The Sandwich-men's Union will hold their annual meeting at
Weinpusslacher's Colossal Restaurant.
They have been saving up for this, their one square meal this
year.
They are paid from twenty to forty cents a day and walk from
fifteen to thirty miles in the ten hours.
Did you know that twice in the Old and five times in the New
Testament mention is made of the sandwich-men?
Do you know why Catholic Spain and anti-Semitic Russia alike
permit no sandwich-men to ply their time-honored occupation
within their confines?
There the article abruptly ended.
"Weinie," said Max, exultingly, "this makes you. Be very nice to Mr.
Rutgers. You'll have to pay him thousands of dollars--"
"Then, you vas in league mit him?"
"No. But he's a genius!"
"I thought he was German," said C. Weinpusslacher, controversially.
"Get busy, Weinie. The crowd will be here in a minute. And don't ask Mr.
Rutgers to pay for his dinner."
"Why not?" growled Weinie. He was on his way to a sure million. That
made the growl natural.
"What is thirty dollars for their dinner to thirty thousand dollars
worth of free advertising?"
"Thirty dollars," observed C. Weinpusslacher, thriftily, "is _thirty
dollars_!"
"Bah!"
"I tell you, it is, mister." C. Weinpusslacher frowned pugnaciously.
But Onthemaker knew his man. So he said: "I'll get Meyer Rabinowitz to
give us an option on the property to-night before he reads the
newspapers. As Rutgers said, once your place is a success, you'll have
to pay any price the landlord wants. Meyer's got you! I can hear your
squeals of agony already!"
Max shook his head so gloomily that C. Weinpusslacher actually began to
tremble with joy. The thought of making money did not move him. The
thought of losing the money he had not made, did. Oh yes; born
money-makers!
By the time H. Rutgers arrived at the Colossal Restaurant Caspar
Weinpusslacher, Esq., and the Hon. Maximilian Onthemaker had constituted
themselves into a highly enthusiastic reception committee, for the crowd
that came with H. Rutgers filled the street so that all you heard was
the squealing and cursing of persons that were pressed against iron
newel-posts of the old-fashioned stoops or precipitated into basements
and cellars. Sixty policemen, impartially cursing the Mayor, Epictetus,
and H. Rutgers, and yearning for the days of Aleck Williams, when clubs
were made to be used and not to be fined for, endeavored to keep the
crowd moving.
"You'll find everything ready, Mr. Rutgers," said M. Onthemaker. "Here
is one of my cards. The name, you will see," he almost shouted, "is
spelled with a _k_ not _h_--O-n-t-h-e-m-a-k-e-r. Everything is ready,
Mr. Secretary." He looked at the reporters out of a corner of his eye.
"And it won't cost you nothing, not one cent," interjected C.
Weinpusslacher, eagerly and distinctly. "Any feller wot's smart like
you, Mr. Rutchers--"
"And the poor starving men," quickly interjected M. Onthemaker, not
wishing for character-analyses yet, "who are the victims of a ruthless
industrial system--"
"Yah, sandwiches!" put in C. Weinpusslacher.
M. Onthemaker grimaced horribly, and C. Weinpusslacher was silent for a
minute. Presently he told Rutgers, "They get enough to eat here,
anyways, I bet you."
He glared with a sort of malevolent triumph at M. Onthemaker, until he
heard the boss say in stern accents:
"That, of course, Weinpusslacher, includes a couple of beers apiece."
"Of course! Of course!" put in M. Onthemaker, hastily. "The
representatives of the press will sit at their own table, at which I am
to have the honor of presiding, Max Onthemaker--O-n-t-h-e-m--"
"We got it down," the _Evening Journal_ man assured him, amiably.
C. Weinpusslacher was so angry that anybody should help him to make
money, when half the pleasure is in making it yourself out of your
fellow-men, that he said, spitefully, "There will be free beer!"
Hendrik Rutgers took an innkeeper's notion and made of it the most
remarkable platform in the history of party government. He said,
sternly, "Everything free for free men!"
