IN CLEVELAND
The next morning we set off under grey, lowery clouds, over the shore
road to Cleveland, which proved better than that between Erie and
Painesville, having no breaks and being as smooth as a table. At one
place we had to stop in an oatfield where the grain had been newly cut
and shocked, to see if we could still jump over the shocks as in days of
yore, this being a true test, according to Speed, as to whether one was
in a fit condition to live eighty years, and also whether one had ever
been a true farmer. Franklin and Speed leaped over the shocks with ease,
Franklin’s coat skirts flying out behind in a most bird-like manner, and
Speed’s legs and arms taking most peculiar angles. When it came my turn
to do it, I funked miserably. Actually, I failed so badly that I felt
very much distressed, being haunted for miles by the thought of
increasing age and impending death, for once I was fairly athletic and
could run three miles at a steady jog and not feel it. But now—well now,
whenever I reached the jumping point I couldn’t make it. My feet refused
to leave the ground. I felt heavy.
Alas! Alas!
And then we had to pause and look at the lake, which because of the
storm the night before and the stiff northwest wind blowing this
morning, offered a fine tumbling spectacle. As to dignity and
impressiveness I could see no difference between this lake shore and
most of the best sea beaches which I have seen elsewhere. The waves were
long and dark and foamy, rolling in, from a long distance out, with a
thump and a roar which was as fierce as that of any sea. The beach was
of smooth, grey sand, with occasional piles of driftwood scattered along
its length, and twisted and tortured trees hanging over the banks of the
highland above. In the distance we could see the faint outlines of the
city of Cleveland, a penciled blur, and over it a cloud of dark smoke,
the customary banner of our manufacturing world. I decided that here
would be a delightful place to set up a writing shack or a studio,
transferring all my effects from my various other dream homes, and
spending my latter days. I should have been a carpenter and builder, I
think. It would save me money constructing houses for myself.
In the suburbs of Cleveland were being built the many comfortable homes
of those who could afford this handsome land facing the lake. Hundreds
of cottages we passed were done in the newer moods of our American
architects, and some of them were quite free of the horrible banalities
to which the American country architect seems addicted. There were homes
of real taste, with gardens arranged with a sense of their architectural
value and trees and shrubs which enhanced their beauty. Here, as I could
tell by my nerves, all the ethical and social conventions of the middle
class American and the middle West were being practised, or at least
preached. Right was as plain as the nose on your face; truth as definite
a thing as the box hedges and macadam roads which surrounded them;
virtue a chill and even frozen maid. If I had had the implements I would
have tacked up a sign reading “Non-conformists beware! Detour south
through factory regions.”
[Illustration: WHERE I LEARN THAT I AM NOT TO LIVE EIGHTY YEARS]
As we drew nearer Cleveland, this same atmosphere continued, only
becoming more dense. Houses, instead of being five hundred feet apart
and set in impressive and exclusive spaces, were one hundred feet apart
or less. They were smartly suburban and ultra-respectable and refined.
The most imposing of churches began to appear—I never saw finer—and
schools and heavily tree-shaded streets. Presently we ran into Euclid
Avenue, an amazingly long and wide street, once Cleveland’s pride and
the centre of all her wealthy and fashionable life, but now threaded by
a new double tracked trolley line and fallen on lesser, if not
absolutely evil, days. This street was once the home, and still may be
for all I know (his immortal residence was pointed out to us by a
policeman), of the sacrosanct John D. Rockefeller. Yes, in his earlier
and poorer years, when he was worth only from seventy to eighty
millions, he lived here, and the house seemed to me, as I looked at it
this morning, actually to reflect all the stodgy conservatism with which
he is credited. It was not smart—what rich American’s house of forty or
fifty years ago ever is?—but it was solid and impressive and cold. Yes,
cold is the word,—a large, roomy, silent thing of grey stone, with a
wide smooth lawn at least a hundred feet wide spreading before it, and
houses of its same character flanking it on either hand. Here lived John
D. and plotted, no doubt, and from here he issued to those local
religious meetings and church socials for which he is so famous. And no
doubt some one or more of the heavy chambers of this house consumed in
their spaciousness the soft, smooth words which meant wealth or poverty
to many an oil man or competitor or railroad manipulator whose rates
were subsequently undermined. For John D. knew how to outplot the best
of them. As an American I forgive him for outplotting the rest of the
world. As an individual, well, if he weren’t intellectually and
artistically so dull I could forgive him everything.
