The planters cease their workThe planters cease their work
The old Christmas traditions are likewise kept up.On Christmas day the negroes come flocking up to the house for their gifts. Their first concern is to attempt to cry "Christmas gift!" to others, before it can be said to them—for according to ancient custom the one who says the words first must have a gift from the other.
An observer approaching a strange city should be "neutral even in thought." He may listen to what is said of the city, but he must not permit his opinions to take form in advance; for, like other gossip, gossip about cities is unreliable, and the casual stranger's estimate of cities is not always founded upon broad appreciations. But though it is unwise to judge of cities by what is said of them, it is perhaps worth remarking that one may often judge of men by what they say of cities.
I remember an American manufacturer, broken down by overwork, who, when he looked at Pompeii, could think only of the wasted possibilities of Vesuvius as a power plant, and I remember two traveling salesmen on a southern railroad train who expressed scorn for the exquisite city of Charleston because—they said—it is but a poor market place for suspenders and barbers' supplies. There are those who think of Boston only as headquarters of the shoe trade, others who think of it only in the terms of culture, and still others who regard it solely as an abode of negrophiles.
In the case of the chief city of Alabama, however, my companion and I noticed, as we journeyed through theSouth, that reports were singularly in accord. Birmingham is too young to have any Civil War history. Her history is the history of the steel industry in the South, and one hears always of that: of the affluence of the city when the industry is thriving, and hard times when it is not. One is invariably told that Birmingham is not a southern city, but a northern city in the South, and the chief glories of the place, aside from steel, are (if one is to believe rumors current upon railroad trains and elsewhere), a twenty-seven story building, Senator Oscar Underwood, the distinguished Democratic leader, and the Tutwiler Hotel. Even in Atlanta it is conceded that the Tutwiler is a good hotel, and when Atlanta admits that anything in Birmingham is good it may be considered as established that the thing is very, very good—for Birmingham and Atlanta view each other with the same degree of cordiality as is exchanged between St. Louis and Kansas City, Minneapolis and St. Paul, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Having been, in the course of our southern wanderings, in several very bad hotels, and having heard the Tutwiler compared with Chicago's Blackstone, my companion and I held eager anticipation of this hostelry. Nor were our hopes dashed by a first glimpse of the city on the night of our arrival. It was a modern-looking city—just the sort of city that would have a fine new hotel. The railroad station through which we passed after leaving the train was not the usual dingy little southern station, but an admirable building, and thestreets along which we presently found ourselves gliding in an automobile hack, were wide, smooth, and brightly illuminated by clustered boulevard lights.
True, we had long since learned not to place too much reliance upon the nocturnal aspects of cities. A city seen by night is like a woman dressed for a ball. Darkness drapes itself about her as a black-velvet evening gown, setting off, in place of neck and arms, the softly glowing façades of marble buildings; lights are her diamond ornaments, and her perfume is the cool fragrance of night air. Almost all cities, and almost all women, look their best at night, and there are those which, though beautiful by night, sink, in their daylight aspect, to utter mediocrity.
Presently our motor drew up before the entrance of the Tutwiler—a proud entrance, all revolving doors and glitter and promise. A brisk bell boy came running for our bags. The signs were of the best.
The lobby, though spacious, was crowded; the decorations and equipment were of that rich sumptuousness attained only in the latest and most magnificent American hotels; there was music, and as we made our way along we caught a glimpse, in passing, of an attractive supper room, with small table-lights casting their soft radiance upon white shirt fronts and the faces of pretty girls. In all it was a place to make glad the heart of the weary traveler, and to cause him to wonder whether his dress suit would be wrinkled when he took it from his trunk.
Behind the imposing marble "desk" stood several impeccable clerks, and to one of these I addressed myself, giving our names and mentioning the fact that we had telegraphed for rooms. I am not sure that this young man wore a braided cutaway and a white carnation; I only know that he affected me as hotel clerks in braided cutaways and white carnations always do. While I spoke he stood a little way back from the counter, his chin up, his gaze barely missing the top of my hat, his nostrils seeming to contract with that expression of dubiousness assumed by delicate noses which sense, long before they encounter it, the aroma of unworthiness.
