1886
Society life in the big cities of America in 1886 had become a strange
nightmare of extravagance and late hours. It was developing a queer race
of people. Temporarily, the Lenten season stopped the rustle and flash
of toilettes, chained the dancers, and put away the tempting chalice of
social excitement. When Lent came in the society of the big cities of
America was an exhausted multitude. It seemed to me as though two or
three winters of germans and cotillions would be enough to ruin the best
of health. The victims of these strange exhaustions were countless. No
man or woman could endure the wear and tear of social life in America
without sickness and depletion of health. The demands were at war with
the natural laws of the human race.
Even the hour set for the average assembling of a "society event" in
1886 was an outrage. Once it was eight o'clock at night, soon it was
adjourned to nine-thirty, and then to ten, and there were threats that
it would soon be eleven. A gentleman wrote me this way for advice about
his social burden:
"What shall I do? We have many friends, and I am invited out
perpetually. I am on a salary in a large business house in New York. I
am obliged to arise in the morning at seven o'clock, but I cannot get
home from those parties till one in the morning. The late supper and the
excitement leave me sleepless. I must either give up society or give up
business, which is my living. My wife is not willing that I should give
up society, because she is very popular. My health is breaking down.
What shall I do?"
It was not the idle class that wasted their nights at these parties; it
was the business men dragged into the fashions and foibles of the idle,
which made that strange and unique thing we call society in America.
I should have replied to that man that his wife was a fool. If she were
willing to sacrifice his health, and with it her support, for the
greeting and applause of these midnight functions, I pitied him. Let him
lose his health, his business, and his home, and no one would want to
invite him anywhere. All the diamond-backed terrapins at fifty dollars a
dozen which he might be invited to enjoy after that would do him no
harm. Society would drop him so suddenly that it would knock the breath
out of him. The recipe for a man in this predicament, a man tired of
life, and who desired to get out of it without the reputation of a
suicide, was very simple. He only had to take chicken salad regularly at
midnight, in large quantities, and to wash it down with bumpers of wine,
reaching his pillow about 2 a.m. If the third winter of this did not
bring his obituary, it would be because that man was proof against that
which had slain a host larger than any other that fell on any
battle-field of the ages. The Scandinavian warriors believed that in the
next world they would sit in the Hall of Odin, and drink wine from the
skulls of their enemies. But society, by its requirements of late hours
and conviviality, demanded that a man should drink out of his own skull,
having rendered it brainless first. I had great admiration for the
suavities and graces of life, but it is beyond any human capacity to
endure what society imposes upon many in America. Drinking other
people's health to the disadvantage of one's own health is a poor
courtesy at best. Our entertainments grew more and more extravagant,
more and more demoralising. I wondered if our society was not swinging
around to become akin to the worst days of Roman society. The princely
banquet-rooms of the Romans had revolving ceilings representing the
firmament; fictitious clouds rained perfumed essences upon the guests,
who were seated on gold benches, at tables made of ivory and
tortoise-shell. Each course of food, as it was brought into the banquet
room, was preceded by flutes and trumpets. There was no wise man or
woman to stand up from the elaborate banquet tables of American society
at this time and cry "Halt!" It might have been done in Washington, or
in New York, or in Brooklyn, but it was not.
The way American society was moving in 1886 was the way to death. The
great majority, the major key in the weird symphony of American life,
was not of society.
We had no masses really, although we borrowed the term from Europe and
used it busily to describe our working people, who were massive enough
as a body of men, but they were not the masses. Neither were they the
mob, which was a term some were fond of using in describing the
destruction of property on railroads in the spring of 1886. The
labouring men had nothing to do with these injuries. They were done by
the desperadoes who lurked in all big cities. I made a Western trip
during this strike, and I found the labouring men quiet, peaceful, but
idle. The depôts were filled with them, the streets were filled with
them, but they were in suspense, and it lasted twenty-five days. Then
followed the darkness and squalor--less bread, less comfort, less
civilisation of heart and mind. It was hard on the women and children.
Senator Manderson, the son of my old friend in Philadelphia, introduced
a bill into the United States Senate for the arbitration of strikes. It
proposed a national board of mediation between capital and labour.
