ACROSS AMERICA NORTH TO SOUTH
Ewart was much surprised by the politeness of Chicago. If he made a
mistake in New York, such as to bring his lighted cigarette into a
car of the overhead railway, he met with such rebukes as _Put that
cigarette out! Put-it-OUT!_ But as the porter put our bags into the
cab at Chicago he cried out to us: "Good luck, boys!" and gave us a
cheery salute. Perhaps we overtipped him. And when we got to Santa Fe
a salesman in a shop selling Ewart a shirt called him "brother"--"This
pattern, brother, is what you want." I explained to my friend that the
lower orders in New York were Lithuanians and the like, who had only
just learned enough English to be impolite in it. He must not judge the
manners of America by them.
We spent a Chicago morning in Marshall Field's and "The Fair," trying
to buy a pair of canvas shoes with rubber soles and brown leather
facings, something Ewart had seen on the boat and fancied. The foreman
of the floor walkers of the huge department store examined his chart,
saw at a glance which salesmen were occupied and which were waiting,
and assigned us to one who was straightway called. That young man
proceeded to try and sell to us, not what Ewart wanted, but what he
had got; brought out box after box of shoes, and even persuaded him
to try on a pair of shoes of an entirely different style. "But what I
mean is a sort of a tennis shoe with leather toe-caps. You know what
I mean," said Ewart. "You want Oxfords," decided the salesman, and
passed him on to another department. Thence we were transferred to a
subdivision of the Athletic department, and then got back to "Shoes."
Here another salesman proceeded to show us all that we had seen before,
assuring us, however, that he had just what we wanted.
After that we spent an hour in that crowded chaotic emporium called
"The Fair" where the procedure was different. A very busy, preoccupied
salesman, tending six or seven anxious bargain-hunting Chicagoans,
assured us he had just the thing, got Ewart with his boots off, gave
him a pair of white tennis shoes, "just to get his size," and left him
stranded for a full quarter of an hour--whilst as it seemed all Chicago
swirled past, gossiping, buying, clamoring, jostling, and in the
midst of this great shop crowds of children went up and down a moving
staircase for fun.
I believe that both in Marshall Field's and "The Fair" shoes of the
kind wanted were in stock, but the salesman's habit was to show just
what he was put in charge of--he had become incapable of the mental
process of imagining what a customer might describe as his need. In
England a shopkeeper has to pay much more attention to individual
wants. If he has not got a certain thing he will get it. Americans buy
much more from what is spread before them than by choice and need.
However, without the shoes, we left "The Fair" for the less crowded
streets, and had lunch in a restaurant on Dearborn. My friend had
ordered roast beef. "The thing to have here is 'hot dog,'" said I.
"No, really? I say, I think I'll change that order. Have you, er, have
you hot dog?"
"Sure," replied the waitress with alacrity, and she brought him back
two large sausages, crisp and burst at one end.
"Some dawgs, I'll say," smiled the girl as she put them before him. He
did not put them away coldly from him. He ate his dogs, and was amused.
He was getting what they call "an angle on America."
"Not bad 'eats,'" said he with a twinkle. "I'll remember that. In
Chicago I ate dog."
One can hardly see Chicago in two or three days. It is a more
important place for studying America than is New York. For it is more
characteristic. The lights of the capitals of Europe all shine in New
York. It is a city of a hundred good-bys. But in Chicago one light
burns and that is the light of America. It is a city of a hundred good
mornings.
But Chicago so much depends on your knowing what it was. The
visitor who sees it for the first time is still likely to pass an
adverse judgment upon it--especially if he wanders in its streets
at random. There is dirt and a humanity that looks like dirt, there
is appalling carelessness and lack of joy in life, rust and refuse
uncounted--but that is not all. Chicago is a city rising to strong
self-consciousness, a city getting under control and improving
steadily. It is no longer the city which Stead saw when he wrote,
_If Christ came to Chicago_, nor is it the city described in Upton
Sinclair's _Jungle_. It is many streets better. It has gone several
blocks West. In Chicago people now talk of the "City Beautiful."
Chicago has been the anvil of fortune, and that merely, the smithy,
the works, the place to which men went to make money, to lift
themselves from a life of rough primitive toil to a life of clean
clothes and ease. There they employed whom they could to help them,
and incidentally helped their helpers often. It is true they exploited
the foreign immigrant and that they did not help him much--because he
was largely helpless. And they attracted great numbers of Negroes and
exploited them and did not help them much. They left the immigrant and
the colored man to live round about their factories amid waste ends of
material. And when that labor itself wore out, it lay around also as
waste-ends--waste-ends of humanity. Hence the vast aggregation of dirt
and poverty in the city.
