Myths About America

Dear Stan,

Here is an account by Peter Hitchens of his train journey from Washington DC to Chicago. How many Americans make such a journey nowadays? But Peter is a big train fan. Not the least of his complaints about modern British governments is the massive cuts in our railway network since the 1950s. When the French President Sarkozy recently came to London, Peter wondered why he came by air when there is a superb high-speed rail link between the centres of London and Paris, which are much closer together than Chicago and Washington. When I flew to Paris in 2006, it took ages to get the Metro from Charles de Gaulle Airport into the Gare du Nord; and that is the station where the Eurostar train from London arrives.

Bill
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America, the UK and Misleading Myths
Peter Hitchens

As some of you may have noticed, I spent last week in the USA. I managed to do a lot of traveling by train, as the USA's passenger rail system is a lot more comprehensive and more pleasant to use than most people (including Americans) think. The journey between Washington DC and Chicago brings to mind John Keegan's remark that, while England is a garden, North America is still largely a wilderness.


You'd never get the opportunity to see this contrast if you took either the plane (which ignores the country in between) or the Interstate motorways, which sweep past and round physical features, and are bordered with regular trees, motels and restaurants. But the train plunges you into wildness, just a few miles out of the capital. After Harper's Ferry, a melodramatic and romantic place, overhung by tall cliffs, which entirely lives up to its legendary name, the tracks wind for hours through deep forest, along the upper reaches of the Potomac , wholly wild and barely inhabited, probably unaltered for thousands of years.

This is not the distant west or even the overpowering space of the prairies. It is just over the horizon from the great belt of intense human settlement that runs all the way down from Boston to Richmond, and on the way to another glowing concentration of human power and energy, the chain of industrial cities that lie along the southern edge of the Great Lakes.

Even once the mountains are over, the sense of space is always there. And I think this is another of the main differences between our two cultures, the immense amount of room in which Americans find it easier to get along with each other by staying a safe distance from each other. It was also astonishing to pass through the gigantic steelworks that still fringe the southern edge of Lake Michigan, though I think they're much diminished from how they were 20 years back. . I wonder if they'll be there at all in 20 years, given the pace of globalisation, but they give you some idea of the colossal industrial and economic power which was unleashed in the USA by the Second World War - and they reminded me of what Sheffield and Rotherham used to look like when we still had a serious steel industry.

It doesn't matter how many times I'm told that it doesn't matter that we know longer make very much ourselves. I can't help thinking that it does matter, and also that a society which doesn't have jobs for men to do, such as steelmaking, coalmining and shipbuilding, has lost something very important. We've mechanized the land, and exported most of the hard manual work to the East. Is it, can it be right for us to live at such a distance from the making of real wealth, and the growing of real food?

As for the debate in Grand Rapids which was one of the reasons for my journey, I still haven't seen it (my reflections on the event were published in the MoS on Sunday and can still be found on the website). If you take part in such a thing, you get a very misleading impression of it. But it was clear that there is ( as I knew there would be) a great gulf between American and British ways of expressing things, and between the two wholly different experiences of the early 21st century. I am told that most in the audience simply couldn't believe my description of the violence and disorder in British cities nowadays, much as I suspect many British people would be amazed by the order and safety of most of America. Both nations subsist on myths about each other which are almost completely misleading.

Multiculturalism in the UK

It was a miserable, cold, wet Easter Monday and I was driving up to Waddesdon Manor, about 40 miles north of Reading. This stately home is a little piece of France dropped into a lovely corner of the English countryside. A member of the Rothschild banking family loved French culture and decided that a French chateaux would be his ideal country house to entertain royalty, nobility and the otherwise wealthy of the late 19th century. He duly recruited a French architect and a French landscape gardener and the end result is now open to the general public - provided that you pay £6.30 ($12.60) to get into the park and another £7.00 ($14.00) to enter the house.

