he comes at last, will direct his first and hardest efforts to cutting
off New York, and then make some attempt to keep it detached afterward.
This, in fact, is an essential part of the new higher strategy, which
is based upon economic considerations, as the old strategy was based
upon dynastic considerations. In the Middle Ages, the object of war
was to capture and hamstring a king; at present it is to dismember a
great state, and so make it impotent. The Germans, had they won, would
have broken up the British Empire, and probably detached important
territories from France, Italy and Russia, beside gobbling Belgium _in
toto_. The French, tantalized by a precarious and incomplete victory,
attempted to break up Germany, as they broke up Austria. The chances
are that an enemy capable of taking and holding New York would never
give it back wholly--that is, would never consent to its restoration to
the Union on the old terms. What would be proposed, I venture, would
be its conversion into a sort of free state--a new Dantzig, perhaps
functioning, as now, as the financial and commercial capital of the
country, but nevertheless lying outside the bounds politically. This
would solve the problem of the city’s subsistence, and still enable
the conqueror to keep his hold upon it. It is my belief that the New
Yorkers, after the first blush of horror, would agree to the new
arrangement and even welcome it. Their patriotism, as things stand, is
next to nothing. I have never heard, indeed, of a single honest patriot
in the whole town; every last man who even pretends to kiss the flag
is simply a swindler with something to sell. This indifference to the
great heart-throbs of the hinterland is not to be dismissed as mere
criminality; it is founded upon the plain and harsh fact that New York
is alien to the rest of the country, not only in blood and tastes,
but also in fundamental interests--that the sort of life that New
Yorkers lead differs radically from the sort of life that the rest of
the American people lead, and that their deepest instincts vary with
it. The city, in truth, already constitutes an independent free state
in all save the name. The ordinary American law does not run there,
save when it has been specifically ratified, and the ordinary American
_mores_ are quite unknown there. What passes as virtue in Kansas is
regarded as intolerable vice in New York, and _vice versa_. The town is
already powerful enough to swing the whole country when it wants to,
as it did on the war issue in 1917, but the country is quite impotent
to swing the town. Every great wave of popular passion that rolls up
on the prairies is dashed to spray when it strikes the hard rocks of
Manhattan.
As a free state, licensed to prey upon the hinterland but unharassed
by its Crô-Magnon prejudices and delusions, New York would probably
rise to heights of very genuine greatness, and perhaps become the most
splendid city known to history. For one thing, it would be able, once
it had cut the painter, to erect barriers and conditions around the
privilege of citizenship, and so save itself from the double flood
that now swamps it--first, of broken-down peasants from Europe, and
secondly and more important, of fugitive rogues from all the land
West and South of the Hudson. Citizenship in New York is now worth no
more than citizenship in Arkansas, for it is open to any applicant
from the marshes of Bessarabia, and, still worse, to any applicant
from Arkansas. The great city-states of history have been far more
fastidious. Venice, Antwerp, London, the Hansa towns, Carthage, Tyre,
Cnossus, Alexandria--they were all very sniffish. Rome began to wobble
when the Roman franchise was extended to immigrants from the Italian
hill country, _i. e._, the Arkansas of that time. The Hansa towns,
under the democracy that has been forced upon them, are rapidly sinking
to the level of Chicago and Philadelphia. New York, free to put an
end to this invasion, and to drive out thousands of the gorillas who
now infest it--more, free from the eternal blackmail of laws made at
Albany and the Methodist tyranny of laws made at Washington--could face
the future with resolution and security, and in the course of a few
generations it might conceivably become genuinely civilized. It would
still stand as toll-taker on the chief highway of American commerce; it
would still remain the premier banker and usurer of the Republic. But
it would be loosed from the bonds which now tend so strenuously to drag
it down to the level of the rest of the country. Free at last, it could
cease to be the auction-room and bawdy-house that it is now, and so
devote its brains and energy to the building up of a civilization.
IX. MEDITATIONS IN THE METHODIST DESERT
1
_The New Galahad_
My agents in attendance upon the so-called moving pictures tell me that
persons who frequent such shows begin to tire of Western films--that
they are no longer roused to clapper-clawing by the spectacle of
actors in patent-leather jack-boots murdering Indians and Mexicans.
