Abroad at Home: American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures of Julian Street
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Title: Abroad at Home: American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures of Julian Street
Author: Julian Street
Illustrator: Wallace Morgan
Release date: April 25, 2011 [eBook #35965]
Language: English
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ABROAD AT HOME
by
JULIAN STREET
* * * * *
THE NEED OF CHANGE
Fifth Anniversary Edition. Illustrated by James Montgomery Flagg.
Cloth, 50 cents net. Leather, $1.00 net.
PARIS A LA CARTE
"Gastronomic promenades" in Paris. Illustrated by May Wilson
Preston. Cloth, 60 cents net.
WELCOME TO OUR CITY
Mr. Street plays host to the stranger in New York. Illustrated by
James Montgomery Flagg and Wallace Morgan. Cloth, $1.00 net.
SHIP-BORED
Who hasn't been? Illustrated by May Wilson Preston. Cloth, 50 cents
net.
ABROAD AT HOME
Cheerful ramblings and adventures in American cities
and other places. Illustrated by Wallace Morgan. Cloth, $2.50 net.
For Children
THE GOLDFISH
A Christmas story for children between six and sixty.
Colored Illustrations and page Decorations. Cloth, 70 cents net.
* * * * *
[Illustration: The St. Francis at tea-time.--With her hotels San
Francisco is New York, but with her people she is San Francisco--which
comes near being the apotheosis of praise]
ABROAD AT HOME
American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures of Julian Street
With Pictorial Sidelights by Wallace Morgan
[Illustration]
New York
The Century Co.
1915
Copyright, 1914, by
The Century Co.
Copyright, 1914, by
P. F. Collier & Son, Inc.
Published, November, 1914
TO MY FATHER
the companion of my first railroad journey
The Author takes this opportunity to thank the old friends, and the new
ones, who assisted him in so many ways, upon his travels. Especially, he
makes his affectionate acknowledgment to his wise and kindly companion,
the Illustrator, whose admirable drawings are far from being his only
contribution to this volume.
--J. S.
New York,
October, 1914.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
STEPPING WESTWARD
I STEPPING WESTWARD 3
II BIFURCATED BUFFALO 21
III CLEVELAND CHARACTERISTICS 40
IV MORE CLEVELAND CHARACTERISTICS 48
MICHIGAN MEANDERINGS
V DETROIT THE DYNAMIC 65
VI AUTOMOBILES AND ART 77
VII THE MAECENAS OF THE MOTOR 91
VIII THE CURIOUS CITY OF BATTLE CREEK 105
IX KALAMAZOO 121
X GRAND RAPIDS THE "ELECT" 127
CHICAGO
XI A MIDDLE-WESTERN MIRACLE 139
XII FIELD'S AND THE "TRIBUNE" 150
XIII THE STOCKYARDS 164
XIV THE HONORABLE HINKY DINK 173
XV AN OLYMPIAN PLAN 181
XVI LOOKING BACKWARD 187
"IN MIZZOURA"
XVII SOMNOLENT ST. LOUIS 201
XVIII THE FINER SIDE 221
XIX HANNIBAL AND MARK TWAIN 237
XX PIKE AND POKER 253
XXI OLD RIVER DAYS 267
THE BEGINNING OF THE WEST
XXII KANSAS CITY 275
XXIII ODDS AND ENDS 291
XXIV COLONEL NELSON'S "STAR" 302
XXV KEEPING A PROMISE 313
XXVI THE TAME LION 323
XXVII KANSAS JOURNALISM 337
XXVIII A COLLEGE TOWN 345
XXIX MONOTONY 365
THE MOUNTAINS AND THE COAST
XXX UNDER PIKE'S PEAK 379
XXXI HITTING A HIGH SPOT 400
XXXII COLORADO SPRINGS 417
XXXIII CRIPPLE CREEK 434
XXXIV THE MORMON CAPITAL 439
XXXV THE SMITHS 454
XXXVI PASSING PICTURES 465
XXXVII SAN FRANCISCO 474
XXXVIII "BEFORE THE FIRE" 488
XXXIX AN EXPOSITION AND A "BOOSTER" 498
XL NEW YORK AGAIN 507
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The St. Francis at tea-time.--With her hotels
San Francisco is New York, but with her people
she is San Francisco--which comes near being FACING
the apotheosis of praise. _Frontispiece_ PAGE
I was moving about my room, my hands full of
hairbrushes and toothbrushes and clothes
brushes and shaving brushes; my head full of
railroad trains, and hills, and plains, and
valleys 5
A dusky redcap took my baggage 12
What scenes these black, pathetic people had
passed through--were passing through! Why did
they not look up in wonderment? 17
We made believe we wanted to go out and
smoke. And as we left our seats she made
believe she didn't know that we were going. 23
The gentleman who favored linen mesh was a
fat, prosperous-looking person, whose
gold-rimmed spectacles reflected flying lights
from out of doors 26
In a few hours there was enough shame around
us to have lasted all the reformers and
muckrakers I know a whole month 32
My companion and I made excuses to go
downstairs and wash our hands in the public
washroom, just for the pleasure of doing so
without fear of being attacked by a swarthy
brigand with a brush 35
I was prepared to take the field against all
comers, not only in favor of simplicity, but
in favor of anything and everything which was
favored by my hostess 38
Chamber of Commerce representatives were with
us all the first day and until we went to our
rooms, late at night 43
It is an Elizabethan building, with a heavy
timbered front, suggesting some ancient,
hospitable, London coffee house where wits of
old were used to meet 46
In this charming, homelike old building,
with its grandfather's clock, its Windsor
chairs, and its open wood fires, a visitor
finds it hard to realize that he is in the
"west" 53
Down by the docks we saw gigantic, strange
machines, expressive of Cleveland's lake
commerce--machines for loading and unloading
ships in the space of a few hours 60
In midstream passes a continual parade of
freighters ... and in their swell you may see,
teetering, all kinds of craft, from proud
white yachts to canoes 71
The automobile has not only changed Detroit
from a quiet old town into a rich, active
city, but upon the drowsy romance of the old
days it has superimposed the romance of modern
business 74
Of course there was order in that place, of
course there was system--relentless
system--terrible "efficiency"--but to my mind it
expressed but one thing, and that thing was
delirium 97
Never, since then, have I heard men jeering
over women as they look in dishabille, without
wondering if those same men have ever seen
themselves clearly in the mirrored washroom
of a sleeping car 112
"Can that stuff," admonished Miss Buck in her
easy, offhand manner 117
She was saying to herself (and, unconsciously,
to us, through the window): "If _I_ had played
that hand, I never should have done
it _that_ way!" 124
Rodin's "Thinker" 145
Chicago's skyline from the docks.... A city
which rebuilt itself after the fire; in the
next decade doubled its size; and now has a
population of two million, plus a city of about
the size of San Francisco 160
Two rabbis, old bearded men, performed the
rites with long, slim, shiny blades 177
As I stood there, studying the temperament of
pigs, I saw the butcher looking up at me.... I
have never seen such eyes 192
The bold front of Michigan Avenue along Grant
Park ... great buildings wreathed in whirling
smoke and that allegory of infinity which
confronts one who looks eastward 196
The dilapidation of the quarter has continued
steadily from Dickens's day to this, and the
beauty now to be discovered there is that of
decay and ruin 205
The three used bridges which cross the
Mississippi River at St. Louis are privately
controlled toll bridges 212
The skins are handled in the raw state ... with
the result that the floor of the exchange is
made slippery by animal fats, and that the
olfactory organs encounter smells not to be
matched in any zoo 221
St. Louis needs to be taken by the hand and
led around to some municipal-improvement
tailor, some civic haberdasher 225
We came upon the "Mark Twain House."... And
to think that, wretched as this place was,
the Clemens family were forced to leave it for
a time because they were too poor to live there 240
At one side is an alley running back to the
house of Huckleberry Finn, and in that alley
stood the historic fence which young Sam
Clemens cajoled the other boys into
whitewashing for him 244
Never outside of Brittany and Normandy have
I seen roads so full of animals as those of
Pike County 253
Mr. Roberts is a wonder--nothing less. There's
a book in him, and I hope that somebody will
write it, for I should like to read that book 268
Looking down from Kersey Coates Drive, one
sees ... the appalling web of railroad tracks,
crammed with freight cars, which seen through
a softening haze of smoke, resemble a relief
map--strange, vast and pictorial 289
Colonel Nelson is a "character." Even if he
didn't own the "Star," ... he would be a
"character."... I have called him a volcano;
he is more like one than any other man I have
ever met 304
Mr. Fish informed me that the waters of
Excelsior Springs resemble the waters of
Homburg, the favorite watering place of the
late King Edward--or, rather, I think he put
it the other way round 322
We strolled in the direction of the old house,
that house of tragedy in which the family lived
in the troublous times.... It was there that
the Pinkertons threw the bomb 328
It was Frank James.... He looks more like a
prosperous farmer or the president of a rural
bank than like a bandit. In his manner
there is a strong note of the showman 335
The campus seems to have "just
growed."... Nevertheless, there is a sort of
homely charm about the place, with its
unimposing, helter-skelter piles of brick and
stone 353
Even at sea the great bowl of the sky had
never looked to me so vast 368
The little towns of western Kansas are far
apart and have, like the surrounding scenery,
an air of sadness and desolation 373
In the lobby of the Brown Palace Hotel we saw
several old fellows, sitting about, looking
neither prosperous nor busy, but always
talking mines. A kind word, or even a pleasant
glance, is enough to set them off 380
"Ain't Nature wonderful!" 405
I was by this time very definitely aware that
I had my fill of winter motoring in the
mountains. The mere reluctance I felt as we
began to climb had now developed into a
passionate desire to desist 412
The homes of Colorado Springs really explain
the place and the society is as cosmopolitan
as the architecture 417
On the road to Cripple Creek we were always
turning, always turning upward 432
We were invited to meet the President of the
Mormon Church and some members of his family
at the Beehive House, his official residence 452
The Lion House--a large adobe building in
which formerly resided the rank and file of
Brigham Young's wives 461
The Cliff House has a Sorrento setting and
hectic turkey-trotting nights 468
The Salt-water pool, Olympic Club, San Francisco 477
The switchboard of the Chinatown telephone
exchange is set in a shrine and the operators
are dressed in Chinese silks 496
We believed we had encountered every kind of
"booster" that creeps, crawls, walks, crows,
cries, bellows, barks or brays, but it remained
for the Exposition to show us a new specimen 504
New York--Everyone is in a hurry. Everyone is
dodging everyone else. Everyone is trying to
keep his knees from being knocked by
swift-passing suitcases 513
STEPPING WESTWARD
ABROAD AT HOME
CHAPTER I
STEPPING WESTWARD
"_What, you are stepping westward?_"--"_Yea._"
--'Twould be a wildish destiny,
If we, who thus together roam
In a strange Land, and far from home,
Were in this place the guests of Chance:
Yet who would stop or fear to advance,
Though home or shelter he had none,
With such a sky to lead him on?
--WORDSWORTH.
For some time I have desired to travel over the United States--to ramble
and observe and seek adventure here, at home, not as a tourist with a
short vacation and a round-trip ticket, but as a kind of privateer with
a roving commission. The more I have contemplated the possibility the
more it has engaged me. For we Americans, though we are the most
restless race in the world, with the possible exception of the Bedouins,
almost never permit ourselves to travel, either at home or abroad, as
the "guests of Chance." We always go from one place to another with a
definite purpose. We never amble. On the boat, going to Europe, we talk
of leisurely trips away from the "beaten track," but we never take them.
After we land we rush about obsessed by "sights," seeing with the eyes
of guides and thinking the "canned" thoughts of guidebooks.
In order to accomplish such a trip as I had thought of I was even
willing to write about it afterward. Therefore I went to see a publisher
and suggested that he send me out upon my travels.
I argued that Englishmen, from Dickens to Arnold Bennett, had "done"
America; likewise Frenchmen and Germans. And we have traveled over there
and written about them. But Americans who travel at home to write (or,
as in my case, write to travel) almost always go in search of some
specific thing: to find corruption and expose it, to visit certain
places and describe them in detail, or to catch, exclusively, the comic
side. For my part, I did not wish to go in search of anything specific.
I merely wished to take things as they might come. And--speaking of
taking things--I wished, above all else, to take a good companion, and I
had him all picked out: a man whose drawings I admire almost as much as
I admire his disposition; the one being who might endure my presence for
some months, sharing with me his joys and sorrows and collars and
cigars, and yet remain on speaking terms with me.
The publisher agreed to all. Then I told my New York friends that I was
going.
[Illustration: I was moving about my room, my hands full of hairbrushes
and toothbrushes and clothesbrushes and shaving brushes; my head full of
railroad trains, and hills, and plains, and valleys]
They were incredulous. That is the New York attitude of mind. Your
"typical New Yorker" really thinks that any man who leaves Manhattan
Island for any destination other than Europe or Palm Beach must be
either a fool who leaves voluntarily or a criminal taken off by force.
For the picturesque criminal he may be sorry, but for the fool he has
scant pity.
* * * * *
At a farewell party which they gave us on the night before we left, one
of my friends spoke, in an emotional moment, of accompanying us as far
as Buffalo. He spoke of it as one might speak of going up to Baffin Land
to see a friend off for the Pole.
I welcomed the proposal and assured him of safe conduct to that point in
the "interior." I even showed him Buffalo upon the map. But the sight of
that wide-flung chart of the United States seemed only to alarm him.
After regarding it with a solemn and uneasy eye he shook his head and
talked long and seriously of his responsibilities as a family man--of
his duty to his wife and his limousine and his elevator boys.
It was midnight when good-bys were said and my companion and I returned
to our respective homes to pack. There were many things to be put into
trunks and bags. A clock struck three as my weary head struck the
pillow. I closed my eyes. Then when, as it seemed to me, I was barely
dozing off there came a knocking at my bedroom door.
"What is it?"
"Six o'clock," replied the voice of our trusty Hannah.
As I arose I knew the feelings of a man condemned to death who hears the
warden's voice in the chilly dawn: "Come! It is the fatal hour!"
When, fifteen minutes later, doubting Hannah (who knows my habits in
these early morning matters) knocked again, I was moving about my room,
my hands full of hairbrushes and toothbrushes and clothes brushes and
shaving brushes; my head full of railroad trains, and hills, and plains
and valleys, and snow-capped mountain peaks, and smoking cities and
smoking-cars, and people I had never seen.
The breakfast table, shining with electric light, had a night-time
aspect which made eggs and coffee seem bizarre. I do not like to
breakfast by electric light, and I had done so seldom until then; but
since that time I have done it often--sometimes to catch the early
morning train, sometimes to catch the early morning man.
Beside my plate I found a telegram. I ripped the envelope and read this
final punctuation-markless message from a literary friend:
_you are going to discover the united states dont be afraid to say
so_
That is an awful thing to tell a man in the very early morning before
breakfast. In my mind I answered with the cry: "But I _am_ afraid to say
so!"
And now, months later, I am still afraid to say so, because, despite a
certain truth the statement may contain, it seems to me to sound
ridiculous, and ponderous, and solemn with an asinine solemnity.
It spoiled my last meal at home--that well-meant telegram.
I had not swallowed my second cup of coffee when, from her switchboard,
a dozen floors below, the operator telephoned to say my taxi had
arrived; whereupon I left the table, said good-by to those I should miss
most of all, took up my suit case and departed.
Beside the curb there stood an unhappy-looking taxicab, shivering as
with malaria, but the driver showed a face of brazen cheerfulness which,
considering the hour and the circumstances, seemed almost indecent. I
could not bear his smile. Hastily I blotted him from view beneath a pile
of baggage.
With a jerk we started. Few other vehicles disputed our right to the
whole width of Seventy-second Street as we skimmed eastward. Farewell, O
Central Park! Farewell, O Plaza! And you, Fifth Avenue, empty, gray,
deserted now; so soon to flash with fascinating traffic. Farewell!
Farewell!
Presently, in that cavern in which vehicles stop beneath the overhanging
cliffs of the Grand Central Station, we drew up. A dusky redcap took my
baggage. I alighted and, passing through glass doors, gazed down on the
vast concourse. Far up in the lofty spaces of the room there seemed to
hang a haze, through which--from that amazing and audacious ceiling,
painted like the heavens--there twinkled, feebly, morning stars of
gold. Through three arched windows, towering to the height of six-story
buildings, the eastern light streamed softly in, combining with the
spaciousness around me, and the blue above, to fill me with a curious
sense of paradox: a feeling that I was indoors yet out of doors.
The glass dials of the four-faced clock, crowning the information bureau
at the center of the concourse, glowed with electric light, yellow and
sickly by contrast with the day which poured in through those windows.
Such stupendous windows! Gargantuan spider webs whose threads were
massive bars of steel. And suddenly I saw the spider! He emerged from
one side, passed nimbly through the center of the web, disappeared,
emerged again, crossed the second web and the third in the same way, and
was gone--a two-legged spider, walking importantly and carrying papers
in his hand. Then another spider came, and still another, each black
against the light, each on a different level. For those windows are, in
reality, more than windows. They are double walls of glass, supporting
floors of glass--layer upon layer of crystal corridor, suspended in the
air as by genii out of the Arabian Nights. And through these corridors
pass clerks who never dream that they are princes in the modern kind of
fairy tale.
As yet the torrent of commuters had not begun to pour through the vast
place. The floor lay bare and tawny like the bed of some dry river
waiting for the melting of the mountain snows. Across the river bed
there came a herd of cattle--Italian immigrants, dark-eyed, dumb,
patient, uncomprehending. Two weeks ago they had left Naples, with
plumed Vesuvius looming to the left; yesterday they had come to Ellis
Island; last night they had slept on station benches; to-day they were
departing; to-morrow or the next day they would reach their destination
in the West. Suddenly there came to me from nowhere, but with a
poignance that seemed to make it new, the platitudinous thought that
life is at once the commonest and strangest of experiences. What scenes
these black, pathetic people had passed through--were passing through!
Why did they not look up in wonderment? Why were their bovine eyes
gazing blankly ahead of them at nothing? What had dazed them so--the
bigness of the world? Yet, after all, why should they understand? What
American can understand Italian railway stations? They have always
seemed to me to express a sort of mild insanity. But the Grand Central
terminal I fancy I do understand. It seems to me to be much more than a
successful station. In its stupefying size, its brilliant
utilitarianism, and, most of all, in its mildly vulgar grandeur, it
seems to me to express, exactly, the city to which it is a gate. That is
something every terminal should do unless, as in the case of the
Pennsylvania terminal in New York, it expresses something finer. The
Grand Central Station _is_ New York, but that classic marvel over there
on Seventh Avenue is more: it is something for New York to live up to.
* * * * *
When I had bought my ticket and moved along to count my change there
came up to the ticket window a big man in a big ulster who asked in a
big voice for a ticket to Grand Rapids. As he stood there I was
conscious of a most un-New-York-like wish to say to him: "After a while
I'm going to Grand Rapids, too!" And I think that, had I said it, he
would have told me that Grand Rapids was "_some town_" and asked me to
come in and see him, when I got there,--"at the plant," I think he would
have said.
As I crossed the marble floor to take the train I caught sight of my
traveling companion leaning rigidly against the wall beside the gate. He
did not see me. Reaching his side, I greeted him.
He showed no signs of life. I felt as though I had addressed a waxwork
figure.
"Good morning," I repeated, calling him by name.
"I've just finished packing," he said. "I never got to bed at all."
At that moment a most attractive person put in an appearance. She was
followed by a redcap carrying a lovely little Russia leather bag. A few
years before I should have called a bag like that a dressing case, but
watching that young woman as she tripped along with steps restricted by
the slimness of her narrow satin skirt, it occurred to me that modes in
baggage may have changed like those in woman's dress and that her
little leather case might be a modern kind of wardrobe trunk.
My companion took no notice of this agitating presence.
"Look!" I whispered. "_She_ is going, too."
Stiffly he turned his head.
"The pretty girl," he remarked, with sad philosophy, "is always in the
other car. That's life."
"No," I demurred. "It's only early morning stuff."
