Ohio History Journal

Brand Whitlock's Macochee:

Puritan Theo-Politics in the Midwest

 

By ABE C. RAVITZ*

 

 

 

TO BE REGARDED as "an American Hardy" or "an American

Turgenev" was a lifelong ambition of Brand Whitlock, well-

known midwest political figure and diplomat, who, to his

everlasting disappointment, failed in his ambitious quest for

such literary renown.¹ Held in high esteem, however, by

political scientists and historians alike for his successful meth-

ods in the administration of local government and revered

by countless humanitarians who remember his often bizarre

exploits in Belgium as head of the relief commission there

during World War I, this one-time firebrand mayor of Toledo

(1905-13) had established a reputation for himself in the field

of journalism long before the call to public service temporarily

halted his earnest efforts to scale Parnassus.

As political reporter for the Chicago Herald (1890-93),

Whitlock had caught the attention of Governor John P. Alt-

geld, Illinois' famed "eagle forgotten," and subsequently spent

many hours at the executive mansion talking occasionally

about politics but discoursing more often on the literary con-

tributions of Tolstoy, Meredith, and other luminaries in the

glamorous world of contemporary letters.² His first law office

in Toledo had on its walls not portraits of supreme court

justices or photographs of other legal titans, but rather a

prominent picture of William D. Howells, fellow Ohioan and

 

* Abe C. Ravitz is associate professor of English at Hiram College.

1 Allan Nevins, ed., The Letters and Journal of Brand Whitlock (New York

and London, 1936), lxviii. Hereafter cited as Letters.

2 Letters, xxxi.

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258        THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

current "dean" of the American literati.³ Whitlock's long and

warm friendship with Clarence Darrow, the most famous

criminal lawyer of the twentieth century, was sealed by a

bond having little to do with jurisprudence: each admired the

other as a writer, and the Chicago counselor encouraged and

even edited the early literary endeavors of young Whitlock.⁴

By 1907 this "part-time" writer had published six volumes of

prose fiction, and Howells, as supreme literary arbiter of

America, observed shortly thereafter that he considered Whit-

lock and Robert Herrick "the two most hopeful figures in

American literature."⁵ Without doubt, then, this phase of

Whitlock's creative life constituted something more than a

mere transient aberration of the intellect, for when bibliog-

raphers total the Whitlock canon, they will find ten novels,

two short-story collections, two full-length biographies, an

autobiography, and numerous uncollected pieces of prose and

verse that appeared in the most popular periodicals of the

day. The accolade of Howells alone would attest somewhat

to the quality of these productions.

The purpose of this paper is not to make a case for Whit-

lock's being the neglected major figure of American realism.

I propose, rather, to study a unique midwestern mythology

created by Whitlock, a schema of life wrought as consciously

as the heralded Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, of Wil-

liam Faulkner. Furthermore, well in advance of Sherwood

Anderson's sensational Winesburg, Ohio, which in 1919 burst

before the horrified eyes of the American reading public to

shatter the conventional fiction of uncomplicated, folksy mid-

west respectability, Whitlock, with the creative sureness im-

plicit in the brand of realism embodied by the work of his

idol Howells, was focusing a humane, nonetheless analytical,

3 Brand Whitlock, Forty Years of It (New York and London, 1914), 103.

4 "When he [Darrow] boarded his train he had in his valise the MS. of my

story." Ibid., 86. On November 7, 1900, Whitlock wrote Darrow: "Do you think

it would be out of the way to send the MS ... to him [Howells] now? You will

know best-but I suggest it to you out of all my anxiety, and shall impatiently

await your advice. Please don't be long in giving it to me, for I must be guided

by your opinion." Letters, 33. Darrow was liaison between Howells and Whitlock.

5 Letters, 110.

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BRAND WHITLOCK'S MACOCHEE                259

eye on the very same attributes of the Buckeye personality

and character. As early as 1899 he had revealed his inten-

tions in a letter to Miss Octavia Roberts, confidante of many

of his literary plans:

 

Sometimes I am tempted to abandon all else and plunge into literature

alone . . . . I shall be happy if I can portray life in two of its phases,

as I know it, at least. One is that political world, and the other is

that existence to be found in certain parts of Central and Southern

Ohio, with its deadly monotony, almost total lack of colour; often sordid,

and yet, because the human heart is everywhere the same, it has its

tragedies, its romances, its joys and sorrows, as have more favored and

picturesque spots.⁶

 