Jay Gould was the most abused of men just then. He was denounced by both
contestants in this American conflict most uselessly. The knights of
Labour came in for an equal amount of abuse. We were excited and could
not reason. The men had just as much right to band together for mutual
benefit as Jay Gould had a right to get rich. It was believed by many
that Mr. Gould made his fortune out of the labouring classes. Mr. Gould
made it out of the capitalists. His regular diet was a capitalist per
diem, not a poor man--capitalist stewed, broiled, roasted, panned,
fricaseed, devilled, on the half shell. He was personally, as I knew
him, a man of such kindness that he would not hurt a fly, but he played
ten pins on Wall Street. A great many adventurers went there to play
with him, and if their ball rolled down the side of the financial alley
while he made a ten strike or two or three spares, the fellows who were
beaten howled. That was about all there really was in the denunciation
of Jay Gould.
I couldn't help thinking sometimes, when the United States seemed to
change its smile of prosperity to a sudden smile of anger or petulance,
that we were a spoiled nation, too much pampered by divine blessings.
If we had not been our own rulers, but had been ruled--what would
America have been then? We were like Ireland crying for liberty and
abusing liberty the more we got of it.
Mr. Gladstone's policy of Home Rule for Ireland, announced in April,
1886, proposed an Irish Parliament and the Viceroy. It should remain,
however, a part of England. I fully believed then that Ireland would
have Home Rule some day, and in another century I believed that Ireland
would stand to England as the United States stands to England, a
friendly and neighbouring power. I believed that Ireland would some day
write her own Declaration of Independence. Liberty, the fundamental
instinct of the most primitive living thing, would be the world's
everlasting conflict.
Our exclusion of the Chinese, which came up in the spring of 1886, when
an Ambassador from China was roughly handled in San Francisco, was a
disgrace to our own instincts of liberty. A great many people did not
want them because they did not like the way they dressed. They objected
to the Chinaman's queue. George Washington wore one, so did Benjamin
Franklin and John Hancock. The Chinese dress was not worse than some
American clothes I have seen. Some may remember the crinoline
monstrosities of '65, as I do--the coal-scuttle bonnets, the silver
knee-buckles! The headgear of the fair sex has never ceased to be a
mystery and a shock during all my lifetime. I remember being asked by a
lady-reporter in Brooklyn if I thought ladies should remove their hats
in the theatre, and I told her to tell them to keep them on, because in
obstructing the stage they were accomplishing something worth while. Any
fine afternoon the spring fashions of 1886, displayed in Madison Square
between two and four o'clock, were absurdities of costume that eclipsed
anything then worn by the Chinese.
The Joss House of the Chinese was entitled to as much respect in the
United States, under the constitution, as the Roman Catholic church, or
the Quaker Meeting house, or any other religious temple. A new path was
made for the Chinese into America via Mexico, when 600,000 were to be
imported for work on Mexican territory. In the discussion it aroused it
was urged that Mexico ought to be blocked because the Chinese would not
spend their money in America. In one year, in San Francisco, the Chinese
paid $2,400,000 in rent for residences and warehouses. Our higher
civilisation was already threatened with that style of man who spends
three times more money than he makes, and yet we did not want the
thrifty unassuming religious Chinaman to counteract our mania for
extravagance. This entire agitation emanated from corrupt politics. The
Republican and Democratic parties both wanted the electoral votes of
California in the forthcoming Presidential election, and, in order to
get that vote, it was necessary to oppose the Chinese. Whenever these
Asiatic men obtain equal suffrage in America the Republican party will
fondle them, and the Democrats will try to prove that they always had a
deep affection for them, and some of the political bosses will go around
with an opium pipe sticking out of their pockets and their hair coiled
into a suggestion of a queue.
The ship of state was in an awful mess. No sooner was the good man in
power than politics struggled to pull him down to make room for the
knaves. When Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated, the _Sentinel_ of Boston
wrote the obituary of the American nation. I quote it as a literary
scrap of the past:
"MONUMENTAL INSCRIPTION--expired yesterday, regretted by all good men,
THE FEDERAL ADMINISTRATION OF THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES, aged
12 years. This Monumental Inscription to the virtues and the services of
the deceased is raised by the Sentinel of Boston."
It might have been a recent editorial. Van Buren was always cartooned as
a fox or a rat. Horace Greeley told me once that he had not had a sound
sleep for fifteen years, and he was finally put to death by American
politics. The cartoons of Mr. Blaine and Mr. Cleveland during their
election battle, as compared to those of fifty years before, were
seraphic as the themes of Raphael. It was not necessary to go so far
back for precedent. The game had not changed. The building of our new
Raymond Street jail in Brooklyn, in 1886, was a game which the
politicians played, called "money, money, who has got the money?"
