ALONG THE ERIE SHORE
If anyone doubts that this is fast becoming one of the most interesting
lands in the world, let him motor from Buffalo to Detroit along the
shore of Lake Erie, mile after mile, over a solid, vitrified brick road
fifteen feet wide at the least, and approximately three hundred miles
long. As a matter of fact, the vitrified brick road of this description
appears to be seizing the imagination of the middle west, and the
onslaught of the motor and its owner is making every town and hamlet
desirous of sharing the wonders of a new life. Truly, I have never seen
a finer road than this, parts of which we traversed between Buffalo and
Cleveland and between Cleveland and Sandusky. There were great gaps in
it everywhere, where the newest portions were in process of completion,
and the horrific “detour” sign was constantly in evidence, but traveling
over the finished sections of it was something like riding in paradise.
Think of a long, smooth red brick road stretching out before you mile
after mile, the blue waters of Lake Erie to your right, with its waves,
ships and gulls; a flat, Holland-like farming land to your left, with
occasional small white towns, factory centers, and then field upon field
of hay, corn, cabbages, wheat, potatoes—mile after mile and mile after
mile.
Ohio is too flat. It hasn’t the rural innocence and unsophistication
which Indiana seems still to retain, nor yet the characteristics of a
thoroughgoing manufacturing world. There are too many factories and too
many trolley lines, and a somewhat unsettled and uncertain feeling in
the air, as if the state were undecided whether it would be all city and
manufacturing or not. I hate that mid-state, uncertain feeling, which
comes with a changing condition anywhere. It is something like that
restless simmering into which water bursts before it boils. One wishes
that it would either boil or stop simmering. This, as nearly as I can
suggest it, is the way the northern portion of Ohio that we saw
impressed me.
And, unlike my feeling of fifteen or twenty years ago, I think I am just
a little weary of manufacturing and manufacturing towns, however well I
recognize and applaud their necessity. Some show a sense of harmony and
joy in labor and enthusiasm for getting on and being happy; but others,
such as Buffalo and Cleveland, seem to have fallen into that secondary
or tertiary state in which all the enthusiasm of the original workers
and seekers has passed, money and power and privileges having fallen
into the hands of the few. There is nothing for the many save a kind of
spiritless drudgery which no one appreciates and which gives a city a
hard, unlovely and workaday air. I felt this to be so, keenly, in the
cases of Buffalo and Cleveland, as of Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool.
Years ago these American cities were increasing at the rate of from ten
to fifty thousand a year. Then there was more of hope and enthusiasm
about them than there is now, more of happy anticipation. It is true
that they are still growing and that there is enthusiasm, but neither
the growth nor the enthusiasm is of the same quality. As a nation,
although we are only twentyfive to thirty years older in point of time,
we are centuries older in viewpoint. We have experienced so much in
these past few years. We have endured so much. That brood of giants that
rose and wrought and fell between 1870 and 1910—children of the dragon’s
teeth, all of them—wrought shackles in the night and bound us hand and
foot. They have seized nearly all our national privileges, they have
bedeviled the law and the courts and the national and state seats of
legislation, they have laid a heavy hand upon our highways and all our
means of communication, poisoned our food and suborned our colleges and
newspapers; yet in spite of them, so young and strong are we, we have
been going on, limping a little, but still advancing. Giants who spring
from dragon’s teeth are our expensive luxury. In the high councils of
nature there must be some need for them, else they never would have
appeared. But I am convinced that these western cities have no longer
that younger, singing mood they once had. We are soberer as a nation.
Not every man can hope to be president, as we once fancied,—nor a
millionaire. We are nearer the European standard of quiet, disillusioned
effort, without so many great dreams to stir us.
Departing from Buffalo, not stopping to revisit the Falls or those
immense turbine generators or indeed any other thing thereabout, we
encountered some men who knew Speed and who were starting a new
automobile factory. They wanted him to come and work for them, so well
known was he as a test man and expert driver. Then we came to a grimy
section of factories on a canal or pond, so black and rancidly stale
that it interested us. Factory sections have this in common with other
purely individual and utilitarian things,—they can be interesting beyond
any intention of those who plan them. This canal or pond was so slimy or
oily, or both, that it constantly emitted bubbles of gas which gave the
neighborhood an acrid odor. The chimneys and roofs of these warehouses
rose in such an unusual way and composed so well that Franklin decided
he should like to sketch them. So here we sat, he on the walking beam of
a great shovel derrick lowered to near the ground, behind two tug boats
anchored on the shore, while I made myself comfortable on a pile of
white gravel, some of which I threw into the water. I spent my time
speculating as to what sort of people occupied the small drab houses
which faced this picturesque prospect. I imagined a poet as great as
Walt Whitman being able to live and take an interest in this grimy
beauty, with thieves and pick-pockets and prostitutes of a low order for
neighbors.