Several of the astute Ashkenazim in charge of the movie industry,
noting that slackening of taste, have sought to find a new hero to
replace the scout and cowboy, but so far without success. The children
of today, young and old, seem to take no interest in pirates, nor are
they stirred by train-robbers, safe-blowers and other such illicit
adventurers. It can’t be that the movie censorship is to blame, for
the same thing is visible in the field of _belles lettres_. The dime
novel, once so prosperous, is practically dead. The great deeds of
the James brothers, known to every literate boy in my youth, are now
forgotten. And so are the great deeds of Nick Carter and Old Sleuth:
the detective has fallen with his prey.
What is needed, obviously, is a new hero for the infantry of the land,
for if one is not quickly supplied there is some danger that the boys
will begin admiring Y. M. C. A. secretaries, crooked members of the
Cabinet and lecturers on sex hygiene. In this emergency I nominate the
bootlegger--not, of course, the abject scoundrel who peddles bogus
Scotch in clubs and office buildings, but the dashing, romantic,
defiant fellow who brings the stuff up from the Spanish Main. He is,
indeed, almost an ideal hero. He is the true heir, not only of the
old-time Indian fighters and train-robbers, but also of the tough and
barnacled deep-water sailors, now no more. He faces the perils of the
high seas in a puny shallop, and navigates the worst coast in the world
in contempt of wind and storm. Think of him lying out there on wild
nights in Winter, with the waves piling mountain-high and the gale
standing his crazy little craft on her beam! Think of him creeping
in in his motor-boat on Christmas Eve, risking his life that the
greatest of Christian festivals may be celebrated in a Christian and
respectable manner! Think of him soaked and freezing, facing his exile
and its hardships uncomplainingly, saving his money that his old mother
may escape the poor-farm, that his wife may have her operation for
gall-stones, that his little children may be decently fed and clad,
and go to school regularly, and learn the principles of Americanism!
This brave lad is not only the heir of Jesse James and Ned Buntline;
he is also the heir of John Hancock and of all the other heroes who
throttled the accursed Hun in 1776. All the most gallant among them
were smugglers, and in their fragile craft they brought in, not only
rum, but also liberty. The Revolution was not only against the person
of the Potsdam tyrant, George III; it was also, and especially, against
harsh and intolerable laws--the worst of them the abhorrent Stamp
Act. But was the Stamp Act worse than Prohibition? I leave it to any
fair man. Prohibition, in fact, is a hundred times as foul, false,
oppressive and tyrannical. If the Stamp Act was worth a Revolution, the
Prohibition is worth a massacre and an earthquake. Well, it has already
bred its Hancocks, and soon or late, no doubt, it will breed its Molly
Pitchers, Paul Reveres and Mad Anthony Waynes. Liberty, driven from
the land by the Methodist White Terror, has been given a refuge by
the hardy boys of the Rum Fleet. In their bleak and lonely exile they
cherish her and keep her alive. Some day, let us hope, they will storm
the coast, slit the gullets of her enemies, and restore her to her
dominion. The lubbers of the land have limber necks; their blood runs
pale and yellow. But on the roaring deep there are still men who are
colossally he, and when the bugle calls they will not fail.
2
_Optimist vs. Optimist_
If these heroes _do_ fail, alas, alas, then all will be lost, including
honor. For there is not the slightest sign of revolt among the craven
hordes who cling to the land, ignominiously dependent for their very
existence as Christians upon the gallant fellows beyond the twelve-mile
limit. They simply go on hoping against hope. Each successive Congress
is to relieve them, rescue them, restore the liberties bequeathed to
them by the Fathers. And each successive Congress does nothing of the
kind. Nor, I believe, will any one coming hereafter. Congress is made
up eternally of petty scoundrels, pusillanimous poltroons, highly
vulnerable and cowardly men: they will never risk provoking the full
fire of the Anti-Saloon League. The notion that such degraded fellows
will ever rise up and put down Prohibition, so fondly cherished by
the wets, is thus a snare and a mocking, and so is the notion that
they will presently find a way to enforce it, cherished by the drys.
Optimist eat optimist! As for me, I can find no reason whatever for
believing that, within the lifetime of men now living, the voluptuous
consumption of alcohol will be countenanced by law in the Republic, and
neither do I see any reason for believing that it will ever be stopped,
nor, indeed, any reason for believing that any serious effort will be
made to stop it.
