TWO STUDIES IN DISAPPOINTMENT
I
The Riddle of Intolerance
In considering the quality of the American mind (upon which, as
I believe, the ultimate destiny of America entirely depends), it
has been necessary to point out that, considered as one whole, it
still seems lacking in any of that living sense of the state out
of which constructive effort must arise, and that, consequently,
enormous amounts of energy go to waste in anarchistic and chaotically
competitive private enterprise. I believe there are powerful forces
at work in the trend of modern thought, science, and method, in the
direction of bringing order, control, and design into this confused
gigantic conflict, and the discussion of these constructive forces must
necessarily form the crown of my forecast of America's future. But
before I come to that I must deal with certain American traits that
puzzle me, that I cannot completely explain to myself, that dash my
large expectations with an obstinate shadow of foreboding. Essentially
these are disintegrating influences, in the nature of a fierce
intolerance, that lead to conflicts and destroy co-operation. One makes
one's criticism with compunction. One moves through the American world,
meeting constantly with kindness and hospitality, with a familiar
helpfulness that is delightful, with sympathetic enterprise and
energetic imagination, and then suddenly there flashes out a quality of
harshness....
I will explain in a few minutes what I mean by this flash of harshness.
Let me confess here that I cannot determine whether it is a necessary
consequence of American conditions, the scar upon the soul of too
strenuous business competition, or whether it is something deeper,
some subtle, unavoidable infection perhaps in this soil that was once
the Red Indian's battle-ground, some poison, it may be, mingled with
this clear exhilarating air. And going with this harshness there seems
also something else, a contempt for abstract justice that one does not
find in any European intelligence--not even among the English. This
contempt may be a correlative of the intense practicality begotten by
a scruple-destroying commercial training. That, at any rate, is my own
prepossession. Conceivably I am over-disposed to make that tall lady in
New York Harbor stand as a symbol for the liberty of property, and to
trace the indisputable hastiness of life here--it is haste sometimes
rather than speed,--its scorn of æsthetic and abstract issues, this
frequent quality of harshness, and a certain public disorder, whatever
indeed mars the splendid promise and youth of America, to that. I
think it is an accident of the commercial phase that presses men
beyond dignity, patience, and magnanimity. I am loath to believe it is
something fundamentally American.
I have very clearly in my memory the figure of young MacQueen, in his
gray prison clothes in Trenton jail, and how I talked with him. He and
Mr. Booker T. Washington and Maxim Gorky stand for me as figures in
the shadow--symbolical men. I think of America as pride and promise,
as large growth and large courage, all set with beautiful fluttering
bunting, and then my vision of these three men comes back to me;
they return presences inseparable from my American effect, unlit
and uncomplaining on the sunless side of her, implying rather than
voicing certain accusations. America can be hasty, can be obstinately
thoughtless and unjust....
Well, let me set down as shortly as I can how I saw them, and then go
on again with my main thesis.
II
MacQueen
MacQueen is one of those young men England is now making by the
thousand in her elementary schools--a man of that active, intelligent,
mentally hungry, self-educating sort that is giving us our elementary
teachers, our labor members, able journalists, authors, civil
servants, and some of the most public-spirited and efficient of our
municipal administrators. He is the sort of man an Englishman grows
prouder of as he sees America and something of her politicians and
labor leaders. After his board-school days MacQueen went to work as
a painter and grainer, and gave his spare energy to self-education.
He mastered German, and read widely and freely. He corresponded with
William Morris, devoured Tolstoy and Bernard Shaw, followed the
_Clarion_ week by week, discussed social questions, wrote to the
newspapers, debated, made speeches. The English reader will begin to
recognize the type. Jail had worn him when I saw him, but I should
think he was always physically delicate; he wears spectacles, he warms
emotionally as he talks. And he decided, after much excogitation, that
the ideal state is one of so fine a quality of moral training that
people will not need coercion and repressive laws. He calls himself an
anarchist--of the early Christian, Tolstoyan, non-resisting school.
Such an anarchist was Emerson, among other dead Americans whose names
are better treasured than their thoughts. That sort of anarchist has
as much connection with embittered bomb-throwers and assassins as Miss
Florence Nightingale has with the woman Hartmann, who put on a nurse's
uniform to poison and rob....
