Chapter XVI: Part 16

The most exciting and interesting hour and a half I spent in Italy was in an anteroom watching twoscore or more persons who were waiting to be received, watching them go in so scared, come out exultant, go in inflated, come out collapsed. There was no one of them but was anxious, even the Admiral of the Fleet then at Ostia. He walked nervously about while he was waiting, adjusting his uniform, and when his turn came strode in as if marching in a parade.

Nothing I saw in Italy, as I have said, was more interesting to me. Though I must confess that all the time there was an undercurrent of nervousness. What I was afraid of was that my French would go to pieces, provided he gave me a chance to speak at all—of which I had a doubt. What if I should forget and say “vous” instead of “votre excellence”? Should I be shot at sunrise?

It was all so different from what I had anticipated. I must have misread and misheard the reports of interviews to have had such an unpleasant impression of what was waiting me. As I crossed the long room towards the desk Mussolini came around to meet me, asked me to take one of the two big chairs which stood in front of his desk—and, as he seated me, was apologizing, actually apologizing, in excellent English for keeping me waiting. As he did it I saw that he had a most extraordinary smile, and that when he smiled he had a dimple.

Nothing could have been more natural, simple, and courteous than the way he put me at my ease. His French, in which he spoke after his first greeting, was fluent, excellent. I found myself not at all afraid to talk, eager to do so. If he had not been as eager, I think I should have done all the talking, for luckily at once we hit on a common interest—better housing. His smiling face became excited and stern. He pounded the table.

“Men and women must have better places in which to live. You cannot expect them to be good citizens in the hovels they are living in, in parts of Italy.”

He went on to talk with appreciation and understanding of the various building undertakings already well advanced, some of which I had seen in different parts of the country. He talked at length of the effect on women of crowded, cheerless homes. “A reason for their drinking too much wine sometimes,” he mused.

He was particularly interested in what prohibition was doing to working people in the United States. “I am dry,” he said, “but I would not have Italy dry [_sec_].” And he amused me by quickly changing _sec_ to _seche_. “We need wine to keep alive the social sense in our hard-working people.”

Altogether it was an illuminating half-hour, and when Mussolini accompanied me to the door and kissed my hand in the gallant Italian fashion I understood for the first time an unexpected phase of the man which makes him such a power in Italy. He might be—was, I believed—a fearful despot, but he had a dimple.

I left Italy, my head alive with speculations as to the future of the man. There was a chance, and it seemed to me a very good one, that he would be assassinated. Three dramatic attempts were made on his life while I was there, attempts known to the public. There may have been others, the authorities kept quiet. As I was sailing there came a rash attack on him at Bologna, the assassin being torn to pieces, so it was said, by an enraged crowd. For months after my return I watched my morning paper for the headline, “Mussolini Assassinated.”

Of course there was a chance—so far as I could see, it was what Mussolini himself believed he could realize—to bring Italy to an even keel economically, by thrift, hard work, development of resources and by a system of legitimate colonization in the parts of the earth where he could obtain land, by treaty or by purchase.

And there was a third possibility to one at all familiar with the course of dictators in the world, particularly with the one with whom you instinctively compare Mussolini—Napoleon Bonaparte—that the day would come when he would overreach himself in a too magnificent attempt, an attempt beyond the forces of his country and so of himself, and he would finally go down as Napoleon went down.

Are Ethiopia and the alliance with Franco and the rebels of Spain to be to Mussolini what Spain and Russia were to Napoleon?

I was glad to breathe the air of the United States. It was still free, whatever our follies. There was at that moment no dictator in sight—no talk of one. But it was not Mussolini or the Corporate State which mattered to us: it was what was back of them. Why had parliamentary government broken down in Italy, the Italy of Garibaldi, of Cavour, Victor Emmanuel? Why had a dictator been able to replace it with a new form of government? Could this happen in the government of Washington and Lincoln? Those were the questions of importance to Americans. There was where there was something to learn.

19
LOOKING OVER THE COUNTRY

My chief consolation in what I looked on as the manhandling of democratic ideals and processes in all ranks of society, public and private, was Abraham Lincoln. In spite of his obvious limitations and mistakes he had won the biggest battle for freedom we have yet had to fight. He had done it by taking time to figure things out, by sticking to the conclusions he had reached so long as, and no longer than, they seemed to him sound, by squaring his conduct always with what he conceived to be just, moral principles. The more I knew of him, the better I liked him and the more strongly I felt we ought as a people to know about how he did things, not ask how he would solve a problem tormenting us, but how he would go to work to solve it.

Feeling as I did and do about him, I have kept him always on my workbench. There has never been a time since the War that I have not had a long or short piece of Lincoln work on hand. The result has been five books, big and little, and a continuous stream of articles, long and short.

