Utah

American Mercury 7/3 (March 1926)

I. Wilderness

I had gone to a reception at the home of a Harvard professor. I was vouched for by a youth ancestrally related to the Cabots and Lowells. Later in the evening our hostess, on her rounds among the freshmen, casually asked me where I came from — and three centuries of Boston Kultur kept her face expressionless at my answer. Thereafter she was at pains to be kind to me, visibly shielding me from the severities of Brattle Street, Cambridge. But as I left, amazement triumphed.

“So people really live in Utah!” she exclaimed.

I could see pity in her eyes — and, also, apprehension. And no wonder, for she heard a noise at the gates of Harvard, yes, at the Johnston Gate itself — the bridles and the scabbards of the Goths.

“But how?” she asked.

That was a number of years ago. I have since then been asked the very same question at least once a week. It has been propounded to me even by natives of Tallahassee and Escanaba. Here is my answer.

Before the good old days ended, people lived very well in Utah, if they liked the rude exhilaration of frontier life, and if mountain scenery repaid them for the absence of civilization. But those days ended in June, 1906, when the Senate of the United States, remembering that a national campaign impended, voted that Reed Smoot was entitled to the seat he held. That decision, to the Mormons, meant rehabilitation and complete vindication. To the Gentiles, however, it meant decisive failure in the most ambitious assault on the Saints since the Edmunds-Tucker Act. It marked, in fact, the end of one of history’s most hilarious wars, the sixty years’ strife between the Mormon and the Gentile. But what is more important, it spread a blanket of peace, fraternity and monotony over Utah, and since then the State has never enjoyed itself.

Long before the first Mormon train pulled a white-top over the mountains, Utah was familiar to the trapper. The Hudson’s Bay Company, the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, and the Missouri Fur Company had explored it. They followed the Green river into the Uintah Mountains, or the Bear river into the Wasatch. They laid their traps along every creek, and they wintered in sheltered canyons, beside boiling springs. Annually, they held a Summer rendezvous at Ogden’s Hole or in Cache Valley. This rendezvous, the frontier equivalent of Mardi Gras or Saturnalia or the Eleusinian mystery, was picturesque enough. The trappers came from all the thousands of miles of mountain wilderness, the owners came from the East, and the Indians from everywhere. For a year, singly or in threes and fours, the trappers would fight the Indians, blizzards, starvation and madness. At the end of that period they would draw a year’s pay, give back most of it to their employers for new outfits, lose the rest at cards and drink themselves blind for a fortnight. The owners drank a trifle less than their employés. The Indians drank as much as they could beg, barter for, or take by force. It was no suave liquor, no bourbon or rum or even applejack that they drank — but raw alcohol. When the trail is two thousand miles long and wheeled vehicles are an impossibility, one has to take what one gets.

Any frontiersman must have courage, strength and skill. He must also have a nervous system only a little more sensitive than that of a goat — or he could not survive. At best, the fur-trader was little better than a savage, at worst he was unquestionably a madman. Immense strains racked him. At any moment he might lose his scalp. Floods, snowslides, quicksands, falling cliffs might destroy him. Most of all, the unimaginable solitude of the peaks tortured him. It will, even today, age a tourist ten years overnight, if he get lost in it. The trapper spent his life in it: he crawled through canyons shut out from the sun, he toiled over passes so high that he saw visions, he fought mirages on the level and he peopled the land with enemies and monstrosities. He developed a characteristic melancholy. He grew silent, surly and superstitious. Sometimes he even reverted to unlovely racial voodoos.

I do not know for sure whether Jim Bridger ever choked a grizzly bear to death, as legend says he did, but it is almost certain that Jedediah Smith went for one with his fists and delivered a knockout blow to the jaw. When two such gladiators took to mauling each other, however, they used the short skinning knife of their guild, a weapon capable of dramatic effects. The victor customarily carved a trophy from his victim’s ear or forearm and wore it in his cap. They approved the Indian custom of scalping and employed it on every redskin they slaughtered. Sometimes, too, they tore out the Indian’s heart and ate it raw. Occasionally, as a diversion, they ate one another when a cache of food could not be found under the snow. They made casual marriages with the daughters of Indian chiefs — not only for solace, but to strengthen the uncertain loyalty of the tribes. They thus acquired a stake in the country. Their progeny became the guides of the next generation, the generation of settlers.

II. The Brigham Golden Age

They were the first Americans in Utah. Ashley, Ogden, Smith, Sublette, Bridger, Wootton, Carson, Provost, Cox. Long before them the Spaniards had passed this way. Cardenas probably touched the Southeast corner in 1540, eighty years before the Mayflower sailed; and in July 1776, while Jefferson’s committee was meeting, a Franciscan priest, Padre Velez Escalante, set out from Santa Fé to break a route through the Great Basin to Monterey. By September he had reached the meadows of the Green river and had christened them “The Plain of the Holy Cross.”

One wishes that the Spaniards had lingered somewhere in that vast expanse of mountain and desert. A few hundred miles away, in Arizona and in New Mexico, you may find their arrogance looking at you from Indian eyes or see their grace preserved in Indian ankles. Their place names give a gentle beauty to many a map and landscape, and their Catholicism has left on the lives of these States a faint but ineradicable poetry. There is no poetry in Utah. A different religion settled on the Wasatch. This was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, fleeing the jurisdiction of the United States. Alas, they had hardly reached Utah when it, too, came under the flag. The frontier of the trapper now became the frontier of settlement. Pious cowherds who believe themselves capable of summoning angels to converse with them went out to plow the desert. Almost at once another frontier swung across Utah and so killed forever the Mormon dream of isolation. The Oregon Trail had missed the state by miles when it turned North to reach Fort Hall, though Sublette’s cut-off to California touched a desert corner in the West. But the Forty-Niners roared through Salt Lake City — and the Overland Trail was made. Along it came all the pageantry of adventure, Overland Mail, pony express, the Creighton telegraph, the road-agent, the confidence man, the gambler. Utah thus became a picture frame for all the shifting frontiers of the West.

The mining camps soon played out their violent comedy. Virginia City, Gold Creek, Helena, Lewiston, Missoula, Clearwater, Bitter Root, Sublette, down to such recent names as Goldfield and Rhyolite and Tonopah — one and all they hurried across the mountains their groups of frenzied men. Each one carried its wake of less respectable characters, and each one left its deposit of undesirables — of Gentiles — in Utah. Then came the Union Pacific from the East and the Central Pacific from the West, shaking the earth with mighty labor, to meet near Ogden and give Oakes Ames a chance for scandal and Bret Harte one for poetry. After the railroad came the cowboy. After him the homesteader, the land-boomer, the sheepman, the populist and the Mormon-baiter. Whatever the frontier was or did, in some degree Utah responded. Even as late as 1906 Harriman was bridging Great Salt Lake and D.C. Jackling was on his way to Bingham. During all this time life in Utah provided spectacle and intensity. No poets lingered there, no musicians, philosophers, or scholars. The atmosphere was neither cultured nor urbane, but it was interesting. No native was ever bored; no transient ever yawned. A first-rate religious war was then progressing through crescendoes of bitterness and farce.

The Mormons were staid peasants whose only distinguishing characteristics were their servility to their leaders and their belief in a low-comedy God. They had flocked to the Church from localities where civilization had never penetrated. Then, with an infallible instinct, they had recruited their numbers from the slums of English factory cities and from the bankrupt crofter-districts of Scandinavia. The Gentiles were less fanatical than the Mormons and less ignorant, but they were also less robust. They represented the unfit of the frontier, those who had fallen by the wayside along the trail to glory. They had started for California or Idaho or Montana mines, they had given out at the first oasis — and they stayed there.

For sixty years their warfare made the State a matrix of living color — color that reached even the Christian Endeavor Societies of the Atlantic seaboard, and even Congress. It set loose over the land a nomadic tribe of uplifters who harrowed their audiences with tales of Mormon murders and titillated them with one-sex-only exposures of polygamy. But these prurient fools, the worst injustice the Mormon heresy has had to bear, left the battle at home undisturbed. While the evangelical communions shuddered and the politicians ranted in the Senate, Mormon and Gentile fought out in Utah their protracted, desperate, side-splitting battle for supremacy. Albert Sidney Johnston led an army to end it forevermore. His army was stopped outside the State, its trains were burned, its menace was burlesqued. That trick went to the Church. It was the Gentiles’ turn when, after Brigham Young had bastinadoed some Federal officials and prayed publicly for the success of the Confederacy, Colonel Connor marched a regiment into Salt Lake City. He camped in the foothills, trained a cannon on the Endowment House, and told the new officials to carry on. But on the whole, while Brigham lived, the Mormons had the better of the argument. The invading horde of governors, marshals and magistrates were all corrupt and stupid politicians, and, opposing Brigham Young, they were child-like and innocent.

Brigham’s artillery, both light and heavy, bombarded them in the Tabernacle. The curses of God, most dreadful, and the wit of a giant joker, most obscene, took off their hides in patches. The Gentiles fumed and threatened, but Brigham ruled and ridiculed. They formed secret sodalities for defense — but these were impotent. They sold their goods, when the prophet allowed them to, and they paid tribute, when he willed.

III. The Gentiles Triumph

Then Brigham died. Pygmies succeeded him, and the Gentiles entered a bull market. The Union Pacific began dragging in trainloads of deacons and deaconesses hell-bent for converting the infidels, and it soon hauled out the same folk, all burning with the desire to tell the dreadful story. It was an era of indictment. The reformer prowled abroad. Religion and morality, the nation over, urged extermination of a whole people. Congress investigated. Congress legislated. Lecturers spewed out their farrago of lies and shocking tales of immorality. The eyes of the nation, when they were not staring with horror at the greenbackers, at Charles J. Guiteau, or at the Mulligan letters, stared with horror at these monsters of bigotry and licentiousness.

At home the struggle became desperate. The Gentile ranks had increased. They had developed the mines, they had got a foothold in business, and they had established newspapers of their own. So they fought stoutly and, since the nation upheld them, victoriously. The struggle took on economic, social and personal aspects. There were midnight skull-crackings and even murders. There were vilification and abuse. There was bribery, apostasy, subornation. This public and private hatred soon became an element of everyone’s daily life; it worked into the unconscious impulse of every Utahn. These were days of a mutual hatred almost unparalleled in our history. There is no understanding Utah without realizing that neighbor, for sixty years, was at neighbor’s throat.

The Gentile victory came with the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 which — unconstitutionally — confiscated Church property to the United States, attached a test-oath to the suffrage, outlawed polygamists, dissolved the corporation of the Church and in general gelded, strangled and gutted the organization of the Saints. Within a year the leaders were in hiding, the Territory was bankrupt, the Gentiles were delirious with triumph and the Mormon martyr-complex was strengthened a thousand-fold. Before another year was out, polygamy was declared to be inexpedient, and chastened leaders were seeking the Prophet’s amnesty. In January 1896 Utah entered the Union as a sovereign State — and the Mormon question was settled forever.

But it was a victory far more for Kansas and Iowa than for Gentile Utah. Midwestern Epworth Leagues might hereafter be sure that no octogenarian Mormon in Utah could enjoy the delights of a harem, but in Utah no Gentile storekeeper could be sure that the infidels would not undersell him. The Utah Gentiles had used the hullabaloo about polygamy only as a weapon to destroy the monopolies of the Saints, but all too soon they saw that their victory was a mirage. The Church, rid of its worst encumbrance, progressed more in ten years than it had in the preceding sixty. In the next two decades it quadrupled that progress. Once more the Gentiles advanced with fixed bayonets. But, alas, the outside world knew that the Mormon question had been settled with the repeal of polygamy. The Gentiles succeeded in barring a polygamist from the House of Representatives. But they could not bar Reed Smoot from the Senate. The old warfare was over.

When God’s ultimate histories are written, 1906 will stand out as the first vindication of the Saints. The good old days ended, and the era of Good Feeling for the Sake of Business began. That year, too, marked the fall of other frontiers. The Lucin cut-off approached completion, and the industrialization of Bingham began. The mortality rate among the pioneers increased. The old generation of inflexible haters and rigid doctrinaires, who had seen Joseph in the flesh, began to die off. Leadership and public feeling among the Saints tended to soften, to set profit above principle, to accept the Gentile as good pay. And the Gentiles began to see the necessity of compromise.

IV. A Starless Firmament

Such was the old Utah, a frontier State always racked and scarred by religious warfare. A State peopled by frontiersmen — ruddy, illiterate, herd-minded folk. A State where the very process of survival demanded a rigorous suppression of individuality, impracticability, scepticism and all the other qualities of intelligence. A State which never produced nor wanted an aristocracy. A State where life was honestly rude, where even the crafts languished, where the Indians seemed only an hour away, and the sense of martyrdom was a present reality. This Utah produced but one man whose name has crossed its borders. In him it produced nobility and tragedy. I refer to Frank J. Cannon, the first senator from Utah. Utah will not look upon his like again. How successful a political career he threw away one may judge by the power of Reed Smoot, much his inferior, has attained; and he threw it away because he set a value on his pledged word. Not content to ruin a political career by saving his honor, he deliberately wrecked his career within the Church. His talents, his family and his services all marked him for leadership. His father was loved by the Mormons as no other leader has ever been; he himself could have succeeded to that reverence. Today he is considered, next to the murderers of the prophet Joseph, the worst devil in the Mormon hell. And why? Because he had a quaint notion that the Church should respect its oath. He acted on his belief. He should have known his people better than that.

