The First Morning on Board
The First Morning on Board
p. 11-17
At half past eight, the sun shines down from the sky on the Isle of Wight. Spithead comes into sight while comically round towers, plump and stocky like pudding, lay sleepily in the water and protect the harbor entrance. They are painted like a chessboard, and behind the black panels you can see the mouths of cannons aimed upwards, but they only fire at noon, or perhaps more often if the king is crowned. The first white yachts hunt from the Solent back and forth into the canal. Over there we see Ryde, a tiny harbor with cute little houses, looking as if they had been taken out of a box. The dreadnought on the Portsmouth side is an elaborate, ugly plaything out in the distance, sitting like a plank of wood.
We stop at Cowes, and out of the forest on the shore, a slender and delicate tower raises up near the water. It’s a house, with a terrace gliding out into the sunshine, a green lawn in front of it, gleaming windows, dark green ivy on the windows and stretching up to the point of the tower, everything bright and cheerful. A couple of hazy dots travel between the lawn and the building.
I stand on the promenade deck, from where I can look down to steerage, and with my good binoculars I can observe the wonderful summer morning over on the manor.
Down in steerage, the throng is in full motion. All the assorted colors of the world hurry about the women’s skirts, headscarves, slippers and the children’s clothing.
Back at the castle, two figures emerge, dressed in white, a gentleman and a lady. They carry with them something which is red and swings: a sun-umbrella that the man carries with him. They walk here and there until they stand around lazily by the lawn. There are about a hundred steps from the terrace to the beach.
Below in steerage, some order is coming into the crowd, quietly. I’m sensing a feeling of oppression. The people are moving to the sides, and below me, below the promenade deck where I’m standing, men and women, old and young, walk one at a time out of a door, tickets in hand, which they hold out to the ship’s officer. They never hold the tickets very far out, as if they want to say: Enough! Read it from here! But there’s something in their gestures which stirs me, something timid which is begging for forgiveness. People like us would never hold a ticket like the people down there.
Over at Wight, I spot a small, merry fleck dancing under the ivied castle: a tiny, blond girl, next to a light-haired sheepdog springing out. The young lady turns to the lawn, the woman and the child run towards each other, the great white spot bends down to the little white spot, and for a moment they form one white spot. Then the woman and the child go arm in arm down to the beach, where the man is waiting for them. The collie is already there, almost by the water. On the terrace, two new figures appear in front of the gleaming windows; the breakfast is over. The sun is so bright over the lawn.
Down below, Mr. X. Y. from A. (from above I can read the names on the tickets quite well) walks out of the gangway. He and his family, an old scrawny woman and a small blond girl, cling tightly to each other, walking in step and holding hands. The man, elderly and thick in well-worn clothes, holds up his ticket — He passes.
I can’t see the castle anymore. For awhile yet, I can still see the tower over the trees and the light strip of lawn, and then we’re gone.
Below, one after the other, people step through the gangway tickets in hand and stand there relieved on the deck, where the sun illuminates the colors over and over again. –
In steerage, an infectious disease can spread with disastrous speed, so the people in steerage must be daily subjected to examination on board. The hygienic facilities are excellent, giving no one any reason to feel sorry or shed a tear. But the day before yesterday, I saw something in Bremen which I will not soon forget. The man from North German Lloyd took me through the train station into the Emigration Department, and over there I saw what I want to tell you. In a large room, day after day, three doctors in lab coats stand in front of a sort of barrier. They have a table with containers of carbolic acid next to them, and in their hands they hold these steel instruments, which at best I can say look like nail files, I can find no better comparison. Three long rows of people walk up to the barrier, men and women holding children by the arm. They come up to the doctor with the shirtsleeves on their right arms rolled up.
With the sharp end of the steel instrument, the doctors scratch the arms held before them, arms which are trembling or brave, anemic or muscular. Then the doctor flips the instrument, lifts it up to the person’s eye, turns inside-out the left then the right eyelid, dips the “nail file” into the bowl and then the line steps forward and so on and so forth. It all flies quickly before them — One — Two — Three — Four — At the fourth, disinfection.