Suddenly there was an arraignment in the courts. Mr. Jaehne was
incarcerated in Sing Sing for bribery. Twenty-five New York aldermen
were accused. Nineteen of them were saloon keepers. There was a fearful
indifference to the illiteracy of our leaders in 1886. It threatened the
national intelligence of the future.
In the rhapsody of May, however, in the resurrection of the superlative
beauties of spring, we forgot our human deficiencies. In the first week
of lilacs, the Americanised flower of Persia, we aspired to the breadth
and height and the heaven of our gardens. The generous lilac, like a
great purple sea of loveliness, swept over us in the full tide of
spring. It was the forerunner of joy; joy of fish in the brooks, of
insects in the air, of cattle in the fields, of wings to the sky.
Sunshine, shaken from the sacred robes of God! Spring, the spiritual
essence of heaven and physical beauty come to earth in many forms--in
the rose, in the hawthorn white and scarlet, in the passion flower. In
this season of transition we hear the murmurings of heaven. There were
spring poets in 1886, as there had been in all ages.
Love and marriage came over the country like a divine opiate, inspired,
I believe, by that love story in the White House, which culminated on
June 2, 1886, in the wedding of Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland. Never in my
knowledge were there so many weddings all over the United States as
during the week when this official wedding took place in the White
House. The representatives of the foreign Governments in Washington were
not invited to Mr. Cleveland's wedding. We all hoped that they would not
make such fools of themselves as to protest--but they did. They were
displeased at the President's omission to invite them. It was always a
wish of Mr. Cleveland's to separate the happiness of his private life
from that of his public career, so as to protect Mrs. Cleveland from the
glare to which he himself was exposed. His wedding was an intimate,
private matter to him, and if there is any time in a man's life when he
ought to do as he pleases it is when he gets married. It was a
remarkable wedding in some respects, remarkable for its love story, for
its distinguished character, its American privacy, its independent
spirit. The whole country was rapturously happy over it. The foreign
ministers who growled might have benefited by the example of Americanism
in the affair. Even the reporters, none of whom were invited, were happy
over it, and gave a more vivid account of the joyous scene than they
could have given had they been present.
The difference in the ages of the President and his beautiful bride was
widely discussed. Into the garland of bridal roses let no one ever twist
a sprig of night-shade. If 49 would marry 22, if summer is fascinated
with spring, whose business is it but their own? Both May and August are
old enough to take care of themselves, and their marriage is the most
noteworthy moment of their too short season of life. Some day her voice
is silenced, and the end of the world has come for him--the morning
dead, the night dead, the air dead, the world dead. For his sake, for
her sake, do not spoil their radiance with an impious regret. They will
endure the thorns of life when they are stronger in each other's love.
That June wedding at the White House was the nucleus of happiness, from
which grew a great wave of matrimony. The speed of God's will was
increasing in America. Most of the things managed by divine instinct are
characterised by speed--rapid currents, swift lightnings, swift coming
and going of lives. In the old-fashioned days a man got a notion that
there was sanctity in tardiness. It was a great mistake. In America we
had arrived at that state of mind when we wanted everything fast--first
and fast. Fast horses, fast boats, fast runners are all good things for
the human race.
The great yacht races of September 7, 1886, in which the "May Flower"
distanced the "Galatea" by two miles and a half, was a spanking race.
Our sporting blood was roused to fighting pitch, and we became more
active in every way of outdoor sports. Lawn tennis tournaments were
epidemic all over the country. There were good and bad effects from all
of them. Those romping sports developed a much finer physical condition
in our American women. Lawn tennis and croquet were hardening and
beautifying the race. From the English and German women we adopted
athletics for our own women. Our girls began to travel more frequently
in Europe. It looked as though many of the young ladies who prided
themselves upon their bewitching languors and fashionable dreaminess,
would be neglected by young men in favour of the more athletic types. It
had been decided, in the social channels of our life, that doll babies
were not of much use in the struggle, that women must have the capacity
and the strength to sweep out a room without fainting; that to make an
eatable loaf of bread was more important than the satin cheek or the
colour of hair that one strong fever could uproot. I was accused of
being ambitious that Americans should have a race of Amazons. I was not.
I did want them to have bodies to fit their great souls. What I did wish
to avoid, in this natural transition, was a misdirected use of its
advantages. There is dissipation in outdoor life, as well as indoors,
and this was to be deplored. I wanted everything American to come out
ahead.
