Yale University Library

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As seen ty a Iranspiantecl Easterner

ArtKur E.Bostwicl

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THE West of the book is the belt of gte^t- states fringing the
Mississippi, usually termed the Middle West ; and "different"
means difference from the East.
The author, formerly connected with the New York Public
Library, and one-time President of the American Library Associa
tion, is a transplanted easterner — now Librarian of the St, Louis
Public Library.
The strong impressions made upon him, and the lack of litera
ture on the subject, led to the recording of his conclusions and
generalizations which cover the land features, vegetation, weather
conditions, transportation, education, politics, art, science, literature,
speech, and other conditions of difference between East and West.
Fundamental misconceptions of attitude and temperament and mutual
misunderstandings are pointed out, so that the work will do good
service in helping bring the sections closer together.
The views are bright, taking, and optimistic. Many bits of
humor, illustrative stories, and facts of value' fill the pages. The
book is eminently adapted for popular reading.

THE DIFFERENT WEST

THE DIFFERENT WEST
As Seen by a
Transplanted Easterner
By ARTHUR E, BOSTWICK

"O, East is East and West is West."
— Kipling

CHICAGO
A. C, McCLURG & CO.
1913

*'*-\\n* ^3

Copyright
A, C, MeClurg & Co,
1913

Published February, 1913

n 0

W. F. HALL PRINTING COMPANY, CHICAGO

PREFACE
SOME readers will find fault with this book
because it neither gives statistics nor quotes
authorities. It is well to say, therefore, at the
outset, that it is written for those who dislike both,
and who like to read straight on without having
their attention distracted by footnotes or figures,
iThe author assumes full responsibility for what he
says, and if he has inadvertently missed the truth
upon occasion, doubtless it matters little.
A, E, B,

CONTENTS Chapter I page
Some Preliminaries  i
Scope of the work — Advantages of first im
pressions — Difiference between local and
general peculiarities — What is " The West "?
Chapter II
Flying Impressions  lo
Topography — Vegetation — Climate — Cities
and towns — Transportation.
Chapter III
The East's Misunderstanding of the
West  23
"The Temper of the West"— A new racial
character — " New " countries — Social cor
respondences — Colonizers and colonized —
" Hysteresis,"
Chapter IV
The West's Misunderstanding of the
East  37
The East's " stiffness " — Mistaken social as
sumptions — Is the East incompetent? — The
East at its own valuation.

Contents

Chapter V page
The West's Political Unrest .... 47
The first Western " insurgents" — Eastern
and western ill-feeling — Western restless
ness — Movements from below upward —
Democracy in the West — Bryan and Roose
velt — Socialism — The heritage of border
lawlessness.
Chapter VI
The West's Economic Unrest .... 66
Speculation — Hatred of "Wall Street"—
The experimental temper — The western
judiciary — The transportation problem.
Chapter VII
Education in the West  80
Public education — Public recreation — State
universities — Lack of traditions — Co-edu
cation — Faculty and student — Some com
parisons — Women's clubs and public libraries.
Chapter VIII
Literature in the West  95
Boston's former primacy — Its passage to
New York — Western writers in New York
— Growth of local feeling — The business of
publishing — Western journalism — "Boom "
literature — Local character of the press.

Contents

Chapter IX page
Science in the West  io8
Its practicality — Lack of popular apprecia
tion — Some western applications of science
— Water purification — River transportation
— Water power — Scientific agriculture —
Irrigation — The smoke nuisance — Railways,
Chapter X
Art in THE West  123
Antiquities — Domestic art — Architecture —
Galleries and exhibitions — Art production in
the West — Public appreciation — Music and
musicians — The theatre — Art instruction.
Chapter XI
Society in the West  138
Social status a neglected subject — A sug
gested scale — Influence of occupation — of
religious connection — Lack of a leisure class
— Hospitality and neighborly feeling — Clubs
— Local pride.
Chapter XII
Sources of the West's Population . . 154
Relationships with the rest of the country —
North and South — Foreign races — Jews —
The French — Germans — Scandinavians —
The Indian — The Negro — Lack of homo
geneity.

Contents

Chapter XIII page
The Speech and Manners of the West i66
Variants in American local speech — Eastern
and western "tricks of speech" — Written
and spoken language — School and family
influence — The "American voice" — West
ern freedom of manner — Chaperonage —
Working hours — Recreations — Conclusion.

THE DIFFERENT WEST

The Different West

discuss the particulars in which the West differs
from the East, our observer must be one who Is
familiar with the East, The foreigner, if he is an
Englishman, notes first the aspects in which America,
as a whole, differs from England; all states look
alike to him. The typical American of the British
novel, as has been amusingly noted in a recent maga
zine article,* combines the dialects and the manner
isms of Maine and Texas, of North Carolina and
Arizona, If the foreign observer is a German, he
is struck by any Anglo-Saxon peculiarity, including
those that we share with our transatlantic cousins.
To these a Frenchman or Italian Is apt to add
various Teutonic or non-Latin items. All of which
is simply the elementary arithmetical truth that if
you desire to find the difference between two quan
tities you must subtract one from the other; taking
both from a third will be of no avail. And when
one is a variable that rapidly approaches the other,
as time passes, then the sooner the subtracting is
done, the more nearly will the difference appear in
its original amount. When the two objects to be com
pared — in this case the easterner and the westerner
— are very nearly equal to start with, the approach
due to contact Is very swift. Differences that appall,
amuse, or vex at the outset, are overlooked In a few
*The Yankee in British Fiction, by Frank M, Bicknell, The
Outlook, Nov, 19, 1910.

Some Preliminaries

months, and one soon forgets that they ever existed.
The newcomer in Illinois or Missouri soon finds
himself almost remembering that persimmons grew
on the New Hampshire farm, and forgets that chest
nuts ever existed outside of literature,
A Russian experimental psychologist, in a recent
interesting series of investigations concerning the
apprehension of numerical relations by animals,
seems to have proved conclusively that dogs can
count up to four. At least this is true if by " count
ing" we mean distinguishing that number of objects
or events from other smaller numbers. The experi
menter, Zeliony by name, says that the Impression
made on the mind by any one of a series of events
is colored by all those that have gone before : hence
we are able to distinguish the fourth of a series, for
instance, which has three predecessors, from the
third, which has only two.
In like manner, the impressions of a newcomer
vary slightly with every day of his stay, even if they
are the same objectively. The effect produced by
looking down the same street is different on the
second day from the first, and still more different
on the third. This difference is not wholly due to
addition of impressions; if It were so, the effect
should grow stronger with time, whereas the reverse
is generally true; perception becomes dulled with
habit, details once noticed are blurred or smoothed

The Different West

over, and familiarity relegates the whole impression
more or less to the subconsciousness. Recognition
of detail thus grows up to a certain point and then
fades. This point of maximum recognition is the
one at which one should sit down to record his
impressions. The case is different with the recognition of rela
tionships, which requires thought. This usually im
proves with time. One's Impressions of life In a
foreign city might be more vivid and interesting in
the first few weeks than at a later period; one's
understanding of what It all meant might not be
good within the year, and might constantly improve
thereafter. The accounts written by foreign travelers of their
first glimpse of New York from the bay, of the
docks, of the drive through the streets to the hotel,
of the reporter's first visit, and so on, are not only
interesting, but extremely valuable; but when these
visitors begin to generalize on short acquaintance, as
they so often regrettably do, what they have to say
is not so well worth while.
When the writer of this volume has included in
it more than first impressions he has tried not to go
beyond the kind of generalizations that are made
earliest and that are not far removed from the
impressions themselves.
The recorder of somewhat superficial impressions

Superficial Impressions

runs the risk, of course, of mistaking a local pecul
iarity for one that is common to a wider region;
this he can avoid only by observing and comparing
peculiarities in divers points of that region.
I once knew a good lady from South Carolina
who occasionally visited relatives in Waltham, Mass.
She was a keen observer and discoursed freely on
what she regarded as New England peculiarities.
Some were such in truth, but most would have puz
zled the majority of New Englanders to recognize,
being customs or idioms peculiar to Massachusetts,
or to Waltham, or even, perhaps, to the family in
which she visited. So our British cousin who has
spent some time in New York returns to report the
customs and peculiarities of that city as those of the
United States in general.
In order to avoid such a mistake, or at least to
render its commission unlikely, it is not necessary
that the traveler should visit every town, hamlet, and
farm in the region of which he is to write, A
somewhat wide sampling is all that is necessary. If
we open a dozen cans, chosen at random from a pile
of several thousand, and find tomatoes in all, we are
justified in concluding — not perhaps that there are
absolutely no peaches or pears in the lot, but at any
rate that the tomato is abundant in the pile. So if
one finds here and there throughout a region the
same custom, the same trick of speech, he con-

The Different West

eludes that it Is characteristic of the region. Our
friend from Waltham, Mass,, would not have con
fused the peculiarities of that town with those of
New England had she made observations also In
Burlington, Vt, Concord, N, H,, and Waterbury,
Conn. The time has now come for us to ask "What Is
the West? Where, precisely, are Its boundaries?"
A Chicago paper recently printed a clever cartoon
giving a bird's-eye view of the United States, and
showing a strip on the Atlantic coast surrounded
by a high wall and labeled "The East," while the
rest of the country bore the legend " Only the
West." As a graphic delineation of eastern opin
ion this is hardly an exaggeration, and the reason is
not far to seek. Our country began with a strip
along the Atlantic, and the western edge of this
strip was of course "The West," Central New
York and Pennsylvania, and western Virginia, were
all once on this western edge. The strip has wid
ened until it reaches from ocean to ocean, and it has
necessarily done so entirely by westward extension
of this edge, the eastern being fixed at the Atlantic
coast. Hence every part of the country west of
the original boundary has been successively "The
West," and this shifting has been so rapid that a
new strip has acquired the name before the older
ones have had time to lose it. Hence it happens that

Where Is the West?

a New Englander still occasionally talks of " going
west" to Buffalo, N, Y,, and a Jerseyite will talk
of his "western relatives" In Wllkesbarre, Pa,
It must not be forgotten, however, that the
expanding strip of American dominion did not pass
over absolute wilderness. It overflowed and sub
merged, more or less completely, the French settle
ments in the Mississippi Valley, and the Spanish
colonies In Texas and California, All these had
already their own customs and their own points of
view. To the St, Loulsan, the Mississippi has
always divided the East from the West, while to
the San Franciscan the East has been as all-
inclusive as the West has been to the Atlantic Coast
dweller — hence the story of the two girls, one of
whom had been East, to Denver, while the other
had gone West, to Pittsburg,
In selecting any one region of the country to
describe by the name of "The West," one Is thus
confronted by an embarrassment of riches. The
most reasonable criterion would appear to consist
in asking the question " What region most fre
quently accepts the name as apphed to itself?"
Now we find that no matter how central New York
and Pennsylvania are regarded by Atlantic dwellers,
they never themselves acknowledge that they are
"western," looking upon the term, indeed, as
involving a certain degree of opprobrium, Simi-

8 The Different West
larly, a Callfornlan or an Oregonlan seldom admits
that he lives " in the West," His abode is in " the
Pacific States," or "on the Coast" — a superb
phrase whose magnificent disrespect to the Atlantic
can not be too much admired.
So far as I can find out, the only westerner self-
confessed and unashamed. Is he who dwells in what
easterners call the " Middle West" — the great belt
of states fringing the Mississippi on either side,
especially about the country's middle latitudes.
Here the denizens ask naturally, " How do you like
it here in the West?" and speak of "us west
erners." They talk, to be sure, of "going west"
when they entrain for Denver or Pueblo, but this
is purely in a kinematic sense, and means merely that
the train Is to move toward the setting sun. Few
would refer to Colorado, in a static sense, as " The
West." Some dwellers in this region. It is true, object to
the words "west" and "western," as apphed to
them and their states, I was taken to task not
long ago by a Chlcagoan of eastern origin for so
using them, "The Central States," he maintained,
should be the true term. Now this phrase, aside
from the fact that nobody uses it, is not even
descriptive. The " Central States " are those in the
neighborhood of Colorado; certainly Indiana and
Iowa do not belong to them.

The Middle West

Then an inevitable confusion with the so-called
"Middle States" would result. As a matter of
fact, names of this sort are traditional and habitual,
and rarely descriptive; but the exchange of a famil
iar name that was once descriptive and has become
non-descriptive only through changed conditions, for
an unfamiliar one that never was and never will
be descriptive, does not commend itself.
The "Middle West," then, is the "West" of
this modest treatise — the West, whither Its writer
has been transplanted and to which, in common with
its older inhabitants, he " points with pride," It is
a land of whose differences there is something to
say; were it not so, these pages would have no
reason for being. But those differences, as they
really are, are not as the eye of the westerner sees
them, nor yet as that of the easterner beholds them.
Perhaps the eye of the present writer has not dis
criminated them aright; it may take nothing less
than the fabled Eye of Faith to view them as they
are. At any rate, they are here set down as they
obtrude themselves upon one person's consciousness.
Like Luther, here he stands — on the banks of the
Mississippi — he "can not do otherwise."

CHAPTER II
FLYING impressions
WHEN Sylvia Pankhurst, the English suffra
gette, was In St, Louis, she addressed the
members of the City Club, just after luncheon. As
she entered the crowded dining room of the club,
accompanied by two other ladies, those present
naturally rose to their feet and so remained until
the women were seated. What kind of treatment
Miss Pankhurst had expected, I do not know, but
she is said to have been deeply affected by this
courteous reception — something, she said, that she
had never experienced at home. It Is to be hoped
that she did not wrongly interpret it as a universal
expression of sympathy with her ideas.
In the course of her speech, when she was telling
how the London bobbies had driven her suffra
gette sisters from their posts, she remarked, "but
they came back," This bit of appropriate but quite
unintentional slang was met with an instant roar of
laughter and applause. The expression on the
speaker's face was worth going miles to see. She
saw she had made some kind of a hit, but she did
not see why or how; and she was half inclined to
10

Bluffs and Prairies il
suspect that the demonstration was intended to be
unfriendly. Whether her American friends enlight
ened her or whether she is still wondering what it
was all about, I do not know.
These trivial incidents illustrate very well what
the newcomer, especially the foreign newcomer, has
to meet in the West — little differences from the
treatment to which he is accustomed or from the
environment with which he is familiar — differences
so small that he is doubtful whether they exist or
not, or Is even unaware of their existence until the
involuntary smiles of those about him lead him to
investigate. The first differences noticed by a newcomer to a
given region are those apparent to the senses, espe
cially to the sight; those of topography, vegetation,
and climate. In the vast region that we have chosen
to denominate " the West," there are no mountains
and very few hills; whole states are nearly level
except for the cuttings made by the rivers. Where
these rivers are of any size the flat country is
divided Into two levels: "bottom lands," the broad
alluvial plains constituting the river's flood-area,
over which it meanders almost at will, and the
prairies at the level of the top of the bluffs. The
transition from one level to the other, especially
where the bluffs are soft and earthy and easily fur
rowed into ravines, Is often beautiful and gives the

12 The Different West
impression of a hilly region. This may be near
the river itself or it may be fifteen miles distant.
The easterner's idea of the Middle West as a flat
country is apt to receive a jolt when he visits, for
instance, Alton, 111., a Mississippi River town that
is as precipitous as Providence, R, I. The relation
of river-bluffs to both prairie and bottom lands is
often misapprehended, even by those who frequently
pass over all three in railway journeys.
Another misapprehension is that prairies are
always flat. Bottom lands are necessarily so; the
plains west of the Missouri are apparently so,
although really they rise steadily in level to the foot
of the Rockies where they are "mile-high," But
prairies may be, and often are, lovely rolling coun
try, intersected by beautiful ravines. What makes
them striking to an easterner's eye is the absence
of rock. Such rolling country, brilliant green with
young wheat, as far as the eye can reach, reminds
one of a lawn, especially at a little distance, and an
easterner can scarcely help having the impression
that it has been cleared of stones and graded, at
huge expense, whereas the configuration is perfectly
natural. But even a flat region is far from uninteresting.
It gives one the impression of largeness and airi
ness that seems inseparable from the West, "You
ought to see the country where we live," said a west-

Bottom Lands 13

ern farmer's daughter, "Why, it's perfectly beau
tiful; it's just as flat as the top of a table," This
girl would probably always regard hilly country as
alien; interesting, perhaps, but not homelike. To
thousands of our fellow citizens the rocky hills of
New England are simply an infertile wilderness —
difficult, monotonous, and disagreeable,
A man loves the kind of country where he was
born and bred: that is right; only he must not
assume that those born and bred elsewhere should
and do love his kind of country instead of their own.
Both have their beauties, as even the discriminating
stranger must acknowledge. The "American bot
toms" — the flood plain of the Mississippi on the
Illinois side In the neighborhood of St, Louis, form
an absolutely flat region of hundreds of square
miles. There are few more impressive sights than
this great plain, as viewed from the giant Indian
mound near the banks of the Cahokia Creek, green
with the new wheat, and dotted here and there with
the smaller, but still great, tumuli of a vanished
race. The Indifference of the residents of the neigh
borhood to this region of wonders is astonishing.
Fortunately it is as hard to destroy a tumulus as
it is to erect one, and the material — the common
soft earth of the region — excites no one's cupidity;
otherwise the mounds would have been leveled to
the ground long ago.

14 The Diiferent West
This softness of the earth, and its lack of stones,
is also responsible for another feature that is noted
at once by the eastern eye — the muddiness of the
rivers. Clear water flows over rock from which
all soil has long since been washed away; water
running through an alluvial plain, shifting its course
and washing away its soft, earthy banks, must needs
be muddy, "What's that?" said a slum child on
her first view of the Mississippi's brown, rolling
flood, during a charitable "fresh-airing," "What
do you think it is?" was the answering query
from one of the fair patronesses, " I don't know
for sure," rejoined the child, hesitatingly; "but it
looks like coffee," It surely does; but It has beauty
of Its own for the eyes that are not disappointed
because It is not something else.
Some people ought to find fault with the sky be
cause it Is not green like the trees, I have heard of
a California woman who said she would object
to the pearly gates of heaven if they were not made
of the abalone shell of her native Pacific, And I
have listened to loud complaints uttered because
the Mississippi a thousand miles above Its mouth
is not as wide as the Hudson at New York!
The great eastern rivers, so far as they are great,
are not real rivers at all, but drowned valleys — estu
aries, arms of the sea, with salt or brackish water,
slight current and tidal flow. The great western

Rivers in the West 15
rivers are as far from the ocean, and as independent
of It, as the brooks; they are in fact huge brooks
and resemble in no respect the navigable reaches
of the Hudson, the Connecticut, or the Delaware,
These differences have a wide Influence on condi
tions of life. Those relating to the navigability of
the rivers will be touched upon elsewhere, but those
that affect the appearance of the streams as they flow
past cities belong here. The easterner thinks of a
navigable river as fringed with wharves as It passes
a city — projections at right-angles to its banks.
But in swift-flowing streams — brooks on a huge
scale — varying In level perhaps forty feet from
high to low water, such wharves are Impracticable,
On rivers like the Mississippi the sloping bank is
simply paved to form a "levee" and the water
comes up as far as it will, the boats with it. Steam
boats have long gangways slung from their bows,
which can be let down either at levees or on any
convenient spot along the banks where paved spaces
do not exist, or wharf-boats are moored at the
edge of the water and are hauled up and let out
as it advances and recedes,
A recent novel in which the hero starts on his
career from St, Louis gives a stirring picture of
the water-front there as the eastern author Imagined
it; the long wharves and the great steamers
between them, hauling out into the stream as they

1 6 The Different West
start, just as they do In the North River at New
York, or the Delaware at Philadelphia, If the
author had ever seen one of the big western rivers,
or had even read of the conditions that obtain along
their banks, he would not have penned so absurd
a passage. Next to topographical features the easterner is
struck by differences of vegetation, and here we
must exclude those due purely to differences of lati
tude. The dweller in the Northwest who visits the
Southwest is struck, of course, by variations due to
his southward travel — with these we have nothing
to do. The most striking differences to the traveler
along one parallel of latitude are probably those due
to changed agricultural conditions, chiefly the huge
size of the fields and the enormous areas devoted to
one crop.
In Illinois one may travel for hours without see
ing anything but corn and that In apparently limit
less areas. As one goes farther west, the wheat
intrudes, takes the middle of the stage and then
yields partly to alfalfa or other crops, but there
is the same extent, the same impressive monotony,
all of which is foreign to the East, In the case of
natural vegetation there is hardly the same degree
of noticeable difference, except to the botanist.
Trees of the poplar family, such as the sycamore and
Cottonwood, are more numerous; others, the maple

Western Weather ij
and the elm for Instance, grow fewer. Strange wild
fruits such as the persimmon are abundant; spring-
flowering shrubs such as the red-bud give an unfa
miliar look to the woods In that season, yet taken
by and large, vegetative nature does not obtrude
her differences on the easterner, except perhaps in
the parts of the bottom-lands given over to floods
and abandoned for cultivation. Here there is a
jungle of willows, wild vines, and the like, that gives
a peculiarly savage and unfamiliar look.
Variation of climate, like that of vegetation,
which depends on it so closely, is of course less
noticed when traveling east and west than from
north to south or the reverse. The chief things
that make that of the Middle West different from
that of the East are the absence of mountains, the
inland situation, and the fact that, as our weather
moves from west to east, the West gets its storms
and Its hot and cold waves earlier.
Absence of a great body of water near by, with
its capacity for absorbing and storing heat, makes
the climate on the same parallel colder in winter and
hotter in summer. On a hot August day there is no
chance that the wind by switching to the east will
bring the cool sea air over the parched country; the
familiar newspaper headline, " No Relief In Sight,"
has a more sinister meaning. At the same time the
remoteness of great bodies of water lessens the

1 8 The Different West
humidity — that great terror of the eastern sum
mer and winter weather alike. Fifty below zero in
Minnesota may be merely stimulating, where twenty
above In New York may seem unbearably cold. So
also in the latter city the " scare " headlines In the
papers begin to bloom at eighty-five degrees, where
ninety-five degrees in dryer St, Louis scarcely brings
them out.
The absence of mountains means greater regu
larity in atmospheric disturbances — a tendency to
follow the laws of meteorology without Interruption,
Here we may have a great cyclonic movement,
around a center of low-pressure, a thousand miles
in diameter, entirely over flat country. One of the
things that happens according to regulation in such
a vast cyclonic disturbance is the development of
thunderstorms, tempests, and whirlwinds, In its
southeast quadrant; and all these are more frequent
in the West than in more broken country. Tor
nadoes do occur in New England and the Middle
States, but no one thinks of taking out tornado
insurance there, or of building " cyclone-cellars " for
refuge, as is done regularly In many parts of the
West, The sign "Tornado Insurance" on a busi
ness building is one of the things that gives the
eastern visitor a mental jolt and reminds him that
he has entered a region that Is different meteoro
logically as well as topographically. What has been

The West the Weather's Source 19
said of the absence of bodies of water does not
apply of course to the Great Lake region, where
the effect of the lakes on the climate Is similar, on
a smaller scale, to that of the ocean; but this effect
is purely local.
The nearness of the West to the source of the
weather is an influence that acts in the same direc
tion as Its uniformity of surface. We do not know
exactly how or why the great atmospheric whirls
that we call cyclones and anti-cyclones begin, but we
know that they start in the Far West and travel
thence eastward across the continent. Our weather
prediction is largely the art of watching them, track
ing them, and estimating when they will reach a
given spot. When the disgusted citizen swears at
the weather bureau it Is apt to be because the erratic
whirl with Its attendant "weather" fooled the fore
caster by slowing up, or turning aside, or perhaps
by melting away altogether. The nearer one is to
the starting point the less chance all these accidents
have to happen; hence the weather Is somewhat
more uniform In the West than in the East, Also
the storms are more severe; the hot and cold waves
are felt in their full force.
Most of the differences mentioned in what pre
cedes do not depend on the hand of man; what is
said of the crops constitutes the only exception.
There are other differences, however, noticeable to

20 The Different West
the casual traveler as he glances from the car win
dow, that are artificial rather than natural. Farm
houses seem smaller and more Infrequent, This is
partly due to the vastness of the setting, which
makes a normal house with its usual outbuildings
seem insignificant; partly to the fact that the use
of machinery in farm-operation has rendered a large
resident staff unnecessary. It is only at harvest that
an army of men must be employed, and these are
hired temporarily, often from outside the boun
daries of the state. The country is familiar with
the annual newspaper Item to the effect that so-
many thousand men will be required to harvest the
wheat or corn crops In Kansas or Nebraska. These
are all " emergency help,"
As the train passes through cities and towns the
traveler notices that their immediate environs are
not so well kept as In eastern cities. The outskirts
of most American cities are discreditable: Boston
is a shining exception. Possibly this condition Is
inseparable from continuous and rapid growth; and
as this is taking place more rapidly in the West
than in the East, it might be expected that condi
tions there would be even more unsatisfactory.
Even the more remote suburbs, accessible by rail or
long-distance trolley beyond the rim of immediate
outskirts, are not in general so noteworthy as in
the East, Chicago has some of great beauty on the

Railway Peculiarities 21
lake shore, but in general such suburban towns as
those about Philadelphia or in the New Jersey and
"Sound" environs of New York, are lacking. The
suburb habit is not so fully developed, San Fran
cisco is much more like New York in this respect
than any town in the West as we are using the
term. In general the type of residence district that
the easterner associates with a more or less distant
suburb is to be found within the city limits in west
ern cities. In many of them, too, the private
"Place," a short-parked street constituting a rus in
urbe, is much in vogue and highly developed.
Some of the most striking differences apparent to
the traveler he will notice best from the rear obser
vation platform of his train. In the first place he
will find that he is running on a single track,
although he may be on one of the fast " flyers " with
de luxe equipment. But the place of the second
track will often be taken by a single-track inter-
urban trolley road, whose rails parallel for miles
those on which he is running. The roadbed is as
good as that of the steam road on which he travels,
sometimes even better. The cars are large and fine,
and race successfully with the flyer, sometimes get
ting ahead of it.
The development of these interurban electric
roads has no parallel In the East. Their patrons
use them for comparatively long trips and they even

22 The Different West
run sleepers whose conveniences are in some respects
greater than those of the standard Pullmans, The
interurban electric terminal In Indianapolis is a note
worthy building and one even more striking is to be
erected in St. Louis, where the Illinois Traction Co.,
one of the largest of the interurban electric roads,
has built an expensive bridge over the Mississippi
for its exclusive use.
Some of these items, briefly mentioned here, will
be dwelt upon more at length In subsequent chapters.