Brand Whitlock then proceeded to place under the sensitive

scrutiny of a creative artist the fictitious town of Macochee,⁷

seat of Gordon County, Ohio. A reviewer in 1912 blandly

remarked, "Odd old folk must have lived and died there."⁸

I

 

While Whitlock as a youth had been part and parcel of the

environment he now chose to portray in fiction ("the family

removed from town to town" in Ohio as the ecclesiastical au-

thorities ordered the Rev. Elias D. Whitlock from one small

church to another), his flexible literary methods enabled him

at times to assume the guise of a spiritual Paul Pry--one who

deliberately removed himself from what Hawthorne called

"the magnetic chain of humanity" to study in detail the pass-

ing parade of life. To investigate life in Macochee by choos-

ing as interpreters the local isolatoes was his major literary

scheme; to dissect the political and theological structures on

which the intellectual foundation of the town depended, and

from this pivotal axis to examine the social maladies stem-

6 Letters, 23.

⁷ Whitlock adopted the name from that of Mac-o-chee Creek, a tributary of the

Mad River. As a boy he must have known this lovely valley, which is located

only about ten miles north of his native town of Urbana.

8 The Nation, XCV (1912), 126.

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260   THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

ming therefrom was his primary plan. In studying the theo-

political architecture of this small midwest town, Brand Whit-

lock pictured an area haunted by the grim specter of doctrin-

aire Puritanism with its manifold ramifications pervading all

life and movement in Macochee, Ohio.

In a tale from Whitlock's first published collection, The

Gold Brick (1910), one gleans an initial insight into the

political superstructure of this town. Young George Halliday,

a local boy recently graduated from the Harvard College Law

School, returns to Macochee and reveals to astonished neigh-

bors the decadent influence education in the East has had

upon him: "He smoked cigarettes, puffed a heavy briar pipe,

wore red neckties and knickerbockers, and he drank beer.

And he did something else, something that struck the moral

fiber of the town on the raw. He changed his politics and

became a Democrat!"⁹ Such an action was inexplicable in a

community dominated exclusively by the Republican party,

whose youthful adherents followed the Catholic children home

from their parochial school and derisively chanted:

 

Fried rats and pickled cats,

Are good enough for Democrats.

 

The fall from innocence of Halliday was particularly painful

to his fellow townsmen, for he, like any ambitious hometown

boy, had at one time perceived the local political truism that

the only respectable affiliation with government a Gordon

Countian might have lay in the fold of the Republican party.

The abandoned Democrats, unprincipled all, as respectable

citizens of Macochee saw them, were ne'er-do-wells whose le-

gal careers and business connections had been for years in

varying stages of disrepute: Fowler Brunton, who enraged

the "good people" of Macochee because he was said "to play

poker night after night with a few chosen cronies" and "to

drink . . . in Sullivan's Saloon" where on occasion he "de-

9 "Macochee's First Campaign Fund," in The Gold Brick (Indianapolis, 1910),

142.

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BRAND WHITLOCK'S MACOCHEE               261

claimed passages from Shakespeare";10 Wade Powell, who

was labeled "a drunkard, practically," "an infidel," or "at least

a free-thinker," and who irritated Macocheeans by his "sar-

donic" countenance and "cynical" presence at their enthusiastic

political rallies;11 Malcolm Dyer, another dissolute conspirator,

a nominal Episcopalian "who . . . seldom went to church,"

who "worst of all . . . proclaimed himself a Democrat," and

whose "spree" in celebration of Cleveland's election in 1884

made respectable Macochee shiver in outraged mortification.¹²

Indeed, as a jubilant torchlight procession moved down Main

Street, with the brass band noisily accompanying frenzied

Republican marchers to cries of "Blaine! Blaine! James G.

Blaine!"¹³ the profligates Dyer and Powell irreverently with-

drew to the local bar. Since "rum, Romanism, and rebellion"14

were allegedly the intrinsic elements in the personality of most

Democrats, citizens of Macochee could only regard such a

political slogan with the awe accorded a divinely inspired pro-

nouncement, for in the Catholic district of Lighttown, in

Sullivan's Bar, and in the diabolic wrongheadedness of the

local iconclasts were found living emblems of these anarchical

traits.

There were in Macochee, however, not enough Democrats

to disturb very seriously the political peace, for their paucity

enabled them only (so the Republicans contended) to enter

weak protest votes against the principles of sound govern-

ment. Joshua Hardin, honest Macochee carriage maker, ex-

emplifies, on the other hand, the type of moral warfare political

vendettas engendered within the ranks of the GOP itself.