The only fresh water in this Lincolnian stream was in a book I called “In the Footsteps of the Lincolns.” Beginning with the first of the family in this country—Samuel, who came in 1637—I traced them mile by mile from Hingham, Massachusetts, where Samuel started, down through Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, the Shenandoah Valley, the wilderness of Kentucky, southwestern Indiana, into Illinois, to the final resting place. I ran down the records that had been left behind, copied the inscriptions on gravestones, went over houses in which they had lived, looked up the families into which they had married, the friends they had made. When I finished my journey I felt that I had quite definitely and finally rescued the Lincolns from the ranks of poor white trash where political enemies had so loved to place them.

I have the satisfaction of knowing that this seven-generation pilgrimage of the Lincoln family has been added to the itineraries which enthusiastic students include in the cult of Lincoln now growing so strong in this country. I have never had an honor which pleased me more than a certificate from this group naming me Lincoln Pilgrim Number One.

My conviction that we needed in all our difficulties to familiarize ourselves with good models, sound laboratory practices led me to publish in 1932 a life of Owen D. Young. Mr. Young had impressed me as being just what I called him, “A New Type of Industrial Leader.” And how we needed one! I had first heard of him in connection with what was called the President’s Second Industrial Conference. After what I regarded as the cowardly retreat of the members of the President’s first conference Mr. Wilson had called a second with the same objective, a distinguished body of men, among them Owen D. Young.

The sessions of this conference were all secret—a contrast to the noisy publicity which had surrounded the first gathering, and which had been partly responsible for its failure, the political-minded conferees being able in this way to speak to the country when they made speeches to their fellows—a privilege they valued more than trying to understand and cooperate with their fellows.

It was not long before I began to hear rumors of the satisfactory way the second conference was going and to hear the name of Owen D. Young as the man who as much as anybody else was leading to a broad, fair program of recommendations. His fairness, based on his experience in industrial relations, came as a surprise to not a few of the members of the conference, for Mr. Young represented the General Electric Company.

Secretary Wilson, who was then at the head of the Federal Labor Department, declared that Mr. Young had no fear and no prejudice as a conferee, that he worked with an open mind. Attorney General Gregory said of him that there was no man on the conference who was so progressive in his philosophy of industrial relations. These opinions from the inside of the conference, followed by its admirable published report, with which I learned Mr. Young had had much to do, set me to following his work in labor matters so far as it reached the public.

I was deeply impressed by the showing he made as a negotiator on the Dawes and Young committees called to settle the thorny problem of what reparations Germany should make to the Allies—the first sitting in 1924 and the second, in 1929—Mr. Young being the chairman of the latter.

He proved himself a negotiator of unusual quality. He knew the facts. He kept his head under all circumstances. He had the warmest kind of human sympathies as well as what one of his colleagues called “a superior emotional sensitiveness,” which made him steer clear of danger points before anybody else realized that they were near.

Such were the qualities, I told myself, needed in a leader to handle the infinitely difficult tangle in labor relations that was more and more disturbing industry.

All I could do was to say so in print, and that I tried to do in a book that came out in 1932 and had the misfortune to collide with a Presidential boom for Mr. Young which misguided friends were cooking up contrary to his wishes. It was the last thing that he wanted. He had the good sense to see that there were vastly important things for the good of the public to be done inside his industry. He wanted to go on with them. He was doing a good job and should have been left with it, I felt. But numbers of admirers and interested politicians continued to cry for him for President until finally Mr. Young came out flat-footed to say that under no circumstances would he accept a nomination.

But here was my book coming out while this outcry was going on, and naturally enough political-minded reviewers took it as intended for a campaign biography. The point I had been trying to make, that here was somebody with rare ability to lead in the labor struggle, was entirely lost. I still believe that if we could have had him active in these past years so disheartening for peaceful industrial relations, the years which have set back so far the hope of genuine understanding cooperation inside industry, we should have been saved the peck of trouble that we are now in.

It was out of the stuff gathered in these various undertakings that I was depending for security. But the return from the books and articles of a free lance is more or less uncertain, particularly when they come in so sober a form as mine and are always shaped to fit a self-made pattern.

I saw that I must have an annual sure if modest money crop, and I found it from 1924 on in lyceum work. My two seasons on the Chautauqua platform had encouraged the lecture bureau to add me to its list of “talent,” and it was arranged that I go out from four to six weeks a year beginning around Lincoln’s birthday when dinners and celebrations called for speakers, and running on into March—usually five engagements a week, the local committees choosing the subject from the half-dozen I offered.

These bookings covered the country from North to South and East to West, long and erratic journeys. Frequently I occupied two different beds a night, and now and then three. It was brutal, exhaustive business, but I learned to climb into an upper berth without a fuss, to sleep on a bench if there was no berth, to rejoice over a cup of hot coffee at an all-night workmen’s lunch counter, to warm my feet by walking a platform while waiting for a train. By the end of the first season I had developed a stoical acceptance of whatever came. This, I argued, saved nervous wear and tear. I think now a certain amount of indignant protest, useless as it would have been, might have put more zest into my travel, as well as my talking.