CHAPTER III
THE east's misunderstanding OF THE WEST
ONE of the most Interesting of Mr, Bryce's
chapters Is that on "The Temper of the
West," In it, however, he commits the capital error
of making his West too Inclusive, his dividing line
between It and the East being apparently the Alle
ghany Mountains, What he has to say of the West
relates therefore sometimes to the Mississippi Val
ley, sometimes to the Rocky Mountain region, some
times to the Pacific Coast, At the present day,
generalization that will apply to all three Is espe
cially difficult. The "temper" of the Pacific slope
is not at all that of the Illinois and Indiana prairies.
The underlying note of the chapter is the effect on
the westerner of his recent entrance into a vast pro
ductive, but undeveloped region. This has doubt
less had its effect on the pioneer wave whose prog
ress westward from the Atlantic we have already
noted. But that wave has long passed over the
part of the country to which we have given the
name of "West" in these pages. The temper of
our "West" may be influenced by pioneer condi
tions, but hardly by such conditions in the present,
23

24 The Different West
I should say that the "temper of the West" is
preeminently one of restlessness under restraint —
of efforts at independence in politics, of disregard
of social and traditional curbs, of dislike of any
body or anything that tries to lead from outside or
to Impose restrictions of any kind.
According to some writers we are developing in
the United States a new national and racial charac
ter. This is a favorite subject with foreign
observers. They pick out whatever they can find
that Is weird or bizarre in our literature, our man
ners or our methods, and wonder whether It Is not
an indication that we are just about to turn out a
new racial product. It used to be gravely asserted
that if we were let alone we would be so affected
by environment that we should gradually but per
manently take on the racial characteristics of the
Indian. The American himself bothers little about
his own peculiarities, least of all to inquire whether
they are racial or accidental, but If a new product
is really turned out by what Zangwill aptly calls the
Melting Pot, we might expect it to appear first in
the West and to look forward to the "temper" of
that region as the transformed temper of the whole
American people.
This new national and racial character, according
to G. W. Steevens, is " an Irresistible impulse to
impress all Its sentiments externally by the crudest

New Racial Characters 25
and most obvious medium." Elsewhere he says we
are "superficial," and complains of our "want of
thoroughness." All this Is based on a misapprehen
sion — the same one that blinds the eastern eye on
occasion when it gazes westward. The westerner,
and in a lesser degree every American, has the gift
of concentration, and he has the defects of this
great quality. He sees one thing at a time — the
thing that he Is trying to do. Just now he Is bent
on material progress, so he neglects the finer arts of
civilization. Our critics mistake this concentration
of our efforts on one thing as a manifestation of
some change In our character, as if a boy who suc
cessively devoted his eager attention to making a
hen-coop, playing ball, and studying his lessons,
should be regarded, by a solemn observer, as chang
ing his character from that of a designer and
constructor to that of a devotee of recreation and
again to that of a student. The westerner espe
cially bends his energies to what Is before him, and
he recks little of what may be beyond his horizon,
" It is pathetic and exasperating," wrote Richard
Harding Davis, in his West from a Car Win
dow, when Oklahoma City was only three years
old, " to see men who would excel In a great metrop
olis , . . wasting their energies in a desert of
wooden houses in the middle of an ocean of prairie,
where their point of view Is bounded by the railroad

26 The Different West
tank and a barb-wire fence," This is a character
istic eastern view. That Oklahoma City would grow
in twenty years' time Into the large, handsome, well-
ordered, and altogether creditable place that it Is
today, Mr, Davis probably did not dream; had he
done so, he might have thought that the work of
assisting in so marvelous a development was great
and important enough even for "men who would
excel In a great metropolis." But the difference
between the eastern and western attitude is that the
westerner sees clearly the possibility of such growth
where it exists, and regards the attempt to realize it
as something worthy of his best endeavor. He may
fail; but the gambling spirit is strong enough in his
veins to regard this only as an additional incentive.
He might " excel in a great metropolis " ; it is doubt
less his intention to do so; but he prefers that the
metropolis should be one of his own building — a
tour de force, one day open prairie bounded by tank
and fence, the next a well-paved, solidly built com
mercial and residential city,
"No one ever lost," said a great American finan
cier, "who bet on the United States," The west
erner realizes this more vividly than his eastern
brother, and he is especially ready to bet on the
West, His faith may be childlike, but his winnings,
so far, have been anything but juvenile.
If asked to state briefly the salient peculiarities of

Alliterative Epithets 27
the West as distinguished from the East, the man-in-
the-street of New York or Boston would probably
reply, after some cogitation, that It is "wild" and
"woolly," Now these somewhat vague adjectives
were doubtless chosen at the outset for alliterative
reasons — just as the East is "effete" largely be
cause both words chance to begin with E, But there
is nothing that makes an adjective so sticky as allit
eration — those initial letters seem to have hooks
like burrs — one can not get rid of them. Their
logical applicability is quite beside the mark.
Shorn of alliterative " aptness," the alleged wild-
ness and wooUIness of the West seem to refer
merely to the fact that it was more recently settled
than the East; that the wave of colonization moved
westward, not eastward. But time is a great equal
izer, A boy of five and one of fifteen are hardly
in the same century, whereas the selfsame individ
uals at fifty and sixty are contemporaries. So the
West in its pioneer days was in a different age
from the East — already well settled and civilized,
whereas a time must inevitably come when the wave
of settlement and civilization will stand as high on
the register on one side of the Alleghanies as on the
other. Has this time arrived? This much, I think,
may surely be said: the differences between West
and East are no longer due to the fact that the latter
is the elder. The most obvious difference between

28 The Different West
our boys of five and fifteen is due to the ten years'
seniority of the latter; when they are sixty and
seventy they may still differ in marked degree, but
the seniority, while it remains absolutely the same,
has become relatively unimportant,
A vast deal of nonsense has been and is still talked
about "new countries," One would think that our
emigrant ancestors at once retrograded to mon
keys when they touched American soil and that we
had been painfully trying to get back our ancestral
British manhood ever since; also that our more
recent sires took another backward step In the evo
lutionary pathway when they removed to Milwau
kee or St, Louis. When the Latin poet said that
you couldn't change a man's spirit by taking him
across seas, he spoke eternal truth; and a thousand
miles or so of hill and prairie are similarly powerless
to set back the hands on the dial of his development.
The " civlhzatlon " of New York is just as old as
that of London, and that of Chicago is as ancient
as either. They are different — but the difference
is not one of seniority; the time is past for that.
The West, in fact, has taken on quite as " old " an
aspect as the East. It seems absurd to use such a
word of New York, where the whole city above
Canal Street has sprung up almost within the mem
ory of those now living, where whole districts are
leveled to the ground and rebuilt In a brief tale of

"New" Countries 29
years, and where vast regions in the Bronx, covered
one day with pastures and truck gardens, are trans
formed as by magic In a few months Into solidly
built blocks with paved streets, parks, and all the
concomitants of settled city life. It would be easy
to pick out tumble-down districts in Chicago, Mil
waukee, or St, Louis far older in atmosphere than
these. As for smaller places, the difference lies, per
haps, in the greater decrepitude or lack of self-
respect of certain western towns and villages. It is
possible for a New England town to remain small
for a century without losing Its dignity or its legiti
mate pride. This may occur also in the West; but
in the large majority of cases it would seem as if
failure to expand carried with It the loss, or per
haps the failure to acquire, these qualities. These
places are withered before they are ripe; senility
overtakes them before they have enjoyed a well-
considered and respectable middle-age. They are
slatternly, dirty, and slack — and no one cares; why
should anyone care, since the place hasn't grown
since 1873? All this the East misunderstands, in
much the same way as Europe misunderstands us
all — East and West together. To the European
eye we are all crude, unkempt, and slovenly — to
tally occupied In dollar-chasing. Nor is this the
only particular in which the East-and-West relation
is similar to the English-American.

30 The Diiferent West
The ability of eastern people, for instance, prop
erly to estimate those from the West suffers from
very much the same cause that makes It hard for
the English to "place" Americans, In England
certain things very nearly always go together. For
instance, certain grades of education, social posi
tion, and good-manners. From an Englishman's
manners it is reasonably easy to Infer at once his
position and education, and from his education his
social position generally follows. It used to be so
also with political position and Is still so to some
extent. Membership In the House of Commons, for
instance, once always implied social influence and
the degree and kind of education and breeding that
went with It, These things are not so with us, and
in the West still less than the East, The English
traveler in the United States meets a man of good
education and is scandalized, perhaps, to see him
eating with his knife. He meets a Member of Con
gress and Is surprised to hear him murder the
King's English, His inferences are at once, though
wrongly, detrimental to this country. Placing his ac
quaintance in the English class in which his higher
grade accomplishment or position would Indicate
that he belonged, the traveler concludes that at least
some members of that class in America are far below
the English standard. It would, of course, be
equally logical to " place " the man by his low-grade

Education and Manners 31
accomplishment and then conclude that members of
that class were superior to the corresponding per
sons in England, For instance. Instead of classing
the Illiterate congressman with the English polit
ically dominant class, it would be possible to grade
him with the English uneducated class and then point
out that while in England members of that class
do not usually show enough ability to elevate them
to elective office, they frequently do so in the United
States. The fallacy In both ways of looking at the facts
lies, of course. In the assumption that the same
things characterize the same classes here as In
England, Nowhere in the United States may we
infer a person's social or political standing from his
education, or any of the three from his manners,
but it is possible to go farther In this direction In
the East than in the West, The easterner knows
what are the limitations of the method In his own
section, but within those limitations he attempts to
employ it in the West precisely as he would at
home, and fails in the same way the Englishman
does. On the other hand, the westerner may make the
converse mistake In the East, just as the American
does in England. Unaccustomed to any fixed con
nection between political status, social position, man
ners, and education, he fails to infer one from the

32 The Different West
other, and causes the same astonishment as if he
had failed to conclude from the appearance of a
man's head above a wall that a man's body was
beneath, LIuman heads do not grow in England
on the bodies of oxen or elephants — but they do
in America, especially in western America,
Another cause of misunderstanding between East
and West Is the inevitably strained relation that
always exists between a colonizing and a colonized
country, or part of a country. The colonizers be
come cool a little before the colonists do. The kit
ten is still looking upon the mother-cat with trust
and affection at the epochal moment when the latter,
recognizing that the time for dependence is over,
turns a cold shoulder to her offspring and returns
its overtures with a vicious sputter or a cuff on the
ear. This doubtless seems rather hard to the kit
ten, " Perhaps you were right to dissemble your
love," she might quote, "but why did you kick me
downstairs? " It is, however, the way of the world.
We loved our British mother dearly when she began
the series of cuffs and sputterlngs that ultimately
drove us from her door. Even when she was fight
ing us with tooth and claw and we, to the best of
our infant ability, were biting and scratching back,
we could not bear to think that It might all result
in a separation. We have never forgotten that we
are mother and daughter, but the attitude engen-

Colonizers and Colonized 33
dered by the cuffings and scratchings has never
wholly passed away — the supercIHousness on the
one side — aptly characterized by Lowell as "a cer
tain condescension" — due to a motherly contempt
for kittenish behavior, remaining long after it has
been outgrown; and a certain amount of suspicion
and dislike, curiously mingled with respect and
admiration, on the other side.
Now as a general rule two regions on an east and
west line in the United States bear to each other the
relation of colonizing and colonized regions, and the
feeling between them shows a trace of that relation.
There has been no separation and there have been
no scratches and bites — except perhaps in the pub
lic press. Despite all this, however, it is easy for
the westerner to detect in the East the same attitude
of condescension that Lowell noted In foreigners,
and his own attitude is correspondingly marked by
what may be called a reluctant respect tinged with
distrust. The condescension, slight as it may be,
involuntary and unnoticed as it may be on one part,
is Infallibly detected and resented on the other, all
the more as the conditions and relations that en
gendered it have long been outgrown.
In particular, while the East is fully cognizant of
the West's progress and while her increasing regard
and appreciation grows with this progress, what the
electricians call "hysteresis" Is only too plainly

34 The Different West
visible — a lagging behind of the appreciation as
compared with the progress. This lag may be
roughly estimated at about twenty-five years: the
average easterner who has not seen for himself —
and some who have seen, but not with the eye of
understanding — thinks of Chicago, St, Louis, and
Kansas City as they were about 1885, or even
earlier. He does not know for instance that St.
Louis has practically abandoned her old residence
district and built up a new one of great beauty, dif
fering in toto from the old; he thinks that steam
boats still run up the Missouri River; he knows
nothing of the great playground system of Chicago,
with Its wonderful " field-houses " putting New York
and Boston to shame; he is incredulous when he
hears of the admirable park and boulevard system
of Kansas City; to his mind the great and growing
western state universities still stand as they did
when Michigan was the only one worth speaking of,
Washington Avenue, St, Louis, has such a pave
ment as Fifth Avenue never had and possibly never
will have; but he thinks of it as deep in mud. It
was, once ; but that day Is long past.
Charles F. Lummis, himself transplanted, but
almost too thoroughly acclimatized, says that the
trouble with easterners is that they " come to the
West with their brains in a tin can — and they forget
to bring the can-opener." Going back to our elec-

Contemplation and Actuality 35
trical metaphor, this simply means that the hystere
sis in the eastern brain, as It contemplates things
western, is regrettably persistent. It may seem
curious, or even Inexplicable, that this "lag" so evi
dent in the easterner is absent, or exists to a very
slight degree, in the westerner as he contemplates
the East, Sometimes contemplation runs even
ahead of actuality, as It did in the case of a San
Franciscan acquaintance of mine who thought he
was riding through the New York subway when
the surface-cars took him through the old Fourth
Avenue tunnel, years before the subway was run
ning. There is really nothing remarkable about
this. The line of relationships between two places
nearly always has polarity as well as direction; Its
two aspects are different. The New Yorker will tell
you that It is very much farther from New York to
Brooklyn than it Is from Brooklyn to New York,
So It is with East and West, The westerner Is only
twenty- four hours from Broadway; the Bostonian
or Phlladelphlan Is generally a whole lifetime away
from Chicago or Kansas City, The westerner keeps
in touch with the East through business trips, and
social visits, and vacation sojourns; his newspapers
tell him, in a somewhat distorted way, what Is going
on there; his understanding and appreciation of
what Is going on in New York or Washington is
quicker and juster than the easterner's of what is

36 The Different West
happening in Cincinnati or St. Louis. In other
words, "lag" is slight; there Is little or no hystere
sis. It is not altogether absent — but that is for
another chapter.

CHAPTER IV
the west's misunderstanding of the east
"T TRUST you won't get like the New Yorkers,"
-¦- says Honora's aunt to her in Winston Church
ill's last (and best) book. Honora is leaving St,
Louis for the East,
"Do you remember how stiff they were, Tom?
, , . And they say now that they hold their heads
higher than ever,"
"That," said Uncle Tom, gravely, "is a local
disease, and comes from staring at the high
buildings." This represents pretty accurately the average
snap-judgment of westerners. To the question
"What Is the chief characteristic of the East?" nine
out of ten would be apt to reply: "The people
there are stiff." Pressed for details, the speaker
might amplify his position somewhat thus: "They
are cold, unresponsive, unnelghborly. It Is difficult
to get acquainted with them. They have no depth
of emotion. They seem to be considering personal
advantage all the time," And more of the same
sort. This is a misconception, as every easterner
will agree. It arises from a false inference from
37

38 The Different West
conduct to motive. Judged by what the westerner
is accustomed to In his own section, the easterner
certainly lays himself open to misconception of this
kind, but In this instance, as In others, appearances
are deceitful. Let us take another case : The Eng
lish books tell us much of the curious Yankee — the
man who Insists on Inquiring at length about your
intimate affairs, I have been about the country as
much as most persons and I have lived many years
in Yankeedom, which Is the land of my forefathers;
but I have never happened to meet this gentleman.
Far be It from me to assert that he does not exist.
He may once have been a type, but his apparent
curiosity, I will venture to say, was not curiosity at
all — only compliance with what he regarded as a
custom of courtesy. Europeans are annoyed by
what they regard as the Impertinent questions of
the Chinese when members of that race Inquire
"Are you married?" "Why don't you get mar
ried?" " How many children have you ? " "Why
don't you have more?" and so on. The Celestial
Is simply being polite, according to his customs; he
doesn't really care about these things any more
than did the old Irishwoman who asked "And how
is your health, Mrs. Mullaney? Not that I care
a snap; but only to make conversation!"
It used to be considered polite to show the utmost
interest in the affairs of the person addressed; now,

Deceitful Appearances 39
that interest must be limited to his health and that
of his relatives. Intimate friends may go farther;
but only In Oriental circles Is It proper to inquire
why he does not marry. On the other hand, it is a
deadly insult to ask a Mussulman about his wives.
Truly, the customs of courtesy are strange things.
They differ more in Europe and Asia than they do
in Massachusetts and Missouri; yet even in two of
these United States there are subtle variations that
may be the causes of serious misapprehension. If
of two men who sit down with you In the smoking-
room of a Pullman, one enters at once into conver
sation while the other sits silent, it is unjust to con
clude either that the one is loquacious or that the
other is morose; each is simply doing what he has
been taught to consider the polite thing under the
circumstances. The talkative man may really feel
like keeping quiet; the silent one may be bursting
with speech. Each may thus be sacrificing his In
clinations on the altar of politeness. When two such
men meet, each sets the other down as a cad, owing
to ignorance of causes.
This is why a certain kind of easterner and a
certain kind of westerner, who may or may not be
typical, make a mistake when they conclude, respect
ively, that the easterner is a cold, silent fish, with
out feeling, and that the westerner Is a man who
presses himself upon his neighbor with unnecessary

40 (The Different West
insistence. Their conceptions of human intercourse
are different — that Is all. The westerner is the
more human and the less artificial; he may congratu
late himself on that; but the easterner, underneath
his mantle of aloofness, assumed purely as a mat
ter of custom, may, in reality and by nature, have
quite as much cordial feeling as the other.
There Is a condition of things where two human
beings, meeting for the first time, at once find them
selves not only on a footing of acquaintance, but of
mutual confidence and intimacy. For instance, these
two individuals may be alone and in a position of
danger; they may be travelers in the frozen North
or the wilds of Africa ; they may stand together on
the roof of a burning house or on a floating ice
floe. In such situations the ordinary standards of
intercourse and customs of courtesy are thrown to
the winds. Many a novehst has utilized this fact,
as we all know. The reason for it Is that the con
trast with the harsh conditions of nature emphasizes
the common humanity of the two strangers and mini
mizes all the differences between them that might
have made cooperation, or even mere acquaintance.
Impossible under normal conditions. In a less de
gree this same force draws together two civilized
men among savages, two Europeans In Asia, or even
two Americans in England, Now the westerner is
not so far removed in time from a state of society

Conditions of Intimacy 41
where relations such as these obtained generally as
is the easterner. The ancestors of both were in a
case when they were glad, in their primitive wilder
ness, to give a hearty welcome to a casual comer and
make friends with him shortly, but the necessity for
this ceased a century ago in the East, while it per
sisted in the West perhaps fifty years longer. And
while It persisted it set the standard, even for those
personally unaffected by it. Hence it has been con
sidered the proper thing much longer in the West
than In the East to speak to the casual stranger, with
whom one is thrown on a journey or by any other
chance, and to make of him a temporary friend. In
the East this custom has largely passed, and two
men who meet thus estimate each other's perma
nent possibilities of comradeship before they do
more than pass the time of day.
A westerner once stated the case thus: In the
West we assume that a man Is well bred and com
panionable until he proves himself the contrary; if
he does so disappoint us, we drop him, of course.
But in the East a stranger Is assumed to be objec
tionable until he shows himself to be otherwise, and
until he comes forward with his proofs he is a
pariah. To a people that prides itself, even over
much, on holding a man innocent till his guilt is
proved, this way of putting it will appeal strongly;
yet both attitudes are quite logical. The eastern

42 The Different West
attitude, however, is adapted to a well inhabited
country whose citizens brush up against each other
constantly; It Is not fitted for a sparsely settled
region where it would be difficult to establish one's
antecedents and relationships. I once ran up against
an unknown cousin on a railroad train in Kansas;
but that was an unlikely chance, whereas In a New
England community one has to tread warily to avoid
stepping on the toes of all sorts of blood relations.
Now the West Is Indeed no longer sparsely set
tled; the conditions there today are not widely
different from those In the East; yet just because
the customs engendered by other conditions have
not had so much time to adjust themselves, the west
erner is friendly and the easterner comparatively
wary, and the former will naturally regard the lat
ter as hostile and forbidding unless he knows some
thing of social causes,
A westerner, in whose judgment I have confi
dence, surprised me the other day by some remarks
about the East, Had I remained simply one of his
eastern friends, doubtless I should not have heard
them; but transplantation brings many experiences,
and the pleasure of hearing an impartial estimate
of one's former neighbors is one of them
The East, said my friend, was full of lazy and
incompetent persons; one saw them on every hand
in passing through New England or the Middle

Two Attitudes 43

States, It could not be otherwise, he went on; all
the wideawake, able citizens had abandoned those
effete regions and had moved to the West, where
alone one may now travel about without having
one's vision offended with slatternliness, incompe
tency, and laziness, I could not help a sly glance
to see whether he was not joking — but he was as
solemn as a judge, and his tone rasped a little with
that asperity that I have often heard In western
judgments of the East, So I merely agreed with
him to avoid argument and wondered at the lament
able blindness of sectional feeling. It must be
that at the end our population, stirred by the inces
sant whipping of our railway trains, will be lashed
out of such parochialism. Then perhaps Americans
will not believe that every Englishman drops his
A's; Englishmen will not be sure that the Penn-
treaty Indians still live in Philadelphia, Then, too,
citizens of distant sections of the United States will
not credit all sorts of absurd things about each
other. My friend's argument was, it is true, quite valid;
but not as between the East and the West as we
have defined it. As before noted, these sections are
approaching each other In relative age. It stands
good only in the comparison of an older community
with one in its earlier generations, perhaps I should
have said in Its original or first generation — a Wyo-

44 The Different West
ming cowboy district of the seventies, perhaps.
Such a district has no timid citizens, no lazy ones,
no incompetents — that Is, when the particular kind
of competence valid In those regions is meant. But
as soon as there is marriage and the begetting of
children the law of atavism asserts Itself; some of
the children inherit their father's traits, but others
go back to those of their grandsires. — those in
competent and lazy persons left behind In the East.
And In the West this atavistic process has now
gone on for many generations. Added to the mix
ing action of our easy transportation systems it has
brought about a ratio of incompetency to compe
tency, of laziness to Industry, and of cowardice to
courage, that is not very far different from that
obtaining on the Atlantic coast. We have here one
of the few instances of the "hysteresis" defined in
the last chapter, operating In the West — the lag of
thought that throws back conditions, In mental ap
preciation, to what they were a decade, a lustrum,
or even a century ago.
Another source of western misconception of the
East is the tendency to take the East at its own
valuation. This is perhaps most noticeable only
among those who have not visited the East, but it
extends further than this. The East, of course,
thinks that the history of the United States Is that
of the Atlantic coast. The parochial doings of

The East's Self -appreciation 45
petty magistrates are of vast concern there, but what
was happening in other parts of the continent at
the same time does not niatter; those regions are
worth noticing only when they become part of the
Union. This is particularly the case In New Eng
land, There are many good citizens of Massachu
setts who think that nine-tenths of all the important
things that ever happened to our country occurred
in that state. As for Boston, Dr, Holmes's remark
;about the Hub of the Universe, which has passed
into our literature as a pleasantry, is no joke to
many, but sober earnest.
It is curious to see these views accepted calmly,
without surprise or resentment, by westerners, in
somewhat the same spirit as the traditional account
of the Noachian flood is accepted by many. In par
ticular, the primacy of Boston seems to be unques
tioned. It is assumed that all New Englanders have
the same reverence for that town that is felt by
her own citizens ; that they are familiar with the city
and accept its claims as meekly as the English do
those of London, To some extent, it Is assumed
that any easterner will entertain like feelings.
As a matter of fact, all easterners, except possibly
the Bostonlans themselves, are familiar with the
resentment felt everywhere with the Boston attitude
and claims. There are other cities In the East and
there are even a few in New England, Capitals

46 The Different West
like Hartford and Providence, towns like Portland,
New Haven, and Burlington — all have something
to say on the subject. Just as there is no one city
related to the United States as London to England
or Paris to France, so there Is no one town bearing
this relationship to the whole of New England,
Big things show best at a distance, and there is
lack of knowledge throughout the West of the char
acteristics of small eastern towns. Places like
Springfield, Mass., Scranton, Pa., or Rochester,
N. Y,, have ten times the Individuality of a huge
metropolis like New York, The individuality Is less
marked in western towns of this size; hence the
western inability to place such communities properly
in the scheme of things eastern.