A grunting murmur ran down the line of derelicts--the inarticulate
tribute of great thirst to great leadership. In a hundred pairs of eyes
a human hope kindled its fire for the first time in two hundred years!
Great indeed was Hendrik Rutgers!
His faithful sandwiches would go through fire for him! A man who can get
free beer for Sahara throats could put out the fire--with more beer.
The boards were hung around the great hall in plain sight of the
reporters, who copied the legends, that all America might read. While
they were writing, Caspar was hiring thirty extra waiters and turning
people away. Hendrik went from man to man, sternly warning that no one
must begin to eat until he gave the order. A violation of his order
would entail the loss of the dinner and most of the scalp. He also said
they must not linger over their victuals, and told them that two extra
beers apiece would be awarded to the ten men who finished first.
He had made up his mind that the cold and callous world should be told
how starving men eat.
What do people who get enough to eat know about starving men?
Nothing!
They impede the world's progress by being content. Human pigs!
In a surprisingly short time one hundred complete dinners were in front
of one hundred starving men. Six bartenders were busy filling
schooners--in plain sight of the starving men. But the boss's awful
frown held them in check. Each man began to tremble in advance--fearing
he might not be one of the ten to win the extra schooners.
The reporters looked at the hundred faces and began to write like mad.
Hendrik rose. There was an awed silence. The reporters stopped writing.
One hundred inferior maxillaries began to castanet away like mad. The
boss held up a hand. Then he said in measured tones:
"May God be good to us sandwich-men again this year! _Eat!_"
When he said eat, men ate. Don't forget the moral effect of commanding
and being obeyed!
They flung themselves on the food like wild beasts, and made animal
noises in their throats. They disdained forks, knives, and spoons. They
used claws and jaws on meat, coffee, bread, potatoes, soup, or pie
whichever was nearest.
No man wanted to be the last to finish.
"My God!" exclaimed the _Evening Post_ man. "This is absolutely
horrible!"
"Pippin!" said the creative artist from the Sun.
All of them would treat it as a Belasco production. That is, they would
impart to it all the dignity and importance of a political convention.
At 8 P.M. Hendrik Rutgers, man of destiny, rose to speak. He never even
glanced at the reporters. He said, very earnestly, to his tattered
cohorts:
"Comrades! Ours is beyond question the only labor union in the United
States, and, for all I know, in the entire world, that is not
monopolistic in its tendencies. We are individualists because
advertising is not a science nor a trade, but an art, and we are
artists. When the advertisers' greed saw the artists' hunger, the result
was _that_!" He pointed to five score dehumanized faces before him.
"Great!" murmured the _Sun_ man.
"Hereafter watch the sandwich-man, and in one corner of the sign look
for the union label--a skeleton carrying a coffin, to remind us that no
matter what a man is when he is born, he goes to his Maker between
boards. In death all men are equal, and in his coffin a man is the
Ultimate Sandwich!"
"That's literature!" muttered the serious young man from the _Journal_.
"We refuse to be thieves. Therefore we decline to do any sandwiching for
patent medicines, banks, quack cures, fraudulent stores, immoral books,
coal-dealers, fake doctors, suburban real estate, bum chiropodists, or
disreputable people of any kind, class, or nature whatsoever. We start
with professional ethics, which is where most professions end. We who
have been the lowest of the low class that work for their daily bread
are now the S. A. S. A.--the Society of American Sandwich Artists. All
we ask is permission to live! Our headquarters will be in the Allied
Arts Building on Fifth Avenue."
His speech had quotable phrases. A country that once cast the biggest
vote in its history for the square deal, that makes minions of dollars
out of asking you if you see that hump, and from promising to do the
rest if you push the button, and boasts of the thorn that made a rose
famous, is bound to be governed by phrases. The only exceptions are the
Ten Commandments. They are quotable, but not memorable.
