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UNITED STATES

A SYMPOSIUM

Edited by
ERNEST GRUENING

SECOND SERIES

 

BONI ann LIVERIGHT
PUBLISHERS New YorxKCopyright, 1924, by

Bont & Livericnut, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

First printing, December, 1924
Second printing, March, 1925

LUT

TPOCULUUUUUTULLT LUTTE LEAP EERE PERECHAPTER

I.

i)

Q.

Ielie

13.

VIRGINIA

MINNESOTA

MONTANA

FLORIDA

ILLINOIS

West VIRGINIA

New HAMPSHIRE

WYOMING

NortH CAROLINA

NEBRASKA

OKLAHOMA

IDAHO

New YorkK

CONTENTS

VOLUME II

A Gentle Dominion ‘
Douglas Freeman
The Norse State

Sinclair Lewis
Land of the Copper Collar .
Arthur Fisher

The Desert and the Rose
Clara G. Stillman
First Province of the Mid-
dlevKinpdonms.) -a ee.
Howard Vincent O'Brien
A Mine-Field Melodrama .
James M. Cain
Not Yet Abandoned. .
Ralph D. Paine
A Maverick Citizenry . .
Walter C. Hawes
A Militant Mediocracy .
Robert Watson Winston
The End of the First Cycle
Willa Sibert Cather
Low Jacks and the Crooked

Game . Burton Rascoe
A Remnant of the Old
Frontier . MV. R. Stone

(1) The City—Work of
Man

Ernest Gruening

123

I4I

154
170

184

   
 
  
  
   
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
  
 
  
 
   
  
  
 
   

a aa

a Nae raevi CONTENTS

PUORERURPRATAUDRT RAPED ERR REPRE LE

 

 

 

  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
  
 
 
 
  
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
  
 
 
 
  
 
  
 
   

CHAPTER

14. NEw YorRK

15. KENTUCKY

16. WASHINGTON
17. New Mexico
18. INDIANA

19. RHODE ISLAND
20. Missouri

21. NortH DAKOTA

22. GEORGIA

23. THE Districr OF
CoLUMBIA

24. ALASKA
25. Porto Rico

26. HAWAII

UMES I AND II

UMES I AND II

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES

INDEX OF CONTRIBUTORS
RANGED—VOLUMES I AND II

(II) State of Unwilling
Progress...
Charles W. Wood
Where Men Die Standing .
Ben Lucien Burman
The Dawn of a Tomorrow
Robert Whitaker
A Relic of Ancient America
Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant
Her Soil and Light
Theodore Dreiser
A Lively Experiment
Robert Cloutman Dexter
Doesn’t Want to be Shown
Manley O. Hudson

A Twentieth-Century Val-

ley Forge .
Robert George Barerson
Invisible Empire State. .
W. E. Burghardt DuBois
Ward of the Nation . .
John W, Owens

Our Returning Frontier
Bruce Rogers
The American Colony
Luis Munoz Marin
A Sub-Tropical New Eng-
land
Olayion Einnilion
oF COoONTRIBUTORS—VOL-

-

INDEX OF STATES ALPHABETICALLY ARRANGED—VOL-

ALPHABETICALLY AR-

PAGE
203
218

233

295

310
322

346

356

373

394

A417

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VIRGINIA
A GENTLE DOMINION

By DOUGLAS FREEMAN

VircIniA buried her beloved at Appomattox, as her
sons stood by, very ragged. All that she was, all that
she hoped, all in which she had taken pride she told
herself she had interred there. But it was spring for
her sons, plowing-season, and they were hungry. They
tramped back home and fortunately found in the recla-
mation of stumpy fields and neglected meadows an
outlet for their grief. They thought of the past as
seldom as they might and talked of it scarcely at all. It
was five years before they had the farm in order, ten
before they had any leisure, twenty before they pos-
sessed any money, thirty before they were measurably
prosperous as their fathers had been in 1860. After
the Spanish-American War—they never knew why—
they could paint the house and buy a new surrey and
take the wife to town for her shopping twice a year.
By 1905 they began to argue whether it would not be
possible to send the girl as well as the boy to college.

S'nce then there has been plenty. The village no
longer looks as though its solitary street were a
streamer of crépe on the door of the landscape. The
countryside is not quite trim, as yet, but has brightened

immeasurably. The ‘Eastern Shore’’—which com-
Iti} H nee ‘
Fl WAPOROEERERRGRRADERRAER REBEL MEBSEUOORA PO EE ORG OUDE: wana

2 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

prises the two counties between the Chesapeake and
the ocean—has become one of the richest agricultural
communities in the United States. The Shenandoah
Valley is white with apple blossoms almost as soon as
the snow is gone. The section beyond the New River,
“the gre-e-at Southwest,” as its residents proudly style
it, finds double wealth in its coal mines and in its export
cattle, fattened on a very luxuriant blue grass. The
people of the “Southside” counties, between the James
River and the North Carolina line, are improving
yearly the quality of their tobacco, and if they succeed
in raising the early cotton they have planted expert-
mentally they will rival the Carolina farmers, whom
they now envy. Codperative marketing is slowly taking
hold, though eyed doubtfully by some bankers and
vigorously fought by rich warehousemen. The breed-
ing of stock has improved so much that the scrub,
Pennyroyal bull now belongs with the bear that has
disappeared from the mountains and the deer that has
been killed in the swamps. Enough has been done to
furnish abundant themes for the writers of booster-
literature, and to pile up statistics that sprain the backs
of the graphs official bureaus delight to draw. Vir-
ginia’s sons and their sons after them have done a
brave, clean job since Appomattox.

The mother herself, Virginia, went straight from
Appomattox to the old house that typified the civiliza-
tion that had perished. She climbed to the second-story
bedroom; she pulled down the blinds and through the
darkness of reconstruction sat in her mourning. She
would put out the Southern flag on May 30 and go
down to the porch when the veterans passed by on the
way to reunions; she never missed a session of theaaa aeaae

  

VIRGINIA 3

 

U. D. C. and tended a booth in the old-fashioned
bazaar that was held to raise money for another Con-
federate monument. She went to church and sat very
quietly in the ancestral pew, though perhaps she could
not bring herself to say Amen at the end of the prayer
for the President of the United States and all others in
authority. Sometimes she walked in the garden. But
her thoughts were still of the war between the States.
She could not forget and she had no desire to forget
its triumphs and its agony. Her face has been turned
to the past. Without pose or ostentation (those who
are noisy have simply married into the family and do
not understand), without making a fetish of her veil
or a spectacle of her tears, Virginia has been “in deep
mourning.’

While the widow has been lamenting in the front
chamber upstairs, her daughters have been receiving
new callers in the drawing-room and her sons have been
paying court in strange parlors. Society has changed
vastly during the great lady's widowhood—has
changed so much, in fact, that she is beginning to
doubt herself ever so little when daily she replies
to a daughter’s mention of a visitor's name with her
emphatic, ‘“Why, my dear child, I never heard of him;
who was his grandfather ?”’

Names and blood still count in Virginia, but lack
of them handicaps a man less in acquiring social position
than possession of them aids him in preserving it. A
few who have ancestry and no money keep their place;
many who have money and no ancestry make their
place. Even in Richmond, where the doors of the
Monday German once were unlocked only for those
who had as many quarterings as an officer in thehihi TURP RRAARDRT ALTE PRADA RA DURTOA PAREN Saat

4 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

bodyguard of a Bourbon, the daughter of the rich
newcomer always is invited after two or three years
and, a little later, her mother and father. ‘“‘He’s rich’”’
is now an apologia for many shortcomings. Now and
again there is scandalized squawking when a nobody
wins the heart of an old aristocrat’s daughter; but the
girl seldom loses caste and the boy may gain. Where
a great lady rules, why should not there be matriarchy?
Nothing better illustrates the slow effacing of the old
hard lines than that unless a union is hopeless the
station of man and wife in a few years becomes that
of the more distinguished of the two, be it that of
the man or that of the woman. The old mercantile
aristocracy of the cities died with the industrial era
to which it belonged. Not one name in ten that ap-
peared in the list of those who entertained Lafayette,
or were the familiars of John Marshall, or even of
those on whom Jefferson Davis called when visiting
in Virginia cities after the war is heard now at social
functions. Many of the greatest lines are near ex-
tinction. General Robert E. Lee had three sons and
four daughters. There survive only one grandson, two
granddaughters, one great-granddaughter and one
great-grandson. This is characteristic. Cynics have
afirmed that if two or three families of great planters
had not been inexhaustibly prolific and had not inter-
married early and widely, genealogists would have to
despair of proving descent from early Colonial times,
except, of course, for the goodly host of those who
possess, or think they possess, some of the blood of
Pocahontas.

In rural Virginia, the old aristocracy still clings to
a few of its ancient seats, such as Shirley on the JamesVIRGINIA

 

 

and Mount Airy on the Rappahannock, but elsewhere
it has perished or migrated and has had no successor.
Nowhere in the South is the passing of the old order
more manifest than in certain of the older counties,
lower Hanover or King William, for example. Some
of the old mansions remain, though fire has claimed
more; but these often are habited by people ignorant
of the history of the houses in which they dwell. One
gets almost the impression that plague or an approach-
ing army had driven the natives before it and that
after years of decay another race has moved in.
With the lesser aristocracy and the middle-classes
the change has not been so great. Where the family
was numerous it often happened that some of the
sons went to the cities while the others remained at

)

the “home-place.”’ Twenty years ago fully half the
urban population in this way had kin in the country.
Now the ties have been broken—one reason, this, for
the sharpened legislative antagonisms between town
and country. In the social life of the farmers much
depends on the extent to which the old families have
held on. There still are districts where some of the
planters do not call on neighbors who are as prosper-
ous as themselves but do not have a like background.
Elsewhere the rural church has worked for democracy
in the leveling of the old barriers. Even the aliens
who occasionally settle in the counties gradually are
made welcome in the homes of the neighborhood if
they are well-behaved. Usually, however, there is
one generation of something very much like proba-
tion: after that the son goes where the father might
not. Conditions in the country on the whole are de-
structive of the aristocratic tradition. It is hard to beTHESE UNITED STATES

 

 

socially exclusive where neighbors are few and solitude
wears down pride as well as nerves.

An element fast increasing in some parts of rural
Virginia is that of the city-dweller, the son or grandson
of a planter, who buys himself a country home which
he uses part of the year. In northern Virginia, around
Leesburg and Middleburg particularly, and in the
beautiful foothills between the homes of Jefferson
and of Madison, are numerous colonies of these re-
formed burghers who spend on the land the money
they make in trade. Sometimes these men attempt to
figure in the political life of the county, but more
frequently they consort with their kind. ‘They are
welcomed by the small farmer, who sells them his
produce or his labor at prices well above the market,
but they are jealously eyed by the larger planter, whose
sun they dim and whose colored farmhands they hire
at prices the ‘‘practical” farmer cannot pay. Not in-
frequently some wealthy man from the North or
from the West, with a liking for the historical and
with a desire to found a family, will purchase one
of the large and famous estates and will make a the-
atrical attempt to lead the life of which he has read
in a levant-bound life of Washington. Where taste
and tact are sustained by patience and a purse some
of these efforts to recreate the spacious style of the
eighteenth century do not fail altogether of ‘their
purpose. Where any of the essentials is lacking the
outcome is comical. Half the aristocrats of the lower
James chuckled and the other half shuddered when
those who visited one of the most beautiful of the
old river mansions reported that the magnificent ma-
hogany wainscoting of the main corridor had beenVIRGINIA ,

 

 

adorned by its new owner with a Harvard pennant
of the sort the least sophisticated freshman buys the
week he enters college and puts away before the
Christmas intermission.

One type there is that still links the great widow
with her past. It is a type seen often in Virginia
cities and every Sunday in the country. On Franklin
Street in Richmond, of a Monday afternoon, one
may observe a dozen exemplars. They are the little
old ladies, dressed inconspicuously in black, who trip
to the Woman’s Club, hear a program, sip their tea,
and then, grasping their handbags tightly, trot home
again. Some are widows, but most of them are the
unmarried daughters of well-to-do business men of
the last generation. They grew to womanhood in the
seventies. Men were scarce then. Thousands of the
young Virginians who should have been wooing them
were moldering bones on the battlefields of the war
between the States, or else, if spared, had given up
hope in the Old Dominion and had sought a livelihood
where cities were not in ashes and farmers’ fields were
not burrowed with trenches. Many of the young
women of that day married men not worthy of them.
Many others had no lovers. They stayed on in their
fathers’ houses until their parents died and then they
went to reside with kinspeople or had a spinster cousin
of like temperament come to live with them. They
use the old furniture and read the old books and
adhere to the old fashions and think the old thoughts.
They are given to charity, they write regularly to
all their relatives, and they know what is happening
in the homes of all their friends. To sit for an hour
with one of these women and to hear her talk of—— .
Tt

eee

 

 

 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  

 

THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Pa” and of ‘““Ma”—for they cling to the eighteenth-
century pronunciation—is to agree that the women are
the great social conservators. Virginia society in its
distinctive sense would have breathed its last long
ago but for the little old ladies.

The great widow consoles herself with the loyalty of
these daughters. She does not fear for the family por-
traits or for the ancestral certificate of membership in
the Society of the Cincinnati so long as any of them is
alive. She takes comfort, too, in some of the charac-
teristics her grandsons display when they tramp up-
stairs after dinner to pay their respects to her. They
are not as handsome as their grandfathers, she tells
herself, and they are too much interested in making
money, but they would be known by anyone to belong
to the family. If the widow’s eyes were a bit keener, she
might observe a slight twitching of their facial muscles -
when she begins, “I don’t think I ever told you, but I
remember once during the war—’ The grandsons
are too polite, of course, to tell the widow that if the
effort taxes her they can give in ipsissimis verbis all
her favorite stories from memory, with names and
dates correct and in place; but the truth is that youth is
rather tired of the old family anecdotes. And when
he goes to a public meeting and hears the orators wind
their wearying way toward an apostrophe on the
glories of the Old Dominion, he is apt to groan, “Good
Lord, in a minute we'll get Lee and Jackson and the
army that was destroyed but never conquered,” Yet—
such are the contradictions in the young man—when
he entertains a friend of the North, he will show him all
the graveyards and monuments and will talk as volubly
as the widow herself of the sixties and of General Lee—particularly of General Lee. The character and the
personality of the most beloved of the Southern gen-
erals have become an inspiring part of the average
Virginian’s background. There is an unmistakable Lee
cult, which the traveler and sojourner observe and, like
as not, share in season. There probably is no other
State in the Union and no part of any State—not even
the Springfield district in [llinois—where one man has
so influenced the thought, the manners and the outlook
of a people. Hundreds of Virginia families must have
their private traditions of General Lee. Recently a
newspaper offered to print on January nineteen, his
birthday, all unpublished stories of General Lee that
were sentin. It received a score and more—some that
seemed to have about them the odor of the rose-
leaves in which they had been kept with the other
family treasures. General I. S. Jackson stands second,
though only second, to General Lee in the affection of
the people. It is part of the education of every Vir-
ginian to read Henderson’s Stonewall Jackson, which
surely is one of the finest of military biographies: The
reading usually means an awakening of new interest in
all things Southern.

The widow likes this in her grandsons. She likes,
too, to hear them talk, for that reminds her of their
grandfather. Conversation is as much a part of the
Virginia tradition as is worship of General Lee or the
eating of batterbread and herring for breakfast. Talk
does not interfere greatly with business, though if there
were an appendix to These United States containing a
statistical summary of the length of the average tele-
phone conversation in all parts of the Union, it would
explain many things and would show Virginia not

VIRGINIA 910 THESE UNITED STATES

 

among the most laconic of States. There are clubs
dedicated ostensibly to the study of current events, or
literature or some professional interest but actually de-
voted to the practice of plain and fancy conversation.
It used to be said of the late Captain W. Gordon Mc-
Cabe—who valued that Confederate title more than
any of his Litt.D.’s or LL.D.’s—that he carefully
wrote out the best of his stories and rehearsed them
painstakingly. That probably was slander, for the cap-
tain told his anecdotes so often and observed so
thoroughly the effect on his hearers that he must have
found his climaxes shaping themselves. They came
very close to perfection in their realm and never tired
the men who groaned inwardly as the less skillful
would begin their “that reminds me.” Captain Mc-
Cabe’s “Sally Anne Madeira” story has been carried
to four continents—Lord Tennyson enjoyed it greatly
but it is not told today by anyone who can approach
Captain McCabe’s delivery.

To the display of the chosen art of Virginia there
is one recognized obstacle: he great raconteur sel-
dom is willing to give a rival due hearing or a beginner
fit coaching. Captain McCabe himself, who was a
schoolmaster by vocation, himself exploded with wrath
when a cousin from Williamsburg attempted to tell
him for the ninth time—and very badly—what hap-
pened aboard the Tennessee in the battle of Mobile
Bay, just before Admiral Buchanan was wounded.
The art of conversation is discouraged on occasion by
the death of a great story-teller such as Mr. McCabe
or his admitted peer Major Robert W. Hunter, but
it revives and, at its worst, distinguishes Virginia from
her neighbors. The wicked affirm, in explaining this,

PESTER ERE EUNORER UNE RUECEOUSTR RAEN ERRR REDE RARER ERE ROR AU REROUUREROUERRTN HERDER ELD EP
: ' ' PEARUR UR SLER EE,VIRGINIA II

 

 

that the Marylander has forgotten how to talk, since
Baltimore became a foreign city, and that the North
Carolinian has not yet learned. Missionaries of cul-
ture, journeying into Virginia, have charged to the
natives’ love of culture the dearth of public libraries
in the State—the people, it is insisted, are too busy
talking to have time for reading books. And just when
the gospelers of Chautauqua and Carnegieism are
about to invite prayer for the benighted, they observe
that the Virginia love of conversation has given most
men a facility of speech that enables them to hold their
own at the council board or in a public meeting without
coming under the imputation of being that which would
make millions shudder

 

a race of orators.

Lloyd George said when he was in America that he
noticed how life became softer and geniler when he
entered the South and that this was most pronounced
in Virginia. Many others have much the same feeling,
which cannot be explained by the drawling speech and
the absence of the ruthless roar of great cities. Life
is not gentler because it is slower, for Virginia labor
does as much work in a day—lays as many bricks or
saws as many planks or pays as many professional
calls as the blusterer of the North who spends two
hours a day telling how busy he 1s. ‘There is not a
manufacturer in the South who would not match his
operatives against a like force from any plant in the
Connecticut Valley or hesitate to wager on a larger pro-
duction. Life is calmer not because the people are
indolent but because the widow's children have in-
herited a certain consideration for the feelings of
others. Virginians dislike to say unpleasant things or
touch a sore spot, and before anj,wering a question or

Te ee ae ad

    
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
    
  
   
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
    
   
   

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r2 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

opening a new subject, are apt to ask themselves
whether it will be offensive. They are as sensitive as
they are considerate, and because they are sensitive
they are reserved. “You've got to understand the
Virginia people,” said a shrewd traveling salesman
recently. ‘You must study them just as you do the
South Americans. You can’t attempt to manhandle
a merchant and you mustn’t try to hurry him, but if you
go slowly and watch his face, you not only will do a
good business but you will make a lot of personal
friends. Nowhere in my territory do I get more per-
sonal invitations or meet with as much courtesy as
in Virginia.” The other view was presented by a
salesman of the pachydermatous type—the sort of
man who dies not care what he says or what his
customer thitks of him, so long as he gets the order.
‘“TTow’s businzss? It’s rotten, and say, believe me,
ll never trave! this damn State of yours again. Every-
body down here resents my telling ’em about up-to-
date methods, and when I show a man where he’s doing
things wrong, he, gets mad and asks me why I don’t
buy his business if ] want to run it. I’m through, I
tell you—no more of your proud Virginia for mel”
The widow values the quality the statesman deplores.
She regards independence as one of the family char-
acteristics. She considers it bad manners to meddle in
other people’s affairs and requires all her self-control
and poise in dealing with those who come down from
New York to meddle: in hers. When she is talking to
her intimates and is sure her words will not be quoted
to hurt anyone’s feelings, she is apt to rejoice in her
quiet way that she has only a little more than one per
cent of foreign born ‘n her population. For she holds

WURERERE hearseVIRGINIA 13

 

 

that the bumptiousness of noisy salesmen and the bad
manners they display originate with aliens. If pos-
sible, she is more concerned over the bad manners
some strangers exhibit than over their disposition to
lecture her on the superior energy and business ability
of the North. Bad manners corrupt children and de-
stroy all the gentleness in life. She cannot understand
how some parents permit the children to drop the
“sir”? and the ‘‘mam” in speaking to their elders.
“Why,” she will say, “that is the first test of a Vir-
ginian. When a child does not say, ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No,
mam,’ I always expect he’s going to say, ‘What?’
when I ask him a question he does not understand.
And if he says, ‘What’ instead of, ‘Excuse me, I did
not understand you,’ then I know he’s going to pro-
nounce South as Sauth and that proves he was not
born in Virginia.’ In her family, good manners still
are valued more highly than a good mind. The Old
Dominion fundamentally is the Gentle Dominion.
The widow, in a word, is rather relieved that during
the doleful years of her mourning, the family did not
go to the devil. She is pleased, on the whole, with the
character and bearing of her children, despite some
of their new-fangled ways. She is satisfied that in
time they will take their grandfather’s place in church
and State; yet she knows in the wisdom of her widow-
hood that she has not caught the rhythm of the faster
spinning world and she wonders if the new generation
has. She looks upon her sons as youngsters who have
all the qualities for success, but she thinks they have
not quite found themselves and she is troubled, very
genuinely troubled, about their education. In 1860,
Virginia had in her colleges more students per thou-14 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

sand of population than any other State in the Union,
Massachusetts not excepted. The classes of 1861-65
graduated on the battlefield—at Manassas, at Fred-
ericksburg, at Gettysburg, in front of Richmond and
at Appomattox. For the next twenty years, only the
most persistent and the sons of the fortunate were
able to go to college. Nearly the whole of the genera-
tion born between 1845 and 1870 was denied the aca-
demic training their fathers and their sons had. While
their former Confederate soldiers were struggling for
self-education in their poverty, they had to provide an
inexpensive substitute for the old-fashioned academy
in which most of the children had been taught before
the war. Simultaneously, Virginia had to undertake,
in common with the other Southern States, that for
which there are few parallels in educational history— ~
the schooling of an entire race which prior to that time
had been almost wholly illiterate. No wonder an im-
poverished State seemed to make slow progress. Yet
today, Virginia scarcely is conscious of the magnitude
of the work she has done, and because her school sys-
tem is still given a low grading, in comparison with
those of States untouched by war, she is humiliated and
anxious to improve her standards. More vitality and
more vision are displayed in Virginia’s efforts for
better schools and colleges than in anything else she
undertakes. She knows that this is fundamental and
that her hopes for the future are only as well-founded
as her education is thorough. She smiles—and only
smiles—when Mrs. Norman V. Randolph, long-time
president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy,
says half humorously and half with a sigh, “They do
not agree with me any longer about education. TheyVIRGINIA 15

 

 

 

want to teach everything. I believe a lot of people are
better off if they are not taught anything but reading,
writing and arithmetic and—of course—Virginia his-
tory.”

The political education of her sons is Virginia’s
other worry. Public life in Virginia is dominated to-
day by a political machine, built up about the “‘court-
house rings’ of county administrative officers. Their
Juggernaut car is rather easy-going and is not often
used for political joy-riding. The machine politicians
do little to arouse antagonism. Those whom they
cannot defeat they usually conciliate. Former Gov-
ernor Westmoreland Davis is the only man who has
defeated the machine in recent years and has not in
time yielded to it. Usually the machine is content to
guard the interests of the county-rings, to fatten their
fees, to reject or to cripple with amendments the bills
Liberals offer and, for the rest, to move only when
orodded. Occasionally, as in the recent defeat of a
proposal to issue $50,000,000 of bonds for roads, the
machine shows itself capable of effective organization
and contentious debate.

The rule of the machine, which is made possible by
the form of local government, is rendered easy by the
limitations on the franchise. Virginia’s constitution
was adopted in 1902 primarily to remove the Negro
from politics and thereby to put an end to election
frauds. The Negro has been eliminated effectually
enough. Frauds have been reduced. But the price
has been too high for the benefits received. Tens of
thousands of whites have been disfranchised. Interest
has died with contest. In most sections of the State,
the general election is farcical and perfunctory, with16 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

no Republican opposition to the Democratic ticket.
The real fight is in the Democratic primary, to which
the regular election requi:‘ements apply. Owing to the
restrictions on the ballot, the total poll in the primary
does not often exceed 150,000. As few as 80,000
voters, supporting the winner in a close primary, se-
lect the officers for a State of 2,300,000. The result
is stagnation. The State of the great American po-
litical philosophers, Jefferson, Marshall and Madison,
is ceasing to be politically minded. ‘The best young
men are not entering the life for which, by tradition
and temperament, they are or should be best qualified.

Virginia would be satisfied with her very substan-
tial industrial progress, and would not list the dollar
among her concerns, were it not for North Carolina.
Virginia has not reached the acute sensitiveness of the ’
apocryphal South Carolina legislator who proposed a
bill making it a misdemeanor for any person to compare
the Palmetto State with North Carolina in education
and in roads. Virginia is not a little proud of her
Southern sister—proud and impressed and somewhat
awed by her remarkable advance. Whenever North
Carolina is mentioned among Virginians, a debate be-
gins that chooses the cleavage within the State between
conservative and liberal, between those whose first
thought is of the past and those who are turning in
mind more to the future. The dispute begins with the
warning that Virginia is being left behind by North
Carolina. To this the stock answer is that Virginia has
a spiritual heritage in great names and history that
North Carolina never can equal. The favorite retort
is that it is not enough to have Abraham for a father,
that Virginia herself is proof that a prosperous societyVIRGINIA 17

 

 

 

breeds great men, and that if North Carolina continues
as now, she will make her own tradition rival Virgin-
ia’s. When the argument reaches this point, the con-
servative as likely as not puts logic aside with the state-
ment that those who are not satisfied with Virginia can
go to North Carolina or to hell! That’s one trouble
now—too many Virginians have gone from her already.
The 1920 census showed some 680,000 of them in
other States, while nearly half her land is untilled.

Most of Virginia’s characteristics are plain to the
traveler who has eyes for differences among the States.
Whatever his approach, he has not long crossed the
frontier before he knows he is in the Gentle Dominion.
If he has sped down overnight from the North he
notes as soon as he has crossed the Potomac that the
foreign type has disappeared, that Catholic churches
are not seen, that the Negro is more numerous, that
all white men talk in terms of equality with the unmis-
takable elision of the “g’’ in all sounds of “ing” and
with the telltale pronunciation of ‘“‘ou.”’ He will find
life not as ostentatiously hurried as in the North, and,
if he penetrates the first reserve of natives, he will
discover State pride, a conscious relation to the past
and, if one may stress it again, consideration for the
feeling of others. This last—if all distinctions must
be resolved into one—is the most noteworthy quality
of the people. Should one’s journey be eastward into
Virginia, by any of the great coal-carrying railroads,
one finds no change until one rolls down from the
Alleghany Mountains into the valley of the Shenan-
doah, where the stock of eastern Virginia and that of
the old Pennsylyania Germans have met but have not
yet fused. As contrasted with West Virginia, moreTHESE UNITED STATES

 

 

urbanity and tolerance, a slighter class-prejudice and, as
a rule, a less absorbing interest in the making of money.
If, finally, one’s way into Virginia be through North
Carolina, cotton fields become fewer and then dis-
appear altogether, the roads are not as good, the drawl
is not as pronounced. Something less of new agri-
cultural prosperity but, if it may be said without of-
fense, perhaps something more of old culture.

And tomorrow? When the widow thinks of that,
it seems strangely apart from herself. The new world
is not her world. Already, when she uses the familiar
phrase, “before the war,” youth asks, ‘“Which war?”
She hears, and in a way she shares, a reconstruction
different from that of the later ’sixties, which proved
scarcely less terrible than the slaughter itself. Per-
haps Virginia realizes that in the era begun in 1914,
as in that which was opened in 1865, she is not to have
the role that once was hers. Alone among American
states, she has suffered that which has been the equiva-
lent, in a sense, of the “territorial compensation” the
victorious demand in the struggles of imperialism. In
the loss of West Virginia, which was taken from her
during the war between the States, she paid an in-
demnity of billions, and even then had difficulty in
making the newer State assume a part of the ante-
bellum debt. Had Virginia come through the war with
her borders unchanged, she would today be not far
behind Texas as the richest Southern commonwealth,
and instead of being the twentieth in population she
would be next after Massachusetts and ahead of Michi-
gan as the seventh. But violations of the constitution
in time become part of the constitution. What’s done
is not to be undone by laments and lingering overVIRGINIA 19

 

 

 

might-have-beens. The State still is peopled with the
descendants of those who cleared the wilderness and
fought the revolution, who have, somehow, the confi-
dence of their race, the belief that in ways not yet plain
and through powers they do not pretend to understand,
the State again will serve the nation in more than mere
production and man-power. They may be right; it ts
possible they are mistaken. If they are, it is not
altogether loss. Some think it will be more of gain
than of loss. For there is need in noisy America for
a commonwealth of quietness. There is place among
forty-eight grasping States for a Gentle Dominion.
There is room off the crowded speedways for a garden
of memories.MINNESOTA
THE NORSE STATE

By SINCLAIR LEWIS

On May 9, 1922, Mr. Henry Lorenz of Pleasant-
dale, Saskatchewan, milked the cows and fed ‘the
horses and received the calls of his next farm neigh-
bors. Obviously he was still young and lively, though
it did happen that on May 9 he was one hundred and
seventeen years old. When St. Paul, Mendota, and
Marine, the first towns in Minnesota, were established,
Henry was a man in his mid-thirties—yes, and Presi-
dent Eliot was seven and Uncle Joe Cannon was five.
As for Minneapolis, now a city of four hundred thou-
sand people, seventy-five years ago it consisted of one
cabin. Before 1837, there were less than three hun-
dred whites and mixed breeds in all this Minnesotan
domain of eighty thousand square miles—the size of
England and Scotland put together.

It is so incredibly new; it has grown so dizzyingly.
Here is a village which during the Civil War was
merely a stockade with two or three log stores and
a company of infantry, a refuge for the settlers when
the Sioux came raiding. During a raid in 1863, a
settler was scalped within sight of the stockade.

Now, on the spot where the settler was scalped,
is a bungalow farmhouse, with leaded casement win-
dows, with radio and phonograph, and electric lights
in house and garage and barns. A hundred blooded

cows are milked there by machinery. The farmer
20MINNESOTA 21

 

 

 

 

 

goes into town for Kiwanis Club meetings, and last
year he drove his Buick to Los Angeles. He is, or
was, too prosperous to belong to the Nonpartisan
League or to vote the Farmer-Labor ticket.

Minnesota is unknown to the Average Easterner,
say to a Hartford insurance man or to a New York
garment-worker, not so much because it is new as
because it is neither Western and violent, nor Eastern
and crystallized. Factories and shore hotels are in-
evitably associated with New Jersey, cowpunchers and
buttes with Montana; California is apparent, and
Florida and Maine. But Minnesota is unplaced. I
have heard a Yale junior speculate: “Now you take
those Minnesota cities—say take Milwaukee, for in-
stance. Why, it must have a couple of hundred thou-
sand population, hasn’t it?’ (Nor is this fiction. He
really said it.)

This would be a composite Eastern impression of
Minnesota: a vastness of wind-beaten prairie, flat as
a parade ground, wholly given up to wheat-growing
save for a fringe of pines at the north and a few
market-towns at the south; these steppes inhabited by
a few splendid Yankees—one’s own sort of people—
and by Swedes who always begin sentences with “Vell,
Aye tank,” who are farmhands, kitchen-maids, and
icemen, and who are invariably humorous.

This popular outline bears examination as well as
most popular beliefs; quite as well as the concept that
Negroes born in Chicago are less courteous than those
born in Alabama. Minnesota is not flat. It is far
less flat than the province of Quebec. Most of it is
prairie, but the prairie rolls and dips and curves; it
lures the motorist like the English roads of Broad22 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

Highway fiction. Along the skyline the cumulus clouds
forever belly and, with our dry air, nothing is more
spectacular than the crimson chaos of our sunsets.
But our most obvious beauty is the lakes. There are
thousands of them—nine or ten thousand—brilliant
among suave grain fields or masked by cool birch and
maples. On the dozen-mile-wide lakes of the north
are summer cottages of the prosperous from Missouri,
Illinois, even Texas.

Leagues of the prairie are utterly treeless, except
for artificial windbreaks of willows and cottonwoods
encircling the farmhouses. Here the German Catholic
spire can be seen a dozen miles off, and the smoke of
the Soo Line freight two stations away. But from
this plains country you come into a northern pine
wilderness, ‘“‘the Big Woods,” a land of lumber camps
and reservation Indians and lonely tote-roads, king-
dom of Paul Bunyan, the mythical hero of the lumber-
jacks.

The second error is to suppose that Minnesota is
entirely a wheat State. It was, at one time, and the
Minneapolis flour-mills are still the largest in the
world. Not even Castoria is hymned by more bill-
boards than is Minneapolis flour. But today it 1s
Montana and Saskatchewan and the Dakotas which
produce most of the wheat for our mills, while the
Minnesota farmers, building tall red silos which adorn
their barns like the turrets of Picardy, turn increas-
ingly to dairying. We ship beef to London, butter
to Philadelphia. The iron from our Mesaba mines
is in Alaskan rails and South African bridges, and
as to manufacturing, our refrigerators and heat-regu-
lators comfort Park Avenue apartment-houses, whileMINNESOTA

 

our chief underwear factory would satisfy a Massa-
chusetts Brahmin or even a Chicago advertising-man.

Greatest error of all is to believe that Minnesota is
entirely Yankee and Scandinavian, and that the Swedes
are helots and somehow ludicrous.

A school principal in New Duluth analyzed his
three hundred and thirty children as Slovene, 49;
Italian, 47; Serbian, 39; American, 37; Polish, 30;
Austrian and Swedish, 22 each; Croatian, 20; colored,
9 (it is instructive to note that he did not include them
among the “Americans’’) ; Finnish, 7; Scotch, 6; Slav
unspecified, 5; German, French, Bohemian, and Jew-
ish, 4 each; Rumanian, Norwegian, and Canadian,
3 each; Scandinavian, unspecified; Lithuanian, Irish,
Ukrainian, and Greek, 2 each; Russian and English,
I each—60o0 per cent of them from Southern and
Eastern Europe!

Such a Slavification would, of course, be true only
of an industrial or mining community, but it does in-
dicate that the whole Mid-Western population may
alter as much as has the East. In most of the State
there is a predomination of Yankees, Germans, Irish,
and all branches of Scandinavians, Icelanders and
Danes as well as Swedes and Norwegians. And
among all racial misconceptions none is more vigor-
ously absurd than the belief that the Minnesota Scan-
dinavians are, no matter how long they remain here,
like the characters of that estimable old stock-company
play “Yon Yonson’’—a tribe humorous, inferior, and
unassimilable. ‘To generalize, any popular generaliza-
tion about Scandinavians in America is completely and
ingeniously and always wrong.
4n Minnesota itself one does not hear (from theTHESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

superior Yankees whom one questions about that sort
of thing) that the Scandinavians are a comic people,
but rather that they are surly, that they are Socialistic,
that they “won’t Americanize.” Manufacturers and
employing lumbermen speak of their Swedish employees
precisely as wealthy Seattleites speak of the Japs;
Bostonians of the Irish, Southwesterners of the Mexi-
cans, New Yorkers of the Jews, marine officers of
the Haitians, and Mr. Rudyard Kipling of nation-
alist Hindus—or nationalist Americans. Uncon-
sciously, all of them give away the Inferior Race
Theory, which is this: An inferior race is one whose
members work for me. They are treacherous, un-
erateful, ignorant, lazy, and agitator-ridden, because
they ask for higher wages and thus seek to rob me
of the dollars which I desire for my wife’s frocks and
for the charities which glorify me. This inferiority
‘s inherent. Never can they become Good Americans
(or English Gentlemen, or Highwellborn Prussians).
I know that this is so, because all my ‘university
classmates and bridge-partners agree with me.

The truth is that the Scandinavians Americanize
only too quickly. They Americanize much more
quickly than Americans. For generation after gen-
eration there is a remnant of stubborn American
abolitionist stock which either supports forlorn causes
and in jail sings low ballads in a Harvard accent, or
else upholds, like Lodge, an Adams tradition which 1s
as poisonous as communism to a joy in brotherly
boosting. So thorough are the Scandinavians about
it that in 1963 we shall be hearing Norwegian Try-
gavasons and Icelandic Gislasons saying of the Monte-
negrins and Letts; ‘They're reg’lar hogs aboutMINNESOTA

 

 

wages, but the worst is, they simply won’t Americanize.
They won’t vote either the Rotary or the Ku Klux
ticket. They keep hollering about wanting some kind
of a doggone Third Party.”

Scandinavians take to American commerce and
schooling and journalism as do Scotsmen or Cockneys.
Particularly they take to American politics, the good
old politics of Harrison and McKinley and Charley
Murphy. Usually, they bring nothing new from their
own experimental countries. They permit their tra-
ditions to be snatched away. ‘True, many of them
have labored for the Nonpartisan League, for woman
suffrage, for cooperative societies. The late Governor
John Johnson of Minnesota seems to have been a
man of destiny; had he lived he would probably have
been President, and possibly a President of power and
originality. But again—there was Senator Knute Nel-
son, who made McCumber look like a left-wing syndi-
calist and Judge Gary like Francois Villon. There
is Congressman Steenerson of Minnesota, chairman
of the House postal committee. Mr. Steenerson once
produced, out of a rich talent matured by a quarter
of a century in the House, an immortal sentence. He
had been complaining at lunch that the Nonpartisan
League had introduced the obscene writings of ‘“‘this
Russian woman, Ellen Key,” into the innocent public
schools. Someone hinted to the Scandinavian Mr.
Steenerson, ‘But I thought she was a Swede.”

He answered: “No, the Key woman comes from
Finland and the rest of Red Russia, where they nation-
alize the women.”

Naturally it is the two new Senators, Hendrik
Shipstead and Magnus Johnson, who now represent26 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

to the world the Scandinavian element in Minnesota.
How much they may bring to the cautious respecta-
bility of the Senate cannot be predicted but certainly,
like John Johnson, they vigorously represent every-
thing that is pioneer, democratic, realistic, American
in our history.

Good and bad, the Scandinavians monopolize Min-
nesota politics. Of the last nine governors of the
State, including Senatorial-Candidate Preus, six have
been Scandinavians. So is Harold Knutson, Republi-
can whip of the House. Scandinavians make up a
large proportion of the Minnesota State Legislature,
and while in Santa Fé the Mexican legislators speak
Spanish, while in Quebec the representatives still -de-
bate in French though for generations they have been
citizens of a British dominion, in Minnesota the poli-
ticians who were born abroad are zealous to speak
nothing but Americanese. Thus it is in business and
the home. Though a man may not have left Scandi-
navia till he was twenty, his sons will use the same
English, good and bad, as the sons of settlers from
Maine, and his daughters will go into music clubs or
into cocktail sets, into college or into factories, with
the same prejudices and ideals and intonations as girls
named Smith and Brewster.

The curious newness of Minnesota has been sug-
gested, but the really astonishing thing is not the
newness—it is the oldness, the solid, traditionalized,
cotton-wrapped oldness. A study of it would be
damaging to the Free and Fluid Young America
theory. While parts of the State are still so raw
that the villages among the furrows or the dusty
pines are but frontier camps, in the cities and in aMINNESOTA 27

 

 

 

few of the towns there is as firm a financial obligarchy
and almost as definite a social system as London, and
this power is behind all Sound Politics, in direct or in-
direct control of all business. It has its Old Families,
who tend to marry only within their set. Anywhere
in the world, an Old Family is one which has had
wealth for at least thirty years longer than average
families of the same neighborhood. In England, it
takes (at most) five generations to absorb “parvenus’’
and ‘‘profiteers’’ into the gentry, whether they were
steel profiteers in the Great War or yet untitled land
profiteers under William the Conqueror. In New
York it takes three generations—often. In the Middle
West it takes one and a half.

No fable is more bracing, or more absurd, than
that all the sons and grandsons of the pioneers, in
Minnesota or in California, in Arizona or Nebraska,
are racy and breezy, unmannerly but intoxicatingly free.
The grandchildren of men who in 1862 fought the
Minnesota Indians, who dogtrotted a hundred miles
over swamp-blurred trails to bear the alarm to the
nearest troops—some of them are still clearing the
land, but some of them are complaining of the un-
English quality of the Orange Pekoe in dainty painty
city tea-rooms which stand where three generations
ago the Red River fur-carts rested; their chaufteurs
await them in Pierce Arrow limousines (special bodies
by Kimball, silver fittings from Tiffany) ; they present
Schnitzler and St. John Ervine at their Little Theaters;
between rehearsals they chatter of meeting James
Joyce in Paris; and always in high-pitched Mayfair
laughter they ridicule the Scandinavians and Finns whoHO Sok
AER EED: BERREREES HOUR OAEEEE

EAE ae PTL EL ELE AR ET ae
ease A AO TS I ee aS

     

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
  

28 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

are trying to shoulder into their sacred, ancient Yankee
caste. A good many of their names are German.

Naturally, beneath this Junker class there is a use-
ful, sophisticated, and growing company of doctors,
teachers, newspapermen, liberal lawyers, musicians who
have given up Munich and Milan for the interest~
of developing orchestras in the new land. ‘There
is a scientific body of farmers. The agricultural school
of the huge University of Minnesota is sound and
creative. And still more naturally, between Labor
and Aristocracy there is an army of the peppy, poker-
playing, sales-hustling He-men who are our most char-
acteristic Americans. But even the He-men are not
so obvious as they seem. What their future is, no
man knows—and no woman dares believe. It is con-
ceivable that, instead of being a menace in their naive
boosting and their fear of the unusual, they may pass
only too soon; it is possible that their standardized
bathrooms and Overlands will change to an equally
standardized and formula-bound culture—yearning
Culture, arty Art. We have been hurled from to-
bacco-chewing to tea-drinking with gasping speed; we
may as quickly dash from boosting to a beautiful and
languorous death. If it is necessary to be Fabian in
politics, to keep the reformers (left wing or rigid
right) from making us perfect too rapidly, it is yet
more necessary to be a little doubtful about the ardent
souls who would sell Culture; and if the Tired Busi-
ness Man is unlovely and a little dull, at least he is
real, and we shall build only on reality.

Small is the ducal set which controls these other
classes. It need be but small. In our rapid accumu-
lation of wealth we have been able to create an oli-MINNESOTA

 

 

garchy with ease and efficiency, with none of the vulgar
risks which sword-girt Norfolks and Percys encoun-
tered. This is one of the jests which we have per-
petrated. The nimbler among our pioneering grand-
fathers appropriated to their private uses some
thousands of square miles in northern Minnesota, and
cut off—or cheerfully lost by forest fire—certain bil-
lions of feet of such lumber as will never be seen
again. When the lumber was gone, the land seemed
worthless. It was good for nothing but agriculture,
which is an unromantic occupation, incapable of mak-
ing millionaires in one generation. The owners had
few of them acquired more than a million dollars, and
now they could scarcely give their holdings away. Sud-
denly, on parts of this scraggly land, iron was discov-
ered, iron in preposterous quantities, to be mined in
the open pit, as easily as hauling out gravel. Here
is the chief supply of the Gary and South Chicago
mills. The owners of the land do not mine the ore.
They have gracefully leased it—though we are but
Westerners, we have our subsidiary of the United
States Steel Company. The landowner himself has
only to go abroad and sit in beauty like a flower, and
every time a steam shovel dips into the ore, a quarter
drops into his pocket.

So at last our iron-lumber-flour railroad aristocracy
has begun to rival the beef barons of Chicago, the coal
lords of Pennsylvania, and the bond princes of New
York.

This article is intended to be a secret but flagrant
boost. It is meant to increase civic pride and the value
of Minnesota real estate. Yet the writer wonders
if he will completely satisfy his chambers of com-30 THESE UNITED STATES

merce. There is a chance that they would prefer
a statement of the value of our dairy products, the
number of our admirable new school-buildings, the
number of motor tourists visiting our lakes, and an
account of James J. Hill’s encouraging progress from
poverty to magnificence. But a skilled press agent
knows that this would not be a boost; it would be
an admission of commerce-ruled barrenness. The in-
teresting thing in Minnesota is the swift evolution of
a complex social system, and, since in two generations
we have changed from wilderness to country clubs,
the question is what the next two generations will pro-
duce. It defies certain answer; it demands a scrupulous
speculation free equally from the bland certitudes of
chambers of commerce and the sardonic impatience of
professional radicals. To a realistic philosopher, the
existence of an aristocracy is not (since it does exist)
a thing to be bewailed, but to be examined as a fact.

There is one merit not of Minnesota alone but of
all the Middle West which must be considered. The
rulers of our new land may to the eye seem alto-
gether like the rulers of the East—of New England,
New York, Pennsylvania. Both groups are chiefly
reverent toward banking, sound Republicanism, the
playing of golf and bridge, and the possession of
large motors. But whereas the Easterner is content
with these symbols and smugly desires nothing else,
the Westerner, however golfocentric he may be, is not
altogether satisfied; and raucously though he may
snortle at his wife’s “fool suffrage ideas” and “all
this highbrow junk the lecture-hounds spring on you,’’
yet secretly, wistfully he desires a beauty that he does
not understand.MINNESOTA 21

~

 

 

 

As a pendant, to hint that our society has become
somewhat involved in the few years since Mr. Henry
Lorenz of Saskatchewan was seventy, let me illogi-
cally lump a few personal observations of Minnesota:

Here is an ex-professor of history in the State Uni-
versity, an excellent scholar who, retiring after many
years of service, cheerfully grows potatoes in a back-
woods farm among the northern Minnesota pines, and
builds up codperative selling for all the farmers of
his district.

Here is the head of a Minneapolis school for kinder-
gartners, a woman who is summoned all over the coun-
try to address teachers’ associations. She will not
admit candidates for matriculation until she is sure
that they have a gift for teaching. She does some-
thing of the work of a Montessori, with none of the
trumpeting and anguish of the dottoressa.

Here is the greatest, or certainly the largest, medi-
cal clinic in the world—the Mayo clinic, with over
a hundred medical specialists besides the clerks and
nurses. It is the supreme court of diagnosis. Though
it is situated in a small town, off the through rail
routes, it is besieged by patients from Utah and On-
tario and New York as much as by Minnesotans.
When the famous European doctors come to America,
they may look at the Rockefeller Institute, they may
stop at Harvard and Rush and Johns Hopkins and
the headquarters of the American Medical Associa-
tion, but certainly they will go on to Rochester. The
names of “Charley” and “Will” have something of
the familiarity of R. L. S.” anda:

Here is a Chippewa as silent and swart as his
grandfather, an active person whom the cavalry used

   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
   

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Bi ea!

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SE A TT ET RRA RE RE Sa iE OL Te aR ar

 

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32 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

to hunt every open season. The grandson conducts
a garage, and he actually understands ignition. His
farm among the lowering Norway pines he plows with
a tractor.

Here is a new bookshop which is publishing the
first English translation of the letters of Abélard. The
translator, Henry Bellows, is a Ph.D., an editor, and

| a colonel of militia.

Here are really glorious buildings: the Minneapolis
Art Institute, the State Capitol, the St. Paul Public
Library, and Ralph Adams Cram’s loveliest church.
Here, on the shore of Lake of the Isles, is an Italian
palace built by a wheat speculator. Here where five
years ago were muddy ruts are perfect cement roads.

Here is a small town, a “typical prairie town,’
which has just constructed a competent golf course.
From this town came a minister to Siam and a pro-
fessor of history in Columbia.

And here are certain Minnesota authors. You
know what Mid-Western authors are—rough fellows
but vigorous, ignorant of the classics and of Burgundy,
yet close to the heart of humanity. They write about
farmyards and wear flannel shirts. Let us confirm
this portrait by a sketch of eleven Minnesota authors,
most of them born in the State:

Charles Flandrau, author of “Harvard Episodes”
and ‘Viva Mexico,” one-time Harvard instructor, now
wandering in Spain. Agnes Repplier has called him

the swiftest blade among American essayists. Scott
Fitzgerald, very much a Minnesotan, yet the father
of the Long Island flapper, the prophet of the Ritz,
the idol of every Junior League. Alice Ames Winter,
recently president of the General Federation ofMINNESOTA

 

 

Women’s Clubs. Claude Washburn, author of ‘The
Lonely Warrior’ and several other novels which,
though they are laid in America, imply a European
background. He has lived for years now in France
and Italy. Margaret Banning, author of ‘‘Spell-
binders.”’ Thomas Boyd, author of that valiant im-
pression of youth in battle, “Through the Wheat.”
Grace Flandrau, of “Being Respectable’ and other
authentically sophisticated novels. Woodward Boyd,
whose first novel, ‘“The Love Legend,” is a raid on
the domestic sentimentalists. Carlton Miles, a dra-
matic critic who gives his Minnesota readers the latest
news of the continental stage. He is just back from
a European year spent with such men as Shaw, Drink-
water, and the director of La Scala. Brenda Ueland,
who lives in Greenwich Village and writes for the
Atlantic Monthly. Sinclair Lewis, known publicly as
a scolding corn-belt realist, but actually (as betrayed
by the samite-yclad, Tennyson-and-water verse which
he wrote when he was in college) a yearner over what
in private life he probably calls ‘“‘quaint ivied cot-
tages.”

Seventy-five years ago—a Chippewa-haunted wilder-
ness. Today
which, stirring or dismaying or both, is altogether

a complex civilization with a future

 

unknowable. ‘To understand America, it is merely
necessary to understand Minnesota. But to under-
stand Minnesota you must be an historian, an ethnolo-
gist, a poet, a cynic, and a graduate prophet all in
one.PEO RRRGEG

 

  
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
    

MONTANA
LAND OF THE COPPER COLLAR
By ARTHUR FISHER

Srx months is the longest one may live in Montana

without making the decision whether one is “for the

Company” or “against the Company.” Even some

members of that ever-growing stream of automobile

pilgrims which enters our hot sage-brush plains from

North Dakota’s prairies and threads its way west-

ward through the irrigated valley of the Yellowstone

are frequently to be found enlisted in one camp or

the other before they have zigzagged down from some

pass over the Rockies and crept along a narrow ledge

above a roaring stream through the canyon into Idaho.

The all-pervading and unrelenting nature of the Mon-

3 tana struggle admits of no neutrals. Since the terri-
tory’s admission to statehood in 1889 the conflict has

continued. On the one hand, firmly intrenched, stand

the ramifying and interlinked corporate interests cen-

tering in the copper industry, now under the leader-

ship of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. On

the other stands the rest of the population which feels

it has no stake in the Company’s prosperity but sufters

| from the Company’s exploitation of every natural re-
| source and profitable privilege, its avoidance of taxa-
| tion, and its dominance of the political and educa-
tional life of the State. The latter side has the largest

potential man-power, although the forces of the Com-

pany, including all officers, henchmen, agents, sub-

54

PEMONTANA 35

 

 

 

 

 

 

agents, employees who feel their livelihood is de-
pendent upon their public attitude, unaffiliated
business interests who sell to the Company and its sub-
sidiaries or who must secure banking credits, and pro-
fessional men to whom business can be thrown and
who desire to rise in the social world—all these total
a considerable number. The opposition is only par-
tially united by farmer and labor organizations led
by intermittent crusaders for the democratic idea.
Commonly such leaders are not entirely devoid of
personal political ambition, although even for these
the risks and the sacrifices are by no means small.
But the Company is led by a single united command
of professional soldiers designated in Montana by the
term “on the pay roll.’ The local field office in Butte
is popularly known as ‘‘The Sixth Floor of the Hen-
nesey Building’’—awe-inspiring title. Of the general
headquarters back of the lines, ultimate source of all
authority, Montanans are never reminded by the local
press except when a short news item announces that
the private car of Mr. John D. Ryan or Mr. Con
Kelly arrived on the Missoula or Great Falls or Butte
siding last night—from New York City.

This important event usually occurs just prior to
the breaking out of one of the big engagements, the
biennial election, when the heavy guns are brought up
and the very heavens are torn by the thunder of the
campaign artillery and illumined by the fireworks of
the press. Money is poured out like water; and
men fall by the hundred before the temptations of
the bribe-giver or the promise of future preferment,
and the fear of the consequences if they do not yield.
Frequently the atmosphere is charged to such a point

 
   
    
 
  
  
 
    
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
   
 
 
   

OTS ae a TESS

——— ae af

    

 

   

36 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

that neighbor hardly dares speak to neighbor, and
entire communities are rent in two by passion and
fear.

Between the major campaigns ceaseless guerrilla
warfare is waged, now and then breaking out in the
form of a labor battle in the mining camps, the am-
bushing of a teacher in the State University, or the
shooting in the back of some small business man who
talked too independently. In addition a continuous
flood of propaganda is poured out by the Company
press, which includes nearly every daily paper and
most of the weeklies, to maintain morale and win
new recruits. Every newcomer to the State is ap-
proached through suggestion and advice, through busi-
ness pressure and social temptation, until the day when
he expresses some sentiment which henceforth throws
him definitely into one camp or the other. Thereafter
he is fair game for the side which he has slighted. And
there are no closed seasons. The struggle of the Com-
pany to maintain its rule and its privileges against
the people’s attempts to subject it to democratic con-
trol is an economic and political conflict in which the
entire social development of the State is inextricably
interwoven. But the conflict is more than that. It is
the leading sporting event in- Montana life.

What the Harvard-Yale game is to intercollegiate
football, what the Davis Cup matches are to inter-
national tennis, what the Grand National is to the
English racing world, the World Series to baseball,
the Mardi Gras to New Orleans, or the Rose Festival
to Portland, what a good county court-house trial
used to be before the days of the movie, all this and
more the battles with the Company are to Montana.MONTANA 37

 

 

 

 

They form Montana’s epic; an epic told through ten
thousand newspaper editorials, ten thousand stump
speeches, ten thousand unwritten anecdotes. The uni-
versal topic of conversation, it serves as a common
interest to unite the people of the State even as at the
same time it separates them into two warring camps.

For years the key to the major operations in the
conflict has been a short clause in the State constitu-
tion, adopted when Montana entered the Union for
the purpose of encouraging the mining industry to
develop the State, and remaining unchanged since then.
This clause provides that mineral lands shall not be
assessed for purposes of taxation at a higher value
than the price at which the lands were acquired from
the Federal Government. As in no case did this
amount exceed $5 an acre, and as today many of
these holdings in “the richest hill in the world,” as
Butte proudly boasts, are worth many hundreds of
thousands of dollars, it is not dificult to understand
why the Company considers expenditure of unmeas-
ured sums for the purpose of winning an election or
for ‘“‘publicity and education” justified by the strictest
business considerations.

Just at present the severe agricultural depression
through which the State is passing has brought all tax
issues to the front and has united the forces demand-
ing a revision of the constitutional provision, so that
the Company has succeeded in blocking reform only
by the narrowest of margins. Prosperity may disunite
the people before the change is effected. But some
day, perhaps in five years, perhaps in twenty, this
peculiarly crude and obviously discriminatory consti-
tutional privilege is certain to be remedied. It is by38 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

no means as certain, however, that this will end the
struggle between the people and the Company. The
situation in Montana is not the same or as simple as
that which formerly existed in most of the Middle
Western States in the old days of railway rule. In
Montana the railways have long since yielded first
place to the Company. They still, of course, employ
expert lobbyists, but they attempt no wholesale win-
ning of elections nor purchase of legislatures. In a
State with only half a million population, which it
takes as long to cross by limited train as it does to
go from Chicago to New York, the influence of three
transcontinental railway systems is by no means slight.
And although there is considerable talk of taking the
public into the railways’ confidence, there is good
reason for suspicion that the bonds of unity of in-
terest reaching out from higher banking circles lead
the railways to take the Company more often into
‘ts confidence than the public—and to find reasons for
siding with the Company in its hottest battles.

These battles will not end so long as the Company
remains a combination of all the really profitable priv-
ileges and large-scale undertakings in the State. Copper
is only the core. Surrounding this core are the largest
lumber interests in the State; and the untouched timber
resources in the jumble of mountain ranges which
cross Montana, reaching their highest point in the
Continental Divide, are extensive and are controlled
by the Anaconda Company. So also are the princi-
pal banks, the largest water-power company, the
smelters, coal companies, land companies, public utili-
ties, newspapers, mercantile concerns. Where there
is not outright ownership by the Company there is———eo~"—~<“ 2 A aA

     
  
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 

MONTANA 39

 

 

 

 

 

identity of interest and an affiliation which reaches
the same end of harmonious and united action. All W
this is the Company; and the Company is more than i
this; for it controls in Connecticut the largest Ameri-
can brass company and domestic user of copper, and
controls extensive ore deposits in South America and
other parts of the world. When the constitutional
mining-tax clause is a thing of the past, the struggle |
will still go on, widened, more complex, more difficult
to dramatize, but no less vital to the success of the
democratic ideal in our third largest State.
Unlike the situation in some other States, such as
Delaware, where the power of the Du Ponts is per-
haps even more complete and no less ramifying and
carefully protected by every outwork and fortification
of control of education and public opinion, the Mon-
tana fight is characterized by its openness and the
vigor of the champions on either side. Senator Burton
K. Wheeler in the national arena has recently aroused
the spectators by his direct methods and energy.
Wheeler was trained in the Montana school. And
in Montana there has never been supine admission of
the hopelessness of the struggle, no silent submission
to an insidious all-embracing octopus. In Montana
the copper collar shines brazenly forth for all to see.
Davids go bravely forth to the blare of trumpets to
battle with Goliath. And their whitening bones strew |
the wayside like the skulls of the bison which once
in countless thousands roamed Montana’s plains.
The tradition of the open fight began in Montana
in the days before the copper industry had been |
brought under one single dominant control as it is
today. The mining interests worked together against40 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the live-stock men and the rest of the State, but within
their own ranks there were vigorous clashes in which
Irish labor followed Irish mine owner against Oppos-
ing operators with the traditional loyalty and fighting
spirit of the old country clans. The occasion for
these sanguinary battles between companies has passed
and the Irish blood has been largely replaced by 1m-
migrants from Southern Europe but the fighting spirit
and much of the Irish leadership lives on. Nor has
the fighting spirit failed to draw some sustenance in
blood and traditions from districts removed from the
mining camps. Montana cherishes her traditions and
has developed a form of ancestor worship of which
hardly less is heard than in Massachusetts Bay itself
albeit the canvas of Montana’s Mayflowers was
nailed down on the hoops topping heavy prairie
schooners, and, her pilgrim fathers bear the locally
revered title of “the pioneers.” ‘These traditions speak
much of vigilantes, of posses, of hangings after quick
trials, of cattle wars against homesteaders and sheep
men, of Indian wars and Custer’s last stand.

The hand-to-hand engagements of most of the bat-
tles of today occur in or about the trenches of the
Butte hill—that city in size and downtown appear-
ance, perched on a gashed and torn foothill of the
Rockies, shafts and drifts and tunnels and ore dumps
cropping up between skyscrapers and prosperous down-
town clubs and churches, a city, yet no more than
“the biggest mining camp in the world.” Seen from
a distance at night as the limited train starts crawl-
ing down from the crest of the Continental Divide it
‘5 not unbeautiful, a hill of sparkling lights under a
cloudless heaven of stars. At noon with a hot sun beat-MONTANA

 

 

 

 

ing down from that same cloudless sky upon a jumble
of tall buildings and shacks, not a spear of grass or
other vegetation in sight, clouds of dust swirling
through the streets filled with miners idle through a
lay-off, the blacklist, or a preference for bumming
to going back into the deep hot mines, it is as for-
bidding a town as any in the United States. Either
in the heat of summer or in the severe cold of the
winter it is a town where the thin air of the high
altitude stimulates men’s nerves and their appetites
for the night life of the mining camp; and readily
turns the hard-faced restless crowd full of injured,
limbless, and diseased men into a mob.

These physical conditions and the nature of the
occupation have had none of their raw edges smoothed
by the labor policies of the Company. The tempera-
ture in the mines is commonly above 100 degrees, and
the men’s lungs are eaten by the dust and their skin
by the drip of the copper-impregnated water on bare,
stooping backs. Following periods of tremendous
profits, such as that enjoyed during the war, the mines
and smelters have been closed without the slightest
provision for the mass of the employees or their fami-
lies. It is not strange that few men undertake the
burden of a family which must almost of necessity
transform them into abject slaves of the Company.
The intemperance, instability, and violence of the
Butte labor movement and its publications—foremost
of these the sometimes brilliant and always radical
Butte Bulletin—are the natural result of conditions
in Butte and of the labor policies of the Anaconda
Copper Mining Company and the personnel of local
managers selected by absentee ownership.ee =

  

WEGREUEREGEERRELLERERURELAEHRTRUEERU EDERAL , spy?
APPARAESEAPELERSEOEARE PURRERAEA EST ORRTOER ERED ORER EOE AEA: j

| threat
aeenal PORORRaee,

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42 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

But Butte is not Montana, nor are even the smelter
towns of Anaconda and Great Falls and other lesser
mining districts Montana in any other sense than that
they caricature the ultimate product of the Montana
conflict, the symbol of which is the body of the union
organizer Frank Little hanging from a railway trestle,
or the office of the Butte Daily Bulletin in an aban-
doned church guarded by a “red guard” of rifles
through a night of battle, a night, be it said, not
entirely unwelcomed by the members of that “red
guard,” the fiery writers of the Bulletin, and the of-
ficers of the local O.B.U. and I.W.W.

But there are other figures also symbolic of Mon-
tana, lesser figures at the pedestal of the statue and
in low relief around it.

A tall quiet-faced farmer with sleeves rolled above
the bulging muscles of his tanned forearm stands in
knee boots in the mud of an irrigated wheat field. A
river winds through the flat below the ditch; above
roll endlessly treeless hills cut by treeless gulches.

A slouching rider walks an ambling cow-pony along
a straight wire fence which disappears both ahead
and behind over the same silver gray sage-covered
hills. A few red steers look up from the sparse bunch
grass at the bottom of a sandy hollow.

A sharp-eared and alert sheep dog trots behind
a dusty cloud of bleating sheep, in the midst of which
walks a dark Basque with a crook, looking less human
and less intelligent than the dog. In the dim distance
vague dark shadows stretch along the horizon, spotted
with white cloudlike patches at their tops—snow peaks

of the mountains!
A smiling round-cheeked girl in a blue ginghamMONTANA 4

 

apron stands on a ladder in a great orchard of evenly-
placed trees specked with red. At her feet is a box
full of red apples. Above her, so sheer as to seem
to overhang the valley, are jagged saw-tooth peaks
of black rock, a white finger of snow lying in a gulch
between. The air is full of the sweet, cool smell of
pine woods.

A crowd of lumberjacks and harvest hands in macki-
naw coats sit about a small camp fire on the edge
of a railway yard. Tin cans are propped over the
fire, and dirty blanket rolls lie near by. One of the
‘‘bos”’ reads from a small red paper-covered book en-
titled “Songs of the I.W.W.” A railway switchman
walks along the cinder track to his home in an aban-
doned box car; he waves a friendly hand to the men
by the fire.

A square tar-paper shack stands on a slight ridge.
Several windows are broken in; sand has drifted over
the wooden box branded “Carnation Milk” which
serves as a doorstep; a rusty tractor stands in the
yard around which a barbed wire fence is broken
down; weeds waist-high grow in all the surrounding
hollows and on all the treeless hills. A dry-land
farmer once thought here was to be his Eldorado.

Up to the outbreak of the World War, and even
for a year or so thereafter, almost anyone in Mon-
tana would have risked the prophecy that another
decade would see agriculture the dominant interest
of the State. It seemed certain that a new weight
was to be thrown into the scales of battle and that
the Company would soon have to yield to the new
battalions arriving by the trainload, lured by the vivid
recruiting literature and enticements of the railroadsBEObaES

 

  
  
 
 
 
 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  

 

44 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

and the State immigration service—lawyers, mechanics,
teachers, factory hands, clerks, doctors, farmers from
the Middle West, none familiar with the peculiar prob-
lems either of dry-farming or irrigation. For a few
years those who first turned the sparse desert sod in
this new migration prospered. ‘They enjoyed better
than normal rainfall and better than normal prices
for wheat. Then followed four years in which the
rainfall dropped from the 16-inch average to 8 inches,
and the price of wheat was cut more than in half.
Many a dry-land home miles from water or tree knew
actual hunger, and all knew privation, disappointment,
and misery as they saw green fields wither and die
before the hot winds. And even the irrigated districts
saw all profits disappear before low prices, high trans-
portation rates, and burdensome charges for water.
So today these acres on the margin of profitable
cultivation which are Montana—on the margin both
because of scanty rainfall and the cost of placing
water on the land—are being foreclosed and aban-
doned wholesale. In some dry counties of Montana
80 per cent of the farm lands have reverted to the
State for failure to pay taxes, and bank after bank
has closed its doors. Pressure of population is almost
certain to make the irrigated districts ultimately profit-
able for those who can hang on, or for their suc-
cessors. In the meantime the Federal irrigation
service will have to wait for repayment of its expendi-
ture and even for interest on the money. But whether
the great dry-land area of Montana will ever be more
than a siren temptress to the uninformed—one good
crop year and two failures—remains to be seen. The
possibilities of science in soil culture and in plantMONTANA 4

Wr

 

 

 

 

 

breeding are beyond prediction; western Nebraska and
Kansas, with hardly more rainfall than eastern Moh-
tana’s average, were once abandoned by the first dis-
illusioned victims of the railway settlers’ bureaus.
Science in marketing methods and codperative distrib-
uting may also do much. But in the meantime the once-
tilled lands of dry Montana are going back to the
cattle range, a range scarred and ruined for years to
come by the turning of the natural sod.

‘“Montana’s real trouble,” said an old rancher to
me, “is that her graveyards aren’t big enough.” He
explained that he was not advocating a general resort
to the hangings of vigilante days, nor even waiting
until a new generation came on the scene, but that
more Montanans must come to look upon the State
as their permanent home and final resting place. From
the first pioneers who washed their fortunes out of
the gold placers, with hydraulic pressure turning
pleasant hillsides into desolate wastes of boulders,
nearly all who have come to Montana have looked
forward to the day when they would have accumu-
lated sufficient funds to permit them to live out the
remainder of their days in southern California,
Florida, or New York. Now and then a big brown
stone house is erected on the hilly streets of Helena
as a monument to financial success; but the owners
are usually found living elsewhere. And the mansion
of Montana’s richest citizen, who still keeps his local
legal residence (whether out of sentiment or to avoid
income and inheritance taxes is not known), stands
on Fifth Avenue, New York City—the “home” of
ex-Senator W. A. Clark.

Unlike such a State as Colorado, where the tourist46 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

population almost exceeds the resident population and
is one of the State’s leading industries, Montana has
done little to promote tourist traffic. Glacier Park
is the advertising product of one railway and the play-
thing of the son of a great railway pioneer who opened
up northern Montana, James J. Hill. It has hardly
yet repaid interest on the investment, though its strik-
ing beauty may before long do so. Other sections
of Montana’s mountains are hardly less attractive;
yet they have not been capitalized to the extent
even of the establishment of the “dude ranches” of
Wyoming. Nevertheless every Montana rancher feels
he has neglected his family if he is unable to find some
period between planting or irrigating or harvesting
or fall plowing when he can pack them all into a
car or wagon, leave the stock in charge of relatives or
neighbors, and take a camping, fishing, or hunting trip
in the hills.

Indeed, a symbol of Montana second only to the
copper collar itself is that of a fisherman whipping
a trout stream. No single subject in the legislature
evokes the statewide attention, the enthusiasm, or the
intelligent interest of a debate on the biennial revision
of the fish and game laws. But even in this fact
the coils of the Anaconda may be seen; for fishing
is a pleasanter and more diverting subject to discuss
than taxation. Native Montanans who can sell noth-
ing directly to the tourist trade are not enthusiastic
about poachers on their fishing preserves; and it is
expensive to build roads which will stand up under
the wheels of the endless chain of cars which goes
trekking across the State piled high and bulging side-
wise with tents, extra cans of oil and gas, blanket rolls,MONTANA

 

 

and every sort of paraphernalia, the dust hardly given
time to settle before it is stirred up by the Ford be-
hind. Although rain may turn this dust into a quag-
mire of mud—the famous gumbo— in the course of a
few moments’ shower, and all automobile traffic of
whatever nature be forced to suspend, no trip or family
picnic is ever spoiled for a native Montanan by rain.
In the midst of the hardest downpour or the most
prolonged drizzle, whether in town or country, he
greets everyone he meets with a broad smile.

“Fine weather, isn’t it?’ he beams.

“Another million-dollar shower,’”’ is the response.

“Tf we get one more like this the crop is made.”’

Doubtless even the officials of the Company wel-
come a real Montana soaker, and watch with satisfac-
tion the official rain gauge creep upwards, in the criti-
cal time of year, above the 8-inch minimum to the
16-inch average, even though they never find time to
say so in the midst of their praises of the benefits to
the State of A.C.M. development and their denunci-
ations as dangerous radicals of every member of farmer
organization, labor union, or independent political
group. For in a personal way the Company’s offcial-
dom and subordinates are for the most part “good
fellows’? who have risen from the ranks; something
of the free and easy ways of the mining camp or the
open range still clinging to them; and Montana is still
too young and too near to the frontier to have yet
produced those worst of human products, snobbery
and the glowering resentment of a long-submerged
people. In Montana one may still speak to a man as
a man—before drilling him or his business or his
reputation full of holes.FLORIDA
THE DESERT AND THE ROSE

By CLARA G, STILLMAN

A FLAT, sandy, sun-bathed plain sprinkled with a
sparse monotony of pine, punctuated here and there
with vague swamplands and thick, rich forests intri-
cate with interlacings of hardwood, scrub and vine,
and jeweled with thousands of sparkling lakes, streams
and fountains—such is Florida, a paradise for in-
valids, sportsmen and naturalists. To the east the
far-flung coast line harbors still other waterways,
creat salt rivers and lakes formed by shallow sand-
bars and peninsulas lying parallel with the mainland.
To the south lies the vast region of the Everglades,
eight thousand square miles of swamp and partly sub-
merged prairie bristling with rapier-edged sawgrass
eight feet high, a panoplied wilderness only recently
penetrated by white men, through which Indians have
traveled swiftly from time immemorial. The west
coast, curving widely around the gulf, crumbles away
at its southern end into the archipelago of the Ten
Thousand Islands, a land of mystery, a labyrinth of
woods, swamps, mud flats, beaches, bays, channels
and fierce tidal rivers that has never been completely
explored. Most of the southern shore, too, is a little
known wilderness. Florida preserves for us, though
probably not for long, our last remnant of virgin soil.

No other State thrusts down into the Tropics. No
other contains so many kinds of climate and soil, such
48FLORIDA 49

 

 

 

 

an elongated and diversified coastline, such a widely
distributed and easily tapped water supply, such varied
luxuriance of native and naturalized vegetation. As
a final unique gesture there are the Keys, that exotic
flourish beyond the mainland’s southern tip, of coral
and limestone reefs and prickly island jungles, swept
and sculptured into jagged grotesqueness by wild tropic
tides, eternally being built up and dissolved away by
the fierce action of wind and sea—remote repositories
of curious and entrancing forms of life.

Physically then, Florida has everything except moun-
tains—there are even hills, rising between three and
four hundred feet in its center and its rolling north-
west corner—and it can produce almost anything ex-
cept apples and wheat. What the landscape lacks in
plastic beauty it compensates for by its suave and deli-
cate coloring, the luminous cloud pictures that lift its
flatness into the soaring magic of argosies and Wal-
hallas, and the sparkling caress of its air, woven of
sea tang, sunbeam and pine, with something inde-
scribably mellow that is at once languorous and in-
spiriting and pleasantly confusing to the senses; so
that one soon feasts one’s eyes on the warmth about
one and feels the healing radiance of color soak into
one’s highly sensitized pores.

In 1513 came Ponce de Leon seeking the fabled
island of Bimini, its fountain of youth and its mythi-
cal treasure far surpassing the known splendors of
Mexico and Peru. Other Spaniards soon followed.
The search for renewed youth, the desire for gold
were the lures that first brought white men to these
shores, and in a somewhat changed form still continue

to bring them. ‘The Spaniards held the land withEET

Se

 

   

50 THESE UNITED STATES
one short interruption for two hundred and fifty years.
They found and left it a teeming wilderness. For
three hundred and fifty years the smiling region was
tossed about like a football among the nations. From
Spain to England, from England back to Spain, from
Spain in part to France, finally from France and
Spain to the United States. It became a territory
distracted by Indian wars, then a State entering the
Union only to secede a few months later, then a State
once more, enfeebled by civil war and racked with
war-born hatreds and maladjustments. During all this
time the face of Florida changed but little, but al-
ways blood ran in plenty. Blood of Catholic and
Huguenot, of Spaniard and Frenchman, of Briton and
Indian, of Negro and white American soaked into the
sterile sands or fertilized the tangled growth of swamp
and hammock. The history of the State shows little
continuity or coherence. When Britain took posses-
sion nearly the whole Spanish population emigrated.
When Spain returned there was a general exodus of
British. Hardly a trace of either occupation persisted.
Northwest Florida, with the exception of St. Augustine
and the St. John’s River country, the earliest settled
section, was ravaged by ‘nvasions French, Spanish,
American. ‘Three times Pensacola was taken and
finally burned to the ground. Crudity, disorganization
and bloodshed were for centuries the normal condition.
During the Revolution the State was a base for
loyalist plots. Seven thousand Tories fled there. The
wilderness beyond the frontier became a refuge for
fugitive slaves and other outlaws. Lo the more ac-
cessible regions there was 4a trickle of immigration
from the North, from Alabama and Georgia, mainlyFLORIDA 1
a low grade of white squatter, but conditions were
not such as to attract wealth or culture. Florida had
so far been a place from which men thought to carry
away something they wanted or to which to escape
from something they did not want. They went but
rarely with the idea of founding homes and stable
communities. Such germs of social life and refinement
as existed were concentrated in the great cotton planta-
tions and the few small towns in the North. The least
developed territory admitted to statehood, Florida was
at the outbreak of the Civil War the poorest of the
Southern States, with the fewest towns, plantations
and slaves. Its population was about 140,000. Its
life was of the most primitively rural type. Its whole
productiveness consisted of a few staples such as cot-
ton, turpentine and lumber for export and vegetables
for home consumption. It had no social, political or
religious traditions, such as went to the founding of
Massachusetts, Maryland, Virginia or South Carolina,
and no homogeneous group of citizens bound by com-
mon ideals to develop it in any particular direction.
T’o other obstacles to its development may be added
the various epidemics, fires and frosts which at one
time or another wiped out struggling or established
communities and promising ventures in orange culture.
Immigration for the culture of oranges and the taking
up of land for homes began seriously about 1870.
“The orange craze has developed within the last six
or eight years,” says an investigator who visited the
county in 1880." In the eighties, too, were discovered
the great phosphate fields of the Southwest. But long
before that St. Augustine and the St. John’s River had

1G. M. Barbour, Florida for Tourists, Invalids and Settlers, 1882.52 THESE UNITED STATES

been centers of winter travel for health and amuse-
ment. In 1869, “At St. Augustine,” a tourist of
that day relates,” “the fashionable belle of Newport
and Saratoga and the pale, thoughtful and furloughed
clergyman of New England were at all points en-

Sountered. . . . Lnvalids) have ong sought this por-
tion of the Union and its general reputation has
steadily increased.” Hotels were few and bad, roads

wretched and travel difficult and uncomfortable. “We
had completed a long journey seldom taken—a ride
across the heart of South Florida from the Atlantic
to the Gulf,” writes the traveler of 1880. He had
journeyed from Rockledge to Tampa, hardly what
would now be called the heart of Southern Florida.
Palm Beach was non-existent, Miami slumbered in
the womb of time, Tampa itself had only 1,500 in-
habitants, and St. Petersburg was not. There were
almost no railroads except one or two short mule
power affairs with wooden ties that frequently col-
lapsed, upon which the passengers turned out and
helped the conductor fnd and fashion new ones. Yet
even then our traveler notes that “Plorida is rapidly
becoming a Northern Colony.”

But it was in the nineties, with the beginning of
the great railway systems, the East Coast of which
Henry M. Flagler was the presiding genius, and the
Atlantic Coast Line carried down to Tampa by Henry
B. Plant, that Florida’s history as a modern State actu-
ally began. ‘The railroads made all things possible.
As they pushed farther south the railroad companies
built the huge, elaborate hotels so well known to all
rourists at least from the outside, which were to be

2QLedyard Bill, A Winter in Florida, 1869.FLORIDA

 

the last word in comfort, elegance and expense. Plant
died before completing all that he had planned, but
the Flagler system pushed on, passing beyond the last
small pioneer settlements, taming wildernesses and
planting palaces in lonely deserts and jungles. Palm
Beach arose to snatch from St. Augustine its social
eminence as the Winter Newport. By ’96 the rail-
road had reached Miami, dropped another hotel into
the wilds, and proceeded on its way to perform one
of the most romantic of modern engineering feats—
the Overseas Route that joins Key West and the in-
tervening keys to the mainland, snaring wild islands
and binding turbulent seas with concrete and steel,
and stopping finally only because there were no more
keys to conquer.

velopment. Tourists overran the State. East coast,
west coast and center sprouted resorts like mushrooms.
A thousand and one agencies sprang up to cater to
their needs. A huge floating population of invalids
and pleasure-seekers that had to be housed, fed,
clothed, doctored, nursed, entertained. A secondary
throng of floaters arriving to help serve the first. A
great stock-taking and overhauling of regional re-
sources. A hectic competition of road building and
developing schemes. Great swamp areas drained and
turned into fertile farm and fruit lands. The most
ambitious of these projects, the draining of the Ever-
glades, has been going on for some eighteen years,
and is not yet completed. While tourists continue to
be enthusiastically cultivated, settlers and investors are
a still greater need. In spite of the large volume of
immigration from other states, there are still only

Now began a period of sensational economic de-te MUREARELED

 

  

    

54 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

17.7 inhabitants to the square mile, and planned im-
provements are constantly outstripping taxes and bond
issues. Hence an endless, vociferous campaign of real
estate enterprise, of building and boosting, of push-
ing, piping and hornblowing, of slogans and specula-
tions and bonuses and appeals and invitations to free
trips with free luncheons and free eloquence thrown in.

