GROWTH INVINCIBLE
I
Boston's Way of Growing
But Boston did not propose that its less-assertive key should be
misunderstood, and in a singularly short space of time I found myself
climbing into a tremulous impatient motor-car in company with three
enthusiastic exponents of the work of the Metropolitan Park Commission,
and provided with a neatly tinted map, large and framed and glazed,
to explore a fresh and more deliberate phase in this great American
symphony, this symphony of Growth.
If possible it is more impressive, even, than the crowded largeness
of New York, to trace the serene preparation Boston has made through
this Commission to be widely and easily vast. New York's humanity
has a curious air of being carried along upon a wave of irresistible
prosperity, but Boston confesses design. I suppose no city in all the
world (unless it be Washington) has ever produced so complete and ample
a forecast of its own future as this Commission's plan of Boston. An
area with a radius of between fifteen and twenty miles from the State
House has been planned out and prepared for Growth. Great reservations
of woodland and hill have been made, the banks of nearly all the
streams and rivers and meres have been secured for public park and
garden, for boating and other water sports; big avenues of vigorous
young trees; a hundred and fifty yards or so wide, with drive-ways
and ridingways and a central grassy band for electric tramways, have
been prepared, and, indeed, the fair and ample and shady new Boston,
the Boston of 1950, grows visibly before one's eyes. I found myself
comparing the disciplined confidence of these proposals to the blind
enlargement of London; London, that like a bowl of viscid human fluid,
boils sullenly over the rim of its encircling hills and slops messily
and uglily into the home counties. I could not but contrast their large
intelligence with the confused hesitations and waste and muddle of our
English suburban developments....
There were moments, indeed, when it seemed too good to be true, and Mr.
Sylvester Baxter, who was with me and whose faith has done so much to
secure this mapping out of a city's growth beyond all precedent, became
the victim of my doubts. "Will this enormous space of sunlit woodland
and marsh and meadow really be filled at any time?" I urged. "All
cities do not grow. Cities have shrunken."
I recalled Bruges. I recalled the empty, goat-sustaining, flower-rich
meadows of Rome within the wall. What made him so sure of this
progressive magnificence of Boston's growth? My doubts fell on stony
soil. My companions seemed to think these scepticisms inopportune, a
forced eccentricity, like doubting the coming of to-morrow. Of course
Growth will go on....
The subject was changed by the sight of the fine marble buildings of
the Harvard medical school, a shining façade partially eclipsed by
several dingy and unsightly wooden houses.
"These shanties will go, of course," says one of my companions. "It's
proposed to take the avenue right across this space straight to the
schools."
"You'll have to fill the marsh, then, and buy the houses."
"Sure."...
I find myself comparing this huge growth process of America with
the things in my own land. After all, this growth is no distinctive
American thing; it is the same process anywhere--only in America there
are no disguises, no complications. Come to think of it, Birmingham and
Manchester are as new as Boston--newer; and London, south and east of
the Thames, is, save for a little nucleus, more recent than Chicago--is
in places, I am told, with its smoky disorder, its clattering ways, its
brutality of industrial conflict, very like Chicago. But nowhere now is
growth still so certainly and confidently _going on_ as here. Nowhere
is it upon so great a scale as here, and with so confident an outlook
towards the things to come. And nowhere is it passing more certainly
from the first phase of a mob-like rush of individualistic undertakings
into a planned and ordered progress.
II
The End of Niagara
Everywhere in the America I have seen the same note sounds, the note of
a fatal gigantic economic development, of large prevision and enormous
pressures.
I heard it clear above the roar of Niagara--for, after all, I stopped
off at Niagara.
As a water-fall, Niagara's claim to distinction is now mainly
quantitative; its spectacular effect, its magnificent and humbling size
and splendor, were long since destroyed beyond recovery by the hotels,
the factories, the power-houses, the bridges and tramways and hoardings
that arose about it. It must have been a fine thing to happen upon
suddenly after a day of solitary travel; the Indians, they say, gave it
worship; but it's no great wonder to reach it by trolley-car, through
a street hack-infested and full of adventurous refreshment-places and
souvenir-shops and the touting guides. There were great quantities of
young couples and other sightseers with the usual encumbrances of wrap
and bag and umbrella, trailing out across the bridges and along the
neat paths of the Reservation Parks, asking the way to this point and
that. Notice boards cut the eye, offering extra joys and memorable
objects for twenty-five and fifty cents, and it was proposed you should
keep off the grass.
