The paper with which I was eventually connected was the Cleveland Leader, which represented all that was conservative in the local life. Wandering into its office on the second or third day of my stay, I was met at the desk of the city editor by a small, boyish-looking person of a ferret-like countenance, who wanted to know what I was after. I told him, and he said there was nothing, but on hearing of the papers with which I had been connected and the nature of the work I had done he suggested that possibly I might be able to do something for the Sunday edition. The Sunday editor proved to be a tall, melancholy man with sad eyes, a sallow face, sunken cheeks, narrow shoulders and a general air of weariness and depression.
“What is it, now, you want?” he asked slowly, looking up from his musty roll-top desk.
“Your city editor suggested that possibly you might have some Sunday work for me to do. I’ve had experience in this line in Chicago and St. Louis.”
“Yes,” he said not asking me to sit down. “Well, now, what do you think you could write about?”
This was a poser. Being new to the city I had not thought of any particular thing, and could not at this moment. I told him this.
“There’s one thing you might write about if you could. Did you ever hear of a new-style grain-boat they are putting on the Lakes called——”
“Turtle-back?” I interrupted.
“Turtle-back?” went on the editor indifferently. “Well, there’s one here now in the harbor. It’s the first one to come here. Do you think you could get up something on that?”
“I’m sure I could. I’d like to try. Do you use pictures?”
“You might get a photo or two; we could have drawings made from them.”
I started for the door, eager to be about this, when he said: “We don’t pay very much: three dollars a column.”
That was discouraging, but I was filled with the joy of doing something. On my way out I stopped at the business office and bought a copy of the last Sunday issue, which proved to be a poor makeshift composed of a half dozen articles on local enterprises and illustrated with a few crude drawings. I read one or two of them, and then looked up my waterfront boat. I found it tied up at a dock adjoining an immense railroad yard and near an imposing grain elevator. Finding nobody about, I nosed out the bookkeeper of the grain elevator, who told me that the captain of the boat had gone to the company’s local office in a nearby street. I hastened to the place, and there found a bluff old lake captain in blue, short, stout, ruddy, coarse, who volunteered, almost with a “Heigh!” and a “Ho!” to tell me something about it.
“I think I ought to know a little something about ’em—I sailed the first one that was ever sailed out of the port of Chicago.”
I listened with open ears. I caught a disjointed story of plans and specifications, Sault Ste. Marie, the pine woods of Northern Michigan, the vast grain business of Chicago and other lake ports, early navigation on the lakes, the theory of a bilge keel and a turtle-back top, and all strung together with numerous “y’sees” and “so nows.” I made notes, on backs of envelopes, scraps of paper, and finally on a pad furnished me by the generous bookkeeper. I carried my notes back to the paper.
The Sunday editor was out. I waited patiently until half-past four, and then, the light fading, gave up the idea of going with a photographer to the boat. I went to a faded green baize-covered table and began to write my story. I had no sooner done a paragraph or two than the Sunday editor returned, bringing with him an atmosphere of lassitude and indifference. I went to him to explain what I had done.
“Well, write it up, write it up. We’ll see,” and he turned away to his papers.
I labored hard at my story, and by seven or eight o’clock had ground out two thousand words of description which had more of the bluff old captain in it than of the boat. The Sunday editor took it when I was through, and shoved it into a pigeon-hole, telling me to call in a day or two and he would let me know. I thought this strange. It seemed to me that if I were working for a Sunday paper I should work every day. I called the next day, but Mr. Loomis had not read it. The next day he said the story was well enough written, though very long. “You don’t want to write so loosely. Stick to your facts closer.”
This day I suggested a subject of my own, “the beauty of some of the new suburbs,” but he frowned at this as offering a lot of free advertising to real estate men who ought to be made to pay. Then I proposed an article on the magnificence of Euclid Avenue, which was turned down as old. I then spoke of a great steel works which was but then coming into the city, but as this offered great opportunity to all the papers he thought poorly of it. He compromised a day or two later by allowing me to write up a chicken-farm which lay outside the city.
Of course this made a poor showing for me at the cashier’s desk. At the end of the second week I was allowed to put in a bill for seven dollars and a half. I had not realized that I was wasting so much time. I appealed to all the editors again for a regular staff position, but was told there was no opening. It began to look as if I should have to leave Cleveland soon, and I wondered where I should go next—Buffalo or Pittsburgh, both equally near.