In science we were still far behind. The Charleston earthquake in
September, 1886, proved this. Our philosophers were disgusted that the
ministers and churches down there devoted their time to praying and
moralising about the earthquake, when only natural phenomena were the
cause. Science had no information or comfort to give, however. The only
thing the scientist did was to predict a great tidal wave which would
come and destroy all that was left of the previous calamity. Science
lied again. The tidal wave did not come; the September rains stopped,
and Charleston began to rebuild. That is one of the wonderful things
about America; we are not only able to restore our damages, but we have
a mania for rebuilding. Our chief fault lies in the fact that we
rebuild for profit rather than for beauty of character or moral
strength.
There had been a time during my pastorate when Brooklyn promised to be
the greatest watering place in America. We were in a fair way of
becoming the summer capital of the United States. It was destroyed by
the loafers and the dissoluteness of Coney Island. In the autumn of
1886, Brooklyn was more indignant than I had ever seen it before, and I
knew it intimately for a quarter of a century. Our trade was damaged,
our residences were depreciated, because the gamblers and liquor dealers
were in power. Part of the summer people were too busy looking for a sea
serpent reported to be in the East River or up the Hudson to observe
that a Dragon of Evil was twining about the neck and waist and body of
the two great cities by the sea.
In contrast to all this political treachery in the North there developed
a peculiar symbol of political sincerity in Tennesee. Two brothers,
Robert and Alfred Taylor, were running for Governor of that State--one
on the Republican and the other on the Democratic ticket. At night they
occupied the same room together. On the same platform they uttered
sentiments directly opposite in meaning. And yet, Robert said to a crowd
about to hoot his brother Alfred, "When you insult my brother you insult
me." This was a symbol of political decency that we needed. One of the
great wants of the world, however, was a better example in "high life."
We were shocked by the moral downfall of Sir Charles Dilke in England,
by the dissolute conduct of an American official in Mexico, by the
dissipations of a Senator who attempted to address the United States
Senate in a state of intoxication.
Mr. Cleveland's frequent exercise of the President's right of veto was
a hopeful policy in national affairs. The habit of voting away thousands
of dollars of other people's money in Congress needed a check. The
popular means of accomplishing this out of the national treasury was in
bills introduced by Congressmen for public buildings. Each Congressman
wanted to favour the other. The President's veto was the only cure. This
prodigality of the National Legislature grew out of an enormous surplus
in the Treasury. It was too great a temptation to the law-makers.
$70,000,000 in a pile added to a reserve of $100,000,000 was an infamous
lure. I urged that this money should be turned back to the people to
whom it belonged. The Government had no more right to it than I had to
five dollars of overpay, and yet, by over-taxation, the Government had
done the same sort of thing. This money did not belong to the
Government, but to the people from whom they had taken it. From private
sources in Washington I learned that officials were overwhelmed with
demands for pensions from first-class loafers who had never been of any
service to their country before or since the war. They were too lazy or
cranky to work for themselves. Grover Cleveland vetoed them by the
hundred. We needed the veto power in America as much as the Roman
Government had required it in their tribunes. Poland had recognised it.
The Kings of Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands had used it. With the
exception of two states in the Union, all the American Governors had the
privilege. Because a railroad company buys up a majority of the
legislature there is no reason why a Governor should sign the charter.
There was no reason why the President should make appointments upon
indiscriminate claims because the ante-room of the White House was
filled with applicants, as they were in Cleveland's first
administration. My sympathies were with the grand army men against these
pretenders.
What a waste of money it seemed to me there was in keeping up useless
American embassies abroad. They had been established when it took six
weeks to go to Liverpool and six months to China, so that it was
necessary to have representation at the foreign courts. As far back as
1866 it was only half an hour from Washington to London, to Berlin, to
Madrid. I have seen no crisis in any of these foreign cities which made
our ambassadors a necessity there. International business could be
managed by the State Department. The foreign embassy was merely a good
excuse to get rid of some competent rival for the Presidency. The cable
was enough Minister Plenipotentiary for the United States, and always
should be. I regarded it as humiliating to the constitution of the
United States that we should be complimenting foreign despotism in this
way.
The war rage of Europe was destined to make a market for our bread stuff
in 1886, but at the cost of further suffering and disaster. I have no
sentimentality about the conflicts of life, because the Bible is a
history of battles and hand to hand struggles, but war is no longer
needed in the world. War is a system of political greed where men are
hired at starvation wages to kill each other. Could there be anything
more savage? It is the inoffensive who are killed, while the principals
in the quarrel sit snugly at home on throne chairs.
A private letter, I think it was, written during the Crimean war by a
sailor to his wife, describing his sensations after having killed a man
for the first time, is a unique demonstration of the psychology of the
soldier's fate.