The Big Difference

Moscow, Idaho is a pleasant, placid town in the middle of rolling, prospering farmland. There are 14 churches and a red brick railroad depot in Moscow, and the four-story Elk's Club is the tallest building in town. Local products are dried peas (nearly all the world's supply is produced in the area) and students (nearly a third of the town's 10,593 residents are students at the University of Idaho). Nobody really knows how Moscow got its name (it was possibly a gesture of sympathy toward Russia during the Crimean War), and hardly anybody in Moscow has any desire to change it. Idaho's Muscovites have a stock answer to all suggestions that they rename their town: let Moscow, U.S.S.R. change its name.

When the U.S. Treasury Department, seeking a stimulant for a Savings Bond drive, suggested a Moscow, U.S.A. version of May Day, the citizens were skeptical. But the university, which had just lost a college blood-donor contest to California Polytechnic, thought May Day would be a good occasion for a blood-donor campaign, too--and the theme became "bonds and blood." A parody of a bristling, Soviet-style May Day was ruled out in favor of a purely American holiday. "We wanted to show what Moscow, U.S.A. has," explained Chamber of Commerce President Del MacPherson. "It might be corny," added the regional T-man, Edward Reese, "but it's still fundamental."

On May Day. Moscow was bright with flags and bond-drive posters. A crowd of 10,000 turned out. The parade was fine: there was a reasonable facsimile of George Washington, a flock of sheep in the Future Fanners of America entry, and a church window made of colored paper. The winning float was a 12-ft., papier-mache Statue of Liberty with a flask of plasma in her right hand and a sheaf of bonds under her left arm. One student marcher confessed that his crim son Cossack coat was really a girl's bed jacket, and one of his medals was a high-school prize for oratory.

All in all, the university collected 1,730 pints of blood and the Treasury sold $385,000 worth of bonds. When a radio interviewer asked a farmer what he thought of it all, he replied, in an unexpected display of laissez faire: "Don't know. I come into town to buy a shirt." But when May Day was over, the men in charge collected in a back room at the Moscow Hotel to mull things over. The crowd wasn't as big as they had hoped; the returning Korean prisoners had drawn the headlines away from their celebration; but they had satisfactorily fulfilled, they decided, what they had come to regard as Moscow's destiny: the perennial challenge to show the world the difference between there and here.

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