“O CLEVELAND, the Forest City! The Fountain City! O, la Belle City!” cried a nineteenth-century newspaper editor, visiting from Wisconsin with his French phrasebook and his head full of wind. “Cleveland doesn’t put enough garlic in its cooking; it’s no friend to food,” complained the twentieth-century wife of a professor at Western Reserve University. “I like Cleveland because it’s so nice to me,” said a lovely young visitor with a New York road company (waist 23, bust 34, hips 35), “with all its theaters and goodwill and its new teevee channels opening up.”
The subject of these diverse meditations is the sixth largest community in the nation, a metropolitan area of about a million and a half, representing just one per cent of the total population of the United States. It is the world’s center of paint manufacturing, and is said to contain the largest Hungarian settlement outside the city limits of Budapest, but is chiefly remarkable for its wealth and its stability. Newspapers estimate that Cleveland had among the largest average family incomes of the great American cities last year—about six thousand dollars. One of its suburbs, Cleveland Heights, a community of sixty thousand souls whose men coast eagerly downhill into the city each morning and rise profitably amid a bumper-to-bumper irritation each evening, boasts an average annual income of about nine thousand dollars per family.
What does Cleveland do with its money?
It worries about it, as does everyone else. It wonders whether the party will go on and it wonders why it isn’t having such a good time as it expected. There is a sense of dream, as if one were to wander loose in a studio making gen-u-ine counterfeit dollars. Some of the fantasts fresh to the hiring of tax lawyers do not yet feel secure in this materialized dream. Most of us, however, are doing quite well, thank you, from the art lover who recently settled between one and two million dollars on an actress once the favorite of Pirandello, to the lowliest policeman with a bingo parlor or a bookie on his beat and an occasional all-expenses-paid trip to Miami Beach.
Spread out strategically along Lake Erie between Detroit and Buffalo, Cleveland sometimes refers to itself in magazine advertisements as “the Best Location in the Nation,” with good rail, truck, and water communications, a central position among raw materials and markets, and a climate humid enough to spur on the inhabitants to energetic activity in order to forget the nasal drip with which a good proportion of us are inflicted. The members of Moses Cleaveland’s party who surveyed this territory in 1796, ate delicious broiled rattlesnake and found both commercial and esthetic delights in barter with the Indians, but worried about “the subtil, baneful wind” off Lake Erie, which led straight to death if breathed through the mouth. Despite their fears, there has not been an epidemic, flood, earthquake, volcanic eruption, or other serious act of God except for the purchase by Bill Veeck of the Cleveland Indians. Mr. Veeck has since moved on.
The water on a first-baseman’s knee, the laryngitis of a disc jockey, or another policeman surprised in an act of burglary or venery while on duty provide the staple diet of newspapers in quest of local catastrophe. Cleveland policemen obey the Philosopher’s great doctrine of the Golden Mean between penuriousness (Atlantic City) and profligacy (Beverly Hills), accepting just the amount required in favor and shakedown to send these commissioned Aristotelians to Miami Beach, Coral Gables, and a proper dignity in the sunset of their days. They are sometimes punished for the excessive taking of bribes by a lonely duty on the East Ninth Street pier, jutting onto Lake Erie, where they are told to watch out for invaders from Canada. Any time the Canadians want to take over, the Force can be counted upon to turn its back if the fix be put in with a minimal delicacy.
Cleveland is secure in steady employment, diversified industry, and a profitable balance between war and civilian production. Everything from television sets and chlorophyll pills to gold bricks and honorary degrees has a good market here. Racial and class tensions are relatively low, the Nationality Gardens in Rockefeller Park a symbol of the way Polish, German, Czech, Italian, Jewish, Hungarian, Russian, English, Serbian, and Greek vegetables can grow together in harmony. As long as business continues good, the antagonism among groups which is one of America’s sadnesses everywhere can probably be confined to the level of personal bitterness. There may be ill feeling over the movement of neighborhoods, but no race riots for this year or next. The current controversy over slum clearance, which involves resettlement of a large area, will probably be resolved by bureaucratic rather than Klan methods. Thus far, the local officials, the Negro population, and the city as a whole have held firm against a few hysterics made at the inevitable. A fine residential community of prosperous Negroes has developed among the mansions near Western Reserve University. As to others of the oppressed proletariat, a typical real-estate item in one of the newspapers tells of the sale to a machinist of a “ranch-type” in Shaker Heights. Price: “About $45,000.”
The city has expanded beyond the dreams of John D. Rockefeller, whose home on Euclid Avenue was razed to make room for a parking lot, and even now approaches the fantasies of the Van Sweringen brothers, those heroes of our mythology who lived together in one room of their castle near Cleveland and provide perhaps the most dramatic of the local success stories. (They died owing between ten and twenty million dollars.) The rapid spread of the city has created transportation difficulties, housing difficulties, and political difficulties, with slow money to be made in solving these problems and fast money to be made in compounding them. Clevelanders have not proved reluctant to accept either variety of cash. The fifty-two-floor Terminal Tower, built by the authority of Van Sweringen paper, looks out with commercial pride over the movements of money in a land once wasted by Indians, its flag far up aflutter to indicate a ball game today and its spire imperceptibly in motion against the forces of wind and gravity.
