Nebraska on the make

How culture flourishes in the western plains state where Bryans are Bryans and cornhuskers are kings

ROBERT BURLINGAME

"There is no place like Nebraska." Twenty thousand voices regularly join in this paean of praise to a conquering Cornhusker football team after its accustomed victory in the Memorial Stadium on an autumn afternoon. For be it known that the pride of Nebraska is her gangling university on the flats of Lincoln, and the chief business of the university is the manufacture of championship football teams.

This business the university dispatches with regularity, barring a few untoward incidents, such as a 44 to 0 trouncing at the University of Pittsburgh in 1931. But the Pittsburgh boys were only iron puddlers and coal miners, who scarcely count. Out in the real America the cornhuskers are kings, and lost is that October Saturday whose low descending sun does not find them proclaiming their royalty over the prostrate form of another corn-belt university. Best of all do the Lincoln boys love to pummel the high-hats from Iowa City, softened by their contact with the effete East —Illinois, Wisconsin, and even Ohio.

To the outlander beyond the Missouri or west of Scott's Bluff, it may seem impious to open a Nebraska narrative in the university stadium, passing by such distinguished citizens as George Norris, the embattled liberal of the federal Senate, and Willa Cather, the chronicler of prairie life. But only thus can Ogallala and Wahoo and Broken Bow be made comprehensible, for the city of Lincoln and its university are practically the only forces that hold this hodgepodge state together.

The North Platte country, for instance, has always disliked the South Platte, and the South Platte retorts by expressing the pious wish that it may some day cast loose the North Platte millstone and make a more profitable alliance with Kansas. Omaha, with its back to Nebraska and its face turned east across the Big Muddy, is either a pariah or a rose in a cabbage-patch, depending on whether the commentator lives outstate or in the city itself. The southeast section of the state is fat and middle-aged and prosperous; the northwest has the sweep and rawness of Wyoming and the Dakota badlands. Catholics jostle Lutherans and Mennonites elbow Orthodox Russians, while the racial picture of the commonwealth is a contracted map of all Europe. In short, Nebraska is the product of the later frontier and the work of the melting-pot when it was bubbling its merriest.

Only the gilded Capitol tower and the horseshoe-shaped stadium a half-dozen blocks away bring some degree of unity out of these discordant themes. And the stadium deserves a degree of precedence over the $10,000,000 state-house, because it takes the ranch-hand from Cherry County, the sugar-beet laborer from the western panhandle, and the packing-house boy from South Omaha, and for three months each fall makes them a crusading host for the defence of Nebraska's honor. During the dull months of spring the coaching staff barnstorms the state, preaching to Rotary clubs and Chambers of Commerce the revealed gospel of higher football. Every Nebraskan is pledged, by the head of the emperor, to assist in swelling the enrollment in the stadium courses at the university. Football has given this school a hold over its entire constituency such as no other state university approaches, with the possible exception of Wisconsin.

Each football victory, by a remarkable system of logic, serves to convince the Nebraska citizen that his university is the equal of Harvard, Oxford, Leipzig, and the Sorbonne, done up in one package and with Cambridge and Stanford added for good measure. His pride, however, does not touch his purse. He continues to complain like a stuck pig at the burden of the university appropriation, and to applaud the legislature for heroically keeping the salary scale of teachers below that of almost any other recognized university in the country. The disarray of angular brick buildings strewn over a planless campus does not trouble his aesthetic sense, for aesthetics is a closed book to the Nebraskan. Only a smart-aleck easterner would listen to the national fraternity secretary who dismissed Nebraska with a reference to "its location on the endless plain, and a student body of typical middle-class German people—who make good citizens but offer little of special social life."

Nebraska boasts of Roscoe Pound and the Prairie Schooner, a literary quarterly praised by so fastidious a critic as Henry Mencken, but is content to send her children to one of the most inadequate public school systems in America. Outside of Omaha Central High School, where a true classicist wages a lone battle against his motor-minded constituency, the state offers no adequate preparation for college. Latin is displaced by Smith-Hughes agriculture, and if a hardy soul ventures into foreign language he stops with two years of Spanish, which is vaguely thought to be helpful in a South American business career.

