Abroad at Home: American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures of Julian Street

E-text prepared by Juliet Sutherland, Corsetiere, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 35965-h.htm or 35965-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/35965/pg35965-images.html) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35965/35965-h.zip)

Abroad At Home

by

Julian Street

* * * * *

The Need Of Change

Fifth Anniversary Edition. Illustrated by James Montgomery Flagg. Cloth, 50 cents net. Leather, $1.00 net.

Paris A La Carte

"Gastronomic promenades" in Paris. Illustrated by May Wilson Preston. Cloth, 60 cents net.

Welcome To Our City

Mr. Street plays host to the stranger in New York. Illustrated by James Montgomery Flagg and Wallace Morgan. Cloth, $1.00 net.

Ship-Bored

Who hasn't been? Illustrated by May Wilson Preston. Cloth, 50 cents net.

Abroad At Home

Cheerful ramblings and adventures in American cities and other places. Illustrated by Wallace Morgan. Cloth, $2.50 net.

For Children

The Goldfish

A Christmas story for children between six and sixty. Colored Illustrations and page Decorations. Cloth, 70 cents net.

* * * * *

[Illustration: The St. Francis at tea-time.--With her hotels San Francisco is New York, but with her people she is San Francisco--which comes near being the apotheosis of praise]

Abroad At Home

American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures of Julian Street

With Pictorial Sidelights by Wallace Morgan

[Illustration]

New York The Century Co. 1915

Copyright, 1914, by The Century Co.

Copyright, 1914, by P. F. Collier & Son, Inc.

Published, November, 1914

TO MY FATHER the companion of my first railroad journey

The Author takes this opportunity to thank the old friends, and the new ones, who assisted him in so many ways, upon his travels. Especially, he makes his affectionate acknowledgment to his wise and kindly companion, the Illustrator, whose admirable drawings are far from being his only contribution to this volume.

--J. S.

New York, October, 1914.

Contents

Chapter Page

Stepping Westward

I Stepping Westward 3

II Bifurcated Buffalo 21

III Cleveland Characteristics 40

IV More Cleveland Characteristics 48

Michigan Meanderings

V Detroit The Dynamic 65

VI Automobiles And Art 77

VII The Maecenas Of The Motor 91

VIII The Curious City Of Battle Creek 105

IX Kalamazoo 121

X Grand Rapids The "Elect" 127

Chicago

XI A Middle-Western Miracle 139

XII Field'S And The "Tribune" 150

XIII The Stockyards 164

XIV The Honorable Hinky Dink 173

XV An Olympian Plan 181

XVI Looking Backward 187

"In Mizzoura"

XVII Somnolent St. Louis 201

XVIII The Finer Side 221

XIX Hannibal And Mark Twain 237

XX Pike And Poker 253

XXI Old River Days 267

The Beginning Of The West

XXII Kansas City 275

XXIII Odds And Ends 291

XXIV Colonel Nelson'S "Star" 302

XXV Keeping A Promise 313

XXVI The Tame Lion 323

XXVII Kansas Journalism 337

XXVIII A College Town 345

XXIX Monotony 365

The Mountains And The Coast

XXX Under Pike'S Peak 379

XXXI Hitting A High Spot 400

XXXII Colorado Springs 417

XXXIII Cripple Creek 434

XXXIV The Mormon Capital 439

XXXV The Smiths 454

XXXVI Passing Pictures 465

XXXVII San Francisco 474

XXXVIII "Before The Fire" 488

XXXIX An Exposition And A "Booster" 498

XL New York Again 507

List Of Illustrations

The St. Francis at tea-time.--With her hotels San Francisco is New York, but with her people she is San Francisco--which comes near being FACING the apotheosis of praise. _Frontispiece_ PAGE

I was moving about my room, my hands full of hairbrushes and toothbrushes and clothes brushes and shaving brushes; my head full of railroad trains, and hills, and plains, and valleys 5

A dusky redcap took my baggage 12

What scenes these black, pathetic people had passed through--were passing through! Why did they not look up in wonderment? 17

We made believe we wanted to go out and smoke. And as we left our seats she made believe she didn't know that we were going. 23

The gentleman who favored linen mesh was a fat, prosperous-looking person, whose gold-rimmed spectacles reflected flying lights from out of doors 26

In a few hours there was enough shame around us to have lasted all the reformers and muckrakers I know a whole month 32

My companion and I made excuses to go downstairs and wash our hands in the public washroom, just for the pleasure of doing so without fear of being attacked by a swarthy brigand with a brush 35

I was prepared to take the field against all comers, not only in favor of simplicity, but in favor of anything and everything which was favored by my hostess 38

Chamber of Commerce representatives were with us all the first day and until we went to our rooms, late at night 43

It is an Elizabethan building, with a heavy timbered front, suggesting some ancient, hospitable, London coffee house where wits of old were used to meet 46

In this charming, homelike old building, with its grandfather's clock, its Windsor chairs, and its open wood fires, a visitor finds it hard to realize that he is in the "west" 53

Down by the docks we saw gigantic, strange machines, expressive of Cleveland's lake commerce--machines for loading and unloading ships in the space of a few hours 60

In midstream passes a continual parade of freighters ... and in their swell you may see, teetering, all kinds of craft, from proud white yachts to canoes 71

The automobile has not only changed Detroit from a quiet old town into a rich, active city, but upon the drowsy romance of the old days it has superimposed the romance of modern business 74

Of course there was order in that place, of course there was system--relentless system--terrible "efficiency"--but to my mind it expressed but one thing, and that thing was delirium 97

Never, since then, have I heard men jeering over women as they look in dishabille, without wondering if those same men have ever seen themselves clearly in the mirrored washroom of a sleeping car 112

"Can that stuff," admonished Miss Buck in her easy, offhand manner 117

She was saying to herself (and, unconsciously, to us, through the window): "If _I_ had played that hand, I never should have done it _that_ way!" 124

Rodin's "Thinker" 145

Chicago's skyline from the docks.... A city which rebuilt itself after the fire; in the next decade doubled its size; and now has a population of two million, plus a city of about the size of San Francisco 160

Two rabbis, old bearded men, performed the rites with long, slim, shiny blades 177

As I stood there, studying the temperament of pigs, I saw the butcher looking up at me.... I have never seen such eyes 192

The bold front of Michigan Avenue along Grant Park ... great buildings wreathed in whirling smoke and that allegory of infinity which confronts one who looks eastward 196

The dilapidation of the quarter has continued steadily from Dickens's day to this, and the beauty now to be discovered there is that of decay and ruin 205

The three used bridges which cross the Mississippi River at St. Louis are privately controlled toll bridges 212

The skins are handled in the raw state ... with the result that the floor of the exchange is made slippery by animal fats, and that the olfactory organs encounter smells not to be matched in any zoo 221

St. Louis needs to be taken by the hand and led around to some municipal-improvement tailor, some civic haberdasher 225

We came upon the "Mark Twain House."... And to think that, wretched as this place was, the Clemens family were forced to leave it for a time because they were too poor to live there 240

At one side is an alley running back to the house of Huckleberry Finn, and in that alley stood the historic fence which young Sam Clemens cajoled the other boys into whitewashing for him 244

Never outside of Brittany and Normandy have I seen roads so full of animals as those of Pike County 253

Mr. Roberts is a wonder--nothing less. There's a book in him, and I hope that somebody will write it, for I should like to read that book 268

Looking down from Kersey Coates Drive, one sees ... the appalling web of railroad tracks, crammed with freight cars, which seen through a softening haze of smoke, resemble a relief map--strange, vast and pictorial 289

Colonel Nelson is a "character." Even if he didn't own the "Star," ... he would be a "character."... I have called him a volcano; he is more like one than any other man I have ever met 304

Mr. Fish informed me that the waters of Excelsior Springs resemble the waters of Homburg, the favorite watering place of the late King Edward--or, rather, I think he put it the other way round 322

We strolled in the direction of the old house, that house of tragedy in which the family lived in the troublous times.... It was there that the Pinkertons threw the bomb 328

It was Frank James.... He looks more like a prosperous farmer or the president of a rural bank than like a bandit. In his manner there is a strong note of the showman 335

The campus seems to have "just growed."... Nevertheless, there is a sort of homely charm about the place, with its unimposing, helter-skelter piles of brick and stone 353

Even at sea the great bowl of the sky had never looked to me so vast 368

The little towns of western Kansas are far apart and have, like the surrounding scenery, an air of sadness and desolation 373

In the lobby of the Brown Palace Hotel we saw several old fellows, sitting about, looking neither prosperous nor busy, but always talking mines. A kind word, or even a pleasant glance, is enough to set them off 380

"Ain't Nature wonderful!" 405

I was by this time very definitely aware that I had my fill of winter motoring in the mountains. The mere reluctance I felt as we began to climb had now developed into a passionate desire to desist 412

The homes of Colorado Springs really explain the place and the society is as cosmopolitan as the architecture 417

On the road to Cripple Creek we were always turning, always turning upward 432

We were invited to meet the President of the Mormon Church and some members of his family at the Beehive House, his official residence 452

The Lion House--a large adobe building in which formerly resided the rank and file of Brigham Young's wives 461

The Cliff House has a Sorrento setting and hectic turkey-trotting nights 468

The Salt-water pool, Olympic Club, San Francisco 477

The switchboard of the Chinatown telephone exchange is set in a shrine and the operators are dressed in Chinese silks 496

We believed we had encountered every kind of "booster" that creeps, crawls, walks, crows, cries, bellows, barks or brays, but it remained for the Exposition to show us a new specimen 504

New York--Everyone is in a hurry. Everyone is dodging everyone else. Everyone is trying to keep his knees from being knocked by swift-passing suitcases 513

Stepping Westward

Abroad At Home

Chapter I

Stepping Westward

"_What, you are stepping westward?_"--"_Yea._" --'Twould be a wildish destiny, If we, who thus together roam In a strange Land, and far from home, Were in this place the guests of Chance: Yet who would stop or fear to advance, Though home or shelter he had none, With such a sky to lead him on?

--Wordsworth.

For some time I have desired to travel over the United States--to ramble and observe and seek adventure here, at home, not as a tourist with a short vacation and a round-trip ticket, but as a kind of privateer with a roving commission. The more I have contemplated the possibility the more it has engaged me. For we Americans, though we are the most restless race in the world, with the possible exception of the Bedouins, almost never permit ourselves to travel, either at home or abroad, as the "guests of Chance." We always go from one place to another with a definite purpose. We never amble. On the boat, going to Europe, we talk of leisurely trips away from the "beaten track," but we never take them. After we land we rush about obsessed by "sights," seeing with the eyes of guides and thinking the "canned" thoughts of guidebooks.

In order to accomplish such a trip as I had thought of I was even willing to write about it afterward. Therefore I went to see a publisher and suggested that he send me out upon my travels.

I argued that Englishmen, from Dickens to Arnold Bennett, had "done" America; likewise Frenchmen and Germans. And we have traveled over there and written about them. But Americans who travel at home to write (or, as in my case, write to travel) almost always go in search of some specific thing: to find corruption and expose it, to visit certain places and describe them in detail, or to catch, exclusively, the comic side. For my part, I did not wish to go in search of anything specific. I merely wished to take things as they might come. And--speaking of taking things--I wished, above all else, to take a good companion, and I had him all picked out: a man whose drawings I admire almost as much as I admire his disposition; the one being who might endure my presence for some months, sharing with me his joys and sorrows and collars and cigars, and yet remain on speaking terms with me.

The publisher agreed to all. Then I told my New York friends that I was going.

[Illustration: I was moving about my room, my hands full of hairbrushes and toothbrushes and clothesbrushes and shaving brushes; my head full of railroad trains, and hills, and plains, and valleys]

They were incredulous. That is the New York attitude of mind. Your "typical New Yorker" really thinks that any man who leaves Manhattan Island for any destination other than Europe or Palm Beach must be either a fool who leaves voluntarily or a criminal taken off by force. For the picturesque criminal he may be sorry, but for the fool he has scant pity.

* * * * *

At a farewell party which they gave us on the night before we left, one of my friends spoke, in an emotional moment, of accompanying us as far as Buffalo. He spoke of it as one might speak of going up to Baffin Land to see a friend off for the Pole.

I welcomed the proposal and assured him of safe conduct to that point in the "interior." I even showed him Buffalo upon the map. But the sight of that wide-flung chart of the United States seemed only to alarm him. After regarding it with a solemn and uneasy eye he shook his head and talked long and seriously of his responsibilities as a family man--of his duty to his wife and his limousine and his elevator boys.

It was midnight when good-bys were said and my companion and I returned to our respective homes to pack. There were many things to be put into trunks and bags. A clock struck three as my weary head struck the pillow. I closed my eyes. Then when, as it seemed to me, I was barely dozing off there came a knocking at my bedroom door.

"What is it?"

"Six o'clock," replied the voice of our trusty Hannah.

As I arose I knew the feelings of a man condemned to death who hears the warden's voice in the chilly dawn: "Come! It is the fatal hour!"

When, fifteen minutes later, doubting Hannah (who knows my habits in these early morning matters) knocked again, I was moving about my room, my hands full of hairbrushes and toothbrushes and clothes brushes and shaving brushes; my head full of railroad trains, and hills, and plains and valleys, and snow-capped mountain peaks, and smoking cities and smoking-cars, and people I had never seen.

The breakfast table, shining with electric light, had a night-time aspect which made eggs and coffee seem bizarre. I do not like to breakfast by electric light, and I had done so seldom until then; but since that time I have done it often--sometimes to catch the early morning train, sometimes to catch the early morning man.

Beside my plate I found a telegram. I ripped the envelope and read this final punctuation-markless message from a literary friend:

_you are going to discover the united states dont be afraid to say so_

That is an awful thing to tell a man in the very early morning before breakfast. In my mind I answered with the cry: "But I _am_ afraid to say so!"

And now, months later, I am still afraid to say so, because, despite a certain truth the statement may contain, it seems to me to sound ridiculous, and ponderous, and solemn with an asinine solemnity.

It spoiled my last meal at home--that well-meant telegram.

I had not swallowed my second cup of coffee when, from her switchboard, a dozen floors below, the operator telephoned to say my taxi had arrived; whereupon I left the table, said good-by to those I should miss most of all, took up my suit case and departed.