Here, coming to other names, I pause. How am I to suggest the utter mediocrity of life in the new Utah? How can I suggest its poverty in everything that makes for civilization? A little over a year ago Edgar Lee Masters came to Salt Lake City to lecture. The propaganda department of the Church took him in hand. And lo, when Mr. Masters came to contribute to the Nation‘s symposium on the vicissitudes of artists in the United States, he said that if he were a young artist, he would flee not to Paris but to Salt Lake City! Here, he informed us, was a whole people who loved, respected, encouraged and produced beauty. Here art was the common bread, and here the artist was king. We read his article, we who had lived there a few days more than overnight — and we burst into laughter.

I defy Mr. Masters or anyone else to find one artist or even a quasi-artist in all the wide expanse of Utah, from Soda Springs to Hurricane, from Roosevelt to St. George. No artist ever lived there ten minutes after he had the railroad fare out. If the presence of one should become known, the Mormons would damn him as a loafer and the Gentiles would damn him as a profligate. Look, let us say, for picture. You will find life-sized portraits of Mormon apostles and blue-ribbon Holsteins. The two art sops in the State, run by men who know their public, display greeting cards and framed mottoes. Sculpture? You will find one exquisite monument to the seagulls, and three dozen wooden Indians covered with tin plate and named after the martyrs. No building in the State could qualify for reproduction in any respectable architectural journal. There is no public library worth the name, no college library up to even the Carnegie standard. Music? The Church boasts of its organ, its choirs and its great love of music. You may test this assertion every noon during the Summer, when the propaganda department holds free concerts in the Tabernacle. You will hear “The Rosary,” Handel’s Largo, the Anvil Chorus, and “Come, Come, Ye Saints.”

Who, indeed, ever heard of a Utah painter, a Utah sculptor, a Utah novelist, or poet, or critic, or educator, or editor, or publicist M who ever heard of a Utahn? I have, but then I have studied the State for many years. I am confident that Mr. Masters has not. Let him repeat a line of Utah poetry or the name of a Utah book; let him whistle five bars of Utah music, or describe a Utah painting, a Utah statue — any work of the mind or spirit that may be associated with Utah. let us take a look at the starry catalogue.  Accident of birth, not residence, assigns Maude Adams to the State. The same is true of Solon Borglum. Cyrus E. Dallin, whose romantic Indians grace several galleries, was born in Utah, it is true, but he lives in Boston. The official panegyrist, Professor Levi Edgar Young, lists a number of other sculptors, the most prominent being the one who carved the bird that roosts atop the Eagle Gate. He cannot claim even such distinction for the painters. The best of them, we learn, exhibited a canvas called “The Gypsy” at the Centennial Exposition of 1876. Professor Young, with typical academic ignorance, omits from his list the finest artist that ever breathed mountain air — Beauregard. His work caught the mystery of the desert as no one has that Taos has given us. He was beginning to feel his strength; then he died. Last summer I made occasion to mention him in Utah. In Salt Lake City none of the intelligentsia had heard of him. I found an alumnus of the Ogden High School who remembered that a Mr. Beauregard once taught there but did not know that he painted. Chicago, New York and even Los Angeles hang his canvases, but the art lovers of Utah know him not.

There are no Utah writers. There are no Utah composers. No Utahn has ever sung his way into celebrity. There were Hazel Dawn, and her sister, Margaret Romaine, and Emma Lucy Gates. You have, perhaps, heard of them. The State university, after many years, assembled a faculty of considerable distinction, of too great distinction, in fact. Five of them were fired for disseminating ideas. Fifteen of the others left in disgust. Among those who resigned was Byron Cummings, the discoverer of the Nonnezoshe and one of the most learned and most brilliant
American anthropologists of today. In Professor A. A. Kerr, the university has filled his place more satisfactorily than that of any of the heretics. Dr. Kerr is a trained anthropologist, and he stands out like a sequoia amidst sagebrush — a scholar alone in a mob of Mormon bishops, tank-town annotators and hicks. There is a critic who has made a collection of one-act plays. There is a sociologist who has achieved his doctorate by holding up Mormon group-life as the salvation of the Republic. There is a historian who has rebuked Mr. Wells for not including Joseph Smith in his “Outline of History.” Such are the adornments of Utah, the flowers of its art and learning.

V. 100% American

But the people? Utah is normal. As a commonwealth of greengrocers who have lifted themselves from the peasantry it is no different from Indiana, Iowa, or Nebraska. Poverty is rare. Morality, the unassuming morality of unassuming folk, is high. Civic virtue is even higher. The State’s roads, schools, per capita ownership of Fords, patriotism, sewer system and modernity of office appliances are, in fact, well above the average. Those who have no interest in social or intellectual or artistic life may live there as well as anywhere else in this best of all possible Republics. The difference is merely that should they ever, for a moment, want to enter or observe such life or feel the need of anything that springs from it, they would be at a dead stop. Civilized life does not exist in Utah. It has never existed there. It never will exist there.

The farmers differ little from farmers anywhere else. They are, perhaps, a little absurd in their belief that Christ was inferior to Joseph Smith. But get away from the fertile valleys where the farms are and into the arid lands and you will find the ranchers — a race of better men, self-reliant, courageous, humorous, hospitable. Life on the desert ranches has a certain dignity of skill and courage, an unhurried awareness of mastery. It has the assurance that strength develops. It is, perhaps, a bit backward in the matters of china-ware and central heating. But, in tolerance, human intercourse, refinement — in all the qualities of civilization — it is infinitely less primitive than Salt Lake City. This ranch life, I fear, is all I can offer in rebuttal of my Cambridge hostess. Certainly the gentry, newly developed in the Babylons of Ogden and Salt Lake City, are an offense to heaven. After 1906 prosperity came to Utah. In a few years a generation whose fathers had begotten them under the eyes of their mothers and sisters in one-room shacks began to be conscious of their wealth. They bought closed cars. They learned that there were other beverages beside straight whiskey. They tried manfully to achieve the blisses of adultery hinted at in the works of Mr. Chambers, the one novelist they knew of. They experimented with golf pants for men and riding pants for women. In short, they became civilized.

I trust I am not unfair to my home State when I “declare in words of soberness” (to crib the Book of Mormon) that these nouveaux-riches, these cultured exponents of society, lead the most swinish life now discernible in the United States. I may be wrong; for the sake of the mountains that brought me so much delight in my youth I hope I am. The millionaire cow-puncher, I know, is epidemic in our times and infests every corner of the country. But even in Los Angeles you will find expatriated Iowans who can read French. Even in Hollywood a movie gal, when arrested, had, beside the Police Gazette, a volume of Freud. Even in Chicago there are a few who rank Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms slightly above Our Lord Calvin Coolidge. Even in South Boston, Massachusetts, you will hear talk of Yeats, of Thackeray, of Shakespeare. Even in Richmond disgruntled folk deny that Hoover is greater than Caesar, and read the Dial, or speak now and then of Gauguin, or Osler, or Huxley. But not in Utah. There people talk only of the Prophet, hogs and Fords.

Even the ancient color of the State is gone. Mormon and Gentile dwell together in amity and Rotary. The State, at this moment, is whooping up the fellowship, with its fingers crossed. The Gentile merchant hires Mormon clerks. The Gentile Chamber of Commerce rebukes an alien congressman who has sneered at the Mormons. The Gentile churches, once the foci of righteous hatred, turn their eyes on the Asiatic field. The Gentile booksellers refuse to sell a book that laughs at the Church. The Salt Lake Tribune, once the archfiend of Mormon persecution, is now the guardian angel of the followers of the Prophet. The Mormon legislature repeals the Mormon anti-cigarette law, at the directions of a Mormon governor. The Mormon merchant hires Gentile clerks. The uncouth Temple union-suits give way to officially sanctioned lingerie with lace and ribbons. “We are a peculiar people,” long Zion’s boast, becomes the plaintive “We are no different from other people.” “We are no different from other people.” Yearning for fellowship, the present-day apostle boasts that rabbis, Catholics and even Methodists have preached in the Tabernacle and are always welcome. The president of the Agricultural College, interviewing the notables he has subsidized to lecture at his Summer School, magnificently informs them that the Church will not interfere with their freedom of expression — a naïveté, by the way, without parallel in the history of American colleges. And at the University of Utah, Heber J. Grant, Prophet, Seer and Revelator, anointed to interview God and convey his will to all mankind, introduces Eddie Guest to a rapt student body, explaining that he has Mr. Guest’s complete works in limp leather, and that Mr. Guest is undoubtedly the greatest poet of all time, greater even than Eliza Snow, a widow of the Prophet!

How do people live in Utah? They join the business-men’s calisthenics class at the gymnasium. Or they buy Fords on the five-dollar-a-week basis. Or they yawn. Or they die.

[See also Bernard DeVoto’s letter to Jarvis Thurston, 1943]

The American Spirits

from The Hour, Chapter 1 (1951)

We are a pious people but a proud one too, aware of a noble lineage and a great inheritance. Let us candidly admit that there are shameful blemishes on the American past, of which by far the worst is rum. Nevertheless we have improved man’s lot and enriched his civilization with rye, bourbon, and the martini cocktail. In all history has any other nation done so much? Not by two-thirds.

Whiskey came first; it has been the drink of patriots ever since freedom from her mountain height unfurled her banner to the air. The American people achieved nationality and Old Monongahely in a single generation, which should surprise no one since nations flower swiftly once their genius has budded. Look, for instance, at the Irish, for many centuries a breed of half-naked cave dwellers sunk in ignorance and sin and somewhat given to contentiousness. Then the gentle, learned St. Patrick appeared among them. He taught them to make usquebaugh and at once they became the most cultured people in the world. No one challenged their supremacy, certainly the Scotch didn’t, till inspiration crossed the Atlantic and set up a still in Pennsylvania.

Or look nearer home, at the Indians. Gentler than the Irish, they were an engaging people whose trust we repaid with atrocious cruelties. (As when, after the French had educated them to brandy, we forced rum on them.) Yet a thoughtful man may wonder whether they had it in them to rise to cultural distinction. They evoke both pity and dismay: north of Mexico they never learned to make a fermented beverage, still less a distilled one. Concede that they had ingenuity and by means of it achieved a marvel: they took a couple of wild grasses and bred them up to corn. But what did they do with corn? Century succeeded century and, regarding it as mere food, they could not meet the challenge on which, as Mr. Toynbee has pointed out, their hopes of civilization hung. Across the continent, every time the rains came some of the corn stored in their granaries began to rot. Would it be doom, the Age of Polished Stone forever, or toward the stars? The historian watches, his breathing suspended, and sees the pointer settle toward decline. They threw the spoiled stuff out for the birds, angrily reproaching their supernaturals, and never knew that the supernaturals had given them a mash.

The Americans got no help from heaven or the saints but they knew what to do with corn. In the heroic age our forefathers invented self-government, the Constitution, and bourbon, and on the way to them they invented rye. (“If I don’t get rye whiskey I surely will die” expresses one of Mr. Toynbee’s inexorable laws of civilization more succinctly than ever he did.) Our political institutions were shaped by our whiskeys, would be inconceivable without them, and share their nature. They are distilled not only from our native grains but from our native vigor, suavity, generosity, peacefulness, and love of accord. Whoever goes looking for us will find us there.

It is true that the nation has never quite lived up to them. From the beginning a small company have kept idealism alight, but the generality have been content to live less purely and less admirably. The ideal is recognized everywhere; it is embodied in an American folk saying that constitutes our highest tribute to a first-class man, “He’s a gentleman, a scholar, and a judge of good whiskey.” Unhappily it is more often generous than deserved. Anyone who will work hard enough can acquire gentility, but there are never many judges of good whiskey. Now there are only you and I and a few more. One reason is that there is little good whiskey to judge — we do not hold our fellows to the fullness of the nation’s genius.

In the era called Prohibition we lapsed into a barbarism that was all but complete — though that dark time did contribute some graces to our culture. In those days one heard much scorn of Prohibition whiskey, but the truth is that there was just about as much good whiskey then as there had been before or is now. (It was then, moreover, that a taste for Scotch, previously confined to a few rich men who drank an alien liquor as a symbol of conspicuous waste, spread among us — a blight which the true-born American regards as more destructive to the ancient virtues than Communism. Think of it less as a repudiation of our heritage than as the will to believe. If we paid the bootlegger for Scotch, we thought, we might get the Real Old McCoy, though one whiskey is as easily made as another where they print the label and compound the flavoring.) Such good whiskey as existed was hard to find but when hadn’t it been? Below the level of the truly good we went on drinking the same stuff we had drunk before. We are still drinking it now. The untutored are, and the unworthy.

[…]

Well, you say, how good is good whiskey? Out in the bourbon country where the honor of the taste buds runs 180-proof, you can get an argument in ten seconds and a duel in five minutes by asserting that it is as good as it used to be. Here the little stillhouse comes in again. Men grown reverend and wise will tell you that the glory departed when the big combine bought up the family distillery. They are remembering their youth and the smell of mash in a hundred Kentucky valleys. There was art then, they say, and the good red liquor had the integrity of the artist and his soul too, and between Old Benevolence and Old Mr. This there were differences of individuality but none of pride, and how shall America have heroes again, or even men, with this dead-level nonentity they force us to drink now?

