Back to the Land?

While George Romney went a slumming, theWhite House turned a shrewd distaff eye upon the countryside. Accompanied by a Cabinet-rank coterie, the President's wife last week took off on a four-day, seven-state Midwest trek to broach a new Johnsonian quest: Can the U.S. slow the hegira to the cities, haul the hamlets out of hibernation, and reverse the overwhelming demographic thrust of the century?

Almost certainly not. Already 70% of America's population lives on 1.3% of its land. A tide of unskilled rural migrants floods the crowded ghettos, choking the cities' power to provide jobs, housing, education, transportation, police protection, or even breathable air. Another 100 million souls will join the population by the year 2000, leading the Administration to see an impending social holocaust so dire that, as Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman put it, it will make "last summer a pink tea party compared with what's ahead."

Coming Alive. Nonetheless, Lady Bird caroled a hopeful counterpoint as she zipped through the farms and villages of the American heartland. Noting that 71 million Americans still live in communities of 10,000 or less, she declared that "in many of these towns, the streets are coming alive with commerce and industry, old problems are being solved in new ways, and the arts are flourishing." To show just how commerce, industry and the arts are faring these days in the national heartland was one important purpose of her trip.

Another purpose was to let Lady Bird do some "nonpolitical" stumping, at which she is adept. The phrase "my husband" sprinkled her talks. Bands played, banners puffed, and swarming crowds were as giggly as if they were seeing a presidential parade. In a sense, they were. In Quincy, 111., she took a towboat down the Mississippi, preparing herself for a visit to Mark Twain's hometown of Hannibal, Mo., by rereading his work. On the boat she ate Mississippi catfish and sang along with Bing Crosby's old banjoist. In Hannibal, she was met by youngsters costumed as Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher, plus virtually the whole town. The welcome was so hyper-American hearty that a White House aide wished Pollster Lou Harris were along, particularly when little girls at one gathering warbled:

We love you, Lady Bird, Yes, we do. We love you, Lady Bird, And we'II be true.

Aeschylus, Athens & Ice Cream. In Montevideo, Minn., Lady Bird visited an old-folks home and an urban-renewal project. In nearby Waverly, Mrs. Hubert Humphrey showed her a bookmobile and artmobile and fed her homemade ice cream on the lawn. In Minneapolis--which hardly qualifies as a village--she suffered nobly through Tyrone Guthrie's The House of Atreus, a 31-hour version of Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy. In Columbus, Ind., "the Athens of the Prairie," she listened to the American National Opera Company and praised the striking smalltown, big-name architecture (including work by such distinguished designers as I. M. Pei and the late Eero Saarinen). At Ironwood, Mich., she dedicated a park. At Avoca and Spring Green, Wis., she toured a dairy farm and chatted with the widow of Frank Lloyd Wright. ID. Madison, after spending the night with Republican Governor and Mrs. Warren Knowles, she talked to 3,000 youngsters attending the World Youth Forum of the World Food Exposition. Then she flew back to Washington.

Before her tour ended, the chairman of the President's Commission on Rural Poverty, Kentucky Governor Edward T. Breathitt, had announced in New York that this group is preparing a report on ways to make rural areas and small towns attractive enough to reduce the annual exodus of some 600,000 Americans to the cities.

Lady Bird's carefully selected sampling of the joys of rural life may be atypical of life in most crossroads communities around the country. Even so, 200 small towns have disappeared in the past 20 years, and they will almost certainly be depopulated at an even greater rate for years to come. If Lady Bird had no instant panacea for the vanishing America, she at least gave it a heart-plucking epitaph: "Here lies fresh air, a place to play, friendly neighbors. It was great while it lasted."

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