This is the vaccination and the Trachoma examination which each steerage passenger is subjected to. I don’t know how many people are fixed up for their trip over the course of an hour. I also never thought to count how many passed me by during the two minutes I was watching. I know only that I gagged a little in my throat and took off, stumbling out of this Dante’s hell into the open.
But there’s really no cause to get worked up over notions of hell and that sort of thing. The large shipping company has caught onto the business-like way of doing things in the States, and I should actually be happy that the people here are protected from a detour into sickness and death. But the whole affair with the tickets bothers me. I hope I won’t be hardened to feelings of this sort.
And besides, if you really look at the daily life of these hundred thousands, comparing their life on board to their life beforehand, you can honestly say that they have every reason to feel happy about their strange and lucky fortunes.
Now that I’ve looked down from the promenade deck of the Kaiser Wilhelm the Great down onto the liberated throng beneath me, down onto this bustle, which moves about strangely, comically and en masse, like a microcosm, like the life in a piece of cheese under the microscope, I can now correct an old dusty idea that has been laying around my brain for years.
In the train stations of Silesian Oderbeg, in the evening, emigrants lay on beds in fourth-class waiting rooms under pale gaslight, sleeping a short and interrupted sleep in damp clothing from the day before, constantly in thrall to their underfed bodies. At half past three in Berlin, in the train station of the Berlin Zoological Garden, when one of the emigrant trains drifts slowly by — how can I describe the expression on those faces, staring out of the windows at us, the fully dressed, the inquisitive people who stand back on the platform, rocking back and forth on our feet!
Now that I’m watching from the promenade deck, everything takes on a different face. What sorts of dreams are coming true down there! They have a week to look forward to, where they will not have to work to feed their bodies, not twelve hours, not ten hours, no hours at all! There will be a week in their lives, where they can sleep out in the good air and on clean beds, one bed for each person, where they will experience the joys of showers and single-occupancy water closets, where they will get to eat truly divine meat every day and are allowed to feel the daylight from sunrise to sunset over their heads, without having to sweat or work their hands. A week, where they will get to experience something which has nothing to do with the dreary misery of their surrounding lives! Where else could the poor have such an untroubled week? (Maybe in prison.) Here in steerage, they experience a week that will shine over their dreary souls as a hope, a new part of the world rising before their eyes!
On the inside of the promenade deck railing, a sign advises us against throwing the steerage passengers any money, fruit or similar items. Do they really have to spell it out in black and white to you honored fellow first-class travelers? I wish I could step over to one of the gentlemen here and begin throwing money, fruit and similar items down to the people below. I’d probably get a few jabs in my first-class nose, by God, and be in danger of being thrown overboard!
For today and five days afterward, we’re allowed to call these poor people the people in the depths. You can’t really say they’ve been torn from their native soil, because who today still has his native soil underneath him? What do you call it today: soil? The small farmer has to work for his massive landlord or go underneath the gravedigger. In the same way, the small tradesman must sell off the honored tools handed down to him from his earliest ancestors and put on a “tear-proof” factory worker’s uniform. As for the small, calculating man in his moldy suburban business, his front window is boarded up and so is everything he sold to the people on his street. Now he tidies up, according to artistic principles, the front windows of the warehouses which have made him an assistant into his old age. So which of these people would cry over living his life on a ship, torn away from his self and his home? Even if this homeland were so wonderful as an Upper Hungarian castle or as shabby and pitiful as a shoemaker’s workshop in a dirty little street in Czernowitz?
The feeling of happiness in these people down below is only really half true, if you think about the entire situation when looking down to steerage from the promenade deck. In the Emigrant Department someone said to me: If the people in this room were forced to wait a few days longer on account of some delay, they’d become nervous and restless and disturbed. They have clean beds and good baths and good air, they are catered to at the expense of the company, they have meat and other good things to eat all day, and still they are nervous and disturbed. Why is that? These meager laborer’s brains probably don’t have much more room for the idea of freedom. All for the worse!