It was not only hard but lonesome business. From the day I started out I felt myself a detached wanderer, one who had laid aside personality and become a cog in the mechanism called a lecture bureau. My one ambition was to fill the specifications of the schedule and have it over with. It was not until I said good-bye to the last committee and was headed home that I felt the joyful rush of reviving personality.

This is putting an unfair face on my experiences. These long railroad journeys, these nights waiting in dreary stations were not without their rewards. I carry no more beautiful pictures in my mind than those flashed on me riding across this country: glittering snow mountains with stars hanging over them as big as a moon; miles of blossoming redbuds rising from the mist along an Oklahoma stream; the lovely rounded forms of the Ozark Mountains stretched as in sleep across Missouri; amethyst deserts; endless rolling prairies yellow with wheat or white with snow. These journeys took me at one time or another into every state in the Union, and there is no one of them in which some bit of remembered beauty does not take the curse off the almost universal disorder, even squalor of their towns and cities as I saw them going in and out by rail.

These long rides, these night waits, brought unforgettable looks into human lives. Strange how travelers will confide their ambitions, unload their secrets, show their scars to strangers. Never have I been more convinced of the supreme wisdom of the confessional of the Catholic Church than by the confidences poured into my ears in these brief and accidental meetings. Memorable and poignant though these experiences are of the country’s beauty as well as of its human tragedy and comedy, they are little more than a blur. The rapid and crowded succession of events left no time to follow up, digest, get at the meaning, the solution. This was particularly tantalizing when it came to the actual filling of the engagement, for here you were for a time in close contact with a few people, your committee, and you had an hour or more facing an audience representative of a community.

The committee represented authority. It was my business to follow its instructions, please it if I could. Its chairman was the first person I sought on arrival—that is, the first after checking up on how and when I was to get away from the place at which I had just arrived.

To be sure, I had careful routing, but was the train by which I was ordered to leave still running? Had there been a flood or blizzard or accident to make a detour necessary? Sometimes it was an exciting detour. More than once I had to go fifty or a hundred miles by car over flooded or snowbound roads which the pessimistic declared impassable, and which only an adventurous youth for a good round sum would undertake to negotiate. In one of these hold-ups I traveled two hundred miles in a freight car behind an engine, the first to go over the snowbound road in a week. More than once on these exciting detours I felt that probably I should not come out alive; but I always did and always found, however late my arrival, my audience was waiting me. As a matter of fact those little adventures were highly stimulating after hours and hours of the benumbing comfort of trains.

When I knew how I was to get away, I looked up the committee. So far as I was concerned, the point at which I most frequently found a serious conflict in a committee was the subject on which I was to talk. That was supposed to have been settled—I had their letter for it. But not everybody wanted me to talk on so-and-so. Usually I found it was because somebody feared I might be too radical. They didn’t want anything said on their platform which would antagonize the well-to-do conservative sponsors of the course or encourage the town’s social and economic rebels.

I remember times when, after an exciting discussion behind the scenes, I stood in the wings waiting for the signal to come onto the platform while behind me the discussion went on. Only at the last moment did the chairman say begrudgingly, “Well, talk on so-and-so.” But the chief objector meeting me after the lecture said, “I would so much have preferred to have heard you on so-and-so.”

But the indecision of the committee was not the only trying experience before I was actually on my feet and at my job. There was the introduction. You never knew exactly what was to happen. As a matter of fact the introduction should and frequently does give opportunity for repartee, for anecdote—an easy way for putting yourself at once on terms of friendliness with your audience. But I was never happy at that kind of thing. On the Chautauqua circuit the fashion has been for the speaker to go out as soon as the music was over, take his stand and begin. Nobody said, “This is So-and-So who will speak on so-and-so.” Nobody told them anything about you—you stood up and said your piece.

The ritual on the lyceum platform was different. There they made the most of me, as a rule. It sometimes seemed to me that each successive committee had a different way of presenting me. Sometimes I marched out with the master of ceremonies, a man or woman, and was placed in an armchair while the chairman made remarks about me which were often bewildering. I have been introduced as the author of George Kennan’s Siberian books and of Edna Ferber’s Emma McChesney stories. I have heard a long explanation of why I had never married. Once I was called a notorious woman by the speaker, he evidently thinking that the word was flattering. Often I had a bodyguard made up of important women of the community—a tribute to my sex.

One of the most peculiar fashions, as well as the most trying, was having a scene arranged behind the drop curtain. The stage was turned into a pleasant sitting room, and a half-dozen of the leading women of the town in their best gowns were seated about in informal fashion. When we were all ready the curtain went up. There would be music, and then the chairman would tell them who I was, and why I was supposed to be worth their attention. While this was going on the audience was locating the different persons of importance on the stage and criticizing the setting and the costumes.

One going as a lecturer to the most remote parts of the country that support a lecture course may think he will be a treat, but if he has any sensibility he will soon discover that, far from that, he usually has a critical audience. It is interested in what he has to say, treats him with courtesy and respect; but it has also had experience with scores of lecturers in past years and compares his matter and his manner with theirs. I have been in towns in the Middle West where they had heard Thackeray and Dickens read, had listened to Emerson and Bronson Alcott, and had heard every popular lecturer in all the years since their day.

