NOT WANTED.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXIV, 31 December 1926, Page 5

NOT WANTED.

KEEP AWAY FROM SANTE FEI NEW YORK, November 21. America is gazing wild-eyed and incredulous, at Sante Fe. Not at the railway line, but at the town, which; in 1920, numbered 7236 Mexican, Indian, Spanish, and American residents. No wonder America is holding its breath, ,for Santa Fe is refusing to be mads bigger and better, to boost or be boosted—in fact, Santa Fe is “crazy.” Here is a place that has not even the distinction of being the oldest town in the country —it comes fairly near it, though, having been founded in 1605 — that just wants to be allowed to sitin the lap of sunny plain 7000 feet up, in the Southern Rockies; it wants to “stay put,” with its permanent colony of etchers and sculptors, and poets and essayists, and painters and novelists and thinkers. It is the home of the School, of American Research, which has schools in Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, making up the Archaeological Institute of America, and it asks nobody to watch it grow. Secure in the knttwledge of its own mysterious beauty, of its enchanting climate, proud of its Lombardy poplars by the little river that flows through the town, of its quiet walled gardens., of its Plaza, with its pattering donkeys and its Mexican pedlars, the capital of New Mexico, full of romance, of historic and ethnological interest, and of memories that are not allowed to be forgotten, declines to be commercialised. The Federated Women’s Clubs of nine western States wanted a cultural colony of permanent summer homes m a holiday and educational atmosphere. Various towns suggested themselves, and entered the lists to secure something that they considered was well worth getting. The Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce, the Business Club, and the Professional Women’s Club thought the idea excellent, and finally, encouraged by the railway, a convention of women transported free of charge, and representing 50,000 women, being part of a federation of more than two million women, arrived at Santa Fe. For five days and nights they convened, and dined and lunched, and made resolutions and saw sites, and listened to landscape architects, and held mass meetings, and met leading citizens, and endorsed projects. They explained their aims; they said that through them Santa Fe would become known all over the world, that lactur-c-rs would come there from the uttermost parts of the earth; they accepted the programme of the School of American Research as their programme; they assured the Santa Feans that their one object was to be associated with the town, to blend themselves —and they incorporated themselves under thy title of “The Cultural Centre of the Southwest.” Vaguely, as if in a nightmare, that part of Santa Fe not connected with the Chamber of Commerce, the shops, the railway, and the realtors, spoke. Those dreamers murmured that they did not want 3000 strangers to squat there every summer, grafting culturine on to true culture. They said they did not want financial prosperity, more sales of their paintings, and their books on pueblos and pottery, that they would not put up with a. new ami powerful factor that, while it brought the breath of life to the town, would conform to old traditions; that they did not want the Governor’s Palace, where Lew Wallace wrote the last three books of “Ben Hur,” to be made famous, and that, above all, they did not desire crowds to come to the Fiestas to watch the Indian dancer, and to gaze at the historical pageant. Too many people were coming as it way and the way they insisted on taking snapshots was simply scandalous. “Atmosphere? ’ they said, tartly, “we will soon not have any left.” Do you wonder that Los Angeles and Chicago and Seattle and Milwaukee are rubbing their eyes, and that the whole of America is just a tiny bit bewildered ?