1915

January 15: The blogger’s father, James R. Viall, was born. The day he would have turned 100, I decided to compare the world in which he arrived with the world a century later. 

One of the first differences anyone would notice would be that in 1915 there were not as many people. U.S. population stood at just over 100 million, less than a third of what it is today. 

The world population would not hit two billion until 1927, when my father and mother were entering seventh grade. It would top three billion about the time my older brother, Tim, was in junior high. Population growth accelerated from there: four billion in 1974, when Jenny Viall, my father’s second granddaughter was born, five billion in 1987, when Sarah Viall, his fifth grandchild joined the fray, six billion by the time she entered junior high, seven billion by the time she graduated from Yale in 2012. 

(Ellora Viall, born in 2013, is likely to see the world’s population reach nine billion before she turns 40.)

 

Medical care was far less advanced. The first heart transplant was half a century down the road. Insulin would not be discovered for seven more years. Any boy or girl who developed type-1 diabetes was doomed. (For my daughter Emily’s sake, I’m glad that’s no longer true.) Smallpox was still a killer and a sister of my father succumbed in 1912. Life expectancy was 52.5 years for men, almost 57 for women. 

A little more than 1 in 4 American workers (27%) were employed on 6.4 million farms at the time of my father’s birth. 

(The figures today are 2.2 million and 2%).

Henry Ford rules the road with his cars.

Speaking of workers, Henry Ford dominated the fledgling auto industry. Ford would roll his millionth car off the assembly lines before the year ended. 

Ford also had problems. He had perfected the assembly line but was having trouble keeping workers. He decided to raise wages. In 1914, the average Ford factory worker earned $2.50 per day for nine hours. Ford cut the workday to eight and raised the daily rate to $5.00, with bonuses. The president of Pittsburgh Plate Glass predicted ruin for his company, or American industry, or both. The Wall Street Journal hinted that Ford was infected with Bolshevik tendencies.

 

Over half of all workers in mines and factories were foreign-born in 1915. Conditions were far from ideal. Almost 2,300 coal miners would die on the job during the year, roughly the average between 1903-1930. A steel worker could report working 68 hours per week. And no Saturdays off for most. 

A Polish immigrant reported making $41 in two weeks at his factory job. He then had to pay the company $9 rent for living in a company-owned house, owed $24 for purchases at the company-owned store, and had to pay a fee of 50¢ for a visit to the company-owned hospital and 30¢ for the privilege of having his tools sharpened at the company-owned shop. “Company towns” were common in those days – with workers sometimes paid in “scrip,” or bills and coins only good at the company store. Only one in ten American workers belonged to a union. 

On April 5, in a heavyweight fight held in Havana, Cuba, Jess Willard defeated Jack Johnson, a match ripe with racial undertones. Johnson, a black fighter, had made all kinds of enemies, mainly by pummeling white fighters, and seeming to enjoy it, as well as marrying and/or living with various white women. (Interracial marriage was illegal in most states, which did complicate matters.) 

 

Three weeks later, Frances Marion Harbit, the mother of my wife, was born. (She was named after the Revolutionary War hero.) 

The world she entered in 1915 was a place where women were still denied the right to vote. Legally, in most states, a wife’s services also belonged to her spouse, so a husband controlled her paycheck. In one famous case a St. Louis woman, long separated from her husband, lost her leg in an industrial accident. She sued the company for $10,000, only to have her long-lost man reappear, agree to settle with her employer for $300, and disappear with the cash. 

In some states it was still legal for the husband to grant custody of the children in his will to whomever he chose. 

At the time only 1 in 5 workers was female.  

Only 1 in 25 medical school graduates was a woman, a figure that would remain virtually unchanged from 1905 until 1965.  

There were still almost no female lawyers, judges, or elected officials.

The dumbest man in history. 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I used to point out to students that my mother was in kindergarten by the time women won the right to vote in the United States. I liked to point out, with emphasis that, “The dumbest man in history – the dumbest – had more rights than all the females ever born, until recently.”

 

 

Ruth signs as a pitcher with the Red Sox.

Babe Ruth was enjoying himself. In the spring he signed a contract with the Boston Red Sox for $3,500. The investment paid off, as Ruth, a lefthanded pitcher, compiled a record of 18-6. As a bonus he led the Red Sox in homeruns with four. No other player on the team hit more than two for the season. The Boston squad would go on to win the World Series, 4 games to 1, vs. the Philadelphia Phillies. Ruth never had a chance to pitch and went 0 for 1 as a pinch hitter. 

Charlie Chaplin was also having a banner year, having inked a deal to earn $1,250 per week, on the strength of a popular new character, “The Tramp,” who in April first appeared as a full-blown figure in a movie of that name. 

 

“Collars down around the waist.” 

Billy Sunday, the fiery preacher, was in the news. In one blistering sermon after another he railed against dresses which showed too much cleavage, with “collars down around the waist.” He warned against playing bridge, about listening to jazz, and said it was impossible to “see God through the bottom of a beer-mug.” 

World War I had raged for six months by the time my father arrived as a squalling infant. In August 1914, news of war had been met with singing and cheering in Moscow, London, and Paris. In Berlin one observer reported that the people were “mad for war.” Military experts predicted fighting would be over in three to five months. As the months dragged by in 1915, enthusiasm waned. On a single day, newspapers could report that 20,000 soldiers had been killed in twenty-four hours. 