Perhaps because of an inferiority complex due to her
long history of frustration and her lack of traditions,
Florida has suddenly discovered an enormous pride
and faith in herself, an unlimited appetite for wealth
and power. Her climate is unrivaled, her soil unsur-
passed. She can produce three crops a year and some
that can be grown nowhere else in the country. To
her long list of products and manufactures—fish,
sponges, cigars, lumber, rosin and turpentine, phos-
phates, tobacco, citrus fruits, peaches, pineapples, po-
tatoes, tomatoes and other vegetables, sugar and for-
age grasses—new items are constantly added. For
her growing commerce she is busily deepening harbors
in which she expects to do an increasingly great busi-
ness with Central and South America and the world
at large. Nothing less than everything that any other
State has, with a few slight exceptions such as moun-
tains and glaciers, and as many things as possible that
other States have not is her economic ideal. A great
world playground. But this is not enough. A great
agricultural commonwealth unrivaled in the quantity,
quality and variety of its products. But this is not
enough. A great focus of world trade with opulent
cities strewn along its splendid coasts, cities that shall
combine roo per cent industrialism with 100 per
cent American home atmosphere and 100 per cent op-FLORIDA 6s

 

 

portunities for luxury and pleasure. If anything has
been omitted let the reader supply it and be sure that
Florida includes that, too, in her vision of greatness.

Material greatness, of course. For Florida, mix-
ture of infant prodigy, spoiled prima donna and nou-
veau riche, has the engaging and disheartening quali-
ties of all three. Forced into adult ways beyond her
years, what wonder that she frequently lapses into
corners to play with dolls or to make faces, what
wonder that like the slattern who is beautiful only
for company, she decks herself gorgeously, according
to her lights, in her tourist centers and rich agricul-
tural regions, with wastes of slovenly, burned-out,
swamp-gutted rural destitution and decay between.
Nothing can exceed the forlornness of some of her
aspects, with windowless cabins and crazy leantos in
the midst of a sandy waste containing a few stricken
pines, anemically sharing a bog with weedy, undaunted
razorbacks and discouraged cattle mournfully nosing
among inhospitable cypress roots. Then there are
Florida’s beautiful schoolhouses—for her white chil-
dren—which she has scattered about with a prodigal
hand. Only the best is good enough for these. And
naively to her the best is always something to be
seen, touched and financially rated. But school terms
are short, teachers few and poor and money for
their salaries not always forthcoming. Here is the
antithesis of the little red schoolhouse of New Eng-
land tradition with its proud poverty conscious of in-
ner worth, and its meager equipment dedicated to high
purposes. Florida has many splendid shells but
whether anything is to come out of them remains
to be seen. So far education, boomed and boosted—

 

THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

of late like every other acknowledged desideratum,
is less an inner necessity than an economic asset. The
trail of the Rotarian is over it all as well as over
everything else. Nothing distinguished has yet
emerged from Florida, whether in statesmanship,
scholarship, letters or arts, and whatever comes in
the future will have to struggle through a pall of
American provincialism, Protestant white supremacy,
economic ruthlessness and_ religious obscurantism.
Florida took William Jennings Bryan to her bosom
with the instant mutual recognition that they were
made for each other. But Florida is the melting pot
of all the States. So what one finds there is after
all not only typically southern but a composite of
typically small town and rural Americanism with an
‘infusion of pioneer crudeness and youthful bump-
tiousness. The States and sections of the country are,
however, not equally represented. The southern
cracker type still rules in politics which are narrowly
local and unprogressive. Florida, after years of agi-
tation, still retains the antiquated open range for
cattle, still finds in abuse of the Negro the master
key to political office, and would still be farming her
county prisoners to the highest bidder, had not recent
sensational disclosures, made by another State, of the
murderous brutalities practiced upon her unhappy con-
vict slaves, forced her about a year ago to abolish
the lash and sweep the leasing system out of ex-
‘stence. These abuses had persisted for years with
little protest from her own citizens.

There are, indeed, many Floridas within the boun-
daries of the State, and some of them know little of
some of the others. There is, for instance, the pro-FLORIDA

 

 

 

 

posed political division along geographical lines which
frequently comes up for discussion. The northern
part of the State was settled long before the rest, the
center is but of yesterday, the south barely of today
and partly of tomorrow. United only in their common
envy of California whose minutest blizzard, seismic
tremor or other liability is enthusiastically featured on
every Florida newspaper’s front page, these parts are
jealous of each other. The north has the State capital
and all the public institutions. In 1885, when the con-
stitution was established, representation was accord-
ing to population which was much denser in the north-
ern counties. The constitution allowed for a change
in the number of representatives, according to growth,
but such changes have never been made in spite of
strenuous efforts of the southern counties to bring
them about. In the last twenty-five years the increase
in population in the southern half of the State and
in political and economic consciousness has been phe-
nomenal. South Florida feels that it is different,
unique, indeed, among all parts of the Union. It is
tropical, differing by gentle degrees but still differ-
ing, from the rest of the State in climate, aspect, agri-
cultural and structural possibilities. It is developing a
regional self-consciousness and dreams of a regional
culture. So one hears talk sometimes of a separation
into two States—North and South Florida. It is
only the absence of serious political issues that gives
an apparent importance to such questions. Bills pro-
viding for separation are periodically introduced by
legislators anxious to display some innocuous activity,
but they arouse little interest.

The jealousies of Florida, however, exist not onlyte

 

     
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
  
   

58 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

between north and south, but between east and west
coast and individual resorts in the same or different
regions. Miami and Jupiter “merely cling to the outer
skirts of Palm Beach” a booklet informs us which com-
pares Palm Beach to Egypt, Venice, Honolulu, Algiers,
Mandalay, Constantinople, Greece and Mecca, “the
Mecca of the pilgrim with his face turned towards
Society, and perhaps praying equally as fervently as
his Bedouin brother,” a Mecca, moreover, to which one
makes ‘‘a journey of de luxe idealism.”

But tourist Florida is not all extravagance and
fashion. It may be a small room with a kitchenette in
which a Northern farm couple are passing a thrifty
and comfortable winter. One sees them mainly in the
center and on the west coast—for the east goes after
bigger game—but actually they are everywhere,
strong, ungainly, weather and work-worn, or cadaver-
ous and pale, sitting about on park benches, pitching
horseshoes in shirt sleeves, or forcing huge fists used
to more rugged employment, to guide treacherous pens
over the gay stationery provided by paternal boards of
trade. They are from Vermont, New Hampshire,
Iowa, Michigan, Kansas, from everywhere where
farmers in winter sit by the stove behind the snow-
drifts. They have found a better way to wait for
planting time. ‘Like it? Wall, I guess I do. Four
feet o’ snow to hum,” and they smile, crinkling little
red eyes, sharing with you the picture and the sub-
jective shiver in the rosy well being of sun-warmed
blood and appeased ‘“‘rheumatics.” “Yes, they'd like
fust rate tosettle if they was twenty years younger. But
there’t is. Ma’n’ me’s too old to start fresh.” Some-
times they do settle, fail wretchedly and are fortunateFLORIDA

 

 

if they can return to their frostbound northern haven.
Sometimes with efficiency and luck they reap a golden
harvest in spite of the real estate man. For them and
for the many others who need the sun—the too thin,
too white, too fat, or too ruddy, those who have lived
too long or too much, or not enough, Florida is all
golden, with nothing more sinister than the possibility
of an incomplete cure or a too complete investment.
Then there is the naturalists’ Florida, far different
from that of the railroad folder and the realtor’s
snappy blurb; unimproved, unmanicured, devoid of
sleekness and comfort, full of hardship, danger, ad-
venture and beauty, now being pushed ever farther
south and fast disappearing. The stories of these men
are not, more’s the pity, published by live boards of
trade—but hidden from the public gaze in the journals
of museums and scientific societies. Only one that I
know of, Charles Torrey Simpson, a veteran explorer
of thirty years’ standing, has emerged into the open
with a delightful book, “In Lower Florida Wilds,”
which is at once a pean to the wild life he knows so
well, and a protest against its passing. Through its
pages one may come to see in the vanishing tropic and
semi-tropic forests, the rich, wild hammocks, Florida's
unique treasure, whose like is not in any other State,
and will soon be little more than a memory in this.
His is a voice crying for the wilderness fast turning
into tomato farms, pineapple fields and cocoanut
groves, and with him one learns to mourn the depart-
ing man-grove, most human of trees, whose primitive
methods of land building are giving way before the
concrete sea wall, the dredge and the suction pump,
the gentle, colorful race of tree snails, the flamingo,Pe .

a en eiieaaeD ae

       
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  

60 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

the roseate spoonbill, and other wild things that die
in the presence of civilized man.

Still another Florida, least known of any, through
which most travelers and natives walk blindfold or
upon which they bestow the cursory attention and facile
generalizations of the ‘‘car window sociologist.” This
‘s the colored man’s Florida, which differs more from
all the other Floridas than they do from each other.
What does Florida mean to its Negro inhabitants?
It is “the best of the bad states” one will tell you. On
the whole it used to be better before there were so
many people and so much competition. Of course,
this means some increase in economic opportunity, but
also increased discrimination and bitterness. In
Miami, the wonder city, pride of South Florida, where
some of its citizens dream a new culture is to be born,
we have this extraordinary situation, extraordinary
even for the South. A curfew regulation: No Negroes
except those needed as night bell boys, porters and the
like by hotels, allowed out of the colored section of
the city after nine p. m. No Negroes permitted to
act as public chauffeurs, or, in the winters at least, in
any but unskilled jobs connected with building. In
winter, when building is at a standstill in the North,
northern workmen, ‘‘snow birds” or ‘“‘white doves” in
Negro parlance, flock South. Work must be found for
the white doves, so out go the blackbirds. It is hardly
within the power of any builder to retain his colored
workmen, even if he wishes to. In summer, when pres-
sure relaxes, one may find Negro workmen again on the
job, but the uncertainty and seasonal character of the
work discourages them, as it is intended to. Miami is
proud of its “solution” of the race problem. TheyFLORIDA

 

 

 

 

“keep them down,” and ‘“‘you must hand it to the
Southerners,” remarks many as admiring Yankee;
“they know how to treat the Niggers.’’ Odd this, for
Miami is anywhere from 75 to 85 per cent Northern.
What becomes, then, of the pleasant myth that the
presence of so many Northerners in Florida has per-
ceptibly lightened the Negro’s lot? Nothing. It
continues to be a pleasant myth. “Some of the North-
erners are worse than the Southerners,’ you will be
told. Why? Well, they want to be popular, stand in
with the others, show they’re desirable business and
social associates. And then it’s always pleasant to
oppress someone with the approval of public opinion.
It’s the line of least resistance and the easiest way to
feel superior.

But even Miami, to return to that hardboiled center
of future sweetness and light, even Miami was unable
to be quite as hardboiled to its Negroes as it wished to
be. In the days when bicycles were fashionable, it
forbade them bicycles. When automobiles came in,
it ruled that no colored man should drive one. It
went so far as to offer white chauffeurs free of charge
for the period of their stay to visitors who brought
their colored ones with them. A few years ago a
Negro could not rent a locked box in the Miami Post
Office. But all this created too much friction both with
the colored population and with white tourists who
wished to retain their own chauffeurs. Miami had to
relent. A colored man may now drive members of his
own race, and he may be brought into the city as the
private chauffeur of a white man, but his employer is
expected to take him back with him.

Miami is, of course, the extreme. As everywhere inTHESE UNITED STATES

the South the Negro’s condition varies greatly in vari-
ous sections. Places are “good” and ‘“‘bad” from the
Negro point of view, and it is not always easy to know
why some should be one and some the other. Thus
Miami is bad, Tampa is good. St. Augustine is good,
Jacksonville less so. In the northwest there is a cer-
tain amount of peonage—white peons as well as black
—caught in the net of tenant farming with all its
attendant evils in remote rural districts where condi-
tions are always at their worst. If the white schools
throughout the State are poorly developed except
architecturally, colored schools have not even architec-
ture to boast of. Brick buildings are rare and matter
for some pride. In all the State there is not a single
standard colored high school. In all South Florida
there is only one high school, so-called, for colored
children, the one at Tampa, which shares a somewhat
down-at-heel brick building outside the city limits, and
its principal, with a grammar school. The equipment
for this school did not include chairs. The money for
these was recently raised by colored citizens. They
still have no desks for some classes. They have them-
selves put in electricity, so they can use the building
for evening meetings. Chemistry is in the curriculum,
but it has to be taught theoretically because there is
no apparatus. School terms are everywhere shorter
than those of the white schools, which are themselves
in some cases shorter than they should be. There are
several counties that have no colored schools at all.
The Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College, the
State College for Negroes at Tallahassee has Car-
negie Libraries and at Jacksonville there is a Negro
reading room in the Public Library building containingFLORIDA

 

 

some eight thousand volumes, which cannot grow be-
cause there is no budget for its expansion. This is the
only public library provision for Negroes in the State.

The colored public school system is supplemented by
several large educational institutions supported by
denominational and individual contributions. These
schools are the soil for a certain timid optimism that is
beginning to raise a somewhat paradoxical head among
Florida Negroes. It consists of the feeling that
although racial conditions are growing worse, they are
also growing better. Violence and lesser forms of
oppression have of late years increased, but there is
also an increasing number of Negroes technically and
intellectually equipped to improve the primitive social
conditions under which most of the race lives. There
is the rising financial status, and the growing spirit of
racial responsibility and self-help so much needed,
which is fostered by these schools. If increased edu-
cation and prosperity sometimes bring with them an
increase of persecution, this is to be faced and over-
come with still further progress.

Taking it all in all, Florida is, physically and spiri-
tually, both the desert and the rose, and strangely,
when it appears to be one, it often turns out to be the
other. Its gray sands and malarial swamps are poten-
tial treasure houses of fertility and health, its bustling
surface life, its expansive self-satisfaction, hide a pro-
found mental and spiritual sterility. In this it is, of
course, like a great many other States, and there is
no reason why we should expect it to be different. Fine
climates do not necessarily make fine peoples, and the
best States in the world, like the most beautiful woman
of the French proverb, can give only what they have.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
  
   

SPRANG AT RI

————sitideriipne

ILLINOIS
FIRST PROVINCE OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM

By HOWARD VINCENT O’BRIEN

“In tres partes divisa est” the State of Illinois: (a)
Chicago; (b) ‘“‘down state’; (c) the circulation of the
Chicago T'ribune—a domain of resentful serfs who
pay their tributary coppers even beyond the Missis-
sippi. The distillation of such complexity into the
compass of a few thousand words presents difficulties,
because, though the three parts have a semblance of
geographic and political identity, they are really in no
way related. Chicago is a part of Illinois only as
Rome was a part of the Italian peninsula; and the
“World’s Greatest Newspaper,” as it modestly calls
itself, belongs only to its owners.

If one write of Illinois, with subordinate considera-
tion of Chicago and the County of Cook, the citizenry
of the metropolis will rise as one man to point out
that he has rather absurdly discussed the dog’s tail,
with only incidental mention of the dog. On the other
hand, if he set forth Chicago, with Illinois as the side
dish, he offers insult to half the population of a sover-
eign State. Nor can he straddle: to be neutral is to
enjoy the unhappy ignominy of one in Dublin who is
neither green nor orange.

To personalize the situation, one may picture 4
farmer, white and native born, who can read and write,
but doesn’t—much—with a son who ran away and
more or less accidentally got very rich. Relations be-
64ILLINOIS

 

tween parent and offspring are a trifle strained, son
being somewhat contemptuous of dad, and dad in a
constant state of irritation with son, because the latter
appears to think he’s going to run the whole gosh
blamed farm. There were other children, of greater
filial piety, some of whom went into manufacturing,
and have done very well, such as Rockford and Moline
and Joliet. “There was also Peoria, a dubious source
of pride, which took to distilling, and until the advent
of a statesman of Scandinavian descent, from Minne-
sota, was one of the most prosperous of the family.

But to characterize I\linois as a farmer is only in
part accurate. ‘True, it ranks second in the production
of corn and in the South is a land of dolce far niente,
a low, hot region, with extraordinarily fertile soil,
known, for various reasons, as ‘‘Egypt.’’ One of the
reasons is the name of its principal city, which is
Cairo. It would be impolitic to specify the other rea-
sons. But as one proceeds northward, though the
semblance is beautiful to the agricultural eye, the beauty
is quite literally ‘‘skin deep,’ for immediately below
the green and smiling prairie lies a vast bed of bitu-
minous coal, and the pick becomes almost as symbolical
of the State as is the hoe.

Statistics are dreadful things. But they are as in-
separable from a statement of Illinois as figures are
from a bank. A European or a New Englander would
consider Illinois as very sparsely populated. But the
relative handful of people who inhabit it are extremely
busy. With a population of six million odd, and a size
less than the average of the Union—s6,000 square
miles—it ranks among the first three in manufacturing,
savings-bank deposits, soft coal, pig iron, and corn.66 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

And in the value of its agricultural produce, as distin-
guished from mere quantity, it ranks first.

Contrary to Eastern notions of the Middle West,
merely material distinctions are held of less moment
than those which must be measured on finer scales.
Illinois is proud of its rating in dollars and tonnage,
but it is very much prouder of the fact that although
the density of its population is about three times that
of the average of the country as a whole, its percent-
age of illiteracy is only 4.2 per cent, as opposed to 10.7
per cent in the country at large.

The farmers, the miners, the artisans, and the shop-
keepers of Illinois share an obsession with education.
Scratch the average citizen, and you find an individual
who has, or has had, or is about to have, a son or
daughter in the University of Illinois. Eastern eye-
brows may elevate at mention of this provincial seat
of learning, and Eastern lips may curl at sheepskins
awarded for excellence in hippology and Ph.D.’s in
animal husbandry, and Eastern skin may creep at the
spectacle of uncouth youths roaming what should be
cloistered solitudes in sweaters. But the citizen of
Illinois is placid. He knows the opulence his univer-
sity enjoys, as a consequence of the provisions for edu-
cation in the establishment of the Western Reserve.
Through his legislature he is ever ready to supplement
that wealth. And when legal methods are too slow,
he is quick to dig down into his blue-jeans for what
may be needed. At the moment, it is a stadium—an
enormous affair, costing millions, and every penny pro-
vided by private subscription.

In Winnetka, a suburb of Chicago, when the school
problem became acute and the bonding capacity of theILLINOIS

 

 

village was exhausted, the citizens, led by a lawyer who
was serving as the head of the school board, stepped
in and built a magnificent public school. The principal
contributor was a wealthy Jewish clothing manufac-
turer: the others were Tom, Dick, and Harry.

The man of Illinois is a practical man, and he knows
that money talks. It enables him to provide his uni-
versity with better buildings and more of them than
any seaboard seat of learning can boast, and it enables
him to offer financial inducements to professorial skill
that are beyond resisting. To an Eastern observer
there is something appalling in the positive enormity
of everything at the University of Illinois. After
seeing the armory, an edifice large enough to house the
old Yale campus, he is too numbed for comment when
he hears that the student band alone is almost half the
size of the entire Princeton undergraduate body. A
bell rings, and from a huge building come a swarm of
girls and boys, like ants from a burning log. Ten
thousand students, he mutters, and when he is told that
the bass drum, used by the aforementioned student
band, is of such magnitude that it requires a special
flat car for its transport, he shivers and flees from
further Brobdingnagian data.

Illinois has a placid exterior. But there is turbu-
lence within its bosom. It can run to extremes. It
can, for instance, run a temperature as high as 107
degrees, and in a few weeks or hours—it is done by
minutes in Chicago—drop to 24 below. This mercuric
climate may, perhaps, be held accountable for Illinois’s
rather distinguished record for violence. Excluding
minor lynchings, which, after all, are of importance
chiefly to the individual concerned, Illinois has attained68 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the front page of the yellower journals, and the edi-
torial columns of the fireside press, several times of
late years. There were, several years ago, the Spring-
field riots, of a racial character, with fire, murder, and
rapine flourishing in the very shadow of the State Capi-
tol. There was, later, the outburst in Chicago, in
which black men were murdered somewhat more
atrociously than white men usually murder white men,
and during which, in the heart of the city where the
Great Emancipator was nominated, it was unsafe for
a man of color to show himself on the street. And,
most recently, there was the Herrin “massacre, in
which the ever-present emotional dynamite of the coal
fields was bloodily detonated.

The real feature of this last affair, in which murder
was followed by mutilations worthy of Armenia, was
the lineage of the malefactors. As in the great railway
strike, the devilment was not the work of alien “‘reds,”’
but of more or less direct descendants of Mayflower
stock. Much editorial comment damned the atrocities
at Herrin as “un-American,” whereas, like the anarchy
which ruled the streets of Chicago in the summer of
1894, it was as thoroughly American as the Declara-
tion of Independence. The people of Herrin are singu-
larly free from any consciousness of sin. They recently
reélected to office, by an overwhelming majority, a
local official admittedly involved in the affair. This
gave great pain to Chicago, which, having forgotten
the race riots of 1919, refers piously to the Herrin
incident as a blot on the State’s escutcheon.

Chicago is old enough to have forgotten a number
of things. One of them is its origin. Everyone knows
that Chicago is the greatest railway center in the world.ILLINOIS

 

 

But no one can really explain why. The fact is that
Chicago is an accident. It did not begin, as most cities
do, as an answer to the needs of commerce. Its nucleus
was not a trading-post, but a military one—Fort Dear-
born—-situated (the military methods of the period ap-
parently not differing from those now current) in a
peculiarly disagreeable and unhealthful swamp, beside
a wretched little river, the Indian name of which was
Wild Onion.

One likes to picture the pioneers, those sparks from
Plymouth Rock, as foreseeing the greatness of Chicago.
But unfortunately some of them made the mistake of
committing their views to paper. One, for instance,
came to the little hamlet, tarried a while, studying its
possibilities with all his Yankee caution, and then,
when he had satisfied himself, moving on to a village
in the neighboring Fox River Valley, where he settled.
That village, he said, was destined to be the metropolis
of the Western Reserve. The Fox River still flows,
and the village is still there—no larger than when he
found it! Another, owning a lot on what is today
Michigan Avenue, Chicago’s principal boulevard, al-
lowed it to be sold for taxes, and moved his family to
Milwaukee, a city, he said, which had a “future.” A
third offered a piece of land in what is now the heart of
the downtown business district, in settlement of a debt,
refused to accept it, because it was under water.

The first Chicago railroad was the Galena and Chi-
cago Union, later to become the Northwestern. It was !
chartered in 1836, when, in the words of the historian, ii
‘Galena was the leading city of the West,” and for that
reason its name took precedence in the title of the
road. Ten years later, the Michigan Central, strug-70 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

gling westward, at last reached the edge of Lake Michi-
gan. It did not trouble to work around and up to the
inconsequential town of Chicago: it was satisfied with
its terminus in the thriving and populous city of New
Buffalo!

The Chicago city seal is graced by a somewhat portly
female of Grecian origin, whose motto is “I will.” The
words are better than the picture. There is nothing
feminine or Hellenic about Chicago. A better person-
alization of it would be the type so familiar in the
recent era of high prices and labor scarcity—hands
rough and a little soiled, wearing a silk shirt and dia-
monds, who ordered two pianos at a time, stripping
bills from the ‘‘wad’’ extracted from his “‘pants,” to
pay for them.

It is, in short, a gross lout of a city, long on health
and vigor and ruthlessness and imagination and money,
and with less sign of sprouting what is known as “‘cul-
ture’ than a cement sidewalk shows of sprouting grass.
H. G. Wells called it a ‘lapse from civilization.” An
Oriental undoubtedly had it in mind when he spoke of
America as being inhabited by the flattest-minded
people on the globe. Interest in babies, prohibition,
and the stock market is widespread. Interest in other
things is not so widespread.

And yet—there is a population of some four hundred
thousand Jews. Where there are Jews, the cultural
spark is never quite extinguished. Under the glossy
concrete shell of commercialism there is evidence of a
warm lush soil in which good seed will one day flourish.
There are pianos. The fathers bought them for deco-
rative purposes: signs are not wanting that sons and
daughters are learning to play them. The bluff scorn ofILLINOIS a1

 

 

 

 

the pioneers for effete things like opera has softened.
Opera has had the accolade of “civic” accorded it, and
the plain people are beginning to give it the respect they
give the Cubs and the Stock Yards and the Municipal
Pier. It has lost something of its mere social signifi-
cance, and the gallery sells out before the boxes. The
Symphony Orchestra—still referred to by ladies of the
old school as the Thomas orchestra—and Ravinia, that
extraordinary outdoor temple to the muse, on the
North Shore—nothing like it this side of Germany—
are known wherever music matters. Not long ago, a
fountain by a famous sculptor was unveiled on a city
thoroughfare. Every city, of course, has fountains by
famous sculptors. But the significant thing about this
one was the fact that it was paid for from a fund be-
queathed by an utter unknown—a man of the people
who had amassed riches out of lumber, a Mecenas of
the democratic order. Near the river, on the West
Side, is a grim pile of red brick—a monument to that
refinement of modernism, the mail-order business. It
is quintessential of merchandising and turnover and dis-
tribution and profit. And in the Art Institute, held
worthy of place on walls with Corot and VanDyke, are
canvases painted by the active head of that mail-order
business. Nor is his case isolated. There is an active
and not inconsiderable group of business men who paint
pictures—many of them painting extremely well.

The visitor to Chicago receives a welcome as brisk
as the ceaseless wind from the lake. A crisp hand-
shake, and he finds himself helpless. Whether he
wants to or not, he is going to see the Stock Yards,
the boulevard link, State and Madison at noon, the

Wrigley Building, the Field Museum, and the North72 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Shore. In Chicago hospitality has retained its small-
town quality. Unlike the New Yorker, the Parisian,
and the Londoner, the Chicagoan does not dine his out-
lander friend at a restaurant and take him to theater—
he takes him home. That is one of the reasons why the
visitor does not see the “night life” of Chicago. The
other reason is that there isn’t any. Nightfall sees
the streets deserted, save on what the newspapers call
the Rialto, ordinarily known as Randolph Street, where
one may see some of the New York shows, acted by
the kind of actor that doesn’t mind traveling. There
are also several places for circumspect dancing, after
twelve. And at Huyler’s, if you go early enough, you
can secure excellent soda water.

A decade or so ago any article about Chicago would
have mentioned the Drainage Canal, an ingenious piece
of engineering whereby the course of the river was re-
versed, and the city sewage, instead of entering Lake
Michigan, was carried by canal and a network of
streams eventually to the Mississippi. Current activity
concerns itself with nothing less than the fundamental
reorganization of the city, for greater beauty, greater
comfort, and the expedition of traffic. A complete
“lan” has been worked out, extraordinary as to detail
and magnitude. One of those details recently came to
completion in the shape of a broad, two-level bridge of
great practicality and some beauty, connecting the
North and South Sides.

These “sides”—three in number—form the back-
round to the city’s history. They are formed by the
branching of the river, a mile or so inland, but no one
can explain why the aristocracy of two generations ago

should have dwelt on the West Side, the aristocracy ofILLINOIS 73

 

the last, on the South Side, and that of the present, on
the North. An address on Ashland Boulevard,
Prairie Avenue, or Astor Street, with accompanying
dates, gives as clear a definition of social status as
England has in Burke’s Peerage.

With her vast littoral on the lake Chicago has a num-
ber of bathing beaches for its citizens and their visi-
tors. One of them, at Oak Street, on the North Side,
presents the same difficulties to the current plutocracy
that bread and circuses did to the Roman patricians.
Skirting the shore, at this point, is the Lake Shore
Drive, or, in local jargon, the “Gold Coast.” This is
a focal point of opulence. Here aristocracy dwells.
Here is the Drake Hotel—the city’s most luxurious.
And here, when the weather is warm, repair the alien
and unwashed from the hinterlands of the West Side.
There being no shelter, the proletariat comes throng-
Ing in natatorial costume, or does its disrobing en route.
Extremes meet at Oak Street. The pensioners of pelf
sit behind drawn shades, their ears scandalized by the
clamor of the joyous mob below, their eyes—for they
do peep—shocked by what they see, and their nostrils
—something, declare the aristocrats, must be done
about it. Something. Meanwhile, of a summer eve-
ning, the throngs grow larger, like flies around an arc
light. Chicago, of late years, has rediscovered the
lake. From one end of the city to the other summer
finds the streets jammed with parked automobiles, cur-
tains drawn—more or less—bath-houses of a new
genre. Ordinances are passed by the Council, shocked
policemen protest and pinch, preachers thunder at the
peril of the bath-robe—and each year sees the lake
front grow more like the edge of a duck pond.74 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

The lake front is an evidence of the profound fore-
sight the city’s forefathers did not have. One wonders
what was in their minds—or in their pockets—when
they allowed the Illinois Central Railroad to lay its
tracks in the municipal front yard, quite literally under
their very noses. This civic Helgoland was, until re-
cently, both in figure and in fact, nothing more than a
dump. But as time passed it became evident that rub-
bish is objectionable only when there is not enough of
it: for the dreadful litter of dirt and garbage and tin
cans presently became a considerable area of new land.
The water was driven back, and beyond the railroad
tracks lies the broad expanse of Grand Park.

It is here that the circus is held, and spectacles of all
variety, on land and water, and in the air. And at the
noon hour, from the offices in the ‘“Loop”—that Isle de
la Cité formed by the structure of the Elevated—
pours forth a throng of youths to play ball, and their
gentler coadjutors to disport themselves in the sun.
The cindery waste—on a foggy, rainy day it looks like
nothing so much as the Somme country in I918—is a
treasure such as no other city can boast. It is the vil-
lage common magnified—coarsened in the process, un-
lovely, noisy, and very dirty—but a precious thing to
office-fettered youth.

The only building ever raised on the lake side of
Michigan Avenue between Randolph and Twelfth
Street—or, as it is now called, Roosevelt Road, was the
Art Institute. But some years ago all the realtors of
the city, as if moved by a common impulse, suddenly
announced their intention of putting up new, large, in-
comparably magnificent edifices to flank the institute.
There was great jubilation. ‘Boosting’ attained thevran

  

ILLINOIS 76

 

 

proportions of a delirium. The Avenue, which about
this time became the Boulevard, or as B.L.T. dubbed it,
the “Boul Mich,” was in the familiar American hyper-
bole, to be the finest in the world. But into the iri-
descent dream stepped the unpleasant reality of one
Montgomery Ward, another man who had made a
success of the mail-order business. His weapons were
law-suits and injunctions: his purpose to keep the far
side of the Boulevard forever free of buildings. The
litigation was endless, and to a cheated and outraged
public the name of Ward became anathema. But the
Watch Dog of the Lake Front never let go, and the
city can still see the blue waters of the lake. And today
there is a widespread contention that Grant Park ought
tobe Ward Park. The beautification of the land which
this obstinate old man preserved for the people against
their will continues steadily. The Illinois Central is to
be put under ground and electrified. There are to be
flowers, plashing fountains, gondolas on the silver
bosom of a lake tamed into lagoons, a stadium, mu-
seums, and what not—all for the pleasure and edifica-
tion of the common people. It is all planned, some of
it actually in work, and if you express any doubt of
its ultimate completion a Chicagoan will promptly re-
mind you that the city’s motto is “I will.”

The quality of paradox in the composition of Chi-
cago reached its climax in the person of its erstwhile
mayor, Mr. William Hale Thompson, who gained in-
ternational fame during the war, for quite accurately,
but with poor judgment, characterizing the place he
governed as the ‘‘sixth German city of the world.”

Chicago, like other American cities, has always en-
joyed varying degrees of bad government. But several. - a
Soe,

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76 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

years ago the “better element” was roused to reform.
It was time, they said, to take the city out of politics.
So, very carefully, they picked a man with no political
affiliations, of independent means, and of good, sound
American stock to raise the banner of civic virtue.
Their candidate was duly elected. Whereupon he put
a sombrero on his head and became “Big Bill’—prince
of demagogues. Before the ink was dry on the felici-
tations of press and pulpit, Chicago was in the grip of
a political machine that made the efforts of such men
as Tweed seem bungling and experimental.

Thompson has now passed from the scene. But
what may be called Thompsonism, remains. It is a
kind of bond between Chicago and Illinois, because it
rules both. The governor of the State, Len Small,
yields fealty to the “organization.” Not long ago he
was tried for the unromantic crime of embezzlement
—and acquitted. Those who acquitted him were there-
upon tried—and acquitted. When members of the
Chicago school board were under a similar indictment
the case could not be brought to trial because the at-
torney general of the State lacked the funds necessary
to prosecute it. And he lacked them because the gov-
ernor had vetoed the necessary appropriations. No,
this is not a scene from the “Mikado”—it is just Illi-
nois politics.

Thompsonism has many friends and apologists. But
their loyalty is for the most part negative—inspired by
their dislike to the Tribune, which is bitterly hostile to
Thompsonism. But why is it so hostile and so bitter ?
Well, dear children, that goes back to its feud with
Senator Lorimer, who, not a little from its efforts, was
chased out of the United States Senate. Mr. LorimerILLINOIS 77

 

 

was, in a way, the progenitor of Thompsonism, and a
little verse which appeared in the “Line o’ Type” sum-
marizes the whole matter:

You may ventilate, fumigate, douche if you will,
But the odor of Lorimer will cling to you still!

The Tribune is vindictive, clever, and irreconcilable.
It is rich beyond computation, and enormously power-
ful. It is as personal and unstable as a country weekly
—which is natural, since its owners are also its active
editors. It is less popular than prohibition. A great
many people hate it violently. Those who have any-
thing like affection for it are negligible. And yet one
out of every five families, in five States, subscribes to it.
The people of Illinois have no enthusiasm for [homp-
sonism, and less for the Tribune. But they vote for
the one, and buy the other. They would shed no tears
at the downfall of either. But the fact remains that
the Tribune, if not the world’s greatest newspaper, cer-
tainly is one of them, and Thompsonism does build
roads and bridges and supply fétes, even if they cost
more than they should. And there is therefore no im-
mediate prospect that Mr. Hearst will dominate Ili-
nois journalism, or that the new brooms which from
time to time are installed in Illinois politics will do
much more than sweep dust into the eyes of the people.

One of the most striking things about Chicago is the
fact that it has grown to be what it is in the span of a
single lifetime. There are people, now living in the
city, who lived in it when it was a trading post. One
of them, a dear old lady, enlivens her declining years
by perusal of the “‘society” items in the newspapers.
Nothing delights her more than mention of an “oldi

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78 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

family.” To her no Chicago family is hallowed by any
sanctity of tradition. And until she and her kind are
all goné the social life of the city will not dare to crys-
tallize and stratify—she knows too much!

Youthful and masculine is Chicago—generous, im-
pulsive, and somewhat skeptical of “‘dog.”’ It takes a
person of great hardihood to stroll down the Boule-
vard carrying a cane. Though that skepticism is more
for the stroll than the stick. One does not stroll in
Chicago. Neither does one contemplate. One goes
and one does—at the greatest possible speed. The
Frenchman, sipping his sirop grenadine and discussing
Balkan politics, and the German, with his beer, listen-
ing to Wagner, are alike beyond the comprehension of
Chicago. The Chicagoan does not discuss politics—
he takes sides; and he would rather dance to music than
listen to it. And he regards his watch more highly than
his imagination.

And yet, he has a boundless imagination. His
dreams have magnitude, if not intensity, and he has
the energy to bring great plans to fruition. His city
is all compact of the yea and nay which is in him. It
is tolerant of graft, and prudish about art. It is liberal
as regards business ethics, and bigoted as regards social
ethics. It is polyglot and conservative. It welcomes
new people, and mistrusts new ideas. And though, un-
like other great cities, it has no leisure class, and the
sons of wealth are obliged by the pressure of public
opinion to toil as sweatily as their grandfathers did,
there is a certain unmistakable wistfulness for the
things which set human life apart from the beasts of
the field, and make of the human economy something
more than a digestive tube.ILLINOIS

 

 

 

 

Chicago has the feeling for Illinois that the dweller
within gates has always had for the outlander; and
Illinois fears and dislikes Chicago because it 1s
“foreign.” But under the surface of mutual distrust,
of, vainglorious pride, of crude commercialism on the
one hand and smug ruralism on the other, lies a ques-
tioning and hopeful pessimism. It is like the coal beds
under the fields of smiling corn—latent fire. [llinois,
by the record, has done well in all the ways of the
flesh. To the historian, if not the prophet, it is clear
that she will presently flower into achievement in the
things of the spirit.WEST VIRGINIA
‘A MINE-FIELD MELODRAMA

By JAMES M. CAIN

I

RouGH mountains rise all about, beautiful in their
bleak ugliness. They are hard and barren, save for
a sctubby, whiskery growth of trees that only half
conceal the hard rock beneath. Yet they have their
moods. On gray days they are heavy and sullen, but
on sunny mornings they are dizzy with color: flat can-
vases painted in gaudy hues, here and there soft black
pines showing against a blue sky. At night, if the
moon shines through a haze, they hang far above you,
dim outlines of smoke; you could throw a stone right
through them. They are gashed everywhere with
watercourses, roaring rivers and burbling creeks.
Along these you plod, a crawling midge, while ever the
mountains shut you in. Now and then you top a ridge
and look about. Miles and miles of billowing peaks,
miles and miles of color softly melting into color.
Bright reds and yellows give way to greens and misty
grays, until they all fade into faint lavender and hori-
zon blue... . A setting for a Nibelungen epic—but
it mounts a sordid melodrama.

A melodrama where men carry pistols, often in
leather holsters, and wear big black hats of the kind
affected by the late William Frederick Cody. Where
they give each other three-fingered handshakes, and

slips of paper pass from palm to palm. Where
80WEST VIRGINIA 81

 

 

 

 

 

hoarsely whispered plots are’ met by counter-plots, and
detective agencies flourish. Where personal differences
are settled by guns, and letters taken from bodies
designate persons by initials and numbers. Where the
most casual visitor is a mysterious stranger. Where
murder, dynamiting, arson, and insurrection are too
common to attract more than passing notice. In brief,
where life is a hodge-podge of two-gun heroes, snarling
villains, and find-the-papers mysteries—a peanut-and-
hisses melodrama of coal.

For it is coal that has brought this state of affairs
into being. In West Virginia it is the staff of life.
The State is a huge layer cake, hacked into great slices
by the elements; the slices are mountains, the layers are
rocks, and the filling is coal. Coal, coal, coal; every-
where coal. The seams run for miles, jumping across
rivers and creeks, now broken by some convulsion an
eternity ago, now tilted at crazy angles, but for the
most part flat, regular, rich, and thick. Railroads,
indispensable adjunct of mining, run beside every creek.
A grimy structure of steel, a ribbon of rails up the
mountain side, a grinding and clanking, and you are at
a tipple. It is coal on which a third of the population
depends directly for a living; it is coal on which prob-
ably another third depends indirectly. It is coal that
has converted the State into one great pock-work of
mines.

This coal development, however, is relatively recent.
Only in the two closing decades of the last century was
it of much importance; the richest fields of all are
scarcely twenty years old. Before that, the State was
a sort of wilderness, carved out of the backwoods of
Virginia in the turmoil of the Civil War. Indigenousa
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82 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

to it was a unique type of human being—the moun-
taineer. Here and there he survives today, and, in
spite of his baffling idiosyncrasies, is a likable person.
If you have won his regard, he will take you into his
home and seat you before his rude fireplace as the
guest of honor. He will listen with respect to your
discourse, and reply with homely comment of his own.
He speaks a quaint language. It recalls an America
that is fast passing, the America of the timber trail and
the cabin in the hills; it has echoes of James Fenimore
Cooper in it, and recalls a forgotten generation of
leather-shirted woodsmen. It uses “ary” and “nary,”
“cayn’t”’ and “‘hayn’t,” “done” and “done been” with
verbs, instead of “‘have’’ and ‘“‘had.”’ It has odd words
peculiar to itself, such as “swag” for a small marsh,
and retains words long discarded in other parts of the
world, such as “poke” for bag. It is spoken with a
plaintive drawl, gentle and unassertive. A language
arresting and haunting, pathetically and insistently
American. That, probably, is because the mountaineer
who speaks it is one of the oldest and purest Ameri-
can types extant. He drifted westward with the mi-
gration of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and
finding habitable creek bottoms, loitered by the way-
side, while his more energetic brethren pushed on to
the Ohio River and the West. For a century he stayed
here, and raised a few hogs, and corn for hominy, and
carried on a small traffic in illicit whisky. He was his
own law, and his rifle was his last court of appeal.
. . . As time went on, he and his kind interbred, the
strain grew weaker and weaker, and he developed un-
usual ideas and customs. Personal grudges obsessed
him. He nursed them for years, and prosecuted themWEST VIRGINIA 83

 

 

with his rifle, until the outside world began to hear of
strange feuds, such as the one between the Hatfields
and the McCoys, that arose from trivial and incompre-
hensible causes. Whole families were exterminated in
these feuds, and the rifle came forward with more and
more sinister prominence in the West Virginia scheme
of things.

About all this was the flavor of a queer, half-savage
code, a cavalleria montagnola that was at least pic-
turesque. Then came coal and the ever-advancing rail-
roads. Mining companies bought the hillside cabin and
dispossessed its lodger. The gaunt mountaineer, wait-
ing for days, rifle on knees, eyes starry with hate, until
his enemy should come up the creek bottom, was forced
inevitably to enter the coal bank and toil for his living.
Moreover, his new masters took leaves out of his own
book and used them against him. ‘They adopted the
law of the rifle themselves. ‘They hired armed gentry
to watch him and police him and curtail his liberties.
They told him where to go to church and where to
send his children to school. They told him what he
must take for his labor, how much he must pay for his
food, and where he must buy it. Lastly they told him
what organizations he might join, and those that he
might not join; and prominent among the latter were
labor unions. In vain he arose in his wrath. He oiled
his rifle, but there was no dignity in it. He swore his
vendettas against the mine guards, but the old heroic
venom was gone. He killed his man, and it was a
blowsy murder. He had brought all his former stage
trappings, and they had become tawdry overnight. He
was degraded, a serf: the last of the Mohicans turned
tourists’ cook.i ee

THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

II

Thus his condition when the United Mineworkers of
America undertook to strike off his shackles. In this
valiant enterprise the union was also helping itself a
bit, for by the early years of the present century its
pristine security in the Central Competitive Field was
being seriously threatened by the growth on all sides
of large non-union fields, and the largest of these was
West Virginia. So it set about organizing the State.
It was repulsed ferociously by the operators, who could
make more money if they didn’t have to pay the union
scale. But it kept on, and eventually gained a member-
ship of a few thousand. And to the occasional whis-
perings and shootings in the mining camp there was
added a new and bigger kind of plotting. The union
soon saw that the mine-guard system was the main bar
to its organization; if the guards persistently ejected
union organizers, there wasn’t much hope of getting
very far. So it saw to it that the mine guards became
anathema to all union miners; they were dubbed thugs,
and took their places as permanent members of the
cast, upstage, right, striding scowlishly about slapping
their holsters while the trembling miner signed the
open-shop agreement... . The first phase of the
union’s fight came to an end in 1912 and 1913, with
strikes on Paint and Cabin Creeks, and with three hun-
dred guards imported by the companies, some of whom
didn’t get out alive. In all, nearly two score men lost
their lives in these strikes, and people began to take
gunplay and dynamiting for granted.

In 1918, the union, through a political deal, was
allowed to organize the Fairmont field. By securingWEST VIRGINIA 8

Ur

 

 

 

this territory and consolidating in the central part of
the State, it pushed its membership to some fifty thou-
sand. But ever the coal frontier receded over the
horizon—and now Southern West Virginia was pro-
ducing enough coal to undermine the union power, to
render any national strike largely ineffective. The
southern part of the State was a big non-union strong-

 

hold, with the mine-guard system functioning perfectly.
It embraced Mingo, Logan, McDowell, Raleigh, Mer-
cer, and Wyoming counties. The union tackled Logan
first—in I9I9Q.

As usual, it met with armed resistance. Here was
a mine-guard system, paid for by coal operators, its
main duty to eject union organizers. Its guards were
invested with all the majesty of the law; they were
deputy sheriffs of the county, duly sworn in under the
Logan high sheriff, Don Chafin, who directed their ac-
tivities and paid them out of a pool assessed against
the operators. Mr. Chafin’s deputies did their work
thoroughly, and soon a wail came drifting over the
Guyon Ridge: ‘“They’re a-murderin’ the women an’
children!’ This is an important line in the West Vir-
ginia libretto. It is always the cue for the big scene, of
which more in a moment. So far as I know the depu-
ties have never murdered any women or children, but
art is art, and it is a good line—why sacrifice it? .
Taking their cue, the union miners to the north assem-
bled at a place called Marmet, within a dozen miles of
Charleston, the State capital, and marched about a
thousand strong on Logan. Then ensued the spectacle
of the Governor of the State, John J. Cornwell, hoist-
ing the gubernatorial robes aboard a wagon, beseeching
the miners to go home, promising an investigation, and86 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

finally threatening troops. The miners went home, and
their effort was abortive. But the West Virginian, a
regular attendant at Western feature films and a dili-
gent student of the Pluck and Luck series, had noted
the possibilities of the scene.

So all energy was bent toward a successful staging
of the great drama. The operators hired extra guards
and howled defiance at the union. The union girded
its loins, counted its money, and swore that might
should not conquer right. It sent its organizers into
Mingo. A number of camps were organized. The
union demanded recognition, the operators refused it.
The union called its men out on strike, the operators
evicted the strikers. As fast as the operators evicted
them the union set them out in tents. Guerrilla warfare
broke out. There were massacres, ten men being killed
in a one-minute battle at Matewan. ‘he operators set
spies to watch the miners and the miners potshotted
the operators’ spies. Plots were hatched by the dozen
and card indices were needed to keep track of ven-
dettas. Federal troops were called in twice. Ihe new
sovernor, E. F. Morgan, declared martial law, and the
State military commandant began clapping union men
in jail. Finally, two union sympathizers, Sid Hatfield
and Ed Chambers, as the result of a quasi-official feud,
were shot down at Welch. This, with heavy mutter-
ings and alarms sounding off in the North, rang down
the curtain on Act [—in August, 1921.

When Act II opened, two weeks later, union miners
were assembling again at Marmet for another march.
This time the plan was to march through Logan, kill
Don Chafin on the way, continue to Mingo, liberate the
prisoners in jail, nullify martial law, and proclaim lib-WEST VIRGINIA 87

 

 

 

erty and justice once more in the land. . . . For days
they gathered and the press of the country screamed
their purpose far and wide. Then they started, and as
they swung down the road to Racine they sang:

Hang Don Chafin to the sour-apple tree,
Hang Don Chafin to the sour-apple tree,
Hang Don Chafin to the sour-apple tree,

As we go marching on!

They were halted once when their president ad-
dressed them at Madison. They threatened to hang
him, but they went home—at least, some of them did.
Some of them stayed, commandeered a locomotive and
flat cars and played with them—and waited. They
didn’t wait in vain. Down at Sharples, in Logan
county, there came a clash between union miners and a
party of Logan deputies and State police, coming, 250
strong, to serve warrants—at midnight (sh/ sh/ sh/).
Two miners were killed. Then the long-delayed cue
that had been holding up the show: ‘“‘They’re a-mur-
derin’ the women an’ children.’”’ The miners reassem-
bled, eight thousand strong. They flung out battle lines
and donned red brassards. They gave out a password:

‘“Who’s there ?”’ whispered the sentries.

“I come creepin’,”’ replied the miners, misterioso.

‘‘Pass,”’ said the sentries.

They drilled around the schoolhouse at Blair, while
coal company officialdom snooped and took notes in
memorandum books. ‘They brought in food and rifles
on trucks. ‘They shouted hoarse commands, and ran
hither and yon to make sure this had been attended to,
and that had not been overlooked. . . . And on the
other side of the ridge all was a-buzz, too. Doneee -

h
7 '
|

‘fg

(~
=a A

88 THESE UNITED STATES

 

Chafin issued a call for volunteers, and several thou-
sand sprang forward. He imported four airplanes.
The volunteers dug trenches on the military crest of
Blair Mountain. All now being in readiness, both
sides entered their positions and shot at each other for
three days. The airplanes zoomed and dropped bombs
on the rocks. Machine guns went put, pul, put; the
rifle fire never ceased. The noise was superb. On
the fourth day a regiment of federal troops arrived—
and everybody went home. It was the best second act
that had ever been staged, and was marred by only one
unpleasant event. Three men were killed. It is true
they were killed in a purely accidental encounter be-
tween scouting parties, but the incident shows that
great care must be exercised in the future, if this march
‘5 to become a permanent institution in West Vir-
Oiflla mete)

You rise in your seat. Stay. There is another act,
the great courtroom scene.

Hardly had the last miner handed in his gun than
the Logan County grand jury met in special session.
It indicted whole payrolls. It indicted for murder, con-
spiracy, and unlawful assembly. Then it rested, met
in regular session, and ‘ndicted some more. It met yet
again, and to the indictments already found, it added
a score or so for treason. And so, after a few months,
after a change of venue, court opened to try these cases.
The first case was a treason case, and oddly enough the
court sat in the same courtroom at Charles Town
where John Brown had been convicted of treason. ..- -
Well, the first defendant, as I recall, was acquitted.
Then followed convictions and acquittals and possibly

even a few hung juries—I don’t exactly recall. TheWEST VIRGINIA 89

 

 

 

trials have been going on for two years now, and
Charles Town was long ago left behind and the hear-
ings moved on to one place after another. Berkeley
Springs, Lewisburg, Fayetteville—trials have been held
in all these places, and I don’t guarantee that they
make a complete list. . . . I attended one of these
trials, and it quite appalls me to think of the amount
of breath that has been consumed in their prosecution.
Breath and spittle. Most of the lawyers retained are the
spittley kind, and it flies all about, mainly over the jury.
Thus life in West Virginia in this era of Christian
progress. In addition to the big show there are in-
numerable little shows. In all the coal counties the
plots, counter-plots, vendettas, murders, and trials go
on incessantly. The Federal court at Charles Town is
a never-ending round of restraining orders, injunctions,
and citations for contempt. The sterile conflict over-
shadows and paralyzes everything else. Before it the
State government is impotent. The State police, or-
ganized bona fide to enforce the law, are animated by
no maturer ideal than to posture as moving picture edi-
tions of the Canadian Mounted, i.e., to wear pretty uni-
forms, carry pistols, and growl sidewise that they al-
ways get their man. ‘They are now quite as detested as
the mine guards; the miners call them the “‘Governor’s
Cossacks,” and charge openly that they are on the side
of the operators. ... Culture is at a standstill; the only
theaters are those that show five-reel shooting features;
there are few libraries, hardly ever a concert.

If

Well, well, well. I have certainly grown a luxuriant
set of sneers. I may as well out with the truth90 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

now, and confess that I like the place. Sordid and wit-
less this war certainly is, but the State itself pulls on
something inside of me—I should like to go back there.
Possibly it is the big outdoor poetry of it all. Things
are organized on a gigantic scale there. To see it is
to get the feeling of it: the great iron machinery of coal
and oil, the never-ending railroads and strings of black
steel cars, eternally groaning and creaking towards
somewhere. ... You are drawn close to these big
‘nanimate things. A plume of smoke “down the
holler,’ and a locomotive comes stealing around the
bend. The locomotive has long since ceased to be a
terrifying pile of steam jets and puffing, but has be-
come “‘she’’; and when she comes to a stop you lean
affectionately against her and spit on her drivers while
you swap talk with the engineer.

There is something about these great cruel indus-
tries, too, which eats away the soft spots of the human
beings that man them, that leaves them gnarled and
seamed, but flintier than people who live in a land less
bleak. . . . When the labor train rattles up the creek,
in the foggy hour before dawn, and hundreds of blurred
shapes pile out on the cinders, and a half dozen lines of
bobbing points of light crawl slowly up the mountain
side, as the miners seek their various mines,—that is
something which, seen once, is never to be forgotten.
And when, at the end of the day, they all pile aboard
the same old train, and settle vacantly on the hard
boards while they bump down to a bleary mining camp,
—that is something not to be forgotten either. Faces
stamp themselves on you indelibly, you seem to be
seeing incarnations of Toil ‘tself. . . . Lhe Hungarian
with the slash across his nose, hardly recognizable forWEST VIRGINIA gI

c oouenenu aanaas

 

the grime of coal dust that covers him. . . . The man
with the wooden leg, and delicate, thin hatchet face,
and soft, resigned eyes... . An old Negro, a little bit
looney. . . . Two young loaders, roaring badinage at
each other the full length of the car. Why is there
pathos in all this? Why is there a different quality in
it from anything else you will find in the United States?
Iam sureI don’t know. Yet it leaves its impression on
you, and there is something about it which shames your
contempt. . . . I have said something about libraries
and concerts. [ give myself airs. What have libraries
and concerts to do with it, anyhow? ‘They are for a
sleeker civilization. These people live with more primi-
tive things. When they no longer have to break their
backs throwing coal lumps on mine cars, when they no
longer pass into eternity after being “‘rolled agin’ the
rib,” or after “‘he hit his head agin’ the big feed cable,
and it singed all the hair offen his head, took the soles
offen his feet, an’ melted all the gold fillin’s outen his
teeth’; when the women folk no longer sit dumbly on
the front stoop after the corpse has been carried in,—
when all these things have come about, then it will be
time to talk about libraries and concerts and such
things. . . . But that will be a long time.

As I ponder over West Virginia, I find myself won.
dering more and more what the State will eventually
become. ‘The present conflict, of course, will not go
on forever. Eventually the union will organize the
whole State, or get thrown out completely, and there
will be an end of the fighting. Then what? As the coal
development becomes more and more intense, and as
wealth concentrates there, and as some of the wealthy
find leisure to realize that the world is a little largerSs. ae a

  
     
 
   
  
   
  
 
  
  

92 THESE UNITED STATES
than West Virginia, what kind of civilization will that
be? A charming but conventional culture, like what
you find in the hard coal regions, around Wilkes-Barre
and Scranton, Pennsylvania? Or something more in-
teresting? I imagine the latter. Now, of course, it is
terribly crude. The upper stratum of the State is as
blatant as it well can be. It 1s brutal Babbittry at its
worst. But in a few generations, with the growth of
a feeling of noblesse oblige toward that raw, crude
mass of humanity below, something may come that

will be worth having.NEW HAMPSHIRE
NOT YET ABANDONED

By RALPH D. PAINE

THE literary tradition of a rural New England con-
sisting of abandoned farms, queer, flat-chested spin-
sters, and faded wives who go insane because of soli-
tude and Puritan complexes has found its focus, to a
large extent, in rock-ribbed New Hampshire. Con-
tending with a hard climate has made us a patient folk,
unemotionally enduring the buffets of fortune, but we
grow a little weary of a certain condescension among
outsiders. It is quite the fashion to ask what’s the
matter with New Hampshire and then start another
survey or investigation.

During the brief summer thousands of motor tourists
stream over our highways to visit the White Moun-
tains. They come from regions as remote as the Pacific
Coast. It is a flamboyant invasion that scatters millions
of dollars among hotels, camps, tea houses, garages,
and small-town merchants. New Hampshire piously
thanks God for this bountiful source of revenue, but
reserves comment. Of this multitude of transients
some are decent people who deserve to be at large.
They have manners and intelligence. Many others,
however, offend the landscape which they have not
eyes to see while they step on the gas in order to arrive
somewhere else for no particular purpose. And as they
go tearing through noble gorges and verdant valleys or
93

a ae a a

— am SS94 THESE UNITED STATES

 

pass lakes whose ripples brightly beckon they glance
with pity at the natives of New Hampshire.

In their opinion we are the ultimate hicks. Poor
stupid clods who have never learned to put pep into life
and jazz it up! Slaves toa plain white farmhouse on
a windy hill, and a hundred acres of tillage, woodland,
and meadow, with a thousand a year cash income as the
measure of material comfort. Always struggling to
pay off the mortgage on the old homestead, so it is
alleged, speaking a curious Yankee dialect, counting a
journey as far away as Boston as the event of a life-
time.

Do we envy these birds of passage? Well, not
enough to say so. Your New Hampshire farmer is not
easily fooled by the buncombe and bluff which the city
dweller accepts as a doctrine of existence. He is not
sufficiently up to date to live beyond his income and be
satisfied with keeping one jump ahead of his creditors.
As one result, the tenant farming which has blighted
the Middle West is a negligible factor. Ninety-three
per cent of our farmers own their land. Only 37 per
cent of the farms are mortgaged, the literary tradition
notwithstanding.

The rural population is steadily decreasing, no doubt
of that—12 per cent since 1900, or 22,000 fewer sturdy
men, women, and children on the soil of their ancestors,
but the total valuation of the farming lands of the
State has increased considerably during this time. The
picture has its melancholy aspects, but it is not so dark

as the sentimental fictionist delights to paint it. It was
sagacious to abandon a great many of these farms.
They belonged to the pioneering era of American his-
tory. Changing economic conditions have made it im-NEW HAMPSHIRE 95

 

 

 

possible to wrest a livelihood from them. They are
too small, insolated, and sterile. It is better to let
them grow up in timber for the benefit of posterity.
The pathetic cellar hole by the roadside or the weather-
beaten set of buildings given over to decay are often
mute memorials of an obsolete social fabric, like the
sod house of the prairie or the log hut of the Kentucky
frontier. They may invoke the tribute of a sigh, but
their day is done excepting as they attract the pilgrim
in search of a summer home.

But wherever in New Hampshire there is mellow
soil and convenient access to markets you will still find
modest prosperity and contentment. Few good farms
are being abandoned. ‘The older generation is able to
make both ends meet and a little more. New Hamp-
shire was almost untouched by the adverse conditions
which have put the Western farmer flat on his baek in
recent years. Never affluent and with little to lose,
it steers a course that avoids the rocks and manages
to pinch through. The State University is sending its
agricultural experts into every rural nook and corner
to teach better methods of farming. Other agencies
are working in the same direction. New Hampshire
will not surrender without a stiff battle. It does not
have to be told that its one asset beyond price is the
people of its farms and villages and the things they
stand for.

The drift to the industrial cities is slowly devitalizing
the old stock with its rugged virtues of industry, thrift,
stubborn independence, and respect for law. This is
the profound tragedy of it. If the salt have lost his
savor, wherewith shall it be salted? Certainly not in
the polyglot mill communities of Manchester, Berlin,96 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

or Dover. These are in no wise typical of New Hamp-
shire. Their rotary clubs or chambers of commerce
shout the get-together, booster jargon of Seattle or
Dallas. Their politicians are as fat-witted, selfish, and
inefficient as elsewhere. Their backgrounds of dignity
and tradition have been obliterated by the rising tide
of French Canadians, Irish, Greeks, and Slavs. Massa-
chusetts is ever so much worse off. Vermont has al-
most escaped the curse. Maine has preserved much of
its native integrity because it is still a vast wilderness
province.

New Hampshire is a small State of 450,000 people
who reflect, to an intimate degree, the prevailing cur-
rents of an American life which had its rise in the very
beginnings of the nation. Past and present rub elbows.
Industrialism is a canker and the summer tourist has
been both a bane and a blessing. The countryside has
been infected with shabby ideals, a vulgar code of be-
havior, and a slangy, slipshod dialect from New York
and Chicago that is spoiling the English speech, pure
and undefiled, which New Hampshire received as a
heritage from its forbears. The younger generation
imitates these invaders and refuses to be buried alive
on a farm. It prefers the bondage of a white-collar
job with small hope of advancement. For an eloquent
comment, the average age of the owner of a New
Hampshire farm is fifty-three years. One-fifth of them
are sixty-five or over. They have grown old behind
the plow. And yet it heartens one to find a certain
number of educated, upstanding young men returning to
the acres that their childhood knew. With their prac-
tical knowledge and wider point of view they are the
hope of rural New Hampshire. One of them, a neigh-aeaae

   
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
   

NEW HAMPSHIRE

 

 

bor of mine, started a poultry farm and cleared $10,-
ooo in the third year of operation.

There is an automobile in almost every country
dooryard and few of them are bought on the install-
ment plan. The next time you are driving through
New Hampshire, please note how trim, well-painted,
and comfortable most of these farmhouses are. Grind-
ing poverty is not reflected from such homes as these.
Miracles of economy are performed. It is in the blood.
There has never been enough money to go round. But
what percentage of city folks are as well off at the
end of the year?

More than half the population is still rural, living
on farms or in the villages whose characteristics have
survived the changes of the modern scene. This 1s
the real New Hampshire, when you sift it from the
urban rubbish. Nowhere can it be observed to such
advantage as in the State legislature, which meets
every two years. This assemblage has made New
Hampshire famous, like Mount Washington and Lake
Winnepesaukee. We have long boasted of it as the
largest legislative body in the world, with 416 members
in the lower house. It supplied Winston Churchill with
excellent material for novels written after the fact.
Gone is the epoch, however, when the Boston and
Maine Railroad was said to purchase New Hampshire
patriots in carload lots and a Jethro Bass could deliver
the goods in the room of the Phenix Hotel, renowned
for its red plush furniture. The legislature has become
honest and unromantic. There are no more leaders,
good or bad. Politically New Hampshire is as unpro-
ductive as an abandoned farm. It once sired a DanielMaRePReanenyeiell

98 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

Webster. Now it sends a George H. Moses to the
United States Senate.

A novelist would find poor pickings under the State
House dome at Concord. The lobbyist is branded as a
suspicious character who has to watch his step. Sev-
eral years ago the writer served a term as a member
of the Appropriations Committee. The chairman was
the last of the old guard which had carried New
Hampshire in its breeches pockets. A patriarchal per-
son, white-bearded, soft-spoken, he maintained the
ancient rites, a secluded room in the Eagle Hotel,
whispered conferences, confidential bargains.

But a progressive Speaker of the House, young and
unterrified, defied this ‘“‘Uncle Jim,’’ mocked his dy-
nasty, and figuratively stood him upon his ancient head.
He was outvoted in the very committee which he had
hand-picked and dominated for a generation. The
State finances were snatched from under his thumb.
He became no more than a ghostly reminder of a time
when New Hampshire politics had been intensely prac-
tical. He was no better and no worse than the other
leaders of his day. A zealous watch-dog of the treas-
ury, he opposed every modern scheme of welfare for
the common good.

Shorn of the glamour of that picaresque era, the New
Hampshire Legislature is a social club for the plain
people, a biennial party for getting acquainted in a
leisurely manner. In this respect it is worth all its
costs. Numerous bills are passed, most of which are
superfluous and inconsequential. They are never ex-
travagant. The rural members see to that. Every
dollar appropriated is squeezed until its shrieks echo
along the Merrimac Valley. The pleasant familiarityNEW HAMPSHIRE 99

 

 

of a session whose weeks stretch into months is seldom
disturbed by a Governor with brains or gumption
enough to make himself seriously annoying. If an
able man happens to hold the chair, it is the exception
to prove the rule. The average type is a rather elderly
banker or lawyer who desires the honor for the sake
of his progeny and is willing to foot the bills. The
salary of $2,500 is not apt to attract younger men
of parts who have to make their way in the world.

The Senate, of twenty-four members, is cut more
or less from the same cloth for the reason that its
electoral districts are divided according to taxable
wealth, and not population. This makes the worthy
senators view with alarm any departure from things
as they are. Their chief pastime is killing what may
be called popular legislation as passed by the lower
house. Membership in a State senate of this descrip-
tion means boredom to tears unless one happens to be
built that way.

The teeming House of Representatives is the place
to study and enjoy mankind. As a body it mills about
with a vast deal of waste motion because of its un-
wieldy size. It grinds a small amount of grist for the
number of hands employed. Every attempt to decrease
its numbers by the enactment of a constitutional amend-
ment has been pugnaciously defeated. The men from
the farms and villages refuse to be robbed of the prize
of going to the legislature. It is an honor which
custom decrees should pass in rotation from one sub-
stantial citizen to another. Asa rule it shows a greedy
spirit to expect more than one term at Concord. The
emoluments consist of $200 for a term of perhaps
three months and railroad transportation. It is‘to therr

100 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

credit of some of these incredibly thrifty legislators
that they save a few dollars of this impressive salary
after paying their living expenses in Concord. A pop-
ulation of 600 entitles a village to send a representa-
tive regularly. Three hundred people rate a member
every other session, or one-half member per session,
to work it out arithmetically. Above the 600 mark
the community acquires another representative for
every increase of 1,200 souls. As a consequence, Man-
chester sends 68 representatives, Nashua 23, and Con-
cord 18. This is absurd. It might be inferred that
the few cities, with such topheavy delegations, could
control legislation for their own ends. It doesn’t work
out that way.

The Manchester contingent, composed largely of
French Canadians and Irish ward politicians, is usually
rent by internal dissension and too ignorant to achieve
results. The balance of power is held by the canny
men from the rural districts. The brains and common
sense of New Hampshire still come from close to the
soil or from the simple environment of the small town.
A refreshing, interesting lot of men they are. In a
benighted age of standardization, they have maintained
an individualism which refuses to be card-indexed.
They cannot be led unless they know precisely where
they are going. Many of them were isolated from
neighbors until the “‘flivver” banished the barriers of
poor roads, intervening hills and mountains, and
sparsely settled regions. They have had unhurried
rainy days in the barn or long winter evenings by the
fireside to think and talk. They are self-taught in the
best sense of the word.

The wives and daughters, no longer shut in andNEW HAMPSHIRE IOI

 

 

 

deprived of stimulating contacts, are more energetic
and ambitious than the menfolk. Nowhere will you
find groups of women more genuinely cultivated and
alive to modern trends and values than among the
clubs of the little New Hampshire towns. They do
not belong on Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street nor are
their husbands Babbitts. It was Waldo Frank whose
lively fancy depicted the wretched New Hampshire
housewife as gazing from her kitchen window only to
pick out a tree from which to hang herself. This was
not meant to be humorous. It was in line with the
accepted legend.

And so our farmer comes to Concord with a pretty
keen desire to make himself useful, realizing that his
women will prod him on and scrutinize his legislative
record with great care. He is mostly interested in
keeping taxes down and diverting the available funds
toward good roads and better schools. It is appealing,
in a way, to find how heavily this question of taxation
weighs upon him. In the districts where rural depopu-
lation is going on the burden falls more heavily each
year upon those who are left behind. And the chief
fiscal problem of the household is gathering together
enough cash to pay the tax bill.

However, when a new educational law was passed
in 1918 whose purpose was to reorganize the public-
school system of New Hampshire and raise it to a
par with far richer States, these legislators from the
farms and hamlets supported it earnestly. They were
willing to pay the price as soon as they felt they would
receive their money’s worth. It signified that they
hoped, more than anything else, to make their children
contented at home and to give them some of the ad->
KEIN 4
a

  
  

102 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

vantages of the city-bred youngster. For once rural
New Hampshire was pulling together.

The writer was appointed a member of the State
Board of Education, which had the task of putting
this new system in operation. He made a speech at a
meeting of the State Grange to an audience of a thou-
sand farmers and their wives. Flattering himself that
he had put the argument across, he sat down with
that specious glow of satisfaction that sometimes re-
wards the amateur spellbinder. Later a competent-
looking woman with a piercing eye cornered him in the
hallway and spoke as follows: “I have had to attend

‘a lot of meetings this year, Mr. Paine, as president

of our woman’s club. And it does seem as if ’most
everywhere I go I have to listen to you make a speech.
Of course that can’t be helped. But I must say I do
get sick and tired of hearing you say this new Board
of Education serves without any salary. Now, you
know as well as I do that if you were worth anything
the State would pay you for it.”

There you have the genuine New Hampshire flavor.
This admirably candid woman wasted no breath in
counterfeit words but went straight to the point. Alas,
she was quick to suspect the other person’s motives and
wonder what there was in it for him. This is a flaw
in a catalogue of splendid native qualities. It has
thwarted most of the efforts to bring about codperation
in government, in improving the conditions of agricul-
ture, in reducing the cost of living. It is found in
rural communities elsewhere, but New Hampshire has
been a soil peculiarly congenial.

Some of these legislators come from the North
Country, beyond the White Mountains, where littleNEW HAMPSHIRE 103

~

 

towns exist twenty to forty miles from a railroad with
great stretches of forest between them. This is a stal-
wart, clannish breed, with force of character above the
average. The north countrymen have always been con-
spicuous in New Hampshire affairs. One may fitly
call them the Highlanders of this old New England
commonwealth.

Others come from the southeastern border, where
the sea pounds the reefs and forelands of a granite
coast. They recall the stately mansions of Portsmouth,
built by shipping merchants and captains whose top-
sails gleamed in ports exotic and far distant, or Paul
Jones and the Ranger fitting out for a famous cruise
in the English Channel. New Hampshire wrote its
pages in the briny chronicle of Yankee ships and sailors
that won maritime supremacy for this nation in its
infancy. Now Portsmouth is awakened from _ its
drowsy peace by the crews of the gray warships at the
Kittery Navy Yard and the wealthy cottagers of Rye
Beach, whose motors fill the old square in July and
August.

To Concord also come the men from the western
counties of the Connecticut Valley, whose farms are
fertile and never abandoned unless for a goodly sum
per acre. hey ask no sympathy and are doing very
well, thank you. The White Mountains sends its hotel-
keepers and merchants to the Legislature, dapper,
worldly persons who have learned how to capitalize
scenery for all the traffic will bear.

Most worth while are the farmers from the hills,
slow-spoken, round-shouldered, who strive tenaciously
to keep their places going with a few cows, a gnarled
orchard, some hay to sell, an acre or two of potatoes.104 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

Their social center at home is often the little red
schoolhouse. They look askance at new-fangled ideas.
They are cast in the mold of their ancestors, who
marched from Nottingham Square and Durham to the
battle of Bunker Hill.

These are the folks for whom a term in the Legis-
lature is a memorable experience. It is inaccurate to
call them taciturn. They are not given to incessant
chatter, but they love to sit and talk. And it is good
talk, shrewd, seasoned, meaty. The outside world
has accepted Calvin Coolidge as the typical Vermonter,
compared with whom a clam is fairly garrulous. The
New Hampshire folks are not like that, the Lord be
praised. There is blood in their veins and not ice-
water. And in other respects they are quite human
and likable. Their so-called reserve is merely a habit
of having something to say before they say ie

New Hampshire is very much in transition between
the old and new, somewhat fettered to the past, but
by no means blind to the future. Its textile mills, which
are the sinews of its industrial life, are seriously men-
aced by Southern competition. It is not impossible
that the cities may be sapped of their strength by an
economic revolution of this kind, and the conditions
of former days more or less restored. This would
mean various industries fostered among the smaller
towns, employing native labor amid wholesome sur-
roundings. The undeveloped or abandoned water
power of a hundred little rivers is waiting to be utilized.
Meanwhile tired business men buy New Hampshire
farms and the campers flock to every wooded lake.

On the whole, New Hampshire is not yet bound
over the hill to the poorhouse nor is its vigorous nativeNEW HAMPSHIRE

 

 

 

stock submerged beyond rescue. It utters no loud cries
for help and intends to work out its own salvation.
Robert Frost has said it very well in these lines:

The glorious bards of Massachusetts seem |
‘To want to make New Hampshire people over. tt

‘They taunt the lofty land with little men.

I don’t know what to say about the people.
For art’s sake one could almost wish them worse
Rather than better. How are we to write

The Russian novel in America
As long as life goes so unterribly?

There is the pinch from which our only outcry
In literature is heard to come.
We get what little misery we can

Out of not having cause for misery.sm

Mi
ih
’
r
|

SASSI

EEBALLERLELOEEEUL ER CECT er OTETRT ELT

    
  
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
  
  
 
     

WYOMING
A MAVERICK CITIZENRY

By WALTER C. HAWES

WHEN the roaring middle years of the nineteenth
century were witnessing a mighty trekking to and
fro of young and turbulent manhood in search of
virgin lands of gold in these United States, one partic-
ular stretch of murderous desert in the western part of
the territory of Dakotah baffled the quest of the
frontiersmen for anything worth development. For a
full quarter of the century these torrents of humanity
surged this way and that, to California, to Pike’s Peak,
to Nevada, to Montana, and all that while the district
that was to be Wyoming was regarded only as a deso-
late place along the trails which men traversed for the
sole purpose of reaching some place beyond. Twenty
years of flood-tide emigration along the Oregon Trail
left no residue save the soldiers in the military posts
and the keepers of the road houses. Indeed had it not
been for a break in the Rocky Mountains and a welling
up of the plains which caught the eye of the searchers
for easy passage to the Pacific Coast, there is no tell-
ing when the attention of men would have been turned
this way.

It was this low place in the hills that brought to the
district in the summer of 1867 the two creeping lines
of steel which represented the westward progress of
the first coast-to-coast railway. And keeping pace with

the breaking plows of the contractors went the first
106WYOMING 107

 

 

towns of the district, the riotous “hells on wheels”
that sprang up overnight and went as quickly, popu-
lated with the huge construction gangs and the motley
horde which preyed upon them. At intervals behind
these moving vanguard settlements sprang up the di-
vision-point towns, permanent but almost as rough and
ready as their mushroom predecessors.

The violence that prevailed in those towns during
the first year made it certain that if continuous rail
traffic was to be assured, there must be some seat of
government nearer than the capital of Dakotah terri-
tory. And thus it was that Wyoming, child of the
cross-continental trails, came into being as a unit of
administration to serve the needs of the Union Pacific
Railroad.

There being no other reason for the existence of the
Territory, it was not unnatural that the railroad cor-
poration regarded the new division of the United
States much as it regarded the huge land grants to
which the federal government had given its full title.
By a shrewd manipulation of these land grants it
secured legal possession of the immense coal deposits
bordering its right-of-way which then seemed the only
part of the Territory worth owning. For many decades
it was common report that the Union Pacific was the
power behind the throne in territorial politics, and
results went to show that it had ways and means of
exerting strong persuasion wherever its interests were
vitally involved. Until the present year the assess-
ments of Union Pacific properties in Wyoming were
fractional as compared with the assessment of that
corporation’s properties in other States. In 1922 the
line across the prairies of Nebraska was assessed atae

neninen

 

108 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

$133,155 per mile, while the same line in Wyoming,
with long stretches of mountain construction and with
tunnels and snowsheds costing millions, was assessed
at $62,376.20 per mile. That same year a former
division superintendent and known business ally of the
Union Pacific running for governor on the single plank
platform of economy and tax reduction was defeated
by 723 votes. His defeat was followed by the ap-
pointment of a State board of equalization which
ordered a sharp raise in the assessment of Union
Pacific properties.

In the period immediately following construction no
one was interested in disputing the suzerainty of the
railroad. Viewed from the window of a railway coach
the Territory seemed through most of its extent a land
as desolate as the surface of an extinct planet. To the
eye accustomed to the rational, water-molded topog-
raphy of the East the land was beyond comprehension.
A precipitately tilted ledge of rock would cut across
the trail without reference to the rest of the landscape,
and the route would skirt along its base to a V-shaped
water-gap through which a bewildered river found its
way. These rivers following circuitous routes through
the bad lands eventually gave the State its value as
one of the finest cattle ranges in the world. From the
high central plateau seated like the cupola of a con-
tinent they radiate east, north, west, southwest like
the spokes of a wheel, paying the State’s tribute of
waters to the Gulf of California and Puget Sound as
well as to the Missouri and Mississippi on the east.

But it required someone other than a New York
farmer’s son to discover the land’s value. Cattlemen
of the Texas and Panhandle ranges driving their herdsWYOMING 109

 

    

 

hundreds of miles north to a railroad outlet found
that the seemingly scanty grasses had a strength un-
known to forage of more rainy lands. hey soon were
trailing hundreds of thousands of cattle here in the
early summer to fatten on the nutritious Northern
grasses and be shipped to market in the fall. Not a
fence intervened along their route, and under ordinary
conditions the cattle were brought the whole way for
not more than $1 per head.

It was not until the middle seventies that the dangers
from hostile Indians were removed and headquarters
ranches were established. The perils were still so great
that they were reflected in interest rates as high as
from 24 to 36 per cent required by the Texas and
Cheyenne banks. The result was that large stock-selling
companies were formed which enlisted capital in the
Eastern States and in England and Scotland. Scotch
money was especially active in the West those days,
so much so that at one time Edinburgh was practically
the financial capital of Wyoming. The chief agency
directing the flow of Scottish finance here was the
Scottish-American Investment Company, formed orig-
inally to take advantage of the heavy financial needs
of the United States during the development period
following the Civil War. Money was secured from
investors at a rate of from four to four and a half
per cent, and reloaned to stockmen at rates of from
six to eight per cent. Many cattle companies were also
floated across the Atlantic, most famous of them being
the Swan Land & Cattle Company, which is still in
existence. This outfit was at one time capitalized at
$4,500,000, with a book count of 120,000 cattle and
nearly 600,000 acres of land under contract of pur-BERDUSEADRARRALERERRRURRRREER GAEL WEVERRaEEAL

SEs

  

TIO THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

chase from the original locators or the Union Pacific
Railway. All actions of any consequence were subject
to the review of the Scotch board of directors, and the
manager of the company made annual trips across the
water to report to this board in the shadow of King
Arthur’s seat in Edinburgh.

Many cosmopolitans of the clubs of New York and
London gathered to this playground of the western
continent to indulge young men’s tastes for action in
their business) Among the names now deeply
grounded in the history of the State was that of Sir
Horace Plunkett, now world renowned Irish statesman,
who ranched in the Powder River section from 1879
to 1889, and who financed the State’s first large irriga-
tion project—the Wheatland colony.

There were Morton and Dick Frewen, English gen-
tlemen who developed a ranch in the Hole-in-the-Wall
country, naming that famous landmark after a spot in
their native London. There were Arthur Teschmaker
and Hubert De Billier, Harvard ’78, who bought a
string of ranches along the Laramie River in 1879,
and who for years were leaders in that brilliant and
dashing assembly of young men who made the old
Cheyenne Club their headquarters.

At this famous hostelry, nicknamed “Little Lunnon”’
from the many Englishmen who frequented it, lived
these gentlemen of blood and breeding, leaving the
management of their ranches to foremen who had
grown up in the industry. They fitted the place in
sumptuous style, decorating the walls with prints of
British racing horses, with the large copy of Paul
Potter’s ‘Bull,’ marked with a revolver shot, and with
the fine steel engraving, “In the Heart of The BigWYOMING III

 

Horns” by Bierstahdt, presented to the club by the
artist himself.

Despite the ravings of the romanticists over the free-
dom and the larger manners of the days of the un-
fenced range the plains cattle-industry of those days
was no pure democracy. All conditions made for the
success of the large outfit. Under the provisions of
the federal land laws legal title to the range was out
of the question save in small amounts beneath notice
in a pastoral country. Consequently the range was no-
man’s land, and anyone who could get money could
flood it with cattle. An estimate of that day states that
a herd of 5,000 cattle could be maintained there for $1
per head, a herd of 10,000 for 75 or 80 cents per head,
and a herd of 25,000 for not much over 50 cents per
head the year round. Large herds, running as high as
75,000 head, became the rule. When the Wyoming
Live Stock Association was formed in 1879 it was re-
puted to be the largest organized body of stockmen in
the world, comprising 400 members representing over
half the States in the Union and several foreign coun-
tries, and possessing stock and equipment valued well
up toward $100,000,000. ‘The foreign-owned com-
panies employed foremen who were often stockholders
and managed as many as 150 men. Only part of this
force was resident on the range the year round; and
every spring there was an influx of riders. After the
beef round-ups in the fall these transients would “hole
up” in the towns with the stake they had earned, or
in many cases they went to Eastern States, where they
followed more prosaic occupations during the winter.

