CHAPTER XXVIIIIN CLEVELAND
The next morning we set off under grey, lowery clouds, over the shore road to Cleveland, which proved better than that between Erie and Painesville, having no breaks and being as smooth as a table. At one place we had to stop in an oatfield where the grain had been newly cut and shocked, to see if we could still jump over the shocks as in days of yore, this being a true test, according to Speed, as to whether one was in a fit condition to live eighty years, and also whether one had ever been a true farmer. Franklin and Speed leaped over the shocks with ease, Franklin’s coat skirts flying out behind in a most bird-like manner, and Speed’s legs and arms taking most peculiar angles. When it came my turn to do it, I funked miserably. Actually, I failed so badly that I felt very much distressed, being haunted for miles by the thought of increasing age and impending death, for once I was fairly athletic and could run three miles at a steady jog and not feel it. But now—well now, whenever I reached the jumping point I couldn’t make it. My feet refused to leave the ground. I felt heavy.
Alas! Alas!
And then we had to pause and look at the lake, which because of the storm the night before and the stiff northwest wind blowing this morning, offered a fine tumbling spectacle. As to dignity and impressiveness I could see no difference between this lake shore and most of the best sea beaches which I have seen elsewhere. The waves were long and dark and foamy, rolling in, from a long distance out, with a thump and a roar which was as fierce as that of any sea. The beach was of smooth, grey sand, with occasional piles of driftwood scattered alongits length, and twisted and tortured trees hanging over the banks of the highland above. In the distance we could see the faint outlines of the city of Cleveland, a penciled blur, and over it a cloud of dark smoke, the customary banner of our manufacturing world. I decided that here would be a delightful place to set up a writing shack or a studio, transferring all my effects from my various other dream homes, and spending my latter days. I should have been a carpenter and builder, I think. It would save me money constructing houses for myself.
In the suburbs of Cleveland were being built the many comfortable homes of those who could afford this handsome land facing the lake. Hundreds of cottages we passed were done in the newer moods of our American architects, and some of them were quite free of the horrible banalities to which the American country architect seems addicted. There were homes of real taste, with gardens arranged with a sense of their architectural value and trees and shrubs which enhanced their beauty. Here, as I could tell by my nerves, all the ethical and social conventions of the middle class American and the middle West were being practised, or at least preached. Right was as plain as the nose on your face; truth as definite a thing as the box hedges and macadam roads which surrounded them; virtue a chill and even frozen maid. If I had had the implements I would have tacked up a sign reading “Non-conformists beware! Detour south through factory regions.”
Where I learn that I am not to Live Eighty YearsWHERE I LEARN THAT I AM NOT TO LIVE EIGHTY YEARS
WHERE I LEARN THAT I AM NOT TO LIVE EIGHTY YEARS
WHERE I LEARN THAT I AM NOT TO LIVE EIGHTY YEARS
As we drew nearer Cleveland, this same atmosphere continued, only becoming more dense. Houses, instead of being five hundred feet apart and set in impressive and exclusive spaces, were one hundred feet apart or less. They were smartly suburban and ultra-respectable and refined. The most imposing of churches began to appear—I never saw finer—and schools and heavily tree-shaded streets. Presently we ran into Euclid Avenue, an amazingly long and wide street, once Cleveland’s pride and the centre of all her wealthy and fashionable life,but now threaded by a new double tracked trolley line and fallen on lesser, if not absolutely evil, days. This street was once the home, and still may be for all I know (his immortal residence was pointed out to us by a policeman), of the sacrosanct John D. Rockefeller. Yes, in his earlier and poorer years, when he was worth only from seventy to eighty millions, he lived here, and the house seemed to me, as I looked at it this morning, actually to reflect all the stodgy conservatism with which he is credited. It was not smart—what rich American’s house of forty or fifty years ago ever is?—but it was solid and impressive and cold. Yes, cold is the word,—a large, roomy, silent thing of grey stone, with a wide smooth lawn at least a hundred feet wide spreading before it, and houses of its same character flanking it on either hand. Here lived John D. and plotted, no doubt, and from here he issued to those local religious meetings and church socials for which he is so famous. And no doubt some one or more of the heavy chambers of this house consumed in their spaciousness the soft, smooth words which meant wealth or poverty to many an oil man or competitor or railroad manipulator whose rates were subsequently undermined. For John D. knew how to outplot the best of them. As an American I forgive him for outplotting the rest of the world. As an individual, well, if he weren’t intellectually and artistically so dull I could forgive him everything.