Well, MacQueen led an active life in England, married, made a decent
living, and took an honorable part in the local affairs of Leeds until
he was twenty-six. Then he conceived a desire for wider opportunity
than England offers men of his class.
In January, 1902, he crossed the Atlantic, and, no doubt, he came very
much aglow with the American idea. He felt that he was exchanging a
decadent country of dwarfing social and political traditions for a land
of limitless outlook. He became a proof-reader in New York, and began
to seek around him for opportunities of speaking and forwarding social
progress. He tried to float a newspaper. The New York labor-unions
found him a useful speaker, and, among others, the German silk-workers
of New York became aware of him. In June they asked him to go to
Paterson to speak in German to the weavers in that place.
The silk-dyers were on strike in Paterson, but the weavers were weaving
"scab-silk," dyed by dyers elsewhere, and it was believed that the
dyers' strike would fail unless they struck also. They had to be called
out. They were chiefly Italians, some Hungarians. It was felt by the
New York German silk-workers that perhaps MacQueen's German learned in
England might meet the linguistic difficulties of the case.
He went. I hope he will forgive me if I say that his was an extremely
futile expedition. He did very little. He wrote an entirely harmless
article or so in English for _La Questione Sociale_, and he declined
with horror and publicity to appear upon the same platform with a
mischievous and violent lady anarchist called Emma Goldman. On June
17, 1902, he went to Paterson again, and spoke to his own undoing.
There is no evidence that he said anything illegal or inflammatory,
there is clear evidence that he bored his audience. They shouted him
down, and called for a prominent local speaker named Galiano. MacQueen
subsided into the background, and Galiano spoke for an hour in Italian.
He aroused great enthusiasm, and the proceedings terminated with a
destructive riot.
Eight witnesses testify to the ineffectual efforts on the part of
MacQueen to combat the violence in progress....
That finishes the story of MacQueen's activities in America, for
which he is now in durance at Trenton. He, in common with a large
crowd and in common, too, with nearly all the witnesses against him,
did commit one offence against the law--he did not go home when
destruction began. He was arrested next day. From that time forth
his fate was out of his hands, and in the control of a number of
people who wanted to "make an example" of the Paterson strikers. The
press took up MacQueen. They began to clothe the bare bones of this
simple little history I have told in fluent, unmitigated lying. They
blackened him, one might think, out of sheer artistic pleasure in the
operation. They called this rather nervous, educated, nobly meaning if
ill-advised young man a "notorious anarchist"; his head-line title
became "Anarchistic MacQueen"; they wrote his "story" in a vein of
imaginative fervor; they invented "an unsavory police record" for
him in England; and enlarged upon the marvellous secret organization
for crime of which he was representative and leader. In a little
while MacQueen had ceased to be a credible human being; he might have
been invented by Mr. William le Queux. He was arrested--Galiano went
scot-free--and released on bail. It was discovered that his pleasant,
decent Yorkshire wife and three children were coming out to America to
him, and she became "the woman Nellie Barton"--her maiden name--and
"a socialist of the Emma Goldman stripe." This, one gathers, is the
most horrible stripe known to American journalism. Had there been a
worse one, Mrs. MacQueen would have been the _ex officio_. And now
here is an extraordinary thing--public officials began to join in
the process. This is what perplexes me most in this affair. I am
told that Assistant-Secretary-of-the-Treasury H.A. Taylor, without
a fact to go upon, subscribed to the "unsavory record" legend and
Assistant-Secretary C.H. Keep fell in with it. They must have seen
what it was they were indorsing. In a letter from Mr. Keep to the
Reverend A.W. Wishart, of Trenton (who throughout has fought most
gallantly for justice in this case), I find Mr. Keep distinguishes
himself by the artistic device of putting "William MacQueen's" name
in inverted commas. So, very delicately, he conveys out of the void
the insinuation that the name is an alias. Meanwhile the Commissioner
of Immigration prepared to take a hand in the game of breaking up
MacQueen. He stopped Mrs. MacQueen at the threshold of liberty,
imprisoned her in Ellis Island, and sent her back to Europe. MacQueen,
still on bail, was not informed of this action, and waited on the pier
for some hours before he understood. His wife had come second class to
America, but she was returned first class, and the steamship company
seized her goods for the return fare....
