home and let me run the country for a while.” But I did not accept the
advice. I broached to _Everybody’s Magazine_ the idea of a series of
articles exposing the conditions under which children worked in
industry. They thought this a promising idea and agreed to use a series
of eight or ten such articles. Alas, being new at the game, I omitted to
tie them down with a contract. I took Mrs. Bloor and went down to the
glass factories of southern New Jersey in the heat of midsummer, and I
spent my time watching little boys of ten and twelve working all night
in front of red-hot furnaces. One story I remember: an exhausted child
staggering home at daybreak, falling asleep on the railroad tracks, and
being run over by a train. I lived in the homes of these workers, I
talked with them and ate their food, and in later years I put some of
them into my books. Always the critics say--without knowing anything
about it--that I “idealize” these characters. I can only say that if
there is any finer type in the world than the humble workingman who has
adopted brotherhood as his religion and sacrifices his time and money
and often his job for his faith, I have not encountered it.
I went next to the Allegheny steel country, the real headquarters of
American wage slavery in those old days. What I wrote horrified
_Everybody’s_, and they changed their minds about my series. So I had to
rest, whether I would or not.
It was high time; for one of my teeth became ulcerated, and I had a
painful time, wandering about the city of Trenton on a Sunday, trying in
vain to find a dentist. After two nights of suffering I went to a
dentist in New York, had the tooth drilled through, and for the first
time in my life nearly fainted. Afterward I staggered out, went into the
first hotel I saw, and got a room and fell on the bed. It happened to be
a fashionable hotel, and this gave great glee to the newspapers, which
were pleased to discover signs of leisure-class follies in a socialist.
There is a saying among women that every child costs a tooth. With me it
read: every crusade costs a tooth. Of course this wasn’t necessary; it
was not merely overwork but ignorance of diet, the eating of white flour
and sugar and other denatured foods, and pouring into the drain pipe the
mineral salts from fruits and vegetables. But I did not know anything
about all this; my college education, which had left out socialism, and
money, and love and marriage, had also left out diet and health. Instead
of such things, I had learned what a _hapax legomenon_ is, and a _pons
asinorum_, and a _glyptocrinus decadactylus_--and was proud of
possessing such wisdom.
Another activity during that summer and autumn of 1906 was an effort to
turn _The Jungle_ into a play. Arch and Edgar Selwyn were playbrokers at
this time and suggested Edgar’s wife as my collaborator. Margaret Mayo
afterward wrote a highly successful farce-comedy, _Baby Mine_, but _The
Jungle_ was something different, and I fear we made a poor
dramatization. We had a manager who was thinking of nothing but making
money, and some slapstick comedians put in dubious jokes that I, in my
innocence, did not recognize until I heard the gallery tittering. The
play came to New York for six weeks and lost money--or so I was told by
the managers, with whom I had invested three thousand dollars.
Concerning _The Jungle_ I wrote that “I aimed at the public’s heart, and
by accident I hit it in the stomach.” I helped to clean up the yards and
improve the country’s meat supply. Now the workers have strong unions
and, I hope, are able to look out for themselves.
_6_
_Utopia_
I
Three winters spent upon an isolated farm had taken all the romance out
of the back-to-nature life for a young author. The roads were either
deep with mud or cut with the tracks of sleighs, so that the only place
to walk was up and down in a field, along the lee side of a fence. Also,
four summers had taken the romance out of agriculture as an avocation
for a literary man. The cows broke into the pear orchard and stuffed
themselves and died; the farmhands who were brought from the city got
drunk and sold the farm produce for their own benefit. “Away from
nature!” became the slogan.
The young writer, who had been close to starving for the past five or
six years, now had thirty thousand dollars, in hand or on the way, and
it was burning holes in all his pockets. He had never heard of such a
thing as investing money, and would have considered it an immoral thing
to contemplate. He wanted to spend his money for the uplifting of
mankind, and it was characteristic of him that even in the matter of
getting a home he tried to combine it with the solving of a social
problem, and with setting an example to his fellowmen.
