Feeling a Severed Limb

the instinct to fight for history

On July 7, 1919, the U.S. Army embarked on an experiment: It sent a motorized convoy of 81 trucks, staff cars, and scout motorcycles across the country, in part to see how it would go and in part to argue for a system of national roads. It took them 62 days to drive from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco. The convoy more or less traveled the route of the Lincoln Highway, a mostly aspirational national road assembled by a private organization funded by car and tire companies. The army sent a film crew, and the soldiers brought cameras, so you can see great pictures, footage, and historical documents here. The record of the trip offers an excellent corrective for the view that life now is much harder than it used to be. Here’s a summer day in western Nebraska, taken from this excellent book by Pete Davies:

Aside from the need to push and pull a truck convoy by hand through the deep sand of functionally nonexistent roads, and to improvise spare parts in the deserts, the convoy’s biggest challenge was a spontaneous national outpouring of enthusiasm and support. In every town they reached, the soldiers found people waiting for them with parades and dinners and dances; they drove twelve to fifteen hours a day, then danced for a few hours, then slept for a few hours, then woke up and did it again. There were at least two Transcontinental Motor Convoy marriages — conducted in the field — and probably a few Transcontinental Motor Convoy babies.

Along the way, this young man traveled with the convoy as an observer:

He hadn’t seen his wife for eight months, so she joined the convoy when it reached the middle of the country. Mamie Eisenhower traveled west with her husband from Nebraska to eastern Wyoming, so one of their last evenings together would have happened here, where the officers of the convoy were hosted by the community for dinner:

The Wheat Growers Hotel opened in 1918, reputedly as “the most glamorous hotel between Omaha and Denver,” and didn’t close until 1988. Today it sits empty, the walls stripped to the beams but the original tile intact:

The people of Kimball, Nebraska are rallying to save it, raising funds to rebuild and reopen a significant piece of their local history. “Quality of life is what separates successful cities and towns from declining communities in the new millenium,” they write. “The Wheat Growers Hotel is a visual representation of our community's heritage and the architecture is a physical expression of Kimball's history.”

If you’ve been reading along here for a while, you’ve seen a recent discussion of a similar attempt to rebuild a small town’s main business district, restoring a smaller boutique hotel in Humboldt, Kansas. My next stop was Red Cloud, Nebraska, home of the National Willa Cather Center, where the town is successfully — try to guess — rebuilding a historic building to turn it into a boutique hotel. I’m seeing more and more of this as I look around the country: historic properties being restored by community effort, and a particular sense that hotels are meaningful and important to save.

The recurring 21st-century woke theme about the American past is that the country comes from degradation and filth, and has no history worthy of celebration. Make America Great Again? Like when we had slavery? There’s endless cheap comedy to be had in poking at the claim that we come from anything that was ever at all beautiful:

But the narcissism of this thinly veiled celebration of the self — isn’t it wonderful that we’re the first people who’ve ever been morally good? — is a tissue-thin artifact of poorly educated narcissism, and yes, that’s the second time I’m using that word in the same sentence. The smug rejection of the past is infantile narcissism, third reference, full stop. Our past is a mix of darkness and beauty, worth remembering and well worth preserving. We know this; we show that we know this by the instinct to rally around emptied buildings and to restore them. You can’t know the history of the Wheat Growers Hotel and not want to save it — it’s cold to the point of being inhuman.

The most successful restoration of a historic American hotel that I know of is La Posada, a Fred Harvey hotel in Winslow, Arizona that was gutted and turned into a railroad office in 1960, before being abandoned in 1994. Allan Affeldt and Tina Mion restored La Posada, and are still and forever restoring it, along with two historic hotels in Las Vegas, New Mexico. You can read about their work here, under the appropriate headline, “Believing In Our Past.” As an old railroad hotel, La Posada still sits next to the tracks; old guys stop by the bar, then go out to watch the freight trains — like people have been doing, in the same place, since 1930.

The dismal culture war in America is, among other things, a struggle between people who value a complex past and want to protect it, and people who can’t see the past because they only see themselves in everything. Every community working to save a historic structure is a rebuke to their emptiness.

So yes: I hope to spend the night at the Wheat Growers Hotel, and to hear the footsteps of the Transcontinental Motor Convoy in the halls. “When was America great?” The sad spectacle of seeing that line being played for comedy.