On May 7, a German submarine put a single torpedo into the side of the great ocean liner Lusitania. The “floating hotel,” as the ship was called, would sink in eighteen minutes, carrying almost 1,200 passengers and crew with her to the bottom, including thirty-one infants. 

From that moment, pressure would grow on President Woodrow Wilson to enter the war on the side of France and England. He would refuse, and in 1916, run for re-election on the slogan, “He kept us out of war.” (Wilson would go to bed on election night believing he had been defeated; but final results, three days later, would show he had won a narrow electoral victory, 277-254, over Republican challenger Charles Evans Hughes. Ohio had 24 electoral votes, California 13, Florida 6, in those days. Today the figures are 18, 55 and 29, reflecting huge population shifts.)

 

July 27: My mother, Eleanor Cecile Winter, was welcomed into the world. 

There was great concern at the time about the flood of immigrants. The term hyphenated-American came into use. (Teddy Roosevelt, however, popularized the idea of the “one hundred percent American,” no hyphen allowed.) People wondered: Could German Americans be trusted to be loyal if the U.S. entered the fight? It was often assumed, wrongly, that most Italian American men were criminals. The radical, socialist ideas of some foreign workers made them suspect. And there was the overarching question: Could all these people ever assimilate? After visiting one Italian immigrant family a social worker grumbled: “Not Americanized. Still eating spaghetti.” 

 

“Hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality.” 

From 1900 to 1915, three million Italian immigrants landed on our shores. The flow had been changing. More and more Jews, fleeing persecution in Poland and Russia, joined them. Many others came from Greece, Romania, Hungary, and Armenia. On the eve of World War I, 1 of every 4 Greek males at work was working in this country. Edward Ross, a professor of sociology, watched the flood and saw only “hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality,” people who clearly belonged in “wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age.” 

These weren’t the kind of people who built America – who made it great – he warned! (Doesn’t that sound familiar?) 

The Ku Klux Klan was also having a good year, as membership blossomed, and the Klan message – anti-black, anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish and anti-immigrant – resonated. Sometime during the 20s, I believe, my mother’s Catholic family looked out to see a cross burning on their lawn one night, in Akron, Ohio.

 

A number of books during this era warned of the growing immigrant menace. Madison Grant, in The Passing of a Great Race (1916) talked of 

a large and increasing number of the weak, the broken and the mentally crippled of all races drawn from the lowest stratum of the Mediterranean basin and the Balkans, together with hordes of the wretched, submerged populations of the Polish ghettos. Our jails insane asylums and almshouses are filled with this human flotsam and the whole tone of American life, social, moral and political [emphasis added] has been lowered and vulgarized by them.

 

Almost 1.2 million immigrants landed on American shores in 1914. Then war in Europe cut the flow to just over 350,000 in 1915. 

Spoon River was published, as well.  

Lillian Gish starred in the film, The Birth of a Nation, which portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroic defenders of Southern women and Anglo-Saxon culture and civilization. 

Anti-Semitism was in vogue. On August 17, Leo Frank is lynched in Marietta, Georgia. He had been found guilty of the murder of Mary Phagan, a young woman employed in Frank’s factory; but the sentence of death was commuted. (Many legal experts believed Frank was innocent all along.) A mob of outraged citizens dragged him from his cell and left him dangling from a tree. The Marietta paper approved of mob action, referring to participants as “law-abiding citizens” who only wished to see a just sentence carried out. For the year there were thirteen lynchings of white prisoners and fifty-six of blacks. Harvard and other elite institutions implemented quotas on Jewish admissions. Henry Ford, himself, published a newspaper which regularly attacked Jewish bankers and ordinary Jews in language that, after the Great War ended, warmed the heart of a young veteran named Adolf Hitler.  (In fact, we know Hitler later owned a German translation of Ford’s book: The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem.)

 

Speaking of prejudice, African Americans, referred to in those days as “negroes” (if they were lucky), were denied access to the vote across the South. Literacy tests and poll taxes were employed to keep them off the rolls. In some counties, with majority black populations, a black man had a better chance of being lynched than he did of casting a ballot. In many places not a single non-white voter would be listed on the rolls until after 1960. 

Finally, Americans were far less educated a century ago than today. Only 6 in 10 white children, ages 5-19, were enrolled in school in 1915. The figure for blacks was roughly 4 in 10. The average number of years of schooling completed was 8.6.  

As late as 1940, my father would still be the exception, my mother and Anne’s mother even more so. The year they all turned twenty-five only five percent of adults had college degrees. (A year before the United States joined the fighting in World War II, the average high school graduate was earning $1,661. The average college graduate was doing better, earning almost a thousand dollars more: $2,607.)

 

* 

First great film. First virulently racist film. 

The following details are from a story in The New York Times: 

Based on the racist writings of Thomas Dixon Jr., the movie, Birth of a Nation debuted. The film by D. W. Griffith. would eventually be called a “masterpiece” Within days of the movie’s release, however, a New York woman named Annette Wallach Erdmann was writing to the Times:

 

The portrayal, unjust as it is to the negro, showing him as a cruel, inhuman, almost demented being, cannot help but create prejudice [emphasis added] against a race that has a difficult road to travel at best and needs all possible sympathy and understanding from his white neighbor.

             

Furthermore, the film presents a biased point of view that overemphasizes the mistakes of reconstruction days (in regard to carpetbaggers and their influence on negroes, &c.) on the one hand and glorifies the Ku Klux Klan on the other (the latter is portrayed as constantly rescuing defenseless maidens from the outrageous hands of the colored man). Thus it rouses the feelings of resentment and hatred that almost shattered our country a half century ago.

