Another Fine Mess Page 19

  The New York Times referenced a different breed of totalitarian Ford-fan in 1928, when it dubbed Henry ‘an industrial fascist – the Mussolini of Detroit’. The doctrine of ‘Fordismus’ was roundly praised by certain elements of the German political scene, and Henry Ford won his most unfortunate cheerleader in 1923, when Adolf Hitler, then in prison after his foiled beer-cellar coup, came upon a translation of My Life and Work. Ford would earn a glowing namecheck in Mein Kampf, and after becoming Führer, Hitler always kept a photographic portrait of Henry in his office. In 1936, Hitler sent his motor supremo Ferdinand Porsche to meet Henry in Detroit, where the pair toured Ford’s factories and discussed the Führer’s plans for his Volkswagen – a ‘People’s Car’ project wholly inspired by the utilitarian Model T, and the brutal efficiency of its mass production. River Rouge workers had already dubbed Bennett’s Service Department ‘the Ford Terror’, and many commentators would later wonder if Hitler borrowed it as the model for his Gestapo.

  I would like to say this concludes Henry’s besmirching association with Nazism, but regrettably we shall be returning to it later. While we’re here, though, this seems as good a place as any to note the prominence of Ford and the Model T in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, published in 1932, with its T-shaped crucifixes and pious reflections on ‘the time of our Ford’. The Year Zero of Huxley’s dystopia, the After Ford age, aligns with the year that the first Model T rolled off the Highland Park lines. In Brave New World, of course, bottled foetuses run down the conveyor belts. For reasons he has never explained, my father always reread the opening chapters while waiting for my mother to give birth.

  CHAPTER 12

  Mike and I were now heading into proper horse-with-no-name country, through cowboy panoramas of boulder-strewn, deep-red plains and dried-up orange creeks. Clusters of morose dark brown cattle jostled for shade under spindly mesquite trees. I swooped into burnt-ochre canyons, then laboured deafeningly back up to the Martian bluffs and mesas. The hot, dry air seemed to extrude this landscape’s immensity: the grain elevators of the next lonely settlement always stood clear and sharp and imminent, before a signpost revealed it lay ten or more miles distant. Behind me, that two-lane blacktop juddering about in the mirror seemed to exist in a very different dimension of time and space. No sooner did a mobile glint take distant shimmery shape than it shot by at three-digit speed, with the slamming whoosh of an express train. And then I was once more alone, reeling in hot, straight miles with a sack of Walmart trail mix between my knees, a gallon jug of water warming on the passenger seat, and a soaring heart. What a thrill to be pitting my frail old car against this muscular, hostile vastness. What a relief to be doing so now that I could vaguely control it.

  I bagged my first ‘howdy’ at the liquor store in Old Glory, its solitary shop, and saw my first roadrunner – long fanned tail, silly little crest, hot-footing it down the shiny tarmac past a coyote-tempting roadside inducement: ‘TNT – BUY ONE, GET FIVE FREE.’ Every few hours I’d pause at a plaque or monument blasted half-smooth by sand and the West Texas wind, and decode some of the T era’s more unfortunate language and attitudes. ‘In honour of Major General Mackenzie, who defeated the Comanches in Tule Canyon and ended Indian power in Texas.’ ‘First white child born in Motley County was Nora Cooper, born here in 1882.’ Native Americans were still being killed in armed encounters as late as 1918, and the Indian Plains Wars didn’t officially end until 1924, the year of Mike’s birth, when a gang of Apache horse thieves surrendered in Arizona.

  Guthrie looked big on the map but not in the dusty flesh, little more than a high school and a courthouse (every half-horse town seemed to have one of these). The gas station I’d anticipated was conspicuous by its absence, which very nearly cost me dear – when I stuck my measuring stick in the tank by the pumps in Paducah, 30 miles up the road, it came out dry as a bone. For some weeks henceforth refuelling opportunities were routinely spaced 80 or 90 miles apart, and I learned to top Mike up whenever I passed one.

  Guthrie was the gateway to King County, number two in my pack of Top Trumps, a district where precisely five people voted for Hillary Clinton. There were few signs of life, and fewer still of productive potential. A dozen longhorns stood up to their haunches in a pool of brown water. Beyond them, a scattering of little tin-bladed water-pump windmills poked out from the scorched earth. Not a derrick in sight: nobody was making money from ‘ahl’, as they pronounced it round these parts. This was ranching at its scrappiest and most marginal. The pick-ups that now sped crazily past were dwarfed beneath some perilous, monumental load, a bale of hay as wide as a tube tunnel, or a shed-sized plastic tank.