“What is this?” I queried of Franklin. “Surely Euclid Avenue isn’t being
given over to trade, is it? See that drug store there, built in front of
an old home—and that garage tacked on to that mansion—impossible!”
But so it was. These great old mansions set back in their tremendous
spaces of lawn were seeing the very last of their former glory. The
business heart of the city was apparently overtaking them, and these car
tracks were so new I was uncertain whether they were being put down or
taken up.
I hailed a policeman.
“Are these tracks being removed or put in?”
“Put in,” he replied. “They’ve just finished a long fight here. The rich
people didn’t want it, but the people won. Tom Johnson began fighting
for this years ago.”
Tom Johnson! What an odd sense of the passing of all things the name
gave me. Between 1895 and 1910 his name was on nearly everyone’s tongue.
How he was hated by the growing rich! In the face of the upspringing
horde of financial buccaneers of that time—Hanna, Rockefeller, Morgan,
Harriman, Ryan—he stood out as a kind of tribune of the people. He had
made money in business, and by much the same methods as every other man,
taking and keeping, but now he declared himself desirous of seeing
something done for the people—of doing something—and so he fought for
three cent fares in Cleveland, to be extended, afterwards, everywhere, I
suppose.
Don’t smile, dear reader. I know it sounds like a joke. In the face of
the steady settling of all powers and privileges in America in the hands
of a powerful oligarchy, the richest and most glittering the world has
ever seen, the feeble dreamings of an idealist, and a but slightly
equipped one at that, are foolish; but then, there is something poetic
about it, just the same, quite as there is about all the other poets and
dreamers the world has ever known. We always want to help the mass, we
idealists, ’_at first_. We look about and see human beings like
ourselves, struggling, complaining, dying, pinching along with little or
nothing, and our first thought is that some one human being or some
group of beings is responsible, that nature has designed all to have
plenty, and that all we have to do is to clear away the greed of a few
individuals who stand between man and nature, and presto, all is well
again. I used to feel that way and do yet, at times. I should hate to
think it was all over with America and its lovely morning dreams.
And it’s fine poetry, whether it will work or not. It fits in with the
ideas of all prophets and reformers since the world began. Think of
Henry George, that lovely soul, dying in New York in a cheap hotel,
fighting the battle of a labor party—he, the dreamer of “Progress and
Poverty.” And Doctor (The Reverend Father) McGlynn, declaring that some
day we would have an American Pope strolling down Broadway under a silk
hat and being thoroughly social and helpful and democratic; and then
being excommunicated from the church for it or silenced—which was it?
And W. J. Bryan, with his long hair and his perfect voice (that moving,
bell-like voice), wishing to solve all the ills of man by sixteen to
one—the double standard of gold and silver; and John P. Altgeld, high,
clear, dreamy soul, with his blue eyes and his sympathy for the betrayed
anarchists and the poor; and “Potato” Pingree, as they used to call him,
once governor of Michigan, who wanted all idle land in Detroit and
elsewhere turned over to the deserving poor in order that they might
grow potatoes or something else on it. And Henry Ford with his “peace
ship” and his minimum of five dollars a day for every man, and Hart,
Schaffner and Marx with their minimum of two dollars for every little
seamstress and poorest floor washer. What does it all mean?
I’ll tell you.
It means a sense of equilibrium, or the disturbance of it. Contrasts
remain forever,—vast differences in brain, in heart, in opportunity, in
everything; but now and then when the contrasts become too sharp or are
too closely juxtaposed, up rises some tender spirit—Isaiah, or Jeremiah,
or Christ, or St. Francis, or John Huss, or Savanarola, or Robert Owen,
or John Brown, or Abraham Lincoln, or William Lloyd Garrison, or Walt
Whitman, or Lloyd George, or Henry Ford, or John P. Altgeld, or W. J.
Bryan—and begins to cry “Ho! Assyrian” or its equivalent. It is
wonderful. It is positively beautiful and thrilling, this love of
balance and “fair play” in nature. These men are not always thinking of
themselves, you may depend on it. It is inherent in the scheme of
things, just as are high mountains and deep valleys, but oh, those who
have the sense of it—those dreamers and poets and seekers after the
ideal!
“They can kill my body but not what I stand for.”—_John Brown._
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”—_Christ._
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not
charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.”—_St.
