kept his head under all circumstances. He had the warmest kind of human
sympathies as well as what one of his colleagues called “a superior
emotional sensitiveness,” which made him steer clear of danger points
before anybody else realized that they were near.
Such were the qualities, I told myself, needed in a leader to handle the
infinitely difficult tangle in labor relations that was more and more
disturbing industry.
All I could do was to say so in print, and that I tried to do in a book
that came out in 1932 and had the misfortune to collide with a
Presidential boom for Mr. Young which misguided friends were cooking up
contrary to his wishes. It was the last thing that he wanted. He had the
good sense to see that there were vastly important things for the good
of the public to be done inside his industry. He wanted to go on with
them. He was doing a good job and should have been left with it, I felt.
But numbers of admirers and interested politicians continued to cry for
him for President until finally Mr. Young came out flat-footed to say
that under no circumstances would he accept a nomination.
But here was my book coming out while this outcry was going on, and
naturally enough political-minded reviewers took it as intended for a
campaign biography. The point I had been trying to make, that here was
somebody with rare ability to lead in the labor struggle, was entirely
lost. I still believe that if we could have had him active in these past
years so disheartening for peaceful industrial relations, the years
which have set back so far the hope of genuine understanding cooperation
inside industry, we should have been saved the peck of trouble that we
are now in.
It was out of the stuff gathered in these various undertakings that I
was depending for security. But the return from the books and articles
of a free lance is more or less uncertain, particularly when they come
in so sober a form as mine and are always shaped to fit a self-made
pattern.
I saw that I must have an annual sure if modest money crop, and I found
it from 1924 on in lyceum work. My two seasons on the Chautauqua
platform had encouraged the lecture bureau to add me to its list of
“talent,” and it was arranged that I go out from four to six weeks a
year beginning around Lincoln’s birthday when dinners and celebrations
called for speakers, and running on into March—usually five engagements
a week, the local committees choosing the subject from the half-dozen I
offered.
These bookings covered the country from North to South and East to West,
long and erratic journeys. Frequently I occupied two different beds a
night, and now and then three. It was brutal, exhaustive business, but I
learned to climb into an upper berth without a fuss, to sleep on a bench
if there was no berth, to rejoice over a cup of hot coffee at an
all-night workmen’s lunch counter, to warm my feet by walking a platform
while waiting for a train. By the end of the first season I had
developed a stoical acceptance of whatever came. This, I argued, saved
nervous wear and tear. I think now a certain amount of indignant
protest, useless as it would have been, might have put more zest into my
travel, as well as my talking.
It was not only hard but lonesome business. From the day I started out I
felt myself a detached wanderer, one who had laid aside personality and
become a cog in the mechanism called a lecture bureau. My one ambition
was to fill the specifications of the schedule and have it over with. It
was not until I said good-bye to the last committee and was headed home
that I felt the joyful rush of reviving personality.
This is putting an unfair face on my experiences. These long railroad
journeys, these nights waiting in dreary stations were not without their
rewards. I carry no more beautiful pictures in my mind than those
flashed on me riding across this country: glittering snow mountains with
stars hanging over them as big as a moon; miles of blossoming redbuds
rising from the mist along an Oklahoma stream; the lovely rounded forms
of the Ozark Mountains stretched as in sleep across Missouri; amethyst
deserts; endless rolling prairies yellow with wheat or white with snow.
These journeys took me at one time or another into every state in the
Union, and there is no one of them in which some bit of remembered
beauty does not take the curse off the almost universal disorder, even
squalor of their towns and cities as I saw them going in and out by
rail.
These long rides, these night waits, brought unforgettable looks into
human lives. Strange how travelers will confide their ambitions, unload
their secrets, show their scars to strangers. Never have I been more
convinced of the supreme wisdom of the confessional of the Catholic
Church than by the confidences poured into my ears in these brief and
accidental meetings. Memorable and poignant though these experiences are
of the country’s beauty as well as of its human tragedy and comedy, they
are little more than a blur. The rapid and crowded succession of events
left no time to follow up, digest, get at the meaning, the solution.
This was particularly tantalizing when it came to the actual filling of
the engagement, for here you were for a time in close contact with a few
people, your committee, and you had an hour or more facing an audience
representative of a community.
The committee represented authority. It was my business to follow its
instructions, please it if I could. Its chairman was the first person I
sought on arrival—that is, the first after checking up on how and when I
was to get away from the place at which I had just arrived.