CHAPTER V
the west's political unrest
'T^HE widening movement of the strip of states,
-'- which has carried its western edge continually
farther westward, has not been unchecked. It has
paused more than once at natural obstacles until the
colonizing motor- force could gather strength to
surmount them or burst through them. So the tide
stopped for a time at the Alleghanies, again at the
Mississippi, again at the Rockies, and in the "Great
American Desert." There have been times, then,
when the regions on either side of these particular
boundaries have with more than usual appropriate
ness been known as "East" and "West," It was
during the first of these pauses that the typical
"western" spirit of uneasiness, unrest, and dis
satisfaction first found expression In open violence,
in what is called "the Whisky Insurrection," Here
the "East" put down the "West" by force of
arms — a feat that it has never since been called
upon to perform, though it is difficult to say what
might have happened if the greater differences
between North and South had not thrown all others
into the shade during just those years when the
47

48 The Different West
East- West boundary was shifting westward. Even
since the close of that contest It has been predicted,
now and again, that East and West would one day
also come to blows. In a book of Impressions
of America, published in London In 1868, Mr,
George Rose, an English observer, speaks confi
dently of "the coming struggle" between these two
sections, and uses these words :
Whenever these two incarnations of self — the western
and eastern men — shall come into collision, then will
human nature be seen in its basest colors : then will
avarice, envy, and hatred, ranked on both sides, meet in
a deadly conflict, the horrors of which will be unmiti
gated by either fear of God or human respect.
We may smile at this, but it is unique rather in
its wording than in its underlying idea.
To return to the Whisky Insurrection, this first
and most explosive of eastern and western differ
ences has left Its Impress on that particular part of
the country where it occurred. Whatever differ
ences there may be between East and West, they
exist almost as strongly between eastern and western
Pennsylvania as between New York and Indiana.
Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are hardly in the same
country and the local feeling between the two sec
tions has more than once given expression to a
sentiment that the State should be divided. Pos
sibly only our American love for bigness still keeps

Sectional Hostility 49
the great State of Pennsylvania a unit. The antago
nism that was at the bottom of the Whisky Insur
rection, however, moved westward with the moving
east-and-west line of division. At bottom It was the
feeling that the stronger East was not fair to the
West; that it was doing things In the way that was
best for itself rather than for the country as a
whole; that It was opinionated, intolerant, and
altogether irritating. As the West grew stronger,
the shifting line added more and more territory to
what came to be considered as "The East," This
territory assumed "eastern" ways and eastern
modes of thought, and the eastern preponderance
was thus maintained. It was the old story of the
Socialist who modifies his opinions as he becomes
a large property-holder, of the pedestrian whose
point of view changes when he buys an automo
bile, of the British Whig politician who becomes a
Tory when he is raised to the peerage. And in
addition to this political preponderance of mere
voting strength there came to be added a financial
preponderance that was even more irritating.
The way In which the West regards the East has
thus apparently a somewhat complex source — so
cial, political, and economic — but at bottom these
are all very much the same.
Politically the restlessness of the West has always
manifested itself in eagerness to enter into move-

50 The Different West
ments for reform, sometimes with rather ill-
considered haste, in refusal to follow leaders of
social prominence, in the hasty setting up and pull
ing down of popular idols. Movements from below
upward, instead of from above downward, have
been apt to sway it. Its leading men, willy-nilly,
have gone with the masses oftener than they have
persuaded the masses to follow them. It cannot be
said, perhaps, that reform movements have been
more effective in the West than In the East. There
have been rotten municipal governments, senatorial
election-scandals, wholesale bribery, in both sections.
It is rather the way In which reform movements
are conceived and carried on that marks the differ
ence between them.
For instance, the abolition movement in Boston
was at the outset a movement of socially prominent
persons. The mob was against It. When it was
triumphant it was because its leaders had brought
the mob around. The " Liberal Republican " move
ment that resulted in the nomination of Horace
Greeley was similarly from above downward; it did
not get far enough downward. In fact, to win the
votes. So with the Innumerable campaigns against
Tammany, which have been largely led by " silk-
stockings." So with the policies identified In New
York with the administration of Governor Hughes.
This state of things has always given color to the

Reform from Below 51
assertion by machine-men, stand-patters, Tammany-
ites, etc., that their opponents were self-righteous
Pharisees — "holier-than-thou" men, undemocratic,
and opposed to popular government. Just after one
of the earlier periodical overturns of Tammany In
New York, a professor in Columbia University
remarked that he found suddenly that he began to
have the pleasure of knowing a large number of city
office-holders. There had been, in fact, a social
revolution, Tammany had been overturned from
above downward, which is the one very good reason
why it never stays upset, Tamen usque recurret,
which may be read as a pun or not, just as you
choose. Curiously enough, one of the places where it is
easiest and most Instructive to compare eastern with
western spirit and methods is at the great eastern
universities, which for reasons that need not be dis
cussed here, are those that draw their students most
generally from all parts of the country. For this
reason, it may be said In passing, a man may well
decide to send his son to Harvard or Yale or Prince
ton, rather than to a local eastern college like
Amherst or WlUIams, or to one of the great west
ern state universities, like Wisconsin or Illinois.
The opportunity that one gets at a continental as
opposed to a local Institution, to live and exchange
opinions daily with north, south, east, and west.

52 The Different West
may well outweigh considerations based on curricu
lum, size, situation, or administration. It is greatly
to be regretted that since the Civil War southerners
do not flock to these universities as they used to do.
So far as I know there Is no Institution, unless it
may be Johns Hopkins, where one may meet large
numbers of persons from both North and South,
For the East and the West, however, what has been
said holds good. I well remember that my first
class reunion at Yale was held in the stress of the
Mugwump secession from Blaine to Cleveland in
1884, and the Impression is still strong of the dif
ferent attitudes toward it of my classmates from the
East and from the West. The class was Repub
lican by a large majority — so large that when we
formed campaign marching clubs In the Garfield-
Hancock contest of senior year, the Democrats had
just enough men for officers — there were none left
for the rank and file. Almost without exception,
among my own friends, the western Republicans
were Blaine men, and the easterners were Mug
wumps. And neither could at all understand the
attitude of the others. It was in the eastern and
western air. Possibly this may seem quite contra
dictory of what has been just said. Not at all.
We represented the top, not the bottom. " Mug-
wumpery," which has grown powerful under vary
ing names, is today stronger in the West than in

Political Movements 53
the East. My western friends, some of them high
in the councils of their parties, have been dragged
into it by forces from below, so far as they have
not been able to resist these by " standing pat."
The easterners have not generally been able to
carry the masses with them into insurgency. Where
this has been done, as in New Hampshire, it has
been distinctly by successful leading from above, not
by a mass-movement from below.
Now compare, if you please, with the eastern
movements to which we have briefly alluded, west
ern ones like the sudden rise of the Populists, the
recent successes of the Socialist party in various
cities, the Influence of Bryan, the reform of the
tariff, the commission form of government, the so-
called "Insurgent" movement, with Its corollary
the Progressive party — the idolizing of Roosevelt,
To a much greater extent than the corresponding
eastern movements, these had their origin in popular
sentiment, which had well leavened the masses and
made them ready to accept leadership when it
appeared. This sort of thing, of course, puts a pre
mium on hypocrisy among political leaders; men
like La Follette in Wisconsin and Cummins In Iowa
have been accused of It: but If these accusations be
true they are only additional evidence of the way
in which the western movements arise.
Occasionally the West tries the eastern plan of

54 The Different West
organizing reform from the top, and the failure of
such attempts Is sufficient proof that they are exotic.
Two conspicuous recent instances are the defeat' of
Professor Merrlam for the mayoralty of Chicago
and the rejection at the polls of a new charter for
the city of St. Louis. Both the candidacy of Pro
fessor Merrlam and the new charter were, actually
or reputedly, it makes little difference which, aristo
cratic In their origin and tendencies. The success
of both would have made for civic righteousness
and advancement; failure In each case was a dis
aster, and it may be set down to the credit of those
who have apparently forgotten that in the West,
nothing, no matter how good, can be forced on the
people from above.
The fate of various elaborate city plans may be
similarly explained. It seems to have been assumed
in various quarters that an imitation of certain
externals in other cities will bring about a corre
sponding change in fundamentals. For instance,
there is little spectacular street and cafe night-life
in St. Louis — a fact much to its credit. Its citizens
have attractive homes and prefer to spend their
evenings therein. But business men often lament
this state of things because it makes deficient the
entertainment of travehng salesmen and buyers.
An imitation of New York's "Tenderloin" is evi
dently required. The brilliant street-lighting being

City Plans 55

the most obvious feature of that celebrated district,
it has been assumed that if sufficient light were pro
vided, all the rest would follow, oblivious of the fact
that the light In New York is a product of the
Tenderloin life, not its cause. Considerable sums
have thus been spent not only In St, Louis, but in
other cities, on brilliant street-lighting, much to the
improvement of the streets, of course, but absolutely
without the creation of a "Tenderloin."
So with " city planning," The real " city beauti
ful" is usually an outgrowth of conditions, and the
creation of certain architectural features will not
serve to create also these conditions. The mag
nificent civic improvements planned by architects
for the great western cities are not only largely
Impractical on account of expense, but they do not
correspond to any need felt by the great body of
the citizens. The practical way, and the one that
accords with western ideas and methods, is to bring
about a change of public opinion in regard to one
detail after another that is making the city ugly,
and so transform it gradually. Instead of trying to
replace a section of It with a section of Paris,
leaving the rest untouched.
It is a pleasure to turn to a set of institutions
that have been initiated and carried forward In a way
more consonant with western Ideas, These are the
city clubs, organizations, generally of younger men.

56 The Different West
whose object Is thoroughly to ventilate all ques
tions relating to civic matters, without t?klng sides
in any of them. These bodies are catholic in their
membership and are beginning at the bottom in
quite the proper way. Much may be expected from
these and similar efforts.
It has been Intimated above that the West Is more
democratic than the East. Democracy must have
leaders, but it makes a great deal of difference
whether those leaders be chosen or self-imposed.
Geographical conditions doubtless have something
to do with these differences. Democracy can not
flourish well under fear of foreign invasion, and this
fear, whether consciously or not, is an inherited
habit of mind on every sea-coast. Plainsmen, and
dwellers in the river-bottoms, like mountaineers,
" are always freemen." It will not do, of course,
to push this idea too far, but it may be noted that
just after the civil war, when militarism reigned
supreme, In the Mississippi Valley as on the Coast,
the popular movements that have always character
ized the West practically ceased to arise. Every
body seemed to be " standing pat," and the mlHtary
insurgency of the South, by its effect on those who
helped to put It down, seemed to have had a blight
ing effect, for the time being, on western pohtical
insurgency. It has been made clear, I trust, that the western

Western Democracy 57
democracy does not reject leaders; on the contrary,
it idoHzes them and follows them blindly. But they
are its own leaders, and they stand for Its own prin
ciples — the simple secret of their influence. The
two patent examples in recent times are William J.
Bryan and Theodore Roosevelt. Belonging to
nominally opposed political parties, each has repre
sented the popular and radical wing of his party
and has stood especially for those ideas that are
rife In the West. Bryan has openly accused Roose
velt of stealing his policies. It would be nearer the
truth to say that both have borrowed those policies
from western public opinion, Roosevelt usurped
Bryan's place In the western heart because he was
successful. Democracy adores success and looks for
a leader that can succeed; It will depose one after
another till it finds him. Whether Roosevelt's fail
ure to secure a third term in the presidential chair
will hurt his western popularity, remains to be seen.
Possibly not; for his successes In the late campaign
were In the West; his failures in the East. The
essential " westernness " of Roosevelt has often
been remarked. For years his personality has been
the one political subject that would stir up a social
gathering In the East. We may refuse to be moved
by the tariff, or imperialism, or the prospects of a
war with Japan; but if somebody says " Roosevelt,"
everyone Is in arms at once — the East generally on

58 The Different West
one side, and the West on the other. Anti-Roosevelt
westerners usually turn out to have railroad or cor
poration connections. I have traveled day after
day in a suburban train to and from New York
when everyone In my car was discussing Roosevelt —
and the first syllable of that word might well be
omitted. The curses In this case were loud as well
as deep: the one or two Roosevelt advocates in the
car were fairly scared into silence. Yet at this time
the general popularity of Roosevelt throughout the
country was unexampled, and it was particularly
the West that was its seat. We hear much of the
compelling effect of his magnetic personality, but
that never seemed to count for much among the
Wall Street crowd; and If Roosevelt had been
another Ballinger, it would have gone for nothing
among his present admirers of the Middle West,
although It has undoubtedly added to the general
effect. No; Roosevelt's present position (for he still
holds it as a western leader), like Bryan's former
position, is due to the fact that he is an exponent
of policies that fall in with the peculiar political
unrest of which we have been speaking.
I shall doubtless be reminded here that Bryan's
Influence rose on the crest of the free-silver wave,
and that Roosevelt has always been a consistent
opponent of free silver. Precisely; and the substi-

Theodore Roosevelt 59
tutlon of Roosevelt's influence for Bryan's coincides
with the abandonment of the free-silver idea in the
West. Political unrest focused Itself for a brief
time on this point and then dropped it when it was
unsuccessful. In this abandonment of the West's
once dominant idea, Theodore Roosevelt played
absolutely no part at all.
In attempting to sum up the West's political
unrest, I am reminded of Professor Franklin Gid-
dlngs' answer to the editor of a Socialist paper
who asked him If he were of the faith. Professor
GIddings said (I quote from memory) : "If behef
in what Socialists are trying to do, as opposed to
the ways in which they are trying to do it, makes
one a Socialist, then I am a Socialist." This, I
take It, is the fundamental attitude of the West,
whether fully acknowledged or not, and the leaven
is working eastward, also. The assets of Socialism
are two — its grievance, which is a universal one,
and Its offer of a definite cure. This cure is of the
nature of a panacea, the age-long stand-by of the
quack. The scientific physician knows that there is
no such thing; he realizes that every malady must
be studied and treated by Itself, The suffering
patient knows this too, perhaps — theoretically; yet
if he is on his last legs and the quack comes along
with his cure-all, the patient is very apt to give it a
trial. So, when we are on our last legs, we may

6o The Different West
turn in despair to the Socialistic cure-all — probably
not otherwise. Meanwhile, Socialists of varying
schools are proposing all sorts of policies and expe
dients that they conceive to be consonant with, or
to be steps toward, their general plan. Some of
these are obviously good, some doubtful, some
foolish, and some mischievous. The American
people, especially in the West, are approving and
adopting many of these, and those who do not like
It are shouting " Socialism ! " This cry Is not fright
ening westerners at all, and I do not beheve that
it will ultimately frighten anyone, east or west,
Latin nations are apt to give their adherence to
general principles and then blindly accept whatever
policy may seem to correspond with them. Anglo-
Saxons have never done this; they examine each
policy on Its merits and adopt it if they like it,
without regard to whether or not It may be con
sidered socialistic, capitalistic, idealistic, material
istic, or atavistic. The attitude of " show me,"
assumed traditionally by Missourlans, is really
characteristic of Anglo-Saxon civilization.
The grievance that the Socialistic cure-all is
designed to correct is, as I conceive it, the fact that
the rewards of effort are unjustly distributed. When
we come to define equitable distribution, then we all
part company; but most of us agree that the present
arrangement is inequitable. Some would assert that

Socialism 6 1

any possible arrangement is Inequitable, while others
would say that an equitable distribution is within
the bounds of possibility. The Socialists go fur
ther: they say that they can define equitable distri
bution (though they do not all do it In the same
way) and that they have discovered a sure means of
bringing It about. The western attitude is some
thing like this: those who hold it recognize the
injustice of the present state of things and sympa
thize with efforts to make it better; but they regard
it as a group of phenomena each of which must be
dealt with separately and experimentally. Anything
that seems likely to work in the direction of partial
and local alleviation is willingly tried. Hence we
have commission forms of government, the eccen
tricities of the Oklahoma constitution, bank-deposit
guarantees, hotel Inspection, the initiative, referen
dum, and recall, woman suffrage in several states,
drastic railway regulation, and many other such
expedients. In The Land of the Dollar, a book which,
belying its somewhat flippant title, is one of the
most appreciative short estimates of our country,
the author, the late G, W, Steevens, writing during
the McKInley-Bryan campaign of 1896, speaks as
follows :
For the first time, the East and West find, or believe
they find, their interests sharply and diametrically op-

62 The Different West
posed. And I own it does not appear to me the best of
augury for the ultimate unity of this country that each
side appears more set on beating down the opponent than
on trying to conciliate his interests with his own. I have
not noticed, for instance, that the Republicans have put
out any alternative policy to relieve western agriculture,
nor that the Democrats have devised any expedient, in
the event of their success, to break the fall of eastern
business. The election was won by the Republicans. What
would have happened if the other side had been
victorious, we need not discuss. But western agri
culture Is not only "relieved" but is extraordinarily
prosperous and as satisfied as any restless American
industry can be. Some will say that this Is because
"Providence looks out for children, drunken men,
and the United States;" but another adage tells us
"God helps those who help themselves," and I pre
fer to think that we fall into the latter category
rather than Into the " shorn-lamb " class to whom
the wind is tempered. Napoleon is said to have
asked first about every man to whom his attention
was called, "Is he lucky?" He was quite right,
A man's "luck" Is usually the excuse given by his
incompetent friends for some special ability and its
satisfactory results. The western farmer has doubt
less been fortunate, but I can not help thinking that
he himself has had something to do with it. And it
is quite possible that after the contest the victors

Western Luck 63

themselves turned their attention to that conciliation
of Interests, of whose absence during the campaign
Mr, Steevens complains. This Is quite In accord with
the customs of all good fighters. When the fight is
on, they fight; the time for conciliation does not
arrive until the issue has been decided.
This chapter began with an allusion to some early
western political unrest that bore fruit In armed
protest, " The voice of the West," said Woodrow
Wilson on a western trip In 19 11, "is a voice of
protest," In the Kansas-Missouri border warfare
just preceding the civil war, the irrepressible conflict
between North and South broke out In a character
istic western way. The influence of such lawlessness
as this is hard to eradicate. It showed itself In the
career of the James brothers and of others in more
recent times. In certain regions of the West as
nowhere In the East, there are persons with the
true brigand spirit of Italy and Corsica. The train
robber, to them, is one of their own people,
misguided perhaps, but to be sympathized with,
concealed, and even admired. This spirit is dis
appearing, but it still exists, "They value good
government," says our kindly critic, Mr. Bryce,
"but they are tolerant of lawlessness that does not
directly attack their own interest."
Most western lawlessness is a survival, and it
survives not so much from tolerance of the kind

64 The Different West
mentioned by Mr, Bryce as because the western
states do not possess the machinery for its suppres
sion. That machinery Is not created because, after
all, the lawlessness Is sporadic and it does not seem
worth while to mount a siege-gun to kill a grass
hopper. This may not be the right way to look
at the matter, A little abnormal lawbreaking,
especially If it tends toward brigandage, will give
a black eye to a community that is normally quiet
and peaceful. A train robbery here, a mountain
feud there, will create the Impression of utter dis
regard for order, whereas there may be more actual
crime In proportion to population in a week of
New York than in a year of such a region. Take,
if you please, train robbery — a crime more fre
quent in the West than In the East, partly because
of the facilities, for both commission and escape,
offered by more sparsely settled country and partly
as an Inheritance from former frontier or border
lawlessness. To do away with highway robbery
of any kind, of which train robbery is but a species,
a local police or constabulary is totally insufficient.
An organization covering a wide extent of terri
tory — a state or national poHce like the Cuban
Rurales, the Texas Rangers, or the Pennsylvania
Constabulary is needed. But shall such an organi
zation be created to stop an occasional train
robbery? The western states have evidently de-

Lawlessness 65

cided that it would be a waste of money to do so.
Texas had her border conditions to care for: Penn
sylvania her mining territory; a state police has
paid them where it might not pay Iowa or Mis
souri or Kansas. This may be bad argument, but
it is the argument that makes conditions what they
are, whether it has been definitely formulated or
not. Fortunately, whenever a train robber inter
feres with the mails, the Federal secret service at
once takes the matter up and, not being hampered
by local conditions, generally runs the culprits to
earth. And if it comes to capture, the robber pre
fers Federal custody, for in some western states
death is the penalty for his crime, whereas Federal
law prescribes only Imprisonment, It is a curious
commentary on the feebleness of local authority, in
the face of this type of offense, that the train robber
has vastly more fear of the Federal detective, with
Imprisonment as his only weapon, than of the local
police, capture by whom means the gallows.
Lawlessness such as this, however, is rather a
relic of past political unrest than an indication of
the present variety, which has nothing in common
with It, The politics of the West will continue
strenuous so long as its temper is unchanged, but
we shall have no more whisky Insurrections, no
more border warfare, and. It is to be hoped, no more
bandit "brothers" of the James and Younger type.

CHAPTER VI
the west's . economic unrest
THAT the speculative element can never be
eliminated from commercial transactions goes
without saying. It is present even in so elementary
a case as the purchase of food for one's own use,
without thought of selling: for whether one spends
much or little for a given amount depends on the
state of the market. The prudent man will lay In
an extra stock of non-perishable goods when prices
are low — that is, when they are as low as he thinks
they are likely to go. Whether he is right or not
depends partly on his judgment, partly on chance.
There will be many who are not prudent enough to
do this, or who do not trust their own judgments
sufficiently to attempt it. It would seem eminently
proper that others who are prudent and who do
trust their own judgment should be able, by buying
and reselling to the ignorant or timid ones, to make
the profits that these either do not know how to
make, or are afraid to make, for themselves. From
such operations as these we may advance by almost
imperceptible steps to the worst forms of wild-cat
speculation, which few would hesitate to call gam
es

Wall Street 67

bling, pure and simple. The line must be drawn
somewhere, and the place for drawing it must be
selected more or less arbitrarily.
This selection involves the personal equation.
The Wall Street man, who lives in an atmosphere
of speculation, will not draw it in the same place
as the Missouri farmer. In whose commercial trans
actions chance plays a relatively unimportant part,
A creditor and a debtor would not be likely to agree
on the place to draw it; still less the members of a
creditor class and a debtor class. Now, until very
recently the western farmer was always a borrower.
His property was mortgaged and he was continually
paying interest to eastern capitalists. It seemed to
him, rightly or wrongly, that conditions were so
manipulated and rates of interest so adjusted, in
eastern financial circles, as to keep him always a
debtor and to make him pay high for the privi
lege. Matters have changed now: the Kansas and
Nebraska farmers have paid off their mortgages,
have money In the bank, and own automobiles; but
hard feelings engendered by conditions do not
always disappear with the alteration of those
conditions. Some of us still lay up against our English cousins
the fact that they objected, with force of arms, to
our Independence, despite the fact that we have now
possessed and enjoyed it for nearly a century and a

68 The Different West
half. It is possible that the western farmers' feel
ing against "Wall Street" will last as long as this,
and If conditions should ever become unfavorable
again, that feeling will be Intensified. At present
it is also kept alive by the tariff. Despite efforts
to persuade the farmer to be a high-tariff man,
increased protective duties on imports have been
generally due to the efforts of manufacturers. The
East has been more thoroughly and consistently
protectionist than the West, and the western farmer
has been a low-tariff man on economic grounds,
whatever his political affiliations.
Of course, the "Wall Street" that is detested
and feared in the West is the whole body of eastern
financial and industrial Influence — the influence of
the money-lender, the high-tariff manufacturer, the
manipulator of markets, the maker and controller
of trusts. All of these occupations. It Is true, are
now Indulged In by westerners also. More shoes
are made in St. Louis than In Boston; the " corners "
of the Chicago exchanges rival those of New York;
the trust extends its wings over the West as well
as the East. But as In the case of other grievances,
the feeling lasts longer than the conditions that give
rise to It, and the western feeling against "Wall
Street" is very real and very important. Griev
ances of this kind, real or fancied, become, after

Freak Laws 69

long nursing, the causes of great political or
economic upheavals that are precipitated by some
apparently trivial incident. It was not the greasing
of the cartridges that made India flame out into
mutiny, or the passage of the Stamp Act that severed
our bonds with the Mother Country, or the elec
tion of Lincoln that brought about secession. These
events were due to long-continued tension that was
bound to find relief in one way if it did not in an
other. Possibly the tension In the West may never
result In any great upheaval, but It has had Impor
tant political results in the past and may conceivably
have others in the future, before it Is relieved. Some
of these results are Populism, the Free Silver move
ment, "Insurgency," and others dwelt upon with
more detail in the last chapter. Be this as it may,
it Is certain that the East greatly underrates this
tension, largely because of its inability to under
stand it.
One cause of this inability is the fact that in the
East there are fewer points for a movement to
crystallize upon than in the West, Chemists know
that a solution may remain supersaturated for an
indefinite time, until a tiny crystal Is dropped in,
when solidification, proceeding from that crystal as
a nucleus, begins at once. The East may be super
saturated with feeling — jealousy, or fear, or indig-