Beside the curb there stood an unhappy-looking taxicab, shivering as with malaria, but the driver showed a face of brazen cheerfulness which, considering the hour and the circumstances, seemed almost indecent. I could not bear his smile. Hastily I blotted him from view beneath a pile of baggage.

With a jerk we started. Few other vehicles disputed our right to the whole width of Seventy-second Street as we skimmed eastward. Farewell, O Central Park! Farewell, O Plaza! And you, Fifth Avenue, empty, gray, deserted now; so soon to flash with fascinating traffic. Farewell! Farewell!

Presently, in that cavern in which vehicles stop beneath the overhanging cliffs of the Grand Central Station, we drew up. A dusky redcap took my baggage. I alighted and, passing through glass doors, gazed down on the vast concourse. Far up in the lofty spaces of the room there seemed to hang a haze, through which--from that amazing and audacious ceiling, painted like the heavens--there twinkled, feebly, morning stars of gold. Through three arched windows, towering to the height of six-story buildings, the eastern light streamed softly in, combining with the spaciousness around me, and the blue above, to fill me with a curious sense of paradox: a feeling that I was indoors yet out of doors.

The glass dials of the four-faced clock, crowning the information bureau at the center of the concourse, glowed with electric light, yellow and sickly by contrast with the day which poured in through those windows. Such stupendous windows! Gargantuan spider webs whose threads were massive bars of steel. And suddenly I saw the spider! He emerged from one side, passed nimbly through the center of the web, disappeared, emerged again, crossed the second web and the third in the same way, and was gone--a two-legged spider, walking importantly and carrying papers in his hand. Then another spider came, and still another, each black against the light, each on a different level. For those windows are, in reality, more than windows. They are double walls of glass, supporting floors of glass--layer upon layer of crystal corridor, suspended in the air as by genii out of the Arabian Nights. And through these corridors pass clerks who never dream that they are princes in the modern kind of fairy tale.

As yet the torrent of commuters had not begun to pour through the vast place. The floor lay bare and tawny like the bed of some dry river waiting for the melting of the mountain snows. Across the river bed there came a herd of cattle--Italian immigrants, dark-eyed, dumb, patient, uncomprehending. Two weeks ago they had left Naples, with plumed Vesuvius looming to the left; yesterday they had come to Ellis Island; last night they had slept on station benches; to-day they were departing; to-morrow or the next day they would reach their destination in the West. Suddenly there came to me from nowhere, but with a poignance that seemed to make it new, the platitudinous thought that life is at once the commonest and strangest of experiences. What scenes these black, pathetic people had passed through--were passing through! Why did they not look up in wonderment? Why were their bovine eyes gazing blankly ahead of them at nothing? What had dazed them so--the bigness of the world? Yet, after all, why should they understand? What American can understand Italian railway stations? They have always seemed to me to express a sort of mild insanity. But the Grand Central terminal I fancy I do understand. It seems to me to be much more than a successful station. In its stupefying size, its brilliant utilitarianism, and, most of all, in its mildly vulgar grandeur, it seems to me to express, exactly, the city to which it is a gate. That is something every terminal should do unless, as in the case of the Pennsylvania terminal in New York, it expresses something finer. The Grand Central Station _is_ New York, but that classic marvel over there on Seventh Avenue is more: it is something for New York to live up to.

* * * * *

When I had bought my ticket and moved along to count my change there came up to the ticket window a big man in a big ulster who asked in a big voice for a ticket to Grand Rapids. As he stood there I was conscious of a most un-New-York-like wish to say to him: "After a while I'm going to Grand Rapids, too!" And I think that, had I said it, he would have told me that Grand Rapids was "_some town_" and asked me to come in and see him, when I got there,--"at the plant," I think he would have said.

As I crossed the marble floor to take the train I caught sight of my traveling companion leaning rigidly against the wall beside the gate. He did not see me. Reaching his side, I greeted him.

He showed no signs of life. I felt as though I had addressed a waxwork figure.

"Good morning," I repeated, calling him by name.

"I've just finished packing," he said. "I never got to bed at all."

At that moment a most attractive person put in an appearance. She was followed by a redcap carrying a lovely little Russia leather bag. A few years before I should have called a bag like that a dressing case, but watching that young woman as she tripped along with steps restricted by the slimness of her narrow satin skirt, it occurred to me that modes in baggage may have changed like those in woman's dress and that her little leather case might be a modern kind of wardrobe trunk.

My companion took no notice of this agitating presence.

"Look!" I whispered. "_She_ is going, too."

Stiffly he turned his head.

"The pretty girl," he remarked, with sad philosophy, "is always in the other car. That's life."

"No," I demurred. "It's only early morning stuff."

And I was right, for presently, in the parlor car, we found our seats across the aisle from hers.

Before the train moved out a boy came through with books and magazines, proclaiming loudly the "last call for reading matter."

I think the radiant being believed him, for she bought a magazine--a magazine of pretty girls and piffle: just the sort we knew she'd buy. As for my companion and me, we made no purchases, not crediting the statement that it was really the "last call." But I am impelled to add that having, later, visited certain book stores of Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit, I now see truth in what the boy said.

For a time my companion and I sat and tried to make believe we didn't know that some one was across the aisle. And she sat there and played with pages and made believe she didn't know we made believe. When that had gone on for a time and our train was slipping silently along beside the Hudson, we felt we couldn't stand it any longer, so we made believe we wanted to go out and smoke. And as we left our seats she made believe she didn't know that we were going.

Four men were seated in the smoking room. Two were discussing the merits of flannel versus linen mesh for winter underwear. The gentleman who favored linen mesh was a fat, prosperous-looking person, whose gold-rimmed spectacles reflected flying lights from out of doors.

"If you'll wear linen," he declared with deep conviction--"and it wants to be a union suit, too--you'll never go back to shirt and drawers again. I'll guarantee that!" The other promised to try it. Presently I noticed that the first speaker had somehow gotten all the way from linen union suits to Portland, Me., on a hot Sunday afternoon. He said it was the hottest day last year, and gave the date and temperatures at certain hours. He mentioned his wife's weight, details of how she suffered from the heat, the amount of flesh she lost, the name of the steamer on which they finally escaped from Portland to New York, the time of leaving and arrival, and many other little things.

I left him on the dock in New York. A friend (name and occupation given) had met him with a touring car (make and horsepower specified). What happened after that I do not know, save that it was nothing of importance. Important things don't happen to a man like that.

[Illustration: A dusky redcap took my baggage]

Two other men of somewhat Oriental aspect were seated on the leather sofa talking the unintelligible jargon of the factory. But, presently, emerged an anecdote.

"I was going through our sorting room a while back," said the one nearest the window, "and I happened to take notice of one of the girls. I hadn't seen her before. She was a new hand--a mighty pretty girl, with a nice, round figure and a fine head of hair. She kept herself neater than most of them girls do. I says to myself: 'Why, if you was to take that girl and dress her up and give her a little education you wouldn't be ashamed to take her anywheres.' Well, I went over to her table and I says: 'Look at here, little girl; you got a fine head of hair and you'd ought to take care of it. Why don't you wear a cap in here in all this dust?' It tickled her to death to be noticed like that. And, sure enough, she did get a cap. I says to her: 'That's the dope, little girl. Take care of your looks. You'll only be young and pretty like this once, you know.' So one thing led to another, and one day, a while later, she come up to the office to see about her time slip or something, and I jollied her a little. I seen she was a pretty smart kid at that, so--" At that point he lowered his voice to a whisper, and leaned over so that his thick, smiling lips were close to his companion's ear. The motion of the train caused their hat brims to interfere. Disturbed by this, the raconteur removed his derby. His head was absolutely bald.

* * * * *

Well, I am not sure that I should have liked to hear the rest. I shifted my attention back to the apostle of the linen union suit, who had talked on, unremittingly. His conversation had, at least, the merit of entire frankness. He was a man with nothing to conceal.

"Yes, sir!" I heard him declare, "every time you get on to a railroad train you take your life in your hands. That's a positive fact. I was reading it up just the other day. We had almost sixteen thousand accidents to trains in this country last year. A hundred and thirty-nine passengers killed and between nine and ten thousand injured. That's not counting employees, either--just passengers like us." He emphasized his statements by waving a fat forefinger beneath the listener's nose, and I noticed that the latter seemed to wish to draw his head back out of range, as though in momentary fear of a collision.

For my part, I did not care for these statistics. They were not pleasant to the ears of one on the first leg of a long railroad journey. I rose, aimed the end of my cigar at the convenient nickel-plated receptacle provided for that purpose by the thoughtful Pullman Company, missed it, and retired from the smoking room. Or, rather, I emerged and went to luncheon.

Our charming neighbor of the parlor car was already in the diner. She finished luncheon before we did, and, passing by our table as she left, held her chin well up and kept her eyes ahead with a precision almost military--almost, but not quite. Try as she would, she was unable to control a slight but infinitely gratifying flicker of the eyelids, in which nature triumphed over training and femininity defeated feministic theory.

A little later, on our way back to the smoking room, we saw her seated, as before, behind the sheltering ramparts of her magazine. This time it pleased our fancy to take the austere military cue from her. So we filed by in step, as stiff as any guardsmen on parade before a princess seated on a green plush throne. Resolutely she kept her eyes upon the page. We might have thought she had not noticed us at all but for a single sign. She uncrossed her knees as we passed by.

In the smoking room we entered conversation with a young man who was sitting by the window. He proved to be a civil engineer from Buffalo. He had lived in Buffalo eight years, he said, without having visited Niagara Falls. ("I've been meaning to go, but I've kept putting it off.") But in New York he had taken time to go to Bedloe Island and ascend the Statue of Liberty. ("It's awfully hot in there.") Though my companion and myself had lived in New York for many years, neither of us had been to Bedloe Island. But both of us had visited the Falls. The absurd humanness of this was amusing to us all; to my companion and me it was encouraging as well, for it seemed to give us ground for hope that, in our visits to strange places, we might see things which the people living in those places fail to see.

When, after finishing our smoke, we went back to our seats, the being across the way began to make believe to read again. But now and then, when some one passed, she would look up and make believe she wished to see who it might be. And always, after doing so, she let her eyes trail casually in our direction ere they sought the page again. And always we were thankful.

As the train slowed down for Rochester we saw her rise and get into her slinky little coat. The porter came and took her Russia leather bag. Meanwhile we hoped she would be generous enough to look once more before she left the car. Only once more!

But she would not. I think she had a feeling that frivolity should cease at Rochester; for Rochester, we somehow sensed, was home to her. At all events she simply turned and undulated from the car.

That was too much! Enough of make-believe! With one accord we swung our chairs to face the window. As she appeared upon the platform our noses almost touched the windowpane and our eyes sent forth forlorn appeals. She knew that we were there, yet she walked by without so much as glancing at us.

We saw a lean old man trot up to her, throw one arm about her shoulders, and kiss her warmly on the cheek. Her father--there was no mistaking that. They stood there for a moment on the platform talking eagerly; and as they talked they turned a little bit, so that we saw her smiling up at him.

[Illustration: What scenes these black, pathetic people had passed through--were passing through! Why did they not look up in wonderment?]

Then, to our infinite delight, we noticed that her eyes were slipping, slipping. First they slipped down to her father's necktie. Then sidewise to his shoulder, where they fluttered for an instant, while she tried to get them under control. But they weren't the kind of eyes which are amenable. They got away from her and, with a sudden leap, flashed up at us across her father's shoulder! The minx! She even flung a smile! It was just a little smile--not one of her best--merely the fragment of a smile, not good enough for father, but too good to throw away.

Well--it was not thrown away. For it told us that she knew our lives had been made brighter by her presence--and that she didn't mind a bit.

* * * * *

Pushing on toward Buffalo as night was falling, my companion and I discussed the fellow travelers who had most engaged our notice: the young engineer from Buffalo, keen and alive, with a quick eye for the funny side of things; the hairless amorist; the genial bore, whose wife (we told ourselves) got very tired of him sometimes, but loved him just because he was so good; the pretty girl, who couldn't make her eyes behave because she was a pretty girl. We guessed what kind of house each one resided in, the kind of furniture they had, the kind of pictures on the walls, the kind of books they read--or didn't read. And I believed that we guessed right. Did we not even know what sort of underwear encased the ample figure of the man with the amazing memory of unessential things? And, while touching on this somewhat delicate subject, were we not aware that if the alluring being who left the train, and us, at Rochester possessed the once-so-necessary garment called a petticoat, that petticoat was hanging in her closet?

All this I mention because the thought occurred to me then (and it has kept recurring since) that places, no less than persons, have characters and traits and habits of their own. Just as there are colorless people there are colorless communities. There are communities which are strong, self-confident, aggressive; others lazy and inert. There are cities which are cultivated; others which crave "culture" but take "culturine" (like some one drinking from the wrong bottle); and still others almost unaware, as yet, that esthetic things exist. Some cities seem to fairly smile at you; others are glum and worried like men who are ill, or oppressed with business troubles. And there are dowdy cities and fashionable cities--the latter resembling one another as fashionable women do. Some cities seem to have an active sense of duty, others not. And almost all cities, like almost all people, appear to be capable alike of baseness and nobility. Some cities are rich and proud like self-made millionaires; others, by comparison, are poor. But let me digress here to say that, though I have heard mention of "hard times" at certain points along my way, I don't believe our modern generation knows what hard times really are. To most Americans the term appears to signify that life is hard indeed on him who has no motor car or who goes without champagne at dinner.

* * * * *

My contacts with many places and persons I shall mention in the following chapters have, of necessity, been brief. I have hardly more than glimpsed them as I glimpsed those fellow travelers on the train. Therefore I shall merely try to give you some impressions, from a sort of mental sketchbook, of the things which I have seen and done and heard. There is one point in particular about that sketchbook: in it I have reserved the right to set down only what I pleased. It has been hard to do that sometimes. People have pulled me this way and that, telling me what to see and what not to see, what to write and what to leave out. I have been urged, for instance, to write about the varied industries of Cleveland, the parks of Milwaukee, and the enormous red apples of Louisiana, Mo. I may come to the apples later on, for I ate a number of them and enjoyed them; but the varied industries of Cleveland and the Milwaukee parks I did not eat.

I claim the further right to ignore, when I desire to, the most important things, or to dwell with loving pen upon the unimportant. Indeed, I reserve all rights--even to the right to be perverse.

