We whose parents read to us the Bible, the Brothers Grimm, Mother Goose, Hans Christian Anderson, Reynard the Fox, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Aesop’s Fables know almost by heart the story of “The Country Mouse and the Town Mouse.” This is the version translated by the English scholars George Tyler Townsend and Thomas James:
Once upon a time a Country Mouse who had a friend in town invited him, for old acquaintance sake, to pay him a visit in the country. The invitation being accepted in due form, the Country Mouse, though plain and rough and somewhat frugal in his nature, opened his heart and store, in honor of hospitality and an old friend. There was not a carefully stored up morsel that he did not bring forth out of his larder: peas and barley, cheese-pairings and nuts, hoping by quantity to make up what he feared was lacking in quality, to suit the palate of his dainty guest. The Town Mouse, condescending to pick a bit here and a bit there, while the host sat nibbling a blade of barley-straw, at length exclaimed, “How is it, my good friend, that you can endure the dullness of this unpolished life? You are living like a toad in a hole. You can’t really prefer these solitary rocks and woods to streets teeming with carriages and men. On my honor, you are wasting your time miserably here. We must make the most of life while it lasts. A mouse, you know, does not live for ever. So come with me and I’ll show you life and the town.” Overpowered with such fine words and so polished a manner, the Country Mouse assented; and they set out together on their journey to town. It was late in the evening when they crept stealthily into the city, and midnight ere they reached the great house where the Town Mouse took up his quarters. Here were couches of crimson velvet, carvings in ivory, everything in short that denoted wealth and luxury. On the table were the remains of a splendid banquet, to procure which all the choicest shops in town had been ransacked the day before. It was now the turn of the courtier to play the host; he places his country friend on purple, runs to and fro to supply all his wants, presses dish upon dish and dainty upon dainty, and as though he were waiting upon a king, tastes every course ere he ventures to place it before his rustic cousin. The Country Mouse, for his part, affects to make himself quite at home, and blesses the good fortune that had wrought such a change in his way of life; when, in the midst of his enjoyment, as he is thinking with contempt of the poor fare he has forsaken, on a sudden the door flies open, and a party of revelers, returning from a late entertainment, burst into the room. The affrighted friends jump from the table in the greatest consternation and hide themselves in the first corner they can reach. No sooner do they venture to creep out again than the barking of dogs drives them back in still greater terror than before. At length, when things seemed quiet, the Country Mouse stole out from his hiding place, and bidding his friend good-bye, whispered in his ear, “Oh my good sir, this fine mode of living may do for those who like it; but give me my barley-bread in peace and security before the daintiest feast where Fear and Care are in waiting.”
This is a particularly rich version, nuanced not only with the lure of the city but with the Seven Deadly Sins (pride, envy, wrath, avarice, gluttony, lust, and sloth), which Christians adapted from their pagan ancestors in Greece and Rome, and the rabbis of Jerusalem. Aesop was a slave (much Greek wisdom came from their slaves) whose wit gained him freedom, and whose prudence made him a teacher who told stories about animals so that, unlike the prophet Nathan, he didn’t have to tell his Davids face-to-face that they were morally challenged. (Still, it is said that Aesop died when neighbors who did not appreciate his wit threw him over a cliff.)
The City Mouse condescends to his Country Cousin; pride of life is at the heart of his polite comment, “You are living like a toad in a hole.” The Country Mouse envies the riches of the city: The “couches of crimson velvet” tempt him to leave the “dullness of [his] unpolished life.” Anger is apparently not a mouse trait, but it appears in the “barking of dogs” and perhaps in the “party of revelers” who “affrighted” the mice in the first place. The mice covet the leftover banquet; they eat their fill in an orgy of gluttony; the lust of their feeding is complementary to the lust of their eyes that “presses dish upon dish and dainty upon dainty.” Sloth is the insidious and almost unnoticed elephant in the room: They are tempted to live off the bounty provided by revelers. (Welfare is such a comfortable vice.) Sloth gets us in the gut and the brain, as we bless “the good fortune that had wrought such a change in his way of life.” Sloth is the basis of pride, and both are overcome only by fear. The Country Mouse gives up luxury and adventure for peace: “give me my barley-bread in peace and security before the daintiest feast where Fear and Care are waiting.”