That was more than MacQueen could stand. He had been tried, convicted,
sentenced to five years' imprisonment, and he was now out on bail
pending an appeal. Anxiety about his wife and children was too much for
him. He slipped off to England after them ("Escape of the Anarchist
MacQueen"), made what provision and arrangements he could for them,
and returned in time to save his bondsman's money ("Capture of the
Escaped Anarchist MacQueen"). Several members of the Leeds City Council
("Criminal Associates in Europe") saw him off. That was in 1903. His
appeal had been refused on a technical point. He went into Trenton
jail, and there he is to this day. There I saw him. Trenton Jail did
not impress me as an agreeable place. The building is fairly old, and
there is no nonsense about the food. The cells hold, some of them,
four criminals, some of them two, but latterly MacQueen has had spells
in the infirmary, and has managed to get a cell to himself. Many of
the criminals are negroes and half-breeds, imprisoned for unspeakable
offences. In the exercising-yard MacQueen likes to keep apart. "When I
first came I used to get in a corner," he said....
Now this case of MacQueen has exercised my mind enormously. It was
painful to go out of the gray jail again after I had talked to
him--of Shaw and Morris, of the Fabian Society and the British labor
members--into sunlight and freedom, and ever and again, as I went about
New York having the best of times among the most agreeable people,
the figure of him would come back to me quite vividly, in his gray
dress, sitting on the edge of an unaccustomed chair, hands on his
knees, speaking a little nervously and jerkily, and very glad indeed
to see me. He is younger than myself, but much my sort of man, and we
talked of books and education and his case like brothers. There can be
no doubt to any sensible person who will look into the story of his
conviction, who will even go and see him, that there has been a serious
miscarriage of justice.
There has been a serious miscarriage of justice, such as (unhappily)
might happen in any country. That is nothing distinctive of America.
But what does impress me as remarkable and perplexing is the immense
difficulty--the perhaps unsurmountable difficulty--of getting this man
released. The Governor of the State of New Jersey knows he is innocent,
the judges of the Court of Pardons know he is innocent. Three of them
I was able to button-hole at Trenton, and hear their point of View.
Two are of the minority and for release, one was doubtful in attitude
but hostile in spirit. They hold, the man, he thinks, on the score of
public policy. They put it that Paterson is a "hotbed" of crime and
violence; that once MacQueen is released every anarchist in the country
will be emboldened to crime, and so on and so on. I admit Paterson
festers, but if we are to punish anybody instead of reforming the
system, it's the masters who ought to be in jail for that.
"What will the property-owners in Paterson say to us if this man is
released?" one of the judges admitted frankly.
"But he hadn't anything to do with the violence," I said, and argued
the case over again--quite missing the point of that objection.
Whenever I had a chance in New York, in Boston, in Washington, even
amid the conversation of a Washington dinner-table, I dragged up the
case of MacQueen. Nobody seemed indignant. One lady admitted the
sentence was heavy, "he might have been given six months to cool off
in," she said. I protested he ought not to have been given a day. "Why
did he go there?" said a Supreme Court judge in Washington, a lawyer in
New York, and several other people. "Wasn't he making trouble?" I was
asked.
At last that reached my sluggish intelligence.
Yet I still hesitate to accept the new interpretations. Galiano, who
preached blind violence and made the riot, got off scot-free; MacQueen,
who wanted a legitimate strike on British lines, went to jail. So
long as the social injustice, the sweated disorder of Paterson's
industrialism, vents its cries in Italian in _La Questione Sociale_,
so long as it remains an inaudible misery so far as the great public
is concerned, making vehement yet impotent appeals to mere force, and
so losing its last chances of popular sympathy, American property, I
gather, is content. The masters and the immigrants can deal with one
another on those lines. But to have outsiders coming in!
There is an active press campaign against the release of "the Anarchist
MacQueen," and I do not believe that Mr. Wishart will succeed in his
endeavors. I think MacQueen will serve out his five years.
