Engaged couples were there made man and wife before landing in New
York. I was helping a girl who struggled with a huge basket, and a
detective asked me if she were my sweetheart. If I could have said
"Yes," as like as not we'd have been married off before we landed.
America is extremely solicitous about the welfare of women, especially
of poor unmarried women who come to her shores. So many women fall
into the clutches of evil directly they land in the New World. The
authorities generally refuse to admit a poor friendless girl, though
there is a great demand for female labour all over the United States,
and it is easy to get a place and earn an honest living.
It was a pathetic sight to see the doubtful men and women pass into
the chamber where examination is prolonged, pathetic also to see the
Russians and Poles empty their purses, exhibiting to men with good
clothes and lasting "jobs" all the money they had in the world.
At half-past two I gave particulars of myself and showed the coin I
had, and was passed.
"Have you ever been arrested?" asked the inspector.
Well, yes, I had. I was not disposed to lie. I had been arrested four
or five times. In Russia you can't escape that.
"For a crime involving moral turpitude?" he went on.
"No, no."
"Have you got a job in America?" (This is a dangerous question; if you
say 'Yes' you probably get sent back home; it is against American law
to contract for foreign labour.)
I explained that I was a tramp.
This did not at all please the inspector. He would not accept that
definition of my occupation, so he put me down as author.
"Are you an anarchist?"
"No."
"Are you willing to live in subordination to the laws of the United
States?"
"Yes."
"Are you a polygamist?"
"What does that mean?" I asked.
"Do you believe a man may possess more than one wife at a time?"
"Certainly not."
"Have you any friends in New York?"
"Acquaintances, yes."
"Give me the address."
I gave him an address.
"How much money have you got?" ... "Show me, please!" ... And so on. I
was let go.
At three in the afternoon I stood in another ferry-boat, and with a
crowd of approved immigrants passed the City of New York. Success had
melted most of us, and though we were terribly hungry, we had words and
confidences for one another on that ferry-boat. We were ready to help
one another to any extent in our power. That is what it feels like to
have passed the Last Day and still believe in Heaven, to pass Ellis
Island and still believe in America.
Two or three of us hastened to a restaurant. I sat down at a little
table, and waited. So did the others, but we were making a mistake,
for there were no waiters. We had as yet to learn the mechanism of a
"Quick Lunch" shop; there was a certain procedure to be observed and
followed, we must learn it if we wanted a dinner. I watched the first
American citizen who came in, and did as he did. First I went to the
cashier and got a paper slip on which were printed many numbers 5, 10,
15, 25, and so on in intervals of fives. These represented cents, and
were so arranged for convenience in adding and for solid profit. At
this restaurant nothing cost less than five cents (twopence halfpenny),
and there were no intermediaries between five and ten, ten and fifteen,
and so forth. The unit then was five cents, and not as in England two
cents (one penny). Obviously this means enormous increase of takings in
the long run. That five-cent unit is part of the foundation of American
prosperity. I obtained my slip so numbered. Then I took a tray from a
stack of trays and a glass from an array of glasses, a fork and a knife
from the fork basket, and I went to the roast chicken counter and asked
for roast chicken. A plate of hot roast chicken was put on my tray, and
the white-hatted cook punched off twenty-five cents on my slip. I went
to another counter and received a plate of bread and butter, and to
yet another and sprinkled pepper and salt from the general sprinklers.
I went and drew iced water. Then, like the slave of the lamp working
for himself, I put the whole on my little table. When I had finished
my first course I put my plate aside and took my tray to the cook and
received a second, and when I had finished that I fetched my coffee.
"Well," thought I, looking round, "no waiters, that means no tips;
there is not even a superfluous mendicant boy in charge of the swinging
doors." So I began to learn that in America the working man pays no
tips.
My companions at the other tables were getting through with their
dinners and looking across at one another with congratulatory smiles.
We would have sat together, but in this shop one table accommodated one
customer only--an unsociable arrangement. I waited for them to finish,
so that we could go out together.
Whilst doing so a man came up to me from another table and said very
quietly:
"Just come over?"
"This morning," I replied.