Hardin "had poured the holy enthusiasm of his youth into the

formation of the Republican Party; to him it was sacrosanct;

he could not desert it."¹⁵ With the advent of growing agitation

10 "Fowler Brunton," in The Fall Guy (Indianapolis, 1912), 150.

11 The Happy Average (Indianapolis, 1904), 64.

12 J. Hardin & Son (New York and London, 1923), 24, 79.

13 Ibid., 69.

14 Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland: A Study in Courage (New York, 1932),

182. This remark was passed by the Rev. Samuel Burchard, a leading New

York clergyman and supporter of Blaine.

15 J. Hardin & Son, 109.

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262    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

in the area for prohibition, this man of acute moral sensibility

found himself obsessed by split loyalties and went about fran-

tically seeking means whereby he could support the cause of

prohibition "without compromising his stand as a Republi-

can."¹⁶ Hardin at length found his emotional panacea in the

Anti-Saloon League, where he could reform society on

grounds other than political. The Honorable Clyde Sturrock,

however, Macochee's proud representative in congress, re-

mained leader of the local organization and vulgar proponent

of the "wet" faction. Sturrock made few amicable overtures

to Hardin and the small group of intra-party dissenters, for

the shrewd congressman knew that despite Hardin's professed

integrity he could never bring himself to bolt the party of his

youth, but would release his aggressions on "Cleveland and

his fool administration"¹⁷ whose tenure in office meant nothing

but "hard times of course." The political machinery in Brand

Whitlock's Macochee, Ohio, then, ran with efficient smooth-

ness since so few wheels needed to be manipulated. Battle

lines denoting good and evil were clearly marked by party

label, and the political structure categorized with accuracy

the attitudes and opinions of the respectable majority--an

exalted group of quality and worth whose major prerequisite

for membership was enrollment in the Republican party.

Along with this fervid political spirit in the town went an

accompanying muscular theological system patterned after

the Calvinist blueprint that has come to epitomize orthodoxy

in the Massachusetts Bay Colony of the seventeenth century.

Young Paul Hardin, through whose perceptive insights Whit-

lock studies most cogently the spiritual temperament of Ma-

cochee, listened one evening to the semi-weekly "summons of

evangelism":

 

First, the bell of the Lutheran Church sounded a sullen detonation,

then paused, and waited. Then the bell of the Presbyterian Church

struck its despairing note and there followed the dissonant sound of the

bell in the United Presbyterian Church, and then the impatient clangor

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid., 254.

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BRAND WHITLOCK'S MACOCHEE                 263

 

of the bell of the Methodist Church, still sounding in loud vibrations

until after the United Methodist bell had rung in its high pitched key.

Then the note of the Congregational Church bell and after it the clang

of the Baptist bell, to which the Campbellite Church dissented with a

sharp stroke and finally the United Brethren Church bell joined the

tolerant antiphony, the Lutheran bell rang again, and the round was

repeated. . . . The Roman Catholic Church . . . contented itself with three

authoritative taps morning, noon, and night, while the Episcopal Chapel

maintained the chilling silence of its superior reserve.¹⁸

 

Thus was Macochee notified of prayer-meeting time, and

Paul, coerced by his devout parents, went to sit under the

preaching of the Rev. Mr. Sparrow, an "evangelist" and a

man "of many devices" who "spoke as though he held the

keys of Heaven in his hand."¹⁹ Throughout his life Paul

Hardin was never to forget the "clear barytone [sic] voice"

of the Rev. Mr. Sparrow as "without accompaniment and

with complete self-abandon" the good preacher would sing

"Mother." Nor could he ever forget this minister "standing

there stretching out his arms" and exhorting, "Think, sinners,

think, while the clock in hell is ticking--never, forever; for-

ever, never--it may tick your last moment on earth and your

first in eternity."²⁰ After Sparrow in this manner had exposed

his flock to the perils of hellfire, Mr. Popple, a church worker,

would scurry up and down the aisle seeking possible "con-

verts." Paying particular attention to the young, Popple

treated Master Hardin to another version of the fiery pit:

 

"You know . . . that those who are not saved go to hell, don't you?

. . . Think of the few short years of this life, and the unending eternity.

Would you then decide deliberately to spend that eternity in hell? . . .

