Stephen Fry in America

by Stephen Fry

  In a moving ceremony on 6 October 1965 the following was enacted into the State Legislature:

  5.08 Official state beverage.

  Text of Statute

  The canned, processed juice and pulp of the fruit of the herb Lycopersicon esculentum, commonly known as tomato juice, is hereby adopted as the official beverage of the state.

  It’s up there with Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.

  Neil Young

  I wish I could tell you of great adventures enjoyed in Ohio and great sights seen. I fear I have really done the state no favours at all. I can’t even claim to have driven through it. I paralleled its border when I was in Kentucky all those weeks ago and I parallel its border now on the way to Indiana. I am photographed at the state line, I record a small piece to camera about Neil Young’s song ‘Ohio’. And…well, that is it. Farewell, Buckeye State, land of contrasts. We will carry you in our hearts for ever. And sorry.

  Entirely not Ohio’s fault. It was a matter of logistics. Although maybe Ohio is to blame for bordering so many states in such a contradictory fashion. That is why it calls itself ‘The Heart Of It All’, I suppose. It isn’t a state so much as a connective tissue, joining the east, north, south and Midwest. It is technically designated an East North Central state, which tells you just how confused it is. It touches Canada to the north, Kentucky to the south and Pennsylvania to the East. There are big towns, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus (so much begins with C…even its state bird and flower) and there are Akron and Dayton, all big enough to make the state the seventh most populous in the union.

  Neil Young’s ‘Ohio’, incidentally, is all about the shootings by Ohio National Guardsmen, in May 1970, of thirteen unarmed student protesters on the campus at Kent State University, Ohio. Four were killed, one paralysed for life and another eight seriously injured. Perhaps the most shameful and shocking example to date of ruthless state power perpetrated in America against its own citizens, the massacre mobilised yet more people against Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War.

  The students at Kent had been protesting the American involvement in Cambodia, although some of those shot were merely passers-by. The aftershock of the event was enormous, school and university strikes and shutdowns, and a 100,000-strong demonstration in Washington. One of the best-known images of the entire era is that of a female student screaming in pain and disbelief over the body of Jeffrey Miller, one of the students killed by the guardsmen. It was carried instantly around the world and played its part too in inflaming international opinion against the war.

  If you don’t know the Neil Young song, listen to it. It’s really pretty good.

  * * *

  OHIO

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  OH

  Nickname:

  The Buckeye State, The Heart of It All

  Capital:

  Columbus

  Flower:

  Scarlet Carnation

  Tree:

  Buckeye

  Bird:

  Cardinal

  Beverage:

  Tomato Juice

  Motto:

  With God, all things are possible

  Well-known residents and natives: Ulysses S. Grant (18th President), Rutherford B. Hayes (19th President), James Garfield (20th President), Benjamin Harrison (23rd President), William Howard Taft (27th President), Warren Harding (29th President), General George Armstrong Custer, General William Tecumseh Sherman, Clarence Darrow, John D. Rockefeller, Jack Warner, Lew Wasserman, Ted Turner, Larry Flynt, Annie Oakley, Gloria Steinem, John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell, Thomas Edison, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Harvey Firestone, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sherwood Anderson, James Thurber, Zane Grey, Toni Morrison, James Levine, Steven Spielberg, Jim Jarmusch, Chris Columbus, Theda Bara, Lillian Gish, Dorothy Dandridge, Roy Rogers, Clark Gable, Tyrone Power, Bob Hope, Doris Day, Dean Martin, Phyllis Diller, George Chakiris, Paul Newman, Hal Holbrook, Joel Grey, Martin Sheen, John Lithgow, Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, Woody Harrelson, Halle Berry, Beverly D’Angelo, Alison ‘CJ’ Janney, Sarah Jessica Parker, Drew Carey, Nancy ‘Bart Simpson’ Cartwright, Carmen Electra, Chrissie Hynde, Marilyn Manson.

  * * *

  MICHIGAN

  ‘Despite my passion for driving I am relegated to the passenger seat.’

