Our Renaissance of Dignity

...Minute marvel cafes with tables for ladies and gents seem generally headed the way of dodos and spring buggies...

...The talk of the citizenry has simmered down into complacency...

...Many of our theatres are showing a happier consideration for their wares and patrons...

...Self-respect, dignity and generosity, qualities of the rare and cultured man, may be in the West traits of the common man...

...one is the American Negro, another the contemporary backwoodsman and a third the old-stock westerner...

...Our lunch times are increasing in duration, and dinners last provokingly far past dinner time...

...A noticeable majority of Negroes are capable of friendship without familiarity, of jocundity without insolence...

...Moving-picture houses are for the most part better run now than they were, say, five years ago, and so, generally speaking, are fairs, carnivals, open markets, clothing shops, bus services, tourist boats, resorts, legitimate dance halls and illegitimate speakeasies...

...The comic-strip writer dares to be homely and trivial and thorough...

...To him life is not basically a matter for words...

...But now the world in general expects him to know about Eugene O'Neill, auction bridge, Spinoza, George Jean Nathan, executive policies of General Motors and the notable highlights of contemporary literary scandal...

...They have an epic spontaneity of narrative...

...Another example is our contemporary literature of illiteracy...

...The American backwoodsman is descended from a race of pioneers who valued personal independence more than position or property, and independence and self-sufficiency remain the primary ingredients of backwoods dignity...

...The westerner of today is very likely to be the son or grandson of first-strain pioneers who took to the Oregon trail and deliberately put 2,000 miles of rough country between themselves and the ways and resources of the life then contemporary...

...This new dignity is making sundry outcroppings in the various fields of contemporary American life...

...He does not seize upon one as a patron confessor, nor does he expect his guest to give himself wholeheartedly away...

...The upcountry commoner reckons to build up his own cabin and keep it going...

...Our comic strips represent an interminable series of burrowings into current fields of imagination, aspirations and fantasy...

...Yessuh, I reckon your country can grow mighty fine corn and wheat and hogs...

...Speaking generally, the new westerner is a pretty true son of the old westerner...

...Youth and wide open spaces require loud voices, but establishment and reduced distances allow for propriety and composure...

...Take the comic strip...

...But you know, these old hills aroun' here can grow men...

...Its brief age of boosters and live wires is waning...

...Self-sufficiency builds for self-respect and self-respect for dignity...

...His home is his bed place and his citadel, the castle of which he is lord...

...Progenitors of Elizabethan cavaliers met with much the same problems, so did the elders of Athens and the lords of Mercia...

...When the end had come, Uncle John Holland uncrossed his legs and surveyed the teller just a trifle diagonally...

...Naturally enough, so complex and entangled a quality cannot be weighed with scientific accuracy nor dissected with surgical precision, but even the most casual looker-on might notice at least three other generative sources of this new dignity...

...Albeit cowboys do drive Ford trucks and the gunmen have moved to the cities, the far West remains a country of young frontiers...

...It is my steady and unsubstantiated conviction, too, that we have fewer billboards to the highway mile, less malodorous newspaper and magazine advertising and fewer sandwichmen to the city block than has any considerable segment of modern-day Europe...

...to him virtues are to be soundly weighed and a man is openly a man...

...The run of backwoodsmen do not have the rawness and awkwardness which is conventionally associated with farming people...

...if he lacks the price of dental work his teeth will rot...

...Courtship, for example, is courtship and there can be no reasonable mistaking it...

...Come to them things, we ain't nothin' to brag about...

...A rickety old field Negro riding past on a proportionately rickety jackass, riding with a dignity which poverty and burdening years and tattered clothes and unharmonious patches can in no way obliterate...

...Our better restaurants are being managed with greater dignity and deliberateness...

...Their towns are merely places...

...Comedians and jokesmiths by the dollar-gathering thousands have portrayed the Negro as a day-long dispenser of all that is ludicrous and simple...

...The run of backwoodsmen have a primitive and clear-cut forwardness...

...They are resourceful, folkish and basically vigorous...

...The uproar of first enthusiasms has abated and their life has come to be a leisurely and speculative one...

...If you are a stranger he will meet you as an undisputed equal, offer you his scant fare without embarrassment and expect it to be accepted in such a way...

...He dispenses the greatest of all the humanities-the unconscious and the unobserved...

...A nation-wide quality, whether it be newly sprung or hoary with standing, is certain to have contributory factors and secondary points of support, nourishment or perpetuation...

...They were five-feet-eleven, they weighed 164 pounds, and they were made of watch springs, whale bone and dynamite...

...His higher rhapsodies are usually inarticulate...

...For not only must he finance all of these surges and ebbs of modernism and sophistication and cultural dignity, but he must himself become modern and sophisticated and cultured while he is about it...

...Memories crowd upon me of sundry interludes of Negro gracefulness and race dignity...

...The past two decades have been an era of unprecedented ladder-climbing and the Americanus has been kept humping it...

...In a sense, some of our older cities have done just that...

...And West is still West...

...Epigrammatic Main Streets could be foaled and Sinclair Lewises could no doubt flourish in modern England or France or Germany or China...

...And the grocery-man's second assistant basket-filler is expected to know about Freud and H. L. Mencken and birth control...

...The other morning I was loafing about a country store in northwest Arkansas...

...The backwoodsman is a commoner who accepts and keeps silent...

...But the great body of America still strains after the alluring fruit of culture...

...He holds honest veneration for age and professional attainment...

...Compan-ionate to this adoration of home there is a powerful element of pride in locale and in sectional integrities...

...Then with quaint gracefulness they help one another into tattered overcoats, light their pipes, and each motions the other to lead the way out...

