Full text of "Your United States; impressions of a first visit"

See other formats

YOUR UNITED STATES

THE GLORY OF FIFTH AVENUE INSPIRES EVEN

[See page 28
THOSE ON FOOT

YOUR
UNITED STATES

IMPRESSIONS OF A FIRST VISIT

ARNOLD BENNETT

ILLUSTRATED BY

FRANK CRAIG

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON

M CM XII

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PUBLISHED OCTOBER. 1912

A-N

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. THE FIRST NIGHT 3

II. STREETS 27

III. THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES 49

IV. SOME ORGANIZATIONS 73

V. TRANSIT AND HOTELS 99

VI. SPORT AND THE THEATER 123

VII. EDUCATION AND ART 147

VIII. CITIZENS 171

254395

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE GLORY OF FIFTH AVENUE INSPIRES EVEN THOSE ON FOOT Frontispiece

DISEMBARKING AT NEW YORK Facing p. IO

THE DOWN-TOWN BROADWAY OF CROWDED SKY-SCRAPERS . " 1 6

BROADWAY ON ELECTION NIGHT " 2O

A BUSY DAY ON THE CURB MARKET 34

A WELL-KNOWN WALL STREET CHARACTER 36

THE SKY-SCRAPERS OF LOWER NEW YORK AT NIGHT ... 38

A WINTER MORNING IN LINCOLN PARK, CHICAGO .... 42

A RIVER-FRONT HARMONY IN BLACK AND WHITE — CHICAGO . " 44

THE APPROACH TO THE CAPITOL 50

ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE 52

ON THE STEPS OF THE PORTICO — THE CAPITOL 54

UNDER THE GREAT DOME OF THE CAPITOL " 56

THE PROMENADE — CITY POINT, BOSTON 60

THE BOSTON YACHT CLUB — OVERLOOKING THE HARBOR . . 64

AT MORN POURING CONFIDENCES INTO HER TELEPHONE . 74

LUNCHEON IN A DOWN-TOWN CLUB " 86

A YOUNG WOMAN WAS JUST FINISHING A FLORID SONG . . " QO

ABSORBED IN THAT WONDROUS SATISFYING HOBBY .... " 94

IN THE PARLOR-CAR " IOO

BREAKFAST EN ROUTE " IO8

IN THE SUBWAY ONE ENCOUNTERS AN INSISTENT, HURRYING

STREAM " 112

THE STRAP-HANGERS " 1 14

THE PASSENGERS ON THE ELEVATED AT NIGHT ARE ODDLY

ASSORTED .... " Il6

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE RESTAURANT OF A GREAT HOTEL IS BUT ONE FEATURE

OF ITS SPLENDOR Facing p. Ii8

THE HORSE-SHOWS ARE WONDROUS DISPLAYS OF FASHION . " 124
THE SENSE OF A MIGHTY AND CULMINATING EVENT SHARPENED

THE AIR " 130

THE VICTORS LEAVING THE FIELD " 134

UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS — UNIVERSITY OF. PENNSYLVANIA . . " 156
MITCHELL TOWER AND HUTCHINSON COMMONS — UNIVERSITY

OF CHICAGO " 164

PART OF THE DAILY ROUND OF THE INDOMITABLE NEW YORK

WOMAN " 172

THE ASTOUNDING POPULOUSNESS OF THE EAST SIDE ... " 1 86

THE FIRST NIGHT

YOUR UNITED STATES

THE FIRST NIGHT

I SAT with a melting ice on my plate, and my gaze
on a very distant swinging door, through which came
and went every figure except the familiar figure I de
sired. The figure of a woman came. She wore a pale-
blue dress and a white apron and cap, and carried a
dish in uplifted hands, with fhe gesture of an acolyte.
On the bib of the apron were two red marks, and as she
approached, tripping, scornful, unheeding, along the
interminable carpeted aisle, between serried tables of
correct diners, the vague blur of her face gradually de
veloped into features, and the two red marks on her
stomacher grew into two rampant lions, each holding a <
globe in its ferocious paws; and she passed on, bearing
away the dish and these mysterious symbols, and lessened
into a puppet on the horizon of the enormous hall, and
finally vanished through another door. She was suc
ceeded by men, all bearing dishes, but none of them so
inexorably scornful as she, and none of them disappear
ing where she had disappeared; every man relented
and stopped at some table or other. But the figure I

YOUR UNITED STATES

desired remained invisible, and my ice continued to
melt, in accordance with chemical law. The orchestra
in the gallery leaped suddenly into the rag-time without
whose accompaniment it was impossible, anywhere in
the civilized world, to dine correctly. That rag-time,
committed, I suppose, originally by some well-inten
tioned if banal composer in the privacy of his study one
night, had spread over the whole universe of restaurants
like a pest, to the exasperation of the sensitive, but
evidently to the joy of correct diners. Joy shone in the
elated eyes of the four hundred persons correctly dining
together in this high refectory, and at the end there was
honest applause! . . . And yet you never encountered a
person who, questioned singly, did not agree and even
assert of his own accord that music at meals is an out
rageous nuisance! . . .

However, my desired figure was at length manifest.
The man came hurrying and a little breathless, with his
salver, at once apologetic and triumphant. My ice
was half liquid. Had I not the right to reproach him,
in the withering, contemptuous tone which correct
diners have learned to adopt toward the alien serfs who
attend them? I had not. I had neither the right nor
the courage nor the wish. This man was as Anglo-
Saxon as myself. He had, with all his deference, the
mien of the race. When he dreamed of paradise, he
probably did not dream of the caisse of a cosmopolitan
Grand Hotel in Switzerland. When he spoke English
he was not speaking a foreign language. And this
restaurant was one of the extremely few fashionable
Anglo-Saxon restaurants left in the world, where an

THE FIRST NIGHT

order given in English is understood at the first try,
and where the English language is not assassinated and
dismembered by menials who despise it, menials who
slang one another openly in the patois of Geneva,
Luxembourg, or Naples. A singular survival, this
restaurant! . . . Moreover, the man was justified in his
triumphant air. Not only had he most intelligently
brought me a fresh ice, but he had brought the particular
kind of rusk for which I had asked. There were over
thirty dishes on the emblazoned menu, and of course I
had wanted something that was not on it: a peculiar
rusk, a rusk recondite and unheard of by my fellow-
diners. The man had hopefully said that he "would
see." And here lay the rusk, magically obtained. I
felicitated him, as an equal. And then, having consumed
the ice and the fruits of the hot-house, I arose and
followed in the path of the lion-breasted woman, and
arrived at an elevator, and was wafted aloft by a boy of
sixteen who did nothing else from 6 A.M. till midnight
(so he said) but ascend and descend in that elevator.
By the discipline of this inspiring and jocund task he
was being prepared for manhood and the greater world!
. . . And yet, what would you? Elevators must have boys,
and even men. Civilization is not so simple as it may
seem to the passionate reformer and lover of humanity.
Later, in the vast lounge above the restaurant, I
formed one of a group of men, most of whom had ac
quired fame, and had the slight agreeable self-conscious
ness that fame gives; and I listened, against a back
ground of the ever-insistent music, to one of those end
less and multifarious reminiscent conversations that are

YOUR UNITED STATES

heard only in such places. The companion on my right
would tell how he had inhabited a house in Siam, next
to the temple in front of which the corpses of people too
poor to be burned were laid out, after surgical prelimina
ries, to be devoured by vultures, and how the vultures,
when gorged, would flap to the roof of his house and sit
there in contemplation. And the companion on my
left would tell how, when he was unfamous and on his
beam-ends, he would stay in bed with a sham attack of
influenza, and on the day when a chance offered itself
would get up and don his only suit — a glorious one — and,
fitting an eye-glass into his eye because it made him
look older, would go forth to confront the chance. And
then the talk might be interrupted in order to consult
the morning paper, and so settle a dispute about the
exact price of Union Pacifies. And then an Italian
engineer would tell about sport in the woods of Maine,
a perfect menagerie of wild animals where it was ad
visable to use a revolver lest the excessive noise of a
fowling-piece should disturb the entire forest, and how
once he had shot seven times at an imperturbable par
tridge showing its head over a tree, and missed seven
times, and how the partridge had at last flown off, with
a flicker of plumage that almost said aloud, "Well, I
really can't wait any longer!" And then might follow
a simply tremendous discussion about the digestibility
of buckwheat-cakes.

And then the conversation of every group in the lounge
would be stopped by the entry of a page bearing a tele
gram and calling out in the voice of destiny the name
of him to whom the telegram was addressed. And then

THE FIRST NIGHT

another companion would relate in intricate detail a
recent excursion into Yucatan, speaking negligently — as
though it were a trifle — of the extraordinary beauty of
the women of Yucatan, and in the end making quite
plain his conviction that no other women were as beau
tiful as the women of Yucatan. And then the inevitable
Mona Lisa would get onto the carpet, and one heard,
apropos, of the theft of Adam mantelpieces from Russell
Square, and of superb masterpieces of paint rotting
with damp in neglected Venetian churches, and so on
and so on, until one had the melancholy illusion that the
whole art world was going or gone to destruction. But
this subject did not really hold us, for the reason that,
beneath a blase exterior, we were all secretly preoccupied
by the beauty of the women of Yucatan and wondering
whether we should ever get to Yucatan. . . . And then,
looking by accident away, I saw the dim, provocative
faces of girls in white jerseys and woolen caps peering
from without through the dark double windows of the
lounge. And I was glad when somebody suggested that
it was time to take a turn. And outside, in the strong
wind, abaft the four funnels of the Lusitania, a star
seemed to be dancing capriciously around and about the
masthead light. And it was difficult to believe that the
masthead and its light, and not the star, were dancing.
From the lofty promenade deck the Atlantic wave is a
little enough thing, so far down beneath you that you
can scarcely even sniff its salty tang. But when the
elevator-boy — always waiting for me — had lowered me
through five floors, I stood on tiptoe and gazed through
the thick glass of a porthole there; and the flying Atlantic

YOUR UNITED STATES

wave, theatrically moonlit now, was very near. Sud
denly something jumped up and hit the glass of the port
hole a fearful, crashing blow that made me draw away my
face in alarm ; and the solid ground on which I stood vi
brated for an instant. It was the Atlantic wave, caress
ing. Anybody on the other side of this thin, nicely
painted steel plate (I thought) would be in a rather
hopeless situation. I turned away, half shivering, from
the menace. All was calm and warm and reassuring
within the ship. ... In the withdrawn privacy of my
berth, with the curtains closed over the door and Murray
Gilchrist's new novel in my hand and a poised electric
lamp over my head, I looked about as I lay, and every
thing was still except a towel that moved gently, al
most imperceptibly, to and fro. Yet the towel had copied
the immobility of the star. It alone did not oscillate.
Forty-five thousand tons were swaying; but not that
towel. The sense of actual present romance was too
strong to let me read. I extinguished the light, and
listened in the dark to the faint straining noises of
the enormous organism. I thought: "This magic thing
is taking me there! In three days I shall be on that
shore." Terrific adventure ! The rest of the passengers
were merely going to America.

The magic thing was much more magic than I had
conceived. The next morning, being up earlier than
usual and wandering about on strange, inclosed decks
unfamiliar to my feet, I beheld astonishing unsuspected
populations of men and women — crowds of them — a
healthy, powerful, prosperous, independent, somewhat

THE FIRST NIGHT

stern and disdainful multitude, it seemed to me. Those
muscular, striding girls in caps and shawls would not
yield an inch to me in their promenade; they brushed
strongly and carelessly past me ; had I been a ghost they
would have walked through me. They were, and had
been, all living — eating and sleeping — somewhere within
the vessel, and I had not imagined it! It is true that
some ass in the saloon had already calculated for my
benefit that there were " three thousand souls on board!"
(The solemn use of the word "souls" in this connection
by a passenger should stamp a man forever.) But such
numerical statements do not really arouse the imagina
tion. I had to see with my eyes. And I did see with
my eyes. That afternoon a high officer of the ship,
spiriting me away from the polite flirtations and pastimes
of the upper decks, carried me down to more exciting
scenes. And I saw a whole string of young women
inoculated against smallpox, under the interested gaze
of a crowd of men ranged on a convenient staircase.
And a little later I saw a whole string of men inoculated
against smallpox, under the interested gaze of a crowd
of young women ranged on a convenient staircase.

"They're having their sweet revenge," said the high
officer, indicating the young women. He was an
epigrammatic and terse speaker. When I reflected
aloud upon the order and discipline of service which was
necessary to maintain more than a thousand roughish
persons in idleness, cleanliness, health, peace, and con
tent, in the inelastic forward spaces of the ship, he
said with a certain grimness: "Everything has to be
screwed up as tight as you can screw it. And you must

YOUR UNITED STATES

keep to the round. What you do to-day you must do
to-morrow. But what you don't do to-day you can't
get done to-morrow."

Nevertheless, it proved to be a very human world,
a world in which the personal equation counted. I re
member that while some four hundred in one long hall
were applauding "Home, Sweet Home," very badly
fiddled by a gay man on a stool ("Home, Sweet Home"
— and half of them Scandinavians!), and another four
hundred or so were sitting expectant on those multi
farious convenient staircases or wandering in and out
of the maze of cubicles that contained fifteen hundred
separate berths, and a third four hundred or so in an
other long hall were consuming a huge tea offered to
them by a cohort of stewards in white — I remember
that while all this was going forward and the complex
mechanism of the kitchen was in full strain a little,
untidy woman, with an infant dragging at one hand and
a mug in the other, strolled nonchalantly into the breath
less kitchen, and said to a hot cook, "Please will you give
me a drop o' milk for this child?" And under the mili
tary gaze of the high officer, too! Something awful
should have happened. The engines ought to have
stopped. The woman ought to have been ordered out
to instant execution. The engines did seem to falter
for a moment. But the high officer grimly smiled, and
they went on again. "Give me yer mug, mother," said
the cook. And the untidy woman went off with her booty.

"Now I'll show you the first-class kitchens," the high
officer said, and guided me through uncharted territories
to chambers where spits were revolving in front of in-

DISEMBARKING AT NEW YORK

t^A-iA ' f-^v^-f--*-- c^t '\(--i rj t\ NT^

THE FIRST NIGHT

tense heat, and where a confectionery business proceeded,
night and day, and dough was mixed by electricity, and
potatoes peeled by the same, and where a piece of clock
work lifted an egg out of boiling water after it had lain
therein the number of seconds prescribed by you. And
there, pinned to a board, was the order I had given for a
special dinner that night. And there, too, more impres
sive even than that order, was a list of the several hun
dred stewards, together with a designation of the post of
each in case of casualty. I noticed that thirty or forty
of them were told off "to control passengers." After
all, we were in the midst of the Atlantic, and in a crisis
the elevator-boys themselves would have more author
ity than any passenger, however gorgeous. A thought
salutary for gorgeous passengers — that they were in the
final resort mere fool bodies to be controlled! After
I had seen the countless store-rooms, in the recesses of
each of which was hidden a clerk with a pen behind his
ear and a nervous and taciturn air, and passed on to the
world of the second cabin, which was a surprisingly
brilliant imitation of the great world of the saloon, I
found that I held a much-diminished opinion of the great
world of the saloon, which I now perceived to be naught
but a thin crust or artificial gewgaw stuck over the truly
thrilling parts of the ship.

It was not, however, till the next day that I realized
what the most thrilling part of the ship was. Under the
protection of another high officer I had climbed to the
bridge — seventy-five feet above the level of the sea —
which bridge had been very seriously disestablished by
an ambitious wave a couple of years before — and had

YOUR UNITED STATES

there inspected the devices for detecting and extinguish
ing fires in distant holds by merely turning a handle, and
the charts and the telephones and the telegraphs, and
the under-water signaling, and the sounding-tubes, and
the officers' piano; and I had descended by way of the
capstan-gear (which, being capable of snapping a chain
that would hold two hundred and sixty tons in sus
pension, was suitably imprisoned in a cage, like a fierce
wild animal) right through the length of the vessel to the
wheel-house aft. It was comforting to know that if
six alternative steering-wheels were smashed, one after
another, there remained a seventh gear to be worked,
chiefly by direct force of human arm. And, after
descending several more stories, I had seen the actual
steering — the tremendous affair moving to and fro,
majestic and apparently capricious, in obedience to the
light touch of a sailor six hundred feet distant. And
then I had seen the four shafts, revolving lazily one
hundred and eighty-four to the minute; and got myself
involved in dangerous forests of greasy machinery,
whizzing all deserted in a very high temperature under
electric bulbs. Only at rare intervals did I come across
a man in brown doing nothing in particular — as often
as not gazing at a dial; there were dials everywhere,
showing pressures and speeds. And then I had come to
the dynamo-room, where the revolutions were twelve
hundred to the minute, and then to the turbines them
selves — insignificant little things, with no swagger of
huge crank and piston, disappointing little things that
developed as much as one-third of the horse-power
required for all the electricity of New York.

THE FIRST NIGHT

And then, lastly, when I had supposed myself to be at
the rock-bottom of the steamer, I had been instructed
to descend in earnest, and I went down and down steel
ladders, and emerged into an enormous, an incredible
cavern, where a hundred and ninety gigantic furnaces
were being fed every ten minutes by hundreds of tiny
black dolls called firemen. I, too, was a doll as I looked
up at the high white-hot mouth of a furnace and along
the endless vista of mouths. . . . Imagine hell with the
addition of electric light, and you have it ! . . . And up
stairs, far above on the surface of the water, confec
tioners were making fancy cakes, and the elevator-
boy was doing his work! . . . Yes, the inferno was the
most thrilling part of the ship; and no other part of the
ship could hold a candle to it. And I remained of this
conviction even when I sat in the captain's own room,
smoking his august cigars and turning over his books.
I no longer thought, " Every revolution of the pro
pellers brings me nearer to that shore." I thought,
"Every shovelful flung into those white-hot mouths

brings me nearer."

•

It is an absolute fact that, four hours before we could
hope to disembark, ladies in mantles and shore hats
(seeming fantastic and enormous after the sobriety of
ship attire), and gentlemen in shore hats and dark
overcoats, were standing in attitudes of expectancy in
the saloon-hall, holding wraps and small bags: some
of their faces had never been seen till then in the public
resorts of the ship. Excitement will indeed take strange
forms. For myself, although I was on the threshold

YOUR UNITED STATES

of the greatest adventure of my life, I was unaware of
being excited — I had not even "smelled" land, to say
nothing of having seen it — until, when it was quite dark,
I descried a queerly arranged group of different-colored
lights in the distance — yellow, red, green, and what not.
My thoughts ran instantly to Coney Island. I knew
that Coney was an island, and that it was a place where
people had to be attracted and distracted somehow,
and I decided that these illuminations were a device
of the pleasure-mongers of Coney. And when the ship
began to salute these illuminations with answering flares
I thought the captain was a rather good-natured man
to consent thus to amuse the populace. But when we
slowed, our propellers covering the calm sea with acres
of foam, and the whole entire illuminations began to
approach us in a body, I perceived that my Coney Island
was merely another craft, but a very important and of
ficial craft. An extremely small boat soon detached
itself from this pyrotechnical craft and came with a
most extraordinary leisureness toward a white square
of light that had somehow broken forth in the black
ness of our side. And looking down from the topmost
deck, I saw, far below, the tiny boat manceuver on the
glinting wave into the reflection of our electricity and
three mysterious men climb up from her and disappear
into us. Then it was that I grew really excited, un
comfortably excited. The United States had stretched
out a tentacle.

In no time at all, as it seemed, another and more
formidable tentacle had folded round me — in the shape
of two interviewers. (How these men had got on board

THE FIRST NIGHT

— and how my own particular friend had got on board
— I knew not, for we were yet far from quay-side.) I
had been hearing all my life about the sublime American
institution of the interview. I had been warned by
Americans of its piquant dangers. And here I was sud
denly up against it! Beneath a casual and jaunty ex
terior, I trembled. I wanted to sit, but dared not.
They stood; I stood. These two men, however, were
adepts. They had the better qualities of American
dentists. Obviously they spent their lives in meeting
notorieties on inbound steamers, and made naught of it.
They were middle-aged, disillusioned, tepidly polite,
conscientious, and rapid. They knew precisely what
they wanted and how to get it. Having got it, they
raised their hats and went. Their printed stories were
brief, quite unpretentious, and inoffensive — though one
of them did let out that the most salient part of me was
my teeth, and the other did assert that I behaved
like a school-boy. (Doubtless the result of timidity
trying to be dignified — this alleged school-boyishness!)
I liked these men. But they gave me an incomplete
idea of the race of interviewers in the United States.
There is a variety of interviewers very different from
them. I am, I think, entitled to consider myself a fairly
first-class authority on all varieties of interviewer, not
only in New York but in sundry other great cities. My
initiation was brief, but it was thorough. Many va
rieties won my regard immediately, and kept it; but
I am conscious that my sympathy with one particular
brand (perhaps not numerous) was at times imperfect.
The brand in question, as to which I was amiably

YOUR UNITED STATES

cautioned before even leaving the steamer, is usually very
young, and as often a girl as a youth. He or she cheer
fully introduces himself or herself with a hint that of
course it is an awful bore to be interviewed, but he or she
has a job to do and he or she must be allowed to do it.
Just so! But the point which, in my audacity, I have
occasionally permitted to occur to me is this: Is this
sort of interviewer capable of doing the job allotted
to him? I do not mind slips of reporting, I do not mind
a certain agreeable malice (indeed, I reckon to do a bit
in that line myself). I do not even mind hasty mis
representations (for, after all, we are human, and the
millennium is still unannounced) ; but I do object to
inefficiency — especially in America, where sundry kinds
of efficiency have been carried farther than any efficiency
was ever carried before.

Now this sort of interviewer too often prefaces the
operation itself by the remark that he really doesn't
know what question to ask you. (Too often I have been
tempted to say : ''Why not ask me to write the interview
for you? It will save you trouble.") Having made this
remark, the interviewer usually proceeds to give a
sketch of her own career, together with a conspectus
of her opinions on everything, a reference to her im
portance in the interviewing world, and some glimpse of
the amount of her earnings. This achieved, she breaks
off breathless and reproaches you: "But, my dear man,
you aren't saying anything at all. You really must
say something." ("My dear man" is the favorite
form of address of this sort of interviewer when she
happens to be a girl.) Too often I have been tempted

- i- "i II

THE DOWN-TOWN BROADWAY OF CROWDED SKY-SCRAPERS

THE FIRST NIGHT

to reply: "Cleopatra, or Helen, which of us is being in
terviewed?" When he has given you a chance to talk,
this sort of interviewer listens, helps, corrects, advises,
but never makes a note. The result the next morning
is the anticipated result. The average newspaper reader
gathers that an extremely brilliant young man or woman
has held converse with a very commonplace stranger who,
being confused in his or her presence, committed a num
ber of absurdities which offered a strong and painful
contrast to the cleverness and wisdom of the brilliant
youth, f This result apparently satisfies the average
newspaper reader, but it does not satisfy the expert.

Immediately after my first bout with interviewers
I was seated at a table in the dining-saloon of the ship
with my particular friend and three or four friendly,
quiet, modest, rather diffident human beings whom I
afterward discovered to be among the best and most
experienced newspaper men in New York — not inter
viewers.

Said one of them:

"Not every interviewer in New York knows how to
write — how to put a sentence together decently. And
there are perhaps a few who don't accurately know the
difference between impudence and wit."

A caustic remark, perhaps. But I have noticed that
when the variety of interviewing upon which I have
just animadverted becomes the topic, quiet, reasonable
Americans are apt to drop into causticity.

Said another :

"I was a reporter for twelve years, but I was cured of
personalities at an early stage — and by a nigger, too!
2 17

YOUR UNITED STATES

I had been interviewing a nigger prize-fighter, and I'd
made some remarks about the facial characteristics of
niggers in general. Some other nigger wrote me a
long letter of protest, and it ended like this: 'I've never
seen you. But I've seen your portraits, and let me re
spectfully tell you that you're no Lillian Russell."

Some mornings I, too, might have sat down and writ
ten, from visual observation, "Let me respectfully tell
you that you're no Lillian Russell."

Said a third among my companions:

"No importance whatever is attached to a certain
kind of interview in the United States."

Which I found, later, was quite true in theory, but not
in practice. Whenever, in that kind of interview, I had
been made to say something more acutely absurd and
maladroit than usual, my friends who watched over me,
and to whom I owe so much that cannot be written,
were a little agitated — for about half an hour; in about
half an hour the matter had somehow passed from their
minds.

//"Supposing I refuse to talk to that sort of inter
viewer?" I asked, at the saloon table.

"The interviews will appear all the same," was the
reply.

My subsequent experience contradicted this. On the
rare occasions when I refused to be interviewed, what
appeared was not an interview, but .invective.

Let me not be misunderstood. I have been speaking
of only one brand of American interviewer. I en
countered a couple of really admirable women inter
viewers, not too young, and a confraternity of men who

THE FIRST NIGHT

did not disdain an elementary knowledge of their busi
ness. One of these arrived with a written list of ques
tions, took a shorthand note of all I said, and then
brought me a proof to correct. In interviewing this
amounts almost to genius. ... I have indicated what to
me seems a defect — trifling, possibly, but still a defect —
in the brilliant organization of the great national sport
of interviewing. Were this defect removed, as it could
be, the institution might be as perfect as the American
oyster. Than which nothing is more perfect.

"You aren't drinking your coffee," said some one,
inspecting my cup at the saloon table.

"No," I answered, firmly; for when the smooth ef
ficiency of my human machine is menaced I am as faddy
and nervous as a marine engineer over lubrication. ' ' If
I did, I shouldn't sleep."

"And what of it?" demanded my particular friend,
challengingly.

It was a rebuke. It was as if he had said, "On this
great night, when you enter my wondrous and romantic
country for the first time, what does it matter whether
you sleep or not?"

I saw the point. I drank the coffee. The romantic
sense, which had been momentarily driven back by the
discussion of general ideas, swept over me again. ... In
fact, through the saloon windows could be seen all the
Battery end of New York and the first vague visions of
sky-scrapers. . . . Then — the moments refused to be
counted — we were descending by lifts and by gangways
from the high upper decks of the ship down onto the

YOUR UNITED STATES

rocky ground of the United States. I don't think that
any American ever set foot in Europe with a more pro
found and delicious thrill than that which affected me
at that instant. ... I was there! . . . The official and un
official activities of the quay passed before me like a
dream. ... I heard my name shouted by a man in a
formidably severe uniform, and I thought, "Thus
early have I somehow violated the Constitution of these
States?" But it was only a telegram for me. . . . And
then I was in a most rickety and confined taxi, and the
taxi was full to the brim with luggage, two friends, and
me. And I was off into New York.

At the center of the first cross-roads I saw a splendid
and erect individual, flashing forth authority, gaiety,
and utter smartness in the gloom. Impossible not to
believe that he was the owner of all the adjacent ground,
disguised as a cavalry officer on foot.

"What is that archduke?" I inquired.

"He's just a cop."

I knew then that I was in a great city.

The rest of the ride was an enfevered phantasmagoria.
We burst startlingly into a very remarkable deep glade
— on the floor of it long and violent surface-cars, a few
open shops and bars with commissionaires at the doors,
vehicles dipping and rising out of holes in the ground,
vistas of forests of iron pillars, on the top of which ran
deafening, glittering trains, as on a tight-rope; above
all that, a layer of darkness ; and above the layer of dark
ness enormous moving images of things in electricity
— a mastodon kitten playing with a ball of thread, an
umbrella in a shower of rain, siphons of soda-water

. .«*•*»',•

•./ ;'•: i V . V/

BROADWAY ON ELECTION NIGHT

THE FIRST

being emptied and filled, gigantic horses galloping at
full speed, and an incredible heraldry of chewing-gum. . . .
Sky-signs! In Europe I had always inveighed manfully
against sky-signs. But now I bowed the head, van
quished. These sky-signs annihilated argument. More
over, had they not been made possible by the invention
of a European, and that European an intimate friend
of my own? . . .

"I suppose this is Broadway?" I ventured.

It was. That is to say, it was one of the Broadways.
There are several different ones. What could be more
different from this than the down-town Broadway of
Trinity Church and the crowded sky-scrapers? And
even this Broadway could differ from itself, as I knew
later on an election night. ... I was overpowered by
Broadway.

"You must not expect me to talk," I said.

We drew up in front of a huge hotel and went into
the bar, huge and gorgeous to match, shimmering with
white bartenders and a variegated population of men-
about-town. I had never seen such a bar.

"Two Polands and a Scotch highball," was the order.
Of which geographical language I understood not a
word.

"See the fresco , ' ' my particular friend suggested . And
from his tone, at once modestly content and artificially
careless, I knew that that nursery-rhyme fresco was one
of the sights of the pleasure quarter of New York, and
that I ought to admire it. Well, I did admire it. I
found it rather fine and apposite. But the free-luncheon
counter, as a sight, took my fancy more. Here it was,

YOUR UNITED STATES

the free-luncheon counter of which the European reads
— generously loaded, and much freer than the air.

