April 11, 2018:—Mayor Kopensky is particularly deep in Singapore learning. He conceals his well-beloved studies in public, as senators of old used to conceal their wealth. He must, of course, get his majorities from the University students, who are the majority of the population, so many are studying even after marriage, and so many men continue their studies after entering business.
In political hours the attitude even of the older students of the University of Springfield is seemingly ungrateful. It is that of the traditionally impudent college freshman toward the imaginary greasy grind and toward the professor who eggs him on to scholarship. They think the names of these City Commissioners: “Cave Man Thomas,” “Sparrow Short,” “Coffee Kusuko,” “Montague Rock,” “Drug Store Smith,” “Jefferson Radley,” “Mayo Sims,” mean dash and romance.
104This is the “City Hall” block of seven people in the city commission of eleven. The Mayor is the eighth. He seldom has occasion to use his prerogative of the casting vote, for it is not often five to five on a side. There are only three people in the commission who represent the School Board, one of them is Black Hawk Boone.
Boone roars away with the others, who are on his right and left, like Aaron and Hur holding up the hands of Moses. And it is only at the end of some long and well dramatized skirmish that Boone wins by forcing the issues in his paper the Boone Ax and scaring a more cowardly four in Kopensky’s faction to vote with him temporarily on what seems a purely educational issue. It is not always the same four he bulldozes and many and obvious are his plots.
Drug Store Smith and Coffee Kusuko supply about one-fifth of cold science to the Mayor’s City Hall stew. They represent the “slick” side of Kopensky. They have natty ideas of dress and natty ideas of administration. The remainder of Kopensky’s routine political workers are slack in every way except in the matter of secret party-discipline.
The columnist Romanoff in a charitable mood says, in the Boone Ax for April 11, 1052018:—“When we view the soggy-souled but amiable group of city fathers around Kopensky, we rejoice. There is no sign of a complete clean-up of the ages. The patriot is still at home in the government. And, as Andrew Jackson knew, there is an intrinsic governing power in any mass of humanity linked by friendship and under American skies. Along with the City Hall dishonesty there goes a certain mercy and fraternity, far from the sternness of the editor of this paper, who may take my remarks for what they are worth, and he may fire me if he chooses. Let my boss, the editor, admit, since he must, that the City Hall gang keep our more angular truth-telling moods from torturing the town beyond reason. As it is, I declare myself the only real jester among all our children of light.”
April 15:—As I wander about, I am glad that in my former life I was a member of the Anti-Saloon League of Central Illinois. There is no such thing as a saloon to be seen. The bar room is as extinct as the trilobite. Coca-Cola and Bevo have their new successors every day, along with mysterious elaborations of coffee and tea, and spiced drinks from the Jungles of South America. And, of course, after a hundred non-alcoholic years the soda fountains have tremendous importance. Drug 106Store Smith, member of the city council, is the local Soda Fountain King. He is now the owner of all the drug stores, including Dodds’ Drug Store, which keeps its old location at Fifth and Monroe.
I have indeed a curious impression as I go into Dodds’ for a soda. Fifth and Monroe reminds me of a century before. It is still the street-car center of our town. There are as of old long benches in Dodds’ where people are waiting to take street cars and there are the same revolving stools along the soda fountain counter but that counter is twice as long and there are tables for customers now. The sodas are as good as those wonders Jim Sylva used to mix, but no better.
Across the street is the old Coe’s Book Store, owned by some descendant of the original Coe family. There is, as of old, a great counter of magazines, some of them better, some of them rawer than the old list. Many of them are now published in Springfield or near by. The majority of the motion picture magazines are full of simpering photographs of Los Angeles ladies in bathing suits. They are, of course, delightful to behold but the mystery still remains as to what this has to do with the art of the motion picture. Of the literary magazines, the Atlantic Monthly and 107Poetry, a Magazine of Verse, still survive. The Atlantic still keeps its brick red cover and its nippy New England style and Poetry still has Pegasus on the cover and new poets on the inside. Vogue and Vanity Fair are still for sale. I wander out and watch the Fifth and Monroe crowd again. It is Saturday, nine o’clock in the evening, and the automobile horns are deafening and the crossing policeman is quite busy.