Your real opportunity to judge of the intelligence and alertness of the community comes while you are speaking. Look for an hour or more into the faces of a group of men and women who, whatever they may think of you, are courteous enough to give you their attention, and you know soon what certain individuals think of what you are saying. Always I found myself speaking to someone who I knew heartily disagreed with me, someone I felt I would like to convince. Always I knew that there was a man waiting to challenge me. Usually these challenges came from Socialists or Single Taxers. If an opportunity was given to ask questions after my talk (something which I always encouraged), they were the first on their feet. The community knew them and knew what their questions would be, and frequently laughed at them. But a really good audience enjoys seeing a speaker heckled a bit and the speaker, if he is really interested in his business, is glad to take the heckling. I know nothing better for a lecturer who is going over the same arguments night after night than to know that there will probably be somebody in his audience who will seize the first opportunity to pick on a weak point, challenge his generalization, his facts. If that happens you always go away from your lecture better equipped than you came to it.

In the twelve years in which I regularly made an annual lecture trip—I gave up the work in 1932, finding it too much for my strength—in all those twelve years I everywhere found the liveliest absorption in national policies. People told you how they felt about an undertaking, how it was working out in their particular community—important, for here you had the test of the pudding in its eating. It was what I saw of the workings of prohibition in the 1920’s that drove me to do one of the most unpopular things I ever did—that was to tell bluntly how I saw it working in hotels from one end of the land to the other, disheartening evidences of its effect on the young, the unexpected dangers it brought to a woman traveling alone at night, both in stations and on trains. I set down what I had seen over a wide range of territory, what I had heard from the mouths of men and women who had been ardent prohibitionists, and who were appalled by the things that were happening particularly to youth in their own communities.

I had never been a prohibitionist in principle. My whole theory for the improvement of society is based on a belief in the discipline and the education of the individual to self-control and right doing, for the sake of right doing. I have never seen fundamental improvements imposed from the top by ordinances and laws. I believed that the country was gradually learning temperance. But if prohibition could be made to work I was willing it should be tried. But what I saw in these years had led me by 1928 to feel that something unexpected and very disastrous was going on, and that it must be faced, not hidden. It was the most important observation that my crowded lecture days yielded, but as I say it brought me bitter criticism and now and then an intimation from some indignant woman of power and parts that I had sold myself to the liquor interests. One lady even intimated that if she had known that my pen was for sale she would have bid for it. This kind of criticism, however, is one of the things that one who says what he thinks must be prepared to meet. It is very difficult to believe that those who disagree with you are as convinced of the right of their point of view as you are, that they are not being bribed or unduly influenced, have no selfish purpose as you are sure you have not.

Two generalizations topping all others came out of this going up and down the land in the years between 1920 and 1932. The first is the ambition of our people to live and think according to what they conceive to be national standards. They adopt them whether they suit their locality or not, and often in adopting them destroy something with individuality and charm. For the traveler it begins with the hotel, spick and span, and as like as two peas to the one in A-ville—B-ville—and so on. Over the way is a sturdy stone building dating from the days of the coach and four. You may sigh for its great rooms and for a sight of the old lithographs sure to be on the wall, but you know it is run down. The town cannot support two, and it prefers the smart and comfortable commonplace to modernizing its fine old inn.

Look out your hotel window and you will see opposite a smart, little dress shop, a duplicate of one you have been seeing everywhere you have halted, a duplicate of many a one you have seen on New York avenues. Next door is a standardized beauty parlor, and the pretty girl who waits on you at the table, the daughter probably of some solid and self-respecting townsman, has the latest coiffure and blood-red nails. She is struggling to look as she supposes girls do in Chicago or New York.

When the committee takes you out to drive it is to show their one high building, a high building on a prairie with limitless land to occupy, or a country club as fine as the one in the nearest city. The pride is in looking like something else, not themselves. The growth of this progress in imitation can be traced in the change that has come over the local postal card. All my life I have been a buyer of postal cards, largely on account of my mother, to whom I always sent pictures of the localities through which I was passing. Mother died in 1917, but up to this day I rarely go through a station that I do not say to myself, “I must find a card for Mother”—and turn away with a pang. In the years between 1920 and 1932 the postal card grew steadily less interesting. Once there were pictures of a near-by fort, the earliest house, a local celebrity, a rare view, but now it is all of high buildings and new blocks. They give of course the pictures of the Zoo and the parks, and even the Zoo and the parks pride themselves, like the country club, on their resemblance to those of the nearest large city.