"Have something?"

I would not. They could shame me into drinking
coffee, but they could not shame me into eating corned
beef and granite biscuits at eleven o'clock at night.
The Poland water sufficed me.

We swept perilously off again into the welter. That
same evening three of my steamer companions were
thrown out of a rickety taxi into a hole in the ground
in the middle of New York, with the result that one of
them spent a week in a hotel bed, under doctor and nurse.
But I went scatheless. Such are the hazards of life. . . .
We arrived at a terminus. And it was a great terminus.
A great terminus is an inhospitable place. And just
here, in the perfection of the manner in which my
minutest comfort was studied and provided for, I began
to appreciate the significance of American hospitality —
that combination of eager good-nature, Oriental lavish-
ness, and sheer brains. We had time to spare. Close
to the terminus we had passed by a hotel whose summit,
for all my straining out of the window of the cab, I had
been unable to descry. I said that I should really like
to see the top of that hotel. No sooner said than done.
I saw the highest hotel I had ever seen. We went into
the hotel, teeming like the other one, and from an agree
able and lively young dandy bought three cigars out of
millions of cigars. Naught but bank-notes seemed to
be current. The European has an awe of bank-notes,
whatever their value.

Then we were in the train, and the train was moving.

THE FIRST NIGHT

And every few seconds it shot past the end of a long,
straight, lighted thoroughfare — scores upon scores of
them, with a wider and more brilliant street interspersed
among them at intervals. And I forgot at what hun
dredth street the train paused before rolling finally out
of New York. I had had the feeling of a vast and metro
politan city. I thought, "Whatever this is or is" not, it
is a metropolis, and will rank with the best of 'em."
I had lived long in more than one metropolis, and I
knew the proud and the shameful unmistakable marks
of the real thing. And I was aware of a poignant sym
pathy with those people and those mysterious genera
tions who had been gradually and yet so rapidly putting
together, girder by girder and tradition by tradition, all
unseen by me till then, this illustrious, proud organism,
with its nobility and its baseness, its rectitude and its
mournful errors, its colossal sense of life. I liked New
York^irreyocably.

STREETS

WHEN I first looked at Fifth Avenue by sunlight, in
the tranquillity of Sunday morning, and when I
last set eyes on it, in the ordinary peevish gloom of a busy
sailing-day, I thought it was the proudest thoroughfare
I had ever seen anywhere. The revisitation of certain
European capitals has forced me to modify this judg
ment; but I still think that Fifth Avenue, if not un-
equaled, is unsurpassed.

One afternoon I was driving up Fifth Avenue in the
company of an architectural expert who, with the in
credible elastic good nature of American business men,
had abandoned his affairs for half a day in order to go
with me on a voyage of discovery, and he asked me, so as
to get some basis of understanding or disagreement, what
building in New York had pleased me most. I at once
said the University Club — to my mind a masterpiece.
He approved, and a great peace filled our automobile;
in which peace we expanded. He asked me what build
ing in the world made the strongest appeal to me, and
I at once said the Strozzi Palace at Florence. Whereat
he was decidedly sympathetic.

"Fifth Avenue," I said, "always reminds me of
Florence and the Strozzi. . . .The cornices, you know."

He stopped the automobile under the Gorham store

YOUR UNITED STATES

and displayed to me the finest cornice in New York,
and told me how Stanford White had put up several
experimental cornices there before arriving at finality.
Indeed, a great cornice ! I admit I was somewhat dashed
by the information that most cornices in New York are
made of cast iron ; but only for a moment ! What, after
all, do I care what a cornice is made of, so long as it
juts proudly out from the fagade and helps the street
to a splendid and formidable sky-line? I had neither
read nor heard a word of the cornices of New York, and
yet for me New York was first and last the city of effec
tive cornices! (Which merely shows how eyes differ!)
The cornice must remind you of Italy, and through Italy
of the Renaissance. And is it not the boast of the
United States to be a renaissance? I always felt that
there was something obscurely symbolic in the New
York cornice — symbolic of the necessary qualities of a
renaissance, half cruel and half humane.

The critical European excusably expects a very great
deal from Fifth Avenue, as being the principal shopping
street of the richest community in the world. (I speak
not of the residential blocks north of Fifty-ninth Street,
whose beauty and interest fall perhaps far short of their
pretensions.) And the critical European will not be
disappointed, unless his foible is to be disappointed —
as, in fact, occasionally happens. Except for the miserly
splitting, here and there in the older edifices, of an in
adequate ground floor into a mezzanine and a shallow
box (a device employed more frankly and usefully with
an outer flight of steps on the East Side), there is noth
ing mean in the whole street from the Plaza to Wash-

STREETS

ington Square. A lot of utterly mediocre architecture
there is, of course — the same applies inevitably to every
long street in every capital — but the general effect is
homogeneous and fine, and, above all, grandly generous.
And the alternation of high and low buildings produces
not infrequently the most agreeable architectural acci
dents : for example, seen from about Thirtieth Street, the
pale-pillared, squat structure of the Knickerbocker
Trust against a background of the lofty red of the
^Eolian Building. . . . And then, that great white store
on the opposite pavement ! The single shops, as well as
the general stores and hotels on Fifth Avenue, are im
pressive in the lavish spaciousness of their disposition.
Neither stores nor shops could have been conceived, or
could be kept, by merchants without genuine imagina
tion and faith.

And the glory of the thoroughfare inspires even those
who only walk up and down it. It inspires particularly
the mounted policeman as he reigns over a turbulent
crossing. It inspires the women, and particularly the
young women, as they pass in front of the windows, own
ing their contents in thought. I sat once with an old,
white-haired, and serious gentleman, gazing through
glass at Fifth Avenue, and I ventured to say to him,
" There are fine women on Fifth Avenue." " By Jove!"
he exclaimed, with deep conviction, and his eyes sud
denly fired, " there are!" On the whole, I think that,
in their carriages or on their feet, they know a little
better how to do justice to a fine thoroughfare than
the women of any other capital in my acquaintance.
I have driven rapidly in a fast car, clinging to my hat

YOUR UNITED STATES

and my hair against the New York wind, from one end
of Fifth Avenue to the other, and what with the sunshine,
and the flags wildly waving in the sunshine, and the blue
sky and the cornices jutting into it and the roofs scrap
ing it, and the large whiteness of the stores, and the in
vitation of the signs, and the display of the windows,
and the swift sinuousness of the other cars, and the
proud opposing processions of American subjects — what
with all this and with the supreme imperialism of the
mounted policeman, I have been positively intoxicated!
' And yet possibly the greatest moment in the life of
Fifth Avenue is at dusk, when dusk falls at tea-time.
The street lamps flicker into a steady, steely blue,
and the windows of the hotels and restaurants throw
a yellow radiance; all the shops — especially the jewelers'
shops — become enchanted treasure-houses, whose in
teriors recede away behind their facades into infinity;
and the endless files of innumerable vehicles, interlacing
and swerving, put forth each a pair of glittering eyes. . . .
Come suddenly upon it all, from the leafy fastnesses of
Central Park, round the corner from the Plaza Hotel,
and wait your turn until the arm of the policeman, whose
blue coat is now whitened with dust, permits your
restive chauffeur to plunge down into the main currents
of the city. . . . You will have then the most grandiose
impression that New York is, in fact, inhabited; and that
even though the spectacular luxury of New York be
nearly as much founded upon social injustice and poverty
as any imperfect human civilization in Europe, it is a
boon to be alive therein! ... In half an hour, in three-
quarters of an hour, the vitality is clean gone out of the

STREETS

street. The shops have let down their rich gathered cur
tains, the pavements are deserted, and the roadway is
no longer perilous. And nothing save a fire will arouse
Fifth Avenue till the next morning. Even on an elec
tion night the sole sign in Fifth Avenue of the disorder of
politics will be a few long strips of tape-paper wreathing
in the breeze on the asphalt under the lonely lamps.

It is not easy for a visiting stranger in New York
to get away from Fifth Avenue. The street seems to
hold him fast. There might almost as well be no other
avenues; and certainly the word "Fifth" has lost all
its numerical significance in current usage. A youthful
musical student, upon being asked how many symphonies
Beethoven had composed, replied four, and obstinately
stuck to it that Beethoven had only composed four.
Called upon to enumerate the four, he answered thus,
the C minor, the Eroica, the Pastoral, and the Ninth.
"Ninth" had lost its numerical significance for that
student. A similar phenomenon of psychology has hap
pened with the streets and avenues of New York. Euro
peans are apt to assume that to tack numbers instead of
names on to the thoroughfares of a city is to impair
their idejitities and individualities'." Hot a bit! The
numbers grow into names. "That is all. Such is the
mysterious poetic force of the human mind! That curt
word "Fifth" signifies as much to the New-Yorker as
"Boulevard des Italiens" to the Parisian. As for the
possibility of confusion, would any New-Yorker ever
confuse Fourteenth with Thirteenth or Fifteenth Street,
or twenty-third with Twenty-second or Twenty-fourth,

YOUR UNITED STATES

or Forty-second with One Hundred and Forty-second,
or One Hundred and Twenty-fifth with anything else
whatever? Yes, when the Parisian confuses the Champs
Elysees with the Avenue de 1' Opera ! When the Parisian
arrives at this stage — even then Fifth Avenue will not
be confused with Sixth!

One day, in the unusual silence of an election morning,
I absolutely determined to see something of the New York
that lies beyond Fifth Avenue, and I slipped off west
ward along Thirty-fourth Street, feeling adventurous.
The excursion was indeed an adventure. I came across
Broadway and Sixth Avenue together! Sixth Avenue,
with its barbaric paving, surely could not be under the
same administration as Fifth! Between Sixth and
Seventh I met a sinister but genial ruffian, proudly
wearing the insignia of Tammany; and soon I met a lot
more of them: jolly fellows, apparently, yet somehow
conveying to me the suspicion that in a saloon shindy
they might prove themselves my superiors. (I was told
in New York, and by the best people in New York, that
Tammany was a blot on the social system of the city.
But I would not have it so. I would call it a part of
the social system, just as much a part of the social system,
and just as expressive of the national character, as the
fine schools, the fine hospitals, the superlative business
organizations, or Mr. George M. Cohan's Theater. A
civilization is indivisibly responsible for itself. It
may not, on the Day of Jugdment, or any other day,
lessen its collective responsibility by baptizing certain
portions of its organism as extraneous " blots" dropped
thereon from without.) To continue — after Seventh

STREETS

Avenue the declension was frank. In the purlieus of the
Five Towns themselves — compared with which Pitts-
burg is seemingly Paradise — I have never trod such
horrific sidewalks. I discovered huge freight-trains
shunting all over Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, and
frail flying bridges erected from sidewalk to sidewalk,
for the convenience of a brave and hardy populace.
I was surrounded in the street by menacing locomotives
and crowds of Italians, and in front of me was a great
Italian steamer. I felt as though Fifth Avenue was a
three days' journey away, through a hostile country.
And yet I had been walking only twenty minutes! I
regained Fifth with relief, and had learned a lesson. In
future, if asked how many avenues there are in New York
I would insist that there are three : Lexington, Madison,

and Fifth.

•

The chief characteristic of Broadway is its inter-
minability. Everybody knows, roughly, where it be
gins, but I doubt if even the topographical experts of
Albany know just where it ends. It is a street that
inspires respect rather than enthusiasm. In the day
time all the uptown portion of it — and as far down
town as Ninth Street — has a provincial aspect. If
Fifth Avenue is metropolitan and exclusive, Broadway
is not. Broadway lacks distinction, it lacks any sort
of impressiveness, save in its first two miles, which do —
especially the southern mile — strike you with a vague
and uneasy awe. And it was here that I experienced
my keenest disappointment in the United States.

I went through sundry disappointments. I had ex-

3 33

YOUR UNITED STATES

pected to be often asked how much I earned. I never was
asked. I had expected to be often informed by casual
acquaintances of their exact income. Nobody, save
an interviewer or so and the president of a great trust,
ever passed me even a hint as to the amount of his
income. I had expected to find an inordinate amount of
tippling in clubs and hotels. I found, on the contrary,
a very marked sobriety. I had expected to receive many
hard words and some insolence from paid servants,
such as train-men, tram-men, lift-boys, and policemen.
From this class, as from the others, I received nothing
but politeness, except in one instance. That instance,
by the way, was a barber in an important hotel, whom
I had most respectfully requested to refrain from
bumping my head about. "Why?" he demanded.
"Because I've got a headache," I said. "Then why
didn't you tell me at first?" he crushed me. "Did
you expect me to be a thought-reader?" But, indeed,
I could say a lot about American barbers. I had ex
pected to have my tempting fob snatched. It was not
snatched. I had expected to be asked, at the moment
of landing, for my mature opinion of the United States,
and again at intervals of about a quarter of an hour,
4^ ^^ day and night, throughout my stay. But I had been
in America at least ten days before the question was put
to me, even in jest. I had expected to be surrounded
by boasting and impatient vanity concerning the achieve
ments of the United States and the citizens thereof.
I literally never heard a word of national boasting, nor
observed the slightest impatience under criticism. . . .
I say I had expected these things. I would be more

A BUSY DAY ON THE CURB MARKET

STREETS

correct to say that I should have expected them if
I had had a rumor - believing mind: which I have
not.

But I really did expect to witness an overwhelming
violence of traffic and movement in lower Broadway
and the renowned business streets in its vicinity. And I
really was disappointed by the ordinariness of the scene,
which could be well matched in half a dozen places in
Europe, and beaten in one or two. If but once I had
been shoved into the gutter by a heedless throng going
furiously upon its financial ways, I should have been
content. . . . The legendary "American rush" is to me a
fable. Whether it ever existed I know not ; but I certain
ly saw no trace of it, either in New York or Chicago.
I dare say I ought to have gone to Seattle for it. My
first sight of a stock-market roped off in the street
was an acute disillusionment. In agitation it could not
have competed with a sheep-market. In noise it was a
muffled silence compared with the fine racket that en
livens the air outside the Paris Bourse. I saw also an
ordinary day in the Stock Exchange. Faint excitations
were afloat in certain corners, but I honestly deemed the
affair tame. A vast litter of paper on the floor, a vast
assemblage of hats pitched on the tops of telephone-
boxes — these phenomena do not amount to a hustle.
Earnest students of hustle should visit Paris or Milan.
The fact probably is that the perfecting of mechanical
contrivances in the United States has killed hustle as
a diversion for the eyes and ears. The mechanical
side of the Exchange was wonderful and delightful.

YOUR UNITED STATES

The skyscrapers that cluster about the lower end of
Broadway — their natural home — were as impressive as
I could have desired, but not architecturally. For
they could only be felt, not seen. And even in situa
tions where the sky-scraper is properly visible, it is, as a
rule, to my mind, architecturally a failure. I regret for
my own sake that I could not be more sympathetic
toward the existing sky-scraper as an architectural
entity, because I had assuredly no Europen prejudice
against the sky-scraper as such. The objection of
most people to the sky-scraper is merely that it is un
usual — the instinctivej3bj ection of most people to every
thing that is original enough to violate tradition ! I, on
the contrary, as a convinced modernist, would applaud
the unusualness of the sky-scraper. Nevertheless, I
cannot possibly share the feelings of patriotic New-
Yorkers who discover architectural grandeur in, say, the
Flat Iron Building or the Metropolitan Life Insurance
Building. To me they confuse the poetical idea of
these buildings with the buildings themselves. I eagerly
admit that the bold, prow-like notion of the Flat Iron
cutting northward is a splendid notion, an inspiring
notion; it thrills. But the building itself is ugly — nay,
it is adverbially ugly; and no reading of poetry into it
will make it otherwise.

Similarly, the Metropolitan Building is tremendous.
It is a grand sight, but it is an ugly sight. The men who
thought of it, who first conceived the notion of it, were
poets. They said, "We will cause to be constructed the
highest building in the world; we will bring into exist
ence the most amazing advertisement that an insurance

A WELL-KNOWN WALL STREET CHARACTER

STREETS

company ever had." That is good; it is superb; it is
a proof of heroic imagination. But the actual designers
of the building did not rise to the height of it ; and if any
poetry is left in it, it is not their fault. Think what
McKim might have accomplished on that site, and in
those dimensions!

Certain architects, feeling the lack of imagination in
the execution of these enormous buildings, have set
their imagination to work, but in a perverse way and
without candidly recognizing the conditions imposed
upon them by the sky-scraper form: and the result
here and there has been worse than dull; it has been
distressing. But here and there, too, one sees the evi
dence of real understanding and taste. If every tenant
of a sky-scraper demands — as I am informed he does —
the same windows, and radiators under every window,
then the architect had better begin by accepting that
demand openly, with no fanciful or pseudo-imaginative
pretense that things are not what they are. The
Ashland Building, on Fourth Avenue, where the archi
tectural imagination has exercised itself soberly, honestly,
and obediently, appeared to me to be a satisfactory and
agreeable sky-scraper; and it does not stand alone as
the promise that a new style will ultimately be evolved.

In any case, a great deal of the poetry of New York
is due to the sky-scraper. At dusk the effect of the
massed sky-scrapers illuminated from within, as seen
from any high building up-town, is prodigiously beau
tiful, and it is unique in the cities of this world. The
early night effect of the whole town, topped by the afore
said Metropolitan tower, seen from the New Jersey

YOUR UNITED STATES

shore, is stupendous, and resembles some enchanted
city of the next world rather than of this. And the fact
that a very prominent item in the perspective is a fiery
representation of a frothing glass of beer inconceivably
large — well, this fact too has its importance.

But in the sky-scrapers there is a deeper romanticism
than that which disengages itself from them externally.
You must enter them in order to appreciate them, in
order to respond fully to their complex appeal. Out
side, they often have the air of being nothing in par
ticular; at best the facade is far too modest in its revela
tion of the interior. You can quite easily walk by a
sky-scraper on Broadway without noticing it. But you
cannot actually go into the least of them and not be
impressed. You are in a palace. You are among
marbles and porphyries. You breathe easily in vast
and brilliant foyers that never see daylight. And then
you come to those mysterious palisaded shafts with
which the building and every other building in New
York is secretly honeycombed, and the palisade is opened
and an elevator snatches you up. I think of American
cities as enormous agglomerations in whose inmost dark
recesses innumerable elevators are constantly ascending
and descending, like the angels of the ladder. . . .

The elevator ejects you. You are taken into dazzling
daylight, into what is modestly called a business office;
but it resembles in its grandeur no European business
office, save such as may have been built by an American.
You look forth from a window, and lo ! New York and
the Hudson are beneath you, and you are in the skies.
And in the warmed stillness of the room you hear the

'STREETS

wind raging and whistling, as you would have imagined
it could only rage and whistle in the rigging of a three-
master at sea. There are, however, a dozen more stories
above this story. You walk from chamber to chamber,
and in answer to inquiry learn that the rent of this one
suite — among so many — is over thirty-six thousand
dollars a year! And you reflect that, to the beholder
in the street, all that is represented by one narrow row
of windows, lost in a diminishing chess-board of windows.
And you begin to realize what a sky-scraper is, and the
poetry of it.

More romantic even than the sky-scraper finished
and occupied is the sky-scraper in process of construc
tion. From no mean height, listening to the sweet drawl
of the steam-drill, I have watched artisans like dwarfs
at work still higher, among knitted steel, seen them
balance themselves nonchalantly astride girders swing
ing in space, seen them throwing rivets to one another
and never missing one; seen also a huge crane collapse
under an undue strain, and, crumpling like tinfoil,
carelessly drop its load onto the populous sidewalk
below. That particular mishap obviously raised the
fear of death among a considerable number of people,
but perhaps only for a moment. Anybody in America
will tell you without a tremor (but with pride) that each
story of a sky-scraper means a life sacrificed. Twenty
stories — twenty men snuffed out; thirty stories — thirty
men. A building of some sixty stories is now going up
—sixty corpses, sixty funerals, sixty domestic hearths to
be slowly rearranged, and the registrars alone know how
many widows, orphans, and other loose by-products!

YOUR UNITED STATES

And this mortality, I believe, takes no account of the
long battles that are sometimes fought, but never yet to
a finish, in the steel webs of those upper floors when the
labor-unions have a fit of objecting more violently than
usual to non-union labor. In one celebrated building,
I heard, the non-unionists contracted an unfortunate
habit of getting crippled; and three of them were in
discreet enough to put themselves under a falling girder
that killed them, while two witnesses who were ready
to give certain testimony in regard to the mishap
vanished completely out of the world, and have never
since been heard of. And so on. What more natural
than that the employers should form a private associa
tion for bringing to a close these interesting hazards?
You may see the leading spirit of the association. You
may walk along the street with him. He knows he is
shadowed, and he is quite cheerful about it. His re
volver is always very ready for an emergency. Nobody
seems to regard this state of affairs as odd enough for any
prolonged comment. There it is! It is accepted. It
is part of the American dailiness. Nobody, at any rate
in the comfortable clubs, seems even to consider that
the original cause of the warfare is aught but a homi
cidal cussedness on the part of the unions. ... I say
that these accidents and these guerrillas mysteriously
and grimly proceeding in the skyey fabric of metal-
ribbed constructions, do really form part of the poetry of
life in America — or should it be the poetry of death?
Assuredly they are a spectacular illustration of that
sublime, romantic contempt for law and for human
life which, to a European, is the most disconcerting

STREETS

factor in the social evolution of your States. I have
sat and listened to tales from journalists and other
learned connoisseurs till — But enough!

•

When I left New York and went to Washington I
was congratulated on having quitted the false America
for the real. When I came to Boston I received the
sympathies of everybody in Boston on having been put
off for so long with spurious imitations of America, and a
sigh of happy relief went up that I had at length got
into touch with a genuine American city. When, after
a long pilgrimage, I attained Chicago, I was positively
informed that Chicago alone was the gate of the United
States, and that everything east of Chicago was negligible
and even misleading. And when I entered Indianapolis
I discovered that Chicago was a mushroom and a suburb
of Warsaw, and that its pretension to represent the
United States was grotesque, the authentic center of the
United States being obviously Indianapolis. . . . The
great towns love thus to affront one another, and their
demeanor in the game resembles the gamboling of young
tigers — it is half playful and half ferocious. For myself,
I have to say that my heart was large enough to hold
all I saw. While I admit that Indianapolis struck me as
very characteristically American, I assert that the un
reality of New York escaped me. It appeared to me
that New York was quite a real city, and European
geographies (apt to err, of course, in matters of detail)
usually locate it in America.

Having regard to the healthy mutual jealousy of the
great towns, I feel that I am carrying audacity to the

.YOUR UNITED STATES

point of foolhardiness when I state that the streets of
every American city I saw reminded me on the whole
rather strongly of the streets of all the others. What
inhabitants of what city could forgive this? Yet I must
state it. Much of what I have said of the streets of New
York applies, in my superficial opinion, for instance, to
the streets of Chicago. It is well known that to the
Chinaman all Westerners look alike. No tourist on his
first visit to a country so astonishing as the United States
is very different from a Chinaman; the tourist should
reconcile himself to that deep truth. It is desolating
to think that a second visit will reveal to me the blind
ness, the distortions, and the wrong-headedness of
my first. But even as a Chinaman I did notice subtle
differences between New York and Chicago. As one
who was brought up in a bleak and uncanny climate,
where soft coal is in universal use, I at once felt more at
home in Chicago than I could ever do "in New York.
The old instinct to wash the hands and change the collar
every couple of hours instantly returned to me in Chicago,
together with the old comforting conviction that a harsh
climate is a climate healthy for body and spirit. And,
because it is laden with soot, the air of Chicago is a great
mystifier and beautifier. Atmospheric effects may be
seen there that are unobtainable without the combustion
of soft coal. Talk, for example, as much as you please
about the electric sky-signs of Broadway — not all of
them together will write as much poetry on the sky as
the single word "Illinois" that hangs without a clue to
its suspension in the murky dusk over Michigan Avenue.
The visionary aspects of Chicago are incomparable.

STREETS

Another difference, of quite another order, between
New York and Chicago is that Chicago is self-conscious.
New York is not ; no metropolis ever is. You are aware
of the self-consciousness of Chicago as soon as you are
aware of its bitumen. The quality demands sympathy,
and wins it by its wistf illness. Chicago is openly anxious
about its soul. I liked that. I wish I could see a livelier
anxiety concerning the municipal soul in certain cities of
Europe.

Perhaps the least subtle difference between New York
and Chicago springs from the fact that the handsomest
part of New York is the center of New York, whereas
the center of Chicago is disappointing. It does not
impress. I was shown, in the center of Chicago, the
first sky-scraper that the world had ever seen. I visited
with admiration what was said to be the largest depart
ment store in the world. I visited with a natural
rapture the largest book-store in the world. I was in
formed (but respectfully doubt) that Chicago is the great
est port in the world. I could easily credit, from the
evidence of my own eyes, that it is the greatest railway
center in the world. But still my imagination was not
fired, as it has been fired again and again by far lesser
and far less interesting places. Nobody could call
Wabash Avenue spectacular, and nobody surely would
assert that State Street is on a plane with the collective
achievements of the city of which it is the principal
thoroughfare. The truth is that Chicago lacks at pres
ent a rallying-point — some Place de la Concorde or Arc
de Triomphe — something for its biggest streets to try to
live up to. A convocation of elevated railroads is not

,43

YOUR UNITED STATES

enough. It seemed to me that Jackson Boulevard or
Van Buren Street, with fine crescents abutting opposite
Grant Park and Garfield Park, and a magnificent square
at the intersection of Ashland Avenue, might ultimately
be the chief sight and exemplar of Chicago. Why not?
Should not the leading thoroughfare lead boldly to the
lake instead of shunning it ? I anticipate the time when
the municipal soul of Chicago will have found in its
streets as adequate expression as it has already found
in its boulevards.

Perhaps if I had not made the "grand tour" of those
boulevards, I might have been better satisfied with the
streets of Chicago. The excursion, in an automobile,
occupied something like half of a frosty day that ended
in torrents of rain — apparently a typical autumn day
in Chicago! Before it had proceeded very far I knew
that there was a sufficient creative imagination on the
shore of Lake Michigan to carry through any municipal
enterprise, however vast, to a generous and final con
clusion. The conception of those boulevards discloses a
tremendous audacity and faith. And as you roll along
the macadam, threading at intervals a wide-stretching
park, you are overwhelmed — at least I was — by the
completeness of the scheme's execution and the lavishness
with which the system is in every detail maintained and
kept up.

You stop to inspect a conservatory, and find yourself
in a really marvelous landscape garden, set with statues,
all under glass and heated, where the gaffers of Chicago
are collected .together to discuss interminably the excit
ing politics of a city anxious about its soul. And while

STREETS

listening to them with one ear, with the other you may
catch the laconic tale of a park official's perilous and suc
cessful vendetta against the forces of graft.

And then you resume the circuit and accomplish many
more smooth, curving, tree-lined miles, varied by a jolt
ing section, or by the faint odor of the Stock-yards, or
by a halt to allow the longest freight-train in the world
to cross your path. You have sighted in the distance
universities, institutions, even factories ; you have passed
through many inhabited portions of the endless boule
vard, but you have not actually touched hands with the
city since you left it at the beginning of the ride. Then
at last, as darkness falls, you feel that you are coming
to the city again, but from another point of the compass.
You have rounded the circle of its millions. You need
only think of the unkempt, shabby, and tangled out
skirts of New York, or of any other capital city, to realize
the miracle that Chicago has put among her assets. . . .

You descry lanes of water in the twilight, and learn
that in order to prevent her drainage from going into
the lake Chicago turned a river back in its course and
compelled it to discharge ultimately into the Mississippi.
That is the story. You feel that it is exactly what
Chicago, alone among cities, would have the imagination
and the courage to do. Some man must have risen from
his bed one morning with the idea, "Why not make
the water flow the other way?" And then gone, per
haps diffidently, to his fellows in charge of the city with
the suggestive query, "Why not make the water flow
the other way ?" And been laughed at ! Only the thing
was done in the end! I seem to have heard that there

YOUR UNITED STATES

was an epilogue to this story, relating how certain other
great cities showed a narrow objection to Chicago drain
ing herself in the direction of the Mississippi, and how
Chicago, after all, succeeded in persuading those whom
it was necessary to persuade that, whereas her drainage
was unsuited to Lake Michigan, it would consort well
with the current of the Mississippi.

