But this convention, how it thrilled me! To be tossed into the vortex of national politics at a time when the country was seething over the possible resuscitation of the old Democratic party to strength and power was something like living. I listened to the speeches, those dully conceived flights and word gymnastics and pyrotechnics whereby backwoods statesmen, district leaders and personality-followers seek to foist upon the attention of the country their own personalities as well as those of the individuals whom they admire. Although it was generally known that Cleveland was to be nominated (the money power of America having fixed upon him) and it was useless to name any one else, still as many as ten different “statesmen” great leaders, saviors were put in nomination. Each man so mentioned was the beau ideal of a nation’s dream of a leader, a statesman, a patriot, lover of liberty and of the people. This in itself was a liberal education and slowly but surely opened my eyes. I watched with amazement this love of fanfare and noise, the way in which various delegations and individual followers loved to shout and walk up and down waving banners and blowing horns. Different States or cities had sent large delegations, New York a marching club two thousand strong, all of whom had seats in this hall, and all were plainly instructed to yell and demonstrate at the mention of a given name.
The one thing I heard which seemed rather important at the time, beautiful, because of a man’s voice and gestures, was a speech by Bourke Cochran, exhorting the convention to nominate his candidate, David Bennett Hill, and save the party from defeat. Indeed his speech, until later I heard William Jennings Bryan, seemed to me the best I had ever heard, clear, sonorous, forcible, sensible. He had something to say and he said it with art and seeming conviction. He had presence too, a sort of Herculean, animal-like effrontery. He made his audience sit up and pay attention to him, when as a matter of fact it was interested in talking privately, one member to another. I tried to take notes of what he was saying until one of my associates told me that the full minutes of his speech could soon be secured from the shorthand reporters.
Being in this great hall cheek by jowl with the best of the Chicago newspaper world thrilled me. “Now,” I said to myself, “I am truly a newspaper man. If I can only get interesting things to write about, my fortune is made.” At once, as the different forceful reporters of the city were pointed out to me (George Ade, Finley Peter Dunne, “Charlie” Seymour, Charles d’Almy), my neck swelled as does a dog’s when a rival appears on the scene. Already, at mere sight of them, I was anxious to try conclusions with them on some important mission and so see which of us was the better man. Always, up to the early thirties, I was so human as to conceive almost a deadly opposition to any one who even looked as though he might be able to try conclusions with me in anything. At that time, I was ready for a row, believing, now that I had got thus far, that I was destined to become one of the greatest newspaper men that ever lived!
But this convention brought me no additional glory. I did write a flowery description of the thing as a whole, but only a portion of it was used. I did get some details of committee work, which were probably incorporated in the political man’s general summary. The next day, Cleveland being nominated, interest fell off. Thousands packed their bags and departed. I was used for a day or two about hotels gathering one bit of news and another, but I could see that there was no import to what I was doing and began to grow nervous lest I should be summarily dropped. I spoke to Maxwell about it.
“Do you think they’ll drop me?” I asked.
“Not by a damned sight!” he replied contentiously. “You’ve earned a show here; it’s been promised you; you’ve made good, and they ought to give it to you. Don’t you say anything; just leave it to me. There’s going to be a conference here tomorrow as to who’s to be dropped and who kept on, and I’ll have my say then. You saved the day for us on that nomination stuff, and that ought to get you a show. Leave it to me.”
The conference took place the next day and of the five men who had been taken on to do extra work during the convention I and one other were the only ones retained, and this at the expense of two former reporters dropped. At that, I really believe I should have been sent off if it had not been for Maxwell. He had been present during most of the transactions concerning Mr. Gissel’s book and thought I deserved work on that score alone, to say nothing of my subsequent efforts. I think he disliked the little editorial writer very much. At any rate when this conference began Maxwell, according to Dunlap who was there and reported to me, sat back, a look of contented cynicism on his face not unlike that of a fox about to devour a chicken. The names of several of the new men were proposed as substitutes for the old ones when, not hearing mine mentioned, he inquired:
“Well, what about Dreiser?”
“Well, what about him?” retorted Sullivan, the city editor. “He’s a good man, but he lacks training. These other fellows are experienced.”
