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-The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Valley of Democracy, by Meredith
-Nicholson
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
-most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
-of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
-will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
-using this eBook.
-
-Title: The Valley of Democracy
-
-Author: Meredith Nicholson
-
-Illustrator: Walter Tittle
-
-Release Date: March 23, 2021 [eBook #64910]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-Produced by: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed
-             Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
-             produced from images generously made available by The Internet
-             Archive/American Libraries.)
-
-*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY ***
-
-
-
-
-THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY
-
-
-[Illustration: Michigan Avenue, Chicago, from the steps of the Art
-Institute.]
-
-
-
-
-  THE
-  VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY
-
-  BY
-
-  MEREDITH NICHOLSON
-
-  WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
-
-  WALTER TITTLE
-
-  NEW YORK
-  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
-  1919
-
-
-
-
-  COPYRIGHT, 1917, 1918, BY
-  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
-
-  Published September, 1918
-  Reprinted November, December 1918
-
-  [Illustration]
-
-
-
-
-  TO MY CHILDREN
-
-  ELIZABETH, MEREDITH, AND LIONEL
-
-  IN TOKEN OF MY AFFECTION
-
-  AND WITH THE HOPE THAT THEY MAY BE FAITHFUL TO THE
-  HIGHEST IDEALS OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP
-
-
-
-
-CONTENTS
-
-
-  CHAPTER                               PAGE
-
-    I. THE FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS      1
-
-   II. TYPES AND DIVERSIONS               39
-
-  III. THE FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST      83
-
-   IV. CHICAGO                           135
-
-    V. THE MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS       181
-
-   VI. THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST            235
-
-
-
-
-AUTHOR’S NOTE TO THE FOURTH EDITION
-
-
-In the reprintings of a book of this character it would be possible
-to revise and rewrite in such manner as to conceal the errors or
-misjudgments of the author. It seems, however, more honest to permit
-these impressions to stand practically as they were written, with only
-a few minor corrections. It was my aim to make note of conditions,
-tendencies, and needs in the Valley of Democracy, and the conclusion of
-the war has affected my point of view with reference to these matters
-very little.
-
-The first months of the present year have been so crowded with
-incidents affecting the whole world that we recall with difficulty the
-events of only a few years ago. We have met repeated crises with an
-inspiring exhibition of unity and courage that should hearten us for
-the new tasks of readjustment that press for attention, and for the
-problems of self-government that are without end. I shall feel that
-these pages possess some degree of vitality if they quicken in the
-mind and heart of the reader a hope and confidence that we of America
-do not walk blindly, but follow a star that sheds upon us a perpetual
-light.
-
-                                                                   M. N.
-
-  INDIANAPOLIS, June 1, 1919.
-
-
-
-
-ILLUSTRATIONS
-
-
-  Michigan Avenue, Chicago, from the steps of the Art
-    Institute                                             _Frontispiece_
-
-                                                             FACING PAGE
-
-  “Ten days of New York, and it’s me for my home town”                 6
-
-  Art exhibits ... now find a hearty welcome                          20
-
-  The Municipal Recreation Pier, Chicago                              66
-
-  Types and Diversions                                                74
-
-  On a craft plying the waters of Erie I found all the
-    conditions of a happy outing and types that it is always a
-    joy to meet                                                       78
-
-  The Perry Monument at Put-in Bay                                    80
-
-  A typical old homestead of the Middle West                         100
-
-  Students of agriculture in the pageant that celebrated the
-    fortieth anniversary of the founding of Ohio State
-    University                                                       114
-
-  A feeding-plant at “Whitehall,” the farm of Edwin S.
-    Kelly, near Springfield, Ohio                                    120
-
-  Judging graded shorthorn herds at the American Royal
-    Live Stock Show in Kansas City                                   132
-
-  Chicago is the big brother of all lesser towns                     142
-
-  The “Ham Fair” in Paris is richer in antiquarian loot,
-    but Maxwell Street is enough; ’twill serve!                      152
-
-  Banquet given for the members of the National Institute
-    of Arts and Letters                                              176
-
-  There is a death-watch that occupies front seats at every
-    political meeting                                                194
-
-  The Political Barbecue                                             198
-
-
-
-
-THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY
-
-
-
-
-France evoked from the unknown the valley that may, in more than one
-sense, be called the heart of America.... The chief significance and
-import of the addition of this valley to the maps of the world, all
-indeed that makes it significant, is that here was given (though not of
-deliberate intent) a rich, wide, untouched field, distant, accessible
-only to the hardiest, without a shadowing tradition or a restraining
-fence, in which men of all races were to make attempt to live together
-under rules of their own devising and enforcing. And as here the
-government of the people by the people was to have even more literal
-interpretation than in that Atlantic strip which had traditions of
-property suffrage and church privilege and class distinctions, I have
-called it the “Valley of the New Democracy.”
-
-                 --JOHN H. FINLEY: “The French in the Heart of America.”
-
-
-
-
-THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER I
-
-THE FOLKS AND THEIR FOLKSINESS
-
-
-I
-
-“The great trouble with these fellows down here,” remarked my friend as
-we left the office of a New York banker--“the trouble with all of ’em
-is that they forget about the _Folks_. You noticed that when he asked
-in his large, patronizing way how things are going out West he didn’t
-wait for us to answer; he pressed a button and told his secretary to
-bring in those tables of railroad earnings and to-day’s crop bulletins
-and that sort of rubbish, so he could tell _us_. It never occurs to ’em
-that the Folks are human beings and not just a column of statistics.
-Why, the _Folks_----”
-
-My friend, an orator of distinction, formerly represented a tall-corn
-district in Congress. He drew me into Trinity churchyard and discoursed
-in a vein with which I had long been familiar upon a certain
-condescension in Easterners, and the East’s intolerable ignorance
-of the ways and manners, the hopes and aims, of the West, which move
-him to rage and despair. I was aware that he was gratified to have an
-opportunity to unbosom himself at the brazen gates of Wall Street,
-and equally conscious that he was experimenting upon me with phrases
-that he was coining for use on the hustings. They were so used, not
-without effect, in the campaign of 1916--a contest whose results were
-well calculated to draw attention to the “Folks” as an upstanding,
-independent body of citizens.
-
-Folks is recognized by the lexicographers as an American colloquialism,
-a variant of folk. And folk, in old times, was used to signify the
-commonalty, the plain people. But my friend, as he rolled “Folks”
-under his tongue there in the shadow of Trinity, used it in a sense
-that excluded the hurrying midday Broadway throng and restricted its
-application to an infinitely superior breed of humanity, to be found
-on farms, in villages and cities remote from tide-water. His passion
-for democracy, his devotion to the commonweal, is not wasted upon New
-Englanders or Middle States people. In the South there are Folks, yes;
-his own people had come out of North Carolina, lingered a while in
-Kentucky, and lodged finally in Indiana, whence, following a common
-law of dispersion, they sought new homes in Illinois and Kansas.
-Beyond the Rockies there are Folks; he meets their leaders in national
-conventions; but they are only second cousins of those valiant freemen
-who rallied to the call of Lincoln and followed Grant and Sherman into
-battles that shook the continent. My friend’s point of view is held by
-great numbers of people in that region we now call the Middle West.
-This attitude or state of mind with regard to the East is not to be
-taken too seriously; it is a part of the national humor, and has been
-expressed with delightful vivacity and candor in Mr. William Allen
-White’s refreshing essay, “Emporia and New York.”
-
-A definition of Folks as used all the way from Ohio to Colorado, and
-with particular point and pith by the haughty sons and daughters of
-Indiana and Kansas, may be set down thus:
-
-  FOLKS. _n._ A superior people, derived largely from the Anglo-Saxon
-  and Celtic races and domiciled in those northern States of the
-  American Union whose waters fall into the Mississippi. Their
-  _folksiness_ (_q. v._) is expressed in sturdy independence, hostility
-  to capitalistic influence, and a proneness to social and political
-  experiment. They are strong in the fundamental virtues, more or less
-  sincerely averse to conventionality, and believe themselves possessed
-  of a breadth of vision and a devotion to the common good at once
-  beneficent and unique in the annals of mankind.
-
-We of the West do not believe--not really--that we are the only true
-interpreters of the dream of democracy. It pleases us to swagger a
-little when we speak of ourselves as the Folks and hint at the dire
-punishments we hold in store for monopoly and privilege; but we are far
-less dangerous than an outsider, bewildered or annoyed by our apparent
-bitterness, may be led to believe. In our hearts we do not think
-ourselves the only good Americans. We merely feel that the East began
-patronizing us and that anything we may do in that line has been forced
-upon us by years of outrageous contumely. And when New York went to bed
-on the night of election day, 1916, confident that as went the Empire
-State so went the Union, it was only that we of the West might chortle
-the next morning to find that Ah Sin had forty packs concealed in his
-sleeve and spread them out on the Sierra Nevadas with an air that was
-child-like and bland.
-
-Under all its jauntiness and cocksureness, the West is extremely
-sensitive to criticism. It likes admiration, and expects the Eastern
-visitor to be properly impressed by its achievements, its prodigious
-energy, its interpretation and practical application of democracy, and
-the earnestness with which it interests itself in the things of the
-spirit. Above all else it does not like to appear absurd. According to
-its light it intends to do the right thing, but it yields to laughter
-much more quickly than abuse if the means to that end are challenged.
-
-The pioneers of the older States endured hardships quite as great
-as the Middle Westerners; they have contributed as generously to
-the national life in war and peace; the East’s aid to the West,
-in innumerable ways, is immeasurable. I am not thinking of farm
-mortgages, but of nobler things--of men and women who carried
-ideals of life and conduct, of justice and law, into new territory
-where such matters were often lightly valued. The prowler in these
-Western States recognizes constantly the trail of New Englanders who
-founded towns, built schools, colleges, and churches, and left an
-ineffaceable stamp upon communities. Many of us Westerners sincerely
-admire the East and do reverence to Eastern gods when we can sneak
-unobserved into the temples. We dispose of our crops and merchandise as
-quickly as possible, that we may be seen of men in New York. Western
-school-teachers pour into New England every summer on pious pilgrimages
-to Concord and Lexington. And yet we feel ourselves, the great body
-of us, a peculiar people. “Ten days of New York, and it’s me for my
-home town” in Ohio, Indiana, Kansas, or Colorado. This expresses a very
-general feeling in the provinces.
-
-It is far from my purpose to make out a case for the West as the true
-home of the Folks in these newer connotations of that noun, but rather
-to record some of the phenomena observable in those commonwealths where
-we are assured the Folks maintain the only true ark of the covenant
-of democracy. Certain concessions may be assumed in the unconvinced
-spectator whose path lies in less-favored portions of the nation. The
-West does indubitably coax an enormous treasure out of its soil to be
-tossed into the national hopper, and it does exert a profound influence
-upon the national life; but its manner of thought is different: it
-arrives at conclusions by processes that strike the Eastern mind as
-illogical and often as absurd or dangerous. The two great mountain
-ranges are barriers that shut it in a good deal by itself in spite
-of every facility of communication; it is disposed to be scornful of
-the world’s experience where the experience is not a part of its own
-history. It believes that forty years of Illinois or Wisconsin are
-better than a cycle of Cathay, and it is prepared to prove it.
-
-[Illustration: “Ten days of New York, and it’s me for my home town.”]
-
-The West’s philosophy is a compound of Franklin and Emerson, with a
-dash of Whitman. Even Washington is a pale figure behind the Lincoln of
-its own prairies. Its curiosity is insatiable; its mind is speculative;
-it has a supreme confidence that upon an agreed state of facts the
-Folks, sitting as a high court, will hand down to the nation a true
-and just decision upon any matter in controversy. It is a patient
-listener. Seemingly tolerant of false prophets, it amiably gives them
-hearing in thousands of forums while awaiting an opportunity to smother
-their ambitions on election day. It will not, if it knows itself, do
-anything supremely foolish. Flirting with Greenbackism and Free Silver,
-it encourages the assiduous wooers shamelessly and then calmly sends
-them about their business. Maine can approach her election booths as
-coyly as Ohio or Nebraska, and yet the younger States rejoice in the
-knowledge that after all nothing is decided until they have been heard
-from. Politics becomes, therefore, not merely a matter for concern when
-some great contest is forward, but the year round it crowds business
-hard for first place in public affection.
-
-
-II
-
-The people of the Valley of Democracy (I am indebted for this phrase
-to Dr. John H. Finley) do a great deal of thinking and talking; they
-brood over the world’s affairs with a peculiar intensity; and, beyond
-question, they exchange opinions with a greater freedom than their
-fellow citizens in other parts of America. I have travelled between
-Boston and New York on many occasions and have covered most of New
-England in railway journeys without ever being addressed by a stranger;
-but seemingly in the West men travel merely to cultivate the art of
-conversation. The gentleman who borrows your newspaper returns it
-with a crisp comment on the day’s events. He is from Beatrice, or
-Fort Collins, perhaps, and you quickly find that he lives next door
-to the only man you know in his home town. You praise Nebraska, and
-he meets you in a generous spirit of reciprocity and compliments
-Iowa, Minnesota, or any other commonwealth you may honor with your
-citizenship.
-
-The West is proud of its talkers, and is at pains to produce them for
-the edification of the visitor. In Kansas a little while ago my host
-summoned a friend of his from a town eighty miles away that I might
-hear him talk. And it was well worth my while to hear that gentleman
-talk; he is the best talker I have ever heard. He described for me
-great numbers of politicians past and present, limning them with the
-merciless stroke of a skilled caricaturist, or, in a benignant mood,
-presented them in ineffaceable miniature. He knew Kansas as he knew his
-own front yard. It was a delight to listen to discourse so free, so
-graphic in its characterizations, so colored and flavored with the very
-soil. Without impropriety I may state that this gentleman is Mr. Henry
-J. Allen, of the Wichita _Beacon_; the friend who produced him for my
-instruction and entertainment is Mr. William Allen White of the Emporia
-_Gazette_. Since this meeting I have heard Mr. Allen talk on other
-occasions without any feeling that I should modify my estimate of his
-conversational powers. In his most satisfying narrative, “The Martial
-Adventures of Henry and Me,” Mr. White has told how he and Mr. Allen,
-as agents of the Red Cross, bore the good news of the patriotism and
-sympathy of Kansas to England, France, and Italy, and certainly America
-could have sent no more heartening messengers to our allies.
-
-I know of no Western town so small that it doesn’t boast at least one
-wit or story-teller who is exhibited as a special mark of honor for
-the entertainment of guests. As often as not these stars are women,
-who discuss public matters with understanding and brilliancy. The old
-superstition that women are deficient in humor never struck me as
-applicable to American women anywhere; certainly it is not true of
-Western women. In a region where story-telling flourishes, I can match
-the best male anecdotalist with a woman who can evoke mirth by neater
-and defter means.
-
-The Western State is not only a political but a social unit. It is
-like a club, where every one is presumably acquainted with every
-one else. The railroads and interurbans carry an enormous number of
-passengers who are solely upon pleasure bent. The observer is struck
-by the general sociability, the astonishing amount of visiting that
-is in progress. In smoking compartments and in day coaches any one
-who is at all folksy may hear talk that is likely to prove informing
-and stimulating. And this cheeriness and volubility of the people one
-meets greatly enhances the pleasure of travel. Here one is reminded
-constantly of the provincial confidence in the West’s greatness and
-wisdom in every department of human endeavor.
-
-In January of last year it was my privilege to share with seven other
-passengers the smoking-room of a train out of Denver for Kansas
-City. The conversation was opened by a vigorous, elderly gentleman
-who had, he casually remarked, crossed Kansas six times in a wagon.
-He was a native of Illinois, a graduate of Asbury (Depauw) College,
-Indiana, a Civil War veteran, and he had been a member of the Missouri
-Legislature. He lived on a ranch in Colorado, but owned a farm in
-Kansas and was hastening thither to test his acres for oil. The range
-of his adventures was amazing; his acquaintance embraced men of all
-sorts and conditions, including Buffalo Bill, whose funeral he had
-just attended in Denver. He had known General George A. Custer and
-gave us the true story of the massacre of that hero and his command
-on the Little Big Horn. He described the “bad men” of the old days,
-many of whom had honored him with their friendship. At least three of
-the company had enjoyed like experiences and verified or amplified his
-statements. This gentleman remarked with undisguised satisfaction that
-he had not been east of the Mississippi for thirty years!
-
-I fancied that he acquired merit with all the trans-Mississippians
-present by this declaration. However, a young commercial traveller
-who had allowed it to become known that he lived in New York seemed
-surprised, if not pained, by the revelation. As we were passing from
-one dry State to another we fell naturally into a discussion of
-prohibition as a moral and economic factor. The drummer testified to
-its beneficent results in arid territory with which he was familiar;
-one effect had been increased orders from his Colorado customers.
-It was apparent that his hearers listened with approval; they were
-citizens of dry States and it tickled their sense of their own
-rectitude that a pilgrim from the remote East should speak favorably
-of their handiwork. But the young gentleman, warmed by the atmosphere
-of friendliness created by his remarks, was guilty of a grave error of
-judgment.
-
-“It’s all right for these Western towns,” he said, “but you could never
-put it over in New York. New York will never stand for it. London,
-Paris, New York--there’s only one New York!”
-
-The deep sigh with which he concluded, expressive of the most intense
-loyalty, the most poignant homesickness, and perhaps a thirst of long
-accumulation, caused six cigars, firmly set in six pairs of jaws, to
-point disdainfully at the ceiling. No one spoke until the offender had
-betaken himself humbly to bed. The silence was eloquent of pity for one
-so abandoned. That any one privileged to range the cities of the West
-should, there at the edge of the great plain, set New York apart for
-adoration, was too impious, too monstrous, for verbal condemnation.
-
-Young women seem everywhere to be in motion in the West, going home
-from schools, colleges, or the State universities for week-ends, or
-attending social functions in neighboring towns. Last fall I came
-down from Green Bay in a train that was becalmed for several hours
-at Manitowoc. I left the crowded day coach to explore that pleasing
-haven and, returning, found that my seat had been pre-empted by a very
-charming young person who was reading my magazine with the greatest
-absorption. We agreed that the seat offered ample space for two and
-that there was no reason in equity or morals why she should not finish
-the story she had begun. This done, she commented upon it frankly and
-soundly and proceeded to a brisk discussion of literature in general.
-Her range of reading had been wide--indeed, I was embarrassed by its
-extent and impressed by the shrewdness of her literary appraisements.
-She was bound for a normal school where she was receiving instruction,
-not for the purpose of entering into the pedagogical life immediately,
-but to obtain a teacher’s license against a time when it might become
-necessary for her to earn a livelihood. Every girl, she believed,
-should fit herself for some employment.
-
-Manifestly she was not a person to ask favors of destiny: at eighteen
-she had already made terms with life and tossed the contract upon the
-knees of the gods. The normal school did not require her presence until
-the day after to-morrow, and she was leaving the train at the end of
-an hour to visit a friend who had arranged a dance in her honor. If
-that species of entertainment interested me, she said, I might stop for
-the dance. Engagements farther down the line precluded the possibility
-of my accepting this invitation, which was extended with the utmost
-circumspection, as though she were offering an impersonal hospitality
-supported by the sovereign dignity of the commonwealth of Wisconsin.
-When the train slowed down at her station a commotion on the platform
-announced the presence of a reception committee of considerable
-magnitude, from which I inferred that her advent was an incident of
-importance to the community. As she bade me good-by she tore apart a
-bouquet of fall flowers she had been carrying, handed me half of them,
-and passed from my sight forever. My exalted opinion of the young women
-of Wisconsin was strengthened on another occasion by a chance meeting
-with two graduates of the State University who were my fellow voyagers
-on a steamer that bumped into a riotous hurricane on its way down Lake
-Michigan. On the slanting deck they discoursed of political economy
-with a zest and humor that greatly enlivened my respect for the dismal
-science.
-
-The listener in the West accumulates data touching the tastes and
-ambitions of the people of which local guide-books offer no hint. A
-little while ago two ladies behind me in a Minneapolis street-car
-discussed Cardinal Newman’s “Dream of Gerontius,” with as much avidity
-as though it were the newest novel. Having found that the apostles
-of free verse had captured and fortified Denver and Omaha, it was a
-relief to encounter these Victorian pickets on the upper waters of the
-Mississippi.
-
-
-III
-
-One is struck by the remarkable individuality of the States, towns, and
-cities of the West. State boundaries are not merely a geographical
-expression: they mark real differences of opinion, habit, custom, and
-taste. This is not a sentimental idea; any one may prove it for himself
-by crossing from Illinois into Wisconsin, or from Iowa into Nebraska.
-Kansas and Nebraska, though cut out of the same piece, not only seem
-different but they _are_ different. Interest in local differentiations,
-in shadings of the “color” derived from a common soil, keep the visitor
-alert. To be sure the Ladies of the Lakes--Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit,
-Milwaukee, Toledo, Duluth--have physical aspects in common, but the
-similarity ends there. The literature of chambers of commerce as to the
-number of freight-cars handled or increases of population are of no
-assistance in a search for the causes of diversities in aim, spirit,
-and achievement.
-
-The alert young cities watch each other enviously--they are enormously
-proud and anxious not to be outbettered in the struggle for perfection.
-In many places one is conscious of an effective leadership, of a man
-or a group of men and women who plant a target and rally the citizenry
-to play for the bull’s-eye. A conspicuous instance of successful
-individual leadership is offered by Kansas City, where Mr. William R.
-Nelson, backed by his admirable newspaper, _The Star_, fought to the
-end of his life to make his city a better place to live in. Mr. Nelson
-was a remarkably independent and courageous spirit, his journalistic
-ideals were the highest, and he was deeply concerned for the public
-welfare, not only in the more obvious sense, but equally in bringing
-within the common reach enlightening influences that are likely to be
-neglected in new communities. Kansas City not only profited by Mr.
-Nelson’s wisdom and generosity in his lifetime, but the community will
-receive ultimately his entire fortune. I am precluded from citing in
-other cities men still living who are distinguished by a like devotion
-to public service, but I have chosen Mr. Nelson as an eminent example
-of the force that may be wielded by a single citizen.
-
-Minneapolis offers a happy refutation of a well-established notion that
-a second generation is prone to show a weakened fibre. The sons of the
-men who fashioned this vigorous city have intelligently and generously
-supported many undertakings of highest value. The Minneapolis art
-museum and school and an orchestra of widening reputation present
-eloquent testimony to the city’s attitude toward those things that
-are more excellent. Contrary to the usual history, these were not
-won as the result of laborious effort but rose spontaneously. The
-public library of this city not only serves the hurried business man
-through a branch in the business district, equipped with industrial
-and commercial reference books, but keeps pace with the local
-development in art and music by assembling the best literature in these
-departments. Both Minneapolis and Kansas City are well advertised by
-their admirably managed, progressive libraries. More may be learned
-from a librarian as to the trend of thought in his community than from
-the secretary of a commercial body. It is significant that last year,
-when municipal affairs were much to the fore in Kansas City, there was
-a marked increase in the use of books on civic and kindred questions.
-The latest report of the librarian recites that “as the library more
-nearly meets the wants of the community, the proportion of fiction used
-grows less, being but 34 per cent of the whole issue for the year.”
-Similar impulses and achievements are manifested in Cleveland, a city
-that has written many instructive chapters in the history of municipal
-government. Since her exposition of 1904 and the splendid pageant
-of 1914 crystallized public aspiration, St. Louis has experienced
-a new birth of civic pride. Throughout the West American art has
-found cordial support. In Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Cincinnati,
-Indianapolis, St. Louis, Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha, and Kansas City
-there are noteworthy specimens of the best work of American painters.
-The art schools connected with the Western museums have exercised a
-salutary influence in encouraging local talent, not only in landscape
-and portraiture, but in industrial designing.
-
-By friendly co-operation on the part of Chicago and St. Louis smaller
-cities are able to enjoy advantages that would otherwise be beyond
-their reach. Lectures, orchestras, and travelling art exhibits that
-formerly stopped at Chicago or jumped thence to California, now find a
-hearty welcome in Kansas City, Omaha, and Denver. Thus Indianapolis was
-among the few cities that shared a few years ago in the comprehensive
-presentation of Saint Gaudens’s work. The expense of the undertaking
-was not inconsiderable, but merchants and manufacturers bought tickets
-for distribution among their employees and met the demand with a
-generosity that left a balance in the art association’s treasury. These
-Western cities, with their political and social problems, their rough
-edges, smoke, and impudent intrusions of tracks and chimneys due to
-rapid development and phenomenal prosperity, present art literally as
-the handmaiden of industry--
-
-  “All-lovely Art, stern Labor’s fair-haired child.”
-
-If any one thing is quite definitely settled throughout this territory
-it is that yesterday’s leaves have been plucked from the calendar:
-this verily is the land of to-morrow. One does not stand beside the
-Missouri at Omaha and indulge long in meditations upon the turbulent
-history and waywardness of that tawny stream; the cattle receipts
-for the day may have broken all records, but there are schools that
-must be seen, a collection of pictures to visit, or lectures to
-attend. I unhesitatingly pronounce Omaha the lecture centre of the
-world--reception committees flutter at the arrival of all trains.
-Man does not live by bread alone--not even in the heart of the corn
-belt in a city that haughtily proclaims itself the largest primary
-butter-market in the world! It is the great concern of Kansas that
-it shall miss nothing; to cross that commonwealth is to gain the
-impression that politics and corn are hard pressed as its main
-industries by the cultural mechanisms that produce sweetness and light.
-Iowa goes to bed early but not before it has read an improving book!
-
-[Illustration: Art exhibits ... now find a hearty welcome.]
-
-In those Western States where women have assumed the burden of
-citizenship they seem to lose none of their zeal for art, literature,
-and music. Equal suffrage was established in Colorado in 1893,
-and the passing pilgrim cannot fail to be struck by the lack of
-self-consciousness with which the women of that State discuss social
-and political questions. The Western woman is animated by a divine
-energy and she is distinguished by her willingness to render public
-service. What man neglects or ignores she cheerfully undertakes, and
-she has so cultivated the gentle art of persuasion that the masculine
-check-book opens readily to her demand for assistance in her pet causes.
-
-It must not be assumed that in this land of pancakes and panaceas
-interest in “culture” is new or that its manifestations are sporadic or
-ill-directed. The early comers brought with them sufficient cultivation
-to leaven the lump, and the educational forces and cultural movements
-now everywhere marked in Western communities are but the fruition
-of the labors of the pioneers who bore books of worth and a love of
-learning with them into the wilderness. Much sound reading was done in
-log cabins when the school-teacher was still a rarity, and amid the
-strenuous labors of the earliest days many sought self-expression in
-various kinds of writing. Along the Ohio there were bards in abundance,
-and a decade before the Civil War Cincinnati had honest claims to being
-a literary centre. The numerous poets of those days--Coggeshall’s
-“Poets and Poetry of the West,” published in 1866, mentions one hundred
-and fifty-two!--were chiefly distinguished by their indifference to the
-life that lay nearest them. Sentiment and sentimentalism flourished
-at a time when life was a hard business, though Edward Eggleston is
-entitled to consideration as an early realist, by reason of “The
-Hoosier Schoolmaster,” which, in spite of Indiana’s repudiation of it
-as false and defamatory, really contains a true picture of conditions
-with which Eggleston was thoroughly familiar. There followed later E.
-W. Howe’s “The Story of a Country Town” and Hamlin Garland’s “Main
-Travelled Roads,” which are landmarks of realism firmly planted in
-territory invaded later by Romance, bearing the blithe flag of Zenda.
-
-It is not surprising that the Mississippi valley should prove far more
-responsive to the chimes of romance than to the harsh clang of realism.
-The West in itself is a romance. Virginia’s claims to recognition as
-the chief field of tourney for romance in America totter before the
-history of a vast area whose soberest chronicles are enlivened by
-the most inthralling adventures and a long succession of picturesque
-characters. The French voyageur, on his way from Canada by lake and
-river to clasp hands with his kinsmen of the lower Mississippi; the
-American pioneers, with their own heroes--George Rogers Clark, “Mad
-Anthony” Wayne, and “Tippecanoe” Harrison; the soldiers of Indian wars
-and their sons who fought in Mexico in the forties; the men who donned
-the blue in the sixties; the Knights of the Golden Circle, who kept the
-war governors anxious in the border States--these are all disclosed
-upon a tapestry crowded with romantic strife and stress.
-
-The earliest pioneers, enjoying little intercourse with their fellows,
-had time to fashion many a tale of personal adventure against the
-coming of a visitor, or for recital on court days, at political
-meetings, or at the prolonged “camp meetings,” where questions of
-religion were debated. They cultivated unconsciously the art of
-telling their stories well. The habit of story-telling grew into a
-social accomplishment and it was by a natural transition that here
-and there some one began to set down his tales on paper. Thus General
-Lew Wallace, who lived in the day of great story-tellers, wrote “The
-Fair God,” a romance of the coming of Cortez to Mexico, and followed
-it with “Ben Hur,” one of the most popular romances ever written.
-Crawfordsville, the Hoosier county-seat where General Wallace lived,
-was once visited and its romanticism menaced by Mr. Howells, who sought
-local color for the court scene in “A Modern Instance,” his novel
-of divorce. Indiana was then a place where legal separations were
-obtainable by convenient processes relinquished later to Nevada.
-
-Maurice Thompson and his brother Will, who wrote “The High Tide at
-Gettysburg,” sent out from Crawfordsville the poems and sketches that
-made archery a popular amusement in the seventies. The Thompsons, both
-practising lawyers, employed their leisure in writing and in hunting
-with the bow and arrow. “The Witchery of Archery” and “Songs of Fair
-Weather” still retain their pristine charm. That two young men in an
-Indiana country town should deliberately elect to live in the days of
-the Plantagenets speaks for the romantic atmosphere of the Hoosier
-commonwealth. A few miles away James Whitcomb Riley had already begun
-to experiment with a lyre of a different sort, and quickly won for
-himself a place in popular affection shared only among American poets
-by Longfellow. Almost coincident with his passing rose Edgar Lee
-Masters, with the “Spoon River Anthology,” and Vachel Lindsay, a poet
-hardly less distinguished for penetration and sincerity, to chant of
-Illinois in the key of realism. John G. Niehardt has answered their
-signals from Nebraska’s corn lands. Nor shall I omit from the briefest
-list the “Chicago Poems” of Carl Sandburg. The “wind stacker” and the
-tractor are dangerous engines for Romance to charge: I should want
-Mr. Booth Tarkington to umpire so momentous a contest. Mr. Tarkington
-flirts shamelessly with realism and has shown in “The Turmoil” that he
-can slip overalls and jumper over the sword and ruffles of Beaucaire
-and make himself a knight of industry. Likewise, in Chicago, Mr.
-Henry B. Fuller has posted the Chevalier Pensieri-Vani on the steps
-of the board of trade, merely, we may assume, to collect material
-for realistic fiction. The West has proved that it is not afraid of
-its own shadow in the adumbrations of Mrs. Mary A. Watts, Mr. Robert
-Herrick, Miss Willa Sibert Cather, Mr. William Allen White, and Mr.
-Brand Whitlock, all novelists of insight, force, and authority; nor may
-we forget that impressive tale of Chicago, Frank Norris’s “The Pit,” a
-work that gains in dignity and significance with the years.
-
-Education in all the Western States has not merely performed its
-traditional functions, but has become a distinct social and economic
-force. It is a far cry from the day of the three R’s and the dictum
-that the State’s duty to the young ends when it has eliminated them
-from the illiteracy columns of the census to the State universities
-and agricultural colleges, with their broad curricula and extension
-courses, and the free kindergartens, the manual-training high schools,
-and vocational institutions that are socializing and democratizing
-education.
-
-
-IV
-
-In every town of the great Valley there are groups of people earnestly
-engaged in determined efforts to solve governmental problems. These
-efforts frequently broaden into “movements” that succeed. We witness
-here constant battles for reform that are often won only to be lost
-again. The bosses, driven out at one point, immediately rally and
-fortify another. Nothing, however, is pleasanter to record than the
-fact that the war upon vicious or stupid local government goes steadily
-on and that throughout the field under scrutiny there have been
-within a decade marked and encouraging gains. The many experiments
-making with administrative devices are rapidly developing a mass of
-valuable data. The very lack of uniformity in these movements adds to
-their interest; in countless communities the attention is arrested
-by something well done that invites emulation. Constant scandals in
-municipal administration, due to incompetence, waste, and graft, are
-slowly penetrating to the consciousness of the apathetic citizen, and
-sentiment favorable to the abandonment of the old system of partisan
-local government has grown with remarkable rapidity. The absolute
-divorcement of municipalities from State and national politics is
-essential to the conduct of city government on business principles.
-This statement is made with the more confidence from the fact that it
-is reinforced by a creditable literature on the subject, illustrated
-by countless surveys of boss-ridden cities where there is determined
-protest against government by the unfit. That cities shall be conducted
-as stock companies with reference solely to the rights and needs of
-the citizen, without regard to party politics, is the demand in so
-many quarters that the next decade is bound to witness striking
-transformations in this field. Last March Kansas City lost a splendidly
-conducted fight for a new charter that embraced the city-manager plan.
-Here, however, was a defeat with honor, for the results proved so
-conclusively the contention of the reformers, that the bosses rule,
-that the effort was not wasted. In Chicago, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and
-Minneapolis, the leaven is at work, and the bosses with gratifying
-density are aiding the cause by their hostility and their constant
-illustration of the evils of the antiquated system they foster.
-
-The elimination of the saloon in States that have already adopted
-prohibition promises political changes of the utmost importance in
-municipal affairs. The saloon is the most familiar and the most
-mischievous of all the outposts and rallying centres of political
-venality. Here the political “organization” maintains its faithful
-sentinels throughout the year; the good citizen, intent upon his lawful
-business and interested in politics only when election day approaches,
-is usually unaware that hundreds of barroom loafers are constantly
-plotting against him. The mounting “dry wave” is attributable quite as
-much to revolt against the saloon as the most formidable of political
-units as to a moral detestation of alcohol. Economic considerations
-also have entered very deeply into the movement, and prohibition
-advocated as a war measure developed still another phase. The liquor
-interests provoked and invited the drastic legislation that has
-overwhelmed their traffic and made dry territory of a large area
-of the West. By defying regulatory laws and maintaining lobbies in
-legislatures, by cracking the whip over candidates and office-holders,
-they made of themselves an intolerable nuisance. Indiana’s adoption of
-prohibition was very largely due to antagonism aroused by the liquor
-interests through their political activities covering half a century.
-The frantic efforts of breweries and distilleries there and in many
-other States to persuade saloon-keepers to obey the laws in the hope of
-spiking the guns of the opposition came too late. The liquor interests
-had counselled and encouraged lawlessness too long and found the
-retailer spoiled by the immunity their old political power had gained
-for him.
-
-A sweeping Federal law abolishing the traffic may be enacted while
-these pages are on the press.[A] Without such a measure wet and dry
-forces will continue to battle; territory that is only partly dry
-will continue its struggle for bone-dry laws, and States that roped
-and tied John Barleycorn must resist attempts to put him on his feet
-again. There is, however, nothing to encourage the idea that the
-strongly developed sentiment against the saloon will lose its potency;
-and it is hardly conceivable that any political party in a dry State
-will write a wet plank into its platform, though stranger things have
-happened. Men who, in Colorado for example, were bitterly hostile to
-prohibition confess that the results convince them of its efficacy. The
-Indiana law became effective last April, and in June the workhouse at
-Indianapolis was closed permanently, for the interesting reason that
-the number of police-court prisoners was so reduced as to make the
-institution unnecessary.
-
-The economic shock caused by the prostration of this long-established
-business is absorbed much more readily than might be imagined. Compared
-with other forms of manufacturing, brewing and distilling have been
-enormously profitable, and the operators have usually taken care of
-themselves in advance of the destruction of their business. I passed
-a brewery near Denver that had turned its attention to the making
-of “near” beer and malted milk, and employed a part of its labor
-otherwise in the manufacture of pottery. The presence of a herd of
-cows on the brewery property to supply milk, for combination with malt,
-marked, with what struck me as the pleasantest of ironies, a cheerful
-acquiescence in the new order. Denver property rented formerly to
-saloon-keepers I found pretty generally occupied by shops of other
-kinds. In one window was this alluring sign:
-
-  BUY YOUR SHOES
-  WHERE YOU BOUGHT YOUR BOOZE
-
-
-V
-
-The West’s general interest in public affairs is not remarkable when
-we consider the history of the Valley. The pioneers who crossed the
-Alleghanies with rifle and axe were peculiarly jealous of their rights
-and liberties. They viewed every political measure in the light of
-its direct, concrete bearing upon themselves. They risked much to
-build homes and erect States in the wilderness and they insisted, not
-unreasonably, that the government should not forget them in their
-exile. Poverty enforced a strict watch upon public expenditures, and
-their personal security entered largely into their attitude toward the
-nation. Their own imperative needs, the thinly distributed population,
-apprehensions created by the menace of Indians, stubbornly hostile to
-the white man’s encroachments--all contributed to a certain selfishness
-in the settlers’ point of view, and they welcomed political leaders
-who advocated measures that promised relief and protection. As they
-listened to the pleas of candidates from the stump (a rostrum fashioned
-by their own axes!) they were intensely critical. Moreover, the
-candidate himself was subjected to searching scrutiny. Government,
-to these men of faith and hardihood, was a very personal thing: the
-leaders they chose to represent them were in the strictest sense
-their representatives and agents, whom they retired on very slight
-provocation.
