Not So Wild a Dream

Eric Sevareid

• Publisher: Diversion Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781635763492
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Journalist Biographies

"For anyone even remotely interested in American literature and journalism, Not So Wild a Dream is a must-read, and a joy."– Dan RatherIn this captivating first-person account, Eric Sevareid describes in thrilling detail his time as a journalist covering international affairs during World War II. From a young man in North Dakota to an instrumental figure in establishing CBS as an international news organization, Sevareid witnessed the shaping of America's journalistic landscape. His experiences provide an invaluable glimpse into the trials and tribulations of a dogged reporter. With current distrust of the press on the rise, Sevareid's insight is poignant and all the more necessary."The book is an excellent sketch of the war's progress, and a thoughtful personal record of Mr. Sevareid's adventures--one of the most far ranging war correspondent journals yet published."– Library Journal

Chapter I

The small brown river curved around the edge of our town. The farmers plowed close to its muddy banks and left their water jugs in the shade of the willows. There is not much shade in the northern sections of North Dakota, nor is there much shelter in the wintertime. Even as very small children we could sense the river’s life-giving nature and meaning to the farmers, to us all. By December, despite the river’s current, the men could cut ice blocks three feet square, to be stacked and layered with sawdust in the shed behind Moose’s general trading store on Main Street, against midsummer when the hot winds came across the prairie, a time when the milk seemed to sour just a few minutes after you had milked the cow, when you couldn’t even be sure of the butter kept in the well.

Velva (nobody seemed to know where the name came from; I suspect it made a pretty sound to the wife of some early settler) was only one of various villages strung upon the river’s wandering length, but naturally we felt we exercised particular rights of possession over its flowing. On the red-painted wooden bridge, leading into the “city park” was mounted a large sign bearing a white star and the words in block letters: “Star City on the Mouse.” This led also to the baseball diamond and the swimming hole just beyond. Sometimes the team from a village like Voltaire would come to play our men, and I can still remember my own feeling of proud generosity when, after the game, the Voltaire team would hurry to our swimming hole, strip off their overalls, and slide down our mud slide into the water, shouting, splashing, and shoving one another. Voltaire was only a few miles away, but it was bare and riverless. These men swam awkwardly with a great deal of thrashing and spitting. Only their forearms were burned a dark brown, and the face and neck down to the junction of the collarbone. The rest of their bodies was dead white in contrast. Grown men in those climates did not expose their bodies to the sun, and it was years before I saw adults with carefully nurtured “tans,” acquired in leisure, not working, time.

Wheat. So far as Velva was concerned, wheat was the sole source and meaning of our lives, which were given in continuing hostage to the vagaries of this pewter-colored ocean that lapped to the thistle-covered roadbed of the Soo Line and receded in perpetually undulating billows as far as a child could see from the highest point, even from the top of the water tank. We were never its masters, but too frequently its victims. It was our setting and scenery. It was rarely long outside a conversation. On the mercy of the wheat depended the presence of new geography books in the red brick schoolhouse, a new Ranger bicycle from Montgomery Ward’s, good humor in my father’s face. Its favor or disfavor determined the size and mood of the crowd of farmers on Main Street Saturday nights, and was the reason Pastor Reishus in the Lutheran church prayed as frequently for rain as he did for our immortal souls. In good harvests it meant that hordes of itinerant workers, I.W.W.’s (which meant “I won’t work,” according to the businessmen of the town), hung around the poolroom and Eats Cafe, hunched like tattered crows on the hitching rails, spat tobacco juice at the grasshoppers in the dusty street, and frightened the nice women of the town so that they rarely ventured on Main Street in the evening time. Good harvest meant that my father would have to leave his office in the back of the little bank, remove his hard white collar, change to overalls, and, taking my older brother with him, go to help out on one of the bank’s farms by driving the four-horse binder, while Paul, who was big for his age, would struggle with the shocks. Hired man or town banker, wheat was the common denominator of this democracy. It made all men equal, in prosperity or wretchedness. It meant that my father, the banker, was more of a confessor than the Catholic priest. His office was connected by a door to the town library for a time, and I could slip in among the bookshelves on days when the library was closed to everyone else. Sometimes I looked through the keyhole. I remember times when I would see a gaunt, unshaved Norwegian farmer sitting before my father’s desk, staring down at his blackened nails, speaking to my father with painful difficulty about the locusts or the reaper which broke its axle on a rock, and sometimes, with more difficulty, about his wife who had gone sick again. Those were in the bad times. Those were the days when my father could not eat much at supper. Those were the days when a buggy would drive up to our house after supper and my father and a wheat farmer would sit on the porch talking in low tones, with long periods of silence, until after we children fell asleep upstairs. Wheat was our solace and our challenge. My mother, who came from a green and pleasant city in the distant, mystical East—in Iowa—feared and hated it. My father simply met the challenge without emotion, as a man should, and grappled with it as well as a man knew how. In the end he lost. It ruined him.

