BUFFALO OLD AND NEW
We had traveled now between six and seven hundred miles, and but for a
short half mile between Nicholsen and New Milford, Pennsylvania, we
could scarcely say that we had seen any bad roads—seriously impeding
ones. To be sure, we had sought only the best ones in most cases, not
always, and there were those patches of state road, cut up by heavy
hauling, which we had to skirt; but all things considered, the roads so
far had been wonderful. From East Aurora into Buffalo there was a solid,
smooth, red brick boulevard, thirty feet wide and twelve miles long,
over which we raced as though it were a bowling alley. The bricks were
all vitrified and entirely new. I know nothing about the durability of
such a road, and this one gave no evidence of its wearing qualities, but
if many such roads are to be built, and they stand the wear, America
will have a road system unrivaled.
As we were spinning along, the factories and high buildings and chimneys
of Buffalo, coming into view across a flat space of land, somehow
reminded me of those older hill cities of Europe which one sees across a
space of land from a train, but which are dead, dead. “Here is life,” I
said to myself, “only here nothing has happened as yet, historically;
whereas there, men have fought to and fro over every inch of the
ground.” How would it be if one could say of Buffalo that in 2316 A.
D.—four hundred years after the writing of this—there was a great labor
leader who having endured many injuries was tired of the exactions of
the money barons and securing a large following of the working people
seized the city and administered it cooperatively, until he had been
routed by some capitalistic force and hanged from the highest building,
his followers also being put to death? Or suppose a great rebellion had
originated in New Mexico, and it had reached Buffalo and Pittsburg in
its onsweep, and that here an enormous battle had been fought—an
Austerlitz or a Waterloo? How we should stare at the towers as we came
across this plain! How great names would rise up and flash across the
sky! We would hear old war songs in our ears and dream old war dreams.
Or suppose there were a great cathedral or a great museum crowded with
the almost forgotten art of the twentieth, twentyfirst and twentysecond
centuries!
I dream. Yet such are the things which somehow make a great city. But
lacking in historic charm as Buffalo might be, the city had a peculiar
interest for me, a very special one indeed, egoist that I am. For here,
one springtime, twenty years before this, I entered Buffalo looking for
work. Fear not, I am not going to begin a romantic and sentimental
account of my youth and early struggles. It was still late March and
very chilly. There was snow on the ground, but a touch of Spring in the
air. I had come on from Cleveland, where I had failed to find anything
to do, and was destined to go on to Pittsburg from here, for I could not
make a permanent connection with any Buffalo paper. I was a lonely,
lank, impossible newspaper type as I see myself now, and so sentimental
and wistful that I must have seemed a fool to practical men. They never
troubled to pay me a decent salary, I know that. But instead of looking
briskly and earnestly for work, as you might think a boy with only a few
dollars in his pocket and no friends anywhere within hundreds of miles
would do, I spent my time mooning over what seemed then great streets
and over the harbor waters near at hand, with their great grain
elevators and ships and coal pockets. Ah, those small rivers with their
boats and tugs and their romantic suggestion of the sea,—how I yearned
over them!
At that time I traveled by trolley to Niagara, nearly forty miles away,
and looked at that tumbling flood, which was then not chained or drained
by turbine water power sluices. I was impressed, but somehow not quite
so much as I thought I would be. Standing out on a rock near the
greatest volume of water, under a grey sky, I got dizzy and felt as
though I were being carried along, whether I wanted to or not. Farther
up stream I stared at the water as it gathered force and speed, and
wondered how I should feel if I were in a small canoe and were fighting
it for my life. Below the falls I gazed up at the splendid spray and
wanted to shout, so vigorously did the water fall and smash the rocks
below. When I returned to Buffalo and my room, I congratulated myself
that if I had got nothing else, so far, out of Buffalo, at least I had
gained this.
Beyond having traveled from Warsaw to Chicago and thence to St. Louis
and from St. Louis to this same city, via Toledo, and Cleveland, I had
never really been anywhere, and life was all wonderful. No songs of
Shelley, nor those strange wild lines of Euripides could outsing my mood
at this time. I dreamed and dreamed here in this crude manufacturing
town, roaming about those chilly streets, and now as I look back upon
it, knowing that never again can I feel as I then felt, I seem to know
that actually it was as wonderful as I had thought it was.
The spirit of America at that time was so remarkable. It was just
entering on that vast, splendid, most lawless and most savage period in
which the great financiers, now nearly all dead, were plotting and
conniving the enslavement of the people and belaboring each other for
power. Those crude and parvenu dynasties which now sit enthroned in our
democracy, threatening its very life with their pretensions and
assumptions, were just in the beginning. John D. Rockefeller was still
in Cleveland. Flagler, William Rockefeller, H. H. Rogers, were still
comparatively young and secret agents. Carnegie was still in
Pittsburg—an iron master—and of all his brood of powerful children only
Frick had appeared. William H. Vanderbilt and Jay Gould had only
recently died. Cleveland was president and Mark Hanna was an unknown
business man in Cleveland. The great struggles of the railroads, the
coal companies, the gas companies, the oil companies, were still in
abeyance, or just beginning. The multimillionaire had arrived, it is
true, but not the billionaire. Giants were plotting, fighting, dreaming
on every hand, and in this city, as in every other American city I then
visited, there was a singing, illusioned spirit. Actually, the average
American then believed that the possession of money would certainly
solve all his earthly ills. You could see it in the faces of the people,
in their step and manner. Power, power, power,—everyone was seeking
power in the land of the free and the home of the brave. There was
almost an angry dissatisfaction with inefficiency, or slowness, or age,
or anything which did not tend directly to the accumulation of riches.
The American world of that day wanted you to eat, sleep and dream money
and power.