He brightened up and asked:
"Looking for a job?"
"You don't mean to say I am being offered one already?" said I.
"That's about it, two dollars."
"Two dollars a day?"
"That's the idea."
"What's the work?"
"Brick-making."
It was brick-making up country for some Trust Company. I said I
was staying in New York, couldn't go just yet. He might try my
acquaintances. I pointed them out.
One of them, a Pole, said he would go. The contractor went out with us,
and we accompanied him to his office. We took a street car. The fare
was five cents, a "nickel," and it was necessary to put the coin in the
slot of the conductor's money-box before entering. The conductor stood
stiff, like an intelligent bit of machinery, and we were to him fares
not humans. The five cents would take me to the other end of the city
if I wished it, but there was no two-cent fare in case I wished to go a
mile. That five-cent unit again!
We sat in the car and looked out of the windows, interested in every
sight and sound. First we had glimpses of the East Side streets, all
push-carts and barrows, like Sukhareva at Moscow. Then we saw the dark
overhead railway and heard the first thunder of the Elevated train.
We went up the Bowery, unlike any other street in the world; we noted
that it was possible to get a room there for twenty cents a night. We
stared curiously at the life-sized carved and painted Indians outside
the cigar stores, and at the gay red-and-white stripe of the barbers'
revolving poles.
We alighted just by a barber's shop. The agent showed us his office
and told us to come in if we changed our minds and would like the job.
There we left the Pole, and indeed saw him no more.
There were two others beside myself--a Russian and a Russian Jew.
As the Jew and I both wanted a shave we all went into the barber's
shop. We were still carrying our bags, and were rather a strange
party to enter a shop together. But the barbers, a pleasant array of
close-shaven smiling Italians, were not put out in the least. They were
ready to shave any living thing. Their job was to shave and take the
cash, and not to be amused at the appearance of the customers.
In America the barber's shop has a notice outside stating the number of
barbers. If the number is high it is considerable recommendation. Then
the briskly revolving pole suggests that it's your turn next and no
waiting.
I was put into an immense, velvet-bottomed adjustable chair, my legs
were steadied on a three-foot stand, and the barber turning a handle
caused the back of the chair to collapse gently so that my head and
body pointed towards the doorway like the cannon mouth. Then the shave
commenced, and the barber twirled my head about and around as if it
were on a revolving hinge. And how laborious he was! In America, quick
lunch and slow shave; in England quick shave and slow lunch. And
fifteen cents for a shave, and thirty-five for a hair-cut.
"That's a high price," said I.
"Union rate," said he. "We are now protected against the public."
The Jew, however, paid five cents less; he had bargained beforehand.
He said it was the last cent he'd pay for a shave in that country;
he'd buy a safety razor. The Russian smiled; he hadn't shaved yet, and
didn't intend to, ever.
At this point the Jew parted company with us. He was going to find
a friend of his in Stanton Street. The Russian and I made for a
lodging-house in Third Avenue. At a place ticketed "Rooms by the day
or month," we rang the bell, rang the bell and waited, rang again. We
were to be initiated into another mystery of New York, the mechanical
door, the door which has almost an intelligence of its own. Down came a
German woman at last, and gave us a rare scolding. Why hadn't we turned
the handle and come in? Why had we brought her down so many flights of
stairs?
It appeared that by turning a handle in her room on the second floor
she liberated the catch in the lock, and all the visitor had to do was
to turn the handle and walk in.
"I heard a rattle in the lock," said I. "I wondered what it meant."
"How long've you been in America?" she asked.
"A few hours. We want rooms for a few days while we look about."
"Days? My lodgers take rooms for years. I haven't any one staying less
than six months."
