First edition: London: Longmans, 1908;
New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1909.
Second edition: New York: The author, 1920.
Copyright renewed, 1936, by Nellie Harris.
(Copy-text), reprinted: Chicago: U. Chicago, 1963; John Dos Passos,
introduction Copyright 1963 by The University of Chicago.
Reprinted in paperback: Portland, OR: Feral House, 1996,
with John Zerzan copyrighted afterword,
ISBN 0-922915-37-7; Feral House, PO Box 3466,
Portland, OR, 97208. Also, translated into German,
French, Spanish, and other languages.
[1896-1970]
[1963]
Frank Harris was an objectionable little man. He was sallow as a gypsy. He had bat ears, dark hair with a crinkle in it that grew low on the forehead, and a truculent mustache. People remarked on the richness of his bass voice. His charm was great, particularly for the opposite sex. He had the gift of gab to a sublime degree and a streak of deep scoundrelism that was the ruin of him.
A natural storyteller, tall tales so permeated his private life that his biographers were hard put to it to disentangle any facts at all from the web of fiction he spun about himself. Particularly in the twenties, when he was editing Pearson's Magazine in New York, there used to be considerable journalistic searching for "the real Frank Harris." One wonders now if such a creature ever existed. He wrote some good short stories. He might have developed into a first-rate novelist if he hadn't been such a damn liar.
Though at times he named Brighton, England, as his birthplace, amid other variants of his curriculum vitae, it seems likely that he first saw the light at Galway on the West Coast of Ireland, on St. Valentine's Day in 1856, and that he was christened James Thomas Harris. His parents were Plymouth Brethren, of the most fundamentalist of Protestant sects, and were probably Welsh. His mother died when he was very small. His father was a seafaring man who had managed to work his way up in the Royal Navy from ship's boy to lieutenant in command of a revenue cutter, no mean feat in those days.
The father was always at sea. The children lived higgledy-piggledy, shifting from one small school to another as they followed their father's ports of call. Ireland was in a state of barely suppressed revolt. These were the days of the Fenian "troubles." Harris, who had been a great reader of Captain Marryat, told in later life of his bitter disappointment that his father failed to get him into the Royal Navy when he was fourteen. He always blamed his father for that.
Little Jim Harris was obviously a bright youngster, a voracious reader with a retentive memory. His father, who wanted to do what he thought best for the boy, sent him to a classical English school, which he hated with an eternal hatred. With ten pounds he managed to wangle there as a prize for scholastic attainments he ran away to Liverpool and bought himself steerage passage to America.
He must have reached New York in the early seventies. German and Irish immigrants poured off every ship. The country was in a state of intermittent boom and bust. Some greenhorns starved. Others made fortunes. Everybody talked big.
Harris became enormously Americanized. He decided his name was Frank. Like a Horatio Alger hero he started out shining shoes. Then he worked as a sandhog in the pressurized caissons they used in building the piers for Roebling's Brooklyn Bridge. He saw a man die of the bends and went back to shining shoes.
His story was that a gentleman whose shoes he was shining heard him quote some Latin and was so impressed that he offered him a job as night clerk in a Chicago hotel. If we can believe Frank Harris he was managing the entire hotel by the time he was seventeen. Some Texas cattlemen put up at his hostelry and induced him to go west with them to make his fortune.
He was physically husky, and as he told the tale, with an ever-increasing abundance of detail, a great man with the ladies. He learned to ride in Texas and sopped up sagas of Indian-fighting and cattle-rustling across the Rio Grande. He was developing a flair for writing. His first articles came out in frontier newspapers. Two of his brothers seem to have settled in Lawrence, Kansas, and at some point he studied for a year or so at the university there, became a naturalized citizen--so his story goes--and was admitted to the Kansas bar.
He caught the money-grubbing fever of the time. He'd speculate in anything. When a financial crash wiped out his and his brothers' investments in Lawrence real estate, he went to work for a newspaper in Philadelphia. From then on his accounts of his meetings with the literary great become as confusing as his tales of amorous successes. He seems to have actually grasped the hand of Walt Whitman after a lecture. He told of visiting Emerson in Concord. A name was all he needed to hang a story on. He became the great name-dropper of the century.
Somewhere around the time he came of age Frank Harris decided he wanted to be an Englishman instead of an American. Little malpractices, like the rumored theft of a certain judge's lawbooks, may have made it too hot for him in Lawrence, and possibly he wore out his welcome with the college professor he was sponging on in Philadelphia. He tells a fantastic tale, a little too much like Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days to be believable, of crossing the continent to San Francisco with a highyaller paramour in his stateroom on the sleeper and sailing from the Golden Gate for Bombay and Capetown. Somehow, he did get himself from Philadelphia to Paris.
His great admiration was Carlyle. It was the Paris of the French Revolution that he saw. He hired himself a cheap room on the rue St Jacques and learned the language by going through Hugo's Hernani and Madame Bovary with a dictionary. He attended Tame's lectures at the Sorbonne and made enough impression on that venerable critic to get a recommendation from him when he needed one.
When his money ran out he went to see his father who had retired on halfpay at Denbigh in the beautiful Welsh Vale of Clwyd. He left Denbigh in a hurry to avoid having to marry a young woman who thought herself engaged to him; and, with the help of literary friends, got himself taken on as a teacher at Brighton College. The meeting with the aged Carlyle which later became such an important part of the Frank Harris legend may have taken place in Brighton if it took place at all. Forever after he posed as an expert on poor Carlyle's marital infelicity.
As Harris told the story it was during his stay in Brighton that he speculated so successfully in Chilean bonds that he laid away twenty-five hundred pounds to finance his education. Teaching at a provincial college was not the young careerist's meat. After some kind of falling out with the college authorities Frank Harris was suddenly heard of as a war correspondent in Moscow for the American press, attached to the great pan-Slavist General Skobeliev in his short war against the Turks. Next he turned up in Heidelberg, listening to Kuno Fischer lecture on Shakespeare. As a writer he was planning to model himself on Carlyle. He sent Carlyle a wild west novel he was writing for his criticism. Since Carlyle was saturated with German scholarship Harris was bound he would seek his education in Germany.
Expelled from Heidelberg, so he told it, for knocking down an insulting student with his fist, he moved on to Göttingen and Berlin. He became fluent in German, read Goethe and Heine, and soaked up all the Socialist theories out of which Bismark was building his welfare state as a bulwark for Hohenzollern autocracy. "Heroes and Hero-Worship," The Iron Chancellor became his great admiration. In English Shakespeare was god.
European students in the years after the Franco-Prussian war were obsessed with socialism and sex, the two prongs of the revolt of the intellectuals against the established order. In Vienna Freud was soon to be inciting his patients to erotic dreams. In London Marx was dissecting capitalism in the library of the British Museum. Frank Harris completed his Wanderjahr with a grand tour that took him to Florence and Athens and Constantinople. He never tired of talking about sex. Spouting contes drolatiques of cosmopolitan bed-wrestling, he went back to Paris. There, by his own confession, he became the intimate friend of Guy de Maupassant. Turgenev somehow he muffed.
At the age of twenty-seven, Frank Harris, tingling with lust and greed and ambition, was ready to take on the foggy capital of the Victorian world. He wrote of London as a woman "with wet draggled skirts," with "glorious eyes lighting up her wet pale face." He had somehow wangled a letter of introduction from Carlyle to Froude. It was as a poet he first showed himself. He had taken to representing himself as an American, an Irishman, or an Englishman as the occasion demanded. According to Harris' story Froude introduced him to literary society with a great dinner.
Be that as it may, by the summer of 1883 Harris had only managed to publish an occasional book review in the Spectator. His money must have run out because soon we hear of him making slim pickings as a reporter for the Evening News.
He had come back from Germany a Socialist. He didn't disdain to let his voice be heard at radical gatherings in Hyde Park. It was at a Socialist meeting that he first met Shaw. He told of being introduced to Karl Marx, and found the author of Das Kapital full of loving kindness. When Harris told him he had written the greatest book since The Wealth of Nations, he cried out that Harris' German was Wunderbar.
Socialists, Communists, anarchists were all of a heap in those days. Some Hyde Park orators were rumored to be subsidized by the Conservative party to undermine Gladstone's dominant Liberals. Kropotkin smelt the agent provocateur in glib young Harris and warned his disciples away from him.
Frank Harris was dragging on the shabby life of an apprentice writer in a Bloomsbury boarding-house when suddenly he burst on Fleet Street as the editor-in-chief of the Evening News. It is typical of Harris' career that the most believable explanation of his sudden leap to fortune is found in a novel called The Adventures of John Johns, a bestseller in its day, which according to the gossip of the Cafe Royal, was based on Harris' career. John Johns became editor of an important London newspaper by going to bed with the publisher's wife.
He edited the Evening News for several years with great success. As editor he was skilful, resourceful, and ruthless. By using the sensation-mongering methods that were soon to bring William Randolph Hearst such success in America, he turned the paper from a liability into an asset for the owners in a few months. Years later he explained to some journalist friends that when he first took the sheet over his idea was to edit it as a cosmopolitan scholar of twenty-eight. "Nobody wanted my opinions; but as I went downwards and began to edit it as I felt at twenty, then at eighteen, then at sixteen, I was more successful: but when I got to my tastes at fourteen years of age, I found instantaneous response. Kissing and fighting were the only things I cared for at thirteen or fourteen, and these are the things the English public desires and enjoys today."
As editor of the Evening News, in spite of the disrepute of that scandal sheet among men of good will, Frank Harris became a figure in London society. He was dressed by the best Bond Street tailors, adopted high Spanish heels to look less pint-sized, and was admitted to a number of clubs. For a man with a literary career to make the Evening News was a stepping-stone. Though Harris had already become famous for his social agility, it was with astonishment that the English reading public discovered that this young upstart, a mere boy of thirty who had appeared out of nowhere, was to edit the Fortnightly Review. The Fortnightly Review was the most respectable literary journal in England, but respectability gave no assurance of circulation. Frank Harris was a circulation builder in the modern sense.
The eight years he edited the Fortnightly Review and his four years that followed as owner of the Saturday Review constituted the crowning period of his life. He was the centre of the literary nineties. He discovered H. G. Wells. He launched Shaw as a drama critic. He encouraged Cunninghame Graham and Max Beerbohm. He published Swinburne and Oscar Wilde and Beardsley. In spite of a continuing liaison with Laura Clapton, which he publicized as the great love of his life, he married a wealthy widow with a house in Park Lane. His luncheons were notorious, in Park Lane or at the Cafe Royal, where he liked to seat his guests at an oval table in the centre of the restaurant so that all London could overhear his gibes and indiscretions. His memory served him well. In a society appreciative of good conversation, his talk was a volcano of anecdote and paradox, laced with the scabrous revelations that so thrilled the prudish Victorians.
"Modesty," he claimed was "the fig leaf of mediocrity." He was the bounder par excellence. When he boasted to Oscar Wilde that he'd gotten himself invited to every great house in London, Wilde made the famous rejoinder "But never more than once, Frank."
