TYPES AND DIVERSIONS
“O I see flashing that this America is only you and me,
Its power, weapons, testimony, are you and me,
Its crimes, lies, thefts, defections, are you and me,
Its Congress is you and me, the officers, capitols, armies, ships,
are you and me,
Its endless gestations of new States are you and me,
The war (that war so bloody and grim, the war I will henceforth
forget), was you and me,
Natural and artificial are you and me,
Freedom, language, poems, employments, are you and me,
Past, present, future, are you and me.”
WHITMAN.
I
At the end of a week spent in a Middle Western city a visitor from the
East inquired wearily: “Does no one work in this town?” The answer to
such a question is that of course everybody works; the town boasts no
man of leisure; but on occasions the citizens play, and the advent of
any properly certified guest affords a capital excuse for a period of
intensified sociability. “Welcome” is writ large over the gates of all
Western cities--literally in letters of fire at railway-stations.
Approaching a town the motorist finds himself courteously welcomed
and politely requested to respect the local speed law, and as he
departs a sign at the postern thanks him and urges his return. The
Western town is distinguished as much by its generous hospitality
as by its enterprise, its firm purpose to develop new territory and
widen its commercial influence. The visitor is bewildered by the
warmth with which he is seized and scheduled for a round of exhausting
festivities. He may enjoy all the delights that attend the triumphal
tour of a débutante launched upon a round of visits to the girls she
knew in school or college; and he will be conscious of a sincerity,
a real pride and joy in his presence, that warms his heart to the
community. Passing on from one town to another, say from Cincinnati to
Cleveland, from Kansas City to Denver, from Omaha to Minneapolis, he
finds that news of his approach has preceded him. The people he has
met at his last stopping-place have wired everybody they know at the
next point in his itinerary to be on the lookout for him, and he finds
that instead of entering a strange port there are friends--veritable
friends--awaiting him. If by chance he escapes the eye of the reception
committee and enters himself on the books of an inn, he is interrupted
in his unpacking by offers of lodging in the homes of people he never
saw before.
There is no other region in America where so much history has been
crowded into so brief a period, where young commonwealths so quickly
attained political power and influence as in the Middle West; but
the founding of States and the establishment of law is hardly more
interesting than the transfer to the wilderness of the dignities and
amenities of life. From the verandas of country clubs or handsome
villas scattered along the Great Lakes, one may almost witness the
receding pageant of discovery and settlement. In Wisconsin and Michigan
the golfer in search of an elusive ball has been known to stumble upon
an arrow-head, a significant reminder of the newness of the land; and
the motorist flying across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois sees log cabins
that survive from the earliest days, many of them still occupied.
Present comfort and luxury are best viewed against a background of
pioneer life; at least the sense of things hoped for and realized in
these plains is more impressive as one ponders the self-sacrifice and
heroism by which the soil was conquered and peopled. The friendliness,
the eagerness to serve that are so charming and winning in the West
date from those times when one who was not a good neighbor was a
potential enemy. Social life was largely dependent upon exigencies that
brought the busy pioneers together, to cut timber, build homes, add a
barn to meet growing needs, or to assist in “breaking” new acres. The
women, eagerly seizing every opportunity to vary the monotony of their
lonely lives, gathered with the men, and while the axes swung in the
woodland or the plough turned up the new soil, held a quilting, spun
flax, made clothing, or otherwise assisted the hostess to get ahead
with her never-ending labors. To-day, throughout the broad valley
the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the pioneers ply the
tennis-racket and dance in country club-houses beside lakes and rivers
where their forebears drove the plough or swung the axe all day, and
rode miles to dance on a puncheon floor. There was marrying and giving
in marriage; children were born and “raised” amid conditions that cause
one to smile at the child-welfare and “better-baby” societies of these
times. The affections were deepened by the close union of the family in
the intimate association of common tasks. Here, indeed, was a practical
application of the dictum of one for all and all for one.
The lines of contact between isolated clearings and meagre settlements
were never wholly broken. Months might pass without a household seeing
a strange face, but always some one was on the way--an itinerant
missionary, a lost hunter, a pioneer looking for a new field to
conquer. Motoring at ease through the country, one marvels at the
journeys accomplished when blazed trails were the only highways. A
pioneer railroad-builder once told me of a pilgrimage he made on
horseback from northern Indiana to the Hermitage in Tennessee to meet
Old Hickory face to face. Jackson had captivated his boyish fancy and
this arduous journey was a small price to pay for the honor of viewing
the hero on his own acres. I may add that this gentleman achieved his
centennial, remaining a steadfast adherent of Jacksonian democracy to
the end of his life. Once I accompanied him to the polls and he donned
a silk hat for the occasion, as appropriate to the dignified exercise
of his franchise.
There was a distinct type of restless, adventurous pioneer who liked
to keep a little ahead of civilization; who found that he could not
breathe freely when his farm, acquainted for only a few years with
the plough, became the centre of a neighborhood. Men of this sort
persuaded themselves that there was better land to be had farther
on, though, more or less consciously, it was freedom they craved.
The exodus of the Lincolns from Kentucky through Indiana, where they
lingered fourteen years before seeking a new home in Illinois, is
typical of the pioneer restlessness. In a day when the effects of
a household could be moved in one wagon and convoyed by the family
on horseback, these transitions were undertaken with the utmost
light-heartedness. Only a little while ago I heard a woman of eighty
describe her family’s removal from Kentucky to Illinois, a wide détour
being made that they might visit a distant relative in central Indiana.
