liberty openly and unashamed. I have no belief in politicians: the good
ones and the bad ones seem to me to be unanimously thieves. Thus I
hope I may whoop for it with some grace, despite the fact that my name
appears on its flagstaff. How my name got there I don’t know; I receive
no emolument from its coffers, and write for it very seldom, and then
only in contravention of its ideas. I even have to pay cash for my
annual subscription--a strange and painful burden for a journalist
to bear. But I know of no other expenditure (that is, of a secular
character) that I make with more satisfaction, or that brings me a
better return. Most of the papers that I am doomed to read are idiotic
even when they are right. The _Nation_ is intelligent and instructive
even when it is wrong.
XIV. OFFICERS AND GENTLEMEN
Hard luck pursues the American Navy. It is the common butt, not only
of political mountebanks, but also of all the brummagem uplifters and
soul-snatchers who now sweat to save us. If a Mr. Secretary Denby is
not permitting the Falls and Dohenys to raid its goods, a Mr. Secretary
Wilbur or Josephus Daniels is trying to convert it into a Methodist
Sunday-school. Worse, the Navy gets more than its fair share of the
national dirty work. It is told off to put down free speech in the
Virgin Islands, and it is delegated to flog, hang and butcher the poor
Haitians, and so convert them into black Iowans, with money in the
bank. Elsewhere in the world such disagreeable jobs are given to the
Army. The British Army, for example, performs all the massacres that
are necessary in India, and the French Army attends to whatever routine
murders and mayhems are called for in Syria and Morocco. But the
American custom puts all such Christian endeavor upon the Navy.
However, unless my agents lie, it is not the gore that revolts the
more high-toned naval officers, but the new rectitude that has been
thrust upon them. They are, as a class, excellent fellows, and full
of pride in their uniform. As officers, they are all theoretically
gentlemen, and many of them are so in fact. They have traveled widely,
and are familiar with the usages of the civilized world. They know what
is decent and seemly. Well, try to imagine how they must feel when
they read the daily papers. One day they read that the Secretary of
the Navy has ordered a group of their colleagues to prosecute a woman
nurse for bringing in a couple of jugs aboard a naval collier. The next
day they observe that a high officer in the Marines has filled the
newspapers with a meticulous and indignant account of what went on at
a table where he was a guest, in the house of one of his subordinates.
Explanations of this last episode have been offered, but they certainly
do not explain it away. The essential and immovable point is that
one officer snitched on another, his host--that the immemorial and
invariable obligations of a guest were sacrificed to Law Enforcement.
What would happen to an English naval officer who made any such assault
upon the code? What, indeed would happen to an honest Elk?
But I am not arguing here that any such things ought to happen; I am
merely calling attention to the fact that, under democracy, it is
becoming increasingly difficult for officers to be gentlemen, as the
term is commonly understood in the world, and perhaps also increasingly
improbable. We are, it would appear, passing through a time of
changing values, and what was considered decent by our fathers will
lose that quality to-morrow. The lower orders of men, having attained
to political power, now proceed to force their ideas upon their
betters, and some of those ideas naturally have to do with decorum.
It is already unlawful in America to take a bottle of wine to a sick
friend; in a few years it may also be indelicate. And simultaneously,
it may become quite proper to go to the police with anything that is
said or done in a friend’s house. Personally, I am inclined to oppose
such changes, if only in sheer hunkerousness, but I am surely under
no illusion that opposing them will stop them. They flow naturally
out of the character of the common man, now in the saddle, and are
thus irresistible. He is extremely and even excessively moral, but the
concept of what is called honor is beyond him. If, for example, he
aspires to public office, he believes that it is entirely proper to
abandon one conviction and take on its opposite in order to get votes.
And, having got into office, he believes that it is entirely proper to
hold on at any cost, even at the cost of common decency.
