THE next day I was left to myself, and visited City Hall, Brooklyn
Bridge, Wall Street and the financial and commercial sections.
I, having no skill for making money and intensely hungry for the things
that money would buy, stared at Wall Street, a kind of cloudy Olympus in
which foregathered all the gods of finance, with the eyes of one who
hopes to extract something by mere observation. Physically it was not
then, as it is today, the center of a sky-crowded world. There were few
if any high buildings below City Hall, few higher than ten stories. Wall
Street was curved, low-fronted, like Oxford Street in London. It began,
as some one had already pointed out, at a graveyard and ended at a
river. The house of J. P. Morgan was just then being assailed for its
connection with a government gold bond issue. The offices of Russell
Sage and George Gould (the son), as well as those of the Standard Oil
Company below Wall in Broadway, and those of a whole company of now
forgotten magnates, could have been pointed out by any messenger boy,
postman or policeman. What impressed me was that the street was vibrant
with something which, though far from pleasing, craft, greed, cunning,
niggardliness, ruthlessness, a smart swaggering ease on the part of
some, and hopeless, bedraggled or beaten aspect on the part of others,
held my interest as might a tiger or a snake. I had never seen such a
world. It was so busy and paper-bestrewn, messenger and broker
bestridden, as to make one who had nothing to do there feel dull and
commonplace. One thought only of millions made in stocks over night, of
yachts, orgies, travels, fames and what not else. Since that time Wall
Street has become much tamer, less significant, but then one had a
feeling that if only one had a tip or a little skill one might become
rich; or that, on the other hand, one might be torn to bits and that
here was no mercy.
I arrived a little before noon, and the ways were alive with messenger
boys and young clerks and assistants. On the ground was a mess of
papers, torn telegrams and letters. Near Broad and Wall streets the air
was filled with a hum of voices and typewriter clicks issuing from open
windows. Just then, as with the theatrical business later, and still
later with the motion picture industry, it had come to be important to
be in the street, however thin one’s connection. To say “I am in Wall
Street” suggested a world of prospects and possibilities. The fact that
at this time, and for twenty years after, the news columns were all but
closed to suicides and failures in Wall Street, so common were they,
illustrates how vagrant and unfounded were the dreams of many.
But the end of Wall Street as the seat of American money domination
might even then have been foretold. The cities of the nation were
growing. New and by degrees more or less independent centers of finance
were being developed. In the course of fifteen years it had become the
boast of some cities that they could do without New York in the matter
of loans, and it was true. They could; and today many enterprises go
west, not east, for their cash. In the main, Wall Street has degenerated
into a second-rate gamblers’ paradise. What significant Wall Street
figures are there today?
On one of my morning walks in New York I had wandered up Broadway to the
_Herald_ Building and looked into its windows, where were visible a
number of great presses in full operation, much larger than any I had
seen in the West, and my brother had recalled to me the fact that James
Gordon Bennett, owner and editor of the _Herald_, had once commissioned
Henry M. Stanley, at that time a reporter on the paper, to go to Africa
to find Livingstone. And my good brother, who romanticized all things,
my supposed abilities and possibilities included, was inclined to think
that if I came to New York some such great thing might happen to me.
On another day I went to Printing House Square, where I stared at the
_Sun_ and _World_ and _Times_ and _Tribune_ buildings, all facing City
Hall Park, sighing for the opportunities that they represented. But I
did not act. Something about them overawed me, especially the _World_,
the editor of which had begun his career in St. Louis years before.
Compared with the Western papers with which I had been connected, all
New York papers seemed huge, the tasks they represented editorially and
reportorially much more difficult. True, a brother of a famous
playwright with whom I had worked in St. Louis had come East and
connected himself with the _World_, and I might have called upon him and
spied out the land. He had fortified himself with a most favorable
record in the West, as had I, only I did not look upon mine as so
favorable somehow. Again, a city editor once of St. Louis was now here,
city editor of one of the city’s great papers, the _Recorder_, and
another man, a Sunday editor of Pittsburgh, had become the Sunday editor
of the _Press_ here. But these appeared to me to be exceptional cases. I
reconnoitered these large and in the main rather dull institutions with
the eye of one who seeks to take a fortress. The editorial pages of all
of these papers, as I had noticed in the West, bristled with cynical and
condescending remarks about that region, and their voices representing
great circulation and wealth gave them amazing weight in my eyes.
Although I knew what I knew about the subservience of newspapers to
financial interests, their rat-like fear of religionists and moralists,
their shameful betrayal of the ordinary man at every point at which he
could possibly be betrayed yet still having the power, by weight of lies
and pretense and make-believe, to stir him up to his own detriment and
destruction, I was frightened by this very power, which in subsequent
years I have come to look upon as the most deadly anD forceful of all in
nature: the power to masquerade and by.
There was about these papers an air of assurance and righteousness and
authority and superiority which overawed and frightened me. To work on
the _Sun_, the _Herald_, the _World_! How many cubs, from how many
angles of our national life, were constantly and hopefully eyeing them
from the very same sidewalks or benches in City Hall Park, as the
ultimate solution of all their literary, commercial, social, political
problems and ambitions. The thousands of pipe-smoking collegians who
have essayed the _Sun_ alone, the scullion Danas, embryo Greeleys and
Bennetts!
