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THE AMERICAN MERCURY

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

THE BRIGHTNESS OF
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ii

On Saturdays th'ere's George Van Slyke

and David Lawrence on Politics, William
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The Newspaper of Distinction [n its Readers,

its News and its Advertising

280

BROADWAY

NEW YORK

The AMERICAN. MERCURY

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VOLUME
XXXVII

TABLE OF CONTENTS

NUMBER
148

April, 1936
IF

THE NEW DEALERS WIN.

VERGE. Verse
THE ROOSEVELT MYTH.
PRISON CAMPS OF LIBERTY.
EVIDENCE OF APRIL. Verse .
THE CREDO OF ANEW DEALER.
FOR A SPINSTER. Verse .
BusH BRIGADES AND BLACKAMOORS .
PANTHER IN THE MIND. Verse.
THE STATE OF THE UNION:
Who Will Pay the Bill?
THE BIRDS. Verse .
THE PROFESSIONAL COMMUNIST .
YOUTH FACES THE SEX PROBLEM .
THE MIDDLE WEST RULES AME,RICA
NOT FOR THE SICKLE. Verse.
GALSWORTHY
AMERICANA.
CURLY COMMITS MURDER. A Story,
I AM GLAD I AM DEAF.
INVITATION TO MONARCHY .
THE CLINIC:
Rats
Solace' for Lonely Hearts.
Who Owns Yellowstone Park?
THE LIBRARY:
The Background of Crime .
Chesterton's Three-Card Trick
The Wordsworths .
Our Vanishing Vulgarity,
Briefer Mention ,
THE CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX TO VOLUME XXXVII
CHECK LIST OF NEW BOOKS
RECORDED MUSIC

Frank R. Kent 385

Frances Frost
. Ashmun Brown
. William Henry Chamberlin
. Lionel Wiggam
. Paul Paln1er
. Sara Henderson Hay
. Laurence Stallings
. John Holmes

389
390
395
403
404
410
411

41 9

Albert Jay Nock 420

Reuel Denney 4 2 4
. David Allan Ross 425
. Constance Cassady 433
Duncan Aikman 439
. Ted Olson 447
. Ford Madox Ford 44 8
460
. Maurice Samuel 464
. Arthur G. Leisman 476
Ralph Adams Cram 479

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. Henry Morton Robinson

. Judith Ravel
. A. C. McIntosh

4 87
489
493

Fletcher Pratt 497

. Ernest Boyd 499
Llewelyn Powys . 502
Meade Minnigerode 505
508

510

5~1

IV

Irving Kolodin

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Lawrence E. Spivak, Publisher

Gordon Carroll, Managing Editor

Laurence Stallings, Literary Editor

Paul Palmer, Editor

Louis Untermeyer, Poetry Editor

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iii

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

M-DAY
By Rose M. Stein
An expose of the factors that make our wars.
Deals with dynamite, names names, is sound and
authentic. Based in part on the findings of the
Senate Munitions Committee. (M-Day is a term
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$2.50

HENRY FORD VS. TRUMAN H. NEWBERRY.

By Spencer Ervin.
Richard R. Smith
$4.50
6~ x 9~; 6r6 pp.
New York

CI T Y
GOVERNMENT
by DANIEL W. HOAN
Mr. Hoan, mayor of Milwaukee for 20 years, writes
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$2.50

AMERICAN LABOR

STRUGGLES
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$3.50

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"Industrial Adjustment"-a practical proposal for
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and MONEY
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OLD JULES.
By Mari Sandoz.
$3

6 x 9; 424 pp.

Little, Brown
Boston

This book, awarded the $5000 Atlantic Monthly

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wisdom which was his - and the various hardships of pioneering on the Western plains. Some
of the scenes are unforgettable: the book is every

(Continued in back advertising section p. x)

J

iv

TI-lR AMRRICAN MERCURY

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"South Rjdjn~"
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"Greater Love"
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II

Aerial Odyssey

II

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ff

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"Punch's

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THE AMERICAN MERCURY

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The New Deal Mentality

by H. L. MENCKEN
in the May issue of 'The American Mercury
This exciting article will be as widely read and quoted as
"Three Years of Dr. Roosevelt" which created a sensation
throughout the country and exhausted two editions of the
. March American Mercury within a week of issue.
Watch for further articles about the present rulers of the
Republic: J ames A. Farley, Rexford G. Tugwell, Harold L.
Ickes, Felix Frankfurter, Henry A. Wallace, and company.
Contributors in forthcoming issues will include: Laurence
Stallings, George Santayana, Albert Jay N ock, Mark Sullivan, David Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Edwin W. Kemmerer, Hendrik Willem Van Loon, Edgar Lee Masters,
Robert Frost, Nicholas Roosevelt, Hilaire Belloc, Bertrand
Russell, Arthur Machen, St. John Irvine, James A. Beck,
Hugh Walpole, Lawrence Dennis, and many others.
Thousands of readers were unable to obtain copies of the
March American Mercury in spite of two large printings.
Reserve your copies of future issues by subscribing now. Use
the card enclosed-it requires no postage.
.

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570
viii

LEXINGTON AVENUE, NEW YORK CITY

VOLUME XXXVII

APRIL, 1936

NUMBER 148

T he American
MERCURY'
IF THE NEW DEALERS WIN
BY FRANK R. KENT

is simple enough. For the first time, the

HERE have been. fe.w Presidential campaigns in which the breast-beating Republic languishes under the regime of
demagogues with the bull voices have a President who has definitely departed
not proclaimed that "the future of the from the American system - to say nothcountry is at stake". Sometimes there is ing of the multiplication table. Mr.Roosea trace of truth in these mouth-filling and velt has tried to operate the government
melodramatic words, but more often they outside the Constitution, has swept aside
are just so much political gurry. Most of the fundamental doctrine of States' Rights,
the time, so far as the future of the coun- has seized, in the name of a dubious emertry is concerned, it makes little di.fference gency, vast powers not intended to be
which Presidential candidate is chosen by wielded by the Executive, and has thus
the great American people in their quad- made mincemeat of the two great underrennial emotional rush to the ballot box. lying. principles of American government.
If one party succeeds .the other, there is The only factor that has prevented a coma grand shift in the federal personnel, a plete remaking of America on the lines
certain expansion of the federal govern- laid down by a little group of willful
ment incidental to every Congress, and Brain Trusters is the Supreme Court. With
an imn1ediate increase in the general waste, that august body, the New Deal came into
cost, and inefficiency, which are part of the violent collison, the net result being the
price we pay for freedom. But the na- collapse of the Administration's two major
tional direction is unchanged.
devices and the creation of a condition of
Thoughtful men, however, are fairly demoralization and bewilderment practiwell agreed that it can be said with literal cally without precedent in history.
With other New Deal legislative enacttruth of this 1936 contest that the future
of the nation is really involved, in a sense ments now awaiting the axe, with the whole
that it has not been for generations. When grandiose program bogged down in hormen say of this fight that we are "at the rible confusion, with federal finances in
cross-roads", it is not merely a trite piece an alarmingly sick condition, with the naof political rhetoric, but a fact. The reason tional debt piled mountainously high, with
3 85

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

an accumulated deficit nearing the fifteenbillion mark, with neither the agricultural
nor the unemployment problem an inch
nearer final solution, and with a great and
widening split in his party, Mr. Roosevelt
goes into his campaign for re-election very
definitely on the defensive and, as attested
by numerous polls and straw votes, with
the tide running full against him. Belonging as he does (at least nominally) to the
minority political party, this situation, the
truth of which is hardly open to dispute,
normally would mean his defeat. Indeed,
defeat would be considered certain but for
what are regarded as his unique political
assets acquired through the New Deal's
vast spending policy. These can be listed
as follows:
First, the supposedly solid support of the
subsidized farmers in the great agricultural states, won through the "gentle rain
of checks" with which they have been
steadily drenched.
Second, the supposed gratitude of the
millions of recipients of federal relief
funds, including the multitudes vacationing in CCC camps or dawdling on various
public works jobs.
Third, the influence and power of an
extraordinary federal machine, expanded
and increased since 1933 beyond anything
heretofore imagined. To the civil payroll
of the government have been added in
three years nearly 30,000 new and greedy
jobholders, bringing the total close to
1,000,000, exclusive of the judicial, military,
and legislative departments.
Fourth, endorsement by some leaders of
organized labor, and the attraction to the
Roosevelt standard of radicals and claimjumpers of all degrees.
Fifth, the outright appeal for class-hatred
against the business and financial interests
of the country, which is to be. the basic
strategy of the New Deal campaign.

In brief, the efforts will be to array the

Have-nots against the Haves, in order, as
the ineffable Professor Tugwell phrases it,
to "effect an irresistible alliance between
the workers and the farmers" against what
the Administration evangels choose to call
"creatures of entrenched greed". And in
this category the New Dealers put everyone who disagrees with them.
Now it is true that efforts to stir up
class-antagonism have been made in this
country a number of times in the past,
but never with success. The difference on
this occasion, however, is quite apparent.
Heretofore, class-hatred has been the stock
in trade of the cheap demagogues of the
minority, those on the outside trying to
get in. But today marks the first time that
such a campaign policy has been adopted
by a federal administration elaborately
equipped with patronage and power, determined to perpetuate itself by whatever
means it can. Certainly it is the first time
in history that a President of the United
States has struck that campaign keynote,
and initiated, encouraged, and promoted a
fight along those lines. It is, upon sober
reflection, the first time that men sympathetic and susceptible to this sort of strategy
have ever been intrusted with positions of
governmental control. To those familiar
with the group of yogis who have most influenced the Roosevelt mind, this class appeal appears the logical and inevitable
outcome of the Brain Trust philosophy.
By others, it is regarded as the last desperate expedient of a man who suddenly
realizes that his popularity is on the wane
and the odds are greatly against him. It
is impossible to account for the Roosevelt
strategy in any other way.
No one can accurately forecast the prob~
able result. The question is whether the
above-listed political assets, in a Hate-theRich campaign conducted by the Ins in-

IF THE NEW DEALERS WIN

stead of the Outs, can succeed. My personal
belief is that it cannot. But there are sufficient new factors in the situation to create
considerable doubt, and to make imperative some serious thought on the subject
of what is likely to happen to America

should the New Dealers win next No-

wa y is far too. slow a process for the apas,..

tIes of the New Regimentation. And there
are only three ways by which Court control can be secured. Congress, under Executive direction, can enlarge the Court,
thus giving the President his opportunity
to pack it. Or Mr. Roosevelt can wait for

vember.

the inevitable vacancies and, by appoint-

To appreciate the meaning to the country

of another four years of Roosevelt control,
it seems essential to keep clearly in mind
that the one obstacle to the complete
fruition of the grandiose New Deal program is the Supreme Court. That tribunal
has destroyed the two great Administration schemes for regimenting industry and
agriculture. Before this article is printed,
it may have destroyed others. Whether or
not the Court versus the President becomes
the dominant issue in the campaign, the
following observations are true:
First, the decisions of the Court have
neither altered nor diluted the New
Dealers' belief in their Utopian plans.
Second, there exists among the Brain
Trusters, from Mr. Roosevelt down, a deep
resentment against the Court as the chief
barrier in their path.
Third, victory for Mr. Roosevelt in November will be construed as a vindication
of his policies and a mandate to go ahead
on the lines laid down by the Tugwells
and Wallaces - Court and Constitution
not\vithstanding.
Fourth, there is every intention, both on
the part of Mr. Roosevelt and of his inlpatient advisers, to go the limit toward
collectivism if they get the chance.
Now quite clearly, even if vindicated at
the polls, the New Dealers cannot go ahead
unless in some \vay they control the Court.
To amend the Constitution in the regular

ment, make the majority pro-New Deal.

Or Congress can take away from the Court
the right to declare its legislation unconstitutional, which obviously scraps the
Constitution. In effect, anyone of these
methods of dealing with the Court means
making the Constitution just what the
President wants it to be. I think it can
be set down as certain that one of these
methods will immediately be adopted
should the Ne"v Deal win in November.
What this means is that, in the event of
victory, the last legal bar to the New Deal
planners will come down, and they can
whoop ahead full steam with their favorite
collectivist ideas, reviving the AAA, reorganizing the NRA, expanding the TVA,
extending the WPA, enlarging the RRA,
continuing the RFC - until every last
phase of human activity is directed, supervised, regulated, and controlled from
Washington, D. C. In brief, the amazing
alphabetical bureaucracy, foisted upon us
in the name of a dubious emergency and
supposedly to meet a national crisis, will
be yoked on our necks as a permanent
form of government. And that means, as
the late ex-Governor Ritchie of Maryland
pointed out, that two great governmental principles now imbedded in the Constitution will be precipitously sacked. The
first of these is based on the American
dual system of state and nation whereby
the federal government can do only such
things as are expressly or by fair implication delegated to it, all other powers being
reserved to the states or to the people. Tne

II

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

second is the division of powers of government into three departments, separate
and distinct from each other, with no one
of them authorized to. exercise the functions of the other two.
It seems to me impossible to doubt that
a New Deal success in the coming election
is sure to be followed by this Presidential
control of the Supreme Court, gained one
way or another. The logical progress from
that point will be toward an unlimited extension of the Executive power. States'
Rights, now greatly obscured, will wholly
disappear. The President, luxuriating in
his new power, will dominate both the
judicial and legislative branches of the government. That is the tendency of the New
Deal; that is what will inevitably happen
if the New Dealers win. I do not see how
the fact can be disputed.
This unpleasing prospect means a complete change in American government and
American life. It means a complete discard of the system of constitutional checks
and balances under which we have always
operated. It means that ours will no longer
be a government by law but, instead, a
government by men. It means that power
to regulate and control industry, agriculture, capital, and labor, to make experimental rules which have the effect of true
law, and to function in the judicial and
legislative as well as administrative capacity, will be vested in the Executive and
wielded by irresponsible department heads
and shoddy bureau chiefs. In brief, the
country will be run entirely by a DictatorPresident, in whom all authority will rest.
For all practical purposes, the so-called coordinate branches of government will be
emasculated, and state lines will be completely obliterated.
It cannot be denied that this will be a
new system, foreign to the conception of
the Constitution, the exact system which

the framers of that instrument took such

extraordinary precautions to forestall. It is
a system under which true freedom could
not survive. Such would be the power of
the federal administration, unchecked by
the Supreme Court or Congress, that
neither home rule, localsel-government,
nor individual or journalistic liberty could
exist, except to the degree permitted by

Washington. Under such circumstances,

four more years of the New Deal would
mean a continuation of the highly unsound experiments to which Mr. Roosevelt is committed, and the initiation of an
unpredictable number of others of which
we have not yet even heard. It would end
all thought of a balanced budget, every
possibility of a return to normal governmental activities, any chance for a reduction in governmental expenses. The nature
of the forces now behind Mr. Roosevelt,
coupled with his own well-known temperament and inclination, preclude these
things.
Even if he wanted to, the President
could not slow down or turn around: the
impetus of his campaign and its character,
if successful, are bound to carry him relentlessly forward. That entails more, not
less confusion, greater, not diminished
cost, larger deficits, heavier debt, increased
taxes, more handouts.. to the underprivileged, further punitive assaults upon
wealth, and an accelerated speed toward
national bankruptcy either by the repudiation route or the equally effective method
of printing-press money.
It isn't going to be the easiest thing in
the world to avert these evils, even should
Mr. Roosevelt be beaten by a candidate
pledged to end experimentation, and
sworn to return, through economy and reduction in the size and cost of the government, to a sound financial basis. Any successor to Mr. Roosevelt, backed by the solid

VERGE
business interests and the great mass of
conservatives, is going to have a hard job
keeping the country from going over the
brink.. But Q. New Deal victory, won
despite bitter opposition of the substantial
elements and with the aid of every variety
of radical agitator, crackpot liberal, organized minority leader, and scatter-the..
dough progressive in the country, just

about makes it impossible to stop - even

if Mr. Roosevelt would like to - and of

that he gives not the slightest indication
in word or deed.
Another four years of the New Deal,
and the governmental situation, now incredibly confused, will be wholly out of
hand. It isn't communism we need fear
- it is chaos.

VERGE
BY FRANCES FROST
year 1,"s early, and the light half-gone
From knotty twigs, from alder
Thin-red by roads; and red from ended sun
Bends the gray-branched sky. The meadow-brook grows wilder

HE

At wind-fall; and each, emerald frog blows out

His throat to a silver bubble.
The crows descend and their hungry cries are stout
In the stiff and darkening stubble.
No bucket gleams on the maple that has shed
Its crimson foam of buds. A lean-faced farmer
Drives his belled cattle to a green-flushed bed;
The windless land turns warmer.
The evening dips toward shadow, the melting year
Aches toward stalk and flower.
It is our season, it is our meadowy air:
We walk in the clear, in the waiting incredible hour
While the balance dips toward summer, we who are lost,
Who are more temporal even
Than the clenched dark bud containing the leafy ghost,
Than the Spring that vanishes under a quiet heaven.

THE ROOSEVELT MYTH

BY ASHMUNBROWN
born in the first year of the New
Deal. We Washington correspondents
were its parents. Day after day we informed the gullible public that Franklin
Delano Roosevelt was by far the smartest
politician who had ever occupied the
White House. We even believed the myth
ourselves.
But we don't any more. We have dropped
the idea, like a hot potato, from our stock
of cliches. And we admit we were wrong.
The events of the past year have proved
that the President is anything but a superpolitician. The record is strewn with instances of shortsighted action, ill-chosen
words, and impolitic conduct. The myth
has been exploded.
A key to whatever mystery may surround
the birth of the Roosevelt reputation for
astuteness, and likewise its recent sad demise, may be found in the dictionary definition of the word politic: "sagacious and
wary in planning"; and in its synonyms:
"artful, crafty, cunning, diplomatic, discreet, judicious, prudent, sagacious, shrewd,
wary, wily, wise"" For certainly when
Franklin D. Roosevelt was a candidate in
1932, and in his conduct as President in
1933 and 1934, he appeared to possess and
to employ these very characteristics. Indeed,
he was a continuing surprise to those of us
who had known him in Washington in the
days when he was merely a young, attractive, sincere, and not greatly distinguished
Assistant Secretary of the Navy. At that
period no one credited him with a pro-

T WAS

39

found knowledge of politics or of government. But his spectacular election, his obvious ability to capitalize for his own benefit
the existing mood of the American people,
the astounding rapidity with which he
moved in his first hundred days, the ease
with which he brought Congress to heel,
the .amazing and revolutionary changes he
accomplished in shifting the direction and
enlarging the functions of the federal government, and the national acclaim which
swept him to an unbelievable popularity all this convinced the correspondents that
here was a politician to make Machiavelli,
Mark Hanna, Talleyrand, and Boies Penrose hang their heads in utter shame. This,
surely, was a fellow "sagacious and wary
in planning" and likewise "artful, shrewd,
crafty, cunning, wily," and all the rest.
Mr. Roosevelt's masterful playing of
politics was so successful that it commanded awed respect even among his most
ribald opponents. And success, temporary
though it may be, is after all the only
yardstick we Washington correspondents
are inclined to accept for measuring the
difference between good politics and bad.
The man who gets away with it is a good
politician; the man who doesn't usually retires to the old homestead after the next
election. Thus the martyred Huey Long
will always survive in popular memory as
one of the best. Measured in like fashion,
Mr. Roosevelt qualified as a master politician from the early part of his administration until after the 1934 elections, which in

THE ROOSEVELT MYTH

themselves were a convincing national tribute to his acumen.
But while the country as a whole retained

its faith, the correspondents began to

weaken. Their

doubt~

grew

a~

the indica-

tions became plainer that the man who had

planned the various imbecilities of the New
Deal could not be altogether "sagacious and
wary". The preposterous NRA was cracking up dismally. A horde of hungry bureaucrats descended on Washington like a
fearful plague. As the alphabet was gradually exhausted, it became increasingly
clearer that, for all its soulful protestations,
the New Deal did not offer and never had
offered any even half-way suitable plans
for lifting the country out of the depression
and accomplishing at the same time gigantic social, political, and economic reforms.
The New Deal, in other words, was revealed as entirely experimental, opportunistic, and lunatic in character. Despite an
unparalleled ballyhoo the cold, hard facts
began to show that, instead of one complete plan, there was a multitude of contradictory plans, each operating on its own
and often clashing with its rivals within
the tottering structure erected by the Brain
Trust. The hasty exodus of sadly-disappointed New Dealers from the Administration got under way as the ship sank deeper.
And it was plain the Master Mind had not
anticipated any such developments. A good
politician, one was reminded, anticipates
every possible reaction. . . .
It was in this respect, then, that Mr. Roosevelt failed throughout 1935 to live up to the
standards of political sagacity set for him
in the public mind. How much this failure
is understood by the public even now is a
matter open to debate. But that it is fully
appreciated by all practical politicians and
by the correspondents is no longer to be
questioned. The Roosevelt myth has vanished into thin air.

39 1

Monday, May 27, 1935, may be starred as

the date on which the myth began its precipitous decline. It was on that day that the
Supreme Court, in a devastating decision,
outiawec\ the NRA. At on.ce it bec:Ame cle:o.r
that the President was totally unprepared
for such a blow. Nothing of the sort had
been anticipated. The Administration was
demoralized. Neither the Fuhrer nor his
Brain Trust had prepared a plan of retreat
in the event of such a decision.
How completely Mr. Roosevelt misjudged the temper of the country was
demonstrated a few days later when, in his
now famous press conference of May 31, he
exhibited anger, disappointment, and chagrin in a petulant tirade against the Su~
preme Court lasting one hour and twenty
minutes by the clock. Taking as his text
several of the Court's obiter dicta, he permitted himself to exaggerate grossly the
effect, actual and potential, of the rulings,
and to declare that dle country had been
thrown "back to the horse-and-buggy
days". No President has ever made so intemperate an utterance at a press conference. The public reaction was immediate
and far from complimentary to the masterful politician.
Yet, in less than three weeks after that
debacle, Mr. Roosevelt plunged himself and
his Administration into another clumsy
situation which surprised, bewildered, and
embarrassed his supporters, and created the
undeniable impression that blind impulse
rather than sound reasoning had motivated
~is .course.
The business began with a surprise
message to Congress on June 19, sulr
mitting the Soak-the-Rich scheme of taxation, and ended up in a roaring farce of
misunderstanding, confusion, and doublecrossing. In his budget message in January
the President had said that he "did not consider it advisable at this time to propose any

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

new or additional taxes". He asked only
that the emergency nuisance and other excise taxes, levied the year before, be re-imposed, as the law exacting these revenues
would die by its own limitations on June 30
if it were not re-enacted. Proceeding on the
assumption that Mr. Roosevelt meant exactly what he said, the House Ways and
Means Committee and the Senate Finance
Committee were perfecting the proper bill
for continuing the rates. Both committees
announced that no other tax legislation
would be attempted.
But in the meantime Huey Long was
keeping up an incessant demand for the
Share-the-Wealth philosophy. And his idea
was gaining alarming popularity. It was
then that Mr. Roosevelt sprang his surprise
taxat,ion message, supposedly to counteract
the Long campaign. Congressional leaders,
not having been admitted to the Presiden..
tial confidence, were dumbfounded. They
did not know whether the President meant
a business double of the Long bid, or was.
merely making an original psychic bid of
his own. And they couldn't find out. Immediately after dispatching his message Mr.
Roosevelt departed for New London to see
the Harvard-Yale boat races and went from
there to H yde Park for the week-end.
It was only after many excited conferences on Capitol Hill that the leaders concluded the President did not expect action
at the session on his recommendations. But
no sooner was this apparent than Senators
La Follette and Wheeler, traditional Soakthe-Rich advocates, moved into action. They
obtained the signatures of twenty-two senators to a round-robin pledging immediate
enactment of the plan of taxation suggested
by the President. Their scheme was to at..
tach the new rates as a rider on the pending
bill extending the excise taxes; and their
threat was that if the rider were not attached, passage of the bill by the June 29

deadline would be blocked. Administration

leaders haughtily declared they would not
permit any rider legislation.
Thus matters stood until Monday, June
24, when the President returned to Washington and summoned the congressional
leaders to a night conference. It was at the
conclusion of this conference that Senator
Robinson formally told the newspapermen
that the decision had been "to press action
on the recommendations of the President
pertaining to amendments to the tax laws
at the present session". On this authority
and with additional comment obtained
from Senator Pat Harrison, chairman of the
Finance Committee, the newspapers announced on Tuesday that the decision was
to attach the new legislation to the pending
measure and get the whole thing enacted
before the coming Saturday night.
This surrender to the Wheeler-La Follette
group stimulated immediate opposition.
That day and the next, newspapers from
coast to coast rang with vociferous denunciations of the White House program. And
then at his Wednesday press conference the
President blandly informed the correspondents that their reports had been wrong; that
he had not demanded excessive speed; that
he did not expect his recommendations to
be attached to the pending bill and put
through by Saturday night. Correspondents
who had received from senators in whom
they had absolute confidence a version totally at variance with what the President
was saying, gasped in amazement. The
questions which followed reflected their
anger and incredulity. And their gasps were
presently echoed by certain other senators
when informed of what the President had
said. As good and loyal partisans, however,
the latter swallowed their irritation and proceeded to issue statements confirming the
official version. This was the time when Pat
Harrison nearly choked to death. . .

THE ROOSEVELT MYTH

The conclusions to be drawn from this incident are obvious. Suffice it to say here that
a lasting impression was left on the minds
of legislators and newspaper correspondents alike. And the Roosevelt myth suffered
another deflation.

II
The myth shrank still further when the
President needlessly submitted himself
again to stinging criticism and weakened
the faith of large elements of the population in his political sagacity by writing an
extraordinary letter to Representative Sam
Hill, the Democratic chairman of the
House Ways and Means sub-committee,
then considering that darling of the Brain
Trusters, the Guffey coal bill.
"1 hope your committee," wrote the
President on July 7, 1935, "will not permit
doubts as to constitutionality, however reasonable, to block this legislation."
Here was a recurrence to the theme of
his press conference of May 31 that had
startled the country and frightened so many
constitutional Democrats away from the
Administration. To say that this letter was
impolitic is to put the matter mildly. In it
the President revealed his own mental processes and his conception of the Constitution
and of government under its restrictions.
As a Presidential communication to the
legislative arm of the government it is
unique among the nation's state papers. No
other President in history has ever felt it
necessary, in obtaining the passage of a
measure, to counsel his supporters to violate the Constitution.
Shortly after this affair, namely, on July
24, 1935, Mr. Roosevelt again exposed his
mind to the public in a fashion that clearly
was impolitic, and neither prudent, sagacious, nor discreet, and thus further lowered his reputation as a s,mart politician.

393

Voluntarily and with the evident desire

to have his opinions published, Mr. Roosevelt announced to his press conference that
he was opposed to the practice of corporations making donations to charity. To do
so was a misapplication of the stockholders'
money, a reduction of their dividends without permission. Furthermore, the President submitted, the real purpose of such
charitable gifts by corporations was to "buy
good will", and that was an evil in itself.
At once the officials of national organizations such as the Community Chest and
other large charitable societies overwhelmed the President with facts and arguments demonstrating his error. Mr. Roosevelt was then forced to make a public
announcement commending and approving drives for charitable funds and asking
all to contribute. This second statement
could only be construed as a weak apology.
The myth shrivelled further.
Next came the magnificent blunder of
the "preacher letters" in the following September. To many thousands of clergymen
of all denominations there went forth from
the White House a circular letter, bearing
an excellent reproduction of the President's
signature, begging these men of God for
their "counsel and advice". Mr. Roosevelt
asked in a wholly non-partisan manner that
they tell him of conditions in their own
communities and how "our government
can better serve our people". The spirit of
a great and noble soul, struggling to improve the conditions of common humanity, turning to the church for guidance and
help, was touchingly breathed in every sentence of the missive.
But suddenly there came the revelation
that, back on March 5, 1935, six months
before, Governor La Follette of Wisconsin
had sent an almost identical letter to the
clergymen of his State. Describing the gigantic task of improving national condi-

394

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

tions, Governor La Follette, to quote but

one sample phrase, had written:
No one man and no single group can do
it. We shall have to work together for
the common end of better spiritual and
material conditions for the American
people.

The Roosevelt letter put it this way:

No one man or single group can do
it. We shall have to work together for
the common end of better spiritual and
material conditions for the American
people.

That the White House had bodily stolen

the idea and even the language of that accomplished politician, Governor La Follette, to flatter the clergymen of the nation
and line them up in political support of the
New Deal, was all too apparent. Resentment and indignation, together with bitter
attacks, characterized many of the replies
which ministers sent to the President - and
gave to the newspapers in their home towns.
Thus was another precedent shattered.
No President of the United States had ever
before been caught in the perpetration of
such a cheap political trick, which lacked
even the merit of being original. The only
excuse offered was that Mr. Roosevelt was
so busy that he had not given attention to
the matter - in other words, the old alibi
that an underling in the White House, unknown to the President, had made a mistake. Well, there was once a really smart
politician also named Roosevelt who lived
in the White House. Can anyone whose
memory goes back far enough imagine him
permitting his signature to be used on
White House stationery - on any sort of
circular letter - without knowing all the
facts and circumstances?

III
Such were the major reasons for the collapse of the Roosevelt myth in 1935. Early
this year, following the sweeping decision
of the Supreme Court outlawing the AAA
and uprooting the vital principle of much
New Deal legislation, other incidents developed. They are so fresh in the public
mind as to need no recapitulation here. The
case stands very well even without them.
The suggestion that Franklin Delano
Roosevelt is the smartest President in history is no longer a shibboleth of the Washington correspondents. A new idea has already been substituted, so quick is the whirl
of the presses. It has been most neatly
phrased by Arthur Krock, chief of the
Washington Bureau of the New York
Times. In his dispatch of January 2, relating to the President's arrangements to deliver his message on the State of the Union
(laughter) at a special night session of the
Congress on January 4, Mr. Krock wrote:
No other President, since the radio hookups were available, ever thought of using
them to make a personal, fireside talk of
an annual message to Congress. But Mr.
Roosevelt is the best showman the White
House has lodged since modern science
made possible such an effective dual performance.

So we are now in for a deluge of superlatives about showmanship. That is, until the
show closes. Then, perhaps, we will have to
admit that the President is not the accomplished actor we now think he is. But the
political sagacity myth is a thing of the past.
Under the strain of opposition, in the face
of the first adversity, the master politician
cracked up. Perhaps Mr. Roosevelt can't
take it.

PRISON CAMPS OF LIBERTY

BY WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN
the World War any question ships of the central and eastern portions of
as to the value of human liberty, so the Continent.
far as North America and the greater
The scales in pre-war Germany were
part of Europe were concerned, would weighted in favor of the aristocratic and
have seemed banal. Such things as regular propertied classes; but Germany under the
elections, freedom of press and speech, se- Kaiser was a paradise for John Stuart Mill
curity against arbitrary arrest and execu- compared with the Nazi Third Reich. Par..
tion, were taken for granted in almost all liamentarism in pre-war Italy worked
countries of consequence. People could poorly; but an Italian could express views
freely leave their own frontiers and travel divergent from those of his government
in other lands. Concentration camps and without having to anticipate an enforced
forced-labor cantonments were unknown. trip to a penal island or a beating or a
The whole trend was in the direction of stiff dose of castor-oil. The Soviet regime
extending the area of political, personal, has not only taken over the whole Czarand civil liberty. Of course there were dark ist technique of repressing "dangerous
spots on the European horizon, such as thoughts" (censorship, espionage, arbitrary
Czarist Russia and the semi-Oriental arrest, and banishment); it has greatly in..
Balkans; and there were individual cases tensified it. When Czar Alexander II was
when justice and freedom were obviously bombed to death in 1881, five revolution..
denied and trampled on. Such cases, how- aries who participated in the plot were put
ever, were exceptions to be denounced, not to death. .When Sergei Kirov, one of
rules of administrative practice to be ac- Stalin's chief lieutenants, was assassinated
in 1934, one hundred and seventeen per..
cepted as normal and regular.
Yet one of the most ironical and por- sons were shot, of whom only thirteen,
tentous results of that war which was sup- judging from the laconic Soviet official
posed to safeguard the world for democ- communiques, were actually charged with
racy has been the postwar contraction of complicity. One does not find in Czarist
the area wherein relatively free institutions legislation any parallel for the Soviet law
prevail. Democracy, in the sense of effec- of August 7, 1932, prescribing the death
tive popular control over the workings of penalty for theft of State property (which
the governmental machine, survives today in Russia means almost all property), or
only in the United States, Great Britain for the decree issued in the summer of
and its self-governing Dominions, France, 1934, under which innocent dependents of

EFORE

and a few of the smaller countries of north..

any Soviet citizen who flees from the coun..

ern and western Europe, with Czechoslovakia a lonely oasis amid the dictator-

try are to be punished with. five years of

banishment to Siberia.

395

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

In theory, as in practice, liberty today is
assailed as it has not been for a century.
The two main governmental philosophies
which have developed since the war, communism and fascism,are contemptuous of
freedom in principle and utterly destructive of it in actual methods of rule. One
might have imagined that a reasonable
human being's reaction to the late Armageddon would have been intense aversion to
violence, cruelty, and bloodshed, regardless
of the professed objective. But, on the contrary, a hard-boiled psychology is one of
the outstanding characteristics not only of
avowed communists and fascists, but of
the fringe of sympathizers which each doctrine has attracted. It is lightly assumed
that it doesn't make the slightest difference how many human eggs are broken if
only the perfect communist or fascist omelette comes out in the end.
Now it would be an over-simplification
to suggest that fascism and communism
are identical. But there is so strikingly
much in common between the ruling-class
psychology and the practical methods of
governing which now prevail in the Soviet Union, in Germany, and in Italy, that
these two challenges to liberty may fairly
be examined together.
The typical enemies of liberty in the
pre-war period were the traditional autocrat and the ambitious soldier who played
the role of a small-scale Napoleon. Both
the hereditary and the self-made ruler of
this type bothered very little about public
opinion or the dissemination of favorable
propaganda. The rulers rose and fell, depending on the reliability of their soldiers
and their police. But the communist-fascist
technique of remaining in power is more
subtle and more formidable. It is based
first of all on a recognition of the tremendous potentialities of state-monopolized
propaganda in an age when most people

go to school, read newspapers, listen to

radio broadcasts, and attend the movies.
Side by side with this goes a clear realization of the fact that few individuals
pqssess the stuff of heroes and martyrs. Consequently a regime of calculated frightfulness, with no opportunity even for public
martyrdom, a regime of secret killings
without public trial, of wholesale brutality
in concentration camps, of widespread espionage, is calculated to break all but the
strongest spirits, to make impossible
mass opposition to any governmental measures, and to sanctify sacrifices which the
omnipotent rulers demand of the masses
- for their own ultimate good, of course.
The inevitable outcome of an extended
period of government by propaganda plus
terror is that acertain part of the population
is converted to a belief in the existing order,
that another and probably larger part learns
the wisdom of keeping its collective mouth
shut, that the obstinate dissidents are cowed
and crushed, and that the credulous foreign
visitor who comes to see and to admire has
an unrivalled opportunity to make a fool of
himself.

II
Italian Fascism and German National Socialism came into existence after Russian
Bolshevism. And there is not a single trick
of administration that. the fascist systems
did not learn or could not have learned
from their Russian predecessor. There is
the practice of a single political party, for
instance, which gives the ruling group eyes
and ears and nerve centers in every part
of the country and also affords a sizable
organized minority of the people a stake
in the existing order and a reason to fear
any change. Over and above this party
towers the infallible, incomparable Vozhd,
Fuhrer, or D'uce who is the indispensable

PRISON CAMPS OF LIBERTY

figure in the communist-fascist system of
government. The incense of adulation that
falls to the lot of a modern dictator would
have seemed a little strong to the nostrils
of even a Russian Czar or a Byzantine Emperor. Note the following lush outburst
from a writer named Avdyenko, in glorification of Stalin:
Centuries shall elapse and the communist
generations of the future will deem us
the happiest of all mortals that have inhabited this planet throughout the ages,
because we have seen Stalin the leadergenius, Stalin the Sage, the smiling, the
kindly, the supremely simple. When I met
Stalin, even at a distance, I throbbed with
his forcefulness, his magnetism and his
greatness. I wanted to sing, to shriek, to
howl from happiness and exaltation.
Similar ecstatic tributes to Hitler and Mussolini can be found on every hand.
The communist dictatorship in Russia
may also lay claim to the credit or discredit of originating the following administrative methods,which the fascist dictatorships were not slow to take over and
adapt to their own uses:
(I) Executions without open trial and
wholesale sentencing to concentration
camps of "counter-revolutionaries", a term
that is applied to anyone who is justly or
unjustly suspected of harboring critical
thoughts about the existing regime.
(2) Treatment of wives and other relatives of political suspects as hostages for
good behavior. This system was first used
on a large scale by the Reds during the
Russian civil war, especially with a view
to insuring the loyalty of the pre-war
officers who had been mobilized for service in the Red Army.
(3) Making it a grave penal offense for
a citizen to leave his country without official sanction. One of the greatest marks
of distinction between the free and the unfree countries of the world is that anyone

3'97

who is dissatisfied with life in a free country may leave it, unless he is accused
of some specific crime. In the unfree
countries, especially in the Soviet Union,
permission to go abroad is granted suspiciously and reluctantly, and is often arbitrarily withheld if the applicant is suspected of holding unsound political views.
The Soviet Union is a vast prison for a
not inconsiderable part of its population;
escape is a life-and-death adventure.
(4) Finding imaginary scapegoats for
the blunders of government. The sabotage
trials in the Soviet Union, in one of which
two dead men were solemnly indicted for
treasonable activities supposedly committed long after their deaths, were admirable
dress rehearsals for the Reichstag Fire trial.
When a leading National Socialist, Herr
Rudolf Hess, recently endeavored to make
the Jews responsible for all Germany's
woes, from the loss of the war to the present shortage of butter, he was unconsciously following the well-trodden path of
the numberless communist orators who attributed the inevitable consequences of illconceived and rashly-executed Soviet agrarian policies to the luckless kulaks, long
after the last kulak had been effectively
liquidated.
Thus, advocates of communism and
fascism have two lines of defense when
doubting critics raise the question of the
summary and ruthless treatment meted out
to dissidents. The first line, especially use..
ful with inexperienced and ill-informed
observers who wish to be converted, is to
deny flatly even the best authenticated
proofs of administrative atrocities. The
second and subtler apologia is to fall back
on the overworked egg-and-omelette
theory.

Yet all revolutionary change, one may

suggest, demands its victims. What if a
few million peasants died in Russia in 1933

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

as the result of ruthless state requisitions
of their food products and failure to extend relief after large-scale famine had set
in? The survivors are enJoying all the supposed benefits of collectivized farming under state supervision; some of them have
even been honored by personal interviews
with Stalin. What if a few hundred thou~
sand Jews were harried and persecuted
after the inauguration of the Third Reich?
How can this be weighed in the balance
against the resurgence of German national
unity, of the German national soul? And,
in view of the magnificent order, discipline, and accurate keeping of railway
schedules which have been characteristic of
Italy under fascism, does it matter much if a
few incorrigible cranks came to untimely
ends, or had to flee the country, or took up
an enforced residence on the penal island
of Lipari?
III
In contrast to communists and fascists,
genuine liberals and democrats do not
make of their faith a fetish, an end-in-itself. They believe that liberty was made for
man, not man for liberty. The answer to
the question whether liberty matters can
only be supplied if one first considers the
communist and fascist cases against it,
and then examines how far communism
and fascism have provided more satisfac~
tory conditions of government and daily
life to the people who live under these
systems.
The communist's justification for the
complete suppression of what he would
call "bourgeois democracy" (i.e., freedom
of press, speech, assembly and political ac~
tivity unsanctioned by the ruling party,
security against arrest, and banishment
without trial) is that the Soviet Union is
engaged in erecting a new social order of

such promise that nothing should be al..

lowed to hinder its development. The dis..
tinctive feature of this new order is that
all means of production and national re~
sources are withdrawn from private ownership and placed in the hands of the State.
Believing that private property is the root
of economic original sin, the communist
contends that all means are legitimate if
they conduce to the eradication of this evil.
The fascist also pleads revolutionary
emergency as the justification for substituting habeas cadaver for habeas corpus. His
ideal is not to destroy private economic
enterprise, but to curb, control, and direct
it by setting up the State as a super-arbiter,
with powers to coerce both capital and
labor. He believes that liberalism and
democracy are outworn and decadent, and
that nations achieve greatness in proportion
as individuals are subordinated to the state,
which is incarnated in the infallible
Leader. Like the communist, the fascist
believes strongly in planned economy as a
cure for such economic ailments as unemployment and overproduction. While
neither Germany nor Italy, where private
operation of trade and industry still prevails, has gone as far in the direction of a
centralized planned economy as the Soviet Union, both these fascist regimes have
regimented private economic activity much
more minutely and strictly than democratic governments have found it expedient to do.
Judgments on the success or failure of
the communist and fascist experiments naturally vary widely, because there is no
universally accepted standard on which
verdicts can be based. Something that
might impress a Nazi or a communist as
a noteworthy and desirable achievement
(the expulsion of all the Jews from a Bavarian village or of all the kulaks from an
Ukrainian county, for instance) might

PRISON CAMPS OF LIBERTY

399

seem to one who did not share Nazi racial ing of marshes and other public works,
dogmas and communist economic dogmas did not save Italy from feeling the full imboth inhuman and detrimental, from the pact of the world crisis. There can be little
standpoint of the general welfare. One doubt that social and economic difficulties
may, however, suggest three broad tests of represented a main factor in pushing the
apprai~al for the regime~ which have de- nation into the current Ethiopian advenliberately sacrificed liberty, as that term ture, which offers, at this writing, not the
is commonly understood, for the sake of slightest prospect of solving any of the
supposedly more important objectives. country's economic problems. It is a war
These tests are material well-being, cul- where the reward of victory will prob..
tural progress, and the right of the indi- ably be national bankruptcy and the results
vidual, in the language of the Declaration of defeat will be incalculably disastrous.
It is surely an ironical commentary on
of Independence, to "pursue happiness".
How does the balance of comparison be- Hitler's claim that he saved Germany from
tween dictatorship and democracy stand Bolshevism that his regime has already
been marked by so many features typical
on these three counts?
If one takes five typical democracies, the of Soviet administration: concentration
United States, Great Britain, France, Swit- camps, rigorous currency restrictions, and
zerland, and Sweden, there would cer- food shortages. While there has been a retainly be little reason for their inhabitants duction in the number of the unemployed
to envy the material lot of the subjects of since the Third Reich came into existence
five equally typical dictatorships, Germany, (part of which would most probably have
Italy, the Soviet Union, Poland, and Jugo- occurred in any case, because of the imslavia. It may be argued that the form of provement in world economic conditions),
government is not decisive in determining this is. offset by more hardships among
material well-being, and that such factors those already in employment. Here again
as natural wealth and incidents of histor- dictatorship has offered no new idea, no
ical development enter into consideration. saving principle of economic regeneration.
While this is unquestionably true, the
The Soviet Union, most sweeping and
association of a relatively high standard of far-reaching of all the dictatorships, also
living in such matters as food, housing, offers little support for the theory that the
sanitation, means of communication, ma- abandonment of individual liberty is a
terial conveniences, and free institutions is necessary prerequisite to economic wellsurely too general to be accidental. What being. As recently as 1933 the peasants in
is still more significant, not one of the a large part of the Soviet Union experipostwar dictatorships has revealed con- enced a most devastating famine, the grimvincing proof of its ability to give its sub- mest sort of proof that their standard of
jects a higher standard of living as com.. living had sunk far below the level of
pensation for the freedom of which they Czarist times. Since 1933 there has been a
have been deprived. All started with great certain amount of recovery; but years must
promises and great expectations, most of pass, under the most favorable circumwhich remained conspicuously unfulfilled. stances, before the terrific loss of livestock,
The institution of the Corporative State, which was the result of the compulsory
the enforced harmony between capital and collectivization of the peasant holding, can
labor in Italy, the much-advertised drain- be made good.

400

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

The peasants .constitute the majority of

the Soviet population. The industrial
workers have been the preferred class under the communist dictatorship. Yet the
position of the Russian workman today,
so far as material things are concerned, is
much closer to that of the unemployed
American or British worker than to the
employed. The Soviet currency has just
heen restabilized at five rubles to the dol..
lar; and the average monthly wage of the
industrial worker is 170 rubles. Thirty-four
dollars a month might seem a rather modest average wage almost two decades after
a revolution that was primarily made in
the interest of the manual working class.
Still, by Eastern European standards, it
would not be so low if the dollars had
large purchasing power. But this is emphatically not the case. A recent dispatch
from Moscow mentioned the following
food prices: butter, two dollars a pound;
bread, sixty cents a loaf; beef, seventy-five
cents a pound.
It has always seemed to me that the
Russian famine of 1933 was the most overwhelming proof of the necessi~y of civil
and political liberties as a safeguard for the
common man against extreme exploitation
at the hands of what Nietzsche called "the
coldest of all cold monsters", the State. This
famine was political, not climatic. By exacting its full pound of flesh, by scouring the
countryside for the peasants' pitiful hidden
stocks of grain and vegetables and confiscating them, by failing to grant relief when
mass-mortality from starvation and related
diseases set in, the Soviet authorities incurred the full responsibility for a famine
that cost millions of lives. Had the peasants
possessed any means of controlling the central or local governmental bodies, had they
been able to present their case in a free
press, no such tragedy could conceivably
have occurred.