They scandalize and horrify the modern distiller. The little stillhouse, he tells you, was steadily poisoning Kentucky. The old-time distiller’s mash was not only uncontrolled and vagrant – he got his feet in it and no doubt his hogs too, and it spoiled on him or went contrary or deceived him. Those remembered subtleties were only impurities, or maybe eccentricities of the still going haywire, or the leniency of the gauger, or most likely an old man’s lies. He himself with his prime grains, his pedigreed yeast, his scientific procedures controlled to the sixth decimal place, and his automatic machinery that protects everything from the clumsiness and corruption of human hands – he is making better bourbon than the melancholy gaffers ever tasted in the old time.

We have run into a mass of legend and folklore. It reveals that we are a studious people and serious about serious things, but it does make for prejudice and vulgar error. (You want to know where I stand? You must never besmirch yourself with a blend, son — what do you suppose bond is for?) Devoted men, hewing their way through it, have come out with one finding that leans a little toward the opinion of the elders. The old-time distillers, known locally as the priesthood, put their whiskey into bond at less than proof, that is with the percentage of alcohol below fifty. Four years of the aging process brought it up to proof and they bottled it as it was, uncut. The modern distiller, known everywhere as a servant of the people, impelled by government regulation and the higher excise, bonds his stuff at a few percent above proof. Aging in bond increases the percentage still more, so after bottling he cuts it back to proof with water.

There is instruction here: when you add water to whiskey, you change the taste. In a moment of pure devotion, therefore, the faithful drink it straight….See to it that your demeanor is decorous and seemly at that moment. Attentively but slowly, with the poise of a confidence that has never been betrayed since the Founding Fathers, with due consciousness that providence has bestowed a surpassing bounty on the Americans or that they have earned it for themselves. Our more self-conscious brethren, the oenophilists, are good men too and must not be dispraised, but they vaingloriously claim more than we can allow. Their vintages do indeed have many beauties and blessings and subtleties but they are not superior to ours, only different. True rye and true bourbon wake delight like any great wine with a rich and magical plenitude of overtones and rhymes and resolved dissonances and a contrapuntal succession of fleeting aftertastes. They dignify man as possessing a palate that responds to them and ennoble his soul as shimmering with the response.

The modern distiller will tell you that whiskey comes to full maturity in its sixth year, that thereafter its quality falls off. The truth is not in him, do not give him heed, and why for a hundred and seventy years have sound distillers, and quacks too, used the adjective “Old” in their brand names? He obviously does not believe himself. At mounting expense he keeps some of his product in bond for eight years and charges correspondingly, and the result is well worth the mark-up. Eight years is the longest period for which he can get bond but at still greater expense he keeps some in the wood for four years more — and with a twelve-year-old whiskey to point to, Americans can hold their peace and let who will praise alien civilizations. The distiller will also tell you that nothing happens to the finest after it is bottled, and again he is wrong. He is especially wrong about rye. In the spacious time when taxes increased the cost of whiskey by only five hundred percent (it is several thousand now) the wise and provident and kindly bought it by the keg, in fact bought kegs up to their ability to pay, and bottled it themselves in due time and laid it away for posterity. Better to inherit a rye so laid away in 1915 than great riches. I have known women past their youth and of no blatant charm to make happy marriages because Uncle John, deplored by the family all his life long as a wastrel, had made them his residuary legatee. There is no better warranty of success in marriage; an helpmeet so dowered will hold her husband’s loyalty and tenderness secure. A rye thus kept becomes an evanescence, essential grace. It is not to be drunk but only tasted and to be tasted only when one is conscious of having lived purely.

This letter is taken from The Selected Letters of Bernard DeVoto and Katharine Sterne, edited and annotated by Mark DeVoto and published in 2012 by the University of Utah Press.   Sterne (1907-1944), an honors graduate of Wellesley College and an assistant arts critic on the New York Times, wrote a letter to Bernard DeVoto in 1933 from a tuberculosis sanitarium where she was a patient.  DeVoto replied, and they continued to write to each other until Sterne’s death in 1944, exchanging more than 800 letters and memoirs, but they never met in person.  In 1943, DeVoto dedicated The Year of Decision: 1846 to Sterne, “a very gallant lady.”  The published volume contains about one-quarter of the total correspondence; the remainder is published on the website of the Marriott Library of the University of Utah: http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm/ref/collection/UP-Bryson/id/922

Lincoln, Massachusetts

[18 February 1936; probably later]

Dear Kate:

Samuel Dye in Middletown: or, A Study in the Formation of the Small Bourgeoisie Following the Stage of Frontier Society…  The data regarding Samuel and his wife Rhoda have been listed in “Jonathan Dyer, Frontiersman,” which you may or may not have read when it came out in Harper’s.  These are relevant here: he was a religious emigrant from England to Deseret; he was a mechanic, not a farmer, who was nevertheless required by the Mormon system to become a farmer; he was docile to religious and political leadership; he reclaimed forty-odd acres of desert; he was tough as a hickory knot, in that life and circumstance were never too much for him.

The study is founded on — dependable — information from Grace Dye, spinster and milliner, of Pocatello, Idaho.

Excuse it, please.  I’ve just realized that I’ll never do this again and that I’d like a copy for possible reference.  God forbid that I should write letters this way, but, asking your favor, I’m going to insert a carbon.

[beginning on a new page:]

(How appropriate that the radio should be doing barn dances, across the hall.)  Well, then listening to Aunt Grace and checking off my interests, I was uneasily struck by the frequency of marital difficulties in the record, amazed by the more explicable prominence of the railroad theme, and quite unable to come to any conclusions about family diseases, as I had hoped to, and unable to make more than one generalization — which will follow in due time.

This is the generation of Samuel and Rhoda, except for one stillborn child.

Samuel:  Born in Boston, died in Ogden.  Education, country school.  Telegrapher for the U.P. in various parts of Wyoming, Utah, and Nevada.  Left the railroad and undertook to be a commission merchant in Nevada.  Finally got too expansive and went under.  Manufactured cleansing powder in a small shop.  Went back to U.P. as car inspector.  Ended running a filling station.  Cause of death: stomach ulcer.  Widow still survives.
Married to the daughter of a railroad automatic fakes watch man, in Wyoming.  Her family from Nebraska.  One child.  She divorced him.  She and the child unreported.
Married, 2d, to a (Mormon) daughter of a Scotch immigrant.  Children:

Rhoda.  High school education.  Married to a banker. Four children.

Beatrice.  (I think I have referred to her as Rhoda in earlier communiqués, out of some vague notion of disguise.)  With the possible exception of Edith, see below, the best looking descendant.  One year of college. Married an insurance man; is his business partner.  No children.

Maynard.  No education.  Died of epilepsy at the age of eighteen.

Glenn.  High school education.  Various jobs — still too young to classify.

Robert.  Still younger; no report.

Rhoda:  Born in Brooklyn, died in Ogden.  Education, “academy” (frontier high school) — by virtue of “hiring out” in Ogden in order to get it.  Worked as waitress in a railroad restaurant in Wyoming, before her first marriage; as dressmaker before her second marriage.  Cause of death: pernicious anemia.

First married to a New Yorker named DeWolfe, county clerk of Sweetwater County, Wyo.  When a shortage of funds was discovered, he held the bag and slipped away to Mexico.  She went back to her father’s farm, then moved to Ogden and took up dressmaking, divorcing her husband some eight years after the desertion.  This experience made a hysteric of her.

Child by this marriage, Cleveland.  High school education.  Railroad telegrapher in southern Utah, then buccaneer in Mexico, then a secretary, finally a C.P.A.  Now lives in Salt Lake City.  Has had no communication with his half-brother in twenty years.  Two children, one of whom is in his first year at college; the other will probably go that far too, if not beyond.  [marginal note in pencil: Both A.B.]

Second marriage: Florian DeVoto, then a railroad freight agent, later abstractor of title.  The only college man who appears in this generation — he held six degrees.  A man of great brilliance and completely paralyzed will.

Child by this marriage, Bernard.  Artium baccalaureus, cum laude.  One child so far.  (That A.B. is the only college degree to date.)

Sarah:  Born in Uinta, died in Sacramento.  Education, country school.  She seems to have been the dumbest of the children.  Cause of death, undetermined, general debility.  First married a Wyoming railroad man named White; details of his occupation unknown, for Aunt Grace dismissed him as a drunken bum.  Children of this marriage:

George.  Boilermaker, first railroads, now steamboats (California).  Married.  No children.

Bert.  Railroad conductor in California.  Married.  Two children.

Florence.  Died in infancy, of meningitis.

Cora.  Two years in some cow college in Idaho.  Married to a stock-breeder.  Two children.  This is one of the romantic parts of the saga.  Cora was born just after her father died — of D.T.’s, I gather.  Her mother was struggling to support the family, in the semi-cooperative house that my mother’s dressmaking establishment had by then become — all the sisters showed up there when widowed, abandoned, or out of work.  She gave the child to a childless couple to raise, and Cora grew up as their daughter, not learning her identity till they and her mother were dead.  I can remember the histrionic behavior when she came to see my mother after the revelation.  If my memory is dependable she was, next to Beatrice, the most intelligent of the grandchildren.

Second marriage: a Scotchman named Kennedy, a railroad mechanic, first in Nevada, then in California.  He died before she did, but not much before.  Children:

Madeleine.  High school.  Married.  Two children.  No dope on her husband’s occupation, for Aunt Grace has quarreled with her.  She is disliked by the whole family — faintly tartish behavior, followed by some kind of dispute over Samuel’s estate, I don’t know what it could have been, for her share would have been under a hundred dollars.  I remember her at seventeen as mildly pretty and godawful dumb.  I only saw her that once.

Donald.  High school.  Electrician, with particular reference to airplane beacons.  Married.  No children.

Edward.  Couldn’t, I believe, finish grammar school.  The lowest ebb of the family energy.  Aunt Grace describes him as a bum and a damned liar, that being the only oath I ever heard her utter.  It coincides with my observations during the month he spent with us when I was in high school.  Married.  No children.  No occupation.  Lives with various relatives till they pass him on.

Madeleine:  Born in Uinta, lived in Ogden, now lives in Bakersfield.  Education, pretty damn vague.  The aunt I never could stand.  She was neurasthenic and a weeper.  She used to weep in our house a good part of the time.  Also she was “poor” and that irked me — it meant that she couldn’t live on the modest level of the rest of us, and my too ready sympathies were always being aroused when I didn’t want them to be.
First marriage: to a big, genial, worthless hulk named Ward, a railroad fireman whom she picked up in Chicago while staying with Martha (q.v.).  He was a tough baby, contributed very little to her support, was always in trouble, once shot a man through the cheek, did some high grade swindling, bummed a bit, ran pumping engines, raised chickens, wheedled money from everyone especially my father, and was forever having to be kept or bailed out of jail, again by my father.  But I liked him.  He was worthless but he was genial and always jolly and kind to me.  Except for Samuel, he was the only one of my uncles I ever saw (I think), and the word Uncle has always had a glow because of him.  Children:

Grace.  Part of high school, I think.  A fairly pretty and pleasant dimwit.  Married dining-car conductor when she was seventeen.  Divorced him.  Learned beauty-parlor technique from Martha.  Married an insurance salesman.  Operates a beauty parlor somewhere in California.  No children.

Etta.  Practically no education.  Pretty and absolutely petrified.  Has been married twice, once to a farm-management teacher or superintendent (Aunt Grace is pretty vague, here), now, after divorce, to a gent who does nothing at all.  Lives with, and on, her mother.  Two children.

[handwritten: Omission: Albert.  About 22 yrs old.  RR mechanic — 2nd marriage of Madeleine follows later.]

Martha:  We get on more agreeable ground here — she and Aunt Grace, with Beatrice, Rhoda and Webb, are the ones I have liked.  Born in Uinta, lives in Ogden.  Education rather hard to make out; some “academy,” I think.
First marriage (that was pure suggestion — she had only one)  She married a railroad man in Chicago named Gray.  Aunt Grace says he was an engineer, which is hard to fit in, for his family was on a distinctly higher level, economically, than the family had elsewhere attained.  His people were well to do and his father lived to become Governor of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.  Anyway, he was too much of a hand with the ladies.  He railroaded in Louisiana, Kansas, Mississippi, and finally Mexico.  When he went to Mexico, she left him, having had enough of his gayeties.  The experience produced the typical Dye crackup — see Rhoda and Grace, not to mention Madeleine.  She had herself a beautiful nervous seizure.  Once, when I was repeating the theme with brass and percussion, I asked her if she knew anything about it.  She said that for over a year she did not dare go into the children’s room after they were asleep for fear she might kill them…   But she, together with Rhoda and Grace, had Samuel’s toughness.  She took training in the Cook County Hospital and became a nurse, then went back to Ogden and worked at her trade.  Sometimes she parked the kids with my mother, sometimes she set up a joint household with Grace, sometimes she let them run themselves.  But she saw them married.  Then she went back to Chicago and took a highly-gadgeted course in beauty-parlor stuff.  Going back to Ogden, she worked up from a one-table joint to founding a school in the stuff she had learned.  When Edith died, she took the child and has brought him up.  She has made a modest competence — which has been damned convenient, along with Grace’s, for the Dye descendants.  The failure of the Ogden State Bank pretty well wiped her out.  But she has expanded her school again and is coming back.  This refusal to be downed by circumstance, this ability to meet it head on and subdue it, is the sheer guts that distinguished Samuel.  Just three of his children had it.  I won’t be able to follow the grandchildren, but it would be interesting to see where it appears in them.  Rhoda, maybe — I’ll tell you about her sometime.  Anyway, in Martha and Grace the Dye stock gets its highest expression.  Children:

Alice.  Two years at the U of Utah, taking kindergarten training.  Pretty and fairly clever.  Something of a tart, I think, in the first Wilson administration; anyway, a “flirt” and a “belle.”  Taught kindergarten.  If Skinny Browning’s oldest brother didn’t sleep with her for over a year, he was unlike the other Brownings.  Finally married a bank clerk — amiable and worthless.  Three kids.  Finally had to teach kindergarten again.  Now helping her mother run the beauty-parlor school.

