I had to wait at a small station in the West for one of those periodically late trains, and was reading the only fiction available, the railroad time-table. A train which came from the opposite direction brought a gang of working men who had been shovelling the snow which had blocked the road. As they were all immigrants I had no further use for my time-table and went among them, guessing at their nationality, sorting them according to the shape of their heads, delighting my soul by talking to them as much as I could of their native country, and quizzing them about their experience in the United States.
I had succeeded splendidly with all of them and there was but one man left. As soon as I saw him I said to myself, “He is a Russian, not a common Russian, but of the Velko Russ variety which is still rare or comparatively rare among our immigrant population.” I walked up to him and saluted him with the pious greeting of his class. There wasn’t the slightest indication that he understood me, so I concluded that I was mistaken; but knowing that he was a Slav, I tried a greeting in Polish, and again the great, shaggy Slav seemed not to understand. When Bohemian failed, I decided that my error was merely geographical and this was a Southern, not a Northern Slav. I used all the Serbic I knew without getting anything but a stare from my victim, and then decided that he might be an Albanian. Knowing only two words of that language I tried them with the same negative result. Finally, disgusted with myself I resorted to English. Feeling sure that he would not understand, I shouted at him, “Are you a Greek?” Then a ray of intelligence passed over his stolid face. Deliberately taking his pipe out of his mouth, he laconically replied: “No, I am from Missoury.”
A shout of laughter followed my story; but the Herr Director’s face grew darker and darker. When we were in our taxicab going back to the hotel, he said: “One of the most remarkable things I have learned to-day about the American people is that they are very young, almost childlike.”
“Why, how did you learn that?” I asked.
“Oh,” he answered, “who but a childlike, naïve people would laugh over such a stupid joke as yours? Anyway, how did you dare bring such a silly story into so serious a conversation?”
“Yes,” I replied; “that is as you say a sign of our youth. The more complex and seasoned jokes belong to the older civilizations, and the love of a simple story and the ready response to it, even though it be a poor story, are a sign of our youthful health; but you know,” I added, “that story I told was not so mal apropos after all.” And the rest of the day I struggled mightily to convince the Herr Director that being “from Missoury” is one of the most hopeful things about the American Spirit.
“TAKE us out of New York,” the Herr Director said after a wearing day of sightseeing, “or we will go home on the next steamer. My neck aches from looking at the sky-scrapers, my nerves are all on edge, and,” glancing at the Frau Directorin who had hugely enjoyed every moment and showed no sign of weariness, “we must have rest.”
I was reluctant to leave New York, because, after all, it holds those great thrills with which we like to startle our foreign friends. I feared the change from those daily surprises which thus far I had been able to give them. Lake Mohonk, the only place outside of New York City which we had visited, is unique in many ways and its experiences were not likely to be duplicated; so it was somewhat heavy heartedly that I started them on a new adventure, praying to Him who “holds the nations in the hollow of His Hand” to aid me in my praiseworthy endeavors.
I was not very sanguine that my prayer would be answered, for we were beginning a tour of the Eastern educational institutions, than which there is nothing more difficult to interpret. This, not only because they have no counterpart anywhere in Europe, and the line between our university and college is so indistinct, but because I hoped to reveal their Spirit, which no mere outsider can comprehend, and which even the man on the inside finds it difficult to understand.
I drew into the conspiracy dear friends, alumni of the different institutions, who knew every blade of grass on each respective campus, over which they walked proudly and reverently. To find one university tucked away in a village, another defying the grime and noise of a growing city which crowded upon it; one still retaining its air of exclusive dignity in spite of its garish surroundings, while a fourth was nearly swamped by the culture-hungry children of immigrants, yet remained triumphantly American, was new enough and startling enough to keep my guests on the heights.
The pleasant walks, shaded by tall, graceful elms, and the presence of distinguished Americans, acted soothingly upon the Herr Director; while the gracious attention paid to the ladies convinced the Frau Directorin that she had reached the feminine paradise. She could not understand, however, why, when the ladies were permitted to go everywhere, and were even allowed to gaze at American students in athletic undress, they were barred from sharing with us the rare privilege of seeing a thousand or more of them being fed in one of those Gothic dining halls. There, surely, one might expect nothing worse than medieval piety tempering the appetite. Probably this tradition of no ladies in the galleries is the only thing beside the architecture which is left us from that hoary age.
There are certain definite points which the enthusiastic alumnus always tries to impress upon visitors, and one of them is the past, in which every college glories, and as youth seems to be unpardonable, history begins when as yet it “was not.”
In most of the places we visited, no such historic license was necessary, for many of them were respectably old, one of them being contemporaneous with the history of our country, and others belonging to that eminently respectable period, “before the Revolution.”
Some have important battles named after them, and several were “Washington’s headquarters,” a distinction freely bestowed upon many places by that ubiquitous and much beloved “Father of our Country.” At present the most important thing seems to be the buildings; dormitories, laboratories, libraries and usually most prominent of all, the gymnasium and the athletic field.
The president of one of the lesser universities, having such a million dollar plaything, became our cicerone, and while he took us hastily through everything else, lingered fondly there, showing us in detail the expensive apparatus. With classic pride he stood upon the athletic field, looking as some Cæsar must have looked when he showed visitors to Rome his arena, the “largest,” and at that time the “costliest in the world.”
It was interesting to find that the buildings which pleased the Herr Director most were neither new nor Gothic, a fact easily explained by his dislike for everything which is English. He marvelled that we had chosen to imitate English college architecture, with its heaviness and gloom, its hideous gargoyles, its useless, and here meaningless, cloisters, rather than to continue our fine inheritance, with its severely classic lines, its wide windows inviting the light, and its generous, broad doors, so much in harmony with our educational ideals.
Of course no one had an answer ready; yet personally while I do not “hasse” England nor the things which are English, I vastly prefer, let us say Nassau Hall at Princeton, to anything which that glorious campus holds, not even excepting the graduate college with its massive and impressive Cleveland Memorial Tower.
The Herr Director shook his head many a time at the external glory of our universities and even more at the comfort and luxuries of the dormitories and fraternity houses. We were the guests of one fraternity at dinner. About twenty young men were living under one roof, having chosen each other by some mysterious, selective process, and I was tempted to think that it was their negative rather than their positive qualities which drew them together. We were shown the house from cellar to garret, much to the dismay of the Herr Director who does not like climbing stairs, but to the joy of the Frau Directorin who, woman-like, not only loves to peep into closets, and see pretty rooms, but having discovered the American standard for feminine grace, wanted to lose some of her “meat” as she expressed it in her quaint English.
Each of these young men occupied a suite of three rooms. The hangings were heavy and not in the best taste, the chairs all invited to leisure, and the most conspicuous piece of furniture was a smoking set with a big brass tobacco bowl in the center; while innumerable pipes hung from a gaudily painted rack. In keeping with the furniture were the pictures which were decently vulgar, and of books there were no more than necessary.
