I
I confess to a good deal of emotion as the train slowed up in the
Pennsylvania Station, and I think I had a right to it. It is not every
day one comes home after a quarter of a century's absence, and at the
first glance everything was so bewilderingly home-like. Not that I had
not had my misgivings as the train neared Philadelphia. From the car
windows I had seen my old Convent at Torresdale transformed beyond
recognition, many new stations with new names by the way, rows and rows
of houses where I remembered fields, Philadelphia grown almost as big as
London to get into, a new, strange, unbelievable sky-line to the town,
the bridges multiplied across the Schuylkill--change after change where
I should have liked to find everything, every house, field, tree, blade
of grass even, just as I had left it. But what change there might be in
the station kept itself, for the moment anyway, discreetly out of sight.
For all the difference I saw, I might have been starting on the journey
that had lasted over a quarter of a century instead of returning from
it.
This made the shock the greater when, just outside in Market Street, I
was met by a company of mounted policemen. It is true they were there
to welcome not me, but the President of the United States who was due by
the next train, and were supported by the City Troop, as indispensable a
part of my Philadelphia as the sky over my head and the bricks under my
feet; true also that, well-uniformed, well-mounted, well-groomed as they
were, I felt they would be a credit to any town. But the shock was to
find them there at all. Philadelphia in my day could not have run, or
would not have wanted to run, to anything so officially imposing; that
it could and did now was a warning there was no mistaking. Whatever
Philadelphia might have developed, or deteriorated, into, it was not any
longer the Philadelphia I had known and loved.
It was the same sort of warning all the way after that. Wherever I went,
wherever I turned, I stumbled upon an equally impossible jumble of the
familiar and the unfamiliar. At times, I positively ached with the joy
of finding places so exactly as I remembered them that I caught myself
saying, just here "this" happened, or "that," as I and my Youth met
ourselves; at others I could have cried for the absurdity, the tragedy,
of finding everything so different that never in a foreign land had I
seemed more hopelessly a foreigner.
[Illustration: BROAD STREET STATION]
I did not have to go farther than my hotel for a reminder that
Philadelphia, to oblige me, had not stood altogether still during my
quarter of a century's absence, but had been, and was, busy refashioning
itself into something preposterously new. From one of my high windows I
might look down to the Philadelphia Library and the Episcopal
Academy,--those two bulwarks of Philadelphia respectability--and beyond,
stretching peacefully away to the peaceful curves of the Delaware, to a
wide plain of flat red roofs and chimneys, broken by the green lines of
the trees that follow the straight course of Philadelphia's streets and
by the small green spaces of the trees that shade Philadelphia's
back-yards: level and lines and spaces I knew as well as a lesson learnt
by heart. But, from the midst of this red plain of roofs, huge high
buildings, like towers, that I did not know, sprang up into the blue
air, increasing in number as my eye wandered northward until, from the
other window, I saw them gathered into one great, amazing, splendid
group with William Penn, in full-skirted coat and broad-brimmed hat,
springing still higher above them.
When I went down into the streets, I might walk for a minute or two
between rows of the beloved old-fashioned red brick houses, with their
white marble steps and their white shutters below and green above, and
then, just as exultantly I began to believe them changeless as the
Pyramids and the Sphinx, I would come with a jar upon a Gothic gable, an
absurd turret, a Renaissance doorway, a facade disfigured by a hideous
array of fire escapes, a sham Colonial house, or some other upstart that
dated merely from yesterday or the day before. And here and there a
sky-scraper of an apartment house swaggered in the midst of the little
"homes" that were Philadelphia's pride--the last new one, to my dismay,
rearing its countless stories above the once inviolate enclosure of
Rittenhouse Square.
When I went shopping in Chestnut Street my heart might rejoice at the
sight of some of the well remembered names--Dreka, Darlington, Bailey,
Caldwell, as indispensable in my memory as that of Penn himself--but it
sank as quickly in the vain search for the many more that have
disappeared, or indeed, for the whole topsy-turvy order of things that
could open the big new department stores into Market Street and make it
the rival of Chestnut as a shopping centre, or that could send other
stores up to where stores had never ventured in my day: stores in Walnut
Street as high as Eighteenth, a milliner's in Locust Street almost under
the shadow of St. Mark's, a stock-broker at the corner of Fifteenth and
Walnut, Hughes and Mueller--I need tell no Philadelphian who Hughes and
Mueller are even if they have unkindly made two firms of the old
one--within a stone's throw of Dr. Weir Mitchell's house; when I saw
that I felt that sacrilege could go no further.
