A YOUNG METROPOLIS
An observer approaching a strange city should be "neutral even in
thought." He may listen to what is said of the city, but he must not
permit his opinions to take form in advance; for, like other gossip,
gossip about cities is unreliable, and the casual stranger's estimate of
cities is not always founded upon broad appreciations. But though it is
unwise to judge of cities by what is said of them, it is perhaps worth
remarking that one may often judge of men by what they say of cities.
I remember an American manufacturer, broken down by overwork, who, when
he looked at Pompeii, could think only of the wasted possibilities of
Vesuvius as a power plant, and I remember two traveling salesmen on a
southern railroad train who expressed scorn for the exquisite city of
Charleston because--they said--it is but a poor market place for
suspenders and barbers' supplies. There are those who think of Boston
only as headquarters of the shoe trade, others who think of it only in
the terms of culture, and still others who regard it solely as an abode
of negrophiles.
In the case of the chief city of Alabama, however, my companion and I
noticed, as we journeyed through the South, that reports were
singularly in accord. Birmingham is too young to have any Civil War
history. Her history is the history of the steel industry in the South,
and one hears always of that: of the affluence of the city when the
industry is thriving, and hard times when it is not. One is invariably
told that Birmingham is not a southern city, but a northern city in the
South, and the chief glories of the place, aside from steel, are (if one
is to believe rumors current upon railroad trains and elsewhere), a
twenty-seven story building, Senator Oscar Underwood, the distinguished
Democratic leader, and the Tutwiler Hotel. Even in Atlanta it is
conceded that the Tutwiler is a good hotel, and when Atlanta admits that
anything in Birmingham is good it may be considered as established that
the thing is very, very good--for Birmingham and Atlanta view each other
with the same degree of cordiality as is exchanged between St. Louis and
Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Paul, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Having been, in the course of our southern wanderings, in several very
bad hotels, and having heard the Tutwiler compared with Chicago's
Blackstone, my companion and I held eager anticipation of this hostelry.
Nor were our hopes dashed by a first glimpse of the city on the night of
our arrival. It was a modern-looking city--just the sort of city that
would have a fine new hotel. The railroad station through which we
passed after leaving the train was not the usual dingy little southern
station, but an admirable building, and the streets along which we
presently found ourselves gliding in an automobile hack, were wide,
smooth, and brightly illuminated by clustered boulevard lights.
True, we had long since learned not to place too much reliance upon the
nocturnal aspects of cities. A city seen by night is like a woman
dressed for a ball. Darkness drapes itself about her as a black-velvet
evening gown, setting off, in place of neck and arms, the softly glowing
façades of marble buildings; lights are her diamond ornaments, and her
perfume is the cool fragrance of night air. Almost all cities, and
almost all women, look their best at night, and there are those which,
though beautiful by night, sink, in their daylight aspect, to utter
mediocrity.
Presently our motor drew up before the entrance of the Tutwiler--a proud
entrance, all revolving doors and glitter and promise. A brisk bell boy
came running for our bags. The signs were of the best.
The lobby, though spacious, was crowded; the decorations and equipment
were of that rich sumptuousness attained only in the latest and most
magnificent American hotels; there was music, and as we made our way
along we caught a glimpse, in passing, of an attractive supper room,
with small table-lights casting their soft radiance upon white shirt
fronts and the faces of pretty girls. In all it was a place to make glad
the heart of the weary traveler, and to cause him to wonder whether his
dress suit would be wrinkled when he took it from his trunk.
Behind the imposing marble "desk" stood several impeccable clerks, and
to one of these I addressed myself, giving our names and mentioning the
fact that we had telegraphed for rooms. I am not sure that this young
man wore a braided cutaway and a white carnation; I only know that he
affected me as hotel clerks in braided cutaways and white carnations
always do. While I spoke he stood a little way back from the counter,
his chin up, his gaze barely missing the top of my hat, his nostrils
seeming to contract with that expression of dubiousness assumed by
delicate noses which sense, long before they encounter it, the aroma of
unworthiness.
"Not a room in the house," he said. Then, as though to forestall further
parley, he turned and spoke with gracious lightness to one of his own
rank and occupation who, at the request of my companion, was
ascertaining whether letters were awaiting us.