This, from her recital, must have been the jolliest of excursions, for
the children at least, with the daily experiences of fording streams,
the constant uncertainties as to the trail, and the camping out in the
woods when no cabin offered shelter.
It was a matter of pride with the housewife to make generous provision
for “company,” and the pioneer annalists dwell much upon the good
provender of those days, when venison and wild turkeys were to be
had for the killing and corn pone or dodger was the only bread.
The reputation of being a good cook was quite as honorable as
that of being a successful farmer or a lucky hunter. The Princeton
University Press has lately resurrected and republished “The New
Purchase,” by Baynard Rush Hall, a graduate of Union College and of
Princeton Theological Seminary, one of the raciest and most amusing
of mid-Western chronicles. Hall sought “a life of poetry and romance
amid the rangers of the wood,” and in 1823 became principal of Indiana
Seminary, the precursor of the State University. Having enjoyed an
ampler experience of life than his neighbors, he was able to view the
pioneers with a degree of detachment, though sympathetically.
No other contemporaneous account of the social life of the period
approaches this for fulness; certainly none equals it in humor. The
difficulties of transportation, the encompassing wilderness all but
impenetrable, the oddities of frontier character, the simple menage
of the pioneer, his food, and the manner of its preparation, and the
general social spectacle, are described by a master reporter. One of
his best chapters is devoted to a wedding and the subsequent feast,
where a huge potpie was the pièce de résistance. He estimates that at
least six hens, two chanticleers, and four pullets were lodged in this
doughy sepulchre, which was encircled by roast wild turkeys “stuffed”
with Indian meal and sausages. Otherwise there were fried venison,
fried turkey, fried chicken, fried duck, fried pork, and, he adds, “for
anything I knew, even fried leather!”
II
The pioneer adventure in the trans-Mississippi States differed
materially from that of the timbered areas of the old Northwest
Territory. I incline to the belief that the forest primeval had a
socializing effect upon those who first dared its fastnesses, binding
the lonely pioneers together by mysterious ties which the open plain
lacked. The Southern infusion in the States immediately north of
the Ohio undoubtedly influenced the early social life greatly. The
Kentuckian, for example, carried his passion for sociability into
Indiana, and pages of pioneer history in the Hoosier State might have
been lifted bodily from Kentucky chronicles, so similar is their
flavor. The Kentuckian was always essentially social; he likes “the
swarm,” remarks Mr. James Lane Allen. To seek a contrast, the early
social picture in Kansas is obscured by the fury of the battle over
slavery that dominates the foreground. Other States fought Indians and
combated hunger, survived malaria, brimstone and molasses and calomel,
and kept in good humor, but the settlement of Kansas was attended
with battle, murder, and sudden death. The pioneers of the Northwest
Territory began life in amiable accord with their neighbors; Kansas
gained Statehood after a bitter war with her sister Missouri, though
the contest may not be viewed as a local disturbance, but as a “curtain
raiser” for the drama of the Civil War. When in the strenuous fifties
Missouri undertook to colonize the Kansas plains with pro-slavery
sympathizers, New England rose in majesty to protest. She not only
protested vociferously but sent colonies to hold the plain against the
invaders. Life in the Kansas of those years of strife was unrelieved
by any gayeties. One searches in vain for traces of the comfort and
cheer that are a part of the tradition of the settlement of the Ohio
valley States. Professor Spring, in his history of Kansas, writes:
“For amusement the settlers were left entirely to their own resources.
Lectures, concert troupes, and shows never ventured far into the
wilderness. Yet there was much broad, rollicking, noisy merrymaking,
but it must be confessed that rum and whiskey--lighter liquors like
wine and beer could not be obtained--had a good deal to do with it....
Schools, churches, and the various appliances of older civilization got
under way and made some growth; but they were still in a primitive,
inchoate condition when Kansas took her place in the Union.”
There is hardly another American State in which the social organization
may be observed as readily as in Kansas. For the reason that its
history and the later “social scene” constitute so compact a picture
I find myself returning to it frequently for illustrations and
comparisons. Born amid tribulation, having indeed been subjected to the
ordeal of fire, Kansas marks Puritanism’s farthest west; her people
are still proud to call their State “The Child of Plymouth Rock.” The
New Englanders who settled the northeastern part of the Territory were
augmented after the Civil War by men of New England stock who had
established themselves in Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa when the war began,
and having acquired soldiers’ homestead rights made use of them to
pre-empt land in the younger commonwealth. The influx of veterans after
Appomattox sealed the right of Kansas to be called a typical American
State. “Kansas sent practically every able-bodied man of military age
to the Civil War,” says Mr. William Allen White, “and when they came
back literally hundreds of thousands of other soldiers came with them
and took homesteads.” For thirty years after Kansas attained Statehood
her New Englanders were a dominating factor in her development,
and their influence is still clearly perceptible. The State may be
considered almost as one vast plantation, peopled by industrious,
aspiring men and women. Class distinctions are little known; snobbery,
where it exists, hides itself to avoid ridicule; the State abounds in
the “comfortably well off” and the “well-to-do”; millionaires are few
and well tamed; every other family boasts an automobile.
While the political and economic results of the Civil War have been
much written of, its influence upon the common relationships of life
in the border States that it so profoundly affected are hardly less
interesting. The pioneer period was becoming a memory, the conditions
of life had grown comfortable, and there was ease in Zion when the
young generation met a new demand upon their courage. Many were
permanently lifted out of the sphere to which they were born and
thrust forth into new avenues of opportunity. This was not of course
peculiar to the West, though in the Mississippi valley the effects
were so closely intermixed with those of the strenuous post-bellum
political history that they are indelibly written into the record.
