WAR TALK SCARCE
But go down the four-lane highways, through the big tunnels and the express viaducts, across the Alleghenies to where the land flattens into the Mississippi Valley. America is out there too. The farms are big and prosperous-looking, the cities are farther apart already, and there is a mountain range between your life and Europe's war. When I went west in July the men who gave me lifts talked about the good prospects of the crop, were surprised that I was hitch-hiking so far, told about their sexual experiences. (Men are alike in this: they curse freely and talk about women.) There was some national political discussion, but not much talk of the war. After leaving an east where a man who didn't want to fight was a coward, I was surprised.
The surprise lasted across the rich land of Indiana and Illinois, through the rolling grasslands of Missouri, out into the great flat stretching plain of Kansas and eastern Colorado, up and over the shining Rockies, across the grilled emptiness of Wyoming, Utah and Nevada, and into the High Sierras of California. Then I was all right. I was with people who worried about foreign aggression again. Of course they worried about the Japs, but still they worried. And I knew the Japs were twice as far from California as Hitler was from New York so I didn't have to worry with them.
Well, it's all different now. While I was in California the conscription bill went into debate. Out there came the news of the first bad raids on London. In Holly- wood I talked with Collier Young '3O and Budd Schulberg '36 and some other Dart- mouth and non-Dartmouth men who were becoming increasingly thoughtful about the need for knowing which end of a gun was up. They were not running around looking for fights to join; they were ask- ing about what their chances would be in case a fight joined them.
Apparently the rest of the people in the wide flatnesses of the land between the western mountains and the eastern mountains began asking about the same time. I came home out of San Diego across the Imperial Valley, where it was too hot for me to talk but not too hot for me to listen. The men who pioneered a profitable farm-country out of the impossible desert down on the border were getting angry at the Congress. Migod nobody hates standing in line like I do, they would say, but here's something we gotta do. Through j| Yuma, out of Tucson, in the hills neargi Lordsburg and on the long road down to El Paso, where it takes you two days to go goo miles the rides are so far apart, they would say, Well it's just one of those I things, I'd love to get behind a tree with a squirrel rifle and shoot redcoats but itS looks like they're on our side now for fair.
Texas is so big it made me mad and I stayed out of bed for two nights and a day to get across it, 836 bleeding miles I from El Paso to Texarkana, and Texans are very proud of their big cities and their friendliness and their pretty girls; you know they're independent because they fought for it, but I didn't meet a single Texan who wasn't slowly, calmly ready to say that we'd better get ready to fight again because if there was gonna be a fight we didn't want to miss it and besides if we were ready maybe there wouldn't be one. They like some occasional streetbrawling but they remember the World War too well to be all for big-scale fighting that doesn't give a chance to a man alone.
It was the same thing getting into the south. In Tennessee they also talked about the way Willkie ran Commonwealth & Southern: the farmers, truck drivers, drummers and occasional businessmen I met seemed almost vengeful about the Republican nominee, recalled his fight against TVA which most of them feel has saved their lives, spoke bitterly of watered stock, a utility-controlled newspaper in Chattanooga, restricted production tinder Commonwealth & Southern, large "contributions" in the 1935 municipal power election, and a bad labor record. They talked about the beauties of barbecued pig and the hard time a man has keeping his pants pressed in the world today, too. Their quiet contempt for Willkie was matched by their anger at the Congressmen who were delaying action on the conscription bill until after the election. What's the matter with those guys, they said. Don't they know there's a war on?
!I began going to movies again when I hit the seaboard, because I felt I was nearer home and there wasn't so much hurry. There was unanimity in the newsreel reactions: a kind of patriotic expression which had some hokum in it, but which seemed realer. Maybe it seemed that way to me because I had seen something of what there was to be patriotic about. In Washington that same feeling of honesty came through in the pitying laughter of some women in the Senate waitingroom, laughter directed at the Death Watch ladies in their black veils. Don't they see, one of the laughing women asked me, that they're trying to save themselves a little heartbreak now and will get themselves a lot more of it later on?
HEADLINES HOLD STUDENT ATTENTION An undergraduate, relaxing on Commons porch, keeps tabs on the war and the conscrip•tion law which may vitally influence his future.