"But we telegraphed two days ago!" I protested desperately.
"Can't help it. Hardware Convention. Everything taken."
Over my shoulder I heard from my companion a sound, half sigh, half
groan, which echoed the cry of my own heart.
"I felt this coming!" he murmured. "Didn't you notice all these people
with ribbons on them? There's never any room in a hotel where
everybody's wearing ribbons. It's like a horse show. They get the
ribbons and we get the gate."
"Surely," I faltered, "you can let us have one small room?"
"Impossible," he answered brightly. "We've turned away dozens of people
this evening."
"Then," I said, abandoning hope, "perhaps you will suggest some other
hotel?"
I once heard a woman, the most perfect parvenu I ever met, speak of her
poor relations in a tone exactly similar to that in which the clerk now
spoke the names of two hotels. Having spoken, he turned and passed
behind the partition at one end of the marble counter.
My companion and I stood there for a moment looking despondently at each
other. Then, without a word, we retreated through that gorgeous lobby,
feeling like sad remnants of a defeated Yankee army.
Again we motored through the bright streets, but only to successive
disappointments, for both hotels mentioned by the austere clerk were
"turning 'em away." Our chauffeur now came to our aid, mentioning
several small hotels, and in one of these, the Granada, we were at last
so fortunate as to find lodgings.
"It begun to look like you'd have to put up at the Roden," the chauffeur
smiled as we took our bags out of the car and settled with him.
"The Roden?"
"Yes," he returned "Best ventilated hotel in the United States."
Next day when the Hotel Roden was pointed out to us we appreciated the
witticism, for the Roden is--or was at the time of our visit--merely
the steel skeleton of a building which, we were informed, had for some
years stood unfinished owing to disagreements among those concerned with
its construction.
As for the Granada, though a modest place, it was new and clean; the
clerk was amiable, the beds comfortable, and if our rooms were too small
to admit our trunks, they were, at all events, outside rooms, each with
a private bath, at a rate of $1 per day apiece. Never in any hotel have
I felt that I was getting so much for my money.
Next morning, after breakfast, we set out to see the city. Having
repeatedly heard of Birmingham as the "Pittsburgh of the South," we
expected cold daylight to reveal the sooty signs of her industrialism,
but in this we were agreeably disappointed. By day as well as by night
the city is pleasing to the eye, and it is a fact worth noting that the
downtown buildings of Atlanta (which is not an industrial city) are
streaked and dirty, whereas those of Birmingham are clean--the reason
for this being that the mills and furnaces of Birmingham are far removed
from the heart of the town, whereas locomotives belch black smoke into
the very center of Atlanta's business and shopping district.
Moreover, the metropolis of Alabama is better laid out than that of
Georgia. The streets of Birmingham are wide, and the business part of
the city, lying upon a flat terrain, is divided into large, even
squares. From this district the chief residence section mounts by easy,
graceful grades into the hills to the southward. Because of these
grades, and the curving drives which follow the contours of the hills,
and the vistas of the lower city, and the good modern houses, and the
lawns and trees and shrubbery and breezes, this Highlands region is
reminiscent of a similar residence district in Portland, Oregon--which
is to say that it is one of the most agreeable districts of the kind in
the United States.
Well up on the hillside, Highland Avenue winds a charming course between
pleasant homes, with here and there a little residence park branching
off to one side, and here and there a small municipal park occupying an
angle formed by a sharp turn in the driveway; and if you follow the
street far enough you will presently see the house of the Birmingham
Country Club, standing upon its green hilltop, amidst rolling, partly
wooded golf links, above the road.
Nor is the Country Club at the summit of this range of hills. Back of it
rise other roads, the most picturesque of them being Altamont Road,
which runs to the top of Red Mountain, reaching a height about
equivalent to that of the cornice line of Birmingham's tallest building.
The houses of this region are built on streets which, like some streets
of Portland, are terraced into the hillside, and the resident of an
upper block can almost look down the chimneys of his neighbors on the
block below. The view commanded from these mountain perches does not
suggest that the lower city runs up into the Highlands. It seems to be a
separate place, down in a distant valley, and the sense of its
remoteness is heightened by the thin veil of gray smoke which wafts from
the tall smokestacks of far-off iron furnaces, softening the serrated
outlines of the city and wrapping its tall buildings in the industrial
equivalent for autumn haze.