Local hostilities aroused by the conflict were of long duration; the
copperhead was never forgiven for his disloyalty; it is remembered to
this day against his descendants. Men who, in all likelihood, would
have died in obscurity but for the changes and chances of war rose to
high position. The most conspicuous of such instances is afforded by
Grant, whose circumstances and prospects were the poorest when Fame
flung open her doors to him.
Nothing pertaining to the war of the sixties impresses the student
more than the rapidity with which reputations were made or lost or
the effect upon the participants of their military experiences. From
farms, shops, and offices men were flung into the most stirring
scenes the nation had known. They emerged with the glory of battle
upon them to become men of mark in their communities, wearing a new
civic and social dignity. It would be interesting to know how many
of the survivors attained civil office as the reward of their valor;
in the Western States I should say that few escaped some sort of
recognition on the score of their military services. In the city
that I know best of all, where for three decades at least the most
distinguished citizens--certainly the most respected and honored--were
veterans of the Civil War, it has always seemed to me remarkable and
altogether reassuring as proof that we need never fear the iron collar
of militarism, that those men of the sixties so quickly readjusted
themselves in peaceful occupations. There were those who capitalized
their military achievements, but the vast number had gone to war from
the highest patriotic motives and, having done their part, were glad to
be quit of it. The shifting about and the new social experiences were
responsible for many romances. Men met and married women of whose very
existence they would have been ignorant but for the fortunes of war,
and in these particulars history was repeating itself last year before
our greatest military adventure had really begun!
The sudden appearance of thousands of khaki-clad young men in the
summer and fall of 1917 marked a new point of orientation in American
life. Romance mounted his charger again; everywhere one met the wistful
war bride. The familiar academic ceremonials of college commencements
in the West as in the East were transformed into tributes to the
patriotism of the graduates and undergraduates already under arms
and present in their new uniforms. These young men, encountered in
the street, in clubs, in hurried visits to their offices as they
transferred their affairs to other hands, were impressively serious and
businesslike. In the training-camps one heard familiar college songs
rather than battle hymns. Even country-club dances and other functions
given for the entertainment of the young soldiers were lacking in
light-heartedness. In a Minneapolis country club much affected by
candidates for commissions at Fort Snelling, the Saturday-night dances
closed with the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner”; every face
turned instantly toward the flag; every hand came to salute; and the
effect was to send the whole company, young and old, soberly into
the night. In the three training and mobilizing camps that I visited
through the first months of preparation--Forts Benjamin Harrison,
Sheridan, and Snelling--there was no ignoring the quiet, dogged
attitude of the sons of the West, who had no hatred for the people
they were enlisted to fight (I heard many of them say this), but were
animated by a feeling that something greater even than the dignity and
security of this nation, something of deep import to the whole world
had called them.
III
In “The American Scene” Mr. James ignored the West, perhaps as lacking
in those backgrounds and perspectives that most strongly appealed to
him. It is for the reason that “polite society,” as we find it in
Western cities, has only the scant pioneer background that I have
indicated that it is so surprising in the dignity and richness of its
manifestations. If it is a meritorious thing for people in prosperous
circumstances to spend their money generously and with good taste in
the entertainment of their friends, to effect combinations of the
congenial in balls, dinners, musicals, and the like, then the social
spectacle in the Western provinces is not a negligible feature of their
activities. If an aristocracy is a desirable thing in America, the
West can, in its cities great and small, produce it, and its quality
and tone will be found quite similar to the aristocracy of older
communities. We of the West are not so callous as our critics would
have us appear, and we are only politely tolerant of the persistence
with which fiction and the drama are illuminated with characters
whose chief purpose is to illustrate the raw vulgarity of Western
civilization. Such persons are no more acceptable socially in Chicago,
Minneapolis, or Denver than they are in New York. The country is
so closely knit together that a fashionable gathering in one place
presents very much the appearance of a similar function in another.
New York, socially speaking, is very hospitable to the Southerner; the
South has a tradition of aristocracy that the West lacks. In both New
York and Boston a very different tone characterizes the mention of a
Southern girl and any reference to a daughter of the West. The Western
girl may be every bit as “nice” and just as cultivated as the Southern
girl: they would be indistinguishable one from the other save for the
Southern girl’s speech, which we discover to be not provincial but “so
charmingly Southern.”
Perhaps I may here safely record my impatience of the pretension that
provincialism is anywhere admirable. A provincial character may be
interesting and amusing as a type; he may be commendably curious about
a great number of things and even possess considerable information,
without being blessed with the vision to correlate himself with the
world beyond the nearest haystack. I do not share the opinion of some
of my compatriots of the Western provinces that our speech is really
the standard English, that the Western voice is impeccable, or that
culture and manners have attained among us any noteworthy dignity
that entitles us to strut before the rest of the world. Culture is
not a term to be used lightly, and culture, as, say, Matthew Arnold
understood it and labored to extend its sphere, is not more respected
in these younger States than elsewhere in America. We are offering
innumerable vehicles of popular education; we point with pride to
public schools, State and privately endowed universities, and to
smaller colleges of the noblest standards and aims; but, even with
these so abundantly provided, it cannot be maintained that culture
in its strict sense cries insistently to the Western imagination.
