January 2011

THE SPRUCE GOOSE FINDS A NEST OF A FLAG AND A FACE HOLIDAY FARE THE ELKS UNCORKED

On July 19,1942, Henry J. Kaiser- whose construction company had helped to build Boulder Dam and was now grinding out Liberty Ships by the dozen—attended the launching of the Harvey W. Scott in his yards and presented the assembled crowd with a vision he believed would win the war for America: “We will be able to put down a vast army, anywhere in the world, within a single week. We will be free once and for all of the fear of having our Armies cut off in some place distant from our shores. . . . The whole world will be our front yard. And our enemies will be beaten to their knees.”

It was some fourteen months later, or five months after Pearl Harbor, that my wife and I drove down from our home in Manhattan, Kansas, to spend a weekend with the Whites in Emporia.

My contact with him was through his “literary” side. In that unpropitious season (I was awaiting the draft) I had published a first novel. White, as one of the original four judges of the Bookof-the-Month Club, had read it in galleys, had made a glowing speech about it at the annual meeting of the Kansas Authors Club, and had, he told me, pressed hard though in vain for its book-club selection. Of course we talked a good deal about literature and writing as a profession that weekend—good talk, with White and Sallie expressing judgments of contemporary authors that were both shrewd and sensitively appreciative.

In 1874 an Iowa farmer named Lorenzo Coffin watched the train he was riding hook on to a freight car. A brakeman stood between the car and the train, ready to couple them. He miscalculated, and Coffin saw the man fall to the ground shrieking, two fingers sheared from his right hand.

He could never have so assailed big businessmen five years before. He would be as incapable of so assailing ethnic minorities five years hence. And the event upon which he editorialized speeded this change of mind and heart.

For McKinley’s death placed White’s great and good friend T.R. in the White House. Soon opened the Progressive Era—the confidently forward-looking years of “practical idealism” and social reform when White’s literary and political impulses, his attraction toward power and his instinctive generosity, his private ambition and his commitment to the general welfare, were brought into their closest harmony. By 1905 he was writing Gazette editorials frankly confessing that the Populists had been far nearer the truth than he in 1896.

Yet even during these happiest of his years, when he most nearly achieved an unflawed integrity of mind and spirit, White remained profoundly selfdivided. The nature of his self-division (so typically American, so of the essence of what a philosophical historian might diagnose as the Middle American malaise) was clearly revealed to critical eyes in a novel he produced during this period.

A Certain Rich Man was published in 1909. It was commercially but not artistically successful. And the root cause of both the success and the failure (given White’s writing talent) was his refusal, perhaps his constitutional inability, to pay the price of basic consistency in dealing with his subject matter. His often brilliant intuitions and flashes of wisdom—psychological, historical, sociological, economic—were in the end merely tantalizing, even irritating, since he invariably drew back from their logical long-run implications whenever these might seriously shock what he conceived to be his immediate audience.

By the demise of the Bull Moose, White was presented with a fairly clear-cut choice among three possibilities. He might declare himself politically independent, shift major emphasis from active politics to his literary career, and, as author and journalist, commit himself wholly to truth, justice, and beauty as he saw and felt them. He might join the Democracy of Woodrow Wilson who, after all, had adopted in 1916 much of the New Nationalism that T.R. was abandoning and who, like White, was “eager to see the rising power of industrialism checked, controlled and channelled to the common good.” Last, he might follow T.R.’s “leadership” back into the Republican party, which he had repudiated on grounds of principle in 1912, and whose organization, because of Bull Moose defections, was now more firmly in the hands of predatory big-business interests than it had been then.

Either of the first two choices would have jibed with White’s continuing progressivism. But the choice he made was the third.