254 Singing Valleys 



huskings. All of them knew state and county fairs, corn- 

 judging contests and hog-callings. At the time they began 

 sending manuscripts to publishers in New York and Boston 

 the East was still under the spell cast by Henry James, in 

 whose veins the American blood ran so thin that he was 

 driven to retreat to London from the frontier as represented 

 by Beacon Street. James' flight had coincided with the advent 

 in Boston of William Dean Howells. Howells was born in 

 the corn belt. He had "limped beside his father, with his eyes 

 on the cow but his mind on Cervantes and Shakespeare." As 

 James had sought security in England, he ran away from the 

 farm to the bosom of the Atlantic Monthly. "You have more 

 passion than I have," James confided to him after reading one 

 of his manuscripts. It was the faint trace of cornfed culture in 

 Howells which the born Bostonian detected. Poor James, who 

 could look at a quince tree and only see it "full of antiquity 

 and contortions." How gratefully, after that, one lets Sandburg 

 take one up-river with Lincoln in the cool, American Spring. 



Frequently it was hard for the East to understand that these 

 young writers out of the corn belt were not funny. They were 

 as serious about people living in sod houses on the Nebraska 

 prairie as if these had been Ethan Fromes. They wrote as if 

 the midwest mattered. And as if Main Street were all of a 

 piece, from Bangor, Maine, to Denver, Colorado. 



In the cities of the corn-growing midwest the Rotary and 

 Kiwanis Clubs developed a business fellowship which the 

 East, at first, found faintly amusing. It laughed, even while 

 it adopted the idea. These clubs, dedicated to bigger, better 

 and friendlier business, accomplished something more than 

 profits for the members. When Professor Edward Lee Thorn- 

 dike made a survey several years ago of three hundred Amer- 

 ican cities, he discovered that wherever there was a large 

 membership in these organizations, this proved to be "a symp- 

 tom of a community of good people of low incomes and of 

 average total welfare." 



It was not only writers who came out of the cornlands; 