There are people of culture, yes; there are social expressions both
interesting and charming; but our preoccupations are mainly with the
utilitarian, an attitude wholly defensible and explainable in the
light of our newness, the urgent need of bread-winning in our recent
yesterdays. However, with the easing in the past fifty years of the
conditions of life there followed quite naturally a restlessness,
an eagerness to fill and drain the cup of enjoyment, that was only
interrupted by our entrance into the world war. There are people, rich
and poor, in these States who are devotedly attached to “whatsoever
things are lovely,” but that they exert any wide influence or color
deeply the social fabric is debatable. It is possible that “sweetness
and light,” as we shall ultimately attain them, will not be an
efflorescence of literature or the fine arts, but a realization of
justice, highly conceived, and a perfected system of government that
will assure the happiness, contentment, and peace of the great body of
our citizenry.
In the smaller Western towns, especially where the American stock
is dominant, lines of social demarcation are usually obscure to the
vanishing-point. Schools and churches are here a democratizing factor,
and a woman who “keeps help” is very likely to be apologetic about it;
she is anxious to avoid the appearance of “uppishness”--an unpardonable
sin. It is impossible for her to ignore the fact that the “girl” in
her kitchen has, very likely, gone to school with her children or has
been a member of her Sunday-school class. The reluctance of American
girls to accept employment as house-servants is an aversion not to be
overcome in the West. Thousands of women in comfortable conditions
of life manage their homes without outside help other than that of
a neighborhood man or a versatile syndicate woman who “comes in” to
assist in a weekly cleaning.
There is a type of small-town woman who makes something quite casual
and incidental of the day’s tasks. Her social enjoyments are in no
way hampered if, in entertaining company, she prepares with her own
hands the viands for the feast. She takes the greatest pride in her
household; she is usually a capital cook and is not troubled by any
absurd feeling that she has “demeaned” herself by preparing and
serving a meal. She does this exceedingly well, and rises without
embarrassment to change the plates and bring in the salad. The salad
is excellent and she knows it is excellent and submits with becoming
modesty to praise of her handiwork. In homes which it is the highest
privilege to visit a joke is made of the housekeeping. The lady of the
house performs the various rites in keeping with maternal tradition
and the latest approved text-books. You may, if you like, accompany
her to the kitchen and watch the broiling of your chop, noting the
perfection of the method before testing the result, and all to the
accompaniment of charming talk about life and letters or what you will.
Corporate feeding in public mess-halls will make slow headway with
these strongly individualistic women of the new generation who read
prodigiously, manage a baby with their eyes on Pasteur, and are as
proud of their biscuits as of their club papers, which we know to be
admirable.
Are women less prone to snobbishness than men? Contrary to the
general opinion, I think they are. Their gentler natures shrink from
unkindness, from the petty cruelties of social differentiation which
may be made very poignant in a town of five or ten thousand people,
where one cannot pretend with any degree of plausibility that one does
not know one’s neighbor, or that the daughter of a section foreman or
the son of the second-best grocer did not sit beside one’s own Susan
or Thomas in the public school. The banker’s offspring may find the
children of the owner of the stave-factory or the planing-mill more
congenial associates than the children on the back streets; but when
the banker’s wife gives a birthday party for Susan the invitations are
not limited to the children of the immediate neighbors but include
every child in town who has the slightest claim upon her hospitality.
The point seems to be established that one may be poor and yet
be “nice”; and this is a very comforting philosophy and no mean
touchstone of social fitness. I may add that the mid-Western woman,
in spite of her strong individualism in domestic matters, is, broadly
speaking, fundamentally socialistic. She is the least bit uncomfortable
at the thought of inequalities of privilege and opportunity. Not long
ago I met in Chicago an old friend, a man who has added greatly to
an inherited fortune. To my inquiry as to what he was doing in town
he replied ruefully that he was going to buy his wife some clothes!
He explained that in her preoccupation with philanthropy and social
welfare she had grown not merely indifferent to the call of fashion,
but that she seriously questioned her right to adorn herself while
her less-favored sisters suffered for life’s necessities. This is an
extreme case, though I can from my personal acquaintance duplicate it
in half a dozen instances of women born to ease and able to command
luxury who very sincerely share this feeling.
IV
The social edifice is like a cabinet of file-boxes conveniently
arranged so that they may be drawn out and pondered by the curious. The
seeker of types is so prone to look for the eccentric, the fantastic
(and I am not without my interest in these varieties), which so
astonishingly repeat themselves, that he is likely to ignore the claims
of the normal, the real “folksy” bread-and-butter people who are, after
all, the mainstay of our democracy. They are not to be scornfully waved
aside as bourgeoisie, or prodded with such ironies as Arnold applied to
the middle class in England. They constitute the most interesting and
admirable of our social strata. There is nothing quite like them in any
other country; nowhere else have comfort, opportunity, and aspiration
produced the same combination.
The traveller’s curiosity is teased constantly, as he cruises through
the towns and cities of the Middle West, by the numbers of homes that
cannot imaginably be maintained on less than five thousand dollars a
year. The economic basis of these establishments invites speculation;
in my own city I am ignorant of the means by which hundreds of such
homes are conducted--homes that testify to the West’s growing good
taste in domestic architecture and shelter people whose ambitions are
worthy of highest praise. There was a time not so remote when I could
identify at sight every pleasure vehicle in town. A man who kept a
horse and buggy was thought to be “putting on” a little; if he set up
a carriage and two horses he was, unless he enjoyed public confidence
in the highest degree, viewed with distrust and suspicion. When in the
eighties an Indianapolis bank failed, a cynical old citizen remarked
of its president that “no wonder Blank busted, swelling ’round in a
carriage with a nigger in uniform”! Nowadays thousands of citizens
blithely disport themselves in automobiles that cost several times the
value of that banker’s equipage. I have confided my bewilderment to
friends in other cities and find the same ignorance of the economic
foundation of this prosperity. The existence, in cities of one,
two, and three hundred thousand people of so many whom we may call
non-producers--professional men, managers, agents--offers a stimulating
topic for a doctoral thesis. I am not complaining of this phenomenon--I
merely wonder about it.