North Dakota. Why have I not returned for so many years? Why have so few from those prairies ever returned? Where is its written chapter in the long and varied American story? In distant cities when someone would ask: “Where are you from?” and I would answer: “North Dakota,” they would merely nod politely and change the subject, having no point of common reference. They knew no one else from there. It was a large, rectangular blank spot in the nation’s mind. I was that kind of child who relates reality to books, and in the books I found so little about my native region. In the geography, among the pictures of Chicago’s skyline, Florida’s palms, and the redwoods of California, there was one small snapshot of North Dakota. It showed a waving wheatfield. I could see that simply by turning my head to the sixth-grade window. Was that all there was, all we had? Perhaps the feeling had been communicated from my mother, but very early I acquired a sense of having no identity in the world, of inhabiting, by some cruel mistake, an outland, a lost and forgotten place upon the far horizon of my country. Sometimes when galloping a bare backed horse across the pastures in pursuit of some neighbor’s straying cattle, I had for a moment a sharp sense of the prairie’s beauty, but it always died quickly away, and the unattainable places of the books were again more beautiful, more real.

2

My father was of the second generation of Norwegian pioneers who came with the Swedes, the Germans, and the Danes to this bleak and barren northwestern country, where the skyline offered nothing to soothe the senses, but where the soil was rich and lumpy in knowing fingers. He was of the second wave. The first, which carried in my grandfather, paused, in the fifties and sixties, among the pleasant rolling hills of Iowa and the southern counties of Minnesota, where one was always sure of rain. The land hunger did not die there. The railroads pushed out across the Dakotas, reaching for the fertile and already long-famous Oregon country, and the sons of the first, considering themselves very much American but still easily speaking their European tongues, followed soon after. The westering impulse was still strong in those men when my father went, in the first decade of this century, and those who penetrated North Dakota sought quick returns as well as permanent homes. For this was bonanza country. The soil was perfect for the crop. There were no hills to circumvent, no forests to clear. It required steadier purpose, harder work, and better men than the finding of gold; but the wheat was their gold. This was the Wheat Rush. So, recklessly they plowed and planted, the same crop year after year. They grew momentarily rich in the years of the First World War, but then the rains ceased. By now the original buffalo grass, which had preserved the soil, was long since plowed away, and without rain the earth lay dried and desolate, the color of old mud, and the hot prairie winds of summer, with nothing to stop them, simply transferred the top soil in the form of fine dust to faraway places. God knows how families survived those years, but they were tough and patient people and they always talked of “next year…next year,” until even a child could grow sick of hearing it.

(And this, in the very years when the rest of the country flourished in the most extravagant prosperity it had ever known. Before Franklin Roosevelt presented the principle that Americans were one, obliged to care for one another. An idea, I must say, which would have seemed very strange out there in my father’s day, when a man still believed that his preservation depended upon himself alone, so that he blamed only himself—and the elements—when he failed.)

Perhaps it was our common dependence upon the wheat that made all men essentially equal, but I do know now, having looked at society in many countries, that we were a true democracy in that huddled community of painted boards. A man might affect pretensions, but he could not pretend for long. We lived too closely together for that. There were, of course, differences in degree of material wealth. There were what was always referred to as the “well-to-do,” and we had a few families “on the other side of the tracks.” No doubt there was envy at times and small bitternesses here and there. But no man lived in fear of another. No man had the power to direct another to vote this way or that. No impenetrable combine could foist a candidate upon the people if they did not wish, and it would have been quite impossible to rig an election and get away with it. This was an agrarian democracy, which meant that there was no concentration of capital goods, which meant in turn, since we had no all-powerful landlords, that no class society based upon birth or privilege had a chance to develop. Only a very thick-skinned, insensitive person would dare to “put on airs” in that intimate community. If Mother dressed my brothers and me too prettily for school one day, it was a moral and political necessity that we muddy our clothes as quickly as possible before showing up in the classroom. If this was a Christian democracy, still, no virtue was made of poverty; the Scandinavian is too hard-headed for that. But to be poor was no disgrace. If the man of the house in one of the families that lived close to the edge fell ill and could not work, my mother and other mothers carried them baskets of fresh things to eat. It was not charity, not condescension to ease the conscience; it was neighborliness, taken as such, and no one’s pride was injured. The Horatio Alger tradition was strong even then, and the village boys really read those insufferable little books. One day when we were out picking wild plums by the river bank, another boy said to me: “Your father is a pretty good man, even if he is the richest man in town.” I had no feeling of pride; far from it. I was shocked, and hurried home, close to tears. I demanded the truth of my father, for if this were true, I felt I would be in a highly compromised position; somehow my own worth would be at a discount. Patiently, he demonstrated to me that the charge of possessing great wealth was a false accusation, and I relayed this gratifying information to the proper place without delay.