And then, in the night and in the rain, you swerve
round some corner into the straight, by Grant Park, in
full sight of one of the most dazzling spectacles that
Chicago or any other city can offer — Michigan Avenue
on a wet evening. Each of the thousands of electric
standards in Michigan Avenue is a cluster of six huge
globes (and yet they will tell you in Paris that the Rue
de la Paix is the best-lit street in the world), and here
and there is a red globe of warning. The two lines of
light pour down their flame into the pool which is the
roadway, and you travel continually toward an incan
descent floor without ever quite reaching it, beneath
mysterious words of fire hanging in the invisible sky ! . . .
The automobile stops. You get out, stiff, and murmur
something inadequate about the length and splendor of
those boulevards. "Oh," you are told, carelessly,
"those are only the interior boulevards. . . . Nothing!
You should see our exterior boulevards — not quite
finished yet!"

Ill

THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES

Ill

THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES

"TTERE, Jimmy!" said, briskly, a middle-aged ad-
11 ministrative person in easy attire, who apparently
had dominion over the whole floor beneath the dome.
A younger man, also in easy attire, answered the call with
an alert smile. The elder pointed sideways with his
head at my two friends and myself, and commanded,
"Run them through in thirty minutes!" Then, having
reached the center of a cuspidor with all the precision of
a character in a Californian novel, he added benevo
lently to Jimmy, "Make it a dollar for them." And
Jimmy, consenting, led us away.

In this episode Europe was having her revenge on the
United States, and I had planned it. How often, in
half a hundred cities of Europe, had I not observed
the American citizen seeing the sights thereof at high
speed? Yes, even in front of the Michael Angelo sculp
tures in the Medici Chapel at Florence had I seen him,
watch in hand, and heard him murmur "Bully!" to the
sculptures and the time of the train to his wife in one
breath ! Now it was impossible for me to see Washing
ton under the normal conditions of a session. And so
I took advantage of the visit to Washington of two
friends on business to see Washington hastily, as an
excursionist pure and simple. I said to the United

4 49

YOUR UNITED STATES

States, grimly: "The most important and the most
imposing thing in all America is surely the Capitol at
Washington. Well, I will see it as you see the sacred
sights of Europe. By me Europe shall be revenged.'*
' Thus it came about that we had hired a kind of car
riage known as a "sea-going hack," driven by a negro
in dark blue, who was even more picturesque than the
negroes in white who did the menial work in the classic
hotel, and had set forth frankly as excursionists into
the streets of Washington, and presently through the
celebrated Pennsylvania Avenue had achieved entrance
into the Capitol.

It was a breathless pilgrimage — this seeing of the
Capitol. And yet an impressive one. The Capitol
is a great place. I was astonished — and I admit at
once I ought not to have been astonished — that the
Capitol appeals to the historic sense just as much as any
other vast legislative palace of the world — and perhaps
more intimately than some. The sequence of its end
less corridors and innumerable chambers, each associat
ed with event or tradition, begets awe. I think it was
in the rich Senatorial reception-room that I first caught
myself being surprised that the heavy gilded and mar
moreal sumptuosity of the decorations recalled the
average European palace. Why should I have been
expecting the interior of the Capitol to consist of austere
bare walls and unornamented floors? Perhaps it was
due to some thought of Abraham Lincoln. But what
ever its cause, the expectation was naive and derogatory.
The young guide, Jimmy, who by birth and genius evi
dently belonged to the universal race of guides, was

THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES

there to keep my ideas right and my eyes open. He was
infinitely precious, and after his own fashion would have
done honor to any public monument in the East. Such
men are only bred in the very shadow of genuine
history.

"See," he said, touching a wall. "Painted by cele
brated Italian artist to look like bas-relief! But put
your hand flat against it, and you'll see it isn't carved!"
One might have been in Italy.
And a little later he was saying of other painting:
"Although painted in eighteen hundred sixty-five —
forty-six years ago — you notice the flesh tints are as
fresh as if painted yesterday!"

This, I think, was the finest remark I ever heard a
guide make — until this same guide stepped in front of a
portrait of Henry Clay, and, after a second's hesitation,
threw off airily, patronizingly:

"Henry Clay — quite a good statesman!"
But I also contributed my excursionist's share to
these singular conversations. In the swathed Senate
Chamber I noticed two holland-covered objects that
somehow reminded me of my youth and of religious
dissent. I guessed that the daily proceedings of the
Senate must be opened with devotional exercises, and
these two objects seemed to me to be proper — why,
I cannot tell — to the United States Senate; but there was
one point that puzzled me.

"Why," I asked, "do you have two harmoniums?"
"Harmoniums, sir!" protested the guide, staggered.
"Those are roll-top desks."

If only the floor could have opened and swallowed me

.YOUR UNITED STATES

up, as it opens and swallows up the grand piano at the
Thomas concerts in Chicago!

Neither the Senate Chamber nor the Congress Cham
ber was as imposing to me as the much less spacious
former Senate Chamber and the former Congress Cham
ber. The old Senate Chamber, being now transferred
to the uses of supreme justice, was closed on the day of
our visit, owing to the funeral of a judge. Europeans
would have acquiesced in the firm negative of its locked
doors. But my friends, being American, would not
acquiesce. The mere fact that the room was not on
view actually sharpened their desire that I should see it.
They were deaf to refusals. ... I saw that room. And
I was glad that I saw it, for in its august simplicity it
was worth seeing. The spirit of the early history of the
United States seemed to reside in that hemicycle; and
the crape on the vacated and peculiar chair added its
own effect.

My first notion on entering the former Congress
Chamber was that I was in presence of the weirdest
collection of ugly statues that I had ever beheld. Which
impression, the result of shock, was undoubtedly false.
On reflection I am convinced that those statues of the
worthies of the different States are not more ugly than
many statues I could point to in no matter what fane,
museum, or palace of Europe. Their ugliness is only
different from our accustomed European ugliness. The
most crudely ugly mural decorations in the world are
to be found all over Italy — the home of sublime frescos.
The most atrociously debased architecture in the world
is to be found in France — the home of sober artistic

ON PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE

THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES

tradition. Europe is simply peppered everywhere with
sculpture whose appalling mediocrity defies competition.
But when the European meets ugly sculpture or any
ugly form of art in the New World, his instinct is to
exclaim, "Of course!" His instinct is to exclaim, "This
beats everything!" The attitude will not bear examina
tion. And lo! I was adopting it myself.

"And here's Frances Willard!" cried, ecstatically, a
young woman in one of the numerous parties of ex
cursionists whose more deliberate paths through the
Capitol we were continually crossing in our swift course.

And while, upon the spot where John Quincy Adams
fell, I pretended to listen to the guide, who was proving
to me from a distance that the place was as good a
whispering-gallery as any in Europe, I thought: "And
why should not Frances Willard's statue be there? I am
glad it is there. And I am glad to see these groups of
provincials admiring with open mouths the statues of
the makers of their history, though the statues are
chiefly painful." And I thought also: "New York may
talk, and Chicago may talk, and Boston may talk, but it
is these groups of provincials who are the real America."
They were extraordinarily like people from the Five
Towns — that is to say, extraordinarily like comfortable
average people everywhere.

We were outside again, under one of the enormous
porticos of the Capitol. The guide was receiving his
well-earned dollar. The faithful fellow had kept nicely
within the allotted limit of half an hour.

"Now we'll go and see the Congressional Library,"
said my particular friend.

53'

YOUR UNITED STATES

But I would not. I had put myself in a position to
retort to any sight-seeing American in Europe that I
had seen his Capitol in thirty minutes, and I was content.
I determined to rest on my laurels. Moreover, I had
discovered that conventional sight-seeing is a very ex
hausting form of activity. I would visit neither the
Library of Congress, nor the Navy Department, nor the
Pension Bureau, nor the Dead-Letter Museum, nor the
Zoological Park, nor the White House, nor the National
Museum, nor the Lincoln Museum, nor the Smithsonian
Institution, nor the Treasury, nor any other of the great
spectacles of Washington. We just resumed the sea
going hack and drove indolently to and fro in avenues
and parks, tasting the general savor of the city's large
pleasantness. And we had not gone far before we got
into the clutches of the police.

"I don't know who you are," said a policeman, as
he stopped our sea-going hack. "I don't know who you
are," Pie repeated, cautiously, as one accustomed to
policing the shahs and grand viziers of the earth, "but
it's my duty to tell you your coachman crossed over on
the wrong side of the lamp-post. It's not allowed, and
he knows it as well as I do."

We admitted by our shamed silence that we had no
special "pull" in Washington; the wise negro said not a
word; and we crept away from the policeman's wrath,
and before I knew it we were up against the Washington
Monument — one of those national calamities which
ultimately happen to every country, and of which the
supreme example is, of course, the Albert Memorial in
Kensington Gardens.

ON THE STEPS OF THE PORTICO — THE CAPITOL

THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES

When I drove into the magnificent railway station late
that night — true American rain was descending in sheets
— I was carrying away with me an impression, as it were,
of a gigantic plantation of public edifices in a loose tangle
and undergrowth of thoroughfares : which seemed proper
for a legislative and administrative metropolis. I was
amused to reflect how the city, like most cities, had
extended in precisely the direction in which its founders
had never imagined it would extend ; and naturally I was
astonished by the rapidity of its development. (One
of my friends, who was not old, had potted wild game
in a marsh that is now a park close to the Capitol.)
I thought that the noble wings of the Capitol were
architecturally much superior to the central portion
of it. I remembered a dazzling glimpse of the White
House as a distinguished little building. I feared that
ere my next visit the indefatigable energy of America
would have rebuilt Pennsylvania Avenue, especially the
higgledy-piggledy and picturesque and untidy portion
of it that lies nearest to the Capitol, and I hoped that
in doing so the architects would at any rate not carry
the cornice to such excess as it has been carried in other
parts of the town. And, finally, I was slightly scared
by the prevalence of negroes. It seemed to me as if
in Washington I had touched the fringe of the negro

problem.

•

It was in a different and a humbler spirit that I went
to Boston. I had received more warnings and more
advice about Boston than about all the other cities put
together. And, in particular, the greatest care had been

tYOUR UNITED STATES

taken to permeate my whole being with the idea that
Boston was "different." In some ways it proved so to
be. One difference forced itself upon me immediately
I left the station for the streets — the quaint, original
odor of the taxis. When I got to the entirely admirable
hotel I found a book in a prominent situation on the
writing-table in my room. In many hotels this book
would have been the Bible. But here it was the cata
logue of the hotel library ; it ran to a hundred and eighty-
two pages. On the other hand, there was no bar in the
hotel, and no smoking-room. I make no comments; I
draw no conclusions; I state the facts.

The warnings continued after my arrival. I was in
formed by I don't know how many persons that Boston
was "a circular city," with a topography calculated to
puzzle the simple. This was true. I usually go about
in strange places with a map, but I found the map of
Boston even more complex than the city it sought to
explain. If I did not lose myself, it was because I never
trusted myself alone; other people lost me.

Within an hour or so I had been familiarized by
Bostonians with a whole series of apparently stock
jokes concerning and against Boston, such as that one
hinging on the phrase "cold roast Boston," and that
other one about the best thing in Boston being the five
o'clock train to New York (I do not vouch for the hour
of departure). Even in Cambridge, a less jocular place,
a joke seemed to be immanent, to the effect that though
you could always tell a Harvard man, you could not tell
him much.

Matters more serious awaited me. An old resident

UNDER THE GREAT DOME OF THE CAPITOL

THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES

of Boston took me out for privacy onto the Common and
whispered in my ear: "This is the most snobbish city
in the whole world. There is no real democracy here.
The first thing people do when they get to 'know you is
to show you their family tree and prove that they came
over in the Mayflower." And so he ran on, cursing
Boston up hill and down dale. Nevertheless, he w^as
very proud of his Boston. Had I agreed with the con
demnation, he might have thrown me into the artificial
brook. Another great Bostonian expert, after leading
me on to admit that I had come in order to try to learn
the real Boston, turned upon me with ferocious gaiety,
thus: "You will not learn the real Boston. You cannot.
The real Boston is the old Back Bay folk, who gravitate
eternally between Beacon Street and State Street and the
Somerset Club, and never go beyond. They confuse
New England with the created universe, and it is im
possible that you should learn them. Nobody could
learn them in less than twenty years' intense study and
research."

Cautioned, and even intimidated, I thought it would
be safest just to take Boston as Boston came, respect
fully but casually. And as the hospitality of Boston
was prodigious, splendid, unintermittent, and most de
lightfully unaffected, I had no difficulty whatever in
taking Boston as she came. And my impressions began
to emerge, one after another, from the rich and cloudy
confusion of novel sensations.

What primarily differentiates Boston from all the
other cities I saw is this : It is finished ; I mean complete.
Of the other cities, while admitting their actual achieve-

YOUR UNITED STATES

ment, one would say, and their own citizens invariably
do say, "They will be . . ." Boston is.

Another leading impression, which remains with me,
is that Boston is not so English as it perhaps imagines
itself to be. An interviewer (among many) came to
see me about Boston, and he came with the fixed and sole
notion in his head that Boston was English. He would
have it that Boston was English. Worn down by his
persistency, I did, as a fact, admit in one obscure cor
ner of the interview that Boston had certain English
characteristics. The scare-head editor of the interview
ing paper, looking through his man's copy for suitable
prey, came across my admission. It was just what he
wanted ; it was what he was thirsting for. In an instant
the scare-head was created: "Boston as English as a
muffin!" An ideal scare-head! That I had never used
the word "muffin" or any such phrase was a detail ex
quisitely unimportant. The scare-head was immense.
It traveled in fine large type across the continent. I met
it for weeks afterward in my press-cuttings, and I doubt
if Boston was altogether delighted with the comparison.
I will not deny that Boston is less strikingly un-English
than sundry other cities. I will not deny that I met men
in Boston of a somewhat pronounced English type. I
will not deny that in certain respects old Kensington
reminds me of a street here and there in Boston — such
as Mount Vernon Street or Chestnut Street. But I do
maintain that the Englishness of Boston has been seri
ously exaggerated.

And still another very striking memory of Boston —
indeed, perhaps, the paramount impression! — is that it

THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES

contains the loveliest modern thing I saw in America —
namely, the Puvis de Chavannes wall-paintings on the
grand staircase of the Public Library. The Library itself
is a beautiful building, but it holds something more
beautiful. Never shall I forget my agitation on behold
ing these unsurpassed works of art, which alone would
suffice to make Boston a place of pilgrimage.

When afterward I went back to Paris, the painters'
first question was: "Et les Puvis a Boston — VOMS les avez
vusf Qu'est-ce que vous en ditesT"1

It was very un-English on the part of Boston to com
mission these austere and classical works. England
would never have done it. The nationality of the
greatest decorative painter of modern times would have
offended her sense of fitness. What — a French painter
officially employed on an English public building?
Unthinkable ! England would have insisted on an Eng
lish painter — or, at worst, an American. It is strange
that a community which had the wit to honor itself
by employing Puvis de Chavannes should be equally
enthusiastic about the frigid theatricalities of an E. A.
Abbey or the forbidding and opaque intricate dexterity
of a John Sargent in the same building. Or, rather, it is
not strange, for these contradictions are discoverable
everywhere in the patronage of the arts.

It was from the Public Library that some friends and
I set out on a little tour of Boston. Whether we went
north, south, east, or west I cannot tell, for this was one
of the few occasions when the extreme variousness of a
city has deprived me definitely of a sense of direction;
but I know that we drove many miles through magnifi-

YOUR UNITED STATES

cent fenny parks, whose roads were reserved to pleasure,
and that at length, after glimpsing famous houses and
much of the less centralized wealth and ease of Boston,
we came out upon the shores of the old harbor, and went
into a yacht-club-house with a glorious prospect. Boston
has more book-shops to the acre than any city within
my knowledge except Aberdeen (not North Carolina,
but Scotland). Its book-shops, however, are as naught
to its yacht clubs. And for one yacht club I personally
would sacrifice many book-shops. It was an exciting
moment in my life when, after further wandering on and
off coast roads, and through curving, cobbled, rackety
streets, and between thunderous tram-cars and under
deafening elevated lines, I was permitted to enter the
celestial and calm precincts of the Boston Yacht Club
itself, which overlooks another harbor. The acute and
splendid nauticality of this club, all fashioned out of an
old warehouse, stamps Boston as a city which has com
prehended the sea. I saw there the very wheel of the
Spray, the cockboat in which the regretted Slocum
wafted himself round the world! I sat in an arm-chair
which would have suited Falstaff, and whose tabular
arms would have held all FalstafFs tankards, and gazed
through a magnified port -hole at a six-masted schooner
as it crossed the field of vision! And I had never even
dreamed that a six-masted schooner existed! It was
with difficulty that I left the Boston Yacht Club. In
deed, I would only leave it in order to go and see the
frigate Constitution, the ship which was never defeated,
and which assuredly, after over a hundred and ten years
of buoyant life, remains the most truly English thing

THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES

in Boston. The afternoon teas of Boston are far less *
English than that grim and majestic craft.

We passed into the romantic part of Boston, skirting *
vast wool-warehouses and other enormous establish
ments bearing such Oriental signs as "Coffee and Spices."
And so into a bewildering congeries of crowded streets,
where every name on the walls seemed to be Italian,
and where every corner was dangerous with vegetable-
barrows, tram-cars, and perambulators; through this
quarter the legend of Paul Revere seemed to float like
a long wisp of vapor. And then I saw the Christopher
Wren spire of Paul Revere 's signal-church, closed now —
but whether because the congregation had dwindled to
six or for some more recondite reason I am not clear.
And then I beheld the delightful, elegant fabric of the
old State House, with the memories of massacre round
about it, and the singular spectacle of the Lion and the
Unicorn on its roof. Too proudly negligent had Boston
been to remove those symbols!

And finally we rolled into the central and most cir
cular shopping quarter, as different from the Italian
quarter as the Italian quarter was different from Copley
Square; and its heart was occupied by a graveyard.
And here I had to rest.

The second portion of the itinerary began with the
domed State Capitol, an impressive sight, despite its
strange coloring, and despite its curious habit of illu
minating itself at dark, as if in competition with such
establishments as the "Bijou Dream," on the opposite
side of the Common. Here I first set eyes on Beacon
Street, familiar — indeed, classic — to the European stu-

YOUR UNITED STATES

dent of American literature. Commonwealth Avenue, I
have to confess, I had never heard of till I saw it. These
interminable and gorgeous thoroughfares, where each
massive abode is a costly and ceremonial organization
of the most polished and civilized existence, leave the
simple European speechless — especially when he re
members the swampy origin of the main part of the
ground. . . . The inscrutable, the unknowable Back Bay !

Here, indeed, is evidence of a society in equilibrium,
and therefore of a society which will receive genuinely
new ideas with an extreme, if polite, caution, while
welcoming with warm suavity old ideas that disguise
themselves as novelties!

It was a tremendous feat to reclaim from ooze the
foundation of Back Bay. Such feats are not accom
plished in Europe; they are not even imaginatively con
ceived there. And now that the great business .is
achieved, the energy that did it, restless and unoccupied,
is seeking another field. I was informed that Boston
is dreaming of the construction of an artificial island
in the midst of the river Charles, with the hugest cathe
dral in the world thereon, and the most gorgeous bridges
that ever spanned a fine stream. With proper deference,
it is to be hoped that Boston, forgetting this infelicitous
caprice, will remember in time that she alone among
the great cities of America is complete. A project that
would consort well with the genius of Chicago might
disserve Boston in the eyes of those who esteem a sense
of fitness to be among the major qualifications for the
true art of life. And, in the matter of the art of daily
living, Boston as she is has a great deal to teach to the

THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES

rest of the country, and little to learn. Such is the
diffident view of a stranger.

•

/\ Cambridge is separated from Boston by the river
Charles and by piquant jealousies that tickle no one more
humorously than those whom, theoretically, they stab.
From the east bank Cambridge is academic, and there
fore negligible; from the west, Boston dwindles to a mere
quay where one embarks for Europe.

What struck me first about Cambridge was that it
must be the only city of its size and amenity in the United
States without an imposing hotel. It is difficult to
imagine any city in the United States minus at least two
imposing hotels, with a barber's shop in the basement and
a world's fair in the hall. But one soon perceives that
Cambridge is a city apart. In visual characteristics it
must have changed very little, and it will never change
with facility. Boston is pre-eminently a town of tradi
tions, but the traditions have to be looked for. Cam
bridge is equally a town of traditions, but the traditions
stare you in the face.

My first halt was in front of the conspicuous home of
James Russell Lowell. Now in the far recesses of the
Five Towns I was brought up on "My Study Windows."
My father, who would never accept the authority of an
encyclopedia when his children got him in a corner on
some debated question of fact, held James Russell
Lowell as the supreme judge of letters, from whom not
even he could appeal. (It is true, he had never heard
of Ste. Beuve, and regarded Matthew Arnold as a modern
fad.) And there were the study windows of James

YOUR UNITED STATES

Russell Lowell ! And his house in its garden was only one
of hundreds of similar houses standing in like old gardens.
It was highly agreeable to learn that some of the pre-
Revolution houses had not yet left the occupation of
the families which built them. Beautiful houses, a
few of them, utterly dissimilar from anything on the
other side of the Atlantic! Did not William Morris
always maintain that wood was and forever would be the
most suitable material for building a house? On the
side of the railroad track near Toledo I saw frame houses,
whose architecture is debased from this Cambridge
architecture, blown clean over by the gale. But the
gale that will deracinate Cambridge has not yet begun
to rage. ... I rejoiced to see the house of Longfellow.
In spite of the fact that he wrote "The Wreck of the
Hesperus," he seems to keep his position as the chief
minor poet of the English language. And the most
American and the most wistful thing in Cambridge
was that the children of Cambridge had been guided to
buy and make inalienable the land in front of his house,
so that his descendant might securely enjoy the free
prospect that Longfellow enjoyed. In what other coun
try would just such a delicate, sentimental homage have
been paid in just such an ingeniously fanciful manner?1

1This story was related to me by a resident of Cambridge. Mr.
Richard H. Dana, Longfellow's son-in-law, has since informed me that it
is quite untrue. I regret that it is quite untrue. It ought to have been
quite true. The land in question was given by Longfellow's children to
the Longfellow Memorial Association, who gave it to the city of Cam
bridge. The general children of Cambridge did give to Longfellow an
arm-chair made from the wood of a certain historic "spreading chestnut-
tree," under which stood a certain historic village smithy; and with this
I suppose I must be content. — A. B.

THE BOSTON YACHT CLUB — OVERLOOKING THE HARBOR

THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES

After I had passed the Longfellow house it began to
rain, and dusk began to gather in the recesses between
the houses; and my memory is that, with an athletic
and tireless companion, I walked uncounted leagues
through endless avenues of Cambridge homes toward
a promised club that seemed ever to retreat before us
with the shyness of a fawn. However, we did at length
capture it. This club was connected with Harvard,
and I do not propose to speak of Harvard in the present

chapter.

The typical Cambridge house as I saw it persists in my
recollection as being among the most characteristic and
comfortable of "real" American phenomena. And one
reason why I insisted, in a previous chapter, on the special
Americanism of Indianapolis is that Indianapolis is full
of a modified variety of these houses which is even more
characteristically American — to my mind — than the
Cambridge style itself. Indianapolis being by general
consent the present chief center of letters in the United
States, it is not surprising that I, an author, knew more
people from Indianapolis than from any other city.
Indeed, I went to Indianapolis simply because I had old
friends there, and not at all in the hope of inspecting
a city characteristically American. It was quite start-
lingly different from the mental picture I had formed
of it.

I think that in order to savor Indianapolis properly
one should approach it as I approached it — in an ac
commodation-train on a single track, a train with a
happy-go-lucky but still agreeable service in its res-
5 65

YOUR UNITED STATES

taurant-car, a train that halts at every barn-door in the
vast flat, featureless fields of yellow stubble, rolling some
times over a muddy, brown river, and skirting now and
then a welcome wooded cleft in the monotony of the
landscape. The scenes at those barn-doors were full
of the picturesque and of the racy. A farmer with a gun
and a brace of rabbits and a dog leaping up at them,
while two young women talked to or at the farmer from
a distance; a fat little German girl in a Scotch frock,
cleaning outside windows with the absorbed serious
ness of a grandmother; a group of boys dividing their
attention between her and the train; an old woman
driving a cart, and a negro gesticulating and running
after the cart; and all of them, save the nigger, wearing
gloves — presumably as a protection against the strong
wind that swept through the stubble and shook the
houses and the few trees. Those houses, in all their
summariness and primitive crudity, yet reminded one of
the Cambridge homes; they exhibited some remains of
the pre-Revolution style.

And then you come to the inevitable State Fair
grounds, and the environs of the city which is the capital
and heart of all those plains.

And after you have got away from the railroad
station and the imposing hotels and the public monu
ments and the high central buildings — an affair of five
minutes in an automobile — you discover yourself in
long, calm streets of essential America. These streets
are rectangular; the streets of Cambridge abhor the
straight line. They are full everywhere of maple-trees.
And on either side they are bordered with homes — each

THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES

house detached, each house in its own fairly spacious
garden, each house individual and different from all the
rest. Few of the houses are large; on the other hand,
none of them is small: this is the region of the solid
middle class, the class which loves comfort and piques
itself on its amenities, but is a little ashamed or too
timid to be luxurious.

Architecturally the houses represent a declension
from the purity of earlier Cambridge. Scarcely one is
really beautiful. The style is debased. But then, it
possesses the advantage of being modernized; it has not
the air of having strayed by accident into the wrong cen
tury. And, moreover, it is saved from condemnation
by its sobriety and by its honest workmanship. It is
the expression of a race incapable of looking foolish, of
being giddy, of running to extremes. It is the expression
of a race that both clung to the past and reached out to
the future; that knew how to make the best of both
worlds; that keenly realized the value of security be
cause it had been through insecurity. You can see that
all these houses were built by people who loved "a bit
of property," and to whom a safe and dignified roof was
the final ambition achieved. Why! I do believe that
there are men and women behind some of those curtains
to this day who haven't quite realized that the Indians
aren't coming any more, and that there is permanently
enough wood in the pile, and that quinine need no longer
figure in the store cupboard as a staple article of diet!
I do believe that there are minor millionaires in some of
those drawing-rooms who wonder whether, out-soaring
the ambition of a bit of property, they would be justified

YOUR UNITED STATES

in creeping down-town and buying a cheap automobile!
. . . These are the people who make the link between
the academic traditionalism of Cambridge and such ex
cessively modern products of evolution as their own
mayor, Mr. Shanks, protector of the poor. They are
not above forming deputations to parley with their own
mayor. ... I loved them. Their drawing-rooms were
full of old silver, and book-gossip, and Victorian ladies
apparently transported direct from the more aristocratic
parts of the Five Towns, who sat behind trays and
poured out tea from the identical tea-pot that my grand
mother used to keep in a green bag.

In the outer suburbs of the very largest cities I saw
revulsions against the wholesale barracky conveniences
of the apartment -house, in the shape of little colonies
of homes, consciously but superficially imitating the
Cambridge-Indianapolis tradition — with streets far more
curvily winding than the streets of Cambridge, and
sidewalks of a strip of concrete between green turf-
bands that recalled the original sidewalks of Indianap
olis and even of the rural communities around In
dianapolis. Cozy homes, each in its own garden, with
its own clothes-drier, and each different from all the
rest! Homes that the speculative builder, recking not
of the artistic sobriety, had determined should be pic
turesque at any cost of capricious ingenuity! And not
secure homes, because, though they were occupied by
their owners, their owners had not built them — had only
bought them, and would sell them as casually as they
had bought. The apartment-house will probably prove
stronger than these throwbacks. And yet the time

THE CAPITOL AND OTHER SITES

will come when even the apartment -house will be re
garded as a picturesque survival. Into what novel
architecture and organization of living it will survive I
should not care to prophesy, but I am convinced that
the future will be quite as interestingly human as the
present is, and as the past was.

IV
SOME ORGANIZATIONS

SOME ORGANIZATIONS

WHAT strikes and frightens the backward European
as much as anything in the United States is the
efficiency and fearful universality of the telephone.
Just as I think of the big cities as agglomerations pierced
everywhere by elevator-shafts full of movement, so I
think of them as being threaded, under pavements and
over roofs and between floors and ceilings and between
walls, by millions upon millions of live filaments that
unite all the privacies of the organism — and destroy
them in order to make one immense publicity! I do
not mean that Europe has failed to adopt the telephone,
nor that in Europe there are no hotels with the dreadful
curse of an active telephone in every room. But I do
mean that the European telephone is a toy, and a some
what clumsy one, compared with the inexorable serious
ness of the American telephone. Many otherwise highly
civilized Europeans are as timid in addressing a tele
phone as they would be in addressing a royal sovereign.
| The average European middle-class householder still
\ speaks of his telephone, if he has one, in the same
falsely casual tone as the corresponding American is
liable to speak of his motor-car. It is naught — a negli
gible trifle — but somehow it comes into the conversation !
"How odd!" you exclaim. And you are right. It is

YOUR UNITED STATES

we Europeans who are wrong, through no particular
fault of our own.

