts tending to deflect Booth's pursuit, or after Booth's death to obscure the trail, seem trace-able to him and the Leftists around him. Within a few hours of the murder he wrote to the American Minister in London of 'evidence obtained' to show that the murder was 'deliberately planned and set on foot by rebels, under pretence of avenging the South'. Just so did Goering claim to have proof that Communists fired the Reichstag, while it still burned. Stanton may have pictured himself as dictator; he nearly achieved such status in the sequel of events. He forced through Congress a Reconstruction Bill to dissolve the Southern States and degrade them to military districts, and a Tenure of Office Bill framed to deprive the new President of the constitutional power to dismiss himself, Stanton. When President Johnson did dismiss him he refused to resign and only failed by one Senator's vote to secure the President's impeachment. Andrew Johnson proved a stauncher man than the Leftists expected when he succeeded Lincoln. Among the most arresting questions of American history is, what would have ensued had Johnson's impeachment succeeded by one vote, not failed. Since President Roosevelt revived the political issues of Reconstruction days the conundrum has gained new and current interest.

Sitting at my restaurant window I pictured Booth riding away from Ford's Theatre. 'There you go,' I thought, 'Wilkes Booth, Gavrile Princep, Marinus van der Lubbe, Vlada the Chauffeur: whatever your name, your unimportant shape is clear, but the darkness around you hides your masters ...'

Chapter Six

STRICKEN FIELD

Therefore I looked with much interest at this other early riser. The White House was falling down and being shored up for repair, so that he used Blair House for a time. He was of medium build, energetic, and when saluted by those he met responded with the beaming smile which party-managers like prominent party-men to wear; they believe it to reassure the populace about the state of the world. The weight of his formidable decision seemed to lie lightly on him. American newspapers said that the four years following it had left him 'four pounds heavier and a good deal more confident'. They added, however, that the decision 'was still on his mind', and he himself, about that time, said at a social gathering, 'I had to make that decision on the basis of the welfare of not only this country but of our enemy country. And I made that decision because I thought 200 thousand of our young men and some 300 or 400 thousands of the enemy would be saved ... Now I believe that we are in a position where we will never have to make that decision again, but if it has to be made for the welfare of the United States, and the democracies of the world are at stake, I wouldn't hesitate to make it again.'

I thought, four years later, that the area of what might by any stretch be called democracy was much diminished in the sequel to that event. The argument seemed dubious, but the tone of the words was arresting. American presidents seemed truly much more confident than in a day when one, Thomas Jefferson, said, 'I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just'. So much faith appeared nowadays to be invested in the personal pronoun, the leanest letter of the alphabet, where it stands like a weak sapling among robuster growths.

The day after I saw the confident man I drove out of Washington, with regret, on my further way. I crossed a river and saw people waiting for a great river-steamer, with tall chimney and many, windowed decks, that moved towards them. It was called the Robert E. Lee, and I found myself humming, 'Waiting on the levee, waiting for the Robert E. Lee'. A little later I ran into Maryland. 'Maryland, my Maryland,' I thought, and suddenly realized how much Englishmen of my age have grown up with songs of the American South. They accompanied me all the way from Mobile, and made me think of leave from the trenches and shows in London, for I was of the generation that first began to sing of coal-black mammy down in Alabamy, of peaches down in Georgia, of Carolina where nuthn' could be finer, of Virginia and the loveliness that's in yer. This was a musical ride back through my own lifetime, and I wondered how these Southern songs, with their negro rhythm and their attendant, jungle-born dances, gained such appeal for the youthful British mind. Mainly it was the result of the mass-production of songs in New York during this century and their dissemination through paid 'song-plugging'. However, the original appeal of primitive folk to ones less primitive was genuine.

I made a detour in order to visit Gettysburg, a hallowed place where a gentle peace intervenes in the hurried American scene. It must be unique, this battlefield stricken, as it were, at the combat's height. Breast-works and gunpits remain; every gun is in place; homestead walls show bullet holes; the famous peach orchard has been replanted as it was in 1863 and bloomed before me in Arcadian tranquillity. Nothing but the soldiers and the din are absent, and eight hundred memorials mark the position of every company, troop, battalion, brigade, division and corps.