This was the Wyoming beloved of the romanticist—
a community of roistering young bachelors without a112 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

stake in the land and with little aim other than to enjoy
the spice of adventure that went with the cattle indus-
try. Among them prevailed the open-handed cama-
raderie of the adventurer. Even among their employ-
ers, while the reserves of the bank of nature were more
than equal to the demands there was no reason for
tight-fistedness or thieving. Thus it was that for a
decade or less there prevailed an atmosphere of open-
handed generosity and honorable dealings.

It was inevitable that this seemingly idyllic period
should be no more than an evanescent phase of the
land’s development; and sober consideration will reveal
that its perpetuation was not desirable. The life of the
cow-hand alternated between long periods of hard
work, when he was the very moderately paid employee
of a large outfit, and brief seasons of hard dissipation
in the sordid little cow towns composed of a store or
two and several saloons about a loading chute. The
social institutions of the country were crude. Well
into the twentieth century the barkeepers outnumbered
the doctors, lawyers, and ministers of the State com-
bined. There were few decent women back in the
range country and many reasons for not bringing them
there.

When the abler men aspired to homes and outfits of
their own they came into conflict with the interests
already in control of the range. The syndicates dis-
couraged ownership on the part of their employees, un-
less they wished to buy stock in the companies. It was
true that an employee with a brand of his own could
steal without limit from his employer. It was accord-
ingly a rule with many companies that the employee
with his own brand was blacklisted.WYOMING 113

 

 

But the large concerns were unable to compete with
these new rivals who had grown up in their employ and
were the real cattlemen on whom they had depended
for the rough and ready work. For once the man on
the ground doing the work of production held the ad-
vantage, for he knew the industry from every angle.
The chief weakness of the syndicates lay in their in-
ability to get undisputed control of any considerable
acreage. Ihe homestead law allowed each man a title
to 160 acres of land, to be acquired by actual residence.
For a foreign company this was a poser. Twenty aver-
age acres of range land were required to maintain one
cow the year round. Consequently a homestead would
carry eight cows. If the outfit owned 5,000 cattle,
which was a small herd in the open-range days, it
needed the equivalent of 625 homesteads to run them
on. The large companies laid their case before Con-
gress, asking for legislation permitting long-term leases
of large tracts of arid land as a matter of range con-
servation. here were strong arguments in favor of
such legislation. Notwithstanding the larger gross re-
turns reported from later systems of mixed small
ranching and farming, it seems probable that more
clear money was taken from the country during the
day of the large company than at any time since. For
the changes since have involved much costly contro-
versy and expensive education, however valuable they
may be in the long run. The odium attaching to the
exploitation of the public lands by foreign capital was
emphasized with good effect by the opponents of leas-
ing, however, and the lawmakers were unwilling, for
political reasons if for no other, to lay themselves open
to that charge.ee St

    

114 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

Overstocking and disorganization ensued, and the
severe winter of 1886-87 was sufficient to bring the
old order to an abrupt end. From 50 to 60 per cent
of the cattle were lost that season before summer
opened. Such companies as did not immediately go
out of business reduced their operations to bedrock,
and in the ensuing decade the number of cattle in
Wyoming fell from 900,000 to 300,000.

At the close of the disorganized period the return of
better times found the hated “nester,’”’ the small
rancher, in full control. For a period of ten years the
men who had grown up with the country and who had
been identified with its development more than any
other class of men before or since were in possession.
At the close of that decade there were reported to be
3,200 horse and cattle raisers in the State, with herds
ranging from 100 to 1,000. But even with these
smaller holdings, the legal title to sufficient range was
out of reach. They managed as best they could with
gentlemen’s agreements; several ranchers would fence
in a tract for a common pasture. But the time came
when these men, in their turn, found themselves help-
less before a new invasion.

The new heir to the range was the homesteader who
proposed to take the 160 acres allowed by law and
make his living on it by agriculture. For him it seemed
the federal government had been waiting as the right-
ful owner who was to develop the arid lands along a
policy which it could sanction—the policy which had
been tested in the fertile rain belt.

In reality the movement was engineered by land
boomers who took advantage of the land fever which
resulted from the prosperous farming period whichWYOMING IIs

 

 

came with the opening of the twentieth century. The
boomer saw and grasped his golden opportunity to
exploit the cheap lands of the West. He took up the
systems, so called, of dry-farming developed by experi-
menters and expanded them in a literature that reeked
with the patter of ‘“‘dust mulches’ and “subsoil pack-
ing’’ warranted to retain in gravel beds every drop of
moisture and hold it the year round payable on de-
mand. He acquired title to cheap railway lands, or he
offered to “‘locate” settlers on homesteads for fees
ranging from $25 to $100.

The wage slave and the tenant farmer of the East
leaped hungrily to the bait, and there ensued that
crusade of the innocents that shattered its ranks in vain
against the stubborn desert. Heeding not the warn-
ings of the experienced ranchers, which they held to be
inspired by their selfish interests, and armed with a
dry-farming manual furnished gratis by the promoter
as a buckler against disaster, these knights errant of
the soil essayed their high emprise of making a bushel
of wheat grow where nature had produced but a tuft
of bunch-grass.

During a few years conditions favored them.
World War prices enabled settlers on the better lands
to make ends meet and even show a margin of profit.
But the fitting symbol of the whole movement was the
shack which the homesteader built for his home. All
houses in the dry-farming districts were ‘“‘shacks” in
name and most of them were that in fact. Mere little
paper-lined shells they were, to be blown away at the
first puff of disaster. When disaster did strike the
farming industry in 1920, it transpired that the dry-
farming movement was also a shell of another type,peribbibindisecaceseeel

 

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116 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

loaded with dynamite. Eastern loan companies had
over-financed the movement, advancing $8, $10, even
$12 per acre on lands that now go begging for pur-
chasers at any price. It is true that these loan com-
panies had managed to get usurious rates of interest by
the expedient of withholding a good sum from the
principal as a “commission” for making the loan. But
that availed them nothing when the owner of the land
elected to call the transaction a sale and decamped with
the money, leaving the company to reimburse itself as
best it might from the lands which it had accepted as
1 security. The companies now hold the nests but the
Wi birds are flown. When the collapse came the dry-
farmers who had been holding on precariously during
the best years scattered to the four winds. A few re-
yo stricted localities were favored with a soil actually
| adapted to producing crops under arid conditions, and
here a remnant held on. A county agent whose busi-
ness takes him into a number of dry-farming communi-
ties estimates that in the neighborhood of 10 per cent
of the farmers who came in the boom period are left.
In one section where originally 125 farmers settled
there are five left: in another there are two left out of
twenty-four. The go per cent who let go bettered their
condition, and are now for the most part in the oil
fields and railway towns, earning good wages and living
| | better than at any time in their experience.

| | | But he who concludes from the above recital that
there is nothing left to do but to inscribe R.I.P. over
the departed glories of the land is very much mistaken.
For as the dry-farming industry was just about to burst
like the overblown bubble it was, and as the live-stock
industry was entering a temporary eclipse, a newWYOMING 117

 

 

 

 

dynamic more potent than was ever known in range-
land before entered this arena of seemingly spent
forces. Far below the grass roots once considered the
State’s sole wealth the adventuring drills of the wild-
catters discovered the miracle of petroleum. As early
as the nineties there had been a small production from
the shallow sand of Salt Creek, but it was not until
1914 that the presence of the deeper and richer sands
was determined.

The first result was a rush of the oil companies for
holdings, and a battle of giants ensued, from which the
Standard group emerged victor. By virtue of its posi-
tion as the owner of the only pipe-lines out of the fields
in the early development, the Standard was able to
throttle competition to an unusual degree. Crude
prices in the Wyoming field were hammered down to a
fraction of the mid-continent prices. When the prod-
uct of the latter fields was selling for $3.50 per barrel
during the war, the higher grade Salt Creek product
was selling for around $2 per barrel. When mid-
continent prices slumped to about $1, Salt Creek crude
was selling for barely more than half that amount.
When the independent company was not crowded to
the wall by these methods, the Standard bored from
within until it secured control of the majority of the
stock.

In September, 1921, a faction of the independent
operators under the lead of attorney George Brimmer
of Rawlins demanded a special session of the legisla-
ture to enact laws curbing the monopolistic tendencies
of large companies, but nothing was done, and the
hold of the Standard on the oil industry of the State is

practically complete.

  

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omit a if
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pageant on a a = a = 7 .
5118 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

As the oil was discovered almost entirely on Federal
or State lands, the companies hold these lands under
lease, paying loyalties to those governments. As the
laws require that the bids be open to competition, the
companies sometimes fail to make previous arrange-
ments, and there is spirited bidding. Such was the case
with the famous Section 16, located in the heart of
Salt Creek and owned by the State. When the date
came to release in 1923, there entered the lists a de-
feated candidate who ascribed his downfall in the
election of the previous year to Standard machinations.
As a consequence the Standard interests were forced to
raise the royalty for the lease of Section 16 from 35
per cent to 65 per cent of the production.

But an oil monopoly has ways and means of recoup-
ing such losses. The royalties paid to the State are
largely recovered by higher charges on gasoline within
the State’s borders. Since the beginning of the indus-
try, Wyoming gasoline has sold cheaper at Missouri
River points than within the State. At the present
time the gasoline that is selling in towns neighboring
the oil fields at 21 cents per gallon is selling in Col-
orado at 16 cents. Glaring as this practice is, there is
no concerted move to check it.

The discovery of oil did more, however, than to en-
rich a large corporation. It served to turn the atten-
tion of the entire State inward for the first time. At
last there is a universal center of interest—Salt Creek.
About that oil field and the young city of Casper which
has developed from it there has crowded a population
of 50,000, the first industrial center of any consequence
in the State. Previously it had been a State without
cities, a ragged fringe of settlements around a centralWYOMING 119

 

 

 

 

 

 

desert. Economically the State had been as thoroughly
partitioned into spheres of influence as ever was
Poland or darkest Africa.

Due to the development of Salt Creek there is now
under construction the first railway line designed to
serve the interior needs of the State—the road being
built by the Haskell interests from Sheridan to Casper,
and is eventually to connect with the Union Pacific at
Rawlins. Eventually Salt Creek seems destined to
become the hub of a system of railways radiating to
every region of the State, which will bind together all
sections about this rich central empire. Then this
meaningless geographical rectangle, this oblong satire
on rational map-making, may become at last a unified
commonwealth, a State among States, instead of a mere
tribute payer to a usurious sisterhood. And then may
arise the organized will to resist the exploitation of re-
sources by monopolies without regard to the rights of
the citizens.

Yet is there any assurance of such outcome? Will
the imprisoned genii of the earth which were released
through the casings with the roaring gas and thunder-
ing crude when the wild-catter’s bit pierced the wealthy
lower sands of Salt Creek effect any real social and
political development? Or will the State merely ex-
perience a change of corporate allegiance, and become
known as a province of Standard Oil?

He would be a hardy prophet who would venture
a definite prediction. A medley of cross currents and
clashing interests typifies the political as well as the
industrial stage. There is no longer an outstanding
element of population which dominates as did the
ranchers until two decades ago. Those former masters120 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

of the scene are for the most part pushed to the back-
ground—old men, their ranges gone, their trusty cow-
hands scattered into other places and other walks of
life, their herds decimated year after year to pay the
interest on the debts that seem as permanent as Gibral-
tar. Not given to voluble complaint, their sufferings
have not received the same advertisement accorded to
the wheat farmers of the Northwest, whose losses were
fractional in comparison.

The combined number of farmers and ranchers in
the State, according to the census of 1920, was 15,748.
This number has been reduced by shoals of desertions,
especially among the younger ranchers and the dry
farmers, who went principally to swell the ranks of the
refinery workers. The agricultural element remaining
comprises three distinct classes—ranchers, dry farmers,
and farmers on the irrigation projects—all with widely
different and partially conflicting interests. Add to
these the seven thousand coal miners of half a hundred
nationalities, and the several thousand railway workers,
whose economic creed has become sharply defined in
the course of several years of industrial warfare—and
it is plain why State and national elections today are
battles in the mist for the old leaders.

Once Frank Mondell and Frances E. Warren were
Wyoming, as far as national politics were concerned.
For twelve straight terms Gentleman Frank had been
returned to the House of Representatives, until he was
withdrawn from that contest in 1922 to defeat John B.
Kendrick and make it unanimous for the Republicans
in the Wyoming delegation to the Senate. The result
of that election was in the nature of a revolution in the
political history of the State. Mondell had been con-WYOMING 121

 

 

 

 

 

 

sidered unbeatable. In the prime of his popularity he
had an immense personal following, built up by individ-
ual services to his various constituents. He had sensed
the political importance of the homestead vote and
spared no pains to work for their interests. His office
had served as an information bureau to the new settler:
many a Gordian knot of red tape had been severed by
a word from him. Every new settler received a letter
from Mondell offering his services.

But title to a homestead was scarce a matter for
gratulation in 1922, and Mondell’s old following had
left him for new gods. Touted to win by a comfort-
able margin, he was decisively defeated. When the
smoke of that conflict had rolled away, his discom-
fited backers took cognizance for the first time of the
revolution in progress.

In the 1924 elections the seat of Senator Warren is
at stake. With 81 years behind him, 34 of them spent
in continuous service in the United States Senate, the
leader of the Old Guard goes into his last fight with a
divided opposition as his best asset. A united opposi-
tion would have assured his defeat. But with a dirt
farmer candidate and a liberal Democrat with a strong
labor following in the field against him, he is conceded
a good chance to round out his full four decades in
the upper chamber at Washington. Win or lose, the
day of his real leadership is a part of that lamented
past when Wyoming may have been wild and woolly in
a social way but as dependable as a crime wave after
war in matters political.

This division in the opposition to Warren is typical]
of the heterogeneous and disorganized character of
the new elements of population. Weak in their stateWeRUEREARLA

 

3 7
ee tae he

      
  
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   

122 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

allegiance, these newer elements are more interested in
oil developments than in civic affairs. They are more
interested in lobbying in the offices of oil company man-
agers in behalf of exploration in their respective com-
munities than in legislative relief. Harry Sinclair and
the directorates of the Midwest Oil Company are men
of more consequence than puny State officials, and have
more desirable favors in their grant. A few cents per
gallon of extortion in gasoline can be condoned if only
the oil companies can be induced to recognize the ad-
vantages of their communities as fields for wildcatting.

And so the homesteader mails his semi-annual tax
payments to keep his title clear against the coming of
the wildcatter. The rancher is casting a desperate eye
that same way for relief from the impending auction-
eer’s hammer. And all the ragged little cow towns for-
get the halcyon epoch when Wyoming was “‘a territory
with a future, rather than a state with a past,’’ dream-
ing on the sunbrowned prairie of the day when the oil
rig will be unloaded on the side track and they will take
their rightful place with Tulsa and with Casper.NORTH CAROLINA
A MILITANT MEDIOCRACY

By ROBERT WATSON WINSTON

WHEN Bancroft wrote that North Carolina was the
freest of the free he might have added ‘“‘the slowest of
the slow.” She got into the Union too late to vote for
George Washington, she got out too late to vote for
Jefferson Davis. Until recently she was provincial and
proud of it. Lying between Virginia and South Caro-
lina, it amused and pleased her to be called a valley
of humility between two mountains of conceit. No
F. F. V.’s for her! Her early settlers were plain peo-
ple, neither rich nor aristocratic. “Esse quam videri”’
her motto, the old Tar Heel State would fight, but
she would not brag about it, Sir. She wanted no
archives, no Historical Associations, no written his-
tory. What good was State pride, anyhow,? She began
life as a tail to Thomas Jefferson’s kite, and was quite
willing to do the work and let Virginia have the glory.

This is the way that we North Carolinians have been
wont to put it. One does not fail to detect a note of
aggressiveness in these declarations of modesty. A
citizen of a neighboring commonwealth once said, in
the course of a good-humored dispute with a Tar Heel:
“The trouble with you fellows is that you’re so d d
proud of your humility.” But, anyway, the self-abase-
ment is a thing of the past now. The former valley
is becoming a pretty good mountain itself when it

comes to telling the world. No longer does there take
123

 

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124 THESE UNITED STATES

     
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
   

 

 

place this sort of colloquy, which one could hear at
Virginia Springs back in the days when there were
no North Carolina resorts:
“Oh, you are a Virginian, of course ?”
| [ Apologetically] “No, Madam; but I was born quite
near the Virginia line.”
The late Governor Aycock summed up the educa-
tional status in these words: ‘Thank God for South
| Carolina! She keeps North Carolina from the foot of
i | the column of illiteracy.” The press made no contribu-
tion to the problem. The task of Josephus Daniels’s
| daily paper, for instance, was to turn everything to po-
litical advantage, in its own words to “save the States
The two following citations are illustrative: “Who dis-
covered the North Pole? Dr. Cook, of course, and
| it’s the usual Republican trick to take the glory from
| Cook because he is a Democrat, and give it to Peary, a
i | | Republican.” The efforts of the Rockefeller Founda-
| tion to eradicate hook-worm with its deadly conse-
quences Mr. Daniels declared to be nothing less than a
reflection upon the State whose people were the health-
jest on earth and had no such disease as hook-worm—
the whole thing being another illustration of meddling
Northern philanthropy.

The best philosophy the State could boast for a long
time was that of Nathaniel Macon, Speaker of the
National House in the early days of the Republic.
“Bury me,” he said, “‘in the rockiest spot of my planta-
tion, cover me over with white flint rocks, and do not
| mark my grave.” And among his wise saws were:

“Hold elections every year,” ‘Don’t live near enough
to your neighbor to hear his dog bark,” “Poor land is
the best neighbor,” “Pay as you go—that is the phi-NORTH CAROLINA 125

 

 

losopher’s stone.”’ Governor Vance followed with the
wisdom that ‘“‘When a man left the farm for the fac-
tory he ceased to be a free man and became a slave.”’

How could there be outstanding men or commerce in
these circumstances? And great cities, such as Atlanta,
Georgia; Richmond, Virginia, or Charleston, South
Carolina, would be a menace to liberty and not to be
thought of fora moment. North Carolina hasn’t them
today—uniquely among Southern States.

This is a far cry indeed from today, when we find
Virginia and South Carolina and Georgia newspapers
asking, almost plaintively, why North Carolina goes
ahead so much faster than her Southern sisters in edu-
cation, good roads, industrial development. I shall not
encumber this discussion with statistics, but the records
will show the following facts:

The taxable wealth of North Carolina is $4,543,-
110,0o00—an increase of 176 per cent in ten years.
Twenty years ago her total tax values were $300,000,-
000; today two counties out of a hundred—Guilford
and Forsyth—have a taxable valuation of three hun-
dred million. Last year North Carolina communities
voted $11,000,000 for school buildings—more than
Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Ten-
nessee combined. The last two legislatures voted
$65,000,000 for good roads which nearly equals the
combined outlay for roads in all the other Southern
States south of the Potomac and east of the Missis-
sippi. In addition to $65,000,000 voted for public
roads by the State the individual counties have voted
an aggregate amount of $45,000,000 for the same pur-
pose. In crop values North Carolina holds fifth
place. Texas comes first, then lowa—$475,000,000,a a oe a a i 2 RS EY ag co AT

126 THESE UNITED STATES

 

Illinois — $459,000,000, California — $447,000,000
and North Carolina—$415,000,000. She has 505
cotton mills with a spindleage of 5,540,000; her 80,000
cotton mill operatives turn out $318,000,000 of out-
put; her total factory output is a billion dollars.

North Carolina leads the South in the number of
factory establishments; in the number of wage earners;
in capital employed—Texas, her nearest competitor,
is a hundred million dollars behind.

North Carolina leads the world in tobacco manufac-
ture as well as in tobacco crop value. Her factories
consume nearly a third of all leaf tobacco raised in the
United States; she pays nearly a third of the national
tobacco taxes. At Kannapolis are the largest towel
mills in the world; at Durham the largest hosiery
mills in the world; at Winston-Salem, the world’s
largest tobacco factory, and underwear mills; at Can-
ton the largest pulp mill in the world, and at Badin the
largest aluminum plant. Greensboro has the largest
denim mills in the United States, and Roanoke Rapids,
the largest damask mills in the Nation; in textile manu-
facturing she is second in the Nation only to Massachu-
setts. In twenty years industrial wages have increased
from 14 to 137 millions of dollars, and capital em-
ployed from 68 to 669 millions. The State has been
conspicuously generous, in comparison with other States
in the same section of the country, in supporting insti-
tutions of higher education, notably the University,
colleges for women, and the College of Agriculture and
Engineering.

Turning to the dark side of the picture, we are faced
with the living and working conditions of a great part
of North Carolina’s agricultural population. Tens ofthousands of small farmers are owned body and soul
by the landowner and the money-lender. Their crop is
mortgaged before it sprouts, and if cotton and tobacco
prices reach a low level, which happens many years, not
only is there no margin over and above the debt, but a
deficit which leaves the farmers deeper in the mire than
ever. It is these Americans sunk in poverty of whom
Walter Hines Page wrote in ‘“The Forgotten Man.”
Competent observers have estimated that between two
and three hundred thousand of these tenant farmers—
“croppers, as they are called—and their families are
not possessed of the wherewithal for even the simplest
sort of decent life.

Another condition of which North Carolina has no
cause to be proud is the low state of culture reflected
both in the creation and in the appreciation of litera-
ture, painting, sculpture, and music. True, there is a
cultured class around the colleges and in some of the
cities, with scattered points of light in the villages and
the country, but it is a deplorably insignificant showing.
A recent report upon the small number of books
bought, and borrowed from public libraries, brought
forth avowals of mortification and vehement self-
criticism from the State’s organs of news and opinion.

The saving factor, as regards both tenant farmer
and the neglect of literature and the arts, is that North
Carolina is working to remove both these reproaches.
It is decreasingly trying to distract attention or blind
its own eyes by rhapsodic allusions to its Mecklenburg
Declaration of Independence in 1775 and the gallant
deeds of ’61 to’65. The leaders of the State’s thought
are zealously striving to remedy its weaknesses, and
they are supported by an active forward-looking ele-he
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128 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

ment the absence of which thirty-five or forty years ago
was so vividly recorded by Mr. Page. A State literary
and historical association, an active library association,
and an organization at the university to develop dra-
matic talent are leading manifestations of the will-to-
progress in one direction. In the other direction, the
farm-tenancy evil is being attacked by experts in rural
sociology, a public-welfare department, farm-demon-
stration agents, and of course through the steady ex-
pansion of the schools.

To the outsider the question at once occurs—what
has made this State different from the rest, what ex-
plains its going ahead more rapidly than other South-
ern States in education and industrial development and
road-building ?

Now, let us not take too much credit to ourselves,
but give some of it to Providence. The State of North
Carolina is so placed that it escapes the rigors of
severe cold and yet is free from the oppression that
prolonged intense heat visits upon mind and body.
Soil, the seasons, the temperature, and the distribution
of rainfall enable us to grow every important crop
grown in the United States. North Carolina alone in
the Union is both a big cotton and a big tobacco-
growing State. In cotton it stands with South Caro-
lina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, in tobacco with
Virginia and Kentucky. This circumstance in itself
would explain the millions by which its agricultural
products exceed in value those of other States of about
the same area.

Another natural advantage of capital importance to
industrial expansion is water power, in which North
Carolina leads all other States east of the Mississippi,NORTH CAROLINA 129

 

 

excepting only New York with its Niagara. Hundreds
of thousands of horse-power are already used for mills
and public utilities, and a great deal more await devel-
opment. In manufacturing North Carolina would
never have been able to forge ahead as she has without
the rivers tumbling down from the heights of the Ap-
palachian chain. Here is wealth in inexhaustible form.
Coal is burned up, and even the fishes of the sea are
numbered, but water keeps on coming out of the clouds.

But advantages of climate and soil, beauties of
mountain and plain were hid to the world until recent
circumstances uncovered Asheville and Pinehurst, now
overwhelmed with tourists and home seekers. Ashe-
ville’s apotheosis and the erection “‘of the costliest
resort hotel in the world” were synchronous. A cer-
tain Dr. Grove, having amassed a fortune from a
patent medicine, chanced to pass through the Land of
the Sky. The chateau of George W. Vanderbilt and
its magnificent grounds attracted his attention. He in-
vestigated the Thermal Belt, well-nigh immune to
frost and especially adapted to the growth of choice
apples. He traveled over the Yonnalasee highway,
skirting the Grandfather Mountain, with its great
cascades tumbling through rhododendron and moun-
tain laurel; his eyes dwelt on Mt. Mitchell, 6,800 feet
above sea level, with a hundred sister peaks of more
than 5,000 feet each; he caught rainbow trout in the
Oconolufty, the Cataloochee, the Tuckasegee. He
found, notably at Tryon and Flat Rock, cultivated fam-
ilies from Chicago, Charleston, New Orleans, and
remoter sections, writers, authors, scholars, Army and
Navy men, seeking an all-the-year-climate and finding
it. He compared western North Carolina, with its

 
  
 
  
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
    

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130 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

dry climate and gorgeous scenery, with New England
or the playgrounds of the Old World. To his apprais-
ing eye the Blue Ridge and the Craggies seemed supe-
rior to the White Mountains or the Green, the Adiron-
dacks or the Berkshires; the sylvan Wye and the gentle
Afton inferior to the rippling French Broad, the pic-
turesque Swannanoa, the romantic Nantahala, dashing
over pebbly bottoms. His mind was made up—Ashe-
ville would be his headquarters. And so at Asheville
he constructed the costliest resort hotel in the world.
To Grove’s Tasteless Chill Tonic let us rise and sing!
Last year 300,000 people visited the Asheville region
with its long stretches of hard-surfaced roads. Near by
the Government had two hospitals for soldiers; and
Black Mountain, Hendersonville, Montreat, and Jun-
aluska are assembly grounds for religious bodies of all
kinds. Two boys’ schools, one with patronage extend-
ing from South Carolina to Texas; the other filled with
the picked youth of New England, Chicago, and the
West, are the pride of this metropolis of the moun-
tains. Camps for boy and girl scouts are plentiful.
Through the newly created Pisgah National Forest and
Game Reserve runs the national highway to Pisgah,
5,700 feet above the sea, furnishing a panorama of
mountain scenery of marvelous beauty and grandeur.
Perhaps the greatest playground for the. people east
of the Mississippi has come into being.

The birth of Pinehurst and Southern Pines, home of
winter sports, was even more accidental than that of
Asheville. In the nineties a native of the Pine Barrens
of Central North Carolina, where land went begging
at 50 cents an acre, was sitting in his cabin door when
a stranger, driving over roads hub deep in sand, haltedNORTH CAROLINA 131

 

 

near by. The stranger was Leonard Tufts, a soda
water manufacturer of Boston. He called:

‘Hello, friend! Do you own this entire farm?”

“Well, that’s what the folks say.”

“Then I’m truly sorry for you.”

“Well, now, stranger, you needn’t be wasting yer
sympathy, there ain't as much land in this piece as
you think thar is.”

Today the Sand Hill Red-Skinned Peach Association,
the Page family, and other peach growers own great
tracts in this region which are hard to get at $100 an
acre, and from Cameron to Hamlet are flourishing or-
chards of peaches, grapes, dewberries, and blackberries.

This transformation came about because of Leonard
Tufs’s visit in search of an ideal winter climate, and
Pinehurst and Southern Pines, in consequence of his
work, are better known than the State itself. And
what a stimulus they have been to the State, with
their herds of blooded Berkshires and Ayrshires and
their community fairs! But, true to the “esse quam
videri’”’ motto of the State, these good people have
not made it known that they are raising a peach more
luscious and more costly than the Georgia peach, and
that they shipped this season nearly a million crates, to-
gether with hundreds of thousands of crates of berries.

So much for the help of nature. But that is not
the whole story. Another great cause of this State’s
progress has to do with men, men much in earnest for
education and for industrial development. About 1875
the father of a barefoot lad, Charles B. Aycock, had
sold a little piece of land and the County Squire had
come to take the signature of the boy’s mother. “You
sign on the second line, Madam, just under your hus-

   
   
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
   
 
 
 
 
  
   
  
   

—— ne132 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

band, please.” ‘I cannot write my name, I will have
to make my mark”; and the boy was listening to
the conversation. Not boastingly, but just to show the
impelling power which made him pledge his life to the
cause of education, Governor Charles B. Aycock,
North Carolina’s ‘‘educational Governor,” once re-
lated this story, and added—“‘I then and there made
a vow that every man and woman in North Carolina
should have a chance to read and write.”

The new amendment to the Constitution required
that white boys and black boys alike, after January,
1908, possess certain educational qualifications as a
prerequisite to the ballot. It was then that the voice
of Aycock, like the crack of a new saddle, aroused
the people as never before, bringing compulsory edu-
cation, a six months’ school term, and farm-life schools
throughout the State: “I tell you men that from this
good hour opposition to the cause of education must
be regarded as treason to the State. People charge me
with spending great sums of money in the cause of
education. I admit it; I am going to keep on doing
it, and if I don’t spend more it will be because I
haven’t got any more to spend.”

Mclver, laboring for the education of women, him-
self a college-mate of Aycock, declared: “When you
educate a man, you educate one person; when you
educate a woman, you educate an entire family.” These
men died young, died with their boots on, died spur-
ring their hobby-horses—and these galloped on.

Then came James Buchanan Duke, tobacco king;
and Walter Clark, smasher of idols. Duke, now the
wealthiest man in all Dixie, loves to tell this story of
his boyhood.NORTH CAROLINA 133

 

 

Just after the Civil War, Duke’s father, living in
the hill country, drove a covered wagon loaded with
tobacco, which he had manufactured by hand, to the
Capehart herring fishery on the Albemarle Sound. The
two mules required the better part of a week for the
journey, for the roads were muddy and rough. The
venture was a success; his tobacco had been bartered
for corned herring and the herring in turn had been
traded for fresh pork, which the merchants in Raleigh
bought at good prices. Out of his double profit our
small tobacco manufacturer could afford to be gener-
ous, even lavish, so he laid out a dollar in brown sugar,
bought a tin bucket, a dozen shiny pewter spoons, and,
on reaching home, proudly bade his three sons pitch
in and eat all they wanted. In about half an hour the
second lad called out: “Daddy, they’ve cheated you on
this sugar, the bottom isn’t half as good as the top.”

While Duke was eating his first sugar another lad,
somewhat older and of gentle birth, lately returned
from Lee’s army, was sitting on the generous veranda
of his ancestral home regretting the fate which brought
him into the world too late to have been a major
general, and asking himself ‘‘What next?” This was
Walter Clark, a Confederate colonel at 17, now, and
for the last third of a century, Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court of North Carolina, the most talked-of
man in the State’s history.*

These two men, Clark and Duke, differing toto
cwlo, have taught the State to think in terms of mil-
lions. Before the coming of Duke and Clark ‘Pay
as you go’’ was the fixed policy of the State, good

1 While this volume is in press word comes of the death of Chief
Justice Clark.

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134 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

roads or bad roads, education or no education. Macon

had promulgated it, Vance advocated it, Aycock got

roundly abused for violating it in the cause of uni-

versal education, Daniels’s paper frightened legisla-

[ ture after legislature into following it. But “Pay as

i | you go” is no more. Dead are the old leaders—and

! eight years in Washington have educated Josephus

Daniels. It should be set down in his favor that for

a long time now he has been a consistent champion

of progress. No longer does he fight bond issues in

behalf of great enterprises; and at this time, cities,

counties, and the State, released from the dead hand

of the past, are using their credit, marketing bonds

by the millions, for roads and schools, for water-

works and other public necessities.

a All this pleases the Chief Justice immensely. It

| dwarfs the individual and magnifies the State. “‘Give

1 | the people all comforts, all conveniences,” says Clark.

When Circuit Judge, his standing orders in a hundred

counties were: ‘‘Remove those uncomfortable chairs

from the jury box, replace them with the latest re-

volving chairs; tear up that ill-smelling carpet; put a

clock on the wall; bring the county law library into the

courtroom; transact public business in a business way.”

In one county, where the commissioners refused to

obey, he called the matter to the attention of an ad-

aha miring grand jury with satisfactory results. Asked

hd what will become of our grandchildren, burdened with
|

et

the weight of debt, he smiles and says: “Don’t you
worry about the grandchildren, they will take care of
themselves, much better than you or I did.”

When the late Bishop Kilgo, then president of
Trinity College, praised Washington Duke for a largeNORTH CAROLINA 135

J

 

gift to the college, Clark, a trustee, took offense.
spurned the money, sought to expel Kilgo from the
faculty, and in a ringing article parodied President
Kilgo’s speech of acceptance: ‘My Lord Duke, give
us money; thou art the greatest man in this our
Southland; thy little finger is thicker than the loins
of the law; money, money, all else is but as dust in
the balance.”’ After these plain words the atmosphere
of Clark’s city church, its stewards being also Trinity
trustees, grew decidedly cold. The fight got into the
courts and threatened to disrupt the Methodist church.
Clark suggested that to the Trinity College motto
“Eruditio et Religio” should be added “et Tobacco.”
Following hard on this episode, Brother Kilgo was
made Methodist bishop, while Brother Clark contin-
ued to do business as usual.

Chief Justice Taft recently declared that he would
not trust Judge Clark with the Constitution overnight,
and it is said that on one occasion when a writ of error
was demanded of former Chief Justice White, the
following conversation took place:

Railroad Attorney: ‘We are asking a writ of er-
ror to the Supreme Court of North Carolina, Mr.
Chief Justice.”’

Chief Justice White: ‘What is the nature of the
action, and who wrote the opinion?”

Railroad Attorney: ‘The action is against a rail-
road for damages for personal injury and the opinion
was written by Chief Justice Clark.”

Chief Justice White: “You need not trouble to
read the record. I will sign your writ.”

The corporation papers often charge that Clark
is trailing the judicial ermine in the dust. He likes136 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

this. It calls the people’s attention sharply to the
fact that corporations dislike him. Tireless years has
Clark labored to improve sanitary conditions in fac-
tories, protect the health and life of the wage-earner,
throw safeguards about women and children, bring
about woman’s suffrage, and explode an opinion, in
Hoke vs. Henderson, that a public office is a contract.
“The people gave, the people can take away,” said
Clark, Chief Justice. To Walter Clark the Consti-
tution of the United States is but a buffer to protect
the rich in their ill-gotten gains. Washington, Henry,
Marshall, Adams, Franklin were land-grabbers, time-
servers. Jefferson was the honest man of the Revolu-
tion. The greatest usurpation in judicial history was
Marshall’s declaring an Act of Congress unconstitu-
tional. Whatever the people say is the law. He
admires fighters like La Follette and Tom Johnson.
As for the trusts they are snakes which must be killed,
not scotched. Shall a handful of Rockefellers and
Dukes be suffered to possess the wealth which, of
right, belongs to one hundred and twenty million free
men? The people will never get their dues until
the government acquires all natural resources, coal,
iron, and oil fields, the means of transportation and
of disseminating news, all railroads, steamboats, tele-
graphs and telephones, and the like. Squeeze every
drop of water out of this stock, issue millions of bonds
if necessary, and purchase those properties at prime
cost, restoring them to the people. Perhaps you in-
quire why the Chief Justice is so busy about these
matters; why is he not solemn and dignified and like
other wearers of the ermine? He is not made that
way. He wants these changes to take place in his life-NORTH CAROLINA 137

 

 

 

time, and he verily believes that they will be. If in the
pursuit of them he becomes lonesome, unsocial, cut off
from companionship with his class, run out of the aris-
tocratic city church to the little Methodist chapel in the
outskirts, a man without party, friends, pleasures, or
vices—what of it? That way duty and destiny lie.

And “Buck” Duke? He does not know that Judge
Clark is after him. He started life with nothing, and
if he is the most powerful capitalist in the South he
achieved it all himself. Before he organized the to-
bacco trust and put cigarettes in the mouths of Chinese
and Japanese, the tobacco crop of North Carolina
was a pitiful sixty million pounds—today it is four
hundred million pounds, for which he pays the farmer
the tidy sum of one hundred and fifteen million dol-
lars annually. It was he, he contends, who gave the
State a standing in the financial world. From his
brain and energy have sprung mill-towns and cities
and great wealth for thousands of North Carolina
associates, and into State and national coffers millions
upon millions of taxes have been poured, so that all
property in North Carolina today is exempt from tax-
ation for State purposes. Before he built his cotton
mills many a poor family in mountain cove or in the
valley was eking out a living, rearing children pale
andunderfed. ‘Today the same family has some money
in the bank, ample food and clothing, and the bless-
ings of schooled offspring.

Not long ago Duke’s imagination was aroused by
the hydro-electric possibilities of his State and he
formulated plans for the Southern Power Company.
“I shall develop,” said he recently, ‘“‘millions of horse-
power, sufficient to heat and light the State; and oura wat
eae aA

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138 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

people will no longer pay tribute to the coal barons.
Of Piedmont, Carolina, I shall make a garden spot
where there will be ample work for all; and agriculture
shall be brought out of its long bondage. Trinity Col-
lege, founded by my father, shall become the most
heavily endowed college in America. Do you see that
hydro-electric plant there?” pointing to his Catawba
development. ‘It has cost me eighty million dollars.”

“What do you expect to get out of it, Mr. Duke?”
he was asked.

“Nothing. I was born in North Carolina. It is
about time I was beginning to think of a monument.
I want to leave something in the State that five hun-
dred years from now people can look at and say ‘Duke
did that.’ Everyone owes something to the State he
was born in, and this is what I want to leave to North
Carolina. Do I look like a dangerous man to be let
loose in the State?” he concluded. In this fierce fight
between Clark and Duke, which will win? Shall it be
Clark’s “Dream of John Ball,” or the dream of
“Buck” Duke? In either case there will be progress.

But after all neither natural advantages nor wise
leadership accounts for North Carolina’s recent
growth. The credit must go largely to the “get to-
gether” spirit of a people 99 per cent native born.
The average Tar Heel owns his little farm, “lives at
home and boards at the same place.” North Caro-
lina’s development is the triumph of a vigorous middle
class. The State never had the aristocratic tradition
of either Virginia or South Carolina. To be sure, it
had its planter class, the members of which cherished
their escutcheons and family trees as the Virginia and
South Carolina grandees cherished theirs; but thisNORTH CAROLINA 139

 

 

favored company never established itself so firmly in
a holy of holies as its blood brethren to the north
or south. It was closer to the ground, and when the
big smash came the aura which had surrounded it
was dissipated more quickly.

The more complete dominance of an upper class in
Virginia had its advantages. It was favorable to
leisure for a privileged few, and that leisure in turn
was favorable to the growth of culture. No unbiased
observer of the life of these two neighbors, no student
of their history, can fail to find that North Carolina
has been behind Virginia in polish, in the amenities of
intercourse, in devotion to things literary and artistic.

The lesser gap between high and low in North
Carolina in ante-bellum days has been reflected in a
greater readiness to welcome new ideas, a lack of
reverence for old allegiances and _ preconceptions.
True, the dead hand of the past seemed to have as
firm a grip here as elsewhere in the first quarter of
a century after Appomattox, but more recent events
have proved that this was not so.

There are those who will say: “You are wrong;
there is no difference between the mass of the people
in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and
Georgia. They are from the same stock. Your faster
march is due to your luck in having the right leaders
at the right time.’’ A good deal may be said for that
view. While South Carolina and Georgia have been
worshiping at the altars of such gods as Blease and
Tom Watson, North Carolina has been heeding the
advice of Aycock, Mclver, Alderman, and others with
a passion for real democracy and democratic educa-
tion. Whatever the reason, there arose in the ninetieset

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140 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a few leaders who answered miraculously to the need
of the hour. They had to combat a vast ignorance—
the heritage of slavery, war, and subsequent dire pov-
erty—as well as sectarian prejudices fanned by per-
sons who knew better. They attacked inertia and reac-
tion with the fervor of crusaders and with much success.

But the hardest battle of all is yet to be fought—
the battle for religious, political and intellectual free-
dom. Incredible, for instance, is it that the State
Board of Education has just now excluded from the
public schools all text books teaching evolution. “Only
the Bible account of man’s creation shall be taught,”
they declare. Heretofore the University has been our
greatest agency for good. Now its trustees, some
two hundred active politicians, are insisting that in
the future only “red blooded North Carolinians” shall
be added to the faculty. Instead of endeavoring to
raise up the people to the standard of a college worthy
a great State they are demanding that the course’ of
instruction be lowered to the level of the crowd. “How
would Mr. Lincoln have got his license to practice
law if a three-year law course had been required of
him?” they ask; and there is no Aycock to set them
right. The recent marvelous growth, the exceptionally
fine climate and other natural advantages of this State
will turn to ashes unless she take another forward step.

If intellectual freedom is to be barred and a cheap-
John system of education, based on prejudice and de-
pendent upon popular applause, insisted upon, North
Carolina must remain a militant mediocracy, for un-
doubtedly the history of the world is nothing but the
development of the idea of freedom.NEBRASKA
THE END OF THE FIRST CYCLE

By WILLA SIBERT CATHER

THE State of Nebraska is part of the great plain
which stretches west of the Missouri River, gradually
rising until it reaches the Rocky Mountains. ‘The
character of all this country between the river and
the mountains is essentially the same throughout its
extent: a rolling, alluvial plain, growing gradually
more sandy toward the west, until it breaks into the
white sand-hills of western Nebraska and Kansas and
eastern Colorado. From east to west this plain meas-
ures something over five hundred miles; in appearance
it resembles the wheat lands of Russia, which fed the
continent of Europe for so many years. Like Little
Russia it is watered by slow-flowing, muddy rivers,
which run full in the spring, often cutting into the
farm lands along their banks; but by midsummer they
lie low and shrunken, their current split by glistening
white sand-bars half overgrown with scrub willows.

The climate, with its extremes of temperature, gives
to this plateau the variety which, to the casual eye at
least, it lacks. "There we have short, bitter winters;
windy, flower-laden springs; long, hot summers; tri-
umphant autumns that last until Christmas—a season
of perpetual sunlight, blazing blue skies, and frosty
nights. In this newest part of the New World au-
tumn is the season of beauty and sentiment, as spring

is in the Old World.

 

141a

 

142 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

Nebraska is a newer State than Kansas. It was a
State before there were people init. Its social history
falls easily within a period of sixty years, and the first
stable settlements of white men were made within
the memory of old folk now living. The earliest of
these settlements—Bellevue, Omaha, Brownville, Ne-
braska City—were founded along the Missouri River,
which was at that time a pathway for small steamers.
In 1855-1860 these four towns were straggling groups
of log houses, hidden away along the wooded river
banks.

Before 1860 civilization did no more than nibble
at the eastern edge of the State, along the river blutts.
Lincoln, the present capital, was open prairie; and
the whole of the great plain to the westward was still
a sunny wilderness, where the tall red grass and the
buffalo and the Indian hunter were undisturbed. Fre-
mont, with Kit Carson, the famous scout, had gone
across Nebraska in 1842, exploring the valley of the
Platte. In the days of the Mormon persecution fifteen
thousand Mormons camped for two years, 1845-1846,
six miles north of Omaha, while their exploring parties
went farther west, searching for fertile land outside
of government jurisdiction. In 1847 the entire Mor-
mon sect, under the leadership of Brigham Young,
went with their wagons through Nebraska and on
to that desert beside the salty sea which they have
made so fruitful.

In forty-nine and the early fifties, gold hunters,
bound for California, crossed the State in thousands,
always following the old Indian trail along the Platte
Valley. The State was a highway for dreamers and
adventurers; men who were in quest of gold or grace,NEBRASKA 143

 

 

freedom or romance. With all these people the road
led out, but never back again.

While Nebraska was a camping-ground for seekers
outward bound, the wooden settlements along the
Missouri were growing into something permanent.
The settlers broke the ground and began to plant the
fine orchards which have ever since been the pride of
Otoe and Nemaha counties. It was at Brownville
that the first telegraph wire was brought across the
Missouri River. When I was a child I heard ex-Gov-
ernor Furness relate how he stood with other pioneers
in the log cabin where the Morse instrument had been
installed, and how, when it began to click, the men
took off their hats as if they were in church. The
first message flashed across the river into Nebraska
was not a market report, but a line of poetry: “West-
ward the course of empire takes its way.” The Old
West was like that.

The first back-and-forth travel through the State
was by way of the Overland Mail, a monthly pas-
senger-and-mail-stage service across the plains from
Independence to the newly founded colony at Salt Lake
—a distance of twelve hundred miles.

When silver ore was discovered in the mountains
of Colorado near Cherry Creek—afterward Camp
Denver and later the city of Denver—a picturesque
form of commerce developed across the great plain
of Nebraska: the transporting of food and merchan-
dise from the Missouri to the Colorado mining camps,
and on to the Mormon settlement at Salt Lake. One
of the largest freighting companies, operating out of
Nebraska City, in the six summer months of 1860
carried nearly three million pounds of freight acrossenero rane nrmeenne

Se TS TS Te ee eer

144 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nebraska, employing 515 wagons, 5,687 oxen, and
600 drivers.

The freighting began in the early spring, usually
about the middle of April, and continued all summer
and through the long, warm autumns. The oxen made
from ten to twenty miles a day. I have heard the
old freighters say that, after embarking on their six-
hundred mile trail, they lost count of the days of the
week and the days of the month. While they were
out in that sea of waving grass, one day was like
another; and, if one can trust the memory of these old
men, all the days were glorious. The buffalo trails
still ran north and south then; deep, dusty paths the
bison wore when, single file, they came north in the
spring for the summer grass, and went south again
‘in the autumn. Along these trails were the buftalo
‘7 allows’’—shallow depressions where the rain water
gathered when it ran off the tough prairie sod. These
wallows the big beasts wore deeper and packed hard
when they rolled about and bathed in the pools, so
that they held water like a cement bottom. The
freighters lived on game and shot the buffalo for their
hides. The grass was full of quail and prairie
chickens, and flocks of wild ducks swam about on the
lagoons. These lagoons have long since disappeared,
but they were beautiful things in their time; long
stretches where the rain water gathered and lay clear
on a grassy bottom without mud. From the lagoons
the first settlers hauled water to their homesteads,
before they had dug their wells. The freighters could
recognize the lagoons from afar by the clouds of
golden coreopsis which grew up out of the water and
waved delicately above its surface. Among the pio-NEBRASKA 145

 

 

neers the coreopsis was known simply as “the lagoon
flower.”’

As the railroads came in, the freighting business
died out. Many a freight-driver settled down upon
some spot he had come to like on his journeys to and
fro, homesteaded it, and wandered no more. The
Union Pacific, the first transcontinental railroad, was
completed in 1869. The Burlington entered Nebraska
in the same year, at Platsmouth, and began construc-
tion westward. It finally reached Denver by an in-
direct route, and went on extending and ramifying
through the State. With the railroads came the home-
seeking people from overseas.

When the first courageous settlers came straggling
out through the waste with their oxen and covered
wagons, they found open range all the way from Lin-
coln to Denver; a continuous, undulating plateau, cov-
ered with long, red, shaggy grass. The prairie was
green only where it had been burned off in the spring
by the new settlers or by the Indians, and toward
autumn even the new grass became a coppery brown.
This sod, which had never been broken by the plow,
was so tough and strong with the knotted grass roots
of many years, that the home-seekers were able to
peel it off the earth like peat, cut it up into bricks, and
make of it warm, comfortable, durable houses. Some
of these sod houses lingered on until the open range
was gone and the grass was gone, and the whole face
of the country had been changed.

Even as late as 1885 the central part of the State,
and everything to the westward, was, in the main,
raw prairie. The cultivated fields and broken land
seemed mere scratches in the brown, running steppea -_

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146 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

that never stopped until it broke against the foothills
of the Rockies. The dugouts and sod farm houses
were three or four miles apart, and the only means of
communication was the heavy farm wagon, drawn by
heavy work horses. The early population of Ne-
braska was largely transatlantic. The county in which
I grew up, in the south-central part of the State, was
typical. On Sunday we could drive to a Norwegian
church and listen to a sermon in that language, or to
a Danish or a Swedish church. We could go to the
French Catholic settlement in the next county and
hear a sermon in French, or into the Bohemian town-
ship and hear one in Czech, or we could go to church
with the German Lutherans. There were, of course,
American congregations also.

There is a Prague in Nebraska as well as in Bo-
hemia. Many of our Czech immigrants were people
of a very superior type. The political emigration
resulting from the revolutionary disturbances of 1848
was distinctly different from the emigration resulting
from economic causes, and brought to the United
States brilliant young men both from Germany and
Bohemia. In Nebraska our Czech settlements were
large and very prosperous. I have walked about the
streets of Wilber, the county seat of Saline County,
for a whole day without hearing a word of English
spoken. In Wilber, in the old days, behind the big,
friendly brick saloon—it was not a “saloon,” prop-
erly speaking, but a beer garden, where the farmers
ate their lunch when they came to town—there was
a pleasant little theater where the boys and girls were
trained to give the masterpieces of Czech drama in
the Czech language. ‘‘Americanization” has doubt-NEBRASKA 147

 

 

less done away with all this. Our lawmakers have
a rooted conviction that a boy can be a better Ameri-
can if he speaks only one language than if he speaks
two. I could name a dozen Bohemian towns in Ne.
braska where one used to be able to go into a bakery
and buy better pastry than is to be had anywhere ex-
cept in the best pastry shops of Prague or Vienna.
The American lard pie never corrupted the Czech.

Cultivated, restless young men from Europe made
incongruous figures among the hard-handed breakers
of the soil. Frederick Amiel’s nephew lived for many
years and finally died among the Nebraska farmers.
Amiel’s letters to his kinsman were published in the
Atlantic Monthly of March, 1921, under the title
“Amiel in Nebraska.” Camille Saint-Saéns’s cousin
lived just over the line, in Kansas. Knut Hamsun,
the Norwegian writer who was awarded the Nobel
Prize for 1920, was a “hired hand” on a Dakota farm
to the north of us. Colonies of European people,
Slavonic, Germanic, Scandinavian, Latin, spread across
our bronze prairies like the daubs of color on a
painter’s palette. They brought with them something
that this neutral new world needed even more than
the immigrants needed land.

Unfortunately, their American neighbors were sel-
dom open-minded enough to understand the Euro-
peans, or to profit by their older traditions. Our set-
tlers from New England, cautious and convinced of
their own superiority, kept themselves insulated as
much as possible from foreign influences. ‘The in-
comers from the South—from Missouri, Kentucky, the
two Virginias—were provincial and utterly without

curiosity. They were kind neighbors—lent a hand=i
ro .

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148 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

to help a Swede when he was sick or in trouble. But
I am quite sure that Knut Hamsun might have worked
a year for any one of our Southern farmers, and his
employer would never have discovered that there
was anything unusual about the Norwegian. A New
England settler might have noticed that his chore-boy
had a kind of intelligence, but he would have dis-
trusted and stonily disregarded it. If the daughter
of a shiftless West Virginia mountaineer married the
nephew of a professor at the University of Upsala,
the native family felt disgraced by such an alliance.

Nevertheless, the thrift and intelligence of its pre-
ponderant European population have been potent
factors in bringing about the present prosperity of
the State. The census of 1910 showed that there were
then 228,648 foreign-born and native-born Germans
living in Nebraska; 103,503 Scandinavians; 50,680
Czechs. The total foreign population of the State
was then 900,571, while the entire population was
1,192,214. That is, in round numbers, there were
about nine hundred thousand foreign Americans in the
State, to three hundred thousand native stock. With
such a majority of foreign stock, nine to three, it would
be absurd to say that the influence of the European
does not cross the boundary of his own acres, and
has had nothing to do with shaping the social ideals
of the commonwealth.

When I stop at one of the graveyards in my own
county, and see on the headstones the names of fine
old men I used to know: “Eric Ericson, born Bergen,
Norway ... died Nebraska,” “Anton Pucelik, born
Prague, Bohemia . . . died Nebraska,” I have always
the hope that something went into the ground withNEBRASKA 149

 

 

 

 

those pioneers that will one day come out again. Some-
thing that will come out not only in sturdy traits of
character, but in elasticity of mind, in an honest attt-
tude toward the realities of life, in certain qualities
of feeling and imagination. Some years ago a pro-
fessor at the University of Nebraska happened to
tell me about a boy in one of his Greek classes who
had a very unusual taste for the classics—intuitions and
perceptions in literature. This puzzled him, he said,
as the boy’s parents had no interest in such things. I
knew what the professor did not: that, though this
boy had an American name, his grandfather was a
Norwegian, a musician of high attainment, a fellow-
student and life-long friend of Edvard Grieg. It is
in that great cosmopolitan country known as the Mid-
dle West that we may hope to see the hard molds of
American provincialism broken up; that we may hope
to find young talent which will challenge the pale pro-
prieties, the insincere, conventional optimism of our
art and thought.

The rapid industrial development of Nebraska,
which began in the latter eighties, was arrested in the
years 1893-1897 by a succession of crop failures and
by the financial depression which spread over the whole
country at that time—the depression which produced
the People’s Party and the Free Silver agitation. [hese
years of trial, as everyone now realizes, had a salutary
effect upon the new State. They winnowed out the
settlers with a purpose from the drifting malcontents
who are ever seeking a land where man does not live
by the sweat of his brow. The slack farmer moved
on. Superfluous banks failed, and money lenders who
drove hard bargains with desperate men came to grief.Soon et Dot es ee xr
SI ARS PSE SS Ee

  
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   

150 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

The strongest stock survived, and within ten years
those who had weathered the storm came into their
reward. What that reward is, you can see for your-
self if you motor through the State from Omaha to
a) the Colorado line. The country has no secrets; it is
i, as open as an honest human face.
The old, isolated farms have come together. They
rub shoulders. ‘The whole State is a farm. Now
it is the pasture lands that look little and lonely,
crowded in among so much wheat and corn. It is
scarcely an exaggeration to say that every farmer
owns an automobile. I believe the last estimate showed
that there is one motor car for every six inhabitants
in Nebraska. The great grain fields are plowed by
| tractors. The old farm houses are rapidly being re-
ia placed by more cheerful dwellings, with bathrooms
{ | and hardwood floors, heated by furnaces or hot-water
| | plants. Many of them are lighted by electricity, and
: every farm house has its telephone. The country
towns are clean and well kept. On Saturday night the
main street is a long black line of parked motor cars;
the farmers have brought their families to town to
see the moving-picture show. When the school bell
rings on Monday morning, crowds of happy looking
children, well nourished—for the most part well man-
nered, too—flock along the shady streets. They wear
| cheerful, modern clothes, and the girls, like the boys,
| are elastic and vigorous in their movements. These
a thousands and thousands of children—in the little
| towns and in the country schools—these, of course,
ten years from now, will be the State.
In this time of prosperity any farmer boy who wishes
ta study at the State University can do so. A NewNEBRASKA rst

 

 

York lawyer who went out to Lincoln to assist in
training the university students for military service
in war time exclaimed when he came back: ‘‘What
splendid young men! I would not have believed that
any school in the world could get together so many
boys physically fit, and so few unfit.”

Of course, there is the other side of the medal,
stamped with the ugly crest of materialism, which
has set its seal upon all of our most productive com-
monwealths. ‘oo much prosperity, too many moving-
picture shows, too much gaudy fiction have colored the
taste and manners of so many of these Nebraskans of
the future. There, as elsewhere, one finds the frenzy
to be showy; farmer boys who wish to be spenders
before they are earners, girls who try to look like the
heroines of the cinema screen; a coming generation
which tries to cheat its esthetic sense by buying things
instead of making anything. There is even danger
that that fine institution, the University of Nebraska,
may become a gigantic trade school. The men who
control its destiny, the regents and the lawmakers, wish
their sons and daughters to study machines, mercantile
processes, “the principles of business’’; everything that
has to do with the game of getting on in the world—
and nothing else. ‘The classics, the humanities, are
having their dark hour. They are in eclipse. Studies
that develop taste and enrich personality are not en-
couraged. But the “Classics” have a way of reveng-
ing themselves. One may venture to hope that the
children, or the grandchildren, of a generation that
goes to a university to select only the most utilitarian
subjects in the course of study—among them, sales-
manship and dressmaking—will revolt against all theeen

152 THESE UNITED STATES

 

heaped-up, machine-made materialism about them.
They will go back to the old sources of culture and
wisdom—not as a duty, but with burning desire.

In Nebraska, as in so many other States, we must
face the fact that the splendid story of the pioneers
‘s finished, and that no new story worthy to take its
place has yet begun. The generation that subdued the
wild land and broke up the virgin prairie is passing,
but it is still there, a group of rugged figures in the
background which inspire respect, compel admiration.
With these old men and women the attainment of
material prosperity was a moral victory, because it
was wrung from hard conditions, was the result of
a struggle that tested character. They can look out
over those broad stretches of fertility and say: ‘We
made this, with our backs and hands.” The sons, the
generation now in middle life, were reared amid hard-
ships, and it is perhaps natural that they should be
very much interested in material comfort, in buying
whatever is expensive and ugly. Their fathers came
‘nto a wilderness and had to make everything, had to
be as ingenious as shipwrecked sailors. The genera-
tion now in the driver’s seat hates to make anything,
wants to live and die in an automobile, scudding past
those acres where the old men used to follow the
long corn-rows up and down. They want to buy every-
thing ready-made: clothes, food, education, music,
pleasure. Will the third generation—the full-blooded,
joyous one just coming over the hill—will it be fooled?
Will it believe that to live easily is to live happily?

The wave of generous idealism, noble seriousness,
which swept over the State of Nebraska in 1917 and
1918, demonstrated how fluid and flexible is any liv-NEBRASKA

 

 

ing, growing, expanding society. If such “conversions”
do not last, they at least show of what men and
women are capable. Surely the materialism and
showy extravagance of this hour are a passing phase!
They will mean no more in half a century from now
than will the “hard times” of twenty-five years ago—
which are already forgotten. The population is as
clean and full of vigor as the soil; there are no old
grudges, no heritages of disease or hate. The belief
that snug success and easy money are the real aims
of human life has settled down over our prairies, but
it has not yet hardened into molds and crusts. The
people are warm, mercurial, impressionable, restless,
over-fond of novelty and change. These are not the
qualities which make the dull chapters of history.PESRRRUREELGael
} }

OKLAHOMA
LOW JACKS AND THE CROOKED GAME

By BURTON RASCOE

Poritics in Oklahoma are, if anything, not much
more corrupt than they are, say, for instance, in the
city of Boston. The economic parity in Oklahoma is,
if anything, not much more out of balance than it
is, say, for instance, in the city of New York. The
averages of literacy and intelligence in Oklahoma are
little lower than they are, say, for instance, in the
city of Chicago. The difference is that whereas in
these great urban communities one may easily live in
comfortable ignorance of the socio-economic condition
that sustains one, there is in the State of Oklahoma
no city large enough to conceal the hideous aspect of
its fundamental organization. The sinister and dis-
comforting skeleton is not only devoid of all the dra-
peries, rouge, rice powder, and mascara of civilization ;
it is not even presentably filled out with the fat and
tissue of human illusions.

It is not that Oklahomans are men and women
set aside as an especially enigmatic exhibit in the mys-
terious way God moves His wonders to perform. They
only seem so. That is because the State is so young
and unpopulous as never to have acquired a social
fabric with a nap of culture: it is a haphazard home-
spun every thread of whose woof is visible. An Okla-
homan knows, if he keeps his eyes open at all, every-
thing that is going on about him and he knows that
154OKLAHOMA 155

 

 

it is not conducive to respect and solicitude for his
fellowmen. It is the worst possible place for an ideal
ist and, since most people of normal intelligence and
decent instincts are weighted in adolescence with the
impedimenta of illusions, they either shed their burden
and become Oklahomans or shake the State’s dust from
their feet at the first opportunity. As a result the
Oklahoma towns and cities are constantly being drained
of their young and vigorous blood, blood which might
redeem them from the mental, moral, and spiritual
torpor into which, since statehood, they have fallen.
Even in the larger towns such as Tulsa, Oklahoma
City, Muskogee, Okmulgee, and Shawnee, the popu-
lation, on the whole, is transient. People come and
go in them with such rapidity that it is often difficult
for one to discover a familiar face in the streets after
a few years’ absence. Only those who are anchored
by real estate and resignation remain.

The reason is fairly obvious. Oklahoma has been,
from the first, a boomer State, even before it was a
State—when old Oklahoma Territory was first thrown
open to settlers. It was peopled largely by land
gamblers instead of home seekers. Like other boomer
States, since the days of the California and through
the Alaska gold rushes, Oklahoma was, when it first
attracted attention, the goal not of people who wished
to till the land, build homes, and develop a common-
wealth on secure foundations, but of people who
wanted to get rich suddenly and with as little effort as
possible. That was the situation before oil was dis-
covered in the State and that discovery intensified
rather than diminished pre-existing conditions. The
State’s cattle and agricultural resources are hardly156 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

more than self-sustaining, much less exploitable; but
this fact did not prevent the land gamblers from in-
flating prices out of all proportion to the value of the
land’s increment. Towns, like Lawton, sprang up
overnight with populations of 10,000 or more, on ab-
solutely arid land, unfit even for grazing. ‘They died
out, of course, when the inhabitants discovered they
could not live solely by trading real estate among
themselves. In other towns, like Oklahoma City,
more advantageously situated, on intersecting railway
main lines and in reasonably productive districts, the
boomer spirit was equally disastrous. Such towns were
not permitted to grow normally. Their population
figures were distorted into an aspect of metropolitan-
ism and the optimistic real-estate boomers set about
making the towns live up to these false figures. “They
sold bonds and erected skyscrapers for which they
had no use, and these buildings sometimes remained
vacant for years. They sold stock and erected great
meat-packing, canning, tanning, and other industries
which seldom got farther than buildings and equip-
ment when bankruptcy revealed the enterprises as plain
fnancial swindles, fostered often enough by local
chambers of commerce to attract immigrants and sell
them real estate. One naturally asks how it was that
plain, common foresight did not tell the business men
‘1 communities where such things were going on that
crashes and depression were bound to follow; but the
answer is that there were almost never in these com-
munities any business men in any acceptable use of
that term, no business men mindful of the credit sys-
tem, contented with a legitimate margin of profit,
careful of future security; they were boomers, eagerOKLAHOMA 157

 

 

to make their immediate pile even at the cost of their
established residences, stores, and reputations, and skip
elsewhere. They took chances, that is all; they
gambled, because the State has been from the first
one vast roulette wheel played by adventurers from
other States.

True enough, it has its farmers who bear the burden
of producing the food, its manual laborers, small shop-
keepers, clerks, and other accretions of industrialism
which give some semblance of a permanently organ-
ized society; but behind them all is the gambling spirit
producing probably the vulgarest low comedy offered
anywhere under the name of democratic government.
Where else is afforded a spectacle similar to this: The
theft by night of the State papers from the Capitol
in Guthrie by automobile bandits from Oklahoma City
who sped back and established the State capital in the
Lee-Huckins Hotel; the indictment of a governor and
a State bank examiner for graft arising from false
statements of solvency of banks under State super-
vision; the emptying of the State prison overnight by
a lieutenant governor who held the reins of govern-
ment for a few hours in the absence of the governor
and issued pardons at so much a head; all the impor-
tant State officials selected by a lawyer for a great oil
corporation, to whom they are in debt for campaign
expenses incidental to their jobs and for whose laws
and political wishes they are merely the agents and
office boys; graft so prevalent and inalienable a feature
of State government that the only citizens who are not
partaking of it are the stupid or unlucky? *

1 Recently another act was added to the State’s historical melo-
drama. John Galloway (“Jack”) Walton, whose inauguration asme esiin

   

Te a ae RR ST eT

   

158 THESE UNITED STATES

 

Let us consider for a moment the history of a
State in which such a spectacle is possible. When the
western part of the territory which the United States
Government had reserved as a haven for the Indians
who had been driven out of the other States was
thrown open to land grabbers, certain portions were
designated as Indian reservations and as school land.
The remainder, up to a stated number of acres, was
his who first staked it out as a claim. The west and
southwest were suitable only for cattle raising; the
northern and northeastern sections were soon a rich
erain-producing region, yielding wheat, oats, barley,
corn, alfalfa, and milo maize. ‘The central, eastern,
and southern sections of the territory were given over
to cotton, corn, alfalfa, and potatoes. There was coal
to be mined near McAlester, Coalgate and Okmulgee.
At first, except in the extremely fertile districts, there
were extensive ranches and cattle ranges, acquired by
the enterprising, and these were in due time fenced
off and converted into small farms. Settlers out of the
bleak hills and rocks of Arkansas, the dry prairies of

governor had been celebrated by a tremendous barbecue to his
friends “the common folks,” was sitting in his new $40,000 mansion,
impeached. A whipping in Tulsa, charged to the Ku Klux Klan,
had given Walton an opportunity to make opposition to the Klan
a spectacular issue in his campaign for a United States senatorship.
With little or nothing to justify such drastic measures, he declared
martial law in Tulsa and instituted a military censorship in that
city to prevent the Tulsa newspapers from publishing anything in
criticism of the administration. This precipitated a State Klan and
anti-Klan fight, following which Walton put the whole State under
martial law. When a member of the State legislature issued a call for
that body to convene, Walton made the statement that any legislator
who came to Oklahoma City would be thrown in jail, and when
the legislature attempted to convene, members were dispersed at
the point of the bayonet. Finally an initiative petition, which provides
that the legislature may meet without the call of the governor, was
submitted to the people and overwhelmingly carried. When the
legislature met, Walton was impeached on twenty-one counts.OKLAHOMA 159

 

 

Kansas and Texas, the swamps of Louisiana, and the
barren lands of southern Missouri came through in
covered wagons, prepared to establish homes. They
found that the better portions of the land had already
got into the hands of people who were holding them
for speculation—town residents, bankers, real-estate
operators. To acquire land one had either to pay
a whopping price for it or marry an Indian woman.
This latter method was a favorite one with a great
many who were not already burdened with a family.
Each adult Indian woman had 160 acres in her own
right, as a government land grant, and for each child
she should have there would be additional grants of
160 acres. At first there was also a government al-
lotment of money to full-blooded Indians and to such
children as they bore. This proved an allurement not
only to a great many white men but to Negroes as
well, and as a consequence black and white squaw men
and their progeny came into possession of such de-
sirable lands as had not already fallen into the clutches
of speculators and land operators.

There was established then almost from the first
an agricultural caste system, divided into landowners,
tenant farmers, and share-croppers. Less than 30
per cent of the farmers of the State own the land
they work. The landowners rarely live on the land
they own. ‘They rent it to tenant farmers or leave
its yield to the industry and intelligence of the share-
croppers. A tenant farmer has his own teams and
implements, cows, hogs, and chickens; he undertakes
to till the land, pay for the extra farm labor, and
market the crops. If he does not rent outright he
pays over to the landlord a stated share of the grossrn

    

  

160 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

proceeds on the farm for the year. The share-cropper
is among the most pitiable of human beings. He
owns nothing whatever except the clothes on his back.
He usually has a wife and numerous children. These,
and his own bodily strength, are his assets. The land-
lord provides him with a house in which to live, teams
and implements with which to work, and, often
enough, an advance of money for food while he is
laying in the crops. He and his wife and children
perform the labor in the fields and get in return a
fraction of the yield of the crops. The share-cropper
is, of course, as his condition indicates, a man of very
low order of intelligence and almost always illiterate.
To him is left the bulk of the agricultural resources of
the State. He farms by the most backward of meth-
ods, the prey of superstitions, knowing nothing of
modern intensive agriculture, ignorant of weather re-
ports, distrustful of innovations. Droughts destroy
his corn one season and rains ruin his cotton the next.
Boll weevils and potato bugs ravage his crops; ticks
and Texas fever kill his cows; malaria and pellagra
attack his children. He is too slothful and ignorant
to do anything about it; he attributes his woes to a
malignant Providence or to the political party cur-
rently in power.

The only way he knows of meeting the situation is
that of voting the straight Democratic ticket if the
Republicans happen to be in office, or of electing Re-
publicans if the administration is Democratic. Man-
kind, to him, has three constituents: Democrats, Re-
publicans, and the others, roughly classified as Reds.
Without differentiation he includes among the Reds;
socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, I. W. W.’s, Cath-OKLAHOMA 161

olics, Jews, pacifists, labor unionists, atheists, and
what not. If he is a Republican it is conceivable to
him that a man may be a Democrat without being a
menace to the community, or if he is a Democrat he
will concede that a man may be a Republican and
still be only misinformed politically; but it is not con-
ceivable to him that a man may be neither a Democrat
nor a Republican and still hold a shred of honor. The
most persistently and mercilessly exploited human be-
ing in the country, he is the most zealous and intract-
able upholder of the politico-economic system that
exploits him. Let him hear that some other share-
cropper as illiterate as himself has been converted to
socialistic doctrines and he will help his fellow Ku
Klux Klaners that night give the poor wretch a tar
bath and a coat of chicken feathers. He will not
suffer for a moment anything that threatens his privi-
lege of being mulcted.

Elections come at the height of the cotton-picking
season. If, at the beginning of the season the cotton
market has gone down and the tenant farmer is
threatened with a loss of his year’s labor, the cam-
paigners get busy for the party which is not in power.
For a brief period he and the share-cropper suddenly
become the backbone of the State, the salt of the earth;
and any political orator who tells him that a couple
of times in the course of a speech can make him be-
lieve implicitly the hollowest buncombe. Only one
thing does the farmer at that time understand and
that is that he expected to get twenty cents, say, a
pound for his cotton, and that he is offered only nine,
a price which will not enable him even to pay off his
note at the bank, let alone allow him a margin ofeR on

—— Eee

  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
   
    

      

162 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

profit to carry him through until the next planting.
The campaigner tells him that this is because the
Democratic (or as the case may be, the Republican)
Party has run the government to the dogs; and that
if he will only cast the straight Republican (or as the
case may be, the Democratic) ticket, cotton will go
to twenty-five cents the day after election. He doesn’t
doubt this; and the following year he doesn’t doubt
the equally absurd cock-and-bull promises of the rival
party. And, since political office depends upon his
vote and the vote of his similars in the towns and
cities, there can be no stability in the State government.
Democrats are voted in at one election, and voted out
the next, and under these hazards of fortune it is
little wonder that political office is sought mainly by
grafters who rob the State treasury and sell laws,
grants, and franchises to the highest bidder during
the few months of their opportunity. ‘Their salaries
as State officials during a full term of office would not
ordinarily pay the cost of their campaigns for election.
They make it up by a succession of party raids on the
taxpayers’ money, by selling out the State to cor-
porations, and by all sorts of grand and petty larceny
from padding pay rolls to receiving bonds and cash
from insolvent banks in return for certificates of sol-
vency.

What happens now in the agricultural regions is
this. Although the State has the most rigid banking
laws, bringing all banks under State or Federal su-
pervision, most banks in all but the larger cities are
not banks at all; they are the offices of a group of
men whose principal business is real-estate specula-
tion, horse-trading, and mortgage foreclosing. TheOKLAHOMA 163

 

 

depositors are not farmers; they have nothing to de-
posit. The bank officials are their own depositors
who lend their money out at usurious rates. The
State usury law limits the interest rate to 7 per cent.
But this is the way it works. Farmer Brown has a
span of mules worth in the market $650 and farm
implements worth a couple of hundred dollars more.
He needs $200 for food and for the salary of farm
hands to tide him over until he has finished bringing
in his crop. Early in the season he has already mort-
gaged his crop at the bank for the money necessary
to live on while he is planting his crop. He applies
for a loan of $200, giving as security a mortgage on
his mules and implements. He receives $175 in cash
and is obliged to sign a note promising to pay back
$200 at 7 per cent. In other words, $25 in interest
is collected from him before he gets his money. The
amount subtracted from the original loan varies ac-
cording to the pressure of the farmer’s need and the
negotiability of his securities. Sometimes the amount
deducted from a loan of $100 is as much as $30. If
he invokes the usury law (as some poor devils have
done) he is blacklisted by every bank in the State
and thereafter cannot borrow a cent, no matter what
security he has to offer. If his crops fail or if the
market price for his produce does not enable him to
pay off his note or notes at the bank and he 1s unable
to dig up more security, the mortgage is foreclosed.
It sometimes happens that a farmer who has mort-
gaged his crop merely has his note increased when he
finds it necessary to mortgage his live stock and im-
plements, and if a drought or excessive rains prevent
him from raising enough money either to decrease his164 THESE UNITED SPATES

 

 

note materially or clear it up, he will lose everything
he has. Since what he has in the way of live stock
and farm implements is the result of long years of
labor and gradual acquisition as a share-cropper and
later as a tenant farmer, the loss of it means that he
automatically goes back again as a farm hand or as a
share-cropper.

A generous national government reserved the most
fertile sections of the country for those Indians which
it had hopes of making over into good and industri-
ous citizens. It had been unable to tame the Apaches,
Comanches, and Arapahoes, so it permitted them to
die out of boredom in great numbers, under the armed
surveillance of Federal troops in the arid regions of
the southwest part of the State. The Osages, heirs
to land in the north-central section which was tapped
for a prodigious output of petroleum, became, pro-
verbially, the richest nation, per capita, on the face
of the globe. Discovery of oil upon their lands and
upon the lands of many of the Creeks and Cherokees
(who had been granted nice rocky hills to roam around
in) made millionaires of many of these original citi-
zens of the country. The Seminoles and Creeks inter-
married freely with the Negroes; and the Pottawat-
tomies, Shawnees, Sacs and Foxes, and Cherokees
intermarried equally freely with the whites. The
Cherokees had a language and even a literature of
their own; but with rare exceptions the Indians have
not taken cordially to the blessings of the civilization
which has been offered them. The Apaches, Co-
manches, and Arapahoes actively resented it as long
as they were numerous, and even after they were shut
up in stockades they occasionally broke out and scalpedOKLAHOMA 165

 

 

 

a few settlers. The Osages and the mixed breed Semi-
noles, Pottawottomies, Cherokees, Shawnees, and
Creeks tilled their land, or had it tilled for them, and
complied in some degree to the customs of the whites;
but the full-blooded Indians, even of the younger gen-
eration, have consistently refused to embrace white
culture. They live in tribal communities; they wear
their beads, moccasins, and blankets; they hold such
ceremonial dances as the government will permit them
(they are denied the privilege of the war dance) ;
and they allow themselves to be cheated out of their
land by the enterprising whites.

Like the Cumean sibyl, they apparently wish only
to die, helplessly resentful of the passing of their
freedom and their leisure. —The government secondary
schools for Indians have been, like Carlisle, patron-
ized almost exclusively by Oklahoma Redskins, a fail-
ure. Some few individuals completed their courses,
took university degrees, and entered into professional
and commercial competition with the whites, usually
with vast success. But the majority of government
school graduates have returned immediately after
commencement, doffed their uniforms and department-
store dresses, and donned the costumes peculiar to their
tribes. The girls braid their hair again; the men
erow a scalp lock; and all of them after a few months
back with the tribe pretend not to understand or to
speak English. Under the Federal law, an Indian
may dispose of his inherited land, but not of his
original allotment, when he has reached the age of
twenty-one. Knowing this, in every county seat in the
State, land sharks literally sit around on the door-
steps of the county buildings waiting for old IndiansF Sy ee aed
--. 2
ed ~
bs
rh
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i
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TS a Se = Pa

  
 
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
   
   
 

166 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

to die and young ones to come to the age of twenty-
one. ‘These sharks know how much land each Indian
can dispose of, what it is worth at the current land
valuation, the date of the Indian’s birth, his guardian,
and his personal disposition.

Here is a typical instance of what goes on every
month in a dozen different counties. The two leading
bankers, which is to say the leading land sharks, in
rival towns had their eye on the property of an Indian
who had 800 acres of bottom land in the oil region,
worth at the lowest estimate $200 an acre as prices
go. [wo weeks before the youth’s birthday one of
them stole a march on the other, invited the boy on
a trip, took him to Chihuahua, Mexico, got him drunk,
showed him a riotous time in the redlight district,
crossed the border back into the State on his birthday,
had the deeds drawn up for him to sign, giving him
$8,000 in cash for $160,000 worth of property, got
his signature, and rushed the deed through the probate
court the next day.

So much, in sketch, for the productive complexion
of the State exclusive of its bonanza of gas, oil, and
coal—a comparatively recent discovery, and already,
according to many expert estimates, a source of wealth
that is rapidly being exhausted. The general features
attending the discovery of oil in the Tulsa-Sapulpa and
Ada-Ardmore districts do not differ in essentials from
the turn of events such a discovery brings about in
every State. There was, of course, the rush of ad-
venturers, oil promoters, highjackers (an oil-region
term for murderous robbers), laborers, and camp fol-
lowers. Until Tulsa amassed a wealth in its local
banks which compared favorably with that of St, LouisOKLAHOMA 167

 

 

and Kansas City it was, like most of the smaller oil
towns now, a gay and lawless community, with gambling
houses running wide open, a redlight district in full
blaze, moonshine whisky readily obtainable through-
out the periods of senatorial, State, and national dry-
ness, and the frenzied excitement prevailing which is
always a concomitant of sudden visions of wealth. Mil-
lionaires were made overnight, and men and women
who had until yesterday toiled barefooted in the fields
trying to wrest a meager living from the sandy and
rocky soil suddenly found themselves in possession of
incomes from oil leases amounting to thousands of
dollars a week.

This sudden acquisition of unexpected wealth on
the part of illiterate white settlers had its comic aspect:
they knew but two or three ways of spending it—
buying high-priced and luxurious automobiles and tear-
ing them up on the rocky roads, only to buy new
ones; chartering special cars for a trip to Niagara
Falls or to Washington; and buying diamonds. This
vision and fact of sudden, immense wealth has also
its tragic side. The farmers, the normal producers of
the State, live buoyed up by the hope that some day
oil will be discovered on their land. Meanwhile they
persist in the most backward agricultural methods ob-
taining in any State in the Union, and market their
produce through the most inefficient and wasteful chan-
nels of middlemen and profiteers it is possible to
imagine.

Within the last year the Oklahoma Cotton Growers’
Association, a sort of farmers’ union, has been per-
fecting a codperative scheme for marketing and ware-
housing which may check some of the losses the farmercnet emma

 

168 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

ordinarily sustains in the disposal of his cotton. An-
other part of the plan of the association is to limit
the acreage in cotton to prevent overproduction. I
was privy to one such agreement by the assembled
farmers of one county. The following spring every
single one of them increased his cotton acreage by at
least a third, on the theory that everyone else would
decrease his acreage, the price of cotton would go up,
and he would be the gainer. There was an excess of
cotton produced throughout the country that year; the
price slumped, and these men who had solemnly agreed
to cut their production and raise corn for their stock
and potatoes and other vegetables for themselves all
but starved.

