The shock waves from Bill’s speech spread quickly throughout the Confederation. His opposition gave great encouragement to those who wanted modern life back again, and it left the Retro movement in the dumps. Both assumed, rightly, that it tubed the referendum. By the time it was held, on the 15th of August, it was of little interest. Only 34 percent of voters came to the poll, and of that 34 percent, only 22 percent voted in favor.
Both sides misread the vote, because neither calculated that most of the Retro folks simply stayed home. Or at least stayed away from the polls: many were out and about. This time, instead of electoral petitions, they were carrying pledge cards.
The very evening Bill spoke, the first groups met to design and carry out the pledge drive. Some did so because they regarded the governor as their leader. Others realized a voluntary pledge was more powerful than state imposition, not less. Many came forward, then and later, because Retroculture itself warned against the power of the state. The world Retroculture sought to recapture had been one where the American federal government was small and unobtrusive.
The advocates of television and computers and cars dismissed the pledge campaign. They were sure the convenience of easy travel and the allure of instant entertainment would be irresistible.
They were wrong.
By the end of August, more than a million citizens of the states that made up the Confederation had signed the pledge. Many not only signed, but joined the drive to get more signatures. The numbers jumped exponentially: 5 percent of the population in September became 25 percent by the end of October. The Retro folks set a goal: they wanted a majority of the population to take the pledge by Thanksgiving.
Dr. Faust struck back with all he had. The mails were stuffed with glitzy brochures pushing TVs and computers. Toyota offered its fast, sleek, long-range electric cars at a loss, priced lower than a decent wagon and a pair of Percherons. Men in raincoats lurked outside schools, offering children violent video games for free.
The Retro movement responded with a series of simple posters, just black type on white. The first asked, “Did We Fight for Nothing?” The second, “Have We So Soon Forgotten?” The final poster, which went up early in November, simply read, “Turn Back, O Man.”
They got their majority by November 15th. Throughout the Confederation, Thanksgiving was celebrated with a special fervor that year. By Christmas, an amazing 85 percent of the people of the Northern Confederation had taken the pledge.
Of course, those who did not were free to buy TVs and computers and cars, and many did. Television stations sprang up in most of the larger cities. A few places began installing cable.
But such actions had a cost. As the pledge drive grew, so did the understanding that these technologies were immoral. If a family got a TV or a computer, it found its neighbors growing chilly. They wouldn’t allow their children to go to that house. In Boston, the Catholic Archbishop excommunicated television owners. When people drove their fancy new Toyota to a store or restaurant, they were often refused service. Sometimes, children threw stones.
Dr. Faust’s party tried to put a good face on it, hoping that with time, folks would loosen up. But the fact was, they were beat. The new television stations went broke. The long-range cars were sold for export. When the telephone operator detected a modem, she pulled the plug.
Oh, a few madmen in cabins in the woods kept their toys; you can find some even today. New England has always had its eccentrics. But, the hopes of Henry David Thoreau notwithstanding, we’ve always been able to tell a loon from an owl.
The summer of 2039 marked a change in the life of our country, and in my life as well. For the first time since Maine declared its independence, I could start something with reasonable hope I could finish it. That meant I could farm.
I didn’t try to do too much that first year. In late May, I put most of the good bottom land into potatoes, and the rest into feed corn. Hartland now had a potato chip factory. The labels on the cans were in Chinese as well as English, and most of them were sold to the Asian market. The feed corn would enable us to add a few more cows; Maria knew how to make cheese.
Up behind the house was an ancient orchard. It had been there as long as anyone could remember, and the apples were antique varieties, all now nameless but some with unique flavors. I pruned and fed the trees, and got in a small cider press. Come fall, I’d press the apples from each tree separately, identify the best flavors, then do some grafting from those trees. I figured I could build up a small business in specialty ciders, which sold well both at home and overseas. It wouldn’t be too many years before the Old Place again offered its inhabitants a decent living.
