known to the public because he testified as an expert in murder trials.
He had snowy white mustaches, one arm, and a peppery temper. His
assistant was his son, whom he persisted in referring to as Charlie,
which amused us, because Charlie was a big man with a flourishing black
beard. I managed early in the course to get on the elderly scientist’s
nerves by my tendency to take the physical phenomena of the universe
without due reverence. The old gentleman would explain to us that
scientific caution required us to accept nothing on his authority, but
to insist upon proving everything for ourselves. Soon afterward he
produced a little vial of white powder, remarking, “Now, gentlemen,
this vial contains arsenic, and a little pinch of it would be sufficient
to kill all the members of this class.” Said I, “_You_ try that,
Professor!”
Really, he might have joined in the laugh. But what he did was to call
me an “insolent young puppy,” and to predict that I was going to “flunk”
his course, in which event he would see to it that I did not get
promoted to the next class. This roused my sporting spirit, and I
decided to “flunk” his course and get such high marks in all the other
courses that I could not be held back. This I did.
The top floor of our building was a big auditorium, where we met every
morning for chapel. Our “prexy” read a passage from the Bible, and three
of us produced efforts in English composition, directed and staged by a
teacher of elocution, who had marked our manuscripts in the margin with
three mystic symbols: _rg_, _lg_, and _gbh_. The first meant a gesture
with the right hand, the second a gesture with the left hand, and the
third a gesture with both hands--imploring the audience, or in extreme
emergencies lifted into the air, imploring the deity. In a row, upstage,
facing the assembled students, sat our honorable faculty, elderly
gentlemen with whiskers, doing their best not to show signs of boredom.
Our “prexy” was a white-bearded Civil War veteran, General Webb; and
when it was my turn to prepare a composition, I made my debut as a
revolutionary agitator with an encomium of my fathers favorite hero,
Robert E. Lee. My bombshell proved a dud, because General Webb, who had
commanded a brigade at Gettysburg, remarked mildly that it was a good
paper, and Lee had been a great man. Soldiers, I learned, take a
professional attitude to their jobs, and confine their fighting to the
field of battle.
XIII
The year I started at this college, we lived in a three-or four-room
flat on West 65th Street. Mother did the cooking, and father would put
an apron over his little round paunch and wash the dishes; there was
much family laughter when father kissed the cook. When the weather was
fair, I rode to college on a bicycle; when the weather was stormy, I
rode on the Sixth Avenue Elevated and walked across town. I took my
lunch in a little tin box with a strap: a couple of sandwiches, a piece
of cake, and an apple or banana. The honorific circumstances of college
life were missing. In fact, so little did I know about these higher
matters that when I was sounded out for a “frat,” I actually didn’t know
what it was, and could make nothing of the high-sounding attempts at
explanation. If the haughty upperclassman with the correct clothes and
the Anglo-Saxon features had said to me in plain words, “We want to keep
ourselves apart from the kikes and wops who make up the greater part of
our student body,” I would have told him that some of the kikes and wops
interested me, whereas he did not.
About two thirds of the members of my class were Jews. I had never known
any Jews before, but here were so many that one took them as a matter of
course. I am not sure if I realized they were Jews; I seldom realize it
now about the people I meet. The Jews have lived in Central Europe for
so long, and have been so mixed with the population, that the border
line is hard to draw. Since I became a socialist writer, half my friends
and half my readers have been Jews. I sum up my impression of them in
the verse about the little girl who had a little curl right in the
middle of her forehead, and when she was good she was very, very good,
and when she was bad she was horrid.
About this time, I threw away another chance for advancement. My uncle,
Terry Sinclair, who was an “old beau” in New York and therefore met the
rich and had some influence, brought to his bright young nephew the
offer of an appointment to the Annapolis Naval Academy. This was
regarded as my birthright, but I declined it. I had made up my mind that
I wanted to be a lawyer, having come to the naïve conclusion that the
law offered a way to combine an honorable living with devotion to books.