"Not a room in the house," he said. Then, as though to forestall further parley, he turned and spoke with gracious lightness to one of his own rank and occupation who, at the request of my companion, was ascertaining whether letters were awaiting us.
"But we telegraphed two days ago!" I protested desperately.
"Can't help it. Hardware Convention. Everything taken."
Over my shoulder I heard from my companion a sound, half sigh, half groan, which echoed the cry of my own heart.
"I felt this coming!" he murmured. "Didn't you notice all these people with ribbons on them? There's never any room in a hotel where everybody's wearing ribbons. It's like a horse show. They get the ribbons and we get the gate."
"Surely," I faltered, "you can let us have one small room?"
"Impossible," he answered brightly. "We've turned away dozens of people this evening."
"Then," I said, abandoning hope, "perhaps you will suggest some other hotel?"
I once heard a woman, the most perfect parvenu I ever met, speak of her poor relations in a tone exactly similar to that in which the clerk now spoke the names of two hotels. Having spoken, he turned and passed behind the partition at one end of the marble counter.
My companion and I stood there for a moment looking despondently at each other. Then, without a word, we retreated through that gorgeous lobby, feeling like sad remnants of a defeated Yankee army.
Again we motored through the bright streets, but only to successive disappointments, for both hotels mentioned by the austere clerk were "turning 'em away." Our chauffeur now came to our aid, mentioning several small hotels, and in one of these, the Granada, we were at last so fortunate as to find lodgings.
"It begun to look like you'd have to put up at the Roden," the chauffeur smiled as we took our bags out of the car and settled with him.
"The Roden?"
"Yes," he returned "Best ventilated hotel in the United States."
Next day when the Hotel Roden was pointed out to us we appreciated the witticism, for the Roden is—orwas at the time of our visit—merely the steel skeleton of a building which, we were informed, had for some years stood unfinished owing to disagreements among those concerned with its construction.
As for the Granada, though a modest place, it was new and clean; the clerk was amiable, the beds comfortable, and if our rooms were too small to admit our trunks, they were, at all events, outside rooms, each with a private bath, at a rate of $1 per day apiece. Never in any hotel have I felt that I was getting so much for my money.
Next morning, after breakfast, we set out to see the city. Having repeatedly heard of Birmingham as the "Pittsburgh of the South," we expected cold daylight to reveal the sooty signs of her industrialism, but in this we were agreeably disappointed. By day as well as by night the city is pleasing to the eye, and it is a fact worth noting that the downtown buildings of Atlanta (which is not an industrial city) are streaked and dirty, whereas those of Birmingham are clean—the reason for this being that the mills and furnaces of Birmingham are far removed from the heart of the town, whereas locomotives belch black smoke into the very center of Atlanta's business and shopping district.
Moreover, the metropolis of Alabama is better laid out than that of Georgia. The streets of Birmingham are wide, and the business part of the city, lying upon a flat terrain, is divided into large, even squares. From this district the chief residence section mounts by easy,graceful grades into the hills to the southward. Because of these grades, and the curving drives which follow the contours of the hills, and the vistas of the lower city, and the good modern houses, and the lawns and trees and shrubbery and breezes, this Highlands region is reminiscent of a similar residence district in Portland, Oregon—which is to say that it is one of the most agreeable districts of the kind in the United States.
Well up on the hillside, Highland Avenue winds a charming course between pleasant homes, with here and there a little residence park branching off to one side, and here and there a small municipal park occupying an angle formed by a sharp turn in the driveway; and if you follow the street far enough you will presently see the house of the Birmingham Country Club, standing upon its green hilltop, amidst rolling, partly wooded golf links, above the road.
Nor is the Country Club at the summit of this range of hills. Back of it rise other roads, the most picturesque of them being Altamont Road, which runs to the top of Red Mountain, reaching a height about equivalent to that of the cornice line of Birmingham's tallest building. The houses of this region are built on streets which, like some streets of Portland, are terraced into the hillside, and the resident of an upper block can almost look down the chimneys of his neighbors on the block below. The view commanded from these mountain perches does not suggest that the lower city runs up into the Highlands. It seems to be a separateplace, down in a distant valley, and the sense of its remoteness is heightened by the thin veil of gray smoke which wafts from the tall smokestacks of far-off iron furnaces, softening the serrated outlines of the city and wrapping its tall buildings in the industrial equivalent for autumn haze.