He was the arriviste who never quite arrived. His wife soon tired of his infidelities and his cadging of her money for endless speculations on the shadier fringes of the City. Then there were freakish things about his personal habits. A colossal eater and drinker he had taken to using the stomach pump after meals as a substitute for the Roman vomitorium. Her solicitors arranged a separation.
After a purple period the forces of British respectability were gaining the upper hand again. One symptom was the trial and venomous persecution of Oscar Wilde. Another was Harris' being cashiered as editor of the Fortnightly. According to his account the management objected to an article which described some bomb-throwing French anarchists without condemning them and to paying Swinburne fifty pounds for a poem which they considered seditious.
The Saturday Review was a rearguard action. As a leader of opinion he was already slipping. Other stars of the Cafe Royal, Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde, were fading into degradation and ignominy. Bernard Shaw was saved by his sense of humor and the thorough monogamy of his personal life. Wells, who kept his bohemianism quite private, was enshrined in the hearts of suburbia by his mixture of science fiction with social idealism. Licentiousness was going out of style. Harris became the man of lost causes.
He defended Wilde and Havelock Ellis. He took the unpopular side in the Boer War. He attacked British imperialism and prudishness and hypocrisy and the poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
His life teemed with desperate expedients to raise money, deals with bucketshop operators, the use of his social connections to promote the sale of blue-sky securities. He had learned to live in the style of the Grand Dukes. He had become an addict of the Hotel du Cap at Antibes much frequented by the literary British in those days. Possibly hoping to cash in on the friendship, which we are assured was platonic, of the wealthy American lady who was then Princess of Monaco, he invested in a Monte Carlo hotel, then in one at Eze. He had begun to believe his own stories of his youthful success in the hotel business in Chicago. His luck had turned. Both schemes went awry.
He had to make his living by writing. His stories of the American west had always gone over when he told them from the head of the table. He started to write them down. His style was forceful and clear. He had the narrative drive. His first publications were American-type short stories. Then he tried to emulate the success of Prosper Merimée's Carmen by a novelette about a bullfighter which he called "Montes the Matador." Montes was a great success. George Meredith praised it because the bull's feelings were so well described. Harris' hunting with the hounds hadn't brought him the wealth and position he craved. From now on he would run with the hares.
Now, "in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes," as his beloved Shakespeare had put it, he found himself more and more siding with the exploited and the unfortunate. He would write with intent. He'd shatter the complacency of the well-heeled Victorians who were turning him down. After a hurried trip to America to refresh his memory of Chicago in 1908 he published The Bomb.
When on May 4, 1886, in the course of the rioting that accompanied a wave of agitation for the eight-hour day, a bomb was thrown into a group of police advancing to break up a protest meeting in the Chicago Haymarket, the British press joined the American press in intemperate denunciation of the murderous anarchists.
Frank Harris was still groping for the fourteen-year-old mentality as editor of the Evening News. It was not till many months later that any trace of the feelings of the erstwhile Hyde Park orator appeared in its columns. Even then, though in private he seems to have doubted the guilt of the indicted anarchists, his name did not appear along with that of his friend George Bernard Shaw, or along with William Morris' or Peter Kropotkin's, on an appeal for amnesty approved by a meeting of protest in London in the fall of 1887. The Park Lane viveur could hardly associate himself with the grubby mass meetings of radical sectarians.
By the time Harris picked up the story the hanged men had been rehabilitated in the opinion of a large sector of American opinion. Governor John P. Altgeld of Illinois, with a rare exhibition of civic courage, pardoned the two survivors in 1892. Altgeld went further. In a careful analysis of the trial he proved, to the satisfaction of most fair minded citizens, that though the Chicago anarchists might have been guilty of inciting to riot, they were innocent of conspiracy to commit murder, or of the bomb-throwing itself. Altgeld's pursuit of justice was the ruin of his career as a politician.
The Bomb might well be classed as an early form of the "proletarian" novel.
I don't know whether Frank Harris is a "great" writer or not. He had drive and force. He had a knack for sketching characters. His writing stands up with Wells's or Kipling's as an example of the limpid English style of the period. He was very much of a precursor.
As a newspaper editor he foreshadowed the sensationalism of the cheap English press of our day. In The Man Shakespeare he led in the effort to save the mighty dead from the gradgrinds and the embalmers. Perhaps he loved Shakespeare "not wisely but too well." With his Contemporary Portraits he introduced into English with entertaining results a French strain of literary journalism. In My Life and Loves, and in the pornographic material he peddled pathetically from door to door in the latter part of his life, he anticipated the flood of smut that now clogs the literary marketplace.
Critics have complained of historical inaccuracies in The Bomb. It rings true to the emotions of the time. Picking Rudolph Schnaubelt, the man who disappeared, as the bomb-thrower is as good a guess as any. If anybody knew who threw the bomb he has kept his mouth shut to this day. Harris fell into an anachronism in his description of the building of Brooklyn Bridge, which refers to the early seventies instead of the early eighties, but he had to work in his own experiences and recollections. Half a century after the book was first printed the reader will find the re-creation of the mood of the time singularly convincing.
Looking back on the nineteenth-century anarchists from the sixties of the twentieth century, when exploitation of aspirations and resentments has become part of the standard textbook of political career-making, the Chicago anarchists seem as naïvely alien as the Children's Crusade. The oppressions and injustices that they protested against were real, but the notion that society could be shocked into justice and charity by the blowing up of a few policemen ranks with delusions relegated to the psychiatric ward. Out of the energy of these blind protests and deluded hatreds, of men struggling against adjustment to the changes in their lives enforced by technological revolution, we have seen terrible empires built. Perhaps the war-spirit of political ideologies is losing its hold as the passions that fed the wars of religion lost their hold in the past. In any case The Bomb will give you a glimpse of an odd and moving and disturbing, and fortunately fairly unique, episode in Chicago's history.
[To The First American Edition (1909)]
[by Frank Harris]
I have been asked to write a foreword to the American edition of The Bomb and the publisher tells me that what the American public will most want to know is how much of the story is true.
All through 1885 and 1886 I took a lively interest in the labour disputes in Chicago. The reports that reached us in London from American newspapers were all bitterly one-sided: they read as if some enraged capitalist had dictated them: but after the bomb was thrown and the labour leaders were brought to trial little islets of facts began to emerge from the sea of lies.
I made up my mind that if I ever got the opportunity I would look into the matter and see whether the Socialists who had been sent to death deserved the punishment meted out to them amid the jubilation of the capitalistic press.
In 1907 I paid a visit to America and spent some time in Chicago visiting the various scenes and studying the contemporary newspaper accounts of the tragedy. I came to the conclusion that six out of seven men punished in Chicago were as innocent as I was, and that four of them had been murdered--according to law.
I felt so strongly on the subject that when I sketched out The Bomb I determined not to alter a single incident but to take all the facts just as they occurred. The book then, in the most important particulars, is a history, and is true, as history should be true, to life, when there are no facts to go upon.
The success of the book in England has been due partly perhaps to the book itself; but also in part to the fact that it enabled Englishmen to gloat over a fancied superiority to Americans in the administration of justice. The prejudice shown in Chicago, the gross unfairness of the trial, the savagery of the sentences allowed Englishmen to believe that such judicial murders were only possible in America. I am not of that opinion. At the risk of disturbing the comfortable self-esteem of my compatriots I must say that I believe the administration of justice in the United States is at least as fair and certainly more humane than it is in England. The Socialists in Trafalgar Square, when John Burns and Cunninghame Graham were maltreated, were even worse handled in proportion to their resistance than their fellows in Chicago.
I am afraid the moral of the story is a little too obvious: it may, however, serve to remind the American people how valuable are some of the foreign elements which go to make up their complex civilization. It may also incidentally remind the reader of the value of sympathy with ideas which he perhaps dislikes.
Frank Harris
LONDON
January 1909
[to the Second American Edition (1920)]
[by Frank Harris]
FLAUBERT exclaimed once that no one had understood, much less appreciated, his Madame Bovary. "I ought to have criticized it myself," he added; "then I'd have shown the fool-critics how to read a story and analyze it and weigh the merits of it. I could have done this better than anyone and very impartially; for I can see its faults, faults that make me miserable."
In just this spirit and with the self-same conviction I want to say a word or two about The Bomb. I have stuck to the facts of the story in the main as closely as possible; but the character of Schnaubelt and his love story with Elsie are purely imaginary. I was justified in inventing these, I believe, because almost nothing was known of Schnaubelt and as the illiterate mob continually confuse Socialism and free love, it seemed to me well to demonstrate that love between social outcasts and rebels would naturally be intenser and more idealistic than among ordinary men and women. The pressure from the outside must crush the pariahs together in a closer embrace and intensify passion to self-sacrifice.
My chief difficulty was the choice of a protagonist; Parsons was almost an ideal figure; he gave himself up to the police though he was entirely innocent and out of their clutches and when offered a pardon in prison he refused it, rising to the height of human self-abnegation by declaring that if he, the only American, accepted a pardon he would thus be dooming the others to death.
But such magnanimity and sweetness of spirit is not as American, it seemed to me, as Lingg's practical heroism and passion of revolt In spite of Miss Goldman's preference for Parsons, I still believe I chose my hero rightly, but I idealized Lingg beyond life-size, I fear. No young man of twenty ever had the insight into social conditions which I attribute to him. I should have given him less vision and put in a dash of squalor or of cruelty or cunning to make the portrait lifelike. But the fault seems to me excusable.
The whole book is probably too idealistic; but as all rebels--socialists and anarchists alike--are whelmed in these States in a flood of furious and idiotic contempt and hatred, a certain small amount of idealization of the would be reformers is perhaps justified. On the whole I'm rather proud of The Bomb and of Elsie and Lingg.
In a pamphlet published by the police, shortly after the execution of the Anarchists, it was stated that "Lingg's father was a dragoon officer of royal blood, but he only knew his mother for whom he always showed a passionate devotion. Four years after her liaison with the handsome officer, his mother wedded a lumber-worker named Link. When Louis was about twelve his foster-father got heart-disease through exposure and died. The widow was left in poverty and had to do washing and ironing in order to support herself and a daughter named Elise who had been born of her marriage.
"Louis received a fair education [I continue to give the gist of the police record] and became a carpenter at Mannheim in order to help his mother. In 1879 he was out of his apprenticeship and went to Kehl and then to Freiburg.
"Here he fell in with free-thinkers and became an avowed Socialist. In '83 he went to Luzern and thence to Zurich where he met the famous anarchist Reinsdoff to whom he became greatly attached. He joined the German Socialist society "Eintracht" and threw his whole soul into the cause.
"In August 1884 Mrs. Lingg married a second time, one Christian Gaddum, in order, as she said, to find support for her daughter, she herself being in poor health; she asked Louis to return home if only for a visit.
"But Louis had now reached the age for military service and as his whole being revolted against German militarism he decided to emigrate to America.
"After the wayward boy had taken ship at Havre he and his mother corresponded regularly. All her letters breathed encouragement; she sent him money often and concluded invariably by giving him good counsel and urging him to write frequently.
"That Lingg had a great love for his mother is shown by the fact that he kept all her letters from the time he left home till he killed himself.
