Another group is entirely masculine, being made up of husbands of various ages, their mutual bond being the downtown club to which they go daily, and in which the subjects discussed are politics, golf, and the evils of prohibition. To this group always belong the black-sheep husbands who, after taking their wives to the Country Club, disappear and remain away until they are sent for because it is time to go home, when they come back shamefaced and scented with Scotch.
Every American city has also what Don Marquis calls its "little group of serious thinkers"—women, most of them—possessed of an ardent desire to "keep abreast of the times." These women belong to clubs and literary societies which are more serious than war. They are always reading papers or attending lectures, and at these lectures they get a strange assortment of "cultural" information and misinformation, delivered with ghastly assurance by heterogeneous gentlemen in cutaway coats, who go about and spout for pay. If you meet these ladies, and they suspect you of being infested by the germs of "culture," they will open fire on you with a "thought," about which you may detect a curious ghostly fragrance, as of Alfred Noyes's lecture, last week, or of "the New Republic" or the "Literary Digest." The most "liberal" of them may even take "The Masses," precisely as people rather like them used to take "The Philistine," a generation or two ago. Among the members of this group are the women who work violently for suffrage—something in which I personally believe, but which, merely because I believe in it, I do not necessarily like to take in my coffee as a substitute for sugar, on my bread as a substitute for butter, and in my ear as a substitute for pleasant general conversation.
I do not wish to seem to speak disparagingly of women of this type, for they are doing good, and they will do more good when they have become more accustomed to possessing minds. Having but recently discovered their minds, they are playing with them enthusiastically, like children who have just discovered their new toys on Christmas morning. It is delightful to watch them. It is diverting to have them pop ideas at you with that bright-eyed, efficient, assertive look which seems to say: "See! I am a liberal woman—a woman of the new type. I meet men on their own ground. Do you wish to talk of birth control, social hygiene, and sex attraction? Or shall we reverse the order? Or shall I show you how much I know about Brieux, and household economics, and Ellen Key, and eugenics, and George Meredith, and post-impressionism, and "Roberts' Rules of Order," and theosophy, and conditions in the Sixteenth Ward?"
When one thinks of these city groups, and of mail-order houses, and Fords, one may begin to fear it is indeed true that we are becoming standardized, but when one lets one's mind drift over the country as the eye drifts over a map; when one thinks of the quantities of modest, thoughtful, gentle, generous, intelligent, sound American families which are to be found in every city and every town, and thinks again, in a twinkling, of sheriffs and mining-camp policemen in the Far West, of boys going to Harvard, and other boys going to the University of Kansas, others to the old Southern universities, so rich in tradition, and still others to Annapolis or West Point; when one thinks of the snow glittering on the Rocky Mountain wall, back of Denver; of sleepy little towns drowsing in the sun beside the Mississippi; of Charles W. Eliot of Cambridge, and Hy Gill of Seattle; of Dr. Lyman Abbott of New York and Tom Watson of Georgia; of General Leonard Wood and Colonel William Jennings Bryan; of ex-slaves living in their cabins behind Virginia manor houses, and Filipino and Kanaka fishermen living in villages built on stilts beside the bayous below New Orleans; of the dry salt desert of Utah, and two great rivers meeting between green rocky hills, at Harper's Ferry; of men working in offices at the top of the Woolworth Building in New York, and other men working thousands of feet below the ground, in the copper mines of Butte and the iron and coal mines of Birmingham—when one thinks of these things one quickly ceases to fear that the United States is standardized, and instead begins to fear that few Americans will ever know the varied wonder of their country, and the varied character of its inhabitants, their problems, hopes, and views.
If I lived somewhere in the region of Boston, New York, or Philadelphia and wished quickly to learn whether the country were really standardized or not, I should get into my automobile—or into some one else's—and take an autumn tour through Baltimore, past Doughoregan Manor, some miles to the west of Baltimore, on to Frederick, Maryland (where they dispute, quite justly, I believe, the truth of the Barbara Frietchie legend), and thence "over the mountain wall" and down into the northeastern corner of the most irregularly shaped State in the Union, West Virginia. I should strike for Harper's Ferry, and from there run to Charles Town, a few miles distant (where John Brown was tried and executed for the Harper's Ferry raid), and after circulating about that corner of the State, I should go down into Virginia by the good highway which leads from Charles Town to Berryville—"Bur'v'l," they pronounce it—and to "Winchester twenty miles away" (where they say that Sheridan's Ride was nothing to make such a lot of talk about!), and then back, by way of Berryville, and over the Blue Ridge Mountains into the great fox-hunting counties of Virginia: Clark, Loudon, and Fauquier. Here I should see a hunt meet or a race meet. There are many other places to which I might go after that, but as I meant only to suggest an easy little tour, I shall stop at this point, contenting myself with saying that not far to the south is Charlottesville, where Jefferson built that most beautiful of all universities, the University of Virginia, and his wonderful house Monticello; that Staunton (pronounced as without the "u"), where Woodrow Wilson was born, lies west of Charlottesville, while Fredericksburg, where Washington's mother lived, lies to the northeast.
Some such trip as this I should take instead of a conventional New England tour. And before starting I should buy a copy of Louise Closser Hale's delightful book, "Into the Old Dominion."
One beauty of the trip that I suggest is that it isn't all the same. In one place you get a fair country hotel, in another an inn, and somewhere along the way you may have to spend a night in a private house. Also, though the roads through Maryland, and the part of West Virginia I speak of, are generally good, my experience of Virginia roads, especially through the mountains, leads me to conclude that in respect to highways Virginia remains a backward State. But who wants to ride always over oiled roads, always to hotels with marble lobbies, or big white porches full of hungry-eyed young women, and old ladies, knitting? Only the standardized tourist. And I am not addressing him.
I am talking to the motorist who is not ossified in habit, who has a love of strangeness and the picturesque—not only in scenery but in houses and people and the kind of life those people lead. For it is quite true that, as Professor Roland C. Usher said in his "Pan Americanism," "the information in New York about Buenos Aires is more extended, accurate, and contemporaneous than the notions in Maine about Alabama.... Isolation is more a matter of time than of space, and common interests are due to the ease of transportation and communication more often than geographical location."