This idea I carried through college and until I went up to Columbia
University, where I had an opportunity to observe the law-school
students.
XIV
My Saturdays and holidays I spent racing about the streets and in my
playground, Central Park. In the course of these years I came to know
this park so well that afterward, when I walked in it, every slope and
turn of the winding paths had a story for me. I learned to play tennis
on its grass courts; I roller-skated on its walks and ice-skated on its
lakes--when the flag with the red ball went up on top of the “castle,”
thrilling the souls of young folks for miles around. I played hare and
hounds, marking up the asphalt walks with chalk; we thought nothing of
running all the way around the park, a distance of seven miles.
The Upper West Side was mostly empty lots, with shanties of “squatters”
and goats browsing on tin cans--if one could believe the comic papers.
Blasting and building were going on, and the Italian laborers who did
this hard and dangerous work were the natural prey of us young
aborigines. We snowballed them from the roofs of the apartment houses,
and when there was no snow, we used clothespins. When they cursed us we
yelled with glee. I can still remember the phrases--or at any rate what
we imagined the phrases to be. “Aberragotz!” and “Chingasol!”--do those
sounds mean anything to an Italian? If they do, it may be something
shocking, perhaps not fit to print. When these “dagos” chased us, we
fled in terror most delightful.
Sometimes we would raid grocery stores on the avenue and grab a couple
of potatoes, and roast them in bonfires on the vacant lots. I was a
little shocked at this idea, but the other boys explained to me that it
was not stealing, it was only “swiping,” and the grocers took it for
granted. So it has been easy for me to understand how young criminals
are made in our great cities. We manufacture crime wholesale, just as
certainly and as definitely as we manufacture alcohol in a mash of
grain. And just as we can stop getting alcohol by not mixing a mash, so
we can stop crime by not permitting exploitation and economic
inequality.
But that is propaganda, and I have sworn to leave it out of this book.
So instead, let me tell a story that illustrates the police attitude
toward these budding criminals. In my mature days when I was collecting
material about New York, I was strolling on the East Side with an
elderly police captain. It was during a reform administration, and the
movement for uplift had taken the form of a public playground, with
swings and parallel bars. The young men of the tenements were developing
their muscles after a day’s work loading trucks, and I said to the
captain, what a fine thing they should have this recreation. The
elderly cynic snorted wrathfully: “Porch climbers! Second-story work!”
The Nietzscheans advise us to live dangerously, and this advice I took
without having heard it. The motorcar had not yet come in, but there
were electric cars and big two-horse trucks, and my memory is full of
dreadful moments. Riding down Broadway to college, the wheel of my
bicycle slipped into the wet trolley slot, and I was thrown directly in
front of an oncoming car. Quick as a cat, I rolled out of the way, but
the car ran over my hat, and a woman bystander fainted. Again, skating
on an asphalt street, I fell in the space between the front and rear
wheels of a fast-moving express wagon, and had to whisk my legs out
before the rear wheels caught them. When I was seventeen, I came to the
conclusion that Providence must have some special purpose in keeping me
in the world, for I was able to reckon up fourteen times that I had
missed death by a hairbreadth. I had fallen off a pier during a storm; I
had been swept out to sea by a rip tide; I had been carried down from
the third story of the Weisiger House by a fireman with a scaling
ladder.
I do not know so much about the purposes of Providence now as I did at
the age of seventeen, and the best I can make of the matter is this:
that several hundred thousand little brats are bred in the great
metropolis every year and turned out into the streets to develop their
bodies and their wits, and in a rough, general way, those who get caught
by streetcars and motorcars and trucks are those who are not quite so
quick in their reactions. But when it comes to genius, to beauty,
dignity, and true power of mind, I cannot see that there is any chance
for them to survive in the insane hurly-burly of metropolitan life. If I
wanted qualities such as these in human beings, I would surely transfer
them to a different environment. And maybe that is what Providence was
planning for me to understand and to do in the world. At any rate, it is
what I am trying to do, and is my final reaction to the great metropolis
of Mammon.