  Google, breakfast cereals, the motor car, Diana Ross, Madonna, Eminem–Michigan seems to have done a great deal to help create the twentieth century. Its rather schizophrenic plenitude of nicknames hints at a state that cannot quite decide upon a stable identity. Cold in winter and blessed with an abundance of lakes (‘Water Winter Wonderland’), the home of the Big Three car manufacturers (‘The Automotive State’) and–as a sop to nature perhaps–a place where you might, if you weren’t busy, seek and find wolverines. Also, nature has decreed that the main peninsula is in the shape of a mitten, hence the final nickname. Like Chicago, which lies just over the water to the west of the state, Michigan is one of those places whose French presence in its history is betrayed by the soft ‘ch’ sound in its name. It would have been spelled Mishigan if the British had got there first, just as the city would have been Shicago, for they are both approximations of Native American names that were never written down. To a Frenchman, the Ojibwe Indian ‘mishigami’, meaning ‘big water’, was most naturally spelled michigami, which in its turn became Michigan.

  The longest freshwater shoreline in the world of which Michiganders (for so they style themselves) are justly proud, is often frozen. When I arrive at the hotel in Dearborn, a town some eight miles west of Detroit, there is snow on the ground and a crisp snap in the air that tells me I had better dress up good and warm for the next day’s open-topped motoring.

  Ford’s Greenfield

  Dearborn is Michigan’s most popular tourist destination. An unprepossessing city of some 100,000 souls, it has no shoreline amenities, no fishing, hunting or kayaking on offer, but only the fruits of one man’s vision. And what a man: one of the most intensely unlikeable figures of the twentieth century, fanatical anti-Semite, enemy of labour unions and proud recipient of medals from Nazi Germany, where Hitler held him in veneration, Henry Ford was also an employer who paid his workers more than his competitors, an innovator who pioneered the assembly line and a visionary whose part in the creation of the twentieth century was so great that Aldous Huxley, in his Brave New World, prefigured a society whose calendar was divided into BF and AF–Before Ford and After Ford: citizens in the book exclaim ‘My Ford!’ instead of ‘My Lord!’, say ‘Ford’s in his flivver, and all’s well with the world’ and make the sign of the T instead of the sign of the cross, in honour of Henry’s most famous creation, the Model T.

  Early in the cold, cold morning, I am all wrapped up and sitting in the passenger seat of a mint condition Model T, whose engine starts first time and continues to tick sweetly all day like a sewing machine. Despite my passion for driving I am relegated to the passenger seat because it is deemed unlikely that in my wounded state (the broken arm is still mending) I will be able to control this ancient conveyance safely around the icy streets of Greenfield Village, its hand-operated throttle and idiosyncratic transmission being notoriously difficult for the modern driver to master. Reluctantly I am brought to believe that the decision is the right one: here is a car where the right pedal operates the brake, the middle pedal engages reverse gear and the left pedal does something outré involving high gear and neutral. A weird set-up to us, but in the 1920s, most American drivers had learned to drive on one of these. Known affectionately as the Flivver or the Tin Lizzie, the Model T was the most successful motor car of its time, and perhaps remains to this day the most successful production model ever. Cheap and reliable, Ford’s brilliant breakthrough was to create a car that his own workers could afford. Indeed, it was only four months’ salary to one of his workers. Contrary to widespread belief, for most of its nineteen-year run it was perfectly possible to buy one in a range of colours aside from the famous black.

  *
* *

  MICHIGAN

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  MI

  Nickname:

  The Wolverine State, the Great Lakes State, the Automotive State, Water-Winter Wonderland, the Mitten State

  Capital:

  Lansing

  Flower:

  Apple Blossom

  Tree:

  White Pine

  Bird:

  American Robin

  Reptile:

  Painted turtle

  Motto:

  Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice (‘If it’s a pleasant peninsula you’re after, then look around you’)

