IN the meantime I was going about my general work, and an easy task it
proved. My city editor, cool, speculative, diplomatic soul, soon
instructed me as to the value of news and its limitations here. “We
don’t touch on labor conditions except through our labor man,” he told
me, “and he knows what to say. There’s nothing to be said about the rich
or religious in a derogatory sense: they’re all right in so far as we
know. We don’t touch on scandals in high life. The big steel men here
just about own the place, so we can’t. Some papers out West and down in
New York go in for sensationalism, but we don’t. I’d rather have some
simple little feature any time, a story about some old fellow with
eccentric habits, than any of these scandals or tragedies. Of course we
do cover them when we have to, but we have to be mighty careful what we
say.”
So much for a free press in Pittsburgh, A.D. 1893!
And I found that the city itself, possibly by reason of the recent
defeat administered to organized labor and the soft pedal of the
newspapers, presented a most quiescent and somnolent aspect. There was
little local news. Suicides, occasional drownings, a wedding or death in
high society, a brawl in a saloon, the enlargement of a steel plant, the
visit of a celebrity or the remarks of some local pastor, provided the
pabulum on which the local readers were fed. Sometimes an outside event,
such as the organization by General Coxey, of Canton, Ohio, of his
“hobo” army, at that time moving toward Washington to petition congress
against the doings of the trusts; or the dictatorial and impossible
doings of Grover Cleveland, opposition President to the dominant party
of the State; or the manner in which the moribund Democratic party of
this region was attempting to steal an office or share in the
spoils—these and the grand comments of gentlemen in high financial
positions here and elsewhere as to the outlook for prosperity in the
nation or the steel mills or the coal fields, occupied the best places
in the newspapers. For a great metropolis as daring, forceful,
economically and socially restless as this, it seemed unbelievable that
it could be so quiescent or say so little about the colossal ambitions
animating the men at the top. But when it came to labor or the unions,
their restlessness or unholy anarchistic demands, or the trashy views of
a third-rate preacher complaining of looseness in dress or morals, or an
actor voicing his views on art, or a politician commenting on some
unimportant phase of our life, it was a very different matter. These
papers were then free enough to say their say.
I recall that Thomas B. Reed, then Speaker of the House, once passed
through the city and stopped off to visit some friendly steel magnate. I
was sent to interview him and obtain his views as to “General” Coxey’s
army, a band of poor mistaken theorists who imagined that by marching to
Washington and protesting to Congress they could compel a trust-dictated
American Senate and House to take cognizance of their woes. This able
statesman—and he was no fool, being at the time in the councils and
favor of the money power and looked upon as the probable Republican
Presidential nominee—pretended to me to believe that a vast national
menace lay in such a movement and protest.
“Why, it’s the same as revolution!” he ranted, washing his face in his
suite at the Monongahela, his suspenders swaying loosely about his fat
thighs. “It’s an unheard-of proceeding. For a hundred years the American
people have had a fixed and constitutional and democratic method of
procedure. They have their county and State and national conventions,
and their power of instructing delegates to the same. They can write any
plank they wish into any party platform, and compel its enforcement by
their votes. Now comes along a man who finds something that doesn’t just
suit his views, and instead of waiting and appealing to the regular
party councils, he organizes an army and proceeds to march on
Washington.”
“But he has been able to muster only three or four hundred men all
told,” I suggested mildly. “He doesn’t seem to be attracting many
followers.”
“The number of his followers isn’t the point,” he insisted. “If one man
can gather an army of five hundred, another can gather an army of ten or
five hundred thousand. That means revolution.”
“Yes,” I ventured. “But what about the thing of which they are
complaining?”
“It doesn’t matter what their grievance is,” he said somewhat testily.
“This is a government of law and prescribed political procedure. Our
people must abide by that.”