The Herr Director was asked regarding student life in Germany, and he contrasted their surroundings with his own cold, inhospitable Gymnasium, the relentless examinations, and the freer but responsible life in his university. He described the rooms of the present Emperor of Germany when he was a student at the University of Bonn, remarking that they looked like barracks in comparison with these. “How can you study in such luxurious rooms?” he asked, and naïvely and frankly came the answer: “We don’t.”
On the whole, the Herr Director liked the looks of the boys he saw, and the Frau Directorin quite fell in love with them. They were so frank, so clean looking, and what above all amazed them most, so altruistic in their outlook upon life; they looked so healthy and well groomed and were so altogether wholesome. But that boys could graduate from colleges and not have studied—that was beyond their comprehension.
The German student’s social standing and his future depend upon his “exams.” There is only one prime thing, and that is study. When the Herr Director learned the multiplicity of our outside activities which divide the attention of the students, he knew why they do not study. He was aghast at the scant reverence paid members of the faculty. When walking with the president of one of these universities, we met groups of students who did not salute the head of their institution and barely made way for him to pass, he grew quite wrathy, and it took the combined efforts of the president and myself to keep him from telling the young men what boors they were. I think he discovered later that it was mere thoughtlessness, and that there is something really fine about the average American student; that he is usually a gentleman at heart, but that he has not yet learned to value the grace which comes from that sacrament of the common life—lifting his hat to his superiors.
When I told him that one of my students came to me one morning in haste, with “Say, Prof, where is Prexy?” he did not laugh as I expected; but when I remembered that I did not laugh either, when it happened, I forgave him his lack of perception.
It is of course true, that the average college professor would rather be called Jimmy or Jack or some other pet name than to have his academic degrees pronounced every time a student speaks to him; but there still remains the fact that the ordinary American youth lacks this sense of respect for personality, and that an education, even a college education, does not remedy the defect.
It is a very exciting moment in the life of the undergraduates of at least one university when they try to discover if the preacher can make himself heard above their coughs, which is their way of challenging his message; but it does not help him to believe that he is in the presence of men who know what reverence means.
I do not deny that the undergraduate honors achievement, but even in that he lacks proper discrimination. How much education can do to instill this common and deplorable lack of reverence for personality I do not know; for it lies far back, too far back to be reached by mere academic training.
During our tour, the Herr Director had a chance to see one university come out of its incoherence and inexplicable confusion into unity. He heard it roar like the “Bulls of Bashan,” fling its flaring colors to the wind, hoot its defiance to the enemy, dance, dervish-like, around the battle flames; he saw ten thousands of young men suffering the war fever, and an equal number of young women shrieking in wild delirium; he saw embankments of automobiles struggling to reach the seat of the conflict, armies of men trying to storm the ramparts, and newspaper correspondents mad from haste; while in the center of it all, twenty-two disguised men struggled for a chalk-line. Unfortunately, no friendly guide was near us to explain it all, and as I am still an un-Americanized alien to a football game, its meaning was lost to my guests.
When two men were carried from the field limp, and seemingly lifeless, the Frau Directorin promptly fainted. The Herr Director was beside himself, for there was no way to extricate ourselves from the maddened mass of humanity; but while he was wildly and vainly calling for water, she revived, and we stayed to the finish. I wished I had not brought them, for to appreciate a football game one must be born in America, and no explanation I offered could convince the Herr Director that we are not more cruel than the Spaniards, whose opponents in their deadly games are bulls, not men. The Frau Directorin still sheds tears at the remembrance of how badly we use our “perfectly nice young men.”
The fierceness back of this conflict, the vast amount of money spent upon properly playing the game, the primary place it occupies in the imagination of the American youth, its deadening influence upon scholarship, and all the multitudinous pros and cons, are over-shadowed by the fact that, as far as the community at large is concerned, it expects this Roman holiday, and a college or university is considered good or poor, to the degree that it caters to this desire. One thing I can say for it: it is thoroughly American, bringing into the lime-light some of our virtues and most of our faults.
“In Germany,” again the Herr Director, “where things are not permitted to grow merely because they grow elsewhere, it was found that for military preparedness your sports are of little or no value, especially if engaged in vicariously; and that teaching men to dig trenches and serve cannon, to obey implicitly a command and carry it out effectively, is of more use, not only to the individual’s well-being, but also for the great, collective purpose of national defense.”
It seems very strange to me that nearly all foreigners whom I have helped introduce to our academic life have been so gratified by its evident democracy, and that their satisfaction was greatest when their own aristocratic lineage was highest. That a man’s career in our institutions of learning is not made impossible because he does manual labor to help him through, and that he may do such femininely menial tasks as waiting on table or washing dishes, while taxing their credulity, is always unstintingly praised.
I have, however, good reason to believe that while our foreign visitors find the democracy of our colleges interesting and praiseworthy, we are losing the thing itself to a large degree, and my conscience has not always been at ease when I finished a panegyric on college democracy. In fact what I fear is its defeat just there, where it is most needed, where we are supposed to train the leaders who, whether they become leaders or not, are the men who will give tone to our national life and will control its expression.
In travelling from one of the universities to the other, we came upon a group of college men in the train. The Herr Director recognized them at once, whether instinctively or because he had discovered the type, I do not know. I knew them because of the fit of their garments, or the lack of it, and by the fact that they smoked cigarettes incessantly.
The Herr Director, as a distinguished foreigner, had no difficulty in opening a conversation with them, and I think he got much illuminating amusement out of them. They had just finished their semester “exams,” and one of them said that the question upon which he flunked was a comparison between the two English authors, Dickens and DeQuincy. Though he did not know the difference between these two, he showed his classic training by differentiating between a Rameses II and an Egyptian Deity cigarette merely by the color of the smoke.
I was not drawn into the conversation until the Herr Director needed me to interpret some campus English. One of the lads undertook to inform us regarding the social life of his university and more especially the fraternities, with particular emphasis upon his own, which excluded not only certain well-defined races, but also put a ban upon certain classes. “We don’t admit anybody into our fraternity whose people are not somebody in their communities.”
I asked him his name and he gave it to me with a French pronunciation.
I thought he was Bohemian, and recognized the name as such, in spite of its French disguise. I told him so, and pronounced it for him in the hard, Slavic way, all gutturals and consonants. I also told him its meaning: “A very common hoe such as the peasants use, and it means that your ancestors in Bohemia earned their living honestly, which I am sorry to say cannot always be said about ‘people who are somebody’ in our communities.”
The Herr Director thought I was very hard upon the poor fellow, and later I had a good talk with him. I tried to show him that his Bohemian, peasant origin ought to be a source of pride to him. That the very fact that he and his people had come out of the steerage, and by virtue of our democratic institutions could rise to the point where they could send him to college, should make him a guardian of the American Spirit and not its foe. I do not know that he profited by what I said; for I often find myself talking to the wind and the tide, and they are both against me.