All the newspapers spread themselves on that story. In their clubs the
managing editors heard their fellow-members talk about the parade, and
this made each M. E. telephone to the city editor to play it up. It was
too picturesque not to be good reading, and since good reading is always
easy writing, both reporters and editorial writers enjoyed themselves.
That made them artists instead of wage-earners.
Hendrik Rutgers possessed the same quality of political instinct that
nearly made the luckiest man in the world President of the United
States. By blindly following it, young Mr. Rutgers jumped into the very
heart of a profound truth. And once he landed, the same sublimated
sagacity impelled him to stamp with both feet hard. Then, unemotionally
perceiving exactly what he had done, he proceeded very carefully to pick
out his own philosophical steps, in order to be able later on to prove
that he had been coldly logical. Impulsive humanity always distrusts
impulsiveness in others. Leaders, therefore, always call them carefully
considered plans.
In all irreligious countries, as Hendrik Rutgers, astutely arguing
backward, told himself, the people who buy, sell, and vote are alive
only to To-day and therefore dare not take heed of the Hereafter. This
has exalted _news_ to the dignity of a sacred commandment.
In such communities success is necessarily a matter of skilful
publicity.
Who is the greatest of all press agents, working while you sleep and
even when you blunder?
The People!
The front page of the newspaper is therefore the arena of to-day!
To live in that page, all you have to do is to become News.
Once you become News all the king-making reporters of all the
nation-making newspapers become your press agents. The public does the
rest and pays all salaries.
Thrilled by his discovery, Hendrik called Max Onthemaker to one side
and, with the air of a man risking one hundred and two millions of cash,
said to him: "I have decided to make you chief counsel of my society.
Your services will entitle you to represent me."
Never had man been so lavishly overpaid for breathing since the dawn of
historical time. Hendrik went on, still imperial in bounty:
"I have in mind some great things. Every one of them will be worth as
much space as the newspapers will give to this dinner. Do you see your
chance?"
"I can't live on newspaper articles," began Max, elated but dissembling.
"You can die without them. Chronic obscurity; acute starvation," said
Hendrik Rutgers in his clinical voice. "I not only do not propose to pay
you a cent, but I expect you to pay all necessary expenses out of your
privy purse without a murmur--unless said murmur is intended to express
your legal opinion and your gratitude. I shall give you an opportunity
to represent my society"--you would have sworn he was saying _my
regiment_--"in actions involving the most famous names in America."
"For instance?" asked M. Onthemaker, trying to speak skeptically, that
his eagerness might not show too plainly.
Hendrik Rutgers named six of the mightiest.
"You're on, Mr. Rutgers," said Max, enthusiastically. "Now, I think--"
"Wait!" interrupted Hendrik, coldly. "Never forget that I am not your
press agent. You are mine."
"There will be glory enough to go around," said Max Onthemaker in his
police-court voice. "When do we begin?"
"To-morrow."
"Yes, sir. And now--"
"My _now_ is your _when_! Your job is to find the legal way of helping
the Cause."
"I will!" promised Onthemaker, heartfully. The Cause would be his Cause.
He'd fix it so they couldn't leave out his name.
But Hendrik saw the gleam in the lawyer's eye.
That's the worst of all thoughts of self. They invariably are
undisguisable.
"The Cause, Onthemaker," said Hendrik, sternly, "is the cause of the
Society of American Sandwich Artists. We are not associated to make
money for ourselves, but for our employers. This is revolutionary.
Moreover, we are not working-men, but artists. Therefore our men not
only love their work, but are law-abiding. This will make the employers
helpless to retaliate. We shall never do anything without invoking the
aid of the law, for I believe that the law will help the poor not less
than the rich if properly--"
"Advertised," prompted Max. "I get you. In the forum of the people's
liberties--the daily papers--is the place to try--"
Hendrik held up a hand. He had chosen the right lawyer. The
interpretation of the law depends exclusively upon the tone of voice.
All reporters are trained to be judges of elocution. They have to be, in
republics.
"To-morrow--" Here Hendrik paused.
Max's face paled slightly as he waited. What was coming?