There is a familiar example. I allude to the Cathcart case. In
that case a high officer of State found himself confronting an
uncomfortable dilemma. On the one hand he was bound by an outrageous
law to engage in a public and obscene chase of a woman taken in
adultery. On the other hand he was bound by the code of all civilized
men to refuse and refrain. What was the way out for him? The way out,
obviously, was for him to resign his office--in other words, to decline
flatly to perform any such ignoble and disgusting duty, and to spurn
as insults the honors and emoluments offered for doing it. But, as far
as I can make out, he never so much as thought of that. Instead he
played the bounder--and kept his dirty job. His conduct, I believe,
seemed quite proper to the overwhelming majority of his countrymen. The
newspapers, in discussing it, never once suggested that a man of honor,
in his boots, would resign forthwith. Instead, they simply denounced
him for doing his plain duty under the law--that is, they proposed
that he get out of his dilemma by violating his oath of office. The
device is characteristically American. Anything is fair and decent that
keeps a man his job. That has been the settled American doctrine since
Jackson’s time.
But it is only of late, I believe, that it has been defended openly,
and its antithesis denounced as, in some mysterious fashion, inimical
to democracy. We owe that change to the liberation of the lower orders
which began with the Civil War. That liberation produced, on one
side, an immense increase in political corruption, and, on the other,
a rise in moral frenzy. All the characteristic ideas of the mob began
to be reflected in public life and legislation. The typical American
public officer, who had been a theorist willing to sacrifice anything,
including his office, to his notions, became a realist willing to
sacrifice anything, including his principles and his honor, to his
job. We have him with us to-day, and he smells worse and worse as year
chases year. Grover Cleveland was perhaps the last lonely survivor
of the old days. He had his faults, God knows, but no one could have
imagined him yielding to the mob in order to make votes. Right or
wrong, he was his own man--and never more surely than when, by popular
standards, he was wrong. In his successor, Dr. Coolidge, we have an
almost perfect specimen of the new order. Coolidge is a professional
trimmer, who has made his living at the art since his early manhood. It
is impossible to imagine him sacrificing his political welfare to his
convictions. He has vanity, but nothing properly describable as dignity
or self-respect. One automatically pictures him doing, in the Cathcart
case, precisely what his subordinate did. He performed many comparable
acts during the stinking progress of the Fall case.
This general decay of honor is bound, plainly enough, to drive all
the decenter sort of men out of public life among us. The process,
indeed, has already gone a long way. I point to Congress. I point to
the Federal judiciary. In both directions one observes an increase
in trimmers and knee-benders and a decrease in independent and
self-respecting men. The bench, in particular, has suffered. The better
sort of judges, torn between their lawyer-like respect for all law
and their inescapable conviction that many of the new laws they are
called upon to enforce are unjust and dishonest, tend to throw off the
ermine and go back to practice. And their places are filled by limber
nonentities selected--and policed--by the Anti-Saloon League.
Until a few years ago the Army and the Navy escaped this general
degradation. Their officers stood apart from the main body of public
job-holders. They held office for life, and they were assumed to be
innocent of politics. Having no need to curry favor with the mob, they
could afford to disdain the common hypocrisies. Inheriting an austere
and exact tradition of professional honor, they were what is called
gentlemen. They did not blab upon one another. They had the fine
tolerance of civilized men. They had dignity. It was as impossible to
imagine a naval officer or an army officer playing the spy for the
Anti-Saloon League as it was to imagine him using a table-napkin as a
handkerchief or getting converted at a Methodist revival. But I fear
those days are past. The pressure from outside, exerted through such
mountebanks as Mr. Secretary Wilbur, becomes too heavy to be borne.
Worse, there is disintegration within, due in part, perhaps, to the
packing of the two Services with civilians from the gutter, but in part
also to changes in the method of selecting candidates for Annapolis
and West Point. Whatever the cause, the effects are already plain. In
a few short years, perhaps, we shall see a major-general in the Army
preaching Fundamentalism in Tennessee, and an admiral in the Navy going
to work for the Anti-Saloon League.
XV. GOLDEN AGE
The rest of us, struggling onward painfully, must wait in patience for
the boons and usufructs of Heaven; Judge Elbert Henry Gary, LL.D.,
chairman of the United States Steel Corporation, has them here and
now. To few men in history, I believe, has it been given to live in a
universe so nearly to their hearts’ desire. Let the learned ex-jurist
look East or West, he will find only scenes to content him. Let him
look North or South, and his eye will be caressed and frankincense will
spray his gills. The emperor and pope of all the Babbitts, he sits at
the center of a Babbitts’ paradise. For him and his like there dawns a
Golden Age, and its hero is good Cal.
