America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction Read Online Free Page B

being horsemen and dealing in gentry’s goods, land and cattle. Theirs was an unassailable position, a little like that of English royalty. Then Claus Spreckels came from Holland and built a Sugar Factory (in capitals) and the flatlands of the valley around Salinas were planted to sugar beets and the Sugar People prospered. They were upstarts, of course, but they were solvent. The Cattle People sneered at them, but learned as every aristocracy does that not blood but money is the final authority. Sugar People might never have got any place socially if lettuce had not become the green gold of the Valley. Now we had a new set of upstarts: Lettuce People. Sugar People joined Cattle People in looking down their noses. These Lettuce People had Carrot People to look down on and these in turn felt odd about associating with Cauliflower People. And all the time the town stretched out—the streets extended into the country. Farmland became subdivisions. Salinas became five thousand and then ten thousand. Enthusiasts thought that twenty thousand was not too high a mark to shoot at. We had a brick high school and a National Guard armory for dances. And we had the rodeo in the summer to attract tourists.
    This celebration had started as a kind of local competition. One’s uncles and even athletic aunts entered the roping contests. The ranch-men from the valley in the foothills rode in on saddles decorated with silver, and their sons demonstrated their skill with unbroken horses. Then gradually the professionals moved in and it became “show business.” A working cowman hadn’t time to attain the circus perfection of the professionals and soon even the wild horses and the Brahma bulls were imported, and cowboy clowns, who moved from show to show, took the places of the sons of Lynches and Abernathys and Bardins.
    I remember Salinas best when it had a population of between four and five thousand. Then you could walk down Main Street and speak to everyone you met. Tom Meek the policeman, and Sheriff Nesbit, Jim Bardin, Mr. Pioda, manager of the Sugar Factory, and any one of a multitude of Hugheses. The generations of Portuguese and Swiss and Scandinavians became American so that the names of Tavernetti and Sveresky and Anoitzbehere and Nissen no longer sounded foreign to our ears.
    I wonder whether all towns have the blackness—the feeling of violence just below the surface. Of course it was the only town I knew. Are they all full of dark whispers? There were whispers of murders covered up and only hinted at, of raids on the county funds. When the old court-house burned down it was hinted that the records would have been dangerous to certain officeholders. It was a blackness that seemed to rise out of the swamps, a kind of whispered brooding that never came into the open—a subsurface violence that bubbled silently like the decaying vegetation under the black water of the Tule Swamps. I do not think Salinas was a gay place in those days. Monterey was gay but not Salinas. Maybe it was the wind beating every day on the nerve ends. Perhaps it was the months of high, sad, gray fog.
    People wanted wealth and got it and sat on it and it seemed to me that when they had it, and had bought the best automobile and had taken the hated but necessary trip to Europe, they were disappointed and sad that it was over. There was nothing left but to make more money. Theater came to Monterey and even opera. Writers and painters and poets rioted in Carmel, but none of these things came to Salinas. For pure culture we had Chautauqua in the summer—William Jennings Bryan, Billy Sunday, The World of Art, with slides in a big tent with wooden benches. Everyone bought tickets for the whole course, but Billy Sunday in boxing gloves fighting the devil in the squared ring was easily the most popular.
    Mr. Rowling, the violin teacher, tried for years to breathe life into a small orchestra but the town preferred to hear Joe Conner sing