Maria and I were together a lot that summer. That’s the real test. Does time in close company draw people together or cause them to rub each other raw? Nature usually decrees the second. But farming reminds us of another fact, which is that labor can overcome nature. Maria and I were both old enough and mature enough to work at getting along. So we did, and time smoothed the rough edges rather than sharpening them. Which is another way of saying we were growing into love.
One afternoon late in August, when days were growing cool but not yet noticeably short, Cousin John drove up to visit in his new Baker Electric car. John had gone Retro, and the car was Retro, too. It was a duplicate of the china closet, the electric car favored by old ladies early in the 20th century: black, upright, with a short sloping hood and a trunk filled with lead-acid batteries. It had window shades and flower vases and was driven from the back seat with a tiller. Instead of a horn, it had a bell. It was a perfect lawyer’s car, which is what Cousin John was. Even in summer, he always wore a black homburg hat.
I’d finished the milking and was coming out of the barn when he pulled up. “Evenin', Cousin,” I said. “That’s a fancy new buggy for these parts.”
“There’s money in these parts now, Ire, for the first time in almost a century. We’re making things people want to buy, people in foreign parts. I assume you've seen the sheep all over the hills. And the expansion of the tannery, and the potato chip plant, and the wagon works and soon, with the new electric power, a Nestlé’s cannery. It’ll be Swiss money putting that up.”
“But that’s all honest business. What I want to know is, how’s a lawyer makin’ money?”
“Contracts. Business contracts. Many with foreign suppliers or buyers. Not lawsuits much any more, I’m glad to say. Nor impossibly complicated dealings with government agencies.”
“Waal, that’s all right then, I guess. It's suppertime now for us. We farm folk eat early, as you probably know. You're welcome to join us.”
“We town folk eat late, as you should know. The Baker will get me back home in time for our dinner, at eight.”
“So even in Hartland we now have town and country?”
“We do, Ire. Hartland is a real town again, with town manners. We want to keep it that way, or at least I do. That’s what I’ve come to talk to you about, if you’ve got a minute.”
“In the country, we always have a minute, or an hour. Come on in and at least have a beer—Pittsfield brewery—so we don’t feel inhospitable.”
“I trust that’s not a bad pun about ambulance chasing.”
“I know why you’re a good lawyer. You don't miss a word, do you?”
“Not often.”
We went through the back door into the kitchen, which summer or winter was the family room of any Maine house. It smelled of warm apple pie, made from our own Transparents. John sat down and pulled out his pipe while I poured us each a mug of Porter.
“So what can I do for Hartland, John?” I asked. “I hope nobody is planning to attack it.”
“Well, Ire, they are in fact. In a manner of speaking, anyway. Now that cars, short-range ones anyway, are making a comeback, a fellow wants to re-start all the ugliness cars brought with them. He wants to put in a strip mall along the road between Hartland and Pittsfield. Not only do those things look like hell, they suck the life out o
f towns. I don’t want to see our towns die a second time, so I and a few other folks are going to fight it. I was hoping you might join us.”
“I’m not sure that’s my kind of fight, John. Unless you’re planning to let this fellow put up his strip of stores, then bring up artillery. Remember, John, I haven’t gone Retro, not yet anyway.”
“Haven’t you? I’m not so sure about that.”
“You won’t catch me wearing a homburg, John. One of the most important principles of war is, 'Never trust a soldier who much cares what he looks like.'”
“Retroculture isn’t about clothes, Ire. Period clothing is just an outward symbol some of us use to witness quietly to our beliefs. Retroculture is in part about what things look like, because ugliness breeds ugly behavior. Why do you think the cultural Marxists in the old U.S.A. so avidly promoted ugly architecture, ugly art, and ugly music? They understood that ugliness is a weapon. For us, beauty is also a weapon. Don’t you see any difference between a harmonious, traditional New England town and a plastic strip mall?”
