2015 Graduate Student Essay Prize Winner: An Experiment in the Moral Imagination: Russell Kirk, Clinton Wallace, and Conservative Hobohemia

Abstract

The Michigan Historical Review 42:1 (Spring 2016): 1-34©2016 Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved 2015 Graduate Student Essay Prize Winner An Experiment in the Moral Imagination: Russell Kirk, Clinton Wallace, and Conservative Hobohemia By Andrina Tran A poor man, if he has dignity, honesty, the respect of his neighbors, a realization of his duties, a love of the wisdom of his ancestors, and possibly some taste for knowledge or beauty, is rich in the unbought grace of life.1 Mecosta, Michigan, lies on a glaciated bank above a creek that trickles into the Muskegon on the west and the Chippewa on the east, two of forty lakes stretching across six miles of second-growth woods.2 The woods give the village its nickname: Stump Country. During the late nineteenth century, lumber barons descended upon the land and ravaged its white pine forests, leaving behind underbrush and rot. Ever since the Panic of 1893, when the last deforesting occurred, Mecosta has been classified as a depressed region. The bleak winter extending from October through April appears only to confirm this characterization. To outsiders, Mecosta may seem a ghost town, fallen from its noble lumbering days. It embodies “rural America in retreat” with its sagging barns, peeling paint, and clapboard shops.3 Yet for those who have lived here for generations, Mecosta is a radiant place. Its landscape bears a rich mixture of hills and prairies, swamps and boulders, pine and oak, sumac and white clover.4 The children try to escape, tempted by the glamour of city life, but they often return to the soil they inherit, to the people they know, to the traditions they cherish. Mecostans see themselves as the salt 1 Russell Kirk, “The Unbought Grace of Life,” Northern Review 7 (November 1954): 14. 2 Russell Kirk, “Where the Country Spirit is Alive and Well,” Michigan Living (April 1987): 30. 3 Russell Kirk, The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995), 6. 4 Curtis K. Stadtfeld, From the Land and Back (New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972), 4, 6. 2 The Michigan Historical Review of the earth, virtuous farmers battling the tide of industrialism sweeping America. They form an organic unit and derive strength from one another. They belong to the land, to the buildings of pine and stone, to the church, and to the ghosts.5 But on a Sunday morning in 1966, a forgotten man trudged along Mecosta’s single snowy road, belonging to no one but himself. He approached the door of St. Michael’s rectory and begged the priest to “spare a dollar for a bum.”6 The priest examined the man. Was he really a bum? Far from decrepit, he wore sturdy clothes, creased but still clean. In fact, he looked better off than most of the parishioners in church today. No knapsack weighed him down, only an overused razor and toothbrush in his coat pocket.7 Rising 6 feet 3 inches tall, this handsome “bum” did not appear the least bit humbled by the hardships of the road. His only signs of aging were some lost teeth and whitened hair, but his eyes retained their deep blue color and his hair sat thick and well brushed upon his head. Still, the priest could not refuse the bread of charity and handed over one dollar. The man resumed his steady march down the road to Mecosta. His name was Clinton Wallace, born in 1915 on an island off the coast of Maine.8 At fifteen or sixteen he escaped from an abusive father, going as far as Richmond, Indiana, before inexperience and lack of food forced him to turn back.9 On his second attempt, Wallace decided to ride the rails to California, joining an uprooted army of men, women, and children. The Great Depression had just begun and, as he recalled years later, “the whole country was on the road.”10 He’d been traveling across the continent for forty-seven years, avoiding the South, where hobos were seized to work in chain gangs.11 The longest he’d stayed in...