I have only pity for the gilded youth who go to an American college with its vast opportunities of human contact, yet fail to see any one outside their own social boundaries. After all, the chief glory of our educational institutions is that their best things are still democratic. No man is kept from the Holy of Holies, from sound learning, from the contact with scholarly minds, from good books, and enough of rich fellowship to make going to college worth while.
We heard one delightful story which is so typically American and so reveals the American Spirit at its best, that the Herr Director embodied it in his book. The president of a Quaker college told us that just as he found there was some danger that the men who had to work their way through, were losing caste, one of the upper classmen opened a boot and shoe mending and cleaning shop. As he was a man of means, whose standing in his group was unquestioned, his action took from common labor its ever renewing curse.
In many of the colleges we met groups of men so full of this spirit, so concerned with fostering it, that all the snobberies of which we had heard seemed even smaller than they were in their own right. We met those who gave their leisure hours to that most difficult and worthy task of Americanizing the immigrants who, in many instances, almost encroached upon the campus. The students visited them in the box-cars where they lived, or in the hovels where they reared children; they taught them English and the elements of good citizenship, and every one of them had some particular Antonio to whom he was devoted, and whom he was trying to lift to his level.
Although the general testimony was that the students had gained more from the contact than the immigrants had, I know how immeasurably much it means to these strangers to have leaning up against their own lonely souls men of culture, and sweet, clean breath, and brotherly heart.
It is this idealism in our college youth which is so precious an asset that to lose it would mean bankruptcy to our educational institutions.
Although the Herr Director did not tell me, I knew that this excursion into the universities of the East had been a success; for thus far he seemed to have enjoyed everything; at least he did not complain about anything. He seemed in an especially happy mood when we were talking it over in the home of one of the presidents, whose guests we had become. “Yes, I like your colleges very much, and if I should want my boy to have four years of more or less organized happiness, I would send him to an American college. He would have a good time, I think his morals would be safe,” and he added with a smile, “his intellect would be safe also.”
NEW YORK is geographically misplaced for such a purpose as mine. It ought to lie somewhere west of Niagara Falls, so that one might be able to take strangers to that wonderful cataract without their having previously exhausted all the emotions which they are capable of expressing.
The day journey between New York and Buffalo is never commonplace, especially when it furnishes such euphonious names as Susquehanna, Wilkes Barre, Mauch Chunk, etc. From the hilltops we had glimpses of great valleys below, valleys which are mined and furrowed and channelled by a great industrial host whose crowded dwellings resemble the hives of bees and are as monotonously alike.
I could make these glimpses interesting enough, for I could tell by the shape of the church steeples and by the style of cross which crowned them, what faiths were there contending with each other. With equal certainty, and by the same signs, I knew the nationality of the people who worked there, and had faith enough to build steeples in the shadow of mine shafts and coal breakers. It was an atmosphere tense from the labor of seven unbroken days, and heavy from noxious gases in which trees languish and die, fish perish in the murky rivers, birds fear to nest, and man alone, immigrant man, lives and works and worships.
The Herr Director, like all Germans, has a natural contempt for the Slavs, and when I proposed that before we visited Niagara Falls we should see some of the Slavic settlements, he demurred; but when the Frau Directorin added her plea to mine, he reluctantly yielded. I was able to promise them an interesting meeting with an idealistic, young Russian priest, who had voluntarily taken a mission among these miners. He was earnestly striving to guard their souls, and also that which seems quite as precious to their church, their Russian nationality.
The Greek Orthodox Church is the most nationalistic church in existence, and where-ever those bulbous towers with their slanting crosspieces dominate the sky, it is equivalent to the raising of the national flag. The Slavic soul is thoroughly Christian in its quality of patient endurance, in which it has had long and hard tutelage. At the same time it is tenacious and unyielding of its particular dogma, having been taught from its earliest consciousness that its salvation lies in strict adherence to the national faith.
The city where we tarried is one of the best in which to study the Slavic Soul, and its relation to the American Spirit, being large enough to express that Spirit in its varied manifestations; yet not so large that the articles it manufactures hide or crush the articles of its faith.
I knew my guests would like the place, for while it is a busy town in the very heart of Pennsylvania’s industrial region, it has retained a sort of homelike atmosphere. Situated midway between the large cities and the small towns which we had thus far visited, it has all the usual bustle, and is full of vigorous rivalry with other like cities in the same valley. Whatever one city does, whether building ambitious sky-scrapers or a commodious Y. M. C. A., promoting a revival, or bringing in new industries, this little city endeavors to duplicate upon a still larger scale.
My guide for the day was the town’s chief “hustler,” the secretary of the Y. M. C. A., who is an embodiment of the American Spirit, being both body and spirit. He made a splendid foil to the Russian priest who is all soul, Russian soul and as little at home in the United States as the Czar’s double eagle would be, floating from the city’s court-house which stood in typical court-house fashion in the center of the town square.
The Y. M. C. A. secretary met us at the station, needless to say, in an automobile, as there is nothing the average American would rather do than “show off” his town. He gave his time unstintingly for that purpose, beginning the process by taking us through his institution which is American enough to have challenged the Herr Director’s attention. In great good humor he, with the rest of us, followed the secretary from the bowling alley to the roof garden, looked into the dormitories and class rooms, and protested only when our zealous guide gave us long statistics as to how many people took baths, how many men were converted, and how much of the mortgage had been paid off during his incumbency.
I had to explain to the Herr Director the meaning of mortgage and its relation to our religious institutions; for the two seemed related in some mysterious way.
He was duly impressed; for this practical side of religion, this combination of saving souls and giving baths was new to him. Newer and more interesting still was the clerical machinery with its card indices, its numerous secretaries, stenographers, and its clock-like regularity and efficiency.
The secretary is undoubtedly a religious man; but he is a business man first, and his soul has had no small struggle in an atmosphere which demands that he attract new members, raise a generous budget, pay off a mortgage and at odd moments look after his own business; for besides being secretary of this great institution, he dabbles in Western lands, has an interest in a canning factory, and helps “boom” the town.
I could assure the Herr Director that, nevertheless, his soul survives; for the average American is remarkably adaptable, and while this secretary may permit his religion to suffer before his business, I know he does not “lose his own soul”; although in that respect as in everything else he does run frightful risks.
When we left the palatial lobby of the Y. M. C. A., having had bestowed upon us its annual report, souvenir postal cards, and incidentally a prospectus of the Western Land Co., the secretary insisted upon accompanying us. As he put his automobile at our disposal, and the Slavic settlements were out of reach by the ordinary means of locomotion, we reluctantly accepted his kind offer, the Herr Director having previously confided to me that he did not like the secretary’s “hustle,” and that his “efficiency” made him nervous.