As a socialist Thyrsis of course believed in co-operation, and regarded
the home as the most ancient relic of individualism. Every person had,
or sought to have, his own home, and there lived his own little selfish
life, wasteful, extravagant, and reactionary. It did not occur to
Thyrsis that not every home might be as unhappy as his own; if anyone
had suggested the idea to him, he would have said that no one should be
happy in a backward way of life, and he would have tried to make them
unhappy by his arguments.
His plan was to establish a co-operative home, to demonstrate its
practicability and the wider opportunities it would bring. There was
nothing revolutionary about this idea; it was being practiced in many
parts of America--only people were doing it without realizing what they
were doing. Up in the Adirondacks were clubs where people owned the land
in common and built individual cabins, or rented them from the club, and
had a common kitchen and dining room; they ran their affairs, as all
clubs are run, on a basis of equality and democracy. Only the members
didn’t use these radical phrases and made no stir in the newspapers.
Thyrsis, for his part, had to make a stir in the papers, else how could
he find anybody to go into a club with him? He knew but few persons, and
only two or three of these were ready for the experiment. How could
others be found? It might have been done by personal inquiry, but that
would have been a slow process; when Thyrsis wanted anything, he wanted
it at once. Being a modern, up-to-date American, he shared the idea that
the way to get something was to advertise. So he wrote an article for
the _Independent_ (June 4, 1906), outlining his plan for a “home colony”
and asking to hear from all persons who were interested. Soon afterward
he rented a hall, and announced in the newspapers that a series of
discussion and organization meetings would be held.
II
Many persons came; some of them serious, some of them cranks, some of
them both. The process of sorting them out was a difficult one, and was
not accomplished without heart-burning. There is no standard test for
cranks, and there were some with whom Thyrsis could have got along well
enough but who were not acceptable to the rest of the group. There were
some who quietly withdrew--having perhaps decided that Thyrsis was a
crank.
Anyhow, the new organization came into being. A company was formed,
stock issued, and the world was invited to invest. In this, as in other
reform schemes, Thyrsis found that it was possible to raise about one
tenth of the money, and necessary to put up the rest out of one’s own
pocket. A search was begun for a suitable building; and real-estate
agents came swarming, and broken-down hotels were inspected and found
unsuitable. Finally there came better tidings; some members of the
committee had stumbled upon a place with the poetical name of Helicon
Hall.
It stood on the heights behind the Palisades, overlooking Englewood, New
Jersey, just above the Fort Lee ferry from New York. It had been a boys’
school, and there was a beautiful building planned by an
aesthetic-minded pedagogue who hoped that boys could be civilized by
living in dignified surroundings and by wearing dress suits every
evening for dinner. There were two or three acres of land, and the price
was $36,000, all but ten thousand on mortgage. Thyrsis, of course, knew
nothing about real estate, what it was worth, or how one bought it; but
the sellers were willing to teach him, and in a day or two the deal was
made.
So, from November 1, 1906, to March 7, 1907 (at three o’clock in the
morning, to be precise), the young dreamer of Utopia lived according to
his dreams. Not exactly, of course, for nothing ever turns out as one
plans. There were troubles, as in all human affairs. There was a time
when the co-operative mothers of the Helicon Home Colony charged that
the head of the children’s department had permitted the toothbrushes to
get mixed up; there was a time when the manager in charge of supplies
forgot the lemons, and it was necessary for Thyrsis to drive to town and
get some in a hurry. But in what home can a writer escape such problems?
III
The most obvious success was with the children. There were fourteen in
the colony, and the care they received proved not merely the economics
of co-operation but also its morals; our children lived a social life
and learned to respect the rights of others, which does not always
happen in an individual home. There was a good-sized theater in the
building, and this became the children’s separate world. They did most
of their own work and enjoyed it; they had their meals in a dining room
of their own, with chairs and tables that fitted them, food that agreed
with them and was served at proper hours. Now and then they assembled in
a children’s parliament and discussed their problems, deciding what was
right and what wrong for them. There was a story of a three-year-old
popping up with “All in favor say aye!”