It is commonly argued by the more impatient and worthy opponents of the
Methodist millennium that the Eighteenth Amendment was slipped through
Congress and the State legislatures against the wishes of the majority
of American freemen--that the thing was accomplished by a sort of
trick, partly political and partly magical. It is further argued that,
had the soldiers who were then abroad, fighting for human liberty,
been at home and voting, they would have piled up such majorities for
wet candidates that both Houses of Congress would have been made proof
against the Anti-Saloon League. It seems to me that both contentions
are unsound. The Eighteenth Amendment, when it was passed, actually had
a majority behind it, and I incline to think that that majority was a
very substantial one. What made it so large was simply the war hysteria
of the time. _Homo boobiens_ was scientifically rowelled and run amok
with the news that all the German brewers of the country were against
the amendment; he observed himself that all German sympathizers,
whether actual Germans or not, were bitter opponents of it. His nights
made dreadful by dreams of German spies, he was willing to do anything
to put them down, and one of the things he was willing to do was to
swallow Prohibition. When he recovered from his terror, it was too
late; the first article of the Methodist Book of Discipline had been
read into the Constitution, and there it remains today, an unpleasant
fly in imperishable amber. The soldiers, had they been at home, would
have gone the way of their lay brothers. They were, if anything, even
more in terror of Germans than the latter, and even more eager to
floor them and so get rid of them. In every camp and cantonment Y. M.
C. A. secretaries addressed the conscripts daily, instructing them in
the moral nature of the crusade they were engaged in. The effects are
visible today in the familiar swineries of the American Legion; its
members are still down with the war psychosis. Moreover, it is not
to be forgotten that large numbers of soldiers could not have voted,
even if they had been at home. For example, those who were minors.
Again, the Southern Negroes. Yet again, the enormous number of aliens
who were rushed to the trenches by the draft boards to relieve native
patriots--in New York City alone, fully 25,000, most of them Russian
Jews. Finally, it is to be recalled that there was no plebiscite on
Prohibition--that the men who put it into the Constitution were all
safely in office at the time the test suddenly confronted them.
But what of the state of public opinion today? Isn’t it a fact that
hundreds of thousands of persons who were in favor of Prohibition in
1919 are now so disgusted by its colossal failure that they have turned
violently against it? I doubt it. I know of no such person. I know of a
great many persons who, though they voted for Prohibition when they had
the chance, or, at all events, favored it, now guzzle like actors or
policemen, but I believe that substantially all of them, if the thing
were put up to them tomorrow, would be for it again. Whoever believes
that they have changed heart is a very poor student of the Puritan
psyche. What a Puritan advocates and what he does have no necessary
connection. The late Anthony Comstock was a diligent collector of
dirty books, and used to entertain favored callers by exhibiting his
worst specimens to them. Nevertheless, Comstock was honestly in favor
of suppressing such books, and would have gone to the extreme length
of giving up his own recreation if he had ever been convinced that it
would have helped the cause. To the Puritan, indeed, moral obligation
is something quite outside personal conduct, and has very little
contact with it. He may be, in private, an extremely gross and porcine
fellow, and he frequently is, but that fact doesn’t diminish his
veneration for his ethical ideal in the slightest. Brought to the mark,
he always sticks to that ideal, however absurdly his conduct clashes
with it. As everyone knows, he is rather more prone than most other men
to commit fornication, particularly in its more sordid and degrading
forms; nevertheless, it is impossible to imagine him advocating any
relaxation of the prevailing sexual taboos, however beneficial it would
be. Again, as everyone also knows, he is very apt, when he drinks at
all, to make a hog of himself, for the amiable drinking customs of
civilized men are beyond him; nevertheless, it is impossible to imagine
him admitting specifically that any man has a right to drink at all.
This last fact explains something that often puzzles foreign observers:
the relative smallness and impotence of anti-Prohibition organizations
in America, despite the great amount of gabbling against Prohibition
that goes on. It is due to the Puritan’s fear of appearing on the side
of the devil. He will drink in private, but he will not defend the
practise in public.