Birmingham—The thin veil of smoke from far-off iron furnaces softens the city's serrated outlinesBirmingham—The thin veil of smoke from far-off iron furnaces softens the city's serrated outlines
At night the scene from the Highlands is even more spectacular, for at brief intervals the blowing of a converter in some distant steel plant illuminates the heavens with a great hot glow, like that which rises and falls about the crater of a volcano in eruption. Thus the city's vast affairs are kept before it by day in a pillar of cloud, and by night in a pillar of fire. Iron and steel dominate Birmingham's mind, activities and life. The very ground of Red Mountain is red because of the iron ore that it contains, and those who reside upon the charming slopes of this hill do not own their land in fee simple, but subject always to the mineral rights of mining companies.
The only other industry of Birmingham which is to be compared, in magnitude or efficiency, with the steel industry is that of "cutting in" at dances. All through the South it is carried on, but whereas in such cities as Memphis, New Orleans and Atlanta, men show a little mercy to the stranger—realizing that, as he is presumably unacquainted with all the ladies at a dance, he cannot retaliate in kind—Birmingham is merciless and prosecutes the pestilential practice unremittingly, even going so far as to apply the universal-service principleand call out her highschool youths to carry on the work. Before I went to certain dances in Birmingham I felt that high-school boys ought to be kept at home at night, but after attending these dances I realized that such restriction was altogether inadequate, and that the only way to deal with them effectively would be to pickle them in vitriol.
Birmingham practices unremittingly the pestilential habit of "cutting in" at dancesBirmingham practices unremittingly the pestilential habit of "cutting in" at dances
Where, in other cities of the South, I have managed to dance as much as half a dance without interruption, I never danced more than twenty feet with one partner in Birmingham. Nor did my companion.
Our host was energetic in presenting us to ladies of infinite pulchritude and State-wide terpsichorean reputation, but we would start to tread a measure with them, only to have them swiftly snatched from us by some spindle-necked, long-wristed, big-boned, bowl-eared high-school youth, in a dinner suit which used to fit him when it was new, six months ago.
As we would start to dance the lady would say:
"You-all ah strangehs, ahn't you?"
We would reply that we were.
"Wheh do you come from?"
"New York."
Then, because the Hardware Convention was being held in town at the time, she would continue:
"Ah reckon you-all ah hahdware men?"
But that was as far as the conversation ever got. Just about the time that she began to reckon we were hardware men a mandatory hand would be laid upon us,and before we had time to defend ourselves against the hardware charge, the lady would be wafted off in the arms of some predatory youth who ought to have been at home consideringpons asinorum.
Had we indeed been hardware men, and had we had our hardware with us, they could have done with fewer teachers in the high schools of that city after the night of our first dance in Birmingham.
Up in the hills, some miles back of the Country Club, on the banks of a large artificial lake, stands the new clubhouse of the Birmingham Motor and Country Club, and around the lake runs the club's two-and-a-half-mile speedway. Elsewhere is the Roebuck Golf Club, the links of which are admitted ("even in Atlanta!") to be excellent—the one possible objection to the course of the Birmingham Country Club being that it is suited only to play with irons.
I mention these golfing matters not because they interest me, but because they may interest you. I am not a golfer. I played the game for two seasons; then I decided to try to lead a better life. The first time I played I did quite well, but thence onward my game declined until, toward the last, crowds would collect to hear me play. When I determined to abandon the game I did not burn my clubs or break them up, according to the usual custom, but instead gave them to a man upon whom I wished to retaliate because his dog had bitten a member of my family.
Small wonder that all golf clubs have extensive bars! It is not hard to understand why men who realize that they have become incurable victims of the insidious habit of golf should wish to drown the thought in drink. But in Birmingham they can't do it—not, at least, at bars. Alabama has beaten her public bars into soda fountains and quick-lunch rooms, and though her club bars still look like real ones, the drinks served are so soft that no splash occurs when reminiscent tears drop into them.
