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A Pedantic
Autobiography
You don't know
about me without you have read a book by the name of Lake Wobegon Days.
That book was made by Mr. Garrison Keillor, and he told the truth, mainly.
There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
It’s nice to be able
to tell your life story in footnotes. Keillor gives you a pretty good
idea of what life was like when I was growing up. So does the movie
Fargo,
minus the violence. Both are exaggerated, but you have to be from around
there to know what’s exaggerated and what isn’t. (You don't have to like
Keillor or his book. It's OK just to read it for information).
More footnotes:
F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby: “lost Swede towns”. In 1963 I boarded a train at
the same St. Paul train station that Fitzgerald did in order to go to
talented-and-gifted summer school at his Princeton University -- but
rather than leading to fame, fortune, alcoholism, and an early death, my
trip led only to a degree of alcoholism.
Sinclair Lewis,
Main Street – eleven miles away.
John Updike’s
Pigeon Feathers is about Pennsylvania, but when I read this book
while I still lived back in Minnesota, it seemed like home. Keillor and Updike
both came up with solutions to a difficult writing problem –
how do you write about a place where people are pretty much successful
in assuring that nothing dramatic ever happens? (Looking back at this
book after forty years, though, I now feel that Updike overwrites.)
Faulkner’s
Intruder in the Dust was about an entirely different way of life,
but he perfectly caught the eerie feeling of being the favored son of a
small-town worthy whom everyone knows and has an opinion about.
J. F. Powers,
Morte D’Urban, about a Catholic priest in a town like mine. (My
parents met Powers once, before I was born.) Trivia: when the priest
shows up at the rectory to which he has been assigned, he finds the
freezer filled with northern pike. Northerns are bony and not highly
prized by fisherman around there – it’s the walleyed pike (a completely
unrelated fish) that people fish for. Parishioners had been donating the fish they didn’t want to the church, and
the priest who had preceded Urban had not bothered to eat them.
Carol Bly, the
ex-wife of the poet and guru Robert Bly, has also written good stuff
about the area. (She should not be blamed for his drumming.)
Thorstein Veblen,
The Country Town:
“The country
town of the great American farming-region is the perfect flower of
self-help and cupidity standardized on the American plan. Its name may
be Spoon River or Gopher Prairie, or it may be Emporia or Centralia or
Columbia.”
Veblen was writing
about the period before 1900 when he was growing up, and one thing he
emphasizes is that American towns were founded by speculators whose plan
was to make a quick buck and move on. The same pattern can be found in
my own home town’s history, but the speculators were ultimately replaced
by Scandinavians and Germans (like Veblen’s own parents) who just wanted
to farm, and they transformed the place into something quite different .
(All small towns are well aware, though, that they are the mercy
of monstruous financial powers in strange, distant cities.)
My home town was
first settled before the Civil War, but it was depopulated during the
Sioux Uprising and resettled again afterwards. It was located on a
military road leading from St. Cloud on the Mississippi to Fort
Abercrombie on the Red River south of present-day Fargo. This road
roughly divided the Sioux (Dakota) and Ojibwa (Anishinabe) spheres of
influence. Most of Minnesota was French territory until the Louisiana
Purchase in 1803, and before the French and Indian Wars, Upper Louisiana
had bordered Greater Quebec. Because of the fur trade via the Great Lakes, the northernmost part
of Minnesota was settled by Europeans (French and Métis
-- a mixed Native American / French people) before the south was.
There still are a scattering of French surnames and place-names in the
area, but without any survival of French language or culture.
When the Great
Northern Railroad came through, my home town briefly became a swanky
resort town, since it was on the first big lake out from Minneapolis. One
local boy,
Gar Wood, began an engineering and boat-racing career there during the
1890’s which culminated in world water-speed records during the 1920’s.
(He also contributed to the development of the
dump truck, and that was what financed his racing). Two world-class boxers, the brothers Tommy and Mike
Gibbons, also spent their summers there growing up, and trained
there. (Tommy was defeated only three times during his career, losing
tough championship fights to Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney.) In my early
days I barely knew of the existence of any of these men, however (though
Tommy Gibbons had financed the construction of the local Church
of the Immaculate Conception).
Other famous
Minnesotans I like to mention are Frances Gumm and
Robert Zimmerman, who
were both born up north, twenty years and thirty miles apart.
The state of
Minnesota as a whole has some demographic peculiarities. It is
overwhelmingly German and Scandinavian, with the lowest proportion of
inhabitants of British descent of any state except Hawaii and perhaps
North Dakota1.
Probably as a result, Minnesota during the 20’s and 30’s had the most
radical political scene of any state in the union, electing the
self-professed Socialist Floyd B. Olson as governor in 1932. By now
Minnesota has reverted almost to the mean, but the left tradition is
probably still stronger there than in any other state.
The Farmer-Labor
Party which elected Olsen is perhaps better described as populist than as
leftist, however. In 1936 the only Congressman who voted to end the arms
embargo to the Spanish Republic was the Minnesota Farmer-Laborite John
Bernard, who was almost excommunicated for his vote -- whereas only
six years later in 1942, the Farmer-Labor Senator Ernest
Lundeen died in a mysterious plane crash while under investigation for
Nazi ties. My judgment is that Minnesota at that time was far enough from
the centers of power to be paranoid, but prosperous enough not to be
completely submissive -- and not terribly discriminating in the forms of
rebellion chosen.
As of 2002,
Minnesota’s 7th Congressional District where I grew was one of
the nation’s
50 poorest Congressional Districts, and perhaps the poorest
predominantly-white northern district. While I was growing up I knew many
people without running water or central heating.
As a boy I always
knew I was sort of odd, and so did everyone else in town, but in general
everyone took things in stride and we got along fine. It helped that my
father, who was one of the town’s most prominent citizens and who was
(with exceptions) liked and
admired, was also a little odd. Until I went to
college, though, I never knew that according to the national standard,
everyone I grew up with was pretty odd too.
P.S. Some pedantic
afterthoughts:
One of my collateral ancestors.
Elizabeth Emerson,
was given extensive personal counseling by Cotton Mather before she was
hanged for infanticide. Mather judged that his counseling had been
unsuccessful, but not by his fault. Another, Thomas Cornell, was hanged
for killing his mother and setting her body on fire; key testimony at his
trial came from his dead mother, who had appeared as a ghost in someone's
dream.
And as I explain
here (search
"Colorado"), before I was born my father and my pregnant mother passed
through Colorado
at about the same time that Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Neal
Cassady, Humbert Humbert, Dolores Haze, Sal Paradise, and Dean Moriarty
were coming, going, or passing through there. (And like Neal Cassady's
father, Ann Landers, and Dear Abby,
my grandmother was
born in Sioux City, Iowa).
Footnote
1. Roger Doyle, Atlas of
Contemporary America, Facts on File, 1994, p 31.
A political history of Minnesota
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I am emersonj at gmail dot com.
Original materials copyright John J
Emerson
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