The growing evidence that nationalization is blotting out local individuality, destroying the pungent personality of sections, states, communities, struck me with new force after the months I spent in Italy in 1926. In Italy I had found that, however deeply unionism might be written in the hearts of some men, you were a Roman, a Perugian, a Venetian, a Neapolitan before you were an Italian. The long arm of Fascism was reaching into the provinces and the towns, but it did not as yet disturb their ways of life. Mussolini had shown, up to that date, rare knowledge of his Italians. He had left them their ways. Sure of them, they did not worry so much about the change in government. Most of them could see about them the proofs of two thousand years of change; they could show you records and scars of a long succession of emperors, kings, consuls, dictators. It did not seem to make a vast difference to them what the government was if they could go on being themselves.

Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative, to benumb the creative impulse above all else essential to the vitality and growth of democratic ideals.

The second of my two generalizations was slower in its making. It came when I began to scratch below the surface of the imitative life so conspicuous. Then I found a stable foundation of people who stayed at home and went about their business in their own way and without much talking. These were people who in spite of droughts and dust storms stuck to their farms, making the most of good years, saving enough to carry them through the evil ones, adding a little, year by year, to their possessions in town and country, supporting schools, churches, and incidentally lecture courses. They were people who believed in freedom to work out their own salvation and asked from the state nothing more than protection in this freedom. It was the business of government, as they saw it, to keep off the plunderers and let them alone.

Democracy to them was not something which insured them a stable livelihood. It was something which protected them while they earned a livelihood. If they failed it was their failure. If the Government did not protect them from transportation plunderers, manipulations of money, stock gambling in goods which they raised to feed the world, it was the Government’s failure. Then they had the right to change the Government, hold it up to its duty. That was their political business.

This was about what I found, the country over. When once I had learned to look beyond the restless imitative crowd, to hunt out people who were going about their business steadily, and for the most part serenely, I began to breathe more freely and to say: “Well, perhaps, after all, the men and women of this country as a whole do know what they are about. They do know what democracy means, and in the best way that they can under many hampering circumstances they are trying to live it.”

Some such conclusion I always brought back with me from my annual swings around the country, my dozens of nights in dozens of different places—the high spot of which always was the hour of searching the faces of the men and women who came to listen to what I had to say, and who, I knew, sized me up for just about what I was worth. I might be fooling myself but not them.

20
NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN

Here then is the record of my day’s work still unfinished at eighty. Nobody can be more surprised than I am that I am still at work. Looking forward at life at thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, generally finding myself tired and a little discouraged, having always taken on things for which I was unprepared, things which were really too big for me, I consoled myself by saying, “At seventy you stop.” I planned for it. I would burrow into the country, have a microscope—my old love. I knew by this time that was not the way for me to find God, but I expected to have a lot of fun watching the Protozoa and less anguish than watching men and women.

But I discovered when seventy came that I still had security to look after. I could make it by seventy-five, I thought, but I did not. And I have come where I am with a consciousness that, so long as my head holds out, I shall work. More important, I am counting it as one of my blessings. In spite of the notion early instilled into me that the place of the aged is in the corner resignedly waiting to die, that there is no place for their day’s work in the scheme of things, that they no longer will have either the desire or the power to carry on, I find things to do which belong to me and nobody else.

It is an exciting discovery that this can be so. Old age need not be what the textbooks assure us it is. Shakespeare is wrong. Cicero, dull as he is in comparison, is more nearly right. More, it can be an adventure. My young friends laugh at me when I tell them that, in spite of creaking joints and a tremulous hand, there are satisfactions peculiar to the period, satisfactions different from those of youth, of middle life, even of that decade of the seventies which I supposed ended it all.

I have been finding it a surprising adventure, if frequently disillusioning and disturbing, to review my working life, to pick out what seems to be the reason for my going here and not there, for thinking this and not that. It has been a good deal like renewing acquaintance with a friend I had not seen since childhood. Probably the reason for this is that I have never stopped long enough after any one piece of work to clean up, valuate what I had done. Always a new undertaking was on my table before I was finished with what went before. Packing boxes and letter files of badly classified material still clutter up my small space with the physical evidence of the incompleteness of every piece of work I have undertaken.

This explains why telling my story has been so full of surprises. “I did not realize I felt that way,” I have told myself more than once. “I had forgotten I did that.” “I cannot imagine why I thought that.”

I took on self-support at the start that I might be free to find answers to questions which puzzled me. After long floundering I blundered into man’s old struggle for the betterment of his life.

My point of attack has always been that of a journalist after the fact, rarely that of a reformer, the advocate of a cause or a system. If I was tempted from the strait and narrow path of the one who seeks for that which is so and why it is so, I sooner or later returned. This was partly because of the humor and common sense of my associates on _McClure’s_ and _The American Magazine_, and partly because the habit of accepting without question the teachings and conventions of my world was shattered when in girlhood I discovered that the world was not created in six days of twenty-four hours each. That experience aroused me to questioning, qualifying even what I advocated, which no first-class crusader can afford to do.

I have never had illusions about the value of my individual contribution! I realized early that what a man or a woman does is built on what those who have gone before have done, that its real value depends on making the matter in hand a little clearer, a little sounder for those who come after. Nobody begins or ends anything. Each person is a link, weak or strong, in an endless chain. One of our gravest mistakes is persuading ourselves that nobody has passed this way before.

