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Title: The Future in America
A Search After Realities
Author: Herbert George Wells
Release Date: February 2, 2018 [EBook #56484]
Language: English
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[Illustration: FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK]
THE
FUTURE IN AMERICA
A SEARCH AFTER REALITIES
BY
H.G. WELLS
AUTHOR OF
"ANTICIPATIONS" "THE WAR OF THE WORLDS"
"THIRTY STRANGE STORIES" ETC.
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1906
Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers.
_All rights reserved._
Published November, 1906.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. The Prophetic Habit of Mind 1
II. Material Progress 21
III. New York 35
IV. Growth Invincible 49
V. The Economic Process 68
VI. Some Aspects of American Wealth 88
VII. Certain Workers 104
VIII. Corruption 116
IX. The Immigrant 133
X. State-Blindness 152
XI. Two Studies in Disappointment 167
XII. The Tragedy of Color 185
XIII. The Mind of a Modern State 203
XIV. Culture 223
XV. At Washington 236
The Envoy 254
ILLUSTRATIONS
FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK _Frontispiece_
ENTRANCE TO BROOKLYN BRIDGE _Facing p._ 38
STATE STREET, CHICAGO " 62
WESTERN FARMERS STILL OWN THEIR FARMS " 82
PLUMP AND PRETTY PUPILS OF EXTRAVAGANCE " 90
NEW YORK'S CROWDED, LITTERED EAST SIDE " 106
BREAKER BOYS AT A PENNSYLVANIA COLLIERY " 112
INTERIOR OF A NEW YORK OFFICE BUILDING " 124
WHERE IMMIGRANT CHILDREN ARE AMERICANIZED " 148
HARVARD HALL AND THE JOHNSON GATE, CAMBRIDGE " 214
A BIT OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY " 216
IN THE CONGRESSIONAL LIBRARY " 238
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
THE FUTURE IN AMERICA
CHAPTER I
THE PROPHETIC HABIT OF MIND
(_At a writing-desk in Sandgate_)
I
The Question
"Are you a Polygamist?"
"Are you an Anarchist?"
The questions seem impertinent. They are part of a long paper of
interrogations I must answer satisfactorily if I am to be regarded as
a desirable alien to enter the United States of America. I want very
much to pass that great statue of Liberty illuminating the World (from
a central position in New York Harbor), in order to see things in its
light, to talk to certain people, to appreciate certain atmospheres,
and so I resist the provocation to answer impertinently. I do not
even volunteer that I do not smoke and am a total abstainer; on which
points it would seem the States as a whole still keep an open mind.
I am full of curiosity about America, I am possessed by a problem I
feel I cannot adequately discuss even with myself except over there,
and I must go even at the price of coming to a decision upon the
theoretically open questions these two inquiries raise.
My problem I know will seem ridiculous and monstrous when I give it in
all its stark disproportions--attacked by me with my equipment it will
call up an image of an elephant assailed by an ant who has not even
mastered Jiu-jitsu--but at any rate I've come to it in a natural sort
of way and it is one I must, for my own peace of mind, make some kind
of attempt upon, even if at last it means no more than the ant crawling
in an exploratory way hither and thither over that vast unconscious
carcass and finally getting down and going away. That may be rather
good for the ant, and the experience may be of interest to other ants,
however infinitesimal from the point of view of the elephant, the final
value of his investigation may be. And this tremendous problem in my
case and now in this--simply; What is going to happen to the United
States of America in the next thirty years or so?
I do not know if the reader has ever happened upon any books or
writings of mine before, but if, what is highly probable, he has not,
he may be curious to know how it is that any human being should be
running about in so colossally an interrogative state of mind. (For
even the present inquiry is by no means my maximum limit). And the
explanation is to be found a little in a mental idiosyncrasy perhaps,
but much more in the development of a special way of thinking, of a
habit of mind.
That habit of mind may be indicated by a proposition that, with a fine
air of discovery, I threw out some years ago, in a happy ignorance that
I had been anticipated by no less a person than Heraclitus. "There is
no Being but Becoming," that was what appeared to my unscholarly mind
to be almost triumphantly new. I have since then informed myself more
fully about Heraclitus, there are moments now when I more than half
suspect that all the thinking I shall ever do will simply serve to
illuminate my understanding of him, but at any rate that apothegm of
his does exactly convey the intellectual attitude into which I fall. I
am curiously not interested in things, and curiously interested in the
consequences of things. I wouldn't for the world go to see the United
States for what they are--if I had sound reason for supposing that the
entire western hemisphere was to be destroyed next Christmas, I should
not, I think, be among the multitude that would rush for one last look
at that great spectacle,--from which it follows naturally that I don't
propose to see Niagara. I should much more probably turn an inquiring
visage eastward, with the west so certainly provided for. I have come
to be, I am afraid, even a little insensitive to fine immediate things
through this anticipatory habit.
This habit of mind confronts and perplexes my sense of things that
simply _are_, with my brooding preoccupation with how they will
shape presently, what they will lead to, what seed they will sow
and how they will wear. At times, I can assure the reader, this
quality approaches otherworldliness, in its constant reference to an
all-important here-after. There are times indeed when it makes life
seem so transparent and flimsy, seem so dissolving, so passing on
to an equally transitory series of consequences, that the enhanced
sense of instability becomes restlessness and distress; but on the
other hand nothing that exists, nothing whatever, remains altogether
vulgar or dull and dead or hopeless in its light. But the interest
is shifted. The pomp and splendor of established order, the braying
triumphs, ceremonies, consummations, one sees these glittering shows
for what they are--through their threadbare grandeur shine the little
significant things that will make the future....
And now that I am associating myself with great names, let me discover
that I find this characteristic turn of mind of mine, not only in
Heraclitus, the most fragmentary of philosophers, but for one fine
passage at any rate, in Mr. Henry James, the least fragmentary
of novelists. In his recent impressions of America I find him
apostrophizing the great mansions of Fifth Avenue, in words quite after
my heart;--
"It's all very well," he writes, "for you to look as if, since you've
had no past, you're going in, as the next best thing, for a magnificent
compensatory future. What are you going to make your future _of_, for
all your airs, we want to know? What elements of a future, as futures
have gone in the great world, are at all assured to you?"
I had already when I read that, figured myself as addressing if not
these particular last triumphs of the fine Transatlantic art of
architecture, then at least America in general in some such words. It
is not unpleasant to be anticipated by the chief Master of one's craft,
it is indeed, when one reflects upon his peculiar intimacy with this
problem, enormously reassuring, and so I have very gladly annexed his
phrasing and put it here to honor and adorn and in a manner to explain
my own enterprise. I have already studied some of these fine buildings
through the mediation of an illustrated magazine--they appear solid,
they appear wonderful and well done to the highest pitch--and before
many days now I shall, I hope, reconstruct that particular moment,
stand--the latest admirer from England--regarding these portentous
magnificences, from the same sidewalk--will they call it?--as my
illustrious predecessor, and with his question ringing in my mind
all the louder for their proximity, and the universally acknowledged
invigoration of the American atmosphere. "What are you going to make
your future _of_, for all your airs?"
And then I suppose I shall return to crane my neck at the Flat-Iron
Building or the _Times_ sky-scraper, and ask all that too, an identical
question.
II
Philosophical
Certain phases in the development of these prophetic exercises one may
perhaps be permitted to trace.
To begin with, I remember that to me in my boyhood speculation about
the Future was a monstrous joke. Like most people of my generation I
was launched into life with millennial assumptions. This present sort
of thing, I believed, was going on for a time, interesting personally
perhaps but as a whole inconsecutive, and then--it might be in my
lifetime or a little after it--there would be trumpets and shoutings
and celestial phenomena, a battle of Armageddon and the Judgment.
As I saw it, it was to be a strictly protestant and individualistic
judgment, each soul upon its personal merits. To talk about the Man of
the Year Million was of course in the face of this great conviction, a
whimsical play of fancy. The Year Million was just as impossible, just
as gayly nonsensical as fairy-land....
I was a student of biology before I realized that this, my finite and
conclusive End, at least in the material and chronological form, had
somehow vanished from the scheme of things. In the place of it had come
a blackness and a vagueness about the endless vista of years ahead,
that was tremendous--that terrified. That is a phase in which lots of
educated people remain to this day. "All this scheme of things, life,
force, destiny which began not six thousand years, mark you, but an
infinity ago, that has developed out of such strange weird shapes and
incredible first intentions, out of gaseous nebulæ, carboniferous
swamps, saurian giantry and arboreal apes, is by the same tokens to
continue, developing--into what?" That was the overwhelming riddle that
came to me, with that realization of an End averted, that has come now
to most of our world.
The phase that followed the first helpless stare of the mind was a wild
effort to express one's sudden apprehension of unlimited possibility.
One made fantastic exaggerations, fantastic inversions of all
recognized things. Anything of this sort might come, anything of any
sort. The books about the future that followed the first stimulus of
the world's realization of the implications of Darwinian science, have
all something of the monstrous experimental imaginings of children. I
myself, in my microcosmic way, duplicated the times. Almost the first
thing I ever wrote--it survives in an altered form as one of a bookful
of essays,--was of this type; "The Man of the Year Million," was
presented as a sort of pantomime head and a shrivelled body, and years
after that, the _Time Machine_, my first published book, ran in the
same vein. At that point, at a brief astonished stare down the vistas
of time-to-come, at something between wonder and amazed, incredulous,
defeated laughter, most people, I think, stop. But those who are doomed
to the prophetic habit of mind go on.
The next phase, the third phase, is to shorten the range of the
outlook, to attempt something a little more proximate than the final
destiny of man. One becomes more systematic, one sets to work to trace
the great changes of the last century or so, and one produces these
in a straight line and according to the rule of three. If the maximum
velocity of land travel in 1800 was twelve miles an hour and in 1900
(let us say) sixty miles an hour, then one concludes that in 2000 A.D.
it will be three hundred miles an hour. If the population of America in
1800--but I refrain from this second instance. In that fashion one got
out a sort of gigantesque caricature of the existing world, everything
swollen to vast proportions and massive beyond measure. In my case that
phase produced a book, _When the Sleeper Wakes_, in which, I am told,
by competent New-Yorkers, that I, starting with London, an unbiassed
mind, this rule-of-three method and my otherwise unaided imagination,
produced something more like Chicago than any other place wherein
righteous men are likely to be found. That I shall verify in due
course, but my present point is merely that to write such a book is to
discover how thoroughly wrong this all too obvious method of enlarging
the present is.
One goes on therefore--if one is to succumb altogether to the
prophetic habit--to a really "scientific" attack upon the future.
The "scientific" phase is not final, but it is far more abundantly
fruitful than its predecessors. One attempts a rude wide analysis
of contemporary history, one seeks to clear and detach operating
causes and to work them out, and so, combining this necessary set of
consequences with that, to achieve a synthetic forecast in terms just
as broad and general and vague as the causes considered are few. I
made, it happens, an experiment in this scientific sort of prophecy
in a book called _Anticipations_, and I gave an altogether excessive
exposition and defence of it, I went altogether too far in this
direction, in a lecture to the Royal Institution, "The Discovery of
the Future," that survives in odd corners as a pamphlet, and is to be
found, like a scrap of old newspaper in the roof gutter of a museum, in
_Nature_ (vol. LXV., p. 326) and in the Smithsonian Report (for 1902).
Within certain limits, however, I still believe this scientific method
is sound. It gives sound results in many cases, results at any rate as
sound as those one gets from the "laws" of political economy; one can
claim it really does effect a sort of prophecy on the material side of
life.
For example, it was quite obvious about 1899 that invention and
enterprise were very busy with the means of locomotion, and one could
deduce from that certain practically inevitable consequences in the
distribution of urban populations. With easier, quicker means of
getting about there were endless reasons, hygienic, social, economic,
why people should move from the town centres towards their peripheries,
and very few why they should not. The towns one inferred therefore,
would get slacker, more diffused, the countryside more urban. From
that, from the spatial widening of personal interests that ensued,
one could infer certain changes in the spirits of local politics,
and so one went on to a number of fairly valid adumbrations. Then
again starting from the practical supersession in the long run of
all unskilled labor by machinery one can work out with a pretty fair
certainty many coming social developments, and the broad trend of
one group of influences at least from the moral attitude of the mass
of common people. In industry, in domestic life again, one foresees
a steady development of complex appliances, demanding, and indeed
in an epoch of frequently changing methods _forcing_, a flexible
understanding, versatility of effort, a universal rising standard of
education. So too a study of military methods and apparatus convinces
one of the necessary transfer of power in the coming century from
the ignorant and enthusiastic masses who made the revolutions of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and won Napoleon his wars,
to any more deliberate, more intelligent and more disciplined class
that may possess an organized purpose. But where will one find that
class? There comes a question that goes outside science, that takes
one at once into a field beyond the range of the "scientific" method
altogether.
So long as one adopts the assumptions of the old political economist
and assumes men without idiosyncrasy, without prejudices, without, as
people say, wills of their own, so long as one imagines a perfectly
acquiescent humanity that will always in the long run under pressure
liquefy and stream along the line of least resistance to its own
material advantage, the business of prophecy is easy. But from the
first I felt distrust for that facility in prophesying, I perceived
that always there lurked something, an incalculable opposition to these
mechanically conceived forces, in law, in usage and prejudice, in the
poiëtic power of exceptional individual men. I discovered for myself
over again, the inseparable nature of the two functions of the prophet.
In my _Anticipations_, for example, I had intended simply to work out
and foretell, and before I had finished I was in a fine full blast of
exhortation....
That by an easy transition brought me to the last stage in the life
history of the prophetic mind, as it is at present known to me. One
comes out on the other side of the "scientific" method, into the large
temperance, the valiant inconclusiveness, the released creativeness of
philosophy. Much may be foretold as certain, much more as possible,
but the last decisions and the greatest decisions, lie in the hearts
and wills of unique incalculable men. With them we have to deal as
our ultimate reality in all these matters, and our methods have to
be not "scientific" at all for all the greater issues, the humanly
important issues, but critical, literary, even if you will--artistic.
Here insight is of more account than induction and the perception of
fine tones than the counting of heads. Science deals with necessity and
necessity is here but the firm ground on which our freedom goes. One
passes from affairs of predestination to affairs of free will.
This discovery spread at once beyond the field of prophesying. The
end, the aim, the test of science, as a model man understands the
word, is foretelling by means of "laws," and my error in attempting a
complete "scientific" forecast of human affairs arose in too careless
an assent to the ideas about me, and from accepting uncritically such
claims as that history should be "scientific," and that economics and
sociology (for example) are "sciences." Directly one gauges the fuller
implications of that uniqueness of individuals Darwin's work has so
permanently illuminated, one passes beyond that. The ripened prophet
realizes Schopenhauer--as indeed I find Professor Münsterberg saying.
"The deepest sense of human affairs is reached," he writes, "when we
consider them not as appearances but as decisions." There one has the
same thing coming to meet one from the psychological side....
But my present business isn't to go into this shadowy, metaphysical
foundation world on which our thinking rests, but to the brightly lit
overworld of America. This philosophical excursion is set here just to
prepare the reader quite frankly for speculations and to disabuse his
mind of the idea that in writing of the Future in America I'm going to
write of houses a hundred stories high and flying-machines in warfare
and things like that. I am not going to America to work a pretentious
horoscope, to discover a Destiny, but to find out what I can of what
must needs make that Destiny,--a great nation's Will.
III
The Will of America
The material factors in a nation's future are subordinate factors,
they present advantages, such as the easy access of the English to
coal and the sea, or disadvantages, such as the ice-bound seaboard of
the Russians, but these are the circumstances and not necessarily the
rulers of its fate. The essential factor in the destiny of a nation,
as of a man and of mankind, lies in the form of its will and in the
quality and quantity of its will. The drama of a nation's future, as
of a man's, lies in this conflict of its will with what would else be
"scientifically" predictable, materially inevitable. If the man, if the
nation was an automaton fitted with good average motives, so and so,
one could say exactly, would be done. It's just where the thing isn't
automatic that our present interest comes in.
I might perhaps reverse the order of the three aspects of will I have
named, for manifestly where the quantity of will is small, it matters
nothing what the form or quality. The man or the people that wills
feebly is the sport of every circumstance, and there if anywhere the
scientific method holds truest or even altogether true. Do geographical
positions or mineral resources make for riches? Then such a people will
grow insecurely and disastrously rich. Is an abundant prolific life at
a low level indicated? They will pullulate and suffer. If circumstances
make for a choice between comfort and reproduction, your feeble people
will dwindle and pass; if war, if conquest tempt them then they will
turn from all preoccupations and follow the drums. Little things
provoke their unstable equilibrium, to hostility, to forgiveness....
And be it noted that the quantity of will in a nation is not
necessarily determined by adding up the wills of all its people. I am
told, and I am disposed to believe it, that the Americans of the United
States are a people of great individual force of will, the clear strong
faces of many young Americans, something almost Roman in the faces of
their statesmen and politicians, a distinctive quality I detect in such
Americans as I have met, a quality of sharply cut determination even
though it be only about details and secondary things, that one must
rouse one's self to meet, inclines me to give a provisional credit
to that, but how far does all this possible will-force aggregate to
a great national purpose?--what algebraically does it add up to when
this and that have cancelled each other? That may be a different thing
altogether.
And next to this net quantity of will a nation or people may possess,
come the questions of its quality, its flexibility, its consciousness
and intellectuality. A nation may be full of will and yet inflexibly
and disastrously stupid in the expression of that will. There was
probably more will-power, mere haughty and determined self-assertion
in the young bull that charged the railway engine than in several
regiments of men, but it was after all a low quality of will with no
method but a violent and injudicious directness, and in the end it
was suicidal and futile. There again is the substance for ramifying
Enquiries. How subtle, how collected and patient, how far capable of a
long plan, is this American nation? Suppose it has a will so powerful
and with such resources that whatever simple end may be attained by
rushing upon it is America's for the asking, there still remains the
far more important question of the ends that are not obvious, that are
intricate and complex and not to be won by booms and cataclysms of
effort.
An Englishman comes to think that most of the permanent and precious
things for which a nation's effort goes are like that, and here too I
have an open mind and unsatisfied curiosities.
And lastly there is the form of the nation's purpose. I have been
reading what I can find about that in books for some time, and now
I want to cross over the Atlantic, more particularly for that, to
question more or less openly certain Americans, not only men and women,
but the mute expressive presences of house and appliance, of statue,
flag and public building, and the large collective visages of crowds,
what it is all up to, what it thinks it is all after, how far it means
to escape or improve upon its purely material destinies? I want over
there to find whatever consciousness or vague consciousness of a common
purpose there may be, what is their Vision, their American Utopia,
how much will there is shaping to attain it, how much capacity goes
with the will--what, in short, there is in America, over and above the
mere mechanical consequences of scattering multitudes of energetic
Europeans athwart a vast healthy, productive and practically empty
continent in the temperate zone. There you have the terms of reference
of an enquiry, that is I admit (as Mr. Morgan Richards the eminent
advertisement agent would say), "mammoth in character."
The American reader may very reasonably inquire at this point why an
Englishman does not begin with the future of his own country. The
answer is that this particular one has done so, and that in many ways
he has found his intimacy and proximity a disadvantage. One knows too
much of the things that seem to matter and that ultimately don't, one
is full of misleading individual instances intensely seen, one can't
see the wood for the trees. One comes to America at last, not only with
the idea of seeing America, but with something more than an incidental
hope of getting one's own England there in the distance and as a whole,
for the first time in one's life. And the problem of America, from
this side anyhow, has an air of being simpler. For all the Philippine
adventure her future still seems to lie on the whole compactly in one
continent, and not as ours is, dispersed round and about the habitable
globe, strangely entangled with India, with Japan, with Africa and with
the great antagonism the Germans force upon us at our doors. Moreover
one cannot look ten years ahead in England, without glancing across the
Atlantic. "There they are," we say to one another, "those Americans!
They speak our language, read our books, give us books, share our mind.
What we think still goes into their heads in a measure, and their
thoughts run through our brains. What will they be up to?"
Our future is extraordinarily bound up in America's and in a sense
dependent upon it. It is not that we dream very much of political
reunions of Anglo Saxondom and the like. So long as we British retain
our wide and accidental sprawl of empire about the earth we cannot
expect or desire the Americans to share our stresses and entanglements.
Our Empire has its own adventurous and perilous outlook. But our
civilization is a different thing from our Empire, a thing that
reaches out further into the future, that will be going on changed
beyond recognition. Because of our common language, of our common
traditions, Americans are a part of our community, are becoming indeed
the larger part of our community of thought and feeling and outlook--in
a sense far more intimate than any link we have with Hindoo or Copt or
Cingalese. A common Englishman has an almost pathetic pride and sense
of proprietorship in the States; he is fatally ready to fall in with
the idea that two nations that share their past, that still, a little
restively, share one language, may even contrive to share an infinitely
more interesting future. Even if he does not chance to be an American
now, his grandson may be. America is his inheritance, his reserved
accumulating investment. In that sense indeed America belongs to the
whole western world; all Europe owns her promise, but to the Englishman
the sense of participation is intense. "_We_ did it," he will tell of
the most American of achievements, of the settlement of the middle west
for example, and this is so far justifiable that numberless men, myself
included, are Englishmen, Australian, New-Zealanders, Canadians,
instead of being Americans, by the merest accidents of life. My father
still possesses the stout oak box he had had made to emigrate withal,
everything was arranged that would have got me and my brothers born
across the ocean, and only the coincidence of a business opportunity
and an illness of my mother's, arrested that. It was so near a thing
as that with me, which prevents my blood from boiling with patriotic
indignation instead of patriotic solicitude at the frequent sight
of red-coats as I see them from my study window going to and fro to
Shorncliffe camp.
Well I learn from Professor Münsterberg how vain my sense of
proprietorship is, but still this much of it obstinately remains, that
I will at any rate _look_ at the American future.
By the accidents that delayed that box it comes about that if I want
to see what America is up to, I have among other things to buy a
Baedeker and a steamer ticket and fill up the inquiring blanks in
this remarkable document before me, the long string of questions that
begins:--
"Are you a Polygamist?"
"Are you an Anarchist?"
Here I gather is one little indication of the great will I am going to
study. It would seem that the United States of America regard Anarchy
and Polygamy with aversion, regard indeed Anarchists and Polygamists as
creatures unfit to mingle with the already very various eighty million
of citizens who constitute their sovereign powers, and on the other
hand hold these creatures so inflexibly honorable as certainly to tell
these damning truths about themselves in this matter....
It's a little odd. One has a second or so of doubt about the quality of
that particular manifestation of will.
CHAPTER II
MATERIAL PROGRESS
(_On the "Carmania" going Americanward_)
I
American Certitudes
When one talks to an American of his national purpose he seems a little
at a loss; if one speaks of his national destiny, he responds with
alacrity. I make this generalization on the usual narrow foundations,
but so the impression comes to me.
Until this present generation, indeed until within a couple of decades,
it is not very evident that Americans did envisage any national
purpose at all, except in so far as there was a certain solicitude
not to be cheated out of an assured destiny. A sort of optimistic
fatalism possessed them. They had, and mostly it seems they still
have, a tremendous sense of sustained and assured growth, and it is
not altogether untrue that one is told--I have been told--such things
as that "America is a great country, sir," that its future is gigantic
and that it is already (and going to be more and more so) the greatest
country on earth.
I am not the sort of Englishman who questions that. I do so regard
that much as obvious and true that it seems to me even a little
undignified, as well as a little overbearing, for Americans to insist
upon it so; I try to go on as soon as possible to the question just
how my interlocutor _shapes_ that gigantic future and what that world
predominance is finally to do for us in England and all about the
world. So far, I must insist, I haven't found anything like an idea. I
have looked for it in books, in papers, in speeches and now I am going
to look for it in America. At the most I have found vague imaginings
that correspond to that first or monstrous stage in the scheme of
prophetic development I sketched in my opening.
There is often no more than a volley of rhetorical blank-cartridge. So
empty is it of all but sound that I have usually been constrained by
civility from going on to a third enquiry;--
"And what are you, sir, doing in particular, to assist and enrich this
magnificent and quite indefinable Destiny of which you so evidently
feel yourself a part?"...
That seems to be really no unjust rendering of the conscious
element of the American outlook as one finds it, for example, in
these nice-looking and pleasant-mannered fellow-passengers upon the
_Carmania_ upon whom I fasten with leading questions and experimental
remarks. One exception I discover--a pleasant New York clubman who
has doubts of this and that. The discipline and sense of purpose in
Germany has laid hold upon him. He seems to be, in contrast with his
fellow-countrymen, almost pessimistically aware that the American
ship of state is after all a mortal ship and liable to leakages.
There are certain problems and dangers he seems to think that may
delay, perhaps even prevent, an undamaged arrival in that predestined
port, that port too resplendent for the eye to rest upon; a Chinese
peril, he thinks has not been finally dealt with, "race suicide" is
not arrested for all that it is scolded in a most valiant and virile
manner, and there are adverse possibilities in the immigrant, in the
black, the socialist, against which he sees no guarantee. He sees huge
danger in the development and organization of the new finance and no
clear promise of a remedy. He finds the closest parallel between the
American Republic and Rome before the coming of Imperialism. But these
other Americans have no share in his pessimisms. They may confess to
as much as he does in the way of dangers, admit there are occasions
for calking, a need of stopping quite a number of possibilities if the
American Idea is to make its triumphant entry at last into that port
of blinding accomplishment, but, apart from a few necessary preventive
proposals, I do not perceive any extensive sense of anything whatever
to be done, anything to be shaped and thought out and made in the sense
of a national determination to a designed and specified end.
II
A Symbol of Progress
There are, one must admit, tremendous justifications for the belief
in a sort of automatic ascent of American things to unprecedented
magnificences, an ascent so automatic that indeed one needn't bother
in the slightest to keep the whole thing going. For example, consider
this, last year's last-word in ocean travel in which I am crossing, the
_Carmania_ with its unparalleled steadfastness, its racing, tireless
great turbines, its vast population of 3244 souls! It has on the whole
a tremendous effect of having come by fate and its own forces. One
forgets that any one planned it, much of it indeed has so much the
quality of moving, as the planets move, in the very nature of things.
You go aft and see the wake tailing away across the blue ridges, you
go forward and see the cleft water, lift protestingly, roll back in an
indignant crest, own itself beaten and go pouring by in great foaming
waves on either hand, you see nothing, you hear nothing of the toiling
engines, the reeking stokers, the effort and the stress below; you beat
west and west, as the sun does and it might seem with nearly the same
independence of any living man's help or opposition. Equally so does
it seem this great, gleaming, confident thing of power and metal came
inevitably out of the past and will lead on to still more shining,
still swifter and securer monsters in the future.
One sees in the perspective of history, first the little cockle-shells
of Columbus, the comings and goings of the precarious Tudor
adventurers, the slow uncertain shipping of colonial days. Says Sir
George Trevelyan in the opening of his _American Revolution_, that
then--it is still not a century and a half ago!--
"a man bound for New York, as he sent his luggage on board at Bristol,
would willingly have compounded for a voyage lasting as many weeks as
it now lasts days.... Adams, during the height of the war, hurrying to
France in the finest frigate Congress could place at his disposal ...
could make not better speed than five and forty days between Boston
and Bordeaux. Lord Carlisle ... was six weeks between port and port;
tossed by gales which inflicted on his brother Commissioners agonies
such as he forbore to make a matter of joke even to George Selwyn....
How humbler individuals fared.... They would be kept waiting weeks on
the wrong side of the water for a full complement of passengers and
weeks more for a fair wind, and then beating across in a badly found
tub with a cargo of millstones and old iron rolling about below, they
thought themselves lucky if they came into harbor a month after their
private store of provisions had run out and carrying a budget of news
as stale as the ship's provisions."
Even in the time of Dickens things were by no measure more than
half-way better. I have with me to enhance my comfort by this aided
retrospect, his _American Notes_. His crossing lasted eighteen days and
his boat was that "far-famed American steamer," the _Britannia_ (the
first of the long succession of Cunarders, of which this _Carmania_ is
the latest); his return took fifty days, and was a jovial home-coming
under sail. It's the journey out gives us our contrast. He had the
"state-room" of the period and very unhappy he was in it, as he
testifies in a characteristically mounting passage.
"That this state-room had been specially engaged for 'Charles Dickens,
Esquire, and Lady,' was rendered sufficiently clear even to my scared
intellect by a very small manuscript, announcing the fact, which was
pinned on a very flat quilt, covering a very thin mattress, spread
like a surgical plaster on a most inaccessible shelf. But that this
was the state-room, concerning which Charles Dickens, Esquire, and
Lady, had held daily and nightly conferences for at least four months
preceding; that this could by any possibility be that small snug
chamber of the imagination, which Charles Dickens, Esquire, with the
spirit of prophecy strong upon him, had always foretold would contain
at least one little sofa, and which his Lady, with a modest and yet
most magnificent sense of its limited dimensions, had from the first
opined would not hold more than two enormous portmanteaus in some odd
corner out of sight (portmanteaus which could now no more be got in at
the door, not to say stowed away, than a giraffe could be persuaded or
forced into a flower-pot): that this utterly impracticable, thoroughly
preposterous box, had the remotest reference to, or connection with,
those chaste and pretty bowers, sketched in a masterly hand, in
the highly varnished, lithographic plan, hanging up in the agent's
counting-house in the City of London: that this room of state, in
short, could be anything but a pleasant fiction and cheerful jest of
the Captain's, invented and put in practice for the better relish and
enjoyment of the real state-room presently to be disclosed: these were
truths which I really could not bring my mind at all to bear upon or
comprehend."
So he precludes his two weeks and a half of vile weather in this paddle
boat of the middle ages (she carried a "formidable" multitude of no
less than eighty-six saloon passengers) and goes on to describe such
experiences as this;
"About midnight we shipped a sea, which forced its way through the
skylights, burst open the doors above, and came raging and roaring
down into the ladies' cabin, to the unspeakable consternation of
my wife and a little Scotch lady.... They, and the handmaid before
mentioned, being in such ecstacies of fear that I scarcely knew what
to do with them, I naturally bethought myself of some restorative
or comfortable cordial; and nothing better occurring to me, at the
moment, than hot brandy-and-water, I procured a tumblerful without
delay. It being impossible to stand or sit without holding on, they
were all heaped together in one corner of a long sofa--a fixture
extending entirely across the cabin--where they clung to each other in
momentary expectation of being drowned. When I approached this place
with my specific, and was about to administer it with many consolatory
expressions, to the nearest sufferer, what was my dismay to see
them all roll slowly down to the other end! and when I staggered to
that end, and held out the glass once more, how immensely baffled
were my good intentions by the ship giving another lurch, and their
rolling back again! I suppose I dodged them up and down this sofa,
for at least a quarter of an hour, without reaching them once; and
by the time I did catch them, the brandy-and-water was diminished,
by constant spilling, to a teaspoonful. To complete the group, it is
necessary to recognize in this disconcerted dodger, an individual
very pale from sea-sickness, who had shaved his beard and brushed his
hair last at Liverpool; and whose only articles of dress (linen not
included) were a pair of dreadnought trousers; a blue jacket, formerly
admired upon the Thames at Richmond; no stockings; and one slipper."
It gives one a momentary sense of superiority to the great master to
read that. One surveys one's immediate surroundings and compares them
with _his_. One says almost patronizingly: "Poor old Dickens, you know,
really did have too awful a time!" The waves are high now, and getting
higher, dark-blue waves foam-crested; the waves haven't altered--except
relatively--but one isn't even sea-sick. At the most there are
squeamish moments for the weaker brethren. One looks down on these long
white-crested undulations thirty feet or so of rise and fall, as we
look down the side of a sky-scraper into a tumult in the street.
We displace thirty thousand tons of water instead of twelve hundred,
we can carry 521 first and second class passengers, a crew of 463, and
2260 emigrants below....
We're a city rather than a ship, our funnels go up over the height of
any reasonable church spire, and you need walk the main-deck from end
to end and back only four times to do a mile. Any one who has been to
London and seen Trafalgar Square will get our dimensions perfectly,
when he realizes that we should only squeeze into that finest site in
Europe, diagonally, dwarfing the National Gallery, St. Martin's Church,
hotels and every other building there out of existence, our funnels
towering five feet higher than Nelson on his column. As one looks down
on it all from the boat-deck one has a social microcosm, we could set
up as a small modern country and renew civilization even if the rest
of the world was destroyed. We've the plutocracy up here, there is a
middle class on the second-class deck and forward a proletariat--the
_proles_ much in evidence--complete. It's possible to go slumming
aboard.... We have our daily paper, too, printed aboard, and all the
latest news by marconigram....
Never was anything of this sort before, never. Caligula's shipping it
is true (unless it was Constantine's) did, as Mr. Cecil Torr testifies,
hold a world record until the nineteenth century and he quotes Pliny
for thirteen hundred tons--outdoing the _Britannia_--and Moschion for
cabins and baths and covered vine-shaded walks and plants in pots.
But from 1840 onward, we have broken away into a new scale for life.
This _Carmania_ isn't the largest ship nor the finest, nor is it to be
the last. Greater ships are to follow and greater. The scale of size,
the scale of power, the speed and dimensions of things about us alter
remorselessly--to some limit we cannot at present descry.
III
Is Progress Inevitable?
It is the development of such things as this, it is this dramatically
abbreviated perspective from those pre-Reformation caravels to the
larger, larger, larger of the present vessels, one must blame for
one's illusions. One is led unawares to believe that this something
called Progress is a natural and necessary and secular process,
going on without the definite will of man, carrying us on quite
independently of us; one is led unawares to forget that it is after
all from the historical point of view only a sudden universal jolting
forward in history, an affair of two centuries at most, a process for
the continuance of which we have no sort of guarantee. Most western
Europeans have this delusion of automatic progress in things badly
enough, but with Americans it seems to be almost fundamental. It is
their theory of the Cosmos and they no more think of inquiring into
the sustaining causes of the progressive movement than they would into
the character of the stokers hidden away from us in this great thing
somewhere--the officers alone know where.
I am happy to find this blind confidence very well expressed for
example in an illustrated magazine article by Mr. Edgar Saltus,
"New York from the Flat-iron," that a friend has put in my hand to
prepare me for the wonders to come. Mr. Saltus writes with an eloquent
joy of his vision of Broadway below, Broadway that is now "barring
trade-routes, the largest commercial stretch on this planet." So
late as Dickens's visit it was scavenged by roving untended herds of
gaunt, brown, black-blotched pigs. He writes of lower Fifth Avenue and
upper Fifth Avenue, of Madison Square and its tower, of sky-scrapers
and sky-scrapers and sky-scrapers round and about the horizon. (I am
to have a tremendous view of them to-morrow as we steam up from the
Narrows.) And thus Mr. Saltus proceeds,--
"As you lean and gaze from the toppest floors on houses below, which
from those floors seem huts, it may occur to you that precisely as
these huts were once regarded as supreme achievements, so, one of
these days, from other and higher floors, the Flat-iron may seem a hut
itself. Evolution has not halted. Undiscernibly but indefatigably,
always it is progressing. Its final term is not existing buildings,
nor in existing man. If humanity sprang from gorillas, from humanity
gods shall proceed."
The rule of three in excelsis!
