Stokes: Looking back
By Thomas L. Stokes
New York –
It is trite to say it, but it is more true every time you experience it – the thrill that comes from going across the country and back again by train, as a number of us have done with Governor Dewey.
It gives you fresh enthusiasm and fresh energy for the plunge back into the selfish and self-confident East, which is not near so important as it thinks it is, and not half as human and thoughtful.
The experience makes you humble, almost reverent, wo see how much we have and how fine it is, and from what we started and what we have made of it.
It makes you understand why farm boys and city boys fight for it, and die for it. We massed them on this journey into America.
They will be back, the larger part of those boys, and they will grumble at what they find back home. That is as it should be. too, for that is what made us what we are, that continual discontent with things as they are. Some of them, too, will go to hospital beds, and some will lie there, disconsolate, watching the sands of life run out. And these, and so many others, will be disillusioned.
America is their sustenance and America cannot fail them again, as it did once before. Somehow, too, alter seeing America again, you have a faith that she will not fail them. We surely have learned much in the years between.
They will go back
They will go back to the places we have seen on this trip.
And they are good places, for the most part, except for those bleak tenements you see in the large cities. They are still there, though not so many as they once were.
The rolling prairie of Illinois, with the corn standing there in contentment, whispering to the wind. Iowa at dusk, a gracious country, with its comfortable farm houses and its big barns silhouetted against the horizon. The great stretches of Nebraska, now bare, now fruitful. The uplands of Wyoming and Montana where the sheep and cattle graze. And the mountains in the distance, with the cool and quiet refuge among the trees that you are conscious is there. and the jumping stream, hopping down the rocks, that the Indians knew and our children and our grandchildren shall know.
Suddenly, one morning, you raise the shade, and there are the Cascade Mountains, like long lines of furry bears, ambling off into the distance. Then you are riding down the Pacific Coast, through her lovely valleys so green and inviting, like the green pastures in the Psalms. There is San Francisco and that gorgeous harbor, and the people who live with a grace that New York cannot know. Los Angeles rises up like a great, luscious lady of pleasure, demanding her price always, a beautiful face and a cold heart.
It is a relief to strike the waste places again, desolate as they look from the train window, in Arizona and New Mexico, against the background of stark, lonely mountains for there at least is space, and some place to move around as an individual.
Good to remember people
Always, everywhere, are the small towns, lined up along the railroad track, where people still go to church on Sunday, where they grumble now at the restrictions somebody in Washington puts on them, and yet who give their boys unsparingly. To understand that, you have to know America.
It is good to remember the people as we saw them, so friendly to the stranger, so hospitable, so thoughtful, and yet apologetic, in a pioneer fashion, at what they offer to the visitor from the East who is so grateful for it all, and yet unable to say his thanks, self-conscious and humble in the realization of it.
And you remember, as you look back, the stout, dominating ladies of the GAR Auxiliary at Des Moines who were shepherding the handful of Civil War veterans about at their convention; the trainman and his wife who lived in a railroad car on the high plateau of the Cascades, sitting there watching the Dewey special train as it stopped for water; the four little Negro girls, neat and shining, who stood, hand in hand, along the street to watch the New York governor and his wife ride by in the parade at her home town of Sapulpa.
And the kids who run along the street and shout “Fooey for Dewey” and “We Want Roosevelt” and who, if the President should come along. Would probably invent some slogan that wouldn’t be complimentary to him.
For that’s the way American children are, and that’s why they fight for their rights when they get older.
And that’s the way their older brothers were who now are fighting in earnest somewhere.
It’s a great land – and it is still free.