A milder illustration of the same point is

to be found in ,the resistance which the
Soviet, program of cotton expansion in
Central Asia encountered among, the natives of that region. A recent dispatch from
Moscow to the Christian Science Monitor
contains the following suggestive sentences:
There was both active and passive resistance to Soviet efforts to expand cotton
areas at the expense of grain regions. The

revolt was blamed on "kulaks" and "nationalists", but there is reason to believe
it was due in part at least to inadequate
distribution of food among Central Asian
tribes and also to a passive strike against
state prices for cotton, which were considered confiscatory.

One hears much of the unquestionable

grievances of the share-croppers in America's Southern states. Uncritical admirers
of the Soviet economic system might profitably give a little more consideration to
the plight of the share-croppers of Central
Asia, who have an all-powerful State as a
landlord and are deprived of any means
of organized political or economic protest
when food distribution is inadequate or
when prices, dictated by bureaucrats in
faraway Moscow, are confiscatory.
Moreover, one sometimes encounters an
easy conviction that political and civil liberties are of consequence only to the wellto-do and highly-educated classes, that the
masses will be automatically emancipated
if only capitalism, in the sense of private
ownership and operation of all important
economic enterprises, is eliminated. But it
seems to me that one of the outstanding
and obvious lessons of the Russian experience is that the fullest measure of
political and civil liberty is even more
necessary under socialism than under capitalism, because the concentration of economic power in a few hands is immensely
greater under socialism. A state on the

PRISON CAMPS OF LIBERTY

make is even more ruthless, because more
irresistible, than a corporation on the make.
Soviet prisons and concentration camps today are filled with people who might fairly
be called labor agitators, peasants who
voiced objections against excessive requisitions and low prices for their products,
workers who resisted the intensive speed-up
of labor that is now going on in Russia
under the name of Stakhanovism.
In fact, there is no country. in the world
where there is less personal security or
where people work under greater nervous
strain and tension than in the Soviet
Union. The industrial manager or engineer constantly fears that a slip or mistake will be construed as sabotage. The
peasant knows that to be denounced to
the authorities as a kulak or a kulak-sympathizer means transportation to a forcedlabor. camp with short rations and a high
death-rate. The Communist Party member
is in an agony before the periodic Party
purge; some personal enemy may denounce
him as unworthy of membership because
his wife's uncle once owned a windowglass factory.
As for Soviet methods of abolishing unemployment, they are comparable with
Soviet methods of "eliminating insecurity".
A recent Moscowcammunique announced
the completion of a railway construction
operation in Eastern Siberia, where the
workers were all prisoners, some of them
probably ordinary criminals, others political prisoners, including peasants who opposed collective farming. The communique
casually mentioned that the workers often
were required to stand to the waist in
freezing water. Similar or worse conditions
prevailed in the building of the BalticWhite Sea Canal, rushed to completion by
serf labor under the supervision of the
notoriously merciless Gay-Pay-Oo. One
need not underestimate the tragedy to feel

41

that, given the alternative, one would

much rather be unemployed in the United
States than employed in the Soviet Union.

IV
The new-style fascist and communist dictatorships differ from former autocracies
in another important point: they want
their subjects to be able to read and write,
although not to think, except along officially prescribed lines. Propaganda, which
plays such a big role in the up-to-date dictatorship, is less effective with an illiterate
population. So Germany, Italy, and the
Soviet Union can all point to some credirable achievements in providing instruction and entertainment for the masses. The
Italian Dopa Lavoro (After Work) movement, the German Kraft durchFreude
(Strength through Joy), and the Soviet
state-controlled trade-unions have all done
a good deal in the way of providing the
workers with cheap vacation' trips, opera
and theater tickets at reduced prices, and
opportunities for excursions to museums
and places of historic interest. All three
regimes have also encouraged sport and
outdoor exercise. But nothing that has been
done along these lines would be impossible under a democratic system. And it
is in the very nature of dictatorship,
whether of the communist or the fascist
brand, to be hostile to creative and critical
thought.
The Nazi book-burning has not been duplicated in the Soviet Union, yet Russian
censors do not yield to their brethren in
Berlin and Rome in preventing the printing or the importation from abroad of any
works that may contain "dangerous
thoughts". History and biography, works
on political and social science and economics, all fall under the blight of a vigilant censorship that makes free and objec-

402

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

tive research impossible. .Imagine, for

instance, a Soviet history of the Russian
Revolution that candidly appraised the
role of Trotsky, or a present-day German
history that gave a fair picture of the services rendered to the German cause by
Jewish scientists, or an Italian history that
painted the full realities of Caporetto.
And when one comes to the question of
human happiness under democracy and
under dictatorship, how much intangible
satisfaction does a young Russian, German,
or Italian gain from the mere fact of belonging to the inclusive communist or
fascist youth organization, from being in
step, marching along, singing the songs
that everyone is singing? How far does
the unending stream of self-glorification
which emanates from every dictatorial regime compensate the Russian, the German,
and the Italian for the hardships and deprivations of daily life? It is difficult, probably impossible, to know. Free, uninhibited
talk is a rare luxury in a land where everyone has an uneasy consciousness that his
neighbor may be a spy and an informer.
Professor Tchernavin and his wife, fleeing
at the risk of their lives from a Russia
which they loved, where they would certainly have made a noteworthy scientific
and intellectual contribution under any
democratic regime, even under Czarism,
are the human symbols of the countless
existences that have been torn up by the
roots by the violence, oppression, and arbitrary injustice which are the invariably distinctive qualities of dictatorship.
A democratic regime, by its very nature,
cannot employ against communists or
fascists these methods of total and ruthless
suppression. Consequently, the democratic
regime is more exposed to undermining
from within, and the challenge to liberty
represented by the spread of fascIsm and
communism becomes a serious and for-

midable one. What should be done about

it? Well, one reassuring consideration is
to compare pre-war Russia with pre-war
England. The Czarist regime was buttressed to the limit by repressive .laws and
administrative practices, by soldiers and
gendarmes, police and censors. England
was as free, so far as expression of opinion
was concerned, as any country could be.
The contrasted fates of Russia and of Great
Britain under the common shock of war
afford a convincing and final answer to the
question of which method is safer, the
method of freedom or the method of
tyranny.
The fundamental appeal of freedom
must be constructive and creative. Liberty
is not a hare abstraction, an academic
formula. It is a supremely important practical instrument for carrying on the organized life of society with vastly less
cruelty, oppression, and injustice than
must exist under dictatorship. It should always be associated with progress, never
with mere stagnation and a maintenance
of the social and economic status quo.
How much more of a genuine achievement it is to win a fifty-five or sixty per
cent majority in an honest election than to
get a unanimous vote of confidence (no
other kind has ever been known) at a
Soviet Congress or a ninety-five per cent
majority in a Hitlerite plebiscite!
In this modern age of rapid social change
and. scientific advance, it is certainly foolish to be dogmatic on any detail of eco..
nomic organization. It is not of vital importance whether railroads and public
utility enterprises are nationally or municipally or privately owned; every country,
provided it retains democratic self-government, can be depended on to find the arrangement that best suits its own needs.
But it is a matter of supreme importance
whether people can speak and write and

EVIDENCE OF APRIL
vote freely, whether they can go to bed
without a haunting fear of being dragged
off to questioning, torture, and exile by
secret police, whether they can talk above
a whisper about public affairs when there
are unknown listeners. Once the juggernaut of the modern dictatorial state rolls
over a country, irreparable damage is done
to its standards of culture, to the. quality

of its human relations, to the most ordinary canons of common decency. The
absolute and unconditional value of human liberty is no longer a theoretical
proposition. With the record of communism and fascism written large before our
eyes, there can be little doubt that the frontier of civilization today closely coincides
with the frontier of freedom.

EVIDENCE OF APRIL
BY LIONEL WIGGAM

mountain trembles, for the light is changing,

And each ravine betrays an April symbol:
Air grown suddenly sweet, and earth grown spongy,
And sky turned water-color clear and ample.

HE

Scarcely-stirring twigs are taut with promise.

Prismatic pools appear where streams are thawing.
The sleepy serpent wriggles from a crevice
Where paper-like his winter skin is lying.
Color is found, uncertain and spasmodic,
Along the underbrush and in the bracken.
And bird by bird the thicket swells with music:
The winter, like a hoary spell, is broken.
And children leave the town to plunge their fingers
Under the glassy armor of the river,
Climbing the slope with April-loving anger,
Swearing to keep the summertime forever.

THE CREDO OF A NEW DEALER

BY PAUL PALMER
the aid and information of future political historians, THE AMERICAN MERCURY,
ever eager to help in such matters, herewith presents one hundred shibboleths of
that More Abundant Life under which the Republic now sweats and groans. Care
ful investigation has established that a full-blown New Dealer believes the following:

OR

That the Supreme Court is unconstitutional.

That every time a Republican candidate

kisses a baby, the baby dies.

8
That a Treasury bond, placed in the
vault of a private bank, increases in value,
like wine or whisky.

That there are at least 700 members of

the du Pont family and that each has contributed $12,000,000 to the American Liberty League.

3
That when President Roosevelt says
"My friends" into the microphone, every
adult American immediately stops whatever he is doing and stands spellbound.
4
That a horse-and-buggy is the n10st reprehensible vehicle ever constructed by the
hand of man.

9
That a pump can be primed by pouring
the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans into it.
10

That the Angel Gabriel is a frequent

overnight guest at the White House.
II

That farmers ought to get double prices

for everything they grow, and a discount
of fifty per cent on everything they buy.

12

That the House of Morgan forced the

United States into the World War, was
instrumental in sinking the Lusitania, Titanic, and Vestris, set the Iroquois Theater
fire, and is directly responsible for the poor
showing of the Washington Senators in
the 1935 baseball season.

That the law of supply and demand

should be repealed by Congress.

6
That the 1936 Literary Digest poll is a
capitalist plot. (In 1932 it was O.K.)

44

13
That the government shouldn't give
American business too many breathing
spells.
14
That Upton Sinclair is a gifted statesman and will be of vital assistance in ending production in America.

THE CREDO OF A NEW DEALER

15

23

That Franklin Delano Roosevelt can't

help smiling.

That the prominent -Democrats who

have deserted Cabinet offices and other
high positions in the Administration returned to private life because they were
sick or broke, but not because they could
no longer stomach the New Deal.

16
.(J

45

That the best government can be

achieved by a crew of tinkers ambitiously
patching the various parts of the social
structure, provided they work independently, with indifferent tools, and according
to conflicting principles of craftsmanship;
and that the resulting cacophony of economic flats, .agrarian diminuendos, and
industrial discords can be symphonized
into a grand concert by such contrabasses
of political oratory as General Farley.

17
That the Brain Trust has brains and
can be trusted.

18
That all who attack the New Deal
should be suppressed permanently because
the current situation is a national emergency.

19
That Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau may not be very bright, but that his
father is a financial genius.
20

1-(hat the report that Thomas Jefterson

has turned over in his grave twice weekly
since March 4, 1932, is a foul canard.

24
That the full-dress suit worn by Al
Smith at the Liberty League Dinner was
bought and paid for by J. P. Morgan.

25
That the frankfurter
gift to man.

IS

God's greatest

26
That Harry Hopkins spends $48,000,000
before breakfast each morning instead. of
doing setting-up exercises.

27
That it is too bad William E. Borah
wasn't born a Democrat.

28
That Dr. Wirt was wrong.

29
That Democratic members of the last
Congress passed the Administration's legislation witll dizzy speed, not because they
were sandbagged by threats of curtailed
patronage, but because they believed in
the merits of the bills before them.

3
21

That it is much more important to finance Warm Springs, Georgia, than it

is to finance the United States of America.
22

That President Roosevelt's sons know

how to drive automobiles.

That Henry A. Wallace is the greatest

Secretary of Agriculture since the last
greatest Secretary of Agriculture.

31
That every time Thomas S. Lamont
asks John W. Davis for the correct time
he gets a bill for $75,000.

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

32

That a President who had controlled

Congress body and soul for three years
was powerless to prevent passage of the
Bonus.

That the last thing a public utility of..

ficial does at night, before retiring to his
platinum..lined boudoir, is to raise the con..
sumer's rates one more notch.

33

41

That crop reduction is well served by

sending farmers to Alaska to open up new
lands.

That all solvent American citizens are

Wall Street speculators and should be im..
prisoned at once.

34
That Norman Thomas is a reactionary
because he refuses to merge the Socialist
Party with the New Deal.

42

35

That .Alfred E. Smith's political convic..

tions are contrary to Democratic doctrines,
but that Rexford Guy Tugwell's collectiv..
ist ideas are 100 per cent orthodox.

That the almost instantaneous spurt in

business when the Supreme Court declared
NRA unconstitutional is difficult to explain, but that the demise of NRA had
nothing whatever to do with it.

43
That the share-cropper who was forced
on relief by the Cotton Control Act re..
gains his self-respect with a WPA privy..
building job.

36
That the imprisonment of a citizen for
buying undated potatoes is a noble, and
therefore unassailable, instance of the New
Jurisprudence.

44
That the New Deal ideology is not
communistic, but that even if it were, it
would be better for the country than a
Republican administration.

37
That the SEC will not accomplish its
purpose until it has strangled finance and
turned the New York Stock Exchange
Building into a rest home for indigent
WPA officials.

38
That what this country needs is a good
fifty-billion-dollar deficit.
39
That the Justices of the Supreme Court
are all over 100 years of age and pass their
spare time matching twenty-dollar gold
pieces supplied .in case lots by Andrew
Mellon.

45
That Dr. Townsend is a sincere idealist,
but a little ahead of his time.

46
That if fifty-one per cent of the nation's
voters can be got onto the federal payroll,
the New Deal will .become perpetual.

47
That George Washington. was all right
because he plowed under a cherry tree.

48
That the various gabby females prominently identified with the New Deal ac..

THE CREDO OF A NEW DEALER

tually dislike publicity and are forced onto
the front pages and before microphones
against their will.

to Der Fuhrer in private in the same terms

with. which they breathe his name in
public.

49
That to pay fifty dollars a' plate and
,vear evening clothes to a Jackson Day
Dinner attended by a Mr. Roosevelt (D.,
N. Y.) is to be a high-minded patriot, but
that to pay five dollars a plate and wear
evening clothes to a Liberty League Dinner attended by a Mr. Smith (D., N. Y.)
is to be a predatory plutocrat.

56

That individual human liberty is oldfashioned and will never be missed once
the More Abundant Life reaches full
flower.

57
That, after all, there may be something
to the Soviet scheme of liquidating the
opposition.

That the Bill of Rights is out-moded

and can be scrapped altogether as soon as
the old Solid South creeps as far North
as Philadelphia.

58
That the sooner we realize the expressions "capitalist" and "public enemy" are
synonymous, the better.

51
That the European nations we1ched on
their war debts, but that the United States
acted honorably when it repudiated its
gold-bond clause.

59
That every American business must
be regulated by government supervisors
twenty-four hours of the day.

52
That the booing one hears nowadays
when the smiling Roosevelt face appears
in newsreels is carried on by paid agents
of the Ku Klux Klan.

53
That by planting two rows of trees from
the Canadian border to the Mexican, a
great step :will be taken toward balancing
the budget.

54
That all former American Presidents
who were admittedly great men, regardless of Party, would support the New Deal
if they were alive today.

55
That veteran Democratic senators refer

60
That if the annoying people who are
criticizing the New Deal would only shut
their mouths, the country could be made
over completely within three weeks.

61
That the Forgotten Man can now be
definitely forgotten.

62
That civilization in the United States
came to a dead stop on March 2, 1932.

63
That there can't be too many jobholders.

64
That although Mussolini is a cruel autocrat for oppressing the Ethiopians, he can't

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

be entirely evil, because his Corporation
State owns seventy-five per cent of Italian
business.

65
That if the railroads can be regulated a
little further, they will finally collapse and
then can be commandeered by the federal
bureaucracy, lock, stock, and barrel.
66
That the labor unions have been taken
in very smoothly by the New Deal and
will not wake up until it is too late.

67
That America can never be prosperous
until no one is rich.

68
That social security must be guaranteed
to every indigent in the land because the
federal government owes every citizen a
living.

69
That it is too bad William Jennings
Bryan wasn't elected to the Presidency in
1896 or the New Deal could have started
then.
'

7
That President Roosevelt has only to
smile during his newspaper conferences
to mesmerize almost all the correspondents,
the exceptions being those reporters who
are in direct receipt of Wall Street gold.

men, broken-down Single Taxers, ex-AntiSaloon League clerks, former Prohibition

agents, lady beauticians, veterinarians, osteopaths, and gold-brick salesmen who
have found cash customers for the Brooklyn Bridge.

72
That the purchasing power of the
American dollar, come 1937, will still be
59 worth of votes and 41 worth of
baloney.

73
That honesty, decency, and statesmanship must be rooted out of American
public life once and for. all.

74
That any allegation of federal censorship of free speech over the radio is a gross
libel, but that if attacks on the New Deal
continue there is no telling what will
happen.

75
That a political platform does not mean
what it says and so should be plowed
under.

76
That a New Deal jobholder who digs
into the Federal Treasury for $I 0,000 a
year is a patriot, but that a New Deal critic
who earns the same amount by the sweat
of his brow is a "creature of entrenched
greed".

71
That Cabinet officers and other high
government officials can best be recruited
from the ranks of the following unemployed: professors of cow-state colleges,
Y.M.C.A. secretaries, amateur uplifters, social service workers, disqualified clergy-

77
That the most thrilling proletarian document since the Communist Manifesto was
the President's address to Congress on the
State of the Union, in which he declared
the American Class-War.

THE CREDO OF A NEW DEALER

78
That wealth may be augmented and

people left and then the poor will feel

better.

equitably distributed by failing to produce

86

it or by actually destroying it, and that

a non-existent hog is better for a starving
farmhand than the fumes of roast pig in
the oven of his share-cropping employer.

That the Civil Service Commission, by

placing a premium on literacy, is a menace to patronage, and therefore should be
abolished.

79

87

That the NRA was the most nearly perfect piece of legislation ever voted by Congress, only it didn't go far enough.

That Rexford Guy Tugwell sacrificed a

great career to work for the government.

80
That if Thomas Jefferson were alive
today he would approve the New Deal's
setting class against class because he was
an agrarian revolutionist himself.

81
That inflation can't happen here because it happened in Germany, a land of
Huns.

82
That the doctrine of States' Rights, formerly subscribed to by the Democratic
Party, is obsolete today because under it
the number of federal jobholders is necessarily limited.

83
That every American citizen who has
survived the last three years with his savings account intact should be taxed unmercifully to support all those who haven't
savings accounts and never will have them.

84
That the way to re-employ ten million
unemployed is to raise prices so high that
the consumer cannot purchase.

85
That if the rich can be soaked with
enough taxes there won't be any rich

88
That the American farmer has been
helped considerably by the importation of
hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of
food stuffs necessitated by New Deal cropcontrol legislation.

89
That the best way to pay old debts is by
contracting new and larger ones.

90
That a belief in the doctrines of Karl
Marx and an aversion to manual labor
entitle the possessor to free meals at the
expense of the government.

91
That Henry Morgenthau has discovered
the philosopher's stone, whereby Treasury
paper, exchangeable for more Treasury
paper, may be transmuted into riches by
printing magic words on it.
92
That a correlated political philosophy
is a handicap to governmental virtuosity,
and hence the New Dealer is free to try
all roads and by-alleys of endeavor, including the left, the right, and the south due
north; the ultimate destination being left
to chance, political expediency, electoral
patience, and the Supreme Court.

FOR A SPINSTER

410
93

That entrenched bureaucracy is somehow vast!y different from entrenched

greed.

94
That any citizen who has a job, saves
money, and pays his honest debts is ipso
facto a reactionary.
95
That the Federal Treasury is an inexhaustible horn of abundance, whose broad
end should remain in Washington, where
it is used as a pork barrel, while the narrow neck oozes out largesse into the various states, serving, at the same time, as
a vacuum cleaner of efficient taxation.

96
That a Harvard law student, after listening to three lectures by Felix Frankfurter,

knows more about the law than the nine

judges of the Supreme Court.

97
That the true and lawful title to all
money is vested in those who have not
earned it, and to all property in those who
do not own it.

98
That all the people can be fooled all the
time.
99
That $5,000,000,000 can buy a national
election.
100

And that Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

running on a platform commending him
for the successful execution of the ideas
heretofore catalogued, will be re-elected
next November by the largest plurality in
the history of the Republic.

FOR A SPINSTER'
(Dying of Cancer of the Breast)
BY SARA HENDERSON HAY

ALACK, what irony is this.

l. Surely a harsh and bitter jest

That one inviolate so long
Should come at length to such a lover.
Here was a very maiden breast,
A heart no passion might discover,
Whom Death has done a cruel wrong,
Betrayed unto a brutal kiss.
Dishonored now and given over,
Finally, shamefully possessed.

BUSH BRIGADES AND BLACKAMOORS

BY LAURENCE STALLINGS

Addis Ababa
of Ethiopia sits upon the
T saddleCapital
of a mountain, in a situation of
HE

surpassing equatorial beauty. It is more

filthy than the houseboat colonies of Hong
Ko~g, and has less color than the Negro
section of an Alabama canebrake town.
Too much has been written of it. Suffice
to say it is a squalid collection of mudhuts
housing one hundred thousand syphilitic
niggers, ruled by a thousand black-and-tan
Jack-the-Rippers.

Negus Neghusti
The King of Kings is a little warm
brown man with flop ears and a receding
chin which he masks in a luxuriant black
beard. He sits cafard in his eyrie, a barny
palace profusely decorated ,vith silverframed portraits of the English royal family, a living triumph of British diplomacy
in Africa. He sits with great dignity back
of a long French table, unruffled and
smooth - quiet, Oriental, with wonderful
dark eyes, black pupils framed in malarial
whites. He has poisoned, stabbed, shot,
and fought his way to his kingship; and
now, when Birnam Wood has started
moving down his alley, this jitney Macbeth
must regret bitterly his failure to do business with the Italians.

Class-War
Ethiopia is partitioned into marvelous
provinces, each barely connected by Am-

harra conquerors with other component

parts. The Amharras are for the most part
ginger-cake people, appearing far more
Semitic than Hamitic. They resemble, the
best of them, the type of colored denizens
in New York City where Negro Harlem
meets the Jewish Bronx. I dislike the Amharras with a great intensity; though this
can hardly be due to sheer racial hatred. I
admire the Somalis, those truculent and
savage shepherds and warriors who people the deserts - the husk of Ethiopia.
They are a Semitic people, more Arabian
than not, with of course strong streams of
Negroid in them. The Arabs, who speak
with contempt of the Ethiopians as "The
Mixed Ones" (The Bastards), share with
all the Near East a hatred and distrust of
Ethiopian character.
The bulk of the Ethiopians are Gallas.
They are the great fighters, the true Mos..
lems of the country. There must be eight
or ten millions of them. A scientist would
call them a non-Bantu Hamitic people.
To me, they are most near the Southern
Negro, and a people of the same wonderful patience, the same quick courage.
They filtered into Ethiopia in the fifteenth
century, coming from Kenya and other
equatorial countries. They have been conquered by the Amharras in the past fifty
years, just as have the Somalis and other
subject races. The Emperor, an Amharra,
is fighting his war with his serfs, the Gallas. There are dozens of small minorities.
One such is the Danakalls, a people who

411

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

perhaps are nearer to the ancient Egyptians than any others living. Of course all
are in thralldom, though in many places
they cannot yet tolerate the sight of their
conquerors.
Thanks mainly to the propaganda of
the British, we are supposed to think of
the Ethiopian officials as ministers of war,
state, etc., but this is sheer poppycock, as
any journalist will tell you. It is better to
think of them in their true titles. The chief
official is a Dejasmaj, or keeper of the center gate. His second-in-command is a
Grazmaj, or Right-wing leader. He is, as
a man of the Right, chief of police and
protector of private property such as
horses, dogs, children of gabars (slaves),
etc. The least of the three rnajors is the
Kenjasmaj, or Left-wing leader. Then
there is one other title to be understood.
That is the Fita-wrari - that nigger more
truculent than the rest who, from the Emperor's bounty, has been award~d the land
and slaves of the outlying villages. His
title literally means Rhinoceros Horn and
he is the Roland who, in the pass, may
wind his horn for aid.
These four titles are all needed to understand Ethiopia, which is the last great
slave state of the world, and which has
not a Chinaman's chance to survive the
next twenty years of history.

Chercher
No act of a European power ever gave
so much pleasure to the African as the
bon1bing of Adowa .conferred upon the
Galla peasants of the Chercher province.
This fine long range of mountain meadows and upland pastures belongs partly to
T ekla Hawariat. Naturally only his caste
may wear rifles, for the Gallas are subject
to the Amharra dynasty.... There is a
valley in the Chercher where men no
longer go; for Menelik ra~ed it in the be-

ginning of the present century, and there

are said to. be forty thousand ghosts there,
looking for their heads. . The Gallas,
however, after the bombing of Adowa,
were given rifles.
The Gallas still boast of their king hidden somewhere among the Moslem secrets
of the Chercher, and now he has many
armed warriors. The Emperor, having
armed them, can look to his laurels once
the present European difficulties are settled out of court. A Galla peasant with a
new Mauser is a man to avoid.
Some of the rifles issued them were not
new, which accounted for the figure,
sprawled in the road one morning, of an
Amharra soldier. Evidently he, as a member of the elect, had owned a new Mauser.
He now lay on his back, an old Lebel
fusil by him. He had been a very tall man,
and the Galla who killed him had carried
away proof of his stature, having carefully
removed a strip from lower lip to groin.
The Amharra sprawled in the road, still
faintly pumping away his heart's blood,
right where the clay road wound towards
the Chercher province.
When Tekla Hawariat returned from
Geneva, he brought his two small sons
with him. They were tiny children, chic
in Parisian togs; for the French have great
skill in dressing under-sized children. The
old warrior looked with great gusto upon
his country, but the little pickaninnies
~tared at a homeland they had heard of,
but had never seen. The railway stops
were alive with unkempt and frowsy
horrors.

Haramaieh
There will never be a finer setting for
a village than that one which lies just beyond the pass into Harrar province. A
punchbowl of equatorial mountains rolls
a green rim 10,000 feet towards high and

BUSH BRIGADES AND BLACKAMOORS

stately cumulus clouds, themselves picked
out of a miraculous African blue. At
6000 feet the floor of the valley is fifty
miles across. Settling in the exact center
is a lake which, on its' sheet of glass, faithfully reproduces the scene.

When the Aurussi troops poured through

Haramaieh in November they killed and
castrated three shepherds. The Fita-wrari
of the province then flogged twelve of
them, giving each thirty lashes with a
rhinoceros whip. Some of us were unluck-

By tlle lake still remain a few Harrari, ily caught in the radio
fled there to evade the Emperor's coloniz..

ing forces. Harrar was theirs; then became

station in Harrar

town and forced to remain there while the

flogging went on in the compound. The
only plumbing in Harrar province I saw
that day - a little spout which squ~rted
water into the flogged man's face after
each blow. One of the Aurussis survived
the flogging - at least, a surgeon said it
seemed as though the fellow might.
The murder of their fathers did not dim
the gaiety of these children by the little lake.
Even though they had seen those dreadful
red patches in the sun, they still greeted
me (they flying after bolting donkeys and
sheep) with "Denas Stelling, Gue-tah . . .
Good morrow to you, Master."

General Makonnen's by right of conquest.

The latter gave it to his son, who is Haile
Selassie. It was all over with Harrar prov..
ince then, for the accursed Amharras
moved in to enslave these gay people.
Even the brothels are now an Amharra
monopoly, only women of the Emperor's
caste being permitted to hang the Crusader's red cross and white tabard before
their doors. Every avenue for the acquisition of silver belongs to the King of Kings
in Harrar province now.
So thoroughly is the province his that an
English diplomat has recently written:
"His being King of Kings is only further Dream Prince
mark of his high sacrifice; for, possessed of
The Prince Ismail Daout is brother-inlarge estates, he might retire to his own law to the King of Egypt, and head of a
Harrar and there lead the agricultural1ife Red Cross mission in Ethiopia. Naturally
of a country gentleman..." (Sir Roger the Prince wanted his outfit, which he fide Coverley, after Sunday morning nanced himself, to go from Addis Ababa
prayers, dropping down to the segregated towards the Northern front. He had organdistrict to count Saturday night's takings.) ized his units for mule caravan from Dessie
The only children who. seemed to lead a onwards. But Haile Selassie cuts all the
childish life of games and dreamy pleasures cards. He did not want the Prince Isn1ail
were beside that lake; I saw no such others Daout to be so near Egypt, where he might
in all Ethiopia. They did not even resent communicate military intelligence to his
the harsh chatter of a motorcycle which sent people; so he sent him to Harrar, where
their small flocks flying; rather they were his mules would be useless.
The Prince wore clothes like an Englishrejoicing, it seemed to me, that they might
go dashing naked across the broad mead- man, and he had a monocle, a manner, and
ows in pursuit, tunics trailing on the wind dress boots. I liked best his habit of kickbehind their necks. Though money meant ing Amharras in the groin. (The kick is
nothing to them, silver piastres with Mene- not an offensive weapon in Ethiopia, for
lik's head (he severed the heads of some the foot is not considered a part of the hutwenty thousand once as a disciplinary man body, but a mere appendage of mud
upon which the body stands.) I saw the
measure) were pretty, shining things.

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

Prince Ismail Daout fork an unfortunate
Amharra three feet in the air while the
Egyptian Red Cross doctors beamed at the
vigor of their chief. It was the Prince's first
careless rupture at Dire Dawa, and caused
a sensation, Greeks who had been cadged
for whisky by Amharras since time immemorial running to doorways with ill-concealed smiles, Red Cross doctors standing
at proud attention. The Frenchman who is the chief of Am..
harra special police there (a special group
of embusques, lesser fry Amharras too unimportant to get cushy jobs in the safety of
Red Cross signs) arrived in full blue, looking like John Philip Sousa. There was a
colloquy, after which the Prince extended
his hand and the Amharra, coiled on the
ground like a snail, reluctantly gave his
free hand in return. The incident was
closed.
I did not see His Royal Highness. kick
anyone again until he had secured the Duke
of Harrar's palace for headquarters. Here,
during the excitement of moving in, one of
the Egyptian pharmacists accidentally ate
a tin of potted chicken which was among
the Prince's personal effects. There was
never such a demonstration of kicking.
The doctors formed a line and the Prince
set out to make a record. He kicked fore
and aft for fifteen minutes, sat and had a
bottle of iced Chianti, and then resumed.
The pharmacist knew a thing or two about
the game, and guarded his groin with remarkable celerity throughout the first session. The Prince got his guard down in
the second, however, and soon reduced the
man to unconsciousness.
"You may think me," said the Prince,
puffing, "a bit highhanded, my dear fellow." I didn't say what I thought. The
Prince polished his monocle. "I not only
must be a medical missionary," he said, "but
a disciplinarian as wdl." The Prince spoke

excellent English, and looked forward, as

an Egyptian, to cementing the bonds
of friendship between his country and
Ethiopia.

Harrar Town
At Harrar, according to the celebrated
Doctor Ferron of the French mission, the
population has the finest syphilis average in
Ethiopia, batting a cool 100 per cent. Also,
smallpox is endemic, and sufferers are escorted to the town wall and kicked out.
Leprosy is rather common, and elephantiasis even more so. But I saw very little
trachoma.
The striking thing about Harrar is the
chains. The town is a cluster of chains. In
three months' residence there I never ceased
wishing that the English ruled Harrar,
kicking out the Amharras and giving the
old town an opportunity to be itself. Arthur
Rimbaud was a merchant there, on its green
hillside sloping down to the divine Valley
of the Fanfan. But that was long before the
little brown man at Addis Ababa decided
to uplift it as his very own.

Afwerk
Doubtless the world has learned of poor
Afwerk's death at Gorahai, which guards
the gateway of the Webi Schebelli. These
forts were erected early in August under
direction of the Turkish adviser, Wehib
Pasha. Of hewn rock, they dominated the
only high ground for miles around, overlooking the baked brush of the Ogaden
Desert, guarding the morass of the water
course which leads to the heart of the Harrar and Chercher provinces, and into Dire
Dawa, the railway capital of the empire.
Afwerk was the Grazmaj, or Right-wing
leader, of Shoa. And the Shoan dynasty of
black-and-tan Amharras now rules the un..
happy lands of the Abyssinians.
Afwerk had been a slave to these Am-

BUSH BRIGADES AND BLACKAMOORS

harras. He was not longish and effeininate,
like the natives, but a roundhead, a bulletskulled black Negro, stocky, brave, and
true. He had won, too, a smattering of
European lore about modern firearms,
being well-coached by the Swedes and the
Belgians in their schools. These schools,
primarily to create bodyguards for the overlords of the plateau, taught a Plattsburgh
course to the gentry. Afwerk, coming and
going from Harrar to Jijiga, was instantly
impressive as a man of parts. H.e had a fine
hatred of whites. I last saw him on the day
when, at last, he had secured ten camion
loads of barbed wire and two cases of English gasmasks of the old-fashioned, boxrespirator type. He was all happy determination then.
Being assigned command of the rock
forts at Gorahai, where the old Pasha had
persuaded Haile Selassie's Brain-Truster,
Nasibu, that the starch must be taken out
of the Italian askart's, Afwerk with his newfound lore, his ancient courage, his fine
intelligence, knew that he held a post which
would bring him to grips with the Italians.

of these regulars, and when the day came

that they were soundly bombed and (quite
sensibly I think) fled to the bushes, Afwerk
shot them down with unfailing grim humOf, meanwhile his own people standing
their ground. (Should an Ethiopian
"Great" elect to stand and forbid the sea
to roll in upon him, his personal family,
large or small, would stand with him.)
Afwerk, major general, thus died at
Gorahai, manning a cheap Belgian machine gun, firing at aeroplanes which
were dipping at 6000 feet to cast off the
crudest sort of high explosive bombs,
round barrels of fragmented steel with fulminate detonators at either end. Many
died with. him. Some who did not die
were the Fita-wrart', or vanguardist,
Saumo, and one hundred and fifty regulars. In the midst of the grief over Afwerk's death - I was privately warned by
the Governor of Harrar that, should I attempt to attend memorial services in Afwerk's honor, the government would not
be responsible for a white man's safetythe Emperor flew to Jij iga and there dis-

He must have carried, in his personal re-

ciplined the regulars who had run from

tainership, a motley of wives, slaves, riflemen, bed-boys, priests, and whores to the
number of eighteen hundred of all rank;
or, in the Ethiopian sense of organization,
a full brigade. They were, in a way of speaking, his own, parasites upon his economic
body, chattels of his medieval demesne.
There were also at Gorahai some eight
hundred regulars, men in full khaki kit
who could salute, do squads righrabout,
erect shelter tents, and, if given plenty of
time, stack arms.
Afwerk had little brief for these latter.
He had a contempt for European civilization which included the gist of it - the
armed man with a thousand years of poetry
and science in his mind. Afwerk set up his
own personal suite of machine guns back

air attack. The punishment was typically

Ethiopian. Each of the hundred and fifty
men received thirty lashes, which meant a
lingering death from septic cuts after a
month's suffering. Saumo himself received
forty lashes, carefully breached through the
whipping so that. his final punishment
would be the slow entrance of a bayonet
into the place where Haile Selassie informed the tormentors that they could
stick it. The Emperor, unperturbed
through this ordeal, even forbade Dr. Robert Hockman, later killed, from putting
Saumo out of his misery.

Croix Rouge
The poor Ethiops were a long time understanding the significance of the Red

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

Cross. In the first place, the Red Cross was
wished upon the commanders by Haile
Selassie, who had finally made up his mind
that he must, sooner or later, admit these
mercy-mongering Franks into the country - though they were as welcome as a
Y. M. C. A. secretary would be in a Canuck
lumber-town after a trapper's winter.
Once the Amharras got it into their
heads that aeroplanes would not fire upon
Red Crosses (such is their blissful ignorance of World War history), they took it
up with great enthusiasm. It became a
home 'for embusques; and Dr. Hockman
told me that, whenever his post at Dagga
Burgh sighted Italian planes, the Red
Cross tents became a bevy of brass-hats.
No Amharra will give up his arms; and
it became a nuisance to find the best armed
of the peers bristling with guns, daggers,
pistols, and cartridges, and with large Red
Cross brassards on their arms. As the Red
Cross then contained the gentry, and the
gentry could afford alcoholic spirits (or
drink. the medical stores), they were always offensive. Some of us grew tired of
having bayonets in our faces and black
rascals screaming "Halt!" whenever an accursed white man passed near a Red Cross
dump at night. So we disarmed them one
afternoon in my only enjoyable day in
Ethiopia.
It was wonderful after that to walk by
the Red Cross doorway and observe the
Amharras equipped with quarter-staves.
They were quite forlorn, the only blackguards. in Ethiopia without firearms.

a clatter that, when one crawled beneath

its deafening barrel, the vibration inevitably set-oft the camera shutter.
The gunner was a fine fellow, a Galla.
He had never been so near a white man
before, and he trembled. I gave him a pack
of cigarettes, and for days afterwards he
always waved a high hand to me. It was
in a place where everyone disliked whites;
and the simple act of that gunner flinging
high his arm always made me feel quite
secure. I hope he gets through this show
all right. When they attempt to take his
gun away I hope he manages to keep it.
When the tax-gatherer calls to take half his
goats . . . well, I hope he will have learned
by then to keep his eyes open, with the
bull's-eye on top of the front sight, and
front sight squarely in the middle of the
tax-gatherer.

Thralls

It's no good saying one dislikes a race.

The Gallas, which constitute most of Ethiopia and which are an abjectly subject race
now, are as cruel as any set of men. History records that they came from central
Africa 500 years ago, bringing with them
many cruel practices. Even so, I never saw
a troop of Gallas I did not instantly like.
No matter how Europe cuts the cake, they
will survive. The French had begun fair
ranches in the Aurussi country before this
recent difficulty; and several plantersfled to haven in Djibouti - spoke of them
as good farmers, loyal and brave.
The Belgians who trained the riflemen
always spoke of them with warmth; and
Afitrailleuse 1Voire
two of us worked a week with them, filmI spent an unlovely day trying to photo- ing them on the road which spurs off Hargraph an Ethiopian machine-gunner's eyes rar towards the Chercher. It was hard work
while the gun was firing. He shut them for all of us, but they were infinitely patightly during the firing, and opened them tient, and very proud of their new rifles.
after the clip was finished. I never could . . . Their women are the handsomest in
prove the fact on film. The gun made such Ethiopia. They seem to be the only women

BUSH BRIGADES AND BLACKAMOORS

of the plateau who have a sense of color,
winding coffee berries and pepper strings
into their buttered hair, and walking with
an Athenian pride of bearing. The Gallas
alone of the Ethiopians know how to smile.

sans with his own Belgian-made machine

guns.
I liked N asibu best of all Ethiopians;
because he was rude, cynical, and a man
of parts. When finally he went with Wehib Pasha to new headquarters at Jijiga,
Somalia
where I could not go, I missed him heartThe King (Hadji) of the Somalis is ily. The only time he was polite to me
talking:
was when he wanted someone to unscrew
the
fulminate cap from a dud bomb. It was
We SOlnalis are a great race for we are
the
only time I was ever rude to him. I
great travelers and liars, and too, we are
good fighters; and these are the three func- had practiced for days the best way to
tions of a true man: that he has traveled, accent that opening line ... "S'it vous
can lie well as to what he has seen, and plait, Votre Excellence, je vous prie ..."
can whip the man who questions his stoNasibu was no slouch for discipline; he
ries. . . . I regret the present difficulty,
seemed
to have kept half of Harrar in
for the Italians are no people to govern us
and bring us their lore. No, not even the chains. A New Dealer, a deputy for the
French, I think, are up to it; though per- Negus, he did not spare the cat-o'-ninesonally I should not mind French domina- tails. The Italians will do well to buy him
tion. Personally, I should like our people up; but it is my belief he will be of exto have a country called Somalia; and
when we needed help we could hire the cellent service to the English, when they
British raj to put us right again. This is a get their slice of Ethiopia. N asibu knows,
war country, Sahib. I do not admire Haile in that finely-molded skull of his, that
Selassie; he is a timid scholar, and not a England understands more about colonial
great savage bulk like Menelik. Unless we administration than all the rest of Europe
receive help in Ethiopia, the Italians will
have us. Did you know that I can write put together.
English fairly well?

Dejasmaj
General N asibu is the Governor of Harrar province, and the Emperor's viceroy. It
is natural that he should be the chief of
staff of the Southern front. He is a very
able man, tall and finely-featured, and he
suffers from a syphilitic ear. (Once, to illustrate the appearance of some explosive
in a dud bomb, he produced a tube of neosalvarsan to explain its color.) N asibu has
a good record as a guerilla fighter. He was
with the Emperor when Haile Selassie overthrew Lidj Jasu, the former Emperor, by
suddenly producing three French military
planes and bombing the legitimist troops
into flight. N asibu himself cleaned up the
desert spearmen of the Danakails and Is-

Dire Dawa
The French actually control Ethiopia
from Dire Dawa in to the Somali1and
border. The village is much like an orange
town above Redlands in California. At
4000 feet its acrid desert air, its bungalows
draped in Bougainvillaea, its sleepiness,
seem to provoke a halcyon gusto in all men
coming down from the high plateau after
months immured in Addis Ababa.
The French moved two hundred colonial
marines into the railway town and fortified the compound. The Emperor gave
them spirited opposition, but the French
moved in. Among ten million shiftless
Negroes for so many months, witnessing
their filth and bestiality, I always enjoyed
visits to the French officers there. The lit-

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

tIe compound was an essay in the art of
fortification; for the French have a genius
in the use of earth, whether they grow
tomatoes under glass, or entrench a position. Each time I came through Dire Dawa
I could see new fire steps, banquettes, chevaux-de-frise.
The Grazmaj of Dire Dawa called
weekly, protesting that the tirailleurs had
no right to fortify their position. (In a
country where children of ten trail loaded
rifles, and murder is the only serious profession!) The Grazmaj never succeeded
in provoking the captain of the French, a
St. Cyr man of cool, unruflled mien which
masked a prime humor. "Oh," I heard the
captain say to the Grazmaj T afara after
that plump ginger-cake gent had stood
aghast at the sight of a fine concrete platform enabling four Hotchkiss guns to enfilade the boulevard. C'cst une terrasse
. pour les aperitifs."
U

Coptic Lice
One saw little of the Coptic Church. The
buildings were shacks, the singing mere
caterwauling (the choir needed a bass from
the Christian music of the Gregorian
chants or the chords of Johann Sebastian
Bach to write spirituals), and the priests a
set of thick-set villainous rogues served by
gabars kept in savage thralldom. Occasionally one tried to photograph in churchyards and was thrown out for his pains.
Once in the gray dawn of Bolalakos'
coffee room in Dire Dawa, I met the Abbe
Habema, and followed him by train to
Addis Ababa. I wondered if he were going
to ask permission to poison Lidj Jasu, th~
former Emperor who sat cutting out paper
dolls in a house near Harrar; I gave him
the benefit of the doubt and decided that
he was rushing to Addis to save Lidj Jasu's
life. When 1 returned to Dire Dawa 1 met
Lidj Worku Gobenya, a gentleman, and

the Governor of Issa province. (Of course

Lidj Worku could not reside in his province; for, as an Issan chief said: "I hope,
Sahib, the Italians beat the Gallas"; for he
did not even know of the existence of the
Galla masters, the Amharras, and believed
the Gallas the dominant race of Ethiopia.)
Lidj Worku's father was many years the
Finger-Man for Haile Selassie; and he was
responsible for Lidj Jasu's person. I asked
Lidj Worku: "Tell me, is Lidj Jasu alive
or dead?"
"Please don't ask me such a question,"
he said gently.
A month later I found a copy of Time
magazine which reported that Lidj Jasu,
ex-Emperor of Ethiopa, was kaput. Furthermore, said Time, Ras Hailu, another of
the Emperor's rivals, had been immured
on an island in Sidamo. 1 had the feeling,
however, that Ras Hailu had been murdered along with Lidj Jasu. Poisoning need
not be a fine art in Ethiopia. Once a month
the priest administers kosso tea for tapeworm sufferers among the raw-meat
eaters. The holy men have regular rates.

French Influence
A traveler leaving Ethiopia via the port
of Djibouti is not impressed by that sandy
little seaport's motley. Hotels are run by
Greeks, presumably because no Frenchman
could survive the squeeze. Viewed from
the air the situation is one of beauty: a
radiation of boulevards from the common
center of the Place Menelik, the blue of
Tadjoura Gulf encircling the town. Old
King Rhigas, the patriarch of the town,
now kibitzes the backgammon game; and
being the patriarch will not permit a misplay. When he considers a player to have
made a mistake (which is quite possible in
a temperature of 130 degrees, in an atmosphere so house-fly laden as to turn the landscape black), he insists upon corrections.

PANTHER IN THE MIND

Old Man Rhigas was among the first to secret service man. As a test case - either
settle at Obock, the original port of French .to show the possibility of maintaining deSomaliland; and while there he was corum, or the ability to pay promptly the
friendly with Arthur Rimbaud, who sensi- authorities who must look the other way
biy deserted Parisian studios to become a - two French women were imported from
merchant of sorts in Harrar. He rarel y Saigon. They were installed in an Arab
mentioned Rimbaud; though I tried to house beyond the salt works.
When I saw the ladies they were very
make him speak of that distraught genius.
He could remember vaguely when Rim- fatigued, but still genteel. They had just
baud was ill of a cancerous knee, and tradi- serviced the two destroyers in the harbor,
tion says the old man paid his fare to Mar- and were pallid from their week-end of
seilles where he died of his malady. Rhigas heroic exertion. A month later, they had
furnished ten rooms with call bells and
sometimes recited from, Verlaine.
Recently the great brothel syndicate of maintained a downstairs bar presided over
the Near East made heroic efforts to open, by a married couple. Beer was iced; there
at Djibouti, a decent tropical emporium were some potted plants, and three sousfor the sale of white women's favors. The officiers of French tirailleurs were playing
contact man was a huge Breton who, in excellent pil1gpong on the roof.
Thus does the white man's civilization
white tennis shoes and toothpick, spent
hours in the Hotel Europe with an Italian come to the East.