"The story of Olympus is merely a tale of what might have been. That
which might have been may yet come to pass. Even now could the old
divinities, hushed forevermore, awake, they would be perplexed enough
to see how mortals have exceeded them.... In Fifth Avenue inns they
could get fairer fare than ambrosia, and behold women beside whom
Venus herself would look provincial and Juno a frump. The spectacle of
electricity tamed and domesticated would surprise them not a little,
the elevated quite as much, the Flat-iron still more. At sight of the
latter they would recall the Titans with whom once they warred, and
sink to their sun-red seas outfaced.
"In this same measure we have succeeded in exceeding them, so will
posterity surpass what we have done. Evolution may be slow, it
achieved an unrecognized advance when it devised buildings such as
this. It is demonstrable that small rooms breed small thoughts. It
will be demonstrable that, as buildings ascend, so do ideas. It is
mental progress that sky-scrapers engender. From these parturitions
gods may really proceed--beings, that is, who, could we remain long
enough to see them, would regard us as we regard the apes...."
Mr. Saltus writes, I think, with a very typical American accent. Most
Americans think like that and all of them I fancy feel like it. Just
in that spirit a later-empire Roman might have written apropos the
gigantic new basilica of Constantine the Great (who was also, one
recalls, a record-breaker in ship-building) and have compared it with
the straitened proportions of Cæsar's Forum and the meagre relics of
republican Rome. So too (_absit omen_) he might have swelled into
prophecy and sounded the true modern note.
One hears that modern note everywhere nowadays where print spreads,
but from America with fewer undertones than anywhere. Even I find it,
ringing clear, as a thing beyond disputing, as a thing as self-evident
as sunrise again and again in the expressed thought of Mr. Henry James.
But you know this progress isn't guaranteed. We have all indeed been
carried away completely by the up-rush of it all. To me now this
_Carmania_ seems to typify the whole thing. What matter it if there
are moments when one reflects on the mysterious smallness and it
would seem the ungrowing quality of the human content of it all? We
are, after all, astonishingly like flies on a machine that has got
loose. No matter. Those people on the main-deck are the oddest crowd,
strange Oriental-looking figures with Astrakhan caps, hook-noses,
shifty eyes, and indisputably dirty habits, bold-eyed, red-capped,
expectorating women, quaint and amazingly dirty children; Tartars
there are too, and Cossacks, queer wraps, queer head-dresses, a sort
of greasy picturesqueness over them all. They use the handkerchief
solely as a head covering. Their deck is disgusting with fragments of
food, with egg-shells they haven't had the decency to throw over-board.
Collectively they have--an atmosphere. They're going where we're going,
wherever that is. What matters it? What matters it, too, if these
people about me in the artistic apartment talk nothing but trivialities
derived from the _Daily Bulletin_, think nothing but trivialities,
are, except in the capacity of paying passengers, the most ineffectual
gathering of human beings conceivable? What matters it that there is
no connection, no understanding whatever between them and that large
and ominous crowd a plank or so and a yard or so under our feet? Or
between themselves for the matter of that? What matters it if nobody
seems to be struck by the fact that we are all, the three thousand two
hundred of us so extraordinarily got together into this tremendous
machine, and that not only does nobody inquire what it is has got us
together in this astonishing fashion and why, but that nobody seems to
feel that we are together in any sort of way at all? One looks up at
the smoke-pouring funnels and back at the foaming wake. It will be all
right. Aren't we driving ahead westward at a pace of four hundred and
fifty miles a day?
And twenty or thirty thousand other souls, mixed and stratified, on
great steamers ahead of us, or behind, are driving westward too. That
there's no collective mind apparent in it at all, worth speaking about
is so much the better. That only shows its Destiny, its Progress as
inevitable as gravitation. I could almost believe it, as I sit quietly
writing here by a softly shaded light in this elegantly appointed
drawing-room, as steady as though I was in my native habitat on dry
land instead of hurrying almost fearfully, at twenty knots an hour,
over a tumbling empty desert of blue waves under a windy sky. But,
only a little while ago, I was out forward alone, looking at that.
Everything was still except for the remote throbbing of the engines and
the nearly effaced sound of a man, singing in a strange tongue, that
came from the third-class gangway far below. The sky was clear, save
for a few black streamers of clouds, Orion hung very light and large
above the waters, and a great new moon, still visibly holding its dead
predecessor in its crescent, sank near him. Between the sparse great
stars were deep blue spaces, unfathomed distances.
Out there I had been reminded of space and time. Out there the ship was
just a hastening ephemeral fire-fly that had chanced to happen across
the eternal tumult of the winds and sea.
CHAPTER III
NEW YORK
(_In a room on the ninth floor in the sky-scraper hotel New York_)
I
First Impressions
My first impressions of New York are enormously to enhance the effect
of this Progress, this material progress, that is to say, as something
inevitable and inhuman, as a blindly furious energy of growth that
must go on. Against the broad and level gray contours of Liverpool one
found the ocean liner portentously tall, but here one steams into the
middle of a town that dwarfs the ocean liner. The sky-scrapers that
are the New-Yorker's perpetual boast and pride rise up to greet one
as one comes through the Narrows into the Upper Bay, stand out, in a
clustering group of tall irregular crenellations, the strangest crown
that ever a city wore. They have an effect of immense incompleteness;
each one seems to await some needed terminal,--to be, by virtue of its
woolly jets of steam, still as it were in process of eruption. One
thinks of St. Peter's great blue dome, finished and done as one saw it
from a vine-shaded wine-booth above the Milvian Bridge, one thinks of
the sudden ascendency of St. Paul's dark grace, as it soars out over
any one who comes up by the Thames towards it. These are efforts that
have accomplished their ends, and even Paris illuminated under the tall
stem of the Eiffel Tower looked completed and defined. But New York's
achievement is a threatening promise, growth going on under a pressure
that increases, and amidst a hungry uproar of effort.
One gets a measure of the quality of this force of mechanical, of
inhuman, growth as one marks the great statue of Liberty on our
larboard, which is meant to dominate and fails absolutely to dominate
the scene. It gets to three hundred feet about, by standing on a
pedestal of a hundred and fifty; and the uplifted torch, seen against
the sky, suggests an arm straining upward, straining in hopeless
competition with the fierce commercial altitudes ahead. Poor liberating
Lady of the American ideal! One passes her and forgets.
Happy returning natives greet the great pillars of business by name,
the St. Paul Building, the World, the Manhattan tower; the English
new-comer notes the clear emphasis of the detail, the freedom from
smoke and atmospheric mystery that New York gains from burning
anthracite, the jetting white steam clouds that emphasize that freedom.
Across the broad harbor plies an unfamiliar traffic of grotesque broad
ferry-boats, black with people, glutted to the lips with vans and
carts, each hooting and yelping its own distinctive note, and there is
a wild hurrying up and down and to and fro of piping and bellowing tugs
and barges; and a great floating platform, bearing a railway train,
gets athwart our course as we ascend and evokes megatherial bellowings.
Everything is moving at a great speed, and whistling and howling, it
seems, and presently far ahead we make out our own pier, black with
expectant people, and set up our own distinctive whoop, and with the
help of half a dozen furiously noisy tugs are finally lugged and butted
into dock. The tugs converse by yells and whistles, it is an affair of
short-tempered mechanical monsters, amidst which one watches for one's
opportunity to get ashore.
Noise and human hurry and a vastness of means and collective result,
rather than any vastness of achievement, is the pervading quality of
New York. The great thing is the mechanical thing, the unintentional
thing which is speeding up all these people, driving them in headlong
hurry this way and that, exhorting them by the voice of every car
conductor to "step lively," aggregating them into shoving and elbowing
masses, making them stand clinging to straps, jerking them up elevator
shafts and pouring them on to the ferry-boats. But this accidental
great thing is at times a very great thing. Much more impressive than
the sky-scrapers to my mind is the large Brooklyn suspension-bridge.
I have never troubled to ask who built that; its greatness is not
in its design, but in the quality of necessity one perceives in its
inanimate immensity. It _tells_, as one goes under it up the East
River, but it is far more impressive to the stranger to come upon it
by glimpses, wandering down to it through the ill-paved van-infested
streets from Chatham Square. One sees parts of Cyclopean stone arches,
one gets suggestive glimpses through the jungle growth of business now
of the back, now of the flanks, of the monster; then, as one comes
out on the river, one discovers far up in one's sky the long sweep of
the bridge itself, foreshortened and with a maximum of perspective
effect; the streams of pedestrians and the long line of carts and
vans, quaintly microscopic against the blue, the creeping progress of
the little cars on the lower edge of the long chain of netting; all
these things dwindling indistinguishably before Brooklyn is reached.
Thence, if it is late afternoon, one may walk back to City Hall Park
and encounter and experience the convergent stream of clerks and
workers making for the bridge, mark it grow denser and denser, until
at last they come near choking even the broad approaches of the giant
duct, until the congested multitudes jostle and fight for a way.
They arrive marching afoot by every street in endless procession;
crammed trolley-cars disgorge them; the Subway pours them out.... The
individuals count for nothing, they are clerks and stenographers,
shop-men, shop-girls, workers of innumerable types, black-coated
men, hat-and-blouse girls, shabby and cheaply clad persons, such as one
sees in London, in Berlin, anywhere. Perhaps they hurry more, perhaps
they seem more eager. But the distinctive effect is the mass, the black
torrent, rippled with unmeaning faces, the great, the unprecedented
multitudinousness of the thing, the inhuman force of it all.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO BROOKLYN BRIDGE]
I made no efforts to present any of my letters, or to find any one to
talk to on my first day in New York. I landed, got a casual lunch, and
wandered alone until New York's peculiar effect of inhuman noise and
pressure and growth became overwhelming, touched me with a sense of
solitude, and drove me into the hospitable companionship of the Century
Club. Oh, no doubt of New York's immensity! The sense of soulless
gigantic forces, that took no heed of men, became stronger and stronger
all that day. The pavements were often almost incredibly out of repair,
when I became footweary the street-cars would not wait for me, and I
had to learn their stopping-points as best I might. I wandered, just
at the right pitch of fatigue to get the full force of it into the
eastward region between Third and Fourth Avenue, came upon the Elevated
railway at its worst, the darkened streets of disordered paving below,
trolley-car-congested, the ugly clumsy lattice, sonorously busy
overhead, a clatter of vans and draught-horses, and great crowds of
cheap, base-looking people hurrying uncivilly by....
II
The Coming of White Marble
I corrected that first crowded impression of New York with a clearer,
brighter vision of expansiveness when next day I began to realize the
social quality of New York's central backbone, between Fourth Avenue
and Sixth. The effect remained still that of an immeasurably powerful
forward movement of rapid eager advance, a process of enlargement and
increment in every material sense, but it may be because I was no
longer fatigued, was now a little initiated, the human being seemed
less of a fly upon the wheels. I visited immense and magnificent
clubs--London has no such splendors as the Union, the University, the
new hall of the Harvard--I witnessed the great torrent of spending
and glittering prosperity in carriage and motor-car pour along Fifth
Avenue. I became aware of effects that were not only vast and opulent
but fine. It grew upon me that the Twentieth Century, which found New
York brown-stone of the color of desiccated chocolate, meant to leave
it a city of white and colored marble. I found myself agape, admiring
a sky-scraper--the prow of the Flat-iron Building, to be particular,
ploughing up through the traffic of Broadway and Fifth Avenue in the
afternoon light. The New York sundown and twilight seemed to me quite
glorious things. Down the western streets one gets the sky hung in
long cloud-barred strips, like Japanese paintings, celestial tranquil
yellows and greens and pink luminosity toning down to the reeking
blue-brown edge of the distant New Jersey atmosphere, and the clear,
black, hard activity of crowd and trolley-car and Elevated railroad.
Against this deepening color came the innumerable little lights of the
house cliffs and the street tier above tier. New York is lavish of
light, it is lavish of everything, it is full of the sense of spending
from an inexhaustible supply. For a time one is drawn irresistibly into
the universal belief in that inexhaustible supply.
At a bright table in Delmonico's to-day at lunch-time, my host told me
the first news of the destruction of the great part of San Francisco
by earthquake and fire. It had just come through to him, it wasn't
yet being shouted by the newsboys. He told me compactly of dislocated
water-mains, of the ill-luck of the unusual eastward wind that was
blowing the fire up-town, of a thousand reported dead, of the manifest
doom of the greater portion of the city, and presently the shouting
voices in the street outside arose to chorus him. He was a newspaper
man and a little preoccupied because his San Francisco offices were
burning, and that no further news was arriving after these first
intimations. Naturally the catastrophe was our topic. But this disaster
did not affect him, it does not seem to have affected any one with
a sense of final destruction, with any foreboding of irreparable
disaster. Every one is talking of it this afternoon, and no one is in
the least degree dismayed. I have talked and listened in two clubs,
watched people in cars and in the street, and one man is glad that
Chinatown will be cleared out for good; another's chief solicitude is
for Millet's "Man with the Hoe." "They'll cut it out of the frame,"
he says, a little anxiously. "Sure." But there is no doubt anywhere
that San Francisco can be rebuilt, larger, better, and soon. Just as
there would be none at all if all this New York that has so obsessed
me with its limitless bigness was itself a blazing ruin. I believe
these people would more than half like the situation. It would give
them scope, it would facilitate that conversion into white marble in
progress everywhere, it would settle the difficulties of the Elevated
railroad and clear out the tangles of lower New York. There is no sense
of accomplishment and finality in any of these things, the largest,
the finest, the tallest, are so obviously no more than symptoms and
promises of Material Progress, of inhuman material progress that is so
in the nature of things that no one would regret their passing. That, I
say again, is at the first encounter the peculiar American effect that
began directly I stepped aboard the liner, and that rises here to a
towering, shining, clamorous climax. The sense of inexhaustible supply,
of an ultra-human force behind it all, is, for a time, invincible.
One assumes, with Mr. Saltus, that all America is in this vein, and
that this is the way the future must inevitably go. One has a vision
of bright electrical subways, replacing the filth-diffusing railways of
to-day, of clean, clear pavements free altogether from the fly-prolific
filth of horses coming almost, as it were, of their own accord beneath
the feet of a population that no longer expectorates at all; of grimy
stone and peeling paint giving way everywhere to white marble and
spotless surfaces, and a shining order, of everything wider, taller,
cleaner, better....
So that, in the meanwhile, a certain amount of jostling and hurry and
untidiness, and even--to put it mildly--forcefulness may be forgiven.
III
Ellis Island
I visited Ellis Island yesterday. It chanced to be a good day for my
purpose. For the first time in its history this filter of immigrant
humanity has this week proved inadequate to the demand upon it. It was
choked, and half a score of gravid liners were lying uncomfortably up
the harbor, replete with twenty thousand or so of crude Americans from
Ireland and Poland and Italy and Syria and Finland and Albania; men,
women, children, dirt, and bags together.
Of immigration I shall have to write later; what concerns me now is
chiefly the wholesale and multitudinous quality of that place and its
work. I made my way with my introduction along white passages and
through traps and a maze of metal lattices that did for a while succeed
in catching and imprisoning me, to Commissioner Wachorn, in his quiet,
green-toned office. There, for a time, I sat judicially and heard him
deal methodically, swiftly, sympathetically, with case after case, a
string of appeals against the sentences of deportation pronounced in
the busy little courts below. First would come one dingy and strangely
garbed group of wild-eyed aliens, and then another: Roumanian gypsies,
South Italians, Ruthenians, Swedes, each under the intelligent guidance
of a uniformed interpreter, and a case would be started, a report made
to Washington, and they would drop out again, hopeful or sullen or
fearful as the evidence might trend....
Down-stairs we find the courts, and these seen, we traverse long
refectories, long aisles of tables, and close-packed dormitories with
banks of steel mattresses, tier above tier, and galleries and passages
innumerable, perplexing intricacy that slowly grows systematic with the
Commissioner's explanations.
Here is a huge, gray, untidy waiting-room, like a big railway-depot
room, full of a sinister crowd of miserable people, loafing about or
sitting dejectedly, whom America refuses, and here a second and a third
such chamber each with its tragic and evil-looking crowd that hates
us, and that even ventures to groan and hiss at us a little for our
glimpse of its large dirty spectacle of hopeless failure, and here,
squalid enough indeed, but still to some degree hopeful, are the
appeal cases as yet undecided. In one place, at a bank of ranges, works
an army of men cooks, in another spins the big machinery of the Ellis
Island laundry, washing blankets, drying blankets, day in and day out,
a big clean steamy space of hurry and rotation. Then, I recall a neat
apartment lined to the ceiling with little drawers, a card-index of the
names and nationalities and significant circumstances of upward of a
million and a half of people who have gone on and who are yet liable to
recall.
The central hall is the key of this impression. All day long, through
an intricate series of metal pens, the long procession files, step by
step, bearing bundles and trunks and boxes, past this examiner and
that, past the quick, alert medical officers, the tallymen and the
clerks. At every point immigrants are being picked out and set aside
for further medical examination, for further questions, for the busy
little courts; but the main procession satisfies conditions, passes
on. It is a daily procession that, with a yard of space to each,
would stretch over three miles, that any week in the year would more
than equal in numbers that daily procession of the unemployed that is
becoming a regular feature of the London winter, that in a year could
put a cordon round London or New York of close-marching people, could
populate a new Boston, that in a century--What in a century will it all
amount to?...
On they go, from this pen to that, pen by pen, towards a desk at a
little metal wicket--the gate of America. Through this metal wicket
drips the immigration stream--all day long, every two or three seconds
an immigrant, with a valise or a bundle, passes the little desk and
goes on past the well-managed money-changing place, past the carefully
organized separating ways that go to this railway or that, past the
guiding, protecting officials--into a new world. The great majority
are young men and young women, between seventeen and thirty, good,
youthful, hopeful, peasant stock. They stand in a long string, waiting
to go through that wicket, with bundles, with little tin boxes, with
cheap portmanteaus, with odd packages, in pairs, in families, alone,
women with children, men with strings of dependents, young couples. All
day that string of human beads waits there, jerks forward, waits again;
all day and every day, constantly replenished, constantly dropping the
end beads through the wicket, till the units mount to hundreds and the
hundreds to thousands....
Yes, Ellis Island is quietly immense. It gives one a visible image of
one aspect at least of this world-large process of filling and growing
and synthesis, which is America.
"Look there!" said the Commissioner, taking me by the arm and pointing,
and I saw a monster steamship far away, and already a big bulk
looming up the Narrows. "It's the _Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse_. She's
got--I forget the exact figures, but let us say--eight hundred and
fifty-three more for us. She'll have to keep them until Friday at the
earliest. And there's more behind her, and more strung out all across
the Atlantic."
In one record day this month 21,000 immigrants came into the port of
New York alone; in one week over 50,000. This year the total will be
1,200,000 souls, pouring in, finding work at once, producing no fall in
wages. They start digging and building and making. Just think of the
dimensions of it!
IV
To Fall River
One must get away from New York to see the place in its proper
relations. I visited Staten Island and Jersey City, motored up to
Sleepy Hollow (where once the Headless Horseman rode), saw suburbs
and intimations of suburbs without end, and finished with the long
and crowded spectacle of the East River as one sees it from the Fall
River boat. It was Friday night, and the Fall River boat was in a
state of fine congestion with Jews, Italians, and week-enders, and one
stood crowded and surveyed the crowded shore, the sky-scrapers and
tenement-houses, the huge grain elevators, big warehouses, the great
Brooklyn Bridge, the still greater Williamsburgh Bridge, the great
promise of yet another monstrous bridge, overwhelmingly monstrous by
any European example I know, and so past long miles of city to the
left and to the right past the wide Brooklyn navy-yard (where three
clean white war-ships lay moored), past the clustering castellated
asylums, hospitals, almshouses and reformatories of Blackwell's long
shore and Ward's Island, and then through a long reluctant diminuendo
on each receding bank, until, indeed, New York, though it seemed
incredible, had done.
And at one point a grave-voiced man in a peaked cap, with guide-books
to sell, pleased me greatly by ending all idle talk suddenly with the
stentorian announcement: "We are now in Hell Gate. We are now passing
through Hell Gate!"
But they've blown Hell Gate open with dynamite, and it wasn't at
all the Hell Gate that I read about in my boyhood in the delightful
chronicle of Knickerbocker.
So through an elbowing evening (to the tune of "Cavalleria Rusticana"
on an irrepressible string band) and a night of unmitigated fog-horn
to Boston, which I had been given to understand was a cultured and
uneventful city offering great opportunities for reflection and
intellectual digestion. And, indeed, the large quiet of Beacon Street,
in the early morning sunshine, seemed to more than justify that
expectation....
CHAPTER IV
GROWTH INVINCIBLE
I
Boston's Way of Growing
But Boston did not propose that its less-assertive key should be
misunderstood, and in a singularly short space of time I found myself
climbing into a tremulous impatient motor-car in company with three
enthusiastic exponents of the work of the Metropolitan Park Commission,
and provided with a neatly tinted map, large and framed and glazed,
to explore a fresh and more deliberate phase in this great American
symphony, this symphony of Growth.
If possible it is more impressive, even, than the crowded largeness
of New York, to trace the serene preparation Boston has made through
this Commission to be widely and easily vast. New York's humanity
has a curious air of being carried along upon a wave of irresistible
prosperity, but Boston confesses design. I suppose no city in all the
world (unless it be Washington) has ever produced so complete and ample
a forecast of its own future as this Commission's plan of Boston. An
area with a radius of between fifteen and twenty miles from the State
House has been planned out and prepared for Growth. Great reservations
of woodland and hill have been made, the banks of nearly all the
streams and rivers and meres have been secured for public park and
garden, for boating and other water sports; big avenues of vigorous
young trees; a hundred and fifty yards or so wide, with drive-ways
and ridingways and a central grassy band for electric tramways, have
been prepared, and, indeed, the fair and ample and shady new Boston,
the Boston of 1950, grows visibly before one's eyes. I found myself
comparing the disciplined confidence of these proposals to the blind
enlargement of London; London, that like a bowl of viscid human fluid,
boils sullenly over the rim of its encircling hills and slops messily
and uglily into the home counties. I could not but contrast their large
intelligence with the confused hesitations and waste and muddle of our
English suburban developments....
There were moments, indeed, when it seemed too good to be true, and Mr.
Sylvester Baxter, who was with me and whose faith has done so much to
secure this mapping out of a city's growth beyond all precedent, became
the victim of my doubts. "Will this enormous space of sunlit woodland
and marsh and meadow really be filled at any time?" I urged. "All
cities do not grow. Cities have shrunken."
I recalled Bruges. I recalled the empty, goat-sustaining, flower-rich
meadows of Rome within the wall. What made him so sure of this
progressive magnificence of Boston's growth? My doubts fell on stony
soil. My companions seemed to think these scepticisms inopportune, a
forced eccentricity, like doubting the coming of to-morrow. Of course
Growth will go on....
The subject was changed by the sight of the fine marble buildings of
the Harvard medical school, a shining façade partially eclipsed by
several dingy and unsightly wooden houses.
"These shanties will go, of course," says one of my companions. "It's
proposed to take the avenue right across this space straight to the
schools."
"You'll have to fill the marsh, then, and buy the houses."
"Sure."...
I find myself comparing this huge growth process of America with
the things in my own land. After all, this growth is no distinctive
American thing; it is the same process anywhere--only in America there
are no disguises, no complications. Come to think of it, Birmingham and
Manchester are as new as Boston--newer; and London, south and east of
the Thames, is, save for a little nucleus, more recent than Chicago--is
in places, I am told, with its smoky disorder, its clattering ways, its
brutality of industrial conflict, very like Chicago. But nowhere now is
growth still so certainly and confidently _going on_ as here. Nowhere
is it upon so great a scale as here, and with so confident an outlook
towards the things to come. And nowhere is it passing more certainly
from the first phase of a mob-like rush of individualistic undertakings
into a planned and ordered progress.
II
The End of Niagara
Everywhere in the America I have seen the same note sounds, the note of
a fatal gigantic economic development, of large prevision and enormous
pressures.
I heard it clear above the roar of Niagara--for, after all, I stopped
off at Niagara.
As a water-fall, Niagara's claim to distinction is now mainly
quantitative; its spectacular effect, its magnificent and humbling size
and splendor, were long since destroyed beyond recovery by the hotels,
the factories, the power-houses, the bridges and tramways and hoardings
that arose about it. It must have been a fine thing to happen upon
suddenly after a day of solitary travel; the Indians, they say, gave it
worship; but it's no great wonder to reach it by trolley-car, through
a street hack-infested and full of adventurous refreshment-places and
souvenir-shops and the touting guides. There were great quantities of
young couples and other sightseers with the usual encumbrances of wrap
and bag and umbrella, trailing out across the bridges and along the
neat paths of the Reservation Parks, asking the way to this point and
that. Notice boards cut the eye, offering extra joys and memorable
objects for twenty-five and fifty cents, and it was proposed you should
keep off the grass.
After all, the gorge of Niagara is very like any good gorge in the
Ardennes, except that it has more water; it's about as wide and about
as deep, and there is no effect at all that one has not seen a dozen
times in other cascades. One gets all the water one wants at Tivoli,
one has gone behind half a hundred downpours just as impressive in
Switzerland; a hundred tons of water is really just as stunning as ten
million. A hundred tons of water stuns one altogether, and what more
do you want? One recalls "Orridos" and "Schluchts" that are not only
magnificent but lonely.
No doubt the Falls, seen from the Canadian side, have a peculiar long
majesty of effect; but the finest thing in it all, to my mind, was not
Niagara at all, but to look up-stream from Goat Island and see the
sea-wide crest of the flashing sunlit rapids against the gray-blue sky.
That was like a limitless ocean pouring down a sloping world towards
one, and I lingered, held by that, returning to it through an indolent
afternoon. It gripped the imagination as nothing else there seemed to
do. It was so broad an infinitude of splash and hurry. And, moreover,
all the enterprising hotels and expectant trippers were out of sight.
That was the best of the display. The real interest of Niagara for me,
was not in the water-fall but in the human accumulations about it. They
stood for the future, threats and promises, and the water-fall was
just a vast reiteration of falling water. The note of growth in human
accomplishment rose clear and triumphant above the elemental thunder.
For the most part these accumulations of human effort about Niagara
are extremely defiling and ugly. Nothing--not even the hotel signs and
advertisement boards--could be more offensive to the eye and mind than
the Schoellkopf Company's untidy confusion of sheds and buildings on
the American side, wastefully squirting out long, tail-race cascades
below the bridge, and nothing more disgusting than the sewer-pipes
and gas-work ooze that the town of Niagara Falls contributes to the
scenery. But, after all, these represent only the first slovenly
onslaught of mankind's expansion, the pioneers' camp of the
human-growth process that already changes its quality and manner. There
are finer things than these outrages to be found.
The dynamos and turbines of the Niagara Falls Power Company, for
example, impressed me far more profoundly than the Cave of the
Winds; are, indeed, to my mind, greater and more beautiful than that
accidental eddying of air beside a downpour. They are will made
visible, thought translated into easy and commanding things. They are
clean, noiseless, and starkly powerful. All the clatter and tumult of
the early age of machinery is past and gone here; there is no smoke, no
coal grit, no dirt at all. The wheel-pit into which one descends has an
almost cloistered quiet about its softly humming turbines. These are
altogether noble masses of machinery, huge black slumbering monsters,
great sleeping tops that engender irresistible forces in their
sleep. They sprang, armed like Minerva, from serene and speculative,
foreseeing and endeavoring brains. First was the word and then these
powers. A man goes to and fro quietly in the long, clean hall of the
dynamos. There is no clangor, no racket. Yet the outer rim of the big
generators is spinning at the pace of a hundred thousand miles an hour;
the dazzling clean switch-board, with its little handles and levers,
is the seat of empire over more power than the strength of a million
disciplined, unquestioning men. All these great things are as silent,
as wonderfully made, as the heart in a living body, and stouter and
stronger than that....
When I thought that these two huge wheel-pits of this company are
themselves but a little intimation of what can be done in this way,
what will be done in this way, my imagination towered above me. I fell
into a day-dream of the coming power of men, and how that power may be
used by them....
For surely the greatness of life is still to come, it is not in such
accidents as mountains or the sea. I have seen the splendor of the
mountains, sunrise and sunset among them, and the waste immensity of
sky and sea. I am not blind because I can see beyond these glories. To
me no other thing is credible than that all the natural beauty in the
world is only so much material for the imagination and the mind, so
many hints and suggestions for art and creation. Whatever is, is but
the lure and symbol towards what can be willed and done. Man lives to
make--in the end he must make, for there will be nothing else left for
him to do.
And the world he will make--after a thousand years or so!
I, at least, can forgive the loss of all the accidental, unmeaning
beauty that is going for the sake of the beauty of fine order and
intention that will come. I believe--passionately, as a doubting lover
believes in his mistress--in the future of mankind. And so to me it
seems altogether well that all the froth and hurry of Niagara at last,
all of it, dying into hungry canals of intake, should rise again in
light and power, in ordered and equipped and proud and beautiful
humanity, in cities and palaces and the emancipated souls and hearts of
men....
I turned back to look at the power-house as I walked towards the Falls,
and halted and stared. Its architecture brought me out of my day-dream
to the quality of contemporary things again. It's a well-intentioned
building enough, extraordinarily well intentioned, and regardless of
expense. It's in granite and by Stanford White, and yet--It hasn't
caught the note. There's a touch of respectability in it, more than a
hint of the box of bricks. Odd, but I'd almost as soon have had one of
the Schoellkopf sheds.
A community that can produce such things as those turbines and dynamos,
and then cover them over with this dull exterior, is capable, one
realizes, of feats of bathos. One feels that all the power that throbs
in the copper cables below may end at last in turning Great Wheels for
excursionists, stamping out aluminum "fancy" ware, and illuminating
night advertisements for drug shops and music halls. I had an afternoon
of busy doubts....
There is much discussion about Niagara at present. It may be some
queer compromise, based on the pretence that a voluminous water-fall
is necessarily a thing of incredible beauty, and a human use is
necessarily a degrading use, will "save" Niagara and the hack-drivers
and the souvenir-shops for series of years yet, "a magnificent monument
to the pride of the United States in a glory of nature," as one
journalistic savior puts it. It is, as public opinion stands, a quite
conceivable thing. This electric development may be stopped after
all, and the huge fall of water remain surrounded by gravel paths
and parapets and geranium-beds, a staring-point for dull wonder, a
crown for a day's excursion, a thunderous impressive accessory to
the vulgar love-making that fills the surrounding hotels, a Titanic
imbecility of wasted gifts. But I don't think so. I think somebody will
pay something, and the journalistic zeal for scenery abate. I think
the huge social and industrial process of America will win in this
conflict, and at last capture Niagara altogether.
And then--what use will it make of its prey?
III
The Tail of Chicago
In smoky, vast, undisciplined Chicago Growth forced itself upon me
again as the dominant American fact, but this time a dark disorder of
growth. I went about Chicago seeing many things of which I may say
something later. I visited the top of the Masonic Building and viewed
a wilderness of sky-scrapers. I acquired a felt of memories of swing
bridges and viaducts and interlacing railways and jostling crowds and
extraordinarily dirty streets, I learnt something of the mystery of the
"floating foundations" upon which so much of Chicago rests. But I got
my best vision of Chicago as I left it.
I sat in the open observation-car at the end of the Pennsylvania
Limited Express, and watched the long defile of industrialism from the
Union Station in the heart of things to out beyond South Chicago,
a dozen miles away. I had not gone to the bloody spectacle of the
stock-yards that "feed the world," because, to be frank, I have an
immense repugnance to the killing of fixed and helpless animals; I saw
nothing of those ill-managed, ill-inspected establishments, though I
smelt the unwholesome reek from them ever and again, and so it was
here I saw for the first time the enormous expanse and intricacy of
railroads that net this great industrial desolation, and something of
the going and coming of the myriads of polyglot workers. Chicago burns
bituminous coal, it has a reek that outdoes London, and right and
left of the line rise vast chimneys, huge blackened grain-elevators,
flame-crowned furnaces and gauntly ugly and filthy factory buildings,
monstrous mounds of refuse, desolate, empty lots littered with rusty
cans, old iron, and indescribable rubbish. Interspersed with these are
groups of dirty, disreputable, insanitary-looking wooden houses.
We swept along the many-railed track, and the straws and scraps of
paper danced in our eddy as we passed. We overtook local trains and
they receded slowly in the great perspective, huge freight-trains met
us or were overtaken; long trains of doomed cattle passed northward;
solitary engines went by--every engine tolling a melancholy bell; open
trucks crowded with workmen went cityward. By the side of the track,
and over the level crossings, walked great numbers of people. So it
goes on mile after mile--Chicago. The sun was now bright, now pallid
through some streaming curtain of smoke; the spring afternoon was lit
here and again by the gallant struggle of some stunted tree with a rare
and startling note of new green....
It was like a prolonged, enlarged mingling of the south side of
London with all that is bleak and ugly in the Black Country. It is
the most perfect presentation of nineteenth-century individualistic
industrialism I have ever seen--in its vast, its magnificent squalor;
it is pure nineteenth century; it had no past at all before that; in
1800 it was empty prairie, and one marvels for its future. It is indeed
a nineteenth-century nightmare that culminates beyond South Chicago in
the monstrous fungoid shapes, the endless smoking chimneys, the squat
retorts, the black smoke pall of the Standard Oil Company. For a time
the sun is veiled altogether by that....
And then suddenly Chicago is a dark smear under the sky, and we are in
the large emptiness of America, the other America--America in between.
IV
Intimations of Order
"Undisciplined"--that is the word for Chicago. It is the word for
all the progress of the Victorian time, a scrambling, ill-mannered,
undignified, unintelligent development of material resources.
Packingtown, for example, is a place that feeds the world with meat,
that concentrates the produce of a splendid countryside at a position
of imperial advantage, and its owners have no more sense, no better
moral quality, than to make it stink in the nostrils of any one who
comes within two miles of it; to make it a centre of distribution for
disease and decay, an arena of shabby evasions and extra profits; a
scene of brutal economic conflict and squalid filthiness, offensive
to every sense. (I wish I could catch the soul of Herbert Spencer and
tether it in Chicago for awhile to gather fresh evidence upon the
superiority of unfettered individualistic enterprises to things managed
by the state.)
Want of discipline! Chicago is one hoarse cry for discipline! The
reek and scandal of the stock-yards is really only a gigantic form
of that same quality in American life that, in a minor aspect, makes
the sidewalk filthy. The key to the peculiar nasty ugliness of those
Schoellkopf works that defile the Niagara gorge is the same quality.
The detestableness of the Elevated railroads of Chicago and Boston
and New York have this in common. All that is ugly in America, in
Lancashire, in South and East London, in the Pas de Calais, is due
to this, to the shoving unintelligent proceedings of underbred and
morally obtuse men. Each man is for himself, each enterprise; there is
no order, no prevision, no common and universal plan. Modern economic
organization is still as yet only thinking of emerging from its
first chaotic stage, the stage of lawless enterprise and insanitary
aggregation, the stage of the prospector's camp....
But it does emerge.
Men are makers--American men, I think, more than most men--and amidst
even the catastrophic jumble of Chicago one finds the same creative
forces at work that are struggling to replan a greater Boston, and that
turned a waste of dumps and swamps and cabbage-gardens into Central
Park, New York. Chicago also has its Parks Commission and its green
avenues, its bright flower-gardens, its lakes and playing-fields. Its
Midway Plaisance is in amazing contrast with the dirt, the congestion,
the moral disorder of its State Street; its Field Houses do visible
battle with slum and the frantic meanness of commercial folly.