  Well-known residents and natives: Pontiac (American Indian leader), Thomas Dewey, Charles Lindbergh, Betty Ford, Elijah ‘the real’ McCoy, Jimmy Hoffa, Aileen Wuornos, Ivan Boesky, Edna Ferber, Elmore Leonard, Joyce Carol Oates, Neil LaBute, Ring Lardner, Richard Ellmann, Theodore Roethke, Jim Bakker, Malcolm X, James (Barnum and Bailey) Bailey, W. K. Kellogg, C.W. ‘Grape Nuts’ Post, Henry Ford, Horace and John Dodge, David Buick, John De Lorean, William Boeing, Larry ‘Google’ Page, William ‘Packard’ Hewlett, Steve ‘Microsoft’ Ballmer, Edgar Bergen, Sandra Bernhard, Casey Kasem, James ‘Inside The Actors’ Studio’ Lipton, Jerry Bruckheimer, Francis Ford Coppola, John Hughes, Michael Moore, Sam Raimi, Paul Schrader, George C. Scott, Tom Selleck, Steven Seagal, Lily Tomlin, Robert Wagner, Elaine Stritch, Lee Majors, Dick ‘Rowan &’ Martin, George Peppard, Gilda Radner, Jason Robards, Betty Hutton, James Earl Jones, Ellen Burstyn, Tim Allen, Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, Eminem, Madonna.

  * * *

  This example, expertly driven by Kathy Cichon, is black as it happens and manages admirably the streets, which are as glass and cannot be walked on without slipping.

  ‘Ford’s in his flivver and all’s well with the world…’–Greenfield Village, Dearborn.

  Ford had worked early in his career as an engineer with Thomas Alva Edison and admired the great inventor all his life. Indeed he is said to have captured the dying Edison’s last breath in a glass vessel which can be inspected to this day in the Henry Ford Museum. It is certainly true that he transported the whole of Menlo Park, Edison’s factory/research facility, all the way from New Jersey to Greenfield, Dearborn.

  For Greenfield Village is Ford’s mixture of a Disneyland re-creation of a folksy middle-American small town and a ‘living’ museum of American achievement. It contains not just Menlo Park, but also the North Carolina bicycle shop where Orville and Wilbur Wright first built a powered heavier than air flying machine. Not a replica of the bicycle shop, the actual bicycle shop itself, transported brick by brick, pane by pane. Thus within one small area one can commune with the birthplace of recorded sound, the light bulb, the aeroplane and the motor car. There is more besides: there are small dry-goods stores, Robert Frost’s house, Rosa Park’s bus, the theatre seat and limousine in which Lincoln and JFK were shot, models of aeroplane and motor car and home interiors from the ages.

  The museum, known as The Henry Ford, is fantastically popular and successful: it is hard not to note the melancholy contrast between it and its founding corporation. Where once nine out of every ten cars owned in America were Fords, the Ford Motor Company is now struggling desperately, posting a recent loss than ran into the billions.

  GM

  Not so General Motors, the company that overtook Ford in the thirties and has been the largest motor-car manufacturer in the world ever since. It is just managing to hold off Toyota, but its brands–Cadillac, Chevrolet, Buick and Pontiac (not to mention Saab, Opel and Vauxhall)–consistently outsell those of Ford and of the other member of the Detroit gang of three, Chrysler.

  I go to GM’s design and technical centre in Warren, a fabby creation by rationalist architect Eero Saarinen, whose concrete arch in St Louis, Missouri we have already met. I meet up with John Manoogian, designer of the latest Cadillac and am taken for a ride all round the campus. Inside, I am allowed a glimpse under the sheet at their new concept eco-car, the Volt, so long as our cameras are strictly turned off. The paranoia of automakers knows no bounds.

  One thing is certain as I drive around industrial Detroit, allowing our cameraman views of the Ford Rouge Works (once the largest industrial centre in the world) and other smoky landscapes: they have never seen a car like my cab in Motor Town. At every traffic light in this car-conscious town I am stopped and quizzed about my black beauty. Some (insultingly) seem to believe that it is German, others wonder if it is a new Detroit concept car that I am street-testing.

  Detroit can lay claim to being an urban vision of all America, characterised as it is by cars, crime and popular music. But across the water lies an altogether more beguiling and appealing city. Chicago.

  But between Detroit and Chicago lies the northern part of the state of Indiana. First things first.

  A replica of Ford’s original Detroit factory.

  INDIANA

  ‘I already look like ten types of twat, but worse is to come.’

  Hoosier? Hoosier? What the hell is a Hoosier, you are entitled to ask. I don’t know. Nobody seems to know. It is one of the best-known state nicknames in America. But it also seems to be a state secret. Citizens here are called Hoosiers more often than Indianans; every bar, realtor, lawyer’s office and insurance company contrives to work the word into its name or its advertising. The 1954 Indiana State Champion basketball team had a film made about them called Hoosiers, starring Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey and Dennis Hopper. It was nominated for two Oscars.