I hope I do not exaggerate. No doubt Judge Gary, in the privacy of
his chamber, sweats and fumes against imperfections invisible to
the rest of us. He is a man of imagination, and has, I daresay, a
bold and soaring fancy. He can imagine a Republic even kinder and
more osculatory than this one--that is, to Babbitts. He can even,
perhaps, imagine a President more ineffable than Cal. But here we
shoot into mere human weaknesses--the voluptuous, Freudian day-dreams
of one who, like all of us, has his aberrant, goatish moods. Dr.
John Roach Straton, I suppose, can imagine improvements in the Holy
Scriptures--here a paragraph excised _pro bonos mores_, there a comma
inserted to make sense. I myself have dreamed of a malt liquor better
than Pilsner Bürgerbräu. But I do not sign my name to such inordinate
speculations, and neither does Dr. Straton. Judge Gary, too, holds
his tongue. The rest of us, contemplating him, can only envy him. A
vast nation of 110,000,000 human beings, all of them alike, seems to
be organized to the one end of making him happy. Whatever he wants it
to do, it does. Its laws are framed to his precise taste; its public
conscience approves his partisans and execrates his enemies; its high
officers of state are his excellent friends, and humble and obedient
servants. When he gives a feast, judges and ambassadors leap to grace
it. When he would dine out, he is welcome at the White House. The
newspapers fawn upon him. Labor licks his hand. His frown is dreaded
in the Senate house and on the bench. Altogether, his life is happier
than that of a Broadway actor, and if he is not content then it is only
because contentment is physiologically impossible to _Homo sapiens_.
The United States, I believe, is the first great empire in the history
of the world to ground its whole national philosophy upon business.
There have been, of course, eminent trading nations in the past, but
none ever went so far. Even in Carthage there was a _Junker_ hierarchy
that stood above the merchants; in Hannibal it actually had a Crown
Prince. And even in England, the nation of shopkeepers of Napoleon’s
derision, there has always been an aristocracy (made up mainly of
military freebooters, enterprising adulterers, the issue of the latter,
and, in modern times, shyster lawyers, vaudeville magnates, and the
proprietors of yellow newspapers) that has held its own against the men
of trade, even at the cost of absorbing the more pugnacious of them.
But here in this great Republic of the West the art of trafficking is
king--and Judge Gary is its grand vizier, as Cal is its chief eunuch.
No other human activity brings such great rewards in money and power,
and none is more lavishly honored. The one aim of our jurisprudence is
to safeguard business--to make its risks small and its profits sure.
If the rights of the citizen get in the way, then the rights of the
citizen must be sacrificed. Upon this point our higher courts have
delivered themselves more than once, and in eloquent, ringing terms.
Judge Gary and his friends prefer dry and dismal slaves to those who
are stewed and happy. _Also_, to hell with the Bill of Rights! They
prefer, when there is a strike, to win it rather than lose it. Out,
then, with the pad of blank injunctions! They sweat under criticism,
and shiver under attack. To the hoosegow, constable, with the
Bolsheviks!
All this, of course, was not achieved without a struggle. For years the
Constitution stood in the way--the Constitution and certain national
superstitions--the latter sprung from the blather of the Revolutionary
stump. But all those impediments are now surmounted. The bench gave
Judge Gary to business, and business has reciprocated the favor by
providing sound and sane men for the bench. To-day jurisprudence is
unfettered. When, a year or so ago, the Supreme Court finally got rid
of the Fourth Amendment, that delayed mopping up went almost unnoticed.
As I say, Judge Gary, ought to be a happy man. The sun shines upon him
from all four points of the compass. Congress, well rehearsed, plays
soft jazz for him; bishops bring him his toddy; a straw issues from the
White House and tickles him behind the ear. But never is his happiness
greater, I believe, than when his thoughts turn idly upon the subject
of labor, and he contemplates the state of the union movement in the
Federal Union.