After all, the gorge of Niagara is very like any good gorge in the
Ardennes, except that it has more water; it's about as wide and about
as deep, and there is no effect at all that one has not seen a dozen
times in other cascades. One gets all the water one wants at Tivoli,
one has gone behind half a hundred downpours just as impressive in
Switzerland; a hundred tons of water is really just as stunning as ten
million. A hundred tons of water stuns one altogether, and what more
do you want? One recalls "Orridos" and "Schluchts" that are not only
magnificent but lonely.
No doubt the Falls, seen from the Canadian side, have a peculiar long
majesty of effect; but the finest thing in it all, to my mind, was not
Niagara at all, but to look up-stream from Goat Island and see the
sea-wide crest of the flashing sunlit rapids against the gray-blue sky.
That was like a limitless ocean pouring down a sloping world towards
one, and I lingered, held by that, returning to it through an indolent
afternoon. It gripped the imagination as nothing else there seemed to
do. It was so broad an infinitude of splash and hurry. And, moreover,
all the enterprising hotels and expectant trippers were out of sight.
That was the best of the display. The real interest of Niagara for me,
was not in the water-fall but in the human accumulations about it. They
stood for the future, threats and promises, and the water-fall was
just a vast reiteration of falling water. The note of growth in human
accomplishment rose clear and triumphant above the elemental thunder.
For the most part these accumulations of human effort about Niagara
are extremely defiling and ugly. Nothing--not even the hotel signs and
advertisement boards--could be more offensive to the eye and mind than
the Schoellkopf Company's untidy confusion of sheds and buildings on
the American side, wastefully squirting out long, tail-race cascades
below the bridge, and nothing more disgusting than the sewer-pipes
and gas-work ooze that the town of Niagara Falls contributes to the
scenery. But, after all, these represent only the first slovenly
onslaught of mankind's expansion, the pioneers' camp of the
human-growth process that already changes its quality and manner. There
are finer things than these outrages to be found.
The dynamos and turbines of the Niagara Falls Power Company, for
example, impressed me far more profoundly than the Cave of the
Winds; are, indeed, to my mind, greater and more beautiful than that
accidental eddying of air beside a downpour. They are will made
visible, thought translated into easy and commanding things. They are
clean, noiseless, and starkly powerful. All the clatter and tumult of
the early age of machinery is past and gone here; there is no smoke, no
coal grit, no dirt at all. The wheel-pit into which one descends has an
almost cloistered quiet about its softly humming turbines. These are
altogether noble masses of machinery, huge black slumbering monsters,
great sleeping tops that engender irresistible forces in their
sleep. They sprang, armed like Minerva, from serene and speculative,
foreseeing and endeavoring brains. First was the word and then these
powers. A man goes to and fro quietly in the long, clean hall of the
dynamos. There is no clangor, no racket. Yet the outer rim of the big
generators is spinning at the pace of a hundred thousand miles an hour;
the dazzling clean switch-board, with its little handles and levers,
is the seat of empire over more power than the strength of a million
disciplined, unquestioning men. All these great things are as silent,
as wonderfully made, as the heart in a living body, and stouter and
stronger than that....
When I thought that these two huge wheel-pits of this company are
themselves but a little intimation of what can be done in this way,
what will be done in this way, my imagination towered above me. I fell
into a day-dream of the coming power of men, and how that power may be
used by them....
For surely the greatness of life is still to come, it is not in such
accidents as mountains or the sea. I have seen the splendor of the
mountains, sunrise and sunset among them, and the waste immensity of
sky and sea. I am not blind because I can see beyond these glories. To
me no other thing is credible than that all the natural beauty in the
world is only so much material for the imagination and the mind, so
many hints and suggestions for art and creation. Whatever is, is but
the lure and symbol towards what can be willed and done. Man lives to
make--in the end he must make, for there will be nothing else left for
him to do.
And the world he will make--after a thousand years or so!
