Produced by Annie R. McGuire. This book was produced from
scanned images of public domain material from the Internet
Archive.
PEOPLE OF DESTINY
* * * * *
_Americans as I Saw Them
At Home and Abroad_
[Illustration: PHILIP GIBBS]
PEOPLE OF DESTINY
_Americans as I saw them
at Home and Abroad_
_by_
PHILIP GIBBS
_Author of_
"NOW IT CAN BE TOLD"
[Illustration]
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Copyright, 1920, by Harper & Brothers
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK 1
II. SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA 35
III. THINGS I LIKE IN THE UNITED STATES 68
IV. AMERICA'S NEW PLACE IN THE WORLD 98
V. WHAT ENGLAND THINKS OF AMERICA 125
VI. AMERICANS IN EUROPE 160
ILLUSTRATIONS
PHILIP GIBBS _Frontispiece_
A RELIEF FROM BOREDOM AFTER OFFICE HOURS _Facing p._ 42
THE SOCIAL ATMOSPHERE OF AN AMERICAN POST-OFFICE 72
I LIKED THE GREETING OF THE TRAIN CONDUCTOR 96
PEOPLE OF DESTINY
I
THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE IN NEW YORK
I had the luck to go to New York for the first time when the ordinary
life of that City of Adventure--always so vital and dynamic in
activity--was intensified by the emotion of historic days. The war was
over, and the warriors were coming home with the triumph of victory as
the reward of courage; but peace was still delayed and there had not yet
crept over the spirits of the people the staleness and disillusionment
that always follow the ending of war, when men say: "What was the use of
it, after all? Where are gratitude and justice? Who pays me for the loss
of my leg?"... The emotion of New York life was visible in its streets.
The city itself, monstrous, yet dreamlike and mystical as one sees it
first rising to fantastic shapes through the haze of dawn above the
waters of the Hudson, seemed to be excited by its own historical
significance. There was a vibration about it as sunlight splashed its
gold upon the topmost stories of the skyscrapers and sparkled in the
thousand windows of the Woolworth Tower and flung black bars of shadow
across the lower blocks. Banners were flying everywhere in the streets
that go straight and long between those perpendicular cliffs of masonry,
and the wind that comes blowing up the two rivers ruffled them. They
were banners of rejoicing, but reminders also of the service and
sacrifice of each house from which they were hanging, with golden stars
of death above the heads of the living crowds surging there below them.
In those decorations of New York I saw the imagination of a people
conscious of their own power, and with a dramatic instinct able to
impress the multitudes with the glory and splendor of their achievement.
It was the same sense of drama that is revealed commercially in the
genius of advertisement which startled me when I first walked down
Broadway, dazzled by moving pictures of light, by flashing signs that
shouted to me from high heaven to buy chewing-gum and to go on chewing;
and squirming, wriggling, revolving snakes of changing color that
burned letters of fire into my brain, so that even now in remembrance my
eyes are scorched with the imprint of a monstrous kitten unrolling an
endless reel of cotton. The "Welcome Home" of American troops was an
advertisement of American manhood, idealized by emotion; and it was
designed, surely, by an artist whose imagination had been touched by the
audacity of the master-builders of New York who climb to the sky with
their houses. I think it was inspired also by the vision of the
moving-picture kings who resurrect the gorgeous life of Babylon, and
re-establish the court of Cleopatra, for Theda Bara, the "Movie Queen."
When the men of the Twenty-seventh Division of New York came marching
home down Fifth Avenue they passed through triumphal arches of white
plaster that seemed solid enough to last for centuries, though they had
grown high, like Jack's beanstalk, in a single night; and the troops
glanced sideways at a vast display of Indian trophies with tattered
colors like those of sunburnt wigwams where the spears of the "braves"
were piled above the shields of fallen warriors.
"Like an undergraduate's cozy corner," said an unkind wit, and New York
laughed, but liked the symbolism of those shields and went on with
astonished eyes to gaze at the masterpiece of Chalfin, the designer of
it all, which was a necklace like a net of precious jewels, suspended,
between two white pillars surmounted by stars, across the Avenue. At
night strong searchlights played upon this necklace, and at the end of
those bars of white radiance, shot through the darkness, the hanging
jewels swayed and glittered with a thousand delicate colors like
diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. Night after night, as I drove
down Fifth Avenue, I turned in the car to look back at the astonishing
picture of that triumphal archway, and saw how the long tide of cars
behind was caught by the searchlights so that all their metal was like
burnished gold and silver; and how the faces of dense crowds staring up
at the suspended necklace were all white--dead-white as Pierrot's; and
how the sky above New York and the tall clifflike masses of masonry on
each side of Fifth Avenue were fingered by the outer radiance of the
brightness that was blinding in the heart of the city. To me, a stranger
in New York, unused to the height of its buildings and to the rush of
traffic in its streets, these illuminations of victory were the crowning
touch of fantasy, and I seemed to be in a dream of some City of the
Future, among people of a new civilization, strange and wonderful. The
soldiers of the Twenty-seventh Division were not overcome by emotion at
this display in their honor. "That's all right," they said, grinning at
the cheering crowds, "and when do we eat?" Those words reminded me of
Tommy Atkins, who would go through the hanging-gardens of Babylon
itself--if the time-machine were switched back--with the same shrewd
humor.