Is it worth it? Most definitely. In a way, it is an incredible bargain when you consider the cost of building this house and estate. The first step was cutting 30 feet off a hilltop to make a plateau large enough for the house and formal garden. Then a branch line was built from the local railway to haul in building materials. As the house is so far out in the countryside, they had to lay a water pipeline 11 miles long from the nearest large town. A gasworks was built to provide the gas for the gaslights and pretty soon a powerhouse was built to house the generators for the new electric light. Laying out the grounds consumed a staggering amount of back breaking hard slog; horses galore were brought in to haul trees from other parts of England to populate a rather barren site.

The huge park is planted with magnificent trees, scrubs, bushes and thousands upon thousands of flowers. It contains an aviary with a wide variety of exotic birds and a powerhouse which originally contained the electricity generators and now has a wall lined with the 1920s vintage electrical gear. There is a children's playground and the converted stableyard which houses a restaurant and art gallery. The house contains French furniture and tableware galore, plus an art collection by an assortment of British, Dutch and Italian masters. Admittedly you won't find the furniture at the French equivalent of J C Penny - it includes treasures such as the writing desks of King Louis XVI and his queen Marie Antoinette, who lost their heads in the French Revolution. The china comes from the famous manufacturers at Sevres in Paris and Meissen in Dresden. The creation of china models of complex objects such as sailing ships, animals and birds represents the cutting edge of 18th century manufacturing technology.

The house itself was a state of the art dwelling, comparable to the houses recently created by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. In the late 19th century it had wonders such as electric light and an electric elevator, plus under floor central heating and indoor bathrooms with running water. Despite its technological marvels, the estate of course depended on a huge labour input, much of it from the locality. The house alone had 24 servants to maintain a rigorous maintenance regime which accounts for the excellent state of preservation of the contents, even vulnerable soft items such as upholstery, curtains, wall hangings and carpets. The huge park kept 60 gardeners busy. There were 5 more staff in the laundry plus more in the stables. Some servants had an international background, such as the chef who had cooked for the Czar of Russia. But you could not help but wonder what the majority of the employees thought about this alien wonder in their midst.

This French style property, conceived by a member of wealthy German Jewish family and filled with treasures from half of Europe, was multiculturalism made concrete. The Rothschilds lived on a different planet to their employees, economically, mentally, culturally and certainly politically. The guests included Queen Victoria and Winston Churchill. The latter always asked for the only bedroom suite which has a balcony - most likely so that he could enjoy a smoke without trekking down to the smoking room or offending against the house's rigorous no-smoking rule (another area where it was way ahead of its time). One of the exhibits in an upstairs room describes the Rothschilds' extensive connections with Israel and their support for its creation - a huge historic event which obviously deeply affects all our lives now and for the indefinite future. Yet there was no other obvious link with their Jewish heritage in the house's architecture or contents; any European Catholic grand house would have had some religious artifacts and quite likely a splendid private chapel.

The Other Universe - Rural Life

The contrast between the lives of such people and the surrounding rural population can hardly be imagined. In Reading we have a superb little museum, The Museum of English Rural Life (www.reading.ac.uk/Instits/im). This documents the English countryside before the mass mechanization of the 20th century. The most obvious difference was the localization of the economy. Everything was grown or made within a very small radius of where it was used or consumed. The four essential raw materials were wood, straw, leather and iron. The raw iron might have to be imported from Wales or elsewhere in Britain, but the local blacksmith would transform it into horseshoes and agricultural tools. The other three essentials came directly off the local land and animals. There was no national manufacturer, much less a multi-national manufacturer, of hay carts or leather buckets. You ate the food which you or your neighbours grew or could find growing wild, like berries, mushrooms and birds' eggs. You built your house with local wood, stone or brick and roofed it with local tiles or thatch. So you had a fascinating regional variation in clothing, tools, food, houses and farm vehicles - not to mention songs and customs. The Rothschilds and their guests enjoyed the advantages of ideas, materials, artefacts and cultural products from a much wider world.