You know what the Good Book says of hell--the place where the worm

dieth not, and the fire is not quenched."²1

 

Succumbing to the multiplicity of pressures brought to bear

upon him by family and community, Paul Hardin at last

18 Ibid., 15, 16.

19 Ibid., 42, 43.

20 Ibid., 45.

21 Ibid., 46-47.

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264    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

joined in full communion, although despair and weariness

rather than the light of the gospel motivated this step. Clyde

Sturrock, on the other hand, even as a young man immersed

in the devious politics of acceptance and adjustment, became

an immediate and expedient convert, to the exultant joy of

all present visible saints. As each prospective communicant

completed his probationary period of six months and was

forthwith admitted to full status in the church, the moral

fiber of Macochee was toughened; when at the age of twenty-

one the individual was also granted the privilege of enrolling

in the Republican party, the complete spiritual and political

attainments of his lifetime were achieved. He had then as-

sumed the full responsibility of his mature status and had

found his peculiar niche within the confines of a provincial

ethic that comprised the intellectual framework of Macochee

and that transmitted all pulsating ideas in control of thought

and action in Gordon County, Ohio.

II

The most evident analogy between Brand Whitlock's fic-

tional town and the Massachusetts Bay Colony is the potent

union of church and state maintaining the social equilibrium

and providing the vital ethos most necessary for wholesome

existence. Verging on the theocratic organization evident

in the political and religious structure set up by John Win-

throp and his associates as early as 1630, Macochee feels both

the pleasure and displeasure of Divine Providence as its com-

munity leaders--akin to the Bay Colony's governor, magis-

trates of the general court, and clergy--act with the power

of appointed stewards of the Almighty, responsible only to

Him. In the Bay Colony, outlanders and interlopers were

persecuted: the Indians were divinely slaughtered,²² the

Quakers were divinely stoned,²³ and political deviants, like

22 Thomas Shepard in his journal noted that "the providence of God" guided

the English to "the divine slaughter" of the "Pekoats." Perry Miller and T. H.

Johnson, eds., The Puritans (New York, 1938), 473.

23 In his Puritan tale "The Gentle Boy," Hawthorne speaks of "the fines, im-

prisonments, and stripes" inflicted liberally on Quakers.

• 8
 

BRAND WHITLOCK'S MACOCHEE 265

Roger Williams, were divinely banished. In Macochee, Smoke,

a Negro laborer, is lynched because of his "uppity" ways

("Damn black niggers," cried Mr. Tilling, one of the town's

strongest pillars of the church); Evelyn Walling, illegitimate

daughter of "infidel" transient actors, is taunted and chased

by a mob of "moral" ruffians until she plunges hysterically

into a creek and nearly drowns; and Wade Powell is right-

eously ostracized by the pious community of saints. As "the

temporal arm vigorously supported the ecclesiastical will" any

"speculator, scoffer, and atheist"²⁴ fared badly when caught in

the unified crossfire between the secular and non-secular

guardians of the law.

The frontier brand of revivalism and religious enthusiasm

prevalent in Macochee's theological system, furthermore, bears

strong analogy with the well-known "thorny points" of Bay

Colony Calvinism. The various steps toward communion are

chronicled thus by Whitlock: "lost," "saved," "come to Jesus"

or "stand up for Jesus," "conviction," and "experience."25

This process of achieving oneness with the Deity evinces a

strikingly similar pattern to the Puritan progression toward

salvation: Original Sin (lost), Election (saved), Regeneration

(come to Jesus; spiritual re-birth through personal experi-

ence), Justification (conviction; forgiveness achieved through

the grace of Christ), and Sanctification (experience; evidence

of a moral life through deed and action). Indeed, both the

New England Calvinist and the midwest neo-Puritan deeply

believed that ultimate judgment for the "sheep" rather than

the "goats" could be realized through the assiduous discharge

of secular duties--this despite the omnipresent incubus of pre-

destination. Without such hope, the ordeal of life would be

unbearable. Each person, then, had to be punctual in his per-

formance of the day-to-day tasks comprising the responsibili-

ties of existence as "ethical" duties long after they had ceased

to be material necessities.²⁶ Through the colorless yet laborious

24 Henry Adams, The United States in 1800 (Ithaca, N. Y., 1955), 56.

25 J. Hardin & Son, 44.

26 R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York, 1926),

241-242.

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266    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

tedium of everyday routine one isolates himself from, and

insulates himself against, the frivolousness of life and the

temptations of Satan, who is forever nearby contending with

the Almighty for the possession of individual souls. Paul

Hardin's father, a blacksmith by trade, reveals this economic

aspect of Puritanism in a significant dialogue with his curious

son:

 

"Blacksmithing's hard work," Paul observed.