The plain truth is that no one pretends he is in jail on his merits;
he is in jail as an example and lesson to any one who proposes to
come between master and immigrant worker in Paterson. He has attacked
the system. The people who profit by the system, the people who think
things are "all right as they are," have hit back in the most effectual
way they can, according to their lights.
That, I think, accounts for the sustained quality of the lying in
this case, and, indeed, for the whole situation. He is in jail on
principle and without personal animus, just as they used to tar and
feather the stray abolitionist on principle in Carolina. The policy
of stringent discouragement is a reasonable one--scoundrelly, no
doubt, but understandable. And I think I can put myself sufficiently
into the place of the Paterson masters, of the Trenton judges, of
those journalists, of those subordinate officials at Washington
even, to understand their motives and inducements. I indulge in no
self-righteous pride. Simply, I thank Heaven I have not had their
peculiar temptations.
But my riddle lies in the attitude of the public--of the American
nation, which hasn't, it seems, a spark of moral indignation for this
sort of thing, which indeed joins in quite cheerfully against the
victim.
It is ill served by its press, no doubt, but surely it understands....
III
Maxim Gorky
Then I assisted at the coming of Maxim Gorky, and witnessed many
intimate details of what Professor Giddings, that courageous publicist,
has called his "lynching."
Here, again, is a case I fail altogether to understand. The surface
values of that affair have a touch of the preposterous. I set them down
in infinite perplexity.
My first week in New York was in the period of Gorky's advent.
Expectation was at a high pitch, and one might have foretold a
stupendous, a history-making campaign. The American nation seemed
concentrated upon one great and ennobling idea, the freedom of Russia,
and upon Gorky as the embodiment of that idea. A protest was to be made
against cruelty and violence and massacre. That great figure of Liberty
with the torch was to make it flare visibly half-way round the world,
reproving tyranny.
Gorky arrived, and the _éclat_ was immense. We dined him, we lunched
him, we were photographed in his company by flash-light. I very gladly
shared that honor, for Gorky is not only a great master of the art I
practise, but a splendid personality. He is one of those people to whom
the camera does no justice, whose work, as I know it in an English
translation, forceful as it is, fails very largely to convey his
peculiar quality. His is a big, quiet figure; there is a curious power
of appeal in his face, a large simplicity in his voice and gesture.
He was dressed, when I met him, in peasant clothing, in a belted blue
shirt, trousers of some shiny black material, and boots; and save for
a few common greetings he has no other language than Russian. So it
was necessary that he should bring with him some one he could trust
to interpret him to the world. And having, too, much of the practical
helplessness of his type of genius, he could not come without his right
hand, that brave and honorable lady, Madame Andreieva, who has been now
for years in everything but the severest legal sense his wife. Russia
has no Dakota; and although his legal wife has long since found another
companion, the Orthodox Church in Russia has no divorce facilities for
men in the revolutionary camp. So Madame Andreieva stands to him as
George Eliot stood to George Lewes, and I suppose the two of them had
almost forgotten the technical illegality of their tie, until it burst
upon them and the American public in a monstrous storm of exposure.
It was like a summer thunder-storm. At one moment Gorky was in an
immense sunshine, a plenipotentiary from oppression to liberty, at the
next he was being almost literally pelted through the streets.
I do not know what motive actuated a certain section of the American
press to initiate this pelting of Maxim Gorky. A passion for moral
purity may perhaps have prompted it, but certainly no passion for
purity ever before begot so brazen and abundant a torrent of lies.
It was precisely the sort of campaign that damned poor MacQueen, but
this time on an altogether imperial scale. The irregularity of Madame
Andreieva's position was a mere point of departure. The journalists
went on to invent a deserted wife and children, they declared Madame
Andreieva was an "actress," and loaded her with all the unpleasant
implications of that unfortunate word; they spoke of her generally as
"the woman Andreieva"; they called upon the Commissioner of Immigration
to deport her as a "female of bad character"; quite influential people
wrote to him to that effect; they published the name of the hotel that
sheltered her, and organized a boycott. Whoever dared to countenance
the victims was denounced. Professor Dewar of Columbia had given them
a reception; "Dewar must go," said the head-lines. Mark Twain, who had
assisted in the great welcome, was invited to recant and contribute
unfriendly comments. The Gorkys were pursued with insult from hotel
to hotel. Hotel after hotel turned them out. They found themselves at
last, after midnight, in the streets of New York city with every door
closed against them. Infected persons could not have been treated more
abominably in a town smitten with a panic of plague.