And I, to whom my future was still a mystery (would that it were so
still!), was dreaming of love and power, too, but with no theory of
realizing them and with no understanding, indeed, of any way in which I
could achieve the happiness and pleasures which I desired. Knowing this,
I was unhappy. All day, after a fifteen cent breakfast in some cheap
restaurant, or some twentyfive cent dinner in another, I would wander
about, staring at these streets and their crowds, the high buildings,
the great hotels, uncertain whether to go on to Pittsburg or to hang on
here a little while longer in the hope of getting a suitable position as
a reporter. Ah, I thought, if I could just be a great newspaper man,
like McCullagh of St. Louis, or Dana of New York! In my pocket was a
letter from the proprietor of the St. Louis _Republic_, telling all and
sundry what a remarkable youth he had found me to be, but somehow I
never felt courageous enough to present it. It seemed so vainglorious!
Instead, I hung over the rails of bridges and the walls of water fronts,
watching the gulls, or stopped before the windows of shops and stores,
and outside great factories, and stared. At night I would return to my
gloomy room and sit and read, or having eaten somewhere, walk the
streets. I haunted the newspaper offices at the proper hours, but
finding nothing, finally departed. Buffalo seemed a great but hard and
cold city. Spinning into it this day, over long viaducts and through
regions of seemingly endless factories and cars, it still seemed quite
as vigorous, only not so hard, because my circumstances were different.
Alas, I said to myself, I am no longer young, no longer really poor in
the sense of being uncertain and inefficient, no longer so dreamy or
moony over a future the details of which I may not know. Then all was
uncertain, gay with hope or dark with fear. It might bring me anything
or nothing. But now, now—what can it bring as wonderful as what I
thought it might bring? What youth, I said to myself, is now walking
about lonely, wistful, dreaming great dreams, and wishing, wishing,
wishing? I would be that one if I could. Yes, I would go back for the
dreams' sake,—the illusion of life. I would take hold of life as it was,
and sigh and yearn and dream.
Or would I go back if I could?
We did not stay so long in Buffalo this day, but longer than we would
have if we could have discovered at once that Canada had placed a heavy
license tax on all cars entering Canada, and that, because of the
European War, I presume, we would have to submit to a more thorough and
tedious examination of our luggage than ordinarily. Naturally there was
much excitement, and on all sides were evidences of preparations being
made to send armaments and men to the Mother Country. We had looked
forward with the greatest pleasure to a trip into Canada, but the
conditions were so unfavorable that we hesitated to chance it. We didn’t
go. In spite of our plans to cross into Canada here and come out at
Detroit at the west end of Lake Erie, we listened to words of wisdom and
refrained. The automobile expert of the Statler assured us that we would
have a great deal of trouble. There would be an extra tax, delays,
explanations, and examination of our luggage. A very handsome cigar
clerk in this same hotel—what an expensive youth he was, in a very high
collar, a braided suit, and most roseate necktie!—told us with an air of
condescension that made me feel like a mere beginner in this
automobiling world: “It’s nothing to do now. What car have you?”
We told him.
“Ah, no, you need a big racer like the —— (naming a car which neither
Franklin nor I had ever heard of). Then you can make it in a day.
There’s nothing to see. You don’t wanta stop.”
He patronized us so thoroughly from the vantage point of his youth (say
eighteen years), and his knowledge of all the makes of machines and the
roads about Buffalo, that I began to feel that perhaps as a boy I had
not lived at all. Such shoes, such a tie, such rings and pins!
Everything about him seemed to speak of girls and barbers and florists
and garages and tailors. The Buffalo white light district rose up before
me, and all the giddy-gaudy whirl of local rathskellers and the like.
“What a rowdy-dow boy it is, to be sure,” I observed to Franklin.
“Yes, there you have it,” he replied. “Youth and inexperience triumphing
over any possible weight of knowledge. What’s the Encyclopedia
Britannica compared to that?”
Our lunch at one of the big (I use the word advisedly) restaurants, was
another experience in the same way. Speed had gone off somewhere with
the car to some smaller place and Franklin and I ambled into the large
place. It was as bad as the Roycroft Inn from the point of view of
pretentiousness and assumed perfection, but from another it was even
worse. When we try to be luxurious in America, how luxurious we can
really be! The heaviness of our panelings and decorations! the thickness
of our carpets! the air of solidity and vigor and cost without very much
taste! It is Teutonic without that bizarre individuality which so often
accompanies Teutonic architecture and decoration. We are so fine, and
yet we are not—a sort of raw uncouthness showing like shabby woodwork
from behind curtains of velvet and cloth of gold.
Sometimes, you know, I remember that we are a mongrel race and think we
may never achieve anything of great import, so great is my
dissatisfaction with the shows and vulgar gaucheries to be seen on all
sides. At other times, viewing the upstanding middle class American with
his vivid suit, yellow shoes, flaring tie and conspicuous money roll, I
want to compose an ode in praise of the final enfranchisement of the
common soul. How much better these millions, I ask you, with their derby
and fedora hats, their ready made suits, their flaring jewelry,
automobiles and a general sense of well being, and even perfection, if
you will, than a race of slaves or serfs, dominated by grand dukes,
barons, beperfumed and beribboned counts, daimios and lords and ladies,
however cultivated and artistic these may appear! True, the latter would
eat more gracefully, but would they be any the more desirable for that,
actually? I hear a thousand patrician minded souls exclaiming, “Yes, of
course,” and I hear a million lovers of democracy insisting “No.”
Personally, I would take a few giants in every field, well curbed, and
then a great and comfortable mass such as I see about me in these
restaurants, for instance, well curbed also. Then I would let them mix
and mingle.
But, oh, these restaurants!
And how long will it be before we will have just a few good ones in our
cities?