The American is ruthlessly logical about the tele
phone. The only occasion on which I was in really
serious danger of being taken for a madman in the
United States was when, in a Chicago hotel, I permanent
ly removed the receiver from the telephone in a room
designed (doubtless ironically) for slumber. The whole
hotel was appalled. Half Chicago shuddered. In re
sponse to the prayer of a deputation from the manage
ment I restored the receiver. On the horrified face of
the deputation I could read the unspoken query: "Is
it conceivable that you have been in this country a
month without understanding that the United States is
primarily nothing but a vast congeries of telephone-
cabins?" Yes, I yielded and admired! And I surmise
that on my next visit I shall find a telephone on every
table of every restaurant that respects itself.

It is the efficiency of the telephone that makes it
irresistible to a great people whose passion is to "get
results" — the instancy with which the communication
is given, and the clear loudness of the telephone's voice
in reply to yours : phenomena utterly unknown in Europe.
Were I to inhabit the United States, I too should become
a victim of the telephone habit, as it is practised in its
most advanced form in those suburban communities
to which I have already incidentally referred at the end
of the previous chapter. There a woman takes to the
telephone as women in more decadent lands take to
morphia. You can see her at morn at her bedroom
window, pouring confidences into her telephone, thus

AT MORN POURING CONFIDENCES INTO HER TELEPHONE

SOME ORGANIZATIONS

combining the joy of an innocent vice with the healthy
freshness of breeze and sunshine. It has happened to
me to sit in a drawing-room, where people gathered round
the telephone as Europeans gather round a fire, and to
hear immediately after the ejaculation of a number into
the telephone a sharp ring from outside through the open
window, and then to hear in answer to the question,
"What are you going to wear to-night?" two absolutely
simultaneous replies, one loudly from the telephone
across the room, and the other f aintlier from a charming
human voice across the garden: "I don't know. What
are you?" Such may be the pleasing secondary scien
tific effect of telephoning to the lady next door on a
warm afternoon.

Now it was obvious that behind the apparently simple
exterior aspects of any telephone system there must be
an intricate and marvelous secret organization. In Eu
rope my curiosity would probably never have been ex
cited by the thought of that organization — at home one
accepts everything as of course! — but, in the United
States, partly because the telephone is so much more
wonderful and terrible there, and partly because in a
foreign land one is apt to have strange caprices, I allowed
myself to become the prey of a desire to see the arcanum
concealed at the other end of all the wires; and thus,
one day, under the high protection of a demigod of the
electrical world, I paid a visit to a telephone-exchange
in New York, and saw therein what nine hundred and
ninety-nine out of every thousand of the most ardent
telephone-users seldom think about and will never see.

A murmuring sound, as of an infinity of scholars in a

YOUR UNITED STATES

prim school conning their lessons, and a long row of
young women seated in a dim radiance on a long row of
precisely similar stools, before a long apparatus of holes
and pegs and pieces of elastic cord, all extremely intent :
that was the first broad impression. One saw at once
that none of these young women had a single moment
to spare; they were all involved in the tremendous
machine, part of it, keeping pace with it and in it, and
not daring to take their eyes off it for an instant, lest
they should sin against it. What they were droning
about it was impossible to guess; for if one stationed one
self close to any particular rapt young woman, she seemed
to utter no sound, but simply and without ceasing to peg
and unpeg holes at random among the thousands of
holes before her, apparently in obedience to the signaling
of faint, tiny lights that in thousands continually ex
pired and were rekindled. (It was so that these tiny
lights should be distinguishable that the illumination
of the secret and finely appointed chamber was kept
dim.) Throughout the whole length of the apparatus
the colored elastic cords to which the pegs were attached
kept crossing one another in fantastic patterns.

We who had entered were ignored. We might have
been ghosts, invisible and inaudible. Even the super
visors, less-young women set in authority, did not turn
to glance at us as they moved restlessly peering behind
the stools. And yet somehow I could hear the delicate
shoulders of all the young women saying, without
speech: "Here come these tyrants and taskmasters
again, who have invented this exercise which nearly but
not quite cracks our little brains for us! They know

SOME ORGANIZATIONS

exactly how much they can get out of us, and they get
it. They are cleverer than us and more powerful than
us; and we have to submit to their discipline. But—
And afar off I could hear: "What are you going to wear
to-night?" "Will you dine with me to-night?" "I
want two seats." "Very well, thanks, and how is Mrs.
. . . ?" "When can I see you to-morrow?" "I'll take
your offer for those bonds." . . . And I could see the in
teriors of innumerable offices and drawing-rooms. . . .
But of course I could hear and see nothing really except
the intent drone and quick gesturing of those completely
absorbed young creatures in the dim radiance, on stools
precisely similar.

I understood why the telephone service was so efficient.
I understood not merely from the demeanor of the long
row of young women, but from everything else I had
seen in the exact and diabolically ingenious ordering of
the whole establishment.

We were silent for a time, as though we had entered
a church. We were, perhaps unconsciously, abashed
by the intensity of the absorption of these neat young
women. After a while one of the guides, one of the
inscrutable beings who had helped to invent and con
struct the astounding organism, began in a low voice
on the forlorn hope of making me comprehend the
mechanism of a telephone-call and its response. And I
began on the forlorn hope of persuading him by in
telligent acting that I did comprehend. We each made
a little progress. I could not tell him that, though I
genuinely and humbly admired his particular variety
of genius, what interested me in the affair was not the

YOUR UNITED STATES

mechanics, but the human equation. As a professional
reader of faces, I glanced as well as I could sideways at
those bent girls' faces to see if they were happy. An
absurd inquiry! Do I look happy when I'm at work,
I wonder! Did they then look reasonably content?
Well, I came to the conclusion that they looked like most
other faces — neither one thing nor the other. Still,
in a great establishment, I would sooner search for
sociological information in the faces of the employed
than in the managerial rules.

"What do they earn?" I asked, when we emerged from
the ten-atmosphere pressure of that intense absorption.
(Of course I knew that no young women could possibly
for any length of time be as intensely absorbed as these
appeared to be. But the illusion was there, and it was
effective.)

I learned that even the lowest beginner earned five
dollars a week. It was just the sum I was paying for a
pair of clean sheets every night at a grand hotel. And
that the salary rose to six, seven, eight, eleven, and even
fourteen dollars for supervisors, who, however, had to
stand on their feet seven and a half hours a day, as shop
girls do for ten hours a day ; and that in general the girls
had thirty minutes for lunch, and a day off every week,
and that the Company supplied them gratuitously with
tea, coffee, sugar, couches, newspapers, arm-chairs, and
fresh air, of which last fifty fresh cubic feet were pumped
in for every operator every minute.

"Naturally," I was told, "the discipline is strict.
There are test wires. . . .We can check the 'time elements.'
. . . We keep a record of every call. They'll take a dollar

SOME ORGANIZATIONS

a week less in an outside place — for instance, a hotel. . . .
Their average stay here is thirty months."

And I was told the number of exchanges there were in
New York, exactly like the one I was seeing.

A dollar a week less in a hotel ! How feminine ! And
how masculine! And how wise for one sort of young
woman, and how foolish for another! . . . Imagine
quitting that convent with its guaranteed fresh air,
and its couches and sugar and so on, for the rough
hazards and promiscuities of a hotel! On the other
hand, imagine not quitting it!

Said the demigod of the electrical world, condescend
ingly: "All this telephone business is done on a mere few
hundred horse-power. Come away, and I'll show you
electricity in bulk."

And I went away with him, thoughtful. In spite
of the inhuman perfection of its functioning, that ex
change was a very human place indeed. It brilliantly
solved some problems; it raised others. Excessively
difficult to find any fault whatever in it! A marvelous
service, achieved under strictly hygienic conditions —
and young women must make their way through the
world! And yet — Yes, a very human place indeed!

The demigods of the electric world do not condescend
to move about in petrol motor-cars. In the exercise
of a natural and charming coquetry they insist on elec
trical traction, and it was in the most modern and sound
less electric brougham that we arrived at nightfall
under the overhanging cornice-eaves of two gigantic
Florentine palaces — just such looming palaces, they

YOUR UNITED STATES

appeared in the dark, as may be seen in any central
street of Florence, with a cinema-show blazing its signs
on the ground floor, and Heaven knows what remnants
of Italian aristocracy in the mysterious upper stories.
Having entered one of the palaces, simultaneously with
a tornado of wind, we passed through long, deserted,
narrow galleries, lined with thousands of small, caged
compartments containing "transformers," and on each
compartment was a label bearing always the same words:
"Danger, 6,600 volts." "Danger, 6,600 volts." "Dan
ger, 6,600 volts." A wondrous relief when we had
escaped with our lives from the menace of those innumer
able volts ! And then we stood on a high platform sur
rounded by handles, switches, signals — apparatus enough
to put all New York into darkness, or to annihilate it
in an instant by the unloosing of terrible cohorts of
volts! — and faced an enormous white hall, sparsely
peopled by a few colossal machines that seemed to be
revolving and oscillating about their business with the
fatalism of conquered and resigned leviathans. Im
maculately clean, inconceivably tidy, shimmering with
brilliant light under its lofty and beautiful ceiling,
shaking and roaring with the terrific thunder of its own
vitality, this hall in which no common voice could make
itself heard produced nevertheless an effect of magical
stillness, silence, and solitude. We were alone in it,
save that now and then in the far-distant spaces a figure
might flit and disappear between the huge glinting
columns of metal. It was a hall enchanted and in
explicable. I understood nothing of it. But I under
stood that half the electricity of New York was being

SOME ORGANIZATIONS

generated by its engines of a hundred and fifty thousand
horse-power, and that if the spell were lifted the eleva
tors of New York would be immediately paralyzed, and
the twenty million lights expire beneath the eyes of a
startled population. I could have gazed at it to this day,
and brooded to this day upon the human imaginations
that had perfected it; but I was led off, hypnotized, to
see the furnaces and boilers under the earth. And even
there we were almost alone, to such an extent had one
sort of senseless matter been compelled to take charge
of another sort of senseless matter. The odyssey of the
coal that was lifted high out of ships on the tide beyond,
to fall ultimately into the furnaces within, scarcely
touched by the hand-wielded shovel, was by itself
epical. Fresh air pouring in at the rate of twenty-four
million cubic feet per hour cooled the entire palace,
and gave to these stoke-holes the uncanny quality of
refrigerators. The lowest horror of the steamship had
been abolished here.

I was tempted to say: "This alone is fit to be called
the heart of New York!"

They took me to the twin palace, and on the windy
way thither figures were casually thrown at me. As
that a short circuit may cause the machines to surge
wildly into the sudden creation of six million horse
power of electricity, necessitating the invention of other
machines to control automatically these perilous vaga
ries ! As that in the down-town district the fire-engine
was being abolished because, at a signal, these power
houses could in thirty seconds concentrate on any given
main a pressure of three hundred pounds to the square

6 81

YOUR UNITED STATES

inch, lifting jets of water perhaps above the roofs of
sky-scrapers! As that the city could fine these power
houses at the rate of five hundred dollars a minute
for any interruption of the current longer than three
minutes — but the current had never failed for a single
second! As that in one year over two million dollars'
worth of machinery had been scrapped! . . . And I was
aware that it was New York I was in, and not Timbuctoo.
In the other palace it appeared that the great American
scrapping process was even yet far from complete. At
first sight this other seemed to resemble the former one,
but I was soon instructed that the former one was as
naught to this one, for here the turbine — the "strong,
silent man" among engines — was replacing the racket
of cylinder and crank. Statistics are tiresome and futile
to stir the imagination. I disdain statistics, even when
I assimilate them. And yet when my attention was
directed to one trifling block of metal, and I was told
that it was the most powerful "unit" in the world, and
that it alone would make electricity sufficient for the
lighting of a city of a quarter of a million people, I
felt that statistics, after all, could knock you a stagger
ing blow. ... In this other palace, too, was the same
solitude of machinery, attending most conscientiously
and effectively to itself. A singularly disconcerting
spectacle! And I reflected that, according to dreams
already coming true, the telephone-exchange also would
soon be a solitude of clicking contact-points, functioning
in mystic certitude, instead of a convent of girls requiring
sugar and couches, and thirsting for love. A singularly
disconcerting prospect!

SOME ORGANIZATIONS

But was it necessary to come to America in order to
see and describe telephone - exchanges and electrical
power-houses? Do not these wonders exist in all the
cities of earth? They do, but not to quite the same
degree of wondrousness. Hat-shops, and fine hat-shops,
exist in New York, but not to quite the same degree
of wondrousness as in Paris. People sing in New York,
but not with quite the same natural lyricism as in
Naples. The great civilizations all present the same
features; but it is just the differences in degree between
the same feature in this civilization and in that — it is
just these differences which together constitute and
illustrate the idiosyncrasy of each. It seems to me that
the brains and the imagination of America shone super
latively in the conception and ordering of its vast or
ganizations of human beings, and of machinery, and of
the two combined. By them I was more profoundly
attracted, impressed, and inspired than by any other
non-spiritual phenomena whatever in the United States.
For me they were the proudest material achievements,
and essentially the most poetical achievements, of the
United States. And that is why I am dwelling on them.

•

Further, there are business organizations in America
of a species which do not flourish at all in Europe. For
example, the " mail-order house," whose secrets were
very generously displayed to me in Chicago — a peculiar
establishment which sells merely everything (except
patent-medicines) — on condition that you order it by
post. Go into that house with money in your palm,
and ask for a fan or a flail or a fur-coat or a fountain-

YOUR UNITED STATES

pen or a fiddle, and you will be requested to return home
and write a letter about the proposed purchase, and
stamp the letter and drop it into a mail-box, and then
to wait till the article arrives at your door. That house
is one of the most spectacular and pleasing proofs that
the inhabitants of the United States are thinly scattered
Dver an enormous area, in tiny groups, often quite
Isolated from stores. On the day of my visit sixty
thousand letters had been received, and every executable
order contained in these was executed before closing
time, by the co-ordinated efforts of over four thousand
female employees and over three thousand males. The
conception would make Europe dizzy. Imagine a mer
chant in Moscow trying to inaugurate such a scheme !

A little machine no bigger than a soup-plate will open
hundreds of envelops at once. They are all the same,
those envelops; they have even less individuality than
sheep being sheared, but when the contents of one—
any one at random — are put into your hand, something
human and distinctive is put into your hand. I read the
caligraphy on a blue sheet of paper, and it was written
by a woman in Wyoming, a neat, earnest, harassed,
and possibly rather harassing woman, and she wanted
all sorts of things and wanted them intensely — I could
see that with clearness. This complex purchase was
an important event in her year. So far as her imagina
tion went, only one mail-order would reach the Chicago
house that morning, and the entire establishment would
be strained to meet it.

Then the blue sheet was taken from me and thrust
into the system, and therein lost to me. I was taken to

SOME ORGANIZATIONS

a mysteriously rumbling shaft of broad diameter, that
pierced all the floors of the house and had trap-doors
on each floor. And when one of the trap-doors was
opened I saw packages of all descriptions racing after
one another down spiral planes within the shaft. There
were several of these great shafts — with divisions for
mail, express, and freight traffic — and packages were
ceaselessly racing down all of them, laden with the
objects desired by the woman of Wyoming and her
fifty-nine-thousand-odd fellow-customers of the day.
At first it seemed to me impossible that that earnest,
impatient woman in Wyoming should get precisely
what she wanted; it seemed to me impossible that some
mistake should not occur in all that noisy fever of rush
ing activity. But after I had followed an order, and
seen it filled and checked, my opinion was that a mis
take would be the most miraculous phenomenon in that
establishment. I felt quite reassured on behalf of Wyo
ming.

And then I was suddenly in a room where six hundred
billing-machines were being clicked at once by six hun
dred young women, a fantastic aural nightmare, though
none of the young women appeared to be conscious that
anything bizarre was going on. ... And then I was in
a printing-shop, where several lightning machines spent
their whole time every day in printing the most popular
work of reference in the United States, a bulky book full
of pictures, with an annual circulation of five and a half
million copies — the general catalogue of the firm. For
the first time I realized the true meaning of the word
" popularity " — and sighed. . . .

YOUR UNITED STATES

And then it was lunch-time for about a couple of
thousand employees, and in the boundless restaurant

I witnessed the working of the devices which enabled
these legions to choose their meals, and pay for them
(cost price) in a few moments, and without advanced
mathematical calculations. The young head of the
restaurant showed me, with pride, a menu of over a
hundred dishes — Austrian, German, Hungarian, Italian,
Scotch, French, and American; at prices from one cent
up as high as ten cents (prime roast -beef) — and at the
foot of the menu was his personal appeal: "J desire to
extend to you a cordial invitation to inspect,"- etc.

II My constant aim will be," etc. Yet it was not his
restaurant. It was the firm's restaurant. Here I had
a curious illustration of an admirable characteristic of
American business methods that was always striking
me — namely, the real delegation of responsibility. An
American board of direction will put a man in charge of
a department, as a viceroy over a province, saying, as
it were: "This is yours. Do as you please with it. We
will watch the results." A marked contrast this with
the centralizing of authority which seems to be ever
proceeding in Europe, and which breeds in all classes
at all ages — especially in France — a morbid fear and
horror of accepting responsibility.

Later, I was on the ground level, in the midst of an
enormous apparent confusion — the target for all the
packages and baskets, big and little, that shot every
instant in a continuous stream from those spiral planes,
and slid dangerously at me along the floors. Here
were the packers. I saw a packer deal with a collected

SOME ORGANIZATIONS

order, and in this order were a number of tiny cookery
utensils, a four-cent curling-iron, a brush, and two
incredibly ugly pink china mugs, inscribed in cheap
gilt respectively with the words " Father " and "Mother."
Throughout my stay in America no moment came
to me more dramatically than this moment, and none
has remained more vividly in my mind. All the daily
domestic life of the small communities in the wilds of
the West and the Middle West, and in the wilds of the
back streets of the great towns, seemed to be revealed
to me by the contents of that basket, as the packer
wrapped up and protected one article after another.
I had been compelled to abandon a visitation of the
West and of the small communities everywhere, and I
was sorry. But here in a microcosm I thought I saw the
simple reality of the backbone of all America, a symbol
of the millions of the little plain people, who ultimately
make possible the glory of the world-renowned streets
and institutions in dazzling cities.

There was something indescribably touching in that
curling-iron and those two mugs. I could see the table
on which the mugs would soon proudly stand, and
"father" and "mother" and children thereat, and I
could see the hand heating the curling-iron and applying
it. I could see the whole little home and the whole life
of the little home. . . . And afterward, as I wandered
through the warehouses — pyramids of the same chair,
cupboards full of the same cheap violin, stacks of the
same album of music, acres of the same carpet and wall
paper, tons of the same gramophone, hundreds of tons
Of the same sewing-machine and lawn-mower — I felt

YOUR UNITED STATES

as if I had been made free of the secrets of every village
in every State of the Union, and as if I had lived in
every little house and cottage thereof all my life? Al
most no sense of beauty in those^ tremendous supplies
of merchandise, but a lot of honesty, self-respect, and
ambition fulfilled. I tell you I could hear the engaged
couples discussing ardently over the pages of the cata
logue what manner of bedroom suite they would buy,
and what design of sideboard. . . .

Finally, I arrived at the firm's private railway station,
where a score or more trucks were being laden with the
multifarious boxes, bales, and parcels, all to leave that
evening for romantic destinations such as Oregon, Texas,
and Wyoming. Yes, the package of the woman of
Wyoming's desire would ultimately be placed somewhere
in one of those trucks ! It was going to start off toward

her that very night!

Impressive as this establishment was, finely as it
illustrated the national genius for organization, it yet
lacked necessarily, on account of the nature of its ac
tivity, those outward phenomena of splendor which
charm the stranger's eye in the great central houses of
New York, and which seem designed to sum up all that
is most characteristic and most dazzling in the business
methods of the United States. These central houses are
not soiled by the touch of actual merchandise. Noth
ing more squalid than ink ever enters their gates. They
traffic with symbols only, and the symbols, no matter
what they stand for, are never in themselves sordid.
The men who have created these houses seem to have

SOME ORGANIZATIONS

realized that, from their situation and their importance,
a special effort toward representative magnificence was
their pleasing duty, and to have made the effort with
a superb prodigality and an astounding ingenuity.

Take, for a good, glorious example, the very large
insurance company, conscious that the eyes of the world
are upon it, and that the entire United States is ex
pecting it to uphold the national pride. All the splen
dors of all the sky-scrapers are united in its building.
Its foyer and grand staircase will sustain comparison
with those of the Paris Opera. You might think you
were going into a place of entertainment! And, as a
fact, you are! This affair, with nearly four thousand
clerks, is the huge toy and pastime of a group of mil
lionaires who have discovered a way of honestly amusing
themselves while gaining applause and advertisement.
Within the foyer and beyond the staircase, notice the
outer rooms, partitioned off by bronze grilles, looming
darkly gorgeous in an eternal windowless twilight
studded with the beautiful glowing green disks of elec
tric-lamp shades; and under each disk a human head
bent over the black-and-red magic of ledgers! The
desired effect is at once obtained, and it is wonderful.
Then lose yourself in and out of the ascending and
descending elevators, and among the unending multi
tudes of clerks, and along the corridors of marble (total
length exactly measured and recorded). You will be
struck dumb. And immediately you begin to recover
your speech you will be struck dumb again. . . .

Other houses, as has been seen, provide good meals
for their employees at cost price. This house, then,

YOUR UNITED STATES

will provide excellent meals, free of charge! It will
install the most expensive kitchens and richly spacious
restaurants. It will serve the delicate repasts with
dignity. "Does all this lessen the wages?" No, not in
theory. But in practice, and whether the management
wishes or not, it must come out of the wages. "Why
do you do it?" you ask the departmental chief, who ap
parently gets far more fun out of the contemplation of
these refectories than out of the contemplation of pre
miums received and claims paid. "It is better for the
employees," he says. "But we do it because it is better
for us. It pays us. Good food, physical comfort,
agreeable environment, scientific ventilation — all these
things pay us. We get results from them." He does
not mention horses, but you feel that the comparison
is with horses. A horse, or a clerk, or an artisan — it
pays equally well to treat all of them well. This is
one of the latest discoveries of economic science, a dis
covery not yet universally understood.

I say you do not mention horses, and you certainly
must not hint that the men in authority may have been
actuated by motives of humanity. You must believe
what you are told — that the sole motive is to get results.
The eagerness with which all heads of model establish
ments would disavow to me any thought of being
humane was affecting in its naivet£; it had that touch of
ingenuous wistfulness which I remarked everywhere in
America — and nowhere more than in the demeanor of
many mercantile highnesses. (I hardly expect Ameri-
icans to understand just what I mean here.) It was
as if they would blush at being caught in an act of

A YOUNG WOMAN WAS JUST FINISHING A FLORID SONG

SOME ORGANIZATIONS

humanity, like school-boys caught praying. Still, to
my mind, the white purity of their desire to get financial
results was often muddied by the dark stain of a humane
motive. I may be wrong (as people say), but I know I
am not (as people think).

The further you advance into the penetralia of this
arch-exemplar of American organization and profusion,
the more you are amazed by the imaginative perfection
of its detail: as well in the system of filing for instant
reference fifty million separate documents, as in the
planning of a concert-hall for the diversion of the
human machines.

As we went into the immense concert -hall a group of
girls were giving an informal concert among themselves.
When lunch is served on the premises with chronographic
exactitude, the thirty-five minutes allowed for the meal
give an appreciable margin for music and play. A
young woman was just finishing a florid song. The
concert was suspended, and the whole party began to
move humbly away at this august incursion.

"{iing it again; do, please!" the departmental chief
suggested. And the florid song was nervously sung
again; we applauded, the artiste bowed as on a stage,
and the group fled, the thirty-five minutes being doubt
less up. The departmental chief looked at me in
silence, content, as much as to say: "This is how we do
business in America." And I thought, "Yet another
way of getting results!"

But sometimes the creators of the organization, who
had provided everything, had been obliged to confess
that they had omitted from their designs certain factors

YOUR UNITED STATES

of evolution. Hat-cupboards were a feature of the wom
en's offices — delightful specimens of sound cabinetry.
And still, millinery was lying about all over the place,
giving it an air of feminine occupation that was ex
tremely exciting to a student on his travels. The
truth was that none of those hats would go into the cup
boards. Fashion had worsted the organization com
pletely. Departmental chiefs had nothing to bo but
acquiesce in this startling untidiness. Either they must
wait till the circumference of hats lessened again, or they
must tear down the whole structure and rebuild it with
due regard to hats.

Finally, we approached the sacred lair and fastness
of the president, whose massive portrait I had already
seen on several walls. Spaciousness and magnificence
increased. Ceilings rose in height, marble was softened
by the thick pile of carpets. Mahogany and gold shone
more luxuriously. I was introduced into the vast ante
chamber of the presidential secretaries, and by the chief
of them inducted through polished and gleaming bar
riers into the presence-chamber itself: a noble apart
ment, an apartment surpassing dreams and expectations,
conceived and executed in a spirit of majestic prod
igality. The president had not been afraid. And his
costly audacity was splendidly justified of itself. This
man had a sense of the romantic, of the dramatic, of
the fit. And the qualities in him and his £tat major
which had commanded the success of the entire enter
prise were well shown in the brilliant symbolism of that
room's grandiosity. . . . And there was the president's
portrait again, gorgeously framed.

SOME ORGANIZATIONS

He came in through another door, an old man of
superb physique, and after a little while he was relating
to me the early struggles of his company. "My wife
used to say that for ten years she never saw me," he
remarked.

I asked him what his distractions were, now that the
strain was over and his ambitions so gloriously achieved.
He replied that occasionally he went for a drive in his
automobile.

"And what do you do with yourself in the evenings?"
I inquired.

He seemed a little disconcerted by this perhaps un
accustomed bluntness.

"Oh," he said, casually, "I read insurance literature."

He had the conscious mien and manners of a reigning
prince. His courtesy and affability were impeccable
and charming. In the most profound sense this human
being had succeeded, for it was impossible to believe
that, had he to live his life again, he would live it very
differently.

Such a type of man is, of course, to be found in nearly
every country; but the type flourishes with a unique
profusion and perfection in the United States ; and in its
more prominent specimens the distinguishing idiosyn
crasy of the average American successful man of busi
ness is magnified for our easier inspection. The rough,
broad difference between the American and the European
business man is that the latter is anxious to leave his
work, while the former is anxious to get to it. The
attitude of the American business man toward his
business is pre-eminently the attitude of an artist. You

YOUR UNITED STATES

may say that he loves money. So do we all — artists
particularly. No stock-broker's private journal could be
more full of dollars than Balzac's intimate correspond
ence is full of francs. But whereas the ordinary artist
loves money chiefly because it represents luxury, the
American business man loves it chiefly because it is the
sole proof of success in his endeavor. He loves his
business. It is not his toil, but his hobby, passion,
vice, monomania — any vituperative epithet you like
to bestow on it ! He does not look forward to living in
the evening; he lives most intensely when he is in the
midst of his organization. His instincts are best ap
peased by the hourly excitements of a good, scrimmaging
commercial day. He needs these excitements as some
natures need alcohol. He cannot do without them.

On no other hypothesis can the unrivaled ingenuity
and splendor and ruthlessness of American business
undertakings be satisfactorily explained. They surpass
the European, simply because they are never out of the
thoughts of their directors, because they are adored
with a fine frenzy. And for the same reason they are
decked forth in magnificence. Would a man enrich
his office with rare woods and stuffs and marbles if it
were not a temple? Would he bestow graces on the en
vironment if while he was in it the one idea at the back
of his head was the anticipation of leaving it? Watch
American business men together, and if you are a
European you will clearly perceive that they are dev
otees. They are open with one another, as intimates
are. Jealousy and secretiveness are much rarer among
them than in Europe. They show off their respective

ABSORBED IN THAT WONDROUS SATISFYING HOBBY

SOME ORGANIZATIONS

organizations with pride and with candor. They ad
mire one another enormously. Hear one of them say en
thusiastically of another: "It was a great idea he had
—connecting his New York and his Philadelphia places
by wireless — a great idea!" They call one another by
their Christian names, fondly. They are capable of
wonderful friendships in business. They are cemented
by one religion — and it is not golf. For them the journey
"home" is often not the evening journey, but the morn
ing journey. Call this a hard saying if you choose: it
is true. Could a man be happy long away from a hobby
so entrancing, a toy so intricate and marvelous, a setting
so splendid? Is it strange that, absorbed in that won
drous satisfying hobby, he should make love with the
nonchalance of an animal? At which point I seem to
have come dangerously near to the topic of the singular
position of the American woman, about which every
body is talking. . . .