To be sure, I had careful routing, but was the train by which I was
ordered to leave still running? Had there been a flood or blizzard or
accident to make a detour necessary? Sometimes it was an exciting
detour. More than once I had to go fifty or a hundred miles by car over
flooded or snowbound roads which the pessimistic declared impassable,
and which only an adventurous youth for a good round sum would undertake
to negotiate. In one of these hold-ups I traveled two hundred miles in a
freight car behind an engine, the first to go over the snowbound road in
a week. More than once on these exciting detours I felt that probably I
should not come out alive; but I always did and always found, however
late my arrival, my audience was waiting me. As a matter of fact those
little adventures were highly stimulating after hours and hours of the
benumbing comfort of trains.
When I knew how I was to get away, I looked up the committee. So far as
I was concerned, the point at which I most frequently found a serious
conflict in a committee was the subject on which I was to talk. That was
supposed to have been settled—I had their letter for it. But not
everybody wanted me to talk on so-and-so. Usually I found it was because
somebody feared I might be too radical. They didn’t want anything said
on their platform which would antagonize the well-to-do conservative
sponsors of the course or encourage the town’s social and economic
rebels.
I remember times when, after an exciting discussion behind the scenes, I
stood in the wings waiting for the signal to come onto the platform
while behind me the discussion went on. Only at the last moment did the
chairman say begrudgingly, “Well, talk on so-and-so.” But the chief
objector meeting me after the lecture said, “I would so much have
preferred to have heard you on so-and-so.”
But the indecision of the committee was not the only trying experience
before I was actually on my feet and at my job. There was the
introduction. You never knew exactly what was to happen. As a matter of
fact the introduction should and frequently does give opportunity for
repartee, for anecdote—an easy way for putting yourself at once on terms
of friendliness with your audience. But I was never happy at that kind
of thing. On the Chautauqua circuit the fashion has been for the speaker
to go out as soon as the music was over, take his stand and begin.
Nobody said, “This is So-and-So who will speak on so-and-so.” Nobody
told them anything about you—you stood up and said your piece.
The ritual on the lyceum platform was different. There they made the
most of me, as a rule. It sometimes seemed to me that each successive
committee had a different way of presenting me. Sometimes I marched out
with the master of ceremonies, a man or woman, and was placed in an
armchair while the chairman made remarks about me which were often
bewildering. I have been introduced as the author of George Kennan’s
Siberian books and of Edna Ferber’s Emma McChesney stories. I have heard
a long explanation of why I had never married. Once I was called a
notorious woman by the speaker, he evidently thinking that the word was
flattering. Often I had a bodyguard made up of important women of the
community—a tribute to my sex.
One of the most peculiar fashions, as well as the most trying, was
having a scene arranged behind the drop curtain. The stage was turned
into a pleasant sitting room, and a half-dozen of the leading women of
the town in their best gowns were seated about in informal fashion. When
we were all ready the curtain went up. There would be music, and then
the chairman would tell them who I was, and why I was supposed to be
worth their attention. While this was going on the audience was locating
the different persons of importance on the stage and criticizing the
setting and the costumes.
One going as a lecturer to the most remote parts of the country that
support a lecture course may think he will be a treat, but if he has any
sensibility he will soon discover that, far from that, he usually has a
critical audience. It is interested in what he has to say, treats him
with courtesy and respect; but it has also had experience with scores of
lecturers in past years and compares his matter and his manner with
theirs. I have been in towns in the Middle West where they had heard
Thackeray and Dickens read, had listened to Emerson and Bronson Alcott,
and had heard every popular lecturer in all the years since their day.
Your real opportunity to judge of the intelligence and alertness of the
community comes while you are speaking. Look for an hour or more into
the faces of a group of men and women who, whatever they may think of
you, are courteous enough to give you their attention, and you know soon
what certain individuals think of what you are saying. Always I found
myself speaking to someone who I knew heartily disagreed with me,
someone I felt I would like to convince. Always I knew that there was a
man waiting to challenge me. Usually these challenges came from
Socialists or Single Taxers. If an opportunity was given to ask
questions after my talk (something which I always encouraged), they were
the first on their feet. The community knew them and knew what their
questions would be, and frequently laughed at them. But a really good
audience enjoys seeing a speaker heckled a bit and the speaker, if he is
really interested in his business, is glad to take the heckling. I know
nothing better for a lecturer who is going over the same arguments night
after night than to know that there will probably be somebody in his
audience who will seize the first opportunity to pick on a weak point,
challenge his generalization, his facts. If that happens you always go
away from your lecture better equipped than you came to it.
