gnat-swarming marshes. I had a bad time as to the heat and the
mosquitoes, and, despite use of strong disinfectants, I got badly
stung, and was consequently feverish for some days. I was also very
idle, very much inclined to sit on palings and consider how hot it was.
On the Sunday, just to see whether the plaints of the farmers were
justified, I made a census of all the vehicles that passed me. On the
Monday I got to Hammond, and on Tuesday came in by car to Chicago. That
day was the hottest of the year. Fifty-three people died from the heat
in the city that day. I could have understood a few tramps dying even
on the road.
XVI
THE CHOIR DANCE OF THE RACES
The road into Chicago was one of increasing noise and smoke and
desolation, of heat and gloom, and the rumour of a sordid defeat of
life. I remember Calumet City by the factory stacks, the chimneys whose
blackness seemed fainting out of sight in the haze of the heat. Dark
smokes and white steams curled above many workshops; along the roadside
black rivulets flowed from the factories. There were heaps of ashes
and tin cans lying in odorous ponds. The leaves of the trees and the
grasses of the fields were wilted and yellowed by the airs and fumes
of Chicago. At Hammond a drunken, one-armed man followed me for about
a mile, attracting a crowd of street Arabs by his foul language. East
Chicago looked to me like parts of suburban London, and I was reminded
in turns of Peckham, Hackney Marshes, Commercial Road, Whitechapel.
There was, however, much that was unlike anything in London--the
ominous squads of factory chimneys; clouds of heavy-rolling, ochreous
fumes and smoke; palings with such advertisements as "Read no scab
newspapers" or "You'll Holler"; wooden houses; dilapidated, ramshackle
frame-buildings of grey wood; broken-down verandahs; black stairways;
grey washing hanging on strings from stairway to stairway; half-naked
children; piles of old cans and rusty iron.
The vehicles increased on the highway, the lumber of much traffic
commenced, the red and yellow tramcars multiplied, railway lines
crossed the road, and by the rush of trains one felt that all the
traffic of Eastern and Central America was converging to one point. The
open country disappeared. The air of the roadway became full of dust.
The heat increased ten degrees, and to move a limb was to perspire.
Foreigners jostled one another on the sidewalks, negroes and negresses
sat in doorways. The odour of carcases came to the nostrils from
Packing-town, and at last the great central roar of traffic--Chicago.
I can give no account of the great city here--it would be only to
recount and add together the uglinesses and the promises of other
cities. It was at once worse and better than I had expected. The
hopelessness of the picture given by Upton Sinclair in _The Jungle_ I
felt to be exaggerated. I was told at Hull House that the novelist had
got all his stories at the stockyards, but that the massed calamities
that are so appalling in the story never occurred to one family in
real life. The effect of accumulated horrible detail in _The Jungle_
deprives you at the time of any love towards America; it made me, a
Briton, feel hatred towards America, and when first I read the book I
felt that no Russian who read it carefully would entertain willingly
the idea of going to America. If he had entertained the idea, having
read _The Jungle_ he would abandon it. It is an astonishing tract on
the fate of a Russian peasant family leaving the land of so-called
tyranny for a land of so-called freedom; and its obvious moral is
that Russia is a better country for the individual than America--that
America takes the fine peasant stock of Europe and shatters it to bits.
It is true that Chicago makes a convenience of men, and that there man
exists that commerce may thrive rather than that commerce exists that
man may thrive. It is a place where the physical and psychical savings
of Europeans are wasted like water, and where no one understands what
the waste means. Spending is always joyful, and Chicago is a gay city.
It is full of a light-hearted people, pushing, bantering, laughing,
blindfolded over their spiritual eyes. In such places as Chicago the
immigrant finds a market for things he could never sell at home--his
body, his nerve, his vital energy; a ready market, and he sells
them and has money in his pocket and beer in plenty. Listen to the
loud-voiced, God-invoking crowd in the saloons! They have the proceeds
that come of selling the savings of Europe. They have come out of the
quiet villages and forests where, from generation to generation and
age to age, the peasantry live quiet lives, and grow richer and richer
in spirit and nerve. But these in the Chicago streets and saloons have
found their mysterious destiny, to lavish in a life, and for seemingly
worthless ends, what hundreds of quiet-living ancestors have saved. The
tree of a hundred years falls in a day and becomes timber, supporting a
part of the fabric of civilisation for a while.
