THE TWO FACTIONS:—MAYOR SLICK SLACK KOPENSKY AND HIS BOSS, MAYO SIMS;
_VERSUS_ BOONE, PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD OF EDUCATION.
April 3, 2018:—It is a sunny April morning. I note some tiny spring
beauties in the patches of snow. Every cloud threatens, but every cloud
rolls by. I begin to apprehend April’s pretty promise of final
deliverance from frost and snow. I am loafing around the coffee houses,
listening to the talk, and being received as one of the more obscure
inhabitants. Occasionally some one asks, with an effort at interest, if
I am starting my art classes soon. But the most lofty and the most
humble call me “cousin,” as they do one another. I am sounded a bit as
to whether I share the political opinions of Sparrow Short, and
incidentally if we belong to the same school of art teaching, and if he
will give my classes a criticism from time to time. I write down the
name of the youth who seeks me out desiring to enroll and am for the
first time flattered.
By putting fugitive bits of loud talk with observations of the last few
mornings, I begin to get the social fabric, and take a lesson in New
Springfield’s politics.
More women vote than men. Woman is the housekeeper and municipal
politics is a kind of nest building and a house keeping of a sort.
The women follow their old occupations. And they have many new ones.
They are locksmiths, safe experts, confectioners, cigar factory workers
and owners, makers of advertising novelties for the whole world, eye,
ear, nose and throat physicians, bill posters, wallpaper cleaners,
opticians, dog, cat, and bird doctors, barbers, undertakers,
auctioneers, dentists, and a thousand other things. But this does not
mean that women monopolize such occupations. It is only a minority that
leaves the home. But it is a majority that floods the elections. They
are about equally divided between the established factions among the men
and perhaps getting the mass of their opinions from the men but
certainly furnishing their own steam.
I note many curious phases of caste, if there may be said to be such in
a fluent community where everyone may change his status before nightfall
by doughty deed or awful failure. There is an exalted status to
occupations that were once deemed commonplace. There is yet the same
distinction that used to go to lawyer or doctor or head of a university
department, but it is extended to such seemingly miscellaneous
occupations as conductors of Turkish baths, special gymnasiums and mud
baths, billiard halls, bowling alleys. Stores for sporting and athletic
goods convey great distinction. And the demi-god of these, Cave Man
Thomas, is indeed held in high regard and his minions have almost the
same lustre, and so he is one of the eleven city commissioners.
But the end of these surprises is not complete. There is a particular
dignity given to junk dealers, cobblers, garbage handlers, and
manufacturers, and devisers of patent medicines. They stand as did the
lords, dukes, knights, and bishops of old, if there is a charm to their
private characters equal to that of their public service.
I find that a special training, and therefore a special distinction, is
involved in being shoddy manufacturers, pawnbrokers, silo manufacturers.
And many other once simple ways of making a living have become so
complex and fastidious that they are the signs of nobility. But
respectability, in man or woman, is, as a matter of fact, not always a
thing of occupation in the final analysis. It may be a matter of race or
of personal record. And sometimes it seems to be a matter of party
politics.
The really significant party lines are local. The Democratic and
Republican parties have their turn every four years at national
elections but at all other seasons new ideas come into the local
commissioners, platforms that cannot be classed as Democratic or
Republican ideas and the people do not array themselves under those
banners but rather the banners of Doctor Mayo Sims on the one hand and
Black Hawk Boone on the other.
New Harmony, Indiana, is particularly distinguished for sending in civic
and social recruits to Boone’s faction, though the nucleus of the
faction came up with him from Cairo. While New Harmony was founded by
those who protested against mystical religion, many of the present waves
of enthusiasm from that exceedingly vital place were born in the New
Harmony Methodist and Episcopal churches. They take to Boone by
affinity, and hate Mayo Sims by instinct.
With no particular support from Boone, they have cultivated the mania
for planting the highly specialized ever-blooming Golden Rain Trees from
New Harmony as symbols of democratic feeling and as a way of saying that
all men are created equal. And they call them The Gate Trees, since,
passing under them, we enter the gate to the free land of democracy in
symbol if not in fact. The horticulturists from New Harmony are making
newer and more magnificent varieties of the tree and sending them across
the world.
