THE CITY OF SWAMP ROOT
Binghamton—"Bimington," as Franklin confusedly called it in trying to
ask the way of someone—now dawned swiftly upon us. I wouldn’t devote a
line to those amazingly commercial towns and cities of America which are
so numerous if the very commercial life of the average American weren’t
so interesting to me. If anyone should ask me “What’s in Binghamton?” I
should confess to a sense of confusion, as if he were expecting me to
refer to something artistic or connected in any way with the world of
high thought. But then, what’s in Leeds or Sheffield or Nottingham, or
in Stettin or Hamburg or Bremen? Nothing save people, and people are
always interesting, when you get enough of them.
When we arrived in Binghamton there was a parade, and a gala holiday
atmosphere seemed everywhere prevailing. Flags were out, banners were
strung across the roadway; in every street were rumbling, large
flag-bedecked autotrucks and vehicles of various descriptions loaded
with girls and boys in white (principally girls) and frequently labeled
“Boost Johnson City.”
“What in the world is Johnson City, do you suppose?” I asked of
Franklin. “Are they going to change the name of Binghamton to Johnson
City?”
Speed was interested in the crowds. “Gee, this is a swell town for
girls,” he commented; but after we had alighted and walked about among
them for a time, they did not seem so attractive to me. But the place
had a real if somewhat staccato air of gayety.
“Where is Johnson City?” I asked of a drug clerk of whom we were buying
a sundae.
“Oh, it’s a town out here—a suburb that used to be called
Leicestershire. They’re renaming it after a man out there—R. G.
Johnson.”
“Why?”
“Oh, well, he’s made a big success of a shoe business out there that
employs two thousand people and he’s given money for different things.”
“So they’re naming the town after him?”
“Yes. He’s a pretty good fellow, I guess. They say he is.”
Not knowing anything of Mr. Johnson, good, bad, or indifferent, I agreed
with myself to suspend judgment. A man who can build up a shoe
manufacturing business that will employ two thousand people and get the
residents of a fair-sized city or town to rename it after him is doing
pretty well, I think. He couldn’t be a Dick Turpin or a Jesse James; not
openly, at least. People don’t rename towns after Dick Turpins.
But Binghamton soon interested me from another point of view, for
stepping out of this store I saw a great red, eight or nine story
structure labeled the Kilmer Building, and then I realized I was looking
at the home of “Swamp Root,” one of those amazing cure-all remedies
which arise, shine, make a fortune for some clever compounder and
advertiser, and then after a period disappear. Think of Hood’s
Sarsaparilla, Ayer’s Sarsaparilla, Peruna, Omega Oil, Lydia E. Pinkham’s
Vegetable Compound! American inventions, each and all, purchased by
millions. Why don’t the historians tell us of the cure-alls of Greece
and Rome and Egypt and Babylon? There must have been some.
Looking at Dr. Kilmer’s Swamp Root Building reminded me of a winter
spent in a mountain town in West Virginia. It had a large and prosperous
drug store, where one night I happened to be loafing for a little while,
to take shelter from the snow that was falling heavily. Presently there
entered an old, decrepit negro woman who hobbled up to the counter, and
fumbling under her black shawl, produced a crumpled dollar bill.
“I want a bottle of Swamp Root,” she said.
“I’ll tell you how it is, mammy,” said the clerk, a dapper country beau,
with a most oily and ingratiating manner. “If you want to take six
bottles it’s only five dollars. Six bottles make a complete cure. If you
take the whole six now, you’ve got ’em. Then you’ve got the complete
cure.”
The old woman hesitated. She was evidently as near the grave with any
remedy as without one.
“All right,” she said, after a moment’s pause.
So the clerk wrapped six bottles into a large, heavy parcel, took the
extra bills which she produced and rang them up in his cash register.
And meanwhile she gathered her cure under her shawl, and hobbled forth,
smiling serenely. It depressed me at the time, but it was none of my
business.
Now as I looked at this large building, I wondered how many other
hobbling mammies had contributed to its bricks and plate glass—and why.
There was another large building, occupied by a concern called the Ansco
Company, which seemed to arouse the liveliest interest in Franklin. He
had at some previous time been greatly interested in cameras and
happened to know that a very large camera company, situated somewhere in
America, had once stolen from this selfsame Ansco Company some secret
process relating to the manufacture of a flexible film and had proceeded
therewith to make so many millions that the user of the stolen process
eventually became one of the richest men in America, one of our captains
of great industries.
But the owners of the Ansco Company were dissatisfied. Like the citizens
in the ancient tale who are robbed and cry “Stop thief!” they sued and
sued and sued in the courts. First they sued in a circuit court, then in
a state court of appeals, then in a federal court and then before the
United States Supreme Court. There were countless lawyers and bags and
bags of evidence: reversals, new trials, stays, and errors in judgment,
until finally, by some curious turn of events, the United States Supreme
Court decided that the process invented by the Ansco Company really did
belong to said Ansco Company and that all other users of the process
were interlopers and would have to repay to said Ansco Company all they
had ever stolen and more—a royalty on every single camera they had ever
sold. So the Ansco Company, like the virtuous but persecuted youth or
girl in the fairy tale, was able to collect the millions of which it had
been defrauded and live happily ever afterwards.