[Illustration: AT THE FOUNTAIN IN THE PARK: A HOT DAY IN CHICAGO.]
The strangest thing is the clamour of the Chicago crowd--it is
dead-sure about everything in the world, ignorant, cocksure, mocking.
It does not know it is losing, does not know that it is blind-folded,
because it is the victim of destiny.
Part of the spiritual blindness of the great city is the belief it
holds that there is no other place of importance but itself. And
many outsiders take the city at its own estimate. But Chicago is not
America, neither is New York or any other great city. If going to
America meant going only to the great cities, then few but the Jews
would emigrate from Europe.
The ideals of America cannot be worked out merely in the great cities.
The cities are places of death, of the destruction of national tissue,
and of human combustion, necessary, no doubt, as such, certainly not
places where one need worry about national health. The national health
is on the farms of Pennsylvania and Indiana and Minnesota, Michigan,
Iowa, the Dakotas, the Far West. The men range big out there; the
stand-by of the people will always be found in these places and not in
the cities.
And New York and Chicago, though necessary, are abnormal. They are
not so much America as unassimilated Europe. The population of a city
should be the natural sacrifice of the population of the country. It
is often deplored that the country people are forsaking the land and
flocking to the towns; but the proper people to replenish the failing
stock of the cities is just those whom instinct and destiny prompt to
leave the country. It is most bewildering to the student of America
that her city-populations are replenished by the foreign immigrants,
by people nursing, it is true, American sentiments, but not yet born
into the American ideal, not made America's own. The natural place for
the first generation of immigrants is on the land. If Chicago seems
too large, too sudden a growth, disorderly, unanticipated, altogether
out of hand, it is because of the hordes of foreigners who are there,
who have not the impulse to co-operate, and who do not readily respond
to the efforts of the idealist and politician. And they do not readily
respond because they have not lived long enough in the true American
atmosphere, have not served a quiet apprenticeship in the country, but
have been dumped into an industrial wilderness served with the yellow
press and "sped up."
America will have to guide the flow of the immigrants, and learn to
irrigate with it and make fertile the Middle and the Far West. It is
over-commercialisation and near-sightedness that clamours for more
labour in the great cities. The size of a city is never too small. In
the normal state of a nation the city functionises the country, and
according to the strength of the people in the background the state of
the great town will be busy or slack. It is good news that negotiations
are being made with the trans-Atlantic shipping companies to ship
immigrants to the Far Western coast _via_ the Panama Canal, at rates
not very much heavier than at present exist for shipment to Boston and
Philadelphia and New York. A man and his wife planted on the land in
the East are worth ten given to the greedy cities of the West.
In the matter of the colonisation of her own country America might
learn a great deal from Russia, especially in the matter of railway
transit. It is all to the advantage of a country that means of transit
are cheap, and that there be a brisk circulation of the blood of the
body-politic. As a newspaper realises that the cheaper its price the
greater its success, the greater its circulation, so America might
realise that the cheaper were its railway fares the more facility
would there be for the mingling of the peoples, the assimilation of
foreigners, and the development of the country.
In America it costs 39 dollars 60 cents to go as far as Denver,
Colorado, which is about 2000 miles, and $76.20 to go to San Francisco.