And I was right, for presently, in the parlor car, we found our seats
across the aisle from hers.
Before the train moved out a boy came through with books and magazines,
proclaiming loudly the "last call for reading matter."
I think the radiant being believed him, for she bought a magazine--a
magazine of pretty girls and piffle: just the sort we knew she'd buy. As
for my companion and me, we made no purchases, not crediting the
statement that it was really the "last call." But I am impelled to add
that having, later, visited certain book stores of Buffalo, Cleveland,
and Detroit, I now see truth in what the boy said.
For a time my companion and I sat and tried to make believe we didn't
know that some one was across the aisle. And she sat there and played
with pages and made believe she didn't know we made believe. When that
had gone on for a time and our train was slipping silently along beside
the Hudson, we felt we couldn't stand it any longer, so we made believe
we wanted to go out and smoke. And as we left our seats she made believe
she didn't know that we were going.
Four men were seated in the smoking room. Two were discussing the merits
of flannel versus linen mesh for winter underwear. The gentleman who
favored linen mesh was a fat, prosperous-looking person, whose
gold-rimmed spectacles reflected flying lights from out of doors.
"If you'll wear linen," he declared with deep conviction--"and it wants
to be a union suit, too--you'll never go back to shirt and drawers
again. I'll guarantee that!" The other promised to try it. Presently I
noticed that the first speaker had somehow gotten all the way from linen
union suits to Portland, Me., on a hot Sunday afternoon. He said it was
the hottest day last year, and gave the date and temperatures at certain
hours. He mentioned his wife's weight, details of how she suffered from
the heat, the amount of flesh she lost, the name of the steamer on which
they finally escaped from Portland to New York, the time of leaving and
arrival, and many other little things.
I left him on the dock in New York. A friend (name and occupation given)
had met him with a touring car (make and horsepower specified). What
happened after that I do not know, save that it was nothing of
importance. Important things don't happen to a man like that.
[Illustration: A dusky redcap took my baggage]
Two other men of somewhat Oriental aspect were seated on the leather
sofa talking the unintelligible jargon of the factory. But, presently,
emerged an anecdote.
"I was going through our sorting room a while back," said the one
nearest the window, "and I happened to take notice of one of the girls.
I hadn't seen her before. She was a new hand--a mighty pretty girl, with
a nice, round figure and a fine head of hair. She kept herself neater
than most of them girls do. I says to myself: 'Why, if you was to take
that girl and dress her up and give her a little education you wouldn't
be ashamed to take her anywheres.' Well, I went over to her table and I
says: 'Look at here, little girl; you got a fine head of hair and you'd
ought to take care of it. Why don't you wear a cap in here in all this
dust?' It tickled her to death to be noticed like that. And, sure
enough, she did get a cap. I says to her: 'That's the dope, little girl.
Take care of your looks. You'll only be young and pretty like this once,
you know.' So one thing led to another, and one day, a while later, she
come up to the office to see about her time slip or something, and I
jollied her a little. I seen she was a pretty smart kid at that, so--"
At that point he lowered his voice to a whisper, and leaned over so that
his thick, smiling lips were close to his companion's ear. The motion of
the train caused their hat brims to interfere. Disturbed by this, the
raconteur removed his derby. His head was absolutely bald.
* * * * *
Well, I am not sure that I should have liked to hear the rest. I shifted
my attention back to the apostle of the linen union suit, who had talked
on, unremittingly. His conversation had, at least, the merit of entire
frankness. He was a man with nothing to conceal.
"Yes, sir!" I heard him declare, "every time you get on to a railroad
train you take your life in your hands. That's a positive fact. I was
reading it up just the other day. We had almost sixteen thousand
accidents to trains in this country last year. A hundred and thirty-nine
passengers killed and between nine and ten thousand injured. That's not
counting employees, either--just passengers like us." He emphasized his
statements by waving a fat forefinger beneath the listener's nose, and I
noticed that the latter seemed to wish to draw his head back out of
range, as though in momentary fear of a collision.
For my part, I did not care for these statistics. They were not pleasant
to the ears of one on the first leg of a long railroad journey. I rose,
aimed the end of my cigar at the convenient nickel-plated receptacle
provided for that purpose by the thoughtful Pullman Company, missed it,
and retired from the smoking room. Or, rather, I emerged and went to
luncheon.
Our charming neighbor of the parlor car was already in the diner. She
finished luncheon before we did, and, passing by our table as she left,
held her chin well up and kept her eyes ahead with a precision almost
military--almost, but not quite. Try as she would, she was unable to
control a slight but infinitely gratifying flicker of the eyelids, in
which nature triumphed over training and femininity defeated feministic
theory.
A little later, on our way back to the smoking room, we saw her seated,
as before, behind the sheltering ramparts of her magazine. This time it
pleased our fancy to take the austere military cue from her. So we filed
by in step, as stiff as any guardsmen on parade before a princess seated
on a green plush throne. Resolutely she kept her eyes upon the page. We
might have thought she had not noticed us at all but for a single sign.
She uncrossed her knees as we passed by.
In the smoking room we entered conversation with a young man who was
sitting by the window. He proved to be a civil engineer from Buffalo. He
had lived in Buffalo eight years, he said, without having visited
Niagara Falls. ("I've been meaning to go, but I've kept putting it
off.") But in New York he had taken time to go to Bedloe Island and
ascend the Statue of Liberty. ("It's awfully hot in there.") Though my
companion and myself had lived in New York for many years, neither of us
had been to Bedloe Island. But both of us had visited the Falls. The
absurd humanness of this was amusing to us all; to my companion and me
it was encouraging as well, for it seemed to give us ground for hope
that, in our visits to strange places, we might see things which the
people living in those places fail to see.
When, after finishing our smoke, we went back to our seats, the being
across the way began to make believe to read again. But now and then,
when some one passed, she would look up and make believe she wished to
see who it might be. And always, after doing so, she let her eyes trail
casually in our direction ere they sought the page again. And always we
were thankful.
As the train slowed down for Rochester we saw her rise and get into her
slinky little coat. The porter came and took her Russia leather bag.
Meanwhile we hoped she would be generous enough to look once more before
she left the car. Only once more!
But she would not. I think she had a feeling that frivolity should cease
at Rochester; for Rochester, we somehow sensed, was home to her. At all
events she simply turned and undulated from the car.
That was too much! Enough of make-believe! With one accord we swung our
chairs to face the window. As she appeared upon the platform our noses
almost touched the windowpane and our eyes sent forth forlorn appeals.
She knew that we were there, yet she walked by without so much as
glancing at us.
We saw a lean old man trot up to her, throw one arm about her shoulders,
and kiss her warmly on the cheek. Her father--there was no mistaking
that. They stood there for a moment on the platform talking eagerly; and
as they talked they turned a little bit, so that we saw her smiling up
at him.
[Illustration: What scenes these black, pathetic people had passed
through--were passing through! Why did they not look up in wonderment?]
Then, to our infinite delight, we noticed that her eyes were slipping,
slipping. First they slipped down to her father's necktie. Then sidewise
to his shoulder, where they fluttered for an instant, while she tried to
get them under control. But they weren't the kind of eyes which are
amenable. They got away from her and, with a sudden leap, flashed up at
us across her father's shoulder! The minx! She even flung a smile! It
was just a little smile--not one of her best--merely the fragment of a
smile, not good enough for father, but too good to throw away.
Well--it was not thrown away. For it told us that she knew our lives had
been made brighter by her presence--and that she didn't mind a bit.
* * * * *
Pushing on toward Buffalo as night was falling, my companion and I
discussed the fellow travelers who had most engaged our notice: the
young engineer from Buffalo, keen and alive, with a quick eye for the
funny side of things; the hairless amorist; the genial bore, whose wife
(we told ourselves) got very tired of him sometimes, but loved him just
because he was so good; the pretty girl, who couldn't make her eyes
behave because she was a pretty girl. We guessed what kind of house each
one resided in, the kind of furniture they had, the kind of pictures on
the walls, the kind of books they read--or didn't read. And I believed
that we guessed right. Did we not even know what sort of underwear
encased the ample figure of the man with the amazing memory of
unessential things? And, while touching on this somewhat delicate
subject, were we not aware that if the alluring being who left the
train, and us, at Rochester possessed the once-so-necessary garment
called a petticoat, that petticoat was hanging in her closet?
All this I mention because the thought occurred to me then (and it has
kept recurring since) that places, no less than persons, have characters
and traits and habits of their own. Just as there are colorless people
there are colorless communities. There are communities which are strong,
self-confident, aggressive; others lazy and inert. There are cities
which are cultivated; others which crave "culture" but take "culturine"
(like some one drinking from the wrong bottle); and still others almost
unaware, as yet, that esthetic things exist. Some cities seem to fairly
smile at you; others are glum and worried like men who are ill, or
oppressed with business troubles. And there are dowdy cities and
fashionable cities--the latter resembling one another as fashionable
women do. Some cities seem to have an active sense of duty, others not.
And almost all cities, like almost all people, appear to be capable
alike of baseness and nobility. Some cities are rich and proud like
self-made millionaires; others, by comparison, are poor. But let me
digress here to say that, though I have heard mention of "hard times" at
certain points along my way, I don't believe our modern generation knows
what hard times really are. To most Americans the term appears to
signify that life is hard indeed on him who has no motor car or who
goes without champagne at dinner.
* * * * *
My contacts with many places and persons I shall mention in the
following chapters have, of necessity, been brief. I have hardly more
than glimpsed them as I glimpsed those fellow travelers on the train.
Therefore I shall merely try to give you some impressions, from a sort
of mental sketchbook, of the things which I have seen and done and
heard. There is one point in particular about that sketchbook: in it I
have reserved the right to set down only what I pleased. It has been
hard to do that sometimes. People have pulled me this way and that,
telling me what to see and what not to see, what to write and what to
leave out. I have been urged, for instance, to write about the varied
industries of Cleveland, the parks of Milwaukee, and the enormous red
apples of Louisiana, Mo. I may come to the apples later on, for I ate a
number of them and enjoyed them; but the varied industries of Cleveland
and the Milwaukee parks I did not eat.
I claim the further right to ignore, when I desire to, the most
important things, or to dwell with loving pen upon the unimportant.
Indeed, I reserve all rights--even to the right to be perverse.
Thus I shall mention things which people told me not to mention: the
droll Detroit Art Museum; the comic chimney rising from the center of a
Grand Rapids park; horrendous scenes in the Chicago stockyards; the
Free Bridge, standing useless over the river at St. Louis for want of
an approach; the "wettest block"--a block full of saloons, which marks
the dead line between "wet" Kansas City, Mo., and "dry" Kansas City,
Kas. (I never heard about that block until a stranger wrote and told me
not to mention it.)
As for statistics, though I have been loaded with them to the point of
purchasing another trunk, I intend to use them as sparingly as possible.
And every time I use them I shall groan.
CHAPTER II
BIFURCATED BUFFALO
Alighting from the train at Buffalo, I was reminded of my earlier
reflection that railway stations should express their cities. In Buffalo
the thought is painful. If that city were in fact, expressed by its
present railway stations, people would not get off there voluntarily;
they would have to be put off. And yet, from what I have been told, the
curious and particularly ugly relic which is the New York Central
Station there, to-day, does tell a certain story of the city. Buffalo
has long been torn by factional quarrels--among them a protracted fight
as to the location of a modern station for the New York Central Lines.
The East Side wants it; the West Side wants it. Neither has it. The old
station still stands--at least it was standing when I left Buffalo, for
I was very careful not to bump it with my suit case.
This difference of opinion between the East Side and the West with
regard to the placing of a station is, I am informed, quite typical of
Buffalo. Socially, commercially, religiously, politically, the two sides
disagree. The dividing line between them, geographically, is not, as
might be supposed, Division Street. (That, by the way, is a peculiarity
of highways called "Division Street" in most cities--they seldom divide
anything more important than one row of buildings from another.) The
real street of division is called Main.
Main Street! How many American towns and cities have used that name, and
what a stupid name it is! It is as characterless as a number, and it
lacks the number's one excuse for being. If names like Tenth Street or
Eleventh Avenue fail to kindle the imagination they do not fail, at all
events, to help the stranger find his way--although it should be added
that strangers do, somehow, manage to find their way about in London,
Paris, and even Boston, where the modern American system of numbering
streets and avenues is not in vogue. But I am not agitating against the
numbering of streets. Indeed, I fear I rather believe in it, as I
believe in certain other dull but useful things like work and government
reports. What I am crying out about is the stupid naming of such streets
as carry names. Why do we have so many Main Streets? Do you think we
lack imagination? Then look at the names of Western towns and Kansas
girls and Pullman cars! The thing is an enigma.
Main Street is not only a bad name for a thoroughfare; the quality which
it implies is unfortunate. And that quality may be seen in Main Street,
Buffalo. On an exaggerated scale that street _is_ like the Main Street
of a little town, for the business district, the retail shopping
district, all the city's activities string along on either side. It is
bad for a city to grow in that elongated way just as it is bad for a
human being. To either it imparts a kind of gawky awkwardness.
[Illustration: We made believe we wanted to go out and smoke. And as we
left our seats she made believe she didn't know that we were going]
The development of Main Street, Buffalo, has been natural. That is just
the trouble; it has been too natural. Originally it was the Iroquois
trail; later the route followed by the stages coming from the East. So
it has grown up from log-cabin days. It is a fine, broad street; all
that it lacks is "features." It runs along its wide, monotonous way
until it stops in the squalid surroundings of the river; and if the
river did not happen to be there to stop it, it would go on and on
developing, indefinitely, and uninterestingly, in that direction as well
as in the other.
The thing which Buffalo lacks physically is a recognizable center; a
point at which a stranger would stop, as he stops in Piccadilly Circus
or the Place de l'Opera, and say to himself with absolute assurance:
"Now I am at the very heart of the city." Every city ought to have a
center, and every center ought to signify in its spaciousness, its
arrangement and its architecture, a city's dignity. Buffalo is,
unfortunately, far from being alone in her need of such a thing. Where
Buffalo is most at fault is that she does not even seem to be thinking
of municipal distinction. And very many other cities are. Cleveland is
already attaining it in a manner which will be magnificent; Chicago has
long planned and is slowly executing; Denver has work upon a splendid
municipal center well under way; so has San Francisco; St. Louis,
Milwaukee, and Grand Rapids have plans for excellent municipal
improvements. Even St. Paul is waking up and widening an important
business street.
* * * * *
Every one knows that what is called "a wave of reform" has swept across
the country, but not every one seems to know that there is also surging
over the United States a "wave" of improved public taste. I shall write
more of this later. Suffice it now to say that it manifests itself in
countless forms: in municipal improvements of the kind of which the
Cleveland center is, perhaps, the best example in the country; in
architecture of all classes; in household furniture and decoration; in
the tendency of art museums to realize that modern American paintings
are the finest modern paintings obtainable in the world to-day; in the
tendency of private art collectors not to buy quite so much rubbish as
they have bought in the past; in the Panama-Pacific Exposition, which
will be the most beautiful exposition anybody ever saw; and in
innumerable other ways. Indeed, public taste in the United States has,
in the last ten years, taken a leap forward which the mind of to-day
cannot hope to measure. The advance is nothing less than marvelous, and
it is reflected, I think, in every branch of art excepting one: the
literary art, which has in our day, and in our country, reached an
abysmal depth of degradation.
With Cleveland so near at hand as an example, and so many other
American cities thinking about civic beauty, Buffalo ought soon to begin
to rub her eyes, look about, and cast up her accounts. Perhaps her
trouble is that she is a little bit too prosperous with an olden-time
prosperity; a little bit too somnolent and satisfied. There is plenty to
eat; business is not so bad; there are good clubs, and there is a
delightful social life and a more than ordinary degree of cultivation.
Furthermore, there may be a new station for the New York Central some
day, for it is a fact that there are now some street cars which actually
_cross_ Main Street, instead of stopping at the Rubicon and making
passengers get out, cross on foot, and take the other car on the other
side! That, in itself, is a startling state of things. Evidently all
that is needed now is an earthquake.
* * * * *
I have remarked before that cities, like people, have habits. Just as
Detroit has the automobile habit, Pittsburgh the steel habit, Erie, Pa.,
the boiler habit, Grand Rapids the furniture habit, and Louisville the
(if one may say so) whisky habit, Buffalo had in earlier times the
transportation habit. The first fortunes made in Buffalo came originally
from the old Central Wharf, where toll was taken of the passing
commerce. Hand in hand with shipping came that business known by the
unpleasant name of "jobbing." From the opening of the Erie Canal until
the late seventies, jobbing flourished in Buffalo, but of recent years
her jobbing territory has diminished as competition with surrounding
centers has increased.
The early profits from docks and shipping were considerable. The
business was easy; it involved comparatively small investment and but
little risk. So when, with the introduction of through bills of lading,
this business dwindled, it was hard for Buffalo to readjust herself to
more daring ventures, such as manufacturing. "For," as a Buffalo man
remarked to me, "there is only one thing more timid than a million
dollars, and that is two million." It was the same gentleman, I think,
who, in comparing the Buffalo of to-day with the Buffalo of other days,
called my attention to the fact that not one man in the city is a
director of a steam railroad company.
From her geographical position with regard to ore, limestone, and coal
it would seem that Buffalo might well become a great iron and steel city
like Cleveland, but for some reason her ventures in this direction have
been unfortunate. One steel company in which Buffalo money was invested,
failed; another has been struggling along for some years and has not so
far proved profitable. Some Buffalonians made money in a land boom a
dozen or so years since; then came the panic, and the boom burst with a
loud report, right in Buffalo's face.
Back of most of this trouble there seems to have been a streak of real
ill luck.
[Illustration: The gentleman who favored linen mesh was a fat,
prosperous-looking person, whose gold-rimmed spectacles reflected flying
lights from out of doors]
There is a great deal of money in Buffalo, but it is wary
money--financial wariness seems to be another Buffalo habit. And there
are other cities with the same characteristic. You can tell them
because, when you begin to ask about various enterprises, people will
say: "No, we haven't this and we haven't that, but this is a safe town
in times of financial panic." That is what they say in Buffalo; they
also say it in St. Louis and St. Paul. But if they say it in Chicago, or
Minneapolis, or Kansas City, or in those lively cities of the Pacific
slope, I did not hear them. Those cities are not worrying about
financial panics which may come some day, but are busy with the things
which are.
If you ask a Buffalo man what is the matter with his city, he will, very
likely, sit down with great solemnity and try to tell you, and even call
a friend to help him, so as to be sure that nothing is overlooked. He
may tell you that the city lacks one great big dominating man to lead it
into action; or that there has been, until recently, lack of cooperation
between the banks; or that there are ninety or a hundred thousand Poles
in the city and only about the same number of people springing from what
may be called "old American stock." Or he may tell you something else.
If, upon the other hand, you ask a Minneapolis man that question, what
will he do? He will look at you pityingly and think you are demented.
Then he will tell you very positively that there is nothing the matter
with Minneapolis, but that there is something definitely the matter with
any one who thinks there is! Yes, indeed! If you want to find out what
is the matter with Minneapolis, it is still necessary to go for
information to St. Paul. As you proceed westward, such a question
becomes increasingly dangerous.
Ask a Kansas City man what is wrong with his town and he will probably
attack you; and as for Los Angeles--! Such a question in Los Angeles
would mean the calling out of the National Guard, the Chamber of
Commerce, the Rotary Club, and all the "boosters" (which is to say the
entire population of the city); the declaring of martial law, a trial by
summary court-martial, and your immediate execution. The manner of your
execution would depend upon the phrasing of your question. If you had
asked: "Is there anything wrong with Los Angeles?" they'd probably be
content with selling you a city lot and then hanging you; but if you
said: "What _is_ wrong with Los Angeles?" they would burn you at the
stake and pickle your remains in vitriol.
* * * * *
At this juncture I find myself oppressed with the idea that I haven't
done Buffalo justice. Also, I am annoyed to discover that I have written
a great deal about business. When I write about business I am almost
certain to be wrong. I dislike business very much--almost as much as I
dislike politics--and the idea of infringing upon the field of friends
of mine like Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, Miss Tarbell, Samuel
Hopkins Adams, Will Irwin, and others, is extremely distasteful to me.