-
-The sharp projection of the extension of slavery as an issue served
-to awaken and crystallize national feeling. Education, internal
-improvements to the accompaniment of wildcat finance, reforms in State
-and county governments, all yielded before the greater issue. The
-promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness had led the
-venturous husbandmen into woods and prairies, and they viewed with
-abhorrence the idea that one man might own another and enjoy the fruits
-of his labor. Lincoln was not more the protagonist of a great cause
-than the personal spokesman of a body of freemen who were attracted
-to his standard by the facts of his history that so largely paralleled
-their own.
-
-It is not too much to say that Lincoln and the struggle of which he was
-the leader roused the Middle West to its first experience of a national
-consciousness. The provincial spirit vanished in an hour before the
-beat of drums under the elms and maples of court-house yards. The
-successful termination of the war left the West the possessor of a new
-influence in national affairs. It had not only thrown into the conflict
-its full share of armed strength but had sent Grant, Sherman, and many
-military stars of lesser magnitude flashing into the firmament. The
-West was thenceforth to be reckoned with in all political speculations.
-Lincoln was the precursor of a line of Presidents all of whom were
-soldiers: Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Harrison, McKinley; and there was no
-marked disturbance in the old order until Mr. Cleveland’s advent in
-1884, with a resulting flare of independence not wholly revealed in the
-elections following his three campaigns.
-
-My concern here is not with partisan matters, nor even with those
-internal upheavals that in the past have caused so much heartache to
-the shepherds of both of the major political flocks. With only the
-greatest delicacy may one refer to the Democratic schism of 1896 or to
-the break in the Republican ranks of 1912. But the purposes and aims
-of the Folks with respect to government are of national importance.
-The Folks are not at all disposed to relinquish the power in national
-affairs which they have wielded with growing effectiveness. No matter
-whether they are right or wrong in their judgments, they are far from
-being a negligible force, and forecasters of nominees and policies for
-the future do well to give heed to them.
-
-The trend toward social democracy, with its accompanying eagerness
-to experiment with new devices for confiding to the people the power
-of initiating legislation and expelling unsatisfactory officials,
-paralleled by another tendency toward the short ballot and the
-concentration of power--these and kindred tendencies are viewed
-best in a non-partisan spirit in those free Western airs where the
-electorate is fickle, coy, and hard to please. A good deal of what was
-called populism twenty years ago, and associated in the minds of the
-contumelious with long hair and whiskers, was advocated in 1912 by
-gentlemen who called themselves Progressives and were on good terms
-with the barber. In the Progressive convention of 1916 I was struck
-by the great number of Phi Beta Kappa keys worn by delegates and
-sympathetic spectators. If they were cranks they were educated cranks,
-who could not be accused of ignorance of the teachings of experience in
-their political cogitations. They were presumably acquainted with the
-history of republics from the beginning of time, and the philosophy to
-be deduced from their disasters. It was because the Progressive party
-enlisted so many very capable politicians familiar with organization
-methods that it became a formidable rival of the old parties in 1912.
-In 1916 it lost most of these supporters, who saw hope of Republican
-success and were anxious to ride on the band-wagon. Nothing, however,
-could be more reassuring than the confidence in the people, _i. e._,
-the Folks manifested by men and women who know their Plato and are
-familiar with Isaiah’s distrust of the crowd and his reliance upon the
-remnant.
-
-The isolation of the independent who belongs to no organization and is
-unaware of the number of voters who share his sentiments, militates
-against his effectiveness as a protesting factor. He waits timidly in
-the dark for a flash that will guide him toward some more courageous
-brother. The American is the most self-conscious being on earth and he
-is loath to set himself apart to be pointed out as a crank, for in
-partisan camps all recalcitrants are viewed contemptuously as erratic
-and dangerous persons. It has been demonstrated that a comparatively
-small number of voters in half a dozen Western States, acting together,
-can throw a weight into the scale that will defeat one or the other
-of the chief candidates for the presidency. If they should content
-themselves with an organization and, without nominating candidates,
-menace either side that aroused their hostility, their effectiveness
-would be increased. But here again we encounter that peculiarity of
-the American that he likes a crowd. He is so used to the spectacular
-demonstrations of great campaigns, and so enjoys the thunder of the
-captains and the shouting, that he is overcome by loneliness when he
-finds himself at small conferences that plot the overthrow of the party
-of his former allegiance.
-
-The West may be likened to a naughty boy in a hickory shirt and
-overalls who enjoys pulling the chair from under his knickerbockered,
-Eton-collared Eastern cousins. The West creates a new issue whenever
-it pleases, and wearying of one plaything cheerfully seeks another. It
-accepts the defeat of free silver and turns joyfully to prohibition,
-flattering itself that its chief concern is with moral issues. It
-wants to make the world a better place to live in and it believes in
-abundant legislation to that end. It experiments by States, points with
-pride to the results, and seeks to confer the priceless boon upon the
-nation. Much of its lawmaking is shocking to Eastern conservatism, but
-no inconsiderable number of Easterners hear the window-smashing and are
-eager to try it at home.
-
-To spank the West and send it supperless to bed is a very large order,
-but I have conversed with gentlemen on the Eastern seaboard who feel
-that this should be done. They go the length of saying that if this
-chastisement is neglected the republic will perish. Of course, the
-West doesn’t want the republic to perish; it honestly believes itself
-preordained of all time to preserve the republic. It sits up o’ nights
-to consider ways and means of insuring its preservation. It is very
-serious and doesn’t at all like being chaffed about its hatred of Wall
-Street and its anxiety to pin annoying tick-tacks on the windows of
-ruthless corporations. It is going to get everything for the Folks
-that it can, and it sees nothing improper in the idea of State-owned
-elevators or of fixing by law the height of the heels on the slippers
-of its emancipated women. It is in keeping with the cheery contentment
-of the West that it believes that it has “at home” or can summon to its
-R. F. D. box everything essential to human happiness.
-
-Across this picture of ease, contentment, and complacency fell the
-cloud of war. What I am attempting is a record of transition, and
-I have set down the foregoing with a consciousness that our recent
-yesterdays already seem remote; that many things that were true only a
-few months ago are now less true, though it is none the less important
-that we remember them. It is my hope that what I shall say of that
-period to which we are even now referring as “before the war” may
-serve to emphasize the sharpness of America’s new confrontations and
-the yielding, for a time at least, of the pride of sectionalism to the
-higher demands of nationality.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER II
-
-TYPES AND DIVERSIONS
-
-
-  “O I see flashing that this America is only you and me,
-  Its power, weapons, testimony, are you and me,
-  Its crimes, lies, thefts, defections, are you and me,
-  Its Congress is you and me, the officers, capitols, armies, ships,
-    are you and me,
-  Its endless gestations of new States are you and me,
-  The war (that war so bloody and grim, the war I will henceforth
-    forget), was you and me,
-  Natural and artificial are you and me,
-  Freedom, language, poems, employments, are you and me,
-  Past, present, future, are you and me.”
-
-                                                                WHITMAN.
-
-
-I
-
-At the end of a week spent in a Middle Western city a visitor from the
-East inquired wearily: “Does no one work in this town?” The answer to
-such a question is that of course everybody works; the town boasts no
-man of leisure; but on occasions the citizens play, and the advent of
-any properly certified guest affords a capital excuse for a period of
-intensified sociability. “Welcome” is writ large over the gates of all
-Western cities--literally in letters of fire at railway-stations.
-Approaching a town the motorist finds himself courteously welcomed
-and politely requested to respect the local speed law, and as he
-departs a sign at the postern thanks him and urges his return. The
-Western town is distinguished as much by its generous hospitality
-as by its enterprise, its firm purpose to develop new territory and
-widen its commercial influence. The visitor is bewildered by the
-warmth with which he is seized and scheduled for a round of exhausting
-festivities. He may enjoy all the delights that attend the triumphal
-tour of a débutante launched upon a round of visits to the girls she
-knew in school or college; and he will be conscious of a sincerity,
-a real pride and joy in his presence, that warms his heart to the
-community. Passing on from one town to another, say from Cincinnati to
-Cleveland, from Kansas City to Denver, from Omaha to Minneapolis, he
-finds that news of his approach has preceded him. The people he has
-met at his last stopping-place have wired everybody they know at the
-next point in his itinerary to be on the lookout for him, and he finds
-that instead of entering a strange port there are friends--veritable
-friends--awaiting him. If by chance he escapes the eye of the reception
-committee and enters himself on the books of an inn, he is interrupted
-in his unpacking by offers of lodging in the homes of people he never
-saw before.
-
-There is no other region in America where so much history has been
-crowded into so brief a period, where young commonwealths so quickly
-attained political power and influence as in the Middle West; but
-the founding of States and the establishment of law is hardly more
-interesting than the transfer to the wilderness of the dignities and
-amenities of life. From the verandas of country clubs or handsome
-villas scattered along the Great Lakes, one may almost witness the
-receding pageant of discovery and settlement. In Wisconsin and Michigan
-the golfer in search of an elusive ball has been known to stumble upon
-an arrow-head, a significant reminder of the newness of the land; and
-the motorist flying across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois sees log cabins
-that survive from the earliest days, many of them still occupied.
-
-Present comfort and luxury are best viewed against a background of
-pioneer life; at least the sense of things hoped for and realized in
-these plains is more impressive as one ponders the self-sacrifice and
-heroism by which the soil was conquered and peopled. The friendliness,
-the eagerness to serve that are so charming and winning in the West
-date from those times when one who was not a good neighbor was a
-potential enemy. Social life was largely dependent upon exigencies that
-brought the busy pioneers together, to cut timber, build homes, add a
-barn to meet growing needs, or to assist in “breaking” new acres. The
-women, eagerly seizing every opportunity to vary the monotony of their
-lonely lives, gathered with the men, and while the axes swung in the
-woodland or the plough turned up the new soil, held a quilting, spun
-flax, made clothing, or otherwise assisted the hostess to get ahead
-with her never-ending labors. To-day, throughout the broad valley
-the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the pioneers ply the
-tennis-racket and dance in country club-houses beside lakes and rivers
-where their forebears drove the plough or swung the axe all day, and
-rode miles to dance on a puncheon floor. There was marrying and giving
-in marriage; children were born and “raised” amid conditions that cause
-one to smile at the child-welfare and “better-baby” societies of these
-times. The affections were deepened by the close union of the family in
-the intimate association of common tasks. Here, indeed, was a practical
-application of the dictum of one for all and all for one.
-
-The lines of contact between isolated clearings and meagre settlements
-were never wholly broken. Months might pass without a household seeing
-a strange face, but always some one was on the way--an itinerant
-missionary, a lost hunter, a pioneer looking for a new field to
-conquer. Motoring at ease through the country, one marvels at the
-journeys accomplished when blazed trails were the only highways. A
-pioneer railroad-builder once told me of a pilgrimage he made on
-horseback from northern Indiana to the Hermitage in Tennessee to meet
-Old Hickory face to face. Jackson had captivated his boyish fancy and
-this arduous journey was a small price to pay for the honor of viewing
-the hero on his own acres. I may add that this gentleman achieved his
-centennial, remaining a steadfast adherent of Jacksonian democracy to
-the end of his life. Once I accompanied him to the polls and he donned
-a silk hat for the occasion, as appropriate to the dignified exercise
-of his franchise.
-
-There was a distinct type of restless, adventurous pioneer who liked
-to keep a little ahead of civilization; who found that he could not
-breathe freely when his farm, acquainted for only a few years with
-the plough, became the centre of a neighborhood. Men of this sort
-persuaded themselves that there was better land to be had farther
-on, though, more or less consciously, it was freedom they craved.
-The exodus of the Lincolns from Kentucky through Indiana, where they
-lingered fourteen years before seeking a new home in Illinois, is
-typical of the pioneer restlessness. In a day when the effects of
-a household could be moved in one wagon and convoyed by the family
-on horseback, these transitions were undertaken with the utmost
-light-heartedness. Only a little while ago I heard a woman of eighty
-describe her family’s removal from Kentucky to Illinois, a wide détour
-being made that they might visit a distant relative in central Indiana.
-This, from her recital, must have been the jolliest of excursions, for
-the children at least, with the daily experiences of fording streams,
-the constant uncertainties as to the trail, and the camping out in the
-woods when no cabin offered shelter.
-
-It was a matter of pride with the housewife to make generous provision
-for “company,” and the pioneer annalists dwell much upon the good
-provender of those days, when venison and wild turkeys were to be
-had for the killing and corn pone or dodger was the only bread.
-The reputation of being a good cook was quite as honorable as
-that of being a successful farmer or a lucky hunter. The Princeton
-University Press has lately resurrected and republished “The New
-Purchase,” by Baynard Rush Hall, a graduate of Union College and of
-Princeton Theological Seminary, one of the raciest and most amusing
-of mid-Western chronicles. Hall sought “a life of poetry and romance
-amid the rangers of the wood,” and in 1823 became principal of Indiana
-Seminary, the precursor of the State University. Having enjoyed an
-ampler experience of life than his neighbors, he was able to view the
-pioneers with a degree of detachment, though sympathetically.
-
-No other contemporaneous account of the social life of the period
-approaches this for fulness; certainly none equals it in humor. The
-difficulties of transportation, the encompassing wilderness all but
-impenetrable, the oddities of frontier character, the simple menage
-of the pioneer, his food, and the manner of its preparation, and the
-general social spectacle, are described by a master reporter. One of
-his best chapters is devoted to a wedding and the subsequent feast,
-where a huge potpie was the pièce de résistance. He estimates that at
-least six hens, two chanticleers, and four pullets were lodged in this
-doughy sepulchre, which was encircled by roast wild turkeys “stuffed”
-with Indian meal and sausages. Otherwise there were fried venison,
-fried turkey, fried chicken, fried duck, fried pork, and, he adds, “for
-anything I knew, even fried leather!”
-
-
-II
-
-The pioneer adventure in the trans-Mississippi States differed
-materially from that of the timbered areas of the old Northwest
-Territory. I incline to the belief that the forest primeval had a
-socializing effect upon those who first dared its fastnesses, binding
-the lonely pioneers together by mysterious ties which the open plain
-lacked. The Southern infusion in the States immediately north of
-the Ohio undoubtedly influenced the early social life greatly. The
-Kentuckian, for example, carried his passion for sociability into
-Indiana, and pages of pioneer history in the Hoosier State might have
-been lifted bodily from Kentucky chronicles, so similar is their
-flavor. The Kentuckian was always essentially social; he likes “the
-swarm,” remarks Mr. James Lane Allen. To seek a contrast, the early
-social picture in Kansas is obscured by the fury of the battle over
-slavery that dominates the foreground. Other States fought Indians and
-combated hunger, survived malaria, brimstone and molasses and calomel,
-and kept in good humor, but the settlement of Kansas was attended
-with battle, murder, and sudden death. The pioneers of the Northwest
-Territory began life in amiable accord with their neighbors; Kansas
-gained Statehood after a bitter war with her sister Missouri, though
-the contest may not be viewed as a local disturbance, but as a “curtain
-raiser” for the drama of the Civil War. When in the strenuous fifties
-Missouri undertook to colonize the Kansas plains with pro-slavery
-sympathizers, New England rose in majesty to protest. She not only
-protested vociferously but sent colonies to hold the plain against the
-invaders. Life in the Kansas of those years of strife was unrelieved
-by any gayeties. One searches in vain for traces of the comfort and
-cheer that are a part of the tradition of the settlement of the Ohio
-valley States. Professor Spring, in his history of Kansas, writes:
-“For amusement the settlers were left entirely to their own resources.
-Lectures, concert troupes, and shows never ventured far into the
-wilderness. Yet there was much broad, rollicking, noisy merrymaking,
-but it must be confessed that rum and whiskey--lighter liquors like
-wine and beer could not be obtained--had a good deal to do with it....
-Schools, churches, and the various appliances of older civilization got
-under way and made some growth; but they were still in a primitive,
-inchoate condition when Kansas took her place in the Union.”
-
-There is hardly another American State in which the social organization
-may be observed as readily as in Kansas. For the reason that its
-history and the later “social scene” constitute so compact a picture
-I find myself returning to it frequently for illustrations and
-comparisons. Born amid tribulation, having indeed been subjected to the
-ordeal of fire, Kansas marks Puritanism’s farthest west; her people
-are still proud to call their State “The Child of Plymouth Rock.” The
-New Englanders who settled the northeastern part of the Territory were
-augmented after the Civil War by men of New England stock who had
-established themselves in Ohio, Illinois, and Iowa when the war began,
-and having acquired soldiers’ homestead rights made use of them to
-pre-empt land in the younger commonwealth. The influx of veterans after
-Appomattox sealed the right of Kansas to be called a typical American
-State. “Kansas sent practically every able-bodied man of military age
-to the Civil War,” says Mr. William Allen White, “and when they came
-back literally hundreds of thousands of other soldiers came with them
-and took homesteads.” For thirty years after Kansas attained Statehood
-her New Englanders were a dominating factor in her development,
-and their influence is still clearly perceptible. The State may be
-considered almost as one vast plantation, peopled by industrious,
-aspiring men and women. Class distinctions are little known; snobbery,
-where it exists, hides itself to avoid ridicule; the State abounds in
-the “comfortably well off” and the “well-to-do”; millionaires are few
-and well tamed; every other family boasts an automobile.
-
-While the political and economic results of the Civil War have been
-much written of, its influence upon the common relationships of life
-in the border States that it so profoundly affected are hardly less
-interesting. The pioneer period was becoming a memory, the conditions
-of life had grown comfortable, and there was ease in Zion when the
-young generation met a new demand upon their courage. Many were
-permanently lifted out of the sphere to which they were born and
-thrust forth into new avenues of opportunity. This was not of course
-peculiar to the West, though in the Mississippi valley the effects
-were so closely intermixed with those of the strenuous post-bellum
-political history that they are indelibly written into the record.
-Local hostilities aroused by the conflict were of long duration; the
-copperhead was never forgiven for his disloyalty; it is remembered to
-this day against his descendants. Men who, in all likelihood, would
-have died in obscurity but for the changes and chances of war rose to
-high position. The most conspicuous of such instances is afforded by
-Grant, whose circumstances and prospects were the poorest when Fame
-flung open her doors to him.
-
-Nothing pertaining to the war of the sixties impresses the student
-more than the rapidity with which reputations were made or lost or
-the effect upon the participants of their military experiences. From
-farms, shops, and offices men were flung into the most stirring
-scenes the nation had known. They emerged with the glory of battle
-upon them to become men of mark in their communities, wearing a new
-civic and social dignity. It would be interesting to know how many
-of the survivors attained civil office as the reward of their valor;
-in the Western States I should say that few escaped some sort of
-recognition on the score of their military services. In the city
-that I know best of all, where for three decades at least the most
-distinguished citizens--certainly the most respected and honored--were
-veterans of the Civil War, it has always seemed to me remarkable and
-altogether reassuring as proof that we need never fear the iron collar
-of militarism, that those men of the sixties so quickly readjusted
-themselves in peaceful occupations. There were those who capitalized
-their military achievements, but the vast number had gone to war from
-the highest patriotic motives and, having done their part, were glad to
-be quit of it. The shifting about and the new social experiences were
-responsible for many romances. Men met and married women of whose very
-existence they would have been ignorant but for the fortunes of war,
-and in these particulars history was repeating itself last year before
-our greatest military adventure had really begun!
-
-The sudden appearance of thousands of khaki-clad young men in the
-summer and fall of 1917 marked a new point of orientation in American
-life. Romance mounted his charger again; everywhere one met the wistful
-war bride. The familiar academic ceremonials of college commencements
-in the West as in the East were transformed into tributes to the
-patriotism of the graduates and undergraduates already under arms
-and present in their new uniforms. These young men, encountered in
-the street, in clubs, in hurried visits to their offices as they
-transferred their affairs to other hands, were impressively serious and
-businesslike. In the training-camps one heard familiar college songs
-rather than battle hymns. Even country-club dances and other functions
-given for the entertainment of the young soldiers were lacking in
-light-heartedness. In a Minneapolis country club much affected by
-candidates for commissions at Fort Snelling, the Saturday-night dances
-closed with the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner”; every face
-turned instantly toward the flag; every hand came to salute; and the
-effect was to send the whole company, young and old, soberly into
-the night. In the three training and mobilizing camps that I visited
-through the first months of preparation--Forts Benjamin Harrison,
-Sheridan, and Snelling--there was no ignoring the quiet, dogged
-attitude of the sons of the West, who had no hatred for the people
-they were enlisted to fight (I heard many of them say this), but were
-animated by a feeling that something greater even than the dignity and
-security of this nation, something of deep import to the whole world
-had called them.
-
-
-III
-
-In “The American Scene” Mr. James ignored the West, perhaps as lacking
-in those backgrounds and perspectives that most strongly appealed to
-him. It is for the reason that “polite society,” as we find it in
-Western cities, has only the scant pioneer background that I have
-indicated that it is so surprising in the dignity and richness of its
-manifestations. If it is a meritorious thing for people in prosperous
-circumstances to spend their money generously and with good taste in
-the entertainment of their friends, to effect combinations of the
-congenial in balls, dinners, musicals, and the like, then the social
-spectacle in the Western provinces is not a negligible feature of their
-activities. If an aristocracy is a desirable thing in America, the
-West can, in its cities great and small, produce it, and its quality
-and tone will be found quite similar to the aristocracy of older
-communities. We of the West are not so callous as our critics would
-have us appear, and we are only politely tolerant of the persistence
-with which fiction and the drama are illuminated with characters
-whose chief purpose is to illustrate the raw vulgarity of Western
-civilization. Such persons are no more acceptable socially in Chicago,
-Minneapolis, or Denver than they are in New York. The country is
-so closely knit together that a fashionable gathering in one place
-presents very much the appearance of a similar function in another.
-New York, socially speaking, is very hospitable to the Southerner; the
-South has a tradition of aristocracy that the West lacks. In both New
-York and Boston a very different tone characterizes the mention of a
-Southern girl and any reference to a daughter of the West. The Western
-girl may be every bit as “nice” and just as cultivated as the Southern
-girl: they would be indistinguishable one from the other save for the
-Southern girl’s speech, which we discover to be not provincial but “so
-charmingly Southern.”
-
-Perhaps I may here safely record my impatience of the pretension that
-provincialism is anywhere admirable. A provincial character may be
-interesting and amusing as a type; he may be commendably curious about
-a great number of things and even possess considerable information,
-without being blessed with the vision to correlate himself with the
-world beyond the nearest haystack. I do not share the opinion of some
-of my compatriots of the Western provinces that our speech is really
-the standard English, that the Western voice is impeccable, or that
-culture and manners have attained among us any noteworthy dignity
-that entitles us to strut before the rest of the world. Culture is
-not a term to be used lightly, and culture, as, say, Matthew Arnold
-understood it and labored to extend its sphere, is not more respected
-in these younger States than elsewhere in America. We are offering
-innumerable vehicles of popular education; we point with pride to
-public schools, State and privately endowed universities, and to
-smaller colleges of the noblest standards and aims; but, even with
-these so abundantly provided, it cannot be maintained that culture
-in its strict sense cries insistently to the Western imagination.
-There are people of culture, yes; there are social expressions both
-interesting and charming; but our preoccupations are mainly with the
-utilitarian, an attitude wholly defensible and explainable in the
-light of our newness, the urgent need of bread-winning in our recent
-yesterdays. However, with the easing in the past fifty years of the
-conditions of life there followed quite naturally a restlessness,
-an eagerness to fill and drain the cup of enjoyment, that was only
-interrupted by our entrance into the world war. There are people, rich
-and poor, in these States who are devotedly attached to “whatsoever
-things are lovely,” but that they exert any wide influence or color
-deeply the social fabric is debatable. It is possible that “sweetness
-and light,” as we shall ultimately attain them, will not be an
-efflorescence of literature or the fine arts, but a realization of
-justice, highly conceived, and a perfected system of government that
-will assure the happiness, contentment, and peace of the great body of
-our citizenry.
-
-In the smaller Western towns, especially where the American stock
-is dominant, lines of social demarcation are usually obscure to the
-vanishing-point. Schools and churches are here a democratizing factor,
-and a woman who “keeps help” is very likely to be apologetic about it;
-she is anxious to avoid the appearance of “uppishness”--an unpardonable
-sin. It is impossible for her to ignore the fact that the “girl” in
-her kitchen has, very likely, gone to school with her children or has
-been a member of her Sunday-school class. The reluctance of American
-girls to accept employment as house-servants is an aversion not to be
-overcome in the West. Thousands of women in comfortable conditions
-of life manage their homes without outside help other than that of
-a neighborhood man or a versatile syndicate woman who “comes in” to
-assist in a weekly cleaning.
-
-There is a type of small-town woman who makes something quite casual
-and incidental of the day’s tasks. Her social enjoyments are in no
-way hampered if, in entertaining company, she prepares with her own
-hands the viands for the feast. She takes the greatest pride in her
-household; she is usually a capital cook and is not troubled by any
-absurd feeling that she has “demeaned” herself by preparing and
-serving a meal. She does this exceedingly well, and rises without
-embarrassment to change the plates and bring in the salad. The salad
-is excellent and she knows it is excellent and submits with becoming
-modesty to praise of her handiwork. In homes which it is the highest
-privilege to visit a joke is made of the housekeeping. The lady of the
-house performs the various rites in keeping with maternal tradition
-and the latest approved text-books. You may, if you like, accompany
-her to the kitchen and watch the broiling of your chop, noting the
-perfection of the method before testing the result, and all to the
-accompaniment of charming talk about life and letters or what you will.
-Corporate feeding in public mess-halls will make slow headway with
-these strongly individualistic women of the new generation who read
-prodigiously, manage a baby with their eyes on Pasteur, and are as
-proud of their biscuits as of their club papers, which we know to be
-admirable.
-
-Are women less prone to snobbishness than men? Contrary to the
-general opinion, I think they are. Their gentler natures shrink from
-unkindness, from the petty cruelties of social differentiation which
-may be made very poignant in a town of five or ten thousand people,
-where one cannot pretend with any degree of plausibility that one does
-not know one’s neighbor, or that the daughter of a section foreman or
-the son of the second-best grocer did not sit beside one’s own Susan
-or Thomas in the public school. The banker’s offspring may find the
-children of the owner of the stave-factory or the planing-mill more
-congenial associates than the children on the back streets; but when
-the banker’s wife gives a birthday party for Susan the invitations are
-not limited to the children of the immediate neighbors but include
-every child in town who has the slightest claim upon her hospitality.
-The point seems to be established that one may be poor and yet
-be “nice”; and this is a very comforting philosophy and no mean
-touchstone of social fitness. I may add that the mid-Western woman,
-in spite of her strong individualism in domestic matters, is, broadly
-speaking, fundamentally socialistic. She is the least bit uncomfortable
-at the thought of inequalities of privilege and opportunity. Not long
-ago I met in Chicago an old friend, a man who has added greatly to
-an inherited fortune. To my inquiry as to what he was doing in town
-he replied ruefully that he was going to buy his wife some clothes!
-He explained that in her preoccupation with philanthropy and social
-welfare she had grown not merely indifferent to the call of fashion,
-but that she seriously questioned her right to adorn herself while
-her less-favored sisters suffered for life’s necessities. This is an
-extreme case, though I can from my personal acquaintance duplicate it
-in half a dozen instances of women born to ease and able to command
-luxury who very sincerely share this feeling.
-
-
-IV
-
-The social edifice is like a cabinet of file-boxes conveniently
-arranged so that they may be drawn out and pondered by the curious. The
-seeker of types is so prone to look for the eccentric, the fantastic
-(and I am not without my interest in these varieties), which so
-astonishingly repeat themselves, that he is likely to ignore the claims
-of the normal, the real “folksy” bread-and-butter people who are, after
-all, the mainstay of our democracy. They are not to be scornfully waved
-aside as bourgeoisie, or prodded with such ironies as Arnold applied to
-the middle class in England. They constitute the most interesting and
-admirable of our social strata. There is nothing quite like them in any
-other country; nowhere else have comfort, opportunity, and aspiration
-produced the same combination.
-
-The traveller’s curiosity is teased constantly, as he cruises through
-the towns and cities of the Middle West, by the numbers of homes that
-cannot imaginably be maintained on less than five thousand dollars a
-year. The economic basis of these establishments invites speculation;
-in my own city I am ignorant of the means by which hundreds of such
-homes are conducted--homes that testify to the West’s growing good
-taste in domestic architecture and shelter people whose ambitions are
-worthy of highest praise. There was a time not so remote when I could
-identify at sight every pleasure vehicle in town. A man who kept a
-horse and buggy was thought to be “putting on” a little; if he set up
-a carriage and two horses he was, unless he enjoyed public confidence
-in the highest degree, viewed with distrust and suspicion. When in the
-eighties an Indianapolis bank failed, a cynical old citizen remarked
-of its president that “no wonder Blank busted, swelling ’round in a
-carriage with a nigger in uniform”! Nowadays thousands of citizens
-blithely disport themselves in automobiles that cost several times the
-value of that banker’s equipage. I have confided my bewilderment to
-friends in other cities and find the same ignorance of the economic
-foundation of this prosperity. The existence, in cities of one,
-two, and three hundred thousand people of so many whom we may call
-non-producers--professional men, managers, agents--offers a stimulating
-topic for a doctoral thesis. I am not complaining of this phenomenon--I
-merely wonder about it.
-
-The West’s great natural wealth and extraordinary development is
-nowhere more strikingly denoted than in the thousands of comfortable
-homes, in hundreds of places, set on forty or eighty foot lots that
-were tilled land or forest fifty or twenty years ago. Cruising
-through the West, one enters every city through new additions,
-frequently sliced out of old forests, with the maples, elms, or
-beeches carefully retained. Bungalows are inadvertently jotted down
-as though enthusiastic young architects were using the landscape
-for sketch-paper. I have inspected large settlements in which no
-two of these habitations are alike, though the difference may be
-only a matter of pulling the roof a little lower over the eyes of
-the veranda or some idiosyncrasy in the matter of the chimney. The
-trolley and the low-priced automobile are continually widening the
-urban arc, so that the acre lot or even a larger estate is within
-the reach of city-dwellers who have a weakness for country air and
-home-grown vegetables. A hedge, a second barricade of hollyhocks, a
-flower-box on the veranda rail, and a splash of color when the crimson
-ramblers are in bloom--here the hunter of types keeps his note-book
-in hand and wishes that Henry Cuyler Bunner were alive to bring his
-fine perceptions and sympathies to bear upon these homes and their
-attractive inmates.
-
-The young woman we see inspecting the mignonette or admonishing the
-iceman to greater punctuality in his deliveries, would have charmed a
-lyric from Aldrich. The new additions are, we know, contrived for her
-special delight. She and her neighbors are not to be confounded with
-young wives in apartments with kitchenette attached who lean heavily
-upon the delicatessen-shop and find their sole intellectual stimulus in
-vaudeville or the dumb drama. It is inconceivable that any one should
-surprise the mistresses of these bungalows in a state of untidiness,
-that their babies should not be sound and encouraging specimens of the
-human race, or that the arrival of unexpected guests should not find
-their pantries fortified with delicious strawberries or transparent
-jellies of their own conserving. These young women and their equally
-young husbands are the product of the high schools, or perhaps they
-have been fellow students in a State university. With all the world
-before them where to choose and Providence their guide, they have
-elected to attack life together and they go about it joyfully. Let no
-one imagine that they lead starved lives or lack social diversion. Do
-the housekeepers not gather on one another’s verandas every summer
-afternoon to discuss the care of infants or wars and rumors of wars;
-and is there not tennis when their young lords come home? On occasions
-of supreme indulgence the neighborhood laundress watches the baby while
-they go somewhere to dance or to a play, lecture, or concert in town.
-They are all musical; indeed, the whole Middle West is melodious with
-the tinklings of what Mr. George Ade, with brutal impiety, styles “the
-upright agony box.” Or, denied the piano, these habitations at least
-boast the tuneful disk and command at will the voices of Farrar and
-Caruso.
-
-
-V
-
-It is in summer that the Middle Western provinces most candidly present
-themselves, not only because the fields then publish their richness
-but for the ease with which the people may be observed. The study of
-types may then be pursued along the multitudinous avenues in which
-the Folks disport themselves in search of pleasure. The smoothing-out
-processes, to which schools, tailors, dressmakers, and “shine-’em”
-parlors contribute, add to the perils of the type-hunter. Mr. Howells’s
-remark of twenty years ago or more, that the polish slowly dims on
-footgear as one travels westward, has ceased to be true; types once
-familiar are so disguised or modified as to be unrecognizable. Even the
-Western county-seat, long rich in “character,” now flaunts the smartest
-apparel in its shop-windows, and when it reappears in Main Street upon
-the forms of the citizens one is convinced of the local prosperity
-and good taste. The keeper of the livery-stable, a stout gentleman,
-who knows every man, woman, and child in the county and aspires to
-the shrievalty, has bowed before the all-pervasive automobile. He
-has transformed his stable into a garage (with a plate-glass “front”
-exposing the latest model) and hides his galluses (shamelessly
-exhibited in the day of the horse) under a coat of modish cut, in
-deference to the sensibilities of lady patrons. The country lawyer is
-abandoning the trailing frock coat, once the sacred vestment of his
-profession, having found that the wrinkled tails evoked unfavorable
-comment from his sons and daughters when they came home from college.
-The village drunkard is no longer pointed out commiseratingly; local
-option and State-wide prohibition have destroyed his usefulness as an
-awful example, and his resourcefulness is taxed to the utmost that he
-may keep tryst with the skulking bootlegger.
-
-Every town used to have a usurer, a merchant who was “mean” (both
-of these were frequently pillars in the church), and a dishevelled
-photographer whose artistic ability was measured by the success of his
-efforts to make the baby laugh. He solaced himself with the flute or
-violin between “sittings,” not wholly without reference to the charms
-of the milliner over the way. In the towns I have in mind there was
-always the young man who would have had a brilliant career but for his
-passion for gambling, the aleatory means of his destruction being an
-all-night poker-game in the back room of his law-office opposite the
-court-house. He may appropriately be grouped with the man who had been
-ruined by “going security” for a friend, who was spoken of pityingly
-while the beneficiary of his misplaced confidence, having gained
-affluence, was execrated. The race is growing better and wiser, and
-by one means and another these types have been forced from the stage;
-or perhaps more properly it should be said that the stage and the
-picture-screen alone seem unaware that they have passed into oblivion.
-
-[Illustration: The Municipal Recreation Pier, Chicago.]
-
-The town band remains, however, and it is one of the mysteries of our
-civilization that virtuosi, capable of performing upon any instrument,
-exist in the smallest hamlet and meet every Saturday night for
-practice in the lodge-room over the grocery. I was both auditor and
-spectator of such a rehearsal one night last summer, in a small town
-in Illinois. From the garage across the street it was possible
-to hear and see the artists, and to be aware of the leader’s zeal
-and his stern, critical attitude toward the performers. He seized
-first the cornet and then the trombone (Hoosierese, sliphorn) to
-demonstrate the proper phrasing of a difficult passage. The universal
-Main Street is made festive on summer nights by the presence of the
-town’s fairest daughters, clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
-who know every one and gossip democratically with their friend the
-white-jacketed young man who lords it at the druggist’s soda-fountain.
-Such a group gathered and commented derisively upon the experiments
-of the musicians. That the cornetist was in private life an assistant
-to the butcher touched their humor; the evocation of melody and the
-purveying of meat seemed to them irreconcilable. In every such town
-there is a male quartette that sings the old-time melodies at church
-entertainments and other gatherings. These vocalists add to the joy
-of living, and I should lament their passing. Their efforts are more
-particularly pleasing when, supplemented by guitar and banjo, they move
-through verdurous avenues thrumming and singing as they go. Somewhere a
-lattice opens guardedly--how young the world is!
-
-The adventurous boy who, even in times of peace, was scornful of formal
-education and ran away to enlist in the navy or otherwise sought to
-widen the cramped horizons of home--and every town has this boy--still
-reappears at intervals to report to his parents and submit to the
-admiration and envy of his old schoolmates in the Main Street bazaars.
