America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (33 page)

The crowd parted and let him through, and we walked through the rain to his little shack. The coffee got made all right, but never quite drunk, for reports began coming in from the dripping tents. There was an epidemic in the camp,—in the muddy, flooded camp. In that camp of two thousand souls, every kind of winter disease had developed; measles and whooping cough; mumps; pneumonia and throat infections. And this little man was trying to do everything. He had to. There was no one else but the people in the camp. Even if they wanted to help they couldn't for want of knowledge.

We tried to drink the coffee. A man ran up. Riot in the sewing room. Over we splashed. The sewing room was the measles room. Forty speckled children lying on blankets on the floor. Cloth tacked over the windows to protect children's eyes from the daylight. In the doorway, a huge, bare-armed woman stood, while a little assault developed in the mud in front of her. She had instructions from Windsor to keep uninfected visitors out and she was doing it to the outrage of families and neighbors who always visited with sick people. The riot was settled, infections explained. We went back to our coffee, reheated it, poured the cups full. But hell broke loose in a sanitary unit. A new-come woman, contrary to regulations, was standing on the toilet seat besieged by a furious group of women who only recently learned not to stand on the seats. And Windsor Drake settled that.

We went back to our coffee, heated it again. And all evening it went on. A man beat his wife. New children came down with the measles and had to be separated from their parents and taken to the sewing room. Nerves were on edge in the pouring rain. Fights started out of nothing and sometimes ended bloodily. And Windsor Drake trotted back and forth explaining, coaxing, now and then threatening, trying to keep peace in the miserable, wet slum until daylight should come. His white trousers were splashed mud to the knees, and his big eyes had that burning tiredness beyond sleep. Near midnight the camp gradually quieted out of sheer exhaustion. Then Windsor put a battered skillet on the little stove and dropped some bacon in it.

I dropped to sleep in my chair. A baby's crying near at hand awakened me. Windsor was gone. He came back in a few moments and stood turning the burnt bacon.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Baby lost the breast. Mother was too tired to wake up.”

“What did you do?”

“Found the breast and gave it back to the baby.”

“Didn't the mother wake up then?”

“No—too tired. Been working all day in the rain.”

Later in the year Windsor and I traveled together, sat in the ditches with the migrant workers, lived and ate with them. We heard a thousand miseries and a thousand jokes. We ate fried dough and sow belly, worked with the sick and the hungry, listened to complaints and little triumphs.

But when I think of Windsor Drake, I remembered first the tired eyes, and I think of the baby that lost the breast in the night, and the mother too tired to wake up.

I KNOW NOTHING about photography. What I have to say about Capa's work is strictly from the point of view of a layman, and the specialists must bear with me. It does seem to me that Capa has proved beyond all doubt that the camera need not be a cold mechanical device. Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart.

Capa's pictures were made in his brain—the camera only completed them. You can no more mistake his work than you can the canvas of a fine painter. Capa knew what to look for and what to do with it when he found it. He knew, for example, that you cannot photograph war because it is largely an emotion. But he did photograph that emotion by shooting beside it. He could show the horror of a whole people in the face of a child. His camera caught and held emotion.

Capa's work is itself the picture of a great heart and an overwhelming compassion. No one can take his place. No one can take the place of any fine artist, but we are fortunate to have in his pictures the quality of the man.

I worked and traveled with Capa a great deal. He may have had closer friends but he had none who loved him more. It was his pleasure to seem casual and careless about his work. He was not. His pictures are not accidents. The emotion in them did not come by chance. He could photograph motion and gaiety and heartbreak. He could photograph thought. He made a world and it was Capa's world. Note how he captures the endlessness of the Russian landscape with one long road and one single human. See how his lens could peer through the eyes into the mind of a man.

Capa for all his casualness was a worrier. In Russia he had to send his film to be developed by the Soviet Government. He fidgeted and fried until the negatives came back. And then nothing was right. They were over- or underdeveloped. The grain was wrong. He would clasp his brow and yell with anguish. He cared all right. He cared very much.

The greatness of Capa is twofold. We have his pictures, a true and vital record of our time—ugly and beautiful, set down by the mind of an artist. But Capa had another work which may be even more important. He gathered young men about him, encouraged, instructed, even fed and clothed them, but best he taught them respect for their art and integrity in its performance. He proved to them that a man can live by this medium and still be true to himself. And never once did he try to get them to take his kind of picture. Thus the effect of Capa will be found in the men who worked with him. They will carry a little part of Capa all their lives and perhaps hand him on to their young men.

It is very hard to think of being without Capa. I don't think I have accepted that fact yet. But I suppose we should be thankful that there is so much of him with us still.

WHEN I FIRST MET Mr. Roosevelt he had been President for some time. I said, “Mr. President, I'm one American who doesn't want a Government job.”

He laughed and said, “In my experience, you're the only one.”

Mr. Stevenson, I still don't want a Government job.

A year and a half ago, I had never heard of Mr. Stevenson. A year ago I knew his name and only remembered it because of the unusual first name. Until the convention I had never heard nor read a Stevensonian word. And now we hurry through dinner to hear him on radio or to see him on television. We fight over the morning paper with the “full text.” And I can't remember ever reading a political speech with pleasure—sometimes with admiration, yes, but never with pleasure.