CHAPTER LVIII
Finding Cleveland hopeless for me, I one day picked up and left. Then came Buffalo, which I reached toward the end of March. Aside from the Falls I found it a little tame, no especial snap to it—not as much as I had felt to be characteristic of Cleveland. What interest there was for me I provided myself, wandering about in odd drear neighborhoods, about grain elevators and soap factories and railroad yards and manufacturing districts. Here, as in Cleveland, I could not help but see that in spite of our boasted democracy and equality of opportunity there was as much misery and squalor and as little decent balancing of opportunity against energy as anywhere else in the world. The little homes, the poor, shabby, colorless, drear, drab little homes with their grassless “yards,” their unpaved streets, their uncollected garbage, their fluttering, thin-flamed gas-lamps, the crowds of ragged, dirty, ill-cared-for children! Near at hand was always the inevitable and wretched saloon, not satisfying a need for pleasure in a decent way but pandering to the lowest and most conniving and most destroying instincts of the lowest politicians and heelers and grafters and crooks, while the huge financial and manufacturing magnates at the top with their lust for power and authority used the very flesh of the weaker elements for purposes of their own. It was the saloon, not liquor, which brought about the prohibition folly. I used to listen, as a part of my reportorial duties, to the blatherings of thin-minded, thin-blooded, thin-experienced religionists as well as to those of kept editorial writers, about the merits and blessings and opportunities of our noble and bounteous land; but whenever I encountered such regions as this I knew well enough that there was something wrong with their noble maunderings. Shout as they might, there was here displayed before my very eyes ample evidence that somewhere there was a screw loose in the “Fatherhood of Man—Brotherhood of God” machinery.
After I had placed myself in a commonplace neighborhood near the business center, I canvassed the newspaper offices and their editors. Although I had in my pocket that letter from the publisher of the St. Louis Republic extolling my virtues as a reporter and correspondent, so truly vagrom was my mood and practical judgment that I did not present it to any one. Instead I merely mooned into one office after another (there were only four papers here), convinced before entering that I should not get anything—and I did not. One young city editor, seeming to take at least an interest in me, assured me that if I would remain in Buffalo for six weeks he could place me; but since I had not enough money to sustain myself so long I decided not to wait. Ten days spent in reconnoitering these offices daily, and I concluded that it was useless to remain longer. Yet before I went I determined to see at least one thing more: the Falls.
Therefore one day I traveled by trolley to Niagara and looked at that tumbling flood, then not chained or drained by turbine water-power sluices. I was impressed, but not quite so much as I had thought I should be. Standing out on a rock near the greatest volume of water under a gray sky, I was awed by the downpour and then became dizzy and felt as though I were being carried along whether I would or not. Farther upstream I stared at the water as it gathered force and speed, wondering how I should feel if I were in a small canoe and fighting it for my life. Behind the falls were great stalagmites and stalactites of ice and snow still standing from the cold of weeks before. I recalled that Blondel, a famous French swimmer of his day, had ten years before swum these fierce and angry waters below the Falls. I wondered how he had done it, so wildly did they leap, huge wheels of water going round and round and whitecaps leaping and spitting and striking at each other.
When I returned to Buffalo I congratulated myself that if I had got nothing else out of my visit to Buffalo, at least I had gained this.
CHAPTER LIX
I now decided that Pittsburgh would be as good a field as any, and one morning seeing a sign outside a cut-rate ticket-broker’s window reading “Pittsburgh, $5.75,” I bought a ticket, returned to my small room to pack my bag, and departed. I arrived at Pittsburgh at six or seven that same evening.
Of all the cities in which I ever worked or lived Pittsburgh was the most agreeable. Perhaps it was due to the fact that my stay included only spring, summer and fall, or that I found a peculiarly easy newspaper atmosphere, or that the city was so different physically from any I had thus far seen; but whether owing to one thing or another certainly no other newspaper work I ever did seemed so pleasant, no other city more interesting. What a city for a realist to work and dream in! The wonder to me is that it has not produced a score of writers, poets, painters and sculptors, instead of—well, how many? And who are they?