"His illegitimate birth appears to have annoyed the youth; he worried his mother to give him his father's name. In one letter she says: "It grieves me that you speak of your birth; where your father is I don't know. My father did not want me to marry him because he did not desire me to follow him into Hessia and as he had no real estate he could not marry me in Schwetzingen according to our laws. He left and went I don't know where."
"A little later Louis appears to have asked her to get him a certificate of birth, for a later letter from her satisfies this request. I reproduce it word for word as characteristic of their relations:
MANNHEIM, June 29, 1884.
DEAR Louis: You must have waited a long time for an answer. John said to Elise that I had not yet replied to your last letter. The officials of the court you cannot push. For my part I would have been better pleased if they had hurried up, because it would have saved you a great deal of time. But now I am glad that it has finally been accomplished. After a great deal of toil, I put myself out to go to Schwetz-ingen and see about the certificate of your birth. I know you will be glad and satisfied to learn that you carry the name of Lingg. This is better than to have children with two different names. He (the first husband) had you entered as a legitimate child before we got married. I think this was the best course, so that you will not worry and reproach me. Such a certificate of birth is no disgrace, and you can show it.
I felt offended that you took no notice of the "confirmation." Elise had everything nice. Her only wish was to receive some small token from Louis, which would have pleased her more than anything else. When she came from church, the first thing she asked for was about a letter or card from you, but we had to be contented with the thought that perhaps you did not remember us. Now it is all past...
I was very much troubled that it has taken so long (to procure the certificate), but I could not help it. Everything is all right, and we are all well and working. I hope to hear the same from you. It would not be so bad if you wrote oftener. I have had to do a great many things for you the last eighteen years, but with a mother you can do as you please--neglect her and never answer her letters.
"The certificate sent him read as follows:
CERTIFICATE OF BIRTH
No. 9,681.
Ludwig Link, legitimate son of Philipp Friedrich Link and of Regina Von Hoefler, was born at Schwetzingen, on the ninth (9th) day of September, 1864. This is certified according to the records of the Evangelical Congregation of Schwetzingen.
SCHWETZINGEN, May 24, 1884.
(Seal.)
"One thing appears from the above, and that is that at home Louis' name was Link. Other documents, some of them legal, also found in his trunk, show that his name was formerly written Link. He must have changed it shortly before leaving Europe or just after reaching the United States. The thought of his illegitimacy (according to the police report) helped to make him in religion a free-thinker, in theory a freelover, and in practice an implacable enemy of existing society. His mother's letters show that she wished him to be a good man, and it was no fault of her early training that he subsequently became an Anarchist.
"No sooner had Lingg reached Chicago than he looked up the haunts of Socialists and Anarchists . . . Lingg arrived here only eight or nine months before the eventful 4th of May, but in that short time he succeeded in making himself the most popular man in Anarchist circles. No one had created such a furore since 1872, when Socialism had its inception in the city.
"Lingg had not been connected with the organization long before he became a recognized leader and made speeches that enthused all the comrades. While young in years, they recognized in him a worthy leader, and the fact that he had sat at the feet of Reinsdorf as a pupil elevated him in their estimation. This distinction, added to his personal magnetism, made him the subject for praise and comment . . .
"His work was never finished, and never neglected. At one time he taught his followers how to handle the bombs so that they would not explode in their hands, and showed the time and distance for throwing the missiles with deadly effect; at another he drilled those who were to do the throwing . . . He was not alone a bomb-maker; he also constituted himself an agent to sell arms. This is shown by a note found in his trunk addressed to Abraham Hermann. It reads as follows:
Friend:--I sold three revolvers during the last two days, and I will sell three more to-day (Wednesday). I sell them from $6.00 to $7.80 apiece.
Respectfully and best regards,
L. LINGG
"In truth, he was the shiftiest as well as the most dangerous Anarchist in all Chicago.
"The Haymarket riot proved a most bitter disappointment. Lingg was fairly beside himself with chagrin and mortification. The one consuming desire of his life had utterly and signally failed of realization."
[Here occurs the police account of his arrest which I have reproduced in The Bomb. I now continue it]:
"During the time Lingg remained at the station his wounded thumb was regularly attended to; he was treated very kindly, had plenty to eat, and was made as comfortable as possible.
"One day I asked him if he entertained any hostility towards the police. He replied that during the McCormick factory riot he had been clubbed by an officer, but he did not care much for that. He could forget it all, but he did not like Bonfield. He would kill Bonfield, willingly, he declared.
"Lingg was a singular Anarchist. Though he drank beer, he never drank to excess, and he frowned upon the use of bad or indecent language. He was an admirer of the fair sex, and they reciprocated his admiration, his manly form, handsome face, and pleasing manners captivating all.
"There was one visitor he always welcomed. It was his sweetheart, who became a regular caller. She invariably wore a pleasant smile, breathed soft, loving words into his ears through the wire screen that separated the visitor's cage from the jail corridor, and contributed much toward keeping him cheerful.
"She simply passed with the jail officials at first as 'Lingg's girl,' but one day someone called her Ida Miller, and thereafter she was recognized under that name. She was generally accompanied by young Miss Engel, the daughter of the Anarchist Engel, and during the last four months of her lover's incarceration she could be seen every afternoon entering the jail. She was always readily admitted until the day the bombs were found in Lingg's cell. After that neither she nor Mr. and Mrs. Stein were admitted. While it has never been satisfactorily proven who it was that introduced the bombs into the jail, it is likely that they were smuggled into Lingg's hands by his sweetheart. She enjoyed Lingg's fullest confidence, and obeyed his every wish.
"It is not known whether Miller is the real name of the girl, but it is supposed to be Elise Friedel. She is a German, and was twenty-two years of age at the time, her birthplace being Mannheim, which was also Lingg's native town. She was tall, well-made, with fair complexion, and dark eyes and hair."
Here ends the police account so far as it concerns us or throws light on the characters of The Bomb. It is informative and fairly truthful but plainly inspired by illiterate and brainless prejudice. Still it proves that in my story I have kept closely to the facts.
FRANK HARRIS.
"Hold the high way and let thy spirit thee lead
And Truth shal thee deliver, it is no drede."
MY NAME is Rudolph Schnaubelt. I threw the bomb which killed eight policemen and wounded sixty in Chicago in 1886. Now I lie here in Reichholz, Bavaria, dying of consumption under a false name, in peace at last.
But it is not about myself I want to write: I am finished. I got chilled to the heart last winter, and grew steadily worse in those hateful, broad, white Muenchener streets which are baked by the sun and swept by the icy air from the Alps. Nature or man will soon deal with my refuse as they please.
But there is one thing I must do before I go out, one thing I have promised to do. I must tell the story of the man who spread terror through America, the greatest man that ever lived, I think; a born rebel, murderer and martyr. If I can give a fair portrait of Louis Lingg, the Chicago Anarchist, as I knew him, show the body and soul and mighty purpose of him, I shall have done more for men than when I threw the bomb. . . .
How am I to tell the story? Is it possible to paint a great man of action in words; show his cool calculation of forces, his unerring judgment, and the tiger spring? The best thing I can do is to begin at the beginning, and tell the tale quite simply and sincerely. "Truth," Lingg said to me once, "is the skeleton, so to speak, of all great works of art." Besides, memory is in itself an artist. It all happened long ago, and in time one forgets the trivial and remembers the important.
It should be easy enough for me to paint this one man's portrait. I don't mean that I am much of a writer; but I have read some of the great writers, and know how they picture a man, and any weakness of mine is more than made up for by the best model a writer ever had. God! if he could come in here now and look at me with those eyes of his, and hold out his hands, I'd rise from this bed and be well again; shake off the cough and sweat and deadly weakness, shake off anything. He had vitality enough in him to bring the dead to life, passion enough for a hundred men. . . .
I learned so much from him, so much; even more, strange to say, since I lost him than when I was with him. In these lonely latter months I have read a good deal, thought a good deal; and all my reading has been illumined by sayings of his which suddenly come back to my mind, and make the dark ways plain. I have often wondered why I did not appreciate this phrase or that when he used it. But memory treasured it up, and when the time was ripe, or rather, when I was ripe for it, I recalled it, and realized its significance; he is the spring of all my growth.
The worst of it is that I shall have to talk about myself at first, and my early life, and that will not be interesting; but I can't help it, for after all I am the mirror in which the reader must see Lingg, and I want him to feel pretty certain that the mirror is clean at least, and does not distort truth, or disfigure it.
I was born near Munich, in a little village called Lindau. My father was an Oberfoerster, a chief in the forestry department. My mother died early. I was brought up healthily enough in the hard way of the German highlands. At six I went to the village school. Because my clothes were better than most of the other boys' clothes, because every now and then I had a few Pfennige to spend, I thought myself better than my schoolmates. The master, too, never beat me or scolded me. I must have been a dreadful little snob. I remember liking my first name, Rudolph. There were princes, forsooth, called Rudolph; but Schnaubelt I hated, it seemed vulgar and common.
When I was about twelve or thirteen I had learned all that the village school had to teach. My father wished me to go to Munich to study in the Gymnasium, though he grudged the money it would cost to keep me there. When he was not drinking or working he used to preach the money-value of education to me, and I was willing enough to believe him. He never showed me much affection, and I was not sorry to go out into the larger world, and try my wings in a long flight.
It was about this time that I first of all became aware of nature's beauty. Away to the south our mountain valley broke down towards the flat country, and one could look towards Munich far over the plain all painted in different colors by the growing crops. Suddenly one evening the scales fell from my eyes; I saw the piney mountain and the misty-blue plain and the golden haze of the setting sun, and stared in wondering admiration.
How was it I had never before seen their beauty?
Well, I went to the Gymnasium. I suppose I was dutiful and teachable: we Germans have those sheep-virtues in our blood. But in my reading of Latin and Greek I came across thoughts and thinkers and at length Heine, the poet, woke me to question all the fairy tales of childhood. Heine was my first teacher, and I learned from him more than I learned in the classrooms; it was he who opened for me the door of the modern world. I finished with the Gymnasium when I was about eighteen, and left it, as Bismarck said he left it, a Freethinker and Republican.
In the holidays I used to go home to Lindau; but my father made my life harder and harder to me. He was away all day at work. He did work, that is one thing I must say for him; but he left at home the girl who took charge of the house, and she used to give herself airs. She was justified in doing so, I suppose, poor girl; but I did not like it at the time, and resented her manner, snob that I was. When I had any words with Suesel I was sure to have a row with my father afterwards, and he didn't pick his words, especially when he had drink in him. I seemed to anger him; intellectually we were at opposite poles. Even when cheating or worse he was a devout Lutheran, and his servility to his superiors was only equalled by the harshness with which he treated his underlings. His credulity and servility were as offensive to my new dignity of manhood as his cruelty to his subordinates or his bestial drunkenness.