_2_
_Youth_
I
Childhood lasted long, and youth came late in my life. I was taught to
avoid the subject of sex in every possible way; the teaching being done,
for the most part, in Victorian fashion, by deft avoidance and anxious
evasion. Apparently my mother taught me even too well; for once when I
was being bathed, I persisted in holding a towel in front of myself.
Said my mother: “If you don’t keep that towel out of the way, I’ll give
you a spank.” Said I: “Mamma, would you rather have me disobedient, or
immodest?”
The first time I ever heard of the subject of sex, I was four or five
years old, playing on the street with a little white boy and a Negro
girl, the child of a janitor. They were whispering about something
mysterious and exciting; there were two people living across the street
who had just been married, and something they did was a subject of
snickers. I, who wanted to know about everything, tried to find out
about this; but I am not sure my companions knew what they were
whispering about; at any rate, they did not tell me. But I got the
powerful impression of something strange.
It was several years later that I found out the essential facts. I spent
a summer in the country with a boy cousin a year or two younger than I,
and we watched the animals and questioned the farmhands. But never did I
get one word of information or advice from either father or mother on
this subject; only the motion of shrinking away from something
dreadful. I recollect how the signs of puberty began to show themselves
in me, to my great bewilderment; my mother and grandmother stood
helplessly by, like the hens that hatch ducklings and see them go into
the water.
Incredible as it may seem, I had been at least two years in college
before I understood about prostitution. So different from my friend Sam
De Witt, socialist poet, who told me that he was raised in a tenement
containing a house of prostitution, and that at the age of five he and
other little boys and girls played brothel as other children play dolls,
and quarrelled as to whose turn it was to be the “madam”! I can remember
speculating at the age of sixteen whether it could be true that women
did actually sell their bodies. I decided in the negative and held to
that idea until I summoned the courage to question one of my classmates
in college.
The truth, finally made clear, shocked me deeply, and played a great
part in the making of my political revolt. Between the ages of sixteen
and twenty I explored the situation in New York City, and made
discoveries that for me were epoch-making. The saloonkeeper, who had
been the villain of my childhood melodrama, was merely a tool and victim
of the big liquor interests and politicians and police. The twin bases
of the political power of Tammany Hall were saloon graft and the sale of
women. So it was that, in my young soul, love for my father and love for
my mother were transmuted into political rage, and I sallied forth at
the age of twenty, a young reformer armed for battle. It would be a
longer battle than I realized, alas!
II
Another factor in my life that requires mentioning is the Protestant
Episcopal Church of America. The Sinclairs had always belonged to that
church; my father was named after an Episcopal clergyman, the Reverend
Upton Beall. My mother’s father was a Methodist and took the _Christian
Herald_, and as a little fellow I read all the stories and studied all
the pictures of the conflicts with the evil one; but my mother and aunts
had apparently decided that the Episcopal Church was more suited to
their social standing, and therefore my spiritual life had always been
one of elegance. Not long ago, seeking local color, I attended a
service in Trinity Church; it was my first service in more than thirty
years, yet I could recite every prayer and sing every hymn and could
even have preached the sermon.
In New York, no matter how poor and wretched the rooms in which we
lived, we never failed to go to the most fashionable church; it was our
way of clinging to social status. When we lived at the Weisiger House,
we walked to St. Thomas’ on Fifth Avenue. When we lived on Second
Avenue, we went to St. George’s. When we moved uptown, we went to St.
Agnes’. Now and then we would make a special trip to the Church of St.
Mary the Virgin, which was “high” and had masses and many candles and
jeweled robes and processions and genuflections and gyrations. Always I
wore tight new shoes and tight gloves and a neatly brushed little derby
hat--supreme discomfort to the glory of God. I became devout, and my
mother, determined upon making something special of me, decided that I
was to become a bishop. I myself talked of driving a hook-and-ladder
truck.
