CLOTHESLINE

HOMEOWNERS ASSOCIATIONS are fierce guardians of design morality, yard upkeep, and homogeneous property values. They've politely mentioned to a friend that her clothesline is not an approved landscaping feature. Of course they're polite. Bigotry and reminding folks that they have stepped outside accepted standards is always begun politely.

Her homeowners association is cowering before the persistence of image. When they see her clothes fluttering in the breeze, they don’t see a farm wife in the prairie wind but the stigma of the tenements, all those clotheslines hung between buildings, in air shafts, on tar roofs.

As a journalist, I should greet the association’s wet-jammie jitters as a compliment, since it stems in some part from one of the earliest and most powerful landmarks of photojournalism, Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements In New York, 1890. This photo essay made an indelible impression on middle and upper class consciousness and persists to this day. It revealed the “shame of the squalid tenements.” A few efforts were made toward improving conditions but it was clear that the shame resided with the tenement dwellers, and there was obvious pique that the poor had embarrassed the rich.

But there’s something odd in the tenement clothesline prejudice. The period in which we welcomed so many immigrants and enriched our national gene pool with so much genius and drive was one of America's golden times. Yet our central icon of America, also from that time, is the cowboy. In reality the cattle drover we celebrate as the Marlboro Man was another indigent, socially abhorrent member on the lowest rung of society. The literacy rate in the tenements was sky-high compared to the readin’ and writin’ of the cattlemen. The cowboy’s heyday was brief: the “Texas cattle for Yankee dollars” era of driving big herds from the Southwest to the railheads in Kansas and Missouri spanned only about fifteen years. In that heyday the drover was seen by most of society as a pariah, filthy and uncivilized, ignorant and rowdy. To be fair, this perception was probably spot-on.

But out of our tenements in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnatti, Pittsburgh, Albany, Hartford and other urban centers we saw invention, enterprise, social reform, striving, artistic expression, and a new national spirit of diversity and respect. Granted, it took a hundred years for that spirit to gather power and legitimacy, but our national conscience began in the tenements with all those fluttering, clean clothes strung between buildings.

What social upheavals did the cowboys offer? The spirit of independence and self-reliance? No historic evidence of that. Most cowboys were hired on as part of a local cattlemen’s associations or a big-business rancher’s outfit, often with eastern or British money behind them. They were mounted troops at the beginning of the undeclared "War of Western Consolidation" that squeezed out "small-holders" and established big-money agribusiness.

That war saw a prairie suspension of habeus corpus, death squad "regulators," lynchings and corporate terrorism. But it's not a war you found in your textbooks. Billy the Kid was one champion of the small-holders in the Lincoln County War. The Mussel Shoals War was a bloodier conflict waged in California, involving Leland Stanford and his robber baron colleagues. Mussel Shoals was followed with obsessive interest in the class struggle it represented by a writer and theorist in London, Karl Marx.

So why the cowboy and not the immigrant striver? It was probably the hat. Even today a good Stetson attracts attention. It surely wasn't the horse. In that pre-automobile era everyone knew horses, every streetcorner layabout presented himself as an expert on horseflesh. But the hat, now there was the key to romance.

So why isn’t our national romance grounded in the tenements? Bad hats? Mebbe. In large part the influx of intelligence and talent the United States received between the beginning of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War is what made this country great. Immigrants, a sound and balanced Constitution, size and fortunate geography. There you have America.

The homeowners association should bugger off and read their history books a little more closely, damnit.

BRAXINOSO SPEAKS

Himself exhibits a dash of unaccustomed passion in this rant, but he makes sense. Surely we could afford more diversity in our heroes. We recall the Pecos Bill archetype in our pantheon but we seem to have largely dismissed Paul Bunyan, Mike Fink, Davy Crockett and Joe Magarak. Dirty Harry should be turned away as a national model, of course, but he's the obvious product of Duke Wayne's legacy.