HELLO AMERICA!-- AN ECONOMIST GOB ABROAD

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 104, 23 July 1927, Page 24

HELLO AMERICA!-- AN ECONOMIST GOB ABROAD

Realtors and Slogans „ . . “Hot Dogs* 5 and Road H©nses o The University of Stanford . „ .

Professor J. B. Condliffe, icho writes this article for THE SUN, is a New Zealander, who has had a very distinguished career. He vacated a Chair of Economics in Ner Zealand to accept an appointment with the Institute of Pacific Relations. ■ ENTERED America last Wednesday through the Golden Gate. This was in every way appropriate (or an economist and an alien —far better than sailing in past the statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. For a New Zealander too, California after Honolulu is an easy and natural transition to American life and manners. This is just as well, because in seven weeks I must range from San Francisco to New York, down to Washington, spend a little time in New England, go up to Montreal and Toronto, and so on to Winnipeg and Vancouver, returning down the Pacific Coast to San Francisco. The size of this programme laid out for me makes more vivid the truth of the saying that in America life is a choice between the quick and the dead. The new feeling, however, of having at last put on the seven-league boots, is in itself stimulating. One wished for the boots a few days ago as the ship lagged 10 hours late across the sadly-misnamed Pacific Ocean. First impressions of California are necessarily concerned mainly with motor-cars and motor traffic. The quick, it is said, are those who jumped in time and the dead are those who didn’t. As I came in a friends car out from the pier on to the Embarcadero, San Francisco’s great waterfront street, I was glad not to have any jumping to do. Even so the traffic was sufficiently exciting, particularly when, at the first stoppage, the car alongside was seen to have a very drunken driver.

My first jaunt into the countryside was also redolent of gasolene. I went by motor-stage to Palo Alto, a distance of 35 miles up and down hill. About three of these miles were through dense city traffic, and for another 10 the road was quite crowded with motors of all sorts and sizes; but the bus was right up to time, taking exactly an hour and a quarter for the journey. I noticed that all the d. ivers of these motor-stages were young men, apparently in the twenties. One wonders how long they last on the job. In this part of California around San Francesco there is a noticeable rawness and many signs of hasty development. We are apt to that the whole state is newer, some of it much newer, than our New Zealand settlements. The pace of development has been and still is amazing. When a firm of “realtors” opens up a new tract of land, it plants a branch office on the spot, beflags the entrances and gets the “proposition” off in quick time. California is growing so fast that there is usually little difficulty in doing this. Between Palo Alto and San Francisco there must have been at least a dozen of these blocks being opened, with roads being made and buildings going up in all directions. Much of the building is speculative, but the constant expansion of San Francisco causes the houses to be

bought very readily. One of the “realtors” had the very suitable name of Grabstein—there must be a deal of money being made in this region from rising land values. Apart from the greater haste and the larger scale and general air of crude hustle, the countryside is not unlike our own. The likeness is enhanced by the familiar presence of plantations of eucalypts everywhere, all at about the same stage of development. California got through its forestry boom many years ago. Perhaps, on the whole, the countryside, as well as the town and the harbour, is more like Sydney; but no New Zealander would feel much out of his environment here on a mild day in early spring, before the grass becomes parched. That is, of course, as far as the hills and the sunshine are concerned. The human environment, it one may call it so, is a good deal different. The little sawn-off houses, many of them with flat roofs and all with minimal chimneys, are different in design; but they tell the same story as with us of comparatively independent householders. The people, too, from a distance, are physically like ours, big and healthy. But they eat publicly and with zest. All along the road are signs, sometimes sta with forceful simplicity that “good eats” are to be had within, or rather without: and in other cases descending to picturesque detail such as “Chicken Hash House” or, more explicitly still, “Fried Half Chicken.” As I went through America chicken came on to the menu at almost every meal. There must be a tremendous annual slaughter of the innocents. The most popular of these wayside comestibles would seem to be “hot dog,” and of the hot dogs the Fat Boy and Fat Girl varieties appear most frequently. To make suggestion still more real, a whole syndicate of them is labelled "Barbecue.” Sam Weller’s kittens with the seasonin’ have apparently failed to hit the popular taste, yet a wideawake publicity man might surely get from them a slogan with “a kick in it.”