“What is this?” I queried of Franklin. “Surely Euclid Avenue isn’t being given over to trade, is it? See that drug store there, built in front of an old home—and that garage tacked on to that mansion—impossible!”
But so it was. These great old mansions set back in their tremendous spaces of lawn were seeing the very last of their former glory. The business heart of the city was apparently overtaking them, and these car tracks were so new I was uncertain whether they were being put down or taken up.
I hailed a policeman.
“Are these tracks being removed or put in?”
“Put in,” he replied. “They’ve just finished a long fight here. The rich people didn’t want it, but the people won. Tom Johnson began fighting for this years ago.”
Tom Johnson! What an odd sense of the passing of all things the name gave me. Between 1895 and 1910 his name was on nearly everyone’s tongue. How he was hated by the growing rich! In the face of the upspringing horde of financial buccaneers of that time—Hanna, Rockefeller, Morgan, Harriman, Ryan—he stood out as a kind of tribune of the people. He had made money in business, and by much the same methods as every other man, taking and keeping, but now he declared himself desirous of seeing something done for the people—of doing something—and so he fought for three cent fares in Cleveland, to be extended, afterwards, everywhere, I suppose.
Don’t smile, dear reader. I know it sounds like a joke. In the face of the steady settling of all powers and privileges in America in the hands of a powerful oligarchy, the richest and most glittering the world has ever seen, the feeble dreamings of an idealist, and a but slightly equipped one at that, are foolish; but then, there is something poetic about it, just the same, quite as there is about all the other poets and dreamers the world has ever known. We always want to help the mass, we idealists, ’at first. We look about and see human beings like ourselves, struggling, complaining, dying, pinching along with little or nothing, and our first thought is that some one human being or some group of beings is responsible, that nature has designed all to have plenty, and that all we have to do is to clear away the greed of a few individuals who stand between man and nature, and presto, all is well again. I used to feel that way and do yet, at times. I should hate to think it was all over with America and its lovely morning dreams.
And it’s fine poetry, whether it will work or not. It fits in with the ideas of all prophets and reformers since the world began. Think of Henry George, that lovely soul, dying in New York in a cheap hotel, fighting thebattle of a labor party—he, the dreamer of “Progress and Poverty.” And Doctor (The Reverend Father) McGlynn, declaring that some day we would have an American Pope strolling down Broadway under a silk hat and being thoroughly social and helpful and democratic; and then being excommunicated from the church for it or silenced—which was it? And W. J. Bryan, with his long hair and his perfect voice (that moving, bell-like voice), wishing to solve all the ills of man by sixteen to one—the double standard of gold and silver; and John P. Altgeld, high, clear, dreamy soul, with his blue eyes and his sympathy for the betrayed anarchists and the poor; and “Potato” Pingree, as they used to call him, once governor of Michigan, who wanted all idle land in Detroit and elsewhere turned over to the deserving poor in order that they might grow potatoes or something else on it. And Henry Ford with his “peace ship” and his minimum of five dollars a day for every man, and Hart, Schaffner and Marx with their minimum of two dollars for every little seamstress and poorest floor washer. What does it all mean?
I’ll tell you.
It means a sense of equilibrium, or the disturbance of it. Contrasts remain forever,—vast differences in brain, in heart, in opportunity, in everything; but now and then when the contrasts become too sharp or are too closely juxtaposed, up rises some tender spirit—Isaiah, or Jeremiah, or Christ, or St. Francis, or John Huss, or Savanarola, or Robert Owen, or John Brown, or Abraham Lincoln, or William Lloyd Garrison, or Walt Whitman, or Lloyd George, or Henry Ford, or John P. Altgeld, or W. J. Bryan—and begins to cry “Ho! Assyrian” or its equivalent. It is wonderful. It is positively beautiful and thrilling, this love of balance and “fair play” in nature. These men are not always thinking of themselves, you may depend on it. It is inherent in the scheme of things, just as are high mountains and deep valleys, but oh, those who have the sense of it—those dreamers and poets and seekers after the ideal!
“They can kill my body but not what I stand for.”—John Brown.“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”—Christ.“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.”—St. Paul.“Oh, poorest Jesus, the grace I beg of Thee is to bestow on me the grace of the highest poverty.”—St. Francis.“I with my barbaric yawp, yawping over the roofs of the world.”—Walt Whitman.
“They can kill my body but not what I stand for.”—John Brown.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”—Christ.