There were two things which the Frau Directorin found everywhere and in which her soul delighted: marked and courteous attention to the ladies—and automobiles. We took just one street car ride in New York City, having been fairly showered by offers of automobile rides, one form of hospitality of which we have grown quite prodigal.
It was well that we had both the secretary and the automobile; for although I thought I knew where the Russian parish was located I did not reckon with the fact that it was three years since I had last visited it. During that interval the town had so altered that the landscape was quite unrecognizable.
It is the peculiarity of this and neighboring towns that they change their topography over night. What was a hill becomes a hollow, and the reverse process also takes place though more slowly, because of the huge culm piles which accumulate.
The mining of coal being carried on under the town has been so thorough in later years that intervening coal props have been removed, and houses and churches which formerly were above the level are now below it.
We finally found the Russian church and its adjoining parsonage in as uninviting an environment as I have ever seen. The three years since I visited them had not only let them down from their eminence, but had developed a stagnant pool on one side, while refuse from the mines had encroached upon the other. All the glory of red and yellow paint had departed, leaving only a drab dinginess, the prevailing tone of the landscape.
The priest received us in his study, which, besides the Icons and a Samovar had no ornaments. The musty air was full of cigarette smoke, and most diminutive stumps of these “Papirosy” were lying about, adding to the general untidiness. A parish register lay upon the desk. It contained the names of more than a thousand souls with the chronicle of their coming into this world and their going out of it, and also that most important item, when they had attended Holy Communion, the one visible sign of their allegiance to the true faith.
The Holy Father had a strange history. The son of a priest, he naturally was destined for the same calling. Caught by the ever moving tide of revolt he had “sown his wild oats,” which consisted of disseminating revolutionary literature. He was imprisoned, then like many good Russians repented, and, as a penance, came to Pennsylvania.
In desolation and distance from home his parish was not unlike Siberia. It was even worse, for it was an exile from like-minded men, and his suffering on that score was acute. I have watched the manifestation of national or racial characteristics in individuals, and I feel certain that the Russian reflects those characteristics most intensely, whether he be peasant, priest or noble.
Not without reason does he call his country “Mother Russia.” He has for her just that kind of affection, and it is as different from the violent love of the Herr Director for his Fatherland as is the matter-of-fact sentiment of the American for his.
The Russian completely reflects his country, and as both her virtues and her faults are feminine, there is in him something gentle and yielding towards external authority, and yet something unconquerable and defiant. There is a capacity for suffering and sacrifice of which no other people seem to be capable. There is also a confidence in the goodness of humanity, no matter how bad it may seem, which reminds me of the confidence of the woman who is beaten by her drunken husband, yet knows that in his sober moments he is not a bad man.
The predominance of the spiritual quality may or may not be feminine, but it certainly is Russian, and one may indeed speak of the soul of a people in relation to the Slavs in general, and the Russians in particular.
The priest possessed all these characteristics; he was the Russian Soul, and this soul quality became even more apparent in contrast with the complex spirit of the American secretary, in whom Teuton and Celt were blended, and with the Herr Director, whose soul had hardened under the discipline which Germany had given him.
He lost no time in beginning an argument with the priest as to the relations of their respective countries, and when it threatened to become acrimonious, the secretary, hoping to create a diversion, asked the priest why he did not encourage his parishioners to come to the Y. M. C. A. At that point I threw myself into the breach, and with considerable difficulty directed the conversation into safer channels.
I asked the priest to show us his mission, and he took us into the church, much poorer than any I have ever seen in Russia, and then into the schoolroom, where the children of the miners received their religious instruction and as much of secular education as they craved. The teacher was a lean youth who looked as if he had suffered moral, spiritual and physical bankruptcy before coming to America. He and the whole equipment seemed hopelessly inadequate and out of place.
The secretary did not know that hundreds of children were growing up in an American community, yet completely isolated from it, and the Herr Director remarked that in Germany this would be regarded as treason to the state. The priest declared that it was his mission in America not only to keep his people and their children loyal to the national church, but to inject into our Westernized materialism this true Slavic faith and its leaven.
He believed that in America we lack soul. We worship science and money and business. The Russian alone lives in intimacy with God and regards that relation of the supremest importance. “The American,” he continued, “believes in developing natural resources, the German develops the mind, the Russian alone develops the soul.”
I have always had the greatest reverence for the Russian Soul. I have learned something the Herr Director could not see, on account of the natural, political antagonism between his own country and Russia; something the secretary could not comprehend on account of his provincialism, and the priest would not admit because of his official position, namely: that neither the Russian State nor the Russian Church represents the Russian Soul. Its common people, although nearly crushed by the one and confused by the other, are still Christian souls and as such have a mission to America; but I could not see how that mission would be fulfilled by locking up a few hundred children in a filthy schoolroom and teaching them their national catechism.
The Spiritual Russia, as it is incorporated in its common people and as it is interpreted by Tolstoy and Dostoyewsky, has reached us and taught us the greatest lesson which we self-righteous Americans needed to learn: the impossibility to judge our peers or to be judged by them.
It was Tolstoy and Dostoyewsky who compelled some of us to see our own guilt, and they, not the Russian Church, united our voices with those of the Russian people in the chief note of their Mass, “Lord have mercy! O Lord have mercy!” The Russian peasant always knew that men are stricken by crime as by a disease; and when he passed those consigned to prison, he cried out incessantly: “Lord have mercy! O Lord have mercy!” And for the man who escaped, he never hunted with the bloodhound’s passion, as we do; he put a crust of bread upon the window, to help him on his way.
It was news to the secretary that Judge Lindsay, the “Kid’s Judge,” as he is affectionately called, received his inspiration from Tolstoy, and that the tendency to change our prisons into Social Clinics was originally suggested by Dostoyewsky, a name quite unfamiliar to him.
The Herr Director spoke of the inadequacy of these same Russians when they try to put their theories into practice, and what prosaic, impossible preachers they make. To which I replied that their failures are due to their preponderance of soul and their lack of the practical spirit with which we are so super-abundantly endowed.
The secretary could scarcely believe that his practical, matter-of-fact, card-indexed, efficient-from-top-to-bottom, result-bringing, tabulated, report-making, American Y. M. C. A. might be benefited by an infusion of Russian Soul. He almost doubted that the delving miners whom we saw coming home from the mines, sooty and begrimed, possessed that soul. Nor did the Herr Director realize that all his Germanic searching and classifying, all his minute, painstaking investigation into the innermost of everything, left him where the Russian had long ago preceded him: in the holy presence of the unknowable, unsearchable wisdom of God.
The American has great reverence for results, and it is hard for him to be patient with failure. The German respects authority, and has scant respect for the individual. The Russian respects man and knows what it means to love him in his weakness, and to be humble in the presence of another’s failure.
I had a long, intimate talk with my friend the priest, who has never spent a happy day since he has been in America which he hates, or rather, despises, and so hurts me more than he knows.