TRANSIT AND HOTELS

HTHE choice of such a trite topic as the means of
1 travel may seem to denote that my observations
in the United States must have been superficial. They
were. I never hoped that they would be otherwise.
In seven weeks (less one day) I could not expect to pene
trate very far below the engaging surface of things.
Nor did I unnaturally attempt to do so ; for the evidence
of the superficies is valuable, and it can only be properly
gathered by the stranger at first sight. Among the
scenes and phenomena that passed before me I of course
remember best those which interested me most. Rail
roads and trains have always appealed to me; I have
often tried to express my sense of their romantic savor.
And I was eager to see and appreciate these particular
manifestations of national character in America.

It happily occurred that my first important journey
from New York was on the Pennsylvania Road.

"I'll meet you at the station," I said to my particular
friend.

"Oh no!" he answered, positively. "I'll pick you
up on my way."

The fact was that not for ten thousand dollars would
he have missed the spectacle of my sensations as I
beheld for the first time the most majestic terminus in

YOUR UNITED STATES

the world! He alone would usher me into the gates of
that marvel! I think he was not disappointed. I
frankly surrendered myself to the domination of this
extraordinary building. I did not compare. I knew
there could be no comparison. Whenever afterward
I heard, as I often did, enlightened, Europe-loving
citizens of the United States complain that the United
States was all very well, but there was no art in the
United States, the image of this tremendous master
piece would rise before me, and I was inclined to say:
"Have you ever crossed Seventh Avenue, or are you
merely another of those who have been to Europe and
learned nothing?" The Pennsylvania station is full
of the noble qualities that fine and heroic imagination
alone can give. That there existed a railroad man
poetic and audacious enough to want it, architects with
genius powerful enough to create it, and a public with
heart enough to love it — these things are for me a surer
proof that the American is a great race than the exis
tence of any quantity of wealthy universities, museums
of classic art, associations for prison reform, or deep-
delved safe-deposit vaults crammed with bonds. Such
a monument does not spring up by chance; it is part of
the slow flowering of a nation's secret spirit!

The terminus emerged brilliantly from an examina
tion of the complicated detail, both esthetic and prac
tical, that is embedded in the apparent simplicity of
its vast physiognomy. I discovered everything in it
proper to a station, except trains. Not a sign of a train.
My impulse was to ask, ' ' Is this the tomb of Alexander
J. Cassatt, or is it a cathedral, or is it, after all, a railroad

100

IN THE PARLOR-CAR

TRANSIT AND

station?'* Then I was led with due ceremony across
the boundless plains of granite to a secret staircase,
guarded by lions in uniform, and at the foot of this
staircase, hidden like a shame or a crime, I found a
resplendent train, the Congressional Limited. It was
not the Limited of my dreams; but it was my first
American Limited, and I boarded it in a condition of
excitement. I criticized, of course, for every experienced
traveler has decided views concerning trains de luxe.
The cars impressed rather than charmed me. I pre
ferred, and still prefer, the European variety of Pullman.
(Yes, I admit we owe it entirely to America !) And then
there is a harsh, inhospitable quality about those all-
steel cars. They do not yield. You think you are touch
ing wood, and your knuckles are abraded. The imita
tion of wood is a triumph of mimicry, but by no means
a triumph of artistic propriety. Why should steel be
made to look like wood? . . . Fireproof, you say. But
is anything fireproof in the United States, except per
haps Tammany Hall? Has not the blazing of fire
proof constructions again and again singed off the eye
brows of dauntless firemen? My impression is that
"fireproof," in the American tongue, is one of those
agreeable but quite meaningless phrases whch adorn
the languages of all nations. Another such phrase, in
the American tongue, is "right away!" . . .

I sat down in my appointed place in the all-steel car,
and, turning over the pages of a weekly paper, saw
photographs of actual collisions, showing that in an
altercation between trains the steel-and-wood car could
knock the all-steel car into a cocked hat ! . . . The dec-

IOI

YOUR UNITED STATES

oration of the all-steel car does not atone for its prob
able combustibility and its proved fragility. In par
ticular, the smoking-cars of all the Limiteds I intrusted
myself to were defiantly and wilfully ugly. Still, a
fine, proud train, handsome in some ways! And the
trainmen were like admirals, captains, and first officers
pacing bridges; clearly they owned the train, and had
kindly lent it to the Pennsylvania R. R. Their demeanor
expressed a rare sense of ownership and also of re
sponsibility. While very polite, they condescended.
A strong contrast to the miserable European "guard'*
—for all his silver buttons! I adventured into the ob
servation-car, of which institution I had so often heard
Americans speak with pride, and speculated why, here
as in all other cars, the tops of the windows were so low
that it was impossible to see the upper part of the
thing observed (roofs, telegraph-wires, tree-foliage, hill-
summits, sky) without bending the head and cricking
the neck. I do not deny that I was setting a high stan
dard of perfection, but then I had heard so much all
my life about American Limiteds!

The Limited started with exactitude, and from the
observation-car I watched the unrolling of the wondrous
Hudson tunnel — one of the major sights of New York,
and a thing of curious beauty. . . . The journey passed
pleasantly, with no other episode than that of dinner,
which cost a dollar and was worth just about a dollar,
despite the mutton. And with exactitude we arrived
at Washington — another splendid station. I generalized
thus: "It is certain that this country understands rail
road stations." I was, however, fresh in the country,

102

TRANSIT AND HOTELS

and had not then seen New Haven station, which,
as soon as it is quite done with, ought to be put in a
museum.

We returned from Washington by a night train; we
might have taken a day train, but it was pointed out to
me that I ought to get into "form" for certain pro
jected long journeys into the West. At midnight I
was brusquely introduced to the American sleeping-
car. I confess that I had not imagined anything so ap
palling as the confined, stifling, malodorous promiscuity
of the American sleeping-car, where men and women
are herded together on shelves under the drastic control
of an official aided by negroes. I care not to dwell on
the subject. ... I have seen European prisons, but in
none that I have seen would such a system be tolerated,
even by hardened warders and governors ; and assuredly,
if it were, public opinion would rise in anger and destroy
it. I have not been in Siberian prisons, but I remember
reading George Kennan's description of their mild
horrors, and I am surprised that he should have put
himself to the trouble of such a tedious journey when
he might have discovered far more exciting material
on any good road around New York. However, nobody
seemed to mind, such is the force of custom — and I did
not mind very much, because my particular friend, in
telligently foreseeing my absurd European prejudices,
had engaged for us a state-room.

This state-room, or suite — for it comprised two apart
ments — was a beautiful and aristocratic domain. The
bedchamber had a fan that would work at three speeds
like an automobile, and was an enchanting toy. In

103

YOUR UNITED STATES

short, I could find no fault with the accommodation.
It was perfect, and would have remained perfect had the
train remained in the station. Unfortunately, the engine-
driver had the unhappy idea of removing the train from
the station. He seemed to be an angry engine-driver,
and his gesture was that of a man setting his teeth and
hissing: "Now, then, come out of that, you sluggards!"
and giving a ferocious tug. There was a fearful jerk,
and in an instant I understood why sleeping-berths in
America are always arranged lengthwise with the train.
If they were not, the passengers would spend most of
the night in getting up off the floor and climbing into
bed again. A few hundred yards out of the station
the engine-driver decided to stop, and there was the same
fearful jerk and concussion. Throughout the night he
stopped and he started at frequent intervals, and always
with the fearful jerk. Sometimes he would slow down
gently and woo me into a false tranquillity, but only to
finish with the same jerk rendered more shocking by
contrast.

The bedchamber was delightful, the lavatory amount
ed to a boudoir, the reading-lamp left nothing to desire,
the ventilation was a continuous vaudeville entertain
ment, the watch-pocket was adorable, the mattress was
good. Even the road-bed was quite respectable — not
equal to the best I knew, probably, but it had the great
advantage of well- tied rails, so that as the train passed
from one rail-length to the next you felt no jar, a bliss
utterly unknown in Europe. The secret of a satis
factory "sleeper," however, does not lie in the state
room, nor in the glittering lavatory, nor in the lamp,

104

TRANSIT AND HOTELS

nor in the fan, nor in the watch-pocket, nor in the bed,
nor even in the road-bed. It lies in the mannerisms of
that brave fellow out there in front of you on the engine,
in the wind and the rain. But no one in all America
seemed to appreciate this deep truth. For myself,
I was inclined to go out to the engine-driver and say to
him: "Brother, are you aware — you cannot be — that
the best European trains start with the imperceptible
stealthiness of a bad habit, so that it is impossible to
distinguish motion from immobility, and come to rest
with the softness of doves settling on the shoulders
of a young girl?" ... If the fault is not the engine-
driver's, then are the brakes to blame? Inconceivable!
. . . All American engine-drivers are alike; and I never
slept a full hour in any American "sleeper," what with
stops, starts, hootings, tollings, whizzings round sharp
corners, listening to the passage of freight-trains, and
listening to haughty conductor-admirals who quarreled
at length with newly arrived voyagers at 2 or 3 A.M. !
I do not criticize ; I state. I also blame myself. There
are those who could sleep. But not everybody could
sleep. Well and heartily do I remember the moment
when another friend of mine, in the midst of an intermi
nable scolding that was being given by a nasal- voiced
conductor to a passenger just before the dawn, exposed
his head and remarked : "Has it occurred to you that this
is a sleeping-car?" In the swift silence the whirring of
my private fan could be heard.

*I arrived in New York from Washington, as I arrived
at all my destinations after a night journey, in a state of
enfeebled submissiveness, and I retired to bed in a hotel.

105

YOUR UNITED STATES

And for several hours the hotel itself would stop and start
with a jerk and whiz round corners.

For many years I had dreamed of traveling by the
great, the unique, the world-renowned New York-
Chicago train; indeed, it would not be a gross exaggera
tion to say that I came to America in order to take that
train; and at length time brought my dream true. I
boarded the thing in New York, this especial product
of the twentieth century, and yet another thrilling
moment in my life came and went! I boarded it with
pride; everybody boarded it with pride; and in every
eye was the gleam: ''This is the train of trains, and I
have my state-room on it." Perhaps I was ever so
slightly disappointed with the dimensions and appoint
ments of the state-room — I may have been expecting
a whole car to myself — but the general self-conscious
smartness of the train reassured me. I wandered into
the observation-car, and saw my particular friend proud
ly employ the train-telephone to inform his office that
he had caught the train. I saw also the free supply of
newspapers, the library of books, the typewriting-ma
chine, and the stenographer by its side — all as promised.
And I knew that at the other end of the train was a
dining-car, a smoking-car, and a barber-shop. I picked
up the advertising literature scattered about by a
thoughtful Company, and learned therefrom that this
train was not a mere experiment; it was the finished
fruit of many experiments, and that while offering the
conveniences of a hotel or a club, it did with regularity

106

TRANSIT AND HOTELS

what it undertook to do in the way of speed and prompt
ness. The pamphlet made good reading! . . .

I noted that it pleased the Company to run two other
very important trains out of the terminus simultaneously
with the unique train. Bravado, possibly; but bravado
which invited the respect of all those who admire en
terprise ! I anticipated with pleasure the noble spectacle
of these three trains sailing forth together on three
parallel tracks; which pleasure was denied me. We for
Chicago started last; we started indeed, according to
my poor European watch, from fifteen to thirty seconds
late! . . . No matter! I would not stickle for seconds:
particularly as at Chicago, by the terms of a contract
which no company in Europe would have had the grace
to sign, I was to receive, for any unthinkable lateness,
compensation at the rate of one cent for every thirty-
six seconds!

Within a quarter of an hour it became evident that
that train had at least one great quality — it moved.
As, in the deepening dusk, we swung along the banks of
the glorious Hudson, veiled now in the vaporous mys
teries following a red sunset, I was obliged to admit
with increasing enthusiasm that that train did move.
Even the persecutors of Galileo would never have had
the audacity to deny that that train moved. And one
felt, comfortably, that the whole Company, with all
the Company's resources, was watching over its flying
pet, giving it the supreme right of way and urging it
forward by hearty good- will. One felt also that the
moment had come for testing the amenities of the hotel
and the club.

107

YOUR UNITED STATES

"Tea, please," I said, jauntily, confidently, as we
entered the spotless and appetizing restaurant-car.

The extremely polite and kind captain of the car was
obviously taken aback. But he instinctively grasped
that the reputation of the train hung in the balance,
and he regained his self-possession.

"Tea?" His questioning inflection delicately hinted:
"Try not to be too eccentric."

"Tea."

"Here?"

"Here."

"I can serve it here, of course," said the captain,
persuasively. "But if you don't mind I should prefer
to serve it in your state-room."

We reluctantly consented. The tea was well made and
well served.

In an instant, as it seemed, we were crossing a dark
river, on which reposed several immense, many-storied
river-steamers, brilliantly lit. I had often seen illus
trations of these craft, but never before the reality. A
fine sight — and it made me think of Mark Twain's in
comparable masterpiece, Life on ike Mississippi, for
which I would sacrifice the entire works of Thackeray
and George Eliot. We ran into a big town, full of elec
tric signs, and stopped. Albany! One minute late! I
descended to watch the romantic business of changing
engines. I felt sure that changing the horses of a fash
ionable mail-coach would be as nothing to this. The
first engine had already disappeared. The new one
rolled tremendous and overpowering toward me; its
wheels rose above my head, and the driver glanced down

108

TRANSIT AND HOTELS

at me as from a bedroom window. I was sensible of all
the mystery and force of the somber monster; I felt the
mystery of the unknown railway station, and of the
strange illuminated city beyond. And I had a corner
in my mind for the thought: " Somewhere near me
Broadway actually ends." Then, while dark men under
the ray of a lantern fumbled with the gigantic couplings,
I said to myself that if I did not get back to my car I
should probably be left behind. I regained my state
room and waited, watch in hand, for the jerk of restart
ing. I waited half an hour. Some mishap with the
couplings! We left Albany thirty-three minutes late.
Habitues of the train affected nonchalance. One of
them offered to bet me that "she would make it up."
The admirals and captains avoided our^gaze.

We dined, a la carte; the first time I had ever dined
a la carte on any train. An excellent dinner, well and
sympathetically served. The mutton was impeccable.
And in another instant, as it seemed, we were running,
with no visible flags, through an important and showy
street of a large town, and surface-cars were crossing
one another behind us. I had never before seen an
express train let loose in the middle of an unprotected
town, and I was naif enough to be startled. But a
huge electric sign — "Syracuse bids you welcome" —
tranquilized me. We briefly halted, and drew away
from the allurement of those bright streets into the
deep, perilous shade of the open country.

I went to bed. The night differed little from other
nights spent in American sleeping-cars, and I therefore
will not describe it in detail. To do so might amount

109

YOUR UNITED STATES

to a solecism. Enough to say that the jerkings were
possibly less violent and certainly less frequent than
usual, while, on the other hand, the halts were strangely
long; one, indeed, seemed to last for hours; I had to
admit to myself that I had been to sleep and dreamed
this stoppage.

From a final cat-nap I at last drew up my blind to greet
the oncoming day, and was rewarded by one of the finest
and most poetical views I have ever seen: a misty,
brown river flanked by a jungle of dark reddish and
yellowish chimneys and furnaces that covered it with
shifting canopies of white steam and of smoke, varying
from the delicatest grays to intense black; a beautiful
dim gray sky lightening, and on the ground and low,
flat roofs a thin crust of snow: Toledo! A wonderful
and inspiring panorama, just as romantic in its own
way as any Spanish Toledo. Yet I regretted its name,
and I regretted the grotesque names of other towns on
the route — Canaan, Syracuse, Utica, Geneva, Ceylon,
Waterloo, and odd combinations ending in "burg."
The names of most of the States are superb. What
could be more beautiful than Ohio, Idaho, Kentucky,
Iowa, Missouri, Wyoming, Illinois — above all, Illinois?
Certain cities, too, have grand names. In its vocal
quality "Chicago" is a perfect prince among names.
But the majority of town, names in America suffer, no
doubt inevitably, from a lack of imagination and of
reflection. They have the air of being bought in haste
at a big advertising "ready-for-service" establishment.

Remembering in my extreme prostration that I was
in a hotel and club, and not in an experiment, I rang

TRANSIT AND HOTELS

the bell, and a smiling negro presented himself. It was
only a quarter to seven in Toledo, but I was sustained
in my demeanor by the fact that it was a quarter to
eight in New York.

"Will you bring me some tea, please?'*

He was sympathetic, but he said flatly I couldn't have
tea, nor anything, and that nobody could have any
thing at all for an hour and a half, as there would be
no restaurant-car till Elkhart, and Elkhart was quite
ninety miles off. He added that an engine had broken
down at Cleveland.

I lay in collapse for over an hour, and then, summon
ing my manhood, arose. On the previous evening the
hot-water tap of my toilette had yielded only cold water.
Not wishing to appear hypercritical, I had said nothing,
but I had thought. I now casually turned on the cold-
water tap and was scalded by nearly boiling water. The
hot-water tap still yielded cold water. Lest I should be
accused of inventing this caprice of plumbing in a hotel
and club, I give the name of the car. It was appropri
ately styled "Watertown" (compartment E).

In the corridor an admiral, audaciously interrogated,
admitted that the train was at that moment two hours
and ten minutes late. As for Elkhart, it seemed to be
still about ninety miles away. I went into the observa
tion-saloon to cheer myself up by observing, and was
struck by a chill, and by the chilly, pinched demeanor
of sundry other passengers, and by the apologetic faces
of certain captains. Already in my state-room my
senses had suspected a chill; but I had refused to be
lieve my senses. I knew and had known all my life

YOUR UNITED STATES

that American trains were too hot, and I had put down
the supposed chill to a psychological delusion. It was,
however, no delusion. As we swept through a snowy
landscape the apologetic captains announced sadly that
the engine was not sparing enough steam to heat the
whole of the train. We put on overcoats and stamped
our feet.

The train was now full of ravening passengers. And
as Elkhart with infinite shyness approached, the raven
ing passengers formed in files in the corridors, and their
dignity was jerked about by the speed of the icy train,
and they waited and waited, like mendicants at the
kitchen entrance of a big restaurant. And at long last,
when we had ceased to credit that any such place as
Elkhart existed, Elkhart arrived. Two restaurant-cars
were coupled on, and, as it were, instantly put to the
sack by an infuriated soldiery. The food was excellent,
and newspapers were distributed with much generosity,
but some passengers, including ladies, had to stand for
another twenty minutes famished at the door of the
first car, because the breakfasting accommodation of
this particular hotel and club was not designed on the
same scale as its bedroom accommodation. We reached
Chicago one hundred and ten minutes late. And to
compensate me for the lateness, and for the refrigera
tion, and for the starvation, and for being forced to eat
my breakfast hurriedly under the appealing, reproach
ful gaze of famishing men and women, an official at the
Lasalle station was good enough to offer me a couple
of dollars. I accepted them. . . .

An unfortunate accident, you say. It would be more

112

TRANSIT AND HOTELS

proper to say a series of accidents. I think "the great
est train in the world" is entitled to one accident, but
not to several. And when, in addition to being a train,
it happens to be a hotel and club, and not an experiment,
I think that a system under which a serious breakdown
anywhere between Syracuse and Elkhart (about three-
quarters of the entire journey) is necessarily followed by
starvation — I think that such a system ought to be
altered — by Americans. In Europe it would be allowed
to continue indefinitely.

Beyond question my experience of American trains
led me to the general conclusion that the best of them
were excellent. Nevertheless, I saw nothing in the
organization of either comfort, luxury, or safety to justify
the strange belief of Americans that railroad traveling
in the United States is superior to railroad traveling in
Europe. Merely from habit, I prefer European trains on
the whole. It is perhaps also merely from habit that
Americans prefer American trains.

•

As regards methods of transit other than ordinary
railroad trains, I have to admit a certain general dis
appointment in the United States. The Elevated sys
tems in the large cities are the terrible result of an origi
nal notion which can only be called unfortunate. They
must either depopulate the streets through which they
run or utterly destroy the sensibility of the inhabitants ;
and they enormously increase and complicate the dan
gers of the traffic beneath them. Indeed, in the view
of the unaccustomed stranger, every Elevated is an
affliction so appallingly hideous that no degree of con-

8 113

YOUR UNITED STATES

venience could atone for its horror. The New York
Subway is a masterpiece of celerity, and in other ways
less evil than an Elevated, but in the minimum decencies
of travel it appeared to me to be inferior to several
similar systems in Europe.

The surface-cars in all the large cities that I saw were
less smart and less effective than those in sundry Euro
pean capitals. In Boston particularly I cannot forget
the excessive discomfort of a journey to Cambridge,
made in the company of a host who had a most beauti
ful house, and who gave dinners of the last refinement,
but who seemed unaccountably to look on the car
journey as a sort of pleasant robustious outing. Nor
can I forget — also in Boston — the spectacle of the citi
zens of Brookline — reputed to be the wealthiest suburb
in the world — strap-hanging and buffeted and flung
about on the way home from church, in surface-cars
which really did carry inadequacy and brutality to
excess.

The horse-cabs of Chicago had apparently been im
ported second-hand immediately after the great fire
from minor towns in Italy.

There remains the supreme mystery of the vices of
the American taxicab. I sought an explanation of this
from various persons, and never got one that was con
vincing. The most frequent explanation, at any rate
in New York, was that the great hotels were responsible
for the vices of the American taxicab, by reason of their
alleged outrageous charges to the companies for the
privilege of waiting for hire at their august porticos.
I listened with respect, but with incredulity. If the

114

THE STRAP-HANGERS

TRANSIT AND HOTELS

taxicabs were merely very dear, I could understand;
if they were merely very bad, I could understand; if
they were merely numerically insufficient for the num
ber of people willing to pay for taxicabs, I could under
stand. But that they should be at once very dear, very
bad, and most inconveniently scarce, baffled and still
baffles me. The sum of real annoyance daily inflicted
on a rich and busy but craven-hearted city like New
York by the eccentricity of its taxicab organization must
be colossal.

As to the condition of the roadways, the vocabulary
of blame had been exhausted long before I arrived. Two
things, however, struck me in New York which I had
not heard of by report: the greasiness of the streets,
transforming every automobile into a skidding death
trap at the least sign of moisture, and the leisureliness
of the road- works. The busiest part of Thirty-fourth
Street, for example — no mean artery, either — was torn
up when I came into New York, and it was still torn up
when I left. And, lastly, why are there no island re
fuges on Fifth Avenue? Even at the intersection of
Fifth and Broadway there is no oasis for the pursued
wayfarer. Every European city has long ago decided
that the provision of island refuges in main thorough
fares is an act of elementary justice to the wayfarer in
his unequal and exhausting struggle with wheeled traffic.

All these criticisms, which are severe but honest, would
lose much of their point if the general efficiency of the
United States and its delightful genius for organization
were not so obvious and so impressive to the European.
In fact, it is precisely the brilliant practical qualities of

* '5

YOUR UNITED STATES

the country which place its idiosyncrasies in the matter
of transit in so startling a light. ... I would not care to
close this section without a grateful reference to the very
natty electric coupes, usually driven by ladies, which
are so refreshing a feature of the streets of Chicago, and
to the virtues of American private automobiles in

general.

It is remarkable that a citizen who cheerfully and
negligently submits to so many various inconveniences
outside his home should insist on having the most com
fortable home in the world, as the American citizen un
questionably has! Once, when in response to an inter
viewer I had become rather lyrical in praise of I forget
what phenomenon in the United States, a Philadelphia
evening newspaper published an editorial article in
criticism of my views. This article was entitled "Offen
sive Flattery." Were I to say freely all that I thought
of the American private house, large or small, I might
expose myself again to the same accusation.

When I began to make the acquaintance of the Ameri
can private house, I felt like one who, son of an exiled
mother, had been born abroad and had at length en
tered his real country. That is to say, I felt at home.
I felt that all this practical comfort and myself had been
specially destined for each other since the beginning of
time, and that fate was at last being fulfilled. Freely
I admit that until I reached America I had not under
stood what real domestic comfort, generously conceived,
could be. Certainly I had always in this particular
quarreled with my own country, whose average notion

116

THE PASSENGERS ON THE ELEVATED AT NIGHT ARE ODDLY ASSORTED

TRANSIT AND HOTELS

of comfort still is to leave the drawing-room (tempera
ture 70° — near the fire) at midnight, pass by a wind
swept hall and staircase (temperature 55°) to a bedroom
full of fine fresh air (temperature 50° to 40°), and in that
chamber, having removed piece by piece every bit of
warm clothing, to slip, imperfectly protected, between
icy sheets and wait for sleep. Certainly I had always
contested the joyfulness of that particular process; but
my imagination had fallen short of the delicious innu
merable realities of comfort in an American home.

Now, having regained the "barbaric seats" whence
I came, I read with a peculiar expression the advertise
ments of fashionable country and town residences to
rent or for sale in England. Such as: "Choice resi
dence. Five reception-rooms. Sixteen bedrooms. Bath
room — " Or: "Thoroughly up-to-date mansion. Six
reception-rooms. Splendid hall. Billiard-room. Twenty-
four bedrooms. Two bath-rooms — " I read this litera
ture (to be discovered textually every week in the best
illustrated weeklies) , and I smile. Also I wonder, faintly
blushing, what Americans truly do think of the resi
dential aspects of European house-property when they
first see it. And I wonder, without blushing, to what
miraculous degree of perfected comfort Americans would
raise all their urban traffic if only they cared enough to
keep the professional politician out of their streets as
strictly as they keep him out of their houses.

The great American hotel, too, is a wondrous haven
for the European who in Europe has only tasted com
fort in his dreams. The calm orderliness of the bed-

117

YOUR UNITED STATES

room floors, the adequacy of wardrobes and lamps, the
reckless profusion of clean linen, that charming notice
which one finds under one's door in the morning, "You
were called at seven-thirty, and answered," the funda
mental principle that a bedroom without a bath-room
is not a bedroom, the magic laundry which returns your
effects duly starched in eight hours, the bells which are
answered immediately, the thickness of the walls, the
radiator in the elevator-shaft, the celestial invention of
the floor-clerk — I could catalogue the civilizing features
of the American hotel for pages. But the great Ameri
can hotel is a classic, and to praise it may seem inept.
My one excuse for doing so is that I have ever been a
devotee of hotels, and once indeed wrote a whole book
about one. When I told the best interviewer in the
United States that my secret ambition had always been
to be the manager of a grand hotel, I was quite sincere.
And whenever I saw the manager of a great American
hotel traversing with preoccupied and yet aquiline glance
his corridors and public rooms, I envied him acutely.

The hospitality of those corridors and public rooms is
so wide and comprehensive that the ground floor and
mezzanine of a really big hotel in the United States offer
a spectacle of humanity such as cannot be seen in
Europe; they offer also a remarkable contrast to the
tranquillity of their own upper stories, where any eccen
tricity is vigorously discouraged. I think that it must
be the vast tumult and promiscuity of the ground floor
which is responsible for the relative inferiority of the
restaurant in a great American hotel. A restaurant
should be a paramount unit, but as a fact in these hotels

118,

THE RESTAURANT OF A GREAT HOTEL IS BUT ONE FEATURE OF ITS

SPLENDOR

TRANSIT AND HOTELS

it is no more than an item in a series of resorts, several
of which equal if they do not surpass it in popular in
terest. The Americans, I found, would show more in
terest in the barber-shop than in the restaurant. (And
to see the American man of business, theoretically in a
hurry, having his head bumped about by a hair-cutter,
his right hand tended by one manicurist, his left hand
tended by another manicurist, his boots polished by a
lightning shiner, and his wits polished by the two mani
curists together — the whole simultaneously — this spec
tacle in itself was possibly a reflection on the American's
sense of proportion.) Further, a restaurant should be a
sacred retreat, screened away from the world; which ideal
is foreign to the very spirit of the great American hotel.
I do not complain that the representative celebrated
restaurants fail to achieve an absolutely first-class cuisine.
No large restaurant, either in the United States or out
of it, can hope to achieve an absolutely first-class cui
sine. The peerless restaurant is and must be a little one.
Nor would I specially complain of the noise and throng
ing of the great restaurants, the deafening stridency of
their music, the artistic violence of their decorations;
these features of fashionable restaurants are now uni
versal throughout the world, and the philosopher adapts
himself to them. (Indeed, in favor of New York I
must say that in one of the largest of its restaurants I
heard a Chopin ballade well played on a good piano —
and it was listened to in appreciative silence; event
quite unique in my experience. Also, the large restau
rant whose cuisine nearest approaches the absolutely
first-class is in New York, and not in Europe.)

119

YOUR UNITED STATES

Nor would I complain that the waiter in the great res
taurant neither understands English nor speaks a tongue
which resembles English, for this characteristic, too, is
very marked across the Atlantic. (One night, in a Bos
ton hotel, after lingual difficulties with a head- waiter,
I asked him in French if he was not French. He cut
tingly replied in waiter's American: "I was French,
but now I am an American." In another few years
that man will be referring to Great Britain as "the old
country.") . . .

