existence, as it had. Here there was no noise of railroads, no sign of
the coal and steel and iron industries which encircled it but had never
passed its boundaries. Here all people seemed to me to live tranquilly
in roomy houses with pleasant yards or on near-by farms where there were
fine horses and fat blooded sheep, and where planting and harvesting
went ahead year in and year out in orderly fashion.
The chief and only industry of Poland was its seminary, now about thirty
years old. It was a community enterprise started in 1848 by Mr. B. F.
Lee, the financial agent who had hired me. Everybody in the village had
subscribed to its endowment, practically every church had at one time or
another been its patron. The long depression of the seventies had
crippled its finances sadly; but times were better now, and the
well-to-do Presbytery of Mahoning County had agreed to take it under its
care. But I was soon to learn that Poland Union Seminary in spite of the
patronage of the Presbytery lived on a narrow and worn shoestring.
Moreover, I at once divined, kind as were those who were responsible for
my being there, that I had been injected into a situation of which Mr.
Lee had given me no hint strong enough to penetrate my inexperience. It
was serious enough, as on the very day the school bell first rang for me
the villagers began to let me know. Men and women would stop me on the
street to say:
“So it’s you that’s taking Miss Blakeley’s place. You have no idea how
badly we feel about her resigning. I went to school to her, my father
and mother went to school to her. I had hoped all my children would go
to her. She was a wonderful teacher, a beautiful character. You look
pretty young; you haven’t had much experience, have you?”
I was not long in learning that the devotion of the community to Miss
Blakeley was deserved. The village was right in honoring her, in
mourning her. It no doubt felt a certain satisfaction in letting me know
at the start it in no way regarded me as an adequate substitute. Its
insistence was such that, before the end of my first fortnight, I was
ready to resign.
My morale would hardly have been so quickly shaken if I had not at once
discovered to my consternation that there was an important part of my
duties which was in danger of proving too much for me. The worst of it
was that it concerned the largest block of pupils in an institution
where every pupil counted, where Mr. Lee regarded it as of vital
importance that every pupil be given what he wanted. Here he advertised
you could prepare for college, here you could have special advanced work
in anything you wanted. And Mr. Lee was right if the seminary was to
live as a cog in the country’s educational wheel.
Somebody ought to write, perhaps somebody has written of the passing of
this once valuable institution. It came before the college and the high
school and for a time did the work of both; but when the high school
began to prepare students for the college and the colleges added
preparatory departments and at the same time offered special courses the
seminary slowly realized that it must either go out of business or
combine with one or another of its healthy growing rivals.
In a few places, as in Poland Village, the seminary was hanging on
tenaciously, trying to demonstrate that it was still a better man than
these new undertakings, these high schools, these colleges with their
preparatory schools.
The faculty which was to make the demonstration at Poland was made up of
three persons: in order of rank, the President, the Preceptress, her
assistant. The acting President insisted on all the perquisites of his
title. His chief duty he regarded as conducting the chapel with more or
less grandiloquent remarks. When my assistant and I complained of too
much work he would scowl and say that his executive duties made it
impossible for him to take on more classes. The result was that I
started out with two classes in each of four languages—Greek, Latin,
French, and German, as well as classes in geology, botany, geometry,
trigonometry. In addition there was my threatened Waterloo, the two
largest classes in the school: one in what was called “verb grammar,”
the other, “percentage arithmetic”—so named from the points in the
textbooks where the term’s work began. From time immemorial these two
classes had been conducted in the interests of the district
schoolteachers of the territory. It was the custom for these teachers to
spend one term a year in the seminary, where, regardless of the number
of years they had been teaching, the number of times they had treated
themselves to a period of study, they always (so I was told) insisted on
their verb grammar and their percentage arithmetic. It was like a
ritual. As they were the numerical backbone of the institution, there
was nothing so important in the judgment of management as their
satisfaction.