“I thought you and Gissel sort of agreed to give him a show if he sold that book for you?”
“No, I didn’t,” said Sullivan. “I only promised to give him a tryout around convention time. I’ve done that.”
“But he’s the best man on the staff today,” insisted Maxwell. “He brought in the only piece of news worth having. He’s writing better every day.”
He bristled, according to Dunlap, and Sullivan and Gissel, taking the hint that the quarrel might be carried higher up or aired inconveniently, changed their attitude completely.
“Oh, well,” said Sullivan genially, “let him come on. I’d just as lief have him. He may pan out.”
And so on I came, at fifteen dollars a week, and thus my newspaper career was begun in earnest.
CHAPTER XII
This change from insecurity to being an accredited newspaper man was delightful. For a very little while, a year or so, it seemed to open up a clear straight course which if followed energetically must lead me to great heights. Of course I found that beginners were very badly paid. Salaries ranged from fourteen to twenty-five dollars for reporters; and as for those important missions about which I had always been reading, they were not even thought of here. The best I could learn of them in this office was that they did exist—on some papers. Young men were still sent abroad on missions, or to the West or to Africa (as Stanley), but they had to be men of proved merit or budding genius and connected with papers of the greatest importance. How could one prove oneself to be a budding genius?
Salary or no salary, however, I was now a newspaper man, with the opportunity eventually to make a name for myself. Having broken with the family and with my sister C——, I was now quite alone in the world and free to go anywhere and do as I pleased. I found a front room in Ogden Place overlooking union Park (in which area I afterwards placed one of my heroines). I could walk from here to the office in a little over twenty minutes. My route lay through either Madison Street or Washington Boulevard east to the river, and morning and night I had ample opportunity to speculate on the rancid or out-at-elbows character of much that I saw. Both Washington and Madison, from Halsted east to the river, were lined with vile dens and tumbledown yellow and gray frame houses, slovenly, rancorous, unsolved and possibly unsolvable misery and degeneracy, whole streets of degraded, dejected, miserable souls. Why didn’t society do better by them? I often asked of myself then. Why didn’t they do better by themselves? Did God, who, as had been drummed into me up to that hour was all wise, all merciful, omnipresent and omnipotent make people so or did they themselves have something to do with it? Was government to blame, or they themselves? Always the miseries of the poor, the scandals, corruptions and physical deteriorations which trail folly, weakness, uncontrolled passion fascinated me. I was never tired of looking at them, but I had no solution and was not willing to accept any, suspecting even then that man is the victim of forces over which he has no control. As I walked here and there through these truly terrible neighborhoods, I peered through open doors and patched and broken windows at this wretchedness and squalor, much as a man may tread the poisonous paths of a jungle, curious and yet fearsome.
It was this nosing and speculative tendency, however, which helped me most, as I soon found. Journalism, even in Chicago, was still in that discursive stage which loved long-winded yarns upon almost any topic. Nearly all news stories were padded to make more of them than they deserved, especially as to color and romance. All specials were being written in imitation of the great novelists, particularly Charles Dickens, who was the ideal of all newspaper men and editors as well as magazine special writers (how often have I been told to imitate Charles Dickens in thought and manner!). The city editors wanted not so much bare facts as feature stories, color, romance; and, although I did not see it clearly at the time, I was their man.
Write?
Why, I could write reams upon any topic when at last I discovered that I could write at all. One day some one—Maxwell, I suppose—hearing me speak of what I was seeing each day as I came to or went from the office to my room, suggested that I do an article on Chicago’s vilest slum, which lay between Halsted and the river, Madison and Twelfth streets, for the next Sunday issue, and this was as good as meat and drink for me. I visited this region a few times between one and four in the morning, wandering about its clattering boardwalks, its dark alleys, its gloomy mire and muck atmosphere. Chicago’s wretchedness was never utterly tame, disconsolate or hang-dog, whatever else it might be; rather, it was savage, bitter and at times larkish and impish. The vile slovens, slatterns, prostitutes, drunkards and drug fiends who infested this region all led a strident if beggarly or horrible life. Saloon lights and smells and lamps gleaming smokily from behind broken lattices and from below wooden sidewalk levels, gave it a shameless and dangerous color. Accordions, harmonicas, jew’s-harps, clattering tin-pan pianos and stringy violins were forever going; paintless rotting shacks always resounded with a noisy blasphemous life between twelve and four; oaths, foul phrases; a Hogarthian shamelessness and reconciliation to filth everywhere—these were some of the things that characterized it. Although there was a closing-hour law there was none here as long as it was deemed worth while to keep open. Only at four and five in the morning did a heavy peace seem to descend, and this seemed as wretched as the heavier vice and degradation which preceded it.