No; what disconcerts the European in the great
American restaurant is the excessive, the occasionally
maddening slowness of the service, and the lack of in
terest in the service. Touching the latter defect, the
waiter is not impolite; he is not neglectful. But he is,
too often, passively hostile, or, at best, neutral. He, or
his chief, has apparently not grasped the fact that buy
ing a meal is not like buying a ton of coal. If the pur
chaser is to get value for his money, he must enjoy his
meal; and if he is to enjoy the meal, it must not merely
be efficiently served, but it must be efficiently served
in a sympathetic atmosphere. The supreme business
of a good waiter is to create this atmosphere. . . . True,
that even in the country which has carried cookery and
restaurants to loftier heights than any other — I mean,
of course, Belgium, the little country of little restau
rants — the subtle ether which the truly civilized diner
demands is rare enough. But in the great restaurants
of the great cities of America it is, I fancy, rarer than
anywhere else.

VI
SPORT AND THE THEATER

SPORT AND THE THEATER

I REMEMBER thinking, long before I came to the
United States, at the time when the anti-gambling
bill was a leading topic of American correspondence in
European newspapers, that a State whose public opin
ion would allow even the discussion of a regulation so
drastic could not possibly regard " sport" as sport is
regarded in Europe. It might be very fond of gam
bling, but it could not be afflicted with the particular
mania which in Europe amounts to a passion, if not
to a religion. And when the project became law, and
horse-racing was most beneficially and admirably abol
ished in the northeastern portion of the Republic, I was
astonished. No such law could be passed in any Euro
pean country that I knew. The populace would not
suffer it; the small, intelligent minority would not care
enough to support it ; and the wealthy oligarchical priest-
patrons of sport would be seriously convinced that it
involved the ruin of true progress and the end of all
things. Such is the sacredness of sport in Europe,
where governments audacious enough to attack and over
throw the state-church have never dared to suggest
the suppression of the vice by which alone the main
form of sport lives. . . .

So that I did not expect to find the United States a

123

YOUR UNITED STATES

very "sporting" country. And I did not so find it.
I do not wish to suggest that, in my opinion, there is no
"sport " in the United States, but only that there is some
what less than in Western Europe; as I have already
indicated, the differences between one civilization and
another are always slight, though they are invariably
exaggerated by rumor.

I know that the "sporting instinct" — a curious com
bination of the various instincts for fresh air, destruc
tion, physical prowess, emulation, devotion, and betting
— is tolerably strong in America. I could name a list
of American sports as long as the list of dutiable articles
in the customs tariff. I am aware that over a million
golf balls are bought (and chiefly- lost) in the United
States every year. I know that no residence there is
complete without its lawn-tennis court. I accept the
statement that its hunting is unequaled. I have ad
mired the luxury and completeness of its country clubs.
Its yachting is renowned. Its horse-shows, to which en
thusiasts repair in automobiles, are wondrous displays
of fashion. But none of these things is democratic;
none enters into the life of the mass of the people.
Nor can that fierce sport be called quite democratic
which depends exclusively upon, and is limited to, the
universities. A six-day cycling contest and a Presiden
tial election are, of course, among the very greatest
sporting events in the world, but they do not occur
often enough to merit consideration as constant factors
of national existence.

Baseball remains a formidable item, yet scarcely ca
pable of balancing the scale against the sports — football,

124

SPORT AND THE THEATER

cricket, racing, pelota, bull-fighting — which, in Europe,
impassion the common people, and draw most of their
champions from the common people. In Europe the
advertisement hoardings — especially in the provinces-
proclaim sport throughout every month of the year;
not so in America. In Europe the most important daily
news is still the sporting news, as any editor will tell you;
not so in America, despite the gigantic headings of the
evening papers at certain seasons.

But how mighty, nevertheless, is baseball! Its fame
floats through Europe as something prodigious, incom
prehensible, romantic, and terrible. After being en
tertained at early lunch in the correct hotel for this
kind of thing, I was taken, in a state of great excitement,
by a group of excited business men, and flashed through
Central Park in an express automobile to one of the
great championship games. I noted the excellent ar
rangements for dealing with feverish multitudes. I
noted the splendid and ornate spaciousness of the grand
stand crowned with innumerable eagles, and the calm,
matter-of-fact tone in which a friend informed me that
the grand-stand had been burned down six months ago.
I noted the dreadful prominence of advertisements, and
particularly of that one which announced "the 3 -dollar
hat with the 5-dollar look," all very European! It was
pleasant to be convinced in such large letters that even
shrewd America is not exempt from that universal
human naivete which is ready to believe that in some
magic emporium a philanthropist is always waiting to
give five dollars' worth of goods in exchange for three
dollars of money.

125

YOUR UNITED STATES

Then I braced my intelligence to an understanding of
the game, which, thanks to its classical simplicity, and
to some training in the finesse of cricket and football, I
did soon grasp in its main outlines. A beautiful game,
superbly played. We reckon to know something of
ball games in Europe; we reckon to be connoisseurs;
and the old footballer and cricketer in me came away
from that immense inclosure convinced that baseball
was a game of the very first class, and that those players
were the most finished exponents of it. I was informed
that during the winter the players condescended to fol
low the law and other liberal professions. But, judging
from their apparent importance in the public eye, I
should not have been surprised to learn that during the
winter they condescended to be Speakers of the House of
Representatives or governors of States. It was a re
lief to know that in the matter of expenses they were
treated more liberally than the ambassadors of the
Republic.

They seemed to have carried the art of pitching a ball
to a more wondrous degree of perfection than it has
ever been carried in cricket. The absolute certitude of
the fielding and accuracy of the throwing was profoundly
impressive to a connoisseur. Only in a certain lack of
elegance in gesture, and in the unshaven dowdiness of
the ground on which it was played, could this game be
said to be inferior to the noble spectacle of cricket. In
broad dramatic quality I should place it above cricket,
and on a level with Association football.

In short, I at once became an enthusiast for baseball.
For nine innings I watched it with interest unabated,

126

SPORT AND THE THEATER

until a vast purple shadow, creeping gradually eastward,
had obscurely veiled the sublime legend of the 3 -dollar
hat with the 5 -dollar look. I began to acquire the prop
er cries and shouts and menaces, and to pass comments
on the play which I was assured were- not utterly foolish.
In my honest yearning to feel myself a habitue, I did
what everybody else did and even attacked a morsel
of chewing-gum; but all that a European can say of
this singular substance is that it is, finally, eternal and
unconquerable. One slip I did quite innocently make.
I rose to stretch myself after the sixth inning instead of
half-way through the seventh. Happily a friend with
marked presence of mind pulled me down to my seat
again, before I had had time fully to commit this hor
rible sacrilege. When the game was finished I surged
on to the enormous ground, and was informed by inner-
ring experts of a few of the thousand subtle tactical
points which I had missed. And lastly, I was flung up
onto the Elevated platform, littered with pieces of news
paper, and through a landscape of slovenly apartment-
houses, punctuated by glimpses of tremendous quantities
of drying linen, I was shot out of New York toward a
calm week-end.

Yes, a grand game, a game entirely worthy of its
reputation! If the professional matador and gladiator
business is to be carried on at all, a better exemplifica
tion of it than baseball offers could hardly be found or
invented. But the beholding crowd, and the behavior
of the crowd, somewhat disappointed me. My friends
said with intense pride that forty thousand persons were
present. The estimate proved to be an exaggeration ; but

' 127

YOUR UNITED STATES

even had it not been, what is forty thousand to the similar
crowds in Europe ? In Europe forty thousand people will
often assemble to watch an ordinary football match.
And for a "Final," the record stands at something over
a hundred thousand. It should be remembered, too, in
forming the comparison, that many people in the Eastern
States frequent the baseball grounds because they have
been deprived of their horse-racing. Further, the New
York crowd, though fairly excited, was not excited as
sporting excitement is understood in, for instance, the
Five Towns. The cheering was good, but it was not
the cheering of frenzied passion. The anathemas,
though hearty, lacked that religious sincerity which a
truly sport-loving populace will always put into them.
The prejudice in favor of the home team, the cruel,
frank unfairness toward the visiting team, were both
insufficiently accentuated. The menaces were merely
infantile. I inquired whether the referee or umpire,
or whatever the arbiter is called in America, ever went
in danger of life or limb, or had to be protected from a
homicidal public by the law in uniform. And I was
shocked by a negative answer. Referees in Europe
have been smuggled off the ground in the center of a
cocoon of policemen, have even been known to spend a
fortnight in bed, after giving a decision adverse to the
home team! . . . More evidence that the United States
is not in the full sense a sporting country!

•

Of the psychology of the great common multitude of
baseball "bleachers," I learned almost nothing. But
as regards the world of success and luxury (which, of

128

SPORT AND THE THEATER

course, held me a willing captive firmly in its soft and
powerful influence throughout my stay), I should say
that there was an appreciable amount of self -hypno
tism in its attitude toward baseball. As if the thriving
and preoccupied business man murmured to his soul,
when the proper time came: "By the way, these base
ball championships are approaching. It is right and
good for me that I should be boyishly excited, and I will
be excited. I must not let my interest in baseball die.
Let's look at the sporting-page and see how things stand.
And I'll have to get tickets, too!" Hence possibly what
seemed to me a superficiality and factitiousness in the
excitement of the more expensive seats, and a too-rapid
effervescence and finish of the excitement when the game
was over.

The high fever of inter-university football struck me
as a more authentic phenomenon. Indeed, a university
town in the throes of an important match offers a
psychological panorama whose genuineness can scarcely
be doubted. Here the young men communicate the
sacred contagion to their elders, and they also communi
cate it to the young women, who, in turn, communicate
it to the said elders — and possibly the indirect method
is the surer! I visited a university town in order to
witness a match of the highest importance. Unfortu
nately, and yet fortunately, my whole view of it was
affected by a mere nothing — a trifle which the news
papers dealt with in two lines.

When I reached the gates of the arena in the morning,
to get a glimpse of a freshmen's match, an automobile
was standing thereat. In the automobile was a pile of
9 129

YOUR UNITED STATES

rugs, and sticking out of the pile of rugs in an odd, un
natural, horizontal way was a pair of muddy football
boots. These boots were still on the feet cf a boy, but
all the rest of his unconscious and smashed body was
hidden beneath the rugs. The automobile vanished,
and so did my peace of mind. It seemed to me tragic
that that burly infant under the rugs should have been
martyrized at a poor little morning match in front of a
few sparse hundreds of spectators and tens of thousands
of unresponsive empty benches. He had not had even
the glory and meed of a great multitude's applause.
When I last inquired about him, at the end of the day,
he was still unconscious, and that was all that could be
definitely said of him ; one heard that it was his features
that had chiefly suffered in the havoc, that he had been
defaced. If I had not happened to see those muddy foot
ball boots sticking out, I should have heard vaguely of
the accident, and remarked philosophically that it was
a pity, but that accidents would occur, and there would
have been the end of my impression. Only I just did
happen to see those muddy boots sticking out.

When we came away from the freshmen's match, the
charming roads of the town, bordered by trees and by
the agreeable architecture of mysterious clubs, were be
ginning to be alive and dangerous with automobiles and
carriages, and pretty girls and proud men, and flags and
flowers, and colored favors and shoutings. Salutes were
being exchanged at every yard. The sense of a mighty
and culminating event sharpened the air. The great
inn was full of jollity and excitement, and the reception-
clerks thereof had the negligent mien of those who know

130

THE SENSE OF A MIGHTY AND CULMINATING EVENT SHARPENED THE AIR

SPORT AND THE THEATER

that every bedroom is taken and every table booked.
The club (not one of the mysterious ones, but an in
genuous plain club of patriarchs who had once been
young in the university and were now defying time)
was crammed with amiable confusion, and its rich car
pets protected for the day against the feet of bald lads,
who kept aimlessly walking up-stairs and down-stairs
and from room to room, out of mere friendly exuberance.
And after the inn and the club I was conducted into
a true American home, where the largest and most free
hospitality was being practised upon a footing of uni
versal intimacy. You ate standing; you ate sitting;
you ate walking the length of the long table; you ate
at one small table, and then you ate at another. You
talked at random to strangers behind and strangers be
fore. And when you couldn't think of anything to say,
you just smiled inclusively. You knew scarcely any
body's name, but the heart of everybody. Impossible to
be ceremonious! When a young woman bluntly in
quired the significance of that far-away look in your
eye, impossible not to reply frankly that you were dream
ing of a second helping of a marvelous pie up there at
the end of the long table; and impossible not to eat all
the three separate second helpings that were instantly
thrust upon you ! The chatter and the good-nature were
enormous. This home was an expression of the democ
racy of the university at its best. Fraternity was abroad ;
kindliness was abroad; and therefore joy. Whatever
else was taught at the university, these were taught,
and they were learnt. If a publicist asked me what
American civilization had achieved, I would answer that

YOUR UNITED STATES

among other things it had achieved this hour in this
modest home.

Occasionally a face would darken and a voice grow
serious, exposing the terrible secret apprehensions, based
on expert opinion, that the home side could not win.
But the cloud would pass. And occasionally there would
be a reference to the victim whose muddy boots I had
seen. "Dreadful, isn't it?" and a twinge of compassion
for the victim or for his mother! But the cloud would
immediately pass.

And then we all had to leave, for none must be late
on this solemn and gay occasion. And now the roads
were so many converging torrents of automobiles and
carriages, and excitement had developed into fever.
Life was at its highest, and the world held but one prob
lem. . . . Sign that reaction was approaching!

A proud spectacle for the agitated vision, when the
vast business of filling the stands had been accomplished,
and the eye ranged over acres of black hats and varie
gated hats, hats flowered and feathered, and plain male
caps — a carpet intricately patterned with the rival
colors! At a signal the mimic battle began. And in a
moment occurred the first casualty — most grave of a
series of casualties. A pale hero, with a useless limb,
was led off the field amid loud cheers. Then it was
that I became aware of some dozens of supplementary
heroes shivering beneath brilliant blankets, under the lee
of the stands. In this species of football every casualty
was foreseen, and the rules allowed it to be repaired.
Not two teams, but two regiments, were, in fact, fight
ing. And my European ideal of sport was offended.

132

SPORT AND THE THEATER

Was it possible that a team could be permitted to re
place a wounded man by another, and so on ad infinitumf
Was it possible that a team need not abide by its mis
fortunes ? Well, it was ! I did not like this. It seemed
to me that the organizers, forgetting that this was a
mimic battle, had made it into a real battle, and that
there was an imperfect appreciation of what strictly
amateur sport is. The desire to win, laudable and essen
tial in itself, may by excessive indulgence become a
morbid obsession. Surely, I thought, and still think,
the means ought to suit the end! An enthusiast for
American organization, I was nevertheless forced to
conclude that here organization is being carried too far,
outraging the sense of proportion and of general fitness.
For me, such organization disclosed even a misappre
hension as to the principal aim and purpose of a uni
versity. If ever the fate of the Republic should depend
on the result of football matches, then such organiza
tion would be justifiable, and courses of intellectual
study might properly be suppressed. Until that dread
hour I would be inclined to dwell heavily on the ad
mitted fact that a football match is not Waterloo, but
simply a transient game in which two sets of youngsters
bump up against one another in opposing endeavors
to put a bouncing toy on two different spots of the
earth's surface. The ultimate location of the inflated
bauble will not affect the national destiny, and such
moral value as the game has will not be increased but
diminished by any enlargement of organization. After
all, if the brains of the world gave themselves exclusive
ly to football matches, the efficiency of football matches

YOUR UNITED STATES

would be immensely improved — but what then? ... I
seemed to behold on this field the American passion for
" getting results" — which I admire very much; but it
occurred to me that that passion, with its eyes fixed
hungrily on the result it wants, may sometimes fail to
see that it is getting a number of other results which it
emphatically doesn't want.

Another example of excessive organization presented
itself to me in the almost military arrangements for
shrieking the official yells. I was sorry for the young
men whose duty it was, by the aid of megaphones and
of grotesque and undignified contortions, to encourage
and even force the spectators to emit in unison the com
plex noises which constitute the yell. I have no doubt
that my pity was misdirected, for these young men were
obviously content with themselves; still, I felt sorry
for them. Assuming for an instant that the official yell
is not monstrously absurd and surpassingly ugly, ad
mitting that it is a beautiful series of sounds, enhearten-
ing, noble, an utterance worthy of a great and ancient
university at a crisis, even then one is bound to remember
that its essential quality should be its spontaneity. En
thusiasm cannot be created at the word of command,
nor can heroes be inspired by cheers artificially pro
duced under megaphonic intimidation. Indeed, no
moral phenomenon could be less hopeful to heroes than
a perfunctory response to a military order for enthusiasm.
Perfunctory responses were frequent. Partly, no doubt,
because the imperious young men with megaphones
would not leave us alone. Just when we were nicely
absorbed in the caprices of the ball they would call us

THE VICTORS LEAVING THE FIELD

SPORT AND THE THEATER

off and compel us to execute their preposterous chorus;
and we — the spectators — did not always like it.

And the difficulty of following the game was already
acute enough! Whenever the play quickened in inter
est we stood up. In fact, we were standing up and
sitting down throughout the afternoon. And as we all
stood up and we all sat down together, nobody gained
any advantage from these muscular exercises. We saw
no better, and we saw no worse. Toward the end we
stood on the seats, with the same result. We behaved
in exactly the child-like manner of an Italian audience
at a fashionable concert. And to crown all, an aviator
had the ineffably bad taste and the culpable foolhardi-
ness to circle round and round within a few dozen yards
of our heads.

In spite of all this, the sum of one's sensations amount
ed to lively pleasure. The pleasure would have been
livelier if university football were a better game than
in candid truth it is. At this juncture I seem to hear
a million voices of students and ex-students roaring out
at me with menaces that the game is perfect and the
greatest of all games. A national game always was and
is perfect. This particular game was perfect years ago.
Nevertheless, I learned that it had recently been im
proved, in deference to criticisms. Therefore, it is now
pluperfect. I was told on the field — and sharply -
that experience of it was needed for the proper apprecia
tion of its finesse. Admitted! But just as devotees of
a favorite author will put sublime significances into his
least phrase, so will devotees of (a game put marvels
of finesse into its clumsiest features. The process is

YOUR UNITED STATES

psychological. I was new to this particular game, but
I had been following various footballs with my feet or
with my eyes for some thirty years, and I was not to be
bullied out of my opinion that the American university
game, though goodish, lacked certain virtues. Its char
acteristics tend ever to a too close formation, and in
evitably favor tedium and monotony. In some aspects
an unemotional critic might occasionally be tempted
to call it naive and barbaric. But I was not unemotional.
I recognize, and in my own person I proved, that as a
vehicle for emotion the American university game will
serve. What else is such a game for? In the match
I witnessed there were some really great moments, and
one or two masterly exhibitions of skill and force. And
as "my " side won, against all odds, I departed in a state

of felicity.

•

If the great cities of the East and Middle West are not
strikingly sportive, perhaps the reason is that they are
impassioned theater-goers ; they could not well be both,
at any rate without neglecting the financial pursuits
which are their chief real amusement and hobby. I
mention the theaters in connection with sports, rather
than in connection with thwarts, because the American
drama is more closely related to sporting diversions than
to dramatic art. If this seems a hard saying, I will add
that I am ready to apply it with similiar force to the
English and French drama, and, indeed, to almost all
modern drama outside Germany. It was astonishing
to me that America, unhampered by English traditions,
should take seriously, for instance, the fashionable and

SPORT AND THE THEATER

utterly meretricious French dramatists, who receive
nothing but a chilly ridicule from people of genuine
discrimination in Paris. Whatever American drama
tists have to learn, they will not learn it in Paris; and
I was charmed once to hear a popular New York play
wright, one who sincerely and frankly wrote for money
alone, assert boldly that the notoriously successful
French plays were bad, and clumsily bad. It was a
proof of taste. As a rule, one finds the popular play
wright taking off his hat to contemporaries who at best
are no better than his equals.

A few minor cases apart, the drama is artistically
negligible throughout the world; but if there is a large
hope for it in any special country, that country is the
United States. The extraordinary prevalence of big
theaters, the quickly increasing number of native
dramatists, the enormous profits of the successful ones
— it is simply inconceivable in the face of the phenomena,
and of the educational process so rapidly going on, that
serious and first-class creative artists shall not arise in
America. Nothing is more likely to foster the produc
tion of first-class artists than the existence of a vast
machinery for winning money and glory. When I re
flect that there are nearly twice as many first-class
theaters in New York as in London, and that a very
successful play in New York plays to eighteen thousand
dollars a week, while in London ten thousand dollars a
week is enormous, and that the American public has a
preference for its own dramatists, I have little fear for
the artistic importance of the drama of the future in
America. And from the discrepancy between my own

YOUR UNITED STATES

observations and the observations of a reliable Euro
pean critic in New York only five years ago, I should
imagine that appreciable progress had already been made,
though I will not pretend that I was much impressed by
the achievements up to date, either of playwrights,
actors, or audiences. A huge popular institution, how
ever, such as the American theatrical system, is always
interesting to the amateur of human nature.

The first thing noted by the curious stranger in Ameri
can theaters is that American theatrical architects have
made a great discovery — namely, that every member of
the audience goes to the play with a desire to be able
to see and hear what passes on the stage. This happy
American discovery has not yet announced itself in
Europe, where in almost every theater seats are im
pudently sold, and idiotically bought, from which it is
impossible to see and hear what passes on the stage.
(A remarkable continent, Europe!) Apart from this
most important point, American theaters are not, either
without or within, very attractive. The auditoriums, to
a European, have a somewhat dingy air. Which air is
no doubt partly due to the non-existence of a rule in
favor of evening dress (never again shall I gird against
the rule in Europe!), but it is due also to the oddly in
efficient illumination during the entr'actes, and to the
unsatisfactory schemes of decoration.

The interior of a theater ought to be magnificent, sug
gesting pleasure, luxury, and richness; it ought to create
an illusion of rather riotous grandeur. The rare archi
tects who have understood this seem to have lost their
heads about it, with such wild and capricious results as

138

SPORT AND THE THEATER

the new opera-house in Philadelphia. I could not re
strain my surprise that the inhabitants of the Quaker
City had not arisen with pickaxes and razed this archi
tectural extravaganza to the ground. But Philadelphia
is a city startlingly unlike its European reputation.
Throughout my too-brief sojourn in it I did not cease
to marvel at its liveliness. I heard more picturesque
and pyrotechnic wit at one luncheon in Philadelphia
than at any two repasts outside it. The spacious gaiety
and lavishness of its marts enchanted me. It must have
a pretty weakness for the most costly old books and
manuscripts. I never was nearer breaking the Sixth
Commandment than in one of its homes, where the
Countess of Pembroke's own copy of Sir Philip Sidney's
Arcadia — a unique and utterly un-Quakerish treasure-
was laid trustfully in my hands by the regretted and
charming Harry Widener.

To return. The Metropolitan Opera-House in New
York is a much more satisfactory example of a theatrical
interior. Indeed, it is very fine, especially when strung
from end to end of its first tier with pearls, as I saw it.
Impossible to find fault with its mundane splendor.
And let me urge that impeccable mundane splendor,
despite facile arguments to the contrary, is a very real
and worthy achievement. It is regrettable, by the way,
that the entrances and foyers to these grandiose interiors
should be so paltry, slatternly, and inadequate. If the
entrances to the great financial establishments reminded
me of opera-houses, the entrances to opera-houses did
not!

Artistically, of course, the spectacle of a grand-opera

139

YOUR UNITED STATES

season in an American city is just as humiliating as it
is in the other Anglo-Saxon country. It was discon
certing to see Latin or German opera given exactly —
with no difference at all; same Latin or German artists
and conductors, same conventions, same tricks — in
New York or Philadelphia as in Europe. And though
the wealthy audiences behaved better than wealthy
audiences at Covent Garden (perhaps because the boxes
are less like inclosed pews than in London), it was morti
fying to detect the secret disdain for art which was ex
pressed in the listless late arrivings and the relieved
early departures. The which disdain for art was, how
ever, I am content to think, as naught in comparison
with the withering artistic disdain felt, and sometimes
revealed, by those Latin and German artists for Anglo-
Saxon Philistinism. I seem to be able to read the sar
castic souls of these accomplished and sensitive aliens,
when they assure newspaper reporters that New York,
Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and London are really
musical. The sole test of a musical public is that it
should be capable of self-support — I mean that it should
produce a school of creative and executive artists of its
own, whom it likes well enough to idolize and to enrich,
and whom the rest of the world will respect. This is
a test which can be safely applied to Germany, Russia,
Italy, and France. And in certain other arts it is a test
which can be applied to Anglo-Saxondom — but not in
music. In America and England music is still mainly
a sportive habit.

When I think of the exoticism of grand opera in New
York, my mind at once turns, in contrast, to the natural

140

SPORT AND THE THEATER

raciness of such modest creations as those offered by
Mr. George Cohan at his theater on Broadway. Here, in
an extreme degree, you get a genuine instance of a pub
lic demand producing the desired artist on the spot.
Here is something really and honestly and respectably
American. And why it should be derided by even the
most lofty pillars of American taste, I cannot imagine.
(Or rather, I can imagine quite well.) For myself, I
spent a very agreeable evening in witnessing "The Little
Millionaire." I was perfectly conscious of the blatancy
of the methods that achieved it. I saw in it no mark
of genius. But I did see in it a very various talent and
an all-round efficiency; and, beneath the blatancy, an
admirable direct simplicity and winning unpretentious-
ness. I liked the ingenuity of the device by which, in
the words of the programme, the action of Act II was
"not interrupted by musical numbers." The dramatic
construction of this act was so consistently clever and
right and effective that more ambitious dramatists
might study it with advantage. Another point —
though the piece was artistically vulgar, it was not
vulgar otherwise. It contained no slightest trace of the
outrageous salacity and sottishness which disfigure the
great majority of successful musical comedies. It was
an honest entertainment. But to me its chief value and
interest lay in the fact that while watching it I felt that
I was really in New York, and not in Vienna, Paris, or
London.

Of the regular theater I did not see nearly enough to be
able to generalize even for my own private satisfaction.
I observed, and expected to observe, that the most re-

141

YOUR UNITED STATES

actionary quarters were the most respected. It is the
same everywhere. When a manager, having discovered
that two real clocks in one real room never strike
simultaneously, put two real clocks on the stage, and
made one strike after the other; or when a manager
mimicked, with extraordinary effects of restlessness, a
life-sized telephone-exchange on the stage — then was I
bound to hear of "artistic realism" and "a fine pro
duction"! But such feats of truthfulness do not con
sort well with chocolate sentimentalities and wilful fal
sities of action and dialogue. They caused me to doubt
whether I was not in London.

The problem-plays which I saw were just as futile
and exasperating as the commercial English and French
varieties of the problem-play, though they had a trifling
advantage over the English in that their most sentiment
al passages were lightened by humor, and the odiously
insincere felicity of their conclusions was left to the
imagination instead of being acted ruthlessly out on the
boards. The themes of these plays showed the usual
obsession, and were manipulated in the usual attempt
to demonstrate that the way of transgressors is not so
very hard after all. They threw, all unconsciously,
strange side-lights on the American man's private esti
mate of the American woman, and the incidence of the
applause was extremely instructive.

The most satisfactory play that I saw, "Bought and
Paid For," by George Broadhurst, was not a problem-
play, though Mr. Broadhurst is also a purveyor of prob
lem-plays. It was just an unpretentious fairy-tale about
the customary millionaire and the customary poor girl.

143

SPORT AND THE THEATER

The first act was maladroit, but the others made me
think that "Bought and Paid For" was one of the best
popular commercial Anglo-Saxon plays I had ever seen
anywhere. There were touches of authentic realism
at the very crisis at which experience had taught one
to expect a crass sentimentality. The fairy-tale was
well told, with some excellent characterization, and very
well played. Indeed, Mr. Frank Craven's rendering
of the incompetent clerk was a masterly and unforget
table piece of comedy. I enjoyed "Bought and Paid
For," and it is on the faith of such plays, imperfect and
timid as they are, that I establish my prophecy of a
more glorious hereafter for the American drama.

VII
EDUCATION AND ART

i..'SS«-v

BREAKFAST EN ROUTE

VII

EDUCATION AND ART

1HAD my first glimpses of education in America from
the purser of an illustrious liner, who affirmed the
existence of a dog — in fact, his own dog — so highly
educated that he habitually followed and understood
human conversations, and that in order to keep secrets
from the animal it was necessary to spell out the key
word of a sentence instead of pronouncing it. After
this I seemed somehow to be prepared for the American
infant who, when her parents discomfited her just curi
osity by the same mean adult dodge of spelling words,
walked angrily out of the room with the protest:
"There's too blank much education in this house for
me!" Nevertheless, she proudly and bravely set her
self to learn to spell; whereupon her parents descended
to even worse depths of baseness, and in her presence
would actually whisper in each other's ear. She merely
inquired, with grimness: "What's the good of being
educated, anyway? First you spell words, and when I
can spell then you go and whisper!" And received no
adequate answer, naturally.