“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.”—St. Paul.
“Oh, poorest Jesus, the grace I beg of Thee is to bestow on me the grace of the highest poverty.”—St. Francis.
“I with my barbaric yawp, yawping over the roofs of the world.”—Walt Whitman.
Are things to be made right by law? I will admit that some wide and sweeping differences can be eliminated. Tyrants can occasionally be pulled down and humanitarians elevated for the time being. Yes, yes. A rough equation can be struck always, and it is something of that of which these men were dreaming. But even so, in the face of all the physical, temperamental, spiritual, intellectual, to say nothing of climatic and planetary differences, what matter? Will law save an idiot or undo a Shelley or a Caesar? Will law pull down the sun and set the moon in its place? My masters, we can only sympathize at times where we cannot possibly act,—and we can act and aid where we cannot cure. But of a universal panacea there is only a dream—or so I feel. Yet it is because we can and do dream—and must, at times—and because of our dreams and the fact that they must so often be shattered, that we have art and the joy of this thing called Life. Without contrast there is no life. And without dreams there might not be any alteration in these too sharp contrasts. But where would our dreams be, I ask you—or the need of them—if all of that of which we are compelled to dream and seek in an agony of sweat and despair were present and we did not need to dream? Then what?
But let us away with abstrusities. Let us sing over Life as it is. These tall, poetic souls—are they not beautiful? And would you not have it so that they may appear?
In riding up this same street I was on familiar ground,for here, twentytwo years before, in that same raw spring which took me to Buffalo, I stopped, looking for work—and found some, of sorts. I connected myself for a very little while (a week or two) with the Sunday issue of thePlain Dealerand did a few specials, trying to prove to the incumbent of the high office of Sunday editor that I was a remarkable man. He did not see it—or me. He commented once that my work was too lofty in tone, that I loved to rhapsodize too much. I know he was right. Nevertheless, the second city afterwards (Pittsburg), like the others from which I had just come (Toledo, St. Louis, and Chicago), liked me passing well. But my ambition did not run to a permanent position in Cleveland anyhow.
Just the same, and what was of interest to me this morning as I rode into Cleveland, was that here, after a most wonderful ramble east from St. Louis, I had arrived, quite as in Buffalo, spiritually very hungry and lorn. As I look back on it now I know that I must have been a very peculiar youth, for nothing I could find or do contented me for so much as an hour. I had achieved a considerable newspaper success in St. Louis, but had dropped it as being meaningless; and because of a silly dream about running a country newspaper (which I shall narrate later) in a town called Grand Rapids, Ohio, I had a chance to take over said country paper, but when I looked it over and pictured to myself what the local life would be, I fled in horror. In Toledo I encountered a poet and an enthusiast, a youth destined to prove one of the most helpful influences in my whole career, with whom I enjoyed a period of intense mental cerebration, yet him I left also, partly because I lacked money and an interesting future there, but more because I felt restless and wanted to see more of the world.
One of my principal trials at this time was that I was in love and had left the object of my adoration behind me, and was not sure that I would ever earn enough money to go and fetch her,—so uncertain were my talents and my opportunities in my own eyes.
And like Buffalo, which came after Cleveland in my experience, this city seemed dirty and raw and black, but forceful. America was in the furnace stage of its existence. Everything was in the making,—fortunes, art, its social and commercial life, everything. The most astonishing thing in it was its rich men, their houses, factories, institutions of commerce and pleasure. Nothing else had occurred. There was nothing to see but business and a few hotels,—one, really—and theatres. I remember looking at a great soldiers' monument (it is still here in the principal square) and wondering why so large a monument. I do not recall that any man of Cleveland particularly distinguished himself in the Civil War.
But the one thing that struck me as of greatest import in those days was Euclid Avenue with its large houses and lawns which are now so close to the business heart, and its rich men, John D. Rockefeller and Mark Hanna and Henry M. Flagler and Tom Johnson. Rockefeller had just given millions and millions to revivify the almost defunct University of Chicago, then a small Baptist College, to say nothing of being hailed (newly then) as the richest man in America. All of these people were living here in Euclid Avenue, and I looked up their houses and all the other places of interest, envying the rich and wishing that I was famous or a member of a wealthy family, and that I might meet some one of the beautiful girls I imagined I saw here and have her fall in love with me.
Tra, la! Tra, la! There’s nothing like being a passionate, romantic dunce if you want to taste this wine of wizardry which is life. I was and I did....