In the face of such a scene or picture as this my mind invariably paused in question. I had been reared on dogmatic religious and moral theory, or at least had been compelled to listen to it all my life. Here then was a part of the work of an omnipotent God, who nevertheless tolerated, apparently, a most industrious devil. Why did He do it? Why did nature, when left to itself, devise such astounding slums and human muck heaps? Harlots in doorways or behind windows or under lamp-posts in these areas, smirking and signaling creatures with the dullest or most fox-like expression and with heavily smeared lips and cheeks and blackened eyebrows, were ready to give themselves for one dollar, or even fifty cents, and this in the heart of this budding and prosperous West, a land flowing with milk and honey! What had brought that about so soon in a new, rich, healthy, forceful land—God? devil? or both working together toward a common end? Near at hand were huge and rapidly expanding industries. The street-cars and trains, morning and evening, were crowded with earnest, careful, saving, seeking, moderately well-dressed people who were presumably anxious to work and lay aside a competence and own a home. Then why was it that these others lived in such a hell? Was God to blame? Or society?
I could not solve it. This matter of being, with its differences, is permanently above the understanding of man, I fear.
I smiled as I thought of my father’s attitude to all this. There he was out on the west side demanding that all creatures of the world return to Christ and the Catholic Church, see clearly, whether they could or not, its grave import to their immortal souls; and here were these sows and termagants, wretched, filthy, greasy. And the men low-browed, ill-clad, rum-soaked, body-racked! Mere bags of bones, many of them, blue-nosed, scarlet-splotched, diseased—if God should get them what would He do with them? On the other hand, in the so-called better walks of life, there were so many strutting, contentious, self-opinionated swine-masters whose faces were maps of gross egoism and whose clothes were almost a blare of sound.
I think I said a little something of all this in the first newspaper special I ever wrote. It seemed to open the eyes of my superiors.
“You know, Theodore,” Maxwell observed to me as he read my copy the next morning between one and three, “you have your faults, but you do know how to observe. You bring a fresh mind to bear on this stuff; anyhow I think maybe you’re cut out to be a writer after all, not just an ordinary newspaper man.” He lapsed into silence, and then at periods as he read he would exclaim: “Jesus Christ!” or “That’s a hell of a world!” Then he would fall foul of some turgid English and with a kind of malicious glee would cut and hack and restate and shake his head despairingly, until I was convinced that I had written the truckiest rot in the world. At the close, however, he arose, dusted his lap, lit a pipe and said: “Well, I think you’re nutty, but I believe you’re a writer just the same. They ought to let you do more Sunday specials.” And then he talked to me about phases of the Chicago he knew, contrasting it with a like section in San Francisco, where he had once worked.
“A hell of a fine novel is going to be written about some of these things one of these days,” he remarked; and from now on he treated me with such equality that I thought I must indeed be a very remarkable man.
CHAPTER XIII
This world of newspaper men who now received me on terms of social equality, who saw life from a purely opportunistic, and yet in the main sentimentally imaginative, viewpoint broadened me considerably and finally liberated me from moralistic and religionistic qualms. So many of them were hard, gallant adventurers without the slightest trace of the nervousness and terror of fortune which agitated me. They had been here, there, everywhere—San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Calcutta, London. They knew the ways of the newspaper world and to a limited extent the workings of society at large. The conventional-minded would have called them harsh, impracticable, impossible, largely because they knew nothing of trade, that great American standard of ability and force. Most of them, as I soon found, were like John Maxwell, free from notions as to how people were to act and what they were to think. To a certain extent they were confused by the general American passive acceptance of the Sermon on the Mount and the Beatitudes as governing principles, but in the main they were nearly all mistrustful of these things, and of conventional principles in general.