At night the scene from the Highlands is even more spectacular, for at
brief intervals the blowing of a converter in some distant steel plant
illuminates the heavens with a great hot glow, like that which rises and
falls about the crater of a volcano in eruption. Thus the city's vast
affairs are kept before it by day in a pillar of cloud, and by night in
a pillar of fire. Iron and steel dominate Birmingham's mind, activities
and life. The very ground of Red Mountain is red because of the iron ore
that it contains, and those who reside upon the charming slopes of this
hill do not own their land in fee simple, but subject always to the
mineral rights of mining companies.
The only other industry of Birmingham which is to be compared, in
magnitude or efficiency, with the steel industry is that of "cutting in"
at dances. All through the South it is carried on, but whereas in such
cities as Memphis, New Orleans and Atlanta, men show a little mercy to
the stranger--realizing that, as he is presumably unacquainted with all
the ladies at a dance, he cannot retaliate in kind--Birmingham is
merciless and prosecutes the pestilential practice unremittingly, even
going so far as to apply the universal-service principle and call out
her highschool youths to carry on the work. Before I went to certain
dances in Birmingham I felt that high-school boys ought to be kept at
home at night, but after attending these dances I realized that such
restriction was altogether inadequate, and that the only way to deal
with them effectively would be to pickle them in vitriol.
Where, in other cities of the South, I have managed to dance as much as
half a dance without interruption, I never danced more than twenty feet
with one partner in Birmingham. Nor did my companion.
Our host was energetic in presenting us to ladies of infinite
pulchritude and State-wide terpsichorean reputation, but we would start
to tread a measure with them, only to have them swiftly snatched from us
by some spindle-necked, long-wristed, big-boned, bowl-eared high-school
youth, in a dinner suit which used to fit him when it was new, six
months ago.
As we would start to dance the lady would say:
"You-all ah strangehs, ahn't you?"
We would reply that we were.
"Wheh do you come from?"
"New York."
Then, because the Hardware Convention was being held in town at the
time, she would continue:
"Ah reckon you-all ah hahdware men?"
But that was as far as the conversation ever got. Just about the time
that she began to reckon we were hardware men a mandatory hand would be
laid upon us, and before we had time to defend ourselves against the
hardware charge, the lady would be wafted off in the arms of some
predatory youth who ought to have been at home considering _pons
asinorum_.
Had we indeed been hardware men, and had we had our hardware with us,
they could have done with fewer teachers in the high schools of that
city after the night of our first dance in Birmingham.
* * * * *
Up in the hills, some miles back of the Country Club, on the banks of a
large artificial lake, stands the new clubhouse of the Birmingham Motor
and Country Club, and around the lake runs the club's
two-and-a-half-mile speedway. Elsewhere is the Roebuck Golf Club, the
links of which are admitted ("even in Atlanta!") to be excellent--the
one possible objection to the course of the Birmingham Country Club
being that it is suited only to play with irons.
I mention these golfing matters not because they interest me, but
because they may interest you. I am not a golfer. I played the game for
two seasons; then I decided to try to lead a better life. The first time
I played I did quite well, but thence onward my game declined until,
toward the last, crowds would collect to hear me play. When I determined
to abandon the game I did not burn my clubs or break them up, according
to the usual custom, but instead gave them to a man upon whom I wished
to retaliate because his dog had bitten a member of my family.
Small wonder that all golf clubs have extensive bars! It is not hard to
understand why men who realize that they have become incurable victims
of the insidious habit of golf should wish to drown the thought in
drink. But in Birmingham they can't do it--not, at least, at bars.
Alabama has beaten her public bars into soda fountains and quick-lunch
rooms, and though her club bars still look like real ones, the drinks
served are so soft that no splash occurs when reminiscent tears drop
into them.