Edith.  The one who taught my childhood that femininity was beautiful.  She was pretty even when I was adolescent and had seen other blondes.  High school.  Went to Pocatello to learn the millinery business from Aunt Grace.  Married a railroad clerk.  Died in the influenza epidemic.  One child, whom Martha has raised.  Martha dreamed of putting him through college (the best evidence that she was consciously joining the bourgeoisie) but Aunt Grace says he has decided otherwise and is a government photographer, recently at Boulder Dam.

Grace:  Born in Uinta, lives in Pocatello.  Education, “academy.”  Lived with my mother, clerking in an Ogden store, during the dressmaking period.  Learned how to make hats and worked in an Ogden millinery.  Had some kind of tragic love affair, about which neither I nor Rhoda, who was closest to her, have ever been able to find out anything.  My mother always refused to tell me.  Anyway, it gave her the Dye crash pretty early, and she never tried again, she’s unmarried.  She got together a little money, borrowed a little more from my father and elsewhere, and set up an establishment in Idaho Falls.  She laboriously got it out of debt and was prospering a little when it burned down, uninsured.  She had another crash, a pretty bad one.  She made another start, in Pocatello this time.  Little by little she has gone ahead, enlarging the story here, buying a farm mortgage there, salting away a bond elsewhere.  Martha has contributed to most of her sisters and some of her nephews and nieces, but Grace has practically supported them all at one time or another.  She has become the family’s capitalist.  She has a lot of Idaho farm land, some bonds, some good stocks, too many bum stocks.  She lives the good life, too.  She likes traveling about, and goes to California every year (where she is unmercifully milked by the grandchildren) and most years to Chicago or one of the national parks or the Gulf Coast or whatnot.  She likes the theater and is an inveterate sightseer.  She likes to motor through the mountain country and go on picnics.  She faithfully reads everything I publish, without ever understanding it, but is, thank God, completely unimpressed by it — she likes me because I have been a “good son,” because people with a claim on me can get money from me, and most of all because I obviously work hard.  She saw Sam Dye wrenching a farm from the desert — and that is what counts.  I could sell a million copies, get the Nobel Prize, or have a statue erected to me in the Hall of Fame, and she would pay no attention.  But she sees me working at my job, long hours, of my own will, every day — and that’s what a man should do, that’s what counts.  She is shrewd, self-contained, tolerant, in every real sense of the word sophisticated.  She gives off a curious and memorable aura of mastery.  She has dealt with the conditions of her life and subdued them.  I’d say she is Samuel’s highest reach, and it’s a damned shame that it wasn’t Sarah or Madeleine who turned out to be the spinster.

Edith:  Born in Uinta, lives in Pocatello [pencil: Oakland].  Education, not a hell of a lot.  She is said to have been the prettiest of the daughters, though Grace is certainly the handsomest now.  Appears to have been something of a bright girl, too; at least several of the pious Mormon books I salvaged from Samuel’s library were presented to her as prizes.  Married a railroad conductor from Nevada.  Divorced him some ten years ago.  Children:

Webb — or maybe Webster.  High school.  High school.  Several years older than I and the one grandson I liked.  Used to spend his summers on the farm.  Humorous and naturally sophisticated.  Was intelligent but a long sickness affected his eyes and he could not go to college.  Was a taxi driver for some time.  Now runs a small business of his own.  Aunt Grace describes it as a “basket lunch place.”  I don’t know what it is — a California invention probably.  Was married but his wife died.  No children.  Lives in San Francisco.

Martha.  2 years of college.  Married an insurance salesman.  1 child.

Madeleine (cont.): I forgot to list her romance.  She divorced Bill Ward and some years later, she being fifty or thereabout, married a childhood sweetheart, whose passion had endured through the years.  She abruptly ceased to be a charge on Grace and Martha.  For the sweetheart, beginning life as a U.P. engineer, ended it as a prosperous orange farmer in California.  He ended it pretty soon after exposure to her whines, leaving her a pleasant income.

Well, there’s the record.  It teaches a little sociology, maybe, but I’ll be damned if it teaches me any genetics.  Obviously there is a recurrent neuroticism but I can’t chart it.  I don’t know whether it has showed up in any of the third generation except me and the epilept.  I can’t plot any curve of intelligence, either.  Beatrice and Rhoda were conspicuously intelligent; but their brothers are dimwits.  Of the rest, only Cora, Webb and I have any brains, and I’m not sure of him, having not seen him since 1919.  Sam’s tenacious staying power skipped his son, touched my mother, touched Martha a little more and came out full strength in Grace.  Nobody else had it.  But the others don’t show any obvious traces of its counterpart in Sam’s wife, who was tireless, even tempered, optimistic.  She and Sam were readers and Sam was something of a student, granted his education and his status: of his children, only my mother ever read books, and of his grandchildren, so far as I know only my half-brother and I — and my father was more of an influence on me than my mother.  I doubt if Sarah’s and Madeleine’s children, except Cora, can read a headline without moving their lips.  About half of the grandchildren have shown an ability to maintain themselves in the world; the rest just subsist, with help from Grace and Martha.  Cora, Alice, Beatrice, Martha and I go [?got] to college.  My half-brother, Martha’s other daughter, Sarah’s second brood, Edith’s son certainly could have gone if they had wanted to, and my father offered to put Rhoda through.  They didn’t want to; probably most of them couldn’t have lasted if they had gone.

Conspicuous respectability, broken in the direct line only by Edward.  Conspicuous intellectual mediocrity, broken in the second generation only by Grace and in the third, if I may be so bold, only by me — and that break unquestionably due to genes that had their origin in Genoa.  Conspicuous looseness of heel — it doesn’t come out here but they have wandered all over the continent, and one of them remains in the occupation of the Founder.  There’s a kind of progressive deterioration, in that Sam was at least one of Malinowski’s earth-people, and only Grace of all that crew is today.  But they have, the better half of them, the industry, adaptability and tribe stability of the small bourgeoisie.  And they are a cooperative lot.  Most of them hate my guts but any of them would take me in, and I suppose I’d take any of them in — which is not a loyalty I get from my father’s house.  The third generation seems to be staying married better than its parents did.  Rhoda has done well for herself by marriage, I’ve done well for myself, financially I mean.  Probably only Beatrice and I have to pay income tax.  In the American social hierarchy, only Rhoda as the wife of a banker, Beatrice as the wife of a branch executive, and I as a college professor could sit about [sic] the salt.  But I’ll bet that half the grandchildren own at least an equity in their houses, have savings accounts and life insurance.  America seems safe enough, but somehow I think they haven’t lived up to Sam.

This has crowded out a lot of flashes and week-end cables from the Harvard sector.  I hope it hasn’t bored hell out of you.  I’ll be back on the air after writing lectures on the Muckrakers and Greenwich Village and reviewing the new Wolfe.

Yours,

Benny

***********

Middletown: ref. to Middletown, a Study in Contemporary American Culture, by Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, sociologists, 1929, 1936; Middletown in Transitions, a Study in Cultural Conflicts, 1937.  Deseret: Mormon sobriquet for Utah Territory.  generation of Samuel and Rhoda: Samuel George Dye (1834-1924) and Rhoda Paxman Dye (1830-1919), both natives of Hertfordshire in England, were married in 1856, emigrated to Boston and then New York, and settled in Utah Territory in 1861.  Their children were Samuel George Dye, Jr. (1859-1928); Rhoda Ann Dye (1861-1919), Bernard DeVoto’s mother; Sarah Jane Dye (1863-1909); Madeleine Dye (1864-1946); Martha Amanda Dye (1866-1954); Grace Matilda Dye (1868-1950); and Edith Elizabeth Dye (1872-?).  The stillborn child died in December 1870.  See “The Life of Jonathan Dyer,” in Forays and Rebuttals, 1936.  U.P.: Union Pacific Railroad.  the other will probably go that far, too: Laprielle DeWolfe, called Dee, married Gerald Boicourt; she died in 1954.  Florian DeVoto: in fact he earned only five degrees, all from the University of Notre Dame.   Etta:  1901-1996.   Albert: 1909-1989.   Martha: known as Aunt Matt.  influenza epidemic: the pandemic of 1918-19 is thought to have killed 60 million people worldwide.  Rhoda, who was closest to her: Rhodas appear in at least three generations of Dyes.  The one referred to here is the daughter of Samuel Dye, Jr.  Webb: Webb Moore.  sit about the salt: correctly, “sit above the salt,” i.e., sit in a place of higher social rank or distinction.  Muckrakers: reformist journalists and popular historians who attacked the failures of American society and corruption in politics and big business; the best known were Ida Tarbell (1857-1944; History of the Standard Oil Company, 1904); Upton Sinclair (1878-1968; The Jungle, novel about the meat-packing industry, 1906); and Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936; The Shame of the Cities, 1904).  the new Wolfe:  BDeV’s review, “Genius is Not Enough,” of Thomas Wolfe’s The Story of a Novel appeared in SRL 13/26 (April 25); reprinted in Forays and Rebuttals, 1936.

This letter is taken from The Selected Letters of Bernard DeVoto and Katharine Sterne, edited and annotated by Mark DeVoto and published in 2012 by the University of Utah Press.   Sterne (1907-1944), an honors graduate of Wellesley College and an assistant arts critic on the New York Times, wrote a letter to Bernard DeVoto in 1933 from a tuberculosis sanitarium where she was a patient.  DeVoto replied, and they continued to write to each other until Sterne’s death in 1944, exchanging more than 800 letters and memoirs, but they never met in person.  In 1943, DeVoto dedicated The Year of Decision: 1846 to Sterne, “a very gallant lady.”  The published volume contains about one-quarter of the total correspondence; the remainder is published on the website of the Marriott Library of the University of Utah: http://content.lib.utah.edu/cdm/ref/collection/UP-Bryson/id/922

May 2, 1940

[a letter from KS to BDeV  just prior to this is apparently missing]

32 Coolidge Hill Road
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Dear Kate:

Jesus, I don’t know how you summarize political parties in the Republic, short of a million words…

Well, there are continuities… of a kind.  Don’t ask too much of them.  In general, there has always been a simple dichotomy (a more fundamental one, I mean than the ins and the outs), and for the most part it has always taken about the same expression it has now.  There has usually been a party which stood for debtor class and another one which stood for the propertied class — in the rough.  Each has always been badly confused and impeded by the discordant elements which, the American equilibrium being so unstable, it has had to incorporate or form alliances with in order to get, or retain, power.  It is, however, a fundamental mistake to think of the dichotomy as analogous to the English one, since not even the Southern Democracy had any function as a landholding class.  (You will be much nearer the truth if you will think about them as, in the typical American way, exploiters of new land — by means, as it importantly happened, of human machines.)  Nor is there any division similar to the beautifully neat (and altogether unrealistic) one that French analysts believe in, the rentiers vs. the spéculateurs.  Neither landholders nor rentiers as such or per function have ever had any but the mildest importance.  What we have had from the beginning is a party which stood for the inflation of currency and one that stood for the contraction of currency.  A party for the relief of debtors and a party for the sanctity of mortgages.  A party for the support of agrarian and laboring interests, and a party for the assistance of trade, manufacture, and banking.  Less consistently but in the main, a party which aimed to develop the home market by assisting the producers, and a party which aimed to develop it by assisting the manufacturers.  Even less consistently but in the main till recently, a party which stood for less national and centralized authority, and a party which stood for more of it.  The confusion introduced by this last consideration is paralleled in all the others to a lesser degree, but by and large all the parties named first in the above oppositions have been one and the same party, and all those named second have been the other party.

There is also a kind of continuity in pattern — at least in growth and senescence.  Take Jefferson’s Republicans, who torturously and tenuously survive in Franklin’s New Deal.  The party began to coalesce round him during Washington’s first term, in part because of the activity of Jefferson, the intellectuals he was allied with, and groups and interests that had been most crimped by the compromises that went into the Constitution, but in greater part because of the plain bearing of Hamilton’s fiscal policies and the groups and interest they plainly served.

