Free Report of the County Chairman by James A. Michener Page B

days before the gasoline tractor it was a breadbasket for the city, its spacious farms yielding substantial crops of corn and wheat, but now its historic fields are manicured by gentlemen farmers from the surrounding cities.
    Bucks County is replete with historic sites. From our hospitable shores General Washington crossed the Delawareon Christmas night to attack the British encamped in New Jersey. Back and forth across our county he marched, so that we have many houses still standing of which one can truthfully say, “George Washington slept here.” Our old towns are filled with colonial remnants, and along our country roads are many farms that date back to the time of William Penn, our founding father. It seems only proper that we own one of the world’s principal historical museums, and experts come from many parts of the world to study here, for a sense of the past is very strong in Bucks County. Only this morning I was talking with Arthur Eastburn, crafty senior tactician for the Republicans and a man with an astonishing record of maintaining political control of his county, and he told me that he and his father between them had served as lawyers for ninety years, working out of the same office all that time. We are a historic county.
    Yet we also have a
nouveau riche
aspect, and the natives despise it. In the 1920’s distinguished men and women from New York theatrical and publishing life discovered our magnificent farms, and for the next forty years one after another of the old places fell into alien hands. I was a boy at the time this invasion began and I can remember the bitterness with which we watched the outlanders arrive with their inflated bankrolls and their station wagons: George S. Kaufman, the playwright; S. J. Perelman, who thought he was funny; Pearl Buck, who wrote all those books about China; Oscar Hammerstein, who was mixed up with musical comedies; Moss Hart, who wrote and directed plays … we watched them all come and of each we suspected the worst.
    But we were powerless to keep them out, for our farms were no longer productive, and in time Bucks County became world famous as a center for intellectual bohemianism, not that Kaufman, Perelman, Buck and Hammerstein ever engaged in any of it. They rather disappointed us by staying properly at home on their farms just as if they had been stuffy Bucks Countians all their lives. It was the hangers-on that made Bucks County, and especially the lovely old town of New Hope, notorious. The area was flooded with artists and writers and revolutionaries and people who never took baths. A disproportionate number of homosexuals arrived and people who read poetry aloud and who listened to high-fidelity music at all hours of the night. Our courthouse in Doylestown began to entertain some rather extraordinary cases, and we natives listened agog as things we had never heard of before unrolled before our judges, as such things sometimes will. A few years ago an outsider wrote a novel about us entitled
The Devil in Bucks County
, and all local patriots branded it scandalous, but there was some truth in it if you restricted its more lurid passages only to the New Hope area.
    For one thing we were grateful. The strangers who flooded our county generally kept out of politics, so that although there was a natural animosity between the poor honest residents of the county and the rich debauched strangers who swept in—except that after a while it was the residents who were rich and the strangers who were broke—this animosity never expressed itself in political terms. The county remained Republican, and no mancould remember when it had ever voted for a Democratic President.
    When I was a boy we took politics seriously. My first memory of a political campaign concerned the 1916 contest between Hughes and Wilson, which occurred when I was nine years old. I remember the joy with which my mother took me into the center of town that Tuesday night while the victorious