"Life's hard work," said J. Hardin. . . .

"Yes," observed Paul, after a time, "it must have been a hard life.

You hadn't many pleasures."

"We hadn't time for them," said J. Hardin; "we were a God-fearing

family."

"Then you were spared temptations," Paul ventured.

J. Hardin reared up. . . . "I spent many a day pounding them out

on my anvil!" he declared.²⁷

 

In 1667 the Rev. Jonathan Mitchell, a Bay Colony divine,

in preaching his election sermon, "Nehemiah on the Wall,"

set down the resounding dicta that Joshua Hardin, in an

awkward, non-esoteric manner, was presenting with simple

power to his son more than two centuries later:

 

Go on, therefore, in the work of the Lord and in the service of your

several places, and be not taken off by trouble, difficulties, oppositions,

felt infirmities in yourselves, weaknesses and distempers in persons and

things round about you (which will always be). When were there work

for patience, faith, fortitude, self-denial, and for the spirit of a soldier,

wrestler, etc. if it were not for such things? We must none of us say,

of one order or other, "I will serve God in my place, and help build

the wall of Jerusalem, if I may do it with ease and tranquility, without

trouble, without hazard, without reproaches and ill requitals from men,

etc." Christ is little beholden to us if that be all we will do for him.²⁸

 

Time and space are insolubly fused. The spiritual distance

between seventeenth-century Cambridge, Massachusetts, and

nineteenth-century Macochee, Ohio, becomes minute.

27 J. Hardin & Son, 326-327.

28 Perry Miller, ed., The American Puritans (New York, 1956), 111-112.

• 10
 

BRAND WHITLOCK'S MACOCHEE           267

In November 1913 Brand Whitlock wrote his friend Rut-

ger B. Jewett of his "plan for the novel about the Puritans

in Ohio."²⁹ Five months later he again mentioned in a letter

his scheme for a work "about puritanism in Ohio and the

Middle West generally."³⁰ Fortunately, Whitlock intended an

incisive, honest delineation of the Puritan ethic rather than

a scattershot, iconoclastic exercise written under the imposing

contemporary shadow of H. L. Mencken, who, as intellectual

doll-baby of the "sophisticated thinkers," hopelessly confused

Puritanism with "philistinism."³1 Whitlock, rather, with the

integrity of a true craftsman analyzed the political limits and

theological boundaries that encased the social structure of his

fictional town. Through these theo-politics he then set out

to reveal the divergent human interrelationships of men bound

by this neo-Puritan ethic.

III

"I love Macochee so," cried Glenn Marley, B.A., Ohio Wes-

leyan, and hero of Whitlock's novel The Happy Average, "I

just couldn't leave it "³² In a light, wispy tale of the tribula-

tions common to young love, a novel into which one can see

Booth Tarkington dipping as he wrote his classic of adoles-

cence, Seventeen, some twelve years later, Brand Whitlock

chronicled the obstacles which Macochee and its intellectual

atmosphere imposed upon the innocent buoyancy of an aspir-

ing youth--one who "eagerly identified himself" with a town

whose very name "meant romance" to him. To Marley's

chagrin, he is ultimately brought face to face with a dis-

heartening proposition: any ambitious individual who desires

to make his mark on the face of the universe must begin his

quest for achievement by renouncing his Gordon County heri-

tage. Seeking to marry Lavinia Blair, Glenn encounters

immediate opposition from her father, a politically powerful

²⁹ Letters, 172.

30 Ibid., 179.

31 Oscar Cargill, Intellectual America (New York, 1941), 491.

³² Whitlock, The Happy Average (Indianapolis, 1904), 142.

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268   THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