I came down to it through the brown-blue mountains of Western Pennsylvania, and all day long we had been winding at the base of one or another of them, following the bed of a stream or turning out into a broad smooth valley, crossing directly at the center of it, or climbing some low ridge with a puff-puff-puff and then clattering almost recklessly down the other slope. I had never before seen any mountains. The sight of sooty-faced miners at certain places, their little oil and tow tin lamps fastened to their hats, their tin dinner-pails on their arms, impressed me as something new and faintly reminiscent of the one or two small coal mines about Sullivan, Indiana, where I had lived when I was a boy of seven. Along the way I saw a heavy-faced and heavy-bodied type of peasant woman, with a black or brown or blue or green skirt and a waist of a contrasting color, a headcloth or neckerchief of still another, trailed by a few children of equally solid proportions, hanging up clothes or doing something else about their miserable places. These were the much-maligned hunkies just then being imported by the large manufacturing and mining and steel-making industries of the country to take the place of the restless and less docile American working man and woman. I marveled at their appearance and number, and assumed, American-fashion, that in their far-off and unhappy lands they had heard of the wonderful American Constitution, its guaranty of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as well as of the bounteous opportunities afforded by this great land, and that they had forsaken their miseries to come all this distance to enjoy these greater blessings.
I did not then know of the manufacturers’ foreign labor agent with his lying propaganda among ignorant and often fairly contented peasants, painting America as a country rolling in wealth and opportunity, and then bringing them here to take the places of more restless and greatly underpaid foreigners who, having been brought over by the same gay pictures, were becoming irritated and demanded more pay. I did not then know of the padrone, the labor spy, the company store, five cents an hour for breaker children, the company stockade, all in full operation at this time. All I knew was that there had been a great steel strike in Pittsburgh recently, that Andrew Carnegie, as well as other steel manufacturers (the Olivers, for one), had built fences and strung them with electrified barbed wire in order to protect themselves against the “lawless” attacks of “lawless” workingmen.
I also knew that a large number of State or county or city paid deputy sheriffs and mounted police and city policemen had been sworn in and set to guarding the company’s property and that H. C. Frick, a leading steel manager for Mr. Carnegie, had been slightly wounded by a desperado named Alexander Berkman, who was inflaming these workingmen, all foreigners of course, lawless and unappreciative of the great and prosperous steel company which was paying them reasonable wages and against which they had no honest complaint.
Our mid-Western papers, up to the day of Cleveland’s election in 1892 and for some time after, had been full of the merits of this labor dispute, with long and didactic editorials, intended in the main to prove that the workingman was not so greatly underpaid, considering the type of labor he performed and the intelligence he brought to his task; that the public was not in the main vastly interested in labor disputes, both parties to the dispute being unduly selfish; that it would be a severe blow to the prosperity of the country if labor disputes were too long continued; that unless labor was reasonable in its demands capital would become disheartened and leave the country. I had not made up my mind that the argument was all on one side, although I knew that the average man in America, despite its great and boundless opportunities, was about as much put upon and kicked about and underpaid as any other. This growing labor problem or the general American dissatisfaction with poor returns upon efforts made crystallized three years later in the Free Silver campaign and the “gold parades.” The “full dinner-pail” was then invented as a slogan to counteract the vast economic unrest, and the threat to close down and so bring misery to the entire country unless William McKinley was elected was also freely posted. Henry George, Father McGlynn, Herr Most, Emma Goldman, and a score of others were abroad voicing the woes of hundreds of thousands who were supposed to have no woes.
At that time, as I see it now, America was just entering upon the most lurid phase of that vast, splendid, most lawless and most savage period in which the great financiers were plotting and conniving at the enslavement of the people and belaboring each other. Those crude parvenu dynasties which now sit enthroned in our democracy, threatening its very life with their pretensions and assumptions, were then in their very beginning. John D. Rockefeller was still in Cleveland; Flagler, William Rockefeller, H. H. Rogers, were still comparatively young and secret agents; Carnegie was still in Pittsburgh, an iron master, and of all his brood of powerful children only Frick had appeared; William H. Vanderbilt and Jay Gould had only recently died; Cleveland was President, and Mark Hanna was an unknown business man in Cleveland. The great struggles of the railroads, the coal companies, the gas companies, to overawe and tax the people were still in abeyance, or just being born. The multi-millionaire had arrived, it is true, but not the billionaire. On every hand were giants plotting, fighting, dreaming; and yet in Pittsburgh there was still something of a singing spirit.