-This type endures and will, very likely, persist while there are seas
-to cross and battles to be won. The trumpetings of war stir the blood
-of such youngsters, and since our entrance into the war it has been
-my fortune to know many of them, who were anxious to dare the skies
-or play with death in the waters under the earth. The West has no
-monopoly of courage or daring, but it was reassuring to find that the
-best blood of the Great Valley thrilled to the cry of the bugle. On a
-railway-train I fell into talk with a young officer of the national
-army. Finding that I knew the president of the Western college that
-he had attended, he sketched for me a career which, in view of his
-twenty-six years, was almost incredible. At eighteen he had enlisted
-in the navy in the hope of seeing the world, but had been assigned to
-duty as a hospital orderly. Newport had been one of his stations; there
-and at other places where he had served he spent his spare hours in
-study. When he was discharged he signed papers on a British merchant
-vessel. The ship was short-handed and he was enrolled as an able
-seaman, which, he said, was an unwarranted compliment, as he proved to
-the captain’s satisfaction when he was sent to the wheel and nearly (as
-he put it) bowled over a lighthouse. His voyages had carried him to the
-Orient and the austral seas. After these wanderings he was realizing
-an early ambition to go to college when the war-drum sounded. He had
-taken the training at an officer’s reserve camp and was on his way to
-his first assignment. The town he mentioned as his home is hardly more
-than a whistling-point for locomotives, and I wondered later, as I
-flashed through it, just what stirring of the spirit had made its peace
-intolerable and sent him roaming.[B] At a club dinner I met another
-man, born not far from the town that produced my sailor-soldier, who
-had fought with the Canadian troops from the beginning of the war
-until discharged because of wounds received on the French front. His
-pocketful of medals--he carried them boyishly, like so many marbles, in
-his trousers pocket!--included the _croix de guerre_, and he had been
-decorated at Buckingham Palace by King George. He had been a wanderer
-from boyhood, his father told me, visiting every part of the world that
-promised adventure and, incidentally, was twice wounded in the Boer War.
-
-The evolution of a type is not, with Mother Nature, a hasty business,
-and in attempting to answer an inquiry for a definition of the typical
-mid-Western girl, I am disposed to spare myself humiliating refutations
-by declaring that there is no such thing. In the Rocky Mountain States
-and in California, we know, if the motion-picture purveyors may be
-trusted, that the typical young woman of those regions always wears
-a sombrero and lives upon the back of a bronco. However, in parts
-of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, where there has been a minimum of
-intermixture since the original settlements, one is fairly safe in the
-choice of types. I shall say that in this particular territory the
-typical young woman is brown-haired, blue or brown of eye, of medium
-height, with a slender, mobile face that is reminiscent of Celtic
-influences. Much Scotch-Irish blood flowed into the Ohio valley in the
-early immigration, and the type survives. In the streets and in public
-gatherings in Wisconsin and Minnesota the German and Scandinavian
-infusion is clearly manifest. On the lake-docks and in lumber-camps
-the big fellows of the North in their Mackinaw coats and close-fitting
-knit caps impart a heroic note to the landscape. In January, 1917,
-having gone to St. Paul to witness the winter carnival, I was struck by
-the great number of tall, fair men who, in their gay holiday attire,
-satisfied the most exacting ideal of the children of the vikings. They
-trod the snow with kingly majesty, and to see their performances on
-skis is to be persuaded that the sagas do not exaggerate the daring of
-their ancestors.
-
-  “What was that?” said Olaf, standing
-    On the quarter deck.
-  “Something heard I like the stranding
-    Of a shattered wreck.”
-  Einar then, the arrow taking
-    From the loosened string,
-  Answered “that was Norway breaking
-    From thy hand, O king!”
-
-The search for characteristic traits is likely to be more fruitful
-of tangible results than the attempt to fix physical types, and the
-Western girl who steps from the high schools to the State universities
-that so hospitably open their doors to her may not be _the_ type, but
-she is indubitably _a_ type, well defined. The lore of the ages has
-been preserved and handed down for her special benefit and she absorbs
-and assimilates it with ease and grace. Man is no enigma to her; she
-begins her analysis of the male in high school, and the university
-offers a post-graduate course in the species. Young men are not more
-serious over the affairs of their Greek-letter societies than these
-young women in the management of their sororities, which seem, after
-school-days, to call for constant reunions. It is not surprising that
-the Western woman has so valiantly fought for and won recognition of
-her rights as a citizen. A girl who has matched her wits against boys
-in the high school and again in a State university, and very likely has
-surpassed them in scholarship, must be forgiven for assuming that the
-civil rights accorded them cannot fairly be withheld from her. The many
-thousands of young women who have taken degrees in these universities
-have played havoc with the Victorian tradition of womanhood. They
-constitute an independent, self-assured body, zealous in social and
-civic service, and not infrequently looking forward to careers.
-
-The State university is truly a well-spring of democracy; this may
-not be said too emphatically. There is evidence of the pleasantest
-comradeship between men and women students, and one is impressed in
-classrooms by the prevailing good cheer and earnestness.
-
-  “And one said, smiling, Pretty were the sight
-  If our old halls could change their sex, and flaunt
-  With prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans,
-  And sweet girl-graduates in their golden hair.”
-
-Mild flirtations are not regarded as detrimental to the attainment
-of sound or even distinguished scholarship. The university’s social
-life may be narrow, but it is ampler than that of the farm or “home
-town.” Against the argument that these institutions tend to the
-promotion of provincial insularity, it may be said that there is a
-compensating benefit in the mingling of students drawn largely from a
-single commonwealth. A gentleman whose education was gained in one of
-the older Eastern universities and in Europe remarked to me that, as
-his son expected to succeed him in the law, he was sending him to the
-university of his own State, for the reason that he would meet there
-young men whose acquaintance would later be of material assistance to
-him in his profession.
-
-
-VI
-
-The value of the Great Lakes as a social and recreational medium is
-hardly less than their importance as commercial highways. The saltless
-seas are lined with summer colonies and in all the lake cities piers
-and beaches are a boon to the many who seek relief from the heat
-which we of the West always speak of defensively as essential to the
-perfecting of the corn that is our pride. Chicago’s joke that it is the
-best of summer resorts is not without some foundation; certainly one
-may find there every variety of amusement except salt-water bathing.
-The salt’s stimulus is not missed apparently by the vast number of
-citizens--estimated at two hundred thousand daily during the fiercest
-heat--who disport themselves on the shore. The new municipal pier is
-a prodigious structure, and I know of no place in America where the
-student of mankind may more profitably plant himself for an evening of
-contemplation.
-
-[Illustration: Types and diversions.
-
-A popular bathing beach on Lake Erie, near the town of Sandusky.]
-
-What struck me in a series of observations of the people at play,
-extending round the lakes from Chicago to Cleveland, was the general
-good order and decorum. At Detroit I was introduced to two dancing
-pavilions on the riverside, where the prevailing sobriety was most
-depressing in view of my promise to the illustrator that somewhere
-in our pilgrimage I should tax his powers with scenes of depravity
-and violence. A quarter purchased a string of six tickets, and one
-of these deposited in a box entitled the owner to take the floor
-with a partner. As soon as a dance and its several encores was
-over the floor cleared instantly and one was required to relinquish
-another ticket. There and in a similar dance-hall in a large Cleveland
-amusement park fully one-third of the patrons were young women who
-danced together throughout the evening, and often children tripped into
-the picture. Chaperonage was afforded by vigilant parents comfortably
-established in the balcony. The Cleveland resort, accessible to any one
-for a small fee, interested me particularly because the people were so
-well apparelled, so “good-looking,” and the atmosphere was so charged
-with the spirit of neighborliness. The favorite dances there were the
-waltz (old style), the fox-trot, and the schottische. I confess that
-this recrudescence of the schottische in Cleveland, a progressive city
-that satisfies so many of the cravings of the aspiring soul--the home
-of three-cent car-fares and a noble art museum--greatly astonished me.
-But for the fact that warning of each number was flashed on the wall
-I should not have trusted my judgment that what I beheld was, indeed,
-the schottische. Frankly I do not care for the schottische, and it may
-have been that my tone or manner betokened resentment at its revival;
-at any rate a policeman whom I interviewed outside the pavilion eyed
-me with suspicion when I expressed surprise that the schottische was so
-frequently announced. When I asked why the one-step was ignored utterly
-he replied contemptuously that no doubt I could find places around
-Cleveland where that kind of rough stuff was permitted, but “it don’t
-go _here_!” I did not undertake to defend the one-step to so stern a
-moralist, though it was in his eye that he wished me to do so that he
-might reproach me for my worldliness. I do not believe he meant to be
-unjust or harsh or even that he appraised me at once as a seeker of the
-rough stuff he abhorred; I had merely provided him with an excuse for
-proclaiming the moral standards of the city of Cleveland, which are
-high. I made note of the persistence of the Puritan influence in the
-Western Reserve and hastily withdrew in the direction of the trolley.
-
-Innumerable small lakes lie within the far-flung arms of the major
-lakes adding variety and charm to a broad landscape, and offering
-summer refuge to a host of vacationists. Northern Indiana is
-plentifully sprinkled with lakes and ponds; in Michigan, Wisconsin,
-and Minnesota there are thousands of them. I am moved to ask--is a
-river more companionable than a lake? I had always felt that a river
-had the best of the argument, as more neighborly and human, and I am
-still disposed to favor those streams of Maine that are played upon
-by the tides; but an acquaintance with a great number of these inland
-saucerfuls of blue water has made me their advocate. Happy is the town
-that has a lake for its back yard! The lakes of Minneapolis (there are
-ten within the municipal limits) are the distinguishing feature of that
-city. They seem to have been planted just where they are for the sole
-purpose of adorning it, and they have been protected and utilized with
-rare prevision and judgment. To those who would chum with a river, St.
-Paul offers the Mississippi, where the battlements of the University
-Club project over a bluff from which the Father of Waters may be
-admired at leisure, and St. Paul will, if you insist, land you in one
-of the most delightful of country clubs on the shore of White Bear
-Lake. I must add that the country club has in the Twin Cities attained
-a rare state of perfection. That any one should wing far afield from
-either town in summer seems absurd, so blest are both in opportunities
-for outdoor enjoyment.
-
-Just how far the wide-spread passion for knitting has interfered with
-more vigorous sports among our young women I am unable to say, but
-the loss to links and courts in the Western provinces must have been
-enormous. The Minikahda Club of Minneapolis was illuminated one day by
-a girls’ luncheon. These radiant young beings entered the dining-room
-knitting--knitting as gravely as though they were weaving the destinies
-of nations--and maybe they were! The small confusions and perplexities
-of seating the party of thirty were increased by the dropping of balls
-of yarn--and stitches! The round table seemed to be looped with yarn,
-as though the war overseas were tightening its cords about those young
-women, whose brothers and cousins and sweethearts were destined to the
-battle-line.
-
-Longfellow celebrated in song “The Four Lakes of Madison,” which he
-apostrophized as “lovely handmaids.” I treasure the memory of an
-approach round one of these lakes to Wisconsin’s capitol (one of the
-few American State-houses that doesn’t look like an appropriation!)
-through a mist that imparted to the dome an inthralling illusion of
-detachment from the main body of the building. The first star twinkled
-above it; perhaps it was Wisconsin’s star that had wandered out of
-the galaxy to symbolize for an hour the State’s sovereignty!
-
-[Illustration: On a craft plying the waters of Erie I found all of the
-conditions of a happy outing and types that it is always a joy to meet.]
-
-Whatever one may miss on piers and in amusement parks in the way of
-types may be sought with confidence on the excursion steamers that ply
-the lakes--veritable arks in which humanity in countless varieties
-may be observed. The voyager is satisfied that the banana and peanut
-and the innocuous “pop” are the ambrosia and nectar of our democracy.
-Before the boat leaves the dock the deck is littered; one’s note-book
-bristles with memoranda of the untidiness and disorder. On a craft
-plying the waters of Erie I found all the conditions of a happy outing
-and types that it is always a joy to meet. The village “cut-up,”
-dashingly perched on the rail; the girl who is never so happy as when
-organizing and playing games; the young man who yearns to join her
-group, but is prevented by unconquerable shyness; the child that,
-carefully planted in the most crowded and inaccessible part of the
-deck, develops a thirst that results in the constant agitation of half
-the ship as his needs are satisfied. There is, inevitably, a woman
-of superior breeding who has taken passage on the boat by mistake,
-believing it to be first-class, which it so undeniably is not; and
-if you wear a sympathetic countenance she will confide to you her
-indignation. The crunching of the peanut-shell, the poignant agony of
-the child that has loved the banana not wisely but too well, are an
-affront to this lady. She announces haughtily that she’s sure the boat
-is overcrowded, which it undoubtedly is, and that she means to report
-this trifling with human life to the authorities. That any one should
-covet the cloistral calm of a private yacht when the plain folks are so
-interesting and amusing is only another proof of the constant struggle
-of the aristocratic ideal to fasten itself upon our continent.
-
-Below there was a dining-saloon, but its seclusion was not to be
-preferred to an assault upon a counter presided over by one of the
-most remarkable young men I have ever seen. He was tall and of a
-slenderness, with a wonderful mane of fair hair brushed straight back
-from his pale brow. As he tossed sandwiches and slabs of pie to the
-importunate he jerked his hair into place with a magnificent fling of
-the head. In moments when the appeals of starving supplicants became
-insistent, and he was confused by the pressure for attention, he would
-rake his hair with his fingers, and then, wholly composed, swing round
-and resume the filling of orders. The young man from the check-room
-went to his assistance, but I felt that he resented this as an
-impertinence, a reflection upon his prowess. He needed no assistance;
-before that clamorous company he was the pattern of urbanity. His locks
-were his strength and his consolation; not once was his aplomb shaken,
-not even when a stocky gentleman fiercely demanded a whole pie!
-
-[Illustration: The Perry monument at Put-in Bay.
-
-A huge column of concrete erected in commemoration of Commodore Perry’s
-victory.]
-
-While Perry’s monument, a noble seamark at Put-in-Bay, is a reminder
-that the lakes have played their part in American history, it is at
-Mackinac that one experiences a sense of antiquity. The white-walled
-fort is a link between the oldest and the newest, and the imagination
-quickens at the thought of the first adventurous white man who ever
-braved the uncharted waters; while the eye follows the interminable
-line of ore barges bound for the steel-mills on the southern curve
-of Michigan or on the shores of Erie. Commerce in these waters began
-with the fur-traders travelling in canoes; then came sailing vessels
-carrying supplies to the new camps and settlements and returning with
-lumber or produce; but to-day sails are rare and the long leviathans,
-fascinating in their apparent unwieldiness and undeniable ugliness, are
-the dominant medium of transportation.
-
-One night, a few years ago, on the breezy terrace of one of the
-handsomest villas in the lake region, I talked with the head of a
-great industry whose products are known round the world. His house,
-furnished with every comfort and luxury, was gay with music and the
-laughter of young folk. Through the straits crawled the ships, bearing
-lumber, grain, and ore, signalling their passing in raucous blasts to
-the lookout at St. Ignace. My host spoke with characteristic simplicity
-and deep feeling of the poverty of his youth (he came to America an
-immigrant) and of all that America had meant to him. He was near the
-end of his days and I have thought often of that evening, of his
-seigniorial dignity and courtesy, of the portrait he so unconsciously
-drew of himself against a background adorned with the rich reward of
-his laborious years. And as he talked it seemed that the power of the
-West, the prodigious energies of its forests and fields and hills, its
-enormous potentialities of opportunity, became something concrete and
-tangible, that flowed in an irresistible tide through the heart of the
-nation.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER III
-
-THE FARMER OF THE MIDDLE WEST
-
-  That it may please Thee to give and preserve to our use the kindly
-  fruits of the earth, so that in due time we may enjoy them.--_The
-  Litany._
-
-
-When spring marches up the Mississippi valley and the snows of the
-broad plains find companionship with the snows of yesteryear, the
-traveller, journeying east or west, is aware that life has awakened in
-the fields. The winter wheat lies green upon countless acres; thousands
-of ploughshares turn the fertile earth; the farmer, after the enforced
-idleness of winter, is again a man of action.
-
-Last year (1917), that witnessed our entrance into the greatest of
-wars, the American farmer produced 3,159,000,000 bushels of corn,
-660,000,000 bushels of wheat, 1,587,000,000 bushels of oats, 60,000,000
-bushels of rye. From the day of our entrance into the world struggle
-against autocracy the American farm has been the subject of a new
-scrutiny. In all the chancelleries of the world crop reports and
-estimates are eagerly scanned and tabulated, for while the war lasts
-and far into the period of rehabilitation and reconstruction that
-will follow, America must bear the enormous responsibility, not merely
-of training and equipping armies, building ships, and manufacturing
-munitions, but of feeding the nations. The farmer himself is roused
-to a new consciousness of his importance; he is aware that thousands
-of hands are thrust toward him from over the sea, that every acre of
-his soil and every ear of corn and bushel of wheat in his bins or in
-process of cultivation has become a factor in the gigantic struggle to
-preserve and widen the dominion of democracy.
-
-
-I
-
-“Better be a farmer, son; the corn grows while you sleep!”
-
-This remark, addressed to me in about my sixth year by my great-uncle,
-a farmer in central Indiana, lingered long in my memory. There was
-no disputing his philosophy; corn, intelligently planted and tended,
-undoubtedly grows at night as well as by day. But the choice of seed
-demands judgment, and the preparation of the soil and the subsequent
-care of the growing corn exact hard labor. My earliest impressions of
-farm life cannot be dissociated from the long, laborious days, the
-monotonous plodding behind the plough, the incidental “chores,” the
-constant apprehensions as to drought or flood. The country cousins I
-visited in Indiana and Illinois were all too busy to have much time
-for play. I used to sit on the fence or tramp beside the boys as they
-drove the plough, or watch the girls milk the cows or ply the churn,
-oppressed by an overmastering homesickness. And when the night shut
-down and the insect chorus floated into the quiet house the isolation
-was intensified.
-
-My father and his forebears were born and bred to the soil; they
-scratched the earth all the way from North Carolina into Kentucky and
-on into Indiana and Illinois. I had just returned, last fall, from a
-visit to the grave of my grandfather in a country churchyard in central
-Illinois, round which the corn stood in solemn phalanx, when I received
-a note from my fifteen-year-old boy, in whom I had hopefully looked for
-atavistic tendencies. From his school in Connecticut he penned these
-depressing tidings:
-
-“I have decided never to be a farmer. Yesterday the school was marched
-three miles to a farm where the boys picked beans all afternoon and
-then walked back. Much as I like beans and want to help Mr. Hoover
-conserve our resources, this was rubbing it in. I never want to see a
-bean again.”
-
-I have heard a score of successful business and professional men say
-that they intended to “make farmers” of their boys, and a number of
-these acquaintances have succeeded in sending their sons through
-agricultural schools, but the great-grandchildren of the Middle Western
-pioneers are not easily persuaded that farming is an honorable calling.
-
-It isn’t necessary for gentlemen who watch the tape for crop
-forecasts to be able to differentiate wheat from oats to appreciate
-the importance to the prosperous course of general business of a big
-yield in the grain-fields; but to the average urban citizen farming is
-something remote and uninteresting, carried on by men he never meets
-in regions that he only observes hastily from a speeding automobile or
-the window of a limited train. Great numbers of Middle Western city
-men indulge in farming as a pastime--and in a majority of cases it is,
-from the testimony of these absentee proprietors, a pleasant recreation
-but an expensive one. However, all city men who gratify a weakness
-for farming are not faddists; many such land-owners manage their
-plantations with intelligence and make them earn dividends. Mr. George
-Ade’s Indiana farm, Hazelden, is one of the State’s show-places. The
-playwright and humorist says that its best feature is a good nine-hole
-golf-course and a swimming-pool, but from his “home plant” of 400 acres
-he cultivates 2,000 acres of fertile Hoosier soil.
-
-A few years ago a manufacturer of my acquaintance, whose family
-presents a clear urban line for a hundred years, purchased a farm on
-the edge of a river--more, I imagine, for the view it afforded of a
-pleasant valley than because of its fertility. An architect entered
-sympathetically into the business of making habitable a century-old
-log house, a transition effected without disturbing any of the timbers
-or the irregular lines of floors and ceilings. So much time was spent
-in these restorations and readjustments that the busy owner in despair
-fell upon a mail-order catalogue to complete his preparations for
-occupancy. A barn, tenant’s house, poultry-house, pump and windmill,
-fencing, and every vehicle and tool needed on the place, including a
-barometer and wind-gauge, he ordered by post. His joy in his acres was
-second only to his satisfaction in the ease with which he invoked all
-the apparatus necessary to his comfort. Every item arrived exactly as
-the catalogue promised; with the hired man’s assistance he fitted the
-houses together and built a tower for the windmill out of concrete made
-in a machine provided by the same establishment. His only complaint
-was that the catalogue didn’t offer memorial tablets, as he thought
-it incumbent upon him to publish in brass the merits of the obscure
-pioneer who had laboriously fashioned his cabin before the convenient
-method of post-card ordering had been discovered.
-
-
-II
-
-Imaginative literature has done little to invest the farm with
-glamour. The sailor and the warrior, the fisherman and the hunter are
-celebrated in song and story, but the farmer has inspired no ringing
-saga or iliad, and the lyric muse has only added to the general joyless
-impression of the husbandman’s life. Hesiod and Virgil wrote with
-knowledge of farming; Virgil’s instructions to the ploughman only
-need to be hitched to a tractor to bring them up to date, and he was
-an authority on weather signs. But Horace was no farmer; the Sabine
-farm is a joke. The best Gray could do for the farmer was to send him
-homeward plodding his weary way. Burns, at the plough, apostrophized
-the daisy, but only by indirection did he celebrate the joys of
-farm life. Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper” sang a melancholy strain;
-“Snow-Bound” offers a genial picture, but it is of winter-clad fields.
-Carleton’s “Farm Ballads” sing of poverty and domestic infelicity.
-Riley made a philosopher and optimist of his Indiana farmer, but his
-characters are to be taken as individuals rather than as types. There
-is, I suppose, in every Middle Western county a quizzical, quaint
-countryman whose sayings are quoted among his neighbors, but the man
-with a hundred acres of land to till, wood to cut, and stock to feed is
-not greatly given to poetry or humor.
-
-English novels of rural life are numerous but they are usually in a low
-key. I have a lingering memory of Hardy’s “Woodlanders” as a book of
-charm, and his tragic “Tess” is probably fiction’s highest venture in
-this field. “Lorna Doone” I remember chiefly because it established in
-me a distaste for mutton. George Eliot and George Meredith are other
-English novelists who have written of farm life, nor may I forget Mr.
-Eden Phillpotts. French fiction, of course, offers brilliant exceptions
-to the generalization that literature has neglected the farmer; but,
-in spite of the vast importance of the farm in American life, there
-is in our fiction no farm novel of distinction. Mr. Hamlin Garland,
-in “Main Traveled Roads” and in his autobiographical chronicle “A Son
-of the Middle Border,” has thrust his plough deep; but the truth as
-we know it to be disclosed in these instances is not heartening. The
-cowboy is the jolliest figure in our fiction, the farmer the dreariest.
-The shepherd and the herdsman have fared better in all literatures
-than the farmer, perhaps because their vocations are more leisurely
-and offer opportunities for contemplation denied the tiller of the
-soil. The Hebrew prophets and poets were mindful of the pictorial and
-illustrative values of herd and flock. It is written, “Our cattle also
-shall go with us,” and, journeying across the mountain States, where
-there is always a herd blurring the range, one thinks inevitably of
-man’s long migration in quest of the Promised Land.
-
-The French peasant has his place in art, but here again we are
-confronted by joylessness, though I confess that I am resting my case
-chiefly upon Millet. What Remington did for the American cattle-range
-no one has done for the farm. Fields of corn and wheat are painted
-truthfully and effectively, but the critics have withheld their highest
-praise from these performances. Perhaps a corn-field is not a proper
-subject for the painter; or it may be that the Maine rocks or a group
-of birches against a Vermont hillside “compose” better or are supported
-by a nobler tradition. The most alluring pictures I recall of farm life
-have been advertisements depicting vast fields of wheat through which
-the delighted husbandman drives a reaper with all the jauntiness of a
-king practising for a chariot-race.
-
-I have thus run skippingly through the catalogues of bucolic literature
-and art to confirm my impression as a layman that farming is not an
-affair of romance, poetry, or pictures, but a business, exacting and
-difficult, that may be followed with success only by industrious and
-enlightened practitioners. The first settlers of the Mississippi valley
-stand out rather more attractively than their successors of what I
-shall call the intermediate period. There was no turning back for the
-pioneers who struck boldly into the unknown, knowing that if they
-failed to establish themselves and solve the problem of subsisting
-from the virgin earth they would perish. The battle was to the strong,
-the intelligent, the resourceful. The first years on a new farm in
-wilderness or prairie were a prolonged contest between man and nature,
-nature being as much a foe as an ally. That the social spark survived
-amid arduous labor and daily self-sacrifice is remarkable; that the
-earth was subdued to man’s will and made to yield him its kindly fruits
-is a tribute to the splendid courage and indomitable faith of the
-settlers.
-
-These Middle Western pioneers were in the fullest sense the sons of
-democracy. The Southern planter with the traditions of the English
-country gentleman behind him and, in slavery time, representing a
-survival of the feudal order, had no counterpart in the West, where the
-settler was limited in his holdings to the number of acres that he and
-his sons could cultivate by their own labor. I explored, last year,
-much of the Valley of Democracy, both in seed-time and in harvest.
-We had been drawn at last into the world war, and its demands and
-conjectures as to its outcome were upon the lips of men everywhere.
-It was impossible to avoid reflecting upon the part these plains have
-played in the history of America and the increasing part they are
-destined to play in the world history of the future. Every wheat shoot,
-every stalk of corn was a new testimony to the glory of America. Not
-an acre of land but had been won by intrepid pioneers who severed
-all ties but those that bound them to an ideal, whose only tangible
-expression was the log court-house where they recorded the deeds for
-their land or the military post that afforded them protection. At
-Decatur, Illinois, one of these first court-houses still stands, and we
-are told that within its walls Lincoln often pleaded causes. American
-democracy could have no finer monument than this; the imagination
-quickens at the thought of similar huts reared by the axes of the
-pioneers to establish safeguards of law and order on new soil almost
-before they had fashioned their habitations. It seemed to me that if
-the Kaiser had known the spirit in which these august fields were
-tamed and peopled, or the aspirations, the aims and hopes that are
-represented in every farmhouse and ranch-house between the Alleghanies
-and the Rockies, he would not so contemptuously have courted our
-participation against him in his war for world domination.
-
-What I am calling, for convenience, the intermediate period in the
-history of the Mississippi valley, began when the rough pioneering was
-over, and the sons of the first settlers came into an inheritance of
-cleared land. In the Ohio valley the Civil War found the farmer at
-ease; to the west and northwest we must set the date further along.
-The conditions of this intermediate period may not be overlooked
-in any scrutiny of the farmer of these changed and changing times.
-When the cloud of the Civil War lifted and the West began asserting
-itself in the industrial world, the farmer, viewing the smoke-stacks
-that advertised the entrance of the nearest towns and cities into
-manufacturing, became a man with a grievance, who bitterly reflected
-that when rumors of “good times” reached him he saw no perceptible
-change in his own fortunes or prospects, and in “bad times” he felt
-himself the victim of hardship and injustice. The glory of pioneering
-had passed with his father and grandfather; they had departed, leaving
-him without their incentive of urgent necessity or the exultance of
-conquest. There may have been some weakening of the fibre, or perhaps
-it was only a lessening of the tension now that the Indians had been
-dispersed and the fear of wild beasts lifted from his household.
-
-There were always, of course, men who were pointed to as prosperous,
-who for one reason or another “got ahead” when others fell behind. They
-not only held their acres free of mortgage but added to their holdings.
-These men were very often spoken of as “close,” or tight-fisted; in
-Mr. Brand Whitlock’s phrase they were “not rich, but they had money.”
-And, having money and credit, they were sharply differentiated from
-their neighbors who were forever borrowing to cover a shortage. These
-men loomed prominently in their counties; they took pride in augmenting
-the farms inherited from pioneer fathers; they might sit in the State
-legislature or even in the national Congress. But for many years the
-farmer was firmly established in the mind of the rest of the world as
-an object of commiseration. He occupied an anomalous position in the
-industrial economy. He was a landowner without enjoying the dignity of
-a capitalist; he performed the most arduous tasks without recognition
-by organized labor. He was shabby, dull, and uninteresting. He drove
-to town over a bad road with a load of corn, and, after selling or
-bartering it, negotiated for the renewal of his mortgage and stood on
-the street corner, an unheroic figure, until it was time to drive home.
-He symbolized hard work, hard luck, and discouragement. The saloon, the
-livery-stable, and the grocery where he did his trading were his only
-loafing-places. The hotel was inhospitable; he spent no money there
-and the proprietor didn’t want “rubes” or “jays” hanging about. The
-farmer and his wife ate their midday meal in the farm-wagon or at a
-restaurant on the “square” where the frugal patronage of farm folk was
-not despised.
-
-The type I am describing was often wasteful and improvident. The
-fact that a degree of mechanical skill was required for the care of
-farm-machinery added to his perplexities; and this apparatus he very
-likely left out-of-doors all winter for lack of initiative to build a
-shed to house it. I used to pass frequently a farm where a series of
-reapers in various stages of decrepitude decorated the barn-lot, with
-always a new one to heighten the contrast.
-
-The social life of the farmer centred chiefly in the church, where on
-the Sabbath day he met his neighbors and compared notes with them on
-the state of the crops. Sundays on the farm I recall as days of gloom
-that brought an intensification of week-day homesickness. The road
-was dusty; the church was hot; the hymns were dolorously sung to the
-accompaniment of a wheezy organ; the sermon was long, strongly flavored
-with brimstone, and did nothing to lighten
-
-          “the heavy and the weary weight
-  Of all this unintelligible world.”
-
-The horses outside stamped noisily in their efforts to shake off the
-flies. A venturous bee might invade the sanctuary and arouse hope in
-impious youngsters of an attack upon the parson--a hope never realized!
-The preacher’s appetite alone was a matter for humor; I once reported
-a Methodist conference at which the succulence of the yellow-legged
-chickens in a number of communities that contended for the next
-convocation was debated for an hour. The height of the country boy’s
-ambition was to break a colt and own a side-bar buggy in which to take
-a neighbor’s daughter for a drive on Sunday afternoon.
-
-Community gatherings were rare; men lived and died in the counties
-where they were born, “having seen nothing, still unblest.” County
-and State fairs offered annual diversion, and the more ambitious
-farmers displayed their hogs and cattle, or mammoth ears of corn,
-and reverently placed their prize ribbons in the family Bibles on
-the centre-tables of their sombre parlors. Cheap side-shows and
-monstrosities, horse-races and balloon ascensions were provided for
-their delectation, as marking the ultimate height of their intellectual
-interests. A characteristic “Riley story” was of a farmer with a boil
-on the back of his neck, who spent a day at the State fair waiting for
-the balloon ascension. He inquired repeatedly: “Has the balloon gone up
-yit?” Of course when the ascension took place he couldn’t lift his head
-to see the balloon, but, satisfied that it really had “gone up,” he
-contentedly left for home. (It may be noted here that the new status of
-the farmer is marked by an improvement in the character of amusements
-offered by State-fair managers. Most of the Western States have added
-creditable exhibitions of paintings to their attractions, and in
-Minnesota these were last year the subject of lectures that proved to
-be very popular.)
-
-The farmer, in the years before he found that he must become a
-scientist and a business man to achieve success, was the prey
-of a great variety of sharpers. Tumble-down barns bristled with
-lightning-rods that cost more than the structures were worth. A man
-who had sold cooking-ranges to farmers once told me of the delights of
-that occupation. A carload of ranges would be shipped to a county-seat
-and transferred to wagons. It was the agent’s game to arrive at the
-home of a good “prospect” shortly before noon, take down the old,
-ramshackle cook-stove, set up the new and glittering range, and assist
-the womenfolk to prepare a meal. The farmer, coming in from the fields
-and finding his wife enchanted, would order a range and sign notes
-for payment. These obligations, after the county had been thoroughly
-exploited, would be discounted at the local bank. In this way the
-farmer’s wife got a convenient range she would never have thought of
-buying in town, and her husband paid an exorbitant price for it.
-
-The farmer’s wife was, in this period to which I am referring, a poor
-drudge who appeared at the back door of her town customers on Saturday
-mornings with eggs and butter. She was copartner with her husband, but,
-even though she might have “brought” him additional acres at marriage,
-her spending-money was limited to the income from butter, eggs, and
-poultry, and even this was dependent upon the generosity of the head of
-the house. Her kitchen was furnished with only the crudest housewifery
-apparatus; labor-saving devices reached her slowly. In busy seasons,
-when there were farm-hands to cook for, she might borrow a neighbor’s
-daughter to help her. Her only relief came when her own daughters
-grew old enough to assist in her labors. She was often broken down, a
-prey to disease, before she reached middle life. Her loneliness, the
-dreary monotony of her existence, the prevailing hopelessness of never
-“catching up” with her sewing and mending, often drove her insane. The
-farmhouse itself was a desolate place. There is a mustiness I associate
-with farmhouses--the damp stuffiness of places never reached by the
-sun. With all the fresh air in the world to draw from, thousands of
-farmhouses were ill-lighted and ill-ventilated, and farm sanitation was
-of the most primitive order.
-
-I have dwelt upon the intermediate period merely to heighten the
-contrast with the new era--an era that finds the problem of farm
-regeneration put squarely up to the farmer.
-
-
-III
-
-The new era really began with the passage of the Morrill Act, approved
-July 2, 1862, though it is only within a decade that the effects of
-this law upon the efficiency and the character of the farmer have been
-markedly evident. The Morrill Act not only made the first provision
-for wide-spread education in agriculture but lighted the way for
-subsequent legislation that resulted in the elevation of the Department
-of Agriculture to a cabinet bureau, the system of agriculture
-experiment-stations, the co-operation of federal and State bureaus
-for the diffusion of scientific knowledge pertaining to farming and
-the breeding and care of live-stock, and the recent introduction of
-vocational training into country schools.
-
-[Illustration: A typical old homestead of the Middle West.
-
-The farm on which Tecumseh was born.]
-
-It was fitting that Abraham Lincoln, who had known the hardest farm
-labor, should have signed a measure of so great importance, that
-opened new possibilities to the American farmer. The agricultural
-colleges established under his Act are impressive monuments to Senator
-Morrill’s far-sightedness. When the first land-grant colleges were
-opened there was little upon which to build courses of instruction.
-Farming was not recognized as a science but was a form of hard labor
-based on tradition and varied only by reckless experiments that usually
-resulted in failure. The first students of the agricultural schools,
-drawn largely from the farm, were discouraged by the elementary
-character of the courses. Instruction in ploughing, to young men who
-had learned to turn a straight furrow as soon as they could tiptoe up
-to the plough-handles, was not calculated to inspire respect for “book
-farming” either in students or their doubting parents.
-
-The farmer and his household have found themselves in recent years
-the object of embarrassing attentions not only from Washington,
-the land-grant colleges, and the experiment-stations, but countless
-private agencies have “discovered” the farmer and addressed themselves
-determinedly to the amelioration of his hardships. The social surveyor,
-having analyzed the city slum to his satisfaction, springs from his
-automobile at the farmhouse door and asks questions of the bewildered
-occupants that rouse the direst apprehensions. Sanitarians invade the
-premises and recommend the most startling changes and improvements.
-Once it was possible for typhoid or diphtheria to ravage a household
-without any interference from the outside world; now a health officer
-is speedily on the premises to investigate the old oaken bucket, the
-iron-bound bucket, that hangs in the well, and he very likely ties
-and seals the well-sweep and bids the farmer bore a new well, in a
-spot kindly chosen for him, where the barn-lot will not pollute his
-drinking-water. The questionnaire, dear to the academic investigator,
-is constantly in circulation. Women’s clubs and federations thereof
-ponder the plight of the farmer’s wife and are eager to hitch her
-wagon to a star. Home-mission societies, alarmed by reports of the
-decay of the country church, have instituted surveys to determine the
-truth of this matter. The consolidation of schools, the introduction
-of comfortable omnibuses to carry children to and from home, the
-multiplication of country high schools, with a radical revision of the
-curriculum, the building of two-story schoolhouses in place of the old
-one-room affair in which all branches were taught at once, and the use
-of the schoolhouse as a community centre--these changes have dealt a
-blow to the long-established ideal of the red-mittened country child,
-wading breast-high through snow to acquaint himself with the three
-R’s and, thus fortified, enter into the full enjoyment of American
-democracy. Just how Jefferson would look upon these changes and this
-benignant paternalism I do not know, nor does it matter now that
-American farm products are reckoned in billions and we are told that
-the amount must be increased or the world will starve.
-
-The farmer’s mail, once restricted to an occasional letter, began to be
-augmented by other remembrances from Washington than the hollyhock-seed
-his congressman occasionally conferred upon the farmer’s wife.
-Pamphlets in great numbers poured in upon him, filled with warnings and
-friendly counsel. The soil he had sown and reaped for years, in the
-full confidence that he knew all its weaknesses and possibilities, he
-found to be something very different and called by strange names. His
-lifelong submission to destructive worms and hoppers was, he learned,
-unnecessary if not criminal; there were ways of eliminating these
-enemies, and he shyly discussed the subject with his neighbors.