judge; for the young suitor has unwisely chosen as his law

tutor Wade Powell, the notorious local "free-thinker" ("per-

haps agnostic were the better word," observed the charitable

Judge Blair). Marley soon becomes hopelessly perplexed as

the currents of genuine youthful optimism which generated

his happy sentimentalizing of the "old hometown" clash with

the rude pessimism he imbibed in the constantly impious com-

pany of Powell. Thus belabored into a state of desperation

and looking for sound, stable, sensible advice that might enable

him to combat the influence of the diabolical lawyer, the de-

spondent Marley seeks out Mr. Dudley, the local banker, who

he feels will re-orient the chaotic universe in terms of com-

forting Macocheean philosophy. Dudley emphatically informs

Glenn that the road to success lies in total abstinence from

liquor and tobacco. Now, "failure followed failure" as Mar-

ley began to question the values of his community, and realiz-

ing the paucity of opportunity there, he "began to feel more

and more an alien in Macochee."³³ His mind in complete

shambles, the dilemma-ridden youth seeks final counsel of

Wade Powell, despite more ominous warnings against relying

too heavily on the advice of so decadent an Antichrist. In

Powell's judgment Marley learns that settling among the

local gentry "is utterly out of the question for a man who

wants to make anything out of himself"; the lawyer then goes

on to excoriate Macochee with such vituperation that its at-

tractiveness for Glenn is destroyed once and for all:

 

No one with ambition can stay here now. The town, like all these

old county seats, is good for nothing but impecunious old age and

cemeteries. It was nothing but a country cross-roads before the railroad

came, and since then it's been nothing but a water tank. . . . Its people

are industrious in nothing but gossip, and genuine in nothing but

hypocrisy.³⁴

 

Glenn goes off to Chicago and in a short time succumbs to

the various intellectual vices of the metropolis; he takes up

33 Ibid., 229.

34 Ibid., 126.

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BRAND WHITLOCK'S MACOCHEE               269

journalism and begins reading Turgenev, Tolstoy, George

Eliot, Jane Austen, Ibsen, Henry James, and William Dean

Howells. The specter of Macochee fades, but not the vision

of Lavinia. He returns for her, receives a hero's welcome

at home, and, to his surprise, the locale of his boyhood as-

sumes a new charm. Nevertheless,

 

he was disturbed by a certain restlessness that came over him after he

had been in Macochee a few days and the novelty and excitement of his

return had worn off. The glamour the town had worn for him had left

it; it seemed to have withered and shrunk away. He could no longer,

by any effort of the imagination, realize it as the place he had carried

affectionately in his heart during the long months of his absence; its

interests were so few and so petty, and he found himself battling with

a wish to get away.³⁵

 

As Glenn and his bride plan to leave Macochee and he de-

cides to cut for all time the umbilical cord that had once bound

him there with chauvinistic loyalty, the young expatriate takes

a backward glance at the throbbing symbol of life in Gordon

County, Ohio:

 

And there is the old town . . . nestling among those trees, it seems

peaceful, and calm, and simple. But it is different when you are in it;

for there are gossip and envy and spite. . . . It is little and narrow and

provincial, and the real life is to be lived out in the larger world.³⁶

 

The superficial glitter of the town now reflects for Marley

the stolid, immutable Puritan ethic, whose theo-politics suffo-

cate intellectual and spiritual growth, whose inflexible modus

vivendi encases free will in a moral tomb, and whose righteous

force inhibits the emergence of creativity. Fortunately, Mar-

ley discovered in time these anathemas of life in Macochee.

Of J. Hardin & Son, Brand Whitlock's most lasting contri-

bution to American realism, Hamlin Garland, self-appointed

twentieth-century guardian of the public's fictional morals,

had this to say:

³⁵ Ibid., 325-326.

36 Ibid., 334-335.

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270    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

I read Whitlocks [sic] book and was greatly disappointed in it. It

seemed to me--like Willa Gather's latest--a concession to the people

who want female libertines in their books. For a man of Whitlocks

[sic] position it seems a sad stooping to describe a hired girls [sic]

