THE NATION: The Finest Time of the Year

From the old Long Island whaling port at Sag Harbor to land’s end at Washington’s Cape Flattery, the U.S. was engaged, once more, in that peculiarly American rite—the celebration of autumn. To millions, it was the finest time of the year; the season which somehow best suited a country which still remembered Indians, wild turkeys, log barns and the long, westward crawling of wagon trains.

The weather was wonderful almost everywhere. Skyscraper, silo and factory stack stood sharply against October’s bright blue sky. Nights held the first promissory note of frost. New England’s sumac was already scarlet; and below the snow-dusted rimrock of the high Rockies, aspen gleamed like brass. Lakes lay dark and still and the sound of an ax or a distant locomotive carried for miles on the tranquil air.

Hexed Barns. The college year had begun (with fewer veterans on the campus); the World Series was on. Department stores showed the new fall styles (cloche hats, swathed hips, and shoes in the style of Louis XV). First graders brought home cutout paper pumpkins.

Fall, with its memories of the American past, belonged to the country—to Pennsylvania’s huge, hex-marked barns, to the aching distances of the Great Plains, to the great old houses, the sharecroppers’ shacks and black soil of the Mississippi Delta, to Montana’s Bitterroot Mountains and the foaming rivers and screaming headsaws of the Pacific Northwest. Last week, north, south, east and west, the U.S. was a fat and prosperous land.

Mississippi and Arkansas had the biggest cotton crop in a decade. Countless tons of grapes were on their way to wineries in California. The far West’s army of “fruit tramps” picked apples in Washington’s Wenatchee and Yakima Valleys. In Illinois, Iowa and Indiana, the greatest corn crop in history awaited picking. Tractor-drawn drills were seeding wheat in the fields of Kansas and Nebraska. Sweating cowhands and their sweating mounts were cutting herds in the Southwest.

High Vs. Autumn was also the time for county fairs—for merry-go-round music, spun sugar, and the sight of prize cakes, prize cattle and sullen hootchy-cootchy dancers. Millions of men were digging out red hats, boots and boxes of shells and exchanging speculative glances with suddenly excited bird dogs. Coon hunters were already going out at night, tin lanterns in hand, in Iowa and Connecticut. There would be other game soon—pheasants were fat, honkers were winging south in high Vs and deer were beginning their migration from high country.

There was a new confidence in the U.S., born of the harvest and nurtured with the sweat of work, that matched the weather and the scene. At Amsterdam’s first Assembly of the World Council of Churches (TIME, Sept. 13), Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr had gloomily commented: “There is so little health in the whole of our modern civilization that one cannot find the island of order from which to proceed against disorder.”

But to most American eyes—and to many eyes abroad—the U.S. itself had begun to seem that necessary and hopeful “island of order” in a disorderly, war-littered and distracted world.