I looked down on the scene of Pickett's charge from Cemetery Ridge, where the Southern tide reached its high-water mark and then fell back. The unanswerable questions of history! What if Blucher had not come in time; if the sea had not been calm at Dunkirk; if the South had won at Gettysburg? The South would not then have won the war, for the Southern leaders never expected to and only fought because they felt they must; but there might have been an earlier and better peace, with all that would have meant for today. Instead the war was prolonged, the false issue inserted, and the Leftists at Washington were enabled to pursue their aim of exterminating and depopulating the South, almost to success. The Civil War was America's real revolutionary war, not the one Washington fought. When brother fought brother at Gettysburg, and father even son, they comprehended nothing of the destructive conspiracy in Washington.

I went on through Lancaster and York, ever nearer to the central throng and tumult of America, and felt more and more the awesome, almost distressful energy of the land. The mind can hardly picture an immense further multiplication of the road-traffic and when it asks whither that road finally leads, echo only answers 'Where?' The American devotion to machine-driven progress baulks at no such imaginings, but drives on. Mountains, ravines and torrents are there to be tunnelled, surpassed, by-passed or bridged, no matter what their size. This process, without an apparent spiritual goal, alarms some, like the American-born poet, Mr. T. S. Eliot. Living in Chelsea rooms over those once inhabited by an earlier fugitive who was filled with similar misgivings, Mr. Henry James, he wrote:

... The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit,
The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court,
And the wind shall say: 'Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls ...'

These reflections are for poets and philosophers. The Americans in bulk do not delay with them but drive with quickening materialistic gusto along the asphalt road. I thought, as I whirled over huge bridges that bestrode wide rivers, 'They do these things like shelling peanuts'. The Americans have much enriched the English language. They picture a thing in two or three vivid words by reflecting it in some dazzling glimpse of the American yesterday or today. 'Shelling peanuts' is perfect. 'The horse-and-buggy age' and 'climbing aboard the band wagon' depict a whole era. 'We must hang together or we shall hang separately' and 'a necktie party' put a matter in terms plain to any child who ever read Zane Grey or saw a Western. 'The calm confidence of a Christian with four aces' sharply conveys truth through a sudden peep into a gambling-saloon. When the long-levered gaming-machine is called 'a one-armed bandit' the last word has been said (not that it has been heard, for Americans adore to hand cash to these. If they once feared the hold-up man, they love this mechanical one, and in many parts well-advised sheriffs leave him alone).

Thinking on these things I found myself off to Philadelphia one morning, or at all events through it, on my way to New York.

Chapter Seven

SPEED THE COMING GUEST

It was like sleep-walking, and then sleep-sprinting. Ten miles away, at length, I saw the city's mountainous shape and the race began. I was drawn by the hypnotic force of the signs on to a motor-road where all life ceased but that of the wheeled traveller. It led straight towards Manhattan, the core of New York. Manhattan is an island, long and narrow from north to south, in a loop of two rivers. It can only be reached by bridge or tunnel, or from the east by ocean liner.

I became a fly on a wheel. Signs commanded a low speed but the traffic moved at some forty miles an hour and, tightly contained in it, I was carried along. Wayside notices forbade all further stopping to think or looking before leaping. For the initiated exits offered, but not for me. The road became a bridge, miles long. It did not merely span a river, though I fleetingly saw one or more beneath; on huge stilts it strode over water, fields, houses, factories and sped the newcomer towards Manhattan, while the concrete mountains loomed nearer. My ears were filled with an unaccustomed noise, the unbroken whoosh-whoosh of wheels. I sought the Lincoln Tunnel, having been told to use it, not the Holland Tunnel. Signs flashed by announcing the Holland Tunnel. Suddenly, when I was nearly past it, one said 'Lincoln Tunnel, turn left.' A quick turn at forty miles an hour, a dizzy roundabout, a run downhill, a brief pause to make payment at a turnstile, and I was in the Lincoln Tunnel beneath the Hudson River.