But here is the trouble: so many writers have run a-muckraking that,
now-a-days, when a writer appears in any American city, every one assumes
that he is scouting around in search of "shame." The result is that you
don't have to hunt for shame. People bring it to you by the cartload.
They don't give you time to explain that you aren't a shame
collector--that you don't even know a good piece of shame when you see
it--they just drive up, dump it at your door, and go back to get another
load.
My companion and I were new at the game in Buffalo. As the loads of
shame began to arrive, we had a feeling that something was going wrong
with our trip. We had come in search of cheerful adventure, yet here we
were barricaded in by great bulwarks of shame. In a few hours there was
enough shame around us to have lasted all the reformers and muckrakers I
know a whole month. We couldn't see over the top of it. It hypnotized
us. We began to think that probably shame _was_ what we wanted, after
all. Every one we met assumed it was what we wanted, and when enough
people assume a certain thing about you it is very difficult to buck
against them. By the second day we had ceased to be human and had begun
to act like muckrakers. We became solemn, silent, mysterious. We would
pick up a piece of shame, examine it, say "_Ha!_" and stick it in our
pockets. When some white-faced Buffalonian would drive up with another
load of shame I would go up to him, wave my finger under his nose and,
trying to look as much like Steffens as I could, say in a sepulchral
voice: "Come! Out with it! What are you holding back? Tell me all! Who
tore up the missing will?" Then that poor, honest, terrified Buffalonian
would gasp and try to tell me all, between his chattering teeth. And
when he had told me all I would continue to glare at him horribly, and
ask for more. Then he would begin making up stories, inventing the most
frightful and shocking lies so as not to disappoint me. I would print
some of them here, but I have forgotten them. That is the trouble with
the amateur muckraker or reformer. His mind isn't trained to his work.
He is constantly allowing it to be diverted by some pleasant thing.
For instance, some one pointed out to me that the water front of the
city, along the Niagara River, is so taken up by the railroads that the
public does not get the benefit of that water life which adds so much to
the charm of Cleveland and Detroit. That situation struck me as
affording an excellent piece of muck to rake. For isn't it always the
open season so far as railroads are concerned?
I ought to have kept my mind on that, but in my childlike way I let
myself go ambling off through the parks. I found the parks delightful,
and in one of them I came upon a beautiful Greek temple, built of marble
and containing a collection of paintings of which any city should be
proud. Now that is a disconcerting sort of thing to find when you have
just abandoned yourself to the idea of becoming a muckraker! How can
you muckrake a gallery like that? It can't be done.
* * * * *
With the possible exception of the Chicago Art Institute my companion
and I did not see, upon our entire journey, any gallery of art in which
such good judgment had been shown in the selection of paintings as in
the Albright Gallery in Buffalo. Though the Chicago Art Institute is
much the larger and richer museum, and though its collection is more
comprehensive, its modern art is far more heterogeneous than that of
Buffalo. One admires that Albright Gallery not only for the paintings
which hang upon its walls, but also for those which do not hang there.
Judgment has been shown not only in selecting paintings, but (one
concludes) in rejecting gifts. I do not know that the Albright Gallery
has rejected gifts, but I do know that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York and the Chicago Art Institute have, at times, failed to reject
gifts which should have been rejected. Almost all museums fail in that
respect in their early days. When a rich man offers a bad painting, or a
roomful of bad paintings, the museum is afraid to say "No," because rich
men must be propitiated. That has been the curse of art museums; they
have to depend on rich men for support. And rich men, however generous
they may be, and however much they may be interested in art, are, for
the most part, lacking in any true and deep understanding of it. That
is one trouble with being rich--it doesn't give you time to be much of
anything else. If rich men really did _know_ art, there would not be so
many art dealers, and so many art dealers would not be going to
expensive tailors and riding in expensive limousines.
Those who control the Albright Gallery have been wise enough to
specialize in modern American painting. They have not been impressed, as
so many Americans still are impressed, by the sound of the word
"Europe." Nor have they attempted to secure old masters.
Does it not seem a mistake for any museum not possessed of enormous
wealth to attempt a collection of old masters? A really fine example of
the work of an old master ties up a vast amount of money, and, however
splendid it may be, it is only one canvas, after all; and one or two or
three old masters do not make a representative collection. Rather, it
seems to me, they tend to disturb balance in a small museum.
To many American ears "Europe" is still a magic word. It makes little
difference that Europe remains the happy hunting ground of the advanced
social climber; but it makes a good deal of difference that so many
American students of the arts continue to believe that there is some
mystic thing to be gotten over there which is unobtainable at home.
Europe has done much for us and can still do much for us, but we must
learn not to accept blindly as we have in the past. Until quite
recently, American art museums did, for the most part, buy European
art which was in many instances absolutely inferior to the art produced
at home. And unless I am very much mistaken a third-rate portrait
painter, with a European name (and a clever dealer to push him) can
still come over here and reap a harvest of thousands while Americans
with more ability are making hundreds.
[Illustration: In a few hours there was enough shame around us to have
lasted all the reformers and muckrakers I know a whole month]
One of the brightest signs for American painting to-day is the fact that
it is now found profitable to make and sell forgeries of the works of
our most distinguished modern artists--even living ones. This is a new
and encouraging situation. A few years ago it was hardly worth a
forger's time to make, say, a false Hassam, when he might just as well
be making a Corot--which reminds me of an amusing thing a painter said
to me the other day.
We were passing through an art gallery, when I happened to see at the
end of one room three canvases in the familiar manner of Corot.
"What a lot of Corots there are in this country," I remarked.
"Yes," he replied. "Of the ten thousand canvases painted by Corot, there
are thirty thousand in the United States."
* * * * *
There are two interesting hotels in Buffalo. One, the Iroquois, is
characterized by a kind of solid dignity and has for years enjoyed a
high reputation. It is patronized to-day at luncheon time by many of
Buffalo's leading business men. Another, the Statler, is more
"commercial" in character. My companion and I happened to stop at the
latter, and we became very much interested in certain things about it.
For one thing, every room in the hotel has running ice water and a
bath--either a tub or a shower. Everywhere in that hotel we saw signs.
At the desk, when we entered, hung a sign which read: _Clerk on duty,
Mr. Pratt_.
There were signs in our bedrooms, too. I don't remember all of them, but
there was one bearing the genial invitation: _Criticize and suggest for
the improvement of our service. Complaint and suggestion box in lobby._
While I was in that hotel I had nothing to "criticize and suggest," but
I have been in other hotels where, if such an invitation had been
extended to me, I should have stuffed the box.
Besides the signs, we found in each of our rooms the following: a
clothes brush; a card bearing on one side a calendar and on the other
side a list of all trains leaving Buffalo, and their times of departure;
a memorandum pad and pencil by the telephone; a Bible ("Placed in this
hotel by the Gideons"), and a pincushion, containing not only a variety
of pins (including a large safety pin), but also needles threaded with
black thread and white, and buttons of different kinds, even to a
suspender button.
[Illustration: My companion and I made excuses to go downstairs and wash
our hands in the public washroom, just for the pleasure of doing so
without fear of being attacked by a swarthy brigand with a brush]
But aside from the prompt service we received, I think the thing which
pleased us most about that hotel was a large sign in the public wash
room, downstairs. Had I come from the West I am not sure that sign would
have startled me so much, but coming from New York--! Well, this is what
it said:
_Believing that voluntary service in washrooms is distasteful to
guests, attendants are instructed to give no service which the
guest does not ask for._
Time and again, while we were in Buffalo, my companion and I made
excuses to go downstairs and wash our hands in the public washroom, just
for the pleasure of doing so without fear of being attacked by a swarthy
brigand with a brush. We became positively fond of the melancholy
washroom boy in that hotel. There was something pathetic in the way he
stood around waiting for some one to say: "Brush me!" Day after day he
pursued his policy of watchful waiting, hoping against hope that
something would happen--that some one would fall down in the mud and
really need to be brushed; that some one would take pity on him and let
himself be brushed anyhow. The pathos of that boy's predicament began to
affect us deeply. Finally we decided, just before leaving Buffalo, to go
downstairs and let him brush us. We did so. When we asked him to do it
he went very white at first. Then, with a glad cry, he leaped at us and
did his work. It was a real brushing we got that day--not a mere slap on
the back with a whisk broom, meaning "Stand and deliver!" but the kind
of brushing that takes the dust out of your clothes. The wash room was
full of dust before he got through. Great clouds of it went floating up
the stairs, filling the hotel lobby and making everybody sneeze. When he
finished we were renovated. "How much do you think we ought to give him
for all this?" I asked of my companion.
"If the conventional dime which we give the washroom boys in New York
hotels," he replied, "is proper payment for the services they render, I
should say we ought to give this boy about twenty-seven dollars."
* * * * *
There are many other things about Buffalo which should be mentioned.
There is the Buffalo Club--the dignified, solid old club of the city;
and there is the Saturn Club, "where women cease from troubling and the
wicked are at rest." And there is Delaware Avenue, on which stand both
these clubs, and many of the city's finest homes.
Unlike certain famous old residence streets in other cities, Delaware
Avenue still holds out against the encroachments of trade. It is a wide,
fine street of trees and lawns and residences. Despite the fact that
many of its older houses are of the ugly though substantial architecture
of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and many of its newer ones lack
architectural distinction, the general effect of Delaware Avenue is
still fine and American.
My impression of this celebrated street was necessarily hurried, having
been acquired in the course of sundry dashes down its length in motor
cars. I recall a number of its buildings only vaguely now, but there is
one which I admired every time I saw it, and which still clings in my
memory both as a building and as a sermon on the enduring beauty of
simplicity and good, old-fashioned lines--the office of Spencer Kellogg
& Sons, at the corner of Niagara Square.
* * * * *
It happened that just before we left New York there was a newspaper talk
about some rich women who had organized a movement of protest against
the ever-increasing American tendency toward show and extravagance. We
were, therefore, doubly interested when we heard of a similar activity
on the part of certain fashionable women of Buffalo.
Our hostess at a dinner party there was the first to mention it, but
several other ladies added details. They had formed a few days before a
society called the "Simplicity League," the members of which bound
themselves to give each other moral support in their efforts to return
to a more primitive mode of life. I cannot recall now whether the topic
came up before or after the butler and the footman came around with
caviar and cocktails, but I know that I had learned a lot about it from
charming and enthusiastic ladies at either side of me before the sherry
had come on; that, by the time the sauterne was served, I was deeply
impressed, and that, with the roast and the Burgundy, I was prepared to
take the field against all comers, not only in favor of simplicity, but
in favor of anything and everything which was favored by my hostess.
Throughout the salad, the ices, the Turkish coffee, and the
Corona-coronas I remained her champion, while with the port--ah!
nothing, it seems to me, recommends the old order of things quite so
thoroughly as old port, which has in it a sermon and a song. After
dinner the ladies told us more about their league.
"We don't intend to go to any foolish extremes," said one who looked
like the apotheosis of the Rue de la Paix. "We are only going to scale
things down and eliminate waste. There is a lot of useless show in this
country which only makes it hard for people who can't afford things. And
even for those who can, it is wrong. Take the matter of dress--a dress
can be simple without looking cheap. And it is the same with a dinner. A
dinner can be delicious without being elaborate. Take this little dinner
we had to-night--"
"_What?_" I cried.
"Yes," she nodded. "In future we are all going to give plain little
dinners like this."
"_Plain?_" I gasped.
Our hostess overheard my choking cry.
"Yes," she put in. "You see, the league is going to practise what it
preaches."
"But I didn't think it had begun yet! I thought this dinner was a kind
of farewell feast--that it was--"
[Illustration: I was prepared to take the field against all comers, not
only in favor of simplicity, but in favor of anything and everything
which was favored by my hostess]
Our hostess looked grieved. The other ladies of the league gazed at me
reproachfully.
"Why!" I heard one exclaim to another, "I don't believe he noticed!"
"Didn't you notice?" asked my hostess.
I was cornered.
"Notice?" I asked. "Notice _what_?"
"That we didn't have champagne!" she said.
CHAPTER III
CLEVELAND CHARACTERISTICS
Before leaving home we were presented with a variety of gifts, ranging
all the way from ear muffs to advice. Having some regard for the
esthetic, we threw away the ear muffs, determining to buy ourselves fur
caps when we should need them. But the advice we could not throw away;
it stuck to us like a poor relation.
In the parlor car, on the way from Buffalo to Cleveland, our minds got
running on sad subjects.
"We have come out to find interesting things--to have adventures," said
my blithe companion. "Now supposing we go on and on and nothing happens.
What will we do then? The publishers will have spent all this money for
our traveling, and what will they get?"
I told him that, in such an event, we would make up adventures.
"What, for instance?" he demanded.
I thought for a time. Then I said:
"Here's a good scheme--we could begin now, right here in this car. You
act like a crazy man. I will be your keeper. You run up and down the
aisle shouting--talk wildly to these people--stamp on your hat--do
anything you like. It will interest the passengers and give us something
nice to write about. And you could make a picture of yourself, too."
Instead of appreciating that suggestion he was annoyed with me, so I
ventured something else.
"How would it be for you to beat a policeman on the helmet?"
He didn't care for that either.
"Why don't you think of something for yourself to do?" he said, somewhat
sourly.
"All right," I returned. "I'm willing to do my share. I will poison you
and get arrested for it."
"If you do that," he criticized, "who will make the pictures?"
I saw that he was in a humor to find fault with anything I proposed, so
I let him ramble on. He had a regular orgy of imaginary disaster,
running all the way from train wrecks, in which I was killed and he was
saved only to have the bother and expense of shipping my remains home,
to fires in which my notebooks were burned up, leaving on his hands a
lot of superb but useless drawings.
After a time he suggested that we make up a list of the things we had
been warned of. I did not wish to do it, but, acting on the theory that
fever must run its course, I agreed, so we took paper and pencil and
began. It required about two hours to get everything down, beginning
with _Aches_, _Actresses_, _Adenoids_, _Alcoholism_, _Amnesia_, _Arson_,
etc., and running on, through the alphabet to _Zero weather_,
_Zolaism_, and _Zymosis_.
After looking over the category, my companion said:
"The trouble with this list is that it doesn't present things in the
order in which they may reasonably be expected to occur. For instance,
you might get zymosis, or attempt to write like Zola, at almost any
time, yet those two dangers are down at the bottom of the list. On the
other hand, things like actresses, alcoholism, and arson seem remote. We
must rearrange."
I thought it wise to give in to him, so we set to work again. This time
we made two lists: one of general dangers--things which might overtake
us almost anywhere, such as scarlet fever, hardening of the arteries,
softening of the brain, and "road shows" from the New York Winter
Garden; another arranged geographically, according to our route. Thus,
for example, instead of listing Elbert Hubbard under the letter "H," we
elevated him to first place, because he lives near Buffalo, which was
our first stop.
I didn't want to put down Hubbard's name at all--I thought it would
please him too much if he ever heard about it. I said to my companion:
"We have already passed Buffalo. And, besides, there are some things
which the instinct of self-preservation causes one to recollect without
the aid of any list."
"I know it," he returned, stubbornly, "but, in the interest of science,
I wish this list to be complete."
So we put down everything: Elbert Hubbard, Herbert Kaufman, Eva
Tanguay, Upton Sinclair, and all.
[Illustration: Chamber of Commerce representatives were with us all the
first day and until we went to our rooms, late at night]
A few selected items from our geographical list may interest the reader
as giving him some idea of the locations of certain things we had to
fear. For example, west of Chicago we listed _Oysters_, and north of
Chicago _Frozen Ears_ and _Frozen Noses_--the latter two representing
the dangers of the Minnesota winter. So our list ran on until it reached
the point where we would cross the Great Divide, at which place the word
"_Boosters_" was writ large.
I recall now that, according to our geographical arrangement, there
wasn't much to be afraid of until we got beyond Chicago, and that the
first thing we looked forward to with real dread was the cold in
Minnesota. We dreaded it more than arson, because if some one sets fire
to your ear or your nose, you know it right away, and can send in an
alarm; but cold is sneaky. It seems, from what they say, that you can go
along the street, feeling perfectly well, and with no idea that anything
is going wrong with you, until some experienced resident of the place
touches you upon the arm and says: "Excuse me, sir, but you have dropped
something." Then you look around, surprised, and there is your ear,
lying on the sidewalk. But that is not the worst of it. Before you can
thank the man, or pick your ear up and dust it off, some one will very
likely come along and step on it. I do not think they do it purposely;
they are simply careless about where they walk. But whether it happens
by accident or design, whether the ear is spoiled or not, whether or
not you be wearing your ear at the time of the occurrence--in any case
there is something exceedingly offensive, to the average man, in the
idea of a total stranger's walking on his ear.
I mention this to point a moral. However prepared we may be, in life, we
are always unprepared. However informed we may be, we are always
uninformed. We gaze up at the sky, dreading to-morrow's rain, and slip
upon to-day's banana peel. We move toward Cleveland dreading the
Minnesota winter which is yet far off, having no thought of the
"booster," whom we believe to be still farther off. And what happens? We
step from the train, all innocent and trusting, and then, ah, then----!
* * * * *
If it be true, indeed, that the "booster" flourishes more furiously the
farther west you find him, let me say (and I say it after having visited
California, Oregon, and Washington) that Cleveland must be newly located
upon the map. For, if "boosting" be a western industry, Cleveland is not
an Ohio city, nor even a Pacific Slope city, but is an island out in the
midst of the Pacific Ocean.
Nor is this a mere opinion of my own. Upon the mastodonic brow of the
Cleveland Chamber of Commerce there hangs an official laurel wreath. The
New York Bureau of Municipal Research invited votes from the secretaries
of Chambers of Commerce and similar organizations in thirty leading
cities, as to which of these bodies had accomplished most for its city,
industrially, commercially, etc. Cleveland won.
No one who has caromed against the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce will
wonder that Cleveland won. All other Chambers of Commerce I have met,
sink into desuetude and insignificance when compared with that of
Cleveland. Where others merely "boost," Cleveland "boosts" intensively.
She can raise more bushels of statistics to the acre than other cities
can quarts. And the more Cleveland statistics you hear, the more you
become amazed that you do not live there. It seems reckless not to do
so. The Cleveland Chamber of Commerce can prove this to you not merely
with figures, but also with figures of speech.
Take the matter of population. Everybody knows that Cleveland is the
"Sixth City" in the United States, but not everybody knows that in 1850
she was forty-third. The Chamber of Commerce told me that, but I have
prepared some figures of my own which will, perhaps, give the reader
some idea of Cleveland's magnitude. Cleveland is only a little smaller
than Prague, while she has about 50,000 more people than Breslau.
If that does not impress you with the city's size, listen to this:
Cleveland is actually twice as great, in population, as either Nagoya or
Riga! Who would have believed it? The thing seems incredible! I never
dreamed that such a situation existed until I looked it up in the "World
Almanac." And some day, when I have more time, I intend to look up
Nagoya and Riga in the atlas and find out where they are.
A Chamber of Commerce booklet gives me the further information that
"Cleveland is the fifth American city in manufactures, and that she
comes first in the manufacture of steel ships, heavy machinery, wire and
wire nails, bolts and nuts, vapor stoves, electric carbons, malleable
castings, and telescopes"--a list which, by the way, sounds like one of
Lewis Carroll's compilations.
The information that Cleveland is also the first city in the world in
its record, per capita, for divorce, does not come to me from the
Chamber of Commerce booklet--but probably the fact was not known when
the booklet was printed.
Besides being first in so many interesting fields, Cleveland is the
second of the Great Lake cities, and is also second in "the value of its
product of women's outer wearing apparel and fancy knit goods."
It is, furthermore, "the cheapest market in the North for pig iron."
