of New York dailiness, tales of no important event, but which lit up for
me the whole expanse of existence in the hinterlands of the Elevated.
As, for instance, the following. The tiny young wife of the ambitious
and feverish young man is coming home in the winter afternoon. She is
forced to take the street-car, and in order to take it she is forced to
fight. To fight, physically, is part of the daily round of the
average fragile, pale, indomitable New York woman. In the swaying crowd
she turns her head several times, and in tones of ever-increasing
politeness requests a huge male animal behind her to refrain from
pushing. He does not refrain. Being skilled, as a mariner is skilled in
beaching himself and a boat on a surfy shore, she does ultimately
achieve the inside of the car, and she sinks down therein apparently
exhausted. The huge male animal follows, and as he passes her,
infuriated by her indestructible politeness, he sticks his head against
her little one and says, threateningly, "What's the matter with you,
anyway?" He could crush her like a butterfly, and, moreover, she is
about ready to faint. But suddenly, in uncontrollable anger, she lifts
that tiny gloved hand and catches the huge male animal a smart smack in
the face. "Can't you be polite?" she hisses. Then she drops back,
blushing, horrified by what she has done. She sees another man throw the
aghast male animal violently out of the car, and then salute her with:
"Madam, I take off my hat to you." And the tired car settles down to
apathy, for, after all, the incident is in its essence part of the
dailiness of New York.
The young wife gets home, obsessed by the fact that she has struck a man
in the face in a public vehicle. She is still blushing when she relates
the affair in a rush of talk to another young wife in the flat next to
hers. "For Heaven's sake don't tell my husband," she implores. "If he
knew he'd leave me forever!" And the young husband comes home, after his
own personal dose of street-car, preoccupied, fatigued, nervous, hungry,
demanding to be loved. And the young wife has to behave as though she
had been lounging all the afternoon in a tea-gown on a soft sofa.
Curious that, although she is afraid of her husband's wrath, the
temptation to tell him grows stronger! Indeed, is it not a rather fine
thing that she has done, and was not the salute of the admiring male
flattering and sweet? Not many tiny wives would have had the pluck to
slap a brute's face. She tells the young husband. It is an error of tact
on her part. For he, secretly exacerbated, was waiting for just such an
excuse to let himself go. He is angry, he is outraged--as she had said
he would be. What--his wife, _his_-etc., etc.!
A night full of everything except sleep; full of Elevated and rumbling
cars, and trumps of autos, and the eternal liveliness of the cobbled
street, and all incomprehensible noises, and stuffiness, and the sense
of other human beings too close above, too close below, and to the left
and to the right, and before and behind, the sense that there are too
many people on earth! What New-Yorker does not know the wakings after
the febrile doze that ends such a night? The nerves like taut strings;
love turned into homicidal hatred; and the radiator damnably tapping,
tapping!... The young husband afoot and shaved and inexpensively
elegant, and he is demanding his fried eggs. The young wife is afoot,
too, manoeuvering against the conspiracies of the janitor, who lives far
below out of sight, but who permeates her small flat like a malignant
influence.... Hear the whistling of the dumb-waiter!... Eggs are
demanded, authoritatively, bitterly. If glances could kill, not only
that flat but the whole house would be strewn with corpses.... Eggs!...
Something happens, something arrives, something snaps; a spell is broken
and horror is let loose. "Take your eggs!" cries the tiny wife, in a
passion. The eggs fly across the table, and the front of a man's suit is
ruined. She sits down and fairly weeps, appalled at herself. Last
evening she was punishing males; this morning she turns eggs into
missiles, she a loving, an ambitious, an intensely respectable young
wife! As for him, he sits motionless, silent, decorated with the colors
of eggs, a graduate of a famous university. Calamity has brought him
also to his senses. Still weeping, she puts on her hat and jacket.
"Where are you going?" he asks, solemnly, no longer homicidal, no longer
hungry. "I must hurry to the cleaners for your other suit!" says she,
tragic. And she hurries....