This story has great meaning for those of us who find anything interesting about being “conservative.” The moral that Aesop intended, “Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear,” doesn’t play well in a political culture that values nanny government, big oil, big pharma, leaving no children behind, and exporting democracy. In fact, most contemporary interpretations suggest that the Country Mouse is a wimp or, at the very least, that he just illustrates the point that everyone should do his own thing.
The problem with dismissing the Country Mouse as a wimp or a tolerant liberal is that Aesop’s tales made it through Greek and Roman history, and about 1,500 years more before liberals came along. A monk named Planudes put them into medieval Latin so that Christians could also have access to their moral lessons. Since then, a version of Aesop’s tales has been printed in every language the Western world has learned. And everybody who has read or had read to him this fable has always known that the Country Mouse was right. In the polity, we need order, and calm, and security. There is no other principle that anyone who proposes to “conserve” something can start with.
The Country Mouse did not cotton to Big Ideas. He certainly didn’t “think globally.” Wendell Berry points out that you can’t think globally. “You can only think in detail. ‘Global thinking’ is a distraction from thinking.” The fable doesn’t allow that there were also dangers in his country home—the number of field mice my dog has dug out of their “secure” holes testifies to that—but it does clearly imply that attending to one’s own habitat is wise.
The City Mouse cultivated manners; his eye and palate developed, and he gained taste and sophistication. But he lived by his wits, and on welfare. In Horace’s poetic version of the tale,
The townsman does the honors, lays his guest
At ease upon the couch with crimson dressed,
Then nimbly moves in character of host,
And offers in succession boiled and roast;
Nay, like a well-trained slave each wish prevents,
And tastes before the tit-bits he presents.
He was dependent upon the revelers who provided the banquet. He was a parasite—luxury implied slavery. The Country Mouse gathered his own stores but lived in republican simplicity. He knew instinctively what Mr. Berry meant: “I want to live in a good place, and I know that people can’t live in good places unless they know where they are and pay the closest, kindest attention to what they do there.” The City Mouse would love the mall—bustle, shopping, adventure, jostling, anonymity. The Country Mouse actually knew his smelly neighbors.
Theodore White wrote one of the best autobiographies of the 20th century, In Search of History: A Personal Adventure. Teddy was the author of the Making of the President series—still good reads but not likely to last as long as his own story. He tells us in “Part One—Boston: 1915-1938” how he grew up in a Jewish ghetto in a house on Boston’s Erie Street, which contained a tyrannical Jewish grandmother who spoke only Yiddish and a business-minded but musically inclined henpecked grandfather on the top floor, and a socialist father who had broken a thousand years of rabbinical tradition to become a penniless lawyer married to the daughter of the shrew upstairs but who was a closet Republican downstairs. Teddy loved them all. He went to grammar school and was taught by Miss Fuller (probably my ancestor) and other New England ladies, and later by Irish Catholic girls who were waiting for husbands. He went off to Hebrew school in the late afternoons, learning the Tanakh from intense young Zionists who forced his memory into “cadence and phrase, in imagery and folklore.” He also went into the street, hawking newspapers and learning the ways of commerce. Teddy knew his smelly neighbors.
But Teddy also knew how carved up he was—Puritans, Catholics, tough Irish guys, Italians you could deal with, a national government that by the 1930’s seemed to be Jewish-friendly, the reality that in Boston “the government was Irish,” his dad dead when Teddy was 16, going on “home relief,” the “shaping experience” of the Depression. “It was shameful.” He went to Boston Latin, the original open-admissions school, “a cruel school” that could flunk everybody out if it so chose, and then to Harvard on a scholarship, a classmate of Cap Weinberger and Joe Kennedy, Jr. He was one of the “meatballs,” as opposed to the “white men” and the “gray men” above him. He majored in (what else?) Asian studies, just to complete his total disconnection from any past that might have kept him close to his smelly neighbors.