There are other figures I could give (saving myself a lot of trouble, at
the same time, because I only have to copy them from a book), but I want
to stop and let that pig-iron statement sink into you as it sank into me
when I first read it. I wonder if you knew it before? I am ashamed to
admit it, but _I_ did not. I didn't consider where I could get my pig
iron the cheapest. When I wanted pig iron I simply went out and bought
it, at the nearest place, right in New York. That is, I bought it in
New York unless I happened to be traveling when the craving came upon
me. In that case I would buy a small supply wherever I happened to
be--just enough to last me until I could get home again. I don't know
how pig iron affects you, but with me it acts peculiarly. Sometimes I go
along for weeks without even thinking of it; then, suddenly, I feel that
I must have some at once--even if it is the middle of the night. Of
course a man doesn't care what he pays for his pig iron when he feels
like that. But in my soberer moments I now realize that it is best to be
economical in such matters. The wisest plan is to order enough pig iron
from Cleveland to keep you for several months, being careful to notice
when the supply is running low, so that you can order another case.
[Illustration: It is an Elizabethan building, with a heavy timbered
front, suggesting some ancient, hospitable, London coffee house where
wits of old were used to meet]
Apropos of this let me say here, in response to many inquiries as to
what the nature of this work of mine would be, that I intend it to be
"useful as well as ornamental"--to quote the happy phrase, coined by
James Montgomery Flagg. That is, I intend not only to entertain and
instruct the reader but, where opportunity offers, to give him the
benefit of good sound advice, such as I have just given with regard to
the purchasing of pig iron.
CHAPTER IV
MORE CLEVELAND CHARACTERISTICS
Because I have told you so much about the Chamber of Commerce you must
not assume that the Chamber of Commerce was with us constantly while we
were in Cleveland, for that is not the case. True, Chamber of Commerce
representatives were with us all the first day and until we went to our
rooms, late at night. But at our rooms they left us, merely taking the
precaution to lock us in. No attempt was made to assist us in undressing
or to hear our prayers or tuck us into bed. Once in our rooms we were
left to our own devices. We were allowed to read a little, if we wished,
to whisper together, or even to amuse ourselves by playing with the
fixtures in the bathroom.
On the morning of the second day they came and let us out, and took us
to see a lot of interesting and edifying sights, but by afternoon they
had acquired sufficient confidence in us to turn us loose for a couple
of hours, allowing us to roam about, at large, while they attended to
their mail.
We made use of the freedom thus extended to us by presenting several
letters of introduction to Cleveland gentlemen, who took us to various
clubs.
Almost every large city in the country has one solid, dignified old
club, occupying a solid, dignified old building on a corner near the
busy part of town. The building is always recognizable, even to a
stranger. It suggests a fine cuisine, an excellent wine cellar, and a
great variety of good cigars in prime condition. In the front of such a
club there are large windows of plate glass, back of which the passer-by
may catch a glimpse of a trim white mustache and a silk hat. Looking at
the outside of the building, you know that there is a big, high-ceiled
room, at the front, dark in color and containing spacious leather
chairs, which should (and often do) contain aristocratic gentlemen who
have attained years of discretion and positions of importance. One feels
cheated if, on entering, one fails to encounter a member carrying a
malacca stick and wearing waxed mustaches, spats, and a gardenia. The
Union Club of New York is such a club; so is the Pacific Union of San
Francisco; so is the Chicago Club; and so, I fancy, from my glimpse of
it, is the Union Club of Cleveland.
In the larger cities there is usually another club, somewhat less formal
in architecture, decoration, and spirit, and given over, broadly
speaking, to the younger men--though there is often a good deal of
duplication of membership between the first mentioned type of club and
the second. The Tavern of Cleveland is of the second category; so is the
Saturn Club of Buffalo, of which I spoke in a former chapter. Almost
every good-sized city has, likewise, its university club, its athletic
club, and its country club. University clubs vary a good deal in
character, but athletic clubs and country clubs are in general pretty
true to type.
Besides such clubs as these, one finds, here and there, in the United
States, a few clubs of a character more unusual. Cleveland has three
unusual clubs: the Rowfant, a book collector's club; the Chagrin Valley
Hunt Club, at Gates Mills, near the city, and the Hermit Club.
Were it not for the fact that I detest the words "artistic" and
"bohemian," I should apply them to the Hermit Club. It is one of the few
clubs outside New York, Chicago, and San Francisco possessing its own
house and made up largely of men following the arts, or interested in
them. Like the Lambs of New York, the Hermits give shows in their
clubhouse, but the Lambs' is a club of actors, authors, composers, stage
managers, etc., while the Hermit Club is made up, so far as the theater
is concerned, of amateurs--amateurs having among them sufficient talent
to write and act their own shows, design their own costumes, paint their
own scenery, compose their own music, and even play it, too--for there
is an orchestra of members. I have never seen a Hermits' show, and I am
sorry, for I have heard that they are worth seeing. Certainly their
clubhouse is. It is an Elizabethan building, with a heavy timbered
front, suggesting some ancient, hospitable, London coffee house where
wits of old were used to meet. This illusion is enhanced by the
surroundings of the club, for it stands in an alley--or perhaps I had
better say a narrow lane--and is huddled down between the walls of
taller buildings.
The pleasant promise of the exterior is fulfilled within. The ground
floor rooms are low and cozy, and have a pleasant "rambling" feeling--a
step or two up here or down there. The stairway, leading to the floor
above, is narrow, with a genial kind of narrowness that seems to say:
"There is no one here with whom you'll mind rubbing elbows as you pass."
Ascending, you reach the main room, which occupies the entire upper
floor. This room is the Hermit Club. It is here that members gather and
that the more intimate shows are given. Large, with dark panels, and
heavy beams which spring up and lose themselves in warm shadows
overhead, it is a room combining dignity with gracious informality. And
let me add that, to my mind, such a combination is at once rare and
desirable in a club building--or, for the matter of that, in a home or a
human being. A club which is too informal is likely to seem trivial; a
club too dignified, austere. A club should neither seem to be a joke,
nor yet a mausoleum. If it be magnificent, it should not, at least,
overwhelm one with its magnificence; it should not chill one with its
grandeur, so that one lowers one's voice to a whisper and involuntarily
removes one's hat.
In some clubs a man leaves his hat upon his head or takes it off, as he
prefers. In others custom demands that he remove it. Some men will argue
that if you give a man his choice in that matter he feels more at home;
others contend that if he takes his hat off he will, at all events,
_look_ more at home, whereas, if he leaves it on he will look more as
though he were in a hotel. These are matters of opinion. There are many
pleasant clubs which differ on this minor point. But I do not think that
any club may be called pleasant in which a man is inclined to take off
his hat instinctively because of an air of grim formality which he
encounters on entering the door. To make an Irish bull upon this
subject, one of the nicest things that I remember of the Hermit Club is
that I don't remember whether we wore our hats while there or not.
* * * * *
The Chagrin Valley Hunt Club lies in a pleasant valley which acquired
its name through the error of a pioneer (General Moses Cleveland
himself, if I remember rightly) who, when sailing up Lake Erie, landed
at this point, mistaking it for the site of Cleveland, farther on, and
was hence chagrined. Here, more than a hundred years ago, the little
village of Gates Mills was settled by men whose buildings, left behind
them, still proclaim their New England origin. If ever I saw a
Connecticut village outside the State of Connecticut, that village is
Gates Mills, Ohio. Low white farmhouses, with picturesque doorways and
small windows divided into many panes, straggle pleasantly along on
either side of the winding country road, and there is even an old
meeting house, with a spire such as you may see in many a New England
hamlet.
[Illustration: In this charming, homelike old building, with its
grandfather's clock, its Windsor chairs, and its open wood fires, a
visitor finds it hard to realize that he is in the "west"]
The old Gates house, which was built in 1812 by the miller from whom the
place took its name, is passing a mellow old age as the house of the
Hunt Club. In this charming, homelike old building, with its
grandfather's clock, its Windsor chairs, and its open wood fires, a
visitor finds its hard to realize that he is actually in a portion of
the country which is still referred to, in New York, as "the west."
The Connecticut resemblance is accounted for by the fact that all this
section of the country was in the Western Reserve, which belonged to,
and was settled by, Connecticut. Thus travel teaches us! I knew
practically nothing, until then, of the Western Reserve, and even less
of hunt clubs. I had never been in a hunt club before, and my
impressions of such institutions had been gleaned entirely from short
stories and from prints showing rosy old rascals drinking. Probably
because of these prints I had always thought that "horsey"
people--particularly the "hunting set"--were generally addicted to the
extensive (and not merely external) use of alcohol. As others may be of
the same impression it is perhaps worth remarking that, while in the
Hunt Club, we saw a number of persons drinking tea, and that only two
were drinking alcoholic beverages--those two being visitors: an
illustrator and a writer from New York.
I mentioned that to the M. F. H., and told him of my earlier impression
as to hunt-club habits.
"Lots of people have that idea," he smiled, "but it is wrong. As a
matter of fact, few hunting people are teetotalers, but those who ride
straight are almost invariably temperate. They have to be. You can't be
in the saddle six or eight hours at a stretch, riding across country,
and do it on alcohol."
I also learned from the M. F. H. certain interesting things regarding a
fox's scent. Without having thought upon the subject, I had somehow
acquired the idea that hounds got the scent from the actual tracks of
the animal they followed. That is not so. The scent comes from the body
of the fox and is left behind him suspended in the air. And, other
conditions being equal, the harder your fox runs the stronger his scent
will be. The most favorable scent for following is what is known as a
"breast-high scent"--meaning a scent which hangs in suspension at a
point sufficiently high to render it unnecessary for the hounds to put
their heads down to the ground. Sometimes a scent hangs low; sometimes,
on the other hand, it rises so that, particularly in a covert, the
riders, seated upon their horses, can smell it, while the hounds cannot.
But I think I have said enough about this kind of thing. It is a
dangerous topic, for the terminology and etiquette of hunting are even
more elaborate than those of golf. Probably I have made some mistake
already; indeed, I know of one which I just escaped--I started to write
"dogs" instead of "hounds," and that is not done. I have a horror of
displaying my ignorance on matters of this kind. For I take a kind of
pride--and I think most men do--in being correct about comparatively
unimportant things. It is permissible to be wrong about important
things, such as politics, finance, and reform, and to explain them,
although you really know nothing about them. But with fox hunting it is
different. There are some people who really _do_ know about that, and
they are likely to catch you.
* * * * *
Two other Cleveland organizations should be mentioned.
Troop A of the Ohio National Guard is known as one of the most capable
bodies of militia in the entire country. It has been in existence for
some forty years, and its membership has always been recruited from
among the older and wealthier families of the city. The fame of Troop A
has reached beyond Ohio, for under its popular title, "The Black Horse
Troop," it has gone three times to Washington to act as escort to
Presidents of the United States at the time of their inauguration.
Cleveland is, furthermore, the headquarters for trotting racing. The
Cleveland Gentlemen's Driving Club is an old and exceedingly active
body, and its president, Mr. Harry K. Devereux, is also president of the
National Trotting Association.
* * * * *
A curious and characteristic thing which we encountered in no other city
is the Three-Cent Cult--a legacy left to the city by the late Tom
Johnson. Cleveland's street railway system is controlled by the city
and the fare is not five cents, but three. But that is not all. A
municipal lighting plant is, or soon will be, in operation, with charges
of from one to three cents per kilowatt hour. Also the city has gone
into the dance-hall business. There, too, the usual rate is cut: fifteen
cents will buy five dances in the municipal dance halls, instead of
three. No one will attempt to dispute that dancing, to-day, takes
precedence over the mere matter of eating, yet it is worth mentioning
that the Three-Cent Cult has even found its way into the lunch room.
Sandwiches may be purchased in Cleveland for three cents which are not
any worse than five-cent sandwiches in other cities.
Perhaps the finest thing about the Three-Cent Cult is the fact that it
runs counter to one of the most pronounced and pitiable traits of our
race: wastefulness. Sometimes it seems that, as a people, we take less
pride in what we save than in what we throw away. We have a "There's
more where that came from!" attitude of mind. A man with thousands a
year says: "Hell! What's a hundred?" and a man with hundreds imitates
him on a smaller scale. The humble fraction of a nickel is despised. All
honor, then, to Cleveland--the city which teaches her people that two
cents is worth saving, and then helps them to save it. Two points, in
this connection, are interesting:
One, that Cleveland has been trying to induce the Treasury Department to
resume the coinage of a three-cent piece; another, that the percentage
of depositors in savings banks in Cleveland, in proportion to the
population, is higher than in most other cities. And, by the way, the
savings banks pay 4 per cent.
* * * * *
We were taken in automobiles from one end of the city to the other. Down
by the docks we saw gigantic, strange machines, expressive of
Cleveland's lake commerce--machines for loading and unloading ships in
the space of a few hours. One type of machine would take a regular steel
coal car in its enormous claws and turn that car over, emptying the load
of coal into a ship as you might empty a cup of flour with your hand.
Then it would set the car down again, right side up, upon the track,
only to snatch the next one and repeat the operation.
Another machine for unloading ore would send its great steel hands down
into the vessel's hold, snatch them up filled with tons of the precious
product of the mines, and, reaching around backward, drop the load into
a waiting railroad car. The present Great Lakes record for loading is
held by the steamer _Corry_, which has taken on a cargo of 10,000 tons
of ore in twenty-five minutes. The record for unloading is held by the
_George F. Perkins_, from which a cargo of 10,250 tons of ore was
removed in two hours and forty-five minutes.
Some of the largest steamers of the Great Lakes may be compared, in
size, with ocean liners. A modern ore boat is a steel shell more than
six hundred feet long, with a little space set aside at the bows for
quarters and a little space astern for engines. The deck is a series of
enormous hatches, so that practically the entire top of the ship may be
removed in order to facilitate loading and unloading. As these great
vessels (many of which are built in Cleveland, by the way) are laid up
throughout the winter, when navigation on the Great Lakes is closed, it
is the custom to drive them hard during the open season. Some of them
make as many as thirty trips in the eight months of their activity, and
an idea of the volume of their traffic may be gotten from the statement
that "the iron-ore tonnage of the Cleveland district is greater than the
total tonnage of exports and imports at New York Harbor." One of the
little books about Cleveland, which they gave me, makes that statement.
It does not sound as though it could be true, but I do not think they
would dare print untruths about a thing like that, no matter how anxious
they might be to "boost." However, I feel it my duty to add that the
same books says: "Fifty per cent. of the population of the United States
and Canada _lies_ within a radius of five hundred miles of Cleveland."
* * * * *
I find that when I try to recall to my mind the picture of a city, I
think of certain streets which, for one reason or another, engraved
themselves more deeply than other streets upon my memory. One of my
clearest mental photographs of Cleveland is of endless streets of
homes.
Now, although I saw many houses, large and small, possessing real
beauty--most of them along the boulevards, in the Wade Park Allotment or
on Euclid Heights, where modern taste has had its opportunity--it is
nevertheless true that, for some curious reason connected with the
workings of the mind, those streets which I remember best, after some
months of absence, are not the streets possessed of the most charm.
I remember vividly, for instance, my disappointment on viewing the decay
of Euclid Avenue, which I had heard compared with Delaware, in Buffalo,
and which, in reality, does not compare with it at all, being rather run
down, and lined with those architectural monstrosities of the 70's
which, instead of mellowing into respectable antiquity, have the unhappy
faculty of becoming more horrible with time, like old painted harridans.
Another vivid recollection is of a sad monotony of streets, differing
only in name, containing blocks and blocks and miles and miles of humble
wooden homes, all very much alike in their uninteresting duplication.
These memories would make my mental Cleveland picture somewhat sad, were
it not for another recollection which dominates the picture and
glorifies the city. This recollection, too, has to do with squalid
thoroughfares, but in a different way.
Down near the railroad station, where the "red-light district" used to
be, there has long stood a tract of several blocks of little buildings,
dismal and dilapidated. They are coming down. Some of them have come
down. And there, in that place which was the home of ugliness and vice,
there now shows the beginning of the city's Municipal Group Plan. This
plan is one of the finest things which any city in the land has
contemplated for its own beautification. In this country it was, at the
time it originated, unique; and though other cities (such as Denver and
San Francisco) are now at work on similar improvements, the Cleveland
plan remains, I believe, the most imposing and the most complete of its
kind.
When an American city has needed some new public building it has been
the custom, in the past, for the politicians to settle on a site, and
cause plans to be drawn (by their cousins), and cause those plans to be
executed (by their brothers-in-law). This may have been "practical
politics," but it has hardly resulted in practical city improvement.
No one will dispute the convenience of having public buildings "handy"
to one another, but there may still be found, even in Cleveland, men
whose feeling for beauty is not so highly developed as their feeling for
finance; men who shake their heads at the mention of a group plan; who
don't like to "see all that money wasted." I met one or two such. But I
will venture the prophecy that, when the Cleveland plan is a little
farther advanced, so that the eye can realize the amazing
splendor of the thing, as it will ultimately be, there will be no one
left in Cleveland to convert.
[Illustration: Down by the docks we saw gigantic, strange machines,
expressive of Cleveland's lake commerce--machines for loading and
unloading ships in the space of a few hours]
It is a fine and unusual thing, in itself, for an American city to be
planning its own beauty fifty years ahead. Cleveland is almost
un-American in that! But when the work done--yes, and before it is
done--this single great improvement will have transformed Cleveland from
an ordinary looking city to one of great distinction.
Fancy emerging from a splendid railway station to find yourself facing,
not the little bars and dingy buildings which so often face a station,
but a splendid mall, two thousand feet long and six hundred wide, parked
in the center and surrounded by fine buildings of even cornice height
and harmonious classical design. At one side of the station will stand
the public library; at the other the Federal building; and at the far
extremity of the mall, the county building and the city hall.
Three of these buildings are already standing. Two more are under way.
The plan is no longer a mere plan but is already, in part, an actuality.
When the transformation is complete Cleveland will not only have re-made
herself but will have set a magnificent example to other cities. By that
time she may have ceased to call herself "Sixth City"--for population
changes. But if a hundred other cities follow her with group plans, and
whether those plans be of greater magnitude or less, it must never be
forgotten that Cleveland had the appreciation and the courage to begin
the movement in America, not merely on paper but in stone and marble,
and that, without regard to population, she therefore has a certain
right, to-day, to call herself "First City."
MICHIGAN MEANDERINGS
CHAPTER V
DETROIT THE DYNAMIC
Because Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit are, in effect, situated upon
Lake Erie, and because they are cities of approximately the same size,
and because of many other resemblances between them, they always seem to
me like three sisters living amicably in three separate houses on the
same block.
As I personify them, Buffalo, living at the eastern end of the block, is
the smallest sister. She has, I fear, a slight tendency to be anemic.
Her husband, who was in the shipping business, is getting old. He has
retired and is living in contentment in the old house, sitting all day
on the side porch, behind the vines, with his slippers cocked up on the
porch rail, smoking cigars and reading his newspapers in peace.
Cleveland is the fat sister. She is very rich, having married into the
Rockefeller family. She is placid, satisfied, dogmatically religious,
and inclined to platitudes and missionary work. Her house, in the middle
of the block, is a mansion of the seventies. It has a cupola and there
are iron fences on the roof, as though to keep the birds from falling
off. The lawn is decorated with a pair of iron dogs. But there are
plans in the old house for a new one.
The first two sisters have a kind of family resemblance which the third
does not fully share. Detroit seems younger than her sisters. Indeed,
you might almost mistake her for one of their daughters. The belle of
the family, she is married to a young man who is making piles of money
in the automobile business--and spending piles, too. Their house, at the
western end of the block, is new and charming.
I am half in love with Detroit. I may as well admit it, for you are sure
to find me out. She is beautiful--not with the warm, passionate beauty
of San Francisco, the austere mountain beauty of Denver, nor the
strange, sophisticated, destroying beauty of New York, but with a sweet
domestic kind of beauty, like that of a young wife, gay, strong, alert,
enthusiastic; a twinkle in her eye, a laugh upon her lips. She has
temperament and charm, qualities as rare, as fascinating, and as
difficult to define in a city as in a human being.