A shocking story, a sordid story, you say. Not a bit! They are young;
they have the incomparable virtue of youthfulness. It is naught, all
that! The point of the story is that it illustrates New York--a New York
more authentic than the spaciousness of upper Fifth Avenue or the
unnatural dailiness of grand hotels. I like it.
* * * * *
You may see that couple later in a suburban house--a real home for the
time being, with a colorable imitation of a garden all about it, and the
"finest suburban railway service in the world": the whole being a frame
and environment for the rearing of children. I have sat at dinner in
such houses, and the talk was of nothing but children; and anybody who
possessed any children, or any reliable knowledge of the ways of
children, was sure of a respectable hearing and warm interest. If one
said, "By the way, I think I may have a photograph of the kid in my
pocket," every eye would reply immediately: "Out with it, man--or
woman!--and don't pretend you don't always carry the photograph with you
on purpose to show it off!" In such a house it is proved that children
are unmatched as an exhaustless subject of conversation. And the
conversation is rendered more thrilling by the sense of partially tamed
children-children fully aware of their supremacy--prowling to and fro
unseen in muddy boots and torn pinafores, and speculating in their
realistic way upon the mysteriousness of adults.
"We are keen on children here," says the youngish father, frankly. He is
altered now from the man he was when he inhabited a diminutive flat in
the full swirl of New York. His face is calmer, milder, more benevolent,
and more resignedly worried. And assuredly no one would recognize in him
the youth who howled murderously at university football matches and
cried with monstrous ferocity at sight of danger from the opposing
colors: "Kill him! Kill him for me! I can't stand his red stockings
coming up the field!" Yet it is the same man. And this father, too, is
the fruit of university education; and further, one feels that his
passion for his progeny is one of the chief causes of American interest
in education. He and his like are at the root of the modern
university--not the millionaires. In Chicago I was charmed to hear it
stoutly and even challengingly maintained that the root of Chicago
University was not Mr. Rockefeller, but the parents of Chicago.
Assuming that the couple have no children, there is a good chance of
catching them later, splendidly miserable, in a high-class
apartment-house, where the entire daily adventure of living is taken out
of your hands and done for you, and you pay a heavy price in order to be
deprived of one of the main interests of existence. The apartment-house
ranks in my opinion among the more pernicious influences in American
life. As an institution it is unhappily establishing itself in England,
and in England it is terrible. I doubt if it is less terrible in its
native land. It is anti-social because it works always against the
preservation of the family unit, and because it is unfair to children,
and because it prevents the full flowering of an individuality. (Nobody
can be himself in an apartment-house; if he tried that game he would
instantly be thrown out.) It is immoral because it fosters bribery and
because it is pretentious itself and encourages pretense in its victims.
It is unfavorable to the growth of taste because its decorations and
furniture are and must be ugly; they descend to the artistic standard of
the vulgarest people in it, and have not even the merit of being the
expression of any individuality at all. It is enervating because it
favors the creation of a race that can do absolutely nothing for itself.
It is unhealthy because it is sometimes less clean than it seems, and
because often it forces its victims to eat in a dining-room whose walls
are a distressing panorama of Swiss scenery, and because its cuisine is
and must be at best mediocre, since meals at once sound and showy
cannot be prepared wholesale.
Some apartment-houses are better than others; many are possibly marvels
of organization and value for money. But none can wholly escape the
indictment. The institution itself, though it may well be a natural and
inevitable by-product of racial evolution, is bad. An experienced
dweller in apartment-houses said to me, of a seeming-magnificent house
which I had visited and sampled: "We pay six hundred dollars for two
poor little rooms and a bath-room, and twenty-five dollars a week for
board, whether we eat or not. The food is very bad. It is all kept hot
for about an hour, on steam, so that every dish tastes of laundry.
Everything is an extra. Telephone--lights--tips--especially tips. I tip
everybody. I even tip the _chef_. I tip the _chef_ so that, when I am
utterly sick of his fanciness and prefer a mere chop or a steak, he will
choose me an eatable chop or steak. And that's how things go on!"