PANTHER IN, THE MIND

BY JOHN HOLMES
HE panther in my mind asleep
Has lain a long time quiet there,
An easy prisoner to .keep.
He breathes the dark and flowing air
Unhurried, effortless, and. deep.
I can remen1ber when his tread
Wore out a track across the cage,
From side.to side, uncomforted
In grief and love and groping rage.
So mute and bitter his despair,
His teeth were at my heart like fire,
Until the valiance in my flesh
Was burned away and turned to ash.
But when at last I level pride,
A wasted wall, a useless thing,
And bend the bars of reason wide,

The beast will spring.

~~~~~~~~~~~@~~~~~~~@~~~

~ THE STATE OF THE UNION I~

~

~~

BY ALBERT JAY NOCK

ij~~ij~~ij~~~~~~~ij~~~
Who Witt Pay the Bitt?

HERE

are signs that our glorious politi-

T cal summer is over, and that the winter

of our discontent is here. In other words,

the bills are beginning to come in. The
dance has lagged, and the piper is passing
the hat. People have suddenly become
aware of several things that they should
have foreseen three years ago. First, that
the lunatic gyrations of the New Deal
have run into money, and must be paid
for. Second, that there is nowhere for the
money to come from but out of taxes.
These are important lessons. We seem to
have been going on the assumption that
the wizardry at Washington and in our
state capitals either costs nothing or can
be paid for with some kind of stage
money; but it now appears that this is
not so.
Presently we shall discover another disconcerting fact, which is that just as there
is nowhere for the money to come from
but out of taxes, so there is nowhere for
the taxes to come from but out of production. People get money to pay taxes by producing and exchanging goods or services;
there is no other way. This process is what
we describe by the general term "business".
People can get tax-money only by doing
business. Now, obviously, there is a limit
to the weight of taxation that business will
stand, because if taxes eat up so much of
the income of business as to make it not
worth while to go on, production stops,
and the economic structure of the nation
breaks down, as it did at Rome in the
third century. Therefore the fourth dis-

410

covery which we are on our way to making is whether the IO:id of American taxation has reached that point, and if not,
how far off that point it is.
Facing these four facts is disagreeable,
but there they are. The morning after the
night before is always a bad time, but it
always comes, and there is not much to be
done about it; so let us look around a little
and see if we can make out where we are.
According to a report made to the Merchants' Association of New York, the federal government collected sixty-seven different taxes last year, by 131 separate levies.
The total sum came to $3,299>435,572, of
which nearly half represented indirect or
concealed taxes - concealed not only in
the price of commodities that can be classified as luxury products, like gasoline, tobacco, perfumes, and cosmetics, but also
in the price of such necessaries as sugar,
cotton, wheat, pork, matches, soap, and
certain drugs. The report observes that no
one, not even the poorest of those now living on Relief funds, can escape the incidence of at least eight federal taxes; while
more than thirty taxes are imposed on
every wage-earner in the income-tax group.
As an instance of multiple or cumulative
taxation, where levies are piled on top of
levies, the report states that the tax on
spirits, wine, and beer is imposed in nineteen. different forms. Yet notwithstanding
all this,. the federal government is running
so far ahead of its income that Treasury
figures forecast a deficit of five billion dollars in 1937, and an increase in the national

THE STATE OF THE UNION

debt which "vill bring it to a total of $36,000,000,000.

So much for that. Turning now to the

record of the State of New York, we find
that the president of the State Economic
Council has declared that although twentytwo different kinds of state taxes were in
force last year, they came short by $97,000,000 in meeting the state's expenditures.
Since 1907, these expenditures have risen
from $32,000,000 to $311,000,000; while in
the same period the state debt has risen
from $12,000,000 to more than $0'7,000,000. Meanwhile, the state's municipalities
have acquired an aggregate debt of $3,200,000,000, and some of them are in very
bad financial shape. In one of these municipalities, the largest one, New York City,
the politicians have actually got down to
the level of filching pennies from its citizens by a niggling little sales tax. One
would hardly have expected our grandchildren to live long enough to see anything like that.
These few figures give a suggestion of
the weight which the aggregate of local,
state, and federal debt puts on production
- because, I repeat, all these debts must be
met out of taxes, and taxes must come out
of production. The question therefore
arises whether production can carry the
load. If it can not, then clearly the United
States is no longer a going concern. Some
think it can not. The New York State
Chamber of Commerce, evidently impressed by the sight of banks stuffed full
of federal bonds that no one will buy,
gave warning two months ago that something has to be done very quickly to avert
such an impairment of the national credit
as will bring about a financial collapse;
.and as long ago as last October a lawyer of

into government bonds: "It has always

been my fixed policy never to invest in the
securities of an insolvent corporation."
Some, however, think the situation can
be tided over by confiscatory taxation on
large incomes and accumulat.ions of wealth,
a policy commonly known as Soaking the
Rich. Those who have this idea base it
on the theory that taxation should be
measured by the ability to pay, which is
the most unjust, unsound, and anti-social
theory of taxation ever devised. But aside
from this, as every collectivist is well and
truly aware, soaking the rich is the surest
way, under our present economic system,
to knock production into a cocked hat.
Moreover, the rich have not that much
money - nowhere near that much. As the
report to the New York State Chamber of
Commerce observes, if the whole income
of those who in 1934 earned a net of $6000
or more were confiscated outright, it would
not meet the federal deficit; and it must
be remembered that it is the same persons
who on this theory must also be soaked for
state and local deficits.
Others, again, think that if these debts
are safely passed on to posterity, production will take care of them in time. So it
may; yet certain factors enter into the
case which this view does not take into
account - for instance, the voracity of politicians. There is no reason to suppose that
any future batch of these gentry will be
more eager to see good money go to pay
debts than those \vho are with us now.
They will prefer to apply it to their own
purposes; otherwise why should they be
politicians? The principle which ex-Senator Smoot formulated, and which has
been ironically termed "Smoot's law of
government", should not be lost sight of

my acquaintance who manages large es- in this connection. It is that "the cost of
tates replied austerely to a suggestion that
he should put some of .a client's money

government tends to increase annually, no

matter which party is in power". A pro-

TI-IE AMERICAN MERCURY

gram of retrenchment sufficient to vacate
this principle even temporarily is hardly
to be counted upon. Nor is it certain that
production will hold up to a degree necessary to carry our national credit over the
interim; and it is still more uncertain that
with an incre~sing perspective on the kind
of conduct which has involved us in these
obligations, posterity will regard them as
casually as we do. It may; but the chance
that it will is not so overwhelming as to
amount to certainty, or anything like it,
especially in view of the probability that
incomes between $1000 and $5000, or less,
will do the actual paying.
As a rule, hopeful persons who believe
that we are still solvent, that things are
not so black as they are painted, and that
our public accounts will somehow get
themselves straightened out in the long
run - such persons, I say, as a rule take
a rather shallow view of the causes at
work in the situation. They think that
now the only thing necessary, or at least
the main thing, is to beat Roosevelt, just
as four years ago the main thing was to
beat Hoover. But this does not get us
much. Beat Mr. Roosevelt, by all means,
but what shall we get by it? When we
beat Mr. Hoover, what we needed was a
policy of strict economy, retrenchment,
and reform, and did we get it? Not so
that anyone would notice it. More than
ever we need that policy now, and shall we
get it by beating Mr. Roosevelt? I believe
some modern men of science do not flatly
deny that miracles sometimes happen, but
if this one happened it would settle that
long-disputed question forever.
There are cogent reasons why it will not
happen. Some of them will occur at once
to anybody, and they are competent
enough as far as they go, but they do not
go far. Among those that reach nearer the
root of the matter there is one that I wish

to mention, both because it accounts for

so much and because I believe it is seldom
thought of. I refer to the utterly useless
and preposterous overbuilding of our political structure.
Look at it. First we have a highly-centralized federal unit giving berths to an
enormous number of employees, I do not
know how many; the last statement I saw
put the figure at 815,000, which is probably
not far wrong. Then within the federal
unit we have forty-eight subsidiary units,
each with a full .political apparatus and
personnel, executive, legislative, and judicial. Then within each of these units we
have any number of counties, each with a
political apparatus of its own; and within
each county we have a mess of townships,
boroughs, school-districts, villages, municipalities, wards, each with some kind of
political organization. Thus a citizen may
live, and quite regularly does live, under
six or seven overlapping political jurisdictions, most of which have power to tax
him.
This seems stupid and useless enough,
but what I wish to point out is the viciousness of the thing. rhis arrangement opens
innumerable opportunities for people who
are good for nothing else to go into politics
for a livelihood. Under it, every country
cross-road offers a chance for some worthless fellow to prey upon production, and,
as we see, every one of these overlapping
political units can show its quota of predatory local politicians. Moreover, in order
to keep a grip on his job, whatever it is,
or to get a better one - to boost himself
from ward-leadership to a mayoralty, from
the lower house of Congress to the upper,
or from wherever he is to wherever he
wants to go - he forms around him a sort
of junta, made up chiefly of people as
worthless as hims~lf, but to some degree
gifted, like himself, with the peculiar type

THE STATE OF THE UNION

of low sagacity, the instinct for the main
chance, which is the principal element that
makes for success in the politics of a modern republic. He is bound to this junta by
various obligations of quid pro quo; he has
to "look after the boys", and accommodate
himself to their interests and desires, and
particularly to their several designs upon
the public purse. For his purposes, too, the
larger the junta the better, and therefore
its tendency is to grow; and as it grows in
size, it grows also in power, and as it
grows in power, its field for the exercise
of unscrupulousness becomes larger and
richer. The patronage-junta of the White
House is simply an enlarged replica of
Tammany's junta; and Tammany's junta
is an enlarged replica of the junta surrounding every congressman, sheriff, and
alderman in the land.
Thus the overbuilding of our political
structure invites unconscionable swarms of
vermin to nest in it and eat out our substance. In view of this fact, my impression
is that unless and until that overbuilding
is reduced - and we all know that this
is impossible - Smoot's law will hold,
and our public finances will be in little
better shape than they are. Beating Roosevelt, while no doubt commendable, is not
enough to encourage a great rise of hopefulness. It rather reminds one of our oldstyle crusades to drive streetwalkers out of
town; they could be driven out, and were,
but the trouble was always that their place
was almost immediately taken by others
precisely like them, and so in the end the
crusade broke dovvn. As long as our political accommodations are so exclusively
and elaborately designed for one type of
inhabitant, it seems vain to expect any
other to occupy them.
Yet the uselessness of all this overbuilding must be as apparent as its viciousness.
If we are to have a federal government as

highly centralized as ours is now, why

keep up a complete political apparatus in
the forty-eight major components? I notice that some one has already proposed
to do away with their political character,
and merge them into ten "economic" provinces; but why not rather let their present
boundaries remain as an agreeable concession to local sentiment, like the old
French provinces, and also as a convenience in addressing letters? On the other
hand, if we are to decentralize into an actual federation of sovereign states, why
keep up such an expensive establishment
at Washington when the Senate Office
Building would amply house every legitimate activity of such a federation? We
are bound to be either one thing or the
other - we can not be both - so why not
cut the coat of our political apparatus by
our actual cloth?
Again, what earthly use are counties, except to support jobholders? I know of
none. I can understand the use of townships and city wards under a system like
the one contemplated by Mr. Jefferson,
which proposes to lodge all sovereignty exclusively in these units; but under any
other system they seem wholly useless except, again, for maintaining a set of beings
who might well be cast adrift. Also, why
keep up a1-l apparatus of partisan political
government in a municipality? Some of
our cities have in fact already discarded
it, and from all one hears no great benefits
seem to have been lost to the non-jobholding public.
Probably it is not necessary to say that
I am not offering these, observations as
serious proposals, or expecting that they
will be taken as such by any one. Vermin
do not evict themselves, but on the contrary, they dig in and breed; and the matters I have been discussing are in the hands
of those ,vhom the structural changes I

THE BIRDS
have mentioned would dispossess, which
is the best of reasons why these changes
will not be effected, and why any serious
discussion of them at all would be mere
futility.
All .I have been attempting to do is to
assemble a certain amount of evidence-

by no means complete, but I think enough

- that the country's financial condition is
not to be regarded superficially, and that
those who count on its improvement by
the usual course of superficial or. symptomatic treatment stand a fair chance of
being disappointed.

THE BIRDS
BY REDEL DENNEY
imagine when the grass has grown
Between the switches in the cut beside the mill
And the slag is covered with the mullein and the
Hook of the crane feeds rust to the griping vine,

CAN

All over the sky the smoke no longer travels,

The seasonal flocks that dot the evenings
Will soar the winds with similar compulsions
As press them now, buoyed on still changeless wings.
But circling not remembering, those Hiers that descend
Out of a cloudy sky will hardly know the difference
Between a house that's new and a house that's ruinous,
Since all a bird needs at the last is a perch out of the wind.
When the couplings are cracked, when the wheel is finally stalled,
When. cylinders are corroded in their grooves and wires fall,
And boxcars rot and the factory walls break inward
And the trees walk back and make the squares a mall,
The eagle will take the smokestack and the wren the eaves
And the hummingbirds will fly the foundry's galleries
And at the entrance of the shaft will be the swift.
The robins will nest everywhere where now there are no trees.
I can imagine when men under the wheel and the drivewheel
Have gone at last with touch no longer magical,
City emptied of us whose trains no longer run,
The sky will be darkened by those wings that are automatic and unintellectual.

THE PROFESSIONAL COMMUNIST

BY DAVIn ALLAN ROSS
since the New Deal dawned on a
believing and bewildered America,
the communist movement has enjoyed its own More Abundant Life. The
kept idealists, frustrated intellectuals, backroom debaters, and parlor messiahs have
been encouraged to discuss, envisage, and
demand many benefits that are as impossible in practice as they are in theory. As
a result, the whole country has been entertained with a vast number of public disorders, each a manifestation of this recently
stimulated yen for a New Utopia. Hardly
a city or town has escaped the gaudy
spectacle of picket. lines, mob demonstrations, eviction riots, street brawls, protest
parades, curbstone imbroglios, and similar
antics. In most of these the hand of the
professional communist has been discernible; indeed, the Comrades have been
quick to grab the credit and the publicity, operating under the old adage
that anyone \vho gets on Page One is
ipso facto a person of considerable importance.
But who is the crusader responsible for
these civic pageants and tableaux? Is he
the intellectual radical, the accomplished
propagandist, the college-bred messiah
whose remarkably efficient organization
and indefatigable industry are at present
exerting such a marked influence on public
affairs? Not at all. Rather, it is the legmen of communism, the stooges, the heelers, who do the dirty work and keep the
ball rolling. These are the eternal adoles-

VER

cents, male and female, who shuffie in

picket lines, boycott movie palaces, contrive gutter scuffles, bait the cops, wave
the Red flag, chant the Internationale, toss
stink-bombs, and in general comport themselves as have all public nuisances since
the dawn of time. The more adult citizens
of the Republic are cognizant of these obstreperous crusaders, and have, at one
time or another, seen them in action. But
how many persons comprehend their real
nature, understand their actual purpose?
What do they look like at close range?
How do they talk, think, live, act, and
where do they breed? Who, in short, are
these heelers of communism?
Recently, THE AMERICAN MERCURY commissioned me to find out; and I have devoted considerable time to the assignnlent.
I went to the habitat of the communist underling, lived with him, listened to his
oratory, read his pabulum, ate with him,
attended his meetings, his concerts, his
amusements, and in general was one with
him. As a result, I have been able to construct the following composite portrait of
the professional heeler. The picture is as
fair and unbiased as I can make it. And
it is the simple truth.

IT
This typical heeler, to begin at the beginning, was born of sturdy peasant parents
who, towards the end of the last century,
emigrated from Central Europe and set-

4'-5

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

tIed on a small farm in the eastern United
States where, by working hard and long,
they were able to acquire a modest share
of material possessions which in Europe
would have been considered luxuries far
beyond the expectations of their station in
life. Among these luxuries was the op
portunity to send their son to school; and
so it was with vast pride that they sa~ him
initiated into those mysteries of Education
which had been denied them by the poverty of their own youth. Fortunately for
their peace of mind, the parents could not
envisage the results of introducing entirely
new and heady theories into a brain hardly
prepared for them by centuries of traditional ignorance and repression.
For the lad -let us call him Karlspent his schooldays learning that America was a great Democracy wherein all
were born free and equal; that it was the
richest country in the world and boasted
the highest living standards; that every
citizen had an equal right to a share in
these riches; that the government belonged
to him as one of the people; and that there
were no class distinctions whatsoever.
These lush ideas, tossed at him with little
or no explanation, were bewildering. They
were new, revolutionary. By the time Karl
was ready to leave school he had arrived
at his own interpretation of democracy.
It was this: America owed him a living.
Returning to the farm, Karl was at a
loss to know why his parents continued
their arduous labor in the fields. For himself, he did not like farm work. It was
too hard; the hours were too long and the
rewards smaller than should be expected
in the Land of Opportunity. He concluded
that his father and mother, deprived of the
benefits of education, were fools. And
having heard that in the Big City, working hours were short, wages high, and
chances for easy diversion plentiful, he

went forth to claim his American heritage;

in other words, to get his cut of the wealth.
Having little of the intrinsic moral in..
tegrity which sustains the normal man,
Karl, when he got a job in the city, was
amazed and pained to discover that the
hours were not as short as he had expected,
that the pay was insufficient to provide
him with the luxuries he felt he deserved.
As a final injustice, he was actually expected to work while on the job.
Naturally, he soon found a number of
ways of getting by with minimum eftort,
and felt pleased to think that he was putting something over on the Boss. But this
was not enough. For he also discovered
that he was being Exploited; he learned
that not only must he work for a living,
but that his employer would Profit by his
Labor. Here was a maladjustment so great,
so glaring, and so savagely unjust that it
aroused the bitterest resentment. Was this,
he paused frequently to inquire, Social Jus..
tice, that he should work forty hours a
week for a paltry $30 while his employer
sat in an easy chair doing nothing at all
except run the business and collect the
Profits? The Profits of Karl's Honest Toil?
He began to move among his fellow employees, complaining of his lot, grumbling,
looking for trouble. And shortly, he found
it. He was fired.
Brooding upon what he had learned
since he spread his wings, Karl concluded
that he had been double-crossed. The
Bosses had put one over on him. They
had taught him that America was the
Land of the Free, the land of wealth and
unparalleled opportunity for all; and then
they had tried to make him work for a
living. As he wandered around the city,
sampling this and that job in an eftort to
find one that was all pay and no work,
he saw plenty of evidence that other people
had wealth. It seemed to him that every-

THE PROFESSIONAL COMMUNIST

one else had a car, a radio, a country cottage, a mistress, and similar concomitants
of prosperity, while he had nothing. As he
pondered this, his resentment grew and
festered to bitterness. With the feeling that
someone had pulled a fast one on him,
he began to hate America with a fierce
vindictiveness, and he dreamed of revenging himself some day upon a Society that
so complacently denied him his adopted
birthright. At this point, he discovered
communism and the Communist Party.
He embraced the one and joined the other.

It is a misconception to suppose that American communism, as currently practiced,

is. a politico-economic theory of government. With i.ts childish illogic and florid
emotional appeal, it bears closer resemblance to a primitive religious cult. It is
a refuge for the frustrated, a delusion of
the defeated, the supposed opiate of the
proletariat. It promises to the weak and
spineless a paradise on earth by the simple
device of inverting the entire social setup. Its basic principle is that if the weak
and spineless can get together, there will
be enough of them to achieve the inversion
by sheer weight of numbers. A United
Front of Morons, as it were. Its ultimate
dream is the Second Coming of the Russian Revolution, here in the United States.
Der Tag is awaited fanatically by a multitude of pop-eyed believers.
Thus Karl's first real pleasure came
when he discovered that he did not stand
alone in his resentment and self-pity. There
existed a whole tribe of his fellows, male
and female, who had raised self-commiseration to a point of extraordinary effi-

player was a loathsome wretch, everyone

who earned an honest living a gullible
Wage-Slave, while all who were disgruntled and anti-social assumed heroic
proportions and were garnished with tinsel halos. It was an Alice-Through-The..
Looking-Glass-Land, an upside-down place
where impossibilities became entrancingly
possible, where abysmal stupidities wore
the aspect of sublime wisdom, where contradictions were magically reconciled and
harmonized, where fables became facts.
Karl swallovved communism eagerly, seeing in it the perfet weapon with which he
might in time revenge himself upon the
Bosses, and an instrument for his own
personal aggrandizement. In this spirit,
and with the encouragement of the other
heelers, he became preoccupied with daydream.s of the time when he could loot
Wall Street and rape Park Avenue, thus
achieving economic and social advancement at a single swoop.
But unhappily, a certain degree of disillusion followed the first exuberance of
his introduction to the Cult. For Karl
came to realize presently that the Revolution was not quite as imminent as he had
at first been led to believe. Though he
heard a great deal about the Unrest of
the Masses, and gathered that a large proportion of the American population was
prepared at any moment to spring at the
throats of the Bosses, he discovered, whenever he ventured into the everyday world,
a certain stolidity, an irritating, gum-chewing complaisance which suggested that the
. time was not yet ripe for the World Revolt. Hurt by this, he withdrew himself
wholly within the circle of professional
communism where he could hear nothing
he did not want to hear. I-Ienceorth he

ciency, and made a profession of it. Karl

lived, slept, ate, drank, talked, and breathed

discovered a lata morgana of the discontented, a fairy-land wherein every em-

communism to the complete exclusion of

everything else, nurturing his hatred of

III

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

America and all things American to vin- eagerly the most transparently absurd disdictive heights, and developing a yearning, tortions, shoddy contradictions, and bland
neurotic adoration for Soviet Russia - that ignoring of the truth in the New Masses.
For there are neither moderations nor
happy land where everyone works and
everyone is equal, since nobody has any- exceptions in the heeler's cosmos. There
thing. Karl considered a country where are only two colors, black and white. And,
everyone worked an extremely pleasing as in all fairy tales, there are only three
prospect indeed - when seen from the safe permissible characters; the good Fairy, the
distance of 6000 miles. He was a great be- Ogre, and the long-suffering Hero. The
liever in work - for others. His own role Fairy is impeccable. The Ogre stinks. The
he pictured as that of a Leader of Causes, Hero, who is of course the Worker, is ~
in a purely Executive Capacity.
Martyr with a halo that casts a pleasant
Now a full-blown communist heeler, pink effulgence upon his noble counteKarl is of course on Relief. (He has man- nance. Every, employer is a loathsome repaged thus far to avoid taking a Relief job tile. Policemen are vicious thugs whose
because the WPA does not pay union chief occupation is smashing the skulls
wages, and no good Comrade would sa- of old women and jumping on babies
botage union pay scales by working for - proletarian babies. Pickets, hungerlower rates.) But his Relief check, he feels, marchers, and demonstrators, on the other
is disgustingly small, and often he has to hands, are at all time models of self-constand in line to get it. This he considers trolled deportment even when they are
merely another example of the utter per- being goaded by the Cossacks, who itch to
fidy of the Capitalist Government, and indulge their sadistic natures by cracking
so he occupies himself, while waiting, proletarian pates.
Every evening Karl gathers with his
by distributing Revolutionary Literature
Comrades at the chosen cafeteria or lunchalong the line.
He relishes, however, the more congen- room and sits around discussing the events
ial aspects of his lazy life. True, he lives of the day as interpreted by the Daily
in a shabby room, but he is able to occupy Worker. He reads, also, the little pamhimself exclusively with communist affairs. phlets published by The Workers Library
He has ~cquired a faintly Bohemian as- Publishers, with such titles as T he Propect, and considers himself an Intellectual. gram of the Communist International,
He knows, and uses at every opportunity, State and Revolution, An American Far1!Jer
all the big-sounding phrases and mumbo- Sees the Soviet Union, How Can We
jumbo of his creed, talking endlessly about Share the Wealth? and Foundations of
United Fronts, Solidarity, Class Warfare, Leninism. While Karl is not able to unRace Discrimination, Collectivism, Reg- derstand this stuff, his reading does give
imentation, and Dialectic Materialism. He him a pleasing sense of being frightfully
is not sure what all these things mean, but learned and thoroughly au fait with the
they sound important. He reads the jour- affairs of the Proletariat. His New Learnnals of the Movement religiously, accepting ing causes him to rush constantly around
everything without question. He swallows in a lather, shrieking, shaking his fists,
voraciously the Daily Worker's excursions and banging frantically on a tin can in
into infantile fury, hysterical hatred, and a highly spectacular, though ineffective,
the tantrums of frustration. He laps up manner. In common with all the Com-

THE PROFESSIONAL COMMUNIST

rades, and particularly with those who
write books and magazines, Karl is sublimely indifferent to facts. He has an astonishing capacity for swallowing the most
apparent contradictions, the most flagrant
lies, the most amazing distortions. As a
worshipper of Russia, he whoops with
joy over every occurrence in that happy
land, and snarls with impotent fury over
everything that happens in America. You
will find him in his favorite cafeteria some'
evening about midnight, singing a fervent
paean of praise for that marvelous, that
superb, that typically Russian and altogether magnificent and glorious thing, the
Stakhanov Speed-Up System, under which
the Soviet government attempts to double
and treble industrial production. Yet ten
minutes later he will be baring his teeth
and clawing at his cruller in savage fury
over the speed-up system which the cruel
Capitalist Taskmasters have introduced in
America. He will picket a freighter about
to sail with a cargo of scrap iron for "Mussolini's Capitalistic War", at the same time
sublimely ignoring the fact that Soviet
Russia is shipping oil and war materials
to Italian ports through her back door at
Odessa as fast as she can. If you bring
such contradictions to his attention, Karl
will dismiss them as Capitalist Propaganda.
As an Intellectual (he has contributed
several letters to the Daily Worker, addressed "Con1rade Editor", and is an ardent disciple of the Mike Gold School of
Literature), Karl is interested in the Arts,
chiefly those having a bright red tinge.
He loves nothing more than a good lusty
piece of Propaganda on the stage, in a
short story or novel, in a movie, or at a
dance recital. He applauds everything the
Comrades do with enormous enthusiasm
but little discrimination, and likes his
sentiments meaty and lurid, and his language ungrammatically Proletarian. I-Iis

ideal hero is a colorfully articulate truckdriver with fifteen starving children and
a penchant for slugging Irish cops.
At a moment's notice, Karl can get
wildly excited over anything at all. His
interests are world-wide, so that within
the space of an hour he can work up a
splendid lather over at least a dozen divergent Causes, from Hoboken to China. He
has become acutely race-conscious. At least
once a day he drops a few tears for the
Jews in Germany, the Negroes in Alabama, the Chinese in Manchukuo, the
peons in Mexico, and the poor Ethiopians.
But he has rather curious ways of showing his burning affection for his brothers
in misfortune. He will cheerfully donate
a nickel to a Fund to send a publicityhungry lawyer to Alabama to defend some
Negro, and is sublimely indifferent to the
fact that any Northern lawyer who makes
a point of commenting sarcastically upon
Southern ideas of Justice does much to
insure the conviction of the prisoner he is
defending. This is hard on the victim, of
course, but it is fine communism.
Again, Karl will exercise himself almost
to apoplexy over a labor dispute in the Middle West, and will contribute oral support
towards sending out an Agitprop heeler
with a bale of communistic literature.
There will be an enormous amount of talk
about a United Labor Front. But the unfortunate strikers ultimately awaken to
discover that they have been adopted, and
their strike taken over, by the Comn1unist
Party, the members of which know little
about and care less for the real needs of
American Labor, being interested exclusively in stirring up dissension between
employer and employee, in order to advance their own Cause, which feeds on
confusion and misunderstanding. Every
other worker in the territory will be urged

to strike in sympathy.. The

uSllal

rabble-

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

43

rousing tactics are employed, and every

possible effort made to brand the whole
affair Made in USSR. The net result is
that the local people, originally sympathetic to the aims of the strikers, will become antagonized. The strikers will discover that, instead of an ordinary dispute
between themselves and their employers,
they have got involved in something they
neither understand nor want, called Class
War. The strike will fail because in the
gen~ral confusion, propagandizing, and
rioting, the original cause of the ~trike is
forgotten. And when the Comrades pack
up and go home, satisfied that they have
caused as much trouble as possible, they
will leave the original strikers much worse
off than ever before.
To the outside 'observer all this may
seem futile and silly. But it is good fun,
and it is a great source of satisfaction to
the Comrades to know that they have been
as annoying as possible. Karl feels that if
he is doing nothing else, he is making
himself thoroughly objectionable to those
he hates - the Bosses and the Bourgeois.
He has included the Bourgeois in his list
of hates by this time because they consistently decline to get excited over his yowlings.He hates them, too, because they are
the backbone of the country, and he has
an understandable distrust of backbone.

IV
It is not to be supposed, however, that
Karl spends all his time in such serious
occupations. He has his diversions. There
are plenty of girls among the heelers. Most
of them are homely, drab, neurotic, full
of strange yearnings and half-baked ideas,
possessed of a terrible urge to Do Something Cosmic. For some reason, most of
the girls one meets in this queer nevernever land are short and dumpy, just as

most of the men are thin and anemic.

One wonders at times whence come the
models used in their literature and ''P0sters
to depict typical Comrades. One so often
sees pictures of splendidly built, lusty, attractive men and women with broad
smiles ~nd white teeth, but one never by
any chance sees such specimens in the
flesh. Short fat girls who waddle, thin men
who slouch - one sees hundreds of these,
slumped over cafeteria tables, drinking
endless cups of coffee and smoking innumerable cigarettes. Their mode of living is semi-bohemian, and it is notable that
their innumerable activities never include
any sort of athletic activities.
Karl rarely sees the day until it is halfspent, when he drags himself reluctantly
from the rumpled bed he has neglected
to make for the past week, and glances
sourly at the bathroom with the comforting reflection that bathing is a stup~d
Bourgeois habit. After brewing a pot of
coffee, he enjoys a hearty stretch, scratches
himself, and dresses. In the summer he
wears rumpled slacks and a polo shirtand his hair needs cutting. In the winter
he adds a sweater and a baggy overcoatand his hair needs cutting still more. He
looks rather like a college sophom,ore gone
to the devil. Then he sets out on what
Party work he has chosen for this bright
and merry day. Perhaps he joins a Picket
Line - there is always a strike somewhere
that needs a little stirring up, discontent in
the garment center, dissension between
building owners and elevator operators, a
PWA project to annoy, almost anything.
Or he may enjoy a parade, or a fight with
the cops, perhaps even a night in jail in
order to burnish his Martyr complex. He
may even gain a little wholesome intellectual stimulus by listening to a New
Masses Symposium, or he may attend a debate to be held by the Bourgeois fools up-

THE PROFESSIONAL COMMUNIST

town, and liven it with a little robust
heckling. If he needs some spare change, he
can sell the Daily Worker in the sub,vay or
on a street corner. And by way of humorous diversion, he can go downtown to a
department-store picket line and chain
himself to a lamp post. This always draws
a crowd - and a few lines in the dirty
Capitalist Press.
And there is always some new Organization to be joined. Karl is already a
stanch supporter of such outfits as the International Labor Defense, several branches
of the International Workers Order, the
Group Culture Society, the American
League Against War and Faseism, and
the Friends of the Soviet Union. But in
case he feels that this is not enough, he
can join the Young Communist League,
which issues amusing literature for schoolage readers; or the Social Dancing Group
(which teaches pingpong and the "Proletarian Tango"), the Professional W orkers Anti-Fascist Club, the National Negro
Congress, the Thomas JefIerson Branch
A. W. F., the American Friends of Chinese
People, the Medical Committee for Defense
of Ethiopia, or any of a hundred similar
organizations.
No matter what Karl does at night, his
chief business will consist of talking, unless he has some such work on hand as
helping to organize a dance to raise funds
for the Anti-Fascist League - in which
case he talks twice as much and hopes
that someone else will do the work. No
one ever does, but if the dance is scheduled
to start at 9 o'clock, the Committee will
arrive at 9:30 and fix things up somehow.
Every five minutes. people go around with
baskets demanding contributions to a
Fund. One wonders whether these affairs
are not exclusively devices for gathering
the Comrades together so that they may
be efficiently mulcted. At intervals during

43 1

the proceedings someone gets up on a platform and makes a long incoherent speech,
concluding with a fervid appeal for funds.
What all these Causes really are, who
sponsors them, and where the money goes,
no one seems to know. Between collections,
Karl shuffles around on the floor in a thoroughly Bourgeois manner.
One of the outstanding characteristics of communist affairs is their depressing mediocrity and sloppiness, never concealed under the enormous pretentiousness
with which the heelers invest everything
to which they turn a hand. For it must
not be forgotten that no matter what a
professional communist does or how he
does it, it is always the most important,
the most outstanding, the most cosmically
significant event of all time. A forum of
Comrades discussing such a question as
"Militant Propaganda Against War" will
carryon with the strangest mixture of con..
fusion, pretension, and gravity; yet the
speeches, the questions, and the answe'rs
will hardly be worthy of a grammar-school
debating society, and the meeting will in-..
variably trail off into a heated argument
about something that has nothing to do
with the subject, concluding in a general
uproar with everyone shouting at once and
no one listening. Even the m,ain addresses,
presumably prepared beforehand, are re..
soundingly trivial.
Karl will talk incessantly about everything under the sun, though communist
themes have preference, particularly the
Revolution, since it is the Nirvana of his
Cult. He can only conceive of progress
in terms of violent physical action, for he
has no comprehension of practical eco..
nomics and sociology, and regards the machine gun as the only answer to opposition. To his mind nothing is important
unless it is spectacular. Social evolution
and progress may surge under his very

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

43 2

nose, but he will fail to observe it unless

it is accompanied by shrieks of agony,seas
of blood, piles of corpses, explosions, and
burning buildings. Physical combat is of
course a powerful aphrodisiac - no doubt
most of the wenches in the Movement
cherish secret dreams of standing halfnaked on a Barricade, waving the red flag
midst shot and shell.
As for food, Karl takes it where he finds
it, helped upon occasion by a few dollars
for leg-work done in distributing Party
leaflets, selling newspapers, helping to organize - within his comprehension of the
term - a symposium, or ushering at a concert. For the rest, it is rather hard scratching. Often in a restaurant a group of
heelers will sit up half the night over a
cup of coffee and a hamburger sandwich,
waiting for some more prosperous Comrade to drop in and pay the check. This
seems rather a precarious modus vivendi,
but it is much better than working for a
living, and it helps Karl to prepare for
that important part of what he is pleased
to term the Social Program, to be put into
effect immediately after the. Revolutionthe New Lethargy.

v
There are, it is to be supposed, times when
Karl really has his spiritual moments. Days
when, under the stimulus of some emotion, he believes in his Cause as a Cause;
when communism seems a beautiful and
an inspiring thing. Most of the time, however, he regards communism essentially
as something that will give him a chance
to be one of the Ins instead of one of the
Outs. He will rant by the hour about a
United Front of classes, creeds, and colors.
He will shed copious tears over the sad
state of the Southern Negro, the Pennsylvania miner, the Mississippi share-cropper,

and he will appeal to them most touchingly to support him and his Creed because, so he asserts, that is the only way
they can ever hope to be happy, and the
only way to lick the Bosses, the Landlords, and the Bankers. Yet Kar1 rare!y
has any personal sympathy for these people
or a real comprehension of their problems.
His appeals are simply a device whereby
he hopes to enlist the support of the working classes to aid him in carrying out his
cherished dream of up-ending the economic system so that he will be on top instead of at the bottom. He trades on misfortune, feeds on confusion, and does his
best to foment distrust and hatred.
Thus Karl exists in a happy daze, always meddling, interfering, always enormously busy doing something colossally
unimportant. He is forever dropping one
thing to pick up another with shrieks of
joy, only to drop it just as quickly in its
turn; noisy, quarrelsome, childish, vindictive, and futile, he is an acute case of mental and moral indigestion, a pathetic and
unhappy spectacle of frustration. Rudyard
Kipling could have had the communist
heelers in mind when he wrote his hymn
to the monkeys, Road-Song of the BandarLog:
Here we sit in a branchy row,
Thinking of beautiful things we know;
Dreaming of deeds that we mean to do,
All complete in a minute or two Something noble and grand and good,
Won by merely wishing we could.
Now we're, going to - never mind.
Brother, thy tail hangs down behind!

All the talk we have ever heard

Uttered by bat or beast or bird Hide or fin or scale or featherJabber it quickly and all together!
Excellent! Wonderful! Once again!
Now we are talking just like men.
Let's pretend we are - never mind.
Brother, thy tail hangs down behind!

YOUTH FACES THE SEX PROBLEM

BY CONSTANCE CASSADY
aR some time now the youth of
America has been attempting to answer certain questions of its own.
Confronted with the deflation of many
ancient values in the face of financial uncertainty and social unrest, yet still forced
to conform at least outwardly to the folkways of the past, young men and women
are finding themselves torn between two
loyalties - the morality of their parents
and the urgent demands of life in a modern world. Although it is only in the
higher brackets of intelligence that one
finds young persons inquiring into the
broader aspects of the sex problem, there
is reason to believe that the lower the individual's status in the socia-economic
scale, the sharper his need to reconcile his
personal necessity with some sort of social
sanction. An outstanding example is the
fact that marriage today is economically
impossible for thousands of persons of marriageable age, whereas nature's overwhelming obsession for reproduction has not
abated accordingly.
The girl and boy of eighteen, even when
they have received the most conscientious
sex-instruction at the hands of their parents, are all too apt, these days, to look
about them with observant eyes upon a
world in which the simple biological facts
are woefully inadequate. They are discovering, in many instances, that life is
not so beautifully ordered as the oldsters
would have them believe - that it is not
simply a matter of growing up to the age

of twenty-five or so, and falling in love

with the "right person", and getting married. The adolescent, even without the artificial stimuli of the movies and current
literature, finds himself preoccupied with
sex to a disconcerting degree, and (despite
the pronunciamentos of scoutmasters and
athletic directors) it is doubtful that even a
grueling afternoon at sports will use up
the energy generated by the sex hunger
of a healthy young man. On the contrary,
it would seem that the youth whose body
is vigorous and in perfect condition, would
be, by all laws of biological selection, preeminently fit for mating. The idea of diverting this vitality into "less dangerous"
channels is actually an evasion of a major
issue, and may result in psychological disturbances. It is apparent that, notwithstanding the scattered exponents of the
New Liberty on the one side and the
right-thinkers and moral fuss-budgets on
the other, the great bulk of American
youth still suffers from the sense of sin.
This consciousness of wrong~doing, this
aversion to all things sexual- the contribution of early Christianity to human
ethics - has probably been the cause of
more emotional instability and mental torture in youth than all other disturbing
elements combined.
It will perhaps be conceded, by any but
the most rigid moralist, that continence
beyond the age of nineteen or twenty is
definitely unnatural. The question, then,
is whether sexual freedom before marriage
433

434

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

is sufficiently imperative to warrant its

being accepted in place of the purity
hitherto upheld as the standard for youth.
There is much to be said on both sides.
The exponents of sex freedom point
out, with sound logic, the glaring defects
in the present system of. morality - a system which, however weakened it may
have become in the years since the World
War, is still in effect, to all appearances.
Granted, for instance, that continence is
a physical and psychological strain upon
any normal young human being, the in-'
ference is that, if it is to exist at all, it must
be imposed through training or by the
superior strength of authority. Up to the
present time, the entire weight of public
opinion, of religion and education, of the
whole machinery of Society, has been toward the maintenance of chastity. Every
element of a complex civilization, with the
exception of the admittedly lawless, has
conspired to this end.
So strong has been the tradition that
even prostitutes in their mellower moments
have been known to extol the benefits of
virtue, while seasoned roues would suffer
torture rather than mar the dewy beauty
of an acknowledged virgin. Red-blooded
cowboys weep unashamed over the sagas
. of wronged NeIls, and toughened hillbillies pale at the mere mention of womanhood despoiled, and reach for their rifles.
Virtue is rampant in even such supposedly
iniquitous centers as New York and ;Chicago. More sentiment has been expended
on the subject of youthful purity (feminine) than on any other popular legend,
with the possible exceptions of Home and
Mother. Yet this lush attitude toward sex,
which has long since become an integral
part of the folkmind of America, while it
may have contributed greatly to the gaiety
of nations, is possessed of serious consequences.

Putting aside. for the moment the more

obvious absurdities which have accumulated about the whole subject of youthful
continence, the inequalities and contradictions of the present system must be apparent even to its most vociferous supporters.
It is all very well to mouth such highsounding abstractions as Purity and Virtue, but certainly no one attempts seriously
to impose them upon young men. Society,
even under the Good Queen, was quite
willing to close one eye to the indiscretions
of young gentlemen - so long as they indulged them outside their own class.
Likewise, fathers of the present day who
have heart-to-heart talks with their sons
do not honestly expect the boys to remain virginal until they are mature
enough to assume the responsibilities of
marriage. In fact, they would be a little
worried, not to say disappointed, if the
situation were otherwise.
But when the demure daughter of the
house receives her strict moral orders, the
note of comedy is entirely absent. Here,
the honor of the family is concerned: let
there be no trace of levity. . . . Yet, oddly
enough, a few outspoken persons have intimated of late that the female of the
species is '" dominated by the same desires
which harass her brother. Psychiatrists and
other irreverent prophets, having at last
penetrated the sacred precincts of the
boudoir, announce that the maiden is also
prey to the biological urge, and that the
only reason she has been immaculate for
so many centuries is because everyone else
has insisted on it. It appears' that, while
sentimental males have been extolling her
purity, and slaying other males who cast
slurs upon her fair name, she has been
quite bored by the whole affair. If a
strong-minded girl, she has undoubtedly
been wishing they would stop all the
fuss, and let her have a good time too.

YOUTH FACES THE SEX PROBLEM

In brief, it is doubtful whether a woman's
chastity has ever held for her the importance which men persist in attaching
to it - a contradictory state of affairs which
must have resulted in a good deal of embarrassment, now and again.
Certainly in the past the whole of society
has lined up against the defenseless virgin
in order that her virtue might be preserved,
willy-nilly. The church, in its earliest days,
established purity as the one essential for
women. They could steal, lie, cheat, beat
their mothers, and bear false witness
against their neighbors, so long as they
came to the marriage bed intact. Saint
Paul, whose aversion to women was notorious, struck the keynote for the policy of
the church when he said: "It is better to
marry than to burn."
So far as the average American girl is
concerned, his choice still holds. The old
cliche of "Better death than dishonor",
despite its comic connotation today, is still
so potent in practice that she would rather
marry the first $2o-a-week clerk who excites her passion than endanger her soul or
her social' standing by following her biological instincts. Driven by her own sexhunger as well as by his, and groping in
a confusion of custom, sentimentality, and
religious scruples, she holds out for a wedding ring at any cost. The result is another
unsuccessful alliance between two persons
who have nothing in common but youth
and an inherent longing for sexual expresSIon.

On the other hand, if the young couple

had gratified their normal desires with
ordinary contraceptive precautions, they
might have shared a rather delightful experience, and also have saved themselves
and others a great deal of trouble. They
might" then, have waited until a more
reasonable age to marry, and thus avoided
cluttering the already crowded scene with

435

a number of unwanted offspring whom

they could neither support decently nor
train intelligently. But Society is vehemently against this procedure. Even if the
young man can so far forget his traditional
chivalry as to attempt to "have his way
with her" - and it may be observed that
he usually does make the attempt - the
gir1herself knows better than to surrender.
Whatever his importunities, whatever the
urging of her own nature, she knows that
by submitting she will lose caste, not only
in Society but in the eyes of her lover as
well. Therefore, she assures him that she
is not that kind of girl. Whereupon he
promptly drools with dumb admiration,
begs forgiveness for his own unfitness, and
marries the girl- with all possible speed.
The material consequences of this unsound practice are all too patent. It is wellknown that America, perhaps the only
country in the world where Love Conquers All, has the highest divorce rate on
earth, and likewise the greatest proportion
of neurotic wives and disillusioned husbands. Unfortunately, so long as the bride
is expected to 'bring" nothing to marriage
except a complete ignorance of sexual life,
and so long as women pass on, one to another, the belief that compliance in the
sexual act is nothing more than a distasteful concession to the brutal instincts of a
husband and the necessity for propagation,
there seems little possibility of a happier
state of affairs. The basic immorality of a
society which encourages this exchange of
a purely' physical chastity for economic
security, and which fosters the hypocritical
delusion that intercourse is agreeable only
to the male, has no significance for those
professional moralists who lay down the
law. Their whole concern is to see that the
woman comes to her husband a virgin,
and lives with him as a chaste wife, regardless of the fact that the necessity for these

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

customs, which sprang from practical considerations having to do with inheritance
of property through. the paternal line, has
been virtually nullified by modern contraceptives.
In spite of this weight of Society's authority, however, there can be no doubt
that a number of young women have
privately asserted their right to sexual
equality in recent years. If proof were
needed, the results of a recent questionnaire at one of the prominent women's
colleges would be sufficient. A surprising
percentage of the girls admitted that they
were not virgins. (One hopes that none
of these courageous young pioneers will
have the ill fortune to fall in love with a
gentleman of the old school, and see him
led to the altar by some sweet girl who
has obviously nothing but her stainless
purity to recommend her.) The modern
tendency is unquestionably toward a
greater freedom for both men and women;
yet one must not overlook the fact that
the sexual emancipation of the present era
is often the result of alcoholic. stimulation,
rather than of an intelligent attitude toward morality. The drinking bouts in
which high-school and college students frequently indulge, and which result in promiscuous relations, must not be considered
a step in the right direction. Indeed, the
mere circumstance of alcohol being essential to sex expression might be regarded
as an admission that those who require it
are still enslaved by the ancient taboos
- that, without an artificial means of overcoming inhibitions, they would still be
dominated by the Puritan conscience of
the race.
Now it is apparent, up to this point, that
it would be preferable for the girl to have
the same freedom for intelligent sex experience before marriage as that enjoyed
by the young man. To say that wisdom is

the result of experience is an aphorism,

yet there seems no reason why it should
not apply to love as. well as to. any other
field of activity. Not only would the young
woman thus be enabled to postpone marriage until an age when she was psychologically fit for the responsibilities involved, and to make a more rational choice
of a mate, but she would probably bring
to the marriage relation itself a fuller
measure of tolerance and a more mature
vision. Moreover, even the young man is
not completely unfettered under the prevailing system, for, while he may enjoy
a certain bachelor freedom in his relations
with women, he is thoroughly impregnated with the idea that the only girl
worth marrying is the one who cannot be
possessed otherwise. This code naturally
precludes the possibility of his pre-marital
sexual experiences possessing any real
value. By the very inconsistencies of his
own attitude toward women, he is destined to associate intimately only with
those whom he considers unworthy of his
affection or respect, and the opportunity
for sharing a rich emotional experience
with an equal is sacrificed for an insignificant physical alliance with an inferior.

II
Having marshaled the arguments in favor
of sexual freedom, it is only. reasonable to
glance at the other side of the picture.
Strangely enough, the opposition is not
nearly so loquacious, except when speaking in large organized groups. Individually
it stands silent, firmly entrenched behind
custom and tradition. And yet there is
something to be said upon the negative
side. As noted above, the question resolves
itself largely into freedom for unmarried
women, as continence in men is tacitly
accepted as being non-existent. It is not

YOUTH FACES THE SEX PROBLEM

437

only whether women shall have that free- ulate his desire for possession, the average
dom, but whether men shall permit them woman is not so easily ensnared. She does
to have it, without the loss of prestige and not cast a roving eye upon every chance
respect which has for long been the price male who comes her way, and permit herof feminine liberty.
self to speculate upon his amatory accomOne of the most effective obstacles to plishments - not unless she is hopelessly
intelligent sexual equality is the divergent past the age when love is likely to be ofattitude of male and female toward the fered her. It is almost impossible for her
sex relation. As already observed, the tra- to regard sex in the purely physical sense
ditional attitude of the American woman which it holds for him. Sex attraction, for
is based upon superstition and an artificial the female, must be based upon an appeal
revulsion against sexual intercourse, save of personality; it must present a stronger
as an unpleasant adjunct to an otherwise challenge than the mere prospect of asrespectable married life. But there are cer- suaging a bodily need. Fundamentally, it
tain aspects of the matter which extend may be a biological reaction, but the
more deeply than this.
woman will refuse this solution unless she
The average man realizes early in life is offered certain spiritual or sentimental
- in fact, he seems instinctively to know compensations. The acceptance of sex on
- that an orgasm is an achievement which such wholly different bases, by men and
is not necessarily concerned with his affec- women, must present a well-nigh insurtions in the least. (If this were not true, mountable barrier to a true single standprostitution would long since have van- ard of morality.
ished from the earth.) He finds himself at
And, furthermore, there is the difficulty
an early age the prey of physical desire, of overcoming the age-old attitude of men
and he promptly recognizes .it as such, toward women. The irrationality of the
without recourse to romantic vaporings. masculine viewpoint is proverbial; its conAny presentable wench is a potential mis- tradictory phases have already been distress; he is easily excited by the mere cussed. Yet it stands as incontrovertible,
glimpse of a well-shaped leg, an excite- and perhaps as deplorable, as any other
ment which involves his heart not at all. human proclivity: man using all his
The reason for this is not only that man powers of persuasion to drag woman off
is by nature polygamous and a rake, but her pedestal, and at the same time prethat woman is physically attractive, both ferring her on the .eminence rather than
in her bodily contours and in the artifice on his own level. Even while his body
cries out for her, his soul insists that she
of her dress, while he is not.
On the other hand, it would be difficult remain aloof. He feels the need to worship
to imagine a woman, not a nymphomaniac, her as something higher than himself,
becoming sexually excited by the mere even as he desires to possess her. Perhaps
sight of masculine beauty. While aggres- it is this very internal conflict which often,
siveness and physical strength may be at- even against his reason, causes him to
tractive to certain types of women, it is despise her, once she has descended from
unusual for one of them to succumb con- her heights to become his property. It may

sciously to the appeal. Whereas the average

be that this is nothing more, than addi-

man requires nothing more than an inviting figure or a kissable mouth to stim-

tional proof of the adage that the unattainable is eternally the desirable - or that

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

man demands something a little more more than an animalistic meaning. To
tangible than God. It may be an echo of these, a freer society would make little
.
the romanticism of the Middle Ages, or difference.
the asceticism of the early church. But
But to the rest of humanity, and parwhatever its source, it is there, coloring ticularly to youth, it would seem the
the opinions of men who would neither part of intelligence to open the. doors to
admit nor attempt, to rationalize its exist-- a healthier understanding between the
ence. Its importance lies in the fact that, sexes. If one could build the sexual conso long as it does exist, real freedom be- tacts of youth upon honesty and mutual
respect, rather than upon superstition, a
tween the sexes is impossible.
Perhaps the only rational verdict in the splendid step would have been taken tocase of sexual freedom against Society is ward a more enlightened way of life. If,
an affirmative one with definite reserva- further, one could eliminate the present
tions. The essential element which de- ignoble practice of bartering woman's virmands recognition (and in which much ginity for the economic security of marof the present-day freedom would appear riage, and could arrive at a civilized state
to have failed), is the fact that the im- of public opinion wherein virtue in its
portance of sexual emancipation lies in its narrower sense would have no significance
psychological rather than in its physio- as compared to the more essential qualities
logical significance. There can be no value of sincerity and straight thinking, there
in promiscuity. A casual and experimental might evolve a common ground on which
attitude toward the sex act not only fails young men and young women could
to benefit the participants, but must even- meet without hypocrisy or false premise,
tually result in the obliteration of much and to which they could contribute inthat is finest in human relations. It must be dividually the best of their natures, in
recognized, too, that there will always be intelligence, in passion, and in imaginaindividuals to whom sex can have little ition.

THE MIDDLE WEST RULES AMERICA

BY DUNCAN AIKMAN
HE. political astrologists have been intimating for some months that the
New Deal's fate next November will
be decided in the Middle West. Only a captious calculator could quarrel with their
horoscopes. Mr. Roosevelt may carry more
North Atlantic industrial states than any
Republican just now can imagine, or his
losses in the Confederacy may exceed any
horrors yet upthrust in Mr. Farley's worst
nightmares. But no coalition of the South
and East will conceivably elect him. He
must have the edge in the Middle West to
win, and so must the Republicans. Somewhere between the Alleghenies and the
Rockies, between the Canadian Border and
the line of the Ohio and the Missouri Compromise, a few hundred thousand marginal
voters - perhaps even less - will decide
where we go from here.
There is nothing exceptional about the
situation. The Middle West has always
been the dark and bloody ground of
the Republic's critical decisions. Jefferson
rushed into the Louisiana Purchase to head
off a secession of the Mississippi Valley outlands when there were barely half a million