 

A month later a protest at a showing of the film at the Tremont Theater in Boston nearly got out of hand. According to the Times, five hundred “negroes” led by W. Munroe Trotter,

 

arrived in a body and tried to buy tickets. The management declared that the house was sold out and that the people who were getting tickets at the box office had purchased them in advance. Trotter and his friends, among them several white men, assumed such an attitude that Manager Schoeffel called in the police, and a squad of 100, headed by Superintendent Crowley in person, hurried to the theater in automobiles.

 

In 1916, The Times noted that Griffith had,

 

“seen and utilized far further than anyone else the possibilities of the motion picture as a new and distinct art form.” He would soon be showing movies of his own making at a theater he was taking over in New York. “It now remains for some one to equal ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ which, despite its poisonous, stupid and contemptibly malicious race prejudice, was a photoplay of extraordinary power.” (NYT, 2-5-16)

 

* 

Walworth describes Wilson’s growing interest in the woman who would become his second wife, his first wife having passed away in 1914. “He fell to talking then about Joseph Wilson, and when he learned that Edith Galt also had a revered father,” Walworth writes, “his heart was warmed and he listened while she regaled him with the folklore of the old South – the sufferings of The War, the gallantry of the gentry, the faithfulness of the Negroes.” (10/427) 

Was he remarrying too soon, his aides and friend wondered? 

“I have lived a lifetime of loneliness and heartache” since Ellen’s death, he said. (10/428) 

As for that line about “the faithfulness of the Negroes,” it’s gag-worthy Gone with the Wind kind of crap. 

The question in 1915 is how to keep the U.S. out of the war and still carry on trade with warring nations. Walworth explains:

 

It was soon apparent that the Entente looked to the United States for large supplies of munitions, and Germany would need food, copper, and cotton. Wilson must deal, therefore, with commercial impulses that were as great a threat to neutrality as the emotions of moralists. (10/2 II)

 

Wilson also wrote to a friend, “We cannot enfranchise the women all at once. It would be very dangerous. A woman’s mind is too logical…in politics, and government affairs, and in life you cannot go in a straight and logical line.” (10/326) 

On one occasion, the president decided he had to get away. “Stuffing an old felt hat inside his coat,” Walworth explained, “he eluded the secret service men and walked out the door of the White House, forbidding the doorkeeper to give him away. They found him later in a five-and-ten-cent store, buying penny candy for a gang of dirty-faced children. (10/337) 

In this era, Americans had fond feelings for the Chinese

 

“Every voice echoed the popular fallacy of the day: namely, that the millions of China, victimized by various manifestations of Asiatic despotism, were groping toward a Christian democracy patterned upon the Republic of the United States, and that it was the manifest duty of good Americans to aid them.” (10/350) 

War with Mexico is also a fear of the president.

 

That eventuality was regarded with dread by Wilson, the historian who had set down the Mexican War of 1848 as an inexcusable aggression on the part of a nation that had shown itself “disposed to snatch everything” from a weak neighbor; and moreover, armed interference in Mexico appealed no more to Wilson’s common sense than to his historical judgment. “When two drunks are in a brawl across the street,” he said to Stockton Axson one day, “law-abiding citizens don’t cross over and mix in.”

 

“That reminds me,” Wilson once said, “of a statement made by Carlyle, who said that every man regarded an editorial in a newspaper as very wise and able if it voiced the opinion which he himself held.” (10/360) 

 

*

May 7: The sinking of the Lusitania, says Walworth, “turned American sentiment against Germany with a violence that could never be overcome.” 

“One hundred and twenty-eight Americans were lost, among them thirty-seven women and twenty-one children. The ship was unarmed and was unprotected by a convoy, carried no troops, but had thousands of cases of ammunition in her hold.” (10/14-15 II)

 

* 

“The salvation of mankind.” 

May 10: President Wilson has this to say:

 

One who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American, and the man who goes among you to trade upon your nationality is no worthy son to live under the Stars and Stripes. … America was created to unite mankind by those passions which lift and not by the passions which separate and debase…

 

Wilson, like so many others, had watched the blundering into war, and the slaughter that resulted. It was now “that the vision of a world order of which he had caught a glimpse in earlier years gradually became fixed in his mind as a necessity for the salvation of mankind.” (10/25 II)

 

“In each government I have visited,” [Colonel House reported back to President Wilson], “I have found stubbornness, determination, selfishness, cant. One continually hears self-glorification…” Observing the Kaiser playing at war as if it were the prerogative of royalty and never doubting that God was on his side, and noting the befuddlement of Chancellor Bethmann, House observed in disgust: “In such hands are the destinies of the people placed.” (10/30 II)

 

 * 

The New York Times, in a 2021 review of Wil Haygood’s book Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World, offers this summary of the first movie ever shown in the White House and enjoyed (we may assume) by President Wilson. 

The movie was “The Birth of a Nation” (1915), D. W. Griffith’s notorious silent epic, filled with flying white robes, about the noble intent of the Ku Klux Klan. It portrayed Black people as criminals, sex fiends and goggle-eyed fools, in skulking league with Northern carpetbaggers.

 

This was the first such White House screening, and the president had a stake in the film’s success. For one thing, it was based on a popular novel, “The Clansman,” written by his friend Thomas Dixon Jr. For another, the president made cameo appearances, of a sort. Griffith had adapted some of Wilson’s writing for interstitial explanatory frames.