70 The Different West
nation, but there are no nuclei to start that feeling
into activity. These nuclei are furnished, in the
West, by the tendency to try experiments,
G, W, Steevens says:
Kansas has been the drunken helot of American poli
tics. " Here 's a law ; let 's enact it," has been its continual
watchword. ... In the last few years [prior to 1896]
it has given its allegiance to four new political parties.
These were the Farmers' Alliance, the National Alliance,
the People's Party, and the Silver Party. None of them
did any good.
All this puts in somewhat exaggerated and strik
ing phraseology the restless, experimental temper
that is doubtless characteristic of Kansas, but no
more of her than of her neighbor states. This
tendency, which Is peculiarly an American trait,
appears In the adoption of woman suffrage in a
few western States, the success of prohibition in
others, such "freak" constitutions as that of Okla
homa, and more recently In the Socialist victory in
Milwaukee. No one In the West believes that a
majority of the Milwaukeeans suddenly became at
this time disciples of Lassalle or Karl Marx. They
had tried both the old parties, with unsatisfactory
results, and began experimenting on the third —
that is all. This entry of Socialism into the domain
of practical politics is looked upon In the West as
rather a good thing than otherwise. The abolition
ism of Lincoln was a different thing from that of

The Western Judiciary 711
Garrison; the prohibition spirit of Georgia is not
that of Neal Dow. Nor is the socialism of Victor
Berger that of the preachers of a somewhat abstract
social revolution.
The westerners, as has already been said, like
abstract principles; they enjoy tackling separate
problems In their own way, and will go far and act
rashly in experimenting on solutions; but they object
to set programs. This temper results, like all experi
mentation, in failures and even in disasters; but it
also results in the acquisition of knowledge that can
be obtained in no other way — in ascertaining, for
instance, those localities where prohibition will work,
the cities that can be governed on the commission
plan, the possibilities of such schemes as the bank-
deposit guarantee of Oklahoma, the mild character
of an avowedly Socialistic municipal government.
Now, under these circumstances, when the mind
of a community is under tension, successful experi
ments of this kind serve as lines of least resistance,
along which relief may be afforded; or, to use our
recent simile, as nuclei upon which crystallization
may relieve supersaturation. One of the most in
teresting points to consider In this connection is the
composition of the western judiciary and the atti
tude of the western people toward It, The judiciary
is much nearer the people in the West than in the
East. Its character is not, on the whole, as high,

72 The Different West
but it Is regarded with more friendliness, if with
not so much awe. It Is uniformly elective, and
there has been much rotation in office, so that almost
every passable lawyer in the community has sat on
the bench at one time or another, and judges are
as numerous as colonels In Kentucky, This has its
disadvantages, but in certain conditions it is an
advantage. It is as fortunate a thing for a judge
to have the community on his side as it Is for a
governor or a mayor. This viewpoint will not
appeal to those who regard a judge as a stern re
pressor of a wicked and untoward generation rather
than as the living voice of the community's subli
mated common sense.
This Idea seems to be that the law is a definite
thing and that the task of finding out what it is is
like a mathematical problem. Obviously, if this
is correct, the personal or political bias of the judge,
his birth, breeding, education, affiliations, and modes
of thought have absolutely nothing to do with his
decisions. He ascertains what the law is and makes
declaration thereof — that is all. The trouble is
that the personal equation so obviously does enter
into it all that he who runs may read. Two mathe
maticians may, in solving an intricate problem, arrive
at different results, but it is always possible to find
out which is right and to demonstrate it to the other
in such a way as to force his acknowledgment. No

Eastern and Western Radicalism 73
such thing has ever been possible in law. Doubtless
the law is definite within certain limits, but those
limits allow for plenty of "lost motion," and this
is where personal, political, or sectional bias comes
unconsciously Into play. Theodore Roosevelt has
always seen this, and his keen perception of it has
led to his so-called " attacks on the judiciary," The
Arizonans saw it when In their new constitution
they extended the principle of the recall to their
judges. It is hopeless to expect that the judiciary
of a whole section can remain free from influences
that pervade it, and I believe that western judicial
decisions reflect in many cases the restless temper,
the tension, the supersaturation that has been de
scribed. The most radical decisions under the
Sherman law, the pure food law, railway legisla
tion, etc., have been in the West. This does not
mean that the West is dissatisfied with the judiciary
or with the place it has come to occupy in our system
of government. It reserves the right to criticize or
condemn a judicial act as it does an executive or a
legislative act. It may make up its mind that a
given judge is incompetent and should be replaced.
It may even be in favor of applying the "recall"
to the judiciary — a perfectly logical position in
cases where the judiciary is elective — but it has
no intention to belittle the functions or dignity of a
judge.

74 The Different West
In an address before a western club, an eastern
radical recently made an attack on the judiciary —
on the whole position that it has come to occupy in
our system — that, under the guise of logic and
fair-mindedness, was little short of revolutionary.
To judge by the way In which it was received, the
West does not sympathize with this sort of thing.
The matter may be worth a few words, as it Illus
trates the difference between the indlviduahstic,
almost anarchistic, radicalism of the East and the
coUectlvIst, social, or civic radicalism of the West,
The speaker's attack on the courts was in the guise
of a protest against undue veneration of the United
States Supreme Court, but was in fact an assertion
that no one but the disputants in a suit should pay
any attention to the decision of a court in that suit.
The Supreme Court has no prerogatives not pos
sessed by other courts, except that It is higher than
they. They must all decide questions in accordance
with the law, and In so doing it frequently becomes
necessary for them to decide what the law means or
whether the law-making body, when Its jurisdiction
is limited as Is that of Congress, went beyond its
powers in some instance, making its acts of no effect.
Now, after such a decision it is, of course, theo
retically possible for another suit, involving pre
cisely the same questions to be brought, and
another and another, each of which would be

Eastern and Western Radicalism 75
decided In the same way. It is much easier and
less expensive, however, to recognize this fact and
shape our conduct according to the first decision,
just as it is wiser for a goat who butts his head
against a wall to stop right there and not repeat
the act indefinitely. Such acceptance of the situa
tion is a civic act. It is better for the community,
though it may not suit the individual, who may
prefer to have his own turn at the game of litigation.
This latter method is quite familiar in the criminal
law, Jones steals money and goes to jail; and,
Smith, Brown, and Robinson, in turn, do precisely
the same thing and are served In precisely the same
way. This is surely anti-civic, and to extend the
custom to civil procedure would seem to a layman
no less so.
But this is not the worst of it. The speaker
would have had the Executive of the United States,
after the Supreme Court, In the course of litigation,
had decided that Congress went beyond its powers
in passing an Income-tax law, and that therefore
such law was void, continue to collect the tax, letting
individuals continue, as they desired, to bring the
matter Into Utigation, but disregarding every deci
sion as applicable only to the case In hand. This
is so thorough a reductio ad absurdum of the whole
contention that It is probably unnecessary to pursue
it further. So extended reference to it is excusable

76 The Different West
only because It may serve to show what I believe
is a fundamental difference between the radicalism
of the East and that of the West, The former is
that of individuals and is hence mdivlduallstic ; the
latter is that of coherent bodies of men or of
communities, and hence is social.
Of course, this kind of an attack on the judiciary
is a totally different thing from that attributed to
Mr. Roosevelt. The prerogative of criticizing
judges, or mayors, or selectmen, is freely exercised
by all, from ex-presidents down to the solons of
the corner grocery, and will probably be exercised
by all so long as " Freedom from her mountain
height" continues to watch over our liberties.
Much economic unrest at present is very inti
mately bound up with the transportation problem.
The general feeling that the railroads are not deal
ing fairly with the public is shared with the rest of
the country, but somewhat Intensified by local condi
tions and by the general attitude of protest so com
mon in the West, It has come to the surface
especially In efforts at rate regulation, which the
railroads resent as ill-considered, and which are
perhaps not well-considered, or indeed considered at
all, being merely somewhat blind attempts to " get
back" at the roads. The roads are at last begin-
ing to realize that they are unpopular, though they
profess not to understand why. I heard a railroad

Feeling Against the Railroads JJ
official say recently that a great strike of railroad
employees is inevitable. The demands and beha
vior of the men are becoming unbearable, he said.
The railroads meekly yield to the one and suffer
the other because they know that in any contest the
public would be against them, "The strike will
come whenever we are ready to make a stand,"
said he, "And when we get the public to looking
at matters from our standpoint, just see how quickly
we shall bring it on!" An unconscious tribute to
public opinion and a recognition of how that opinion
regards the roads. As a relief from their exactions,
some are looking forward with hopefulness to the
resumption of river transportation. The only way,
however, in which the railroads have killed river
transportation Is by furnishing something better, as
noted in another chapter, Hope for still better
conditions is justifiable, but longing for the old river
days is foolish. Those who wish to ship goods by
boat may still do so; the charges are less than by
rail, but the insurance brings them up in excess of
the railway rates. This simply means that shippers
are not content to send their goods in the kind of
boats and under the conditions of loading, trans
portation, landing, and temporary storage on shore
that obtained in the old days. Betterment of these
conditions will result in lowering the insurance rates
and making the cost of river transportation really

78 The Different West
lower than that by railway. With all this the rail
road has had little to do except to create a higher
standard of speed and safety for freight. So far
as the rate question Is concerned, the shippers' side
of it is given very forcibly In Norris's novel, The
Octopus. All that the railroad can say, on the other
side. Is that it wants only a fair return on its capital.
What this return ought to be, however, is something
that no two persons will figure out in the same way,
since no two can agree on what it ought to be based.
The public demand for a physical valuation of
these and other public service properties Is very
loud and insistent in the West; and It is doubtless
a proper and inevitable step as a necessary factor
in the determination of equitable rates, whether or
not these are to be based directly upon it or no.
It should be noted that absentee landlordship
plays an important part in western feeling toward
western railroads. The roads are now largely con
trolled by easterners, and the public can scarcely be
expected to look upon the property of Gould or
Harriman as it might on something owned and
operated by its friends and neighbors. When any
thing is done to hurt the railroads, they cry out
against the Injustice done to the "widows and or
phans" who own them. When those widows and
orphans also control them, doubtless we shall see
the West exercising more chivalry in its acts toward

Absentee Railway Owners 79
the roads; but at present they seem as mythical as
their real owners are distant. Of the physical con
dition of the roads and the way in which they are
run, something is said in another chapter.

CHAPTER VII
education in the WEST
TV/TR. BRYCE, in his just and sympathetic
^^¦J^ account of the United States, comments on
the fact that our educational institutions, of which
we speak more modestly and with greater hesita
tion than about any other feature of our national
existence, are the very thing that most commands
the admiration of the outsider and inspires him
with the greatest confidence in our future.
These Institutions, both lower and higher, have
changed even since Mr, Bryce wrote his book; they
have been developing and, on the whole, improving,
even in the East; but in the West the changes have
been In some respects rapid and radical.
The increased respect shown for the public school
by well-to-do people — what may be called a rise
in its social status — has been notable In both sec
tions, but especially in the West. I well remember
New England towns of my boyhood where. In spite
of much alleged pride In the "district school"
system and much talk of its being the bulwark of
our liberties, no well-to-do person would have
thought for an instant of sending his children to
80

Public Education 8 1
a public school. Today, in those same towns there
are good graded schools to which all elements of
the community send pupils — an advance in democ
racy when it would least be expected. But In the
West, Instruction through public channels has always
been respected. There as elsewhere, private schools
will always be preferred by certain persons, but this
preference is not widespread. This may be a reflec
tion of the excellence of public school instruction,
but in part, also, It Is a cause of that excellence,
and due to the general temper of the people. In
general, the grade of teachers Is apt to be better
and the character of the buildings higher than in
eastern communities of the same grade. Where the
community is poor or ignorant, the schools will be
bad, of course — East or West,
In the extension of school activity in the direc
tion of facilities for recreation, the West is far
ahead of the East, Nothing like the Chicago play
grounds, with their complete and sensible "field-
houses," may be seen anywhere else in the world.
It seems to have been assumed In the East that
any sort of a public building in a park must be
ornate and useless — a combination of a band-stand,
used one evening a week, with a pavihon, used by
nobody at all, if he can help It, Probably the money
spent on such structures In the New York play
grounds would have built field-houses hke those in

82 The Different West
Chicago — permanent contributions to the health
and enjoyment of the neighborhood; agencies for
physical and moral improvement that can scarcely
be overestimated. Each of these field-houses con
tains a large assembly-hall, whose use is given freely
for private social gatherings ; a gymnasium for men
and one for women, with skilled attendants; a
branch of the public library, and a capacious out
door swimming pool. The buildings have the
beauty that comes from perfect adaptation to use
with no attempt at useless ornament. If the West
had produced no educational innovation but these
field-houses, it would have deserved our admiration.
Public education has been carried higher up in the
West than In the East, Universities supported by
public taxation are the rule there instead of the
exception. Great private foundations there are,
but except in the case of the University of Chicago
they are not relatively as important as those of the
East, And most of these endowed institutions are
situated in cities of considerable size and draw their
students largely from the adjoining population, to
whom the privilege of living at home, with Its conse
quent saving, appeals more than the saving of
tuition effected by enrollment in the state university.
The difference between a state-supported university
and institutions like Yale, Harvard, or Princeton
may be summarized by saying that they are similar

Democracy 83

to the differences between a public high school and
preparatory schools like Andover, Exeter, St, Paul's,
and Groton, They depend largely on the fact that
the student at Yale or Harvard, like the boy at St.
Paul's or Groton, regards himself as the privileged
member of an organization having forms, customs,
and traditions, and not simply as benefiting by cer
tain courses of instruction provided equally for all
by public taxation.
It may be objected that this is not democratic;
doubtless it is not. It is a popular fiction that
democracy is particularly In favor in the United
States. Democrats we are, doubtless, not from
abstract love of it or reasoned acceptance of it,
but, perforce, from the growth of conditions. Pro
fessor WiUiam G, Sumner used to say that the
peerage was not introduced Into this country when
it was settled because economic conditions required
that everyone should do personal work on the land;
and a peer at the plough would be absurd. It is
for reasons such as this that we have democratic
manners and customs. There is plenty of democ
racy left at the older universities, and It is probable
that the public institutions will become assimilated
to them by the gradual acquisition of their own
forms and traditions rather than by the loss of such
by the Institutions that now possess them. Indeed,
the acquisition of ritual and ceremony has been

84 The Different West
rather noticeable in the United States all along the
line in the past twenty years.
At a Yale commencement a score of years ago
the only traces of formalism were the procession
across the Green to the old Center Church, headed
by the sheriff of New Haven County, and the presi
dent's use of Latin as he bestowed degrees or called
upon the band to play. Now the graduating classes
are in cap and gown, and the dignitaries on the
stage glow in the rainbow hues of appropriate robes
and hoods. The president enters the university hall
where the ceremonies take place, preceded by an
official bearing a mace of gold, and he wears a
heavy gold chain of office about his neck. Doubt
less the fact that the university already had certain
forms and ceremonies made it easier to adopt these
newer symbols and functions, and the briefness of a
college generation — only four years — soon incor
porated them all into the local undergraduate body
of tradition.
This ritualizing influence, which has been felt
widely outside of educational institutions, clothing
railroad conductors in uniforms and bedecking erst
while sober churches with altar candles, will in time
extend to our public schools and our state universi
ties. Even now there are signs of traditions in both.
Public School No, 36, for example, is affectionately
spoken of by its graduates as " Dear Old Thirty-

Growth of Ritualism 85
six," Tales of its early days accumulate and grow;
its pupils are proud of its achievements in athletics
or in scholarship, even as an Eton boy might be.
It is slowly coming to have the same kind of tradi
tions as Andover or Lawrenceville, albeit hampered
by democracy. And this will come to the state
universities also, perhaps with some grateful
modifications, A recent investigator of university conditions, in
illustrating the reign of blind tradition at eastern
universities, has told how, when he asked for the
reason of this or that oddity, he was answered
calmly, " We have always done it that way," That,
of course, may or may not be absurd, according to
circumstances. If an institution has always carried
out some trivial ceremonial or custom of courtesy
in a particular way, its continuance seems rather a
fine thing; but if a vital function of the institution is
performed in a wasteful or blundering manner,
simply because no one has had sufficient intelligence
to do it otherwise — that is a totally different thing.
From this kind of tradition the state universities are
happily free: there Is nothing to prevent altering
their machinery in any way that will tend toward
greater efficiency.
This is why the easterner finds subjects in a
western state university curriculum that tend to
make him gasp, A "professor of poultry," such

86 The Different West
as Wisconsin has, would stir Yale or Princeton to
indignation or ridicule; not because facts about
poultry are not worth knowing, or are not easily
and satisf,actorily taught by an expert, but because
such a chair would not be in accordance with the
"traditions" of the institutions, Wisconsin, or
Kansas or Nebraska, is not bothered with traditions
of that sort. Traditions of the trivial and harm
less sort, however, they are rapidly picking up.
Take the " college yell," for instance. The average
student imagines, I suppose, not only that college
yells have existed since the dawn of time, but that
his particular college has practised and cherished Its
particular yell from the remotest antiquity. Now,
most of us remember when colleges had no "yells,"
The "three times three" of Harvard, afterward
adopted also by Yale, was hardly a distinctive
university cry, nor was It intended as such. Most
of the earlier "fancy" yells arose as jests. The
famous excerpt from the Frog Chorus of Aris
tophanes, now used by Yale, notably had its origin
in this way. Now they are all traditional, and the
western universities have their traditions with the
rest, A notable instance of a more fundamental dif
ference between eastern and western colleges is
the fact that practically all of the latter, and
none of the former, are co-educational. The de-

Coeducation 87

mand that woman should share man's privilege
of a university education was heard and answered
both in the West and In the East, but the western
answer was to admit women to the higher institu
tions of learning on the same footing with men,
while the eastern answer was to create separate
colleges for them, either quite apart, as at Vassar,
Wellesley, and Smith, or in affiliation with the older
universities, as at RadcHffe and Barnard,
This difference In response may be due in part
to the fact that economic reasons forbade the crea
tion In the West of separate Institutions when the
working machinery already existed in others. Still
more, however, was it due to the basic fact that in
the East, tradition is king, and co-education In the
higher learning was there contrary to tradition.
Once more; examine the relations between mem
bers of a university faculty and between these and
the students, In the East as compared with the West,
I have sat In a faculty group in a western state
university, in the rooms of one of their number.
All were merrily jesting and drinking beer, and
with them sat the honored president of the univer
sity, similarly employed. Many holders of western
chairs, if perchance their eyes fall on this page, will
ask, with open eyes, "Well! why not?" There
Is absolutely no reason "why not;" but if you go to
Cambridge, or New Haven, or Princeton to see a

88 The Different West
similar gathering, you will wait until the infernal
regions are sheathed with a very heavy coating of ice,
I may be wrong: my own acquaintance with
eastern faculties is twenty years old. Perhaps they
have learned some western customs; I know that
they have benefited by an influx of western blood.
That In itself was almost unheard of twenty years
ago; perhaps some other things have also been
added unto them.
Still, however this may be, there is formalism
rather than comradeship in the attitude of members
of an eastern university faculty toward one another,
and especially doth the president stand or sit aloof.
And it Is much the same as between professor and
student. They are much nearer In the West than
in the East, and it is better for both. There is
more love and not less respect.
Another distinction between eastern and western
universities is that the latter are more local, the
former more continental. This is natural, since
there was a time when the eastern Institutions were
the only recourse of those who desired a college
education. The habit thus formed, and the tendency
of the father to send the son to his own college,
account for the fact that an Illinois Yale man will
often send his sons to Yale Instead of to the Uni
versity of Illinois, and that a Harvard man in
Topeka will patronize Harvard rather than the

Western Universities Local 89
University of Kansas. There Is not the same reason
for sending an eastern boy to a western university,
founded for purely local state reasons, and it is
seldom done; although as these institutions gain
prestige and their alumni become more widely scat
tered, the same causes may operate with them also.
Furthermore, the alumni of the eastern colleges,
and even the college authorities, carry on a more
or less vigorous campaign in the Western States.
Every large place has Its association of Harvard,
Yale; and Princeton alumni, and even of graduates
of such smaller colleges as Amherst, Williams, of
Dartmouth. The published accounts of meetings
make public the existence and activities of these
bodies, and the fact that men of standing in the
community are graduates of these institutions. Some
such bodies see to it that the advantages of their
favorite colleges are presented to the senior classes
of preparatory schools, both public and private, by
illustrated talks given by graduates. There is no
such propaganda on behalf of the western universi
ties. Proximity, a smaller cost of living, and the
absence of tuition fees, militate in their favor; but
the net result is hardly satisfactory, as the line of
demarkation is drawn too much on the basis of the
dollar. The well-to-do Princeton man in Indiana,
we will say, sends his boy to Princeton as a matter
of course; the one with a more moderate income

90 The Different West
would prefer to do so, but can afford only the nearer
state university. Likewise, the boy who Is attracted,
perhaps, to Harvard by a glowing presentation of
its charms, given before his high-school class, or
by reading the Harvard papers supplied by gradu
ates to his school reading-room, or by the profuse
Harvard athletic news printed In his local papers,
goes only if he can afford It — otherwise not.
This selective action is responsible for a good
deal of the recent talk about plutocracy In eastern
universities, for it is a natural fact that most of
the western students there are wealthy. This state
of things has worried the western alumni of eastern
colleges more than a little, and they have tried of
late to emphasize In their propaganda the fact that
student self-support In eastern colleges has now be
come frequent and easy, and that there is no reason
why an industrious boy who wants to go to such a
college should be deterred by financial reasons. In
Chicago the Yale alumni support a scholarship, and
the desirability of extending this practice has been
discussed In St, Louis and other cities. However
this may be, it seems certain that the eastern univer
sities will remain for some time more continental in
their appeal than the western.
Indeed, the state university as a hustling, growing
institution is a thing of very recent date. Twenty-
five years ago Michigan was the only one heard of

University Growth 91
or greatly regarded in the East, The others were
poorly supported and had to struggle for recogni
tion and existence. This state of things has been
changed : first, by the growing appreciation of higher
education by the bulk of the western population,
wisely and skilfully fostered by the broad policy of
the universities themselves, which are cutting loose
from the academic tradition and popularizing their
courses by laying stress on practical agriculture, the
breeding of domestic animals, and similar subjects;
second, by recognition of the fact that a good plant
and a good teaching force cost money, driven home
by the phenomenal growth of such non-public insti
tutions as the University of Chicago, founded and
supported by wealthy patrons; and, lastly, by the
dawning consciousness In the mind of the rural legis
lator that a university president must needs be of
somewhat larger caliber than the principal of a
country school. The state universities as now con
ducted on broad lines, with ample state appropria
tions, by capable administrators, have a great future
before them and are coming into their own with
a rapidity that is hardly recognized in the East
and that Is astonishing to westerners with eastern
affiliations. Any account of education in the West, however
brief and sketchy, would not be complete without
mention of the part played by this region in great

92 The Different West
extra-scholastic educational movements such as the
formation and affiliation of women's clubs and the
growth and extension of public libraries. Both are
due to a recognition of the fact that education does
not cease with school and college life, and that It is
part of our legitimate business to see that it proceeds
on proper lines, both in our own cases and in those
of our companions and fellow citizens. In the case
of the woman's club these efforts are purely those
of private cooperation; with the library they have
proceeded on a public and civic basis. Both clubs
and libraries have Increased throughout the country,
but the part played by the West in their multiplica
tion, and the hearty recognition given to them there
as civic agencies, are noteworthy.
In the West the woman's club is a force that must
be reckoned with. Even those of the male sex who
regard these organizations with amusement and
smile at the courageous way In which they attack and
discuss the deep questions of philosophy, science,
and political economy, acknowledge that at last the
women have an organization that must be respected
and taken into account. These organizations have
club-houses that compare favorably with those of
the men's clubs ; they take an active Interest in public
and civic questions that puts most of the mascuhne
organizations to shame. The man who said that
he took a great Interest in women because his mother

Women's Clubs 93

was one, was making more than a jest. As the
mother is, the son is; and who can estimate the
influence on our coming generation of a motherhood
genuinely interested in good literature, in moral up
lift, in civic righteousness?
Step by step with the rise of the woman's club
in the West has gone that of the public library.
Women's clubs have been responsible In hundreds
of cases not only for the inception of the library
but also for the impulse that has caused the com
munity to undertake its support. In states having
no adequate library law, women's clubs have worked
for such a law and secured its passage. On the
other hand, the library has worked for and with
the woman's club In furthering and carrying on its
educational program. The sympathy between the
two depends not only on their similar aims, but also
on the fact that libraries are so largely operated by
women assistants. In many cases the responsible
heads of libraries have been women who are also
influential in club life. All this has favored
cooperation. The so-called library movement of the past twenty
years has been largely an extension of the library's
scope, accompanied by entrance of more progres
sive and capable workers into the library field and a
consequent wider recognition of the library's worth
to the community, expressed especially in increased

94 The Different West
financial support from the public and also in large
donations from private sources.
In this extension, western libraries have done pio
neer work. Open access first attracted librarians'
attention as practised on a large scale In the Cleve
land Public Library; work with children was done
in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and other western
libraries before It was recognized In the East; com
mission field-work, as now largely operated, orig-
inated In western states. Cooperation with schools
was carried on, on a large scale, in St, Louis when
unheard of in the East. In fact, the atmosphere of
free Inquiry and experiment, characteristic of the
West, has made itself felt In a peculiarly effective
way, in this important educational work.

