Before the Flood
By Fredric Smoler
In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which is about three hundred miles from Brooklyn, you can buy much-prized if misnamed Coney Island hot dogs for lunch. I can remember my father-in-law reminiscing about the boxer Jack Johnson pulling up in a vast limousine before the unprepossessing Coney Island Hot Dogs, so that he could escort his white wife into the only restaurant in town that would serve them. It may not be too much of a surprise that someone did: in those days, the ancients who marched at the head of parade on Decoration Day had formerly turned out to get in Lee’s way on his road to Gettysburg, and their descendants retain a more optimistic sense of what the war had been about than do many of my colleagues. This, too, ought not to be wholly surprising: if your grandfathers have spent a few years singing about bringing the jubilee, and dying to make men free, it probably sinks in. I also remember my father-in-law explaining that those men were not "real Civil War vets", just militia who had been brushed aside by the Army of Northern Virginia on its way to Gettysburg. The explicit comparison was to Meade's men, who smashed up Lee a little further down a Pennsylvanian road, and thus did have the right to be called veterans—a remarkably parsimonious definition, though pleasantly so, in this age of very cheap hyperbole. But my father-in-law had been a combat engineer in the Bulge, which probably created a different frame of reference.
He also remembered the beautifully braided manes of the horses that pulled the bread wagons through those streets, and the less carefully groomed horses that pulled the milk wagons. The industrial age was at high heat when he was a boy, and it was useful to be reminded that in the city where men made steel with locally mined coal and iron, a fair share of the work of daily life had within living memory still been done by animals. The hot dog stand is within sight of what had been a steel mill, one of ones that helped win the Second World War. In those days Woody Guthrie’s guitar was carved with the grandiloquent slogan that “This Machine Kills Fascists,” which was not true, but the things they made in Johnstown did kill Fascists, and pretty effectively, too. This was also true of the men of Pennsylvania generally, who numbered more winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor than did the citizens of any other state. The first American ace of the Second World War was from Johnstown, as was one of the four Marines who raised the flag over Mt. Suribachi—Pennsylvania was always a hard-luck state for the enemies of the Republic. During that particular war Johnstown housed more than 100,000 people, in those days most of them working in the mills, the mines, or off at war.
It is now less than a quarter of that size, and all the mills are gone, although not all the soldiers. In church on Sunday, a recent Annapolis graduate wearing his new uniform mourned my father-in-law. Only five years ago a little sheet of paper by the church’s door asked the small congregation’s prayers for those of its members who were in Iraq, of whom 25 were listed. A sign in front of a local bakery announced that it sent Gobs (a much-loved local confection) overseas, and my guess is this did not mean to investment bankers in London. The woman behind the counter at a small store then selling wonderful smoked meats told me that yes, they do have a mail order business; in the last week they’d sent 24 cases of beef jerky to Iraq. But that store is now gone, as is the sign in the church, as was the sign about sending a Gob to your gob, a bit of slang I barely remembered, and which in Johnstown still means a navy man.
Around that time I was reminded that in the 1940s the whole country was in several respects more like Johnstown than it seems to be today, because one of my cousins had just turned some home movies into a DVD and sent copies to the rest of us. It was startling to see so many New York and Chicago relatives, some of whom I had never before heard mentioned, wearing various uniforms. I knew that my father had served in the infantry, and two uncles in the Air Force. But who was that naval officer? Who were those others? Thinking back on it I am surprised that I was surprised. When I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s everyone’s father seemed to have been a veteran of the Second World War, and younger uncles had all served in peacetime, or during the Korean War. Teaching modern undergraduates at a good liberal arts college this is very far from the case, although I do teach the odd general’s daughter or veteran. But in the main those I teach, who are bombarded with talk of “service learning,” do not themselves serve, at least in one distinct older meaning of that word, the one my father-in-law’s fellow veterans meant when they thanked his family for his service. The names in that list at the church also tended to have either more consonants or more vowels than do the names of most of my students (or colleagues), and one other difference came to mind: I do not think any of the men and women in that church would have watched a DVD like the one my cousin made with quite as much wonderment as I did.
I now remember my father-in-law recounting a local story, one that dated from the early ‘twenties, when the Indiana Klan decided to clean out a mass of Catholics it had heard were infesting Johnstown. This rumor was correct, but the Klan apparently underestimated the scale of the problem, sending a few hundred men in jalopies. The Klansmen encountered a rather larger number of heavily armed and irate steelworkers, and as my father-in-law heard the story, one of the rapidly retreating Klansmen fired his revolver at the steel workers as he fled through the cemetery, but his bullet hit a statue of the Virgin Mary, ricocheted, and struck him dead. It was a pretty good story, but even as a small boy he’d begun to suspect that it might not have been true.
But here is what is true: Karl Rove made a heavy last minute bet on people like my father-in-law—on others who had also built their houses with their own hands, and worked in mills and mines before being cheated of much of their pensions, and who seem to have very willingly given and never regretted that service for which they are at the end of their lives tersely and quite movingly thanked by people who have done the same—and in Pennsylvania, at least, also neighboring Ohio, last week Mr. Rove lost that bet. At the lunch after the funeral mass Uncle Henry, astonishingly hale and hearty at ninety-two, head of an organization of eight hundred retired steel workers for Obama, looked forward to the coming election with considerable confidence. So it is a mistake, certainly a graceless and maybe a dangerous one, to see the election as a triumph over people who are old and white, male and rural, rather than in many cases a triumph for them, and in a fair number of cases by them.
From December, 2012
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