 

“The Birth of a Nation” became a sensation, the first blockbuster, seen by roughly a quarter of the American population. And it became grimly apparent, Haygood writes, that Black people “had yet one more enemy: cinema.”

 

*

 

Time magazine, discussing racism, in the wake of the death of George Floyd, makes note of white women using status to threaten African American men for harmless behaviors like bird watching and stenciling “Black Lives Matter” on a wall on their own property. (The nickname “Karen,” for such behavior, takes hold in 2020.) 

The historical narrative of white women’s victimhood goes back to myths that were constructed during the era of American slavery. Black slaves were posited as sexual threats to the white women, the wives of slave owners; in reality, slave masters were the ones raping their slaves. This ideology, however, perpetuated the idea that white women, who represented the good and the moral in American society, needed to be protected by white men at all costs, thus justifying racial violence towards Black men or anyone that posed a threat to their power. This narrative that was the overarching theme of Birth of a Nation, the 1915 film that was the first movie to be shown at the White House, and is often cited as the inspiration for the rebirth of the KKK.

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: if you’d like to be appalled, you can find the writings of Thomas Dixon Jr. online. His novels served as the basis for the story in Birth of a Nation. You’ll see immediate parallels between Dixon and the Nazis.

 

The Leopard’s Spots is typical; and you can get a whiff of the same racism in Gone with the Wind.

 

If you have never read any of Dixon Jr.’s works, I can warn you, they appall. This author has read them in the same way he read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, to understand how racism festers and grows.

 

For my summary of Mein Kampf, you can go to this link.

 

*

 

T.S. Eliot gets his first important poem published in Poetry magazine, “The Love Story of J. Alfred Prufrock.

 

At one point, Eliot writes that “the yellow fog…Licked its tongue into the corners of  evening.”

 

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

 

Eliot perfectly captures the nature of his own confusion and, more generally, human indecision. 

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

 

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

               So how should I presume? 

 

In another poem, “Cousin Nancy,” he writes, 

Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked

And danced all the modern dances;

And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt

        About it,

But they knew it was modern.

An interest in sex is nothing new.

*

“The hatred I feel towards Wilson.” 

“I never expected to hate anyone in politics with the hatred I feel towards Wilson,” Henry Cabot Lodge writes to Teddy  Roosevelt. “I was opposed to our good friend Grover Cleveland, but never in any such way as this.” (10/425) 

The stormy session of Congress, in the winter of 1915, revealed that the flaw in character that had led to Wilson’s defeat at Princeton still remained, more dangerous than ever. Shrinking into personal isolation, indulging in dreams of the ideal government and giving way to intolerance of the hard realities of politics, he had lost touch with seven important Democratic senators. (10/425) 

“No matter what may happen to me personally in the next election, I will not take any action to embarrass England when she is fighting for her life and the life of the world.” (10/5 II)

Asked whether he wished another term in the Presidency, Wilson said: “I wish with all my heart that it wouldn’t be necessary. I should be much happier doing anything else. If I run again for the Presidency, it will be only to keep Bryan out. I feel like a pig when I sit in my chair and look at him and I think, I mustn’t let him be president; he would be ruinous to the country, ruinous to his own reputation …he’s the worst judge of character I ever knew, a spoilsman to the core and the determined enemy to civil service reform.” [Colonel Edward] House’s diary records that when Bryan telephoned to Wilson to discuss patronage and the best means of putting an independent senator “in the hole,” the president was amused by the absurdity of the secretary of state’s concern with so petty a matter when the world was on fire. When he hung up the receiver he uttered a forceful “damn.” Wilson seldom swore, but there were two irritants that could drive him to it - Bryan, and a refractory golf ball. (10/6 II) 

 

*

December 24: Wilson tells Colonel House to focus on efforts to bring peace. “The only guarantees that any rational man could accept,” Wilson insists, “are (a) military and naval disarmament and (b) a league of nations to secure each nation against aggression and maintain absolute freedom of the seas.” (10/29 II)

 

* 

Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen is published, following the trials and tribulations of a William Sylvanus Baxter, he of the title. Here, we provide a few scenes, documenting life in 1915. 

From the first paragraph, we learn that William is painfully self-conscious, as most teens in most eras, are:

 

William Sylvanus Baxter paused for a moment of thought in front of the drug-store at the corner of Washington Street and Central Avenue. He had an internal question to settle before he entered the store: he wished to allow the young man at the soda-fountain no excuse for saying, “Well, make up your mind what it’s goin’ to be, can’t you?” Rudeness of this kind, especially in the presence of girls and women, was hard to bear, and though William Sylvanus Baxter had borne it upon occasion, he had reached an age when he found it intolerable. Therefore, to avoid offering opportunity for anything of the kind, he decided upon chocolate and strawberry, mixed, before approaching the fountain.

 

He may consider himself a young man, but William is not too old to have a second helping later. 

In Chapter II, William – who has had little experience with love – meets a stranger in town. Walking down a shaded street, conscious again, of how he walks, and what kind of impression he might leave on others, he finds his fate has suddenly changed inalterably.

 

He walked in his own manner, using his shoulders to emphasize an effect of carelessness which he wished to produce upon observers. For his consciousness of observers was abnormal, since he had it whether any one was looking at him or not, and it reached a crucial stage whenever he perceived persons of his own age, but of opposite sex, approaching.