Thus I shall mention things which people told me not to mention: the droll Detroit Art Museum; the comic chimney rising from the center of a Grand Rapids park; horrendous scenes in the Chicago stockyards; the Free Bridge, standing useless over the river at St. Louis for want of an approach; the "wettest block"--a block full of saloons, which marks the dead line between "wet" Kansas City, Mo., and "dry" Kansas City, Kas. (I never heard about that block until a stranger wrote and told me not to mention it.)

As for statistics, though I have been loaded with them to the point of purchasing another trunk, I intend to use them as sparingly as possible. And every time I use them I shall groan.

Chapter II

Bifurcated Buffalo

Alighting from the train at Buffalo, I was reminded of my earlier reflection that railway stations should express their cities. In Buffalo the thought is painful. If that city were in fact, expressed by its present railway stations, people would not get off there voluntarily; they would have to be put off. And yet, from what I have been told, the curious and particularly ugly relic which is the New York Central Station there, to-day, does tell a certain story of the city. Buffalo has long been torn by factional quarrels--among them a protracted fight as to the location of a modern station for the New York Central Lines. The East Side wants it; the West Side wants it. Neither has it. The old station still stands--at least it was standing when I left Buffalo, for I was very careful not to bump it with my suit case.

This difference of opinion between the East Side and the West with regard to the placing of a station is, I am informed, quite typical of Buffalo. Socially, commercially, religiously, politically, the two sides disagree. The dividing line between them, geographically, is not, as might be supposed, Division Street. (That, by the way, is a peculiarity of highways called "Division Street" in most cities--they seldom divide anything more important than one row of buildings from another.) The real street of division is called Main.

Main Street! How many American towns and cities have used that name, and what a stupid name it is! It is as characterless as a number, and it lacks the number's one excuse for being. If names like Tenth Street or Eleventh Avenue fail to kindle the imagination they do not fail, at all events, to help the stranger find his way--although it should be added that strangers do, somehow, manage to find their way about in London, Paris, and even Boston, where the modern American system of numbering streets and avenues is not in vogue. But I am not agitating against the numbering of streets. Indeed, I fear I rather believe in it, as I believe in certain other dull but useful things like work and government reports. What I am crying out about is the stupid naming of such streets as carry names. Why do we have so many Main Streets? Do you think we lack imagination? Then look at the names of Western towns and Kansas girls and Pullman cars! The thing is an enigma.

Main Street is not only a bad name for a thoroughfare; the quality which it implies is unfortunate. And that quality may be seen in Main Street, Buffalo. On an exaggerated scale that street _is_ like the Main Street of a little town, for the business district, the retail shopping district, all the city's activities string along on either side. It is bad for a city to grow in that elongated way just as it is bad for a human being. To either it imparts a kind of gawky awkwardness.

[Illustration: We made believe we wanted to go out and smoke. And as we left our seats she made believe she didn't know that we were going]

The development of Main Street, Buffalo, has been natural. That is just the trouble; it has been too natural. Originally it was the Iroquois trail; later the route followed by the stages coming from the East. So it has grown up from log-cabin days. It is a fine, broad street; all that it lacks is "features." It runs along its wide, monotonous way until it stops in the squalid surroundings of the river; and if the river did not happen to be there to stop it, it would go on and on developing, indefinitely, and uninterestingly, in that direction as well as in the other.

The thing which Buffalo lacks physically is a recognizable center; a point at which a stranger would stop, as he stops in Piccadilly Circus or the Place de l'Opera, and say to himself with absolute assurance: "Now I am at the very heart of the city." Every city ought to have a center, and every center ought to signify in its spaciousness, its arrangement and its architecture, a city's dignity. Buffalo is, unfortunately, far from being alone in her need of such a thing. Where Buffalo is most at fault is that she does not even seem to be thinking of municipal distinction. And very many other cities are. Cleveland is already attaining it in a manner which will be magnificent; Chicago has long planned and is slowly executing; Denver has work upon a splendid municipal center well under way; so has San Francisco; St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Grand Rapids have plans for excellent municipal improvements. Even St. Paul is waking up and widening an important business street.

* * * * *

Every one knows that what is called "a wave of reform" has swept across the country, but not every one seems to know that there is also surging over the United States a "wave" of improved public taste. I shall write more of this later. Suffice it now to say that it manifests itself in countless forms: in municipal improvements of the kind of which the Cleveland center is, perhaps, the best example in the country; in architecture of all classes; in household furniture and decoration; in the tendency of art museums to realize that modern American paintings are the finest modern paintings obtainable in the world to-day; in the tendency of private art collectors not to buy quite so much rubbish as they have bought in the past; in the Panama-Pacific Exposition, which will be the most beautiful exposition anybody ever saw; and in innumerable other ways. Indeed, public taste in the United States has, in the last ten years, taken a leap forward which the mind of to-day cannot hope to measure. The advance is nothing less than marvelous, and it is reflected, I think, in every branch of art excepting one: the literary art, which has in our day, and in our country, reached an abysmal depth of degradation.

With Cleveland so near at hand as an example, and so many other American cities thinking about civic beauty, Buffalo ought soon to begin to rub her eyes, look about, and cast up her accounts. Perhaps her trouble is that she is a little bit too prosperous with an olden-time prosperity; a little bit too somnolent and satisfied. There is plenty to eat; business is not so bad; there are good clubs, and there is a delightful social life and a more than ordinary degree of cultivation. Furthermore, there may be a new station for the New York Central some day, for it is a fact that there are now some street cars which actually _cross_ Main Street, instead of stopping at the Rubicon and making passengers get out, cross on foot, and take the other car on the other side! That, in itself, is a startling state of things. Evidently all that is needed now is an earthquake.

* * * * *

I have remarked before that cities, like people, have habits. Just as Detroit has the automobile habit, Pittsburgh the steel habit, Erie, Pa., the boiler habit, Grand Rapids the furniture habit, and Louisville the (if one may say so) whisky habit, Buffalo had in earlier times the transportation habit. The first fortunes made in Buffalo came originally from the old Central Wharf, where toll was taken of the passing commerce. Hand in hand with shipping came that business known by the unpleasant name of "jobbing." From the opening of the Erie Canal until the late seventies, jobbing flourished in Buffalo, but of recent years her jobbing territory has diminished as competition with surrounding centers has increased.

The early profits from docks and shipping were considerable. The business was easy; it involved comparatively small investment and but little risk. So when, with the introduction of through bills of lading, this business dwindled, it was hard for Buffalo to readjust herself to more daring ventures, such as manufacturing. "For," as a Buffalo man remarked to me, "there is only one thing more timid than a million dollars, and that is two million." It was the same gentleman, I think, who, in comparing the Buffalo of to-day with the Buffalo of other days, called my attention to the fact that not one man in the city is a director of a steam railroad company.

From her geographical position with regard to ore, limestone, and coal it would seem that Buffalo might well become a great iron and steel city like Cleveland, but for some reason her ventures in this direction have been unfortunate. One steel company in which Buffalo money was invested, failed; another has been struggling along for some years and has not so far proved profitable. Some Buffalonians made money in a land boom a dozen or so years since; then came the panic, and the boom burst with a loud report, right in Buffalo's face.

Back of most of this trouble there seems to have been a streak of real ill luck.

[Illustration: The gentleman who favored linen mesh was a fat, prosperous-looking person, whose gold-rimmed spectacles reflected flying lights from out of doors]

There is a great deal of money in Buffalo, but it is wary money--financial wariness seems to be another Buffalo habit. And there are other cities with the same characteristic. You can tell them because, when you begin to ask about various enterprises, people will say: "No, we haven't this and we haven't that, but this is a safe town in times of financial panic." That is what they say in Buffalo; they also say it in St. Louis and St. Paul. But if they say it in Chicago, or Minneapolis, or Kansas City, or in those lively cities of the Pacific slope, I did not hear them. Those cities are not worrying about financial panics which may come some day, but are busy with the things which are.

If you ask a Buffalo man what is the matter with his city, he will, very likely, sit down with great solemnity and try to tell you, and even call a friend to help him, so as to be sure that nothing is overlooked. He may tell you that the city lacks one great big dominating man to lead it into action; or that there has been, until recently, lack of cooperation between the banks; or that there are ninety or a hundred thousand Poles in the city and only about the same number of people springing from what may be called "old American stock." Or he may tell you something else.

If, upon the other hand, you ask a Minneapolis man that question, what will he do? He will look at you pityingly and think you are demented. Then he will tell you very positively that there is nothing the matter with Minneapolis, but that there is something definitely the matter with any one who thinks there is! Yes, indeed! If you want to find out what is the matter with Minneapolis, it is still necessary to go for information to St. Paul. As you proceed westward, such a question becomes increasingly dangerous.

Ask a Kansas City man what is wrong with his town and he will probably attack you; and as for Los Angeles--! Such a question in Los Angeles would mean the calling out of the National Guard, the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary Club, and all the "boosters" (which is to say the entire population of the city); the declaring of martial law, a trial by summary court-martial, and your immediate execution. The manner of your execution would depend upon the phrasing of your question. If you had asked: "Is there anything wrong with Los Angeles?" they'd probably be content with selling you a city lot and then hanging you; but if you said: "What _is_ wrong with Los Angeles?" they would burn you at the stake and pickle your remains in vitriol.

* * * * *

At this juncture I find myself oppressed with the idea that I haven't done Buffalo justice. Also, I am annoyed to discover that I have written a great deal about business. When I write about business I am almost certain to be wrong. I dislike business very much--almost as much as I dislike politics--and the idea of infringing upon the field of friends of mine like Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, Miss Tarbell, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Will Irwin, and others, is extremely distasteful to me. But here is the trouble: so many writers have run a-muckraking that, now-a-days, when a writer appears in any American city, every one assumes that he is scouting around in search of "shame." The result is that you don't have to hunt for shame. People bring it to you by the cartload. They don't give you time to explain that you aren't a shame collector--that you don't even know a good piece of shame when you see it--they just drive up, dump it at your door, and go back to get another load.

My companion and I were new at the game in Buffalo. As the loads of shame began to arrive, we had a feeling that something was going wrong with our trip. We had come in search of cheerful adventure, yet here we were barricaded in by great bulwarks of shame. In a few hours there was enough shame around us to have lasted all the reformers and muckrakers I know a whole month. We couldn't see over the top of it. It hypnotized us. We began to think that probably shame _was_ what we wanted, after all. Every one we met assumed it was what we wanted, and when enough people assume a certain thing about you it is very difficult to buck against them. By the second day we had ceased to be human and had begun to act like muckrakers. We became solemn, silent, mysterious. We would pick up a piece of shame, examine it, say "_Ha!_" and stick it in our pockets. When some white-faced Buffalonian would drive up with another load of shame I would go up to him, wave my finger under his nose and, trying to look as much like Steffens as I could, say in a sepulchral voice: "Come! Out with it! What are you holding back? Tell me all! Who tore up the missing will?" Then that poor, honest, terrified Buffalonian would gasp and try to tell me all, between his chattering teeth. And when he had told me all I would continue to glare at him horribly, and ask for more. Then he would begin making up stories, inventing the most frightful and shocking lies so as not to disappoint me. I would print some of them here, but I have forgotten them. That is the trouble with the amateur muckraker or reformer. His mind isn't trained to his work. He is constantly allowing it to be diverted by some pleasant thing.

For instance, some one pointed out to me that the water front of the city, along the Niagara River, is so taken up by the railroads that the public does not get the benefit of that water life which adds so much to the charm of Cleveland and Detroit. That situation struck me as affording an excellent piece of muck to rake. For isn't it always the open season so far as railroads are concerned?

I ought to have kept my mind on that, but in my childlike way I let myself go ambling off through the parks. I found the parks delightful, and in one of them I came upon a beautiful Greek temple, built of marble and containing a collection of paintings of which any city should be proud. Now that is a disconcerting sort of thing to find when you have just abandoned yourself to the idea of becoming a muckraker! How can you muckrake a gallery like that? It can't be done.

* * * * *

With the possible exception of the Chicago Art Institute my companion and I did not see, upon our entire journey, any gallery of art in which such good judgment had been shown in the selection of paintings as in the Albright Gallery in Buffalo. Though the Chicago Art Institute is much the larger and richer museum, and though its collection is more comprehensive, its modern art is far more heterogeneous than that of Buffalo. One admires that Albright Gallery not only for the paintings which hang upon its walls, but also for those which do not hang there. Judgment has been shown not only in selecting paintings, but (one concludes) in rejecting gifts. I do not know that the Albright Gallery has rejected gifts, but I do know that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Chicago Art Institute have, at times, failed to reject gifts which should have been rejected. Almost all museums fail in that respect in their early days. When a rich man offers a bad painting, or a roomful of bad paintings, the museum is afraid to say "No," because rich men must be propitiated. That has been the curse of art museums; they have to depend on rich men for support. And rich men, however generous they may be, and however much they may be interested in art, are, for the most part, lacking in any true and deep understanding of it. That is one trouble with being rich--it doesn't give you time to be much of anything else. If rich men really did _know_ art, there would not be so many art dealers, and so many art dealers would not be going to expensive tailors and riding in expensive limousines.

Those who control the Albright Gallery have been wise enough to specialize in modern American painting. They have not been impressed, as so many Americans still are impressed, by the sound of the word "Europe." Nor have they attempted to secure old masters.

Does it not seem a mistake for any museum not possessed of enormous wealth to attempt a collection of old masters? A really fine example of the work of an old master ties up a vast amount of money, and, however splendid it may be, it is only one canvas, after all; and one or two or three old masters do not make a representative collection. Rather, it seems to me, they tend to disturb balance in a small museum.

To many American ears "Europe" is still a magic word. It makes little difference that Europe remains the happy hunting ground of the advanced social climber; but it makes a good deal of difference that so many American students of the arts continue to believe that there is some mystic thing to be gotten over there which is unobtainable at home. Europe has done much for us and can still do much for us, but we must learn not to accept blindly as we have in the past. Until quite recently, American art museums did, for the most part, buy European art which was in many instances absolutely inferior to the art produced at home. And unless I am very much mistaken a third-rate portrait painter, with a European name (and a clever dealer to push him) can still come over here and reap a harvest of thousands while Americans with more ability are making hundreds.

[Illustration: In a few hours there was enough shame around us to have lasted all the reformers and muckrakers I know a whole month]

One of the brightest signs for American painting to-day is the fact that it is now found profitable to make and sell forgeries of the works of our most distinguished modern artists--even living ones. This is a new and encouraging situation. A few years ago it was hardly worth a forger's time to make, say, a false Hassam, when he might just as well be making a Corot--which reminds me of an amusing thing a painter said to me the other day.