This was just "boosting" her rooms, but I didn't know. I took it for
a good sign. If her tenants stayed long terms the place must be very
clean. But it was only "boosting." Still the rooms looked decent, and
we took them. They were the same price as similar rooms in the centre
of London, ten shillings a week, but dearer than in Moscow where
one would pay fifteen roubles (seven and a half dollars or thirty
shillings) a month for such accommodation. The floors were carpeted,
the sheets were white, there was a good bathroom for each four lodgers,
no children, and all was quiet. Laundry was collected, there was no
charge for the use of electric light, you received a latch-key on the
deposit of twenty-five cents, and could come in any hour of the day or
night. In signing the registration book I saw I was the only person of
Anglo-Saxon name, all were Germans, Swedes, Italians, Russians. With
British caution I hid a twenty-five dollar bill in the binding of one
of the most insignificant of my books, so that if I were robbed of
the contents of my pocket-book I should still have a stand-by. But my
suspicions were begotten only of ignorance. My fellow-lodgers were all
hard working, self-absorbed New Yorkers, who took no thought of their
neighbours, either for good or evil.
III
THE PASSION OF AMERICA AND THE TRADITION OF BRITAIN
I came to America to see men and women and not simply bricks and
mortar, to understand a national life rather than to moan over sooty
cities and industrial wildernesses. Hundreds of thousands of healthy
Europeans passed annually to America. I wanted to know what this asylum
or refuge of our wanderers actually was, what was the life and hope it
offered, what America was doing with her hands, what she was yearning
for with her heart. I wished to know also what was her despair.
On my second day in New York I was deploring the sky-scraper, when
a young American lifted her arms above her head in yearning and
aspiration saying, "Have you seen the Woolworth Building? It is a
bird's flight of stone right away up into the sky, it is higher
and newer than anything else in New York, its cream-coloured walls
are pure and undefiled. It is a commercial house, to be let to ten
thousand business tenants. But it is like a cathedral; its foundations
are on the earth, but its spire is up among the stars; if you go to
it at sundown and look upward you will see the angels ascending and
descending, and hear the murmur of Eternity about it."
I had always thought of the sky-scraper as a black grimy street-front
that went up to an unearthly height, a Noah's Ark of sodden and smoky
bricks. That is what a sky-scraper would tend to be in London. I had
forgotten the drier, cleaner atmosphere of New York.
I went to see the Woolworth Building, and I found it something new. It
was beautiful. It was even awe-inspiring.
In the evening I asked an American literary man whom I met at a club
what he thought was the _raison d'être_ of the Woolworth; was it not
simply the desire to build higher than all other houses--the wish to
make a distinct commercial hit?
He "put me wise."
"First of all," said he, "New York is built on the little island of
Manhattan. The island is all built over, and so, as we cannot expand
outward we've got to build upward. Ground rent, too, has become so high
that we must build high for economy's sake."
I remarked on the number of men who lost their lives in the building of
sky-scrapers. "For every minute of the day there was a man injured in
some town or other of the United States," so I had read in an evening
paper.
He said the Americans were playing large, and must expect to lose
a few men in the game. He expected the America of the future would
justify all sacrifices made just now, and he gave me in the course of a
long talk his view of the passion of America.
"The Woolworth Building is only an inadequate symbol of our faith,"
said he. "You British and the Germans and French are working on a
different principle, you are playing the small game, and playing it
well. You stake your efficiency on the perfection of details. In
the German life, for instance, nothing is too small to be thought
unmeriting of attention."
I told him the watchword of the old chess champion Steinitz, "I do not
vant to vin a pawn; it is enough if I only veakens a pawn."
"You play chess?" said he, laughing. "That's it exactly. He did not
care to sacrifice pieces; he was entirely on the defensive in his
chess, eh? And in life he would be the same, hoarding his pennies and
his dollars, and economising and saving. That's just how the American
is different. He doesn't mind taking great risks; he is playing
the large game, sacrificing small things, hurrying on, building,
destroying, building again, conquering, dreaming. We are always selling
out and re-investing. You are concentrating on yourselves as you are;
we want to leave our old bodies and conditions behind and jump to a new
humanity. If an American youth could inherit the whole world he would
not care to improve it if he saw a chance of selling it to some one
and getting something better."
"The spirit of business," I suggested.
"Call it what you will."
"But," said I, "does not this merely result in a town full of a
hustling, mannerless crowd; trolley-cars dashing along at life-careless
speed; a nation at work with loosely constructed machinery; callous
indifference on the part of the living towards those whom they kill in
their rush to the goal?"