My true and candid friend, the experienced dweller in apartment-houses,
was, I have good reason to believe, an honorable man. And it is
therefore a considerable tribute to the malefic influence of
apartment-house life that he had no suspicion of the gross anti-social
immorality of his act in tipping the _chef_. Clearly it was an act
calculated to undermine the _chef's_ virtue. If all the other
experienced dwellers did the same, it was also a silly act, producing no
good effect at all. But if only a few of them did it, then it was an act
which resulted in the remainder of the victims being deprived of their
full, fair chance of getting eatable chops or steaks. My friend's
proper course was obviously to have kicked up a row, and to have kicked
up a row in a fashion so clever that the management would not put him
into the street. He ought to have organized a committee of protest, he
ought to have convened meetings for the outlet of public opinion, he
ought to have persevered day after day and evening after evening, until
the management had been forced to exclude uneatable chops and steaks
utterly from their palatial premises and to exact the honest performance
of duty from each and all of the staff. In the end it would have dawned
upon the management that inedible food was just as much out of place in
the restaurant as counterfeit bills and coins at the cash-desk. The
proper course would have been difficult and tiresome. The proper course
often is. My friend took the easy, wicked course. That is to say, he
exhibited a complete lack of public spirit.
* * * * *
An apartment-house is only an apartment-house; whereas the republic is
the republic. And yet I permit myself to think that the one may
conceivably be the mirror of the other. And I do positively think that
American education does not altogether succeed in the very important
business of inculcating public spirit into young citizens. I judge
merely by results. Most peoples fail in the high quality of public
spirit; and the American perhaps not more so than the rest. Perhaps all
I ought to say is that according to my own limited observation public
spirit is not among the shining attributes of the United States citizen.
And even to that statement there will be animated demur. For have not
the citizens of the United States been conspicuous for their public
spirit?...
It depends on what is meant by public spirit--that is, public spirit in
its finer forms. I know what I do _not_ mean by public spirit. I was
talking once to a member of an important and highly cultivated social
community, and he startled me by remarking:
"The major vices do not exist in this community at all."
I was prepared to credit that such Commandments as the Second and Sixth
were not broken in that community. But I really had doubts about some
others, such as the Seventh and Tenth. However, he assured me that such
transgressions were unknown.
"What do you _do_ here?" I asked.
He replied: "We live for social service--for each other."
The spirit characterizing that community would never be described by me
as public spirit. I should fit it with a word which will occur at once
to every reader.
On the other hand, I cannot admit as proof of public spirit the
prevalent American habit of giving to the public that which is useless
to oneself--no matter how immense the quantity given, and no matter how
admirable the end in view. When you have got the money it is rather easy
to sit down and write a check for five million dollars, and so bring a
vast public institution into being. It is still easier to leave the same
sum by testament. These feats are an affair of five minutes or so; they
cost simply nothing in time or comfort or peace of mind. If they are
illustrations of public spirit, it is a low and facile form of public
spirit.
True public spirit is equally difficult for the millionaire and for the
clerk. It is, in fact, very tedious work. It implies the quiet daily
determination to get eatable chops and steaks by honest means, chiefly
for oneself, but incidentally for everybody else. It necessitates
trouble and inconvenience. I was in a suburban house one night, and it
was the last night for registering names on an official list of voters
before an election; it was also a rainy night. The master of the house
awaited a carriage, which was to be sent up by a candidate, at the
candidate's expense, to take him to the place of registration. Time grew
short.
"Shall you walk there if the carriage doesn't come?" I asked, and gazed
firmly at the prospective voter.
At that moment the carriage came. We drove forth together, and in a
cabin warmed by a stove and full of the steam of mackintoshes I saw an
interesting part of the American Constitution at work--four hatted
gentlemen writing simultaneously the same particulars in four similar
ledgers, while exhorting a fifth to keep the stove alight. An
acquaintance came in who had trudged one mile through the rain. That
acquaintance showed public spirit. In the ideal community a candidate
for election will not send round carriages in order, at the last moment,
to induce citizens to register; in the ideal community citizens will
regard such an attention as in the nature of an insult.