When we were in Alabama each citizen who so desired was allowed by law
to import from outside the State a small allotment of strong drink for
personal use, but the red tape involved in this procedure had already
discouraged all but the most ardent drinkers, and those found it next to
impossible, even by hoarding their "lonesome quarts," and pooling
supplies with their convivial friends, to provide sufficient alcoholic
drink for a "real party."
We met in Birmingham but one gentleman whose cellars seemed to be well
stocked, and the tales of ingenuity and exertion by which he managed to
secure ample supplies of liquor were such as to lead us to believe that
this matter had become, with him, an occupation to which all other
business must give second place.
It was this gentleman who told us that, since the State went dry, the
ancient form, "R.S.V.P.," on social invitations, had been revised to
"B.W.H.P.," signifying, "bring whisky in hip pocket."
To the "B.W.H.P." habit he himself strictly adhered. One night, when we
chanced to meet him in a downtown club, he drew a flask from a hip
pocket, and invited us to "have something."
"What is it?" asked my companion.
"Scotch."
When my companion had helped himself he passed the flask to me, but I
returned it to the owner, explaining that I did not drink Scotch whisky.
"What do you drink?" he asked.
"Bourbon."
"Here it is," he returned, drawing a second flask from the other hip
pocket.
How well, too, do I remember the long, delightful evening upon which my
companion and I sat in an Atlanta club with a group of the older
members, the week before Georgia went bone dry. There, as in Alabama
before 1915, there had been pretended prohibition, but now the bars of
leading clubs were being closed, and convivial men were looking into the
future with despair. One of the gentlemen was a justice of the Supreme
Court of the State, and I remember his wistful declaration that
prohibition would fall hardest upon the older men.
"When a man is young," he said, "he can be lively and enjoy himself
without drinking, because he is full of animal spirits. But we older men
aren't bubbling over with liveliness. We can't dance, or don't want to,
and we lack the stimulus which comes of falling continually in love. My
great pleasure is to sit of an evening, here at a table in the café of
this club, conversing with my friends. That is where prohibition is
going to hurt me. I shall not see my old friends any more."
The others protested at this somber view, but the judge gravely shook
his head, saying: "You don't believe me, but I know whereof I speak, for
I have been through something like this, in a minor way, before. A good
many years ago I was one of a little group of congenial men to organize
a small club. We had comfortable quarters, and we used to drop in at
night, much as we have been doing of late years here, and have the kind
of talks that are tonic to the soul. Of course we had liquor in the
club, but there came a time when, for some reason or other--I think it
was some trouble over a license--we closed our bar. We didn't think it
was going to make a great difference, but it did. The men began to stop
coming in, and before long the club ceased to exist.
"It won't be like that here. This club will go on. But we won't come
here. We won't want to sit around a table, like this, and drink ginger
ale and sarsaparilla; and even if we do, the talk won't be so good. The
thing that makes me downcast is not that liquor is going, but that we
are really parting this week.
"Every one knows that the abuse of drink does harm in the world, but
these pious prohibitionists are not of the temperament to understand how
alcohol ministers to the esthetic side of certain natures. It gives us
better companions and makes us better companions for others. It
stimulates our minds, enhances our appreciations, sharpens our wit,
loosens our tongues, and saves brilliant conversation from becoming a
lost art."
My sympathies went out to the judge. It has always seemed to me a pity
that the liquor question has resolved itself into a fight between
extremists--for I think the wine and beer people might survive if they
were not tied up with the distillers, and I do not believe that any
considerable evil comes of drinking wine or beer.
Nevertheless it must be apparent to every one who troubles to
investigate, that prohibition invariably works great good wherever it is
made effective. Take, for example, Birmingham.
There was one year--I believe it was 1912--when there was an average of
more than one murder a day, for every working day in the year, in the
county in which Birmingham is located. On one famous Saturday night
there were nineteen felonious assaults (sixteen by negroes and three by
whites), from which about a dozen deaths resulted, two of those killed
having been policemen.
All this has changed with prohibition. Killings are now comparatively
rare, arrests have diminished to less than a third of the former
average, whether for grave or petty offenses, and the receiving jail,
which was formerly packed like a pigpen every Saturday night, now stands
almost empty, while the city jail, which used continually to house from
120 to 150 offenders, has diminished its average population to 30 or
35.