It was about two miles long, but felt much longer. It seemed dark, though it was bathed in a ghostly fluorescent lighting. The whooshing noise was amplified in this cylinder and speed seemed greater; it was not low, at that, but I felt as if I hurtled to some whirling destiny, pursued by furies. Placarded orders flashed by, and from a narrow platform policemen watched on their observance; they looked like the saints of some strange religion as they stood in niches in the curved walls. 'Unlawful to cross the line, said a sudden proclamation, immediately gone; I strained to keep my side of the line of glittering, mesmeric metal knobs. 'Stop at the red lights,' said another; seeing none, I assumed these appeared when some mishap piled up all the traffic in this vault. 'Keep intervals of 75 feet,' abruptly ordered a third; in the mirror I guiltily saw a car treading on my heels and accelerated to sixty to overtake the one in front, which was a quarter-mile ahead, fearing that some unwitting transgression would bring out all the red lights and down on me, like dark avenging angels, all those sentinels. Whoosh-whoosh went the scourging refrain of the tunnel; it stretched ahead like the corridor of doom; dazed but dogged I gripped the wheel. Then the dark pin-point at its end brightened and, like a mariner on a spar, I was thrown ashore, bruised and breathless, into daylight and Manhattan.

A rare but fortunate impulse of caution led me to attempt this first invasion of Manhattan on Sunday; had I emerged into an exitless stream of work-a-day traffic I should have had to circulate until night fell or fuel failed. Now the streets were empty and I was able to seek a lodging. I found, on a sixteenth floor, a small but astonishingly complete room, with cupboards that concealed a cooker, pantry, refrigerator, bath and lavatory. Hunger then led me to an automatic restaurant. I knew the Automat from Berlin, but this was a later model, where a hot-dish slot impersonally presented me with macaroni-cheese and a hot-coffee slot aloofly poured me a cup, adding milk from another tap just as I feared this was forgotten. I took these to a table where a man talked to himself in Viennese German; he seemed filled with Weltschmerz and twice told himself not to talk nonsense: 'Red'n S' do' ka' Unsinn.'

Feeling smaller and lonelier than ever before, I went out, always the busy worker, to look at New York. Making the most of Sunday, I contemplated it afoot and awheel, from subway and elevated, from the Brooklyn Bridge and from a Hudson River ferryboat. It is easy to unravel, for the short and narrow east-west thoroughfares are called streets and are numbered and the long and broad north-south ones are called avenues (save for one, called Broadway, which is narrower). Thus the newest newcomer can at once find 'Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Fifth East', or any other conjunction.

I wandered with apprehensive curiosity through the empty canyons on this springtide Sunday, and compared this marvel of the twentieth century with older ones of Europe and of America. Most of all my mind's eye compared it with Richmond and Washington, the capitals of the first and second phases. This was the third tier in the edifice. The violent break in the tradition was plain even at first sight. It looked rather like a pagan banner planted on a Christian rampart.

Chapter Eight

VIA COLOROSA

Among the lesser lights rose great setpieces of salesmanship-by-night. From a huge face, with O-shaped mouth, came putts of smoke (to advertise a cigarette), that mingled with clouds of steam from manholes in the roadway, below which I supposed the subway trains ran. A neon waterfall played, fifty feet above the pavement. Above a beer-restaurant a train ran through Bavarian mountains, eternally vanishing into and reappearing from Alpine tunnels. Two enormous nude figures, a man and a woman, dazzlingly surmounted a clothing store; their meaning alone was veiled. Between crammed and glittering shops, packed with buyers at this eleven o'clock of the Christian Sabbath, surged thick, human masses. Loud-speakers blared, pin-tables rattled, barkers hoarsely praised the girls within their dancehalls and night-clubs, a man without legs propelled himself on a truck, playing a kind of hurdy-gurdy in this street of dollars and of dolours. Sirens wailed as riot-car or ambulance screamed past, with warning red fights tumbling like a juggler's clubs. Confusedly I scribbled in my mind the song of the Innocent on Broadway:

A roseate, roaring, coruscating roadway
(and rather narrow, too; it isn't broad).
I wonder, did they only call it Broadway
To obfuscate the innocent abroad?

From manhole covers, steamy clouds ascending
(Are dragons down below, or demon's fires?)
'Walk in, walk in, and see The Happy Ending!'
(The screech of brakes on rims, and tortured tires).

Polychromatic taxicabs a-honking,
('Here's Swingland, come on in, we've Lovely Girls!')
Bright honky-tonks all brazenly a-tonking,
Kaleidoscopic lights, all whirls and twirls.

Strident strains cacophonously clashing,
A legless beggar grinding out a tune,
The great white moon beholds a great red Fasching.
('O mon amour, comme elle est blanche - la lune!')

'Suddenly the air' (of tranquil Barsetshire) 'was rent by the hideous wail of a siren, rising and falling, rising and falling. The war was long over ... "The only Aubrey," said Jessica, "he had that siren fitted to his car to show Americans the horrors of war, but I think it's stopped being funny."'