What held on? What gripped him and molded him through decades of traveling in Asia, Europe, the wilds of New York and Washington, the campaign trails of four national elections? The Shema: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” For most of his life this translated into a mild Marxism, a hope that China, Europe, and the United States could become national communities, and an attraction to men who seemed to embody this vision: Chou En-lai, Jean Monnet, and John Kennedy. It was a secular Shema, a cosmopolitan abstraction that “we can all be one,” a latter-day Stoicism. Teddy became a perfect City Mouse, a good man, a man completely liberated from the parochial American Republic, but who always loved the cosmopolitan American Democracy.
I have often compared Theodore White with my father. Both were of the “Greatest Generation” (Dad was born in 1911)—but whereas Teddy’s family was caught in the maelstrom of urban immigrant cosmopolitanism, Dad (Osbern Putnam Willson, who renamed himself “Diddy”) came from a line of East Anglia English Puritans, none of whom ever lived in a place populated by more than a couple thousand souls. Dad’s ancestors were farmers; his father, although an Episcopalian priest, could grow or fix or build just about anything. There was an “upstairs-downstairs” in Dad’s life: Grandma Willson was an intellectual, the author of a book called The Child That Does Not Stumble, which was a sort of Henri Bergson-John Dewey-Quaker-mystic argument that children raised to be democrats must be taught only by love and example—never, ever, by discipline. She raised six children who were never able to work for anyone but themselves (doctors, lawyers, Indian chiefs), but who were all interesting. None of them was an intellectual. Most of them tried city life but ended up living in little rural towns, fiercely loyal to their families.
The forces that made Teddy White cosmopolitan probably should also have made my dad cosmopolitan. Diddy Willson went off to the University of Pennsylvania on a football scholarship. He graduated in 1933, and although he was quite sick of football (and coaches), there weren’t many jobs to be had, so he played for the Philadelphia Eagles for three years. He made a little money playing football and even more playing poker in the locker rooms after games, and saved enough to marry my mom and to go to medical school. He was so terrified of flunking out that he wouldn’t let Mom live with him until, in his senior year, she was pregnant with me, and he was informed that he would graduate at the top of his class. He finished his internship on December 6, 1941. On December 8, he enlisted and did not return home until the spring of 1946, having served on a hospital ship stationed off North Africa, Sicily, Italy, England, France, Okinawa, Saipan, the Japanese mainland, Shanghai, and the Philippines. He came home to a wife of eleven years with whom he had lived for two, and to two sons, one of whom he had never seen.
Dad actually saw more of the world during the war than Teddy White had seen—although Teddy had met Chou En-lai, Mao, Chiang Kai-shek, Joe Stillwell, and Claire Chennault. Dad met the “Dragon Lady” in Shanghai but nobody else very important. The song that caught America’s vaudeville imagination after World War I should have applied to both Teddy and Diddy after World War II: “How’ya gonna keep ’em, down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?” Most of them, you didn’t and couldn’t keep on the farm. The family farm was almost eradicated by 1955, and by 1965 it was, for all intents and purposes, just a memory. When I first went to the movies with the girl who would become my wife, all her extended family lived on farms; when our youngest daughter was born ten years later (in 1965), none of them did. But Dad wanted no part of the city. He bought a family practice in the tiny town of Phelps, in the New York Finger Lakes. He called it “PhelpsNew-YorkHomeoftheBrave,” and everybody who knew him knew what it meant.