I decided that it would be best for me to return to Pittsburgh and save
a little money before I took one of these frowning editorial offices by
storm, and I did return, but in what a reduced mood! Pittsburgh, after
New York and all I had seen there! And in this darkly brooding and
indifferent spirit I now resumed my work. A sum of money sufficient to
sustain me for a period in New York was all that I wished now.
And in the course of the next four months I did save two hundred and
forty dollars, enduring deprivations which I marvel at even
now—breakfast consisting of a cruller and a cup of coffee; dinners that
cost no more than a quarter, sometimes no more than fifteen cents. In
the meantime I worked as before only to greater advantage, because I was
now more sure of myself. My study of Balzac and these recent adventures
in the great city had so fired my ambition that nothing could have kept
me in Pittsburgh. I lived on so little that I think I must have done
myself some physical harm which told against me later in the struggle
for existence in New York.
At this time I had the fortune to discover Huxley and Tyndall and
Herbert Spencer, whose introductory volume to his _Synthetic Philosophy_
(_First Principles_) quite blew me, intellectually, to bits. Hitherto,
until I had read Huxley, I had some lingering filaments of Catholicism
trailing about me, faith in the existence of Christ, the soundness of
his moral and sociologic deductions, the brotherhood of man. But on
reading _Science and Hebrew Tradition_ and _Science and Christian
Tradition_, and finding both the Old and New Testaments to be not
compendiums of revealed truth but mere records of religious experiences,
and very erroneous ones at that, and then taking up _First Principles_
and discovering that all I deemed substantial—man’s place in nature, his
importance in the universe, this too, too solid earth, man’s very
identity save as an infinitesimal speck of energy or a “suspended
equation” drawn or blown here and there by larger forces in which he
moved quite unconsciously as an atom—all questioned and dissolved into
other and less understandable things, I was completely thrown down in my
conceptions or non-conceptions of life.
Up to this time there had been in me a blazing and unchecked desire to
get on and the feeling that in doing so we did get somewhere; now in its
place was the definite conviction that spiritually one got nowhere, that
there was no hereafter, that one lived and had his being because one had
to, and that it was of no importance. Of one’s ideals, struggles,
deprivations, sorrows and joys, it could only be said that they were
chemic compulsions, something which for some inexplicable but
unimportant reason responded to and resulted from the hope of pleasure
and the fear of pain. Man was a mechanism, undevised and uncreated, and
a badly and carelessly driven one at that.
I fear that I cannot make you feel how these things came upon me in the
course of a few weeks’ reading and left me numb, my gravest fears as to
the unsolvable disorder and brutality of life eternally verified. I felt
as low and hopeless at times as a beggar of the streets. There was of
course this other matter of necessity, internal chemical compulsion, to
which I had to respond whether I would or no. I was daily facing a round
of duties which now more than ever verified all that I had suspected and
that these books proved. With a gloomy eye I began to watch how the
chemical—and their children, the mechanical—forces operated through man
and outside him, and this under my very eyes. Suicides seemed sadder
since there was no care for them; failures the same. One of those
periodic scandals breaking out in connection with the care of prisoners
in some local or state jail, I saw how self-interest, the hope of
pleasure or the fear of pain caused jailers or wardens or a sheriff to
graft on prisoners, feed them rotten meat, torture them into silence and
submission, and then, politics interfering (the hope of pleasure again
and the fear of pain on the part of some), the whole thing hushed up, no
least measure of the sickening truth breaking out in the subservient
papers. Life could or would do nothing for those whom it so shamefully
abused.
Again, there was a poor section, one street in the East Pittsburgh
district, shut off by a railroad at one end (the latter erecting a high
fence to protect itself from trespass) and by an arrogant property owner
at the other end; those within were actually left without means of
ingress and egress. Yet instead of denouncing either or both, the
railroads being so powerful and the citizen prosperous and within his
“rights,” I was told to write a humorous article but not to “hurt
anybody’s feelings.” Also before my eyes were always those regions of
indescribable poverty and indescribable wealth previously mentioned,
which were always carefully kept separate by the local papers, all the
favors and compliments and commercial and social aids going to those who
had, all the sniffs and indifferences and slights going to those who had
not; and when I read Spencer I could only sigh. All I could think of was
that since nature would not or could not do anything for man, he must,
if he could, do something for himself; and of this I saw no prospect, he
being a product of these selfsame accidental, indifferent and bitterly
cruel forces.
And so I went on from day to day, reading, thinking, doing fairly
acceptable work, but always withdrawing more and more into myself. As I
saw it then, the world could not understand me, nor I it, nor men each
other very well. Then a little later I turned and said that since the
whole thing was hopeless I might as well forget it and join the narrow,
heartless, indifferent scramble, but I could not do that either, lacking
the temperament and the skill. All I could do was think, and since no
paper such as I knew was interested in any of the things about which I
was thinking, I was hopeless indeed. Finally, in late November, having
two hundred and forty dollars saved, I decided to leave this dismal
scene and seek the charm of the great city beyond, hoping that there I
might succeed at something, be eased and rested by some important work
of some kind.
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