Chapter Nine

NEW BABYLON

Its chief characteristic is a nervous unease, palpably felt in an island where millions of people pursue each other between tall buildings, each of which at morn and eve absorbs and releases the population of a small European town. In midsummer the high walls make the streets steambaths from which the citizen may only find refuge in an air-conditioned store; midwinter gales, hurtling through them, may drive him to that same shelter, then warmed. New York is without repose. The traffic moves at speed, for all the congestion, and furious clamour assails any driver who dares pause. 'The bus-drivers must collect fares and count takings while braking and accelerating between the frequent stops and such tension arises between them and their passengers that one of them once set his whole cargo on the street, then driving off empty to the garage with the remark that he had wanted to do this for years. There are boulevards and bouleversements, but no boulevardiers; here is no time for strollers. The New Yorkers themselves fear the strange thrall and their journals mourn 'the lost art of doing nothing' and 'the sad cult of going nowhere quickly'.

The outer world formerly thought of the average American as an unhurried, deliberate and imperturbable being. Is today's strained impatience a new thing, and is it now an American trait in general, or a symptom of New York? Mr. Truslow Adam's Epic attributes it to Americans in mass, and even to pre-American Americans (the Red Indians), for he says, 'For the most part the climate throughout the continent seems to have been one which tended to produce a high nervous tension in the living beings subjected to it, even the savages, not only from its sudden changes, but from some quality which we do not know ... The Red Indians' nervous systems were unstable and they were of a markedly hysterical make-up, peculiarly susceptible to suggestion.'

Mr. Jay Nock, who thought the haste aimless, wrote of his own New York boyhood in the 'nineties, 'Our people had resources in themselves which enabled them to get on with few mechanical aids to amusement'. He quoted Edison's words, 'I am not acquainted with anyone who is happy', and Stendhal's, 'The springs of happiness seem to have dried up'. Once I stood in Fifth Avenue with a well-known American writer much hounded for his opinions. He watched the throng with apprehensive interest and said, 'No people in history were ever clothed or fed like these. But where are they going, and why are they so unhappy?'

The tortured unease of New York seemed to me a separate thing, distinct from any native 'nervous tension', born of climate and geography, which may inhabit the mass of Americans. So many folk are squeezed into the central island, all hastening, in the steambath or the wind-tunnel, as if from some pursuant fate. The galley-slaves used to call for the lash, when the uttermost was demanded of them; so do New Yorkers seem to scourge themselves. The reasons why 'Manhattan had to be that way' are oft proclaimed; because the island was small the buildings had to be tall, and so on. Anyway, it is that way, and is as different from Richmond and Washington as cloudy from clear; here the shape of things American was abruptly changed.

It is in effect the city of the later immigration, which followed the Civil War. While the landings, the settlements, the War of Independence and the conquest of the wilderness went on the population remained homogeneous; it was predominantly of British, German and Scandinavian stock, continually renewed, which merged smoothly into the 'American' whom the world then knew. When all those clearances were finished the new and different immigration began, from Eastern and Southern Europe, which today (as the reviewer remarked) claims to take over the future. 'Between 1860 and 1880,' (says the Epic) 'less than 250,000 Eastern and Southern Europeans came to us; between 1890 and 1910 they numbered over 8,000,000 ... These people were much more 'foreign' in their background and outlook than those who had come previously, and less easily assimilable to our social life and institutions ... They kept themselves from the desire to assimilate themselves to American social life, to learn English and to adapt themselves to American ways. They thought adaptation should come from the reverse direction and with much success pursued that belief.' 'Before 1882' (says The American People), 'most of the immigrants were from Germany, the British isles and the Scandinavian peninsula; after 1882 they came from Southern and Eastern Europe ... By 1900 one-third of all white people in the country were either themselves foreign-born or had parents one or both of whom were foreigners.'

New York today is the monument to that sudden change in the American course. It is the city of the later corners, whose resolve to remain apart may have been obscured by a misleading phrase, 'The Melting Pot'. The new immigration did not melt into the mass and this mid-century has shown that it aspires to rule America and the world, through American strength. It set out to make New York a state within the State, and then a super-State; the United Nations building is the signpost of that ambition. The charter of this new, transcendent body omitted the name of God, as its flag, if all nations submitted to fly it, would banish the cross from any national banners that still display it. That was logical, for in such a universal directorate the Christian peoples would be far outnumbered and reduced to correspondingly inferior status. In this body the long American trail might find a strange end.