The adventure of life in New York, always startling and exciting, I am
certain, to a man or woman who enters its swirl as a stranger, was more
stirring at the time of my first visit because of this eddying influence
of war's back-wash. The city was overcrowded with visitors from all
parts of the United States who had come in to meet their home-coming
soldiers, and having met them stayed awhile to give these boys a good
time after their exile. This floating population of New York flowed into
all the hotels and restaurants and theaters. Two new hotels--the
Commodore and the Pennsylvania--were opened just before I came, and,
with two thousand bedrooms each, had no room to spare, and did not
reduce the population of the Plaza, Vanderbilt, Manhattan, Biltmore, or
Ritz-Carlton. I watched the social life in those palaces and found it
more entertaining than the most sensational "movie" with a continuous
performance. The architects of those American hotels have vied with one
another in creating an atmosphere of richness and luxury. They have been
prodigal in the use of marble pillars and balustrades, more magnificent
than Roman. They have gone to the extreme limit of taste in gilding the
paneled walls and ceilings from which they have suspended enormous
candelabra like those in the palace of Versailles. I lost myself in the
vastness of tea-rooms and lounges, and when invited to a banquet found
it necessary to bring my ticket, because often there are a dozen
banquets in progress in one hotel, and there is a banqueting-room on
every floor. When I passed up in the elevator of one hotel I saw the
different crowds in the corridors surging toward those great lighted
rooms where the tables were spread with flowers, and from which came
gusts of "jazz" music or the opening bars of "The Star-spangled
Banner."
In all the dining-rooms there rises the gusty noise of many
conversations above the music of an orchestra determined to be heard,
and between the bars of a Leslie Stuart waltz, or on the last beat of
the "Humoreske," a colored waiter says, "Chicken okra, sah?" or "Clam
chowder?" and one hears the laughing words of a girl who asks, "Do you
mind if I powder my nose?" and does so with a glance at a little gold
mirror and a dab from a little gold box. The vastness, and the
overwhelming luxury, of the New York hotels was my first and strongest
impression in this city, after I had recovered from the sensation of the
high fantastic buildings; but it occurred to me very quickly that this
luxury of architecture and decoration has no close reference to the life
of the people. They are only visitors in _la vie de luxe_--and do not
belong to it, and do not let it enter into their souls or bodies. In a
wealthier, more expansive way, they are like the city clerks and their
girls in London who pay eighteenpence for a meal in marble halls at
Lyon's Popular Cafe and sit around a gilded menu-card, saying, "Isn't it
wonderful ... and shall we go home by tram?" There are many rich people
in New York--more, I suppose, than in any other city of the world--but,
apart from cosmopolitan men and women who have luxury beneath their
skins, there is no innate sense of it in the social life of these
people. In the hotel palaces, as well as in the private mansions along
Fifth Avenue and Riverside Drive, all their outward splendor does not
alter the simplicity and honesty of their character. They remain
essentially "middle-class" and have none of the easy licentiousness of
that European aristocracy which, before the war, flaunted its wealth and
its vice in Paris, Vienna, Monte Carlo, and other haunts where the
cocottes of the world assembled to barter their beauty, and where idle
men went from boredom to boredom in search of subtle forms of pleasure.
American women of wealth spend vast sums of money on dress, and there is
the glitter of diamonds at many dinner-tables, but most of them have too
much shrewdness of humor to play the "vamp," and the social code to
which they belong is swept clean by common sense. "My dear," said an
American hostess who belongs to one of the old rich families of New
York, "forgive me for wearing my diamonds to-night. It must shock you,
coming from scenes of ruin and desolation." This dowager duchess of New
York, as I like to think of her, wore her diamonds as the mayor of a
provincial town in England wears his chain of office, but as she sat at
the head of her table in one of the big mansions of New York I saw that
wealth had not cumbered the soul of this masterful lady, whose views on
life are as direct and simple as those of Abraham Lincoln. She was the
middle-class housewife in spite of the footmen who stood in fear of her.
Essentially middle-class in the best sense of the word were the crowds I
met in the hotels. The men were making money--lots of it--by hard work.
They had taken a few days off, or left business early, to meet their
soldier-sons in these gilded halls where they had a sense of
satisfaction in spending large numbers of dollars in a short time.
"This is my boy from 'over there'! Just come back."
I heard that introduction many times, and saw the look of pride behind
the glasses that were worn by a gray-eyed man, who had his hand on the
arm of an upstanding fellow in field uniform, tall and lean and hard.
