HAIL, INDIANA!
Going out of Sullivan I made an observation, based on the sight of many
men and women, sitting on doorsteps or by open windows or riding by in
buggies or automobiles, or standing in yards or fields—that a lush,
fecund land of this kind produces a lush, fecund population—and I think
this was well demonstrated here. There was a certain plumpness about
many people that I saw—men and women—a ruddy roundness of flesh and
body, which indicated as much. I saw mothers on doorsteps or lawns with
kicking, crowing children in their arms or youngsters playing about
them, who illustrated the point exactly. The farmers that I saw were all
robust, chunky men. The women—farm girls and town wives—had almost a
Dutch stolidity. I gazed, hardly willing to believe, and yet convinced.
It was the richness of this soil—black, sandy muck—of which these people
partook. It made me think that governments ought to take starving
populations off unfertile soils and put them on land like this.
Going south from here Franklin and I fell into a very curious and
intricate discussion. The subtlety of some people’s private speculations
at times astonishes me. Not that our conversation was at all
extraordinary from any point of view, but it was so peculiar in spots. I
am not wildly intoxicated by the spirit of my native state, not utterly
so at any rate; yet I must admit that there is something curiously
different about it—delicate, poetic, generative—I hardly know what I
want to say. On the way there I had been saying to Franklin that I
doubted whether I should find the West still the same or whether it was
as generative and significant as I had half come to make myself believe
it was. After leaving Warsaw I had remarked that either I or the town
had changed greatly, and since the town looked the same, it must be me.
To this he assented and now added:
“You should go sometime to a Speedway race at Indianapolis, as I have
often, year after year since it was first built. There, just when the
first real summer days begin to take on that wonderful light, and a kind
of luminous silence over things suggests growing corn and ripening wheat
and quails whistling in the meadows over by the woods, you will find an
assemblage of people from all over this country and from other
countries—cars by the thousands with foreign licenses; which make you
feel that this is the center of things. I’ve been there, and getting a
bit tired of watching the cars have gone over into the woods inside the
grounds and lain down on the grass on my back. There would be the same
familiar things about me, the sugar and hickory trees, the little cool
breeze that comes up in the middle of the day, through the foliage, the
same fine sky that I used to look up into when a boy; but, circling
around me continuously for hours, coming up from the south and along the
great stretches, and from the north bank of the track, were the weird
roar and thunder of an international conflict. Then I would get up and
look away south along the grandstands and see flying in the Indiana
sunlight the flags of all the great nations, Italy and England, France
and Belgium, Holland and Germany. So I sometimes think the spirit that
has been instrumental in distinguishing this particular section from
other sections of the country is something still effective; that it does
not always lead away from itself; that it has established its freedom
from isolation and mere locality and accomplished here a quite vital
contact with universal thought.”
“That’s all very flattering to Indiana,” I said, “but do you really
believe that?”
“Indeed I do,” he replied. “This is a most peculiar state. Almost
invariably, on socalled clear days in July and August out here, an
indescribable haze over everything leaves the horizons unaccounted for
and the distance a sort of mystery. This, it has always seemed to me, is
bound to produce in certain types of mind a kind of unrest. In such
light, buzzards hanging high above you or crows flying over the woods
are no longer merely the things that they are but become the symbols of
a spiritual, if I may use the word, or æsthetic, suggestiveness that is
unescapable. The forests here also, or such as used to be here, must
have had their influence. Temples and cathedrals, all works of art, are
designed to impress men’s minds, leading them into varying conditions of
consciousness. The forests of sugar and beech and poplar and oak and
hickory about here originally, it has been said, were the most wonderful
on the face of the earth. No one had ever experimented with the action
of such things as these on people’s minds, to determine specific
results, but I fancy they have them. In fact I sometimes think there is
something about soil and light, a magnetism or creative power like the
electric generative field of a dynamo, which produces strange, new,
interesting things. How else can you explain the fact that ‘Ben Hur’ was
written out here at Crawfordville, under a beech tree, or why the first
automobile course, after Brooklands, England, was built here at
Indianapolis, or why La Salle, with a company of adventurers, should
come canoeing down the St. Joseph and the Maumee into this region? I
believe thoroughly in the presence of a great resource of relative
truth, constituted of the facts of all human things; that this resource
is available to anyone whoever or wherever he may be, who can, in his
mind, achieve a clear understanding of his own freedom from the
necessities of mere physical communication. This may seem to be getting
a little thin but it is not beside the actual point if you trouble to
think of it.”