seduction of a youth. I am disgusted with a throng of my friends who

are lending their talents to this kind of thing.37

By the prudish evaluation of Garland, there are at least two

"female libertines" in this Whitlock novel of Macochee, but

these fallen souls are not utilized as literary lures for the

sensuality of a tasteless reading public; rather they are sym-

bolic entities that purvey fallacies of personal corruption and

that dramatize conflicts revolving about material versus spir-

itual degradation. The true "hero" of the novel is Macochee

and its all-consuming ethic, maneuvering a helpless, wayward

humanity through the vortex of life there. Paul Hardin, the

main character, grows to maturity in Macochee and, along

the way, unhappily subscribes to the acceptable codes of life

imposed by the neo-Puritanism of the town. His lurid en-

counters with Mattie Briggs, the local prostitute, gratify

Paul's vengeful desire to revolt against the alleged respecta-

bility Macochee imposes upon his personality. These brief

episodes terminated, Paul tediously plods through life work-

ing with his reformist-minded father, choosing a socially

prominent wife, and all the time feeling that he has compro-

mised his integrity for the purposes of peripheral peace and

easy adjustment. His wife, the former Winona Dyer, hates

the memory of her father, for he had been a close friend of

Wade Powell: "As though a man of Papa's refinement and

education could be a boon companion of a vulgar, half-

drunken fellow like Wade Powell!" she cries, frustrated in

her knowledge that the comradeship did exist. She and Paul

drift into separate worlds, and he begins an affair with Evelyn

Laurie, a local hat maker. It becomes evident that Paul

Hardin's only chance to achieve happiness is to run off with

37 Hamlin Garland to F. L. Pattee, November 24, [1923]. The manuscript is

located in the Pattee Collection of Pennsylvania State University. A portion of

this letter was published in my article "Willa Cather Under Fire: Hamlin Gar-

land Misreads A Lost Lady," Western Humanities Review, IX (1955), 182-184.

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BRAND WHITLOCK'S MACOCHEE 271

Evelyn. His desire to cast off the moral strait jacket in which

Macochee has outfitted him is powerful; but so is the tug of

a conscience nurtured in the Puritan tradition. He is now in

line for the presidency of a local bank, his speculations in oil

have paid off, and in the final analysis, he is clutched by the

octopus, Macochee. He must reject Evelyn and again assume

his place among the saints. As he trudges back into town,

returning from his final illicit rendezvous, the beaten Paul

pauses atop a hill where he can look down and see "the black

mass of Macochee"; he hears the familiar sound of the church

bells beginning their habitual chimes, and he goes down the

"long hill into the small town."38 Glenn Marley, who was

able to effect an escape, will achieve self-fulfillment; Paul

Hardin, a study in failure, will resolve his conflicts in self-

annihilation.

Whitlock dealt with Buckeye Puritanism and other gro-

tesqueries of Macochee in several short stories. "The Preach-

er's Son" contrasts the barren monotony of Gordon County

with the jovial excitement of a circus come to town. The

minister's boy is permitted to attend the show after a tense

family scene. As the animated youngster watches the gaiety

and action under the huge tent, he is taken with the horrible

realization that "for him these hours would quickly pass,

Macochee would sink back into her normal slumber, the boys

would resume their normal life, but for the boys of the Sie-

grist Family [big-top performers] there would be an un-

ending circus."³⁹ Life will detour by Macochee while the

town remains a fixed, still point on the pivotal axis of time,

for in the departure of the circus is symbolized the exit of

youth's "long, long thoughts." Macochee has prepared for

the minister's son a mold similar to the one it had reserved

for Paul Hardin.

Another contrast is presented by Whitlock in his tale of

"Fowler Brunton," a Macochee lawyer who endeavored to

bring a measure of humanity into his profession. Like Wade

38 J. Hardin & Son, 451.

39 "The Preacher's Son," in The Fall Guy, 246.

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272   THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

Powell, Brunton antagonized the "minds and hearts" of local

citizens because "he could be so witheringly sarcastic at their

pretensions, or so caustic in his wit and satire at their self-

righteousness."⁴⁰ His career is juxtaposed with that of the

highly respected Judge Chaney, counselor for the railroad,

whose immaculate premises were uncluttered by the poor

and underprivileged daily seeking free advice and assistance.

Chaney is the emblem of conformist mediocrity; he has come

to terms with Macochee and is rewarded with the admiration

of the town. Fowler Brunton has rejected the Gordon County

ethic; for the maintenance of his integrity he is rewarded

with hostility. The man of principle in Macochee is a person

of consequence only if his convictions are derived from the

very mainstream of the town's philosophy, the unchallenged

divinity of theo-political Puritanism. Brunton reads the Bible;

he studies Burns, Shakespeare, and Dickens. Versed in the

literature of true Christianity and steeped in the writings of

authors who crusaded for those durable truths which in

Macochee are moral concepts reduced to pulpit abstractions

and household platitudes, Fowler Brunton is now content to

remain the social pariah, deliberately removing himself from

townspeople who, as his fictional counterpart, Wade Powell,

remarked, are "genuine in nothing but hypocrisy."

"The Old House Across the Street"41 reveals with disturb-

ing finality the spiritual poverty and material decadence of

this fictional town. Mrs. Pratt peeks through her window to

observe the funeral of an old maid who had died. The de-

ceased and her maiden sister had lived in the misty, close

atmosphere of their dreary Macochee estate ever since each

had been disappointed in love by the same young man, now

a dead Civil War hero. Mrs. Pratt avidly observes the serv-

ices. As soon as the obsequies are terminated and the visitors

depart, the old house is thrown open. Almost immediately

two youngsters begin catching ball in the front yard. Now

that the dismal mausoleum is brightened, the freshness holds

40 "Fowler Brunton," ibid., 150.