For this state, it is plain, he has the late Sam Gompers to thank--that
great idealist and easy mark. If he sent less than ten hay-wagons of
roses to Sam’s funeral, then he is a niggard, indeed. For Sam got upon
the back of the American labor movement when it was beginning to be
dangerous, and rode it so magnificently that at the end of his life it
was as tame as a tabby cat. It retains that character to-day, and will
continue to do so as long as the Gompersian hierarchy lasts,--that is,
so long as Judge Gary and his friends continue to appoint Sam’s heirs
and assigns to high-sounding committees, and to invite them to gaudy
dinners. A plate of puddle duck and a chance to make a speech--that was
always enough to fetch Sam. And when Sam was fetched, the 4,000,000
members of the American Federation of Labor were also fetched. Where
else in the world is there a great union organization that has so long
and honorable a record as a strike-breaker? Or that is so diligently
devoted to keeping the lower ranks of labor in due subordination? If it
had been conceived and hatched by Judge Gary himself, it could not have
been more nearly perfect. Practically considered, it is not a labor
organization at all; it is simply a balloon mattress interposed between
capital and labor to protect the former from the latter. Gazing upon
it, I daresay, Judge Gary feels a glow flickering along the periphery
of his gizzard, and if he were not a Christian he would permit himself
a guffaw.
I leave the sweetest to the last. The courts might be docile, Congress
might be consecrated to right thought, labor might grovel and the
bench of bishops might applaud, but if there were an anarchist in the
White House it would all go for naught. Imagine, then, Judge Gary’s
joy in contemplating the incomparable Cal! It is almost as if, in New
York, a bootlegger were made king. The man’s merits, in the Babbitt
view, are almost fabulous. He seems, indeed, scarcely like a man at
all, but more like some miraculous visitation or act of God. He is the
ideal made visible, if not audible--perfection put into a cutaway coat
and trotted up and down like a mannequin in a cloak and suit atelier.
Nor was there any long stress of training him--no season of doubt
and misgiving. Nature heaved him forth full-blown, like a new star
shot into the heavens. In him the philosophy of Babbitt comes to its
perfect and transcendental form. Thrift, to him, is the queen of all
the virtues. He respects money in each and every one of its beautiful
forms--pennies, nickels, dimes, dollars, five-dollar bills, and so on
_ad infinitum_. He venerates those who have it. He believes that they
have wisdom. He craves the loan and use of that wisdom. He invites them
to breakfast, and listens to them. The things they revere, he reveres.
The things they long for, he longs to give them.
Judge Gary is an old man--just how old I do not know, for he withholds
the date of his birth from “Who’s Who in America,” along with the
principal suffragettes. He remembers the dreadful days of Roosevelt,
with bombs going off every two hours. He remembers the turmoils
of the Taft administration. He remembers how _difficile_ Woodrow
was--how he had to be wooed, flattered, led by the nose, drenched
with goose-grease. He remembers the crude carnival under the martyr
Harding--Broadway sports, pug managers, small-town Elks at the trough.
And then he thinks of Washington to-day, and sees it bathed in pink
sunshine. There he is ever welcome. There he is _imperator in imperio_.
There is good _Geschäft_. There is the Athens of the new Golden Age.
XVI. EDGAR SALTUS
Forty years ago Edgar Saltus was a shining star in the national
literature, leading the way out of the Egyptian night of Victorian
sentimentality. To-day he survives only as the favorite author of the
late Warren Gamaliel Harding. I can recall, in the circle of Athene,
no more complete collapse. Saltus plunged from the top of the world to
the bottom of the sea. His books, of late, have been reissued, and his
surviving third wife has printed a biography of him. But all his old
following, save for a few romantic die-hards, has vanished.