For some unhappy months I was at a loose end. I was very proud, thought no end of myself and my petty scholarly achievements; but I didn't know what course to steer in life, what profession to adopt. Besides, the year of military service stood between me and my future occupation, and the mere thought of the slavery was inexpressibly hateful to me. I hated the uniform, the livery of murder; hated the discipline which turned a man into a machine; hated the orders which I must obey, even though they were absurd; hated the mad unreason of the vile, soul-stifling system. Why should I, a German, fight Frenchmen or Russians or Englishmen? I was willing enough to defend myself or my country if we were attacked; confident enough, too, in courage, to believe that a militia like the Swiss would suffice for that purpose. But I loved the French, as my teacher Heine loved them; a great Cultur-volk, I said to myself--a nation in the first rank of civilization; I loved the Russians, too, an intelligent, sympathetic, kindly people; and I admired the adventurous English. Race-differences were as delightful in my eyes as the genera-differences of flowers. Wars and titles belonged to the dark past and childhood of humanity; were we never to be breeched as men simply and brothers? We mortals, I thought, should be trained to fight disease and death, and not one another; we should be sworn to conquer nature and master her laws, that was the new warfare in which wisdom and courage would have their full reward in the humanization of man.
Thoughts like these lighted my darkness but the shadows were heavy. I was at odds with my surroundings; I detested the brainless conventions of life, the so-called aristocratic organization of it; besides, my father did not care to support me any longer; I was a burden to him; and in this state of intolerable dependence and unrest my thoughts turned to America. More and more the purpose fixed itself in me to get money and emigrate; the new land seemed to call me. I wanted to be a writer or teacher; I wanted to see the world, to win new experiences; I wanted freedom, love, honour, everything that young men want, vaguely; my blood was in a ferment. . . .
It was a sordid quarrel with my father, in which he told me that at my age he was already earning his living, which made up my mind for me, that and a sentence of Hermann Grimm, which happened at the time to be singing itself in my ears:--
"An all over-stretching impulse towards equality, before God and the
law, alone controls today the history of our race."
That was what I wanted, or thought I wanted--equality--
"Em ueber-Alles sich ausstreckendes Verlangen nach Gleichheit vor Gott und vor dem Gesetze. . . ."
Not much in the phrase, the reader will say, I'm afraid; but I give it here because at the moment it had an extraordinary effect upon me. It was the first time to my knowledge that a properly equipped thinker had recognized the desire for equality as a motive force at all, let alone as the chief driving power in modern politics.
A few days after our quarrel I told my father I intended to go to America, and asked him if he could let me have five hundred marks ($125) to take me to New York. I fixed the sum at five hundred because he had promised to let me have that amount during my first year in the University. I told him that I wanted it as a loan and not as a gift, and at length I got it, for Suesel backed up my request--a kindness I did not at all expect, which moved me to shamefaced gratitude. But Suesel wanted no thanks; she merely wished to get rid of me, she said; for if I stayed I should be a drag on my father.
I travelled fourth-class to Hamburg, and in three days was on the high seas. I was the only man of any education in the steerage, and I kept to myself, and spent most of my time studying English. Still, I made one or two acquaintances. There was a young fellow called Ludwig Henschel going out as a waiter, who had worked for some years in England, and regarded America as Tom Tiddler's ground. He loved to show off to me and advise me; but all the while was a little proud of my acquaintance and my scholarship, and I tolerated him chiefly because his attitude flattered my paltry vanity.
There was a North German, too, called Raben, who was by way of being a journalist, though he had more conceit than reading, and his learning was to seek. He was small and thin, with washed-out, sandy hair, grey eyes, and white eyelashes. He had a nervous staccato way of talking; but he met one's eye boldly, and though instinct warned me to avoid him, I knew so little of life that I took his stare for proof of frank honesty, and felt with some remorse that my aversion wronged him. Had I known then of him what I learned later, I'd have--but there! Judas didn't go about branded. I think Raben disliked me. At first he tried to make up to me; but in an argument one day he blundered in a Latin tag, and saw that I had detected the mistake. He drew away from me then, and tried to carry Henschel with him; but Ludwig knew more of life than books, and confided to me that he would never trust a man or a woman with light eyelashes. What children we men are!
Another acquaintance I made on the steamer was a Jew boy from Lemburg, Isaac Glueckstein, who had no money and knew but little English, yet whose self-confidence was in itself no mean stock-in-trade. "In five years I shall be rich," was always on the tip of his tongue--five years! He never looked at a book, but he was always trying to talk English with some one or other, and at the end of the voyage he could understand more English than I could, though he could not read it at all, whilst I read it with ease.. . . When we parted on the wharf he drifted out of my life; but I know that he is now the famous Newport banker, and fabulously rich. He had only one ambition, and went in blinkers to attain it; desire in his case being a forecast of capacity.
We reached Sandy Hook late one evening, and ran up to New York next day. Everything was hurry and excitement; the cheerful tone and bustle made me feel very lonesome. When we landed I went to look for lodgings with Henschel, who was only too glad to have me with him, and, thanks to his command of English and the freemasonry of his craft, we soon found a room and board in a by-street on the east side. Next day Henschel and I started to look for work. I little thought that I was going gaily to undreamed-of misery. If I try to recall now some of the sufferings of that time, it is because my terrible experiences throw light on the tragic after-story. Never did any one go out to seek work more cheerfully or with better resolutions. I had made up my mind to work as hard as I could; whatever I was given to do, I said to myself, I would do it with my might, do it so that no one coming after me should do it as well. I had tested this resolution of mine again and again in my school life, and had always found it succeed. I had won always, even in the Gymnasium, even in Prima. Why should not the same resolve bring me to the front in the wider competition of life? Poor fool that I was.
On that first morning I was up at five o'clock, and kept repeating to myself, over and over again as I dressed, the English phrases I should have to use in the day, till they all came trippingly to my tongue, and when at six o'clock I went out into the air I was boyishly excited and eager for the struggle. The May morning had all the beauty and freshness of youth; the air was warm, yet light and quick. I fell in love with the broad, sunny streets. The people, too, walked rapidly, the street cars spun past; everything was brisk and cheerful; I felt curiously exhilarated and light-hearted.
First of all I went to a well-known American newspaper office and asked to see the editor. After waiting some time I was told curtly that the editor was not in.
"When will he be in?" I questioned.
"Tonight, I guess," replied the janitor, "about eleven," with a stare that sized me up from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet. "If you hey a letter for him, you kin leave it."
"I have no letter," I confessed, shamefacedly.
"Oh, shucks!" he exclaimed, in utter contempt. What did "shucks" mean? I asked myself in vain. In spite of repeated efforts I could get no further information from this Cerberus. At last, tired of my importunity, he slammed the window in my face, with--"go scratch your head, Dutchy."
The fool angered me; besides, why should he take pleasure in rudeness? It flattered his vanity, I suppose, to be able to treat another man with contempt.
I was a little cast down by this first rebuff, and when I went again into the streets I found the sun hotter than I had ever known it; but I trudged off to a German paper I had heard of, and asked again to see the editor. The man at the door was plainly a German, so I spoke German to him. He answered with a South German accent strong enough to skate on--"Can't you speak United States?"
"Yes," I said, and repeated my question carefully in American.
"No, he ain't in," was the reply; "and I guess ven he comes in, he von't vant to see you." The tone was worse than the words.
I received several similar rebuffs that first morning, and before noon my stock of courage or impudence was nearly exhausted. Nowhere the slightest sympathy, the smallest desire to help: on all sides contempt for my pretensions, delight in my discomfiture.
I went back to the boardinghouse more weary than if I had done three days' work. The midday meal, however, cheered me up a little; my resolution came back to me and, in spite of the temptation to stay and talk with the other lodgers, I retired to my room and began to study. Henschel had not returned for dinner, so I hoped that he had found work. However that might be, it was my business to learn English as quickly as possible, so I set myself to the task, and memorized through the swooning heat doggedly till six o'clock, when I went downstairs for tea. Our German schools may not be very good; but at least they teach one how to learn languages.
After supper, as it was called, I returned to my room, which was still like an oven, and studied in my shirt-sleeves at the open window till nearly midnight, when Henschel burst in with the news that he had got work in a great restaurant, and had wonderful prospects. I did not grudge him his good luck, but the contrast seemed to make my forlorn state more miserable. I told him how I had been received; but he had no counsel to give, no hope; he was lost in his own good fortune. He had taken ten dollars in tips. It all went into the "tronk" he told me, or common stock, and the waiters and headwaiters shared it at the end of the week, according to a fixed ratio. He would certainly earn, he calculated, between forty and fifty dollars a week. The thought that I, who had spent seven years in study, could not get anything at all to do was not pleasant.
When he left me I went to bed; but I tossed about a long time, unable to sleep. It seemed to me that it would have been better for me if I had been taught any trade or handicraft, instead of being given an education which no one appeared to want. I found out afterwards that had I been trained as a bricklayer, or carpenter, or plumber, or house painter, I should probably have got work, as Henschel got it, as soon as I reached New York. The educated man without money or a profession is not much thought of in America.
Next day I got up and went to look for work as before, with just as little success, and so the hunt continued for six or seven days, till my first week had come to an end, and I had to pay another week's board--five dollars-- out of my scanty stock of forty-five. Eight more weeks, I said to myself, and then--fear came to me, humiliating fear, and gnawed at my self-esteem.
The second week passed like the first. At the end of it, however, Henschel had a Sunday morning off, and took me with him on the steamer to Jersey City; we had a great talk. I told him what I had done, and how hard I had tried to get work--all in vain. He assured me he would keep his eyes and ears open and as soon as he came across a writer or an editor he would speak for me to him and let me know. With this small crumb of comfort I was fain to be content. But the outing and rest had given me fresh courage, and when we came back I told Henschel that as I had exhausted all the newspaper offices, I would try next day to get work on the elevated railways, or on the streetcar lines, or in some German house where English was spoken. Another week or two fleeted by. I had been in hundreds of offices and met nothing but refusals, and generally rude refusals. I had called at every tram centre, visited every railroad depot--in vain. And now there were only thirty dollars in my purse. Fear of the future began to turn into sour rage in me, and infect my blood. Strangely enough, a little talk I had with Glueckstein on board the ship often came back to me. I asked him one morning how he intended to begin to get rich. "Get into a big office," he said.
"But how--where?" I asked.
"Go about and ask," he replied. "There is some office in New York wants me as badly as I want it, and I'm going to find it."
This speech stuck in my memory and strengthened my determination to persevere at all costs.
One fact I noted which is a little difficult to explain. I learned more English in the three or four weeks I spent looking for work in New York than in all the months, or indeed years, I had studied it. Memory seemed to receive impressions more deeply as the tension of anxiety increased. I spoke quite fluently at the end of the first month, though no doubt with a German accent. I had already read a good many novels, too, of Thackeray and others, and half a dozen of Shakespeare's plays. Week after week slipped past; my little stock of dollar bills dwindled away; at length I was at the end of my poor capital, and as far from work as ever. I shall never be able to give an idea of what I suffered in disappointment and sheer misery. Fortunately for my reason the humiliations filled me with rage, and this rage and fear fermented in me into bitterness which bred all-hating thoughts. When I saw rich men entering a restaurant, or driving in Central Park, I grew murderous. They wasted in a minute as much as I asked for a week's work. The most galling reflection was that no one wanted me or my labour. "Even the horses are all employed," I said to myself, "and thousands of men who are much better working animals than any horse are left utterly unused. What waste!" One conclusion settled itself in me; there was something rotten in a society which left good brains and willing hands without work.
