THE VALLEY OF DEMOCRACY

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

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

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

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.

“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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

The Perry monument at Put-in Bay.
A huge column of concrete erected in commemoration
of Commodore Perry’s victory.

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!

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.

A typical old homestead of the Middle West.
The farm on which Tecumseh was born.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Chicago is the big brother of all lesser towns.

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.

“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.

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.