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Title: The Valley of Democracy

Author: Meredith Nicholson

Illustrator: Walter Tittle

Release Date: March 23, 2021 [eBook #64910]

Language: English

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*** 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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