The West’s great natural wealth and extraordinary development is
nowhere more strikingly denoted than in the thousands of comfortable
homes, in hundreds of places, set on forty or eighty foot lots that
were tilled land or forest fifty or twenty years ago. Cruising
through the West, one enters every city through new additions,
frequently sliced out of old forests, with the maples, elms, or
beeches carefully retained. Bungalows are inadvertently jotted down
as though enthusiastic young architects were using the landscape
for sketch-paper. I have inspected large settlements in which no
two of these habitations are alike, though the difference may be
only a matter of pulling the roof a little lower over the eyes of
the veranda or some idiosyncrasy in the matter of the chimney. The
trolley and the low-priced automobile are continually widening the
urban arc, so that the acre lot or even a larger estate is within
the reach of city-dwellers who have a weakness for country air and
home-grown vegetables. A hedge, a second barricade of hollyhocks, a
flower-box on the veranda rail, and a splash of color when the crimson
ramblers are in bloom--here the hunter of types keeps his note-book
in hand and wishes that Henry Cuyler Bunner were alive to bring his
fine perceptions and sympathies to bear upon these homes and their
attractive inmates.
The young woman we see inspecting the mignonette or admonishing the
iceman to greater punctuality in his deliveries, would have charmed a
lyric from Aldrich. The new additions are, we know, contrived for her
special delight. She and her neighbors are not to be confounded with
young wives in apartments with kitchenette attached who lean heavily
upon the delicatessen-shop and find their sole intellectual stimulus in
vaudeville or the dumb drama. It is inconceivable that any one should
surprise the mistresses of these bungalows in a state of untidiness,
that their babies should not be sound and encouraging specimens of the
human race, or that the arrival of unexpected guests should not find
their pantries fortified with delicious strawberries or transparent
jellies of their own conserving. These young women and their equally
young husbands are the product of the high schools, or perhaps they
have been fellow students in a State university. With all the world
before them where to choose and Providence their guide, they have
elected to attack life together and they go about it joyfully. Let no
one imagine that they lead starved lives or lack social diversion. Do
the housekeepers not gather on one another’s verandas every summer
afternoon to discuss the care of infants or wars and rumors of wars;
and is there not tennis when their young lords come home? On occasions
of supreme indulgence the neighborhood laundress watches the baby while
they go somewhere to dance or to a play, lecture, or concert in town.
They are all musical; indeed, the whole Middle West is melodious with
the tinklings of what Mr. George Ade, with brutal impiety, styles “the
upright agony box.” Or, denied the piano, these habitations at least
boast the tuneful disk and command at will the voices of Farrar and
Caruso.
V
It is in summer that the Middle Western provinces most candidly present
themselves, not only because the fields then publish their richness
but for the ease with which the people may be observed. The study of
types may then be pursued along the multitudinous avenues in which
the Folks disport themselves in search of pleasure. The smoothing-out
processes, to which schools, tailors, dressmakers, and “shine-’em”
parlors contribute, add to the perils of the type-hunter. Mr. Howells’s
remark of twenty years ago or more, that the polish slowly dims on
footgear as one travels westward, has ceased to be true; types once
familiar are so disguised or modified as to be unrecognizable. Even the
Western county-seat, long rich in “character,” now flaunts the smartest
apparel in its shop-windows, and when it reappears in Main Street upon
the forms of the citizens one is convinced of the local prosperity
and good taste. The keeper of the livery-stable, a stout gentleman,
who knows every man, woman, and child in the county and aspires to
the shrievalty, has bowed before the all-pervasive automobile. He
has transformed his stable into a garage (with a plate-glass “front”
exposing the latest model) and hides his galluses (shamelessly
exhibited in the day of the horse) under a coat of modish cut, in
deference to the sensibilities of lady patrons. The country lawyer is
abandoning the trailing frock coat, once the sacred vestment of his
profession, having found that the wrinkled tails evoked unfavorable
comment from his sons and daughters when they came home from college.
The village drunkard is no longer pointed out commiseratingly; local
option and State-wide prohibition have destroyed his usefulness as an
awful example, and his resourcefulness is taxed to the utmost that he
may keep tryst with the skulking bootlegger.
Every town used to have a usurer, a merchant who was “mean” (both
of these were frequently pillars in the church), and a dishevelled
photographer whose artistic ability was measured by the success of his
efforts to make the baby laugh. He solaced himself with the flute or
violin between “sittings,” not wholly without reference to the charms
of the milliner over the way. In the towns I have in mind there was
always the young man who would have had a brilliant career but for his
passion for gambling, the aleatory means of his destruction being an
all-night poker-game in the back room of his law-office opposite the
court-house. He may appropriately be grouped with the man who had been
ruined by “going security” for a friend, who was spoken of pityingly
while the beneficiary of his misplaced confidence, having gained
affluence, was execrated. The race is growing better and wiser, and
by one means and another these types have been forced from the stage;
or perhaps more properly it should be said that the stage and the
picture-screen alone seem unaware that they have passed into oblivion.
[Illustration: The Municipal Recreation Pier, Chicago.]
