__________
[In the Town, there was also] …the dark region known as the
Flats, which was given over to the slave ants brought in from foreign countries
to work day and night without light nor air. On the hills, at a little
distance, dwelt those who in a way subsisted upon the work of the slave
ants…
Louis Bromfield
__________
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.
The World in 1915.
 |
Henry Ford rules the road with his cars.
|
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%).
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 with
four home runs. No other player on the team hit more than two. 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)
*
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.
*
June: 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.
|
*
October: Dwight D. Eisenhower meets Mamie Doud, his future wife, and is
immediately impressed.
As is she with him.
 |
Beware of lounge lizards. |
*
October 7: Eliot has a second poem
published, mocking the way the unthinking masses are “taught” to think.
“The readers of the Boston
Evening Transcript
Sway in the wind
like a field of ripe corn.”
*
“The hatred I feel towards Wilson.”
“I never
expected to hate anyone in politics with the hatred I feel towards Wilson,” Henry
Cabot Lodge wrote 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)
*
November 1: For the first time ever, young men,
hoping to become Marines, are sent to Parris Island, South Carolina, now the
official Recruit Depot for the Marine Corps.
*
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 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. 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.
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.