It was a killing schedule for one person, but I was so eager, so
ridiculously willing, so excited, and also so fresh from college that I
did not know it. Indeed, as I look back on it I think I did fairly well,
all things considered. I should have had no great alarm about my success
if it had not been for the grammar and the arithmetic. From the first
day I realized I was on ground there which, once familiar, was now
almost unintelligible. I could and did teach my geometry and “trig” with
relish; I could and did pilot fairly advanced classes in four languages
so that the pupils at least never discovered that in one of them I was
far beyond my depth, and that in all of them I at times knew myself to
be skating on thin ice; but these district schoolteachers, several of
them older than I, were not to be deceived or bluffed. They had had
experience—I had not; and like the villagers of Poland they proposed to
make me realize that no college diploma could make up for inexperience.
Experience in “percentage arithmetic” and “verb grammar” came from doing
the same examples and diagraming and parsing the same sentences year
after year and going back to teach them in their communities. Many of
these examples were tricky. Many of the sentences were ambiguous. They
had learned solutions for both, solutions which had the backing of
tradition. I was soon terrified lest I be trapped, so scared I would
wake up in the night in cold sweats. This was my state of mind when one
day the most important man in the Village, Robert Walker, the local
banker, stopped me on the street.
“Sis,” he said—he was to always call me Sis—“Sis, you are following a
fine teacher.” I could have wept—the same old story. “But don’t worry,
what you must do is keep a stiff upper lip.”
“Oh, thank you, sir,” I said as I hurried on lest I cry in the street.
But that “keep a stiff upper lip,” coming from the man it did, restored
me; and I resolved, cost what it would, to find a way to master my
district schoolteachers. True, it took me two months to discover the
weak place in their armor. Finally I learned they were solving problems
and parsing sentences not according to principles but according to
answers they had learned. The reason they insisted on going over them
year after year at the seminary was to keep the solutions in their
memory. I had no skill in solving puzzles, but I did know something
about the principles and determined to try them on problems and
sentences that were not in their books or any books to which they had
access.
And so one day, luckily for me before they had a chance to demonstrate
my incapacity as two or three of them I am confident were expecting to
do, I casually put on the board two or three rather tough examples from
outside arithmetics, two or three not simple sentences from grammars I
felt sure they had never seen. I always recall with satisfaction the
perplexity with which the two or three young men I most feared looked at
what I had set for them, their injured protest. “But those examples are
not in our books.” “What difference does that make? The only important
thing is that you know the principles. If you can’t apply them, why
learn them?”
After a month of excursions into territory unfamiliar to them I had them
humbled and slowly grasping certain new ideas. I knew I was regarded
with respect. It was the one conquest in the two years I spent as the
Preceptress of the Poland Union Seminary of which I was proud.
Before these two years were up Mr. Lee must have realized he would never
get from me the help he needed in his ambition to preserve the school as
a seminary, that I would never become another Miss Blakeley. He wanted
some one ambitious to make teaching a life work. I was not. Teaching was
a mere stepping-stone in my plan of life, and at Poland Union Seminary
it had proved a slippery stone. From the time I bounded out of bed in
the morning—for in those days I did bound out of bed—until I dropped
into it at an early hour, dead tired, I had no time for my microscope.
It had become dusty on the table, but the passion for it and what it
might reveal was still strong in me. My confidence that I could save
money to continue my studies on five hundred dollars a year had proved
illusory. I found myself coming out short, obliged to borrow from my
father. There came to be a mutual, if unspoken, agreement between Mr.
Lee and me that I should resign. Neither of us was getting what he had
hoped, and so at the end of the second year, June, 1882, I gave up
teaching as a stepping-stone.
So far as I could then see or did see for a long time, this first effort
at an independent self-directing life was an interlude which had no
relation to what I wanted at the time to do or what, as it turned out, I
did do.
The most lasting impressions and experiences in this Poland interlude
had little or nothing to do with my work in the seminary. They came from
the friendships I formed while that work went on, centering in the
family of the understanding gentleman who had at the outset stopped me
on the street to say, “Keep a stiff upper lip.”