Throwing open the well-thumbed, poorly kept register, in such striking contrast to the Y. M. C. A. secretary’s card index, he said: “Look how many I have buried this month,” and he counted them, and there were eighteen, “all of them slain in that dreadful mine, and no one in the Company or in the town cares how they were buried. These Americans have no souls. They send an undertaker who wants to bury them like dogs, and the quicker the thing is done the better. They sent me notice shortly after I came here that the funerals lasted too long and kept the men from work. Look how those men walk! My mujiks, who walked like princes, now bend their backs before your dirty coal, and walk like slaves.”
His complaint was not altogether unreasonable. In some things he was right, in many things he was wrong; but to argue with a Russian is as hopeless as to try to argue with Niagara Falls. I did tell him that while the Russian here must bend his back over his work, he does not have to bend it at every corner before the icon or before every policeman he meets; that here, by virtue of the American Spirit, his soul may be freed from superstition and his mind from darkness.
When in parting the priest embraced and kissed me, he said: “No, even you don’t understand the Russian Soul.”
The Herr Director suffered his embrace with good grace, but when the secretary’s turn came he fled. To be kissed by a man is a sentimentality which the American cannot endure.
“We don’t understand the Russian Soul,” I said to him, “neither you nor I, but one thing I do know. When the coal has been dug out of these hills and these cities shall have gone the way of Sodom and Gomorrah, and your churches and Y. M. C. A. may have vanished because it did not pay to keep them going, this Russian Soul will endure; and the sooner we learn to understand it the better for us and for them and for our country.”
When we left the Russian church and its faithful priest, the Frau Directorin told us that the children were incredibly filthy, and that she had spent the time we wasted in argument cleaning them up, good hausfrau that she is. The secretary was thinking deeply, and when he deposited us at the hotel, he thanked me for revealing something which, although so near, he would never have discovered. The Herr Director kept me up until midnight talking about the Slavic menace to Germany, and the intellectual poison of its modern literature.
We reached Niagara Falls the next afternoon, and, as I had feared, neither of my guests showed any surprise nor felt any thrill. I could understand the Herr Director’s coolness towards our natural wonder, for he had seen it thirty years before; but his wife’s attitude was inexplicable, until she told me what I had all along anticipated. Her capacity for receiving impressions had been exhausted by the city of New York, and after seeing the “high-scraps” nothing astonished her.
As we stood at the bottom of the American Falls, watching the Maid of the Mist making her journeys into their very spray and returning, only to begin her journey again, I suggested that it was like the American Spirit in its daring; but the Herr Director, with truer insight, said that it was “like the Russian Soul, mystical, elusive, on the verge of destruction always, but of little practical service.”
That same day we were in a power-house, which looked more like a temple than the utilitarian thing it is, and peered into the depths of a shaft which creates power enough to move the street railways of half a dozen cities, and change the night of a million people into day. As we listened to the engineer’s account of almost miraculous achievement, I said triumphantly, “This is the American Spirit!” and the Herr Director replied deliberately, and without sarcasm, “This is the one time when you are right.”
WHAT the foreigner thinks of the American Pullman, if he has to spend a night in it, may be found in any volume of the extremely voluminous and interesting literature upon the United States, written by visitors to this country; but more interesting still would be what they have not written about it, and that I have had frequent chances of hearing. The most picturesque and exhaustive comments I ever heard were those made by the Herr Director the evening we left Buffalo, and as he finally determined not to retire at all, we spent the greater part of the night in the smoking-room, much to the dismay of the porter who had no prejudice against sleeping on a Pullman, and whom we cheated out of his irregular but necessary naps.
One of the chief diversions of travellers the world over is to complain against the particular transportation company over whose road they have the ill luck to be going; so it happened that the Herr Director had plenty of company during part of his vigil, and an opportunity to come in touch with one phase of the American Spirit, where it was closely related to his own; for “one ‘kicker’ makes the whole world ‘kick.’”
The small room was so crowded that some of the men were sitting on the wash-stands, and the rest were so close to each other as to make conversation easy and general. This was an extra fare train supposed to be unusually comfortable and speedy; although thus far it had been losing time. It was natural under those conditions that the railroad should come in for its share of blessings, couched in language such as is often heard in smoking compartments of Pullman cars. Had all the pious wishes expressed that night been fulfilled, that railroad and our particular train would have travelled much more swiftly, but to a destination not indicated in the time-tables.
The question under discussion was, which is the worst railroad in the United States, and as some of the men were stock-brokers they knew our roads from their most vulnerable side. The tales they told of the manipulation of stocks and the fleecing of the public, with their consequent effect upon the service, were as startling as they were humiliating; because, in the last analysis, the railroads reflect the general business ethics of the country.
I kept out of the discussion, for not only have I but a hazy notion of economics; my mind was busy classifying the passengers’ racial origin, a very diverting exercise and one which always brings me in touch with people on their really human side.
It happened that two of the men were Polish Jews from Cleveland, who had risen from poverty to where they could travel in Pullman cars, and who confessed that they knew as little of railroad stocks as I, although they were engaged in as risky a business as stocks, that of manufacturing women’s cloaks. They were not far removed from the Ghetto either in speech or ideals, and so were of little interest to me.
A third fellow traveller, who bore the hallmarks of the average American, both in dress and behavior, told me his business without much urging. “I am not selling stock, nor manufacturing women’s cloaks, and I am not a gambler. I have a sure thing; I am a bookie.” Forced to confess myself ignorant as to what “a bookie” is, he explained to me the intricacies of his calling, the problems of evading the law, and if it cannot be evaded, how it may be bought; incidentally showing what an inveterate gambler and what an easy mark the average American is.
The Herr Director was all attention, to my great consternation; for the conversation was as different from that which he had heard at Lake Mohonk, or in our rounds of the Eastern colleges, as one could conceive. As one by one the passengers sought their berths, the Herr Director thanked me for arranging this uncomfortable night journey, saying that though he was sure he could not sleep, he was “so glad to have come in contact with the American Spirit as it is,” and not as I had tried to make it appear. With that kindly thrust he too retired, and I was at liberty to do likewise.
It was not long before I had auricular evidence that the Herr Director was asleep, so I was very much astonished to hear him say the next morning that he had not slept a wink, and that the engineer must bear him a grudge; for he tried to jerk the berth from under him, and “Gott sei dank” that the most uncomfortable night of his life was over. I certainly was as grateful as he. It was with no small satisfaction, though, that upon reaching Chicago two hours late, I collected four dollars from that much abused railroad, and handed the same to the Herr Director, assuring him that even in a railroad office the American Spirit of fairness is operative.
In Chicago as everywhere else the friend who owned an automobile was at my command, and on a glorious May day when wind and sun had cleared the air, and a night’s rain had washed the streets, we were taken from South Shore to North Shore and away out where the American city is at her best, and Chicago is striving to excel them all in her wonderful suburbs.