There was one full-time employee in this children’s department, the rest
of the time being contributed by the various mothers at an agreed rate
of compensation. Many persons had laughed at the idea that mothers could
co-operate in the care of children, but as a matter of fact our mothers
did it without serious trouble. There were different ideas; we had some
believers in “libertarian” education, but when it came to the actual
working out of theories from day to day, we found that everyone wanted
the children to have no more freedom than was consistent with the
happiness and peace of others.
I recall only one parent who was permanently dissatisfied. This was a
completely respectable and antisocialistic lady from Tennessee, the wife
of a surgeon, who was sure that her darlings had to have hot bread every
day. So she exercised her right to take them to an individual home. She
also took her husband, and the husband, in departing, tried to take our
dining room maid as his mistress, but without success. This, needless to
say, occasioned sarcastic remarks among our colonists as to socialist
versus capitalist “free love.”
It was generally taken for granted among the newspapermen of New York
that the purpose for which I had started this colony was to have plenty
of mistresses handy. They wrote us up on that basis--not in plain words,
for that would have been libel--but by innuendo easily understood. So it
was with our socialist colony as with the old-time New England
colonies--there were Indians hiding in the bushes, seeking to pierce us
with sharp arrows of wit. Reporters came in disguise, and went off and
wrote false reports; others came as guests, and went off and ridiculed
us because we had beans for lunch.
I do not know of any assemblage of forty adult persons where a higher
standard of sexual morals prevailed than at Helicon Hall. Our colonists
were for the most part young literary couples who had one or two
children and did not know how to fit them into the literary life; in
short, they were persons with the same problem as myself. Professor W.
P. Montague, of Columbia, had two boys, and his wife was studying to be
a doctor of medicine. Maybe, as the old-fashioned moralists argued, she
ought to have stayed at home and taken care of her children; but the
fact was that she wouldn’t, and found it better to leave the children in
care of her fellow colonists than with an ignorant servant.
But it was hard on Montague when persons came as guests, attended our
Saturday-night dances, and went off and described him dancing with the
dining-room girl. It happened that this was a perfectly respectable girl
from Ireland who had been a servant at our farm for a year or two; she
was quiet and friendly and liked by everybody. Since none of the colony
workers were treated as social inferiors, Minnie danced with everybody
else and had a good time; but it didn’t look so harmless in the New York
gutter press, and when Montague went to Barnard to lecture the young
ladies on philosophy, he was conscious of stern watchfulness on the part
of the lady dean of that exclusive institution. Minnie, now many times a
grandmother, lives in Berkeley, California, and writes to me now and
then.
Montague came to us innocent of social theories and even of knowledge.
But presently he found himself backed up against our four-sided
fireplace, assailed by ferocious bands of socialists, anarchists,
syndicalists, and single taxers. We could not discover that we made any
dent in his armor; but presently came rumors that in the Faculty Club of
Columbia, where he ate his lunch, he was being denounced as a “red” and
finding himself backed up against the wall by ferocious bands of
Republicans, Democrats, and Goo-goos (members of the Good Government
League). Of course the palest pink in Helicon Hall would have seemed
flaming red in Columbia.
IV
There were Professor William Noyes, of Teacher’s College, and his wife,
Anna, who afterward conducted a private school. There were Edwin
Björkman, critic, and translator of Strindberg, and his wife, Frances
Maule, a suffrage worker. There were Alice MacGowan and Grace MacGowan
Cooke, novelists. There was Michael Williams, a young writer, who became
editor of the _Commonweal_, the Catholic weekly. I count a total of a
dozen colonists who were, or afterward became, well-known writers.
There came to tend our furnaces and do odd jobs two runaway students
from Yale named Sinclair Lewis and Allan Updegraff; we educated them a
lot better than Yale would have done you may be sure. “Hal” and “Up”
both wrote novels, but Up was better known as a poet. Hal became the
most successful novelist of his time. When he came to Helicon Hall, he
was very young, eager, bursting with energy and hope. He later married
my secretary at the colony, Edith Summers, a golden-haired and shrewdly
observant young person whose gentle voice and unassuming ways gave us no
idea of her talent. She eventually became Mrs. Edith Summers Kelly,
author of the novel _Weeds_; and after the tumult and shouting have
died, this is one of the books that students will be told to read as
they are now told to read _Evangeline_ and _Hermonn and Dorothea_. I
corresponded with Hal Lewis to the end of his life, but I saw him only
once in his later years--sad ones, ruined by alcohol.