My impressions of this rapid motor journey are a trifle confused, but the hot dogs and eating houses recall at once to my mind, by propinquity, the cemetery area through which we passed. They are not, of course, called cemeteries, and, still less, burial grounds. Each has its elaborate stone entrance and a name done in r.ised letters on the grass lawn outside. We were well past the “Woodlawn Crematory” before its meaning dawned on me; but “Cypress Lawn” was plainer and “Eternal Home,” perfectly definite if a trifle blasphemous in a Christian land. “Mount Olivet” at the entrace to “Eternal Home” had a subsidiary legend—“ Cut Flowers.” The passion of America for euphemisms is amazing. Members of Parliament are always called “Solons,” which is a particularly cruel jest on the public. Undertakers are “morticians.” An economist is bound to approve the latter at any rate, as freeing a very useful word for the technical economic meaning it bears in French. But not even an economist can derive much aesthetic satisfaction from the advertisement of embalming excellences and such-like matters as they appear in the “Morticians’ Gazette,” or whatever their trade paper is called.

There are on the way to Palo Alto only two touches of ancientry, unless one excepts the Spanish names of towns and streets. Surrounded by hot dogs and squab and chicken shacks the “Fly Trap Inn” stands where it stood in the days of the gold rushes, and, not far* from it, is a large wooden barn with the faded sign “Riding Academy” barely legible still. Such superficial impressions of an American road indicate, however, only one side of the story. To compile' “Americana” or to write savage attacks

on dullness, mediocrity and humbug like Babbitt; to call America “The Babbitt Warren”—is at best to tell only half the story and that the lesser half. As William Allen White has recently put it, the difference between him and Sinclair Lewis is that Lewis goes along the shady side of Main Street while he prefers the sunny side. It is good that these things should be written of Americans, by Americans, for Americans to read; but it is silly for us self-satisfied British people to take them as the whole truth concerning American life. Imagine Sinclair Lewis or Mencken turned loose on New Zealand life and foibles.

The better things of American life came to my notice at the end of the ride, which left me at Stanford University. Earlier in the day I had walked with a friend through the campus of the University of California at Berkeley. It was eight in the morning and several hundreds of the 10,000 and more students of the university were coming in to their first lectures. The buildings, old red brick or new classic stone, were nearly all beautiful in themselves and the tall campanile with its straight severity was dominant above them all; but there seemed no plan, no spaciousness, no unity of conception. The buildings at Berkeley left the feeling that the university, with the greatest undergraduate enrolment in the world, and with all its resources, had not yet found itself. At Palo Alto, 35 miles removed from the city, there is a more academic air. The ranch of S,OOO acres which Senator Leland-Stanford endowed in memory of his son, has an ideal setting. From the president’s house the scattered oaks on the grassy hillside opposite look like part of an English park. In this ample and lovely setting a consistent and large building scheme has placed a noble university. The warm stone and the low Spanish mission style with its wide arched cloisters give an air of restful unity. Stanford is a combination of English, German and American university methods and life. Over a thousand men are in college residence the trend under President Wilbur is steadily toward post-graduate study and research, standards are high and undergraduate numbers are kept reasonably low. A quiet, beautiful, scholarly place, Stanford is a considerable makeweight to the crudities of superficial American life. Some people may feel that universities are not at all typical or influential in common life; but this will soon be less true in America than it

is in many other countries. Americans are . ? omin S to believe in university training. They believe in it enough to give their wealth to its support. Stanford has an endowment of considerably more than 22 million dollars invested in securities which return an average rate of 4.8 per cent. Its total income-producing assets amount to more than 28 million dollars. The land on which the university stands and its buildings are valued at another 11 millions. New Zealand has some distance still to go before her colleges are endowed proportionately, even allowing for numbers and for comparative wealth.