Multiculturalism

Driving along I was struck how my little car represented this trend conveyed to the masses. I was listening to the CD (invented by and developed by the Japanese company Sony and the Dutch company Philips) sung by Katie Melua, born in Moscow of Georgian parents and brought up in Belfast. I could insert any CD, bought for few lousy pounds, and have any musical genius on earth entertain and uplift me. I need spend nothing at all, push preset button 3 and get non-stop classical music on BBC Radio 3. To give you an example, a few years ago Radio 3 devoted two weeks to broadcasting the entire work of J S Bach. Or I could push button 4 and get non-stop news and documentaries on every conceivable topic from Radio 4. My Seat was designed by an Italian and assembled in Barcelona with a Volkswagen chassis and engine and its multiple components supplied by God alone knows how many sub-contractors in how many countries. Where did the essential raw materials come from, how many hands and minds had touched them and transformed them? It was the same Seat I had seen in half the countries of Europe. (See www.seat.co.uk and the "Ibiza" model ).The huge variety of local cars produced by nearly every European country have largely succumbed to those provided by the multi-national American, German and Japanese firms. Obviously British dogs such as the Austin Allegro or East German jokes such as the Trabant would never survive in a world where any sane person has the ability to buy a second hand Toyota or VW. But a bizarre and fascinating variety of local designs have disappeared.

The cultural internationalism mirrors the economic; we have such extraordinary access to information, products and concepts from anywhere on earth. But along with the gain there has been a clear loss. The modern idol of "multiculturalism" is presented as if it is something new; of course the localized economies of Britain (and the rest of the world) provided the foundation for an abundant multiculturalism within one country which has been destroyed or diminished as mercilessly as the Trabant. An obvious example is the hundreds of English accents. If you watch Hollywood films you might believe that every English woman speaks like MRS. MINIVER (1942, played by Greer Garson or Meryl Streep's character in PLENTY (1985) . You would never guess at the staggering complexity and variety of local English dialects - never mind the numerous Welsh and Scottish variations.

Most of this is due to geographical stability and isolation. Around 1980 I read of a woman in the village of Sonning Common, 4 miles north of my house, who had allegedly never been outside the village in her whole 70 years. Was this even physically possible I wondered? Well, she would have gone to the local village school until her education finished at the age of 14 - no high school or university. If she was lucky with her health she need never have been hauled off to hospital in Reading or elsewhere. She could have worked locally in a shop or on a farm or as a domestic servant. In short, she could have lived as much of the rural population lived up to 1914.

Laurie Lee's little masterpiece "Cider with Rosie", set immediately after World War One, describes the last years of a thousand year old way of life in rural Gloucestershire, 120 miles west of London. As Laurie walked 3 or 4 miles from one valley to another in Gloucestershire, he could hear the difference in accents which would have been inaudible to a Londoner. Up to World War 2 at least, people in Normandy could tell which village a person came from - a distinction which would have been lost on a Parisian. The Scripture readings at Easter echo this world when the people in Jerusalem accuse Peter of being one of Jesus' disciples - "Your accent gives you away!" Until very recently, local people were conscious of the difference between the urban Reading accent and the rural Berkshire accent of villages a few miles away.

Other factors influence linguistic variety - an obvious one being occupation. An enthralling documentary on accents in Northumberland, the far North-East corner of England, described the different vocabularies of the shepherds, miners and fisherman who lived only a few miles apart, but in three different worlds. Plainly this fascinating diversity is going to be diluted or erased once these occupations disappear; the "local" people mix in jobs at the "local" supermarket (identical to 300 others) and factories and watch the same international soaps and movies created thousands of miles from their homes.

Local life still varies considerably from one country to another, but the physical environment and mental furniture have become standardized to a staggering extent. It was both fascinating and depressing to watch a young Chinese woman watching a "traditional" Irish music DVD in a video shop in Hong Kong - especially as the DVD was itself a hyper-glossy professional production remote from the joyful "craic" of an evening's music making and dancing in a small pub or village hall in rural Ireland, yet obviously going to be a multinational best seller. It was almost a metaphor for the phoniness of "multiculturalism" itself.