The truth of the matter is that the country is just as rich as it ever was. There is just as much money in the United States as we ever had and there is no over production. The people would eat up and wear out everything that has been accumulated if they could get the work to earn the money with which to purchase it, and it is the back-walkers who are preventing them from getting it.
“There is no business; the country is shot,” groans the business back-walker, and he refuses to advertise. “You couldn’t get a job for love or money,” sighs the working man and he sits down to await the return of prosperity. The aggressive man and the hustling worker cut their overhead and wear out their shoes instead of their trousers, taking what they can get as profits, considering a rapid turnover rather than big profits, and never starve.
When this professional back-walker was in Baxter Springs he took off his reflective goggles and turned around and walked like other men and he looked a lot better. It’s that way with the speculative back-walker. They would not only look better but the town would be a lot better off if all of them would remove their goggles and go to walking like normal human beings.
11.
American Dream
Joplin, Missouri, was the most high-and-mighty city Plennie’d seen since Dallas. It stuck out like a bow tie in the Ozark Mountains, stately and polished, trying hard to be noticed.
The “biggest little city in the world,” as the boosters called it, was the product of conflict. The first mines were sunk around 1870, when Missouri had become the fifth-largest state by population in the Union, and St. Louis, just shy of three hundred miles east, was third in size of all American cities. Joplin rose up between two prior settlements that fought like angry siblings. It now boasted a streetcar dinging down Main Street, ten parks, six banks, two daily newspapers, 7,468 telephones, eighteen hotels, 450 retailers, eight theaters, two hospitals, twenty-four schools, six railroads, 56,708 volumes in the library, forty-two churches, and one police department made up of twenty-one officers, not counting the chief, Bert Blizzard, who had died from tuberculosis the year before.
It was getting late when Plennie walked into town, so he ducked into a nice café on Murphy Avenue for dinner. The place was clean and the food was delicious, but he ate practically alone. He was surprised it wasn’t better patronized. Knowing a thing or two about how to run a café, Plennie asked the proprietor where the customers were.
Leslie Van Cleave said his shop was a new venture aiming to capitalize on the recent growth in Joplin. The city’s population had been on the upswing for quite a few years and now numbered more than thirty-three thousand. A nine-story hotel complex had just opened down the street, in fact. But Van Cleave wasn’t sure how to get the word out about his café and drugstore.
“What about advertising?” Plennie asked.
“What do you have in mind?” Van Cleave replied.
“Me,” Plennie said.
He explained himself, highlighting how much attention is lent to a man going the wrong way. Van Cleave thought it was a great idea. He told Plennie he’d pay ten dollars if Plennie would walk backward around Joplin the next day carrying a sign advertising the café. Plennie was happy to have the work and the promise of extra money.
Plennie woke early the next day in the Roosevelt Hotel on Main Street and went to work, tooling in reverse along a significant chunk of Joplin’s seventy miles of paved road, telling everyone he met about Van Cleave’s café and drugstore, about the food and BILDUP, the quick tonic, and Caples No. 7 for paralysis, and all the Famous Caples Remedies. He walked and talked all day and was down to his last block when one of Joplin’s finest grabbed his collar.
“What do you think you’re doing?” the officer asked in a rough tone. “Don’t you know there’s a city ordinance against wearing signs on the street?”
Plennie said he did not, that he’d been in town less than a day.
“Well, there sure is,” the cop said, “and you’d better strip off that sign before I run you in.”
Plennie told the officer he was just a block from the café. He asked if he could hustle down the street and take the sign off there.
“No,” the officer said. “I mean take it off now, or I’ll throw you in the clink.”
They’d banned dancing in Galena, Missouri, forbade lawn weeds in Sedalia, Missouri, and prohibited female teachers from smoking cigarettes in Moberly, Missouri, and Plennie wasn’t in the mood to upset the cart. He removed Mr. Van Cleave’s advertisement, nodded to the officer, and made his merry way down the block to collect his ten dollars and get on out of town.
Dealing with the agents of conformity was trying, no matter how much respect and deference Plennie could muster. It would happen again and again during his walk. So many police seemed to be on edge. The era had been incredibly bloody for men with badges.
Across the country, 307 law enforcement officers had been killed in the line of duty the year before, 1930. In no year since the signing of the Declaration of Independence had the toll of officers killed on duty come even close to that number, nor would it come close in the future, even as the population skyrocketed. The country had reached a sort of lawless crescendo, represented by the number of killed officers each decade since the Civil War: 21 in 1870, 33 in 1880, 58 in 1890, 70 in 1900, 105 in 1910, 202 in 1920, and 307 in 1930.
And 1931 was destined to be comparatively bloody. Shooting police seemed to be en vogue in the great cities, where criminal bootlegging enterprises took root after the Eighteenth Amendment was passed in 1919, banning the manufacture, sale, and transport of alcohol. The newspapers, fast becoming uniform, mass-produced rags aimed at the lowest common denominator, lapped up the bloodshed and brutality. So did Hollywood, where a new film called Scarface, which glorified the lifestyles of hit men and hoods, was in production and set for release in 1932.
