April 3, 2018:—It is a sunny April morning. I note some tiny spring beauties in the patches of snow. Every cloud threatens, but every cloud rolls by. I begin to apprehend April’s pretty promise of final deliverance from frost and snow. I am loafing around the coffee houses, listening to the talk, and being received as one of the more obscure inhabitants. Occasionally some one asks, with an effort at interest, if I am starting my art classes soon. But the most lofty and the most humble call me “cousin,” as they do one another. I am sounded a bit as to whether I share the political opinions of Sparrow Short, and incidentally if we belong to the same school of art teaching, and if he will give my classes a criticism from time to time. I write down the name of the youth who seeks me out desiring to enroll and am for the first time flattered.
By putting fugitive bits of loud talk with 91observations of the last few mornings, I begin to get the social fabric, and take a lesson in New Springfield’s politics.
More women vote than men. Woman is the housekeeper and municipal politics is a kind of nest building and a house keeping of a sort.
The women follow their old occupations. And they have many new ones. They are locksmiths, safe experts, confectioners, cigar factory workers and owners, makers of advertising novelties for the whole world, eye, ear, nose and throat physicians, bill posters, wallpaper cleaners, opticians, dog, cat, and bird doctors, barbers, undertakers, auctioneers, dentists, and a thousand other things. But this does not mean that women monopolize such occupations. It is only a minority that leaves the home. But it is a majority that floods the elections. They are about equally divided between the established factions among the men and perhaps getting the mass of their opinions from the men but certainly furnishing their own steam.
I note many curious phases of caste, if there may be said to be such in a fluent community where everyone may change his status before nightfall by doughty deed or awful 92failure. There is an exalted status to occupations that were once deemed commonplace. There is yet the same distinction that used to go to lawyer or doctor or head of a university department, but it is extended to such seemingly miscellaneous occupations as conductors of Turkish baths, special gymnasiums and mud baths, billiard halls, bowling alleys. Stores for sporting and athletic goods convey great distinction. And the demi-god of these, Cave Man Thomas, is indeed held in high regard and his minions have almost the same lustre, and so he is one of the eleven city commissioners.
But the end of these surprises is not complete. There is a particular dignity given to junk dealers, cobblers, garbage handlers, and manufacturers, and devisers of patent medicines. They stand as did the lords, dukes, knights, and bishops of old, if there is a charm to their private characters equal to that of their public service.
I find that a special training, and therefore a special distinction, is involved in being shoddy manufacturers, pawnbrokers, silo manufacturers. And many other once simple ways of making a living have become so complex and fastidious that they are the signs of 93nobility. But respectability, in man or woman, is, as a matter of fact, not always a thing of occupation in the final analysis. It may be a matter of race or of personal record. And sometimes it seems to be a matter of party politics.
The really significant party lines are local. The Democratic and Republican parties have their turn every four years at national elections but at all other seasons new ideas come into the local commissioners, platforms that cannot be classed as Democratic or Republican ideas and the people do not array themselves under those banners but rather the banners of Doctor Mayo Sims on the one hand and Black Hawk Boone on the other.
New Harmony, Indiana, is particularly distinguished for sending in civic and social recruits to Boone’s faction, though the nucleus of the faction came up with him from Cairo. While New Harmony was founded by those who protested against mystical religion, many of the present waves of enthusiasm from that exceedingly vital place were born in the New Harmony Methodist and Episcopal churches. They take to Boone by affinity, and hate Mayo Sims by instinct.
With no particular support from Boone, they have cultivated the mania for planting 94the highly specialized ever-blooming Golden Rain Trees from New Harmony as symbols of democratic feeling and as a way of saying that all men are created equal. And they call them The Gate Trees, since, passing under them, we enter the gate to the free land of democracy in symbol if not in fact. The horticulturists from New Harmony are making newer and more magnificent varieties of the tree and sending them across the world.