The town band remains, however, and it is one of the mysteries of our
civilization that virtuosi, capable of performing upon any instrument,
exist in the smallest hamlet and meet every Saturday night for
practice in the lodge-room over the grocery. I was both auditor and
spectator of such a rehearsal one night last summer, in a small town
in Illinois. From the garage across the street it was possible
to hear and see the artists, and to be aware of the leader’s zeal
and his stern, critical attitude toward the performers. He seized
first the cornet and then the trombone (Hoosierese, sliphorn) to
demonstrate the proper phrasing of a difficult passage. The universal
Main Street is made festive on summer nights by the presence of the
town’s fairest daughters, clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
who know every one and gossip democratically with their friend the
white-jacketed young man who lords it at the druggist’s soda-fountain.
Such a group gathered and commented derisively upon the experiments
of the musicians. That the cornetist was in private life an assistant
to the butcher touched their humor; the evocation of melody and the
purveying of meat seemed to them irreconcilable. In every such town
there is a male quartette that sings the old-time melodies at church
entertainments and other gatherings. These vocalists add to the joy
of living, and I should lament their passing. Their efforts are more
particularly pleasing when, supplemented by guitar and banjo, they move
through verdurous avenues thrumming and singing as they go. Somewhere a
lattice opens guardedly--how young the world is!
The adventurous boy who, even in times of peace, was scornful of formal
education and ran away to enlist in the navy or otherwise sought to
widen the cramped horizons of home--and every town has this boy--still
reappears at intervals to report to his parents and submit to the
admiration and envy of his old schoolmates in the Main Street bazaars.
This type endures and will, very likely, persist while there are seas
to cross and battles to be won. The trumpetings of war stir the blood
of such youngsters, and since our entrance into the war it has been
my fortune to know many of them, who were anxious to dare the skies
or play with death in the waters under the earth. The West has no
monopoly of courage or daring, but it was reassuring to find that the
best blood of the Great Valley thrilled to the cry of the bugle. On a
railway-train I fell into talk with a young officer of the national
army. Finding that I knew the president of the Western college that
he had attended, he sketched for me a career which, in view of his
twenty-six years, was almost incredible. At eighteen he had enlisted
in the navy in the hope of seeing the world, but had been assigned to
duty as a hospital orderly. Newport had been one of his stations; there
and at other places where he had served he spent his spare hours in
study. When he was discharged he signed papers on a British merchant
vessel. The ship was short-handed and he was enrolled as an able
seaman, which, he said, was an unwarranted compliment, as he proved to
the captain’s satisfaction when he was sent to the wheel and nearly (as
he put it) bowled over a lighthouse. His voyages had carried him to the
Orient and the austral seas. After these wanderings he was realizing
an early ambition to go to college when the war-drum sounded. He had
taken the training at an officer’s reserve camp and was on his way to
his first assignment. The town he mentioned as his home is hardly more
than a whistling-point for locomotives, and I wondered later, as I
flashed through it, just what stirring of the spirit had made its peace
intolerable and sent him roaming.[B] At a club dinner I met another
man, born not far from the town that produced my sailor-soldier, who
had fought with the Canadian troops from the beginning of the war
until discharged because of wounds received on the French front. His
pocketful of medals--he carried them boyishly, like so many marbles, in
his trousers pocket!--included the _croix de guerre_, and he had been
decorated at Buckingham Palace by King George. He had been a wanderer
from boyhood, his father told me, visiting every part of the world that
promised adventure and, incidentally, was twice wounded in the Boer War.
The evolution of a type is not, with Mother Nature, a hasty business,
and in attempting to answer an inquiry for a definition of the typical
mid-Western girl, I am disposed to spare myself humiliating refutations
by declaring that there is no such thing. In the Rocky Mountain States
and in California, we know, if the motion-picture purveyors may be
trusted, that the typical young woman of those regions always wears
a sombrero and lives upon the back of a bronco. However, in parts
of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, where there has been a minimum of
intermixture since the original settlements, one is fairly safe in the
choice of types. I shall say that in this particular territory the
typical young woman is brown-haired, blue or brown of eye, of medium
height, with a slender, mobile face that is reminiscent of Celtic
influences. Much Scotch-Irish blood flowed into the Ohio valley in the
early immigration, and the type survives. In the streets and in public
gatherings in Wisconsin and Minnesota the German and Scandinavian
infusion is clearly manifest. On the lake-docks and in lumber-camps
the big fellows of the North in their Mackinaw coats and close-fitting
knit caps impart a heroic note to the landscape. In January, 1917,
having gone to St. Paul to witness the winter carnival, I was struck by
the great number of tall, fair men who, in their gay holiday attire,
satisfied the most exacting ideal of the children of the vikings. They
trod the snow with kingly majesty, and to see their performances on
skis is to be persuaded that the sagas do not exaggerate the daring of
their ancestors.
“What was that?” said Olaf, standing
On the quarter deck.
“Something heard I like the stranding
Of a shattered wreck.”
Einar then, the arrow taking
From the loosened string,
Answered “that was Norway breaking
From thy hand, O king!”
The search for characteristic traits is likely to be more fruitful
of tangible results than the attempt to fix physical types, and the
Western girl who steps from the high schools to the State universities
that so hospitably open their doors to her may not be _the_ type, but
she is indubitably _a_ type, well defined. The lore of the ages has
been preserved and handed down for her special benefit and she absorbs
and assimilates it with ease and grace. Man is no enigma to her; she
begins her analysis of the male in high school, and the university
offers a post-graduate course in the species. Young men are not more
serious over the affairs of their Greek-letter societies than these
young women in the management of their sororities, which seem, after
school-days, to call for constant reunions. It is not surprising that
the Western woman has so valiantly fought for and won recognition of
her rights as a citizen. A girl who has matched her wits against boys
in the high school and again in a State university, and very likely has
surpassed them in scholarship, must be forgiven for assuming that the
civil rights accorded them cannot fairly be withheld from her. The many
thousands of young women who have taken degrees in these universities
have played havoc with the Victorian tradition of womanhood. They
constitute an independent, self-assured body, zealous in social and
civic service, and not infrequently looking forward to careers.
