Cornfed Culture 249 



Country similar to the effect of inbreeding on the American 

 corn. It intensified hereditary characteristics. It strengthened 

 genetically the American mind. 



Just as the corn, during the generations of its inbreeding, 

 dwindles in height, vigor, beauty and creative power, so the 

 generations of men while the inbreeding process continued 

 produced little of cultural or spiritual value. The midwest, dur- 

 ing the half-century that preceded the war between the states, 

 presented the world with a picture of crudity which has seldom 

 been surpassed. The legendary heroes of the era were Paul 

 Bunyan and Mike Fink. Those were the years of the lanky, 

 whiskered, tobacco-spitting land speculators; of the sleek, soft- 

 spoken gamblers smoking long, Cuban cigars; of the show- 

 boats on the river and the medicine shows on the roads. It 

 was the America of Joseph Cobb's Mississippi Sketches, the 

 America painted by William Sydney Mount whose brush rel- 

 ished the raw flavors of his time as much as Hogarth's or 

 Daumier's pencils caught the peculiar tangs of their London 

 and Paris. It was the America which the New York Times sent 

 Frederick Olmstead out to discover and to report. Olmstead's 

 newspaper articles later these were published as a book, and 

 republished a few years ago belong with William Byrd's 

 History of the Dividing Line and John Smith's Virginia, as 

 chapters of our national saga. 



English and French literary observers who visited the Ohio 

 and Mississippi Valleys Chateaubriand, de Crevecoeur, Har- 

 riet Martineau, Mrs. Trollop, Dickens, to name only an out- 

 standing few of those who came were frankly nonplused by 

 the gap between transmontane America and Concord. The 

 thought in the communities lying along the seaboard was 

 crossed and recrossed by a dozen different strains. It was 

 fertilized by every wind that blew. It heaped harvest baskets 

 with the golden hoard of Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Hawthorne, 

 Lowell, Melville. Critical Europe bowed before these titans. 

 At Casa Guidi, Margaret Fuller was received with homage. 

 Carlyle admitted the fact of American genius. 