"It's good to be back," said one of these young officers, and as he sat
at table he looked round the huge _salon_ with its cut-glass candelabra,
where scores of little dinner-parties were in progress to the strident
music of a stringed band, and then, with a queer little smile about his
lips, as though thinking of the contrast between this scene and "over
there," said, "Darned good!" In their evening frocks the women were
elegant--they know how to dress at night--and now and then the fresh,
frank beauty of one of these American girls startled my eyes by its
witchery of youth and health. Some of them are _decollete_ to the
ultimate limit of a milliner's audacity, and foolishly I suffered from a
sense of confusion sometimes because of the physical revelations of
elderly ladies whose virtue, I am sure, is as that of Caesar's wife. The
frail queens of beauty in the lotus-garden of life's enchanted places
would envy some of the frocks that come out of Fifth Avenue, and scream
with horror at their prices. But although the American woman with a
wealthy husband likes to put on the flimsy robes of Circe, it is only as
she would go to a fancy-dress ball in a frock that would make her
brother say: "Gee!... And where did you get that bit of fluff?" She is
Circe, with the Suffrage, and high ideals of life, and strong views on
the League of Nations. She makes up her face like a French _comedienne_,
but she has, nine times out of ten, the kind heart of a parson's wife in
rural England and a frank, good-natured wit which faces the realities of
life with the candor of a clean mind.
I found "gay life" in New York immensely and soberly respectable. One
could take one's maiden aunt into the heart of it and not get hot by her
blushes. In fact, it is the American maiden aunt who sets the pace of
the fox-trot and the one-step in dancing-rooms where there are music and
afternoon tea. Several times I supped "English breakfast tea"--I suspect
Sir Thomas Lipton had something to do with it--at five o'clock on bright
afternoons, watching the scene at Sherry's and Delmonico's. It seemed to
me that this dancing habit was a most curious and over-rated form of
social pleasure. It was as though American society had said, "Let us be
devilishly gay!" but started too early in the day, with desperate
sobriety. Many couples left the tea-table for the polished boards and
joined the throng which surged and eddied in circles of narrow
circumference, jostled by other dancers. Youth did not have it all its
own way. On the contrary, I noticed that bald-headed gentlemen with some
width of waistbands were in the majority, dancing with pridigious
gravity and the maiden aunts. They were mostly visitors, I am told, from
other cities--Bostonians escaping from the restrictions of their Early
Victorian atmosphere, senators who voted for prohibition in their own
states, business men who had booked reservations on midnight trains from
Grand Central Terminal. Here and there young officers of the army and
navy led out pretty girls, and with linked arms, and faces very close
together, danced in a kind of coma, which they seemed to enjoy, though
without any sparkle in their eyes. There were also officers of other
nations--a young Frenchman appealing to the great heart of the American
people on behalf of devastated France, and dancing for the sake of
people scorched by the horrors of war, to say nothing of the little
American girl whose yellow fringe was on his Croix de Guerre; and young
English officers belonging to the British Mission, and engaged in
propaganda--oh, frightful word!--of which a _the dansant_ at Delmonico's
was, no doubt, a serious part of duty. One figure that caught my eye
gave the keynote to the moral and spiritual character of the scene. It
was the figure of a stout old lady wearing a hat with a huge feather
which waggled over her nose as she danced the one-step with earnest
vivacity, and an old gentleman with side-whiskers. She panted as she
came back to the tea-table, and said, "Say, that makes me feel young!"
It occurred to me that she might be Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch on a
visit to New York, and anyhow her presence assured me that afternoon
dancing at Delmonico's need not form the theme of any moralist in search
of vice in high places. It is not only respectable, it is domestic.
Savonarola himself would not have denounced such innocent amusement. Nor
did I find anything to shock the sensibilities of high-souled ethics in
such midnight haunts as the Ziegfeld Follies or the Winter Garden,
except the inanity of all such shows where large numbers of pretty girls
and others disport themselves in flowing draperies and colored lights
before groups of tired people who can hardly hide their boredom, but
yawn laughingly over their cocktails and say, "Isn't she wonderful?"
when Mollie King sings a song about a variety of smiles, and discuss the
personality of President Wilson between comic turns of the Dooley
brothers. That at least is what happened in my little group on the roof
of the Century Theater, where a manufacturer of barbed wire--I wonder if
they were his barbs on which I tore myself in Flanders fields--initiated
me into the mystery of a Bacardi cocktail followed by a stinger, from
which I was rescued, in the nick of time, by a kind lady on my right who
took pity on my innocence. A famous playwright opposite, as sober as a
judge, as courteous as Beau Brummell, passed the time of day, which was
a wee small hour of morning, with little ladies who came into the
limelight, until suddenly he said, with a sigh of infinite impatience,
"Haven't we enjoyed ourselves enough? I want my bed"; so interrupting a
serious discussion between a war correspondent and a cartoonist on the
exact truth about German atrocities, to the monstrous melody of a jazz
band. Human nature is the same in New York as in other cities of the
world. Passion, weakness, folly, are not eliminated from the relations
between American men and women. But to find vice and decadence in
American society one has to go in search of it; and I did not go. I
found New York society tolerant in its views, frank in its expression of
opinion, fond of laughter, and wonderfully sincere. Wealth does not
spoil its fresh and healthy outlook on life, and its people are
idealists at heart, with a reverence for the old-fashioned virtues and
an admiration for those who "make good" in whatever job to which they
put their hands.