We moved back to the Weisiger House, and I was confirmed at the Church
of the Holy Communion, just around the corner; the rector, Doctor
Mottet, lived to a great age. His assistant was the Reverend William
Wilmerding Moir, son of a wealthy old Scotch merchant; the young
clergyman had, I think, more influence upon me than any other man. My
irreverent memory brings up the first time I was invited to his home and
met his mother, who looked and dressed exactly like Queen Victoria, and
his testy old father, who had a large purple nose, filled, I fear, with
Scotch whisky. The son took me aside. “Upton,” he said, “we are going to
have chicken for dinner, and Father carves, and when he asks you if you
prefer white meat or dark, please express a preference, because if you
say that it doesn’t matter, he will answer that you can wait till you
make up your mind.”
Will Moir was a young man of fashion, but he had gone into the church
because of genuine devoutness and love of his fellowmen. Spirituality is
out of fashion at the moment and open to dangerous suspicion, so I
hasten to say that he was a thoroughly wholesome person; not brilliant
intellectually, but warm-hearted, loyal, and devoted. He became a foster
father to me, and despite all my teasing of the Episcopal Church in _The
Profits of Religion_ and elsewhere, I have never forgotten this loving
soul and what he meant at the critical time of my life. My quarrel with
the churches is a lover’s quarrel; I do not want to destroy them, but to
put them on a rational basis, and especially to drive out the money
changers from the front pews.
Moir specialized in training young boys in the Episcopal virtues, with
special emphasis upon chastity. He had fifty or so under his wing all
the time. We met at his home once a month and discussed moral problems;
we were pledged to write him a letter once a month and tell him all our
troubles. If we were poor, he helped us to find a job; if we were
tempted sexually, we would go to see him and talk it over. The advice we
got was always straightforward and sound. The procedure is out of
harmony with this modern age, and my sophisticated friends smile when
they hear about it. The problem of self-discipline versus
self-development is a complicated one, and I can see virtues in both
courses and perils in either extreme. I am glad that I did not waste my
time and vision “chasing chippies,” as the sport was called; but I am
sorry that I did not get advice and aid in the task of finding a girl
with whom I might have lived wisely and joyfully.
III
I became a devout little Episcopalian, and at the age of fourteen went
to church every day during Lent. I taught a Sunday-school class for a
year. But I lost interest because I could not discover how these little
ragamuffins from the tenements were being made better by learning about
Jonah and the whale and Joshua blowing down the walls of Jericho. I was
beginning to use my brains on the Episcopalian map of the universe, and
a chill was creeping over my fervor. Could it possibly be that the
things I had been taught were merely the Hebrew mythology instead of the
Greek or the German? Could it be that I would be damned for asking such
a question? And would I have the courage to go ahead and believe the
truth, even though I were damned for it?
I took these agonies to my friend Mr. Moir, who was not too much
troubled; it appeared that clergymen were used to such crises in the
young. He told me that the fairy tales did not really matter, he was not
sure that he believed them himself; the only thing of importance was
the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the redemption by his blood. So I
was all right for a time--until I began to find myself doubting the
resurrection of Jesus Christ. After all, what did we know about it? Were
there not a score of other martyred redeemers in the mythologies? And
how could Jesus have been both man and God at the same time? As a
psychological proposition, it meant knowing everything and not knowing
everything, and was not that plain nonsense?
I took this also to Mr. Moir, and he loaded me up with tomes of
Episcopalian apologetics. I remember the Bampton Lectures, an annual
volume of foundation lectures delivered at Oxford. I read several
volumes, and it was the worst thing that ever happened to me; these
devout lectures, stating the position of the opposition, suggested so
many new doubts that I was completely bowled over. Literally, I was
turned into an agnostic by reading the official defenses of
Christianity. I remind myself of this when I have a tendency to worry
over the barrage of attacks on socialism in the capitalist press. Truth
is as mighty now as it was then.