[Illustration: WANAMAKER'S]
For sentiment's sake, I might eat my plate of ice-cream at the old
little marble-topped table in the old Locust Street gloom at Sautter's,
or buy cake at Dexter's at the old corner in Spruce Street, but Mrs.
Burns with her ice-cream, Jones with his fried oysters, had vanished,
gone away in the _Ewigkeit_ as irrevocably as Hans Breitmann's Barty or
the snows of yester-year. And Wyeth's and Hubbell's masqueraded under
other names, and Shinn, from whom we used to buy our medicines, was
dead, and the new firm sold cigars with their ice-cream sodas, and my
Philadelphia was stuffed with saw-dust.
Not a theatre was as I had left it, new ones I had never heard of
drawing the people who used to crowd the Chestnut, which has rung down
its curtain on the last act of its last play even as I write; the Arch,
given over now, alas! to the "Movies" and the "Movies" threaten the end
of the drama not only at the Arch but at all theatres forever;
well-patronized houses flourishing in North Broad Street; the staid
Academy of Music thrown into the shadow by its giddy prosperous upstart
of a rival up-town.
Vanished were old landmarks for which I confidently looked--the United
States Mint from Chestnut Street; from Broad and Walnut the old yellow
Dundas House with the garden and the magnolia for whose blossoming I had
once eagerly watched with the coming of spring; from Thirteenth and
Locust the old Paterson House, turned into the new, imposing, very much
criticised building of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania; from
Eleventh and Spruce, that other garden overlooked by the windows of the
house my Grandfather built and lived in, as my Father did after him,
and, to me more cruel, the house itself passed into other hands, grown
shabby with time, and the sign "For Sale" hanging on its neglected
walls. Change, change, change--that was what I had come home for!
II
I am not sure, however, that I had not the worst shock of all when I
wandered from the old home, further down Spruce Street, below the
beautiful Eighteenth Century Hospital, dishonoured now and shut in on
the Spruce Street side by I hardly know what in the way of new wings and
wards. As I had left it, this lower part of Spruce and Pine and the
neighbouring streets, had changed less perhaps than any other part of
the town--has changed less to-day in mere bricks and mortar. It had
preserved the appropriate background for its inheritance of history and
traditions. Numerous Colonial houses remained and upon them those of
later date were modelled. It had kept also the serenity and repose of
the Quaker City's early days, the character, dignity, charm. Many old
Philadelphia families had never moved away. It was clean as a little
Dutch town with nothing to interrupt the quiet but the gentle jingling
of the occasional leisurely horse-car.
[Illustration: ST. PETER'S CHURCHYARD]
And what did I find it?--A slum, captured by the Russian Jew, the old
houses dirty, down-at-the-heel; the once spotless marble steps unwashed,
the white shutters hanging loose; the decorative old iron hinges and
catches and insurance plaques or badges rusting, and nobody can say how
much of the old woodwork inside burned for kindling; Yiddish signs in
the windows, with here a Jewish Maternity Home, and there a Jewish
newspaper office; at every door, almost every window, and in groups in
the street, men, women and children with Oriental faces, here and there
a man actually in his caftan, bearded, with the little curls in front of
his ears, and a woman with a handkerchief over her head, and all
chattering in Yiddish and slatternly and dirty as I remembered them in
South-Eastern Europe, from Carlsbad and Prague to those remote villages
of Transylvania where dirt was the sign by which I always knew when the
Jewish quarter was reached. A few patriotic Philadelphians have recently
returned hoping to stem the current, and their houses shine with
cleanliness. In Fourth Street the dignified Randolph House, which the
family never deserted, seems to protest against the wholesale surrender
to the foreign invasion. In Pine Street, St. Peter's, with its green
graveyard, has survived untarnished the surrounding desecration. But I
could only wonder how long the church and these few houses will be able
to withstand the triumphing alien, and I abandoned hope when, at the
very gate of St. Peter's, a woman with a handkerchief tied over her head
stopped me to ask the way to "_Zweit und Pine_."