And now I have gone to a good old slapstick movie, by a descendant of Charlie Chaplin, and I am standing again on the corner and it is half past ten. Many people are looking up at the passing figures in the dance hall in the third story over the theatre. Windows are open and wild Singaporian music pours out into the streets. There are great yellow Singaporian lanterns hanging in front of the open windows and yellower light is pouring from the hall itself. It is one of the chain of Yellow dance halls in the syndicate owned by Kusuko and part of his political machine, along with his chain of Coffee houses. This particular place is called “The Hall of Velaska.”
There was a man who sat by me in the movie laughing like a boy. He is now beside 108me again. He is a gigantic black haired but aged Jew, obviously the Rabbi Terence Ezekiel, heretic, and planter of the Oaks of Springfield. He is in most matters a henchman of Boone and a political “scrapper,” whose deeds have set the town ringing. We are friends in a minute. He has seen me with Avanel in his synagogue—takes me as a matter of course, asks me to go with him to the Tom Strong Coffee House and Restaurant, just east of the Gaiety Theatre. There we encounter Boone and the over-sensitive quivering Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third. They are enjoying eleven o’clock salt mackerel together. They take along with it the knockout coffee of Kusuko, who owns all the coffee houses under whatever name, new or old.
And so the Rabbi and I join in these refreshments and have a jolly midnight with the heart of political and educational Springfield and, as long as the Rabbi leads the argument, there is more than enough wit in the assembly. He has the Jewish turn for puns and it is plain that Doctor Mayo Sims and Kopensky have a second laughing foeman.
But amid the jokes the Rabbi is not a bit backward about hatching local empires along 109with this inbred Michael and this black-haired descendant of Daniel Boone. Their present campaign, which they do not conceal in its tactics from me, their “cousin,” is, of course, an effort to out-maneuver the Mayor. Kopensky wants to bring cheap unskilled labor to town, leaving out the usual University entrance-examination. His ostensible reason is that the World’s Fair buildings will not be completed August 15, the date of opening, without this aid. It is obviously but a maneuver to bring more City Hall votes to town and votes of a manageable type.
And so I talk politics with these three. Boone proclaims that the presence this evening of Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, is an evidence that the Boones and the Michaels can pull together from time to time and the Rabbi and the lad seem completely ruled by this headlong Boone who cannot eat mackerel without glowering as though he were devouring his enemies.
The other two are jollying him out of his intensity and he seems to thank them for it. He really relaxes a little toward midnight, as though, after all, this is a festive occasion of red blooded lads in a coffee house. As I think it over, walking home alone, there is an 110elusive impression that young Michael was being given an extra show of confidence for “reasons” by the apparently headlong older gentlemen.
April 17:—I have been asking questions about Drug Store Smith. It seems this person, Smith, has aspirations, and values his exceedingly nominal place among the scientific chemists of America and will leave the town any time to attend a congress of such, where he receives due invitation:—and it is part of the tactics of Boone to lure him out when his vote will be an inconvenience. But it is not always easy to get him sufficient honors of this kind for he is not a benevolent scientist. The charm of his tonics and beverages is deemed specious, though some of them are discreetly marked: “Highly recommended by Doctor Mayo Sims.” “They say” he did some sound chemical and biological research in his youth in the Springfield University laboratories.
I have been asking questions and am beginning to understand Coffee Kusuko. He has a chain of coffee houses as long as Smith’s chain of pharmacy-post-office-street-car-station-patent-medicine-confectionery-cigar-stand-and-soda-fountain establishments. Kusuko 111has made the black demi-tasse the special Springfield vice and there are no deeper addicts than those who fight him politically.
People feel quite sure his drink contains some more sinister ingredient from the Malay peninsula. And he it is who sees to it that all the business offices are equipped with coffee urns that whistle through the late afternoon:—the custom of mixing business and coffee having originated with his great great grandmother, a famous local stenographer, who in the end became lady mayor, through her stenographers’ guild. Politics and coffee are hereditary with Kusuko.
In the legitimate organization which ministers to this drinking habit, Kusuko has concealed his henchmen, who bring him all needed information and carry abroad all necessary orders. And they have a considerable opportunity to serve him. Drinking begins in the offices at 4.30 P. M. and in the more fastidious business groups with many forms, till it is near to resembling the Japanese tea-ceremony. Stenographers, some austere and some luxurious, mingle with women political leaders, such as Orator Carrie Moore, Portia, the Singing Aviator, and others. These help materially to make up the sum of grace and 112bedevilment of the business and political day. A little later people who are still restless and do not want to go home drift off toward the motion picture houses, or the drug stores or the coffee houses of Kusuko.
