192 Singing Valleys 



Cawn bread an' de black molasses 



Is better dan honey en hash 



Fer de fahm-han' coon en de light quadroon, 



Along wid de po' white trash. 



"Cawn bread" meant pones or batter cakes made from meal 

 ground between stones, and with the rich germ left in it. 



It was this demand for flavor as against economy and mod- 

 ern merchandizing that preserved scores of old grist mills 

 throughout the country. The steam mills turned out better 

 wheat flour than the flow from the buhrstones. But wheat was 

 not like American corn. An alien grain, it submitted to 

 processes which standardized it. It imposed no restrictions on 

 the millers. 



The corn did. 



You could no more run it through a steam-rolling mill and 

 preserve its natural characteristics than you could enjoin Amer- 

 icans to become cogs in an industrial machine. Those who 

 submitted themselves to the mill like the American corn 

 lost the germ of their integrity in the milling process. 



There is a deep significance, I believe, in the interest which 

 has grown steadily in recent years in whatever is "American." 

 As I see it, we are a people striving to recapture our own 

 flavor. It was very nearly milled out of us, thanks to Big 

 Business and bombastic advertising, and the zeal for standard- 

 ized equipment and schools and textbooks and college courses. 

 Thanks, too, to the enthusiasm for whatever was European 

 which followed naturally our rediscovery of Europe during 

 the World War. 



But gradually the pendulum is swinging back. 



Some of the terse, vivid American speech is coming back to 

 tongues which learned sophistication from the novels of 

 American authors who found their egos suffered less in Paris 

 or in Juan les Pins than in Gallipolis or Newburg. There is an 

 American look it may have come from gazing steadily down 

 a rifle barrel at a wildcat or a grizzly. There is an American 