Everything in this period is so fluid that all lines are blurred and no statements hold absolutely.  But in general it is true that the Republicans were what Jefferson’s ideas held them to be, small landowners, small merchants, mechanics, free laborers.  Sure, but also they were the Southern planters (in the main, not always) and they were the western pioneers.  The link between the last two classes is obvious.  Until the new lands in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi were opened up, there was no such thing as a solvent planter.  They had been in debt to English factors from the beginning, and as that debt receded after the Revolution it merely found its way increasingly northward.  (In fact, it is arguable that there never was, in all American history, a solvent Southern planter.  DeBow said as much for twenty years before the Civil War and Helper proved it, or nearly proved it, just on the eve of hostilities.  But during the last quarter century before the war there was in the Deep South such an illusion of solvency as we can remember from H. Hoover’s time.)  The planters were, in actual fact, a debtor class, albeit a garnished one.  And the rockbottom fact of American history is that all frontier communities are debtor communities.  These were the interests principally served by the Jeffersonian party…  Let us be clear: by and large men belong to parties because they think their interests are served by those parties, and by and large parties think they are serving the interests they actually do serve…  But also there were other elements, whose relationships to these others could be indicated only by long parentheses.  Notably there were the immigrants and the internationalists.  Tammany began on the immigrant vote.  And there rallied to the Republican party all those whom the blatant Anglomania of Hamilton’s Federalists had annoyed, angered, or cost money.  And all those who felt that the torch lighted in America must be handed on to Europe, by way of France.  And finally, the reformers.  In a sense, down to Jackson, reform was properly only clarification and extension in areas where nothing had been shaped or provided for.  But the battle cry and the effect was the same…  This has been the make-up of the Democratic party, fairly steadily, ever since.

Jefferson’s Republicans did not completely establish or fill out the pattern — there are gaps in it.  This was due not only to the fluidity of everything but also to the fact that they had no real Opposition.  The Federalists were a genuine party but they could not survive an Adams, a foreign war, and the death of Hamilton.  They are one of the two major parties in American history that have been blown up in toto.  It is interesting that the death blow was an act of usurpation that happened to run counter to a sentiment.  For what killed the Federalists was primarily the Alien and Sedition Acts — and the ammunition they gave the Jeffersonians.  (There were, of course, many intricately related things but let them go.)  Without those Acts, the undeclared war with France would certainly have lost them 1800 anyway, and might very well have destroyed them — because things were so fluid.  Finally, nobody could fill Hamilton’s shoes and the organization was not yet rigorous enough to go on without someone who could.  (Note that the Republicans did not perish because of Jefferson’s Embargo Acts, which did far more damage than the A and S but did not offend a sentiment.)  By 1800 it was clear that the Federalists were done for, nationally.  They declined into a sectional party, dwindled, and committed suicide with the Hartford Convention.

Now as outlined above, there are obvious contradictions in the Republicans, of the kind that always make any party course a zigzag and produce the continual frictions and cleavages that impair American party government — and, I think, not only establish the movement of our history but provide the necessary freedom of movement that permits our economic and social system to function.  And there is implicit in them a major paradox.  It is the major paradox not only of the Jeffersonians but of our entire political structure, and in one form or another it has raised hell with every party in our history.  It is this: that whereas the interests of the debtor classes, and especially of the frontier, require the central government to be as limited and diffuse as possible (emphasizing “states’ rights” or the federal republic), those same interests also necessitate a centralizing tendency which must constantly invade the rights of the federated states and accrete power.  Jefferson had been in office just two years when he faced this rockbottom fact.  (His was, genuinely, a “reform” administration to begin with, though Gallatin’s reforms look a hell of a lot like Hamiltonianism.)  If the Mississippi were closed, then trans-Allegheny America would simply fall off from the seaboard.  He had to get at least lower Louisiana.  He got Louisiana.  He had no power to do so and it violated all his principles and beliefs — except self-preservation, Anglophobia, and the voice of the people.  In effect, he set the whole mould of the future…  The strongest nationalizing, which is to say centralizing, force in our history is the expanding frontier.  In its own interest the debtor class has always been forced to forge the instruments which exploited it.  The party in power has always accelerated the tendency, no matter how vehemently it has denied doing so.  Louisiana was one form.  “Internal improvements” was another.  So was “the American system.”  So was “free land.”  So was the tariff.

Yet the outline was neither clear nor complete down to what the texts still call the Jacksonian revolution, by which time everything we know today was established.  The Whig party had grown up to inherit, roughly, the interests served by Federalism and to add to them the interests of the expanding mercantile class and the embryo manufacturing class together with the rudimentary financial system growing out of both.  Yet nothing is ever so simple as the textbooks make out.  Notably, the strong Whig interest in the South is a paradox and the stronger one on the frontier is a greater paradox.  Furthermore, though the central onslaught of the Jacksonian Democracy, which was Jefferson’s Republicans in modern dress, was directly at the financial system which had now learned to use its teeth in protection of its interests, still it is astonishing how much support the Democrats drew from financial interests either excluded from or at war with the system.  Many financial interests are always served by inflation and many others have exactly the same interests as the debtors they have mortgages on.  It is right here, with the rise of the Jacksonian party, that the modern complexities of our politics begin.

The national lands were the biggest single determining force, together with the speculation in them by financial interests, the need for debtor relief, and the development of wildcat banking which, effectively if not by design, provided it.  There was also growing up the manufacturing system that was to become dominant after the Civil War.  The financial system that was implementing that system was, effectively, what the Democrats were aiming to destroy.  Yet (a) it was essential to much of their own functioning, so that (b) they could not muster enough strength to overthrow it, and (c) though they compromised, they sufficiently damaged it to weaken their own organization internally.

It was a hell of a lot less simple a party than Jefferson’s.  And it was a hell of a lot like Franklin D.’s.  It had to swallow the alliance that has always since then partly paralyzed it, the marriage between the agrarians of the first part and the mechanics and city proletariat of the second part.  This, the second great paradox of our political history, proves something or other about America, for what God hath put asunder the Democracy has, on the whole, kept together.  When the Democracy has been out of power, it has been because this shotgun marriage has been broken.  The fundamental interests of the two groups are both relatively and absolutely at odds, and the party has looked a hell of a lot less looney whenever the farmers have been detached…  Jacksonism did not come to power by a mass uprising of the common man, especially the frontiersman, as the texts usually say.  It was, besides that marriage, pretty exactly the New Deal.  It had an energetic nucleus of intellectuals who worked well with the first full crew of professional politicians, as distinct from paid politicians, ever developed here.  It had also the best organized press up to that time.  Jackson was really a front for the politicians and especially the intellectuals.  They have been curiously underestimated and even ignored by the historians and my pupil (who may go West with me, by the way), Arthur Schlesinger Jr., is going to make a reputation very easily because of them.  We hear about Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet: what we do not hear is that its effectives were the intellectuals of whom Amos Kendall was the bright star.  Blatantly during both of Jackson’s administrations and less openly for another twenty years, Kendall was both the Charlie Michelson and the Tommy Corcoran of the time.  Beyond and behind Kendall were a good many others, notably the young George Bancroft and the older Orestes Brownson (the first real advocate of the class struggle in America if not in the world, a pre-Marxian, and the author of more platforms and presidential messages than has been acknowledged).  To these were added the discouraged but not disenchanted reformers (as time went on), like George Ripley.  And to these, the lunatic fringe — for a while, till the rising Republican party drained them off.

(I wonder if Kendall shows the future of Corcoran.  He declined into a kind of lobbyist — for many years the Man To See in Washington.  I suspect — no one has proved, few have ever studied him — that he got a large cut in a good many projects he put across.  Yet he remained, also, as much a giant as there was in those parts.  The Diary of a Public Man which Sandburg quotes so extensively and so effectively was almost certainly written by Kendall.)

It was the intellectuals, really, who grappled with the one firm reality that Jacksonism ever came to grips with, the developing corporation.  It was the corporation, a good deal more than the factory itself, that implemented the industrial revolution and, in doing so, changed the financial system forever.  The boys had a pretty good idea of what it was and was becoming, and what they wrote about it might just as well have been written by A. A. Berle.  They never had a clear idea what they wanted to do about it, and of what they wanted to do they were able to do only a part, which on the whole was worse than nothing at all.

They were always impeded, sometimes nullified, and frequently made idiotic by the discordances within, which as time went on produced the strains that culminated in the schism of 1860, though by that time senescence was so far advanced that the same break-up could have occurred from half a dozen other tensions.  With two interregnums they governed the country for thirty years, and fairly well, considering, during the first twenty of them.  Like all government, theirs was a resultant of partially tangential forces, not a program, not a party government.  What threw them when they tried to control the developing corporations was what threw them throughout, the conflicts between the divergent interests of their own components.  You cannot incorporate in a party the frontier, the plantation system, the mechanics and proletariat, and the metropolitan machines — without considerable friction.  Thus the protective tariff, which the Democracy always swore they were opposed to, was a subsidy to manufacture paid for by the farmers, yet the West had to have internal improvements, which only the tariff could pay for.  Furthermore, manufacturing was thus subsidized at the expense of the planters, yet the planters had to take it because the Democracy would lose the city machines if they didn’t — and had to keep the city machines in line if they want to go on governing.  So, in actual fact, the tariff was never seriously lowered (except once) during the Democratic administrations and was sometimes increased.  Polk, who was honest, blind, and a promise-keeper did, as I shall show in my book, raise hell by forcing a tariff for revenue only through Congress — and, since he had elected to fight a foreign war simultaneously brought the national treasury the closest it had yet been to bankruptcy.  Only the famines in Europe saved him — and won the war…  The tariff was only one of several dilemmas but it would take a lot of space to specify the others.  The point is, government is always by guess and by God, issues seldom correspond to interests, and the young John Chamberlain has finally got it through his head that there are a multiplicity of functioning systems in America, several of which combine in precarious equilibrium to produce a party — and partially hamstring it.

What happened to the Democrats during the Fifties was a result of the inconceivable stupidity of the Southern planters and the accelerating energies of the industrial revolution.  Beyond question, the planters were the biggest fools in our history, which is a weighty superlative.  They never learned how to farm land, they never had intelligence enough to analyze their interests, and they never learned any skill either in politics or in economics.  They are most readily understood not as agrarians but as exploiters of natural resources — who used up land (by means of expendable human machines) precisely as lumbermen used up forests or the miners used up lodes and veins — and as exploiters who, nevertheless, committed themselves to an agrarian economy, and a one-crop agrarian economy at that.  The spread of cotton culture southwest created the illusion of prosperity, the flush times.  With incredible folly, they thought they could perpetuate the phantom by political means — and for political control of Congress they paid the price of economic subjection.  Which is exactly half of the Civil War.  It was, furthermore, a subjection by anarchy.  The manufacturing system and the financial system developed on strict Darwinian principles, without effective control of any kind.  Which is half of the remaining half of the Civil War…  For political control of Congress, conceived as protection of slave property in protection of cotton, they delivered themselves up hogtied into the keeping of the financiers.  The intelligent thing to do would have been to make an alliance with the developing system, rather than fight it head-on, taking what they could get, keeping a share in what they had to give up.  But sublime ignorance of economics (“Cotton is king” was gospel at a time when, as Helper pointed out, the hay crop of the North alone was worth more than the entire cotton crop), plus the delusion of secession, which was really a delusion that southern cotton was necessary to French and British economy, made them mad.

Defence of the status quo invariably and inevitably becomes petrifaction.  During the Fifties the Democracy hardened into an intense reaction, concerned about only one thing, the constitutional defence of slavery, and armed with only one weapon and that terroristic, the threat of secession.  They yowled about the tariff, but they voted for it, buying votes for the protection of slavery thereby.  They became a mere orthodoxy, with their heels dug in.  Efficiency departed from their bureaucracy, not courage only but intelligence departed from their leadership — the descent from, say, Calhoun, to, say, Jeff Davis or Rhett or Yancey (from the tidewater aristocracy to the Deep South parvenus) is approximately the descent of Niagara.  Planless, leaderless, unintelligent, ignorant, opposed to the main currents of political and economic development, they contracted arteriosclerosis as a party and were dead before they were defeated.  They kept power during the Fifties by place and momentum — the accident of history that gave them a respite because the Whigs were annihilated and the Republicans merely being born.

They unconsciously developed the major public policy which the Republicans were to apply consciously: that of, as I have said somewhere, buying the farmer in order to sell him out.  They did it inadvertently, but they did it and it has been the major domestic policy of American politics for something like ninety years.