A comparison with the Russian rates will give an idea how much more
cheaply it is possible to carry people:
+-----------+------------------+---------------------------------------+
| | | Russian Rates. |
| Distance. | American Rates. +------------+------------+-------------|
| | | 3rd Class. | 4th Class. | Immigrants' |
| | | | | Rate. |
+-----------+------------------+------------+------------+-------------+
|2000 miles | 39.60 dollars |9 dollars |4.20 dollars| 1 dollar |
| | | | | |
|3230 " | 76.20 " |12.50 " | 6 " | 1.60 dollars|
+-----------+------------------+------------+------------+-------------+
Of course, the cost of working is more in America than in Russia, and
the trains are twice as fast; but that is not enough to set off against
the enormous differences in fares. A great profit is made out of the
railway business, and the profit is at the expense of America as a
whole. It is absurd to compare the prices of fares in America with the
prices of fares in Great Britain. It is bad enough with us, but ours
is a small territory; it does not cost much to go from end to end.
But America is a vast country. It costs almost a year's wages to pay
the fare of a family across it. You think twice before determining to
travel even a thousand miles. The consequence is that the circulation
of people is sluggish in the extreme. The East begins to get congested,
and the cities are packed with people who would gladly have gone
straight to the West if facilities had been granted them.
In the development of democracy it is circulation that is important,
the circulation of opinion, of sentiment, of ideals. The large
circulation of interest and affection caused by the reduction of
postage rates down to a penny in Britain and two cents in America
has given an immense impetus to democratic development; the larger
circulation of ideas and opinions caused by the reduction of the price
of newspapers to a cent has also been advantageous. But how much more
important than the circulation of opinions, ideas, and sentiments is
the circulation of the people themselves, controlled by the price of
fares on railways! How much more swiftly would the American democracy
become homogeneous if it were possible to travel a thousand miles for
five dollars. That would entail either nationalisation of railways
or subsidisation by the Government. But it would be worth it to the
American people.
Because of the heavy expense of railway travelling America is only
dimly conscious of itself, geographically and ethnologically. Americans
even boast of the distances between their towns and between different
points of the country. Chicago, only one-third of the way across the
continent, is called "The West." Indiana and Illinois and Minnesota are
"out West." It is as if we referred to Berkshire or Warwickshire as the
West of England.
In due course, it may be imagined, the United States Government will
assume state-control of many of the railways, and ten dollars will pay
your fare from New York right across. Immigrants will not be allowed
to settle in great cities till they have spent ten years on the land.
Such a provision would make it easier to admit all sorts and conditions
of Europeans at Ellis Island; and at the corresponding Immigration
stations at other ports a great deal of the White Slave trouble would
be averted, and the shelter of immigrants would not absorb so much of
the urban attention so urgently needed elsewhere.
* * * * * * *
Railways have as much power to make the new American as the newspaper
has. Perhaps they have more power; for the railways can afford great
opportunities for social mingling. The railway can take any immigrant
to a place where he will be not merely a hireling, but a living
organism grafted into the vast body of America. At present the high
fares deter the immigrant, and he is cooped up in districts which he
would like to leave, but cannot; in districts where he must remain
foreign and not American.
For there is an impulse to move and to mingle. If railway facilities
were granted there would be a great deal more social and commercial
intercourse over the surface of America. Each new immigrant who comes
into the United States is particularly wanted somewhere; his landing
is not an accident. Some village or countryside has called him, and
will still call him, though he be frustrated at first, doing the wrong
sort of work among the wrong group of people.
The great heterogeneous mass of peoples wants to become one nation.
There is a power which works through the peoples for that end. The
people are ready to mingle; they are already mingling; they are going
to and fro and in twos and threes, and every step and every transaction
is something essential in the making of the coming homogeneous nation.
It is a choir dance, a dance of molecules or atoms, if you will, but a
dance of human atoms, and one that yields a mystic music that can be
heard by the poet's ear. Leading the peoples in the involutions and
evolutions of the choir dance is a masked figure, not itself one of the
people. What is that figure? Not trade, I think, though it helps; not
common interest, though it is perhaps a rule of the dance; not even
the American idea. The masked figure that leads is a fate; it is an
instinct of Destiny.
The dance is being played out on a vast stage with much scenery--the
three-thousand-mile stretch of America, East to West: the Industrial
East, with its hills; the corn plains and forests of the middle West;
the wild West; the luxuriant and wonderful South.