III
I know that the same thing is going on in almost all the older parts of
the United States, and the new parts too--I know that some small New
England towns can support their two and three Polish newspapers, that
New York swarms with people who talk any and every language under the
sun except English, and can boast, if it is a thing to boast of, more
Italians than Rome, more Jews than Jerusalem; that San Francisco has its
Chinatown, that the Middle West abounds in German and Swedish
settlements--in a word, I know that everywhere throughout the country,
the native American is retreating before this invasion of the alien. But
it is with a certain difference in Philadelphia. Have I not said that
one of the absurdities of my native town--I can afford to call them
absurdities because I love them--is that for the Philadelphian who looks
upon himself as the real Philadelphian, Philadelphia lies between the
Delaware and the Schuylkill, and is bounded on the north by Market
Street, on the south by Lombard; that in the ancient rhyming list of its
streets he recognizes only the line:
"Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, and Pine"?
Now, when I left home this narrow section was threatening to grow too
narrow and it was with some difficulty the Philadelphian kept within it.
Up till then, however, it was in no danger except from his own
increasing numbers. The tragedy is that the Russian Jew should have
descended upon just this section, should now, not so much dispute it
with him, as oust him from it--the Russian Jew, a Jew by religion but
not by race, who has been found impossible in every country on the
Continent of Europe into which he has drifted, so impossible when that
country is Holland that the Jews who have been there for centuries
collect among themselves the money to send him post haste on to England
and poor America, for even the Dutch Jew cannot stand the Russian
Jew--and, from what I have heard, neither can the decent Pennsylvania
Jew who has been with us almost from the beginning. Other aliens have
been more modest and set up their slums where they interfere less with
Philadelphia tradition. I cannot understand, and nobody has been able to
explain to me, why the Russian Jew was allowed to push his way in. But
the indolent never see the thin end of the wedge, and there are
philanthropists whose philanthropy for the people they do not know
increases in direct proportion to the harm it does to those they do
know. I was told more than once to consider what Philadelphia was doing
for the Russian Jew, to remember that he has paid America the compliment
of accepting it as the Promised Land, that his race in America has
produced Mary Antin, and to see for myself what good Americans were
being made of his children. But though Philadelphia may one day blossom
like the rose with Mary Antins, though there might have been an
incipient patriot in every one of the small Russian Jews I met being
taken in batches across Independence Square to Independence Hall to
imbibe patriotism at the fount, I could not help considering rather what
the Russian Jew is just now doing for Philadelphia. For it is as plain
as a pipe stem to anybody with eyes to see that the Philadelphians to
whom Philadelphia originally belonged are being pushed by the Russian
Jew out of the only part of it they care to live in.
[Illustration: CITY HALL FROM THE SCHUYLKILL]
I wondered at first why so many people had fled to the country, why so
many signs "For Sale" or "For Rent" were to be seen about Spruce and
Pine and Walnut Streets. Various reasons were given me:--with the Law
Courts now in the centre of the town and the new Stock Exchange at Broad
and Walnut, and stores everywhere, nobody could live in town; the noise
of the trolleys is unbearable; the dirt of the city is unhealthy; soft
coal has made Philadelphia grimier than London; the motor has destroyed
distance;--excellent reasons, all of them. But it was not until I
discovered the Russian Jew that I understood the most important. It is
the Russian Jew who, with an army of aliens at his back--thousands upon
thousands of Italians, Slavs, Lithuanians, a fresh emigration of negroes
from the South, and statistics alone can say how many other
varieties--is pushing and pushing Philadelphians out of the town--first
up Spruce Street, nearer and nearer to the Schuylkill, then across the
Schuylkill into the suburbs, eventually to be swept from the suburbs
into the country, until who can say where there will be any room for
them at all? With the Russian Jew's genius for adapting himself to
American institutions, I could fancy him taking possession of, and
adding indefinitely to, the little two-story houses that already stretch
in well-nigh endless rows to the West and the North, Germantown and West
Philadelphia built over beyond recognition. I remember when, one day in
a trolley, I had gone for miles and miles between these rows--each
little house with the same front yard, the same porch, the same awning,
the same rocking-chairs--I had a horrible waking nightmare in which I
saw them multiplying--as the alien himself multiplied beyond the most
ardent dreams of Mr. Roosevelt,--and creeping out further and further,
across the city limits, across the State, across the Middle West, across
the prairies, across the Rockies, across the Sierras, until at last they
joined East to West in one unbroken line--one great, unbroken, unlovely
monument to the enterprise of the new American, and the philanthropy of
the old: while only the Russian Jew at the door of the State House, like
Macaulay's New Zealander under the shadow of St. Paul's, remained to
muse and moralize on the havoc he had wrought.