The liquidation haunted even smaller police departments, like Joplin’s. Three years before, in 1928, Detective Alex Brown was shot dead with his own gun while trying to apprehend a twenty-six-year-old ex-convict named William Claude Miller, accused of forging checks. Miller was caught a month later in Texas, driving a stolen car. They hung Officer Brown’s photograph in the basement of Joplin’s City Hall, alongside nine other portraits of policemen killed in the line of duty.
Before month’s end, with Plennie still scooting backward through Missouri, Joplin police captain Alex Lachman would be slaughtered in a shootout with a prisoner, Harry Spencer, twenty-six, a former professional baseball player for the Joplin team whom Lachman had arrested for stealing a car.
The killers had a few commonalities, by and large. They were young and lawless and lacked formal education. They came of age at a time of collapse, saw no end to the ruin, and no geyser of upward economic mobility besides taking money and things from people who had both. They had access to weapons for killing and cars for fast getaways. They were desperados, and some with blood on their hands would be celebrated long after their deaths. The next Joplin officer to have his portrait hung in the City Hall basement was Detective Harry McGinnis, who was killed trying to arrest a young couple called Bonnie and Clyde in April of 1933.
* * *
An odd thing happened on Plennie’s way to St. Louis.
He was nearing Springfield, Missouri, when a car pulled onto the shoulder and two men climbed out, wanting to chat. They made pleasant small talk for a while, mostly listening to Plennie’s stories about his trip, and then the driver spoke up. He asked Plennie if it would be okay to carry him a short distance. He said he wanted to prove a point. The question came out of the blue Missouri sky.
“I don’t know what your point is,” Plennie said, “but if you promise not to harm me, I guess it will be okay.”
“Oh, no,” the man said. “By all means, no.”
Plennie sort of leaned back and the man bent and scooped him into his arms. The stranger carried him like a husband would a bride on their honeymoon, about fifteen paces down the shoulder of Route 66, tu
rned around, then walked back. He set young Plennie down gently, then straightened his posture. Then the man pinched the material of his pants at his thighs and lifted, revealing, to Plennie’s astonishment, two artificial legs.
“Well,” Plennie said, “I would never have believed it.”
The man said he was a representative of a prosthetics company, and if Plennie should lose a leg on the trip, well, he’d be glad to help find a new one.
“Good to know,” Plennie said.
* * *
As Plennie backed past his 500th mile on a lonely, littered stretch of Route 66 between Springfield and St. Louis in May of 1931, a writer and historian named James Truslow Adams was putting the finishing touches on a book he’d audaciously titled The Epic of America, to be published in the fall by Little, Brown. Adams wanted to plant in the annals of American letters a sweeping one-volume history of the United States, running chronologically from time immemorial to the 1930s, the first years of what was shaping up to be the Great Depression.
What Adams set out to do, more than anything else, was capture a feeling. He wrote that he had grown increasingly conscious of how different modern Americans were from the men and women of any other nation. Americans had been shaped by unique heritage and cultural experience.
He wanted to explore the beginning “of that American dream of a better, richer, and happier life…which is the greatest contribution we have as yet made to the thought and welfare of the world.”
That phrase—“American dream”—wasn’t in widespread use until Adams wrote that combination of words more than thirty times in his book. He coined it. He defined it.
“Ever since we became an independent nation,” he wrote, “each generation has seen an uprising of ordinary Americans to save that dream from the forces which appeared to be overwhelming it.”
Adams chronicled the rise of a nation, from a handful of starving immigrants to 120 million industrious individuals made up of all the races of the world, from a country with a guard barely big enough to defend the stockade at Jamestown from Indians, to a nation with 25 million men of military age from whom we could draw a massive army to send across the ocean to fight a world war, all in only nine generations. He chronicled the movement of settlement from east to west, like the sun, to the last frontier, until there was no more land to tame. He pointed out that the pursuit of the frontier, by the perfect concoction of peoples and creeds, is what gave us the American dream. And in 1931, since the frontier no longer existed to absorb our energies, he called for Americans to pour themselves into establishing civilized contentment in the youngest nation.
Adams staked out the ethos of the American dream, for the first time, for everyone to come after him, and the simple phrase would plant itself so firmly in the American psyche that its definition would forever be simply inherited. The American dream was not about owning a plantation in the South or claiming 160 acres in Indian Territory or riding the rails west for unknown opportunity. It was now about settling in.
History had always been on the march from east to west, and explorers had found another West, in North America, to make the sunfall last just a little longer. Then came the Revolution in 1775 and Jefferson’s Northwest Ordinance in 1787 and the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and Lincoln’s Homestead Act in 1862 and Horace Greeley saying “Go west, young man” in 1865 and, in 1890, the superintendent of the US Census announced that rapid western settlement meant that “there can hardly be said to be a frontier line,” meaning the frontier had been settled, closed. And three years later, in 1893, to mark the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World, historian Frederick Jackson Turner in a big speech floated the idea that the entire conquest of the frontier had been the nation’s most formative experience. Manifest destiny had imparted to us as a whole rugged individualism, ingenuity, optimism. Conquest made America great. Turner said the West had been a safety valve for social danger, a bank account on which Americans might continually draw to meet losses. “No grave social problem could exist while the wilderness at the edge of civilization opened wide its portals to all who were oppressed, to all who with strong arms and stout heart desired to hew a home and a career for themselves.”
