AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL. . .'
Neuberger, Richard L.
'America The eautiful ???' By RICHARD L. NEUBERGER NO. 16 left Seattle on time. The clock split 9:30 at night when the engineer pulled back the throttle. The long dragon of orange-painted cars...
...In the club car the soldiers talked about home...
...He wanted to walk through the University campus, holding his wife's hand and remembering the place they had met four years before, when America waa still uneasily at peace...
...they showed he had fought in Europe, won the Silver Star, and been wounded...
...In the morning we were at Spokane...
...16 clicked into small towns and stopped at large cities—the Montana plains, the Dakota prairies, Wisconsin's wooded countryside, the industrial communities of Illinois, Chicago's beckoning skyscrapers, Minnesota's green fields with their background of falling leaves, the drifting leaves of Autumn...
...The slanting woodlands looked as though some master painter of the Almighty had spilled vats of gold and yellow across their crests...
...While the passengers slept, the 20 Pullmans of No...
...The long dragon of orange-painted cars crawled across the carpet of switches in the yard and moved onto the, single track of the main line...
...Now and then the red and green of signal lanterns flashed their message to the engine crew...
...In November the Bitterroots are tinted by the only needle tree which changes color...
...In the distance the lights of the city faded...
...The sergeant headed for Chicago wanted to stroll into the beer tavern down the street and see if his old friends were there, the men with whom he had driven trucks By RICHARD L. NEUBERGER on the run to Milwaukee...
...But whether home was in the Montana wilderness, the Wisconsin dairy country or the Illinois factory areas, the soldier home from war waited in tense expectation as the train clattered to a stop...
...16 rolled on...
...It rolled across the Idaho uplands and toward the looming Rockies, In a little settlement at the bottom of the rocky canyon we had been following, the panting steam locomotive gave way to a majestic electric engine...
...Stars twinkled overhead in the Western night...
...The stentorious electric whistle hollered against the granite walls as the train tackled the 2.2 grade of the Bitterroots...
...Is there any greater word than that ? * * * IT seemed to me as we watched from the observation car, that we were seeing a thing which is the real genius and strength of America, this love for home...
...Home might be Chicago, heart of industrial America, a place of millions of souls, a sprawling entity holding all the conflicts of our machine age...
...Well, why not...
...Gee, mom, I'm home...
...For he was going home...
...The young medical corps officer, a captain, picked up his suitcase expectantly at Madison...
...Home...
...These guardians of the right-of-way disappeared in the darkness as the train rushed on...
...The bag bounced on the sidetrack as a dark-haired girl with a baby in her arms rushed up to him and was lost in his Army overcoat...
...While he was a combat soldier Henry McLemore, the columnist, wrote an article saying that every man he met said that his home town was the finest place on earth...
...Some of the intellectuals and cynics in New York scoff at the "love of place" of the average American...
...Down the steps of a tourist car bounded a pfc...
...Ours was a train straight from Puget Sound, from the docks and wharves which face Alaska and the broad Pacific...
...We watched them bound down the steps of the Pullmans and embrace gray-haired women, bright-faced girls, laughing small children...
...Home might be Deer Lodge, Montana, locked in the high mountains, with pine and tamarack forests fringing the nearby foothills...
...Is there any harm in a corporal saying Deer LdHge, Montana, is the best spot on the planet or a sergeant thinking the same of Chicago and a major saying identical for Madison, Wisconsin...
...I wonder if this cynicism is justified...
...The late Louis D. Brandeis, great liberal justice of the U. S. Supreme Court, said that men should stay where they were born in America and be the kind of people there that their "neighbors could have genuine confidence in...
...A woman with gray hair clasped him to her breast...
...WHEN the history of this period is written, we will find that the war was won as much in the factories of Illinois and on the farms of Wisconsin and Montana, as in the offices of Washington or New York...
...AT the end of the switchbacks surmounting the Bitterroots lay the Montana town of Deer Lodge...
...In great golden slashes, the tamaracks cut deep V's into the green forests of spruce and lodgepole pine...
...I heard the boy gasp...
...And always as the engine whistled down the line and the destination neared, the soldier's eyes were moist and you could tell that his pulse was racing...
...16 slowly resumed its transcontinental journey...
...These men were going home...
...Down the steel steps of ear 22 bounded a boy in khaki...
...The train pulled out of the station...
...I wonder if America would be what it is today if most of the people shared the fondness of the intellectual for the dilettante atmosphere of Greenwich Village ? Is not much of our nation's greatness premised on men like these soldiers, men who love the dirty industrial town in Illinois, the lonely cow town in Montana, the green counthyside of Wisconsin...
...The corporal bound for Montana remembered the white-riffled stream where trout lurked and salmon spawn...
...I thought of Brandeis' words as I watched from the car windows while the soldiers bounded down the car steps and looked at Deer Lodge or Chicago with pride and enthusiasm in their eyes...
...It also brought soldiers discharged at Fort Lewis and Barnes Hospital who had beaten the Nazis in Europe...
...It clattered into Butte and then began the slow ascent of the Rockies...
...Corporal's chevrons decorated his sleeve...
...with a barracks bag on his shoulder...
...It carried the men who had pushed the invader from the Aleutians and conquered the Jap in his homeland...
...We watched them from the back platform as No...
...The electric whistle caromed back and forth off lava crags as the big engine encountered America's highest range of mountains...
...16 crossed the Cascade Mountains...
...On his bosom were the combat infantryman's badge and two rows of decorations...
Vol. 9 • November 1945 • No. 47
