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THE GOLDEN BOOK OF SPRINGFIELD
LIST OF THE BOOKS OF VACHEL LINDSAY
Prose:—
A Handy Guide for Beggars.
Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty.
The Art of the Moving Picture.
The Golden Book of Springfield.
Verse:—
General William Booth Enters Into Heaven and Other Poems.
The Congo and Other Poems.
The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems.
The Golden Whales of California and Other Rhymes in the American
Language.
THE GOLDEN BOOK OF SPRINGFIELD
BY
VACHEL LINDSAY
A CITIZEN OF THAT TOWN
Being the review of a book that will appear in the autumn of the year
2018, and an extended description of Springfield, Illinois, in that
year.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1920
_All rights reserved_
Copyright, 1920
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1920.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Campbellite, the Florist and the Hostess 3
II. The Prognosticator’s Club 10
III. How People of 1920 Think the Book Will Come, in 2018 19
IV. History of the Michaels 49
V. I Myself Enter into the Springfield of 2018 66
VI. Kopensky Versus Boone 90
VII. The Drug Stores, Coffee Houses and Dance Halls 103
VIII. The Springfield Flag 117
IX. The Beginning of the Flying Machine Riots 137
X. The End of the Flying Machine Riots 154
XI. St. Friend, and His Two Religious Orders 171
XII. The Yellow Dance Halls Are Abolished 192
XIII. Surto Hurdenburg is Lynched 209
XIV. In the House of the Man From Singapore 226
XV. Further Experiences in That Strange Mansion 243
XVI. The Return of Joseph Bartholdi Michael 266
XVII. The Lynching of Boone. An interregnum of the Diary. How
The Golden Book Appears 287
XVIII. St. Friend and Avanel Read From The Golden Book 305
XIX. Avanel and I Ascend to the Jungles of Heaven 318
THE PROGNOSTICATOR’S CLUB
1920 2018
David Carson, Campbellite minister,
becomes St. Friend
Anne Morrison, a florist,
becomes Roxana Grey
Eloise Terry, the hostess,
becomes Patricia Anthony
Clara Horton, a school teacher,
becomes Josephine Windom
Gregory Webster, an artist,
becomes Sparrow Short
Nathan Levi, a Jewish boy,
becomes Rabbi Terence Ezekiel
Margaret Evans, a Christian Scientist,
becomes Rachel Madison
Daisy Pearl Johnson, a negress,
becomes Mary Timmons
Nathaniel Davidson, an evangelist,
becomes Cave Man Thomas
Ruth Everett, a welfare worker,
becomes Gwendolyn Charles
John Fletcher, the doubter,
becomes Dr. Mayo Sims
Joseph Bartholdi Michael, I,
becomes Joseph Bartholdi Michael, II
THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED TO ISADORA
CHAPTER I
THE CAMPBELLITE, THE FLORIST AND THE HOSTESS
In this, our town, we call “New Springfield,” David Carson, a young
minister of the Disciples of Christ is a near neighbor of mine. He is a
graduate of Bethany College. His great-grandfather studied there before
him, when Alexander Campbell, the founder of Bethany, was in his prime.
If you want to know of this man as we know him, read Richardson’s staid
old biography, or walk the shades of Bethany, West Virginia. Campbell,
in our eyes, was the American pioneer theologian.
He was devoted to the union of the churches of Christendom. He pleaded
that all disciples of Christ call themselves “simply” Christians, and
unite on those symbols and ordinances which Christendom has in common.
If it would not make our great-grandfathers turn over in their graves, I
and my neighbor would call ourselves “simply” Campbellites. We would do
it for a human, and not lofty reason. It seems that those spiritually or
physically descended from the early Campbellites are on family terms, no
matter how they seem to roam in thought or experience, or no matter what
their hereditary argumentative disposition. For a “Campbellite” is sure
to argue, on the least provocation. There are traces of this tendency
even in Richardson’s reverent biography.
Ultra modern followers of Campbell hang in their libraries with
unlimited pride a certain Rembrandtesque lithograph of the great man, an
heirloom that is now quite rare, and to be classed in its southern way,
as the spinning wheels and old Bibles of the Mayflower are classed in a
northern way. This lithograph is the enlargement of the engraving in the
front of the Richardson biography, but much color and magic have been
added. Out of the darkness emerges a smooth-shaven, high bred, masterful
physiognomy more like that of the statesmen who were the fathers of the
republic, than of a member of any priesthood. Campbell’s cheeks and eyes
are still fired with youth and authority militant. He has a head bowed
with thought, crowned with grey hair, and beneath his chin is the most
statesmanlike of cravats, with a peculiarly old-fashioned roll. Thus he
must have looked, at the height of debate with the infidel.
This is the man who put so much learning, and deathless controversy, and
high distinction into the log cabins of the Ohio river basin, especially
the romantic regions of Mason and Dixon’s line. On west of the
Mississippi his followers carried his light to Seattle, Portland, and
Los Angeles, and the cities of Alaska and Canada and the farms between.