I was told that millionaires and presidents of trusts were chiefly
responsible for any backwardness of public spirit in the United States.
I had heard and read the same thing about the United States in England.
I was therefore curious to meet these alleged sinister creatures. And
once, at a repast, I encountered quite a bunch of millionaire-presidents.
I had them on my right hand and on my left. No two were in the least
alike. In my simplicity I had expected a type--formidable, intimidating.
One bubbled with jollity; obviously he "had not a care in the world."
Another was grave. I talked with the latter, but not easily. He was
taciturn. Or he may have been feeling his way. Or he may have been not
quite himself. Even millionaire-presidents must be self-conscious. Just
as a notorious author is too often rendered uneasy by the consciousness
of his notoriety, so even a millionaire-president may sometimes have a
difficulty in being quite natural. However, he did ultimately talk. It
became clear to me that he was an extremely wise and sagacious man. The
lines of his mouth were ruthlessly firm, yet he showed a general
sympathy with all classes of society, and he met my radicalism quite
half-way. On woman's suffrage he was very fair-minded. As to his own
work, he said to me that when a New York paper asked him to go and be
cross-examined by its editorial board he willingly went, because he had
nothing to conceal. He convinced me of his uprightness and of his
benevolence. He showed a nice regard for the claims of the Republic, and
a proper appreciation of what true public spirit is.
Some time afterward I was talking to a very prominent New York editor,
and the conversation turned to millionaires, whereupon for about half an
hour the editor agreeably recounted circumstantial stories of the
turpitude of celebrated millionaires--stories which he alleged to be
authentic and undeniable in every detail. I had to gasp. "But surely--"
I exclaimed, and mentioned the man who had so favorably impressed me.
"Well," said the editor, reluctantly, after a pause, "I admit he has
_the new sense of right and wrong_ to a greater extent than any of his
rivals."
I italicize the heart of the phrase, because it is italicized in my
memory. No words that I heard in the United States more profoundly
struck me. Yet the editor had used them quite ingenuously, unaware that
he was saying anything singular!... Since when is the sense of right and
wrong "new" in America?
Perhaps all that the editor meant was that public spirit in its higher
forms was growing in the United States, and beginning to show itself
spectacularly here and there in the immense drama of commercial and
industrial policies. That public spirit is growing, I believe. It
chanced that I found the basis of my belief more in Chicago than
anywhere else.
* * * * *
I have hitherto said nothing of the "folk"--the great mass of the
nation, who live chiefly by the exercise, in one way or another, of
muscular power or adroitness, and who, if they possess drawing-rooms, do
not sit in them. Like most writers, when I have used such phrases as
"the American people" I have meant that small dominant minority which
has the same social code as myself. Goethe asserted that the folk were
the only real people. I do not agree with him, for I have never found
one city more real than another city, nor one class of people more real
than another class. Still, he was Goethe, and the folk, though
mysterious, are very real; and, since they constitute perhaps
five-sixths of the nation, it would be singular to ignore them. I had
two brief glimpses of them, and the almost theatrical contrast of these
two glimpses may throw further light upon the question just discussed.
I evaded Niagara and the Chicago Stock-yards, but I did not evade the
"East Side" of New York. The East Side insisted on being seen, and I was
not unwilling. In charge of a highly erudite newspaper man, and of an
amiable Jewish detective, who, originally discovered by Colonel
Roosevelt, had come out first among eighteen hundred competitors in a
physical examination, my particular friend and I went forth one
intemperate night to "do" the East Side in an automobile. We saw the
garlanded and mirrored core of "Sharkey's" saloon, of which the most
interesting phenomenon was a male pianist who would play the piano
without stopping till 2.30 A.M. With about two thousand other persons,
we had the privilege of shaking hands with Sharkey. We saw another
saloon, frequented by murderers who resembled shop assistants. We saw a
Hebraic theater, whose hospitable proprietor informed us how he had
discovered a great play-writing genius, and how on the previous Saturday
night he had turned away seven thousand patrons for lack of room!