 

A person of this description was encountered upon the sidewalk within a hundred yards of his own home, and William Sylvanus Baxter saw her while yet she was afar off. The quiet and shady thoroughfare was empty of all human life, at the time, save for those two; and she was upon the same side of the street that he was; thus it became inevitable that they should meet, face to face, for the first time in their lives. He had perceived, even in the distance, that she was unknown to him, a stranger, because he knew all the girls in this part of the town who dressed as famously in the mode as that! And then, as the distance between them lessened, he saw that she was ravishingly pretty; far, far prettier, indeed, than any girl he knew. At least it seemed so, for it is, unfortunately, much easier for strangers to be beautiful. Aside from this advantage of mystery, the approaching vision was piquant and graceful enough to have reminded a much older boy of a spotless white kitten, for, in spite of a charmingly managed demureness, there was precisely that kind of playfulness somewhere expressed about her. Just now it was most definite in the look she bent upon the light and fluffy burden which she carried nestled in the inner curve of her right arm: a tiny dog with hair like cotton and a pink ribbon round his neck—an animal sated with indulgence and idiotically unaware of his privilege. He was half asleep!

 

William did not see the dog, or it is the plain, anatomical truth that when he saw how pretty the girl was, his heart—his physical heart—began to do things the like of which, experienced by an elderly person, would have brought the doctor in haste. In addition, his complexion altered—he broke out in fiery patches. He suffered from breathlessness and from pressure on the diaphragm.

 

The girl’s deep blue eyes meet his, and as if they were “gentle arrows of turquoise shot through and through him.” 

And with that she passed him by, down the street, disappearing round the corner.

 

In Chapter III, “The Painful Age,” William’s little sister, 10-year-old Jane, plays a major role. That is, like many younger siblings, she annoys her older brother. At her first appearance, we find her with bread and butter, covered in apple sauce and powdered sugar, in hand – and smeared upon her face. Baxter has just stumbled home in a daze, now hopelessly in love, although with a girl he has only seen and does not know by name. He retreats to his room, and after a moment is struck with the thought that he must commit his love to writing. He will compose a poem! He sits down at his writing table and sets to work. 

William is a hopeless romantic, raised on tales of knights and ladies. His poem is definitely not a classic: 

Milady 

I do not know her name

Though it would be the same

Where roses bloom at twilight

And the lark takes his flight

It would be the same anywhere

Where music sounds in air

I was never introduced to the lady

So I could not call her Lass or Sadie

So I will call her Milady

By the sands of the sea

She will always be

Just Milady to me. 

William Sylvanus Baxter, Esq., July 14

 

Sadly, his sweet reverie is interrupted once again by his insufferable (to him) little sister.

 

It is impossible to say how many times he might have read the poem over, always with increasing amazement at his newfound powers, had he not been interrupted by the odious voice of Jane.

 

“Will–ee!”

 

To William, in his high and lonely mood, this piercing summons brought an actual shudder, and the very thought of Jane (with tokens of apple sauce and sugar still upon her cheek, probably) seemed a kind of sacrilege. He fiercely swore his favorite oath, acquired from the hero of a work of fiction he admired. “Ye gods!” And concealed his poem in the drawer of the writing table, for Jane’s footsteps were approaching his door.

 

“Will–ee! Mama wants you.” She tried the handle of the door.

 

“G’way!” he said.

 

“Will–ee!” Jane hammered upon the door with her fist. “Will–ee!”

 

“What you want?” he shouted.

 

Jane explained, certain pauses indicating that her attention was partially diverted to another slice of bread-and-butter and apple sauce and sugar. “Will–ee, mamma wants you – wants you to go help Genesis bring some wash-tubs home and a tin clo’es-boiler – from the second-hand man’s store.”

 

“What!”

 

Jane repeated the outrageous message, adding, “She wants you to hurry -and I got some more bread-and-butter and apple sauce and sugar for comin’ to tell you.”

 

William left no doubt in Jane’s mind about his attitude in reference to the whole matter. His refusal was direct and infuriated, but, in the midst of a multitude of plain statements which he was making, there was a decisive tapping upon the door at a point higher than Jane could reach, and his mother’s voice interrupted:

 

“Hush, Willie! Open the door, please.”

 

So far, the scene may seem amusing. Yet, even in a book about a normal young man, growing up in a small town in the Midwest, we can’t avoid the casual racism that infected so much thinking in that era.

 

Tarkington, who grew up in Indiana, introduces the first African American character in the book m – only he isn’t described as such.

 

As for Willie, he’s still boiling about his sister:

 

He obeyed furiously, and Mrs. Baxter walked in with a deprecating air, while Jane followed, so profoundly interested that, until almost the close of the interview, she held her bread-and-butter and apple sauce and sugar at a sort of way-station on its journey to her mouth.

 

“That's a nice thing to ask me to do!” stormed the unfortunate William. “Ye gods! Do you think Joe Bullitt’s [a friend of William’s] mother would dare to –”

 

“Wait, dearie!” Mrs. Baxter begged, pacifically. “I just want to explain –”

 

“'Explain’! Ye gods!”

 

“Now, now, just a minute, Willie!” she said. “What I wanted to explain was why it’s necessary for you to go with Genesis for the –”

 

“Never!” he shouted. “Never! You expect me to walk through the public streets with that awful-lookin’ old nigger –”

 

“Genesis isn’t old,” she managed to interpolate. “He –”

 

But her frantic son disregarded her. “Second-hand wash-tubs!” he vociferated. “And tin clothes-boilers! That’s what you want your son to carry through the public streets in broad daylight! Ye gods!”

 

“Well, there isn’t anybody else,” she said. “Please don’t rave so, Willie, and say ‘Ye gods’ so much; it really isn’t nice. I’m sure nobody’ll notice you –”

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: I wonder if students would catch the fact that William’s mother is more concerned by his use of a mild oath, than by his use of a degrading term for Genesis.