After such a demonstration of stupidity and covet-
ousness, such a general indifference to the common
weal, one grows sceptical of any profound change for
the better in the source of wealth, the land; and this
scepticism is deepened by the knowledge that, so long
as reports come from time to time that another well
has been sunk by oil-stock promoters, hope will spring
eternal in the farmer’s breast that he will not have
to plant either cotton or corn; so he sinks back in
sloth and squalor, living principally upon cornbread,
salt pork, and sorghum molasses—a diet so preponder-
atingly of corn that pellagra epidemics spread through
the State every year and children, who by all rules of
hygiene should wax strong in the fresh quiet and pure
food of the farm, are emaciated, rickety, weak, and
sallow, easy preys to malaria, tuberculosis, and pneu-
monia. This because the mass of the farmers are
at once so poor and so greedy that they do not keep
cows, and the bulk of such eggs and chickens as theyOKLAHOMA 169

 

 

 

 

raise they sell in the town markets. There are plenty
of schools, good schools for these children to go to;
belief in education amounts in Oklahoma to a super-
stition. The State is heavily burdened with school
taxes; a great portion of the land of the State is re-
served as a source of income for the maintenance of
schools; and there is in force a modification of the
Indiana school system which offers probably as fine
a public means of education as is to be found in any
State. But the physique and minds of the bulk of the
farmers’ children are stunted by malnutrition; and edu-
cation in the towns and cities only leads the young
men and women to a disenchantment and disgust with
a social-political and economic scene from which they
are glad enough to escape.

  
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
    
  
 
   

me i a aE ia

eyae

IDAHO
A REMNANT OF THE OLD FRONTIER

By M. R. STONE

’

“GaLtop your horse,’ wrote Joaquin Miller, “‘as I
have done hundreds of times, against the rising sun; as
you climb the Sweet Water Mountains, far away to the
right you will see the name of Idaho written on the
mountain top—at least, you will see a peculiar and
beautiful light at sunrise, a sort of diadem on two
grand clusters of mountains that bear away to the
clouds, fifty miles distant. I called Colonel Craig’s
attention to this peculiar and beautifully arched light.
‘That,’ said he, ‘is what the Indians call E-dah-hoe,
which means the light, or diadem, on the line of the

299

 

mountains.

For all of Miller’s romantic explanation of the
origin of the name, the fact remains that the State of
Colorado was originally called Idaho, and at a time
years before the poet and his friend Colonel Craig,
of Craig’s Mountain, Nez Percé, rode together to Oro
Fino. Whether or not the name may mean “the gem
of the mountains” or “‘shining mountain” is difficult
to establish; but such a definition must have appealed
to the first settlers who were attracted to the State by
the shining gems of the mountains—gems far more
tangible and valuable to them than the sunlight on the
crests.

The early history of the State is inextricably united

with the gold discoveries of the sixties. “This move-
170a va
ah

   
 
 
 
  
   
 
 
   
  
 
 
 
 
   
    
 
 
 
 
  
  
  
 
 

IDAHO 171

 

 

ment laid the foundation for one of the two traditions
that to this day are largely instrumental in molding
public opinion and character in the State. Gold was
first discovered in the territory now known as Idaho
in the bed of Canal Gulch, a tributary of Oro Fino
Creek, in 1860. The following summer the banks of
all the tributaries of the Clearwater were lined with
the tents of thousands of prospectors. This was the
first inrush of settlers into the hitherto uninhabited
region embraced by the vast, sweeping bend of the
Snake River. There followed, in rapid order, the
strikes on Elk Creek; on the Salmon River, known as
the Florence mines; and in the Boise Basin.

It was in 1862 that gold was first washed out from
the gravel of Grimes Creek, a small stream in the basin.
Today, at the foot of the low range of mountains that
mark the southwestern rim of the basin, is the city
of Boise. The census accredits it with twenty-odd thou-
sand inhabitants. Sixty years ago it was a barren
field of sage-brush bordering the willow-lined Boise
(wooded) River. At that time the population of the
basin was equal to that of the present city, while today
there are not two thousand persons in the entire county
that includes the site of the old mining camp.

It is dificult now, so far as any physical vestiges
that remain, to reconstruct a picture of the teeming
civilization that had its center in the Boise Basin over
half a century ago. It is known that a stage made
four trips a day between the busy mining centers in
the basin and could not accommodate the passengers;
that daily stage service was maintained with Umatilla,
285 miles away, at the head of navigation on the
Columbia; that the main printing office ran day and172 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

night, for all that kerosene was nine dollars a gallon.
The largest camp, Idaho City, possessed three theaters:
the Jenny Lind, the Forrest, and Kelly’s Varieties. In
the latter the musicians were placed on a suspended
platform, swung above the heads of the patrons, so
as to be out of the line of fire.

Mining still is one of the leading industries of the
State. Some of the largest lead and zinc and copper
producers in the nation are located in Idaho, and there
has recently been uncovered what promises to be one
of the largest copper deposits in the world. The vast
interior of the State, remote from any railroad, is an
immense reservoir of mineral wealth. ‘This fact more
than anything else tends to prolong the pioneer spirit
in the citizens of the State. But many of the renowned
old mines have played out. Of these, the ones around
Silver City, in the Owyhee Mountains—still preserving
the original spelling of Hawaii, O-why-hee, in honor
of some Kanakas engaged in the early workings—were,
perhaps, the most famous.

The State today possesses little that is tangible to
remind the observer of their existence, and yet their
romance and glamour still colors local thought and
action. It is a tradition of easy-won wealth, of native
riches respondent to the luck of the prospector, of a
democracy based, not upon work or merit or power, but
upon the impartiality of chance. This legend of placer
gold has preserved the gambler’s spirit, which is not
as reprehensible a characteristic as may be imagined,
especially when there are difficult things to be under-
taken in the face of heavy odds. The willingness to
take a chance, coupled with its corollary, the apprecia-
tion that tomorrow your poorest neighbor may be a173

 

 

 

man of wealth, is a great preservative of sincere
democracy.

With the decay of the first mining impulse there
came the era of the sheep and cattle man—the days of
the rustlers and vigilantes. The vast, dusty ranges
were dotted with thousands of heads of live stock. The
water holes were claimed and counter-claimed, guarded
and worked as fervently as ever the mines. This was
a transitory era, soon to be followed by the period of
the homesteader. There is an element of tragedy in the
story of this valiant but visionary newcomer, living in
squalor but in high hopes on his barren tract of land.
The conquest of the desert was a cruel, hard fight; if
not long in years, interminable in the number of human
lives and hopes sacrificed.

The present green and fertile fields, the scene of so
much hopeful industry, are actually battlefields, as grim
and merciless in their memories as those of Europe.
To them came men in the full tide of youth and hope
and inspiration. ‘There they staked their all; fought
the sage-brush and alkali, the indifference of politicians,
the hunger of poverty, and the bitter remorse of failure.
Generation after generation they moved westward
from the fecund East. Wave after wave lost and
passed away. Stalwart men had their hopes turn
to mock them; faithful wives watched their children
grow up in poverty and denial. But as the defeated
Ones dropped out others took their places. Neither
disappointment, nor failure, nor hardship deterred
them. Prolific nature threw new lives into the battle
and gradually the fight was won. The desert has dis-
appeared. Nothing of it remains but the tawny, golden
sunshine—the regal, desert sunshine.Se

ae

174 THESE UNITED STATES

Se

 

Thus there sprang up in the State a second tradi-
tion, quite different from that of the placer, gold at
first glance, but singularly like it in its implications.
It was a tradition of hard work, of visionary plans
made true, of impossible obstacles overcome. It added
further proof of the rewards that come to the man
who takes a chance; but it hardened the muscles of
the gambler. This second epoch of the State was the
development of irrigation. Irritation farming, they
call it in more favored localities; but the irritation of
the early settlers, wearily waiting for the water that
seems never to come, is soon forgotten once the project
is completed. Today, the man with a vision points to
the rolling hills of volcanic dust, rich in phosphates,
but dun gray with sage and greasewood, streaked with
alkali in the sinks, and smoldering under a summer
sun that dries up every vestige of water, and exclaims:
‘All it needs:is good men and water!’’ And the doubt-
ing Thomas, voicing all the weight of conservative
caution and disinclination for personal discomfort,
drawls: ‘Like hell!’ But inten years, the good men
and water are there; the land is transformed; a new
city is budding forth; and a thousand families or more
have been raised to a new prosperity.

This is still a story of sudden fortunes within the
reach of the man who will take a chance and of sudden
shiftings of personal position. Such a history, such
traditions, especially when compacted within the short
span of sixty years, make for democracy. Such a his-
tory cannot help but leave its impress upon the citizens
of the State: they are individualists and their creed
is self-reliance. Another influence as potent in mold-
ing public character as the traditions of placer gold andIDAHO 175

 

 

irrigation is the topography of the State. The scenery
of Idaho is wonderfully picturesque and diversified.
There are endless forests and boundless sage-brush
flats; precipitous, serrated mountain ranges and great
desert plains; clear lakes incased in granite walls and
desolate lava fields; gigantic waterfalls and burning,
arid volcanic areas, pitted with dead craters; rich irri-
gated valleys and rolling hills incapable of cultivation.

This ever-present environment inevitably creeps into
the blood and spirit of the men and women of the
State, and because of its extreme diversity makes for
restlessness. ‘Habit,’ says William James, ‘“‘is the
great fly-wheel of society.’’ If it is, then restlessness
must be the driving-rod. It is the force that tempts
civilization into new experiments. Habit has never had
much opportunity to be developed in Idaho, nor the
social stratas much chance to become solidified. The
State has been constantly plunging forward into new
activities during all of its brief history.

Thus we have in Idaho the curious anomaly of a
community of nearly half a million citizens still ani-
mated by the simple and individualistic tradition of the
pioneer, when the remainder of the nation has pro-
gressed into a class-conscious, conservative, and cyni-
cal age. Of course the lines are not clearly defined.
Idaho is still a pioneer State but it is only an expur-
gated edition of the old West. Its citizens still possess
a subdued gambling instinct but all lawlessness and
excess have disappeared under the mollifying influence
of the schools.

To the casual observer the State seems to be ab-
sorbed in the cultivation of prunes, politics, and
potatoes, to the exclusion of all else. As a State it has

 

    
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
    
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
   
 
 
 
  
 
  

a ek ales

a176 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

taken the lowly potato and the prune of ill-repute and
elevated them to the rank of semi-luxuries, and it 1s
the home of William E. Borah. In spite of the fact,
however, that the State produces 75 per cent of the
green prunes marketed in the United States, or that
it is the source of the huge baked potatoes for which
the railroad dining-cars ask such fabulous prices, or
that it possesses the highest dam in the world, the
Arrowrock, that impounds the water to irrigate
234,000 acres of land, a large portion of its area is
still virgin territory. However restless its citizens may
be they find plenty of opportunity to express them-
selyes in overcoming the immediate problems of nature.
However prosaic their ordinary daily activities may
appear, back of them there is the knowledge that over
the hill or beyond the valley lies the wilderness and
the romance of the unknown.

In the mind of most persons the name of Idaho con-
notes just one thing—Senator William E. Borah. And
yet, notwithstanding the political prominence of her
most noted son, Idaho is not very much interested in
politics. The presence in Washington of a most ardent
and fearless liberal as representative of the State would
lead the observer to expect the existence of an active
and articulate liberal element in the State. But it 1s
doubtful if Idaho is honestly in sympathy with Senator
Borah’s liberalism, although it is in downright sym-
pathy with his personality. The pioneer likes a fighter
and a man of action. It is not so much what a man
stands for but how he stands that appeals to Idaho.
Senator Borah has a disconcerting ability to do things
and the State applauds if it does not approve.

It may be difficult for the citizens of other StatesIDAHO 177

 

 

to understand Idaho’s continued support of William E.
Borah if it is true that the State as a whole does not
uphold his policies. The explanation of this seeming
inconsistency lies in an understanding of the pioneer
temperament. There is no one so quick to give homage
to merit as the pioneer. To Idaho, William E. Borah
is a national figure, not a State representative. He
has made his mark by his own efforts and ability. His
reputation for fearless integrity and sincerity is nation-
wide. Idahoans feel that he deserves the State’s sup-
port in recognition of these achievements, and that the
State can find plenty of other men to work in Wash-
ington for its sheep or lumber or mining industries.
The absence of class solidarity is a marked character-
istic of Idahoans. As a whole they are very intolerant
of any class moves, but they are more than tolerant
of individuals.

Senator Borah, like his fellow citizens, is an indi-
vidualist. He is not afraid to express his opinions even
though “‘the entire nation and all Idaho” disagree—
an attitude he has been known to persist in even though
his own Republican Party machine was included with
the rest of all Idaho. In the fall election of 1922,
although not a candidate, and most certainly not in-
vited to participate by any of the party leaders, Senator
Borah conducted a campaign of his own. There is
something actually heroic, as well as ironically humor-
ous, in this picture of the most prominent Republican
in the State ridiculing his own party and defying its
machine politics. In a lesser man such action would
be mere disloyalty; with William E. Borah it was the
courage of earnest and sincere conviction. ‘The next
two years belong to me—nobody but God Almighty cana fete 2 a es SR Seep a tienen ne

Ek a Sr

Perit
enema

178 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

take them away from me, and during that period I
am going to say precisely what I think, and advocate
the policies in which I believe, regardless of the politi-
cal consequences to the Republican Party.”

In politics it is not by submission that men become
sanctified. It is revolt that tests the souls of poli-
ticians. Progress must ever be a rebellion against

conformity and tradition. It demands of its adher-
ents a measure of self-sacrifice, a sense of self-respon-
sibility, that weak and vacillating spirits are incapable
| of offering. Some communities, no doubt, would have
accepted Senator Borah’s attitude as a challenge and
would prepare to send a man to the national Capitol
who would echo the wishes of his constituency, or at
i, least, the articulate portion of it; but your true pio-
i ) neer is more tolerant, or is it that he has a keener
Hl | sense of humor? He may not think very much of the
recognition of Russia and he may not be very much
interested in the continued presence of United States
troops in Caribbean countries, or in the direct pri-
mary—in fact, he may have a marked imperialistic
strain in his mental make-up—but he is quite likely, as
the 1922 election returns showed (the Progressive
Party ended the campaign in second place and but ten
thousand votes behind the Republican Party) to enjoy
a good joke at the expense of the usually complacent
| | majority, especially if ‘“‘times’’ have been rather bad
) | for a few years.
| All of which shows, perhaps, that Idaho does not
take its politics very seriously. Toward the end of the
Civil War there was an influx from the Southern States
of such proportions that it came to be known locally as
“the left wing of Price’s army.’ Due to this disturbingIDAHO 179

 

 

factor political rivalry for a time was very keen and
followed with deep interest by the average citizen. Of
late years it has ceased more and more to be an im-
portant element in the life of the State. Idaho accepts
the periodic outpourings of puritanical paternalism, or
of culture, or of radical philosophy, from the East, not
with disinterest, but with good-natured tolerance. Such
things do not reach home in Idaho; but if the majority
of the nation wants them they are accepted placidly.
Like all pioneers, Idahoans are materialists. They
are impressed by results, by concrete actions, more than
by abstract theories, and on all topics that do not touch
them directly they are strict conformists.

This is admirably illustrated by the schools, which
possess no radical improvements but which excel in all
those branches approved by modern practice. Just
what it has meant to Idaho to bring its schools to this
point of perfection is best understood by consulting
the 1920 census tabulations. Idaho has a population of
5.2 per square mile, whereas the ratio for the entire
United States is 35.5. This means that every individ-
ual in Idaho has to aid in the maintenance of the State
government, roads, and schools to an extent practically
seven times as great as the average citizen in the United
States. Last year the maintenance and operation of
State schools cost $18.87 for every citizen of the State.
The fact that the percentage of illiteracy is only 1.5
per cent, and that all foreigners and Indians who can-
not read and write the English language are included
in that percentage, is sufficient proof that Idahoans
have not made their sacrifices to no purpose. Of late
there has been some tendency to attempt to curb the
growing burden of taxation in the State. It speaksiii

 

  

180 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

well for the citizens of Idaho that there has been no
reduction or curtailment of the activities of the State
schools in spite of the fact that they received the burden
of criticism.

Once or twice in the past the State has been shocked
by some concrete evidence of the development within
its borders of problems which had never been consid-
ered very seriously. The most notable of these cases
was the murder of Governor Steunenburg. Then fol-
lowed, after sundry involved actions, the Moyer, Hay-
wood, and Pettibone trial. Idaho suddenly found itself
playing a part in the great social drama of the nation
and in contact with some of the most brilliant minds
of the country. Clarence Darrow was there, remem-
bered in Boise for his characteristic remark that he
was a lawyer by ear and not by note. Several of the
brilliant men of the State found in this brief flash
of the spotlight their opportunity. Borah and Nugent
both emerged from obscurity to national prominence
and have not suffered by the publicity they received.

There were labor troubles in the Coeur d’Alenes, in
which the I. W. W. was the main disturbing factor,
and fully a year after the war Kate Richards O'Hare
was forcibly ejected from Twin Falls—because of the
unpopularity of her socialistic and pacifistic doctrines.
The sympathy of the State in all of these cases was
decidedly on the side of conformity. The Non-partisan
League had but a short life in the State. When the
leaders of the sheep industry tried to corral a large
slice of the public domain they were very promptly
jeered out of court although the action involved some
prominent names. The true Idahoan is daring andIDAHO 181

 

 

original enough as an individual but he is not interested
in class movements.

And: now, lest we have drawn too idyllic a picture
of our Western mountaineer, steeped in the romance
of the past, let us take a look at the outward man,
the Idahoan the casual observer sees from the trans-
continental train. Well, for one thing he has changed
his one time miner’s garb for the conventional straw
hat and blue overalls of the farmer. He insists on
having electric lights in his ranch house, and the very
latest improvements in farm implements or mining
equipment. In some parts of the State he even heats
his house with electricity while his wife cooks the meals
for the hungry hay-hands on an electric stove. He
likes to have his children attend the best schools in the
land and does not oppose any educational frills pro-
vided they are cut along practical lines—vocational
training, agricultural short courses, and so forth. He
likes to have the latest model of his favorite auto-
mobile, and he believes in having a frequent vacation.
He and the family and as many friends as the car
can hold may be seen every day of the season sliding
over the rough mountain roads to some camping ground
where the fishing is good. He does not read on an
average a book a year, but contents himself with the
daily paper and a farm journal. Lacking any infor-
mation on which to base a diverse opinion he accepts
all of the newspaper headings at their own valuation
and does not know that he is being robbed.

He likes to see things undertaken on a big scale
and put through with snap and go. Back of his every-
day task He is dreaming of some big project of his
own—a mine to be developed, an irrigation project to182 THESE UNIDED STARES

    

 

 

be undertaken, a factory to be built. Whatever his
position in life may be, he does not feel that it is the
slightest handicap to him in achieving any of the bold
plans he has secretly developed. He has too many
fine projects of his own, to be very much interested
in the sins or sorrows of other persons. Art and lit-
erature are all very well but he considers them dull
things, indeed, when there is a fortune to be made
in the next day or so.

The point that our Idahoan misses, as do all pio-
neers, is that a great many persons, due to their very
numbers, are forever denied the pleasures and respon-
sibilities of prosperity, no matter how hard they may
work or strive, or how nobly they may plan. The
percentage of opportunities for material success is
still so favorable in Idaho that it is difficult for a
citizen of that State to realize how tight the shoe
pinches in less-favored localities. Consequently, he is
selfish, and since he can secure all he wants without
upsetting any of the existing customs and laws of the
land, he is not interested in any discussion of changing
the established order. His mental attitude toward the
reforms of the hour is best illustrated by the expres-
sion: ‘Set the clock of progress ahead if you want to,
but human nature will still be behind time.’ Time,
he considers, with its slow methodical evolution, will
solve all the perplexing social problems of the present
moment.

Our Idahoan, immersed in the gigantic task of re-
making a desert, or isolated in the rocky gorges of the
State’s central mountains, unearthing their rich min-
erals, makes the same mistake as does his Eastern
brother, ensnared in the roaring mechanism of modernIDAHO

 

183

 

 

business. He carries his specialism too far. It is not
that he overestimates the importance of his practical
problems, but that he devotes all of his time to them
at the expense of his cuftural interests. This disregard
for the finer, kindlier, abstract things of life in prefer-
ence for more spectacular action represents a weakness
not restricted to Idaho, although, perhaps, more no-
ticeable in the pioneer than in anyone else. It is a
common trait. A brass band on the street will gain
more votes for a political candidate than the scholarly
treatise by his opponent resting in the bookshop window
—whether in Boise or Washington, D. C.

The lack of the critical sense is an all too human
characteristic, and the tendency toward conformity
due to this cause would be quite as monotonous and
deadening in Idaho as it is elsewhere were it not re-
lieved by the gambling spirit. This willingness to take
a chance, this sympathy for restlessness, this under-
standing of the lure of the unexpected, makes Ida-
hoans surprisingly and delightfully tolerant of each
other. hey are as susceptible as other good Ameri-
cans when they hear the tom-toms of mob appeal, but
they are rarely carried off their feet on local issues
or personalities. They are not reformers, crusaders,
or whiners. Bigotry and egoism are very rare. They
are first and last individualists, zealous of the rights
of their neighbors lest their own freedom be infringed;
proud of their self-reliance, but not domineering over
those associated with them. These are the traits and
tendencies that cannot help but have tremendous in-
fluence on the future of their State.i

He
|
il
i

- oe

 

 

   
  
  
 
 
 
 

NEW YORK
(I) THE CITY—WORK OF MAN

By ERNEST GRUENING

CERTAIN broad facts about New York are obvious.
It has become the metropolis of our planet. London,
by virtue of the steady inclusion of adjoining districts,
still surpasses Greater New York’s population of
5,802,638. And while other European capitals retain
vestiges of their power and glory—Paris is still by a
dwindling margin the leader in feminine fashion and
the pleasure capital of mankind—New York surpasses
them all. Its high finance settles the fate of nations.
Its shops display the rarest and costliest of the earth’s
goods. It assembles the brains and talent in business,
invention, and the arts. It is the lodestone for am-
bition, the ultimate of human gregariousness, the
culmination of twentieth-century civilization. Here
nature has been pushed back to the vanishing-point to
make way for a house built by human hands, a great
synthetic monolith of steel and cement and stone, an
ordered macrocosm to house man and his works.

It is a farther cry, a more quaintly grotesque contrast
than even our land of great change can show elsewhere,
from the island which the Dutch traders settled in 1613
to the Manhattan of today. They found, the his-
torian ? tells us, “its lower end made up of wooded hills
and grassy valleys, rich in wild fruits and flowers, and
its middle portion covered in part by a chain of swamps

1 Rufus Rockwell Wilson.

184NEW YORK 185

   

 

 

and marshes and a deep pond, with a tiny island in the \
middle, while to the northward it rose into high rocky |
ground, covered by a dense forest, which was filled with
abundance of game. Smaller ponds dotted the island |
in various places, and these with a score of brooks and iit
rivulets swarmed with fish.” For nearly two centuries
man remained little more than a furtive intruder, an
inconsequential guest among the hills and dales of
Manhattan. A genial settlement at its lower tip ex-
panded into a town and here and there amid the wT
wilderness of its upper reaches sparse hamlets nestled.
Hardly more than a century and a quarter ago Mrs. |
John Adams wrote from her residence in Lispenard’s
meadows—south of Greenwich Village: ‘The ven- i
erable oaks and broken ground, covered with wild |
shrubs, which surround me, give a natural beauty to |
the spot which is truly enchanting. A lovely variety

of birds serenade me morning and evening, rejoicing

in their liberty and security, for I have, as much as

possible, prohibited the grounds from invasion, and

sometimes also wished for game-laws when my orders

have not beenregarded. The partridge, the woodcock,

and the pigeon are too great temptations for the |
sportsman to withstand.”

And then in 1811—eight years after the City Hall
had been faced with red sandstone on the north (while
the other three facades were of marble) because “few
citizens would ever reside on that side’’—the brain of
man shaped the destiny of New York and made it
what it is today. The “city plan,” laid out with what
many decried as reckless fantasy the city that might
some day be. It is related that the three commis- il
sioners, while examining the ground one fine day, 1a ee

 

   

186 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

stopped to discuss the problem near a pit where
workmen were screening gravel. In illustration of his
ideas one of the trio began to trace with his cane a
rough map of the island. As he finished the outline
and was about to sketch his proposed system of streets
the sun, emerging from behind a passing cloud, shone
through the screen throwing its criss-cross shadow
upon the map. “There is the plan,” explained an-
other; and immediately it was adopted. The authen-
ticity of this story may be dubious, but certain it is that
for all time the shadow of that gravel screen will
darken the Island of Manhattan. From then on the
rigid lines of this plan seared their way through the
rolling, smiling woods and fields, disregarding topogra-
phy, leveling hills, smothering brooks and rivulets,
crushing nature into a man-made mold, as artificially as
a Chinese woman’s foot. ‘The assumption that the
lines of traffic would always be from river to river
instead of north and south was wrong, of course. But
for a century, instead of attempting to rectify the mis-
take, New York proceeded to suppress all traces of its
heritage, to will nature to conform to its errors. Re-
lentlessly it has tunneled through rock, buried rods
beneath the surface the rebelling springs and streams
it could not annihilate, flattening every undulation,
straightening every variation, squeezing itself into end-
less rows of rectangles, as impersonal as pig iron.

Was not here for the first time cast and forecast
the regimentation that is America?

The prescription which patterned the body of Man-
hattan likewise gripped its soul. Impersonal, a vast
amorphy of stereotypes, its complex formlessness, its
decentralization have given it a myriad-faceted char-NEW YORK 187

 

 

acter all its own. Of the countless generalizations
leveled at New York few are wholly true, few wholly
false. There are a thousand New Yorks, overlapping,
disparate, visible, hidden, obvious, obscure, material,
spiritual, forming the gamut of human experience. Yet
each of these microcosms pays toll to the surrounding
larger entity, subject to its environment, to its dangers,
to its drifts, like a protozoan in a teeming sea.

Of the generalizations there is, first, that no New
Yorkers know New York and that few love it. It has
become too vast and too heterogeneous for either inti-
mate acquaintance or deep affection. Within its 1m-
mensity a New Yorker may know his neighborhood,
his beat, his district. He may love his home, his set,
his club, but only vaguely if at all does he relate this
fondness to the civic background. Devotion to his
section of the city is wholly lacking. As for the cos-
mopolis, he ignores its history, its traditions, its most
elementary topography, its unparalleled resources, in-
tellectual and material. Nor is this average of igno-
rance wrought through the presence of its vast number
of foreigners and native strangers. The indigenous
know and care about as little and apparently have
always been as indifferent. A spiritual heritage more
glorious than any in the land is as spurned by neglect
as are nature’s lavish gifts all about.

In his author’s apology to the Knickerbocker History
of New York, Washington Irving wrote that he “was
surprised to find how few of my fellow-citizens were
aware that New York -had ever been called New
Amsterdam ... or cared a straw about their ancient
Dutch progenitors.” How many New Yorkers today
know that their city was once called New Orange?! RESELUGREEDGEE

 

 

188 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

How many can name the villages which were obliterat-
ed by the Juggernauting city plan? Greenwich Village,
uniquely revived, and Murray Hill, the only eminence
below Morningside which did not wholly yield to the
general leveling, and Harlem, but a generation ago
a separate entity, survive as place names and localities.
But who can locate Yorkville, Chelsea, Bull’s Head
Village, Bloomingdale, Richmond Hill, Odellville,
Carmansville, Mount Pleasant? The city plan has
blotted them out, except where here and there the
slightest trace of irregularity, a jog in the sidewalk,
a slightly curving alley, betrays to the curious anti-
quarian a sentimental remnant of the past.

But it is not in a relatively unimportant assimilation
of sterile facts that the New Yorker lags behind his
brother Philadelphian or Bostonian. In those historic
cities no “city plan” artificially erased ancient land-
marks and frontiers; instead the old settlements have
fused gradually, preserving their ancient contours,
evolving naturally to modernity. It is only in a slight
degree pertinent that these cities are smaller. When
Boston reaches New York’s present size, the Back Bay,
Charlestown, Chelsea, the North, West, and South
Ends will persist, individual and colorful, woven into
their greater city as the figures in an Oriental rug—
unlike the linoleum carpet of New York.

Nor is it merely in the physiographic that New York
has submerged its component parts. Long before the
city achieved its metropolitan bulk, when it was still
“little old New York,” it appeared careless of its local-
ism, indifferent to its civic entity. It was as if the city
had been aware somehow of a national, a cosmic réle,
which made local concerns, local pride, mere provin-NEW YORK 189

 

 

cialism. The Massachusetts tradition has permeated
the land, sanctified at the source, wafted abroad with
the blessings of each succeeding generation, its relics
carefully treasured and displayed. New England has
captured American history. It has made 1620 the
great date, the Mayflower the great argosy. It has
striven manfully and successfully in most quarters in
making Puritanism our great cult. It has unblinkingly
exalted as sheer ruggedness the intolerance, the harsh-
ness, the bigotry inextricably mingled with the brave
pioneering of its founders. It has almost succeeded in
making its own paternity the national fatherhood.
Yet nearly a century before, an Italian—a Florentine
sailing for a French king—had discovered New York.
Dutchmen were comfortably settled on Manhattan
when the first boatload scrambled ashore on Plymouth
Rock. And where the Puritans who had dared greatly
for freedom of worship persecuted the slightest forms
of dissent, and practiced wanton deyviltries on helpless
women in the name of the Lord, the Dutch colony wel-
comed their exiles. Roger Williams and Anne Hutch-
inson both found refuge in New Amsterdam, where the
mother country’s traditional policy of religious tolera-
tion prevailed. In consequence colonists of every faith,
Waldenses from Piedmont, Huguenots, Swedish and
German Lutherans, Scotch Presbyterians, English In-
dependents, Moravians, Anabaptists, and Jews gath-
ered there. Some eighteen languages were spoken in
New Amsterdam about 1650. Indeed the “polyglot
boarding-house,” derided in our time as a latter-day
plague, is of ancient lineage, while the most inherently
American doctrines of religious toleration, of personal
freedom are our Netherlandish, our New Amsterdam,190 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

our Manhattan heritage. The Puritans who have ap-
propriated it honored it only in the breach except as
applied to themselves.

Revolutionary history repeats the abnegation. The
Boston Massacre has been popularly credited with the
first bloodshed for the principles of our War of Inde-
pendence. Yet six weeks before a two days’ skirmish
between the King’s soldiers and the Sons of Liberty
was fought around what is now City Hall Park, and
the unhonored and unsung sailor lad who there received
a mortal thrust from a British bayonet was the first to
sacrifice his life in the cause of freedom. Where Bos-
ton has erected a monument to Crispus Attucks and his
fellows on Boston Common, an obscure tablet in the
dingy post-office building alone records the Battle of
Golden Hill. And so on. How many New Yorkers
know that New York was for six years the national
capital? Faneuil Hall in Boston and Independence
Hall in Philadelphia and other less important settings
of great incidents are preserved and cherished, and in
their shadows the atmosphere of olden time lingers
pleasingly, hardly dispelled by the encroachment of the
modern city all around. Who can walk across the
Common in the heart of Boston without a reminiscent
thrill? Yet in lower New York Washington walked,
and Hamilton, and Jefferson, and Adams—here our
nation struggled in its infancy—and not a trace re-
mains. Federal Hall, where Congress first assembled,
vanished over a century ago. Cherry Street, where
Washington and Hancock lived—one of the beautiful
residential streets of its day—long ago passed into a
filthy slum. St. Paul’s, where the first President wor-
shiped—surrounded by the graveyard where not a fewNEW YORK 191

 

 

of his time are buried—is miraculously preserved, its
dark slender spire seemingly as accidental in its survival
among the towering polyhedra of business as a violet
emerging between the flagstones of lower Broadway.
St. Paul’s and Fraunces’s Tavern, where Washington
bade farewell to his officers, are virtually the only links
that connect what was the old New York with the era
of the founding fathers.

Recently the Globe, New York’s oldest paper,
printed a series of articles on “things as old as the
Globe’; that is, which were extant in the closing years
of the eighteenth century. The remnants of old New
York were countable on the fingers of twoshands. The
two structures above mentioned, an ancient residence
on Cherry Street scarce recognizable as a tenement, a
beautiful mansion on State Street, its architecture
happily preserved in its present function as a Catholic
home for immigrant girls, parts of the Church of St.
Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie, and a small piece of the old
Jewish burying-ground in the new Bowery, consecrated
in 1656—these six remain. The outlying sections of
the present, but not the old, city are more fortunate.
In upper New York the Dyckman House, the Van
Cortlandt and Jumel mansions, and a bare score of
houses in Brooklyn and on Staten Island have, thanks
to a few public-spirited citizens, escaped the utilitarian
pressure of the day—and with the awakening to a
sense of their values, let us hope, permanently. In-
deed, when we speak of what remains of old New York
the term is wholly relative. Here and there bits of
yesterday's charm still linger—North Washington
Square, still almost intact; the London Terrace in

 

1 Since this article was written the Globe has itself disappeared.a

 

192 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

West Twenty-third, Stuyvesant Place, Milligan Place,
Front Street—a fading remnant making a brief but
valiant stand against the onrushing day. ‘The city as
no other on earth is constantly destroying and replacing
itself—only the pattern persists, mortmain of the city
plan. Scarcely a section has been preserved to the uses
of its beginning for a full life-time. Every epoch thus
far has been a transient phase. Throughout most of
lower Manhattan one can observe from a given spot
the varying architectures of ten successive decades.
The abstract thing—New York—the city itself, alone
has remained, demonstrating ruthlessly its dominance
over all its parts. No place, no period, no personality
have been spared. A very few New Yorkers may still
be living who recollect the canal in Canal Street, charm-
ingly lined with brass-knockered residences, but the
erandsires of the oldest were still unborn when the
Broad Street canal placidly reflected the gabled houses
bordering it. Every New Yorker recalls the Fifth
Avenue Hotel, whose history is so inextricably woven
into the political life of the nation. Fewer remember
the Astor House’s greatness, and very few indeed the
heyday of the City Hotel, New York’s leading hostelry
in the first half of the last century. The City Arms and
the Province Arms of Colonial days are forgotten.
There are many New Yorkers who remember Tiffany's
on Union Square, but few who recall it on Broome
Street; many who clearly recall the joys of the Eden
musé¢e with its chamber of horrors and Ajeeb, the
chess automaton, but to whom the greater wonders and
freaks of John Scudder’s American Museum and the
rival establishment of Reuben Peale, both later
acquired by Phineas T. Barnum, are unknown. ManyNEW YORK 193

 

 

of Columbia’s living graduates spent their constricted
college lives around the old brick buildings of Forty-
ninth Street, and recently the university bestowed an
honorary degree on a centenarian whose undergraduate
days were lived on Murray Street. But nowhere is
the past so quickly buried as in New York.

Everything in New York is a nine days’ wonder.”
These were the words of Tammany’s late Chief
Sachem in disparaging a political flurry that was dis-
tasteful to him. Tammany has always known its New
York, where no sensation survives the day. In
Chicago the Great Fire, the World’s Fair, the Iroquois
Theater holocaust, the Eastland disaster are still con-
stantly recurring topics. New York had her great fire,
and for a time the year of its occurrence was so labeled,
a disaster of sufficient dimensions to precipitate a
national financial panic; more recently New York has
had her Triangle holocaust, her General Slocum dis-
aster, her Wall Street explosion, but they are swept
into the oblivion of the past. New York has no monu-
ments for her dead. She alone survives.

Neither has she thrones for her living. A contem-
porary Julius Cesar would never aspire to more than
second place in our metropolis. There are no firsts in
New York, scarcely any seconds or thirds. In the great
cities of other lands which are also political capitals,
kings, -presidents, premiers with their satellites dom-
inate, at least for the period of their brief authority.
In those cities the social structure is concentric. What-
ever their size is, or may be, their human pinnacles are
as Outstanding as the castle towers in a medieval town.
Other American cities have their first families, their

founders, their big business dominators. But who is194 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

first or even second in New York? Not the mayor
of the city, not the president of the university, not the
senior senator, not the editor of one of its great dailies,
not the president of its leading banking institution, not
the cardinal or bishop, nor the richest man in the world,
nor the greatest tenor of the ages. Satraps in their
own little circles, they are at best captains and majors
in New York’s army of humanity. Even the social
oligarchy, the category of snobbery, in New York is
but a pale phantasm in the city’s imagination. The
vast public which gleans some vicarious satisfaction
from reading of the activities of “Society” either
through the social columns or through the occasional
effervescence of some scandal or tragedy in the maga-
zine section of the yellow journals is dimly acquainted
with the names of a few “great”? families. The “four
hundred” remains, a pleasing if attenuated fetish. But
the individuals here as always in New York are lost in
the shuffle. There are Vanderbilts and Astors, but
there is no Vanderbilt and no Astor, and their names
have become largely symbols, of which the frequent
parodic combination in one name affords evidence.
Their world is not in New York the pinnacle of a struc-
ture toward which the millions climb, but merely a unit,
a cell, a sphere, one of many in the vast whole.

What then is New York? And whose is New York?
It is not the New York of those whose houses are care-
fully boarded and electrically protected from May to
November—the New York of which Edith Wharton
writes so well. It is not the New York of the politi-
cians, either of enduring Tammany or ephemeral
Fusion. Indeed it is essentially characteristic of
democracy’s metropolis that nowhere is the govern-NEW YORK 195

 

 

mental structure of less import in the life of its citi-
zens. Not one New Yorker in ten knows the name of
his Congressman, and not one in a hundred the names
of his State senator, assemblyman, alderman, or the
number of the congressional and assembly districts in
which he lives and can vote. It is not the New York of
banking and great business—the city of the twentieth-
story luncheon clubs. It is not the New York of the
cloak-and-suit trade—a world that supports its own
daily newspapers. It is not the New York of the thea-
ter or of music. It is not the New York of the swarm-
ing ghettoes—Lower or Upper East Side, Bronx or
Brownsville, the vast domain of Yiddish newspapers
and a thousand synagogues. It is not the Negro New
York of Harlem or the San Juan Hill district. It is
not the great Italy south of Washington Square, not
the little Syria of Washington Street, nor the Athens
of Pearl Street, nor the Sparta of the Tenderloin, nor
any of the exotic worlds lodged in our midst, repre-
senting almost every land and sect on earth. It is not
the Bohemia or pseudo-Bohemia of Greenwich Village.
It is not the New York of the countless restaurants,
paneled grills, and coffee houses. All these New Yorks
have had their chronicles, many. of them faithful and
brilliant. The Wall Street of Edwin Lefevre, the New
York of crime portrayed by Arthur Train and Arthur
Stringer, the Jewish New York of Abraham Cahan,
James Oppenheim, Bruno Lessing. There is the New
York of the current types—Chimmie Fadden, Van
Bibber, Potash and Perlmutter. There is the unspe-
cialized New York—the New York of a million come-
dies and tragedies of everyday life, recorded among
others by Harris Merton Lyon, Gouverneur Morris in196 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

his earlier stories, and, of course, by O. Henry, whose
stories about the city come closer to being its epic than
anything in our literature—each story a chapter in the
book, a flash in the great moving picture, a novel indeed
of apparently unrelated fragments in which the great
central theme, the central figure—it can scarcely be
called hero or heroine—is New York. ‘There has
never been the ‘“‘great New York novel” just as there
has never been the ‘“‘great American novel,’ and we
are as little likely to get one as the other.

What, indeed, is New York? In vain may one seek
to capture its spirit, to define its catholicity. Through-
out the land it is the target for the scorn, suspicion, and
antipathy of villager or provincial. At the same time
it is his pride and boast, the goal of ever-projected pil-
erimages of pleasure or profit, and with or without his
cognizance the arbiter of his manners and thoughts. It
designs his clothes, it supplies his music, in large part
his books and magazines—even his jnewspaper has
New York’s imprimatur on all but the local news. He
may berate it as the temple of Mammon, as a hotbed
of vice and iniquity, as foreign, continental, un-Ameri-
can. But he projects his local hotel on the model of
its great caravanseries. Its Woolworth and Flatiron
buildings are national monuments to him. Its Broad-
way is reproduced in the “gay white way” of his town.
Its business axioms become his own, its speed, its
“pep,” its magnificence, its idolatry of success his con-
stant admiration and inspiration.

“A fine city to visit, a poor city to live in.” How
many times has it been said! And despite its triteness
it voices in varying degree the individual’s fear of in-
significance in the great mass. But the tribute exactedNEW YORK 197

 

goes beyond personal submergence. In New York,
despite its transcendent opportunities, one confronts
also as nowhere else in the world the frustrations of
modern material civilization. New York is its master-
piece, its magnum opus. And New Yorkers pay the
price. Throughout their childhood and through their
lives millions are denied horizontal vision. Their out-
look is eternally on stone or brick walls. Even the
sky is circumscribed, shrouded in dust, its vault gouged
by great cornices. There is limitation not only for the
eye, but for every sense. Nowhere has constriction
been carried further. In the poorest sections the popu-
lation reaches a density not approached elsewhere on
earth. To the great apartment-renting middle class,
space—or rather lack of it—becomes an ever-intruding
factor. The very word kitchenette began as a New
York colloquialism, and the problem of a room more or
less, or even of the size or number of closets, often
profoundly affects the habits and life of the entire
family. On Fifth Avenue one still sees the palaces of
the very rich, Gothic and Renaissance chateaux flush
with the street. The demolition of ten-story buildings
to substitute others a few stories higher is a common
phenomenon. The rearrangement of business jnte-
riors, the erection of partitions, the frantic attempts to
re-deal space are as characteristic of New York as
trail-blazing of the wilderness. Nowhere can the New
Yorker stand off to gaze at a beautiful edifice—his
church, his theater are mortised into the city’s blocks,
troweled into indistinguishable conformity like the
bricks of adjacent walls. And whatever adornment the
sculptor may have wrought on facade or cornice is

     
  
   
  
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
  
 
 
  
 
 

ee -—- — -——— a ibtgpaciapiianina ieee “

198 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

hopelessly skied in the narrow corridors of New York’s
thoroughfares.

The constriction is clearly more than a physical diff-
culty. It lays its hands on the soul. It robs New
York children of childhood’s natural heritage. Their
choice of playground is the street, the backyard, or the
fire escape. The street, with its pathetic games in-
evitably adapted to environment, ‘“area’—hide-and-
seek, a rubber ball, thrown against the house, street
shinny—games constantly shattered by the passing
automobile, the surveillant policeman, or the disappear-
ance of the ball through a window, or down the sewer.
Or the backyard—four walls inclosing a few feet of
caked dirt in which only the smelly ailanthus can live.
Or the precarious fire-escape, when there is not even
a backyard. Smut, tension, peril, restriction.
There are so-called parks—but the city plan made
allowance for none, and the spacelets of Washington,
Union, and Madison Squares, and Bryant Park owe
their existence to the accident of having served in the
city’s earlier history as Potter’s fields. (There is a
slight debt, it would appear, to the unknown civilian!)
So that in the great city—Manhattan below Fifty-
ninth Street, virtually all that was New York two
generations ago, a city that houses a million and a half
human beings, there is neither park nor waterfront.
The half-dozen tiny spaces labeled parks in this great
district denote merely absence of buildings. The trees,
shadowed by great structures, their leaves withered by
the noxious exhalations of the city, are dying. From
what little patches of grass manage to break through
the crusted earth the public is warned away, confined
to a few slender circling bands of concrete between theNEW YORK 199

 

dust-dejected verdure. Neither refuge nor seclusion
from the din or dirt of the city is furnished in appreci-
able degree. And miles of magnificent waterfront
which should have been the people’s inalienable herit-
age, as it is in European and South American cities,
are, save for the sliver of Battery Park, walled off for
the nation’s and the world’s commercial use.

Above Fifty-ninth Street, where the per capita
wealth increases and the congestion is somewhat less,
the relief is also greater. Central Park, belatedly pur-
chased at great cost, is in itself a typically New York
marvel of compression, and Riverside Drive, despite
the intrusion of the railroad tracks, has preserved a
rarely beautiful stretch of the Hudson’s shore. But
even here nature is steadily losing her fight with the
creature of the twentieth century Frankenstein. The
great elms which adorned the Mall a generation ago
are dead. A tree forty feet high in the lower half of
Central Park is a rarity. Everywhere the forces of na-
ture are shriveling, perishing before the relentless ad-
vance of stone and steel and poison gas. In Park Avenue
we see today an amazing admission in the shape of imi-
tation trees—wire frameworks overtrained with ivy !
There are other and still beautiful parks—Bronx, Van
Cortlandt, Pelham Bay, where nature is not yet stulti-
fied, where the illusion of the primitive still persists—
but the way to them for the New York that needs them
is through miles of subway, crowded, stifling, pungent
with the dust of concrete, iron, and sweat.

The frustration and constriction, we have said, grips
the human soul. The rush hour when New Yorkers
acquiesce in a bodily compression, engage in competi-
tive physical struggle to wedge themselves into subwaya

200 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

trains is merely a burlesque epitome of New York life.
In the contiguity of the great city, as in the enforced
contacts of the subway, there is little room but for re-
pulsions. New York is hard, cynical, ruthless, even
beyond other cities. From their early repression its
children emerge sophisticated, both stunted and over-
developed, perverted, premature, forced by the arti-
ficiality of their environment. ‘There is exaction, too,
of time. The two eternal verities, time and space,
alone are restricted amid the city’s abundance. Where
leisure has become exotic, the supreme experiences—
love, friendship, and human contacts—are harassed
and trammeled. Courtship in New York is of neces-
sity hurried, furtive, interrupted, irrationally exposed
or confined. The streets, offering at best the stoop or
a bench, the crowded parlor, the dance, even the taxi-
cab and the roof are substitutes for the free spaces, or
the seclusion of a real home. Friendship in New York
is hindered by its distances, its haste, its proprieties, its
irresistible propulsion. As for casual contacts, the
city’s philosophy is everyone for himself—and the
devil take the hindmost. Where the competitive urge
has reached the highest notch, where each man is out
to rise upon the bones of his fellows, suspicion and
‘ntraversion are constant. One speaks, of course, of
generic New York. But however wide the individual
variation, however great the individual human im-
pulses, they all are subordinated to the custom of a
city in which with more people living closer together
than anywhere else on earth, neighborliness is reduced
to a minimum. In New York one rarely seeks ac-
quaintance with one’s neighbor; it would be unusual,
suspect. One never leaves a robe or any other portableNEW YORK 201

 

object in a parked automobile—even for five minutes ;
it would be gone on one’s return. These may be but
trifling incidents, but they are the symptoms of the New
York complex. If in New York the milk of human
kindness is not wholly dried up or turned to gall at
least it is pasteurized. Something remotely analogous
to what war does to human beings, some modification
of the precept “If you don’t know, you get killed,” is
New York’s imprint on its denizens. And, like war,
the New York Moloch demands and gets its victims.
Countless moths and butterflies are singed at its flame,
countless brave swimmers dragged down into its mael-
strom, sunk without trace.

Nowhere in the world has the process of subduing
nature progressed farther, become more highly devel-
oped. The skyscraper, in part a response to the irref-
ragable horizontal straitjacketing of the city plan, was
conceived in constriction, sired by aspiration. Drilled
a hundred feet into solid gneiss, built on a base that
defies all laws of equilibration, rearing itself on high
as a challenge to the stress of wind and gravity, it is
essentially a symbol of man’s conquest. Tunneled into
the earth is a great system of subways, of corridors
under river and through bedrock, of conduits, of pipes,
of wires, like the alimentary and respiratory tracts,
blood vessels and nerves of the human body—linking
the vast amorphous structure into one coordinating,
functioning whole, Here man has been not merely in
conflict with nature. Here nature has been not merely
checked, tamed, and converted to his service. Here
nature has been fully conquered and is now being de-
stroyed. Here civilization is creating its own code and
manners, its language variations, new ways of life,202 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

new diseases, a new human species. New forms of
beauty, too. These canyons, these pinnacles and spires,
these high-thrust terraces of Babylon, these airy wire-
hung bridges over which multitudes thunder daily, this
skyline—these million lights, blinking massed and scat-
tered through the city’s vast night—these achieve a
poignant beauty of line and atmosphere which stirs the
emotions deeply and has in it something almost spiri-
tual. Will this spiritual quality, now merely subjec-
tive, ever become a reality? Will man learn to use his
great powers for the good of mankind? Or will he be-
come increasingly the slave of his machine, his own
creation? This is the unsolved riddle of civilization.
New York, where the integration of man’s energies has
gone farthest, will first furnish an answer.NEW YORK
(II) STATE OF UNWILLING PROGRESS

By CHARLES W. WOOD

Nosopy knows New York State. Very few, if any,
have traveled through it. Konrad Bercovici discovers
a different New York almost every time he turns
around, but he hasn’t yet got outside the New York
City limits. Socially, psychologically, and physically
the whole State contains about everything there is and
lots of it. It is mountainous. It is flat. It seems to
touch the sea only in one little corner, but it manages
to have hundreds of miles of seashore just the same.
It is agricultural. It is industrial. Great areas are so
deserted that they seem like desert. Also it has its
mining camps. And much of the State—very much of
it—is physically, socially, and psychologically just plain
backwoods.

People from “up-State,” by the way, do not like to
be taken for New Yorkers. A man from Santa Bar-
bara is sure to say that he is a Californian, although
the name of his city would require no explanatory
amplification, but the man from Syracuse is just from
Syracuse. Of if he hails from a village he will inform
you that he is from New York State, and the emphasis
is to let you know that he is utterly dissociated from
the great city. You have to get down below Pough-
keepsie to discover any willingness on the part of the
population to be mistaken for residents of the world’s
metropolis. Actually the New York “‘Stater” as such

203pacientes.

See a

aS yA

204. THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

is something of a maverick. Unless we except the New
Jerseyman, who as other than a suburbanite of New
York and Philadelphia is a negligible quantity, and the
Pennsylvanian who like as not will flourish some spe-
cialized cultural identification—such as Quaker or
Pennsylvania Dutch—the New Yorker alone among
the Easterners with some generations of settled history
behind them lacks a regional classification and identity.
He is not a Middle Westerner, a Southerner, or a
New Englander. From Ohio to Kansas is a long
jump, but the jumper is still in the Middle West.
From Maryland South and South-West stretches
Dixie-land. And from the Penobscot to the Housa-
tonic persists the modified culture of England trans-
planted to the New World. The Pennsylvanian, more-
over, is State-conscious. In his State the tradition of
William Penn is held in reverence. But the story of
the Dutch settlers is foreign history as far as the
school-children of New York are concerned. ‘They
know nothing whatever about the Duke of York. He
isn’t even an.item. No, there is no State pride in New
York and no common tradition. I have lived in a
dozen different sections and found them all dissimilar.
It is the ‘““Empire State,” and an empire is after all
nothing but a political union, heterogeneous and
broadly inclusive.

No song which these people sing is in any way con-
nected with the glorification, charm, or historic signif-
cance of the State. ‘“The Sidewalks of New York” is
the nearest attempt at such a song, and that couldn't
possibly have any meaning outside the city limits.
Ocean navigation was made possible here, but it is
dificult to hymn the praises of a man named RobertNEW YORK 205

 

 

Fulton or a boat called The Clermont. Finally, and
most discouragingly, if one were to celebrate the event
which really made New York State, one would have to
write a hymn to the Erie Canal. Even that might
have been done, I suppose, if the Erie Canal had made
the State: and then resigned with proper dignity, as the
Prairie Schooner did after it had fulfilled its mission.
But the Erie Canal evolved into a Barge Canal with a
lot of Barge Canal scandals and nothing whatever in
the way of either barges or canal that anyone has ever
felt the least bit proud about.

New York City contains something of almost all the
world. The rest of the State contains something of
almost all America. It is not from New York City
that the most startling stories of modern miracles
come. It is more apt to be from the laboratories of
Schenectady. It was there that man first made and
hurled the thunderbolt. It is there that radio is
reaching its highest development. It was there that the
dream of super-power originated. Nevertheless, one
need travel but a few hours from Schenectady to find
himself in a‘ civilization to which all progress is an-
athema and whose favorite term of opprobrium is
“new-fangled.”

The people of these cross-road settlements have
hung on to their immaturities more tenaciously, I be-
lieve, than the people of any other section of America.
They may not actually be more backward than some of
the hill towns of Kentucky or the rural sections in the
vast hinterland of Georgia, but they have fought
harder to retain their backwardness, and against far
greater odds.

Occasionally in some Catskill cabin or in the backPOPRRPOEOROROUOERPEEELE. rth

   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   

pas ee ESS Ae a es ee

 

206 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

counties of the Adirondack region the State police dis-

cover a nest of seemingly human animals described, for
| the purposes of journalism, as a “destitute family in a
il deplorable condition.’”’ Sometimes they are starving.
hie Sometimes they are freezing. Usually, they are 100
ai per cent American but inbred to the point of intellec-
1 | tual extinction. Usually also they are Christians, with
their fundamentalist theology preserved intact, but
without spiritual force enough to go to church or to
take part in any religious exercises excepting funerals.
In one case a mother-pervert reigned over the nest,
keeping her grown sons, thirty and thirty-five years of
age, in bed for life by the exercise of her fierce animal
will. In another a father and a gaunt crew of pregnant
daughters constituted the ‘‘family.” I do not mean
that these are typical instances of life in the back-
ward sections of the Empire State. They are extreme
cases, no doubt, but they are significant.

One is inclined to associate the backwoods with the
pioneer spirit. One might as well associate the Daugh-
| ters of the American Revolution with revolutionary
thought. These folk are not early settlers. They are
| the descendants of early settlers. The early settlers

had spirit and initiative and daring. That is, until they

got settled. The more adventurous of their offspring,
| of course, refused to stay settled. They ran away from
: | the settlement and built cities and towns. But the timid
ay | remained. They stayed settled, in body, mind and soul.
, They set their faces like flint against every unsettling
thought.

Resistance to change is their most sacred principle.
Modern conveniences appear as signs of degeneracy to
them; and the boy who leaves home to go to the city

iemeremeerennmmnseinaiiicinhies .NEW YORK 207

 

 

is still their most popular theme of tragedy. The girl
who marries the “city chap” is looked upon as dis-
loyal: for in a community where everybody is pretty
much everybody else’s cousin, such unions seem to par-
take of the nature of miscegenation. ‘‘Who knows,”
sighs Uncle Amos, as he hopes for the worst, ‘‘who
knows but what he’s got a wife already?’ This is the
cue for Aunt Mary Jane to reply, ‘“‘Beats me why folks
want to be so stuck up.”

This is not the language of the American farmer. It
is the language of inbred descendants of farmers who
have largely abandoned agriculture. They may still
grow potatoes and beans and corn for their own use.
They may still keep a pig and a cow. But the land is
worn out, the barns are falling in, the more adventur-
ous of the young people have left home, while the old
folks and all the young ones who can be induced to op-
pose change in any form stick miraculously. They
manage to get a living some way. They manage to
marry. [hey manage to breed. ‘They are a hardy
tribe, enduring much tribulation and proud of their
endurance; and there is a certain shrewdness about
them which passes for intelligence. They are econom-
ical in money matters, also in ideas and in speech.
They use few words and indulge in few facial expres-
sions. They do not open their lips to talk, but blow
their syllables through a very narrow aperture.

Numerically, this backwoods element of New York
State life may not be very great. But socially, politi-
cally, and spiritually they have a throttle hold upon the
State. They furnish the traditions to which the natives
think they should be loyal, even though they have
physically run away. New York State is notoriouslyes
’ Li

mee

ee es

 

  
 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   

208 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

“conservative.” This is generally attributed by out-
siders to the influence of Wall Street. It is more prob-
ably due to the traditions of the “Old Home.” ‘The
native up-Stater is seldom able to free himself from the
attitude of fear and suspicion which was a most im-
portant part of his bringing up. Actually he may
be having his bathroom tiled, or be looking around for
an eight-cylinder car; but theoretically, he is still prej-
udiced against new-fangled notions and maintains a
worshipful resistance to change.

The pressure of modern life may not permit him to
act upon these theories in his everyday pursuits. But
he can act upon them on Sunday; and large areas of
New York State are as conservative, religiously, as the
Middle West or South. He can also act upon them at
Albany, and ‘‘new-fangled notions” have slim chance
of getting through the legislature.

The State lags, for instance, in prison reform. It is
not as bad as Florida, to-be sure; but in this as in most
progressive legislation, the State which should in all
logic march in the vanguard of American culture is
anything but up to date. This is likewise true of the
problem of the feeble-minded, which New York psychi-
atrists agree is almost desperate. Those who knew the
situation placed the terrible facts before the legislature,
year in and year out; but it took a scandalous fire in one
of the institutions known to be antiquated and unsafe
to get any considerable number of the people inter-
ested.

The richest and most populous State in the Union
was slow to accept the automobile. New York State
fruitgrowers, with the finest apples in the world, sur-
rendered their natural markets to California and Ore-NEW YORK 209

 

 

gon three thousand miles away because the folk from
“York State” could not bestir themselves to evolve new
methods of marketing. The beautiful city of Syracuse,
with nearly two hundred thousand population, still has
the New York Central Railroad running through its
business center at grade, for no other reason, appar-
ently, than that it always did run that way; and it has
a great and highly endowed university whose chief
pride has been that it has never once shown a sign of
hospitality toward a new idea.

I don’t mean, understand, that Syracuse University
is scandalously behind the times. It has striven faith-
fully to keep nearly up to date. But not once has it
gone ahead of the times. Not once has it taken a posi-
tion of leadership. Professor John R. Commons is
the only nationally known leader of thought I can think
of now who was ever connected with Syracuse; and he
was ousted for his economic heresies so early in his
career that the incident attracted almost no attention.
Since the death of Chancellor Day, Syracuse seems to
be recovering from this chronic dread of the new: and
recently its faculty permitted a public discussion of
birth control. This is hopeful. Discussing the prob-
lem of overpopulation may not seem radical elsewhere,
but it was decidedly radical for Syracuse. The Syra-
cuse Common’ Council, in fact, had just passed’ an ordi-
nance forbidding any public reference to the problem.
The ordinance was vetoed by the mayor and barely
failed of passage over his veto.

Probably no city in the modern world has had such
an influence upon modern civilization as has Bingham.
ton. It was from Binghamton that Patent Medicines
came. It was due to the enterprise of Binghamton thatre Lene =>

page ar nn on

a

 

 

  

210 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

one hundred million people, naturally leaning toward
total abstinence, suddenly rose as one man and began
to rid themselves of all human ills at only one dollar
per bottle. They not only began but they kept it up.
Cure called for cure: the ills were often obstinate but
the cures didn’t feel bad; also one could be a prohibi-
tionist and a convalescent at the same time. Eventu-
ally, after a chapter of newspaper corruption hardly
equaled in history, the business of doping the gullible
became somewhat restricted by law. ‘Theoretically, at
least, the patent medicines which can be purchased
freely at all druggists are now non-alcoholic, and
they are not supposed to contain any ‘habit-forming
drugs. But Binghamton is still great. The rewards
of her enterprise have been harvested. The big,
patent-medicine fortunes are intact, and there is no
limit to the opportunities for philanthropy and boot-
legging which the future holds in store.

Then there’s Rochester. Rochester is the Art Cen-
ter of the United States. No one can deny this.
Rochester admits it freely. All over the world, in
any discussion of art, you will be told that American
art is photographic, and Rochester is the home of the
Kodak industry. Rochester glories in this, and not
without reason; but she never thinks of it as a New
York State achievement. Rochester is Rochester.
She has her own culture, her own ideals, and her own
distinct sense of superiority. She knows exactly how
people ought to live, and she is seeing to it that Roches-
ter children are trained in the way that they should go.
These children are dismissed from the public schools
at specified hours every day to receive religious in-
struction.NEW YORK 211

 

 

Buffalo is different. One could write a song about
Buffalo. In fact, one did. It was ‘‘Put me off at
Buffalo.” I could never be sure in Buffalo just where
I did get off. It seems like Chicago, in a way, with a
suggestion of arrested development. It reminds one
at once of wharves and grain elevators and “‘Fingy”’
Conners. Steve Brody took a chance in Buffalo—and
got away with it. He ran a “music hall” in which he
himself was the main attraction; and his fame was
built solely on the fact that he had jumped off the
Brooklyn Bridge. Buffalo used to be like that. On
each succeeding visit the thing that impresses me most
about Buffalo is that it is so much as it used to be.
Year by year it gets farther from the top of the list
of America’s greatest cities; but it manages, neverthe-
less, to be as big as it ever was.

The rural sections of New York are as varied as its
cities. ‘[he dairy region in the vicinity of Binghamton,
the peach belt between Buffalo and Rochester, the
grape belt out near Dunkirk—each has a character of
its own. The last is peculiarly interesting. Prohibition
gave a decided boost to the grape industry. The grape-
growers no longer have to sort out their grapes or pack
them carefully for the market. ‘They just jam them
into barrels and express them to New York. They
can’t send them by freight or they would ferment and
explode in transit: but they can express them, and do:
and the Italian buyer simply puts the barrel in his cellar
and takes off the head. Then he lets nature take its
course. he ultimate mess may then be sold for “‘red
ink,” but no one in the grape belt has violated the law.

Saratoga is still in New York State—much greater,
in fact, and far more beautiful than in the days when it——

ie

  

  
  

212 THESE UNITED STATES

 

was reckoned great. The automobile is supposed to
have put the horse out of business, but it brings thou-
sands to the horse races who could never have attended
them before. It is still a ‘watering place,” and the
water is good, even if the word has lost the grand
meaning it once held. Saratoga has lost nothing much
except its exclusiveness, and it has gained a State Park.

The “summer resort” business hasn’t fared as well
in other sections. The automobile has brought every-
body into the country, but the country isn’t the same
kind of treat that it used to be. Mammoth wooden
hotels, equipped according to the standards of elegance
that obtained during the seventies and eighties, are
not even places of interest any longer. They are not
gay and they are not profitable. There aren't as many
of them as there were ten years ago. Many have mys-
teriously burned down, and the insurance money has
been put into other enterprises. I don’t know how to
account for this: the owners have been good old native
stock.

New York State may not be pushing ahead: but it
is being pulled ahead quite noticeably. I have lived in
rural New York when ox-teams were common. The
folks preferred oxen in many cases to the more expedi-
tious horse because, when the road was washed away
(as it usually was in spring), the oxen would pull the
rigs out with a steadier pull and with less danger of
breaking expensive harness. The automobile and
motor-truck have now supplanted them: and with the
automobile came concrete highways, electric lights,
telephones, and a thousand conveniences never dreamed
of before. An external hand has been laid upon these
people, dragging them almost against their will into aNEW YORK 213

 

 

bigger world. In that world, thanks to the automobile,
their children are going to real schools and are getting
acquainted with all sorts of different people; and in-
stead of looking upon these new acquaintances as queer
and foreign, they have come to find them charming.
They are having real adventures, real courtships, and
real marriages now: and the eugenists tell us that they
are having a smaller percentage of deformed and
idiotic children. But still you can go into any number
of these communities today and be told by the bearded
sages thereof that “the ruination of this here kentry
is the automobile.’’ ‘These people are giving voice to
the inhibition from which New York State suffers most.
It is our infant fixation. It isn’t strong enough, let us
hope, to forbid progress, but it is strong enough to
keep us from being genuinely progressive.

It is commonly assumed that the beauties of nature
have a refining influence upon human life. What can
one expect, it is asked, of a child born in a tenement,
or in the man-made environment of a factory town?
Well—New York State is altogether beautiful, where-
ever the landscape has not been so defiled by man. It
hasn’t the terrifying beauty of the Rockies, nor the lan-
guorous beauty of the South; nor is there anything in
New York scenery or climate which beckons to adven-
ture or lulls to calm. But the physical charm of the
State simply cannot be shaken off. This is especially
true of northern New York, where the sharp frosts of
early autumn work like magic on the oaks and maples
and produce a thousand gorgeous hues unknown in
the southern section of the State. The crystal frosts
of spring are equally intoxicating. One whose eyes
have fed in childhood upon Lake George with its moun-epee ernest estates

Atta tose

214 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

tain background can almost be excused in later life if he
refuses to thrill at the masterpieces of nature in other
sections of the world. The prairies will be pretty sure
to bore such a person. The wide open spaces will pro-
duce in him nothing much but uneasiness. The sea will
seem too uncertain, the desert too empty.

Lake George is only one of a hundred perfectly satis-
fying bits of homeland in New York State. The Adi-
rondack wilderness is still a wilderness over wide
stretches and still beautiful despite the invasion of
“hard roads” and hitch hikers. The great range of
mountains around Marcy is accessible only to persons
who are willing to climb all day and sleep in the open at
night; its chains of lakes can be traversed only by canoe
and carry. Lake Ontario with its thousand inlets,
and each of the little lakes, north, east and west, has
a color and a fascination of its own. There is no blue
on earth like Skaneateles blue. There are no reds like
the reds of the sugar maple in the fall; especially when
viewed from motorboat or steamer on Lake Cham-
plain.

The casual traveler through the State may think of
Herkimer as a tank station, Auburn as a place of pun-
ishment, and Geneva as nothing at all. But get oft
the train at any of these places, take to the open high-
way and you'll begin to see. The splendors of the
Mohawk Valley cannot be appreciated from a car
window, nor the western chain of lakes. Did you ever
hear, for instance, of Conesus? One of its charms is
that you never did. The motorist in western New
York has the privilege of discovering for himself ever
so many beauty spots that are not famous at all. TheNEW YORK 215

 

 

local inhabitants, to be sure, will point them out with
pride. But it won’t be pride in New York. New York
means nothing to him. A dreadful city chuck full of
foreigners has monopolized that term. New York, to
the up-Stater, exists primarily for the purpose of pay-
ing the State’s taxes. No one from Utica or Elmira or
Mechanicsville would want you to suppose that he
would live in a place like that.

Then, there is Long Island. One tip of it is metro-
politan and one borough on this tip contains a popula-
tion greater than Manhattan’s. But the other tip lives
a life of its own, less disturbed by visitors perhaps
than any other section of the State, a stretch given over
to moors and ponds and sharp sand cliffs dropping into
the sea. In between is an area given over largely to
great private estates, with palaces lying so far back in
the woods that the passing motorist does not see them.
Westchester County and the Catskills are equally mag-
nificent. All that wealth can add to nature is added
here, not to build up or to develop the territory but to
keep it as excluded and unvisited as possible. It is
customary to indict American millionaires for their
lack of refinement and discrimination. I can’t join in
this indictment. It seems to me, whenever I visit these
estates, that they have done well. They may muss up
the scenery which the rest of us have got to look at;
but they keep their own premises free from billboards
and noise and smoke.

And while I am at it, I want to give voice to one
more heresy. It is a popular sport among intellectuals
to sneer at mere industrial advance. Its main con-
tribution to society, it would seem, is to smear the
landscape and turn our natural beauties into piles of2S
See EOD ro ee er

      
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

216 THESE UNITED STATES

 

filthy lucre. The despoiling of Niagara Falls is their
classical example. One-twentieth of the water has
already been diverted into mere channels of usefulness.
Too bad—perhaps. But the discovery by scientists
that Niagara can be enslaved is producing a dream of
human freedom which is mightily affecting New York
State today. Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo are
sharing in this dream of super-power. A hundred
smaller cities and villages are beginning to thrill to it.
Niagara may be doomed: but on the other side of the
ledger, millions of men, women and children are
breaking from the past. They cannot remain as back-
ward as they had religiously intended to.

It is too much to expect that they will become sud-
denly progressive. Only recently New York estab-
lished a moving picture censorship for fear their young
folks might get some suggestion out of harmony with
the permanent and fixed morality of “back home.”
Strenuous efforts are being made to extend this censor-
ship to books and publications. Laws forbidding this
and that are as common in New York as they are in
Kansas. Free speech does not exist. It is still a crime
to make public those discoveries of modern science
which make it possible for women to bear children
when children are wanted. The notorious Lusk Laws,
which make it a crime for school-teachers to teach,
have been repealed; but this only after a hard fight in
the Legislature and because of the insistence of a Tam-
many Hall governor rather than because of any awak-
ened public opinion throughout the State.

Still, New York State is changing. It is becoming
American, due very largely to the influx of so many
foreigners. New pioneers are supplanting the descend-NEW YORK 217

 

ants of pioneers and are keeping the pioneer spirit
alive. Not much is happening in politics, but electricity
is marching on and leading New York State into a dif-
ferent civilization. The “halls of learning” in Syra-
cuse and elsewhere may still echo and reécho the dog-
mas of the past; but in the laboratories of Schenectady
there is no intellectual inbreeding. Foreigners, even
Socialists like the late Dr. Steinmetz, may seem to be
in charge; but what they discover leaves no room for
argument; New York State will have to use it; and
having used it, cannot be what it was before. Elec-

tricity doesn’t care a hang what the folks think at
home.Thapdeypeedany yithitvay
H

SRS re
LEER ae OL 7

   

KENTUCKY
WHERE MEN DIE STANDING

 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     

By BEN LUCIEN BURMAN

In the good old days of hairy-chested Arizona, a
most amiable and pacific Kentuckian of our acquaint-
ance arrived one morning to pass his honeymoon on
a cattle ranch. At dusk a cavalcade of whooping,
firing wags set out from a nearby settlement explosively
to ridicule the tenderfoot newlyweds. On the road the

| horsemen encountered a leather-breeched, leather-
| muscled cowboy whose derisive powers they deemed
i, potent. They invited him to join in the festivities.
| | He blanched.
i “Ye fools!” he sputtered. “Ye blankety-blank-blank
| | idiots! Do ye want to git yer heads blowed off?
| Them people’s Kentuckians! Don’t ye know they're
wuss ’n savages?’ The cavalcade retreated.
By To a diminished degree that leather-muscled cow-
il boy’s verdict is the verdict of the nation. Is not Ken-
| tucky the land of grizzled feudists and defiant moon-
shiners; of soft-hatted politicians who recite poetry
and tote pistols; is it not the land of dashing Night
i Riders and tobacco-chewing Methuselahs; is it not
, Wild West on Main Street? It is. All of these. But
it is not savage: merely romantic. Therefore letwa
mechanized world be grateful.

The mountaineer who—if he can draw the faster—
slays on sight a cousin in war over a pig three gen-

erations dead, is not a fiction: he is a fact. Yet he is
218

eee pueeeneKENTUCKY 219

 

 

the same mountaineer who to a weary, hungry stranger
will give all his rickety bed and more than half his
scanty corn pone. He is hospitable, kind, noble, even
at the starvation point. His violence arises from the
single passion which masters his existence—he must
not be trod upon, he must be free. His cousin’s kin, he
argues, cheated his kin; they are trespassers upon his
family’s, and thus his own, kingdom of self; they must
be annihilated. By no means is Kentucky all moun-
tainous, nor all its dwellers mountaineers, yet from
the misty heights of Pine Mountain on the east to the
mud-lapping Mississippi on the west, the creed is one:
I will be myself. ‘The laws that please me I will obey;
the laws that suit me not be damned. ‘A Kentuckian
kneels only to his God,” declaimed Crittenden, doomed
for aiding the Cuban insurgents, as he faced the rifles
of his Spanish executioners. Well might he have added
that even God would have beheld an unbended knee
did the Kentuckian deem the heavenly command un-
reasonable.

This all-swaying individuality, when hand in hand
with intellectuality, engenders neighbor or friend whose
like in the universe is rare. Alas that the Kentuckian
lacking ethical balance forgets that the doctrine of
‘You let me alone” connotes ‘“‘Then Ill let you alone”’;
certain of his own righteousness, he is not content
until he is transfigured into an exalted crusader, off
for the battle.

Willy-nilly, he would then ram baptism by sprinkling,
baptism by immersion, or whatever the momentary
credo, down his townsman’s throat, with revolver as
ramrod. Intense, passionate, pious, his emotions are
easily stirred, and the unschooled evangelistic parson,220 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

with his jeremiads of literal blood, fire, and brimstone,
can whip him into acts, if not of violence, of ridiculous
stupidity. Such are the black-frocked clerics who would
make of Kentucky a virgin goldfield for the Ku Klux
Klan with nuggets lying beside every tobacco plant—
were it not for one fact: a Kentuckian revels in a
fight, but it must be a fair fight.

One glossy laurel these rustic churchmen almost won:
the law to prohibit the teaching of evolution—a law
the bare mention of which should cause the giant pine
trees, whose ancestors heard the Kentuckian bitterly
assail the repressive Alien and Sedition Acts, to turn
their spiny tops from the sun. The history of the
Darwin episode is illuminating. A veteran Kentucky
legislator’s daughter enrolled at the State University.
The time arrived when she returned home. One af-
ternoon parent and child were conversing. ‘‘Father,”’
the girl announced, “what you and mother taught me
is wrong. All wrong. I’ve studied science in college.
There isn’t any God.’ And the father wept. But mere
weeping is vain, he knew. He decided to act, and
deliver the youth of Kentucky from these lethal edu-
cators who taught that men were no better than mon-
keys or dogs, with the same hope of heaven. The
battalions of the pulpit rallied at his jousting cry.
Bryan entered the capital. He addressed the legisla-
ture. The Nebraska breath was fire; the silver tongue
scattered vitriol. The lower house heeded, with ears
acute, and minds on the little church back home,
thronged with voters. Enough votes were pledged for
a victory. When at the last dramatic moment the
thrice-blessed figure of independence and free-thinking
rose from the corner where it had been pushed andKENTUCKY 221

 

 

sat upon: the bill was defeated by one vote. In the
Senate, had it not been smothered in committee, the
measure would have passed. A fact we confess with
shame.

With shame, because the law would have violated
every tradition that has brought the State glory. The
tradition of the Kentucky which when still an un-
weaned, unprotected infant, surrounded by Indians,
many times verged on a break from the Union because
of Federalist autocracy; the tradition of the Kentucky
governor who at the outbreak of the Civil War, when
commanded by the Union’s military chief to send
troops, telegraphed the haughty officer a courteous
“Go to,” and sent the same valiant message to the
Confederates; the tradition of the Kentucky militiamen
who in the early conflicts of the nation, disgusted with
the campaigns’ conduct, told the chiefs their opinions,
packed up their kits, and went back to the Blue Grass:
the tradition of a Kentucky which, when the decision
of the State’s highest court did not satisfy the people,
abolished the court. After all the anti-Darwin bill
was defeated and tradition saved. Let hosannas ring!

High up in the Cumberlands where men live in the
log houses their forefathers chopped from the shadowy
forests, where there are no doctors in a county, no
automobiles, no railroads, no telephones, there reigns
liberty unfettered—and systematic scorn for law. It
is moonshiners’ paradise. Back from the creek bot-
tom serving as a highway sits Steve Miracle, rifle at
his side. In his pigmy clearing, deserted except for a
hissing rattler, or a “‘blowin’”’ viper, he watches stoic-
ally as the mountain ‘‘dew” drips from the rusted still
into the jug below. Maybe, if Steve isn’t conscientious,Se EL,

gn S=s=

    

  
  

22/2 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

he adds a bit of alkali. Certainly the gun is there.
Kept handy, too. Et’s his liquor, ain’t et? His corn,
his still, by God, it’s all his’n. What right’s them
folks up in Frankfort or way out East to say he cain’t
make liquor ef he wants to? Let a dam revenuer come
aroun’! He’ll show ’em, by God.

Not quickly shall we forget an experience in Clay
county, stumbling on horseback along a rocky “‘crick,”’
many miles from trains or toast. We were about to
enter a region noted for its moonshining enterprises.
As the dripping horse neared a cabin a hundred feet
back from the watery thoroughfare, a rude door of the
tiny structure opened, and a bearded patriarch of the
hills stalked out. He carried no rifle—it was probably
inside—but two revolvers showed at his hips. Obvi-
ously he was an outpost. ‘‘Good day, strangah,” he
drawled. We returned the salutation. With no fur-
ther formalities, he instituted a slow, polite catechism,
painstaking and penetrating as that of a candidate for
a doctor’s degree. It included past, present, and even
future personal history. ‘‘Wheah yuh goin’?” “How
long yuh goin’ to be heah?” ‘“What’s youh name?”
“What yuh workin’ at when youh home?” All of
which and many other questions satisfactorily an-
swered, we passed the examination and rode on through
the lines. In a few days we had seen most of the
stills in the neighborhood, known to every school child.
Our inquisitor was one of the profession’s leaders.
In other portions of the highlands, the strategy
changes. Upon a stranger’s approach, each vigilant
moonshiner fires into the air: the next distiller is thus
warned in time for any preparations necessary, and
when the rider borders his territory, fires as did theKENTUCKY 228

 

 

first. The astonished wayfarer thus finds himself
greeted by a series of uninvited salutes.

So alert are the patient, placid-appearing centurions,
it is almost impossible for a Federal agent to pene-
trate; a raid, to be effective must be a sudden swoop
of thirty or forty quick shooting stalwarts. The caval-
cade’s return would be a parade of triumph, with its
spoils of crushed copper tubes, did not the bodies of
deputies shot to death make of it a funeral procession.

This proudly conscious spirit of irrepressed self is
the highlander’s saving damnation. His salvation, for
were he to be deprived of his bitter joy that comes
in wresting a crop from a bleak, defiant Nature in a
region where the rock-strewn farms of Vermont would
be accounted as Valleys Of The Blest, he would go mad
with desolate loneliness. The mountaineer of the book,
the play, is always wearily unhappy: actually he is
happy, but with the happiness of the tragedian who
loves his tragedy. The mountaineer is the Hamlet
of the twentieth century. The spirit of self is his
damnation, for unlike the meditative Prince of the
Danes, he shoots first and thinks afterward. In a
county whose voting population was eleven hundred,
three years saw twenty fatal shootings and sixteen
woundings. No conviction followed.

Amazingly trivial are the causes. A farmer kicks
his neighbor’s dog. A father gives his intoxicated son
an unwelcome order—orders are not popular in the
mountains. One ingenious highland merchant after a
quarrel, knowing his life to be in danger, constructed
a stockade the entire distance from his house to
his store. He died from a bullet nevertheless. The
statute-books denounce gun-toting: the law is futile asSS A eee: : t ERE EB! ap |
ae SAT PT ea ere ——— eee aed

 

     
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
   

224 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

| a sun parlor in Mammoth Cave. In this year of grace
| nineteen hundred twenty four, of subways, radio, and
chewing gum, every man taking the oath of office in
Kentucky must swear he has neither as principal nor
second participated in a duel! When the last constitu-
tional convention assembled in 1890 obsolete enact-
1 | ments came up for repeal. The dueling law was re-
| tained; the legislators believed revocation would be
H dangerous. More than once has a judge rendered a
: | decision and afterwards affirmed it with his life. The
ie vigorous breath of this warning in the columns of an
q old newspaper still blows up the Licking. “I...
HH] thus publicly give notice to all sheriffs, constables,
: | bailiffs, marshals, and their deputies, that if they do
serve any precept On me preparatory to coercion that

Tiwill >. put aiperiod to their earthly career... 2 =~

Withal, the Kentuckian is kind, devoted, lovable.