Certainly on our night the house was crammed; and the play seemed of
realistic quality, and the actresses effulgently lovely. We saw a Polack
dancing-hall, where the cook-girls were slatterns, but romantic
slatterns. We saw Seward Park, which is the dormitory of the East Side
in summer. We saw a van clattering off with prisoners to the night
court. We saw illustrious burglars, "gunmen," and "dukes" of famous
streets--for we had but to raise a beckoning finger, and they approached
us, grinning, out of gloomy shadows. (And very ordinary they seemed in
spite of slashed faces!)
We even saw Chinatown, and the wagonettes of tourists stationary in its
streets. I had suspected that Chinatown was largely a show for tourists.
When I asked how it existed, I was told that the two thousand Chinese of
Chinatown lived on the ten thousand Chinese who came into it from all
quarters on Sundays, and I understood. As a show it lacked
convincingness--except the delicatessen-shop, whose sights and odors
silenced criticism. It had the further disadvantage, by reason of its
tawdry appeals of color and light, of making one feel like a tourist.
Above a certain level of culture, no man who is a tourist has the
intellectual honesty to admit to himself that he is a tourist. Such
honesty is found only on the lower levels. The detective saved our pride
from time to time by introducing us to sights which the despicable
ordinary tourists cannot see. It was a proud moment for us when we
assisted at a conspiratorial interview between our detective and the
"captain of the precincts." And it was a proud moment when in an
inconceivable retreat we were permitted to talk with an aged Chinese
actor and view his collection of flowery hats. It was a still prouder
(and also a subtly humiliating) moment when we were led through
courtyards and beheld in their cloistral aloofness the American
legitimate wives of wealthy China-men, sitting gorgeous, with the
quiescence of odalisques, in gorgeous uncurtained interiors. I was glad
when one of the ladies defied the detective by abruptly swishing down
her blind.
But these affairs did not deeply stir my imagination. More engaging was
the detective's own habit of stopping the automobile every hundred yards
or so in order to point out the exact spot on which a murder, or several
murders, had been committed. Murder was his chief interest. I noticed
the same trait in many newspaper men, who would sit and tell excellent
murder stories by the hour. But murder was so common on the East Side
that it became for me curiously puerile--a sort of naughtiness whose
punishment, to be effective, ought to wound, rather than flatter, the
vanity of the child-minded murderers. More engaging still was the
extraordinary frequency of banks--some with opulent illuminated
signs--and of cinematograph shows. In the East End of London or of Paris
banks are assuredly not a feature of the landscape--and for good reason.
The cinematograph is possibly, on the whole, a civilizing agent; it
might easily be the most powerful force on the East Side. I met the
gentleman who "controlled" all the cinematographs, and was reputed to
make a million dollars a year net therefrom. He did not appear to be a
bit weighed down, either by the hugeness of his opportunity or by the
awfulness of his responsibility.
[Illustration: THE ASTOUNDING POPULOUSNESS OF THE EAST SIDE]
The supreme sensation of the East Side is the sensation of its
astounding populousness. The most populous street in the
world--Rivington Street--is a sight not to be forgotten. Compared to
this, an up-town thoroughfare of crowded middle-class flats is the
open country--is an uninhabited desert! The architecture seemed to sweat
humanity at every window and door. The roadways were often impassable.
The thought of the hidden interiors was terrifying. Indeed, the hidden
interiors would not bear thinking about. The fancy shunned them--a
problem not to be settled by sudden municipal edicts, but only by the
efflux of generations. Confronted by this spectacle of sickly-faced
immortal creatures, who lie closer than any other wild animals would
lie; who live picturesque, feverish, and appalling existences; who amuse
themselves, who enrich themselves, who very often lift themselves out of
the swarming warren and leave it forever, but whose daily experience in
the warren is merely and simply horrible--confronted by this
incomparable and overwhelming phantasmagoria (for such it seems), one is
foolishly apt to protest, to inveigh, to accuse. The answer to futile
animadversions was in my particular friend's query: "Well, what are you
going to do about it?"
* * * * *