THE next morning, coming down at eleven I encountered my friend of the
day before, whom I found looking through the paper and checking up such
results as he had been able to achieve. “Tst! Tst!” he clicked to
himself as he went over the pages, looking high and low for a minute
squib which he had managed to get in. Looking around and seeing me near
at hand, he said: “Positively, this is the worst paper in New York. I’ve
always heard it was, and now I know it. This damned crowd plays
favorites. They have an inside ring, a few pets, who get all the cream,
and fellows like you and me get the short ends. Take me yesterday: I was
sent out on four lousy little stories, and not one amounted to anything.
I tramped and rode all over town in the snow, listened to a lot of fools
spout, and this morning I have just three little items. Look at that—and
that—and that!” and he pointed to checkmarks on different pages. They
made a total of, say, seven or eight inches, the equivalent in cash of
less than three dollars. “And I’m supposed to live on that,” he went on,
“and I have a boy and a girl in school! How do they figure that a man is
to get along?”
I had no consolation to offer him. After a time he resumed: “What they
do is to get strangers like us, or any of these down-and-out newspaper
men always walking up and down Park Row looking for a job, and get us to
work on space because it sounds bigger to a greenhorn. Sure they have
space-men here who amount to something, fellows who get big money, but
they’re not like us. They make as much as seventy-five and a hundred
dollars a week. But they’re rewrite men, old reporters who have too big
a pull and who are too sure of themselves to stand for the low salaries
they pay here. But they’re at the top. We little fellows are told that
stuff about space, but all we get is leg-work. If you or I should get
hold of a good story don’t you ever think they’d let us write it. I know
that much. They’d take it away and give it to one of these rewrite
fellows. There’s one now,” and he pointed to a large comfortable man in
a light brown overcoat and brown hat who was but now ambling in. “He
rewrote one of my stories just the other day. If they wanted you for
regular work they’d make you take a regular salary for fear you’d get
too much of space. They just keep us little fellows as extras to follow
up such things as they wouldn’t waste a good man on. And they’re always
firing a crowd of men every three or four months to keep up the zip of
the staff, to keep ’em worried and working hard. I hate the damned
business. I told myself in Pittsburgh that I never would get back in it
again, but here I am!”
This revelation made me a little sick. So this was my grand job! A long
period of drudgery for little or nothing, my hard-earned money
exhausted—and then what?
“Just now,” he went on, “there’s nothing doing around the town or I
wouldn’t be here. I’m only staying on until I can get something better.
It’s a dog’s life. There’s nothing in it. I worked here all last week,
and what do you think I made? Twelve dollars and seventy-five cents for
the whole week, time included. Twelve dollars and seventy-five cents!
It’s an outrage!”
I agreed with him. “What is this time they allow?” I asked. “How do they
figure—expenses and all?”
“Sure, they allow expenses, and I’m going to figure mine more liberally
from now on. It’s a little bonus they allow you for the time you work,
but you don’t get anything anyhow. I’ll double any railroad fare I pay.
If they don’t like it they can get somebody else. But they won’t let you
do too much of it, and if you can’t make a little salary on small stuff
they won’t keep you even then.” He grinned. “Anything big goes to the
boys on a salary, and if it’s real big the space-men, who are on salary
and space also, get the cream. I went out on a story the other afternoon
and tramped around in the rain and got all the facts, and just as I was
going to sit down and write it—well, I hadn’t really got started—one of
the managing editors—there are about twenty around here—came up and took
it away from me and gave it to somebody else to write. All I got was
‘time.’ Gee, I was sore! But I don’t care,” he added with a chuckle.
“I’ll be getting out of here one of these days.”
Being handed this dose of inspiring information, I was in no mood for
what followed; although I decided that this series of ills that were now
befalling him was due to the fact that he was older than myself and
maybe not very efficient, whereas in my case, being young, efficient,
etc., etc—the usual mental bonus youth hands itself—I should do better.