I was ready to agree, only I was thinking of the easy manner in which
delegates and elected representatives everywhere were ignoring the
interests if not the mandates of the body politic at large and listening
to the advice and needs of financiers and trust-builders. Already the
air was full of complaints against monopoly. Trusts and combinations of
every kind were being organized, and the people were being taxed
accordingly. All property, however come by, was sacred in America. The
least protest of the mass anywhere was revolutionary, or at least the
upwellings of worthless and never-to-be-countenanced malcontents. I
could not believe this. I firmly believed then, as I do now, that the
chains wherewith a rapidly developing financial oligarchy or autocracy
meant to bind a liberty-deluded mass were then and there being forged. I
felt then, as I do now, that the people of that day should have been
more alive to their interests, that they should have compelled, at
Washington or elsewhere, by peaceable political means if possible, by
dire and threatening uprisings if necessary, a more careful concern for
their interests than any congressman or senator or governor or
President, at that time or since, was giving them. As I talked to this
noble chairman of the House my heart was full of these sentiments, only
I did not deem it of any avail to argue with him. I was a mere cub
reporter and he was the Speaker of the House of Representatives, but I
had a keen contempt for the enthusiasm he manifested for law. When it
came to what the money barons wished, the manufacturers and trust
organizers hiding behind a huge and extortionate tariff wall, he was one
of their chief guards and political and congressional advocates. If you
doubt it look up his record.
But it was owing to this very careful interpretation of what was and
what was not news that I experienced some of the most delightful
newspaper hours of my life. Large features being scarce, I was assigned
to do “city hall and police, Allegheny,” as the assignment book used to
read, and with this mild task ahead of me I was in the habit of crossing
the Allegheny River into the city of Allegheny, where, ensconced in a
chair in the reporters’ room of the combined city hall and central
police station or in the Carnegie Public Library over the way, or in the
cool, central, shaded court of the Allegheny General Hospital, with the
head interne of which I soon made friends, I waited for something to
turn up. As is usual with all city and police and hospital officials
everywhere, the hope of favorable and often manufactured publicity
animating them, I was received most cordially. All I had to do was to
announce that I was from the _Dispatch_ and assigned to this bailiwick,
and I was informed as to anything of importance that had come to the
surface during the last ten or twelve hours. If there was nothing—and
usually there was not—I sat about with several other reporters or with
the head interne of the hospital, or, having no especial inquiry to
make, I crossed the street to Squire Daniels, whose office was in the
tree-shaded square facing this civic center, and here (a squire being
the equivalent of a petty police magistrate), inquired if anything had
come to his notice.
Squire Daniels, a large, bald, pink-faced individual of three
hundredweight, used of a sunny afternoon these warm Spring days to sit
out in front of his office, his chair tilted against his office wall or
a tree, and, with three or four cronies, retail the most delicious
stories of old-time political characters and incidents. He was a mine of
this sort of thing and an immense favorite in consequence with all the
newspaper men and politicians. I was introduced to him on my third or
fourth day in Allegheny as he was sitting out on his tilted chair, and
he surveyed me with a smile.
“From the _Dispatch_, eh? Well, take a chair if you can find one; if you
can’t, sit on the curb or in the doorway. Many’s the man I seen from the
_Dispatch_ in my time. Your boss, Harry Gaither, used to come around
here before he got to be city editor. So did your Sunday man, Funger.
There ain’t much news I can give you, but whatever there is you’re
welcome to it. I always treat all the boys alike,” and he smiled. Then
he proceeded with his tale, something about an old alderman or
politician who had painted a pig once in order to bring it up to certain
prize specifications and so won the prize, only to be found out later
because the “specifications” wore off. He had such a zestful way of
telling his stories as to compel laughter.
And then directly across the street to the east from the city hall was
the Allegheny Carnegie library, a very handsome building which
contained, in addition to the library, an auditorium in which had been
placed the usual “one of the largest” if not “the largest” pipe organ in
the world. This organ had one advantage: it was supplied with a paid
city organist, who on Sundays, Wednesdays and Saturdays entertained the
public with free recitals, and so capable was he that seats were at a
premium and standing-room only the rule unless one arrived far ahead of
time. This manifestation of interest on the part of the public pleased
me greatly and somehow qualified, if it did not atone for, Mr.
Carnegie’s indifference to the welfare of his employees.
But I was most impressed with the forty or fifty thousand volumes so
conveniently arranged that one could walk from stack to stack, looking
at the labels and satisfying one’s interest by browsing in the books.
