IV
She had inquired as to the effect of this dominating
dullness upon foreigners. She remembered the feeble exotic
quality to be found in the first-generation Scandinavians; she
recalled the Norwegian Fair at the Lutheran Church, to
which Bea had taken her. There, in the bondestue, the replica
of a Norse farm kitchen, pale women in scarlet jackets
embroidered with gold thread and colored beads, in black skirts
with a line of blue, green-striped aprons, and ridged caps very
pretty to set off a fresh face, had served rommegrod og lefse—
sweet cakes and sour milk pudding spiced with cinnamon.
For the first time in Gopher Prairie Carol had found novelty.
She had reveled in the mild foreignness of it.
But she saw these Scandinavian women zealously exchanging
their spiced puddings and red jackets for fried pork chops
and congealed white blouses, trading the ancient Christmas
hymns of the fjords for "She's My Jazzland Cutie," being
Americanized into uniformity, and in less than a generation
losing in the grayness whatever pleasant new customs they
might have added to the life of the town. Their sons finished
the process. In ready-made clothes and ready-made
high-school phrases they sank into propriety, and the sound American
customs had absorbed without one trace of pollution
another alien invasion.
And along with these foreigners, she felt herself being ironed
into glossy mediocrity, and she rebelled, in fear.
The respectability of the Gopher Prairies, said Carol, is
reinforced by vows of poverty and chastity in the matter of
knowledge. Except for half a dozen in each town the citizens
are proud of that achievement of ignorance which it is so easy
to come by. To be "intellectual" or "artistic" or, in their
own word, to be "highbrow," is to be priggish and of dubious
virtue.
Large experiments in politics and in co-operative distribution,
ventures requiring knowledge, courage, and imagination, do
originate in the West and Middlewest, but they are not of
the towns, they are of the farmers. If these heresies are
supported by the townsmen it is only by occasional teachers
doctors, lawyers, the labor unions, and workmen like Miles
Bjornstam, who are punished by being mocked as "cranks,"
as "half-baked parlor socialists." The editor and the rector
preach at them. The cloud of serene ignorance submerges
them in unhappiness and futility.