After all, hotel life, and restaurant life, and the glamorous world of
the Great White Way, do not reveal the real soul of New York. They are
no more a revelation of normal existence than boulevard life in Paris
represents the daily round of the average Parisian. They are the happy
hunting-grounds of the transient, and the real New-Yorker only visits
them in hours of leisure and boredom.
Another side of the adventure of life in New York is "downtown," where
the subways and the overhead railways pour out tides of humanity who do
not earn their dollars without hard work and long hours of it. I should
never have found my way to Bowling Green and Wall Street without a
guide, because the underground world of the subways, where electric
trains go rushing like shuttles through the warp and woof of a monstrous
network, is utterly confusing to a stranger. But with the guide, who led
me by the hand and laughed at my childlike bewilderment, I came into the
heart of New York business life and saw its types in their natural
environment. It is an alarming world to the wanderer who comes there
suddenly. I confess that when I first walked through those deep gorges,
between the mighty walls of houses as high as mountains in a surge of
humanity in a hurry, I felt dazed and cowardly. I had a conviction that
my nerve-power would never survive the stress and strain of such a life
in such a place. I nearly dislocated my neck by gazing up at the heights
of the skyscrapers, rising story on story to fifty or sixty floors. In a
House of a Thousand Windows I took the elevator to the top story and
wished I hadn't when the girl in charge of the lift asked, "What floor?"
and was answered by a quiet gentleman who said, "Thirty-one." That was
our first stop, and in the few seconds we took to reach this altitude I
had a vision of this vast human ant-heap, with scores of offices on
each floor, and typewriters clicking in all of them, and girl-clerks
taking down letters from hard-faced young men juggling with figures
which, by the rise or drop of a decimal point, mean the difference
between millions of dollars in the markets of the world. Each man and
woman there in this House of a Thousand Windows had a human soul, with
its own little drama of life, its loves and hopes and illusions, but in
the vastness of one skyscraper, in the whirlpool of commerce, in the
machinery of money-making, the humanities of life seemed to be destroyed
and these people to be no more than slaves of modern civilization,
ruthless of their individual happiness. What could they know of art,
beauty, leisure, the quiet pools of thought?... Out in Wall Street there
was pandemonium. The outside brokers--the curb men--were bidding against
one another for stocks not quoted on the New York Exchange--the Standard
Oil Company among them--and their hoarse cries mingled in a raucous
chorus. I stood outside a madhouse staring at lunatics. Surely it was a
madhouse, surrounded by other homes for incurably insane! This
particular house was a narrow, not very tall, building of reddish brown
brick, like a Georgian house in London, and out of each window, which
was barred, poked two rows of faces, one above the other, as though the
room inside were divided by a false floor. In the small window-frames
sat single figures, in crouched positions, with telephone receivers on
their ears and their faces staring at the crowd in the street below.
Each one of those human faces, belonging to young men of healthy
appearance, was making most hideous grimaces, and each grimace was
accompanied by strange, incomprehensible gestures of the man's fingers.
With a thumb and two fingers, or a thumb and three fingers, they poked
through the windows with violent efforts to attract the notice of
individuals in the street. I saw, indeed, that all this fingering had
some hidden meaning and that the maniacs as I had first taken them to be
were signaling messages to the curb brokers, who wore caps of different
colors in order to be distinguished from their fellows. Up and down the
street, and from the topmost as well as from the lower stories of many
buildings, I saw the grimaces and the gestures of the window-men, and
the noise and tumult in the street became more furious. It was a lively
day in Wall Street, and I thanked God that my fate had not led me into
such a life. It seemed worse than war....
Not really so, after all. It was only the outward appearance of things
that distressed one's soul. Looking closer, I saw that all these young
men on the curb seemed very cheery fellows, and were enjoying themselves
as much as boys in a Rugby "scrum." There was nothing wrong with their
nerves. There was nothing wrong with a crowd of young business men and
women with whom I sat down to luncheon in a restaurant called Robin's,
not far from the Stock Exchange. These were the working-bees of the
great hive which is New York. They were in the front-line trenches of
the struggle for existence, and they seemed as cheerful as our
fighting-men who were always less gloomy than the fellows at the rear in
the safe back-waters of war. Business men and lady-clerks, typists, and
secretaries, were all mingled at the little tables where the backs of
chairs touched, and there was a loud, incessant chatter like the noise
of a parrot-house. I overheard some fragments of conversation at the
tables close to me.
"They don't seem to be getting on with the Peace Conference," said a
young man with large spectacles. "All the little nations are trying to
grab a bit of their neighbors' ground."