I told my friend Mr. Moir what had happened, but still he refused to
worry; it was a common experience, and I would come back. I felt certain
that I never would, but I was willing for him to keep himself happy. I
no longer taught Sunday school, but I remained under my friend’s
sheltering wing, and told him my troubles--up to the time when I was
married. Marriage was apparently regarded as a kind of graduation from
the school of chastity. My friend did not live to see me as a socialist
agitator; he succumbed to an attack of appendicitis--due, no doubt, to
his habit of talking Christianity all through dinner and, just before
the butler came to remove his plate, bolting his food in a minute or
two.
For a time my interest was transferred to the Unitarian Church. I met
Minot J. Savage of the Church of the Messiah, now the Community Church;
his arguments seemed to me to possess that reasonableness that I had
missed in the Bampton Lectures. I never joined his church, and have
never again felt the need of formal worship; from the age of sixteen it
has been true with me that “to labor is to pray.” I have prayed hard in
this fashion and have found it the great secret of happiness.
An interesting detail about Dr. Savage: he was the first intellectual
man I ever met who claimed to have seen a ghost. Not merely had he seen
one, he had sat up and chatted with it. I found this an interesting
idea, and find it so still. I am the despair of my orthodox
materialistic friends because I insist upon believing in the possibility
of so many strange things. My materialistic friends know that these
things are _a priori_ impossible; whereas I assert that nothing is _a
priori_ impossible. It is a question of evidence, and I am willing to
hear the evidence about anything whatever.
The story as I recall it is this. Savage had a friend who set out for
Ireland in the days before the cable; at midnight Savage awakened and
saw his friend standing by his bedside. The friend stated that he was
dead, but Savage was not to think that he had known the pangs of
drowning; the steamer had been wrecked on the coast of Ireland, and the
friend had been killed when a beam struck him on the left side of his
head as he was trying to get off the ship. Savage wrote this out and had
it signed by witnesses, and two or three weeks later came the news that
the ship had been wrecked and the friend’s body found with the left side
of his head crushed.
If such a case stood alone, it would of course be nothing. But in Edmund
Gurney’s two volumes, _Phantasms of the Living_, are a thousand or so
cases, carefully documented. There is another set of cases, collected by
Dr. Walker Franklin Prince, of the Boston Society for Psychical Research
in Bulletin XIV of that society. I no longer find these phenomena so
difficult of belief, because my second wife and I demonstrated
long-range telepathy in our personal lives. Later on, I shall be telling
about our book, _Mental Radio_.
IV
In my class in college there was a Jewish boy by the name of Simon
Stern, whom I came to know well because we lived in the same
neighborhood and often went home together. Simon wrote a short story,
and one day came to class in triumph, announcing that this story had
been accepted by a monthly magazine published by a Hebrew orphans’ home.
Straightway I was stirred to emulation. If Simon could write a story,
why could not I? Such was the little acorn that grew into an oak, with
so many branches that it threatens to become top-heavy.
I wrote a story about a pet bird. For years it had been my custom every
summer to take young birds from the nest and raise them. They would know
me as their only parent, and were charming pets. Now I put one of these
birds into an adventure, making it serve to prove the innocence of a
colored boy accused of arson. I mailed the story to the _Argosy_, one of
the two Munsey publications in those early days, and the story was
accepted, price twenty-five dollars. You can imagine that I was an
insufferable youngster on the day that letter arrived; especially to my
friend Simon Stern, who had not been paid for his story.
Our family fortunes happened to be at a low ebb just then, so I fell to
digging in this new gold mine. I found several papers that bought
children s stories at low prices; also, before long, I discovered
another gold mine--writing jokes for the comic papers. At seventeen,
jokes were my entire means of support. My mother and I spent that winter
on West 23rd Street, near the river. My weekly budget was this: for a
top-story hallroom in a lodginghouse, one dollar twenty-five; for two
meals a day at an eating house, three dollars; and for a clean collar
and other luxuries, twenty-five cents. It seems a slender allowance, but
you must remember that I had infinite riches in the little room of the
college library.