Paul._
“Oh, poorest Jesus, the grace I beg of Thee is to bestow on me the
grace of the highest poverty.”—_St. Francis._
“I with my barbaric yawp, yawping over the roofs of the world.”—_Walt
Whitman._
Are things to be made right by law? I will admit that some wide and
sweeping differences can be eliminated. Tyrants can occasionally be
pulled down and humanitarians elevated for the time being. Yes, yes. A
rough equation can be struck always, and it is something of that of
which these men were dreaming. But even so, in the face of all the
physical, temperamental, spiritual, intellectual, to say nothing of
climatic and planetary differences, what matter? Will law save an idiot
or undo a Shelley or a Caesar? Will law pull down the sun and set the
moon in its place? My masters, we can only sympathize at times where we
cannot possibly act,—and we can act and aid where we cannot cure. But of
a universal panacea there is only a dream—or so I feel. Yet it is
because we can and do dream—and must, at times—and because of our dreams
and the fact that they must so often be shattered, that we have art and
the joy of this thing called Life. Without contrast there is no life.
And without dreams there might not be any alteration in these too sharp
contrasts. But where would our dreams be, I ask you—or the need of
them—if all of that of which we are compelled to dream and seek in an
agony of sweat and despair were present and we did not need to dream?
Then what?
But let us away with abstrusities. Let us sing over Life as it is. These
tall, poetic souls—are they not beautiful? And would you not have it so
that they may appear?
In riding up this same street I was on familiar ground, for here,
twentytwo years before, in that same raw spring which took me to
Buffalo, I stopped, looking for work—and found some, of sorts. I
connected myself for a very little while (a week or two) with the Sunday
issue of the _Plain Dealer_ and did a few specials, trying to prove to
the incumbent of the high office of Sunday editor that I was a
remarkable man. He did not see it—or me. He commented once that my work
was too lofty in tone, that I loved to rhapsodize too much. I know he
was right. Nevertheless, the second city afterwards (Pittsburg), like
the others from which I had just come (Toledo, St. Louis, and Chicago),
liked me passing well. But my ambition did not run to a permanent
position in Cleveland anyhow.
Just the same, and what was of interest to me this morning as I rode
into Cleveland, was that here, after a most wonderful ramble east from
St. Louis, I had arrived, quite as in Buffalo, spiritually very hungry
and lorn. As I look back on it now I know that I must have been a very
peculiar youth, for nothing I could find or do contented me for so much
as an hour. I had achieved a considerable newspaper success in St.
Louis, but had dropped it as being meaningless; and because of a silly
dream about running a country newspaper (which I shall narrate later) in
a town called Grand Rapids, Ohio, I had a chance to take over said
country paper, but when I looked it over and pictured to myself what the
local life would be, I fled in horror. In Toledo I encountered a poet
and an enthusiast, a youth destined to prove one of the most helpful
influences in my whole career, with whom I enjoyed a period of intense
mental cerebration, yet him I left also, partly because I lacked money
and an interesting future there, but more because I felt restless and
wanted to see more of the world.
One of my principal trials at this time was that I was in love and had
left the object of my adoration behind me, and was not sure that I would
ever earn enough money to go and fetch her,—so uncertain were my talents
and my opportunities in my own eyes.
And like Buffalo, which came after Cleveland in my experience, this city
seemed dirty and raw and black, but forceful. America was in the furnace
stage of its existence. Everything was in the making,—fortunes, art, its
social and commercial life, everything. The most astonishing thing in it
was its rich men, their houses, factories, institutions of commerce and
pleasure. Nothing else had occurred. There was nothing to see but
business and a few hotels,—one, really—and theatres. I remember looking
at a great soldiers' monument (it is still here in the principal square)
and wondering why so large a monument. I do not recall that any man of
Cleveland particularly distinguished himself in the Civil War.
But the one thing that struck me as of greatest import in those days was
Euclid Avenue with its large houses and lawns which are now so close to
the business heart, and its rich men, John D. Rockefeller and Mark Hanna
and Henry M. Flagler and Tom Johnson. Rockefeller had just given
millions and millions to revivify the almost defunct University of
Chicago, then a small Baptist College, to say nothing of being hailed
(newly then) as the richest man in America. All of these people were
living here in Euclid Avenue, and I looked up their houses and all the
other places of interest, envying the rich and wishing that I was famous
or a member of a wealthy family, and that I might meet some one of the
beautiful girls I imagined I saw here and have her fall in love with me.
Tra, la! Tra, la! There’s nothing like being a passionate, romantic
dunce if you want to taste this wine of wizardry which is life. I was
and I did....