Culture is not neglected amid such prosperity. Cleveland’s little-theater groups, symphony orchestra, chamber-music societies, art museum, zoo, and sandlot baseball leagues are known throughout our commuting world, from Painesville on the east to Lorain on the west, and—in justice it must be added—even beyond. Ballet, opera, and stag movies all have their enthusiasts. The Health Museum, first in America, houses “Juno, the Transparent Lady,” whose inner organs light up when a button is pressed. Particularly among the “nationality” groups, traditional crafts enjoy a continued practice—ceramics, stained-glass windows, organ-building, weaving, and so on. Cleveland’s sense of being a patron of the arts is fortified by such local events as the annual visits of the New York Metropolitan Opera, the Ballet Russe, and Bennett Cerf; Hart Crane once lived here, and Time was once edited in Cleveland by that young man Luce and friends. The Mad Killer of Kingsbury Run—here reverently given his complete title—whose capture has been announced and then retracted to the accompaniment of scandals in the sheriff’s office and accusations of police brutality, is occasionally resurrected by the newspapers during slow days in the cold war. (Their most generous theory: that he represents a latter-day marriage of Malthus and Robin Hood, ridding the community of undesirables. An estimated score thus far: twenty-six dismemberments.)
Another burgeoning garden of culture is the local television industry. It hopes to contribute to the national glory of Cleveland by eventually housing network shows. Western Reserve University has pioneered in teaching logic, psychology, and literature to thousands of television viewers, morning meditations on Pavlov’s dog being brought to Mrs. Northeastern Ohio by a sixteen-inch-high homunculus in a Muntz or General Electric tube. These are credit courses. Cleveland College, the downtown branch of Western Reserve, has developed an extensive program of evening adult classes, offering capsule courses in everything from Hats & Bonnets to Mann & Gide, with the clatter of sewing machines sometimes interrupting the discussion which attempts to measure in pounds and ounces just how much madness is proper to the most efficient functioning of an artist. We have enough local “creative people,” painters, musicians, sculptors, writers, and disc jockeys, to satisfy the need of the women’s clubs for free luncheon speakers. One novelist claims to have been introduced to an important lady as “a big man in the Insight business.”
But perhaps the most ambitious of the dreams in our community is the city planner reported to be devoting himself to a modern reconstruction of “the Best Location in the Nation” after its helter-skelter growth will have been corrected by an atom bomb. As a more immediate concern, the planners are attempting to reform the lakefront and the Cuyahoga River, that freckled, odorous, precociously senile stream which led W. K. Kelsey, the great journalistic advantage which Detroit holds over Cleveland, to wonder if perhaps the Cuyahoga does not “begin somewhere as a limpid brooklet wandering between lush banks overhung with asphodel and floating with those nenuphars that the French poets love so well, and if along the line it loses its virginity, so that by the time it reaches Cleveland, it’s just an old trot.” The industries and the suburbs which use her, however, love her for what she is, a receptacle so unprepossessing that even the suicides of Cleveland are driven to the drugstore, the locked garage, or other waters.
Of the seven institutions of higher learning located in or near Cleveland, the chief is Western Reserve University, which sponsored a musical comedy two summers ago in order to celebrate a hundred years of progress. Known as “The Yale of the Middle West”—this slogan is applied chiefly during the continuous campaign for endowment—it can perhaps most fairly be stated of Western Reserve that Yale must bow to it in the financing of musical comedies. In return, Cleveland’s great university should be gracious enough to concede the palm to Yale in the area of intellectual vivacity. Several of the graduate schools, those of medicine and others, deserve their respectable national reputations.
Case Institute, Western Reserve’s most steadfast rival in football and fund-raising, has celebrated the victories of abstraction and officially recognized theoretical physics by changing its name from “—of Applied Science” to the luxurious “—of Technology.” Dancing academies, charm schools, Diesel institutes, and evanescent colleges offering degrees in Your Memory, How to Build It, or Success the Himalayan Way all find a clientele hot for inward betterment.
The revival meeting is cultivated with a success which depends on the preacher’s satisfying the critical standards of Cleveland’s sophistication in theology. At Lenten time last year, a newspaper printed a series of personal credos, fine publicity for God, by prominent leaders of business, finance, the professions, government, and the long con; the tone was one of easy social familiarity—they know whose side He is on—and they developed an image of the Almighty as the benevolent cartelist, hedging against inflation but content with nonvoting share in numerous healthy American enterprises. Some splendid local examples attest to the earthly reward of piety.