I was soon to realize that this shrewd bit of advice was instigated by
his daughter Clara, who was to become and who remains one of my dearest
friends. Indeed, it was due to her understanding and affection that my
two years in Poland, quite apart from the professional disappointment in
them, were the gayest, most interesting, and in many ways the happiest
of my life up to that time.
Clara Walker, or “Dot,” as high and low in and about Poland called her,
was a fine example of the out-of-door girl of the eighties, the girl who
had revolted against lacing, high heels, long skirts, and substituted
for them an admirable uniform of independence—tailor-made coat and
skirt, high-neck shirtwaist with four-in-hand tie, flat heels. This
outfit suited Clara Walker’s sturdy figure, her vigorous and free
movement. Her eyes suited her costume, for they were grey, direct,
merry, looking unwaveringly on everybody and everything.
Dot was close-mouthed, but when she sensed possible unfairness in a
situation which interested or concerned her she had her own wordless way
of dealing with it. It was she who realized the determination of the
villagers of Poland to make me feel that I never could fill Miss
Blakeley’s place to their satisfaction. She was loyal as they to the old
teacher, but she wanted me to have my chance and, the first week of
school, announced herself my champion by appearing at the door of the
seminary as I was making my weary way out at the end of the day.
“Wouldn’t you like to take a drive?” she said.
And there stood her smart turnout. What an escape from verb grammar and
percentage arithmetic and my growing inferiority complex! From that time
she never lagged in her determination to help me conquer my problem by
taking me away from it. She apparently took real pleasure in showing me
the country. Never a week that we did not go somewhere: Into town for
the theater—the first time I saw Mary Anderson, then the most beloved
actress as well as the most beautiful woman in the country, was in
Youngstown in “Pygmalion”; to big farms with great flocks of blooded
sheep and horses and ponies; to coal mines and iron mills; to little old
towns and run-down settlements skipped, like Poland, by the invasion of
industry.
Clara peopled all these various places with the unadorned realistic
tales of living and dead men and women. She had been born and had grown
up in Mahoning County. She had a widely scattered family connection, but
most important was her genuine interest in all human beings and theirs
in her. She was a perfect listener, never prying. People liked to talk
to her; she never forgot, related things, judged shrewdly and kindly,
with the result that she had in her mind a map of the human life of the
country, quite as reliable as a road map—a map in warm humorous colors.
Years later I realized that in those two years in Poland I had had under
my eyes a vivid picture of what happens to the farmer, his home, his
town, his children when industry invades his land.
This Mahoning country had been so rich, so apparently stable. The men
and women so loved what they and their forebears had done that they
yielded slowly to the coal miner and the mill man, but they were giving
way in the eighties. The furnace was in the back yard of the fine old
houses with their ample barns; and the shaft of the coal mine, in the
richest meadows. The effort to reconcile the two was making, but
industry was conquering: the destruction of beauty, the breaking down of
standards of conduct, the growth of the love of money for money’s sake,
the grist of social problems facing the countryside from the inflow of
foreigners and the instability of work—all this was written for him who
could read. I could not read then, but I gathered a few impressions
which I realize now helped shape my future interests and thinking.
It was on these long drives I first learned that not cities alone but
all communities have dregs, slums. Strange that it should be in such a
place as Poland, but here it was—a disreputable fringe where a group of
men and women had long been living together with or without marriage.
You heard strange tales of incest and lust, of complete moral and social
irresponsibility, and they were having a scandalously jolly time of it.
Why I was not more shocked, I do not know; probably because incest and
lust were almost unknown words to me in those days.
And there were indelible impressions of the industrial world. When we
drove into Youngstown, ten miles away, we passed between iron furnaces
lying along the Mahoning River. After the long depression of the
seventies they were again busy, and into the valley were coming hundreds
and hundreds of foreigners brought from Europe by the news that there
was once again work in the United States. It was in passing through the
very heart of this furnace district one night returning from the theater
that I first learned of the terrible dangers that lie in the smelting of
ore. A furnace had burst; men had been trapped by the molten metal, and
their charred remains were being carried across the road. Unforgettable
horror.