CHAPTER VIII
literature in the WEST
Tr> OSTON and its vicinity used to have almost
-'-' a monopoly of American literature. The pub
lishing houses were there; the authors were chiefly
there — or, if not, they had to go there to sue for
recognition. The New York school — Halleck,
Morris, Willis, and the rest — if we except Wash
ington Irving — cut but a sorry figure In the literary
pantheon of those days, Poe — our greatest lit
erary genius — was embittered by the thought that
he stood without the sacred pale.
This monopoly, so far as It still exists, has passed
to New York, largely for the same reason that
Harvard used not to win football games — close-
coi"poration In genius is never permanent. It may
be that for a few years all the good writers in the
country may live In Boston, but such a condition will
pass — and it has passed. Boston does not welcome
the outsider and so he stays outside and plays
football, or writes books. In a more congenial
atmosphere. This can not happen to New York because she
has always made the outsider at home. In fact,
95

96 The Different West
she has done this to such an extent that she has be
come a city of outsiders. They have swamped and
hidden the "native New Yorkers" — a mythical
genus. When one hears of a man who has come
Into prominence In New York, one asks instinctively,
"Where did he come from?" and expects to hear
that he was brought up in Maine, or Indiana, or
Tennessee; the idea that he may have been born in
New York never seems to occur to anybody.
This, of course, is what makes New York " cos
mopolitan," but it Is a little hard for the rest of the
country. It Is especially hard on the writers of the
rest of the country, for, unless they go into journal
ism, New York is apt to spoil them. This it does
by sybaritic influences, by flattery, in all sorts of
underground ways. Social favor is particularly in
sidious ; it spoiled poor N. P, Willis, who might have
amounted to something If he had stayed in Boston
where he belonged. It has spoiled and is spoiling
more good writers today than most people realize.
I withhold names because I am afraid of libel suits;
but discriminating readers will have no trouble in
making out a list of promising writers from New
England, the West, and the South who have made a
splendid start, have gone to New York and then
fizzled out completely. I mean from a literary
standpoint, of course; some of them have made
money hand over fist.

Western Literary Groups 97
O, the pity of it! Others have sensibly stayed at
home and are doing conscientious work there. Good
advice to the ambitious western literary worker who
wants to go to New York would be that of Mr.
Punch to persons about to marry, namely, " Don't! "
Even Bryant would have been a greater poet if he
had stayed in New England, although doubtless he
would not have been so good a journalist.
If all western writers had resisted this insidious
influence there would today have been a western lit
erary school of considerable numbers and influence.
Even as it Is, the respectable number of those who
have stayed at home is responsible for local groups
that can not be overlooked. The so-called Indiana
writers will occur to the reader at once. That there
should be a " literary centre " In this state seems to
be regarded by the eastern papers as a huge joke.
It Is hard to see why. It may well be that a num
ber of good writers are now living near Indianapo
lis just as a number once lived near Boston, This
and other groups are discovering local literary ma
terial — that is a hopeful sign. William Allen
White tells us of Kansas, Mrs. Watts of Columbus,
Ohio, Winston Churchill of St. Louis, and so on.
Frank Norris was surely wrong when he asserted
that the only places in the United States about which
a story may be told are New York, Chicago, and
San Francisco. "Imagine," he says, scornfully.

98 The Different West
"writing a story about Nashville, Tenn., or Buffalo,
N. Y. I " O. Henry, quoting this exclamation, takes
up the challenge and proceeds to write about Nash
ville, Tenn., the best story he ever penned — a tale
full of wit, human interest, character, excitement,
and pathos — and withal so local that it could have
been written about no other city than Nashville.
At its close he remarks reflectively: "I wonder
what's doing in Buffalo, N. Y.?"
There is doubtless plenty doing In Buffalo; and
when an O. Henry arises to tell us, we shall surely
know of it. There are stories to tell — nay, there
are histories and biographies to write ; there is local
botany, zoology and geology, sociology and archae
ology. In thousands of western towns, scattered
through the valleys of the Mississippi and its tribu
taries; strewn over the apparently monotonous
plains of Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, and Iowa. When
we say that a place has no history, we mean simply
that no one has yet arisen to appreciate It and
write of it; when we say that such and such a his
tory is dull, we mean only that the writer was un
able, or did not think it worth his while, to make
it interesting. Wherever a western author may live, however, he
usually goes to New York to have his book pub
lished. That publishing, as now conducted, is chiefly
a commercial enterprise is strikingly Illustrated by

Western Publishers 99
its concentration In the commercial metropoKs.
The casual reader invited to name offhand a pub-
Hsher not located in New York would be apt to be
puzzled. Boston and Philadelphia hold on to a
few, nominally at least and as a matter of senti
ment. In the West there are some brave attempts,
and they seem to be succeeding. The time may
come when publishing is no longer purely business
and when a good man can carry It on in Oskaloosa,
Iowa, or Tuscumbia, Ala., as well as anywhere else.
Already great New York firms are finding It con
venient to have at least the manufacturing part of
the work done outside the city. And if one large
firm can profitably move to rural Long Island, it is
hard to say why someone else may not presently
make a still longer "trek." Possibly this may de
pend somewhat on specialization; certain It is that
most of the publishing firms who have secured what
seems to be a permanent foothold In the West are
specializing successfully. Chicago is almost the only
western city where a large general publishing busi
ness is successfully carried on. Elsewhere in the
West there Is specialization In such subjects as his
tory, bibliography, and a certain type of fiction, not
too high In grade but undeniably popular.
SpecIaHzatlon, too, is the note sounded by the
few magazines now issued In the West. Besides
the inevitable medical and pharmaceutical period-

IOO The Different West
icals we have such publications as the Technical
World Magazine and Popular Mechanics of Chi
cago, although these, for the general reader, are
distinctly specialized. About the only general maga
zine in the region. The World To-day of Chicago,
was recently purchased by W, R, Hearst and
removed to New York. There would appear to be
a field In the West for the purely local magazine,
which is as yet almost untrod. There might be at
least one of these in each state, devoted to the
description and discussion of local industries, civic
Improvement, rural conditions, state history and
biography, power-development, and so on. The
most of this kind of literature that has any value is
now issued by railways as part of their campaign
of publicity. This is done far more in the West
than in the East, and some of it Is excellently
done — deserving of a more permanent setting.
There is one kind of periodical, however, that
deserves treatment by Itself — that is the newspaper.
Some critics are apparently forgetting that it is a
periodical, like all the rest. If a man writes an
article of, say, 5000 words for a monthly, they
regard It as worthy of note; if he does the same
thing for a daily, it is beneath contempt. Some
libraries are seriously discussing whether they shall
not drop the dailies from their periodical lists, giv
ing up, for instance, the New York Evening Post,

Western Newspapers IOI
the Boston Transcript, and the Springfield Repub
lican, and clinging to the Broadway Magazine and
Munsey. Yet the daily is closer to the people than
any of them, and will be more valuable than any
others to the historian of a century hence. Sensible
libraries are keeping as many files as they dare and
the student of comparative life and customs in differ
ent regions can do no better than to go to the daily
papers first of all. If there are differences worth
discussing between East and West, some of the most
important may surely be expected to crop out in
these same papers.
The usual criticism of modern American news
papers is that they are controlled by " the interests."
So stated. It would appear not to be a legitimate
complaint. A journal must be controlled by some
man or by some body of men, commercial, political,
or scientific. It Is hard to see why ownership by
the Meat Trust or the Standard Oil Company
should be more objectionable than ownership by
John Smith, the Christian Science Church, the Pro
hibition Party, or the National Academy of Science,
The trouble is that in former days the owner's name
was always known and his control was open,
whereas nowadays, except in the case of religious
papers, it is generally kept quiet and the control is
secret. Where there is ostensible control it is gen
erally not the real one.

102 The Different West
A paper purporting to be the organ of the Repub
lican or Democratic Party is really, perhaps, the
mouthpiece of the Cordage Trust; the sheet which
announces on its title-page its adherence to high pro
tection may be only the personal tool of Thomas
Jones; and the journal that is supposed to be owned
and edited by John Smith does not betray the fact
that this gentleman himself is owned and controlled
by the Steel Trust, So it Is not ownership of Its
papers by the Interests that the public has to object
to; it Is the fact that the ownership is concealed or
misrepresented. And an additional grievance is
that the concealment and misrepresentation them
selves are unknown to many and denied by others.
We do not know who is responsible for what we
read or from what standpoint it is written. Doubt
less the failure to label journals plainly " The Prop
erty of the Umbrella Trust," " The Personal Organ
of Plerpont Rockefeller," and so on, is due to the
popular prejudice against large corporations and
those identified with them. The influence of the
paper will be greater, it is thought, if the source
and nature of that influence is concealed. This is
just but not far sighted. Its result, so far, has been
to discredit American journalism very largely among
thinking people. It is leading to an interesting
revival of personal journalism, not in the form of
the daily paper but of the weekly, of the type exem-

Personal Journalism 103
plified and perhaps originated by Labouchere's
Truth in London — written largely by one person,
irresponsible, trenchant, sometimes a little scandal
ous, yet wielding great influence simply because its
readers believe it to be fearless and independent.
Its adherents prefer to read the real opinions of a
man with whom they only partially agree, rather
than sentiments written to order by an employee of
some corporation.
This new personal journalism, as might be ex
pected, flourishes particularly in the West, I do not
know of any prominent example in the great eastern
cities, but in the West we have The Public, of
Chicago, edited by Louis F, Post; The Mirror, of
St, Louis, by William Marion Reedy; The Bellman,
of Minneapolis; Bryan's Commoner, La Follette' s
Weekly, and many others. These papers are all
readable and worth reading. The ordinary daily
journalism of the West is much like that of the East,
but rather more local. We have, however, nowhere
in the country a daily that sees the real continental
values — probably because we have not yet a public
that sees them. This is what despairing publicists
mean when they say that the United States is not a
"nation," We have not got away yet from the
attitude of the Revolutionary War, when the colo
nies were practically a loose group of allied foreign
countries, when the Baltimore dandies in the Mary-

I04 The Different West
land regiments sneered at the Vermont backwoods
men, and the Massachusetts farmers were jealous
of the Pennsylvania militia, and everybody went
home when he pleased and obeyed orders when he
was "good and ready," We should have been
fighting for our liberties yet, in the intervals of get
ting In our crops and of attending to local politics.
If the French had not lent us a hand.
If we were even now a homogeneous nation, with
country-wide national pride and no local misunder
standings and jealousies, this present volume would
be as useless as the far-famed chapter on snakes in
Iceland. Our country-wide newspapers, or our
attempts to approximate them, are all in the East.
If a foreigner wants to get daily American news as
opposed to that of Minnesota or lUInoIs or
Nebraska, he takes one of the New York dailies, or
the Boston Transcript, or the Springfield Repub
lican. Mr. Bryce tells the story of a small western town
with four daily papers. On being asked how such
a place could keep up four papers, a citizen aptly
replied that it took the four papers to keep up the
place. The questioner, you see, had confused cause
and effect. This function of the pubhc press — of
advertising or booming the place where it Is pub
lished, rests, like all advertising, on a perfectly good
psychological basis; but it Is sometimes forgotten

City Pride and Rivalry 105
that other principles of advertising apply here also.
In the first place there must be something to adver
tise. All the money in the world, spent on pub
licity, would not sell salt as sugar.
This sort of booming leads to and fosters busi
ness rivalry and such rivalry often ends in bitter
feelings that are Inexplicable to an easterner. Such
feeling there used to be between Chicago and St,
Louis before the former city grew so large that
it was forgotten. Such there was until very recently
between Tacoma and Seattle; such there is between
the "Twin Cities" — St, Paul and MlnneapoHs, A
Minneapolis man, being asked for his automobile to
assist in entertaining some visiting delegation,
replied that he would lend it on one condition — it
must not enter the city limits of St, Paul, This,
which seems to an eastern man almost incompre
hensibly childish, was perfectly serious. Without
the kindly nagging of the local press, these jealousies
would not so often arise or so long be perpetuated.
Another adjunct of city pride, of which the west
ern press Is fond, is the so-called " slogan " — a pithy
sentence embodying in epigram the advantages and
virtues of a place — for indiscriminate use in electric
signs, on banners, programs, circulars, and else
where, Tacoma once adopted the line "Watch
Tacoma Grow"; but when she didn't grow fast
enough and was outstripped by her big neighbor

lo6 The Different West
Seattle, she changed it to "You'll Like Tacoma,"
which has more of the permanent element in its
make-up, Chicago proudly but simply says " I
Will." St. Louis, after the throes of an extensive
newspaper competition, awarded a $500 prize to
the fortunate composer of the following sentiment:
"Some cities have a slogan; St. Louis has the
goods," All of which is taken seriously by many
citizens and furnishes undoubted material for news
paper discussion in an off season.
The local character of the western press has ad
vantages that it would be wrong to overlook. A
paper that tries to keep up with the news of the
whole country has to cut its local news pretty short.
The result is that in New York, for Instance, much
of the purely local matter Is taken care of by small
papers of the rural-press type — weekly sheets look
ing out for the interests of Harlem, Washington
Heights, old " Greenwich Village," Tremont, a
dozen or more localities in such boroughs as Rich
mond or Queens. Compared with these, the chief
daily papers of western towns of 10,000 to 15,000
inhabitants are positively metropolitan. It is easy
to get local items into any of them, but they will be
read over a very small part of the city. To Induce
the New York papers to notice a local event or
occurrence It must be of importance sufficient to
make it rank as news outside of New York — other-

Western Press Local 107
wise the local sheets must take care of it. New
Yorkers know little of what is going on in their
city. The city editor of the New York Sun once
asserted that sufficient good stuff was left out of
that paper daily to make several other issues — and
good ones, too. Presumably a large part of this
was local.
Now there is nothing like this in a western city.
The papers there print great quantities of local
news. Every institution is followed up for items,
the Public Library is a daily assignment, like the
police court. Local portraits are published with
very slight excuse. The reader is saturated with
local atmosphere and when he finds that he is get
ting a Httle out of touch with the world outside, he
begins to read the papers of other cities. This is
probably done to a much greater extent in the West
than elsewhere, simply for the reason just stated.

CHAPTER IX
SCIENCE IN THE WEST
THE WEST'S science is predominantly prac
tical. All science, to be sure, is practical, but
we have not all found It out yet. The man who
liked the Theory of Functions "because it never
could possibly be put to any use" was misinformed.
Every bit of new knowledge, and every further de
gree of systematization of knowledge already
acquired, has some bearing, actual or potential, on
our daily life. Civilization has been advanced
chiefly by belief In this, or at any rate by magnifi
cent disregard of its opposite,
I do not mean to say that pure science Is neglected
in the West — her universities furnish proof to the
contrary. So do her occasional bodies like the St,
Louis Academy of Sciences with an honorable record
of many years and with frequent publication of the
work of such men as Chauvenet in mathematics, of
Trelease In botany, or of Nipher in physics. What
I do mean to say is that the lack of popular appre
ciation of science for itself alone, which is notice
able throughout the United States, is particularly
evident in the West, The attitude of the press in
108

Applied Science 109
matters like these is always an Indication of the
popular mind, A meeting of the British Associa
tion for the Advancement of Science is reported in
the London papers very completely, many of the
addresses being given In full and the whole thing
being treated seriously, as we treat, for instance, a
national political convention. In the New York
papers a meeting of the American Association would
be lucky to get a column; In the western papers it
would have only a few sticks, if it were mentioned
at all. And mention of the proceedings is apt to be
in a jocose vein. That a sane man should devote
time and money to clearing up some obscure point
in physical science or natural history, or still more
that he should spend his life in the service of some
science not clearly hitched to the star of palpable
dollars and cents, seems to the average reporter,
who represents the average citizen, as essentially
ludicrous and childish.
When the New York Sun runs short of the efforts
of amateur poets or the odd names of obscure citi
zens, for exploitation in humorous editorials. It can
always make a hit by turning over to its " funny
man " the latest entomological bulletin from Wash
ington, whose Latin technical names Introduced
freely and commented upon In the Sun's well-known
vein of good-humored satire, are in the estimation
of its readers screamingly funny.

I ID The Different West
Hardly a paper in the country includes on Its
staff a scientific expert — a person through whose
hands material involving scientific fact or comment
must pass before it is approved for publication. The
Boston Transcript is almost our only paper whose
scientific news is looked upon by scientific men
otherwise than with contempt.
What has been said applies. It must be noted, to
pure science. As soon as it passes the border line
of application to some Industry, it is differently re
garded. And scientific men are themselves partly
to blame for this state of things, in fostering the
idea that the best science is science that can not be
applied. The best science is doubtless science that
does not look for application. But it all can be
apphed and may one day be applied; and the citizen
whose only respect Is for the application will doubt
less come to respect the science too when he realizes
the potentiality of it all.
Certain problems of applied science the West has
worked out or is working out for itself satisfac
torily. Chief among these, perhaps. Is that of
water-supply where the only source is the muddy
rivers of the region. In St. Louis, for instance,
before the World's Fair, the city water, drawn from
the Mississippi, was so filled with sediment that its
normal color was yellow or brown. Deposition of
suspended matter took place In an ordinary tumbler

Water Problems iil
when It stood for any length of time. Water for
laundry purposes was drawn a week In advance and
allowed to settle in barrels before it could be used,
A commission of experts reported to the city that
it was impracticable to use the water of the Mis
sissippi at all and recommended a plan to bring a
supply from a great distance at an estimated cost
of $31,000,000,
At this juncture it was decided to try another
scheme, whose practical details were worked out by
a young St, Louis chemist, Mr, John Wixford, a
graduate of the city schools and of Washington Uni
versity, This plan was to get rid of the sediment
by forming in the water by chemical action a coagu-
lable precipitate that would stick to it and carry
it down quickly. This proved entirely practicable,
and St, Louis has since enjoyed water of crystal
clearness, free not only from mud but from bac
teria, which are also taken care of in the general
clearing-up process.
The scheme cost just $10,000 to install and is
operated at a very small yearly expense. The chem
icals used are cheap and easily obtained — merely
lime and copperas, or, chemically speaking, calcium
hydrate and sulphate of Iron. Introduced into the
muddy water these at once react to form sulphate of
lime and ferrous hydrate. There are further and
more complicated reactions Into which we can not

112 The Different West
enter here, but in general the lime compounds are
dissolved and serve merely to " harden " the water
to a slight degree, while the iron compounds stick
together in flocculent masses and sink, with the par
ticles of sediment and the bacteria. Anything that
may be left is removed by rapid sand filtration. A
somewhat similar method had previously been used
also in Quincy, 111., and at other river towns, but
its adoption on such a large scale was first effected
in St, Louis, Thus a purely western problem has
been solved by westerners in a characteristically
western way, simple, effective, and thorough.
Another problem, also connected with the rivers,
is that of water transportation, already adverted to
in a previous chapter. The use of the great west
ern rivers for freight and passenger traffic has now
almost ceased, railway transportation having taken
its place. As Is well known, an earnest effort is
being made to revive it, and one feature of that
effort is an attempt to commit the national govern
ment to an extensive scheme of river improvement.
Experts appear to differ regarding the practicability
of the various plans proposed. Meanwhile oppo
nents of the scheme are pointing out that the rivers
are the same as they were fifty years ago, and are
asking why they are not utilized again in their pres
ent condition before any attempt is made to render
them still more usable. This is a good deal like

Western Waterways ill 3
objecting to the substitution of electric light for gas
on the ground that a revival of candles is among
the possibilities. The old use of the rivers per
sisted while it was the only possibility and despite
great inconveniences and disadvantages. When a
better means of transportation was devised, the
rivers were disused. Now a scientific study of the
problem shows that there Is a still better plan — a
partition of the traffic between the railways and the
improved rivers. The adoption of this plan may
be slow, but despite foolish opposition on the part
of the railroads, it is bound to come. It involves,
of course, other improvements besides that of the
channels, notably In the construction of boats, and
the handling of passengers and freight. An attempt
has been made to carry some of these out experi
mentally even with the rivers in their present condi
tion, and the results are likely to be interesting.
They should not, however, delay the progress of the
improved waterway scheme as a whole, and doubt
less we shall see this other peculiarly western prob
lem solved also by westerners In a western way.
An old Mississippi pilot, after an anxious and
tiring night of steering around sandbars and dodg
ing wreckage, turned to a companion in the pilot
house and remarked wearily, " If I had the man
agement of the Universe I should make this river
perfectly straight, with a full moon at each end,"

114 The Different West
It is hardly probable that any such extensive im
provement as this will take place, but we may reason
ably expect that the river will be kept at a uniform
minimum depth and that the banks will be prevented
from caving in and filling it up.
It is interesting to see how these technical prob
lems affecting the West cluster about the great
rivers, A third In our list Is the use of these rivers
for waterpower. They are usually of great volume
but small fall. The Mississippi, for instance, has
been utilized to any great extent only at the falls
of St, Anthony, at Minneapolis, Now, however, a
great dam, to develop some 200,000 horsepower,
is under construction opposite Keokuk, Iowa, at
the rapids whose great energy has hitherto been
allowed to go absolutely to waste. Of this great
power, 60,000 horsepower has already been con
tracted for in St. Louis alone. Doubtless we shall
see in the future a hydro-electric plant at every rapid
along the course of the western rivers. Navigation
will not be impeded, but actually Improved, since
canals are even now generally necessary to avoid
these rapids and the water backed up by the dams
deepens long reaches of the river above.
There will be no interference with scenery, and
objections such as have been properly made to
hydro-electric development at Niagara and other
great falls, will not apply.

Supplementary Irrigation 115
Another way in which applied science has come
very near to the western people is in agriculture.
Probably nowhere In the world has the farmer such
a respect for scientific methods — properly so, for
they have made his fortune for him. He readily
votes taxes for the support of great agricultural
schools and experiment stations and he studies their
results with interest to see how they may be applied
on his own land. As for machinery, he uses it every
where; In fact, his huge farms could not be oper
ated without It. His operating force of men is re
duced to a minimum. He has under cultivation
square miles of land with no human habitation in
sight. Yet he is not lonely, for he has the telephone
to communicate with his neighbor and the automo
bile to reach him quickly In the flesh.
One more great scientific improvement we may
look for on the farm — the introduction of supple
mentary irrigation. It is a curious fact that this
method has chiefly been used hitherto in desert
places. The owner of a Connecticut farm who has
spent much time beyond the Rockies tells me that
there is scarcely a bit of land In the United States
that would not be Improved by it. In New England,
for instance, it would make possible two crops in a
summer Instead of one, and it would forever re
move all fear of drought, A single rainstorm that
occurred the other day In Arkansas was worth to

1 16 The Different West
that state, so the newspapers say, several millions
of dollars. If this is so, why not invest a little
money in a plant to protect the farmer permanently
against drought? In fertile Kansas and Nebraska
It may ruin all the crops of the year, whereas we
hear of nothing of the kind in the California orange
country, although that was originally a desert.
Where there Is no rain, science provides the equiva
lent; where the rain fails only occasionally, we
philosophically take the chances of disaster. We
may look, I think, to a future where the farmer
will insist on being made independent of the clouds
in Kansas as well as in California — In Oklahoma
as well as In Oregon. ^
Droughts are really the only blot on western agri
culture; in spite of them Kansas and Nebraska
farming lands are held at fabulous prices; with
supplementary irrigation they may be expected to
rise even higher.
One of the unsolved problems of applied science
in most of the Middle-West cities is that of the
abundant soft-coal smoke. Those who have studied
the subject assure us that soft coal may be burned
without excessive smoke, but In practice not only are
special devices — patent grates or mechanical
stokers — almost necessary for such burning, but
even with their aid, black smoke will still appear
at the time of stoking, without skilled management.