Later, I read all the exalting literature of the great struggle for a classless society; later, I watched at first hand its manifestations in several countries. It occurred to me then that what men wanted was Velva, on a national, on a world, scale. For the thing was already achieved, in miniature, out there, in a thousand miniatures scattered along the rivers and highways of all the West and Middle West. I was to hear the intelligentsia of eastern America, of England and France, speak often of our Middle West with a certain contempt, with a joke in their minds. They contemned its tightness, its dullness, its bedrock of intolerance. They have much to learn, these gentlemen. For we had, in those severely limited places, an intolerance also of snobbery, of callousness, of crookedness, of men who kicked other men around. The working of democracy is boring, most of the time, and dull compared with other systems, but that is a small price to pay for so great a thing.

I must have been very young when Main Street was first published. It is a title I remember along with the Rover Boys, Horatio Alger, and the Bible. Not that I read it, then, but my mother did and the neighbors up and down our street. I remember the local wrath, and remembering my mother’s distress I know it came from being deeply hurt. Of course, in these little places originality was frowned upon, and genius would have been suspect. Of course, the pressure to conform was almost irresistible, and the boundaries of that conformity were appallingly narrow. Of course, art was at a discount and “niceness” the standard of taste. But this terrible indictment bewildered the citizens and made them wonder if all they had tried to do was wrong and had gone for nothing. For they had no other standard by which to measure except the past. And what had the past been? It had been sod huts, a diet of potatoes and gruel. It had been the hot winds in summer that shriveled the crops, and the blizzards of winter that killed the cattle, that brought the pneumonia and influenza that killed their women and children, while the stricken men turned the pages of a home medical guide and waited for the doctor who lived twenty miles away. It had been the gnarled men who sweated beside a kerosene lamp to learn the grammar of their new country’s language. It had been the handing on from neighbor to neighbor of a few volumes of the classics, a few eastern newspapers three months old. It had been the one-room schoolhouse in a corner of my grandfather’s homestead, where a “bright” aunt could occasionally be prevailed upon to teach the rudiments to tired boys and girls, who had risen before dawn to lug the slops because the family could not afford a hired man. They came together in villages and put paint on the boards of their houses. They planted green trees, made a park as best they could. They put their money together and hired for their children teachers who knew a little more. They sent some sons away to come back with the knowledge of medicine and the law. They built hospitals and colleges. The colleges were not Harvard nor Oxford, but they saw that the right books were there. They thought they had done well. Who, in his present comfort and easy knowledge, is now to sneer? They were of the men who built America; they are now of the men who keep America. They are America.

I was to become one of that small swarm of young American journalists who, however deficient in scholarly background, infested foreign capitals, boldly bearded their great men, pugnaciously investigated their political movements, demanded the unornamental truth at a thousand press meetings where our French, British, or Portuguese colleagues approached the great with timid genuflections and regarded us with a mixture of distaste and awe. Instinctively, we looked at men for what they were—as men. A title of office, or a “von” or a “de” before their names was no kind of passport to our favor. Partly this was due to the rigorous downrightness of our American journalistic training, but partly to our beginnings in a hundred Velvas.

When “Duff” Aaker died prematurely, why did the whole town mourn his death with such unfeigned sorrow? He was only a country doctor with no wealth, no lineage, no power over them but the power of his personality. I can still feel, when I remember, the tapping of his strong fingers on my chest and the cigar smell of his salt-and-pepper beard. He was one of the first in our town to own an automobile, which he drove with savage speed. He played the piano, the cello, and the violin and even wrote symphonic music, which would have made anyone else suspect in respectable eyes. He understood my mother’s longing for the green and leafy places, and to him alone she could talk. He could denounce the Republican party and vote Nonpartisan League—heresy among the businessmen—and get away with it. He could drink in Prohibition days and get away with that. He could speak so wisely with a dying octogenarian that the old man was happy in dying. In his wrath he could refuse anesthesia to a drunken farmhand, terribly gashed in a pitchfork fight, make him sit upright on a kitchen stool, pour in the iodine overgenerously, and rebuke the man if he grunted.