But in the Mystic Year, Springfield is rather to be discussed, for instance—as a convention center, which has at last evolved into the home of a perpetual World’s Fair. It is as of old, a travelling man’s home city, a retired farmer’s place of sleep, a state official’s paradise. Agricultural experts, coal mining experts, would-be statesmen of the middle west, have the same general relation to the city about them that they had in the ancient days of the horse-cars, and the Sangamon County Fair. The town has many of its ancient types. But they are overshadowed by the sculptors, the motion picture scenario writers, the motion picture directors and actors, and the prophets and sibyls of all the arts that go to make up a University Fair. The entrance examination for permanent residence in Springfield, except for the 95native-born, is the same as that for the Universities of America. The native-born, no matter how stupid or cranky, cannot be banished. There are so many extreme followers of the various local religious and philosophical sects that Springfield is as much a Hobby Horse Fair as University Fair, if we are to believe the wits and the laughing poets.
One index of the hobby riding character of the place is the way the humorous columnist, Romanoff, in the Boone Ax characterizes conspicuous people, even at the risk of suit. Today’s Boone Ax contains a new epithet: “The Muttering Thibetan,” a name for the young architect and protege of St. Friend, the Bread Giver. This youth makes his acquaintances impatient by talking to the empty air as he walks the streets.
The columnist names himself: “The Sentimental Romanoff.” He it is who named John Short, political rebel and painting teacher: “Sparrow Short.” He perpetually hounds the mayor with the nicknames: “Slick Slack Kopensky” and “Sims’ Bitters.” This last is because Mayo Sims is deemed the boss and Kopensky his dose to be administered to the town in regular spoonsful.
The deathless industrial revolution that followed the war with Germany still rumbles 96along elsewhere, with strikes, boycotting, blacklistings, picketings, street barricades, dynamitings, massacres, and general annoyances and bedevilment:—advancing, retreating, and advancing again, through three generations and around the world.
But, for the most part, the soreheads outside of Springfield, particularly those stewing in their own caldrons in Chicago, serve vicariously to set us free. We are wrestling with more up-to-date nuisances, with a brighter goal in sight.
It is the dream of a human beehive far from the Marxian society. It is something on the newest New Harmony model, a Springfield that is democratic, artistic, religious, and patriarchal, and therefore following many of the most ancient forms and metaphors of orthodoxy, as an electric light may be softened and given its final character by the shell of an ancient horn lantern.
April 7:—This evening I take Avanel Boone to the Henry George dinner. When I see that long array of distinguished citizens and Avanel names off to me their offices and attributes, I realize that Henry George triumphs in an especial manner over the soul of Springfield, and I rejoice in this with all my 97heart, for I deeply revere the man and glory in his influence. Avanel first points out to me the followers of her saints:—St. Scribe of the Shrines, who has only recently departed this world, and St. Friend, The Bread Giver, who is still to be seen in the Springfield Cathedral, active and wonderful. And here are some of the principal followers of this dynasty of saints:—the pious Darsies, the wholesome Hollys, the sad Rancies, torch bearers of liberalism. Among them are endless officers and privates in the ranks of the Amazonian and the Horseshoe Brotherhood, all religious and political radicals. Avanel is much amused to point out at the dinner an equal number of opposites, though often of the same nominal allegiances, the snobbish Rues, the wirehaired Radleys, the iron-ribbed Standings, and some of the less powerful of the mayor’s faction, some young Kopenskys, Rocks, and the like, who have no more to do with the spirit of Henry George than they have to do with the New Testament.
My dear Avanel grows more sarcastic and almost breaks up the meeting at our end of the table when Jefferson Radley, henchman and slave of the wicked Doctor Mayo Sims, opens the evening with a speech in which he names Henry George and Alexander Hamilton, 98in the same tone of voice and with the same praise.
And now I get my first sight of Black Hawk Boone. As he rises to speak, my dear Avanel blushes with ill-repressed pride and she cannot keep the sparkle from her eyes and the tension of embarrassment and love from her face as Black Hawk shakes his mane.