people beyond the mountains. Midwestern
sectional politics threw the balances in favor
of the War of 1812. Midwestern acquiescence gave the Southerners the balance of
power to declare the Mexican War. The
Middle West's support of Lincoln - a
doubtful matter until Fort Sumter was fired
on and never a quite unanimous support
- solved the Civil War crisis. The Middle

West stopped Bryan in his tracks - at least

for the first thirty-six years, as G.O.P. jibers
would have it. Prohibition did not become
a serious national menace until its emotional epidemic invaded the Midlands,
and it collapsed at the same time the Midlands turned convalescent.
There is far more than the geographical
factor in this amazing power of political
leverage. With the enormous variety of
the Middle West's agricultural and industrial interests, it is seldom that an overwhelming sectional issue arises to sway
votes. The questions of land settlement policies, of outlets to the oceans, and of military
defense which troubled its brawling youth,
have long been settled. The Midlands have
no fixation on manufacturing tariffs, on
cotton, on silver, or on the Japanese menace. In all these obvious matters of geographical self-interest they comprise, unquestionably, the least sectional of the
sections. The Middle-Western electorate,
in fact, shifts the gears of political decision
for the nation almost wholly in accordance with the promptings of the MiddleWestern mind and temperament. What
can we learn about these imponderables
which will help us guess the decisions of
the future?
Whenever I go back to the Middle West,
where I was born under Benjamin Harrison, the thing I am impressed with is the
lack of regional obsessions. Southerners are
obsessed with the "niggehs", cotton, social
position, and their sentimental inheritance
439

44

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

(including Fundamentalist theology and

the Lost Cause). Easterners- barring New
Yorkers who are mainly concerned with
local excitements - are obsessed with business and financial conditions, and, to a
greater degree than is generally advertised,
with the frictions between the original population and the foreign vote. Pacific Coast
voters are obsessed with their various promotional schemes, regional and individual
- including new religions and millennial
political movements like Upton Sinclair's.
In the Middle West you find individuals
with all these and a great many other obsessions, but none of them is dominant. In
a New England manufacturing town a
dozen eminent citizens will tell you they
are against the Administration because look
at the mills all shut down and the way taxes
are going up, and look at the stock market.
The disapproval is sincere and may even
be ferocious, but it seldom varies. In the
Middle West, however, when I meet a
dozen earnest entrepreneurs whose loathing for the Roosevelt era is equally fervid,
the chances are that before the evening is
over they will be squabbling, not always
amiably, over what they loathe it for.
Normally, the Middle Westerner meets
several people each day with different obsessions about economic programs and social values, and it does something to his
mental processes. He is a little less tempted
than other brands of sectionalites, for instance, to believe that a crime against nature has been committed if the demand for
his factory products fans off; or that chastity is undone if a mulatto runs sexually
amuck in the next county. Unless his environment is exclusively parochial- a difficult arrangement in the Middle West of
the 1930's - he may even escape the conviction that all right-minded people belong
to the farm bloc. His obsessions, in other
words, are less likely than in other regions

to be stiffened into dogma by group addictions and group-mindedness, and are regarded even by the Midlander himself, in
his more philosophical moments, somewhat
in the light of private whimsies.
In result, the Middle Westerner carries his basic prejudices relatively lightly,
changes them with, on the whole, refreshing frequency, and keeps his mind fairly
open to new ones. It is perfectly possible,
for instance, for the same Hoosier to have
been an "anti-imperialist" at the turn of
the century, a Bull Mooser in its 'teens, a
Klansman in the 'Twenties, a Technocrat
and New Dealer in the 'Thirties, and God
knows what brand of T ownsendite in the
'Forties. Meanwhile our obsession-shifter's
Southern contemporary has gone on being
the same old romantic Negro-fearer that
his grandfather was, while the New
Englander has lived and died with his
Protestant-banker's or Irish mill-hand's
class-consciousn~ss unsullied by a single
inconsistency.
This seeming fickleness, far more than
any conscious devotion to specific sectional
interests, is what gives the Middle West/the
balance of power in American politics. East
and South, political viewpoints are relatively static. The East reverses its normal
Republican allegiances from time to time
and even the South will prefer a great Black
Republican engineer to Popery. But you
nearly always know when these upsets are
coming and you usually can see why. The
Middle West, on the other hand, changes
its mind, its principles, and even its prejudices in politics with what seems to the
observer from stodgier political climates an
almost wanton abandonment to temperamental impulses.
The confusion, I suspect, is due to the
outlander's inability to see what the Middle
Westerner's true obsession is. It runs so
much deeper than obvious sectional inter..

THE MIDDLE WEST RULES AMERICA

ests and issues that to a New Englander it
is virtually incomprehensible, while it is almost equally outside the emotional orbit of
Southerners. What really conditions the
Middle Westerner's political reactions is the
value he puts on personality.
II
Midlands conversation reeks as much of
persons as talk in the ranching states once
reeked of cows. Your dining car companion
in Iowa tells you the peccadillos of his business career and why his sister-in-law can't
eat bananas, with humorous philosophy,
perhaps, but with an abandonment of reticence that would appall a New Hampshire
family's Thanksgiving reunion. I listened
one night last summer to three middle-aged
women who had just previously struck up
an acquaintance in a Hoosier resort hotel's
lavatory. For more than an hour they
were psychoanalyzing their daughtersaffectionately but with Dostoevskian thoroughness and indelicacy. On the same 6000mile motor journey I listened to, or participated in, perhaps a hundred political
arguments. None of them got very far, because after the first few sentences of challenge and counter-challenge,. the antagonists invariably drifted into describing why
they felt as they did about politics. They
were more interested in explaining - and
in hearing about - each other's mental
processes than in winning battles.
In other sections of the country, if you
ask what Jones is like, you are told, in the
South, the kind of a family he belongs to,
or in the East, that he is a Dartmouth graduate and vice-president of a woolen mill.
That places him sufficiently in the local scale
of values, and if you want to know more,
you can cultivate Jones. But in the Middle
West the first person you ask tells all. Jones,
you are informed, was a pretty wild Deke

44 1

at the State University, but he's settled

down since he lost money on that new flour
mill process. He likes gin and bitters better
than whisky, he does a little rounding occasionally because his wife is "kind of cold"
to him, he gets on the stenographers' nerves
by whistling at his work in the office, he
was just a bit taken in by the New Deal at
first, he'll talk your arm off, he gets bilious
attacks in the hot weather, he's worth
$80,000, and he likes snake stories.
You meet Jones and go to a party at his
house. The chief entertainment you find is
persiflage between your fellow guests about
their personal idiosyncrasies. The serious
conversation is likely to consist largely of
acute character analysis of intimate acquaintances, absent and present. Next day
if a stranger in town asks you what Jones is
like and you confine yourself to strictly
impersonal details, something in the air
warns you that your inquirer feels you are
holding back on him. "Why they told me
you were a pal of his," he may say with
mild pathos. Intimate acquaintance in the
Midlands carries with it not only the privilege 'Of sizing up and exhaustively discussing one's boon companions, but a kind of
moral and social obligation to communicate
the results of one's observations to all presentable strangers on demand. This is an
other way of saying, perhaps, that Middle
Westerners regard the differences between
individuals as God's gift to human curiosity.
"Natural", at any rate, is the key word for
describing the Middle-Western zest for
these details. In all the cheerful and inexhaustible chatter about persons, there is a
minimum of the scandal-mongering and
back-biting tone, characteristic of Southern
and New England villages where an interest in personalities is considered a form
of pruriency, and its gratification a species
of private lewdness. The Midland cult of
personal curiosity is amazingly open and

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

aboveboard. Jones, after all, is as interested
in explaining what he is like as he is in
learning what the neighbors are like. He
knows that Smith knows all about him he told most of it himself - and will pass
on his knowledge to casual strangers. Jones,
on the other hand, will do as much for
Smith when the chance comes; or, for that
matter, as much for Jones if the stranger
gives him a half.-way polite opening.
For better or for worse, both Smith and
Jones feel in the depths of their instincts
that knowing all you can about the other
fellow is a part of one's necessary equip..
ment for living; that the sifting and com...
paring and philosophical utilization of such
wisdom is the most normal and natural of
human social pleasures. The same social
instinct tells them that the man or woman
who stands aloof from the give and take
of this region-wide personal intelligence
service must be neither quite human nor
natural. He is high-hat, he is secretive, he
is cold, or he must have something to hide.
, Telling the world what they are like has
been the dominant intellectual and social
sport of the Midlanders almost since the
first literate settler emerg~d on the sunset
side of Cumberland Gap. There is more
than coincidence in the fact that the doggerel couplet
Abraham Lincoln, his hand and pen,
He will be good but God knows when
is the earliest known Lincoln manuscript.
Abe may have borrowed a rhyme that was
going the rounds among the Gentryville
schoolboys, but the Midwestern sub-gad's
first literary adventure was a bucolic attempt at self-portraiture. Whatever his private merits, Abe was not interested in the
abstract virtues attributed to him by his
legend. He wanted the Gentryville world
to think of him personally and think of him
as prankish.

The pioneer Midlanders, as a matter of

fact, brought a feeling for the glamor of
personality over the mountains with them
in their baggage - and for the most understandable reasons. They were running away
from the high price of farms in the coastal
states, of course, as all economists will tell
you. But they were also running away from
their parts as stooges in a comedy of manners. In the 1780's and 1790's when the original settlement began, the political rights
of average and sub-average Americans had
just been established by successful revolution, but this had less than nothing to do
with the recognition of the rank and file
American's qualities as a person. In the
whole record of the founding fathers, historical and apocryphal, there is scarcely a
suggestion that any member of the Washington' Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton coterie
ever encouraged, or permitted, a personal
confidence from a social inferior. The reason was that the leaders of the successful
revolution were eighteenth.century gentle...
men. They belonged to a breed which felt
that the dignity of their leadership and the
security of society lay in rebuffing intimacies and familiarities between the classes,
and in impressing "the rabble" - by which
was meant the rank and file of tinkers, tanners, and dirt farmers of the new Republic
- that what was expected of them was civil
manners, not self-assertion.
In the first two decades after the Revolution, this freezing dignity of the founding
fathers congealed, if that was possible, into
an even greater rigidity. Nervous about
their official eminence in the New Republic, jittery about the possible consequences
.of the democratic adventure they had let
themselves in for, and badly upset by the
French Revolution, they made it quite
plain to their humbler fellow-citizens that
they were to be ruled by a code of etiquette
predicated upon General Washington's

THE MIDDLE WEST RULES AMERICA

complete indifference to humble fellow citizens as individuals.
The tinkers and tanners and dirt farmers,
who had just won a Revolution in the name
of Democracy, therefore moved westward
with distinct feelings of frustration and
annoyance, and with a hearty determination to break the rules of perfect social behavior, as "the wise, the rich, and the good"
of the seaboard aristocracy had laid them
down. They were off for the wilderness,
and, next to picking themselves fat farms
and founding new fortunes, the sweetest
prospect about life in the wilds was the
chance of escaping social inferiority and
proving themselves interesting and important persons. The outlook was rendered
even more charming when worthies like
President Dwight of Yale and Congressman .Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts
began shrieking after the backs of the migrant adventurers that they were congenital loafers, tavern-brawlers, tax-:-dodgers,
dead-beats, and jail birds - on the whole
admirable material for forest gorillas. It
would add to the long-deferred pleasures
of individual self-assertion to show Connecticut high-brows and Massachusetts
high-hats precisely where they got off.
But even if the pioneers had had no. impulses toward exhibitionism, everything in
the new situation favored it. The society
they founded was so primitively democratic
in its beginnings that not only did it lack
codes of etiquette for suppressing a ramping individualism, but a settler's individuality was shortly discovered to be about the
only social asset he had. Furthermore, there
was world-wide curiosity about the settlers.
From the D,anube to Scandinavia, intellectuals wanted information hot from the
wilds as to whether the new colonizers were
reproducing the political processes of M.
Rousseau's "noble savages", or the social
felicities of M. de Chateaubriand's A tala.

443

From Maine to Savannah there was feverish interest in how morals were holding up
in this painful separation from "the wise,
the rich, and the good". Even President
Dwight was sufficiently concerned to make
an uncomfortable tour of western New
York before penning his crabbed billingsgate.
Finally there was a rising tide of curiosity
about mere persons quite unconnected with
the rage for new Western primitives. The
lowly and inconspicuous rustics who pushed
through Cumberland Gap in the 1790'S
could hardly have known that in the same
decade young Mr. Wordsworth was casting
himself down on his couch and reporting
the nuance effects of daffodil memories
upon his inner life with a new kind of
poetic virtuosity; or that a madcap child,
now growing up on Sir Bysshe Shelley's
estate in Sussex, would shortly identify individuality with the West Wind. Yet even
the most illiterate of the pioneers marched
with the Time Spirit rather than away from
it. Instinctively they realized that an age
which had cherished manners, orderly social subordinations, and philosophical abstractions as its supreme values was becoming outmoded; that the era now coming on
would consider the personal differentiation
between ordinary men supremely romantic.
In short, the Midlanders found themselves
in a world in which they could sell the story
of what they were like on a bull market.

III
The first responses were definitely orgiastic.
The Midlanders demonstrated that they
were iriteresting and important persons by
the eye-gouging exploits of the river-town
ruffians, by composing the luridly personal
pornographies of the Mike Fink saga, in
their "half-horse and half-alligator" concepts of civic and private virtue, in the

444

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

offensive braggadocio of local militia genA decade or two later the regional gift
erals and tobacco-drooling statesmen, re- for public bosom-baring was observable in
ported after almost half a century of settle- new dovecotes. Of all the poetesses of the
ment in Mr. Dickens' American Notes. Suffering Female school of prosody, fashTheir first literature burgeoned in chromo ionable in the 'Forties and 'Fifties, none
romances in which incredible nobleness suffered with quite the same abandonment
foiled inconceivable villainies in pastoral to confidential intimacy as the lady singers
Edens that could hardly have seemed plau- of the quinine and calomel-conscious Midsible even to the land syndicates. Inevitably, lands. Miss Helen L. Bostwick, for instance,
too, the pioneers soon discovered, with with The Little Coffin fairly entered the
howls of evangelical jubilation, that God lists for the poignancy championship:
was a connoisseur of personal relationships.
'Twas a tiny rosewood thing
"No familiarities" might be the rule of
Eben-bound and glittering
President Adams' drawing room, but in
That I loitering chanced to find
In the dust and scent and gloom
the Great Revival of 1800 the Midlanders
Of the undertaker's room-celebrated their emotional. intimacies with
Waiting
empty - - ah, for whom?
the Heavenly Father in a vast social orgasm
of public hysteria. Being a backwoods
In a tone which he would possibly decousin of young Mr. Shelley's West Wind scribe as "more lightsome", Mr. Eddie
was very exciting and led to no end of bad Guest - unquestionably the Midlands' sutaste.
premely popular twentieth-century poetBut orgiastic forms of exhibitionism be- fascinates his millions of readers with pregan to lose caste with the second generation. cisely the same exhibitionist facility. For
By the 1830'S, impeccably refined local poets more than a quarter of a century Mr. Guest
and poetesses were carrying on the work has turned out his daily newspaper syndibegun in the Mike Fink epos, but the only cate poem on all conceivable private moods,
theme which continued irresistibly to fas- experiences, and memorabilia from how
cinate them was - what we are like. Half his aunts punished him for swear words to
a century, for example, before James Whit- thoughts on the Baby Jesus in a Detroit
comb Riley dredged up the last resources of automobile factory. If he has not yet written
folk dialect and sentimentality to prove a jingle on "Why I Took Bicarbonate of
that the plain people were chock-full of Soda Wednesday after Luncheon" it is bepiquant individuality, John Finley - a cause the theme has not occurred to him, or
unique politician, since Richmond, Indiana, Nature absorbs his acidosis. Mr. Guest
elected him the lone poetical mayor of would write it at the drop of a hat if it hapAmerican history - was indulging in pened to him, and his public would receive
whimsical rhymed portraits of the "young it as further proof of the old Midland doc~
ones" in The Hoosier's Nest, and of
trine that all personal revelation ranks the
saIne with the Muses.
. . . . the honest son of toil
But it is not necessary to pursue the recWho settles here to till the soil.
He is (and not the little great)
ord to exhaustion. When a Midlander sits
The bone and sinew of the State.
down to compose a book, "what we are
With six-horse team and one-horse cart like" is the theme that occurs to him, and if
We hail them here from every part,
And some you'll see sans shoes or socks on, he is consulting native authors, "what we
are like" is the theme he prefers to read
With snake-pole and a yoke of oxen.

THE MIDDLE WEST RULES AMERICA

about. This obsession with persons saturates Middle-Western literature in the
same manner as it saturates Middle-Western life. Mr. Hamlin Garland, Mr. Booth
Tarkington, Mr. Edgar Lee Masters, Mr.
Sinclair Lewis, and the earlier William
Dean Howells have been no less conscientiously - and joyously - concerned with
telling the world the old, old regional
story than Mr. Guest, or the makers of
the Lincoln legend; or Smith, when you
ask him the low-down on Jones.

IV
Now what has all this to do with politics?
A good deal more, I suspect, than often
meets the eye of certain political field marshals with vast reputations for strategy in
the outlands. How one behaves during a
campaign, the political arguments one gets
into, the kind of vote one casts, are customary Midland ways of strutting before the
world and showing off personality. Politics
can be a means of dramatizing oneself no
less than writing Guestian jingles or getting converted at Pentecostal revivals.
One can, for instance - or could until
two or three years ago - pose as a fierceeyed prophet of the true and the beautiful
simply by stamping approval of the latest
Anti-Saloon League orator and repeating
his arguments in verbal brawls down at
the drugstore. One can get standing as a
superior humanitarian by preaching Townsendism from pinochle party to pinochle
party, or simply by conveying implicitly
that one will take on anybody any time on
the proposition that Mr. Roosevelt has reformed big business. On the other hand,
one can set up as a professional cynical
philosopher merely by getting the reputation of greeting all references to social betterment through politics with the loudest
ha-ha in the Elks club.

445

I have an elderly male relative, born during the Civil War in southern Indiana, who
explains his lifelong Republicanism on the
ground that he "just can't get over the feeling that all Democrats are either Rebels or
Copperheads". To my personal knowledge
his business affairs often as not have prospered under .Democratic auspices and for
the past forty years he has laughed each
time he has said it. What he is doing is
gathering in the mild personal eclat which
almost any kind of Middle-Western social
circle gladly extends to an amateur humorist with individuality enough to stick up
for an old-fashioned whimsy. I doubt if my
relative would vote to divest himself of the
racy, old soil quality which he enjoys, if
the Democrats brought ocean liners up the
Wabash and subsidized his store.
The fact is that in any election contest
with issues rising above the low emotional
voltage of 1924, millions of Middle Westerners cast their votes in exactly the same
spirit in which unofficially they have chosen
Mr. Eddie Guest to be their regional laureate. They vote for the side which gives
them the best chance to dramatize themselves as interesting persons. In 1916, to
consider an instructive example, Mr. Wilson's "he kept us out of war" plea gave
them an opening to pose before the world
as genial well-wishers of all mankind and
the only Americans with a sound "to hell
with Europe" attitude. Five months later
the minor inconsistency that Mr. Wilson
took us into the war caused no lapse in his
popularity. In khaki the Middle West felt
itself even more interesting than in speaking out against the East's emotional involvements with the Entente. What really
did blow Mr. Wilson out of the Midwestern
waters four years later was his eftort to install the "keep us out of war" idea as a permanent fixture of national policy through
the League of Nations..

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

This, in effect, was telling the Middle
West that a "to hell with Europe" attitude
was unrefined and provincial, and that it
would break the heart of the world if the
Midland voters failed to follow the leader
into a great adventure in tender-minded
internationalism. The Midland voters conceivably might have dramatized themselves
as tender-minded internationalists without
supreme imaginative eftort. What they
could not do was to feel themselves interesting and important as persons while following a President who, according to their
lights, was high-hatting them for one of
their finest virtues - to wit, their indifference to international diplomacy. In result of Mr. Wilson's errors of psychological
approach, 1920 turned out to be an almost
record year for the Middle-Western voters
to dramatize themselves as Bronx-cheering
cynics in respect to noble aims in statesmanship.Although their votes were hardly
needed, they buried Wilsonism under such
landslides that even their fellow Midlander,
James M. Cox of Dayton, has scarcely been
recognizable in politics since.
Yet all the time, as it appeared to me
while observing the campaign's phenomena
journalistically, the Midlanders were feeling perfectly swell about it. The regional
air was as electric with "he kept us out of
war" wisecracks as it was with the currently modish Ford jokes. A lurid folklore
of Mr. Wilson's alleged public and private
crimes and vices - not to mention .reprobation of his unimpeachable virtues bloomed in the very kindergartens. Before
dropping the hot potato of the foreign entanglement sentimentality, each Midland
joker was making it plain how keenly he
realized the humorous experience it had
been to hold it, and before dropping the
late cho~en leader he was developing specifically and categorically all possible reasons
for detest.ing him personally. Midland

politics, in other words, was in a, state of

acute normalcy. It was revolving, like Midland small talk and Midland literature,
a~ound each individual Midlander's egocentricity.
Now by my private calculating system,
there are approximately 25,000,000 authentic Midlanders. The Kentuckians and
Tennesseeans, although their ancestors pioneered for the breed, have long been Confederates. The Oklahomans vote for gross
stakes in oil, cows, and 1ynching bees
rather than from the heart; both brands of
Dakotans as well as most of the Minnesotans and La Follette parishioners vote
their class rather than their self-consciousness. The psychological Midlands are thus
a little narrower than the geographical description.
Among the 25,000,000 I question if any
more political rhyme or reason will be invoked in the Great Decision of 1936 than
was called forth by 1920'S Solemn Referendum. Two sizeable elements of voters
with the lifelong habit of voting their partisan inheritance will cancel each other off
substantially, and so will a few groups who
may be expressing their sentiments on
acute economic grievances. Then the election will be decided - for New York and
Texas as well as for Iowa - by the few million chronic waverers of the Midlands who,
year in and year out with romantic self..
consciousness, vote for the side that makes
them feel best about themselves.
This year they may dramatize themselves
as dashing innovators of new and lovelier
economic systems; ,as shock-troops repuls..
ing a big business counter-revolution; as
soldiers in the natural warfare of plain men
against Brain Trusters and city slickers;
or as some vast and daring posse riding to
death the soulless bureaucrats. who fatten
on honest men's relief bonanzas. Or dramatizations may be invented which no pol-

NOT FOR THE SICKLE

Itlclan could conceivably dream of until
they happen. In no case, however, is the
validity of the issues or. the strength of the
campaign arguments likely to be of serious
consequence in the region wherethe crucial
political power balances quiver. If the Mid~
lands are normal, the outcome will depend
on which set of candidates and which
party's propaganda incites the most Midlanders to believe that we are all pretty in..
teresting and important people together.

After it is over, the probability is also that,

having re-demonstrated their mastery of
the Republic, the Midlanders will continue
to let Big Business or the New Dealers, as
the case may be, run it. After all, anyone
can manage a government. But showing
the world what Middle Westerners "are
like" is what elections are really for. They
can be almost as much fun, in fact, as telling the visitor from Pawtucket why Aunt
Sally can't eat raw apples.

NOT FOR THE SICKLE

BY TED OLSON

447

AKE the bitter kernel of your sorrow.

Plow it uncler with the April furrow.
Stitch the shroud above it with your harrow.

Weeds are quick to claim a field gone fallow.

Let the burdock tousle knoll and hollow;
Give the ditches back to thorn and willow.
Leave the land to autumn; let the sullen
Rain dishevel it, the north wind's talon
Strip the leaf, and sow the snow for pollen.
Let the crows convene, a grave and wintry
Parliament, with one sardonic sentry.
Let it be, to .men, forgotten country;
Till some rabbit-hunting lad, or swimmer
River~bound, and lost, recalls a rumor
This was tillage, in an earlier summer;
And remarks, above the ruined furrow,
One resplendent stalk, a wheaten arrow,

Strange, and tall, and nothing like your sorrow.

GALSWORTHY
BY FORD MADOX FORD
have asked myself a hundred
times in my life: If there had been no
Turgenev what would have become of
Galsworthy? ... Or, though that is the
way the question has always put itself to
me, it might be truer to the thought I want
to express to say: What would Galsworthy
have become?
I might have asked the same question
about Henry James, for the influence of
Turgenev on James must have been enormous, but I did not know James before he
had come across Turgenev, whereas I did
know Galsworthy whilst he was still himself and still astonishingly young. And I
remember distincdy the alarm that came
over me when Galsworthy one morning
mentioned Turgenev for the first time at
breakfast. It was both the nature of the
mention of the beautiful Russian genius
and Galsworthy's emotion of the moment
that alarmed me. I had known him for a
long time as a charming man-about-town
of a certain doggedness in political argument. Indeed, I don't know how long I
hadn't known him; to find out exactly I
should have to do more delving in thought
into my own past than I care to do. But I
knew that he was passing through a period
of great emotional stress and as I had a
great affection for him I was concerned to
find him expressing more emotion over an
anecdote than I had ever known him to
show.
The anecdote was this: Turgenev had a
peasant girl for mistress. One day he was
448

MUST

going to St. Petersburg and he asked the

girl what he should bring her back from
town. She begged him to bring her back
some cakes of scented soap. He asked her
why she wanted scented soap and she answered: "So that it may be proper for you
to kiss my hand as you do those of the
great ladies, your friends."
I never liked the anecdote much, myself.
But Galsworthy, telling it in the sunlit
breakfast room of my cottage at Winchelsea, found it so touching that he appeared
to be illuminated, and really had tears in
his eyes. I daresay the reflection of the
sunlight from the tablecloth may have had
something to do with the effect of illumination, but it comes back to me as if, still, I
saw him in a sort of aura that emanated
from his features. And from that day he
was never quite the same. . . The morning is also made memorable for me by the
ghost of the odor of a very strong embrocation that hung about us both. He was, at
the moment, suffering from severe sciatica
and I had spent. the last half-hour of the
night before and the first half-hour of that
morning in rubbing him in his bed with
that fluid which consisted of turpentine,
mustard, and white of egg. And suddenly
I had of him a conception of a sort of
frailty, as if he needed protection from
the hard truths of the world. It was a
conception that remained to me till the
very end . . . till the last time but one
when I came upon him accidentally watching one of his own plays in New York,

GALSWORTHY
all alone and, seemingly, very perturbed.
I don't know by what.
The disease from which he suffered was
pity ... or not so much pity as an in..
supportable anger at the sufferings of the
weak or the impoverished in a harsh world.
It was as if some portion of his mind had
been flayed and bled at every touch. It
entered into his spirit at about the date of
which I am speaking and remained with
him all his life. And, for me at least, it
robbed his later work of interest, since the
novelist must be pitiless at least when he is
at work.
And it filled me with disappointment. I
tQink I must have been the first person
really to take Galsworthy seriously as a
writer. For most other people who knew
him then - except of course for the lady
who subsequently became Mrs. Galsworthy
- he was still an amiable, rather purposeless man-about-town, with a liking for
racing, with some skill with the shotgun,
a proper connoisseurship in cricket. But
I had already recognized in him a certain
queerness, a certain pixy-like perversity
... and a certain, slight, authentic gift.
So that I had expected him, if he persevered, to provide for us another kind,
sunnier, of Trollope, and I very much did
not want him to become over-serious or
emotional.
And suddenly there was Turgenevthe most dangerous of all writers for his
disciples - Turgenev and emotionalism
appearing in the mentality of that sunny
being with the touch of genius....
I am always being hammered by my associates for saying that Galsworthy had a
touch of genius as a novelist. And indeed
I was hammered by Galsworthy himself
for telling him that that was what he had.
He was himself obstinately of the opinion
that if ever a writer was constructed it was
he. And in the process of getting himself

449

made he submitted to an incredible amount

of buffetings by advisers. It used to seem
almost a miracle that he could find his way
about his own works whilst he was writing them, so frequently was he counseled
by one person and another to change all
the salient passages of his books. Certainly
the Galsworthy who emerged from all that
was someone immensely changed, hardened, and, except for his plays in which
his native gift was more allowed to have
its way, he was dulled... To that I shall
return. Let me for the moment try to finish
getting in my original Galsworthy.
During the earlier years of our acquaintance I had gathered the impression from
Conrad, who knew him as a pleasant idler
long before I did, that his rather slight
figure and blond head contained a frame
and a brain of iron. Conrad, with characteristic generosity when speaking of a
dear friend, used to declare that Galsworthy held the mile record at Oxford.
At times it would even be the world record.
But it was certainly the Oxford one. And,
on my first meeting with him - though
not my first sight for I had seen him at a
club - he had elected, rather than to ride
in. my dog-cart, to trot beside me the two
miles from Sandling Junction to the Pent.
He said he needed exercise, but as the road
was uphill it had seemed a stiffish way to
take it. So I had accepted Conrad's account
of his friend's exploits without demur and,
as it wasn't the kind of thing that Englishmen would talk about, there was in my
mind no question of his being a mile
record-holder at the time I rubbed him in
Winchelsea.
Actually he had rather distinguished
himself at Harrow at cricket and on the
cinder track. If I had known that, I should
have considered his first literary efforts
more seriously. Because for a man to go
through the terrific grind of preparing him-

45

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

self when comparatively mature for the

effort of taking a mile record would be the
worst training imaginable for a liter~ry
life, whereas for an adolescent to distinguish himself at Harrow would merely
mean that he was a stocky fellow.
These slight shades of English rulingclass life at that date are difficult to convey, but they are worth dwelling upon.
To excel in those days in anything - even
in private - was regarded as extremely
dangerous. To excel to the point of anything like publicity would be to write
yourself down a bounder and if you incurred the slightest suspicion of that it was
all over with you. It was nice to have a
Blue - for cricket or rowing. It would
even help you at the bar afterwards if you
wanted to be a practicing barrister . . .
But then in the boat there were eight of
you and on the cricket team eleven, so you
did not stand out. And I am certain that,
just as my friend Marwood, who was one
of the' finest mathematicians of his dayjust as he purposely made a mistake in his
final examination at Cambridge so as to
be second and not Senior Wrangler - so
Galsworthy, if there had been any danger
of making a record at Oxford, would have
stumbled before reaching the tape.
Later, indeed, I happened to ask him
some question about running - it was at
,the time of the first Olympic Games in
Athens - and said innocently:
"You hold the mile record at. Oxford,
don't you?"
He really jumped a couple feet away
from me -we were walking in the Park
- and exclaimed:
"Good gracious, no! Oh goodness gracious, no! I did a little running at Harrow.
But at Oxford I never did anything but
loaf about the High. .. . ." As a matter of
fact, he declared, the very little running
he had done at the school on the hill had

injured his heart so he could not have

done anything in that line at Oxford. And,
as a matter of fact, too, he had, he said,
not done anything in any line at all. He
had just scrambled through his examination for the bar. That was all.
And he had dul y eaten his dinners at
the Middle Temple and, like every other
gentleman's son of those days, had been
called to the' bar. That is to say that if one
was at all "born", one had till about then
gone either to the bar or into the Army,
or if one were born and a very younger
son one went into the Church. But at the
time Galsworthy was called to the bar,
the Army was already showing signs of
becoming a rather serious affair, and with
the fall in the value of agricultural tythes,
the Church had become a not very lucrative profession. So he had donned wig
and gown for a ceremonial attendance on
the Courts, as being the proper thing for a
gentleman's son who had no ambitions
and intended to loaf through life. He had,
I understood, appeared once or twice in
cases, representing, as a junior counsel, the
important firm of which his father was the
chief partner, and, during the voyage on
the Torrens, of which' ship Conrad was
the chief mate, he had rather desultorily
studied naval law.
And there he was, an athlete with a
mildly damaged heart, a barrister with '. no
desire for briefs, the perfect man-abouttown . . . and for me a very incompre..
hensible figure. Conrad said that he was
as hard as iron under a soft exterior and
tenacious as a bulldog in spite of a care..
fully feigned pococurantism. On and off I
saw a good deal of him, but his talk was
mostly of the Eton and Harrow cricket
match, the sires and dams of race horses,
very desultorily of tariff reform, the woes
of Ireland, the behavior of the Boers. Occasionally he would talk a little about some

GALSWORTHY
concert or other, his sister, Mrs. Reynolds, of his stuff . . . and I rather liked some
being melomane, and occasionally he of it. Even at that he seemed too shy to
would talk about pictures, his sister, Mrs. talk about his writing, so I had made a
Sauter, being married to an artist. When few remarks as to progression d'etJet, the
it was a question of books, I did the talk- mot juste, and the like. And I had iming and he would listen with an interest agined that he had dropped his writing.
that I took to be merely polite.
But immediately after the Turgenev anecWe both at that time inhabited an au- dote I opened inadvertently a letter adgust, sedate hilltop in the royal borough dressed to him in care of mysel. It was the
of Kensington called Campden Hill, he morning after he had gone back to Town.
on the one side and I on the other of a Then I knew immediately after the readconcreted open-space given up to tennis ing of merely three amazing words and
courts - it was really the cover of a water- the signature that poor Jack had his
works reservoir. And on days when I was troubles of the heart.
not expecting Conrad, who was in lodgIt gives the measure of the passion that
ings not far off, I would breakfast with I have for not knowing anything about the
Jack in his sunlit, converted stable.
private lives of my friends - particularly
At any rate that is how it comes back if they are writers - that, as I have someto me - the doors and windows always where related, I should have gone to exopen, the sunlight streaming in on the tremes of trouble over the forwarding of
hissing silver teakettle, the bubbling silver that letter. I desperately did not want Galsentree. dishes, the red tiles of the floor, the worthy to know that I knew. It seemed
bright rugs, the bright screens. And we to me that that must inevitably take the
would talk until it was time for me to go bloom oft the pleasure that I had in our
back along the waterworks wall and take gentle and unexciting conversations. I
up the interminable job of writing in my knew then at once that the emotion he
dining-room patchwork passages into had shown over the Turgenev anecdote
Romance, with Conrad writing N ostromo was a sign that he was suffering a great
up in my study. And Galsworthy would be deal over his hidden affair of the heart.
I knew from the signature that it was one
going to ride in the Park....
And then, suddenly, it all went ... that could not run smoothly. If he had
Pop! As if someone had cut the key string been an ordinary layman I should have
of a net and it aU unraveled and disap- stuck the letter up, inscribed it "Opened
by mistake", and forwarded it to its
peared - those tranquillities.
owner. But Galsworthy was by now more
than an ordinary stockbroker or politician.
II
He had come alive. And I took a great
deal
of trouble to get that letter to him
It began with that Turgenev anecdote. I
without
any indications of its having been
had been right to be alarmed. I had by
1
then known for some time that Galsworthy opened.
occasionally wrote a short story, rather
1 I told this story of the letter recently, as a case
of conscience, in one of my books, suppreiSsing of
desultorily as young ladies paint landscapes coune
Galsworthy's name. Now, however, that his
in water-colors. Then one day with a rather official biographer has told the whole .story of the
ironic, dubious expression, Conrad told me fortunate love affair of the author of The Man of
Property, there seems to be no reason for further
that "poor Jack" wanted me to read some concealment.

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

Galsworthy gave no signs of thinking
that the letter had been tampered with
and for a little time it looked as if everything was as it always had been. We break..
fasted and talked about the weather and
the crops; we went together to concerts
that his sister, Mrs. Reynolds, was organizing; we discussed the alterations that his
sister, Mrs. Sauter, suggested in the story
he was writing. . which was, I think,
then the Villa Rubein, a book for which
I had and still have a great affection. Then
gradually the change came.
He began to talk of Turgenev as the
emancipator of the serfs in Russia; about
the reform of the poor laws; about the re..
form of the incidence of the income tax
on the poorer classes. And above all, of
course, about the reform of the marriage
laws, and perhaps still more about the reestimation of marriage as an institution.
He uttered one day the sentiment that
where there is no love, there is no duty.
Then one evening he knocked on my
door in a really pitiable state of distress.
I was giving a rather large dinner, one of
the motives of which was to introduce
Galsworthy himself to the more formidable critics and men of letters of the London day. His book was then n<7ar publica..
tion and Conrad and I had conspired to
do that amount of log-rolling. And suddenl Y' there was Galsworthy at seven-thirty
saying that he could not come to that
dinner. He said that if I knew what was
happening I should not want him to come
to dinner; that all my guests would think
the same. Mysterious things were happening to him; he would probably never
again be invited to dinner by anyone. I
should know all about it tomorrow; then
I should see how right he was.
It was no use saying that if he had been
hammered on the stock exchange or
neglected to pay his racing debts it would

make no difference to my desire to have

him at that dinner. He said: No, no! It
would be unthinkable. It would be an
offense to myself such as he would never
pardon if it had been offered to him. . . .
It was the first time I had come up against
his immense, his formidable, obstinacy.
He wrote to me next day to say that he
.had that afternoon been served with papers
as corespondent in a divorce case. Of
course my guests would have hated meeting him! And he wanted to know if it
would make any difference in our friendship.
Times of course have changed, but I
think that even then the ordinary man
would have taken the matter less tragically.
Galsworthy, however, insisted on considering that his social career and more particularly that of his future wife was at
an end, and that for the rest of their
lives they would be cut off at least
from the public society of decent people.
He was, of course, quite wrong. Even at
that date London society took the view
that, for a decent man and woman, passing
through the divorce courts was a sufficient
ordeal to atone for most irregularities.
Once they were through, they had taken
their punishment and decent society does
not approve of two punishments being exacted for one misdemeanor.... But at
the time it was no good putting that view
to Galsworthy. He was in many ways
singularly old-fashioned and strait-laced.
But more than anything he was sensitive to the sorrow of other people. He was
that even before he had thus got,as it
were, religion, arid the long excruciation
of waiting years for the opportunity of
happiness had made him sensitive beyond
belief. The anticipation of possible future
grief for his wife rendered him at the time
almost out of his normal mind and the
emotion was rendered all the stronger by the

GALSWORTHY
thought of the suffering that for years be..
fore that she had had to endure ... with,
as it were, Soames Forsyte. I really thought
that, at about the time when he had just
received those divorce papers, he might
have gone mad. . . . And that note of
agonized suffering at the thought of oppression or cruelty became at once the
main note of his character and of his public activities. It led him, in his novels, into
exaggerations or slight strainings of the
humanitarian note which distinguished
every page of his writings of that date and,
as we shall see, it influenced the very framework of his novels themselves. And his
very exaggerations tended to negate the
truths of the morals that he meant to enforce.
So you had the once famous controversy
of the rabbit. . . . At the end of the description of a battue in T he Country
House, having rendered, with all the spirit
of Tolstoi after his conversion, the mas..
sacre of game that had taken place, in
order to get the full drama out of the
stupidity and cruelty that obviously distinguish those barbaric slaughters of harmless beings, he found it desirable to emphasize the note and to describe how "one
poor little rabbit" crept out into the open
to die. Now, two pages of the description
of the slaughter of deer in the St. Julien
L'Hospitalier of Flaubert, utterIy dispassionate and without comment as they are,
might well suffice to put you off the shooting of all game whatever ... certainly off
the massacre of driven game. But wounded
rabbits do not ever die in the open . . . of
choice. Even domestic animals, if you let
them alone while they are dying, will creep
under a. bush if a hush. is to be found . . .
or else under a low piece of furniture. . . .
And we ourselves seldom like to die under
the sky, preferring to turn our faces to
some ,vall.

453

So someone noted this exaggeration of

poor Jack's. And controversy broke out, in
the sporting journals, in men's clubs, in
har parlors, in country houses. The more
scientific readers of the journals wrote to
say that, wherever rabbits die, they never
die in their burrows. Their companions
would force them out to die where they
could. Hardened rabbit-hunters for the
pot,warren-breeders, gamekeepers, wrote
or declared in inn-corners that that was all
nonsense. Again and again when digging
out rabbits they had found dead ones
among the living. The scientists declare~
that this only occurred when the dying
rabbit was too large and heavy to be forced
out of his lair. The living rabbits would
then, in order to avoid living with the
putrefying body, have to abandon that
home and dig a new one. . . . But one
and all declared that Galsworthy did not
know what he was talking about. So the
book lost a good deal of influence with its
readers. It would be unfair to say that it
had been written with the sole object of
stopping the practice of shooting driven
game. But that had been one of its purposes. And he gave the upholders of gamepreserving and intensive shooting the
chance to say that damaging thing.
For. Gals\vorthy knew perfectly well
what he was talking about. But his Tolstoian reaction against his former life had
made him forget what, in his subconscious..
ness, he must have known to be the truth.
At any rate, before his regeneration, he
had spent nearly all his autumns shooting
driven grouse, pheasants, and partridges.
Many of his earlier letters contain expressions of exhilaration at the thought that
the gam ~ season was opening again. But
his revulsion from the life of the manabout-town was at that date very thorough
and the emotion of shuddering at every
one of his former habits penetrated to

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

454

every fiber of his being. He was determined, if he could, to bring about a change
of heart i~ human society.
III
There was at this time raging in literary
and artistic society in London much such
a clash of views as lately distinguished
New York. Reformers of all types declared
that no work of art could be real art if
it were not also a work of propaganda for
the Left. And nearly all serious English
novelists were finally driven to take that
view. The novel became a vehicle for every
kind of "ism"; a small but noisy minority
backed Imperialism and bank-holiday patriotism, but the seriolls novel as a whole
interested itself almost solely in sociological
questions.
As against that a still smaller but sufficiently formidable band of foreign writers
had at the time settled mostly in the South
of England. The most important of them
were Conrad, a Pole; James, Crane, and
Hudson, all Americans and the body of
writers for the once immensely famous
Yellow Book. That organ had been
founded by Henry Harland, the author of
T he Cardinal's Snuffbox, an American
who had come to London by way of Paris,
and its supporters were all either foreigners or had had foreign, mostly Parisian,
trainings. It was the day when England,
and America too, rustled all over its literary quarters with the names of Flaubert,
Maupassant, and, above all, Turgenev.
That camp proclaimed that a ",rork of art
must be a passionless rendering of life as
it appears to the artist. It must be colored
by no exaggerations, whether they tended
to exalt either the Right or Left in politics.The public function of. the work of
art in short was, after it had given pleasure, to present such an epitome of life that

the reader could get from it sufficient

knowledge to let him decide from it how
to model both his private and his public
lives. Thus Flaubert wrote that if France
had read his Education Sentimen tale, she
would have been spared the disasters of
the Franco-Prussian War. He meant, not
that France would have learned from him
how to choose a better rifle than the chassepot, but that if France had learned from
that book how to question her accepted
ideas she would have had a set of citizens
capable of studying public questions with
realism. Then she could have taken precautions against the Prussians.... The
business, then, of the artist was to study
the works of his predecessors... the
works that had given pleasure. In that way
he would learn how to give pleasure in his
turn. And, rendering the life of his day as
he saw it and without preconceptions, his
world would at least be enlightened as to
the conditions in which it lived. It might
even, then, improve itself.
Those at any rate were the two schools
of opposed literary thought that .divided
the world when Galsworthy came on the
artistic scene. In addition, as I have already
adumbrated, the Conrad - James - Crane
school, to which I belonged, believed that
you could learn nothing technically from
Turgenev. There are, that is to say, certain writers - Shakespeare is among them
- who have not really "methods" ...
who write, as it were, solely from their
temperaments. Such writers are exceeding!y dangerous to the learner. He can
learn nothing technically from them and
he is extremely likely to fall into an imitation of their mannerisms and into trying
to assume their temperaments. Galsworthy
says in a letter that Mr. Marrot prints2
I Life and Letters of John Galsworthy, by H. V.
Marrot. The author kindly lent me advance sheets
of the work when I had reached this stage of this
article.

GALSWORTHY
that he did not consider himself a born
writer, but one who had made himself
with the labors of the eleven years that
preceded the writing of his Man of Property. At that I have already hinted. He
said it again and again at many different
stages of his life. He repeated it even in
the draft of the speech in thanks for the
receipt of the Nobel Prize, which death
prevented his delivering. And if he said
it at that moment of his apotheosis he
must have believed it to be true. It was
not true, of course.
It might have been true to say that he
was not a born novelist and, from my particular angle, it might be true to say that
he never was a novelist at all. But writing
is not all novel-writing and there were
departments of the art of projecting things
on paper in which he really excelled and
was conscious that he excelled. It is true
that a writer must be born a writer. But
it is true, too, that a born writer can be
made over . . . to his det~iment; and I do
not think that any real writer can have
ever been so made over as the unfortunate
young Galsworthy. I must have written
him reams and reams of letters about his
early work. Mr. Marrot prints one that
takes up some four whole small-print
pages of his book. And sometimes Galsworthy took my advice and sometimes
he stood out against it with the grim obstinacy that was his chief characteristic.
For myself I should have found such a
letter intolerable if it had been addressed
to me, but Galsworthy was always ready
for more . . . and ready for more from
almost anybody who would address advice
to him. His chief advisers in those early
days were Conrad, Mr. Edward Garnett,
who was adviser to Fisher Unwin, the publisher; and his sisters, Mrs. Sauter and
Mrs. Reynolds . . . and the lady who was
to become Mrs. Galsworthy, and myself.

4SS

And I think I can say that it was the last

mentioned two who had the earliest and
most complete belief that he had genius.
I do not believe that any of the others,
at any rate at that time, had at all that
feeling. The sisters had towards him a
nervous maternal attitude such as was
natural in sisters \vith a brother who
wanted to do anything as wayward as
"write". For, if he would be merely normal, he would be assured of a perfectly
comfortable position as a man-about-town
and a member of the best clubs. Conrad
never really liked Galsworthy's writing.
He had for him, I sho,uld say, a real personal .affection and appeared radiantly
pleased when Jack came to visit him. But,
I suppose just because of that personal
affection, he was not ready to accord to
that pleasant boy any share of talent. It
did not seem that anyone so pleasant
could have the sort of grim persistence
that Conrad considered to be indispensable
for a writer. He wrote him of course letters
full of an appreciation of his work that
he expressed in terms of superlatives. But
at the same time in private he always
spoke of "poor Jack" with sighs; and as
Mr. Marrot brings out, he wrote to his
own private correspondents .letters expressing no sort of opinion at all of Galsworthy's gifts. As against that he gave
himself a very great deal of trouble to
place Galsworthy's work.
And later, when Jack was beginning to
succeed, his indignation at the younger
man's dogged humanitarianism went beyond bounds. He used to say that, as a
writer, Galsworthy took a sadie pleasure
in rendering the cruelties that the world
inflicted on the weak and the unfortunate
... and that he would be upset if those
wrongs were righted because then he
would have so much the less to write about.
That of course was not true.

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

But as I have said, Galsworthy had about
him a pixy-like quality that rendered him
very difficult to understand. I don't mean
to say that I understood him altogether.
There were about him too many irreconcilabilities; there was the impressive surface softness and a subcutaneous quality,
as if of corundum. His benevolences were
unparalleled; no man can ever have given
a greater share' of his income or a greater
proportion of his time and worried thought
to the unfortunate of every type. This appears sufficiently in Mr. Marrot's book,
but if Mr. Marrot had a great deal exaggerated that note he would still have been
well within the bounds of the truth. I
know this because of the constant stream
of miserable people which came almost
straight from Galsworthy's doorstep in
Addison Road to the offices of the English
Review. Nearly all of them Galsworthy
would have already relieved. Or rather he
would have relieved all of them. But occasionally he would telephone to me to
say that if So and So should come to me
he .did not consider him to be a proper
person to receive relief from the fund that
at that time I administered for the help
of literary men in distress. . . . And it is
to be remembered that the cases that I
knew of were merely those of writers ...
there must have been more than as many
more again who were laymen ,that he
helped. Mr. Marrot says that Galsworthy
lived on half his income, devoting the rest
of it to public charities or causes; but
more than half the sum that he set aside
for his own use must in addition have
gone to private cases. For those private
charities were to him his life.
I think that, even more than his writing
or his public honors, they were his life.
... But suddenly there would come out
an incomprehensible touch of hardness, as
if some unfortunate had incurred his dis-

pleasure, or as if some public cause had

all of a sudden appeared to have' undesirable aspects. These things would be irreconcilable. He would at one time declare
that the very fact that a man was no good
was the reason that he should be helped,
untiringly. Because it is poor, weak things
that must be helped. Men with backbone
can always in the end help themselves. And
then, suddenly, of the most dreadful case
of totally undeserved misfortune that I
have ever come across he said, shutting his
jaw tight, that the fellow was no good
and had better not be helped any more
... and that after he had been helping
the man for a long time.
Of course it is given to no man to be
consistent. But in Galsworthy it was something more than inconsistency: it was two
distinct psychologies working side by side
in the same being. That was why I have
said that he seemed to be like a pixy ...
as if he were one of those good, serene, and
beautiful immortals that had not human
souls and yet occupied themselves with
human affairs.
It was something of that quality that I
felt myself to discern in his earliest work.
Conrad, in writing compliments to Galsworthy, said about one of his stories that
enthusiastic as he was, my admiration was
much the greater. And my emotion was
much more of a keen delight in a natural
phenomenon - as if a new bird had suddenly sung - than of pleasure in a technical~ literary achievement. It was the pixylike quality of his temperament that had
called it forth. It was a quality that I
hadn't found anywhere else in the world
. .. and that I do not think you will still
find anywhere else.
And that, in the end, is the justification
of the artist in words - that he should be
and express something that has never yet
be,en, or been expressed. To me it became

GALSWORTHY
apparent gradually that Galsworthy was
probably never meant to be a novelist. Or
it would be more just to say that thoughts
of the world of injustice pressed too
strongly on him to let him continue to be
a novelist. That was why, at Winchelsea,
I was alarmed at his rendering of the Tur..
genev anecdote. . . . I can assure you that
I felt a genuine pleasure and impatience
at the thought of coming across a person
with the aspects for me of an authentic
genius ... and if I perceived a threat to
the prospect of the fruits of that genius
growing eventually ripe beneath the sun, I
was proportionately dismayed. And I
thought I perceived that threat. I fore..
saw for a moment his preoccupation with
the unhappinesses of lovers and the help..
less poor . . . and that preoccupation lead..
ing him to become not a dispassionate
artist but an impassioned, an aching, re..
former.

IV
The premOnItion was too true. Villa
Rubein was a novel of a sunlit quality.
But its successor, The Island Pharz'sees, was
already a satire, and The Man of Property,

which came next, was an attempt to cast

discredit on the marriage laws of the day.
And after that, in his novels, he was the
reformer almost to the end.
And unfortunately his temporal success
as novelist obscured his much greater
artistic achievement with the drama. His
novels suffered from his dogged determina..
tion to find ironic antitheses. His one
"effect" as a novelist was to present a
group of conventionally virtuous, kindly
people sitting about and saying the nicest
things about all sorts of. persons. . . . A
divorced woman is thrown over their gar..
den hedge and breaks her collar bone, and
all the kindly people run away and do not

457

so much as offer her a cup of tea. And

that goes on forever, the situation being
always forced to bring in that or some
similar effect. Mr. Marrot quotes a really
amazing correspondence between Mr.
G"arnett and Galsworthy about the end of
The Man of Property. It raged for months.
Galsworthy was determined that his
Bosinney - who was the last person in
the world to do it - should commit suicide
in order, really, to prove that the propertied middle classes were very cruel
people ... with of course the aim of
shaming those classes into becoming really
kinder. Mr. Garnett, all reformer as he too
was, is shocked at the idea that Bosinney
- who was the last person in the world to
commit suicide - should be forced to take
his own life so as to show the effects of
the cruelty of the middle classes. What
Bosinney would have done - and what
the situation demands - would have been
to run away with Irene and live in inconspicuous bliss in Capri ever after. But no,
says Galsworthy, that would not prove
that the middle classes are always cruel
and victorious over the unfortunate. . . .
And the argument seems to go on for..
ever, each party maintaining exactly the
same ground. In the end poor Bosinney
has to be run over by a bus, the reader
being left uncertain whether it is the result of an accident or a suicide . . . and
there seeming to be no moral lesson at all.
But the same dogged determination to
present antitheses which produced an effect of monotony in the later novels was
exactly suited to the theater, where effects
are of necessity more fugitive and need to
be harsher - more cruel. And the keen
pleasure that the mind feels at appreciating
how, unerringly, Galsworthy picks up
every crumb of interest and squeezes the
last drop of drama out of a situation . . .
that pleasure is the greatest humanity can

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

get from a work of art. It is the greatest the King had at his disposal- that of the
because pleasures, shared as they are in Order of Merit. He presided in Paris at
the playhouse, are contagious and can be the dinner of the international .P.E.N.
unbounded. And it is one of the most Club, which is the highest honor that the
legitinlate of man's pleasures.
members of his craft could find for him;
When you came away from the first per- and, in the end, the Nobel Prize Comformance of T he Silver Box you knew that mittee honored itself by selecting him for
something. new had come into the world one of its laureates. It seemed, all this,