The place had most comfortable window-nooks and chairs between stacks
and in alcoves. One afternoon, having nothing else to do, I came here
and by the merest chance picked up a volume entitled _The Wild Ass’s
Skin_ by the writer who so fascinated Wandell—Honoré de Balzac. I
examined it curiously, reading a preface which shimmered with his
praise. He was the great master of France. His _Comédie Humaine_ covered
every aspect of the human welter. His interpretations of character were
exhaustive and exact. His backgrounds were abundant, picturesque,
gorgeous. In Paris his home had been turned into a museum, and contained
his effects as they were at the time of his death.
I turned to the first page and began reading, and from then on until
dusk I sat in this charming alcove reading. A new and inviting door to
life had been suddenly thrown open to me. Here was one who saw, thought,
felt. Through him I saw a prospect so wide that it left me
breathless—all Paris, all France, all life through French eyes. Here was
one who had a tremendous and sensitive grasp of life, philosophic,
tolerant, patient, amused. At once I was personally identified with his
Raphael, his Rastignac, his Bixiou, his Bianchon. With Raphael I entered
the gaming-house in the Palais Royal, looked despairingly down into the
waters of the Seine from the Pont Royal, turned from it to the shop of
the dealer in antiques, was ignored by the perfect young lady before the
shop of the print-seller, attended the Taillefer banquet, suffered
horrors over the shrinking skin. The lady without a heart was all too
real. It was for me a literary revolution. Not only for the brilliant
and incisive manner with which Balzac grasped life and invented themes
whereby to present it, but for the fact that the types he handled with
most enthusiasm and skill—the brooding, seeking, ambitious beginner in
life’s social, political, artistic and commercial affairs (Rastignac,
Raphael, de Rubempre, Bianchon)—were, I thought, so much like myself.
Indeed, later taking up and consuming almost at a sitting _The Great Man
from the Provinces_, _Père Goriot_, _Cousin Pons_, _Cousin Bette_, it
was so easy to identify myself with the young and seeking aspirants. The
brilliant and intimate pictures of Parisian life, the exact flavor of
its politics, arts, sciences, religions, social goings to and fro
impressed me so as to accomplish for me what his imaginary magic skin
had done for his Raphael: transfer me bodily and without defect or lack
to the center as well as the circumference of the world which he was
describing. I knew his characters as well as he did, so magical was his
skill. His grand and somewhat pompous philosophical deductions, his easy
and offhand disposition of all manner of critical, social, political,
historical, religious problems, the manner in which he assumed as by
right of genius intimate and irrefutable knowledge of all subjects,
fascinated and captured me as the true method of the seer and the
genius. Oh, to possess an insight such as this! To know and be a part of
such a cosmos as Paris, to be able to go there, to work, to study,
suffer, rise, and even end in defeat if need be, so fascinatingly alive
were all the journeys of his puppets! What was Pittsburgh, what St.
Louis, what Chicago?—and yet, in spite of myself, while I adored his
Paris, still I was obtaining a new and more dramatic light on the world
in which I found myself. Pittsburgh was not Paris, America was not
France, but in truth they were something, and Pittsburgh at least had
aspects which somehow suggested Paris. These charming rivers, these many
little bridges, the sharp contrasts presented by the east end and the
mill regions, the huge industries here and their importance to the world
at large, impressed me more vividly than before. I was in a workaday,
begrimed, and yet vivid Paris. Taillefer, Nucingen, Valentin were no
different from some of the immense money magnets here, in their case,
luxury, power, at least the possibilities which they possessed.
Coming out of the library this day, and day after day thereafter, the
while I rendered as little reportorial service as was consistent with
even a show of effort, I marveled at the physical similarity of the two
cities as I conceived it, at the chance for pictures here as well as
there. American pictures here, as opposed to French pictures there. And
all the while I was riding with Lucien to Paris, with his mistress,
courting Madame Nucingen with Rastignac, brooding over the horror of the
automatically contracting skin with Raphael, poring over his miseries
with Goriot, practicing the horrible art of prostitution with Madame
Marneffe. For a period of four or five months I ate, slept, dreamed,
lived him and his characters and his views and his city. I cannot
imagine a greater joy and inspiration than I had in Balzac these Spring
and Summer days in Pittsburgh. Idyllic days, dreamy days, poetic days,
wonderful days, the while I ostensibly did “police and city hall” in
Allegheny.
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