252 Singing Valleys 



It is a fact that many of the richest oil fields in the country 

 were discovered not by engineers sent out by companies, but 

 by wildcat prospectors, the sons of corn farmers who were too 

 impatient to follow the plow. Instead of furrows, they drove 

 wells. When the cornlands turned black, not green, they sold 

 out to Standard Oil, which made millions where the original 

 prospectors made thousands. And where the farmer, who had 

 been first on the land, had rejoiced to reap thirty bushels to 

 the acre. 



It is not without significance that a number of the mid- 

 western millionaires should have evinced a willingness to dedi- 

 cate millions to culture and scientific research, an attitude 

 toward the responsibility which wealth imposes which is not 

 generally shared by rich men whose fortunes have been made 

 by trade and speculation in the eastern towns. One has but to 

 examine the record in philanthropy of the Vanderbilts, Wool- 

 worths and Astors and that of the Rockefellers, McCormicks, 

 and Armours to discover, behind the midwestern millionaires, 

 the shade of some long-ago Miss Julia in a little red school- 

 house somewhere in the corn belt, who impressed upon her 

 pupils that money spent on culture was, in a sense, given 

 to the Lord. 



The harvest of the hybrid corn is derived from the crossing 

 of two inbred lines. The meeting of various inbred foreign 

 cultures, and the inbred American variety there in the states 

 of the midwest, and above all in the state universities, has 

 produced the most vital influences in American literature 

 during the past forty years. Even before Dreiser, Sherwood 

 Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Willa Gather, Edna Ferber, Booth 

 Tarkington, Vachel Lindsay and Sinclair Lewis came out of 

 the cornlands, Mark Twain and Bret Harte had taught Amer- 

 ica to laugh at Mississippi Valley humor. Later than these, 

 though of their tradition, was Charles Stewart, a writer too 

 little known. Following them, O. O. Mclntyre brought Gal- 

 lipolis to Broadway. The country was inclined to accept the 