  ‘Where you come from, and where you headin’?’

  A pleasingly ageless greeting in the ‘Crossroads of America’, as at least a dozen towns I’d already been through had already styled themselves, most with no better justification than Paducah, which happened to find itself at the nexus of two not especially significant highways. I provided my answers, and without appearing to process them the elderly manageress of the town’s last surviving motel launched into an unprompted, freewheeling history of the rise and fall of Cottle County and its seat. ‘Now, this was cotton country but the wind and the boll weevil took it away. Back in the Thirties we had sand storms so bad folks had to hide in the jailhouse. Ten thousand of us in Paducah in those days, and I just heard we’re down to nine hundred. Only thing growing here is the cemetery.’ This last sentence rolled out with the mannered ring of a catchphrase. In the minutes ahead I learned that the original Marlboro Man, a blue-eyed cowboy named Clarence Long, was a son of Paducah; that the town’s retailers had taken a fearsome hit when Walmart opened a store 30 miles north; and that after voting Democrat for most of its incorporated life – an uninterrupted run, I later established, from 1928 to the 1990s – Cottle County had now placed its trust very firmly in Donald Trump. ‘He’s trying to get things done. I just wish the media would give him a chance instead of baulking him at every turn. It’s such a shame, that poor man has only got his family left to support him.’ She sighed with such sincere empathy that I thought better of grabbing her by the shoulders and shrieking like a chimpanzee.

  Paducah was something else: no Mexican restaurant, no crickets or cicadas, no purple-shirted seniors clustered around Mike. Dinner was two cheeseburgers at a sticky-tabled shack where my place setting included a fly-swat encrusted with trophies. Then I went out in the low, gold sun and walked on empty, lightly grassed sidewalks to a town square that encapsulated my mission, more starkly and sadly than anywhere else I would visit.

  At its centre towered Cottle County’s magnificent 1930 courthouse, a four-storey civic temple in the Gotham City mould, graced with stylised eagles and fiercely angular representations of Liberty and Justice. The four broad streets that framed this stirring monument were edged with perhaps forty red-brick buildings of commercial aspect, their facades topped with geometric chevrons and other art deco architectural cues. In the absence of any modern accoutrements, not even one parked or passing car, it was easy to picture Bonnie and Clyde’s Ford V8 sidling into shot. The 1967 movie was largely filmed in north Texas towns just like this. I now irresistibly recalled the couple’s abortive raid on a Farmers State Bank, speeding away after the cashier told them it had failed three weeks before and he didn’t have a cent in the safe. Except here in Paducah, the failure was more profound. Of the forty establishments around me, not one – not a single one – remained open for business. The shuttered Palace movie theatre, its marquee board forever promoting ‘JOHN WAYNE – RED RIVER’.

  The windowless Cottle Hotel. The soaped-up offices of the Paducah Post, born 1906, died 2014. J. F. Norris & Co Furniture – no roof. Jordan Fashion – no doors. M. E. Moses Five and Dime – very hopefully for sale. Every other store front betrayed a weird retail death-spiral: ‘FLOWERS GIFTS BALLOONS AND MORE!’ above a window display that comprised a single traffic cone and a very dead pot plant. There wasn’t a soul in sight.
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br />   I gazed up at the mighty courthouse. Its monolithic portico was topped with an engraved inscription: ‘TO NO ONE WILL WE SELL, DENY OR DELAY JUSTICE.’ Noble words above all this forsaken squalor. The courthouse was erected at the high-water mark of that agricultural boom that swept across the Midwest and far beyond in the early T era, a green-rush that brought flocks of immigrants and unimaginable wealth to remote, unlikely places like Paducah. On cue, the rains came, and the desert bloomed with corn and cotton. Good weather and soaring productivity – irrigation, Ford tractors, railroads to deliver supplies and take away produce – led to record harvests and bumper prices.