[Illustration: CHESTNUT STREET BRIDGE]
This may seem a trifle fantastic, but I should find it hard to give an
idea of how impossibly fantastic the prevailing presence of the alien in
Philadelphia appeared to me. To be sure, we had our aliens a quarter of
a century ago. But they were mostly Irish, Germans, Swedes. The Italian
at his fruit-stall was as yet rather the picturesque exception, and I
can remember how, not very long before I left home, the whole town went
to stare at the first importation of Russian Jews, dumped down under I
have forgotten what shelter, as if they were curiosities or freaks from
Barnum's. But now the aliens are mostly Latins, Slavs, Orientals who do
not fit so unobtrusively into our American scheme of things, and who
come from the lowest classes in their own countries, so ignorant and
degraded most of them that, what with their increasing numbers and our
new negro population from the South, there are people in Pennsylvania
who are trying to introduce an educational test at the polls--America
having learned the evil of universal suffrage just as England is
coquetting with it.
IV
The rest of Philadelphia--the rest of America, for that matter--may be
accustomed to this new emigration to my town as well as to all parts of
the country. But I had not seen the latter-day alien coming in by every
steamer, and gradually, almost imperceptibly, establishing himself. The
advantage, or disadvantage, of staying away from home so long is that,
on returning, one gets the net result of the change the days and the
years bring with them. Those who stay at home are broken in to the
change in its initial stages and can accept the result as a matter of
course. I could not. To be honest, I did not like it. I did not like to
find Philadelphia a foreign town.
I did not like to find Streets where the name on almost every store is
Italian. I did not like to find the new types of negro, like savages
straight from the heart of Africa some of them looked, who are disputing
South Street and Lombard Street and that disgraceful bit of Locust
Street with the decent, old-fashioned, self-respecting Philadelphia
darkies. I did not like to find the people with foreign manners--for
instance, to have my hand kissed for a tip in the hotel by a Lithuanian
chambermaid, though I should add that in a month she had grown American
enough to accept the same tip stoically with a bare "Thank You." I did
not like to find the foreigner forcing his way not only into the
Philadelphian's houses, the Philadelphian's schools, the Philadelphian's
professions--professions that have been looked upon as the sacred right
of certain Philadelphia families for almost a couple of centuries. I
have heard all about his virtues, nobody need remind me of them; I know
that he is carrying off everything at the University so that rich Jews
begin to think they should in return make it a gift or bequest, as no
rich Jew has yet, I believe. I know that the young Philadelphian must
give up his sports and his gaieties if he can hope to compete with the
young Russian Jew who never allows himself any recreation on the road to
success--and perhaps this won't do the young Philadelphian any harm. I
know that if the Russian Jew keeps on studying law, the Philadelphia
lawyer will be before long as extinct as the dodo--a probability that if
it wakes up the Philadelphia lawyer may have its uses. All this, and
much besides, I know--also, incidentally, I might add the fact that the
Russian Jew, who is not unintelligent, has mastered in a very short time
the possibilities of arson and bankruptcy as investments. But if there
were no other side to his virtues--and of course there is that other
side too--I should not like to think of the new Philadelphian that is to
come out of this incredible mixture of Russian Jews and countless other
aliens as little like us in character and tradition.
The new Philadelphian may be a finer creature far than in my hopes for
him, finer far than the old Philadelphian I have known--but then he will
not be that old Philadelphian whom I do not want to lose and whom it
would be a pity to lose in a country for which, ever since Penn pointed
the way to the constitution of the United States, he has probably
accomplished more than any other citizen.
Personally, I might as well say that I do not believe he will be a finer
creature. It seems to me that he is doing away with the old American
idea of levelling up and is bent on the levelling down process that is
going on all over Europe. And so foreign is he making us, that I would
not think J. very far wrong in declaring himself the only real American
left, if only he would include me with him.
[Illustration: THE NARROW STREET]