...And above all he is capable of a tacit assumption of equality...

...Their types and purposes are true to form...

...But the vastest of all the strongholds of dignity is the American West...

...Pulls and first families and parasitic pasts are of minimum counting...

...He is solicitous of one's dignity as well as of one's bodily comfort...

...Occasionally a head of house will fly off the crank handle and whup up with somebody, but it is likely that such spells are transitory as spring thunder showers and not a tenth so frequent...

...They are an old people lost among old hills...

...He is a phenomenon of a cycle turn...

...He is a figure in the frontier history of contemporary business life, a sequential outcome of an upspurting of living standards and the fading of entrepreneurship in small business...

...If he has no shoes he will go barefoot...

...In spite of our uproarious progres-siveness America is still capable of individuality, both personal and sectional, and although boundaries merge, our states continue to preserve distinct and recognizable personalities...

...Other instances are about in convenient abundance...

...He has acquired a gregarious dignity and an everyday stateliness which cannot handily be rivaled...

...The early West had slight time for proprieties and non-essentials...

...Speaking generally they are sincere and aboveboard about it...

...For example, there is our present-day advertising...

...It is my firm conviction that America has the most dignified advertising in the commercialized world, certainly not excepting the British...

...And the American backwoods seems to me a country of dignity, taking the term in its true fulness...

...The open school of hard and rough country required that they live up to Eugene Manlove Rhodes's epic definition: "As to the frontiersmen, I knew them well...

...Seattle is bigger than Tacoma, Los Angeles has outgrown San Francisco and New York is still the biggest city in this man's republic...

...The new American dignity is no exception...

...I have spent wet winters and double-portioned summers in the cotton country of the South...

...All to the end of greater profits, the sceptical bystander may say...

...He comprehends the futility of words, the superfluity of saying...

...And fiction writers who undertake to tell a credulous world about Negro life are altogether too prone to overseason it with ceremonial parades and brass bands and pork shops and grotesque gluttonies and penny prudential fraternal orders...

...Perhaps so, but all contribute to the new American dignity...

...You cannot inherit a westerner's respect and you cannot buy it...

...The processes of self-sufficiency make him less cooperative and less imitative than the generality of contemporaries...

...If a hillman does not have the price of an article he generally does without it...

...He pictures the casual interludes of every day with skits which amuse us and continue to amuse, even though genius may fade and great thoughts become trite...

...The average backwoods home is surprisingly free of parental restraint or of pedagogical hammering...

...Just as the store-porch cogitators were beginning to get the lay of things in conversation, a drummer out of St...

...They are of a people who have reached the age for tacit assumption and fuller living...

...In upbrush America it is more essentially put to the individual himself to decide whether he will live as an abiding elder or keep to the fine ethical scruples of a transient tomcat...

...So they pass through the door simultaneously and stroll away down Smoky Row to the far hovels of Tin Cup exuding blue wreathes of smoke and soft zephyrs of merriment...

...I have watched the tenant Negro, burdened with heat and poverty and malnutrition and Confederate tradition and I have watched with deepest admiration the princeliness and the invincibility of his race dignity...

...The growing contests are about settled...

...The lionesses and the lions are doing their all-firedest to get on to the how of etiquette and social behavior...

...The westerner of today is a common man of a rare and civilized sort...

...Whether he be a highway laborer or a college president, the chances are that he can be cordial without being familiar, that he can be accommodating without intruding upon one's privacy...

...Louis struck up about the unapproachable fertility of a particular stretch of hog and wheatland up his way...

...For generations a traditional butt for slapstick, stage hooey and dumb ha-has, he has nevertheless maintained a personality of self-respect which generations of derision and ignorance and mistellings cannot weather...

...Theirs is a comradeship free of the conventional indignities of familiarity...

...In the old days a grocer could be a grocer and a bank clerk could ride a bicycle and drink lemonade and play croquet and read Peck's Bad Boy and feel all right about it so long as he went to Sunday school regularly and kept his coat buttoned up and his collar and cuffs correctly starched...

...if he is without an overcoat he will brave the winter in jeans and jumper...

...By a strange turn of irony the American Negro has founded and perpetuated a dignity of indignities...

...By West I mean specifically the country between the Missouri river and the Pacific ocean, excepting California, which is a phenomenon too varied and complex and contradictory for convenient mention...

...Contemporary America is fast reaching that stage of establishment...

...Little public charity is offered and still less taken...

...He has respect for callings and for the simple honors of attainment...

...Loud talk has simmered down to mild speculation...

...Other nations have reached it, held it and lost it again...

...The walls may run a bit slaunchwise and the roof may be a ways catawaumpus, but it is nevertheless his home, the polaris of his days...

...he appears and vanishes and then appears again...

...Their goal is old as the pages of history...

...it was a land of open range, competitive herds and self-established justice...

...They brush chairs, polish metal and fold shine-rags...

...It is my firm belief that the colored American is possessed of as much genuine dignity as any fellow of the human sort...

...Again I watch two stygian bootblacks in the everyday process of closing shop...

...I have recollections of age-withered mammies lecturing to wide-eyed congregations of piccaninnies on the principles of right behavior and good conduct and I have subsequently listened to the piccaninnies pointing out the blunder-ings and insufficiencies of their white-skinned contemporaries, treating them tolerantly yet with pertinent discernment...

...They expect to become better persons and it appears probable that they are succeeding...

...The result is that the man of the West, even the common, everyday man, has a well-defined and inherent dignity which prohibits either insolence or servileness...

...But Babbitthood is passing the more uproarious stages of its frontier history...

...The creek-bottom bully is the creek-bottom bully, openly and unmincingly...