As to the coffee houses, I make my tours through many and find these places extraordinarily varied in design, though the same general average of a crowd is in most of them. There is a Chinese-looking place called: “The Opium Fish.” There is a place hung with copies of Velasques, Goya, Sorolla, and others, called: “The Spanish Gypsy.” This is a place quieter than most. Then there is a kind of a Jazz emporium with copper and brass decorations, called “The Whing Whang Tree.” There are two other places that specialize in chop suey, called: “The Mock Duck” and “The Fire Cracker King” and then I loaf in “The Pig and the Goose,” and “The Sword of the Skallawag,” etc. In these last two on slightly raised platforms the Malay storytellers sit cross-legged. They unroll the beautiful ensnaring legends of the Malay peninsula and the islands around it. These storytellers appear occasionally in some of the other coffee houses, also, along with negro singers, etc.
And now comes Kusuko’s last touch, where 113he has completely replaced the old political functions of the American saloon, as an acceptable harness for the social brigands. There is always some allusion in the coffee houses, some implication, that the next real thing to do will be dancing, later in the evening, in wonderful Yellow Dance Halls. These are also owned by Kusuko and are the very keystone of his system. I follow the drifting tide of jolly good fellows several evenings and it leads me inevitably to the halls before midnight.
They are never too near the coffee houses and soda fountains and never too far away. There is nothing on the surface to make one apprehensive in the halls, except some very daring social dancing. There is often a motion picture show for part of the evening just off the lounging hallway and place of promenade. The crowd is not much below the average of the regular Fifth and Monroe crowd of all kinds of people.
April 20:—I attend this evening, at the invitation of two prospective art students, a session of the Board of Education. They explain the session to me, while we sit in the gallery and look down upon the general tempestuousness.
Boone is not only the presiding officer but 114has the impression that he is the whole Board of Education. Despite this they are fond of him on the board, but row with him till the men cuss before the ladies in desperate efforts to hold him down, and keep him down, and prevent his bullying the whole assembly out of existence. He insults everybody mercilessly and wags his black beard at them till they quail and quake.
It is a joy, a sorrow, an amazement, and a wonder to me to see people who look so much like the old Prognosticator’s Club, fighting away, and when I meet them all at the end of the verbal war none of them see me except as a casual bystander.
April 21:—I have had a jolly evening at Tom Strong’s with my beloved Rabbi. Boone is our inevitable theme in the end. The Rabbi, as we drink the black coffee and eat the salt mackerel, confirms my tentative remark that Boone, as president of the Board of Education, enforces its edicts, though few of the decrees are those into which from the standpoint of strategy, or even conviction, he can put his private heart. But, the Rabbi points out, they are all clubs with which Boone can pound the Mayor’s majority in the city commission and he backs the board’s edicts, every one, in The 115Boone Ax, and ever so often forces something through the council.
Boone is also University Professor, one hour a week, and in his professorial special pleading, which he excludes from his activities as chairman of the Board of Education, he presents to the University and the world a new doctrine of health and economics, called: “Boonism” by his followers, and “The Complete Healing” in his text book.
The Rabbi expounds: “Boonism denounces metal money for a starter. Boone’s aversion to it has come through millionaires burying their money and bringing out coins one at a time. Boone advocates a special system of paper currency for an economic remedy, and as a means of abolishing millionaires. So Kusuko allows only metal money to be used in his places, which regulation Boone, after some contests, has accepted with a sense of humor, since he likes black coffee and cannot deny it and wants a jolly place to meet his friends. And meanwhile millionaires, though forbidden by the constitution to exist, keep on hiding money.”
According to the Rabbi:—“The most outstanding prescription in the personal health chapters of ‘The Complete Healing’ is the 116Apple Amaranth orchard. The devotee is to walk in the orchards summer and winter, breathing the breath of the bark, blossoms, apples, and leaves, with certain well-worded philosophic meditations. In general Boone condemns drugs, so there is a personal reason for making war on him on the part of Smith and Sims and their followers.
“The Amaranth Apple orchard, around the grave of the Sangamon County pioneer and saint, Hunter Kelly, is particularly esteemed by the Boone following.”
But I cannot imagine Boone or any remotely resembling imitator indulging in philosophic meditations. I could rather imagine him climbing a tree like a cinnamon bear, only with more speed and fidgets.