Rufus: Chapter Three
Rufus
Chapter Three
by Conrad Phillips
“Tom!”
Rufus banged on the brick wall of Tom’s apartment at three in the morning, as if he could shake the entire building with his pounding and wake everybody up. He was beginning to annoy the people on the first floor, but Tom was up on the third and couldn’t hear a thing yet.
“Tom!”
A pudgy face with a mop of dark hair popped out of a first-floor window. “Shut the fuck up!” the kid yelled. “It’s three in the morning!”
“I’m looking for Tom!” The kid on the first floor was only six feet away. Rufus didn’t need to yell.
“He’s not here!”
“How do you know!”
“Just shut the fuck up!”
The kid went back into the apartment and closed the window. It was much warmer now than it had been, but not warm enough to keep the windows open. Rufus thought about yelling again, but instead he pounded silently on the wall with his fist, then he walked away and sat on the curb, depressed. Fifteen minutes later, while Rufus was staring into nothing, Tom stepped out of the building in a ratty bathrobe. “Rufus?”
“Tom?” Rufus stood up. “Tom!”
“Why didn’t you ring the doorbell? Or knock on the door or call me?”
“I know it’s a little early . . . but it’s March 8, remember? You said you’d have time. And I was just tooling around and I realized what day it was and you’d be on break and I thought –”
“Just get inside, Rufus. Someone’s gonna call the cops.”
“. . . Thanks, Tom. I appreciate that.”
The two took the stairs up to the third floor and Tom’s apartment. It was a cramped, campus-controlled apartment, enough for a few beds and amenities and not much else. Tom’s two roommates stood by the door, waiting to see what was going on. “You know this guy?” one of them said, a guy of average height who was getting a little round but looked unnatural about it, as if he’d only really learned to eat once he’d gotten into college.
“Yeah, this . . . he’s my Uncle Rufus.”
“Oh . . . that’s the guy?”
“Yeah.”
Rufus had been never called an uncle before, and even though it was probably an insult, since Tom had to lie to explain this strange man to his friends, somehow being called uncle made Rufus unreasonably proud of himself. Tom introduced his friends. Chris, the fat one. Darius, who was shorter than average and whose body seemed to waste away a little. They shook each other’s hands and realized that they all would rather be in bed right now, even though Darius had been awake when Tom had come calling. Tom told Rufus that there wasn’t much room but that Rufus could sleep on the floor if he liked.
Rufus thought twice and became concerned. “I just want to make sure cuz I don’t want to get anybody in trouble. Are there any rules about visitors or anything?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Tom said.
“Tons of rules,” Darius continued. “More than we can keep track of. But nobody bothers enforcing them unless you piss someone off.”
“Okay,” Rufus said uncertainly. “Good.”
Everyone went to bed and tried or pretended to sleep. Rufus, without a blanket or any means of comfort, wasn’t sure what to do, so he sat in an empty corner and curled into a ball. He was pretty sure he’d be able to fall asleep, but his back was gonna hurt him in the morning.
At about eleven, Tom kicked Rufus gently in the ribs to wake him up. When standing, Rufus looked relatively thin and fit for a man his age, but now that he was crumpled into a corner, all his fat coalesced on his gut. It stuck out over his jeans and sagged downwards over the button and zipper, like a beer belly that had been popped with a pin, gotten sick, died, and was now dripping all over his crotch. Rufus woke up slowly and sullenly, his eyes staring ahead without much purpose, but then he realized it was Tom.
“Cmon . . . do you want breakfast? Chris and Darius left already.”
“Where did they go?”
“They’re gone. Here cmon, I don’t know if anyone’s still serving breakfast.”
“. . . I’ve never been much for breakfast.”
“Well, good. You should still probably eat something.”
“Okay.”
“Do you wanna shave or shower or something? I might have some clothes that’ll still fit you.”
“No . . . no, not really. Not right now.”
“Let’s go, then. Let’s go. We’ve gotta get you moving around.”
“Wait.”
“What?”
“I have to get up first.”