The State university is truly a well-spring of democracy; this may
not be said too emphatically. There is evidence of the pleasantest
comradeship between men and women students, and one is impressed in
classrooms by the prevailing good cheer and earnestness.
“And one said, smiling, Pretty were the sight
If our old halls could change their sex, and flaunt
With prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans,
And sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair.”
Mild flirtations are not regarded as detrimental to the attainment
of sound or even distinguished scholarship. The university’s social
life may be narrow, but it is ampler than that of the farm or “home
town.” Against the argument that these institutions tend to the
promotion of provincial insularity, it may be said that there is a
compensating benefit in the mingling of students drawn largely from a
single commonwealth. A gentleman whose education was gained in one of
the older Eastern universities and in Europe remarked to me that, as
his son expected to succeed him in the law, he was sending him to the
university of his own State, for the reason that he would meet there
young men whose acquaintance would later be of material assistance to
him in his profession.
VI
The value of the Great Lakes as a social and recreational medium is
hardly less than their importance as commercial highways. The saltless
seas are lined with summer colonies and in all the lake cities piers
and beaches are a boon to the many who seek relief from the heat
which we of the West always speak of defensively as essential to the
perfecting of the corn that is our pride. Chicago’s joke that it is the
best of summer resorts is not without some foundation; certainly one
may find there every variety of amusement except salt-water bathing.
The salt’s stimulus is not missed apparently by the vast number of
citizens--estimated at two hundred thousand daily during the fiercest
heat--who disport themselves on the shore. The new municipal pier is
a prodigious structure, and I know of no place in America where the
student of mankind may more profitably plant himself for an evening of
contemplation.
[Illustration: Types and diversions.
A popular bathing beach on Lake Erie, near the town of Sandusky.]
What struck me in a series of observations of the people at play,
extending round the lakes from Chicago to Cleveland, was the general
good order and decorum. At Detroit I was introduced to two dancing
pavilions on the riverside, where the prevailing sobriety was most
depressing in view of my promise to the illustrator that somewhere
in our pilgrimage I should tax his powers with scenes of depravity
and violence. A quarter purchased a string of six tickets, and one
of these deposited in a box entitled the owner to take the floor
with a partner. As soon as a dance and its several encores was
over the floor cleared instantly and one was required to relinquish
another ticket. There and in a similar dance-hall in a large Cleveland
amusement park fully one-third of the patrons were young women who
danced together throughout the evening, and often children tripped into
the picture. Chaperonage was afforded by vigilant parents comfortably
established in the balcony. The Cleveland resort, accessible to any one
for a small fee, interested me particularly because the people were so
well apparelled, so “good-looking,” and the atmosphere was so charged
with the spirit of neighborliness. The favorite dances there were the
waltz (old style), the fox-trot, and the schottische. I confess that
this recrudescence of the schottische in Cleveland, a progressive city
that satisfies so many of the cravings of the aspiring soul--the home
of three-cent car-fares and a noble art museum--greatly astonished me.
But for the fact that warning of each number was flashed on the wall
I should not have trusted my judgment that what I beheld was, indeed,
the schottische. Frankly I do not care for the schottische, and it may
have been that my tone or manner betokened resentment at its revival;
at any rate a policeman whom I interviewed outside the pavilion eyed
me with suspicion when I expressed surprise that the schottische was so
frequently announced. When I asked why the one-step was ignored utterly
he replied contemptuously that no doubt I could find places around
Cleveland where that kind of rough stuff was permitted, but “it don’t
go _here_!” I did not undertake to defend the one-step to so stern a
moralist, though it was in his eye that he wished me to do so that he
might reproach me for my worldliness. I do not believe he meant to be
unjust or harsh or even that he appraised me at once as a seeker of the
rough stuff he abhorred; I had merely provided him with an excuse for
proclaiming the moral standards of the city of Cleveland, which are
high. I made note of the persistence of the Puritan influence in the
Western Reserve and hastily withdrew in the direction of the trolley.
Innumerable small lakes lie within the far-flung arms of the major
lakes adding variety and charm to a broad landscape, and offering
summer refuge to a host of vacationists. Northern Indiana is
plentifully sprinkled with lakes and ponds; in Michigan, Wisconsin,
and Minnesota there are thousands of them. I am moved to ask--is a
river more companionable than a lake? I had always felt that a river
had the best of the argument, as more neighborly and human, and I am
still disposed to favor those streams of Maine that are played upon
by the tides; but an acquaintance with a great number of these inland
saucerfuls of blue water has made me their advocate. Happy is the town
that has a lake for its back yard! The lakes of Minneapolis (there are
ten within the municipal limits) are the distinguishing feature of that
city. They seem to have been planted just where they are for the sole
purpose of adorning it, and they have been protected and utilized with
rare prevision and judgment. To those who would chum with a river, St.