In the twelve years in which I regularly made an annual lecture trip—I
gave up the work in 1932, finding it too much for my strength—in all
those twelve years I everywhere found the liveliest absorption in
national policies. People told you how they felt about an undertaking,
how it was working out in their particular community—important, for here
you had the test of the pudding in its eating. It was what I saw of the
workings of prohibition in the 1920’s that drove me to do one of the
most unpopular things I ever did—that was to tell bluntly how I saw it
working in hotels from one end of the land to the other, disheartening
evidences of its effect on the young, the unexpected dangers it brought
to a woman traveling alone at night, both in stations and on trains. I
set down what I had seen over a wide range of territory, what I had
heard from the mouths of men and women who had been ardent
prohibitionists, and who were appalled by the things that were happening
particularly to youth in their own communities.
I had never been a prohibitionist in principle. My whole theory for the
improvement of society is based on a belief in the discipline and the
education of the individual to self-control and right doing, for the
sake of right doing. I have never seen fundamental improvements imposed
from the top by ordinances and laws. I believed that the country was
gradually learning temperance. But if prohibition could be made to work
I was willing it should be tried. But what I saw in these years had led
me by 1928 to feel that something unexpected and very disastrous was
going on, and that it must be faced, not hidden. It was the most
important observation that my crowded lecture days yielded, but as I say
it brought me bitter criticism and now and then an intimation from some
indignant woman of power and parts that I had sold myself to the liquor
interests. One lady even intimated that if she had known that my pen was
for sale she would have bid for it. This kind of criticism, however, is
one of the things that one who says what he thinks must be prepared to
meet. It is very difficult to believe that those who disagree with you
are as convinced of the right of their point of view as you are, that
they are not being bribed or unduly influenced, have no selfish purpose
as you are sure you have not.
Two generalizations topping all others came out of this going up and
down the land in the years between 1920 and 1932. The first is the
ambition of our people to live and think according to what they
conceive to be national standards. They adopt them whether they suit
their locality or not, and often in adopting them destroy something
with individuality and charm. For the traveler it begins with the
hotel, spick and span, and as like as two peas to the one in
A-ville—B-ville—and so on. Over the way is a sturdy stone building
dating from the days of the coach and four. You may sigh for its great
rooms and for a sight of the old lithographs sure to be on the wall,
but you know it is run down. The town cannot support two, and it
prefers the smart and comfortable commonplace to modernizing its fine
old inn.
Look out your hotel window and you will see opposite a smart, little
dress shop, a duplicate of one you have been seeing everywhere you have
halted, a duplicate of many a one you have seen on New York avenues.
Next door is a standardized beauty parlor, and the pretty girl who waits
on you at the table, the daughter probably of some solid and
self-respecting townsman, has the latest coiffure and blood-red nails.
She is struggling to look as she supposes girls do in Chicago or New
York.
When the committee takes you out to drive it is to show their one high
building, a high building on a prairie with limitless land to occupy, or
a country club as fine as the one in the nearest city. The pride is in
looking like something else, not themselves. The growth of this progress
in imitation can be traced in the change that has come over the local
postal card. All my life I have been a buyer of postal cards, largely on
account of my mother, to whom I always sent pictures of the localities
through which I was passing. Mother died in 1917, but up to this day I
rarely go through a station that I do not say to myself, “I must find a
card for Mother”—and turn away with a pang. In the years between 1920
and 1932 the postal card grew steadily less interesting. Once there were
pictures of a near-by fort, the earliest house, a local celebrity, a
rare view, but now it is all of high buildings and new blocks. They give
of course the pictures of the Zoo and the parks, and even the Zoo and
the parks pride themselves, like the country club, on their resemblance
to those of the nearest large city.
The growing evidence that nationalization is blotting out local
individuality, destroying the pungent personality of sections, states,
communities, struck me with new force after the months I spent in Italy
in 1926. In Italy I had found that, however deeply unionism might be
written in the hearts of some men, you were a Roman, a Perugian, a
Venetian, a Neapolitan before you were an Italian. The long arm of
Fascism was reaching into the provinces and the towns, but it did not as
yet disturb their ways of life. Mussolini had shown, up to that date,
rare knowledge of his Italians. He had left them their ways. Sure of
them, they did not worry so much about the change in government. Most of
them could see about them the proofs of two thousand years of change;
they could show you records and scars of a long succession of emperors,
kings, consuls, dictators. It did not seem to make a vast difference to
them what the government was if they could go on being themselves.
Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the
notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the
surest way to destroy the initiative, to benumb the creative impulse
above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic
ideals.