But when it came to my assignments this day and the next and the next,
and in addition I was “handed” the late watch, my cock sureness began to
evaporate. Each day I was given unimportant rumors or verification
tales, which came to nothing. So keen was the competition between the
papers, especially between the _World_ and the _Sun_, or the _World_ and
the _Herald_, that almost everything suggested by one was looked into
and criticized by the others. The items assigned to me this second day
were: to visit the city morgue and there look up the body of a young and
beautiful girl who was supposed to have drowned herself or been drowned
and see if this was true, as another paper had said (and of course she
was not beautiful at all); to visit a certain hotel to find out what I
could about a hotel beat who had been arrested (this item, although
written, was never used); to visit a Unitarian conference called to
debate some supposed changes in faith or method of church development,
the date for which however had been changed without notice to the
papers, for which I was allowed time and carfare. My time, setting aside
the long and wearisome hours in which I sat in the office awaiting my
turn for an assignment, netted me the handsome sum of two dollars and
fifty cents. And all the time in this very paper, I could read the
noblest and most elevating discourses about duty, character, the need of
a higher sense of citizenship, and what not. I used to frown at the
shabby pecksniffery of it, the cheap buncombe that would allow a great
publisher to bleed and drive his employees at one end of his house and
deliver exordiums as to virtue, duty, industry, thrift, honesty at the
other.
However, despite these little setbacks and insights, I was not to be
discouraged. The fact that I had succeeded elsewhere made me feel that
somehow I should succeed here. Nevertheless, in spite of this sense of
efficiency, I was strangely overawed and made more than ordinarily
incompetent by the hugeness and force and heartlessness of the great
city, its startling contrasts of wealth and poverty, the air of
ruthlessness and indifference and disillusion that everywhere prevailed.
Only recently there had been a disgusting exposure of the putrescence
and heartlessness and brutality which underlay the social structure of
the city. There had been the Lexow Investigation with its sickening
revelations of graft and corruption, and the protection and
encouragement of vice and crime in every walk of political and police
life. The most horrible types of brothels had been proved to be not only
winked at but preyed upon by the police and the politicians by a fixed
and graded monthly tax in which the patrolman, the “roundsman,” the
captain and the inspector, to say nothing of the district leader,
shared. There was undeniable proof that the police and the politicians,
even the officials, of the city were closely connected with all sorts of
gambling and wire-tapping and bunco-steering, and even the subornation
of murder. To the door of every house of prostitution and transient
rooming-house the station police captain’s man, the _roundsman_, came as
regularly as the rent or the gas man, and took more away. “Squealers”
had been murdered in cold blood for their squealing. A famous chief of
police, Byrnes by name, reputed at that time, far and wide, for his
supposed skill in unraveling mysteries, being faced by a saturnalia of
crime which he could not solve, had finally in self-defense caused to be
arrested, tried, convicted and electrocuted, all upon suborned
testimony, an old, helpless, half-witted bum known as Old Shakespeare,
whose only crime was that he was worthless and defenseless. But the
chief had thereby saved his “reputation.” Not far from the region in
which my sister lived, although it was respectable enough in its way,
tramped countless girls by night and by day looking for men, the great
business of New York, and all preyed upon by the police. On several
occasions, coming home from work after midnight, I found men lying
hatless, coatless, trousers pockets pulled out, possibly their skulls
fractured, so inadequate or indifferent or conniving was the so-called
police protection.
Nowhere before had I seen such a lavish show of wealth, or, such bitter
poverty. In my reporting rounds I soon came upon the East Side; the
Bowery, with its endless line of degraded and impossible lodging-houses,
a perfect whorl of bums and failures; the Brooklyn waterfront, parts of
it terrible in its degradation; and then by way of contrast again the
great hotels, the mansions along Fifth Avenue, the smart shops and clubs
and churches. When I went into Wall Street, the Tenderloin, the Fifth
Avenue district, the East and West sides, I seemed everywhere to sense
either a terrifying desire for lust or pleasure or wealth, accompanied
by a heartlessness which was freezing to the soul, or a dogged
resignation to deprivation and misery. Never had I seen so many
down-and-out men—in the parks, along the Bowery and in the
lodging-houses which lined that pathetic street. They slept over
gratings anywhere from which came a little warm air, or in doorways or
cellar-ways. At a half dozen points in different parts of the city I
came upon those strange charities which supply a free meal to a man or
lodging for the night, providing that he came at a given hour and waited
long enough.
And never anywhere had I seen so much show and luxury. Nearly all of the
houses along upper Fifth Avenue and its side streets boasted their
liveried footmen. Wall Street was a sea of financial trickery and
legerdemain, a realm so crowded with sharklike geniuses of finance that
one’s poor little arithmetic intelligence was entirely discounted and
made ridiculous. How was a sniveling scribbler to make his way in such a
world? Nothing but chance and luck, as I saw it, could further the
average man or lift him out of his rut, and since when had it been
proved that I was a favorite of fortune? A crushing sense of
incompetence and general in-efficiency seemed to settle upon me, and I
could not shake it off. Whenever I went out on an assignment—and I was
always being sent upon those trivial, shoe-wearing affairs—I carried
with me this sense of my unimportance.
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