In our eagerness to prove we have found the true solution, we fail to inquire why this same solution failed to work when tried before—for it always has been tried before, even if we in our self-confidence do not know it.

We are given to ignoring not only the past of our solutions, their status when we took them over, but the variety of relationships they must meet, satisfy. They must sink or swim in a stream where a multitude of human experiences, prejudices, ambitions, ideals meet and clash, throw one another back, mingle, make that all-powerful current which is public opinion—the trend which swallows, digests, or rejects what we give it. It is our indifference to or ignorance of the multiplicity of human elements in the society we seek to benefit that is responsible for the sinking outright of many of our fine plans.

There are certain exhibits of the eighty years I have lived which particularly impress me. Perhaps the first of these is the cyclical character of man’s nature and activities. If I separate my eighty years—1857 to 1937—into four generations, examine them, compare my findings, I find startling similarities in essentials. Take the effort, to create, distribute, and use wealth. How alike are the ups and downs that have marked that effort!

I was born in the year of a major panic. The depression which followed it was smothered in war. That war over, quickly there followed in 1866 a serious depression—world-wide. In 1873 came a major panic. When this first period came to an end in 1877 the country was still deep in the clutch of the unhappy depression which followed that panic.

Each of my three successive generations beginning in 1877, 1897, 1917, has featured a “major” panic followed by five to seven years of depression. Then has come a brilliant short-lived recovery ending in what we euphoniously call today a recession.

My fifth generation, just opening, promises well to duplicate its predecessor. If I live ten years longer I no doubt shall see another major panic, and one still more difficult for the productive individual or group to handle because the practice of following the provident ant’s example and storing up in the good time reserves to meet the bad has been made a political offense.

Each generation repeats its leaders. Each sees men endowed with superior inventiveness, energy, and genius for business, inspired by love of power and possession, launch selfish schemes—Carnegies, Rockefellers, Goulds. If each of these strong men left something sinister behind, each also contributed to higher living standards and hurried on the nationalization of the country. The public without whom they could not have lived a day saw in their greedy grandiose undertakings whatever was for its benefit, and took it while ordering its government to control whatever was sinister.

And while they built and served and exploited, other men endowed with far greater idealism than practical sense planned new forms of government, new laws, advertised panaceas, all guaranteed to produce security and justice. Each generation has had its Henry George, its Bellamy, its Bryan, intent on persuading mankind that he had found the way, could lead men to the good life.

In each generation employer and employee have faced the decision—war or cooperation. If war has been the answer in the majority of cases, there have always been those who have gone ahead building up a great mass of evidence of what men inspired by good will, free from suspicion and self-interest, can do in industry by patient cooperative experiments.

Side by side with these exhibits have gone magnificent governmental attempts to correct abuses, to make man’s life in the Republic freer, securer, more just, efforts to carry out the avowed purpose of the government we started a hundred and fifty years ago. And these efforts are alike in essentials—the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt, the New Freedom of Woodrow Wilson, the Square Deal of Theodore Roosevelt, the fight for a larger freedom of opportunity of Grover Cleveland, the struggle to wipe out slavery of Abraham Lincoln.

Again and again in these generations have we seen the great airship of democracy lift from the ground, stagger, gather itself together, soar, sail, while those who had chosen the pilot and loaded in his cargo watched the flight with confidence and exultation. This time their dream had come true.

But the ship has always come back, its journey unfinished, and doubters have jeered at those who believed in it, cried out that it would never fly, that freedom, equal opportunity were only foolish fancies; men, they gloated, function only under strong single rulers. Dictatorship alone makes efficient government—national power and glory. The state, not the individual, is the end.

There is no denying that these repeated failures or half-successes have made cynics of many who have had a hand in the flights, or at least been sympathetic watchers.

It has been sickening to see hopes grow dim under the hammering of reality, to see a generation lose its first grand fire and sink into apathy, cynicism. One asks oneself if man has the staying power ever to realize his ideals. One is inclined when this hour of futility comes to agree with Arthur Balfour that human life is but a disreputable episode on one of the minor planets. As far as I am concerned that smart and cynical estimate never could stand a good night’s sleep.

If I find little satisfaction or hope in examining and comparing one by one my four successive generations, I find considerable in looking at them as a whole. When I do that, I see not a group of cycles rolling one after another along a rocky and uneven road but a spiral—the group moves upward. To be sure it is not a very steady spiral, but I am convinced that is the real movement.

Could there be greater evidence that this is true than that the world as a whole has today come to conscious grips over that most fundamental of problems: Shall all men cooperate in an effort to make a free, peaceful, orderly world, or shall we consent that strong men make a world to their liking, forcing us to live in it? more than that, train us to carry it on?

It is well that the issue should be clear, so clear that each of us must be forced to choose.