The Civil War destroyed the Democracy.  It came back after the war to rest one-half of its paradox on the Solid South, to slowly regain the city machines, and to slowly come into national power again by the time-honored process by which the minority party incorporates all the parties of dissent, protest, agitations, and political and economic lunacy.  From the Greenbackers of 1870 down to the LaFollette twins of today, by way of the Granger movement, Populism, Free Silverites, Mugwumps, and anti-imperialists, they have all been gathered to Democracy’s bosom.  (It is to be said of third-party movements that, though their program is usually adopted, as Wilson put into effect practically everything Bryan campaigned for in 1896, their energy usually comes to little in the end and they make the interior stresses and contradictions so great that they hasten the ultimate break-up and defeat.)  But there was one outstanding and overwhelming difference — they had lost their historic alliance with the Middle West.  And this is the third great paradox of our political history and one of the basic facts about America — and it also says something or other, I don’t know what, about the power of sentiments.  So far as there has been an American agrarian party, actually and historically, it has been the Democracy.  The strongest southern interest is and always has been agrarian.  The Midwest and Western agrarian interest is its natural ally against the exploitation of the East — which is to say, of industry and finance.  The Republicans, because they had the leadership and because the Democrats were blind and crazy, succeeded in detaching the Midwest from this alliance during the Fifties.  They did so by realistically serving the Midwest interests, at a time when (as a minority party) they could afford to and when the Democracy didn’t have brains enough to serve any interest, even its own.  The Civil War, converting the Republicans to the party of power, industry, and finance, also handed them the Midwest in apparent perpetuity.  And this was mere sentiment — the Union forever, down with the traitors, vote the way you shot.  Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, the rest of them might start to stampede off in favor of the Grange, the Populists, or anyone else who seemed likely to readjust, even a little bit, the terrible economic inequalities created by the protective system, the Republican financial system, and the concentration of economic power.  But all the GOP had to do for thirty years was to wave the bloody shirt and all it had to do for nearly twenty more was to draw on its war chest.  This is a stupefying fact.  It enabled the system to change the economic set-up of the world.  It delivered the Midwest into the pockets of Wall Street and it made the whole story of the West that of what I have called a plundered province.  And this in defiance of plain interest.  The spectacle of an Ohio wool-grower, in 1870-80 or -90 voting for a tariff on wool because there was a picture of Honest Abe in the postoffice is not only stupefying, it’s inconceivable.  But there you have it, and that was American history 1865-1912, and for a hell of a lot longer than that.  The one overwhelming service of the New Deal was to readjust that tremendous dislocation — for how long?  Those whom the GOP had put asunder were joined together in 1932 and 1936 but they probably won’t stay joined next November.

[marginal note in pencil, next to the foregoing paragraph:] The next great paradox — disregarding the War — is already a-borning, the Southern industrialists turning Republican

[continuing:]

The Whigs were, by a hair, a more contradictory collection than the Democrats.  Always far stronger locally than nationally, it was an effective Opposition by fits and starts but too greatly strained within to elect more than two Presidents, both War Heroes, or to hold power once it got it.  It had an extraordinary number of able leaders but had too many for its own good — their personal rivalries, quite as much as the divergent interests they served, weakened the party.  It grew by the process of incorporation through the Thirties and Forties, and the incorporated material was so indigestible that it died.  But Clay and Webster were tremendous powers, though they were never able to fuse an effective organization.  They stood for the emergent mercantilism, manufacture, and finance, but it grew too fast for them, was too little aware of what its own interests were, and, in short, they never caught up with it.  But they did save the nation at the most critical crisis before the War, 1850, and by saving it then, saved it in 1860…  They are my favorite party and I could go on at length, but there’s no point.

The Republican party made the most astonishing growth in our history.  It was approximately six years old when it won in 1860.  It was even more a union of warring antitheses than the Whigs.  Abolitionists and Cotton Whigs voted for Lincoln, which is to say, Communists and Liberty Leaguers voting for Franklin D.  Its Free Soil inheritance, by which it first began to drain off the prairies, was at violent war with its New England, New York and Pennsylvania high-tariff, pro-factory inheritance from Whiggery.  It attracted all the reformers, suffragists and labor reformers as well as abolitionists, and in its earlier phases is an index to all the crank notions of the time.  Yet the nucleus round which all these elements coalesced was the Free Soil and “smart business man” coalition.  In any given small town the local banker stayed Whig as long as he could, then turned Republican in the hope that mortgages would stay sound.  The fires of war really are the fires of war and the party of A. Lincoln, which kept its Free Soil promise by passing the Homestead Act (which was either an irreparable damage to the nation or the most powerful assistance ever given the poor man, or both, and you can take your choice for I don’t know) came out of the war the perfected instrument of entrenched financial interests — interests which it had entrenched.  Another war measure, the Pacific Railway Act, was the beginning of a long line.  So was the National Bank Act.  From both the interknit effects ray out till they blind you…  But as a matter of fact, all subsequent history of the U. S. is the history of the Civil War and you had best not get me started on that.  And there is no need to characterize the post-1890 Republican Party down to, shall we say, 1940.

This should be glossed by a treatise on issues.  But that would merely show that each party has in its turn used both sides of every prominent issue — and I’ve got to go to bed…  If this isn’t the sort of thing you want, put in another call card.  But make it fast, for I think I’m leaving for the West in about ten days.

Yours,

Benny

**********

NOTES by Mark DeVoto:

rentiers: (French) stockholders, investors; persons of private means.  Jefferson’s Republicans: Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, headed the party freely called Democratic Republican by historians; its main political opposition was the Whig Party, which collapsed in the 1840’s and was reborn in the 1854 as the Republican Party.  Washington: George Washington (1732-1799), first president of the United States, served his first term from 1789 to 1793.  De Bow: James D. B. De Bow (1820-1867), author and editor, professor of political economy, founded Commercial Review of the South and Southwest, 1846-47.  Helper: Hinton Rowan Helper (1829-1909), author, attorney, and diplomat; The Impending Crisis, 1857.  Tammany: the Tammany Society, or Tammany Hall, founded 1789, became in the nineteenth century a principal instrument of New York City politics and remained powerful well into the 1960’s, but hardly exists today.  Hamilton’s Federalists: Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), the first Secretary of the Treasury, was co-author (with James Madison and possibly others) of The Federalist; Washington and John Adams, second U. S. president, were the only presidents from the short-lived Federalist Party.  Alien and Sedition Acts: enacted in reaction to the French Revolution then engulfing Europe and enforced between 1798 and 1801, these gave the president power to deport aliens, and to prosecute critics of the national government.  The Acts were clearly contrary to the First Amendment to the Constitution which guaranteed freedom of speech and of the press and were soon repealed; persons convicted under the Acts were pardoned by President Jefferson.  Jefferson’s Embargo Acts: Jefferson was president from 1801 to 1809.  The Non-Importation Act of 1806, the Embargo Act of 1807, and the Non-Intercourse Act of 1809 severely restricted foreign trade and effectively ruined the shipping industry for several years, but failed to keep the United States from being drawn into war with England in 1812-1814.  Hartford Convention: Federalist representatives from the New England states met secretly at Hartford, December 1814 to January 1815, to consider formal opposition to “Mr. Madison’s War,” with some extremists recommending secession from the United States.  The Convention approved several more moderate resolutions but these were mooted after the Treaty of Ghent was signed on 24 December 1814, ending the war.  Gallatin: Albert Gallatin (1761-1849), Swiss-born Secretary of the Treasury after Hamilton; diplomat at Ghent; later president of the City College of New York.  Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: (1917-2007), Harvard ’38, professor of history at Harvard, later at CUNY; The Age of Jackson, 1946, Pulitzer Prize in history; The Age of Roosevelt, 3 vols., 1957-1960; A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, 1966, Pulitzer Prize in biography; memoir, A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950, 2000.  Kendall: (1789-1869), attorney and journalist; Postmaster General of the United States, 1837-1840.  Bancroft: (1800-1891), author and historian, known as the “Father of American History”; minister to England, 1846-49; History of the United States, 10 vols., 1834-1874.  Brownson: (1803-1876), “educator and philosopher” (ANB); Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., Orestes Brownson: A Pilgrim’s Progress, 1939.  Ripley: (1802-1880), clergyman, writer, critic, co-founder of the Brook Farm Community.  Diary of a Public Man: this was published anonymously in North American Review, 1879.  Berle: Adolf A. Berle (1895-1971), Harvard ’13; author, attorney, braintruster in the Roosevelt administration; assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs, 1938; The Modern Corporation and Private Property, 1932.  Calhoun: John C. Calhoun (1782-1850), congressman, Secretary of War, 1817-25, Vice President of the United States, 1825-32, resigned in 1832 to become Senator from South Carolina; Secretary of State, 1843-45.  Rhett: Robert Barnwell Rhett (1800-1876), southern statesman, architect of secession.  Yancey: William Lowndes Yancey (1814-63), southern politican, Confederate commissioner and senator.  Greenbackers: the Greenback Party of 1874-76 sought to erase farm debts by inflating the currency; nominated Peter Cooper for president in 1876.  Free Silverites: after the panic of 1873, the Free Silver movement supported fluctuation of the price of silver; eventually arrived at a ratio of 16 to 1 in valuation of silver versus gold (Bland-Allison Act, 1878).  Mugwumps: epithet for Republicans who supported the Democrat Grover Cleveland for president over the Republican James G. Blaine in the election of 1884.  a plundered province: “The West: A Plundered Province,” Harper’s 179/3 (August 1934), reprinted in Forays and Rebuttals, 1936.  two Presidents, both War Heroes: William Henry Harrison (1773-1841), ninth president, known as “Tippecanoe” for his victory in an Indian battle (7 November 1810), died only a month after his inauguration; Zachary Taylor (1784-1850, known as “Old Rough and Ready”), twelfth president, 1849-50.  when it won in 1860: Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president, was the first Republican president.  Liberty Leaguers: the Liberty League was a short-lived organization of anti-Roosevelt conservatives, 1934-40.  Free Soil: the Free Soil party of 1847 opposed the institution of slavery in former Mexican territory; in 1848 it supported Martin Van Buren for president.  Homestead Act: 1862, granting 160 acres, a quarter section, of national land to homesteaders.  Pacific Railway Act: the Pacific Railroads Act of 1862 chartered the Union Pacific Railroad the same year.  National Bank Act: 1864; superseded by the Federal Reserve Act, 1913.

to Mr. Woodford
April 3, 1950

Dear Mr. Woodford:

Of course you have my permission to use the quotation from The Year of Decision you ask for.

Incidentally, I solicit you not to assist the growing conviction of publishers that permission for quotations has to be asked and if possible paid for.  The law is quite clear: “reasonable” quotation, which may run to many hundred words, is everybody’s right.  It is only when a writer stands to profit from the work of others rather than his own that he is infringing any law or
any custom of the publishing business.  If a man is merely editing someone else’s work, as in an anthology, he ought to pay for it.  If, however, he is commenting on it or using it illustratively he is entitled to use as much as he likes and the courts will so find.  Ethically and culturally a man who publishes a book puts it at the disposal of anyone who wants to use it.  If there is such a thing as cultural heritage, then it belongs to everyone and only those who expect to profit from it
should pay.

I look with distrust on the habit publishers have formed in recent years of trying to turn an illegitimate penny by making difficulties or by intimidation.  I regard my own stuff as freely available to anyone who wants to use it and as a matter of principle I do not ask permission when I quote.

Excuse the sermon but I regard the point as important.

Sincerely yours,

To Mr. Warren    
December 10, 1943

Dear Mr. Warren:

I’m afraid I never was much of a newspaperman, and I don’t think I can supply much color about those papers.  Probably the height of my career came the summer after I graduated from high school, which would make it 1914.  I covered the baseball games of the Union Association for the Glassman paper, which was called then either the Ogden Standard or the Ogden Evening Standard, I forget which.  I felt extremely adult and professional.  There was an honest to God press box, in front of, and in full view of, the grandstand.  It had a telephone by which I reported the score, inning by inning, to the Standard and to various local stores which posted it on their windows.  I felt that the eyes of the world were on me and developed a set of mannerisms that would have been adequate for Richard Harding Davis phoning stop-press stuff about the crash of empires.  The Standard went to press about game time and so my story didn’t appear till the next day.  I forget who represented the Examiner, the morning sheet later merged with the Standard, but somebody must have.  Or maybe Darrell Greenwell or Ralph Argubright wrote a story for it.  Greenwell was the Ogden correspondent of the Salt Lake Herald and Argubright of the Tribune — he was the league’s official scorer too.

I tremendously respect those two and looked up to them. They seemed to me the summit of sophistication, which I then conceived to be the distinguishing characteristic of newspapermen.  I listened attentively to them acquired their point of view, aped their talk, and revised my ideas of life and especially love to accord with theirs.  They kidded me a good deal but did me the decency to kid me as a member of the profession.  This gave me a sense of being an initiate, an insider, and was really a great kindness on their part and a great benefit to me — it helped me to grow up.  I was always awe-stricken when it came out that one or the other of them had read my story of the game.

I don’t remember much about those stories.  There were a number of young players in the Association who later got to be names in the big leagues — “Bullet Joe” Bush who helped win a world series for the Athletics, Swede Risberg who was one [of] the “Black Sox,” the White Sox team that threw a world series, somebody called Ducky Jones who played with Detroit, etc.  Also some ex-big leaguers who, of course, were splotes [sic] of violent color to me.  I wrote stuff about them in addition to writing the game — a sort of embryonic sports column.  But I can’t remember what sort of thing it was, except that occasionally Argubright or Greenwell would either praise me or bawl me out for something, which indicates that I was experimenting with phraseology.  I do remember that a player once hit an umpire with a bat and Frank Francis killed the paragraph I wrote about it, explaining that we didn’t editorialize in news stories.

I never followed the team farther than Salt Lake.  I’ll bet I followed it there at my own expense — if any.  I had worked for the Bamberger railroad  — Salt Lake and Ogden? —  and could always deadhead with one of my friends.