Do you ask why she is different from her sisters? I was afraid you might
ask that. They tell a romantic story. I don't like to repeat gossip,
but--They say that, long ago, when her mother lived upon a little farm
by the river, there came along a dashing voyageur, from France, who
loved her. Mind you, I vouch for nothing. It is a legend. I do not
affirm that it is true. But--_voila_! There is Detroit. She is
different.
If you will consider these three fictitious sisters as figures in a
cartoon--a cartoon not devoid of caricature--you will get an impression
of my impression of three cities. My three sisters are merely symbols,
like the figures of Uncle Sam and John Bull. A symbol is a kind of
generalization, and if you disagree with these generalizations of mine
(as I think you may, especially if you live in Buffalo or Cleveland),
let me remind you that some one has said: "All generalizations are
false--including this one." One respect in which my generalization is
false is in picturing Detroit as young. As a matter of fact, she is the
oldest city of the three, having been settled by the Sieur de la Mothe
Cadillac in 1701, ninety years before the first white man built his hut
where Buffalo now stands, and ninety-five years before the settlement of
Cleveland. This is the fact. Yet I hold that there is about Detroit
something which expresses ebullient youth, and that Buffalo and
Cleveland, if they do not altogether lack the quality of youth, have it
in a less degree.
* * * * *
So far as I recall, Chicago was the first American city to adopt a
motto, or, as they call it now, a "slogan."
I remember long ago a rather crude bust of a helmeted Amazon bearing
upon her proud chest the words: "I Will!" She was supposed to typify
Chicago, and I rather think she did. Cleveland's slogan is the
conservative but significant "Sixth City," but Detroit comes out with a
youthful shriek of self-satisfaction, declaring that: "In Detroit Life
is Worth Living!" Doesn't that claim reflect the quality of youth?
Doesn't it remind you of the little boy who says to the other little
boy: "My father can lick your father"? Of course it has the
patent-medicine flavor, too; Detroit, by her "slogan," is a cure-all.
But that is not deliberate. It is exaggeration springing from natural
optimism and exuberance. Life is doubtless more worth living in Detroit
than in some other cities, but I submit that, so long as Mark Twain's
"damn human race" retains those foibles of mind, morals, and body for
which it is so justly famous, the "slogan" of the city of Detroit
guarantees a little bit too much.
I find the same exuberance in the publications issued by the Detroit
Board of Commerce. Having just left the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, I
sedulously avoided contact with the Detroit body--one can get an
overdose of that kind of thing. But I have several books. One is a
magazine called "The Detroiter," with the subtitle "Spokesman of
Optimism." It is full of news of new hotels and new factories and new
athletic clubs and all kinds of expansion. It fairly bursts from its
covers with enthusiasm--and with business banalities about Detroit's
"onward sweep," her "surging ahead," her "banner year," and her
"efficiency." "Be a Booster," it advises, and no one can say that it
does not live up to its principles. Indeed, as I look it over, I wonder
if I have not done Detroit an injustice in giving to Cleveland the blue
ribbon for "boosting." The Detroit Board of Commerce even goes so far in
its "boosting" as to "boost" Detroit into seventh place among American
cities, while the "World Almanac" (most valuable volume on the one-foot
shelf of books I carried on my travels) places Detroit ninth.
Like Cleveland, I find that Detroit is first in the production of a
great many things. In fact, the more I read these books issued by
commercial bodies, the more I am amazed at the varied things there are
for cities to be first in. It is a miserable city, indeed, which is
first in nothing at all. Detroit is first in the production of overalls,
stoves, varnish, soda and salt products, automobile accessories, adding
machines, pharmaceutical manufactures, aluminum castings, in
shipbuilding on the Great Lakes and, above all, in the manufacture of
motor cars. And, as the Board of Commerce adds significantly, "That's
not all!"
But it is enough.
* * * * *
The motor-car development in Detroit interested me particularly. When I
asked in Buffalo why Detroit was "surging ahead" so rapidly in
comparison with certain other cities, they answered, as I knew they
would: "It's the automobile business."
But when I asked why the automobile business should have settled on
Detroit as a headquarters instead of some other city (as, for instance,
Buffalo), they found it difficult to say. One Buffalonian informed me
that Detroit banks had been more liberal than those of other cities in
supporting the motor industry in its early days. This was, however,
vigorously denied in Detroit. When I mentioned it to the president of
one of the largest automobile concerns he laughed.
"Banks don't do business that way," he declared. "The very thing banks
do not do is to support new, untried industries. After you have proved
that you can make both motor cars and money they'll take care of you.
Not before. On the other hand, when the banks get confidence in any one
kind of business they very often run to the opposite extreme. That was
the way it used to be in the lumber business. Most of the early fortunes
of Detroit were made in lumber. The banks got used to the lumber
business, so that a few years ago all a man had to do was to print
'Lumber' on his letterhead, write to the banks and get a line of credit.
Later, when the automobile business began to boom, the same thing
happened over again: the man whose letterhead bore the word
'Automobiles' was taken care of." The implication was that sometimes he
was taken care of a little bit too well.
"Then why did Detroit become the automobile center?" I asked.
The question proved good for an hour's discussion among certain learned
pundits of the "trade" who were in the president's office at the time I
asked it.
[Illustration: In midstream passes a continual parade
of freighters ... and in their swell you may see, teetering, all kinds
of craft, from proud white yachts to canoes]
First, it was concluded, several early motor "bugs" happened to live in
or near Detroit. Henry Ford lived there. He was always experimenting
with "horseless carriages" in the early days and being laughed at for
it. Also, a man named Packard built a car at Warren, Ohio. But the first
gasoline motor car to achieve what they call an "output" was the funny
little one-cylinder Oldsmobile which steered with a tiller and had a
curved dash like a sleigh. It is to the Olds Motor Company, which built
that car, that a large majority of the automobile manufactories in
Detroit trace their origin. Indeed, there are to-day no less than a
dozen organizations, the heads of which were at some time connected with
the original Olds Company. This fifteen-year-old forefather of the
automobile business was originally made in Lansing, Mich., but the plant
was moved to Detroit, where the market for labor and materials was
better. The Packard plant was also moved there, and for the same
reasons, plus the fact that the company was being financed by a group of
young Detroit men.
It was not, perhaps, entirely as an investment that these wealthy young
Detroiters first became interested in the building of motor cars. That
is to say, I do not think they would have poured money so freely into a
scheme to manufacture something else--something less picturesque in its
appeal to the sporting instinct and the imagination. The automobile,
with its promise, was just the right thing to interest rich young men,
and it did interest them, and it has made many of them richer than they
were before.
It seems to be an axiom that, if you start a new business anywhere, and
it is successful, others will start in the same business beside you. One
of the pundits referred me, for example, to Erie, Pa., where life is
entirely saturated with engine and boiler ideas simply because the Erie
City Iron Works started there and was successful. There are now sixteen
engine and boiler companies in Erie, and all of them, I am assured, are
there either directly or indirectly because the Erie City Iron Works is
there. In other words, we sat in that office and had a very pleasant
hour's talk merely to discover that there is truth in the familiar
saying about birds of a feather.
When we got that settled and the pundits began to drift away to other
plate-glass rooms along the mile, more or less, of corridor devoted to
officials' offices, I became interested in a little wooden box which
stood upon the president's large flat-top desk. I was told it was a
dictagraph. Never having seen a dictagraph before, and being something
of a child, I wished to play with it as I used to play with typewriters
and letter-presses in my father's office years ago. And the president of
this many-million-dollar corporation, being a kindly man with, of
course, absolutely nothing to do but to supply itinerant scribes with
playthings, let me toy with the machine. Sitting at the desk, he pressed
a key. Then, without changing his position, he spoke into the air:
"Fred," he said, "there's some one here who wants to ask you a
question."
Then the little wooden box began to talk.
"What does he want to ask about?" it said.
That put it up to me. I had to think of something to ask. I was
conscious of a strange, unpleasant feeling of being hurried--of having
to reply quickly before something happened--some breaking of
connections.
I leaned toward the machine, but the president waved me back: "Just sit
over there where you are."
Then I said: "I am writing articles about Buffalo, Cleveland, and
Detroit. How would you compare them?"
"Well," replied the Fred-in-the-box, "I used to live in Cleveland. I've
been here four years and I wouldn't want to go back."
After that we paused. I thought I ought to say something more to the
box, but I didn't know just what.
"Is that all you want to know?" it asked.
"Yes," I replied hurriedly. "I'm much obliged. That's all I want to
know."
Of course it really wasn't all--not by any means! But I couldn't bring
myself to say so then, so I said the easy, obvious thing, and after that
it was too late. Oh, how many things there are I want to know! How many
things I think of now which I would ask an oracle when there is none to
ask! Things about the here and the hereafter; about the human spirit;
about practical religion, the brotherhood of man, the inequalities of
men, evolution, reform, the enduring mysteries of space, time, eternity,
and woman!
A friend of mine--a spiritualist--once told me of a seance in which he
thought himself in brief communication with his mother. There were a
million things to say. But when the medium requested him to give a
message he could only falter: "Are you all right over there?" The answer
came: "Yes, all right." Then my friend said: "I'm so glad!" And that was
all.
"It is the feeling of awful pressure," he explained to me, "which drives
the thoughts out of your head. That is why so many messages from the
spirit world sound silly and inconsequential. You have the one great
chance to communicate with them, and, because it _is_ your one great
chance, you cannot think of anything to say." Somehow I imagine that the
feeling must be like the one I had in talking to the dictagraph.
* * * * *
Among the characteristics which give Detroit her individuality is the
survival of her oldtime aristocracy; she is one of the few
middle-western cities possessing such a social order. As with that of
St. Louis, this aristocracy is of French descent, the Sibleys, Campaus,
and other old Detroit families tracing their genealogies to forefathers
who came out to the New World under the flag of Louis XIV. The early
habitants acquired farms, most of them with small frontages on the river
and running back for several miles into the woods--an arrangement which
permitted farmhouses to be built close together for protection against
Indians. These farms, handed down for generations, form the basis of a
number of Detroit's older family fortunes.
[Illustration: The automobile has not only changed Detroit from a quiet
old town into a rich, active city, but upon the drowsy romance of the
old days it has superimposed the romance of modern business]
To-day commerce takes up the downtown portion of the river front, but
not far from the center of the city the shore line is still occupied by
residences. Along Jefferson Avenue are many homes, surrounded by
delightful lawns extending forward to the street and back to the river.
Most of these homes have in their back yards boathouses and docks--some
of the latter large enough to berth seagoing steam yachts, of which
Detroit boasts a considerable number. Nor is the water front reserved
entirely for private use. In Belle Isle, situated in the Detroit River,
and accessible by either boat or bridge, the city possesses one of the
most unusual and charming public parks to be seen in the entire world.
And there are many other pleasant places near Detroit which may be
reached by boat--among them the St. Clair Flats, famous for duck
shooting. All these features combine to make the river life active and
picturesque. In midstream passes a continual parade of freighters, a
little mail boat dodging out to meet each one as it goes by. Huge
side-wheel excursion steamers come and go, and in their swell you may
see, teetering, all kinds of craft, from proud white yachts with shining
brasswork and bowsprits having the expression of haughty turned-up
noses, down through the category of schooners, barges, tugs, motor
yachts, motor boats, sloops, small sailboats, rowboats, and canoes. You
may even catch sight of a hydroplane swiftly skimming the surface of
the river like some amphibious, prehistoric animal, or of that natty
little gunboat, captured from the Spaniards at the battle of Manila Bay,
which now serves as a training ship for the Michigan Naval Reserve.
A good many of the young aristocrats of Detroit have belonged to the
Naval Reserve, among them Mr. Truman H. Newberry, former Secretary of
the Navy, about whom I heard an amusing story.
According to this tale, as it was told me in Detroit, Mr. Newberry was
some years ago a common seaman in the Reserve. It seems that on the
occasion of the annual cruise of this body on the Great Lakes, a regular
naval officer is sent out to take command of the training ship. One day,
when common seaman Newberry was engaged in the maritime occupation of
swabbing down the decks abaft the bridge, a large yacht passed
majestically by.
"My man," said the regular naval officer on the bridge to common seaman
Newberry below, "do you know what yacht that is?"
Newberry saluted. "The _Truant_, sir," he said respectfully, and resumed
his work.
"Who owns her?" asked the officer.
Again Newberry straightened and saluted.
"I do, sir," he said.
CHAPTER VI
AUTOMOBILES AND ART
Within the last few years there has come to Detroit a new life. The vast
growth of the city, owing to the development of the automobile industry,
has brought in many new, active, able business men and their families,
whom the old Detroiters have dubbed the "Gasoline Aristocracy." Thus
there are in Detroit two fairly distinct social groups--the Grosse
Pointe group, of which the old families form the nucleus, and the North
Woodward group, largely made up of newcomers.
The automobile has not only changed Detroit from a quiet old town into a
rich, active city, but upon the drowsy romance of the old days it has
superimposed a new kind of romance--the romance of modern business.
Fiction in its wildest flights hardly rivals the true stories of certain
motor moguls of Detroit. Every one can tell you these stories. If you
are a novelist all you have to do is go and get them. But, aside from
stories which are true, there have developed, in connection with the
automobile business, certain fictions more or less picturesque in
character. One of these, which has been widely circulated, is that "90
per cent. of the automobile business of Detroit is done in the bar of
the Pontchartrain Hotel." The big men of the business resent that yarn.
And, of course, it is preposterously false. Neither 90 per cent. nor 10
per cent. nor any appreciable per cent. of the automobile business is
done there. Indeed, you hardly ever see a really important
representative of the business in that place. Such men are not given to
hanging around bars.
I do not wish the reader to infer that I hung around the bar myself in
order to ascertain this fact. Not at all. I had heard the story and was
apprised of its untruth by the president of one of the large motor car
companies who was generously showing me about. As we bowled along one of
the wide streets which passes through that open place at the center of
the city called the Campus Martius, I was struck, as any visitor must
be, by the spectacle of hundreds upon hundreds of automobiles parked,
nose to the curb, tail to the street, in solid rows.
"You could tell that this was an automobile city," I remarked.
"Do you know why you see so many of them?" he asked with a smile.
I said I supposed it was because there were so many automobiles owned in
Detroit.
"No," he explained. "In other cities with as many and more cars you will
not see this kind of thing. They don't permit it. But our wide streets
lend themselves to it, and our Chief of Police, who believes in the
automobile business as much as any of the rest of us, also lends
himself to it. He lets us leave our cars about the streets because he
thinks it a good advertisement for the town."
As he spoke he was forced to draw up at a crossing to let a funeral
pass. It was an automobile funeral. The hearse, black and terrible
as only a hearse can be, was going at a modest pace for a motor,
but an exceedingly rapid pace for a hearse. If I am any judge of
speed, the departed was being wafted to his final resting place at
the somewhat sprightly clip of twelve or fifteen miles an hour.
Behind the hearse trailed limousines and touring cars. Two humble
taxicabs brought up the rear. There was a grim ridiculousness
about the procession's progress--pleasure cars throttled down,
trying to look solemn--chauffeurs continually throwing out their
clutches in a commendable effort to keep a respectful rate of speed.
Is there any other thing in the world which epitomizes our times as does
an automobile funeral? Yesterday such a thing would have been deemed
indecorous; to-day it is not only decorous, but rather chic, provided
that the pace be slow; to-morrow--what will it be then? Will hearses go
shooting through the streets at forty miles an hour? Will mourners
scorch behind, their horns shrieking signals to the driver of the hearse
to get out of the road and let the swiftest pass ahead, where there
isn't all that dust? I am afraid a time is close at hand when, if
hearses are to maintain that position in the funeral cortege to which
convention has in the past assigned them, they will have to hold it by
sheer force of superior horsepower!
* * * * *
Detroit is a young man's town. I do not think the stand-pat, sit-tight,
go-easy kind of business man exists there. The wheel of commerce has
wire spokes and rubber tires, and there is no drag upon the brake band.
Youth is at the steering wheel--both figuratively and literally. The
heads of great Detroit industries drive their own cars; and if the fact
seems unimportant, consider: do the leading men of your city drive
theirs? Or are they driven by chauffeurs? Have they, in other words,
reached a time of life and a frame of mind which prohibit their taking
the wheel because it is not safe for them to do so, or worse yet,
because it is not dignified? Have they that energy which replaces
worn-out tires--and methods--and ideas?
I have said that the president of a large automobile company showed me
about Detroit. I don't know what his age is, but he is under
thirty-five. I don't know what his fortune is, but he is suspected of a
million, and whatever he may have, he has made himself. I hope he is a
millionaire, for there is in the entire world only one other man who, I
feel absolutely certain, deserves a million dollars more than he
does--and a native modesty prevents my mentioning this other's name.
Looking at my friend, the president, I am always struck with fresh
amazement. I want to say to him: "You can't be the president of that
great big company! I know you sit in the president's office, but--look
at your hair; it isn't even turning gray! I refuse to believe that you
are president until you show me your ticket, or your diploma, or
whatever it is that a president has!"
Becoming curious about his exact age, I took up my "Who's Who in
America" one evening ("Who's Who" is another valued volume on my
one-foot shelf) with a view to finding out. But all I did find out was
that his name is not contained therein. That struck me as surprising. I
looked up the heads of half a dozen other enormous automobile
companies--men of importance, interest, reputation. Of these I
discovered the name of but one, and that one was not (as I should have
rather expected it to be) Henry Ford. (There is a Henry Ford in my
"Who's Who," but he is a professor at Princeton and writes for the
_Atlantic Monthly_!)[1]
Now whether this is so because of the newness of the automobile
business, or because "Who's Who" turns up its nose at "trade," in
contradistinction to the professions and the arts, I cannot say.
Obviously, the compilation of such a work involves tremendous
difficulties, and I have always respected the volume for the ability
with which it overcomes them; but when a Detroit dentist (who invented,
as I recollect, some new kind of filling) is included in "Who's Who,"
and when almost every minor poet who squeaks is in it, and almost every
illustrator who makes candy-looking girls for magazine covers, and
almost every writer--then it seems to me time to include, as well, the
names of men who are in charge of that industry which is not only the
greatest in Detroit, but which, more than any industry since the
inception of the telephone, has transformed our life.
The fact of the matter is, of course, that writers, in particular, are
taken too seriously, not merely by "Who's Who" but by all kinds of
publications--especially newspapers. Only opera singers and actors can
vie with writers in the amount of undeserved publicity which they
receive. If I omit professional baseball players it is by intention;
for, as a fan might say, they have to "deliver the goods."
[Footnote 1: "Who's Who" for 1913-1914. The more recent volume, which
has come out since, contains a biographical sketch of Mr. Henry Ford of
Detroit.]
* * * * *
Baedeker's United States, a third volume in the condensed library I
carried in my trunk, sets forth (in small type!) the following: "The
finest private art gallery in Detroit is that of Mr. Charles L. Freer.
The gallery contains the largest group of works by Whistler in existence
and good examples of Tryon, Dewing, and Abbott Thayer as well as many
Oriental paintings and potteries."
But in the case of the Detroit Museum of Art, Baedeker bursts into
black-faced type, and even adds an asterisk, his mark of special
commendation. Also a considerable reference is made to various
collections contained by the museum: the Scripps collection of old
masters, the Stearns collection of Oriental curiosities, a painting by
Rubens, drawings by Raphael and Michelangelo, and a great many works
attributed to ancient Italian and Dutch masters. "The museum also
contains," says Baedeker, "modern paintings by Gari Melchers, Munkacsy,
Tryon, F. D. Millet, and others."
I have quoted Baedeker as above, because it reveals the bald fact with
regard to art in Detroit; also because it reveals the even balder fact
that our blessed old friend Baedeker, who has helped us all so much,
can, when he cuts loose on art, make himself exquisitely ridiculous.
The truth is, of course, that Mr. Freer's gallery is not merely the
"finest private gallery in Detroit"; not merely the finest gallery of
any kind in Detroit; but that it is one of the exceedingly important
collections of the world, just as Mr. Freer is one of the world's
exceedingly important authorities on art. Indeed, any town which
contains Mr. Freer--even if he is only stopping overnight in a
hotel--becomes by grace of his presence an important art center for the
time being. His mere presence is sufficient. For in Mr. Freer's head
there is more art than is contained in many a museum. He was the man
whom, above all others in Detroit, we wished to see. (And that is no
disparagement of Henry Ford.)
