On a Winter day some years ago, coming out of Pittsburgh on one of the expresses of
the Pennsylvania Railroad, I rolled eastward for an hour through the coal and steel towns
of Westmoreland county. It was familiar ground; boy and man, I had been through it
often before. But somehow I had never quite sensed its appalling desolation. Here was
the very heart of industrial America, the center of its most lucrative and characteristic
activity, the boast and pride of the richest and grandest nation ever seen on earth--and
here was a scene so dreadfully hideous, so intolerably bleak and forlorn that it reduced
the whole aspiration of man to a macabre and depressing joke. Here was wealth beyond
computation, almost beyond imagination--and here were human habitations so
abominable that they would have disgraced a race of alley cats.
I am not speaking of mere filth. One expects steel towns to be dirty. What I allude to is
the unbroken and agonizing ugliness, the sheer revolting monstrousness, of every house
in sight. From East Liberty to Greensburg, a distance of twenty-five miles, there was not
one in sight from the train that did not insult and lacerate the eye. Some were so bad,
and they were among the most pretentious --churches, stores, warehouses, and the
like--that they were down-right startling; one blinked before them as one blinks before
a man with his face shot away. A few linger in memory, horrible even there: a crazy little
church just west of Jeannette, set like a dormer-window on the side of a bare leprous hill;
the headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars at another forlorn town, a steel
stadium like a huge rattrap somewhere further down the line. But most of all I recall the
general effect--of hideousness without a break. There was not a single decent house
within eye range from the Pittsburgh to the Greensburg yards. There was not one that
was not misshapen, and there was not one that was not shabby.
The country itself is not uncomely, despite the grime of the endless mills. It is, in form,
a narrow river valley, with deep gullies running up into the hills. It is thickly settled, but
not: noticeably overcrowded. There is still plenty of room for building, even in the larger
towns, and there are very few solid blocks. Nearly every house, big and little, has space
on all four sides. Obviously, if there were architects of any professional sense or dignity
in the region, they would have perfected a chalet to hug the hillsides--a chalet with a
high-pitched roof, to throw off the heavy Winter snows, but still essentially a low and
clinging building, wider than it was tall. But what have they done? They have taken as
their model a brick set on end. This they have converted into a thing of dingy clapboards
with a narrow, low-pitched roof. And the whole they have set upon thin, preposterous
brick piers. By the hundreds and thousands these abominable houses cover the bare
hillsides, like gravestones in some gigantic and decaying cemetery. On their deep sides
they are three, four and even five stories high; on their low sides they bury themselves
swinishly in the mud. Not a fifth of them are perpendicular. They lean this way and that,
hanging on to their bases precariously. And one and all they are streaked in grime, with
dead and eczematous patches of paint peeping through the streaks.
Now and then there is a house of brick. But what brick! When it is new it is the color of
a fried egg. When it has taken on the patina of the mills it is the color of an egg long past
all hope or caring. Was it necessary to adopt that shocking color? No more than it was
necessary to set all of the houses on end. Red brick, even in a steel town, ages with some
dignity. Let it become downright black, and it is still sightly, especially if its trimmings are
of white stone, with soot in the depths and the high spots washed by the rain. But in
Westmoreland they prefer that uremic yellow, and so they have the most loathsome
towns and villages ever seen by mortal eye.
I award this championship only after laborious research and incessant prayer. I have seen,
I believe, all of the most unlovely towns of the world; they are all to be found in the
United States. I have seen the mill towns of decomposing New England and the desert
towns of Utah, Arizona and Texas. I am familiar with the back streets of Newark, Brooklyn
and Chicago, and have made scientific explorations to Camden, N. J. and Newport News,
Va. Safe in a Pullman, I have whirled through the gloomy, Godforsaken villages of Iowa
and Kansas, and the malarious tidewater hamlets of Georgia. I have been to Bridgeport,
Conn., and to Los Angeles. But nowhere on this earth, at home or abroad, have I seen
anything to compare to the villages that huddle aloha the line of the Pennsylvania from
the Pittsburgh yards to Greensburg. They are incomparable in color, and they are
incomparable in design. It is as if some titanic and aberrant genius, uncompromisingly
inimical to man, had devoted all the ingenuity of Hell to the making of them. They show
grotesqueries of ugliness that, in retrospect ,become almost diabolical .One cannot
imagine mere human beings concocting such dreadful things, and one can scarcely
imagine human beings bearing life in them.
Are they so frightful because the valley is full of foreigners--dull, insensate brutes, with
no love of beauty in them? Then why didn't these foreigners set up similar abominations
in the countries that they came from? You will, in fact, find nothing of the sort in
Europe--save perhaps in the more putrid parts of England. There is scarcely an ugly
village on the whole Continent. The peasants, however poor, somehow manage to make
themselves graceful and charming habitations, even in Spain. But in the American village
and small town the pull is always toward ugliness, and in that Westmoreland valley it has
been yielded to with an eagerness bordering upon passion. It is incredible that mere
ignorance should have achieved such masterpieces of horror.
On certain levels of the American race, indeed, there seems to be a positive libido for the
ugly, as on other and less Christian levels there is a libido for the beautiful. It is
impossible to put down the wallpaper that defaces the average American home of the
lower middle class to mere inadvertence, or to the obscene humor of the manufacturers.
Such ghastly designs, it must be obvious, give a genuine delight to a certain type of
mind. They meet, in some unfathomable way, its obscure and unintelligible demands.
The taste for them is as enigmatical and yet as common as the taste for dogmatic
theology and the poetry of Edgar A Guest.
Thus I suspect (though confessedly without knowing) that the vast majority of the
honest folk of Westmoreland county, and especially the 100% Americans among them,
actually admire the houses they live in, and are proud of them. For the same money they
could get vastly better ones, but they prefer what they have got. Certainly there was no
pressure upon the Veterans of Foreign Wars to choose the dreadful edifice that bears
their banner, for there are plenty of vacant buildings along the trackside, and some of
them are appreciably better. They might, in- deed, have built a better one of their own.
But they chose that clapboarded horror with their eyes open, and having chosen it, they
let it mellow into its present shocking depravity. They like it as it is: beside it, the
Parthenon would no doubt offend them. In precisely the same way the authors of the
rat-trap stadium that I have mentioned made a deliberate choice: After painfully
designing and erecting it, they made it perfect in their own sight by putting a completely
impossible penthouse painted a staring yellow, on top of it. The effect is that of a fat
woman with a black eye. It is that of a Presbyterian grinning. But they like it.
Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for
its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out
of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth. The etiology of
this madness deserves a great deal more study than it has got. There must be causes
behind it; it arises and flourishes in obedience to biological laws, and not as a mere act
of God. What, precisely, are the terms of those laws? And why do they run stronger in
America than elsewhere? Let some honest Privat Dozent in pathological sociology apply
himself to the problem.
(from Reading for Rhetoric by Caroline Shrodes, Clifford A, Josephson, James R. Wilson )