We had a rule among our busy workers that nobody came to any other
person’s room except by invitation; so everyone had all the privacy he
wanted. When your work was done, and you felt like conversation, there
was always someone by the four-sided fireplace or in the billiard room.
In the evenings there were visitors, interesting persons from many parts
of the world. John Dewey came occasionally, as the guest of Montague.
Dewey was perhaps the best-known professor at Columbia in my time, and
he exercised tremendous influence upon American education, though his
ideas have often been misunderstood to the point of caricature.
Personally, he was a most kind and gracious gentleman. Another visitor
was William James, who was perhaps the greatest of American
psychologists and certainly the ablest of that time. He was open-minded
and eager in the investigation of psychic phenomena, and I remember
vividly sitting with him at a table watching an old lady with a ouija
board. I had never seen this object before, but the old lady held it for
a good and trusted friend. She held a pencil or pen in her hand and went
into a sort of trance, while some force moved her hand over the board
from letter to letter. In Dewey’s presence her hand moved and spelled
out the sentence “Providence child has been carried to bed.” We took
this sentence to our faithful member named Randall, who owned a small
business in Providence, Rhode Island, and had a wife and child there. He
went to the telephone immediately and was told that the child was ill
with pneumonia.
Another guest I remember was John Coryell, an anarchist, who earned his
living in the strangest way--he was Bertha M. Clay, author of the
sentimental romances that all servant maids then read, and may still
read. Sadakichi Hartmann, the art critic came and was one of the few who
were not welcome; he sent a postcard in advance, “Sadakichi Hartmann
will arrive at six P.M.” and there he was, on time, but unfortunately
drunk, and his companion, Jo Davidson, the sculptor, was not able to
control him. When the time came for departure, he didn’t want to depart
but insisted on sleeping on the cushioned seats in front of our
fireplace. We had to turn him out in the snow, and the next day he wrote
a letter to the papers about us, and there was quite a furor.
During these months at the colony I wrote _The Industrial Republic_, a
prophecy of socialism in America. I have never reprinted this book
because of the embarrassing fact that I had prophesied Hearst as a
radical president of the United States. He really looked like a radical
then, and I was too naïve to imagine the depths of his cynicism and
depravity. When in the effort to become governor of New York he made a
deal with Tom Murphy, the boss of Tammany, whom he had previously
cartooned in prison stripes, I wanted to tear up my book. Incidentally,
I had prophesied socialism in America in the year 1913; instead we had
two world wars and the Russian Revolution--and I fear that more world
wars and more revolutions stand between us and a truly democratic and
free society. The world is even worse than I was able to realize; but I
still cling to my faith in the methods of democracy.
V
The Helicon Home Colony came to an end abruptly, at three o’clock on a
Sunday morning. The first warning I received of its doom was a sound as
of enormous hammers smashing in the doors of the building. I was told
afterward that it was super-heated air in plastered walls, blowing out
sections of the walls. I smelled smoke and leaped out of bed.
My sleeping room was in a tower, and I had to go down a ladder to my
study below; there was a door, leading to a balcony, which ran all the
way around the inside of a court, three stories above the ground. I
opened the door, and a mass of black smoke hit me--it seemed really
solid, with heavy black flakes of soot. I shouted fire, and ran out on
the balcony and up to the front, where there was a studio made over into
sleeping quarters for eight or ten of our colony workers. I ran through
this place, shouting to awaken the sleepers, but got no response;
apparently everybody had got out--without stopping to warn me! The next
day, I learned that one man had been left behind--a stranger who had
been working for us as a carpenter; he had been drinking the night
before and paid for it with his life.