But the point of view has changed. The people of business are so rich
that America has become intolerant of poverty. Like the Prince of
Monaco, she is determined to abolish the poor. She will not admit new
poor into her country, and those she has she is raising out of the
slough. Every thing and every one is being cleaned up. Chicago is to
become all middle class, and during the ten years since I saw it first
it has made enormous strides in that direction.
Michigan Avenue and the Magnolia Walk, the long parklike water-front,
were very gratifying to our eyes after the clamor and bang of State
Street and Dearborn, where there are still many at the anvil of
fortune. "In a hundred years," I hazarded, "the whole city may have
become a park."
Kansas City, at which we stopped next, is of course far less
problematical in aspect than Chicago. It is smaller. It grew up in a
more prosperous era. It took advantage of all the new fixtures and
technical appliances of a later stage. It is, therefore, cleaner and
not so much littered with discarded material. The stock yards and
tanning factories, however, charge the air heavily upon occasion with
an odor which should surely be intolerable. No one could live for
pleasure in a city of infected air. It must, therefore, be a city of
business, money-making, and that only, for most people. Yet it is
a fine city on the high bank of the Kansas River, overlooking rich
farmland. It is the fringe of the West, and cowboys with their broad
hats and sunburnt faces are not infrequent on its crowded streets.
There is an air of expectancy, as if the gates of industrialism and
bondage stood open and the American nation was free to pour out on to
the prairies and the wild places of the Rockies.
It much astonished Ewart that whilst passing through the States of
Kansas and Iowa we could not buy cigarettes. There no one smoked, and
it appeared no one wanted to. Cigarette smoking was regarded as a vice
and a shame.
"Betting has also been abolished, and so has immorality," observed a
Kansan with a smile.
"Free speech also," said I. And I had him there, for America was then
still excited by the arrest of William Allen White at Emporia, Kansas,
for saying he was partly in favor of a railroad strike.
Intolerance cuts into vice, but sometimes takes a slice of virtue too,
even in Kansas. I believe, however, that the Kansan is nearest to being
an average normal American. He is the representative American.
South of Kansas the people are mostly Southerners; West of it they are
certainly Western; North of it and East of it they are certainly Middle
West. But Kansas itself is a New England seed in Middle Western soil.
"You are the people who have taken away our wine," say Easterners,
reproachfully.
The Kansans smile.
"We are the people!" they say, and are not at all ashamed.
Ewart and I traveled across Kansas and its many farms, and the vague
thought of Quivira crossed my mind. This was the country in which
Coronado and his followers in 1541 gave up their quest of gold, being
brought to Wichita by an Indian who wished to lead them to their doom.
In this country, the Indian said, lay the Kingdom of Quivira, where
the King and his princes wore golden armor. And he brought them to a
camp of nomads near the great bend of the Arkansas River, and there
was naught there but the invisible possibility of what is now Kansas.
The enraged Spaniards, therefore, strangled the Indian and turned their
faces southward once more toward Cibola and the deserts in New Spain.
But golden Quivira is golden to-day, golden with corn, and Kansas is
the richest State in the Union; a State literally without poor, a State
of empty prisons, without doss-houses, without out-door relief. Kansas
of to-day wears golden armor against Fate and has proved the Indian to
be right.
"Ho for Kansas, land that restores us!" as Lindsay cried. And then,
farewell. The train on its iron tracks rolls onward, following its
predecessor, followed inevitably by its successor, sootily, dustily,
heavily, to the steeps of Colorado; out of the green country up to the
gray and bare, up to the hills and broken cliffs, to the pasture lands
and the cowboys. The pipe smokers of Colorado fill the black-leather
section of the ordinary cars, the smoking section; in come horse-faced
men who have lived with horses so much that their features have caught
a reflection of horses' features, men with sun-dried complexions and
bodies; not so witty as the people of the East, more humorous though,
and full of a new kind of talk. All the linen collars have gone, and
with them the comparative stiffness of business life. Not that there
are not collars on the train. God forbid! There are Pullman cars
lagging on to us somewhere, and respectability sitting perched on
plush, as everywhere else. But in the smoking section of the ordinary
car is the real life of the country.
Ewart would have liked to dismount at Trinidad, Colorado, and at Dodge
City, but our tickets were nearly out of date. So we let ourselves be
hoisted on to the New Mexican plateau with its wide stretches of sand
dotted with dwarf pines, with its dried-up river channels, its mud
heads of mountains and strange bluffs, its Mexicans and Indians. Next
day we were at Santa Fe.