Sole rival to the university for the state's affection is Mr. Bertram Grosvenor Good-hue's extraordinary Capitol, which is only now reaching completion after ten years of construction. A single-story limestone structure, two blocks square and surrounding a courtyard, it is surmounted by a tower that rises more than four hundred feet above the surrounding plain. Distinctly Egyptian or even Assyrian in line, it would seem as appropriate to a Mesopotamian setting as to Lancaster County. Groups of coatless farmers come in daily from Box Butte and Keya Paha counties, bringing their wives and children to see what God hath wrought. On pleasant Sundays the sightseers reach the proportions of a mob, whom corps of university students escort from marvel to marvel, declaiming a carefully memorized speech on the costs of construction. One by one, the visitors sit in the governor's chair, caress the Italian marble pillars, and exclaim at the hundreds of kinds of wood in the Supreme Court bench. Only a few grumblers remark that tin; money might better have been spent on paved roads.

Except for the capitol and university, Lincoln is a smug middle-class town, conventional enough to satisfy the Methodist clergy and the Republican Party. Travelling men avoid Lincoln on week-ends because of its rigid Sunday blue laws, which close theatres and all other places of amusement. Roadhouses are patronized only by university students trying to be devilish, and night clubs do not thrive on a midnight curfew. A two-million-dollar bank robbery two years ago caught the police department unprepared for any crime more heinous than running through traffic signals; for several months the arm of the law bargained with the underworld for the return of the loot, a procedure that was not edifying to the state at large.

Churches, mostly Protestant, have hemmed in Lincoln with a fringe of suburbs, ranging from a Methodist community which has largely surrendered its purity, to a Seventh Day Advent colony which eschews the devil bv observing Sunday on Saturday and concealing the fact that women have ankles. The Protestant clergy occupies the same favored position which it held in Geneva under Calvin.

For a town that has not yet reached its three-score years and ten, Lincoln has a glamorous past. At one time in the early nineties, William Jennings Bryan was teaching a Presbyterian Sunday School class, Charley Dawes was starting in the business world, and John J. Pershing was drilling university cadets. The Bryan legend is kept fresh by the Great Commoner's brother, now governor of Nebraska.

Divested of the skull cap which made him famous as Democratic candidate for vice-president in 1924, Brother Charley is serving his third term on a platform of low taxes and few frills. Verbose, domineering, and profane, the governor knows how to appeal to the Nebraska farmer in his own language. His opponents were long since disabused of the idea that Charles Bryan has no political capital but a name, and they have come to fear the man's uncanny aptitude for the facts and figures of state government. Unlike Bryan, Pershing figures in Lincoln society. His sister has long been a resident of the city, his son went through the Lincoln schools, and Pershing himself can often he seen in the Cornhusker Motel or with his contemporary, Mark Woods, of Woods Brothers, who advertise that their securities always return seven per cent. On a memorial tablet in the nave of Holy Trinity Church, John J. Pershing's name heads the roll of parishioners who served in the World War. For the rest, Lincoln's aristocracy resembles the cave-dwellers of Washington, content with its own life along Sheridan boulevard, its intermarriages, and its trips to Europe and the East. Like all of Lincoln, it is respectable, does its sinning and drinking quietly, and is not notable for public spirit.

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Fifty-six miles east of Lincoln, over a new paved road, is Omaha, three times as large, ten times as cosmopolitan, but scarcely a part of Nebraska. A true Nebraskan feels ill at ease on its steep hills, which are entirely unlike the topography of the rest of the state. Omaha sneers at Lincoln as her country cousin, and Lincoln retaliates by lifting her eyebrows at the Sodom and Gomorrah of the packing-plants.