Once in a long, long time it is given to the average human being to make
contact for a brief space with some other human being far above the
average--a man who knows one thing supremely well. I have met six such
men: a surgeon, a musician, an author, an actor, a painter, and Mr.
Charles L. Freer.
I do not know much of Mr. Freer's history. He was not born in Detroit,
though it was there that he made the fortune which enabled him to retire
from business. It is surprising enough to hear of an American business
man willing to retire in the prime of life. You expect that in Europe,
not here. And it is still more surprising when that American business
man begins to devote to art the same energy which made him a success
financially. Few would want to do that; fewer could. By the time the
average successful man has wrung from the world a few hundred thousand
dollars, he is fit for nothing else. He has become a wringer and must
remain one always.
Of course rich men collect pictures. I'm not denying that. But they do
it, generally, for the same reason they collect butlers and
footmen--because tradition says it is the proper thing to do. And I have
observed in the course of my meanderings that they are almost invariably
better judges of butlers than of paintings. That is because their
butlers are really and truly more important to them--excepting as their
paintings have financial value. Still, if the world is full of so-called
art collectors who don't know what they're doing, let us not think of
them too harshly, for there are also painters who do not know what they
are doing, and it is necessary that some one should support them.
Otherwise they would starve, and a bad painter should not have to do
that--starvation being an honor reserved by tradition for the truly
great.
Very keenly I feel the futility of an attempt to tell of Mr. Freer in a
few paragraphs. He should be dealt with as Mark Twain was dealt with by
that prince of biographers, Albert Bigelow Paine; some one should live
with him through the remainder of his life--always sympathetic and
appreciative, always ready to draw him out, always with a notebook. It
should be some one just like Paine, and as there isn't some one just
like Paine, it should be Paine himself.
Probably as a development of his original interest in Whistler, Mr.
Freer has, of late years, devoted himself almost entirely to ancient
Oriental art--sculptures, paintings, ceramics, bronzes, textiles,
lacquers and jades. The very rumor that in some little town in the
interior of China was an old vase finer than any other known vase of the
kind, has been enough to set him traveling. Many of his greatest
treasures he has unearthed, bargained for and acquired at first hand, in
remote parts of the globe. He bearded Whistler in his den--that is a
story by itself. He purchased Whistler's famous Peacock Room, brought
it to this country and set it up in his own house. He traveled on
elephant-back through the jungles of India and Java in search of buried
temples; to Egypt for Biblical manuscripts and potteries, and to the
nearer East, years ago, in quest of the now famous "lustered glazes." He
made many trips to Japan, in early days, to study, in ancient temples
and private collections, the fine arts of China, Corea and Japan, and
was the first American student to visit the rock-hewn caves of central
China, with their thousands of specimens of early sculpture--sculpture
ranking, Mr. Freer says, with the best sculpture of the world.
The photographs and rubbings of these objects made under Mr. Freer's
personal supervision have greatly aided students, all over the globe.
Every important public library in this country and abroad has been
presented by Mr. Freer with fac-similes of the Biblical manuscripts
discovered by him in Egypt about seven years ago, so far as these have
been published. The original manuscripts will ultimately go to the
National Gallery, at Washington.
Mr. Freer's later life has been one long treasure hunt. Now he will be
pursuing a pair of mysterious porcelains around the earth, catching up
with them in China, losing them, finding them again in Japan, or in New
York, or Paris; now discovering in some unheard-of Chinese town a
venerable masterpiece, painted on silk, which has been rolled into a
ball for a child's plaything. The placid pleasures of conventional
collecting, through the dealers, is not the thing that Mr. Freer loves.
He loves the chase.
You should see him handle his ceramics. You should hear him talk of
them! He _knows_. And though you do not know, you know he knows. More,
he is willing to explain. For, though his intolerance is great, it is
not directed so much at honest ignorance as against meretricious art.
The names of ancient Chinese painters, of emperors who practised art
centuries ago, of dynasties covering thousands of years, of Biblical
periods, flow kindly from his lips:
"This dish is Grecian. It was made five hundred years before the
birth of Christ. This is a Chinese marble, but you see it has a
Persian scroll in high relief. And this bronze urn: it is perhaps
the oldest piece I have--about four thousand years--it is Chinese.
But do you see this border on it? Perfect Greek! Where did the
Chinese get that? Art is universal. We may call an object Greek, or
Roman, or Assyrian, or Chinese, or Japanese, but as we begin to
understand, we find that other races had the same thing--identical
forms and designs. Take, for example, this painting of Whistler's,
'The Gold Screen.' You see he uses the Tosa design. The Tosa was
used in Japan in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and down to
about twenty years ago. But there wasn't a single example of it in
Europe in 1864, when Whistler painted 'The Gold Screen'; and
Whistler had not been to the Orient. Then, where did he get the
Tosa design? He invented
it. It came to him because he was a great artist, and art is
universal."
It was like that--the spirit of it. And you must imagine the words
spoken with measured distinctness in a deep, resonant voice, by a man
with whom art is a religion and the pursuit of it a passion. He has a
nature full of fire. At the mention of the name of the late J. P.
Morgan, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or of certain Chinese
collectors and painters of the distant past, a sort of holy flame of
admiration rose and kindled in him. His contempt is also fire. A minor
eruption occurred when the automobile industry was spoken of; a Vesuvian
flare which reddened the sky and left the commercialism of the city in
smoking ruins. But it was not until I chanced to mention the Detroit
Museum of Art--an institution of which Mr. Freer strongly
disapproves--that the great outburst came. His wrath was like an
overpowering revolt of nature. A whirlwind of tempestuous fire mounted
to the heavens and the museum emerged a clinker.
He went to our heads. We four, who saw and heard him, left Mr. Freer's
house drunk with the esthetic. Even the flooding knowledge of our own
barbarian ignorance was not enough to sober us. Some of the flame had
gotten into us. It was like old brandy. We waved our arms and cried out
about art. For there is in a truly big human being--especially in one
old enough to have seemed to gain perspective on the universe--some
quality which touches something in us that nothing else can ever reach.
It is something which is not admiration only, nor vague longing to
emulate, nor a quickened comprehension of the immensity of things;
something emotional and spiritual and strange and indescribable which
seems to set our souls to singing.
The Freer collection will go, ultimately, to the Smithsonian Institution
(the National Gallery) in Washington, a fact which is the cause of deep
regret to many persons in Detroit, more especially since the City Plan
and Improvement Commission has completed arrangements for a Center of
Arts and Letters--a fine group plan which will assemble and give
suitable setting to a new Museum of Art, Public Library, and other
buildings of like nature, including a School of Design and an Orchestra
Hall. The site for the new gallery of art was purchased with funds
supplied by public-spirited citizens, and the city has given a million
dollars toward the erection of the building. Plans for the library have
been drawn by Cass Gilbert.
It seems possible that, had the new art museum been started sooner, and
with some guarantee of competent management, Mr. Freer might have
considered it as an ultimate repository for his treasures. But now it is
too late. That the present art museum--the old one--was not to be
considered by him, is perfectly obvious. Inside and out it is unworthy.
It looks as much like an old waterworks as the new waterworks out on
Jefferson Avenue looks like a museum. Its foyer contains some
sculptured busts, forming the most amazing group I have ever seen. The
group represents, I take it, prominent citizens of Detroit--among them,
according to my recollection, the following: Hermes, Augustus Caesar, Mr.
Bela Hubbard, Septimus Severus, the Hon. T. W. Palmer, Mr. Frederick
Stearns, Apollo, Demosthenes, and the Hon. H. P. Lillibridge.
I do not want to put things into people's heads, but--the old museum is
not fire-proof. God speed the new one!
CHAPTER VII
THE MAECENAS OF THE MOTOR
The great trouble with Detroit, from my point of view, is that there is
too much which should be mentioned: Grosse Pointe with its rich setting
and rich homes; the fine new railroad station; the "Cabbage Patch"; the
"Indian Village" (so called because the streets bear Indian names) with
its examples of modest, pleasing, domestic architecture. Then there are
the boulevards, the fine Wayne County roads, the clubs--the Country
Club, the Yacht Club, the Boat Club, the Detroit Club, the University
Club, all with certain individuality. And there is the unique little
Yondatega Club of which Theodore Roosevelt said: "It is beyond all doubt
the best club in the country."
Also there is Henry Ford.
I suppose there is no individual having to do with manufacturing of any
kind whose name is at present more familiar to the world. But in all
this ocean of publicity which has resulted from Mr. Ford's development
of a reliable, cheap car, from the stupefying growth of his business and
his fortune, and more recently from his sudden distribution among his
working people of ten million dollars of profits from his business--in
all this publicity I have seen nothing that gave me a clear idea of
Henry Ford himself. I wanted to see him--to assure myself that he was
not some fabulous being out of a Detroit saga. I wanted to know what
kind of man he was to look at and to listen to.
The Ford plant is far, far out on Woodward Avenue. It is so gigantic
that there is no use wasting words in trying to express its vastness; so
full of people, all of them working for Ford, that a thousand or two
more or less would make no difference in the looks of things. And among
all those people there was just one man I really wanted to see, and just
one man I really wanted not to see. I wanted to see Henry Ford and I
wanted not to see a man named Liebold, because, they say, if you see
Liebold first you never do see Ford. That is what Liebold is for. He is
the man whose business in life it is to know where Henry Ford _isn't_.
To get into Mr. Ford's presence is an undertaking. It is not easy even
to find out whether he is there. Liebold is so zealous in his protection
that he even protects Mr. Ford from his own employees. Thus, when the
young official who had my companion and me in charge, received word over
the office telephone that Mr. Ford was not in the building, he didn't
believe it. He went on a quiet scouting expedition of his own before he
was convinced. Presently he returned to the office in which he had
deposited us.
"No; he really isn't here just now," he said. "He'll be in presently.
Come on; I'll take you through the plant."
* * * * *
The machine shop is one room, with a glass roof, covering an area of
something less than thirty acres. It is simply unbelievable in its size,
its noise and its ghastly furious activity. It was peopled when we were
there by five thousand men--the day shift in that one shop alone. (The
total force of workmen was something like three times that number.)
Of course there was order in that place, of course there was
system--relentless system--terrible "efficiency"--but to my mind,
unaccustomed to such things, the whole room, with its interminable
aisles, its whirling shafts and wheels, its forest of roof-supporting
posts and flapping, flying, leather belting, its endless rows of
writhing machinery, its shrieking, hammering, and clatter, its smell of
oil, its autumn haze of smoke, its savage-looking foreign population--to
my mind it expressed but one thing, and that thing was delirium.
Fancy a jungle of wheels and belts and weird iron forms--of men,
machinery and movement--add to it every kind of sound you can imagine:
the sound of a million squirrels chirking, a million monkeys quarreling,
a million lions roaring, a million pigs dying, a million elephants
smashing through a forest of sheet iron, a million boys whistling on
their fingers, a million others coughing with the whooping cough, a
million sinners groaning as they are dragged to hell--imagine all of
this happening at the very edge of Niagara Falls, with the everlasting
roar of the cataract as a perpetual background, and you may acquire a
vague conception of that place.
Fancy all this riot going on at once; then imagine the effect of its
suddenly ceasing. For that is what it did. The wheels slowed down and
became still. The belts stopped flapping. The machines lay dead. The
noise faded to a murmur; then to utter silence. Our ears rang with the
quiet. The aisles all at once were full of men in overalls, each with a
paper package or a box. Some of them walked swiftly toward the exits.
Others settled down on piles of automobile parts, or the bases of
machines, to eat, like grimy soldiers on a battlefield. It was the lull
of noon.
I was glad to leave the machine shop. It dazed me. I should have
liked to leave it some time before I actually did, but the agreeable
young enthusiast who was conducting us delighted in explaining
things--shouting the explanations in our ears. Half of them I could not
hear; the other half I could not comprehend. Here and there I recognized
familiar automobile parts--great heaps of them--cylinder castings, crank
cases, axles. Then as things began to get a little bit coherent, along
would come a train of cars hanging insanely from a single overhead rail,
the man in the cab tooting his shrill whistle; whereupon I would
promptly retire into mental fog once more, losing all sense of what
things meant, feeling that I was not in any factory, but in a
Gargantuan lunatic asylum where fifteen thousand raving, tearing maniacs
had been given full authority to go ahead and do their damnedest.
In that entire factory there was for me but one completely lucid spot.
That was the place where cars were being assembled. There I perceived
the system. No sooner had axle, frame, and wheels been joined together
than the skeleton thus formed was attached, by means of a short wooden
coupling, to the rear end of a long train of embryonic automobiles,
which was kept moving slowly forward toward a far-distant door. Beside
this train of chassis stood a row of men, and as each succeeding chassis
came abreast of him, each man did something to it, bringing it just a
little further toward completion. We walked ahead beside the row of
moving partially-built cars, and each car we passed was a little nearer
to its finished state than was the one behind it. Just inside the door
we paused and watched them come successively into first place in the
line. As they moved up, they were uncoupled. Gasoline was fed into them
from one pipe, oil from another, water from still another.
Then as a man leaped to the driver's seat, a machine situated in the
floor spun the back wheels around, causing the motor to start; whereupon
the little Ford moved out into the wide, wide world, a completed thing,
propelled by its own power.
* * * * *
In a glass shed of the size of a small exposition building the members
of the Ford staff park their little cars. It was in this shed that we
discovered Mr. Ford. He had just driven in (in a Ford!) and was standing
beside it--the god out of the machine.
"Nine o'clock to-morrow morning," he said to me in reply to my request
for an appointment.
I may have shuddered slightly. I know that my companion shuddered, and
that, for one brief instant, I felt a strong desire to intimate to Mr.
Ford that ten o'clock would suit me better. But I restrained myself.
Inwardly I argued thus: "I am in the presence of an amazing man--a
prince of industry--the Maecenas of the motor car. Here is a man who,
they say, makes a million dollars a month, even in a short month like
February. Probably he makes a million and a quarter in the
thirty-one-day months when he has time to get into the spirit of the
thing. I wish to pay a beautiful tribute to this man, not because he has
more money than I have--I don't admit that he has--but because he
conserves his money better than I conserve mine. It is for that that I
take off my hat to him, even if I have to get up and dress and be away
out here on Woodward Avenue by 9 A. M. to do it."
Furthermore, I thought to myself that Mr. Ford was the kind of business
man you read about in novels; one who, when he says "nine," doesn't mean
five minutes after nine, but nine sharp. If you aren't there your chance
is gone. You are a ruined man.
[Illustration: Of course there was order in that place, of course there
was system--relentless system--terrible "efficiency"--but to my mind it
expressed but one thing, and that thing was delirium]
"Very well," I said, trying to speak in a natural tone, "we will be on
hand at nine."
Then he went into the building, and my companion and I debated long as
to how the feat should be accomplished. He favored sitting up all night
in order to be safe about it, but we compromised at last on sitting up
only a little more than half the night.
The cold, dismal dawn of the day following found us shaved and dressed.
We went out to the factory. It was a long, chilly, expensive, silent
taxi ride. At five minutes before nine we were there. The factory was
there. The clerks were there. Fourteen thousand one hundred and
eighty-seven workmen were there--those workmen who divided the ten
millions--everything and every one was there with a single exception.
And that exception was Mr. Henry Ford.
True, he did come at last. True, he talked with us. But he was not there
at nine o'clock, nor yet at ten. Nor do I blame him. For if I were in
the place of Mr. Henry Ford, there would be just one man whom I should
meet at nine o'clock, and that man would be Meadows, my faithful valet.
Apropos of that, it occurs to me that there is one point of similarity
between Mr. Ford and myself: neither of us has a valet just at present.
Still, on thinking it over, we aren't so very much alike, after all, for
there is one of us--I shan't say which--who hopes to have a valet some
day.
Mr. Ford's office is a room somewhat smaller than the machine shop. It
is situated in one corner of the administration building, and I am told
that there is a private entrance, making it unnecessary for Mr. Ford to
run the gantlet of the main doorway and waiting room, where there are
almost always persons waiting to ask him for a present of a million or
so in money; or, if not that, for four or five thousand dollars' worth
of time--for if Mr. Ford makes what they say, and doesn't work overtime,
his hour is worth about four thousand five hundred dollars.
He wasn't in the office when we entered. That gave us time to look
about. There was a large flat-top desk. The floor was covered with an
enormous, costly Oriental rug. At one end of the room, in a glass case,
was a tiny and very perfect model of a Ford car. On the walls were four
photographs: one of Mr. James Couzens, vice-president and treasurer of
the Ford Company; another, a life-size head of "_Your friend, John
Wanamaker_," and two of Thomas A. Edison. Under one of the latter, in
the handwriting of the inventor--handwriting which, oddly enough,
resembles nothing so much as neatly bent wire--was this inscription:
_To Henry Ford, one of a group of men who have helped to make U. S.
A. the most progressive nation in the world._
_Thomas A. Edison._
Presently Mr. Ford came in--a lean man, of good height, wearing a
rather shabby brown suit. Without being powerfully built, Mr. Ford looks
sinewy, wiry. His gait is loose-jointed--almost boyish. His manner, too,
has something boyish about it. I got the feeling that he was a little
bit embarrassed at being interviewed. That made me sorry for him--I had
been interviewed, myself, the day before. When he sat he hunched down in
his chair, resting on the small of his back, with his legs crossed and
propped upon a large wooden waste-basket--the attitude of a lanky boy.
And, despite his gray hair and the netted wrinkles about his eyes, his
face is comparatively youthful, too. His mouth is wide and determined,
and it is capable of an exceedingly dry grin, in which the eyes
collaborate. They are fine, keen eyes, set high under the brows, wide
apart, and they seem to express shrewdness, kindliness, humor, and a
distinct wistfulness. Also, like every other item in Mr. Ford's physical
make-up, they indicate a high degree of honesty. There never was a man
more genuine than Mr. Ford. He hasn't the faintest sign of that veneer
so common to distinguished men, which is most eloquently described by
the slang term "front." Nor is he, on the other hand, one of those men
who (like so many politicians) try to simulate a simple manner. He is
just exactly Henry Ford, no more, no less; take it or leave it. If you
are any judge at all of character, you know immediately that Henry Ford
is a man whom you can trust. I would trust him with anything. He didn't
ask me to, but I would. I would trust him with all my money. And,
considering that I say that, I think he ought to be willing, in common
courtesy, to reciprocate.
He told us about the Ford business. "We've done two hundred and five
millions of business to date," he said. "Our profits have amounted to
about fifty-nine millions. About twenty-five per cent. has been put back
into the business--into the plant and the branches. All the actual cash
that was ever put in was twenty-eight thousand dollars. The rest has
been built up out of profits. Yes--it has happened in a pretty short
time; the big growth has come in the last six years."
I asked if the rapid increase had surprised him.
"Oh, in a way," he said. "Of course we couldn't be just sure what she
was going to do. But we figured we had the right idea."
"What is the idea?" I questioned.
Then with deep sincerity, with the conviction of a man who states the
very foundation of all that he believes, Mr. Ford told us his idea. His
statement did not have the awful majesty of an utterance by Mr. Freer.
He did not flame, although his eyes did seem to glow with his
conviction.
"It is _one model_!" he said. "That's the secret of the whole doggone
thing!" (That is exactly what he said. I noted it immediately for
"character.")
Having revealed the "secret," Mr. Ford directed our attention to the
little toy Ford in the glass case.
"There she is," he said. "She's always the same. I tell everybody that's
the way to make a success. Every manufacturer ought to do it. The thing
is to find out something that everybody is after and then make that one
thing and nothing else. Shoemakers ought to do it. They ought to get one
kind of shoe that will suit everybody, instead of making all kinds.
Stove men ought to do it, too. I told a stove man that just the other
day."
That, I believe, is, briefly, the business philosophy of Henry Ford.