"I saw the cutest little hat--" said a girl whose third finger was
stained with red ink.
"Have you seen that play by Maeterlinck?" asked an elderly man so like
President Wilson's portraits that he seemed to be the twin brother of
that much-discussed man.
These people were human all through, not at all dehumanized, after all,
because they lived maybe on the thirty-first story of a New York
skyscraper. I dare say also that their work is not so strenuous as it
looks from the outside, and that they earn more dollars a week than
business men and women of their own class in England, so that they have
more margin for the pleasures of life, for the purchase of a "cute
little hat," even for a play by Maeterlinck.
After business hours many of these people hurry away from New York to
suburbs, where they get quickly beyond the turmoil of the city in places
with bustling little high streets of their own and good shops and, on
the outskirts, neat little houses of wooden framework, in gardens where
flowers grow between great rocks which crop out of the soil along the
Connecticut shore. They are the "commuters," or, as we should say in
England, the season-ticket-holders, and, as I did some "commuting"
myself during a ten weeks' visit to America, I used to see them make a
dash for their trains between five and six in the afternoon or late at
night after theater-going in New York. I never tired of the sight of
those crowds in the great hall of the Grand Central Terminal or in the
Pennsylvania Station, and saw the very spirit of the United States in
those vast buildings which typify modern progress. In England a railway
station is, as a rule, the ugliest, most squalid place in any great
city; but in America it is, even in provincial towns, a great adventure
in architecture, where the mind is uplifted by nobility of design and
imagination is inspired by spaciousness, light, color, and silence. It
is strangely, uncannily quiet in the central hall of the Pennsylvania
Station, as one comes down a long broad flight of steps to the vast
floor space below a high dome--painted blue like a summer sky, with
golden stars atwinkling--uplifted on enormous arches. It is like
entering a great cathedral, and, though hundreds of people are scurrying
about, there is a hush through the hall because of its immense height,
in which all sound is lost, and there is no noise of footsteps and only
a low murmur of voices. So it is also in the Grand Central Terminal,
where I found myself many times before the last train left. There is no
sign of railway lines or engines, or the squalor of sidings and sheds.
All that is hidden away until one is admitted to the tracks before the
trains start. Instead, there are fruit-stalls and flower-stalls bright
with color, and book-stalls piled high with current literature from
which every mind can take its choice, and candy-stalls where the aching
jaw may find its chewing-gum, and link up meditation with mastication,
on the way to New Rochelle--"forty-five minutes from Broadway"--or to
the ruralities of Rye, Mamaroneck, and Port Chester, this side of high
life in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Some of the male commuters have a habit of playing cards between New
York and New Rochelle, showing an activity of mind not dulled by their
day's work in town. But others indulge in conversational quartets, and
on these journeys I heard more than I wanted to know about the private
life of President Wilson, and things I wanted to learn about the
experiences of American soldiers in France, the state of feeling between
America and England, and the philosophy of success by men who had
succeeded. It was a philosophy of simple virtue enforced by will-power
and a fighting spirit. "Don't hit often," said one of these
philosophers, who began life as an errand-boy and now designs the
neckwear of society, "but, when you do, hit hard and clean. No man is
worth his salt unless he loses his temper at the right time."
In the last train to Greenwich were American soldiers and mariners just
back from France, who slept in corners of the smoking-coach and wakened
with a start at New Rochelle, with a dazed look in their eyes, as though
wondering whether they had merely dreamed of being home again and were
still in the glades of the Argonne forest.... The powder was patchy on
the nose of a tired lady whose head drooped on the shoulder of a man in
evening clothes chewing an unlighted cigar and thinking, with a little
smile about his lips, of something that had happened in the evening.
Two typist-girls with their mothers had been to a lecture by Captain
Carpenter, V.C., one of the heroes of Zeebrugge. They were "crazy" about
him. They loved his description of the "blunt end" and the "pointed end"
of the ship. They had absorbed a lot of knowledge about naval tactics;
and they were going to buy his photograph to put over their desks....
Part of the adventure of life in New York is the acquisition of
unexpected knowledge by means of lectures; and Carnegie Hall is the
Mecca of lecturers. Having been one of the lecturers, I can speak from
personal experience when I say that a man who stands for the first time
on the naked desert of that platform, looking toward rows of white faces
and white shirt-fronts to the farthest limit of the topmost galleries,
feels humility creep into his soul until he shrinks to the size of
Hop-o'-My-Thumb and is the smallest, loneliest thing in the whole wide
world. A microbe is a monster to him, and he quakes with terror when he
hears the first squeak of his tiny voice in the vast spaciousness under
that high, vaulted roof. On that first night of mine I would have sold
myself, with white shirt, cuff-links, and quaking body, for a two-cent
piece, if any one had been fool enough to buy me and let me off that
awful ordeal. And yet, looking back on it now, I know that it was the
finest hour of my life, and a wonderful reward for small service, when
all those people rose to greet me, and there came up to me out of that
audience a spiritual friendship so warm and generous that I felt it like
the touch of kindly hands about me, and recovered from my fright.
