NO picture of these my opening days in St. Louis would be of the
slightest import if I could not give a fairly satisfactory portrait of
myself and of the blood-moods or so-called spiritual aspirations which
were animating me. At that time I had already attained my full height,
six feet one-and-one-half inches, and weighed only one hundred and
thirty-seven pounds, so you can imagine my figure. Aside from one eye
(the right) which was turned slightly outward from the line of vision,
and a set of upper teeth which because of their exceptional size were
crowded and so stood out too much, I had no particular blemish except a
general homeliness of feature. It was a source of worry to me all the
time, because I imagined that it kept me from being interesting to
women; which, apparently, was not true—not to all women at least.
Spiritually I was what might be called a poetic melancholiac, crossed
with a vivid materialistic lust of life. I doubt if any human being,
however poetic or however material, ever looked upon the scenes of this
world, material or spiritual, so called, with a more covetous eye. My
body was blazing with sex, as well as with a desire for material and
social supremacy—to have wealth, to be in society—and yet I was too
cowardly to make my way with women readily; rather, they made their way
with me. Love of beauty as such—feminine beauty first and foremost, of
course—was the dominating characteristic of all my moods: joy in the
arch of an eyebrow, the color of an eye, the flame of a lip or cheek,
the romance of a situation, spring, trees, flowers, evening walks, the
moon, the roundness of an arm or a hip, the delicate turn of an ankle or
a foot, spring odors, moonlight under trees, a lighted lamp over a dark
lawn—what tortures have I not endured because of these! My mind was
riveted on what love could bring me, once I had the prosperity and fame
which somehow I foolishly fancied commanded love; and at the same time I
was horribly depressed by the thought that I should never have them,
never; and that thought, for the most part, has been fulfilled.
In addition to this I was filled with an intense sympathy for the woes
of others, life in all its helpless degradation and poverty, the
unsatisfied dreams of people, their sweaty labors, the things they were
compelled to endure—nameless impositions, curses, brutalities—the things
they would never have, their hungers, thirsts, half-formed dreams of
pleasure, their gibbering insanities and beaten resignations at the end.
I have sobbed dry sobs looking into what I deemed to be broken faces and
the eyes of human failures. A shabby tumbledown district or doorway, a
drunken woman being arraigned before a magistrate, a child dying in a
hospital, a man or woman injured in an accident—the times unbidden tears
have leaped to my eyes and my throat has become parched and painful over
scenes of the streets, the hospitals, the jails! I have cried so often
that I have felt myself to be a weakling; at other times I have been
proud of them and of my great rages against fate and the blundering,
inept cruelty of life. If there is a God, conscious and personal, and He
considers the state of man and the savagery of His laws and His
indifferences, how He must smile at little insect man’s estimate of Him!
It is so flattering, so fatuously unreasoning, that only a sardonic
devil could enjoy it.
I was happy enough in my work although at times despondent lest all the
pleasures that can come to youth from health, courage, wealth and
opportunity should fail me while I was working and trying to get
somewhere. I had health yet I imagined I had not because I was not a
Sandow, an athlete, and my stomach, due to an undiscovered appendix,
gave me some trouble. As to courage, when I examined myself in that
direction I fancied that I had none at all. Would I slip out if a
dangerous brawl were brewing anywhere? Certainly. Well, then, I was a
coward. Could I stand up and defend myself against a man of my own
height and weight? I doubted it, particularly if he were well-trained.
In consequence, I was again a coward. There was no hope for me among
decently courageous men. Could I play tennis, baseball, football? No;
not successfully. Assuredly I was a weakling of the worst kind. Nearly
everybody could do those things, and nearly all youths were far more
proficient in all the niceties of life than was I: manners, dancing,
knowledge of dress and occasions. Hence I was a fool. The dullest
athlete of the least proficiency could overcome me; the most minute
society man, if socially correct, was infinitely my superior. Hence what
had I to hope for? And when it came to wealth and opportunity, how poor
I seemed! No girl of real beauty and force would have anything to do
with a man who was not a success; and so there I was, a complete failure
to begin with.
The aches and pains that went with all this, the amazing depression, all
but suicidal. How often have I looked into comfortable homes and wished
that some kindly family would give me shelter! And yet half knowing that
had it been offered I would have refused it. How often have I looked
through the windows of some successful business firm and wished I had
achieved ownership or stewardship, a position similar to that of any of
the officers and managers inside! To be president or vice-president or
secretary of something, some great thrashing business of some kind.
Great God, how sublime it seemed! And yet if I had only known how
centrally controlling the tool of journalism could be made! It mattered
not then that I was doing fairly well, that most of my employers had
been friendly and solicitous as to my welfare, that the few girls I had
approached had responded freely enough—still I was a failure.
I rapidly became familiar with the city news department of the
_Globe-Democrat_. Its needs, aside from great emergencies, were simple
enough: interviews, the doings of conventions of various kinds
(wholesale grocers, wholesale hardware men, wholesale druggists), the
plans of city politicians when those could be discovered, the news of
the courts, jails, city hospitals, police courts, the deaths of
well-known people, the goings-on in society, special functions of one
kind and another, fires, robberies, defalcations. For the first few
weeks nothing of importance happened. I was given the task evenings of
looking in at the North Seventh Street police station, a slow district,
to see if anything had happened, and was naturally able to add to my
depression by contemplating the life about there. Again, I attended
various churches to hear sermons, interviewed the Irish boss of the
city, Edward Butler, an amazing person with a head like that of a gnome
or ogre, who immediately took a great fancy to me and wanted me to come
and see him again (which I did once).