There are waiting throngs cooped up in cities and at temporary
standing-places.
The welter of negroes and Spaniards and half-castes in the South, in
the black pale; the Swedes and Norwegians and Finns in the Middle
West; the million Jews in New York; the millions of them elsewhere,
saying, as Mary Antin, that America and not Judea is the Promised
Land, the place where the tribes will be gathered together again and
form a nation; the great Anglo-Saxon stock of America, who would feel
themselves to be the leaven, the ruling principle in the choir dance;
the Dutch-Americans of Pennsylvania; the Irish, of whom there tend
to be more in America than in Ireland; the Slovaks and Ruthenians on
the Pennsylvanian collieries; the Italian gangs on the road and the
Italian quarters of a thousand towns; the Poles, of whom in New York
alone there are more than in any city in Poland; the enormous number of
Germans living on the land; the hundred thousand Russian working men in
Pennsylvania alone; the Molokan Russians in California, and the Russian
gold-washers; the Red Indians on the Reservations; the composite gangs
of all nations in the world going up and down the country doing jobs.
The Jews bring music, mathematical instinct, a sense of justice,
industry, commercial organisation, and commercial tyranny, national
wealth, material prosperity, restlessness.
The English bring ignorance, pluck, and honour; the Scottish bring
their brains and their morals; the Irish bring generosity, cleverness,
laziness, hatred of Jews and of meanness.
The Germans bring the idea of growth and development, evolution, and
with it their own music. They also bring an instinct for efficiency and
shining armour.
The negro brings sensual music and dancing, a taste for barbaric
splendour, the gentleness of little children, and the wildness of
the beasts of the forest at night; and he brings imitativeness,
subserviency, a taste for slavery.
The Red Indians bring the remembrance of the Virgin
Continent--litheness of limb, subtler ear and nose and eyes for the
things of the earth.
The Italians bring their emotionalism and excitability, their songs,
their passion, their fighting spirit.
The Little Russians, Slovaks, Poles, Great Russians bring patience
to endure suffering, but withal a spirit of anarchism which prompts
them to do astonishing things without apparent cause, mystical piety,
charity, much sin, much intemperance, much love and human tenderness.
They bring also the Tartar commercial spirit, and a zest for haggling
over prices and for making deals.
The French bring economy, vivacity, journalistic genius.
But what do they not bring, all these peoples? There are marvellous
gifts closed in all of them, mysterious potentialities that it were
folly to attempt to name.
Each race has its special function, its organic suitability and psychic
value. There are male races like the Jews; female races like the
Germans. There are races that bring spirit, races that bring body.
German goes down the middle with English; Swedish with Irish; Russian
with Pole; Jew with each and all. It is not always with the negro
that the negro dances, not always with the Italian that the Italian
is partnered, nor Hungarian with Hungarian, nor Lithuanian with
Lithuanian. Secretively, unexpectedly, on unanticipated impulses,
strangers obey the magic wand and rhythmical gestures of the Great
Conductor of the dance, and become one with another in the evolution of
America. The dance has been open some time, but it is only now becoming
general. The waiting throngs on all sides are just beginning to break
up and go mingling up and down and in and out, carrying messages,
making sacrifices, performing rites. The victims are blindfolded; the
conquerors have the light of destiny on their brows.
A spectacle for the Gods! In the Old World the heavenly powers have
looked down more or less on the antagonism of the races, war and enmity
and all that results from great battles, the rout of armies, the
sacking of cities, the sinking of ships--
Looking over wasted lands.
Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery
sands,
Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying
hands.
But in the New World the peoples are joined in co-operation and
friendship, working out in peace and trade the synthesis of a new race.