The Herr Director had seen Chicago over thirty-three years ago—a young, thriving, daring, ambitious city in the making; he found her still young, thriving, daring, and in the making. Unchastened by her great disasters, undismayed by her vexing problems, defying the lake, she reaches out into it and into neighboring states, leading and controlling the whole Middle West. Babylon, Capernaum, Rome, her older sisters, her ideal, and perchance her destiny. She is par excellence the merchant city, and the merchant princes rule her, although that rule is not unchallenged.
While the Herr Director saw the city changed in many respects, larger, and in places beautiful, her dirt not so apparent, her wickedness subdued, and her rough corners rubbed off, she is still Chicago, a synonym for boastful bigness and ostentatious wealth.
If it had not been for the Frau Directorin, I would not have taken them where every man, woman and child is taken who visits Chicago, into the largest department store in the world.
She entered with the joyful anticipation of engaging in that most exciting occupation—shopping—aided and abetted by my wife. The Herr Director followed with the martyr’s air common to husbands who go along to pay the bill.
That type of store is no longer a novelty to city dwellers anywhere, but this one because of its size, the variety and quality of goods displayed, the courtesy to customers and, above all, the provisions for their comfort and convenience, were remarkable enough to call forth even the Herr Director’s commendation. The Frau Directorin was in the seventeenth Heaven, the Biblical seventh not being an elevation high enough to be used as a simile when she was shopping in a Chicago department store.
Obliging clerks showed her plates which cost three hundred dollars apiece, cut and etched glass at more fabulous prices; she walked through miles of costly gowns, coats and millinery, and having made a few purchases to her entire satisfaction—we were about to leave the store with flying colors, figuratively speaking, when pride had a fall. Unluckily remembering that a certain small boy needed summer underwear, my wife led our party to the basement. When we left the elevator a polite floor man directed us to aisle 16, Wabash Building. As we were on the State Street side the cavalcade moved past what seemed like miles of commonplace merchandise and commonplace buyers to aisle 16, Wabash Building. At last we had reached our “Mecca.”
“I should like to see boys’ union suits,” my wife said.
“Certainly. How old?”
“Twelve years.”
“We have nothing here over eight years. You will find your size on the sixth floor, Washington Street side.”
I think it was the sixth floor; I know we walked (crestfallen) through endless aisles and were shot up floor after floor. Landed finally, the right counter was reached after numerous conflicting directions.
The Herr Director was puffing and panting, the Frau Directorin radiant and happy, for she enjoys exercise, and my wife, her faith in the efficiency of her favorite store not yet shaken, though wavering, asking for “union suits for a twelve-year-old boy.”
As the clerk reached for the desired article she asked: “Short sleeves or long sleeves?”
“Short sleeves.”
“Randolph Street side, second floor, for short sleeved union suits.”
The Herr Director and I did not accompany the ladies on their further voyage of discovery; we went to the rest room to avoid nervous prostration.
My wife and the Frau Directorin, with the determination and endurance which women alone possess, continued the chase to a victorious finish.
Fortunately an altogether satisfying luncheon followed this strenuous experience, after which, rested and refreshed, we repaired to the Art Institute.
The Chicago Art Institute, within a stone’s throw of the most congested business section, at the edge of its noise and rush, is by its very being there a sort of triumph.
The Herr Director approached it somewhat condescendingly, expecting to find it and its contents big, bizarre and “nouveau richessque.” As soon as he entered the building he felt the dignity and good taste of its arrangement, and his manner changed. After he had looked critically at some of the pictures and approved them, I knew myself for once on the way to success; for his praise was as genuine as his criticism.
Knowing that money can buy both Old and New Masters, he expected to find them; but he had not expected to see such discrimination as was shown in choosing and hanging them. He was entirely unprepared for the excellent work of our native artists, outside of that small but exalted sphere occupied by Whistler, Sargent, Innes, etc.
My joy was complete when we were taken into the Art School by the Director, Dr. French, whose death not long ago must always be deplored. The rooms of the Art School were crowded by boys and girls of all ages and varied nationalities and races, learning to develop their God-given talents under the guidance of competent and sympathetic teachers. The picture they made delighted me more than those they drew or painted; for it seemed so thoroughly, generously, democratically and artistically American.
I scored another victory for the American Spirit when I introduced my guests to Lorado Taft, sculptor, and the guiding star in Chicago’s artistic firmament. In his rare personality, strength and purity, idealism and practical good sense blend, and his art reflects the man. He showed us some of his work and that of his pupils, and both elicited unstinted praise from my guests.
The climax of our visit came when we returned to the entrance hall which we found crowded by public school children, all listening to an orchestra composed of certain of their number, and led by a young girl about fourteen years of age. It seemed to me a remarkable and beautiful combination. The marbles and pictures, the music, and, best of all, the children happily wandering about the place. When the program ended there was ice-cream for everybody, served by the teachers who accompanied the children. It was a real party, an American party, and we might have travelled long and far before I could have found anything which would have better reflected for my guests the American Spirit at its best.
If I were an artist and a sculptor I should like to portray the spirit of Chicago as one feels it in this museum. I would model a group, with its central figure that same sculptor, the finely bred American, clean and wholesome, who longs to create, not only the city beautiful, but the city human. He should be surrounded by the children, happily looking at pictures and listening to music as we saw them in the Art Institute that day.
But there must be another prominent figure in my group: the heartless, ruthless, twentieth century American, with clean-shaven face, jaws strong as a vise, and a chin like the base of an anvil. He is the man who “makes a good husband,” and partly obeys the Scriptural injunction: because he provides for his own. He too should be surrounded by children; not his, but the children who work in his factories and have to live in his rickety tenements. The two men would struggle mightily for supremacy in the city’s life; and I would set up my sculptured group in the busiest place, where all who passed it by might see, and seeing, help him who was struggling for beauty and for happiness.
Dr. French, the Herr Director and I had a long discussion about my conception of the two natures contending within the city. The Herr Director argued that the merchant spirit, so prevalent here, when uncontrolled and uncurbed, is more dangerous to civilization and to our democracy than the military spirit of Germany, and that it needs to be overcome by a force greater and stronger than itself. The corrupting element he said has always been this same merchant spirit, and where ancient civilizations decayed, it was due to the fact that it debased kings and enslaved them by luxuries.
“Business should not control, but be controlled, because business is based entirely upon selfishness.” When the Herr Director stopped for breath, Dr. French, who was an ardent Christian and knew his Bible, took from his pocket a New Testament, and pointed out a remarkable chapter in the Book of Revelation (a chapter I was compelled to confess I had not read) that bore out the Herr Director’s statement.
