122 Singing Valleys 



and Mississippi Valleys brought to birth the America which 

 took sides passionately for and against the principles of 

 Lincoln. 



In this sense corn has fed all our great national movements, 

 as corn had always been the food of the frontier. Exactly 

 what is the urge which has drawn Americans, time and again, 

 from the comfortable homes achieved by a previous genera- 

 tion to rude living on the edge of the great plains or the 

 desert? Even in this day of oil-burning furnaces, glass-enclosed 

 automobiles and television sets, that urge stirs in the blood of 

 thousands of Americans making them ill at ease in our indus- 

 trialized cities. These are men whose bodies are too big and 

 too restless to sit behind office desks. Figures bewilder them; 

 they have not cash-register minds. They are not challenged 

 by competition with other men. If their neighbor makes a 

 million in Amalgamated Amalgam, this does not affect their 

 egos to the point of driving them to make two millions in 

 Incorporated Inks. These are frontiersmen, though they may 

 have degrees from Harvard, Princeton or Yale. They are 

 frontiersmen from whom the American frontier which was 

 first the sea, then the valleys of the Ohio, the Mississippi, and 

 later the Great Plains, has retreated beyond hope of their find- 

 ing it. They are the Sons of the Corn, though now alienated 

 from their Mother. True to the archetypal pattern of the son, 

 they rebel against the mother only to seek her again in another 

 guise. 



So America which rushed to civilize its frontier has been 

 driven to replace it with the Country Club, the Dude Ranch, 

 the Salmon Camp and Duck Shooting Preserve. On these im- 

 provised frontiers the Sons of the Corn make fumbling efforts 

 to return to the Mother. 



It seems apparent that much of the restlessness and inepti- 

 tude of present-day American life springs from this body of 

 Americans who are born to and feel the urge toward a frontier 

 which is now non-existent. They are in the sorry plight of the 