Though his only books be the Bible and the Sears

Roebuck catalogue, he is never uncouth. He is always

the gentleman. Woman, beautiful, black haired or

golden haired, flashing eyed, soft of form and soft of

voice, here dwells in the age of chivalry. Upon her

Wd pedestal she is enthroned, for stranger, lover, husband
to worship. In the Blue Grass the mannish-collared

college girl would be a sight so bizarre that her walk

| upon the streets would signal a parade of gaping
i | ragamufhns and grinning piccaninnies. When Kentucky
| was still an eighteenth-century wilderness of forest,
Indian, and trapper, a dancing-master established a
school for pirouettes in the blockhouse of Lexington.
Nor did he starve. Kentucky is the land where woman
must be woman; her castle her home. ‘True, the State
did at length ratify the suffrage amendment; why, isKENTUCKY 226

 

 

a mystery. At a document-strewn desk a prominent
Kentuckian, pounding with his fist as though each blow
annihilated one of the guilty, scathingly harangued to
us why the law was the most calamitous act in all the
nation’s history.

How ran the old song the school boys chorused when
no teacher was nearby? Something after this fash-
ion:

In Kentucky. In Kentucky.

Where the horses are the fairest,

Where the women are the fastest,

And the politics the damndest:
In Kentucky.

Let the sleek horses graze quietly in their velvet
pastures; bid farewell to the Kentucky maiden—though
verily she merits far more than a glance—and muse
instead upon ballots and balloteers. The writer of the
song’s closing line was a man of truth. Politics are
the damndest in Kentucky. The reason? Again it is
individuality, exalted, bringing with its naiveté strange
contradictions. Whether classroom novice, farmer,
lawyer, clerk, or tobacco picker, every male is a poli-
tician. Asked whence came the principles he cherishes,
his proud reply would be “Myself’’: almost certainly
these are the principles handed down by his father,
and by his father’s father, slightly changed in the
passage of time. Yet, stubborn partisan as he is, should
the interpretations of other father’s sons, clashing with
his own, be made the dominant creed of the party,
instanter he bolts. A party split is as regular and
expected as frogs after a Visalia rain. The schisms
sometimes prove fatal. For politics in Kentucky are

    
  
 
 
 
 
   
   
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
  
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
   

npn SE

ee226 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

never impersonal. Wrote one statesman to a rival:
“T will not call you liar, villain, or scoundrel; but with
all the politeness imaginable, I could prove you so.”’

The office-seeker is delightfully ingenuous. Thus
advertises one highland candidate: “I am out of a
job for some time. My wife and six children need my
support. Think it over, friend, and let me have your
vote forclerk.”’ A poster with the honest rustic smiling
out blazons these cryptic sentences: ‘‘All my life I
lived in this county. My father and grandfather, too.
Not one of us ever asked for a political office. I think
it’s about time they got one, don’t you?” “A dog for
every man in the mountains,” promises a son of Clay
County, wistful for the legislature. While what more
could be asked of man than this: “I will make the
people of our county a good, sober sheriff?”

Along the river valleys, where time is marked by the
coming of the show-boat, or on the rolling plains where
the clock is the county fair, the buying of ballots is a
commerce probably far rarer than in the Northern
States stretching up from the clayey Ohio, with their
Cincinnatis, their Terre Hautes, their Chicagos. In the
Republican mountains, however, where there are few
to see and none to tell, the ballot merchant—so say
the Democrats—disdains retail barter, and opens his
shop for the wholesale trade. The clientele is that
benumbed caste, supposedly the progeny of criminals
who fled from England; their slogan, “A vote for a
dollar.” In a plateau county, so insistent became the
cry for greenbacks a few days before election, the tiny
bank serving the community was drained, and com-
pelled to telegraph the Sub-Treasury for a new supply.
Who, without sin, would arise to condemn? CouldKENTUCKY ° 227

 

 

good Republican leaders do aught else? Is theirs the
blame’ Kentucky happened to-be born under the Donkey
instead of the sacred Elephant? Their lot is hard.
Their mountain votes might better be used as fuel on
the cabin hearths. Except—ah golden days!—when
Jeffersonian calls Jeffersonian stinging names, discord
cleaves the Democratic cohorts, and the wrangling of
the warders at the State gates foreshadows oppor-
tunity to steal through and capture the citadel. Then,
yea blessed are the mountains. Where a precinct num-
bering a hundred ballots in the bitterest primary mys-
teriously swells to five hundred at the State elections.
Why not bring men across the border from Tennessee
or West Virginia, wise men, who know the right way to
vote; or better, wait until the Donkey lowlands have
reported, and stuff your ballot boxes until by a gentle
majority the just result is achieved? The election offi-
cers are all delicate Republicans: let a Democrat stray-
ing around try to holler!

In the Goebel assassination this mountain political
fury attained its height; the case is a twentieth-century
tragedy of two cities begun with death in a duel and
ended with murder. ... William Goebel is State Sena-
tor from Covington in the lowlands. ‘The commoner
hails him as a liberator; corporations denounce him as
a self-seeking despot. . . . [he Senator writes a po-
litical article attacking Colonel John Sandford, an of-
ficer of a Covington bank. ... The two men meet
.. . Sandford falls, mortally wounded. . . . Goebel
is never indicted. : . . Hour years) passy. 9) whe
Senator is now Democratic candidate for governor.
... Lhe returns show the Republicans to be
elected by 2,383 votes. ... The verdict is accepted,

 

———$ ee ————————————————————— - ,
“e
ee tam eS eee rete mea a

    
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
  

a

NNee
ce

 

  

228 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

then contested on a charge of intimidation and fraud
in the mountains. ... The legislative committee as-
sembles at Frankfort to hear the contest... . Feeling
is intense. . . . Nine hundred and sixty armed moun-
taineers invade the capital ‘“‘to see justice done.” ...
The decision of the contest is about to be announced,
in Goebel’s favor. . . . When Goebel, entering the
capitol grounds, is shot to death by a bullet fired from
a window in the Secretary of State’s private office....
Republican leaders are accused, among them the gov-
ernor whose office Goebel was contesting. . . . It is
testified that mountain feudists had agreed “‘to kill off
enough Democrats to make a Republican majority in
the legislature.” ... One confesses, some are convicted:
to be pardoned later when a Republican chief execu-
tive comes into power. . .. One is repeatedly sent
as a mountain representative to Congress. ...Ina
single aspect the grim episode is not typical; Goebel
was slain by an assassin, not by an enemy face to face—
Kentuckians abhor cowards who shoot from behind.
Another fatal drama, so recent that the trials are scarce
ended, is the ‘‘Bloody Election” of Clayhole. In this
hamlet, where political control vacillated, gunmen en-
tered the polls, shot promiscuously and mortally, rid-
dled the ballot boxes with bullets, and dumped them
into the river nearby.

On the same stage as these tragedies of blood, are
rightly, in comic relief, enacted high political comedy
and farce. The legislature, less corrupt perhaps than
in many other commonwealths, naturally could not ex-
ist without its lobbies for drollery and divertissement.
Here the jovial entertainers are the Three MusketeersKENTUCKY 229

 

 

—the coal lobby, the railroad lobby, and the race-track
lobby ; appearing in their sportive interlude:

All for one. One for all.

Dare he strike one, three on him fall.

No bribes, says Mr. Legislator. Away, Satan, with
your bribe! But a drink of whisky from a friend
in a dry country—that’s different. So the soft-coal
lobbyist must stock his hotel chambers with the mel-
lowest of Scotland’s pride, and keep open house for the
men who make the laws. There’s work to be done!
The influence thus exerted is said to be tremendous.

Out of England to the Indian-haunted forests lum-
bered the caravans of the Kentucky settlers. The wil-
derness did its work, and the traits of the newcomers
identifying them as Englishmen vanished. Except one:
the Englishman’s love of a horse race. From the days
when “‘scalping’”’ was a dread fact of the moment, not
a dim tradition, the bronzed inhabitants of each little
settlement gathered to watch shining steed vie with
shining steed. Today the sport, commercialized, has
aggrandized until it is imperial; the daily health bulle-
tins of its Morviches, its Silver Kings, are flashed about
the world as though they told of a god upon whose
well-being hung the universe; millions are won and lost
when the favored Derbyite stumbles and breaks a leg.

It is the race-track lobby, fighting the church lobby
for its life, whose methods are unique. This is the
procedure laid down by the race-track political Book
of Etiquette. About the busy paddocks are a myriad
hangers-on, watchmen, machine-tenders, ticket-takers,
all well paid. Be you envious of such an easy liveli-

    
 
 
  
   
  
  
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 

“ eamer

230 THESE  UNTEE Ds PAiES

 

 

hood, or out of employment, call upon the king of
horses and jockeys, and petition for a place. ‘‘Go,”’
commands the monarch, “and seek out the political
chieftain of your province. Worthiest of all, let it
be a legislator. Ask him to inscribe for you an indorse-
ment. Return to me then, and the post is yours. If
ye gain no such indorsement, return not, for we are
busy, and life is brief.”’

Thus, indirectly, the politician goes deep into the
race-king’s debt: and debts it is not etiquette for a
politician to forget. As another effective expedient,
the sovereign places the legislator upon his regal pay
roll, at a stipend of fifteen dollars a day with no
onerous labor demanded.

One unsophisticated, conscientious legislator, ap-
prised of this boon, so goes the story, besought of the
king to know his duties. ‘‘You see that concrete wall
over there?’ growled the monarch. “Yep,” returned
the anxious inquirer. ‘Well, you’re the wall guard,”
sniffed His Highness. “Keep your eye wide open to
see that it doesn’t walk away.”’

Always a paradox is the Kentuckian; an ultra-con-
servative in making laws, he becomes a passionate rad-
ical in breaking them. The tenant tobacco farmers,
“hill billies’” who were ever in debt to the grocer and
at the mercy of a tobacco trust which paid as the mind
of its buyer varied, decided something must be done.
Failing to consult Blackstone, they banded, agreeing
to retain the crops until a life-supporting price was
offered. If a neighbor more prosperous, or preferring
to play his football game alone, insisted on selling at
any figure tendered, he received three or four warn-
ings. If the warnings went unheeded, upon a cloudyKENTUCKY 221

 

 

night a troop of cavalrymen dashed through his fields,
and a few moments later tobacco barn and its black
leaves were in flames. These incendiaries, haters of
trusts, were, and are, the ‘‘Night Riders.” Similarly,
when toll-gates along the ragged highways in Campbell
County harassed the travelers, and negotiations for
purchase appeared never to end, rustic cavaliers gal-
loped down: when the toll-keeper appeared after dawn
to collect his levy from every voyager he found the
gates hacked into splinters. The sale was consummated
at once.

Dangerous, but for the general good, acts as these
are countenanced, approved. Not so mob punishment
of individual grievance. Lynchings, horsewhippings,
are rare, condemned. Fight the foe is a rigorous
canon: but it is likewise rigorously canonical that he
be fought single handed. Self-proclaimed censors, the
“Possum Hunters” terrorized the plains about Hop-
kinsville. Until the trodden independence of the coun-
try side revolted: one morning passersby beheld the
leader of the moral marauders dangling from a tree.
The Possum Hunters chased no more.

Kentucky, the Kingdom of Self. It is a land which
has borne or fostered many of the famous: Daniel
Boone, Simon Kenton, Henry Clay, Henry Watterson,
Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, the President
of the Confederacy and the President of the Union;
but always the greatness is of the individual, never
of the reflected group. It is the Land Where Any-
thing Might Happen; where judges spit tobacco with
grandiloquent attorneys, and one judge opens court
with hymns; where school-teachers kill wild-cats by
lying upon them; where schoolboys whip pedagogues

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232 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

because no holiday is granted to honor the visiting
elephant; where a newspaper-contest promoter ad-
dressing circular letters in the conventional ‘““My Dear
Mrs. Bowsley” is invited upon the street to fight nu-
merous irate husbands for flirting with their wives;
where the casual wayfarer is introduced to the college
president by the driver of the mail hack. It is a land
where love of liberty compensates for grievous 1m-
perfections; a land of the lotus which the Kentuckian
may leave, but never abandons. This is the State’s
sin: life is too cheap. Let the Kentuckian barter his
revolver for a book, and die in bed.

Lest the Blue Grass inclined vacationer be frightened
from his pilgrimage, to the sorrow of commerce cham-
bers, we hasten to add that there are policemen in
Kentucky, and spots where. the stranger might dwell
five years without hearing the sound of a gun.WASHINGTON
THE DAWN OF A TOMORROW,

By ROBERT WHITAKER

“PuGET SounD? Let me see; where is Puget
Sound ?”

The inquirer was not a foreigner, nor even an
Fasterner. Nor was the query that of an unschooled
street-laborer, or a young child. The question as I
have given it was the response I had from the As-
sistant Librarian in one of the State Educational In-
stitutions of California, a college for the training of
teachers. It may have been on her part a momentary
amnesia, a mere passing cloud of forgetfulness which
was gone almost as soon as it shaped itself into words.
But a real answer to her inquiry goes a good deal
farther than does the knowledge of Puget Sound com-
monly possessed even by those who live on the shores
of that unique American inland sea.

This region figured more prominently in world news
before Americans were there, or while their numbers
were few, than now. It was a bone of international
contention then, and on four separate occasions within
fewer than forty years brought three of the great
European powers, Russia, Spain, and Great Britain,
either to the verge of war among themselves or with
the United States. No section of our country achieved
in its incipiency so much of international disturbance
and deliberation as has the Pacific Northwest. One
might almost assert that the Monroe Doctrine was
233

  
 
   
  
   
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 

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——— i agit234 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

born there, since the large claims of Russia a century
ago to sovereignty on the Northwest Coast of America
had hardly less to do with the famous proclamation
than had the purposes of Spain toward South America.
Thirty years earlier England and Spain had almost
come to blows over the ownership of Nootka Sound,
and fifty years after they had settled their controversy
we ourselves were at the breaking point with Great
Britain because we wanted the whole shore line be-
tween Spanish California and Russian Alaska, and
after we had receded from our belligerent ‘Fifty Four
Forty Or Fight,” and had conceded to British North
America a share with us of the Pacific frontage, the
issue as to whether the line of division went north
or south of certain small islands in Puget Sound came
uncomfortably close to involving us again in a war
with England. Pickett’s famous charge at Gettysburg
on July 3, 1863, is familiar to every American school-
boy, but few people even in the State of Washington
are aware that in July seven years earlier the same
doughty Virginian who led the reckless venture at the
crucial moment of the Civil War to dethrone the Stars
and Stripes had with equal recklessness flung the Amer-
ican flag to the breeze on the San Juan Islands, and
dared the far more powerful British forces to strike
back. But for the self-restraint of the English Admiral
Pickett would have been overwhelmed on that July
day in ’56, and the war between the States might have
waited indefinitely upon the outcome of a war with
Great Britain. The unique thing historically about the
Pacific Northwest, however, is not that so often have
many nations contended over conflicting claims there,
but that in every instance the actual blow has beenWASHINGTON 235

 

 

avoided, and friendly deliberation, followed by judicial
arbitrament, prevailed. Where Puget Sound may be in
the present world discussion of arbitration versus war it
is perhaps too early to say, but without doubt its story
illustrates in exceptional degree the glory that belongs
to the policies of peace. Nowhere has peace had more
dramatic victories than there.

Washington State is the least in size of all our
Pacific Coast possessions. It is surpassed in area al-
most one-half by the State of Oregon, and Oregon and
Washington together are only a little larger than Cali-
fornia. And the three, as one, are only a little more
than one-half as big as Alaska. Yet Washington,
least in dimension, has certain advantages of position
and possession which are as distinctive as her place
in history.

My predecessor in the pastorate at Seattle thirty-
five years ago, a typical Titan of the frontier, was
never weary of demonstrating that the Puget Sound
country is not the northwest corner of the United
States. Seattle, he insisted, is considerably nearer
New York City on the east than to the farthest ex-
tension of Alaska on the: west. Washington State is
the doorway, and the only doorway to more than one-
sixth of the total continental area of the United States.

What is of more consequence to Washington’s fu-
ture is that Puget Sound is the doorway to Asia as
well. Asia, indeed, confronts our whole West Coast.
But it is characteristic of the land masses on both sides
of the Pacific that they approach each other toward
the north and recede rapidly from each other on the
south. This, with the shorter arc of earth curvature
as one goes northward brings the ports on Puget

eenn ee

236 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

Sound several days sailing nearer those of China nel
Japan than are the ports of California. The volume
of commerce which passes now from Puget Sound to
the Orient exceeds many times that of all our harbors
which lie farther south combined.

Thus far I have written as if Puget Sound and the
State of Washington were identical terms. This is
very far from being the case. It was not for Puget
Sound that the province was first named by those who
settled there. Nor was it for Puget Sound that we
wrestled with England so strenuously through the long
years of the Northwest controversy. Puget Sound
was involved in this contest of wits which came so
near to being a contest of arms, but the more im-
mediate issue was the possession of the Columbia
River. Washington shares that river on its western
course from Wallula to the sea with the State of
Oregon. But the Columbia’s more extensive meander-
ings from north to south and east to west are in Wash-
ington’s own territory. It was Great Britain’s failure
to find the mouth of the Columbia quite as early as she
found the’ entrance to Puget Sound that gave the State
of Washington to the United States: it was the de-
sire for the whole river as well as for all the coast
which was back of the militant slogan, “Fifty Four
Forty Or Fight’; and it was their pride in the Colum-
bia rather than in the Sound which led the first Ameri-
can settlers to offer themselves to Congress as an
independent political: division in 1853 under the name
of the Territory of Columbia. Washington State
has always been patriotic enough, but her people ac-
cepted reluctantly the name which Congress thrust
upon them.WASHINGTON 237

 

 

Washington State is the Columbia River and Puget

Sound combined. The one is the greatest river, the
other the most remarkable inland sea on the Pacific
side of the Americas. Together they constitute a
length and breadth and volume of water surface,
closely interwoven with narrowly separated shores,
such as no other State of our Union, and no other
country on the two continents can quite match. The
Columbia has no such advantage of position in rela-
tion to. Alaska and Asia as pertains to Puget Sound.
It has no such availability throughout the greater part
of its course for commercial traffic as have the singu-
larly deep and clear channels of the Sound. Nor is the
land bordering upon it in central and northeastern
Washington so: blest with humidity and therefore so
rich in natural fertility. But the ‘Inland Empire,” of
which Spokane is the capital, that extends far over
into Oregon and Idaho, is not less extraordinary in its
own way than the great basin of Puget Sound. Even
eyes accustomed to the great grain fields of the Mis-
sissippi Valley must view with wonder and awe the
apparently illimitable vistas of the soft hued cereals
which flourish on the billowy stretches of this oceanic
granary of the Northwest. Here also the apple
abounds in abundance and perfection as probably no-
where else on earth. And here is power waiting to be
developed, the ‘‘white coal’”’ of the world’s tomorrow,
beyond anything to be expected elsewhere in America.
The potential hydro-electric potency of the Niagara
Basin is said to be six million horse-power. The Colo-
rado Basin surpasses this expectancy by another mil-
lion. On the authority of Eastern experts that of the
Columbia River Basin may be twenty-one million. No

    
  
    
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
   
 
 
 
 
  
  
    
 
 
  
  
 

 

SE Seree,

  

238 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

need to comment upon these terms. If Puget Sound
claims Alaska and Asia as its own in dreams of to-
morrow’s world commerce, the Inland Empire has
within itself sufficient for self-sustenance throughout
ages to come.

World travelers have paid high tribute to the nat:
ural loveliness of Puget Sound, the healthfulness and
tonic effectiveness of its rarely invigorating climate,
and the exceptional accessibility and safety of its
waters. These items might be extended to include the
agricultural, horticultural, and commercial availability
of its shores. The combination of attractions and ad-
vantages is one hardly paralleled elsewhere on earth.
Rich food staples lie in its waters. Including her share
in the fish resources of the Columbia, and her relation
to the fish cargoes which come down from Alaska the
State of Washington has an interest in this phase of
the world’s food supply which in itself would set her
apart among the favored servants of mankind. Much
else there is. [he Puget Sound country, as other con-
siderable sections of Washington, is peculiarly adapted
to dairy products, and to raising poultry. The progress
already made there is too large easily to visualize its
statistics. The western sections of Washington re-
spond also to the cultivation of the small fruits, ber-
ries in particular, so that the State might supply with
these the tables of the world. The fecundity of her
forests, which puts Washington in the front rank of
the great lumber producing sections of the earth, is
proof and promise of what her fields have to offer on
all lines of natural growth. To mention these matters
thus briefly carries with it almost of necessity some
accent of extravagance. The unique loveliness of na-WASHINGTON 239

 

 

ture there has evoked tributes from all who have had
opportunity to see the State to any advantage.

It was Viscount Bryce of England who summed up
the Washington landscape most strikingly:

“Neither Europe nor Asia nor South America has
a prospect in which sea and woods and snow moun-
tains are so united in a landscape as in the view from
Puget Sound of the great peaks that rise like white
towers above the dark green forests of the Cascades.”

More comprehensive, and not less enthusiastic, is
the testimony of one of our own American writers, Dr.

Woods. Hutchinson, in his ‘Conquest of Consumption”:
q p

‘When once we cross the summit of the Cascades
we enter a totally different climate, an air which is
mild, gentle, and moist, but never depressing; a coun-
try of green mountains, dazzling snow-tipped peaks,
of grass, of moss and fern, which knows neither the
barrenness of winter nor the brownness of summer,
a land which has all the best and most invigorating
qualities of the cradle of our Teutonic race, with none
of its extremes. From one end to the other it is the
land of tall trees and tall men, of the apple, the peach,
the prune, and the pine; the land of the green valley
and the rushing river. The rosy pink of its orchards
every spring is equaled only by the sunset glow upon
its peaks of eternal snow. It is the charmed land of
the American continent, where a temperate sun, a
mild climate, and a fertile soil give man the stimulus of
the green and rain-swept North, with the luxurious re-
turns for moderate effort of the teeming tropics.

If you have never seen Oregon, Washington, or British
Columbia in summer, you lack important qualifications
for imagining what the climate of heaven may be like.”

    
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
    
    
 
 
 
 
  
 
 

 

ee iti cr tas setng rt

Paani

240 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

Nor do even these glowing yet temperate eulogies
wholly indicate the variety of Washington’s claims
upon the nature lover. Too much can hardly be said
for Puget Sound itself. It is not, to be sure, the only
region that devotees have called “the summer play-
ground of America,” but certainly one who has seen
all the America that is under our flag will recall no
portion where all conditions are so generously present
for comfort and healthfulness and delight as they
are during the summer months from the Straits of
Juan De Fuca to the utmost limit of Admiralty Inlet
and Hood’s Canal. The “prospect of sea and woods
and snow mountains” is, as Mr. Bryce so aptly indi-
cates, one not to be surpassed anywhere under the
sun. And under the sunset sun the combinations are
utterly beyond the power of words to describe. If
you doubt it try an evening ride from Victoria to Port
Townsend, for example, with the quaint British capital
on your right, the snow-capped Olympics on your left,
and the molten lava of quivering light flooding out
behind you the whole width of the straits till the golden
glory melts away into the infinity of the Pacific Sea.

Or lie out under the pine trees on the slopes of Para-
dise Valley in Rainier National Park on a summer
night, with the snow patches and the wide-spreading
areas of massed wild-flowers all around you, where
you may peer over the edge of your uplifted couch
into the depths of some glacial crevasse, or, lifting your
eyes may watch the cloud drift above the white sum-
mit that towers still some ten thousand feet above you.
Or, a hundred miles to the east and south float down
the Columbia below the Dalles, where on a cloudless
August afternoon you may view such an exhibit ofWASHINGTON 241

 

far seen snowy summits as is to be found nowhere else
from any river of the continent. Or, if you prefer
motoring, follow the courses of the upper Columbia,
from fifty miles below its confluence with the We-
natchee to the winding ways of the smaller stream
in the neighborhood of Cashmere. There you will
Witness solitude as that of the Old World deserts,
and ride between somber ramparts of great canyon
cliffs. And you will come forth to a garden spot,
wherein the cities of Wenatchee and Cashmere are set
like jewels in silken robes, with a witchery of light ef-
fects upon the sharply silhouetted crests of the ab-
rupt Cascades to the north and east and west that
will renew your faith in the celestial glories set forth
by the seers and apocalyptic dreamers of the past.
Or—but why extend the tale of the inexhaustible beau-
ties of the Pacific Northwest?

One could wish that this were all the story, or that
man’s part in the great pageant were always in har-
mony. It was not so yesterday when the white man
first looked upon the land. Bloody warfare there was
between white man and the darker aborigine. Lovely
Auburn, midway between Seattle and Tacoma, was
once named Slaughter, though the name was hon-
orary rather than descriptive in its origin from Lieu-
tenant Slaughter, one of the early defenders of the
white settlements on Puget Sound, and a victim to
an Indian’s bullet. Many another stained the soil of
Washington with his blood, both west and east of the
Cascades. The Whitman massacre, in the neighbor-
hood of the present city of Walla Walla, was one
of the most tragic episodes in the early story of
western America.

    
   
   
  
   
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
  
 
 
 
   

 

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pO A alt ap retesetTHESE UNITED STATES

 

 

etme iess

More devastating in a way has been the bloody
strife of later days, not between white man and red
man, nor between native and foreigner, but between
American and American, in a fratricidal industrial
warfare. How widespread this warfare has been, and
how many have perished in it, one can hardly say now.
But it has had its supremely tragic phases which more
than once have unhappily put Washington on the first
page of the world’s news-carriers in this twentieth
century of our civilization.

It is no easy matter to write dispassionately of these
things, unless one writes indifferently, and that were
worse than to flame up at the needlessness and horror
of it all. Nor were it necessary to make particular
mention of it here if Washington’s share in the gen-
eral blood-guiltiness of modern industrialism had no
special phases and special meaning of its own. But
what has happened here has been as distinctive as
Puget Sound itself, the scene of the struggle. The
wheat fields of Eastern Washington have not been
free from industrial oppression. Rather have they
because of the more archaic social organization there
been freer only from the powerful protest and revolt
of the lumber regions farther west. For the story,
after all, is not one of tyranny which has prevailed
unopposed, but where the opposition, whatever its
failings and its misjudgments may have been, has been
quite in line with the best American traditions.

But the waste and exploitation of the mighty lumber
regions of the Pacific Northwest, where half the timber
of the United States is still to be found, have been
quite in keeping, scandalously and inexcusably so, with
the worst American traditions. Individual initiativeWASHINGTON 243

 

 

and private enterprise have been allowed to devastate
the great woods and pursue their own ends with ruth-
less disregard both of the interests of the whole Ameti-
can people of tomorrow and of the immediate welfare
of the lumber worker of today. The exploitation and
the oppression have been most extreme in western
Washington. There also the revolt has been most
effective. The Northwest has been made by men who
have had to stand up to nature, and therefore are
not afraid to stand up to each other. It is said that
more dirt has been moved in the making of Seattle
than anywhere else on the American continent except
at the Panama Canal. Possibly the extra resistance
of the lumber-jack of western Washington has pro-
ceeded in part from the back-wash here of the gold-
seekers’ invasion of Alaska. That expedition drew
from the virile and aggressive life of America. Most
of those who went were compelled to make their re-
treat from Alaska as best they could, and many of
them, for obvious reasons, tarried on Puget Sound.
The prosperity of the Sound cities within the last
quarter of a century is in no small measure due to
this infusion of the most adventurous pioneer blood.
They were men, they were young men, and they were
American young men, in the main. Here are the keys to
the intensity of the industrial struggle on Puget Sound.

The story of that struggle cannot be told adequately
in a few words. But its two main ingredients are the
heavy, dangerous character of the work itself, and the
abominable conditions under which greed and graft
forced the workers to carry on their terrific task. As
evidence of the first of these, let me quote, not from
a labor paper, or the mouth of a labor agitator, but

    
 

 

  
 
  
   
 
  
  
  
    
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
  
  
 
 

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from such an eminently respectable and conservative
journal as the Sunset magazine of California. In
February, 1917, it printed this graphic description of
one phase of the lumber worker’s task:

“Shingle-weaving is not a trade, it is a battle. For
ten hours a day the sawyer faces two teethed steel
disks whirling around two hundred times a minute. To
the one on the left he feeds the heavy blocks of cedar,
reaching over with his left hand to remove the heavy
shingles it rips off. . . . Hour after hour the shingle-
weaver’s hands and arms, plain, unarmored flesh and
blood, are staked against the screeching steel that cares
not what it severs. Hour after hour the steel sings
its crescendo note as it bites into the wood, the saw-
dust thickens, the wet sponge under the sawyer’s nose
fills with fine particles. If “cedar asthma,” the
shingle-weaver’s occupational disease, does not get him,
the steel will. Sooner or later he reaches over a little
too far, the whirling blade tosses drops of deep red
into the air, a finger, a hand, or part of an arm comes
sliding down the slick chute.”

Yet when the revolt came it was not against the
risk and the agony and loss involved in the industrial
process itself. The men had a right to demand that
the menace of the machine should be met as far as
possible in practically the only way in which it could
be met, by protecting their health and comfort and
keeping them in decent condition to match their wits
against the whirring steel, or against whatever other
dangers belong to the lumber-jack’s perilous trade.
Little enough it was they asked—reasonable hours of
labor and exemption from that excessive toil which
always takes fearful toll in the increase of industrialWASHINGTON 24.5

 

 

accidents, decent food with which to maintain their
strength, decent quarters in which to dry their rain-
soaked bodies and clothes, and to get the sleep so fully
earned and so indispensable to their safety and health.
None of these things were given them in any reasonable
measure in ordinary times, and the special privilege
which took advantage of the war to exploit the govern-
ment unconscionably seized upon the same crisis to
make heavier the burdens of the workers and to stifle
their protests with hypocritical pretenses of patriotism.
Consequently the war period saw three notable explo-
sions in the economic field in western Washington.

It is worthy of note that not one of these occurred
during the period of our own nation’s actual conflict
with Germany. The first, at Everett, in November,
1916, preceded our direct participation in the war.
The second to be mentioned here took place at Cen-
tralia in November three years later. The so-called
“Seattle Revolution” was an incident of the earlier
part of 1919. The Everett and the Centralia affairs
were massacres, and are so named. Both of them
were direct consequences of the struggle in the lumber
industry. In both, the oppression and provocation
of the workers had been long continued, and violence
resulted from the lawless methods used by the lumber
barons, their aids and accomplices, to suppress the
lawful protests of the workers, organized or supported
in each instance by the I. W. W. In both cases it
was claimed that the workers were the first to open
fire, and the evidence so far as it is obtainable runs
quite to the contrary. At Everett, on that beautiful
Sunday morning in 1916, the workers were on board
the boat on which they had come up from Seattle to246 THESE, UNITED SRALES

 

 

strengthen the hands of the local strikers, and the
business men and their associates had gathered with
weapons forcibly to prevent them from exercising their
indubitable legal right to enter the town. The massed
men on ship-board were fired into wantonly, with no
regard for the non-combatants present, indeed if the
workers themselves could be called combatants. ‘The
arrests made afterwards were of the workers, and not
of their assailants. There was no lack of money and
economic power on the side of the prosecution. But
the trial took place in Seattle, a city of size, was car-
ried out decently, and resulted in the complete acquittal
of all the accused.

There is no need to detail here the events at Cen-
tralia three years later. [he struggle had been long
continued there. Previously the workers had been
attacked in their own hall, and brutally mobbed. This
time the soldiers involved had gone far out of their
way to pass this same hall, with abundant indications
of a set purpose to wreck the workers’ headquarters
again. The weight of testimony, judged impartially,
is that the attack began from without and not from
within the hall, and was engineered by the big lumber
interests. [he barbarities which followed the battle
itself were against the workers, and not by them. The
trial was held in a small town, the judge was mani-
festly prejudiced against the accused and had joined
in formal denunciation of their party. The verdict
against the workers, obviously affected by the intimi-
dating presence of troops hostile to the accused, was
a compromise, and undeniably absurd from the view-
point of the offense itself. And since then five of the
twelve legal jurors have under oath repudiated theirWASHINGTON 247

 

 

verdict as forced from them, while a labor jury, con-
stituted of conservative labor men not in sympathy with
the I. W. W. as an organization, found unanimously
for the accused. The fact that the accused are still
in jail, serving life sentences, except for the two or
three who could not be convicted even under those
extraordinary circumstances, indicates not their guilt
but rather the slow recession of the war hysteria and
the powerful control still exercised in Washington by
the lumber barons and their allies.

The “Seattle Revolution” was an utterly bloodless
affair, and absolutely non-violent both in purpose and
in its actual conduct, despite all the sensational re-
ports to the contrary. It was made by the govern-
ing classes themselves. Under the impetus of the
extraordinary profits that were practicable under war
pressure the workers of the Northwest were not only
allowed but were encouraged to build up their soli-
darity. The labor unions, especially those associated
with the ship-building trades, grew enormously in num-
bers and power. When, following the cessation of the
war, the period of retrenchment and deflation came
the burden of it fell, of course, upon the workers. It
is claimed that adjustments would still have been made
but for the interference of Federal red tape. The
ship-workers went out in common protest against what
they considered the ineptness and injustice of the de-
cision against them. Their fellows in other trades mov-
ing still with the solidarity of the efficient labor codp-
eration achieved during the war, went out with them.
The result was something, the like of which had never
happened before in America, and is not likely to
happen again soon.248 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

There was an amazing, an appalling demonstration
of what it'means when the workers of a great indus-
trial community act with one accord to cease work.
The marvel is that the workers managed it as well
as they did, for they themselves were overwhelmed
with the measure of their success and the manifesta-
tion of their power. They were compelled to retreat
because their advance had carried them so much
farther than they contemplated. They had planned
only to cease work, and they found themselves forced
practically to administer government as soon as they
laid down their tools. This they did, and were will-
ing to do, only to the extent and with the purpose of
preventing violence. Seattle was never so orderly, so
decent, and so non-violent a city as it was during the
few days the strikers held sway. But Seattle labor
was not ready to cut loose from the existing organi-
zation of society, had not dreamed of it, and had not
the remotest thought of challenging the State and the
Nation. Hence its abandonment of the general strike
as soon as the protest had been effectively made. Had
there been any statesmanlike treatment of the workers
when they returned peacefully to their tasks, which
they had peacefully left, it might have been greatly
to the advantage of both Seattle and the nation. It
was such an opportunity for forbearance, moderation,
good-will and real industrial diplomacy as the gov-
erning powers of no other American city have had,
a real chance to show whether there be anything in
the favorite contention of those employers and their
spokesmen who argue that the interests of the workers
and the employers are one. The opportunity was ut-
terly misused, given over to the cheap politician, theWASHINGTON 249

 

 

sensational and unscrupulous news-monger, and the
vindictive money-autocrat. The damage of that fail-
ure has not yet been undone.

A chronic and on the whole a more disastrous fail-
ure of the owning and governing classes in Washing-
ton to enter into the distinctive character of their
commonwealth, and codperate most effectively with
the workers there for the largest realization of its
peculiar opportunities and gifts, continues. The em-
phatic quality of Washington State is its adaptation
to the purposes of creative labor. ‘The climate is a
worker’s, not an idler’s climate. The land is ho
parasite’s paradise, and to develop it as such, is to
make a butterfly farm of what by all its natural con-
ditions is intended to be a vast industrial hive. ‘The
summer playground of the American continent”? Wash-
ington may deserve to be. But its summer is short,
and the merits of the country are not of the few weeks
only in which men rest and play, but rather of the
whole working year. No State of the American Union
surpasses Washington in the possibilities which it pre-
sents to a non-exploiting and non-combative industrial
life. ‘The dawn of a tomorrow is upon the woods
and waters, the orchards and the grain fields of the
great Northwest commonwealth. But it is a tomor-
row which can only come to its noon-day fulness when
constructiveness shall count for more than acquisitive-
ness with those who sit in high places; when there
shall be real conservation not alone of the illimitable
wealth of nature but of the vastly more consequential
wealth that is in both high and lowly humanity—a to-
morrow when all together as truly creative workers
shall enter into their own.NEW MEXICO
A RELIC OF ANCIENT AMERICA

By ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT

New Mexico has an austere and planetary look that
daunts and challenges the soul. In the East and the
Middle West, the honors are nowadays relatively even
between man and nature. In much of the West and
the Southwest they are not, and in New Mexico the
game is still so heavily loaded on nature’s side that the
life of the citizen is profoundly affected. Although the
fourth of our States in area—three-fifths the size of
France, with single counties as big as Wales or Scot-
land—New Mexico has a population smaller than that
of many an American city. Evenly distributed, there
would be about three persons to the square mile. In
contrast to chill snow peaks, and mesas that drop
starkly to rivers running naked in their canyons, the
few little clusters of human habitations which the flow-
ing mountain ranges have secreted at their bases seem
as negligible as the burrows of the prairie dogs.

For all that, the State has fabricated out of soil, and
climate, and racial stock a special brand of civilization,
an individual pattern for life to run in that is of pecu-
liar interest in the record of American States. ‘The
newest in the Union, it boasts two cultures as ancient
as anything on our continent, as little modified by cen-
turies and circumstance. It is still without the ma-
chinery of modern industrialism except in the depths

of mines. Flocks and herds and agricultural crops sup-
250NEW MEXICO 251

 

 

port the greater part of its economic life. But many
of the Indians and Spanish Americans, and even the
now dominant fair-skinned settlers still live, in their
vast colored solitude, as pioneers in space and time,
more closely huddled together than New Englanders
outside of big cities. The Pueblos are sheltered like
monks in their walled villages and terraced community
houses of sun-dried brick. The ‘‘Mexicans,” in their
intramontane valleys, which are often mere rock
crevices with a mountain stream in the middle and the
width of a fertile field of wheat on either side, set
their little dice-like ranch houses end to end. Where
their dwellings have space to be wider spreading, as
in their Palestinian villages, they have a semi-fortified
look; the same flat roof covers three or four genera-
tions, which cling together patriarchally. The old
Spanish towns of importance, as one may discover
in Santa Fé, were drawn tight about plaza and streets
edged with colonnaded sidewalks, and their many re-
ligious and conventual buildings, which lift slated man-
sards to the blue sky, are as secretly inclosed as in
France or Spain. Bernalillo, an old Spanish town,
built on the site of an Indian pueblo where the army of
Coronado made its first winter quarters, has an air of
being religiously set in walls and gardens against the
assaults of a dangerous universe. [The genuinely
frontier towns, like Gallup, near the Arizona line, im-
portant as trading centers for sheep or mining or
Indian country, are no more than a raw street or two
on the edge of infinity. Even Albuquerque, the only
bustling modern city of any size, gives no effect of
proud assertion: Sandia Mountain, floating above,
carries off all the magnificence.

    
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
   
  
   
 
 
  
  
 

 

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252 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

The Southern Rockies, cleaving the State from north
to south, are its backbone. East of this central spine,
all prickly black with forests and bitten into canyons
splashed with hues of blood and wine, high tawny
table-lands roll gradually to join the plains of Western
Texas; but on the other side, as far west as the Con-
tinental Divide, near the Arizona line, lies an alti-
tudinous region of blue peaks and chains, broken by
the red mesas which stand lonely as strongholds of the
giants; a grazing country, interspersed with verdant
agricultural valleys. Five great rivers, of which the
chief is the muddy Rio Grande, draining five great
watersheds, have not sufficed with their swift little
cold tributaries from the peaks, to make the State other
than arid in general character, so low is the percentage
of rainfall. In recent years important storage reser-
voirs for irrigation purposes have been developed in
several regions, notably the Elephant Butte, ‘‘the
largest in the world,’ made by damming the Rio
Grande in a canyon. But such efforts are in their
infancy, and crops dependent on rainfall alone must
everywhere be raised by dry-farming methods.

In an hour or two on horseback one may pass from
the desert, with its dusty evanescent lights and pale
lunar convulsions, through the rich green of an irri-
gated valley filled to the rim of its sandy pink foothills
with corn or alfalfa, where mint and cottonwoods grow
thick along the running ditches, and up into the virgin
pine forest of the mountains, a place of blue-black
shadow. Two or three more hours, and the high sheep
range opens its vistas, fabulously vast, yet green and
smooth and soft as an English park. ven in the
desert, the purple vetches and petunias of early sum-NEW MEXICO BIRR

 

 

mer, the scented sheets of yellow that mark August
and September, the gray-green sagey growths give
color and fragrance to aridity. Owing to the altitude,
nowhere less than 2,500 or 3,000 feet, tropical vege-
tation such as one finds in Arizona is lacking. The
extreme south, along the Mexican border, is a land
of perpetual summer. In the more northerly counties,
like Taos and Santa Fé—the State capital is built at
some 7,000 feet under the Sangre de Cristos, which
rise to a jagged 14,000—snow may fall at any time
between September and June, and spring winds blast the
fruit blossoms; while summer sends to the ripening crops
anything from torrential rains and cloudbursts to the
most blasting drought. But somehow there is always
enough hot sun and golden weather (there is the South
of it) and enough zest in the brilliant air (there is the
West of it) to keep the soul of the agricultural land
alive, and brace men’s hearts for new struggles.
Climatic adversity and violent human conflict have
always been the lot of the natives, one learns from
history and from the fascinating records of vanished
races that lie on the scarred surface of the land—or
just below. Besides the few that have been studied
by the archeologists in the last quarter-century, thou-
sands of unexcavated cave and cliff ruins loom over the
New Mexico canyons, giving the transplanted Kansas
farmer or the grocer of the Kiwanis Club an upsetting
vision of human destiny. The Spanish records name
many aboriginal populations which have wholly van-
ished today. When the florid Conquistadores—the
bulk of them, the historians tell us, the younger sons
of Spanish noblemen, sent out to make their fortunes—
arrived in this country, about a century before the~ pene

254 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

sober Pilgrims were landing on the gray New England
rocks, the red man was, of course, in sole possession.
The Conquistadores’ chief objective was, unlike the
Pilgrim’s, frankly materialistic: treasure, first the sup-
posed treasure of the Seven Cities of Cibola, from
which the present pueblo of Zuni, in the western part
of the State, descends. But these adventurers were
genuine explorers, and the province claimed as New
Mexico, in the name of the Spanish Crown and the
Holy Catholic faith, by the strong arms of the gen-
erals and the determined devotion of the Franciscan:
friars, included, in 1700, what are now Arizona and
Utah, most of Colorado, and parts of Kansas and
Texas. The official figures of the population, in 1799,
were 23,000 Spaniards and 10,000 Indians, living in
missions.

Modern New Mexico history begins about 1821,
when the province passed from Spain to Mexico, and
the opening of the romantic overland route to the
United States gave a region that had lived chiefly by
its southern connections a trade outlet to the East.
This was the moment when the names of Otero, Luna,
Baca, Romero, Ortiz, and others famous in territorial
history—some still to be reckoned with in State poli-
tics—came to the fore. The Mexican government
made large grants of land to leading individuals.
These reénforced the older Spanish grants, and the
Spanish Catholic gentlemen, established, some of them
by many previous generations, in their great ranch
houses, with their patriarchal families, their great flocks
and herds, their practically peon labor of their own
racial stock, and their Indian ‘‘slaves,” were, if not
kings, at least barons in their own right. That pic-NEW MEXICO Dick

 

 

turesque and privileged and quasi-feudal system in
land tenure, stock farming, government, which has
carried over into the present social and political sys-
tem of New Mexico, goes straight back to these gentry.

The American era, following the military occupation
of General Kearney in 1846, and the treaty of Guade-
lupe Hidalgo, by which the territory passed to the
United States, initiated a. new struggle: the Spaniards,
like the Indians before them—but with a much more
bitter reluctance—had to yield moral and commercial
sovereignty to a race backed with more money and
resources than they could now put forward. It was
a slow and gradual and subtle process. The country
was wide and undeveloped beyond all avarice and
exploitation. But as the pioneers of the Santa Fé trail,
traders, miners, sheep ranchers, and’ the rest—quite
as arrogant and unscrupulous and ready with the six-
shooter as the Spanish settlers—filtered in, and later
the building of the railroads introduced new elements
of progress and competition, including “wild catting”
in mines, the old Spanish families began to lose their
supremacy and their land. The ones who did not
must have been those in whom the sensitiveness of the
Southern aristocrat had been thoroughly tempered by
Western air and sun; who were not only tough enough
to endure the competition of a race that esteemed itself
superior, and adaptable enough to Americanize them-
selves, but shrewd enough to use their old prerogatives
over the inarticulate mass of their own race to secure
for themselves a new sort of political hegemony. Pres-
tige, qua prestige, had anyhow passed to the ‘“‘Ameri-
cans.’ [The Spanish leaders who played a significant
role in building up the territory were not chosen toi |

    

 

    

256 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

occupy the Old Palace where the earlier Spanish gover-
nors had ruled. The territorial governors:and even the
prosecuting attorneys were usually appointed from out-
side, and this absentee landlordism on the part of the
national government helped to harden the population
into strata, and to create the peculiarly exasperated
racial susceptibility of the present New Mexican.

The fate of Arizona was joined to that of New
Mexico till 1863, when the former became a separate
territory, and both were admitted to statehood by the
Enabling Act of 1910—New Mexico in 1912. But
Arizona’s greater pioneer remoteness from the capital
of Santa Fé and the older Spanish settlements made
her formative history rather different, and her burning
modern problems are more involved with the mining
industry than with the ancient prides, grudges, and
traditions noted above. ‘The superficial observer,
savoring in New Mexico something more closely re-
sembling European “atmosphere” than he finds else-
where in this country, does not at first realize the
degree to which what may be called the Spanish com-
plex influences the conscious and unconscious mind of
the State. He will be surprised to discover that
Spanish is more often heard than English in many
country districts, and that he cannot bargain for a
horse or a beautiful old hand-woven blanket or a
night’s lodging without the mediation of a child who
has learned English at school. The State constitution
provides that for twenty years after it goes into effect
laws shall be published in both Spanish and English,
and that no citizen shall be deprived of the right to
vote or sit on juries or hold office because of his in-
ability to write or speak English or Spanish. As aNEW MEXICO 257

 

 

 

 

matter of fact, until very recently sessions of the
legislature—in the memory of many opened with six-
shooters—have been conducted in’ Spanish or bilin-
gually, through a Spanish interpreter, and the
interpreter is an important figure in the courts, where,
though the judges are usually “American,” the juries
are preponderantly “Mexican.” The Republicans at-
tribute much of their success with the women voters
to the fact that they send out Spanish-speaking women
canvassers. ['wenty counties are more than _ half
Spanish in population, a few almost 100 per cent.
Even the Pueblos, with three root languages and many
dialects of their own, and no love for the “Mexicanos,”
use the Spanish tongue commonly for inter-tribal com-
munication.

The situation will soon be different, for all Spanish
and Indian children are now being educated in English.
Another clause in the constitution forestalls discrimina-
tion against pupils of Spanish birth in the public
schools, and normally the New Mexico youth—with
the exception of the Indians who are largely in goy-
ernment schools—mingles there happily enough, under
teachers who may or may not be of Spanish origin.
But in a district of mixed population, where the chil-
dren of the “whites,” as they like to call themselves,
are outnumbered by those of their dark-skinned neigh-
bors who increase their slim living by day labor on the
“white” farms, a well-to-do colonist from the Middle
West will be likely to strain the Buick to send his off-
spring to the nearest town.

That only the Indians are spiritually free in New
Mexico is one of the paradoxes in which the State
abounds. For of course they are at the bottom of the258 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

social scale. The man from Main Street (Santa Fe)
loves to tell the Eastern tenderfoot that these lazy
Indians own much land which sure ought to be in the
hands of white men. As a matter of fact they own,
or occupy on reservations, four million acres out of
seventy-eight millions, while the private land grants,
so useful to the cattle interests, validated by the Court
of Private Land Claims, amount to six millions.
There are some 20,000 Indians all told—tthe least of
the tribes in numbers and importance being the once
fearful Apaches, some of them the descendants of
Geronimo, living on two reservations, the Jicarilla in
the north and the Mescalero in the south central part
of the State—which ex-Secretary Fall tried last year
unsuccessfully by a venture of his own called in New
Mexico “‘the spotted park bill’’—to transform into a
National Park. In the northwestern corner of the
State live the Navajos, 9,000 of them—there are
25,000 Navajos on the entire reservation but only one
corner of it lies in New Mexico—a race of nomadic
sheep farmers speaking a language quite as difficult as
ancient Greek, and so protected by canyons and sand
that nobody had bothered much about them but the
traders who make a profit from their wool and their
fine blankets, and the white sheepmen who carried
on a sort of border warfare over grazing rights
till oil began to gleam like a jewel in their
foreheads. The other large Indian unit, the Pueblos,
have from a long time past been jealously regarded,
through their ownership of rich agricultural grants
scattered through the Rio Grande valley. They
have suffered many encroachments upon both land and
water from white, and especially Spanish-AmericanNEW MEXICO 259

 

 

settlers; and by a deal put through by Fall and Bursum,
through which the voters would greatly have profited,
they would last year have lost forever, but for the
national uprising against the Bursum bill, all the dis-
puted portions of their territory. The New Mexico
politicians still attribute their defeat to “paid propa-
ganda.”’ Meanwhile the Pueblos have never lost their
poise in the universe of being. In the midst of these
contending dominant races which they have watched
this long while with appraising eyes, their balanced
communal life, their beautiful primitive handicrafts go
on. And their extraordinarily decorative dances and
religious ceremonies, carried on in the sun-baked plazas
against the Gauguinesque background of the moun-
tains, seem to release from the tensions of altitude
and climate the inner mystery and sensuous harmony
of the immemorial earth.

The simple Spanish folk whom the Kansas colonist
misprizes are also charming to look upon, with cher-
ished and curious traditions dating far into the past.
Winnowing their grain in baskets, weaving gay blankets
on hand looms, dancing old folk dances, and singing
old Spanish tunes to the tinkle of guitars, they look in
their mountain villages, under the shadow of their
great mission churches, as if they had just emerged
from a peasant pastoral like their own Our Lady of
Guadalupe; a miracle play given at Christmas in the
dark-ceiled, whitewashed interiors. Hard working,
or as much so as sun and poco tiempo will allow, seri-
ously undernourished on a diet of beans and chile,
honest and law-abiding and proudly independent on
their ranches, they are harder to account for through
the years and centuries, with the ascetic ardors of their|

 

 

260 THESE UNITED STATES

 

Penitente rites, and the black shawls of their heads,
than the Spanish-American aristocrat. Though they
probably have a dash, acquired perhaps some time
since, of Indian blood, they are in no way to be con-
founded with the peon Indian-Mexican of Old Mexico
—nothing insults them so much as to be called anything
less than the good Americans that they are. But the
little wrinkled Don Quixotic person who smiles at oné
from his blue door, the senorita, so powdered in her
hours of ease, who haunts the Santa Fe plaza, con-
sider themselves bound by ties of true kinship to the
families who have descended from the Conquistadores
to rise in the councils of the Republican Party; and the
great Republicans will not deny the relationship. If
their ‘‘we Mex’’ screens susceptibility with humor, grayv-
ity and clan loyalty ring out in “my people.”

Ten years ago it was customary, in a certain valley
—so the “white” farmers tell me—for the “native”
voters to receive their ballots neatly marked and
wrapped in a two-dollar bill, as they mounted the hill
to the schoolhouse. Recently on the election day
which gave the Democrats their unexpected landslide,
the representative of a certain candidate was walking
up and down in this schoolhouse, among husky farmers
and black shawls, grumbling loudly: ‘““What’s the mat-
ter with these women? They’ve all had their five dol-
’» After this somebody carried out the ballot

 

lars

box and somebody else made a row. A stranger to
New Mexico might misunderstand this little scene. He
would be wrong. The Spanish-American usually votes
as his father advises over the morning cigarette. And
his father advises what the local Don advises, on the
advice of his cousin in Santa Fé. The control of theNEW MEXICO 261

 

Spanish-American vote by the Republican Party, which
has usually held the balance of power, has been worked
out through an elaborate “padrone” system in the
counties and a strong Spanish-American leadership at
the top, with men of the Bursum and Fall variety puli-
ing the strings in the background. There is no saying
that a greenback passes more often here than in New
York City or that one party is more simon-pure than
the other in this regard. As with Tammany, a job
may be a return for a tribute of loyalty, given by those
who for so many centuries took their orders from the
patriarchal master of the hot heart and strong hand.

Surely much of what happens in New Mexico may
be attributed to overweening nature. Mountains may
set you free, like a Chinese sage, in the contemplation
of Everlasting Truth, or they may merely project your
giddy egotism into the empyrean, and then hurl it back
into the timid harness of the taboos and privileges and
prohibitions of a clan. New Mexico communities, in
spite of the many benignant gifts of God, are domi-
nated by spectral fears from which those who rub
elbows under the shadow of skyscrapers are liberated.
Free speech is undoubtedly less flourishing here than
in Boston. Public opinion is likely to get snarled up
In private personalities and “small-town stuff.” Oppo-
site factions do not sit down at the same table and
discuss their differences. An Indian claim has never
had a fair deal in the lower New Mexico courts. A
gentleman of the Republican persuasion may be asked
by his clan to renounce friendship with a sister turned
Democrat. The real reason why the “artist” who now
figures as a definite element in the social grouping is
so resented by a certain type of average citizen is that

     
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
    
 
  
 
 

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262 THESE, UNIZED StATES

 

 

he is an iconoclast who does not live according to Hoyle
—who hesitates, perhaps (it is not so sure) to steal his
neighbor’s water, as ranchers habitually do, who likes,
actually likes as human beings these Indians and Span-
ish people, and wants them to continue in their be-
nighted ways; and gazes upon the purple land and
breathes the crystalline air with no feeling but of sen-
suous enjoyment and spiritual liberation. To one with
a vested interest in water rights, and a certainty that
movies and polished oak and street cars will make New
Mexico more like Kansas City, this is nothing short
of immoral.

The nearest problem of the State is to assimilate the
racial stocks without sacrificing their worth, to become
progressive without cheapness. If the picturesque
features, like Indian villages and Spanish missions,
become as in California merely tourist attractions
played up by hotelkeepers and chambers of commerce,
the last fate of the Indian will be worse than his first
and the rare distinction of the State will vanish. No
telling, either, what future developments in the rich
and largely unexploited mining and oil fields will do
to the civilization and the landscape. The archeologi-
cal possibilities of this region have scarcely yet been
explored; yet pottery jars as fine as any in Crete can
be had for the digging, and two civilizations older even
than that of the Cliff-dwellers, the Pueblos’ prehistoric
ancestors, lie buried under the cliffs and caves. “There
is still a fighting chance of making Santa Fé, with its
two museums and its School of American Research
and its position in the center of two ancient folk cul-
tures, the artistic capital of the Southwest. But these
institutions have no adequate endowment to meet theirHUUEPLL EPEC

  

NEW MEXICO 263

opportunities. It is in the Southwest that the connec-
tions between the North American Indian civilization
and that of the greater Indian peoples of Mexico and
Central America are being traced and studied. It is
in New Mexico, if anywhere, that the contribution of
Indian and Spaniard to the enrichment of modern
American civilization will be worked out. One can
conceive of future schools of art and decoration, music
and the theater, based on native strains, which would
produce in pupils of Indian or Spanish or long-estab-
lished American-Southwestern provenance a flowering
of creative American expression of a totally new sort.
The colonist artist or writer of today, struggling to
present the violent images registered on brain or retina,
can point the way: no more. Before the ceremonial
dance paintings of the young Pueblo painters which
come straight out of instincts, fundamental as the earth,
they must bow their heads in reverence and say—here,

classic skill and luminous, is the pastoral of ancient
America.Hy
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INDIANA
HER SOIL AND LIGHT

By THEODORE DREISER

THERE is about it a charm which I shall not be
able to express, I know, but which is of its soil and
sky and water—those bucolic streams and lakes which
so charm those who see them. And where else will
one find such beech and sugar groves, so stately and
still and serene—the seeming abodes of spirits and
elves that are both friendly and content? Rains come
infrequently and then only in deluging showers. Corn
and wheat and hay and melons flourish throughout the
State. Spring comes early. Autumn lingers pleas-
ingly into November. The winters are not, in the
main, severe. Yet deep, delicious snows fall. And
a dry cold in the northern portion makes sleighing
and skating a delight. The many lakes and streams
afford ample opportunity for house-boats, lakeside cot-
tages, and bungalows as well as canoeing and fish-
ing and idling and dreaming. In the beech and sugar
groves are many turtledoves. The bluejay and the
scarlet tanager flash and cry. Hawks and buzzards
and even eagles, betimes, soar high in the air. Under
the eaves of your cottage are sure to be wrens and
bluebirds. Your chimneys are certain to shelter a
covey of martins. And to your porches will cling the
trumpet vine, purple clematis, and wistaria. Krom

the orchard and woodlot of your farm will sound the
264INDIANA 265

 

 

 

 

rusty squeak of the guinea hen and the more pleasing
cry of the peacock, “calling for rain.”

One should not conclude from this, of course, that
the State is without manufacture, or that, size for
size, its cities and towns are not as interesting as those
of other States. To me they are more so. There is
something in the very air that sustains them that
is of the substance of charm. What it is I cannot
say. You will find it suggested in the poems of Riley
and the stories of Tarkington, a kind of wistfulness
that is the natural accompaniment of the dreams of
unsophistication. To be sure the State is lacking in
urban centers of great size which somehow, regard-
less of character, manage to focus the interest of the
outside world. Apart from Indianapolis, a city of
three hundred thousand, there is no other of even a
third of its size within its borders. Evansville, on
the Ohio, and at the extreme southwest corner of the
State, has possibly eighty thousand. Ft. Wayne, in the
northern portion of the State, the same. Terre Haute,
the most forthright of its several manufacturing cen-
ters, had, until recently at least, a population of seventy
thousand. And because of the character of its man-
ufactories which relate to steel and coal it js looked
upon by many who are not a part of it as grimy. Its
smaller cities such as Gary, Hammond, South Bend,
Kokomo, Richmond, Muncie, and several others lit-
erally resound with manufacture, being centers for
steel, packing, automobiles, engineering supplies, farm
machinery, and so forth. Yet contrasted with the
neighboring States of Ohio, Michigan, and Ilinois—
in particular the latter’s northern portion—it pales as
a center of manufacture. Ohio can boast quite ten266 THESE UNITED STATES

centers to its one. In passing from any of these States
into Indiana one is reminded of the difference between
Holland and Germany or France, the one with its
canals, its windmills, and level fields, dotted with sim-
ple homes, the other with its plethora of cities and fac-
tories and, in the old days, its ever-present army. The
one is idyllic, the other almost disturbingly real and
irritatingly energetic.

Yet to my way of thinking the State is to be con-
eratulated rather than not upon this limited com-
mercial equipment. Not all of our national domain
needs to be commercial, I trust, however much we may
wish it. A few such pastoral areas might prove an
advantage. Besides, as I have indicated, there is run-
ning through the mood of the State something which
those who are most intimate with it are pleased to
denominate “homey” or ‘‘folksy”—a general geniality
and sociability. And with this I agree. ‘he auto-
mobile and the phonograph, plus the dancing which
the latter inspires, have added so much to the color of
the small town and the farm in these days. Or, if
it be the lone cottage, far from any town, with neither
automobile nor phonograph, then the harmonica and
the accordion are found to be in service. And one
may sing and dance to those. Is it the light, or the
soil, or what?

In this connection the church life of Indiana, as
well as its moral taboos, have always interested me.
Morality one might well assume by now, as well as
all important social regulations, are best and most up-
derstandingly based upon and regulated by the Golden
Rule. Beyond that, among the intelligent, restrictions
and compulsions are few. Neither theory nor dogmaINDIANA 267

 

 

nor ritual nor custom nor creed are disturbingly bind-
ing. Yet in my native State, and despite the steady
growth in scientific knowledge, devotion to denomina-
tional liturgy and dogma appears to be unmodified.
Go where you will, into any city or town you choose,
and there will be not one but four or five or six or
more churches of the ultra sectarian type and each
with a lusty and convinced following. Nowhere, con-
sidering the sizes of the various cities and towns and
hamlets, will you see larger or more attractive edifices
of this character. And not infrequently the Bible
school attachments or additions are almost as impres-
sive as the churches themselves. In short, sectarian
religion appears to flourish mightily. It is the most
vigorous and binding of all local social activities. The
affairs of the church are not only spiritually but socially
of the utmost importance. Nearly everyone belongs
to one or another of the various denominations and
the rivalry between the several sects is not infre-
quently keen, especially in the smaller places. And in
the main, and despite all science, they are still imperial-
istic in their claim to revelation and devotion. Re-
ligious innovations are taboo. Even modern liberaliz-
ing theologic tendencies, though sanctioned by a stray
soul here and there, are not in the main either under-
stood or approved of. To this day in many orthodox
quarters the youths of the hour are still discouraged
from attending the State or any other university on
the ground that they are “hotbeds of infidelity and
irreligion.”” And the local press, running true to form,
as it does everywhere, editorially sustains this con-
tention.

And yet, as the world knows, Indiana has its “genius

    
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
  
 
 
    
 
 
 
  
  
 
 
 
 
  
   
 

Ce Na act ame alae ea eR eT bee - eID

— SLAP‘

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268 THESE UNITED STATES

belt” geographically deliminated even, as “south of
a line running east and west through Crawfords-
ville.’ And, locally at least, and until recently there
was no hesitation in stamping the decidedly successful
literary and art products of the State as the effusions
of genius. Well, there’s neither good nor ill but think-
ing makes it so. Certainly the State may well be
proud of George Ade and Booth Tarkington and
William M. Chase, the artist, to say nothing of those
distinguished elders James Whitcomb Riley and Gen-
eral Lew Wallace, the author of ‘Ben Hur.’ Whether
as much may be said for some others still remains
to be seen. Certainly from the point of view of cur-
rent popularity they have nothing to complain of.
And as for posterity, well, posterity pays no grocer’s
bills. There are many aspiring writers who would
gladly change place with George Barr McCutcheon
or Charles Major, who wrote “When Knighthood Was
in Flower.”

Yet apart from these the State is not without a
few personalities whose names will awaken responsive
and other than literary thought beyond its borders—
William Henry Harrison, the “Indian fighter’ and
quondam President, for instance, and Thomas B. Hen-
dricks, once a Vice-President. Also Oliver P. Morton,
an efficient early Governor; John Hay, diplomat, au-
thor, and cabinet officer of his day; and John Clark
Ridpath, the historian. As a true and loyal Hoosier
I suppose I should add that James B. Eads, the dis-
tinguished engineer, once lived in Brookville, Indiana,
that Robert Owen founded his human brotherhood
experiment at New Harmony, in Posey County, that
Henry Ward Beecher was once pastor of the SecondINDIANA 269

 

 

 

 

 

Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis, and that Abra-
ham Lincoln is supposed to have studied those few
books and caught that elusive something that later
gave character and beauty to his utterances some-
where in a log cabin in Spencer County.

But beyond these, what? Well, beyond an agree-
able and respectable and kindly social world in which
to be and pass one’s brief and changeful days, what
more is needed? Trusts? There are several in active
operation, ye tin-plate and ye steel trust, for instance;
the former organized at Kokomo, Indiana, the latter
in full and dictatorial swing at Gary and Hammond,
where only so recently as July, 1919, a number of very
respectable employees on strike were promptly and
in true liberty fashion shot to death upon the streets
of Hammond, their crime being, apparently, opposi-
tion to insufficient wages and certain (as they seem
to have assumed) unsatisfactory piece-work conditions.
The moral entanglements resulting from this method
of adjusting labor difficulties are before the courts of
Indiana at this very time. Large industries? Indian-
apolis, Kokomo, and South Bend are assumed to be
automobile manufacturing centers of the greatest im-
port, nationally and internationally speaking. The
steel interests of Gary, Hammond, and Terre Haute
are assumed, not only locally but nationally, to be sec-
ond to none in America. Indianapolis has not one
but several enormous packing plants. The underlying
coal-beds of southwestern Indiana—especially about
Terre Haute—are listed as among the important re-
sources of the Central West. The melon- and fruit-
bearing powers of the climate and soil of that same
area have brought about not only specialization andi

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270 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

intensive cultivation but a trade-mark which is of the
greatest value. In addition the State has scenic won-
ders such as the caves about Wyandotte and such
natural scenery and curative springs as have given
rise to French Lick, West Baden, Mud Lavia, The
Glades, and all the delightful lake life that character-
izes its northern half.

But perhaps, after all, this is not the type of thing
that should be registered of Indiana. Despite a long
and happy intimacy with it, it is entirely possible that
I have not even suggested or have entirely missed
its truer spiritual significance as we are wont to say
of so much that is but deeply human. Going south
through Indiana once with a friend and fellow Hoosier,
we two fell into a solemn and almost esoteric, I might
say, discussion of the State and its significance, in-
tellectually, emotionally, and otherwise. Previous to
what I am about to set down I had been pointing out
a number of things—not only those that have always
appealed to me, the poetic and folksy charm of the
State and its inhabitants—but also a number of other
things that rather irritated me, its social devotion to
dogmatic religion, for one thing, its rather pharisaical
restfulness in its assumed enlightenment and knowl-
edge of what is true and important to the world at
large, its political somnolence as suggested by its pro-
found and unchanging devotion to the two ancient
and utterly platitudinous parties. With all of this he
most solemnly agreed. Then, having done so, entered
not so much upon a defense as an interpretation of the
State which I will here set down as best I can.

“You should go sometime to an automobile speed
contest such as is held annually at the Speedway atINDIANA 271

 

 

Indianapolis, as I have often, year after year; in fact,
since it was first built. There, just when the first real
summer days begin to take on that wonderful light
that characterizes them out here—a kind of luminous
silence that suggests growing corn and ripening wheat
and quails whistling in the meadows over by the woods,
you will find assembled thousands from this and other
countries, with their cars and at times their foreign
tongues, individuals interested in speed or fame or
the development of the automobile. And this might
cause you to feel, as it has me, that as rural as it
all is, at times Indiana is quite as much of a center
and more so even, than places which, by reason of
larger populations, set themselves up as such. As I
say, I have been there often, and getting a bit tired
of watching the cars have gone over into the woods
inside the course and lain down on the grass on my
back.

“There, about me, would be the same familiar things
I have always known and loved since I was a boy here,
but that getting out into the world for a time had
made me think that I had forgotten, though I hadn’t
—the sugar and hickory and beech trees, the little cool
breezes that come up in the middle of the day and
cool the face and hands for a moment, and rustle the
leaves—the same fine blue sky that I used to look up
into when a boy. But circling around me continuously,
just the same, to the south and the north and the
east and the west, where were the banks of the track
beyond the woods, were these scores of cars from all
parts of the world, with their thunder and dust, the a
thunder and dust of an international conflict. Then il
I would get up and look to the south along the im- HSS ee

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272 THESE UNITED STATES

mense grandstand that was there and would see, flying
in this Indiana sunlight, the flags of all the great na-
tions, Italy and England, France and Belgium, Hol-
land and Germany, Austria and Spain. And it came
to me then that the spirit that had been instrumental
for some reason in distinguishing this particular State
from its sister States, as it unquestionably has been
distinguished, was and still is, I think, effective. It
has won for Indiana a freedom from isolation and
mere locality which is world-wide. It has accomplished
here, on this quiet Hoosier soil, a very vital contact
with universal thought.”

‘Universal thought is a pretty large thing to con-
nect up with, F ”’ I contended genially. ‘And
this is all very flattering to dear old Indiana, but do
you really believe yourself? It seems to me that, if
anything, the State is a little bit sluggish, intellectually
and otherwise. Or, if it isn’t that, exactly, then cer-
tainly there is an element of self-complacency that per-
mits the largest percentage of its population to rest
content in the most retarding forms of political, re-
ligious, and social fol de rol. They are all, or nearly
all, out here, good and unregenerate Democrats or
Republicans, as they have been for, lo! these seventy
years, now—come next Wednesday. Nearly all be-
long to one or another of the twenty-seven sure-cure
sects of Protestantism. And they are nearly all most
heartily responsive to any -ism which is advertised to

solve all the troubles of the world, including those of
I call your attention to the

 

our own dear nation.

history of the Millerites of southeast Indiana, with
their certain date for the ending of the world and their
serious and complete preparation for the same; theINDIANA 273

 

 

Spiritualists and free lovers who fixed themselves in
northwestern Indiana, about Valparaiso, if I am not
mistaken, and Mormon fashion ruled all others out;
the something of soil magnetism which drew Robert
Owen from Scotland to New Harmony and there pro-
duced that other attempt at solving all the ills to which
the flesh is heir. Don’t forget that the Dunkards—
that curious variation of Mennonism—took root out
here and flourished mightily for years, and exists to
this day, as you know. Also the reformed Quakers.
And now I hear that Christian Science and a Chris-
tianized form of Spiritualism are almost topmost in
the matter of growth and the enthusiasm of their
followers. I have no quarrel with any faith as a means
to private mental blessedness. But you were speaking
of universal and creative thought. Just how do you
explain this?”

“Well, I can and I can’t,” was his rather enigmatic
reply. “This is a most peculiar State. It may not
be so dynamic nor yet so creative, sociologically, as it
is fecund of things which relate to the spirit—or per-
haps I had better say to poetry and the interpretative
arts. How else do you explain William M. Chase,
born here in Brookville, I believe, General Lew Wal-
lace, James Whitcomb Riley, Edward Eggleston and
his ‘Hoosier Schoolmaster,’ Booth Tarkington, George
Ade, John Clark Ridpath, Roswell Smith, who
founded the Century Magazine, and then Lincoln
studying and dreaming down in Spencer County? All
accidents? I wonder. In fact I am inclined to think
that there is much more to soil and light in so far as
temperament and genius are concerned than we have
any idea of as yet. here may be, and personally Ire]

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274 THESE UNITED STATES

 

am inclined to think there is, a magnetic and also gen-
erative something appertaining to soil and light which
is not unrelated to the electro-magnetic field of science
in which so much takes place. I look upon them as
potent and psycho-genetic even, capable of producing
and actually productive of new and strange and valu-
able things in the way of human temperament. Take
little Holland, for instance, and its amazing school of
great painters. And Greece, with its unrivaled burst of
genius. Or Italy, with its understanding of the arts.
Or, England, with its genius for governing. There
is something about the soil and light of certain regions
that makes not only for individuality in the land but
in the people of the land.”

“For instance,’ he continued, “I insist that the
Hoosier is different mentally and spiritually to the
average American. He is softer, less sophisticated,
more poetic and romantic. Hedreamsalot. He likes
to play in simple ways. He is not as grasping as some
other Americans and some other nationalities. ‘That
may be due to the fact that he is not as practical, being
as poetic and good natured as heis. If he be poor and
uneducated he likes to fish and play an accordion or
sing. If he is better schooled he likes to read, write
verse, maybe, or books, and dream. In a crude way,
perhaps, he has the temperament of the artist, and so
I still look to Indiana, or its children, at least, to do
great things, artistically. And all this I lay to the soil
and light. Why? I don’t know. I just guess that
they have something to do with it.

‘Nothing else explains to me Edward Eggleston and
his turning to letters at that early time and in the
region from which he hailed—the extreme southeasternINDIANA 275

 

 

part of Indiana. Or General Lew Wallace writing
‘Ben Hur’ there in Crawfordsville, under a beech
tree. Neither will anything else explain to me why
the first automobile this side of France was built
right here at Kokomo, and almost at the same time
that the first one was perfected in France. Nor why
the first automobile course, after Brooklands, Eng-
land, was built here at Indianapolis—not near New
York or Chicago, as one might have expected, perhaps.
Or why an adventurer like La Salle should come canoe-
ing up the Maumee and the St. Joseph into. this par-
ticular region. The French, who first had this terri-
tory, chose to fortify at Terre Haute and Vincennes.
Why? They might just as well have fortified at other
points beyond the present State borders.

‘What I am trying to get at is this: Via such a
soil and such light as is here codperating you have a
temperament more sensitive to the resource above men-
tioned. In the case of those who wandered in here,
like La Salle and Lincoln, you have sensitives affected
by the conditions here. Their dreams or aspirations
were here strengthened. ‘This is a region not unlike
those which produce gold or fleet horses or oranges or
adventurers. ‘There are such regions. ‘They are dif-
ferent. And I look upon Indiana as one such.”

“Bravo!” I applauded. “Very flattering to dear
old Indiana, to say the least, and as an honest native,
and moved by self-interest, I hereby subscribe. But—”
And then I went back to the churches, the hard-headed
conventionalities, the fact that the “‘inventor’’ of the
first automobile here was accused of robbing the French
of their patents, that Robert Owen was a canny Scot
who saw to it that he never lost a dollar in his idealistica er

 

 

276 THESE UNITED STATES

 

enterprise but held the whole town of New Harmony
and all that thereunto appertained in fee simple, so
that when the idea proved groundless he was able to
shoo all his assembled theorists off the place and sell
it for what it would bring. But my friend was not
in the least abashed. He reproached me with being
incurably materialistic and clung to his soil and light
theory, which, I may as well admit, appeals to me very
much. His final rebuke to materialism was that human
nature in toto is nothing but a manifestation of forces
which unavoidably assume opposite phases, which same
we label good or evil, but which really are found to
be supplementing each other in any manifestation which
can be labeled life. So you may see how far Indiana
with its temperament carried us.

But admiring and even revering the State as my
native heath I am perfectly willing to admit all of his
claims and even more of such as may be in its favor.RHODE ISLAND
A LIVELY EXPERIMENT

By ROBERT CLOUTMAN DEXTER

HER people and her politics are the distinguishing
features of Rhode Island. Deeply chiseled over the
granite portal of the magnificent State Capitol in
Providence are these words, taken from the charter
of 1663: ‘“‘to hold forth a livelie experiment that a
most flourishing civill state may stand... with a full
liberty in religious concernments.” ‘The experiment
began as a rebellion against the religious intolerance
of a Puritan theocracy, and has continued to furnish
a lively experiment of one kind or another ever since.
Not that the smallest State in the Union is barren of
other distinctions. Rhode Island clam chowders have
been imitated, but never equaled, and the white corn-
meal of the south county surpasses in texture, flavor,
and color the commoner yellow meal of Dixie. De-
spite these contributions to our national cuisine, how-
ever, the significance of Rhode Island—past and
present—lies in its social developments.

Geographically, Rhode Island can scarcely be called
independent. Massachusetts on the east and north
and Connecticut on the west have both felt that this
upstart interloper, with its peculiar ideas and its de-
sirable waterfront, should belong to them. When, to

quote a local ballad,
277ge ile

 

  

THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

In sixteen hundred thirty-six
Roger Williams got into a fix
By sassing the governor of Massachusetts

And skedaddled away to Rhode Island

Roger and his followers had no rights which the
Chosen of Massachusetts were bound to respect. It
took all the faith and courage of Williams, all his well-
deserved popularity with the Indians, and all his politi-
cal sagacity to maintain his foothold. Even after
Rhode Island had a royal charter Massachusetts and
Connecticut did not hesitate to exercise jurisdiction
whenever possible.

Well-grounded fear of her more powerful neighbors,
and the resulting jealousy to preserve her own rights
and privileges as a sovereign State, have colored all
Rhode Island’s development. Rhode Island is sepa-
ratism personified. Separatism in religion, separatism
in politics, separatism in personal life: these have been
the key-notes of her history. Her daring formulation
of Williams’s doctrine of soul liberty in the face of
bitter opposition from without and lack of unity within
transmitted this strong emphasis on individualism. It
is hardly an accident that until quite recently Rhode
Island, the smallest State in the Union, was the only
one which had two capitals. The tradition of sepa-
ratism explains, also, why each of the thirty-nine towns
in the State has one State senator, so that West Green-
wich, with 367 inhabitants, is as potent in the upper
house as Providence, with a population of 237,595.
This rotten-borough system has been one of the factors
in the half-century of political degradation from which
Rhode Island is now trying to emerge. The old-time
Rhode Island will cite with justice the national SenateRHODE ISLAND 279

 

 

as analogous to his local situation; but neither Nevada
nor New Shoreham (another of the Rhode Island
pocket boroughs) have legislative records that prove the
wisdom of this particularistic democracy. It appears,
nevertheless, to be a fixture in Rhode Island politics.

Of greater importance even than its historical sep-
aratism, for an understanding of present-day Rhode
Island, is its preéminent industrialization. Politics and
people both are quite literally the ‘fruit of the loom.”
It is true that the rotten boroughs furnish the possibil-
ity for corrupt politics, but it has been the manufac-
turers of Rhode Island who for a long period have
profited thereby.

It is the mill owners, also, who for their own pur-
poses have diluted the colonial stock of the original
settlers, first with English mill hands, later with Irish,
and then with French-Canadians, Poles, Italians, and
Portuguese (black and white), until a Saturday after-
noon stroll along Westminster Street, Providence,
leaves one with the conviction that Rhode Island is
not one of “these United States” at all. One looks in
vain for “tall, blond Nordics.”’ And Westminster
Street is by no means the worst. Main Street, Paw-
tucket, speaks every language but English, while in
Woonsocket the writer spent an hour recently in the
City Hall without hearing a word of English spoken
by visitors or officials except that addressed to him.
Rhode Island is not only the most densely populated
State in the Union; it is also the first in the proportion
of foreign-born. Largely because of this foreign im-
migration, brought to work in the mills, Rhode Island
holds the lowest position regarding illiteracy of any
Northeastern State.

SAREUURTEL DY

 

— pete

—280 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

We of the North are apt to think that the harrow-
ing tales of child-labor belong wholly to the past, or
at least to the far-away South. Rhode Island, how-
ever, has met Southern competition during the last
decade by augmenting the number of her laboring chil-
dren, while every other State in the Union, even North
Carolina, the béte noire of industrial reformers, has
shown a decrease. Child labor in the United States
during the last decade fell off 47 per cent; in Rhode
Island it increased 6 per cent. Thirteen and four-
tenths per cent of all the children in the State between
ten and fifteen years of age are gainfully employed.
What is to be this “fruit of the loom’? What of the
future citizens of Woonsocket, with the highest per-
centage of child labor—18.7 per cent—of any city in
the United States, or of Pawtucket, with 17.3 per
cent? In the South, at least, only about half the em-
ployed children are cooped up in mills and factories;
in Rhode Island, four-fifths of the 8,569 working chil-
dren spend their days in the damp, hot, lint-saturated
atmosphere of the spinning-room. Furthermore,
Rhode Island has the unenviable distinction not only
of having the highest percentage of employed girls be-
tween the ages of sixteen and twenty-one of any State
in the Union, but also of employing over two thousand
women nightly in its mills. Is it strange that there was
opposition at the State Capitol last year strong enough
to defeat a forty-eight hour law; or that bills abolish-
ing night work do not pass? The legislature, if not
controlled directly, is frequently intimidated by the
mill owners’ threat to go South, where they can do as
they like—and consequently they do as they like in
Rhode Island.RHODE ISLAND 281

 

 

The heart of Rhode Island is not Providence; Provi-
dence is simply its market-place. Rhode Island owes
its prosperity to two rivers, the brawling Blackstone,
which turns more spindles than any river in the world,
and the winding Pawtuxet. It is along these rivers
that the mills are located, and along these rivers that
the mill operatives live. In these days of the motor-
car, the owner lives in Providence on the East Side,
or, in more and more cases, in New York or Boston.
What have the mills given the workers for homes?
The ordinary mill village presents little that is at-
tractive. The mill is the center of the picture. Around
it are grouped the mi!l tenements huddled together
along one or two streets. Frequently these tenements
are white, freshly painted with well-kept palings in
front. There is none of the hideous ugliness of the coal
or iron town; the chief esthetic defect of the mill town
is its uniformity and’its lack of space. The houses are
built in long rows closely adjoining one another like
city blocks, while all around are undulating hillsides,
winding rivers, and shining lakes. The town turns its
back on these, however, and faces its master, the mill.
In addition to the mill and the mill houses there is a
store and a church—sometimes two churches, the
larger and more pretentious topped by a gilded cross,
and the smaller, generally a mere chapel, weather-
beaten and’in need of repairs. The latter, too, often
supports only a visiting minister; the former is served
by one or two priests, usually conducts its services in
an alien tongue, and is frequently flanked on the one
side by a parochial school, partly financed by company
donations, and on the other by the tightly shuttered
residence of the teaching sisterhood. Almost a hun-

 

=—— oil i

    

    

282 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

dred such villages exist in Rhode Island utterly inde-
pendent of town or county lines; and consequently
having no political unity. They were planted wherever
the water-power was sufficient, and with their con-
stantly changing population have acquired little of sen-
timent or tradition. The workers move readily from
one village to another; the very villages seem inter-
changeable.