Chapter Forty-Six
We couldn’t know it at the time, but the course of events in the year 2039 set a pattern for the Northern Confederation. We had entered the period historians now call the Recovery.
Year by year, more turbines came on line in the great dam across the Bay of Fundy, the most massive engineering work in human history, surpassing even the pyramids and China’s Great Wall. By the time it was all up and running in the year 2057, we had almost triple the total energy available to the same region at the height of the American republic. It was clean power. And it was cheap.
The combination of peace and inexpensive, abundant energy created a boom gaffers and gammers compared to America in the 1950s. As in the 1950s, the growth was real. Our boom was based not on corporate mergers and downsizing and exporting jobs to Third World hell-holes, but on making things.
All over the country, in cities and towns and villages, small factories sprang up. Some were high tech. We now lead the world in cold fusion applications, airship design, and wireless power transmission. In fact, we’ve created a whole new branch of electronics by developing the long-neglected ideas of Nicola Tesla. My department is one of the beneficiaries. Our Navy’s zeppelins carry one device that will fry the electronic circuits of any enemy plane or ship within fifty miles, and another that will explode their on-board ordnance.
But most of our success lay in making improved versions of simple, old fashioned things: Retro-technology. Contrary to the Tofflers and other 20th century prophets, the world did not go high tech. The New World Disorder moved life in the opposite direction. What people needed were simple, useful technologies that could function under primitive, isolated, often chaotic conditions. In most of the world, the only use for a computer was as an anchor for a wooden-hulled, rowed fishing boat.
The Alco works in Schenectady, New York was our first big Retro-technology success. Drawing on the work of the brilliant Argentine steam engineer Livio Dante Porta, Alco designed and built steam locomotives that rivaled diesels in efficiency, yet could be maintained by a jungle machine shop. By the year 2047, Alco was the biggest locomotive builder in the world, exporting a thousand engines a year.
Some people worried that reindustrialization would again depopulate the countryside. That didn’t happen. Thanks to our ever-growing railway network, there was little reason to concentrate industry. Labor cost more in cities, because most people didn’t want to live there. And most of our industries were small; with the strangling net of government regulation gone, anyone with an idea could simply set up shop. Yankees had never been short on ideas.
More important, farm incomes continued to rise, to the point where a farm of a couple of hundred acres offered a comfortable, even a prosperous living. The rest of the world was a hungry place, and some of its hungry people could afford to pay well for food. Though our manufactured exports rose steadily, our overseas trade in farm products remained our main source of foreign exchange. Between the two, we built up our gold reserves and with them our money supply, to the point where by 2048 the standard interest rate in the Northern Confederation was a historically low three percent.
Returning prosperity was necessary for the Recovery, but prosperity was not itself the Recovery. Mere prosperity could easily have degenerated into another consumer economy where people poured their wealth into useless, time-wasting, mind-deadening gadgets that quickly broke or were made obsolete by yet another, more expensive gadget they “had to have.”
But the fall of the American republic and early 21st century culture, coupled with the hardships of the war years, had wrought a vast change in the way people approached life. No longer did they exist merely to be entertained through ephemera, so many mayflies of the spirit. We had again become a serious people. Like serious people throughout the ages, we wanted to build.
If you are going to build, the first thing you have to do is clear the ground. Although the early 21st century was gone, we were surrounded by its debris: depopulated suburbs, abandoned shopping malls, empty strip developments, all the clutter of the auto age, most of it ugly when new and none improved by age and neglect. The fate of the suburbs showed how empty the heads of 20th century “futurists” had been. Not a one had predicted their demise, even though people had been fleeing them by the 1990s the same way (and for the same reasons) they had earlier fled the inner cities. Collapse, revolution, and war had finished them. The disappearance of white collar jobs and gasoline drove their inhabitants to the small towns or the countryside. Those who still worked in cities lived near downtown along the trolley line, just where their great-grandparents did.