Field Houses are peculiar to Chicago, and Chicago has every reason
to be proud of them. I visited one that is positively within smell
of the stock-yards and wedged into a district of gaunt and dirty
slums. It stands in the midst of a little park, and close by it are
three playing-grounds with swings and parallel bars and all manner of
athletic appliances, one for little children, one for girls and women,
and one for boys and youths. In the children's place is a paddling-pond
of clear, clean, running water and a shaded area of frequently
changed sand, and in the park was a broad asphalted arena that can be
flooded for skating in winter. All this is free to all comers, and
free too is the Field House itself. This is a large, cool Italianate
place with two or three reading-rooms--one specially arranged for
children--a big discussion-hall, a big and well-equipped gymnasium, and
big, free baths for men and for women. There is also a clean, bright
refreshment-place where wholesome food is sold just above cost price.
It was early on Friday afternoon when I saw it all, but the place was
busy with children, reading, bathing, playing in a hundred different
ways.
[Illustration: STATE STREET, CHICAGO]
And this Field House is not an isolated philanthropic enterprise. It
is just one of a number that are dotted about Chicago, mitigating and
civilizing its squalor. It was not distilled by begging and charity
from the stench of the stock-yards or the reek of Standard Oil. It
is part of the normal work of a special taxing body created by the
legislature of the State of Illinois. It is just one of the fruits upon
one of the growths that spring from such persistent creative efforts
as that of the Chicago City Club. It is socialism--even as its enemies
declare....
Even amidst the sombre uncleanliness of Chicago one sees the light of
a new epoch, the coming of new conceptions, of foresight, of large
collective plans and discipline to achieve them, the fresh green
leaves, among all the festering manure, of the giant growths of a more
orderly and more beautiful age.
V
The Pennsylvania Limited
These growing towns, these giant towns that grow up and out, that grow
orderly and splendid out of their first chaotic beginnings, are only
little patches upon a vast expanse, upon what is still of all habitable
countries the emptiest country in the world. My long express journey
from Chicago to Washington lasted a day and a night and more, I could
get sooner from my home in Kent to Italy, and yet that was still well
under a third of the way across the continent. I spent most of my
daylight time in the fine and graceful open loggia at the end of the
observation-car or in looking out of the windows, looking at hills and
valleys, townships and quiet places, sudden busy industrial outbreaks
about coal-mine or metal, big undisciplined rivers that spread into
swamp and lake, new forest growths, very bright and green now, foaming
up above blackened stumps. There were many cypress-trees and trees with
white blossom and the Judas-tree, very abundant among the spring-time
green. I got still more clearly the enormous scale of this American
destiny I seek to discuss, through all that long and interesting day of
transit. I measured, as it seemed to me for the first time, the real
scale of the growth process that has put a four-track road nine hundred
miles across this exuberant land and scarred every available hill with
furnace and mine.
Bigness--that's the word! The very fields and farm-buildings seem to me
to have four times the size of our English farms.
Some casual suggestion of the wayside, I forget now what, set me
thinking of the former days, so recent that they are yet within the
lifetime of living men, when this was frontier land, when even the
middle west remained to be won. I thought of the slow diffusing
population of the forties, the pioneer wagon, the men armed with axe
and rifle, knife and revolver, the fear of the Indians, the weak and
casual incidence of law. Then the high-road was but a prairie track and
all these hills and hidden minerals unconquered fastnesses that might,
it seemed, hold out for centuries before they gave their treasure. How
quickly things had come! "Progress, progress," murmured the wheels,
and I began to make this steady, swift, and shiningly equipped train a
figure, just as I had made the _Carmania_ a figure of that big onward
sweep that is moving us all together. It was not a noisy train, after
the English fashion, nor did the cars sway and jump after the habit of
our lighter coaches, but the air was full of deep, triumphant rhythms.
"It goes on," I said, "invincibly," and even as the thought was in my
head, the brakes set up a droning, a vibration ran through the train
and we slowed and stopped. A minute passed, and then we rumbled softly
back to a little trestle-bridge and stood there.
I got up, looked from the window, and then went to the platform at the
end of the train. I found two men, a passenger and a colored parlor-car
attendant. The former was on the bottom step of the car, the latter was
supplying him with information.
"His head's still in the water," he remarked.
"Whose head?" said I.
"A man we've killed," said he. "We caught him in the trestle-bridge."
I descended a step, craned over my fellow-passenger, and saw a little
group standing curiously about the derelict thing that had been a
living man three minutes before. It was now a crumpled, dark-stained
blue blouse, a limply broken arm with hand askew, trousered legs that
sprawled quaintly, and a pair of heavy boots, lying in the sunlit fresh
grass by the water below the trestle-bridge....
A man on the line gave inadequate explanations. "He'd have been all
right if he hadn't come over this side," he said.
"Who was he?" said I.
"One of these Eyetalians on the line," he said, and turned away. The
train bristled now with a bunch of curiosity at every car end, and even
windows were opened....
Presently it was intimated to us by a whistle and the hasty return of
men to the cars that the incident had closed. We began to move forward
again, crept up to speed....
But I could not go on with my conception of the train as a symbol of
human advancement. That crumpled blue blouse and queerly careless legs
would get into the picture and set up all sorts of alien speculations.
I thought of distant north Italian valleys and brown boys among the
vines and goats, of the immigrants who had sung remotely to me out of
the Carmania's steerage, of the hopeful bright-eyed procession of the
new-comers through Ellis Island wicket, of the regiments of workers the
line had shown me, and I told myself a tale of this Italian's journey
to the land of promise, this land of gigantic promises....
For a time the big spectacle of America about me took on a quality of
magnificent infidelity....
And by reason of this incident my last Image of Material Progress
thundered into Washington station five minutes behind its scheduled
time.
CHAPTER V
THE ECONOMIC PROCESS
I
A Bird's-Eye View
Let me try now and make some sort of general picture of the American
nation as it impresses itself upon me. It is, you will understand, the
vision of a hurried bird of passage, defective and inaccurate at every
point of detail, but perhaps for my present purpose not so very much
the worse for that. The fact that I am transitory and bring a sort of
theorizing naïveté to this review is just what gives me the chance
to remark these obvious things the habituated have forgotten. I have
already tried to render something of the effect of huge unrestrained
growth and material progress that America first gives one, and I
have pointed out that so far America seems to me only to refresh an
old impression, to give starkly and startlingly what is going on
everywhere, what is indeed as much in evidence in Birkenhead or Milan
or London or Calcutta, a huge extension of human power and the scale
of human operations. This growth was elaborated in the physical and
chemical laboratories and the industrial experiments of the eighteenth
and early nineteenth century, and chiefly in Europe. The extension
itself is nothing typically American. Nevertheless America now shows
it best. America is most under the stress and urgency of it, resonates
most readily and loudly to its note.
The long distances of travel, and the sense of isolation between place
and place, the remoteness verging upon inaudibility of Washington in
Chicago, of Chicago in Boston, the vision I have had of America from
observation cars and railroad windows brings home to me more and more
that this huge development of human appliances and resources is here
going on in a community that is still, for all the dense crowds of
New York, the teeming congestion of the East Side, extraordinarily
scattered. America, one recalls, is still an unoccupied country, across
which the latest developments of civilization are rushing. We are
dealing here with a continuous area of land which is, leaving Alaska
out of account altogether, equal to Great Britain, France, the German
Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Italy, Belgium, Japan, Holland,
Spain and Portugal, Sweden and Norway, Turkey in Europe, Egypt and
the whole Empire of India, and the population spread out over this
vast space is still less than the joint population of the first two
countries named and not a quarter that of India. Moreover, it is not
spread at all evenly. Much of it is in undistributed clots. It is not
upon the soil, barely half of it is in holdings and homes and authentic
communities. It is a population of an extremely modern type. Urban
concentration has already gone far with it; fifteen millions of it are
crowded into and about twenty great cities, other eighteen millions
make up five hundred towns. Between these centres of population run
railways indeed, telegraph wires, telephone connections, tracks of
various sorts, but to the European eye these are mere scratchings on
a virgin surface. An empty wilderness manifests itself through this
thin network of human conveniences, appears in the meshes even at the
railroad side. Essentially America is still an unsettled land, with
only a few incidental good roads in favored places, with no universal
police, with no wayside inns where a civilized man may rest, with
still only the crudest of rural postal deliveries, with long stretches
of swamp and forest and desert by the track side, still unassailed
by industry. This much one sees clearly enough eastward of Chicago.
Westward, I am told, it becomes more and more the fact. In Idaho at
last, comes the untouched and perhaps invincible desert, plain and
continuous through the long hours of travel. Huge areas do not contain
one human being to the square mile, still vaster portions fall short of
two....
And this community, to which material progress is bringing such
enormous powers, and that is knotted so densely here and there, and
is otherwise so attenuated a veil over the huge land surface, is,
as Professor Münsterberg points out, in spite of vast and increasing
masses of immigrants still a curiously homogeneous one, homogeneous
in the spirit of its activities and speaking a common tongue. It is
sustained by certain economic conventions, inspired throughout by
certain habits, certain trends of suggestion, certain phrases and
certain interpretations that collectively make up what one may call the
American Idea. To the process of enlargement and diffusion and increase
and multiplying resources, we must now bring the consideration of the
social and economic process that is going on. What is the form of that
process as one finds it in America? An English Tory will tell you
promptly, "a scramble for dollars." A good American will tell you it is
self realization under equality of opportunity. The English Tory will
probably allege that that amounts to the same thing.
Let us look into that.
II
Liberty of Property
One contrast between America and the old world I had in mind before
ever I crossed the Atlantic, and now it comes before me very
vividly,--returns reinforced by a hundred little things observed and
felt. The contrast consists in the almost complete absence from the
normal American scheme, of certain immemorial factors in the social
structure of our European nations.
In the first place, every European nation except the English is rooted
to the soil by a peasantry, and even in England one still finds
the peasant represented, in most of his features by those sons of
dispossessed serf-peasants, the agricultural laborers. Here in America,
except in the regions where the negro abounds, there is no lower
stratum, no "soil people," to this community at all; your bottom-most
man is a mobile free man who can read, and who has ideas above digging
and pigs and poultry keeping, except incidentally for his own ends.
No one owns to subordination. As a consequence, any position which
involves the acknowledgment of an innate inferiority is difficult to
fill; there is, from the European point of view, an extraordinary
dearth of servants, and this endures in spite of a great peasant
immigration. The servile tradition will not root here now, it dies in
this soil. An enormous importation of European serfs and peasants goes
on, but as they touch this soil their backs begin to stiffen with a new
assertion.
And at the other end of the scale, also, one misses an element. There
is no territorial aristocracy, no aristocracy at all, no throne,
no legitimate and acknowledged representative of that upper social
structure of leisure, power, State responsibility, which in the old
European theory of society was supposed to give significance to the
whole. The American community, one cannot too clearly insist, does not
correspond to an entire European community at all, but only to the
middle masses of it, to the trading and manufacturing class between the
dimensions of the magnate and the clerk and skilled artisan. It is the
central part of the European organism without either the dreaming head
or the subjugated feet. Even the highly feudal slave-holding "county
family" traditions of Virginia and the South pass now out of memory.
So that in a very real sense the past of this American community is in
Europe, and the settled order of the past is left behind there. This
community was, as it were, taken off its roots, clipped of its branches
and brought hither. It began neither serf nor lord, but burgher and
farmer, it followed the normal development of the middle class under
Progress everywhere and became capitalistic. Essentially America is
a middle-class become a community and so its essential problems are
the problems of a modern individualistic society, stark and clear,
unhampered and unilluminated by any feudal traditions either at its
crest or at its base.
It would be interesting and at first only very slightly misleading to
pursue the rough contrast of American and English conditions upon these
lines. It is not difficult to show for example, that the two great
political parties in America represent only one English party, the
middle-class Liberal party, the party of industrialism and freedom.
There are no Tories to represent the feudal system, and no Labor party.
It is history, it is no mere ingenious gloss upon history, that the
Tories, the party of the crown, of the high gentry and control, of
mitigated property and an organic state, vanished from America at the
Revolution. They left the new world to the Whigs and Nonconformists and
to those less constructive, less logical, more popular and liberating
thinkers who became Radicals in England, and Jeffersonians and then
Democrats in America. All Americans are, from the English point of
view, Liberals of one sort or another. You will find a fac-simile
of the Declaration of Independence displayed conspicuously and
triumphantly beside Magna Charter in the London Reform Club, to carry
out this suggestion.
But these fascinating parallelisms will lead away from the chief
argument in hand, which is that the Americans started almost clear
of the medieval heritage, and developed in the utmost--purity if you
like--or simplicity or crudeness, whichever you will, the modern type
of productive social organization. They took the economic conventions
that were modern and progressive at the end of the eighteenth century
and stamped them into the Constitution as if they meant to stamp
them there for all time. In England you can still find feudalism,
medievalism, the Renascence, at every turn. America is pure eighteenth
century--still crystallizing out from a turbid and troubled solution.
To turn from any European state to America is, in these matters anyhow,
to turn from complication to a stark simplicity. The relationship
between employer and employed, between organizer and worker, between
capital and labor, which in England is qualified and mellowed and
disguised and entangled with a thousand traditional attitudes and
subordinations, stands out sharply in a bleak cold rationalism. There
is no feeling that property, privilege, honor, and a grave liability
to official public service ought to go together, none that uncritical
obedience is a virtue in a worker or that subordination carries with
it not only a sense of service but a claim for help. Coming across the
Atlantic has in these matters an effect of coming out of an iridescent
fog into a clear bright air.
This homologization of the whole American social mass, not with the
whole English social mass, but with its "modern" classes, its great
middle portion, and of its political sides with the two ingredients of
English Liberalism, goes further than a rough parallel. An Englishman
who, like myself, has been bred and who has lived all his life either
in London, with its predominant West-End, or the southern counties with
their fair large estates and the great country houses, is constantly
being reminded, when he meets manufacturing and business men from
Birmingham or Lancashire, of Americans, and when he meets Americans,
of industrial North-country people. There is more push and less tacit
assumption, more definition, more displayed energy and less restraint,
more action and less subtlety, more enterprise and self-assertion than
there is in the typical Englishman of London and the home counties.
The American carries on the contrast further, it is true, and his
speech is not northernly, but marked by the accent of Hampshire or
East Anglia, and better and clearer than his English equivalent's;
but one feels the two are of the same stuff, nevertheless, and made
by parallel conditions. The liberalism of the eighteenth century, the
material progress of the nineteenth have made them both--out of the
undifferentiated Stuart Englishman. And they are the same in their
attitude towards property and social duty, individualists to the
marrow. But the one grew inside a frame of regal, aristocratic, and
feudal institutions, and has chafed against it, struggled with it,
modified it, strained it, and been modified by it, but has remained
within it; the other broke it and escaped to complete self-development.
The liberalism of the eighteenth century was essentially the rebellion
of the modern industrial organization against the monarchial and
aristocratic State,--against hereditary privilege, against restrictions
upon bargains--whether they were hard bargains or not. Its spirit
was essentially Anarchistic,--the antithesis of Socialism. It was
the anti-State. It aimed not only to liberate men but property from
State control. Its most typical expressions, the Declaration of
Independence, and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, are
zealously emphatic for the latter interest--for the sacredness of
contracts and possessions. Post Reformation liberalism did to a large
extent let loose property upon mankind. The English Civil War of the
seventeenth century, like the American revolution of the eighteenth,
embodied essentially the triumphant refusal of private property to
submit to taxation without consent. In England the result was tempered
and qualified, security for private property was achieved, but not
cast-iron security; each man who had property became king of that
property, but only a constitutional and conditional king. In America
the victory of private property was complete. Let one instance suffice
to show how decisively it was established that individual property
and credit and money were sacred. Ten years ago the Supreme Court,
trying a case arising out of the General Revenue tax of 1894, decided
that a graduated income-tax, such as the English Parliament might pass
to-morrow, can never be levied upon the United States nation without
a change in the Constitution, which can be effected only by a vote of
two-thirds of both Houses of Congress as an initiative, and this must
be ratified either by the legislatures of three-fourths of the States,
or by special conventions representing three-fourths of the States.
The fundamental law of the States forbids any such invasion of the
individual's ownership. No national income-tax is legal, and there is
practically no power, short of revolution, to alter that....
Could anything be more emphatic? That tall Liberty with its spiky crown
that stands in New York Harbor and casts an electric flare upon the
world, is, indeed, the liberty of Property, and there she stands at the
Zenith....
III
Aggregation and Some Protests
Now the middle-class of the English population and the whole population
of America that matters at all when we discuss ideas, is essentially
an emancipated class, a class that has rebelled against superimposed
privilege and honor, and achieved freedom for its individuals and
their property. Without property its freedom is a featureless and
unsubstantial theory, and so it relies for the reality of life upon
that, upon the possession and acquisition and development of property,
that is to say upon "business." That is the quality of its life.
Everywhere in the modern industrial and commercial class this
deep-lying feeling that the State is something escaped from, has
worked out to the same mental habit of social irresponsibility, and in
America it has worked unimpeded. Patriotism has become a mere national
self-assertion, a sentimentality of flag cheering, with no constructive
duties. Law, social justice, the pride and preservation of the state
as a whole are taken as provided for before the game began, and one
devotes one-self to business. At business all men are held to be equal,
and none is his brother's keeper.
All men are equal at the great game of business. You try for the best
of each bargain and so does your opponent; if you chance to have more
in your hand than he--well, that's your advantage, and you use it.
Presently he may have more than you. You take care he doesn't if you
can, but you play fair--except for the advantage in your hand; you play
fair--and hard.
Now this middle-class equality ultimately destroys itself. Out of this
conflict of equals, and by virtue of the fact that property, like all
sorts of matter, does tend to gravitate towards itself whenever it is
free, there emerge the modern rich and the modern toiler.
One can trace the process in two or three generations in Lancashire or
the Potteries, or any industrial region of England. One sees first the
early Lancashire industrialism, sees a district of cotton-spinners more
or less equal together, small men all; then come developments, comes
a state of ideally free competition with some men growing large, with
most men dropping into employment, but still with ample chances for an
industrious young man to end as a prosperous master; and so through a
steady growth in the size of the organization to the present opposition
of an employer class in possession of everything, almost inaccessibly
above, and an employed class below. The railways come, and the wealthy
class reaches out to master these new enterprises, capitalistic from
the outset....
America is simply repeating the history of the Lancashire industrialism
on a gigantic scale, and under an enormous variety of forms.
But in England, as the modern Rich rise up, they come into a world of
gentry with a tradition of public service and authority; they learn
one by one and assimilate themselves to the legend of the "governing
class" with a sense of proprietorship which is also, in its humanly
limited way, a sense of duty to the state. They are pseudomorphs after
aristocrats. They receive honors, they inter-marry, they fall (and
their defeated competitors too fall) into the mellowed relationships
of an aristocratic system. That is not a permanent mutual attitude;
it does, however, mask and soften the British outline. Industrialism
becomes quasi-feudal. America, on the other hand, had no effectual
"governing class," there has been no such modification, no clouding
of the issue. Its Rich, to one's superficial inspection, do seem to
lop out, swell up into an immense consumption and power and inanity,
develop no sense of public duties, remain winners of a strange game
they do not criticise, concerned now only to hold and intensify their
winnings. The losers accept no subservience. That material progress,
that secular growth in scale of all modern enterprises, widens the gulf
between Owner and Worker daily. More and more do men realize that this
game of free competition and unrestricted property does not go on for
ever; it is a game that first in this industry and then in that, and
at last in all, can be played out and is being played out. Property
becomes organized, consolidated, concentrated, and secured. This is
the fact to which America is slowly awaking at the present time. The
American community is discovering a secular extinction of opportunity,
and the appearance of powers against which individual enterprise and
competition are hopeless. Enormous sections of the American public are
losing their faith in any personal chance of growing rich and truly
free, and are developing the consciousness of an expropriated class.
This realization has come slowlier in America than in Europe,
because of the enormous undeveloped resources of America. So long as
there was an unlimited extent of unappropriated and unexplored land
westward, so long could tension be relieved by so simple an injunction
as Horace Greeley's, "Go West, young man; go West." And to-day,
albeit that is no longer true of the land, and there are already
far larger concentrations of individual possessions in the United
States of America than anywhere else in the world, yet so vast are
their continental resources that it still remains true that nowhere
in the world is property so widely diffused. Consider the one fact
that America can take in three-quarters of a million of workers in
one year without producing a perceptible fall in wages, and you will
appreciate the scale upon which things are measured here, the scale
by which even Mr. J.D. Rockefeller's billion dollars becomes no more
than a respectable but by no means overwhelming "pile." For all these
concentrations, the western farmers still own their farms, and it is
the rule rather than the exception for a family to possess the freehold
of the house it lives in. But the process of concentration goes on
nevertheless--is going on now perceptibly to the American mind. That
it has not gone so far as in the European instance it is a question of
size, just as the gestation of an elephant takes longer than that of a
mouse. If the process is larger and slower, it is, for the reasons I
have given, plainer, and it will be discussed and dealt with plainly.
That steady trend towards concentration under individualistic rules,
until individual competition becomes disheartened and hopeless, is the
essential form of the economic and social process in America as I see
it now, and it has become the cardinal topic of thought and discussion
in the American mind.
[Illustration: WESTERN FARMERS STILL OWN THEIR FARMS]
This realization has been reached after the most curious hesitation.
There is every reason for this; for it involves the contradiction
of much that seems fundamental in the American idea. It amounts to a
national change of attitude. It is a conscious change of attitude that
is being deliberately made.
This slow reluctant process of disillusionment with individualism is
interestingly traceable through the main political innovations of the
last twenty years. There was the discovery in the east that the supply
of land was not limitless, and we had the Single Tax movement, and
the epoch of the first Mr. Henry George. He explained fervently of
course, how individualistic, how profoundly American he was--but land
was not to be monopolized. Then came the discovery in the west that
there were limits to borrowing and that gold appreciated against the
debtor, and so we have the Populist movement and extraordinary schemes
for destroying the monopolization of gold and credit. Mr. Bryan led
that and nearly captured the country, but only in last May's issue of
the _Century Magazine_ I found him explaining (expounding meanwhile a
largely socialistic programme) that he too is an Individualist of the
purest water. And then the attack shifted to the destruction of free
competition by the trusts. The small business went on sufferance, 'not
knowing from week to week when its hour to sell out or fight might
come. The Trusts have crushed competition, raised prices against the
consumer, and served him often quite abominably. The curious reader
may find in Mr. Upton Sinclair's essentially veracious _Jungle_ the
possibilities of individualistic enterprise in the matter of food and
decency. The States have been agitated by a big disorganized Anti-Trust
movement for some years, it becomes of the gravest political importance
at every election, and the sustained study of the affairs and methods
of that most typical and prominent of trust organizations, the Standard
Oil Company, by Miss Tarbell and a host of followers, is bringing to
light more and more clearly the defencelessness of the common person,
and his hopelessness, however enterprising, as a competitor against
those great business aggregations. His faith in all his reliances and
securities fades in the new light that grows about him, he sees his
little investments, his insurance policy, his once open and impartial
route to market by steamboat and rail, all passing into the grip of the
great property accumulators. The aggregation of property has created
powers that are stronger than state legislatures and more persistent
than any public opinion can be, that have no awe and no sentiment for
legislation, that are prepared to disregard it or evade it whenever
they can.
And these aggregations are taking on immortality and declining to
disintegrate when their founders die. The Astor property, the Jay
Gould property, the Marshall Field property, for example, do not
break up, become undying centres for the concentration of wealth, and
it is doubtful if there is any power to hinder such a development of
perpetual fortunes. In England when Thelussen left his investments to
accumulate, a simple little act of Parliament set his will aside. But
Congress is not sovereign, there is no national sovereign power in
America, and Property in America, it would seem, is absolutely free to
do these things. So you have President Roosevelt in a recent oration
attacking the man with the Muck Rake (who gathered vile dross for the
love of it), and threatening the limitation of inheritance. But he too,
quite as much as Mr. Bryan, assures the public that he is a fervent
individualist.
So in this American community, whose distinctive conception is its
emphatic assertion of the freedom of individual property, whose very
symbol is that spike-crowned Liberty gripping a torch in New York
Harbor, there has been and is going on a successive repudiation of that
freedom in almost every department of ownable things by considerable
masses of thinking people, a denial of the soundness of individual
property in land, an organized attempt against the accumulation of
gold and credit, by a systematic watering of the currency, a revolt
against the aggregatory outcome of untrammelled business competition, a
systematic interference with the freedom of railways and carriers to do
business as they please, and a protest from the most representative of
Americans against hereditary wealth....
That, in general terms, is the economic and social process as one sees
it in America now, a process of systematically concentrating wealth on
the part of an energetic minority, and of a great insurgence of alarm,
of waves of indignation and protest and threat on the part of that
vague indefinite public that Mr. Roosevelt calls the "nation."
And this goes on side by side with a process of material progress
that partly masks its quality, that keeps the standard of life from
falling and prevents any sense of impoverishment among the mass of
the losers in the economic struggle. Through this material progress
there is a constant substitution of larger, cleaner, more efficient
possibilities, and more and more wholesale and far-sighted methods of
organization for the dark, confused, untidy individualistic expedients
of the Victorian time. An epoch which was coaly and mechanical,
commercial and adventurous after the earlier fashion is giving place,
almost automatically, to one that will be electrical and scientific,
artistic and creative. The material progress due to a secular increase
in knowledge, and the economic progress interfere and combine with and
complicate one another, the former constantly changes the forms and
appliances of the latter, changes the weapons and conditions, and may
ultimately change the spirit and conceptions of the struggle. The
latter now clogs and arrests the former. So in its broad features, as
a conflict between the birth strength of a splendid civilization and a
hampering commercialism, I see America.
CHAPTER VI
SOME ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH
I
The Spenders
It is obvious that in a community that has disavowed aristocracy or
rule and subordination or service, which has granted unparalleled
freedoms to property and despised and distrusted the state, the chief
business of life will consist in getting or attempting to get. But the
chief aspect of American life that impinges first upon the European
is not this, but the behavior of a certain overflow at the top, of
people who have largely and triumphantly got, and with hand, pockets,
safe-deposit vaults full of dollars, are proceeding to realize victory.
Before I came to America it was in his capacity of spender that I
chiefly knew the American; as a person who had demoralized Regent
Street and the Rue de Rivoli, who had taught the London cabman to
demand "arf a dollar" for a shilling fare, who bought old books and
old castles, and had driven the prices of old furniture to incredible
altitudes, and was slowly transferring our incubus of artistic
achievement to American soil. One of my friends in London is Mr. X,
who owns those two houses full of fine "pieces" near the British Museum
and keeps his honor unsullied in the most deleterious of trades. "They
come to me," he said, "and ask me to buy for them. It's just buying.
One of them wants to beat the silver of another, doesn't care what
he pays. Another clamors for tapestry. They trust me as they trust a
doctor. There's no understanding--no feeling. It's hard to treat them
well."
And there is the story of Y, who is wise about pictures. "If you want
a Botticelli that size, Mr. Record, I can't find it," he said; "you'll
have to have it made for you."
These American spenders have got the whole world "beat" at the foolish
game of collecting, and in all the peculiar delights of shopping they
excel. And they are the crown and glory of hotel managers throughout
the world. There is something naïve, something childishly expectant
and acquisitive, about this aspect of American riches. There appears
no aristocracy in their tradition, no sense of permanence and
great responsibility, there appears no sense of subordination and
service; from the individualistic business struggle they have emerged
triumphant, and what is there to do now but spend and have a good time?
They swarm in the pleasant places of the Riviera, they pervade Paris
and Rome, they occupy Scotch castles and English estates, their
motor-cars are terrible and wonderful. And the London Savoy Hotel still
flaunts its memory of one splendid American night. The court-yard was
flooded with water tinted an artistic blue--to the great discomfort of
the practically inevitable gold-fish, and on this floated a dream of
a gondola. And in the gondola the table was spread and served by the
Savoy staff, mysteriously disguised in appropriate fancy costume. The
whole thing--there's only two words for it--was "perfectly lovely."
"The illusion"--whatever that was--we are assured, was complete. It
wasn't a nursery treat, you know. The guests, I am told, were important
grown-up people.
This sort of childishness, of course, has nothing distinctively
American in it. Any people of sluggish and uneducated imagination who
find themselves profusely wealthy, and are too stupid to understand the
huge moral burden, the burden of splendid possibilities it carries,
may do things of this sort. It was not Americans but a party of
South-African millionaires who achieved the kindred triumph of the
shirt-and-belt dinner under a tent in a London hotel dining-room. The
glittering procession of carriages and motor-carriages which I watched
driving down Fifth Avenue, New York, apparently for the pleasure
of driving up again, is to be paralleled on the Pincio, in Naples,
in Paris, and anywhere where irresponsible pleasure-seekers gather
together. After the naïve joy of buying things comes the joy of
wearing them publicly, the simple pleasure of the promenade. These
things are universals. But nowhere has this spending struck me as
being so solid and substantial, so nearly twenty-two carats fine, as
here. The shops have an air of solid worth, are in the key of butlers,
bishops, opera-boxes, high-class florists, powdered footmen, Roman
beadles, motor-broughams, to an extent that altogether outshines either
Paris or London.
[Illustration: PLUMP AND PRETTY PUPILS OF EXTRAVAGANCE]
And in such great hotels as the Waldorf-Astoria, one finds the new
arrivals, the wives and daughters from the West and the South, in
new, bright hats, and splendors of costume, clubbed together, under
the discreetest management, for this and that, learning how to spend
collectively, reaching out to assemblies, to dinners. From an observant
tea-table beneath the fronds of a palm, I surveyed a fine array of
these plump and pretty pupils of extravagance. They were for the
most part quite brilliantly as well as newly dressed, and with an
artless and pleasing unconsciousness of the living from inside. Smart
innocents! I found all that gathering most contagiously interested and
happy and fresh.
And I watched spending, too, as one sees it in the various incompatible
houses of upper Fifth Avenue and along the border of Central Park.
That, too, suggests a shop, a shop where country houses are sold and
stored; there is the Tiffany house, a most expensive-looking article,
on the shelf, and the Carnegie house. There had been no pretence on
the part of the architects that any house belonged in any sense to any
other, that any sort of community held them together. The link is just
spending. You come to New York and spend; you go away again. To some of
these palaces people came and went; others had their blinds down and
conveyed a curious effect of a sunlit child excursionist in a train who
falls asleep and droops against his neighbor. One of the Vanderbilt
houses was frankly and brutally boarded up. Newport, I am told, takes
up and carries on the same note of magnificent irresponsibility, and
there one admires the richest forms of simplicity, triumphs of villa
architecture in thatch, and bathing bungalows in marble....
There exists already, of these irresponsible American rich, a splendid
group of portraits, done without extenuation and without malice, in
the later work of that great master of English fiction, Mr. Henry
James. There one sees them at their best, their refinement, their large
wealthiness, their incredible unreality. I think of _The Ambassadors_
and that mysterious source of the income of the Newcomes, a mystery
that, with infinite artistic tact, was never explained; but more I
think of _The Golden Bowl_, most spacious and serene of novels.
In that splendid and luminous bubble, the Prince Amerigo and Maggie
Verver, Mr. Verver, that assiduous collector, and the adventurous
Charlotte Stant float far above a world of toil and anxiety, spending
with a large refinement, with a perfected assurance and precision. They
spend as flowers open. But this is the quintessence, the sublimation,
the idealization of the rich American. Few have the restraint for
this. For the rest, when one has shopped and shopped, and collected
and bought everything, and promenaded on foot, in motor-car and
motor-brougham and motor-boat, in yacht and special train; when one
has a fine house here and a fine house there, and photography and the
special article have exhausted admiration, there remains chiefly that
one broader and more presumptuous pleasure--spending to give. American
givers give most generously, and some of them, it must be admitted,
give well. But they give individually, incoherently, each pursuing a
personal ideal. There are unsuccessful givers....
American cities are being littered with a disorder of unsystematized
foundations and picturesque legacies, much as I find my nursery floor
littered with abandoned toys and battles and buildings when the
children are in bed after a long, wet day. Yet some of the gifts are
very splendid things. There is, for example, the Leland Stanford Junior
University in California, a vast monument of parental affection and
Richardsonian architecture, with professors, and teaching going on in
its interstices; and there is Mrs. Gardner's delightful Fenway Court,
a Venetian palace, brought almost bodily from Italy and full of finely
gathered treasures....
All this giving is, in its aggregate effect, as confused as industrial
Chicago. It presents no clear scheme of the future, promises no growth;
it is due to the impulsive generosity of a mob of wealthy persons, with
no broad common conceptions, with no collective dream, with little to
hold them together but imitation and the burning possession of money;
the gifts overlap, they lie at any angle, one with another. Some are
needless, some mischievous. There are great gaps of unfulfilled need
between.
And through the multitude of lesser, though still mighty, givers, comes
that colossus of property, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, the jubilee plunger of
beneficence, that rosy, gray-haired, nimble little figure, going to
and fro between two continents, scattering library buildings as if he
sowed wild oats, buildings that may or may not have some educational
value, if presently they are reorganized and properly stocked with
books. Anon he appals the thrifty burgesses of Dunfermline with vast
and uncongenial responsibilities of expenditure; anon he precipitates
the library of the late Lord Acton upon our embarrassed Mr. Morley;
anon he pauperizes the students of Scotland. He diffuses his monument
throughout the English-speaking lands, amid circumstances of the
most flagrant publicity; the receptive learned, the philanthropic
noble, bow in expectant swaths before him. He is the American fable
come true; nothing seems too wild to believe of him, and he fills the
European imagination with an altogether erroneous conception of the
self-dissipating quality in American wealth.
II
The Astor Fortune
Because, now, as a matter of fact, dissipation is by no means the
characteristic quality of American getting. The good American will
indeed tell you solemnly that in America it is three generations "from
shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves"; but this has about as much truth in
it as that remarkable absence of any pure-bred Londoners of the third
generation, dear to the British imagination.
Amid the vast yeasty tumult of American business, of the getting and
losing which are the main life of this community, nothing could be
clearer than the steady accumulation of great masses of property that
show no signs of disintegrating again. The very rich people display
an indisposition to divide their estates; the Marshall Field estate
in Chicago, for example, accumulates; the Jay Gould inheritance
survives great strains. And when first I heard that "shirt-sleeves to
shirt-sleeves" proverb, Which is so fortifying a consolation to the
older school of Americans, my mind flew back to the Thames Embankment,
as one sees it from the steamboat on the river. There, just eastward of
the tall red Education offices of the London County Council, stands a
quite graceful and decorative little building of gray stone, that jars
not at all with the fine traditions of the adjacent Temple, but catches
the eye, nevertheless, with its very big, very gilded vane in the form
of a ship. This is the handsome strong-box to which New York pays
gigantic yearly tribute, the office in which Mr. W.W. Astor conducts
his affairs. They are not his private and individual affairs, but the
affairs of the estate of the late J.J. Astor--still undivided, and
still growing year by year.
Mr. Astor seems to me to be a much more representative figure of
American wealth than any of the conspicuous spenders who strike so
vividly upon the European imagination. His is the most retiring of
personalities. In this picturesque stone casket he works; his staff
works under his cognizance, and administers, I know not to what ends
nor to what extent, revenues that exceed those of many sovereign
states. He himself is impressed by it, and, without arrogance, he makes
a visit to his offices, with a view of its storage vaults, its halls of
disciplined clerks, a novel and characteristic form of entertainment.