-
-In speaking of the farmer’s shyness I have stumbled into the field
-of psychology, whose pitfalls are many. The psychologists have as
-yet played their search-light upon the farm guardedly or from the
-sociologist’s camp. I here condense a few impressions merely that the
-trained specialist may hasten to convict me of error. The farmer of the
-Middle West--the typical farmer with approximately a quarter-section
-of land--is notably sensitive, timid, only mildly curious, cautious,
-and enormously suspicious. (“The farmer,” a Kansas friend whispers,
-“doesn’t vote his opinions; he votes his suspicions!”) In spite of the
-stuffing of his rural-route box with instructive literature designed
-to increase the productiveness of his acres and lighten his own toil,
-he met the first overtures of the “book-l’arnin’” specialist warily,
-and often with open hostility. The reluctant earth has communicated
-to the farmer, perhaps in all times and in all lands, something of
-its own stubbornness. He does not like to be driven; he is restive
-under criticism. The county agent of the extension bureau who seeks
-him out with the best intentions in the world, to counsel him in his
-perplexities, must approach him diplomatically. I find in the report
-of a State director of agricultural extension a discreet statement
-that “the forces of this department are organized, not for purposes
-of dictation in agricultural matters but for service and assistance
-in working out problems pertaining to the farm and the community.”
-The farmer, unaffected as he is by crowd psychology, is not easily
-disturbed by the great movements and tremendous crises that rouse the
-urban citizen. He reads his newspaper perhaps more thoroughly than the
-city man, at least in the winter season when the distractions of the
-city are greatest and farm duties are the least exacting. Surrounded by
-the peace of the fields, he is not swayed by mighty events, as men are
-who scan the day’s news on trains and trolleys and catch the hurried
-comments of their fellow citizens as they plunge through jostling
-throngs. Professor C. J. Galpin, of Wisconsin University, aptly
-observes that, while the farmer trades in a village, he shares the
-invisible government of a township, which “scatters and mystifies” his
-community sense.
-
-It was a matter of serious complaint that farmers responded very slowly
-in the first Liberty Loan campaigns. At the second call vigorous
-attempts were made through the corn belt to rouse the farmer, who had
-profited so enormously by the war’s augmentation of prices. In many
-cases country banks took the minimum allotment of their communities and
-then sent for the farmers to come in and subscribe. The Third Loan,
-however, was met in a much better spirit. The farmer is unused to the
-methods by which money-raising “drives” are conducted and he resents
-being told that he must do this, that, or the other thing. Townfolk are
-beset constantly by demands for money for innumerable causes; there
-is always a church, a hospital, a social-service house, a Y. M. C. A.
-building, or some home or refuge for which a special appeal is being
-made. There is a distinct psychology of generosity based largely on the
-inspiration of thoroughly organized effort, where teams set forth with
-a definite quota to “raise” before a fixed hour, but the farmer was
-long immune from these influences.
-
-In marked contrast with the small farmer, who wrests a scant
-livelihood from the soil, is his neighbor who boasts a section or
-a thousand acres, who is able to utilize the newest machinery and
-to avail himself of the latest disclosures of the laboratories, to
-increase his profits. One visits these large farms with admiration
-for the fruitful land, the perfect equipment, the efficient method,
-and the alert, wide-awake owner. He lives in a comfortable house,
-often electric-lighted and “plumbed,” visits the cities, attends farm
-conferences, and is keenly alive to the trend of public affairs. If the
-frost nips his corn he is aware of every means by which “soft” corn may
-be handled to the best advantage. He knows how many cattle and hogs
-his own acres will feed, and is ready with cash to buy his neighbors’
-corn and feed it to stock he buys at just the right turn of the market.
-It is possible for a man to support himself and a family on eighty
-acres; I have talked with men who have done this; but they “just about
-get by.” The owner of a big farm, whose modern house and rich demesne
-are admired by the traveller, is a valued customer of a town or city
-banker; the important men of his State cultivate his acquaintance, with
-resulting benefits in a broader outlook than his less-favored neighbors
-enjoy. Farmers of this class are themselves usually money-lenders or
-shareholders in country banks, and they watch the trend of affairs
-from the view-point of the urban business man. They live closer to the
-world’s currents and are more accessible and responsive to appeals of
-every sort than their less-favored brethren.
-
-But it is the small farmer, the man with the quarter-section or less,
-who is the special focus of the search-light of educator, scientist,
-and sociologist. During what I have called the intermediate period--the
-winter of the farmer’s discontent--the politicians did not wholly
-ignore him. The demagogue went forth in every campaign with special
-appeals to the honest husbandman, with the unhappy effect of driving
-the farmer more closely into himself and strengthening his class
-sense. For the reason that the security of a democracy rests upon
-the effacement to the vanishing-point of class feeling, and the
-establishment of a solidarity of interests based upon a common aim
-and aspiration, the effort making to dignify farming as a calling and
-quicken the social instincts of the farmer’s household are matters of
-national importance.
-
-It may be said that in no other business is there a mechanism so
-thoroughly organized for guarding the investor from errors of omission
-or commission. I am aware of no “service” in any other field of
-endeavor so excellent as that of the agricultural colleges and their
-auxiliary experiment and extension branches, and it is a pleasure to
-testify to the ease with which information touching the farm in all
-its departments may be collected. Only the obtuse may fail these days
-to profit by the newest ideas in soil-conservation, plant-nutrition,
-animal-husbandry, and a thousand other subjects of vital importance
-to the farmer. To test the “service” I wrote to the Department of
-Agriculture for information touching a number of subjects in which my
-ignorance was profound. The return mail brought an astonishing array
-of documents covering all my inquiries and other literature which my
-naïve questions had suggested to the Department as likely to prove
-illuminative. As the extent of the government’s aid to the farmer and
-stockman is known only vaguely to most laymen, I shall set down the
-titles of some of these publications:
-
-  “Management of Sandy Land Farms in Northern Indiana and Southern
-  Michigan.”
-
-  “The Feeding of Grain Sorghums to Live Stock.”
-
-  “Prevention of Losses of Live Stock from Plant Poisoning.”
-
-  “The Feeding of Dairy Cows.”
-
-  “An Economic Study of the Farm Tractor in the Corn Belt.”
-
-  “Waste Land and Wasted Land on Farms.”
-
-  “How to Grow an Acre of Corn.”
-
-  “How to Select a Sound Horse.”
-
-  “The Chalcis Fly in Alfalfa Seed.”
-
-  “Homemade Fireless Cookers and Their Use.”
-
-  “A Method of Analyzing the Farm Business.”
-
-  “The Striped Peach Worm.”
-
-  “The Sheep-Killing Dog.”
-
-  “Food Habits of the Swallows, a Family of Valuable Native Birds.”
-
-As most of these bulletins may be had free and for others only a
-nominal price of five or ten cents is charged, it is possible to
-accumulate an extensive library with a very small expenditure.
-Soil-fertilization alone is the subject of an enormous literature;
-the field investigator and the laboratory expert have subjected the
-earth in every part of America to intensive study and their reports
-are presented clearly and with a minimum use of technical terms. Many
-manufacturers of implements or materials used on farms publish and
-distribute books of real dignity in the advertisement of their wares. I
-have before me a handsome volume, elaborately illustrated, put forth by
-a Wisconsin concern, describing the proper method of constructing and
-equipping a dairy-barn. To peruse this work is to be convinced that
-the manger so alluringly offered really assures the greatest economy of
-feeding, and the kine are so effectively photographed, so clean, and
-so contented that one is impelled to an immediate investment in a herd
-merely for the joy of housing it in the attractive manner recommended
-by the sagacious advertiser.
-
-Agricultural schools and State extension bureaus manifest the greatest
-eagerness to serve the earnest seeker for enlightenment. “The Service
-of YOUR College Brought as Near as Your Mail-Box,” is the slogan of
-the Kansas State Agricultural College. Once upon a time I sought the
-answer to a problem in Egyptian hieroglyphics and learned that the
-only American who could speak authoritatively on that particular point
-was somewhere on the Nile with an exploration party. In the field of
-agriculture there is no such paucity of scholarship. The very stupidity
-of a question seems to awaken pity in the intelligent, accommodating
-persons who are laboring in the farmer’s behalf. Augustine Birrell
-remarks that in the days of the tractarian movement pamphlets were
-served upon the innocent bystander like sheriffs’ processes. In like
-manner one who manifests only the tamest curiosity touching agriculture
-in any of its phases will find literature pouring in upon him; and he
-is distressed to find that it is all so charmingly presented that he is
-beguiled into reading it!
-
-The charge that the agricultural school is educating students away
-from the farm is not substantiated by reports from representative
-institutions of this character. The dean of the College of Agriculture
-of the University of Illinois, Dr. Eugene Davenport, has prepared a
-statement illustrative of the sources from which the students of that
-institution are derived. Every county except two is represented in
-the agricultural department in a registration of 1,200 students, and,
-of 710 questioned, 242 are from farms; 40 from towns under 1,000; 87
-from towns of 1,000 to 1,500; 262 from towns of 5,000 and up; and 79
-from Chicago. Since 1900 nearly 1,000 students have completed the
-agricultural course in this institution, and of this number 69 per
-cent are actually living on farms and engaged in farming; 17 per cent
-are teaching agriculture, or are engaged in extension work; 10 per
-cent entered callings related to farming, such as veterinary surgery,
-landscape-gardening, creamery-management, etc.; less than 4 per cent
-are in occupations not allied with agriculture. It should be explained
-that the Illinois school had only a nominal existence until seventeen
-years ago. The number of students has steadily increased from 7
-registrations in 1890 to 1,201 in 1916-17. At the Ohio College of
-Agriculture half the freshman classes of the last three years came from
-the cities, though this includes students in landscape architecture and
-horticulture. In Iowa State College the reports of three years show
-that 54.5 per cent of the freshmen were sons of farmers, and of the
-graduates of a seven-year period (1907-1914) 34.8 are now engaged in
-farming.
-
-The opportunities open to the graduates of these colleges have been
-greatly multiplied by the demand for teachers in vocational schools,
-and the employment of county agents who must be graduates of a school
-of agriculture or have had the equivalent in practical farm experience.
-The influence of the educated farmer upon his neighbors is very marked.
-They may view his methods with distrust, but when he rolls up a yield
-of corn that sets a new record for fields with which they are familiar
-they cannot ignore the fact that, after all, there may be something
-in the idea of school-taught farming. By the time a farm boy enters
-college he is sufficiently schooled in his father’s methods, and well
-enough acquainted with the home acres, to appreciate fully the value of
-the instruction the college offers him.
-
-The only difference between agricultural colleges and other technical
-schools is that to an unscientific observer the courses in agronomy
-and its co-ordinate branches deal with vital matters that are more
-interesting and appealing than those in, let us say, mechanical
-engineering. If there is something that stirs the imagination in the
-thought that two blades of grass may be made to grow where only one had
-grown before, how much more satisfying is the assurance that an acre of
-soil, properly fertilized and thoroughly tended, may double its yield
-of corn; that there is a choice well worth the knowing between breeds
-of beef or dairy cattle, and that there is a demonstrable difference in
-the energy of foods that may be converted into pork, particularly when
-there is a shortage and the government, to stimulate hog production,
-fixes a minimum price (November, 1917) of $15.50 per hundredweight in
-the Chicago market; and even so stabilized the price is close upon $20
-in July, 1918.
-
-[Illustration: Students of agriculture in the pageant that celebrated
-the fortieth anniversary of the founding of Ohio State University.]
-
-The equipment of these institutions includes, with the essential
-laboratories, farms under cultivation, horses, cattle, sheep, and
-swine of all the representative breeds. Last fall I spent two days in
-the agricultural school of a typical land-grant college of the corn
-belt (Purdue University), and found the experience wholly edifying.
-The value of this school to the State of Indiana is incalculable.
-Here the co-ordinate extension service under Professor G. I. Christie
-is thoroughly systematized, and reaches every acre of land in the
-commonwealth. “Send for Christie” has become a watchword among Indiana
-farmers in hours of doubt or peril. Christie can diagnose an individual
-farmer’s troubles in the midst of a stubborn field, and fully satisfy
-the landowner as to the merit of the prescribed remedy; or he can
-interest a fashionable city audience in farm problems. He was summoned
-to Washington a year ago to supervise farm-labor activities, and is a
-member of the recently organized war policies board.[C] The extension
-service in all the corn and wheat States is excellent; it must be in
-capable hands, for the farmer at once becomes suspicious if the State
-agent doesn’t show immediately that he knows his business.
-
-The students at Purdue struck me as more attentive and alert than those
-I have observed from time to time in literature classes of schools
-that stick to the humanities. In an entomology class, where I noted
-the presence of one young woman, attention was riveted upon a certain
-malevolent grasshopper, the foe of vegetation and in these years of
-anxious conservation an enemy of civilization. That a young woman
-should elect a full course in agronomy and allied branches seemed to
-me highly interesting, and, to learn her habitat in the most delicate
-manner possible, I asked for a census of the class, to determine how
-many students were of farm origin. The young lady so deeply absorbed in
-the grasshopper was, I found, a city girl. Women, it should be noted,
-are often very successful farmers and stock-breeders. They may be
-seen at all representative cattle-shows inspecting the exhibits with
-sophistication and pencilling notes in the catalogues.
-
-To sit in the pavilion of one of these colleges and hear a lecture
-on the judging of cattle is to be persuaded that much philosophy
-goes into the production of a tender, juicy beefsteak or a sound,
-productive milch cow. In a class that I visited a Polled Angus steer
-and a shorthorn were on exhibition; the instructor might have been a
-sculptor, conducting a class in modelling, from the nice points of
-“line,” the distribution of muscle and fat, that he dilated upon. He
-invited questions, which led to a discussion in which the whole class
-participated. At the conclusion of this lecture a drove of swine was
-driven in that a number of young gentlemen might practise the fine
-art of “judging” this species against an approaching competitive
-meeting with a class from another school. In these days of multiplying
-farm-implements and tractors, the farmer is driven perforce to know
-something of mechanics. Time is precious and the breaking down of a
-harvester may be calamitous if the owner must send to town for some
-one to repair it. These matters are cared for in the farm-mechanics
-laboratories where instruction is offered in the care, adjustment, and
-repair of all kinds of farm-machinery. While in the summer of 1917 only
-40,000 tractors were in use on American farms, it is estimated that by
-the end of the current year the number will have increased to 200,000,
-greatly minimizing the shortage in men and horses. The substitution
-of gasolene for horse-power is only one of the many changes in farm
-methods attributable to the imperative demand for increased production
-of foodstuffs. Whitman may have foreseen the coming of the tractor when
-he wrote:
-
-  “Well-pleased America, thou beholdest,
-  Over the fields of the West those crawling monsters;
-  The human-divine inventions, the labor-saving implements”;
-
-for “crawling monster” happily describes the tractor.
-
-The anxiety to serve, to accommodate the instruction to special needs,
-is illustrated in the length of courses offered, which include a
-week’s intensive course in midwinter designed for farmers, two-year
-and four-year courses, and post-graduate work. Men well advanced in
-years attend the midwinter sessions, eager to improve their methods
-in a business they have followed all their lives. They often bring
-their wives with them, to attend classes in dairying, poultry-raising,
-or home economics. It is significant of the new movement in farming
-that at the University of Wisconsin, an institution whose services to
-American agriculture are inestimable, there is a course in agricultural
-journalism, “intended,” the catalogue recites, “to be of special
-service to students who will engage in farming or who expect to be
-employed in station work or in some form of demonstration or extension
-service and who therefore may have occasion to write for publication
-and certainly will have farm produce and products to sell. To these
-ends the work is very largely confined to studies in agricultural
-writing.”
-
-
-IV
-
-The easing of the farmer’s burdens, through the development
-of labor-saving machinery, and the convenience of telephones,
-trolley-lines, and the cheap automobile that have vastly improved his
-social prospects, has not overcome a growing prejudice against close
-kinship with the soil. We have still to deal with the loneliness and
-the social barrenness that have driven thousands of the children of
-farms to the cities. The son of a small farmer may make a brilliant
-record in an agricultural college, achieve the distinction of admission
-to the national honorary agricultural fraternity (the Alpha Zeta, the
-little brother of the Phi Beta Kappa), and still find the old home
-crippling and stifling to his awakened social sense.
-
-There is general agreement among the authorities that one of the chief
-difficulties in the way of improvement is the lack of leadership in
-farm communities. The farmer is not easily aroused, and he is disposed
-to resent as an unwarranted infringement upon his constitutional rights
-the attempts of outsiders to meddle with his domestic affairs. He
-has found that it is profitable to attend institutes, consult county
-agents, and peruse the literature distributed from extension centres,
-but the invasion of his house is a very different matter. Is he not the
-lord of his acres, an independent, self-respecting citizen, asking no
-favors of society? Does he not ponder well his civic duty and plot the
-destruction of the accursed middleman, his arch-enemy? The benevolently
-inclined who seek him out to persuade him of the error of his ways
-in any particular are often received with scant courtesy. He must be
-“shown,” not merely “told.” The agencies now so diligently at work to
-improve the farmer’s social status understand this and the methods
-employed are wisely tempered in the light of abundant knowledge of just
-how much crowding the farmer will stand.
-
-[Illustration: A feeding-plant at “Whitehall,” the farm of Edwin S.
-Kelly, near Springfield, Ohio.]
-
-Nothing is so essential to his success as the health of his household;
-yet inquiries, more particularly in the older States of the Mississippi
-valley, lead to the conclusion that there is a dismaying amount of
-chronic invalidism on farms. A physician who is very familiar with farm
-life declares that “all farmers have stomach trouble,” and this obvious
-exaggeration is rather supported by Dr. John N. Hurty, secretary of the
-Indiana State Board of Health, who says that he finds in his visits to
-farmhouses that the cupboards are filled with nostrums warranted
-to relieve the agonies of poor digestion. Dr. Hurty, who has probably
-saved more lives and caused more indignation in his twenty years of
-public service than any other Hoosier, has made a sanitary survey of
-four widely separated Indiana counties. In Blackford County, where
-1,374 properties were inspected, only 15 per cent of the farmhouses
-were found to be sanitary. Site, ventilation, water-supply, the
-condition of the house, and the health of its inmates entered into the
-scoring. In Ohio County, where 441 homes were visited, 86 per cent
-were found to be insanitary. The tuberculosis rate for this county was
-found to be 25 per cent higher than that of the State. In Scott County
-97.6 per cent of the farms were pronounced insanitary, and here the
-tuberculosis rate is 48.3 per cent higher than that of the State. In
-Union County, where only 2.3 per cent of the farms were found to be
-sanitary, the average score did not rise above 45 per cent on site,
-ventilation, and health. Here the tuberculosis death-rate was 176.3
-in 100,000, against the State rate of 157. In all these counties the
-school population showed a decrease.
-
-It should be said that in the communities mentioned, old ones as
-history runs in this region, many homes stand practically unaltered
-after fifty or seventy-five years of continuous occupancy. Thousands
-of farmers who would think it a shameless extravagance to install
-a bathtub boast an automobile. A survey by Professor George H. von
-Tungeln, of Iowa College, of 227 farms in two townships of northern
-Iowa, disclosed 62 bathtubs, 98 pianos, and 124 automobiles. The number
-of bathtubs reported by the farmers of Ohio is so small that I shrink
-from stating it.
-
-Here, again, we may be sure that the farmer is not allowed to dwell
-in slothful indifference to the perils of uncleanliness. On the heels
-of the sanitarian and the sociologist come the field agents of the
-home-economics departments of the meddlesome land-grant colleges,
-bent upon showing him a better way of life. I was pondering the
-plight of the bathless farmhouse when a document reached me showing
-how a farmhouse may enjoy running water, bathroom, gas, furnace, and
-two fireplaces for an expenditure of $723.97. One concrete story is
-better than many treatises, and I cheerfully cite, as my authority,
-“Modernizing an Old Farm House,” by Mrs. F. F. Showers, included
-among the publications of the Wisconsin College of Agriculture. The
-home-economics departments do not wait for the daughters of the farm
-to come to them, but seek them out with the glad tidings that greater
-ease and comfort are within their reach if only their fathers can be
-made to see the light. In many States the extension agents organize
-companies of countrywomen and carry them junketing to modern farmhouses.
-
-Turning to Nebraska, whose rolling cornfields are among the noblest
-to be encountered anywhere, home-demonstration agents range the
-commonwealth organizing clubs, which are federated where possible to
-widen social contacts, better-babies conferences, and child-welfare
-exhibits. The Community Welfare Assembly, as conducted in Kansas, has
-the merit of offering a varied programme--lectures on agriculture and
-home economics, civics, health, and rural education by specialists,
-moving pictures, community music, and folk games and stories for the
-children. In Wisconsin the rural-club movement reaches every part of
-the State, and a State law grants the use of schoolhouses for community
-gatherings. Seymour, Indiana, boasts a Farmer’s Club, the gift of a
-citizen, with a comfortably appointed house, where farmers and their
-families may take their ease when in town.
-
-The organization of boys’ and girls’ clubs among farm youth is
-a feature of the vocational-training service offered under the
-Smith-Lever Act of 1914, and already the reports of its progress are
-highly interesting. These organizations make possible the immediate
-application of the instruction in agriculture and home economics
-received in the schools. In Indiana more than 25,000 boys and girls
-were enlisted last year in such club projects as the cultivation of
-corn, potatoes, and garden vegetables, canning, sewing, and home-craft,
-and the net profit from these sources was $105,100. In my prowlings
-nothing has delighted me more than the discovery of the Pig Club. This
-is one of Uncle Sam’s many schemes for developing the initiative and
-stimulating the ambition of farm children. It might occur to the city
-boy, whose acquaintance with pork is limited to his breakfast bacon,
-that the feeding of a pig is not a matter worthy of the consideration
-of youth of intelligence and aspiration. Uncle Sam, however, holds the
-contrary opinion. From a desk in the Department of Agriculture he has
-thrown a rosy glamour about the lowly pig. Country bankers, properly
-approached and satisfied of the good character and honorable intentions
-of applicants, will advance money to farm boys to launch them upon
-pig-feeding careers. My heart warms to Douglas Byrne, of Harrison
-County, Indiana, who, under the guidance of a club supervisor, fed 17
-hogs with a profit of $99.30. Another young Hoosier, Elmer Pearce, of
-Vanderburgh County, fed 2 pigs that made a daily gain of 1.38 pounds
-for four months, and sold them at a profit of $12.36. We learn from
-the official report that this young man’s father warned him that the
-hogs he exercised his talents upon would make no such gains as were
-achieved. Instead of spanking the lad for his perverseness, as would
-have been the case in the olden golden days, this father made him the
-ruler over 30 swine. There are calf and pig clubs for girls, and a
-record has been set for Indiana by twelve-year-old Pauline Hadley, of
-Mooresville, who cared for a Poland China hog for 110 days, increasing
-its weight from 65 to 256 pounds, and sold it at a profit of $20.08.
-
-The farmer of yesterday blundered through a year and at the end
-had a very imperfect idea of his profits and losses. He kept no
-accounts; if he paid his taxes and the interest on the omnipresent
-mortgage, and established credit for the winter with his grocer, he
-was satisfied. Uncle Sam, thoroughly aroused to the importance of
-increasing the farmer’s efficiency, now shows him how to keep simple
-accounts and returns at the end of the season to analyze the results.
-(Farm-management is the subject of many beguiling pamphlets; it seems
-incredible that any farmer should blindly go on wasting time and
-money when his every weakness is anticipated and prescribed for by
-the Department of Agriculture and its great army of investigators and
-counsellors!)
-
-If there is little cheerful fiction dealing with farm life, its absence
-is compensated for by the abundance of “true stories” of the most
-stimulating character, to be found in the publications of the State
-agricultural extension bureaus. Professor Christie’s report of the
-Indiana Extension Service for last year recites the result of three
-years’ observation of a southern Indiana farm of 213 acres. In 1914 the
-owner cleared $427 above interest on his capital, in addition to his
-living. This, however, was better than the average for the community,
-which was a cash return of $153. This man had nearly twice as much
-land as his neighbors, carried more live-stock, and his crop yields
-were twice as great as the community average. His attention was called
-to the fact that he was investing $100 worth of feed and getting back
-only $82 in his live-stock account. He was expending 780 days in the
-care of his farm and stock, which the average corn-belt farmer could
-have managed with 605 days of labor. Acting on the advice of the
-Extension Department, he added to his live-stock, built a silo, changed
-his feeding ration, and increased his live-stock receipts to $154 per
-$100 of feed. The care of the additional live-stock through the winter
-resulted in a better reward for his labor and the amount accredited
-to labor income for the year was $1,505. The third year he increased
-his live-stock and poultry, further improved the feeding ration, and
-received $205 per $100 of feed. By adding to the conveniences of his
-barn, he was able to cut down his expenditure for hired labor; or, to
-give the exact figures, he reduced the amount expended in this way from
-$515 to $175. His labor income for the third year was $3,451. “Labor
-income,” as the phrase is employed in farm bookkeeping, is the net sum
-remaining after the farm-owner has paid all business expenses of the
-farm and deducted a fair interest on the amount invested in his plant.
-
-I have mentioned the 80-acre farm as affording a living for a family;
-but there is no ignoring the testimony of farm-management surveys,
-covering a wide area, that this unit is too small to yield the
-owner the best results from his labor. In a Nebraska survey it is
-demonstrated that farms of from 200 to 250 acres show better average
-returns than those of larger or smaller groups, but rainfall, soil
-conditions, and the farmer’s personal qualifications are factors in all
-such studies that make generalizations difficult. A diversified farm of
-160 acres requires approximately 3,000 hours’ labor a year. Forty-five
-acres of corn, shocked and husked, consume 270 days of labor; like
-acreages of oats and clover, 90 and 45 days respectively; care of
-live-stock and poultry, 195 days. In summer a farmer often works twelve
-or fourteen hours a day, while in winter, with only his stock to look
-after, his labor is reduced to three or four hours.
-
-The Smith-Hughes Act (approved February, 1917) appropriates
-annually sums which will attain, in 1926, a maximum of $3,000,000
-“for co-operation with the States in the promotion of education in
-agriculture and the trades and industries, and in the preparation of
-teachers of vocational subjects, the sums to be allotted to the States
-in the proportion which their rural population bears to the total rural
-population of the United States.” Washington is only the dynamic centre
-of inspiration and energy in the application of the laws that make so
-generous provision for the farmer’s welfare. The States must enter into
-a contract to defray their share of the expense and put the processes
-into operation.
-
-There was something of prophecy in the message of President Roosevelt
-(February 9, 1909) transmitting to Congress the report of his Country
-Life Commission. He said: “Upon the development of country life rests
-ultimately our ability, by methods of farming requiring the highest
-intelligence, to continue to feed and clothe the hungry nations; to
-supply the city with fresh blood, clean bodies, and clear brains that
-can endure the terrific strain of modern life; we need the development
-of men in the open country, who will be in the future, as in the past,
-the stay and strength of the nation in time of war, and its guiding and
-controlling spirit in time of peace.” The far-reaching effect of the
-report, a remarkably thorough and searching study of farm conditions,
-is perceptible in agencies and movements that were either suggested by
-it or that were strengthened by its authoritative utterances.
-
-
-V
-
-Much has been written of the decline of religion in rural communities,
-and melancholy statistics have been adduced as to the abandonment of
-churches. But here, as in the matter of farm efficiency and kindred
-rural problems, vigorous attempts are making to improve conditions.
-“The great spiritual needs of the country community just at present
-are higher personal and community ideals,” the Country Life Commission
-reported. “Rural people have need to have an aspiration for the highest
-possible development of the community. There must be an ambition on
-the part of the people themselves constantly to progress in all those
-things that make the community life wholesome, satisfying, educative,
-and complete. There must be a desire to develop a permanent environment
-for the country boy and girl, of which they will become passionately
-fond. As a pure matter of education, the countryman must learn to love
-the country and to have an intellectual appreciation of it.” In this
-connection I wish that every farm boy and girl in America might read
-“The Holy Earth,” by L. H. Bailey (a member of the commission), a
-book informed with a singular sweetness and nobility, and fit to be
-established as an auxiliary reading-book in every agricultural college
-in America.
-
-There is abundant evidence that the religious bodies are not
-indifferent to the importance of vitalizing the country church, and
-here the general socializing movement is acting as a stimulus. Not only
-have the churches, in federal and State conferences, set themselves
-determinedly to improve the rural parish, but the matter has been the
-subject of much discussion by educational and sociological societies
-with encouraging gains. The wide-spread movement for the consolidation
-of country schools suggests inevitably the combination of country
-parishes, assuring greater stability and making possible the employment
-of permanent ministers of a higher intellectual type, capable of
-exercising that intelligent local leadership which all commentators on
-the future of the farm agree is essential to progress.
-
-By whatever avenue the rural problem is approached it is apparent
-that it is not sufficient to persuade American youth of the economic
-advantages of farming over urban employments, but that the new
-generation must be convinced in very concrete ways that country life
-affords generous opportunities for comfort and happiness, and that
-there are compensations for all it lacks. The farmer of yesterday,
-strongly individualistic and feeling that the world’s rough hand was
-lifted against him, has no longer an excuse for holding aloof from the
-countless forces that are attempting to aid him and give his children a
-better chance in life. No other figure in the American social picture
-is receiving so much attention as the farmer. A great treasure of money
-is expended annually by State and federal governments to increase
-his income, lessen his labor, educate his children, and bring health
-and comfort to his home. If he fails to take advantage of the vast
-machinery that is at work in his behalf, it is his own fault; if his
-children do not profit by the labors of the State to educate them, the
-sin is at his own door. In his business perplexities he has but to
-telephone to a county agent or to the extension headquarters of his
-State to receive the friendly counsel of an expert. If his children
-are dissatisfied and long for variety and change, it is because he has
-concealed from them the means by which their lives may be quickened and
-brightened.
-
-[Illustration: Judging graded shorthorn herds at the American Royal
-Live Stock Show in Kansas City.]
-
-With the greatest self-denial I refrain from concluding this chapter
-with a ringing peroration in glorification of farm life. From a desk
-on the fifteenth floor of an office-building, with an outlook across a
-smoky, clanging industrial city, I could do this comfortably and with
-an easy conscience. But the scientist has stolen farming away from the
-sentimentalist and the theorist. Farming, I may repeat, is a business,
-the oldest and the newest in the world. No year passes in which its
-methods and processes are not carried nearer to perfection. City boys
-now about to choose a vocation will do well to visit an agricultural
-college and extension plant, or, better still, a representative
-corn-belt farm, before making the momentous decision. Perhaps the
-thousands of urban lads who this year volunteered to aid the farmers
-as a patriotic service will be persuaded that the soil affords
-opportunities not lightly to be passed by. No one can foretell the vast
-changes that will be precipitated when the mighty war is ended; but one
-point is undebatable: the world, no matter how low its fortunes may
-sink, must have bread and meat. Tremendous changes and readjustments
-are already foreshadowed; but in all speculations the productiveness of
-the American farm will continue to be a factor of enormous importance.
-
-A wide-spread absorption of land by large investors, the increase of
-tenantry, and the passing of the farm family are possibilities of the
-future not to be overlooked by those who have at heart the fullest and
-soundest development of American democracy. For every 100 acres of
-American land now under cultivation there are about 375 acres untilled
-but susceptible of cultivation. Here is a chance for American boys of
-the best fibre to elect a calling that more and more demands trained
-intelligence. All things considered, the rewards of farming average
-higher than those in any other occupation, and the ambitious youth,
-touched with the new American passion for service, for a more perfect
-realization of the promise of democracy, will find in rural communities
-a fallow field ready to his hand.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER IV
-
-CHICAGO
-
-  “And yonder where, gigantic, wilful, young,
-  Chicago sitteth at the northwest gates,
-  With restless violent hands and casual tongue
-  Moulding her mighty fates----”
-
-                          WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY.
-
-
-I
-
-A fateful Titan, brooding over a mammoth chess-board, now cautious
-in his moves as he shifts his myriad pigmies, now daring, but always
-resolute, clear-eyed, steady of hand, and with no thought but
-victory--as such a figure Rodin might have visualized twentieth-century
-Chicago.
-
-Chicago is not a baby and utters no bleating cry that it is
-“misunderstood,” and yet a great many people have not only
-misunderstood or misinterpreted it but have expressed their dislike
-with hearty frankness. To many visitors Chicago is a city of dreadful
-night, to be explored as hurriedly as possible with outward-bound
-ticket clenched tightly in hand. But Chicago may not be comprehended in
-the usual scamper of the tourist; for the interesting thing about this
-city is the people, and they require time. I do not, of course, mean
-that they are all worthy of individual scrutiny, but rather that the
-very fact of so many human beings collecting there, living cheerfully
-and harmoniously, laboring and aspiring and illustrating the pressing,
-changing problems of our democracy awakens at once the beholder’s
-sympathetic interest. Chicago is not New York, nor is it London or
-Paris: Chicago is different. The Chicagoan will convince you of this if
-you fail to see it; the point has been conceded by a great number of
-observers from all quarters, but not in just the same spirit in which
-the citizen speaks of it.
-
-Both inspired and uninspired critics have made Chicago the subject
-of a considerable literature that runs the gamut of anxious concern,
-dismal apprehension, dismay, and disgust. Mr. Kipling saw the city
-embodied as a girl arrayed in a costume of red and black, shod in red
-shoes sauntering jauntily down the gory aisle of a slaughter-house. Mr.
-H. G. Wells boasts that he refrained from visiting the packing-houses
-owing to what he describes as his immense “repugnance to the killing
-of fixed and helpless animals.” He reports that he saw nothing of
-those “ill-managed, ill-inspected establishments,” though he “smelt
-the unwholesome reek from them over and over again,” and observed
-with trepidation “the enormous expanse and intricacy of railroads that
-net this great industrial desolation.” Chicago’s pressing need, he
-philosophizes, is discipline--a panacea which he generously prescribes
-not only for all that displeased him in America, but for Lancashire,
-South and East London, and the Pas de Calais. “Each man,” he ruminates,
-“is for himself, each enterprise; there is no order, no prevision,
-no common and universal plan.” I have cheerfully set down this last
-statement to lighten my own burdens, for by reversing it one may very
-happily express the real truth about Chicago. Instead of the “shoving
-unintelligent proceedings of under-bred and morally obtuse men,” great
-numbers of men and women of the highest intelligence are constantly
-directing their talents toward the amelioration of the very conditions
-that grieved Mr. Wells.
-
-Chicago may, to be sure, be dismissed in a few brilliant phrases as the
-black pit of perdition, the jumping-off place of the world; but to the
-serious-minded American the effort making there for the common uplift
-is too searching, too intelligent, too sincere, for sneers. I fancy
-that in view of events that have occurred in Europe since his visit
-to America Mr. Wells would be less likely to rest his case against
-Chicago on the need of discipline alone. All that discipline may do
-for a people had been achieved by the Imperial German Government when
-the Kaiser started for Paris in 1914; but subjection, obedience, even
-a highly developed efficiency are not the whole of the law and the
-prophets. Justice and mercy are finer things, and nothing in Chicago
-is more impressive or encouraging than the stubborn purpose of many
-citizens who are neither foolish nor ignorant to win and establish
-these twain for the whole. It is an unjust and ungenerous assumption
-that Chicago is unaware of its needs and dangers, or that from year to
-year no gains are made in the attempt to fuse and enlighten the mass.
-It is the greatest laboratory that democracy has known. The very fact
-that so much effort must go into experiment, that there are more than
-two and a half million distinct units to deal with, with a resulting
-confusion in needs and aims, adds not merely to the perplexity but to
-the fascination of the social and political enigma. There is, quite
-definitely, a thing called the Chicago spirit, a thing compounded of
-energy, faith, and hope--and again energy! Nor is the energy all spent
-upon the material and sordid, for the fine, arresting thing is the
-tremendous vim this lusty young giant among the world’s cities brings
-to the solution of its problems--problems that deserve to be printed in
-capitals out of respect for their immensity and far-reaching importance
-to the national life. Chicago does not walk around her problems, but
-meets them squarely and manfully. The heart of the inquirer is won by
-the perfect candor with which the Chicagoan replies to criticism; the
-critic is advised that for every evil there is a remedy; indeed, that
-some agency is at work on that particular thing at that particular
-moment. This information is conveyed with a smile that expresses
-Chicago’s faith and hope--a smile that may be a little sad and
-wistful--but the faith and the hope are inescapably there.
-
-       *       *       *       *       *
-
-Chicago is the industrial and financial clearing-house, the
-inspirational centre of the arts, and the playground for 50,000,000
-people. The pilgrim who lands on the lake shore with an open mind and
-a fair understanding of what America is all about--the unprejudiced
-traveller--is immediately conscious that here, indeed, is a veritable
-capital of democracy.
-
-Every night three hundred or more sleeping-cars bear approximately
-4,500 persons toward this Western metropolis on journeys varying from
-five to twelve hours in length. From innumerable points it is a night’s
-run, and any morning one may see these pilgrims pouring out of the
-railway-stations, dispersing upon a thousand errands, often concluded
-in time for the return trip between six o’clock and midnight. At
-times one wonders whether all the citizens of the tributary provinces
-have not gathered here at once, so great is the pressure upon hotel
-space, so thronged the streets. The sleeping-car holds no terrors
-for the Westerner. He enjoys the friendship of the train-crews; the
-porters--many of them veterans of the service--call him by name and in
-addressing them he avoids the generic “George,” which the travelling
-salesman applies to all knights of the whisk-broom, and greets them by
-their true baptismal appellations of Joshua or Obadiah. Mr. George Ade
-has threatened to organize a “Society for the Prevention of the Calling
-of Sleeping-Car Porters George”!