We were passing through an art gallery, when I happened to see at the end of one room three canvases in the familiar manner of Corot.

"What a lot of Corots there are in this country," I remarked.

"Yes," he replied. "Of the ten thousand canvases painted by Corot, there are thirty thousand in the United States."

* * * * *

There are two interesting hotels in Buffalo. One, the Iroquois, is characterized by a kind of solid dignity and has for years enjoyed a high reputation. It is patronized to-day at luncheon time by many of Buffalo's leading business men. Another, the Statler, is more "commercial" in character. My companion and I happened to stop at the latter, and we became very much interested in certain things about it. For one thing, every room in the hotel has running ice water and a bath--either a tub or a shower. Everywhere in that hotel we saw signs. At the desk, when we entered, hung a sign which read: _Clerk on duty, Mr. Pratt_.

There were signs in our bedrooms, too. I don't remember all of them, but there was one bearing the genial invitation: _Criticize and suggest for the improvement of our service. Complaint and suggestion box in lobby._

While I was in that hotel I had nothing to "criticize and suggest," but I have been in other hotels where, if such an invitation had been extended to me, I should have stuffed the box.

Besides the signs, we found in each of our rooms the following: a clothes brush; a card bearing on one side a calendar and on the other side a list of all trains leaving Buffalo, and their times of departure; a memorandum pad and pencil by the telephone; a Bible ("Placed in this hotel by the Gideons"), and a pincushion, containing not only a variety of pins (including a large safety pin), but also needles threaded with black thread and white, and buttons of different kinds, even to a suspender button.

[Illustration: My companion and I made excuses to go downstairs and wash our hands in the public washroom, just for the pleasure of doing so without fear of being attacked by a swarthy brigand with a brush]

But aside from the prompt service we received, I think the thing which pleased us most about that hotel was a large sign in the public wash room, downstairs. Had I come from the West I am not sure that sign would have startled me so much, but coming from New York--! Well, this is what it said:

_Believing that voluntary service in washrooms is distasteful to guests, attendants are instructed to give no service which the guest does not ask for._

Time and again, while we were in Buffalo, my companion and I made excuses to go downstairs and wash our hands in the public washroom, just for the pleasure of doing so without fear of being attacked by a swarthy brigand with a brush. We became positively fond of the melancholy washroom boy in that hotel. There was something pathetic in the way he stood around waiting for some one to say: "Brush me!" Day after day he pursued his policy of watchful waiting, hoping against hope that something would happen--that some one would fall down in the mud and really need to be brushed; that some one would take pity on him and let himself be brushed anyhow. The pathos of that boy's predicament began to affect us deeply. Finally we decided, just before leaving Buffalo, to go downstairs and let him brush us. We did so. When we asked him to do it he went very white at first. Then, with a glad cry, he leaped at us and did his work. It was a real brushing we got that day--not a mere slap on the back with a whisk broom, meaning "Stand and deliver!" but the kind of brushing that takes the dust out of your clothes. The wash room was full of dust before he got through. Great clouds of it went floating up the stairs, filling the hotel lobby and making everybody sneeze. When he finished we were renovated. "How much do you think we ought to give him for all this?" I asked of my companion.

"If the conventional dime which we give the washroom boys in New York hotels," he replied, "is proper payment for the services they render, I should say we ought to give this boy about twenty-seven dollars."

* * * * *

There are many other things about Buffalo which should be mentioned. There is the Buffalo Club--the dignified, solid old club of the city; and there is the Saturn Club, "where women cease from troubling and the wicked are at rest." And there is Delaware Avenue, on which stand both these clubs, and many of the city's finest homes.

Unlike certain famous old residence streets in other cities, Delaware Avenue still holds out against the encroachments of trade. It is a wide, fine street of trees and lawns and residences. Despite the fact that many of its older houses are of the ugly though substantial architecture of the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and many of its newer ones lack architectural distinction, the general effect of Delaware Avenue is still fine and American.

My impression of this celebrated street was necessarily hurried, having been acquired in the course of sundry dashes down its length in motor cars. I recall a number of its buildings only vaguely now, but there is one which I admired every time I saw it, and which still clings in my memory both as a building and as a sermon on the enduring beauty of simplicity and good, old-fashioned lines--the office of Spencer Kellogg & Sons, at the corner of Niagara Square.

* * * * *

It happened that just before we left New York there was a newspaper talk about some rich women who had organized a movement of protest against the ever-increasing American tendency toward show and extravagance. We were, therefore, doubly interested when we heard of a similar activity on the part of certain fashionable women of Buffalo.

Our hostess at a dinner party there was the first to mention it, but several other ladies added details. They had formed a few days before a society called the "Simplicity League," the members of which bound themselves to give each other moral support in their efforts to return to a more primitive mode of life. I cannot recall now whether the topic came up before or after the butler and the footman came around with caviar and cocktails, but I know that I had learned a lot about it from charming and enthusiastic ladies at either side of me before the sherry had come on; that, by the time the sauterne was served, I was deeply impressed, and that, with the roast and the Burgundy, I was prepared to take the field against all comers, not only in favor of simplicity, but in favor of anything and everything which was favored by my hostess. Throughout the salad, the ices, the Turkish coffee, and the Corona-coronas I remained her champion, while with the port--ah! nothing, it seems to me, recommends the old order of things quite so thoroughly as old port, which has in it a sermon and a song. After dinner the ladies told us more about their league.

"We don't intend to go to any foolish extremes," said one who looked like the apotheosis of the Rue de la Paix. "We are only going to scale things down and eliminate waste. There is a lot of useless show in this country which only makes it hard for people who can't afford things. And even for those who can, it is wrong. Take the matter of dress--a dress can be simple without looking cheap. And it is the same with a dinner. A dinner can be delicious without being elaborate. Take this little dinner we had to-night--"

"_What?_" I cried.

"Yes," she nodded. "In future we are all going to give plain little dinners like this."

"_Plain?_" I gasped.

Our hostess overheard my choking cry.

"Yes," she put in. "You see, the league is going to practise what it preaches."

"But I didn't think it had begun yet! I thought this dinner was a kind of farewell feast--that it was--"

[Illustration: I was prepared to take the field against all comers, not only in favor of simplicity, but in favor of anything and everything which was favored by my hostess]

Our hostess looked grieved. The other ladies of the league gazed at me reproachfully.

"Why!" I heard one exclaim to another, "I don't believe he noticed!"

"Didn't you notice?" asked my hostess.

I was cornered.

"Notice?" I asked. "Notice _what_?"

"That we didn't have champagne!" she said.

Chapter III

Cleveland Characteristics

Before leaving home we were presented with a variety of gifts, ranging all the way from ear muffs to advice. Having some regard for the esthetic, we threw away the ear muffs, determining to buy ourselves fur caps when we should need them. But the advice we could not throw away; it stuck to us like a poor relation.

In the parlor car, on the way from Buffalo to Cleveland, our minds got running on sad subjects.

"We have come out to find interesting things--to have adventures," said my blithe companion. "Now supposing we go on and on and nothing happens. What will we do then? The publishers will have spent all this money for our traveling, and what will they get?"

I told him that, in such an event, we would make up adventures.

"What, for instance?" he demanded.

I thought for a time. Then I said:

"Here's a good scheme--we could begin now, right here in this car. You act like a crazy man. I will be your keeper. You run up and down the aisle shouting--talk wildly to these people--stamp on your hat--do anything you like. It will interest the passengers and give us something nice to write about. And you could make a picture of yourself, too."

Instead of appreciating that suggestion he was annoyed with me, so I ventured something else.

"How would it be for you to beat a policeman on the helmet?"

He didn't care for that either.

"Why don't you think of something for yourself to do?" he said, somewhat sourly.

"All right," I returned. "I'm willing to do my share. I will poison you and get arrested for it."

"If you do that," he criticized, "who will make the pictures?"

I saw that he was in a humor to find fault with anything I proposed, so I let him ramble on. He had a regular orgy of imaginary disaster, running all the way from train wrecks, in which I was killed and he was saved only to have the bother and expense of shipping my remains home, to fires in which my notebooks were burned up, leaving on his hands a lot of superb but useless drawings.

After a time he suggested that we make up a list of the things we had been warned of. I did not wish to do it, but, acting on the theory that fever must run its course, I agreed, so we took paper and pencil and began. It required about two hours to get everything down, beginning with _Aches_, _Actresses_, _Adenoids_, _Alcoholism_, _Amnesia_, _Arson_, etc., and running on, through the alphabet to _Zero weather_, _Zolaism_, and _Zymosis_.

After looking over the category, my companion said:

"The trouble with this list is that it doesn't present things in the order in which they may reasonably be expected to occur. For instance, you might get zymosis, or attempt to write like Zola, at almost any time, yet those two dangers are down at the bottom of the list. On the other hand, things like actresses, alcoholism, and arson seem remote. We must rearrange."

I thought it wise to give in to him, so we set to work again. This time we made two lists: one of general dangers--things which might overtake us almost anywhere, such as scarlet fever, hardening of the arteries, softening of the brain, and "road shows" from the New York Winter Garden; another arranged geographically, according to our route. Thus, for example, instead of listing Elbert Hubbard under the letter "H," we elevated him to first place, because he lives near Buffalo, which was our first stop.

I didn't want to put down Hubbard's name at all--I thought it would please him too much if he ever heard about it. I said to my companion:

"We have already passed Buffalo. And, besides, there are some things which the instinct of self-preservation causes one to recollect without the aid of any list."

"I know it," he returned, stubbornly, "but, in the interest of science, I wish this list to be complete."

So we put down everything: Elbert Hubbard, Herbert Kaufman, Eva Tanguay, Upton Sinclair, and all.

[Illustration: Chamber of Commerce representatives were with us all the first day and until we went to our rooms, late at night]

A few selected items from our geographical list may interest the reader as giving him some idea of the locations of certain things we had to fear. For example, west of Chicago we listed _Oysters_, and north of Chicago _Frozen Ears_ and _Frozen Noses_--the latter two representing the dangers of the Minnesota winter. So our list ran on until it reached the point where we would cross the Great Divide, at which place the word "_Boosters_" was writ large.

I recall now that, according to our geographical arrangement, there wasn't much to be afraid of until we got beyond Chicago, and that the first thing we looked forward to with real dread was the cold in Minnesota. We dreaded it more than arson, because if some one sets fire to your ear or your nose, you know it right away, and can send in an alarm; but cold is sneaky. It seems, from what they say, that you can go along the street, feeling perfectly well, and with no idea that anything is going wrong with you, until some experienced resident of the place touches you upon the arm and says: "Excuse me, sir, but you have dropped something." Then you look around, surprised, and there is your ear, lying on the sidewalk. But that is not the worst of it. Before you can thank the man, or pick your ear up and dust it off, some one will very likely come along and step on it. I do not think they do it purposely; they are simply careless about where they walk. But whether it happens by accident or design, whether the ear is spoiled or not, whether or not you be wearing your ear at the time of the occurrence--in any case there is something exceedingly offensive, to the average man, in the idea of a total stranger's walking on his ear.

I mention this to point a moral. However prepared we may be, in life, we are always unprepared. However informed we may be, we are always uninformed. We gaze up at the sky, dreading to-morrow's rain, and slip upon to-day's banana peel. We move toward Cleveland dreading the Minnesota winter which is yet far off, having no thought of the "booster," whom we believe to be still farther off. And what happens? We step from the train, all innocent and trusting, and then, ah, then----!

* * * * *

If it be true, indeed, that the "booster" flourishes more furiously the farther west you find him, let me say (and I say it after having visited California, Oregon, and Washington) that Cleveland must be newly located upon the map. For, if "boosting" be a western industry, Cleveland is not an Ohio city, nor even a Pacific Slope city, but is an island out in the midst of the Pacific Ocean.

Nor is this a mere opinion of my own. Upon the mastodonic brow of the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce there hangs an official laurel wreath. The New York Bureau of Municipal Research invited votes from the secretaries of Chambers of Commerce and similar organizations in thirty leading cities, as to which of these bodies had accomplished most for its city, industrially, commercially, etc. Cleveland won.

No one who has caromed against the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce will wonder that Cleveland won. All other Chambers of Commerce I have met, sink into desuetude and insignificance when compared with that of Cleveland. Where others merely "boost," Cleveland "boosts" intensively. She can raise more bushels of statistics to the acre than other cities can quarts. And the more Cleveland statistics you hear, the more you become amazed that you do not live there. It seems reckless not to do so. The Cleveland Chamber of Commerce can prove this to you not merely with figures, but also with figures of speech.

Take the matter of population. Everybody knows that Cleveland is the "Sixth City" in the United States, but not everybody knows that in 1850 she was forty-third. The Chamber of Commerce told me that, but I have prepared some figures of my own which will, perhaps, give the reader some idea of Cleveland's magnitude. Cleveland is only a little smaller than Prague, while she has about 50,000 more people than Breslau.

If that does not impress you with the city's size, listen to this: Cleveland is actually twice as great, in population, as either Nagoya or Riga! Who would have believed it? The thing seems incredible! I never dreamed that such a situation existed until I looked it up in the "World Almanac." And some day, when I have more time, I intend to look up Nagoya and Riga in the atlas and find out where they are.

A Chamber of Commerce booklet gives me the further information that "Cleveland is the fifth American city in manufactures, and that she comes first in the manufacture of steel ships, heavy machinery, wire and wire nails, bolts and nuts, vapor stoves, electric carbons, malleable castings, and telescopes"--a list which, by the way, sounds like one of Lewis Carroll's compilations.

The information that Cleveland is also the first city in the world in its record, per capita, for divorce, does not come to me from the Chamber of Commerce booklet--but probably the fact was not known when the booklet was printed.

Besides being first in so many interesting fields, Cleveland is the second of the Great Lake cities, and is also second in "the value of its product of women's outer wearing apparel and fancy knit goods."

It is, furthermore, "the cheapest market in the North for pig iron."