Even more hopeful, if not so clear to many people, is the increasing knowledge that we are getting of man as an individual and as a mass, coming to us particularly from men of science. What we have yet to find out, apparently, is what we can expect of man under this or that circumstance, what words and what promises stir him, what persuades him to cooperation or to revolt, why he follows a particular type of leader at a particular time and how long he can be counted on. Once we know better what we can get out of man under particular circumstances we can plan our action with something like the certainty with which the electrician plans his machine. He knows the nature of the current, what it will do and not do. He puts no strain on it which experiment has proved fatal.

When we reach that knowledge and control of human forces we shall know why the League of Nations works so badly, why we have before us the terrible and apparently uncheckable shambles of Spain and China, why an intolerable outbreak of racial and religious prejudice should shame us at this period of our history, why we must be prepared to meet the savage outbreaks of men and peoples still contemptuous of contracts, unamenable to ideals of honor, peace, and conciliation.

One consolation in any effort to socialize and democratize our plans of life is that the mass of men want a simple world. In every country they ask little more than security, preferably of their own making, freedom to build in the way they like so far as possible. They will follow any system or any leader that promises them that. Politicians would do a better job for men if they wrote fewer constitutions, devised fewer automatic cures, gave more attention to disciplining and training common men and women the world over to honest labor, to cooperation with their fellows, to sacrifice when necessary, keeping alive in them their natural spark of freedom.

How are we going to do it? That is the gravest question we face. In 1921 I went to Washington to report Secretary Hughes’ Conference on the Limitation of Armaments. It seemed to me that I had better do some preliminary reading on the problems, so I went to a wise man at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for advice. He turned out to be a philosopher.

“First,” said he, “read ‘Don Quixote’: he will tell you what they cannot do. Then read Aesop’s Fables: that will tell you what they can do. But above all read the King James Version of the Bible, which tells you that peace on earth is promised only to men of good will.”

There you have it. If we want peace we must make men of common sense, knowing what can be done and what cannot be done, also men of good will.

How are we to do that? I see no more promising path than each person sticking to the work which comes his way. The nature of the work, its seeming size and importance matter far less than its right relation to the place where he finds himself. If the need at the moment is digging a ditch or washing the dishes, that is the greatest thing in the world for the moment. The time, the place, the need, the relation are what decide the value of the act.

It is by following this natural path that new and broader roads open to us, moments of illumination come. There is the only reliable hope of the world. It takes in all of us but puts it up hard to each of us to fit the day’s work into the place where we stand, not crowding into another’s place: no imitation, no hurry, growth always, knowing that light and power come only with growth, slow as it is.

Madame Curie so saw it. Asked what a woman’s contribution to a better world should be, she replied that it began at home, then spread to those immediately connected, her immediate friends, then the community in which she lived; and if the work proved to meet a need of the world at large it spread there. But the important thing was the beginning, and that beginning, Madame Curie insisted, was in the home, the center of small things.

Work backed by such a faith makes life endurable. I doubt if I could have come into my eighties with anything like the confidence I feel in the ultimate victory of freedom, the ultimate victory of man’s self-respect, if I had not groped my way through work into some such faith.

I know I should find this end of life less satisfactory if it were not a working end, conditioned as it must be by certain concessions to years, easements necessary if I am to keep vigor for my two or three hours a day at my desk and, once accepted, becoming more and more enjoyable.

No one can imagine what a satisfaction it is to me to find that I need not go to conferences and conventions and big dinners. That job belongs to youth. It alone has the appetite, the digestion, the resilience for the endless talk and late hours of those functions, also the confidence that salvation is to be reached through them.

Still more satisfactory is the acceptance of the fact that I have not the strength to run about on trains and give lectures. That, too, is the job of young people, and the best I can hope for them in carrying it on is that they will learn as much about people as I think I did. The humility which that will engender will be all to their good.

A discovery which has given me joy, and which had something of the incredible about it, is the durability of friendship born at any period in one’s life. I have enlarged in this narrative only on professional friendships, those that belong legitimately to my day’s work, but this discovery does not cover them alone but all the range from childhood to now.

Circumstances, time, separations, may have completely broken communication. The break may have been caused by complete divergence of opinion, differences as grave as those which caused the breaking up of our old McClure crowd, as grave as the ghastly separations that war brings; but you pick up at the day when the friendship was—not broken but interrupted.

One of the most beautiful personal demonstrations I have had of this unbreakable quality in friendship was a birthday party which S. S. McClure gave Viola Roseboro, John Phillips, and myself when he was seventy-eight, and I close to it. Miss Roseboro had stayed with Mr. McClure when the rest of us left him. That had never made a rift in anybody’s relations with her, and now we all sat down together as once we had sat down in the old St. Denis, the old Astor, the old Holland House—lunching places that marked the stages by which _McClure’s_ worked itself successively into better quarters, went uptown. And we talked only of the things of today, as we always had done. We sat enthralled as in the old years while Mr. McClure enlarged on his latest enthusiasm, marveling as always at the eternal youthfulness in the man, the failure of life to quench him.