I, at least, can forgive the loss of all the accidental, unmeaning
beauty that is going for the sake of the beauty of fine order and
intention that will come. I believe--passionately, as a doubting lover
believes in his mistress--in the future of mankind. And so to me it
seems altogether well that all the froth and hurry of Niagara at last,
all of it, dying into hungry canals of intake, should rise again in
light and power, in ordered and equipped and proud and beautiful
humanity, in cities and palaces and the emancipated souls and hearts of
men....
I turned back to look at the power-house as I walked towards the Falls,
and halted and stared. Its architecture brought me out of my day-dream
to the quality of contemporary things again. It's a well-intentioned
building enough, extraordinarily well intentioned, and regardless of
expense. It's in granite and by Stanford White, and yet--It hasn't
caught the note. There's a touch of respectability in it, more than a
hint of the box of bricks. Odd, but I'd almost as soon have had one of
the Schoellkopf sheds.
A community that can produce such things as those turbines and dynamos,
and then cover them over with this dull exterior, is capable, one
realizes, of feats of bathos. One feels that all the power that throbs
in the copper cables below may end at last in turning Great Wheels for
excursionists, stamping out aluminum "fancy" ware, and illuminating
night advertisements for drug shops and music halls. I had an afternoon
of busy doubts....
There is much discussion about Niagara at present. It may be some
queer compromise, based on the pretence that a voluminous water-fall
is necessarily a thing of incredible beauty, and a human use is
necessarily a degrading use, will "save" Niagara and the hack-drivers
and the souvenir-shops for series of years yet, "a magnificent monument
to the pride of the United States in a glory of nature," as one
journalistic savior puts it. It is, as public opinion stands, a quite
conceivable thing. This electric development may be stopped after
all, and the huge fall of water remain surrounded by gravel paths
and parapets and geranium-beds, a staring-point for dull wonder, a
crown for a day's excursion, a thunderous impressive accessory to
the vulgar love-making that fills the surrounding hotels, a Titanic
imbecility of wasted gifts. But I don't think so. I think somebody will
pay something, and the journalistic zeal for scenery abate. I think
the huge social and industrial process of America will win in this
conflict, and at last capture Niagara altogether.
And then--what use will it make of its prey?
III
The Tail of Chicago
In smoky, vast, undisciplined Chicago Growth forced itself upon me
again as the dominant American fact, but this time a dark disorder of
growth. I went about Chicago seeing many things of which I may say
something later. I visited the top of the Masonic Building and viewed
a wilderness of sky-scrapers. I acquired a felt of memories of swing
bridges and viaducts and interlacing railways and jostling crowds and
extraordinarily dirty streets, I learnt something of the mystery of the
"floating foundations" upon which so much of Chicago rests. But I got
my best vision of Chicago as I left it.
I sat in the open observation-car at the end of the Pennsylvania
Limited Express, and watched the long defile of industrialism from the
Union Station in the heart of things to out beyond South Chicago,
a dozen miles away. I had not gone to the bloody spectacle of the
stock-yards that "feed the world," because, to be frank, I have an
immense repugnance to the killing of fixed and helpless animals; I saw
nothing of those ill-managed, ill-inspected establishments, though I
smelt the unwholesome reek from them ever and again, and so it was
here I saw for the first time the enormous expanse and intricacy of
railroads that net this great industrial desolation, and something of
the going and coming of the myriads of polyglot workers. Chicago burns
bituminous coal, it has a reek that outdoes London, and right and
left of the line rise vast chimneys, huge blackened grain-elevators,
flame-crowned furnaces and gauntly ugly and filthy factory buildings,
monstrous mounds of refuse, desolate, empty lots littered with rusty
cans, old iron, and indescribable rubbish. Interspersed with these are
groups of dirty, disreputable, insanitary-looking wooden houses.
We swept along the many-railed track, and the straws and scraps of
paper danced in our eddy as we passed. We overtook local trains and
they receded slowly in the great perspective, huge freight-trains met
us or were overtaken; long trains of doomed cattle passed northward;
solitary engines went by--every engine tolling a melancholy bell; open
trucks crowded with workmen went cityward. By the side of the track,
and over the level crossings, walked great numbers of people. So it
goes on mile after mile--Chicago. The sun was now bright, now pallid
through some streaming curtain of smoke; the spring afternoon was lit
here and again by the gallant struggle of some stunted tree with a rare
and startling note of new green....