The second of my two generalizations was slower in its making. It came
when I began to scratch below the surface of the imitative life so
conspicuous. Then I found a stable foundation of people who stayed at
home and went about their business in their own way and without much
talking. These were people who in spite of droughts and dust storms
stuck to their farms, making the most of good years, saving enough to
carry them through the evil ones, adding a little, year by year, to
their possessions in town and country, supporting schools, churches, and
incidentally lecture courses. They were people who believed in freedom
to work out their own salvation and asked from the state nothing more
than protection in this freedom. It was the business of government, as
they saw it, to keep off the plunderers and let them alone.
Democracy to them was not something which insured them a stable
livelihood. It was something which protected them while they earned a
livelihood. If they failed it was their failure. If the Government did
not protect them from transportation plunderers, manipulations of money,
stock gambling in goods which they raised to feed the world, it was the
Government’s failure. Then they had the right to change the Government,
hold it up to its duty. That was their political business.
This was about what I found, the country over. When once I had learned
to look beyond the restless imitative crowd, to hunt out people who were
going about their business steadily, and for the most part serenely, I
began to breathe more freely and to say: “Well, perhaps, after all, the
men and women of this country as a whole do know what they are about.
They do know what democracy means, and in the best way that they can
under many hampering circumstances they are trying to live it.”
Some such conclusion I always brought back with me from my annual swings
around the country, my dozens of nights in dozens of different
places—the high spot of which always was the hour of searching the faces
of the men and women who came to listen to what I had to say, and who, I
knew, sized me up for just about what I was worth. I might be fooling
myself but not them.
20
NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN
Here then is the record of my day’s work still unfinished at eighty.
Nobody can be more surprised than I am that I am still at work. Looking
forward at life at thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, generally finding myself
tired and a little discouraged, having always taken on things for which
I was unprepared, things which were really too big for me, I consoled
myself by saying, “At seventy you stop.” I planned for it. I would
burrow into the country, have a microscope—my old love. I knew by this
time that was not the way for me to find God, but I expected to have a
lot of fun watching the Protozoa and less anguish than watching men and
women.
But I discovered when seventy came that I still had security to look
after. I could make it by seventy-five, I thought, but I did not. And I
have come where I am with a consciousness that, so long as my head holds
out, I shall work. More important, I am counting it as one of my
blessings. In spite of the notion early instilled into me that the place
of the aged is in the corner resignedly waiting to die, that there is no
place for their day’s work in the scheme of things, that they no longer
will have either the desire or the power to carry on, I find things to
do which belong to me and nobody else.
It is an exciting discovery that this can be so. Old age need not be
what the textbooks assure us it is. Shakespeare is wrong. Cicero, dull
as he is in comparison, is more nearly right. More, it can be an
adventure. My young friends laugh at me when I tell them that, in spite
of creaking joints and a tremulous hand, there are satisfactions
peculiar to the period, satisfactions different from those of youth, of
middle life, even of that decade of the seventies which I supposed ended
it all.
I have been finding it a surprising adventure, if frequently
disillusioning and disturbing, to review my working life, to pick out
what seems to be the reason for my going here and not there, for
thinking this and not that. It has been a good deal like renewing
acquaintance with a friend I had not seen since childhood. Probably the
reason for this is that I have never stopped long enough after any one
piece of work to clean up, valuate what I had done. Always a new
undertaking was on my table before I was finished with what went before.
Packing boxes and letter files of badly classified material still
clutter up my small space with the physical evidence of the
incompleteness of every piece of work I have undertaken.
This explains why telling my story has been so full of surprises. “I did
not realize I felt that way,” I have told myself more than once. “I had
forgotten I did that.” “I cannot imagine why I thought that.”
I took on self-support at the start that I might be free to find answers
to questions which puzzled me. After long floundering I blundered into
man’s old struggle for the betterment of his life.
My point of attack has always been that of a journalist after the fact,
rarely that of a reformer, the advocate of a cause or a system. If I was
tempted from the strait and narrow path of the one who seeks for that
which is so and why it is so, I sooner or later returned. This was
partly because of the humor and common sense of my associates on
_McClure’s_ and _The American Magazine_, and partly because the habit of
accepting without question the teachings and conventions of my world was
shattered when in girlhood I discovered that the world was not created
in six days of twenty-four hours each. That experience aroused me to
questioning, qualifying even what I advocated, which no first-class
crusader can afford to do.
I have never had illusions about the value of my individual
contribution! I realized early that what a man or a woman does is built
on what those who have gone before have done, that its real value
depends on making the matter in hand a little clearer, a little sounder
for those who come after. Nobody begins or ends anything. Each person is
a link, weak or strong, in an endless chain. One of our gravest mistakes
is persuading ourselves that nobody has passed this way before.
In our eagerness to prove we have found the true solution, we fail to
inquire why this same solution failed to work when tried before—for it
always has been tried before, even if we in our self-confidence do not
know it.