New York--namely, the Bronx. I was urgently invited to go and see how
the folk lived in the Bronx; and, feeling convinced that a place with a
name so remarkable must itself be remarkable, I went. The center of the
Bronx is a racket of Elevated, bordered by banks, theaters, and other
places of amusement. As a spectacle it is decent, inspiring confidence
but not awe, and being rather repellent to the sense of beauty. Nobody
could call it impressive. Yet I departed from the Bronx very
considerably impressed. It is the interiors of the Bronx homes that are
impressive. I was led to a part of the Bronx where five years previously
there had been six families, and where there are now over two thousand
families. This was newest New York. No obstacle impeded my invasion of
the domestic privacies of the Bronx. The mistresses of flats showed me
round everything with politeness and with obvious satisfaction. A stout
lady, whose husband was either an artisan or a clerk, I forget which,
inducted me into a flat of four rooms, of which the rent was twenty-six
dollars a month. She enjoyed the advantages of central heating, gas, and
electricity; and among the landlord's fixtures were a refrigerator, a
kitchen range, a bookcase, and a sideboard. Such amenities for the
people--for the _petits gens_--simply do not exist in Europe; they do
not even exist for the wealthy in Europe. But there was also the
telephone, the house exchange being in charge of the janitor's
daughter--a pleasing occupant of the entrance-hall. I was told that the
telephone, with a "nickel" call, increased the occupancy of the Bronx
flats by ten per cent.
Thence I visited the flat of a doctor--a practitioner who would be the
equivalent of a "shilling" doctor in a similar quarter of London. Here
were seven rooms, at a rent of forty-five dollars a month, and no end of
conveniences--certainly many more than in any flat that I had ever
occupied myself! I visited another house and saw similar interiors. And
now I began to be struck by the splendor and the cleanliness of the
halls, landings, and staircases: marble halls, tesselated landings, and
stairs out of Holland; the whole producing a gorgeous effect--to match
the glory of the embroidered pillow-cases in the bedrooms. On the roofs
were drying-grounds, upon which each tenant had her rightful "day," so
that altercations might not arise. I saw an empty flat. The professional
vermin exterminator had just gone--for the landlord-company took no
chances in this detail of management.
Then I was lifted a little higher in the social-financial scale, to a
building of which the entrance-hall reminded me of the foyers of grand
hotels. A superb negro held dominion therein, but not over the telephone
girl, who ran the exchange ten hours a day for twenty-five dollars a
month, which, considering that the janitor received sixty-five dollars
and his rooms, seemed to me to be somewhat insufficient. In this house
the corridors were broader, and to the conveniences was added a
mail-shoot, a device which is still regarded in Europe as the final word
of plutocratic luxury rampant. The rents ran to forty-eight dollars a
month for six rooms. In this house I was asked by hospitable tenants
whether I was not myself, and, when I had admitted that I was myself,
books of which I had been guilty were produced, and I was called upon to
sign them.
The fittings and decorations of all these flats were artistically
vulgar, just as they are in flats costing a thousand dollars a month,
but they were well executed, and resulted in a general harmonious effect
of innocent prosperity. The people whom I met showed no trace of the
influence of those older artistic civilizations whose charm seems subtly
to pervade the internationalism of the East Side. In certain strata and
streaks of society on the East Side things artistic and intellectual are
comprehended with an intensity of emotion and understanding impossible
to Anglo-Saxons. This I know.
The Bronx is different. The Bronx is beginning again, at a stage earlier
than art, and beginning better. It is a place for those who have learnt
that physical righteousness has got to be the basis of all future
progress. It is a place to which the fit will be attracted, and where
the fit will survive. It has rather a harsh quality. It reminded me of a
phrase used by an American at the head of an enormous business. He had
been explaining to me how he tried a man in one department, and, if he
did not shine in that, then in another, and in another, and so on. "And
if you find in the end that he's honest but not efficient?" I asked.
"Then," was the answer, "we think he's entitled to die, and we fire
him."
The Bronx presented itself to me as a place where the right of the
inefficient to expire would be cheerfully recognized. The district that
I inspected was certainly, as I say, for the fit. Efficiency in physical
essentials was inculcated--and practised--by the landlord-company, whose
constant aim seemed to be to screw up higher and higher the self-respect
of its tenants. That the landlord-company was not a band of
philanthropists, but a capitalistic group in search of dividends, I
would readily admit. But that it should find its profit in the business
of improving the standard of existence and appealing to the pride of the
folk was to me a wondrous sign of the essential vigor of American
civilization, and a proof that public spirit, unostentatious as a coral
insect, must after all have long been at work somewhere.
Compare the East Side with the Bronx fully, and one may see, perhaps
roughly, a symbol of what is going forward in America. Nothing, I should
imagine, could be more interesting to a sociological observer than that
actual creation of a city of homes as I saw it in the Bronx. I saw the
home complete, and I saw the home incomplete, with wall-papers not on,
with the roof not on. Why, I even saw, further out, the ground being
leveled and the solid rock drilled where now, most probably, actual
homes are inhabited and babies have been born! And I saw further than
that. Nailed against a fine and ancient tree, in the midst of a desolate
waste, I saw a board with these words: "A new Subway station will be
erected on this corner." There are legendary people who have eyes to see
the grass growing. I have seen New York growing. It was a hopeful sight,
too.
* * * * *
At this point my impressions of America come to an end, for the present.
Were I to assert, in the phrase conventionally proper to such an
occasion, that no one can be more sensible than myself of the manifold
defects, omissions, inexactitudes, gross errors, and general lack of
perspective which my narrative exhibits, I should assert the thing which
is not. I have not the slightest doubt that a considerable number of
persons are more sensible than myself of my shortcomings; for on the
subject of America I do not even know enough to be fully aware of my own
ignorance. Still, I am fairly sensible of the enormous imperfection and
rashness of this book. When I regard the map and see the trifling
extent of the ground that I covered--a scrap tucked away in the
northeast corner of the vast multi-colored territory--I marvel at the
assurance I displayed in choosing my title. Indeed, I have yet to see
your United States. Any Englishman visiting the country for the second
time, having begun with New York, ought to go round the world and enter
by San Francisco, seeing Seattle before Baltimore and Denver before
Chicago. His perspective might thus be corrected in a natural manner,
and the process would in various ways be salutary. It is a nice question
how many of the opinions formed on the first visit--and especially the
most convinced and positive opinions--would survive the ordeal of the
second.
As for these brief chapters, I hereby announce that I am not prepared
ultimately to stand by any single view which they put forward. There is
naught in them which is not liable to be recanted. The one possible
justification of them is that they offer to the reader the one thing
that, in the very nature of the case, a mature and accustomed observer
could not offer--namely, an immediate account (as accurate as I could
make it) of the first tremendous impact of the United States on a mind
receptive and unprejudiced. The greatest social historian, the most
conscientious writer, could not recapture the sensations of that first
impact after further intercourse had scattered them.
THE END