William in disguise.

 

William and Genesis manage to pick up the boiler and washtub without William being seen; but in a subsequent chapter, Jane embarrasses her brother again. This time, she accosts William as he is talking to the girl of his dreams – who he now knows to be a visitor from out of town, named Lola Pratt. Having had a chance to speak to the girl of his dreams – only to be humiliated, in his mind – he storms home. His mother greets him.

 

“You’ve been gone all morning, Willie,” she said. “I thought your father mentioned at breakfast that he expected you to put in at least four hours a day on your mathematics and –”

 

“That’s neither here nor there,” William returned, vehemently. “I just want to say this: if you don’t do something about Jane, I will! Just look at her! Look at her, I ask you! That’s just the way she looked half an hour ago, out on the public sidewalk in front of the house, when I came by here with Miss Pratt! That was pleasant, wasn't it? To be walking with a lady on the public street and meet a member of my family looking like that! Oh, lovely!”

 

In the anguish of this recollection his voice cracked, and though his eyes were dry his gestures wept for him. Plainly, he was about to reach the most lamentable portion of his narrative. “And then she hollered at me! She hollered, 'Oh, Will–ee!'” Here he gave an imitation of Jane’s voice, so damnatory that Jane ceased to eat for several moments and drew herself up with a kind of dignity. “She hollered, 'Oh, Will–ee’ at me!” he stormed. “Anybody would think I was about six years old! She hollered, 'Oh, Will–ee,” and she rubbed her stomach and slushed apple sauce all over her face, and she kept hollering, ‘Will–ee!” with her mouth full. ‘Will–ee,” look! Good! Bread-and-butter and apple sauce and sugar! I bet you wish you had some, Will–ee!’”

 

“You did eat some, the other day,” said Jane. “You ate a whole lot. You eat it every chance you get!”

 

“You hush up!” he shouted, and returned to his description of the outrage. “She kept following us! She followed us, hollering, ‘Will–ee!’ till it’s a wonder we didn’t go deaf! And just look at her! I don’t see how you can stand it to have her going around like that and people knowing it’s your child! Why, she hasn’t got enough on!”

 

Mrs. Baxter laughed. “Oh, for this very hot weather, I really don’t think people notice or care much about –”

 

“'Notice'!” he wailed. “I guess Miss Pratt noticed! Hot weather’s no excuse for – for outright obesity!” (As Jane was thin, it is probable that William had mistaken the meaning of this word.) “Why, half o’ what she has got on has come unfastened – especially that frightful thing hanging around her leg – and look at her back, I just beg you! I ask you to look at her back. You can see her spinal cord!”

 

“Column,” Mrs. Baxter corrected. “Spinal column, Willie.”

 

“What do I care which it is?” he fumed. “People aren’t supposed to go around with it exposed, whichever it is! And with apple sauce on their ears!”

 

“There is not!” Jane protested, and at the moment when she spoke she was right. Naturally, however, she lifted her hands to the accused ears, and the unfortunate result was to justify William’s statement.

 

“Look!” he cried. “I just ask you to look! Think of it: that’s the sight I have to meet when I’m out walking with Miss Pratt! She asked me who it was, and I wish you’d seen her face. She wanted to know who ‘that curious child’ was, and I’m glad you didn’t hear the way she said it. ‘Who is that curious child?’ she said, and I had to tell her it was my sister. I had to tell Miss Pratt it was my only sister!”

 

“Willie, who is Miss Pratt?” asked Mrs. Baxter, mildly. “I don't think I’ve ever heard of –”

 

Jane had returned to an admirable imperturbability, but she chose this moment to interrupt her mother, and her own eating, with remarks delivered in a tone void of emphasis or expression.

 

“Willie’s mashed on her,” she said, casually. “And she wears false side-curls. One almost came off.”

 

At this unspeakable desecration William’s face was that of a high priest stricken at the altar.

 

“She’s visitin’ Miss May Parcher,” added the deadly Jane. “But the Parchers are awful tired of her. They wish she’d go home, but they don’t like to tell her so.”

 

One after another these insults from the canaille fell upon the ears of William. That slanders so atrocious could soil the universal air seemed unthinkable.

 

He became icily calm.

 

“Now if you don’t punish her,” he said, deliberately, “it’s because you have lost your sense of duty!”

 

William disappears into the house, still fuming, and Jane explains that she has heard Mr. Parcher talk about both his guest, and her annoying little white dog, Flopit, and the boys who come around to visit his daughter May and Lola. 

Says Jane:

 

He said he couldn’t go anywhere around the place without steppin’ on the dog or Willie Baxter. An’ he said he couldn’t sit on his own porch any more; he said he couldn’t sit even in the liberry but he had to hear baby-talk goin’ on somewheres an’ then either Willie Baxter or Joe Bullitt or somebody or another arguin’ about love. Mamma, he said” – Jane became impressive – “he said, mamma, he said he didn’t mind the Sunday-school class [coming for tea], but he couldn’t stand those dam boys!”

 

“Jane!” Mrs. Baxter cried, “you musn’t say such things!”

 

“I didn’t, mamma. Mr. Parcher said it. He said he couldn’t stand those da –”

 

“Jane! No matter what he said, you mustn't repeat –”

 

“But I'm not. I only said Mr. Parcher said he couldn't stand those d—”

 

Mrs. Baxter cut the argument short by imprisoning Jane’s mouth with a firm hand. Jane continued to swallow quietly until released. Then she said:

 

“But, mamma, how can I tell you what he said unless I say –”

 

“Hush!” Mrs. Baxter commanded. “You must never, never again use such a terrible and wicked word.”