I made up my mind to pawn a silver watch my father had given me when we parted, and with what I got for the watch I paid my week's board. The week passed, and still I had no work, and now I had nothing to pawn. I knew from having talked to the boardinghouse keeper that credit was not to be looked for. "Pay or get out" was the motto always on his lips. Pay! Would they take blood?
I was getting desperate. Hate and rage seethed in me. I was ready for anything. This is the way, I said to myself, society makes criminals. But I did not even know how to commit a crime, nor where to turn, and when Henschel came home I asked him if I could get a job as waiter.
"But you are not a waiter."
"Can't anybody be a waiter?" I asked in amazement.
"No, indeed," he replied quite indignantly. "If you had a table of six people, and each of them ordered a different soup, and three of them ordered one sort of fish, and the three others, three different sorts of fish, and so on, you would not remember what had been ordered, and could not transmit the order to the kitchen. Believe me, it takes a good deal of practice and memory to wait well. One must have brains to be a waiter. Do you think you could carry six soup plates full of soup, on a tray, into a room, high above your head, with other waiters running against you, without spilling a drop?"
The argument was unanswerable: "One must have brains to be a waiter!"
"But couldn't I be an assistant?" I persisted.
"Then you would only get seven or eight dollars a week," he replied; "and even an assistant, as a rule, knows the waiter's work, though he perhaps doesn't know American."
The cloud of depression deepened; every avenue seemed closed to me. Yet I must do something, I had no money, not a dollar. What could I do? I must borrow from Henschel. My cheeks burned. I had always looked on him, good fellow though he was, as an inferior, and now--yet it had to be done. There was no other way. I resented having to do it. In spite of myself, I bore a certain ill-will to Henschel and his superior position, as if he had been responsible for my humiliation. What brutes we men are. I only asked him for five dollars, just enough to pay my week's board. He lent them willingly enough; but he did not like being asked, I thought. It may have been my wounded sensibility; but I grew hot with shame at having to take his money. I determined that next day I would get work, work of any kind, and I would go into the streets to get it. I scarcely slept an hour that long hot night; rage shook me again and again, and I got up and paced my den like a beast.
In the morning I put on my worst clothes, and went down to the docks and asked for work. Strange to say, my accent passed unnoticed, and stranger still, I found here some of the sympathy and kindness which I had looked for in vain before. The rough laborers at the docks--Irishmen, or Norwegians, or coloured men--were willing to give me any assistance they could. They showed me where to go and ask for work; told me what the boss was like, the best time and way to approach him. On every hand now I found human sympathy; but for days and days no work. How far did I fall? That week I learned enough to know that I could pawn my Sunday suit. I got fifteen dollars on it; paid my bill, paid Henschel, too, and went straight to a workman's lodging-house, where I could board for three dollars a week. Henschel begged me to stay on with him, said he would help me; but the stomach of my pride would not stand his charity, so I gave him my address, in case he heard of anything to suit me, and went down--to the lowest level of decent working life.
The lodging-house at first seemed to me a foul place. It was a low tenement house let off in single rooms to foreign workmen. You could get your meals in it or cook your own food in your room, whichever you liked. The dining room would hold about thirty people comfortably; but after supper, which lasted from seven till nine, it was filled with perhaps sixty men, smoking and talking at intervals, in a dozen different tongues till ten or eleven o'clock. For the most part they were day labourers, untidy, dirty, shiftless; but they showed me how to get casual light labour at docks and offices and restaurants-- the myriad chance-jobs of a great city. Here I lived for months, spending perhaps three days in getting a job which perhaps only employed me for a few hours, then again finding work which lasted three or four days.
At first I suffered intensely from shame and a sense of undeserved degradation. How had I fallen so low? I must be to blame in some way. Wounded vanity frayed my nerves threadbare and intensified the discomfort of my surroundings. Then came a period in which I accepted my fate, and took everything as it came, sullenly. Usually I earned enough each week to keep me a week and a half or two weeks; but in mid-winter I had three or four spells of bad luck, when I fell even below the lodging-house to the bed for a night, hunger and hopeless misery. It is much harder to get employment in the depth of winter than in any other season. It would really seem as if nature came to aid man in crushing and demoralizing the poor. You will say that this only applies to special trades; but take the statistics of the unemployed, and you will find them highest in mid-winter. I had never experienced anything like the cold in New York, the awful blizzards; the clear nights when the thermometer fell to ten and fifteen degrees below zero, and the cold seemed to pierce one with a hundred icy blades--life threatened at every point by nature and man more brutal-callous than ever.
I had youth on my side, and pride, and no vices which cost money, or I should have gone under in that bitter purgatory. More than once I walked the streets all night long, stupefied, dazed with cold and hunger; more than once the charity of some woman or workman called me back to life and hope. It is only the poor who really help the poor. I have been down in the depths, and have brought back scarcely anything more certain than that. One does not learn much in hell, except hate, and the out-of-work foreigner in New York is in the worst hell known to man. But even that hell of cold gloom and lonely misery was irradiated now and then by rays of pure human sympathy and kindness. How well I remember instance after instance of this. Whenever I sank to utter destitution I used at first to frequent the Battery: the swirling waters seemed to draw me, lulling my pain with their unceasing threnody. There I paced up and down for hours or swung my arms to keep warm, and was often glad that the numbing cold forced me to run about, for somehow or other one's thoughts are not so bitter when one moves briskly as they are when sitting still. One night, however, I was tired out, and sat in the corner of one of the benches. I must have slept, for I was awakened by an Irish policeman--
"Come now, get a move on ye; ye can't slape here, ye know."
I got up, but could hardly stir, I was so numbed with cold, and still half asleep.
"Get on, get on," said the policeman, shoving me.
"How dare ye push the man!" cried a husky woman's voice; "he ain't hurtin' the ould sate, anyway."
It was one of the prostitutes, Irish Betsy they called her, who regarded that part of the Battery as her own particular preserve and kept it sacred by a perfect readiness to fight for it, though its value must have been very small.
The policeman took her interference unkindly, and in consequence got the rough edge of Betsy's tongue. As soon as I could speak I begged her not to quarrel for me; I would go; and I walked away. Betsy followed and overtook me in a little while, and pushed a dollar bill into my hand.
"I can't take money," I said, handing her the bill back.
"And why not?" she asked hotly; "you made it more than me, an' when I want it some night I'll ask it back from ye, the divil doubt me! It's loanin' it to ye, I am!"
Poor, dear Betsy! she had the genius of kindness in her, and afterwards, when times went better with me, I took her to supper as often as I could, and so learned her whole sad story. Love was her sin, love only, and like all other generous mistakes, though it brought punishment and contempt of others, it did not bring self-contempt. Betsy regarded herself as one of the innocent victims of life, and she was probably justified in this, for she kept her goodness of heart all through.
Another scene: I had gone to one place for three or four nights, where I got a bed for ten cents, and as I shivered out into the cold one morning about five-thirty, the hard Yankee who kept the place suddenly asked me--
"What's that to you?"
"Not much; but my cawfee's hot, and if you'll have a cup, you're welcome."
The tone was careless-rough, but the glance that went with it thawed the ice about my heart, and I followed him into his little den. He poured out the coffee and put a steaming cup of it and some bacon and biscuits before me, and in ten minutes I was a man again, with a man's heart in me and a man's hope and energy.
"Do you often give breakfast away like this?" I asked him, smiling.
"Sometimes," was the answer. I thanked him for his kindness, and was on the point of going, when he added, without even looking at me--
"If you haven't got work by tonight you can come here and sleep without the dime, see!" I looked at him in astonishment, and he went on as if trying to excuse a weakness: "When a man gets up and goes out before six this weather, he wants work, and whoever wants work's sure to find it sooner or later. I like to help a man," he added emphatically.
I got to know Jake Ramsden well in a few weeks; he was harsh and silent like his native Maine hills, but kindly at heart.
How I lived through the seven months of that awful winter I can't tell; but I worried through somehow, and as the spring came on I even gathered a few dollars and went back to my old lodging-house, where I boarded for three dollars a week, and could wash and make myself decent. I had come to look upon it as a sort of luxurious hotel. That winter taught me many things, and, above all, this, that however unfortunate a man is there are others worse off and more unhappy: the misery of mankind is as infinite as the sea. And from this one learns sympathy and courage. I suppose on the whole the experiences did me more good than harm, though at the moment I was inclined to believe that they had simply coarsened my mind like the skin of my hands, and had roughened me in a hundred ways. I see now clearly enough that whatever I am or have been, I was made by that winter: for good and for evil I shall bear the marks of the struggle and suffering till I die. I wish I could believe that all the pain I had endured turned into pity for others; but there was a residue in me of bitterness.
Another scene from this period of my life, and I'll be able to tell how I came out of the abyss to air and sunlight once more. One evening in the dining-room an Englishman mentioned casually that any one could get work on the foundations of the Brooklyn Bridge. I could hardly believe my ears; I was still looking for steady employment, though scarcely daring to hope for it; but he went on: "They want men, and the pay's good: five dollars a day."
"Steady work?" I asked, in a tremor.
"Steady enough," he answered, with a scrutinizing glance at me, "but few can stick it, working in compressed air." It appeared that he had tried it and was not able to stand it; but that did not deter me. I found out from him where to apply, and next morning before six o'clock was taken on. I could scarcely contain myself for joy: at last I had got work; but the Englishman's words the night before came back to me: "It's few can do a shift, and in three months every one gets the 'bends.'" A stern joy came into me; if others could stand it, I could.
I suppose every one knows what working in a caisson on the bed of a river, fifty feet under water, is like. The caisson itself is an immense bell-shaped thing of iron; the top of it is an apartment called "the material chamber," through which the stuff dug out of the river passes on its way to the air. High up, on the side of the caisson is another chamber called "the air-lock." The caisson itself is filled with compressed air to keep out the water which would otherwise fill the caisson in an instant. The men going to work in the caisson first of all pass into the air-lock chamber, where they are "compressed" before they go to work, and "decompressed" after doing their shift.
Of course, I had been told what I should feel; but when I stepped into the air-lock with the other men and the door was shut and one little air-cock after another was turned on, letting in a stream of compressed air from the caisson, I could hardly help yelling--the pain stabbed my ears. The drums of the ears are often forcibly driven in and broken; some men not only become deaf, but have the most intense earache and sympathetic headache, attended with partial deafness. The only way to meet the pressure of the air in the ear, I quickly found, was to keep swallowing the air and forcing it up the Eustachian tubes into the middle ear, so that this air-pad on the internal side of the drum might lessen or prevent the painful depression of the drum. During "compression" the blood keeps absorbing the gases of the air till the tension of the gases in the blood becomes equal to that in the compressed air; when this equilibrium has been reached men can work in the caisson for hours without experiencing serious inconvenience.
It took about half an hour to "compress" us, and that first half-hour was pretty hard to bear. When the pressure of the air in the lock was equal to that in the caisson, the door from the caisson into the air-lock opened by itself or at a touch, and we all went down the ladder on to the river bed and began our work, digging up the ground and passing it by lifts into the material chamber. The work itself did not seem very hard; one got very hot, but as one worked nearly naked it didn't matter much; in fact, I was agreeably surprised. The noises were frightful; every time I stooped, too, I felt as if my head would burst. But the two hours will soon pass, I said to myself, and two shifts for five dollars is good pay; in fifteen days I shall have saved the money I came to New York with, and then we shall see; and so I worked on, making light of the earache and headache, the dizziness and the infernal heat.