For the rest, Mr. Astor leads a life of modest affluence, and recreates
himself with the genealogy of his family, short stories about treasure
lost and found, and such like literary work.
Now here you have wealth with, as it were, the minimum of ownership,
as indeed owning its possessor. Nobody seems to be spending that huge
income the crowded enormity of New York squeezes out. The "Estate of
the late J.J. Astor" must be accumulating more wealth and still more;
under careful and systematic management must be rolling up like a
golden snowball under that golden weather-vane. In the most accidental
relation to its undistinguished, harmless, arithmetical proprietor!
Your anarchist orator or your crude socialist is always talking of the
rich as blood-suckers, robbers, robber-barons, _grafters_ and so on.
It really is nonsense to talk like that. In the presence of Mr. W.W.
Astor these preposterous accusations answer themselves. The thing is
a logical outcome of the assumptions about private property on which
our contemporary civilization is based, and Mr. Astor, for all that
he draws gold from New York as effectually as a ferret draws blood
from a rabbit, is indeed the most innocent of men. He finds himself
in a certain position, and he sits down very congenially and adds and
adds and adds, and relieves the tedium of his leisure in literary
composition. Had he been born at the level of a dry-goods clerk he
would probably have done the same sort of thing on a smaller scale,
and it would have been the little Poddlecombe literary society, and
not the _Pall Mall Magazine_, that would have been the richer for his
compositions. It is just the scale of the circumstances that differs....
III
The Chief Getters
The lavish spending of Fifth Avenue and Paris and Rome and Mayfair is
but the flower, the often brilliant, the sometimes gaudy flower of
the American economic process; and such slow and patient accumulators
as Mr. Astor the rounding and ripening fruit. One need be only a
little while in America to realize this, and to discern the branch and
leaf, and at last even the aggressive insatiable spreading root of
aggregating property, that was liberated so effectually when America
declared herself free.
The group of people that attracts the largest amount of attention in
press and talk, that most obsesses the American imagination, and that
is indeed the most significant at the present time, is the little
group--a few score men perhaps altogether--who are emerging distinctly
as winners in that great struggle to get, into which this commercial
industrialism has naturally resolved itself. Central among them are
the men of the Standard Oil group, the "octopus" which spreads its
ramifying tentacles through the whole system of American business,
absorbing and absorbing, grasping and growing. The extraordinarily able
investigations of such writers as Miss Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker,
the rhetorical exposures of Mr. T.W. Lawson, have brought out the
methods and quality of this group of persons with a particularity that
has been reserved heretofore for great statesmen and crowned heads, and
with an unflattering lucidity altogether unprecedented. Not only is
every hair on their heads numbered, but the number is published. They
are known to their pettiest weaknesses and to their most accidental
associations. And in this astonishing blaze of illumination they
continue steadfastly to get.
These men, who are creating the greatest system of correlated private
properties in the world, who are wealthy beyond all precedent, seem
for the most part to be men with no ulterior dream or aim. They are
not voluptuaries, they are neither artists nor any sort of creators,
and they betray no high political ambitions. Had they anything of the
sort they would not be what they are, they would be more than that and
less. They want and they get, they are inspired by the brute will in
their wealth to have more wealth and more, to a systematic ardor. They
are men of a competing, patient, enterprising, acquisitive enthusiasm.
They have found in America the perfectly favorable environment for
their temperaments. In no other country and in no other age could they
have risen to such eminence. America is still, by virtue of its great
Puritan tradition and in the older sense of the word, an intensely
moral land. Most lusts here are strongly curbed, by public opinion, by
training and tradition. But the lust of acquisition has not been curbed
but glorified....
These financial leaders are accused by the press of every sort of crime
in the development of their great organizations and their fight against
competitors, but I feel impelled myself to acquit them of anything so
heroic as a general scheme of criminality, as a systematic organization
of power. They are men with a good deal of contempt for legislation
and state interference, but that is no distinction, it has unhappily
been part of the training of the average American citizen, and they
have no doubt exceeded the letter if not the spirit of the laws of
business competition. They have played to win and not for style, and
if they personally had not done so somebody else would; they fill a
position which from the nature of things, somebody is bound to fill.
They have, no doubt, carried sharpness to the very edge of dishonesty,
but what else was to be expected from the American conditions? Only
by doing so and taking risks is pre-eminent success in getting to be
attained. They have developed an enormous system of espionage, but on
his smaller scale every retail grocer, every employer of servants does
something in that way. They have secret agents, false names, concealed
bargains,--what else could one expect? People have committed suicide
through their operations--but in a game which is bound to bring the
losers to despair it is childish to charge the winners with murder.
It's the game that is criminal. It is ridiculous, I say, to write of
these men as though they were unparalleled villains, intellectual
overmen, conscienceless conquerors of the world. Mr. J.D. Rockefeller's
mild, thin-lipped, pleasant face gives the lie to all such melodramatic
nonsense.
I must confess to a sneaking liking for this much-reviled man. One
thinks of Miss Tarbell's description of him, displaying his first
boyish account-book, his ledger A, to a sympathetic gathering of the
Baptist young, telling how he earned fifty dollars in the first three
months of his clerking in a Chicago warehouse, and how savingly he
dealt with it. Hear his words:
"You could not get that book from me for all the modern ledgers in New
York, nor for all that they would bring. It almost brings tears to my
eyes when I read over this little book, and it fills me with a sense of
gratitude I cannot express....
"I know some people, ... especially some young men, find it difficult
to keep a little money in their pocket-book. I learned to keep money,
and, as we have a way of saying, it did not burn a hole in my pocket. I
was taught that it was the thing to keep the money and take care of it.
Among the early experiences that were helpful to me that I recollect
with pleasure, was one of working a few days for a neighbor digging
potatoes--an enterprising and thrifty farmer who could dig a great many
potatoes. I was a boy perhaps thirteen or fourteen years of age, and he
kept me busy from morning until night. It was a ten-hour day....
"And as I was saving these little sums, I soon learned I could get as
much interest for fifty dollars loaned at seven per cent.--the legal
rate in the State of New York at that time for a year--as I could earn
by digging potatoes ten days. The impression was gaining ground with me
that it was a good thing to let money be my slave and not make myself a
slave to money. I have tried to remember that in every sense."
This is not the voice of any sort of contemptuous trampler of his
species. This is the voice of an industrious, acquisitive, commonplace,
pious man, as honestly and simply proud of his acquisitiveness as a
stamp-collector might be. At times, in his acquisitions, the strength
of his passion may have driven him to lengths beyond the severe moral
code, but the same has been true of stamp-collectors. He is a man who
has taken up with great natural aptitude an ignoble tradition which
links economy and earning with piety and honor. His teachers were
to blame, that Baptist community that is now so ashamed of its son
that it refuses his gifts. To a large extent he is the creature of
opportunity; he has been flung to the topmost pinnacle of human envy,
partly by accident, partly by that peculiarity of American conditions
that has subordinated, in the name of liberty, all the grave and
ennobling affairs of statecraft to a middle-class freedom of commercial
enterprise. Quarrel with that if you like. It is unfair and ridiculous
to quarrel with him.
CHAPTER VII
CERTAIN WORKERS
I
Those Who Do Not Get
Let us now look a little at another aspect of this process of
individualistic competition which is the economic process in America,
and which is giving us on its upper side the spenders of Fifth Avenue,
the slow accumulators of the Astor type, and the great getters of the
giant business organizations, the Trusts and acquisitive finance.
We have concluded that this process of free and open competition in
business which, clearly, the framers of the American Constitution
imagined to be immortal, does as a matter of fact tend to kill itself
through the advantage property gives in the acquisition of more
property. But before we can go on to estimate the further future
of this process we must experiment with another question. What is
happening to those who have not got and who are not getting wealth, who
are, in fact, falling back in the competition?
Now there can be little doubt to any one who goes to and fro in
America that in spite of the huge accumulation of property in a few
hands that is now in progress, there is still no general effect of
impoverishment. To me, coming from London to New York, the effect
of the crowd in the trolley-cars and subways and streets was one of
exceptional prosperity. New York has no doubt its effects of noise,
disorder, discomfort, and a sort of brutality, but to begin with one
sees nothing of the underfed people, the numerous dingily clad and
grayly housed people who catch the eye in London. Even in the congested
arteries, the filthy back streets of the East Side I found myself
saying, as a thing remarkable, "These people have money to spend." In
London one travels long distances for two cents, and great regiments of
people walk; in New York the universal fare is five cents and everybody
rides. Common people are better gloved and better booted in America
than in any European country I know, in spite of the higher prices for
clothing here, the men wear ready-made suits, it is true, to a much
greater extent, but they are newer and brighter than the London clerk's
carefully brushed, tailor-made garments. Wages translated from dollars
into shillings seem enormous.
And there is no perceptible fall in wages going on. On the whole wages
tend to rise. For almost all sorts of men, for working women who are
not "refined," there is a limitless field of employment. The fact that
a growing proportion of the wealth of the community is passing into
the hands of a small minority of successful getters, is masked to
superficial observation by the enormous increase of the total wealth.
The growth process overrides the economic process and may continue to
do so for many years.
So that the great mass of the population is not consciously defeated
in the economic game. It is only failing to get a large share in
the increment of wealth. The European reader must dismiss from his
mind any conception of the general American population as a mass of
people undergoing impoverishment through the enrichment of the few. He
must substitute for that figure a mass of people, very busy, roughly
prosperous, generally self-satisfied, but ever and again stirred to
bouts of irascibility and suspicion, inundated by a constantly swelling
flood of prosperity that pours through it and over it and passes by it,
without changing or enriching it at all. Ever and again it is irritated
by some rise in price, an advance in coal, for example, or meat or
rent, that swallows up some anticipated gain, but that is an entirely
different thing from want or distress, from the fireless hungering
poverty of Europe.
[Illustration: NEW YORK'S CROWDED, LITTERED EAST SIDE]
Nevertheless, the sense of losing develops and spreads in the mass of
the American people. Privations are not needed to create a sense of
economic disadvantage; thwarted hopes suffice. The speed and pressure
of work here is much greater than in Europe, the impatience for
realization intenser. The average American comes into life prepared
to "get on," and ready to subordinate most things in life to that. He
encounters a rising standard of living. He finds it more difficult to
get on than his father did before him. He is perplexed and irritated
by the spectacle of lavish spending and the report of gigantic
accumulations that outshine his utmost possibilities of enjoyment or
success. He is a busy and industrious man, greatly preoccupied by the
struggle, but when he stops to think and talk at all, there can be
little doubt that his outlook is a disillusioned one, more and more
tinged with a deepening discontent.
II
The Little Messenger-boy
But the state of mind of the average American we have to consider
later. That is the central problem of this horoscope we contemplate.
Before we come to that we have to sketch out all the broad aspects of
the situation with which that mind has to deal.
Now in the preceding chapter I tried to convey my impression of the
spending and wealth-getting of this vast community; I tried to convey
how irresponsible it was, how unpremeditated. The American rich have,
as it were, floated up out of a confused struggle of equal individuals.
That individualistic commercial struggle has not only flung up these
rich to their own and the world's amazement, it is also, with an equal
blindness, crushing and maiming great multitudes of souls. But this
is a fact that does not smite upon one's attention at the outset. The
English visitor to the great towns sees the spending, sees the general
prosperity, the universal air of confident pride; he must go out of his
way to find the under side to these things.
One little thing set me questioning. I had been one Sunday night
down-town, supping and talking with Mr. Abraham Cahan about the "East
Side," that strange city within a city which has a drama of its own
and a literature and a press, and about Russia and her problem, and I
was returning on the subway about two o'clock in the morning. I became
aware of a little lad sitting opposite me, a childish-faced delicate
little creature of eleven years old or so, wearing the uniform of a
messenger-boy. He drooped with fatigue, roused himself with a start,
edged off his seat with a sigh, stepped off the car, and was vanishing
up-stairs into the electric glare of Astor Place as the train ran out
of the station.
"What on earth," said I, "is that baby doing abroad at this time of
night?"
For me this weary little wretch became the irritant centre of a painful
region of inquiry. "How many hours a day may a child work in New York,"
I began to ask people, "and when may a boy leave school?"
I had blundered, I found, upon the weakest spot in America's fine front
of national well-being. My eyes were opened to the childish newsboys
who sold me papers, and the little bootblacks at the street corners.
Nocturnal child employment is a social abomination. I gathered stories
of juvenile vice, of lads of nine and ten suffering from terrible
diseases, of the contingent sent by these messengers to the hospitals
and jails. I began to realize another aspect of that great theory
of the liberty of property and the subordination of the state to
business, upon which American institutions are based. That theory has
no regard for children. Indeed, it is a theory that disregards women
and children, the cardinal facts of life altogether. They are private
things....
It is curious how little we, who live in the dawning light of a new
time, question the intellectual assumptions of the social order about
us. We find ourselves in a life of huge confusions and many cruelties,
we plan this and that to remedy and improve, but very few of us go down
to the ideas that begot these ugly conditions, the laws, the usages
and liberties that are now in their detailed expansion so perplexing,
intricate, and overwhelming. Yet the life of man is altogether made up
of will cast into the mould of ideas, and only by correcting ideas,
changing ideas and replacing ideas are any ameliorations and advances
to be achieved in human destiny. All other things are subordinate to
that.
Now the theory of liberty upon which the liberalism of Great Britain,
the Constitution of the United States, and the bourgeois Republic of
France rests, assumes that all men are free and equal. They are all
tacitly supposed to be adult and immortal, they are sovereign over
their property and over their wives and children, and everything is
framed with a view to insuring them security in the enjoyment of
their rights. No doubt this was a better theory than that of the
divine right of kings, against which it did triumphant battle, but it
does, as one sees it to-day, fall most extraordinarily short of the
truth, and only a few logical fanatics have ever tried to carry it
out to its complete consequences. For example, it ignored the facts
that more than half of the adult people in a country are women, and
that all the men and women of a country taken together are hardly as
numerous and far less important to the welfare of that country than
the individuals under age. It regarded living as just living, a stupid
dead level of egotistical effort and enjoyment; it was blind to the
fact that living is part growing, part learning, part dying to make way
and altogether service and sacrifice. It asserted that the care and
education of children, and business bargains affecting the employment
and welfare of women and children, are private affairs. It resisted the
compulsory education of children and factory legislation, therefore,
with extraordinary persistence and bitterness. The commonsense of
the three great progressive nations concerned has been stronger
than their theory, but to this day enormous social evils are to be
traced to that passionate jealousy of state intervention between a
man and his wife, his children, and other property, which is the
distinctive unprecedented feature of the originally middle-class modern
organization of society upon commercial and industrial conceptions in
which we are all (and America most deeply) living.
I began with a drowsy little messenger-boy in the New York Subway.
Before I had done with the question I had come upon amazing things.
Just think of it! This richest, greatest country the world has ever
seen has over 1,700,000 children under fifteen years of age toiling
in fields, factories, mines, and workshops. And Robert Hunter--whose
_Poverty_, if I were autocrat, should be compulsory reading for every
prosperous adult in the United States, tells me of "not less than
eighty thousand children, most of whom are little girls, at present
employed in the textile mills of this country. In the South there are
now six times as many children at work as there were twenty years ago.
Child labor is increasing yearly in that section of the country. Each
year more little ones are brought in from the fields and hills to live
in the degrading atmosphere of the mill towns."...
Children are deliberately imported by the Italians. I gathered from
Commissioner Watchorn at Ellis Island that the proportion of little
nephews and nieces, friends' sons, and so forth, brought in by them is
peculiarly high, and I heard him try and condemn a doubtful case. It
was a particularly unattractive Italian in charge of a dull-eyed little
boy of no ascertainable relationship....
In the worst days of cotton-milling in England the conditions were
hardly worse than those now existing in the South. Children, the
tiniest and frailest, of five and six years of age, rise in the morning
and, like old men and women, go to the mills to do their day's labor;
and when they return home, "wearily fling themselves on their beds, too
tired to take off their clothes." Many children work all night--"in
the maddening racket of the machinery, in an atmosphere unsanitary and
clouded with humidity and lint."
"It will be long," adds Mr. Hunter, in his description, "before I
forget the face of a little boy of six years, with his hands stretched
forward to rearrange a bit of machinery, his pallid face and spare form
already showing the physical effects of labor. This child, six years of
age, was working twelve hours a day."
From Mr. Spargo's _Bitter Cry of the Children_ I learn this much of the
joys of certain among the youth of Pennsylvania:
[Illustration: BREAKER BOYS AT A PENNSYLVANIA COLLIERY]
"For ten or eleven hours a day children of ten and eleven stoop
over the chute and pick out the slate and other impurities from the
coal as it moves past them. The air is black with coal-dust, and
the roar of the crushers, screens, and rushing mill-race of coal is
deafening. Sometimes one of the children falls into the machinery
and is terribly mangled, or slips into the chute and is smothered to
death. Many children are killed in this way. Many others, after a
time, contract coal-miners' asthma and consumption, which gradually
undermine their health. Breathing continually day after day the clouds
of coal-dust, their lungs become black and choked with small particles
of anthracite."...
In Massachusetts, at Fall River, the Hon. J.F. Carey tells us how
little naked boys, free Americans, work for Mr. Borden, the New York
millionaire, packing cloth into bleaching vats in a bath of chemicals
that bleaches their little bodies like the bodies of lepers....
Well, we English have no right to condemn the Americans for these
things. The history of our own industrial development is black with the
blood of tortured and murdered children. America still has the factory
serfs. New Jersey sends her pauper children south to-day into worse
than slavery, but, as Cottle tells in his reminiscences of Southey and
Coleridge, that is precisely the same wretched export Bristol packed
off to feed the mills of Manchester in late Georgian times. We got
ahead with factory legislation by no peculiar virtue in our statecraft,
it was just the revenge the landlords took upon the manufacturers for
reform and free trade in corn and food. In America the manufacturers
have had things to themselves.
And America has difficulties to encounter of which we know nothing. In
the matter of labor legislation each State legislature is supreme; in
each separate State the forces of light and progress must fight the
battle of the children and the future over again against interests,
lies, prejudice and stupidity. Each State pleads the bad example
of another State, and there is always the threat that capital will
withdraw. No national minimum is possible under existing conditions.
And when the laws have passed there is still the universal contempt
for State control to reckon with, the impossibilities of enforcement.
Illinois, for instance, scandalized at the spectacle of children in
those filthy stock-yards, ankle-deep in blood, cleaning intestines
and trimming meat, recently passed a child-labor law that raised the
minimum age for such employment to sixteen, but evasion, they told
me in Chicago, was simple and easy. New York, too, can show by its
statute-books that my drowsy nocturnal messenger-boy was illegal and
impossible....
This is the bottomest end of the scale that at the top has all the
lavish spending of Fifth Avenue, the joyous wanton giving of Mr. Andrew
Carnegie. Equally with these things it is an unpremeditated consequence
of an inadequate theory of freedom. The foolish extravagances of the
rich, the architectural pathos of Newport, the dingy, noisy, economic
jumble of central and south Chicago, the Standard Oil offices in
Broadway, the darkened streets beneath New York's elevated railroad,
the littered ugliness of Niagara's banks, and the lower-most hell
of child suffering are all so many accordant aspects and inexorable
consequences of the same undisciplined way of living. Let each man push
for himself--it comes to these things....
So far as our purpose of casting a horoscope goes we have particularly
to note this as affecting the future; these working children
cannot be learning to read--though they will presently be having
votes--they cannot grow up fit to bear arms, to be in any sense but
a vile computing sweater's sense, men. So miserably they will avenge
themselves by supplying the stuff for vice, for crime, for yet more
criminal and political manipulations. One million seven hundred
children, practically uneducated, are toiling over here, and growing
up, darkened, marred, and dangerous, into the American future I am
seeking to forecast.
CHAPTER VIII
CORRUPTION
I
The Problem of the Nation
So, it seems to me, in this new crude continental commonwealth, there
is going on the same economic process, on a grander scale, indeed, than
has gone so far in our own island. There is a great concentration of
wealth above, and below, deep and growing is the abyss, that sunken
multitude on the margin of subsistence which is a characteristic and
necessary feature of competitive industrialism, that teeming abyss
where children have no chance, where men and women dream neither of
leisure nor of self-respect. And between this efflorescence of wealth
above and spreading degradation below, comes the great mass of the
population, perhaps fifty millions and more of healthy and active men,
women and children (I leave out of count altogether the colored people
and the special trouble of the South until a later chapter) who are
neither irresponsibly free nor hopelessly bound, who are the living
determining substance of America.
Collectively they constitute what Mr. Roosevelt calls the "Nation,"
what an older school of Americans used to write of as the People.
The Nation is neither rich nor poor, neither capitalist nor laborer,
neither Republican nor Democrat; it is a great diversified multitude
including all these things. It is a comprehensive abstraction; it is
the ultimate reality. You may seek for it in America and you cannot
find it, as one seeks in vain for the forest among the trees. It has
no clear voice; the confused and local utterances of a dispersed
innumerable press, of thousands of public speakers, of books and
preachers, evoke fragmentary responses or drop rejected into oblivion.
I have been told by countless people where I shall find the typical
American; one says in Maine, one in the Alleghenies, one "farther
west," one in Kansas, one in Cleveland. He is indeed nowhere and
everywhere. He is an English-speaking person, with extraordinarily
English traits still, in spite of much good German and Scandinavian and
Irish blood he has assimilated. He has a distrust of lucid theories,
and logic, and he talks unwillingly of ideas. He is preoccupied, he
is busy with his individual affairs, but he is--I can feel it in the
air--thinking.
How widely and practically he is thinking that curious product of
the last few years, the ten-cent magazine, will show. In England our
sixpenny magazines seem all written for boys and careless people;
they are nothing but stories and jests and pictures. The weekly
ones achieve an extraordinarily agreeable emptiness. Their American
equivalents are full of the studied and remarkably well-written
discussion of grave public questions. I pick up one magazine and find
a masterly exposition of the public aspect of railway rebates, another
and a trust is analyzed. Then here are some titles of books that
all across this continent are being multitudinously read: Parson's
_Heart of the Railway Problem_, Steffens's _Shame of the Cities_,
Lawson's _Frenzied Finance_, Miss Tarbell's _Story of Standard Oil_,
Abbott's _Industrial Problem_, Spargo's _Bitter Cry of the Children_,
Hunter's _Poverty_, and, pioneer of them all, Lloyd's _Wealth Against
Commonwealth_. These are titles quoted almost at hap-hazard. Within a
remarkably brief space of time the American nation has turned away from
all the heady self-satisfaction of the nineteenth century and commenced
a process of heart searching quite unparalleled in history. Its
egotistical interest in its own past is over and done. While Mr. Upton
Sinclair, the youngest, most distinctive of recent American novelists,
achieved but a secondary success with his admirably conceived romance
of the Civil War, _Manassas, The Jungle_, his book about the beef trust
and the soul of the immigrant, the most unflattering picture of America
that any one has yet dared to draw, has fired the country.
The American nation, which a few years ago seemed invincibly wedded
to an extreme individualism, seemed resolved, as it were, to sit on
the safety valves of the economic process and go on to the ultimate
catastrophe, displays itself now alert and questioning. It has roused
itself to a grave and extensive consideration of the intricate economic
and political problems that close like a net about its future. The
essential question for America, as for Europe, is the rescue of her
land, her public service, and the whole of her great economic process
from the anarchic and irresponsible control of private owners--how
dangerous and horrible that control may become the Railway and Beef
Trust investigations have shown--and the organization of her social
life upon the broad, clean, humane conceptions of modern science. In
every country, however, this huge problem of reconstruction which is
the alternative to a plutocratic decadence, is enormously complicated
by irrelevant and special difficulties. In Great Britain, for example,
the ever-pressing problem of holding the empire, and the fact that one
legislative body is composed almost entirely of private land-owners,
hampers every step towards a better order. Upon every country in Europe
weighs the armor of war. In America the complications are distinctive
and peculiar. She is free, indeed, now to a large extent from the
possibility of any grave military stresses, her one overseas investment
in the Philippines she is evidently resolved to forget and be rid of at
as early a date as possible. But, on the other hand, she is confronted
by a system of legal entanglements of extraordinary difficulty and
perplexity, she has the most powerful tradition of individualism in the
world, and a degraded political system, and she has in the presence
of a vast and increasing proportion of unassimilable aliens in her
substance--negroes, south European peasants, Russian Jews and the
like--an ever-intensifying complication.
II
Graft
Now what is called corruption in America is a thing not confined to
politics; it is a defect of moral method found in every department of
American life. I find in big print in every paper I open, "GRAFT." All
through my journey in America I have been trying to gauge the quality
of this corruption, I have been talking to all kinds of people about
it, I have had long conversations about it with President Eliot of
Harvard, with District-Attorney Jerome, with one leading insurance
president, with a number of the City Club people in Chicago, with
several East-Siders in New York, with men engaged in public work in
every city I have visited, with Senators at Washington, with a Chicago
saloon-keeper and his friend, a shepherd of votes, and with a varied
and casual assortment of Americans upon trains and boats; I read
my Ostrogorsky, my Otünsterberg, and my Roosevelt before I came to
America, and I find myself going through any American newspaper that
comes to hand always with an eye to this. It is to me a most vital
issue in the horoscope I contemplate. All depends upon the answer to
this question: Is the average citizen fundamentally dishonest? Is he
a rascal and humbug in grain? If he is, the future can needs be no
more than a monstrous social disorganization in the face of divine
opportunities. Or is he fundamentally honest, but a little confused
ethically?...
The latter, I think, is the truer alternative, but I will confess
I have ranged through all the scale between a buoyant optimism and
despair. It is extraordinarily difficult to move among the crowded
contrasts of this perplexing country and emerge with any satisfactory
generalization. But there is one word I find all too frequently in the
American papers, and that is "stealing." They come near calling any
profitable, rather unfair bargain with the public a "steal." It's the
common journalistic vice here always to overstate. Every land has its
criminals, no doubt, but the American, I am convinced, is the last
man in the world to steal. Nor does he tell you lies to your face,
except in the way of business. He's not that sort of man. Nor does he
sneak bad money into your confiding hand. Nor ask a higher price than
he means to accept. Nor cheat on exchange. For all the frequency of
"graft" and "stealing" in the press head-lines, I feel the American is
pretty distinctly less "mean" than many Europeans in these respects,
and much more disposed to be ashamed of meanness.
But he certainly has an ethical system of a highly commercial type. If
he isn't dishonest he's commercialized. He lives to get, to come out of
every transaction with more than he gave.
In the highly imaginative theory that underlies the realities of an
individualistic society there is such a thing as honest trading. In
practice I don't believe there is. Exchangeable things are supposed to
have a fixed quality called their value, and honest trading is, I am
told, the exchange of things of equal value. Nobody gains or loses by
honest trading, and therefore nobody can grow rich by it. And nobody
would do business except to subsist by a profit and attempt to grow
rich. The honest merchant in the individualist's dream is a worthy and
urbane person who intervenes between the seller here and the buyer
there, fetches from one to another, stores a surplus of goods, takes
risks, and indemnifies himself by charging the seller and the buyer
a small fee for his waiting and his carrying and his speculative
hawking about. He would be sick and ashamed to undervalue a purchase
or overcharge a customer, and it scarcely requires a competitor to
reduce his fee to a minimum. He draws a line between customers with
whom he deals and competitors with whom he wouldn't dream of dealing.
And though it seems a little incredible, he grows rich and beautiful
in these practices and endows Art, Science, and Literature. Such is
the commercial life in a world of economic angels, magic justice and
the Individualist's Utopia. In reality flesh and blood cannot resist
a bargain, and people trade to get. In reality value is a dream, and
the commercial ideal is to buy from the needy, sell to the urgent
need, and get all that can possibly be got out of every transaction.
To do anything else isn't business--it's some other sort of game. Let
us look squarely into the pretences of trading. The plain fact of the
case is that in trading for profit there is no natural line at which
legitimate bargaining ends and cheating begins. The seller wants to get
above the value and the buyer below it. The seller seeks to appreciate,
the buyer to depreciate; and where is there room for truth in that
contest? In bargaining, overvaluing and undervaluing are not only
permissible but inevitable, attempts to increase the desire to buy and
willingness to sell. Who can invent a rule to determine what expedients
are permissible and what not? You may draw an arbitrary boundary--the
law does here and there, a little discontinuously--but that is all.
For example, consider these questions that follow: Nothing is perfect
in this world; all goods are defective. Are you bound to inform your
customer of every defect? Suppose you are, then are you bound to
examine your goods minutely for defects? Grant that. Then if you
intrust that duty to an employee ought you to dismiss him for selling
defective goods for you? The customer will buy your goods anyhow.
Are you bound to spend more upon cleaning and packing them than he
demands?--to wrap them in gold-foil gratuitously, for example? How are
you going to answer these questions? Let me suppose that your one dream
in life is to grow rich. Suppose you want to grow very rich and found a
noble university, let us say?
You answer them in the Roman spirit, with _caveat emptor_. Then can you
decently join in the outcry against the Chicago butchers?
Then turn again to the group of problems the Standard Oil history
raises. You want the customer to buy your goods and not your
competitor's. Naturally you do everything to get your goods to him,
to make them seem best to him, to reduce the influx of the other
man's stuff. You don't lend your competitor your shop-window anyhow.
If there's a hoarding you don't restrict your advertisements because
otherwise there won't be room for him. And if you happen to have a
paramount interest in the carrying line that bears your goods and
his, why shouldn't you see that your own goods arrive first? And at a
cheaper rate?...
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A NEW YORK OFFICE BUILDING]
You see one has to admit there is always this element of overreaching,
of outwitting, of fore-stalling, in all systematic trade. It may be
refined, it may be dignified, but it is there. It differs in degree
and not in quality from cheating. A very scrupulous man stops at one
point, a less scrupulous man at another, an eager, ambitious man may
find himself carried by his own impetus very far. Too often the least
scrupulous wins. In all ages, among all races, this taint in trade has
been felt. Modern western Europe, led by England, and America have
denied it stoutly, have glorified the trader, called him a "merchant
prince," wrapped him in the purple of the word "financier," bowed down
before him. The trader remains a trader, a hand that clutches, an
uncreative brain that lays snares. Occasionally, no doubt, he exceeds
his function and is better than his occupations. But it is not he but
the maker who must be the power and ruler of the great and luminous
social order that must surely come, that new order I have persuaded
myself I find in glimmering evasive promises amid the congestions of
New York, the sheds and defilements of Niagara, and the Chicago reek
and grime.... The American, I feel assured, can be a bold and splendid
maker. He is not, like the uncreative Parsee or Jew or Armenian, a
trader by blood and nature. The architecture I have seen, the finely
planned, internally beautiful, and admirably organized office buildings
(to step into them from the street is to step up fifty years in the
scale of civilization), the business organizations, the industrial
skill--I visited a trap and chain factory at Oneida, right in the
heart of New York State, that was like the interior of a well-made
clock--above all, the plans for reconstructing his cities show that.
Those others make nothing. But nevertheless, since he, more than any
man, has subserved the full development of eighteenth and nineteenth
century conceptions, he has acquired some of the very worst habits
of the trader. Too often he is a gambler. Ever and again I have had
glimpses of preoccupied groups of men at green tables in little
rooms, playing that dreary game poker, wherein there is no skill, no
variety except in the sum at hazard, no orderly development, only a
sort of expressionless lying called "bluffing." Indeed, poker isn't
so much a game as a bad habit. Yet the American sits for long hours
at it, dispersing and accumulating dollars, and he carries its great
conception of "bluff" and a certain experience of kinetic physiognomy
back with him to his office....
And Americans talk dollars to an astonishing extent....
Now this is the reality of American corruption, a huge exclusive
preoccupation with dollar-getting. What is called corruption by the
press is really no more than the acute expression in individual cases
of this general fault.
Where everybody is getting it is idle to expect a romantic standard of
honesty between employers and employed. The official who buys rails for
the big railway company that is professedly squeezing every penny it
can out of the public for its shareholders as its highest aim, is not
likely to display any religious self-abnegation of a share for himself
in this great work. The director finds it hard to distinguish between
getting for himself and getting for his company, and the duty to
one-self of a discreet use of opportunity taints the whole staff from
manager to messenger-boy. The politicians who protect the interests of
the same railway in the House of Commons or the Senate, as the case may
be, are not going to do it for love either. Nobody will have any mercy
for their wives or children if they die poor. The policeman who stands
between the property of the company and the irregular enterprise of
robbers feels his vigilance merits a special recognition. A position
of trust is a position of advantage, and deserves a percentage.
Everywhere, as every one knows, in all the modern States, quite as
much as in China, there are commissions, there are tips, there are
extortions and secret profits, there is, in a word, "graft." It's no
American specialty. Things are very much the same in this matter in
Great Britain as in America, but Americans talk more and louder than
we do. And indeed all this is no more than an inevitable development
of the idea of trading in the mind, that every transaction must leave
something behind for the agent. It's not stealing, but nevertheless,
the automatic cash-register becomes more and more of a necessity in
this thickening atmosphere of private enterprise.
III
Political Dishonesty
It seems to me that the political corruption that still plays so large
a part in the American problem is a natural and necessary underside
to a purely middle-class organization of society for business. Nobody
is left over to watch the politician. And the evil is enormously
aggravated by the complexities of the political machinery, by the
methods of the presidential election that practically prescribes a
ticket method of voting, and by the absence of any second ballots.
Moreover, the passion of the simpler minded Americans for aggressive
legislation controlling private morality has made the control of
the police a main source of party revenue, and dragged the saloon
and brothel, essentially retiring though these institutions are,
into politics. The Constitution ties up political reform in the most
extraordinary way, it was planned by devout Republicans equally afraid
of a dictatorship and the people; it does not so much distribute
power as disperse it, the machinery falls readily into the hands of
professional politicians with no end to secure but their immediate
profit, and is almost inaccessible to poor men who cannot make their
incomes in its working. An increasing number of wealthy young men have
followed President Roosevelt into political life--one thinks of such
figures as Senator Colby of New Jersey, but they are but incidental
mitigations of a generally vicious scheme. Before the nation, so busy
with its diversified private affairs, lies the devious and difficult
problem of a great reconstruction of its political methods, as a
preliminary to any broad change of its social organization....
How vicious things are I have had some inkling in a dozen whispered
stories of votes, of ballot-boxes rifled, of votes destroyed, of the
violent personation of cowed and ill-treated men. And in Chicago I saw
a little of the physical aspect of the system.
I made the acquaintance of Alderman Kenna, who is better known, I
found, throughout the States as "Hinky-Dink," saw his two saloons and
something of the Chinese quarter about him. He is a compact, upright
little man, with iron-gray hair, a clear blue eye, and a dry manner. He
wore a bowler hat through all our experiences in common, and kept his
hands in his jacket-pockets. He filled me with a ridiculous idea, for
which I apologize, that had it fallen to the lot of Mr. J.M. Barrie to
miss a university education, and keep a saloon in Chicago and organize
voters, he would have looked own brother to Mr. Kenna. We commenced
in the first saloon, a fine, handsome place, with mirrors and tables
and decorations and a consumption of mitigated mineral waters and
beer in bottles; then I was taken over to see the other saloon, the
one across the way. We went behind the counter, and while I professed
a comparative interest in English and American beer-engines, and the
Alderman exchanged commonplaces with two or three of the shirt-sleeved
barmen, I was able to survey the assembled customers.