 

Worse than all the boys hanging about his home, and William in particular, Mr. Parcher can hardly stand listening to Lola, who often talks in baby talk. The boys might love it. He can’t bear it. Soon after they met, Lola and William agreed. He would call her “Cousin Lola.” 

She would call him “Ickle boy Baxter.” 

We next find Lola and William seated on the front porch of the Parcher home. Lola tells William that her dream is to become an actress. “You would make a glorious actress,” he responds. He feels honored that she has shared her dream with him, and adds, “It was wonderful of you to say that to me. I shall never forget it.” 

“It's my DREAM!” Miss Pratt exclaimed, again, with the same enthusiasm. “It's my DREAM.” 

William runs into a series of troubles at a dance – when he sits on a cake by mistake – and during a party at a nearby farm – and has no idea if Lola loves him, as he loves her. At one point, “He wished only to die in some quiet spot and to have Miss Pratt told about it in words that would show her what she had thrown away.” 

During the party at the farm, the guests are invited on a tour. Lola hands William Flopit to hold – a promising sign – and his heart soars. A Swedish lady who works for the family that owns the farm leads the tour. William is at Lola’s side as they start their walk. 

Or so he imagines, in the dark. “A moment later, William wished that he had remained in the rear.”

 

This was due to the unnecessary frankness of the Swedish lady named Anna, who was briefly pointing out the efficiency of various agricultural devices. Her attention being diverted by some effusions of pride on the part of a passing hen, she thought fit to laugh and say:

 

“She yust laid egg.”

 

William shuddered. This grossness in the presence of Miss Pratt was unthinkable. His mind refused to deal with so impossible a situation; he could not accept it as a fact that such words had actually been uttered in such a presence. And yet it was the truth; his incredulous ears still sizzled. “She yust laid egg!” His entire skin became flushed; his averted eyes glazed themselves with shame.

 

He was not the only person shocked by the ribaldry of the Swedish lady named Anna. Joe Bullitt and Johnnie Watson [another of William’s friends], on the outskirts of the group, went to Wallace Banks [who organized the party], drew him aside, and, with feverish eloquence, set his responsibilities before him. It was his duty, they urged, to have an immediate interview with this free-spoken Anna and instruct her in the proprieties. Wallace had been almost as horrified as they by her loose remark, but he declined the office they proposed for him, offering, however, to appoint them as a committee with authority in the matter – whereupon they retorted with unreasonable indignation, demanding to know what he took them for.

 

Unconscious of the embarrassment she had caused in these several masculine minds, the Swedish lady named Anna led the party onward, continuing her agricultural lecture. William walked mechanically, his eyes averted and looking at no one. And throughout this agony he was burningly conscious of the blasphemed presence of Miss Pratt beside him.

 

Therefore, it was with no little surprise, when the party came out of the barn, that William beheld Miss Pratt, not walking at his side, but on the contrary, sitting too cozily with George Crooper [a new rival for Lola’s attention] upon a fallen tree at the edge of a peach-orchard just beyond the barn-yard. It was Miss Parcher who had been walking beside him, for the truant couple had made their escape at the beginning of the Swedish lady’s discourse.

 

In vain William murmured to himself, “Flopit love ole friends best.” Purple and black again descended upon his soul, for he could not disguise from himself the damnatory fact that George had flitted with the lady, while he, wretched William, had been permitted to take care of the dog!

 

Feeling like a fool, he walks over to where they are seated, deposits Flopit at Lola’s feet, and stalks away. 

In the dark, when finally alone, William’s feelings overcome him.

 

he gave way – not to tears, certainly, but to faint murmurings and little heavings under impulses as ancient as young love itself. It is to be supposed that William considered his condition a lonely one, but if all the seventeen-year-olds who have known such halfhours could have shown themselves to him then, he would have fled from the mere horror of billions. Alas! he considered his sufferings a new invention in the world, 

 

William returns to the farmhouse where guests are seated at two long tables for dinner. It turns out that George is a prodigious eater, who “lays waste” to the food before him.

 

He found the party noisily established in the farm-house at two long tables piled with bucolic viands already being violently depleted. Johnnie Watson had kept a chair beside himself vacant for William. Johnnie was in no frame of mind to sit beside any “chattering girl,” and he had protected himself by Joe Bullitt upon his right and the empty seat upon his left. William took it, and gazed upon the nearer foods with a slight renewal of animation.

 

He began to eat; he continued to eat; in fact, he did well. So did his two comrades. Not that the melancholy of these three was dispersed—far from it! With ineffaceable gloom they ate chicken, both white meat and dark, drumsticks, wishbones, and livers; they ate corn-on-the-cob, many ears, and fried potatoes and green peas and string-beans; they ate peach preserves and apricot preserves and preserved pears; they ate biscuits with grape jelly and biscuits with crabapple jelly; they ate apple sauce and apple butter and apple pie. They ate pickles, both cucumber pickles and pickles made of watermelon rind; they ate pickled tomatoes, pickled peppers, also pickled onions. They ate lemon pie.