This change happened in the course of twenty-four hours. On one day
Gorky was at the zenith, on the next he had been swept from the world.
To me it was astounding--it was terrifying. I wanted to talk to Gorky
about it, to find out the hidden springs of this amazing change. I
spent a Sunday evening looking for him with an ever-deepening respect
for the power of the American press. I had a quaint conversation with
the clerk of the hotel in Fifth Avenue from which he had first been
driven. Europeans can scarcely hope to imagine the moral altitudes
at which American hotels are conducted.... I went thence to seek Mr.
Abraham Cahan in the East Side, and thence to other people I knew, but
in vain. Gorky was obliterated.
I thought this affair was a whirlwind of foolish misunderstanding,
such as may happen in any capital, and that presently his entirely
tolerable relationship would be explained. But for all the rest of my
time in New York this insensate campaign went on. There was no attempt
of any importance to stem the tide, and to this day large sections
of the American public must be under the impression that this great
writer is a depraved man of pleasure accompanied by a favorite cocotte.
The writers of paragraphs racked their brains to invent new and smart
ways of insulting Madame Andreieva. The chaste entertainers of the
music-halls of the Tenderloin district introduced allusions. And amid
this riot of personalities Russia was forgotten. The massacres, the
chaos of cruelty and blundering, the tyranny, the women outraged, the
children tortured and slain--all that was forgotten. In Boston, in
Chicago, it was the same. At the bare suggestion of Gorky's coming the
same outbreak occurred, the same display of imbecile gross lying, the
same absolute disregard of the tragic cause he had come to plead.
One gleam of comedy in this remarkable outbreak I recall. Some one
in ineffectual protest had asked what Americans would have said if
Benjamin Franklin had encountered such ignominies on his similar
mission of appeal to Paris before the War of Independence. "Benjamin
Franklin," retorted one bright young Chicago journalist, "was a man of
very different moral character from Gorky," and proceeded to explain
how Chicago was prepared to defend the purity of her homes against
the invader. Benjamin Franklin, it is true, _was_ a person of very
different morals from Gorky--but I don't think that bright young man in
Chicago had a very sound idea of where the difference lay.
I spent my last evening on American soil in the hospitable home
in Staten Island that sheltered Gorky and Madame Andreieva. After
dinner we sat together in the deepening twilight upon a broad veranda
that looks out upon one of the most beautiful views in the world,
upon serene large spaces of land and sea, upon slopes of pleasant,
window-lit, tree-set wooden houses, upon the glittering clusters
of lights, and the black and luminous shipping that comes and goes
about the Narrows and the Upper Bay. Half masked by a hill contour
to the left was the light of the torch of Liberty.... Gorky's big
form fell into shadow, Madame Andreieva sat at his feet, translating
methodically, sentence by sentence, into clear French whatever he
said, translating our speeches into Russian. He told us stories--of
the soul of the Russian, of Russian religious sects, of kindnesses and
cruelties, of his great despair.
Ever and again, in the pauses, my eyes would go to where New York far
away glittered like a brighter and more numerous Pleiades.
I gauged something of the real magnitude of this one man's
disappointment, the immense expectation of his arrival, the impossible
dream of his mission. He had come--the Russian peasant in person,
out of a terrific confusion of bloodshed, squalor, injustice--to tell
America, the land of light and achieved freedom, of all these evil
things. She would receive him, help him, understand truly what he
meant with his "Rossia." I could imagine how he had felt as he came in
the big steamer to her, up that large converging display of space and
teeming energy. There she glowed to-night across the water, a queen
among cities, as if indeed she was the light of the world. Nothing, I
think, can ever rob that splendid harbor approach of its invincible
quality of promise.... And to him she had shown herself no more than
the luminous hive of multitudes of base and busy, greedy and childish
little men.
MacQueen in jail, Gorky with his reputation wantonly bludgeoned and
flung aside; they are just two chance specimens of the myriads who have
come up this great waterway bearing hope and gifts.