He was the last of the Country Doctors. Teddy, on the other hand, went off to Paree and New York and Washington and wrote on all the big stages. Curiously enough, once he pulled out of big-stage journalism he had many second thoughts about being cosmopolitan. Too many stories seemed to be traceable to Washington, and not enough to Erie Street, Boston. Diddy was a very happy Country Mouse, who took Mom to New York City every so often to see plays and dance to Guy Lombardo’s orchestra, but really preferred to stay in his country town where he was regarded with something close to reverence.
These were two good men, a City Mouse and a Country Mouse who lived in a generation when it was all right to be either—at least until sometime around 1970. I was introduced to the writings of Richard Hofstadter and Russell Kirk in the same year, by the same college teacher, a wonderful man by the name of Maynard Smith. He favored the former, and I later became a disciple of the latter. Hofstadter was Columbia University, New York City; he made cosmopolitanism almost into a religion, and tried to teach us all to suspect deeply whatever was parochial or “paranoid” or illiberal in our past. Kirk, borrowing from Edmund Burke, argued that we actually had a conservative mind, and that there are “permanent things” that relate to the “little platoons” of religion, family, neighborhood—and which we neglect only at our great peril. He was Mecosta, Michigan, rooted in his ancestral community, devoted to long walks and never very comfortable in large gatherings of people. He called places like Columbia “Behemoth University.” Russell would have loved to have been called a Country Mouse; nobody could ever mistake Richard Hofstadter for anything but the opposite. Their best books, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It and The Conservative Mind, were published within five years of each other, but they could have lived a hundred years apart.
Dad (1911), Teddy White (1915), Richard Hofstadter (1916), and Russell Kirk (1918) were of the same generation, boys and men of Depression and war and Cold War. Dad and Teddy and Russell would have had good conversations, but I can’t imagine Dad (or Russell, for that matter) having anything to say to Hofstadter, or vice versa. This wasn’t a matter of character flaws; rather, by the time of Hofstadter’s death in 1970, City Mice and Country Mice no longer had much to say to each other. This was, in part, because of demographics. In 1970 farmers made up such a small percentage of our population that NBC’s Little House on the Prairie had to change Laura Ingalls Wilder’s entire vocabulary to make the show understandable. Small towns were considered to be places like Jackson, Michigan: 35,000 or so! Wendell Berry was a young man in 1970, but already a cultural relic. The United States was urban, and striving to become cosmopolitan. Except for conservatives. Most conservatives, that is.
If one were to scroll down the list of George Nash’s conservatives (The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America: Since 1945) one could pick out cosmopolitans: Bill Buckley, for example, a hero to all of us in the 1960’s and who admitted many times that he was conservative in every way except in “temperament.” Even M. Stanton Evans moved from the Heartland to Washington, D.C., “to be near my money.” All the magazines (except Chronicles) have located or relocated on the big stage where the action is. All the young “conservatives” know who Ann Coulter is, and Sean Hannity, but fewer and fewer know much about Russell Kirk or Albert Jay Nock or Richard Weaver. Rush Limbaugh’s silly book sold a couple million copies in 1992—mostly, one suspects, to people who would have trouble understanding one of Kirk’s or Buckley’s sentences. But that’s all right, if the folks who bought it were “instinctive, practical conservatives” in the words of an old friend of mine who didn’t read many books but who built good buildings. In fact, most good conservatives are men and women who do things, and do them well, and are rooted in the little platoons worth conserving.
The problem is, cosmopolitan conservatives want us to conserve only ideas. Scrolling further through George Nash’s monumental book we come eventually to the takeover, the short march through what few conservative institutions there were, that resulted in conservatism becoming dominated by “neoconservatism,” which should really be called “neoprogressivism.” Progressives of all varieties are good at marching through institutions, because they are secular, political, cosmopolitan, and cunning. Or at least they think they are. Because they can outsmart the barking dogs and the drunken revelers and survive on the margins, and win political victories quite often, and take control of magazines of “influence,” they imagine that they have caused conservatives to grow up and accept the postmodern world. And, in a sense, they have. Republicans are certainly not conservative anymore, nor are most of the writers who have usurped the name. The ideas they have chosen to conserve are like all ideas—abstract, unless rooted in the reality of what Henry Salvatori once described to me as the “air we breathe, and in our bones.” He was talking about the Constitution, and what he and his brother felt as the sons of an Italian immigrant.