It thus seems to me that so long as Puritanism remains the dominant
philosophy in America--and certainly it shows no sign of relaxing its
hold upon the low-caste Anglo-Saxon majority--it will be quite hopeless
to look for an abandonment of Prohibition, or even for any relaxation
of its extravagant and probably unconstitutional excesses. But for
precisely the same reason it seems to me to be very unlikely that
Prohibition will ever be enforced, or, indeed, that any honest effort
will ever be made to enforce it. For the Puritan’s enthusiasm for the
moral law is always grounded, at least in large part, upon a keen
realization that it is, after all, only an ideal--that it may be evaded
whenever the temptation grows strong enough--that he himself may evade
it, readily and safely. Like every other man, he likes to kick up now
and then, and forget his holiest principles. He achieves this kicking
up by sinning. When drinking was perfectly lawful, he got no pleasure
out of it and so tried to put it down, but now that it is against
the law he delights in it, and so long as he delights in it he will
keep on doing it. If the Seventh Commandment were repealed tomorrow,
military marriages would decrease 95 per cent. in rural America, and
the great hotels at Atlantic City would be given over to the bats and
owls. Let us, therefore, neither delude ourselves nor get into sweats
of Puritan-like fear. Prohibition officers will continue to beat the
land for stills and bribes until you and I are long gone and forgotten,
and bootleggers will continue to elude them. No genuinely wet President
will be elected, save by accident, in our time, and no President will
ever be able to enforce Prohibition. Respect for the Constitution will
be heard of in every campaign, and then it will be forgotten for four
years more. It will give candidates something to talk about, but it
will not give the rest of us anything to worry about.
3
_Caveat for the Defense_
The wets, I often think, are worse frauds than the drys. For example,
consider their great current eagerness to assure everyone that they
are absolutely against the saloon--that they would not revive it for
an instant, even if they could. All of their spokesmen stop short
dramatically after demanding the restoration of light wines and beer;
they are virtuously opposed, it would appear, to all forms of hard
liquor, as they are opposed to the saloon. In this position I can
detect nothing respectable. Either the advocates of it are hypocrites
trying to fool the Prohibitionists with pious protestations, or
they have been themselves corrupted by Methodist superstitions. The
plain fact is, of course, that the saloon, at its worst, was a great
deal better than any of the substitutes that have grown up under
Prohibition--nay, that it was a great deal better than the ideal
substitutes imagined by the Prohibitionists: for example, the Y. M.
C. A. And it must be equally plain that light wines and beer would
not always satisfy the yearning of the normal man for alcoholic
refreshment--that there are times when his system, if he is sound in
body, craves far stronger stuff. To say that such a normal man, at five
o’clock in the afternoon, wants to drink a _Humpen_ of beer, or that,
on a cold Winter morning, his inner urge would be met by half a bottle
of Ponet Canet is to say something so absurd that the mere statement
of it is sufficient refutation. The fact is, of course, that the last
chance to exile hard liquors for light wines and beer went glimmering
when the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified. In 1918, perhaps, the
scheme had a certain plausibility, for the American consumption of
spirits had been declining for years, and very good beer, imported from
Germany and Bohemia, was everywhere obtainable at low prices, and the
use of wine, chiefly because of the influence of Italian restaurants
and the propaganda of the California vine-growers, was rapidly
increasing. But the years of Prohibition have reconverted Americans
into a nation of whiskey and gin drinkers, as they were before the
Germans brought in lager beer in the fifties of the last century. Light
wines and beer, I believe, would not satisfy them now, even at meals;
there would be just as much bootlegging under a modified Volstead Act
as there is today. Prohibition has restored the hard guzzling of Daniel
Webster’s day.
As for the saloon, the case against it, as voiced by both
Prohibitionists and anti-Prohibitionists, is chiefly based upon a
recollection of what the thing was at its lowest and worst, which is
just as sensible as arguing against Christianity on the ground that a
certain minority of the rev. clergy are notorious swine. The utterly
vicious saloons were always relatively rare, even along the waterfront,
and an honest execution of the laws in force before Prohibition would
have exterminated them in ten days. Their existence was a proof, not
that the saloon itself was inherently evil, but simply that it could
be made evil by corrupt government. To blame it for that fact would
be like blaming the Constitution for the fact that Federal judges
habitually violate it. The normal saloon, I am convinced, was not an
evil influence in its vicinage, but a good one. It not only enabled
the poor man to effect that occasional escape from wife and children
which every man must make if he would remain sane; it also threw him
into a society palpably better than that of his home or his workshop,
and accustomed him to refinements which unquestionably improved him.