At length the shift came to an end, and one by one, streaming with perspiration, we passed up again into the air-lock to learn what "decompression" was like. We closed the door; the air-cocks were turned on, letting out the compressed air, and at once we began to shiver, the ordinary air was so wet and cold. It was as if a stream of ice-water had been turned into a hot bath. I had noticed when we got in that the others began to dress hastily; I now knew why. I hauled on my shirt and then my other clothes as quickly as I could; but the air grew colder and colder, damper and damper, and I began to get weak, giddy and sick. I suppose the gases in the blood were leaving it as the tension got less. At the end of an hour we were "decompressed," and we all stepped out shivering, surrounded by a wet, yellow fog, chilled to the heart.
Think of it; we had been working hard for two hours in a high temperature, and after our work we had this hour of "decompression," an hour of rapidly increasing cold and damp mist, while even the blood pressure in our veins was constantly diminishing. What with the "compression" and the "decompression," the two hours' shift lasted nearly four hours, so that two shifts a day made a very fair day's work--and such work! Most of the men took a glass of hot spirits the moment they got out, and two or three before they went home. I drank hot cocoa, and very glad I am that I did. It revived me as quickly as the spirits, I think, and took away the terrible feeling of chill and depression. Should I be able to stand the work? I could only go on doggedly, and see how continuous work affected me.
I had something to eat, and lay about in the sunshine till I got warm and strong again: but I had still the earache and headache, and felt dizzy when the time came to go to work.
The afternoon shift seemed interminable, dreadful. The compression was not so bad; I had learned how to get the air into my ears to meet the pressure, though whenever I forgot to breathe it in and keep the air-pad full, I paid at once with a spasm of acute earache. Nor was the work in the caisson unendurable; the pace set was not great: the heat comforting. But the "decompression" was simply dreadful. I was shivering like a rat when it was over, my teeth chartering. I could only gasp and not speak, and I easily let myself be persuaded to take a dram of hot spirits like the rest: but I determined that I would not begin to drink; I would bring thick, woollen underclothes with me in the morning, all I had got. I went home exhausted, and with such earache and headache that I found it difficult to eat, and impossible to sleep.
The horror of being unemployed drove me to work next day and the next. How I worked I don't know; but I was recalled to thinking life and momentary forgetfulness of pain by seeing a huge Swiss workman fall down one morning as if he were trying to tie his arms and legs in knots. I never saw anything so horrible as the poor, twisted, writhing form of the unconscious giant. Before we could lift him on a mud-barrow and carry him away to the hospital he was bathed in blood, and looked to me as if he were dead. "What is it?" I cried. "The bends," said one, and shrugged his shoulders.
We had just come out of the airlock into the room where we kept our clothes and food and things, and I began questioning the others about "the bends." It appeared that no one worked for more than two or three months without having an attack. It generally laid them up for a fortnight, and they were never the same men afterwards.
"Do the bosses pay us for the fortnight?" I asked.
"You bet!" cried a workman savagely, "they keep us at the Fifth Avenue and pay us fer restin'."
"Can one only work three months, then?" I asked.
"I have worked more than that," said another man; "but you have got to take care, and not drink. Then I am very thin, and can stand it much better than any one inclined to be stout like you."
"They could make it easy enough for us," said a third; "everybody knows that if they gave us ten thousand feet of fresh air an hour in their damned caissons we could stand it all right;* but they only give us a measly thousand feet. It isn't men's work they buy at five dollars a day, but men's lives, damn them!"
* This workman was right. The illness of men working in caissons, which was formerly over 80 percent in every three months when the air supplied was about 1500 cubic feet an hour, has now dropped to 8 percent since the fresh air supply has been increased to 10,000 cubic feet an hour.--Editor's note.
I noticed then that my mates had the sullenness of convicts. It was rare that one spoke to his fellows; in silence we laboured; in silence we went to our work, and as soon as we came up into God's air and sunlight again, each man sought his home in silence. The cloud fell on me; I was not so sure as I had been at first that I should escape the common lot. After all, strong as I was, I was not so strong as that young Swiss whom I could still see, twisting about on the ground like a snake that has been trodden on. However, I determined not to think, and went to my shifts again as if nothing had happened.
I had been working in compressed air for about a fortnight when I saw a dreadful example of man's careless hardihood. A young American had been working with us for two or three days. This afternoon he wanted to get out, he said, without going through the "decompression," in order to keep an appointment with his girl, so he went up on top of the mud lift, into the material chamber and so into the open air in perhaps five minutes. When we came out, an hour later, after having passed through the air-lock, we found him stretched on the floor of the waiting room with a doctor by his side. He was unconscious, his breathing noisy and difficult, his lips puffed out, blowing froth. He died in a few minutes after we came into the room. It seemed dreadful to me; but not so dreadful as "the bends." After all, the man knew, or ought to have known, that he was running a great risk, and death seemed better to me than that excruciating physical torture; but somehow or other these two occurrences sickened me with the work. I determined to go on, if I could, till the end of the month, and then stop, and that is what I did.
Before the end of the month I began to feel weak and ill: I could not sleep, save by fits and starts, and I was practically never free from pain; still, I stuck it out for a month, and then with a hundred and forty dollars saved I took a fortnight's rest.
I spent every afternoon I could with Henschel; he had generally three or four hours free, and we went across to Jersey City or to Hoboken, bathing, or to Long Island, somewhere in the open air, and sunshine. At the end of the fortnight, I felt nearly as fir as ever, but I still have earaches and headaches occasionally to remind me of the Brooklyn Bridge. I did not go back to it; I had done my share of underground work, I thought; I would not take the risk again. Even the engineers, who had no hard manual labour to do, and earned four hundred dollars a month for merely directing, could not look on in that air for more than two hours a day. It was the men doing the hardest work who were expected to labour for two shifts a day-- the hardest work, double hours, and smallest wage. With the quick rebound of youth, I soon consoled myself; after all I had done something and earned something, and after my fortnight's rest I was about again, as eager as ever to find work, but curiously soft after my fortnight's lazing.
A few days later I heard of another job, a better one this time, though it was hard work and not likely to be permanent. Still, it might be a beginning, I told myself, and hurried to the place. They were taking up a street near the docks to lay a new gaspipe, and the work was being done by an Irish contractor. He looked at me shrewdly--
"Ain't done much work, have you?"
"Nor lately," I replied; "but I will do as much as I can, and in a week as much as any man.
"Will you turn in now for half a day?" he asked, "and then we'll talk."
It was about nine o'clock in the morning. I knew he was cheating me, but I replied, "Certainly," and my heart lifted to hope. In ten minutes I had a pick in my hand, and space to use it. God, the joy of it, steady work at last in the open air! Once more I was a man, and had a place in the world. But the joy did not last long. It was the beginning of July and furiously hot; I suppose I went at the work too hard, for in half an hour I was streaming with perspiration; my trousers were wet through, and my hands painfully sore; the fortnight's rest had made them soft. One of the gang, an oldish man, took it upon himself to advise me. He was evidently Irish; he looked at me with cunning grey eyes, and said--
"You don't need to belt that pick in as if you were going to reach Australy. Take it aisy, man, and leave some work for us tomorrow."
The others all laughed. I found the advice excellent, and began to copy my fellows, using skill and sparing strength. When I returned to work after dinner my back felt as if it had been broken; but I hung on till night, and got a word of modified approval from the boss.
"For the first week I'll give you two dollars a day," he grunted; "ye're not worth more with thim hands."
I could not bargain: I dared not.
"All right," I said sullenly.
"Be here at six sharp," he went on; "if ye're late five minutes ye'll be docked half-a-day; mind that now."
I nodded my comprehension, and he went his way.
I was very tired as I walked home, but glad, glad at heart. I had the satisfaction of feeling that I had earned my living for the day, and a bit over, with pick and shovel and surely there was enough work of that sort to be done in America. In youth one is an optimist and finds it hard to nurse bitterness; it is so much easier to hope than to hare. One week's work, I calculated, would keep me for three or four weeks, and this fact held in it a world of satisfaction.
I had a great evening meal that night, and drank innumerable cups of so-called coffee, and then went to bed and slept from about seven till five next morning, when I awoke feeling very well indeed, though horribly, painfully stiff. That would soon wear off, I told myself; but the worst of it was that my hands were in a shocking stare; blisters had formed all over them and here and there had broken, and I could not use them without pain. The next day's work was excruciating, and my hands were bleeding freely before noon; but the old Irishman in the dinner hour bathed them with whiskey, which certainly dried up the wounds. I felt as if he had poured liquid fire over them, and the smart held throughout the afternoon. For the next three or four days the work was very painful; my hands seemed to get worse rather than better; but when they became so sore that I had to change tools as often as I possibly could, they began to mend, and by the end of the week I could do my day's stunt without pain or fatigue worth mentioning.
The job lasted three weeks, and when it was over the boss gave me his address in Brooklyn and told me if I wanted work he would give it me. I was the only man he picked out in this way. My heart rose again. I thanked him. After all, I said to myself as I went home, it's worth while doing a bit more than other men; one gets work easier. My new job was roadmaking, and I was only one of a hundred men employed. At the end of a few weeks the boss said to me suddenly--
"Shure, you ought to be ashamed to work wid your hands, and you an edjicated man! Why don't you take a sub-contract?"
"How can I get a sub-contract?" I asked.
"I'll give you one," said he. "See here now; I get five dollars a yard for this road, and the stone found me; if you want to rake fifty yards or a hundred yards I'll give them to yez at four dollars a yard; a man must make a little on a contract," he added cunningly, "and your profir'll be big."
I was very grateful to him, I remember, just as grateful as if he had been trying to do me a kindness, which was certainly not the case.
"But how am I to pay men?" I asked.
"That's your business," he replied indifferently. I hesitated a little, but next day I contracted to take a hundred yards and went to work to find labourers. Strange to say it was hard to get men; I could only find casuals--here today and gone tomorrow--and they were anything but energetic. I made up for their laziness by working double hours and by the end of the week I had got five or six fairly good men working for me. After I had completed the first fifty yards of work I was astounded at my profit. I had to pay about a hundred dollars for labour, and had a hundred dollars for myself.
Naturally I wanted as much of this work as I could get, and the boss let me have two hundred yards more; but now I had worse luck. It was the end of October, and we had heavy rains, then it froze hard and snow fell. I soon found that I should have to drive the men or scamp the work, or be content with little or no profit. I hardly made as much over the next two hundred yards as I had made over the first fifty. Still, my month's work had yielded over a hundred dollars net profit, and with that I was content.
One day, talking with the old Irishman who had worked with me on my first job, and who was now working for me, I happened to say that if the frost held I should lose money.
"Hwat's that ye say?" he asked suspiciously.
"It costs me four dollars a yard, now," I explained ruefully.
"An' you gettin' six an' sivin," he retorted with derision.
"Four," I corrected.
"Thin you've bin chated," he concluded; "the ould un's gettin' eight."