Here’s a true story, about another Italian immigrant. Andy Bartucca came to live in PhelpsNewYork-HomeoftheBrave after World War II. He had joined the U.S. Army as a teenager after having already fought for the Sicilian resistance against the troops of both Mussolini and Hitler. His reward was a few combat medals and U.S. citizenship. In Phelps he had a small commercial vegetable garden, and he worked for the Veterans’ Administration in a nearby town, and he cut hair on Saturdays in a little room on the back of his house. Andy worked about 36 hours every 24-hour day, which was not unusual for immigrants then or now. One day when I was ten years old, I went to wait for a haircut and listen to the talk in his small-town barbershop. I was next in line when a tough, old Dutch farmer (our town was full of tough, old Dutch farmers) who was getting a shave from Andy’s straight razor said to him, “Well, Andy, I thought your brother was coming to town.” Andy told him that his brother had found a good job with Stromberg-Carlson up in Rochester. The old farmer said, “I guess that’s a good thing. As far as I’m concerned all you dago bastards can get on the boat and go back where you come from. At least he won’t be here.”
The fact that he said what he said with a war hero’s razor at his throat tells us something about his stupid, complacent courage, or maybe just about days when Italian immigrants were not victims but applicants. I went home and asked my father what a “dago bastard” was, and he said it was a good man who didn’t cut the farmer’s throat. We exposed our vital parts in those days to the “dago bastard” who became a respected and wealthy citizen of the western New York republic. Andy marched every year in our local parades, an honored veteran and American who had no clearer an idea of “diversity” than I, whose family landed on this continent in 1620, did. Andy was a Catholic, a family man, and a worker for good causes. Nobody in the town cared for whom he voted in national elections. He didn’t “think globally”; a man who shoots a particular enemy and grows a garden to feed his neighbors and cuts the hair of men who insult him thinks only in detail.
City Mice spend their time one-upping each other. Country Mice listen to each other. Ben Stein (who has unfortunately become quite cosmopolitan) pointed out many years ago that James Garner, as the hero in The Rockford Files, got into his biggest trouble when he stumbled into small towns, where everybody was a secret pervert or fascist. Rockford was a cosmopolitan cowboy: He rode his faithful Firebird in and out of trouble; he lived on the edge of the law; he had no family except a father who was comically dependent on his son; he fell in love only once, with a death-fated redheaded whore. Rockford could negotiate the libertarian urban underworld—he was a perfect City Mouse—but was helpless against those thugs from the country. He had no ears to hear what a community said, because, when you push aside the beans and get down to the pork, cosmopolitans want nothing to do with smelly neighbors. When progressives talk about communities, they really mean fake communities: the “gay community,” the “black community,” the “Muslim community,” the “Iraqi people.” They never use the term white community, although it would be at least as meaningless as the “communities” they are fond of. One may as well be a member of the “community of size forty-four regulars.”
But it’s not just a matter of progressives and conservatives. It’s also not a matter of blue states and red states. Those terms are political, and all progressives and most of the progressives who call themselves “conservative” want to make as much of our lives political as they possibly can. Country Mice are content to deal as best they can with their smelly neighbors. They conserve the things that are worth conserving. In detail. It is not possible, as my father, Russell Kirk, Wendell Berry, and a lot of others know, to conserve abstractions or really to live as cosmopolitans.
Teddy went back to Erie Street in 1976. He found it “reminiscent of Essen or Berlin—wiped out, as the South Bronx of New York City was wiped out.” The people of South Boston were going for George Wallace, which Teddy attributed to their “fear.” What really was happening, of course, was that the smelly neighbors were defending the neighborhood that the cosmopolitans had abandoned. Would Aesop have been surprised?
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