In an effort to relieve us of some of the money with which the pockets of Cleveland are heavy, the banks swollen, and the mattresses lumpy, a number of industries have undergone rapid expansion during the past ten years. (At income-tax time in town each winter, premium prices are paid for high-grade woolen socks of the sort with reinforced toe and heel in which a roll of fifties can safely be tucked, protected by mothball and prayer from the assaults of time, beast, conscience, or federal treasury agent. A light sleeper is kept awake during the March nights by the steady chuck-chuck of his neighbors’ spades in their back yards.) Clevelanders have tried sex and drink and found that, although activities to be recommended in their places, they do not spend money fast enough. They have tried speculation in real estate and discovered, to their dismay, that no matter how risky the speculation, they have almost invariably suffered a profit during the past fifteen years. The distraught philanthropist who tried scattering bills of medium denomination from his office window was arrested by alert policemen and released to the custody of his heirs. Therefore, in response to great civic need, the existing brokerage firms have expanded their staffs, opened new offices, and invited aid from New York to accommodate the waiting hordes of stock-buyers who seek to regain the unencumbered agility of the fine careless days of 1932.
A more general attempt to spend money is represented by a proliferation of night clubs which astonishes lifetime residents, who remember Cleveland’s café society as a choice between a Saturday night with goulash and wine or the band concerts at the shell in Edgewater Park, the lovers’ sticky hands united in a box of crackerjack. The first settlers of the city converted their grain into liquid form for greater profit in the journey eastward. Their insight and ingenuity was reflected during the era of the Volstead Amendment by many contemporary settlers, now gone legit, mellowed by age and gain. Instead of bucking motor launches across Lake Erie to Canada, some of them have now flowered into a homely maturity and useful contribution to community recreation through their association with the entertainment business, importing everything from trapeze acts to “risky songs direct from New York and Miami Beach.”
Not long ago, a small west-side bar, far from downtown, hired Rudy Vallee for a week of the “Whiffenpoof Song” and nostalgia about old Yale for the pleasure of the neighborhood loungers. “Big names” visit supper clubs which used to be satisfied with high-school bands. The kids who once made out with a soda and a few nickels for the juke box are now in the habit of parking their convertibles at Moe’s Main Street and investing respectable sums in an evening with Johnny Ray (“Mr. Emotion in Person NOW”), as he puts his head against the piano, sobs briefly, and sings, “Tell the Lady I Said Good-bye.” Cleveland bobby-soxers, acting under orders from the local deejays, mouths agape, deeply moved, marched among the first in Johnny Ray’s crusade to carry his message to the Paramount in faraway and infidel New York. At any rate, with tin whistles passé and crackerjack prizes made of paper, the band concert has fallen into obsolesence.
The gentleness and moderation typical of Cleveland can be illustrated by a recent incident. The manager of one of the night spots, a distinguished bootlegger, racketeer, and gambler, was having a heart-to-heart talk with his parking-lot attendant. In the course of their negotiations, which were chiefly devoted to reprimands for joy-riding in the automobiles of customers, he expressed himself with an eloquence which knocked several teeth through the employee’s cheek. The latter, perhaps encouraged by job mobility in a time of intense business activity, retorted by stabbing his ex-boss, who by this time had accepted his resignation. Interviewed at the police station, the parking-lot attendant, now out of work but not embittered, issued the following statement: “I used my little knife because I didn’t want to cut him bad.”
One of the scenic paths recommended to the tourist follows along the Cuyahoga River in the industrial flats. By day this area is covered with an acrid pall. By night the sky is violet, throbbing and flaring with the reflection from the blast furnaces. In this oldest corner of the city, from which the nutritive rattlesnake has long since fled, some of Cleveland’s few poor people cower in shame for their lack of initiative and patriotism toward “The Forest City,” “The Convention City,” “Where Coal and Ore Meet.” Nearby streets, named by the first settlers, may startle the visitor who finds rusty plaques identifying them as Literary Road or College Avenue or Professor Street or Shakespeare Avenue. Farther along, at the shoreline of Lake Erie, he can look east to the municipal rubbish dump, which smolders constantly, and admire the tranquil hobbyists who stand studying it and competing to club the rats which occasionally emerge.
On Sunday, however, the stroller will discover in this area a calm tribute to America’s industrial might. Overhead, the traffic sings across a great bridge, and at his feet, in the shadows of the bridge, a maze of streets, paths, and alleys leads to docks, warehouses, and small machine shops. The stain of smoke fades briefly from the urban clouds.
If he makes his way to the bank of the Cuyahoga, which has kept its Indian name, he can find wild sunflowers which come six feet out of the muck in September. He may even, as did one flâneur, chance upon a lovely young artist rapidly sketching the city’s skyline, her mouth in a pout, her golden hair shining in the autumn sun, her eyes awash with the contemplation of beauty.
To the sightseer this unexpected vision in a beige cashmere sweater came as a wondrous example of an area of experience still open to private enterprise. He made his way through the brush to surprise her, coming around a heap of tin cans and decaying tires with an inquiry which united a theme of respectful gallantry to the grace of esthetic sensibility: “Excuse me, Miss, are you from the Cleveland Institute of Art? The Museum classes, maybe?”
She was reluctant to discuss her work. In fact, she fled with wild shrieks, having been convinced by the newspapers that he must have intended assault, purse-snatching, or at least what is called “exposing his person.”
He was left with her sketch of the Terminal Tower. She seemed to have talent. Like the spirit of Cleveland, her talent might develop with greater richness if she were more confident of her power, less speedy in the flight with money, and yet more adventurous in the exposing of her person to the risks of love.
1951