The conversation of a precinct leader or of a brewery collector would
make but little impression, I daresay, in the Century Club, on the
Harvard campus or in the cloakrooms of the United States Senate, but in
the average saloon of a poor neighborhood it took on an unmistakable
dignity and authority. This collector (or _Todsaufer_, as he was
called) had fresh news; he was a man of comparatively large affairs; he
had an air about him of the great world; most important of all, he was
professionally communicative and affable. The influence of such a man
upon the customers of the place, all of whom were bidden to drink and
permitted to converse with him, was necessarily for the good. He was,
in every sense comprehensible to them, a better man than they were. He
had the use of more money; he dressed better; he knew more; he couched
his ideas in subtler and more graceful terms; he was better bathed and
had better table manners. The effect of his visits, though perhaps not
as massive, was comparable to the effect that would have been worked by
visits by, say, Bishop Manning or Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler. In his
presence discussion took on a higher tone, and he left behind him, in
many a simple heart, an aspiration toward nobler things.
But it was not only the _Todsaufer_ who was a missionary of light and a
pattern of the amenities; so also was the saloon itself. It represented
the only concept of beauty and dignity that ever entered into the lives
of many of its customers. Surrounded all day by the inconceivable
hideousness of the American workshop, and confronted on their return
from work by the depressing ugliness of homes outfitted out of
department-stores and on the instalment plan, with slatternly women and
filthy children as the fauna of the scene, they found themselves, in
the saloon, in a markedly superior milieu. Here some regard was given
to æsthetics. Here was relatively pretentious architecture. Here were
polished hardwoods, resplendent mirrors, comfortable chairs, glittering
glassware and metals, innumerable small luxuries. Here, above all, was
an attempt at genuine cleanliness. The poor saloons of the by-streets
were not to be compared, of course, to the superb drinking-rooms of
the great hotels, but they were at least much cleaner than any of
the homes or factories surrounding them, and they were at least more
beautiful than the adjacent livery-stables, cigar-stores, barber-shops
and Methodist Little Bethels. Furthermore, they set forth an example
of life upon a more urbane and charming scale. Men had to be more
polite in saloons than they were at home; if they were not, they ran
risks of colliding with the fists of their fellow patrons and with the
bartender’s Excaliburs, the bung-starter and ice-pick. The braggart and
bully here met his quick doom; the unsocial fellow felt the weight of
public disapproval; the ignoramus learned the bitter taste of sniffs
and sneers. Life was more spacious spiritually and more luxurious
physically. Instead of the nicked chinaware of his home the customer
encountered shining glass; instead of spitting out of the window or
on the floor he discharged himself into magnificent brass spittoons
or into the brook that ran under the bar-rail; instead of the ghastly
fried beefsteaks and leathery delicatessen of his wife’s cuisine,
he ate appetizing herring, delicate _Wienerwürste_, well-devised
_Kartoffelsalat_, celery, olives, and even such exotic titbits as
_Blutwurst_, _Pumpernickel_, _Bohnensalat_ and caviare.
To argue that such luxuries and amenities had no effect is to argue
utter nonsense. I believe fully that the rise of the latter-day saloon
(a product of the financing of saloonkeepers by wealthy brewers,
so much denounced by superficial sociologists) had a very benign
effect upon American manners. It purged the city workmen of their old
boorishness and pugnacity; it taught them the difference between mere
fodder and civilized food; it shamed them into a certain cleanliness;
it gave them some dim comprehension of design and ornamentation. In
more than one American city the influence of the saloon is visible
today in ecclesiastical architecture, and everywhere it is visible
in theatre architecture. I name one thing specifically: the use of
polished hardwoods. The first parquetry ever seen in America was
in saloons. And so was the first tile-work. And so was the first
plate-glass. Where the saloon reached its highest development there
American life became richest and most expansive. The clatter against
it is ignorant, unfair, philistine and disingenuous.
4
_Portrait of an Ideal World_