And they start ’round the world with it all over again at this hour. Yet
in the end that light is apt to have a color of its origin, touched with
Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky;—a southern gospel, far indeed
from Plymouth Rock, or Manhattan Island.
I can never forget the copy of the lithograph that hung over my
grandmother’s front room fireplace in the patriarchal Frazee farm house
in Indiana. Under it I heard proverbs from Campbell every summer, from
the time I can remember anything. All those sayings were mixed up with
stories that came with my people along the old Daniel Boone trail from
Kentucky and Virginia. And when that old frame house was new and novel,
and most other dwelling houses near were log cabins, Campbell had been a
guest received with breathless reverence. Under that picture I was
personally conducted through all the daguerreotypes and records
pertaining to the Kentucky pioneers of our blood.
And now, in Springfield, under the same rich lithograph my neighbor
keeps the bound volumes of Campbell’s _Christian Baptist_ and _Millenial
Harbinger_, once the arsenal of every debating “elder” of our
persuasion. My grandfather’s copies were marked, every page, and these
are marked by my radical friend, but with a different point of view.
On a certain evening I am in the pastor’s study tracing with
astonishment the suggestion of Christian Socialism in the first number
of the _Harbinger_. My Grandma had said nothing about _that_!
Few of Campbell’s older followers dwell on the hope of a practical City
of God that shouted from the covers even before they were opened. This
reasonable, non-miraculous millennium is much in the mind of my
neighbor, and he tells me again and again of a vision that he has of
Springfield a hundred years hence. But more of this later.
There is a woman who is florist of our town, Anne Morrison a descendant
of the Chapman family. She holds in special reverence, John Chapman,
(Johnny Appleseed,) who began his labors in a region a little north of
Alexander Campbell’s diocese, in the Ohio basin. He remains a tradition
among the more northern group of those who worshipped Campbell, and
among similar pioneers. He is especially honored by that splendid sect,
the Swedenborgians, for he was a preacher and teacher of the doctrines
of Swedenborg. But he was even more notably a nurseryman. He was
deserving of the laurels of Thoreau, three times and more, and by the
test of life rather than writing, to him belongs nearly every
worth-while crown of Whitman. He skirmished on the very edge of the
frontier, but fought the wilderness, not the Indian. The aborigines
thought him a great medicine man and holy man, because of his magical
bag of seeds, for along their trails, wherever he tramped, there soon
came up pennyroyal and all beneficent herbs. With the tenderness of St.
Francis he wept over every wounded bird, and with the steadiness of a
nation builder, he planted orchards of apples in the openings of the
forest, fenced them in, and left them for the pioneers to find, long
after. He wore for a shirt and sole article of clothing an old
gunny-sack with holes cut for arms and legs, and winter or summer slept
in the hollow tree on the pile of old leaves, and weathered it past
seventy years, while the great Whitman lived in houses, and Thoreau was
on Walden but a season or two. These men left behind them certain
writings, but Johnny Appleseed left behind him apples, orchards heavy
with fruit, beauty from the very black earth, and a tradition whose
wonder shall yet ring through all the palaces of mankind. He was swift
as the deer, and gentle as the fawn,—and stern with himself, as the Red
Indian. Like Christ and Socrates he wrote only in the soil. He was
welcomed more like an angel than a man in the pioneer cabins, and if
ever there was an American saint left uncanonized in 1920, it is John
Chapman, Johnny Appleseed, and by 2018 he is canonized indeed, and has
his niche in the Springfield Cathedral, according to Anne Morrison’s
revelation.
Another friend is a great hostess of Springfield, Eloise Terry, by name.
Her enemies declare that she is the representative of her family
fortune, and little else. But they are apt to be people who do not
attend her quite earnest parties, where every ramification of the social
fabric is candidly examined, at least for one evening. The most
competent person is brought in to speak of his strand of the web, be he
bootblack or jailbird or poet. But this is an advance on her family who
are dully conventional, to the core of their souls. And her constant
companions, though they are in fact people of the same general
stratification of good fortune as herself, are selected for their human
interest in her unconsciously inhuman inquisitions. And inquisitions,
after all, come but once a month or so. In general she and her cronies
are taking a decent part in politics, and their wealth does not
interfere with an unprejudiced estimate of candidates, entirely apart
from bank accounts. Her presence in town makes for the truth, and for
progress that much. Liars hate her intensely. Petty political lies fade
before her, however poor her remedies may be for the great lies. She is
a golden-haired girl, around thirty years of age, with three thriving
and well-reared children. Her distinction, in my eyes, is not her
opinions, but the fact that she dresses in schemes allied to the gold of
her hair. I meet her on the street like a bit of blessed sunshine. Also
her heart is quite warm. If she had been a musician, instead of a kind
of contemporary conversational historian, she would have talked of
music, instead of events, with the same ardor and fine tone, to a
similar circle of friends, and brought in the singers, to sing for them,
from the very gutters if necessary, and have been as decent to such
songbirds as she knew how.