[Illustration:
EGYPT AT BUFFALO
A Grain Elevator
]
A few blocks farther on there came into view an enormous grain elevator,
standing up like a huge Egyptian temple in a flat plain. This elevator
was composed of a bundle of concrete tubes or stand pipes, capable of
being separately filled or emptied, thus facilitating the loading and
unloading of cars and allowing the separate storage of different lots of
grain. Before it, as before the great bridge at Nicholsen, we paused,
awestruck by its size and design, something colossal and ancient
suggested by its lines.
Then we sped out among small yellow or drab workingmen’s cottages, their
yards treeless for the most part, their walls smoky.
Lone women were hanging over gates and workingmen plodding heavily about
with pipes in their mouths, and squeaky shoes and clothes too loose
covering their bodies. Every now and then a church appeared—one of those
noble institutions which represent to these poor clowns heaven, pearly
gates and jasper streets. Great iron bridges came into view, or some
small river or inlet crowded with great ships. Then came the lake shore,
lit by a sinking and glorious afternoon sun, and a long stretch of that
wonderful brick road, with enormous steel plants on either hand,
thousands of automobiles, and lines of foreign looking workingmen going
in and out of cottages straggling in conventional order across distant
fields. Out over the water was an occasional white sail or a gull, or
many gulls. Oh, gulls, gulls, I thought, take me into your free, wild
world when I die!
Just outside Buffalo, on a spit of land between this wonderful brick
road and the lake, we came to the Tackawanna Steel Company, its scores
of tall, black stacks belching clouds of smoke and its immense steel
pillar supported sheds showing the fires of the forges below. The great
war had evidently brought prosperity to this concern, as to others.
Thousands of men were evidently working here, Sunday though it was, for
the several gates were crowded by foreign types of women carrying
baskets and buckets, and the road and the one trolley line which ran
along here for a distance were crowded with grimy workers, mostly of
fine physical build. I naturally thought of all the shells and machine
guns and cannon they might be making, and somehow it brought the great
war a little nearer. Personally, I felt at the time that the war was
likely to eventuate in favor of the Germans because they were better
prepared.
Be that as it may, my mood was not belligerent and not pro-moral or
pro-anything. I am too doubtful of life and its tendencies to enthuse
over theories. With nations, as with individuals, the strongest or most
desired win, and in the crisis which was then the Germans seemed to me
the strongest. I merely hoped that America might keep out of it, in
order that she might attain sufficient strength and judgment to battle
for her own ideals in the future. For battle she must, never doubt it,
and that from city to city and state to state. If she survives the
ultimate maelstrom, with her romantic ideals of faith and love and
truth, it will be a miracle.
This matter of manufacture and enormous industries is always a
fascinating thing to me, and careening along this lake shore at
breakneck speed, I could not help marveling at it. It seems to point so
clearly to a lordship in life, a hierarchy of powers, against which the
common man is always struggling, but which he never quite overcomes,
anywhere. The world is always palavering about the brotherhood of man
and the freedom and independence of the individual; yet when you go
through a city like Buffalo or Cleveland and see all its energy
practically devoted to great factories and corporations and their
interests, and when you see the common man, of whom there is so much
talk as to his interests and superiority, living in cottages or long
streets of flats without a vestige of charm or beauty, his labor fixed
in price and his ideas circumscribed in part (else he would never be
content with so meager and grimy a world), you can scarcely believe in
the equality or even the brotherhood of man, however much you may
believe in the sympathy or good intentions of some people.
These regions around Buffalo were most suggestive of the great division
that has arisen between the common man and the man of executive ability
and ideas here in America,—a division as old and as deep as life itself.
I have no least complaint against the common man toiling for anybody
with ideas and superior brains—who could have?—if it were not for the
fact that the superior man inevitably seeks to arrange a dynasty of his
blood, that his children and his children’s children need never to turn
a hand, whereas it is he only who is deserving, and not his children.
Wealth tends to aristocracy, and your strong man comes almost inevitably
to the conclusion that not only he but all that relates to him is of
superior fiber. This may be and sometimes is true, no doubt, but not
always, and it is the exception which causes all the trouble. The
ordinary mortal should not be compelled to moil and delve for a fool. I
refuse to think that it is either necessary or inevitable that I, or any
other man, should work for a few dollars a day, skimping and longing,
while another, a dunce, who never did anything but come into the world
as the heir of a strong man, should take the heavy profits of my work
and stuff them into his pockets. It has always been so, I’ll admit, and
it seems that there is an actual tendency in nature to continue it; but
I would just as lief contend with nature on this subject, if possible,
as any other. We are not sure that nature inevitably wills it at that.
Kings have been slain and parasitic dynasties trampled into the earth.
Why not here and now?