Rufus leaned over to stick out his right arm, gesturing that Tom should grab him and help him to his feet. For a second, Tom was convinced that the old sonofabitch could get up just fine and was looking for pity, but he helped Rufus anyway. Once on his feet, Rufus took some time to straighten out his back. “The damn thing spasms on me now and then.” In the light of the late morning, the apartment seemed even smaller. “You’ll know what I’m talking about . . . you said something about breakfast?”
“There’s a McDonald’s nearby.”
“I don’t wanna go there . . . don’t you have any cafeterias? Campus cafeterias or something?”
“Yeah.”
“Well it’s been awhile since I’ve been on a campus. I want to see it.”
It was only a short walk away, and there really wasn’t much to see. Tom got a wrapped sandwich and a bottle of soda. Rufus took a bagel and some juice. When they came up to the woman behind the register, Rufus handed her a twenty before Tom could even reach for his wallet. “For everything,” Rufus said. She looked at him suspiciously, wondering if the unkempt, unshaven man was a bum or just another one of the professors. Seeing the look on her face, he continued, “I’m his Uncle Rufus.”
“He wants to see the campus,” Tom added.
The woman behind the register decided she didn’t care one way or the other. The two went to an empty table on the far corner of the cafeteria, underneath a flat screen TV turned to a news channel. Rufus tried to figure out what the announcers were talking about, but all he could tell at this point was that something had happened or was happening somewhere. Or possibly hadn’t happened yet. Rufus opened his juice and looked at his bagel. “Is there any salt?” he asked.
“There should be a shaker or something,” Tom answered.
“I’m not seeing anything.”
“Try one of the other tables.”
Rufus stood up and searched among the napkins and detritus on the surrounding tables. No one had been in to clean up after breakfast, so everything was still in a state of disorder. “I didn’t see your two buddies,” Rufus said a little too loudly. “Chris and . . .”
“Darius.”
“Darius . . . did they have plans or something?”
Rufus was walking back up to the counter as Tom said. “We were going to Mexico. They left this morning.”
The cafeteria was depressingly empty now that it was Spring Break, but at least it was quiet. When it was crowded. all the crumbs and napkings were part of a general, hurried mess, but now the mess was its own little setpiece that Tom studied in relative peace.
Rufus came back with a handful of salt packets. “I didn’t know you had plans . . . and here I just went and ruined them, didn’t I . . . I’m sorry. Where were you going?”
“Mexico.”
“Oh, Jesus, really? That would’ve been great. Where exactly?”
“Cancun.”
“Oh . . . well that ain’t Mexico.”
“What do you mean?”
“Now I don’t feel so bad . . . yknow what I found out? If you take some salt and put it on one of these warm bagels, it’s just like one of those super pretzels they make you buy at football games. But this isn’t nearly as expensive.” Rufus split his bagel in half, then poured far too much salt on one end. Then he took a big bite out of the salted end, wincing as is throat shriveled and tried to push back all the salt. And he smiled.
“So what are Chris and Darius up to? What are they studying?”
“Darius is in pre-med and wants to be a doctor or something.”
“Something?”
“Something in health that pays good money. Chris used to want to be a journalist.”
“What does he want to be now?”
“The reason he got out of it was he started making up the articles he was supposed to be making for homework assignments. And he got away with it. So he quit. I don’t know what he is now. Something with literature. Every time I ask, he says he’s studying nothing.”
“Good for him.”
“. . . Right.” Tom took a bite out of his sandwich, frowned, and chewed slowly. He pulled something indistinct and thin, a misplaced piece of spaghetti, out of his mouth. “So what have you been up to?”
Rufus looked back at his heavily salted bagel, but this time he couldn’t take it as well and chased it with the juice, which really didn’t help. “I’ve just been . . . wandering. Not very far yet, but I’ve been wandering. I told you, or I think I told you, I was tired of waiting. I’m tired of waiting. I’ve been going out there and doing what my soul wants. I’m finally doing, or I’m trying, this is harder than it sounds, I’m doing what I think I want to do.”
“So what did you do first?”