-
-The professional or business man rises from his meagre couch refreshed
-and keen for adventure and, after a strenuous day, returns to it and
-slumbers peacefully as he is hurled homeward. The man from Sioux City
-or Saint Joe who spends a day here does not crawl into his berth weary
-and depressed, but returns inspired and cheered and determined to put
-more vim into his business the next morning. On the homeward trail,
-eating supper in company with the neighbors he finds aboard, he dilates
-eloquently upon the wonders of the city, upon its enterprise, upon the
-heartiness with which its business men meet their customers. Chicago
-men work longer hours than their New York brethren and take pride in
-their accessibility. It is easier to get a hearing in high quarters
-in any field of endeavor in Chicago than in New York; there is less
-waiting in the anteroom, and a better chance of being asked out for
-lunch.
-
-The West is proud of Chicago and loves it with a passionate devotion.
-Nor is it the purpose of these reflections to hint that this mighty
-Mecca is unworthy of the adoration of the millions who turn toward it
-in affection and reverence. Chicago not only draws strength from a vast
-territory but, through myriad agencies and avenues, sends back a mighty
-power from its huge dynamo. It is the big brother of all lesser towns,
-throwing an arm about Davenport and Indianapolis, Springfield and
-Columbus, and manifesting a kindly tolerance toward St. Louis, Kansas
-City, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Cleveland, whose growth and prosperity
-lift them to a recognized and respected rivalry.
-
-The intense loyalty of the Chicagoan to his city is one of his most
-admirable characteristics and the secret of his city’s greatness.
-He is proud even of the Chicago climate, which offers from time to
-time every variety of weather known to meteorology and is capable
-of effecting combinations utterly new to this most fascinating of
-sciences. Chicago’s coldest day of record was in 1872, when the minus
-registration was 23; the hottest in 1901, when the mercury rose to
-103. Such excesses are followed by contrition and repentance and days
-of ethereal mildness. The lake serves as a funnel down which roar icy
-blasts direct from the hyperboreans. The wind cuts like a scythe of
-ice swung by a giant. In summer the hot plains pour in their burning
-heat; or, again, when it pleases the weather-god to produce a humid
-condition, the moisture-charged air is stifling. But a Chicagoan does
-not mind the winter, which he declares to be good for body and soul;
-and, as for the heat, he maintains--and with a degree of truth to
-sustain him--that the nights are always cool. The throngs that gathered
-in Chicago for the Republican and the Progressive conventions in
-June, 1916, were treated to a diversity of weather, mostly bad. It
-was cold; it rained hideously. There were dismal hours of waiting for
-reports of the negotiations between the two bodies of delegates in
-which the noblest oratory failed to bring warmth and cheer. Chicago did
-her worst that week, but without serious impairment of her prestige as
-the greatest convention city in the world. Every one said, “Isn’t this
-just like Chicago!” and inquired the way to the nearest quinine.
-
-[Illustration: Chicago is the big brother of all lesser towns.]
-
-“The Windy City” is a descriptive sobriquet. There are not only
-cold winds and hot winds of the greatest intensity, but there are
-innumerable little gusts that spring up out of nowhere for no other
-conceivable purpose than to deposit dust or cinders in the human eye.
-There is a gesture acquired by all Chicagoans--a familiar bit of
-calisthenics essential to the preservation of head-gear. If you see
-a man pursuing his hat in a Chicago street you may be sure that he
-is an outsider; the native knows by a kind of prescience just when
-the fateful breeze is coming, prepares for it, and is never caught
-unawares. In like manner the local optic seems to be impregnable
-to persistent attacks of the omnipresent cinder. By what means the
-eyeball of a visitor becomes the haven for flying débris, while the
-native-born walks unscathed, is beyond my philosophy. It must be
-that the eye of the inhabitant is trained to resist these malevolent
-assaults and that the sharp-edged cinder spitefully awaits an
-opportunity to impinge upon the defenseless optic of passing pilgrims.
-The pall of smoke miraculously disappears at times and the cinder
-abandons its depredations. The sky may be as blue over Chicago as
-anywhere else on earth. The lake shimmers like silk and from brown,
-near shore, runs away to the horizon through every tint of blue and
-green and vague, elusive purples.
-
-
-II
-
-Chicago still retained, in the years of my first acquaintance,
-something of the tang of the wild onion which in the Indian vernacular
-was responsible for its name. (I shudderingly take refuge in this
-parenthesis to avoid collision with etymological experts who have spent
-their lives sherlocking the word’s origin. The genesis of “Chicago” is
-a moot question, not likely to be settled at this late day. Whether
-it meant leek, polecat, skunkweed, or onion does not greatly matter.
-I choose the wild onion from the possibilities, for the highly
-unscientific reason that it seems to me the most appropriate and
-flavorsome of all accessible suggestions.)
-
-In the early eighties one might stand by the lakeside and be very
-conscious of a West beyond that was still in a pioneer stage. At the
-department headquarters of the army might be met hardy campaigners
-against the Indians of mountain and plain who were still a little
-apprehensive that the telegraph might demand orders for the movement
-of troops against hostile red men along the vanishing frontiers.
-The battle of Wounded Knee, in which 100 warriors and 120 women and
-children were found dead on the field (December 29, 1890), might almost
-have been observed from a parlor-car window. It may have been that on
-my visits I chanced to touch circles dominated by Civil War veterans,
-but great numbers of these diverted their energies to peaceful channels
-in Chicago at the end of the rebellion, and they gave color to the
-city life. It was a part of the upbringing of a mid-Western boy of my
-generation to reverence the heroes of the sixties, and it was fitting
-that in the land of Lincoln and in a State that gave Grant a regiment
-and started him toward immortality there should be frequent reunions
-of veterans, and political assemblages and agitations in which they
-figured, to encourage hero-worship in the young. Unforgettable among
-the more distinguished of these Civil War veterans was General John
-A. Logan, sometime senator in Congress and Blaine’s running mate in
-1884. In life he was a gallant and winning figure, and Saint Gaudens’s
-equestrian statue in Grant Park preserves his memory in a city that
-delighted to honor him.
-
-Chicago’s attractions in those days included summer engagements of
-Theodore Thomas’s orchestra, preceding Mr. Thomas’s removal to the city
-and the founding of the orchestra that became his memorial. Concerts
-were given in an exposition hall on the site now occupied by the Art
-Institute, with railway-trains gayly disporting on the lake side of the
-building. So persistent is the association of ideas, that to this day
-I never hear the Fifth Symphony or the Tannhäuser Overture free of the
-rumble and jar and screech of traffic. It was in keeping with Chicago’s
-good-humored tolerance of the incongruous and discordant in those
-years that the scores of Beethoven and Wagner should be punctuated by
-locomotive whistles, and that _pianissimo_ passages should be drowned
-in the grinding of brakes.
-
-At this period David Swing stood every Sunday morning in Central Music
-Hall addressing large audiences, and he looms importantly in the
-Chicago of my earliest knowledge. Swing was not only a fine classical
-scholar--he lectured charmingly on the Greek poets--but he preached
-a gospel that harmonized with the hopeful and liberal Chicago spirit
-as it gathered strength and sought the forms in which it has later
-declared itself. He was not an orator in the sense that Ingersoll and
-Beecher were; as I remember, he always read his sermons or addresses;
-but he was a strikingly individual and magnetic person, whose fine
-cultivation shone brilliantly in his discourses. In the retrospect it
-seems flattering to the Chicago of that time that it recognized and
-appreciated his quality in spite of an unorthodoxy that had caused his
-retirement from the formal ministry.
-
-The third member of a trinity that lingers agreeably in my memory is
-Eugene Field. Journalism has known no more versatile genius, and his
-column of “Sharps and Flats” in the _Morning News_ (later the _Record_)
-voiced the Chicago of his day. Here indubitably was the flavor of the
-original wild-onion beds of the Jesuit chronicles! Field became an
-institution quite as much as Thomas and Swing, and reached an audience
-that ultimately embraced the whole United States. The literary finish
-of his paragraphs, their wide range of subject, their tone, varying
-from kindly encouraging comment on a new book of verse that had won his
-approval to a mocking jibe at some politician, his hatred of pretense,
-the plausibility of the hoaxes he was constantly perpetrating, gave
-an infinite zest to his department. The most devoted of Chicagoans,
-he nevertheless laid a chastening hand upon his fellow citizens. In
-an ironic vein that was perhaps his best medium he would hint at the
-community’s lack of culture, though he would be the first to defend
-the city from such assaults from without the walls. He prepared the
-way for the coming of Edmund Clarence Stedman with announcements of
-a series of bizarre entertainments in the poet’s honor, including a
-street parade in which the meat-packing industry was to be elaborately
-represented. He gave circulation to a story, purely fanciful, that
-Joel Chandler Harris was born in Africa, where his parents were
-missionaries, thus accounting for “Uncle Remus’s” intimate acquaintance
-with negro characters and folklore. His devotion to journalism was
-such that he preferred to publish his verses in his newspaper rather
-than in magazines, often hoarding them for weeks that he might fill a
-column with poems and create the impression that they were all flung
-off as part of the day’s work, though, as a matter of fact, they were
-the result of the most painstaking labor. With his legs thrown across
-a table he wrote, on a pad held in his lap, the minute, perpendicular
-hand, with its monkish rubrications, that gave distinction to all his
-“copy.” Among other accomplishments he was a capital recitationist
-and mimic. There was no end to the variety of ways in which he could
-interest and amuse a company. He was so pre-eminently a social being
-that it was difficult to understand how he produced so much when he
-yielded so readily to any suggestion to strike work for any enterprise
-that promised diversion. I linger upon his name not because of his
-talents merely but because he was in a very true sense the protagonist
-of the city in those years; a veritable _genius loci_ who expressed a
-Chicago, “wilful, young,” that was disposed to stick its tongue in its
-cheek in the presence of the most exalted gods.
-
-My Chicago of the consulship of Plancus was illuminated also by the
-National League ball club, whose roster contained “names to fill a
-Roman line”--“Pop” Anson, Clarkson, Williamson, Ryan, Pfeffer, and
-“Mike” Kelley. Chicago displayed hatchments of woe on her portals when
-Kelley was “sold to Boston” for $10,000! In his biography of Field Mr.
-Slason Thompson has preserved this characteristic paragraph--only one
-of many in which the wit, humorist, and poet paid tribute to Kelley’s
-genius:
-
-“Benjamin Harrison is a good, honest, patriotic man, and we like him.
-But he never stole second base in all his life and he could not swat
-Mickey Welch’s down curves over the left-field fence. Therefore, we
-say again, as we have said many times before, that, much as we revere
-Benjamin Harrison’s purity and amiability, we cannot but accord the
-tribute of our sincerest admiration to that paragon of American
-manhood, Michael J. Kelley.”
-
-
-III
-
-It must be said for Chicago that to the best of her ability her
-iniquities are kept in the open; she conceals nothing; it is all there
-for your observation if you are disposed to pry into the heart of the
-matter. The rectilinear system of streets exposes the whole city to
-the sun’s eye. One is struck by the great number of foreign faces, and
-by faces that show a blending of races--a step, perhaps, toward the
-evolution of some new American type. On Michigan Avenue, where on
-fair afternoons something of the brilliant spectacle of Fifth Avenue
-is reproduced, women in bright turbans, men in modifications of their
-national garb--Syrians, Greeks, Turks, Russians and what-not--are
-caught up and hurried along in the crowd. In the shopping centres
-of Wabash Avenue and State Street the foreign element is present
-constantly, and even since the war’s abatement of immigration these
-potential citizens are daily in evidence in the railway-stations. Yet
-one has nowhere the sense of congestion that is so depressing in New
-York’s East Side; the overcrowding is not so apparent even where the
-conditions are the worst Chicago has to offer.
-
-My search for the picturesque had been disappointing until, quite
-undirected, I stumbled into Maxwell Street one winter morning and found
-its Jewish market to my liking. The “Ham Fair” in Paris is richer in
-antiquarian loot, but Maxwell Street is enough; ’twill serve! Here we
-have squalor, perhaps, and yet a pretty clean and a wholly orderly
-squalor. Innumerable booths litter the sidewalks of this thoroughfare
-between Halstead and Jefferson Streets, and merchandise and customers
-overflow into the streets until traffic is blocked. Fruits, vegetables,
-meats, fowls, raiment of every kind are offered. Bushel-baskets are
-the ordained receptacle for men’s hats. A fine leisure characterizes
-the movements and informs the methods of the cautious purchaser. Cages
-of pigeons proudly surmounting coops of fowls suggested that their
-elevation might be attributable to some special sanctity or reservation
-for sacrificial rites. A cynical policeman (I saw but one guardian
-of the peace in the course of three visits) rudely dispelled this
-illusion with a hint that these birds, enjoying a free range of the
-air, had doubtless been feloniously captured for exposure to sale in
-the market-place--an imputation upon the bearded keepers of the bird
-bazaars that I reject with scorn. Negroes occasionally cross the bounds
-of their own quarter to shop among these children of the Ghettos--I
-wonder whether by some instinctive confidence in the good-will of a
-people who like themselves do daily battle with the most deeply planted
-of all prejudices.
-
-[Illustration: The “Ham Fair” in Paris is richer in antiquarian loot,
-but Maxwell Street is enough; ’twill serve!]
-
-Chicago is rich in types; human nature is comprehensively represented
-with its best and worst. It should be possible to find here, midway of
-the seas, the typical American, but I am mistrustful of my powers of
-selection in so grave a matter. There are too many men observable in
-office-buildings and in clubs who might pass as typical New Yorkers
-if they were encountered in Fifth Avenue, to make possible any safe
-choice for the artist’s pencil. There is no denying that the average
-Chicagoan is less “smart” than the New Yorker. The pressing of clothes
-and nice differentiations in haberdashery seem to be less important
-to the male here than to his New York cousin. I spent an anxious
-Sunday morning in quest of the silk hat, and reviewed the departing
-worshippers in the neighborhood of many temples in this search, but the
-only toppers I found were the crowning embellishments of two colored
-gentlemen in South State Street.
-
-Perhaps the typical Chicagoan is the commuter who, after the day’s
-hurry and fret, ponders the city’s needs calmly by the lake shore or in
-prairie villages. Chicago’s suburbs are felicitously named--Kenilworth,
-Winnetka, Hubbard Woods, Ravinia, Wilmette, Oak Park, and Lake Forest.
-But neither the opulence of Lake Forest and Winnetka, nor polo and a
-famous golf-course at Wheaton can obscure the merits of Evanston. The
-urban Chicagoan becomes violent at the mention of Evanston, yet here we
-find a reservoir of the true Western folksiness, and Chicago profits
-by its propinquity. Evanston goes to church, Evanston reads, Evanston
-is shamelessly high-brow with a firm substratum of evangelicanism.
-Here, on spring mornings, Chopin floats through many windows across
-the pleasantest of hedges and Dostoyefsky is enthroned by the evening
-lamp. The girl who is always at the tennis-nets or on the golf-links of
-Evanston is the same girl one has heard at the piano, or whose profile
-is limned against the lamp with the green shade as she ponders the
-Russians. She is symbolic and evocative of Chicago _in altissimo_. Her
-father climbs the heights perforce that he may not be deprived of her
-society. Fitted by nature to adorn the bright halls of romance, she is
-the sternest of realists. She discusses politics with sophistication,
-and you may be sure she belongs to many societies and can wield the
-gavel with grace and ease. She buries herself at times in a city
-settlement, for nothing is so important to this young woman as the
-uplift of the race; and in so far as the race’s destiny is in her hands
-I cheerfully volunteer the opinion that its future is bright.
-
-I hope, however, to be acquitted of ungraciousness if I say that the
-most delightful person I ever met in Chicago, where an exacting social
-taste may find amplest satisfaction, and where, in the academic shades
-of three universities (Northwestern, Lake Forest, and Chicago), one
-may find the answer to a question in any of the arts or sciences--the
-most refreshing and the most instructive of my encounters was with a
-lady who followed the vocation of a pickpocket and shoplifter. A friend
-of mine who is engaged in the detection of crime in another part of the
-universe had undertaken to introduce me to the presence of a “gunman,”
-a species of malefactor that had previously eluded me. Meeting this
-detective quite unexpectedly in Chicago, he made it possible for
-me to observe numbers of gangsters, or persons he vouched for as
-such--gentlemen willing to commit murder for a fee so ridiculously low
-that it would be immoral for me to name it.
-
-It is enough that I beheld and even conversed with a worthy descendant
-of the murderers of Elizabethan tragedy--one who might confess, with
-the Second Murderer in Macbeth:
-
-      “I am one, my liege,
-  Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world
-  Have so incens’d that I am reckless what
-  I do to spite the world.”
-
-But it was even more thrilling to be admitted, after a prearranged
-knock at the back door, into the home of a woman of years whose life
-has been one long battle with the social order. Assured by my friend
-that I was a trustworthy person, or, in the vernacular, “all right,”
-she entered with the utmost spirit into the discussion of larceny as
-she had practised it. Only a week earlier she had been released from
-the Bridewell after serving a sentence for shoplifting, and yet her
-incarceration--only one of a series of imprisonments--had neither
-embittered her nor dampened her zest for life. She met my inquiries as
-to the hazards of the game with the most engaging candor. I am ashamed
-to confess that as she described her adventures I could understand
-something of the lawless joy she found in the pitting of her wits
-against the law. She had lived in Chicago all her life and knew its
-every corner. The underworld was an open book to her; she patiently
-translated for my benefit the thieves’ argot she employed fluently.
-She instructed me with gusto and humor in the most approved methods
-of shoplifting, with warnings as to the machinery by which the big
-department stores protect themselves from her kind. She was equally
-wise as to the filching of purses, explaining that this is best done
-by three conspirators if a crowded street-car be the chosen scene of
-operations. Her own function was usually the gentle seizure of the
-purse, to be passed quickly back to a confederate, and he in turn was
-charged with the responsibility of conveying it to a third person,
-who was expected to drop from the rear platform and escape. Having
-elucidated this delicate transaction, she laughed gleefully. “Once on
-a Wabash Avenue car I nipped a purse from a woman’s lap and passed it
-back, thinking a girl who was working with me was right there, but
-say--I handed it to a captain of police!” Her husband, a burglar of
-inferior talents, sitting listlessly in the dingy room that shook under
-the passing elevated trains, took a sniff of cocaine. When I professed
-interest in the proceeding she said she preferred the hypodermic, and
-thereupon mixed a potion for herself and thrust the needle into an arm
-much swollen from frequent injections. Only the other day, a year after
-this visit, I learned that she was again in durance, this time for an
-ingenious attempt to defraud an insurance company.
-
-
-IV
-
-In the field of social effort Chicago has long stood at the fore, and
-the experiments have continued until a good many debatable points as
-to method have been determined. Hull House and Miss Jane Addams are a
-part of American history. There are those in Chicago who are skeptical
-as to the value of much of the machinery employed in social betterment,
-but they may be silenced effectively by a question as to just what the
-plight of the two and a half million would be if so many high-minded
-people had not consecrated themselves to the task of translating
-America into terms of service for the guidance and encouragement of the
-poor and ignorant. The spirit of this endeavor is that expressed in
-Arnold’s lines on Goethe:
-
-  “He took the suffering human race,
-  He read each wound, each weakness clear;
-  And struck his finger on the place
-  And said: Thou ailest here and here!”
-
-And when the diagnosis has been made some one in this city of hope is
-ready with a remedy.
-
-When I remarked to a Chicago alderman upon the great number of agencies
-at work in Chicago for social betterment, he said, with manifest pride:
-“This town is full of idealists!” What strikes the visitor is that so
-many of these idealists are practical-minded men and women who devote
-a prodigious amount of time, energy, and money to the promotion of
-social welfare. It is impossible to examine a cross-section anywhere
-without finding vestigia of welfare effort, or traces of the movements
-for political reform represented in the Municipal Voters’ League, the
-Legislative League, or the City Club.
-
-It is admitted (grudgingly in some quarters) that the strengthening
-of the social fabric has carried with it an appreciable elevation of
-political ideals, though the proof of this is less impressive than we
-should like to have it. It is unfortunately true that an individual
-may be subjected to all possible saving influences--transformed
-into a clean, reputable being, yet continue to view his political
-obligations as through a glass darkly. Nor is the average citizen of
-old American stock, who is satisfied, very often, to accept any kind
-of local government so long as he is not personally annoyed about it,
-a wholly inspiring example to the foreign-born. The reformer finds it
-necessary to work coincidentally at both ends of the social scale. The
-preservation of race groups in Chicago’s big wards (the vote in these
-political units ranges from eight to thirty-six thousand), is essential
-to safe manipulation. The bosses are not interested in the successful
-operation of the melting-pot. It is much easier for them to buy votes
-collectively from a padrone than to negotiate with individuals whose
-minds have been “corrupted” by the teachers of political honesty in
-settlements and neighborhood houses. However, the Chicago bosses enjoy
-little tranquillity; some agency is constantly on their heels with
-an impudent investigation that endangers their best-laid devices for
-“protection.”
-
-As an Americanizing influence, important as a means of breaking-up
-race affiliations that facilitate the “delivery” of votes, Chicago has
-developed a type of recreation park that gives promise of the best
-results. The first of these were opened in the South Park district
-in 1905. There are now thirty-five such centres, which, without
-paralleling or infringing upon the work of other social agencies,
-greatly widen the scope of the city’s social service. These parks
-comprise a playground with baseball diamond, tennis-courts, an outdoor
-swimming-pool, playgrounds for young children, and a field-house
-containing a large assembly-hall, club-rooms, a branch library, and
-shower-baths with locker-rooms for men and women. Skating is offered
-as a winter diversion, and the halls may be used for dances, dramatic,
-musical, and other neighborhood entertainments. Clubs organized
-for the study of civic questions meet in these houses; there are
-special classes for the instruction of foreigners in the mystery
-of citizenship; and schemes of welfare work are discussed in the
-neighborhood councils that are encouraged to debate municipal problems
-and to initiate new methods of social service. A typical centre is
-Dvorák Park, ninety-five per cent of whose patrons are Bohemians.
-Among its organizations are a Bohemian Old Settlers’ Club and a
-Servant Girls’ Chorus. Colonel H. C. Carbaugh, of the Civil Service
-Board of South Park Commissioners, in an instructive volume, “Human
-Welfare Work in Chicago,” calls these park centres “public community
-clearing-houses.” They appeal the more strongly to the neighborhoods
-they serve from the fact that they are provided by the municipality,
-and, while under careful and sympathetic supervision, are in a very
-true sense the property of the people. Visits are exchanged by the
-musical, gymnastic, or other societies of the several communities, with
-a view to promoting fellowship between widely separated neighborhoods.
-
-One has but to ask in Chicago whether some particular philanthropic or
-welfare work has been undertaken to be borne away at once to observe
-that very thing in successful operation. It is a fair statement
-that no one need walk the streets of the city hungry. Many doors
-stand ajar for the despairing. A common indictment of the churches,
-that they have neglected the practical application of Christianity
-to humanity’s needs, hardly holds against Chicago’s churches. The
-Protestant Episcopal Church has long been zealous in philanthropic
-and welfare work, and Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists are
-conspicuously active in these fields. The Catholic Church in Chicago
-extends a helping hand through forty-five alert and well-managed
-agencies. The total disbursement of the Associated Jewish Charities
-for the year ending May, 1916, was $593,466, and the Jewish people of
-Chicago contribute generously to social-welfare efforts outside their
-fold. The Young Men’s Christian Association conducts a great number
-of enterprises, including a nineteen-story hotel, built at a cost of
-$1,350,000, which affords temporary homes to the thousands of young men
-who every year seek employment in Chicago. This huge structure contains
-1,821 well-ventilated rooms that are rented at from thirty to fifty
-cents a day. The Chicago Association has twenty-nine widely distributed
-branches, offering recreation, vocational instruction, and spiritual
-guidance. The Salvation Army addresses itself tirelessly to Chicago’s
-human problem. Colonel Carbaugh thus summarizes the army’s work for the
-year ending in September, 1916: “At the various institutions for poor
-men and women 151,501 beds and meals were worked for; besides which
-$38,779.98 in cash was paid to the inmates for work done. To persons
-who were not in a position to work, or whom it was impossible to supply
-with work, 111,354 beds and meals, 11,330 garments and pairs of shoes,
-and 123 tons of coal were given without charge.”
-
-The jaunty inquirer for historical evidences--hoary ruins “out of
-fashion, like a rusty mail in monumental mockery”--is silenced by the
-multiplicity of sentry-houses that mark the line of social regeneration
-and security. Chicago is carving her destiny and in no small degree
-moulding the future of America by these laborious processes brought to
-bear upon humanity itself. Perhaps the seeker in quest of the spirit
-of Chicago better serves himself by sitting for an hour in a community
-centre, in a field-house, in the juvenile court, in one of the hundreds
-of places where the human problem is met and dealt with hourly than in
-perusing tables of statistics.
-
-At every turn one is aware that no need, no abuse is neglected, and
-an immeasurable patience characterizes all this labor. One looks at
-Chicago’s worst slum with a sense that after all it is not so bad, or
-that at any rate it is not hopeless. Nothing is hopeless in a city
-where the highest reach down so constantly to the lowest, where the
-will to protect, to save, to lift is everywhere so manifest. This will,
-this determination is well calculated to communicate a certain awe to
-the investigator: no other expression of the invincible Chicago spirit
-is so impressive as this.
-
-
-V
-
-_Anno Urbis Conditæ_ may not be appended to any year in the chronicles
-of a city that has so repeatedly rebuilt itself and that goes
-cheerfully on demolishing yesterday’s structures to make way for
-the nobler achievements of to-morrow. While the immediate effect of
-the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1892-3 was to quicken the civic
-impulse and arouse Chicago to a sense of her own powers, a lasting and
-concrete result is found in the ambition inspired by the architectural
-glories of the fair to invoke the same arts for the city’s permanent
-beautification. The genius of Mr. Daniel H. Burnham, who waved the
-magic wand that summoned “pillared arch and sculptured dome” out
-of flat prairie and established “the White City” to live as a happy
-memory for many millions in all lands, was enlisted for the greater
-task. Without the fair as a background the fine talents of Mr. Burnham
-and his collaborator, Mr. Edward H. Bennett, might never have been
-exercised upon the city. Chicago thinks in large terms, and being
-properly pleased with the demonstration of its ability to carry
-through an undertaking of heroic magnitude it immediately sought other
-fields to conquer. The fair had hardly closed its doors before Mr.
-Burnham and Mr. Bennett were engaged by the Commercial Club to prepare
-comprehensive plans for the perpetuation of something of the charm
-and beauty of the fairy city as a permanent and predominating feature
-of Chicago. Clearly what served so well as a temporary matter might
-fill the needs of all time. The architects boldly attacked the problem
-of establishing as the outer line, the façade of the city, something
-distinctive, a combination of landscape and architecture such as no
-other American city has ever created out of sheer pride, determination,
-and sound taste. Like the æsthetic problems, the practical difficulties
-imposed by topography, commercial pre-emptions, and legal
-embarrassments were intrusted only to competent and sympathetic hands.
-The whole plan, elaborated in a handsome volume published in 1909, with
-the effects contemplated happily anticipated in the colored drawings of
-Mr. Jules Guérin, fixed definitely an ideal and a goal.
-
-This programme was much described and discussed at the time of its
-inception, and I had ignorantly assumed that it had been neglected in
-the pressure of matters better calculated to resound in bank clearings,
-but I had grossly misjudged the firmness of the Chicago fibre. The
-death of Mr. Burnham left the architectural responsibilities of the
-work in the very capable hands of Mr. Bennett. The Commercial Club,
-an organization of highest intelligence and influence, steadfastly
-supported the plan until it was reinforced by a strong public demand
-for its fulfilment. The movement has been greatly assisted by Mr.
-Charles H. Wacker, president of the plan commission and the author
-of a primer on the subject that is used in the public schools. Mr.
-Wacker’s vigorous propaganda, through the press and by means of
-illustrated lectures in school and neighborhood houses, has tended to
-the democratizing of what might have passed as a fanciful scheme of no
-interest to the great body of the people.
-
-With singular perversity nature vouchsafed the fewest possible
-aids to the architect for the embellishment of a city that had
-grown to prodigious size before it became conscious of its artistic
-deficiencies. The lake washes a flat beach, unbroken by any islanded
-bay to rest the eye, and the back door is level with limitless prairie.
-There is no hill on which to plant an acropolis, and the Chicago River
-(transformed into a canal by clever engineering) offered little to
-the landscape-architect at any stage of its history. However, the
-distribution of parks is excellent, and they are among the handsomest
-in the world. These, looped together by more than eighty miles of
-splendid boulevards, afford four thousand acres of open space. The
-early pre-emption of the lake front by railroad-tracks added to the
-embarrassments of the artist, but the plan devised by Messrs. Burnham
-and Bennett conceals them by a broadening of Grant Park that cannot
-fail to produce an effect of distinction and charm. Chicago has a
-playful habit of driving the lake back at will, and it is destined to
-farther recessions. When the prodigious labors involved in the plan
-are completed the lake may be contemplated across green esplanades,
-broken by lagoons; peristyles and statuary will be a feature of
-the transformed landscape. The new Field Museum is architecturally
-consonant with the general plan; a new art museum and other buildings
-are promised that will add to the variety and picturesqueness of the
-whole. With Michigan Avenue widened and brought into harmony with
-Grant Park, thus extended and beautified and carried across the river
-northward to a point defined at present by the old water-tower (one
-of Chicago’s few antiquities), landscape architecture will have set a
-new mark in America. The congestion of north and south bound traffic
-on Michigan Avenue will be relieved by a double-decked bridge, making
-possible the classification of traffic and the exclusion of heavy
-vehicles from the main thoroughfare. All this is promised very soon,
-now that necessary legislation and legal decisions are clearing the
-way. The establishment of a civic centre, with a grouping of public
-buildings that would make possible further combinations in keeping with
-those that are to lure the eye at the lakeside is projected, but may be
-left for another generation to accomplish.
-
-Chicago’s absorption in social service and well-planned devices for
-taking away the reproach of its ugliness is not at the expense of the
-grave problems presented by its politics. Here again the inquirer is
-confronted by a formidable array of citizens, effectively organized,
-who are bent upon making Chicago a safe place for democracy. That
-Chicago shall be the best-governed city in America is the aspiration
-of great numbers of men and women, and one is struck once more not
-merely by the energy expended in these matters but by the thoroughness
-and far-sightedness of the efforts for political betterment. Illinois
-wields so great an influence in national affairs that strictly
-municipal questions suffer in Chicago as in every other American city
-where the necessities of partisan politics constantly obscure local
-issues. The politics of Chicago is bewilderingly complicated by the
-complexity of its governmental machinery.
-
-It is staggering to find that the city has not one but, in effect,
-twenty-two distinct governing agencies, all intrusted with the taxing
-power! These include the city of Chicago, a board of education, a
-library board, the Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium, the county
-government of Cook County, the sanitary district of Chicago, and
-sixteen separate boards of park commissioners. The interests
-represented in these organizations are, of course, identical in so
-far as the taxpaying citizen is concerned. An exhaustive report of
-the Chicago Bureau of Public Efficiency published in January, 1917,
-reaches the conclusion that “this community is poorly served by its
-hodgepodge of irresponsible governing agencies, not only independent
-of one another but often pulling and hauling at cross-purposes. A
-single governing agency, in which should be centred all the local
-administrative and legislative functions of the community, but directly
-responsible to the voters, would be able to render services which
-existing agencies could not perform nearly so well, if at all, even
-if directed by officials of exceptional ability. The present system,
-however, instead of attracting to public employment men of exceptional
-ability, tends to keep them out, with the result that the places are
-left at the disposal of partisan-spoils political leaders.”
-
-The waste entailed by this multiplication of agencies and resulting
-diffusion of power and responsibility is illustrated by the number of
-occasions on which the citizen is called upon to register and vote. The
-election expenses of Chicago and Cook County for 1916 were more than
-two million dollars, an increase of one hundred per cent in four years.
-This does not, of course, take account of the great sums expended by
-candidates and party organizations, or the waste caused by the frequent
-interruptions to normal business. Chicago’s calendar of election events
-for 1918 includes opportunities for registration in February, March,
-August, and October; city primaries in February; general primaries in
-September; a city election in April; and a general election in November.
-
-Under the plan of unified government proposed by the Bureau of
-Efficiency there would be but three regular elections in each four-year
-period, two biennial elections for national and State officials, and
-one combined municipal and judicial election. A consolidation and
-reform of the judicial machinery of Cook County and Chicago is urged
-by the bureau, which complains that the five county courts and the
-municipal court of Chicago, whose functions are largely concurrent,
-cost annually two and a quarter million. There are six separate clerks’
-offices and a small army of deputy sheriffs and bailiffs to serve these
-courts, with an evident paralleling of labor. While the city and county
-expend nearly a million dollars annually for legal services, this is
-not the whole item, for the library board, the board of education, and
-committees of the city council may, on occasion, employ special counsel.
-
-The policing of so large a city, whose very geographical position
-makes it a convenient way station for criminals of every sort, where
-so many races are to be dealt with, and where the existing form of
-municipal government keeps politics constantly to the fore, is beset
-with well-nigh insuperable obstacles. Last year the police department
-passed through a fierce storm with what seems to be a resulting
-improvement in conditions. An investigator of the Committee of Fifteen,
-a citizens’ organization, declared in May, 1917, that ten per cent
-of the men on the police force are “inherently crooked and ought to
-be driven from the department.” To which a police official retorted
-that for every crooked policeman there are 500 crooked citizens, an
-ill-tempered aspersion too shocking for acceptance. The _Chicago Daily
-News Almanac_ records 114,625 arrests in 1915. Half of the total
-are set down as Americans; there were 9,508 negroes, 4,739 Germans,
-2,144 Greeks, 7,644 Polanders, 5,577 Russians, 2,981 Italians, and
-2,565 Irish. In that year there were 194 murders--35 fewer than in
-1914. Comparisons in such matters are not profitable but it may be
-interesting to note that in 1915 there were 222 murders in New York;
-244 in 1914; 265 in 1913. Over 3,000 keepers and inmates of Chicago
-gaming-houses were arrested in 1915. The cost of the police department
-is in excess of $7,000,000--an amount just about balanced by the
-license fee paid by the city’s seven thousand saloons. Until recently
-the State law closing saloons on Sunday was ignored, but last year the
-city police department undertook to enforce it, with (to the casual
-eye) a considerable degree of success.
-
-The report of the Bureau of Efficiency recommends the consolidation
-of the existing governing agencies into a single government headed by
-an executive of the city-manager type. Instead of a political mayor
-elected by popular vote the office would be filled by the city council
-for an indefinite tenure. The incumbent would be the executive officer
-of the council and he might be given a seat in that body without a
-vote. The council would be free to go outside the city if necessary
-in its search for a competent mayor under this council-manager plan.
-One has but to read the Chicago newspapers to be satisfied that some
-such change as here indicated is essential to the wise and economical
-government of the city. Battles between the mayor and the council,
-upheavals in one city department or another occur constantly with a
-serious loss of municipal dignity. With deep humility I confess my
-incompetence for the task of describing the present mayor of Chicago,
-Mr. William Hale Thompson, whose antics since he assumed office have
-given Chicago a vast amount of painful publicity. As a public official
-his manifold infelicities (I hope the term is sufficiently delicate)
-have at least served to strengthen the arguments in favor of the recall
-as a means of getting rid of an unfit office-holder.[D] Last year a
-general shaking up of the police department had hardly faded from the
-head-lines before the city’s school system, a frequent storm-centre,
-caught the limelight. The schools are managed by a board of trustees
-appointed by the mayor. On a day last spring (1917) the board met
-and discharged the superintendent of schools (though retaining him
-temporarily), and, if we may believe the news columns of the Chicago
-_Tribune_, “Chicago’s mayor was roped, thrown, and tied so rapidly
-that the crowd gasped, laughed, and broke into a cheer almost in one
-moment.” I mention this episode, which was followed in a few weeks by
-the reinstatement of the superintendent with an increase of salary,
-as justifying the demand for a form of government that will perform
-its functions decently and in order and without constant disturbances
-of the public service that result only in the encouragement of
-incompetence.
-
-The politicians will not relinquish so big a prize without a struggle;
-but one turns from the dark side of the picture to admire the many
-hopeful, persistent agencies that are addressing themselves to the
-correction of these evils. The best talents of the city are devoted
-to just these things. The trustees of the Bureau of Public Efficiency
-are Julius Rosenwald, Alfred L. Baker, Onward Bates, George G.
-Tunnell, Walter L. Fisher, Victor Elting, Allen B. Pond, and Frank I.
-Moulton, whose names are worthy of all honor as typical of Chicago’s
-most successful and public-spirited citizens. The City Club, with
-a membership of 2,400, is a wide-awake organization whose 27 civic
-committees, enlisting the services of 500 members, are constantly
-studying municipal questions, instituting inquiries, and initiating
-“movements” well calculated to annoy and alarm the powers that prey.