This captivating creature, whose society I enjoyed at
frequent intervals throughout my stay in America, was
a mirror in which I saw the whole American race of

YOUR UNITED STATES

children — their independence, their self-confidence, their
adorable charm, and their neat sauciness. "What is
father?" she asked one day. Now her father happened
to be one of the foremost humorists in the United States ;
she was baldly informed that he was a humorist. "What
is a humorist?" she went on, ruthlessly, and learned that
a humorist was a person who wrote funny things to make
people laugh. "Well," she said, "I don't honestly
think he's very funny at home." It was naught to her
that humorists are not paid to be funny at home, and
that in truth they never under any circumstances are
very funny at home. She just hurled her father from
his niche — and then went forth and boasted of him as \\
a unique peculiarity in fathers, as an unrivaled orna
ment of her career on earth; for no other child in the
vicinity had a professional humorist for parent. Her
gestures and accent typified for me the general attitude
of youngest America, in process of education, toward
the older generation : an astonishing, amusing, exquisite,
incomprehensible mixture of affection, admiration, trust,
and rather casual tolerating scorn. The children of
most countries display a similar phenomenon, but in
America the phenomenon is more acute and disconcert
ing than elsewhere.

One noon, in perfect autumn weather, I was walking
down the main road of a residential suburb, and observ
ing the fragile-wheeled station-wagons, and the ice-
wagons enormously labeled "DANGER" (perhaps by the
gastric experts of the medical faculty), and the Colonial-
style dwellings, and the "tinder" boarding-houses, and
the towering boot-shine stands, and the roast-chestnut

148

EDUCATION AND ART

emporia, and the gasometers flanking a noble and beau
tiful river — I was observing all this when a number
of young men and maids came out of a high-school and
unconsciously assumed possession of the street. It was
a great and impressive sight; it was a delightful sight.
They were so sure of themselves, the maids particularly;
so interested in themselves, so happy, so eager, so con
vinced (without any conceit) that their importance tran
scended all other importances, so gently pitiful toward
men and women of forty-five, and so positive that the
main function of elders was to pay school-fees, that I was
thrilled thereby. Seldom has a human spectacle given
me such exciting pleasure as this gave. (And they never
suspected it, those preoccupied demigods!) It was the
sheer pride of life that I saw passing down the street and
across the badly laid tram-lines ! I had never seen any
thing like it. I immediately desired to visit schools. Pro
foundly ignorant of educational methods, and with a
strong distaste for teaching, I yet wanted to know and un
derstand all about education in America in one moment —
the education that produced that superb stride and car
riage in the street! I failed, of course, in my desire —
not from lack of facilities offered, but partly from lack
of knowledge to estimate critically what I saw, and from
lack of time. My experiences, however, though they
left my mind full of enigmas, were wondrous. I asked
to inspect one of the best schools in New York. Had I
been a dispassionate sociological student, I should prob
ably have asked to inspect one of the worst schools in
New York — perhaps one of the gaunt institutions to be
found, together with a cinema-palace and a bank, in al-

149

YOUR UNITED STATES

most every block on the East Side. But I asked for one
of the best, and I was shown the Horace Mann School.

The Horace Mann School proved to be a palace where
a thousand children and their teachers lived with ex
treme vivacity in an atmosphere of ozone from which
all draughts and chilliness had been eliminated. As a
malcontent native of the Isle of Chilly Draughts, this
attribute of the atmosphere of the Horace Mann School
impresssd me. Dimensionally I found that the palace
had a beginning but no end. I walked through leagues
of corridors and peeped into unnumbered class-rooms,
in each of which children were apparently fiercely drag
ging knowledge out of nevertheless highly communica
tive teachers; and the children got bigger and bigger,
and then diminished for a while, and then grew again,
and kept on growing, until I at last entered a palatial
kitchen where some two dozen angels, robed in white
but for the moment uncrowned, were eagerly crowding
round a paradisiacal saucepan whose magic contents
formed the subject of a lecture by one of them. Now
these angels were not cherubs; they were full grown;
they never would be any taller than they were; and I
asked up to what age angels were kept at school in
America. Whereupon I learned that I had insensibly
passed from the school proper into a training-school for
teachers; but at what point the school proper ended I
never did learn. It seems to me that if I had penetrated
through seven more doors I should have reached Colum
bia University itself, without having crossed a definite di- !
viding-line ; and, anyhow, the circumstance was symbolic.

150

EDUCATION AND ART

Reluctantly I left the incredible acres of technical
apparatus munificently provided in America for the
training of teachers, and, having risen to the roof and
seen infants thereon grabbing at instruction in the New
York breeze, I came again to the more normal regions
of the school. Here, as everywhere else in the United
States (save perhaps the cloak-room department of the
Metropolitan Opera -House), what chiefly struck me
was the brilliant organization of the organism. There
was nothing that had not been thought of. A hand
somely dressed mother came into the organism and got
as far as the antechamber of the principal's room. The
organization had foreseen her, had divined that that
mother's child was the most important among a thousand
children — indeed, the sole child of any real importance
— had arranged that her progress should be arrested at
just that stage, and had stationed a calm and diplomatic
woman to convince her that her child was indeed the
main preoccupation of the Horace Mann School. A
pretty sight — the interview! It charmed me as the
sight of an ingenious engine in motion will charm an
engineer.

The individual class-rooms, in some of which I lin
gered at leisure, were tonic, bracing, inspiring, and made
me ashamed because I was not young. I saw geog
raphy being taught with the aid of a stereoscopic magic-
lantern. After a view of the high street of a village in
North Russia had been exposed and explained by a pupil,
the teacher said: "If anybody has any questions to ask,
let him stand up." And the whole class leaped furious
ly to its feet, blotting out the entire picture with black

YOUR UNITED STATES

shadows of craniums and starched pinafores. The
whole class might have been famishing. In another
room I saw the teaching of English composition. Al
though when I went to school English composition was
never taught, I have gradually acquired a certain in
terest in the subject, and I feel justified in asserting that
the lesson was admirably given. It was, in fact, the
best example of actual pedagogy that I met with in
the United States. "Now can any one tell me — " began
the mistress. A dozen arms of boys and girls shot up
with excessive violence, and, having shot up, they wig
gled and waggled with ferocious impatience in the air;
it was a miracle that they remained attached to their
respective trunks; it was assuredly an act of daring on
the part of the intrepid mistress to choose between them.

"How children have changed since my time!" I said
to the principal afterward. "We never used to fling up
our hands like that. We just put them up. . . . But
perhaps it's because they're Americans — "

"It's probably because of the ventilation," said the
principal, calmly corrective. "We never have the win
dows open winter or summer, but the ventilation is
perfect."

I perceived that it indeed must be because of the
ventilation.

More and more startled, as I went along, by the
princely lavishness of every arrangement, I ventured to
surmise that it must all cost a great deal.

"The fees are two hundred and eighty-five dollars
in the Upper School."

"Yes, I expected they would be high," I said.

152.

EDUCATION AND ART

"Not at all. They are the lowest in New York.
Smart private schools will charge five or six hundred
dollars a year."

Exhausted, humbled, I at last quitted the warmed
Horace Mann ozone for the harsh and searching atmos
phere of the street. And I gazed up at the pile, and saw
all its interiors again in my mind. I had not grasped
the half nor the quarter of what had been so willingly
and modestly shown to me. I had formed no theory as
to the value of some of the best juvenile education in
the Eastern States. But I had learned one thing. I
knew the secret of the fine, proud bearing of young
America. A child is not a fool; a child is almost al
ways uncannily shrewd. And when it sees a splendid
palace provided for it, when it sees money being showered
upon hygienic devices for its comfort, even upon trifles
for its distraction, when it sees brains all bent on dis
covering the best, nicest ways of dealing with its in
stincts, when it sees itself the center of a magnificent
pageant, ritual, devotion, almost worship, it naturally
lifts its chin, puts its shoulders back, steps out with a
spring, and glances down confidently upon the whole

world. Who wouldn't?

It was an exciting day for me when I paid a call next
door to Horace Mann and visited Columbia University.
For this was my first visit of inspection to any univer
sity of any kind, either in the New World or in the Old.
As for an English university education, destiny had de
prived me of its advantages and of its perils. I could not
haughtily compare Columbia with Oxford or Cambridge,

YOUR UNITED STATES

because I had never set foot even in their towns. I had
no standards whatever of comparison.

I arose and went out to lunch on that morning, and
left the lunch before anybody else and rushed in an auto
mobile to Columbia; but football had already begun for
the day in the campus costing two million dollars, and
classes were over. I saw five or more universities while
I was in America, but I was not clever enough to catch
one of them in the act of instruction. What I did see
was the formidable and magnificent machine, the ap
paratus of learning, supine in repose.

And if the spectacle was no more than a promise,
it was a very dazzling promise. No European with any
imagination could regard Columbia as other than a
miracle. Nearly the whole of the gigantic affair ap
peared to have been brought into being, physically, in
less than twenty years. Building after building, device
after device, was dated subsequent to 1893. And to
my mind that was just the point of the gigantic affair.
Universities in Europe are so old. And there are uni
versities in America which are venerable. A graduate
of the most venerable of them told me that Columbia
was not ''really" a university. Well, it did seem unreal,
though not in his sense; it seemed magic. The graduate
in question told me that a university could not be created
by a stroke of the wand. And yet there staring me in
the face was the evidence that a university not merely
could be created by a stroke of the wand, but had been.
(I am aware of Columbia's theoretic age and of her in
sistence on it.) The wand is a modern invention; to
deny its effective creative faculty is absurd.

154

EDUCATION AND ART

Of course I know what the graduate meant. I my
self, though I had not seen Oxford nor Cambridge, was
in truth comparing Columbia with my dream of Oxford
and Cambridge, to her disadvantage. I was capable
of saying to myself: "All this is terribly new. All this
lacks tradition." Criticism fatuous and mischievous,
if human! It would be as sapient to imprison the en
tire youth of a country until it had ceased to commit
the offense of being young. Tradition was assuredly
not apparent in the atmosphere of Columbia. More
over, some of her architecture was ugly. On the other
hand, some of it was beautiful to the point of nobility.
The library, for instance : a building in which no univer
sity and no age could feel anything but pride. And far
more important than stone or marble was the passion
ate affection for Columbia which I observed in certain
of her sons who had nevertheless known other univer
sities. A passionate affection also perhaps brought into
being since 1893, but not to be surpassed in honest
fervency and loyalty by influences more venerable!

Columbia was full of piquancies for me. It delighted
me that the Dean of Science was also consulting engineer
to the university. That was characteristic and fine.
And how splendidly unlike Oxford! I liked the com
plete life-sized railroad locomotive in the engineering-
shops, and the Greek custom in the baths; and the
students' notion of coziness in the private dens full of
shelves, photographs, and disguised beds; and the
-A visibility of the president; and his pronounced views
as to the respective merits of New York newspapers;
and the eagerness of a young professor of literature in

YOUR UNITED STATES

the Faculty Club to defend against my attacks English
Professor A. C. Bradley. I do believe that I even liked
the singular sight of a Chinaman tabulating from the
world's press, in the modern-history laboratory, a his
tory of the world day by day. I can hardly conceive
a wilder, more fearfully difficult way of trying to acquire
the historical sense than this voyaging through hot,
fresh newspapers, nor one more probably destined to
failure (I should have liked to see some of the two-
monthly resumes which students in this course are
obliged to write); but I liked the enterprise and the
originality and the daring of the idea; I liked its disdain
of tradition. And, after all, is it weirder than the
common traditional method?

To the casual visitor, such as myself, unused either
to universities or to the vastness of the American scale,
Columbia could be little save an enormous and over
whelming incoherence. It so chiefly remains in my
mind. But the ingenious humanity running through
the whole conception of it was touching and memorable.
And although I came away from my visit still perfectly
innocent of any broad theory as to ultimate educational
values in America, I came away also with a deeper and
more reassuring conviction that America was intensely
interested in education, and that all that America had
to do in order to arrive at real national, racial results
was to keep on being intensely interested. When Amer
ica shall have so far outclassed Europe as to be able to
abolish, in university examinations, what New York
picturesquely calls "the gumshoe squad" (of course now
much more brilliantly organized in America than in

156

UNIVERSITY BUILDINGS UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

EDUCATION AND ART

Europe), then we shall begin to think that, under the
stroke of the wand, at least one real national, racial

result has been attained!

When I set eyes on the sixty buildings which con
stitute the visible part of Harvard University, I per
ceived that, just as Kensington had without knowing it
been imitating certain streets of Boston, so certain lost
little old English towns that even American tourists
have not yet reached had without knowing it been
imitating the courts and chimneys and windows and
doorways and luscious brickwork of Harvard. Har
vard had a very mellow look indeed. No trace of the
wand! The European in search of tradition would find
it here in bulk. I should doubt whether at Harvard
modern history is studied through the daily paper —
unless perchance it be in Harvard's own daily paper.
The considerableness of Harvard was attested for me
by the multiplicity of its press organs. I dare say that
Harvard is the only university in the world the offices
of whose comic paper are housed in a separate and im
portant building. If there had been a special press-
building for Harvard's press, I should have been startled.
But when I beheld the mere comic organ in a spacious
and costly detached home that some London dailies
would envy, I was struck dumb. That sole fact indi
cated the scale of magnificence at Harvard, and proved
that the phenomenon of gold-depreciation has pro
ceeded further at Harvard than at any other public
institution in the world.

The etiquette of Harvard is nicely calculated to

157

YOUR UNITED STATES

heighten the material splendor of the place. Thus it is
etiquette for the president, during his term of office, to
make a present of a building or so to the university.
Now buildings at Harvard have adopted the excellent
habit of never costing less than about half a million
dollars. It is also etiquette that the gifts to the univer
sity from old students shall touch a certain annual sum ;
they touch it. Withal, there is no architectural osten
tation at] Harvard. All the buildings are artistically
modest; many are beautiful; scarcely one that clashes
with the sober and subtle attractiveness of the whole
aggregation. Nowhere is the eye offended. One looks
upon the crimson fagades with the same lenient love as
marks one's attitude toward those quaint and lovely
English houses (so familiar to American visitors to our
isle) that are all picturesqueness and no bath-room.
That is the external effect. Assuredly entering some of
those storied doorways, one would anticipate incon
veniences and what is called "Old World charm"
within.

But within one discovers simply naught but the very
latest, the very dearest, the very best of everything that
is luxurious. I was ushered into a most princely apart
ment, grandiose in dimensions, superbly furnished and
decorated, lighted with rich discretion, heated to a turn.
Portraits by John Sargent hung on the vast walls, and
a score of other manifestations of art rivaled these in
the attention of the stranger. No club in London could
match this chamber. It was, I believe, a sort of lounge
for the students. Anyhow, a few students were loun
ging in it ; only a few — there was no rush for the privilege.

158

EDUCATION AND ART

And the few loungers were really lounging, in the wonder
ful sinuous postures of youth. They might have been
lounging in a railway station or a barn instead of amid
portraits by John Sargent.

The squash-racket court was an example of another
kind of luxury, very different from the cunning combi
nations of pictured walls, books, carved wood, and deep-
piled carpets, but not less authentic. The dining-hall
seating a thousand simultaneously was another. Here
I witnessed the laying of dinner-tables by negroes. I
noted that the sudden sight of me instantly convinced
one negro, engaged in the manipulation of pats of but
ter, that a fork would be more in keeping with the
Harvard tradition than his fingers, and I was humanly
glad thus to learn that the secret reality of table-laying
is the same in two continents. I saw not the dining
of the thousand. In fact, I doubt whether in all I saw
one hundred of the six thousand students. They had
mysteriously vanished from all the resorts of perfect
luxury provided for them. Possibly they were with
drawn into the privacies of the thousands of suites —
each containing bedroom, sitting-room, bath-room, and
telephone — which I understood are allotted to them for
lairs. I left Harvard with a very clear impression of
its frank welcoming hospitality and of its extraordinary
luxury.

And as I came out of the final portal I happened to
meet a student actually carrying his own portmanteau —
and rather tugging at it. I regretted this chance. The
spectacle clashed, and ought to have been contrary to
etiquette. That student should in propriety have been

YOUR UNITED STATES

followed by a Nigerian, Liberian, or Senegambian, carry
ing his portmanteau.

My visits to other universities were about as brief,
stirring, suggestive, and incomplete as those to Columbia
and Harvard. I repeat that I never actually saw the
educational machine in motion. What it seemed to me
that I saw in each case was a tremendous mechanical
apparatus at rest, a rich, empty frame, an organism wait
ing for the word that would break its trance. The fault
was, of course, wholly mine. I find upon reflection that
the universities which I recall with the most sympathy
are those in which I had the largest opportunity of listen
ing to the informal talk of the faculty and its wife. I
heard some mighty talking upon occasion — and in par
ticular I sat willing at the feet of a president who could
mingle limericks and other drollery, the humanities,
science, modern linguistics, and economics in a manner
which must surely make him historic.

Education, like most things except high-class cookery,
must be judged by ultimate results ; and though it may
not be possible to pass any verdict on current educa
tional methods (especially when you do not happen to
have even seen them in action), one can to a certain ex
tent assess the values of past education by reference
to the demeanor of adults who have been through it.
One of the chief aims of education should be to stimu
late the great virtue of curiosity. The worst detractors
of the American race — and there are some severe ones
in New York, London, and Paris! — will not be able to
deny that an unusually active curiosity is a marked

1 60

EDUCATION AND ART

characteristic of the race. Only they twist that very
characteristic into an excuse for still further detraction.
They will, for example, point to the " hordes" (a word
which they regard as indispensable in this connection)
of American tourists who insist on seeing everything
of historic or artistic interest that is visible in Europe.
The plausible argument is that the mass of such tourists
are inferior in intellect and taste to the general level of
Europeans who display curiosity about history or art.
Which is probably true. But it ought to be remembered
by us Europeans (and in sackcloth!) that the mass of
us with money to spend on pleasure are utterly indiffer
ent to history and art. The European dilettante goes
to the Uffizi and sees a shopkeeper from Milwaukee
gazing ignorantly at a masterpiece, and says: "How
inferior this shopkeeper from Milwaukee is to me ! The
American is an inartistic race!" But what about the
shopkeeper from Huddersfield or Amiens? The shop
keeper from Huddersfield or Amiens will be flirting about
on some entirely banal beach — Scarborough or Trou-
ville — and for all he knows or cares Leonardo da Vinci
might have been a cabman; and yet the loveliest things
in the world are, relatively speaking, at his door ! When
the European shopkeeper gets as far as Lucerne in Au
gust, he thinks that a journey of twenty-four hours en
titles him to rank a little lower than Columbus. It was
an enormous feat for him to reach Lucerne, and he must
have credit for it, though his interest in art is in no wise
thereby demonstrated. One has to admit that he now
goes to Lucerne in hordes. Praise be to him! But I
imagine that the American horde "hustling for culture"
11 161

YOUR UNITED STATES

in no matter what historic center will compare pretty
favorably with the European horde in such spots as
Lucerne.

All general curiosity is, to my mind, righteousness,
and I so count it to the American. Not that I think
that American curiosity is always the highest form of
curiosity, or that it is not limited. With its apparent
omnivorousness it is often superficial and too easily
satisfied — particularly by mere words. Very seldom
is it profound. It is apt to browse agreeably on ex
ternals. The American, like Anglo-Saxons generally,
rarely shows a passionate and yet honest curiosity about
himself or his country, which is curiosity at its finest.
He will divide things into pleasant and unpleasant, and
his curiosity is trained to stop at the frontier of the lat
ter — an Anglo-Saxon device for being comfortable in
your mind ! He likes to know what others think of him
and his country, but he is not very keen on knowing
what he really thinks on these subjects himself. The
highest form of curiosity is apt to be painful sometimes.
(And yet who that has practised it would give it up?)
It also demands intellectual honesty — a quality which
has been denied by Heaven to all Anglo-Saxon races,
but which nevertheless a proper education ought in the
end to achieve. Were I asked whether I saw in America
any improvement upon Britain in the supreme matter
of intellectual honesty, I should reply, No. I seemed
to see in America precisely the same tendency as in
Britain to pretend, for the sake of instant comfort, that
things are not what they are, J;he same timid but deter
mined dislike of the whole truth, the same capacity to

EDUCATION AND ART

be shocked by notorious and universal phenomena, the
same delusion that a refusal to look at these phenomena
is equivalent to the destruction of these phenomena,
the same flaccid sentimentality which vitiates practi
cally all Anglo-Saxon art. And I have stood in the
streets of New York, as I have stood in the streets of
London, and longed with an intense nostalgia for one
hour of Paris, where, amid a deplorable decadence, in
tellectual honesty is widely discoverable, and where
absolutely straight 'thinking and talking is not mistaken

for cynicism.

« •

Another test of education is the feeling for art, and
the creation of an environment which encourages the
increase of artistic talent. (And be it noted in passing
that the intellectually honest races, the Latin, have
been the most artistic, for the mere reason that intel
lectual dishonesty is just sentimentality, and senti
mentality is the destroying poison of art.) Now the
most exacerbating experience that fell to me in America
— and it fell more than once — was to hear in discreetly
lighted and luxurious drawing-rooms, amid various
mural proofs of trained taste, and usually from the lips
of an elegantly Europeanized American woman with a
sad, agreeable smile: "There is no art in the United
States. ... I feel like an exile. " A number of these
exiles, each believing himself or herself to be a solitary
lamp in the awful darkness, are dotted up and down the
great cities, and it is a curious fact that they bitterly
despise one another. In so doing they are not very
wrong. For, in the first place, these people, like nearly

163

YOUR UNITED STATES

all dilettanti of art, are extremely unreliable judges of
racial characteristics. Their mentality is allied to that
of the praisers of time past, who, having read Tom Jones
and Clarissa, are incapable of comprehending that the
immense majority of novels produced in the eighteenth
century were nevertheless terrible rubbish. They go
to a foreign land, deliberately confine their attention to
the artistic manifestations of that country, and then
exclaim in ecstasy: "What an artistic country this is!
How different from my own !" To the same class belong
certain artistic visitors to the United States who, having
in their own country deliberately cut themselves off
from intercourse with ordinary inartistic persons, visit
America, and, meeting there the average man and
woman in bulk, frown superiorly and exclaim: "This
Philistine race thinks of nothing but dollars!" They
cannot see the yet quite evident truth that the rank and
file of every land is about equally inartistic. Modern
Italy may in the mass be more lyrical than America,
but in either architecture or painting Italy is simply
not to be named with America.

Further, and in the second place, these people never
did and never will look in the right quarters for vital
art. A really original artist struggling under their very
noses has small chance of being recognized by them,
the reason being that they are imitative, with no real
opinion of their own. They associate art with Floren
tine frames, matinee hats, distant museums, and clever
talk full of allusions to the dead. It would not occur
to them to search for American art in the architecture
of railway stations and the draftsmanship and sketch-

164

MITCHELL TOWER AND HUTCHINSON COMMONS — UNIVERSITY OF
CHICAGO

EDUCATION AND ART

writing of newspapers and magazines, because theyhave
not the wit to learn that genuine art flourishes best in
the atmosphere of genuine popular demand.

Even so, with all their blindness, it is unnatural that
they should not see and take pride in the spectacular
historical facts which prove their country to be less
negligible in art than they would assert. I do not mean
the existence in America of huge and glorious collections
of European masters. I have visited some of these col
lections, and have taken keen pleasure therein. But
I perceive in them no national significance — no more
national significance than I perceive in the endowment
of splendid orchestras to play foreign music under for
eign conductors, or in the fashionable crowding of clas
sical concerts. Indeed, it was a somewhat melancholy
experience to spend hours in a private palace crammed
with artistic loveliness that was apparently beloved and
understood, and to hear not one single word disclosing
the slightest interest in modern American art. No, as
a working artist myself, I was more impressed and re
assured by such a sight as the Innes room at the colossal
Art Institute of Chicago than by all the collections of
old masters in America, though I do not regard Innes
as a very distinguished artist. The aforesaid dilettanti
would naturally condescend to the Innes room at
Chicago's institute, as to the long-sustained, difficult
effort which is being made by a school of Chicago sculp
tors for the monumental ornamentation of Chicago.
But the dilettanti have accomplished a wonderful feat
of unnaturalness in forgetting that their poor, inartis
tic Philistine country did provide, inter alia, the great

165

YOUR UNITED STATES

writer who has influenced French imaginative writers
more deeply than any other foreign writer since Byron
— Edgar Allan Poe; did produce one of the world's
supreme poets — Whitman; did produce the greatest
pure humorist of modern times ; did produce the miracu
lous Henry James ; did produce Stanford White and the
incomparable McKim; and did produce the only two
Anglo-Saxon personalities who in graphic art have been
able to impose themselves on modern Europe — Whistler

and John Sargent.

•

— ^-

In the matter of graphic art, I have known so many
American painters in Paris that I was particularly anx
ious to see what American painting was like at home.
My first adventures were not satisfactory. I trudged
through enormous exhibitions, and they filled me with
just the same feeling of desolation and misery that I
experienced at the Royal Academy, London, or the
Societe des Artistes Frangais, Paris. In miles of slip
pery exercise I saw almost nothing that could interest
an intelligent amateur who had passed a notable portion
of his life in studios. The first modern American paint
ing that arrested me was one by Grover, of Chicago. I
remember it with gratitude. Often, especially in New
York, I was called upon by stay-at-home dilettanti to
admire the work of some shy favorite, and with the best
will in the world I could not, on account of his too ob
vious sentimentality. In Boston I was authoritatively
informed that the finest painting in the whole world
was at that moment being done by a group of Boston
artists in Boston. But as I had no opportunity to see

166

EDUCATION AND ART

their work, I cannot offer an opinion on the proud claim.
My gloom was becoming permanent, when one wet day
I invaded, not easily, the Macdowell Club, and, while
listening to a chorus rehearsal of Liszt's ''St. Elizabeth"
made the acquaintance of really interesting pictures by
artists such as Irving R. Wiles, Jonas Lie, Henri, Mrs.
Johansen, and Brimley, of whom previously I had
known nothing. From that moment I progressed. I
met the work of James Preston, and of other men who
can truly paint.

All these, however, with all their piquant merits,
were Parisianized. They could have put up a good show
in Paris and emerged from French criticism with dig
nity. Whereas there is one American painter who has
achieved a reputation on the tongues of men in Europe
without (it is said) having been influenced by Europe,
or even having exhibited there. I mean Winslow
Homer. I had often heard of Winslow Homer from
connoisseurs who had earned my respect, and assuredly
one of my reasons for coming to America was to see
Winslow Homer's pictures. My first introduction to
his oil-paintings was a shock. I did not like them, and
I kept on not liking them. I found them theatrical and
violent in conception, rather conventional in design, and
repellent in color. I thought the painter's attitude tow
ard sea and rock and sky decidedly sentimental beneath
its wilful harshness. And I should have left America
with broken hopes of Winslow Homer if an enthusiast
for State-patronized art had not insisted on taking me
to the State Museum at Indianapolis. In this agreeable
and interesting museum there happened to be a tempo-
id;

YOUR UNITED STATES

rary loan exhibit of water-colors by Winslow Homer. \
Which water-colors were clearly the productions of a
master. They forced me to reconsider my views of
Homer's work in general. They were beautiful; they
thrilled; they were genuine American; there is nothing
else like them. I shall never forget the pleasure I felt
in unexpectedly encountering these summary and highly
distinguished sketches in the quietude of Indianapolis.
I would have liked to collect a trainful of New York,
Chicago, and Boston dilettanti, and lead them by the
ears to the unpretentious museum at Indianapolis, and
force them to regard fixedly these striking creations.
Not that I should expect appreciation from them!
(Indianapolis, I discovered, was able to keep perfectly
calm in front of the Winslow Homer water-colors.)
But their observations would have been diverting.

VIII
CITIZENS

VIII

CITIZENS

NOTHING in New York fascinated me as much as
the indications of the vast and multitudinous
straitened middle-class life that is lived there ; the aver
age, respectable, difficult, struggling existence. I would
always regard this medium plane of the social organism
with more interest than the upper and lower planes.
And in New York the enormity of it becomes spectacu
lar. As I passed in Elevated trains across the end of
street after street, and street after street, and saw so
many of them just alike, and saw so many similar faces
mysteriously peering in the same posture between the
same curtains through the same windows of the same
great houses; and saw canaries in cages, and enfeebled
plants in pots, and bows of ribbon, and glints of picture-
frames ; and saw crowd after dense crowd fighting down
on the cobbled roads for the fearful privilege of entering
a surface-car — I had, or seemed to have, a composite
vision of the general life of the city.