It was like a prolonged, enlarged mingling of the south side of
London with all that is bleak and ugly in the Black Country. It is
the most perfect presentation of nineteenth-century individualistic
industrialism I have ever seen--in its vast, its magnificent squalor;
it is pure nineteenth century; it had no past at all before that; in
1800 it was empty prairie, and one marvels for its future. It is indeed
a nineteenth-century nightmare that culminates beyond South Chicago in
the monstrous fungoid shapes, the endless smoking chimneys, the squat
retorts, the black smoke pall of the Standard Oil Company. For a time
the sun is veiled altogether by that....
And then suddenly Chicago is a dark smear under the sky, and we are in
the large emptiness of America, the other America--America in between.
IV
Intimations of Order
"Undisciplined"--that is the word for Chicago. It is the word for
all the progress of the Victorian time, a scrambling, ill-mannered,
undignified, unintelligent development of material resources.
Packingtown, for example, is a place that feeds the world with meat,
that concentrates the produce of a splendid countryside at a position
of imperial advantage, and its owners have no more sense, no better
moral quality, than to make it stink in the nostrils of any one who
comes within two miles of it; to make it a centre of distribution for
disease and decay, an arena of shabby evasions and extra profits; a
scene of brutal economic conflict and squalid filthiness, offensive
to every sense. (I wish I could catch the soul of Herbert Spencer and
tether it in Chicago for awhile to gather fresh evidence upon the
superiority of unfettered individualistic enterprises to things managed
by the state.)
Want of discipline! Chicago is one hoarse cry for discipline! The
reek and scandal of the stock-yards is really only a gigantic form
of that same quality in American life that, in a minor aspect, makes
the sidewalk filthy. The key to the peculiar nasty ugliness of those
Schoellkopf works that defile the Niagara gorge is the same quality.
The detestableness of the Elevated railroads of Chicago and Boston
and New York have this in common. All that is ugly in America, in
Lancashire, in South and East London, in the Pas de Calais, is due
to this, to the shoving unintelligent proceedings of underbred and
morally obtuse men. Each man is for himself, each enterprise; there is
no order, no prevision, no common and universal plan. Modern economic
organization is still as yet only thinking of emerging from its
first chaotic stage, the stage of lawless enterprise and insanitary
aggregation, the stage of the prospector's camp....
But it does emerge.
Men are makers--American men, I think, more than most men--and amidst
even the catastrophic jumble of Chicago one finds the same creative
forces at work that are struggling to replan a greater Boston, and that
turned a waste of dumps and swamps and cabbage-gardens into Central
Park, New York. Chicago also has its Parks Commission and its green
avenues, its bright flower-gardens, its lakes and playing-fields. Its
Midway Plaisance is in amazing contrast with the dirt, the congestion,
the moral disorder of its State Street; its Field Houses do visible
battle with slum and the frantic meanness of commercial folly.
Field Houses are peculiar to Chicago, and Chicago has every reason
to be proud of them. I visited one that is positively within smell
of the stock-yards and wedged into a district of gaunt and dirty
slums. It stands in the midst of a little park, and close by it are
three playing-grounds with swings and parallel bars and all manner of
athletic appliances, one for little children, one for girls and women,
and one for boys and youths. In the children's place is a paddling-pond
of clear, clean, running water and a shaded area of frequently
changed sand, and in the park was a broad asphalted arena that can be
flooded for skating in winter. All this is free to all comers, and
free too is the Field House itself. This is a large, cool Italianate
place with two or three reading-rooms--one specially arranged for
children--a big discussion-hall, a big and well-equipped gymnasium, and
big, free baths for men and for women. There is also a clean, bright
refreshment-place where wholesome food is sold just above cost price.
It was early on Friday afternoon when I saw it all, but the place was
busy with children, reading, bathing, playing in a hundred different
ways.
[Illustration: STATE STREET, CHICAGO]
And this Field House is not an isolated philanthropic enterprise. It
is just one of a number that are dotted about Chicago, mitigating and
civilizing its squalor. It was not distilled by begging and charity
from the stench of the stock-yards or the reek of Standard Oil. It
is part of the normal work of a special taxing body created by the
legislature of the State of Illinois. It is just one of the fruits upon
one of the growths that spring from such persistent creative efforts
as that of the Chicago City Club. It is socialism--even as its enemies
declare....