I thought he was simply talking loosely, and paid no further attention to him. Still I tried to get a little better contract out of the boss; I failed, however, completely; it was four dollars a yard, take it or leave it, with him.
I took another two hundred yards at this price; but now luck ran dead against me. It froze all through that wretched December and January, froze hard, and when we tore up the road to lay the stones one day, we had to do the work all over again the next day. At the end of the month's work I had lost fifty dollars, though I myself had worked sixteen hours a day. I remonstrated with the boss, told him it was not good enough to keep on at such a rate; but he would not let me have a cent more than my contract price, and swore by all his gods that he was only getting five dollars himself, and could not afford to allow me a cent more for the weather. "We have all to take the scats with the good spuds," he said.
Now that I knew exactly what the work cost, I could not believe him, so I took a day off and went with the old Irishman to find out if he was telling the truth. A few drinks in an Irish saloon, a talk with a captain of Tammany, and I soon discovered that the contract was given to the boss at ten dollars a yard; ten, though it could have been done profitably for five. I found out more even than that. My boss had sent in a claim for extra money because of the bad weather, and had been allowed three dollars a yard on the work I had done in the last two months. Then I understood clearly how men get rich. Here was an uneducated Irishman making ten thousand dollars a year out of the city contract. True, he had to give something to the Tammany officials in bribes, but he always "made a poor mouth," as they said, pretending to be hard up, and in the year, I am certain, never disbursed more than five hundred dollars in palm oil.
I found all this out in one forenoon. I thanked the old Irish labourer, and treated him, and then went off to call on Henschel and spend the afternoon with him. He, too, wanted to see me. He had got to know the editor of the "Vorwaerts," he told me, the Socialist paper in New York, and he asked me to go up and see Dr. Goldschmidt, the editor.
I was in the right humour. I could not bear to think of going on working for that swindling Irish contractor; nor could I make up my mind to take the advice of the old Irishman, who said, "Now you have the truth, force the swindling old baste to give you sivin dollars a yard, or threaten him wid the papers you'll write to; that'll frighten him."
I didn't want to frighten the boss, nor would I take any part in his thieving. I merely wished to be quit of him and to forget the whole sordid story. After all, I had two or three hundred dollars behind me now, and my experiences cried to be given form and to be set out in print.
I went with Henschel to see Dr. Goldschmidt, and found him to be a pleasant man, a Jew, of good education, and with a certain kindliness in him that attracted me. He asked me what I proposed to write about. I said I could give my experiences as an out-of-work or as a day-labourer with pick and shovel, or I could write on the Socialism of Plato. I had had this subject in mind when I first visited the newspaper offices months before. Now Plato and his Republic sounded ridiculous in my ears; I had fresher fish to fry. Goldschmidt was evidently of the same opinion; for he laughed at the suggestion of Plato, and as he laughed, it suddenly became clear to me that I had gone a long way in thought during my year in New York. All at once I realized that my experiences as an emigrant had made a man of me; that those twelve or fifteen months of fruitless striving to get work had turned me into a reformer if not yet into a rebel.
"Let me write on what I have gone through," I said finally to Goldschmidt. "After all, the pick and shovel are as interesting as sword and hauberk, and the old knights who went forth to fight dragons had nothing to meet so fearful as compressed air."
"Compressed air?" he caught me up. "What do you mean? Tell me about that."
He had certainly the journalist scent for a novelty and sensation, so I told him my story; but I could not talk merely about my work in the caissons. I told him nearly everything I have set down here, and, worst of all, I gave him the lessons first, and not the incidents, in my serious German way; told him that manual work is so hard, so exhausting in the American climate, that it turns one into a soulless brute. One is too tired at night to think, or even take any interest in what is going on in the world. The workman who reads an evening paper is rare. The Sunday paper is his only mental food; on weekday she labors and eats and then turns in. The conditions of manual labor in the States are breeding a proletariat ready for revolt. Every man needs some rest in life, some hours of enjoyment. But the laborer has no time for recreation. He dare not rake a day's respite; for if he does he may lose his job, and probably have more leisure than he wants.
My view of the position seemed to strike the doctor as interesting; but my experiences in the caissons clinched the matter.
"Write all the out-of-work part," he said, "and end up with your days in the caisson. I know something about that job. The contractors are to get sixty million dollars for it, and I suppose it'll not cost twenty; but I'll look it all out and back your story up with some hard facts."
"But does anyone make two hundred per cent on a contract?" I asked, forgetting for the moment my Irish boss who wanted at least a two-fold profit and as much more as he could get by lying.
"Certainly," replied Goldschmidt. "There are only a few competitors, if any, for a big job, and the two or three men who are willing and able to take it on, are apt to open their mouths pretty wide."
Bit by bit, it was being forced in on me that our competitive system is an organized swindle.
I went off determined to write a telling series of articles. While talking to Goldschmidt I had made up my mind not to go back to the road-making; it was all brainless, uninteresting, stupefying to me, and the corruption in it horribly distasteful. An hour's talk with an educated man had turned me against it forever. I hated even to meet that lying boss again. I would not meet him. I ached to get back to my books and clean clothes and studious habits of life.
I took rooms up town, but on the east side, very simple rooms, which cost me, with breakfast and tea, about ten dollars a week, and went to work with my pen. I soon found that labor with the pick and shovel in the bitter weather had made it almost impossible for me to use the pen at all. My brain seemed tired, words came slowly, and I soon grew sleepy. Thinking, too, is a function that needs exercise, or it becomes rusty. But in a week or two I wrote more freely, and in a month had finished a series of German articles embodying my experiences as a "tenderfoot," and sent them to Goldschmidt. He liked them, said they were excellent, and gave me a hundred dollars for them. When I received his letter I felt that at long last I had come into my own and found my proper work. The articles made a sort of sensation, and I got two hundred dollars more for them in book form. For the next three or four months it was easy enough by going about New York and keeping my eyes open to get subjects for two or three articles a week. I didn't earn much by them, it is true; but, after my experiences, twenty to twenty-five dollars a week were more than enough for all my needs.
Moreover, I felt that I had solved the problem. I could always earn a living now one way or another by pick and shovel, if not by pen. I was to that extent at least master of my fate.
One day going into the office of the "Vorwaerts," whom should I run across but Raben. Of course we adjourned immediately to a German restaurant nearby, and ordered a German lunch, and many Seidels of German beer. He had been working steadily, it appeared, ever since he left the ship, but at low rates. He wanted to go to Chicago, he told me, where the pay was better, only he had a wonder of a girl whom he could not bear to leave. She was a perfect peach, he added, and I noticed for the first time that his lips were sensual, thick.
While he was speaking it came to me that I should like to go West, too, and break fresh ground. Those accursed months when I tried vainly to get work had left in me a dislike of New York. Deep down in me there was a fund of resentment and bitterness.
"I should like to go to Chicago," I said to Raben. "Could you give me an introduction to anyone?"
"Sure," he said, "to August Spies, the owner and editor of the 'Arbeiter Zeitung.' He is a first-rate fellow, a Saxon, too, a Dresdener. He would be sure to take you. All you South Germans hang together."
I called for pen and paper, and got him to write me a letter of introduction to Spies then and there.
The same evening, I think, I went to see Dr Goldschmidt, and asked him if I might write him a weekly letter from Chicago, about labor matters, and he arranged that he would take one a week from me, at ten dollars a letter; but he told me that I must make it a good two columns--two or three thousand words for ten dollars--the pay was not high; but it ensured me against poverty, and that was the main thing. On the morrow I packed my little trunk, and started for Chicago. . . .
THE long train journey and the great land spaces seemed to push my New York life into the background. I had been in America considerably over a year. I had gone to New York a raw youth, filled with vague hopes and unlimited ambitions; I was leaving it a man, who knew what he could do, if he did not know yet what he wanted. By the by, what did I want? A little easier life and larger pay--that would come, I felt--and what else? I had noticed going about the streets of New York that the women and girls were prettier, daintier, better gowned than any I had been accustomed to see in Germany. Many of them, too, were dark, and dark eyes drew me irresistibly. They seemed proud and reserved, and didn't appear to notice me, and, strange to say, that attracted me as much as anything. Now that the struggle for existence left me a little breathing space, I would try, I said to myself, to get to know some pretty girl, and make up to her. How is it, I wonder, that life always gives you your heart's desire? You may fashion your ideal to your fancy; ask for what eyes and skin and figure you like; if you have only a little patience, life will bring your beauty to the meeting. All our prayers are granted in this world; that is one of the tragedies of life. But I did not know that at the time. I simply said to myself that now I could speak American fluently, I would make love to some pretty girl, and win her. Of course I had to find out, too, all about the conditions of labour in Chicago, for that was what Goldschmidt wanted in my weekly articles, and I must learn to speak and write American perfectly. Already in my thoughts I had begun to call myself an American, so strongly did the great land with its careless freedom and rude equality attract me. There was power in the mere name, and distinction as well. I would become an American, and--my thoughts returned on themselves--and a girl's face fashioned itself before my eyes, dainty-dark, provocative, willful. . . .
My year's work in the open air had made me steel-strong. I was strung tense now with the mere thought of a kiss, of an embrace. I looked down and took stock of myself. I was roughly, but not badly dressed; just above the middle height, five feet nine or so; strongly built, with broad shoulders; my hair was fair, eyes blue, a small moustache was just beginning to show itself as golden down. She would love me, too; she . . . the blood in me grew hot; my temples throbbed. I rose and walked through the car to throw off my emotion; but I walked on air, glancing at every woman as I passed. I had to read to compose myself, and even then her face kept coming between me and the printed page.
I reached Chicago late in the evening, after a forty hours' journey. I was not tired, and in order to save expense I went at once in search of Spies, after leaving my baggage at the depot. I found him at the office of the "Arbeiter Zeitung." The office was much smaller and meaner than Dr. Goldschmidt's; but Spies made an excellent impression on me. He was physically a fine, well set up fellow, a little taller than I was, though perhaps not very strong. He was well educated, and spoke English almost as fluently as his mother tongue, though with a slight German accent. His face was attractive; he had thick, curly brown hair, dark blue eyes, and long moustaches; he wore a pointed beard, too, which seemed to accentuate the thin triangle of his face. I found out, bit by bit, that he was very emotional and sentimental. His chin was round and soft, like a girl's. His actions were always dictated by his feelings at the moment. He met me with a frank kindliness which was charming; said that he had read my articles in "Vorwaerts," and hoped I would do some work for him. "We are not rich," he said, "but I can pay you something, and you must grow up with the paper," and he laughed.
He proposed that we should go out and sup; but when I told him I wanted lodgings he exclaimed: "That fits exactly. There is a Socialist, George Engel, who keeps a toyshop between here and the station. He told me he wanted a lodger. He has two good rooms, I believe, and I am sure you'll like him. Suppose we go and see him." I assented, and we set off, my companion talking the while with engaging frankness of his own plans and hopes. As soon as I saw Engel I knew we should get on together. He had a round, heavy, good-natured face; he was perhaps forty-five or fifty years of age; his brown hair was getting thin on top. He showed me the rooms, which were clean and quiet. He was evidently delighted to talk German, and proposed to take my checks and bring my baggage from the depot, and thus leave me free. I thanked him in our Bavarian dialect, and his eyes filled with tears.