"It just amounts to specializing," he continued. "I like a good
specialist. I like Harry Lauder--he's a great specialist. So is Edison.
Edison has done more for people than any other living man. You can't
look anywhere without seeing something he has invented. Edison doesn't
care anything about money. I don't either. You've got to have money to
use, that's all. I haven't got any job here, you know. I just go around
and keep the fellows lined up."
I don't know how I came by the idea, but I was conscious of the thought
that Mr. Ford's money worried him. He looks somehow as though it did.
And it must, coming in such a deluge and so suddenly. I asked if wealth
had not compelled material changes in his mode of life.
"Do you mean the way we live at home?" he asked.
"Yes; that kind of thing."
"Oh, that hasn't changed to any great extent," he said. "I've got a
little house over here a ways. It's nothing very much--just comfortable.
It's all we need. You can have the man drive you around there on your
way back if you want. You'll see." (Later I did see; it is a very
pleasant, very simple type of brick suburban residence.)
"Do you get up early?" I ventured, having, as I have already intimated,
my own ideas as to what I should do if I were a Henry Ford.
"Well, I was up at quarter of seven this morning," he declared. "I went
for a long ride in my car. I usually get down to the plant around
eight-thirty or nine o'clock."
Then I asked if the change had not forced him to do a deal of
entertaining.
"No," he said. "We know the same people we knew twenty years ago. They
are our friends to-day. They come to our house. The main difference is
that Mrs. Ford used to do the cooking. Lately we've kept a cook. Cooks
try to give me fancy food, but I won't stand for it. They can't cook as
well as Mrs. Ford either--none of them can."
I wish you could have heard him say that! It was one of his deep
convictions, like the "one model" idea.
"What are your hobbies outside your business?" I asked him.
It seemed to me that Mr. Ford looked a little doubtful about that.
Certainly his manner, in replying, lacked that animation which you
expect of a golfer or a yachtsman or an art collector--or, for the
matter of that, a postage-stamp collector.
"Oh, I have my farm out at Dearborn--the place where I was born," he
replied. "I'm building a house out there--not as much of a house as they
try to make out, though. And I'm interested in birds, too."
Then, thinking of Mr. Freer, I inquired: "Do you care for art?"
The answer, like all the rest, was definite enough.
"I wouldn't give five cents for all the art in the world," said Mr. Ford
without a moment's hesitation.
I admired him enormously for saying that. So many people feel as he does
in their hearts, yet would not dare to say so. So many people have the
air of posturing before a work of art, trying to look intelligent,
trying to "say the right thing" before the right painting--the right
painting as prescribed by Baedeker. True, I think the man who declares
he would not give five cents for all the art in the world thereby
declares himself a barbarian of sorts. But a good, honest, openhearted
barbarian is a fine creature. For one thing, there is nothing false
about him. And there is nothing soft about him either. It is the poseur
who is soft--soft at the very top, where Henry Ford is hard.
I saw from his manner that he was becoming restless. Perhaps we had
stayed too long. Or perhaps he was bored because I spoke about an
abstract thing like art.
I asked but one more question.
"Mr. Ford," I said, "I should think that when a man is very rich he
might hardly know, sometimes, whether people are really his friends or
whether they are cultivating him because of his money. Isn't that so?"
Mr. Ford's dry grin spread across his face. He replied with a question:
"When people come after _you_ because they want to get something out of
you, don't you get their number?"
"I think I do," I answered.
"Well, so do I," said Mr. Ford.
CHAPTER VIII
THE CURIOUS CITY OF BATTLE CREEK
It was on a chilly morning, not much after eight o'clock, that we left
Detroit. I recall that, driving trainward, I closed the window of the
taxicab; that the marble waiting room of the new station looked
uncomfortably half awake, like a sleeper who has kicked the bedclothes
off, and that the concrete platform outside was a playground for cold,
boisterous gusts of wind.
Our train had come from somewhere else. Entering the Pullman car, we
found it in its night-time aspect. The narrow aisle, made narrower by its
shroud of long green curtains, and by shoes and suit cases standing
beside the berths, looked cavernous and gloomy, reminding me of a great
rock fissure, the entrance to a cave I had once seen. Like a cave, too,
it was cold with a musty and oppressive cold; a cold which embalmed the
mingling smells of sleep and sleeping car--an odor as of Russia leather
and banana peel ground into a damp pulp.
Silently, gloomily, without removing our overcoats or gloves, we seated
ourselves, gingerly, upon the bright green plush of the section nearest
to the door, and tried to read our morning papers. Presently the train
started. A thin, sick-looking Pullman conductor came and took our
tickets, saying as few words as possible. A porter, in his sooty canvas
coat, sagged miserably down the aisle. Also a waiter from the dining
car, announcing breakfast in a cheerless tone. Breakfast! Who could
think of breakfast in a place like that? For a long time, we sat in
somber silence, without interest in each other or in life.
To appreciate the full horror of a Pullman sleeping car it is not
necessary to pass the night upon it; indeed, it is necessary _not_ to.
If you have slept in the car, or tried to sleep, you arise with blunted
faculties--the night has mercifully anesthetized you against the scenes
and smells of morning. But if you board the car as we did, coming into
it awake and fresh from out of doors, while it is yet asleep--then, and
then only, do you realize its enormous ghastliness.
Our first diversion--the faintest shadow of a speculative interest--came
with a slight stirring of the curtains of the berth across the way. For,
even in the most dismal sleeping car, there is always the remote chance,
when those green curtains stir, that the Queen of Sheba is all radiant
within, and that she will presently appear, like sunrise.
Over our newspapers we watched, and even now and then our curiosity was
piqued by further gentle stirrings of the curtains. And, of course, the
longer we were forced to wait, the more hopeful we became. In a low
voice I murmured to my companion the story of the glorious creature I
had seen in a Pullman one morning long ago: how the curtains had stirred
at first, even as these were stirring now; how they had at last been
parted by a pair of rosy finger tips; how I had seen a lovely face
emerge; how her two braids were wrapped about her classic head; how she
had floated forth into the aisle, transforming the whole car; how she
had wafted past me, a soft, sweet cloud of pink; how she--Then, just as
I was getting to the interesting part of it, I stopped and caught my
breath. The curtains were in final, violent commotion! They were parting
at the bottom! Ah! Slowly, from between the long green folds, there
appeared a foot. No filmy silken stocking covered it. It was a foot.
There was an ankle, too--a small ankle. Indeed, it was so small as to be
a misfit, for the foot was of stupendous size, and very knobby. Also it
was cold; I knew that it was cold, just as I knew that it was attached
to the body of a man, and that I did not wish to see the rest of him. I
turned my head and, gazing from the window, tried to concentrate my
thoughts upon the larger aspects of the world outside, but the picture
of that foot remained with me, dwarfing all other things.
I did not mean to look again; I was determined not to look. But at the
sound of more activity across the way, my head was turned as by some
outside force, and I did look, as one looks, against one's will, at some
horror which has happened in the street.
He had come out. He was sitting upon the edge of his berth, bending over
and snorting as he fumbled for his shoes upon the floor. Having secured
them, he pulled them on with great contortions, emitting stertorous
sounds. Then, in all the glory of his brown balbriggan undershirt, he
stood up in the aisle. His face was fat and heavy, his eyes half closed,
his hair in tussled disarray. His trousers sagged dismally about his
hips, and his suspenders dangled down behind him like two feeble and
insensate tails. After rolling his collar, necktie, shirt, and waistcoat
into a mournful little bundle, he produced from inner recesses a few
unpleasant toilet articles, and made off down the car--a spectacle
compared with which a homely woman, her face anointed with cold cream,
her hair done in kid curlers, her robe a Canton-flannel nightgown, would
appear alluring!
Never, since then, have I heard men jeering over women as they look in
dishabille, without wondering if those same men have ever seen
themselves clearly in the mirrored washroom of a sleeping car.
* * * * *
On the railroad journey between Detroit and Battle Creek we passed two
towns which have attained a fame entirely disproportionate to their
size: Ann Arbor, with about fifteen thousand inhabitants, celebrated as
a seat of learning; and Ypsilanti, with about six thousand, celebrated
as, so to speak, a seat of underwear.
One expects an important college town to be well known, but a
manufacturing town with but six thousand inhabitants must have done
something in particular to have acquired national reputation. In the
case of Ypsilanti it has been done by magazine advertising--the
advertising of underwear. If you don't think so, look over the list of
towns in the "World Almanac." Have you, for example, ever heard of
Anniston, Ala.? Or Argenta, Ark.? Either town is about twice the size of
Ypsilanti. Have you ever heard of Cranston, R. I., Butler, Pa., or
Belleville, Ill.? Each is about as large as Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor put
together.
Then there is Battle Creek. Think of the amount of advertising that town
has had! As Miss Daisy Buck, the lady who runs the news stand in the
Battle Creek railroad station, said to us: "It's the best advertised
little old town of its size in the whole United States."
And now it is about to be advertised some more.
* * * * *
We were total strangers. We knew nothing of the place save that we had
heard that it was full of health cranks and factories where breakfast
foods, coffee substitutes, and kindred edibles and drinkables were made.
How to see the town and what to see we did not know. We hesitated in the
depot waiting room. Then fortune guided our footsteps to the station
news stand and its genial and vivacious hostess. Yes, hostess is the
word; Miss Buck is anything but a mere girl behind the counter. She is
a reception committee, an information bureau, a guide, philosopher, and
friend. Her kindly interest in the wayfarer seems to waft forth from the
precincts of the news stand and permeate the station. All the boys know
Miss Daisy Buck.
After purchasing some stamps and post cards as a means of getting into
conversation with her, we asked about the town.
"How many people are there here?" I ventured.
"Thirty-five," replied Miss Buck.
"_Thirty-five?_" I repeated, astonished.
Though Miss Buck was momentarily engaged in selling chewing gum (to some
one else), she found time to give me a mildly pitying look.
"Thousand," she added.
The "World Almanac" gives Battle Creek but twenty-five thousand
population. That, however, is no reproach to Miss Buck; it is, upon the
contrary, a reproach to the cold-hearted statisticians who compiled that
book. And had they met Miss Buck I think they would have been more
liberal.
"What is the best way for us to see the town?" I asked the lady.
She indicated a man who was sitting on a station bench near by, saying:
"He's a driver. He'll take you. He likes to ride around."
"Thanks," I replied, gallantly. "Any friend of yours--"
"Can that stuff," admonished Miss Buck in her easy, offhand manner.
I canned it, and engaged the driver. His vehicle was a typical town
hack--a mud-colored chariot, having C springs, sunken cushions, and a
strong smell of the stable. Riding in it, I could not rid myself of the
idea that I was being driven to a country burial, and that hence, if I
wished to smoke, I ought to do it surreptitiously.
Presently we swung into Main Street. I did not ask the name of the
street, but I am reasonably certain that is it. There was a policeman on
the corner. Also, a building bearing the sign "Old National Bank."
Old! What a pleasant, mellow ring the word has! How fine, and
philosophical, and prosperous, and hospitable it sounds. I stopped the
carriage. Just out of sentiment I thought I would go in and have a check
cashed. But they did not act hospitable at all. They refused to cash my
check because they did not know me. Well, it was their loss! I had a
little treat prepared for them. I meant to surprise them by making them
realize suddenly that, in cashing the check, they were not merely
obliging an obscure stranger but a famous literary man. I was going to
pass the check through the window, saying modestly: "It may interest you
to know whose check you have the honor of handling." Then they would
read the name, and I could picture their excitement as they exclaimed
and showed the check around the bank so that the clerks could see it.
The only trouble I foresaw, on that score, was that probably they had
not ever heard of me. But I was going to obviate that. I intended to
sign the check "Rudyard Kipling." That would have given them something
to think about!
But, as I have said, the transaction never got that far.
* * * * *
The principal street of Battle Creek may be without amazing
architectural beauty, but it is at least well lighted. On either curb is
a row of "boulevard lights," the posts set fifty feet apart. They are
good-looking posts, too, of simple, graceful design, each surmounted by
a cluster of five white globes. This admirable system of lighting is in
very general use throughout all parts of the country excepting the East.
It is used in all the Michigan cities I visited. I have been told that
it was first installed in Minneapolis, but wherever it originated, it is
one of a long list of things the East may learn from the West.
After driving about for a time we drew up. Looking out, I came to the
conclusion that we had returned again to the railway station.
It was a station, but not the same one.
"This is the Grand Trunk Deepo," said the driver, opening the carriage
door.
"I don't believe we'll bother to get out," I said.
But the driver wanted us to.
[Illustration: Never, since then, have I heard men jeering over women as
they look in dishabille, without wondering if those same men have ever
seen themselves clearly in the mirrored washroom of a sleeping car]
"You ought to look at it," he insisted. "It's a very pretty station."
So we got out and looked at it, and were glad we did, for the driver was
quite right. It was an unusually pretty station--a station superior to
the other in all respects but one: it contained no Miss Daisy Buck.
After some further driving, we returned to the station where she was.
"I suppose we had better go to the Sanitarium for lunch?" I asked her.
"Not on your life," she replied. "If you go to the 'San,' you won't feel
like you'd had anything to eat--that is, not if you're good feeders."
"Where else is there to go?" I asked.
"The Tavern," she advised. "You'll get a first-class dinner there. You
might have larger hotels in New York, but you haven't got any that's
more homelike. At least, that's what I hear. I never was in New York
myself, but I get the dope from the traveling men."
However, not for epicurean reasons, but because of curiosity, we wished
to try a meal at the Sanitarium. Thither we drove in the hack, passing
on our way the office of the "Good Health Publishing Company" and a
small building bearing the sign, "The Coffee Parlor"--which may signify
a Battle Creek substitute for a saloon. I do not know how coffee
drinkers are regarded in that town, but I do know that, while there, I
got neither tea nor coffee--unless "Postum" be coffee and "Kaffir Tea"
be tea.
It was at the Sanitarium that I drank Kaffir Tea. I had it with my
lunch. It looks like tea, and would probably taste like it, too, if they
didn't let the Kaffirs steep so long. But they should use only fresh,
young, tender Kaffirs; the old ones get too strong; they have too much
bouquet. The one they used in my tea may have been slightly spoiled. I
tasted him all afternoon.
The "San" is an enormous brick building like a vast summer hotel. It has
an office which is utterly hotel-like, too, even to the chairs,
scattered about, and the people sitting in them. Many of the people look
perfectly well. Indeed, I saw one young woman who looked so well that I
couldn't take my eyes off from her while she remained in view. She was
in the elevator when we went up to lunch. She looked at me with a
speculative eye--a most engaging eye, it was--as though saying to
herself: "Now there's a promising young man. I might make it interesting
for him if he would stay here for a while. But of course he'd have to
show me a physician's certificate stating that he was not subject to
fits." My companion said that she looked at him a long while, too, but I
doubt that. He was always claiming that they looked at him.
The people who run the Sanitarium are Seventh-Day Adventists, and as we
arrived on Saturday it was the Sabbath there--a rather busy day, I take
it, from the bulletin which was printed upon the back of the dinner
menu:
7.20 A. M. Morning Worship in the Parlor.
7.40 to 8.40 A. M. BREAKFAST.
9.45 A. M. Sabbath School in the Chapel.
11 A. M. Preaching Service in the Chapel.
12.30 to 2 P. M. DINNER.
3.30 P. M. Missionary talk.
5.30 to 6 P. M. Cashier's office open.
6 to 6.45 P. M. SUPPER.
6.45 P. M. March for guests and patients only.
8 P. M. In the Gymnasium. Basket Ball Game. Admission
25 cents.
No food to be taken from the Dining Room.
The last injunction was not disobeyed by us. We ate enough to satisfy
our curiosity, and what we did not eat we left.
The menu at the Sanitarium is a curious thing. After each item are
figures showing the proportion of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates
contained in that article of food. Everything is weighed out exactly.
There was no meat on the bill of fare, but substitutes were provided in
the list of entrees: "Protose with Mayonnaise Dressing," "Nuttolene with
Cranberry Sauce," and "Walnut Roast."
Suppose you had to decide between those three which would you take?
My companion took "Protose," while I elected for some reason to dally
with the "Nuttolene." Then, neither of us liking what we got, we both
tried "Walnut Roast." Even then we would not give up. I ordered a
little "Malt Honey," while my companion called for a baked potato,
saying: "I know what a _potato_ is, anyhow!"
After that we had a little "Toasted Granose" and "Good Health Biscuit,"
washed down in my case by a gulp or two of "Kaffir Tea," and in his by
"Hot Malted Nuts." I tried to get him to take "Kaffir Tea" with me, but,
being to leeward of my cup, he declined. As nearly as we could figure it
out afterward, he was far ahead of me in proteins and fats, but I was
infinitely richer in carbohydrates. In our indigestions we stood
absolutely even.
* * * * *
There are some very striking things about the Sanitarium. It is a great
headquarters for Health Congresses, Race Betterment Congresses, etc.,
and at these congresses strange theories are frequently put forth. At
one of them, recently held, Dr. J. H. Kellogg, head of the Sanitarium,
read a paper in which, according to newspaper reports, he advocated
"human stock shows," with blue ribbons for the most perfectly developed
men and women. At the same meeting a Mrs. Holcome charged that:
"Cigarette-smoking heroes in the modern magazine are, I believe,
inserted into the stories by the editors of publications controlled by
the big interests."
To this Mr. S. S. McClure, the publisher, replied: "I have never
inserted cigarettes in heroes' mouths. I have taken them out lots of
times. But generally the authors use a pipe for their heroes."
[Illustration: "Can that stuff," admonished Miss Buck in her easy,
offhand manner]
There was talk, too, about "eugenic weddings." And a sensation was
caused when a Southern college professor made a charge that graduates of
modern women's colleges are unfitted for motherhood. The statement, it
may be added, was vigorously denied by the heads of several leading
women's colleges.
Rather wild, some of this, it seems to me. But when people gather
together in one place, intent on some one subject, wildness is almost
certain to develop. One feels, in visiting the Sanitarium, that, though
many people may be restored to health there, there is yet an air of mild
fanaticism over all. Health fanaticism. The passionate light of the
health hunt flashes in the stranger's eye as he looks at you and wonders
what is wrong with you. And whatever may be wrong with you, or with him,
you are both there to shake it off. That is your sole business in life.
You are going to get over it, even if you have to live for weeks on
"Nuttolene" or other products of the diet kitchen.
"Nuttolene!"
It is always an experience for the sophisticated palate to meet a
brand-new taste. In "Nuttolene" my palate encountered one, and before
dinner was over it met several more.
"Nuttolene" is served in a slab, resembling, as nearly as anything I can
think of, a good-sized piece of shoemaker's wax. In flavor it is
confusing. Some faint taste about it hinted that it was intended to
resemble turkey; an impression furthered by the fact that cranberry
sauce was served on the same plate. But what it was made of I could not
detect. It was not unpleasant to taste, nor yet did I find it
appetizing. Rather, I should classify it in the broad category of
uninteresting food. However, after such a statement, it is but fair to
add that the food I find most interesting is almost always rich and
indigestible. Perhaps, therefore, I shall be obliged to go to Battle
Creek some day, to subsist on "Nuttolene" and kindred substances as
penance for my gastronomic indiscretions. Better men than I have done
that thing--men and women from all over the globe. And Battle Creek has
benefited them. Nevertheless, I hope that I shall never have to go
there. My feeling about the place, quite without regard to the cures
which it effects, is much like that of my companion:
At luncheon I asked him to save his menu for me, so that I might have
the data for this article. He put it in his pocket. But he kept pulling
it out again, every little while, throughout the afternoon, and
suggesting that I copy it all off into my notebook.
Finally I said to him:
"What is the use in my copying all that stuff when you have it right
there in print? Just keep it for me. Then, when I get to writing, I will
take it and use what I want."
"But I'd rather not keep it," he insisted.
"Why not?"
"Well, there might be a railroad wreck. If I'm killed I don't want this
thing to be found on me. When they went through my clothes and ran
across this they'd say: 'Oh, this doesn't matter. It's all right. He's
just some poor boob that's been to Battle Creek.'"