“I went to a whore.”
“Really . . . how was it?”
“Depressing. Well it wasn’t the first thing I did. I drove around for awhile, and there were always these parts of the city where I’d say that I shouldn’t go any farther or I have no reason to any further. So now I went further, and sure enough, there they were, plain as day. It was night out, but you still figured the cops could just stroll down the street and arrest them one by one. I didn’t go the first time I saw, I just drove around a little, but it grew on me. These weren’t any high-class escorts or something, most of them were ugly and desperate, but that’s what draws you to them, because you’re ugly and desperate, yknow?”
Rufus bit into the bagel again, this time with determination. Tom stared down at his half-eaten sandwich. He decided not to finish it, not because of anything Rufus was saying, but instead because there was something seriously wrong with the sandwich. The bread, the meat, and all the unnamed extras tasted like they’d been dipped in brackish water.
“One thing I found out when I finally . . . made my decision was that these women should be in sales. It’s not like you get your fifteen minutes and get out, at least not with the one I was with. She saw, I don’t know how, that I was the kinda guy who was willing to spend money, so before she even undid my belt, it was all about what she could do for me. We could make this an evening, she was saying. She knew a guy who would bring us liquor, a guy who could get us cocaine or heroin or pot, she knew a girl who was into older guys. That’s what she said. It was synergy. She knew everybody. And it was all so cheap you knew that even the liquor had to be illegal somehow. I just came and went, and she was nice about it, asked me to come back whenever I wanted. Because if I came back, she’d drag me in for a little more and get a little more out of me. I can imagine a poor schmuck going in for a quick blow and staying the whole weekend because of all the cunt shoved at him and all the cheap drugs they got in him. Cuz it’s hard to look ready cunt in the face and say no, right? Right?”
“Right,” Tom said. It was not a conversation he wanted to be having. He might’ve been able to stand it in his apartment, late at night, drunk off one thing or another, and he would’ve been listening to a friend or roommate, but here, in a cafeteria approaching noon, sitting across from his mother’s ex-husband, all he wanted to do was go away. But he didn’t have the nerve.
“She sounded like a telemarketer. I feel sorry for these people. It’s just their job, and I don’t want to pile my shit on top of their shit just because I’m annoyed. I told her I’d be back real soon, I almost asked for contact information, like a business card or something. She knew I wasn’t coming back, but she was good about it. Real professional. And I started going to the forest preserve.” Rufus took a long, last gulp of his juice and pushed the bagel aside. “Do you know how many forest preserves there are in this city? They’re all over the place! I never bothered with them before, and they’re more at the outskirts than anything, but it’s really something. On one of the warmer days last week, I saw a dirty old guy . . . old, I’m old . . . and he was rubbing his crotch and walking up to this kid who couldn’t have been older than twenty. The kid really didn’t do anything, I think it took him awhile to figure out what the guy was doing, then he just walked away. I was right there, but the guy didn’t seem to care about me. I guess I’m not as good-looking as I used to be.” Rufus pushed around his empty salt packets. “I don’t think I want my bagel anymore.”
“The food’s usually better than this.”
“I hope so.”
Tom took his plate to an almost full garbage can, then walked back to Rufus and his small plate. “Are you done?”
“Yeah.” Tom took it away. “Thanks.” When Tom came back, it was only a matter of counting down time before Tom hustled Rufus away. So Rufus made his move.
“Hey.”
“What?”
“Tom.”
“What?”
“I’ve been meaning to take off for a little while . . . I mean, yknow, just go . . . would you want to come with?”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I want someone to come with.”
“I still have to –”
“Whatever we do, you’ll be back by the time classes start. I just want someone to help me. That’s all.”
Rufus tried to stare at Tom, but instead wound up staring at the table. His shoulders were hunched over, and one of his fingers played with a grain of salt that must’ve fallen off his plate. Tom wanted none of it, not the uncle, not the proposition, not the pitiful stance Rufus had adopted. Still, Tom wasn’t all that surprised at his own response.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ve got nothing else to do.”