It struck me as a pretty tough gathering.
The first thing that met the eye were the schooners of beer. There is
nothing quite like the American beer-schooner in England. It would
appeal strongly to an unstinted appetite for beer, and I should be
curious to try it upon a British agricultural laborer and see how many
he could hold. He would, I am convinced, have to be entirely hollowed
out to hold two. Those I saw impressed me as being about the size of
small fish-globes set upon stems, and each was filled with a very
substantial-looking beer indeed. They stood in a careless row all
along the length of the saloon counter. Below them, in attitudes of
negligent proprietorship, lounged the "crowd" in a haze of smoke and
conversation. For the most part I should think they were Americanized
immigrants. I looked across the counter at them, met their eyes, got
the quality of their faces--and it seemed to me I was a very flimsy and
unsubstantial intellectual thing indeed. It struck me that I would as
soon go to live in a pen in a stock-yard as into American politics.
That was my momentary impression. But that line of base and coarse
faces seen through the reek was only one sample of the great saloon
stratum of the American population in which resides political power.
They have no ideas and they have votes; they are capable, if need be,
of meeting violence by violence, and that is the sort of thing American
methods demand....
Now Alderman Kenna is a straight man, the sort of man one likes and
trusts at sight, and he did not invent his profession. He follows his
own ideas of right and wrong, and compared with my ideas of right
and wrong, they seem tough, compact, decided things. He is very kind
to all his crowd. He helps them when they are in trouble, even if it
is trouble with the police; he helps them find employment when they
are down on their luck; he stands between them and the impacts of an
unsympathetic and altogether too-careless social structure in a sturdy
and almost parental way. I can quite believe what I was told, that in
the lives of many of these rough undesirables he's almost the only
decent influence. He gets wives well treated, and he has an open heart
for children. And he tells them how to vote, a duty of citizenship
they might otherwise neglect, and sees that they do it properly. And
whenever you want to do things in Chicago you must reckon carefully
with him....
There you have a chip, a hand specimen, from the basement structure
upon which American politics rest. That is the remarkable alternative
to private enterprise as things are at present. It is America's only
other way. If public services are to be taken out of the hands of such
associations of financiers as the Standard Oil group they have to be
put into the hands of politicians resting at last upon this sort of
basis. Therein resides the impossibility of socialism in America--as
the case for socialism is put at present. The third course is the far
more complex, difficult and heroic one of creating imaginatively and
bringing into being a new state--a feat no people in the world has yet
achieved, but a feat that any people which aspires to lead the future
is bound, I think, to attempt.
CHAPTER IX
THE IMMIGRANT
I
The Flood
My picture of America assumes now a certain definite form. I have
tried to convey the effect of a great and energetic English-speaking
population strewn across a continent so vast as to make it seem small
and thin; I have tried to show this population caught by the upward
sweep of that great increase in knowledge that is everywhere enlarging
the power and scope of human effort, exhilarated by it, and active and
hopeful beyond any population the world has ever seen, and I have tried
to show how the members of this population struggle and differentiate
among themselves in a universal commercial competition that must, in
the end, if it is not modified, divide them into two permanent classes
of rich and poor. I have ventured to hint at a certain emptiness in
the resulting wealthy, and to note some of the uglinesses and miseries
inseparable from this competition. I have tried to give my impressions
of the vague, yet widely diffused, will in the nation to resist this
differentiation, and of a dim, large movement of thought towards a
change of national method. I have glanced at the debasement of politics
that bars any immediate hope of such reconstruction. And now it is time
to introduce a new element of obstruction and difficulty into this
complicating problem--the immigrants.
Into the lower levels of the American community there pours perpetually
a vast torrent of strangers, speaking alien tongues, inspired by alien
traditions, for the most part illiterate peasants and working-people.
They come in at the bottom: that must be insisted upon. An enormous and
ever-increasing proportion of the laboring classes, of all the lower
class in America, is of recent European origin, is either of foreign
birth or foreign parentage. The older American population is being
floated up on the top of this influx, a sterile aristocracy above a
racially different and astonishingly fecund proletariat. (For it grows
rankly in this new soil. One section of immigrants, the Hungarians,
have here a birth-rate of forty-six in the thousand, the highest of any
civilized people in the world.)
Few people grasp the true dimensions of this invasion. Figures carry
so little. The influx has clambered from half a million to 700,000,
to 800,000; this year the swelling figures roll up as if they mean to
go far over the million mark. The flood swells to overtake the total
birth-rate; it has already over-topped the total of births of children
to native-American parents.
I have already told something of the effect of Ellis Island. I have
told how I watched the long procession of simple-looking, hopeful,
sunburned country folk from Russia, from the Carpathians, from southern
Italy and Turkey and Syria, filing through the wickets, bringing their
young wives for the mills of Paterson and Fall River, their children
for the Pennsylvania coal-breakers and the cotton-mills of the South.
Yet there are moments when I could have imagined there were no
immigrants at all. All the time, except for one distinctive evening, I
seem to have been talking to English-speaking men, now and then to the
Irishman, now and then, but less frequently, to an Americanized German.
In the clubs there are no immigrants. There are not even Jews, as there
are in London clubs. One goes about the wide streets of Boston, one
meets all sorts of Boston people, one visits the State-House; it's all
the authentic English-speaking America. Fifth Avenue, too, is America
without a touch of foreign-born; and Washington. You go a hundred yards
south of the pretty Boston Common and, behold! you are in a polyglot
slum! You go a block or so east of Fifth Avenue and you are in a
vaster, more Yiddish Whitechapel. You cross from New York to Staten
Island, attracted by its distant picturesque suggestion of scattered
homes among the trees, and you discover black-tressed, bold-eyed women
on those pleasant verandas, half-clad brats, and ambiguous washing,
where once the native American held his simple state. You ask the way
of a young man who has just emerged from a ramshackle factory, and you
are answered in some totally incomprehensible tongue. You come up again
after such a dive below, to dine with the original Americans again,
talk With them, go about with them and forget....
In Boston, one Sunday afternoon, this fact of immigration struck upon
Mr. Henry James:
"There went forward across the cop of the hill a continuous passage of
men and women, in couples and talkative companies, who struck me as
laboring wage-earners of the simpler sort arrayed in their Sunday best
and decently enjoying their leisure ... no sound of English in a single
instance escaped their lips; the greater number spoke a rude form of
Italian, the others some outland dialect unknown to me--though I waited
and waited to catch an echo of antique refrains."
That's one of a series of recurrent, uneasy observations of this great
replacement I find in Mr. James's book.
The immigrant does not clamor for attention. He is, indeed, almost
entirely inaudible, inarticulate, and underneath. He is in origin a
peasant, inarticulate, and underneath by habit and tradition. Mr. James
has, as it were, to put his ear to earth, to catch the murmuring of
strange tongues. The incomer is of diverse nationality and diverse
tongues, and that "breaks him up" politically and socially. He drops
into American clothes, and then he does not catch the careless eye.
He goes into special regions and works there. Where Americans talk or
think or have leisure to observe, he does not intrude. The bulk of the
Americans don't get as yet any real sense of his portentous multitude
at all. He does not read very much, and so he produces no effect upon
the book trade or magazines. You can go through such a periodical as
_Harper's Magazine_, for example, from cover to cover, and unless
there is some article or story bearing specifically upon the subject
you might doubt if there was an immigrant in the country. On the liner
coming over, at Ellis Island, and sometimes on the railroads one saw
him--him and his womankind,--in some picturesque east-European garb,
very respectful, very polite, adventurous, and a little scared. Then he
became less visible. He had got into cheap American clothes, resorted
to what naturalists call "protective mimicry," even perhaps acquired
a collar. Also his bearing had changed, become charged with a certain
aggression. He had got a pocket-handkerchief, and had learned to move
fast and work fast, and to chew and spit with the proper meditative
expression. One detected him by his diminishing accent, and by a few
persistent traits--rings in his ears, perhaps, or the like adornment.
In the next stage these also had gone; he had become ashamed of the
music of his native tongue, and talked even to his wife, on the
trolley-car and other public places, at least, in brief remarkable
American. Before that he had become ripe for a vote.
The next stage of Americanization, I suppose, is this dingy quick-eyed
citizen with his schooner of beer in my Chicago saloon--if it is not
that crumpled thing I saw lying so still in the sunlight under the
trestle bridge on my way to Washington....
II
In Defence of Immigration
Every American above forty, and most of those below that limit, seem
to be enthusiastic advocates of unrestricted immigration. I could not
make them understand the apprehension with which this huge dilution of
the American people with profoundly ignorant foreign peasants filled
me. I rode out on an automobile into the pretty New York country beyond
Yonkers with that finely typical American, Mr. Z.--he wanted to show
me the pleasantness of the land,--and he sang the song of American
confidence, I think, more clearly and loudly than any. He told me how
everybody had hope, how everybody had incentive, how magnificently it
was all going on. He told me--what is, I am afraid, a widely spread
delusion--that elementary education stands on a higher level of
efficiency in the States than in England. He had no doubt whatever of
the national powers of assimilation. "Let them all come," he said,
cheerfully.
"The Chinese?" said I.
"We can do with them all."...
He was exceptional in that extension. Most Americans stop at the
Ural Mountains, and refuse the "Asiatic." It was not a matter for
discussion with him, but a question of belief. He had ceased to reason
about immigration long ago. He was a man in the fine autumn of life,
abounding in honors, wrapped in furs, and we drove swiftly in his
automobile, through the spring sunshine. ("By Jove!" thought I, "you
talk like Pippa's rich uncle.") By some half-brother of a coincidence
we happened first upon this monument commemorating a memorable incident
of the War of Independence, and then upon that. He recalled details
of that great campaign as Washington was fought out of Manhattan
northward. I remember one stone among the shooting trees that indicated
where in the Hudson River near by a British sloop had fired the first
salute in honor of the American flag. That salute was vividly present
still to him; it echoed among the woods, it filled him with a sense
of personal triumph; it seemed half-way back to Agincourt to me. All
that bright morning the stars and stripes made an almost luminous
visible presence about us. Open-handed hospitality and confidence
in God so swayed me that it is indeed only now, as I put this book
together, I see this shining buoyancy, this bunting patriotism, in
its direct relation to the Italian babies in the cotton-mills, to the
sinister crowd that stands in the saloon smoking and drinking beer, an
accumulating reserve of unintelligent force behind the manoeuvres of
the professional politicians....
I tried my views upon Commissioner Watchorn as we leaned together over
the gallery railing and surveyed that bundle-carrying crowd creeping
step by step through the wire filter of the central hall of Ellis
Island--into America.
"You don't think they'll swamp you?" I said.
"Now look here," said the Commissioner, "I'm English born--Derbyshire.
I came into America when I was a lad. I had fifteen dollars. And here I
am! Well, do you expect me, now I'm here, to shut the door on any other
poor chaps who want a start--a start with hope in it, in the New World?"
A pleasant-mannered, a fair-haired young man, speaking excellent
English, had joined us as we went round, and nodded approval.
I asked him for his opinion, and gathered he was from Milwaukee, and
the son of a Scandinavian immigrant. He, too, was for "fair-play" and
an open door for every one. "Except," he added, "Asiatics." So also, I
remember, was a very New England lady I met at Hull House, who wasn't,
as a matter of fact, a New-Englander at all, but the daughter of a
German settler in the Middle West. They all seemed to think that I was
inspired by hostility to the immigrant in breathing any doubt about
the desirability of this immense process....
I tried in each case to point out that this idea of not being
churlishly exclusive did not exhaust the subject, that the present
immigration is a different thing entirely from the immigration of
half a century ago, that in the interest of the immigrant and his
offspring more than any one, is the protest to be made. Fifty years
ago more than half of the torrent was English speaking, and the rest
mostly from the Teutonic and Scandinavian northwest of Europe, an
influx of people closely akin to the native Americans in temperament
and social tradition. They were able to hold their own and mix
perfectly. Even then the quantity of illiterate Irish produced a marked
degradation of political life. The earlier immigration was an influx
of energetic people who wanted to come, and who had to put themselves
to considerable exertion to get here; it was higher in character and
in social quality than the present flood. The immigration of to-day is
largely the result of energetic canvassing by the steamship companies;
it is, in the main, an importation of laborers and not of economically
independent settlers, and it is increasingly alien to the native
tradition. The bulk of it is now Italian, Russian Jewish, Russian,
Hungarian, Croatian, Roumanian, and eastern European generally.
"The children learn English, and become more American and better
patriots than the Americans," Commissioner Watchorn--echoing everybody
in that--told me....
(In Boston one optimistic lady looked to the Calabrian and Sicilian
peasants to introduce an artistic element into the population--no
doubt because they come from the same peninsula that produced the
Florentines.)
III
Assimilation
Will the reader please remember that I've been just a few weeks in
the States altogether, and value my impressions at that! And will he,
nevertheless, read of doubts that won't diminish. I doubt very much
if America is going to assimilate all that she is taking in now; much
more do I doubt that she will assimilate the still greater inflow of
the coming years. I believe she is going to find infinite difficulties
in that task. By "assimilate" I mean make intelligently co-operative
citizens of these people. She will, I have no doubt whatever, impose
upon them a bare use of the English language, and give them votes and
certain patriotic persuasions, but I believe that if things go on as
they are going the great mass of them will remain a very low lower
class--will remain largely illiterate industrialized peasants. They
are decent-minded peasant people, orderly, industrious people, rather
dirty in their habits, and with a low standard of life. Wherever they
accumulate in numbers they present to my eye a social phase far below
the level of either England, France, north Italy, or Switzerland.
And, frankly, I do not find the American nation has either in its
schools--which are as backward in some States as they are forward in
others--in its press, in its religious bodies or its general tone, any
organized means or effectual influences for raising these huge masses
of humanity to the requirements of an ideal modern civilization. They
are, to my mind, "biting off more than they can chaw" in this matter.
I got some very interesting figures from Dr. Hart, of the Children's
Home and Aid Society, Chicago, in this matter. He was pleading for
the immigrant against my scepticisms. He pointed out to me that
the generally received opinion that the European immigrants are
exceptionally criminal is quite wrong.
The 1900 census report collapsed after a magnificent beginning, and its
figures are not available, but from the earlier records there can be
no doubt that the percentage of criminals among the "foreign-born" is
higher than that among the native-born. This, however, is entirely due
to the high criminal record of the French Canadians in the Northeast,
and the Mexicans in Arizona, who are not overseas immigrants at
all. The criminal statistics of the French Canadians in the States
should furnish useful matter for the educational controversy in Great
Britain. Allowing for their activities--which appear to be based on an
education of peculiar religious virtue--the figures bring the criminal
percentage among the foreigners far below that of the native-born.
But Dr. Hart's figures also showed very clearly something further: as
between the offspring of native and foreign parents the preponderance
of crime is enormously on the side of the latter.
That, at any rate, falls in with my own preconceptions and roving
observations. Bear in mind always that this is just one questioning
individual's impression. It seems to me that the immigrant arrives
an artless, rather uncivilized, pious, good-hearted peasant, with
a disposition towards submissive industry and rude effectual moral
habits. America, it is alleged, makes a man of him. It seems to me
that all too often she makes an infuriated toiler of him, tempts him
with dollars and speeds him up with competition, hardens him, coarsens
his manners, and, worst crime of all, lures and forces him to sell his
children into toil. The home of the immigrant in America looks to me
worse than the home he came from in Italy. It is just as dirty, it is
far less simple and beautiful, the food is no more wholesome, the moral
atmosphere far less wholesome; and, as a consequence, the child of the
immigrant is a worse man than his father.
I am fully aware of the generosity, the nobility of sentiment which
underlies the American objection to any hindrance to immigration. But
either that general sentiment should be carried out to a logical
completeness and a gigantic and costly machinery organized to educate
and civilize these people as they come in, or it should be chastened to
restrict the inflow to numbers assimilable under existing conditions.
At present, if we disregard sentiment, if we deny the alleged need
of gross flattery whenever one writes of America for Americans, and
state the bare facts of the case, they amount to this: that America,
in the urgent process of individualistic industrial development, in
its feverish haste to get through with its material possibilities,
is importing a large portion of the peasantry of central and eastern
Europe, and converting it into a practically illiterate industrial
proletariat. In doing this it is doing a something that, however
different in spirit, differs from the slave trade of its early
history only in the narrower gap between employer and laborer. In the
"colored" population America has already ten million descendants of
unassimilated and perhaps unassimilable labor immigrants. These people
are not only half civilized and ignorant, but they have infected
the white population about them with a kindred ignorance. For there
can be no doubt that if an Englishman or Scotchman of the year 1500
were to return to earth and seek his most retrograde and decivilized
descendants, he would find them at last among the white and colored
population south of Washington. And I have a foreboding that in this
mixed flood of workers that pours into America by the million to-day,
in this torrent of ignorance, against which that heroic being, the
schoolmarm, battles at present all unaided by men, there is to be found
the possibility of another dreadful separation of class and kind, a
separation perhaps not so profound but far more universal. One sees the
possibility of a rich industrial and mercantile aristocracy of western
European origin, dominating a darker-haired, darker-eyed, uneducated
proletariat from central and eastern Europe. The immigrants are being
given votes, I know, but that does not free them, it only enslaves the
country. The negroes were given votes.
That is the quality of the danger as I see it. But before this
indigestion of immigrants becomes an incurable sickness of the States
many things may happen. There is every sign, as I have said, that a
great awakening, a great disillusionment, is going on in the American
mind. The Americans have become suddenly self-critical, are hot with
an unwonted fever for reform and constructive effort. This swamping of
the country may yet be checked. They may make a strenuous effort to
emancipate children below fifteen from labor, and so destroy one of the
chief inducements of immigration. Once convince them that their belief
in the superiority of their public schools to those of England and
Germany is an illusion, or at least that their schools are inadequate
to the task before them, and it may be they will perform some swift
American miracle of educational organization and finance. For all
the very heavy special educational charges that are needed if the
immigrant is really to be assimilated, it seems a reasonable proposal
that immigration should pay. Suppose the new-comer were presently to
be taxed on arrival for his own training and that of any children he
had with him, that again would check the inrush very greatly. Or the
steamship company might be taxed, and left to settle the trouble with
the immigrant by raising his fare. And finally, it may be that if the
line is drawn, as it seems highly probable it will be, at "Asiatics,"
then there may even be a drying up of the torrent at its source. The
European countries are not unlimited reservoirs of offspring. As they
pass from their old conditions into more and more completely organized
modern industrial states, they develop a new internal equilibrium and
cease to secrete an excess of population. England no longer supplies
any great quantity of Americans; Scotland barely any; France is
exhausted; Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia have, it seems, disgorged
nearly all their surplus load, and now run dry....
These are all mitigations of the outlook, but still the dark shadow of
disastrous possibility remains. The immigrant comes in to weaken and
confuse the counsels of labor, to serve the purposes of corruption, to
complicate any economic and social development, above all to retard
enormously the development of that national consciousness and will on
which the hope of the future depends.
IV
The Educational Alliance
I told these doubts of mine to a pleasant young lady of New York, who
seems to find much health and a sustaining happiness in settlement work
on the East Side. She scorned my doubts. "Children make better citizens
than the old Americans," she said, like one who quotes a classic, and
took me with her forthwith to see the central school of the Educational
Alliance, that fine imposing building in East Broadway.
It's a thing I'm glad not to have missed. I recall a large cool room
with a sloping floor, tier rising above tier of seats and desks, and a
big class of bright-eyed Jewish children, boys and girls, each waving
two little American flags to the measure of the song they sang, singing
to the accompaniment of the piano on the platform beside us.
"God bless our native land," they sang--with a considerable variety of
accent and distinctness, but with a very real emotion.
Some of them had been in America a month, some much longer, but here
they were--under the auspices of the wealthy Hebrews of New York and
Mr. Blaustein's enthusiastic direction--being Americanized. They sang
of America--"sweet land of liberty"; they stood up and drilled with
the little bright pretty flags; swish they crossed and swish they
waved back, a waving froth of flags and flushed children's faces;
and they stood up and repeated the oath of allegiance, and at the end
filed tramping by me and out of the hall. The oath they take is finely
worded. It runs:
[Illustration: WHERE IMMIGRANT CHILDREN ARE AMERICANIZED]
"Flag our great Republic, inspirer in battle, guardian of our homes,
whose stars and stripes stand for bravery, purity, truth, and union, we
salute thee! We, the natives of distant lands, who find rest under thy
folds, do pledge our hearts, our lives, and our sacred honor to love
and protect thee, our country, and the liberty of the American people
forever."
I may have been fanciful, but as I stood aside and watched them going
proudly past, it seemed to me that eyes met mine, triumphant and
victorious eyes--for was I not one of these British from whom freedom
was won? But that was an ignoble suspicion. They had been but a few
weeks in America, and that light in their eyes was just a brotherly
challenge to one they supposed a fellow-citizen who stood unduly
thoughtful amid their rhythmic exaltation. They tramped out and past
with their flags and guidons.
"It is touching!" whispered my guide, and I saw she had caught a faint
reflection of that glow that lit the children.
I told her it was the most touching thing I had seen in America.
And so it remains.
Think of the immense promise in it! Think of the flower of belief and
effort that may spring from this warm sowing! We passed out of this
fluttering multiplication of the most beautiful flag in the world, into
streets abominable with offal and indescribable filth, and dark and
horrible under the thunderous girders of the Elevated railroad, to our
other quest for that morning, a typical New York tenement. For I wanted
to see one, with practically windowless bedrooms....
The Educational Alliance is of course not a public institution; it
was organized by Hebrews, and conducted for Hebrews, chiefly for the
benefit of the Hebrew immigrant. It is practically the only organized
attempt to Americanize the immigrant child. After the children have
mastered sufficient English and acquired the simpler elements of
patriotism--which is practically no more than an emotional attitude
towards the flag--they pass on into the ordinary public schools.
"Yes," I told my friend, "I know how these children feel. That, less
articulate perhaps, but no less sincere, is the thing--something
between pride and a passionate desire--that fills three-quarters of the
people at Ellis Island now. They come ready to love and worship, ready
to bow down and kiss the folds of your flag. They give themselves--they
want to give. Do you know I, too, have come near feeling that at times
for America."...
We were separated for a while by a long hole in the middle of the
street and a heap of builder's refuse. Before we came within talking
distance again I was in reaction against the gleam of satisfaction my
last confession had evoked.
"In the end," I said, "you Americans won't be able to resist it."
"Resist what?"
"You'll respect your country," I said.
"What do you mean?"
In those crowded noisy East Side streets one has to shout, and shout
compact things. "_This!_" I said to the barbaric disorder about us.
"Lynching! Child Labor! Graft!"
Then we were separated by a heap of decaying fish that some hawker had
dumped in the gutter.
My companion shouted something I did not catch.
"_We'll_ tackle it!" she repeated.
I looked at her, bright and courageous and youthful, a little
overconfident, I thought, but extremely reassuring, going valiantly
through a disorderly world of obstacles, and for the moment--I suppose
that waving bunting and the children's voices had got into my head a
little--I forgot all sorts of things....
I could have imagined her the spirit of America incarnate rather than a
philanthropic young lady of New York.
CHAPTER X
STATE-BLINDNESS
I
Sense of the State
In what I have written so far, I have tried to get the effect of the
American outlook, the American task, the American problem as a whole,
as it has presented itself to me. Clearly, as I see it, it is a mental
and moral issue. There seems to me an economic process going on that
tends to concentrate first wealth and then power in the hands of a
small number of adventurous individuals of no very high intellectual
type, a huge importation of alien and unassimilable workers, and a
sustained disorder of local and political administration. Correlated
with this is a great increase in personal luxury and need. In all these
respects there is a strong parallelism between the present condition
of the United States and the Roman Republic in the time of the early
Cæsars; and arguing from these alone one might venture to forecast
the steady development of an exploiting and devastating plutocracy,
leading perhaps to Cæsarism, and a progressive decline in civilization
and social solidarity. But there are forces of recuperation and
construction in America such as the earlier instance did not display.
There is infinitely more original and originating thought in the
state, there are the organized forces of science, a habit of progress,
clearer and wider knowledge among the general mass of the people. These
promise, and must, indeed, inevitably make, some synthetic effort of
greater or less homogeneity and force. It is upon that synthetic effort
that the distinctive destiny of America depends.
I propose to go on now to discuss the mental quality of America as I
have been able to focus it. (Remember always that I am an undiplomatic
tourist of no special knowledge or authority, who came, moreover, to
America with certain prepossessions.) And first, and chiefly, I have
to convey what seems to me the most significant and pregnant thing of
all. It is a matter of something wanting, that the American shares
with the great mass of prosperous middle-class people in England. I
think it is best indicated by saying that the typical American has no
"sense of the state." I do not mean that he is not passionately and
vigorously patriotic. But I mean that he has no perception that his
business activities, his private employments, are constituents in a
large collective process; that they affect other people and the world
forever, and cannot, as he imagines, begin and end with him. He sees
the world in fragments; it is to him a multitudinous collection of
individual "stories"--as the newspapers put it. If one studies an
American newspaper, one discovers it is all individuality, all a matter
of personal doings, of what so and so said and how so and so felt. And
all these individualities are unfused. Not a touch of abstraction or
generalization, no thinnest atmosphere of reflection, mitigates these
harsh, emphatic, isolated happenings. The American, it seems to me,
has yet to achieve what is, after all, the product of education and
thought, the conception of a whole to which all individual acts and
happenings are subordinate and contributory.
When I say this much, I do not mean to insinuate that any other nation
in the world has any superiority in this matter. But I do want to urge
that the American problem is pre-eminently one that must be met by
broad ways of thinking, by creative, synthetic, and merging ideas, and
that a great number of Americans seem to lack these altogether.
II
A Sample American
Let me by way of illustration give a specimen American mind. It is not
the mind of a writer or philosopher, it is just a plain successful
business-man who exposes himself, and makes it clear that this want of
any sense of the state of any large duty of constructive loyalty, is
not an idiosyncrasy, but the quality of all his circle, his friends,
his religious teacher....
I found my specimen in a book called _With John Bull and Jonathan_.
It contains the rather rambling reminiscences of Mr. J. Morgan
Richards, the wealthy and successful London agent of a great number of
well-advertised American proprietary articles, and I read it first, I
will confess, chiefly in search of such delightful phrases as the one
"mammoth in character" I have already quoted. But there were few to
equal that first moment's bright discovery. What I got from it finally
wasn't so much that sort of thing as this realization of Mr. Richards's
peculiar quality, this acute sense of all that he hadn't got. Mr.
Richards told of advertising enterprises, of contracts and journeyings,
of his great friendship with the late Dr. Parker, of his domestic
affairs, and all the changes in the world that had struck him, and of a
remarkable dining club, called (paradoxically) the _Sphinx_, in which
the giants (or are they the mammoths?) of the world of advertisement
foregather. He gave his portrait, and the end-paper presented him
playfully as the jolly president of the Sphinx Club, champagne-bottle
crowned, but else an Egyptian monarch; and on the cover are two gilt
hands clasped across a gilt ripple of sea ("hands across the sea"),
under intertwining English and American flags. From the book one got
an effect, garrulous perhaps, but on the whole not unpleasing, of an
elderly but still active business personality quite satisfied by his
achievements, and representative of I know not what proportion, but at
any rate a considerable proportion, of his fellow-countrymen. And one
got an effect of a being not simply indifferent to the health and vigor
and growth of the community of which he was a part, but unaware of its
existence.
He displays this irresponsibility of the commercial mind so
illuminatingly because he does in a way attempt to tell something
more than his personal story. He notes the changes in the world about
him, how this has improved and that progressed, which contrasts
between England and America struck upon his mind. That he himself
is responsible amid these changes never seems to dawn upon him.
His freedom from any sense of duty to the world as a whole, of any
subordination of trading to great ideas, is naïve and fundamental.
He tells of how he arranged with the authorities in charge of the
Independence Day celebrations on Boston Common to display "three large
pieces" containing the name of a certain "bitters," which they did, and
how this no doubt very desirable commodity was first largely advertised
throughout the United States in the fall of 1861, and rapidly became
the success of the day, because of the enormous amount of placarding
given to the cabalistic characters 'S-T-1860-X.' Those strange letters
and figures stared upon people from wall and fence and tree, in every
leading town throughout the United States. They were painted on the
rocks of the Hudson River to such an extent that the attention of the
Legislature was drawn to the fact, and a law was passed to prevent the
further disfigurement of river scenery.
He calls this "cute." He tells, too, of his educational work upon
the English press, how he won it over to "display" advertisements,
and devised "the first sixteen-sheet double-demy poster ever seen
in England in connection with a proprietary article." He introduced
the smoking of cigarettes into England against great opposition.
Mr. Richards finds no incongruity, but apparently a very delightful
association, in the fact that this great victory for the adolescent's
cigarette was won on the site of Strudwick's house, wherein John Bunyan
died, and hard by the path of the Smithfield martyrs to their fiery
sacrifice. Both they and Mr. Richards "lit such a candle in England--"
Well, my business is not to tell of the feats by which Mr. Richards
grew wealthy and important as a tree may grow and flourish amid the
masonry it helps to disintegrate. My business is purely with his
insensibility to the state as an aspect of his personal life. It is
insensibility--not disregard or hostility. One gets an impression from
this book that if Mr. Richards had lived in a different culture, he
would have been a generous giver of himself. In spite of his curious
incapacity to appreciate any issues larger than large enterprises in
selling, he is very evidently a religious man. He sat under the late
Dr. Parker of the rich and prosperous City Temple, and that reverend
gentleman's leonine visage adorns the book. Its really the light one
gets on Dr. Parker and his teaching that appeals to me most in this
volume. For this gentleman Mr. Richards seems to have entertained a
feeling approaching reverence. He notes such details as:
"At the conclusion of an invocation or prayer, his habit always was to
make a pause of a few seconds before pronouncing 'Amen.' This was most
impressive....
"He spoke such words as 'God,' 'Jesus Christ,' 'No,' 'Yes,' 'Nothing,'
in a way to give more value to each word than any speaker I have ever
heard."
They became great friends, rarely a week passed without their meeting,
and, says Mr. Richards, he "was pleased, in the course of time,
to honor me with his confidence in a marked degree, as though he
recognized in me some quality which satisfied his judgment, that I
could be trusted in business questions quite apart from those relating
to his church. He was not only a born preacher, but possessed a
marvellous grasp of sound, practical knowledge upon the affairs of
the day. I often consulted with him regarding my own affairs, always
getting the most practical help."
When Dr. Parker came to America, the two friends corresponded warmly,
and several of the letters are quoted. Even "£5000 a year easily made"
could not tempt him from London and the modest opulence of the City
Temple....
But my business now is not to dwell on these characteristic details,
but to point out that Mr. Richards does not stand alone in the entire
detachment, not only of his worldly achievements, but of his spiritual
life, from any creative solicitude for the state. If he was merely an
isolated "character" I should have no concern with him. His association
with Dr. Parker shows most luminously that he presents a whole cult
of English and American rich traders, who in America "sat under" such
men as the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, for example, who evidently stand
for much more in America than in England, and who, so far as the
state and political and social work go, are scarcely of more use, are
probably more hindrance, than any organization of selfish voluptuaries
of equal wealth and numbers. It is a cult, it has its teachers and its
books. I have had a glimpse of one of its manuals. I find Mr. Richards
quoting with approval Dr. Parker's "Ten General Commandments for Men of
Business," commandments which strike me as not only State-blind, but
utterly God-blind, which are, indeed, no more than shrewd counsels for
"getting on." It is really quite horrible stuff morally. "Thou shalt
not hobnob with idle persons," parodies Dr. Parker in commandment V.,
so glossing richly upon the teachings of Him who ate with publicans
and sinners, and (no doubt to instil the advisability of keeping one's
more delicate business procedure in one's own hands), "Thou shalt not
forget that a servant who can tell lies _for_ thee, may one day tell
lies _to_ thee."...
I am not throwing any doubt upon the sincerity of Dr. Parker and Mr.
Richards. I believe that nothing could exceed the transparent honesty
that ends this record which tells of a certain bitters pushed at
the sacrifice of beautiful scenery, of a successful propaganda of
cigarette-smoking, and of all sorts of proprietary articles landed
well home in their gastric target of a whole life lost, indeed, in
commercial self-seeking, with "What shall I render unto the Lord for
all his benefits?"
"The Now is an atom of Sand,
And the Near is a perishing Clod,
But Afar is a fairyland,
And Beyond is the Bosom of God."
What I have to insist upon now is that this is a sample, and, so
far as I can tell, a fair sample, of the quality and trend of the
mind-stuff and the breadth and height of the tradition of a large and
I know not how influential mass of prosperous middle-class English,
and of a much more prosperous and influential and important section of
Americans. They represent much energy, they represent much property,
they are a factor to reckon with. They present a powerful opposing
force to anything that will suppress their disgusting notice-boards
or analyze their ambiguous "proprietary articles," or tax their
gettings for any decent public purpose. And here I find them selling
poisons as pain-killers, and alcohol as tonics, and fighting ably and
boldly to silence adverse discussion. In the face of the great needs
that lie before America their active trivality of soul, their energy
and often unscrupulous activity, and their quantitative importance
become, to my mind, adverse and threatening, a stumbling-block for
hope. For the impression I have got by going to and fro in America
is that Mr. Richards is a fair sample of at least the older type of
American. So far as I can learn, Mr. J.D. Rockefeller is just another
product of the same cult. You meet these older types everywhere,
they range from fervent piety and temperance to a hearty drinking,
"story"-telling, poker-playing type, but they have in common a sharp,
shrewd, narrow, business habit of mind that ignores the future and
the state altogether. But I do not find the younger men are following
in their lines. Some are. But just how many and to what extent, I do
not know. It is very hard for a literary man to estimate the quantity
and importance of ideas in a community. The people he meets naturally
all entertain ideas, or they would not come in his way. The people
who have new ideas talk; those who have not, go about their business.
But I hazard an opinion that Young America now presents an altogether
different type from the young men of enterprise and sound Baptist
and business principles who were the backbone of the irresponsible
commercial America of yesterday, the America that rebuilt Chicago on
"floating foundations," covered the world with advertisement boards,
gave the great cities the elevated railroads, and organized the trusts.
III
Oneida
I spent a curious day amid the memories of that strangely interesting
social experiment, the Oneida Community, and met a most significant
contemporary, "live American" of the newer school, in the son of the
founder and the present head of "Oneida Limited."
There are moments when that visit I paid to Oneida seems to me to
stand for all America. The place, you know, was once the seat of a
perfectionist community; the large red community buildings stand now
among green lawns and ripening trees, and I dined in the communal
dining-room, and visited the library, and saw the chain and trap
factory, and the silk-spinning factory and something of all its
industries. I talked to old and middle-aged people who told me all
sorts of interesting things of "community days," looked through curious
old-fashioned albums of photographs, showing the women in their
bloomers and cropped hair, and the men in the ill-fitting frock-coats
of the respectable mediocre person in early Victorian times. I think
that some of the reminiscences I awakened had been voiceless for some
time. At moments it was like hearing the story of a flattened, dry,
and colorless flower between the pages of a book, of a verse written
in faded ink, or of some daguerreotype spotted and faint beyond
recognition. It was extraordinarily New England in its quality as I
looked back at it all. They claimed a quiet perfection of soul, they
searched one another marvellously for spiritual chastening, they defied
custom and opinion, they followed their reasoning and their theology
to the inmost amazing abnegations--and they kept themselves solvent by
the manufacture of steel traps that catch the legs of beasts in their
strong and pitiless jaws....
