ALAN writes:
I enjoyed a good laugh recently when I discovered Walter Henry Nelson’s book The Londoners: Life in a Civilized City (Random House, 1974). It is not a comical book. What provoked my amusement was not the book itself but the unexpected discovery of a book with such a title, knowing as I do the character of London when he wrote about it and the character of London today.
It is a “supremely civil city,” he wrote; “…the pace, the color and the charm of London life help one to relax. …in London, it is courtesy which moderates the harsh character of city life. …the discovery of politeness in London was a positive joy; we found it exists all around one. ….neither the temper nor the tempo of the city seems to alter much. …the nonwhite population of Britain is very small indeed….”. (pp. 14, 17, 19, 22, 25, 27)
I visited London in 1971 but did not discover his book until this year. I found that all he wrote about London –as it was then– was true. During my two weeks there in 1971, it was a pleasure to deal with the English people, who were invariably civil, courteous, thoughtful, and unmistakably British.
That was then. He could not write the same book today, and under no circumstances would I visit London today. The increased non-white and alien population is one reason why the temper of life in London has been altered radically and taken downward into planned chaos.
I grew up in the city of St. Louis. It was a decent place to live in the 1950s; a city where civic pride could be seen along with civilized neighborhoods, multiple industries, a thriving downtown, unapologetic law enforcement, and strong Catholic parishes.
In 1960 I visited Los Angeles and San Francisco. They were delightful places to visit, shop, and tour. I came home with nothing but wonderful memories from California.
My father must have had similar fond memories of California from the time he spent there in 1945 after his discharge from the Army Air Corps, and from the early 1950s when he took me to visit my Aunt Margaret in Los Angeles. Years later, Tony Bennett’s “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” became one of his favorite songs, and he enjoyed reading books by San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen and longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer.
The thought among many American soldiers and sailors in the South Pacific in early 1945 was that the Japanese might continue fighting until 1948. In that frame of mind, they coined the phrase “The Golden Gate in ’48”, meaning that they would look forward after the war ended to seeing the Golden Gate Bridge come into view as they approached “the most beautiful city in the world – San Francisco…”. ( Floyd W. Erickson, “Golden Gate in ’48”, The Submarine Review, Oct. 2003; at archive.navalsubleague.org )
My father never forgot that slogan and used it in a letter he wrote in 1983. Could anyone imagine San Francisco today as a beautiful city?
Of course those four cities when-they-were-civil exist today only in memories and old photographs and motion pictures. They are not today even remotely what they were then. But that is not because they were “invaded” or “conquered” by outsiders. On the contrary: In what must rank as one of the most astonishing cultural-political reversals in history, those four cities were surrendered in ritual, supine acquiescence to aliens, agitators, and architects of planned chaos.
My father would be horrified if he could see how docile their populations remained as those four cities were converted from civilized into savage in just one lifetime. Because of that continuing docility and squishy-soft agreeability on the part of adolescent-witted white men, he would conclude that there is no possibility that those cities will ever be again what they once were.
— Comments —
Patrick O’Brien writes:
Thank you to Alan for the wonderful, sad article “Alien Cities.” After the horrors of World War II, these four cities were still civil and decent. But what event happened in the early sixties which was one major foundational point of their decadence? Hmm. Maybe something in the Vatican?