-
-Space that I had reserved for some note of Chicago’s industries, the
-vastness of the stock-yards, the great totals in beasts and dollars
-represented in the meat-packing business, the lake and railroad
-tonnage, and like matters, shrinks under pressure of what seem, on
-the whole, to be things of greater interest and significance. That
-the total receipts of live-stock for one year exceeded 14,000,000
-with a cash value of $370,938,156 strikes me as less impressive than
-the fact that a few miles distant from the packing-houses exists an
-art institute, visited by approximately a million persons annually,
-and an art school that affords capable instruction to 3,000 students.
-Every encouragement is extended to these pupils, nor is the artist,
-once launched upon his career, neglected by the community. The city
-provides, through a Commission for the Encouragement of Local Art,
-for the purchase of paintings by Chicago artists. There are a variety
-of private organizations that extend a helping hand to the tyro, and
-lectures and concerts are abundantly provided. A few years ago the
-National Institute of Arts and Letters met for the first time in
-Chicago. It must have been with a certain humor that the citizens
-spread for the members, who came largely from the East, a royal
-banquet in the Sculpture Hall of the Institute, as though to present
-Donatello and Verrocchio as the real hosts of the occasion. It is by
-such manifestations that Chicago is prone to stifle the charge of
-philistinism.
-
-[Illustration: Banquet given for the members of the National Institute
-of Arts and Letters.]
-
-With a noteworthy absence of self-consciousness, Chicago assimilates
-a great deal of music. The symphony orchestra, founded by Theodore
-Thomas and conducted since his death by Frederic Stock, offers a
-series of twenty-eight concerts a year. Eight thousand contributors
-made possible the building of Orchestra Hall, the organization’s
-permanent home. Boston is not more addicted to symphonies than Chicago.
-Indeed, on afternoons when concerts are scheduled the agitations of
-the musically minded in popular refectories, the presence in Michigan
-Avenue of suburban young women, whom one identifies at sight as
-devotees of Bach and Brahms, suggest similar scenes that are a part
-of the life of Boston. The luxury of grand opera is offered for ten
-weeks every winter by artists of first distinction; and it was Chicago,
-we shall frequently be reminded, that called New York’s attention to
-the merits of Mme. Galli-Curci. Literature too is much to the fore
-in Chicago, but I shall escape from the task of enumerating its many
-practitioners by pleading that only a volume would do justice to the
-subject. The contributors to Mr. Bert Leston Taylor’s “Line o’ Type”
-column in the _Tribune_ testify daily to the prevalence of the poetic
-impulse within the city and of an alert, mustang, critical spirit.
-
-With all its claims to cosmopolitanism one is nevertheless conscious
-that Chicago is only a prairie county-seat that is continually
-outgrowing its bounds, but is striving to maintain its early
-fundamental devotion to decency and order, and develop among its
-millions the respect for those things that are more excellent that is
-so distinguishing a trait of the Folks throughout the West. Chicago’s
-strength is the strength of the soil that was won for civilization and
-democracy by a great and valorous body of pioneer freemen; and the
-Chicago spirit is that of the men and women who plunged into the West
-bearing in their hearts that “something pretty fine” (in Lincoln’s
-phrase), which was the ideal of the founders of the republic. “The
-children of the light” are numerous enough to make the materialists and
-the philistines uncomfortable if not heartily ashamed of themselves;
-for it is rather necessary in Chicago to have “interests,” to manifest
-some degree of curiosity touching the best that has been thought and
-done in the world, and to hold a commission to help and to serve the
-community and the nation, to win the highest esteem.
-
-Every weakness and every element of strength in democracy, as we
-are experimenting with it, has definite and concrete presentment in
-Chicago. In the trying months preceding and following the declaration
-of war with Germany the city repeatedly asserted its intense
-patriotism. The predominating foreign-born population is German, yet
-once the die was cast these citizens were found, except in negligible
-instances, supporting the American cause as loyally as their neighbors
-of old American stock. The city’s patriotic ardor was expressed
-repeatedly in popular demonstrations--beginning with a preparedness
-parade in June, 1916, in which 150,000 persons participated; in public
-gatherings designed to unify sentiment, not least noteworthy of these
-being the meeting in the stock-yards pavilion in May, of last year,
-when 12,000 people greeted Colonel Roosevelt. The visit of M. Viviani
-and Field-Marshal Joffre afforded the city another opportunity to
-manifest its devotion to the cause of democracy. Every responsibility
-entailed by America’s entrance into the war was met immediately with
-an enthusiasm so hearty that the Chicago press was to be pardoned
-for indulging in ironic flings at the East, which had been gloomily
-apprehensive as to the attitude of the Middle West.
-
-The flag flies no more blithely or securely anywhere in America than in
-the great city that lies at the northern edge of the prairies that gave
-Lincoln to be the savior of the nation. Those continuing experiments
-and that struggle for perfection that are the task of democracy
-have here their fullest manifestation, and the knowledge that these
-processes and undertakings are nobly guided must be a stimulus and an
-inspiration to all who have at heart the best that may be sought and
-won for America.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER V
-
-THE MIDDLE WEST IN POLITICS
-
-  _The great interior region bounded east by the Alleghanies, north by
-  the British dominions, west by the Rocky Mountains, and south by the
-  line along which the culture of corn and cotton meets ... already has
-  above 10,000,000 people, and will have 50,000,000 within fifty years
-  if not prevented by any political folly or mistake. It contains more
-  than one-third of the country owned by the United States--certainly
-  more than 1,000,000 square miles. Once half as populous as
-  Massachusetts already is, it would have more than 75,000,000 people.
-  A glance at the map shows that, territorially speaking, it is the
-  great body of the republic. The other parts are but marginal borders
-  to it.--Lincoln: Annual Message to Congress, December, 1862._
-
-
-I
-
-If a general participation in politics is essential to the successful
-maintenance of a democracy, then the people of the West certainly bear
-their share of the national burden. A great deal of history has been
-made in what Lincoln called “the great body of the republic,” and the
-election of 1916 indicated very clearly the growing power of the West
-in national contests, and a manifestation of independence that is not
-negligible in any conjectures as to the issues and leadership of the
-immediate future.
-
-A few weeks before the last general election I crossed a Middle Western
-State in company with one of its senators, a veteran politician, who
-had served his party as State chairman and as chairman of the national
-committee. In the smoking compartment was a former governor of an
-Eastern State and several others, representing both the major parties,
-who were bound for various points along the line where they were to
-speak that night. In our corner the talk was largely reminiscent of
-other times and bygone statesmen. Republicans and Democrats exchanged
-anecdotes with that zest which distinguishes the Middle Western
-politician, men of one party paying tribute to the character and
-ability of leaders of the other in a fine spirit of magnanimity. As the
-train stopped, from time to time, the United States senator went out
-upon the platform and shook hands with friends and acquaintances, or
-received reports from local leaders. Everybody on the train knew him;
-many of the men called him by his first name. He talked to the women
-about their children and asked about their husbands. The whole train
-caught the spirit of his cheer and friendliness, and yet he had been
-for a dozen years the most abused man in his State. This was all in the
-day’s work, a part of what has been called the great American game.
-The West makes something intimate and domestic of its politics, and the
-idea that statesmen must “keep close to the people” is not all humbug,
-not at least in the sense that they hold their power very largely
-through their social qualities. They must, as we say, be “folks.”
-
-Apart from wars, the quadrennial presidential campaigns are America’s
-one great national expression in terms of drama; but through months
-in which the average citizen goes about his business, grateful for a
-year free of political turmoil, the political machinery is never idle.
-No matter how badly defeated a party may be, its State organization
-must not be permitted to fall to pieces; for the perfecting of an
-organization demands hard work and much money. There is always a great
-deal of inner plotting preliminary to a State or national contest, and
-much of this is wholly without the knowledge of the quiet citizen whose
-active interests are never aroused until a campaign is well launched.
-In State capitals and other centres men meet, as though by chance,
-and in hotel-rooms debate matters of which the public hears only when
-differences have been reconciled and a harmonious plan of action has
-been adopted. Not a day passes even in an “off year” when in the corn
-belt men are not travelling somewhere on political errands. There are
-fences to repair, local conditions to analyze, and organizations to
-perfect against the coming of the next campaign. In a Western State I
-met within the year two men who had just visited their governor for
-the purpose of throwing some “pep” into him. They had helped to elect
-him and felt free to beard him in the capitol to caution him as to
-his conduct. It is impossible to step off a train anywhere between
-Pittsburgh and Denver without becoming acutely conscious that much
-politics is forward. One campaign “doth tread upon another’s heel, so
-fast they follow.” This does not mean merely that the leaders in party
-organizations meet constantly for conferences, or that candidates are
-plotting a long way ahead to secure nominations, but that the great
-body of the people--the Folks themselves--are ceaselessly discussing
-new movements or taking the measure of public servants.
-
-The politician lives by admiration; he likes to be pointed out, to have
-men press about him to shake his hand. He will enter a State convention
-at just the right moment to be greeted with a cheer, of which a
-nonchalant or deprecatory wave of the hand is a sufficient recognition.
-Many small favors of which the public never dreams are granted to the
-influential politician, even when he is not an office-holder--favors
-that mean much to him, that contribute to his self-esteem. A friend
-who was secretary for several years of one of the national committees
-had a summer home by a quiet lake near an east-and-west railway-line.
-When, during a campaign, he was suddenly called to New York or Chicago
-he would wire the railway authorities to order one of the fast trains
-to pick him up at a lonely station, which it passed ordinarily at the
-highest speed. My friend derived the greatest satisfaction from this
-concession to his prominence and influence. Men who affect to despise
-politicians of the party to which they are opposed are nevertheless
-flattered by any attention from them, and they will admit, when there
-is no campaign forward, that in spite of their politics they are mighty
-good fellows. And they _are_ good fellows; they have to be to retain
-their hold upon their constituents. There are exceptions to the rule
-that to succeed in politics one must be a good fellow, a folksy person,
-but they are few. Cold, crafty men who are not “good mixers” may
-sometimes gain a great deal of power, but in the Western provinces they
-make poor candidates. The Folks don’t like ’em!
-
-Outside of New York and Pennsylvania, where much the same phenomena
-are observable, there is no region where the cards are so tirelessly
-shuffled as in the Middle Western commonwealths, particularly in Ohio,
-Indiana, Illinois, and Kansas, which no party can pretend to carry
-jauntily in its pocket. Men enjoy the game because of its excitement,
-its potentialities of preferment, the chance that a few votes delivered
-in the right quarter may upset all calculations and send a lucky
-candidate for governor on his way to the Federal Senate or even to the
-White House. And in country towns where there isn’t much to do outside
-of routine business the practice of politics is a welcome “side-line.”
-There is a vast amount of fun to be got out of it; and one who is apt
-at the game may win a county office or “go” to the legislature.
-
-To be summoned from a dull job in a small town to a conference called
-suddenly and mysteriously at the capital, to be invited to sit at the
-council-table with the leaders, greatly arouses the pride and vanity
-of men to whom, save for politics, nothing of importance ever happens.
-There are, I fancy, few American citizens who don’t hug the delusion
-that they have political “influence.” This vanity is responsible for
-much party regularity. To have influence a man must keep his record
-clear of any taint of independence, or else he must be influential
-enough as an independent to win the respect of both sides, and this
-latter class is exceedingly small. At some time in his life every
-citizen seeks an appointment for a friend, or finds himself interested
-in local or State or national legislation. It is in the mind of the
-contributor to a campaign fund that the party of his allegiance has
-thus a concrete expression of his fidelity, and if he “wants something”
-he has opened a channel through which to make a request with a
-reasonable degree of confidence that it will not be ignored. There was
-a time when it was safe to give to both sides impartially so that no
-matter who won the battle the contributor would have established an
-obligation; but this practice has not worked so satisfactorily since
-the institution of publicity for campaign assessments.
-
-It is only immediately after an election that one hears criticisms
-of party management from within a party. A campaign is a great
-time-eater, and when a man has given six months or possibly a year of
-hard work to making an aggressive fighting machine of his party he
-is naturally grieved when it goes down in defeat. In the first few
-weeks following the election of 1916 Western Republicans complained
-bitterly of the conduct of the national campaign. Unhappily, no amount
-of _a posteriori_ reasoning can ever determine whether, if certain
-things had been handled differently, a result would have been changed.
-If Mr. Hughes had not visited California, or, venturing into that
-commonwealth, he had shaken the hand of Governor Hiram Johnson, or if
-he had remained quietly on his veranda at home and made no speeches,
-would he have been elected President? Speculations of this kind may
-alleviate the poignancy of defeat, but as a political situation is
-rarely or never repeated they are hardly profitable.
-
-There are phases of political psychology that defy analysis. For
-example, in doubtful States there are shifting moods of hope and
-despair which are wholly unrelated to tangible events and not
-reconcilable with “polls” and other pre-election tests. Obscure
-influences and counter-currents may be responsible, but often the
-politicians do not attempt to account for these alternations of
-“feeling.” When, without warning, the barometer at headquarters begins
-to fall, even the messengers and stenographers are affected. The gloom
-may last for a day or two or even for a week; then the chairman issues
-a statement “claiming” everything, every one takes heart of hope, and
-the dread spectre of defeat steals away to the committee-rooms of the
-opposition.
-
-An interesting species are the oracles whose views are sought by
-partisans anxious for trustworthy “tips.” These “medicine-men” may not
-be actively engaged in politics, or only hangers-on at headquarters,
-but they are supposed to be endowed with the gift of prophecy. I know
-several such seers whose views on no other subject are entitled to
-the slightest consideration, and yet I confess to a certain respect
-for their judgment as to the outcome of an election. Late in the fall
-of 1916, at a time when the result was most uncertain, a friend told
-me that he was wagering a large sum on Mr. Wilson’s success. Asked
-to explain his confidence, he said he was acting on the advice of
-an obscure citizen, whom he named, who always “guessed right.” This
-prophet’s reasoning was wholly by inspiration; he had a “hunch.” State
-and county committee-rooms are infested with elderly men who commune
-among themselves as to old, unhappy, far-off things and battles long
-ago, and wait for a chance to whisper some rumor into the ear of a
-person of importance. Their presence and their misinformation add
-little to the joy of the engrossed, harassed strategists, who spend
-much time dodging them, but appoint a subordinate of proved patience to
-listen to their stories.
-
-To be successful a State chairman must possess a genius for
-organization and administration, and a capacity for quick decision and
-action. While he must make no mistakes himself, it is his business to
-correct the blunders of his lieutenants and turn to good account the
-errors of his adversary. He must know how and where to get money, and
-how to use it to the best advantage. There are always local conditions
-in his territory that require judicious handling, and he must deal with
-these personally or send just the right man to smooth them out. Harmony
-is the great watchword, and such schisms as that of the Sound Money
-Democrats in 1896, the Progressive split of 1912, and the frequent
-anti-organization fights that are a part of the great game leave much
-harsh jangling behind.
-
-The West first kicked up its heels in a national campaign in the
-contest of 1840, when William Henry Harrison, a native of Virginia who
-had won renown as a soldier in the Ohio Valley and served as governor
-of the Northwest Territory, was the Whig candidate. The campaign was
-flavored with hard cider and keyed to the melody of “Tippecanoe and
-Tyler too.” The log cabin, with a raccoon on the roof or with a pelt of
-the species nailed to the outer wall, and a cider-barrel seductively
-displayed in the foreground, were popular party symbols. The rollicking
-campaign songs of 1840 reflect not only the cheery pioneer spirit but
-the bitterness of the contest between Van Buren and Harrison. One of
-the most popular ballads was a buckeye-cabin song sung to the tune of
-“The Blue Bells of Scotland”:
-
-  “Oh, how, tell me how does your buckeye cabin go?
-  Oh, how, tell me how does your buckeye cabin go?
-  It goes against the spoilsman, for well its builders know
-  It was Harrison who fought for the cabins long ago.
-
-  Oh, who fell before him in battle, tell me who?
-  Oh, who fell before him in battle, tell me who?
-  He drove the savage legions and British armies, too,
-  At the Rapids and the Thames and old Tippecanoe.
-
-  Oh, what, tell me what will little Martin do?
-  Oh, what, then, what will little Martin do?
-  He’ll follow the footsteps of Price and Swartout, too,
-  While the log cabins ring again with Tippecanoe!”
-
-The spirit of the ’40’s pervaded Western politics for many years after
-that strenuous campaign. Men who had voted for “Tippecanoe” Harrison
-were pointed out as citizens of unusual worth and dignity in my youth;
-and organizations of these veterans were still in existence and
-attentive to politics when Harrison’s grandson was a candidate for the
-Presidency.
-
-I find myself referring frequently to the continuing influence of the
-Civil War in the social and political life of these Western States. The
-“soldier vote” was long to be reckoned with, and it was not until Mr.
-Cleveland brought a new spirit into our politics that the war between
-the States began to fade as a political factor; and even then we were
-assured that if the Democrats succeeded they would pension Confederate
-soldiers and redeem the Confederate bonds. There were a good many of us
-in these border States who, having been born of soldier fathers, and
-with Whig and Republican antecedents, began to resent the continued
-emphasis of the war in every campaign; and I look back upon Mr.
-Cleveland’s rise as of very great importance in that he was a messenger
-of new and attractive ideals of public service that appealed strongly
-to young men. But my political apostasy (I speak of my own case
-because it is in some sense typical) was attended with no diminution
-of reverence for that great citizen army that defended and saved the
-Union. The annual gatherings of the Grand Army of the Republic have
-grown pathetically smaller, but this organization is not a negligible
-expression of American democracy. The writing of these pages has been
-interrupted constantly by bugle-calls floating in from the street, by
-the cheers of crowds wishing Godspeed to our young army in its high
-adventure beyond the Atlantic, and at the moment, by stirring news of
-American valor and success in France. In my boyhood I viewed with awe
-and admiration the veterans of ’61-’65 and my patriotism was deeply
-influenced by the atmosphere in which I was born, by acquaintance
-with my father’s comrades, and quickened through my formative years
-by attendance at encampments of the Grand Army of the Republic and
-cheery “camp-fires” in the hall of George H. Thomas Post, Indianapolis,
-where privates and generals met for story-telling and the singing
-of war-songs. The honor which it was part of my education should be
-accorded those men will, I reflect, soon be the portion of their
-grandsons, the men of 1917-18, and we shall have very likely a new
-Grand Army of the Republic, with the difference that the descendants
-of men who fought under Grant and Sherman will meet at peaceful
-“camp-fires” with grandsons of the soldiers of Lee and Jackson, quite
-unconscious that this was ever other than a united nation.
-
-
-II
-
-The West has never lost its early admiration for oratory, whether from
-the hustings, the pulpit, or the lecture-platform. Many of the pioneer
-preachers of the Ohio valley were orators of distinguished ability, and
-their frequent joint debates on such subjects as predestination and
-baptism drew great audiences from the countryside. Both religious and
-political meetings were held preferably out of doors to accommodate the
-crowds that collected from the far-scattered farms. A strong voice, a
-confident manner, and matter so composed as to hold the attention of an
-audience which would not hesitate to disperse if it lost interest were
-prerequisites of the successful speaker. Western chronicles lay great
-stress upon the oratorical powers of both ministers and politicians.
-Henry Ward Beecher, who held a pastorate at Indianapolis (1839-47),
-was already famed as an eloquent preacher before he moved to Brooklyn.
-Not long ago I heard a number of distinguished politicians discussing
-American oratory. Some one mentioned the addresses delivered by Beecher
-in England during the Civil War, and there was general agreement that
-one of these, the Liverpool speech, was probably the greatest of
-American orations--a sweeping statement, but its irresistible logic and
-a sense of the hostile atmosphere in which it was spoken may still be
-felt in the printed page.
-
-[Illustration: There is a death-watch that occupies front seats at
-every political meeting.]
-
-The tradition of Lincoln’s power as an orator is well fortified by
-the great company of contemporaries who wrote of him, as well as by
-the text of his speeches, which still vibrate with the nobility, the
-restrained strength, with which he addressed himself to mighty events.
-Neither before nor since his day has the West spoken to the East with
-anything approaching the majesty of his Cooper Union speech. It is
-certainly a far cry from that lofty utterance to Mr. Bryan’s defiant
-cross-of-gold challenge of 1896.
-
-The Westerner will listen attentively to a man he despises and has no
-intention of voting for, if he speaks well; but the standards are high.
-There is a death-watch that occupies front seats at every political
-meeting, composed of veterans who compare all later performances with
-some speech they heard Garfield or “Dan” Voorhees, Oliver P. Morton
-or John J. Ingalls deliver before the orator spouting on the platform
-was born. Nearly all the national conventions held in the West have
-been marked by memorable oratory. Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll’s
-speech nominating Blaine at the Republican convention of 1876 held
-at Cincinnati (how faint that old battle-cry has become: “Blaine,
-Blaine, Blaine of Maine!”) is often cited as one of the great American
-orations. “He swayed and moved and impelled and restrained and worked
-in all ways with the mass before him,” says the Chicago _Times_ report,
-“as if he possessed some key to the innermost mechanism that moves the
-human heart, and when he finished, his fine, frank face as calm as
-when he began, the overwrought thousands sank back in an exhaustion of
-unspeakable wonder and delight.”
-
-Even making allowance for the reporter’s exuberance, this must have
-been a moving utterance, with its dramatic close:
-
-“Like an armed warrior, like a plumed knight, James G. Blaine marched
-down the halls of the American Congress and threw his shining lance
-full and fair against the brazen foreheads of the defamers of his
-country and the maligners of his honor. For the Republican party to
-desert this gallant leader now is as though an army should desert
-their gallant general upon the field of battle.... Gentlemen of the
-convention, in the name of the great republic, the only republic that
-ever existed upon this earth; in the name of all her defenders and of
-all her supporters; in the name of all her soldiers dead upon the field
-of battle, and in the name of those who perished in the skeleton clutch
-of famine at Andersonville and Libby, whose sufferings he so vividly
-remembers, Illinois, Illinois nominates for the next President of this
-country that prince of parliamentarians, that leader of leaders--James
-G. Blaine.”
-
-In the fall of the same year Ingersoll delivered at Indianapolis
-an address to war veterans that is still cited for its peroration
-beginning: “The past rises before me like a dream.”
-
-The political barbecue, common in pioneer days, is about extinct,
-though a few such gatherings were reported in the older States of the
-Middle West in the last campaign. These functions, in the day of poor
-roads and few settlements, were a means of luring voters to a meeting
-with the promise of free food; it was only by such heroic feats of
-cookery as the broiling of a whole beef in a pit of coals that a crowd
-could be fed. The meat was likely to be either badly burnt, or raw,
-but the crowds were not fastidious, and swigs of whiskey made it more
-palatable. Those were days of plain speech and hard hitting, and on
-such occasions orators were expected to “cut loose” and flay the enemy
-unsparingly.
-
-Speakers of the rabble-rouser type have passed out, though there
-are still orators who proceed to “shell the woods” and “burn the
-grass” in the old style in country districts where they are not in
-danger of being reported. This, however, is full of peril, as the
-farmer’s credulity is not so easily played upon as in the old days
-before the R. F. D. box was planted at his gate. The farmer is the
-shrewdest, the most difficult, of auditors. He is little given to
-applause, but listens meditatively, and is not easily to be betrayed
-into demonstrations of approval. The orator’s chance of scoring a hit
-before an audience of country folk depends on his ability to state his
-case with an appearance of fairness and to sustain it with arguments
-presented in simple, picturesque phraseology. Nothing could be less
-calculated to win the farmer’s franchise than any attempt to “play
-down” to him. In old times the city candidate sometimes donned his
-fishing-clothes before venturing into country districts, but some of
-the most engaging demagogues the West has known appeared always in
-their finest raiment.
-
-[Illustration: The Political Barbecue.]
-
-There has always been a considerable sprinkling of women at big Indiana
-rallies and also at State conventions, as far back as my memory
-runs; but women, I am advised, were rarely in evidence at political
-meetings in the West until Civil War times. The number who attended
-meetings in 1916 was notably large, even in States that have not yet
-granted general suffrage. They are most satisfactory auditors, quick to
-catch points and eagerly responsive with applause. The West has many
-women who speak exceedingly well, and the number is steadily growing.
-I have never heard heckling so cleverly parried as by a young woman
-who spoke on a Chicago street corner, during the sessions of the last
-Republican convention, to a crowd of men bent upon annoying her. She
-was unfailingly good-humored, and her retorts, delivered with the
-utmost good nature, gradually won the sympathy of her hearers.
-
-The making of political speeches is exhausting labor, and only the
-possessor of great bodily vigor can make a long tour without a serious
-drain upon his physical and nervous energy. Mr. Bryan used to refer
-with delight to the manner in which Republicans he met, unable to
-pay him any other compliment, expressed their admiration for his
-magnificent constitution, which made it possible for him to speak so
-constantly without injury to his health. The fatiguing journeys, the
-enforced adjustment to the crowds of varying size in circumstances
-never twice alike, the handshaking and the conferences with local
-committees to which prominent speakers must submit make speaking-tours
-anything but the triumphal excursions they appear to be to the
-cheering audiences. The weary orator arrives at a town to find that
-instead of snatching an hour’s rest he must yield to the importunity
-of a committee intrusted with the responsibility of showing him the
-sights of the city, with probably a few brief speeches at factories;
-and after a dinner, where he will very likely be called upon to say
-“just a few words,” he must ride in a procession through the chill
-night before he addresses the big meeting. One of the most successful
-of Western campaigners is Thomas R. Marshall, of Indiana, twice Mr.
-Wilson’s running mate on the presidential ticket. In 1908 Mr. Marshall
-was the Democratic candidate for governor and spoke in every county
-in the State, avoiding the usual partisan appeals, but preaching a
-political gospel of good cheer, with the result that he was elected by
-a plurality of 14,453, while Mr. Taft won the State’s electoral vote
-by a plurality of 10,731. Mr. Marshall enjoys a wide reputation as a
-story-teller, both for the humor of his narratives and the art he
-brings to their recital.
-
-A few dashes of local color assist in establishing the visiting orator
-on terms of good-fellowship with his audience. He will inform himself
-as to the number of broom-handles or refrigerators produced annually in
-the town, or the amount of barley and buckwheat that last year rewarded
-the toil of the noble husbandmen of the county. It is equally important
-for him to take counsel of the local chairman as to things to avoid,
-for there are sore spots in many districts which must be let alone
-or touched with a healing hand. The tyro who prepares a speech with
-the idea of giving it through a considerable territory finds quickly
-that the sooner he forgets his manuscript the better, so many are the
-concessions he must make to local conditions.
-
-In the campaign of 1916 the Democrats made strenuous efforts to
-win the Progressive vote. Energetic county chairmen would lure as
-many Progressives as possible to the front seats at all meetings
-that they might learn of the admiration in which they were held by
-forward-looking Democrats--the bond of sympathy, the common ideals,
-that animated honest Democrats and their brothers, those patriotic
-citizens who, long weary of Republican indifference to the rights
-of freemen, had broken the ties of a lifetime to assert their
-independence. Democratic orators, with the Progressives in mind,
-frequently apostrophized Lincoln, that they might the better contrast
-the vigorous, healthy Republicanism of the ’60’s with the corrupt,
-odious thing the Republican party had become. This, of course, had to
-be done carefully, so that the Progressive would not experience twinges
-of homesickness for his old stamping-ground.
-
-There is agreement among political managers as to the doubtful value
-of the “monster meetings” that are held in large centres. With plenty
-of money to spend and a thorough organization, it is always possible
-to “pull off” a big demonstration. Word passed to ward and precinct
-committeemen will collect a vast crowd for a parade adorned with
-fireworks. The size and enthusiasm of these crowds is never truly
-significant of party strength. One such crowd looks very much like
-another, and I am betraying no confidence in saying that its units are
-often drawn from the same sources. The participants in a procession
-rarely hear the speeches at the meeting of which they are the
-advertisement. When they reach the hall it is usually filled and their
-further function is to march down the aisles with bands and drum-corps
-to put the crowd in humor for the speeches. Frequently some belated
-phalanx will noisily intrude after the orator has been introduced, and
-he must smile and let it be seen that he understands perfectly that the
-interruption is due to the irrepressible enthusiasm of the intelligent
-voters of the grand old blank district that has never failed to support
-the principles of the grand old blank party.
-
-The most satisfactory meetings are small ones, in country districts,
-where one or two hundred people of all parties gather, drawn by an
-honest curiosity as to the issues. Such meetings impose embarrassments
-upon the speaker, who must accommodate manner and matter to auditors
-disconcertingly close at hand, of whose reaction to his talk he is
-perfectly conscious. In an “all-day” meeting, held usually in groves
-that serve as rural social centres, the farmers remain in their
-automobiles drawn into line before the speakers’ stand, and listen
-quietly to the programme arranged by the county chairman. Sometimes
-several orators are provided for the day; Republicans may take the
-morning, the Democrats the afternoon. Here, with the audience sitting
-as a jury, we have one of the processes of democracy reduced to its
-simplest terms.
-
-The West is attracted by statesmen who are “human,” who impress
-themselves upon the Folks by their amiability and good-fellowship.
-Benjamin Harrison was recognized as one of the ablest lawyers of the
-bar of his day, but he was never a popular hero and his defeat for
-re-election was attributable in large degree to his lack of those
-qualities that constitute what I have called “folksiness.” In the
-campaign of 1888 General Harrison suffered much from the charge that
-he was an aristocrat, and attention was frequently called to the fact
-that he was the grandson of a President. Among other cartoons of the
-period there was one that represented Harrison as a pigmy standing in
-the shadow of his grandfather’s tall hat. This was probably remembered
-by an Indiana politician who called at the White House repeatedly
-without being able to see the President. After several fruitless visits
-the secretary said to him one day: “The President cannot be seen.” “My
-God!” exclaimed the enraged office-seeker, “has he grown as small as
-that?”
-
-Probably no President has ever enjoyed greater personal popularity than
-Mr. McKinley. He would perform an act of kindness with a graciousness
-that doubled its value and he could refuse a favor without making an
-enemy. Former Governor Glynn of New York told me not long ago an
-incident illuminative of the qualities that endeared Mr. McKinley
-to his devoted followers. Soon after his inauguration a Democratic
-congressman from an Eastern State delivered in the House a speech
-filled with the bitterest abuse of the President. A little later
-this member’s wife, not realizing that a savage attack of this sort
-would naturally make its author _persona non grata_ at the White
-House, expressed a wish to take her young children to call on the
-President. The youngsters were insistent in their demand to make the
-visit and would not be denied. The offending representative confessed
-his embarrassment to Mr. Glynn, a Democratic colleague, who said he’d
-“feel out” the President. Mr. McKinley, declaring at once with the
-utmost good humor that he would be delighted to receive the lady and
-her children, named a day and met them with the greatest cordiality.
-He planted the baby on his desk to play, put them all at ease, and as
-they left distributed among them a huge bouquet of carnations that
-he had ordered specially from the conservatory. In this connection I
-am reminded of a story of Thomas B. Reed, who once asked President
-Harrison to appoint a certain constituent collector at Portland. The
-appointment went to another candidate for the office, and when one of
-Reed’s friends twitted him about his lack of influence he remarked:
-“There are only two men in the whole State of Maine who hate me: one
-of them I landed in the penitentiary, and the other one Harrison has
-appointed collector of the port in my town!”
-
-
-III
-
-Statesmen of the “picturesque” school, who attracted attention by
-their scorn of conventions, or their raciness of speech, or for some
-obsession aired on every occasion, are well-nigh out of the picture.
-The West is not without its sensitiveness, and it has found that a
-sockless congressman, or one who makes himself ridiculous by advocating
-foolish measures, reflects upon the intelligence of his constituents
-or upon their sense of humor, and if there is anything the West prides
-itself upon it is its humor. We are seeing fewer statesmen of the type
-so blithely represented by Mr. Cannon, who enjoy in marked degree the
-affections of their constituents; who are kindly uncles to an entire
-district, not to be displaced, no matter what their shortcomings,
-without genuine grief. One is tempted far afield in pursuit of the
-elements of popularity, of which the West offers abundant material
-for analysis. “Dan” Voorhees, “the tall sycamore of the Wabash,” was
-prominent in Indiana politics for many years, and his fine figure, his
-oratorical gifts, his sympathetic nature and reputation for generosity
-endeared him to many who had no patience with his politics. He was
-so effective as an advocate in criminal cases that the Indiana law
-giving defendants the final appeal was changed so that the State might
-counteract the influence of his familiar speech, adjustable to any
-case, which played upon the sympathy and magnanimity of the jurors.
-Allen G. Thurman, of Ohio, a man of higher intellectual gifts, was
-similarly enshrined in the hearts of his constituency. His bandanna
-was for years the symbol of Buckeye democracy, much as “blue jeans”
-expressed the rugged simplicity of the Hoosier democracy when, in
-1876, the apparel of James D. Williams, unwisely ridiculed by the
-Republicans, contributed to his election to the governorship over
-General Harrison, the “kid-glove” candidate. Kansas was much in
-evidence in those years when it was so ably represented in the Senate
-by the brilliant John J. Ingalls. Ingalls’s oratory was enriched by a
-fine scholarship and enlivened by a rare gift of humor and a biting
-sarcasm. Once when a Pennsylvania colleague attacked Kansas Ingalls
-delivered a slashing reply. “Mr. President,” he said, “Pennsylvania has
-produced but two great men: Benjamin Franklin, of Massachusetts, and
-Albert Gallatin, of Switzerland.” On another occasion Voorhees of the
-blond mane aroused Ingalls’s ire and the Kansan excoriated the Hoosier
-in a characteristic deliverance, an incident thus neatly epitomized by
-Eugene F. Ware, (“Ironquill”), a Kansas poet:
-
-  “Cyclone dense,
-    Lurid air,
-    Wabash hair,
-  Hide on fence.”
-
-Nothing is better calculated to encourage humility in young men about
-to enter upon a political career than a study of the roster of Congress
-for years only lightly veiled in “the pathos of distance.” Among United
-States senators from the Middle West in 1863-9 were Lyman Trumbull,
-Richard J. Oglesby, and Richard Yates, of Illinois; Henry S. Lane,
-Oliver P. Morton, and Thomas A. Hendricks, of Indiana; James Harlan and
-Samuel J. Kirkwood, of Iowa; Samuel C. Pomeroy and James H. Lane, of
-Kansas; Zachariah Chandler and Jacob M. Howard, of Michigan; Alexander
-Ramsey and Daniel S. Norton, of Minnesota; Benjamin F. Wade and John
-Sherman, of Ohio.
-
-In the lower house sat Elihu B. Washburne, Owen Lovejoy, and William
-R. Morrison, of Illinois; Schuyler Colfax, George W. Julian, Daniel W.
-Voorhees, William S. Holman, and Godlove S. Orth, of Indiana; William
-B. Allison, Josiah B. Grinnell, John A. Kasson, and James F. Wilson, of
-Iowa; James A. Garfield, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Robert C. Schenck,
-of Ohio. In the same group of States in the ’80’s we find David Davis,
-John A. Logan, Joseph E. McDonald, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas W. Ferry,
-Henry P. Baldwin, William Windom, Samuel J. R. McMillan, Algernon S.
-Paddock, Alvin Saunders, M. H. Carpenter, John J. Ingalls, and Preston
-B. Plumb, all senators in Congress. In this same period the Ohio
-delegation in the lower house included Benjamin Butterworth, A. J.
-Warner, Thomas Ewing, Charles Foster, Frank H. Hurd, J. Warren Keifer,
-and William McKinley.
-
-How many students in the high schools and colleges of these States
-would recognize any considerable number of these names or have any
-idea of the nature of the public service these men performed? To
-be sure, three representatives in Congress from Ohio in the years
-indicated, and one senator from Indiana, reached the White House; but
-at least two-thirds of the others enjoyed a wide reputation, either
-as politicians or statesmen or as both. In the years preceding the
-Civil War the West certainly did not lack leadership, nor did all who
-rendered valuable service attain conspicuous place. For example, George
-W. Julian, an ardent foe of slavery, a member of Congress, and in 1852
-a candidate for Vice-President on the Free Soil ticket, was a political
-idealist, independent and courageous, and with the ability to express
-his opinions tersely and effectively.
-
-It is always hazardous to compare the statesmen of one period with
-those of another, and veteran observers whose judgments must be treated
-with respect insist that the men I have mentioned were not popularly
-regarded in their day as the possessors of unusual abilities. Most of
-these men were prominent in my youth, and in some cases were still
-important factors when I attained my majority, and somehow they seem to
-“mass” as their successors do not. The fierce passions aroused in the
-Middle West by the slavery issue undoubtedly brought into the political
-arena men who in calmer times would have remained contentedly in
-private life. The restriction of slavery and the preservation of the
-Union were concrete issues that awakened a moral fervor not since
-apparent in our politics. Groups of people are constantly at work in
-the social field, to improve municipal government, or to place State
-politics upon a higher plane; but these movements occasion only slight
-tremors in contrast with the quaking of the earth through the free-soil
-agitation, Civil War, and reconstruction.