“The kings of the earth committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth waxed rich by the power of her wantonness.... And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn over her, for no man buyeth their merchandise any more; merchandise of gold, and silver, and precious stones, and pearls, and fine linen, and purple, and silk, and scarlet; and all thyine wood, and every vessel of ivory, and every vessel made of most precious wood, and of brass, and iron, and marble; and cinnamon, and spice, and incense, and ointment, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, and cattle, and sheep; and merchandise of horses and chariots and slaves; and souls of men.”
We urged Dr. French to read the rest of the chapter, which he did.
“And they cast dust upon their heads, and cried, weeping and mourning, saying: Woe, woe, the great city, wherein were made rich all that had their ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate,” and then the voice of the angel crying into the thick of their lament, “Rejoice over her, thou Heaven and ye saints, and ye apostles, and ye prophets; for God hath judged your judgment on her.” It seemed as though the prophet had written the epitaph of all cities in which the merchant was master and not servant.
When he had finished I knew the inscription for my sculptured group: the twentieth verse of the eighteenth chapter of Revelation.
Altogether it was a remarkable day to be experienced only in America, perhaps only in Chicago. To shop in the largest store in the world, visit a picture gallery well worth while, and see art students at work; hear classical music played by a children’s orchestra, and watch the same children enjoying the party which followed; to meet one of the leading sculptors of America who shared with us his plans and hopes, and to have as our guide the Director of the Art Institute, was a colossal experience worthy of the city in which it happened.
The next day was given to the Juvenile Court, Public Play Grounds, the University, and, finally, Hull House. The one great disappointment of the Chicago visit for me and my guests was Miss Jane Addams’ absence in Europe. But the House was there—big, neighborly, homelike, hospitable—and the residents were there, those who do the neighboring, the healing and the helping, who are friends of the friendless, and know no creed or race—except humanity.
My faith in Chicago springs largely from my contact with Hull House, The Commons and like places with their defiant spirit towards evil, their broad-mindedness and their brave attempt at remedying the wrongs of our commercialized civilization.
After dinner I “toted” my guests all over the House, from the reading-room on the first floor to the Boys’ Club on the third, and back again. I have done it frequently, and always with zest and pride, in spite of the fact that I have had no active share in the work.
In Bowen Hall we came upon a dancing party. Some one of the social clubs had been gracious enough to invite its parents to come. We were introduced to Mrs. Frankelstein from Roumania, and Mrs. Flynn from Ireland, Mrs. Ragovsky from Russia, Mr. and Mrs. Feketey from Hungary, Mr. and Mrs. Rocco from Italy, and many others whose picturesque names I do not remember.
We also met a young business man, the son of a millionaire, with sundry other young men and women of the type one likes to meet and introduce, whom one would be proud to know anywhere. They had charge of the affair. The Herr Director and the Frau Directorin caught the spirit of the occasion and entered into it with zest. When the orchestra began to play, he led the Grand March with Mrs. Rocco and she followed with the young millionaire. At the close of the festivities, as we were leaving, they vowed they had had the best time since they left home.
Chicago, big, blundering, materialistic Chicago had a new meaning to the Herr Director. He praised everything and everybody, and as we parted for the night, he said: “‘Almost thou persuadest me to’ believe in the ‘American Spirit.’”
TO the average European there are two things American which have not yet lost their romantic quality: The prairies and the West.
Anticipations of seeing both, filled the breast of the Frau Directorin with mingled feelings of fear and pleasure, as she discussed with her husband the fate of the children they had left behind them—in the event of our being captured by the Indians. However, the probability of our safe return and her consequent opportunity to tell envious friends her experiences in the prairies and the West outweighed all fears.
Among her friends were those who had braved the perils of the ocean and gone as far as New York; some of them had even been in Chicago—but beyond, still hidden in the romance woven about them by Bret Harte (her favorite American author), were those two things she was about to see, and of which they had only dreamed.
The Herr Director, as he repeatedly reminded me, had crossed the plains when I had known them only through Cooper’s fascinating Indian stories, and he was eager to throw off the leadership I had assumed, which, to a dominant nature like his, proved exceedingly irksome.
He soon discovered that he was travelling through territory entirely new to him. The little towns he had known had grown into cities, and the further west we travelled, the greater and more impressive were the changes.
Omaha and Kansas City he did not recognize at all. Not only was there this new growth, “rank growth,” he called it, of sky-scrapers, post-offices and railroad stations with Doric pillars—the men and women he met had a new outlook upon life. While they still boasted of this and that thing in which their city was like Chicago or was unlike some lesser city than their own, they were critical of themselves and eager to learn; they had grown more masterful and at the same time were more refined.
The prairies were not at all what the Frau Directorin had imagined them to be. She was chagrined to find nothing but farm lands and great fields, not so well groomed as those we had seen in the East, but with no Indians or buffaloes, no wild horses or wilder looking men.
She saw no trace of the toil, the struggle and the brave resistance through which these farms had been rescued from the prairies. She could not know of the loneliness of women and the hardihood of men, of the season’s drought and famine, of bitter disappointment, the pangs of bearing and rearing children in utter isolation, and the struggle for education.
No trace of all this was apparent in the sort of settled, middle class prosperity which stretched out in the unvaried, thousand mile panorama through which we journeyed.
In a town of about four thousand inhabitants we stopped; the name of the place is of no significance, for there are hundreds of just such towns in the West. We were met by the superintendent of schools, himself a product of the prairies. Having grown up among the cattle, he is consequently shy of men. He drove his automobile as if it were a broncho, and we all uttered a prayer of thanksgiving when he deposited us, with no bones broken, at the hotel. In a short time we were ready to go with him to his school, which was the objective point of our visit.
It goes without saying that the superintendent boasted of the youth of the town, even as under like circumstances in the East, he would have boasted of its age.
Ten years before it was nothing except a railroad station, miles of sage-brush, rattlesnakes and prairie dogs. Now there are business blocks, embryonic sky-scrapers, a pillared post-office, a hundred-thousand-dollar hotel, a Grand Opera House, neither big enough nor good enough to boast of, numerous churches and this schoolhouse. It is not only a place in which boys and girls learn the “three R’s,” but has a finely equipped gymnasium, a chemical laboratory and a Domestic Science department. It is a center of education and recreation, not only for that town, but for the surrounding country.
I had never seen the Herr Director as enthusiastic over anything as he was over this cowboy school superintendent, with his program of reaching every man, woman and child in the county through his educational and recreational program, his annual budget of some seventy-five thousand dollars, and a faculty of men and women college bred, and citizens of the town. They are not merely educated tramps, but are there to stay, and they take pride in the town in which they make their home.
The Herr Director was no less amused than I was when we were told by one of the teachers that the superintendent, at one of the school board meetings had pulled off his coat and threatened to thrash one of the members who refused his vote on an important measure. As we looked at this six foot three, erstwhile cowboy, his broad shoulders and strong arms which seemed reluctantly confined in a coat, and as we saw his square, determined jaw,—we knew that the unruly member voted aye.
