It would have been foolish to tell him I had nothing save my talent to invest. If Memphians thought I had come to put money into their city it would only make for improved relations. The Fairfaxes asked how long I had known Messrs Gilpin and Roffy. I mentioned that we had met in Washington the previous year. Henry Fairfax was curious about my friends. Mr Roffy had contacted them only recently. He wanted their support for the proposed airport. Some thought it could be based on Mud Island which lay out beyond the wharves. I knew nothing of this but was dubious. ‘I wonder if the island will be big enough. It makes the possibility of future expansion almost impossible.’ They agreed. ‘But land isn’t particularly cheap in Memphis,’ said Pandora. ‘There are plans for several big hotels and other buildings. You’ve probably seen some of them going up. Everyone’s saying Memphis will boom. So everyone’s speculating.’
‘We’re speculating ourselves in a way,’ said her husband.
She laughed. ‘I’d call that just taking a chance.’
Their little wooden house, on the outskirts of the Memphis suburbs, had an almost rural quality. They normally had electricity but the cable was down so they lit their rooms with oil lamps. It was a comfortable sensation to feel oneself back in the past, talking wonderfully about the future. After supper an acquaintance of theirs, another flyer, dropped by. His name was Major Alexander Sinclair. For all his honest, matter of fact manner, he was a little mysterious about the reasons for his visit. He had recently come from Atlanta. I asked him if he knew Tom Cadwallader. ‘Only by repute,’ he said. He was rather withdrawn, though evidently doing his best to be sociable. Later, after a tot of fairly good ‘moonshine’, he warmed to me. He was interested to learn I was a French airman. He was obviously relieved when the subject turned to the Catholic church and I expressed my view that the Pope had much to answer for. Only a very strong man, taking an anticlerical stand, could save Italy. He mentioned some of his own experiences in Europe and asked if I knew any of his surviving comrades. I told him the truth, that I had flown principally on the Eastern Front. I had been with the Allied Expeditionary force during the Russian Civil War. By now he had become deeply interested in my opinion of both Bolsheviks and Jews. I gave him my honest views at some length, apologising that he had ‘woken up the bee in my bonnet’. But he was enthusiastic. ‘You don’t have to hold back with me, colonel. You’re a man after my own heart.’ Had I ever thought of addressing a public meeting on the dangers of Catholicism and Bolshevism? I told him any warning I ever gave the American people would be heartfelt and based on solid experience. ‘But I am really a man of action more than a man of words. Major Sinclair.’ It was very late and I could see my hosts growing tired. He insisted on driving me back into Memphis, even though he was staying with the Fairfaxes, and I rather selfishly accepted his offer. We had taken to each other in that way people sometimes do, though culturally we had almost nothing in common. We were both, however, intellectuals who believed in ‘doing’ rather than ‘moaning’, as he put it. He dropped me off outside the Adler Apartments at two in the morning, noted my address and said he looked forward to seeing me again.
This time when I prepared myself for bed I was in far better spirits. I had received an excellent impression of my new friends, particularly Major Sinclair. Here were people with whom I could most comfortably work: clear-eyed young Americans who were prepared to face the dangers of the modern world and at the same time take advantage of the great opportunities opening up to them. Thereafter I was again to find myself something of a social lion. During the coming days I would be introduced to other Memphians, young and old, who were deeply concerned for their city’s future - and for the future of the whole Christian world. Any impression I had received in the North that the Delta region was old-fashioned and slow was proven wholly false. Dixielanders might set great store by their historic traditions but they had no lack of faith in modern technology or new ideas. All they had lacked until now was finance, for since the Civil War Northern industrialists had systematically milked the South. The North, with its nerve centre in New York, had up until now totally controlled the American economy. Plantation owners, encouraged to grow enormous quantities of cotton, were then told in their best years that their price was too high. Thus New York and Chicago bought themselves artificially cheap raw materials. But I knew as well as anyone that what a defeated nation sometimes lacks in material wealth is frequently compensated for in a deeper spirituality and punctilious pride. These qualities might seem abstract to the scallawags and carpet-baggers so accurately drawn by Mr Griffith, but in the end they always prove far more valuable than any number of sweatshops and spinning jennies. They are qualities which provide men with the will to bide their time. This singular obstinacy allows them to choose their own terms, their own moment, their own form of action. I began to realise how true this was of modern Memphis. Without relinquishing the principles for which her people had fought a great war, she now prepared for a carefully engineered forward movement on all fronts. I could not help but be reminded by a similar determination I had witnessed in Italy, for so long impoverished by Papal tyranny, and now ready to move with relentless, measured step into the second quarter of the twentieth century.
Not for Memphis the hellish factory towns of the North, the urban poverty, the miserable conditions which, as in Russian cities, created a breeding ground of anarchy and unrest. Memphis was about to march from cotton and mules into engineering and services. Here small work forces could exist in ideal environments while producing something for which the whole world would willingly pay! I enjoyed the confidences of the city’s most influential leaders. My opinions were sought by ‘Boss’ Crump, whom everyone recognised as the strongest force in the city: the charismatic possessor of enormous political energy and brilliant insight, his only mistake would be to turn his back on those who most wished to help him. But for a single mistake of judgment he might have become the South’s own Mussolini. Crump’s sophisticated opinions on the Negro Question were illuminating. They expanded my horizons considerably. His plans for Southern self-sufficiency were years ahead of their time. Another far-sighted individual was then a leading businessman in Memphis, the inventor of modern supermarkets in his famous Piggly Wiggly grocery chain. He was building himself a magnificent house of pig-coloured marble near Overton Park and one afternoon treated me to an individual tour of his half built palace. Jewish interests ruined him before he could occupy his own mansion; his name, of course, was Clarence Saunders. I remember him being particularly interested in my ideas for an electrically operated automatic self-service market. I believe that towards the end of his life, still battling bravely against the combined might of Carthage, which by then had all but crushed the entire country, he attempted to make my dream a reality. He was dragged down in the end, however, by the Great Depression. People seemed to think this some sort of natural force, like a drought or an earthquake. Ask any Ukrainian if Stalin was an earthquake.