Omaha is a city: she has a beer racket, a political machine, and a night life, to say nothing of having furnished Lady Charles Cavendish, nee Adele Astaire, to Broadway. She is sophisticated but not intellectual, and she smiles in mild amusement at a $100,000 suit brought by one socialite against another for alienating the affections of a deceased husband. Her country club set joins each year in the Ak-Sar-Ben—ball, where the favorite debutante of the season reigns as queen beside a middle-aged consort whose bank credit makes him eligible to the royal succession. Ak-Sar-Ben—Nebraska spelled backwards—also holds an annual stock show, but the Ak-Sar-Ben races must be spoken of in the past tense since an outstate attorney-general won rural votes by closing the parimutuel machines.

Omaha's wealth is based on her location in the center of the western rail system, which makes the city a natural terminus for livestock and grain shipments. Cattlemen congregate at the Rome hotel, as they once did at the old Paxton, and a remnant of the "line" still exists below Fourteenth Street for those who will have their fling at scarlet sin before returning to the country.

Omaha has lately gone artistic tinder the influence of a new municipal university and the three-million-dollar Joslyn Memorial, opened with great panoply last November. It is the gift of Mrs. Sarah Joslyn out of a fortune which her husband amassed from the sale of newspaper boiler-plate and venereal-disease remedies. To direct her project Mrs. Joslyn drafted Professor Paul Henry Grummann from the state university. Professor Grummann enjoyed a local reputation for polite naughtiness in his course on Ibsen. The remaining cultural enterprise of the city is Creighton University, a Jesuit citadel, which was built from the proceeds of telegraph wire strung over the Rocky Mountain area by Count Creighton in the 1860's.

Lincoln and Omaha are Nebraska to all intents and purposes. Extending to the state line on the west are 450 miles of flat country, only occasionally broken by a town. Grand Island, "the third city," has a population of eighteen thousand, mostly conservative German burghers who like their beer, maintain a Turner Society, and appropriately call their city auditorium Liederkranz Hall. Columbus, on the Platte River, is predominantly Irish, while at Scottsbluff, on the western edge of the state, a large colony of Russians till the irrigated sugar-beet fields of the North Platte valley. Geologists work each summer among the buttes and escarpments of the Scott's Bluff region, excavating remains of a pre-Indian culture which once flourished there. To the north is Cherry County, five times as large as Rhode Island and abounding in vast cattle ranches that foster as vigorous a frontier spirit as survives anywhere in America.

The central part of the state is a drear waste, called the Sand Hills, with roads that must be tied down to keep them from blowing away and clusters of tiny lakes that provide excellent fishing. Just above the Kansas border, in the Republican River valley, the New England settlement of Red Cloud is the family home of Willa Gather, who has done the saga of the Bohemian immigrants in My Antonia. Ninety-five per cent, of the names in Wilber are vowelless, like Brt and Srb, and until a few years ago beer-gardens existed there that were reminiscent of old Prague. Wilber is perhaps the only town in America which has publicly hanged and burned in effigy the leaders of the prohibition movement. This it did during a state campaign a generation ago. Sidney, tucked away in the south-west corner of the state, was once the end of the cattle trail, known far and wide as the "wickedest town in the west." An occasional sheriff is still shot there, just to keep old memories alive.

For a state that was settled by disappointed people who stayed only because they couldn't get farther west, Nebraska has done fairly well. Wind, drought, grasshoppers, and bad banks have inflicted on it most of the evils of man and nature, but in spite of them George W. Norris sits in the Senate and Willa Gather writes her novels. The Methodists held prayer-meetings for Al Smith's defeat in 1928. hut eight hundred saloons paid license fees into the state treasury until the federal government undertook a great experiment. Choppy Rhodes and Monte Munn are more illustrious alumni of the university than all the Rhodes scholars since Jameson's raid, hut Nebraska has been spared the dullness of her Anglo-Saxon neighbors by preserving the native flavor of the Slav, the German, and the Irishman.