So we made a desert and found it was peace. The early Recovery rang with the sound of demolition. Hundreds of square miles of former suburb become farmland once more. So did shopping centers, malls, and the endless Vegas strips along the highways. At first, the removal was utilitarian; the auto age wasn’t coming back, and farmland was valuable.
But the spirit of Retroculture soon took over. In the cities, the cold, slab-sided International-Style buildings, created by the Marxists of the Bauhaus to be alienating, came crashing down. So, in the towns, did the churches and banks that looked like Dairy Queens, the cheap motels, the plastic facades on once-noble buildings. Everywhere, in an orgy of ordered destruction, we trashed the trash and restored the landscape and the streetscape. To us Tolkien fans, it was the Scouring of the Shire, only in reverse.
The Scouring continued up into the 2040s. The wreckage of half a century takes some clearing. But by the mid '30s, we were also starting to build. Here Retroculture gained its first universal acceptance. Retro or not, virtually everyone wanted to go back, back to the City Beautiful movement that had grown out of the Columbian Exposition of 1893, back to the Greek Revival or Victorian town, back to the old-fashioned New England or Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse.
We were not without guides. The sheer ugliness of the last American built landscape had spawned a reaction, the New Urbanism. By the 1990s, pioneers such as architect Andres Duany had recovered many of the rules that shaped 18th and 19th century towns: grid street patterns, ratios of street width to building height that made pedestrians feel comfortable, the social role of front porches. Even then, people wanted such things: Duany’s projects had been commercial successes. But the Establishment had been against him, as it was against anything true, good, or beautiful. Now, with the Recovery, the New Urbanism came into its own. We would have recovered our past without it, but not so quickly nor so well.
As in many things, Maine came out ahead, because Maine had always been behind. Beyond the usual detritus of strip malls and shopping centers, we didn’t have to demolish much. Portland had been heavily into architectural preservation and restoration by the 1980s, and our few other cities mostly needed fixing up: the old buildings still stood. That was true even of small towns like Hartland. Poverty, the great preserver, had kept out the late 20th century crap. So the Scouring didn’t
take much work on our part, though I did join Bill Kraft when he went down to Boston for the demolition of the John Hancock building, I.M. Pei's turd in Beantown's punchbowl. It was a grand festive occasion. Today, the tallest structure in Boston is once again the steeple of Old North Church.
Maine didn’t need to take much down, but it rejoiced in putting things up. Prosperity brought new building even in Hartland, and what we built was splendid. Cousin John’s new house was one of the first. Just a ten-minute walk from the tannery, it was a fine Greek Revival, fan light over the door, center hall all done in native pine post and beam construction. Others like it quickly followed. By 2055, drab, sad old Hartland had become the kind of town the early 21st century tourist would have driven a hundred miles to see. Only no one had to go one hundred miles by then, because the same kind of thing was happening all over. The Northern Confederation was building a beautiful country.
It wasn’t only in architecture that the Recovery was a recovery of the beautiful. Even more important was what happened in the culture. It was amazing how quickly and completely both the old pop culture and elite culture—rock music, soap operas, tabloids, obscene “art,” Pinter’s plays, atonal music, Dadaism in all its forms—simply vanished. We should not have been surprised. That culture was merely the vaporings of a bored, self-destructive people, a people that had lost touch with reality. We were that people no longer.
In its place, the Recovery brought back the beautiful. But it did more than that. The new popular culture that arose in the 2040s was participatory. People didn’t want to lie back like lumps and watch or hear someone else do something. They wanted to do it themselves.
It started with music. In the Fall of 2040, a high school music director in Nashua, New Hampshire, put a notice in the local paper asking for volunteers for a choir to sing the music of Stephen Foster. He had been a secret Foster admirer all his life, and wondered if anyone else in the frozen North might share his eccentricity. More than two hundred people answered, and in March of 2042, he took his choir on a recital tour of New Hampshire and Vermont towns. The halls and churches where they sang of life in the antebellum South overflowed with people, and more stood in the snow outside, straining to hear.