When we were in Alabama each citizen who so desired was allowed by law to import from outside the State a small allotment of strong drink for personal use, but the red tape involved in this procedure had already discouraged all but the most ardent drinkers, and those found it next to impossible, even by hoarding their "lonesome quarts," and pooling supplies with their convivial friends, to provide sufficient alcoholic drink for a "real party."
We met in Birmingham but one gentleman whose cellars seemed to be well stocked, and the tales of ingenuity and exertion by which he managed to secure ample supplies of liquor were such as to lead us to believe that this matter had become, with him, an occupation to which all other business must give second place.
It was this gentleman who told us that, since the State went dry, the ancient form, "R. S. V. P.," on social invitations, had been revised to "B. W. H. P.," signifying, "bring whisky in hip pocket."
To the "B. W. H. P." habit he himself strictly adhered. One night, when we chanced to meet him in a downtown club, he drew a flask from a hip pocket, and invited us to "have something."
"What is it?" asked my companion.
"Scotch."
When my companion had helped himself he passed the flask to me, but I returned it to the owner, explaining that I did not drink Scotch whisky.
"What do you drink?" he asked.
"Bourbon."
"Here it is," he returned, drawing a second flask from the other hip pocket.
How well, too, do I remember the long, delightful evening upon which my companion and I sat in an Atlanta club with a group of the older members, the week before Georgia went bone dry. There, as in Alabama before 1915, there had been pretended prohibition, but now the bars of leading clubs were being closed, and convivial men were looking into the future with despair. One of the gentlemen was a justice of the Supreme Court of the State, and I remember his wistful declaration that prohibition would fall hardest upon the older men.
"When a man is young," he said, "he can be lively and enjoy himself without drinking, because he is full of animal spirits. But we older men aren't bubbling over with liveliness. We can't dance, or don't want to, and we lack the stimulus which comes of falling continually in love. My great pleasure is to sit of an evening, hereat a table in the café of this club, conversing with my friends. That is where prohibition is going to hurt me. I shall not see my old friends any more."
The others protested at this somber view, but the judge gravely shook his head, saying: "You don't believe me, but I know whereof I speak, for I have been through something like this, in a minor way, before. A good many years ago I was one of a little group of congenial men to organize a small club. We had comfortable quarters, and we used to drop in at night, much as we have been doing of late years here, and have the kind of talks that are tonic to the soul. Of course we had liquor in the club, but there came a time when, for some reason or other—I think it was some trouble over a license—we closed our bar. We didn't think it was going to make a great difference, but it did. The men began to stop coming in, and before long the club ceased to exist.
"It won't be like that here. This club will go on. But we won't come here. We won't want to sit around a table, like this, and drink ginger ale and sarsaparilla; and even if we do, the talk won't be so good. The thing that makes me downcast is not that liquor is going, but that we are really parting this week.
"Every one knows that the abuse of drink does harm in the world, but these pious prohibitionists are not of the temperament to understand how alcohol ministers to the esthetic side of certain natures. It gives us better companions and makes us better companions for others. Itstimulates our minds, enhances our appreciations, sharpens our wit, loosens our tongues, and saves brilliant conversation from becoming a lost art."
My sympathies went out to the judge. It has always seemed to me a pity that the liquor question has resolved itself into a fight between extremists—for I think the wine and beer people might survive if they were not tied up with the distillers, and I do not believe that any considerable evil comes of drinking wine or beer.
Nevertheless it must be apparent to every one who troubles to investigate, that prohibition invariably works great good wherever it is made effective. Take, for example, Birmingham.
There was one year—I believe it was 1912—when there was an average of more than one murder a day, for every working day in the year, in the county in which Birmingham is located. On one famous Saturday night there were nineteen felonious assaults (sixteen by negroes and three by whites), from which about a dozen deaths resulted, two of those killed having been policemen.
All this has changed with prohibition. Killings are now comparatively rare, arrests have diminished to less than a third of the former average, whether for grave or petty offenses, and the receiving jail, which was formerly packed like a pigpen every Saturday night, now stands almost empty, while the city jail, which used continually to house from 120 to 150 offenders, has diminished its average population to 30 or 35.