Afterward, as always happens in America, there was a procession of
people who came onto the platform to shake hands and say words of
thanks, so that one gets into actual touch with all kinds of people and
their friendship becomes personal. In that way I made thousands of
friends in America and feel toward them all a lasting gratitude because
of the generous, warm-hearted, splendid things they said as they passed
with a quick hand-clasp. The lecture habit in America is deep-rooted and
widespread. Every small town has its lecture-hall, and is in competition
with every other town near by for lecturers who have some special fame
or knowledge. In New York there is an endless series of lectures, not
only in places like Carnegie Hall and AEolian Hall, but in clubs and
churches. Great audiences, made up of rich society people as well as the
"intellectuals" and the professional classes, gather in force to hear
any man whose personality makes him interesting or who has something to
say which they want to hear. In many cases personality is sufficient.
People of New York will cheerfully pay five dollars to see a famous man,
and not think their money wasted if his words are lost in empty space,
or if they know already as much as he can tell them about the subject of
his speech. Marshal Joffre had no need to prepare orations. When he
said, "_Messieurs et mesdames_" they cheered him for ten minutes, and
when, after that, he said, "_je suis enchante_" they cheered him for ten
minutes more. They like to see the men who have done things, the men who
count for something, and to study the personality of a man about whom
they have read. If he has something to tell them, so much the better,
and if he is not renowned he must tell them something pretty good if he
wants their money and their patience. I have no doubt that the habit of
lecture-going is one of the greatest influences at work in the education
of the American people. The knowledge they acquire in this way does not
bite very deep, and it leaves, I fancy, only a superficial impression,
but it awakens their intelligence and imagination, directs their
thoughts to some of the big problems of life, and is a better way of
spending an evening than idle gossip or a variety entertainment. The
League for Political Education which I had the honor of addressing in
Carnegie Hall has a series of lectures--three times a week, I
think--which are attended by people engaged in every kind of educative
and social work in New York, and at a luncheon afterward I listened to a
number of speeches by public men and women more inspiring in their
sincerity of idealism than anything I have heard in similar assemblies.
All these people were engaged in practical work for the welfare of their
fellow-creatures, as pioneers of progress in the adventure of life in
New York, and the women especially, like Jane Addams, impressed me by
the real beauty of their personality.
Another phase of life which interested me was the club world of the
city, and in these clubs I met most of the men and many of the women who
count in the intellectual activity of New York. I came in touch there
with every stratum of thought and tradition which makes up the
structure of American politics and ideas. I met the conservatives of the
Union Club who live in an atmosphere of dignified austerity (reminding
me of the Athenaeum Club in London, where the very waiters have the air
of bishops and the political philosophy of the late Lord Salisbury), and
who confided to me with quiet gravity their personal and unprintable
opinions of Mr. Wilson; I became an honorary member of the Union League
Club, hardly less conservative in its traditional outlook and having a
membership which includes many leading business and professional men of
New York City. It was here that I saw a touching ceremony which is one
of my best memories of the United States, when the negro troops of a
fighting regiment marched up Fifth Avenue in a snow-storm, and gave back
their colors for safe-keeping to the Union League Club, which had
presented them when they went to war. Ex-Governor Hughes, speaking from
the balcony, praised them for their valor in the great conflict for the
world's liberty, when they fought for the country which had given them
their own freedom by no light sacrifice of blood. By their service in
France they had gained a glory for their citizenship in the United
States and stood equal with their white comrades in the gratitude of the
American people. There were tears in the eyes of colored officers when,
after a luncheon in the Union League Club, they heard other words like
those, giving honor to the spirit of their race.... Up the wide stairway
of the club, in the softly glowing light which comes through a
stained-glass window, the colors of the darky regiment hang as a
memorial of courage and sacrifice....
I was the guest of the Arts Club amid a crowd of painters, poets,
musicians, and writing-men, who sat at long tables in paneled rooms
decorated with pictures and caricatures which were the work of their own
members. Clouds of tobacco smoke made wreaths above the board. A
soldier-poet rose between the courses and sang his own songs to the
chorus of his comrades. It was a jolly night among jolly good fellows,
who had wit, and the gift of laughter, and large hearts which beat in
sympathy for those who suffered in the war.... In the City Club I had a
room when I wanted it, and the hall porter and the bell-boys, and the
elevator-man, and the clerks in the office, shook hands with me when I
went in and out, so that I felt at home there, after a splendid night
when crowds of ladies joined the men to listen to my story of the war,
and when a famous glee-party sang songs to me across rose garlands on
the banquet table. The City Club has a number of habitues who play
dominoes on quiet nights, and in deep leather chairs discuss the destiny
of nations as men who pull the wires which make the puppets dance. It is
the home of the foreign correspondents in New York, who know the inside
of international politics, and whose president is (or was, at the time
of my visit) a kindly, human, English soul with a genius for fellowship
which has made a little League of Nations in this New York house. I met
him first, as a comrade of the pen, in the Street of Adventure, where
London journalists rub shoulders on their way to history; and in New
York his friendship was a generous and helpful gift, and by his good
words I made many other friends.