He has always stuck in my mind as one of the odd experiences of my life.
He lived in a small red brick family dwelling just beyond the
prostitution area of St. Louis, which stretched out along Chestnut
Street between Twelfth and Twenty-second, and was the city’s sole
garbage contractor (out of which he was supposed to have made countless
thousands) as well as one of its principal horse-shoers, having many
blacksmithing shops, and was incidentally its Democratic or Republican
boss, I forget which, a position he retained until his death.
I first saw him at a political meeting during my first few weeks in St.
Louis, and the manner in which he arose, the way in which he addressed
his hearers, the way in which they listened to him, all impressed me.
Subsequently, being sent to his house, I found him in his small front
parlor, a yellow plush album on the marble-topped center table,
horse-hair furniture about the room, a red carpet, crayon enlargements
of photographs of his mother and father. But what force in the man! What
innate gentility of manner and speech! He seemed like a prince disguised
as a blacksmith.
“So ye’ve come to interview me,” he said soothingly. “Ye’re from the
_Globe-Democrat_—well, that paper’s no particular friend of mine, but ye
can’t help that, can ye?” and then he told me whatever it was I wanted
to know, giving me no least true light, you may be sure. At the
conclusion he offered me a drink, which I refused. As I was about to
leave he surveyed me pleasantly and tolerantly.
“Ye’re a likely lad,” he said, laying an immense hand on one of my lean
shoulders, “and ye’re jest startin’ out in life, I can see that. Well,
be a good boy. Ye’re in the newspaper business, where ye can make
friends or enemies just as ye choose, and if ye behave yerself right ye
can just as well make friends. Come an’ see me some time. I like yer
looks. I’m always here av an evenin’, when I’m not attendin’ a meetin’
av some kind, right here in this little front room, or in the kitchen
with me wife. I might be able to do something fer ye sometime—remember
that. I’ve a good dale av influence here. Ye’ll have to write what ye’re
told, I know that, so I won’t be offended. So come an’ see me, an’
remember that I want nothin’ av ye,” and he gently ushered me out and
closed the door behind me.
But I never went, at least not for anything for myself. The one time I
asked him for a position for a friend who wanted to work on the local
street-cars as a conductor he wrote across the letter: “Give this man
what he wants.” It was wretchedly scrawled (the man brought it back to
me before presenting it) and was signed “edward butler.” But the man was
given the place at once.
Although Butler was an earnest Catholic, he was supposed to control and
tax the vice of the city; which charge may or may not have been true.
One of his sons owned and managed the leading vaudeville house in the
city, a vulgar burlesque theater, at which the ticket taker was Frank
James, brother of the amazing Jesse who terrorized Missouri and the
Southwest as an outlaw at one time and enriched endless dime novel
publishers afterward. As dramatic critic of the _Globe-Democrat_ later I
often saw him. Butler’s son, a more or less stodgy type of Tammany
politician, popular with a certain element in St. Louis, was later
elected to Congress.
I wrote up a labor meeting or two, and at one of these saw for the first
time Terence V. Powderly, the head of the dominant labor
organization—the Knights of Labor. This meeting was held in a dingy hall
at Ninth or Tenth and Walnut, a dismal institution known as the
Workingman’s Club or some such thing as that, which had a single red
light hanging out over its main entrance. This long, lank leader,
afterward so much discussed in the so-called “capitalistic press,” was
sitting on a wretched platform surrounded by local labor leaders and
discussed in a none too brilliant way, I thought, the need of a closer
union between all classes of labor.
In regard to all matters relating to the rights of labor and capital I
was at this time perfectly ignorant. Although I was a laborer myself in
a fair sense of the word I was more or less out of sympathy with
laborers, not as a class struggling for their “rights” (I did not know
what their rights or wrongs were) but merely as individuals. I thought,
I suppose, that they were not quite as _nice_ as I was, not as refined
and superior in their aspirations, and therefore not as worthy or at
least not destined to succeed as well as I. I even then felt dimly what
subsequently, after many rough disillusionments, I came to accept as a
fact: that some people are born dull, some shrewd, some wise and some
undisturbedly ignorant, some tender and some savage, _ad infinitum_.
Some are silk purses and others sows’ ears and cannot be made the one
into the other by any accident of either poverty or wealth. At this
time, however, after listening to Mr. Powderly and taking notes of his
speech, I came to the conclusion that all laborers had a just right to
much better pay and living conditions, and in consequence had a great
cause and ought to stick together. I also saw that Mr. Powderly was a
very shrewd man and something of a hypocrite, very simple-seeming and
yet not so. Something he said or did—I believe it was a remark to the
effect that “I always say a little prayer whenever I have a stitch in my
side”—irritated me. It was so suave, so English-chapel-people-like; and
he was an Englishman, as I recall it. Anyhow, I came away disliking him
and his local labor group, and yet liking his cause and believing in it,
and wrote as favorable a comment as I dared. The _Globe_ was not
pro-corporation exactly, at least I did not understand so, and yet it
was by no means pro-workingman either. If I recall correctly, it merely
gave the barest facts and let it go at that.
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