Leaving Binghamton, we went out along the beautiful Susquehanna, which
here in the heart of the city had been parked for a little way, and saw
all the fine houses of all the very wealthy people of Binghamton. Then
we drove along a street crowded with more and more beautiful homes, all
fresh and airy with flowers and lawns and awnings, and at last we came
to Johnson City, or Leicestershire as it once was. Here were the remains
of a most tremendous American celebration—flags and buntings and signs
and a merry-go-round. In front of a new and very handsome Catholic
Church which was just building hung a large banner reading “The noblest
Roman of them all—R. G. Johnson”—a flare of enthusiasm which I take it
must have had some very solid substance behind it. Down in a hollow, was
a very, very, very large red factory with its countless windows and
great towering stacks and a holiday atmosphere about it, and all around
it were houses and houses and houses, all new and all very much alike.
You could see that Mr. Johnson and his factory and his protégés had
grown exceedingly fast. And in the streets still were wagons with
bunting on them and people in them, and we could see that there had just
been a procession, with soldiers and boy scouts and girls—but alas, we
had missed it.
[Illustration: FLORENCE AND THE ARNO, AT OWEGO]
“Well,” I said to Franklin, “now you see how it is. Here is the reward
of virtue. A man builds a great business and treats his employés fairly
and everybody loves him. Isn’t that so?”
Franklin merely looked at me. He has a way of just contemplating you, at
times—noncommittally.
It was soon after leaving Binghamton that we encountered the first of a
series of socalled “detours,” occurring at intervals all through the
states of New York, Ohio and Indiana, and which we later came to
conclude were the invention of the devil himself. Apparently traffic on
the roads of the states has increased so much of late that it has
necessitated the repairing of former “made” roads and the conversion of
old routes of clay into macadam or vitrified brick. Here in western New
York (for we left Pennsylvania at Halstead for awhile) they were all
macadam, and in many places the state roads socalled (roads paid for by
the money of the state and not of the county) were invariably supposed
to be the best. All strolling villagers and rurals would tell you so. As
a matter of fact, as we soon found for ourselves, they were nearly
always the worst, for they hummed with a dusty, whitey traffic, which
soon succeeded in wearing holes in them of a size anywhere from that of
a dollar to that of a washtub or vat. Traveling at a rate of much more
than ten miles an hour over these hollows and depressions was almost
unendurable. Sometimes local motorists and farmers in a spirit of
despair had cut out a new road in the common clay, while a few feet
higher up lay the supposedly model “state road,” entirely unused. At any
rate, wherever was the best and shortest road, there were repairs most
likely to be taking place, and this meant a wide circle of anywhere from
two or three to nine miles. A wretched series of turns and twists
calculated to try your spirit and temper to the breaking point.
“Detours! Detours! Detours!” I suddenly exclaimed at one place in
western Ohio. “I wish to heaven we could find some part of this state
which wasn’t full of detours.” And Speed would remark: “Another damn
detour! Well, what do you think of that? I’d like to have a picture of
this one—I would!”
This, however, being the first we encountered, did not seem so bad. We
jounced and bounced around it and eventually regained the main road,
spinning on to Owego, some fifteen or twenty miles away.
Day was beginning to draw to a close. The wane of our afternoons was
invariably indicated these August days by a little stir of cool air
coming from somewhere—perhaps hollows and groves—and seeming to have a
touch of dew and damp in it. Spirals of gnats appeared spinning in the
air, following us a little way and then being left behind or overtaken
and held flat against our coats and caps. I was always brushing off
gnats at this hour. We were still in that same Susquehanna Valley I have
been describing, rolling on between hills anywhere from eight hundred to
a thousand feet high and seeing the long shadows of them stretch out and
cover the valley. Wherever the sun struck the river it was now golden—a
bright, lustreful gold—and the hills seemed dotted with cattle, some
with bells that tinkled. Always at this time evening smokes began to
curl up from chimneys and the labor of the day seemed to be ending in a
pastoral of delight.
“Oh, Franklin,” I once exclaimed, “this is the ideal hour. Can you draw
me this?”
At one point he was prompted to make a sketch. At another I wanted to
stop and contemplate a beautiful bend in the river. Soon Owego appeared,
a town say of about five thousand, nestling down by the waterside amid a
great growth of elms, and showing every element of wealth and placid
comfort. A group of homes along the Susquehanna, their backs perched out
over it, reminded us of the houses at Florence on the Arno and Franklin
had to make a sketch of these. Then we entered the town over a long,
shaky iron bridge and rejoiced to see one of the prettiest cities we had
yet found.