  Then, quite swiftly, everything went wrong. The market was glutted, and in the three years up to 1924, commodity and livestock prices plunged 85 per cent, bankrupting 600,000 farmers. When the price of corn dropped to $9 a ton, farmers started burning it at home instead of coal, which was twice as dear. A barter economy kicked in. A farmer’s wife in Maryland complained that a dentist had billed her a ton of tomatoes to do twenty minutes’ work on her daughter’s teeth. Lawyers billed farmers 150 bushels of corn to draw up their remortgage documents. Then the boll weevil, a pest that had been spreading north from Mexico since the turn of the century, marched north at speed. In the mid-Twenties, boll weevils destroyed half the US cotton crop, a loss folksily audited as 500 shirts for every man in the land. The rains stopped and the dust storms came. Then the Great Depression pitched up to apply the coup de grâce.

  Paducah had been bled dry for ninety years, but at least it still had a faint pulse. The next day I drove past a grand red-brick ruin set far back from the road in the mesquite trees and wispy grass: a roadside board told me it was Whiteflat high school, opened in 1922 and closed twenty-four years later, the only surviving trace of a town that had once boasted three churches, three gas stations, four grocery stores and a cotton gin.

  The agricultural recession propelled Henry Ford’s small-town popularity into the stratosphere. He had made the car that had changed their lives, and made a fortune doing so. In 1919, Ford danced a jig around his office after buying out every minority Ford shareholder – a ballsy move that cost him $106 million, but delivered complete control of the company. Ford was the people’s tycoon, not beholden to the money men who were busily repossessing farms, or the politicians who stood by and let them do it. Americans seem to have a hardwired weakness for confusing business success with political potential. But in the 1920s, the millionaire they put their faith in at least made a worthy saviour: a hard-working, self-made man of simple tastes and old-fashioned values.

  In 1916, Henry Ford inadvertently won a presidential primary in Michigan. Somebody had put his name on the ballot without telling him, and when he heard the news he thought it was a joke. After that accidental victory he withdrew from the contest. In 1918, he was persuaded to contest the Michigan Senate primaries, but endeavoured to do so on both tickets, beating his Democratic rivals but losing to the eventual Republican victor. Yet despite all this ambivalent reluctance, as the agricultural recession wore on a Ford-for-president bandwagon got rolling and picked up speed. A national organisation, snappily dubbed the Give Henry Ford an Opportunity Club, was swamped with donations. ‘Which side are you on?’ asked one club leaflet. ‘Wall Street or Henry Ford?’ ‘No more politicians or lawyers for us,’ declared another. ‘Ford is our Moses.’

  By the summer of 1923, with a presidential election looming, Ford was acknowledged across the nation as the strongest candidate. Every opinion poll suggested a comfortable win. He hadn’t aligned himself with either mainstream party – no bad thing in terms of his popularity – and nor had he yet declared an intention to stand. He never would. In August, President Warren Harding abruptly dropped dead from a heart attack, and Ford announced he would be playing no part in an unseemly fight for succession. (He should have waited: Harding was soon posthumously exposed as a corrupt womaniser who openly flouted Prohibition in the Oval Office – red meat for Henry’s old-fashioned, anti-establishment fanbase.) Thereafter Ford withdrew from politics, and drifted to conservatism as the old are wont to do. He came to despise FDR’s New Deal, and cursed the unions. In time he was swept rightwards to a very dark place indeed.

  The motel manageress had already gone to bed when I let myself in. A stout cardboard notice stood propped on the reception desk: ‘No refunds for ANY reason.’ I hadn’t noticed it before. But then I also hadn’t noticed the little plastic dishes that I now spotted under each leg of my bed, nor the number of beady-eyed little reasons that were marooned in them, mired in some deathly fluid, antennae twitching feebly. Just before dawn I went for a pee, turned on the light and watched several very much larger reasons scuttle with hideous alacrity into every corner of the bathroom. Two terrible hours later, as the sun rose above Paducah’s gap-toothed, residential wastelands, I heaved my bags into Mike’s back seat, scraped crushed brown legs off my soles on a weathered kerbstone, shielded red eyes behind tinted lenses and clattered off into the derelict silence.

  My ascent to the High Plains had begun, a surreptitious process only betrayed by the elevation signs posted outside each town: Paducah, 1860ft; Matador, 2,380ft; Pampa, 3,238ft. These russet flatlands, clotted here and there with prickly pears, aromatic tufts of sage brush and world-weary cows, receive less than a foot of rain a year, and are subject to the extraordinary daily temperature swings that are the lot of the lofty desert. Mornings began to bring me out in goose pimples, though by noon the sun beat down so brutally that I seared my forearm flesh on Mike’s black bodywork.