“That’s rather flattering to dear old Indiana,” I repeated, “but still
I’m not sure that I’m absolutely convinced. You make out a fairly
plausible case.”
“Look at the tin plate trust,” he continued, “one of the first and most
successful. It originated in Kokomo and expanded until it controlled the
Rock Island Railway, Diamond Match, and other corporations. Look at the
first American automobile—it came from here—and James Whitcomb Riley and
George Ade and Tarkington, and other things like that.”
“Yes, ‘and other things like that,’” I quoted. “You’re right.”
I did not manage to break in on his dream, however.
“Take this man Haynes, for instance, and his car. Here is a case where
the soil or the light or the general texture of the country generated a
sense of freedom, right here in Indiana in a single mind, and to a great
result; but instead of his going away or its taking that direction,
Haynes developed his own sense of freedom right here by building his
motor car here. He rose above his local limitations without leaving.
Through his accomplishment he has made possible a fine freedom for some
of the rest of us. After all, individual freedom is not simply the
inclination and the liberty to get up and go elsewhere; nor is it, as
people seem to think, something only to be embodied in forms of
government. I consider it something quite detached from any kind of
government whatever, a thing which exists in the human mind and, indeed,
is mind.”
Franklin was at his very best, I thought.
“This is getting very esoteric, Franklin,” I commented, “very, very
esoteric.”
“Just the same,” he continued, “the automobile is a part of this same
sense of freedom, the desire for freedom made manifest; not the freedom
of the group but the freedom of the individual. That’s about what it
amounts to in the ultimate. Here we have been traveling across country,
not limited in our ability to respond as we chose to the ‘call of the
road’ and of the outdoors in general; and we have been bound by no rule
save our own, not by the schedule of any organization. That same freedom
was in Haynes' mind in the first instance, and right here, stationary in
Indiana,—and it was generated by Indiana,—the conditions here.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“Well, to me Indiana is noteworthy in having done and in still doing
just that sort of thing. It stands unique in having produced a great
many celebrated men and women in all departments of work, not only those
who have departed from the state but those who have remained and gained
a publicity for their achievements far outside its boundaries. It was,
I’m confident, primarily this soil-generated call that came to you. It
came to me. It must have come the same to many others, or to all I
should say who have accomplished things, those who have grasped at or
struggled for, if you wish to speak of it that way, universal standards
and scope. You felt it and picked up and went away some years ago; now
on your return you do not feel the old generative impulse any more;
everything seems miserably changed and the beauty to a large extent
faded. But it is not. I also do not find things the same any more. Yet I
am convinced the old call is still here; and when I return I have a
feeling that out here on the farms, driving the cows in the morning and
at evening, in the small towns, and hanging around the old watergaps
along the creeks, are boys just like we used to be, to whom the most
vital thing in life is this call and the longing—to be free. Not to be
free necessarily or at all, of these local experiences, but to achieve a
working contact with universal things.”
“That sounds very well, at least,” I commented.
“There’s something in it, I tell you,” he insisted, “and what’s more,
though I’m not inclined to make so very much of that, Indiana was
originally French territory and La Salle and his companions coming down
here may have brought a psychic sprig of the original French spirit,
which has resulted in all these things we have been discussing.”
“You surely don’t believe that?” I questioned.
[Illustration:
VINCENNES
The Knox County Fair
]
“Well, I don’t know. Certainly Indiana is different—inquisitive,
speculative, constructive—the characteristics which have most
distinguished the French. And, by the way,” he added, returning to
Haynes and his car for a moment, “a short time before Haynes developed
his automobile, though not long enough, I’m sure, or to such an extent
that he could have known much of its progress, the same problem was
being studied and worked out in France by Levasser.”
He looked at me as though he thought this was significant, then
continued: “But I’m really not inclined to think that all this stuff is
true or that there is a deep laid spiritual connection between France
and Indiana. I don’t. It’s all amusing speculation, but I do believe
there is something in the soil and light idea.”
He leaned back and we ceased talking.