The fact that a man may shut off his motor and coast downhill from his home to his office in the lower part of Birmingham, is not without symbolism. Birmingham is all business. If I were to personify the place, it would be in the likeness of a man I know—a big, powerful fellow with an honest blue eye and an expression in which self-confidence, ambition, and power are blended. Like Birmingham, this man is a little more than forty years of age. Like Birmingham, he has built up a large business of his own. And, like Birmingham, he is a little bit naïve in his pride of success. His life is divided between his office and his home, and it would be difficult to say for which his devotion is the greater. He talks business with his wife at breakfast and dinner, and on their Sunday walks. He brings his papers home at night and goes over them with her, for, though her specialty is bringing up the children, she is deeply interested in his business and often makes suggestions which he follows. This causes him to admire her intensely, which he would not necessarily do were she merely a good wife and mother.
He has no hobbies or pastimes. True, he plays golf, but with him golf is not a diversion. He plays because he finds the exercise increases his efficiency ("efficiency" is perhaps his favorite word), and because many of his commercial associates are golfers, and he can talk business with them on the links.
His house is pleasant and stands upon a good-sized city lot. It is filled with very shiny mahogany furniture and strong-colored portières and sofa cushions. It is rather more of a house than he requires, for his tastes are simple, but he has a feeling that he ought to have a large house, for the same reason that he and his wife ought to dress expensively—that is, out of respect, as it were, to his business.
One of his chief treasures is an automatic piano, upon which he rolls off selections from Wagner's operas. He likes the music of the great German because, as he has often told me, it stirs his imagination, thereby helping him to solve business problems and make business plans.
The thing he most abhors is general conversation, and he is never so amusing—so pathetically and unconsciously amusing—as when trying to take part in general conversation and at the same time to conceal the writhings of his tortured spirit. There is but one thing which will drive him to attempt the feat, and that is the necessity of making himself agreeable to some man, or the wife of some man, from whom he wishes to get business.
The census of 1910 gave Birmingham a population of 132,000, and it is estimated that since that time the population has increased by 50,000. Birmingham not only knows that it is growing, but believes in trying to make ready in advance for future growth. It gives one the impression that it is rather ahead of its housing problems than behind them. Its area, for instance, is about as great as that of Boston or Cleveland, and its hotels may be compared with the hotels of those cities. If it has not so many clubs as Atlanta, it has, at least, all the clubs it needs; and if it has not so many skyscrapers as New York, it has several which would fit nicely into the Wall Street district. Moreover, the tall buildings of Birmingham lose nothing in height by contrast with the older buildings, three or four stories high, which surround them, giving the business district something of that look which hangs about a boy who has outgrown his clothing. Nor are the vehicles and street crowds, altogether in consonance, as yet, with the fine office buildings of the city, for many of the motors standing at the curb have about them that gray, rural look which comes of much mud and infrequent washing, and the idlers who lean against the rich façades of granite and marble are entirely out of the picture, for they look precisely like the idlers who lean against the wooden posts of country railroad station platforms.
Such curious contrasts as these may be noted everywhere. For instance, Birmingham has been so busy paving the streets that it seems quite to have forgottento put up street signs. Also, not far from the majestic Tutwiler Hotel, and the imposing apartment building called the Ridgely, the front of which occupies a full block, is a park so ill kept that it would be a disgrace to the city but for the obvious fact that the city is growing and wide-awake, and will, of course, attend to the park when it can find the time. Here are, I believe, the only public monuments Birmingham contains. One is a Confederate monument in the form of an obelisk, and the other two are statues erected in memory of Mary A. Cahalan, for many years principal of the Powell School, and of William Elias B. Davis, a distinguished surgeon. Workers in these fields are too seldom honored in this way, and the spirit which prompted the erection of these monuments is particularly creditable; sad to say, however, both effigies are wretchedly placed and are in themselves exceedingly poor things. Art is something, indeed, about which Birmingham has much to learn. So far as I could discover, no such thing as an art museum has been contemplated. But here again the critic should remember that, whereas art is old, Birmingham is young. She is as yet in the stage of development at which cities think not of art museums, but of municipal auditoriums; and with the latter subject, at least, she is now concerning herself.
Even in the city's political life contrasts are not wanting, for though the town is Republican in sentiment, it proves itself southern by voting the Democratic ticket, and it is interesting to note further that the commissionby which it is governed had as one of its five members, when we were there, a Socialist.
