"Cities... a breeding place for slums, crime, and disintegration of moral fibre."
"Some Vermont Ways," Vrest Orton
Vermont Life, Volume 9, Issue 1, page 56.
The article below, written by Vrest Orton in the magazine's autumn issue of 1954, compares city and country life. Orton is of the mindset that "the city is doomed," and that the countryside is superior in just about every manner. While at first glance this article seems to demonstrate Vermont Life's success in "staying out of" the race talk of the Civil Rights Movement by avoiding any mentioning of race, upon closer inspection the reader can see traces of racially charged language (and through this the author and magazine's opinions on race in the U.S.) throughout the text.
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While the author discusses the more surface level aspects of city life that he finds inferior to the countryside (i.e. a lack of greenery, artists and culture, etc.), he also describes cities in a racially charged manner.
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Orton does not believe cities have always been failing, rather, he believes that their "decay" has been a recent phenomenon.
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"Cities have become... so crowded that all the social ills are accentuated and contagious... and so warm a breeding place for slums, clime, and disintegration
or moral fibre."
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There are two portions of this quote that are important to draw attention to.
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1) Orton draws attention (in this quote as well as throughout the article) to the recent overcrowding of cities. Whether consciously or subconsciously, it is likely that a large portion of this crowding that Orton has noticed is due the the Second Great Migration. Between 1940 and 1970, a massive wave of African Americans from the south moved into the cities of the North, Midwest, and even (occasionally) the West. By linking the "decay" of cities to the rise in population size, Orton is linking this same decay to the rise in African-American populations in cities.
2) The language that Orton uses in this article, as exemplified by the quote above, is extremely racially charged. For starters, because the population Orton is describing consists of increasing numbers of African Americans, his descriptions of city dwellers as lacking "moral fibre" are essentially descriptions of the black population as lacking such fibre. Orton's word choice (i.e. "slums") also carries racial connotations, as he uses negative vocabulary often associated with people of color.
In publishing Orton's article, Vermont Life gives the author and his words its approval. While Vermont Life may have made an attempt to appear as though it was staying out of the racially charged debates that the country was partaking in at the time, the magazine still asserted its own views on race and its place in America through articles such as this one.