It seemed to me that New York is a city where friendship is quickly
made, and I found that the best part of my adventure in the city. Day
after day, when dusk was creeping into the streets and lights began to
gleam in all the windows of the houses that reach up to the stars, I
drove down the long highway of Fifth Avenue with a certainty that before
the evening was out I should meet a number of friendly souls who would
make me welcome at their tables and reveal their convictions and ideals
with a candor which does not come to English people until their ice of
reserve is broken or thawed. And that was always so. At a small
dinner-party or a big reception, in one of the great mansions of New
York, or in a suite of rooms high above the traffic of the street,
conversation was free-and-easy, with or without the aid of a cocktail,
and laughter came in gusts, and American men and women spoke of the
realities of life frankly and without camouflage, with a directness and
sincerity that touched the essential truth of things. In one room Melba
sang with eternal girlhood in her voice, while painters and diplomats,
novelists, and wits, famous actresses and princesses of New York, were
hushed into silence for a while, until, when the spell was broken, there
rose again a merry tumult of tongues. In another room a group of
"intellectuals," tired of talking about war and peace, played charades
like children in the nursery, and sat down to drawing games with shouts
of mirth at a woman's head with the body of a fish and the legs of a
bird. In another house the King's Jester of New York, who goes from
party to party like a French wit--the little Abbe Morellet--in the
_salons_ of France before the Revolution, destroyed the dignity of
decorous people by a caricature of German opera and an imitation of a
German husband eating in a public restaurant. I knew the weakness that
comes from a surfeit of laughter.... I did not tire of these social
adventures in New York, and I came to see something of the spirit of the
people as it was revealed in the cosmopolitan city. I found that spirit
touched, in spite of social merriment, by the tragedy of war, and
anxious about the outcome of peace. I found these people conscious of
new responsibilities thrust upon them by fate, and groping in their
minds for some guidance, for some clear light upon their duty and
destiny in the reshaping of the world by the history that has happened.
Europe, three thousand miles away, is still a mystery to them, full of
unknown forces and peoples and passions which they cannot understand,
though they read all their Sunday papers, with all their bulky
supplements. When I went among them they were divided by the conflict of
political differences with passionate emotion, and torn between
conflicting ideals of patriotism and humanity. But most of them put on
one side, with a fine disdain, all meanness of thought and action and
the dirty squalor of financial interests. Sure of their power among
nations, the people I met--and I met many of the best--were anxious to
rise to their high chance in history and to do the Big Thing in a big
way, when they saw the straight road ahead.
When I left New York they were raising their _fifth great Victory Loan_,
and the streets were draped in banners bearing the great V for Victory
and for the number of the loan. Their sense of drama was at work again
to make this enterprise successful, and their genius of advertisement
was in action to put a spell upon the people. The face of a farmer was
on the posters in many streets, and that sturdy old fellow upon whose
industry the wealth of America depends so much, because it is founded in
the soil, put his hand in his pocket and said, "Sure, we'll see it
through!"
From my brief visit one conviction came to me. It is that whatever line
of action the American people take in the new world that is now being
born out of the tumult of war, they will see it through, by any
sacrifice and at any cost.
II
SOME PEOPLE I MET IN AMERICA
As a professional onlooker of life (and it is a poor profession, as I
must admit) it has always been my habit to study national and social
types in any country where I happen to be. I find an untiring interest
in this, and prefer to sit in a French cafe, for example, watching the
people who come in and out, and hearing scraps of conversation that pass
across the table, to the most thrilling theatrical entertainment. And I
find more interest in "common" people than in the uncommonly
distinguished, by fame and power. To me the types in a London omnibus or
a suburban train are more absorbing as a study than a group of generals
or a party of statesmen, and I like to discover the lives of the world's
nobodies, their way of thought and their outlook on the world, by the
character in their faces and their little social habits. In that way one
gets a sense of the social drama of a country and of the national
ideals and purpose. So when I went to the United States after four and a
half years in the war zone, where I had been watching another kind of
drama, hideous and horrible in spite of all its heroism, I fell into my
old habit of searching for types and studying characters. I had unusual
opportunity. New York and many other cities opened their hearts and
their houses to me in a most generous way, and I met great numbers of
people of every class and kind.