41 Ibid., 193-212.

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BRAND WHITLOCK'S MACOCHEE                273

 

no interest for Mrs. Pratt, who, at this point, draws her

curtains. Frolicking children on the lawn of the old maids'

estate stand in direct contrast to the symbols of self-restraint,

self-denial, and calm resignation their decaying home stood

for. The superstructure of Macochee's values were built in-

to the framework of this dilapidated mansion, which, like the

deacon's "one hoss shay," remained a singular monument to

synod and covenant of antiquity. Holgrave, Hawthorne's

daguerreotypist of The House of the Seven Gables, who also

encountered the New England conscience and its acute sense

of the past, was less suggestive but more brutal than Whit-

lock:

Is it a wholesome place to live in, with its black shingles, and the

green moss that shows how damp they are?--its dark, low-studded

rooms?--its grime and sordidness, which are the crystallization on its

walls of the human breath, that has been drawn and exhaled here, in

discontent and anguish? The house ought to be purified with fire,--

purified till only its ashes remain!42

As long as the symbol itself remains, the town can gather

sustenance from it. Hawthorne, himself forever haunted by

the phantasm of Calvinist orthodoxy, emphatically noted the

tendency of institutions to perpetuate themselves, and the

means at the disposal of society for purging itself of haunting

relics of antiquity:

 

But we shall live to see the day, I trust . . . when no man shall build

his house for posterity. Why should he? He might just as reasonably

order a durable suit of clothes--leather, or gutta percha, or whatever

else lasts longest--so that his great-grandchildren should have the bene-

fit of them, and cut precisely the same figure in the world that he

himself does. If each generation were allowed to build its own houses,

that single change, comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply

every reform which society is now suffering for. I doubt whether even

our public edifices--our capitols, state-houses, court-houses, city-halls,

and churches--ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or

brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin, once in twenty

⁴² Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (New York, 1954),

176.

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274    THE OHIO HISTORICAL QUARTERLY

 

years, or thereabouts, as a hint to the people to examine into and reform

the institutions which they symbolize.⁴³

From the solidly inbred ideas comprising the intellectual

zeitgeist of Macochee comes, then, that utter stagnation of

spirit that foretells eventual decay and doom. The only hope

for the salvation of the town resides in the local isolatoes,

for these saints' persecutors maintain that vitality of spirit

and strength of liberal conviction which can expand the in-

tellectual horizons of those who discriminate against them.

On this paradox, unpalatable indeed to the Macochee mind,

Whitlock rests the future of his town.

IV

Within the literary tradition of American realism, Brand

Whitlock's tales and novels of Gordon County, Ohio, portray-

ing the transplanted New England conscience in the Middle

West, calculatedly avoided dealing with that group of stereo-

typed rustics who, even by the early twentieth century, had

been pilloried with thoroughness by many an author revolting

against the village and its lack of "real dreams that never go

smash."⁴⁴ Whitlock, in concerning himself rather with an

examination of the theo-political structure of his community,

still managed to present as integral to Gordon County the

humdrum, static elements that nearly drove Carol Kennicott

insane on the Main Street of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota; but

in Macochee these social anomalies existed only as natural

consequences of the Puritan ethic that Sinclair Lewis failed

to stress with adequate conviction in his assualt on the small

midwest town. Gopher Prairie has only a "social organiza-

tion,"⁴⁵ whereas Macochee reflects the logical impact of

Puritanism on the town in affairs theological, political, and

43 Ibid.

44 Carl Sandburg, "Mamie," in Poems of the Midwest (Cleveland and New

York, 1946), 46. The small town Indiana girl hopes to find "romance" and "real

things" in Chicago.

45 H. M. Fuller, review of J. Hardin & Son, in Literary Review, IV (1923),

145.

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BRAND WHITLOCK'S MACOCHEE          275

economic. This powerful complicity of forces traced the social

picture of Gordon County as if by predestination.

More than a series of disdainful philippics against the ba-

nalities and prejudices of small-town life, Whitlock's thought-

ful scrutiny penetrates and illuminates a real Bay Colony

microcosm as it existed in the Middle West of the late nine-

teenth century.

• 19