The conveniences furnished by the mill owners vary
considerably. Some towns have sewers and a good
water supply; garbage and waste are collected regu-
larly. Others—the majority—have closets with cess-
pools and garbage ‘“‘tubs” placed in the back yard.
These tubs and the earth closets are among the
workers’ chief grievances. Conditions inside the mill
are equally bad; cotton must be worked in a damp,
warm atmosphere, sometimes 92° to 98°. ‘The change
from this to the New England winter outside partly
accounts for the large percentage of tuberculosis and
asthma in the Pawtuxet Valley.

Education is scarcely the main concern of the mill.
The State of Rhode Island has always been backward
in respect to public education, largely because of its
separatism and its comparative poverty; with the ad-
vent of the mills came another and stronger influence
against compulsory school attendance. Nevertheless,
Rhode Island has, today, a fairly well-enforced com-
pulsory-attendance law for children up to fourteen.
Of course, as the mill agent and the attendance officer
alike aver it is difficult to get behind the sworn state-
ments of foreign-born mill operatives as to their chil-
dren’s birth-dates. A significant development in edu-
cation, for which the mill owners are only indirectlyRHODE ISLAND 283

 

 

responsible, is the growing strength of parochial
schools conducted by foreign-speaking groups, princi-
pally the French-Canadians. This nationality has built
up an extensive school system and is bitterly opposing
State regulation of education. A sharp issue exists in
Rhode Island between the protagonists of public
education and the French group; a struggle which cuts
across political lines and unquestionably helped elect
the present Democratic governor. It was the Republi-
cans who enacted the State-supervision bill. The
transfer of the French vote from the Republican to
the Democratic Party reveals the saleability of the
various “foreign votes” in Rhode Island. Cash is not
always. necessary, but all groups have their leaders, and
the Italian, Polish, or French vote is generally nego-
tiated for in advance. The party which defends the
parochial school against assaults, or offers the leader a
nomination to the Supreme Court, wins. Partly as
a result of this. trading the French-Canadians have had
twa governors and the present lieutenant-governor
chosen from among their number, and Representatives
Lamarre and Belhumeur are again introducing a bill
for the repeal of the Peck Act so far as it requires State
supervision of parochial schools, with at least a fair
hope of passage. The Italians signalized their politi-
cal strength by electing a professional prize-fighter last
year to the General Assembly of Rhode Island. While
the mill owners are in many cases definitely opposing
this separatist development along racial and religious
lines the fundamental responsibility is theirs. The
French, the Italians, the Poles, and the Portuguese all
came because the mill owners desired them; and many
mill owners today are working to convince Washington

ree ee284 THESE UNITED STATES

 

that our present immigration policy is not only poor
business, but that we are “untrue to our great mission’”’
because we “refuse an asylum for the oppressed of the
Older World.”

Textile interests are not the only ones in Rhode
Island; jewelry, the metal trades and rubber also
flourish. ‘The metal trades are mainly auxiliary to the
textile interests and are closely grouped about Provi-
dence. The great Brown & Sharpe plant with its six
thousand employees is the leader. In this field wages
are low and the conditions of work not above average.
Trade-union propaganda has made little headway
among the Rhode Island metal workers. A story
popular in Providence just now regarding a promi-
nent metal-trades official is as follows: he died recently
and those in charge of the funeral provided him with
eight pallbearers; during the ceremony the deceased
revived long enough to ejaculate ‘What are those
eight men doing?’ Told that they were his pall-
bearers, he snapped “Far too many; discharge six.”
Lay-offs are’ customary at the Brown & Sharpe plant;
deflation after the war was particularly thorough here,
and after a long loaf men were hired back at pre-war
prices. The chief official of this company is president
of the Providence Society for Organizing Charity—
one of whose necessary functions is to care for Brown
& Sharpe employees in times of unemployment. ‘The
same official is also a prominent member of the Metal
Trades Association and a trustee of Brown University.

Jewelry is another potent industry in Rhode Island
affairs. Providence is the largest jewelry center in the
United States if not in the world; everything from
Gorham’s silver to Woolworth’s hair ornaments comesRHODE ISLAND 285

 

 

 

 

from the city of Roger Williams. The jewelry indus-
try contributes to the child-labor problem a unique ele-
ment. During the brief time in which the Federal
child-labor law was in operation the Department of
Labor discovered a system of home work for children
which has been in existence from the earliest days of
the industry in the State. The Federal] Department,
in contrast to State departments, was shocked at the
extent of child employment, and made a study of the
problem in the three cities of Providence, Pawtucket,
and Central Falls. Its report, recently published,
showed 4,933 children, or 7.6 per cent of all school
children examined, doing “home work.” Such work
consisted of carding snaps, stringing tags, setting
stones in various types af jewelry, and wiring and
stringing rosary beads. What a commentary on our
commercialization even of religion that the very rosa-
ries on which the faithful count their prayers in the
name of Him who loved little children should be made
by these little ones in poorly lighted tenements in the
long evenings after school hours! The Federal investi-
gation revealed the fact that in some of these homes
in which the rosaries which were to be kissed by the
faithful were being made, members of the family were
afflicted with asthma, influenza, and even more loath-
some diseases. Two-fifths of the child “home work-
ers” were of Italian parentage and one-fifth French-
Canadian.

The industrial picture that Rhode Island presents is
not encouraging. ‘True, it produces excellent textiles,
first-class tires, admirable lathes, as well as mountains
of ten-cent store brilliants, but its industries and its
politics alike have been managed with little considera-286 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

tion for the human element. Unstinted immigration
from Europe so long as that was possible, supple-
mented now by “habitants” from Quebec; long hours of
labor for men, women, and children under conditions
detrimental to health and happiness; the exploitation of
children; the grouping of foreigners in mill villages
barren of the better American influences either in edu-
cation or recreation—these are not the most helpful
ingredients from which to make a commonwealth.

Fortunately some aspects of present-day Rhode Is-
land are more promising. In the great strike of 1922,
sixty thousand workers left the mills and stayed out
till the companies gave in. This strike is a landmark
in the history of the State. Resentment against the
Republican administration, which had sent troops to
overrun the strikers, resulted in the Blackstone Valley
in a Democratic victory at the next election. The
former boss of the State Republican committee was
beaten in his own ward, Republican for years, so bitter
was the feeling among the mill workers.

The principal power in the Pawtuxet Valley before
1919 had been the B. B. & R. Knight Company, a
family concern, which commencing with the Pontiac
Mills in the eighteen-forties had gradually grown until
it controlled over a score of mills. The Knights were
notoriously unprogressive; in their own offices a type-
writer was a rarity; oil lamps had sufficed for lighting
when they took over the mills; they sufficed till the
day of sale. A Knight mill tenement had a reputation
that was unsavory in more senses than one. Despite
their antiquated methods they secured maximum prof-
its. In 1919 Robert Knight’s sons sold their mills at
boom prices to a New York corporation. This com-RHODE ISLAND 287

 

 

pany paid approximately $22.50 for spindles which in
the opinion of good textile men, cited by the Labor
Bureau, Inc., could be replaced anywhere in the South
today for $8, and then they capitalized their pur-
chase at $46 per spindle. The new owners believed
in better houses for their workers and built them,
but the rents being higher and wages remaining the
same the workers refused to occupy them: the new
management also introduced service departments: and
made many improvements in technical and working
conditions. But it soon found that conditions in 1921
were not those of 1916-1919, and in order to pay divi-
dends on excess capitalization ordered a 20 per cent
reduction in wages with a continuation of the fifty-four-
hour schedule. The result was an immediate and com-
plete tie-up of every mill in the valley. The workers
not only struck, but organized for protracted resist-
ance. Local men at first headed the strike, but soon
the leaders of the Amalgamated Textile Workers were
called in, and thorough and complete organization was
effected. The food supply was arranged for, dietitians
and nurses were employed by the strikers, food kitch-
ens were opened and sufficient funds secured to fight it
out if it took all summer. And fight it out they did
from January until the autumn, when the wage cut was
rescinded and the strikers went back to the mills vic-
torious. There was little violence in the valley,
although deputies and State troops were stationed
there, and the result of the strike has been an immedi-
ate and definite change in attitude on the part of both
workers and owners. Both sides admit that the work-
ers are now in control, and while this presents difficulty
to the owners, especially in view of their attempt toiioniienianem.

ss i

 

288 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

pay dividends on an overcapitalized investment, it is
distinctly a sign of a better day. And finally, the
children were found better-nourished and healthier at
the end of the strike than at its beginning. The day of
feudal overlordship in the Pawtuxet Valley has dis-
appeared; in its place we have corporate responsibility
on the one side and well-organized labor on the other.
The “foreigner,” as the Knight agents still call the
union organizer, is as definitely established in the
forces of the worker as the expert engineer or efhi-
ciency manager is with the company. Whether either
will finally be able to shake off the heritage of eighty
years of industrial feudalism and political corruption
the future will show. At any rate there are possibilities.
One reason for hope is that in the Pawtuxet Valley the
percentage of English-speaking workers—mainly Eng-
lish weavers—is fairly high. In the Blackstone Valley
the non-progressive French-Canadian predominates.
Lincoln Steffens wrote in McClure’s Magazine in
1905, ‘Rhode Island, a State for Sale,” in which he
proved beyond doubt his initial thesis that ‘‘the politi-
cal situation of Rhode Island is notorious, acknowl-
edged, and shameful.’’ Then Nelson W. Aldrich was
‘the boss of the United States Senate” and at the same
time the head and fount of Rhode Island’s political
corruption. Aldrich and his associates exercised their
power through General Brayton, the famous blind boss
of Rhode Island. Absolute was Brayton’s power.
The story is told that coming into his office one morn-
ing Brayton inquired for a certain State senator. In-
formed that he was in the Senate, Brayton replied,
“Bring him here; I want him to lead me out to (let us
say for politeness’ sake) get a drink.” Brayton wasRHODE ISLAND 289

 

 

“of counsel” for the New Haven Road and Aldrich
was especially interested in the Rhode Island Com-
pany. Ihe New Haven as a factor in New England
politics has passed away, and the poor Rhode Island
Company is still struggling to pay for the indebted-
ness which Aldrich, Brayton, et al., fastened on its
stockholders. Aldrich, Brayton, and their associates
died politically intestate. There was a scramble in
the Republican Party for the seats of the mighty, and
for a while Senators Colt and Lippit between them
exercised the local power which Aldrich had held so
long, but the days of the national boss in the field of
local Rhode Island politics are gone—let us hope,
forever. Colt still sits in the Senate, but Lippit, the
powerful textile senator, is no more. He is still in-
fluential in local affairs, but he never measured up to
the stature of an Aldrich. And as for the successors
of Brayton, they, too, have passed on. It was dynasty
of lesser men at the best. This decadence of the
bosses is one of the most auspicious omens in the politi-
cal horizon of the State. The Democratic Party has
been a party of the disinherited and discontented, and
has lacked unity. A Rhode Islander asked a few years
ago which party he would support in the next election
replied, “I don’t know; I feel like a jackass between
two bales of excelsior.”” Twenty years ago the Repub-
lican Party was known to be corrupt but powerful; the
Democrats were less corrupt but impotent. A change
has come about in Democratic policy. No one con-
versant with Rhode Island politics will maintain that
the Democrats are a unit, but at any rate they are
more united than they were, and they still are the
party of the disinherited and consequently of the pro-290 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

gressives. I say disinherited, despite the fact that they
hold the governor’s chair, one of the two United States
senators, and the presiding officer of the State Senate.
But they are still of the disinherited; they do not repre-
sent the textile interests, the metal trades, or the
jewelry manufacturers. And the Democrats have
leaders: Flynn, the governor; Toupin, the erratic
lieutenant-governor, and George Hurley, the present
assistant attorney general and former chairman of
the State committee.

Hurley is easily the most interesting figure in Rhode
Island today: a Providence boy of Irish extraction, a
brilliant student at Brown, a Rhodes scholar of dis-
tinction, an able young lawyer, and a resourceful poli-
tician. Hurley made a success of his job as State
chairman. Always he has stood for cleanness in poli-
tics, in public and private life. At his own request he
was given the position of assistant attorney general be-
cause he wanted to clean up the gambling-hells at Nar-
ragansett Pier, Johnston, Cranston, North Provi-
dence, and elsewhere that for years past had made
Rhode Island a Mecca for sporting gentry and had
furnished an easy living for politicians and local offi-
cials. Clean them up he did. The story of Hurley’s
fight is too long for this article, but it should be
written. Quiet, gentle-mannered, with a pleasant Irish
smile, and an altogether juvenile expression, he has
cleaned up practically every gambling house in Rhode
Island within the last year. He made no distinction
between high and low. A few months since he sum-
moned into court a philanthropic Rhode Island million-
aire and eight or ten social leaders from New York to
tell the grand jury what they were doing at a certainEERRRSE REGU aa! 7)

RHODE ISLAND 291

 

 

Pier resort. They told. The consequence was that
the resort is closed, and some local politicians are now
working for a living.

Hurley’s story is worth telling because it epitomizes
the most hopeful side of Rhode Island politics. The
younger men, not the boosters, but the keen, intelli-
gent younger generation with a public conscience and
a feeling of local pride, have joined the party of the
disinherited. With the Republicans disorganized, the
textile workers conscious of the value of organization
and the ballot, and the Democratic Party in the hands
of men like Hurley, it can be said with truth that no
longer is Rhode Island a State for sale.

Rhode Island cannot be dismissed without mention
of Brown University, which dominates the intellectual
life of the State to a much greater extent than do either
Harvard or Yale their respective commonwealths.
Under E. Benjamin Andrews, Brown gathered to itself
some of the brightest minds in America, and many of
the political leaders of the younger generation are
practicing the precepts taught in Brunonia’s halls. But
“Benny’’ offended the industrial magnates in Provi-
dence by daring to have an opinion on political issues,
and was dismissed. Andrews left for his successor
some splendid youngish men, but one by one the
Meiklejohns, the George Grafton Wilsons, and their
kind have slipped away to positions of influence else-
where. And Brown is the poorer by their loss. Brown
has recently shown a flash of her old spirit by espous-
ing vigorously the cause of modernism in the Baptist
church, and as a consequence the university is an-
athema to the pious of the West and South. More
such advocacy of the newer conceptions is needed if the292 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

Brown which produced “Charlie” McCarthy, the
apostle of the Wisconsin Idea, and Meiklejohn, of the
Amherst Idea, is to continue to send its quota of first-
rate men into Rhode Island and into the world.
Religiously Rhode Island is predominantly Roman
Catholic, even more so than Massachusetts, but the
Catholic church is rather sharply divided between the
Irish hierarchy on the one hand and the rank and file
of the laity and clergy of different nationalities, the
majority French-Canadian, on the other. Conse-
quently the church is scarcely as powerful as in some
States where it is more homogeneous. Among Protes-
tant bodies the Baptists naturally are the strongest.
Episcopalians and Quakers both flourish, the latter
body being stronger in Rhode Island than in any other
State except Pennsylvania. The Rhode Island Prot-
estants are at present considerably stirred up about
fundamentalism. ‘The uniformed rank of the church
militant—the Episcopalians—are badly split. The
bishop is a devout believer in the Virgin birth and
its accompanying literalism, while the pastors of Grace
Church, the largest in the diocese, and St. John’s, the
oldest, are vigorous modernists; and the end is not
yet. Fundamentalism, a recrudescence of the very in-
tolerance from which Roger Williams escaped, can
scarcely hope to be finally victorious in Rhode Island.
Other features of Rhode Island life should be men-
tioned; the beauties of the luxuriant South County with
its splendid farms and wonderful sea beaches, the
silver windings of Narragansett Bay among its green
islands, the rocks and barrens of the western towns,
and the wilderness in the Kingston country. Then
there is Newport, and Narragansett Pier; they areRHODE ISLAND 293

 

 

 

worthy of the traditions of that early red-skinned
Rhode Islander who catechized on the Ten Command-
ments and about working on the Sabbath Day replied
that since he worked very little any day it was a small
thing to refrain from work on any day his white
friends wished. Newport and the Pier toil not, neither
do they spin. But their glories are not Rhode Island.
The past romance of Newport in the old days of ship-
ping and the pirates and privateers belong to the
history of the State. The present day of gorgeous
cottages for New York millionaires are purely ex-
crescences on the Rhode Island body politic.

A typical Rhode Island institution is the Dexter Do-
nation—six thousand feet of wall which inclose many
acres of the best residential part of the city of Provi-
dence for an aristocratic poor farm—a poor farm with
a property qualification. A century ago Ebenezer
Knight Dexter left his native town sixty thousand dol-
lars to ameliorate the condition of the poor, and he
picked out the best site in the town for his benefaction.
He requested that ‘a good permanent stone wall at
least three feet thick at the bottom and at least eight
feet high . . . and sunk two feet in the ground” be
placed around his farm. There it stands today, de-
spite efforts to have the land sold and the proceeds
used to erect a more modern institution elsewhere. It
affords care only for residents of Providence whose
fathers or grandfathers have owned property; and it
has no waiting list. Its acres of land with the surround-
ing wall furnish an excellent park, but rents are high in
Providence. The institution at Cranston for the poor
who were not so fortunate is generally overcrowded.
In the face of such solid conservatism it is difficult to

(RACE eee N aE294 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

fe optimistic. However, Rhode Island has been de-
spaired of many times, particularly by her neighbors.
Whether it is the protecting shade of Roger Williams
or the healing waters of the Bay, the “lively experi-
ment’’ still continues. Slowly, but nevertheless surely,
changes come. Rhode Island was excluded from the
New England Confederation, whose self-righteous
members referred to their neighbor as “that sewer,”’
principally because she consistently refused to exclude
the sectaries persecuted by the “lord brethren.”
Rhode Island’s privateering was little short of piracy,
and yet it is on this basis that the American merchant
marine of the early nineteenth century developed.
Rhode Island was the first to declare her freedom
from Great Britain, but the last to adopt the Consti-
tution. It took an armed rebellion in 1848 to establish
manhood suffrage, but the rebellion came. ‘Twenty
years ago Rhode Island was literally and absolutely
controlled by its feudal mill owners and their politi-
cal henchmen; now that situation has changed. Al-
though Roger Williams would find it difficult to make
his way about the Providence Union Station built on
the site of a shallow cove, and would stare aghast at
the new Biltmore, we can believe that the stirring
aspirations of the mill workers, the movements for the
abolition of child labor, the striving of the disinherited
for political power and freedom, the demands of the
modernists in the Church and State would enlist the
sympathy of this first and greatest of American radi-
cals. He kept his faith in the lively experiment in the
face of adverse circumstances; may we not believe that
enough of his spirit remains in the Commonwealth he
founded at least to justify its motto, ‘““Hope’’?MISSOURI
DOESN’T WANT TO BE SHOWN

By MANLEY O. HUDSON

NOTHING is simpler than to throw a few millions of
human begins into a hopper and ascribe to all of them
qualities which not one of the individuals may pos-
sess. For a generation now four millions of Mis-
sourians have been herded under the music-hall slogan,
“Pm from Missouri and you’ve got to show me.” And
as a consequence they have gained the reputation for
being a cautious and inquiring people.

Now few things might be said about Missourians
which would be further from the truth. In the large
—by which I mean that I cannot produce statistics
for what I am about to say—in the large, they deserve
no credit for such scepticism. You do not have to
show the Missourian. He knows already. And he
1s quite content to let it go at that. Missouri doesn’t
care to be shown!

Every time I come to town

Th’ boys keep kickin’ my dog aroun’;
Makes no diff’rence if he is a houn’,
You gotta quit kickin’ my dog aroun’.

This Ozark doggerel is not merely the original of
Senator Vest’s famous eulogy. It breathes also the
sentiments with which the Missourian looks at the
world. His dog may be a hound, but it is his and he
295

PrPateees— *

  

THESE UNITED STATES

 

296

 

 

proposes that others shall take it at his valuation.
Missouri may not be the greatest State in the Union.
Illinois may have a richer soil and a more prosperous
people; Iowa may have a better organized community
life; and Kansas, a quicker sense of civic responsibility
and political opportunity. But Missouri doesn’t care
to hear about it. Missourians are satisfied with her,
and she is satisfied with herself. Besides, who can
say that Arkansas excels her in anything?

For Missouri—we who are to the manner born
call her ‘‘Mizzourah” with no apology for rolling the
r—Miissouri is not merely a geographers’ diagram.
It is not simply a place. It is a state of digestion.
It is a set of conventions. It is a slant on life. In
brief, it is a civilization.

An effete Easterner whose travels in America are
bounded by Baltimore on the south, by Buffalo on the
west, and by Bar Harbor on the north may wonder
that the straight lines remembered from his school
geography as the boundaries of Missouri could so
clearly mark out the personality of a people. I have
met Americans on the Atlantic Coast to whom Missourt
was no more than a name for a river or a waltz or
a compromise. Judging by the date-lines not many
editors know today that Kansas City does not vote
in Kansas. And perhaps few New Yorkers will be
able to understand why it is that we resent their plac-
ing Missouri in that trans-Allegheny vastness which
they call “the Middle West.’ Our query is, “West
of what?” It all depends on where you start. We
don’t find Missouri west of where we begin to measure
the continent. To us it is difficult to see why the rest
of the country does not call it “the center.” TheMISSOURI 297

 

 

nerve controls may be elsewhere. And we're willing
to use Chicago as a sort of aorta through which to
supply the rest of the country. But Missouri is the
heart of America!

What other State was so favored by the geog-
raphers? The eight bordering States give Missouri a
contact with the Great Lakes, the Alleghenies, all of
Dixieland, the Gulf, and the Rockies. They make her
the friend of the North and the South, the common
ground of the East and the West, without identifying
her with any section.

As a place, Missouri is not quite coterminous with
the map-makers’ shuffle. The two broad portals which
she opens so generously to the outer world are for most
purposes not part of Missouri herself. We must ex-
clude St. Louis first of all. For that sprawling city
lops over into Illinois and takes its cue from the
screeching factories and glaring furnaces of other
lands. It serves Missouri chiefly as a sieve for Eastern
money and Eastern manners. It is a huge railroad
terminal—the only American city besides Chicago
where passengers always change. No train ever
passes through St. Louis. It is an island of Ger-
manic culture in a sea of American indifference. It
once had a Fair which made it great, and the laurel
has been borne in slumber these twenty years since.
Only recently a bond issue seems to have waked it
up; it was no mean thing to vote eighty-seven million
dollars for improvements on the crest of a high tide
of taxes. But except for Forest Park and its unique
open-air theater, St. Louis sets no pace. It forms no
part of Missouri. Even the postal clerks know it as

SE Louis, US: A:ae
—* Suk A
Ls Ms

\

ee ee

  
  
   
 
  
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
   
  
   
 
 
  
 
 

298 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

At the opposite end of Missouri’s corridor, Kan-
sas City stands as an outpost flung out by the great
Southwest in its reach for Chicago. Busy, boasting,
and Babbitt-ful, Kansas City holds a key position in the
American system of interstate commerce. It \s a
way-station for the country’s hogs and corn and oil.
It is a warehouse for Montgomery Ward & Co. It
has life but it lacks character. It once got bold
enough to experiment with a Board of Public Welfare,
but the courage faded when Jacob Billikopf went East.
It lacks history, too, though a few of us can still re-
call the days when we bought our trousers from the
Grand Pants Co. for ‘$1.75 a leg, seats free.” Those
were the good old days! Then as now Kansas City
was like New York—all of its people come from some-
where else and many of them are still in transit. Like
New York, it is a part of no State. It is interstate.
It does not wear Missouri yarn, and its face is turned
toward Kansas.

These exclusions leave to Missouri a territory larger
than all New England, with a population almost as
large as that of the Irish Free State. They leave the
farmers who cultivate each year a half a million acres
of wheat and oats and corn and hay. They leave the
miners who produce a large part of America’s zinc
and lead and coal and iron. They leave a host of
small villages, each consisting of a few houses clustered
around a combined post-office-and-general-store which
handles postage-stamps, prunes, and potatoes, all in
the bulk. They leave St. Joseph, Kirksville, Hannibal,
Columbia, Jefferson City, Sedalia, Springfield, Joplin,
Carthage, Cape Girardeau—each with a niche in our
national history, each with a Main Street all its own.MISSOURI 299

 

 

For its population, Missouri was originally indebted
to three things—the bad land in Virginia, the failure
of the potato crop in Ireland in 1847, and the revo-
lution in Germany in 1848. From Virginia came a
yeoman stock of purely English blood, urged by the
hard times of the twenties to seek their fortunes in
the promised land across the plains. Some of them
stopped en route in Kentucky—in Madison County,
Sir! A few of them brought their slaves along. But
with the climate inhospitable to both cotton and to-
bacco, slavery got no firm hold in the State. An abo-
litionist conference at Lexington in the late twenties
attracted little attention, and if Missouri was a bone
of contention it was not due to her own defense of
slavery. One-twentieth of the people are still black
or mulatto, but we have no Jim Crow cars and a lynch-
ing or two a year is regarded enough to ‘make the
Negro keep his place.”

This Virginia immigration gave to Missouri so-
ciety a Southern tinge which many communities still
retain. They built their court-houses on the West
Virginia models of the time, and where the court-
house square exists today, with the town built around
it—in Liberty, in Marshall, in Mexico, in Springfield

—the architecture remains unsurpassed by any of the _

styles borrowed from Chicago or Cleveland suburbs.
A Southern family tradition lingers, too, where the
invading Yankees have not smothered it, and helps
Missouri to resist change. I recall entering a farm-
house “in the kingdom of Callaway” a few years ago
on a cold winter day, to find a glowing fire cracking
out its welcome. As I held out my hands, I exclaimed
to my host about his fire. “It ought to be good,”eet tne

 

  

300 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

he parried, “it’s been burning long enough.” I asked
him when it had been started. “In 1832. My father
brought it out from Virginia when he came across the
prairie in a wagon, and it’s been burning ever since.”

It was a very different strain that came from Ire-
land and from Germany. The Irish soon mixed, for
here they never limited themselves to politics and ‘the
police force. But the Germans held aloof, and they
still live in enclaves, secure from the ravages of puri-
tanism. In the early days they captured South St.
Louis, whence they've ministered (since to many a
thirst. They proved themselves superior agricultur-
ists, and in the eastern counties they gradually crowded
the Virginians out of the better bottom lands. With
their militant ideas of freedom, they opposed the ex-
tension of slavery, they kept Missouri from seceding,
they sent Carl Schurz to the Senate. More recently
they held back the Volstead onslaught until the gen-
eral capitulation. They began as Republicans in 1860,
and they’ve voted straight ever since—until the com-
bination of the war and prohibition led them to re-
elect Senator Reed. Content with what they have
escaped in Europe and what they have found in
America, they add no ferment to Missouri’s society.
They help to keep her satisfied.

The Atlantic seaboard is too far away for a large
European immigration—there are some Greeks in St.
Louis and a few Italians in Kansas City. But if some
explorer sent out by the peasants of Southeastern Eu-
rope should ever rediscover Missouri, and if a 3 per
cent limit would not bar it, the Ozark wilderness might
be transformed into another Switzerland!

A traveler who journeys from Kansas City to St.MISSOURI 301

 

 

Louis on the Wabash or the C. & A. or the Missouri
Pacific or the Rock Island—all of our railroads seem
to run east and west—may wonder about Missouri’s
prosperity. For in a land of teeming plenty, poverty
still lifts its ugly head. But if we take as a test the
existence of a favorable trade balance, there can be
no doubt about it. Not that she depends on her for-
eign trade; if she chose to do so, Missouri could prob-
ably live more comfortably on her own resources than
any other State in the Union. She could produce al-
most everything she needs except coffee and rubber,
and doubtless the agricultural experiment stations
would soon find substitutes for those luxuries.

But what community would care to be self-contained
with such wares to spread its fame? There is, for
instance, the corn-cob pipe on which Missouri holds
a world-wide monopoly. Wherever a few smokers
gather together, a hymn of thanksgiving can be heard
for the Missouri meerschaum! Then there is the Mis-
souri mule. He it was who won the war. Indeed
he has won all the modern wars. He opened up
Cuba for our bankers, he stilled the Boer’s insolence,
he elevated Japan to the international peerage, he
waded through blood in the Balkans, and now he has
made the world safe for Poincaré and Mussolini to
play in. But he never gets a decoration. He was
the only part of the A.E.F. that got left behind in
Europe. And a few days ago I saw him trying to
win the peace in Haute-Savoie.

We take our religion very seriously—that is, we
insist that every man must profess it and on all red-
letter days we bow to its authority. We shouldn’t
think a marriage were valid unless a preacher tied

TeeTTeel302 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

the knot. And any renegade is entitled to a funeral
from a church. But on ordinary week-days we don’t
allow ourselves.to be greatly hampered by our faiths.
On Sundays the Irish go to mass, the Germans gather
in the Lutheran Church, and the rest of us are ex-
horted from the Baptist or South Methodist or Pres-
byterian or Campbellite pulpits. A small Virginian
aristocracy is Episcopalian, and Christian Science is
growing in power in spite of the recent difficulties.
The Latter-Day Saints have won a prescriptive right
to their center in Independence. But for other queer
peoples we have no time and no toleration. We
don’t care to be shown that our beliefs are not the
only true beliefs. I once heard it whispered that a
Baptist minister had gone over to Unitarianism, but
the rumor was too awful to follow up. Since the war,
we feel the citadels of our faith attacked by a newly
strengthened modernism. William Jewell College re-
cently dismissed a professor who had yielded to the
temptations of the “higher criticism.” Until the final
victory is won, we must all be fighting fundamentalists.

As to our politics, they don’t much matter. We
like the game. A few men—and latterly women—
play it and are much admired. A few more spectate.
But Missouri was never a “sovereign independent
State,’ and we look upon our State government as
merely a local division under a government which
has its seat in a far-off Washington. Bill Stone was
far more interesting to us when he ruled the bosses
at Jefferson City than when he was chairman of the
Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States Sen-
ate. We pointed with pride when three of our poli-
ticians—Clark and Folk and Hadley, not one of themMISSOURI 303

 

 

native sons—were ranked among the presidential pos-
sibilities in a single electoral year. One reason for
the toleration of Reed is the feeling that he wants
what he wants when he wants it. In the ordinary
campaign the inherited categories of Democrat and
Republican are quite enough for us. The Prohibition-
ists have disappeared. As for being a Socialist, it
isn’t done. Our farmers were cold to Townley. On
the whole, it is men not measures that matter. We
endured an obsolete taxation system and an antiquated
constitution for a whole generation. We didn’t pro-
pose to take any new-fangled notions from Oklahoma
or Wisconsin.

We keep a store of patriotism always ready, and
on the war Missouri was ready to follow the lead of
the East by going in or by staying out. Once in, it
was necessary to have a certain measure of forced
taxation in behalf of the Y. M. C. A. and the Red
Cross, to. prove that we were united. We held in
readiness for any pacifist who might appear the same
medicine that was administered to Lovejoy in 1836.
We insisted that it was not enough for one to say
that he was against the Kaiser and for the war—he
had also to believe that the Kaiser was a mad dog
loose in the world and that the war was a heaven-
blessed righteous crusade or we questioned his Ameri-
canism. When it came to the peace, we were all
for the League of Nations until our politicians got
so nervous about it, and now—we wait for a lead from
Washington.

Education is a necessity in Missouri, but only for
those who are growing up. It ends with the close
of the last spring term. A week of Chautauqua each304 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

summer and three Lyceum evenings during the winter
are enough to keep the adults alive to an outside cul-
ture. I asked a Baptist home missionary what books
he found in the homes he visited. Just two, he said, the
Bible and the Sears-Roebuck catalogue. But in the
towns, the parlor tables exhibit Wells’s Outline and
the latest Hutchinson novel—Sinclair Lewis would be
resented. The State maintains a circulating library,
and will send out a case of ‘“‘standard authors” on
proper demand, but the supply is quite equal to the
demand.

But Missouri does not read books—she reads maga-
zines and newspapers. Any up-to-date person will
know the progress of the latest serial in the Saturday
Evening Post. We once had a great magazine of our
own, great because it introduced America to Spoon
River; but Reedy and his Mirror were buried in the
same grave. The new Point of View, published in
Kansas City “for all who are interested in Travel,
Art, Architecture, Music and Drama,” has yet to
make its mark. And once, in Colonel Nelson’s life-
time, we had a great newspaper—the paper that in-
troduced daylight saving to America; but today, in
spite of its wide territorial influence, the Kansas City
Star takes no precedence over thirty other dull Ameri-
can dailies. In St. Louis, the Post-Dispatch still cru-
sades in an intrepid and intelligent way for an old-
fashioned brand of Pulitzer righteousness; and the
Globe-Democrat, since killing off its hoary rival, the
Republic, justifies its morning monopoly only by the
excellence of its editorial page. But the leadership
of the metropolitan dailies is fast waning. Missouri
editors have gone to school to Walter Williams andMISSOURI 305

 

 

their annual Journalism Week at Columbia is begin-
ning to show results. The smaller cities are develop-
ing a press of their own, with United Press service,
and the publication of a daily paper is coming to be
one of the earmarks of urban respectability.

Another challenge to Missouri’s self-satisfaction is
bringing learning to the land. The farmers have be-
gun to read government bulletins. The time was, not
SO many years ago, when the farmers and the home-
makers knew more about their jobs than any bureau
chief could tell them. But now they have capitulated
to hard times and to the craze for modern babies.
The farmer kills his hogs, fills his silos, and rotates
his crops, and the homemaker cans her cherries, sets
her hens, and nurses her baby according to the latest
bulletin from the State University.

For the University of Missouri is bringing a revolu-
tion in lower as well as in higher education. Thirty
years ago, in the pre-country-club period of American
college education, it was a sleepy recruiting ground for
the learned professions. The first shift came when
athletics and highly colored sweaters captured the en-
thusiasm of the small town high-school boys and girls.
The university began to standardize the high schools
throughout the State, and that in turn drew it into the
job of training the teachers to man them, or more ac-
curately to woman them. The curse of too many col-
leges has been met by creating the rank of Junior Col-
lege and by fitting the professional courses at the
university onto the sophomore college year. The
regimentation of the schools is now all but universal,
with a few outstanding exceptions such as the original
School of Osteopathy at Kirksville.306 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

And now the College of Agriculture is regimenting
the farmers. ‘There are first the clubs to which the
boys and girls at home go to spurt themselves in farm
endeavor. Then the “‘short-horn course” at Columbia
for the older ones who can be spared from home only
during the slack winter months; four months in each
of two winters makes a boy into a farmer who will
never be a peasant. Then the regular four-year course
which is training the farm leaders of the next genera-
tion—the county agents, the experiment-station experts,
the teachers of agriculture, and the “‘gentlemen farm-
ers.’ But most important is the Farmers’ Week in
January when even the genuine dirt farmers gather at
Columbia to listen to lectures, to watch demonstrations,
and to civilize up generally. There they courted favor
with ‘Chief Josephine” while still she held the record
as the world’s largest-producing milch cow. They
heard David Lubin once, and when he scolded them
for not organizing and controlling their markets they
took it sitting down. During the war they entertained
an English lord.

It is a revolution which promises freedom from
many a tyranny. ‘The chinch-bugs and the chiggers
have had their day. The menace of the grasshopper is
gone. The weather man has lost his spell. The “hill-
billies’’ are passing. Missouri has begun to be shown
—by herself.

The millstone today is bad roads. The Missouri
farmer was imprisoned until Henry Ford broke his
chains. For fully a third of the year he is still mired
in the mud. Recently the members of an automobile
club, motoring from the Pacific Coast to the automobile
show in New York, had to take the train at KansasMISSOURI 307

 

 

City and ship their cars to St. Louis. But the reluc-
tance to learn from road-building elsewhere is now
yielding, and the Santa Fé Trail and the Jefferson
Highway are promising beginnings. A sixty-million
dollar bond issue, a non-partisan highway commission,
and a project for primary and secondary roads for the
entire State are the progress registered in a single year.

In spite of the mud, or because of it, each new
generation seems to find its way out. Many towns
seem to be peopled with old men. To Oklahoma, to
Idaho, to California the boys go off. And though they
never cease to be Missourians, they never come back.
Many of them become famous, and a few deserve
fame. There are Harlow Shapley, the astronomer at
Harvard; Walter Stewart, the teacher at Amherst
when Amherst valued teaching; Glenn Frank, the
editor of the Century; Charles G. Ross, the Washing-
ton correspondent; Fred Deering, the Minister to
Portugal—to mention only a few who are under forty.
Every State has its great men; in Missouri we STOW
them for the rest of the country. And let it not be
forgotten, we gave Mark Twain and Jesse James to
the world!

The girls roam less and have a shorter range of
opportunity. Everywhere they are teachers. We still
have a notion that business is not their sphere. Jour-
nalism is opening up to them, and medicine and other
social work. Domestic service, being the preserve of
the colored folk, is not respectable for the whites. But
most of the girls are drawn down that vista of dreari-
ness which we refer to as “‘Just staying at home.” And
though we have always had fewer women than men, we
count them lucky if the last call for the dining-car does308 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

not pass them by. Home means hard work for them,
and often valiant sacrifice. But it is a world in which
nothing happens.

I chanced to meet one of these stay-at-homes on a
train out of St. Louis last Christmas Eve. She was
tall, shapely, thin-skinned, with small ankles and small
wrists but large feet and large-knuckled hands, and she
still nestled up to twenty-five. The crowded condition
of the car led to conversation, and I asked where she
lived and what she did and what the prospects were.
She lived in Warren County; though an artist by tem-
perament, having once had a few lessons with Fannie
Bloomfield Zeisler, she was now a farmer; and the
prospects were horrible. I dilated on the glories of a
life out-of-doors. ‘‘You talk like a novel,” she replied.
“You haven’t sat on a plow from sunrise to sundown
for fifteen days straight running.” ‘Well, don’t you
make money?” ‘‘We’re supposed to be partners—
father, mother, and I. But I never see any money.”

I asked her how she spent her leisure. She read a
bit—she liked Browning’s poems and Barrie’s plays.
But there wasn’t a library within forty miles and books
were so hard to get. ‘‘But for Father Donovan’s lend-
ing me books and giving me ideas, I’d go mad. Life
gets so awfully dull. I get to a point now and then
where I feel I can’t stand it any longer.” I inquired
what her escape was. “I have to havea fling. There’s
no other way out.’ ‘‘Are you returning from a fling
now?’ “Yes. At breakfast two months ago I told
my parents I couldn’t go on another day; that I was
going away. They asked where, and I said I didn’t
know. Away! ‘They refused to drive me to the
station, so I carried my suit-case and walked the eightMISSOURI 309

 

 

miles. Fortunately I had saved a little money from
the music class I used to have in Jackson County. I
took the first train that came along and went to St.
Louis. There I found a hotel, and went out to the
theater. Next day I got a job as governess through
the Y. W.C.A. The children had been unmanageable,
but after a week I got the household straightened out.
And tonight I did so hate to leave them. But then—
that’s not the way I want to live my life.”

“And what now?” I asked. “I’m going home. The
family want me to marry. But there’s no chance to
meet anybody except the farmer boys in the neighbor-
hood, and they wouldn’t understand why I have to
have my fling. Tomorrow I’ll feed the pigs, and I
guess we'll soon be getting ready to put in the crop.”
When I had watched her greet her father at the station
in Jonesburg, I spent the rest of my journey searching
for the secret of a civilization which could produce
such a human being.

Perhaps Missouri herself has been a stay-at-home
too long. Saddled with the monotony and drudgery
of plowing the fields, her life has lacked color. For
too long she had no desire to see how the rest of the
world was living, not even how it was doing its plow-
ing. She did not want to be shown. But a new era
is breaking. Missouri, too, must have her fling. And
she is now beginning to look for it, in a flivver.

     
   
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 

ee SerNORTH DAKOTA
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY VALLEY FORGE

By ROBERT GEORGE PATERSON

Tue drama of North Dakota has been one of the
great American epics. Scene of a gigantic struggle for
independence, fought almost as fiercely and tenaciously
as the Colonists’ revolt in 1776, its far-stretching
prairies have been a continuous battlefield since the
bloody days of Custer. There is a sparkle in the pierc-
ing northern air “‘out in those vast spaces where men
are men’ that prompts the clash of dominating spirits.
Regarded by the sedate East as America’s enfant
terrible, its numerous reforms have made its name a
synonym for radicalism, for amazing governmental
ventures that have startled the conservative world,
shivering its spine with the latest spectacle of the Non-
partisan League, whose daring shadow has broadened
across the whole Western horizon. There has been
real romance in the story of its forceful dramatis
persona, stalwart builders who visualized empires, po-
litical chieftains who slapped each other’s faces, ear-
nest home-makers converting the great plains into a
chrome-yellow sea of ripening grain, strong men bold
enough to strike out for ideals and break the invisible
chains of unseen rulers exacting tribute from afar.

Aside from the war, North Dakota’s revolt has been
one of the century’s outstanding political events in
America. It has had as many interpretations as it has

had observers. Many passively noted it as one of
310NORTH DAKOTA 311

 

 

those freakish experiments in which in the name of
progress certain Western States occasionally have in-
dulged themselves, a temporary obsession to be viewed
with no more concern than a city changing to the com-
mission form of government. To some it has seemed
the heroic effort of the second generation of a pioneer
people to conquer political chiefs, economic overlord:
ship, and the forces industrial civilization has erected,
as their fathers subdued Indian chiefs and the forces
of nature. Others saw it as a conflagration fired by
the incendiary bombs of demagogues whose personal
destruction offered the only hope for its extinction.
Still others have fancied it everything from the first
American foothold of the foreboding International to
a revolt of the tenantry. Ample evidence may exist
for these contentions. It certainly was not a revolution
without its Jacobins, its carpet-bagging exploiters sud-
denly swooping down upon it to direct its generals from
behind the scenes, its feverish mob howling for the
political decapitation of all survivors of the old
régime. Nor was it without its Dantons sincerely seek-
ing the economic deliverance of the State’s agricultural
classes from a system that ground them into vassalage
while they produced the world’s daily bread.

Yet none of these estimates is wholly correct. North
Dakota has been greatly misunderstood, for it is not
a State of Marxian idealists. Prior to the Non-partisan
League’s appearance it had but a straggling Socialist
element scarcely able to muster two thousand votes on
election day. Unlike its neighbors of South Dakota
and Iowa to the south, it never had any land tenantry
worth mentioning. It has not been bothered by labor
disturbances, as it has no laboring class except itsee NIE

12 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

floating farm helpers who come and go with the spring
and autumn. While in 1913 there was a brief I. W. W.
flurry at Minot the rioters were not North Dakotans
but the typical Western rovers who frequent the trans-
Mississippi region during the harvest season together
with a boisterous handful of Butte’s mining element
who had strayed eastward out of Montana. Of all
the States North Dakota is one of the freest from
poverty. Nearly all of its half million people are land-
owners. A country of magnificent distances, its mighty
expanse adapted itself to the acquisition of enormous
tracts. The “bonanza farm,” covering thousands of
acres, sprang into vogue. Inconsequential indeed was
the farmer possessing less than a section—640 acres—
of land. The forty- or eighty-acre farm of the Eastern
or Middle States is inconceivable to the average North
Dakotan. The majority of the 30 per cent of its
people that are not Scandinavian are keen-faced Yan-
kees who migrated from Iowa, Illinois, and western
New York to get rich quick in the early land boom,
but on seeing the country’s possibilities decided to stay.
The years have dealt generously with them, and though
North Dakota boasts only a few millionaires nearly
everyone is well to do. Virtually every farmer has
his car, some three and four. A few years ago the
tremendous business of the Ford plant at Fargo ranked
it near the top of that company’s branches throughout
the country.

North Dakota’s revolt came as the direct result of its
complete subjection to outside domination. Hunger,
poverty, class distinctions, religious oppression, politi-
cal graft and chicanery all prompt rebellion. But noth-NORTH DAKOTA 313

 

 

ing is more certain to provoke it than the attempt of
one people to govern another.

Nominally a sovereign State, in reality North Da-
kota has experienced few of the thrills of sovereignty.
From the hour of statehood it has been merely the
“flickertail” of the Minnesota gopher. Albeit Bismarck
is the capital where the Governor resides and the legis-
lature convenes, the actual seat of the State govern-
ment always has been in St. Paul and Minneapolis,
homes of the overlords who played with its destinies.
At the outset James J. Hill became its acknowledged
patron saint and colonized it with Norwegians as
Minnesota already had been settled by their Swedish
cousins. Throughout his years his excellent paternal
care well entitled him to the fond sobriquet of “Father
of North Dakota.’ From St. Paul he watched over
its interests—so closely interwoven with his own—
with the same anxious eye a keen guardian displays
for a wealthy ward. From a carefully guarded cham-
ber in the West Hotel in Minneapolis its political
wires were manipulated with rare dexterity by that
most astute of all the Northwest’s political chiefs, the
frequently mentioned but infrequently seen ‘Alec’
McKenzie of Klondike fame—fame suggested, if not
exactly extolled, by Rex Beach in ‘‘The Spoilers.’ Per-
chance because of the proprietary concern exhibited in
the State by these two gentlemen, the financiers, mer-
chants, and millers of Minnesota’s chief centers as-
sumed that North Dakota was their private preserve.
And few moves in North Dakota became possible with-
out their sanction, as its legislators, bankers, and grain
growers soon came to understand.

Whenever a North Dakota politician aspired to

   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 

ee

oe314 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

public office in North Dakota it first was necessary to
run down to Minneapolis and see McKenzie. When-
ever a new general business policy was promulgated
for the State its announcement usually followed the
return of some prominent North Dakotan from the
Twin Cities. When Fargo wanted a new chief of
police it sent to Duluth, and as a new Commercial
Club secretary it selected one discarded by St. Paul.
When Fargo was chosen as the site for the French
Government’s gift to the Norwegians of the United
States of a statue of Rollo—the Norseman who in-
vaded France ten centuries ago—the Hill interests
managed, despite Fargo’s spacious parks, to have it
placed on the tiny greensward of their Great Northern
railroad station where it has an uninspiring background
in a yellow brick wall. When Minnesota’s big-business
interests learned that the North Dakota farmer no
longer was producing enough to meet the advancing
cost of their operations they launched a “Better Farm-
ing Association” in North Dakota to scrutinize his
efforts and to make him produce more, sending up
an energetic young man from Minnesota to run it.
And upon discovery that, instead of ever becoming
self-supporting, the ‘‘association” always would be a
drain on their purses, they calmly tried to unload it on
North Dakota’s State Agricultural College and replace
the college president with the energetic young man.
Never has North Dakota been free from the super-
vision of its eastern neighbor. Its first submitted con-
stitution, indignantly rejected as ‘“‘a piece of unwar-
ranted outside intermeddling,” was drafted by James
Bradley Thayer of the Harvard law faculty on request
of the Northern Pacific Railroad’s president, HenryNORTH DAKOTA 315

 

 

Villard. No doubt he was actuated by the best of
motives in his desire to assist the new State’s admission
into the Union. But that he was not a North Dakotan
militated against the acceptance of his good offices.
Even the turbulent upheaval which finally overthrew
the yoke of alien domination failed to restore to North
Dakota’s soil the seat of its government. The shrewd
Loftus, the Robespierre of its revolution, and the auto-
cratic Townley, grabbing the tempest with Napoleonic
opportunism, both directed their annihilating cam-
paigns from St. Paul.

Sporadic outbursts from the beginning revealed
North Dakota’s unconscious groping for self-deter-
mination. Queer things, impulsive and incoherent,
were done in this battle for independence, but all re-
vealed the underlying aim. At its second election it
chose a Populist governor. The experiment did not
last. The next uprising in 1906 had more enduring
effect and made North Dakota a vital contributor to
the subsequent Republican schism. For six years a
Democratic governor and an “Insurgent” Republican
legislature fought the McKenzie “‘Stalwarts” for con-
trol. In that time they enacted into law nearly every
suggestion that promised hope of deliverance from
outside political and financial influence. The statutes.
bristled in their defiance of the railroads and all out-
side business operating within the State. ‘hey affected
nearly every commodity used, inasmuch as North Da-
kota is wholly agricultural and manufactures practically
nothing for its own consumption. The rigidity of the
State’s pure food laws for a number of years barred
entrance to the products of several concerns of national
prominence.316 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

These caprices disturbed distant campaign managers,
not because of North Dakota’s power in national con-
ventions, but on account of the misleading impression
its unexpected treatment of their chosen candidates
might give the electorate at large. It inaugurated sev-
eral disquieting political novelties. It was the first
State to hold a Presidential primary, and in it forsook
the magnetic leadership of its once widely boasted
foster son, Roosevelt, for the progressivism of La
Follette. Later, in the effort to rid itself of Non-
partisan rule, it established another disconcerting prece-
dent as the first State to recall its governor—the in-
offensive Nonpartisan figurehead, Frazier—whom it
subsequently elected to the Senate in place of the vet-
eran conservative, McCumber. Its great organized
protest followed in natural sequence to this list of
reforms. It was but another, more emphatic, more
defiant step toward independence. The protest sub-
sided gradually, partially due to the overwhelming
outside financial pressure marshaled to kill it; but
chiefly because the Nonpartisan League as conducted
proved it was not wholly an agrarian nor a cooperative
movement. As distasteful in its dictatorial methods as
any previous experiment, it failed in its five years of
virtual State power to fulfil its chief promises to the
North Dakota farmers for whose express benefit it
was supposed to exist.

Farming on a huge scale, the ills of the North
Dakotan lie in marketing. His crop is wheat and small
grains. He is dependent on the railroads to move
it and on the grain commission men of the Minneapolis
Chamber of Commerce to sell it. Between the two he
early found himself a helpless victim of strange priceNORTH DAKOTA 317

 

 

fluctuations and freight tariffs that more frequently
favored the big elevator, milling, and railroad interests
than himself. The chief Twin City millers and ele-
vator magnates controlled the Chamber of Commerce,
and the trading privileges of its floor were largely
restricted to their representatives. As they were in
position to buy grain virtually at their own grading,
the North Dakota farmer felt himself at their mercy.

Amelioration of this condition was sought through
a railroad commission empowered to adjust shipping
disputes, through elevator commissions created to sit
in Duluth and Minneapolis and seek fairer grading.
Finally came a proposal for the construction of North
Dakota State-owned and State-managed terminal ele-
vators at Duluth and the Twin Cities. This caught
the popular fancy and gradually edged its way into the
political platforms. But owing to that happy lapse of
memory with which politicians seem blessed after elec-
tion the cherished projects always found a waiting
grave in legislative committees.

Meanwhile a Farmers’ Equity Society sprang into
being to market the crop independently, and opened
a Cooperative Selling Exchange in St. Paul. Immedi-
ately it became the target of the Minneapolis Chamber
of Commerce. Both were located in Minnesota’s Twin
Cities, but as North Dakota furnished the crop it be-
came the battleground of the conflict. The North
Dakotans welcomed it, for they always relish a fight
and are ever ready to take sides. Loftus, president
of the Equity Exchange, a spectacular figure with a
keen knowledge of crowd psychology, staged his skir-
mishes in Fargo every January when it was filled with
farmers attending its annual grain growers’ convyen-ee

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
     
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
  
 
 
  
 
 

  

318 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

tion. His bizarre appeals and escapades stirred the
State. He rented auditoriums, threw men out bodily,
and applied for the removal of that police chief who
dared refuse him protection. Townley sat in his audi-
ences, an obscure but studious observer. When Loftus
had keyed the farmers to open revolt and marched
them on to Bismarck, while the legislature sat, to
demand the long-promised State-owned elevator,
Townley cleverly stepped in and wrested away the
leadership for himself. He steered the Equity’s mem-
bership into an organization of his own. Until that
| moment this new king, suddenly rising over this Egypt
|, | | which knew not Joseph, had never been heard of even
throughout his own country, the “slope country,” on
it the western edge of the State. Dynamic, resorting to
y all the bombastic tricks of Loftus, he swept North
| Dakota like a Billy Sunday whirlwind. Staking his
fortunes on this spirit of revolt at its height he toured
the State in an automobile and secured the signed
pledges of the farmers to support the child of his
brain—the Nonpartisan League—which was to make
him North Dakota’s dictator for the next half decade.

Ostensibly the Nonpartisan League began as an
association of North Dakota farmers formed to run
their own State. But it gathered its leaders from the
| earth’s four corners. While Townley was its czar he
was not so unwise as to conduct it without advisers.
One came from far-away Australia and New Zealand,
another from Colorado and Washington, some from
New York, several from Minnesota, but few from
North Dakota.

Under League rule North Dakota launched ener-
getically into numerous enterprises and sought to be-

ge,BASED GAAEREADRRERUAOADASAOUUIROEIOERGAURUAGRERRARGEEARRTRORTESE

  

NORTH DAKOTA 319

 

 

come its own financier. It opened a State bank. It
started a home-building scheme. It attempted coal-
mine seizures. It enacted legislation to seize necessary
industries either in peace or war. It created an ap-
pointed State sheriff to whom all elected county sheriffs
were made answerable. It attempted its own immi-
gration commission to determine who should enter the
State from Canada. That one tribunal expected to
be the exemplar of law and order, its Supreme Court,
indulged itself in a travesty of all order which might
have. gone well in opera-bouffe but was hardly expected
In a serious government. Three newly elected League
Justices appeared at the capital and demanded their
seats a month before their predecessors’ terms expired.
One of the court’s League justices, evidently of jour-
nalistic bent, found a unique pastime in penning for
the press a weekly letter which commented freely on
his associates and discussed important cases up on
appeal before they were decided. The League taught
North Dakota some new tricks about how to per-
petuate a State administration’s power. It legally sup-
plied the voter with advisers to help him prepare his
ballot correctly. It then granted him the ingenious
supplemental privilege of re-marking it at the polls
upon discovery that he might have checked the wrong
candidates.

It would be difficult to imagine a tranquil hour in
North Dakota. Born in strife, it has been seething
ever since. Long before the battle of the bottle made
the American flag its champion and attacked the free-
dom of the seas, North Dakota wrestled single-handed
with the demon rum, With its twin to the south it- ~———_—_,

 

320 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

was the first State to write prohibition into its con-
stitution when framed.

North Dakotans love their State with an admirable
devotion. Their language describing it is rich with
superlatives. They call Fargo the “biggest little city
in the world” and don’t relish having it belittled. They
like to think of the Red River valley as the ‘“‘world’s
bread basket” and to compare it to the Nile. Fargo
assumes importance because it is the State's cultural,
financial, and political clearing-house, but in more
densely settled sections it wouldn’t pass for a town of
secondary consequence. Quite usual, Eastern in tone,
similar to towns of 30,000 in Ohio or any Middle
Atlantic State, it has a couple of bishops, plenty of
churches, good public schools, an enterprising daily
press, some handsome homes and streets, and an “ex-
clusive set.” There is considerable civic spirit in the
State and nearly every hamlet has its “white way.”

Yet with all its boasted State pride, notwithstanding
‘ts readiness to spend money on futile impeachment
trials, on all sorts of elections and primaries, on new
governmental experiments, North Dakota never has
found the energy or wherewithal to build a decent
State capitol. The nondescript hulk it calls a capitol
unblushingly is shown to Bismarck visitors as one of
the sights. And it is one. Although its location is
superb on an ideal spot overlooking the town and the
bald hills beyond the Missouri, it is a ramshackle,
pieced-together arrangement, constructed in three sec-
tions, each of a different kind and color of brick—
the front dark red, the middle wing vivid yellow, and
the rear white. On all sides handsome new State cap-
‘tols have been erected, but North Dakota makes noNORTH DAKOTA 221

 

 

effort to replace this architectural monstrosity. On its
sloping grounds are the log cabin Roosevelt occupied
during his three years at Medora, and a bronze statue
the North Dakota women have reared to the Indian
“bird woman” who guided Lewis and Clark across the
Rockies.

Educationally North Dakota is quite abreast of
other States. Its percentage of illiteracy is surprisingly
small. Except for a meritorious but unknown epic
drama of its famous: Indian massacre by Aaron Mc-
Gutty Beede, an old Episcopal missionary among the
Sioux, so far it hasn’t figured much in literature and
produced no distinctive: literary geniuses of national
renown—unless the monthly preambles of Sam Clark
in his Jim Jam Jems could possibly rank him as a
littérateur.

To live North Dakota’s life is thrilling. It has a
bleak, white winter when the mercury occasionally
plays around forty degrees below and the railroad
rails snap in the crispness. But there is a mighty call
in its summer with its nine o’clock sunset and lingering
twilight. And it has an irresistible autumn when the
prairie chicken and wild-duck hunting is unequaled.
From the picturesque undulations that pocket Minne-
sota’s myriad sparkling lakes the country flattens out
into the broad surface of North Dakota’s smooth,
fertile prairie which stretches away in a vast sweep to
where the Bad Lands’ jagged cliffs trace their lonely
outline against the leafless Western sky. North Da-
kota possesses some strange germ that enters the blood
and makes whoever leaves it always want to go back.GEORGIA
INVISIBLE EMPIRE STATE

By W. E. BURGHARDT DU BOIS

GeorGIA is beautiful. High on the crests of the
Great Smoky Mountains some Almighty hand shook
out this wide and silken shawl—shook it and swung it
two hundred glistening miles from the Savannah to the
Chattahoochee, four hundred miles from the Appa-
lachians to the Southern Sea. Red, white, and black is
the soil and it rolls by six great rivers and ten wide
cities and a thousand towns, thick-throated, straggling,
low, busy, and sleepy. It is a land singularly full of
lovely things; its vari-colored soil; its mighty oaks and
pines, its cotton fields, its fruit, its hills.

And yet few speak of the beauty of Georgia. Some
tourists wait by the palms of Savannah or try the
mild winters of Augusta; and there are those who,
rushing through the town on its many railroads, glance
at Atlanta, or attend a convention there. Lovers of
the mountains of Tennessee may skirt the mountains
of Georgia; but Georgia connotes to most men
national supremacy in cotton and lynching, Southern
supremacy in finance and industry and the Ku Klux
Klan.

Now all this is perfectly logical and natural.
Georgia does not belong to this nation by history or
present deed. It is a spiritual borderland lying in
the shadows between Virginia and Carolina on the one

hand, Louisiana on the other, and the great North on
322Fi shed ry i preuyeidt ]
MASE RGRGAERRRaRA Gnd | PURO RU URA REREAD eUneaneaenial

      
  
    
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
    
 
 
 
 
   
  
 
 
  
 
 

GEORGIA 323

 

 

the last. It is a land born to freedom from a jail de-
livery of the unfortunate, which insisted passionately
upon slavery and gave poor old Oglethorpe and the
London proprietors many a bad night because they |
tried to prohibit rum and slaves. But Georgia was
frm and insisted: “In spight of all Endeavours to dis-
guise this point, it is as clear as Light itself, that Ne-
groes are as essentially necessary to the Cultivation of
Georgia, as Axes, Hoes, or any other Utensil of Agri-
culture.” Georgia had her way and this accounts for
Georgia.
Georgia has always had a very clear idea of what
she wanted. Of course, Savannah and Augusta with
their old names and families loved and imitated the
grand air of the slave barons, claimed cousinship to
Charleston and looked down upon the “red necks” of
the rest of the State. But Savannah and Augusta are
not all Georgia. Georgia was originally a sweep of
black land, twenty thousand square miles where the
cotton kingdom laid its new foundations, gliding down
from Virginia; and Georgia determined to make
money and be rich. She fought every interference. To
Georgia the Civil War was a matter of interference
with the slavery that underlay this kingdom and ac-
cording to that great Georgian, Alexander H.
Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, Georgia
proposed to establish a new government whose “corner
stone rests upon the great truth, that the Negro is not
equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to
the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” i
The sweep of the cotton kingdom drove the listless, ih
the poor and the unlucky back to the hills above and
around Atlanta and kept oncoming hill-men from|

    

 

  

324 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

descending; while below Macon the great plantation
system spread. Away to the south and west stretches
this black land—the ancient seat of the Cotton King-
dom, the granary of the Confederacy. Swamp and
twisted oak and mile on mile of cotton are neighbored
by the new pecans, tobacco and peanuts. Below and to
the left Brunswick and Darien sleep and decay, beside
the waters that look on the Caribbean. Below and
to the right the massive flood of Chattahoochee
parades to the Gulf with muffled music.

When catastrophe came, Georgia was among the
first to see a way out. While other States were seek-
ing two impossible and incompatible things, the sub-
jection of the blacks and defiance of the North,
Georgia developed a method of her own. With slav-
ery gone the slave baron was bankrupt and two heirs to
his power had rushed forward: The poor white from
the hills around and above Atlanta and the Northern
speculator—‘Scalawag’’ and ‘“Carpet-bagger” they
were dubbed—sought to rebuild the South. In the
more purely agricultural regions this involved a mere
substitution of owners and black laborers. But the
development of Georgia was to be more than agricul-
tural. It was to be manufacturing and mining; trans-
portation, commerce, and finance; and it was to in-
volve both white and colored labor. This was a diff-
cult and delicate task, but there were Georgians who
foresaw the way long before the nation realized it.
The first prophet of the new day was Henry W. Grady
of Atlanta. Grady’s statue stands in Atlanta in the
thick of traffic, ugly, dirty, but strong and solid. He
had Irish wit, Southern fire and the flowers of oratory.
He was among the first to incarnate the “BlackGEORGIA 326

 

Mammy” and he spoke in three years three pregnant
sentences: In New York in 1886 he made a speech on
the “New South” that made him and the phrase fa-
mous. He said: ‘There was a South of slavery and
secession. That South is dead.” The North ap-
plauded wildly. In Augusta, in 1887, he added: “In
her industrial growth the South is daily making new
friends. Every dollar of Northern money invested in
the South gives us a new friend in that section.” The
South looked North for capital and advertised her
industrial possibilities, and finally he said frankly in
Boston in 1889: ‘When will the black man cast a free
ballot? When the Northern laborer casts a vote unin-
fluenced by his employer.” ,

In other words, Grady said to Northern Capital:
Come South and make enormous profits; and to South-
ern captains of industry: Attract Northern capital by
making profit possible. Together these two classes
were to unite and exploit the South: and they were to
make Georgia not simply an industrial center, but what
was much more profitable, a center for financing South-
ern enterprises; and they would furnish industry with
labor that could be depended on.

This last point, dependable labor, was the great
thing. Here was a vast submerged class, the like or
equivalent of which was unknown in the North.
Here were a half million brawny Negro workers and a
half million poor whites. If they could be kept sub-
merged—hard at work in industry and agriculture—
they would raise cotton, make cotton cloth, do any
number of other valuable things, and build a ‘‘pros-
perous” State. If they joined forces and went into
politics to better their common lot they would speedilya

 

 

   
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 

326 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

emancipate themselves. How was this to be obviated?
How were both sets of laborers to be inspired to work
hard and continuously? The modus operandi was
worked out slowly, but it was done skillfully and
brought results. These results have been costly but
they have made Georgia a rich land growing daily
richer. The new wealth was most unevenly distrib-
uted; it piled itself in certain quarters and particu-
larly in Atlanta—birthplace and capital of the new
“Invisible Empire.”

The method used to accomplish all this was in addi-
tion to much thrift and work, deliberately to encourage
race hatred between the mass of white people and
mass of Negroes. This was easy to develop because
the two were thrown into economic competition in
brick-laying, carpentry, and all kinds of mechanical
work connected with the new industries. In such work
Negroes and whites were personal, face-to-face com-
petitors, bidding for the same jobs, working or willing
to work in the same places. The Negroes started with
certain advantages. They were mechanics of the
period before the war. The whites came with one
tremendous advantage, the power to vote. I remem-
ber a campaign in Atlanta. The defeated candidate's
fate was sealed by a small circular. It contained a
picture of colored carpenters building his house.

This doctrine of the economic utility of race hate 1s
never stated as a fact in Georgia or in the South. It
is here that the secrecy of the economic empire of
Georgia enters. Two other facts are continually
stated. The first is the eternal subordination and in-
equality of the Negro. The second is the efficiency andGEORGIA 32%

necessity of Negro labor, provided the subjection of
the Negro is maintained.

Hoke Smith in his memorable campaign in Georgia
in 1906 almost repeated Stephens of 45 years earlier:

“I believe the wise course is to plant ourselves
squarely upon the proposition in Georgia that the
Negro is in no respect the equal of the white man, and
that he cannot in the future in this State occupy a posi-
tion of equality.”

A white labor leader, secretary of the Brotherhood
of Timber Workers, wrote about the same time:

“The next cry raised by the bosses and their stool
pigeons is the ‘Negro question,’ and so we are often
asked how will the Brotherhood handle the Negro
and the white men in the same organization? Answer:
How do the capitalists or employers handle them? To
the employer a working man is nothing but a profit-
producing animal and he doesn’t care a snap of his
finger what the animal’s color is—white, black, red,
brown, or yellow; native or foreign born; religious or
unreligious—so long as he (the worker) has strength
enough to keep the logs coming and the lumber go-
ing—that is all the bosses want or ask. Itis only when
they see the slaves uniting, when all other efforts to
divide the workers on the job have failed, that we hear
a howl go up as to the horrors of ‘social equality.’
Not until then do we really know how sacred to the

boss and his hirelings is the holy doctrine of ‘white
supremacy.’ ”’

On the other hand, once the laborers are thrown
into hating, fearing, despising, competing groups, the
employers are at rest. As one firm said, comparing its328 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

black labor with white: ‘Do the same work, and obey
better; more profit, less trouble.”’

In agriculture poor whites and Negroes were soon
brought into another sort of indirect competition.
The Negroes worked in the fields, the poor whites in
the towns which were the market places for the fields.
Gradually, the poor whites became not simply the
mechanics but the small store keepers. They financed
the plantations and fleeced the workers. They organ-
ized to keep the workers ‘‘in their places” to keep
them from running away, to keep them from striking,
to keep their wages down, to terrorize them with
mobs. On the other hand the Negroes worked to own
land, to escape from country to city, to cheat the mer-
chants, to cheat the land holders.

Then in larger ways and more indirectly both groups
of workers came into competition. “They became sep-
arated according to different, but supporting and inter-
locked, industries and occupations. Negroes prepared
the road bed for the railroads; whites ran the trains.
Negroes were firemen; whites were engineers;
Negroes were porters; whites were mill operatives.
Finally there was the Negro servant stretching all the
way from the great mansion to the white factory
hand’s hovel, touching white life at every point.

In order to secure output and profits, the one essen-
tial was to bring race hatred and economic competi-
tion into such juxtaposition that they looked like two
sides of the same thing. This is what Georgia did and
did first. She did it so successfully that the whole
South has followed her although few other States have
been so clear and single-minded. It was not by acct
dent that Booker Washington made his speech advo-GEORGIA 329

 

 

 

cating industrial peace between the races at Atlanta.
Northern philanthropy offered industrial training to
Negroes free as the price of disfranchisement. South-
ern industry offered the Negro protection and a chance
to work as a condition of giving up agitation for civil
and political rights. And both offered the white man
a chance to work and to vote as long as he did not try
to push wages so high that the Negro would “natu-
rally” supplant him in industry.

Soon the subtle rivalry of races in industry began.
Soon, to the ordinary Georgia white man, the Negro
became a person trying to take away his job, person-
ally degrade him, and shame him in the eyes of his
fellows; starve him secretly. To the ordinary Georgia
Negro, the average white man was a person trying to
take away his job, starve him, degrade him, keep him
In ignorance, and return him to slavery. And these
two attitudes did not spring from careful reasoning.
They were so coiled and hidden with old known and
half-known facts that they became matters of instinct
and inheritance. You could not argue about them;
you could not give or extract information.

It is usual for the stranger in Georgia to think of
race prejudice and race hatred as being the great, the
central, the inalterable fact and to go off into general
considerations as to race differences and the eternal
likes and dislikes of mankind. But that line leads one
astray. The central thing is not race hatred in
Georgia; it is successful industry and commercial in-
vestment in race hatred for the purpose of profit. All
the time behind the scenes in whispered tones and in
secret conference, Georgia is feeding the flame of race
hatred with economic fuel. And while this is not theee

 

    

330 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

conscious and deliberate action of all, it is so with some
and sub-conscious with many others.

Skillfully, but with extraordinary ease, the power to
strike was gradually taken from both white and black
labor. First the white labor vote was used to disfran-
chise Negroes and the threat of white competition
backed by the hovering terror of the white mob made
a strike of black workers on any scale absolutely un-
heard of in Georgia. Continually this disfranchise-
ment went beyond politics into industry and civil life.
On the other hand, the power of a mass of cheap black
labor to underbid almost any class of white laborers
forced white labor to moderate its demands to the
minimum and to attempt organization slowly and ef-
fectively only in occupations where Negro competition
was least, as in the cotton mills.

Then followed the curious and paradoxical semi-
disfranchisement of white labor by means of the
“White Primary.” By agreeing to vote on one issue,
the Negro, the normal spit of the white vote on other
questions or the development of a popular movement
against intrenched privilege is virtually forestalled.
Thus in Georgia, democratic government and real
political life have disappeared. None of the great
questions that agitate the nation—international or
national, social or economic, can come up for free dis-
cussion. Anything that would divide white folk in
opinion or action is taboo and only personal feuds sur-
vive as the issues of political campaigns.

If real issues ever creep in and real difference of
opinion appears—‘‘To your tents, O Israel’—‘‘Do
you want your sister to marry a nigger?”

What induces white labor to place so low a valueGEORGIA 331

 

on its own freedom and true well-being and so high a
value on race hatred? The answer involves certain
psychological subleties and yet it is fairly clear.
Wages and prosperity are in the last analysis spiritual
satisfactions. The Southern white laborer gets low
wages measured in food, clothes, shelter, and the edu-
cation of his children. But in one respect he gets
high pay and that is in the shape of the subtlest form
of human flattery, social superiority over masses of
other human beings.

Georgia bribes its white labor by giving it public
badges of superiority. The Jim Crow legislation was
not to brand the Negro as inferior and to separate the
races, but rather to flatter white labor to accept public
testimony of its superiority instead of higher wages
and social legislation. He was made ostensibly the
equal of the highest. He could not only follow the old
aristocrats into the front entrance of railway stations;
and go with them to the best theaters and movies; but
in all places and occasions he could sit above and apart
from “niggers.” He had a right to the title of
“Mister” and ““Mrs.”’ He could enter street cars at
either end and sit where he pleased or at least in front
of blacks; he could ride in the best railway coaches and
at his leisure saunter among the Negroes herded in
the smoker next the hot and dirty engine. He could
sit in “public” parks and enter “public” libraries where
no Negro could enter; he need seldom fear to get the
worst of a street altercation, or to lose a court case
against a Negro. He could often demand that a
Negro uncover in his presence and yield him prece-
dence on the pavement and in the store.

He grew to love those proofs of superiority. He{
| 332 THESE UNITED STATES

     
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
 
 
  
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   

 

 

boasted of the ‘‘niggers” he had killed and his mar-
velous sexual prowess with the ‘“wenches.” ‘This
fiction of superiority was carried into public affairs:
no Negro school house must approach in beauty and
efficiency a white school; no public competition must
admit Negroes as competitors. No municipal im-
provements must invade the Negro quarters until
every white quarter approached perfection or until
typhoid threatened the whites; in no city and State
affairs could Negroes be recognized as citizens—it was
Georgia, Atlanta, the Fourth Ward, and the Negroes.

The very striving of the Negroes strengthens this
white labor attitude. All Negroes jcannot be kept
down. They escape, they rise; they steal education,
they save money; they push and struggle up. The very
success of the successful fastens the grip of the profit
makers. ‘‘See,’’ they whisper, as the black automo-
bile, the new black home, the black and well-clothed
family appear—‘‘See! This is what threatens white
labor—they’re climbing on you—they’re climbing over
you—beware!” Not negro poverty, crime and degra-
dation, but Negro wealth, ability and ambition is the
great incentive to the white mob.

In return for this empty and dangerous social brib-
ery the white laborer fared badly. Of modern social
| legislation he got almost nothing; the “age of con-

sent” for girls in Georgia was ten years until 1918
when it was, by great effort and outside pressure,
raised to fourteen. Child labor has few effective limi-
tations; children of twelve may work in factories, and
without birth registration the age is ascertainable with
great difficulty. For persons ‘‘under twenty-one’ the
legal work day is still ‘from sunrise to sunset’’ and re-

ag eeeGEORGIA 333

 

 

cently Georgia has become the first State in the Union
to reject the proposed Federal child labor amendment.
Education is improving, but still the white people of
Georgia are one of the most ignorant groups of the
union and the so-called compulsory education law is so
full of loop-holes as to be unenforceable. And black
Georgia? In Atlanta there are twelve thousand
Negro children in school and six thousand seats in the
school rooms! In all legislation tending to limit
profits and curb the exploitation of labor Georgia lin-
gers far behind the nation.

This effort to keep the white group solid led directly
to mob law. Every white man became a recognized
oficial to keep Negroes “‘in their places.” Negro
baiting and even lynching became a form of amuse-
ment which the authorities dared not stop. Blood lust
grew by what it fed on. Again and again the mob got
out and demonstrated its ‘‘superiority” by beating and
murder. These outbreaks must be curbed for they
attected profits, but they could not be suppressed for
they kept certain classes of white labor busy and enter-
tained. Secret government and manipulation ensued.
Secret societies guided the State and administration.
The Ku Klux Klan was quite naturally reborn in
Georgia and Atlanta.

Another method of surrendering to the mob was the
extraordinary yielding to local rule. County after
county has been erected by the legislature as a corpo-
rate center of local government, until today Georgia is
not one State—it is one hundred and sixty-six inde-
pendent counties, counties so independent that if
anarchy wishes to stalk in Wilcox County, Fulton
County has little more power than a foreign State.Se _ = er

ee

 

——— on

  

334 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

The independence and self-rule of these little bits of
territory are astounding. They lay taxes, they spend
monies, they have partial charge of education and
public improvements, and through their dominating
power in the legislature they make laws. Only when
they touch corporate property, industrial privilege,
and labor legislation are the reserve forces of capital
and politics mobilized to curb them. In the law and
administration of personal relations they are supreme.
This decentralization increases year by year.

Georgia is beautiful. Yet on its beauty rests some-
thing disturbing and strange. Physically this is a cer-
tain emptiness and monotony, a slumberous, vague
dilapidation, a repetition, an unrestraint. Point by
point one could pick a poignant beauty—one golden
river, one rolling hill, one forest of oaks and pines, one
Bull Street. But there is curious and meaningless repe-
tition until the beauty palls or fails of understanding.
And on this physical strangeness, unsatisfaction, drops
a spiritual gloom. A certain brooding lies on the land
—there is something furtive, uncanny—at times
almost a horror. Some folk it so grips that they never
see the beauty—the hills to them are haunts of grim
and terrible men; the plantations are homes of things
that cringe and scream and all the world goes armed
with loaded pistols to the hip; concealed, but ready—
always ready.

There is a certain secrecy about this world. No-
body seems wholly frank—neither white nor black;
neither child, woman, nor man. Strangers ask each
other pointed, searching questions. ‘‘What is your
name?” ‘Where are you going?’ ‘What might beGEORGIA 335

 

 

your business?” And they eye you speculatively.
Once satisfied, the response is disconcertingly quick.
They strip their souls naked: before you; there is sud-
den friendship and lavish hospitality. And yet—yet
behind all are the grim bars and barriers; subjects that
must not be touched, opinions that must not be ques-
tioned. Side by side with that warm human quality
called “Southern” stands the grim fact that right here
and beside you, laughing easily with you and shaking
your hand cordially are men who hunt men: who hunt
and kill in packs, at odds of a hundred to one, under
cover of night. They have lynched five hundred
Negroes in forty years; they have killed unnumbered
white men. There must be living and breathing in
Georgia today at least ten thousand men who have
taken human life, and ten times that number who
have connived at it.

Let us look this human thing squarely in the face
without flinching. Georgia has wrought deeds so
awful that they can scarcely be told. Down yonder we
may go of a silent day, slipping through slim forests,
by secret pools and black and silent waters. We cross
a gold brown river shining like a colored girl’s cheek,
placid beneath the trees. There the moss triumphs,
grips and glares on dead trees that wave their corpses
to the bare air; gray cabins crouch beneath the oaks
with chimneys of golden clay. Slow indolent towns
appear wide, low, long, straggling; and plowed fields,
gray and yellow. The towns change from clustered
homes to towns of stores, lines of shops leaning against
each other. We come to Valdosta, a lank, hot town
spread on yellow sand. Near here in 1918, a white
farmer was murdered. The murderer was never336 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

found, but six or more Negroes were lynched for sus-
pected complicity. The wife of one of these last,
Mary Turner, went weeping down the road with an
eight months child in her womb. And as she walked
she cried that if she learned the names of that mob she
would tell—she would tell. The mob heard and came.
They tied her ankles together. They hanged her, head
down, to atree. They took gas and oil from the motor
cars round about (they were not the riff-raff, they
owned motor cars) and poured it over her and set her
afire. They howled as she writhed in flame; and one
man rushed forward with a hog knife and slit open her
stomach and the unborn child dropped to the ground.
I look around upon these people of Georgia. They
are human and commonplace—not gods or devils.
They are the same sort of folk all the world is made
of. Here is a white man in overalls, truculent but
kind; a scrawny young “‘red neck” chewing, ignorant
but not essentially bad; there is the tired, worried
white woman sitting on her porch, with care and
yearning in her face; her daughter is white and gold
and beautiful and idle. Here is a colored washer-
woman with great feet and misshapen hands and the
eyes of God’s mother. Here is the man of the world
who knows it all and owns it all. These people are
caught in the evil web of the world, just as millions
have been caught before. Their struggle to work and
live has been complicated by hateful memories and de-
liberate selfish greed. The natural forces of redeeming
human nature which ever strive to unleash the soul
from evil—these forces are themselves in leash. What
can the forces for uplift and reform do in Georgia?
Of religion as it exists in present-day Georgia oneGEORGIA 337

 

 

may well despair. Georgia is already religious to over-
flowing. Everyone belongs—must belong—to some
church, and really to “belong” one should be Presby-
terian or Baptist or Methodist. Episcopalians are
unusual, Unitarians gravely suspect, Catholics and
Jews feared and hated. But all these are within the
range of understanding or misunderstanding. The
hottest of Hell fire is reserved for any so unspeakable
as to hold themselves free-thinkers, agnostics, or
atheists. Georgia’s religion is orthodox, ‘‘funda-
mental.”” It deals in Biblical texts and phrases—not
in living actualities. It washes its ‘“‘miserable sinners”
in “‘the blood of the lamb,” but the blood of the mob’s
victim lies silent at its very doors. But outside of the
church religion has its uses. When the Ku Klux Klan
sent out its official instructions to delegates to the State
convention, the Grand Dragon said, “It is the earnest
desire of Mr. McAdoo to elect his friend, Mr. John
S. Cohen, as National Committeeman. Mr. Cohen is a
high-class Christian gentleman, a member of the North
Presbyterian Church of Atlanta.’ No, there is little
hope in Georgia religion despite a light here and there.