. . . a new temperament, a new point of appropriate and inevitable, for, in honview, a new and extraordinarily dra- oring him, the world honored one of. its
matic technique. And the conviction was noblest philanthropists.
strengthened by each new play. For myThe last time I saw him was in Paris
self I preferred 'oy to all the others be- when he gave his presidential address to
cause it was more a matter of discussion his beloved P.E.N. And singularly, as he
than of situations, and because it had emerged above the shadow of all those
some of the lightness that had distin.. hard French writers, there re-emerged at
guished the Villa Rubein of our youths. any rate for me the sense of his frailty . . .
But the characteristic of building up an- of his being something that must be
titheses which, monotonous as it becomes shielded from the harder earnestnesses of
in the novel, is always legitimate and ex- the world. I don't know that he was conciting in the swifter moving play, that scious on that last public triumph of the
characteristic distinguished as much his really bad nature of the hard men who
handling of situation qS of staged contro- surrounded him. The world had moved
versy. And finally that conviction came to onward since the days when he had read
be shared by the large, unthinking public, Maupassant and Turgenev for what he
the plays began to run for periods of years could learn of them. Both those writers
in both London and New York, and Gals-- were what he called dissolvents and the
worthy moved from triumph to deserved Paris litterateurs now wanted above all
triumph. No other modern dramatist had constructive writing and would have
anything approaching Galsworthy's lofti- agreed with him if he had said - as he
ness of mind, his compassion, his poetry, did in one of the last letters that he wrote
his occasional sunlight or the instinctive - that T olstoi was a greater writer than
knowledge of what you can do on the Turgenev.
But he said nothing of the sort. He
stage. And by himself he lifted the modern stage to a plane to which until his seemed to float, above all those potential
time it had seemed impossible that it could assassins, like a white swan above a gloomy
mere, radiating bright sunlight. . . and
attain.
And so he made towards supreme with his gentle, modest French words he
honors a tranquil course that suggested made statements that ran hissing all
that of a white~sailed ship progressing in- through Paris as if he had drawn a whip
evitably across a halcyon sea. You would across all those listening faces.
For the French writer of today, Mauhave said that he had every blessing that
kings and peoples and Providence had passant is the Nihilist Enemy - an .enemy
to bestow. Having refused a knighthood almost as hated as the late M. Anatole
he was awarded the highest honor that France.

GALSWORTHY
And Turgenev is an alien ugly duckling
who once disgusted the paving stones of
Paris with his alien footsteps. Nothing indeed so infuriates the French of today as
to say that Turgenev was really a French
writer.... And there, enthroned and
smiling, poor Galsworthy told that audience that shivered like tigers in a circus
cage that, if he had trained himself to
have any art, and if that training had
landed him where he was, that art had
been that of French writers.
A sort of buzzing of pleasurable anticipation went all round that ferocious assembly. The author of Fort Comme La
Paix looked at the author of Nuits Ensoleillees and thought: "Aha, my friend,
this is going to be a bitter moment for you.
When I consider the dedicace of the ignoble volume that this barbarian chieftain
presented yesterday :to me ... when I
consider the fulsome, but nevertheless deserved, praise that he wrote on that flyleaf, I. don't have to doubt whom he is
going to claim as his Master. . . ." And
the author of Nuits Ensoleillees looked
back at the author of the other classic and
thought exactly the same thing - with
the necessary change in the identity of the
author. And every French author present
looked at every other French author and
thought thoughts similar. And when the
applause subsided poor Jack went on:

459

Yes, he repeated, all the art he had had

he had had of the French. If he stood
where he was, if he was honored as he was,
it was because all his life long he had
studied the works, he had been guided
by the examples of ... Guy de Maupassant and of him who though a foreigner
by birth was yet more French in heart
than any Frenchman,-Ivan Turgenev!
I have never seen an audience so can..
founded. If an invisible force had snatched
large, juicy joints of meat from the very
jaws of a hundred Bengal tigers the effect would have been the same. They
simply could not believe their ears....
As for me, I was so overwhelmed with
confusion that I ran out of that place and
plunged, my cheeks still crimson, into
the salon of the author of Vasco, who
was preparing to give a tea-party at the
end of the lIe St. Louis. And the news
had got there before me. It ~as in the
salon of every author of the Ile, of the
Rue Guynemer, of the Rues Madame,
Jacob, Tombe Issoire, and Notre-Dame
des Champs, before the triumphant Galsworthy had finished his next sentence.
... For that was the real triumph of
his radiant personality, that not one of
the fierce beasts quivering under his
lash so much as raised a protest. No
other man in the world could have brought
that off!

CALIFORNIA
FOND hope expressed by the San Francisco

News Letter and Wasp:

The opposition to Mr. Roosevelt will gain
little with a cartoon campaign. . . . Artists
of good taste may refuse to draw cartoons
of him. They may realize that he is too big
a man to caricature. Cartoonists have been
known to refuse.
THE Staff Denouncer of the same celebrated Coast publication cuts loose at loose
females:
Why otherwise delicate appealing females
insist upon lacquering their fingernails to
disgusting hues of red is not in my school
of thought. Crimson coated nails conjure,
in my mind, a woman's blood-spattered
hand emerging from a gory corpse.
THE New Literary Criticism, as reported
by the Reynal and Hitchcock book-news
department:
When Louise Todd reviewed Marching!
Marching!, Clara Weatherwax's proletarian
prize novel, in the current issue of the
Western Worker, she was writing from
experience when she said: "It's United
States. It's today, here, now! It's us." For
Miss Todd is prisoner No. 58,298 in Tehachapi prison, California, where she is serving a sentence on a technicality which
arose in connection with a campaign last
year which put the Communist Party on
the ballot in California.
ADVANTAGES enjoyed by the faithful, as
vouched for by the editor of Mind Maga-

ZJ.tne:
I have been asked to amplify my statements regarding the Healing Temple and
the connection of the Masters with it. It
is in this temple that the Masters congre-

460

gate from time to time for meditation and

to give instruction. It was on our pilgrimage there that we had the experience of
watching twelve and later fifty-two of the
party walk calmly and conveniently across
the surface of a stream two thousand feet
wide, running full bank with a strong
current. The remainder of the party spent
.four days detouring to the nearest bridge
and joining those who had crossed on the
water in a few minutes.

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
THE American Soviet gets itself written
up at the expense of the federal Treasury,
according to the N ew York 'ournal:
At a cost of $r,50o,000, or 50 ,cents a word,
relief workers of the WPA are preparing a
new guide book of America. In charge of
the 4,600 WPA writers whipping the volume into shape is none other than Mrs.
Katherine Kellock, whose husband, Harold, is the press agent for M. Troyanovsky, Soviet Russia's Ambassador to the
United States.

INDIANA
ANOTHER hellish capitalist plot is discovered, this time in the Middle West, by the
well-fed young men of the wealthy New

Republic:
Purdue University recently inquired into
the employment status of its women graduates. . . The average annual salaries of
the graduates of the classes from 1928 to
1934, inclusive, were found to range from
$800 for the class of r933 to $r,280 for the
class of r930... While, of course, there
is a bright side to this - the earnings
might be lower - the publication of these
figures looks suspiciously like part of the
propaganda movement to discourage college attendence.

AMERICANA
CHEERFUL though portentous thought, as
recorded in the Anderson Herald:

"How You Will Look Fifty Years From

Now" will be the theme of Rev. O. E.
Line's sermon at the Line Gospel Tabernacle next Sunday night at 7:30 p. m. Rev.
Line has arranged with Ralph Berryman,
funeral director, to have a coffin brought
into the tabernacle in the manner practiced
at a funeral.
The Line gospel tabernacle quartet will
offer some appropriate musical numbers,
and Rev. Line will preach along the
thought that those present will be gone
from this life by that time. The coffin has
been trimmed so that each person passing
by will see his or her reflection and get the
correct idea of how they will look under
these conditions.

KANSAS
DIFFICULT, perhaps impossible task set for
the people's representatives by the forwardlooking Wyandotte Echo:
STOPI LOOK! AND LISTEN!
Editor's Note: It is now settled beyond
question that from now onward until there
is .a change in our constitution, Congress
will have to do things on its own hook.
That means that Congressmen will have
to develop the virtue of THINKING.

NEW HAMPSHIRE
efficiency hustles to the aid of
the housewife, according to the United
Press:
AMERICAN

Milady may now have egg yolks to match

her breakfast gown. Experts attending the
convention of New Hampshire poultry
growers say they can provide blue yolked
eggs for the woman who eats her morning
meal in blue dimity. Other colors specified
are green and brown.

NEW YORK
of a communist, as indignantly
reported by the virtuous Daily Worker:
Waldimir Isaacs (Charles Bronson), of
Canandaigua, N. Y., has been expelled

OBITUARY

from the Communist Party as a traitor to

the working class, a rotten self-seeker, who
openly campaigned for the Republican
Party in the 1935 elections.
He came out with statements in the local
press of Canandaigua, as well as with leaflets calling upon the workers to vote the
"entire Republican ticket to express your
desire for efficiency, economy and sanity in
government". He lauded the local Republican administration for saving $6,500,000
from relief funds and county credit....
Workers and farmers everywhere, and
all working class organizations should beware of this traitor and scoundrel.

THE lnternationale brought up-to-date by

the same distinguished publication:
Oh, the workers began to frown,
As the wages went down and downW 0- ho- ho- ho- ho- hoSo we struck right there!
Then the bosses began to frown,
As the pickets went roun' and roun'W 0- ho- ho- ho- ho- hoBoy, what a scare I
And when the scabs came roun'
The committee threw them down
The stairs, below, below,
W 0- dileeo- hoY' oughta see them bounce!
Oh, the bosses had to come roun',
As the Union smashed 'em downWo- ho- ho- ho- ho- hoAnd we won our strike!
MIKE GOLD, formerly Staff Epigrammist
of the same journal, rares back and gets off
a real lollipaloosa:
Marxism makes for subtlety, variety, controversy, experiment, not for regimentation.

happy messiahs of communism, in

their luxurious New Republic offices, look
on the sunny side of things while reviewing The Red Network, a rogue's gallery
of practicing American radicals of the
THE

New Era:

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

A good many years from now, say in 2036,
the ancestor-seekers of that time will prob-ably be just as anxious to discover the
names of their forebears in "The Red Network" as would be our living admirers of
dead revolutionaries to find the names of
their great-great-great-grandparents on the
passage-sheet of the "Mayflower." Mrs.
Dilling has produced, by accident, something of a blue book of the newer aristocracy.
THE penetrating mind of George Soule,
one of the same journal's highest-paid idealists, takes a nasty crack at capitalism:
The Pennsylvania Railroad belongs to a
lot of stock and bondholders; the Moscow
subway belongs to everyone in the nation.
HORRIBLE results of birth control as envisaged by a thoroughly alarmed editorial
"vriter in the Catholic News:
A falling off in the number of babies
means not alone a decline in the consumption of milk, but a decreasing demand for
many necessities associated with childhood. . . . There is boundto be a progressive decline in the need for all kinds of
American products, as well as housing, and
as a result our manufacturers will be deprived of a market for their goods. This
will mean national bankruptcy-and to the
birth controllers must go the ignominy of
having destroyed a great nation.
SAD news for boy and girl Comrades, as
reported in the columns of the New Pioneer, a magazine for circulation in radical
nurseries:
By the way things are going, it looks as
though. nobody ever reads the New Pioneer
at all. I don't believe this is true, but it is
the only reason I can think of that will explain the slow progress of the Drive for
$3000. What is the trouble with all you
slow ones, especially you, Buffalo, Minnesota, Omaha, Seattle, Denver, Texas, St.
Louis, Florida, who haven't sent in a c~nt!
Don't you like the New Pioneer? Don't you
care whether it comes out or not? If none
of you are going to do anything for the
magazine, it is in grave danger of not
coming out.

A READER of the Sun writes in with a

pithy summation of the Power of the
Ballot:
Criticisms of Governor Lehman's revenue
estimates are irrelevant because he will be
reelected next November long before anybody can tell whether his figures are right
or wrong.
A NEW Literary Movement gets under
way with the following announcement:
THE CESSPOOL
2709 Webb avenue,
New York City
A new little magazine is in the planning.
But when we say that the Cesspool will
be different, we really mean it. The basic
aim of the journal will be to serve as a
dumping ground for the literary garbage
of American youth. In short, we are offering the pages of our little magazine to the
young people of America who are as yet
unpublished and unsung. We hope that
the Cesspool will become truly representative of the talents of the growing generation. If our magazine should prove. successful it will indicate that American youth
has durability; if it fail, it will mean that
our future masters are today stagnant, fit
for nothing more than a cesspool.
Literature rises to extraordinary heights in the serial now enthralling
the readers of the Modern Monthly:
WELCO,ME LAMB I
by Dorothy Dayton
The story thus far:
Professor Eisenstadt, the world's greatest
scientist, through some formula known
only to himself, received a message from
Ammerran, .a planet in the Milky Way,
announcing the impending visit of one
who signed himself JESUS. The announcement gave the nation's business leaders an
attack of the jitters, and after an unsuccessful "attempt to have the visit postponed,
they arose to the occasion and gave the visitor, who arrived as scheduled in a bright
cloud, the usual New York welcome. Although skeptical of his identity, they honored him with a banquet at the
PROLETARIAN

AMERICANA
Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and speakers told
him of the progress made on this planet
since Zero A.D. The press, not wishing to
do anything that might destroy business
confidence or retard the recovery movement, announced simply that the visitor
was a king from Ammerran. It is not generally known that Ammerran is an underwater planet inhabited by mer-people. The
visitor, a quiet modest fellow who immediately adopted the dress and manners of
the planet, ventured into Union Square,
saw that matters were not exactly as had
been represented by the nation's leaders,
and performed his first miracle-a multiplication of sable coats in the loaf and fish
tradition. He was severely reprimanded by
the General, on behalf of the NRA, who
particularly cautioned him against food
miracles, explaining that in America scarcity paves the path to riches.

OHIO
THE thing gets to be a habit, after a while.
From the W arren Tribune Chronicle:
Harry C-- is held today on a paternity
charge. Officials said the charge was filed
by a young woman who once before filed a
similar charge against C-- in connection
with a previous birth.

WYOMING
A CHEF solves several century-old secrets,
and presents the good news to the waiting
world via an advertisement in the Cody
Enterprise:

ANNOUNCEMENT
Whenever you get tired of your daily food
we have something new-Sukiyaki.
The most favored dish among high social circles at Tokio, New York, and Washington. Pleasing to the palate, easy to digest.
My Sukiyaki is cooked very carefully
without destroying Vitamines "B" and
"e" by high heat and specially designed
to contain more Vitamine "E" than any
other food in the world; therefore I do not
suggest it for young, unmarried people.
This new food will increase your physi-

cal strength, prevent internal sickness, and

increase your vitality and mental powers.
Also-Vigor Chicken SouP-25c. Especially designed for married people and
elderly folks, to give them increased physical power. It has the highest Vitamine
"E" content the same as my special Sukiyaki.
Come in and try these new! y designed
foods-you will like them.

IN OTHER NEW UTOPIAS

ENGLAND
method for revivlng British
prizefighters, often called' Swooning
Swans, as noted by the News-Chronicle:
After Police-constable W. Hughes was

EFFICIENT

knocked out in the first round of his fight

with Constable T. J. Carlisle in the last
bout at the .inter-police boxing tournan1ent
in Belfast last night, the band struck up
the National Anthem. Seconds had failed
to revive him, but when Hughes heard the
anthem he sprang to his feet and stood to
attention groggily until it was finished.

INDIA
SERIOUS setback to belles lettres, as noted
by the Associated Press:
Mahatma Gandhi, who has been ill recently in Bombay, was asked by a news
agency correspondent for comment on
Rudyard Kipling's death, but unfortunately
he was unable to make any because he had
just had two more teeth removed.

RUSSIA
LATEST word on the New Theology from
the model1and of the Brain Trusters, according to the United Press:
Speaking last night at the tenth anniver..
sary meeting of the Society of Militant
Atheists, Nina Kemneva, a pretty blonde
girl of 22, holder of the woman's delayedjump parachute record, assured the meeting that she had searched vainly for God
in the air.
"I have flown high and jumped many
times in parachutes," she said. "I saw no
God and no angels."

CURLY COMMITS MURDER

A Story
BY MAURICE SAMUEL
HEN I first met Curly, about six
years ago, he was thirty-five and
looked twenty-four. He was blond
and slim and quiet. College and athletics
were written on his face, and there was
about him a disarming ingenuousness, an
unpretentiousness and good nature which
made him extremely attractive. His speech
was modest and diffident; his manners, especially in the presence of women, were
winningly correct; the total impression was
that of a decent, wholesome, and healthy
young American, neither intellectual nor
stupid, neither highly emotional nor yet
depressingly stolid, but tolerant, intelligent, kindly, unaffected, and reliable. Yet
a congenital vagueness, an intrinsic nebulosity, haunted his acts and words and
thoughts. There was, about every structure
of fact with which Curly was cortnected,
an endless alternation of seeming honesty
and seeming.duplicity.
It took me almost three years to get a
working formula for his case, and I came
across the key to it accidentally. I always
liked to hear Curly allude to his "kid
sister". There was something refreshing,
in his affectionate and hesitant pronunciation of the words. He might be saying that
he had been at her house the evening before; or that they had gone to the theater
together; or that she had expressed an
opinion worth repeating; and always she
emerged in his talk as someone indescribably charming. She was so clever, he said,

464

a Phi Beta Kappa, in fact, and yet such

a good, straight kid, too. She was so free
from malice, from petty envies and ambitions. She had been so gentle with her
mother. All these qualities Curly implied
whenever he said, "My kid sister." One
felt rather than saw a slight blush coming
into his face when he pronounced the
words. There was something irresistibly
collegiate about him then; a touch of pride,
protectiveness, and humility. If it was
slightly amusing, the amusement was not
derogatory or ribald; it was rather pathetic and wistful, reminiscent of childhood ideals and of far-off, out-moded
chivalries.
Yet when I finally met Curly's sister,
Elaine, I was staggered not so much by
the fact that she was an extremely commonplace person (I was not prepared for
such a let-down, but I said to myself that a
brother's affection is not the best medium
through which to get a reliable estimate
of a person), but by the fact that she was
then thirty-six years old, one year younger
than Curly. However indefinite my .other
preconceptions were, I could have sworn
that she was at least fifteen years his junior.
Of course he had never said anything
about her age. Only the intonation in his
voice, his whole manner, his diffident
fatherliness, or at least big-brotherliness,
had indicated, with the most rigorous precision, a very young person: a sister who
had at one time admired his fabulous

CURLY COMMITS MURDER

manhood while she sat on his knee, who
had waited for him to come back from
college so that he could take her to the
circus. Still, here she was, a rather plain,
hefty, and phlegmatic person of practically
the same age as Curly. I suppose that when
one is nineteen one may properly allude
to a sister who is a year younger as "the
kid sister". But somewhere in the middle
twenties this form of allusion becomes, I
insist, a little misleading. And in the
thirties it is definitely ridiculous.... Then
and there it occurred to me that Curly's
was a case of arrested development.
As I got to know Curly better, I discovered that he was a wonderful boon
companion. He knew it, and was very
proud of it. He held his liquor "like a
prince" (one of the highest verbal awards
Curly ever bestowed), and if he had fits of
moroseness he kept them to himself. He
seldom spoke badly of anyone, but he
would often be heard to say of a man,
"He's a decent sort. Damn decent." By this
he meant, I think, that the man was openhanded, simple, manly, ready to help a
stranger in distress, courteous to inferiors, a
friend to the death, and unafraid of a fight;
in brief, he was "white". I learned, however, that Curly himself had no "friends to
the death". He knew, or seemed to know,
an incredible number of persons, many of
them of importance. His quiet way of
saying "Why, yes, I know him" left the
degree of intimacy in doubt. But he was
always ready to use his acquaintanceships
to procure favors for others. He was always
getting jobs for people. I would hear of
cases from him, casually and absentmindedly, or from others whom he had
told about them. Only now it occurs to me
that I never met one of the persons who
"got a job" through Curly. I only knew
that he had sent an applicant for work to
a judge, or police inspector, or department-

store manager, or newspaper editor, and

that the applicant got the job. It was rather
itnpressive; and it was credible at first
because Curly was so likable that it
seemed natural for people to be doing him
favors.
But whether or not he had ever. got a
job for someone, Curly was always chockfull of information concerning any number of enterprises, realized or in projection:
a new theater that was being built, a
newspaper about to be launched, a prizefight that was being promoted, a merger
of movie firms that vvas being negotiated.
I cannot tell how accurate his information
was, but there ,vas a great deal of it. He
talked with the easy, unboastful self-assurance of an inside man, a friend of the
principals, giving financial details, the history of personal rivalries, the real purpose
behind public statements, the plan behind
the plan; and since he had nothing to gain
from his talk it never occurred to anyone
to contradict him. His conversation was
therefore as interesting as the material of
a good Broadway columnist. And, after
all, what did it matter, from the objective
point of view, whether the information
was accurate or not? Truth, in this sort
of gossip, is not mbre illuminating or instructive than fiction.
But from the point of view of Curly's
character it did matter, of course, whether
the information was accurate or not, and
whether he had taken any pains to find
out. And one was always tempted to ask,
"If he knows all these people and is on
the inside with them, why doesn't he do
something about it for himself? Why is
he merely a hanger-on, or observer? Why
doesn't he turn his ground-floor information to account?" Curly himself, so questioned, would have smiled boyishly: he
wasn't the kind of man to exploit his
friends. Also he would suggest, remotely,

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

romantically: "Others he saved, himself
he could not save." Personally I would
not challenge Curly's dubious intimacy
with the important on these grounds. I
am quite certain he was familiar with
many prominent and semi-prominent personalities. But his influence with them
was, I think, illusory. It existed, or seemed
to exist, only as long as he did not try to
make use of it. There are many persons
who seem to be able to do you a good turn
by putting in a word for you with the
right people; they do not do it - not because they are unwilling, but because they
maintain their apparent status by .never
trying to exploit it. Their status is not
substantial. It is honorary. It carries no
perquisites. It is a carnival uniform.
If Curly had no "friends to the death"
(he never used this melodramatic phrase;
but it represents what he had in mind
when he spoke of friendship) it was because au fond he could not be taken seriously by men. Nor did he want to be, in
all probability. Friendship is a practical
and rational matter, as well as an emotional one; it calls for reliability, commonsense, punctuality, and stability. It is a
serious enterprise. I cannot see that Curly
was fit for genuine friendship. He was,
however, quite successful with women.
This last statement, too, needs modification and expansion. The women he hung
around with (the phrase is vulgar, but
it is accurate enough) were almost invariably provincials - girls who had come
to New York from Baltimore, Kansas
City, New Orleans, St. Louis, in order
to meet "interesting people", such as they
could not find at home. (Why these girls,
of a universal type, should think they are
entitled to meet Interesting People has
always been beyond me.) They were nice
enough, in their way. They were young;
they wanted culture - though they had

none of the preliminary equipment for the

acquisition of culture (to wit, a cultured
soul); they were good natured; and they
were dull. They liked CurIy because he
was at once young and not young; because
he seemed to combine the artlessness and
uncynical kindness of the college boy with
the savoir-faire, or at least the connections,
of the man of the world; and because he
seemed also to be the key to the metropolis, or the transition into its interioran interior which, by the way, does not
exist. Curly was always promising to introduce them to artists, writers, musicians,
actors. Now and again two or three such
girls would club together to arrange a
party, and Curly would actually appear
with someone whose name had been in
the papers. He even introduced me to
several of the girls. And I found out later
that he always played rue up to them in
the most outrageous fashion, not out of
admiration for me, but to make me important in their eyes and himself correspondingly interesting.
Since there are always tens of thousands
of such girls in New York, Curly had a
large field for his operations. And he was
always up to the neck in intrigues. I discovered, finally, that he borrowed money
from these girls, not systematically but
with a haphazard frequency which avoided
the stigma of systematic graft but retained
all its advantages. I must say that he never
borrowed from me, nor even tried to. He
needed me, as he needed quite a number
of others, for a different purpose. We were
part of his stock-in-trade, the few writers,
or singers, or artists to whom he could introduce his girl-friends. He had, besides,
another use for us, which I shall mention
a little further on.
The foregoing may sound harsh; and
perhaps it may have a certain subtle inaccuracy in it, for I must repeat that in

CURLY COMMITS MURDER

the sum everybody found Curly such a
likable fellow. He radiated and inspired
kindliness; he seemed to represent decent,
common-place ideals in a world of frantic
selfishness and ambitiousness; he made
one feel that there was a grain of good
in the human race. And perhaps there are
certain human beings whose function it
is not to produce anything, and not to
make a living, and not to justify themselves by deeds, but simply to be supported
or helped along because they are pleasant,
harmless, restful personalities. This theory
I might have been prepared to accept for
Curly if it had not been for the murder1 can think of it as nothing less - of Louis
Jadwin.

II
It does not matter on what grounds Curly
told Jadwin he could get him a job. It is
my judgment that Curly had no right at
all to say to that wretched and harassed
man, "Colson and Bernie will give you
a job on my say-so." Or even, "I believe
I can help you get a job with Colson and
Bernie." In fact, he had no right to say
anything. And if he believed, in any fashion, that he could help Jadwin get a job
with Colson and Bernie, he had no right
to that belief either.
What, then, made Curly act as he did
and - assuming he believed himself - believe what he did? My answer is: the
pressure of the moment; the irresistible
temptation - which refused to consider
consequences - to pose as an unexpected
savior, a providential apparition. Such a
degree of irresponsibility may seem incredible; yet it is not altogether uncommon.
It is present in the normal person when
he is drunk, and it takes the same form
in him then as it did in Curly when he
was sober. The intensity of the. present

pleasure blurs the perception of the future.

It may even be heightened by the threat
of possible disaster} or regret. I think it
was in Curly's case, and this is what made
him such a wonderful boon companion.
I have seen him come into the possession
of fifteen or twenty dollars which he
needed badly for rent, and spend the
amount in two or three hours in a speakeasy. He was at his happiest then. He
would stand at the bar offering drinks all
round - and not drinking much himself
- simply because the release, the brief
imitation of a man to whom a ten-dollar
bill was small change, flooded him to the
exclusion of every rational consideration.
It overrode the instinct of self-preservation.
Nothing existed in the past or future,
nothing existed in the whole world, but
this tumultuous and laughing moment.
It was, instead of a rut of kindliness, a
spending rut, a rut of conviviality and
carelessness, a feeling of "Good old Curly"
and "This is the life."
What would happen afterwards I could
only guess, for Curly kept his troubles to
himself as far as I was concerned. And
here I may mention the second use to
which Curly put me and a few others.
We were, in a manner, his references. We
were the ones he did not disappoint or
play tricks on, if he courd possibly help
it. Apart from us, the few, his audiences
had to change frequently, for the irresponsible man can behave irresponsibly only
once or twice in the same milieu. Those
of us who have a limited milieu and want
to keep it, realize this and behave more or
less responsibly. Curly's huge acquaintanceship was the result of his constant change
of friends. A man he had fooled once or
twice with regard to a job or a loan could
not be fooled a third time. Women would,
perhaps, be more patient. Or perhaps they
would lend him money with the feeling

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

that as between the sexes a loan of money
has in it faint implications of a gift. I did
not know, until the incident with Louis
Jadwin, what Curly was like, or what
his line of behavior was while sliding away
from a responsibi~ity. I have an idea now,
of course. I suppose that Curly had quite
often done with others the kind of thing
he did with Jadwin. These men persisted
for a longer or shorter time, according to
their obstinacy or gullibility, in pursuing
the phantom of Curly's promise, and then
gave it up. But Jadwin's case was quite
extraordinary.
He turned up one morning at my apartment, bringing with him a. letter of introduction from a common friend of ours
in Chicago. The letter told me that Jadwin
was a pianist and composer of distinction
but not of fame, and that he had not
earned a dollar in the year or so he had
been in New York. My friend had bethought himself of me only within the last
few days: anything I could do for Jadwin, any job I could get for him, etc. I
cursed my friend silently, for he must have
known that the only thing I could do for
Jadwin was-send him to someone as
helpless as myself. If, instead, my friend
had asked me to give Jadwin a few dollars, I should have been pleased and relieved.
But Jadwin, though he looked as if five
dollars would mean a great deal to him,
also made the impression of a man to
whom a stranger could not offer money.
He was haggard; his clothes were threadbare; his manner was desperate. But he
spoke quietly: he did not boast about his
accomplishments; he made no attempt to
pIay the starving genius. He said: "If you
can get me any kind of job. I don't care
what it is. It needn't be in my line..:.though I'm ready to give piano lessons for
fifty cents and carfare, or play in a restau-

rant for ten dollars a week and meals.

Any kind of job: errand boy or dishwasher. I don't care."
I judged him at first to be thirty-five,
but he must have been younger. But even
when a young and presumably unmarried
person speaks to me quietly, urgently, sensibly, as Jadwin did, telling me that he is
down and out and must have a job, and
I can do nothing, I have two impulses:
one is to run away, the other is to fly into
a rage. I told Jadwin, simply, that my
friend had had no business to send him to
me. I knew few people; I kn~w none who
had jobs to give. I could not help him.
If, by one chance in a thousandJadwin was listening in a stupor when
Curly called from downstairs. He was
coming up with a book which he had borrowed and I had asked him to bring back
that morning. I was grateful for the breathing spell. I introduced the two men. I
could not help even at that moment thinking what a charming thing it was to see
Curly making a man's acquaintance. He
said "Glad to know you" so genuinely, he
brought to bear on the encounter so much
good-will, that the man whose hand he was
shaking could have sworn that someone
had been saying nice things about him to
Curly. Yet Curly showed a certain diffidence, too; he conveyed a sense of the
privilege which he knew was being bestowed upon him. He even betrayed a
slight embarrassment. I remembered a
saying of Nietzsche's: "Do you want to
flatter a man? Be embarrassed in his presence." But of course Curly did not act on
formula.
I saw Jadwin's face light up.
"Am I intruding?" asked Curly.
"No," I said. I explained the situation
tactfully. Jadwin was seated again. His
eyes were fixed on Curly, and I caught him
following my words with his lips. When

CURLY COMMITS MURDER

I was finished he repeated, like an incantation: "Any kind of job; errand boy or
dishwasher. I don't care."
Curly nodded, looking neither at myself
nor at Jadwin. Then he said, quite irrel-

evantly, "Can I use your phone?"

felt like crawling under a couch and

apologizing because I too was not penniless and starving. I could have embraced
Curly, not only for what he had done, but
for the fine, gentle, hesitant, and yet matterof-fact way he had done it.

He dialed a number and waited. No

reply. Curly replaced the mouthpiece. "Do
III
you happen to have heard of Lakin, of
Colson and Bernie?" he asked, turning to Both men left soon after, Jadwin looking
as if he had won a reprieve from the elecJadwin.
tric chair, Curly rather uncomfortably, as
"No."
"He's the real owner of the firm. Col- if he hated it to be known that he had
son and Bernie are only employees, but done a good deed. I worked cheerfully
he uses their names because they've made the rest of the morning, lunched contentso many song hits. Lakin doesn't go down edly, and spent the afternoon at the Lito the office much, and I wouldn't call him brary. That evening I dined with friends,
there anyway. Now I happen to know that played bridge, drank a little, won six dolColson and Bernie need a couple of men lars, and came home at midnight.
I found five telephone messages at
in the editorial department. It's no use
the desk downstairs, strung out evenIy
your going to see Colson or Bernie-"
between five-thirty and eleven-thirty..
"I know it," said Jadwin, bitterly.
Through
the variations introduced in the
"They've always got a long list of their
own friends. But this is special. Yau go spelling by the colored boys who alterand see Lakin at his home. At five 0' clock. nated at the switchboard in the evening
He's always in then. I'll give you a note, I recognized the constant - Jadwin. I
and I'll call him again, before you get thought, at first, that he had called me
there. He'll do that for me."
for a little money, now that he was assured
He sat down and wrote a short letter. of a job. By all means. He should have my
Jadwin looked at him open-mouthed, and ' winnings and a little more.
when the letter was ready shook Curly's
At midnight he reached me.
hand, babbling, "It's wonderful of you to
"This is Louis Jadwin speaking," he
take the trouble. Honest, it is, it's-"
intoned. I didn't like that voice.
The faint, fine blush with which I was
"Yes, Mr. Jadwin."
familiar came over Curly's face. "Why, it's
"That address. Mr. Lakin doesn't live
no trouble at all, Mr. Jadwin. It's just an there any more. He moved away a few
accident. It's just one of those things-" weeks ago. Do you know his new ad. "I hope he hasn't got his men yet," Jad- dress?"
"No. Did you ask at Colson and Bernie?"
win. said, feverishly.
Curly shook his head. "No. He hasn't.
"I did. They hadn't it. Or they wouldn't
He's only just begun to think about it. give it to me. They said I could address
You'll find this all right."
a note for him in care of them. I neglected

An immense relief had come, via Jad-

to take your friend's address, too. Can you

win's change of feeling, into the apartment.

I was as grateful as Jadwin. I no longer

give me that? I'm terribly sorry to bother

you-"

47

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

I could see him, quailing and desperate,

at the other end. Already he had spent
twenty-five cents, calling me.
"I haven't got Curly's address," I said.
"But I'll get it first thing in the morning.
Is there anyplace I can reach you?"
"I haven't got a phone."
He that hath not, from him shall be
taken away. I could not even save nickels
for him.
"If you're in town tomorrow morning,"
I said, "go to the office of Maurice Gunther." I gave him the address. "Any time
after ten."
In the morning I phoned Gunther's
office - Maurice was a mutual friend of
Curly's and mine - and from his secretary, Miss Stowe, ascertained that she knew
Curly's address. I wrote it down for myself and told her to give it to Jadwin when
he came in. At eleven o'clock Jadwin
called me. He had obtained the address
and telephone number from Miss Stowe,
he said. He had called Curly. Curly was
not home. He had called Curly three
times. Now he was turning to me again.
"Are you speaking from Gunther's
office?" .I asked.
"No. I didn't like to use the phone there.
I'm calling from the outside."
Those nickels made me sweat.
"It's no use your calling Curly," I said.
"He's probably out for the day. But he may
call me. If he does, I'll leave Mr. Lakin's
address at Gunther's office. If you're passing that 'Yay in the afternoon, drop in and
get it. Otherwise give me your address.
I'll write you as soon as I have the information."
I jotted down his address. I stayed in
that day for lunch, my work unfinished.
Jadwin hung over me. I called Curly, leaving a message that he was to phone me as
soon as he came in or got in touch with his
hotel. At two o'clock he called.

By this time my nerves were on edge,

and Curly's jaunty, "Say, I got a message
to call you," did nothing to soothe me.
I said angrily: "You gave that poor devil,
Jadwin, Lakin's old address. He's been
haunting me all day for the new one."
"Good God!" Curly answered. "That's
right. Mind you, I knew he'd moved, too.
I'll find out the new address from Colson
or Bernie and I'll call you back in ten
minutes."
I, in turn, called Gunther's office. Jadwin
happened to be in. "Tell him to wait there
a few minutes," I said to Miss Stowe. "I'll
let him have Mr. Lakin's address."
The minutes passed - fifteen, thirty,
forty-five- no call from Curly. I rang up
Miss Stowe again and told her not to let
Jadwin go. Another fifteen minutes, another half hour - not a word from Curly.
Blast the idiot, I thought, blast him for his
unpunctuality. I called the office once more,
and told Jadwin to go home. I couldn't
bear the thought of him sitting there. I
said I would mail him the address, special
delivery.
Late in the evening Curly reached me.
I had stayed in especially for him, and I
was raging. But he headed me off with a
highly indignant narrative.
"Can you beat it?" he said. "They
wouldn't give me Lakin's address. Neither
Colson nor Bernie. They're crazy. I know
they've got it. I was .going to. their -office
to have it out with them, but I couldn't
get there in time. Do you know where I've
been-"
"I don't care where you've been," I almost shouted. "You might at least have
called me to report. That poor idiot's been
hanging around-"
Curly was abjectly apologetic. "I know
it's terrible," he said. "I've been doing
nothing all day but trying to get Lakin's
address. Now I know where to get it. At

CURLY COMMITS MURDER

the Ganymede Club. He might be there
himself, and then I can tell him about
Jadvvin."
"All right," I said. "I'll stay in."
Curly did not call me that night. In the
morning the deadly voice of Jadwin inquired over the telephone whether I knew
anything more. I gripped the instrument.
"No," I said, very quietly. "But the moment I know I'll wire you."
In the afternoon, a call from Curly. He
had the address! What a time he'd had
getting it, too! Mr. Lakin was not at the
Ganymede. Mr. Lakin was somewhere or
other on account of a proposition which
- Mr. Lakin had changed his habitsMr. Lakin this - Mr. Lakin that - it was
all very plausible.
"Give me the address," I said.
A few moments later I wired it, from
my room, to Jadwin. W ell- that was that.
But that was not that. The next morning Jadwin again. There was no variation
in his voice. I would have thanked him
for a little display of temper. I would have
been grateful for the privilege of putting
up with it, just to show how conscious I
was of guilt. No - he complained in that
sick, maddening monotone of hopelessness
that Lakin had left for Florida the night
before. It occurred to me that this man
Jadwin was not quite normal. Why should
he waste a nickel to let me know that
Lakin had left for Florida? A man in
normal condition would have cursed me
and Curly for arousing his hopes in vain,
and let it go at that. But perhaps Jadwin
was by now completely incapable of facing
an utterly prospectless future; he dared
not give up Lakin and Curly, even though
commonsense told him it was a hopeless
combination. Or, rather, he dared not believe what commonsense might have told
him. And then again perhaps he thought
that by. confronting me with the disastrous

47 I

consequences of Curly's carelessness, he

might make me feel responsible for it,
and obligated to some sort of restitution.
That was,. in fact, the effect he produced.
"Did you tell Curly?" I asked.
"No, I couldn't reach him."
What was there for me to do? I apologized at length, and promised Jadwin that
I would make a special effort to find something for him. I would write him. I would
wire him. I would not forget him.
He faded off the telephone, leaving me
in a perspiration. Missed Lakin by a night!
Wouldn't that break any man's heart?
And then - I remembered that Curly had
promised to speak with Lakin that very
first day, before Jadwin got there at five
o'clock. Obviously Curly had made no real
attempt, or he would by then have found
out, or been reminded, that Lakin had
moved. Pretty cheap, I thought.
I did not call Curly again. I judged it
to be useless, and I did not want to see
him. Then, three days later, I met him in
a restaurant in the West Forties - jaunty
and good-humored as ever.
"That's a fine mess you made of getting
Jadwin a job," I said to him.
He stared at me. "What do you mean?
Didn't that guy get the job?"
It was my turn to be taken aback. Had
there been subsequent developments, unknown to me?
"He called me three days ago," I said,
"and told me he found Lakin's new home
all right, but Lakin had just left for
Florida."
Curly sat down with a look of irrepressible disgust. "That fellow should be taken
out and shot," he groaned. "It'll be cheaper.
He wasn't meant to find a job."
I was going to answer hotly, but held
myself in.
"Lakin isn't in Florida," said Curly. "I
sa\v him in town last night."

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

"Did you speak with him?" I asked.
"No. He was with a crowd of people,
and we just said hello to each other. I was
certain by that time that Jadwin had the
job."
I wanted to turn my back on Curly and
leave him there. I wish now I had done
just that; I wish it with all my heart. Instead, however, I succumbed to his manner
and let myself think (against my instincts,
against my reasoned judgment, against my
sanity even) that perhaps there had been
a string of wretched coincidences. If only
there was the faintest hope of doing something for Jadwin, of forcing Curly to attend to this business seriously....
I asked: "But why should they tell Jadwin at the house that Lakin was in
Florida? What's the sense of that? Do you
think Lakin came back last night?"
Curly concentrated, like a schoolboy
given a detective problem. His face cleared.
"I bet you I know what happenedl" he
exclaimed. "You see, Harry Lakin is staying with his brother George now. Every
year about this time George goes down to
Florida. See what happened? Jadwin
didn't ask for Harry Lakin. He just asked
for Mr. Lakin. Now you know, the maid
must call George Lakin Mr. Lakin, and
Harry Lakin Mr. Harry. I bet you fifty
dollars to a peanut that's what happened."
"Curly," I said, mournfully, "do you
think Jadwin can still get that job with
Colson and Bernie?"
He answered, with complete spontaneity:
"I'm sure he can. They're opening a new
department in a few weeks. I know they
haven't got the staff together yet. Only
where is that fellow Jadwin?"
"I have his address," I said. "Will you
phone Lakin this afternoon or this evening,
so that Jadwin can see him in the morning ?"
"Certainly. You can count on that."

He said it with a simplicity which would

have made it impossible for an outsider to
guess that the case was now stale and old,
that the favor had been dragged out until
the sweetness of it had gone. Curly seemed
to feel nothing of that. I did not know
what to do. I know now that I should
have trailed Curly, I should have stood
by him all afternoon, until he reached
Lakin. I should have listened in on the
conversation. I thought of it even then,
but it would have sounded mad to suggest it.
IV
I wired Louis Jadwin that afternoon that
Harry Lakin was in town, that he would
be at home to receive Jadwin some time
in the near future, that he was to hold
himself in readiness for a second wire. I
thought: this is the final test. I'll forget
what's happened till now. If only Lakin
receives Jadwin: even if there's no job: just
the interview.
That evening, by merest chance, I ran
across Curly again. Yes, he had spoken
with Lakin. Lakin was ready to receive
Jadwin next morning, at any time up till
eleven, at home. I sent off the second wire
to Jadwin.
And Jadwin did see Lakin the next
morning. For, at half-past ten, he was on
the telephone, giving me an account of the
interview. Mr. Harry Lakin was dreadfully sorry, but he had sold out his interest
in Colson and Bernie several weeks ago.
His successor was the well-known musical
publisher, Mr. Alexander Gitlin. Jadwin
pleaded with Mr. Lakin to give him a
letter to Mr. Gitlin. Mr. Lakin refused,
though not categorically. He said that
Curly knew Mr. Gitlin quite well, and
could give Jadwin a letter direct. Then he
added that he would be glad to use his own

CURLY COMMITS MURDER

influence, too, if he could have a talk with
Curly first. But in person. Ag soon as he
had seen CurlyI said to Jadwin. "Did Lakin tell you
that Curly had phoned him yesterday
about you?"
"He didn't mention it, and I didn't ask.
I just presented the letter."
My heart sank, and anger crept up my
throat. I was quite certain by now that
there was no prospect, none whatsoever,
of getting Jadwin a job with Colson and
Bernie. Curly did know Lakin, obviously.
But he was evading him. It was doubtful
whether he had telephoned Lakin. He had
sent Jadwin up on the off-chance of finding Lakin in. Curly had probably borrowed money from Lakin. Why else
should Lakin want to see him? The disheartening muddle and my rage made me
speechless. T~en I made up my mind to
be cruel with Jadwin.
"I must say it sounds bad," I said.
"They've probably got the vacancies filled
by now. We'll have to think of something
else."
"No, the vacancies are still there," he
said, in a voice which came as near eagerness as his condition would let him. "I
know it." He had heard from other sources
that Colson and Bernie were reorganizing;
they were opening a classical department;
they were taking on several editors.
I began to feel the desperation of a
trapped animal. The fantastically involved
coils of a specific Curly case were tightening around me and strangling me. There
were vacancies, then, at Colson and Bernie!
There had been some truth in what Curly
had been saying! For a moment I saw
everything in a blur. I came to, and asked
myself: How can I tell Jadwin what kind
of person Curly is? How can I warn him
against certain madness if he pursues a
prospect in which Curly is the key? I-Ie'll

473

think I'm insane, or that I'm trying to

shake him.
There was one way out: to get hold of
Curly physically, to hold him, to make him
go with Jadwin to Lakin or Gitlin, whatever the outcome might be. Then, one way
or another, Jadwin would see for himself.
"Of course you've called Curly to tell
him this?" I said.
"I can't reach him," he said, with a sick
man's voice. "1 hate to trouble you like
this, but if you knew what that job, just
that kind of job, too, means to me-"
"All right," I said, curtly. "We'll see this
through." A spasm of fury shot through
me. I'd be damned if r d let Curly wriggle
his way out. There was going to be a showdown if it cost me a week's work. "Mr.
Jadwin," I said, "please come to my hotel
tomorrow, will you? I'll get those letters
for you. I'll have Curly see Lakin. Don't
worry."
My voice and my manner must have put
heart into him, for they put heart into me.
After all, I thought, there is a limit to
evasiveness. 1 would pit against Curly's
slipperiness a persistence which would
mean definitely one of two things - exposure, or delivery of the goods.
In the morning Jadwin came, and I observed in him a disquieting change of
bearing. He had apparently concentrated
the remainder of his vital hope on Curly
and the job with Colson and Bernie. He
was like a man who has been told by a
doctor that one medicine, and one medicine only, can save his life, and that one
man, and one man only, can procure the
medicine for him. Unable to think of
dying, the man must perforce believe that
the medicine will be forthcoming. Jadwin
was under the impression that we had to
get the job for him. He was even quieter
than before; but it is an error to assume
that the exertion of will-povver is accom-

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

474

panied by noise and gestures. On the con~

trary; the more assured the will, the less
it needs the propaganda of pose. And now,
trapped between Jadwin and Curly, I told
Jadwin - probably aping his calmness a
little-that he was to stay in my apart..
ment while I found Curly. He was not to
. stir out. He was to have meals sent up to
him - I would arrange for that. As soon
as I found Curly I would come and fetch
him - Jadwin - and the three of us would
not part company until we had had - and
not merely arranged - the interview with
Lakin or Gitlin. My grimness probably
confirmed Jadwin in his delusion, but by
this time I was hardly thinking of him.
I was in a state of fury resembling a case
of manic-depressive insanity.

v
I cannot remember the course of the day.
I must have been at Curly's hotel three or
four times, since I do remember (one re..
members the feel of an emotion more
obstinately than a mere incident) that I
no longer trusted the switchboard-operator.
I called up the "kid sister" a few times.
I was in and out of a number of speak..
easies and restaurants which Curly fre~
quented. I hunted him with obsessional
persistence. And, if I remember rightly,
I did find traces of him. He had been seen
in the company of others, the night before.
I judged that he had not gone home. He
had spent the night at a downtown hotel.
That was all, until the early afternoon.
Meanwhile I telephoned regularly to Jad..
win and to Gunther's office: to Jadwin in
order to make sure that he hadn't left: to
Gunther's office because I had left word
there, with Miss Stowe, to invite Curly up
on "an urgent matter of business" if he
should phone. Miss Stowe returned a
steady negative to my inquiries. Jadwin

answered in a crescendo of excitement and

hope. I kept putting him off with various
excuses.
Then, by an astounding coincidence, I
found Curly or, rather, I spoke with him.
I entered a speakeasy and heard the bar~
tender, a familiar of Curly's and mine,
address him by name over the telephone.
Curly, it appears, had called him to inquire
after a fountain-pen he had lost some days
ago. Rushing up to the counter I signalled
the bartender. "Let me talk to him," I said.
There were four or five men at the counter;
I had to restrain mysel in their presence;
besides, I would get nowhere if I lost my
temper with Curly. When the bartender
passed the instrument to me, having first
said, "There's a friend of yours who wants
to speak to you," I made my voice casual.
"Hello, Curly."
He answered as simply as if Jadwin and
Lakin and Gitlin had never swum into
our existence.
"Hello, you," he cried, "where were you
last night?"
"Why?"
"I was trying to get you around twelvt.
o'clock. You missed a grand party. I
wanted you to join us."
"That's a shame," I said. "Where are
you now?"
(I think I said "Where are you now?"
I was told later that I did not say "Where
are you now?" but "Where will you be
an hour from now?" A normal person
under normal conditions could not pas..
sibly construct one statement from the
other, but it is possible that I was no longer
in a normal condition, while it is certain
that Curly was not a normal person.)
He answered: "At my kid sister's."
"Will you wait for me there?" I asked
(or think I asked).
"Certainly."
I believe that I paused long enough to

CURLY COMMITS MURDER

telephone Jadwin again and to say triumphantly that in half an hour I would bring
Curly. Then I took a taxi and rushed up
to West Eighty-sixth Street. Elaine herself
opened the door for me, and she seemed
to be startled by my appearance.
"Is Curly here?" I asked abruptly.
"Why, no. I haven't heard from him.
What's the matter?"
"Nothing," I said, wildly. "I've got to
see him. I spoke to him on the phone a
moment ago, and he said he was here,
and would wait till I came up."
She shook her head, more in astonishment at me than in negation of my statement. I returned downtown, driven by
misleading instinct. to. the speakeasy from
which I had spoken with Curly. Then it
occurred to me that I had to telephone
Jadwin again, with some sort of excuse.
And a few minutes later it occurred to me
that I should have left word with Elaine.
I called her again, to let her know what
Curly was to do. It was then that she said:
"Curly was here just now! He told me he
spoke to you, and told you that he would
be here in an hour."
"Where did he go?" I yelled.
"He only just stepped out. He'll be right
back."
I'll get him, I thought. I'll get him by
hook or crook, if it kills me.
I took a taxi again to West Eighty-sixth
Street, and rushed up the two flights of
stairs. Again Elaine met me at the door,
this time with a look of profound distress
on her face. "What a shame," she cried,
almost wringing her hands. "He did come
back. And then he had an important telephone call. He wants you to meet him
at the Ganymede at five o'clock. He says
everything is all right."
I said nothing. I did not trust myself to
speak, for I was now certain that she was
helping Curly to evade me. More than

475

that: she was helping him to demoralize

me. And yet I did go to the Ganymede;
for in this half-planned, half-instinctive
campaign of demoralization directed
against me by Curly and his sister, it was
essential that occasional truths should be
slipped in among the lies. There was the
crux of his method: one could not rely
on Curly to lie always. He would confound and confuse you with these indubitable truths.
But before I stepped into the Ganymede
- or after I had been there for some time
(the picture has lost its outlines) - I called
up my hotel, to speak with Jadwin again.
The girl at the switchboard screamed
when she heard my voice.
"Oh, thank God it's youl"
"Why? What is it?" My heart leapt. For
an instant I projected myself into Curly
and thought he was looking for me as
frantically as I was looking for him.
"Oh, something terrible, something terrible has happened. The gentleman who
was waiting for you in your apartment,
the gentleman who had his lunch served
there-"

"Yes," I asked, breathlessly. "Yes, what is

it?"
"He killed himselfJ"
I stood paralyzed, the receiver glued to
my ear, my body against the wall of the
telephone booth. I heard her say, "He
jumped out of the window of your room."
I met Curly the afternoon of the next
day. I had just returned from the police
station, and he was waiting for me at the
door of my hotel.
"Isn't that awful?" he said, without
greeting.
I did not answer"
"Awful," he repeated, quietly. "Poor
devil. I saw it in the paper in the morning.
And can you imagine? Last night I got
that job all fixed up for him."

I AM GLAD I AM DEAF
BY ARTHUR G. LEISMAN
HAVE been deaf, utterly and absolutely,
for thirty-five years. Since the age of
five, I have heard no sound of that
great chaos and fury which is called life;
the roar of human activity has passed me
by without so much as an echo. Yet today, standing at the threshold of middleage, I scorn the slightest hint of sympathy
from the world. I am glad I am deaf. By
the simple process of comparing the disadvantages of deafness to its benefits, I
have concluded that I am one person for
whom the buffet of fate has provided the
real happiness of life.
Believe it or not, there is a poetry in
silence. A serene, satisfying state of living,
uninterrupted by sound waves, and fraught
with those intangible things we call blessings. This is the world in which I roam,
the world I have grown to love. If my
hearing could be returned tomorrow by
some miraculous means, I would not
snatch at it. In fact, I would reject it,
swiftly and without regret. For contrary to
popular belief, it is not a calamity to roll
along life's grooves sans hearing. There are
numberless delights and diversions if one
knows how and where to find them.
I picture the reader shaking his head
slowly, incredulously, recalling with telling rebuttal the things I have missedthe soul of the violin, the pleasant ring of
familiar voices, the sunrise note of the
robin, the swish of a hooked trout, the
whisper of the wind among hemlocks.
I-Iow do I know of these sounds and of
47 6

their delightful effects when I cannot recollect ever having heard them? Well, is
this not sufficient proof that the ability to
hear is not the only prerequisite to their
enjoyment? Stuff cotton in your ears, shut
yourself in a soundproof room, and you
still have your delicately-tuned emotional
forces to depend upon. That is why I have
become so inured to deafness that I have
learned to love it.
To be sure, there are deprivations, but
with a correspondingly greater degree I
enjoy the things that are permitted me.
Peace and tranquillity of nerves are mine,
like the peace found on a South Sea island
where one's natural needs are satisfied.
Deep sleep, unbroken by the horns of impatient motor cars and the midnight serenade of romantic cats. An insensibility to
harshly-shouted words, to mysterious
creaking noises in the attic, to the wails of
an ailing baby, to meaningless blah-blahs
emanating from the radio. When you crawl
into bed at the end of a busy day, do you
ever reHect how thankful you are that you
can hear? Hardly. You take it as a matter
of course. But, likely as not, you are quite
fatigued from the constant bombardment
on your eardrums at the office, and you
crave quietude and relaxation. "Stop that
infernal racket!" is a command you have
probably had to shout more than once.
And then, just as Morpheus has you in his
soothing embrace, the neighbor's saxophone hegins to whine. . . . Pardon me if
I smile.

I AM GLAD I AM DEAF
I can have utter silence at any and all
times. A boisterous party can go on forever next door for all I care. When political
bees are buzzing and citizens express themselves windily about New Dealers and
Reds, when,scalldal-mongers wag their
tongues, when lie-detectors are operating,
I am dwelling in a serene seventh heaven.
The fiery admonitions from a pulpit concerning damnation and eternal fire, which
cause men to regret their last evening's
debauch and women to fumble nervously
with their handkerchiefs, fail to make a
dent on my ears. In the midst of such a
sermon I am apt to be speculating on the
probable starting pitchers in the afternoon's ball game. During fifteen years of
married life I have never heard .my wife
bawl me out. It is entirely likely that, because of lack of practice, she is at present
incapable of doing so. Nor have I ever
turned the air blue in my home with
vitriolic interjections, or orally consigned
a man to the category of the ignoramus.
Whenever an unbidden salesman or fairweather friend buttonholes me with the
request that I lend him my ear, I am always glad to oblige. In a minute or so he
is on his way.
"I wish I had your bum ears," a hen..
pecked friend wrote me. "Then I could
find sonle semblance of peace in my home.
Let me tell you, you're lucky and don't
know it."
But I do know it. As I look in the mirror
while shaving and soliloquize on those
pink ears of mine being useful only for
ornamental purposes, the arresting thought
arises that brain-fever did not play me a
dirty trick when it came like a thief at
night and took away my hearing. For,
without being the least bit egotistical, what
manner of man would I otherwise be at
present? The fact that I am deaf and
therefore one of the few privileged to rove

477

the thinly-populated world of silence, has

spurred me to the pursuit of a career quite
foreign to the common variety. My activities for and on behalf of fellow deaf people
afford me a chance to make something of
myself, with plenty of elbow room. I gain
satisfaction in the realization that within
my hands lies the faculty to perform functions and services for the deaf with that
degree of sympathy and understanding
which I could never grasp were I not one
of their kind. There is an inexplicable
fascination in this work - a fascination
which carries with it no conscious thought
of self-sacrifice. I have been speaker at
state and national conventions of the deaf,
have had charge of banquets for the deaf,
and know the unalloyed thrill of entertaining a crowd of several hundred who
hear only with their eyes. For unrestrained
good humor and kindliness, some of the
deaf persons I know have proved themselves the best of friends. It is a pleasure
to mingle with such delightful people; for
this reason, perhaps, I am glad I am one
of them.
I am able to read lips moderately well,
but the kind of conversation I enjoy most