My new acquaintance looked at me in a way that seemed to say
"You--Britisher." He was a great enthusiast for his country, and I had
been sent to him by friends in London who wanted me to get to the heart
of America, and not simply have my teeth set on edge by the bitter rind.
"You think the end will justify the proceedings?" I added.
"Oh yes," he said. "You know we've only been fifty years on this job;
there's nothing in modern America more than fifty years old. Think of
what we've done in the time--clearing, building, engineering; think of
the bridges we've built, the harbours, the canals, the great factories,
the schools. We've been taxed to the last limit of physical strength,
and only to put down the pavement and the gas-pipes so to speak, the
things you found ready made for you when you were born, but which we
had to lay on the prairie. We are only now beginning to look round and
survey the foundations of civilisation. Still most of us are hurrying
on, but the end will be worth the trials by the way; we
"Are whirling from heaven to heaven
And less will be lost than won."
"But is it not a miserable, heartless struggle for the individual?"
said I. "For instance, to judge by the story of _The Jungle_ I should
gather that the lot of a Russian family come fresh to Chicago was
terrible."
"Oh, you mustn't take Sinclair literally. He is a Socialist who wants
to show that society, as it is at present constituted, is so bad that
there is no hope except in revolution. There is heartbreak often,
but the struggle is not heartless. It is amazingly full of hope. If
you go into the worst of our slums you'll find the people hopeful,
even in extremity. I've been across to London, and I never saw such
hopeless-looking people as those who live in your East Ham and West Ham
and Poplar and the rest of them."
"There is hope with us too," I protested. "The people in our slums are
very rebellious, they look forward to the dictatorship of Will Thorne
or George Lansbury."
"Ah well," my friend assented, "that's your kind of
hope--rebelliousness, hatred of the splendid and safe machine. That's
just it. We haven't your rebelliousness and quarrelsomeness. The
new-come immigrant is always quarrelling with his neighbours. It is
only after a while that America softens him and enriches his heart. The
vastness of America, the abundance of its riches, is infectious; it
makes the heart larger. The immigrant feels he has room, life is born
in him."
"But," said I, "the great machine is here as in Europe. A man is known
by his job here just as much as with us, isn't he? He is labelled and
known, he fills a fixed place and has a definite rotation. Every man
says to him 'I see what you are, I know what you are; you are just what
I see and no more.' His neighbour takes him for granted thus. Out of
that horrible taking-for-granted springs rebelliousness and hate of the
great machine. You must be as rebellious as we are."
"No, no." My companion wouldn't have it. "We don't look at people that
way in America. But you're right about looks. It's looks that make
people hate. It's eyes that make them curse and swear and hate. Every
day hundreds and thousands of eyes look at one. I think eyes have power
to create. If thousands and thousands of people pass by a man and look
at him with their eyes they almost change him into what they see. If
in the course of years millions of eyes look at an individual and see
in him just some little bolt in a great machine, then his tender human
heart wants to turn into iron. The ego of that man has a forlorn and
terrible battle to fight. He thinks he is fighting himself; he is
really fighting the millions of creative eyes who by faith are changing
flesh and blood into soulless machinery."
"And here?" I queried.
He laughed a moment, and then said seriously, "Here it is different.
Here we are playing large. Oh, the dwarfing power, the power to make
you mean, that the millions of eyes possess in a country that is
playing the small game! They make you feel mean and little, and then
you become mean. They kill your heart. Your dead little heart withdraws
the human films and the tenderness and imaginativeness from your eyes,
and you also begin to look out narrowly, dwarfingly, compellingly. You
eye the people in the streets, in the cars, in the office, and they
can't help becoming what you are."
"But some escape," said I.