The causes of the débâcle are certainly not hard to determine. They
were set forth twenty-five years ago by that ingenious man, the late
Percival Pollard, and you will find them in his book, “Their Day in
Court.” Saltus was simply a bright young fellow who succumbed to
his own cleverness. The gaudy glittering phrase enchanted him. He
found early in life that he had a hand for shaping it; he found soon
afterward that it had a high capacity for getting him notice. So he
devoted himself to its concoction--and presently he was lost. His
life after that was simply one long intoxication. He was drunk on
words. Ideas gradually departed from him. Day and night, for years
and years, he held his nozzle against the jug of nouns, adjectives,
verbs, pronouns, prepositions and interjections. Some of his phrases,
of course, were good ones. There were enough of that kind in “Imperial
Purple,” for example, to fascinate the sainted Harding, a voluptuary
in all the arts. But the rest quickly wore out--and with them Saltus
himself wore out. He passed into the shadows, and was forgotten. When
he died, a few years ago, all that remained of him was a vague name.
His wife’s biography is encased in an orange slip-cover which announces
melodramatically that it is “an extraordinary revealing life.” It is,
but I doubt that what it reveals will serve to resuscitate poor Saltus.
The man who emerges from it is simply a silly and hollow trifler--a
mass of puerile pretensions and affectations, vain of his unsound
knowledge and full of sentimentalities. He began life by hawking the
stale ribaldries of Arthur Schopenhauer, already dead twenty years;
he departed to realms of bliss chattering the blowsy nonsense of
theosophy. Mrs. Saltus, in the new and appalling fashion of literary
wives, is extremely frank. Her Edgar was a handsome dog, but extremely
foolish, and even childish. When he was engaged upon his rococo
compositions he had to be protected like a queen bee in childbed. The
slightest sound dissipated his inspiration, and set him to yelling. If
a fish-peddler stopped beneath his window he was done for the day. If
a cat came in and brushed his leg he was thrown into hysterics, and
had to go to bed. His love affairs were highly complex, and apparently
took up a great deal of his time. Early in life, while he was a student
at Heidelberg, he had an affair with a lady of noble birth, and even
ran away with her. The business was quickly broken up, apparently by
the allied sovereigns of Europe. The bride-elect was immured in a
convent, and died there “the year following.” Saltus then came back
to the Republic and married the daughter of a partner in J. P. Morgan
& Company. “She was no small catch,” but the alliance was doomed. The
man was too fascinating to women. His pulchritude charmed them, and
his epigrams finished them. In a few years Mrs. Saltus was suing for
divorce.
There followed a series of morganatic affairs, culminating in a second
marriage. This one also blew up quickly; the bride denounced Saltus as
a liar, and even hinted that he had induced her to marry him by fraud.
But though she soon left his bed and board, she clung resolutely to
her other rights as his wife, and thereafter, for many long years, he
devoted all the time he could spare from his writing to efforts to get
rid of her. He moved from New York to California, in fact, mainly
because the divorce laws on the Coast were easier than in the East. But
they were not easy enough to free him. Finally, after endless waiting,
he got news one day that the party of the second part was dead. He
displayed the correct regrets, but was obviously much relieved.
Meanwhile, Wife No. 3 was at call in the anteroom. She had been there,
in fact, for years. When Saltus first met her she was a school-girl
with her hair down her back, and his attentions to her--he was then
rising forty--naturally outraged her family. But her own heart was
lost, and so the effort to warn him off failed. He followed her, after
that, all over the civilized world. Did she go to London, he was at her
heels on the next steamer. Did she move to Los Angeles, he arrived by
the next train. In the end they were married in Montreal, on a very hot
day and after a pretty lovers’ quarrel.
This lady is the author of the biography with the orange slip-cover.
Facing page 310 there is a portrait of her showing her “sitting at the
table on which her husband wrote his books, burning incense before a
Siamese Buddha, and meditating on a stanza from the Bhagavad-Gita.” She
denies, however, that Saltus took to theosophy under her tutelage. The
actual recruiting officer was a certain Mr. Colville, of Pasadena, who
combined the “enthusiasm of a scholar and the erudition of a sage.”
This Colville introduced Saltus to the theosophical elements, and
later guided his faltering steps. In the end poor old Schopenhauer lost
a customer and the art of epigram a gifted and diligent practitioner.
Saltus passed into senility with his thoughts concentrated powerfully
upon Higher Things.