And it was on one of these chance drives that I first saw what women can
do in moments of frenzied protest against situations which they cannot
control, first had my faith challenged in the universally peaceful
nature of my sex. I learned the meaning of Maenads, Furies, as we came
upon a maddened, threatening crowd rushing towards the offices of the
mills which had been shut down without warning. It was led by big robust
shrieking women, their hair flying, their clothes disheveled. It was a
look into a world of which I knew nothing, but like the charred bodies
carried across the road as I rode from the theater it was an
unforgettable thing.
There were other introductions to the industrial world less horrifying.
It was while in Poland that I first went into a coal mine—a deep
old-fashioned coal mine, a subsidiary to a farm. Under some of these
great farms with their blooded sheep, their fine orchards and fields,
their horses and ponies, coal had been found. And it was being mined as
a side line of the farm, a new kind of crop. Near the head of the shaft
were little houses for the miners; and when dull times came and the mine
was shut down the farmers took on their care. There was a slaughter of
an immense number of pigs, the putting down of barrels of pork, the
smoking of an incredible number of hams, the making of sausages and
headcheese.
“But why, why all this?” I asked.
“Oh,” said my hostess, “mining is unstable business. When there are long
shutdowns we must help the miners out, see that they have food.”
The intimacy with Dot Walker gave me a home. Mrs. Walker treated me as a
daughter, and as for Robert Walker, who still called me “Sis,” he liked
to have me around and to give me a word of wise counsel now and then. It
is because, in those months, I learned him to be as kindly, shrewd,
honest, simple-minded a man as I have ever known that I must interrupt
my narrative long enough to put in here the story of one of the cruelest
episodes of which I personally have known in the fifty years that I have
been a more or less understanding observer of our national political
life. The story is of Robert Walker and his one-time friend William
McKinley, the twenty-fifth President of the United States.
When I became an intimate of the Walker household a person I often heard
mentioned by its head was “the Major”—Major McKinley. Now it was not in
1880 a name unfamiliar to me. I had met it already at Allegheny College,
where McKinley had once been a student. When the Civil War broke out he
had joined the exodus of students who volunteered at the first call. He
had come out of the war a major, studied law, and settled in Canton,
Ohio, only sixty or seventy miles from Poland and in the same
Congressional District. Here in 1876—the Mahoning district as it was
called—had sent him to Congress. It was a matter of interest in
Allegheny in my time to have one of its former students turn out a
Congressman, its usual crop being teachers, preachers, and missionaries.
When I came to Poland I learned quickly that McKinley had lived there as
a boy, had attended the seminary, and was their proudest example of “the
boy who had made good.” For four years he had been their Congressman.
How they boasted of him! How solidly they voted for him!
I was not long in the Walker household before I sensed something more in
Robert Walker than a citizen’s pride in McKinley. It was that species of
adoration a modest, honest-minded man often has for his leader—his
leader who can do no wrong. I realized this when I first saw them
together. The Major had come to our seminary commencement in June of
1881. I remember nothing at all of the speech he made, but the scene on
the wide green in front of the village church after the exercises were
over remains vivid. Scattered about were scores upon scores of girls and
women in the frilly white gowns, the long white feather boas, the
flower-trimmed hats, the gay parasols of the period; and in and out
wound the Major, shaking hands, smiling, exchanging friendly
greetings—all together at home, no back slapping, no kissing of babies.
It was all so gentle, so like a picture of an English garden party where
the politics are hidden beneath the finest of social veneers. And there
was Robert Walker almost effulgent.
“Well, Sis,” he asked me later, “what do you think of the Major?” A
remark to which he expected no answer. What answer other than his could
there be?
What I did not know then was that from the beginning of William
McKinley’s political career Robert Walker had been his chief—and for a
time, I think, his only—financial backer. Beginning with his first
campaign for Congress in 1875 Mr. Walker had advanced the Major $2,000
for expenses. He continued equal advances before each successive
campaign, the understanding being that $1,000 a year was to be paid on
the debt.