Nevertheless, there are brave men in Georgia, men
and women whose souls are hurt even to death by this
merciless and ruthless exploitation of race hatred.
But what can they do? It is fairly easy to be a re-
former in New York or Boston or Chicago. One can
fight there for convictions and while it costs to oppose
power, yet it canbe done. It even gains some applause
and worth-while friends. But in Atlanta? The
students of white Emory College recently invited a
student of black Morehouse College to lead a
Y. M. C. A. meeting. It was a little thing—almost338 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

insignificant. But in Georgia it was almost epoch-
making. Ten years ago it would have meant riot.
Today it called for rare courage. When the Southern
Baptists met in Atlanta recently, they did not segre-
gate Negro visitors. Such a thing has seldom if ever
happened before in Georgia. It is precisely the com-
parative insignificance of these little things that shows
the huge horror of the problem—the bitter fight be-
tween Georgia in 1924 and civilization.

Some little things a liberal public opinion in Georgia
may start to do, although the politico-economic alli-
ance stands like a rock wall in the path of real reform.
A determined group called ‘“‘inter-racial’’ asks for
changes. Most of them would mean by this the stop-
ping of lynching and mobbing, decent wages, the
abolition of personal insult based on color. Most of
them would not think of demanding the ballot for
blacks or the abolition of Jim Crow cars or civil
rights in parks, libraries, and theaters or the right of
a man to invite his black friend to dinner. Some there
are who in their souls would dare all this, but they may
not whisper it aloud—it would spoil everything; it
would end their crusade. Few of these reformers
yet fully envisage the economic nexus, the real enemy
encased in enormous profit. They think reform will
come by right thinking, by religion, by higher culture,
and do not realize that none of these will work their
end effectively as long as it pays to exalt and main-
tain race prejudice.

Of the spiritual dilemmas that face men today I
know of none more baffling than that which faces the
conscientious, educated, forward-looking white man of
Georgia. On the one hand is natural loyalty to whatGEORGIA

  
  
 
    
  
  
   
   
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 

 

 

his fathers believed, to what his friends never ques- ie
tion; then his own difficulty in knowing or understand-
ing the black world and his inbred distrust of its ability
and real wish; there is his natural faith in his own
ability and the ability of his race; there is the subtle
and continuous propaganda—gossip, newspapers,
books, sermons, and “‘science”’: there is his eager desire
to see his section take a proud place in the civilized
world. There is his job, his one party, his white pri-
mary—his social status so easily lost if he is once
dubbed a “nigger lover.’ Facing all this is lynching,
mob murder, ignorance, silly self-praise of people piti-
fully degenerate in so many cases, exploitation of the
poor and weak and insult, insult, insult heaped on the
blacks.

Thus Georgia reaps the whirlwind. Yet the Voice,
the eternal Voice rises and sings in this Wilderness.
The present travesty cannot endure. It is a denial of
the fundamental tenets of Christianity, a repudiation
of the veriest elementals of fair play and equality of
opportunity that one likes to think of as American.
Yet it is not from these contradictions but from the
economic paradox that change is likely to come.

Suppose a man of the people, that is, of the white
people, arose in Georgia and said: ‘We are being
exploited, tremendously and shamelessly. The great
mass of workers lack even the primitive protection of
modern days such as limited hours of labor, safe-
guards for women and children in industry and from
industry. It is worth while to arouse the workers and
get them to vote in better industrial conditions.” |
What would happen? iM
There was once such a man in Georgia, Tom Wat-340 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

son. He tried to unite labor. He organized the
Populist Party in Georgia and invited the blacks to
help. It was a critical situation that developed in the
early nineties when it was increasingly difficult to keep
the Negro disfranchised illegally and yet not possible
to disfranchise him legally. In the first campaign it
was easy to beat the Populists by the fraud of “count-
ing them out.” Immediately thereafter the captains
of industry mobilized. By newspaper, by word of
mouth, by lodge communications, it was conveyed to
the white workers that not only would Negroes benefit
from any attempt to better the present industrial situa-
tion, but they would gradually displace the white work-
ers by underbidding them; that any benefits for white
workers must come secretly and in such a way that
Negroes could not share in the benefits. ‘Thus imme-
diately the emphasis was put on race discrimination.
And this race difference grew and expanded until in
most cases the whole knowledge and thought of the
workers and voters went to keeping Negroes down,
rather than to raising themselves.

Internal dissension in the labor ranks followed.
The Negroes were then blamed for not voting solidly
with white labor; for selling out to capital; for under-
bidding labor. The whole movement swung into in-
tense Negro hatred; and the net result was that the
white labor vote was swung completely into a move-
ment finally and completely to disfranchise the Negro
labor. The mob shot down Watson’s Negro leaders
in their tracks and the only way in which he could sur-
vive politically was to out-Herod Herod in his dia-
tribes against Negroes and in coining new variants
of appeals to prejudice by attacks on Catholics andvaeeaeae

  

GEORGIA

 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
 

 

 

Jews. To his death he kept a dangerous political
power and even reached the United States Senate, but
with his labor party cut in two and forced into addi-
tional disfranchisement by the ‘White Primary,” he
could never again seriously menace the ‘“‘machine.”’

A second way toward emancipation may lie through
dissension in the high seats of power. When in Cleve-
land’s day Hoke Smith opposed ‘“‘free silver’? he was
read out of Georgia democracy and his path to the
United States Senate was blocked. Immediately he
espoused the cause of “labor” and made a frontal at-
tack on capital and the great corporations of Georgia.
The white labor vote flocked to him and instead of
the “White Primary” being the ordinary parade, a
bitter internal political fight developed. Smith and his
opponents quickly came to terms. In the midst of the
campaign Smith dexterously switched his attack on
monopoly to an attack on Negroes as the cause of
monopoly and since this old game had often been
played, he played it harder and more fiercely. He
went so far that the State was aroused as never before.
Race bitterness seethed, and white labor took the bit
into its teeth. It demanded economic disfranchisement
of the Negro to follow political. The Negro must be
kept from buying land, his education must be cur-
tailed, his occupations limited.

This was overshooting the mark and destroying the
whole bi-racial labor situation upon which the Secret
Empire of Georgia is based. Quick action was needed.
The minds of the mob must be turned again and turned
from political and economic thought to pure race
hatred. Immediately the sex motif arose to leader-
ship. All subconsciously, sex hovers about race in342 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

en)

Georgia. Every Negro question at times becomes a
matter of sex. Voting? They want social equality.
Schools? They are after our daughters. Land?
They'll rape our wives. Continually the secrecy, the
veiled suggestion, the open warning pivots on sex;
gossip rages and horrible stories are spread. The
ignorant, the superstitious feed on such flame and go
mad with anger and hate. There is something horri-
ble in the air that swells at times and bursts. The
world goes stark mad.

The Leo Frank case of more recent date was
a natural product, if a slight variant, of a soil never
weeded of its medieval superstitions and long fer-
tilized with racial hate. Fantastic and lurid tales, a
legal lynching, an actual mob murder, the “better
people” rushing in their limousines to the undertaker’s
to view the battered corpse. The chivalric motif pres-
ent, of course. Georgian manhood had defied Georgia
law to avenge a woman, and when the crush of approv-
ing and gloating Atlantans became perilous the Mayor
of the city himself was on the job to leap to the low
roof of the undertaking shop and beseech the crowd
‘n the fair name of Atlanta” not to “‘jostle the ladies.”

It was a novel experience for the Jews of Georgia
and America, and the whole country was shocked.
But the Negroes had long been living under the terror.
So it had been at the culmination of the Hoke Smith
campaign. All restraint was suddenly swept away and
submerged in wild stories of rape and murder.
Atlanta papers rushed out extra editions each with a
new horror afterward proved wholly fictitious or
crassly exaggerated. On a Saturday night the white
Atlanta laborers arose and murdered every Negro theyGEORGIA 343

 

 

could catch in the streets. For three days war and
rapine raged—then the streets of the Empire City sank
into awful silence. Hoke Smith became Governor and
Senator, and the industrial and political system were
intact. So, too, ten years later Hugh Dorsey rose to
the governorship on the bones of the mob’s victim.

The terror under which the Negroes live is no ab-
stract thing. It is no exceptional misfortune that picks
an isolated and perhaps not wholly undeserving victim.
On the contrary it is the self-respecting, the thrifty,
the successful colored man who is its shining target.
Their way is thorny as that of no other in this land
of ours. Let me refer to one instance based on the
published authority of the Governor of Georgia.

A Negro of about sixty years of age had bought
ten years ago a farm of one hundred and forty acres
and Irved there with his wife and twelve children. He
had educated three of his daughters who were teach-
ing school. He owned mules, horses, a cow and
thirty-five hogs. During the war he bought a thousand
dollars worth of Liberty Bonds and the white news-
papers praised him. But he lived neighbor to an illit-
erate white man and the white man grew angry at the
colored man’s prosperity. A dispute arose over the
boundary line and one Saturday when the Negro came
to town the marshal arrested him without a warrant,
struck him in the face and knocked him down. Other
white men rushed at him and choked and beat him.
His two daughters started to help him. One was
kicked in the stomach and the three, together with a
son, were all locked in jail. The girl who had been
kicked was deathly sick and lay moaning and begging
for medical aid for herself and father, but they were——--——~_- a!

ea

  

 

     
 
 
 

344 THESE UNITED STATES

 

left locked up all night without attention and ignorant
of the charge against them. They were tried in the
Superior court and the father was sentenced to twelve
months in the chain gang and a fine of two hundred
and fifty dollars. The girls were fined fifty dollars
each and the son one hundred dollars. While the
family was in jail a mob, led by the town marshal, went
to the house in the night and shot into it with their
guns. “Next morning the woman with her children
fled from her home never to return.”

And yet there is steady progress—up-stream. In
truth there can be no successful economic change in
Georgia without the black man’s aid. First of all the
Negroes are property holders. Sixty years after slav-
ery and despite everything Georgia Negroes own two
million acres of land, a space nearly as large as the
late kingdom of Montenegro. Their taxable property
saved from low wages and systematic cheating has
struggled up from twelve millions of dollars in 1890
to over sixty millions today; and now and then even
the remnant of their political power strikes a blow.
Once, in Atlanta, for instance, some dozen years ago,
the candidate of the “White Primary’ who was Mayor
of the city was found drunk in a bawdy-house just
before election and was arrested by the police before
they recognized their distinguished prisoner. This
proved too much for the city to swallow and in the
regular election they threw off their disfranchising
vows to the ‘White Primary’ and, assisted by the
small number of registered colored voters, elected a
decent man as mayor.

Again but last year in Savannah a fight within the
“White Primary” between the corrupt gang andGEORGIA 345

 

 

decency gave twelve hundred Negro voters the bal-
ance of power. Determined efforts were made to in-
timidate the Negroes. Skull and cross bones signed
by the Ku Klux Klan were posted on the doors of eight
of the prominent Negro churches with the legend,
“This is a white man’s fight; keep away.” Warning
slips were put under the doors of colored citizens. In
vain. The colored voters held their own political
meetings, financed their own campaign, went into the
election and of their twelve hundred votes it was
estimated that less than a hundred went for the gang;
the reform mayor was elected.

The hills twist and pass. Slowly the climate
changes—cold pines replace the yellow monarchs of
the South. There is no cotton. From the door of
hewn log cabins faces appear—dead white faces and
drawn, thin forms. Here live the remnants of the
poor whites.

I am in the hot, crowded, and dirty Jim Crow car,
where I belong. A black woman with endless babies
is faring forth from Georgia, North. Two of the
babies are sitting on parts of me. I am not comfort-
able. ‘Then I look out of the window and somehow it
seems to me that here in the Jim Crow car and there
in the mountain cabin lies the future of Georgia—in
the intelligence and union of these laborers, white and
black, on this soil wet with their blood and tears.
They hate and despise each other today. They lynch
and murder body and soul. They are separated by
the width of a world. And yet—and yet, stranger
things have happened under the sun than understand-
ing between those who are born blind.TETiT

 

    
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  

THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
WARD OF THE NATION

By JOHN W. OWENS

THE District of Columbia, like the mule, has neither
pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity. No founding
fathers, as President Harding used to say, moved
hardily to the banks of the Potomac, conquered the
wilderness, wrung a living plus an increasing surplus
from nature, and fashioned their own traditions and
standards for the families they reared and established.
And Washington, which is the District of Columbia,
walking in pride and a certain glory, has no dream
today of perpetuating itself through the generations.
It has no dream of something that it alone created
and is like nothing else, and that it would have repro-
duced in faithful recurrence fifty years hence, 100
years hence—something that its own struggles have
worked into its warp and woof, something that gives
it separateness and distinction as of its own right.

To the north, east, and west lies Maryland; to the
south lies Virginia. Maryland is Maryland, and its
people are Marylanders; Virginia is Virginia, and its
people are Virginians. If in pregnant hours a call goes
forth to the sons of Maryland or Virginia there is
raised a spiritual panorama in which these men per-
ceive the manner of meh their forbears were. The
wells of tradition are stirred, and the dreams men
weave for their children become realities to be pre-
served and protected.

246THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA 347

 

 

But such a call to the men of the District, tucked
away between Maryland and Virginia, raises no pano-
rama of the past, stirs no traditions, vitalizes no pe-
culiar dreams of a people for its posterity. For the
man of the District is a wayfarer and sojourns in a
tavern. His yesterday was spent in another clime.
His tomorrow, as expressed in the future of his chil-
dren, he hopes will be spent in another clime, unless he
be of that minority which sets soft living above achieve-
ment in the theory of what is good. He lives in social
and economic suspension.

The explanation of this unnatural state of being is
simple. About a century and a quarter ago the Federal
government needed an area about ten miles square in
which to place its capital and administrative seat.
Maryland and Virginia ceded the land. The small
section south of the Potomac was returned to Virginia
within a few years. In the area remaining, named the
District of Columbia—a gaudy title when one stops to
think—the Federal government set about the creation
of a community wholly dependent upon it and wholly
subservient to it.

The District was to be a capital city and nothing
else, at once the tool and the jewel of the ambitious
new nation. Here the tradesman, then swiftly strength-
ening his claim to position, was confined to his ancient
part of standing and waiting, denied encouragement
to increase his substance or to expand his life. Here
the industrialist of a later day, endowed with so large
a share of the creative genius of the country, was
viewed askance. Life and growth in the District were
to be in predestined grooves. Nothing was wanted or
welcomed that did not supplement or complement the348 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

pedestaled official existence. The normal life of an
aspiring, variegated American community was taboo.
Inevitably, the people of the District became a
people without roots. They could not plant them-
selves deeper than the topsoil. The gusty winds of
political ambition or self-interest, or the cleaner winds
of genuine patriotism, blew them in; they lodged on
the surface a little time and plucked bravely at the
soil; but long before penetration could be effected the
winds had completed their circuit and were back, bear-
ing new human plants and ruthlessly forcing the old to
make way. So it has been and so it will be.
Washington has been denied the most priceless of
human values, most priceless because with it all other
values may be realized and without it all others may
be lost—it has been denied the value that exists in the
right to dig in and build a roof-tree. In that right
families attain security, learn independence, and bring
about the interplay and interdevelopment of code and
character. In that right families aggregate into com-
munities that possess treasures as imperishable as man
may hope to hold. The right has been denied to Wash-
ington not alone in the artificiality of its design; equally
it has been denied in an adverse process of selection
of population. Government-created, government-de-
veloped, it has repelled the constructive, independence-
seeking type of men, and has been a magnet to the
opposite type. It is the haven of the congenital hired
man, through the practical workings of the representa-
tive system of government. That system is the best
we know, but inevitably sucks into office a vast army
of men of the lower grades of spirit.
We may see that clearly today, and I suspect thatTHE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA 349

 

 

it always might have been seen. Every man who knows
politics knows that the genuinely proud men interested
in public affairs and in government seldom go to Con-
gress or even into administrative offices. The men who
go are the order takers. It may be that they take
their orders from the popular will. It may be that
they take their orders from some selfish clique. It may
be that they take good orders: and it may be that they
take. bad orders. But they take orders, and they are
men for whom there is no diminution in the formal
honor of high office if it be attained by subserviency,
either to mass will or to clique will. The men of erect
spirit stay at home. If they are of generous mold, they
help mightily in fashioning a mass will that gives orders
for the common weal. If they are of selfish mold, they
help in building powerful cliques that give orders for
the benefit of classes. There they stop. They can
neither bring themselves to kneel, ear to ground, to
catch the first rumble of the mass voice, nor bring
themselves to respond when wires are pulled. The ex-
ceptions, the men big enough to hold office by mastering
and guiding the mass. mind or by overcoming the wire-
pullers, are one in a hundred.

Take our present Senate. Borah, the progressive,
may be classed as one of the exceptions. So may Un-
derwood, the conservative, and Glass of Virginia, the
Wilsonian Democrat. There are a few others. In
the House the percentage is no higher. And it is to: be
observed that of the men who have served in the ex-
ecutive department within a generation the three who
most conspicuously played their parts in the spirit of
mastery—Cleveland, Roosevelt, and Wilson—all
reached the White House by short cuts; they had little350 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

or no service in the bowing and scraping lesser grades
of public life. Indeed, Wilson, the most truly im-
perious and masterful of the three, had been but two
years in the public service when he entered the White
House. Such a type as Wilson could never have reached
the White House through the gradual stages of po-
litical preferment as did McKinley, Harding, and
Coolidge. Either he would have been flung on the
scrapheap as a nuisance of stubbornness or his will
would have been broken and he would not have been
Wilson.

Not such as they, but the order-taking, favor-hunt-
ing, favor-doing, ear-to-the-ground products of the
representative system constitute the nucleus of the pop-
ulation brought into the city of government. And sur-
rounding this nucleus is the horde of less fortunate
players of the same breed in the game of politics. In
the early days this army of hangers-on and job-seekers
was a somewhat picturesque lot, petty in its values, but
moved by love of excitement and encounter. In time,
the classified civil service was instituted to abolish the
worst abuses practiced by and for these little politicians.
In its operation as a selective process of humans, the
new system substituted the seeker after small security
for the seeker after small adventure. The instances in
which this is not true—they will come to mind at once:
the fine and devoted specialists to be found in the
despised bureaucracy, Heaven’s fools who serve some
splendid idea without appreciation and often without
comfortable living, and the ambitious women who
turned years ago to the government service because
the doors of private enterprise were closed—these in-(SRRER ED!

  

THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA 451

 

 

stances do not affect the rule. The enormous majority
is content to be fitted into trivial niches for life.

The two classes—the political representatives, or
more accurately the political agents, and the army of
regimented employees—are fringed by another class
with which they have natural affinity; the paid cour-
tiers of myriad industries, interests, groups, and classes
back in the country which wish the government to do
or not to do specific things. Big and little, they are in
Washington by the thousands, minding the business and
running the errands of forthright doers who spend
their days many miles from Washington. It matters
not whom these courtiers serve. They may work for
the anti-prohibitionists or for the militant churches:
for tariff barons or for farmers; for railroads and
mines or for labor; for capitalism or for socialism.
It makes no difference. Under the skin these Wash-
ington hired men are the same. Their business is to
be agreeable, to mold and twist themselves into readi-
ness for insertion into any situation. Making friends
is their trade. The driving, purposeful, self-sustaining
man of the railroads, the farms, the churches, or what
not, rarely takes the Washington representation of his
interest. And more rarely does he remain.

And these classes plus the idle rich who come to
exchange their gilded hospitality for admittance into
oficial society are Washington. Tropic soil for the
“get next” philosophy—that is the real Washington,
the real District of Columbia, precisely as industrialism
is the real life of Pennsylvania and agrarianism is the
real life of Kansas. The bar, so influential in molding
the character of many communities, is in Washington
merged in an overwhelming degree into the life ofa

 

352 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

officialdom and the courtier fringe of officialdom.
There are fine and able lawyers who devote them-
selves to their profession in a rigid manner, but they
are not the eye-filling lawyers of Washington. The
eye-filling lawyers often were in public life a little while
ago, and are the kind of men who always are on ex-
cellent and intimate terms with important figures in
public life.

Business men are on like footing. A few are a part
of the real Washington. The majority mind their own
business during office hours, and beyond that might as
well be in Philadelphia or Atlanta. Their story is re-
vealed by the Jewish proprietor of a department store
who commutes to Baltimore, forty miles away. So
with the newspapers. The Star is part of the real
Washington, and it would.almost as soon dynamite its
fine new building as attack an important public official.
The balance of the press is not of Washington.
Part is Heart, and that part could be moved bodily
to any other city without causing a wrinkle. Another
part is Scripps, and the same is true of it. An-
other part is McLean, and that part is McLean.
Such, in fact, is the story wherever one turns in Wash-
ington.

Obviously, such a community is an elusive shadow.
Subjectively, it is unreal, for the people who form and
shape its life are not themselves; they are always other
people who live somewhere else. Nor is Washington
objectively real. It creates nothing, its material bar-
renness being matched by its cultural barrenness. The
percentage of formally educated, traveled, sophisti-
cated people, possessed of strong cultural tints, is un-
usually high. But Washington’s own genuine contribu-A Fi ,
anal aeaae j een) eeeeaaea aa} eaaae Baae) PRO RPRUO OEE RE ESGEA
RUUROSTORGASEASRRURORGRSERORGOEARGDSRASUBESLORIEEORURE:

  

THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA — 353

 

 

tions to literature, to music, to art in any form are
small. Forget the contributions that somehow find
their way out of New York and Chicago with their
noisy, discordant millions. Compare the contributions
of Washington, save those of transients, with those
of San Francisco or Boston, denatured as both have
become.

Even Main Street, nowhere more derided than in
Washington, is superior in the realities of life and
effort. Her factories may be ghastly, her shops tawdry,
her houses gingerbread, her people fried-suppered, and
her esthetics infantile. Nevertheless, she is what she
is, and by the grace of God she fights her way to her
own peculiar destiny—living, thinking, feeling, as her
own intelligence, experience, and taste may direct; she
is the treasurer of verities, of values in which are the
germ of growth. Main Street is true. But Washing-
ton, holding herself the elect, is and may be only a
quivering fluid, a veritable Reuben among communities
in the instability of its life, producing nothing, having
nothing, meaning nothing—here yesterday, gone to-
morrow, seeking the fulness of life between suns.

Well, I have preached my little sermon. Now let
me to my little confession. I would rather live in
Washington than in any other place in this country.
When my children are older perhaps I shall pull up
and go to some place where there are fewer people
who sport in the froth, and more people who take
raw, ugly things and painfully fashion them into useful
or beautiful things. But until I am, say, at the half-
century mark, let me have Washington. A dance hall
is a pleasanter place than a factory or a laboratory
or a study; conforming travelers of the broad path are354 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

easier on their fellows’ elbows than angular men of
ideas and purposes. Here in Washington the human
tides roll up gently from the ends of the earth, and
mingle in a life'in which prickly ideas are soaped over
with polite customs and conventions. ‘These tides bring
color, atmosphere, cosmopolitanism, and a certain deb-
onair spirit of chance which are pleasant to feel, and
convey an agreeable measure of stimulation. In Wash-
ington the procession of all things that are American
may be seen and felt—from the painted and befeath-
ered real American, who may be glimpsed there
occasionally to better advantage than on distant
reservations, to those individuals, whose lineaments the
newspapers have made familiar in millions of house-
holds. And there is a certain largeness of character
and purpose expressed in, if not by, our national capital.

Here we find what has long been the loveliest of
American cities—and growing apace inits charm. Here
we discover the refutation of the elsewhere visible truth
that our cities are ugly, utilitarian, and invariably at-
tempting feebly and too late to change the mold in
which the grim struggle for growth and power has cast
them. In Washington we have our sole example of
the planned city—laid out through the forethought of
Washington and Jefferson, by the art and genius of
Pierre Charles Enfant. If his landscaping has not
been wholly conserved, if of late colonial mansions
fragrant with important tradition have been swept
away to make room for needlessly crowding depart-
mental office buildings with but a tablet to hallow the
vanished past, the consecration of the city to the things
more akin to the spirit remains. Wide, radiating ave-
nues, terminating in inspiring vistas; emerald jewels ofTHE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA  3¢¢

 

 

squares, circles, and triangles at the intersections: a
rambling park where nature is undefiled; an unspoiled
waterfront. Spaciousness, leisure, and grace are here.
It is as if the nation, like a family whose early days
were spent in hardship, had planned to shield apart,
to cherish especially one of its fairest daughters, a ward
perhaps, to keep her from the moil of conflict, to
lavish upon her the offerings of all the others. So
Washington, undisfigured by the grime of factories and
the huddle of industrial tenements, has become the altar
upon which our people seek to lay the best expression
of their aspirations. Everywhere new monuments to
the many American cults, architecturally splendid, ap-
propriate, representing the mellowed dignity and taste
that come with achievement, are rising. Realizations,
they are, and worthy ones of the memories and move-
ments that make up the American heritage.

There stands the superb domed American Capito]—
built from the rock of Virginia and Massachusetts—
eternal reminder of the great national ideal. There
in enduring stone soars the shaft that commemorates
the father of our country. Facing it from afar, crystal-
lized in the whitest of marble, shines the memorial to
the preserver of the Union. National cathedrals in
prospect; shrines of science in actuality; a great Ma-
sonic temple, a temple to typically American fellow-
ship—before long every grouping in the land will be
represented. So Washington, lacking its own epic,
without its own vision, perhaps wanting its own soul,
1s becoming a concrete expression of the soul of
America. Here is beauty, made by man, assembled
by Americans as tokens of the civilization that is in
far and near parts of these United States,ee
ee

ALASKA
OUR RETURNING FRONTIER

By BRUCE ROGERS

Tue frontier is winning back Alaska. The placer-
gold cycle has almost gone and the tide of adventurers
who swept out new trails through the tundra wastes
and planted great wooden capitals on the Yukon and
the Arctic Coast has backwashed to the greater “Out-
side.’ Nome and its Canadian forerunner, Dawson,
are lined with empty houses, falling to pieces, and the
old-timers still remaining are relics of a quarter cen-
tury that has gone. A few lame-duck political ap-
pointees survive in their store clothes, but they are
pathetic, hothouse growths.

This is the Arctic Alaska of gold, malamute, and in-
tense winter cold. The southern shores have not fared
so disastrously. In the panhandle region there is some
permanency, though Juneau and its sister cities are not
flourishing as they were earlier in the century, despite
the more genial climate of this southeastern strip. An-
chorage and Valdez, halfway between Juneau and the
Arctic, are holding on, sadly diminished, but not the
ghosts that Nome has become. And every summer a
seasonal life invades the salmon streams that indent
the seaboard for thousands of miles from Ketchikan
to Bristol Bay. If you doubt this ask Dan Sutherland,
delegate to Congress, to tell of the fishing fleets and
“China gangs” that come annually on their lucrative
excursions. But Arctic Alaska, once resplendent with
356ALASKA 357

 

her gold-digging hordes, js saying farewell to the
white race and is fading away to the lonely whiteness
that shrouds her hills from November to May.

Yet physically Arctic Alaska has changed little, ex-
cept that her surface gold has been scratched out of
her creeks and beaches and the Caucasian biped is
giving way to the Eskimo and Indian once more. The
Siberian reindeer has to some extent taken the place of
the caribou herds. Yet big caribou herds remain,
returning a little from the hinterland to which they
have been pushed and in some cases interbreeding with
their tamer relatives. The bull moose, lynx, and wolf
still flourish. The gigantic brown bear, greatest of the
ursine family, is rearing her cubs, and the ice of Bering
Sea floats the walrus and polar bear. Alaska’s hills
and valleys*are abloom with glorious flowers in early
spring and swept in winter by the fierce winds that have
blown over them since time began in the Arctic.

Arctic Alaska is too barren a pasturage for the
white man, now that the surface gold has been
skimmed away, but it throbs with its own life.
Eskimos still fringe the coastline from the Kuskokwim
to the Canadian north. Hardy folks they, whose snow
lands have not been coveted as were those of the
Indians south of ‘Fifty-four Forty.” They are sur-
viving as a race, the white man’s diseases, even the
Spanish influenza that in 1918 emptied two-thirds of
the Seward Peninsula igloos. Their ways have been
modified but not revolutionized by contact with the
missionary, the teacher, gold-digger, fur buyer, and
whaler. Some are reindeer herdsmen now, but for the
most part they trap the fox and catch the seal and
walrus and whale, though with steel-toothed traps,

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high-powered rifles, and bombs. The igloo remains
the prevailing architecture because no white men’s
housing methods will keep out the cold like these semi-
dugouts, covered with walrus hide and turf; when col-
lecting a little dog-sled load of driftwood is a half
day’s job, the home must conserve heat. The igloo
clothing industry remains. No white man’s garb of
cotton or wool will keep out Arctic winds like that
ancient garment, the parka, a one-piece tunic of fur
that fits snugly from head to feet. Crawl through the
narrow tunnel into an igloo and you find the women
folks chewing the tough hides of Arctic animals to
make them pliable for their mates to wear. Teeth
still manage this difficult tanning task though sugar
and white flour are softening the molars. The white
man’s price system has entered into the Eskimo’s life,
but chiefly in relation to his dealings with the outsider.
The old communal village unity is yet the most pro-
nounced characteristic of an Eskimo settlement. Some
further changes have taken place through the introduc-
tion of Christianity—a different creed for every part
of Eskimo Alaska, the territory having been parceled
out among the missions by the government. But little
moral priggishness has come with Christianity—the
Eskimo’s blood is too warm.

Alaska’s authentic history for the white man began
with the voyage of Bering and Chirikov in 1741. Un-
til that time the Eskimos and Indians had lived out a
hundred generations untroubled by the outside world
except for the visits of other Eskimos from East Cape,
Siberia, who came in big open skin boats to trade.
And for nearly a century and a half after the firstimperial flag was raised over the northland white in-
truders were few. A rough and ready census of the
whites in this 600,000 square miles of remoteness in
1867, the year Seward purchased Alaska for $7,000,-
000, shows only 483 Russians and Siberians and 150
Americans, outside of troops, with 200 other Cau-
casians. Set off against these were 27,000 natives,
with about 1,400 half-breeds. By 1880, after thirteen
years of American occupancy, there were only 430
whites.

America was even less interested in her new posses-
sions than the Czar had been. For the first seventeen
years Congress did not bother to set up any govern-
ment. Instead it granted a fur-seal monopoly to the
Alaska Commercial Company, which paid $300,000
into the Federal treasury annually for the privilege of
making much more. If the Alaska Commercial Com-
pany chose to conduct a school for the natives of
Unalaska, the United States did not interfere, nor was
it interested. America assumed no responsibility for
her new lands. If men and women up there wanted to
live together the United States had no provision for
the recording of marriages, nor could title be given
to property. Trial by jury did not exist. There was
only a military occupation that consisted of groups of
garrisoned soldiery without civil functions. Our
troops in those days were not so versatile as our
marines in Haiti today.

It was the gold miner who brought political history
to Alaska. A preliminary gold rush to the Juneau dis-
trict in 1881, a mere trickle as compared to those that
flooded the Arctic in the late nineties, brought con-
flicting property interests and led to the appointment

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of a governor in 1884. The governor’s arm was
short, however, and as miners began to penetrate the
remote places the only government they knew was
| the one they created themselves under ‘‘Miners’ Law,”’
with its standard punishments of hanging, banishment,
and fines.
The placer-gold cycle that gave Alaska a white
man’s boom began with the discovery of the great
| Klondike placers in 1896, gained impetus in the creeks
ai and on the beaches of Nome three years later, took
| another great drive forward after several additional
years with the uncovering of the richer “third beach”
where prehistoric waters had washed, and wound
along in diminished ratio, through many stampedes
until the emptying of the placer gravel beds.
Alaska cried out to the common man, to the fellow
| a with two strong arms and a fearless heart, who saw a
| chance to carve out the fortune that was denied him in
a civilization crystallized outside. Just as big business
was taking possession of the production of wealth in
Pu the populated southland, Alaska flaunted her poke
sacks before the eyes of the adventurer. It took little
time for a new big business, in part Alaska-grown, in
| part a limb of outside capital, to get its hands on most
of the poke sacks, but as long as new placer beds were
i | to be found it was the prospector who was breaking
the trails into the unknown.
| The prospectors came to get rich, but their hunt was
| not a commonplace pursuit of wealth. Nor were the
seekers of gold commonplace. Had they been, they
would have stayed outside to continue work in fac-
tories, on farms, or in professions. They shared few
of the timidities common to most men. Such asALASKA 361

 

quailed before the stern northland quickly found their
way out again. Those who stayed in the Arctic game
were strong and imaginative. It is natural that such
persons fell, almost unconsciously, in love with their
borean mistress and clung to her long after the golden
dowry proved to be an illusion. The magic of this
lonely, desolate, but beautiful land had cast a spell
which they could feel more often than describe. And
the independent life of the prospector—his own boss—
was compensation for the meager material returns. I
remember two of these free-spirited men I ran into in
a gulch several miles behind Nome one June day dur-
ing the war. A friend and I were celebrating the
nocturnal splendor of the summer solstice when sun-
set blends with sunrise. We climbed Anvil Moun-
tain and looked out over the glistening ice fields that
glorified Bering Sea to the west of our beach city and
turned in that vast quiet to the shining rounded sum-
mits that stretched behind us, as far as eye could see,
like a titanic garden of snowy bosoms.

‘How can one leave such beauty?” I asked.

“Only if one is starved out,” said my friend.

A. few miles further on we came to a little cabin
squeezed between two hills. There a bearded middle-
aged miner with a round-faced, muscular Wife, a six-
year-old daughter, whose cheeks glowed like Alaskan
poppies, and his partner, a young bachelor, showed
us their diggings—a shaft down to the “bench” where
the gold dust lay. Beside the shaft was the gravel
dump built from the bucketfuls below. This they
would wash out later for its treasure particles. Not
much gold, but enough to live on. They had cleared
$500 the year before, after sledding in provisions from———

362

 

THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

Nome. Both the men said they would never quit
the gold game as long as it kept them alive, no mat-
ter how simply. They liked the country and they
liked to work for themselves; that was the way they
said it. ‘‘We’ve put ourselves on a seven-hour day,”
said the younger man proudly. ‘Their only fear was
that the gold streak, slim as it was, would peter out
and they would have trouble leasing another one.
Half the Nome district miners left that summer—
half of the scanty remnant of the big migrations of
twenty years before. ‘The richer placers had been
stripped and the big companies had taken nearly all
the remaining ones. Men like my two friends were
lessees, virtually tenants. And most of the gold dig-
gers of Nome were actually wage earners. They
didn’t like to admit it. They would take a summer’s
earnings and prospect until these were spent, but not
many of them were panning out their own gold much
of the time. That summer the wage-earning miners
rebelled. There was a big strike throughout the Nome
district for the eight-hour day. The strike created
much indignation among the mine operators and their
satellites who controlled the district politically. Com-
ing as it did during the war for democracy it was
denounced as seditious, and the indictment and trial
followed of the editor of the miners’ daily paper, the
Nome Industrial Worker, official organ of the Nome
Miners’ Union, which was affliated with the Inter-
national Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers’ Union. A
former editor of the same paper was indicted and
tried earlier in the year when the operators were get-
ting ready for the strike. Yet this labor walkout,
thus described as treason, was called solely for theALASKA 363

 

 

purpose of enforcing something that the people had
declared for at the polls. An eight-hour-day law had
carried at the territorial referendum the year before,
by 85 per cent of the votes cast—and then was nulli-
fied by the courts.

Nome was aging in those days, but it was still
capable of abundant emotion. The strike aroused the
fighting spirit of both sides as the Great War failed
to do. The reader should not conclude hastily from
this that Nome lacked patriotism, nor need he jump
to that conclusion when I admit the fact that not a
single eligible male had gone voluntarily into the cus-
tody of the local army officers who were attempting
to recruit against the ‘“Hun.” The town’s Liberty
Bond record ought to refute such suspicions; Nome’s
social leaders never wearied of telling of their inde-
fatigable efforts in the bond and Red Cross drives.
And their patriotism came welling to the surface in
full measure during the big strike. Our sturdy old
mayor looms large in my memory in this connection
as one who showed his love for the Stars and Stripes
by his heartfelt denunciation of its reputed enemies
who were rebelling against the flag and the law in this
“outrageous strike.’ Our mayor could always be re-
lied on to defend the Constitution, and he is today
protecting his country from a judge’s seat in the Arctic
to which he was raised by an admiring President.

This city father represented a different type of
Northlander from the prospector. Yet he came to
Alaska almost with the first, giving up a rather brief-
less law trade in a Minnesota city and reaching Nome
in 1900. With a shrewd eye for the things that lead
to honor and success he let others break their picks

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on frozen gravel and their hopes in futile suits to
recover stolen claims, and attached himself to the most
powerful mining interests as a legal adviser. When
I knew him he was the right-hand man of the domi-
nant millionaire of Nome, local attorney for the mil-
lionaire’s company, head of the millionaire’s reindeer
syndicate, and mayor—governing in the interest of the
millionaire.

In those days Nome was able to support only one
local millionaire. Or perhaps I should say, as the
millionaire’s friends would have it, that he supported
Nome by giving employment to so many of its citi-
zens. That was a point of view I have heard debated
on street corners between business folk and certain
radicals connected with the miners’ and longshore-
men’s unions. Anyhow this millionaire was a striking
personality, who held power by virtue of his wealth
and the force of character by which he had wrested
it from less lucky holders. His evolution from a Nor-
wegian-Lapp reindeer herder of 1898 to the economic
master of Nome testifies to the opportunity the
Northland under free American institutions gave to
a poor man to rise to riches. This Norwegian-Lapp
immigrant used the reindeer service merely as a means
of transportation to Eldorado. Once in Alaska he
promptly quit the moss-eating beasts for the treasure-
bearing gravels. His claims were rich and with rare
business understanding he quickly amassed other claims
by ways the law subsequently sanctioned. The hard
fact that many prospectors had to face was that some-
one who came to a claim after them had been there
before them, according to the dates in the Recorder’s
books. Again and again in the Alaska gold-mining4 meant F
aaa A i. eeu ifia ava ToRRRUnG eaanae Gl eRe: ‘Seebaaee ae
PERRAROOREUREAEECUOSURRATASEOOUOGOGAPRDOROOOOAOAERUHOAGHORIERARORO REDS EAED

  

ALASKA

 

 

industry was borne out the prophecy that the last shall
be first. By this time, it will be observed, Alaska had
a government—and lawyers.

The big man of Nome came to serious grief only
once, in those early days, say the yarn-spinning “sour-
doughs.” It happened when the original discoverer
of the “third beach” line found that his discovery was
not sanctioned by law. He met the power behind
the law on the streets of Nome, and the invisible gOv-
ernment went down so hard that he stayed down until
the prospector had finished massaging his anatomy
with a pair of heavy shoe-packs. Direct action won;
the law saw the light and the original finder of “third
beach” retired a plutocrat, though the miners who
first filed on the claims further down this greatest
placer streak lost their property to the claim-jumpers
acting for the millionaire and his fellows.

Nome’s richest man was no hypocrite. He would
listen to a radical union man on the street, clap him
on the shoulder and laugh: “I believe in socialism,
too, but fifty years from now.’’ He would drink with
the gang; he spent no time at worship and was never
ashamed of his Lapp derivation, though the Best
People of Nome, who got their living in the sunshine
of his bank’s favor, were always embarrassed when
someone referred to “the Lapp.”

One cannot write of Alaska without telling of its
politics, for politics is the great winter industry. As
other means of livelihood have waned politics has at-
tracted more and more of the best brains. It takes
a hardy and resourceful player to make good in this
fierce game in the Northland, as ferocious as a mala-
mute dog fight and governed by the same ethics. A

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few years ago the little town of Nome, shrunk to a
few hundred from the 30,000 of 1900 days, was stag-
ing as hot a three-cornered fight within the Demo-
cratic Party as the donkey’s stable has ever seen. ‘The
Federal judge was trying to prevent the marshal’s re-
appointment by calling him names over the wireless
to Washington, and the marshal was throwing bombs
into the judge’s reputation. In fact, it had been as-
serted and currently believed that this particular judge
had been sent into the Division “to get the marshal.”
He found much difficulty in revealing to the people
of Nome any other qualifications for the appointment,
but won for himself the title of ‘“Windy Bill” in his
brief stay on the job. A weaker faction waited on
the outside for both sides to destroy themselves. In
the midst of the fracas a curious document came back
to Nome that showed the marshal’s technique. It was
a list of leading citizens of Nome and many lesser
persons, naming them severally as pro-Germans, anti-
British Irish, I. W. W., and ex-convicts. This list,
which had fallen into the wrong hands in Washington,
coincided with the panel from which the grand jury
was selected. The judge’s henchmen promptly sent
carbon copies about the town and a new list of ene-
mies to the marshal had been created. One of the
marshal’s deputies explained the whys and wherefores
of this shrewdly calculated move, which only chance
had nullified. The marshal had had a tip that his
enemies planned his downfall along conventional
Alaska lines. The plot was to “frame” him the com-
ing winter with an Eskimo woman prisoner. The
Eskimo woman upon whom the marshal was to make
an imaginary attack had not yet been arrested butMUPTEVETTSU EST EUERSTEA TT UEEO STAT TTERTAPOA CONTE COATAS OCP ERRA OED SUSPOROCOSe EU BEED

  

ALASKA 367

 

 

at some time during the winter there was certain to
be such a prisoner. The game was to present evidence
of the attack to the grand jury and have the marshal
indicted. When the marshal learned of this plan he
countered by discrediting the grand jury in advance.
He sent to Washington a list of the grand jury tales-
men, omitting none, and coupling them with whatever
description would do the most good, so that whatever
happened he could say: ‘Well, look who my enemies
are.”’

Hitting an enemy by connecting his name with an
Eskimo woman was a favorite method of warfare in
Alaskan politics. The district attorney told me that
he had barely escaped a diabolical plot to get him drunk
and photographed in snug juxtaposition to a copper-
colored member of the gentler sex.

Alaskans there are who have married into Eskimo
families and become “‘squaw men,” but these are prin-
cipally of the older generation. The white trader at
Point Barrow, the extreme north tip of the territory,
is a “‘squaw man” with many children. He has held
several Federal appointments and is wholly a reputable
person. In the older days, when Alaska was younger
and fresher, she had a different standard of respecta-
bility. In those days there were even marriages from
“The Alley.” But now that the rough, roving gold
digger has given way to the politicians and the agents
of the big companies such things are past. The only
honor in recent years paid in Nome to a lady from
‘The Alley” was when the oldest resident there died.
Then Nome turned out in mass to her funeral. But
that meant little; Nome always would come to a
funeral or a wedding.- ~

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368 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

Whiling away the tedium of an Arctic winter in a
frozen-in town is a matter of much gossiping. Gossip
starts in November in a sprightly, good-natured
fashion; it becomes vinegarish by the New Year, and
is gall and wormwood at Easter. But the arts and
letters have their share in winter diversion. Alaskans
are great readers, especially the lonely prospectors in
their cabins. The townsfolk go in for amateur the-
atricals of a homespun kind. One little Seward Penin-
sula mining town, Council, outdid Nome itself in this
respect, for the Council people had to depend entirely
on themselves, having no movie in the early days. In
the small group of white men there were half a dozen
creative artists. One, the government teacher to the
Eskimos, is now a university professor and has won
several poetry prizes. Another Council citizen was
a miner and mine-company bookkeeper, a Canadian
Scotchman, who collaborated with the teacher in a
book of Alaskan poetry that for racy color amuses
me more than anything Service did with the possible
exception of “Sam McGee.’ McLennan lacked con-
ventional verse form, but he served bits of captivating
life. His rhyme of two French Canadian trappers
and a cinnamon bear is a screaming farce, and ‘‘Mariar
Jane,” the tale of Old Scroggins and his squaw, is an
Alaskan classic. Poor Mariar Jane. She was drowned
in the Yukon and ‘“‘went to feed the Yukon fish that
fed her all her life. Every silver salmon I’ve ketched
since, I think of my poor wife.’ And his final la-
ment: ‘I’d ruther lose Old Towser than poor Mariar
Jane.”

Attend an old-time miners’-union smoker and get
impromptu entertainment unsurpassed. A ScotchmanALASKA

 

sings a love song in brogue. An old English miner
leans on a stick and begins a’ ‘wo-part sea ballad—
he had once been a sailor—which is taken up by
another old man from the audience. Up comes the
village tailor, a vital young Russian Jew, and gives
them a Russian revolutionary song, and follows to a
storm of applause from sentimental men with a “Oh,
Johnny, Oh, Johnny how I love you.” No Ku Klux
spirit in this port for world argonauts. Morris Pas-
coft was the most popular fellow in town.

All the while the beer cups were passing.

What is left in Alaska today is surreptitious boot-
legging and sneaking hootch parties. But in the days
of the placer-gold cycle Alaska had the broad con-
viviality of the pioneer saloon, the one place where
class lines broke down, where patent leather and
mukluk pressed the same brass rail. It was my privi-
lege to be in Nome on that historic evening before
Alaska went dry by territorial enactment. The great
Board of Trade saloon, a barnlike place with bars
and pool tables, was jammed with hundreds of men.
Champagne was two bits and all you could use. Every-
one loved everyone else. Even the old mayor en-
deared himself to the crowd as he climbed the bar at
the fateful hour of midnight, when no license went
into effect, and cried: ‘‘Boys, the way you are be-
having shows we don’t need prohibition.” Then a big
Danish miner turned the clock back.

But the clock could not be turned back for long.
The placer-gold cycle was passing into history and
with it the romantic glory of white man’s Alaska. The
frontier has been coming back despite the railroad from

es rea

  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   

370 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

the southern coast to Fairbanks. The railroad is a big
engineering achievement, but it has failed to restore
the life that this capital of the Tanana River valley had
in the old dog-team days, because the placer gold has
pretty well gone and no other industries in the in-
terior are taking its place. Agricultural experiment
stations have done interesting things, but the utmost
to expect is garden produce for the workers in other
industries—and where are those industries? ‘The im-
mense coal deposits of Alaska are comparatively un-
used. There are many different explanations as to why
this is so. The government bureaucracy is blamed
and so are the corporations, but the fact is unanswer-
able that the States outside already have a mining in-
dustry capable of producing twice the coal that markets
absorb. Some copper is still coming from southern
Alaska, and considerable gold quartz operations con-
tinue in the southeastern panhandle strip that is com-
paratively accessible to Seattle, but the gigantic areas
of the body of Alaska are going beyond the horizon.
The cost of production is prohibitively greater than
on the outside.

The fisheries produce astonishing wealth, but the
fishers work out of Seattle and San Francisco in the big
fleets of the Alaska Packers’ Association and allied con-
cerns, with offices on the outside. The very fishermen
and cannery hands come from the outside. Alaskans
have little to do with the whole affair except to pro-
test indignantly to Washington at the favoritism which
gives the rich salmon streams to the selections of the
Secretary of Commerce. These fishing expeditions are
reducing the Indians on the salmon streams to degra-
dation. The fish on which they have lived since timeALASKA B77
forgotten are caught at the ocean mouth, and the
native who wants to live can come down there and
work coolie-like alongside imported Filipinos, China-
men, and the medley of homeless workers who sell
themselves to the canneries for the summer. Yes, the
government concerns itself with the fishing situation
a little. Do we not remember how Governor Riggs,
Wilson’s latter appointee, called loudly for a bigger
launch patrol to hunt I. W. W. who were supposed
to be stirring the cannery workers to disloyal thoughts ?
Fourteen hours a day in a cannery, bunking at night
with venereals and tuberculosis carriers, might inspire
disloyalty. Seeing spoiled salmon packed in by tuber-
cular workers, with no United States inspectors to in-
tervene, might tend to the same wayward thinking.
These cannery workers have had their own glimpse
of how Alaska is ruled. The prospectors who saw
their claims jumped through the connivance of govern-
ment officials have had theirs. In fairness, however,
it must be said that there has been one department
of the government which has functioned differently.
The Alaskan Bureau of Education, under the direction
for fifteen years of William T. Lopp, has in
the main worked wisely for its native wards. It has
proceeded on the idea of keeping the Eskimos as self-
sustaining producers through their ownership of the
reindeer originally fetched from Siberia. There is a
danger that the Eskimo may yet become a serf to the
reindeer syndicate that now owns many herds and is
the big market for surplus deer production. But as
yet the reindeer have been a blessing to the natives
who otherwise would find famine on the tundras that
have been depleted of so much of their game. ‘The

 

 

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coming of the reindeer and the fact that his icy wastes
were unattractive to the white man have so far saved
the Eskimo from the fate that is overtaking the In-
dians, even those of Alaska.

If the Eskimos are destroyed, who can take their
place and make a living out of the Arctic wastes? Per-
haps airplane transportation will make great changes.
Perhaps the dream of Charles P. Steinmetz, of blasting
out a wider channel in Bering Straits and warming the
Arctic shores with southern currents, will some day be
a reality and Alaska will be populated by millions of
homesteaders from the south. But meanwhile the ice
king is squeezing out one by one the white folks who
came to the great lone land he had set aside for his
favorite Eskimo children.PORTO RICO
THE AMERICAN COLONY

By LUIS MUNOZ MARIN

THE gods have made Porto Rico the first colonial
experiment of the United States. The slices taken
from Mexico were empty or more American than
Mexican in almost everything but political allegiance:
the power exercised over the Philippines is explicitly
temporary; Hawaii came as a motley of peoples domi-
nated by an American business and planting group.
In Porto Rico, on the other hand, the Americans ac-
quired for permanent use a rather well-rounded civili-
zation by means which, though questioned by not a few,
are considered legal and virtuous by current interna-
tional usage. Here for the first time the American
people undertook to boss a foreign culture. What
manner of place, then, is this first American colony,
and what manner of colonizers are these Americans?

Though Columbus touched the west coast of Porto
Rico during his second trip, it was not until 1509
that the King commissioned Juan Ponce de Leon to
settle the island of San Juan, as Porto Rico was then
known, lay hands on the fabulous treasures that were
supposed to flow down the beds of its rivulets, and
send him his fifth. Juan Ponce found, according to
later estimates, about fifty thousand Indians on the
island, fine-featured, lazy, somewhat nomadic. His
coming decimated them through war, interbreeding,
slavery, the morbus gallicus, small-pox, and the emi-
373

TEEN ae ee)374 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

gration to adjacent islands that the more warlike
among the savages felt compelled to undertake. In
thirty years Indians had become scarce and African
slaves were brought to coax gold out of the increas-
ingly hopeless rivers, and raise truck and cattle. By
the first quarter of the eighteenth century the last In-
dian village had disappeared as such. The melting-
pot seethed with a strong compound of Hispanic and
African spiced with aboriginal blood. The Indian sur-
vives chiefly in the form of aquiline noses on copper-
black faces and, some assert, in the melancholy strain
that is supposed to underlie our temperament. ‘The
pure blacks increase at a slower rate, and those set
down by the census-taker as pure white at a faster rate,
than the population as a whole.

The story of Porto Rico is dull politically, a suc-
cession of governors-general; militarily, the building
of strong fortifications, a few pirate and foreign raids,
nothing on a grand scale; economically, the triumph
of after-dinner delicacies—coffee, sugar, tobacco—
over the dinner itself. In the South American wars
of independence we took no effective interest. A
province of Spain culturally, we were an overseas back-
woods of the motherland. Political life worth men-
tioning was non-existent until the latter half of the
nineteenth century. When liberals got the upper hand
in Spain, which was rarely, they relieved their feel-
ings by granting reforms to the colonies, reforms that,
so far as Porto Rico was concerned, were accepted
gratefully and surprisedly, and relinquished when the
time came dumbly and humbly. Distinguished men
were sports of nature rather than fruits of a culture.
A printing press was not seen in Porto Rico untilPORTO RICO 375

 

1808, and even at that late date it did not come as a
need of the Porto Rican soul but as a convenience of
the govenment which used it to print decrees and the
oficial gazette. Twenty-five years passed before an
unofhicial newspaper appeared, and that was the organ
of the Spanish planters and shopkeepers. It is not
until the middle of the century that the first book of
native literature of which we have record appears—
a shrewd and humorous study of the jtbaros, the white
peasants of the mountain tops. It was about this time
that men of talent born in Porto Rico began to con-
sider themselves Porto Ricans. Political antagonisms
grew between those who came from Spain or retained
the Spanish ways, and those who were somehow dif-
ferent even when no other racial strain intervened.
The growing conflict was not primarily economic, the
Porto Rican leaders being as a rule engaged in the
same ipursuits as the Spaniards. The Spanish gOv-
ernment stupidly fostered this consciousness of varia-
tion, as it did in Cuba. The two islands were the
last shreds of the Spanish imperial power in the world
it had given to mankind. Their essential historical
conditions were the same, their ethnic and economic
development closely akin. They differed strongly in
the extent and nature of their territory and in the
methods of the Spanish tyranny, which were relatively
mild in Porto Rico. It may have been due to these
differences that while Cuba fought two terrible wars
for her independence, in which many Porto Ricans
died, Porto Rico’s only revolution, in 1868, concocted
in part by an American called Van Buren—lasted but
three hours.

Slavery was peacefully abolished in 1872, after manySe

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376 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

 

 

 

years of earnest propaganda by the slave-owners them-
selves. To their attitude Porto Rico undoubtedly
owes in a great measure the admirable relationship
that has prevailed there between the white and negroid
races. Perhaps the island should be of interest to
the American people chiefly as a laboratory experiment
in racial ethics, as there you find the nearest approach
to social equality of this sort within the supposedly
permanent territory of the United States. From the
middle class down, the union of white women to brown
or black men is not unusual enough to astonish or
enrage anybody, and the union of black or brown
women to white men is of course more frequent. Dis-
creet instances of both varieties of intermarriage may
be found in the highest social pinnacles, where the
prejudice against people of Negro extraction finds
expression in drawing-room whispers of What are we
coming to? Lynching, and the humiliation of Ne-
eroes by statute, are unthinkable. There are no segre-
gated districts, though the general division of labor
brought about by climatic conditions has assigned the
mountains to the white man and the coast to the
white and the black. Jim Crow cars would seem as
freakish as a man with two thumbs on one hand
and eight fingers on the other. A white Porto Rican
Senator once traveled through Virginia with two Negro
friends in the black man’s car and justified his pres-
ence there to the conductor by claiming Negro blood.
After close scrutiny the conductor decided to throw
a curtain around the group anyway. I have been told
by Negro delegates to labor conventions held in the
South that they can usually avoid the worst featuresaeeeeaul
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PORTO RICO 377

 

 

of the Southerner’s prejudice by speaking with an ob-
viously foreign, accent!

A good proportion of the school-teachers are of
Negro and mixed extraction and they give their services
to black, brown, and white indiscriminately. Negro
and mulatto lawyers, physicians, journalists, poets,
politicians, philosophers lead a common professional
and spiritual life. One of the ablest and most re-
spected leaders of the Republican Party (the party
that always stands for Americanism and usually for
statehood) was Dr. Barbosa, a Negro physician. A
newspaper in Ponce employed Carrion Maduro, a well-
known Negro writer, as editor with a white staff
under him. Our most expressive composer was
Campos, a light mulatto. One of our good minor
poets, a full-blooded Negro, would take to the road
with a valise full of his works; in every town he would
visit barber-shops, cafés, stores, clubs, and the homes
of the leading citizens, delivering the following sales
talk: “I am Luis Felipe Dessus and this is my book
Flores y Balas; I am offering it to you for sale; its
price is one dollar; its value, if you wish to pay for it
by that standard, is much greater; you may take it or
not, of course; but if you don’t take it after I have
paid this personal call upon you I shall consider it a
personal affront, and act in a manner befitting a gen-
tleman.”’ He accomplished the feat of living largely
by his pen.

Men of both races get along quite well with one
another in all social strata. It is the women of the
upper classes who offer the most stubborn resistance
to a complete acceptance of the tolerant spirit that
dominates our racial relationships. This acts as a

   

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' ee eoe eee378 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

strong determinant of the tendency of whites to marry
whites and of blacks to bring lighter blood into the
family. The American authorities, in so far as they
may act without fear of raising a hullabaloo, intro-
duce segregation, as in the National Guard. And a
desire is growing not to seem inferior to Americans
by their own standard. Class distinctions are on the
whole more vivid than race distinctions. Blanquito
(little white) is applied to one who appears well off,
whatever his color, while negrito (little Negro) does
not mean the opposite but is used by all as a satisfy-
ing expression of erotic tenderness.

You cannot consider the more articulate portion
of the Porto Rican soul without getting the suggestion
that it is afflicted with an inferiority complex. In an
island where nothing grand ever happened everything
happens in the grand manner. Graduating exercises,
speeches about local officials, burial laudations of re-
spectable people are performed with a genuine will to
grandeur. Street-corner meetings are ‘grandiose,’
the applause at the end of a well-turned paragraph is
invariably ‘‘delirious,” any American Congressman is
“the great statesman,” verbose political spellbinders
are always called great orators and frequently night-
ingales. I have been called sublime for donating two
dollars to a worthy cause. Two years ago we had
with us as Governor a Harding appointee named
Reily, a gross politician from Missouri who followed
in a particularly uncouth fashion the usual War De-
partment policy of repressing all important manifesta-
tions of the regional spirit. The island became the
stage of a great drama where the forces of liberty and
oppression came to a grapple. There was plenty ofPORTO RICO 379

 

 

dressing-room trafficing, to be sure, but the proscenium
was kept immaculately tragic. A young politician
threatened a hunger strike against Reily. Another,
of the same party, commented, “It should be the long-
est hunger strike on record,” implying that the striker
would be secretly fed. This gives in tabloid form a
paradox composed of two of our dominant qualities.
We love to strut in a falsely epic atmosphere; we
know it’s sham; and we don’t catch ourselves, but each
other, at it. The two politicians in the story are in-
terchangeable.

Much as we dislike to do our duty we love to be
generous; and many of us lead lives of virtuous trick-
ery and fraud, not to provide for our families, as the
rationalization goes, but to practice largesse. People
who are stingy to those to whom they owe no duty
are comparatively rare. A lawyer may grab all the
land he can from the traditional widows and orphans,
but he will, you may be sure, contribute freely to Bo-
hemian, as distinguished from respectable charities—
paying a poor devil’s fine to get him out of jail, buying
a bankrupt poet’s passage for more fruitful lands,
setting up a fisherman in business with a boat and
nets. A jibaro earning sixty cents a day during the
“live time’ may, as he thinks, overcharge you for
pottery, hammocks, or straw hats that he makes dur-
ing the ‘‘dead time,” but let his neighbor pass away
and he will as like as not adopt some of his children, or
the whole brood.

We are always contemplating what we never carry
out. Some paved approach to hell ought to be named
for Porto Rico. Visions that burst forth magnificently,
and take impetus as plans, cool off as calculations,

    
    
  
 
 
 
    
  
 
   
  
 
 
 
 
   
 
  
 
 
   
 
   

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and generally peter out as accomplishments. Maga-
zines are a notable instance. ‘They are thought of
at a café table, planned in a row-boat or on a stroll
round the plaza, launched a few days later on a capital
of fifty or one hundred dollars; and die like flies.
The creative thrill is in getting the idea, in thinking
about it, and in actually starting something; then, as
Thoreau put it, having made one pencil, why make
more?

Porto Ricans are tolerant of most heterodoxies.
Religious toleration is unassailable in reality as well
asin law. That, however, is not a good example, for
we are very indifferent to the gods. But we like our
money, and love to spend it, and hoard it, and squander
it; and still, we are reluctant to persecute good fel-
lows that happen to be tempted by other people’s
money, including our own. It’s considered somewhat
in bad taste to pursue your property rights to fine
points in small matters. ‘There is a bit of poetic juris-
prudence laid down by Judge Bolivar Pagan, who,
though quite exceptional as a magistrate, is represen-
tative of the very best in Porto Rican manhood. A
jibaro went hungry for three days and then stole some
coconuts. The Judge acquitted him on the ground
that a man who has gone hungry for three days is
a blind cosmic force no more capable of criminal in-
tention than the wind. Some legislators receive money
from rich men openly and, if the spirit moves them,
vote against the rich men’s interests just the same. In
those cases money transfers are simply not thought
of as affecting such natural integrity as a soul may

possess.
In sexual matters, on the other hand, orthodoxy isae aeaea
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PORTO RICO 381

 

 

iron-bound. Women must be chaste and men unchaste,
or pay the penalty in the form of murder or ostracism
in the one case and of ridicule in the other. In the
attitude toward women there is gallantry and chivalry,
but more of the former than of the latter. No man
worthy of the name would permit a woman to pay
his carfare or allow his wife to go to the movies
alone. Women were made to marry and become
queens of the home, first as chaste wives and after-
ward as sainted mothers. The rough contacts are not
for them, excepting perhaps such as might occur within
the sacred walls of the home. The obey clause in
the marriage rite is imposed and accepted literally.
A very talented Porto Rican pianist who was success-
fully carving out a career on the American concert
stage had to cancel a string of valuable and inter-
esting engagements and give up her work because her
husband disliked the climate. Neither of them thought
it proper for her to go on while he returned to the
tropics. In Porto Rico mores when the wife’s career
and the husband’s catarrh clash, his catarrh wins.
The assumption that good women are sweet and
pure and therefore too elevated for life’s rough and
tumble seems to underlie the attitude of the Porto
Rican gentleman. But scratch this concept of the good
and pure woman and you will brutally come upon the
assumption that she cannot be trusted to take care of
her physical virtue. Though mostly subconscious, this
idea frequently becomes deliberate, gets into words,
and is used as an argument against allowing Porto
Rican women the same personal freedom that Ameri-
can women enjoy. “The climate’ is a favorite ex-
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American influerice is perhaps strongest in the direc-
tion of freeing women from the degrading bondage
of that state of mind. Where my mother had to
receive my father during their engagement in the pres-
ence of at least two sisters, and my father had to
avail himself of the ancient and adventurous trick of
the wide-open newspaper to kiss her, some modern
girls may be seen of an afternoon in a movie house,
quite alone with their duly accredited fiancés and the
rest of the audience. (Curiously enough, the movies
exert a liberalizing influence on Porto Rican manners.
Doesn’t the screen show women going out on respect-
able business with men who are neither their fathers,
their brothers, their husbands, nor their fiancés? When
a young boy and girl, heroically cast, are left alone,
walk and play together on the screen, and when, sur-
prisingly, nothing happens, the Porto Rican audience
is seeing something truly revolutionary!) Divorces,
which were strictly taboo on moral more than religious
grounds, are not infrequent now, though divorcees are
rather considered lawful prey by our numerous, active,
and skilful Don Juans. Divorced husbands tend to
remarry their former wives. Children are sometimes
a consideration, but the tendency owes much to jeal-
ousy—the thought that other men may now make love
to the woman that has been theirs is a notion intoler-
able to our chicken-coop pride.

Though marriage continues to be a woman’s trade,
and man the raw material for it, even upper class
women may now earn their living. But those who do
are too close to the domestic era to make a broad
success of their new opportunities. Some take of-
fice positions as a matter of necessity (it 1s not yetUGPRUEAINEREOUNURAUCHUAUREOURUROOURELANANTREGDUTAPEUEGARTPANTARRRER TA AEEEAI OAT

  

PORTO RICO 383

 

 

impossible to belong to the upper class and be poor
at the same time). Their mothers, in similar circum-
stances, would have taken in sewing as secretly as
possible or baked cakes to sell at their back doors to
the cooks of other good families. Others accept work
out of their homes as a matter of dignity, to feel—
not to be—somewhat independent of obnoxious hus-
bands. But they find the life hard and usually wel-
come a chance to resume their historic tasks. In-
stances of girls giving up easy and relatively lucrative
office positions to embark into the most dubious matri-
monial, or even extra-matrimonial, adventures are the
rule, overwhelmingly.

Male chastity seems to us preposterous and highly
suspicious—to claim it the depth of absurdity. The
rumor is about that many Americans are chaste and
say so. They are regarded as hypocrites, and strange
hypocrites at that. What can induce a man falsely to
pass himself off as something discreditable!

It would be unfair to present certain phases of our
contemporary character without clarifying the eco-
nomic background against which they must be ob-
served. Porto Rico has never been prosperous, but
it has known respectable poverty. The early Spanish
adventurers conquered it for the gold of its rivers.
In thirty years they exported less than four million
pesos—a bad return for their pains—and began to
devote their best energies to the soil, upon which
they had formerly looked as a mere means of keeping
alive till they were rich enough in gold ingots to re-
turn to the motherland. By the end of the nineteenth
century, coffee, tobacco, and sugar had become, in the
order named, the principal products of the island.

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The three were important in inverse ratio to their in-
dustrial nature. Coffee needed little elaboration; to-
bacco, if turned into cigars, needed but small hand
tools and skill; it took a chemical process and a clumsy
wooden mill driven by a pair of oxen to get sugar
out of cane. Given the land, the amount of capital
necessary for any of the three pursuits was relatively
unimportant. The land, with a few notorious excep-
tions, was divided into small estates, and in the up-
lands there was scarcely a free man who could not
own a few acres or rent them cheap. The law com-
pelled wage laborers to hire themselves, ostensibly as
a corrective for tropical laziness, that convenient
whipping-boy, actually because the economic law of
need does not seem to have been powerful enough.
But they were patriarchally handled by their em-
ployers, with all the good and the evil of that atti-
tude, and found that they could convert their almost
invisible money wages into an abundant, if unscien-
tific, diet that kept away the pangs and the passions
of hunger, and into some stiff-bosomed shirts and ab-
surdly starched dresses for holiday wear. This very
modest but rather widespread economic semi-inde-
pendence and content made possible the full expres-
sion of that kindliness, that absence of petty rasping
passions, that hospitality, that chivalry, traces of which
are still to be found, especially among the pale men
of the mountains.

Two forces appeared dramatically to precipitate a
change that would perhaps have taken place anyway:
a cyclone and the Americans. The cyclone of San
Ciriaco wrought havoc with the coffee and tobacco
plantations of the mountains, ruining a host of smallPORTO RICO 385

 

 

landowners and centralizing the soil into fewer and
mightier hands. The Americans came in the name
of liberty and democracy and destroyed the liberal
parliamentary government wrested from Spain by Luis
Munoz Rivera two months before the outbreak of
the war; they also brought the tariff on sugar, which
attracted outside and local capital to the cane-fields
of the coast. “Twenty-three years ago there were scat-
tered over the island several hundred primitive sugar
mills which turned out a round 69,000 tons annually.
In 1920 there were seventy-five modern factories, be-
longing for the most part to large absentee corpora-
tions, turning out six times that number of tons. That
is the open glory of the colonialists. Profit has been
known to surpass 100 per cent per annum, and a very
large share of it leaves the island never to return.
That is the secret glory of the colonialists. And even
this ghastly spectacle of wealth drained from a starv-
ing population into the richest country on earth is sanc-
timoniously set down in the official reports as a “‘fav-
orable trade balance.”

As a young editor put it to the House Committee
on Insular Affairs, one of our sorest economic troubles
is that we have no bananas today. We used to have
a lot of them; they grew all around and could usually
be had for the picking, so that they made a very im-
portant item in the common diet. And what was true
of bananas was true of many fruits and vegetables.
But sugarcane is elbowing all these out of the soil.
Now we import our staples, with the result, as Dr.
Bailey K. Ashford sees it, that not even the rich are
well nourished in Porto Rico.

The tobacco industry is entirely under the tutelagerp

 

386 THESE UNITED STATES

 

of the American tobacco trust, and coffee-growing, the
last refuge of the falling middle class, suffers from
the fact that to the great coffee-drinking people of the
United States all coffees taste alike! The conse-
quences of all this have been, the attainment of certain
sections of a half dozen towns to a degree of opulence
seldom tasteful enough to be a public good; the prole-
tarization of great masses of people; the debasing of
a general standard of living, that was never too gener-
ous; the elimination of certain ethical checks and cul-
tural ideals that become untenable in sweated colonies
and on rafts lost at sea.

The average daily wage paid to a laborer in the
cane-fields is about a dollar, with a six months working
year, when prices for such necessities of life as he
consumes are slightly higher than in New York. The
business manager of one of the principal newspapers
in San Juan, a peculiarly capable and reliable man,
received until recently a monthly salary of one hun-
dred dollars for a task that rarely released him before
nine o'clock at night.

As might be expected, the intensity of the struggle
for existence is appalling. It has dulled our ancestral
virtues—such as they were—and that it has not wiped
them out altogether seems miraculous. Sham, trickery,
flattery, beggary, mendacity are accepted means of
getting along. When you find that Don Pedro has
swindled you, the moral indignation you feel about
it is not much greater than when you learn that he
has invested in real estate or in a new suit of clothes.
You take your revenge if you can, of course, but
largely as a part of the policy of living, and not nec-
essarily on Don Pedro.PORTO RICO 387

 

 

The quixotic gestures of Spain will flourish on any
earth. Few people will sell you things in which they
do not regularly traffic. A horse dealer may try to
prevent you by every subterfuge at his command from
examining the mouths of his horses, but if you are his
friend and remark on the beauty of his new field-
glass he is likely to insist upon your taking it home
with you, and will be deeply offended if you suggest
paying for it. Until quite recently it was impossible
to purchase flowers; the owners took pride in giving
you all you wanted; and even now it is only in the
principal cities that flowers can be obtained in ex-
change for money.

But these qualities are becoming segregated. Those
who, if conservative, measure civilization by com-
mercial and industrial growth, and, if radical, by labor-
union activity, lament the mountain regions. You can’t
start anything there. But the bulk of the folk-poetry,
the folk-pottery, the folk-hats, the folk-hammocks, and
the folk-nobility comes from the mountains.

These forsaken jibaros, pale, frequently blond, al-
ways poverty-stricken, form the most consistently un-
mixed body of Europeans on the island. Whenever
the hookworm permits they are more active physically
and mentally than the people of the coast. And yet
their ideals are of leisure while the ideals of the coast
(not necessarily the practice) are becoming those of
activity and go-getting. Here the shade of the guava-
tree still suggests the hammock; the moon calls out
the singer and his tiple. Troubadours compete with
songs for the love of barefoot girls, though machetes
are thought good enough to cut to decisions, often
within the limitations of a gentlemanly code. The

    
    
 
 
 
   
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
   
 
  
   
     

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388 THESE UNITED STATES

 

jibaros are infantile, passionate, shrewd in their simple
dealings, susceptible to religious quackery, and man-
age to carry a surprisingly heavy load of generosity
along with that of their poverty. ‘They have fre-
quently been imposed upon by the outside world, and
have developed a naive armor of suspiciousness that
enrages the politicians and rural confidence men who
try to prey upon them. Here is a song in which they
have placed a large part of their soul:

Oh, I saw a Napoleon,

Oh, I saw a Napoleon,

That was being taken as a prisoner,
But as I don’t know anything about it,
But as I don’t know anything about it,
I won’t continue the versification.

There is the desire to appear in imagination as
witnessing vague, important, and sad events, a certain
laziness in not troubling to think up any more than
the one flash scene, combined with a shrewd deter-
mination not to be compromised.

I recall an episode that remarkably expresses the
blend of sordid need and quixotic craving harbored in
the lives of these men, as in a measure, of all Porto
Ricans. A politician on the village square was trying
to arrange for a hundred badly needed votes. The
illiterate jibaros around him all belonged to his party,
but refused to vote unless given fifty cents a piece.
It appears that the politician could only dispose of a
quarter for each voter. ‘‘Of course,” he was saying,
‘‘you understand that I am not trying to corrupt your
consciences, because there is not enough money in thePORTO RICO 389

 

 

world to buy the sacred conscience of the humblest
man. It is understood that you are Unionists. You
are also good citizens and cannot refuse to cast your
ballots. I simply want to give each one of you a
quarter that you may drink the health of our glorious
party and enjoy yourselves a bit before you return to
your homes, and all I ask is that you vote right now,
before I leave.” The jibaros refused to budge.
They wouldn’t vote for any other party, that was cer-
tain; they were loyal Unionists (followers of the erst-
while independence movement), but if they didn’t get
their price they were going home without voting.
“But how am I to know if you really are Unionists if
you don’t vote,” the politician queried reasonably
enough. The answer came solemn and shrewd: ‘‘We
don’t care whether you know it or not. God knows it.”
They did not vote.

Religion plays a minor role in the Porto Rican
scene. We don’t fear hell, and heaven bores us. We
don’t believe in an anthropomorphic God or that it is
important that church ceremonies should be performed
in this way or the other. Atheism in Porto Rico, as
elsewhere, seems to be a natural complement of Ca-
tholicism. That the Bible is an astronomical, geologi-
cal, biological, and historical document of irrefutable
veracity is too absurd a statement for our average
high-school boy to advance. I refer, of course, to the
more sophisticated classes. Most of us will admit a
vague allegiance to the Church of Rome. But you will
very seldom catch us at mass, you will almost never
find us in the confessional, and you will but infre-
quently meet us when we are not on our way to or from
the infringement of some of the commandments.

  
  
 
 
 
 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
   

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Perhaps the sharpest difference between Porto Rican
development and that of the rest of Latin America
lies in the fact that there has never been a serious
movement for Porto Rican independence. Such po-
litical expression of a feeling for independence as we
have had came—some say strangely, and some say
naturally—under the American régime. In 1904, for
the first time in our history, an enthusiast slipped an
independence clause into the platform of a ruling party,
and its leaders felt compelled regretfully to leave it
there. From that time until 1922 when the clause
went overboard that party’s most earnest efforts were
devoted to placing independence in as innocuous a
position as possible. A dream for the far future, the
natural desire of all peoples, the last refuge of our
dignity were some of the formulas used. Indeed, if
it was kept alive so long the phenomenon must be
ascribed to the persistence of José de Diego, a man
too strong to override, who wished to hold that so-
lution before the Porto Rican people. But the senti-
ment for independence is real enough among young
fellows and the common people, and it only waits to
be organized by a politician with some poetry in his
make-up. Whether that happens or not, the prospects
for the immediate future are those of continued liberal
political servitude, growing cautiously more liberal with
the years.

The ultimate fate of Porto Rico will obviously de-
pend upon the degree of its cultural Americanization
and the strength of the advantageous economic ties
binding it to the States. I do not believe that American
overlordship is Americanizing us to an important de-
gree. We are proud of tall buildings, commercial ac-TERRORS eR eaaeeanen
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PORTO RICO 391

 

 

 

tivity, and prosperity more than of worthier things;
but all Latin Americans tend to abandon their con-
tempt for material prosperity whenever the possibility
of achieving it becomes clear to them. We hastily
adopted the California code which, among other
equally appropriate things, required us to place stoves
In jury rooms; but we have managed to avoid cooking
our jurors. Congress acquired by the Treaty of Paris
the right to call us names, and proceeded to exercise
it by calling us Porto Rico, which means nothing, in-
stead of Puerto Rico, which means, however mislead-
ingly, Rich Port; but none of us uses the legal name
in Spanish, and I am using it here as a concession to
the editor. Our first native commissioner of education
considers Edgar Guest the best American poet and
imitates his doggerel; but it was probably on account
of the very exceptional qualifications indicated by that
preference that the Bureau of Insular Affairs sug-
gested that Harding appoint him.

Women are freeing themselves through the influ-
ence of the United States: but then Latin-American
women generally are throwing off their shackles at a
great rate and largely because of ‘North American”
influence. Shakespeare has replaced Cervantes as the
greatest poet in the world, but Cervantes continues to
be the better seller. Washington has been appointed
the hero of a people who can cut down a forest of
cherry trees and remain serenely silent about it. Lin-
coln is presented as the destroyer of slavery to the
grandsons and granddaughters of the slave-owners who
requested Spain to free their slaves with or without
compensation. The American Federation of Labor Tt
through my friend Santiago Iglesias is trying hard to

  

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392 THESE UNITED STATES

 

Americanize Porto Rico; but what Mr. Iglesias under-
stands by Americanism is a high standard of living,
free speech, and free press: we have the last two to a
greater extent than you have in the States, and the
first is good rather than American.

In spite of this haphazard cultural attack, and of
the fact that most of us are proud to be officially part
of a nation that does big obvious things, we continue
subconsciously to class ourselves with Latin Americans.
In the conflicts between the United States and Latin
America our sympathies are with Latin America. I
doubt if a half dozen decent and intelligent Porto
Ricans could be smoothly recruited for an expedition
against, say, Mexico. Mr. Travieso, a member of the
Porto Rican senate, was severely criticized for ac-
cepting an executive post under the American military
occupation of Santo Domingo. There is relatively as
much interest in the effort of the Venezuelan people
to get rid of the tyrant Gomez as in that of the
American people to change Presidents. Our literature,
which in some branches is very copious, follows the
general Latin-American currents where it does not
show native or original traits. Llorens, our most pop-
ular and perhaps our greatest poet, is Porto Rico
‘ncarnate; Hostos is accepted by Latin America as one
of its great thinkers; De Diego, while acting as
Speaker of our lower house, vigorously urged the for-
mation of an Antillean Republic to consist of Cuba,
Santo Domingo, and Porto Rico. The economic ties
that now bind us to the United States are not advan-
tageous. That our sugar industry is protected along
with that of Louisiana is an unmixed blessing only to
those that control it, and they are chiefly non-residentUTES ETE

  

PORDO? RICO 393

 

 

corporations. On the other hand, this same wall of
protection compels our poverty-stricken population to
buy its staples in the same market where the American
banker and bricklayer buy theirs. The latter evil can-
not be corrected so long as we remain within the cus-
toms system of the United States. Absentee ownership
can be diminished. But the evident policy of the War
Department here, as in the Philippines, is to discourage
and make difficult the execution of measures tending
to correct it. In 1921, the legislature enacted a series
of laws calculated to give small planters a chance to
free themselves to some extent of the tutelage of the
large corporations, by building government railroads
which would enable them to ship their cane to more
than one sugar factory, etc. Loans to the extent of
some fourteen million dollars were authorized to carry
out the projects. Governor Reily declined to issue
them. The more suave and tactful Governor Towner,
who holds the ruling politicos in the hollow of his
hand, saddled upon the island a loan of six million
dollars for building purposes. As Porto Rico may not
contract debts for more than thirty million, and the
latest loan raised the public debt to $22,000,000, most
of the 1921 projects must be abandoned for lack of
funds.