He is a short man, with a curly big black beard such as Ashurbanipal and Nimrod must have shaken at their foes. His cheek is flushed with anger and his midnight eyes give out lightning and he hits the table till the dishes rattle and as good as denounces Jefferson Radley as a hypocrite and a scoundrel. He is plainly one of those accustomed to having his way completely, as far as he has it at all, for few people will have the energy to combat the wrath he puts into any battle or into such a thing as a pretty after-dinner tribute to a saint. Boone howls, and snaps his teeth together. His terrible sneer would destroy all but a rhinoceros or a seasoned politician.
At length Boone possesses himself enough to speak clearly and with much economic eloquence, a perfect bore to Avanel and myself. She is trying to fascinate me by allowing me to hold two of her fingers under the table. Then suddenly the banquet ends and she 99goes home with her father, looking severely at me. And she kisses her father, and whispers in his ear—no doubt that he made an excellent speech. Boone does not so much as glance my way and I must wait till another time to talk to him. He has never been at home when I have called on his daughter.
April 10:—The city hall is apparently less rigid than of old, a masterpiece of the happy-go-lucky. Mayor Slick Slack Kopensky, “Sims’ Bitters,” is sitting next to me at a coffee house table with Sims and Kusuko and Cave Man Thomas, all parts of the City Hall machine. Kopensky looks like the pictures of President William McKinley. While by no means so large a character, he is, by all reports, much more picturesque in his political methods. He is even now saying to his coterie and with intent that those near by may hear if they so desire: “All the governments above that of the city weigh on the people like a hat of lead. But the government of our City Hall, as long as I have my way, is going to be as gay and easy as safety will allow. As long as the Public School bunch act like a bunch of regulators and hoot-owls, we will beat them to pulp.”
April 12:—Now I note certain established 100and accredited loafers, who are assumed to be part of the landscape. I find that the gang of Kopensky, Sims, and so forth have not failed to annex every one of such, who can tell a smutty story to some jolly group of pornographically inclined gentlemen. Mayo Sims believes in the medicine of laughter to cure the sickness of a political machine, and with Kopensky’s help has made it appear on the surface that the issue is between the laughing City Hall and the militant and irksome University. So I get a public-school map of the city from the Board of Education offices and hire a taxi and make a quick still hunt around all the old and new sites. Judging by the equipment alone, I conclude at once that the public schools of Springfield have gone on like a line of irresistible battle-tanks. There is a complete material ladder from the first grade, on through the awards and honors of The University World’s Fair that sets itself in rigid competition with the masters of the world. But there are, no doubt, many qualifications to this outline to be offered by friends and enemies of the system. It is plain in one taxi ride that the system has commanded rivers of ungrudged money and I can well believe that outside the political field the system 101has had an unbroken and unchallenged prestige.
In the coffee houses and the gigantic loafing lobbies of the motion-picture theatres and over the endless ice cream tables of the drug stores and confectioneries and in the lounging rooms of the dance-halls everywhere the argument roars and rattles and clatters and squeals and shrieks and splutters and swears. Every kind of a skirmish between Catholic and Protestant, aristocrat and democrat, labor and capital, is obliterated or merged into this main war. Springfield is Black Hawk Boone, President of the Board of Education and the World’s Fair of the University of Springfield and editor of the relentless Boone Ax:—versus this gang composed of Mayor Kopensky, Sims, his boss, and the laughing, dancing crew led by Drug Store Smith and Coffee Kusuko and Cave Man Thomas.
Practically all the religious leaders and all the people with names of real distinction and untainted standing are with Black Hawk Boone. His School Board includes among others Rabbi Terence Ezekiel, Roxana Grey, Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, son of the Senator who represents us in the World Government, St. Friend, the Bread Giver, 102Rachel Madison, the Christian Science Reader, Mary Timmons and John Emis, representatives of the African Race, Gwendolyn Charles, the Motion Picture Director and scenario writer, Patricia Anthony, Josephine Windom of the Three Color Printing Department. They are a dithyrambic, chanting improvising howling-dervish set, with a local millennial dialect of their own and lacking mainly in that sense of humor and everydayness and that cold political self-control with which the City Hall is fully supplied.