“many different kinds of negroes”

 

On a personal note This blog site was set up for me by my friend Jon Crosby, whose technological know-how and patience far exceeded mine. Jon and I were both students at Northgate Grammar School for Boys in Ipswich from 1963-1970, and close neighbours. In 1970 we were the two boys from Northgate admitted by Cambridge colleges (King’s in Jon’s case); two more went to Oxford. Jon would often send me comments on the pieces I wrote, and also his own descriptions of rambles around London and the like. Alas, Jon died this month, so I finished this piece too late for him to comment, but with a long and enduring friendship very much in mind.

 

In the 1950s the Police Department of Milwaukee issued to its officers a booklet on the subject of race relations. The officers learned that “our grandparents, or even we, have emerged from differing and alien cultural backgrounds, so that we do not dress, eat and live alike, and, most important, do not look alike”. The officers were encouraged to understand that “Until we realize that there are just as many different kinds of negroes as there are different kinds of policemen [note ‘men’], we shan’t be able to make intelligent and creditable decisions.” The events of 2020 suggest that, far from learning such lessons, 70 or more years later many American police forces have regressed from the culture to which Milwaukee PD aspired.

 

This passage struck me as I read one of my Christmas gifts, Jan Morris’ account of her life and travels in the USA in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Coast to Coast. Morris (who was a he at the time of writing) notes that the residents of Cranbury, New Jersey, a mere stone’s throw from Princeton, lived “in a good deal of comfort” with their refrigerator, television set, washing machine, new car, central heating, and that all-American gadget that grinds trash before it is washed down the kitchen waste pipe. However, things in Cranbury were not quite so comfortable for everybody. Each year migrant workers, “mostly Negroes”, arrived in Cranbury for the potato harvest to be housed with their families in shacks and huts. The good people of Cranbury arranged schooling for the children, provided meals and organized occasional outings, for “They care little about racial antipathies. Indeed, any distinction that I could detect between black and white in Cranbury was purely economic, the blacks being mostly indigent and ill-educated, for even the Negroes resident in Cranbury migrated not long ago from the abyss of the South.”

 

The Cranbury Inn, established 1780

Morris notes that in one of the buildings in Princeton Washington presided over the Continental Congress. He had crossed the Delaware and roundly defeated the British in three battles at Trenton to the south of Princeton. Morris notes that later Southern gentlemen would attend the hallowed halls of learning, attended by their personal slaves.

 

Nassau Hall, Princeton, last redoubt of the British forces against Washington's army

However, Morris had no time for the genteel racism of the Southern planters. He recalled a visit to a Mississippi plantation that belonged to a Mr Parker. Once, at 10,000 acres, one of the great estates of the region, the Parkers now farmed a mere 150 acres. As Morris and Parker sipped long cool drinks on the porch, “a great cloud of dust approached us from the drive”. The dust was raised by a mule-drawn contraption driven by a Negro retainer, Uncle Henry, who politely addressed Mr Parker: “G’d evening, boss, sir; g’d evening, Missus Parker”. It would, of course, have been quite unthinkable, Morris observed, to invite Uncle Henry to join them for drinks.

 

While Morris was appalled by the vile treatment and “gentlemanly” racism of the South, Uncle Henry is the only individual Negro included in the pages of the book. Not a single Mexican appears, although a few Indians of various tribes put in an appearance. For Morris is painting a picture, as an Englishman perceived it, of that great America emerging from the Second World War. He tells of the booming economy of a new world power, a nation of the American dream, so enticing for its Anglo population, much less so for those of other races, for whom, Morris notes, an extensive list of demeaning sobriquets had been invented. 

 

It occurred to me that today’s gun-toting America first vigilantes might well dream of a return to the America of Cranbury c.1960. That was an America in which the black man had his place and had better know it, or he’d be in trouble. Mexicans were where they belonged in the fruit and vegetable farms of California, or doing the heavy dirty work in Texas. Jews were not welcome in the country club, and certainly no Muslims in the extraordinary event that a Muslim might apply. And assorted other ethnic groups knew the social limits imposed on them.