I don’t remember that Frank Francis taught me much.  There was a reporter named Lonnie West, who did teach me to write leads to my stuff and to check names, etc.  I remember that he was an orthodox Mormon, sometimes showed up at the pressbox or somewhere else where Greenwell and Argubright were, and got kidded about his orthodoxy.  He was my mentor at the Standard — though there was also a telegrapher there who liked me, who combed some of the hayseed out of my hair, and who also seemed to me the refined essence of world-weariness, disillusionment, and disenchantment.  Naturally I admired him beyond belief and incorporated his sophistication into the brand I was picking up from Greenwell and Argubright.  Years later I put him into a Saturday Evening Post story.  That, by the way, was one of a series, five or six, which used various details from my Standard days.  They were the best short stories I ever wrote.

I mostly ran errands for Lonnie West.  I covered the local Chautauqua and sometimes did hotels, or the court house, or what not when Lonnie had something else to do.  The big stuff was, of course, the police court but Lonnie usually took care to cover that himself, though I got a shot at it occasionally.  I ran round tirelessly, acting the young reporter all over the place.  I remember, as a specimen of my importance, that I once wrote two or three pages about the corpse of a horse on Washington Avenue.  Naturally, none of it got printed.

That was the longest period I worked for the Standard.  Later on I sometimes worked two or three weeks at a stretch when an extra or substitute was needed and I happened to be in town.  At such times I did the regular stint and, being older, did it a hell of a lot better.  Also, before 1914 I had occasionally written something for the Standard or the Examiner.  Newspapers fascinated me, they were romantic, and I hung around both offices a good deal.  Francis or the editor of the Examiner would ask me to cover something at the high school or something of the sort and I’d do it.  I remember I once tried to do some feature stuff for Francis — a kind of columnist at the age of sixteen — but never got anywhere with it.

There was one incident that has amused me a good deal.  When Homer Lea’s Valor of Ignorance was revived a couple of years ago — the book which foretells the war with Japan — I remembered that I had written a piece about it years before.  So I wrote out to Ogden and had the files of the Standard searched.  Sure enough, dated May 10, 1913, “The Reasonableness of World-Wide Conciliation.  By Bernard DeVoto, of Ogden High School.”  I was then a lieutenant in the high school cadet corps, which was run by a chap named Kneass, who had been in the Spanish-American War (or maybe the Philippines, I forget which), was captain of the local National Guard company, and later on was a major in the war.  That spring one of the world-peace foundations was conducting a big campaign.  Part of it was a nation-wide contest for essays on world peace by high school students.  There was a big to-do at Ogden High School and all the brightest boys and girls were solicited or stimulated to enter the contest.  It drove Kneass almost nuts.  I was the only writer in his cadet corps and he sought me out and asked me if I believed in world peace.  I didn’t believe anything one way or the other, but I was always agin everything, and the fact that the bright boys and girls were on one side would invariably put me on the other.  So Kneass evangelized me — we mustn’t let them get away with this, pacifism (if the word had been coined then) is the decay of civilization, we must save this nation from the bright poison, etc.  He gave me a copy of The Valor of Ignorance and bade me make some kind of noise to counteract the dangerous softness into which Ogden High School had fallen.  So I wrote the piece and the Standard published it, and the copy which I had made a couple of years back is one of my most valuable possessions.  I want to tell you, it’s a honey.  It’s the most doom-prophesying, saber-rattling, let-us-save-the-white-race, military-power-is-the-vigor-of-nations job you ever saw in your life, and the rhetoric of a sixteen-year-old evangelist is something.  Homer Lea wrote it all right, but by God I rewrote it.

I spent one year, 1914-1915, at the University of Utah and occasionally hung round the Tribune office.  I don’t remember whether I ever wrote anything for it or not.  I think I did at the time of the then celebrated faculty purge and secession at the U.  I was the young revolutionist, spouting about free speech and the horrid Mormon suppressions.  (I had also helped to organize a chapter of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, which was ordered not to meet on the campus.)  I remember writing some verses lampooning the president of the University and I must have written other stuff.

While I was at Harvard I occasionally wrote some stuff for the Boston Herald.

I think that covers my newspaper career, bearing in mind that up to 1922, when I left Utah for good, I occasionally worked for a few days at the Standard.  I remember interviewing de Valera in 1920, the president then in absentia of the Irish Free State….

Incidentally, someone taught me, sometime or other, the rudiments of interviewing.  Every once in a while I am appalled by an interviewer who comes to see me, hasn’t looked up my name or what I’ve done, doesn’t know why he’s interviewing me, and cannot conceal the fact that he never heard of me until he got the assignment and has done nothing about it on the way to my house.  I have enough residual feeling for the newspaper business to feel humiliated, not on my behalf but on behalf of his paper.  I’ve had that experience in a good many places — I had it at Indianapolis last spring when I was delivering lectures on the University’s biggest and best advertised foundation, and one of those birds showed up and I had to write his interview for him.  But I never had it worse than I did in Ogden a few years ago — 1940 — when I was in town for the first time in years and the Standard sent a youth round to see me.  I finally got so sore that I delivered a lecture on how to find out who a man is before you go to see him.  I told him about the morgue and the public library in considerable detail, and finally informed him, I trust with considerable hauteur, that I had once worked for his paper and that the newspaper business had an old and sacred tradition about former members of the local staff.

I remember the Tribune as by far the best paper in Utah in my time.  Maybe the memory of Frank Cannon contributed to that feeling, for he was not only a family friend but the Great Apostate as well, and so all but holy in my sight.  But I think it was a good paper, regardless of that.  There was another evening paper in Ogden called, I think, the Journal or the Utah Journal, or something of the sort.  It folded while I still lived there, but something of the same anti-Mormon tradition was associated with it.  Those must have been great days, the days when the Gentile papers crusaded and the Mormon papers fought back.  It was long over when I became aware of it, of course, but I heard stories and still retain something of that glamour.  I’ve always intended sometime to read my way through the files of the Tribune and maybe write something about it.

I don’t know how much I was reflecting the emotions of my father, who hated the elder Glassman all his life, but I had, in those days, a firm belief that the Standard was just the agent of what we would nowadays call rackets run by old Bill.  I guess he was something of a crook and certainly there was a vast and vivid folklore about him.  C. C. Goodwin, of course, was the great man of Utah journalism and there was a story, I don’t know how true it is but it has the superficial earmarks of truth, that C. C. was toastmaster at a banquet of newspaper editors and managers from all over the West and had the duty of introducing Bill Glassman.  He faced his duty like a man and introduced him, the story runs, in these words:  “…Bill Glassman, the kind of son of a bitch who would steal his mother’s marriage license to prove himself a bastard for five dollars.”  That checked with what I heard and firmly believed about the old man.  I also hated the guts of young Bill, who was something of a thug and a good deal of a bully and one [who(?)] beat hell out of me in a fist fight.  I liked the oldest Glassman boy, Roscoe.  I imagine that Abe was the power house.  He was shrewd, likable, and probably not too scrupulous — had something of his father’s careful discrimination among the finer shades of honesty.

When I was setting up as a writer I did a piece for the Mercury on Utah.  It was tolerably painful stuff, very Mencken, not too accurate, and full of the young revolutionist line.  Still, it was also tolerably tame.  But it wasn’t received tamely.  It hit the local inferiority complex dead center and rocked the state as few things have since the Liberal Party days.  I not only got the Church’s curse in hundreds of columns, practically every paper in the state raised hell with me and went on raising hell for, literally, years.  I am still not respectable in Utah and though I long ago made amends in my writing for that piece and have, I think, written more favorably about the Mormon Church than any other Gentile who ever lived, every new book of mine is reviewed all over the state in terms of that old Mercury piece.

I don’t remember anyone in my time who turned out to be a writer.  I think that Lewellyn Jones, later literary editor of the Chicago Post and at one time something of a literary figure, worked for the Journal at some time, I don’t know when.  At any rate, when I knew him in Chicago he was full of Glassman stories.  There was a real estate man in Ogden who dated back to the Liberal Party days and retained his anti-Mormon fire.  His name was O. A. Kennedy.  He developed into something of an antiquarian, and wrote many pieces about early Ogden and Utah history.  They were incredibly badly written but they had a genuine feeling for the past and he knew enough to do research.  They are very valuable stuff indeed and I have a great respect for them.  It was a curious period — practically nobody had any interest in local history.  We owe a good deal to men like him.  Now that we are interested in western history we have such men to thank for the preservation of material, clues, leads, and records that would otherwise have disappeared entirely.

There were some eccentric literary figures.  A mining man named Don Maguire wrote thousands of pages of fiction, very bad, inconceivably bad, and other thousands of pages of reminiscences of the old West which I would give an eye to see now, since he knew a lot and found out more.  A doctor named Roche, also of Ogden, wrote a long epic in blank verse and published it at his own expense.  Also bad beyond belief; I found a copy of it some years ago in Widener Library and leafed through it, remembering how he had talked it over with my father.  Of course Wilbert Snow, the poet, taught at the University.  In fact, he was one of those who were fired in the purge mentioned above.  He was my instructor in freshman English.  I see him occasionally for he is the most revered professor at Connecticut Wesleyan now and we talk like gaffers about those brave days of revolt.

You see, I haven’t anything much to your purpose.  It’s a pious purpose, however, and I wish you success at it.  I’m damned glad that you’re doing that particular job.  It badly needs doing and we’ll all be in your debt.  If I can help in any way, don’t hesitate to call on me.  I’m in Washington mostly, these days, and will be for six months more, with possible excursions overseas, but you can always reach me here.

Sincerely yours,

to Jarvis Thurston

May 24, 1943

Dear Mr. Thurston:

I have long intended to thank you for your understanding and uniformly generous reviews of my stuff and defense of me generally in Ogden.  I am once more in debt to you now for an excellent and unquestionably over-kind review of my new book [The Year of Decision: 1846].  But what finally pricks me out of amiable intention into action is not that review but a clipping which I take to be from Frank Francis’s column in which he quotes you.  I gather that Frank had said something about me in his column previously but, if he did, my clipping bureau missed it.  Well, you bring up the question of those two early articles of mine and I’m in a mood to make a statement about them.  I make it to you, to show you how I feel and think about them today, for your private information.  If at any time you care to quote any part, or all, of what I say, you have my full permission to do so.  But I am not interested in your doing so: I am making an explanation to a man whom I recognize as a supporter of mine in my home town.

Many years have passed since I would have attempted any justification whatever of those two articles.  They were ignorant, brash, prejudiced, malicious, and, what is worst of all, irresponsible.  They were absolutely in the Mercury mood of illegitimate and dishonest attack.  They represented the only occasions in my career when I yielded to that mood.  I have spent practically all my literary life attacking other manifestations of that mood, and I have always regarded my yielding to it on those occasions as an offense which can be neither justified nor palliated.

There was, and doubtless remains, much in the life and culture of Utah which could be legitimately criticized.  Some of the things I said in those articles made points which would have been legitimate criticism if I had said them fairly and objectively — and if the entire mood and atmosphere of the articles had not been atrociously offensive.  It was, and doubtless remains, thoroughly possible to oppose some of the tendencies and manifestations of civilization in Utah on reasonable, empirical grounds.  But that consideration is irrelevant, since my criticism and opposition were embodied in a lot of prejudice, irresponsible humor, and a general yanking out of shirttails and setting them on fire.

I cannot now remember whether I realized as much when I was writing.  Certainly I realized it soon afterward.  I believe that everything I have written about Utah and the Mormon Church ever since has been fair-minded and objective.  I go farther than that: I think that everything I have written about them since those articles has been informed by a basic sympathy.  But again, that does not matter…except that very little I have since written about them has been taken into account by the people who go on denouncing me.

Why did I write them, and write them as I did?  Well, for one thing I was a young buck, intoxicated with the newly achieved privilege of publication, full of wild and yeasty irreverence, and obviously gifted at burlesque and extravaganza.  (That last, I may say parenthetically, is an embarrassing, occasionally dangerous gift.  It has recurrently thrown me throughout my career and even now sometimes prods me into writing gs rolex oyster perpetual m277200 0009 ladies 31mm oyster bracelet silver tone passages which react against the serious intention of my work.  We have been told that a sense of humor is fatal to a career in politics.  It is a handicap to any career in literature and an extremely serious handicap to a career in social criticism.  It has joined with a habit of using concrete words to keep my stature in contemporary letters considerably smaller than it would have been if I had expressed myself solemnly and abstractly.  In beautiful letters, the light touch is dangerous.)  For another thing, I was, if a cocky young fool, also an over-sensitive young fool — and I had, or thought I had, been widely snooted and derided in Utah for presuming to desire a career as a writer.  Ogden, Utah generally, is a far more sophisticated, far more cultivated society now than it was when I was growing up there.  In my adolescence I was certainly the only person in the state, male or female, who aspired to such a career.  The fact that such an ambition is now fairly common there and is treated as a matter of course is a sign, not that I was wrong and the attitude toward me right, but that the local culture has progressed in thirty-odd years.  At any rate, I was widely treated as a fool on the one hand, for it must be foolish of me to suppose that I could ever be a writer, and as a kind of pansy on the other hand, for obviously only the epicene would aspire to a career so obviously trivial and even sissy as that of writer.  I was, I repeat, widely snooted and derided on just those grounds.  Now unquestionably I exaggerated this, but unquestionably also it existed.  The attitude was not, at that time, confined to Utah; it was characteristic of provincial America everywhere although I think it was more evident in Utah than in most places, for Utah was nearer than most places to the pioneer society in which literary activity has always been considered foolish and sissy.  I resented it violently — much more than I should have resented it if I had been older, wiser, more cultivated myself, or more sophisticated.  So I reacted against it when I came to write those articles.  In some degree they were acts of self-vindication, in some degree acts of revenge.