is that which employs the sign language.
Simple, unbelievably effective, and startlingly beautiful at times, it is to the deaf
what a farm-yard pond is to the ducks.
Anything that can be dug up in the realm
of thought and feeling may be clearly revealed through this medium, and often in
a far more impressive and telling manner
than is possible with spoken words. If I
cannot hear, I have at least mastered a
language not found in any textbook, a
language that has the added advantage of
silence. While thus engaged with flashing
fingers and waving arms, my lighted cigar
can remain in its proper place and I have
the assurance that no one with the keenest
ears can overhear me.

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

With one of my five senses gone, my
needs are limited, my desires easily and
abundantly gratified. Eliminating from my
recreational program such inconsequential
items as the talkies, stage plays, concerts,
and radio demonstrations, there remain
automobile trips, hunting and fishing,
sports events, and social gatherings of the
deaf. Moreover, the time I spend with my
typewriter and with books leaves me thoroughly satisfied. I love to assemble words
into verses, articles, and fiction in my spare
time. With so many other activities pressing me for time, I spurn that bird of ill
breed, self-consciousness.
Yet it would be exaggeration to say that
I have never rued my fate. Time was when
I submitted to the caressing embraces of
a subtle inferiority complex. Overcoming
it has helped me to realize that the state
of deafness itself is incapable of inflicting
mental, moral, or physical harm. Time
was, also, when I cowered at the mention
of "deaf and dumb". But now I smile, not
because of a well-developed immunity to
barbed words, but more because such an
utterance sometimes reveals the dumbness
of the speaker himself.
Well-meaning friends have patted me
on the back and spoken consolingly of
nlY "sad loss", and in. the next breath
complained that because their nerves were
frayed, they were eager for a sojourn in
the North woods where the voice of man
seldom breaks the silence. Pressed for particulars, they confess that when you hear,
you must hear the bad as well as the good.
Now in my silent life these features are
absent. If introduced into my sphere they
would inevitably detract from the wholesome pleasantries of a simple existence.

Deafness acts as a tireless sentinel outside

my auditory chambers, and a very effective one too. For although in the conglomeration of sound that strives unsuccessfully for an entry, there are admittedly
desirable and beneficial portions, I can well
afford to get along without them, simply
because they have not yet proved indispensable to my daily method of living.
All the worthwhile things that have ever
been uttered or sung are preserved on
paper. The immortal Gettysburg speech
of Abraham Lincoln, for example, was
heard by only a few, yet millions have been
thrilled by its eloquence, not through the
ear but through printer's ink. Music? Not
all the tender airs depend for satisfying
enjoyment upon normal hearing. The lyrics
of Tennyson, the sonnets of Browning,
and all time-tested songs can be read with
the feeling that my heart is responsive to
their hidden tones.
Thus, life without sound is like a deep
silent river coursing leisurely through
gorgeously-hued canyons and. between
varying patterns of landscapes, broken here
and there by man-reared cities, but from
all of which there is no raucous shout, no
shrill whistle, no rumble of heavy traffic
and geared machinery. All is serene, beautiful, naturally conducive to peace. There
is no reason why I should throw myself
against a wailing wall just because my
hearing rates at zero. Not when I have
so much liking for the benefits of deafness that I can express myself as unqualifiedly in favor of a silent life as opposed
to that which might have been. It is just
as easy as switching off my bedside reading
lamp and lying down to pleasant soundless dreams.

INVITATION TO MONARCHY
BY RALPH ADAMS CRAM
the last ten years there has
been a most astonishing avalanche
of books scrutinizing social, industrial, and political democracy, all of them
explicitly or by inference challenging its
assumptions and drastically condemning
its works. To name only a few of the authors who come from many lands, we
have: Spengler, Ortega y Gasset, Berdyaev,
Orton, Niebuhr, Agar, Nock. All these
men of open eyes .and active minds are
devotees of liberty; they recognize the
unescapable fact that under democracy
we have lost this liberty, or are losing it
with ever-increasing momentum, together
with many other highly desirable commodities in the social sphere. Their power
of analysis is admirable, their capacity for
characterization and denunciation (Messrs.
Agar and Nock, for example) highly edifying, but curiously enough they one and
all seem able to envisage only two possible destinies for disintegrating democracy, either of which may perfectly well
happen, both of' which are equally repulsive: communism or fascism.
So it is not from these high-minded and
sometimes highly excitable students (with
the single but brilliant exception of Professor Berdyaev) that the suggestion of
a revived monarchism issues, but rather
from such unexpected sources as quite
commonplace citizens, voters, formal adherents of some political party or other;
from practical men of business, teachers
of economics or sociology, common .work-

D
.

DRING

men, and the man on the street. It is

from the people at this end of the scale
that there has come the query: Is not
some form of monarchy the best and most
effective form of political and social organization, and to kingship shall we not
ultimately - and almost immediately return? This is significant, and the subject is (I think) worth pursuing a little
further.
In the light of this new leading, my
memory of old days is clarified, and I call
to mind a period, now some forty years
gone, when those men with whom I was
then associated were convinced monarchists, not to say Legitimists and Jacobites.
This was at the very meridian of the
age of Triumphant Democracy, and to
none of us, I fancy, was it more than a
pious aspiration; certainly we did not
quite expect to be taken seriously, nor,
it is hardly necessary to say, were we
so taken. Certainly, also, we dared not envisage a time, hardly more than a generation in the future, when serious-minded
men of twice our years (as they were
then) would pose the question and give
it an affirmative answer.
Perhaps if, back in the very last days
of the closing century, we had for one
mad moment foreseen the progressive degeneration of. the parliamentary system of
government and the dark discredit to be
cast on social and political democracy by
its own revealing actions, as these were to
be accomplished in the coming and im479

THE 'AMERICAN MERCURY

mediate years, our hopes would have been
better. Nothing of the sort was vouch..
safed us. We were, I suppose, less the
prophets of what was to come than the
last ripples of the dying wave of Roman..
ticism. Our monarchical bent was roman..
tic, sentimental, decorative, rather than
the issue of a critical and philosophical
estimate of existing conditions and a
drawing of conclusions therefrom. As a
matter of fact, we should have been rather
superhuman in point of intelligence
(which we most certain!y were not) had
we deduced from the evidence any can..
clusions that would have indicated what
was really about to take place. At that
time everything, particularly democracy,
was going strong. Civilization was on the
upgrade under the determining impulse
of progressive evolution, and the only
threat to the equally progressive, democratization of the world was a possible,
though hardly probable, declension of the
crescent socialism on anarchy.
There were kings pretty much everywhere, except in France and the United
States and South America, but they were
without exception rois faineants, negligible
quantities, except where their personal
character gave them an unofficial status;
and one saw signs indicating their ulti..
mate liquidation by a process of peaceful
penetration by parliaments ever growing
stronger (in craft if not in character) and
establishing themselves, apparently, in per..
petuity.This was not the sort of kingship
we .had in mind, so, perforce, we went
back to certain model kings (or those
we held to be such) of older and happier
times. Such, for example, as St. Louis,
Rene of Anjou, Frederick II as King of
Sicily, Charles I of England. There was
glamor about them all. We liked this sav..
ing grace of personality. and found little
enough of it, either in our physical or

spiritual environment (I am wntIng of

the late 'Eighties) and none at all in the
"Thrones, Dominations, Kingdoms, Pow..
ers" (political) of that particular period
of civilization.
Then some of us began to penetrate
beneath the glamor, though formal his..
tories and biographies gave little aid, for
the accepted chroniclers for a century or
more had been stanchly - not to say
unscrupulously - anti-monarchical, while
they based their conclusions on an unwholesome blend of congenital myopia
and an' uncritical reliance on original
documents, the latter, notoriously, the 'least
reliable of all historical sources of accurate
information. Nevertheless, we got what we
wanted (the word is deliberately chosen)
in spite of Macaulay, Carlyle, Froude, and
their propagandist ilk, and discovered
that, for example, Charles I was a patriot,
statesman, and martyr, and that' Van
Dyck and the Icon Basilike actually
showed him as he was: an idealist and
great gentleman, fighting for justice and
the poorer and more Christian of his people, against as sorry a cabal of sportsmen,
profiteers, receivers of stolen goods, and
sour sectaries as ever assailed a high..
minded king. This was pretty good, and
we kept on until we built up our galaxy
am free to
of patriot kings and then,
admit, attributed their virtues to many
others of their calling, of whom less could
be said in praise. We stopped, however,
before we reached the reigning sovereigns of the day (with the exception of
Leo XIII, who ranked as high as any)
because we found them unhandsome and
generally impotent, and this sort of thing
did not fit into our picture.
Then democracy achieved its perfect
work: one throne after another was vacated, the very' idea of kingship fell into
the limbo of archaeology, and at last came

INVITATION TO MONARCHY
the Armageddon of the year of grace,
1918-19, and after that those of us who
retained our faith could only sit in the
shadow and "tell sad stories of the death
of kings". And now, as I said in the beginning, the kings may not have come
back (two, at least, are hurriedly on the
way) but the idea has, and from Ortega
y Gasset and Nicholas Berdyaev to the
newspaper correspondents, this same idea
is being brought forward, and apparently
without protest.
Perhaps, after all, this phenomenon is
not so surprising. Democratic governmental methods and practices began to
corrupt first of all here in the United
States just after the Civil War: then Continental governments followed the same
course, with added refinements, and finally the parliamentary system, since the
World War, has dissolved in such a
witches' sabbath of incompetence, ineptitude, and venality that it has been thrown
into the discard and, apart from England,
France, and the admirable Scandinavian
kingdoms, all Europe has aGcepted dictatorships as the lesser of two evils. No
wonder, then, that the alternative, good
sound monarchy, suggests itself to those
who have no taste for parliaments, dictatorships, or soviets.
For this astonishing phenomenon is
now prevalent. At the very moment when
there are fewer reigning monarchs than
at any time since the close of the Dark
Ages, here, there, and everywh~re are
heard not only whispers of republican
disloyalty and tentative suggestions that
after all there may have been something
in the monarchical idea, but clearly-vocalized statements to the effect that we, even
we ourselves, at the close of the Century
of Progress and before the sepulcher of
triumphant democracy, could do very well
with a king "happy and glorious long to

reign over us". And these subversive sentiments are voiced not alone by the highbrow and the political theorist, but very
frequently by the man in the street, who
at last seems to be doing a little thinking
for himself.
II

During the great debacle that befell when

peace, with all its horrors, broke out over
Europe when the guns ceased fire in 1918,
the fall or Hight of a king from his throne
was .hailed by the newspapers and other
organs of pUblic opinion (how exact is
the phrase!) as an act of God - or more
correct!y of Demos, who then held a position of greater honor and respect. Now
the case is quite different and the surviving sovereigns are treated with respect
and even affection. True, they are rather
a picked lot, but even the kings in exile,
with one or two exceptions, are subj ect
to no disfavor. When the King of England celebrates his Jubilee, the whole
warld (the Irish Republic excepted) pays
him honor, not to say adoration, and all
the magnificent and medieval panoply of
high kingship is avidly, even enviously
regarded by the citizenry of this Republic. Somehow behind the glittering show,
men seem to sense reality; there are stirrings of an older memory, for a few generations - they really are hardly more
than decades - cannot wholly nullify the
inheritance of five millenniums. After all,
republicanism is a very bourgeois, nouveau riche affair. After its first rather hysterical manifestations, it was increasingly
afflicted with an inferiority complex, and
now that it has before its eyes what it has
led to, whether in the shape of contemporary parliaments or the salving but uncomfortable dictatorships, its complex is
merging rapidly into what Evangelicals

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

used to call "conviction of sin". So far
as the office-holders and legislators are
concerned, this is, where and if it. exists,
an interior emotion; the prime necessity
of retaining their jobs quite estops them
from any form of outward expression.
Now I frankly associate myself with
those who believe that monarchy is a better system of civil government than democracy. I began to think this long ago
when parliamentary governments, based
on universal suffrage, seemed still to be
working fairly well; I mean during the
'Nineties of the last century. Study of the
theory and scheme of government became
rather a cherished avocation, as soon as I
got beyond the glamor of romantic monarchy. Through the framing of the American Constitution, I worked back by way
of English government and the French
Revolution to the Renaissance monarchies
(which set me back a bit, they were so
obviously out of key with the fundamental principles of justice and liberty)
and so to the free kingship of the Middle
Ages. Once there it did not seem necessary to go farther, for a sane model then
came into view. The study of political
theory in the Middle Ages, and of its
practical working-out, is illuminating and,
as well, a commentary on the lack of intelligence, or the deliberate propagandism
of the writers on this subject in the nineteenth century.
Back in those delectable 'Nineties, we
knew very little about medieval political
theory, or any other, for that matter; we
were working on theory and emotion,
which,after all, is not a bad basis. to start
on - if it is abandoned in good season.
We indulged in no vain hopes and I
fancy that the two things that seemed to
us most nearly impossible were that within fifty years, democracy and parliamentary governments would break up in im-

potence and futility over the greater part

of the world, giving place to dictatorships, and that at the expiration of that
period, there would be a real revival of
monarchical sentiment frankly expressed
and without any outburst of popular indignation. Well, exactly that has happened, and so I indite this inquirendo
into how it all came about, and why after
all monarchy is the best working system.
The answer to the first question is easy
enough: it is simply that the representative, parliamentary system, based on universal suffrage, with a chief executive
elected for a brief term by party votes
and by party methods, has come a most
terrible cropper, the results being so deplorable and so obvious that in sheer selfdefense, the erstwhile democratic states
have been forced to accept the monarchical idea not in its absolutist form, but in
the rather unpleasant guise of dictatorships.
True, the dictator possesses some of the
essential qualities and powers of a king,
but he has also,. by his very nature, some
of the worst as well. His achievement of
power is based on force - or the threat
of force; his tenure of office is insecure;
he has no contractual relation with his
people, and his will is law. In a word,
he is not a patriot king, but a Renaissance despot.
I am not quarreling with current dictatorships - at least not with all of them
- for they were and are emergency measures, ,~onceived in desperation. They
saved the day wherever they were established, but it would be a most unpleasant
thought to have to look on them as permanent institutions. Thinking things
through is not an habitual practice of
mankind at large, and so I doubt if very
many realize that dictatorships are the
first steps towards monarchy, taken in a
sort of panic induced by a sudden reali-

INVITATION TO MONARCHY
zation of what has happened to democracy - and what is going to happen next.
Having got a dictatorship, man is as little
pleased as he was after he got democracy
- and had his experience of it for a considerable period. He can't go back to democracy; the memory is too close and too
poignant. He must take the next step
and this, of course, leads, as it always has
done in the past, to monarchy. Some few
realize this, but most men confront a
dilemma. The very word frightens them,
because they do not look back far enough.
They see, conjured up by the word, English Georges, French Bourbons, German
Hohenzollerns, Italian tyrants of the
Renaissance - all the unhandsome despots
who came to power after Medievalism
had perished. The picture is neither
alluring nor convincing, and it is also
very misleading.
Now authentic kingship is a very different matter and there is nothing in it
at all alarming, while it may easily be
used to make democracy possible (which
democracy itself does not), to insure
liberty and to assure a measure of order,
justice, and the good life. Medieval political theory was based on three firm foundation stones. One: that the object of government was to insure justice. Two: that
society, from the household up, must find
its focus in one man - father, count,
duke, king, emperor - and in this solitary individual, society, in its several unitary forms, incarnates itself and achieves
its dynamic symbol. Three: that all authority came from God; that therefore a
king ruled by divine right, but this divine right gave no authority to rule evilly
or unjustly. Who were to judge and de..
termine this question? The subjects who
were ruled. The decision lay with them
and they knew how to enforce it. The
which is very good democracy.

III
Now to make practical application of this
to our present estate. During the last two
decades, we have had a sufficiently clear
demonstration that the democratic-republican system of government no longer
works. This is not necessarily to say that
it never did, but that is another story. The
reasons for its present failure would seem
to be these: The system is based on the
false theory that "all men are and of
right ought to be free and equal"; that
man, by an inscrutable law of the unknowable, is proceeding through the
method of progressive evolution to ever
higher and higher things; that the electoral franchise is not a privilege but an
inalienable right of man; that the major..
ity is generally right, but the majority,
right or wrong, must rule. These premises are all disproved by history and experience, but they are bred in the bone
of the general public and they are the
means whereby politicians live, therefore
they are as the laws of the Medes and Persians. They are, some of them, but not
all, as is generally supposed, embedded
in the original Constitution of 1787; those
that are not there have been inserted by
means of the Amendments promulgated
since the compilation of the Bill of Rights,
and this amended (and shockingly distorted) Constitution has become a fetish
and sacrosanct. The Constitution was
framed for some three million agrarian
citizens of thirteen sovereign states. It was
intended to adapt itself to changing conditions and ample provision was made for
this. U nortunately - as I have tried to
show in an earlier article* - every amendment subsequent to the Thirteenth was
adopted as a sort of emergency measure,
Back to What Constitution? The American Mercury, December, 1935.

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

and the trail of popular passion, uninformed public opinion, and political expediency is over them all.
The strongest point in the original Constitution was the power given into the
hands of the President. It is now the
weakest. In 1787, party government, in
the sense in which we have experienced
it since the election of Andrew Jackson,
was unthought of. Indeed, the original
Constitution provided that the candidate
receiving the largest number of votes
should be President; the candidate having
the next largest number, Vice-President.
The President was to represent' the people as a whole, without regard to party,
and the Framers thought they had provided for this by the device of the Electoral College. Of course, the people themselves were not to vote directly for
President, in spite of the fact that the
electorate was then a restricted and select
body. The intent, and the expectation,
was that the several states would choose
their wisest men as members of the Electoral College and that these disinterested
citizens would, in turn, select the one man
who could best serve the Republic. It was
assumed that he would be re-elected for an
indefinite number of,terms, provided he
ruled acceptably.
In 1787 this was a conservative and altogether admirable scheme; but by constitutional amendment, the force of precedent,
and a transformed public opinion consequent on a completely revolutionized
racial stock, universal suffrage, and the
new financial and industrial system, it has
now been so altered that it bears no resemblance to the original. What the majority of the Founders wanted was a
sovereign similar to the English King but
without the title. What we have got is a
party boss raised to high eminence and
given certain powers greater than those

held by the nominal kings of the nineteenth century. After the first great quartet from Washington to John Quincy
Adams, it is hard to count more than five
who rose above this level. Andrew Jackson did (personally I hold him to have
been the evil genius of the Republic), and
so also did Lincoln, Cleveland, Wilson
and the first Roosevelt. Few fell to the low
level of Grant and Harding, but mostly
they were party leaders and therefore
subservient to party. This is not enough
now when parliaments have come to be
what they are and the common life what
it is, as well as the electorate and the public opinion it engenders under the influence of mob psychology.
Here, then, is the first proposition: In
a well-ordered and free society, where
liberty is a prime requisite and justice the
object of government, the Chief of State
must not be the head of a political party.
He must not owe his office to partisan
action, nor must he be dependent on party
favor for continuance in office. He, himself, must represent the whole people and
the State ,as a unitary and living organism. This means that he must hold office
for life - or as the phrase goes, for good
behavior. He must be chosen by methods as nearly unpartisan as possible, perhaps by some device similar to the original Electoral College, its capture by
political parties rigidly guarded against,
but never, certainly, by popular vote. Two
new prerogatives must be given him: initiative in legislation and authority to dissolve either or both of the legislative bodies
in the event that a government bill which,
in his opinion, supported by his cabinet
or ministry, is vital to the welfare of the
nation, fails of passage, or a legislative
bill (there must be room for such once
the more important government agenda
is disposed of) is passed over his veto.

INVITATION TO MONARCHY
These new prerogatives are all that is
necessary to transform the President into
a sovereign who would be a true Chief
of State. The suggested initiative in legislation means only that with the advice
and consent of his cabinet, he presents
before each session of the legislative
bodies an agenda of such bills as are considered necessary to the welfare of the
country, which bills cannot be referred
to committee but must be debated in the
open and either passed, amended and
passed, or refused, after which private
bills may be introduced and dealt with as
at present. Power to dissolve the legislative chambers and order a new election
throws the moot question back on the
people where, in the end, in all sound
forms of government, the ultimate sanction must rest. If they fail to support the
Governlnent, then that is the end of the
matter.
Of course this strengthening of the sovereign power would not alone guarantee
good government, though it would go
far to this end. Many other reforms are
necessary, such as the total abolition .of
the lobby, the elimination of some of the
foolish and intolerable rules of the legislative chambers (such as those that permit
riders and filibusters), and particularly
the restoration of the electoral franchise
to its original status as a privilege and a
duty, nota natural right. These, however, have no place in this essay, which
is intended to deal only with the question
of kingship and its superiority to an
elected and partisan presidency. I propose to take up these matters at another
time.
The releasing of the Chief of State from
all party affiliations would go far towards

tion as his prerogatives. The most vital

factor in kingship is just this incarnation
in one visible individual, of the tradition
of a people, their patriotism, their ideals,
and their aspirations. This is why a king
of today, like him of England, though
shorn of nearly all his just prerogatives,
is still in the eyes of his people the august
and honored personification of the State;
a cohesive and inspiring force in secular
society. This centralizing of a national
idea in one personality is a basic factor
in any well-ordered polity. There is no
valid substitute. You cannot make a flag,
a slogan, or an anthem take its place. Efforts towards this end are always failures
and with results that are frequently ridiculous.
Under normal circumstances a President chosen as such-like are chosen
today, cannot play this part. The candidate who is seen maneuvering for nomination, working to secure pledges and
delegates, giving promises and negotiating deals with other politicians, rushing
over the country in "whirlwind campaigns", broadcasting eloquent addresses
to every known type of citizen, hedging
diplomatically here, "viewing with alarm"
there: the "little friend of all the world"
(of his own party) until the votes are
counted - such an one may give an entertaining show, arouse the facile admiration of the go-getter for his similar qualities, but he can never personify the State.
Elected, he can never slough off the ignominious connotations of the political
campaign. He is always the head of his
party, not the head of his people in their
inner consciousness. Never, unless, on occasion, he achieves martyrdom, and then
only posthumously - and then not always.

giving him status as the personification of

Lincoln gained this sad honor, but only he;

the State in the consciousness of the people, and this is as important a considera-

not even Wilson in the tragedy of his end.

Once a politician, always a politician. But

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

what the people, the community, the state
need and should have, is their man, not
the parties' choice. This may be why, all
unconsciously, they reject every President
- sooner or later - as their head and their
leader, accepting him only as just another politician who, for his party or for
his adherents, can get results in the field
of material benefits.
It is not enough, then, that the Chief
of State should be given added powers
and prerogatives of sovereignty and be released from all partisan ties. He must
assume that title and state which are consonant with his dignity, and function as
the State incarnate. A President is by
title the fellow of the president of a chamber of commerce, a railway system, or a
social club. Words are symbols and they
are dynamic in their power of suggestion;
therefore they are to be reckoned with.
A president presides; a true chief of state
leads, directs, and inspires. By association, which has been part of human consciousness for at least four thousand years,
the word King, or its linguistic equivalents, has meant just this, and so long
as the mind of man is what it is, you
cannot make the word President, or its
equivalent, take its place. This, of course,
is why when a democracy goes to pieces,
as in time it always does, the strong man
who comes into power to redeerp the consequent social loss and build a new state,
always takes the title, not of President
but of Emperor, Duce, Fuhrer, or, most
logically, King.
And with the fact, the title, and the
estate, must go the forms, ceremonies,
ritual, and vesture that show in visible
form the quality of this kingship that is
so much more than a faculty of govern-

ment. All these things are symbols, as the

flag or the other inanimate details are
symbols, with the difference that they are
more universal and at the same time personal in their significance and appeal.
They are not employed for ostentation or
for the magnifying of the individual, any
more than are the sacerdotal vestments
of the priest at the altar, the robes of the
judges on the bench, the gowns of scholastics, or the secular dress clothes for formal occasions. To resent them is snobbish
and vulgar. We have our own ceremonial
today: hat on the heart or handkerchief
fluttered in the air when the flag goes by;
military salutes of rifle, sword, cannon,
and bunting: the weird habiliments of
secret societies, grips, and passwords. But
the old and splendid ceremonial of a royal
progress, as at the recent funeral of the
British King, is more noble, significant,
beautiful, and spiritually stimulating.
And so, after this inter!ude of wellmeant but futile democracy of the modern sort, we should do well to return to
the old kingship. Not that. of the Renaissance autocracies, which was the debasement of sovereignty, but to the elder sort
under which a real democracy was not
only possible but well assured. There may
be liberty under a right monarchy: there
has come a sort of slavery under the democracies of the modern form where a
political oligarchy and a money oligarchy,
now in alliance, now in conflict, have
brought about grave disorder, social
chaos, and the negation of the free and
the good life, under the forms of a free
commonwealth founded on assumptions
that are baseless biologically, philosophically, historically, and from the stand-'
point of plain commonsense.

Rats
By

HENRY MORTON ROBINSON

as it may seem, the animal

whose name is a synonym for everything contemptible in the human vocabulary is, in many essential respects, the most
similar of all animals to man. At the basis
of this similarity is the fact that men and
rats are the only completely omnivorous
animals on earth. They and they alone
will eat anything and everything: meat,
cereal, fruits, nuts, eggs, fish, and if nothing else is available - each other. Moreover, mammals having the same food
habits are known to develop close similarities in their nervous and nutritional processes. Thus, the same diseases attack
them; both rats and men, for example,
are highly susceptible to a virulent type of
cancer. They both can live in any climate
from torrid to polar, and under conditions
that would spell death to other creatures.
And this strange parallel goes beyond
mere physical adaptability; Hans Zinsser,
author of Rats, Lice and History, declares
that rats and men have precisely the same
attitude toward all the rest. of creation.
They are completely useless to other forms
of animal life which they impartially destroy by their audacity, ferocity, and resourcefulness.
It was because of the identical eating
habits of rats and men that a group of
biologists decided, about twenty-five years
ago, to utilize the rat as the ideal experimental animal. So now, at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology, U niversity of Pennsylvania, specially-constructed

RONICAL

steel and concrete buildings are devoted to

the breeding and study of a perfect race of
Mus N orvegicus albinus, free from flaws
and disease. In experiments involving human conclusions, the Wistar standardized
white rat has proved itself superior to
guinea pigs, dogs, monkeys, or rabbits.
Under the direction of Dr. H. H. Donaldson, the world's foremost authority on
white rats, ninety-six generations have been
bred under approximately ideal conditions.
Their food is scientifically balanced and
prepared; their air is filtered and sterilized.
No visitors are allowed; they might contaminate the rats, and thus invalidate years
of laboratory research. The Wistar Institute supplies virtually all white rats used
by scientists today, at $45 per hundred,
f.o.b. Philadelphia.
Business is brisk. For without the services of Mus N orvegicus, the scientific laboratories might just as well close up shop.
On this pink-eyed, white-furred rodentan offshoot of the pugnacious brown Norway rat,;..- scientists have performed more
experiments than upon all other animals
combined. They make him run in a revolving cage until he is exhausted, then
observe the effects of fatigue upon his sex
life. They expose him to leprosy, syphilis,
tuberculosis, and pneumonia, and watch
him "take it". In the nutritional field Mus
is the, preferred subject of metabolic research: groups are fed all the vitamins, a
few vitamins, no vitamins at all; at the
end of each experiment their tiny bones
4 87

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

are measured and their most minute organs weighed. To plumb the mysterious
workings of the animal mind, the rats
are placed in the center of an intricate
labyrinth and clocked as they puzzle their
way out. For data on blood-pressure and
other circulatory changes under emotional
stress, biochemists throw them into "an
experimental rage", thendraw off their
blood, analyze it, and compare it with
the blood of their tranquil cheese-gnawing
brothers. With the single exception of man
himself, more scientific papers have been
written about the rat than about any other
mammal on earth.
This pest-bearer, who has killed more
people with the bubonic plague than all
the wars since 400 B.C., has a brief but
eventful life in the laboratory. After a
gestation period of twenty-two to twentythree days it is born blind, hairless, with
a short tail and undeveloped limbs. It can
barely squeak and suckle; yet from the
day of its birth it is constantly seeking
something, a trait observed in no other
animal save man. The eyes of the female
open first; at the age of ten days the young
pups begin to roam about their cage. At
twenty-five days the rat is independent of
its parents, and its subsequent development
- both mental and physical- is extremely
rapid. The life span of the white rat is
about three years, which corresponds to
ninety years of human life; thus the rat
develops thirty times faster than man, and
by the use of an equivalent age scale, results obtained from rats can be precisely
transferred to men. The ninety-six generations of rats observed at the Wistar Institute correspond to 3100 years of human
life (allowing three generations to a century), or a period longer than all recorded
history.
Mus Norvegicus is proverbially fertile;
a good breeding female will produce about

ten litters in a lifetime; the offspring of

a sturdy pair will number fifteen million
in five years. Contrary to popular belief,
inbreeding does not weaken the stock;
experiments with fifty generations demonstrate that if a start is made with a vigorous pair, and the -best of the offspring
are selected for mating, the descendants
will be heavier, stronger, and longer-lived
than their ancestors. Because of the rat's
fertility and ability to breed true to type,
it is the preferred animal in any study of
human genetics. Whereas it would require
almost a century to observe three human
generations, rats tell the same story in
eighteen months.
Practically all our knowledge of food
values has been derived from experiments
on these rodent replicas of man. The manganese deficiency tests made by E. V. McCollum of the School of Hygiene and
Public Health, Johns Hopkins University,
are particularly illuminating. He wished
to determine how human beings would be
affected if manganese - an element found
chiefly in cereals, blueberries, nuts, and
meat - was omitted from the diet. First,
of course, it was necessary to provide an
adequate life-sustaining diet free. of manganese. By the spectrographic. method of
examination, the following foods were
selected: starch, sucrose, butter-fat, sodium
chloride, and vitamins A, D, and E. Four
different diets were fed to groups of young
rats: first, a manganese-free diet; second,
a control diet containing substances with
a natural manganese content; and third
and fourth, manganese-free diets, supplemented by manganese artificially prepared.
All the rats grew to maturity and those
on a manganese-free diet did not apparently differ from the others. They looked,
weighed, and reproduced alike. Two
things were noticeable, however. The females had no milk with which to suckle

THE CLINIC
their young. The males showed no abnormality till the hundredth day, when

testicular degeneration appeared; from

that time forward, progressive atrophy
continued, ending in complete sterility.
Male sexual potency was restored by the
addition of manganese to the diet. McCollum accordingly concluded (and his
findings were afterwards substantiated in
human experiments) that manganese is essential in the production of the hormone
which regulates the function of the testes
in the male and the mammary tissue in
the female.
When a new drug, serum, or poison, is
discovered, it is first tried out on Mus N orvegicus to determine the medicinal and
lethal doses. Since a fully-grown rat weighs
about half a pound, or approximately
1/250 as much as a man, a fractional dose
in this proportion is administered, and its
effects gauged. If all goes well with the
rodent, increasing doses are administered
until the lethal point is reached. The first
studies in the use of morphine, and many
subsequent tests of snake venoms and
other poisons, were made on white rats.
In certain forms of cancer research, notabl y in "tar cancer", the rodent subject is indispensable. Virulent cancerous

growths are easily grafted from one rat to

another. Even "ratinin", the poison that
has no harmful effect on livestock or human beings, was discovered only after
thousands of laboratory rats had been used
in experiments.
Yet in the wild state, the rat is still a
serious menace to life and property, destroying over five billion dollars' worth
of goods each year. But the scientists who
work with white rats in the laboratory
say that when they are "gentled" - that
is, freed from the terror of human beings
- they are as playful and affectionate as
children. They like to be petted, and one
authority goes so far as to declare that
they are extremely fond of music and will
click their teeth in audible appreciation.
The white rats at the Wistar Institute
will eventually produce a pure-bred, disease-free strain of animals raised under
optimum .conditions. What happens to a
perfect race at last? Are the mental and
physical changes desirable, unlimited, harmonious? We may ultimately find in the
perfection of Mus Norvegicus some definite clues as to what might reasonably be
expected of the human race if it were rendered entirely free of disease for a few
hundred years.

({j
Solace for Lonely Hearts
By JUDITH RAVEL
fellow in his recent musS ings shrewd
on human nature awoke to two
OME

incontrovertible facts. People want to be

happy, and people like to receive letters.
Forthwith he established a correspondence
club, and the mail came rolling in. Letters from ministers,doctors, teachers,
farmers, business men, and housewives, all

responding toa sentence in his circular"by joining the - - Correspondence

Club, you will form friendships, and Life
will take on a beautiful significance".
The appeal is universal; most of us
want life to take on some other significance besides the one which it seems to
hold. If, by filling out a questionnaire and

490

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

sending off two dollars to a correspondence exchange, we can detect the throb
of some heart beating in unison with our
own, why not? Thus, writing clubs have
lately sprung up from Maine to California,
sponsored mostly by sincere altruists, who
hope, after the publicity, postage, and stationery have been paid for, to show a
small profit. These friendship exchanges,
or happiness centers hold themselves
haughtily aloof from matrimonial bureaus,
and in their circulars emphasize the fact,
stating that, once two members have met
via the mailbox, the club's responsibility is
at an end. "Of course," several have admitted coyly, "when' you bring two congenial people together, sometimes they just
will marry." As one director explains, his
club seeks "to keep out married flirts".
The principle of operating these institutions is simple. An advertisement is inserted in the pulp magazines, or in several of the more intellectual journals,
reading: "Lonesome? Let us arrange a
correspondence for you", or "The-Get-Together Club. Reliable members everywhere. Write for sealed particulars." The
applicant receives a prospectus, full of
encouragement. "Act at once J Happiness
awaits you! " "No more lonely Hours!"
"Develop that happy attitude of mind
that comes from holding out a sympathetic hand and in new friendships receive your reward. Satisfy that eternal
longing in your heart. Feel the singing
rhythm of living. Let us bring the zest
and happiness of new interests into YOUR
life." Accompanying this is a questionnaire, demanding the name, age, occupation, height, weight, nationality, religion,
education, and preferences of the applicant. This, enclosed with the fee - two to
five dollars for men and one to four dollars for women - will bring a membership
card and a list of desirable names to

which the bidder for happiness may write.

His or her name also appears on a similar list which is sent to other members.
Having supplied lonely hearts with this
means of mitigating sorrow, the club's
activity ceases.
At first blush, this business sounds entertaining, profitable, and somewhat like a
racket, but inquiries have shown that the
recompense for the enormous amount of
clerical work required is relatively slight,
and that competition is pretty stiff. Many
of the directors continue simply for the
joy of the work, rather than for any vast
profits. The roster of club founders includes a widow past middle-life in the
South, a college graduate, a soldier in the
United States Army, two enterprising
young women in New York City, a business-like couple in the West, an amateur
writer on the Pacific Coast, and an energetic lady of good antecedents in Detroit.
These are typical. One club, founded six
months ago, boasts a membership of sixtynine, and caters almost exclusively to teachers, students, authors, lecturers, lawyers, and
business people. Most of the letter writers
confine themselves to such safe topics as
music, writing, flower culture, and sports.
One of the oldest and most flourishing
cl ubs serves no less than 20,000 clients
yearly. The members occasionally marry
each other, although the main business
of the organizers is avowedly to see that
two people are introduced to each other,
and no more. On the mailing list are
ministers, geologists, oil-drillers, doctors,
nurses, dietitians, miners, laborers, ranchers, waitresses, housekeepers, actresses,
hotel keepers, ad infinitum. The efficient
lady who conducts this club says that she
has had many visitors personally, and has
yet to receive a complaint.
There seem to be as many men as
women writing throughout America, and

THE CLINIC
as many city dwellers as country cousins.
The median age in most clubs is twentynine to thirty-three, although the range
on the whole is astounding. A specimen
list furnished by one of the newer clubs
contains a cross-section of these writers.
Number 172, female, 23, teaches, is single, and seeking to overcome inhibitions
instilled by early training.
Number 237, male, single, 40, is a former
deputy sheriff, interested in social justice
for all classes. He adds that his favorite
movie actress is Mae West.
Number 301, male, 34, is a farmer and
single. He is interested in fencing and
roughing it, and wishes a life companion
to aid him in star-gazing.
Number 250, female, 36-ish, a Jewess full
of the old Ned and loves to tease. Her sole
possession is a model T Ford.
Number 422, male, widower, 57, sounds
like a menace. He is a cruise director, a
lover of music, firesides, and Southern
skies, with a yen for wine, women, and
song.
Number 173, female, over 21, church
worker and single, but not very devout.
She loves dancing, reading, swimming,
tennis, poetry, and moonlight trips.
A club will often find these individuals
just what they are looking for.
"So far all of the letters which you forwarded to me from other members were of
a most excellent caliber", reads one epistle
to a club director. "Especially among the
lady members, there are some very fine
minds indeed".
"I would like to express my appreciation of the - - Club," says another.
"There are only one or two of those whom
I wrote who have continued, but those I
have found worthwhile. It has afforded
me a means of at least temporary escape
from a depressing atmosphere".
And another: "Kindly remove my

49 1

name from the list of correspondents as

I have met one of the most beautiful and
wonderful women God ever made".
Still another reports: "I have met and
cultivated the formal friendship of a number of the lady members, and am pleased
to state that they are much above the average in character, sincerity and intelligence.
I have been fortunate in meeting a fine
Christian woman, well-educated, refined
& a fine musician, in whom I find my
ideal. We are mutually happy and have
been absolutely honest & frank with each
other, & I believe I will find a permanent
companionship entirely agreeable and a
source of perfect earthly happiness".
For real romance, however, one must
consider the innumerable matrimonial
clubs, which have flourished for a considerably longer period than the new friendship exchanges. One of the most successful of these openly commercial centers for
traffic in romance operates on the usual
membership plan - gentlemen $2, ladies
$1. The club wastes no time in prating
about friendship or congenial interests.
Its prospectus begins: "Have you realized
the Love Dream of your life?" and proceeds in no uncertain terms to outline the
bliss which awaits future members. "Introductions by mail, by which love-hungry
men and women enjoy the fufillment of
their rightful share of love and happiness,
have come to break the monotony of loneliness and means everything to your future
life and contentment. It opens the pathway
to secret Thrills, Romance, Enchantment,
Intimate Joys, Exciting Cheerful Courtships, Faithful and Enduring Love, from
which you pass on to the Triumphs of Another Life full of bloom and moments
which you scarcely dared dream of".

There are certain safeguards which the

directors of matrimonial clubs adopt for
the protection of members. They insist that

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

all applicants be of the white race, and refuse membership to those "who are not
sincere and honorable in their intentions".
Their questionnaires are much more exhaustive than those of the friendship exchanges. They wish to know about church
membership, hobbies, preferences as to
city or country life, and preferred occupations. There are also discreet questions as
to finances. Color of hair, eyes, height, and
above all weight, seem to be determining factors in predisposing strangers.. A
fair example of the average clients are the
following would-be husbands:
L. G., widower, 52, German-American,
weighs 190 pounds,s feet I I inches, dark
complexion, has a delicatessen store and
other assets, would be content with either
city or country life with a lady who has
average business ability, 38 to 4S years
of age, with a likable personality.
M. F. turns out to be a young bachelor,
33 years old, 5 feet 9 inches, 150 pounds,
blue eyes, looks very distinguished. He is
a mechanic~ engineer, and feels that he
wants to settle down to a real home with
a warmhearted woman.
P. B. is single, 21, 6 feet tall, 170 pounds,
Irish descent, witty and very jolly. Likes
mechaniatl work and farming, could enjoy
himself anywhere with a love-mate, brunette type. Prefers a single girl, but has no
objection to a widow with one child.
A. A., widower, 42, 5 feet 6 inches, 140
pounds, has "a peaches and cream complexion" and beautiful blue eyes, is of
English nationality, has his own home, a
modern car, other property of value, and
steady employment. He wishes to correspond for pleasure and what may follow,
as he is very lonesome. Has a considerate
disposition, is a tasty dresser, nice-looking,
home-loving,. and enjoys the best of health.
While there are undoubtedly many professional people who find "helpful Soul

Mates" through this medium, a classification of letters shows that it is C.C.C. workers, garage mechanics, proprietors of small
businesses, doormen, nightwatchmen, or
chefs to whom the idea of "a real sweetheart by mail" appeals. Their feminine
counterparts, as indicated by the female
listing of this same club, include a widow,
61, who is a good cook and housekeeper,
has a nice disposition, and prefers a Protestant professional or business man in a
small town; a business school graduate; a
public stenographer; another widow, 37,
who plays the piano and is very partial to
blond men; a widow, 59, now employed
as a nurse; a gay divorcee of 120 pounds;
a lady of 2S with property; several matrons
in homes or boys' clubs; another stenographer and private secretary; a beauty parlor operator; and a handsome brunette of
30, who wants to secure Friendship and
Romance while she is yet young enough to
enjoy it.
It is impossible to estimate how many
happy lovers embark on matrimony as a
result of correspondence courtship; the
directors of matrimonial bureaus can only
refer to letters which arrive from satisfied
customers.
"Please take my name off of your list, as
I have found the nicest man a girl could
want. I certainly am happy, and want to'
thank you for this."
And, "Enclosed find photo for reference
of our family. If you remember, you introduced us several years ago, and we are
happily married."
And again, "I thought I would let you
know we were married and happy. We
married last Tuesday and want to thank
you so very much."
Busy people, who have hosts of friends,
may turn up their noses at the idea of
joining a correspondence club. But to
widows and widowers in small towns,

THE CLINIC
girls and men in cities or on farms, the
results of this craze for letter-writing have
been a Godsend. The codes of social con-

493

vention have nothing to do with the case.

When lonely hearts shriek for solace, what
harm in supplying comfort?

Who Owns Yellowstone Park?

By A. C. McINTOSH
year thousands of Americans,
harassed by the increasing complexity of existence and eager to Get Away
From It All, pay a visit to Yellowstone
National Park. There, beside clear streams'
and lakes, in cool forests, amid the grandeur of waterfall, canyon and mountain,
the more or less bewildered citizen seeks
re-creation, and strives to view both himself and his machine-ridden civilization in
true perspective. Unfortunately he finds
not only tranquil scenic beauty, but predatory money-changers as well. The latter
have been at the park almost from the beginning, "helping the traveler, rendering
indispensable service." In Yellowstone one
may still view near the Daisy geyser a record of the early vested interests: the debris
of a tent camp in the days before the horseless carriage.
Odd as it may seem today, President
Grant in 1872 signed the first Yellowstone
Park Act, setting apart the vast wilderness tract as a "public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment
of the people." The bill further provided
for the preservation of the forests, natural
curiosities or wonders, and against the
"wanton destruction of fish and game."
It was a lofty idea, a panegyric in defense
of the great free outdoors. However, things
have changed in the last sixty years. Big
Business has taken charge.
At present the principal monopolies of
Yellowstone are the Yellowstone Park

AcH

Hotel Company, with four large hotels;

the Yellowstone Park Lodge and Camps
Company, operating several lodges, cafeterias, and some 2000 lodge and housekeeping cabins; the Yellowstone Park
Transportation Company, controlling bus
transportation in the park; the Haynes
Picture Shops; and the Hamilton Stores.
There are several other minor operators.
In most cases the companies hold twentyyear franchises and in theory, mild theory,
they are subject to regulation by the
National Park Service. During the fiscal
year 1932-33 the franchise and permit fees
derived from all Yellowstone operators
totaled $29,551.18, and in the following
fiscal year receipts from the same source
were $25,72.54. Tourists entering the park
in automobiles paid more than $114,000 in
fees during 1932-33, $135,000 the succeeding
year, and $163,000 during 1934-35. More
than 71,000 automobiles entered the park
during the 1935 season. Fees no doubt
passed the $200,000 mark. However, what
the operators paid in 1934-35 had not been
made public at the time this article was
written.
Federal appropriations for maintenance
in recent years have averaged $500,000 annually, and for 1933-35 the government
allocated an additional $3,000,000 to permit extensive highway construction. Obviously, the annual payments of $25,000 to
$3,000. made by the operators during the
fiscal years 1932-33 and 1933-34 constitute

494

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

but an insignificant fraction of the total

revenues needed for park maintenance and
improvements.
The average. expenditure of the Yellowstone visitor can be estimated at $20 per
person. Many tourists spend more, but
some "sage-brushers" (as campers are
called in the park) purchase all their supplies outside and use free camp grounds.
Once within the gates these independent
folk close up like clams, economically
speaking - a not unnatural reaction to
park prices, which are high. If the estimate
of $20 per capita strikes an average, the
260,000 tourists who swarmed through
during the 1934 season must have left behind some $5,000,000. Total travel for 1935
was 317,998, an increase of twenty-two per
cent over 1934.
Officials in Yellowstone are ready to
agree that the operators have their problems - short season, tremendous depreciation and high freight rates. But these
problems fade before close analysis. The
season depends on the weather, averaging
about three months, although a few stores
and cabin camps may remain open four
months or longer. At any rate, the season
is no shorter than in outside resort centers.
Property depreciation is considerable, although most of the larger buildings are
constructed of huge durable timbers and
other natural unfinished materials. While
the park is isolated from centers of population and production, the north entrance is
connected by rail with the main line of
the Northern Pacific, fifty miles away;
a branch line of the Union Pacific extends
from Pocatello, Idaho, to the west entrance; and from W est Yellowstone by
paved highway the irrigated section of
central Idaho is only 125 miles distant.
As tourists by the thousands converge
on Yellowstone from all points of the compass, they run the gauntlet of stores, lodges

and hotels in a manner analogous to sheep

passing through a shearing pen. In Yel10wstone if one needs transportation, food,
clothing or shelter, he pays a price not set
by fair competition, or does without. Yet
the wages tendered Yellowstone employees
are surprisingly low for federal as well as
private payrolls. I have before me an interesting document - the 1935 employment
circular of the Yellowstone Park Lodge
and Camps Company. Under "positions in
main lodges," it lists thirty-eight types of
employment, ranging from "accountants
- wage, $45 per month; bonus, $15 per
month," to "vegetable men - wage, $30
per month; bonus, $10 per month." It is
enlightening to learn that the current rate
for able-bodied pot washers .is $30 per
month, plus a $10 bonus. Porters and
waitresses, who depend largely on tips, receive $15 monthly plus $10 bonus, but
"laundry maids - wage $20 per month;
bonus, $10 per month" must be facing a
dreary future. Some thirteen different types
of jobs are available in cafeterias. Salad
women and checkers and cashiers punch
out $35, plus $10, with floor girls and
vegetable women trailing .at $20 plus $10.
In the housekeeping camps, where the
wage scale is slightly lower, cashiers receive $30 plus $10, scrubbers (men) muscle
in at $30 plus $10, and cabin cleaners and
maids manage to pick up $15 plus $10.
However, the demand for jobs being
steady, the operator secures at his own price
an abundance of help. The bonus is paid
only at the end of the season to workers
who have completed their contracts. According to the employment circular, "the
lot of contract breakers is an. unhappy
state. They lose their bonus and their automobile transportation back to the railroad."
On the other hand, the company reserves
in contracts the right to transfer or to
change the status of any employee, and

THE CLINIC
In the event of an excess of employees
owing to decreased travel, or other circum~
stances beyond the control of employer, to
terminate the period of employment."
Reading further in the circular, one meets
the frank statement: "The work is hard.
Just how hard depends on the mental and
physical make~up of the employee. The
acceptable type is the person with a sturdy,
healthy body, and a disposition to be happy
at work."
"On the other hand," the circular con~
tinues, "there is a bright side to the pic~
ture" in the form of "high altitude""life in the open" - "renewal of physical
vigor" - and "stimulating association with
healthy, ambitious and intelligent young
people from every corner of the United
States." Apparently, there is an intangible
"something in the atmosphere of Yellow~
stone and the camp life that makes hard
work seem far less arduous than the same
work elsewhere."
The hotels and lodges depend in can..
siderable degree on dudes - the tourists
who reach the park by rail and use the
yellow buses during their stay. In the early
years of the depression such travel de~
creased alarmingly and the hotels were
hard hit. More recently, however, the railroads have offered attractive rates and rail
travel for the 1935 season showed an increase of 28,3 per cent over 1934. Hotel
rates range from $2.75 for one person, not
including meals and bath, to $10 a day for
room with bath and meals for one person.
Lodges, constituting the next step downward in the park caste system, maintain
dining rooms and cafeterias, but the guests
sleep in separate cabins, the furnishings including the old-fashioned wash bowl and
pitcher with related accessories. These
cabins are provided with stoves, fuel, and
electric lights. The lodge rate for meals
and cabin is $4.50 per day for each guest.

495

The housekeeping cabins in the auto camps

are almost as crude as packing cases. Constructed of pine boards and in some cases
provided only with canvas tops, these
wilderness domiciles are no more luxurious
than the hogan of the Navaho. Usually
there is a rusty stove and floors stained
with the grease of countless fish fries. The
rates for these cabins range from $1 a night
for one person to $2.50 for four adults, bedding and fuel not included. The company
kindly rents blankets at twenty-five cents
each per night.
In Yellowstone a .fire in the evening is
not only cheerful but is needed for personal comfort. Yet first you must procure
wood- a fuel so plentiful that the park
power plants burn huge quantities of it.
Thousands of trees have been felled in recent attempts to check the inroads of bark
beetles, and in clearings for highway con~
struction. But in spite of the abundance of
wood, it becomes extraordinarily rare
when you need it. The sage-brusher may
gather wood free in the forest, but the
main camping areas. are picked clean.
However, there is wood for sale in Yellowstone Park - of all places! For twenty-five
cents one may purchase almost an armful
of split pieces. Formerly the bundles were
but twelve inches in diameter; now they
have been enlarged to sixteen inches.
Contrary to belief, the yellow buses in
the park are not gold-plated, although an
analysis of rates might so indicate. If one
enters the park at "Vest Yellowstone, the
charge for the trip around the main loop
is $25 for the 17o-mile journey - almost
fifteen cents per mile.. A similar but shorter
tour, starting at Gardiner and returning,
would cost almost seventeen cents a mile.
If the bus passenger desires to experience
real mountain driving, the company
obligingly will route any bus over a short
detour leading to the top of Mt. Wash-

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

burn - for an extra $2 a head. There is
The speed with which many VISItors
also a side trip to the north end of the glimpse the park reminds one of the auto
magnificent Teton country - about 100 races at Indianapolis. A tourist will drive
miles in all- for an extra $12.50.
up to the information office at Old FaithYellowstone general stores bear a strik- ful and, without taking the trouble to dising resemblance to the metropolitan drug embark, will yell: "When will she squirt?"
store, supplying every need from beefsteak If the eruption is expected within the next
and beer to fishing tackle and mittens. Of few minutes the tourist condescends to
souvenirs there is an overwhelming abun- wait. However, before the awe-inspiring
dance, although with the exception of bear four-minute eruption is completed, John
skins, hardly one of the trinkets is char- Tourist may be zooming down the road
acteristic of the northern Rocky Moun- towards West Thumb, his gait hastened
tain section. Most of this stuff travels by his anxiety to escape this area of high
thousands of miles in its journey to Yel- prices, some of which he has already en10wstone. A local prospectus describing countered.
the wonders of the contiguous Jackson
At present the sage-brush method is the
Hole country naively states that in season, best way to see Yellowstone Park, as everbear hunting is good, especially near the increasing multitudes are learning. The expark boundaries!
perienced sage-brusher bu:ys his staple
Food prices in the stores range from groceries and equipment in the larger
moderate to exorbitant. Articles with the towns outside the park. Once within the
price printed on the wrapper are sold at boundary he sets up his home under his
the stipulated figure. I do not recall the own private pine tree in one of the free
price of bananas at Old Faithful, where I tourist camps. His box of provisions he
was stationed in 1934, but I do remember suspends from a bough beyond the grasp
it seemed so ridiculous that I did not in- of ever-hungry bears. Wise and leisurely,
dulge in the fruit. Flour was twice as high, he learns that Yellowstone holds wonders
and ground beef and fresh tomatoes, even and treasures unknown to the three-andwhen the latter were in season, were ap- one-haH-day dude. He also learns that the
proximately three times as costly at Old way to appreciate them is not to pay park
Faithful as in Pocatello or Salt Lake City. prices. The sage-brusher, one suspects,
Married federal employees living in Yel- holds the firm opinion that the people relowstone Park purchase many of their com- ferred to in the first Yellowstone Park Act
modities outside, usually at Livingston, were the American people, not a small
Montana, the nearest large town.
group of concession operators.