I was in Europe at convention time. Europe was, as nearly as we could tell, pretty solidly behind Eisenhower. So was I, as solid as possible. Then gradually the newspapers in France and England and Italy began to print remarks by a man named Stevenson, first a phrase, then a sentence, then a paragraph. When I left England very recently nearly every newspaper was printing a daily Stevenson box on the front page. Europe has switched to Stevenson. So have I. And I have been drawn only by his speeches. They are unique in my experience and from the reaction of the audiences—and I have only seen them on television—the speeches are a new experience to everyone. The listeners set up no hullabaloo. The speaker is never canceled out by emotional roars of inattentive applause. People seem to resent applause because in the noise they might miss something. I've read that the meetings are quiet because the audiences are not moved. Then I've watched them leaning forward, their eyes never leaving the speaker's face and turning irritably toward any distraction. They're listening, all right, listening as an audience does to fine theater or fine music or fine thinking.

It is one of our less admirable traits that we always underrate the intelligence of the “people.” The speaker never includes himself as one of the “people.” It is always those others. The story is told of a movie producer who argued that people would not understand a part of a film he was previewing. His nine-year-old boy spoke up, saying, “Dad, I understand it.”

The producer whirled on him and shouted, “We are not making pictures for nine-year-old boys.”

Now I read in the opposition press that Stevenson is talking over the heads of the people. I have read the speeches not once but several times. The words are small and direct, the ideas are clear. I can understand them and I don't think I am more intelligent than the so-called “people.” I have come to the conclusion that the fear in Stevenson's opponents is not that the people don't understand him, but that they do.

Throughout our whole history we have been in favor of humor. To be against humor was like being against mother love. But I read now that humor has been made an official sin. Anything effective is a sin to your opponent. Traditionally, political humor has followed a pattern. The speaker made a joke which had been carefully inspected to see that it had nothing whatever to do with the subject he intended to discuss. The flat little joke got a titter of laughter and the speaker knew that his audience was warmed up. He flopped without transition into the body of his speech, hoping that for a few sentences his listeners would still be listening for another joke. Audiences are pretty clever, though, and they rarely fall for this method.

Stevenson has changed the technique. He draws his humor from his subject. His jokes, far from obscuring his message, enlighten it. This makes him doubly dangerous to an opponent, for his listeners not only listen, they remember and they repeat. I don't recall any other speeches that have made people unsatisfied with a digest. We want the thing in the man's own words.

Being a writer, I have had a bit of trouble here and there, and it has been my experience that when I have been accused of some particularly gaudy sin, my accuser has felt some kind of knife and is striking back. I can understand why the opposition hates Mr. Stevenson's humor. They are very busy licking their wounds. In our whole political history I can recall only one man who used humor effectively. That was Abraham Lincoln and he, too, was excoriated by his opponents. In his time also humor was a sin.

There is a further devastating effect of the Stevensonian speech, which his opponents cannot admit. He makes their efforts sound so ill-conceived, clumsily thought-out and dull. The weighty sarcasms, moral indignations, the flaggy patriotisms and dingy platitudes which have been perfectly good in other elections are covered with gray dust in this year. It is very hard to follow a great act with a Minsky blackout.

Now and then in a group the question arises, Does Stevenson write his own speeches? I don't know, but as a writer I know that only one man writes those speeches. There may be people working on ideas and organization and so forth, but I am sure that either Stevenson writes every word of the speeches or some other one man writes every word of them. Individuality is in every line. I don't think it could be imitated.

I have dwelt only on Mr. Stevenson's speeches because that is all I know about the man. There are only four approaches in knowing a man. What does he look like? What has he done? What does he say—in other words think—and, last and most important, as a conditioner—what has he done to or for me?

I know Mr. Stevenson only from pictures of him, from reading his history and from his speeches. I was for Eisenhower, knew about him and liked him. I did not switch to Stevenson because of physical appearance, surely. Neither candidate is any great shucks in that department. I could not have changed on a basis of past achievements because Eisenhower's contribution is second to none in the world and certainly overshadows the record of the Governor of Illinois, no matter how good it may have been. I have switched entirely because of the speeches.

A man cannot think muddled and write clear. Day by day it has seemed to me that Eisenhower's speeches have become more formless and mixed up and uncertain. I don't know why this is. Maybe he is being worried and mauled by too many dissident advisers who in fighting each other are destroying their candidate. Eisenhower seems like a punch-drunk fighter who comes out of his corner on wavery legs and throws his first punch at the referee. Again, Eisenhower seems to have lost the ability to take any kind of stand on any subject. We're pretty sure that he still favors children or dogs but that maybe he would like the states to take them over, too—anything to avoid making a decision. He is rather firm on those issues which are still handled by the Deity and he has a sense of relief that this is so.

Stevenson, on the other hand, has touched no political, economic, or moral subject on which he has not taken a clear and open stand even to the point of bearding selfish groups to their faces.

I do not know, but I can imagine the pressures on candidates for the Presidency. They must be dreadful, but they must be equally dreadful for both candidates. With equal pressures we have seen in a pitiful few months the Eisenhower mind crumble into uncertainty, retire into generalities, fumble with friendships and juggle alliances. At the same time Stevenson has moved serenely on, clarifying his position, holding to his line and never being drawn nor driven from his nongeneralized ideals.

And if the pressures on a candidate are powerful, how much more so must they be on a President? I find I am for the man I think can take the pressures best and can handle them without split loyalties, expedient friendships or dead animals—cats or albatrosses. In a word I think Stevenson is more durable, socially, politically and morally. Neither candidate has or is likely to do anything to or for me personally. And I can't hurt or help either of them. As a writer I love the clear, clean writing of Stevenson. As a man I like his intelligent, humorous, logical, civilized mind. And I strongly suspect what we can't possibly know until November. Americans are real mean when they go behind that voting-booth curtain. But I suspect there are millions just like me who have switched to Stevenson as the greater man and as potentially the greater President.