But in the Mystic Year, Springfield is rather to be discussed, for
instance—as a convention center, which has at last evolved into the home
of a perpetual World’s Fair. It is as of old, a travelling man’s home
city, a retired farmer’s place of sleep, a state official’s paradise.
Agricultural experts, coal mining experts, would-be statesmen of the
middle west, have the same general relation to the city about them that
they had in the ancient days of the horse-cars, and the Sangamon County
Fair. The town has many of its ancient types. But they are overshadowed
by the sculptors, the motion picture scenario writers, the motion
picture directors and actors, and the prophets and sibyls of all the
arts that go to make up a University Fair. The entrance examination for
permanent residence in Springfield, except for the native-born, is the
same as that for the Universities of America. The native-born, no matter
how stupid or cranky, cannot be banished. There are so many extreme
followers of the various local religious and philosophical sects that
Springfield is as much a Hobby Horse Fair as University Fair, if we are
to believe the wits and the laughing poets.
One index of the hobby riding character of the place is the way the
humorous columnist, Romanoff, in the _Boone Ax_ characterizes
conspicuous people, even at the risk of suit. Today’s _Boone Ax_
contains a new epithet: “The Muttering Thibetan,” a name for the young
architect and protege of St. Friend, the Bread Giver. This youth makes
his acquaintances impatient by talking to the empty air as he walks the
streets.
The columnist names himself: “The Sentimental Romanoff.” He it is who
named John Short, political rebel and painting teacher: “Sparrow Short.”
He perpetually hounds the mayor with the nicknames: “Slick Slack
Kopensky” and “Sims’ Bitters.” This last is because Mayo Sims is deemed
the boss and Kopensky his dose to be administered to the town in regular
spoonsful.
The deathless industrial revolution that followed the war with Germany
still rumbles along elsewhere, with strikes, boycotting, blacklistings,
picketings, street barricades, dynamitings, massacres, and general
annoyances and bedevilment:—advancing, retreating, and advancing again,
through three generations and around the world.
But, for the most part, the soreheads outside of Springfield,
particularly those stewing in their own caldrons in Chicago, serve
vicariously to set us free. We are wrestling with more up-to-date
nuisances, with a brighter goal in sight.
It is the dream of a human beehive far from the Marxian society. It is
something on the newest New Harmony model, a Springfield that is
democratic, artistic, religious, and patriarchal, and therefore
following many of the most ancient forms and metaphors of orthodoxy, as
an electric light may be softened and given its final character by the
shell of an ancient horn lantern.
April 7:—This evening I take Avanel Boone to the Henry George dinner.
When I see that long array of distinguished citizens and Avanel names
off to me their offices and attributes, I realize that Henry George
triumphs in an especial manner over the soul of Springfield, and I
rejoice in this with all my heart, for I deeply revere the man and glory
in his influence. Avanel first points out to me the followers of her
saints:—St. Scribe of the Shrines, who has only recently departed this
world, and St. Friend, The Bread Giver, who is still to be seen in the
Springfield Cathedral, active and wonderful. And here are some of the
principal followers of this dynasty of saints:—the pious Darsies, the
wholesome Hollys, the sad Rancies, torch bearers of liberalism. Among
them are endless officers and privates in the ranks of the Amazonian and
the Horseshoe Brotherhood, all religious and political radicals. Avanel
is much amused to point out at the dinner an equal number of opposites,
though often of the same nominal allegiances, the snobbish Rues, the
wirehaired Radleys, the iron-ribbed Standings, and some of the less
powerful of the mayor’s faction, some young Kopenskys, Rocks, and the
like, who have no more to do with the spirit of Henry George than they
have to do with the New Testament.
My dear Avanel grows more sarcastic and almost breaks up the meeting at
our end of the table when Jefferson Radley, henchman and slave of the
wicked Doctor Mayo Sims, opens the evening with a speech in which he
names Henry George and Alexander Hamilton, in the same tone of voice and
with the same praise.
And now I get my first sight of Black Hawk Boone. As he rises to speak,
my dear Avanel blushes with ill-repressed pride and she cannot keep the
sparkle from her eyes and the tension of embarrassment and love from her
face as Black Hawk shakes his mane.