“And now,” Turner wrote, “four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period in American history.” The Indian gave way to the explorer, who gave way to the trader, who gave way to the rancher, who gave way to the farmer, who built his home. Game trail to footpath to country road to highway, where a man walked backward now, representing his time and place.
When Plennie Wingo’s great-grandfather was born, the United States extended only to the Mississippi River. The year his grandfather was born, gold was discovered in California, and as a young man, Benjamin Duncan Wingo moved his family from Alabama to Hale County, Texas, the Caprock region, in what was then called No Man’s Land. Plennie’s father turned twenty years old the year North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, and Idaho were admitted to the United States.
Where did that leave Plennie Wingo? His ancestors were concerned with getting there, and they had, and the maps were complete. They closed the frontier five years before Plennie was born. What’s a man to do when there is nothing left to be done? When his spirit stirs, when there is no geographical void to receive the fruit of all his energy, what then? Maybe it made perfect sense to turn around and walk backward rather than to simply settle in. Maybe it made sense to re-create in reverse the migration of mankind, from the grave to the cradle, the wellspring of life.
It’s funny what a fella thinks about when he’s alone.
12.
Bone Dry Forever
Rumor of Plennie’s walk preceded him to St. Louis, so when he neared the outskirts of the city there were two journalists from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch waiting beside the road. That Wednesday was hot and humid, but he was glad to stop for the attention, and for the human contact. He’d walked nearly all the way across the Show Me State having had only one decent conversation, with two men and their wives at a roadside park. They were touring the country on vacation, and they’d read about Plennie and invited him to join them for a picnic lunch so they could ask him about his travels. Before they parted, they told Plennie that if he ever made it to Pittsburgh he should look them up. He put their names in his journal, George W. Trumond and Harry G. Walker, and wives, Pittsburgh.
“Had lunch together,” he wrote in the margin. “Colored.”
The St. Louis journalists wanted his story and some photos for the evening paper, and before he could really get to telling them about his trip they were hustling off toward the office at Twelfth Boulevard and Olive Street to meet their deadline. That afternoon, as the buildings of the old French outpost on the Mississippi River grew taller in his mirrors, the evening papers went out and readers were treated to news about a black man from Boston who repaired baby carriages for $12 a week winning $150,000 in the Irish Hospital Derby at Epsom Downs, a wounded bank robber admitting to four local holdups, and the poor Vanderbilt couple over on Locust Street, who were found with their throats slit. Mrs. Vanderbilt had written her cousin, ending her letter with a Sunday school chorus, “O how sweet it will be in that beautiful land, So free from all sorrow and pain.” Mr. Vanderbilt had not been able to find work and was fast with the razor.
Elsewhere, the Italian fascists and Mussolini were arresting Catholic youth leaders on political warrants, and Mayor Victor Miller of St. Louis was visiting Paris to lay a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe, and, hey: MAN WALKING BACKWARD AROUND WORLD REACHES CITY.
Plennie L. Wingo, a former restaurant keeper of Abilene, Tex., backed through St. Louis today on a reverse walking trip around the world. He left Fort Worth, Tex., on April 15, expects to be in New York next fall and hopes to return home by way of California within three years. He is 36 years old.
Equipped
with rear-vision mirrors on his dark goggles, Plennie backed briskly along Manchester Avenue toward the Free Bridge, pausing occasionally to sell photographs of himself to defray expenses.
“I hadn’t heard of anybody backing around the world,” he said, “so I just thought I’d try it. I trained for six months before starting out. It’s great for the health, all right. I was nearly bald when I started and now look at my hair.
“I’ve lost 22 pounds and am in fine physical fettle. I average three miles an hour, but stop whenever I feel like it. I haven’t any important engagement until I see my wife and baby again three years from now.”
So by the time he was in the thick of St. Louis, folks were looking out for him. The manager of the colossal Mayfair Hotel, Raymond Calt, stopped Plennie on the sidewalk and invited him to spend his stay as a guest of the hotel. Another man interrupted his walk. “My name is Pete Mazza,” he said, “and I’d sure like you to spend your time here in my home in University City.” Plennie told him about the Mayfair’s offer. “Oh, well,” Mazza said, “how about coming to my place after a day or two at the Mayfair.” Plennie thought that sounded swell and agreed. He sold Mazza six postcards to boot, and pocketed a dollar fifty.
As he was moving on, a man vaulted out of a bar and grabbed Plennie’s hand, shaking it and pressing a five-dollar bill into his palm, enough to buy a new pair of suit pants or two new felt hats. “I’ve been waiting all day for you,” the charitable drunk slobbered. Plennie could smell the booze on the man’s breath and saw in his unfocused eyes excitement and intoxication. Just as the man was turning Plennie loose, a police car screeched to a stop at the curb and an officer jumped out. The man’s expression changed as the cop walked toward him, reaching for his handcuffs. Plennie couldn’t help but watch, slack-jawed. Welcome to Mound City.
The Man Who Walked Backward Page 10