Growing Up in the Two Americas

Another source of estrangement

By Rolf Dumke

Land vs. cities, as Tim Wallace’s November 16 NY Times article “The Two Americas of 2016^*” affirms, is an important division of American culture and politics, which have many sources for division.

I’ve lived in two small towns, in rural Ohio, for only one and a half years, and lived the rest of my life in the United States in a big city or a number of university towns. I only became aware of the large group of country people on two later occasions:
    In Nashville, while attending Vanderbilt University Graduate School, my wife (Susan) and I went to the Grand Ole Opry in its original fine wooden structure, an old church. I appreciated the huge attraction of country music to thousands of county folk, who lined up for many blocks to see and hear their stars perform live on its 24-hour radio program. The Ole Opry was the opera of country folk of Tennessee who attempted to see it at least once or twice in their lifetime. The lineup included a wide assortment of strangely dressed men and women, some with wild wide-brimmed hats, thick sweaters, and boots. Much of their dress was home-made. The visiting men who had financed their family’s attendance at this fine venue took a proud stance. Towing along old folks and children, they filled the old church building pew by pew to stay for one hour, then the whole row had to clear out, and was filled by new visitors.
    We sat upstairs in expensive reserved seats and saw the live radio program, with advertisements being sung by the same star singers who had just sung on the regular program a couple of seconds before, now reading off the ads from big boards held before them on a wide, cluttered stage, where helpers were sorting upcoming singers and persons to interview in groups while others organized the succession of ads with the appropriate boards. Friends and family members of performers were allowed to come on stage to watch them perform. There was a lot of hustle and bustle. It looked like chaos, but on radio the program had a nice rhythm between live music, interviews, live ads, and news on the hour.
    The proceedings were led by a sort of sergeant who directed by gesture and kept the program on time each minute of every hour, while individual ground floor pews were progressively filled and emptied.
   Although my main musical preferences were for classical music and jazz, country music had developed a charm, as I found out during an all-night drive through Germany in 1970, listening to the American Services radio broadcast of Bob Dylan’s fine “Nashville Skyline” album of 1969. It raised good memories of the Grand Ole Opry. Dylan had captured the essence of country music and amalgamated it with folk and a bit of rock. After hearing the album, Tim Souster of the BBC asked, “Isn’t this idyllic country landscape (simply) too good to be true?”
    Many of Donald Trump’s supporters may now ask the same question.

In my undergraduate year off from Yale, I worked as a foreign-exchange teller in a Cleveland bank and was drafted by the Army.
    The first command I was given was to come early one morning to a nondescript downtown office building. In a giant, badly lit hall I lined up naked with many hundreds of other, mostly scruffy country boys, all with a plastic bag of possessions attached to a rope around our necks. We proceeded from one physician to another, being told by the first to breathe while a cold stethoscope was held to our chest or back, and so on.
    Some guys started to cough vehemently, showing more or less advanced TB. But the doc said, “You have fine lungs, boy, move on!” The next doc with a stethoscope listened to my heart and approvingly said, “It beats, move on!” – same as he did with everyone else. And move on most of them did, to Vietnam.
    I had an important letter from the Yale Student Health office that provided a 4-F status because of a heart murmur. The Yale doc had heard something alarming that kept me out of rowing. He also kept me out of Vietnam, along with all the otherwise healthy athletes that morning who had knee and elbow problems from football. The scrawny rest – i.e., the average out-of-college young men – proceeded to fight this “fine” war, instigated by the Democrats and Harvard’s finest presidential advisers.
    A couple of years later I was astounded by the huge graduate classes in economics at the University of Wisconsin – over a hundred students in mine. Many were draft dodgers, not getting a PhD. The department was overwhelmed and my major professor, Bob Baldwin, an important international economist, fled for a two-year leave of absence in Washington, DC to do research on non-tariff barriers to trade, leaving me and his other fifteen doctoral candidates in the lurch. This led to my switching to the field of economic history, where an important faculty member, Rondo Cameron, held court, only to leave a year later for another professorship at Emory University, with better climate, better pay, and lower student loads.
    However, in Cameron’s last seminar at Wisconsin I presented a novel idea, to analyze the German historical customs union, the Zollverein of 1834, with the new customs-union theory of the 1960s. With my seminar paper and Cameron’s support. I received a dissertation research fellowship in Germany from the DAAD, the German academic exchange service, that led to my PhD in Wisconsin in 1976 and a career in economic history.

There was a lot of passing the buck back in the good old times of the 1960s where the college-educated avoided meeting their patriotic duties and universities were complicit. The death toll among the young country men who did not attend college was massive.
    I’m sure that this has caused lasting resentment between America’s working men and the college-educated, a source of estrangement that Donald Trump has been able to harness.
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Copyright © 2016 by Rolf Dumke Rolf Dumke is the author of the series of memoirs, “Growing Up in America,” whose latest installment appeared on September 4.