Another curious and individual touch is contributed by the soda-fountain lunch rooms which abound in the city, and which, I judge, arrived with the disappearance of barroom lunch counters. In connection with many of the downtown soda fountains there are cooking arrangements, and business lunches are served.
The roads leading out of the city in various directions have many dangerous grade crossings, and accidents must be of common occurrence. At all events, I have never known a city in which cemeteries and undertaking establishments were so widely advertised. In the street cars, for instance, I observed the cheerful placards of one Wallace Johns, undertaker, who promises "all the attention you would expect from a friend," and I was informed that Mr. Johns possesses business cards (for restricted use only) bearing the gay legend: "I'll get you yet!"
As to schools the city is well off. Dr. J. H. Phillips, superintendent of public schools, has occupied his post probably as long as any school superintendent in the country. He organized the city school system in 1883, beginning with seven teachers, as against 750 now employed. The colored schools are reported to be better than in most southern cities.
Of the general status of the negro in Birmingham I cannot speak with authority. As in Atlanta, negroes are sometimes required to use separate elevators in office buildings, and, as everywhere south of Washington, the Birmingham street cars give one end to whites and the other to negroes. But whereas negroes use the back of the car in Atlanta, they use the front in Birmingham. It was attempted, at one time, to reverse this order, for reasons having to do with draft and ventilation, but the people of Birmingham had become accustomed to the existing arrangement and objected to the change. "After all," one gentleman said to me, in speaking of this matter, "it is not important which end of the car is given to the nigger. The main point is that he must sit where he is told."
The means by which the negro vote is eliminated in various Southern States are generally similar, though Alabama has, perhaps, been more thorough in the matter than some other States. The importance of this issue to the southern white man is very great, for if all negroes were allowed to vote the control of certain States would be in negro hands. To the Southerner such an idea is intolerable, and it is my confident belief that if the State of Alabama were resettled by men from Massachusetts, and the same problems were presented to those men, they would be just as quick as the white Alabamans of to-day to find means to suppress the negro vote. With all my heart I wish that such an exchange of citizens might temporarily be effected, for when the immigrants from Massachusetts moved back to their native New England, after an experience of the black belt, they would take with them an understanding of certain aspects of the negro problem which they have never understood; an understanding which, had they possessed it sixty or seventy years ago, might have brought about the freeing of slaves by government purchase—a course which Lincoln advocated and which would probably have prevented the Civil War, and thereby saved millions upon millions of money, to say nothing of countless lives. Had they even understood the problems of the South at the end of the Civil War, the horrors of Reconstruction might have been avoided, and I cannot too often reiterate that, but for Reconstruction we should not be perplexed, to-day, by the unhappy, soggy mass of political inertia known as the Solid South.
I asked a former State official how the negro vote had been eliminated in Alabama. "At first," he said, "we used to kill them to keep them from voting; when we got sick of doing that we began to steal their ballots; and when stealing their ballots got to troubling our consciences we decided to handle the matter legally, fixing it so they couldn't vote."
I inquired as to details. He explained.
It seems that in 1901 a constitutional convention was held, at which it was enacted that, in order to be eligible for life to vote, citizens must register during the next two years. There were, however, certain qualifications prescribed for registration. A man must be of good character, and must have fought in a war, or be the descendant of a person who had fought. Thisenactment, known as the "grandfather clause," went far toward the elimination of the negro. As an additional safeguard, however, an educational clause was added, but the educational requirement did not become effective at once, as that would have made illiterate whites ineligible as voters. Not until the latter were safely registered under the "grandfather clause," was the educational clause applied, and as, under this clause, the would-be voter must read and writeto the satisfaction of his examiner, the negro's chance to get suffrage was still more reduced.
The United States Supreme Court has, I believe, held that the educational clause does not constitute race discrimination.
As though the above measures were not sufficient, it is further required that, in order to vote at November elections in Alabama, voters must pay a small voluntary poll tax. This tax, however, must be paid each year before February first—that is, about nine months before elections actually take place. The negro has never been distinguished for his foresightedness with a dollar, and, to make matters harder for him, this tax is cumulative from the year 1901, so that a man who wishes to begin to vote this year, and can qualify in other respects, must pay a tax amounting to nearly twenty dollars.