"Yes, some go and smash windows and get sent to gaol, some become
tramps, and some come to America. In Giant Despair's dungeon poor
Christian exclaims, 'What a fool I am to remain here when I have in my
heart a key which I am persuaded will unlock any of the doors of this
castle. Strange that it has only now occurred to me that all I need
to do is to lift my hand and open the door and go away.' Then poor
Christian books a passage to America or Australia. He starts for the
New World; and the moment he puts his foot on the vessel he begins to
outgrow. He was his very smallest and meanest under the pressure of
the Old World; when the pressure is removed he begins to expand. He is
free. He is on his own. He is sailing to God as himself. The exception
has beaten the rule. Now I hold as a personal belief that we are all
exceptions, that we take our stand before God as tender human creatures
of His, each unique in itself. The emigrant on the boat has the
delicious feelings of convalescence, of getting to be himself again. He
basks in the sun of freedom. The sun itself seems like the all-merciful
Father, the Good Shepherd who cares for each one and knows each by
name, leading him out to an earthly paradise."
"That paradise is America, eh?" said I rather mockingly, and then I
paused and added, "But America ought to be really a paradise; it is
pathetic to think of the difference between America as the Russian
thinks it to be and America as it is. It is a shame that your trusts
and tariffs and corrupt police should have made America a worse place
to live in than the Old World. I know it is the land of opportunity,
opportunity to become rich, to get on, to be famous; but for the poor
immigrant it is rather the land of opportunism, a land where he himself
is the opportunity, which not he but other people have the chance to
seize."
My friend was scandalised. "I think it gives every one an
opportunity," said he, "even the drunkard and the thief and the
embezzler whom you so incharitably hand over to us. You know the
saying, 'It takes an ocean to receive a muddy stream without
defilement.' The ocean of American life cleanses many a muddy stream of
the Old World."
"Still," said I, "not to abandon oneself utterly to ideas, is it not
true that Pittsburg actually destroys thousands of Slav immigrants
yearly? It utterly destroys them. They have no children who come
to anything--they are just wiped out. I gather so much from your
Government survey of Pittsburg."
"Well," said he, "that survey is just part of the New America, of
the new national conscience. Terrible things do happen, witness the
enormous white-slave traffic. You have just come to us at the right
moment to see the initiation of sweeping changes. President Wilson is
like your David Lloyd George, only he has more power, because he has
more people at his back. We are just beginning a great progressive era.
On the other hand, America is not the place of the weak. That's why we
send so many back home from Ellis Island. We've got something else to
do than try and put Humpty Dumpty up on the wall again. When the weaker
get past Ellis Island into our fierce national life they are bound to
go to the wall. We haven't time even to be sorry, and if questioned we
can only answer that we believe the sacrifice will be justified."
I recall to my mind the startling objection of Ivan Karamazof in the
greatest of Russian novels. "When God's providence is fulfilled we
shall understand all things; we shall see how the pain and death of,
for instance, a little child could be necessary. I understand of course
what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven
and earth blends in one hymn of praise, and everything that lives
and has lived cries aloud, 'Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are
revealed'; but to my mind the pain of one little child were too high a
price to pay." Ivan Karamazof would certainly have renounced the grand
future of America bought by the exploitation of thousands of weak and
helpless ones.
Still I suppose the past must take care of itself, and the America
which stands to-day on the threshold of a new era has more thought and
tenderness for the victims of its commercial progress. It is making up
its mind to save the foreign women and their little babies. For the
rest, America plays large, as my friend said. There is a spaciousness
with her, there is contrast, there is life and death, virtue and sin,
things to laugh over and things to cry over. The little baby buds are
taken away and branches are lopped, but the mustard grows a great tree.
There is a chance in America, a chance that you may be a victim, but
also a chance that you may be in at the mating of the King.
* * * * * * *
Several months later, when I had tramped some six hundred American
miles, and talked to all manner of persons, I realised that America
was superlatively a place of hope. I had been continually asking
myself, "What _is_ America? What _is_ this new nation? How are they
different from us at home in England?" And one morning, sitting under
a bush in Indiana, the answer came to me and I wrote it down. They are
fundamentally people who have crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and we are
stay-at-homes. They are adventurous, hopeful people. They are people
who have thrown themselves on the mercy of God and Nature.
We live in a tradition; they live in an expectation. We are remedying
the old state; they are building the new. We are loyal to the ideas of
our predecessors, they are agape to divine the ideas of generations yet
to come.