But this book is not about the things that concerned Oneida in
community days, and I mention them here only because of the curious
developments of the present time. Years ago, when the founder, John
Humphrey Noyes, grew old and unable to control the new dissensions
that arose out of the sceptical attitude of the younger generation
towards his ingenious theology, and such-like stresses, communism was
abandoned, the religious life and services discontinued, the concern
turned into a joint-stock company, and the members made shareholders on
strictly commercial lines. For some years its prosperity declined. Many
of the members went away. But a nucleus remained as residents in the
old buildings, and after a time there were returns. I was told that in
the early days of the new period there was a violent reaction against
communistic methods, a jealous inexperienced insistence upon property.
"It was difficult to borrow a hammer," said one of my informants.
Then, as the new generation began to feel its feet, came a fresh
development of vitality. The Oneida company began to set up new
machinery, to seek wider markets, to advertise and fight competitors.
This Mr. P.B. Noyes was the leader into the new paths. He possesses all
the force of character, the constructive passion, the imaginative power
of his progenitor, and it has all gone into business competition. I
have heard much talk of the romance of business, chiefly from people I
heartily despised, but in Mr. Noyes I found business indeed romantic.
It had get hold of him, it possessed him like a passion. He has
inspired all his half-brothers and cousins and younger fellow-members
of the community with his own imaginative motive. They, too, are
enthusiasts for business.
Mr. Noyes is a tall man, who looks down when he talks to one. He showed
me over the associated factories, told me how the trap trade of all
North America is in Oneida's hands, told me of how they fight and win
against the British traps in South America and Burmah. He showed me
photographs of panthers in traps, tigers in traps, bears snarling at
death, unfortunate deer, foxes caught by the paws....
I did my best to forget those photographs at once in the interest of
his admirable machinery, which busied itself with chain-making as
though it had eyes and hands. I went beside him, full of that respect
that a literary man must needs feel when a creative business controller
displays his quality.
"But the old religion of Oneida?" I would interpolate.
"Each one of us is free to follow his own religion. Here is a new sort
of chain we are making for hanging-lamps. Hitherto--"
Presently I would try again. "Are the workers here in any way members
of the community?"
"Oh no! Many of them are Italian immigrants. We think of building a
school for them.... No, we get no labor troubles. We pay always above
the trade-union rates, and so we get the pick of the workmen. Our class
of work can't be sweated."...
Yes, he was an astonishing personality, so immensely concentrated on
these efficient manufacturing and trading developments, so evidently
careless of theology, philosophy, social speculation, beauty.
"Your father was a philosopher," I said.
"I think in ten years' time I may give up the control here," he threw
out, "and write something."
"I've thought of the publishing trade myself," I said, "when my wits
are old and stiff."...
I never met a man before so firmly gripped by the romantic constructive
and adventurous element of business, so little concerned about
personal riches or the accumulation of wealth. He illuminated much
that had been dark to me in the American character. I think better
of business by reason of him. And time after time I tried him upon
politics. It came to nothing. Making a new world was, he thought,
a rhetorical flourish about futile and troublesome activities, and
politicians merely a disreputable sort of parasite upon honorable
people who made chains and plated spoons. All his constructive
instincts, all his devotion, were for Oneida and its enterprises.
America was just the impartial space, the large liberty, in which
Oneida grew, the Stars and Stripes a wide sanction akin to the
impartial irresponsible harboring sky overhead. Sense of the State had
never grown in him--can now, I felt convinced, never grow....
But some day, I like to imagine, the World State, and not Oneida
corporations, and a nobler trade than traps, will command such services
as his.
CHAPTER XI
TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT
I
The Riddle of Intolerance
In considering the quality of the American mind (upon which, as
I believe, the ultimate destiny of America entirely depends), it
has been necessary to point out that, considered as one whole, it
still seems lacking in any of that living sense of the state out
of which constructive effort must arise, and that, consequently,
enormous amounts of energy go to waste in anarchistic and chaotically
competitive private enterprise. I believe there are powerful forces
at work in the trend of modern thought, science, and method, in the
direction of bringing order, control, and design into this confused
gigantic conflict, and the discussion of these constructive forces must
necessarily form the crown of my forecast of America's future. But
before I come to that I must deal with certain American traits that
puzzle me, that I cannot completely explain to myself, that dash my
large expectations with an obstinate shadow of foreboding. Essentially
these are disintegrating influences, in the nature of a fierce
intolerance, that lead to conflicts and destroy co-operation. One makes
one's criticism with compunction. One moves through the American world,
meeting constantly with kindness and hospitality, with a familiar
helpfulness that is delightful, with sympathetic enterprise and
energetic imagination, and then suddenly there flashes out a quality of
harshness....
I will explain in a few minutes what I mean by this flash of harshness.
Let me confess here that I cannot determine whether it is a necessary
consequence of American conditions, the scar upon the soul of too
strenuous business competition, or whether it is something deeper,
some subtle, unavoidable infection perhaps in this soil that was once
the Red Indian's battle-ground, some poison, it may be, mingled with
this clear exhilarating air. And going with this harshness there seems
also something else, a contempt for abstract justice that one does not
find in any European intelligence--not even among the English. This
contempt may be a correlative of the intense practicality begotten by
a scruple-destroying commercial training. That, at any rate, is my own
prepossession. Conceivably I am over-disposed to make that tall lady in
New York Harbor stand as a symbol for the liberty of property, and to
trace the indisputable hastiness of life here--it is haste sometimes
rather than speed,--its scorn of æsthetic and abstract issues, this
frequent quality of harshness, and a certain public disorder, whatever
indeed mars the splendid promise and youth of America, to that. I
think it is an accident of the commercial phase that presses men
beyond dignity, patience, and magnanimity. I am loath to believe it is
something fundamentally American.
I have very clearly in my memory the figure of young MacQueen, in his
gray prison clothes in Trenton jail, and how I talked with him. He and
Mr. Booker T. Washington and Maxim Gorky stand for me as figures in
the shadow--symbolical men. I think of America as pride and promise,
as large growth and large courage, all set with beautiful fluttering
bunting, and then my vision of these three men comes back to me;
they return presences inseparable from my American effect, unlit
and uncomplaining on the sunless side of her, implying rather than
voicing certain accusations. America can be hasty, can be obstinately
thoughtless and unjust....
Well, let me set down as shortly as I can how I saw them, and then go
on again with my main thesis.
II
MacQueen
MacQueen is one of those young men England is now making by the
thousand in her elementary schools--a man of that active, intelligent,
mentally hungry, self-educating sort that is giving us our elementary
teachers, our labor members, able journalists, authors, civil
servants, and some of the most public-spirited and efficient of our
municipal administrators. He is the sort of man an Englishman grows
prouder of as he sees America and something of her politicians and
labor leaders. After his board-school days MacQueen went to work as
a painter and grainer, and gave his spare energy to self-education.
He mastered German, and read widely and freely. He corresponded with
William Morris, devoured Tolstoy and Bernard Shaw, followed the
_Clarion_ week by week, discussed social questions, wrote to the
newspapers, debated, made speeches. The English reader will begin to
recognize the type. Jail had worn him when I saw him, but I should
think he was always physically delicate; he wears spectacles, he warms
emotionally as he talks. And he decided, after much excogitation, that
the ideal state is one of so fine a quality of moral training that
people will not need coercion and repressive laws. He calls himself an
anarchist--of the early Christian, Tolstoyan, non-resisting school.
Such an anarchist was Emerson, among other dead Americans whose names
are better treasured than their thoughts. That sort of anarchist has
as much connection with embittered bomb-throwers and assassins as Miss
Florence Nightingale has with the woman Hartmann, who put on a nurse's
uniform to poison and rob....
Well, MacQueen led an active life in England, married, made a decent
living, and took an honorable part in the local affairs of Leeds until
he was twenty-six. Then he conceived a desire for wider opportunity
than England offers men of his class.
In January, 1902, he crossed the Atlantic, and, no doubt, he came very
much aglow with the American idea. He felt that he was exchanging a
decadent country of dwarfing social and political traditions for a land
of limitless outlook. He became a proof-reader in New York, and began
to seek around him for opportunities of speaking and forwarding social
progress. He tried to float a newspaper. The New York labor-unions
found him a useful speaker, and, among others, the German silk-workers
of New York became aware of him. In June they asked him to go to
Paterson to speak in German to the weavers in that place.
The silk-dyers were on strike in Paterson, but the weavers were weaving
"scab-silk," dyed by dyers elsewhere, and it was believed that the
dyers' strike would fail unless they struck also. They had to be called
out. They were chiefly Italians, some Hungarians. It was felt by the
New York German silk-workers that perhaps MacQueen's German learned in
England might meet the linguistic difficulties of the case.
He went. I hope he will forgive me if I say that his was an extremely
futile expedition. He did very little. He wrote an entirely harmless
article or so in English for _La Questione Sociale_, and he declined
with horror and publicity to appear upon the same platform with a
mischievous and violent lady anarchist called Emma Goldman. On June
17, 1902, he went to Paterson again, and spoke to his own undoing.
There is no evidence that he said anything illegal or inflammatory,
there is clear evidence that he bored his audience. They shouted him
down, and called for a prominent local speaker named Galiano. MacQueen
subsided into the background, and Galiano spoke for an hour in Italian.
He aroused great enthusiasm, and the proceedings terminated with a
destructive riot.
Eight witnesses testify to the ineffectual efforts on the part of
MacQueen to combat the violence in progress....
That finishes the story of MacQueen's activities in America, for
which he is now in durance at Trenton. He, in common with a large
crowd and in common, too, with nearly all the witnesses against him,
did commit one offence against the law--he did not go home when
destruction began. He was arrested next day. From that time forth
his fate was out of his hands, and in the control of a number of
people who wanted to "make an example" of the Paterson strikers. The
press took up MacQueen. They began to clothe the bare bones of this
simple little history I have told in fluent, unmitigated lying. They
blackened him, one might think, out of sheer artistic pleasure in the
operation. They called this rather nervous, educated, nobly meaning if
ill-advised young man a "notorious anarchist"; his head-line title
became "Anarchistic MacQueen"; they wrote his "story" in a vein of
imaginative fervor; they invented "an unsavory police record" for
him in England; and enlarged upon the marvellous secret organization
for crime of which he was representative and leader. In a little
while MacQueen had ceased to be a credible human being; he might have
been invented by Mr. William le Queux. He was arrested--Galiano went
scot-free--and released on bail. It was discovered that his pleasant,
decent Yorkshire wife and three children were coming out to America to
him, and she became "the woman Nellie Barton"--her maiden name--and
"a socialist of the Emma Goldman stripe." This, one gathers, is the
most horrible stripe known to American journalism. Had there been a
worse one, Mrs. MacQueen would have been the _ex officio_. And now
here is an extraordinary thing--public officials began to join in
the process. This is what perplexes me most in this affair. I am
told that Assistant-Secretary-of-the-Treasury H.A. Taylor, without
a fact to go upon, subscribed to the "unsavory record" legend and
Assistant-Secretary C.H. Keep fell in with it. They must have seen
what it was they were indorsing. In a letter from Mr. Keep to the
Reverend A.W. Wishart, of Trenton (who throughout has fought most
gallantly for justice in this case), I find Mr. Keep distinguishes
himself by the artistic device of putting "William MacQueen's" name
in inverted commas. So, very delicately, he conveys out of the void
the insinuation that the name is an alias. Meanwhile the Commissioner
of Immigration prepared to take a hand in the game of breaking up
MacQueen. He stopped Mrs. MacQueen at the threshold of liberty,
imprisoned her in Ellis Island, and sent her back to Europe. MacQueen,
still on bail, was not informed of this action, and waited on the pier
for some hours before he understood. His wife had come second class to
America, but she was returned first class, and the steamship company
seized her goods for the return fare....
That was more than MacQueen could stand. He had been tried, convicted,
sentenced to five years' imprisonment, and he was now out on bail
pending an appeal. Anxiety about his wife and children was too much for
him. He slipped off to England after them ("Escape of the Anarchist
MacQueen"), made what provision and arrangements he could for them,
and returned in time to save his bondsman's money ("Capture of the
Escaped Anarchist MacQueen"). Several members of the Leeds City Council
("Criminal Associates in Europe") saw him off. That was in 1903. His
appeal had been refused on a technical point. He went into Trenton
jail, and there he is to this day. There I saw him. Trenton Jail did
not impress me as an agreeable place. The building is fairly old, and
there is no nonsense about the food. The cells hold, some of them,
four criminals, some of them two, but latterly MacQueen has had spells
in the infirmary, and has managed to get a cell to himself. Many of
the criminals are negroes and half-breeds, imprisoned for unspeakable
offences. In the exercising-yard MacQueen likes to keep apart. "When I
first came I used to get in a corner," he said....
Now this case of MacQueen has exercised my mind enormously. It was
painful to go out of the gray jail again after I had talked to
him--of Shaw and Morris, of the Fabian Society and the British labor
members--into sunlight and freedom, and ever and again, as I went about
New York having the best of times among the most agreeable people,
the figure of him would come back to me quite vividly, in his gray
dress, sitting on the edge of an unaccustomed chair, hands on his
knees, speaking a little nervously and jerkily, and very glad indeed
to see me. He is younger than myself, but much my sort of man, and we
talked of books and education and his case like brothers. There can be
no doubt to any sensible person who will look into the story of his
conviction, who will even go and see him, that there has been a serious
miscarriage of justice.
There has been a serious miscarriage of justice, such as (unhappily)
might happen in any country. That is nothing distinctive of America.
But what does impress me as remarkable and perplexing is the immense
difficulty--the perhaps unsurmountable difficulty--of getting this man
released. The Governor of the State of New Jersey knows he is innocent,
the judges of the Court of Pardons know he is innocent. Three of them
I was able to button-hole at Trenton, and hear their point of View.
Two are of the minority and for release, one was doubtful in attitude
but hostile in spirit. They hold, the man, he thinks, on the score of
public policy. They put it that Paterson is a "hotbed" of crime and
violence; that once MacQueen is released every anarchist in the country
will be emboldened to crime, and so on and so on. I admit Paterson
festers, but if we are to punish anybody instead of reforming the
system, it's the masters who ought to be in jail for that.
"What will the property-owners in Paterson say to us if this man is
released?" one of the judges admitted frankly.
"But he hadn't anything to do with the violence," I said, and argued
the case over again--quite missing the point of that objection.
Whenever I had a chance in New York, in Boston, in Washington, even
amid the conversation of a Washington dinner-table, I dragged up the
case of MacQueen. Nobody seemed indignant. One lady admitted the
sentence was heavy, "he might have been given six months to cool off
in," she said. I protested he ought not to have been given a day. "Why
did he go there?" said a Supreme Court judge in Washington, a lawyer in
New York, and several other people. "Wasn't he making trouble?" I was
asked.
At last that reached my sluggish intelligence.
Yet I still hesitate to accept the new interpretations. Galiano, who
preached blind violence and made the riot, got off scot-free; MacQueen,
who wanted a legitimate strike on British lines, went to jail. So
long as the social injustice, the sweated disorder of Paterson's
industrialism, vents its cries in Italian in _La Questione Sociale_,
so long as it remains an inaudible misery so far as the great public
is concerned, making vehement yet impotent appeals to mere force, and
so losing its last chances of popular sympathy, American property, I
gather, is content. The masters and the immigrants can deal with one
another on those lines. But to have outsiders coming in!
There is an active press campaign against the release of "the Anarchist
MacQueen," and I do not believe that Mr. Wishart will succeed in his
endeavors. I think MacQueen will serve out his five years.
The plain truth is that no one pretends he is in jail on his merits;
he is in jail as an example and lesson to any one who proposes to
come between master and immigrant worker in Paterson. He has attacked
the system. The people who profit by the system, the people who think
things are "all right as they are," have hit back in the most effectual
way they can, according to their lights.
That, I think, accounts for the sustained quality of the lying in
this case, and, indeed, for the whole situation. He is in jail on
principle and without personal animus, just as they used to tar and
feather the stray abolitionist on principle in Carolina. The policy
of stringent discouragement is a reasonable one--scoundrelly, no
doubt, but understandable. And I think I can put myself sufficiently
into the place of the Paterson masters, of the Trenton judges, of
those journalists, of those subordinate officials at Washington
even, to understand their motives and inducements. I indulge in no
self-righteous pride. Simply, I thank Heaven I have not had their
peculiar temptations.
But my riddle lies in the attitude of the public--of the American
nation, which hasn't, it seems, a spark of moral indignation for this
sort of thing, which indeed joins in quite cheerfully against the
victim.
It is ill served by its press, no doubt, but surely it understands....
III
Maxim Gorky
Then I assisted at the coming of Maxim Gorky, and witnessed many
intimate details of what Professor Giddings, that courageous publicist,
has called his "lynching."
Here, again, is a case I fail altogether to understand. The surface
values of that affair have a touch of the preposterous. I set them down
in infinite perplexity.
My first week in New York was in the period of Gorky's advent.
Expectation was at a high pitch, and one might have foretold a
stupendous, a history-making campaign. The American nation seemed
concentrated upon one great and ennobling idea, the freedom of Russia,
and upon Gorky as the embodiment of that idea. A protest was to be made
against cruelty and violence and massacre. That great figure of Liberty
with the torch was to make it flare visibly half-way round the world,
reproving tyranny.
Gorky arrived, and the _éclat_ was immense. We dined him, we lunched
him, we were photographed in his company by flash-light. I very gladly
shared that honor, for Gorky is not only a great master of the art I
practise, but a splendid personality. He is one of those people to whom
the camera does no justice, whose work, as I know it in an English
translation, forceful as it is, fails very largely to convey his
peculiar quality. His is a big, quiet figure; there is a curious power
of appeal in his face, a large simplicity in his voice and gesture.
He was dressed, when I met him, in peasant clothing, in a belted blue
shirt, trousers of some shiny black material, and boots; and save for
a few common greetings he has no other language than Russian. So it
was necessary that he should bring with him some one he could trust
to interpret him to the world. And having, too, much of the practical
helplessness of his type of genius, he could not come without his right
hand, that brave and honorable lady, Madame Andreieva, who has been now
for years in everything but the severest legal sense his wife. Russia
has no Dakota; and although his legal wife has long since found another
companion, the Orthodox Church in Russia has no divorce facilities for
men in the revolutionary camp. So Madame Andreieva stands to him as
George Eliot stood to George Lewes, and I suppose the two of them had
almost forgotten the technical illegality of their tie, until it burst
upon them and the American public in a monstrous storm of exposure.
It was like a summer thunder-storm. At one moment Gorky was in an
immense sunshine, a plenipotentiary from oppression to liberty, at the
next he was being almost literally pelted through the streets.
I do not know what motive actuated a certain section of the American
press to initiate this pelting of Maxim Gorky. A passion for moral
purity may perhaps have prompted it, but certainly no passion for
purity ever before begot so brazen and abundant a torrent of lies.
It was precisely the sort of campaign that damned poor MacQueen, but
this time on an altogether imperial scale. The irregularity of Madame
Andreieva's position was a mere point of departure. The journalists
went on to invent a deserted wife and children, they declared Madame
Andreieva was an "actress," and loaded her with all the unpleasant
implications of that unfortunate word; they spoke of her generally as
"the woman Andreieva"; they called upon the Commissioner of Immigration
to deport her as a "female of bad character"; quite influential people
wrote to him to that effect; they published the name of the hotel that
sheltered her, and organized a boycott. Whoever dared to countenance
the victims was denounced. Professor Dewar of Columbia had given them
a reception; "Dewar must go," said the head-lines. Mark Twain, who had
assisted in the great welcome, was invited to recant and contribute
unfriendly comments. The Gorkys were pursued with insult from hotel
to hotel. Hotel after hotel turned them out. They found themselves at
last, after midnight, in the streets of New York city with every door
closed against them. Infected persons could not have been treated more
abominably in a town smitten with a panic of plague.
This change happened in the course of twenty-four hours. On one day
Gorky was at the zenith, on the next he had been swept from the world.
To me it was astounding--it was terrifying. I wanted to talk to Gorky
about it, to find out the hidden springs of this amazing change. I
spent a Sunday evening looking for him with an ever-deepening respect
for the power of the American press. I had a quaint conversation with
the clerk of the hotel in Fifth Avenue from which he had first been
driven. Europeans can scarcely hope to imagine the moral altitudes
at which American hotels are conducted.... I went thence to seek Mr.
Abraham Cahan in the East Side, and thence to other people I knew, but
in vain. Gorky was obliterated.
I thought this affair was a whirlwind of foolish misunderstanding,
such as may happen in any capital, and that presently his entirely
tolerable relationship would be explained. But for all the rest of my
time in New York this insensate campaign went on. There was no attempt
of any importance to stem the tide, and to this day large sections
of the American public must be under the impression that this great
writer is a depraved man of pleasure accompanied by a favorite cocotte.
The writers of paragraphs racked their brains to invent new and smart
ways of insulting Madame Andreieva. The chaste entertainers of the
music-halls of the Tenderloin district introduced allusions. And amid
this riot of personalities Russia was forgotten. The massacres, the
chaos of cruelty and blundering, the tyranny, the women outraged, the
children tortured and slain--all that was forgotten. In Boston, in
Chicago, it was the same. At the bare suggestion of Gorky's coming the
same outbreak occurred, the same display of imbecile gross lying, the
same absolute disregard of the tragic cause he had come to plead.
One gleam of comedy in this remarkable outbreak I recall. Some one
in ineffectual protest had asked what Americans would have said if
Benjamin Franklin had encountered such ignominies on his similar
mission of appeal to Paris before the War of Independence. "Benjamin
Franklin," retorted one bright young Chicago journalist, "was a man of
very different moral character from Gorky," and proceeded to explain
how Chicago was prepared to defend the purity of her homes against
the invader. Benjamin Franklin, it is true, _was_ a person of very
different morals from Gorky--but I don't think that bright young man in
Chicago had a very sound idea of where the difference lay.
I spent my last evening on American soil in the hospitable home
in Staten Island that sheltered Gorky and Madame Andreieva. After
dinner we sat together in the deepening twilight upon a broad veranda
that looks out upon one of the most beautiful views in the world,
upon serene large spaces of land and sea, upon slopes of pleasant,
window-lit, tree-set wooden houses, upon the glittering clusters
of lights, and the black and luminous shipping that comes and goes
about the Narrows and the Upper Bay. Half masked by a hill contour
to the left was the light of the torch of Liberty.... Gorky's big
form fell into shadow, Madame Andreieva sat at his feet, translating
methodically, sentence by sentence, into clear French whatever he
said, translating our speeches into Russian. He told us stories--of
the soul of the Russian, of Russian religious sects, of kindnesses and
cruelties, of his great despair.
Ever and again, in the pauses, my eyes would go to where New York far
away glittered like a brighter and more numerous Pleiades.
I gauged something of the real magnitude of this one man's
disappointment, the immense expectation of his arrival, the impossible
dream of his mission. He had come--the Russian peasant in person,
out of a terrific confusion of bloodshed, squalor, injustice--to tell
America, the land of light and achieved freedom, of all these evil
things. She would receive him, help him, understand truly what he
meant with his "Rossia." I could imagine how he had felt as he came in
the big steamer to her, up that large converging display of space and
teeming energy. There she glowed to-night across the water, a queen
among cities, as if indeed she was the light of the world. Nothing, I
think, can ever rob that splendid harbor approach of its invincible
quality of promise.... And to him she had shown herself no more than
the luminous hive of multitudes of base and busy, greedy and childish
little men.
MacQueen in jail, Gorky with his reputation wantonly bludgeoned and
flung aside; they are just two chance specimens of the myriads who have
come up this great waterway bearing hope and gifts.
CHAPTER XII
THE TRAGEDY OF COLOR
I
Harsh Judgments
I seem to find the same hastiness and something of the same note
of harshness that strike me in the cases of MacQueen and Gorky
in America's treatment of her colored population. I am aware how
intricate, how multitudinous, the aspects of this enormous question
have become, but looking at it in the broad and transitory manner I
have proposed for myself in these papers, it does seem to present
many parallel elements. There is the same disposition towards an
indiscriminating verdict, the same disregard of proportion as between
small evils and great ones, the same indifference to the fact that the
question does not stand alone, but is a part, and this time a by no
means small part, in the working out of America's destinies.
In regard to the colored population, just as in regard to the great
and growing accumulations of unassimilated and increasingly unpopular
Jews, and to the great and growing multitudes of Roman Catholics whose
special education contradicts at so many points those conceptions of
individual judgment and responsibility upon which America relies, I
have attempted time after time to get some answer from the Americans
I have met to what is to me the most obvious of questions. "Your
grandchildren and the grandchildren of these people will have to
live in this country side by side; do you propose, do you believe
it possible, that under the increasing pressure of population and
competition they should be living then in just the same relations that
you and these people are living now; if you do not, then what relations
do you propose shall exist between them?"
It is not too much to say that I have never once had the beginnings
of an answer to this question. Usually one is told with great gravity
that the problem of color is one of the most difficult that we have
to consider, and the conversation then breaks up into discursive
anecdotes and statements about black people. One man will dwell upon
the uncontrollable violence of a black man's evil passions (in Jamaica
and Barbadoes colored people form an overwhelming proportion of the
population, and they have behaved in an exemplary fashion for the last
thirty years); another will dilate upon the incredible stupidity of the
full-blooded negro (during my stay in New York the prize for oratory
at Columbia University, oratory which was the one redeeming charm of
Daniel Webster, was awarded to a Zulu of unmitigated blackness); a
third will speak of his physical offensiveness, his peculiar smell
which necessitates his social isolation (most well-to-do Southerners
are brought up by negro "mammies"); others, again, will enter upon the
painful history of the years that followed the war, though it seems a
foolish thing to let those wrongs of the past dominate the outlook for
the future. And one charming Southern lady expressed the attitude of
mind of a whole class very completely, I think, when she said, "You
have to be one of us to feel this question at all as it ought to be
felt."
There, I think, I got something tangible. These emotions are a cult.
My globe-trotting impudence will seem, no doubt, to mount to its
zenith when I declare that hardly any Americans at all seem to be in
possession of the elementary facts in relation to this question. These
broad facts are not taught, as of course they ought to be taught,
in school; and what each man knows is picked up by the accidents of
his own untrained observation, by conversation always tinctured by
personal prejudice, by hastily read newspapers and magazine articles
and the like. The quality of this discussion is very variable, but
on the whole pretty low. While I was in New York opinion was greatly
swayed by an article in, if I remember rightly, the _Century Magazine_,
by a gentleman who had deduced from a few weeks' observation in the
slums of Khartoum the entire incapacity of the negro to establish a
civilization of his own. He never had, therefore he never could; a
discouraging ratiocination. We English, a century or so ago, said all
these things of the native Irish. If there is any trend of opinion at
all in this matter at present, it lies in the direction of a generous
decision on the part of the North and West to leave the black more and
more to the judgment and mercy of the white people with whom he is
locally associated. This judgment and mercy points, on the whole, to an
accentuation of the colored man's natural inferiority, to the cessation
of any other educational attempts than those that increase his
industrial usefulness (it is already illegal in Louisiana to educate
him above a contemptible level), to his industrial exploitation through
usury and legal chicanery, and to a systematic strengthening of the
social barriers between colored people of whatever shade and the whites.
Meanwhile, in this state of general confusion, in the absence
of any determining rules or assumptions, all sorts of things
are happening--according to the accidents of local feeling. In
Massachusetts you have people with, I am afraid, an increasing sense of
sacrifice to principle, lunching and dining with people of color. They
do it less than they did, I was told. Massachusetts stands, I believe,
at the top of the scale of tolerant humanity. One seems to reach the
bottom at Springfield, Missouri, which is a county seat with a college,
an academy, a high school, and a zoological garden. There the exemplary
method reaches the nadir. Last April three unfortunate negroes were
burned to death, apparently because they were negroes, and as a general
corrective of impertinence. They seem to have been innocent of any
particular offence. It was a sort of racial sacrament. The edified
Sunday-school children hurried from their gospel-teaching to search
for souvenirs among the ashes, and competed with great spirit for a
fragment of charred skull.
It is true that in this latter case Governor Folk acted with vigor
and justice, and that the better element of Springfield society was
evidently shocked when it was found that quite innocent negroes had
been used in these instructive pyrotechnics; but the fact remains
that a large and numerically important section of the American public
does think that fierce and cruel reprisals are a necessary part of
the system of relationships between white and colored man. In our
dispersed British community we have almost exactly the same range
between our better attitudes and our worse--I'm making no claim of
national superiority. In London, perhaps, we out-do Massachusetts in
liberality; in the National Liberal Club or the Reform a black man
meets all the courtesies of humanity--as though there was no such thing
as color. But, on the other hand, the Cape won't bear looking into for
a moment. The same conditions give the same results; a half-educated
white population of British or Dutch or German ingredients greedy
for gain, ill controlled and feebly influenced, in contact with a
black population, is bound to reproduce the same brutal and stupid
aggressions, the same half-honest prejudices to justify those
aggressions, the same ugly, mean excuses. "Things are better in Jamaica
and Barbadoes," said I, in a moment of patriotic weakness, to Mr.
Booker T. Washington.
"Eh!" said he, and thought in that long silent way he has.... "They're
worse in South Africa--much. Here we've got a sort of light. We know
generally what we've got to stand. _There_--"
His words sent my memory back to some conversations I had quite
recently with a man from a dry-goods store in Johannesburg. He gave me
clearly enough the attitude of the common white out there; the dull
prejudice; the readiness to take advantage of the "boy"; the utter
disrespect for colored womankind; the savage, intolerant resentment,
dashed dangerously with fear, which the native arouses in him. (Think
of all that must have happened in wrongful practice and wrongful law
and neglected educational possibilities before our Zulus in Natal were
goaded to face massacre, spear against rifle!) The rare and culminating
result of education and experience is to enable men to grasp facts, to
balance justly among their fluctuating and innumerable aspects, and
only a small minority in our world is educated to that pitch. Ignorant
people can think only in types and abstractions, can achieve only
emphatic absolute decisions, and when the commonplace American or the
commonplace colonial Briton sets to work to "think over" the negro
problem, he instantly banishes most of the material evidence from his
mind--clears for action, as it were. He forgets the genial carriage
of the ordinary colored man, his beaming face, his kindly eye, his
rich, jolly voice, his touching and trusted friendliness, his amiable,
unprejudiced readiness to serve and follow a white man who seems to
know what he is doing. He forgets--perhaps he has never seen--the dear
humanity of these people, their slightly exaggerated vanity, their
innocent and delightful love of color and song, their immense capacity
for affection, the warm romantic touch in their imaginations. He
ignores the real fineness of the indolence that despises servile toil,
of the carelessness that disdains the watchful aggressive economies,
day by day, now a wretched little gain here and now a wretched little
gain there, that make the dirty fortune of the Russian Jews who prey
upon color in the Carolinas. No; in the place of all these tolerable
every-day experiences he lets his imagination go to work upon a
monster, the "real nigger."
"Ah! You don't know the _real_ nigger," said one American to me when I
praised the colored people I had seen. "You should see the buck nigger
down South, Congo brand. Then you'd understand, sir."
His voice, his face had a gleam of passionate animosity.
One could see he had been brooding himself out of all relations to
reality in this matter. He was a man beyond reason or pity. He was
obsessed. Hatred of that imaginary diabolical "buck nigger" blackened
his soul. It was no good to talk to him of the "buck American,
Packingtown brand," or the "buck Englishman, suburban race-meeting
type," and to ask him if these intensely disagreeable persons justified
outrages on Senator Lodge, let us say, or Mrs. Longworth. No reply
would have come from him. "You don't understand the question," he would
have answered. "You don't know how we Southerners feel."
Well, one can make a tolerable guess.
II
The White Strain
I certainly did not begin to realize one most important aspect of this
question until I reached America. I thought of those eight millions
as of men, black as ink. But when I met Mr. Booker T. Washington,
for example, I met a man certainly as white in appearance as our
Admiral Fisher, who is, as a matter of fact, quite white. A very large
proportion of these colored people, indeed, is more than half white.
One hears a good deal about the high social origins of the Southern
planters, very many derive indisputably from the first families of
England. It is the same blood flows in these mixed colored people's
veins. Just think of the sublime absurdity, therefore, of the ban.
There are gentlemen of education and refinement, qualified lawyers
and doctors, whose ancestors assisted in the Norman Conquest, and they
dare not enter a car marked "white" and intrude upon the dignity of the
rising loan-monger from Esthonia. For them the "Jim Crow" car....
One tries to put that aspect to the American in vain. "These people,"
you say, "are nearer your blood, nearer your temper, than any of those
bright-eyed, ringleted immigrants on the East Side. Are you ashamed of
your poor relations? Even if you don't like the half, or the quarter
of negro blood, you might deal civilly with the three-quarters white.
It doesn't say much for your faith in your own racial prepotency,
anyhow."...
The answer to that is usually in terms of mania.
"Let me tell you a little story just to illustrate," said one deponent
to me in an impressive undertone--"just to illustrate, you know.... A
few years ago a young fellow came to Boston from New Orleans. Looked
all right. Dark--but he explained that by an Italian grandmother. Touch
of French in him, too. Popular. Well, he made advances to a Boston
girl--good family. Gave a fairly straight account of himself. Married."
He paused. "Course of time--offspring. Little son."
His eye made me feel what was coming.
"Was it by any chance very, very black?" I whispered.
"Yes, _sir_. Black! Black as your hat. Absolutely negroid. Projecting
jaw, thick lips, frizzy hair, flat nose--everything....
"But consider the mother's feelings, sir, consider that! A pure-minded,
pure white woman!"
What can one say to a story of this sort, when the taint in the blood
surges up so powerfully as to blacken the child at birth beyond even
the habit of the pure-blooded negro? What can you do with a public
opinion made of this class of ingredient? And this story of the
lamentable results of intermarriage was used, not as an argument
against intermarriage, but as an argument against the extension
of quite rudimentary civilities to the men of color. "If you eat
with them, you've got to marry them," he said, an entirely fabulous
post-prandial responsibility.
It is to the tainted whites my sympathies go out. The black or mainly
black people seem to be fairly content with their inferiority; one sees
them all about the States as waiters, cab-drivers, railway porters, car
attendants, laborers of various sorts, a pleasant, smiling, acquiescent
folk. But consider the case of a man with a broader brain than such
small uses need, conscious, perhaps, of exceptional gifts, capable
of wide interests and sustained attempts, who is perhaps as English
as you or I, with just a touch of color in his eyes, in his lips, in
his fingernails, and in his imagination. Think of the accumulating
sense of injustice he must bear with him through life, the perpetual
slight and insult he must undergo from all that is vulgar and brutal
among the whites! Something of that one may read in the sorrowful
pages of Du Bois's _The Souls of Black Folk_. They would have made
Alexandre Dumas travel in the Jim Crow car if he had come to Virginia.
But I can imagine some sort of protest on the part of that admirable
but extravagant man.... They even talk of "Jim Crow elevators" now in
Southern hotels.
At Hull House, in Chicago, I was present at a conference of colored
people--Miss Jane Addams efficiently in control--to consider the
coming of a vexatious play, "The Clansman," which seems to have been
written and produced entirely to exacerbate racial feeling. Both men
and women were present, business people, professional men, and their
wives; the speaking was clear, temperate, and wonderfully to the point,
high above the level of any British town council I have ever attended.