From these things springs the peculiar feeling of New York. Soil and climate may generate a 'nervous tension' in Texas and Oregon as well as Brooklyn and the Bronx, yet the 'nervous tension' of New York is different. It is in its temper and passion recognizably Asiatic or Eurasian to any man who knows those parts. New York was once New Amsterdam, the foreordained capital of the New Netherlands. It became New York, pendant to New England. Today it may be New Minsk, New Pinsk or even New Naples; it is distinctly not New York or New Amsterdam. Mr. John Gunther quoted a friend 'who always says that Manhattan is like Constantinople ... He means not merely the trite fact that New York is polyglot, but that it is full of people, like the Levantines, who are interested basically in only two things, living well and making money.'

The words where opinions differ are 'living well'. The new masses changed New York from a place where 'there were values other than the beastly rent values' to one where 'there are no reasons but of dollars', as Henry James, returned to New York in middle age, wrote when he looked back on his New York youth. The New Yorkers I knew did not feel they lived well, save in material things not conclusively material. They lived to get out of New York, and that was a criticism. Its thrall was all-possessing while they were in it; it is without quiet backwaters, secluded places and the rustic corners which seem essential to urbanity. Its people eat well but often in discomfort; the stool, food-machine and self-service counter make for speed but not for content. They may drink what they please, without the bans and adulterations of other lands, and in doing so sit in rows in a dim light, all gazing one way; they seem to await some coming but in fact watch the television screen.

Eating and drinking can hardly count among the day's amenities in New York now. Once, with an American friend, I went to the Pierpoint Morgan Library, a quiet corner in the tumult where early printed books were on display. From the open page of a very early one, John Lydgate's The Horse, the Sheep and the Goose, printed by William Caxton in 1477, words sprang out at us. 'Atte thy mele be glad in contenance. In mete and drynke be thou mesurable. Beware of surfite and misgovernance. They cause men oft to be Unresonable. Suffre nothing be said at thy table that ony may hurte or displese.'

'Sound rules for living well,' I said. 'Not in New York,' he said, 'we must have slipped back a long way if those standards were generally accepted in 1477.' 'They weren't,' I said, 'but the idea of a standard was accepted, if not the standard itself' 'The only standard here is that of the quick-lunch counter,' he said, 'sit, eat, pay, git. I guess the guy was right who said American society is the only one which has passed directly from barbarism into decadence without once knowing civilization.' 'Who said it?' I asked. 'Some Frenchman,' he said. 'It sounded smoothly Gallic,' l said, 'sparkling but paste. It might fit New York. It isn't true of America. A clear line of civilization shows in the South' (and later, after travelling farther, I would have added 'and New England'), 'New York seems to be a bogus façade, subsequently imposed.'

Here and there, in this city of mountains and canyons, were remains of that earlier period so plainly to be seen north and south of it. They needed search, the pleasant streets in the East Fifties, the Little Church Round The Corner, Gramercy Square, Wanamaker's Store left downtown by the uptown tide, the Battery, a few nooks and corners by the East River. Each time I found such relics I had a mental picture of the city that might have been. It is a vision that haunted Henry James. His last story, The Jolly Corner, shows an American expatriate (obviously himself) returning to the old New York house of his boyhood and finding it haunted by the ghost of the self he would have become, had he remained in America. The spectre reveals a face 'evil, odious, blatant, vulgar', from which he recoils.

Henry James's whole life was shaped by a prescient fear of what was coming over America, and it drove him to take his body abroad, though not his heart. But for an injury he would have fought for the North against the South, like his brothers; nevertheless some revelation disclosed to him the changed shape which that war was to give his country and some of his novels seem to me allegorical treatments of this theme. The corrupted characters (usually Americans, as are the innocent ones) impart a sinister feeling of possession by an evil spirit; the later New York made that same effect on him, whereas his boyhood memories of it were filled with grace, charm and happiness. He wrote with more foreknowledge than knowledge and New York today is the full reality of his presentiment.

It is polyglot, but one of its breeds is paramount. 'New York is a Jewish city' (wrote the Zionist Record of Johannesburg), 'when you have got over the first terrific impact which New York makes on you, you wake up to discover that New York is a Jewish city.' That is true and to my mind is the secret of New York's esp