Even amidst the sombre uncleanliness of Chicago one sees the light of
a new epoch, the coming of new conceptions, of foresight, of large
collective plans and discipline to achieve them, the fresh green
leaves, among all the festering manure, of the giant growths of a more
orderly and more beautiful age.
V
The Pennsylvania Limited
These growing towns, these giant towns that grow up and out, that grow
orderly and splendid out of their first chaotic beginnings, are only
little patches upon a vast expanse, upon what is still of all habitable
countries the emptiest country in the world. My long express journey
from Chicago to Washington lasted a day and a night and more, I could
get sooner from my home in Kent to Italy, and yet that was still well
under a third of the way across the continent. I spent most of my
daylight time in the fine and graceful open loggia at the end of the
observation-car or in looking out of the windows, looking at hills and
valleys, townships and quiet places, sudden busy industrial outbreaks
about coal-mine or metal, big undisciplined rivers that spread into
swamp and lake, new forest growths, very bright and green now, foaming
up above blackened stumps. There were many cypress-trees and trees with
white blossom and the Judas-tree, very abundant among the spring-time
green. I got still more clearly the enormous scale of this American
destiny I seek to discuss, through all that long and interesting day of
transit. I measured, as it seemed to me for the first time, the real
scale of the growth process that has put a four-track road nine hundred
miles across this exuberant land and scarred every available hill with
furnace and mine.
Bigness--that's the word! The very fields and farm-buildings seem to me
to have four times the size of our English farms.
Some casual suggestion of the wayside, I forget now what, set me
thinking of the former days, so recent that they are yet within the
lifetime of living men, when this was frontier land, when even the
middle west remained to be won. I thought of the slow diffusing
population of the forties, the pioneer wagon, the men armed with axe
and rifle, knife and revolver, the fear of the Indians, the weak and
casual incidence of law. Then the high-road was but a prairie track and
all these hills and hidden minerals unconquered fastnesses that might,
it seemed, hold out for centuries before they gave their treasure. How
quickly things had come! "Progress, progress," murmured the wheels,
and I began to make this steady, swift, and shiningly equipped train a
figure, just as I had made the _Carmania_ a figure of that big onward
sweep that is moving us all together. It was not a noisy train, after
the English fashion, nor did the cars sway and jump after the habit of
our lighter coaches, but the air was full of deep, triumphant rhythms.
"It goes on," I said, "invincibly," and even as the thought was in my
head, the brakes set up a droning, a vibration ran through the train
and we slowed and stopped. A minute passed, and then we rumbled softly
back to a little trestle-bridge and stood there.
I got up, looked from the window, and then went to the platform at the
end of the train. I found two men, a passenger and a colored parlor-car
attendant. The former was on the bottom step of the car, the latter was
supplying him with information.
"His head's still in the water," he remarked.
"Whose head?" said I.
"A man we've killed," said he. "We caught him in the trestle-bridge."
I descended a step, craned over my fellow-passenger, and saw a little
group standing curiously about the derelict thing that had been a
living man three minutes before. It was now a crumpled, dark-stained
blue blouse, a limply broken arm with hand askew, trousered legs that
sprawled quaintly, and a pair of heavy boots, lying in the sunlit fresh
grass by the water below the trestle-bridge....
A man on the line gave inadequate explanations. "He'd have been all
right if he hadn't come over this side," he said.
"Who was he?" said I.
"One of these Eyetalians on the line," he said, and turned away. The
train bristled now with a bunch of curiosity at every car end, and even
windows were opened....
Presently it was intimated to us by a whistle and the hasty return of
men to the cars that the incident had closed. We began to move forward
again, crept up to speed....
But I could not go on with my conception of the train as a symbol of
human advancement. That crumpled blue blouse and queerly careless legs
would get into the picture and set up all sorts of alien speculations.
I thought of distant north Italian valleys and brown boys among the
vines and goats, of the immigrants who had sung remotely to me out of
the Carmania's steerage, of the hopeful bright-eyed procession of the
new-comers through Ellis Island wicket, of the regiments of workers the
line had shown me, and I told myself a tale of this Italian's journey
to the land of promise, this land of gigantic promises....
For a time the big spectacle of America about me took on a quality of
magnificent infidelity....
And by reason of this incident my last Image of Material Progress
thundered into Washington station five minutes behind its scheduled
time.