Both the Herr Director and I were asked to speak to the boys and girls. As soon as they entered the room the air became electric with their high school yell; they “rah rahed” us individually and collectively, and “what’s the matter withed” everybody, and indulged in all those academic and classical performances which every high school now seems to consider an essential part of preparation for college.
The Herr Director told them that among all the things he had seen thus far in America he liked their high school the best; which remark of course elicited thunderous applause. This was most gratifying to him, and all day he was in high spirits. He thought the most hopeful characteristic of the American is this faith in education, the practical, far-reaching methods employed, and the daring all sorts of educational experiments. At the same time he severely criticized our lack of unanimity, and the evident disadvantages of such communities as have no cowboy superintendent to lick a conservative or stingy school board member into conformity with his plans.
We visited an agricultural college where we were told of farmers who came to study soil fertility, and farmers’ wives who studied kitchen chemistry, farmers’ children who tested seeds, and to whom these prairies, to which they were being bound by an intelligent knowledge of their environment, were beginning to speak a new language.
We saw a teacher’s college which one with the prophet’s vision had planted in the desert. The sage-brush ridden prairie had been transformed into a glorious campus, and uncultured boys and girls into enthusiastic teachers. More than twelve hundred of them come back each year to get better equipment for their difficult task.
The cities in which we stopped interested the Herr Director less than the towns, and we did not tarry long except in one of them, where we had to stay because of an engagement I had made to address a certain club. I did this because it gave me a fine chance to introduce that particular American institution, a combination of eating and speaking club, which meets once a month and whose program is as ambitious as are most things Western.
We were met at the station by a committee of men and women in automobiles of course, and found the finest rooms in the hotel reserved for us. Big, high, generous rooms, in which the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin openly rejoiced.
The committee awaited us in a private dining-room where luncheon was served. There were three other guests who were to speak during the evening. One of them, a most brilliant woman, a well-known social worker. The second a United States Senator, and the third an explorer who had just returned from a voyage into some less known parts of South America.
The luncheon was sufficiently elaborate and artistically served to satisfy both the Herr Director and the Frau Directorin, but he protested when after the meal, without even a chance at a nap, we were escorted to waiting motor cars, and a long cavalcade of us started on a sight-seeing expedition.
The city was worth seeing, with its boulevards, parks and playgrounds; its schoolhouse, churches, and clubs. We heard much of its prospects, always so great an asset in the life of our Western cities.
Amusing and remarkable to the strangers was the evident pride of this committee in the city, to which they had come from all parts of the country if not of the world; yet they spoke of it with a lover’s affection.
The one thing underneath all this civic pride, and finer than anything visible to us, was the fight for decency, law and order, and the health and happiness of children, which has been waged there and is not yet won. It is as exciting as, and more valorous than, many a battle in which men fight with powder and bullets.
It was an exhilarating experience to shake the hand and look into the face of a woman who had defied the monied interests of her state, who had jeopardized her comforts and her position, even her life, to loosen the hold of graft from the schools of the state.
It was inspiring to hear from a mild mannered, unaggressive looking man how he had helped wipe out brothels and evil dance halls, broken up the connivance of the police with the criminal element and put through a positive program of rational, clean amusements for the people.
We visited a business plant, the architecture and equipment of which are as unique as are its owner’s business methods. We were told the story (not by himself) of how a brave and good man, single handed, struggled against bosses, political cliques and large financial interests in league with them, and all but freed the city from its most dangerously decent foes.
We were shown hills which the citizens had faith enough to remove and the hollows into which they had cast them; a raging river which they meant to control, and ugly, sickening slums which were doomed to go, and that none too soon; the old things which were to become new, and crooked things which were to be made straight.
Thirty-three years before the Herr Director had heard stories of vanishing buffaloes and the last struggles with the Indians. He had met scouts, hunters and soldiers. This was a new type of fighters, much less picturesque, but fit successors to those valiant pioneers. I rescued my guests from a visit to the stock-yards (why any one should care to show off stock-yards I do not know), and the committee released its hold upon us so that we might make our toilettes for the reception which preceded the banquet.
If there is anything more conducive to creating a barrier to real human contact than a reception, I have not seen it, unless it be a reception with orchestral accompaniment; this was such an one, and its chief function seemed to be to drown conversation.
The ladies of our party were happy because this was one of the few occasions on our trip when they could wear evening gowns.
The Frau Directorin was astonished beyond measure when she heard that some of the women on the reception committee of this club were mothers (to a limited degree, it is true), that they had, at the most, two servants, and that some of them had none; that they were interested in Literary Clubs and civic affairs, served on school boards and church committees, and were doing various other things to help the Creator manage His universe.
The German woman, who has adhered to the program marked out for her by the Emperor, the “three K’s,” “Küche, Kirche und Kinder” stands aghast at the strenuous lives many of our women lead. The Frau Directorin, who has servants for the kitchen and the children, upon whom the third K, the Church, lays no burden in the way of missionary meetings, fairs and suppers, who does not have to reduce her flesh to be in the fashion, and whose social position is determined by her husband’s station in life, may well wear an unruffled smile and keep an unfurrowed brow.
At the banquet, the waiters and the orchestra vied with each other in noise making, and it was a relief when, with the bringing of the black coffee, they all disappeared, and the toast-master rose and began unbottling his stock of stories. Nowhere in the world is there such a thirst for stories as in America, and a group of men after a banquet has an unlimited capacity for absorbing and enjoying them.
There were four scheduled speakers and a few who expected to be called upon unexpectedly, among them the Herr Director; a Glee Club was to sing before, between and after the speeches; so the toast-master did not stop telling stories any too soon.
The first speaker of the evening was a woman who well deserved the cheers which greeted her appearance. Her address on Workmen’s Compensation was so clear, so aptly put, so well reasoned through and so within the limit of time assigned her, that when she finished, the enthusiastic Herr Director shouted: “Bravo! bravo!” loud enough to be heard above the less euphonious sound of hand clapping, in which form of applause the American audience indulges.
The address was an eloquent but unemotional plea for fair play for the working man, an arraignment of present practices, cruelly sickening in detail, and frightful as a revelation of the attitude of large industrial interests towards labor. It showed the fair-mindedness of the men there, that they listened so approvingly, in spite of the fact that a large number of them was in similar relationship to labor, and that the proposed law for which she pleaded would be against their own interests.
After the lady’s address, the Glee Club sang and then the United States Senator was introduced. I have forgotten his subject, but that does not matter, for it had no relation to what he said. It was the kind of address which could be delivered with equal propriety at a Grangers’ picnic or a political meeting.
There were two things which the senator did not know: First, that his audience had outgrown that particular kind of address, and second, when to stop. When his final finally was finally spoken, the Glee Club sang again, after which the Herr Director was called upon to speak. He was listened to most attentively as he told how German cities are built, governed, provisioned and lighted.