There are other figures I could give (saving myself a lot of trouble, at the same time, because I only have to copy them from a book), but I want to stop and let that pig-iron statement sink into you as it sank into me when I first read it. I wonder if you knew it before? I am ashamed to admit it, but _I_ did not. I didn't consider where I could get my pig iron the cheapest. When I wanted pig iron I simply went out and bought it, at the nearest place, right in New York. That is, I bought it in New York unless I happened to be traveling when the craving came upon me. In that case I would buy a small supply wherever I happened to be--just enough to last me until I could get home again. I don't know how pig iron affects you, but with me it acts peculiarly. Sometimes I go along for weeks without even thinking of it; then, suddenly, I feel that I must have some at once--even if it is the middle of the night. Of course a man doesn't care what he pays for his pig iron when he feels like that. But in my soberer moments I now realize that it is best to be economical in such matters. The wisest plan is to order enough pig iron from Cleveland to keep you for several months, being careful to notice when the supply is running low, so that you can order another case.

[Illustration: It is an Elizabethan building, with a heavy timbered front, suggesting some ancient, hospitable, London coffee house where wits of old were used to meet]

Apropos of this let me say here, in response to many inquiries as to what the nature of this work of mine would be, that I intend it to be "useful as well as ornamental"--to quote the happy phrase, coined by James Montgomery Flagg. That is, I intend not only to entertain and instruct the reader but, where opportunity offers, to give him the benefit of good sound advice, such as I have just given with regard to the purchasing of pig iron.

Chapter IV

More Cleveland Characteristics

Because I have told you so much about the Chamber of Commerce you must not assume that the Chamber of Commerce was with us constantly while we were in Cleveland, for that is not the case. True, Chamber of Commerce representatives were with us all the first day and until we went to our rooms, late at night. But at our rooms they left us, merely taking the precaution to lock us in. No attempt was made to assist us in undressing or to hear our prayers or tuck us into bed. Once in our rooms we were left to our own devices. We were allowed to read a little, if we wished, to whisper together, or even to amuse ourselves by playing with the fixtures in the bathroom.

On the morning of the second day they came and let us out, and took us to see a lot of interesting and edifying sights, but by afternoon they had acquired sufficient confidence in us to turn us loose for a couple of hours, allowing us to roam about, at large, while they attended to their mail.

We made use of the freedom thus extended to us by presenting several letters of introduction to Cleveland gentlemen, who took us to various clubs.

Almost every large city in the country has one solid, dignified old club, occupying a solid, dignified old building on a corner near the busy part of town. The building is always recognizable, even to a stranger. It suggests a fine cuisine, an excellent wine cellar, and a great variety of good cigars in prime condition. In the front of such a club there are large windows of plate glass, back of which the passer-by may catch a glimpse of a trim white mustache and a silk hat. Looking at the outside of the building, you know that there is a big, high-ceiled room, at the front, dark in color and containing spacious leather chairs, which should (and often do) contain aristocratic gentlemen who have attained years of discretion and positions of importance. One feels cheated if, on entering, one fails to encounter a member carrying a malacca stick and wearing waxed mustaches, spats, and a gardenia. The Union Club of New York is such a club; so is the Pacific Union of San Francisco; so is the Chicago Club; and so, I fancy, from my glimpse of it, is the Union Club of Cleveland.

In the larger cities there is usually another club, somewhat less formal in architecture, decoration, and spirit, and given over, broadly speaking, to the younger men--though there is often a good deal of duplication of membership between the first mentioned type of club and the second. The Tavern of Cleveland is of the second category; so is the Saturn Club of Buffalo, of which I spoke in a former chapter. Almost every good-sized city has, likewise, its university club, its athletic club, and its country club. University clubs vary a good deal in character, but athletic clubs and country clubs are in general pretty true to type.

Besides such clubs as these, one finds, here and there, in the United States, a few clubs of a character more unusual. Cleveland has three unusual clubs: the Rowfant, a book collector's club; the Chagrin Valley Hunt Club, at Gates Mills, near the city, and the Hermit Club.

Were it not for the fact that I detest the words "artistic" and "bohemian," I should apply them to the Hermit Club. It is one of the few clubs outside New York, Chicago, and San Francisco possessing its own house and made up largely of men following the arts, or interested in them. Like the Lambs of New York, the Hermits give shows in their clubhouse, but the Lambs' is a club of actors, authors, composers, stage managers, etc., while the Hermit Club is made up, so far as the theater is concerned, of amateurs--amateurs having among them sufficient talent to write and act their own shows, design their own costumes, paint their own scenery, compose their own music, and even play it, too--for there is an orchestra of members. I have never seen a Hermits' show, and I am sorry, for I have heard that they are worth seeing. Certainly their clubhouse is. It is an Elizabethan building, with a heavy timbered front, suggesting some ancient, hospitable, London coffee house where wits of old were used to meet. This illusion is enhanced by the surroundings of the club, for it stands in an alley--or perhaps I had better say a narrow lane--and is huddled down between the walls of taller buildings.

The pleasant promise of the exterior is fulfilled within. The ground floor rooms are low and cozy, and have a pleasant "rambling" feeling--a step or two up here or down there. The stairway, leading to the floor above, is narrow, with a genial kind of narrowness that seems to say: "There is no one here with whom you'll mind rubbing elbows as you pass." Ascending, you reach the main room, which occupies the entire upper floor. This room is the Hermit Club. It is here that members gather and that the more intimate shows are given. Large, with dark panels, and heavy beams which spring up and lose themselves in warm shadows overhead, it is a room combining dignity with gracious informality. And let me add that, to my mind, such a combination is at once rare and desirable in a club building--or, for the matter of that, in a home or a human being. A club which is too informal is likely to seem trivial; a club too dignified, austere. A club should neither seem to be a joke, nor yet a mausoleum. If it be magnificent, it should not, at least, overwhelm one with its magnificence; it should not chill one with its grandeur, so that one lowers one's voice to a whisper and involuntarily removes one's hat.

In some clubs a man leaves his hat upon his head or takes it off, as he prefers. In others custom demands that he remove it. Some men will argue that if you give a man his choice in that matter he feels more at home; others contend that if he takes his hat off he will, at all events, _look_ more at home, whereas, if he leaves it on he will look more as though he were in a hotel. These are matters of opinion. There are many pleasant clubs which differ on this minor point. But I do not think that any club may be called pleasant in which a man is inclined to take off his hat instinctively because of an air of grim formality which he encounters on entering the door. To make an Irish bull upon this subject, one of the nicest things that I remember of the Hermit Club is that I don't remember whether we wore our hats while there or not.

* * * * *

The Chagrin Valley Hunt Club lies in a pleasant valley which acquired its name through the error of a pioneer (General Moses Cleveland himself, if I remember rightly) who, when sailing up Lake Erie, landed at this point, mistaking it for the site of Cleveland, farther on, and was hence chagrined. Here, more than a hundred years ago, the little village of Gates Mills was settled by men whose buildings, left behind them, still proclaim their New England origin. If ever I saw a Connecticut village outside the State of Connecticut, that village is Gates Mills, Ohio. Low white farmhouses, with picturesque doorways and small windows divided into many panes, straggle pleasantly along on either side of the winding country road, and there is even an old meeting house, with a spire such as you may see in many a New England hamlet.

[Illustration: In this charming, homelike old building, with its grandfather's clock, its Windsor chairs, and its open wood fires, a visitor finds it hard to realize that he is in the "west"]

The old Gates house, which was built in 1812 by the miller from whom the place took its name, is passing a mellow old age as the house of the Hunt Club. In this charming, homelike old building, with its grandfather's clock, its Windsor chairs, and its open wood fires, a visitor finds its hard to realize that he is actually in a portion of the country which is still referred to, in New York, as "the west."

The Connecticut resemblance is accounted for by the fact that all this section of the country was in the Western Reserve, which belonged to, and was settled by, Connecticut. Thus travel teaches us! I knew practically nothing, until then, of the Western Reserve, and even less of hunt clubs. I had never been in a hunt club before, and my impressions of such institutions had been gleaned entirely from short stories and from prints showing rosy old rascals drinking. Probably because of these prints I had always thought that "horsey" people--particularly the "hunting set"--were generally addicted to the extensive (and not merely external) use of alcohol. As others may be of the same impression it is perhaps worth remarking that, while in the Hunt Club, we saw a number of persons drinking tea, and that only two were drinking alcoholic beverages--those two being visitors: an illustrator and a writer from New York.

I mentioned that to the M. F. H., and told him of my earlier impression as to hunt-club habits.

"Lots of people have that idea," he smiled, "but it is wrong. As a matter of fact, few hunting people are teetotalers, but those who ride straight are almost invariably temperate. They have to be. You can't be in the saddle six or eight hours at a stretch, riding across country, and do it on alcohol."

I also learned from the M. F. H. certain interesting things regarding a fox's scent. Without having thought upon the subject, I had somehow acquired the idea that hounds got the scent from the actual tracks of the animal they followed. That is not so. The scent comes from the body of the fox and is left behind him suspended in the air. And, other conditions being equal, the harder your fox runs the stronger his scent will be. The most favorable scent for following is what is known as a "breast-high scent"--meaning a scent which hangs in suspension at a point sufficiently high to render it unnecessary for the hounds to put their heads down to the ground. Sometimes a scent hangs low; sometimes, on the other hand, it rises so that, particularly in a covert, the riders, seated upon their horses, can smell it, while the hounds cannot.

But I think I have said enough about this kind of thing. It is a dangerous topic, for the terminology and etiquette of hunting are even more elaborate than those of golf. Probably I have made some mistake already; indeed, I know of one which I just escaped--I started to write "dogs" instead of "hounds," and that is not done. I have a horror of displaying my ignorance on matters of this kind. For I take a kind of pride--and I think most men do--in being correct about comparatively unimportant things. It is permissible to be wrong about important things, such as politics, finance, and reform, and to explain them, although you really know nothing about them. But with fox hunting it is different. There are some people who really _do_ know about that, and they are likely to catch you.

* * * * *

Two other Cleveland organizations should be mentioned.

Troop A of the Ohio National Guard is known as one of the most capable bodies of militia in the entire country. It has been in existence for some forty years, and its membership has always been recruited from among the older and wealthier families of the city. The fame of Troop A has reached beyond Ohio, for under its popular title, "The Black Horse Troop," it has gone three times to Washington to act as escort to Presidents of the United States at the time of their inauguration. Cleveland is, furthermore, the headquarters for trotting racing. The Cleveland Gentlemen's Driving Club is an old and exceedingly active body, and its president, Mr. Harry K. Devereux, is also president of the National Trotting Association.

* * * * *

A curious and characteristic thing which we encountered in no other city is the Three-Cent Cult--a legacy left to the city by the late Tom Johnson. Cleveland's street railway system is controlled by the city and the fare is not five cents, but three. But that is not all. A municipal lighting plant is, or soon will be, in operation, with charges of from one to three cents per kilowatt hour. Also the city has gone into the dance-hall business. There, too, the usual rate is cut: fifteen cents will buy five dances in the municipal dance halls, instead of three. No one will attempt to dispute that dancing, to-day, takes precedence over the mere matter of eating, yet it is worth mentioning that the Three-Cent Cult has even found its way into the lunch room. Sandwiches may be purchased in Cleveland for three cents which are not any worse than five-cent sandwiches in other cities.

Perhaps the finest thing about the Three-Cent Cult is the fact that it runs counter to one of the most pronounced and pitiable traits of our race: wastefulness. Sometimes it seems that, as a people, we take less pride in what we save than in what we throw away. We have a "There's more where that came from!" attitude of mind. A man with thousands a year says: "Hell! What's a hundred?" and a man with hundreds imitates him on a smaller scale. The humble fraction of a nickel is despised. All honor, then, to Cleveland--the city which teaches her people that two cents is worth saving, and then helps them to save it. Two points, in this connection, are interesting:

One, that Cleveland has been trying to induce the Treasury Department to resume the coinage of a three-cent piece; another, that the percentage of depositors in savings banks in Cleveland, in proportion to the population, is higher than in most other cities. And, by the way, the savings banks pay 4 per cent.

* * * * *

We were taken in automobiles from one end of the city to the other. Down by the docks we saw gigantic, strange machines, expressive of Cleveland's lake commerce--machines for loading and unloading ships in the space of a few hours. One type of machine would take a regular steel coal car in its enormous claws and turn that car over, emptying the load of coal into a ship as you might empty a cup of flour with your hand. Then it would set the car down again, right side up, upon the track, only to snatch the next one and repeat the operation.

Another machine for unloading ore would send its great steel hands down into the vessel's hold, snatch them up filled with tons of the precious product of the mines, and, reaching around backward, drop the load into a waiting railroad car. The present Great Lakes record for loading is held by the steamer _Corry_, which has taken on a cargo of 10,000 tons of ore in twenty-five minutes. The record for unloading is held by the _George F. Perkins_, from which a cargo of 10,250 tons of ore was removed in two hours and forty-five minutes.

Some of the largest steamers of the Great Lakes may be compared, in size, with ocean liners. A modern ore boat is a steel shell more than six hundred feet long, with a little space set aside at the bows for quarters and a little space astern for engines. The deck is a series of enormous hatches, so that practically the entire top of the ship may be removed in order to facilitate loading and unloading. As these great vessels (many of which are built in Cleveland, by the way) are laid up throughout the winter, when navigation on the Great Lakes is closed, it is the custom to drive them hard during the open season. Some of them make as many as thirty trips in the eight months of their activity, and an idea of the volume of their traffic may be gotten from the statement that "the iron-ore tonnage of the Cleveland district is greater than the total tonnage of exports and imports at New York Harbor." One of the little books about Cleveland, which they gave me, makes that statement. It does not sound as though it could be true, but I do not think they would dare print untruths about a thing like that, no matter how anxious they might be to "boost." However, I feel it my duty to add that the same books says: "Fifty per cent. of the population of the United States and Canada _lies_ within a radius of five hundred miles of Cleveland."

* * * * *

I find that when I try to recall to my mind the picture of a city, I think of certain streets which, for one reason or another, engraved themselves more deeply than other streets upon my memory. One of my clearest mental photographs of Cleveland is of endless streets of homes.

Now, although I saw many houses, large and small, possessing real beauty--most of them along the boulevards, in the Wade Park Allotment or on Euclid Heights, where modern taste has had its opportunity--it is nevertheless true that, for some curious reason connected with the workings of the mind, those streets which I remember best, after some months of absence, are not the streets possessed of the most charm.