Paul offers the Mississippi, where the battlements of the University
Club project over a bluff from which the Father of Waters may be
admired at leisure, and St. Paul will, if you insist, land you in one
of the most delightful of country clubs on the shore of White Bear
Lake. I must add that the country club has in the Twin Cities attained
a rare state of perfection. That any one should wing far afield from
either town in summer seems absurd, so blest are both in opportunities
for outdoor enjoyment.
Just how far the wide-spread passion for knitting has interfered with
more vigorous sports among our young women I am unable to say, but
the loss to links and courts in the Western provinces must have been
enormous. The Minikahda Club of Minneapolis was illuminated one day by
a girls’ luncheon. These radiant young beings entered the dining-room
knitting--knitting as gravely as though they were weaving the destinies
of nations--and maybe they were! The small confusions and perplexities
of seating the party of thirty were increased by the dropping of balls
of yarn--and stitches! The round table seemed to be looped with yarn,
as though the war overseas were tightening its cords about those young
women, whose brothers and cousins and sweethearts were destined to the
battle-line.
Longfellow celebrated in song “The Four Lakes of Madison,” which he
apostrophized as “lovely handmaids.” I treasure the memory of an
approach round one of these lakes to Wisconsin’s capitol (one of the
few American State-houses that doesn’t look like an appropriation!)
through a mist that imparted to the dome an inthralling illusion of
detachment from the main body of the building. The first star twinkled
above it; perhaps it was Wisconsin’s star that had wandered out of
the galaxy to symbolize for an hour the State’s sovereignty!
[Illustration: On a craft plying the waters of Erie I found all of the
conditions of a happy outing and types that it is always a joy to meet.]
Whatever one may miss on piers and in amusement parks in the way of
types may be sought with confidence on the excursion steamers that ply
the lakes--veritable arks in which humanity in countless varieties
may be observed. The voyager is satisfied that the banana and peanut
and the innocuous “pop” are the ambrosia and nectar of our democracy.
Before the boat leaves the dock the deck is littered; one’s note-book
bristles with memoranda of the untidiness and disorder. On a craft
plying the waters of Erie I found all the conditions of a happy outing
and types that it is always a joy to meet. The village “cut-up,”
dashingly perched on the rail; the girl who is never so happy as when
organizing and playing games; the young man who yearns to join her
group, but is prevented by unconquerable shyness; the child that,
carefully planted in the most crowded and inaccessible part of the
deck, develops a thirst that results in the constant agitation of half
the ship as his needs are satisfied. There is, inevitably, a woman
of superior breeding who has taken passage on the boat by mistake,
believing it to be first-class, which it so undeniably is not; and
if you wear a sympathetic countenance she will confide to you her
indignation. The crunching of the peanut-shell, the poignant agony of
the child that has loved the banana not wisely but too well, are an
affront to this lady. She announces haughtily that she’s sure the boat
is overcrowded, which it undoubtedly is, and that she means to report
this trifling with human life to the authorities. That any one should
covet the cloistral calm of a private yacht when the plain folks are so
interesting and amusing is only another proof of the constant struggle
of the aristocratic ideal to fasten itself upon our continent.
Below there was a dining-saloon, but its seclusion was not to be
preferred to an assault upon a counter presided over by one of the
most remarkable young men I have ever seen. He was tall and of a
slenderness, with a wonderful mane of fair hair brushed straight back
from his pale brow. As he tossed sandwiches and slabs of pie to the
importunate he jerked his hair into place with a magnificent fling of
the head. In moments when the appeals of starving supplicants became
insistent, and he was confused by the pressure for attention, he would
rake his hair with his fingers, and then, wholly composed, swing round
and resume the filling of orders. The young man from the check-room
went to his assistance, but I felt that he resented this as an
impertinence, a reflection upon his prowess. He needed no assistance;
before that clamorous company he was the pattern of urbanity. His locks
were his strength and his consolation; not once was his aplomb shaken,
not even when a stocky gentleman fiercely demanded a whole pie!
[Illustration: The Perry monument at Put-in Bay.
A huge column of concrete erected in commemoration of Commodore Perry’s
victory.]
While Perry’s monument, a noble seamark at Put-in-Bay, is a reminder
that the lakes have played their part in American history, it is at
Mackinac that one experiences a sense of antiquity. The white-walled
fort is a link between the oldest and the newest, and the imagination
quickens at the thought of the first adventurous white man who ever
braved the uncharted waters; while the eye follows the interminable
line of ore barges bound for the steel-mills on the southern curve
of Michigan or on the shores of Erie. Commerce in these waters began
with the fur-traders travelling in canoes; then came sailing vessels
carrying supplies to the new camps and settlements and returning with
lumber or produce; but to-day sails are rare and the long leviathans,
fascinating in their apparent unwieldiness and undeniable ugliness, are
the dominant medium of transportation.
One night, a few years ago, on the breezy terrace of one of the
handsomest villas in the lake region, I talked with the head of a
great industry whose products are known round the world. His house,
furnished with every comfort and luxury, was gay with music and the
laughter of young folk. Through the straits crawled the ships, bearing
lumber, grain, and ore, signalling their passing in raucous blasts to
the lookout at St. Ignace. My host spoke with characteristic simplicity
and deep feeling of the poverty of his youth (he came to America an
immigrant) and of all that America had meant to him. He was near the
end of his days and I have thought often of that evening, of his
seigniorial dignity and courtesy, of the portrait he so unconsciously
drew of himself against a background adorned with the rich reward of
his laborious years. And as he talked it seemed that the power of the
West, the prodigious energies of its forests and fields and hills, its
enormous potentialities of opportunity, became something concrete and
tangible, that flowed in an irresistible tide through the heart of the
nation.