  And yet no one knows what the word means or where it comes from. I mean, how careless is that? The state is less than two hundred years old. How could they have forgotten something as elementary as the origin of its nickname? The ‘s’ in Hoosier, by the way, is often (but not always) pronounced ‘zh’, as in ‘leisure’ or ‘measure’.

  Here are just some of the explanations I have gleaned from various sources including native Indianans themselves.

  Version 1

  It’s a corruption either of ‘Who’s yer’ as in ‘Who’s yer friend?’ or ‘Who’s here?’ Both are said to be anxious equivalents of the kind of ‘Who goes there? Friend or foe?’ cry that is familiar in other cultures. Verdict? You don’t need to tell me how utterly feeble and unconvincing this is as an explanation. Poppycock.

  Version 2

  Ear-biting was so common in brawls that ‘Whose ear?’ was a common cry as various body parts were picked off the saloon-bar floor. Verdict? Even more pathetic a theory than Version 1.

  Version 3

  There was once a businessman called Hoosier whose employees were known as ‘Hoosier’s men’. Well, if that’s true it surely clears the whole issue up. Except that there is no record of such a man, or such a name, anywhere either in Indiana or anywhere else. Verdict? Drivel.

  Version 4

  To win a fight is to hush your opponent, so the brawny brawlers of Indiana became known as hushers which corrupted to Hoosiers. Verdict? In a pig’s arse.

  Version 5

  A man called Colonel Lehmanowsky came to Indiana in the 1830s and lectured on the Napoleonic wars, taking especial care to praise the Hussars. Which Hussars? The French, the British? The Polish? The story doesn’t say but goes on to suggest that young Indianan men listening to the lectures were so impressed that they went around the place putting on the airs of Hussars, which they had misheard as ‘Hoosiers’. Verdict? Arse gravy of the worst possible kind. For a start Indianans were already called Hoosiers by the time this dubious-sounding Colonel came to Indiana.

  Version 6

  Hoosa is an Indian word for corn. Oh yeah? Research has not found a single one of the hundreds of Native American languages or dialects in which there is such a word for corn. It may be that the word was once in one of the many languages that has become extinct since the 1830s, but it’s all a bit suspicious. Verdict? Highly doubtful.

  Version 7

  Hoose is an old English word for a disease suffered by cattle, whi
ch gives them a wild look consonant with the Indianan self-image. Verdict? Hmmmm…it is true that there is a parasitic bronchitis in cattle called hoose, but…it sounds suspiciously like someone hunted through the dictionary for words beginning with ‘hoo’ and tacked on an explanation afterwards.

  * * *

  INDIANA

  KEY FACTS

  Abbreviation:

  Abbreviation: IN

  Nickname:

  The Hoosier State

  Capital:

  Indianapolis

  Flower:

  Peony

  Tree:

  Tulip Tree

  Bird:

  Cardinal

  River:

  Wabash

  Motto:

  The Crossroads of America

  Well-known residents and natives: William Henry Harrison (9th President), Lew ‘Ben Hur’ Wallace, Wendell Wilkie, Dan Quayle, Will ‘Commission’ Hays, Orville ‘Popcorn’ Redenbacher, Colonel Sanders, Halston, Bill Blass, Amelia Earhart, Gus Grissom. Alfred Kinsey, John Dillinger, Jimmy Hoffa, Eli Lilly, Jared Carter, Theodore Dreiser, Lloyd C. Douglas, Gene Stratton Porter, Booth Tarkington, Kurt Vonnegut, Irene Dunn, Anne Baxter, Clifton Webb, Carole Lombard, James Dean, Karl Malden, Steve McQueen, Sydney Pollack, David Letterman, Shelley Long, Greg Kinnear, Brendan Fraser, Forrest Tucker, Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter, John Mellencamp, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Axl Rose, Crystal Gale.

  * * *

  Version 8

  A hoo is an ancient English word for a rise in the land, a promontory or cliff, as in Sutton Hoo and Luton Hoo. Maybe the word is from Hoo Shire, a place of rising land, so Hoosiers are basically hillbillies. Verdict? No, no, no. You’re just thrashing about now.