I remember vividly, for instance, my disappointment on viewing the decay of Euclid Avenue, which I had heard compared with Delaware, in Buffalo, and which, in reality, does not compare with it at all, being rather run down, and lined with those architectural monstrosities of the 70's which, instead of mellowing into respectable antiquity, have the unhappy faculty of becoming more horrible with time, like old painted harridans. Another vivid recollection is of a sad monotony of streets, differing only in name, containing blocks and blocks and miles and miles of humble wooden homes, all very much alike in their uninteresting duplication.

These memories would make my mental Cleveland picture somewhat sad, were it not for another recollection which dominates the picture and glorifies the city. This recollection, too, has to do with squalid thoroughfares, but in a different way.

Down near the railroad station, where the "red-light district" used to be, there has long stood a tract of several blocks of little buildings, dismal and dilapidated. They are coming down. Some of them have come down. And there, in that place which was the home of ugliness and vice, there now shows the beginning of the city's Municipal Group Plan. This plan is one of the finest things which any city in the land has contemplated for its own beautification. In this country it was, at the time it originated, unique; and though other cities (such as Denver and San Francisco) are now at work on similar improvements, the Cleveland plan remains, I believe, the most imposing and the most complete of its kind.

When an American city has needed some new public building it has been the custom, in the past, for the politicians to settle on a site, and cause plans to be drawn (by their cousins), and cause those plans to be executed (by their brothers-in-law). This may have been "practical politics," but it has hardly resulted in practical city improvement.

No one will dispute the convenience of having public buildings "handy" to one another, but there may still be found, even in Cleveland, men whose feeling for beauty is not so highly developed as their feeling for finance; men who shake their heads at the mention of a group plan; who don't like to "see all that money wasted." I met one or two such. But I will venture the prophecy that, when the Cleveland plan is a little farther advanced, so that the eye can realize the amazing splendor of the thing, as it will ultimately be, there will be no one left in Cleveland to convert.

[Illustration: Down by the docks we saw gigantic, strange machines, expressive of Cleveland's lake commerce--machines for loading and unloading ships in the space of a few hours]

It is a fine and unusual thing, in itself, for an American city to be planning its own beauty fifty years ahead. Cleveland is almost un-American in that! But when the work done--yes, and before it is done--this single great improvement will have transformed Cleveland from an ordinary looking city to one of great distinction.

Fancy emerging from a splendid railway station to find yourself facing, not the little bars and dingy buildings which so often face a station, but a splendid mall, two thousand feet long and six hundred wide, parked in the center and surrounded by fine buildings of even cornice height and harmonious classical design. At one side of the station will stand the public library; at the other the Federal building; and at the far extremity of the mall, the county building and the city hall.

Three of these buildings are already standing. Two more are under way. The plan is no longer a mere plan but is already, in part, an actuality.

When the transformation is complete Cleveland will not only have re-made herself but will have set a magnificent example to other cities. By that time she may have ceased to call herself "Sixth City"--for population changes. But if a hundred other cities follow her with group plans, and whether those plans be of greater magnitude or less, it must never be forgotten that Cleveland had the appreciation and the courage to begin the movement in America, not merely on paper but in stone and marble, and that, without regard to population, she therefore has a certain right, to-day, to call herself "First City."

Michigan Meanderings

Chapter V

Detroit The Dynamic

Because Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit are, in effect, situated upon Lake Erie, and because they are cities of approximately the same size, and because of many other resemblances between them, they always seem to me like three sisters living amicably in three separate houses on the same block.

As I personify them, Buffalo, living at the eastern end of the block, is the smallest sister. She has, I fear, a slight tendency to be anemic. Her husband, who was in the shipping business, is getting old. He has retired and is living in contentment in the old house, sitting all day on the side porch, behind the vines, with his slippers cocked up on the porch rail, smoking cigars and reading his newspapers in peace.

Cleveland is the fat sister. She is very rich, having married into the Rockefeller family. She is placid, satisfied, dogmatically religious, and inclined to platitudes and missionary work. Her house, in the middle of the block, is a mansion of the seventies. It has a cupola and there are iron fences on the roof, as though to keep the birds from falling off. The lawn is decorated with a pair of iron dogs. But there are plans in the old house for a new one.

The first two sisters have a kind of family resemblance which the third does not fully share. Detroit seems younger than her sisters. Indeed, you might almost mistake her for one of their daughters. The belle of the family, she is married to a young man who is making piles of money in the automobile business--and spending piles, too. Their house, at the western end of the block, is new and charming.

I am half in love with Detroit. I may as well admit it, for you are sure to find me out. She is beautiful--not with the warm, passionate beauty of San Francisco, the austere mountain beauty of Denver, nor the strange, sophisticated, destroying beauty of New York, but with a sweet domestic kind of beauty, like that of a young wife, gay, strong, alert, enthusiastic; a twinkle in her eye, a laugh upon her lips. She has temperament and charm, qualities as rare, as fascinating, and as difficult to define in a city as in a human being.

Do you ask why she is different from her sisters? I was afraid you might ask that. They tell a romantic story. I don't like to repeat gossip, but--They say that, long ago, when her mother lived upon a little farm by the river, there came along a dashing voyageur, from France, who loved her. Mind you, I vouch for nothing. It is a legend. I do not affirm that it is true. But--_voila_! There is Detroit. She is different.

If you will consider these three fictitious sisters as figures in a cartoon--a cartoon not devoid of caricature--you will get an impression of my impression of three cities. My three sisters are merely symbols, like the figures of Uncle Sam and John Bull. A symbol is a kind of generalization, and if you disagree with these generalizations of mine (as I think you may, especially if you live in Buffalo or Cleveland), let me remind you that some one has said: "All generalizations are false--including this one." One respect in which my generalization is false is in picturing Detroit as young. As a matter of fact, she is the oldest city of the three, having been settled by the Sieur de la Mothe Cadillac in 1701, ninety years before the first white man built his hut where Buffalo now stands, and ninety-five years before the settlement of Cleveland. This is the fact. Yet I hold that there is about Detroit something which expresses ebullient youth, and that Buffalo and Cleveland, if they do not altogether lack the quality of youth, have it in a less degree.

* * * * *

So far as I recall, Chicago was the first American city to adopt a motto, or, as they call it now, a "slogan."

I remember long ago a rather crude bust of a helmeted Amazon bearing upon her proud chest the words: "I Will!" She was supposed to typify Chicago, and I rather think she did. Cleveland's slogan is the conservative but significant "Sixth City," but Detroit comes out with a youthful shriek of self-satisfaction, declaring that: "In Detroit Life is Worth Living!" Doesn't that claim reflect the quality of youth? Doesn't it remind you of the little boy who says to the other little boy: "My father can lick your father"? Of course it has the patent-medicine flavor, too; Detroit, by her "slogan," is a cure-all. But that is not deliberate. It is exaggeration springing from natural optimism and exuberance. Life is doubtless more worth living in Detroit than in some other cities, but I submit that, so long as Mark Twain's "damn human race" retains those foibles of mind, morals, and body for which it is so justly famous, the "slogan" of the city of Detroit guarantees a little bit too much.

I find the same exuberance in the publications issued by the Detroit Board of Commerce. Having just left the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, I sedulously avoided contact with the Detroit body--one can get an overdose of that kind of thing. But I have several books. One is a magazine called "The Detroiter," with the subtitle "Spokesman of Optimism." It is full of news of new hotels and new factories and new athletic clubs and all kinds of expansion. It fairly bursts from its covers with enthusiasm--and with business banalities about Detroit's "onward sweep," her "surging ahead," her "banner year," and her "efficiency." "Be a Booster," it advises, and no one can say that it does not live up to its principles. Indeed, as I look it over, I wonder if I have not done Detroit an injustice in giving to Cleveland the blue ribbon for "boosting." The Detroit Board of Commerce even goes so far in its "boosting" as to "boost" Detroit into seventh place among American cities, while the "World Almanac" (most valuable volume on the one-foot shelf of books I carried on my travels) places Detroit ninth.

Like Cleveland, I find that Detroit is first in the production of a great many things. In fact, the more I read these books issued by commercial bodies, the more I am amazed at the varied things there are for cities to be first in. It is a miserable city, indeed, which is first in nothing at all. Detroit is first in the production of overalls, stoves, varnish, soda and salt products, automobile accessories, adding machines, pharmaceutical manufactures, aluminum castings, in shipbuilding on the Great Lakes and, above all, in the manufacture of motor cars. And, as the Board of Commerce adds significantly, "That's not all!"

But it is enough.

* * * * *

The motor-car development in Detroit interested me particularly. When I asked in Buffalo why Detroit was "surging ahead" so rapidly in comparison with certain other cities, they answered, as I knew they would: "It's the automobile business."

But when I asked why the automobile business should have settled on Detroit as a headquarters instead of some other city (as, for instance, Buffalo), they found it difficult to say. One Buffalonian informed me that Detroit banks had been more liberal than those of other cities in supporting the motor industry in its early days. This was, however, vigorously denied in Detroit. When I mentioned it to the president of one of the largest automobile concerns he laughed.

"Banks don't do business that way," he declared. "The very thing banks do not do is to support new, untried industries. After you have proved that you can make both motor cars and money they'll take care of you. Not before. On the other hand, when the banks get confidence in any one kind of business they very often run to the opposite extreme. That was the way it used to be in the lumber business. Most of the early fortunes of Detroit were made in lumber. The banks got used to the lumber business, so that a few years ago all a man had to do was to print 'Lumber' on his letterhead, write to the banks and get a line of credit. Later, when the automobile business began to boom, the same thing happened over again: the man whose letterhead bore the word 'Automobiles' was taken care of." The implication was that sometimes he was taken care of a little bit too well.

"Then why did Detroit become the automobile center?" I asked.

The question proved good for an hour's discussion among certain learned pundits of the "trade" who were in the president's office at the time I asked it.

[Illustration: In midstream passes a continual parade of freighters ... and in their swell you may see, teetering, all kinds of craft, from proud white yachts to canoes]

First, it was concluded, several early motor "bugs" happened to live in or near Detroit. Henry Ford lived there. He was always experimenting with "horseless carriages" in the early days and being laughed at for it. Also, a man named Packard built a car at Warren, Ohio. But the first gasoline motor car to achieve what they call an "output" was the funny little one-cylinder Oldsmobile which steered with a tiller and had a curved dash like a sleigh. It is to the Olds Motor Company, which built that car, that a large majority of the automobile manufactories in Detroit trace their origin. Indeed, there are to-day no less than a dozen organizations, the heads of which were at some time connected with the original Olds Company. This fifteen-year-old forefather of the automobile business was originally made in Lansing, Mich., but the plant was moved to Detroit, where the market for labor and materials was better. The Packard plant was also moved there, and for the same reasons, plus the fact that the company was being financed by a group of young Detroit men.

It was not, perhaps, entirely as an investment that these wealthy young Detroiters first became interested in the building of motor cars. That is to say, I do not think they would have poured money so freely into a scheme to manufacture something else--something less picturesque in its appeal to the sporting instinct and the imagination. The automobile, with its promise, was just the right thing to interest rich young men, and it did interest them, and it has made many of them richer than they were before.

It seems to be an axiom that, if you start a new business anywhere, and it is successful, others will start in the same business beside you. One of the pundits referred me, for example, to Erie, Pa., where life is entirely saturated with engine and boiler ideas simply because the Erie City Iron Works started there and was successful. There are now sixteen engine and boiler companies in Erie, and all of them, I am assured, are there either directly or indirectly because the Erie City Iron Works is there. In other words, we sat in that office and had a very pleasant hour's talk merely to discover that there is truth in the familiar saying about birds of a feather.

When we got that settled and the pundits began to drift away to other plate-glass rooms along the mile, more or less, of corridor devoted to officials' offices, I became interested in a little wooden box which stood upon the president's large flat-top desk. I was told it was a dictagraph. Never having seen a dictagraph before, and being something of a child, I wished to play with it as I used to play with typewriters and letter-presses in my father's office years ago. And the president of this many-million-dollar corporation, being a kindly man with, of course, absolutely nothing to do but to supply itinerant scribes with playthings, let me toy with the machine. Sitting at the desk, he pressed a key. Then, without changing his position, he spoke into the air:

"Fred," he said, "there's some one here who wants to ask you a question."

Then the little wooden box began to talk.

"What does he want to ask about?" it said.

That put it up to me. I had to think of something to ask. I was conscious of a strange, unpleasant feeling of being hurried--of having to reply quickly before something happened--some breaking of connections.

I leaned toward the machine, but the president waved me back: "Just sit over there where you are."

Then I said: "I am writing articles about Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit. How would you compare them?"

"Well," replied the Fred-in-the-box, "I used to live in Cleveland. I've been here four years and I wouldn't want to go back."

After that we paused. I thought I ought to say something more to the box, but I didn't know just what.

"Is that all you want to know?" it asked.

"Yes," I replied hurriedly. "I'm much obliged. That's all I want to know."

Of course it really wasn't all--not by any means! But I couldn't bring myself to say so then, so I said the easy, obvious thing, and after that it was too late. Oh, how many things there are I want to know! How many things I think of now which I would ask an oracle when there is none to ask! Things about the here and the hereafter; about the human spirit; about practical religion, the brotherhood of man, the inequalities of men, evolution, reform, the enduring mysteries of space, time, eternity, and woman!

A friend of mine--a spiritualist--once told me of a seance in which he thought himself in brief communication with his mother. There were a million things to say. But when the medium requested him to give a message he could only falter: "Are you all right over there?" The answer came: "Yes, all right." Then my friend said: "I'm so glad!" And that was all.

"It is the feeling of awful pressure," he explained to me, "which drives the thoughts out of your head. That is why so many messages from the spirit world sound silly and inconsequential. You have the one great chance to communicate with them, and, because it _is_ your one great chance, you cannot think of anything to say." Somehow I imagine that the feeling must be like the one I had in talking to the dictagraph.

* * * * *

Among the characteristics which give Detroit her individuality is the survival of her oldtime aristocracy; she is one of the few middle-western cities possessing such a social order. As with that of St. Louis, this aristocracy is of French descent, the Sibleys, Campaus, and other old Detroit families tracing their genealogies to forefathers who came out to the New World under the flag of Louis XIV. The early habitants acquired farms, most of them with small frontages on the river and running back for several miles into the woods--an arrangement which permitted farmhouses to be built close together for protection against Indians. These farms, handed down for generations, form the basis of a number of Detroit's older family fortunes.