The Smoke Nuisance 117
The substitution of hard for soft coal is not only
unlikely but undesirable. Hard coal is expensive
in the Middle West on account of distance from
the anthracite fields of Pennsylvania; and soft coal
is abundant and near. It Is the cheapest and most
convenient fuel-supply known to man — easily
handled and quickly lighted — its smoke is the one
objection to it. Smoke-abatement means, therefore,
the installation of proper smoke-consuming devices
in connection with all large furnaces, with the train
ing of those who are to superintend and handle
them; and the general education of the public in
the smokeless management of domestic furnaces,
stoves, and grates, without such devices. The use
of fuel-gas is also an Important factor where this
is available. Natural gas, however, though a per
fect solution of the problem. Is apt to be only a
temporary one, as shown by the experience of Pitts
burg; and manufactured fuel-gas, though more and
more widely used for cooking, Is still too expensive
for general heating purposes. The development of
hydro-electric power, as at the great Mississippi dam
at Keokuk, Iowa, now building, may also offer a
partial solution.
But at present the problem is one of psychology.
The things to be done are clearly indicated ; it is not
so easy to get people to do them. The first thing
that the enthusiastic reformer thinks of is coercive

Ii8 The Different West
legislation. It can not be said that this has proved
successful when unaided. When a man is required
by law to do what he believes to be impossible, he
simply disobeys, and if he Is punished, that only
arouses his undying hostility to the law. Where
smoke has been sensibly abated It has generally been
done by dealing with each case as It arises, demon
strating to the offender that his plant would be
smokeless if properly run, or could be made so by
the expenditure of a specified sum in a specified
way. Offenders on a large scale can be turned Into
law-abiding citizens in this way; those on a small
scale must be dealt with by public opinion.
It must not be forgotten that a large body of
citizens In every smoky town is accustomed to the
smoke and does not mind It; and believes that Its
abatement Is an impossibility, or that. If possible,
it would drive away profitable industries. A manu
facturer In a western city, whose son, home for his
vacation from an eastern college, objected to the
smoky atmosphere. Informed the boy that the smoke
was profitable and healthful, that he would have to
get used to It and like it and that if he found It
impossible to do so, he would have to go back to
the East.
No collection of notes on the West's problems In
applied science would be complete without a word
on the differences between the railroads of the East

Railway Competition .119
and the West, Some of these have already been
briefly noticed. Possibly the most salient point of
difference is that In the East the roadbed excels
and in the West the equipment. In the East the
permanent way Is commonly solid and expensive,
with double or even quadruple track on main lines,
whereas in the West most of the lines are single
and the roadbed poorly kept up, even on important
systems. On the other hand, the general average
of cars, especially of passenger day coaches, is
poorer in the East than in the West, doubtless on
account of the greater amount of short distance
travel. The western cars are apt to be heavier
and better lighted, the newer types of steel cars
being met even on many second-grade systems.
In the East a given territory is served by fewer
lines than in the West, and the result is often that
the service is more satisfactory. There Is for in
stance only one company operating trains between
New York and Boston, whereas there are four
between Chicago and St, Louis, on no one of which
is the service as good as on the eastern line. This
is in spite of the militant competition due to the
existence of an unnecessary number of lines and may
be attributed to the fact that business which would
yield a good profit to a single line will barely pay
the expenses of half a dozen or so, "Touting" for
business is much more active in the West than In

I20 The Different West
the East, and a man who is planning a thousand-
mile trip may expect calls from the representatives
of half a dozen roads, who will set forth their
advantages and solicit custom. Despite the greater
profit of freight business every possible effort is
made to stimulate passenger traffic. The literature
issued is elaborate and well conceived. In 19 ii the
St, Louis Public Library collected 400 volumes of
such literature, of which only a few were Issued by
eastern roads, where the ordinary travel Is usually
as heavy as can well be accommodated, especially In
summer. All this competition is due partly to the facts that
consohdation of roads has been more thorough in
the East, and that the building of unnecessary com
peting lines was made difficult there when it was
easy in the West; and also In large part to the
great ease of running lines over the flat prairie,
where, in the early days of railroading, there was
scarcely any grading at all, and the rails were often
moved about from one part of the prairie to
another, with little effort.
Railway competition in the West, however, is
solely for passengers and freight; It has no effect
on rates or speeds, which are now regulated by
agreement between the roads, much to the detriment
of the public. State governments are taking a hand
in rate-regulation, but they have not tackled the

speed Conditions 1 21
speed question yet. Eastern express speeds vary
from forty to sixty miles per hour; in the West,
even where the quality of the roadbed does not limit
speed, it is kept down by agreement. All trains
between Chicago and St. Louis, for instance, a dis
tance of 280 miles, require eight hours, and this is
quite typical. In the West any train that makes an
average of over thirty miles an hour is a flyer.
Conditions are improved by occasional " speed
wars," but soon revert to their former state. This
does not apply of course to the fast expresses on
the lines between the Mississippi and the Atlantic
Coast, which may make, on occasion, speeds as high
as eighty miles an hour within the region of which
we are now speaking.
So far as western roadbeds are concerned, there
is a notable trend now toward decided improvement,
as in the double-tracking of the great main lines
such as the Union Pacific, and the Installation of
automatic signals, as on the Missouri Pacific and
the Frisco,
The efforts of western roads to "make business"
appear also in their attempts, often very success
ful, to build up Industry along their hnes. Their
organizations include great land and Industrial de
partments, and much of the literature already
referred to Is issued in connection with these. The
eastern lines do little work of this kind, although the

122 The Different West
New Haven road has just established an industrial
department — the first of its kind in the East,
Another marked difference between eastern and
western railroad travel Is the fact that so much of
the latter takes place at night. In the East there
is considerable through travel by daylight, espe
cially in summer, when a large proportion of the
passengers are women. In the West, daylight
travel Is mostly local; if a man plans a trip requiring
8 to 12 hours he almost always goes at night. Pos
sibly one reason for this may be the monotony of
the outlook. We Americans, who have such odd
streaks of sentiment in our materialism, are very
fond of fine scenery. When traveling we will often
stop over for a night in order not to miss a day's
ride through the mountains. Even east of the Mis
sissippi, trains will be selected and schedules
scanned so that the traveler may pass the Alle
ghanies, or the Mohawk Valley, or some other
choice bit of scenic territory by daylight. But across
the plains or over the prairies, the spice of variety
is absent. One hour and one mile are as good as
the next, and the passenger might as well sleep away
his time.

CHAPTER X
art IN THE WEST
npHE measure of popular appreciation of art is
-¦- doubtless not the existence of museums or pub
lic collections, or even the degree to which these are
visited by citizens, but the good taste displayed In
the construction and arrangement of the material
things used or met with In daily life — buildings,
streets and parks, domestic implements, ornaments,
articles of clothing, and so on. Tested thus, modern
appreciation of art Is far below what it was in
ancient Greece; the Germans today have less of It
than the French, and the English still less. We
have not so much of it in America as any European
country has; and there Is less of It in the West than
In the East, The Anglo-Saxon race has never ex
celled In this appreciation of the beauty of common
things and it is doubtful whether it will ever do
so. In the West the old French sub-stratum, which
might have favored It, has been pretty well snowed
under. Age, which makes some things beautiful,
independently of the maker's will. Is acting to some
extent in the West as It has done earlier in the East;
123

124 The Different West
but unfortunately the West does not like relics. As
a general thing only the old appreciate antiquities,
and the West is still young enough to despise them.
The Catholic Church, which Is old enough to ven
erate things for their age alone, preserves its land
marks, but about every other relic In the average
western town is destroyed ruthlessly when its imme
diate usefulness has passed.
Ordinary utensils are mostly ugly all over the
United States: the West can claim no distinction In
this regard. There is not even any good domestic
art Indigenous to the soil, as there Is west of the
Rockies where the forms and decoration of pottery,
buildings, textiles, etc., made and used by the In
dians, are so good. Indian utensils found over the
Middle West are always Interesting and sometimes
artistic, but they are prehistoric and can have no
effect on modern life as the art of the Navahos and
the Hopis, for instance, incontestably has.
In architecture the West is doing well, and In this
respect there seems to be a genuine and growing
appreciation of beauty and good taste applied to a
utihtarian end. Recent residential sections in west
ern cities are apt to be beautiful, that Is, if we look
at each residence separately. There Is little " team
work," but that may come later. The wealthy
donor of a memorial chapel in a New York suburb
stipulated that she should design and construct the

Beaux- Arts and Bizarre 1125

building in her own way, afterward turning it over
to the trustees of the church to which she was giving
it. The memorial, while built as an annex to the
church, proved to be in a totally different style and
altogether incongruous with It. Asked the reason,
the good lady replied: " I didn't want it to be like
the church. I wanted it to be so different that people
would ask as they passed, 'Why! what Is that?'
and would be told: 'That is the Smith Memorial
Chapel!'" By a similar wish — the desire to be
conspicuously different — have most of our house-
builders been actuated. Better far to live In south
ern California, where you have to build in the
Mission style, whether you want to or not.
A New York wit once remarked that there were
in that city only two architectural styles, " the Beaux-
Arts and the Bizarre." The West has been happily
free from this bondage to a single school, however
good; and odd and grotesque though some of her
buildings may be, it Is hardly possible to place In
this class all that have not been designed by a single
coterie of architects. It Is said that Denver owes
the attractiveness of Its residence sections to the fact
that a group of young Beaux-Arts men happened to
be on the spot just at the time when the rising for
tunes and the inclinations of the successful miners
acted together to produce a building boom. How
ever this may be, the city boasts of many creditable

126 The Different West
private houses, and the Paris school Is of course
welcome to whatever part of the credit It deserves.
Doubtless It deserves much throughout the West,
but It is probably well that there are others to claim
their share of praise.
So far as what is generally called " art " is con
cerned — the formal production and exhibition of
painting and sculpture — the West is doing her
share. It Is an Interesting fact that New York has
never been able to capture the leadership In art, In
the United States, as she has that of commerce,
finance, and literature. Her literary supremary won
from Boston not long ago, she will not hold undis
puted. That has been discussed in a previous chap
ter. But the supremacy in art she has never held.
Great artists have not lived and painted there. The
wonderful subjects to be found In her streets and on
her waterways are just beginning to find recognition.
She has had no preeminent art school. No one pro
fessional association has been able to hold all her
artists. The National Academy is national only in
name. There is no proper home for current art
exhibitions In the great city, Philadelphia — de
spised Philadelphia — leads the metropolis In art
matters, and dozens of other smaller cities stand
abreast of her. New York's Metropolitan Museum
stands unrivaled, but merely because the gifts of mil
lionaires have put it In funds.

Museums and Clubs 127
In the West, Chicago and St, Louis both have
noteworthy art museums and popular appreciation
of them is greater than in most eastern cities, Chi
cago has the best site for popular work; the St,
Louis museum, which is the permanent part of the
World's Fair art section, necessarily stands on the
site of that fair, in Forest Park, Inaccessible to
the great mass of the pubhc. It will have to be sup
plemented by exhibitions down town if the great
bulk of the population is to be reached. But even
with this handicap the interest shown in It is note
worthy, I think we may say that in the West, even
more than In the East, people are well disposed
toward art. Like the cautious French student whom
Arago asked ironically if he had ever seen the
Moon, they "have heard It spoken of," There is a
disposition among all to welcome it and wish It
well. But the tendency is to think of it as some
thing apart from daily life. It Is an Anglo-Saxon
tendency which Is felt also by religion. We like to
keep these things severely in their places — to be
able to water the milk (or the stock) on week days
and attend .Divine Worship on Sundays; to look
out of our ugly offices all day, at the ugly buildings
across the ugly street and then go home to gaze
at the Corots and Daubignys that our millions have
enabled us to acquire. But although this feeling is
stronger in the West than in the East, there are

128 The Different West
also more hopeful signs of a revolt against it in
the former region. There is nothing in the East,
so far as I know, quite like the Artists' Guild of
St. Louis. The Authors' Club in New York resem
bles It but has for its basis purely literary work.
The Salmagundi and similar organizations do not
take its place.
The " Arts and Crafts Movement " is strong in
the West and has perhaps received somewhat more
than the average amount of sympathy and appre
ciation from the ordinary citizen.
To the production of good painting and sculp
ture the West is contributing notably, both by fur
nishing subjects and those who can interpret them.
The effect of a great work of representative art —
painting, sculpture, drama — depends on two
things, A mathematician would say that it is " a
function of two variables" — the thing represented
and the state of mind of the artist. In the proper
balance of these factors lies the success of the work.
The painter who tries to paint as much like a pho
tograph as possible, shutting out the personal ele
ment altogether, fails; but so also does he who tries
to express himself by a representation that succeeds
only in obeying the Second Commandment literally
in looking like nothing " in heaven above, or the
earth beneath, or the waters under the earth." The
expression of one's self is the important thing, to

Western Subjects in Art 129

be sure, provided one has something worth while
to contribute, but the thing through whose repre
sentation that expression is to be accomplished is
not unimportant. I do not believe that a man can
express as much in a picture of an apple on a plate
as he can in a landscape, nor that he can express
just the same things In a landscape that he can in
a group of figures. And yet it is the manner rather
than the matter that constitutes art.
There Is yet matter in the West, waiting for the
western artist to express himself and to express the
West — its largeness, its restlessness. Its Impatience
of control. The eastern artist who "goes West"
for his subject seldom stops short of the Rockies,
or perhaps, like Remington, he goes on to the sage
brush and alkali of Wyoming or Arizona. The
West In our present sense Is yet to be painted In
its largeness and freeness, and Its own sons must
do the work. Parts of It have been done, and done
well. No one has painted the Mississippi River
like Sylvester of St. Louis; the Chicago River has
its Interpreter In Clusman of that city; Meakin
paints Ohio, and the "Hoosler group" — Stark,
Adams, Forsyth, and Steele — the country about
Indianapolis. But the West depicted in all its full
ness as the Dutch painters have given us Holland
or as SoroUa has painted present day Spain, is. It
seems to me, yet in the womb of Time. I do not

130 The Different West
know who is to depict it if not some painter or some
school of painters from the West itself. And when
it is done it will not be done in the French or the
German or the Italian style, or In imitation of any
thing or anybody, but with originality.
The depressing thing about most American art
exhibitions is the obvious imitation. The French
impressionists hit on a way to depict the delicate
play of color on the surfaces of objects — a wonder
ful method though sacrificing somewhat the impres
sion of solidity and actuality of those objects. At
once scores of painters try to do the same thing
and succeed only in conveying the impression that
trees, rocks, and buildings are themselves pink, yel
low or lilac instead of merely reflecting light of
those colors. Another artist produces wonderful
effects by slapping on pigment with a palette-knife,
and a swarm of others Immediately adopt the
method, without producing the effects. So It goes;
and the same is true, of course, in any other art,
such as poetry or music. Originality is the only
thing that counts, and it Is the only thing that can
not be imitated.
Now Americans, least of all those of the West,
are by no means Imitators in other fields. In me
chanics, for instance, we have long led the world in
boldness and originality as well as in fertility of
invention. There seems to be no reason why we

Imitation in Art 131
should not be bold, original, fertile, and successful
in art also, as soon as our bold and original spirits
see in art something that is worth their while. So
long as art is something for ladies to putter at or
for badly paid and Incompetent workmen to bungle
over, this realization will remain far distant. Curi
ously enough, the first dawn of a new day shines
forth not in our painting but in our sculpture, and
the sculpture and sculptors of the West, especially
when dealing with western subjects, do her great
credit. There is something virile about sculpture
that holds the western imagination, and It may be
that in this form of art the West Is to excel and so
to find its true expression,
"It takes two to tell the truth," says an old
writer, "one to speak and the other to listen,"
Likewise does It take two to give a work of art its
value — one to create and one to appreciate. The
greatest art is that of the man who causes you to
Imagine that you see what he desires you to see.
The shadow on the snow in yonder picture has
little to do with the artist's brush-marks, as you may
see if you step nearer and regard the picture close
at hand. The shadow Is in your brain, and Is partly
there because you know you ought to see it. Yet the
suggestion is the work of the artist — and that is his
art. Such art there cannot be, however, without the
party of the second part, the person suggestible to

132 The Different West
the artist's efforts. The condition of his mind re
acts on the artist ; If the suggestion buds and blooms
in his imagination, the artist Is encouraged; if not,
he Is likely to take up the photographic style that
suggests nothing to the Imagination, and represents
only a low type of art.
Thus It is encouraging when one sees even fail
ures in an attempt at this kind of painting; its
very existence shows the presence of appreciative
spectators. Standing in a crowded western art museum I
heard one man say to another, " How many of these
people understand what they see?" If he meant
to ask how many appreciate the technique of the
artists at whose works they gaze, the answer must
be, "Very few." But the understanding of
technique is not the appreciation of art. It Is not
at all necessary in order to receive the artist's
message; it may, indeed, Interfere with such recep
tion. The artist who paints or the poet or musician
who writes, solely to interest his fellow artists in
the way In which he does It, is not an artist of uni
versal appeal, which means that he is not truly great.
The great artist is great among artists and also
among those who know nothing of art, provided
only their senses and their minds are in proper
shape. When an art-gallery is thronged with per
sons who are evidently enjoying what they see, such

Music in the West 133
questions as I have quoted are superfluous. It takes
little observation to pick out those who have the
common sense that Is necessary to look at a picture,
as it is necessary to most acts In this world of ours.
The man, for instance, who has not noticed that
the best pictures are so painted that they must be
seen from one particular distance, and that only —
who regards a canvas from a viewpoint of six
Inches, and seeing only brush marks and unblended
colors, concludes that he does not like art, may be
seen In any miscellaneous gallery crowd. He does
not yet form part of the Intelligent public that the
artist must reckon with; yet even he requires but
a word to set him right.
A love for good music is one of the things for
which the West has to thank its German citizens.
Why the Germans should be the leading musical
people in the world is a hard problem to solve; they
do not look it, whereas the Latin peoples decidedly
do. But why, If music is a Teutonic gift, did not
our own Teutonic forefathers transmit it to us?
The English are probably the most unmusical nation
on earth; what hope there Is for us Americans we
have largely from the leaven of other peoples that
has been and is working on us.
Music Is like language: the only way to under
stand it Is to listen to it. There is no use In trying
to teach a babe to talk by giving him lessons in

134 The Different West
grammar and rhetoric. When he knows one lan
guage these will help him to acquire another, and
likewise a listener that understands the musical lan
guage of Beethoven but not that of Debussy may be
helped by verbal explanation. But just as the way
to resume specie payments was to resume, so "the
way to listen to music" is to listen and to listen
much and attentively. The presence of other list
eners who evidently like what they hear is a potent
factor In the increase of musical appreciation In a
community, and here Is where the Germans have
done such good service. The West still suffers, It
Is true, from the prevailing American contempt of
things done on a small scale. Unless a town is big
enough to support a Boston symphony orchestra or
a Metropolitan Opera, it may as well throw up the
sponge, according to this view. Salvation from this
belief Is to be found in the multiplication of per
formers, as opposed to mere listeners. If there are
in a town a large number of persons who sing or
who play on some musical instrument, the existence
of musical organizations will come as a matter of
course. This is the way that It works in Germany,
and when the German leaven has worked so far that
it is also the case In small western cities, the West's
musical life will have been put on a new foundation.
As for western theatres, they are chiefly houses
where traveling companies play for engagements of

The Drama 135

a single night to a week or two — sometimes longer.
For the larger cities there are certain advantages in
this, but the disadvantages outweigh them. The
advantages are those common to all systems of peri
patetic interchange. The Methodist ministry has
been operated on that basis for a long time and
those concerned appear to be satisfied with it; but
it has never commended itself to other Christian
bodies. The churches and the clergy both get va
riety; there is no monopoly of what is good on
either side; no one has time to get into a rut. On
the other hand, there Is no element of stability or
permanence in such an arrangement. Everyone con
cerned Is looking forward to the next move, and
there is hardly time to become accustomed to one
set of conditions before another takes Its place.
It may be said that the peripatetic theatrical sys
tem is not common to the West, or to small places,
at all. The old-fashioned stock company, as we
saw it at Wallack's or Daly's in New York, in the
Boston Museum, or at Mrs, John Drew's in Phila
delphia, is practically obsolete. There are no " one-
night stands" in New York, but the difference is
one of quantity rather than of quality. Sooner or
later every play and every actor goes " on the
road" — even the Metropohtan Opera Company,
This is true, and yet the same play may run at the
same theatre in New York for a whole season.

136 The Different West
Things have time to get settled as they never do In
stays of a few nights each in small cities. One
would rather see any favorite actor In New York
than at a one-night stand. Why? Good acting
is a very sensitive plant: it responds quickly to con
ditions and environment and a "first night," popu
lar though it may be, is never the best night at a
playhouse. Obviously, then, In a tour made up
chiefly of "first nights" no theatrical company can
do itself justice.
Again, under present conditions there is no East
or West, no North or South In theatrical matters;
the country is one huge circuit, and no section has
an opportunity to express itself, despite sectional
dramas like In Mizzoura, The Nigger, and the like.
From this point of view the drama, as a representa
tive art, is surely not in a satisfactory state, but the
West now simply shares conditions common to all
the United States,
The state of the arts, one and all, In any com
munity depends somewhat on the way In which they
are taught or fail to be taught, to the young.
American educational institutions have just begun
to awaken to their duties In the matter of art Instruc
tion, Fifty years ago no one of them taught litera
ture with any insistence on the fact that It Is an
art; as for music, painting, and sculpture, they were
treated with contempt. This is being slowly reme-

Art Instruction 137

died. In the West, musical Instruction in the com
mon schools Is being taken up, and taken up in the
right way. Universities are Introducing courses In
music and art. When I was told the other day
that a promising musician — a young man — had
gone to the University of Nebraska at Lincoln to
study counterpoint and composition my first feeling
was one of surprise, not unmlngled with amusement;
my next was a thrill due to the realization that the
musical West is coming into her own.
No longer is the artistic progress of the univer
sity student to be gauged by the childish lays of the
average college glee club and the disheartening
drawings in the average college paper. These
things are looking up, and nowhere more than in
the West. The Anglo-Saxon may never count art
as his stronghold ; but we may at least hope that he
is at last saying good-by to the age of artistic igno
rance, childishness, and triviality in which he has so
long complacently dwelt.

CHAPTER XI
SOCIETY IN THE WEST
npHE whole subject of social standing in the
¦*¦ United States has been greatly neglected by
writers and students. Making a list of countries In
the order of fixity of social status and Its relationship
with beliefs, occupations, and other social phenom
ena, we should doubtless find India, with its caste
system, at one extreme and the United States at the
other. In India, given a man's caste, one may know
at once not only his occupation, habits, religious
behef, and general attitude of mind, but those of
his ancestors and descendants. Passing through the
list of countries where It Is less and less possible
to infer any such connection, we arrive finally at our
own, where it is least possible. It would be wrong
to conclude, however, that no conclusions of the kind
may be drawn here. They follow more easily in
the East than they do in the West, In no land prob
ably, for instance, is there a total divorce between
social status and occupation. In many countries the
latter depends strictly on the former. In the United
States the dependence is rather the other way, but
not wholly. We may Infer that the day-laborer is
133

Social Standing 139

not an intimate in the house of the bank-president;
that is, we infer his social standing from his occupa
tion; but it is also true that the bank-president's
son, however impoverished he might become, would
rarely think of resorting to manual labor of this kind
for support. In other words, we may infer occupa
tion from social standing to some degree even in
this country.
Perhaps this is the place to define what may be
meant by a " social scale," It is a very easy matter,
as it depends solely upon the possibility of Intimate
personal association. If you acknowledge that It is
Impossible that a given man should ever invite you
to his house for dinner, and that you would feel
greatly honored If he did so, you thereby acknowl
edge him as your social superior. If he invites you
and you still feel flattered by the invitation, the
difference between you is less, but he is still above
you. If you exchange and accept invitations freely
with no feelings of the sort, you are social equals.
If you hesitate about accepting his invitation, and
think that you are conferring a favor If you do, you
regard him as your social inferior; still more so if
you would never think either of accepting his invi
tation or of inviting him yourself.
But, you say, how about the other fellow? Is he
willing to accept your and his relative positions in
the social scale as you evaluate them? In a land

140 The Different West
where the social scale is absolutely fixed, yes. In
India there is not the slightest doubt on either side.
In England there Is not much. In America there Is
a great deal, A may consider himself B's social
superior, when in the estimation of B their positions
are reversed. Still, if we take positions far enough
apart on the scale, the difference Is generally recog
nized on both sides; that Is, if we accept the cri
terion of dinner invitations, A and B may each look
down socially on the other; neither would then think
of inviting the other, or of accepting his invitation.
If A and B, however, are really far enough apart,
the unwillingness of A to Invite B is generally accom
panied by great willingness of B to accept if invited.
So much for my test of social position, of which I
make a present to any aspiring sociologist who
wishes to experiment further with it,
I leave to this gentleman, whoever he may be, the
interesting task of drawing up a list of occupations
in various lands in the order of their social value.
The order would not be by any means the same in
all countries, or in the same country at all times.
Commercial occupations have risen in the social
scale in England; the professions are still relatively
lower there than in the United States, In a small
American town, no one stands higher than the local
lawyer, physician, and clergyman; In an English
village of similar size there Is always a landholder —

Public Office and Society 141
a squire — to overtop everyone else. Here, differ
ences between West and East are slight and almost
vanishing; but it is probably true that in the West
commerce stands relatively higher and the profes
sions lower than In the East. The tradition of
clerical dominance, which still lingers in parts of
New England, for instance, has never existed there.
The lawyer is important politically but not neces
sarily socially. State or national office has not the
standing that It has in the East. In many countries
the possession of an office raises one at once in the
social scale. There is something of this sort at
Washington and at one or two state capitals, but
not In the West, The word "un-American" has
been overworked, but I believe it finds Its place here.
The bestowal of social standing on a person simply
because he holds office Is especially objectionable in
this country, where offices are commonly elective.
Were it generally acknowledged it would make un
available for office many men of force and ability
who are not "clubbable" or whose wives are
regarded as " impossible,"
To begin at the top, there Is absolutely no social
parallel between the President of the United States
and a foreign monarch. The latter is the social
head of his country; in England he is little else.
To bestow any such position on the President is
absurd, and although there has always been an effort

142 The Different West
to do so. Its social writs have scarcely run beyond
the boundaries of the District of Columbia. The
newspaper custom of dubbing the President's wife
the " first lady In the land " Is not only ridiculous,
but harmful. A man once told me that he intended
to vote against the presidential candidate of his own
party, one of the best equipped men who ever sat
in the chair, because his wife was unfitted, for some
reason or othei-, to be "first lady."
Our offices, from the President's down, are busi
ness positions, and should be filled for merit, not for
social standing. Only In the case of ambassadors to
foreign countries should this have weight. In Rome
we must do as the Romans do; but on the soil of
the United States we are the " Romans " ourselves,
and our customs should govern.
As I have said, there is little of this kind of thing
in the West. There Is also, less than in the East,
the feeling that social superiority carries with It the,
privilege of considering one's self superior in other
respects. A very able machinist, we will say, has
not those qualities that would make him a welcome
guest at your table. That Is no reason why, In
conversing with him about machinery — a subject
in which he is your acknowledged superior — you
should condescend to him. And yet you surely
would, were you an Englishman, and you probably
would if you were an easterner. You might, but

Superior and Inferior 143
you would not be so likely, if you were a westerner.
A Scotchman, of good middle-class position, after
a few days in this country, said to me : " I have
never In my life seen so many people who are
aggressively ' as good as you are.' " Now, the " ag
gressiveness," If it were really present, was objec
tionable; nobody ought to be unpleasantly aggres
sive, no matter what his social status. But probably
it was merely the absence of formal British obse
quiousness that struck the good man, and struck him
unfavorably, as everything strange does strike our
transatlantic cousins. As for being " as good as he
was" — bless his heart; so they were, in the places
where they came into contact with him. They were
all passengers on a trolley car or pedestrians on a
sidewalk together. The fact that many of them
were his social Inferiors had no more to do with it
than the fact, equally certain, that some of them
were his social superiors. The Idea that the social
inferior should behave always as If Inferior, whether
in social contact or some other. Is a relic of the days
when before the law the social superior was treated
differently from the inferior. That day has not
entirely passed, but. In theory at least, all are now
treated alike. In India, as Mr. Price Colher notes,
it Is only the British yoke that keeps them equal; to
the native It is almost unthinkable that the prince
and the beggar should be punished alike for murder.