And what sharpened and stimulated the vision more
than anything else was the innumerable flashing glimpses
of immense torn clouds of clean linen, or linen almost
clean, fluttering and shaking in withdrawn courtyards
between rows and rows of humanized windows. This
domestic detail, repugnant possibly to some, was par-

171

YOUR UNITED STATES

ticularly impressive to me; it was the visible index of
what life really is on a costly rock ruled in all material
essentials by trusts, corporations, and the grand prin
ciple of tipping.

I would have liked to live this life, for a space, in
any one of half a million restricted flats, with not quite
enough space, not quite enough air, not quite enough
dollars, and a vast deal too much continual strain
on the nerves. I would have liked to come to close
quarters with it, and yet its subtle and sinister toxin
incurably into my system. Could I have done so,
could I have participated in the least of the uncountable
daily dramas of which the externals are exposed to the
gaze of any starer in an Elevated. I should have known
what New York truly meant to New-Yorkers, and what
was the real immediate effect of average education re
acting on average character in average circumstances;
and the knowledge would have been precious and ex
citing beyond all knowledge of the staggering "won
ders" of the capital. But, of course, I could not ap
proach so close to reality; the visiting stranger seldom
can; he must be content with his imaginative visions.

Now and then I had the good-fortune to come across
illuminating stories of New York dailiness, tales of no
important event, but which lit up for me the whole
expanse of existence in the hinterlands of the Elevated.
As, for instance, the following. The tiny young wife
of the ambitious and feverish young man is coming
home in the winter afternoon. She is forced to take
the street-car, and in order to take it she is forced to
fight. To fight, physically, is part of the daily round

172

PART OF THE DAILY ROUND OF THE INDOMITABLE NEW YORK
WOMAN

CITIZENS

of the average fragile, pale, indomitable New York
woman. In the swaying crowd she turns her head sev
eral times, and in tones of ever-increasing politeness re
quests a huge male animal behind her to refrain from
pushing. He does not refrain. Being skilled, as a
mariner is skilled in beaching himself and a boat on a
surfy shore, she does ultimately achieve the inside of
the car, and she sinks down therein apparently exhausted.
The huge male animal follows, and as he passes her, in
furiated by her indestructible politeness, he sticks his
head against her little one and says, threateningly,
"What's the matter with you, anyway?" He could
crush her like a butterfly, and, moreover, she is about
ready to faint. But suddenly, in uncontrollable anger,
she lifts that tiny gloved hand and catches the huge
male animal a smart smack in the face. "Can't you
be polite?" she hisses. Then she drops back, blushing,
horrified by what she has done. She sees another man
throw the aghast male animal violently out of the car,
and then salute her with: "Madam, I take off my hat
to you." And the tired car settles down to apathy, for,
after all, the incident is in its essence part of the dailiness
of New York.

The young wife gets home, obsessed by the fact that
she has struck a man in the face in a public vehicle.
She is still blushing when she relates the affair in a rush
of talk to another young wife in the flat next to hers.
"For Heaven's sake don't tell my husband," she im
plores. "If he knew he'd leave me forever!" And the
young husband comes home, after his own personal dose
of street-car, preoccupied, fatigued, nervous, hungry,

YOUR UNITED STATES

demanding to be loved. And the young wife has to be
have as though she had been lounging all the afternoon
in a tea-gown on a soft sofa. Curious that, although
she is afraid of her husband's wrath, the temptation to
tell him grows stronger! Indeed, is it not a rather fine
thing that she has done, and was not the salute of the
admiring male flattering and sweet? Not many tiny
wives would have had the pluck to slap a brute's face.
She tells the young husband. It is an error of tact on
her part. For he, secretly exacerbated, was waiting for
just such an excuse to let himself go. He is angry, he
is outraged — as she had said he would be. What — his
wife, his — etc., etc.!

A night full of everything except sleep; full of Ele
vated and rumbling cars, and trumps of autos, and the
eternal liveliness of the cobbled street, and all incom
prehensible noises, and stuffiness, and the sense of other
human beings too close above, too close below, and to
the left and to the right, and before and behind, the
sense that there are too many people on earth! What
New-Yorker does not know the wakings after the febrile
doze that ends such a night? The nerves like taut
strings; love turned into homicidal hatred; and the
radiator damnably tapping, tapping! . . . The young
husband afoot and shaved and inexpensively elegant,
and he is demanding his fried eggs. The young wife is
afoot, too, manceuvering against the conspiracies of the
janitor, who lives far below out of sight, but who per
meates her small flat like a malignant influence. . . . Hear
the whistling of the dumb-waiter ! . . . Eggs are demanded,
authoritatively, bitterly. If glances could kill, not only

CITIZENS

that flat but the whole house would be strewn with
corpses. . . . Eggs! ....

Something happens, something arrives, something
snaps; a spell is broken and horror is let loose. "Take
your eggs!" cries the tiny wife, in a passion. The eggs
fly across the table, and the front of a man's suit is
ruined. She sits down and fairly weeps, appalled at
herself. Last evening she was punishing males; this
morning she turns eggs into missiles, she a loving, an
ambitious, an intensely respectable young wife! As for
him, he sits motionless, silent, decorated with the colors
of eggs, a graduate of a famous university. Calamity
has brought him also to his senses. Still weeping, she
puts on her hat and jacket. "Where are you going?"
he asks, solemnly, no longer homicidal, no longer hungry.
"I must hurry to the cleaners for your other suit!" says
she, tragic. And she hurries. . . .

A shocking story, a sordid story, you say. Not a
bit! They are young; they have the incomparable
virtue of youthfulness. It is naught, all that! The
point of the story is that it illustrates New York — a
New York more authentic than the spaciousness of
upper Fifth Avenue or the unnatural dailiness of grand
hotels. I like it.

You may see that couple later in a suburban house —
a real home for the time being, with a colorable imita
tion of a garden all about it, and the "finest suburban
railway service in the world": the whole being a
frame and environment for the rearing of children. I

i75

YOUR UNITED STATES

have sat at dinner in such houses, and the talk was of
nothing but children; and anybody who possessed any
children, or any reliable knowledge of the ways of chil
dren, was sure of a respectable hearing and warm in
terest. If one said, "By the way, I think I may have
a photograph of the kid in my pocket," every eye would
reply immediately: "Out with it, man — or woman! —
and don't pretend you don't always carry the photo
graph with you on purpose to show it off!" In such a
house it is proved that children are unmatched as an
exhaustless subject of conversation. And the conversa
tion is rendered more thrilling by the sense of partially
tamed children — children fully aware of their supremacy
— prowling to and fro unseen in muddy boots and torn
pinafores, and speculating in their realistic way upon
the mysteriousness of adults.

"We are keen on children here," says the youngish
father, frankly. He is altered now from the man he
was when he inhabited a diminutive flat in the full swirl
of New York. His face is calmer, milder, more benevo
lent, and more resignedly worried. And assuredly no
one would recognize in him the youth who howled mur
derously at university football matches and cried with
monstrous ferocity at sight of danger from the opposing
colors: "Kill him! Kill him for me! I can't stand his
red stockings coming up the field!" Yet it is the same
man. And this father, too, is the fruit of university
education; and further, one feels that his passion for
his progeny is one of the chief causes of American in
terest in education. He and his like are at the root of
the modern university — not the millionaires. In Chicago

176

CITIZENS

I was charmed to hear it stoutly and even challengingly
maintained that the root of Chicago University was not
Mr. Rockefeller, but the parents of Chicago.

Assuming that the couple have no children, there is a
good chance of catching them later, splendidly miser
able, in a high-class apartment-house, where the entire
daily adventure of living is taken out of your hands and
done for you, and you pay a heavy price in order to be
deprived of one of the main interests of existence. The
apartment-house ranks in my opinion among the more
pernicious influences in American life. As an institution
it is unhappily establishing itself in England, and in
England it is terrible. I doubt if it is less terrible in
its native land. It is anti-social because it works always 7

against the preservation of the family unit, and because
it is unfair to children, and because it prevents the full
flowering of an individuality. (Nobody can be himself
in an apartment-house; if he tried that game he would
instantly be thrown out.) It is immoral because it
fosters bribery and because it is pretentious itself and
encourages pretense in its victims. It is unfavorable
to the growth of taste because its decorations and furni
ture are and must be ugly; they descend to the artistic
standard of the vulgarest people in it, and have not
even the merit of being the expression of any individual
ity at all. It is enervating because it favors the creation
of a race that can do absolutely nothing for itself. It
is unhealthy because it is sometimes less clean than it
seems, and because often it forces its victims to eat in
a dining-room whose walls are a distressing panorama
of Swiss scenery, and because its cuisine is and must be

12 177

YOUR UNITED STATES

at best mediocre, since meals at once sound and showy
cannot be prepared wholesale.

Some apartment -houses are better than others; many
are possibly marvels of organization and value for money.
But none can wholly escape the indictment. The in
stitution itself, though it may well be a natural and in
evitable by-product of racial evolution, is bad. An
experienced dweller in apartment-houses said to me, of
a seeming-magnificent house which I had visited and
sampled: "We pay six hundred dollars for two poor
little rooms and a bath-room, and twenty-five dollars
a week for board, whether we eat or not. The food is
very bad. It is all kept hot for about an hour, on steam,
so that every dish tastes of laundry. Everything is an
extra. Telephone — lights — tips — especially tips. I tip
everybody. I even tip the chef. I tip the chef so that,
when I am utterly sick of his fanciness and prefer a mere
chop or a steak, he will choose me an eatable chop or
steak. And that's how things go on!"

My true and candid friend, the experienced dweller
in apartment-houses, was, I have good reason to believe,
an honorable man. And it is therefore a considerable
tribute to the malefic influence of apartment-house life
that he had no suspicion of the gross anti-social im
morality of his act in tipping the chef. Clearly it was an
act calculated to undermine the chefs virtue. If all the
other experienced dwellers did the same, it was also
a silly act, producing no good effect at all. But if only
a few of them did it, then it was an act which resulted
in the remainder of the victims being deprived of their
full, fair chance of getting eatable chops or steaks. My

178

CITIZENS

friend's proper course was obviously to have kicked up
a row, and to have kicked up a row in a fashion so clever
that the management would not put him into the street.
He ought to have organized a committee of protest, he
ought to have convened meetings for the outlet of public
opinion, he ought to have persevered day after day and
evening after evening, until the management had been
forced to exclude uneatable chops and steaks utterly
from their palatial premises and to exact the honest
performance of duty from each and all of the staff. In
the end it would have dawned upon the management
that inedible food was just as much out of place in the
restaurant as counterfeit bills and coins at the cash-
desk. The proper course would have been difficult and
tiresome. The proper course often is. My friend took
the easy, wicked course. That is to say, he exhibited
a complete lack of public spirit.

An apartment-house is only an apartment-house;
whereas the republic is the republic. And yet I permit
myself to think that the one may conceivably be the
mirror of the other. And I do positively think that
American education does not altogether succeed in the
very important business of inculcating public spirit ^
into young citizens. I judge merely by results. Most \
peoples fail in the high quality of public spirit ; and thd
American perhaps not more so than the rest. Perhaps
all I ought to say is that according to my own limited
observation public spirit is not among the shining attri
butes of the United States citizen. And even to that
statement there will be animated demur, For have not

179

YOUR UNITED STATES

the citizens of the United States been conspicuous for
their public spirit ? . . .

It depends on what is meant by public spirit — that
is, public spirit in its finer forms. I know what I do not
mean by public spirit. I was talking once to a member
of an important and highly cultivated social community,
and he startled me by remarking :

"The major vices do not exist in this community at
all."

I was prepared to credit that such Commandments
as the Second and Sixth were not broken in that com
munity. But I really had doubts about some others,
such as the Seventh and Tenth. However, he assured
me that such transgressions were unknown.

"What do you do here?" I asked.

He replied : * * We live for social service — f or each other. ' '

T^jjfpirit characterizing that community would never
be described by me as public spirit. I should fit it with
a word which will occur at once to every reader.

On the other hand, I cannot admit as proof of public
spirit the prevalent American habit of giving to the
public that which is useless to oneself — no matter how
immense the quantity given, and no matter how ad
mirable the end in view. When you have got the money
it is rather easy to sit down and write a check for five
million dollars, and so bring a vast public institution
into being. It is still easier to leave the same sum by
testament. These feats are an afTair of five minutes
or so; they cost simply nothing in time or comfort or
peace of mind. If they are illustrations of public spirit,
it is a low and facile form of public spirit.

180

CITIZENS

True public spirit is equally difficult for the millionaire
and for the clerk. It is, in fact, very tedious work. It
implies the quiet daily determination to get eatable
chops and steaks by honest means, chiefly for oneself,
but incidentally for everybody else. It necessitates
trouble and inconvenience. I was in a suburban house
one night, and it was the last night for registering names
on an official list of voters before an election ; it was also
a rainy night. The master of the house awaited a car
riage, which was to be sent up by a candidate, at the
candidate's expense, to take him to the place of regis
tration. Time grew short.

"Shall you walk there if the carriage doesn't come?"
I asked, and gazed firmly at the prospective voter.

At that moment the carriage came. We drove forth
together, and in a cabin warmed by a stove and full of
the steam of mackintoshes I saw an interesting part of
the American Constitution at work — four hatted gentle
men writing simultaneously the same particulars in
four similar ledgers, while exhorting a fifth to keep the
stove alight. An acquaintance came in who had trudged
one mile through the rain. That acquaintance showed
public spirit. In the ideal community a candidate for
election will not send round carriages in order, at the
last moment, to induce citizens to register; in the ideal
community citizens will regard such an attention as in
the nature of an insult.

I was told that millionaires and presidents of trusts
were chiefly responsible for any backwardness of public
spirit in the United States. I had heard and read the
same thing about the United States in England. I was

181

YOUR UNITED STATES

therefore curious to meet these alleged sinister creatures.
And once, at a repast, I encountered quite a bunch of
millionaire-presidents. I had them on my right hand
and on my left. No two were in the least alike. In
my simplicity I had expected a type — formidable, in
timidating. One bubbled with jollity; obviously he
"had not a care in the world." Another was grave. I
talked with the latter, but not easily. He was taciturn.
Or he may have been feeling his way. Or he may have
been not quite himself. Even millionaire-presidents
must be self-conscious. Just as a notorious author is
too often rendered uneasy by the consciousness of his
notoriety, so even a millionaire-president may some
times have a difficulty in being quite natural. How
ever, he did ultimately talk. It became clear to me that
he was an extremely wise and sagacious man. The lines
of his mouth were ruthlessly firm, yet he showed a gen
eral sympathy with all classes of society, and he met my
radicalism quite half-way. On woman's suffrage he was
very fair-minded. As to his own work, he said to me
that when a New York paper asked him to go and be
cross-examined by its editorial board he willingly went,
because he had nothing to conceal. He convinced me
of his uprightness and of his benevolence. He showed
a nice regard for the claims of the Republic, and a proper
appreciation of what true public spirit is.

Some time afterward I was talking to a very promi
nent New York editor, and the conversation turned to
millionaires, whereupon for about half an hour the edi
tor agreeably recounted circumstantial stories of the
turpitude of celebrated millionaires — stories which he

182

CITIZENS

alleged to be authentic and undeniable in every detail.
I had to gasp. "But surely — " I exclaimed, and men
tioned the man who had so favorably impressed me.

"Well," said the editor, reluctantly, after a pause,
"I admit he has the new sense of right and wrong to a
greater extent than any of his rivals."

I italicize the heart of the phrase, because it is itali
cized in my memory. No words that I heard in the
United States more profoundly struck me. Yet the
editor had used them quite ingenuously, unaware that
he was saying anything singular ! . . . Since when is the
sense of right and wrong "new" in America?

Perhaps all that the editor meant was that public
spirit in its higher forms was growing in the United
States, and beginning to show itself spectacularly here
and there in the immense drama of commercial and
industrial policies. That public spirit is growing, I
believe. It chanced that I found the basis of my belief
more in Chicago than anywhere else.

I have hitherto said nothing of the "folk" — the great
mass of the nation, who t live chiefly by the exercise, in
one way or another, of muscular power or adroitness,
and who, if they possess drawing-rooms, do not sit in
them. Like most writers, when I have used such phrases
as "the American people" I have meant that small
dominant minority which has the same social code as
myself. Goethe asserted that the folk were the only
real people. I do not agree with him, for I have never
found one city more real than another city, nor one class
of people more real than another class. Still, he was

183

YOUR UNITED STATES

Goethe, and the folk, though mysterious, are very real;
and, since they constitute perhaps five-sixths of the
nation, it would be singular to ignore them. I had
two brief glimpses of them, and the almost theatrical
contrast of these two glimpses may throw further light
upon the question just discussed.

I evaded Niagara and the Chicago Stock-yards, but
I did not evade the "East Side" of New York. The
East Side insisted on being seen, and I was not unwilling.
In charge of a highly erudite newspaper man, and of an
amiable Jewish detective, who, originally discovered by
Colonel Roosevelt, had come out first among eighteen
hundred competitors in a physical examination, my par
ticular friend and I went forth one intemperate night
to "do" the East Side in an automobile. We saw the
garlanded and mirrored core of "Sharkey's" saloon, of
which the most interesting phenomenon was a male
pianist who would play the piano without stopping till
2.30 A.M. With about two thousand other persons, we
had the privilege of shaking hands with Sharkey. We
saw another saloon, frequented by murderers who re
sembled shop assistants. We saw a Hebraic theater,
whose hospitable proprietor informed us how he had
discovered a great play-writing genius, and how on the
previous Saturday night he had turned away seven
thousand patrons for lack of room! Certainly on our
night the house was crammed; and the play seemed of
realistic quality, and the actresses effulgently lovely.
We saw a Polack dancing-hall, where the cook-girls were
slatterns, but romantic slatterns. We saw Seward Park,
which is the dormitory of the East Side in summer.

184

CITIZENS

We saw a van clattering off with prisoners to the night
court. We saw illustrious burglars, "gunmen," and
"dukes" of famous streets — for we had but to raise a
beckoning finger, and they approached us, grinning, out
of gloomy shadows. (And very ordinary they seemed
in spite of slashed faces!)

We even saw Chinatown, and the wagonettes of tour
ists stationary in its streets. I had suspected that
Chinatown was largely a show for tourists. When I
asked how it existed, I was told that the two thousand
Chinese of Chinatown lived on the ten thousand Chinese
who came into it from all quarters on Sundays, and I
understood. As a show it lacked convincingness — ex
cept the delicatessen-shop, whose sights and odors
silenced criticism. It had the further disadvantage,
by reason of its tawdry appeals of color and light, of
making one feel like a tourist. Above a certain level
of culture, no man who is a tourist has the intellectual
honesty to admit to himself that he is a tourist. Such
honesty is found only on the lower levels. The detective
saved our pride from time to time by introducing us to
sights which the despicable ordinary tourists cannot
see. It was a proud moment for us when we assisted
at a conspiratorial interview between our detective and
the "captain of the precincts." And it was a proud mo
ment when in an inconceivable retreat we were per
mitted to talk with an aged Chinese actor and view his
collection of flowery hats. It was a still prouder (and
also a subtly humiliating) moment when we were led
through courtyards and beheld in their cloistral aloof
ness the American legitimate wives of wealthy China-

185

YOUR UNITED STATES

men, sitting gorgeous, with the quiescence of odalisques,
in gorgeous uncurtained interiors. I was glad when one
of the ladies defied the detective by abruptly swishing
down her blind.

But these affairs did not deeply stir my imagination.
More engaging was the detective's own habit of stopping
the automobile every hundred yards or so in order to
point out the exact spot on which a murder, or several
murders, had been committed. Murder was his chief
interest. I noticed the same trait in many newspaper
men, who would sit and tell excellent murder stories by
the hour. But murder was so common on the East Side
that it became for me curiously puerile — a sort of
naughtiness whose punishment, to be effective, ought to
wound, rather than flatter, the vanity of the child-
minded murderers. More engaging still was the ex
traordinary frequency of banks — some with opulent
illuminated signs — and of cinematograph shows. In
the East End of London or of Paris banks are assured
ly not a feature of the landscape — and for good reason.
The cinematograph is possibly, on the whole, a civilizing
agent ; it might easily be the most powerful force on the
East Side. I met the gentleman who "controlled" all
the cinematographs, and was reputed to make a million
dollars a year net therefrom. He did not appear to be
a bit weighed down, either by the hugeness of his op
portunity or by the awfulness of his responsibility.

The supreme sensation of the East Side is the sensa
tion of its astounding populousness. The most populous
street in the world — Rivington Street — is a sight not
to be forgotten. Compared to this, an up-town thor-

186

THE ASTOUNDING POPULOUSNESS OF THE EAST SIDE

CITIZENS

oughfare of crowded middle-class flats io the open
country — is an uninhabited desert! The architecture
seemed to sweat humanity at every window and door.
The roadways were often impassable. The thought of
the hidden interiors was terrifying. Indeed, the hidden
interiors would not bear thinking about. The fancy
shunned them — a problem not to be settled by sudden
municipal edicts, but only by the efflux of generations.
Confronted by this spectacle of sickly-faced immortal
creatures, who lie closer than any other wild animals
would lie; who live picturesque, feverish, and appal
ling existences; who amuse themselves, who enrich
themselves, who very often lift themselves out of the
swarming warren and leave it forever, but whose daily
experience in the warren is merely and simply horrible
—confronted by this incomparable and overwhelming
phantasmagoria (for such it seems), one is foolishly apt
to protest, to inveigh, to accuse. The answer to futile
animadversions was in my particular friend's query:
"Well, what are you going to do about it?"

My second glimpse of the folk was at quite another
end of the city of New York — namely, the Bronx. I was
urgently invited to go and see how the folk lived in the
Bronx; and, feeling convinced that a place with a name
so remarkable must itself be remarkable, I went. The
center of the Bronx is a racket of Elevated, bordered by
banks, theaters, and other places of amusement. As a
spectacle it is decent, inspiring confidence but not awe,
and being rather repellent to the sense of beauty. No
body could call it impressive. Yet I departed from the

187

YOUR UNITED STATES

Bronx ver considerably impressed. It is the interiors
of the Bronx homes that are impressive. I was led to
a part of the Bronx where five years previously there
had been six families, and where there are now over
two thousand families This was newest New York.

No obstacle impeded my invasion of the domestic
privacies of the Bronx. The mistresses of flats showed
me round everything with politeness and with obvious
satisfaction. A stout lady, whose husband was either
an artisan or a clerk, I forget which, inducted me into
a flat of four rooms, of which the rent was twenty-six
dollars a month. She enjoyed the advantages of cen
tral heating, gas, and electricity; and among the land
lord's fixtures were a refrigerator, a kitchen range, a
bookcase, and a sideboard. Such amenities for the
people — for the petits gens — simply do not exist in
Europe; they do not even exist for the wealthy in
Europe. But there was also the telephone, the house
exchange being in charge of the janitor's daughter — a
pleasing occupant of the entrance-hall. I was told that
the telephone, with a "nickel" call, increased the occu
pancy of the Bronx flats by ten per cent.

Thence I visited the flat of a doctor — a practitioner
who would be the equivalent of a "shilling" doctor in
a similar quarter of London. Here were seven rooms,
at a rent of forty-five dollars a month, and no end of
conveniences — certainly many more than in any flat
that I had ever occupied myself! I visited another
house and saw similar interiors. And now I began to
be struck by the splendor and the cleanliness of the
halls, landings, and staircases: marble halls, tesselated

188

CITIZENS

landings, and stairs out of Holland ; the whole producing
a gorgeous effect — to match the glory of the embroidered
pillow-cases in the bedrooms. On the roofs were drying-
grounds, upon which each tenant had her rightful "day,"
so that altercations might not arise. I saw an empty
flat. The professional vermin exterminator had just
gone — for the landlord-company took no chances in
this detail of management.

Then I was lifted a little higher in the social-financial
scale, to a building of which the entrance-hall reminded
me of the foyers of grand hotels. A superb negro held
dominion therein, but not over the telephone girl, who
ran the exchange ten hours a day for twenty-five dollars
a month, which, considering that the janitor received
sixty-five dollars and his rooms, seemed to me to be
somewhat insufficient. In this house the corridors were
broader, and to the conveniences was added a mail-
shoot, a device which is still regarded in Europe as the
final word of plutocratic luxury rampant. The rents
ran to forty-eight dollars a month for six rooms. In
this house I was asked by hospitable tenants whether
I was not myself, and, when I had admitted that I was
myself, books of which I had been guilty were produced,
and I was called upon to sign them.

The fittings and decorations of all these flats were ar
tistically vulgar, just as they are in flats costing a thou
sand dollars a month, but they were well executed, and
resulted in a general harmonious effect of innocent pros
perity. The people whom I met showed no trace of
the influence of those older artistic civilizations whose
charm seems subtly to pervade the internationalism

189

YOUR UNITED STATES

of the East Side. In certain strata and streaks of so
ciety on the East Side things artistic and intellectual
are comprehended with an intensity of emotion and
understanding impossible to Anglo-Saxons. This I
know.

The Bronx is different. The Bronx is beginning again,
at a stage earlier than art, and beginning better. It is
a place for those who have learnt that physical righteous
ness has got to be the basis of all future progress. It is
a place to which the fit will be attracted, and where the
fit will survive. It has rather a harsh quality. It re
minded me of a phrase used by an American at the head
of an enormous business. He had been explaining to
me how he tried a man in one department, and, if he did
not shine in that, then in another, and in another, and
so on. "And if you find in the end that he's honest but
not efficient?" I asked. "Then," was the answer, "we
think he's entitled to die, and we fire him."

The Bronx presented itself to me as a place where the
right of the inefficient to expire would be cheerfully rec
ognized. The district that I inspected was certainly, as
I say, for the fit. Efficiency in physical essentials was
inculcated — and practised — by the landlord-company,
whose constant aim seemed to be to screw up higher and
higher the self-respect of its tenants. That the landlord-
company was not a band of philanthropists, but a capi
talistic group in search of dividends, I would readily
admit. But that it should find its profit in the business
of improving the standard of existence and appealing to
the pride of the folk was to me a wondrous sign of the
essential vigor of American civilization, and a proof

190

CITIZENS

that public spirit, unostentatious as a coral insect, must
after all have long been at work somewhere.

Compare the East Side with the Bronx fully, and one
may see, perhaps roughly, a symbol of what is going
forward in America. Nothing, I should imagine, could
be more interesting to a sociological observer than that
actual creation of a city of homes as I saw it in the Bronx.
I saw the home complete, and I saw the home incomplete,
with wall-papers not on, with the roof not on. Why, I
even saw, further out, the ground being leveled and the
solid rock drilled where now, most probably, actual homes
are inhabited and babies have been born! And I saw
further than that. Nailed against a fine and ancient
tree, in the midst of a desolate waste, I saw a board with
these words: "A new Subway station will be erected
on this corner." There are legendary people who have
eyes to see the grass growing. I have seen New York
growing. It was a hopeful sight, too.

At this point my impressions of America come to an
end, for the present. Were I to assert, in the phrase
conventionally proper to such an occasion, that no one
can be more sensible than myself of the manifold
defects, omissions, inexactitudes, gross errors, and gen
eral lack of perspective which my narrative exhibits, I
should assert the thing which is not. I have not the
slightest doubt that a considerable number of persons
are more sensible than myself of my shortcomings; for
on the subject of America I do not even know enough
to be fully aware of my own ignorance. Still, I am
fairly sensible of the enormous imperfection and rashness

191

YOUR UNITED STATES

of this book. When I regard the map and see the
trifling extent of the ground that I covered — a scrap
tucked away in the northeast corner of the vast multi
colored territory — I marvel at the assurance I displayed
in choosing my title. Indeed, I have yet to see your
United States. Any Englishman visiting the country
for the second time, having begun with New York,
ought to go round the world and enter by San Francisco,
seeing Seattle before Baltimore and Denver before
Chicago. His perspective might thus be corrected in a
natural manner, and the process would in various ways
be salutary. It is a nice question how many of the
opinions formed on the first visit — and especially the
most convinced and positive opinions — would survive
the ordeal of the second.

As for these brief chapters, I hereby announce that I
am not prepared ultimately to stand by any single view
which they put forward. There is naught in them which
is not liable to be recanted. The one possible justifica
tion of them is that they offer to the reader the one
thing that, in the very nature of the case, a mature and
accustomed observer could not offer — namely, an im
mediate account (as accurate as I could make it) of the
first tremendous impact of the United States on a mind
receptive and unprejudiced. The greatest social his
torian, the most conscientious writer, could not recapture
the sensations of that first impact after further inter
course had scattered them.

THE END

Internet Archive Audio

Featured

Top

Images

Featured

Top

Software

Featured

Top

Books

Featured

Top

Video

Featured

Top

Mobile Apps

Browser Extensions

Archive-It Subscription

Save Page Now

Full text of "Your United States; impressions of a first visit"

See other formats