[Illustration: The automobile has not only changed Detroit from a quiet old town into a rich, active city, but upon the drowsy romance of the old days it has superimposed the romance of modern business]

To-day commerce takes up the downtown portion of the river front, but not far from the center of the city the shore line is still occupied by residences. Along Jefferson Avenue are many homes, surrounded by delightful lawns extending forward to the street and back to the river. Most of these homes have in their back yards boathouses and docks--some of the latter large enough to berth seagoing steam yachts, of which Detroit boasts a considerable number. Nor is the water front reserved entirely for private use. In Belle Isle, situated in the Detroit River, and accessible by either boat or bridge, the city possesses one of the most unusual and charming public parks to be seen in the entire world. And there are many other pleasant places near Detroit which may be reached by boat--among them the St. Clair Flats, famous for duck shooting. All these features combine to make the river life active and picturesque. In midstream passes a continual parade of freighters, a little mail boat dodging out to meet each one as it goes by. Huge side-wheel excursion steamers come and go, and in their swell you may see, teetering, all kinds of craft, from proud white yachts with shining brasswork and bowsprits having the expression of haughty turned-up noses, down through the category of schooners, barges, tugs, motor yachts, motor boats, sloops, small sailboats, rowboats, and canoes. You may even catch sight of a hydroplane swiftly skimming the surface of the river like some amphibious, prehistoric animal, or of that natty little gunboat, captured from the Spaniards at the battle of Manila Bay, which now serves as a training ship for the Michigan Naval Reserve.

A good many of the young aristocrats of Detroit have belonged to the Naval Reserve, among them Mr. Truman H. Newberry, former Secretary of the Navy, about whom I heard an amusing story.

According to this tale, as it was told me in Detroit, Mr. Newberry was some years ago a common seaman in the Reserve. It seems that on the occasion of the annual cruise of this body on the Great Lakes, a regular naval officer is sent out to take command of the training ship. One day, when common seaman Newberry was engaged in the maritime occupation of swabbing down the decks abaft the bridge, a large yacht passed majestically by.

"My man," said the regular naval officer on the bridge to common seaman Newberry below, "do you know what yacht that is?"

Newberry saluted. "The _Truant_, sir," he said respectfully, and resumed his work.

"Who owns her?" asked the officer.

Again Newberry straightened and saluted.

"I do, sir," he said.

Chapter VI

Automobiles And Art

Within the last few years there has come to Detroit a new life. The vast growth of the city, owing to the development of the automobile industry, has brought in many new, active, able business men and their families, whom the old Detroiters have dubbed the "Gasoline Aristocracy." Thus there are in Detroit two fairly distinct social groups--the Grosse Pointe group, of which the old families form the nucleus, and the North Woodward group, largely made up of newcomers.

The automobile has not only changed Detroit from a quiet old town into a rich, active city, but upon the drowsy romance of the old days it has superimposed a new kind of romance--the romance of modern business. Fiction in its wildest flights hardly rivals the true stories of certain motor moguls of Detroit. Every one can tell you these stories. If you are a novelist all you have to do is go and get them. But, aside from stories which are true, there have developed, in connection with the automobile business, certain fictions more or less picturesque in character. One of these, which has been widely circulated, is that "90 per cent. of the automobile business of Detroit is done in the bar of the Pontchartrain Hotel." The big men of the business resent that yarn. And, of course, it is preposterously false. Neither 90 per cent. nor 10 per cent. nor any appreciable per cent. of the automobile business is done there. Indeed, you hardly ever see a really important representative of the business in that place. Such men are not given to hanging around bars.

I do not wish the reader to infer that I hung around the bar myself in order to ascertain this fact. Not at all. I had heard the story and was apprised of its untruth by the president of one of the large motor car companies who was generously showing me about. As we bowled along one of the wide streets which passes through that open place at the center of the city called the Campus Martius, I was struck, as any visitor must be, by the spectacle of hundreds upon hundreds of automobiles parked, nose to the curb, tail to the street, in solid rows.

"You could tell that this was an automobile city," I remarked.

"Do you know why you see so many of them?" he asked with a smile.

I said I supposed it was because there were so many automobiles owned in Detroit.

"No," he explained. "In other cities with as many and more cars you will not see this kind of thing. They don't permit it. But our wide streets lend themselves to it, and our Chief of Police, who believes in the automobile business as much as any of the rest of us, also lends himself to it. He lets us leave our cars about the streets because he thinks it a good advertisement for the town."

As he spoke he was forced to draw up at a crossing to let a funeral pass. It was an automobile funeral. The hearse, black and terrible as only a hearse can be, was going at a modest pace for a motor, but an exceedingly rapid pace for a hearse. If I am any judge of speed, the departed was being wafted to his final resting place at the somewhat sprightly clip of twelve or fifteen miles an hour. Behind the hearse trailed limousines and touring cars. Two humble taxicabs brought up the rear. There was a grim ridiculousness about the procession's progress--pleasure cars throttled down, trying to look solemn--chauffeurs continually throwing out their clutches in a commendable effort to keep a respectful rate of speed.

Is there any other thing in the world which epitomizes our times as does an automobile funeral? Yesterday such a thing would have been deemed indecorous; to-day it is not only decorous, but rather chic, provided that the pace be slow; to-morrow--what will it be then? Will hearses go shooting through the streets at forty miles an hour? Will mourners scorch behind, their horns shrieking signals to the driver of the hearse to get out of the road and let the swiftest pass ahead, where there isn't all that dust? I am afraid a time is close at hand when, if hearses are to maintain that position in the funeral cortege to which convention has in the past assigned them, they will have to hold it by sheer force of superior horsepower!

* * * * *

Detroit is a young man's town. I do not think the stand-pat, sit-tight, go-easy kind of business man exists there. The wheel of commerce has wire spokes and rubber tires, and there is no drag upon the brake band. Youth is at the steering wheel--both figuratively and literally. The heads of great Detroit industries drive their own cars; and if the fact seems unimportant, consider: do the leading men of your city drive theirs? Or are they driven by chauffeurs? Have they, in other words, reached a time of life and a frame of mind which prohibit their taking the wheel because it is not safe for them to do so, or worse yet, because it is not dignified? Have they that energy which replaces worn-out tires--and methods--and ideas?

I have said that the president of a large automobile company showed me about Detroit. I don't know what his age is, but he is under thirty-five. I don't know what his fortune is, but he is suspected of a million, and whatever he may have, he has made himself. I hope he is a millionaire, for there is in the entire world only one other man who, I feel absolutely certain, deserves a million dollars more than he does--and a native modesty prevents my mentioning this other's name.

Looking at my friend, the president, I am always struck with fresh amazement. I want to say to him: "You can't be the president of that great big company! I know you sit in the president's office, but--look at your hair; it isn't even turning gray! I refuse to believe that you are president until you show me your ticket, or your diploma, or whatever it is that a president has!"

Becoming curious about his exact age, I took up my "Who's Who in America" one evening ("Who's Who" is another valued volume on my one-foot shelf) with a view to finding out. But all I did find out was that his name is not contained therein. That struck me as surprising. I looked up the heads of half a dozen other enormous automobile companies--men of importance, interest, reputation. Of these I discovered the name of but one, and that one was not (as I should have rather expected it to be) Henry Ford. (There is a Henry Ford in my "Who's Who," but he is a professor at Princeton and writes for the _Atlantic Monthly_!)[1]

Now whether this is so because of the newness of the automobile business, or because "Who's Who" turns up its nose at "trade," in contradistinction to the professions and the arts, I cannot say. Obviously, the compilation of such a work involves tremendous difficulties, and I have always respected the volume for the ability with which it overcomes them; but when a Detroit dentist (who invented, as I recollect, some new kind of filling) is included in "Who's Who," and when almost every minor poet who squeaks is in it, and almost every illustrator who makes candy-looking girls for magazine covers, and almost every writer--then it seems to me time to include, as well, the names of men who are in charge of that industry which is not only the greatest in Detroit, but which, more than any industry since the inception of the telephone, has transformed our life.

The fact of the matter is, of course, that writers, in particular, are taken too seriously, not merely by "Who's Who" but by all kinds of publications--especially newspapers. Only opera singers and actors can vie with writers in the amount of undeserved publicity which they receive. If I omit professional baseball players it is by intention; for, as a fan might say, they have to "deliver the goods."

[Footnote 1: "Who's Who" for 1913-1914. The more recent volume, which has come out since, contains a biographical sketch of Mr. Henry Ford of Detroit.]

* * * * *

Baedeker's United States, a third volume in the condensed library I carried in my trunk, sets forth (in small type!) the following: "The finest private art gallery in Detroit is that of Mr. Charles L. Freer. The gallery contains the largest group of works by Whistler in existence and good examples of Tryon, Dewing, and Abbott Thayer as well as many Oriental paintings and potteries."

But in the case of the Detroit Museum of Art, Baedeker bursts into black-faced type, and even adds an asterisk, his mark of special commendation. Also a considerable reference is made to various collections contained by the museum: the Scripps collection of old masters, the Stearns collection of Oriental curiosities, a painting by Rubens, drawings by Raphael and Michelangelo, and a great many works attributed to ancient Italian and Dutch masters. "The museum also contains," says Baedeker, "modern paintings by Gari Melchers, Munkacsy, Tryon, F. D. Millet, and others."

I have quoted Baedeker as above, because it reveals the bald fact with regard to art in Detroit; also because it reveals the even balder fact that our blessed old friend Baedeker, who has helped us all so much, can, when he cuts loose on art, make himself exquisitely ridiculous.

The truth is, of course, that Mr. Freer's gallery is not merely the "finest private gallery in Detroit"; not merely the finest gallery of any kind in Detroit; but that it is one of the exceedingly important collections of the world, just as Mr. Freer is one of the world's exceedingly important authorities on art. Indeed, any town which contains Mr. Freer--even if he is only stopping overnight in a hotel--becomes by grace of his presence an important art center for the time being. His mere presence is sufficient. For in Mr. Freer's head there is more art than is contained in many a museum. He was the man whom, above all others in Detroit, we wished to see. (And that is no disparagement of Henry Ford.)

Once in a long, long time it is given to the average human being to make contact for a brief space with some other human being far above the average--a man who knows one thing supremely well. I have met six such men: a surgeon, a musician, an author, an actor, a painter, and Mr. Charles L. Freer.

I do not know much of Mr. Freer's history. He was not born in Detroit, though it was there that he made the fortune which enabled him to retire from business. It is surprising enough to hear of an American business man willing to retire in the prime of life. You expect that in Europe, not here. And it is still more surprising when that American business man begins to devote to art the same energy which made him a success financially. Few would want to do that; fewer could. By the time the average successful man has wrung from the world a few hundred thousand dollars, he is fit for nothing else. He has become a wringer and must remain one always.

Of course rich men collect pictures. I'm not denying that. But they do it, generally, for the same reason they collect butlers and footmen--because tradition says it is the proper thing to do. And I have observed in the course of my meanderings that they are almost invariably better judges of butlers than of paintings. That is because their butlers are really and truly more important to them--excepting as their paintings have financial value. Still, if the world is full of so-called art collectors who don't know what they're doing, let us not think of them too harshly, for there are also painters who do not know what they are doing, and it is necessary that some one should support them. Otherwise they would starve, and a bad painter should not have to do that--starvation being an honor reserved by tradition for the truly great.

Very keenly I feel the futility of an attempt to tell of Mr. Freer in a few paragraphs. He should be dealt with as Mark Twain was dealt with by that prince of biographers, Albert Bigelow Paine; some one should live with him through the remainder of his life--always sympathetic and appreciative, always ready to draw him out, always with a notebook. It should be some one just like Paine, and as there isn't some one just like Paine, it should be Paine himself.

Probably as a development of his original interest in Whistler, Mr. Freer has, of late years, devoted himself almost entirely to ancient Oriental art--sculptures, paintings, ceramics, bronzes, textiles, lacquers and jades. The very rumor that in some little town in the interior of China was an old vase finer than any other known vase of the kind, has been enough to set him traveling. Many of his greatest treasures he has unearthed, bargained for and acquired at first hand, in remote parts of the globe. He bearded Whistler in his den--that is a story by itself. He purchased Whistler's famous Peacock Room, brought it to this country and set it up in his own house. He traveled on elephant-back through the jungles of India and Java in search of buried temples; to Egypt for Biblical manuscripts and potteries, and to the nearer East, years ago, in quest of the now famous "lustered glazes." He made many trips to Japan, in early days, to study, in ancient temples and private collections, the fine arts of China, Corea and Japan, and was the first American student to visit the rock-hewn caves of central China, with their thousands of specimens of early sculpture--sculpture ranking, Mr. Freer says, with the best sculpture of the world.

The photographs and rubbings of these objects made under Mr. Freer's personal supervision have greatly aided students, all over the globe. Every important public library in this country and abroad has been presented by Mr. Freer with fac-similes of the Biblical manuscripts discovered by him in Egypt about seven years ago, so far as these have been published. The original manuscripts will ultimately go to the National Gallery, at Washington.

Mr. Freer's later life has been one long treasure hunt. Now he will be pursuing a pair of mysterious porcelains around the earth, catching up with them in China, losing them, finding them again in Japan, or in New York, or Paris; now discovering in some unheard-of Chinese town a venerable masterpiece, painted on silk, which has been rolled into a ball for a child's plaything. The placid pleasures of conventional collecting, through the dealers, is not the thing that Mr. Freer loves. He loves the chase.

You should see him handle his ceramics. You should hear him talk of them! He _knows_. And though you do not know, you know he knows. More, he is willing to explain. For, though his intolerance is great, it is not directed so much at honest ignorance as against meretricious art.

The names of ancient Chinese painters, of emperors who practised art centuries ago, of dynasties covering thousands of years, of Biblical periods, flow kindly from his lips:

"This dish is Grecian. It was made five hundred years before the birth of Christ. This is a Chinese marble, but you see it has a Persian scroll in high relief. And this bronze urn: it is perhaps the oldest piece I have--about four thousand years--it is Chinese. But do you see this border on it? Perfect Greek! Where did the Chinese get that? Art is universal. We may call an object Greek, or Roman, or Assyrian, or Chinese, or Japanese, but as we begin to understand, we find that other races had the same thing--identical forms and designs. Take, for example, this painting of Whistler's, 'The Gold Screen.' You see he uses the Tosa design. The Tosa was used in Japan in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and down to about twenty years ago. But there wasn't a single example of it in Europe in 1864, when Whistler painted 'The Gold Screen'; and Whistler had not been to the Orient. Then, where did he get the Tosa design? He invented it. It came to him because he was a great artist, and art is universal."