Later on, I deeply regretted having written them.  I do not regret them now.  I conceive that the damage they did to Utah was nil — was wholly non-existent.  (In all those years of the Mercury‘s slam-bang, indiscriminate derision of American life, was any attack on any community written that is now remembered in the community attacked, save only mine?  I doubt it.  An antiquarian, a historian of that period, I am familiar with most of those attacks and as I go about the country I inquire about them.  I never find anyone except antiquarians and historians who remembers them.  And most of those people do not remember them at first hand but have encountered them in research.)  They did Utah no harm and they did me much good.  For one thing they succeeded in rousing a historian’s conscience in me, so that I have never again written anything without knowing what I was talking about.  But what is much more important, they have enabled me to understand that period, the youth and young manhood of my own generation, as I should never have been able to understand it if I had not both written and repented them.  They were absolutely and altogether of my literary generation.  The revolt against the home town and the dishonest attack on it are type-specimens, absolute stigmata, of the period.  My own career in letters has been in absolute opposition to the main literary current of my time.  From my second novel on to my present book and the one now in manuscript, I have set myself to oppose the ideas, concepts, theories, sentiments, and superstitions of the official literature of the United States between the two wars.  If I have any significance as a writer, it derives entirely from that fact.  And that fact in turn rests, intellectually, on two realizations: my realization of what I had done in writing those articles and my realization of what Van Wyck Brooks had done in evolving and elaborating his system of thinking about American culture.  I could not have understood my literary generation, and certainly could not have taken a stand in opposition to it, without either experience.

So much for my part.  Let me add what I believe to be true about the reception of those articles in Utah and their subsequent reputation there.

We cannot imagine those articles being written today: the world has changed too much.  Mutatis mutandis, granting the idioms and sentiments of this later time, if the equivalent of those articles were to be published today, they would, I think, cause considerably less stir and offense in Utah.  The state has grown more sophisticated, it has come to understand more what intellectual and literary discussion are, it has become at least a little more tolerant.  More people are accustomed to the play and interchange and expression of ideas.  Ideas are more likely to be received as ideas, not epithets, not insults, not imputations of dishonor.  The booster state of mind, which in the West of the 1920s was the equivalent of the vigilante state of mind in earlier days, has lapsed considerably.  If I or someone else were to say the same things today, in today’s idioms, there would be a lot less fuss.

And yet it is true, I think, that Utah, and especially the Mormon culture, is extremely sensitive and intolerant to criticism and even to difference of opinion in which there is no criticism whatever.  That is probably true of the West in general, as distinguished from other sections, even the South, but it is more true of Utah and the Mormons than of the rest of the West.  I have been, not surprised, but exceedingly interested to see the old patterns repeated in the comments I get, in correspondence mostly, about my current book.  There can be no question whatever that that book contains the Με Ενσωματωμένη Μπαταρία Mods 2023 most sympathetic treatment of the Mormons ever published by a Gentile.  Any dispassionate mind need only compare it with, say, Linn or Werner.  It is packed full of the most flagrant and even fulsome praise of the Mormons, condemnation of their oppressors, admiration of their achievements, sympathy with their suffering, patient exposition of their point of view.  Yet I receive a steady stream of vilification on the old, familiar grounds (you’re a liar, you’re a mobocrat, you’re a homosexual, you’re a publicity seeker, you’re a cheap sensationalist, you’re a defiler of the prophet and an author of filthy pornography, etc.), the Deseret Book Company holds up its order until it determines whether the book is sanitary or should be burnt by the public hangman (and how it made up its mind I haven’t bothered to investigate), and somebody to me unknown sends my publisher a copy of a radio script which discusses the book purely in terms of those two old articles, as if there were nothing else in it.  Except for you, nobody in the state reviews the book.  Except for three or four people, and they friends of mine mostly, everyone who writes to me damns me for having blasphemed the religion of which, it is repeatedly pointed out, my mother was a communicant.

Now in the first place I think it is true, as you say in Frank Francis’s column, that most of these people who are so sore at me have not read the articles.  They know my name as that of a son of a bitch who once wrote a lot of damned lies about Utah, and that relieves them of any obligation to know either what those damned lies were or what the present book is.  But in the second place, it is lugubriously true that the orthodox Mormon mind cannot tolerate any objective treatment of Mormon history whatever.  All treatment of the Mormons must completely accept the Mormon doctrinal, metaphysical, and supernatural assumptions.  If it does not accept them, then it is ipso facto prejudiced, unjust, and libelous.  All Mormon actions have always been pure and sanitary; all criticism of them has always been evil and mendacious.  Who is not for them is against them.  That is why the fact that I have presented the Mormons to the readers of American history more sympathetically and with a more careful exposition of their relationships to their time than anyone had done before me goes without recognition in the abuse heaped on me.  It is enough that I do not accept the Mormon assumptions.  This is what I have sometimes called the Mormon inferiority complex.  Something of the sort is, of course, part of all religious orthodoxy.  Yet it is perfectly possible for any writer to handle any other religion in America objectively and to be answered objectively in turn.  It is not possible of the Mormons, and that is further evidence of their cultural lag.

All this makes no difference to me.  I have no desire for Mormon praise and no need of Mormon approval.  Neither do I desire the people of my home town to pay me any respect whatever.  It certainly matters nothing to them that I have become a writer and, as one, have frequently written about the West.  I should rather have them friendly toward me than otherwise, but I have become so thoroughly a part of a different society that I am fundamentally indifferent.  I dislike it when I get a letter of fulsome praise from some Ogdenite who has seen my name in the papers and is impressed by the publicity without giving a damn for the work and, most likely, without having read it.  To the same degree, I dislike it when I get a letter full of equally ignorant abuse.  I should like to know that there are a few people in Utah who like me, without reference to my work, and a few who like my work, without reference to me.  And I should like those who dislike my work to dislike it with reference to the work itself, not with reference to idiocies I committed long ago, which they may know, besides, only by hearsay.

When one is young and idiotic there may be some ambition to be known as a final authority, an important writer, a man of distinction and publicity or even fame.  It doesn’t last: one matures.  One comes to understand that what counts is the honesty and thoroughness of the work.  I should find it hard to state exactly what my ambition as a mature man is.  It would run something like this: to do good work, to do work in which I may take some satisfaction and my friends some pleasure; at the utmost, as Frost once said of Robinson, to put something on the record that will not easily be dislodged.

All this doubtless sounds vague and inconclusive.  Some weeks ago I came down with a streptococcus infection, the most serious illness I can remember having had, and my mind has lacked teeth ever since.  I began with some notion of expressing my thanks to you and my feeling that you read me with much more understanding and sympathy than most writers get from most readers, and that in a very warming way you are a friend of mine.

Sincerely yours,

[The remarks in the second paragraph to “those two articles” refer to “Ogden: The Underwriters of Salvation” and “Utah,” published in 1925 and 1926 respectively.]

to Rose Wilder Lane

June 12th, 1942

Dear Mrs. Lane:

I was going to argue with you a month ago, but now that I clear my desk and get down to it,  I don’t see what the argument is about. I have no love for the English, and feel first, that peace can bring us no greater boon than the privilege of resuming our mutual dislike and second, that that dislike has proved itself an excellent basis for international relationships.

On the other hand, I cannot at your solicitation amend my feeling that on the whole the British have been far gentler than the Germans or the Dutch or the Spanish or the Portuguese or anyone else who ever went into the empire business, and that on the whole the power of the British empire was the great stabilizing force that made possible the very industrial revolution that you praise.  I have no quarrel with you about that revolution or about our function in it.  Nevertheless, as a veteran of one war who hopes to be a veteran of this one also, and as a veteran intellectual and something of a historian, I hope to God that we are not going to face the world again with the innocent idealism which we innocently found was so horribly raped after the last one.

We are not going to dominate the world with tractors, automobiles or cigarettes.  We are going to dominate it, if at all, in a highly realistic partnership with those who help us win.  Russia has still a large part, and China has all of the 19th Century to go through — not necessarily a guarantee of perfect accord to come.

I am sorry, but I continue to find not only our hope, but what we are calling the hope of mankind best guaranteed by an intelligent American adaptation of the principles which the British Empire contrived to put into effect for nearly a century.

Sincerely yours,

In an active career Bernard DeVoto (1897-1955) was a journalist, essayist, novelist, literary critic, historian, conservationist, college teacher, and all-around professional writer who once said in a letter, “I am a literary department store.”  During his lifetime he published 20 books and about 800 miscellaneous pieces in magazines and other public fora, including essays, reviews, polemics, commentaries, addresses, and editorials; in private he wrote letters numbering in the thousands.  For twenty years he presided over a monthly column, “The Easy Chair,” in Harper’s Magazine and contributed dozens of other articles to that magazine as well as to many others.  In 1932 he published a book-length study of Mark Twain, the first of five such analyses or collections; the last of these, Letters From the Earth, was published in 1962, seven years after DeVoto’s death.  From 1936 to 1938 DeVoto worked in New York City as editor of  The Saturday Review of Literature, to which he had already been a regular contributor.  In 1943 he published the first volume in a trilogy about the history of the American West, The Year of Decision: 1846; this was followed by Across the Wide Missouri (Pulitzer Prize, 1948) and The Course of Empire (National Book Award, 1953); all three of these books are still in print today, as is his popular edition of The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1953).

Bernard DeVoto was born and raised in Ogden, Utah.  Following a year at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, he transferred to Harvard College, and majored in philosophy.  He graduated cum laude in 1920 after 16 months of service in the Army during the Great War.   He taught public school for a year, and then moved to Illinois to teach in the English Department at Northwestern University from 1922 to 1927.  In 1923 he married Avis MacVicar, who had been a student in his expository writing class, and in 1924 published his first novel, The Crooked Mile.  In 1927 he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in 1929 began seven years of teaching at Harvard University.  He published three more novels before leaving Harvard for his editorial position in New York; except for occasional short visits, he never went back to college teaching, though he did earn four honorary degrees.

Back in Cambridge from 1938, DeVoto earned a living mostly as a freelance writer, working on his histories and supporting his family in part by writing potboiler novels under the pseudonym of John August, and in 1947 his last work of serious fiction, Mountain Time, was published under his own name.  Other books that he published include two volumes of literary analysis, The Literary Fallacy (1944) and The World of Fiction (1950); a lighthearted tribute to American whiskey and the dry martini, The Hour (1951); and three collections of essays, the last of which, The Easy Chair, appeared two weeks before his premature death in 1955.    He left an important examination of the history and ecology of the American West about two-thirds finished in draft; this was edited by Patricia Nelson Limerick and Douglas Brinkley and published as The Western Paradox in 2001 (Yale University Press), summarizing a decade of DeVoto’s thought and research about conservation and politics of the American public lands.  A related collection, DeVoto’s West: History, Conservation, and the Public Good, edited by Edward Muller (Swallow Press of Ohio University Press) and including a number of DeVoto’s other writings, was published in 2005.

A biography of Bernard DeVoto, The Uneasy Chair,  by his close friend Wallace Stegner, was published in 1974; a collection of DeVoto’s letters, also edited by Stegner, appeared the following year.  In 2012 the University of Utah Press published The Selected Letters of Bernard DeVoto and Katharine Sterne, containing about 150 letters and memoirs chosen from some 800 items of an eleven-year correspondence.   Bernard DeVoto wrote about his own family history in two letters, to Robert Forsythe in 1927 and to Kate Sterne in 1936.

to Mr. Williams

May 2, 1945

Dear Mr. Williams:

As a historian, I have considerable respect for the type of Missourian you sketch. Granted all you say about their clan loyalties, their stubborn conservatism, and their complete willingness to admire the feats of thugs and outlaws, they nevertheless have a very valuable courage, sense of justice, realism, and unwillingness to be stampeded, which when directed into socially useful channels can be very valuable indeed. In Mr. Truman’s public life at least, I do not say that they have had anything but a beneficial effect. I am not in the least appalled by his connection with the Pendergast machine. Since Washington, exceedingly few presidents have reached their office without the support of machines just as bad or worse. Just under fifty percent of all the corruptionists in the United States supported Lincoln, with Lincoln’s acquiescence, and the percentage that supported Franklin Roosevelt was just as great, and I should not care to lose the Administrations of either from our history.

The Truman Committee did a very courageous job. As a matter of fact, it seems to me that Mr. Truman is the only member of either House of Congress who grew in stature during the war years. When you consider how many more than one there were in the Civil War and First World War Congresses, that fact alone seems to me very reassuring. In fact, I think that Mr. Truman comes very close to that hypothetical creature, the mean of the American mind and character. If he does, we have a ready test of that mind and character, and whatever their variations I believe in them. I think he is likely to be a good President. At any rate, nothing on the record suggests that he is a Johnson, and only Republican campaign oratory has suggested that he is a Coolidge.

I have been trying to get to St. Louis for some scholarly research for nearly a year, but so far have not succeeded in making it. I will have to get there eventually. I hope that you and I can meet when I do and talk it out over a stein of Michelob, which is not available in these uncivilized parts.

Sincerely yours,