He drove down one day from the new hospital at Minot to play the organ at the funeral of the local shoemaker, and rushing out of the church tripped, I think, on a croquet arch obscured in the weeds. He was injured internally and died in great pain. My father was a big, stern man, who made stern judgments, and I had never actually heard him speak any praise of the doctor. The night Aaker died my father went up to bed early, without saying goodnight. When we children were going to sleep we could hear his bed shaking. He was sobbing, and we listened in terror all night, for we had never known him to do such a thing. Duff Aaker was the first great man I ever knew about outside of books. No president or premier ever seemed greater to me.

Sometimes now it seems to me that my generation lived in preparation for nothing except this war that has ended and which involved my own life so profoundly; but the First World War, which was really the first phase of this one, must have been a very minor interlude for that generation. It surely did not affect our village much. I do remember my father lifting me to the window of a troop train as it halted beside the water tank, in order that we children could shake hands with Uncle Ephraim who was passing through on his way “over there.” I remember scolding Arthur Renning, next door, for putting sugar on his bread, knowing that the government in Washington did not want us to put sugar on bread. That’s all I remember about that war, except a dream, which is clearest of all. I dreamed the same dream many times. A column of “Huns” was marching down Main Street, past MacKnight’s drugstore, and had reached Welo’s department store, when I, lying artfully concealed on the roof of the bank, let go with my father’s Winchester .22 and mowed them down. They seemed to make no effort to take cover, or to stop me, and they all died instantly. (In the winter when this war was ending in Europe, the British press printed pictures of two German youngsters who had tried to snipe at our men. The captions said: “Examine the faces of these killers, this spawn of the Nazi beasts. Can we treat them as innocent children?”)

There were a good many Germans in town, but your parents never talked about them as Germans, never pointed them out and set them aside in your mind. Broad women with kindly faces who opened the doors to their clean, good-smelling kitchens and handed you a piece of limp, fragrant coffee-cake. They were just the neighbors. You knew they came from Germany, but you did not move them into that side of your mind which contained the Germany of the devilish Kaiser, the spiked helmets, and the savage men who cut the hands from Belgian children. The conception of Germans as a race, with racial (or, at least, national) characteristics of their own, was something that did not enter my mind for many years. There were no races with us, except the Negroes, and we saw only one specimen, who worked awhile around Johnson’s barber shop, then drifted somewhere else. Undoubtedly, there were Jews among us, a few, but I didn’t know what a Jew was until I was almost ready for college. A Jew is still just another person to me. If I do not experience any special reaction in the presence of a Jew, it is not due to broad-mindedness. I cannot. It just isn’t there. The toxin was not injected into our bloodstream early enough, for which we give thanks to Velva.

For my father’s generation, born in America though they were, the “old country,” which they had never seen, still seemed close. He carried a faint Norwegian accent in his speech throughout his life, which came from his early boyhood when few around the farms spoke English. Christmas dinner was never right for him without lutefisk and lefse, and Pastor Reishus always preached first in Norwegian, then in English. But there came a break with my generation, the third. It happened throughout that northwest country. Talk with visitors in the parlor about the old country bored my brothers and me. I hated the sound of the Norwegian tongue and refused to try to learn it. It meant nothing to me that my grandfather on my mother’s side was one of America’s most distinguished scholars of Scandinavian literature and life. The books in my classroom dealt only with the United States, and there lay the sole magnet to our imaginations. The thread connecting these northwest people with Europe was thinning out, and with my generation it snapped.

There was another course which changed in that period. We were the first to grow up without the American West shining before the eye of the mind as the vision of the future. Instinctively we knew that the last of the frontiers had disappeared. From the time when the Indian tales lost their spell and we began to think, we wanted to go east. It was the East that was golden. My father did move his family east—a little way, to Minnesota—but not to seek more opportunity, more freedom; years of drought ruined his wheatlands and broke his bank.

3

The high-school period, in America anyway, is surely the worst period in a man’s life—the most awkward, uncomfortable, inept and embarrassing of all times. And the most fruitless. It is astonishing how little one is taught in these schools, or, at least, how little one absorbs of what they must be trying to teach. They handle this period much better in Europe, particularly in France. At least they do something with a boy’s mind. They fail, however, to do anything at all about the boy’s body, which is important at that age, so that almost the only exercise the pale, skinny Paris kids of seventeen obtain is in chasing girls—and, furthermore, catching up with them. This probably explains some of the...

Table of contents

• Not So Wild a Dream
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Dedication
• Introduction to the New Edition
• Chapter I
• Chapter II
• Chapter III
• Chapter IV
• Chapter V
• Chapter VI
• Chapter VII
• Chapter VIII
• Chapter IX
• Chapter X
• Chapter XI
• Chapter XII
• Chapter XIII
• Chapter XIV
• Chapter XV
• Connect with Diversion Books