It was like that--the spirit of it. And you must imagine the words spoken with measured distinctness in a deep, resonant voice, by a man with whom art is a religion and the pursuit of it a passion. He has a nature full of fire. At the mention of the name of the late J. P. Morgan, of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, or of certain Chinese collectors and painters of the distant past, a sort of holy flame of admiration rose and kindled in him. His contempt is also fire. A minor eruption occurred when the automobile industry was spoken of; a Vesuvian flare which reddened the sky and left the commercialism of the city in smoking ruins. But it was not until I chanced to mention the Detroit Museum of Art--an institution of which Mr. Freer strongly disapproves--that the great outburst came. His wrath was like an overpowering revolt of nature. A whirlwind of tempestuous fire mounted to the heavens and the museum emerged a clinker.

He went to our heads. We four, who saw and heard him, left Mr. Freer's house drunk with the esthetic. Even the flooding knowledge of our own barbarian ignorance was not enough to sober us. Some of the flame had gotten into us. It was like old brandy. We waved our arms and cried out about art. For there is in a truly big human being--especially in one old enough to have seemed to gain perspective on the universe--some quality which touches something in us that nothing else can ever reach. It is something which is not admiration only, nor vague longing to emulate, nor a quickened comprehension of the immensity of things; something emotional and spiritual and strange and indescribable which seems to set our souls to singing.

The Freer collection will go, ultimately, to the Smithsonian Institution (the National Gallery) in Washington, a fact which is the cause of deep regret to many persons in Detroit, more especially since the City Plan and Improvement Commission has completed arrangements for a Center of Arts and Letters--a fine group plan which will assemble and give suitable setting to a new Museum of Art, Public Library, and other buildings of like nature, including a School of Design and an Orchestra Hall. The site for the new gallery of art was purchased with funds supplied by public-spirited citizens, and the city has given a million dollars toward the erection of the building. Plans for the library have been drawn by Cass Gilbert.

It seems possible that, had the new art museum been started sooner, and with some guarantee of competent management, Mr. Freer might have considered it as an ultimate repository for his treasures. But now it is too late. That the present art museum--the old one--was not to be considered by him, is perfectly obvious. Inside and out it is unworthy. It looks as much like an old waterworks as the new waterworks out on Jefferson Avenue looks like a museum. Its foyer contains some sculptured busts, forming the most amazing group I have ever seen. The group represents, I take it, prominent citizens of Detroit--among them, according to my recollection, the following: Hermes, Augustus Caesar, Mr. Bela Hubbard, Septimus Severus, the Hon. T. W. Palmer, Mr. Frederick Stearns, Apollo, Demosthenes, and the Hon. H. P. Lillibridge.

I do not want to put things into people's heads, but--the old museum is not fire-proof. God speed the new one!

Chapter VII

The Maecenas Of The Motor

The great trouble with Detroit, from my point of view, is that there is too much which should be mentioned: Grosse Pointe with its rich setting and rich homes; the fine new railroad station; the "Cabbage Patch"; the "Indian Village" (so called because the streets bear Indian names) with its examples of modest, pleasing, domestic architecture. Then there are the boulevards, the fine Wayne County roads, the clubs--the Country Club, the Yacht Club, the Boat Club, the Detroit Club, the University Club, all with certain individuality. And there is the unique little Yondatega Club of which Theodore Roosevelt said: "It is beyond all doubt the best club in the country."

Also there is Henry Ford.

I suppose there is no individual having to do with manufacturing of any kind whose name is at present more familiar to the world. But in all this ocean of publicity which has resulted from Mr. Ford's development of a reliable, cheap car, from the stupefying growth of his business and his fortune, and more recently from his sudden distribution among his working people of ten million dollars of profits from his business--in all this publicity I have seen nothing that gave me a clear idea of Henry Ford himself. I wanted to see him--to assure myself that he was not some fabulous being out of a Detroit saga. I wanted to know what kind of man he was to look at and to listen to.

The Ford plant is far, far out on Woodward Avenue. It is so gigantic that there is no use wasting words in trying to express its vastness; so full of people, all of them working for Ford, that a thousand or two more or less would make no difference in the looks of things. And among all those people there was just one man I really wanted to see, and just one man I really wanted not to see. I wanted to see Henry Ford and I wanted not to see a man named Liebold, because, they say, if you see Liebold first you never do see Ford. That is what Liebold is for. He is the man whose business in life it is to know where Henry Ford _isn't_.

To get into Mr. Ford's presence is an undertaking. It is not easy even to find out whether he is there. Liebold is so zealous in his protection that he even protects Mr. Ford from his own employees. Thus, when the young official who had my companion and me in charge, received word over the office telephone that Mr. Ford was not in the building, he didn't believe it. He went on a quiet scouting expedition of his own before he was convinced. Presently he returned to the office in which he had deposited us.

"No; he really isn't here just now," he said. "He'll be in presently. Come on; I'll take you through the plant."

* * * * *

The machine shop is one room, with a glass roof, covering an area of something less than thirty acres. It is simply unbelievable in its size, its noise and its ghastly furious activity. It was peopled when we were there by five thousand men--the day shift in that one shop alone. (The total force of workmen was something like three times that number.)

Of course there was order in that place, of course there was system--relentless system--terrible "efficiency"--but to my mind, unaccustomed to such things, the whole room, with its interminable aisles, its whirling shafts and wheels, its forest of roof-supporting posts and flapping, flying, leather belting, its endless rows of writhing machinery, its shrieking, hammering, and clatter, its smell of oil, its autumn haze of smoke, its savage-looking foreign population--to my mind it expressed but one thing, and that thing was delirium.

Fancy a jungle of wheels and belts and weird iron forms--of men, machinery and movement--add to it every kind of sound you can imagine: the sound of a million squirrels chirking, a million monkeys quarreling, a million lions roaring, a million pigs dying, a million elephants smashing through a forest of sheet iron, a million boys whistling on their fingers, a million others coughing with the whooping cough, a million sinners groaning as they are dragged to hell--imagine all of this happening at the very edge of Niagara Falls, with the everlasting roar of the cataract as a perpetual background, and you may acquire a vague conception of that place.

Fancy all this riot going on at once; then imagine the effect of its suddenly ceasing. For that is what it did. The wheels slowed down and became still. The belts stopped flapping. The machines lay dead. The noise faded to a murmur; then to utter silence. Our ears rang with the quiet. The aisles all at once were full of men in overalls, each with a paper package or a box. Some of them walked swiftly toward the exits. Others settled down on piles of automobile parts, or the bases of machines, to eat, like grimy soldiers on a battlefield. It was the lull of noon.

I was glad to leave the machine shop. It dazed me. I should have liked to leave it some time before I actually did, but the agreeable young enthusiast who was conducting us delighted in explaining things--shouting the explanations in our ears. Half of them I could not hear; the other half I could not comprehend. Here and there I recognized familiar automobile parts--great heaps of them--cylinder castings, crank cases, axles. Then as things began to get a little bit coherent, along would come a train of cars hanging insanely from a single overhead rail, the man in the cab tooting his shrill whistle; whereupon I would promptly retire into mental fog once more, losing all sense of what things meant, feeling that I was not in any factory, but in a Gargantuan lunatic asylum where fifteen thousand raving, tearing maniacs had been given full authority to go ahead and do their damnedest.

In that entire factory there was for me but one completely lucid spot. That was the place where cars were being assembled. There I perceived the system. No sooner had axle, frame, and wheels been joined together than the skeleton thus formed was attached, by means of a short wooden coupling, to the rear end of a long train of embryonic automobiles, which was kept moving slowly forward toward a far-distant door. Beside this train of chassis stood a row of men, and as each succeeding chassis came abreast of him, each man did something to it, bringing it just a little further toward completion. We walked ahead beside the row of moving partially-built cars, and each car we passed was a little nearer to its finished state than was the one behind it. Just inside the door we paused and watched them come successively into first place in the line. As they moved up, they were uncoupled. Gasoline was fed into them from one pipe, oil from another, water from still another.

Then as a man leaped to the driver's seat, a machine situated in the floor spun the back wheels around, causing the motor to start; whereupon the little Ford moved out into the wide, wide world, a completed thing, propelled by its own power.

* * * * *

In a glass shed of the size of a small exposition building the members of the Ford staff park their little cars. It was in this shed that we discovered Mr. Ford. He had just driven in (in a Ford!) and was standing beside it--the god out of the machine.

"Nine o'clock to-morrow morning," he said to me in reply to my request for an appointment.

I may have shuddered slightly. I know that my companion shuddered, and that, for one brief instant, I felt a strong desire to intimate to Mr. Ford that ten o'clock would suit me better. But I restrained myself.

Inwardly I argued thus: "I am in the presence of an amazing man--a prince of industry--the Maecenas of the motor car. Here is a man who, they say, makes a million dollars a month, even in a short month like February. Probably he makes a million and a quarter in the thirty-one-day months when he has time to get into the spirit of the thing. I wish to pay a beautiful tribute to this man, not because he has more money than I have--I don't admit that he has--but because he conserves his money better than I conserve mine. It is for that that I take off my hat to him, even if I have to get up and dress and be away out here on Woodward Avenue by 9 A. M. to do it."

Furthermore, I thought to myself that Mr. Ford was the kind of business man you read about in novels; one who, when he says "nine," doesn't mean five minutes after nine, but nine sharp. If you aren't there your chance is gone. You are a ruined man.

[Illustration: Of course there was order in that place, of course there was system--relentless system--terrible "efficiency"--but to my mind it expressed but one thing, and that thing was delirium]

"Very well," I said, trying to speak in a natural tone, "we will be on hand at nine."

Then he went into the building, and my companion and I debated long as to how the feat should be accomplished. He favored sitting up all night in order to be safe about it, but we compromised at last on sitting up only a little more than half the night.

The cold, dismal dawn of the day following found us shaved and dressed. We went out to the factory. It was a long, chilly, expensive, silent taxi ride. At five minutes before nine we were there. The factory was there. The clerks were there. Fourteen thousand one hundred and eighty-seven workmen were there--those workmen who divided the ten millions--everything and every one was there with a single exception. And that exception was Mr. Henry Ford.

True, he did come at last. True, he talked with us. But he was not there at nine o'clock, nor yet at ten. Nor do I blame him. For if I were in the place of Mr. Henry Ford, there would be just one man whom I should meet at nine o'clock, and that man would be Meadows, my faithful valet.

Apropos of that, it occurs to me that there is one point of similarity between Mr. Ford and myself: neither of us has a valet just at present. Still, on thinking it over, we aren't so very much alike, after all, for there is one of us--I shan't say which--who hopes to have a valet some day.

Mr. Ford's office is a room somewhat smaller than the machine shop. It is situated in one corner of the administration building, and I am told that there is a private entrance, making it unnecessary for Mr. Ford to run the gantlet of the main doorway and waiting room, where there are almost always persons waiting to ask him for a present of a million or so in money; or, if not that, for four or five thousand dollars' worth of time--for if Mr. Ford makes what they say, and doesn't work overtime, his hour is worth about four thousand five hundred dollars.

He wasn't in the office when we entered. That gave us time to look about. There was a large flat-top desk. The floor was covered with an enormous, costly Oriental rug. At one end of the room, in a glass case, was a tiny and very perfect model of a Ford car. On the walls were four photographs: one of Mr. James Couzens, vice-president and treasurer of the Ford Company; another, a life-size head of "_Your friend, John Wanamaker_," and two of Thomas A. Edison. Under one of the latter, in the handwriting of the inventor--handwriting which, oddly enough, resembles nothing so much as neatly bent wire--was this inscription:

_To Henry Ford, one of a group of men who have helped to make U. S. A. the most progressive nation in the world._

_Thomas A. Edison._

Presently Mr. Ford came in--a lean man, of good height, wearing a rather shabby brown suit. Without being powerfully built, Mr. Ford looks sinewy, wiry. His gait is loose-jointed--almost boyish. His manner, too, has something boyish about it. I got the feeling that he was a little bit embarrassed at being interviewed. That made me sorry for him--I had been interviewed, myself, the day before. When he sat he hunched down in his chair, resting on the small of his back, with his legs crossed and propped upon a large wooden waste-basket--the attitude of a lanky boy. And, despite his gray hair and the netted wrinkles about his eyes, his face is comparatively youthful, too. His mouth is wide and determined, and it is capable of an exceedingly dry grin, in which the eyes collaborate. They are fine, keen eyes, set high under the brows, wide apart, and they seem to express shrewdness, kindliness, humor, and a distinct wistfulness. Also, like every other item in Mr. Ford's physical make-up, they indicate a high degree of honesty. There never was a man more genuine than Mr. Ford. He hasn't the faintest sign of that veneer so common to distinguished men, which is most eloquently described by the slang term "front." Nor is he, on the other hand, one of those men who (like so many politicians) try to simulate a simple manner. He is just exactly Henry Ford, no more, no less; take it or leave it. If you are any judge at all of character, you know immediately that Henry Ford is a man whom you can trust. I would trust him with anything. He didn't ask me to, but I would. I would trust him with all my money. And, considering that I say that, I think he ought to be willing, in common courtesy, to reciprocate.

He told us about the Ford business. "We've done two hundred and five millions of business to date," he said. "Our profits have amounted to about fifty-nine millions. About twenty-five per cent. has been put back into the business--into the plant and the branches. All the actual cash that was ever put in was twenty-eight thousand dollars. The rest has been built up out of profits. Yes--it has happened in a pretty short time; the big growth has come in the last six years."

I asked if the rapid increase had surprised him.

"Oh, in a way," he said. "Of course we couldn't be just sure what she was going to do. But we figured we had the right idea."

"What is the idea?" I questioned.

Then with deep sincerity, with the conviction of a man who states the very foundation of all that he believes, Mr. Ford told us his idea. His statement did not have the awful majesty of an utterance by Mr. Freer. He did not flame, although his eyes did seem to glow with his conviction.

"It is _one model_!" he said. "That's the secret of the whole doggone thing!" (That is exactly what he said. I noted it immediately for "character.")

Having revealed the "secret," Mr. Ford directed our attention to the little toy Ford in the glass case.

"There she is," he said. "She's always the same. I tell everybody that's the way to make a success. Every manufacturer ought to do it. The thing is to find out something that everybody is after and then make that one thing and nothing else. Shoemakers ought to do it. They ought to get one