 

Morris had an eye and ear for telling details. For example, so smoky was the atmosphere of Pittsburgh, the steel capital of the USA, that the per capita expenditure on laundry bills was $41. When the city introduced measures to clean the air, the laundry lobby fought the changes tooth and nail. After all, it was the smoke that dirtied the shirts etc. that the citizens of Pittsburgh paid the laundries to launder. The laundries lost, much to the satisfaction of the railways, whose executives had long wished to switch from coal to diesel, but dared not do so for fear of offending their biggest customers, the coal barons who powered the steel mills.

 

Pittsburgh, 1950 (photo Elliott Erwitt)

When he discusses the great Mississippi river, the watery highway that made America a great economy, Morris finds the Bill of Fare of the Steamer Monarch from 31 March 1861. Passengers were offered no fewer than six roasts, five Hot Entrées, including the mysterious Curbancedes of Mutton Garnished with New Potatoes (if any reader can tell me what a Curbancedes was I would be most grateful). If your tastes ran to the cold, you could try Potted Fowl and Tongue Ornamented with Jelly, or Boned Turkey with Champagne Jelly or Cream with Apple Jelly. Prefer game? Why not try Teal Duck Braised á la Madeira? There were five pies (including an exotic Whortleberry pie), an Apple and Gooseberry Tart, six cakes, and a dizzying array of Miscellaneous, including Cabinet Pudding, Russian Cream, Boston Cream Cake, and just plain “Cake”.

 

Jefferson County, Montana, was, it seems, uranium country in 1950s America. Some of the mineral was mined for the new atomic bombs, but many mines were marketed as health spas, where customers could benefit from the health-giving properties of the atomic gases and rays. Mines were equipped with waiting rooms with chintz curtains, “dainty rest rooms” and lifts.

 

Radon therapy at the Free Enterprise Radon Mine

Another mining story provides Morris with some attention-grabbing facts. Virginia City, Nevada, was the centre for the mining of the Comstock Lode. So significant had the production of gold been here, that the discovery of one deposit persuaded Bismarck to abandon the silver standard. The immense wealth generated by the mine gave Virginia City the International Hotel, with a famous restaurant and the first elevator to be installed anywhere between Chicago and San Francisco. There was an opera house where Virginia City’s rowdy citizens could once hear the best voices that money (but not taste) could buy. And in the city’s heyday shops had sold the latest Paris couturier fashions in desolate Nevada.

 

A view of C Street, Virginia City

Morris’ book is a good read, but not nearly as satisfying as his truly brilliant portrait of post-war New York, Manhattan ’45. For memorable anecdotes and facts don’t of themselves make a satisfying story of a vast and sprawling nation. But it did remind me of the question I was once asked by the owner of one of the publishing companies I worked for. This man owned a publishing company in New York, but loathed the USA, where he paid me to spend a good portion of my year. At a leaving party for a colleague he asked me “Do you really enjoy spending so much time in America?” I replied that I have never been anywhere in the country that did not have something interesting to be learned.

 

Of course, not everything is positive. You don’t have to spend much time in the USA to hear commentators and politicians speak of the “victim culture”. The injustices of slavery, so the argument goes, have been swept away by the civil rights campaigns of the 1950s and 60s and the resulting legislation. That fixed the problem, and any further complaints of injustice and inequality are the unjustified grumblings of minorities who wallow in grievance. Everybody loves Martin Luther King, but conveniently forgets that he stood not just for voting rights, but for workers’ rights, trade unions, the right to strike, and against imperialist wars. He considered these to be fundamental Christian principles. Contemporary evangelicals too often equate Christianity with freedoms (from the state, from taxes, from uncomfortable societal change) that obviate the need to enhance the life chances of others.

 

I lived in the USA from 1977-1981 and spent much of the following 35 years travelling in USA for Macmillan, Oxford University Press and Thames & Hudson. I was not well-disposed to America at first. I had spent some time living in Mexico, a country that, as a 19^th-century dictator once pronounced was ‘so far from God, so close to the United States’. But contact with real Americans and their immensely varied country soon dispelled my worst prejudices. This will be the subject of my next item.