-
-The men I have mentioned were, generally speaking, poor men, and
-the next generation found it much more comfortable and profitable
-to practise law or engage in business than to enter politics. I am
-grieved by my inability to offer substantial proof that ideals of
-public service in the Western provinces are higher than they were
-fifty or twenty years ago. I record my opinion that they are not, and
-that we are less ably served in the Congress than formerly, frankly to
-invite criticism; for these times call for a great searching for the
-weaknesses of democracy and, if the best talent is not finding its way
-into the lawmaking, administrative, and judicial branches of our State
-and federal governments, an obligation rests upon every citizen to find
-the reason and supply the remedy.
-
-No Westerner who is devoted to the best interests of his country will
-encourage the belief that there is any real hostility between East and
-West, or that the West is incapable of viewing social and political
-movements in the light of reason and experience. It stood steadfastly
-against the extension of slavery and for the Union through years of
-fiery trial, and its leaders expressed the national thought and held
-the lines firm against opposition, concealed and open, that was kept
-down only by ceaseless vigilance. Even in times of financial stress
-it refused to hearken to the cry of the demagogue, and Greenbackism
-died, just as later Populism died. More significant was the failure
-of Mr. Bryan to win the support of the West that was essential to his
-success in three campaigns. We may say that it was a narrow escape,
-and that the West was responsible for a serious menace and a peril not
-too easily averted, but Mr. Bryan precipitated a storm that was bound
-to break and that left the air clearer. He “threw a scare” into the
-country just when it needed to be aroused, and some of his admonitions
-have borne good fruit on soil least friendly to him.
-
-The West likes to be “preached at,” and it admires a courageous
-evangelist even when it declines his invitation to the mourners’
-bench. The West liked and still likes Mr. Roosevelt, and no other
-American can so instantly gain the ear of the West as he. In my
-pilgrimages of the past year nothing has been more surprising than the
-change of tone with reference to the former President among Western
-Republicans, who declared in 1912 and reiterated in 1916 that never,
-never again would they countenance him.[E]
-
-
-IV
-
-One may find in the Mississippi valley, as in the Connecticut valley
-or anywhere else in America, just about what one wishes to find. A New
-England correspondent complains with some bitterness of the political
-conservatism he encountered in a journey through the West; he had
-expected to find radicalism everywhere rampant, and was disappointed
-that he was unable to substantiate his preconceived impression by
-actual contacts with the people.
-
-If I may delicately suggest the point without making too great a
-concession, the West is really quite human. It has its own “slant”--its
-tastes and preferences that differ in ways from those of the East,
-the South, or the farther West; and radicals are distributed through
-the corn belt in about the same proportion as elsewhere. The
-bread-and-butter Western Folks are pretty sensible, taken in the long
-run, and not at all anxious to pull down the social pillars just
-to make a noise. They will impiously carve them a little--yes, and
-occasionally stick an incongruous patch on the wall of the sanctuary
-of democracy; but they are never wilfully destructive. And it cannot
-be denied that some of their architectural and decorative efforts have
-improved the original design. The West has saved other sections a good
-deal of trouble by boldly experimenting with devices it had “thought
-up” amid the free airs of the plains; but the West, no more than the
-East, will give storage to a contrivance that has been proved worthless.
-
-The vindictive spirit that was very marked in the Western attitude
-toward the railroads for many years was not a gratuitous and unfounded
-hatred of corporations, but had a real basis in discriminations that
-touched vitally the life of the farmer and the struggling towns to
-which he carried his products. The railroads were the only corporations
-the West knew before the great industrial development. A railroad
-represented “capital,” and “capital” was therefore a thing to chastise
-whenever opportunity offered. It has been said in bitterness of
-late that the hostile legislation demanded by the West “ruined the
-railroads.” This is not a subject for discussion here, but it can
-hardly be denied that the railroads invited the war that was made upon
-them by injustices and discriminations of which the obscure shipper
-had a right to complain. The antagonism to railroads inspired a great
-deal of radicalism aimed at capital generally, and “corporate greed,”
-“the encroachments of capital,” “the money devils of Wall Street,” and
-“special privilege” burned fiercely in our political terminology. Our
-experiment with government control as a war measure has, of course,
-given a new twist to the whole transportation problem.
-
-The West likes to play with novelties. It has been hospitable to such
-devices as the initiative, the referendum, and the recall, multiplied
-agencies for State supervision in many directions, and it has shown
-in general a confidence in automatic machinery popularly designed to
-correct all evils. The West probably infected the rest of the country
-with the fallacy that the passing of a law is a complete transaction
-without reference to its enforcement, and Western statute-books are
-littered with legislation often frivolous or ill considered. There has,
-however, been a marked reaction and the demand is rather for less
-legislation and better administration. A Western governor said to me
-despairingly that his State is “commissioned” to death, and that he is
-constantly embarrassed by the difficulty of persuading competent men to
-accept places on his many bipartisan regulative boards.
-
-There is a virtue in our very size as a nation and the multiplicity
-of interests represented by the one hundred million that make it
-possible for the majority to watch, as from a huge amphitheatre, the
-experiments in some particular arena. A new agrarian movement that
-originated in North Dakota in 1915 has attained formidable proportions.
-The Non-Partisan League (it is really a political party) seems to have
-sprung full-panoplied from the Equity Society, and is a successor
-of the Farmers’ Alliance and Populism. The despised middleman was
-the first object of its animosity, and it began with a comprehensive
-programme of State-owned elevators and flour-mills, packing-houses
-and cold-storage plants. The League carried North Dakota in 1916,
-electing a governor who immediately vetoed a bill providing for a
-State-owned terminal elevator because the League leaders “raised their
-sights” as soon as they got into the trenches. They demanded unlimited
-bonding-power and a complete new programme embodying a radical form
-of State socialism. “Class struggle,” says Mr. Elmer T. Peterson, an
-authority on the League’s history, “is the key-note of its propaganda.”
-The student of current political tendencies will do well to keep an eye
-on the League, as it has gained a strong foothold in the Northwest, and
-the co-operative features of its platform satisfy an old craving of the
-farmer for State assistance in the management of his business.
-
-The League is now thoroughly organized in the Dakotas, Minnesota,
-Wisconsin, Montana, Idaho, and Colorado and is actively at work in
-Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. Governor Burnquist of Minnesota
-addressed a letter to its executive secretary during the primary
-campaign last summer in which he said:
-
-  At the time of our entrance into the European conflict your
-  organization condemned our government for entering the war. When it
-  became evident that this course would result in disaster for their
-  organization they changed their course and made an eleventh-hour
-  claim to pure loyalty, but notwithstanding this claim the National
-  Non-Partisan League is a party of discontent. It has drawn to it
-  the pro-German element of our State. Its leaders have been closely
-  connected with the lawless I. W. W. and with Red Socialists.
-  Pacifists and peace advocates whose doctrines are of benefit to
-  Germany are among their number.
-
-The League’s activities in obstructing conscription and other war
-measures have been the subject of investigation by military and civil
-authorities. The _Leader_, the official organ of the party, recently
-printed, heavily capitalized, this sentiment, “The Government of the
-People by the Rascals for the Rich,” as the key-note of its hostility
-to America’s participation in the war.
-
-The West is greatly given to sober second thoughts. Hospitable to new
-ideas as it has proved itself to be, it will stop short of a leap in
-the dark. There is a point at which it becomes extremely conservative.
-It will run like a frightened rabbit from some change which it has
-encouraged. But the West has a passion for social justice, and is
-willing to make sacrifices to gain it. The coming of the war found
-this its chief concern, not under the guidance of feverish agitators
-but from a sense that democracy, to fulfil its destiny, must make the
-conditions of life happy and comfortable for the great body of the
-people. It is not the “pee-pul” of the demagogue who are to be reckoned
-with in the immediate future of Western political expression, but an
-intelligent, earnest citizenry, anxious to view American needs with the
-new vision compelled by the world struggle in the defense of democracy.
-
-The rights and privileges of citizenship long enjoyed by women of
-certain Western States ceased to be a vagary of the untutored wilds
-when last year New York adopted a constitutional amendment granting
-women the ballot. The fight for a federal amendment was won in the
-House last winter by a narrow margin, but at this writing the matter
-is still pending in the Senate. Many of the old arguments against the
-enfranchisement of women have been pretty effectually disposed of
-in States that were pioneers in general suffrage. I lived for three
-years in Colorado without being conscious of any of those disturbances
-to domesticity that we used to be told would follow if women were
-projected into politics. I can testify that a male voter may register
-and cast his ballot without any feeling that the women he encounters as
-he performs these exalted duties have relinquished any of the ancient
-prerogatives of their womanhood.
-
-There is nothing in the experience of suffrage States to justify a
-suspicion that women are friendlier to radical movements than men, but
-much to sustain the assertion that they take their politics seriously
-and are as intelligent in the exercise of the ballot as male voters.
-The old notion that the enfranchisement of women would double the vote
-without changing results is another fallacy; I am disposed to think
-them more independent than their male fellow citizens and less likely
-to submit meekly to party dictation.
-
-In practically every American court- and State-house and city hall
-there are women holding responsible clerical positions, and, if the
-keeping of important records may be intrusted to women, the task of
-defending their exclusion from elective offices is one that I confess
-to be beyond my powers. Nor is there anything shocking in the presence
-of a woman on the floor of a legislative body. Montana sent a woman to
-the national Congress, and already her fellow members hear her voice
-without perturbation. Mrs. Agnes Riddle, a member of the Colorado
-Senate, is a real contributor, I shall not scruple to say, to the
-intelligence and wisdom of that body. Mrs. Riddle, apart from being
-a stateswoman, manages a dairy to its utmost details, and during the
-session answers the roll-call after doing a pretty full day’s work on
-her farm. The schools of Colorado are admirably conducted by Mrs. C.
-C. Bradford, who has thrice been re-elected superintendent of public
-instruction. The deputy attorney-general of Colorado, Miss Clara Ruth
-Mozzor, sits at her desk as composedly as though she were not the first
-woman to gain this political and professional recognition in the
-Centennial Commonwealth. I am moved to ask whether we shall not find
-for the enfranchised woman who becomes active in public affairs some
-more felicitous and gallant term than politician--a word much soiled
-from long application to the corrupt male, and perhaps the Federation
-of Women’s Clubs will assist in this matter.
-
-
-V
-
-As the saying became trite, almost before news of our entrance into
-the world war had reached the nation’s farthest borders, that we
-should emerge from the conflict a new and a very different America, it
-becomes of interest to keep in mind the manner and the spirit in which
-we entered into the mighty struggle. It was not merely in the mind of
-people everywhere, on the 2d of April, 1917, that the nation was face
-to face with a contest that would tax its powers to the utmost, but
-that our internal affairs would be subjected to serious trial, and
-that parties and party policies would inevitably experience changes
-of greatest moment before another general election. When this is read
-the congressional campaign will be gathering headway; as I write,
-public attention is turning, rather impatiently it must be said, to
-the prospects of a campaign that is likely to pursue its course to the
-accompaniment of booming cannon overseas. How much the conduct of the
-war by the administration in power will figure in the pending contest
-is not yet apparent; but as the rapid succession of events following
-Mr. Wilson’s second inauguration have dimmed the issues of 1916, it may
-be well to summarize the respective attitudes of the two major parties
-two years ago to establish a point of orientation.
-
-It was the chief Republican contention that the Democratic
-administration had failed to preserve the national honor and security
-in its dealings with Mexico and Germany. As political platforms are
-soon forgotten, it may be of interest to reproduce this paragraph of
-the Republican declaration of 1916:
-
-  The present administration has destroyed our influence abroad and
-  humiliated us in our own eyes. The Republican party believes that a
-  firm, consistent, and courageous foreign policy, always maintained by
-  Republican Presidents in accordance with American traditions, is the
-  best, as it is the only true way to preserve our peace and restore us
-  to our rightful place among the nations. We believe in the pacific
-  settlement of international disputes and favor the establishment of a
-  world court for that purpose.
-
-The concluding sentence is open to the criticism that it weakens what
-precedes it; but the Mexican plank, after denouncing “the indefensible
-methods of interference employed by this administration in the internal
-affairs of Mexico,” promises to “our citizens on and near our border,
-and to those in Mexico, wherever they may be found, adequate and
-absolute protection in their lives, liberty, and property.”
-
-General Pershing had launched his punitive expedition on Mexican soil
-in March, and the Democratic platform adopted at St. Louis in June
-justifies this move; but it goes on to add:
-
-  Intervention, implying as it does military subjugation, is revolting
-  to the people of the United States, notwithstanding the provocation
-  to that course has been great, and should be resorted to, if at all,
-  only as a last resort. The stubborn resistance of the President and
-  his advisers to every demand and suggestion to enter upon it, is
-  creditable alike to them and to the people in whose name he speaks.
-
-As to Germany, this paragraph of the Democratic platform might almost
-have been written into President Wilson’s message to Congress of April
-2, 1917, so clearly does it set forth the spirit in which America
-entered into the war:
-
-  We believe that every people has the right to choose the sovereignty
-  under which it shall live; that the small states of the world have
-  a right to enjoy from other nations the same respect for their
-  sovereignty and for their territorial integrity that great and
-  powerful nations expect and insist upon, and that the world has a
-  right to be free from every disturbance of its peace that has its
-  origin in aggression or disregard of the rights of peoples and
-  nations, and we believe that the time has come when it is the duty of
-  the United States to join with the other nations of the world in any
-  feasible association that will effectively serve these principles, to
-  maintain inviolate the complete security of the highway of the seas
-  for the common and unhindered use of all nations.
-
-The impression was very general in the East that the West was apathetic
-or indifferent both as to the irresponsible and hostile acts of
-Mexicans and the growing insolence of the Imperial German Government
-with reference to American rights on the seas. Any such assumption was
-unfair at the time, and has since been disproved by the promptness
-and vigor with which the West responded to the call to arms. But the
-West had no intention of being stampeded. A Democratic President whose
-intellectual processes and manner of speech were radically different
-from those at least of his immediate predecessors, was exercising a
-Lincoln-like patience in his efforts to keep the country out of war.
-From the time the Mexican situation became threatening one might
-meet anywhere in the West Republicans who thought that the honor and
-security of the nation were being trifled with; that the President’s
-course was inconsistent and vacillating; and even that we should have
-whipped Mexico into subjection and maintained an army on her soil until
-a stable government had been established. These views were expressed in
-many parts of the West by men of influence in Republican councils, and
-there were Democrats who held like opinions.
-
-The Republicans were beset by two great difficulties when the national
-convention met. The first of these was to win back the Progressives
-who had broken with the party and contributed to the defeat of Mr.
-Taft in 1912; the second was the definition of a concrete policy
-touching Germany and Mexico that would appeal to the patriotic voter,
-without going the length of threatening war. The standpatters were
-in no humor to make concessions to the Progressives, who, in another
-part of Chicago, were unwilling to receive the olive-branch except on
-their own terms. Denied the joy of Mr. Roosevelt’s enlivening presence
-to create a high moment, the spectators were aware of his ability to
-add to the general gloom by his telegram suggesting Senator Lodge as a
-compromise candidate acceptable to the Progressives. The speculatively
-inclined may wonder what would have happened if in one of the dreary
-hours of waiting Colonel Roosevelt had walked upon the platform and
-addressed the convention. Again, those who have leisure for political
-solitaire may indulge in reflections as to whether Senator Lodge would
-not have appealed to the West quite as strongly as Mr. Hughes. The
-West, presumably, was not interested in Senator Lodge, though I timidly
-suggest that if a New Jersey candidate can be elected and re-elected
-with the aid of the West, Massachusetts need not so modestly hang in
-the background when a national convention orders the roll-call of the
-States for favorite sons.
-
-There was little question at any time from the hour the convention
-opened that Mr. Hughes would be the nominee, and I believe it is a
-fair statement that he was the candidate the Democrats feared most.
-The country had formed a good opinion of him as a man of independence
-and courage, and, having strictly observed the silence enjoined by his
-position on the bench during the Republican family quarrel of four
-years earlier, he was looked upon as a candidate well fitted to rally
-the Progressives and lead a united party to victory.
-
-The West waited and listened. While it had seemed a “safe play” for the
-Republicans to attack the Democratic administration for its course
-with Mexico and Germany, the presentation of the case to the people was
-attended with serious embarrassments. The obvious alternative of Mr.
-Wilson’s policy was war. The West was not at all anxious for war; it
-certainly did not want two wars. If war could be averted by negotiation
-the West was in a mood to be satisfied with that solution. Republican
-campaigners were aware of the danger of arraigning the administration
-for not going to war and contented themselves with attacks upon what
-they declared to be a shifty and wobbly policy. The West’s sense of
-fair play was, I think, roused by the vast amount of destructive
-criticism launched against the administration unaccompanied by any
-constructive programme. The President had grown in public respect and
-confidence; the West had seen and heard him since he became a national
-figure, and he did not look or talk like a man who would out of sheer
-contrariness trifle with the national security and honor. It may be
-said with truth that the average Western Democrat was not “keen” about
-Mr. Wilson when he first loomed as a presidential possibility. I
-heard a good deal of discussion by Western Democrats of Mr. Wilson’s
-availability in 1910-11, and he was not looked upon with favor. He was
-“different”; he didn’t invoke the Democratic gods in the old familiar
-phraseology, and he was suspected of entertaining narrow views as to
-“spoils,” such as caused so much heartache among the truly loyal in Mr.
-Cleveland’s two administrations.
-
-The Democratic campaign slogan, “He has kept us out of war!” was
-not met with the definite challenge that he should have got us into
-war. Jingoism was well muffled. What passed for apathy was really
-a deep concern as to the outcome of our pressing international
-difficulties, an anxiety to weigh the points at issue soberly. Western
-managers constantly warned visiting orators to beware of “abusing the
-opposition,” as there were men and women of all political faiths in the
-audiences. Both sides were timid where the German vote was concerned,
-the Democrats alarmed lest the “strict accountability” attitude of
-the President toward the Imperial German Government would damage the
-party’s chances, and the Republicans embarrassed by the danger of
-openly appealing to the hyphenates when the Republican campaign turned
-upon an arraignment of the President for not dealing drastically enough
-with German encroachment upon American rights. In view of the mighty
-sweep of events since the election, all this seems tame and puerile,
-and reminds us that there is a vast amount of punk in politics.
-
-In the West there are no indications that an effect of the war will
-be to awaken new radical movements or strengthen tendencies that were
-apparent before America sounded the call to arms. I have dwelt upon the
-sobriety with which the West approached the election of 1916 merely as
-an emphasis of this. We shall have once more a “soldier vote” to reckon
-with in our politics, and the effect of their participation in the
-world struggle upon the young men who have crossed the sea to fight for
-democracy is an interesting matter for speculation. One thing certain
-is that the war has dealt the greatest blow ever administered to
-American sectionalism. We were prone for years to consider our national
-life in a local spirit, and the political parties expended much energy
-in attempts to reconcile the demands and needs of one division of the
-States with those of another. The prolonged debate of the tariff as
-a partisan issue is a noteworthy instance of this. The farmer, the
-industrial laborer, the capitalist have all been the objects of special
-consideration. One argument had to be prepared for the cotton-grower
-in the South; another for the New England mill-hands who spun his
-product; still another for the mill-owner. The farm-hand and the
-mechanic in the neighboring manufacturing town had to be reached by
-different lines of reasoning. Our statesmanship, East and West, has
-been of the knot-hole variety--rarely has a man risen to the top of
-the fence for a broad view of the whole field. What will be acceptable
-to the South? What does the West want? We have had this sort of thing
-through many years, both as to national policies and as to candidates
-for the presidency, and its effect has been to prevent the development
-of sound national policies.
-
-The Republican party has addressed itself energetically to the business
-of reorganization. The national committee met at St. Louis in February
-to choose a new chairman in place of Mr. William R. Willcox, and the
-contest for this important position was not without its significance.
-The standpatters yielded under pressure, and after a forty-eight-hour
-deadlock the election of Mr. Will H. Hays, of Indiana, assured a
-hospitable open-door policy toward all prodigals. In 1916 Mr. Hays, as
-chairman of the Republican State committee, carried Indiana against
-heavy odds and established himself as one of the ablest political
-managers the West has known. As the country is likely to hear a
-good deal of him in the next two years, I may note that he is a man
-of education, high-minded, resourceful, endowed with prodigious
-energy and trained and tested executive ability. A lawyer in a town
-of five thousand people, he served his political apprenticeship in
-all capacities from precinct committeeman to the State chairmanship.
-Mr. Hays organized and was the first chairman of the Indiana State
-Council of Defense, and made it a thoroughly effective instrument for
-the co-ordination of the State’s war resources and the diffusion of
-an ardent patriotism. Indeed the methods of the Indiana Council were
-so admirable that they were adopted by several other States. It is
-in the blood of all Hoosiers to suspect partisan motives where none
-exists, but it is to Mr. Hays’s credit that he directed Indiana’s war
-work, until he resigned to accept the national chairmanship, with the
-support and to the satisfaction of every loyal citizen without respect
-to party. Mr. Hays is essentially a Westerner, with the original Wabash
-tang; and his humor and a knack of coining memorable phrases are not
-the least important items of his equipment for politics. He is frank
-and outspoken, with no affectations of mystery, and as his methods
-are conciliatory and assimilative the chances are excellent for a
-Republican rejuvenation.
-
-The burden of prosecuting the war to a conclusive peace that shall
-realize the American aims repeatedly set forth by President Wilson
-is upon the Democratic administration. The West awaits with the same
-seriousness with which it pondered the problems of 1916 the definition
-of new issues touching vitally our social, industrial, and financial
-affairs, and our relations with other nations, that will press for
-attention the instant the last shot is fired. In the mid-summer of 1918
-only the most venturesome political prophets are predicting either
-the issues or the leaders of 1920. Events which it is impossible to
-forecast will create issues and possibly lift up new leaders not
-now prominent in national politics. A successful conclusion of the
-war before the national conventions meet two years hence would give
-President Wilson and his party an enormous prestige. On the other
-hand, if the war should be prolonged we shall witness inevitably the
-development of a sentiment for change based upon public anxiety to
-hasten the day of peace. These things are on the knees of the gods.
-
-In both parties there is to-day a melancholy deficiency of presidential
-timber. It cannot be denied that Republican hopes, very generally,
-are centred in Mr. Roosevelt; this is clearly apparent throughout
-the West. In the Democratic State convention held at Indianapolis,
-June 18, tumultuous enthusiasm was awakened by the chairman, former
-Governor Samuel M. Ralston, who boldly declared for Wilson in 1920--the
-first utterance of the kind before any body of like representative
-character. However, the immediate business of the nation is to win
-the war, and there is evident in the West no disposition to suffer
-this predominating issue to be obscured by partisanship. Indeed since
-America took up arms nothing has been more marked in the Western States
-than the sinking of partisanship in a whole-hearted support of the
-government and a generous response to all the demands of the war. In
-meetings called in aid of war causes Democrats and Republicans have
-vied with each other in protestations of loyalty to the government. I
-know of no exception to the rule that every request from Washington
-has been met splendidly by Republican State governors. Indeed, there
-has been a lively rivalry among Middle Western States to exceed the
-prescribed quotas of dollars and men.
-
-Already an effect of the war has been a closer knitting together
-of States and sections, a contemplation of wider horizons. It is
-inevitable that we shall be brought, East and West, North and South,
-to the realization of a new national consciousness that has long been
-the imperative need of our politics. And in all the impending changes,
-readjustments, and conciliations the country may look for hearty
-co-operation to a West grown amazingly conservative and capable of
-astonishing manifestations of independence.
-
-
-
-
-CHAPTER VI
-
-THE SPIRIT OF THE WEST
-
-  The wise know that foolish legislation is a rope of sand, which
-  perishes in the twisting; that the State must follow, and not lead,
-  the character and progress of the citizen; the strongest usurper
-  is quickly got rid of; and they only who build on Ideas, build for
-  eternity; and that the form of government which prevails is the
-  expression of what cultivation exists in the population which permits
-  it.--EMERSON.
-
-
-I
-
-Much water has flowed under the bridge since these papers were
-undertaken, and I cheerfully confess that in the course of the year
-I have learned a great deal about the West. My observations began at
-Denver when the land was still at peace, and continued through the hour
-of the momentous decision and the subsequent months of preparation.
-The West is a place of moods and its changes of spirit are sometimes
-puzzling. The violence has gone out of us; we went upon a war footing
-with a minimum amount of noise and gesticulation. Deeply preoccupied
-with other matters, the West was annoyed that the Kaiser should so
-stupidly make it necessary for the American Republic to give him a
-thrashing, but as the thing had to be done the West addressed itself
-to the job with a grim determination to do it thoroughly.
-
-We heard, after the election of 1916, that the result was an indication
-of the West’s indifference to the national danger; that the Middle
-Western people could not be interested in a war on the farther side of
-the Atlantic and would suffer any indignities rather than send their
-sons to fight in Europe. It was charged in some quarters that the West
-had lost its “pep”; that the fibre had softened; that the children and
-the grandchildren of “Lincoln’s men” were insensible to the national
-danger; and that thoughts of a bombardment of New York or San Francisco
-were not disturbing to a people remote from the sea. I am moved to
-remark that we of the West are less disposed to encourage the idea
-that we are a people apart than our friends to the eastward who often
-seem anxious to force this attitude upon us. We like our West and may
-boast and strut a little, but any intimation that we are not loyal
-citizens of the American Republic, jealous of its honor and security
-and responsive to its every call upon our patriotism and generosity,
-arouses our indignation.
-
-Many of us were favored in the first years of the war with letters
-from Eastern friends anxious to enlighten us as to America’s danger
-and her duty with respect to the needs of the sufferers in the wake
-of battle. On a day when I received a communication from New York
-asking “whether nothing could be done in Indiana to rouse the people
-to the sore need of France,” a committee for French relief had just
-closed a week’s campaign with a fund of $17,000, collected over the
-State in small sums and contributed very largely by school children.
-The Millers’ Belgian Relief movement, initiated in the fall of 1914 by
-Mr. William C. Edgar, of Minneapolis, publisher of _The Northwestern
-Miller_, affords a noteworthy instance of the West’s response to
-appeals in behalf of the people in the trampled kingdom. A call was
-issued November 4 for 45,000 barrels of flour, but 70,000 barrels
-were contributed; and this cargo was augmented by substantial gifts
-of blankets, clothing for women and children, and condensed milk.
-These supplies were distributed in Belgium under Mr. Edgar’s personal
-direction, in co-operation with Mr. Herbert C. Hoover, chairman of the
-Commission for the Relief of Belgium.
-
-Many Westerners were fighting under the British and French flags, or
-were serving in the French ambulance service before our entrance
-into the war, and the opening of the officers’ training-camps in 1917
-found young Westerners of the best type clamoring for admission. The
-Western colleges and universities cannot be too strongly praised for
-the patriotic fervor with which they met the crisis. One president
-said that if necessary he would nail up the doors of his college until
-the war was over. The eagerness to serve is indicated in the Regular
-Army enlistments for the period from June to December, 1917, in which
-practically all of the Middle Western States doubled and tripled the
-quota fixed by the War Department; and any assumption that patriotism
-diminishes the farther we penetrate into the interior falls before
-the showing of Colorado, whose response to a call for 1,598 men was
-answered by 3,793; and Utah multiplied her quota by 5 and Montana by
-7. This takes no account of men who, in the period indicated, entered
-training-camps, or of naval and marine enlistments, or of the National
-Guard or the selective draft. More completely than ever before the
-West is merged into the nation. The situation when war was declared is
-comparable to that of householders, long engrossed with their domestic
-affairs and heeding little the needs of the community, who are brought
-to the street by a common peril and confer soberly as to ways and means
-of meeting it.
-
-“The West,” an Eastern critic complains, “appears always to be
-demanding something!” The idea of the West as an Oliver Twist with
-a plate insistently extended pleases me and I am unable to meet it
-with any plausible refutation. The West has always wanted and it will
-continue to want and to ask for a great many things; we may only pray
-that it will more and more hammer upon the federal counter, not for
-appropriations but for things of value for the whole. “We will try
-anything once!” This for long was more or less the Western attitude
-in politics, but we seem to have escaped from it; and the war, with
-its enormous demands upon our resources, its revelation of national
-weaknesses, caused a prompt cleaning of the slate of old, unfinished
-business to await the outcome.
-
-It is an element of strength in a democracy that its political
-and social necessities are continuing; there is no point of rest.
-Obstacles, differences, criticism are all a necessary part of the
-eternal struggle toward perfection. What was impossible yesterday is
-achieved to-day and may be abandoned to-morrow. Democracy, as we have
-thus far practised it, is a series of experiments, a quest.
-
-
-II
-
-The enormous industrial development of the Middle West was a thing
-undreamed of by the pioneers, whose chief concern was with the soil;
-there was no way of anticipating the economic changes that have been
-forced upon attention by the growth of cities and States. Minnesota had
-been a State thirteen years when in 1871 Proctor Knott, in a speech in
-Congress, ridiculed the then unknown name of Duluth: “The word fell
-upon my ear with a peculiar and indescribable charm, like the gentle
-murmur of a low fountain stealing forth in the midst of roses, or the
-soft, sweet accent of an angel’s whisper in the bright, joyous dream of
-sleeping innocence.” And yet Duluth has become indeed a zenith city of
-the saltless seas, and the manufactured products of Minnesota have an
-annual value approximating $500,000,000.
-
-The first artisans, the blacksmiths and wagon-makers, and the women
-weaving cloth and fashioning the garments for their families in Ohio,
-Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, never dreamed that the manufactures
-of these States alone would attain a value of $5,500,000,000,
-approximately a fifth of the nation’s total. The original social and
-economic structure was not prepared for this mighty growth. States in
-which the soil was tilled almost wholly by the owners of the land were
-unexpectedly confronted with social and economic questions foreign to
-all their experience. Rural legislators were called upon to deal with
-questions of which they had only the most imperfect understanding.
-They were bewildered to find the towns nearest them, which had been
-only trading centres for the farmer, asking for legislation touching
-working hours, housing, and child labor, and for modifications of local
-government made necessary by growth and radical changes in social
-conditions. I remember my surprise to find not long ago that a small
-town I had known all my life had become an industrial centre where the
-citizens were gravely discussing their responsibilities to the laborers
-who had suddenly been added to the population.
-
-The preponderating element in the original occupation of the Middle
-Western States was American, derived from the older States; and the
-precipitation into the Mississippi valley industrial centres of great
-bodies of foreigners, many of them only vaguely aware of the purposes
-and methods of democracy, added an element of confusion and peril to
-State and national politics. The perplexities and dangers of municipal
-government were multiplied in the larger cities by the injection into
-the electorate of the hordes from overseas that poured into States
-whose government and laws had been fashioned to meet the needs of a
-homogeneous people who lived close to the soil.
-
-The war that has emphasized so many needs and dangers has sharply
-accentuated the growing power of labor. Certain manifestations of
-this may no longer be viewed in the light of local disturbances and
-agitations but with an eye upon impending world changes. Whatever
-the questions of social and economic reconstruction that Europe must
-face, they will be hardly less acutely presented in America; and these
-matters are being discussed in the West with a reassuring sobriety.
-The Industrial Workers of the World has widely advertised itself by
-its lawlessness, in recent years, and its obstructive tactics with
-respect to America’s preparations for war have focussed attention upon
-it as an organization utterly inconsonant with American institutions.
-An arresting incident of recent years was the trial, in 1912, in
-the United States Court for the District of Indiana, of forty-two
-officers and members of the International Association of Structural
-Iron Workers for the dynamiting of buildings and bridges throughout the
-country. The trial lasted three months, and the disclosures, pointing
-to a thoroughly organized conspiracy of destruction, were of the most
-startling character. Thirty-eight of the defendants were convicted. The
-influence of labor in the great industrial States of the West is very
-great, and not a negligible factor in the politics of the immediate
-future. What industrial labor has gained has been through constant
-pressure of its organizations; and yet the changes of the past fifty
-years have been so gradual as to present, in the retrospect, the
-appearance of an evolution.
-
-There is little to support an assumption that the West in these
-critical hours will not take counsel of reason; and it is an
-interesting circumstance that the West has just now no one who may be
-pointed to as its spokesman. No one is speaking for the West; the West
-has learned to think and to speak for itself. “Organized emotion” (I
-believe the phrase is President Lowell’s) may again become a power for
-mischief in these plains that lend so amiable an ear to the orator; but
-the new seriousness of which I have attempted to give some hint in the
-progress of these papers, and the increasing political independence of
-the Western people, encourage the belief that whatever lies before us
-in the way of momentous change, the West will not be led or driven to
-ill-considered action.
-
-In spite of many signs of a drift toward social democracy,
-individualism is still the dominant “note” in these Middle Western
-States, apart from the industrial centres where socialism has
-indisputably made great headway. It may be that American political and
-social phenomena are best observed in States whose earliest settlement
-is so recent as to form a background for contrast. We have still
-markedly in the Mississippi valley the individualistic point of view
-of the pioneer who thought out his problems alone and was restrained
-by pride from confessing his needs to his neighbors. In a region where
-capital has been most bitterly assaulted it has been more particularly
-in the pursuit of redress for local grievances. The agrarian attacks
-upon railroads are an instance of this. The farmer wants quick and
-cheap access to markets, and he favors co-operative elevators because
-he has felt for years that the middleman poured too many grains out of
-the bushel for his services. In so far as the farmer’s relations with
-the State are concerned, he has received from the government a great
-many things for which, broadly speaking, he has not asked, notably in
-the development of a greater efficiency of method and a widening of
-social horizons.
-
-
-III
-
-When the New Englander, the Southeasterner, and the Pennsylvanian met
-in the Ohio valley they spoke a common language and were animated by
-common aims. Their differences were readily reconcilable; Southern
-sentiment caused tension in the Civil War period and was recognizable
-in politics through reconstruction and later, but it was possible
-for one to be classed as a Southern sympathizer or even to bear the
-opprobrious epithet of copperhead without having his fundamental
-Americanism questioned. Counties through this belt of States were named
-for American heroes and statesmen--Washington, Franklin, Jefferson,
-Hamilton, Marion, Clark, Perry--varied by French and Indian names that
-tinkle musically along lakes and rivers.
-
-There was never any doubt in the early days that all who came were
-quickly assimilated into the body of the republic, and certainly
-there was no fear that any conceivable situation could ever cause
-the loyalty of the newly adopted citizen to be questioned. The soil
-was too young in the days of Knownothingism and the body of the
-population too soundly American for the West to be greatly roused by
-that movement. Nevertheless we have had in the West as elsewhere the
-political recognition of the race group--a particular consideration for
-the Irish vote or the German vote, and in the Northwestern States for
-the Scandinavian. The political “bosses” were not slow to throw their
-lines around the increasing race groups with a view to control and
-manipulation. Our political platforms frequently expressed “sympathy
-with the Irish people in their struggle for home rule,” and it had
-always been considered “good politics” to recognize the Irish and the
-Germans in party nominations.
-
-Following Germany’s first hostile acts against American life and
-property, through the long months of waiting in which America hoped
-for a continuation of neutrality, we became conscious that the point
-of view held by citizens of American stock differed greatly from that
-of many--of, indeed, the greater number--of our citizens of German
-birth or ancestry. Until America became directly concerned it was
-perfectly explicable that they should sympathize with the people,
-if not with the government, of the German Empire. The _Lusitania_
-tragedy, defended in many cases openly by German sympathizers; the
-disclosure of the duplicity of the German ambassador, and revelations
-of the insidious activity and ingenious propaganda that had been in
-progress under the guise of pacifism--all condoned by great numbers of
-German-Americans--brought us to a realization of the fact that even
-unto the third and fourth generation the fatherland still exercised
-its spell upon those we had accepted unquestioningly as fellow
-citizens. And yet, viewed in the retrospect, the phenomenon is not so
-remarkable. More than any other people who have enjoyed free access to
-the “unguarded gates,” of which Aldrich complained many years ago, the
-Germans have settled themselves in both town and country in colonies.
-Intermarriage has been very general among them, and their social fife
-has been circumscribed by ancestral tastes and preferences. As they
-prospered they made frequent visits to Germany, strengthening ties
-never wholly broken.
-
-It was borne in upon us in the months following close upon the
-declaration of war against Germany, that many citizens of German birth,
-long enjoying the freedom and the opportunities of the Valley of
-Democracy, had not really been incorporated into the body of American
-citizenship, but were still, in varying degrees, loyal to the German
-autocracy. That in States we had proudly pointed to as typically
-American there should be open disloyalty or only a surly acceptance
-of the American Government’s position with reference to a hostile
-foreign Power was profoundly disturbing. That amid the perils of war
-Americanism should become the issue in a political campaign, as in
-Wisconsin last April, brought us face to face with the problem of a
-more thorough assimilation of those we have welcomed from the Old
-World--a problem which when the urgent business of winning the war
-has been disposed of, we shall not neglect if we are wise. Wisconsin
-nobly asserted her loyalty, and it should be noted further that her
-response in enlistments, in loan subscriptions, in contributions to the
-Red Cross and other war benevolences have been commensurate with her
-wealth and in keeping with her honorable record as one of the sturdiest
-of American commonwealths. The rest of America should know that as
-soon as Wisconsin realized that she had a problem with reference to
-pro-Germanism, disguised or open, her greatly preponderating number
-of loyal citizens at once set to work to deal with the situation. It
-was met promptly and aggressively, and in the wide-spread campaign
-of education the University of Wisconsin took an important part. A
-series of pamphlets, straight-forward and unequivocal, written by
-members of the faculty and published by the State, set forth very
-clearly America’s position and the menace to civilization of Germany’s
-programme of frightfulness.