The first people I met, before I had stepped off my ship of adventure,
were young newspaper men who searched the ship like a sieve for any
passenger who had something in his life or brain worth telling to the
world. I was scared of them, having heard that they could extract the
very secrets of one's soul by examination of the third degree; but I
found them human and friendly fellows who greeted me cheerily and did
not take up much time when they set me up like a lay-figure on the boat
deck, turned on the "movie"-machine, snap-shotted me from various
angles, and offered me American cigarettes as a sign of comradeship. I
met many other newspaper men and women in the United States; those who
control the power of the press--the masters of the machine which shapes
the mind of peoples--and those who feed its wheels with words. Because I
had some history to tell, the word-writers lay in wait for me, found my
telephone number in any hotel of any town before I knew it myself,
tapped at my bedroom door when I was in the transition stage between day
and evening clothes, and asked questions about many things of which I
knew nothing at all, so that I had to camouflage my abysmal depths of
ignorance.
They know their job, those American reporters, and I was impressed
especially by the young women. There was one girl who sat squarely in
front of me, fixed me with candid gray eyes, and for an hour put me
through an examination about my sad past until I had revealed
everything. There is nothing that girl doesn't know about me, and I
should blush to meet her again. She did not take a single note--by that
I knew her as a good journalist--and wrote two columns of revelation
with most deadly accuracy and a beautiful style. Another girl followed
me round a picture-gallery listening to casual remarks among a group of
friends, and wrote an article on art-criticism which left me breathless
with admiration at her wit and knowledge, of which I took the credit.
One young man, once a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, boarded the train at New
York, bought me a drawing-room for private conversation, and by the time
we reached Philadelphia made it entirely futile for me to give a
lecture, because he had it all in his memory, and wrote the entire
history of everything I had seen and thought through years of war, in
next day's paper. I liked a young Harvard man who came to see me in
Boston. He had a modesty and a winning manner which made me rack my
brains to tell him something good, and I admired his type, so clean and
boyish and quick in intelligence. He belonged to the stuff of young
America, as I saw it in the fields of France, eager for service whatever
the risk. I met the editorial staffs of many newspapers, and was given a
luncheon by the proprietor and editors of one great newspaper in New
York which is perhaps the biggest power in the United States to-day. All
the men round me were literary types, and I saw in their faces the
imprint of hard thought, and of hard work more strenuous, I imagine,
than in the newspaper life of any other country of the world. They all
had an absorbing interest in the international situation after the
armistice, and knew a good deal about the secret workings of European
policy. A young correspondent just back from Russia made a speech
summing up his experiences and conclusions, which were of a startling
kind, told with the utmost simplicity and bluntness. The proprietor took
me into his private room, and outlined his general policy on world
affairs, of which the first item on his program was friendship with
England.... I found among newspaper men a sense of responsibility with
which they are not generally credited, and wonderfully alert and open
minds; also, apart from their own party politics and prejudices, a
desire for fair play and truth. The Yellow Press still has its power,
and it is a malign influence in the United States, but the newspapers of
good repute are conducted by men of principle and conviction, and their
editorial and literary staffs have a high level of talent, representing
much, I think, of the best intelligence of America.
[Illustration: A RELIEF FROM BOREDOM AFTER OFFICE HOURS]
The women of America seem to me to have a fair share of that
intelligence, and I met many types of them who were interesting as
social studies. Several states are still resisting woman suffrage, but
as far as equality goes in all affairs of daily life outside political
power the women of America have long claimed and gained it. During the
war they showed in every class, like the women of England, that they
could take on men's jobs and do them as well as men in most cases, and
better than men in some cases. They drove motor-lorries and machines;
they were dairy farmers and agriculturists; they became
munition-workers, carpenters, clerks, and elevator-girls, and the
womanhood of America rallied up with a wonderful and devoted spirit in a
great campaign of work for the Red Cross and all manner of comforts for
the troops, who, by a lamentable breakdown in transport organization,
never received many of the gifts sent to them by women old and young
whose eyes and fingers ached with so much stitching during the long
evenings of war. Apart altogether from war-work, American women have
made themselves the better halves of men, and the men know it and are
deferential to the opinions and desires of their women-folk. It is
natural that women should have a wider knowledge of literature and ideas
in a scheme of life where men have their noses down to the grindstone
of work for long hours every day. That is what most American husbands
have to do in a struggle for existence which strives up to the
possession of a Ford car, generally known as a "Tin Lizzie" or a
"Flivver," on the way to a Cadillac or a Packard, a country cottage on
Long Island or the Connecticut shore, an occasional visit to Tiffany's
in Fifth Avenue for a diamond brooch, or some other trinket symbolizing
success, a holiday at Palm Beach, week-ends at Atlantic City, and a
relief from boredom after office hours at the Forty-fourth Street
Theater or the Winter Garden. That represents the social ambition of the
average business man on the road to fortune, and it costs a goodly pile
of dollars to be heaped up by hard work, at a high strain of nervous
tension. Meanwhile the women are keeping themselves as beautiful as God
made them, with slight improvements according to their own ideas, which
are generally wrong; decorating their homes; increasing their
housekeeping expenses, and reading prodigiously. They read a vast number
of books and magazines, so making it possible for men like
myself--slaves of the pen--to exist in an otherwise cruel world.