One lady would have stood out as capable and charming in any sort of
public discussion in England--though we are not wanting in good women
speakers--and she was at least three-quarters black....
And while I was in Chicago, too, I went to the Peking Theatre--a
"coon" music-hall--and saw something of a lower level of colored life.
The common white, I must explain, delights in calling colored people
"coons," and the negro, so far as I could learn, uses no retaliatory
word. It was a "variety" entertainment, with one turn, at least, of
quite distinguished merit, good-humored and brisk throughout. I watched
keenly, and I could detect nothing of that trail of base suggestion
one would find as a matter of course in a music-hall in such English
towns as Brighton and Portsmouth. What one heard of kissing and
love-making was quite artless and simple indeed. The negro, it seemed
to me, did this sort of thing with a better grace and a better temper
than a Londoner, and shows, I think, a finer self-respect. He thinks
more of deportment, he bears himself more elegantly by far than the
white at the same social level. The audience reminded me of the sort of
gathering one would find in a theatre in Camden Town or Hoxton. There
were a number of family groups, the girls brightly dressed, and young
couples quite of the London music-hall type. Clothing ran "smart,"
but not smarter than it would be among fairly prosperous north London
Jews. There was no gallery--socially--no collection of orange-eating,
interrupting hooligans at all. Nobody seemed cross, nobody seemed
present for vicious purposes, and everybody was sober. Indeed, there
and elsewhere I took and confirmed a mighty liking to these gentle,
human, dark-skinned people.
III
Mr. Booker T. Washington
But whatever aspect I recall of this great taboo that shows no signs
of lifting, of this great problem of the future that America in her
haste, her indiscriminating prejudice, her lack of any sustained study
and teaching of the broad issues she must decide, complicates and
intensifies, and makes threatening, there presently comes back to mind
the browned face of Mr. Booker T. Washington, as he talked to me over
our lunch in Boston.
He has a face rather Irish in type, and the soft slow negro voice. He
met my regard with the brown sorrowful eyes of his race. He wanted
very much that I should hear him make a speech, because then his words
came better; he talked, he implied, with a certain difficulty. But I
preferred to have his talking, and get not the orator--every one tells
me he is an altogether great orator in this country where oratory is
still esteemed--but the man.
He answered my questions meditatively. I wanted to know with an active
pertinacity. What struck me most was the way in which his sense of the
overpowering forces of race prejudice weighs upon him. It is a thing he
accepts; in our time and conditions it is not to be fought about. He
makes one feel with an exaggerated intensity (though I could not even
draw him to admit) its monstrous injustice. He makes no accusations. He
is for taking it as a part of the present fate of his "people," and for
doing all that can be done for them within the limit it sets.
Therein he differs from Du Bois, the other great spokesman color
has found in our time. Du Bois, is more of the artist, less of the
statesman; he conceals his passionate resentment all too thinly.
He batters himself into rhetoric against these walls. He will not
repudiate the clear right of the black man to every educational
facility, to equal citizenship, and equal respect. But Mr. Washington
has statecraft. He looks before and after, and plans and keeps his
counsel with the scope and range of a statesman. I use "statesman"
in its highest sense; his is a mind that can grasp the situation and
destinies of a people. After I had talked to him I went back to my
club, and found there an English newspaper with a report of the opening
debate upon Mr. Birrell's Education Bill. It was like turning from the
discussion of life and death to a dispute about the dregs in the bottom
of a tea-cup somebody had neglected to wash up in Victorian times.
I argued strongly against the view he seems to hold that black and
white might live without mingling and without injustice, side by
side. That I do not believe. Racial differences seem to me always to
exasperate intercourse unless people have been elaborately trained to
ignore them. Uneducated men are as bad as cattle in persecuting all
that is different among themselves. The most miserable and disorderly
countries of the world are the countries where two races, two
inadequate cultures, keep a jarring, continuous separation. "You must
repudiate separation," I said. "No peoples have ever yet endured the
tension of intermingled distinctness."
"May we not become a peculiar people--like the Jews?" he suggested.
"Isn't that possible?"
But there I could not agree with him. I thought of the dreadful
history of the Jews and Armenians. And the negro cannot do what the
Jews and Armenians have done. The colored people of America are of a
different quality from the Jew altogether, more genial, more careless,
more sympathetic, franker, less intellectual, less acquisitive, less
wary and restrained--in a word, more Occidental. They have no common
religion and culture, no conceit of race to hold them together. The
Jews make a ghetto for themselves wherever they go; no law but their
own solidarity has given America the East Side. The colored people are
ready to disperse and inter-breed, are not a community at all in the
Jewish sense, but outcasts from a community. They are the victims of a
prejudice that has to be destroyed. These things I urged, but it was,
I think, empty speech to my hearer. I could talk lightly of destroying
that prejudice, but he knew better. It is the central fact of his life,
a law of his being. He has shaped all his projects and policy upon
that. Exclusion is inevitable. So he dreams of a colored race of decent
and inaggressive men silently giving the lie to all the legend of their
degradation. They will have their own doctors, their own lawyers, their
own capitalists, their own banks--because the whites desire it so. But
will the uneducated whites endure even so submissive a vindication as
that? Will they suffer the horrid spectacle of free and self-satisfied
negroes in decent clothing on any terms without resentment?
He explained how at the Tuskegee Institute they make useful men,
skilled engineers, skilled agriculturalists, men to live down the
charge of practical incompetence, of ignorant and slovenly farming and
house management....
"I wish you would tell me," I said, abruptly, "just what you think of
the attitude of white America towards you. Do you think it is generous?"
He regarded me for a moment. "No end of people help us," he said.
"Yes," I said; "but the ordinary man. Is he fair?"
"Some things are not fair," he said, leaving the general question
alone. "It isn't fair to refuse a colored man a berth on a
sleeping-car. I?--I happen to be a privileged person, they make an
exception for me; but the ordinary educated colored man isn't admitted
to a sleeping-car at all. If he has to go a long journey, he has to sit
up all night. His white competitor sleeps. Then in some places, in the
hotels and restaurants--It's all right here in Boston--but southwardly
he can't get proper refreshments. All that's a handicap....
"The remedy lies in education," he said; "ours--_and theirs_.
"The real thing," he told me, "isn't to be done by talking and
agitation. It's a matter of lives. The only answer to it all is for
colored men to be patient, to make themselves competent, to do good
work, to live well, to give no occasion against us. We feel that. In a
way it's an inspiration....
"There is a man here in Boston, a negro, who owns and runs some big
stores, employs all sorts of people, deals justly. That man has done
more good for our people than all the eloquence or argument in the
world.... That is what we have to do--it is all we _can_ do."...
Whatever America has to show in heroic living to-day, I doubt if she
can show anything finer than the quality of the resolve, the steadfast
effort hundreds of black and colored men are making to-day to live
blamelessly, honorably, and patiently, getting for themselves what
scraps of refinement, learning, and beauty they may, keeping their
hold on a civilization they are grudged and denied. They do it not
for themselves only, but for all their race. Each educated colored
man is an ambassador to civilization. They know they have a handicap,
that they are not exceptionally brilliant nor clever people. Yet every
such man stands, one likes to think, aware of his representative
and vicarious character, fighting against foul imaginations,
misrepresentations, injustice, insult, and the naïve unspeakable
meannesses of base antagonists. Every one of them who keeps decent and
honorable does a little to beat that opposition down.
But the patience the negro needs! He may not even look contempt. He
must admit superiority in those whose daily conduct to him is the
clearest evidence of moral inferiority. We sympathetic whites, indeed,
may claim honor for him; if he is wise he will be silent under our
advocacy. He must go to and fro self-controlled, bereft of all the
equalities that the great flag of America proclaims--that flag for
whose united empire his people fought and died, giving place and
precedence to the strangers who pour in to share its beneficence,
strangers ignorant even of its tongue. That he must do--and wait. The
Welsh, the Irish, the Poles, the white South, the indefatigable Jews
may cherish grievances and rail aloud. He must keep still. They may
be hysterical, revengeful, threatening, and perverse; their wrongs
excuse them. For him there is no excuse. And of all the races upon
earth, which has suffered such wrongs as this negro blood that is still
imputed to him as a sin? These people who disdain him, who have no
sense of reparation towards him, have sinned against him beyond all
measure....
No, I can't help idealizing the dark submissive figure of the negro in
this spectacle of America. He, too, seems to me to sit waiting--and
waiting with a marvellous and simple-minded patience--for finer
understandings and a nobler time.
CHAPTER XIII
THE MIND OF A MODERN STATE
I
Recapitulatory
I do not know if I am conveying to any extent the picture of America
as I see it, the vast rich various continent, the gigantic energetic
process of development, the acquisitive successes, the striving
failures, the multitudes of those rising and falling who come between,
all set in a texture of spacious countryside, animate with pleasant
timber homes, of clangorous towns that bristle to the skies, of great
exploitation districts and crowded factories, of wide deserts and
mine-torn mountains, and huge half-tamed rivers. I have tried to make
the note of immigration grow slowly to a dominating significance in
this panorama, and with that, to make more and more evident my sense
of the need of a creative assimilation, the cry for synthetic effort,
lest all this great being, this splendid promise of a new world,
should decay into a vast unprogressive stagnation of unhappiness and
disorder. I have hinted at failures and cruelties, I have put into the
accumulating details of my vision, children America blights, men she
crushes, fine hopes she disappoints and destroys. I have found a place
for the questioning figure of the South, the sorrowful interrogation
of the outcast colored people. These are but the marginal shadows of
a process in its totality magnificent, but they exist, they go on to
mingle in her destinies.
Then I have tried to show, too, the conception I have formed of the
great skein of industrial competition that has been tightening and
becoming more and more involved through all this century-long age,
the age of blind growth, that draws now towards its end; until the
process threatens to throttle individual freedom and individual
enterprise altogether. And of a great mental uneasiness and discontent,
unprecedented in the history of the American mind, that promises
in the near future some general and conscious endeavor to arrest
this unanticipated strangulation of freedom and free living, some
widespread struggle, of I know not what constructive power, with the
stains and disorders and indignities that oppress and grow larger in
the national consciousness. I perceive more and more that in coming
to America I have chanced upon a time of peculiar significance. The
note of disillusionment sounds everywhere. America, for the first time
in her history, is taking thought about herself, and ridding herself
of long-cherished illusions. I have already mentioned (in Chapter
VIII.) the memorable literature of self-examination that has come
into being during the last decade. Hitherto American thought has been
extraordinarily localized; there has been no national press, in the
sense that the press of London or Paris is national. Americans knew of
America as a whole, mainly as the flag. Beneath the flag America is
lost among constituent States and cities. All her newspapers have been,
by English standards, "local" papers, preoccupied by local affairs,
and taking an intensely localized point of view. A national newspaper
for America would be altogether too immense an enterprise. Only since
1896, and in the form of weekly and monthly ten-cent magazines, have
the rudiments of a national medium of expression appeared, and appeared
to voice strange pregnant doubts. I had an interesting talk with Mr.
Brisben Walker upon this new development. To him the first ten-cent
magazine, _The Cosmopolitan_, was due, and he was naturally glad to
tell me of the growth of this vehicle. To-day there is an aggregate
circulation of ten millions of these magazines; they supply fiction, no
doubt, and much of light interesting ephemeral matter, but not one of
them is without its element of grave public discussion. I do not wish
to make too much of this particular development, but regard it as a
sign of new interests, of keen curiosities.
Now I must confess when I consider this ocean of readers I find the
fears I have expressed of some analogical development of American
affairs towards the stagnant commercialism of China, or towards
a plutocratic imperialism and decadence of the Roman type, look
singularly flimsy. Upon its present lines, and supposing there were
no new sources of mental supply and energy, I do firmly believe that
America might conceivably come more and more under the control of a
tacitly organized and exhausting plutocracy, be swamped by a swelling
tide of ignorant and unassimilable labor immigrants, decline towards
violence and social misery, fall behind Europe in education and
intelligence, and cease to lead civilization. In such a decay Cæsarism
would be a most probable and natural phase, Cæsarism and a splitting
into contending Cæsarisms. Come but a little sinking from intelligence
towards coarseness and passion, and the South will yet endeavor to
impose servitude anew upon its colored people, or secede--that trouble
is not yet over. A little darkening and impoverishment of outlook and
New York would split from New England, and Colorado from the East. An
illiterate, short-sighted America would be America doomed. But America
is not illiterate; there are these great unprecedented reservoirs of
intelligence and understanding, these millions of people who follow
the process with an increasing comprehension. It is these millions of
readers who make the American problem, and the problem of Europe and
the world to-day, unique and incalculable, who provide a cohesive and
reasonable and pacifying medium the Old World did not know.
II
Birth Struggles of a Common Mind
You see, my hero in the confused drama of human life is intelligence;
intelligence inspired by constructive passion. There is a demi-god
imprisoned in mankind. All human history presents itself to me as
the unconscious or half-unconscious struggle of human thought to
emerge from the sightless interplay of instinct, individual passion,
prejudice, and ignorance. One sees this diviner element groping after
law and order and fine arrangement, like a thing blind and half-buried,
in ancient Egypt, in ancient Judæa, in ancient Greece. It embodies
its purpose in religions, invents the disciplines of morality, the
reminders of ritual. It loses itself and becomes confused. It wearies
and rests. In Plato, for the first time, one discovers it conscious and
open-eyed, trying, indeed, to take hold of life and control it. Then it
goes under, and becomes again a convulsive struggle, an inco-ordinated
gripping and leaving, a muttering of literature and art, until the
coming of our own times. Most painful and blundering of demi-gods it
seems through all that space of years, with closed eyes and feverish
effort. And now again it is clear to the minds of many men that they
may lay hold upon and control the destiny of their kind....
It is strange, it is often grotesque to mark how the reviving racial
consciousness finds expression to-day. Now it startles itself into a
new phase of self-knowledge by striking a note from this art, and now
by striking one from that. It breaks out in fiction that is ostensibly
written only to amuse, it creeps into after-dinner discussions,
and invades a press which is economically no more than a system of
advertisement sheets proclaiming the price of the thing that is.
Presently it is on the stage; the music-hall even is not safe from it.
Youths walk in the streets to-day, talking together of things that were
once the ultimate speculation of philosophy. I am no contemner of the
present. To me it appears a time of immense and wonderful beginnings.
New ideas are organizing themselves out of the little limited efforts
of innumerable men. Never was there an age so intellectually prolific
and abundant as this in the aggregate is. It is true, indeed, that
we who write and think and investigate to-day, present nothing to
compare with the magnificent reputations and intensely individualized
achievements of the impressive personalities of the past. None the
less is it true that taken all together we signify infinitely more.
We no longer pose ourselves for admiration, high priests and princes
of letters in a world of finite achievement; we admit ourselves no
more than pages bearing the train of a Queen--but a Queen of limitless
power. The knowledge we co-ordinate, the ideas we build together, the
growing blaze in which we are willingly consumed, are wider and higher
and richer in promise than anything the world has had before....
When one takes count of the forces of intelligence upon which we
may rely in the great conflict against matter, brute instinct, and
individualistic disorder, to make the new social state, when we
consider the organizing forms that emerge already from the general
vague confusion, we find apparent in every modern state three chief
series of developments. There is first the thinking and investigatory
elements that grow constantly more important in our university
life, the enlarging recognition of the need of a systematic issue
of university publications, books, periodicals, and of sustained
and fertilizing discussion. Then there is the greater, cruder,
and bolder sea of mental activities outside academic limits, the
amateurs, the free lances of thought and inquiry, the writers and
artists, the innumerable ill-disciplined, untrained, but interested
and well-meaning people who write and talk. They find their medium
in contemporary literature, in journalism, in organizations for the
propaganda of opinion. And, thirdly, there is the immense, nearly
universally diffused system of education which, inadequately enough,
serves to spread the new ideas as they are elaborated, which does, at
any rate by its preparatory work, render them accessible. All these
new manifestations of mind embody themselves in material forms, in
class-rooms and laboratories, in libraries, and a vast machinery of
book and newspaper production and distribution.
Consider the new universities that spring up all over America.
Almost imperceptibly throughout the past century, little by little,
the conception of a university has changed, until now it is nearly
altogether changed. The old-time university was a collection of learned
men; it believed that all the generalizations had been made, all the
fundamental things said; it had no vistas towards the future; it
existed for teaching and exercises, and more than half implied what
Dr. Johnson, for example, believed, that secular degeneration was the
rule of human life. All that, you know, has gone; every university,
even Oxford (though, poor pretentious dear, she still professes to read
and think metaphysics in "the original" Greek) admits the conception
of a philosophy that progresses, that broadens and intensifies, age
by age. But to come to America is to come to a country far more alive
to the thinking and knowledge-making function of universities than
Great Britain. One splendidly endowed foundation, the Johns Hopkins
University, Baltimore, exists only for research, and that was the first
intention of Chicago University also. In sociology, in pedagogics, in
social psychology, these vital sciences for the modern state, America
is producing an amount of work which, however trivial in proportion to
the task before her, is at any rate immense in comparison with our own
British output....
III
Columbia University
I did my amateurish and transitory best to see something of the
American universities. There was Columbia. Thither I went with a
letter to Professor Giddings, whose sociological writings are world
famous. I found him busy with a secretary in a businesslike little
room, stowed away somewhere under the dome of the magnificent building
of the university library. He took me round the opulent spaces, the
fine buildings of Columbia.... I suppose it is inevitable that a
visitor should see the constituents of a university out of proportion,
but I came away with an impression overwhelmingly architectural. The
library dome, I confess, was fine, and the desks below well filled with
students, the books were abundant, well arranged, and well tended. But
I recall marble staircases, I recall great wastes of marble steps, I
recall, in particular, students' baths of extraordinary splendor, and
I do not recall anything like an equivalent effect of large leisure
and dignity for intellectual men. Professor Giddings seemed driven and
busy, the few men I met there appeared all to have a lot of immediate
work to do. It occurred to me in Columbia, as it occurred to me later
in the University of Chicago, that the disposition of the university
founder is altogether too much towards buildings and memorial
inscriptions, and all too little towards the more difficult and far
more valuable end of putting men of pre-eminent ability into positions
of stimulated leisure. This is not a distinctly American effect. In
Oxford, just as much as in Columbia, nay, far more! you find stone and
student lording it over the creative mental thing; the dons go about
like some sort of little short-coated parasite, pointing respectfully
to tower and façade, which have, in truth, no reason for existing
except to shelter them. Columbia is almost as badly off for means
of publication as Oxford, and quite as poor in inducements towards
creative work. Professors talk in an altogether British way of getting
work done in the vacation.
Moreover, there was an effect of remoteness about Columbia. It may
have been the quality of a blue still morning of sunshine that invaded
my impression. I came up out of the crowded tumult of New York to it,
with a sense of the hooting, hurrying traffics of the wide harbor, the
teeming East Side, the glitter of spending, the rush of finance, the
whole headlong process of America, behind me. I came out of the subway
station into wide still streets. It was very spacious, very dignified,
very quiet. Well, I want the universities of the modern state to be
more aggressive. I want to think of a Columbia University of a less
detached appearance, even if she is less splendidly clad. I want to
think of her as sitting up there, cheek on hand, with knitted brows,
brooding upon the millions below. I want to think of all the best minds
conceivable going to and fro--thoughts and purposes in her organized
mind. And when she speaks that busy world should listen....
As a matter of fact, much of that busy world still regards a professor
as something between a dealer in scientific magic and a crank, and a
university as an institution every good American should be honestly
proud of and avoid.
IV
Harvard
Harvard, too, is detached, though not quite with the same immediacy
of contrast. Harvard reminded me very much of my first impressions of
Oxford. One was taken about in the same way to see this or that point
of view. Much of Harvard is Georgian red brick, that must have seemed
very ripe and venerable until a year or so ago one bitter winter killed
all the English ivy. There are students' clubs, after the fashion of
the Oxford Union, but finer and better equipped; there is an amazing
Germanic museum, the gift of the present Emperor, that does, in a
concentrated form, present all that is flamboyant of Germany; there are
noble museums and libraries, and very many fine and dignified aspects
and spaces, and an abundant intellectual life. Harvard is happily free
from the collegiate politics that absorb most of the surplus mental
energy of Oxford and Cambridge, and the professors can and do meet and
talk. At Harvard men count. I was condoled with on all hands in my
disappointment that I could not meet Professor William James--he was
still in California--and I had the good fortune to meet and talk to
President Eliot, who is, indeed, a very considerable voice in American
affairs. To me he talked quite readily and frankly of a very living
subject, the integrity of the press in relation to the systematic and
successful efforts of the advertising chemists and druggists to stifle
exposures of noxious proprietary articles. He saw the problem as the
subtle play of group psychology it is; there was none of that feeble
horror of these troubles as "modern and vulgar" that one would expect
in an English university leader. I fell into a great respect for his
lean fine face and figure, his deliberate voice, his open, balanced,
and constructive mind. He was the first man I had met who had any
suggestion of a force and quality that might stand up to and prevail
against the forces of acquisition and brute trading. He bore himself
as though some sure power were behind him, unlike many other men I met
who criticised abuses abusively, or in the key of facetious despair. He
had very much of that fine aristocratic quality one finds cropping up
so frequently among Americans of old tradition, an aristocratic quality
that is free from either privilege or pretension....
[Illustrations: HARVARD HALL AND THE JOHNSON GATE, CAMBRIDGE]
At Harvard, too, I met Professor Münsterberg, one of the few writers
of standing who have attempted a general review of the American
situation. He is a tall fair German, but newly annexed to America,
with a certain diplomatic quality in his personality, standing almost
consciously, as it were, for Germany in America, and for America in
Germany. He has written a book for either people, because hitherto they
have seen each other too much through English media ("von Englischen
linseln retouchiert"), and he has done much to spread the conception
of a common quality and sympathy between Germany and America. "Blood,"
he says in this connection, "is thicker than water, but ... printer's
ink is thicker than blood." England is too aristocratic, France too
shockingly immoral, Russia too absolutist to be the sympathetic and
similar friend of America, and so, by a process of exhaustion, Germany
remains the one power on earth capable of an "inner understanding."
(Also he has drawn an alluring parallel between President Roosevelt
and the Emperor William to complete the approximation of "die beiden
Edelnationen"). I had read all this, and was interested to encounter
him therefore at a Harvard table in a circle of his colleagues,
agreeable and courteous, and still scarcely more assimilated than the
brightly new white Germanic museum among the red brick traditions of
Kirkland and Cambridge streets....
Harvard impresses me altogether as a very living factor in the present
American outlook, not only when I was in Cambridge, but in the way the
place _tells_ in New York, in Chicago, in Washington. It has a living
and contemporary attitude, and it is becoming more and more audible.
Harvard opinion influences the magazines and affects the press, at
least in the East, to an increasing extent. It may, in the near future,
become still more rapidly audible. Professor Eliot is now full of
years and honor, and I found in New York, in Boston, in Washington,
that his successor was being discussed. In all these cities I met
people disposed to believe that if President Roosevelt does not become
President of the United States for a further term, he may succeed
President Eliot. Now that I have seen President Roosevelt it seems to
me that this might have a most extraordinary effect in accelerating the
reaction upon the people of America of the best and least mercenary of
their national thought. Already he is exerting an immense influence in
the advertisement of new ideas and ideals. But of President Roosevelt I
shall write more fully later....
V
Chicago University
Chicago University, too, is a splendid place of fine buildings and
green spaces and trees, with a great going to and fro of students, a
wonderful contrast to the dark congestions of the mercantile city to
the north. To all the disorganization of that it is even physically
antagonistic, and I could think as I went about it that already this
new organization has produced such writing as Veblen's admirable
ironies (_The Theory of Business Enterprise_, for example), and such
sociological work as that of Zueblin and Albion Small. I went through
the vigorous and admirably equipped pedagogic department, which is
evidently a centre of thought and stimulus for the whole teaching
profession of Illinois; I saw a library of sociology and economics
beyond anything that London can boast; I came upon little groups of
students working amid piles of books in a businesslike manner, and
if at times in other sections this suggestion was still insistent
that thought was as yet only "moving in" and, as it were, getting the
carpets down, it was equally clear that thought was going to live
freely and spaciously, to an unprecedented extent, so soon as things
were in order.
[Illustration: A BIT OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY]
I visited only these three great foundations, each in its materially
embodiment already larger, wealthier, and more hopeful than any
contemporary British institution, and it required an effort to realize
that they were but a portion of the embattled universities of America,
that I had not seen Yale nor Princeton nor Cornell nor Leland Stanford
nor any Western State university, not a tithe, indeed, of America's
drilling levies in the coming war of thought against chaos. I am in no
way equipped to estimate the value of the drilling; I have been unable
to get any conception how far these tens of thousands of students
in these institutions are really _alive_ intellectually, are really
inquiring, discussing, reading, and criticising; I have no doubt the
great numbers of them spend many hours after the fashion of one roomful
I saw intent upon a blackboard covered with Greek; but allowing the
utmost for indolence, games, distractions, and waste of time and energy
upon unfruitful and obsolete studies, the fact of this great increasing
proportion of minds at least a little trained in things immaterial,
a little exercised in the critical habit, remains a fact to put over
against that million and a half child workers who can barely have
learned to read--the other side, the redeeming side of the American
prospect.
VI
A Voice from Cornell
I am impressed by the evident consciousness of the American
universities of the rôle they have to play in America's future. They
seem to me pervaded by the constructive spirit. They are intelligently
antagonistic to lethargic and self-indulgent traditions, to disorder,
and disorderly institutions. It is from the universities that the
deliberate invasion of the political machine by independent men
of honor and position--of whom President Roosevelt is the type
and chief--proceeds. Mr. George Iles has called my attention to a
remarkable address made so long ago as the year 1883 before the Yale
Alumni, by President Andrew D. White (the first president), of
Cornell, who was afterwards American Ambassador at St. Petersburg
and Berlin. President White was a member of the class of '53, and he
addressed himself particularly to the men of that year. His title was
"The Message of the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth," and it is
full of a spirit that grows and spreads throughout American life, that
may ultimately spread throughout the life of the whole nation, a spirit
of criticism and constructive effort, of a scope and quality the world
has never seen before. The new class of '83 are the messengers.
"To a few tottering old men of our dear class of '53 it will be granted
to look with straining eyes over the boundary into the twentieth
century; but even these can do little to make themselves heard then.
Most of us shall not see it. But before us and around us; nay, in our
own families are the men who shall see it. The men who go forth from
these dear shades to-morrow are girding themselves for it. Often as I
have stood in the presence of such bands of youthful messengers I have
never been able to resist a feeling of awe, as in my boyhood when I
stood before men who were soon to see Palestine and the Far East, or
the Golden Gates of the West, and the islands of the Pacific. The old
story of St. Fillipo Neri at Rome comes back to me, who, in the days
of the Elizabethan persecutions, made men bring him out into the open
air and set him opposite the door of the Papal College of Rome, that
he might look into the faces of the English students, destined to go
forth to triumph or to martyrdom for the faith in far-off, heretic
England."
I cannot forbear from quoting further from this address; it is all so
congenial to my own beliefs. Indeed, I like to think of that gathering
of young men and old as if it were still existing, as though the old
fellows of '53 were still sitting, listening and looking up responsive
to this appeal that comes down to us. I fancy President White on the
platform before them, a little figure in the perspective of a quarter
of a century, but still quite clearly audible, delivering his periods
to that now indistinguishable audience:
"What, then, is to be done? Mercantilism, necessitated at first by our
circumstances and position, has been in the main a great blessing. It
has been so under a simple law of history. How shall it be prevented
from becoming in obedience to a similar inexorable law, a curse?
"Here, in the answer to this question, it seems to me, is the most
important message from this century to the next.
"For the great thing to be done is neither more nor less than to
develop _other_ great elements of civilization now held in check, which
shall take their rightful place in the United States, which shall
modify the mercantile spirit, ... which shall make the history of our
country something greater and broader than anything we have reached, or
ever can reach, under the sway of mercantilism alone.
"What shall be those counter elements of civilization? Monarchy,
aristocracy, militarism we could not have if we would, we would not
have if we could. What shall we have?
"I answer simply that we must do all that we can to rear greater
fabrics of religious, philosophic thought, literary thought,
scientific, artistic, political thought to summon young men more and
more into these fields, not as a matter of taste or social opportunity,
but as a patriotic duty; to hold before them not the incentive of
mere gain or of mere pleasure or of mere reputation, but the ideal
of a new and higher civilization. The greatest work which the coming
century has to do in this country is to build up an aristocracy of
thought and feeling which shall hold its own against the aristocracy of
mercantilism. I would have more and more the appeal made to every young
man who feels within him the ability to do good or great things in any
of these higher fields, to devote his powers to them as a sacred duty,
no matter how strongly the mercantile or business spirit may draw him.
I would have the idea preached early and late....
"And as the guardian of such a movement, ... I would strengthen at
every point this venerable university, and others like it throughout
the country. Remiss, indeed, have the graduates and friends of our own
honored Yale been in their treatment of her. She has never had the
means to do a tithe of what she might do. She ought to be made strong
enough, with more departments, more professors, more fellowships, to
become one of a series of great rallying points or fortresses, and
to hold always concentrated here a strong army, ever active against
mercantilism, materialism, and Philistinism....
"But, after all, the effort to create these new counterpoising,
modifying elements of a greater civilization must be begun in the
individual man, and especially in the youth who feels within himself
the power to think, the power to write, the power to carve the
marble, to paint, to leave something behind him better than dollars.
In the individual minds and hearts and souls of the messengers who
are preparing for the next century is a source of regeneration. They
must form an ideal of religion higher than that of a life devoted to
grasping and grinding and griping, with a whine for mercy at the end of
it. They must form an ideal of science higher than that of increasing
the production of iron or cotton. They must form an ideal of literature
and of art higher than that of pandering to the latest prejudice or
whimsey. And they must form an ideal of man himself worthy of that
century into which are to be poured the accumulations of this. So shall
material elements be brought to their proper place, made stronger for
good, made harmless for evil. So shall we have that development of new
and greater elements, that balance of principles which shall make this
republic greater than anything of which we now can dream."
CHAPTER XIV
CULTURE
I
The Boston Enchantment
Yet even as I write of the universities as the central intellectual
organ of a modern state, as I sit implying salvation by schools, there
comes into my mind a mass of qualification. The devil in the American
world drama may be mercantilism, ensnaring, tempting, battling against
my hero, the creative mind of man, but mercantilism is not the only
antagonist. In Fifth Avenue or Paterson one may find nothing but
the zenith and nadir of the dollar hunt, at a Harvard table one may
encounter nothing but living minds, but in Boston--I mean not only
Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue, but that Boston of the mind and
heart that pervades American refinement and goes about the world--one
finds the human mind not base, nor brutal, nor stupid, nor ignorant,
but mysteriously enchanting and ineffectual, so that having eyes it yet
does not see, having powers it achieves nothing....
I remember Boston as a quiet effect, as something a little withdrawn,
as a place standing aside from the throbbing interchange of East and
West. When I hear the word Boston now it is that quality returns. I do
not think of the spreading parkways of Mr. Woodbury and Mr. Olmstead
nor of the crowded harbor; the congested tenement-house regions, full
of those aliens whose tongues struck so strangely on the ears of Mr.
Henry James, come not to mind. But I think of rows of well-built, brown
and ruddy homes, each with a certain sound architectural distinction,
each with its two squares of neatly trimmed grass between itself and
the broad, quiet street, and each with its family of cultured people
within. I am reminded of deferential but unostentatious servants,
and of being ushered into large, dignified entrance-halls. I think
of spacious stairways, curtained archways, and rooms of agreeable,
receptive persons. I recall the finished informality of the high tea.
All the people of my impression have been taught to speak English with
a quite admirable intonation; some of the men and most of the women are
proficient in two or three languages; they have travelled in Italy,
they have all the recognized classics of European literature in their
minds, and apt quotations at command. And I think of the constant
presence of treasured associations with the titanic and now mellowing
literary reputations of Victorian times, with Emerson (who called Poe
"that jingle man"), and with Longfellow, whose house is now sacred, its
view towards the Charles River and the stadium--it is a real, correct
stadium--secured by the purchase of the sward before it forever....
At the mention of Boston I think, too, of autotypes and then of plaster
casts. I do not think I shall ever see an autotype again without
thinking of Boston. I think of autotypes of the supreme masterpieces
of sculpture and painting, and particularly of the fluttering garments
of the "Nike of Samothrace." (That I saw, also, in little casts and
big, and photographed from every conceivable point of view.) It is
incredible how many people in Boston have selected her for their
æsthetic symbol and expression. Always that lady was in evidence about
me, unobtrusively persistent, until at last her frozen stride pursued
me into my dreams. That frozen stride became the visible spirit of
Boston in my imagination, a sort of blind, headless, and unprogressive
fine resolution that took no heed of any contemporary thing. Next
to that I recall, as inseparably Bostonian, the dreaming grace of
Botticelli's "Prima vera." All Bostonians admire Botticelli, and
have a feeling for the roof of the Sistine chapel--to so casual and
adventurous a person as myself, indeed, Boston presents a terrible,
a terrifying unanimity of æsthetic discriminations. I was nearly
brought back to my childhood's persuasion that, after all, there is
a right and wrong in these things. And Boston clearly thought the
less of Mr. Bernard Shaw when I told her he had induced me to buy a
pianola, not that Boston ever did set much store by so contemporary a
person as Mr. Bernard Shaw. The books she reads are toned and seasoned
books--preferably in the old or else in limited editions, and by
authors who may be lectured upon without decorum....
Boston has in her symphony concerts the best music in America, and
here her tastes are severely orthodox and classic. I heard Beethoven's
Fifth Symphony extraordinarily well done, the familiar pinnacled Fifth
Symphony, and now, whenever I grind that out upon the convenient
mechanism beside my desk at home, mentally I shall be transferred
to Boston again, shall hear its magnificent aggressive thumpings
transfigured into exquisite orchestration, and sit again among that
audience of pleased and pleasant ladies in chaste, high-necked,
expensive dresses, and refined, attentive, appreciative, bald, or
iron-gray men....
II
Boston's Antiquity
Then Boston has historical associations that impressed me like
iron-moulded, leather-bound, eighteenth-century books. The War of
Independence, that to us in England seems half-way back to the days of
Elizabeth, is a thing of yesterday in Boston. "Here," your host will
say and pause, "came marching" so-and-so, "with his troops to relieve"
so-and-so. And you will find he is the great-grandson of so-and-so, and
still keeps that ancient colonial's sword. And these things happened
before they dug the Hythe military canal, before Sandgate, except for
a decrepit castle, existed; before the days when Bonaparte gathered
his army at Boulogne--in the days of muskets and pigtails--and erected
that column my telescope at home can reach for me on a clear day. All
that is ancient history in England and in Boston the decade before
those distant alarums and excursions is yesterday. A year or so ago
they restored the British arms to the old State-House. "Feeling,"
my informant witnessed, "was dying down." But there were protests,
nevertheless....
If there is one note of incongruity in Boston, it is in the gilt dome
of the Massachusetts State-House at night. They illuminate it with
electric light. That shocked me as an anachronism. It shocked me--much
as it would have shocked me to see one of the colonial portraits, or
even one of the endless autotypes of the Belvidere Apollo replaced, let
us say, by one of Mr. Alvin Coburn's wonderfully beautiful photographs
of modern New York. That electric glitter breaks the spell; it is
the admission of the present, of the twentieth century. It is just
as if the Quirinal and Vatican took to an exchange of badinage with
search-lights, or the King mounted an illuminated E.R. on the Round
Tower at Windsor.