The gods look down on factory-chimneys belching smoke, on kingdoms
covered with red-gold corn uncoveted by men of arms, on hurrying
trains and the dancing peoples going hither and thither, with smiles
and little enchantments and allurements. They look upon the Protestant
pulpits where the Puritans preach, on the Roman Catholic Church and the
confessionals, on the Orthodox Church, on the Baptists, on the Mormons;
and on the way the varying peoples flock around temples, and in and
out of church doors, carrying messages, receiving messages. They look
upon many developments that we have so aptly called movements, the
mysterious "woman's movement", the Romanising movement, the Socialistic
movement. They look upon a million schools where the children, the
second generation of the dancers, are polished and tested and clothed
before they in their turn join the throng at the side and go down the
middle with their partners.
It is like a kaleidoscope, and at each successive revolution the
peoples change their aspects and their pattern; but there is no
reverting to the original pattern, as in the kaleidoscope. The
constituents of the pattern are divining what the next pattern will be,
and it is always a new pattern, something nearer to the great coming
unity, the new American nation. In no one particular bosom is the
destiny of America; one man by himself means nothing there. It is a
whole people that is living or will live. Once the foreigner parts from
the waiting throngs at the side and enters the mystic dance, his own
little consciousness and purpose become but a part of the much greater
consciousness and purpose of the whole. It is not the development of
one sort of person, but the combination of a million sorts to make one.
It is not the development of a race, as is our own British progress in
Great Britain, but something which seems rather novel in the history
of mankind, the making of a new democracy. It is not a Gladstone or a
Bismarck or an Alexander the Liberator, who is leading this development
that I have called a Choir Dance, not a Lincoln or a Roosevelt or a
Wilson. Men have only their parts to play in the making of a democracy;
if they could make it all by themselves, or originate the making, or
achieve the making, it would not be a democracy that they were making.
As I said, it is a masked figure that leads the mystic movement--a
fate. In one sense there are many fates also among the dancers and
mingled with them,--a mysterious and wonderful ballet, perfect in idea
and in fulfilment.
And as it is with men so it is with the rites they perform. There are
myriads of rites in the movement of the dance, but not one of them is
charged with absolute significance. Thus in the mazes of evolution
there stands impregnable, as it would seem, the historic open Bible of
America. Around it, marking time, is a massed host of Americans, now
reinforced by newcomers, now diminished by secessions, swayed to this
way and to that by streams of Catholics, streams of Hebrews, streams of
pleasure-lovers, but as yet holding its own, and claiming in sonorous
choruses that the Bible shall be the leaven of the New America.
At another point of vantage on the stage you may see the Jews
proclaiming by vote that America is no longer a Christian country,
and calling the intellectuals and pleasure-wanters to support, if not
Judaism, at least rationalism and "intelligent" materialism.
At another point you see the menace of the half-civilised negro, the
spectacle of the rapid multiplication of a people over whom there is
no control, and in whose nature lies, apparently, an enormous physical
power to degrade the type of the whites.
There is the phenomenon of the wholesale slaughter and sacrifice of
blindfolded foreigners exploited in industrial cities; forests of men
used up as the forests of wood are worn away into daily newspapers and
rubbish.
You see the booths where dancers make voluntary abdication of European
nationality and take the oaths of American citizenship.
You see the prizes for which, in the dance, whole crowds seem to be
straining and yearning and even struggling, the prize of wealth, of
even a little wealth, of a name printed in a newspaper, of a name
printed in all newspapers, the prize of fame, of political position, of
premiership. You see the wild political campaigns.
You see the places where the ambitious laze by the way, the baseball
races where men are shouting themselves and others mad for an empty
game, the halls of rag-time and trotting. You see in thousands of
instances actions which seem to disgrace the name of America and to
augur ill for her future,--women sold into evil, negroes burned at the
stake, heinous crimes committed against children. But the destiny of
the great choric dance cannot be thwarted by any of these things. Death
is useful to life, darkness to brightness, sin to virtue--useful in a
way which it is not necessary for the individual to penetrate. Each
man fulfils his destiny, guides others according to his light, acts
according to his inclination, temptation, and conscience. The whole
nation takes care of itself.
* * * * * * *