“You can’t take one loss and run with it. It was just a client, and we didn’t even lose the client. I mean, when people lose jobs, when children lose their toys, when fucking rats lose their cheese, they all go looking for more jobs, more toys, more . . . cheese. No . . . we all gotta pull that parachute out, that support line, we just have to find out what that is. If you just think about what you actually want, not this soul stuff, I’m talking material stuff, stuff you can hold in your hand. If you can just think about it hard enough, and think about how badly you really want it, and I know you want it, otherwise you wouldn’t have been working as hard as you have for so long, if you can think about those goals and those achievements sitting there in the palm of your hand, they will come to you, and you’ll be happy. It won’t be magic, they won’t just magically appear, but just by thinking about them, you’ll focus on them more, and without even knowing it you’ll work harder to get them. Just keep thinking about how good life could be, and life will be good. That kind of thinking has gotten a lot of people a long way, and, so far as I can see, any other kind of thinking, like thinking negatively or thinking about things that may or may not exist, only leads to failure and suffering.”
Tyler Ehrenreich talked to himself and clicked through his notes concerning the people who worked under him, the people who had worked with Rufus. Stephen, Natalie, Sylvia, Dean, Patricia, Jim . . . He had finished what he said he was going to do that day, and now he was left pacing back and forth in his head, thinking up things to do or going over past events in his mind, wondering how he could’ve done things better. He always showed up fifteen minutes early, not too early, not too late. He would work late if he had to, but he always insisted that none of the people he supervised should feel obliged to do the same thing. “I am your boss and I am paid more than you are and you should not have to work harder than I do.” Tyler knew that, behind his back, people thought he was a something of a prick, someone who prided himself too much on being perfect, and he had the vague impression that they relished every one of his mistakes. But he was the boss. It was his job to make decisions and take shit. He hoped they appreciated that.
He decided he was going to save Rufus.
And that was that. He didn’t know what it meant that he was going to save Rufus. It could’ve been that he imagined himself as Rufus in the future and didn’t want to come to that sort of end, going to pieces over what amounted to a mild failure. He seemed to think that the whole Rufus affair was bad for morale, and maybe that was true. But it was a boss’s decision. A hunch, and now he had to find out if the hunch was right.
Tyler went through his list again and called in Natalie, Sylvia, and Jim. They would be able to help him, if they wanted.
A Day in the Chicago Schools
A Day in the Chicago Schools
p. 327-338
In front of Hull House at eight o’clock in the morning, we pick up one Miss Starr Kellogg, the overseer of a public school district. We entrust ourselves to her leadership on a tour of the public and private grammar schools and high schools, and also the trade schools west of Chicago.
In the company of this wonderful American, I experienced (along with my friend) one of my great American days, a day whose memory will remain fresh and living to me for a very long time. This day in the Chicago schools was marked by deep emotion and good cheer.
At Rowland School, we begin with the kindgergarten, where even the smallest of them dance in the ring-around-the-roses and where children with beaming faces build little piles of sand, where they plant Indian wigwams, trees and buffalo in-between the trees. We make our way through rooms where children paint small pictures of all sorts on their desks using colored chalk. We come to a room where little ones about six or seven years old analyze an autumn landscape. One after the other, boys and girls step in front of the teacher and list two things which make it a pretty picture of autumn: a yellow treetop and a white cloud behind it, or a crow sitting in a harvested field. In the next room, children stand in front of an open window, bent forward and breathing in and out. Ah, now we can see how the methods of Germany’s Friedrich Fröbel and Johann Pestalozzi have come to America. When we enter a room holding about fifty or sixty children from ten to twelve years old, the lessons stop. At Miss Kellogg’s command, the class stands up and sings in unison the Chicago Fire Song. Gestures accompany the words. The words fall one at a time, clearly pronounced, crystals from the pure lips of children. These are foreign children, children of Russian Jews, Bohemians, Greeks, Sicilians. The teacher, like a good conductor of a large orchestra, listens for every word pronounced falsely, every emphasis on the wrong syllable. Here the children of far, foreign lands are brought into the language of the nation, the mighty English language. Here, in these rooms, sharp and formidable tools are forged so that these awakening children will soon be able to serve in the struggle for bread and freedom.