* * * * *
When we got out of the hack at the station before leaving Battle Creek,
I asked the hackman how the town got its name. He didn't know. So, after
buying the tickets, I went and asked Miss Daisy Buck.
"I suppose," I said, "there was some battle here, beside some creek,
wasn't there?"
But for once Miss Buck failed me.
"You can search _me_," she replied. Then: "Did you lunch at the 'San'?"
We admitted it.
"How did you like it?"
We informed her.
"What did you eat--Mercerized hay?"
"No; mostly Nuttolene."
She sighed. Then:
"What town are you making next?" she asked.
"Kalamazoo," I said.
"Oh, Ka'zoo, eh? What line are you gen'l'men travelling in?"
"I'm a writer," I replied, "and my friend here is an artist. We're going
around the country gathering material for a book."
In answer to this statement, Miss Buck simply winked one eye as one who
would say: "You're some little liar, ain't you?"
"It's true," I said.
"Oh, sure!" said Miss Buck, and let one eyelid fall again.
"When the book appears," I continued, "you will find that it contains an
interview with you."
"Also a picture of you and the news stand," my companion added.
Then we heard the train.
Taking up our suit cases, we thanked Miss Buck for the assistance she
had rendered us.
"I'm sure you're quite welcome," she replied. "I meet all kinds
here--including kidders."
That was some months ago. No doubt Miss Buck may have forgotten us by
now. But when she sees this--as, being a news-stand lady, I have reason
to hope she will--I trust she may remember, and admit that truth has
triumphed in the end.
CHAPTER IX
KALAMAZOO
I had but one reason for visiting Kalamazoo: the name has always
fascinated me with its zoological suggestion and even more with its
rich, rhythmic measure. Indian names containing "K's" are almost always
striking: Kenosha, Kewanee, Kokomo, Keokuk, Kankakee. Of these, the last
two, having the most "K's" are most effective. Next comes Kokomo with
two "K's." But Kalamazoo, though it has but one "K," seems to me to take
first place among them all, phonetically, because of the finely assorted
sound contained in its four syllables. There is a kick in its "K," a
ring in its "L," a buzz in its "Z," and a glorious hoot in its two final
"O's."
I wish here to protest against the abbreviated title frequently bestowed
upon the town by newspapers in Detroit and other neighboring cities.
They call it "Ka'zoo."
Ka'zoo, indeed! For shame! How can men take so fine a name and treat it
lightly? True, it is a little long for easy handling in a headline, but
that does not justify indignity. If headline writers cannot handle it
conveniently they should not change the name, but rather change their
type, or make-up. If I owned a newspaper, and there arose a question of
giving space to this majestic name, I should cheerfully drop out a
baseball story, or the love letters in some divorce case, or even an
advertisement, in order to display it as it deserves to be displayed.
Kalamazoo (I love to write it out!) Kalamazoo, I say, is also sometimes
known familiarly as "Celery Town"--the growing of this crisp and
succulent vegetable being a large local industry. Also, I was informed,
more paper is made there than in any other city in the world. I do not
know if that is true, I only know that if there is not more _something_
in Kalamazoo than there is in any other city, the place is unique in my
experience.
From my own observations, made during an evening walk through the
agreeable, tree-bordered streets of Kalamazoo, I should have said that
it led in quite a different field. I have never been in any town where
so many people failed to draw their window shades, or owned green
reading lamps, or sat by those green-shaded lamps and read. I looked
into almost every house I passed, and in all but two, I think, I saw the
self-same picture of calm, literary domesticity.
One family, living in a large and rather new-looking house on Main
Street, did not seem to be at home. The shades were up but no one was
sitting by the lamp. And, more, the lamp itself was different. Instead
of a plain green shade it had a shade with pictures in the glass, and
red bead fringe. Later I found out where the people were. They were
playing bridge across the street. They must have been the people from
that house, because there were two in all the other houses, whereas
there were four in the house where bridge was being played.
I stood and watched them. The woman from across the street--being the
guest, she was in evening dress--was dummy. She was sitting back
stiffly, her mouth pursed, her eyes staring at the cards her partner
played. And she was saying to herself (and, unconsciously, to us,
through the window): "If _I_ had played that hand, I never should have
done it _that_ way!"
* * * * *
Kalamazoo has a Commercial Club. What place hasn't? And the Commercial
Club has issued a booklet. What Commercial Club hasn't? This one bears
the somewhat fanciful title "The Lure of Kalamazoo."
"The Lure of Kalamazoo" is written in that peculiarly chaste style
characteristic of Chamber of Commerce "literature"--a style comparable
only with that of railway folders and summer hotel booklets. It is the
"Here-all-nature-seems-to-be-rejoicing" school. Let me present an
extract:
Kalamazoo is peculiarly a city of homes--homes varying in cost from
the modest cottage of the laborer to the palatial house of the
wealthy manufacturer.
The only place in which the man who wrote that slipped up, was in
referring to the wealthy manufacturer's "house." Obviously the word
called for there is "mansion." However, in justice to this man, and to
Kalamazoo, I ought to add that the town seemed to be rather free from
"mansions." That is one of the pleasantest things about it. It is just a
pretty, unpretentious place. Perhaps he actually meant to say "house,"
but I doubt it. I think he missed a trick. I think he failed to get the
right word, just as if he had been writing about brooks, and had
forgotten to say "purling."
But if I saw no "mansions," I did see one building in Kalamazoo the
architecture of which was distinguished. That was the building of the
Western Michigan Normal School--a long, low structure of classical
design, with three fine porticos.
* * * * *
Having a Commercial Club, Kalamazoo quite naturally has a "slogan," too.
(A "slogan," by the way, is the war cry or gathering cry of a Highland
clan--but that makes no difference to a Commercial Club.) It is: "In
Kalamazoo We Do."
This battle cry "did" very well up to less than a year ago; then it
suddenly began to languish. There was a company in Kalamazoo called the
Michigan Buggy Company, and this company had a very sour failure last
year, their figures varying from fact to the extent of about a million
and a half dollars. Not satisfied with dummy accounts and padded
statements, they had, also, what was called a "velvet pay roll." And,
when it all blew up, the whole of Michigan was shaken by the shock.
Since that time, I am informed, the "slogan" "In Kalamazoo We Do" has
not been in high favor.
[Illustration: She was saying to herself (and, unconsciously, to us,
through the window): "If _I_ had played that hand, I never should have
done it _that_ way!"]
* * * * *
Among the "lures" presented in the Commercial Club's booklet are four
hundred and fifty-six lakes within a radius of fifty miles of the city.
I didn't count the lakes myself. I didn't count the people either--not
all of them.
The "World Almanac" gives the population of the place as just under
forty thousand, but some one in Kalamazoo--and I think he was a member
of the Commercial Club--told me that fifty thousand was the correct
figure.
Now, I ask you, is it not reasonable to suppose that the Commercial
Club, being right _in_ Kalamazoo, where it can count the people every
day, should be more accurate in its figures than the Almanac, which is
published in far-away New York? Errors like this on the part of the
Almanac might be excused, once or twice, on the ground of human
fallibility or occasional misprint, but when the Almanac keeps on
cutting down the figures given by the Commercial Clubs and Chambers of
Commerce of town after town, it begins to look like wilful
misrepresentation if not actual spitework.
That, to tell the truth, was the reason I walked around and looked in
all the windows. I decided to get at the bottom of this matter--to find
out the cause for these discrepancies, and if I caught the Almanac in
what appeared to be a deliberate lie, to expose it, here. With this in
view, I started to count the people myself. Unfortunately, however, I
did not start early enough in the evening. When I had only a little more
than half of them counted, they began to put out their lights and go
upstairs to bed. And, oddly enough, though they leave their parlor
shades up, they have a way of drawing those in their bedrooms. I was,
therefore, forced to stop counting.
I do not attempt to explain this Kalamazoo custom with regard to window
shades. All I can say is that, for whatever reason they follow it, their
custom is not metropolitan. New Yorkers do things just the other way
around. They pull down their parlor shades, but leave their bedroom
shades up. Any one who has lived in a New York apartment house in summer
can testify to that. Probably it is all accounted for by the fact that
in a relatively small city, like Kalamazoo, the census takers go around
and count the people in the early evening, whereas in New York it is
necessary for those who make the reckoning to work all night in order
to--as one might say--get all the figures.
CHAPTER X
GRAND RAPIDS THE "ELECT"
I know a man whose wife is famous for her cooking. That is a strange
thing for a prosperous and charming woman to be famous for to-day, but
it is true. When they wish to give their friends an especial treat, the
wife prepares the dinner; and it _is_ a treat, from "pigs in blankets"
to strawberry shortcake.
The husband is proud of his wife's cooking, but I have often noticed,
and not without a mild amusement, that when we praise it past a certain
point he begins to protest that there are lots of other things that she
can do. You might think then, if you did not understand him, that he was
belittling her talent as a cook.
"Oh, yes," he says, in what he intends to be a casual tone, "she can
cook very well. But that's not all. She's the best mother I ever
saw--sees right into the children, just as though she were one of them.
She makes most of their clothes, too. And in spite of all that, she
keeps up her playing--both piano and harp. We'll get her to play the
harp after dinner."
People are like that about the cities that they live in. They are like
that in Detroit. They are afraid that in considering the vastness of the
automobile industry, you'll overlook the fact that Detroit has a lot of
other business. And in Grand Rapids they're the same; only there, of
course, it's furniture.
"Yes," they say almost with reluctance, "we do make a good deal of
furniture, but we also have big printing plants and plaster mills, and a
large business in automobile accessories, and the metal trades."
They talked that way to me. But I kept right on asking about furniture,
just as, when the young husband talks to me about his wife's harp
playing, I keep right on eating shortcake. That is no reflection on her
music (or her arms!); it is simply a tribute to her cooking.
* * * * *
Grand Rapids is one of those exceedingly agreeable, homelike American
cities, which has not yet grown to the unwieldy size. It is the kind of
city of which they say: "Every one here knows every one else"--meaning,
of course, that members of the older and more prosperous families enjoy
all the advantages and disadvantages of a considerable intimacy.
To the visitor--especially the visitor from New York, where a close
friend may be bedridden a month without one's knowing it--this sort of
thing makes a strong appeal at first. You feel that these people see one
another every day; that they know all about one another, and like one
another in spite of that. It is nice to see them troop down to the
station, fifteen strong, to see somebody off, and it must be nice to be
seen off like that; it must make you feel sure that you have friends--a
point upon which the New Yorker, in his heart, has the gravest doubts.
Consider, for example, my own case. In the course of my residence in New
York, I have lived in four different apartment houses. In only two of
these have I had even the slightest acquaintance with any of the other
tenants. Once I called upon some disagreeable people on the floor below
who had complained about the noise; once I had summoned a doctor who
lived on the ground floor. In the other two buildings I knew absolutely
no one. I used to see occasionally, in the elevator of one building, a
man with whom I was acquainted years ago, but he had either forgotten me
in the interim, or he elected to do as I did; that is, to pretend he had
forgotten. I had nothing against him; he had nothing against me. We were
simply bored at the idea of talking with each other because we had
nothing in common.
Any New Yorker who is honest will admit to you that he has had that same
experience. He passes people on the street--and sometimes they are
people he has known quite well in times gone by--yet he refrains from
bowing to them, and they refrain from bowing to him, by a sort of tacit
understanding that bowing, even, is a bore.
That is a sad sort of situation. But sadder yet is the fact that in New
York we lose sight of so many people whom we should like to see--friends
of whom we are genuinely fond, but whose evolutions in the whirlpool of
the city's life are such that we don't chance to come in contact with
them. At first we try. We paddle toward them now and then. But the very
act of paddling is fatiguing, so by and by we give it up, and either
never see them any more, or, running across them, once in a year or two,
on the street or in a shop, lament at the broken intimacy, and make new
resolves, only to see them melt away again in the flux and flow of New
York life.
I thought of all this at a Sunday evening supper party in Grand
Rapids--a neighborhood supper party at which a dozen or more people of
assorted ages sat around a hospitable table, arguing, explaining,
laughing, and chaffing each other like members of one great glorious
family. It made me want to go and live there, too. Then I began to
wonder how long I'd really want to live there. Would I always want to?
Or would I grow tired of that, just as I grow tired of the contrasting
coldness of New York? In short, I wondered to myself which is the worst:
to know your neighbors with a wonderful, terrible, all-revealing
intimacy, or--not to know them at all. I have thought about it often,
and still I am not sure.
The Grand Rapids "Press" fearing that I might fail to notice certain
underlying features of Grand Rapids life, printed an editorial at the
time of my visit, in which attention was called to certain things. Said
the "Press":
It isn't immediately revealed to the stranger that this is one of
the clearest-thinking communities in the country. The records of
the public library show the local demand for books on sociology, on
political economy, on the relations of labor and capital, on
taxation, on art, on the literature that has some chance of
permanency. The topics discussed in the lecture halls, in the
social centers, and in the Sunday gatherings, which are so
pronounced a feature of church life here, add to the testimony. Ida
M. Tarbell noticed that on her first visit. Her impression deepened
on her second.... Without tossing any bouquets at ourselves it can
be said that we are thinking some thoughts which only the elect in
other cities dream of thinking.
I should like to make some intelligent comment on this. I feel, indeed,
that something very ponderous, and solemn, and authoritative, and
learned, and wise, and owlish, and erudite, ought to be said.
But the trouble is that I am utterly unqualified to speak in that way. I
am not one of the elect. If some one called me that, I would knock him
down if I could, and kick him full of holes. That is because I think
that the elect almost invariably elect themselves. They are intellectual
Huertas, and as such I generally detest them. I merely print the
"Press's" statement because I think it is interesting, sometimes, to see
what a city thinks about itself. For my own part, I should think more of
Grand Rapids if, instead of sitting tight and thinking these
extraordinary thoughts, it had done more to carry out the plan it had
for its own beautification.
That is not to say that it is not a pretty city. It is. But its beauty
is of that unconscious kind which comes from hills, and pleasant homes,
and lawns, and trees. The kind of beauty that it lacks is conscious
beauty, the creation of which requires the expenditure of thought,
money, and effort. And if it does nothing else to indicate its
intellectual and esthetic soarings, I should say that it might do well
to discard the reading lamp in favor of the crowbar, if only for long
enough to take the latter instrument, go down to the park, and see what
can be done about that chimney which rises so absurdly there.
* * * * *
The lack of coherent municipal taste is all the more a reproach to Grand
Rapids for the reason that taste, perhaps above all other qualities, is
the essential characteristic of the city's leading industry.
I used to have an idea that "cheap" furniture came from Grand Rapids.
Perhaps it did. Perhaps it still does. I do not know. But I do know that
the tour I made through the five acres, more or less, of rooms which
make up the show house of Berkey & Gay, afforded me the best single bit
of concrete proof I met, in all my travels, of the positive growth of
good taste in this country.
Just as the whole face of things has changed architecturally in the last
ten or fifteen years, furnishings have also changed. The improved
appreciation which makes people build sightly homes makes them fill
those homes with furniture of respectable design. People are beginning
to know about the history of furniture, to recognize the characteristics
of the great English furniture designers and to appreciate the beauty
which they handed down.
We went through the warerooms with Mr. Gay, and as I feasted my eyes
upon piece after piece, set after set, of Chippendale, Sheraton,
Heppelwhite, and Adam, I asked Mr. Gay about the renaissance which is
upon us. One thing I was particularly curious about: I wanted to know
whether the improvement in furniture sprang from popular demand or
whether it had been in some measure forced upon the public by the
manufacturers.
Mr. Gay told me that the change was something which originated with the
people. "We have always wanted to make beautiful furniture," he said,
"and we have helped all we could, but a manufacturer of furniture cannot
force either good taste or bad taste upon those who buy. He has to offer
them what they are willing to take, for they will not buy anything else.
I know that, because sometimes we have tried to press matters a little.
Now and then we have indulged ourselves to the extent of turning out
some fine pieces, of one design or another, a little in advance of
public appreciation, but there has never been any considerable sale for
such things." He indicated a fine Jacobean library table of oak. "Take
that piece for instance. We made some furniture like that twenty or
twenty-five years ago, but could sell very little of it. People weren't
ready for it then. Or this Adam set--as recently as five years ago we
couldn't have hoped for anything more than a few nibbles on that kind
of thing, but there's a big market for it now."
I asked Mr. Gay if he had any theories as to what had caused the
development in popular appreciation.
"It is a great big subject," he said. "I think the magazines have done
some of it. There have been quantities of publications on house
furnishing. And the manufacturers' catalogues have helped, too. And as
wealth and leisure have increased, people have had more time to give to
the study of such things."
On the train going to Chicago I fell into conversation with a man whom I
presently discerned to be a furniture manufacturer. I don't know who he
was but he told me about the furniture exposition which is held in Grand
Rapids in January and July each year. There are large buildings with
many acres of floor space which stand idle and empty all the year
around, excepting at the time of these great shows. Last year more than
two hundred and fifty separate manufacturers had exhibitions, a large
number of them being manufacturers whose factories were not located in
Grand Rapids, but who nevertheless found it profitable to ship samples
there and rent space in the exhibition buildings in order to place their
wares before the buyers who gather there from all over the country.
Before we parted, this gentleman told me a story which, though he said
it was an old one, I had never heard before.
According to this story, there was, in Grand Rapids, a very inquisitive
furniture manufacturer, who was always trying to find out about the
business done by other manufacturers. When he would meet them he would
question them in a way they found exceedingly annoying.
One day, encountering a rival manufacturer upon the street, he stopped
him and began the usual line of questions. The other answered several,
becoming more and more irritated. But finally his inquisitor asked one
too many.
"How many men are working in your factory now?" he demanded.
"Oh?" said the other, as he turned away, "about two-thirds of them."
CHICAGO
CHAPTER XI
A MIDDLE-WESTERN MIRACLE
Imagine a young demigod, product of a union between Rodin's "Thinker"
and the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and you will have my symbol of
Chicago.
Chicago is stupefying. It knows no rules, and I know none by which to
judge it. It stands apart from all the cities in the world, isolated by
its own individuality, an Olympian freak, a fable, an allegory, an
incomprehensible phenomenon, a prodigious paradox in which youth and
maturity, brute strength and soaring spirit, are harmoniously confused.
Call Chicago mighty, monstrous, multifarious, vital, lusty, stupendous,
indomitable, intense, unnatural, aspiring, puissant, preposterous,
transcendent--call it what you like--throw the dictionary at it! It is
all that you can do, except to shoot it with statistics. And even the
statistics of Chicago are not deadly, as most statistics are.
First, you must realize that Chicago stands fourth in population among
the cities of the world, and second among those of the Western
Hemisphere. Next you must realize that there are people still alive who
were alive when Chicago did not exist, even as a fort in a swamp at the
mouth of the Chicago River--the river from which, by the way, the city
took its name, and which in turn took its own name from an Indian word
meaning "skunk."
I do not claim that there are many people still alive who were alive
when Chicago wasn't there at all, or that such people are feeling very
active, or that they remember much about it, for in 102 years a man
forgets a lot of little things. Nevertheless, there _are_ living men
older than Chicago.
Just one hundred years ago Fort Dearborn, at the mouth of the river, was
being rebuilt, after a massacre by the Indians. Eighty-five years ago
Chicago was a village of one hundred people. Sixty-five years ago this
village had grown into a city of approximately the present size of
Evanston--a suburb of Chicago, with less than thirty thousand people.
Fifty-five years ago Chicago had something over one hundred thousand
inhabitants. Forty-five years ago, at the time of the Chicago fire, the
city was as large as Washington is now--over three hundred thousand. In
the ten years which followed the disaster, Chicago was not only entirely
rebuilt, and very much improved, but also it increased in population to
half a million, or about the size of Detroit. In the next decade it
actually doubled in size, so that, twenty-five years ago, it passed the
million mark. Soon after that it pushed Philadelphia from second place
among American cities. So it has gone on, until to-day it has a
population of two million, plus a city of about the size of San
Francisco for full measure.
There are the statistics in a capsule paragraph. I hope you will feel
bett
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