Along with this financial support went a staunch support of all the
Major’s political ideas. These ideas were those of the Republican party,
and for men like Robert Walker the party was hallowed. It was “the party
of Lincoln.” Loyalty to Lincoln required loyalty to all that was
directly or indirectly connected with him.
“Is Robert Lincoln a dude?” one of my Mahoning County acquaintances
asked me years later when I told him that I had been talking with Robert
Lincoln about his father.
“Is he a dude?”—by which he meant, as I took it, a kind of Ward
McAllister.
“No, no, not that,” I assured him.
“Well,” he said reflectively, “even if he was a dude I would vote for
him for President because he is Abraham Lincoln’s son.”
The chief test of loyalty to the party of Lincoln in Ohio was the degree
of support given to the high protective tariff. William McKinley’s
support was devout and unqualified. He looked on a duty so low that it
allowed importations as a species of treason. There was tin plate, for
example.
The year that I went to Poland, 1880, McKinley first espoused a duty on
tin plate. There was strong opposition among iron and steel
manufacturers. They felt they already had all they could look after in
Congress; but when they told this to McKinley his answer was that unless
they supported tin plate he would not support their tariffs. Naturally
they yielded, and tin plate was added to their list of protégés.
McKinley felt so sure of ultimate victory for the duty that he evidently
did not hesitate to advise his friends to get ready for its coming. At
all events he encouraged Robert Walker, suggested to him in fact that he
establish in Youngstown, Ohio, a stamping plant for the making of
tinware, taking with him as partner his brother-in-law Andrew J. Duncan.
As Andrew Duncan had no money to invest the Major gave to Mr. Walker a
sheaf of signed notes to be used whenever he had need of money.
Now Robert Walker was not a manufacturer; he was a farmer and a good
one—a coal operator—the banker of the Village of Poland and the
surrounding country, but it was not in Robert Walker’s nature to refuse
to help the Major or his relatives in their ambitions, as he had already
frequently proved. Indeed, at that time he was backing McKinley’s
brother Abner in a business venture which was soon to fail with loss of
all he had put in. But Robert Walker’s faith in McKinley’s wisdom was
such that he could not conceive of failure in anything he advised.
The plant was started in 1890. There could not have been a more unlucky
moment to launch a new industry. The long depression of the nineties was
beginning. Iron and steel were already seriously affected. Money was
tight. Robert Walker found himself almost at once forced to use the
Major’s notes. He found only too soon that he had embarked on a hopeless
undertaking, and in February of 1893 the works were closed.
Now at that moment Mark Hanna and his colleagues on the National
Republican Committee were counting on William McKinley to win the
Presidential election for them in 1896. The announcement that he was
involved in the Walker failure to the tune of some one hundred thousand
dollars, more than the combined fortune of himself and wife, was a cruel
blow to their plan. McKinley was straightforward with them. He had
signed the notes; he must give up politics, go back to the law, and pay
his honest debts. But that could not be permitted. He was too
important—one hundred thousand dollars was a small sum compared to what
the Republican Committee expected from his election. The money was
raised—not so quietly. It became necessary to explain how McKinley had
become involved to this amount, and the explanation which McKinley’s
political friends put out was that he was a victim of “a man named
Walker,” as Mark Hanna’s able biographer, Herbert Croly, calls him—a man
whom he had trusted, and who had deceived him as to the amount of money
he was raising on his notes. That is, the Republican committee
deliberately put on Robert Walker the stigma of fraud, presented him to
the public as a man who had betrayed confidence, and William McKinley
never denied their presentation.
I have it from Robert Walker and from his daughter that no note of
William McKinley was ever cashed without consulting him, and I believe
them. Moreover, Andrew Duncan was in this enterprise and knew what was
going on. It is an interesting fact that when my friend Clara Walker,
who kept the accounts for the McKinleys and her father, went the morning
after the announcement of the failure to her office in Youngstown, all
her books had disappeared along with many papers which belonged to the
firm.