~~~~!a~M~:i:~~~tiil1

THE LIBRARY

~
T he Background of Crtme
By

FLETCHER PRATI

MONEY FROM HOME, by Damon Runyon. $2.00. 512 xiX; 313 pp. New York:
Stokes.
CRIME INCORPORATED, by Martin
Mooney. $2.50' 512 x 8; 280 pp. New York:
Whittlesey House.
SCIENCE VERSUS CRIME, by Henry
Morton Robinson. $2.5 0 5 x 8 ~; 303 pp.
Indianapolis: Babbs-Merrill.
MORE STUDIES IN MURDER, by Edmund Pearson. $2.50' 5~ x 812; 3 1 5 pp.
New York: Smith & Haas.
ROOTS OF CRIME, by Dr. Franz Alexander and Dr. William Healy. $3. 00. 5~
x 8'i4; 305 pp. New York: Knopf.

ity of the first to the purple velvet gloom

of the last. Only two of them (the Pearson
and Robinson opera) are well enough written to be read for their literary merits;
only two (Robinson again and Roots of
Crime) make any effort toward serious
treatment; and only one, the last, reports
an attempt to deal with the roots of that
problem of crime which is so highly absorbing to the American public that detective .stories form the largest single class
of books now being printed.
It is perhaps significant that the one serious effort to deal with the question should
be the record of an almost total failure,
ending in a plea, of insufficient data and

wave. Mr. Robinson, who writes like an

angel except when he is discussing general
ideas, and Mr. Mooney, who writes like
Bernarr MacFadden all the time, feel
themselves on surer ground. They are quite
certain that the roots of crime lie in "general social maladjustment" - one of those
vague New Deal phrases by which anything from boondoggling to blowing off
the top of your neighbor's head may be justified. "Under present conditions crime will
never be eradicated," says Mr. Robinson.
"Nor is it likely to decrease until those
who engage in it, those who profit by it,
those who tolerate it, are swept aside by
an informed and powerful social philosophy which declares that no citizen ...
shall henceforth be condemned to a life
of criminality by flaws of physical heritage,
mental deficiency, social inequality or economic pressure."
Now we submit that this is counsel of
despair, with an elfin echo of "Workers
of the world, unite ! You have nothing to
lose but your chains." It is unrealistic, as
hopelessness always is, for it does not seem
to have occurred to either the melancholy
Mr. Robinson or the gloomy Mr. Mooney
that the "social maladjustment" they complain about is, in fact, the very spirit of
America. Essentially, there is not much
difference between the boy who leaves

experience. The scientists, in other words,

home to join a gang and the men who left

are not at all sure either of the cause or

the cure of the American permanent crime

home to colonize a continent. Both forsake

intolerable local conditions in the hope of

HESE

five crime books fall readily into a

T chromatic scale from the pinkish hilar-

497

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

gaInIng large rewards among circumstances dangerous and trying indeed, but
beyond the reach of petty regulations designed to make humans move through life
with the rhythmical monotony of clocks.
The American frontier, as every visitor
from Basil Hall down has noted, has always been the abode of "bad men". Weare
hardly a generation from it, and the closing of the frontiers has simply driven the
bad men into the cities.
The interesting point concerns the permanence of this frontier psychology, this
spirit of discontent, adventure, and lawlessness. Certainly it now underlies the whole
of American society; the population is
made up of elements on which a process
of evolutionary selection has operated to
accentuate these characteristics. For three
centuries Europe has been discharging its
turbulent oddities into this continent to
join others of their kind, and keepi'ng its
contented cows' at home. If Mr. Mooney
were familiar with the Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle or the sagas, as he apparently
is not, he would know that Norway and
England a thousand years ago were vexed
with crime and an alliance between racketeers and politicians very little different
from that which he pictures as a new and
horrible menace to America. All the characteristic stigmata were present then as
now, even the excessive legalism which so
frequently aids the guilty to escape in the
cases described by Mr. Pearson. Indeed,
this legislative enthusiasm for manufacturing a thousand new crimes in the effort to
prevent one old one, is not the least curious of the botanical specimens nourished
in the subsoil of American lawlessness. Mr.
Mooney (a great hand at alliteration) mentions "sixteen sinister rackets". Six of them
are not crimes in any country but the
United States. One other (compulsory
unionization of labor) is practiced by the

governments of several countries with the

approval of the population; one more (mo..
nopolistic control of certain food products) is practiced by all governments at
times, and still another (gambling) is publicly encouraged in many other New Utopias. The average citizen cannot keep from
breaking the law in some way every day,
and if he be of a sardonic spirit, he can
hardly miss the fact that it is very little
worse for him to break all the laws. In
short, the American does not have the European's respect for the rules of society to
start with, and even if he did have it,
American society has so many rules he
cannot possibly keep them all.
This is curiously reflected in the two
books from the opposite poles of the spectrum. Drs. Alexander and Healy sought to
arouse in the subjects they treated by psychoanalysis, not a sense of social respon-'
sibility but one of individual responsibility - an interesting plan but one not likely
to be carried much further until psychology
becomes a more exact science.
Mr. Runyon's racetrack touts, petty
crooks, and dames have a code of conduct,
and a guy is a "wrong gee" if he violates
it, yet all of them accept the effraction of
the official statutes as a matter of course.
Although the characters in Money From
Home are romanticized out of all resemblance to human beings, there is no reason
to doubt the acc\lracy of Mr. Runyon's
portrait of their attitude toward the law.
After all, as the public relations counsel
for Broadway, he is in a position to speak
authoritatively for this code. Very prominent among its principles are those forbidding all commerce with "squealers", permitting a man to take justice into his own
hands in cases of "outraged honor", and
the idea that woman is a frail vessel no
more to be held responsible for her acts
than a child. None of these codes is recog-

THE LIBRARY

499

nized in law, yet as Mr. Pearson's cases

prove, all are established in fact, not in New
York alone but throughout the country.
Mr. Pearson traces the beginnings of the
curious code of "honor-slaying" to the days
of the Hearst-Pulitzer yellow journalism
war, when the sob sisters of the Tournai and
the World got Maria Barberi a re-trial and
acquittal in an honor murder of which she
had already been convicted and which she
did not deny ("Everything went black I") ;
and the murder of Albert Richardson by
Dan McFarland. I think he is in error;
more than half a century before the Richardson-McFarland case, Andrew Jackson
was relieved of pains and penalties after
killing a man for similar cause, and General Sickles had filled his wife's paramour
with lead slugs amid universal approval
long before McFarland had heard of Richardson.
One detects an accent of indignation in
Mr. Pearson's accounts of such acquittals,
apparently due to the fact that they fly in
the face of the law. But his annoyance is
both useless and unphilosophical; for he
fails to recognize that all law has come
into being by crystallizing around a core of
custom. The really curious thing about
this code is that with adaptations to adult
conditions, it is precisely the code of schoolboys the world over. Mr. Robinson, indeed,
recognizes this fact. He finds the roots of
crime in the American competitive system
- "For we cheris,h a peculiar illusion, we
Americans, the illusion that we all have a
right to be .rich, beautiful, well-married.
. . . Psychically, this illusion is so green, so
childish, that other nations laugh at us for
our naivete. A French farmer knows he
will always be poor and a German shopkeeper realizes that his tiny Geschaft will

And the inherent youthfulness of the

American attitude toward crime comes
out in all the first four books in this little
collection. In Money From Home, COIncidence drops fortune out of the skies into
the lap of every deserving citizen and finds
a glass slipper for every Cinderella; Crime,
Incorporated is all about the dreadful
boogeymans, miirchen of a more romantic
world; More Studies in Murder urbanely
conducts its readers through a tide of blood
that is no more vital than the theoretical
gore spilled in a schoolboys' war game;
Science Versus Crime tells us about magicians who conjure genii out of bottles to
defeat the demons of darkness. Yes, it is
all very jejune, childish, and unsophisticated. It may be possible for America to
find laws that will permit everyone reasonable activity, but if we ever get to the millennial stage where none of us has any
sense of "general social maladjustment", it
will be time for the Japs to step in and take
us over along with the other coolies.

never yield him more than a mere liveli-

ments of alcoholic beverages. When Messrs.

hood. Yet we Americans scorn these miserable destinies."

Shaw, Wells, Belloe, and Chesterton debated publicly at least once a week, and

e
Chesterton's Three-Card Trick
By

ERNEST BOYD

THE WELL AND THE SHALLOWS, by

G. K. Chesterton. $2.50. 5~ x 8; 277 pp.
New York: Sheed and Ward.
years I have been watching
F the thirty
gyrations of Mr. Chesterton's conOR

troversial pen. I was a precocious reader of

his when he professed to be a Liberal and,
though an ardent advocate of beer, beer,
glorious beer, wrote for what was then
known as the "Cocoa Press", because the
Cadbury owners did not permit advertise-

500

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

that monster of literary vaudeville, the

"Chesterbelloc", was christened by Mr.
Shaw, I witnessed the gradual evolution of
Mr. Chesterton 'from Liberalism to Roman
Catholicism and a weird utopia of Merrie
England, filled with pious, beer-drinking
peasants, all craftsmen or tillers of the soil,
and all snugly ensconced in their pre-Reformation faith. At all times I was impressed by
his manifest inferiority, as a controversialist, to the other writers of the group, and
to this day I cannot understand how his
mere thimble-rigging of ideas could be
compared to the witty and thought-provoking paradoxes of Mr. Shaw.
Mr. Shaw, it is true, had a doctrine to
preach, whereas Mr. Chesterton had nothing to offer, for a long time, but puns, verbal or mental, chiefly the former. In 198,
however, when Orthodoxy came as a positive pronouncement of his creed, he, too,
had found religion, and after the lapse of
some years he was formally received into'
the Roman Catholic Church. Whatever
private satisfactions this conversion may
have brought him, the seriousness of his
purpose did not in any way change or improve his style. Unlike Mr. Shaw, he could
not combine wit and paradox with the
gravity of his mission. He remained the
incorrigible three-card trickster, uttering
his spiel of machine-made quips and ~pi
grams. Just to show that his method could
be adapted to the rehabilitation of any system of belief, he actually wrote an essay
in Orthodoxy proving from fairy-tales that
miracles are possible.
The Well and the Shallows is clearly
intended to take its place beside that earlier work, for it purports to be a serious
exposition of Mr. Chesterton's orthodox
opinions on current controversial questions. Roman Catholic editors and publishers are always pathetically eager to welcome any reputedly intellectual figure who

professes to have found a haven in the

bosom of Holy Mother Church. My own
feeling is that they ought to beware of
their newly-found friends, for they usually
represent the nadir of that excruciating art
known as Christian apologetics, and G. K.
Chesterton is certainly no exception. As
the basis of all such arguments is essentially a begging of the question, the assumption that what has to be proved is already
true, without proof, all that one can do is
to judge the quality and method of argument as evidence of the author's good faith
- whatever his Faith may be.
Both the tacit and the declared thesis is
that the dogmas of Roman Catholic orthodoxy are the quintessence of sweetness, reasonableness, and light, and that modern
science and modern thought, Protestantism and agnosticism, industrialism and
parliamentary democracy, are the negation
of civilization and the sole source of all
social evils and inequalities. In brief, that
the thirteenth century was the best. Hence,
we find Mr. Chesterton arguing that N aziism is the inevitable result of Protestantism. "The hollow places that were once
filled with the foaming fanaticism of the
first Reformation doctrines are now filled
with a foaming fanaticism of a totally different kind." Yet, the Nazi movement is
led by an Austrian Catholic, despite Mr.
Chesterton's assurances that Catholic Austria was the bulwark of true German
Christianity against the Mohammedans
and the Teutonic barbarians of fhe North.
Strange, is it not, that the "void" created
by the Reformation elsewhere has given us
the entire phalanx of anti-Nazi, Protestant,
democratic countries? But this is falling
back on "the jolly old catchword of calling
Hitler a Catholic".
Because Bernard Shaw has read the
Bible and drawn from it other conclusions
than those of Mr. Chesterton, the latter

THE LIBRARY
hastens to deprecate what he calls the "fun
and futility" of "sectarian" Scripturereading. He realizes, in other. words, that
it is dangerous for intelligent people to
study the documents upon which the entire Christian religion is based. For instance, an advantage of ignoring the Bible
is that one can then prove that divorce and
birth-control are contrary to the teachings
of God. There is, of course, not the faintest
evidence that such is the case. In the Old
Testament, divorce is explicitly sanctioned.
There is no commandment against it, nor
against birth-control- surely a curious
failure on Jehovah's part to buttress up two
of the most fanatical dogmas of the Catholic Church? As birth-control, in particular, is a subject upon which that Church
presumes to dictate to non-Catholics, we
are entitled to ask what Scriptural authority there is for such an attitude. The answer is: none whatsoever.
"The only reference to the matter is the
well-known passage in which Onan incurred the Lord's displeasure because he
refused to have children by his brother's
wife. His motive was specifically indicated,
and the entire incident is one of hundreds
of similar occasions when the Children of
Israel were punished for minor and frequently ridiculous offenses, none of which
has been taken over as precedent for the
guidance of Christians. Otherwise, why
have the kosher dietary laws been ignored? By analogy with the case of Onan,
Mr. Chesterton should be opposed to census-taking, because the Lord punished Joab
for so doing by killing seventy thousand
men. In contrast to this isolated punishment of Onan, and the innumerable other
references to like manifestations of the
Lord's wrath, are all the very precise and
reiterated commands which are quietly dis..
regarded. The Lord, if we may judge by
His own Holy Word, was much more con-

51

cerned about circumCISIon than about

Onanism and He most emphatically denounced the lighting of fires in households
on the Sabbath. His concern for every detail of hygiene, as understood at the time,
would suggest that the practice of contraception would have inspired more than an
anecdote, if He had deemed it a matter
of paramount importance.
Mr. Chesterton .adds nothing to the familiar Catholic diatribes on all aspects of
the sexual question, save the wholly gratuitous assumption that, because divorce is
possible, people now marry with the ntenton of getting divorced. By a like process of non-reasoning he protests against
the revision of the Anglican prayer-book,
on the ground that Parliament acted as if
it "owned the Church of England", and
that many of the members were atheists.
Why a state-owned church should not be
controlled. by the people who support it,
and discussed by the representatives of the
nation to which it belongs, I fail to see.
Here, too, the typical distrust of the Bible
again becomes visible in the preposterous
claim that the Book of Common Prayer is
the "masterpiece of Protestantism", because
"it was written by apostate Catholics....
It is strong, not in so far as it is the first
Protestant book, but in so far as it was the
last Catholic book." Protestantism is too
vulgar to produce great stylists, readers of
English literature will be pleased to hear,
so Chesterton proves that style is exc1usivelythe possession of "men who had been
Catholics for fourteen-hundred years", as
contrasted with "men who have been Protestants for four-hundred years". This obviously accounts for the superiority of the
Catholic Douay Bible over the King James
Version. I wonder why more than fourteen hundred years of Catholicism failed to
give style to the Bible in French, Italian,
and Spanish, and why the "foaming fan-

52.