When I came back from the studio to the balcony, the flames were
sweeping over it in a furious blast. If I live to be a hundred, I shall
never forget that sensation; it was like a demon hand sweeping over
me--it took all the hair from one side of my head and a part of my
nightshirt. I escaped by crouching against the wall, stooping low, and
running fast. Fortunately the stairs were not yet in flames, so I got
down into the central court, which was full of broken glass and burning
brands, not very kind to my bare feet. I ran to the children’s quarters
and made sure they were all out; then I ran outside, and tried to stop
the fall of two ladies who had to jump from windows of the second story.
Harder to stop the fall of human bodies than I would have imagined!
We stood in the snow and watched our beautiful utopia flame and roar,
until it crashed in and died away to a dull glow. Then we went into the
homes of our fashionable neighbors, who hadn’t known quite what to make
of us in our success but were kind to us in our failure. They fitted us
out with their old clothes--for hardly anyone had saved a stitch. I had
the soles of my feet cleaned out by a surgeon, and was driven to New
York to stay with my friends, the Wilshires, for a couple of days. An
odd sensation, to realize that you do not own even a comb or a
tooth-brush--only half a nightshirt! Some manuscripts were in the hands
of publishers, so I was more fortunate than others of my friends.
Two or three days later I was driven back to Englewood to attend, on
crutches, the sessions of the coroner’s jury. So I learned what the
outside world had been thinking about our little utopia. They not only
thought it a “free-love nest,” but the village horse doctor on the jury
thought we had set fire to it ourselves, to get the insurance. Also, and
worse yet, they thought we had arranged our affairs in such a way that
we could beat the local tradesmen out of the money we owed them. It was
a matter for suspicion that we had got ropes, to serve as fire escapes,
shortly before the fire; they blamed us for this, and at the same time
they blamed us because we had made insufficient preparations--although
they had made no objection to the same conditions existing in a boys’
school for many years. In short, we did not please them in any way, and
everything they said or insinuated went on to the front pages of the
yellow newspapers of the country.
Every dollar of the debts of the Helicon Home Colony was paid as soon as
my feet got well, which was in a week or two. Likewise all those persons
who were left destitute were aided. I bought myself new clothes and
looked around to decide what to do next. If I had had the cash on hand,
I would have started the rebuilding of Helicon Hall at once; but we had
long negotiations with insurance companies before us, and in the
meantime I wanted to write another novel. I took my family to Point
Pleasant, New Jersey, rented a little cottage, and went back to the
single-family mode of life. It was like leaving modern civilization and
returning to the dark ages. I felt that way about it for a long time,
and made efforts at another colony in spite of a constantly increasing
load of handicaps.
VI
We employed an honest lawyer and made an honest statement of the value
of our property. The insurance companies then cut it by one third and
told us that if we were not satisfied, we could sue, which would mean
waiting several years for our money. I learned too late that this is
their regular practice; to meet it, you double the value of your claim.
You must have a _dis_honest lawyer.
We could not afford to wait, for many persons were in distress, and I
was unwilling to see them suffer even though they had no legal claim
upon me or the company. We settled the insurance matters and sold the
land for what it would bring; after the mortgage holders were paid, I
had a few thousand dollars left from the thirty thousand _The Jungle_
had earned. My friend Wilshire was in trouble with his gold mine just
then, and as he had loaned me money several times, I now loaned some to
him; that is, I invested it in his mine, and he wrote me a letter
agreeing to return it on demand. But his affairs thereafter were in such
shape that I never did demand it. And that was the end of my first
“fortune.”
However, I did not worry; I was going to make another at once--so I
thought. Having portrayed the workers of America and how they lived, I
was now going to the opposite end of the scale--to portray the rich, and
how they lived. There had come many invitations to meet these rich;
there were intelligent ones among them, like “Robbie” Collier, Mrs.
“Clarrie” Mackay, and Mrs. “Ollie” Belmont; there were some who were
moved by curiosity and boredom, and some even with a touch of mischief.
The suggestion that I should write _The Metropolis_ came first from a
lady whose social position was impregnable; she offered me help and kept
her promise, and all I had to do in return was to promise never to
mention her name.