On the basis of these realities, only a scrupulously
unselfish policy—inaugurated soon—on the part of the
United States is likely to induce the Porto Rican people,
as distinguished from their politicians, to remain per-
manently—should they have become—loyal at heart to
the United States.

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HAWAII *
A SUB-TROPICAL NEW ENGLAND

By CLAYTON HAMILTON

SI
Twice a day at Honolulu an elderly gentleman
toddles along the sea-wall at Waikiki from the direc-
tion of Fort De Russy, takes a dip in the ocean, and
then sits and suns himself on the tiny patch of sand
that is known to old inhabitants as the Children’s
Beach. I shall call him Mr. Wheeler, for, though
that is not his name, it is sufficiently near to it to
identify him to the host of his acquaintances. Mr.
Wheeler was born in New York; and, when he learned
that I came from the metropolis, he asked me if the
food was just as good as ever at the Fifth Avenue
Hotel.
“How long have you been in the islands?” I inquired.
“Well,” said Mr. Wheeler, “I was sailing home
from China in 1887. The ship touched at Honolulu
for a day, and I came ashore to get my laundry done.”
The rest was silence, and an enigmatic smile.
Another day he told me more particularly why he
was not in any hurry for his laundry to come back.
“This is the only place in the world,” he said, “where
everybody is well-to-do. For what is meant by being
wealthy except that you don’t need any money? You

1 This article, in an abbreviated form, first appeared in the Century
Magazine, and thanks are due its editor for permission to use the

material in this series.

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CUE PETER TERETEE ESSE ESEOLA ORDO EAT OUEPOTEQOUHAU OAV ONO OUOOSHVORURUEIVOOSOGDIDEDEQOOOD

BERS: i EE

      
  
  
  
   
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 

HAWAII 395

 

are foolish to go back to New York. You will have
to have money there; and to get it, you will have to
sell your life to earn your living. There isn’t any
sense to that.”

“No,”—I hesitated, ‘—except for a few necessi-
CLES! a8

“And what are the necessities of life?” retorted
Mr. Wheeler. ‘Food, clothing, shelter, fuel—and one
other, more important than them all. You don’t need
money here for food. The coconuts drop at your
feet. Bananas and papaia and bread-fruit hang down
within your reach from many trees. There are acres
and acres of pineapples. And at any hour any day
you may wade into the warm water with a net—like
that wahini yonder—and haul ashore the most delicious
fish. You don’t need money here for clothing. All
you want, the year around, is a bathing-suit, a shirt, a
pair of trousers. You don’t need any fuel except for
cooking; and wood is everywhere. You need only pick
it up. For shelter all you want is a roof over your
head in the rainy season, and some wire netting to
keep out the mosquitoes. Walls aren’t necessary. You
don’t need a house; you want only a lanai. It is warm
enough to sleep in the open any night in the year, and
never too warm to sleep. So, you see, I’m a rich man:
I don’t need any money.”

‘But that other need you spoke of, the one you said
was more important... .?”

“Ah, yes—companionship. And this is the best place
in the world for that. The most interesting people
come here, and only the most interesting. Sooner or i
later, from all the quarters of the globe they come, just 7 |
like you, and talk to me upon this little patch of sand.

  

seeded TERETE EanBi
a 396 THESE UNITED STATES

 

| I don’t have to go to see people; they come to see
} ' me. A man needs friends; but if I went to London,
A a to Paris, to Rome, to Yokohama, to Pekin, I should
never make so many friends as here at Waikiki. They
come and go, and others come; but after they are gone,
I know’ that they remember always, and are always

i over the sea. Several children were splashing in the
| | lime-green waves that broke upon the sand. A little
| | beyond them, Dave Kahanamoku came loitering along
| | in his outrigger-canoe to pick up some passengers at
Halekulani. Out on the anchored raft, Fuji, my Jap-
anese boy, was poised for a backward dive, and two
i American girls were climbing out of the water. The
} | if surf heaved away in jade-green rollers out to the coral
reef, where it creamed in league-long breakers, beyond
which lay the sapphire reaches of the deep Pacific. But
"4 as I gazed out to the far horizon, the whole picture,
i as they say in the “movies,” seemed to dissolve into a
remembered vision of the paler water of Walden Pond
and of a cairn of stones upon the wooded shore that
marks the site where stood a humble hut which, for
| two years at least, housed the throne of letters in
| | New England.
| | Before the vision faded, I had asked Mr. Wheeler
| an apparently irrelevant question:
! “Do you happen to know Henry David Thoreau
“No,” he said; “at least I don’t remember him.

Who is he?”’
“Oh, just a chap that used to live in Concord, Massa-

| i hoping to come back again. It will be that way with
| you.”
| There was a long pause after that. I looked out

??AUEUEEEEUTEUT ATURE EES PAOME OUTRO LOUIE

AURUGRRUADRAROR DURA URES RREOR AA,

HALLE |

  

HAWAII 397

 

 

chusetts. Something that you said reminded me of
him; that’s all. I think he’d like it here.”

“Then he’ll come—sooner or later,’ said Mr.
Wheeler.

“He has come,” I answered. And then it was my
turn to smilé an enigmatic smile.

For Mr. Wheeler, who had quite unconsciously
evolved on the island of Oahu the same philosophy
of life that Thoreau had evolved in old New England,
had suddenly given me the clew to a mystery that had
haunted me ever since I had reached the Happy Isles
and the friend I called Achilles had met me at the
dock and garlanded my neck with Jeis.

§ 2

That experienced traveler, Mr. Somerset Maugham,
has remarked that, whatever one expects of Honolulu,
one is sure to be surprised. His own expression of
bewilderment is worthy of quotation, and I shall copy
it from his volume called ‘““The Trembling of a Leaf’’:

‘Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu. It is so
far away from Europe, it is reached after so long a
journey from San Francisco, so strange and so charm-
ing associations are attached to the name, that at first
I could hardly believe my eyes. I do not know that I
had formed in my mind any very exact picture of what
I expected, but what I found caused me a great sur-
prise.”

In my own case, I was not surprised by the suavity
of the climate, the multi-colored luxuriance of the vege-
tation, or the almost unimaginable loveliness of the
landscape; for I had been prepared to expect these
wonders by a witty lady of San Francisco, who had398 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

told me emphatically, just before I sailed, that the
Hawaiian Islands were all that southern California
pretended to be, and wasn’t. Neither was I surprised
by the outlandish picturesqueness that is imparted to
Honolulu by its gathering together of many different
races, yellow and white and brown. I knew, of course,
that it was the most Oriental of Occidental cities, the
most Occidental of Oriental; that it was, by virtue of
its geographical position, the one city in the world
where East is West and West is East, and where the
twain have met in harmony. But the one thing which
did surprise me greatly was to find that Honolulu,
despite its multi-racial population, is one of the most
civilized cities in the modern world, and that its civ-
ilization is thoroughly, indeed definitively, American.

It is only a quarter of a century since the Hawaiian
Islands were annexed to the United States and the
Stars and Stripes were first flown over the [olan
Palace, but, in the ancestral sense, Honolulu has been
American for more than a hundred years; and since,
in the midst of the Pacific, there is more leisure than
we have upon the mainland for cultivating, undisturbed
by interruption, the imaginative art of memory, Hono-
lulu demonstrates more vividly a reminiscence of what
America meant at the outset of the nineteenth century
than any other community outside the confines of our
thirteen original States. It is, in fact, an old New
England city in the midst of the Pacific, venerable in
Americanism beyond any other of our cities seated
west of the Appalachians. Honolulu was already a
cultivated community when San Francisco was but a
roaring mining-camp and when Los Angeles was noth-
ing but a patch of unirrigated desert. Indeed, when. TUR ERAT TATERUCT OUTAGE Teka erriieel i
MUUSHHAATAEAALSUUERERAATAREEOURANOAEEUONALURUOUOOUOGUREREERAUSOSOOSSREEE

  

HAWAII 399

 

 

the forty-niners of San Francisco, suddenly enriched
with gold, desired to bring their daughters up as ladies,
they sent them out in sailing-ships to Honolulu to be
educated in the Kamehameha schools.

I dare say that I should have been less surprised
by the settled civilization of Honolulu if I had gone
there directly from New York: but I happened, in-
stead, to proceed to the Hawaiian Islands from Los
Angeles. Los Angeles is, of course, the newest city
in the world. It is vehemently up to date, like the latest
six-star extra-issue of an evening newspaper. Los An-
geles may be described, in a single phrase, as a city
without a past. It has no memories, because it has
nothing to remember. Consequently it has no interest
in tradition and no respect for the past. It is lively
and alert and forward-looking: but it is never con-
templative and never calm. There is something un-
canny about a city without a past, just as, in the Ger-
man legend, there was something uncany about the
man who had lost his shadow. Life, divorced from
any sense of permanence, becomes unreal when it is
lived only in the fleeting moment. Los Angeles lives
merely in the here and now; it knows nothing of what
happens otherwhere, and cares nothing for what has
happened otherwhen. Existence in Los Angeles is
merely transient; and during my two years as a tran-
sient Angeleno I felt utterly out of the world, cut off
from all my previous contacts with the inherited culture
of the ages.

Escaping from Los Angeles and plunging seaward
from San Francisco, I dare say that, five days later,
when the dawn disclosed the cloud-collecting mountains
of the island of Oahu, I vaguely expected to find a

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400 THESE UNITED STATES

  

 

 

newer world; and the surprise came when | found,
instead, in Honolulu, an older world, and discovered
that, by traveling actually from California to Hawaii,
I had proceeded really from Los Angeles back again to
old New England.

For Honolulu is a city with a past. It casts a shadow.
Its memorial function is not paralyzed and atrophied,
for it has something to remember. It is wisely con-
templative and patiently calm. It knows about what
happens otherwhere, and cares about what has hap-
pened otherwhen. It is not up to date, but dateless;
not transient, but permanent. It was in 1887 that Mr.
Wheeler went ashore at Waikiki to have his laundry
done. And the rest can be reported only with an enig-
matic smile.

§ 3

In 1820, half a dozen missionary families set sail
from a port in Massachusetts on a perilous long voyage
round Cape Horn for the purpose of carrying the
Congregational brand of Christianity to the Polynesian
natives of the Sandwich Islands. The extravagant
idealism of these missionaries, judged by the practical
standards of contemporary enterprise, is a thing to
strike the mind with admiration. For these pilgrims
staked their all upon the outcome of this great crusade,
and carried with them their wives and their children
and all their furniture and household goods, to be
plunged, as God might will, into the deep, or edified
at last upon some heathen island half the world away.

The smiling Polynesians, in that distant time, were
as friendly and as hospitable as they are today, and
welcomed the winged ships that housed the crusadersTRUER OUADSRSRERR GAG,

  

HAWAII 401

 

 

from New England, and their wives and children and
their furniture and household goods. The idealistic
missionaries were intent on saving the souls of the
purple-skinned Kanakas, and the kindly Polynesians
were intent on ministering to the practical comfort of
their white-skinned visitors. Consequently, the thrifty
New-Englanders were able, without embarrassment, to
exchange the veritable word of God for authenticated
title-deeds to the most productive lands in the islands.
In nearly all the Massachusetts families that sailed
around the Horn in 1820 to carry Christianity to the
heathen of Hawaii there were six or eight children.
As these children came of age, intermarriages between
the missionary families became, of course, inevitable.
Such intermarriages have continued to this day, so that
now the scions of the original half-dozen families must
number more than a thousand people, all of whom are
cousins to one another in some degree or other. And
for over a hundred years these inheritors of the original
families have owned nearly all of the registered real
estate of the eight islands in the Hawaiian group. To
this day, for instance, the entire island of Lanai is
owned by a single family, the Baldwins. To this day
the entire island of Molokai, with the exception of the
leper settlement, which stretches seaward on a sandy
peninsula backed by towering, insurmountable pali-
sades, is owned also by a single family, the Cookes.
And even on the island of Oahu, where Honolulu itself
is seated, and on the big island of Hawaii, the investi-
gating visitor is beset forever with the recurrence of
half a dozen ancestral names that are synonymous with
overlordship of the land.
Since the land is extremely productive, especially inee .

  

egg

402 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

pineapple and in sugar-cane, most of the descendants
of the original missionary families are, of course, ex-
tremely wealthy; but they have been wealthy for so
long that they have ceased to be aware of the fact, and
lead very simple lives, undisturbed by any ostentation.
They hold the islands as a public trust, and the ma-
chinery of society is so conducted that there is a place
for everybody, white or yellow or brown. and every-
body is happy in his place.

The division of labor is sanely effected along racial
lines. A white man is not given a yellow man’s job,
nor vice versa. The agricultural work upon the great
plantations is done by the Japanese, the Portuguese, or
the Filipinos; but these three races are not mixed to-
gether indiscriminately on the same section of land.
A malehini, or newcomer from the mainland of Amer-
ica, coming out to seek employment, would not be put
to work on the plantations but would be diverted to
some sort of office job in the executive branch of one
of the local industries. The Kanakas—as the Hawaiian
natives are called—disport themselves in such easy and
showy jobs as those of car-conductors, motormen, and
trafic cops. The Kanaka police, clad in their white
uniforms, have a very happy time directing the traffic
of the narrow streets with the magnificent and florid
gestures of Neapolitan band-masters. Most of the
domestic servants are Japanese or Chinese; and the
Orientals also run the smaller shops, which are re-
markable for their cleanliness and neatness. The larger
shops, of course, like all of the big business enterprises,
are run by haoles, or white people.

There is never any unemployment in the islands,
and there is no poverty at all. The only industriali‘ i wa r | r 7. aeeehaaya aT } } r waa j rreititi PUTUPUATARUE URE T AAA GAA REET Ad
PRERUETATERUATEAT TPES EAUARPESPROGTREUEAHTARREOUTTAURUARITTPAUTTTRUTTAOUTRURANTRGERRORERUORPRAEUEREREOITEERER EEE ae
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HAWAII

  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 

 

 

 

difficulty is a shortage of unskilled labor in certain
necessary branches. When, at the end of the nineteenth
century, the provisional republican government applied
for annexation to the United States, it became neces-
sary to accept, as an established fact of American law,
the Chinese exclusion act; and the industrial leaders of
the islands have been trying ever since to have the Ter-
ritory of Hawaii excepted from the application of this
legislation. The Chinese are by far the finest of the
imported races; they are more desirable than the Jap-
anese; they are greatly needed for various kinds of
labor, which they accomplish better than anybody else:
but the pleas of the Hawaiian commission at Wash-
ington are never listened to. Neither the Republican
Party nor the Democratic Party can be bothered about
the legislative needs of a Territory that casts no vote
in the Electoral College and sends no representatives to
Congress, to vote with either party. But meanwhile,
the Territory of Hawaii manages its internal affairs
to the apparent satisfaction of all its citizens. Those
who have but little money need less; and, in Mr.
Wheeler’s philosophic sense, it may truthfully be said
that the poorest of the Polynesians is rich indeed.

§ 4

In most of our American cities at the present day
life suffers from the lack of an aristocracy. The popu-
lar phrase that every man is as good as every other
is merely a way of saying that no man rises superior i
to the dead level of medocrity. Mr. Langdon il
Mitchell, the brilliant son of a famous father and a
scion of an old Philadelphia family, has pointed out
in a recent essay that the hardy frontiersmen who

  

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404 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

pushed beyond the Mississippi and ultimately extended
the map of the United States to the Pacific were, for
the most part, cursed with the unfortunate habit of
leaving their culture behind them and became less
literate the farther they adventured from the Atlantic
seaboard. In most of our Western cities the leaders
of society have been vaulted into eminence by some
accident of sudden wealth; but the cities are so new
that they have no traditions and, in consequence, no
standards. A cultivated aristocracy cannot be devel-
oped in a decade; it requires several generations of
consistent careful breeding.

When the missionary families of Massachusetts
sailed around the Horn in 1820 to Hawaii, they car-
ried their culture with them; and they have kept it
ever since. Generation after generation, they have
sent their sons back to New England to be educated at
Harvard or at Yale, and have never, for convenience,
allowed them to stop off at the half-way stations of
Berkeley or Palo Alto. It is by no means my inten-
tion to disparage the brand of education that is dis-
pensed on the Pacific Coast, but I merely wish to em-
phasize the point that the old families of Honolulu
have clung consistently, for an entire century, to the
culture of New England and have remained, in reality,
New-Englanders, though living on a tropic island a
quarter of the world away.

Their houses have a New-England look, with
columned porticos approached by shaded driveways.
The lay-out of the city has a New-England look, with
quiet houses grouped about an overshadowed green.
The tree that dominates a little square may be a
banian but yet it will remind you somehow of elmsi eal H H j eeu ae Weanee "| " ti vbeeiii ail
Fl aon HTL if TTLEELTELTL i} Raa ae a aad anand
| | : { AORRORTEE

     
   
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   

HAWAII 405

 

 

and oaks. Inside the houses you will find the loveliest
of old colonial furniture, dating from the seventeenth
century and reverently brought around the Horn in
sailing-ships a hundred years ago; and you will find
old books, hundreds and hundreds of old books, and
leisure under lamplight, and quiet converse of tall
spirits when the night is down.

The Kawaiahao Church is built of coral rock, but
the lines of it are utterly New England. The church-
yard houses the tomb of King Lunalilo, but all around
this tomb the ground is tableted with ancient names
that read of Massachusetts. Sometimes, in a lamplit
hour of early evening, the old church breaks into choric
song, and, if you happen to be lingering in the neigh-
borhood, you will wander into it. You sit down in an
old New-England pew, and while the cheerful Ha-
waiian preacher is making announcements in a liquid
language that you do not understand, you fumble for a
hymn-book. The words are printed in Hawaiian, but
you recognize the old tunes that have made New Eng-
land eloquent for three hundred years; and when the
white-garbed dusky choir-girls stand up and sing, with
a zest as if these old, old hymns were finding voice for
the first time in the world, you remember certain eve-
nings long ago and far away, and feel yourself at
home again.

§ 5
Even the far-famed bathing beach at Waikiki is
distinguished by the decorous atmosphere of old New
England; and, if any tired business men from Broad-
way should go out to Honolulu with a musical comedy it
concept in their minds, they would be emphatically dis- |

  

Un (HEE THESTREET EEE PURE TULETORT RCE RA STU TRU SERA TT RUOTUT VS ERVINE RRO ERRRD AD ROADS TRUDEGE DROPLET AEE veiled CERNE UF406 THESE UNITED STATES

 

appointed. There aren’t any grass-skirted hula-girls
dancing upon moonlit sands to the music of the ukulele.
I happened to be in Honolulu when a national conven-
tion of the Mystic Shriners that was held in San
Francisco spilled a couple of shiploads of red-fezzed
pleasure-seekers over into the Hawaiian Islands. For
this occasion, a primitive native house of ancient mat-
ting was erected among the coconut trees of Kapio-
lani Park, booths were set up to display various
Polynesian curios and works of handicraft, and three
elderly Hawaiian women who had danced the hula in
the old days of King Kalakaua were resurrected from
the past and decked out in grass skirts that had been
manufactured in Kalamazoo and imported all the way
from Michigan, in order that the archeologists among
the Mystic Shriners might not be disappointed.
When the native women dress up in their best, they
wear, not the grass skirts and coral garlands of our
musical comedy choruses, but the white Mother Hub-
bard that was imposed upon them by the New England
missionaries a century ago and that still perpetuates
the stylish cut of 1820. This garment is called, in
the native language, holoku: the word means, “I can
walk!”, and immortalizes the child-like ejaculation of
an old Hawaiian queen when first she donned the
missionary dress and discovered with surprise that,
though it hid the legs, it did not hamper them. In-
deed, though the holoku has long sleeves and is cut
high and tight at the neck, it is a fully flowing gar-
ment; and it has the practical advantage that it may
be slipped off very easily whenever the wearer is seized
with a sudden impulse to plunge into the sea.
The ukulele is not unknown at Waikiki, and some-PEUTAUUOUUTEOTEATUE ETT OTUETOUOTVEETAPIUAUAYOCAUAUETOELOHIEITEIEEUAPEERen ECU A SEES ee Len cna

    
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 

HAWAII 407

 

 

times, on moonlit nights, native boys come twanging
it along the sea-wall and singing plaintive songs; but
it is not, as is commonly supposed, a Polynesian inven-
tion. It is, instead, a Portuguese instrument, originally
called the braga, and was brought out to Hawaii
from the Azores when the Latin laborers were im-
ported round the Horn a couple of generations ago.

Many visitors are disappointed by “the beach at
Waikiki” because, in the customary sense, there is
scarcely any beach. That is to say, there is no exten-
sive stretch of sand, overrun by a helter-skelter public.
The land, for the most part, is privately owned; and
the luxuriant lawns of private residences extend down
to a rocky sea-wall against which the waves come lap-
ping. There is a narrow stretch of sand in front of the
Moana Hotel and the Outrigger Canoe Club; but,
even here, there is very little room for parading or
lolling on the beach. At Waikiki, the women, as well
as the men, wear swimming suits for the sake of
swimming and not for the sake of exhibiting their fig-
ures; and local custom compels them to don dressing-
gowns before crossing the Kalakaua Boulevard, which
is the first avenue that runs parallel to the sea. The
neighborhood of the beach is utterly free from those
abominations in which our American seaside resorts
usually abound: there are no peanut or popcorn
stands, no booths for vendors of ‘‘hot dogs,” no
merry-go-rounds, no scenic railways, none of the
raucous and pitiful appurtenances of public pleasure.
There is nothing to do at Waikiki but swim.

But the swimming is, unquestionably, the finest in
the world. Every day of the year, and every hour of
the day or night, the temperature of the water—which

  

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408 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

never varies more than three or four degrees from
seventy eight Fahrenheit—remains almost identical
with the temperature of the air; so that one may lead
an amphibious existence, plunging into the sea or
climbing out into the air again with never any shock
from any change of temperature. Both the water and
the air feel like velvet to the skin: there is an inex-
pressible suavity about them. And it is very easy to
swim without fatigue at Waikiki, because the water is
heavier—that is to say, its specific gravity is greater—
than that of the Atlantic or the Mediterranean. I
have never seen statistics on this point; but I have
swum in many waters and I know by experience that
the Pacific has an extraordinary buoyance. It is, I
think, a significant fact that the crawl stroke, which
revolutionized modern swimming, was invented by the
Australians and perfected by the Hawaiians; for in
the Pacific it is much easier to crawl upon the surface
of the sea than in the Atlantic.

The one handicap to swimming at Waikiki is the
presence of great quantities of coral rock, only slightly
submerged beneath the surface, which will scrape and
gash the knees of the adventurer who swims without
a chart. For long swims, it is necessary to know the
channels and to map a course according to them. To
give the soldiers at Fort De Russy an opportunity to
use a diving-board, it was necessary to dynamite great
quantities of coral and blast out an artificial swimming-
tank in the open sea.

But the rhythm of the surf at Waikiki is unsur-
passed for swimming. A mile from shore, the outer
ocean crashes against a great coral reef, which is im-ry vat Trai a ae AUURUAUACRETAGEU RU CHETGRET TEL i} ental aan j TORU PPRASSURUDRUAUOUOR CT Se Reteboget) tS ayeet res = Ss
UELSUTARTAUEATERTTEEUERUURSEUAACOUCOQUOHADOOHRAOOEAOOEAROQEAAUOEIOOULANORLAONELUONELUOULAOOOSEIOOOIEOOEEIFORDORG EE eUAbAIUSIRIGESE [isok ars |i ee o a

F

   
 
   
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 

HAWAII 409

 

 

pervious to sharks and all other dangerous denizens
of the deep. Within the reef, the shoreward surf
gathers in long slow rollers ideally adapted to the
native sport of surfboard-riding. The impact of this
inner surf upon the sand is not heavy enough to knock
down a vigorous child, and there is never any under-
tow or tidal drag to the recoiling waves.

Nobody is ever drowned at Waikiki; and, over on
the big island of Hawaii, nobody is ever killed or in-
jured by the great volcano. The molten lava tosses
high in the Halemauman, or fire-pit, of Kilanea, the
largest active crater in the world; but the Goddess
Pele maintains a friendly heart for her admirers, and,
though visitors have walked up to the very edge of
the fire-pit for a hundred years, no fatal accident has
ever been recorded. Furthermore, in all of the
Ffawaiian Islands, there is no poisonous plant of any
kind, and no predatory animal, or reptile, or insect.
Neither rattlesnakes nor poison-ivy nor stinging hor-
nets imperil the bare-foot wanderer through the deep-
est jungle. Even mosquitoes were unknown till very
recently, when they were accidentally imported to
Oahu by ships from Japan.

§ 6
Because the eight islands of the Hawaiian group
have now been owned for over a century by the
descendants of half a dozen families, it is still pos-
sible to observe, in the midst of the Pacific, the prac-
tical advantages of that oligarchic system of society
which, after many centuries of practice, has for the
most part been discarded elsewhere in the world.
In Honolulu a multi-racial population is ruled and

  

Pe tiihji STE UATITANLU NER TOE Witt uu

4eng

  

   

410 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

guided by an aristocratic minority; and this oligarchic
arrangement works, to all appearance, perfectly. In
order to analyze the present ethnological complexion
of the Hawaiian Islands, it is necessary to resort to
statistics, and the latest official figures that are avail-
able are those for 1921. In 1921 there were approxi-
mately a quarter of a million people living on the eight
islands of the Hawaiian group. Of these, nearly one
half, or one hundred and fifteen thousand, were Japan-
ese; twenty-three thousand were Chinese; twenty
thousand were pure Polynesians; and eighteen thou-
sand were half Hawaiian, by a crossing of the brown
race with the yellow or the white. In 1921 there were
twenty-four thousand Filipinos (of recent importa-
tion) in the islands, five thousand Coreans, twenty-five
thousand Portuguese (imported half a century ago
from the Azores and Madeira), one thousand Span-
iards, and only thirty-eight thousand haoles, or Arglo-
Saxon people like ourselves. Thus it will be seen that
the haoles, who constitute the ruling class, politically,
economically, and socially, are in a very small minority,
and are already outnumbered, three to one, by the
Japanese alone. And since the Japanese are the most
prolific of the races, rearing families of six or eight
children, it is apparent that within a few years the
racial complexion of the islands will be overwhelmingly
yellow.

But at the present time, at least, there appears to
be no race problem in Hawaii, and among the haole
inhabitants of Honolulu I discovered none of that
almost hysterical fear and hatred of the Japanese
which is a commonplace in California. For in Hawaii
there is no rivalry between the races. Each race fulfilsST ee ee eee eee eee TTT TT TET TSEaeA ge seag Ea

  

HAWAII

  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
 

 

 

its proper function, falls easily into its appointed place,
and is not envious of the activities of the other races.

For more than a century the haole minority has held
without dispute that superior position in the general
esteem which used to be accorded, in an English
county, to the squire and his family. For a hundred
years the haoles have been looked up to by all other
races as an aristocracy, and their oligarchic eminence is
still accepted as indisputable. The Japanese, even our
native-born citizens of Japanese ancestry, are not in-
terested in politics and do not wish to be bothered with
the details of government; and none of the other races
has evinced any ambition or desire to “take up the
white man’s burden.”

The traditional respect that has been paid for sey-
eral generations to an established aristocracy accounts,
of course, for the fact that the atmosphere of life in
Honolulu is more democratic than elsewhere in the
world. ‘The Kanakas are not looked upon nor treated
as an inferior race, like the Negroes in our Southern
States. Intermarriages between white men of the
traditional New-England stock and Hawaiian women
related to the old royal family have occurred not in-
frequently in the course of a century; and, in the best
society, you will meet a few Polynesian ladies and a
few people of part-Hawaiian parentage. Down in the
social scale, intermarriages between Hawaiians and
Chinese have become quite customary; and the result-
ant half-breed race is physically strong and handsome,
and mentally alert. The Japanese, on the other hand,
are steadfastly exclusive and never intermarry with any
other race.

A. democratic association between these varied peo-

  

PTT ee WT OE BOTTLE TTT TTT UNE ERNE PANN TOA ERROR NEUES NREL Vibes Re ee er eey PASTURES CRY

tsee

412 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

ples is begun, of course, in that most American of all
the institutions inherited from old New England—the
public school. Children of all the races are taught in
the same class-rooms, side by side, and brought up to
be Americans. And this democratic association per-
sists through later life. For example, it is not uncus-
tomary for the Japanese and Kanaka servants of the
very rich to go swimming and canoeing with the fam-
ilies of their employers; and, in the sea at Waikiki,
everybody plays with everybody else, regardless of
anybody’s station in society. A lady of great wealth
who is one of the social leaders of Honolulu told me
that none of her five children owned a pair of shoes:
they went to school barerfooted, like all the other
children.

Real democracy in manners is most likely to be
found in a society that is controlled by a cultured oli-
garchy. The aristocrats are benevolent to the
plebeians, and the poor people do not hate the rich.
In Hawaii, the smiling Polynesians scarcely work at
all. They do not have to work. Everybody loves
them, and they subsist upon the general bounty. The
industrious Japanese work hard and save their money.
The efficient Chinese accomplish wonders silently, cash
in, and never tell the world. The Portuguese and the
Filipinos work happily on the plantations. And the
haoles go to business at eight-thirty in the morning,
call it a day at four p.M., and play around with one
another in the mellow hours of the afternoon.

All these people live together happily, without
jealousy and without contention, because their society
is wisely ordered; and the wisdom of this order is the
wisdom that was carried around Cape Horn fromUUEPEN OETA VAATHPATEMPSTOAT ORS av LACUOLOUAGAOAEG AANOROGDOQUGRORIOTOQEOAUATONEOTNOVONUQUOEOIQUAUONOAIOVOANITOOEOOTeMManEE OIL AEEAI Ee eeO ned

  

HAWAII

  
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 

 

 

Massachusetts before the newer America had been
tempted to forget what it had always understood in its
ancestral days.

$7

Flawaii remained a monarchy until the eighteen-
nineties; and, in these days when kings are falling
right and left, it may be profitable to pause a moment
to muse upon the advantages of monarchy. A century
ago the scions of the great Kamehameha were saluted
as right royal in all the capitals of Europe; and in
Honolulu the visitor may still observe the silver service
and the painted portrait that were sent out to the
Hawaiian Islands by Louis Philippe of France as a
personal token from one anointed monarch to another.
For economic reasons a revolution was necessitated in
the eighteen-nineties, when King Kalakaua died and
Queen Lilliuokalani showed herself to be unable to
grow with the growing age; but this revolution was not
pointed against, but rather pointed toward, a respect
for the historical traditions of the ancient kingdom of
Hawaii.

And this historical respect is still perpetuated among
the haoles, who are proud to remember that Honolulu
was a royal capital before most of the American cities
were staked out by the real-estate promoters. In the
highest society of Honolulu there is still to be observed
a tradition of courtliness which has been inherited
from the eighteenth century. Every now and then a
flower-show is held in the stateroom of the capital,
the erstwhile throne-room of the Iolani Palace. You
attend this flower-show, and amidst a rich profusion of
hibiscus blooms you bow to many gentlemen and ladies

  

PILL ena TERI T RUE PAPO Pen PATTUTUT TUTTI AUTEN PROP NTI AUN REECE NP OPM R VANE RENAN RET ADR RU GGeS aT CARP Rea aa)ee

     

A414 THESE UNITED STATES

 

 

of an ancien régime that has almost been forgotten
elsewhere in the world. Oddly enough, there seem to
be no “‘flappers” in the best society of Honolulu. In
that salubrious climate people live to a great age; and
every important function is attended by ladies and
gentlemen of seventy or eighty. These patriarchs hold
court, and are admired for their memories; and mo-
dernity is given pause when they recall their far-off
childhood and tell anecdotes of time-worn days when
the royal scions of the great Kamehameha were still
able, in the ancient fashion, to keep a little corner of
the world safe from the incursion of democracy.

§ 8

How to be happy, though civilized, has become the
most insistent problem of contemporary life. Hono-
lulu is the happiest city that I have ever visited be-
cause, by virtue of its geographical aloofness, it has
managed to remember so many things that have been
forgotten elsewhere in the hurly-burly of the modern
world.

It is a heartbreaking experience to sail away from
Honolulu. A day before you leave, your neck is gar-
landed with Jeis, and thereafter you go about capari-
soned with the flowered tokens of departure. Mr.
Wheeler hails you with a sad aloha, and smiles again
his enigmatic smile as he sits down on the sands of
Waikiki to wait for his laundry to come back. Nearly
all of Honolulu stops business and comes down to the
dock to watch you sail away; and you hurl down from
the deck multicolored paper-streamers, which are
caught by your friends ashore, your brown friends and
yellow friends and white. There are wistful looks inSPUAETTSPTTAEAUETAVOTATUUTOT ORAS UAAOLOHOUAVATALOCOTOTOAONOAUHONOTER EGON UAUOUAEAUOFOEAFOEAOTOTOLATOTORII TRAIT TMeRnP eee reno ceeete

  

HAWAII

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
    
 
 
 

 

 

many eyes, and Achilles, whom you sailed to see when
you pushed off from San Francisco, begins to look
gray and rather old and almost little, like some quaint
figure in a childish fairy-tale. Then the white-
uniformed Hawaiian Band, magnificent and royal,
strikes up the tender strains of ‘““Aloha Oe,” that tear-
compelling anthem of farewell. The steamer backs
and turns. The multicolored strips of paper snap
in twain and are tumbled overboard. Soon Honolulu
hides itself in vegetation, while the steamer saunters
past the creaming coral-reef of Waikiki, beyond which
Mr. Wheeler may be imagined seated on the Chil-
dren’s Beach, still smiling his enigmatic smile.

And as you cast your flowered /Jeis upon the sea, to
be carried backward with the tide, you recall the quaint
voice of Mr. Wheeler. ‘“They come and go,” he used
to say, when the mirage of Walden Pond was in his
eyes, “and others come: but after they are gone, I
know that they remember always, and are always hop-
ing to come back again. It will be that way with you.”

 

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AUEESEUER REET OUEU ECSU DES RRAEPHO UU UPOAEOAASOPOOONCAACQEAAOOAELEOUAOPAUOEAOAVOCOOAEOLOAOLNOSTOHIEOOAEFFOsdoD

    
  
   
 
 
 
 
   
    
 
 
 
  
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
 

THE CONTRIBUTORS TO
THESE UNITED STATES
(VoLUME [)

Kansas: A Puritan Survival
WiLiiaM ALLEN WHITE is a native of Kansas where
he was born in 1868. For the last twenty-seven years he
has been the owner and editor of the Daily and Weekly
Gazette of Emporia, his birth-place. He is the author of
“A Certain Rich Man,” “The Old Order Changeth,”
and other novels and short stories. From 1912 to 1916
he was a member of the Progressive National Committee
and chairman of its Publicity Committee. He is probably
the most widely known living Kansan, and the most dis-
tinguished editor between the Alleghenies and the Rockies.
His editorial, ““What’s the Matter with Kansas?” attracted
attention to him, to his paper, and to his State.
Maryland: Apex of Normalcy
Henry L. MENCKEN is a native and resident of Balti-
more and a graduate of its schools. He was reporter, and
city editor, of the Baltimore Morning Herald, editor of
the Evening Herald, and has been on the staff of the Suns
—morning and evening—during the last nine years. He
is the author of ‘““The American Credo,” ‘The American
Language,” and of numerous collections of essays. He is
internationally known as a writer, editor, critic, publicist
and expert in Americana.
Mississippi: Heart of Dixie
BEULAH AMIDON RaTLiFF was born in Fargo, North
Dakota, in 1894, a daughter of U. S. District Judge
Charles F. Amidon. She was graduated from Barnard
417

  

TR Th PRA Rae ennn ECT U TTT A ENAMEL PERRET TTR ECKERT eA ROUTAN ae GAUGE eLUP An iy OUGRUPOSORRRARROU REDD Ora ly—

CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

College, Columbia University, in 1915. As an organizer
for the National Woman’s Party, she worked for the
federal suffrage amendment in Mississippi in 1917. In
1919 she married Paul G. Ratliff, a native of Mississippi,
whose family has been prominent in that State for four
generations. She lived first in the small plantation village
of Drew, in Sunflower County, for eight months, and then
for two years in Vicksburg. During that time she made a
special study of the white and colored school systems.

Vermont: Our Rich Little Poor State

DorotHy CANFIELD FISHER, novelist and essayist, lives
in Arlington, Vermont, and has been a member of the
State Board of Education, Middlebury College, Vermont,
and the University of Vermont bestowed upon her the
degree of Litt.D. in 1921 and 1922, respectively. She is
the author of ‘“The Montessori Mother,’ ‘““The Bent
Twig,’ “The Brimming Cup,” ‘““The Home-Maker,” etc.

New Jersey: The Slave of Two Cities

EDMUND WILSON, JR., was born in Red Bank, New
Jersey, where his family now resides, and where he has
spent a considerable portion of his life. His father was
for some time Attorney General of the State of New
Jersey. Mr. Wilson was graduated from Princeton with
the class of 1916. He has been managing editor of Vanity
Fair, a member of the editorial staff of the New Republic,
and is a frequent contributor to current periodicals.

Utah: Apocalypse of the Desert

Murray E. Kine was born in Utah in 1876. He
attended the Mormon Academy at Fillmore and later
Brigham Young College at Provo. At the age of 12 he
became a freethinker, and later when called to a mission
by Brigham Young College declined to go. After teaching
school and doing reportorial work on newspapers in Utah,
he enlisted in the Spanish-American War and was in six
engagements in the Philippines. On his return home he“Tey , iT UURWER AYE TAT PUCUAVETAAVARALURTARRAVRTEUTIR TEER TET T PRRHEWAL EAT AAET, ’
PDULEASEUR EAT EREUDEEEEEPESSSUUOAPAGCO US EORA RAGS OOEMHAALOSONESUAAAUOONAEEAADOOOOAELRNOOUEREREROUVOSARELEROROD PenDAuaE

     
    
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 

CONTRIBUTORS 419

 

 

became editor of the Inter-Mountain Worker, official or-
gan of the Utah State Federation of Labor. In 1917 he
entered the service of the Nonpartisan League and in
1921 was secretary of the Farmer-Labor Party Research
Bureau. Recently he has been on the editorial staff of the
Minnesota Daily Star.
South Carolina: A Lingering Fragrance
Lupwic Lerwisoun, critic, editor, author, came to
America at the age of 7 and settled in Charleston, South
Carolina. He attended school there, received the degrees
of Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts from the College
of Charleston in 1901, and of Litt.D. in 1914. He is the
author of “Up-stream,” an autobiography, of “Don
Juan,” a novel, and of numerous essays and criticisms.
Nevada: Beautiful Desert of Buried Hope
ANNE Martin was born in Empire City, Nevada, in
1875. She holds degrees from the University of Nevada,
where she was professor of history from 1897 to 1899,
and Leland Stanford University. She also studied at
Columbia and at the Universities of London and Leipsic.
She was leader of the Nevada Equal Suffrage Campaign
In I911-14, chairman of the National Woman’s Party
1916-17, and independent candidate for United States
Senator from Nevada 1918 and 1920.
Ohio: I'll Say Weve Done Well
SHERWOOD ANDERSON was born at Camden, Ohio, in
1878, and grew up at Clyde, a town some miles back from
Lake Erie and on the railroad between Toledo and Cleve-
land. A common school education was supplemented by
a few months at Wittenburg College, Springfield. Mr.
Anderson began life as a laborer and worked in factories

ea

an ee

si eR.

In various cities in Ohio. Later he became an advertising
writer in Chicago, and after that a manufacturer at Cleve-
land and Elyria, Ohio. He wrote his first novel while

  

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ee

CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

running a small factory at Elyria. Half his life has heen
spent within his native State, and a great many of his
stories and novels have been built up from material gath-
ered there. Mr. Anderson won the Dial’s award of $2,000
in recognition for his services to American letters for the
year 1921. Among his books are “Windy McPherson’s
Son,’ “Marching Men,” ‘Mid-American Chants,”
“Winesburg, Ohio,” “Poor White,’ “The Triumph of
the Egg,” and “Many Marriages.”

Maine: “Down East’

RosBert HERRICK was born in Cambridge, Massachu-
setts, in 1868. His first visit to Maine was a summer
vacation spent at North East Harbor in 1886, when that
summer resort was still quite primitive, with few cottages,
a number of small barnlike boarding houses. From that
year until the present Mr. Herrick has spent many sum-
mers in Maine, at first in the Mt. Desert region and
about Penobscot Bay, and since 1913 has made his home
at York Village, Maine, during half of the year. He
owns a house there and votes there. During 1908-1911
Mr. Herrick lived in the northern part of the State in
Bethel, about twenty-five miles from the White Mountains.
While there he wrote “The Master of the Inn,” ‘““To-
gether,’ “A Life for a Life,’ “The Healer.” ... Thus
he has become familiar with three different sections of the
State, all three distinct in character and background.

Delaware: The Ward of a Feudal Family

ARTHUR WaRNER is not a native of Delaware, and had
never spent a day there in his life until he went to gather
material for his article. Conditions in Delaware suggested
that nobody could tell the truth about the State and live
happily there ever after. So Mr. Warner was asked to
tackle the job because he was a rank outsider and a hard-
boiled journalist, singularly indifferent to whether he livedBUEDENUTFATEATUQEAT UAT OOU OAV OAH EOUOOTOQAUOAUONOAVOATOATOALONIOATEATOA TEA TITOO EAT EeaeRE aL

  

CONTRIBUTORS

  
 
  
   
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 

 

 

happily ever after in Delaware or any other place. Mr.
Warner has been connected with the Washington Post,
the Washington Star, the New York Sun, and the New
York Evening Post. During the European War he
worked in Paris, first for the New York Herald and later
for the London Daily Mail. Since 1919 he has been an
associate editor of The Nation.
Tennessee: Three-quarters of Bewilderment
E. E. MILuer was born in Greene County, Tennessee,
and has lived practically all his life in Tennessee and North
Carolina, except for a short time in Alabama. After a
course at the University of Tennessee, he entered the
editorial field, being managing editor of the Progressive
Farmer from 1908 to 1913, editor of the Southern Farm
Journal, 1914, editor of the Southern Agriculturist, pub-
lished in Nashville, since 1915. He is author of two books,
“Fertilizing for Profit,’ and “Field-Path and Highway,”
and has contributed frequently to periodicals. He has
been a close student of political and agricultural economy,
and is a recognized authority on these subjects.
California: The Prodigious
GeorcE P. WEsT was a political reporter for the San
Francisco Bulletin during the first three years of John-
son’s first term as Governor, when the Bulletin was his
principal newspaper supporter in northern California. In
that capacity he accompanied Johnson on all his campaign
trips, including his tour of the country as vice-presidential
candidate in 1912. In 1920 he was publicity man for
William Kent in Kent’s unsuccessful campaign for the
Senate. Mr. West has contributed extensively to peri-
odicals.
Wisconsin: A Voice from the Middle Border
ZONA GALE was born in Portage, Wisconsin, in 1874.
She was educated in the Portage public schools and at the

 

PUTT TTT Oe PUSUTUT TTT CUT CRUE TU MOSTAR TA RLU LTT TTT ORTVREAEARETA ARAL TULA eeO aT PUPPETS STe TTT apeCONTRIBUTORS

 

 

University of Wisconsin. After eight years of newspaper
work in Milwaukee and New York she returned to Port-
age where she makes her home. She is a regent at large
of the State University and chairman of the Wisconsin
Free Library Commission. She is a writer of novels and
plays, including ‘““Miss Lulu Bett,” “Birth,” “Faint Per-
fume.”

Michigan: The Fordizing of a Pleasant Peninsula

LEONARD LANSON CLINE was born in Bay City, Michi-
gan, and has lived in Detroit, Ministee, Ironwood, Ypsi-
lanti. For three years he attended the University of
Michigan at Ann Arbor. For seven years he wrote polit-
ical articles and music and art criticism for Detroit news-
papers. He has been a contributor of prose and poetry
to various magazines. He has been on the staff of the

Baltimore Sun and New York World.

Louisiana: “Madame de la Louisiane’

Basi THOMPSON was born in New Orleans in 1892,
and grew up there. He was graduated from Loyola
College, and studied at Tulane and at Jefferson and Lee
University. In 1921, with Julius Weis Friend, Mr.
Thompson founded The Double-Dealer Magazine and
was co-editor of this periodical until his death in April,
1924. Mr. Thompson was the author of “Auguries,” a
book of poems, and with three other poets published
“Estrays.” Just before his death he had collected for
publication in book form his latest poems and these will
appear under the title “The Grey Men and Other
Rhymes.” Mr. Thompson’s verse has appeared in many
of the better known magazines.

Iowa: A Mortgaged Eldorado

JouHan J. SMERTENKO lived seven years in the Middle
West, the last two and a half of which he spent in Iowa
as managing editor of the Grinnell Review and director of
publicity for the Grinnell College endowment fund. HeSOUAT PEAT TARTUEET EPEAT ONTOS POETS PUTO EA HANNAH OHO PO UAE OT OED OOO GEO ODOCOTOUOA OU ALAEROCADOUEOEO LOOT Pe EeES EGIL

  

CONTRIBUTORS

  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
   
 
 
 
  
   
  
 
 

 

 

has lectured at Hunter College, New York City, and has
contributed articles to many periodicals.
Massachusetts: A Roman Conquest
JouHn Macy was born in Detroit in 1877. He took
his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Harvard and taught
there, in the Department of English, in 1900-01. He was
associate editor of the Youth’s Companion from 1901 to
1909, literary editor of the Boston Herald, 1913-14, and
literary editor of The Nation, 1923-24. His books include
“Life of Poe,” “Guide to Reading,” “The Spirit of
American Literature,” “The Critical Game,” ‘The Story
of the World’s Literature,” “Walter James Dodd,” a
biography, and others.
Alabama: A Study in Ultra-Violet
CLEMENT Woop was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in
1888. He grew up in his native State and was graduated
from the State University before studying law at Yale.
He practiced law for three years in Alabama and served as
Assistant City Attorney and Judge of the Central Re-
corder’s Court of Birmingham. At present he is living in
New York, where he has written several novels and books
of verse. Among these are “Glad of Earth,” ‘“Mountain,”
“Nigger.” He has contributed extensively to the maga-
zines and his poems have won several prize awards.
South Dakota: State Without End
HaypEN CaRRUTH was born in Minnesota in 1862,
but lived a large part of his life in South Dakota. He con-
ducted the Estelline Bell in that State when it was part of
Dakota Territory. Among other volumes he is the author
of ““Track’s End.” In the years 1888 to 1892 he was on
the New York Tribune, and at present writes ‘“The Post-
script” in the Woman’s Home Companion.
Oregon: A Slighted Beauty
CuHares H. CHAPMAN was a resident of Portland and
its near neighborhood for more than twenty years. He

 

SOO Ee COED Ce ee eee ULE RA LLU eraCONTRIBUTORS

   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

wrote editorials for the Oregonian for some ten years, and
during four years for the Journal. From 1893 to 1900
he was president of the State University at Eugene. He
ran a fruit farm just across the Columbia from Portland,
has traveled all over the State, and is intimately acquainted
| | with its people. He has lectured for women’s clubs, the
Y. M. C. A., and various labor unions on politics and
| literature.
Pennsylvania: Still a Keystone
| | REGINALD WriIGHT KAUFFMAN was born in Columbia,
Ries (| Pennsylvania, of Pennsylvania Dutch stock. He is the
author of many books and has been connected with the
Philadelphia Press and the North American. During the
al Peace Conference he was a member of a mission represent-
Pt | ing the Republican National Committee at Paris. He still
Hi lives in his native town.
ii Texas: The Big Southwestern Specimen
(if Gerorce Cxiirron Epwarps was born in Dallas, Texas,
in 1877, and has lived there nearly all his life. Graduated
at the University of the South, 1898, and at Harvard,
1899, he taught for several years until discharged from
i the Dallas High School for being a Socialist. Since then
| | he has practiced law in Dallas, mostly for poor people,
ti union men, and radicals. He drew most of the liberal
[ provisions of the present Dallas charter, and most of the
city ordinances passed by the initiative method.
Arizona: The Land of the Joyous Adventure
| | Mary Austin was born in Illinois, removed to the
| i Far West in 1888 and settled in that portion of the Cali-
| fornia desert which borders on Nevada and Arizona. She
began almost at once to extend her knowledge of the coun-
try into Arizona, having visited every portion of it at some
time or another. For the past half dozen years the center
of her interest there has been the Botanical Laboratory of
the Carnegie Institute near Tucson. In 1919 she made aCONTRIBUTORS 426

 

 

sociological survey of the Southwest for the Carnegie
Foundation Americanization study. Mrs. Austin is best
known as an interpreter of the social and cultural aspects
of the Southwest, having written several books on the
subject, notably ‘““The Land of Little Rain” and “The
Land of Journey’s Ending.” She is also the author of
“The Basket Woman,” “The Flock,” ‘‘Love and the Soul-
Maker,” ‘The Man Jesus,” ‘“The Trail Book,” “Out-
land.”

Connecticut: A Nation in Miniature

Don C. Seitz was born in Portage, Wood County,
Ohio, in 1862 and began his interest in Connecticut by
close connection with its Western Reserve, which was to
be amplified into a 26-year residence at Cos Cob, in Green-
wich. For more than thirty years he has been actively
identified with the New York World, is president of the
Authors’ Club, a Litt.D. of Bowdoin College and the
writer of numerous volumes, including biographies of
Artemus Ward, General Braxton Bragg and Joseph
Pulitzer.

Arkansas: A Native Proletariate

C. L. Epson was born in Wilbur, Nebraska, in 1881.
He was graduated from the University of Kansas in 1904
and spent two years reporting and doing editorial writing
on the Kansas City Star. He then went to Leslie, Arkansas,
and bought a homesteader’s new farm in the mountains.
Farming with a white mule and a bull-tongue plow and
working at odd times in the timber, cutting saw logs and
hewing railroad ties, Mr. Edson lived the life of the
Arkansas hill-billy for six years. Having had newspaper
training he was on the alert for local material which he
could turn into articles. Mr. Edson says: “I never studied
Arkansas as a trained professor would study it. I was
mentally alert but a poverty-stricken member of the Arkan-
sas community for half a dozen glorious years, and then

AeRURUV eee eR aes S|426 CONTRIBUTORS

   

 

 

ee

I went to New York and capitalized my rusticity with a
series of newspaper essays called ‘An Arkansas Man on
Broadway. ”
he Colorado: Two Generations
EasLey S$. JONES was born in Blue Springs, Nebraska,
| and moved to Colorado at the age of nine. He was grad-
OF | uated from the University of Colorado and remained in
| the same school for several years as instructor in English.
| After graduate study at Harvard University and the Uni-
versity of Illinois, and several years of foreign travel, he
| has returned to Boulder, Colorado, where he is occupied
i} | with writing.
|

| (VoLuME II)

Virginia: A Gentle Dominion
iy Douctas FREEMAN is a Virginian by birth and parent-
| (| age. Born at Lynchburg in 1886, he was educated at

a Richmond College, Washington and Lee, William and
| | Mary, and Johns Hopkins. He entered editorial work in
| | 1909 on the staff of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, was
| secretary of the Virginia Tax Commission from I910 to
1912, and became associate editor of the Richmond News-
I Leader in 1913. In 1915 he was made editor, and since
1922 has been part owner of this paper as well.

Minnesota: The Norse State
| SINCLAIR LeEwis is universally known as the author
of “Main Street” and “Babbitt,” titles which have become
| incorporated in the current American idiom. He was
| | born at Sauk Center, Minnesota, in 1885, was graduated
| from Yale in 1907, and has spent some years at journalism
, in various parts of the country.
Montana: Land of the Copper Collar

‘| ARTHUR FISHER was forced out of the law school of the
| University of Montana several years ago through theSTUVETTATTRTTE UAT EETIESTSAT SHEA ESHA EA UAC AA EMU UAD EAU ESO PEA OMEOQOAOMOOATOQTAOOOOAUOAEOONOQIOAEIO NOT TeeeeeaPeT oe eT ED

      
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 
    
 
  
 
  
    
  
 
  
  
    
  
 
 
  
  
 
 

CONTRIBUTORS 427

 

 

efforts of the American Legion, as a result of his views.
He was later connected with several papers controlled by
Farmer-Labor groups in Montana.
Florida: The Desert and the Rose
Crara G. StILtiMAN has at various times traveled ex-
tensively in Florida and has made special studies of the
State’s history. She is a resident of New York and a
contributor to various magazines.
Illinois: First Province of the Middle Kingdom
Howarp VINCENT O’BRIEN is a resident of Winnetka,
one of Chicago’s suburbs. He was graduated from Yale
in 1910, joined the editorial staff of Printer’s Ink the next
year, and in the same year founded and assumed editorship
of a magazine called Art. He served with the A. E. F.
as first lieutenant from 1917 to 1919, and since that time
has been engaged in writing books and contributing to
various magazines. Among his books are “New Men for
Old” and “Trodden Gold.” He writes: “I was born
in Chicago (in 1888), as were my parents, and my grand-
parents arrived when the place was little more than a
trading-post. One of them, however, thought so little of
Chicago’s prospects that he pushed on to Milwaukee... .
My paternal grandfather, Martin O’Brien, in 1853, estab-
lished the art business which still bears his name. It is, I
believe, one of the oldest institutions of its kind in the
United States. Martin must have been a man! Fancy
selling pictures to Chicago in 1853!”
West Virginia: A Mine-Field Melodrama
James M. Cain is a native of Maryland. For a
number of years he was connected with the Baltimore
Sun. For that paper he covered numerous West Virginia
assignments and wrote extensively on industrial and polit-
ical conditions there. Later he personally investigated the
coal situation in the State, working for a time as a miner
in order to obtain first hand information.

  

UPUP Ueto POST TIA PON TRAD REDE TTT TOT it428

  

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New Hampshire: Not Yet Abandoned

RatpH D. PAINE was born in Illinois, studied at Yale
and at the University of New Hampshire. He did special
correspondence for newspapers during the Spanish-Ameri-
can War and the Boxer Rebellion, and was with the
Allied Naval Forces in the war zone in 1917-18. He
has served as a member of the New Hampshire legislature
and of the New Hampshire Board of Education. Mr.
Paine is the author of numerous books and is known
particularly on account of his books for boys which have
enjoyed considerable popularity.

Wyoming: The Maverick Citizenry
g
'

WaLTeER C. HAwWEs is a newspaper man, until lately
editor of the Rock River Review, who has lived in Wy-
oming for many years and has made a close study of
the social and historical institutions of the State.

North Carolina: A Militant Mediocracy

RoBert Watson WINSTON was born at Windsor,
North Carolina, in 1860. He received his A.B. degree
at the State University in 1879, his LL.B. degree in 1884,
and his LL.D. from Wake Forest College in 1915. Mr.
Winston practiced law in his native State for thirty years
and, according to his biography in ‘‘Who’s Who,” “re-
entered college at 60 to fit himself ‘to interpret the New
South to the Nation and the Nation to the New South.’ ”
He has been president of the North Carolina Literary and
Historical Association, State Senator and Circuit Judge,
Judge of the Superior Court of North Carolina, and
president of the Durham Chamber of Commerce.

| | Nebraska: The End of the First Cycle

WILLA S1BERT CATHER moved at the age of nine from
Virginia, where her family had lived for several genera-
tions, to Nebraska. ‘The Cathers settled in a thinly popu-
lated part of the State—there were few American families;
all the near neighbors were Scandinavian and nearby aHa

eaeaaa:

UEEUETTSATUTEESOSETES PEA ESTA ATO EAA COA UOTOOUO GAAS OOTOOAOQ COUT OOTOOONCOQOOOIEOANOI OUI POIIOI TOE TOMEO OP MEET te ettt

CONTRIBUTORS 429

 

 

township settled by Bohemians. After preparation at the
high school at Red Cloud Miss Cather entered the Uni-
versity of Nebraska and was graduated at nineteen. The
scenes of many of Miss Cather’s short stories, of her
novels—“O, Pioneers!’ and “One of Ours” (which won
the Pulitzer Prize for the best American novel in 1922) —
are in the Nebraska prairieland.

Oklahoma: Low Jacks and the Crooked Game

Burton Rascoe was born in Fulton, Kentucky. He
moved to Shawnee, Oklahoma, with his parents when he
was ten years old and remained there until his graduation
from the Shawnee High School in 1911. While in high
school he was first a reporter and later wrote editorials
and conducted a “colyum” on the Shawnee Herald. He
also founded a short-lived magazine in Shawnee called
The Tatler; and for two years was assistant librarian of
the Carnegie Public Library there. He has since visited
the State on three occasions. His parents reside on a farm
in Seminole County. After leaving Oklahoma in 1011,
he studied at the University of Chicago; worked for eight
years on the Chicago Tribune as reporter, assistant city
editor, feature writer, assistant Sunday editor, roto-
gravure editor, dramatic critic, and literary editor; spent
one year as associate editor of McCall’s, and two and a
half years as literary editor of the New York Tribune,
now the Herald-Tribune.

Idaho: A Remnant of the Old Frontier

Morton R. STONE was born in Chicago and received
his education in various widely separated districts in the
United States and Canada; he was located in the northern
portion of Idaho during the construction of the Pacific
extension of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railway
and was locating engineer for the Idaho State Highway
Department on several projects in the southeastern portion
of the State; he has been engaged in the commission busi-

eS TOOT ee PeLIeAU RULE

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oS ORS CE RS AI GT OE as Ie

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430

CONTRIBUTORS

 

 

ness in southern Idaho for the past five years, and has
assisted in the formation of several farmers’ codperative
movements. He is a resident of Boise, Idaho.

New York (I): The City—Work of Man

ERNEST GRUENING was born on West 83rd Street,
Manhattan, in 1887, lived the first twelve years of his
life on East 23rd Street and thereafter on East 57th Street.
He went to school on East 28th Street, East 49th Street
and West 59th Street. He has been managing editor of
the New York Tribune and of the New York Nation.

New York (II): State of Unwilling Progress

CuarLes WeEsLEY Woop was born in Ogdensburg, New
York, in 1880. Son of a Methodist clergyman, he spent his
childhood largely in the rural districts of St. Lawrence,
Lewis, Oswego and Jefferson counties. He was expelled
from the Watertown High School in 1897 for making a
speech which was said to be “‘anarchistic,” and later from
the Genesee Wesleyan Seminary, at Lima, Livingstone
County, for a similar offense. He became a local preacher
and entered Syracuse University, but soon resigned from
both religion and education and drifted about as an un-
skilled laborer to Buffalo, Schenectady, Mechanicsville, and
other industrial centers. At twenty-three he became a loco-
motive fireman at Rotterdam Junction. While still rail-
roading, he contributed articles to Collier’s, the Cosmmo-
politan and the American Magazine. In 1907 he married
Miss Mabel Barrett of Plattsburg. In 1909 be became a
reporter on the Syracuse Journal. ‘Two years later he was
editing the Schenectady Citizen and in 1913 joined the
staff of the New York Sunday World, with which, al-
though a free lance, he has been loosely associated ever
since. In 1919 Boni & Liveright published his only
book, ‘“The Great Change.” In the same year he was
sent to China by the Methodist Centenary Committee toYATEEUETATTUSUATOSERAIOOTOOTS COHLAT TAOOUOOGAU EC COQOLOLPAUUEOOOATVOOIOTOOTANIOOOAINOOOINEOONITITOMMOOO IIT ene eet ar

Ea!

   
   
 
 
 
 
 
  
   
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 

CONTRIBUTORS 431

 

 

study the missionary movement from the standpoint of a
rank outsider. Mr. Wood lives at Clemons, in the wilds
of Washington County, New York.
Kentucky: Where Men Die Standing
Ben Lucien BuRMAN was born in Covington, Ken-
tucky, in 1896, and grew up there. After graduation from
Harvard College and a period of service as a member of
the staff of the Boston Herald, he returned to Kentucky
and became head of the History and Government Depart-
ment of the Covington High School. He left the teaching
profession after a year to become an assistant city editor,
then assistant telegraph editor of the Cincinnati Times-
Star, for a time acting as Kentucky editor. Journeying east,
he joined the staff of the Sunday Magazine of the New
York World, and was a literary reviewer for The Nation.
Very lately he has been in the Blue Grass State writing
fiction and occasional verse for various magazines. He
has traveled extensively through the Kentucky mountains.
Washington: The Dawn of a Tomorrow
Rogpert WHITAKER was born in Lancashire, England,
but has been a resident of the United States for fifty-five
years, thirty-seven of them on the Pacific Coast. He was
ordained as a Baptist minister in New England in 1887,
spent a year in missionary service in old Mexico, and had
his first pastorate in Seattle, Washington, in 1888-80.
He was on Puget Sound again in the summer of 1902,
again in 1907 and 1920, and spent eighteen months in the
State of Washington, covering the major part of the State
In 1922-23. Besides his ministerial work Mr. Whitaker
has been editorial writer and a correspondent of many
newspapers and magazines for the past thirty years, has
published several books, mainly on religious and social
topics, and has lectured all over the United States and in
Great Britain.

 

UETURESOSOES ULL U LUTEAL LATS AMAL AR CATAMARAN AU OU AS CAI MAD UAUAAHEAALEGAUAACEUHOESERUE CUT EUITH OGIO SGU SSE POU REN UTS OORT ALATEST HTT wyCONTRIBUTORS

 

 

New Mexico: A Relic of Ancient America

ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT can only qualify as a
New Mexican by taste and adoption. She was born near
Boston in 1881, was graduated from Bryn Mawr College,
and until after the late war her journalistic and literary
work was largely identified with the Eastern seaboard
and with France. But both her father and her maternal
grandparents went West from New England as pioneering
young folks, and she probably has something in her blood
which made the elemental yet richly colored background
of the Tesuque Valley peculiarly sympathetic. The agri-
cultural acres and ditches of this valley, six miles from
Santa Fé, where Miss Sergeant settled in 1920, are dis-
puted by American farmers, Spanish-American small
ranchers and one of the immemorial tribal groups of
Pueblo Indians. Miss Sergeant’s Mexican adobe occupies
a hilltop in the midst of these neighbors, and she was
inevitably drawn into local questions as a resident rather
than as a spectator or theoretical altruist through the Fall-
Bursum attack on Pueblo lands in 1922-23. She was one
of the founders of the New Mexico Association on Indian
Affairs, and is now writing a book on the Pueblos. She
has published numerous articles on Indian and other aspects
of Southwestern life in the last four years, including a
series in Harper's Magazine, “The Journal of a Mud

House.”

Indiana: Her Soil and Light

THEODORE DREISER was born in Terre Haute, Indiana,
in 1871. He got his schooling and college training in his
native State, and entered journalistic work in Chicago in
1892. He has been connected in various capacities with
many of the leading periodicals and has written numerous
books. Among these are “A Hoosier Holiday,” “The
Genius,” ‘Seven Plays,” “Sister Carrie,” ““The Financier,”ATUATTUTTTATATETACARTTEEUPATORY AULA HOO EA OLED OA OA OG EA AD OO ERONEAUAONOLOQODOVQONOOONANAEVOV ELIE O ERO NEO ETI TetEE

  

CONTRIBUTORS

 

“The Titan,” “Jennie Gerhardt,” and “A Traveler at
Forty.”

Rhode Island: A Lively Experiment

RoBert CLouTMAN Dexter is not a Rhode Islander by
birth; only by marriage and residence. He was born in
Nova Scotia, but spent most of his early years in the
neighboring State of Massachusetts. He spent five years
as a student in Brown University, Providence, and a year
in social work in Providence after graduation. He has
ever since been much interested and kept in close touch with
Rhode Island affairs. Up to recently he was teaching in
Clark University, Worcester, but twenty miles from the
Rhode Island State line. He received an M.A. degree
from Brown, and much of his work for his doctor’s disser-
tation was done in Rhode Island. Mr. Dexter says: “My
own feeling is that perhaps the fact that Rhode Island is
a ‘mother-in-law State’ rather than a ‘mother State’ may

help me to view her virtues and vices somewhat more
fairly.”

Missouri: Doesn't Want To Be Shown

Maney O. Hupson was born in St. Charles County,
Missouri, and grew up in Montgomery County; he was
four years a student at William Jewell College at Liberty,
and for nine years a professor at the State University; he
has been secretary of the Missouri Children’s Code Com-
mission and was one of the State’s Commissioners on Uni-
form State Laws. Since leaving Missouri he has been
attached to the Department of State, the League of Na-
tions, and Harvard University.

North Dakota: A Twentieth-Century Valley Forge

 

UEP Ree eer ae a |

RogBert Georcre Paterson was born in Bellefontaine,
Ohio. His mother was the late Virginia Sharpe Paterson,
writer and naturalist. He received his education at Char-
lotte Hall Military Academy, Maplewood Classical School,
and Ohio State University. He has done journalistic

 

tf

  
 
 
 
 
 
   
  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
   
  
 
 
   
 
  

TILL LT eekCONTRIBUTORS

 

 

|] work in Ohio, Indiana, Oklahoma, Georgia, North Dakota

| and New York. He was on the staff of the Fargo Forum
| for nearly five years, serving as its legislative correspondent
| at Bismarck, its political writer and city editor, and was
manager of the Democratic Press Bureau in the North
| Dakota State campaign of 1914. During the war he was
a Y. M. C. A. lecturer to the troops of the First and
i Twenty-sixth Divisions in France and also in American
cantonments, later enlisting as a private in the Tank
Corps, U. S. Army. Since the war Mr. Paterson has
been connected with Current Opinion as assistant to its
late editor-in-chief, Edward J. Wheeler, and is now asso-
! ciate editor of the McClure Newspaper Syndicate.
Georgia: Invisible Empire State
| W. E. Burcuarpt Dv Bots was born in Massachusetts
in 1868 and was educated there, in Tennessee, and in
Germany. He taught in Ohio and Pennsylvania and came
to Georgia in 1896. He lived there continuously thirteen
years and since 1910 has visited the State several times
and kept in close touch by correspondence. While in
Georgia, as agent of the United States Census and of the
Labor Bureau, as writer for several magazines and as
editor of the Atlanta University Social Studies, he visited
i all parts of the State. He is now editor of the Crisis
Magazine and Director of Publications and Research for
the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People.
if The District of Columbia: Ward of the Nation
| Joun W. Owens was born in Anne Arundel County,
Maryland, November 2, 1884. He was educated in the
public schools and took night and summer courses at Johns
1 Hopkins University. He has been political reporter of the
Baltimore Sun since 1911 and has lived in Washington for
| the last four years.

~~
= ~~ .

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a a aUUEPESUUATRTANTUTEUTTRTOQNEOS A OUCQNLAUEAROAEOSEANOQUOATOUEADOQNOQUOTIOTOATOAUOTOONOGEOTOOLOTEATOTTOTIETONEOTIMne ECA

  

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Alaska: Our Returning Frontier
Bruce Rocers was born in Georgia and spent his boy-
hood in Texas. As a boy he taught school, raised cotton,
studied law (while sleeping on a carpenter’s bench),
supported his widowed mother and infant sisters, became
the “boy orator” of the county, and entered the Univer-
sity of Austin. He says that all hope for a glorious future
was here blasted by his proclaiming admiration for Bob
Ingersoll, associating with a Negro school-teacher, and
acquiring a knowledge of Karl Marx from a German
student. Moving north from Austin he was admitted to
the bar in Kansas and later became a victim of the perse-
cutions heaped on the I. W. W. because of his connection
with Clarence Darrow in the trial of the editor of The
Appeal to Reason. When the United States entered the
war Rogers edited a miners’ daily in Nome, Alaska. He
was arrested for alleged sedition and after being held a
year for trial was acquitted on his own defense. He now
is in charge of the Interport News Service.
Porto Rico: The American Colony
Luis Munoz Marin was born in San Juan, Porto
Rico, a few months before the outbreak of the Spanish-
American War. His people, Spanish and Italian, had
resided in the island about eighty years. He was first
brought to the United States when three years old, and
since then has divided his time between Porto Rico and
the United States. He studied in the public and private
schools of Porto Rico, in the public schools of New York,
and at Georgetown University. He acted as secretary to
his father, who represented Porto Rico in Congress, and
to his successor in office; and has been at different times
editor, stump orator, lecturer, short-story writer, and
correspondent. Porto Ricans consider his father, Luis
Mujioz Rivera, their national hero.

 

EPPO ORES eo eG |

RU RUBUPHSE PRU eee436

    

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Hawaii: A Sub-Tropical New England

Crayton HamItTon was born in Brooklyn, New York,
in 1881. After taking the degree of B.A. at the Brooklyn
Polytechnic Institute he took his M.A. degree at Columbia
University, where he subsequently lectured for twenty
years on dramatic literature. He has contributed many
articles to various magazines and is about to publish a
volume of these sketches entitled “Wanderings.” He is a
member and vice-president of the National Institute of Arts
and Letters. Mr. Hamilton writes of the Territory of
Hawaii from the point of view of an experienced traveler
rather than that of a native of the territory. He has
traveled through many countries and lived during one
summer at Waikiki, in intimate touch with the leading
families of Honolulu. It was at that time that he gathered
the impressions of Hawaii on which his article has been
built.TUE PEE TT ETT TS TUEEETUEEOUE EO CAA AEG AATAOAMEROLOEOECOUAOAOONOCUEVOEOOTO EG EROT OTA ETOA OTE DDELATEE TEE

  

INDEX OF STATES

  
 
 
 
  
 
 
 
 
  
  
   
  
 
 
  
  
  
  
  
   
  
    
    
     
   
   
  
   
 
 
 
 

VOLUME PAGE
ALABAMA: A Study in Ultra- Violet, by Clement Wood . . I

245
ALASKA; Our Returning Frontier, by Bruce ROGEt Ss) ibe aiz we II 356
ARIZONA: The Land of the Joyous reheat by Mary

Austin att ke I 326
ARKANSAS: A Native Broletariete be C. L. Egcon 1} 355
CALIFORNIA: The Prodigious, by George P. West I She
COLORADO: Two Generations, by Easley S. Jones : I 373
CONNECTICUT: A Nation in Miniature, by Don C. Seite I 340
DELAWARE: The Ward of a pengee Family, by Arthur

Warner Sei arWeeACy eC iceee I 127
DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, THE: Ward of the anon,

by John W. Owens . II 346
FLORIDA: The Desert cel He Rebs bi Clara G. Stillman II 48
GEORGIA: Invisible Empire State, by W. E. Bx Gh ange

Die Bois) * II 322
HAWAII: A Sub- eDronical New Racland: by Clayton Hamilton II 394
IDAHO: A Remnant of the Old Frontier, by M. R. Stone . II 170
ILLINOIS: First Province of the Middle Kingdom, by hehe

Vincent O’Brien . IT 64
INDIANA: Her Soil aad Light. by Theodore poison aie IT 264
IOWA: A Mortgaged Eldorado, by Johan J. Smertenko . . I 214
KANSAS: A Puritan Survival, by William Allen White . 3 I I
KENTUCKY: Where Men Die Sianding. by Ben Lucien

Burman ; II 218
LOUISIANA: (Madame le 1 Teouisinne)’ by Basil Bhvanpeon I 199
MAINE: ‘Down East,” by Robert Herrick : oye I 118
MARYLAND: Apex of Normalcy, by H. L. Meniben I 13
MASSACHUSETTS: A Roman Conquest, by John Macy . I 228
MICHIGAN: The Fordizing of a Pleasant pone by

Leonard Lanson Cline . ; I 185
MINNESOTA: The Norse State, by Sinclair ewe : II 20
MISSISSIPPI: Heart of Dixie, by Beulah Amidon Ratliff I 25
MISSOURI: Doesn’t Want to be Shown, YY Matiey O.

Hudson : II 295
MONTANA: Band of the Gopnce Collar, Be sei Fisher IT 34
NEBRASKA: The End of the First Cycles Py Willa Sibert

Cather . II 141
NEVADA: Beautiful Dect of Buried Hae fee Bane Merce I 94
NEW HAMPSHIRE: Not Yet Abandoned, by Ralph D. Paine II 93
NEW JERSEY: The Slave of Two Cite By peared Wil-

son, Jr. I 56
NEW MEXICO: A Relic of Wnciene Asmerion: by Elisabeth

Shepley Sergeant : II 250

NEW YORE: (I) The City —Work of Man, by Heed
Gruening . II 184

NEW Oe (IT) State of Unwilling Progress, by Gharies
W. A

IT 203
NORTH BORA. A ‘Militant Mediocracy, hy Robert Wat.
son Winston . II 123
NORTH DAKOTA: A Twentieth: Century Valley Forge, by
Robert George Paterson . , Seer ehipua ts ans II 310

437

  

MTT TTT PAUSE TTT ipa nes en ee a eae 3

438 INDEX

OHIO: “I'll Say We’ve Done Well,” by Sherwood Anderson
OKLAHOMA: Low jacks and the Crooked Game, BY Exar
Rascoe
OREGON: A Slighted Beauty by Charles H. Chatman ;
PENNSYLVANIA: Still a Key Sane: By peaunald Wimsatt
Kauffman
PORTO RICO: The mmeniean Galery, Be Tass anos Maree
RHODE ISLAND: A ively Expect By Robert Cloutman
Dexter
SOUTH CAROLINA: A Lingering Fragrance, by Ludwig
Lewisohn .
SOUTH DAKOTA: State Without End, he Hayden Garath
TENNESSEE: Three Creare of Bewilderment, by E. E.
Maller a
TEXAS: The Big Icunheesteral Specimen, by George Clifton
Edwards ‘
UTAH: Wacesiense of the Desert. iby itacas E. King :
EOE: Our Rich Little Poor Site by Dor auey Conneld
wrner °
VIRGINIA: A Gentle Dominion, by Douglas vcewen
WASHINGTON: The Dawn of a Tomorrow, by BOLr
Whitaker . .
Weary VIRGINIA: A Minefield curelagearaa: by Tames M.
ain °
WISCONSIN: A Voice front the Middle Border! hy ona Gale
WYOMING: A Maverick Citizenry, by Walter C. Hawes .z

VOLUME

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109

154
280

293
373

277

84
263

143

305
67

ae
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233

80
172
106| } " aye whan AUAORORRARAGAdaa RARRR AURA MRED APRA AR ER EA ESSER TaN aE eee
A ATETENETVANUATO ENT TOTOLENE4H OUEATEAIEH OOOO EN OO EOI EOTEPIOUTTUANUATATOHINTOO TINTON ETP TTTATTETTTT

  

INDEX OF CONTRIBUTORS

   
  
     
   
    
     
 
 
 
 
 
   
  
  
  
 
  
   
  
   
   
 
 
 
  
 

VOLUME PAGE

ANDERSON, SHERWOOD, Ohio ....................... I 109
RUSTING AMARY,, Arizona’ 2).2% sale qu ncieic son na tae I 326
BURMAN, BEN LUCIEN, Wentucity:. sre siete eee II 218
CAIN, JAMES M., West Vii ginia otf ere Sieacisyat ce ae eee II 80
CARRUTH, HAYDEN, South Dakotas beck inti cto, wee I 263
CATHER, WILLA SIBERT, Nebraska seemene seen ee IT 141
CHAPMAN, CHARLES He, -Oregon? teisee cmc r onicne eee I 280
CLINE, LEONARD LANSON; Michigan cee ee ee ee I 185
DEXTER, ROBERT CLOUTMAN, Rhode Island .......... II 277
DREISER, THEODORE, Indiana ....................... II 264
DU BOIS, W. E. BURGHARDT, Georgia ............... II 322
EDSON MGs Le Arkansasias facies sree eee el I 355
EDWARDS, GEORGE CLIFTON, Texas ................ I 305
BISHERS ARTHUR, ‘Montana, ococse esse cccatasen ons une II 34
FISHER, DOROTHY CANFIELD, Vermont .............. I A4
FREEMAN, DOUGLAS, Wirginia: econ fa eee TT I
CATE ZONA, | Wisconsin (2... stnaeease sue ee ae I 172
GRUENING, ERNEST, New York (Ehe (City) 22455-4255 II 184
HAMILTON, CLAYTON, Hawaii .......s.ccccceee....,. II 394
HAWES, WALTER C., Wyoming actor as cimcce renee meee II 106
BERRICK) ROBERT, “Maine. ws: e.secce. ccceee ee I 118
HUDSON, MANLEY O., Missouri ...........-........0, II 295
JONES MEASLEN (S:5) Colorado: ssmcccsecir een e nee I 373
KAUFFMAN, REGINALD WRIGHT, Fennsylvaniay eauniee- I 293
ISIN GEMURRAVG (Es; (Utahy sien seen acee eee en t I 67
LEWIS, SINCLAIR, Minnesota ......./................ It 20
LEWISOHN, LUDWIG, South Carolina ..............._. I 84
MACY, JOHN, Massachusetts) so ajtas ste ieecieee cee eerie I 228
MARIN, LUIS MUNOZ, Porto Rico .....eeeececee-....... II 373 h
MESREINSVANNE,| Nevadas osc, sccm anaie ne ne nee I 94 i
MENCKEN, H. L., Maryland) Rivecciietee enn ter err ene I 13
MIUPER | Was ba lennessée) | ssjassie sadn I 143 f
O'BRIEN, HOWARD VINCENT, Illinois ................. II 64 Ki
OWENS, JOHN W., The District of Columbiativensae seer II 346 }
PAINE, RALPH D., New Flampshirey tun eerie rene IT 93 Ha
PATERSON, ROBERT GEORGE, North Dakota ......... II 310 h
RASCOE, BURTON, Oklahoma .........00cecee000......, II 154 ;
RATLIFF, BEULAH AMIDON, Mississippi .............. I 25 4
ROGERS VBRUCE, Alaska (5. a cis -enen eens eee eee II 356 i
SEITZ, DON (C5 Connecticut: . 01 e.0c1eecclucss sinh I 340 i
SERGEANT, ELIZABETH SHEPLEY, New Mexico ...... II 258 1
SMERTENKOT OHA N) Jey lowal eer een an ne I 214 iH
SITELMAN; CLARA Gi) Florida s)oc5cscnes ou tl ane II 44 1
SON Ey ay (Rap idaho wns cea saree cars cents ea II 170 ii!
DH OMESONRIBACIL, ‘Louisianay oo. ees een ee ee I 199 i
WARNER ARTHUR. ‘Delaware socssesneneeein ieee ; I 12? i
WEST GEORGHEP California, jasc eee nee ee I 155 |
WHITAKER, ROBERT, Washington’ (occ scsaacs re eee IT 233
WHITE, WILLIAM ALLEN Kansas sence een eee I I
WILSON, EDMUND, Jr., New Jersey ...cccccccccccscccce I 56
WINSTON, ROBERT WATSON, North Carolina ......... II 123
WOOD, CHARLES W., New York (The State) .......00. II 203
WOOD, CLEMENT, Alabama’ werciascrc stern Glaisjeleivisinieleleo (sya I 245

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