 

At that, they were no rivals to George Crooper, who was a real eater. Love had not made his appetite ethereal to-day, and even the attending Swedish lady named Anna felt some apprehension when it came to George and the gravy, though she was accustomed to the prodigies performed in this line by the robust hands on the farm. George laid waste his section of the table, and from the beginning he allowed himself scarce time to say, “I dunno why it is.” The pretty companion at his side at first gazed dumfounded; then, with growing enthusiasm for what promised to be a really magnificent performance, she began to utter little ejaculations of wonder and admiration. With this music in his ears, George outdid himself. He could not resist the temptation to be more and more astonishing as a heroic comedian, for these humors sometimes come upon vain people at country dinners.

 

George ate when he had eaten more than he needed; he ate long after every one understood why he was so vast; he ate on and on sheerly as a flourish—as a spectacle. He ate even when he himself began to understand that there was daring in what he did, for his was a toreador spirit so long as he could keep bright eyes fastened upon him.

 

Finally, he ate to decide wagers made upon his gorging, though at times during this last period his joviality deserted him. Anon his damp brow would be troubled, and he knew moments of thoughtfulness.

 

The time comes. Lola must soon return home. So a dance is held for all the young people. There are chaperones, of course, Mr. and Mrs. Parcher. Mr. Parcher is excited, because Lola is going away, and his home life can return to normal. Studying William, the only boy not dancing, he exclaims:

 

… “Just look at him!” said Mr. Parcher. His face has got more genuine idiocy in it than I’ve seen around here yet, and God knows I’ve been seeing some miracles in that line this summer!”

 

“He’s looking at Lola Pratt,” Mrs. Parcher.

 

“Don’t you suppose I can see that?” Mr. Parcher returned, with some irritation. “That’s what’s the trouble with him. Why don’t he quit looking at her?”

 

“I think probably he feels badly because she’s dancing with one of the other boys,” said his wife, mildly.

 

“Then why can’t he dance with somebody else himself?” Mr. Parcher inquired, testily, “instead of standing around like a calf looking out of the butcher’s wagon! By George! He looks as if he was just going to moo!” (263)

 

The next day, Lola is scheduled to leave on the train. William, May Parcher, and a group of friends Lola has made plan to see her off at the station. Deep in thought – and overcome with sorrow – William almost misses the sendoff. His mother finally knocks at the door to his room, and informs him it’s almost one o’clock.

 

“What?”

 

“Yes, it is. It’s – ”

 

She had no further speech with him.

 

Breathless, William flung open his door, seized the hat, rocketed down the stairs, and out through the front door, which he left open behind him. Eight seconds later he returned at a gallop, hurtled up the stairs and into his room, emerging instantly with something concealed under his coat. Replying incoherently to his mother’s inquiries, he fell down the stairs as far as the landing, used the impetus thus given as a help to greater speed for the rest of the descent – and passed out of hearing.

 

That “something” is a box of candy for Lola. When the train pulls away from the station, Lola waves at William and the others. William continues waving even after the train is out of view. 

He has forgotten to give Lola the candy. 

Later, at home, with only Jane around, he gives way to melancholy.

 

The small noises of the town – that town so empty to-night – fell upon his ears mockingly. It seemed to him incredible that so hollow a town could go about its nightly affairs just as usual. A man and a woman, going by, laughed loudly at something the man had said: the sound of their laughter was horrid to William. And from a great distance from far out in the country – there came the faint, long-drawn whistle of an engine.

 

That was the sorrowfulest sound of all to William. His lonely mind's eye sought the vasty spaces to the east; crossed prairie, and river, and hill, to where a long train whizzed onward through the dark – farther and farther and farther away. William uttered a sigh, so hoarse, so deep from the tombs, so prolonged, that Jane, who had been relaxing herself at full length upon the floor, sat up straight with a jerk.

 

In the dark, outside, William hears a young man singing. He leaps to his feet on the porch and shouts at him to go away. He’s in no mood for singing. In the dark, however, a friend of Jane’s, Miss Mary Randolph Kirsted, is also passing by.

 

YOU GET OUT O' HERE!” she said, in a voice as deep and hoarse as she could make it. “YOU GET OUT O' HERE!”

 

Her intention was as plain as the moon. She was presenting in her own person a sketch of William, by this means expressing her opinion of him and avenging Jane.

 

“YOU GET OUT O' HERE!” she croaked.

 

The shocking audacity took William's breath. He gasped; he sought for words.

 

“Why, you—you—” he cried. “You—you sooty-faced little girl!”

 

In this fashion he directly addressed Miss Mary Randolph Kirsted for the first time in his life.

 

And that was the strangest thing of this strange evening. Strangest because, as with life itself, there was nothing remarkable upon the surface of it. But if M. Maeterlinck has the right of the matter, and if the bright air of that June evening, almost eleven years in the so-called future, was indeed already trembling to “Lohengrin,” then William stood with Johnnie Watson against a great bank of flowers at the foot of a church aisle; that aisle was roped with white-satin ribbons; and William and Johnnie were waiting for something important to happen. And then, to the strains of “Here Comes the Bride,” it did—a stately, solemn, roseate, gentle young thing with bright eyes seeking through a veil for William's eyes.

 

Yes, if great M. Maeterlinck is right, it seems that William ought to have caught at least some eerie echo of that wedding-march, however faint—some bars or strains adrift before their time upon the moonlight of this September night in his eighteenth year.

 

For there, beyond the possibility of any fate to intervene, or of any later vague, fragmentary memory of even Miss Pratt to impair, there in that moonlight was his future before him.

 

He started forward furiously. “You – you – you little – ”

 

But he paused, not wasting his breath upon the empty air.

 

His bride-to-be was gone.