-
-Governor Philipp, in a patriotic address at Sheboygan in May, on the
-seventieth anniversary of Wisconsin’s admission to the Union, after
-reviewing the State’s war preparations, evoked great applause by these
-utterances:
-
-“There is a great deal said by some people about peace. Don’t you
-permit yourselves to be led astray by men who come to you with some
-form of peace that they advocate that would be an everlasting disgrace
-to the American people. We cannot subscribe to any peace treaty, my
-friends, that does not include within its provisions an absolute and
-complete annihilation of the military autocracy that we have said to
-the world we are going to destroy. We have enlisted our soldiers with
-that understanding. We have asked our boys to go to France to do that,
-and if we quit short of fulfilling that contract with our own soldiers,
-those boys on the battlefield will have given their lives in vain.”
-
-In the present state of feeling it is impossible to weigh from
-available data the question of how far there was some sort of
-“understanding” between the government at Berlin and persons of German
-sympathies in the United States that when _Der Tag_ dawned for the
-precipitation of the great scheme of world domination they would stand
-ready to assist by various processes of resistance and interference.
-For the many German-Americans who stood steadfastly for the American
-cause at all times it is unfortunate that much testimony points to
-some such arrangement. At this time it is difficult to be just about
-this, and it is far from my purpose to support an indictment that is
-an affront to the intelligence and honor of the many for the offenses
-of scattered groups and individuals; and yet through fifty years
-German organizations, a German-language press, the teaching of German
-in public schools fostered the German spirit, and the efforts made to
-preserve the solidarity of the German people lend color to the charge.
-It cannot be denied that systematic German propaganda, either open
-or in pacifist guise, was at work energetically throughout the West
-from the beginning of the war to arouse sentiment against American
-resistance to German encroachments.
-
-Americans of German birth have been controlled very largely by leaders,
-often men of wealth, who directed them in their affairs great and
-small. This “system” took root in times when the immigrant, finding
-himself in a strange land and unfamiliar with its language, naturally
-sought counsel of his fellow countrymen who had already learned the
-ways of America. This form of leadership has established a curious
-habit of dependence, and makes against freedom of thought and action
-in the humble while augmenting the power of the strong. It has been
-a common thing for German parents to encourage in their children the
-idea of German superiority and Germany’s destiny to rule the world.
-A gentleman whose parents, born in Germany, came to the Middle West
-fifty years ago told me recently that his father, who left Germany to
-escape military service, had sought to inculcate these ideas in the
-minds of his children from their earliest youth. The sneer at American
-institutions has been very common among Germans of this type. Another
-young man of German ancestry complained bitterly of this contemptuous
-attitude toward things American. There was, he said, a group of men
-who met constantly in a German clubhouse to belittle America and
-exalt the joys of the fatherland. Their attitude toward their adopted
-country was condensed into an oft-repeated formula: “What shall we
-think of a people whose language does not contain an equivalent for
-_Gemütlichkeit_!”
-
-As part of the year’s record I may speak from direct knowledge of a
-situation with which we were brought face to face in Indianapolis, a
-city of three hundred thousand people, in a State in which the centre
-of population for the United States has been fixed by the federal
-census for two decades. Indiana’s capital, we like to believe, is a
-typical American city. Here the two tides of migration from the East
-and the Southeast met in the first settlement. A majestic shaft in the
-heart of the town testifies to the participation of Indiana in all
-the American wars from the Revolution; in no other State perhaps is
-political activity so vigorous as here. It would seem that if there
-exists anywhere a healthy American spirit it might be sought here with
-confidence. The phrase “He’s an honest German” nowhere conveyed a
-deeper sense of rectitude and probity. Men of German birth or ancestry
-have repeatedly held responsible municipal and county offices. And yet
-this city affords a striking instance of the deleterious effect of the
-preservation of the race group. It must be said that the community’s
-spirit toward these citizens was the friendliest in the world; that in
-the first years of the European War allowances were generously made for
-family ties that still bound many to the fatherland and for pride and
-prejudice of race. There had never been any question as to the thorough
-assimilation of the greater number into the body of American democracy
-until the beginning of the war in 1914.
-
-When America joined with the Allies a silence fell upon those who had
-been supporting the German cause. The most outspoken of the German
-sympathizers yielded what in many cases was a grudging and reluctant
-assent to America’s preparations for war. Others made no sign one way
-or the other. There were those who wished to quibble--who said that
-they were for America, of course, but that they were not for England;
-that England had begun the war to crush Germany; that the stories
-of atrocities were untrue. As to the _Lusitania_, Americans had no
-business to disregard the warning of the Imperial German Government;
-and America “had no right” to ship munitions to Germany’s enemies.
-Reports of disloyal speech or of active sedition on the part of
-well-known citizens were freely circulated.
-
-German influence in the public schools had been marked for years, and
-the president of the school board was a German, active in the affairs
-of the National German-American Alliance. The teaching of German in the
-grade schools was forbidden by the Indianapolis school commissioners
-last year, though it is compulsory under a State law where the
-parents of twenty-five children request it. It was learned that “The
-Star-Spangled Banner” was sung in German in at least one public school
-as part of the instruction in the German language, and this was
-defended by German-Americans on the ground that knowledge of their
-national anthem in two languages broadened the children’s appreciation
-of its beauties. One might wonder just how long the singing of “Die
-Wacht am Rhein” in a foreign language would be tolerated in Germany!
-
-We witnessed what in many cases was a gradual and not too hearty
-yielding to the American position, and what in others was a refusal to
-discuss the matter with a protest that any question of loyalty was an
-insult. Suggestions that a public demonstration by German-Americans,
-at a time when loyalty meetings were being held by American citizens
-everywhere, would satisfy public clamor and protect innocent sufferers
-from business boycott and other manifestations of disapproval were met
-with indignation. The situation became acute upon the disclosure that
-the Independent Turnverein, a club with a handsome house that enrolled
-many Americans in its membership, had on New Year’s Eve violated the
-government food regulations. The president, who had been outspoken
-against Germany long before America was drawn into the war, made public
-apology, and as a result of the flurry steps were taken immediately to
-change the name of the organization to the Independent Athletic Club.
-On Lincoln’s Birthday a patriotic celebration was held in the club. On
-Washington’s Birthday _Das Deutsche Haus_, the most important German
-social centre in the State, announced a change of its name to the
-Athenæum. In his address on this occasion Mr. Carl H. Lieber said:
-
-  With mighty resolve we have taken up arms to gain recognition for
-  the lofty principles of a free people in unalterable opposition to
-  autocracy and military despotism. Emerging from the mists and smoke
-  of battle, these American principles, like brilliant handwriting
-  in the skies, have been clearly set out by our President for the
-  eyes of the world to see. Our country stands undivided for their
-  realization. Impartially and unselfishly we are fighting, we feel,
-  for justice in this world and the rights of mankind.
-
-This from a representative citizen of the second generation
-satisfactorily disposed of the question of loyalty, both as to the
-renamed organization and the majority of its more influential members.
-A little later the Männerchor, another German club, changed its name to
-the Academy of Music.
-
-It is only just to say that, as against many evidences of a failure
-to assimilate, there is gratifying testimony that a very considerable
-number of persons of German birth or ancestry in these States have
-neither encouraged nor have they been affected by attempts to diffuse
-and perpetuate German ideas. Many German families--I know conspicuous
-instances in Western cities--are in no way distinguishable from their
-neighbors of American stock. In one Middle Western city a German
-mechanic, who before coming to America served in the German army and
-is without any illusions as to the delights of autocracy, tells me
-that attachment to the fatherland is confined very largely to the more
-prosperous element, and that he encountered little hostility among the
-humbler people of German antecedents whom he attempted to convince of
-the justice of the American position.
-
-The National German-American Alliance, chartered by special act of
-Congress in 1901, was one of the most insidious and mischievous
-agencies for German propaganda in America. It was a device for
-correlating German societies of every character--turnvereins, music
-societies, church organizations, and social clubs, and it is said
-that the Alliance had 2,500,000 members scattered through forty-seven
-American States. “Our own prestige,” recites one of its publications,
-“depends upon the prestige of the fatherland, and for that reason
-we cannot allow any disparagement of Germany to go unpunished.” It
-was recited in the Alliance’s statement of its aims that one of its
-purposes was to combat “nativistic encroachments.” I am assured by a
-German-American that this use of “nativistic” does not refer to the
-sense in which it was used in America in the Know-Nothing period, but
-that it means merely resistance to puritanical infringements upon
-personal freedom, with special reference to prohibition.
-
-The compulsory teaching of German in the public schools was a frank
-item of the Alliance’s programme. In his book, “Their True Faith and
-Allegiance” (1916), Mr. Gustavus Ohlinger, of Toledo, whose testimony
-before the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate attracted
-much attention last February, describes the systematic effort to widen
-the sphere of the teaching of German in Western States. Ohio and
-Indiana have laws requiring German to be taught upon the petition of
-parents. Before the repeal of a similar law in Nebraska last April we
-find that in Nebraska City the school board had been compelled by the
-courts to obey the law, though less than one-third of the petitioners
-really intended to have their children receive instruction in German.
-Mr. Ohlinger thus describes the operation of the law in Omaha:
-
-  In the city of Omaha ... the State organizer of the Nebraska
-  federation of German societies visited the schools recently and was
-  more than pleased with what he found: the children were acquiring a
-  typically Berlin accent, sung a number of German songs to his entire
-  approval, and finally ended by rendering “Die Wacht am Rhein” with
-  an enthusiasm and a gusto which could not be excelled among children
-  of the fatherland. Four years ago Nebraska had only 90 high schools
-  which offered instruction in German. To-day, so the Alliance reports,
-  German is taught in 222 high schools and in the grade schools of
-  nine cities. Omaha alone has 3,500 pupils taking German instruction.
-  In addition to this, the State federation has been successful in
-  obtaining an appropriation for the purchase of German books for the
-  State circulating library. Germans have been urged to call for such
-  books, in order to convince the State librarian that there is a
-  popular demand and to induce further progress in this direction.
-
-These conditions have, of course, passed, and it is for those of us who
-would guard jealously our rights, and honestly fulfil our obligations,
-as American citizens to see to it that they do not recur. The Alliance
-announced its voluntary dissolution some time before its charter was
-annulled, but the testimony before the King committee, which the
-government has published, will be an important source of material for
-the historian of the war. German propaganda and activity in the Middle
-West did little for the Kaiser but to make the word “German” an odious
-term. “German” in business titles and in club names has disappeared and
-German language newspapers have in many instances changed their names
-or gone out of business. I question whether the end of the war will
-witness any manifestations of magnanimity that will make possible a
-restoration of the teaching of German in primary and high schools.
-
-We of the Middle West, who had thought ourselves the especial guardians
-of American democracy, found with dismay that the mailed fist of Berlin
-was clutching our public schools. In Chicago, where so much time,
-money, and thought are expended in the attempt to Americanize the
-foreign accretions, the spelling-book used in the fourth, fifth, sixth,
-seventh, and eighth grades consisted wholly of word-lists, with the
-exception of two exercises--one of ten lines, describing the aptness of
-the natives of Central Australia in identifying the tracks of birds and
-animals, and another which is here reproduced:
-
-
-  THE KAISER IN THE MAKING
-
-  In the _gymnasium_ at Cassel the German _Kaiser_ spent three years of
-  his boyhood, a _diligent_ but not a _brilliant_ pupil, ranking tenth
-  among _seventeen candidates_ for the _university_.
-
-  Many tales are told of this _period_ of his life, and one of them, at
-  least, is _illuminating_.
-
-  A _professor_, it is said, wishing to curry favor with his royal
-  pupil, informed him _overnight_ of the chapter in Greek that was to
-  be made the _subject_ of the next day’s lesson.
-
-  The young _prince_ did what many boys would not have done. As soon as
-  the classroom was _opened_ on the following morning, he entered and
-  wrote _conspicuously_ on the blackboard the _information_ that had
-  been given him.
-
-  One may say _unhesitatingly_ that a boy capable of such an action has
-  the root of a fine _character_ in him, _possesses_ that _chivalrous_
-  sense of fair play which is the nearest thing to a _religion_ that
-  may be looked for at that age, hates _meanness_ and _favoritism_,
-  and will, _wherever possible_, expose them. There is in him a
-  _fundamental_ bent toward what is clean, manly, and aboveboard.
-
-The copy of the book before me bears the imprint, “Board of Education,
-City of Chicago, 1914.” The Kaiser’s “chivalrous sense of fair play”
-has, of course, ceased to be a matter of public instruction in the
-Western metropolis.
-
-“Im Vaterland,” a German reading-book used in a number of Western
-schools, states frankly in its preface that it was “made in Germany,”
-and that “after the manuscript had been completed it was manifolded and
-copies were criticised by teachers in Prussia, Saxony, and Bavaria.”
-
-In contrast with the equivocal loyalty of Germans who have sought to
-perpetuate and accentuate the hyphen, it is a pleasure to testify to
-the admirable spirit with which the Jewish people in these Western
-States have repeatedly manifested their devotion to America. Many of
-these are of German birth or the children of German immigrants, and yet
-I am aware of no instance of a German Jew in the region most familiar
-to me who has not warmly supported the American cause. They have not
-only given generously to the Red Cross and to funds for French and
-Belgian relief, quite independently of their efforts in behalf of
-people of their own race in other countries, but they have rendered
-most important aid in all other branches of war activities. No finer
-declaration of whole-hearted Americanism has been made by any American
-of German birth than that expressed (significantly at Milwaukee) by
-Mr. Otto H. Kahn, of New York, last January:
-
-  Until the outbreak of the war, in 1914, I maintained close and active
-  personal and business relations in Germany. I was well acquainted
-  with a number of the leading personages of the country. I served
-  in the German army thirty years ago. I took an active interest
-  in furthering German art in America. I do not apologize for, nor
-  am I ashamed of, my German birth. But I am ashamed--bitterly and
-  grievously ashamed--of the Germany which stands convicted before the
-  high tribunal of the world’s public opinion of having planned and
-  willed war, of the revolting deeds committed in Belgium and northern
-  France, of the infamy of the _Lusitania_ murders, of innumerable
-  violations of The Hague conventions and the law of nations, of
-  abominable and perfidious plotting in friendly countries, and
-  shameless abuse of their hospitality, of crime heaped upon crime in
-  hideous defiance of the laws of God and man.
-
-A curious phase of this whole situation is the fact that so many
-thousands of Germans who found the conditions in their own empire
-intolerable and sought homes in America, should have fostered a
-sentimental attachment for the fatherland as a land of comfort and
-happiness, and of its ruler as a glorious Lohengrin afloat upon the
-river of time in a swan-boat, in an atmosphere of charm and mystery, to
-the accompaniment of enchanting music. In their clubs and homes they so
-dreamed of this Germany and talked of it in the language of the land
-of their illusion that the sudden transformation of their knight of the
-swan-boat into a war lord of frightfulness and terror, seeking to plant
-his iron feet upon an outraged world, has only slowly penetrated to
-their comprehension. It is clear that there has been on America’s part
-a failure, that cannot be minimized or scouted, to communicate to many
-of the most intelligent and desirable of all our adopted citizens, the
-spirit of that America founded by Washington and saved by Lincoln, and
-all the great host who in their train--
-
-        “spread from sea to sea
-  A thousand leagues the zone of liberty,
-  And gave to man this refuge from his past,
-  Unkinged, unchurched, unsoldiered.”
-
-
-IV
-
-In closing these papers it seems ungenerous to ignore the criticisms
-with which they were favored during their serial publication. To a
-gentleman in Colorado who insists that my definition and use of Folks
-and “folksiness” leave him in the dark as to my meaning, I can only
-suggest that a visit to certain communities which I shall be glad to
-choose for him, in the States of our central basin, will do much for
-his illumination. An intimation from another quarter that those terms
-as I have employed them originated in Kentucky does not distress me a
-particle, for are not we of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois first cousins
-of the people across the Ohio? At once some one will rise to declare
-that all that is truly noble in the Middle West was derived from the
-Eastern States or from New England, and on this question I might
-with a good conscience write a fair brief on either side. With one
-Revolutionary great-grandfather, a native of Delaware, buried in Ohio,
-and another, a Carolinian, reposing in the soil of Kentucky, I should
-be content no matter where fell the judgment of the court.
-
-To the complaint of the Chicago lady who assailed the editor for his
-provincialism in permitting an Easterner to abuse her city, I demur
-that I was born and have spent most of the years of my life within a
-few hours of Chicago, a city dear to me from long and rather intimate
-acquaintance and hallowed by most agreeable associations. The _Evening
-Post_ of Chicago, having found the fruits of my note-book “dull” as to
-that metropolis, must permit me to plead that in these stirring times
-the significant things about a city are not its clubs, its cabarets,
-or its galloping “loop-hounds,” but the efforts of serious-minded
-citizens of courage and vision to make it a better place to live in.
-The cynicism of those to whom the contemplation of such efforts is
-fatiguing, lacks novelty and is only tolerable in so far as it is a
-stimulus to the faithful workers in the vineyard.
-
-I have spoken of The Valley of Democracy as being in itself a romance,
-and the tale as written upon hill and plain and along lake and river
-is well-nigh unequalled for variety and interest in the annals of
-mankind. I must plead that the sketchiness of these papers is due
-not to any lack of respect for the work of soberer chroniclers, but
-is attributable rather to the humility with which I have traversed a
-region laboriously explored by the gallant company of scholars who
-have established Middle Western history upon so firm a foundation. It
-is the view of persons whose opinions are entitled to all respect that
-the winning of the West is the most significant and important phase of
-American history. Certain it is that the story wherever one dips into
-it immediately quickens the heart-beat, and it is a pleasure to note
-the devotion and intelligence with which materials for history have
-been assembled in all the States embraced in my general title.
-
-The great pioneer collector of historical material was Dr. Reuben Gold
-Thwaites, who made the Wisconsin Historical Society the most efficient
-local organization of its kind in the country. “He was the first,”
-writes Dr. Clarence W. Alvord, of the University of Illinois, “to unite
-the State historical agent and the university department of history so
-that they give each other mutual assistance--a union which some States
-have brought about only lately with great difficulty, while others are
-still limping along on two ill-mated crutches.” Dr. Thwaites was an
-indefatigable laborer in his chosen field, and an inspiring leader. He
-not only brought to light a prodigious amount of material and made it
-accessible to other scholars, but he communicated his enthusiasm to a
-noteworthy school of historians who have specialized in “sections” of
-the broad fertile field into which he set the first plough. Where the
-land is so new it is surprising and not a little amusing that there
-should be debatable points of history, and yet the existence of these
-adds zest to the labors of the younger school of historical students
-and writers. State historical societies have in recent years assumed a
-new dignity and importance, due in great measure to the fine example
-set by Wisconsin under Dr. Thwaites’s guidance.
-
-Frederick Jackson Turner is another historian whose interest in the
-West has borne fruit in works of value, and he has established new
-points of orientation for explorers in this field. He must always be
-remembered as one of the first to appreciate the significance of the
-Western frontier in American history, and by his writings and addresses
-he has done much to arouse respect for the branch in which he has
-specialized. Nor shall I omit Dr. John H. Finley’s “The French in the
-Heart of America” as among recent valuable additions to historical
-literature. There is a charming freshness and an infectious enthusiasm
-in Dr. Finley’s pages, attributable to his deep poetic feeling for the
-soil to which he was born. All writers of the history of the Northwest,
-of course, confess their indebtedness to Parkman, and it should not be
-forgotten that before Theodore Roosevelt became a distinguished figure
-in American public life he had written “The Winning of the West,” which
-established a place for him among American historians.
-
-A historical society was formed in Indiana in 1830, but as no building
-was ever provided for its collection, many valuable records were lost
-when the State capitol was torn down thirty years ago. Many documents
-that should have been kept within the State found their way to
-Wisconsin--an appropriation by the tireless Thwaites of which Indiana
-can hardly complain in view of the fact that she has never provided for
-the proper housing of historical material. Still, interest in local
-history, much of it having an important bearing on the national life,
-has never wholly died, and in recent years the _Indiana Historical
-Magazine_ and the labors of Jacob P. Dunn, James A. Woodburn, Logan
-Esarey, Daniel Waite Howe, Harlow Lindley, and other students and
-writers have directed attention to the richness of the local field.
-
-Illinois, slipping this year into her second century of statehood,
-is thoroughly awake to the significance of the Illinois country in
-Western development. Dr. Alvord, who, by his researches and writings,
-has illuminated many dark passages of Middle Western history, has
-taken advantage of the centenary to rouse the State to a new sense of
-its important share in American development. The investigator in this
-field is rewarded by the unearthing of treasures as satisfying as any
-that may fall to the hand of a Greek archæologist. The trustees of the
-Illinois Historical Library sent Dr. Alvord to “sherlock” an old French
-document reported to be in the court-house of St. Clair county. Not
-only was this document found but the more important Cahokia papers
-were discovered, bearing upon the history of the Illinois country
-during the British occupation and the American Revolution. Illinois
-has undertaken a systematic survey of county archives, which includes
-also a report upon manuscript material held by individuals, and the
-centenary is to have a fitting memorial in a five-volume State history
-to be produced by authoritative writers.
-
-Iowa, jealous of her history and traditions, has a State-supported
-historical society with a fine list of publications to its credit.
-Under the direction of the society’s superintendent, Dr. Benjamin F.
-Shambaugh, the search for material is thorough and persistent, and
-over forty volumes of historical material have been published. The
-Iowa public and college libraries are all branches of the society and
-depositories of its publications. The Mississippi Valley Historical
-Association held its eleventh annual meeting this year in St. Paul to
-mark the dedication of the new building erected by the State for the
-use of the Minnesota Historical Society.
-
-The wide scope of Western historical inquiry is indicated in the papers
-of the Mississippi Valley Association, and its admirable quarterly
-review, in which we find monographs by the ethnologist, the specialist
-in exploration, and the student of political crises, such as the
-Lincoln-Douglas contest and the Greenback movement. Not only are the
-older Middle Western States producing historical matter of national
-importance but Montana and the Dakotas are inserting chapters that bind
-the Mississippi Valley to the picturesque annals of California in a
-continuous narrative. Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Illinois,
-and Indiana have established an informal union for the prosecution of
-their work, one feature of which is the preparation of a “finding list”
-of documents in Washington. This co-ordination prevents duplication of
-labor and makes for unity of effort in a field of common interest.
-
-
-V
-
-I had hoped that space would permit a review in some detail of
-municipal government in a number of cities, but I may now emphasize
-only the weakness of a mere “form,” or “system,” where the electorate
-manifest too great a confidence in a device without the “follow-up” so
-essential to its satisfactory employment; and I shall mention Omaha,
-whose municipal struggle has been less advertised than that of some
-other Western cities. Omaha was fortunate in having numbered among
-its pioneers a group of men of unusual ability and foresight. First a
-military outpost and a trading centre for adventurous settlements, the
-building of the Union Pacific made it an important link between East
-and West, and, from being a market for agricultural products of one of
-the most fertile regions in the world, its interests have multiplied
-until it now offers a most interesting study in the interdependence and
-correlation of economic factors.
-
-Like most other Western cities, Omaha grew so rapidly and was so
-preoccupied with business that its citizens, save for the group of
-the faithful who are to be found everywhere, left the matter of
-local government to the politicians. Bossism became intolerable, and
-with high hopes the people in 1912 adopted commission government;
-but the bosses, with their usual adaptability and resourcefulness,
-immediately captured the newly created offices. It is a fair consensus
-of local opinion that there has been little if any gain in economy or
-efficiency. Under the old charter city councilmen were paid $1,800; the
-commissioners under the new plan receive $4,500, with an extra $500 for
-the one chosen mayor. Several of the commissioners are equal to their
-responsibilities, but a citizen who is a close student of such matters
-says that “while in theory we were to get a much higher grade of public
-servants, in fact we merely elected men content to work for the lower
-salary and doubled and tripled their pay. We still have $1,800 men in
-$4,500 jobs.” However, at the election last spring only one of the city
-commissioners was re-elected, and Omaha is hoping that the present
-year will show a distinct improvement in the management of its public
-business. Local pride is very strong in these Western cities, and from
-the marked anxiety to show a forward-looking spirit and a praiseworthy
-sensitiveness to criticism we may look confidently for a steady gain in
-the field of municipal government.
-
-It is to be hoped that in the general awakening to our imperfections
-caused by the war, there may be a widening of these groups of patient,
-earnest citizens, who labor for the rationalization of municipal
-government. The disposition to say that “as things have been they
-remain” is strong upon us, but it is worth remembering that Clough also
-bids us “say not the struggle naught availeth.” The struggle goes on
-courageously, and the number of those who concern themselves with the
-business of strengthening the national structure by pulling out the
-rotten timbers in our cities proceeds tirelessly.
-
-Western cities are constantly advertising their advantages and
-resources, and offering free sites and other inducements to
-manufacturers to tempt them to move; but it occurs to me that
-forward-looking cities may present their advantages more alluringly
-by perfecting their local government and making this the burden of
-their appeal. We shall get nowhere with commission government or the
-city-manager plan until cities realize that no matter how attractive
-and plausible a device, it is worthless unless due consideration is
-given to the human equation. It is very difficult to find qualified
-administrators under the city-manager plan. A successful business man
-or even a trained engineer may fail utterly, and we seem to be at the
-point of creating a new profession of great opportunities for young
-men (and women too) in the field of municipal administration. At the
-University of Kansas and perhaps elsewhere courses are offered for
-the training of city managers. The mere teaching of municipal finance
-and engineering will not suffice; the courses should cover social
-questions and kindred matters and not neglect the psychology involved
-in the matter of dealing fairly and justly with the public. By giving
-professional dignity to positions long conferred upon the incompetent
-and venal we should at least destroy the cynical criticism that there
-are no men available for the positions created; and it is conceivable
-that once the idea of fitness has become implanted in a careless and
-indifferent public a higher standard will be set for all elective
-offices.
-
-
-VI
-
-No Easterner possessed of the slightest delicacy will read what
-follows, which is merely a memorandum for my friends and neighbors
-of the great Valley. We of the West have never taken kindly to
-criticism, chiefly because it has usually been offered in a spirit of
-condescension, or what in our extreme sensitiveness we have been rather
-eager to believe to be such. In our comfortable towns and villages we
-may admit weaknesses the mention of which by our cousins _in partibus
-infidelium_ arouses our deepest ire. We shall not meekly suffer the
-East in its disdainful moods to play upon us with the light lash of
-its irony; but among ourselves we may confess that at times we have
-profited by Eastern criticism. After all, there is no spirit of the
-West that is very different from the spirit of the East. Though I only
-whisper it, we have, I think, rather more humor. We are friendlier,
-less snobbish, more sanguine in our outlook upon public matters, and
-have a greater confidence in democracy than the East. I have indicated
-with the best heart in the world certain phases and tendencies of our
-provinces that seem to me admirable, and others beside which I have
-scratched a question-mark for the contemplation of the sober-minded.
-I am disposed to say that the most interesting thing about us is our
-politics, but that, safely though we have ridden the tempest now and
-again, these be times when it becomes us to ponder with a new gravity
-the weight we carry in the national scale. Colorado, Illinois, Indiana,
-Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wisconsin wield
-145 votes of the total of 531 in the electoral college; and in 1916 Mr.
-Wilson’s majority was only 23. The political judgment of the nation is
-likely, far into the future, to be governed by the West. We dare not,
-if we would, carry our responsibilities lightly. We have of late been
-taking our politics much more seriously; a flexibility of the vote,
-apparent in recent contests, is highly encouraging to those of us who
-see a hope and a safety in the multiplication of the independents. But
-even with this we have done little to standardize public service; the
-ablest men of the West do not govern it, and the fact that this has
-frequently been true of the country at large can afford us no honest
-consolation. There is no reason why, if we are the intelligent, proud
-sons of democracy we imagine ourselves to be, we should not so elevate
-our political standards as to put other divisions of the republic
-to shame. There are thousands of us who at every election vote for
-candidates we know nothing about, or for others we would not think of
-intrusting with any private affair, and yet because we find their names
-under a certain party emblem we cheerfully turn over to such persons
-important public business for the honest and efficient transaction of
-which they have not the slightest qualification. What I am saying is
-merely a repetition of what has been said for years without marked
-effect upon the electorate. But just now, when democracy is fighting
-for its life in the world, we do well to give serious heed to such
-warnings. If we have not time or patience to perform the services
-required of a citizen who would be truly self-governing, then the glory
-of fighting for free institutions on the battle-fields of Europe is
-enormously diminished.
-
-The coming of the war found the West rather hard put for any great
-cause upon which to expend its energy and enthusiasm. We need a good
-deal of enthusiasm to keep us “up to pitch,” and I shall not scruple
-to say that, in spite of our fine showing as to every demand thus
-far made by the war, the roll of the drums really found us inviting
-the reproach passed by the prophet upon them “that lie upon beds of
-ivory, and stretch themselves upon their couches, and eat the lambs
-out of the flock, and the calves out of the midst of the stall.” Over
-and over again, as I have travelled through the West in recent years,
-it has occurred to me that sorely indeed we needed an awakening.
-Self-satisfaction and self-contemplation are little calculated to
-promote that clear thinking and vigorous initiative that are essential
-to triumphant democracy. Yes; this may be just as true of East or
-South; but it is of the West that we are speaking. I shall go the
-length of saying that any failure of democracy “to work” here in
-America is more heavily chargeable upon us of these Middle Western
-States than upon our fellow Americans in other sections. For here we
-are young enough to be very conscious of all those processes by which
-States are formed and political and social order established. Our
-fathers or our grandfathers were pioneers; and from them the tradition
-is fresh of the toil and aspiration that went to the making of these
-commonwealths. We cannot deceive ourselves into believing that they did
-all that was necessary to perpetuate the structure, and that it is not
-incumbent upon us to defend, strengthen, and renew what they fashioned.
-We had, like many of those who have come to us from over the sea to
-share in our blessings, fallen into the error of assuming that America
-is a huge corporation in which every one participates in the dividends
-without reference to his part in earning them. Politically speaking, we
-have too great a number of those who “hang on behind” and are a dead
-weight upon those who bear the yoke. We must do better about this; and
-in no way can the West prove its fitness to wield power in the nation
-than through a quickening of all those forces that tend to make popular
-government an intelligently directed implement controlled by the fit,
-and not a weapon caught up and exercised ignorantly by the unfit.
-
-Again, still speaking as one Westerner to another, our entrance into
-the war found us dangerously close to the point of losing something
-that was finely spiritual in our forebears. I am aware that an
-impatient shrug greets this suggestion. The spires and towers of
-innumerable churches decorate the Western sky-line, and I accept
-them for what they represent, without discussing the efficiency
-of the modern church or its failure or success in meeting the
-problems of modern life. There was apparent in the first settlers
-of the Mississippi valley a rugged spirituality that accounted
-for much in their achievements. The West was a lonesome place and
-religion--Catholic and Protestant--filled a need and assisted greatly
-in making wilderness and plain tolerable. The imagination of the
-pioneer was quickened and brightened by the promise of things that
-he believed to be eternal; the vast sweep of prairie and woodland
-deepened his sense of reliance upon the Infinite. This sense so
-happily interpreted and fittingly expressed by Lincoln is no longer
-discernible--at least it is not obtrusively manifest--and this seems
-to me a lamentable loss. Here, again, it may be said that this is not
-peculiar to the West; that we have only been affected by the eternal
-movement of the time spirit. And yet this elementary confidence in
-things of the spirit played an important part in the planting of the
-democratic ideal in the heart of America, and we can but deplore the
-passing of what to our immediate ancestors was so satisfying and
-stimulating. And here, as with other problems that I have passed with
-only the most superficial note, I have no solution, if indeed any be
-possible. I am fully conscious that I fumble for something intangible
-and elusive; and it may be that I am only crying vainly for the
-restoration of something that has gone forever. Perhaps this war came
-opportunely to break our precipitate rush toward materialism, and the
-thing we were apparently losing, the old enthusiasm for higher things,
-the greater leisure for self-examination and self-communion, may come
-again in the day of peace.
-
-“There is always,” says Woodberry, “an ideality of the human spirit”
-visible in all the works of democracy, and we need to be reminded
-of this frequently, for here in the heart of America it is of grave
-importance that we remain open-minded and open-hearted to that
-continuing idealism which must be the strength and stay of the nation.
-
-Culture, as we commonly use the term, may properly be allowed to
-pass as merely another aspect of the idealism “deep in the general
-heart of man” that we should like to believe to be one of the great
-assets of the West. Still addressing the Folks, my neighbors, I will
-temerariously repeat an admission tucked into an earlier chapter,
-that here is a field where we do well to carry ourselves modestly.
-There was an impression common in my youth that culture of the highest
-order was not only possible in the West but that we Westerners were
-peculiarly accessible to its benignant influences and very likely to
-become its special guardians and apostles. Those were times when life
-was less complex, when the spirituality stirred by the Civil War was
-still very perceptible, when our enthusiasms were less insistently
-presented in statistics of crops and manufactures. We children of those
-times were encouraged to keep Emerson close at hand, for his purifying
-and elevating influence, and in a college town which I remember very
-well the professor of Greek was a venerated person and took precedence
-in any company over the athletic director.
-
-In those days, that seem now so remote, it was quite respectable to
-speak of the humanities, and people did so without self-consciousness.
-But culture, the culture of the humanities, never gained that foothold
-in the West that had been predicted for it. That there are few signs
-of its permanent establishment anywhere does not conceal our failure
-either to implant it or to find for it any very worthy substitute. We
-have valiantly invested millions of dollars in education and other
-millions in art museums and in libraries without any resulting
-diffusion of what we used to be pleased to call culture. We dismiss
-the whole business quite characteristically by pointing with pride to
-handsome buildings and generous endowments in much the same spirit that
-we call attention to a new automobile factory. There are always the
-few who profit by these investments; but it is not for the few that we
-design them; it is for the illumination of the great mass that we spend
-our treasure upon them. The doctrine of the few is the old doctrine of
-“numbers” and “the remnant,” and even at the cost of reconstructing
-human nature we promised to show the world that a great body of people
-in free American States could be made sensitive and responsive to
-beauty in all its forms. The humanities still struggle manfully, but
-without making any great headway against adverse currents. The State
-universities offer an infinite variety of courses in literature and the
-fine arts, and they are served by capable and zealous instructors, but
-with no resulting progress against the tide of materialism. “Culture,”
-as a friend of mine puts it, “is on the blink.” We hear reassuring
-reports of the State technical schools where the humanities receive
-a niggardly minimum of attention, and these institutions demand our
-heartiest admiration for the splendid work they are doing. But
-our development is lamentably one-sided; we have merely groups of
-cultivated people, just as older civilizations had them, not the great
-communities animated by ideals of nobility and beauty that we were
-promised.
-
-In the many matters which we of the West shall be obliged to consider
-with reference to the nation and the rest of the world as soon as
-_Kultur_ and its insolent presumptions have been disposed of, culture,
-in its ancient and honorable sense, is quite likely to make a poor
-fight for attention. And yet here are things, already falling into
-neglect, which we shall do well to scan once and yet again before
-parting company with them forever. There are balances as between
-materialism and idealism which it is desirable to maintain if the
-fineness and vigor of democracy and its higher inspirational values
-are to be further developed. Our Middle Western idealism has been
-expending itself in channels of social and political betterment, and it
-remains to be seen whether we shall be able to divert some part of its
-energy to the history, the literature, and the art of the past, not for
-cultural reasons merely but as part of our combat with provincialism
-and the creation of a broad and informed American spirit.
-
-“Having in mind things true, things elevated, things just, things pure,
-things amiable, things of good report--having these in mind, studying
-and loving these, is what saves States,” wrote Matthew Arnold thirty
-years ago. In the elaboration of a programme for the future of America
-that shall not ignore what is here connoted there is presented to
-the Middle West abundant material for new enthusiasms and endeavors,
-commensurate with its opportunities and obligations not merely as the
-Valley of Democracy but as the Valley of Decision.
-
-
-THE END.
-
-
-
-
-FOOTNOTES:
-
-
-[A] The matter has been disposed of by the adoption of a prohibition
-amendment to the Federal Constitution.
-
-[B] Kenneth Victor Elliott, of Sheridan, Indiana. He died in battle,
-giving his youth and his high hope of life for the America he loved
-with a passionate devotion.
-
-[C] Now the Assistant Secretary of Agriculture.
-
-[D] Mr. Thompson was re-elected April 1, 1919, by a plurality of 17,600.
-
-[E] Colonel Roosevelt died January 6, 1919.
-
-
-
-
-TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
-
-
-  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
-
-  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
-
-  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.
-
-  Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.
-
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