  Buzzards circled high above. A debut ball of tumbleweed skittered across the road and lodged itself under a headlight. It became ever easier to believe that only 2 per cent of the United States is classed as built-up. Every desolate town was home to a one-stop oasis serving gas and groceries to lonesome old ranchers from far and wide, standing in line before me with 2 gallons of milk and a slab of beer. Goodnight, Rule, Tuxedo … these settlements were blessed with such tirelessly quaint names that when I passed a sign for ‘SANITARY LANDFILL’, first word above the second, I read it as a two-town direction post.

  No bends and no traffic meant distance was measured in driving hours out here: I’d ask the cashier how far it was to the next gas station, and be told how long it would take to get there, an estimate that required trebling to bridge the gap between the locals’ cruising speed and mine. I wasn’t surprised to find every fellow motorist tackling this hostile enormity hoist a fraternal, encouraging hand out of the window. But then almost every single driver I’d encountered in 3,500 miles had hailed me in some fond and approving manner. By this stage I was reflexively lifting a finger or two off the wheel at every approaching car, in pre-emptive acknowledgement.

  Every High Plains morning, at whatever plucky settlement found itself in the right place at the right time, there was breakfast, a great convivial round of bacon and bonhomie, with Mike and I as the talk of the tiny town. My challenge: to get to the bottom of the Trump phenomenon before dying face-down in a fry up.

  ‘Vern, Dave, this here is Tim Ball, and that’s his keen little deal outside … Maylene, give your daddy a call – this gentleman is taking a 24 Model T coast to coast and he needs to meet him … Hey, Merle! Merle! Stop starin’ at that old Bonnie and Clyde car out there, get yourself in and talk to this crazy Brit who’s driving it to the Pacific.’

  And soon enough I’d be sharing my table with every oldie in town, shooting the shit over sunny-side-ups and hash browns and endless cups of bitter, brown water. These diner gatherings kicked off like a very good-natured job interview – the firm handshakes, the exchange of names, the preludial pleasantries about the weather and your chosen route into town. Then we were off on a free-roaming exchange of gossip, bullshit, old-school cheers and fears. ‘Read about a guy back in the Eighties, he lost 175 pounds and all he ate was bacon … I just can’t keep up with all this L.G.B.T.Q.M.O.U.S.E., whatever the hell it is today … Well, long as you’re not killing or hurting
someone, I say you should be allowed to do it. What you’re doin’, Teeum, well, ain’t that a kick. Me, I ain’t never been out of Texas.’

  With varying degrees of finesse, I’d introduce a certain flabby old narcissist into the debate. ‘See, he’s a businessman who won’t follow the rules, and if all those self-serving politicians and the media hate him for that, then he’s gotta be doing something right … Left wing and right wing are part of the same bird … I’m not strictly pro-Trump, I’m just anti-politician, anti-federal … And hey, congratulations on your Brexit!’

  I must have heard these last four words a hundred times. As cheerfully ignorant as most Americans remain about events beyond their borders – in the realm of broadcast news, the outside world simply doesn’t exist unless an Islamic terrorist attacks it – the EU referendum result had burned itself deep into the small-town consciousness. The Limeys had flipped the finger at federalism – woo-hoo! It was such a self-evident cause for universal celebration that they simply blanked out my protestations, no matter how bluntly I expressed them, which by about the eightieth time was extremely sodding bluntly.

  Such was the split personality I encountered every day, the small-town yin and yang. On a personal level, these rural oldies were just so irrepressibly upbeat, so open and positive. At the Main Street Café in Matador, a well-built guy with a ‘Vietnam veteran’ lanyard round his neck insisted on paying for my breakfast. As I climbed on to Mike’s running-board, the sprightly old proprietor trotted out and flicked a smart blue Main Street Café trucker’s cap on to my head. ‘Not too often we get visitors,’ he said. Yet their world view was a bundle of darkness, a doom-laden, paranoid bunker mentality. Just outside Matador, full of hash browns and humanity, I was confronted by a big black sign that read: ‘9/11 – WORSE THINGS COMING – FIND JESUS!’ Fiercely anti-governmental sentiments wobbled up out of the heat haze in half the towns I drove through: a giant metal pig with ‘COUNTY ASSESSOR = GREED’ painted on it in a front yard, ‘TO ALBANY TAX PAYERS: CHECK YOUR LIGHTS, KNOW YOUR RIGHTS!’ daubed on a barn in vast letters.