The Chicago Fire Song rings out melodically. The rhythm of the vereses shoots up and down. A crescendo:
Fire — Fire — FIRE!
and the small faces, lifted up high, burn in childlile excitement at the thought of the blazing city!
But it’s a lengthy song and we have to leave. Miss Kellogg has the children sit down, and now they have to stand up according to nationality, in order to show how many were born here and how many in their old homelands. Of the fifty, only ten were born in America, while the others came over not too long ago. There are two German children among the fifty, and the others are Bohemians, Polish Jews, Lithuanians, Serbians, Greeks, Irish, Sicilians. As they all sit down again, Miss Kellogg steps in front of them and calls out loudly in the schoolroom.
“And now, children, say, what are we all?” The children leap up, as if they were shot through with electricity, their high voices cheerful and shouting and rejoicing: “Americans!”
In the American school schedule, an hour of instruction belongs to civics. In Germany we would call it Bürgerrechte. We saw one such civics hour at Cooper School. There haven’t been many hours during my stay in America which have given me such rich instruction about America and such deep, constant love for this land, its people and its spirit.
As we walk in, a small, thirteen-year-old Bohemian stands and speaks from memory.
His memory explains “the law for recalling such judges who irresponsibly abuse their office and their unbounded power for the support of corrupt corporations, railroads and trusts against the injured and defenseless private citizen.” These given laws are a great part of the progressive politics in America. Here is another law, that of the referendum, word for word: “Bills should be presented to the people for their final acceptance or refusal.” And here is the initiative word for word: “The law should be put before the people, so that they can make suggestions to be applied to the law.” — Laws aiming to achieve “direct legislation through the people” have already been passed in many states of the Union, chiefly in those west of the Mississippi. The small Bohemian lectures on the referendum and the initiative. Finally, the little kid wraps up his speech as follows: “We must make sure that the senators are chosen from the people! There is nothing the people need more than direct legislation!” And then he sits back down in his seat!
It knocks you upside the head. What the heck, are we in Congress in Washington, or are we in a grammar school? You almost want to take the little one by the ear and knock him around a bit as you ask: “How do you know what the people need or don’t need? Go play with your marbles, you little know-it-all!”
But then you sit up and take notice when a small eleven-year-old girl stands up and lists the states where women possess the right to vote. The child names the state Colorado, and the teacher asks the class: “What is the capital of Colorado!”
“Denver!” yells the class.
“Who lives in Denver?” asks the teacher.
And then I hear the children’s voices call the name that brings tears to my eyes, honest Ben’s name, the name of the gentle judge of the children of Colorado.
“Ben Lindsey!” cry the children.
And they stand up, one after the other, and report the deeds of the Friend of the Children. A small young boy knows enough to say that Lindsey owes it to the voting women of Colorado that he, who has fought with the political parties, has been allowed to remain in office. (Is the teacher pushing suffragette propaganda? What of it? All the better if she does!) A different small boy reports seriously and objectively, with a calm and earnest voice, what the judge of the children of Denver has done. He talks about the social services for the orphans, about the supervision to help the little street urchins, about the swimming pool in the poor district, not to mention how broad and deep the pool is, and the material it’s built of: concrete.
A child stands up and talks about the laws in Oregon, in Tennessee, in Wyoming. Another adds to the report and talks about the South Park of Chicago and its arrangements.
Gradually, the connection between politics and education is proven to me. I begin to understand how American children are prepared for public life, how to be part of that life when they become adults. I see: this is not just a series of history lessons leading up to the present. This is the true history lesson. I see: this is what Americans call the national feeling, and this is how it is awakened. I see: you don’t have to start with the Merovingians to show a child he belongs to a great nation. (You don’t even have to start with the Puritans!) I see clearly the borderline between national feeling and the feeling for humanity. I listen eagerly to what the children say. I learn much in this hour lesson, and I feel much because of it.