"Ach du liebster Junge!" he cried, and shook me by both hands. I felt I had won a friend, and turning to Spies said, "Now we can sup together."
Though it was getting late, he took me off at once to a German restaurant, where we had a good meal. Spies was an excellent companion; he talked well, was indeed, on occasion, both interesting and persuasive. Besides, he knew the circumstances of the foreign workers in Chicago better than perhaps any one. He had genuine pity, too, for their wants and faults, sincere sympathy with their sufferings.
"Whether they come from Norway or Germany or South Russia," he told me, "they are cheated for the first two or three years by everyone. In fact, till they learn to speak American freely they are mere prey. I want to start a sort of Labour Bureau for them, in which they can get information in their mother tongue on all subjects that concern them. It is their own ignorance which makes them slaves--pigeons to be plucked."
"Is the life very hard?" I asked.
"In winter dreadfully hard," he replied. "About thirty-five per cent of working men are always out of employment; that entails a sediment of misery, and our winters here are terrible. . . .
"There are some dreadfully unfortunate cases. We had a woman last week who came to our meeting to ask for help. She had three young children. Her husband had been employed in Thompson's cheap jewelery manufactory. He earned good wages, and they were happy. One day the fan broke and he breathed the fumes of nitric acid. He went home complaining of a dry throat and cough; seemed to get better in the night. Next morning was worse; began to spit thin, yellow stuff The wife called in a doctor. He prescribed oxygen to breathe. That night the man died. We got up a subscription for her, and I went to see the doctor. He told me the man had died of breathing nitrous acid fumes; it always causes congestion of the lungs, and is always fatal within forty-eight hours, There the wife is now, destitute, with three children to feed, and all because the law does not compel the employer to put up a proper fan. Life's brutal to the poor. . . .
"Besides, American employers discharge men ruthlessly, and the police and magistrates are all against us foreigners. They are getting worse and worse, too. I don't know where it'll all end," and he went silent for a time. "Of course you're a Socialist," he resumed, "and will come to our meetings, and join our Verein."
"I don't know that you would call me a Socialist," I replied; "but my sympathies are with the workmen. I'd like to come to your meetings."
Before we parted he had taken me round, and shown me the lecture-room, which was quite close to his newspaper office, and given me a little circular about the meetings for the month. He left me finally at Engel's door, with the hope that we might meet again soon.
It must have been nearly midnight when I got into the house. Engel was waiting up for me, and we had a long talk in our homely Bavarian dialect. I told him it was my rule never to speak German; but I could not resist the language of my boyhood. Engel, too, had read my articles in "Vorwaerts," and was delighted with them; he was entirely self-taught, but not without a certain shrewdness in judging men; a saving, careful soul, with an immense fund of pure human kindness at the heart of him--a clear pool of love. We parted great friends, and I went to bed full of hope and had an excellent night.
Next morning I went about looking at Chicago; then I paid a visit to the "Arbeiter Zeitung" for some statistics which I wanted for my New York article, and so the day drifted by.
I had been in Chicago a week when I went to the first of the Socialist meetings. The building was a mere wooden shanty at the back of some brick buildings. The room was a fairly large one, would seat perhaps two hundred and fifty people; it looked bare and was simply furnished with wooden benches and a low platform on which stood a desk and a dozen plain chairs. Fortunately the weather was very pleasant, and we could sit with open windows; it was about mid-September, if I remember rightly. The speakers could hold forth, too, without being overheard, which was perhaps an advantage.
The first speaker rather amused me. He was presented by Spies as Herr Fischer, and he spoke a sort of German-American jargon that was almost incomprehensible. His ideas, too, were as inchoate as his speech. He believed, apparently, that the rich were rich simply because they had seized on the land, and on what he called "the instruments of production," which enabled them to grind the faces of the poor. He had evidently read "Das Kapital" of Marx, and little or nothing more. He did not even understand the energy generated by the open competition of life. He was a sort of half-baked student of European Communism, with an intense hatred of those whom he called "the robber rich."
Fischer probably felt that he was not carrying his audience with him, for he suddenly left off his sweeping denunciations of the wealthy, and began to deal with the action of the police in Chicago. In handling the actual he was a different man. He told us how the police had begun by dispersing meetings in the streets under the pretext that they interfered with the traffic; how they went on to break up meetings held on lots of waste ground. At first, too, the police were content, he said, to hustle the speaker from his improvised platform, and quietly induce the crowd to move on and break up; lately they had begun to use their clubs. Fischer remembered every meeting, and gave chapter and verse for his statements. It was not for nothing that he had worked as a reporter on the "Arbeiter Zeitung." He had evidently too, an uncommonly vivid sense of fairness and justice, and was exasperated by what he called despotic authority. He spoke now in the exact spirit of the American Constitution. Free speech to him was a right inherent in man. He declared that he for one would never surrender it, and called upon his audience to go to the meetings armed and resolved to maintain a right which had never before been questioned in America. This provoked a tempest of cheers, and Fischer sat down abruptly. His argument was unimpeachable; but he did not realize that native-born Americans would claim for themselves rights and privileges which they would not accord to foreigners.
The next speaker was a man of a different stamp, a middle-aged Jew called Breitmayer, who spoke in favour of subscription for Spies' Labor Bureau. He told how the laborers were exploited by the employers, and pointed his discourse with story after story. This sort of talk I could appreciate. I had been exploited, too, and I joined heartily in the applause which punctuated the speech. To Breitmayer humanity was separated into two camps--the "haves" and the "have-nots," or, as he put it, the masters and the slaves, the wasters and the wanters. He never raised his voice, and some of his talk was effective; but even Breitmayer could not keep off the burning subject. A friend of his had been struck down by a policeman, in the last meeting; he was still in hospital, and, he feared, permanently injured. What crime had Adolph Stein committed, what wrong had he done, to be maltreated in this way? Breitmayer, however, ended up tamely. He was in favour of passive resistance as long as possible (some hissing); "as long as possible," he repeated emphatically, and the repetition provoked cheer upon cheer. My heart beat fast with excitement; evidently the people were ripe for active resistance to what they regarded as tyrannical oppression.
After Breitmayer sat down there was a moment's pause, and then a man moved forward from the side, and stood before the meeting. He was a slight, ordinary, nondescript person, with a green shade over his eyes. Spies went up beside him, and explained that Herr Leiter had been injured in a boiler explosion a year before; he had been taken to the hospital and treated; had been discharged two days ago, almost totally blind. He had gone to his former employers, Messrs. Roskill, the famous soap manufacturers, of the East Side, who had two thousand hands, and asked for some light job. They would give him nothing, however, and he now appealed to friends and brother workmen for help in his misfortune. He could see dimly at two or three yards. If he had a couple of hundred dollars he could open a shop for all sorts of soap, and perhaps make a living. At any rate, with the help of his wife, he would not starve, if he had a shop. All this Spies told in an even, unemotional voice. A collection was made, and he announced that one hundred and eighty-four dollars had been collected. One hundred and eighty-four dollars from that small gathering of working-men and women--it was splendidly generous.
"I dank you very mooch," said Herr Leiter, with a catch in his voice, and retired on his wife's arm to his seat. The helpless, hopeless pathos of the shambling figure; the patience with which he bore the awful, unmerited disaster, brought quick, hot tears to my eyes. Mr. Roskill could spare nothing out of his millions to this soldier broken in his service. What were these men made of that they did not revolt? Had I been blinded down there under water at Brooklyn I would have found words of fire. Roskill had done nothing for him. Was it credible? I pushed my way to the platform and asked Leiter in German: "Nichts hat Er gethan--Nichts? Nichts gegeben?" ("Did Roskill do nothing? Give you nothing?")
"Nichts; er sagte dass es ihm Leid thaete." ("Nothing; he said that he was sorry') My hands fell to my sides. I began to understand that resignation was a badge of servitude, that such sheepish patience was inherited. In spire of reasons, my blood boiled, and pity shook me; something must be done. Suddenly Breitmayer's words came back to me, "passive resistance as long as possible." The limit must be nearly reached, I thought. I could not stay on at the meeting. I had to get by myself to think, with the stars above me, so I made my way to the door. Blind at six and twenty, and turned out to starve, as one would not turn out a horse or a dog. It was maddening.
To judge by the speeches, the working men in Chicago were even worse off than the working-men in New York. Why? I could not help asking myself: why? Probably because there was not so much accumulated wealth, and an even more passionate desire to get rich quickly.
"Blind and no compensation, no help," the words seemed to be stamped on my brain in letters of fire. It was the thought of Leiter that made me join the Socialist Club two days later.
I had arranged with Spies to go about visiting the various workmen's clubs, and I went to several of them for the sake of that weekly article to New York, and found what I expected to find. The wages of the working man were slightly higher than in New York, but wherever it was possible to cheat him he was cheated, and the proportion of unemployed was larger than it was on Manhattan Island.
After finishing my article on Leiter that week for "Vorwaerts," I went down the Michigan Boulevard and walked along the Lake Shore. The broad expanse of water had a fascination for me, and I liked the great boulevard and the splendid houses of brownstone or brick, each standing in its own grassy lawn. After I had walked for an hour, I returned by the Boulevard and had an interesting experience. A hired brougham had run into a buggy, or the buggy had run into the hired carriage, which was turning out of a cross street; at any rare, there was a great row; the buggy was badly broken up and a couple of policemen were attending to the horses. A crowd gathered quickly.
"What is the matter?" I asked of my neighbour, who happened to be a girl. She turned. "I don't know; I've only just come," and she lifted her eyes to mine.
Her face took my breath away; it was the face of my dreams--the same dark eyes, and hair, the same brows; the nose was a little thinner, perhaps, the outlines a little sharper, but the confident, willful expression was there, and the dark, hazel eyes were divine. Feeling that confession was the best sort of introduction, I told her I was a stranger in Chicago; I had just come from New York; I hoped she'd let me know her. It was so lonely for me. As we turned away from the crowd she said she thought I was a foreigner; there was something strange in my accent. I confessed I was a German, and pleading that it was a German custom to introduce oneself, I begged her to allow me to do so, adding in German fashion, "My name is Rudolph Schnaubelt." In reply she told me her name, Elsie Lehman, quite prettily.
"Oh, no!" she said; "my father was a German; he died when I was quite little," and then she went on to say that she lived alone with her mother, who was a Southerner. I hoped I might accompany her to her house; she accepted my escort with a prim, "Certainly."
As we walked we talked about ourselves, and I soon learned a good deal about Elsie. She was a typewriter and shorthand writer, and was engaged during the day with Jansen McClurg and Company, the book-sellers, but was free every evening after seven o'clock. I seized the chance; would she come to the theater some night? She replied, flushing, that she'd be delighted; confessed, indeed, that she liked the theatre better than any other amusement except dancing, so I arranged to take her to the theatre the very next night.
I parted with her at the door of the lodging house where she and her mother lived; she asked me in to make her mother's acquaintance, but I begged her to let me come next night instead, for I was in my working clothes. I can still see her standing at the top of the steps as she said "good night" to me--the slight, lissom figure, the provocative dainty face. </