One of my great satisfactions has been a revival of curiosity. I lost it in the 1920’s and early 1930’s. Human affairs seemed to me to be headed for collapse. War was not over, and men were taking it for granted it was. The failure of the hopes of previous generations had taught us nothing. The sense of disaster was strong in me. What I most feared was that we were raising our standard of living at the expense of our standard of character. If you believed as I did (and do) that permanent human betterment must rest on a sound moral basis, then our house would collapse sooner or later.

It was taking a longer view, looking at my fifty years as a whole, that revived me. I thought I saw a spiral, was eager to prove it.

Once more I am curious. It is an armchair curiosity—no longer can I go out and see for myself; but that has its advantages. It compels longer reflection, intensifies the conviction that taking time, having patience, doing one thing at a time are the essentials for solid improvement, for finding answers. Perhaps, I tell myself, I may from an armchair find better answers than I have yet found to those questions which set me at my day’s work, the still unanswered questions of the most fruitful life for women in civilization, the true nature of revolutions, even the mystery of God. It is the last of the three which disturbs me least. The greatest of mysteries, it has become for me the greatest of realities.

INDEX

Adams, Dr. Herbert B., 76

Addams, Jane, 273, 279, 305, 309, 310, 312, 313, 322, 334, 349, 354

Agassiz, Louis, 41, 42

Alber, Louis, 300

Alden, Timothy, 37–39

Aldrich, Esther Tarbell (niece), 264, 265, 359

Allegheny College, 34–47, 58, 64, 89, 142

American Federation of Labor, 82, 371

_American Magazine, The_, 255, 259, 261, 265–267, 270, 274, 276, 281,
282, 288, 292, 293, 297–300, 306, 307, 327, 350, 353, 359, 365, 399

Anderson, Mary, 55, 323, 349

Anderson, Maxwell, 307

Anthony, Susan B., 31–33, 40, 327

Archbold, John D., 220, 221, 232

Baker, Ray Stannard, 196, 197, 242, 258, 261, 266, 274, 279, 282, 292,
299, 350

Barton Lincolniana, 170, 171

Beecher-Tilton scandal, 33

Bell, Alexander Graham, 44, 147, 181–184

Bellamy, Edward, 83, 401

Bentley, William, 38, 39

Berkman, Alexander, 126

Blanc, Madame (Théodore Bentzon), 100, 101

Bliven, Bruce, 307

Bloomer, Amelia, 31

Bonaparte, Napoleon, 130, 146–153, 155, 156, 159, 161, 164, 205, 384

Bonnet, Madame, 90, 103–106, 110, 112, 114, 116–118

Bonta House, 19, 205

Borgeaud, Charles, 131, 145, 350

Boyden, Albert, 258, 261, 262, 266, 300

Bryan, William Jennings, 355, 356, 401

Bugbee, Dr. Lucius, 35, 43

Burlingame, Edward L., 98–100

Burroughs, John, 308

Catt, Carrie Chapman, 320–322, 326

Chautauqua Assembly, 65–72

Chautauqua Circuit, 300–305, 314, 329, 352–356, 388–397

Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, 69–71, 81

_Chautauquan, The_, 64, 71–79, 81–83, 85–89, 94, 98, 179, 204, 211, 268

Cherry Run, 4, 5, 8, 10

Claflin, Tennessee, 32, 33

Claude, Monsieur, 97

Cleveland, Grover, 83, 149, 268–272, 402

Coppée, François, 122, 123

Corrigan, James, 237, 238

Craft, Amos Norton, 27, 28

Dana, Charles A., 174–177

Darmesteter, James, 131

Daudet, Alphonse, 122, 126, 127

Delamater, Wallace, 79, 80

Dieulafoy, Madame, 101, 102

Doremus, Dr. R. Ogden, 65, 66

Duffus, Robert L., 307

Dumas, Alexandre, 122

Duncan, Andrew J., 60, 61

Dunne, Finley Peter (Mr. Dooley), 259–261, 265, 300, 361

Edison, Thomas A., 64, 310

Ely, Dr. Richard T., 76

Emery, Fred Parker, 114

Emery, Lewis, Jr., 231–234, 236, 237, 252

Fairchild, David, 183

Finley, Dr. John H., 70, 76, 77, 171, 172

Fisk, Jim, 22

Flagler, Henry, 217–220

Fletcher, Henry P., 382

Flood, Dr. Theodore L., 64, 72–75, 87

Ford, Henry, 287–293, 296, 309–312

Gary, Judge Elbert H., 285, 364–374

Gautier, Judith, 102, 103

Gautier, Théophile, 102

George, Henry, 83, 401

Gifford, Walter S., 320, 325

Gilder, Jeannette L., 265

Gladden, Dr. Washington, 243

Gompers, Samuel, 285, 349, 371–373

Gould, Jay, 22, 25

Grayson, David, 197. _See also_ Baker, Ray Stannard

Grosvenor, Gilbert II., 183

Grumbine, Annette, 46