Save for that one discord there broods over the real Boston an immense
effect of finality. One feels in Boston, as one feels in no other part
of the States, that the intellectual movement has ceased. Boston is
now producing no literature except a little criticism. Contemporary
Boston art is imitative art, its writers are correct and imitative
writers the central figure of its literary world is that charming old
lady of eighty-eight, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. One meets her and Colonel
Higginson in the midst of an authors' society that is not so much
composed of minor stars as a chorus of indistinguishable culture. There
are an admirable library and a museum in Boston, and the library is
Italianate, and decorated within like an ancient missal. In the less
ornamental spaces of this place there are books and readers. There is
particularly a charming large room for children, full of pigmy chairs
and tables, in which quite little tots sit reading. I regret now I did
not ascertain precisely what they were reading, but I have no doubt it
was classical matter.
I do not know why the full sensing of what is ripe and good in the past
should carry with it this quality of discriminating against the present
and the future. The fact remains that it does so almost oppressively. I
found myself by some accident of hospitality one evening in the company
of a number of Boston gentlemen who constituted a book-collecting club.
They had dined, and they were listening to a paper on Bibles printed
in America. It was a scholarly, valuable, and exhaustive piece of
research. The surviving copies of each edition were traced, and when
some rare specimen was mentioned as the property of any member of the
club there was decorously warm applause. I had been seeing Boston,
drinking in the Boston atmosphere all day.... I know it will seem
an ungracious and ungrateful thing to confess (yet the necessities
of my picture of America compel me), but as I sat at the large and
beautifully ordered table, with these fine, rich men about me, and
listened to the steady progress of the reader's ever unrhetorical
sentences, and the little bursts of approval, it came to me with a
horrible quality of conviction that the mind of the world was dead, and
that this was a distribution of souvenirs.
Indeed, so strongly did this grip me that presently, upon some slight
occasion, I excused myself and went out into the night. I wandered
about Boston for some hours, trying to shake off this unfortunate idea.
I felt that all the books had been written, all the pictures painted,
all the thoughts said--or at least that nobody would ever believe this
wasn't so. I felt it was dreadful nonsense to go on writing books.
Nothing remained but to collect them in the richest, finest manner one
could. Somewhere about midnight I came to a publisher's window, and
stood in the dim moonlight peering enviously at piled copies of Izaak
Walton and Omar Khayyam, and all the happy immortals who got in before
the gates were shut. And then in the corner I discovered a thin, small
book. For a time I could scarcely believe my eyes. I lit a match to be
the surer. And it was _A Modern Symposium_, by Lowes Dickinson, beyond
all disputing. It was strangely comforting to see it there--a leaf of
olive from the world of thought I had imagined drowned forever.
That was just one night's mood. I do not wish to accuse Boston of any
wilful, deliberate repudiation of the present and the future. But I
think that Boston--when I say Boston let the reader always understand
I mean that intellectual and spiritual Boston that goes about the
world, that traffics in book-shops in Rome and Piccadilly, that I have
dined with and wrangled with in my friend W.'s house in Blackheath,
dear W., who, I believe, has never seen America--I think, I say, that
Boston commits the scholastic error and tries to remember too much, to
treasure too much, and has refined and studied and collected herself
into a state of hopeless intellectual and æsthetic repletion in
consequence. In these matters there are limits. The finality of Boston
is a quantitive consequence. The capacity of Boston, it would seem, was
just sufficient but no more than sufficient, to comprehend the whole
achievement of the human intellect up, let us say, to the year 1875
A.D. Then an equilibrium was established. At or about that year Boston
filled up.
III
About Wellesley
It is the peculiarity of Boston's intellectual quality that she cannot
unload again. She treasures Longfellow in quantity. She treasures his
works, she treasures associations, she treasures his Cambridge home.
Now, really, to be perfectly frank about him, Longfellow is not good
enough for that amount of intellectual house room. He cumbers Boston.
And when I went out to Wellesley to see that delightful girls' college
everybody told me I should be reminded of the "Princess." For the life
of me I could not remember what "Princess." Much of my time in Boston
was darkened by the constant strain of concealing the frightful gaps in
my intellectual baggage, this absence of things I might reasonably be
supposed, as a cultivated person, to have, but which, as a matter of
fact, I'd either left behind, never possessed, or deliberately thrown
away. I felt instinctively that Boston could never possibly understand
the light travelling of a philosophical carpet-bagger. But I hid--in
full view of the tree-set Wellesley lake, ay, with the skiffs of "sweet
girl graduates"--own up. "I say," I said, "I wish you wouldn't all be
so allusive. _What_ Princess?"
It was, of course, that thing of Tennyson's. It is a long, frequently
happy and elegant, and always meritorious narrative poem, in which a
chaste Victorian amorousness struggles with the early formulæ of the
feminist movement. I had read it when I was a boy, I was delighted to
be able to claim, and had honorably forgotten the incident. But in
Boston they treat it as a living classic, and expect you to remember
constantly and with appreciation this passage and that. I think that
quite typical of the Bostonian weakness. It is the error of the clever
high-school girl, it is the mistake of the scholastic mind all the
world over, to learn too thoroughly and to carry too much. They want to
know and remember Longfellow and Tennyson--just as in art they want to
know and remember Raphael and all the elegant inanity of the sacrifice
at Lystra, or the miraculous draught of Fishes; just as in history they
keep all the picturesque legends of the War of Independence--looking up
the dates and minor names, one imagines, ever and again. Some years ago
I met two Boston ladies in Rome. Each day they sallied forth from our
hotel to see and appreciate; each evening, after dinner, they revised
and underlined in Baedeker what they had seen. _They meant to miss
nothing in Rome._ It's fine in its way--this receptive eagerness, this
learners' avidity. Only people who can go about in this spirit need,
if their minds are to remain mobile, not so much heads as _cephalic
pantechnicon vans_....
IV
The Wellesley Cabinets
I find this appetite to have all the mellow and refined and beautiful
things in life to the exclusion of all thought for the present and
the future even in the sweet, free air of Wellesley's broad park,
that most delightful, that almost incredible girls' university,
with its class-rooms, its halls of residence, its club-houses and
gathering-places among the glades and trees. I have very vivid in
my mind a sunlit room in which girls were copying the detail in the
photographs of masterpieces, and all around this room were cabinets of
drawers, and in each drawer photographs. There must be in that room
photographs of every picture of the slightest importance in Italy,
and detailed studies of many. I suppose, too, there are photographs
of all the sculpture and buildings in Italy that are by any standard
considerable. There is, indeed, a great civilization, stretching over
centuries and embodying the thought and devotion, the scepticism and
levities, the ambition, the pretensions, the passions, and desires of
innumerable sinful and world-used men--_canned_, as it were, in this
one room, and freed from any deleterious ingredients. The young ladies,
under the direction of competent instructors, go through it, no doubt,
industriously, and emerge--capable of Browning.
I was taken into two or three charming club-houses that dot this
beautiful domain. There was a Shakespeare club-house, with a delightful
theatre, Elizabethan in style, and all set about with Shakespearean
things; there was the club-house of the girls who are fitting
themselves for their share in the great American problem by the study
of Greek. Groups of pleasant girls in each, grave with the fine gravity
of youth, entertained the reluctantly critical visitor, and were
unmistakably delighted and relaxed when one made it clear that one was
not in the Great Teacher line of business, when one confided that one
was there on false pretences, and insisting on seeing the pantry. They
have jolly little pantries, and they make excellent tea.
I returned to Boston at last in a state of mighty doubting, provided
with a Wellesley College calendar to study at my leisure.
I cannot, for the life of me, determine how far Wellesley is an aspect
of what I have called Boston; how far it is a part of that wide forward
movement of the universities upon which I lavish hope and blessings.
Those drawings of photographed Madonnas and Holy Families and
Annunciations, the sustained study of Greek, the class in the French
drama of the seventeenth century, the study of the topography of Rome
fill me with misgivings, seeing the world is in torment for the want of
living thought about its present affairs. But, on the other hand, there
are courses upon socialism--though the text-book is still _Das Kapital_
of Marx--and upon the industrial history of England and America. I
didn't discover a debating society, but there is a large accessible
library.
How far, I wonder still, are these girls thinking and feeding mentally
for themselves? What do they discuss one with another? How far do
they suffer under that plight of feminine education--notetaking from
lectures?...
But, after all, this about Wellesley is a digression into which I fell
by way of Boston's autotypes. My main thesis was that culture, as it
is conceived in Boston, is no contribution to the future of America,
that cultivated people may be, in effect, as state-blind as--Mr.
Morgan Richards. It matters little in the mind of the world whether
any one is concentrated upon mediæval poetry, Florentine pictures, or
the propagation of pills. The common, significant fact in all these
cases is this, a blindness to the crude splendor of the possibilities
of America now, to the tragic greatness of the unheeded issues that
blunder towards solution. Frankly, I grieve over Boston--Boston
throughout the world--as a great waste of leisure and energy, as a
frittering away of moral and intellectual possibilities. We give too
much to the past. New York is not simply more interesting than Rome,
but more significant, more stimulating, and far more beautiful, and the
idea that to be concerned about the latter in preference to the former
is a mark of a finer mental quality is one of the most mischievous and
foolish ideas that ever invaded the mind of man. We are obsessed by
the scholastic prestige of mere knowledge and genteel remoteness. Over
against unthinking ignorance is scholarly refinement, the spirit of
Boston; between that Scylla and this Charybdis the creative mind of man
steers its precarious way.
CHAPTER XV
AT WASHINGTON
I
Washington as Anti-climax
I came to Washington full of expectations and curiosities. Here, I
felt, so far as it could exist visibly and palpably anywhere, was
the head and mind of this colossal America over which my observant
curiosities had wandered. In this place I should find, among other
things, perhaps as many as ten thousand men who would not be concerned
in trade. There would be all the Senators and representatives, their
secretaries and officials, and four thousand and more scientific and
literary men of Washington's institutions and libraries, the diplomatic
corps, the educational centres, the civil service, the writers and
thinking men who must inevitably be drawn to this predestined centre. I
promised myself arduous intercourse with a teeming intellectual life.
Here I should find questions answered, discover missing clues, get hold
of the last connections in my inquiry. I should complete at Washington
my vision of America; my forecast would follow.
I don't precisely remember how this vision departed. I know only that
after a day or so in Washington an entirely different conception was
established, a conception of Washington as architecture and avenues,
as a place of picture post-cards and excursions, with sightseers
instead of thoughts going to and fro. I had imagined that in Washington
I should find such mentally vigorous discussion-centres as the New
York X Club on a quite magnificent scale. Instead, I found the chief
scientific gathering-place has, like so many messes in the British
army before the Boer war, a rule against talking "shop." In all
Washington there is no clearing-house of thought at all; Washington has
no literary journals, no magazines, no publications other than those
of the official specialist--there does not seem to be a living for a
single firm of publishers in this magnificent empty city.
I went about the place in a state of ridiculous and deepening concern.
I went through the splendid Botanical Gardens, through the spacious
and beautiful Capitol, and so to the magnificently equipped Library
of Congress. There in an upper chamber that commands an altogether
beautiful view of long vistas of avenue and garden to that stupendous
unmeaning obelisk (the work of the women of America) that dominates
all Washington, I found at last a little group of men who could talk.
It was like a small raft upon a limitless empty sea. I lunched with
them at their Round Table, and afterwards Mr. Putnam showed me the
Rotunda, quite the most gracious reading-room dome the world possesses,
and explained the wonderful mechanical organization that brings almost
every volume in that immense collection within a minute of one's hand.
"With all this," I asked him, "why doesn't the place _think_?" He
seemed, discreetly, to consider it did.
[Illustration: IN THE CONGRESSIONAL LIBRARY]
It was in the vein of Washington's detached deadness that I should
find Professor Langley (whose flying experiments I have followed for
some years with close interest) was dead, and I went through the
long galleries of archæological specimens and stuffed animals in the
Smithsonian Institution to inflict my questions upon his temporary
successor, Dr. Cyrus Adler. He had no adequate excuses. He found a
kind of explanation in the want of enterprise of American publishers,
so that none of them come to Washington to tap its latent resources of
knowledge and intellectual capacity; but that does not account for the
absence of any traffic in ideas. It is perhaps near the truth to say
that this dearth of any general and comprehensive intellectual activity
is due to intellectual specialization. The four thousand scientific men
in Washington are all too energetically busy with ethnographic details,
electrical computations, or herbaria to talk about common and universal
things. They ought not to be so busy, and a science so specialized
sinks half-way down the scale of sciences. Science is one of those
things that cannot hustle; if it does, it loses its connections.
In Washington some men, I gathered, hustle, others play bridge, and
general questions are left, a little contemptuously, as being of the
nature of "gas," to the newspapers and magazines. Philosophy, which
correlates the sciences and keeps them subservient to the universals
of life, has no seat there. My anticipated synthesis of ten thousand
minds refused, under examination, to synthesize at all; it remained
disintegrated, a mob, individually active and collectively futile, of
specialists and politicians.
II
The City of Conversation
But that is only one side of Washington life, the side east and
south of the White House. Northwestward I found, I confess, the most
agreeable social atmosphere in America. It is a region of large fine
houses, of dignified and ample-minded people, people not given over
to "smartness" nor redolent of dollars, unhurried and reflective, not
altogether lost to the wider aspects of life. In Washington I met
again that peculiarly aristocratic quality I had found in Harvard--in
the person of President Eliot, for example--an aristocratic quality
that is all the finer for the absence of rank, that has integral in
it--books, thought, and responsibility. And yet I could have wished
these fine people more alive to present and future things, a little
less established upon completed and mellowing foundations, a little
less final in their admirable finish....
There was, I found, a little breeze of satisfaction fluttering the
Washington atmosphere in this region. Mr. Henry James came through the
States last year distributing epithets among their cities with the
justest aptitude. Washington was the "City of Conversation"; and she
was pleasantly conscious that she merited this friendly coronation.
Washington, indeed, converses well, without awkwardness, without
chatterings, kindly, watchful, agreeably witty. She lulled and tamed my
purpose to ask about primary things, to discuss large questions. Only
once, and that was in an after-dinner duologue, did I get at all into a
question in Washington. For the rest, Washington remarked and alluded
and made her point and got away.
III
Mount Vernon
And Washington, with a remarkable unanimity and in the most charming
manner, assured me that if I came to see and understand America I
must on no account miss Mount Vernon. To have passed indifferently
by Concord was bad enough, I was told, but to ignore the home of
the first president, to turn my back upon that ripe monument of
colonial simplicity, would be quite criminal neglect. To me it was a
revelation how sincerely insistent they were upon this. It reminded
me of an effect I had already appreciated very keenly in Boston--and
even before Boston, when Mr. Z took me across Spuyten Duyvil into
the country of Sleepy Hollow, and spoke of Cornwallis as though he
had died yesterday--and that is the longer historical perspectives
of America. America is an older country than any European one, for
she has not rejuvenesced for a hundred and thirty years. In endless
ways America fails to be contemporary. In many respects, no doubt,
she is decades in front of Europe, in mechanism, for example, and
productive organization, but in very many other and more fundamental
ones she is decades behind. Go but a little way back and you will
find the European's perspectives close up; they close at '71, at '48,
down a vista of reform bills, at Waterloo and the treaty of Paris,
at the Irish Union, at the coming of Victor Emanuel; Great Britain,
for example, in the last hundred years has reconstructed politically
and socially, created half her present peerage, evolved the Empire of
India, developed Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, fought fifty
considerable wars. Mount Vernon, on the other hand, goes back with
unbroken continuity, a broad band of mellow tradition, to the War of
Independence.
Well, I got all that in conversation at Washington, and so I didn't
need to go to Mount Vernon, after all. I got all that about 1777,
and I failed altogether to get anything of any value whatever about
1977--which is the year of greater interest to me. About the direction
and destinies of that great American process that echoes so remotely
through Washington's cool gracefulness of architecture and her
umbrageous parks, this cultivated society seemed to me to be terribly
incurious and indifferent. It was alive to political personalities, no
doubt, its sons and husbands were Senators, judges, ambassadors, and
the like; it was concerned with their speeches and prospects, but as
to the trend of the whole thing Washington does not picture it, does
not want to picture it. I found myself presently excusing myself for
Mount Vernon on the ground that I was not a retrospective American, but
a go-ahead Englishman, and so apologizing for my want of reverence for
venerable things. "We are a young people," I maintained. "We are a new
generation."
IV
In the Senate-House
I went to see the Senate debating the railway-rate bill, and from
the Senatorial gallery I had pointed out to me Tillman and Platt,
Foraker and Lodge, and all the varied personalities of the assembly.
The chamber is a circular one, with enormously capacious galleries.
The members speak from their desks, other members write letters, read
(and rustle) newspapers, sit among accumulations of torn paper, or
stand round the apartment in audibly conversational groups. A number of
messenger-boys--they wear no uniform--share the floor of the House with
the representatives, and are called by clapping the hands. They go to
and fro, or sit at the feet of the Vice-President. Behind and above the
Vice-President the newspaper men sit in a state of partial attention,
occasionally making notes for the vivid descriptions that have long
since superseded verbatim reports in America. The public galleries
contain hundreds of intermittently talkative spectators. For the most
part these did not seem to me to represent, as the little strangers'
gallery in the House of Commons represents, interests affected. They
were rather spectators seeing Washington, taking the Senate _en route_
for the obelisk top and Mount Vernon. They made little attempt to hear
the speeches.
In a large distinguished emptiness among these galleries is the space
devoted to diplomatic representatives, and there I saw, sitting in a
meritorious solitude, the British _charge d'affaires_ and his wife
following the debate below. I found it altogether too submerged for me
to follow. The countless spectators, the Senators, the boy messengers,
the comings and goings kept up a perpetual confusing babblement. One
saw men walking carelessly between the Speaker and the Vice-President,
and at one time two gentlemen with their backs to the member in
possession of the House engaged the Vice-President in an earnest
conversation. The messengers circulated at a brisk trot, or sat on the
edge of the dais exchanging subdued badinage. I have never seen a more
distracted Legislature.
The whole effect of Washington is a want of concentration, of something
unprehensile and apart. It is on, not in, the American process. The
place seems to me to reflect, even in its sounds and physical forms,
that dispersal of power, that evasion of a simple conclusiveness,
which is the peculiar effect of that ancient compromise, the American
Constitution. The framers of that treaty were haunted by two terrible
bogies, a military dictatorship and what they called "mob rule,"
they were obsessed by the need of safeguards against these dangers,
they were controlled by the mutual distrust of constituent States
far more alien to one another than they are now, and they failed to
foresee both the enormous assimilation of interests and character
presently to be wrought by the railways and telegraphs, and the huge
possibilities of corruption, elaborate electrical arrangements offer
to clever unscrupulous men. And here in Washington is the result, a
Legislature that fails to legislate, a government that cannot govern,
a pseudo-responsible administration that offers enormous scope for
corruption, and that is perhaps invincibly intrenched behind the
two-party system from any insurgence of the popular will. The plain
fact of the case is that Congress, as it is constituted at present,
is the feeblest, least accessible, and most inefficient central
government of any civilized nation in the worst west of Russia.
Congress is entirely inadequate to the tasks of the present time.
I came away from Washington with my pre-conception enormously
reinforced that the supreme need of America, the preliminary thing to
any social or economic reconstruction, is political reform. It seems
to me to lie upon the surface that America has to be democratized.
It is necessary to make the Senate and the House of Representatives
more interdependent, and to abolish the possibilities of deadlocks
between them, to make election to the Senate direct from the people,
and to qualify and weaken the power of the two-party system by the
introduction of "second ballots" and the referendum....
But how such drastic changes are to be achieved constitutionally in
America I cannot imagine. Only a great educated, trained, and sustained
agitation can bring about so fundamental a political revolution, and at
present I can find nowhere even the beginnings of a realization of this
need.
V
President Roosevelt
In the White House, set midway between the Washington of the sightseers
and the Washington of brilliant conversation, I met President
Roosevelt. I was mightily pleased by the White House; it is dignified
and simple--once again am I tempted to use the phrase "aristocratic
in the best sense" of things American; and an entire absence of
uniforms or liveries creates an atmosphere of Republican equality
that is reinforced by "Mr. President's" friendly grasp of one's
undistinguishable hand. And after lunch I walked about the grounds with
him, and so achieved my ambition to get him "placed," as it were, in my
vision of America.
In the rare chances I have had of meeting statesmen, there has always
been one common effect, an effect of their being smaller, less audible,
and less saliently featured than one had expected. A common man
builds up his picture of the men prominent in the great game of life
very largely out of caricature, out of head-lines, out of posed and
"characteristic" portraits. One associates them with actresses and
actors, literary poseurs and such-like public performers, anticipates
the same vivid self-consciousness as these display in common
intercourse, keys one's self up for the paint on their faces, and for
voices and manners altogether too accentuated for the gray-toned lives
of common men. I've met politicians who remained at that. But so soon
as Mr. Roosevelt entered the room, "Teddy," the Teddy of the slouch
hat, the glasses, the teeth, and the sword, that strenuous vehement
Teddy (who had, let me admit, survived a full course of reading in the
President's earlier writings) vanished, and gave place to an entirely
negotiable individuality. To-day, at any rate, the "Teddy" legend is
untrue. Perhaps it wasn't always quite untrue. There was a time during
the world predominance of Mr. Kipling, when I think the caricature
must have come close to certain of Mr. Roosevelt's acceptances and
attitudes. But that was ten years and more ago, and Mr. Roosevelt to
this day goes on thinking and changing and growing....
For me, anyhow, that strenuousness has vanished beyond recalling, and
there has emerged a figure in gray of a quite reasonable size, with a
face far more thoughtful and perplexed than strenuous, with a clinched
hand that does indeed gesticulate, though it is by no means a gigantic
fist--and with quick movements, a voice strained indeed, a little
forced for oratory, but not raised or aggressive in any fashion, and
friendly screwed-up eyes behind the glasses.
It isn't my purpose at all to report a conversation that went from
point to point. I wasn't interviewing the President, and I made no note
at the time of the things said. My impression was of a mind--for the
situation--quite extraordinarily open. That is the value of President
Roosevelt for me, and why I can't for the life of my book leave
him out. He is the seeking mind of America displayed. The ordinary
politician goes through his career like a charging bull, with his eyes
shut to any changes in the premises. He locks up his mind like a powder
magazine. But any spark may fire the mind of President Roosevelt.
His range of reading is amazing; he seems to be echoing with all the
thought of the time, he has receptivity to the pitch of genius. And he
does not merely receive, he digests and reconstructs; he thinks. It is
his political misfortune that at times he thinks aloud. His mind is
active with projects of solution for the teeming problems around him.
Traditions have no hold upon him--nor, his enemies say, have any but
quite formal pledges. It is hard to tie him. In all these things he is
to a single completeness, to mind and will of contemporary America. And
by an unparalleled conspiracy of political accidents, as all the world
knows, he has got to the White House. He is not a part of the regular
American political system at all--he has, it happens, stuck through.
Now my picture of America is, as I have tried to make clear, one of a
gigantic process of growth, of economic coming and going, spaced out
over vast distances and involving millions of hastening men; I see
America as towns and urgency and greatnesses beyond, I suppose, any
precedent that has ever been in the world. And like a little island of
order amid that ocean of enormous opportunity and business turmoil and
striving individualities, is this District of Columbia, with Washington
and its Capitol and obelisk. It is a mere pin-point in the unlimited,
on which, in peace times, the national government lies marooned,
twisted up into knots, bound with safeguards, and altogether impotently
stranded. And peering closely, and looking from the Capitol down the
vista of Pennsylvania Avenue, I see the White House, minute and clear,
with a fountain playing before it, and behind it a railed garden set
with fine trees. The trees are not so thick, nor the railings so high
but that the people on the big "seeing Washington" cannot crane to look
into it and watch whoever walk about it. And in this garden goes a
living speck, as it were, in gray, talking, swinging a white clinched
hand, and trying vigorously and resolutely to get a hold upon the
significance of the whole vast process in which he and his island of
government are set.
Always before him there have been political resultants, irrelevancies
and futilities of the White House; and after him, it would seem, they
may come again. I do not know anything of the quality of Mr. Bryan,
who may perhaps succeed him. He, too, is something of an exception, it
seems, and keeps a still developing and inquiring mind. Beyond is a
vista of figures of questionable value so far as I am concerned. They
have this in common that they don't stand for thought. For the present,
at any rate, a personality, extraordinarily representative, occupies
the White House. And what he chooses to say publicly (and some things
he says privately) are, by an exceptional law of acoustics, heard in
San Francisco, in Chicago, in New Orleans, in New York and Boston, in
Kansas, and Maine, throughout the whole breadth of the United States
of America. He assimilates contemporary thought, delocalizes and
reverberates it. He is America for the first time vocal to itself.
What is America saying to itself?
I've read most of the President's recent speeches, and they fall in
oddly with that quality in his face that so many photographs even
convey, a complex mingling of will and a critical perplexity. Taken all
together they amount to a mass of not always consistent suggestions,
that and conflict overlap. Things crowd upon him, rebate scandals,
insurance scandals, the meat scandals, this insecurity and that. The
conditions of his position press upon him. It is no wonder he gives out
no single, simple note....
The plain fact is that in the face of the teeming situations of to-day
America does not know what to do. Nobody, except those happily gifted
individuals who can see but one aspect of an intricate infinitude,
imagines any simple solution. For the rest the time is one of
ample, vigorous, and at times impatient inquiry, and of intense
disillusionment with old assumptions and methods. And never did a
President before so reflect the quality of his time. The trend is
altogether away from the anarchistic individualism of the nineteenth
century, that much is sure, and towards some constructive scheme which,
if not exactly socialism, as socialism is defined, will be, at any
rate, closely analogous to socialism. This is the immense change of
thought and attitude in which President Roosevelt participates, and to
which he gives a unique expression. Day by day he changes with the big
world about him--contradicts himself....
I came away with the clear impression that neither President
Roosevelt nor America will ever, as some people prophesy, "declare
for socialism," but my impression is equally clear, that he and all
the world of men he stands for, have done forever with the threadbare
formulæ that have served America such an unconscionable time. We talked
of the press and books and of the question of color, and then for a
while about the rôle of the universities in the life of the coming time.
Now it is a curious thing that as I talked with President Roosevelt in
the garden of the White House there came back to me quite forcibly that
undertone of doubt that has haunted me throughout this journey. After
all, does this magnificent appearance of beginnings which is America,
convey any clear and certain promise of permanence and fulfilment
whatever? Much makes for construction, a great wave of reform is going
on, but will it drive on to anything more than a breaking impact upon
even more gigantic uncertainties and dangers. Is America a giant
childhood or a gigantic futility, a mere latest phase of that long
succession of experiments which has been and may be for interminable
years--may be indeed altogether until the end--man's social history?
I can't now recall how our discursive talk settled towards that, but
it is clear to me that I struck upon a familiar vein of thought in
the President's mind. He hadn't, he said, an effectual disproof of
any pessimistic interpretation of the future. If one chose to say
America must presently lose the impetus of her ascent, that she and all
mankind must culminate and pass, he could not conclusively deny that
possibility. Only he chose to live as if this were not so.
That remained in his mind. Presently he reverted to it. He made a sort
of apology for his life against the doubts and scepticisms that, I
fear, must be in the background of the thoughts of every modern man
who is intellectually alive. He mentioned a little book of mine, an
early book full of the deliberate pessimism of youth, in which I drew
a picture of a future of decadence, of a time when constructive effort
had fought its fight and failed, when the inevitable segregations
of an individualistic system had worked themselves out and all the
hope and vigor of humanity had gone forever. The descendants of the
workers had become etiolated, sinister, and subterranean monsters, the
property-owners had degenerated into a hectic and feebly self-indulgent
race, living fitfully amid the ruins of the present time. He became
gesticulatory, and his straining voice a note higher in denying this
as a credible interpretation of destiny. With one of those sudden
movements of his, he knelt forward in a garden chair--we were standing
before our parting beneath the colonnade--and addressed me very
earnestly over the back, clutching it, and then thrusting out his
familiar gesture, a hand first partly open and then closed.
"Suppose after all," he said, slowly, "that should prove to be right,
and it all ends in your butterflies and morlocks. _That doesn't matter
now._ The effort's real. It's worth going on with. It's worth it. It's
worth it--even then."...
I can see him now and hear his unmusical voice saying "The effort--the
effort's worth it," and see the gesture of his clinched hand and
the--how can I describe it? the friendly peering snarl of his face,
like a man with the sun in his eyes. He sticks in my mind as that,
as a very symbol of the creative will in man, in its limitations,
its doubtful adequacy, its valiant persistence amid perplexities and
confusions. He kneels out, assertive against his setting--and his
setting is the White House with a background of all America.
I could almost write, with a background of all the world--for I
know of no other a tithe so representative of the creative purpose,
the _good-will_ in men as he. In his undisciplined hastiness, his
limitations, his prejudices, his unfairness, his frequent errors, just
as much as in his force, his sustained courage, his integrity, his open
intelligence, he stands for his people and his kind.
THE ENVOY
And at last I am back in my study by the sea. It is high June. When
I said good-bye to things it was March, a March warm and eager to
begin with, and then dashed with sleet and wind; but the daffodils
were out, and the primulas and primroses shone brown and yellow in
the unseasonable snow. The spring display that was just beginning
is over. The iris rules. Outside the window is a long level line of
black fleur-de-lys rising from a serried rank of leaf-blades. Their
silhouettes stand out against the brightness of the twilight sea. They
mark, so opened, two months of absence. And in the interval I have seen
a great world.
I have tried to render it as I saw it. I have tried to present the
first exhilaration produced by the sheer growth of it, the morning-time
hopefulness of spacious and magnificent opportunity, the optimism of
successful, swift, progressive effort in material things. And from that
I have passed to my sense of the chaotic condition of the American
will, and that first confidence has darkened more and more towards
doubt again. I came to America questioning the certitudes of progress.
For a time I forgot my questionings; I sincerely believed, "These
people can do anything," and, now I have it all in perspective, I
have to confess that doubt has taken me again. "These people," I say,
"might do anything. They are the finest people upon earth--the most
hopeful. But they are vain and hasty; they are thoughtless, harsh, and
undisciplined. In the end, it may be, they will accomplish nothing."
I see, I have noted in its place, the great forces of construction,
the buoyant, creative spirit of America. But I have marked, too, the
intricacy of snares and obstacles in its path. The problem of America,
save in its scale and freedom, is no different from the problem of
Great Britain, of Europe, of all humanity; it is one chiefly moral and
intellectual; it is to resolve a confusion of purposes, traditions,
habits, into a common ordered intention. Everywhere one finds what
seem to me the beginnings of that--and, for this epoch it is all too
possible, they may get no further than beginnings. Yet another Decline
and Fall may remain to be written, another and another, and it may be
another, before the World State comes and Peace.
Yet against this prospect of a dispersal of will, of a secular decline
in honor, education, public spirit, and confidence, of a secular
intensification of corruption, lawlessness, and disorder, I do, with
a confidence that waxes and wanes, balance the creative spirit in
America, and that kindred spirit that for me finds its best symbol in
the President's kneeling, gesticulating figure, and his urgent "The
effort's worth it!" Who can gauge the far-reaching influence of even
the science we have, in ordering and quickening the imagination of
man, in enhancing and assuring their powers? Common men feel secure
to-day in enterprises it needed men of genius to conceive in former
times. And there is a literature--for all our faults we do write more
widely, deeply, disinterestedly, more freely and frankly than any set
of writers ever did before--reaching incalculable masses of readers,
and embodying an amount of common consciousness and purpose beyond
all precedent. Consider only how nowadays the problems that were once
the inaccessible thoughts of statesmen may be envisaged by common
men! Here am I really able, in a few weeks of observant work, to get
a picture of America. I publish it. If it bears a likeness, it will
live and be of use; if not it will die, and be no irreparable loss.
Some fragment, some suggestion may survive. My friend Mr. F. Madox
Hueffer was here a day or so ago to say good-bye; he starts for America
as I write here, to get _his_ vision. As I have been writing these
papers I have also been reading, instalment by instalment, the subtle,
fine renderings of America revisited by Mr. Henry James. We work in
shoals, great and small together, one trial thought following another.
We are getting the world presented. It is not simply America that we
swarm over and build up into a conceivable process, into something
understandable and negotiable by the mind. I find on my desk here
waiting for me a most illuminating _Vision of India_, in which Mr.
Sidney Low, with a marvellous aptitude, has interpreted east to west.
Besides my poor superficialities in _The Tribune_ appears Sir William
Butler, with a livid frankness expounding the most intimate aspects
of the South African situation. A friend who called to-day spoke of
Nevinson's raid upon the slave trade of Portuguese East Africa, and
of two irrepressible writers upon the Congo crimes. I have already
mentioned the economic and social literature, the so-called literature
of exposure in America. This altogether represents collectively a
tremendous illumination. No social development was ever so lit and
seen before. Collectively, this literature of facts and theories and
impressions is of immense importance. Things are done in the light,
more and more are they done in the light. The world perceives and
thinks....
After all is said and done, I do find the balance of my mind tilts
steadily to a belief in a continuing and accelerated progress now in
human affairs. And in spite of my patriotic inclinations, in spite,
too, of the present high intelligence and efficiency of Germany, it
seems to me that in America, by sheer virtue of its size, its free
traditions, and the habit of initiative in its people, the leadership
of progress must ultimately rest. Things like the Chicago scandals,
the insurance scandals, and all the manifest crudities of the American
spectacle, don't seem to me to be more than relatively trivial after
all. There are the universities, the turbines of Niagara, the New York
architecture, and the quality of the mediocre people to set against
these....
Within a week after I saw the President I was on the _Umbria_ and
steaming slowly through the long spectacle of that harbor which was my
first impression of America, which still, to my imagination, stands so
largely for America. The crowded ferry-boats hooted past; athwart the
shining water, tugs clamored to and fro. The sky-scrapers raised their
slender masses heavenward--America's gay bunting lit the scene. As we
dropped down I had a last glimpse of the Brooklyn Bridge. There to the
right was Ellis Island, where the immigrants, minute by minute, drip
and drip into America, and beyond that the tall spike-headed Liberty
with the reluctant torch, which I have sought to make the centre of
all this writing. And suddenly as I looked back at the sky-scrapers
of lower New York a queer fancy sprang into my head. They reminded me
quite irresistibly of piled-up packing cases outside a warehouse. I
was amazed I had not seen the resemblance before. I could really have
believed for a moment that that was what they were, and that presently
out of these would come the real thing, palaces and noble places, free,
high circumstances, and space and leisure, light and fine living for
the sons of men....
Ocean, cities, multitudes, long journeys, mountains, lakes as large as
seas, and the riddle of a nation's destiny; I've done my impertinent
best now with this monstrous insoluble problem. I finish.
The air is very warm and pleasant in my garden to-night, the sunset has
left a rim of greenish-gold about the northward sky, shading up a blue
that is, as yet, scarce pierced by any star. I write down these last
words here, and then I shall step through the window and sit out there
in the kindly twilight, now quiet, now gossiping idly of what so-and-so
has done while I have been away, of personal motives and of little
incidents and entertaining intimate things.
THE END
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