These measures give Alabama, as my informant put it, a "very exclusive electorate." With a population of approximately two millions, the greatest number ofvotes ever cast by the State was 125,000. Of this number, 531 votes were those of negroes, "representing" a colored population of 840,000!
The gentleman who explained these matters also told me a story illustrative of the old-time Southerner's attitude toward the negro in politics.
During Reconstruction, when Alabama's Legislature was about one-third white and two-thirds negro, a fine old gentleman who had been a slaveholder and was an experienced parliamentarian, was attempting to preside over the Legislature. In this he experienced much difficulty, his greatestbête noirbeing a negro member, full of oratory, who continually interrupted other speakers.
Realizing that this was a part of the new order of things, the presiding officer tried not to allow his irritation to get the better of him, and to silence the objectionable man in parliamentary fashion. "The member will kindly come to order!" he repeated over and over, rapping with his gavel. "The member will kindly come to order!"
After this had gone on for some time without effect, the old gentleman's patience became exhausted. He laid down his gavel, arose to his feet, glared at the irrepressible member, and, shaking his finger savagely, shouted: "Sit down, you blankety-blank black blankety-blank!"
Whereupon the negro dropped instantly to his seat and was no more heard from.
To visit Birmingham without seeing an iron and steel plant would be like visiting Rome without seeing the Forum. Consequently my companion and I made application for permission to go through the Tennessee Coal, Iron, & Railroad Company's plant, at Ensley, on the outskirts of the city. When the permission was refused us we attacked from another angle—using influence—and were refused again. Next we called upon a high official of the company, and (as we had, of course, done in making our previous requests for admission to the plant) explained our errand.
Though this gentleman received us with the utmost courtesy, he declared that the company desired no publicity, and plainly indicated that he was not disposed to let us into the plant.
"I'll tell you what the trouble is," said my companion to me. "This company is a part of the United States Steel Corporation, and in the old muckraking days it was thoroughly raked. They think that we have come down here full of passionate feeling over the poor, downtrodden workingman and the great, greedy octopus."
"What makes you think that?"
"Well, we are a writer and an artist. Lots of writers and artists have made good livings by teaching magazine readers that it is dishonest for a corporation, or a corporation official, to prosper; that the way to integrity is through insolvency; that the word 'company' is a term of reproach, while 'corporation' is a foul epithet, and 'trust' blasphemy."
"What shall we do?"
"We must make it clear to these people," he said, "that we have no mission. We must satisfy them that we are not reformers—that we didn't come to dig out a red-hot story, but to see red-hot rails rolled out."
Pursuing this course, we were successful. All that any official of the company required of us was that we be open-minded. The position of the company, when we came to understand it, was simply that it did not wish to facilitate the work of men who came down with pencils, paper, and preconceived "views," deliberately to play the great American game of "swat the corporation."
Surely there is not in the world an industry which, for sheer pictorial magnificence, rivals the modern manufacturing of steel. In the first place, the scale of everything is inexpressibly stupendous. To speak of a row of six blast furnaces, with mouths a hundred feet above the ground, and chimneys rising perhaps another hundred feet above these mouths, is not, perhaps, impressive, but to look at such a row of furnaces, to seetheir fodder of ore, dolomite, and coke brought in by train loads; to see it fed to them by the "skip"; to hear them roar continually for more; to feel the savage heat generated within their bodies; to be told in shouts, above the din, something of what is going on inside these vast, voracious, savage monsters, and to see them dripping their white-hot blood when they are picked by a long steel bar in the hands of an atom of a man—this is to witness an almost terrifying allegory of mankind's achievement.
The gas generated by blast furnaces is used in part in the hot-blast stoves—gigantic tanks from which hot air, at very high pressure, is admitted to the furnaces themselves, and is also used to develop steam for the blowing engines and other auxiliaries. In the furnaces the molten iron, because of its greater specific gravity, settles to the bottom, while the slag floats to the top. The slag, by the way, is not, as I had supposed, altogether worthless, but is used for railroad ballast and in the manufacture of cement.
The molten iron drawn from the blast furnaces runs in glittering rivulets (which, at a distance of twenty or thirty feet, burn the face and the eyes), into ladle cars which are like a string of devils' soup bowls, mounted on railroad trucks ready to be hauled away by a locomotive and served at a banquet in hell.