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

aticism" of the Reformation gave us the

German Bible, the only one at all comparable to our own, from a literary point of
view?
The Early Victorian notion of the "dog..
ma of science" is trotted out and triumphantly refuted by reference to "the unanswered challenge of Lourdes", and to the
mystical maunderings of the new physi..
cists. Mr. Chesterton will never grasp, ap..
parently, the real significance of that other
Early Victorian and still sound concept:
agnosticism. He believes that we are all
panting to believe in something that has
not been proved. So he asks us to believe
that "the Church is always in advance of
the world", because St. Thomas was an
internationalist and St. Joan a nationalist
before their time, and the blessed Roberto
Bellarmine said "all there is to be said for
democracy". Well, it is surely most unfor..
tunate that the Church was so far behind
the time of St. Joan that it burned her,
and that the Ptolemaic system was so far
in advance of the world that the Church
punished Galileo for demonstrating the
now accepted Copernican astronomy. But
then, Mr. Chesterton does not hesitate to
say that the Spanish Inquisition was
"started strictly by the State", a piece of
thimble-rigging which will presumably
convince us that the Church had little or
nothing to do with it.
Moreover, in spite of the fact that the
only Protestant country in the world where
tyranny flourishes today is Germany, Mr.
Chesterton argues that Italy enjoys popular
freedom, and that it is in the Protestant
countries that traditions of freedom are
being "ruthlessly and rapidly torn up and
uprooted". In order to see through this
three-card trick of debate it is necessary
to realize that "Protestant tyranny is totally different from Catholic tyranny; let
alone Catholic liberty". One might reply

that all tyrannies are equally objectionable,

or that the Protestant variety has mani..
festly weighed more lightly on the modern
world. Mr. Chesterton, however, is not in..
terested in history. The Church being in
possession of the Absolute Truth, it can do
no wrong. Non-Catholics, not being
equipped with this privilege, can never be
right when they differ from Catholics.
Which brings us back to the petitio principii, which renders futile all discussion
with G. K. Chesterton.

The Wordsworths
By

LLEWELYN POWYS

THE EARLY LETTERS OF WILLIAM

AND DOROTHY WORDSWORTH,
1787-185, arranged and edited by Ernest
de Selincourt. $8.75. 6~ x 9; 578 pp. New
York: Oxford University Press.

SELINCOURT is performing an
M invaluable
service in editing the letR. DE

ters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth.

It is true that the result of his industry is
never likely to make popular reading, yet
for persons possessing a serious interest in
the literary history of England these comprehensive collections will always be highly
valued.
The volume under consideration contains the correspondence of the brother
and sister during the early and more interesting years of their lives, and it offers an
opportunity for a course of quiet reading
that will be found restorative to those who
desire a retreat from the insistent pressure
of present-day life. It is in truth a homely
enough record of the day-by-day existence
of the poet and his gifted sister, and yet
as the effect of the letters accumulates we
find ourselves becoming more and more

THE LIBRARY
involved in the modest dramas of the unmenaced Dove Cottage existence. They
were an odd pair, the young man with
slowly-moving animal emotions and
slowly-moving animal thoughts capable
of being roused under particular circumstances to passionate reciprocities or to
truly sublime poetic inspirations; the sensitive girl more aware than her brother of
the surrounding scenes, with a quicker attention and more variable mental complexion, and spiritually far less heavily
self-absorbed. They used to say that
Wordsworth's head resembled that of a
horse, and surely Dorothy might be
likened to a wild-eyed filly following at
the unshod heavy hoofs of an "old mountain rover", which, ranging free - now
walking, now grazing, now walking, now
grazing - was as indifferent to rain as to
sunshine, in all weathers patient and enduring. There is no doubt that inspiration
was often far from Wordsworth. For
weeks together he would remain in a state
of "stupid being", in a state of blank and
obdurate passivity, like a wayside stock
which confronts a turnpike with the same
unillumined, weather-worn, unchanging
visage. Many of the letters reveal a ponderous quality, if nothing worse, so that
one is dismayed to findonesel recalling
De Quincey's malicious recollections of
walking by the side of Dorothy (a little
way behind the poet who was discussing
business with a friend), and of hearing
her exclaim as she observed the concentrated slope of Wordsworth's shoulders:
"Is it possible? Can that be William?
How very mean he looks!"
A dash of the attorney blood of their
father seems to have run in the veins
of all the family. Even Dorothy can be

episode of William's love affair in France

was crowned with success for a whole
century, so that the name of Annette ValIon was all but forgotten, together with
their little natural daughter Caroline, the
subject of Wordsworth's sonnet which
contains the beautiful lines:
Dear Child! Dear Girl! that walkst with
me here,
If thou appear untouched by solemn
thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine.

That the poet did have something a

trifle unworthy in his composition appears
clear enough after reading a letter addressed to his wealthy benefactor, Sir
George Beaumont, a few days subsequent
to the tragic death of Captain John Wordsworth, .Wordsworth's younger brother,
drowned in the wreck of the Abergavenny
off Weymauth in 1805:
My dear and honoured friend, one pang
I had, one vain wish, one bitter regret, it
was this, that in the hour of his agony he
might have had communicated to him for
one poor moment your goodness to his
Brother.

And yet in spite of such lapses he remains always a figure that commands respect. Mr. H. R. King, who was for many
years a schoolmaster at Sherborne and died
a few months ago at the age of eighty,
told me that as a young man he used to
ask the dalesmen for their memories of the
poet and recollected one of them saying,
"I mind the auld man well. Many is the
time I have heard him a'humming to himself out on the fells." It was of course
Wordsworth's habit to compose his poetry
as he walked abroad on those celebrated
spindle legs of his, about which De
Quincey makes such unmannerly sport,

sharp with her brother Richard on the

calculating that they had carried him at

subject of her patrimony, and it is to be recalled how the family plan to conceal the

least two-hundred thousand miles far all

their ill looks.

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

Certain modern readers may agree with
Miss Babette Deutsch in finding the Wordsworths' letters stodgy and full of more information about the activity of their bowels
than about that of their minds, but there
will be others both more and less sophisticated who will derive comfort from an
initiation into the passage of such harmless
uneventful days, days redeemed by happenings such as the following, which, though
lightly referred to, appears now to contain
"intimations of Immortality" indeed! "I left
William sitting upon a stone near the foot
of BrothersWater and walked up the lake.
When I returned I found him writing the
poem which I send you"-the poem in
question being the one which begins:
The cock is crowing
The stream is flowing
The small birds twitter

The lake doth glitter

The green field sleeps in the sun.

A poem as thrilling to the ears of after

generations as is a blackbird's April whistling from a pear-tree branch. These early
letters teach us to forget all those later
years of the great poet's lHe, years which
were studiously employed in the deliverance of endless verses which were to
provoke Oscar Wilde to remark: "Wordsworth found sermons under the stones,
but he had put them there himself."
There is a delightful intimacy about
many of the letters. How charming, for
instance, is the excitement of Derwent,
Coleridge's second little boy, when the
Wordsworths were seen from a distance
approaching the Keswick house, baby John
and all. "Derwent was half mad with
pleasure. They said he ran up and down
the room shouting 'Mary's coming, Dorothy's coming, get the green stool for
Johnny!'" There is scarce a letter that
does not open a door for us into a solid

Cockermouth fairyland made up of hazelnut copses, primrose orchards, and of the

sounds of rainbow-falling waterfalls. Cockermouth, where Wordsworth was born,
isa land of long sunshine-mornings, of
long indolent afternoons, of clouds and
winds and small spring rains and of lovely
interminable twilights - the dwelling
place of a simple folk content with the
most .harmless pleasures ever conceived:
"We have our haircutter below stairs, William is reading the leach-gatherer to him";
and again in another of Dorothy's letters,
"You who have nursed your own babe by
a cottage fireside know what peace and
pleasure, wakefulness and hope there is
in attending upon a healthy infant . . .
his eyes are not fine ones, they are small,
but that you know makes him more like
his Father, and they have frequently the
very same expression as his Father'sthat same mild light when he smiles"; and
again to her same sympathetic correspondent, Mrs. Clarkson, "Oh! my dear friend,
what a beautiful spot this is! The greenest in all the earth, the softest green covers
the mountains even to the very top. I am
writing in my own room. Every now and
then I hear the chirping of a .little family
of swallows that have their abode against
the glass of my windows." The very disappointments and frustrations of this exceptional girl's life seem to add an air of
reality to the primitive idyllic scene; and
although in her old age, when her understanding became pathetically overcast and
Wordsworth tended her with an ungrudging devotion, we have every reason for
suspecting that in these earlier times he
would not have concerned himself to
lighten her indoor duties, which, after all,
must have been so much more irksome
to the poetic Dorothy than to W ordsworth's wife, "domestic as a plate", of
whom De Quincey reports that the words

THE LIBRARY
"God bless you" represented her conversational gifts. "Dorothy," Wordsworth
writes to Coleridge, "is now sitting by me
racked with toothache. This is a grievous
misfortune as she has so much work for
her needle 'among the bed curtains"; and
she herself in a letter to Jane Marshall
writes: "1 was left at home to make pies
and dumplings, and was to follow them
when I had finished my business; but as
they could not tell exactly which way they
should go I sought them in vain."
And yet when one remembers the lot
of the average young lady of the period,
hers might appear favored. She would certainly have had small scope for moments
of high imaginative intensity had she remained in the establishment of her conventional uncle, Canon Cookson of Windsor, and after all, to have been present at
the actual birth of the Romantic Revival
in English poetry was a most singular
privilege. "We have been on another tour:
We set out last Monday evening at half
past four. The evening was dark and
cloudy. We went eight miles, William and
Coleridge employing themselves in laying
the plan of a ballad, to be published with
some pieces of William's." When, however, she writes to Coleridge or of Coleridge, a heightened feeling becomes apparent which leads one to suspect that the
old hearsay which suggested that the heart
of this rare creature was held in the keeping of her brother's extraordinary friend
was. not altogether unreliable. "Farewell!
God love you! God bless you! Dear Coleridge, our very dear friend."
De Quincey, michievous as a drawingroom sprite, does not hesitate "to pass remarks" upon the singular material good
fortune that accompanied the poet through
his long life, so that what with legacies
and sinecures his income never fell behind
the increases of his expenditure, "still

keeping pace in almost arithmetical ratio

with his wants". For such dispensations of
Providence he is most surely to be envied,
but even more perhaps. for the spacious
undisturbed days of innocent tranquillity
when in his goings-in and comings-out he
remained hour after hour, year after year,
untroubled in his mind and untroubled in
his body, days the quality of which may
well be suggested by such an innocent extract as the following: "1 am going to
spend the afternoon with my sister and
the children in the orchard. It is as warm
as summer."

Our Vanishing Vulgarity

By

MEADE MINNIGERODE

A VISIT TO, AMERICA, by A. G. Macdonell. $2.50' 5 ~ x 8 ~; 274 pp. New

York: Macmillan.
AMERICA,

PRACTICAL

HAND-

BOOK, by Ronald Elwy Mitchell. Five

shillings. 7~ x 5~; 318 pp. London:

Hamish Hamilton.
was much troubled
A G.withMACDONELL
parties. "Only in a Pullman car
is the European traveler safe from parties."
In New York, in the first four days, sixteen cocktail parties, four dinner parties,
four supper parties, and four dances. He
survived sufficiently, however, to discover
that in New York only the poor use the
subway, and that it is impossible to find
any trains in the Grand Central Station.
He also visited the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Harl,em. In addition, and continually pestered with parties, Macdonell
visited Baltimore, Chicago, and Omaha;
Billings, Helena, and Butte; Salt Lake
City, San Francisco, Monterey, and Los
Angeles; Fort Worth, Dallas, Louisville,

506

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

Boston, and Paterson, New Jersey. So he

has written a book on America.
R.. E." Mitchell spent three years in
America; under the- auspices of the Commonwealth Fund, he studied at an American university; he traveled thousands of
miles all over the country in every direction; he was not overwhelmed with cocktails or unduly bothered with parties; and
he, too, has written a book, a "superficial"
book he modestly calls it. A very different
sort of book.
Now Macdonell, after all his mileage,
has "never solved this problem" - he calls
it "one of the major insoluble problems of
American life" - and the problem is this:
"Why is it that so many American gentlemen, often of the most distinguished appearance and of otherwise faultless manners, find it necessary to expectorate in
public so often, whereas American ladies
so v~ry seldom do?" In fact, the author
"cannot recall a single instance of seeing
an American lady perform this inelegant
feat, whereas American gentlemen are at
it, in club cars at any rate, frequently".
W ell, it is a problem. One of those curious problems of American life. It all goes
back to 1840 - the quotations from now
on are all from contemporary American
sources - when Home was "the palace of
the husband and the father", in which he
was "the monarch of that little empire,
wearing a crown that is the gift of Heaven,
swaying a scepter put into his hands by the
Father of all, acknowledging no superior,
fearing no rival, and dreading no usurper".
Expectorating at will, and unchallenged,
into his large spittoons. The American lady
never had a chance. To men belonged the
professions and offices, to them, "by right
of courtesy, all the activities and authorities of life". Indeed, the only activity open
to woman, "the only accredited seat for
a woman's intellect", was authorship.

Actually, Macdonell has come among

us a little late. Expectorating is not, really,
what it used to be in America. The old
proficiency, among our gentlemen at least,
is not there. The propulsion of the quid,
across the sanded floor, into the bull's-eye
of the brass spittoon, in a swiftly accurate
arc - that art is dying out. There is now
hardly an American gentleman who could
hit a fifty-cent piece at five paces. Already
our vulgarity has lost much of its fine, aggressive individuality. Today it sits, a pale
shadow of itself, in club cars, distinguished
and faultlessly mannered, unable to do
anything more than expectorate - and not
too brilliantly either; without any particular verve or technique, without coloratura
and without pride.
But Macdonell's problem is not insoluble. They already knew the answer to it
in 1840. "The secret of all this vulgarity
in society is that wealth, or the reputation
of wealth, constitutes the open sesame to
its delectable precincts." There it ismoney, money, money. Only the poor use
the subway, where they are not permitted
to expectorate. At the present rate at which
wealth is evaporating, it will not be long
before all our gentlemen are using the
subway - no more club cars, no more spittoons - and then expectorating itself will
finally cease in America.
And not only that, but our capacity for
giving parties is steadily diminishing.
These visiting authors who have to lock
themselves up in their return cabins to recuperate from the effects of our terrific
hospitality simply cannot take it. Our terrific hospitality today is a puny degeneration from the robust conviviality and gastronomic give and take of the previous
century; our attention to visitors only a
feeble twittering. compared to the sweat..
ing, corn-trampling, vociferating stampede
of our earlier curiosity, our former excita-

THE LIBRARY
tion. Of course, the number of visiting au- stewed oysters, boned turkey with celery
thors has vastly increased, and not every and cranberries, ice cream and sugar
goose quill can be a swan's feather. But plums, accompanied by hock, sherry, Mathe fact remains that we have lost much of deira, champagne, and brandy. Perhaps
our social vigor, along with our decreasing Macdonell attended some banquets, but
vulgarity. We no longer have so much was his digestive prowess ever challenged,
stuff on the meat ball.
all at one sitting, to the tune of two soups,
Parties forsooth! Macdonell was sub- two fish, five releves including turkey and
jected to innumerable cocktails and high- calf's head, some cold set pieces, nineteen
balls, but at that no one filled him full of entrees and then - roast beef, roast lamb,
sangarees and timberdoodles. He saw Har- roast duck, roast turkey, roast chicken, and
lem, but he never saw the Model Artists roast goose, followed by guinea hens, quails,
show in which men and women were ex- and partridges with seven vegetables, leadhibited in tableaux vivants "in almost the ing up to twelve desserts?
same state in which Gabriel saw them in
And no doubt Macdonell was lionized.
the Garden of Eden on the first morning But was he ever, in the midst of three
of creation"-those "nice tableaux vivants hours of speechmaking, a "pilgrim of genof beautiful young ladies sans both petti- ius from other lands, bringing costly -gems
coats and pants, who scorning fashion's to enrich the foreign shrine, and gathering
shifts and whims did nightly crowds de- wild flowers to adorn the domestic altar"?
light by showing up their handsome limbs In your hat I And was he ever - to the
at fifty cents a sight". Macdonell had to sound of an enormous gong - made to apfoot it through numberless dances, but he pear upon a platform under a dome of
never staggered home with cramps in his bunting and gold tissue, greeted with gales
calves after an evening spent dancing the of laughter, and then buffeted about
violent polka-that "gross, vulgar and ob- through a concourse of three thousand perscene exhibition"-in a ballroom reflecting sons who all fell in behind, whooping and
the glitter of two thousand candles, with cheering their heads off?
young ladies wearing tight corsages
That was the hilarious America of a
trimmed with feathers, and roses and birds hundred years ago. Vim, vigor, vulgarity,
of paradise in their hair; or else the hair and victuals. And very good fun, too. Now
in bandeaux, a little frizzed, the back already we are falling from our previous
coiled up in thick rouleaux like cables, low estate. It will not be long before Amerwith two branches of the pink acacia ica is made entirely safe for visiting audrooping at each .side of the face. Freely thors. It is too bad.
sprinkled with frangipani or patchouli,
But R. E. Mitchell's book shows what
catechu, ambergris, musk or spermaceti. you can do if you come to a strange coun
Himself anointed with bear's grease, try armed with a lively and humorous
bull's marrow, or Balm of Columbia, per- curiosity, a certain share of common sense,
fumed perhaps with Double Extract of an intelligent desire to see and observe,
Queen Victoria.
and a mind capable of recording impres
Macdonell partook of many suppers, sions and not merely impressionisms. A
but he never had to take Spolen's Elixir of series of such books, on the English, on
Health for having been forced to indulge the French, on any nationality you please,
too freely in an eleven o'clock supper of would make fascinating and instructive
M

58

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

reading. The book is, as it proclaims itself,

a handbook, filled with every sort of practical information, much of it superfluous
to an American reader. And yet there is
a virtue in lists, in catalogues of places
and names, in comparisons of terms and
juxtapositions of methods, which makes
even those portions of the book entertaining to a native. For it is always entertaining to read about yourself, to be reminded
how you do a thousand and one things
which you do without thinking, to discover that you do a thousand and one
things which you had forgotten you did.
This is America, fine, funny and foolish,
from a thousand and one viewpoints;
from boats, and trains, and flivvers; from
Vermont hilltops and Florida beaches;
from the Empire State Building and from
Hollywood studios; from hotels, and tourist rest-houses, and roadside cabin camps;
from open fields, and deserts, and waste
places; from Charleston, and Duluth, and
Sauk Center. What we do and how we
do it; what we say and how we pronounce
it; what we eat and how we cook it; what
we think, what we sing, what we laugh
at. And some very fine descriptions of our
countryside. Aside from this, no wonders
of Nature, and almost no cocktails. It is
excellent reading.

sure, they struggle for emancipation by means

of scientific gadgets and instalment buying. But
the laws of mathematics are exact laws, and the
family which tries to make one dollar do the
work of two is headed for disaster. In the final
collapse, the structure of home, parents, and children lies buried beneath the debris of fallacious
hopes and broken promises. It I Have Four
Apples is a more important book than its predecessor, Years Are So Long; it is more ruthless
and probing. If read by a sufficient number of
people, it would do more towards bringing
about a clear understanding of modern economic
problems than a complete library of academic
treatises.
FREEDOM, FAREWELL.
By Phyllis Bentley.
$2.5 0
5~ x 7~; 496 pp.

Here is a story of Caesar and the end of the

Roman Republic, of the realist patriot who became. dictator in order to purge his .country of
"the exasperating muddle of the Senate, the
selfishness of the rich, the ignorance and misery
of the poor", and left behind him a legacy of
despotism. Miss Bentley adorns her tale with a
remarkably vivid picture of the Roman world of
Caesar's day. She builds on fact and allows her
creative imagination full play in the interpretation of causes and characters. Caesar and Brutus,
clever time-serving Cicero, Julia, the soldier Pompey, Portia, stern Cato, the Servilia whom Caesar
loved, Rome and the Rubicon, Pharsala, Philippi,
people and fateful places come into life and being
in an absorbing, brilliantly written historical
novel.
CAPTAIN CONAN.
By Roger Vereel.

Briefer Mention

$2.50

FICTION
IF I HAVE FOUR APPLES.
By Josephine Lawrence.
$2.50
5% x 8~; 3 1 4 pp.

Stokes
New York

Here, at last, is the definitive novel on middleclass America. The dreary saga of the Hoes is the
composite case-history of ten million American
families who manage to scrape through life without in the least comprehending its values or
responsibilities. Hemmed in by economic pres-

Macmillan
New York

Holt and Company

New York

57'z x 8; 296 pp.

The portrait of a born soldier brought to dark

stature by war, painted by a Frenchman who
has utilized his own experiences in the Balkans
during the late ArmageddoJ.l to construct an unusually moving story. Captain Conan is a onetime draper of Brittany, who discovers in armed
strife the outlet for bravery, as well as debauchery and insubordination. At the close of the war
he leads his band of trench-raiders into Rumania,
where they pose as heroes while pursuing the
more profitable trade of bandits. Finally placed
under arrest for the death of a hold-up victim,

THE LIBRARY
the Captain wipes clean his shield by a valiant
feat of arms. Then occurs his gradualretrogression to civilian life, where the collapse of his
character and morale becomes complete. This is
a story of tragedy and baseness, lighted here and
there with glimpses of a human struggling
against the destiny of the misfit. It is neither a
defense nor a condemnation of war; rather it is
a study of war's effects upon man's mind. As a
novel of sound worth, it deserves the honor
awarded it in France ~ the Prix Goncourt for
1934

I'LL MOURN YOU LATER.

By Catherine Whitcomb.
Houghton Mifflin
$2
6 x 8 ~; 257 pp.
Boston

A first novel distinguished by unusual subtlety

and delicacy of perception, with a style both light
and certain. The story of a widow's return to her
childhood home for her mother's funeral, and the
foregathering of the St. John family, each one
with a different, living claim upon her, frequently
suggests, with its integrity, the artistry of Willa
Cather.
PRECIOUS BANE.
By Mary Webb.
5~ x 8; 320 pp.
$3

E. P. Dutton
New York

Awarded the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for

clusion of the book, the reader discovers that

nothing has been proved, except that radical
propaganda rarely deviates from its juvenile norm.

POETRY
THE ISLAND CALLED PHAROS.
By Archibald Fleming.
$2
5 x 7%; 66 pp.

Liveright
New York

Archibald Fleming's first volume shows sensitivity in thought and phrase; his images are
interesting; his expression is uneven. The chief
defect of his work is its fashion; it is too
patently a product of the moment's poetic styles.
After the first few lines one foresees that the
book will be the properly balanced mixture of
cle~n epithet and vague feeling, of partial penetration and general obscurity. "Adonis" is another of the numerous progeny begotten by
"The Waste Land", even to the appended and
erudite Note. "Atlas" and "Haunted House"
mingle the inflection of Ezra Pound with the
suspended accent of Archibald MacLeish. It may
be true that Fleming, as MacLeish says, has
"the poetic idiom of the generation now in its
twenties". Unfortunately, that idiom is not its
own, and the better poets of the generationJames Agee, Muriel Rukeyser, Reuel Denney,
among others - have already established a
speech of their own.

1924-25 when it was originally published in

England, and given American publication in

1926, Precious Bane is now brought out in a
new edition - for the delight of an audience
which will probably continue to be small but
deeply appreciative. It is a wise and tender book.
A STONE CAME ROLLING.
By Fielding Burke.
Longmans, Green
$2.50
5* x 8~; 412 pp.
New York

This is another proletarian novel. That is to

say, it deals with the squalor, greed, selfishness,
intolerance, and personal uncleanliness which
have for long been recognized as the hallmark
of the inferior human being. That is to say,
the families under discussion are about as unattractive and unwholesome as any to be found
in America. The principal character, in this case
a woman, devotes her efforts and physical glamor
to furthering class hatred. We are entertained
by accounts of omnipotent capitalists with
paunches, who grind anemic millworkers beneath the wheels of Rolls-Royces. At the con-

ONCE WHEN ARCTURUS SHONE.

By Mabel Posegate.
Stephen Daye Press
$r.60
5~ x 7
95 pp. Brattleboro, Vermont

*;

Mrs. Posegate writes in the tradition, but she

writes well. Her lyrics, such as the title-poem,
remind one of Sara Teasdale's early songs, but
her sonnets show a more thoughtful impulse.
At her best, her verse has spontaneity and
grace.
KANSAS POETS and IOWA POETS.
Henry Harrison
Edited by the House of Harrison.
$2 each
5~ x 8%; 221 pp.
New York

The industrious House of Harrison continues

its progress through these States, gathering poets
not so much with editorial acumen as with a
vacuum-cleaner. Soon there will be no excuse
but poverty or perversity to keep the least talented versifier frorn finding himself between
cloth-covers. With the exception of three contributors, both volumes are beneath comment.

~~~~~~m;l~!f::~~~!f::~~~~

THE CONTRIBUTORS

~~~ij.

5d

DUNCAN AIKMAN (The Middle West

Rules America) is a veteran Washington newspaperman and has been a frequent contributor
to THE MERCURY in the past.

FORD MADOX FORD (Galsworthy) is

the noted English novelist and essayist. He will
continue to contribute literary portraits to these
pages.

ERNEST BOYD (Chesterton's Three-Card

Trick), one of America's leading critics and men
of letters, has often contributed to these pages.
Further rev~ews from Mr. Boyd will appear regulady in THE LIBRARY.

FRANCES FROST (Verge) makes her winter home at Folly Island, South Carolina. Her
last novel, Innocent Summer {Farrar and Rinehart), appeared in January.

ASHMUN BROWN (The Roosevelt Myth)

has been a newspaperman for forty-five years
and a Washington correspondent for twentysix.

CONSTANCE CASSADY (Youth Faces the

Sex Problem), a native of Pittsburgh, now lives
in Chicago. She is the wife of an artist, has
three children, and is the author of Even in
Laughter (Bobbs-Merrill).

WILLIAM HENRY CHAMBERLIN (Prison

Camps of Liberty), writer and journalist, is
now in Tokio, acting as the chief Far Eastern
correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor.
He is the author of the recent two-volume history, The Russian Revolution (Macmillan).

RALPH ADAMS CRAM (Invitation to Monarchy), one of America's most eminent architects, is equally well-known as an essayist and
literary critic. His autobiography, My Life in
Architecture (Little, Brown) was published in
January.

SARA HENDERSON HAY (For a Spinster)

lives in Anniston, Alabama. She is the author
of Field of Honor (Kaleidograph).
JOHN HOLMES (Panther in the Mind),
a contributor of verse and essays to various magazines, is a member of the English Department
of Tufts College.
FRANK R. KENT (If the New Dealers
Win) is the able Washington correspondent
and political commentator of the Baltimore
Sun, in the columns of which he writes. a daily
article concerning national affairs.

ARTHUR G. LEISMAN (I Am Glad I Am

Deaf) is the president of the Wisconsin State
Association for the Deaf.

A. C. McINTOSH ( Who Owns Yellowstone

Park?) has served as a ranger and naturalist
in the government service. Since 1923, he has
headed the Biology Department of the South
Dakota State School of Mines.

REDEL DENNEY (The Birds) was graduated

from Dartmouth College in 1932. He has contributed verse to Poetry and other magazines.
SIO

MEADE MINNIGERODE (Our Vanishing

Vulgarity), novelist and biographer, lives in
Essex, Conl'lecticut. His most recent book is
The Son of Ma.rie Antoinette (Farrar and
Rinehart).

THE CONTRIBUTORS
ALBERT JAY NOCK (Who Will Pay the
Bill?), one of the foremost writers on past and
present problems of American government, is
a regular contributor to these pages.
TED OLSON (Not for the Sickle) is the
news editor of the Laramie, Wyoming, Republican-Boomerang, and the author of one volume
of verse, A Stranger and Afraid (Yale University
Press).
LLEWELYN POWYS (The Wordsworths) is
the well-known English novelist and critic.
FLETCHER PRATT (The Background of
Crime) was born in Buffalo in 1897 and now
lives in New York City. His recent books include Ordeal By Fire, The Cunning Mulatto,
and Hail, Caesar! (Smith and Haas).
JUDITH RAVEL (Solace for Lonely Hearts)
is a resident of New York City and a contributor to various newspapers and magazines.
HENRY MORTON ROBINSON (Rats) has
taught at Columbia University and is a former

editor of Contemporary Verse. His latest book,

Science Versus Crime (Bobbs-Merrill) , is reviewed in this issue.
DAVID ALLAN ROSS (The Professional
Communist), writer and journalist, has lived
in New York City for the past ten years.
MAURICE SAMUEL (Curly Commits Murder) was born in Rumania in 1895 and came to
America in 1914. He served in the A. E .F., and
since the war has traveled extensively in Europe,
Africa, and Asia Minor.
LAURENCE STALLINGS (Bush Brigades
and Blackamoors) has recently returned from
Ethiopia, where he served as war correspondent
for the North American Newspaper Alliance
and chief of photography for Fox Movietone
News. Mr. Stallings will resume his literary reviews for THE LIBRARY in the May issue of THE
MERCURY.
LIONEL WIGGAM (Evidence of April) is
a frequent contributor of verse to THE MERCURY,
as well as to a number of other magazines.

INDEX TO VOLUME XXXVII

Aikman, Duncan: The Middle West Rules
439
America
Americana . . . . . . . . 46, 2.07, 302., 460
Anderson, PaulY.: Sad Death of a Hero . 2.93
Anonymous: Don't Be a Lawyer
. 30
Anonymous: A Penny a Word . . . . . 2.85
Barry, Ralph A. . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2.9
Bartlett, Randolph: Portrait of a Day. . 72.
Bates, Ernest Sutherland: The Congressional Heritage . . . . . . . . . . 56
Beard, Charles A.: Minority Rule in
190
America
Benet, William Rose: The Brotherhood of
Orpheus . . : . . . . . . . . . . 375
Benson, E. F.: Archaeology in Literature . 119
Boie, Mildred: The Eviction . . . . . . 107
Borchard, Edwin: Circumstantial Evidence 337
Boyd, Ernest: The Gay Twenties . . . . 2.47
Report on Rugged Proletarianism
367
Chesterton's Three-Card Trick
499
Briefer Mention . . . . . 12.4, 252., 381, 508

Brown, Ashmun: The Roosevelt Myth . . 390

Burt, Struthers: Is Patriotism Necessary? 318
Cabell, Branch: Romance and the Novel . 114
Cain, James M.: Dead Man
32.6
Carlson, Oliver: The South Faces Disaster I
Cassady, Constance: Youth Faces the Sex
Problem
433
Chamberlin, William Henry: Prison
. . . . 395
Camps of Liberty
Check List of New Books . . iv, iv, iv, iv
Chesterton, G. K.: Persecuting the Com67
mon Man
Chrasta, V. James: There Is No Comfort
2.84
Now
Churchill, Allen: The Awful Disclosures
of Maria Monk . . . . . . . . . . 94
Coffin, Robert P. Tristram: Sweet Grass . 2.40
Contributors, The . . . . 12.7, 2.55, 383, 510
Cram, Ralph Adams: An American Sits in
Judgment . . . . . . .
. . 2.44
Invitation to Monarchy
. 479

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

Credo of aNew Dealer, The
404
Dangerfield, Royden J.: The Senatorial
359
, Diplomats
Denney, Reuel: A Boxer Called Panther . 2. 65
The Birds . . . . . . . . . . .' . . . 42.4
Dennis, Lawrence: What Is Mussolini? . 372.
Dickinson, Lester J.: What's the Matter
With Congress? . . . . . . . . . . 12.9
Ellis, Havelock: Studies in Sex: A History 14
Ephraim, Jerome W.: The Truth About
104
Colds
The Truth About Shaving
2.36
Fairley, Margaret Tynes: Garden Without
Walls. . . . . . . . . . . .
. 18 9
This Singing Branch
358
Fante, John: Bricklayer in the Snow . . . 50
Ford, Ford Madox: Stephen Crane
. . 36
W. H. Hudson
306
Galsworthy
44 8
Frost, Frances: Verge
389
Gerould, Katharine F.: A Yankee Looks at
, Dixie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. 1 7
Greenbie, Sydney: The Man-God of Japan 2.77
Hartwig, Lester H. : Lost, 50,000,000 Acres. 102.
Hay, Sara Henderson: For a Spinster . . . 410
Heth, Edward Harris: Homecoming . . . 197
Hibschman, Harry: What Is aReasonable
. . . . 3 63
Legal Fee?
Holmes, John: Panther in the Mind . . . 41 9
Houghton, William M.: An Open Letter to
Mr. Jefferson . . . . . . . . . . . 2.73
Kent, Frank R.: If the New Dealers Win . 385
Kenyon, Bernice: Entity . . . . . . . . 66
Kierman, Ray: Jim Curley, Boss of Massachusetts
137
Kobler, John: Walking Laboratory of Dr.
Beaumont
2.32.
Kolodin, Irving: Recorded
Music . . . . . . . . xiv, xiv, xiv, xiii
Kunau, John A.: The Publishing Business
in China . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
Leisman, Arthur G.: I Am Glad I Am Deaf 476
Lewis, Lloyd: King of the Lobby . . . . 2.11
Lyons, Eugene: Barbusse Looks at Stalin 12.2.
Machen, Arthur: Concealed Savages of
Tudor England
2.50
Marks, Margaret: Tactic . . . . . . . . 2.9
Marsden, Eric: Washington: City of Pandemonium
. . . . . . 2.2.
Masters, Edgar Lee: How to Debunk
Abraham Lincoln . . . . . . . . . 2.41

McFee, William: The Ideal Wife of a

Genius
Mclntosh,A. C.: Who Owns Yellowstone
Park?
Mencken, H. L.: Three Years of Dr. Roosevelt
Meyer, Adolph E. : Soviet Education Turns
Right . . . ~ . . . . . . . . . .
Miller, Townsend: Winter Sonnet . . . .
Minnigerode, Meade: Our Vanishing Vulgarity , . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Mullins, Helene: 0 My Generation . . .
Nock, Albert Jay: The Inevitable Rarely
Happens . . . . . . . . .
.
Progress Toward Collectivism
..
The New Deal and Prohibition
...
Who Will Pay the Bill? . . . .
.
No. 772.60: Portrait of a Lifer . .
.
O'Faolain, Sean: Roger Casement
..
Olson, Ted: Not for the Sickle.
..
Padover, S. K.: The First Liberal . . . .
Palmer Paul: Credo of aNew Dealer . .
Powys, Llewelyn: The Wordsworths . .
Pratt, Fletcher: Sherlock Holmes vs. Arsene
Lupin
The Background of Crime
Ravel, Judith: Solace for Lonely Hearts . .
R7pplier, Agnes: The Masculine Era
..
Rlchards, E. A.: These Clouds
Robinson, Henry Morton: Rats
Rohan, Jack: The First Munitions King .
Ross, David Allan: The Professional Communist . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Samuel, Maurice: Curly Commits Murder
Santayana, George: Bertrand Russell's
Searchlight . . . . . . . . . . . .
Smith, Henry Justin: King of the Lobby .
Smythe, Daniel W.: Fall of Rain . . . .
Stallings, Laurence: Bush Brigades and
Blackamoors
Stevens, James: Portland: Athens of the
West
Stuart, Jesse: Toes . . . . . . . . . . .
Talman, Charles F.: St. Elmo's Fire . . .
Thomason, John W., Jr.: This Business of
War
Turano, Anthony M.: Reno the Naughty .
Van Tine, Elisabeth G.: Summer Storm .
Varney, Harold Lord: Are the Capitalists
Asleep? . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Wallis, J. H.: 300,000 Murderers . . . . .
Wiggam, Lionel: Evidence of April
.

116
493
2.57
82.
2.92.
505
13 6
108
168
333
42.0
175
160
447
2.2.1
404
502.
86
497
489
379
350
487
351
42.5
464
377
2.11
196
411

344
152.
100
369
183
93
2.66
9
403

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

LIST

THE

telephone directory is the nation's

More than 12~OOO~OOO names are listed

calling list. Millions of people refer

in the directories of the operating com-

in homes and offices and in

panies of the Bell System. You can go

public pay stations. It is the busiest book

straight to anyone of these millions of

it plays a part in countless activities.

people -

For the names in the telephone book

cally -- by telephone.

to it daily -

easily~ quickly~

and economi-

are more than names. They are friendships and homes and families. They are
bridge parties and golf games ness successes -

busi-

buyers and sellers of

wheat or pins or skyscrapers.

The classified directory is an important feature

of your telephone book. Consult it regularly.
You will find it a handy, reliable
buying guide- a quick, easy way
to find "Where To Buy It."

BELL TELEPHONE SYSTEM

ix

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

CHECK LIST of NEW BOOKS

(Continued from- page iv)
bit as earthy, vital, and distinctive as was Old
Jules himself.

story from beginning to end, makes a major

contribution to the science of criminology. The
book is illustrated, and contains an index.

MEN IN SUN HELMETS.

By Vic Hurley.
$250
5 % x 8 Y4.; 252 pp.

PROPAGANDA AND THE NEWS.

By Will Irwin.
Whittlesey House
$2.75'
5% x gY4.; 325 pp.
New York

Dutton
New York

Mr. Hurley gives an exciting account of his'

years beneath a sun helmet, running a coconut
factory, fighting Moros, and, examining life in
the less civilized sections of the Philippines. Oft
his payroll were more than thirty graduates of
San Ramon penitentiary, eighteen of whom
were convicted murderers - a situation which
tended to make his stay at the factory not uninteresting. The Mindanao islanders, as Mr.
Hurley represents them, are confirmed believers
in witchcraft, ghosts,' and demons, as, well as
the usual forms of vice and brutality. The whole
history of the island is based upon a traffic of
women; drunkenness is as common as indigestion; and the Mohammedan Moros", who in~
habit the island, are, according to the author,
the most terrible warriors in the world. The
fauna and flora are no less terrifying. There
are trees whose very shade is poisonous ; queer
fish with legs which walk on the bottom of the
sea; human-like monkeys which shield their eyes
with their hands as they walk through sunlight;
and ants which can consume whole bodies of
men in two days, leaving only their shiny skeletons behind. There is malaria and dysentery.
Yet, for all this, Mr. Hurley confesses at the end
of the book that he enjoyed the life. "The tropics
have been good to me." An exceptionally good
travel book by a forthright writer and a hardboiled traveler.
FIGHTING THE UNDERWORLD.
By Philip S. Van Cise.
Houghton Mifflin
$3
5~ x 8~; 369 pp.
Boston

This is a detailed account of a young district

attorney's courageous fight against a national
racket which, at the time he entered office, was
protected by politicians, police, and representative city officials. The Denver Bunco Ring, as
it was called, was a veritable paradise of corruption. But in estimating its strength, it overlooked fearless opposition of one man who, in
the course of a few years, was to expose it by
its own subtle tactics of secret machination. In
this book Mr. Van Cise, by telling the whole
X

In this book Mr. Irwin, tells the story of news

as a major factor in modern civilization. He
traces its rise in seventeenth-century Europe, its
struggle against autocq.cy, its attainment of freedom through the influence of the American
press, and, its ultimate corruption by propagandists. TheUnited States, in the second half of
the nineteenth <:entury, became the world laboratory for experiment with journalism. No
other nation' has ever been able to rival her in
successful journalistic innovations. Today, while
names such as Greeley, Godkin, Medill, and
Daria are. no longer common in the' field, American newspapers' continue to lead the ,way both
in efficiency and mechanical technique, unhampered by government censorship and uninhibited
by 'maidenly reticences. The book is rambling
and uneven, but, the story, much of which is
told at first-hand by the author, is all here. There
is an index.
THE THREAT TO EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION.
By Ludwig Freund.
Sheed and Ward
$1.5 0
5 x 7~; 151 pp.
New York

While proud of the part which Europe has

played in the development of the human mind,
Mr. Freund is filled with shame at the spectacle which, as a result of inferior leadership,
she now presents to the world. Tracing at the
outset the genesis and character of European
culture, a task for which he is well-equipped
as an historian, the author goes on to advance
the thesis that this same culture must soon collapse unless some definite effort is made to rehabilitate the Catholic Church - which he accepts as the pillar of civilized society. In the
direction we are now going, colossal catastrophes
await us. Heathen sentiments are growing daily.
"The' ever-increasing attempts that were made
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to
replace religion by philosophy have resulted
today in the cult of the State and 'Caesar' that
was prevalent in the late inlcperial period of dying Rome." Neither Socialism nor Fascism can
help us. We must, insists M[r. Freund, return to
God.

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

;; ...

Impressions
Achieving distinction through
the impress of type upon paper
is not without its problems, especially when production with
economy and dispatch must be
the credo. Haddon craftsmen
are trained in the intricacies of
black and color processes, and
the results reflect their ability
and interest in the task.

The Haddon CraftslDen

Camden, New Jersey

NEW YORK OFFICE : 393 SEVENTH AVENUE

xi

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

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xii

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Just when the faith of this department in Serge

Koussevitzky was about to be permanently dissipated, Victor presents the eminent' maestro in a
recording that re-establishes an esteem more compatible with his traditional stature. To be sure,
there was the recent second Sibelius symphony, ably
directed, to his credit; on the other hand there was
the more recent G Minor Symphony of M'ozart
largely to his discredit. The alteration of quality
returns to the favorable side with this performance
of the A Major Symphony (Italian) of Mendelssohn,
in which the conductor's vitality and incisiveness
are offset by none of the vagaries of tempo and
accent that are frequently to be found in his interpretations. It is a reading of almost exemplary tastefulness, well-organized and beautifully presented.
Though the recording is somewhat less brilliant than
others on the month's list, it reproduces the characteristic qualities of the Boston Symphony Orchestra
admirably, particularly in the final salterello, an
extraordinary evidence of the band's virtuosity.
(R C A-Victor, Album M-294, three 12-inch records,
$6.5 0 .)
The reference to brilliance in recording, just above,
was largely inspired by the astonishing quality of
the reproduction in the new version of Stravinsky's
L'Oiseau de Feu suite, by Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. No doubt the excellence of the
results achieved by Stokowski may be attributed to
his interest in recording, and the pains he takes to
keep high the standard of his accomplishment. As
a result, these discs are an improvement even on his
Scheherezade recording, the previous ultimate in
fidelity. Although it is regrettable that performance
of this quality should be expended on inconsequential
music, this is a set of records worth while by their
mere tonal splendor. (R C A-Victor, Album M-29I,
three 12-inch records, $6.50.)
The list of Kirst~n Flagstad records is augmented
this month by her performance of Elisabeth's Gebet
from Tannhiiuser, which hardly seemed the inevitable
choice for early release by this singer. Why she
could not have first done Isolde's Narrative, or some
other solo portion of the first act of Tristan which
exists in no fully satisfactory version,. I ca~not say.
The quality of the voice is full and rich, the German
diction a model of correctness. This latter fact may be
attributed, 110 doubt, to the circumstance that Flagstad is a Scandinavian. Hans Lange performs competently as the conductor. (R C A-Victor, one 12-inch
record, $2.)

Act I-"DIE WALKURE"

by
Lotte Lehmann Lauritz Melchior
and Emanuel List
A new Victor recording
1

with the Vienna Philharmonic 0 rchestra'~

under Bruno "Walter
Out of a spontaneous and all-consuming love
- doomed from the moment it flamed to life as
Siegmund first saw Sieglinde in the house of her
husband, Hunding - Wagner spun music whose
like thF world had never heard before ... It is
music that engulfs the emotions with its sheer,
sensuous beauty, while it excites the int,ellect
with the bold and unfettered creative imagination of its composer and with the cosmic implications underlying its theme. The complete
First Act ofthis second great opera ofthe Ring"
- tcDie Walkiire" - has been preserved for all
time by Victor in the voices and music of the
top-rank Wagnerian artists of our day.
The cast:
Sieglinde
. . Lotte Lehmann

Siegmund . . . . . Lauritz Melchior

l-Iunding . . . . . . . Emanuel List
with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra
under the great Bruno Walter

Here again Victor higher fidelity recording demonstrates its priceless gift to music lovers. Intonation, color, technique - the living quality of
greatness in these Wagnerian artists-are perfectly
reproduced. Hear this magnificent recording at
your dealer's. Recorded on 8 12 -inch Victor
Red Seal Records, 16 sides. Album, complete
with libretto in German and English, $16.00.

RCA Victor Division,RCA Manufacturing Co., Inc., Camden, N.].

RCA Victor Co., Ltd., Montreal, Canada

xiii

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

The TRUTH About

INFLATION
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THE AMERICAN MERCURY

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xv

THE AMERICAN MERCURY

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