144 The Different West
And to the Englishman It Is still unthinkable that
an ignorant noble should, without condescension, ac
knowledge Inferiority In any respect to a " humble "
though eminent scholar. In the western United
States, perhaps, more than elsewhere, social matters
are kept within their own sphere, A may be socially
inferior to B, his equal as an athlete, and far supe
rior to him in business ability. He is treated in
accordance with the particular contact that Is taking
place between the two.
The relation between rehgious belief and social
standing Is another curious and fascinating subject
of study for the Investigator of differences between
the East and the West. Such a connection exists
everywhere and is usually recognized, though little
is said about It. In parts of the country where there
was an established church, like the Congregational
In Connecticut or the Episcopal In Virginia, that
church has always kept moi-e or less of the social
prestige that once belonged to It. In states where
there was no established church, colonization was
sometimes promoted under particular religious aus
pices, as under the Catholics in Maryland or the
Society of Friends in Pennsylvania — these have
retained social eminence. The fact that the Epis
copal church was established by law in England
gave It prestige in colonial times even in colonies
where it was relatively weak. The Middle West

Sects, East and West 145

spent Its colonial days as a Spanish or French pos
session, but it was never colonized in the same sense
as the states on the Atlantic seaboard, and the re
ligious connections of Its masters have not been
handed down In the same way. These connections
were, of course, predominantly Catholic, The
Mississippi Valley is rich In Cathohc memories, but
those memories are largely of the deeds and lives of
missionaries who worked among Indian tribes now
vanished. In New Orleans, however, and to a lesser
degree In St. Louis, Cathohcs are strong socially;
and In numerous smaller towns where the French
tradition lingers, the same is true.
In general, the West is distinguished from the
East by lack of any one or of any few religious
denominations to which social eminence attaches.
Denominations that are powerful through numbers
contain, of course, more socially powerful individ
uals than others. The Presbyterians, Methodists,
and Baptists are thus relatively important there, the
first-named hardly more, perhaps, than In the East;
the others certainly far more so. This may be
explained by the activity of Methodist and Baptist
missionaries in the West In days when the Episco
palians, for instance, were content with retaining a
local foothold. Some denominations common in the
East are known little or not at all In the West, and
vice versa. For instance, the Dutch Reformed church.

146 The Different West
so familiar in New York and New Jersey, Is practi
cally unknown there, Congregationalism Is a root
transplanted from the East. One the other hand,
the Christians, known only by name in the East, are
strong in the West, numerically and socially. But,
In general, it may be said that members of different
religious communities are apt to meet on much more
common social ground than in the East, I know
many places In New England where a census of any
representative social gathering would disclose hardly
any others but Congregatlonalists and Episcopa
lians — the former In a majority. The presence of
a Catholic would be almost an impossibility; that
of a Baptist or a Methodist, very unlikely. A
census of a similar gathering in the West would
probably reveal, besides all the bodies named above.
Christians, Swedenborglans, Lutherans, and so on.
It need hardly be said that this difference has
nothing whatever to do with religious tolerance or
intolerance. You will find the old first famihes of
Baltimore, New Orleans, and St, Louis largely
Catholic not at all because public opinion in those
cities leans toward the Catholic doctrine. The fact
that you might live for years in a Connecticut town
without meeting a Methodist socially, while half of
your friends might be of that connection after your
removal to a western city, does not mean that there
is any religious prejudice against Methodists in New

Absence of a Leisure Class 147
England, These things have their causes, but they
are only indirectly connected with religion. In a
small New England town forty years ago, the only
Catholics were Irish, and the only Irish were day-
laborers. Hence, obviously, the social status of the
Catholic church in such towns was humble. In the
same towns, the Methodists and Baptists had to
take the " leavings " of the population, while In the
West they were first on the field.
All denominations are more liberal in the West
than In the East. By "liberal" I mean tolerant;
I do not mean to imply that there is any general
tendency toward free-thinking, although possibly
there are more individual free-thinkers. But there
seems to be more of the atmosphere of universal
charity; less feeling that there is, and of necessity
should be, a high board fence about one's own par
ticular denominational back-yard. If a practical
movement for Christian unity should ever arise, we
may well expect it to start In the Middle Western
States. There is, apparently, no leisure class In the West.
The ear-marks of such a class are almost entirely
absent — the great estates, the peculiar type of club
life in the cities, the efforts to invent strange forms
of amusement or occupation — social entertainment,
philanthropy, art, all gone to seed. Not that condi
tions do not produce those who might live In leisure

148 The Different West
if they so chose. But partly they do not so choose;
and those who do choose go elsewhere to live, where
the devices for supporting such a life, and for mak
ing it more supportable to those who live it, are
already well-developed. There Is little for a retired
millionaire to do in Milwaukee, or Indianapolis, or
Cincinnati, or even In St. Louis or Chicago, If he
does not go abroad. New York usually claims him.
To a certain extent this is to the credit of the western
cities, the amusements of these self-expatriated gen
try being usually of a kind that their native places
may well do without. So far, however, as it means
that the West has no attractions for him who wishes
to live the life of a quiet, cultivated gentleman,
spending his money in the gratification of the best
tastes. It is doubtless to be deplored. If the West
can so order Itself that these latter persons of leisure
will remain, while the others will continue to emi
grate, all will be well. This Is not at all beyond the
bounds of possibihty, and there are signs that it may
one day be realized.
Hospitahty and neighborhness are far more
noticeable in the West than In the East. Other
things being equal, a new arrival may expect more
attention there, arising simply from a desire to make
him feel at home and to ensure that he receives a
favorable impression. This sort of attention Is
rare in the East and Is, unfortunately, becoming

Club Life 149
rarer, except in the case of European visitors. It
is also rare In the East to receive attention simply
because one lives near by. Nowhere, I suppose,
Is mere proximity of residence a reason for social
intimacy, except perhaps in Alaska or Central
Africa, But so far as I know, given the requisite
social possibilities, nowhere in the East is residence
In the same street a reason for social attentions, as
it is not infrequently in the West, Is this due to
the greater regard paid by westerners to the home
and to domestic life? That such regard exists in
special degree may be denied by easterners and even
doubted by westerners themselves. Yet no one who
observes the lack of forms of social life outside the
home, in the West as compared with the East, can
doubt. The West is full of clubs, but it has not the kind
of club life that one sees In New York or Boston.
In the city of St. Louis there is not a single club
with large windows opening directly on the street,
where members may sit Idly and watch what goes
on outside. There Is, Indeed, no street where things
worth watching by such gazers are going on. The
new University Club in Chicago, a magnificent and
well-appointed building, looking Its part perfectly
(which is more than can be said of the misfit
millionaire's palace that serves the same purpose
in New York) has such windows, and doubtless they

150 The Different West
will ultimately be occupied; but they have been
empty whenever I have seen them.
Throughout the West the clubs are organizations
of the busy, not of the idle. Lunch clubs abound:
places where you eat and at the same time listen
to instructive discourses, thus killing a materialistic
and an idealistic bird with the same gastronomic
stone. Likewise are there dinner clubs galore : one
could not belong to them all and keep his dinner
average down to one a day.
All this comes, of course, from the exodus of the
leisured, which leaves only the busy. Millionaires
are plenty — more so than In the East — but they
are all the busy kind. Generally there is nothing
visible to differentiate them from the citizen of
moderate means. Consequently there is less about
them in the papers, less vulgar curiosity, less toady
ing. This is surely natural and normal. The man
with ten thousand dollars Is in no way differentiated
socially from the man with twenty thousand. Why
should the man with a million be supposed to have
stepped over the line?
There Is more local pride In the West than In
the East, and at the same time it is less provincial
than the eastern varieties. The Bostonian, for in
stance, has no warmth of affection for Boston, any
more than you or I love to live on this earth In
preference to Mars or the Moon. There is no

Local Pride 151

other place : that is all there is to it. And the New
Yorker (so far as there are any real ones), the
Phlladelphlan, the Baltlmorean, entertain the same
kind of feeling in a less Intense degree. It would
be difficult to discover It In the West, and yet one
may find there real love for a native city, of the
kind that we give to relatives or dear friends. Fre
quently It blinds to faults — it could not do that were
it not of a peculiar quality,
" I have known citizens of Chicago as proud of
Chicago," says Mr, Bryce, "as a Londoner in the
days of EHzabeth was proud of London," That Is
to say, EHzabethan London had still some charac
teristics that we are pleased to consider " western."
It occurs neither to the modern Londoner nor the
modern New Yorker to be proud of his city. I
remember hearing wild applause once in a college
class in astronomy when the professor explained the
conditions that made the moon a satellite of the
Earth instead of some other planet. The boys
"wooded up," as they used to call it, because "we"
had succeeded In keeping the moon. A good deal of
city pride is on much the same basis, being founded
on the city's climate, or situation, or on growth or
characteristics that are purely the result of these —
not the outcome of any effort whatever on the part
of the citizens. One may be glad and happy because
he lives on a beautiful river or "a mile high" in

152 The Different West
the air; but why should he be proud of it? Pride
should be reserved for an efficient and honest govern
ment, Ideal housing conditions, a low death rate,
prosperous churches, good schools, beautiful streets
and parks — things created or brought about by the
conscious action. Industry and good taste of the citi
zens. Be that as it may, pride of this kind is essen
tially western, and In some cases it Is assumed that
if we start out with the pride the conditions that
ought to stimulate the pride will follow. This may
be a correct assumption. Civic pride has often been
the precursor of civic beauty and efficiency. On the
other hand, an ignorant pride is often the very
thing that stops the wheels of progress — the " good
enough for me " sort of feeling.
To sum up, the social scale exists In the United
States, but, outside of the purposes for which it
exists, it makes little difference. Furthermore, it
is both elastic and fluid; individuals and families
rapidly pass up and down it. And in the West it
matters less than in the East. Within its own sphere
it is quite as powerful and important In one region
as in the other, but its claims to reach beyond that
sphere are not so much insisted upon or so fre
quently regarded as valid.
The choice of one's social acquaintance is a good
deal like shopping. If the shopper Is not a good
judge of what he wants, it will be best for him to

Social Selections 153
go to some place of high repute, where he may be
perfectly sure of the quality of anything that he may
buy. But if he has good judgment he may get better
results at far less cost by selecting what he wants
wherever he may find It, So, if he is not quite sure
of his social judgment, he had better frequent a
social clique whose members will be sure to satisfy
his needs, while if he knows real gentlefolk when he
meets them he will not hesitate to select them for
his associates, no matter where or in what sur
roundings he may discover them.
This Is what the westerner does, more frequently
than the easterner, and It bears testimony to his
greater confidence In his own ability to select satis
factory associates.

CHAPTER XII
SOURCES OF THE WEST'S POPULATION
EVERYONE In the West has relationships with
other parts of the country. Each will tell you
that his people came from New England, or Penn
sylvania, or Virginia ; or perhaps from Germany or
France, In many cases, personal relations are main
tained with the family in the East or the South,
perhaps- for several generations, and many families
have summer homes in the state or region of their
fathers. This tends somewhat toward keeping dis
tinct those parts of the population that have different
sources, and various accidents have emphasized this
tendency, such as the civil war, which was strongly
felt as a separating influence between those of north
ern and of southern origin. Emigration from the
East followed parallels of latitude pretty closely,
but an extension of Mason and Dixon's line would
cut across many of the Western States, and the
population below that line has always been predomi
nantly southern.
In southern Illinois and Indiana, this southern
origin gave rise during the war to organizations
like the Knights of the Golden Circle, and was pro-
1S4

N on-English Races 155
ductive of much sympathy with the South, Indeed,
the memories of the civil war have not died out in
this part of the West as they have in the East, If
one were roughly to estimate the share that each
element has contributed to western life, it might be
said that southern emigration has contributed charm,
grace, hospitality, and breeding, and with it a cer
tain turbulence and quickness of temper; while the
northern element has brought business ability, in
terest in civic improvement, with a settling and
steadying influence; and the various foreign contin
gents, each its native qualities in greater or less
degree. One may expect to find the citizens of
southern ancestry genial, popular, well-bred, and
occupying a recognized social position; the man of
northern origin, well-to-do, though perhaps not
wealthy, and active in all civic movements ; the Ger
man, prosperous, often to the point of amassing
great wealth, politically active, and very conserva
tive, even when this attitude puts him into opposition
with obviously needed reforms.
Exceptions will occur to all, and possibly the im
possible has been attempted in making so broad a
generalization as that sketched above.
Persons of other than English descent, settled in
the West, Include many of races somewhat unfa
miliar in the East, including French, Spanish, and
Scandinavians, There are also Indians in somewhat

156 The Different West
greater number than in the East, Other races,
familiar in the East, such as the Germans, are par
ticularly strong in certain cities, such as Milwau
kee, St, Louis, and Cincinnati, and have materially
affected those cities, both in outward aspect and In
the customs of commerce and society.
The Hebrew is hardly as numerous In the West
as in the East: on this account, doubtless, he Is
more esteemed and treated with greater friendliness.
Although a "dispersed" race, the Jews have never
been willing emigrants — they have been forced
abroad by racial and economic conditions. And
they stop at once In the place where such conditions
are favorable, settling quickly down as a precipitate
settles when the liquid that carries it is no longer
agitated. New York is the port of entry, and so
New York has the greatest Jewish population that
has ever gathered in one city since the days of
Abraham, There have always been two kinds of Jews —
those friendly to foreign customs, modes of thoughts
and relationships, and those who keep sternly, even
fanatically, to themselves. The former, the "Hel-
lenizing" Jews of the ancient world, are represented
in modern days by the great and familiar Jewish
names — the Disraelis, the Rothschilds, and so on —
in the United States by names that will occur to all;
men none the less proud of their Hebrew heritage

Two Kinds of Jews 157
because they are willing and anxious to work shoul
der to shoulder with their comrades of other faiths
and races for education, for civic betterment, for
righteousness in general. The latter are repre
sented by the severely orthodox Jews of Poland and
Russia who have been driven to our shores of recent
years. In the West, if we may be rash enough to
attempt a generalization, here also the former type
of Jew is proportionately stronger than In the East,
The French were, of course, masters of the soil
in all the states carved out of the original Louisiana
Purchase, They show various degrees of persist
ency as their original conditions of life have been
retained or changed. The difference between a
French and an English colony is very much like
that between a cultivated plant and a weed. The
weed grows in spite of you ; you can't stop it. The
cultivated plant often shows remarkable results, but
these are proportioned to your efforts to adapt con
ditions to It; leave It alone and It will deteriorate,
and if there are weeds about they will choke it off
and soon have the field all to themselves.
It Is unnecessary to say that in comparing the
English colonies to weeds, I have reference only
to their power of growth without anyone's fostering
care and In the teeth of all sorts of difficulties.
There are two places on the American continent
where the French civihzation persists — in French

158 The Different West
Canada and in Louisiana, Elsewhere it has practi
cally disappeared, either wholly so, or is on its way.
Even In Louisiana it is losing Its hold. Now, It Is
precisely In French Canada that the conditions favor
able to the French have been somewhat artificially
maintained by law. If it had not been so, the French
plant would have been choked by the English as It
has elsewhere. In Louisiana many of the old condi
tions have also been retained — the plant has been
cultivated, but not so sedulously. From this we may
drop through some of the old Missouri towns like
St. Genevieve, through St. Louis to Vincennes, Ind,,
or Cahokia, 111., where the French occupation Is but
a name. Perhaps the French survivals In parts of
the country where one has to search for them some
what sedulously are more Interesting than the full-
fledged civilization, for they throw some light on
the processes of amalgamation. Intermarriage Is,
of course, a potent cause. All through the West
one sees French faces with English or German
names. But where two or three generations may
suffice to make a Teutonic American, they do not
suffice to make a Protestant. The Catholic faith
has proved the most permanent element of the Latin
influence. The newcomer will be told, to his astonishment,
in various parts of the West, that the Richardsons

French Relics 159

or the Joneses, or some others with an equally non-
Gallic name, are " old French famihes." These and
others, where the names as well as the ancestry are
French, used, not so long ago, to send their children
to Paris to be educated; now, in many cases, they
are unable even to speak or to understand the tongue
of their fathers; but they do cling to the ancestral
church, and it is to this fact that the sustained in
fluence of that church is due. In communities where
all other evidence of Latin origin Is fast fading
away. Western place-names are very apt to tell the story
of early French occupation. They have been largely
retained, seldom translated; but their pronunciation
has generally been ruthlessly anglicized, sometimes
barbarously so. This sort of process Is In the hands
of the unlearned part of the community, not of the
scholars. If the latter controlled it, the foreign pro
nunciation would doubtless be retained. As It is, the
French street names In St, Louis, for Instance, are at
the mercy of the street-car conductors, and what
they say goes. What is the use of telling a con
ductor that you want to get out at De Balivlere
Avenue, when he calls It " De Bohvar" and would
not know what you meant? You must use his pro
nunciation, and It soon becomes the accepted form.
So Terre Haute, Ind,, becomes "Terry Hut," and

i6o The Different West
so it goes. The same thing has been done over and
over again in the Mother Country, with its " Beech-
ums," Its " Chumleys," and all the rest.
How do you suppose the French feel about it,
or would feel if they ever bothered to notice any
thing outside of La Belief We Anglo-Saxons have
never had a similar experience. Owing to our bull
dog grip on places that we have once laid hold on,
we have never seen our local names made into hash
by a subsequent owner. How should we feel if one
of the Pacific States, we will say, fell Into the hands
of the Japanese, who proceeded to pronounce all our
names in their own fashion?
As an example of the persistence of Latin influ
ence in ways that are unheeded by those who have
not studied them, we may take the way in which the
street systems of some western cities depend on early
French colonial customs. When French colonists
laid out a town they provided, well outside of its
limits, land for "commons" and for "common
fields" — the former a huge open corral for grazing
animals, and the latter a tract to be divided into
strips and apportioned for cultivation. As the town
grew It often became necessary to lay out other
tracts of land for "common fields," and not Infre
quently the town itself overran all these In Its fur
ther growth. In this case the streets there laid out
were conformed to the original boundary lines of

The Germans i6i

the tracts, so that these tracts still show clearly on
the maps, a century after their original functions
have been forgotten. Of course, the same thing
happens where city growth overtakes and swallows
up small towns with street systems of their own;
but in the cases described there never were settle
ments on these tracts, and some remain still largely
unbuilt upon, while no effort is made to alter their
original lines. These facts have recently been
brought out in a pamphlet on Real Estate Titles
in St. Louis, In which the author, Mr, McCune
Gill, shows by means of a map the location of the
various commons and common fields within the
present limits of that city and the dependence of
the present street systems on their situation and
orientation. There is an old newspaper joke about a traveler
who looks out of the window from his Pullman
berth and, seeing buildings covered with such names
as Rauschenpfeffer, Stelnenflasch, etc, says: "Oh;
I see we have arrived in Milwaukee ! " When the
Kaiser politely asked the visiting American, " Is
this your first visit to Germany?" and he replied,
"No, your Majesty, I have been In St, Louis, Cin
cinnati, and Milwaukee," he made the same jest in
a different form — in fact, it is quite Protean. The
size of the German Immigration to the United
States, its coherence, and the solid contributions It

i62 The Different West
has made to our prosperity, are more or less famihar
to all. The Germans have probably kept together a
little better in the West than elsewhere. Great
German quarters like South St. Louis or the " Over
the Rhine " district in Cincinnati are more frequent
there — in fact, there is hardly one of these in the
East at all except the Second Avenue district In New
York, which Is now rapidly breaking up. Foreign
immigrants, when they enter a strange city in any
numbers, are apt to "flock together" at first, but
as the strangeness wears off they usually disperse.
In the West there seem to have been special reasons
for keeping the Germans together. In St, Louis,
for instance, the fact that they adhered to the Union
in 1 86 1, while the rest of the citizens largely favored
secession, must have inclined them to solidarity.
The tendency of nationalities to congregate in
large cities has already been noted. To a lesser
extent and under favorable conditions this is done
also in the country. A case In point Is the German
colonization of parts of Pennsylvania, giving rise
to the Pennsylvania " Dutch " of the present day,
with their interesting and remarkable preservation
of language, religion, and customs. An equally
Interesting Instance is that of the great Scandinavian
farming region In the northern part of the group of
States that we have elected here to consider as " The
West" — notably In Minnesota and the Dakotas.

The Scandinavians 163
These people are unfamiliar to the East. Plays
based on their peculiarities, books, and newspaper
paragraphs in their dialect, were largely unintelli
gible to easterners; and they still are so. In large
part, although the average New Yorker or Bos
tonian now knows, at second hand, that the Scandi
navian says "Yon" for "John" and "I ban" for
" I am." The Scandinavian farmer is one of the
very best assets of the West, and his steadying
influence Is felt all along the line where he has been
present to exert it, from law-making down to the
cultivation of the soil.
The Scandinavian is a north-Teuton who has been
remote from Latin influence, and in this respect
he Is racially near to our own ancestors — Jutes,
Saxons, and Angles. This may be one reason why
he becomes so quickly naturalized here, and why he
is, on the whole, so well liked. He has a peculiarly
pleasing, ingratiating manner, from which all trace
of trying to curry favor is absent, and which com
bines the simple-heartedness of a child with hard-
headed common -sense and abUIty to succeed in
practical matters.
The Indian is no more noticeable in the West
than he is in the East, except In Oklahoma. So far
as the uncivilized or "blanket" Indian is concerned,
he can be dropped out of consideration, as bearing
no part in the life of the region. The civilized

164 The Different West
Indian of Oklahoma, however, has relations with
the rest of the population similar to those of any
other non-Teutonic race, with the addition that he is
conscious of his position as one of the aboriginal
inhabitants of the country. Many easterners, visit
ing the larger cities of Oklahoma, look in vain for
Indians In blankets and feathers, stalking about the
streets. The Indians are usually there, but no more
distinguishable from other citizens than are mem
bers of any non-Teutonic race. We may reasonably
expect an absorption of these Indians into the gen
eral population at least as rapidly as that of the
Latin races. As for the "blanket Indian," he must
go — either by dying out or by joining the ranks
of the civilized.
As for the negro, his problem is strung along
lines that run north and south, not east and west.
Hardly anything that might be said on aspects of
this problem applies distinctively to the West as a
region. South of an extension of Mason and
Dixon's line the colored element In the population
is numerous and important ; north of It that element
may be almost absent. A recent English traveler
quotes an Indiana woman as saying, when she saw
four negroes walking down the street, that she had
never before seen so many colored men together.
In some parts of that State It would be surely Impos
sible to make such a remark.

The Fusing Ground 165
A comparison of the western with the purely
southern negro would probably show that the former
has imbibed more or less of the independent spirit of
the West, This Is said to have been the case even
in slave states before the abolition of slavery. Com
parison of reminiscences between Virginians and
Missourlans shows that, at least in many cases, the
Missouri slaves were not under as strict discipline
as the Virginian, and that they were really more
independent and harder to manage.
Perhaps, in closing this chapter, we may make a
generalization even broader than that attempted,
perhaps unsuccessfully, above, with the danger of
incurring more severe and equally just criticism. The
population in the West does not seem so homoge
neous as that in the East. Its components have not,
to so great an extent, forgotten their sources; even
the frankly foreign elements are more clannish and
have not mingled so freely with the rest of the
people. This Is due partly to the fact that there
has not been so much time for mixing, partly to
conditions inherent in western life, and doubtless,
also, to accidents, pure and simple. The great
Middle West has been called " the fusing ground,"
and fusion is by no means an instantaneous process.