He is a short man, with a curly big black beard such as Ashurbanipal and
Nimrod must have shaken at their foes. His cheek is flushed with anger
and his midnight eyes give out lightning and he hits the table till the
dishes rattle and as good as denounces Jefferson Radley as a hypocrite
and a scoundrel. He is plainly one of those accustomed to having his way
completely, as far as he has it at all, for few people will have the
energy to combat the wrath he puts into any battle or into such a thing
as a pretty after-dinner tribute to a saint. Boone howls, and snaps his
teeth together. His terrible sneer would destroy all but a rhinoceros or
a seasoned politician.
At length Boone possesses himself enough to speak clearly and with much
economic eloquence, a perfect bore to Avanel and myself. She is trying
to fascinate me by allowing me to hold two of her fingers under the
table. Then suddenly the banquet ends and she goes home with her father,
looking severely at me. And she kisses her father, and whispers in his
ear—no doubt that he made an excellent speech. Boone does not so much as
glance my way and I must wait till another time to talk to him. He has
never been at home when I have called on his daughter.
April 10:—The city hall is apparently less rigid than of old, a
masterpiece of the happy-go-lucky. Mayor Slick Slack Kopensky, “Sims’
Bitters,” is sitting next to me at a coffee house table with Sims and
Kusuko and Cave Man Thomas, all parts of the City Hall machine. Kopensky
looks like the pictures of President William McKinley. While by no means
so large a character, he is, by all reports, much more picturesque in
his political methods. He is even now saying to his coterie and with
intent that those near by may hear if they so desire: “All the
governments above that of the city weigh on the people like a hat of
lead. But the government of our City Hall, as long as I have my way, is
going to be as gay and easy as safety will allow. As long as the Public
School bunch act like a bunch of regulators and hoot-owls, we will beat
them to pulp.”
April 12:—Now I note certain established and accredited loafers, who are
assumed to be part of the landscape. I find that the gang of Kopensky,
Sims, and so forth have not failed to annex every one of such, who can
tell a smutty story to some jolly group of pornographically inclined
gentlemen. Mayo Sims believes in the medicine of laughter to cure the
sickness of a political machine, and with Kopensky’s help has made it
appear on the surface that the issue is between the laughing City Hall
and the militant and irksome University. So I get a public-school map of
the city from the Board of Education offices and hire a taxi and make a
quick still hunt around all the old and new sites. Judging by the
equipment alone, I conclude at once that the public schools of
Springfield have gone on like a line of irresistible battle-tanks. There
is a complete material ladder from the first grade, on through the
awards and honors of The University World’s Fair that sets itself in
rigid competition with the masters of the world. But there are, no
doubt, many qualifications to this outline to be offered by friends and
enemies of the system. It is plain in one taxi ride that the system has
commanded rivers of ungrudged money and I can well believe that outside
the political field the system has had an unbroken and unchallenged
prestige.
In the coffee houses and the gigantic loafing lobbies of the
motion-picture theatres and over the endless ice cream tables of the
drug stores and confectioneries and in the lounging rooms of the
dance-halls everywhere the argument roars and rattles and clatters and
squeals and shrieks and splutters and swears. Every kind of a skirmish
between Catholic and Protestant, aristocrat and democrat, labor and
capital, is obliterated or merged into this main war. Springfield is
Black Hawk Boone, President of the Board of Education and the World’s
Fair of the University of Springfield and editor of the relentless
_Boone Ax_:—_versus_ this gang composed of Mayor Kopensky, Sims, his
boss, and the laughing, dancing crew led by Drug Store Smith and Coffee
Kusuko and Cave Man Thomas.
Practically all the religious leaders and all the people with names of
real distinction and untainted standing are with Black Hawk Boone. His
School Board includes among others Rabbi Terence Ezekiel, Roxana Grey,
Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, son of the Senator who represents
us in the World Government, St. Friend, the Bread Giver, Rachel Madison,
the Christian Science Reader, Mary Timmons and John Emis,
representatives of the African Race, Gwendolyn Charles, the Motion
Picture Director and scenario writer, Patricia Anthony, Josephine Windom
of the Three Color Printing Department. They are a dithyrambic, chanting
improvising howling-dervish set, with a local millennial dialect of
their own and lacking mainly in that sense of humor and everydayness and
that cold political self-control with which the City Hall is fully
supplied.