Curiously, I was most definitely moved by Owego. There is something
about the old fashioned, comfortable American town at its best—the town
where moderate wealth and religion and a certain social tradition
hold—which is at once pleasing and yet comfortable—a gratifying and yet
almost disturbingly exclusive state of affairs. At least as far as I am
concerned, such places and people are antipodal to anything that I could
ever again think, believe or feel. From contemplating most of the small
towns with which I have come in contact and the little streets of the
cities as contrasted with the great, I have come to dread the
conventional point of view. The small mind of the townsmen is antipolar
to that of the larger, more sophisticated wisdom of the city. It may be
that the still pools and backwaters of communal life as represented by
these places is necessary to the preservation of the state and society.
I do not know. Certainly the larger visioned must have something to
direct and the small towns and little cities seem to provide them. They
are in the main fecundating centres—regions where men and women are
grown for more labor of the same kind. The churches and moral theorists
and the principle of self preservation, which in the lowly and dull
works out into the rule of “live and let live,” provide the rules of
their existence. They do not gain a real insight into the fact that they
never practise what they believe or that merely living, as man is
compelled to live, he cannot interpret his life in the terms of the
religionist or the moral enthusiast. Men are animals with dreams of
something superior to animality, but the small town soul—or the little
soul anywhere—never gets this straight. These are the places in which
the churches flourish. Here is where your theologically schooled
numskull thrives, like the weed that he is. Here is where the ordinary
family with a little tradition puts an inordinate value on that
tradition. All the million and one notions that have been generated to
explain the universe here float about in a nebulous mist and create a
dream world of error, a miasmatic swamp mist above which these people
never rise. I never was in such a place for any period of time without
feeling cabined, cribbed, confined, intellectually if not emotionally.
Speed went around the corner to look for a garage and Franklin departed
in another direction for a bag of popcorn. Left alone, I contemplated a
saloon which stood next door and on the window of which was pasted in
gold glass letters “B. B. Delano.” Thirsting for a glass of beer, I
entered, and inside I found the customary small town saloon atmosphere,
only this room was very large and clean and rather vacant. There was a
smell of whiskey in the cask, a good smell, and a number of citizens
drinking beer. A solemn looking bartender, who was exceptionally bald,
was waiting on them. Some bits of cheese showed dolefully under a
screen. I ordered a beer and gazed ruefully about. I was really not
here, but back in Warsaw, Indiana, in 1886.
And in here was Mr. B. B. Delano himself, a small, dapper, rusty, red
faced man, who, though only moderately intelligent, was pompous to the
verge of bursting, as befits a small man who has made a moderate success
in life. Yet Mr. B. B. Delano, as I was soon to discover, had his
private fox gnawing at his vitals. There was a worm in the bud. Only
recently there had been a great anti-liquor agitation and a fair
proportion of the saloons all over the state had been closed. Three
months before in this very town, at the spring election, “no license”
had been voted. All the saloons here, to the number of four, would have
to be closed, including Mr. Delano’s, in the heart of the town. That
meant that Mr. Delano would have to get another business of some kind or
quit. I saw him looking at me curiously, almost mournfully.
“Touring the state?” he asked.
“We’re riding out to Indiana,” I explained. “I come from there.”
“Oh, I see. Indiana! That’s a nice little trip, isn’t it? Well, I see
lots of machines going through here these days, many more than I ever
expected to see. It’s made a difference in my business. Only”—and here
followed a long account of his troubles. He owned houses and lands, a
farm of three hundred acres not far out, on which he lived, and other
properties, but this saloon obviously was his pet. “I’m thinking of
making an eating place of it next fall,” he added. “‘No license’ may not
last—forever.” His eye had a shrewd, calculating expression.
“That’s true,” I said.
“It keeps me worried, though,” he added doubtfully. “I don’t like to
leave now. Besides, I’m getting along. I’m nearly sixty,” he
straightened himself up as though he meant to prove that he was only
forty, “and I like my farm. It really wouldn’t kill me if I never could
open this place any more.” But I could see that he was talking just to
hear himself talk, boasting. He was desperately fond of his saloon and
all that it represented; not ashamed, by any means.
“But there’s Newark and New York,” I said. “I should think you’d like to
go down there.”
“I might,” he agreed; “perhaps I will. It’s a long way for me, though.
Won’t you have another drink—you and your friends?” By now Franklin and
Speed were returning and Mr. Delano waved a ceremonious, inclusive hand,
as if to extend all the courtesies of the establishment.
The bartender was most alert—a cautious, apprehensive person. I could
see that Mr. Delano was inclined to be something of a martinet. For some
reason he had conceived of us as personages—richer than himself, no
doubt—and was anxious to live up to our ideas of things and what he
thought we might expect.
“Well, now,” he said, as we were leaving, “if you ever come through here
again you might stop and see if I’m still here.”
As Speed threw on the ignition spark and the machine began to rumble and
shake, Mr. Delano proceeded up the handsome small town street with quite
a stride. I could see that he felt himself very much of a personage—one
of the leading figures of Owego.