CHAPTER XIII
THE SPEECH AND MANNERS OF THE WEST
DURING my first visit to the regions west of
the Mississippi, I attended a reception In an
interior Missouri town, where I met many of the
townspeople — and charming people they were,
"Are you from the East?" said one of them to me,
"How odd! Eastern people always have an ac
cent; and you talk as if you had been born and
brought up in the Mississippi Valley ! " I was not
insensible to the compliment; but indeed it was not
a compliment to me or to the speaker, but to the
mass of educated Americans. We have been too
fast and furiously mixed and jostled for the effective
formation of real local dialects. Yet differences
exist, and they are characteristic — so much so that
in the Manual of the Boy Scouts an attempt is made
to teach the new-caught "tenderfoot" to distinguish
the origin of the casual stranger by his speech. In
the Official Handbook we learn, among other
things, from the somewhat remarkable section on
"American Dialects" (p. 139), that Californians
always say 'Frisco for San Francisco; that an accent
on the first syllable of the second word in New
166

American "Dialects" iby
Orleans indicates a Louisianlan; that persons from
the Gulf States called Carolina "Cahline;" that
Chlcagoans say "hef" for half and "kef" for calf,
and that the Inhabitants of Toronto call it " Tranto,"
Boy scouts who pin their faith to all this will prob
ably make mistakes; yet It is often possible to detect
locality by the combination of several such signs.
The author of one of the latest books on the
United States, Annette M. B. Meakin,* writes :
Long before I ever set foot in the New World, I had
met, socially, Americans from every part of the United
States, and I remember that I often prided myself on the
certainty with which I was able to guess, after a few
minutes' conversation, the part of his continent from
which an American came. I mention this particularly
because I have several times seen it stated by American
writers of the twentieth century that all educated Amer
icans speak exactly alike.
It Is, Indeed, not hard to tell the southerner from
the New Englander, yet the South Carolinian does
not talk like the Georgian, nor either like the Vir
ginian; and there is an equally noticeable difference
between the speech of men from Maine, Massachu
setts, and Connecticut. Likewise, the Missourian,
the Illinolsan, and the MInnesotan do not talk ex
actly alike, but It ought to be possible to differentiate
the speech of the three, taken collectively, from that
of the New Englander or the southerner. It is pos-
*What America Is Doing. London, 191 1.

i68 The Different West
sible, though not easy; because the New Englander
and the southerner have been well settled In their
respective domains for centuries, while the west
erner. In some cases, has scarcely had time to look
about him. Here again we may fall back on our
old analogy of the Englishman and the American.
Beyond the so-called "American voice," which Is
largely a matter of pitch and quality, the English
man notes especially In the American speech a cer
tain hardness, a tendency to multiply secondary
accents or to accent every syllable. The American
can scarcely do without his secondary accents, while
the Englishman rarely bothers with them, even when
his word has many syllables. Thus the Englishman
can and does pronounce the word "interesting"
with only one accent — that on the first syllable;
most Americans find it necessary to accent both first
and third, some giving the primary stress to one
and some to the other, Bisyllabic words like " Free
dom" or "instant" he often speaks with so even a
stress that to the English ear he appears to give a
primary accent to the ultimate syllable. This pecul
iarity brings with it that of oftener giving vowels
their true value, for the tendency Is to pronounce
all unaccented syllables with the neutral vowel-sound
{uh). The more accents we give, the less of this
there is. Hence, the Englishman seems to us to
hurry and slur his syllables, and wie appear to him

Syllabic Stress 169

to talk with undue stress and to bring out vowel-
sounds with an offensive plainness that amounts to
crudeness. Now, if the westerners have any trick of speech
in common, it is doubtless this tendency to syllabic
stress — those who do not use it would call it "un
due," while those who do would term it "normal"
or " proper," The dwelling upon the sound of " r,"
which is as noticeable to the Bostonian as the latter's
utter neglect of it Is west of the Alleghanies, is
merely a special case, "Isn't It a pity," said an
eastern lady, "that so many western women, other
wise educated and acceptable, pronounce their r's
in such an impossible manner!" If to recognize
this useful letter with too much empressement is the
hall-mark of " impossibility," what shall we call the
stony stare of non-recognition when accorded to it?
This Is merely a case of the general difference of
stress, noted above.
One may follow the dictionaries and talk In either
way. These are extra-^iction^Lvy, or perhaps supra-
dictlonary matters, and belong to the niceties of
speech where custom reigns supreme. When the
West has been settled as long as the South, its minor
peculiarities of speech will be cultivated svith pride,
as are the southerner's, and no one will dare to
comment on them.
In Professor Lounsbury's interesting attempt to

170 The Different West
discover whether our early lexicographers had the
necessary knowledge of polite speech to entitle them
to give evidence of what It was In their time, he
concludes that many of them were hardly compe
tent witnesses. In the early " one-man " dictionaries
the most that one may conclude from the fact that
a given pronunciation is preferred, is that the author
was personally familiar with it and that It prevailed
in the society that he frequented, whatever that
might be. There Is no such limitation on his spell
ings, because these are matters of recorded speech
and circulate too widely to be local. There was no
way of recording pronunciation accurately before the
invention of the phonograph. With its Increasing
use, the records of voices may travel as far and as
wide as those of written speech.
There are, however, no more "one-man" diction
aries. Our present works of reference are compila
tions and collaborations. Whatever errors they
contain are due to haste and to the fact that too
many cooks spoil the broth — they are rarely local
or provincial. Local and provincial uses are re
corded, but they are plainly marked as such. And
there has even been an effort to distinguish between
the usage of sections; one word may be marked
"Western U. S." or even "Illinois" or "Indiana."
This has rarely been done with painstaking care,
and one would err as greatly In relying upon the

American and English Speech 171
dictionaries for his western " dialect" as if he pinned
his faith to the Boy Scout rules mentioned above,
I have alluded In an earlier chapter to the good
lady who regarded whatever she heard In Waltham
as typical of Massachusetts, In Clifton Johnson's
Interesting compilation entitled "What They Say
in New England," he has included many western
and southern sayings and customs that he no
ticed among transplanted famihes — purely exotic
growths. And it is very difficult to distinguish. On
a visit to the Northwest coast in 19 10, I heard for
the first time the expression " a good buy," meaning
a bargain. It seemed to be In general use there.
But In 19 II I saw the same phrase in an advertise
ment in an eastern newspaper. Was the advertiser
a man from Seattle or Portland? Or is the expres
sion old slang, used locally and occasionally all over
the country, which had merely found congenial soil
for multiplication In the Northwest? In an English
novel written some time ago a mother reproves her
daughter for using the word " fad," which she
characterizes as "horrible American slang." Now,
at this time the word was totally unknown In
America, and, although we have now adopted it,
its origin Is purely British. The English regard
this country as the fountain-head of slang and think
that our speech consists of it exclusively — an
opinion fostered by the works of Mr. George Ade

172 The Different West
and likely to be confirmed by the Arctic explorations
of Mr, George Borup,
To revert for a moment to the differences between
written and spoken language, our education regards
the latter too httle. It Is the mark of a well-educated
community that the two forms keep pretty closely
together, without coalescing. No one wants to talk
exactly like a book, nor does he care to sprinkle his
writing with slang and colloquialisms. Yet it is
undesirable that the two should drift so far apart
that they really constitute two dialects, as they do
in some parts of the world. Now we lay great stress
on correct writing in our system of education, and
little on correct speaking. The chief idea that some
of us have of the latter is that it is an exact copy of
correct writing. This results In what has been called
" schoolmarm's Enghsh;" it induces well-meaning
persons to say, "Are you not going? " and " I offered
him a slight recompense," and to use hundreds of
other similar phrases. Children are not taught,
either in school or at home, to talk in correct collo
quial English, and it Is never even hinted to them
that the quality or tone of voice in which they speak
means as much, and is as important, as the words
they use.
Some persons awaken to this in after-life and try
to alter their voices, with the result that they talk

Education of Speech 173
artificially, like actors. This sort of thing must be
learned in childhood or not at all.
It Is commonly said that the English have better
speaking voices than we do. There Is not much to
choose between the best American and the best
English voices ; hkewise, the bad ones among them
compare unfavorably with our worst. The Amer
ican, says G. W, Steevens, often talks English " with
a clarity of pronunciation that puts me again and
again to shame," But it Is undeniable that a larger
proportion of them than of us speak with a pleasant
and acceptable Intonation. Between the so-called
"haw-haw" speech, which is ridiculed in England
as much as it is here, and the extreme American
nasal tone, it would be hard to choose. We are
told that the pessimist, when confronted with two
evils, takes both. In like manner, he who is anxious
to compare English with American manners is fond
of taking both these extremes as typical. For his
own purposes he is right, of course ; but as a matter
of fact the cultivated Enghshman and the cultivated
American talk a good deal alike.
This education of speech has probably gone fur
ther in the East than In the West, It is a matter of
home training and, above all, of example, rather
than of school disciphne. The pleasantest qualities
of voice that we have are to be found in Maine and

174 The Different West
Virginia — slow and distinct in enunciation, sweet in
Intonation. In neither state are children taught In
the schools how to speak. The persons who talk
as I have described are never In a hurry (south of
Washington and north of Boston, tlme^has no value)
and they would not be accounted typical Americans
of the "hustling" variety. Is it possible that a
rasping, metallic, high-pitched intonation has some
connection with business energy?
If so, we must not soon look for its discontinuance.
It has been suggested that it Is the result of our dry,
harsh climate; but the softness of both the Maine
and the Virginia voices would seem to negative this
idea. When our attention Is called to a thing and we
are convinced that it needs mending, we usually
mend it, I look, therefore, to see that Increased care
in the training of children to speak, and in giving
them desirable models to Imitate at home, will ulti
mately overcome whatever racial and climatic in
fluences may be drawing us in the other direction,
and will give to all of us the pleasant mode of speech
that some of us have already. So much for speech.
In regard to manners, the German lady, quoted by
Bryce, who thought American women in the West
were "furchtbar frei und furchtbar fromm," could
not have been more astonished at either of these
phases than the average eastern visitor Is apt to

Chaperonage 175

be on occasion. For the East has been taking on
European customs. Fifty years ago. East and West
were alike In practically rejecting any system of
chaperonage whatever. It was customary, for in
stance, for a young woman to go alone to the theater
with a young man. Today this is vastly less com
mon in the East than In the West, Whether the
West will follow suit can hardly be said as yet; but it
is surely amusing to witness the horror of certain
good eastern ladles at customs which were those of
the East itself in their own girlhood, or, at any rate,
in that of their mothers.
Westerners are still able to analyze the meaning
of chaperonage in such cases as this, and to apply a
httle common-sense to it. If a young man and a
young woman must always be accompanied by an
older person, the functions of the latter must evi
dently be either to prevent the young woman from
acting with impropriety, or to protect her from the
young man. The westerners think they know their
young people ; and I believe that they do. Easterners
used to think so too; why have they changed? Not
because the young people have altered, but solely,
I believe, in response to the dictates of fashion. This
is unfortunate, and It is having a bad effect on eastern
women. They are vastly less unconscious of their
sex than the western woman. In the West, a man
and woman, both well bred, will fall into conversa-

176 The Different West
tion on a train, just as two men would do; where
an eastern woman would not think of doing or suf
fering such an indignity. In the West, almost alone
among American regions, does it now seem possible
for a woman to forget that she Is a woman and to
regard herself merely as a human being.
In his chapter on "The Temper of the West,"
written seventeen years ago, Bryce tells us of west
ern business men that "they rise early; they work
all day; they have few pleasures, few opportunities
for relaxation." To the first part of this indictment
we may still plead guilty. The western business
day does begin early. The young man who has
been accustomed to drift into a New York or Boston
office at 9 A.M. Is surprised, on removing to Chicago
or St, Louis, to find that his presence is expected
at 7 :30, Working-hours, however, are no longer
than in the East; the earher arrival is offset by
earlier departure, and the clerk gets time for recrea
tion in the afternoon — a most sensible plan. As for
lack of pleasures and of opportunities for relaxa
tion. It Is difficult to see where Mr, Bryce obtained
his information on this point. Of course, the rec
reative value of this or that employment depends
largely on the personal equation. The man who
thinks that all time not spent on a schooner yacht
is irrecoverably lost, can evidently not exist com
fortably In Indianapolis or Cincinnati, I once wit-

Conclusion 177

nessed a game of polo in the hills of Northwestern
Connecticut. It was the funniest sight I ever saw.
The ball reposed in the center of the field, while
the players on both sides were trying to get their
frantic mounts near enough to it to hit it. This
convinced me that to play polo one needs polo
ponies. So the man who knows of no recreation
but polo will keep away from Litchfield County until
the importation of his favorite beasts makes it more
attractive. But all this Is not to say that no one
enjoys himself In Indianapolis, or Cincinnati, or in
Litchfield, Conn, The fact is that the westerner,
by reason of his free and easy disposition, his readi
ness to take things as they come, and to amuse
himself in any way that offers, is peculiarly easy
to entertain, and self-entertainment becomes with
him a simple task.
It may be well. In closing this somewhat dis
cursive account of things whose very obviousness
may make their perusal amusing to some and im
possible to others, to emphasize the fact that the
increasing standardization of the elements of our
national civilization, noted by more than one ob
server, never can make for a dead-level of uni
formity. Mayor Gaynor of New York, in a recent
address, asserted that the school children of that
city are acquiring "uniform minds," and as a conse-

178 The Different West
quence are growing to have " uniform faces," Prince
Henry of Prussia noted that what may be called a
"university type" of face prevails among our college
students. By the methods of craniometry and phys
ical measurement It has been established that the
diverse elements of our population are really grow
ing alike. Yet the more the general features, phys
ical or intellectual, approach each other, the more
noticeable minor differences become, and where
there are differences that can not be obliterated, such
as those of topography and climate, these will con
tinue to be reflected In the regional habits and
character. We may expect, then, that there will always be
an East and a West, until that time when, as the
poet says : Earth and sky meet presently
At God's great judgment seat.
That both will so bear themselves as to be able on
that day to render a good account of their peculiar
gifts and of the way In which each has used them,
neither the eastern nor the western reader of these
pages will, I am sure, have any doubt.

INDEX

Accent, American, i68
Adams, artist of " Hoosier
Group," 129
Ade, George, use of slang by,
171
Agriculture, scientific, 115
Alton, III,, a hilly town, 12
Alumni associations, 89
American bottoms, the, 13
American voice, 168
Americans, in British novels, 2
Amusements in the West, 176
Anglo-Saxon local names, 160
Anglo-Saxons not artists, 123
Antiquities in the West, 124
Architecture in the West, 124
Arizona, constitution of, 73
Art in the West, 123; exhibi
tions, 126 ; museums, 127 ; in
struction in the West, 136
Artists' Guild, St, Louis, 128
Arts and crafts movement, 128
Authors' Club, N, Y,, 128
Baptist Church, 145
Beaux-Arts architecture, 125
Bellman, The, Minneapolis, 103
Bicknell, Frank M,, article by, 2
Blaine, J, G,, candidacy of, 52
Bluffs and prairies, 11
Borup, George, use of slang by,
171
Boston, assumed primacy of,
45; former literary suprem
acy, 95; local feeling in, 150;
publishers in, 99; speech of,
169
Boston Transcript, 104, no
Bottomlands, 11

Boy Scouts, i66
Bronx, growth of, 29
Brigandage in the West, 63
Bryan, W, J,, 53, 57; as editor,
103
Bryant, William Cullen, 97
Bryce, James, quoted, 23, 63,
80, 104, 151, 174, 176
Business habits, western, 176
Cahokia, 111,, 13, 158
California, irrigation in, 116
Canada, French in, 158
Catholic Church, 124; in Mary
land, 144; in Mississippi val
ley, 145; in the West, 158
" Central States," 8
Ceremony, growth of, 84
Chaperonage in the West, 175
Chauvenet, William, 108
Chicago, 105 ; Art Museum,
127; as a publishing centre,
99; clubs in, 149; field-houses,
34, 81 ; local pride in, 151 ;
playgrounds, 34, 81 ; Univer
sity of, 82, 91 ; Yale scholar
ships in, 90,
Chicago River in art, 129
Chicago-St, Louis railway serv
ice, 119
Chinese curiosity, 38
Christian Church, 146
Churches, established, 144
Churchill, Winston, 37, 97
Cincinnati, Germans in, 161
City Club, St, Louis, 10
City clubs, SS
City plans, 54
Civic pride, 152

179

i8o

Index

Civil War, effect on democracy,
56; memories of, 155; Ger
mans in, 162
Civilizations, old and new, 28
Cleveland, Grover, candidacy of,
52
Cleveland Public Library, 94
Climate, western, 17
Clubs in the West, 149
Clusman, Chicago artist, 129
Coal, hard and soft, 117
Co-education, 86
College "yells," 86
Colleges, see Universities
Collier, Price, quoted, 143
Colonies, French, 160
Colonizers and colonized, 32
Commoner, The, Lincoln, Neb,,
103
Commons in French colonies,
160
Competition, railway, 119
Congregational Church, 144, 146
Connecticut, established church
in, 144
Constabulary, need for, 64
Constitutions, " freak," 70
Crops in the West, 16
Cummins, Senator, 53
Curiosity of Yankees, 38
Cyclones, 18
Dakotas, Scandinavians in, 162
Davis, R, H,, quoted, 2S
Democracy, East and West, 56 ;
in education, 83
Dialects, American, 167
Dictionaries, pronunciation in,
170
Drama in the West, 134
Dutch Reformed Church, 145
Economic unrest, 66
Education and manners, 30;
extra-scholastic, 92; in the

West, 80; in speaking, 173;
musical and artistic, 137
English accent, 168
Electric roads, interurban, 21
Episcopal Church, 144
European customs, 175
Faculty, social attitude of, 87
Farmer, as a debtor, 67
Farms, 20
Federal secret service, 65 ; treat
ment of train-robbery, 65
Field-houses in Chicago, 34, 81
" First Lady in the Land," 142
Forsyth, artist of " Hoosier
Group," 129
French element in the West,
123, 157
Friends, Society of, in Pennsyl
vania, 144
" Frisco " Railroad, 121
Gas as fuel, 117
Gaynor, William J,, quoted, 177
German element in the West,
ISS, 161 ; influence on music,
133
Giddings, Franklin H,, quoted,
59
Gill, McCune, quoted, 161
Gould railway interests, 78
Greeley, Horace, nomination of,
50
Harriman railway interests, 78
Harvard's college " yell," 86
Harvest, 20
Hearst, W. R,, buys magazine,
100
Henry, O,, quoted, 98
Henry of Prussia, Prince,
quoted, 178
" Hoosier Group " of artists, I2g
Hopi Indians, 124
Hospitality, western, 148
Hours of work in the West, 176

Index

i8i

Hughes, Charles E,, 50
Hysteresis, 33
Illinois, southern element in, 154
Illinois Traction Co,, 22
Imitation in American, Art, 130
Impressionism in Art, 130
" In Mizzoura," play, 136
Income-tax, 75
Indian art, 124
Indians in the West, 163
Indiana, negroes in, 164; south
ern element in, 154
Indianapolis in art, 129; subur
ban terminal in, 22
" Insurgents," 53
Interurban roads, 21
Intimacy, conditions of, 40
Irish in New England, 147
Irrigation, 115
Irving, Washington, 95
James brothers, bandits, 63
Jews in the West, 156
Journalism in the West, 100
Judiciary, western, 71
Kansas border warfare, 63;
droughts in, 116; as the
" Helot of politics," 70
Kansas City boulevards, 34
Keokuk dam, 114, "7
Knights of the Golden Circle,
154
Labouchere, Henry, 103
La Follette, Robert, 53
La Pollette's Weekly, 103
Language, spoken and written,
172
Law, untenable theory of, 72
Legislation against smoke, 118
Leisure class, absence of, I47
Levees, 15
Libraries, 93
Litchfield, Conn,, 177

Literature in the West, 95; is
sued by railways, 120
Local pride, western, 150
Louisiana, French in, is8
Lounsbury, Prof,, quoted, 169
Lowell's " certain condescen
sion," 2S
Lummis, Charles F,, quoted, 34
" Luck," defined, 62
Lutheran Church, 146
McKinley-Bryan campaign, 61
Maine, intonation in, 173
Manners of the West, 166
Maryland, Catholics in, 144
Meakin, Ohio artist, 129
Meakin, A, M, B„ quoted, 167
Merriam, Professor, defeat for
mayor, 54
Methodist Church, 14s
Metropolitan museum, N, Y,, 126
Middle West, position of, 8
Millionaires, western, 150
Milwaukee, a German city, 161 ;
Public Library, 94; Socialist
victory in, 70
Minneapolis, Minn,, 105
Minnesota, Scandinavians in, 162
Mirror, The, St, Louis, 103
Missions in the West, 145
Mississippi river, 114; in art, 129
Mlissouri, slavery in, 165
Missouri Pacific railroad, 121
Mortgages on western farms, 67
Mounds at Cahokia, 13
Mugwump secession, S2
Music in the West, 133
Musical instruction in the West,
137
Napoleon, anecdote of, 62
Nashville, Tenn,, O, Henrys
story of, 98 ^,
National Academy of Fine Arts,
126
Natural gas, 117

l82

Index

Navaho Indians, 124
Nebraska, droughts in, 116; Uni
versity of, 137
Negroes in the West, 164
New countries, 28
New England villages, 29
New Hampshire, " insurgency "
in, S3
New Haven railroad, 122
New Orleans, Catholics in, 145
New York, 28; a city of out
siders, 96; as a publishing cen
tre, 99; as an art centre, 126;
Authors' Club, 128; German
district in, 162 ; Jews in, 156 ;
literary group, 95
New York Sun, 107, 109
News, character of, in papers,
106
Newspapers, western, 100
"Nigger," The, play, 136
Night travel, 122
Nipher, F, J,, physicist, 108
Norris, Frank, quoted, 97; on
the rate question, 78
Northern element in the West,
ISS
Occupation, social influence of,
Office-holders, social status of,
141
Ohio in art, 129
Oklahoma, constitution of, 70;
Indians in, 163
Oklahoma City, 25
" One-night stands," 135
"Over the Rhine," Cincinnati,
162
Pankhurst, Sylvia, in St, Louis,
10
Pavements in St, Louis, 34
Pennsylvania " Dutch," 162
Pennsylvania, Friends in, 144;
sectionalism in, 48

Periodicals in the West, 99
Philadelphia as an art centre,
126 ; publishers in, 99
Pittsbugh, Pa,, 117
Place-names, French, IS9
" Places " in western cities, 21
Playgrounds, 81
Plutocracy in eastern colleges,
90
Police, necessity for state, 64
Poe, Edgar A,, 95
Politics in the West, 47
Popular Mechanics, 100
Population, sources of, 154
Populists, rise of, S3
Post, Louis F,, editor, 103
Prairies, rolling, 12
Presbyterian church, 14s
President, social status of, 141
Professor and student, 88
Progressive party, S3
Pronunciation, in dictionaries,
170
Public, The, Chicago, 103
Public Libraries, 93, 107
Public Library, Cleveland, 94;
St, Louis, 120
Public school in the West, 80
Quincy, 111,, 112
Racial characteristics, 24
Radicalism, eastern and western,
74
Railways, comparison between,
119; feeling against, 76; pe
culiarities of, 21 ; publicity
literature, 100 ; rate-regula
tion, 76 ; speeds, 121
Recall of judges, 73
Recreation, facilities for, 81
Reedy, William M,, editor, 103
Religion and social status, 144
Remington, Frederic, artist,
129

Index

183

Republicans, Liberal, in 1872, 50
Ritualizing influences, 84
River improvement, 112
River transportation, yj
Rivers in the West, 1 1 ; muddi
ness of, 14
Roosevelt, Theodore, S3, 57, 7^ \
attacks on judiciary, 73
Rose, George, Impressions
quoted, 48

St, Anthony, Falls of, 114
St. Genevieve, Mo,, 158
St, Louis, los, 1 1 1, 1 14, 158 ; Acad
emy of Science, 108 ; Art Mu
seum, 127; Artists' Guild,
128; Catholics in, 145 ; City
Club of, 10; club life in, 149;
defeat of new _ charter, 54 ;
French names in, 159; Ger
mans in Civil War, 162;
library co-operation with
schools, 94; new residence
district, 34; Public Library,
120 ; real-estate titles in, 161 ;
street-lighting in, SS ; interur
ban terminal, 22
St, Paul, Minn,, 105
Salmagundi Club, N, Y,, 128
Scandinavian element in the
West, 163 ; farmers, i6«
Scenery, American feeling for,
122
Science in the West, 108
Sculpture in the West, 131
Seattle, Wash,, los
" Show-me"_ attitude, 60
Silver question, s8
Slang in the West, 171
" Slogans " for cities, 105
Smoke nuisance, 116
Social scale, definition of, 139
Socialism, S9 ; in Milwaukee, 70 ;
successes of, S3
Society in the West, 138

Southern element in the West,
o ^S4 .
Speculation defined, 66
Speech of the West, 166
Speeds, on railways, 121
Springfield Republican, 104
Stark, artist of " Hoosier
Group," 129
State universities, future of, 91
Steele, artist of " Hoosier
Group," 129
Steevens, G, W,, quoted, 24,61,
70, 173
Street systems, French, 160
Suburbs, western, 20
Suggestion in art, 131
Sumner, Wm, G,, quoted, 83
Supreme Court, U, S,, 74
Swedenborgian Church, 146
Sylvester, Frederick, artist, 129
Tacoma, Wash,, 105
Tammany, movements against,
50
Technical World Magazine, 100
" Tenderloins," imitation, S4
Terre Haute, Ind., IS9
Texas rangers, 64
Theatre in the West, 134
Tornadoes, western, 18
Train robberies, 63
Transportation problem, 76; by
water, 112
Trees, western, 16
Trelease, William, botanist, 108
Trusts, West and East, 68
Union Pacific railroad, 121
Universities, eastern. Si. 82;
growth of western, 91 ; local
and continental, 88; state, 34,
82
University Club, Chicago, 149
University of Chicago, 82, 91
University of Nebraska, 137
University type of face, 178

1 84

Index

Villages in the West, 29
Vincennes, Ind,, is8
Virginia, established church in,
144; intonation in, 173; sla
very in, 165,
"Wall Street," feeling against,
68
Waterpower, 114; supply, no
Watts, Mrs,, Ohio writer, 97
Weather in the West, 17
West, meaning of the term, 6
Wharf-boats, 15
Whisky Insurrection, 47
White, William Allen, writer, 97
" Wild and Woolly " character
istics, 27

Willis, N, P„ 96
Wilson, Woodrow, quoted, 63
Wisconsin University, 86
Wixford, John, chemist, in
Woman's Clubs, 92
World To-day, Hearst's pur
chase of, 100
Yale University, anecdote of,
S2 ; ceremonies at, 84 ; college
"yell," 86; scholarships in
Chicago, 90
Yankee, in English books, 38
Zeliony, experiments of, 3

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