That is not what happens to them, however. The locomotive takes them to another part of the plant, and their contents, still molten, is poured into the mixers.These are gigantic caldrons as high as houses, which stand in rows in an open-sided steel shed, and the chief purpose of them is to keep the "soup" hot until it is required for the converters—when it is again poured off into ladle cars and drawn away.
The converters are in still another part of the grounds. They are huge, pear-shaped retorts, resembling in their action those teakettles which hang on stands and are poured by being tilted. But a million teakettles could be lost in one converter, and the boiling water from a million teakettles, poured into a converter, would be as one single drop of ice water let fall into a red-hot stove.
In the converters the metalloids—silicon, manganese, and carbon—are burned out of the iron under a flaming heat which, by means of high air pressure, is brought to a temperature of about 3400 degrees. It is the blowing of these converters, and the occasional pouring of them, which throws the Vesuvian glow upon the skies of Birmingham at night. The heat they give off is beyond description. Several hundred feet away you feel it smiting viciously upon your face, and the concrete flooring of the huge shed in which they stand is so hot as to burn your feet through the soles of your shoes.
The most elaborate display of fireworks ever devised by Mr. Pain would be but a poor thing compared with the spectacle presented when a converter is poured. The whole world glows with golden heat, and is filled with an explosion of brilliant sparks, and as the moltenmetal passes out into the sunlight that light is by contrast so feeble that it seems almost to cast a shadow over the white-hot vats of iron.
Next come the tilting open-hearth furnaces, where the iron is subjected to the action of lime at a very high temperature. This removes the phosphorus and leaves a bath of commercially pure iron which is then "teemed" into a hundred-ton ladle, wherein it is treated in such a way as to give it the properties required in the finished steel. What these properties may be, depends, of course, upon the purpose to which the steel is to be put. Rails, for example, must, above all, resist abrasion, and consequently have a higher carbon content than, say, reinforcing bars for concrete work. To obtain various qualities in steel are added carbon, ferro-manganese, or ferro-silicon in proportions differing according to requirements.
In the next process steel ingots are made. I lost track of the exact detail of this, but I remember seeing the ingots riding about in their own steel cars, turning to an orange color as they cooled, and I remember seeing them pounded by a hammer that stood up in the air like an elevated railroad station, and I know that pretty soon they got into the blooming mill and were rolled out into "blooms," after which they were handled by a huge contrivance like a thumb and forefinger of steel which—though the blooms weigh five tons apiece—picked them up much as you might pick up a stick of red candy.
Still orange-hot, the blooms find their way to the rolling mill, where they go dashing back and forth upon rollers and between rollers—the latter working in pairs like the rollers of large wringers, squeezing the blooms, in their successive passages, to greater length and greater thinness, until at last they take the form of long, red, glowing rails; after which they are sawed off, to the accompaniment of a spray of white sparks, into rail lengths, and run outside to cool. And I may add that, while there is more brilliant heat to be seen in many other departments of the plant, there is no department in which the color is more beautiful than in the piles of rails on the cooling beds—some of them still red as they come from the rollers, others shading off to rose and pink, and finally to their normal cold steel-gray.
Presently along comes a great electromagnet; from somewhere in the sky it drops down and touches the rails; when it rises bunches of them rise with it, and, after sailing through the air, are gently deposited upon flat cars. Here, even after the current is shut off, some of them may try to stick to the magnet, as though fearing to go forth into the world. If so, it gives them a little shake, whereupon they let go, and it travels back to get more rails and load them on the cars.
Iron ore, coal, and limestone, the three chief materials used in the making of steel, are all found in the hills in the immediate vicinity of Birmingham. I am told that there is no other place in the world where the three exist so close together. That is an impressive fact, butone grows so accustomed to impressive facts, while passing through this plant, that one ceases to be impressed, becoming merely dazed.
If I were asked to mention one especially striking item out of all that welter, I should think of many things—things having to do with vastness, with gigantic movements and mutations, with Niagara-like noises, with great bursts of flame suggesting fallen fragments from the sun itself—but above all I think that I should speak of the apparent absence of men.