Miss Kellogg tells us quietly, as the lesson continues, that the children in this class, out of their own initiative, filed a petitiion to the city authorities to protect and preserve two trees on their playground which were scheduled to be cut down. That they gathered together to protest against the sponsor of a notrious, hated and criminal city ordinance. That they took the time to write to Washington for official reports and brochures whenever a bill on the agenda caught their interest. These American children . . .
The hour came to an end, our time was up. Miss Kellogg led a small conversation.
“Children! Look around! If it seems to you that anything needs improvement, if there’s something that seems unjust to you, tell us right here! Think about how it could be made better, and tell us this too, and loudly! But make sure you know why it is unjust and wicked. Look around, children!”
“All right, Miss Kellogg, we will!“ say the children.
Then the kind teacher led the class in a small act of international hospitality.
“Children!” she said. “Today we have the pleasure of greeting a visitor from Berlin. Now we’re going to stand up and sing Wacht am Rhein.”
And there we stood, Miss Kellogg, my friend and I, with the children singing Wacht am Rhein!
Stand fast and true
And guard the German Rhine!
“Thank you!” I said to teacher, once we were outside the door. “Thank you in the name of Wilhelm II! Don’t think I’m being ungrateful when I say, and I say it sincerely, that I much would have preferred the Marseillaise . . . but not the French national anthem, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh, you’re a socialist, aren’t you?“ the teacher says.
“Well, not exactly, something in that line!“ I respond.
“All right, now come along. I’ll show you something!“
We go to the school library. Spread out on a long table are monthly and weekly magazines and daily papers. Newspapers from every political party. I see some issues of Boston’s Twentieth Century and New York’s Call, the leading monthly magazine and daily paper for American socialists.
“We read a lot of political articles with the children,” the teacher says. “If I find a political event in a socialist paper and I think it’s okay, the children and I read it from the socialist paper . . .”
I see myself in Germany, standing in a Berlin school as the teacher reads an article to the children out of the Vorwärts or the Arbeiterzeitung, out of the Neuen Zeit!!
I see it now: the American school is not an institution where children are stuffed with all sorts of facts they’ll never remember, which they’ll probably have to forget if they want to become human beings. Instead, it is an instrument which helps children become Americans, that is to say, political beings, that is to say, citizens of the world. All the children of foreign nations are coming to this melting pot, out of which the hard metal of the future of America, the future of the world, is brought up.
All the children of oppressed people, the Russian Jews, the Poles, the Irish, the Bohemians, the Finns, they are all brought up to believe that they are people with rights. They didn’t know this in the old country. Their parents never learned anything new. This education is, I believe, at least as important as the multiplication tables and the alphabet.
This single doctrine is kindled and warmed in the children: You are people and you have rights. This is taught at the same time with this doctrine: You are American! And suddenly it all becomes clear in these little brains: Human Rights = America.
Gradually, I lose all my prejudices against American children being taught by women. There are so many admirable features in the public life of America, which are due to the direct political influence of women. It is inconceivable that social services for poor mothers during pregnancy, for illegitimate children and orphans, that all those welfare insitutions which benefit women and children could still be here without the drastic influence of the fabric of society. Even though women are, for the time being, confined to their traditional domestic domain, they imperceptibly change the interconnections of the modern order, so that the future will be less dreary and modern times will seem somewhat freer and easier from day to day.
Female American teachers understand their jobs not simply as a way to earn a living, but instead they are deeply moved by motherly instinct and love for the children. They take so much warmth, goodness and kindness into the classroom, that you are swept along in a wave of deep sympathy and unconscious outrage — you suddenly begin thinking of your own childhood years, when your were lost among a horde of imaginary tyrants and opinionated fools. For us, when we look at our children in the middle class and their lives, the male teacher takes over as the authority of learning. Because of this, the young boy learns to despise women very early as being insufficient and useless for the serious things of the world. But the American boy learns from a female teacher on the same schoolbench where the young girls sit, and up until his fourteenth year he learns what is prescribed for him from the Board of Education. A spirit of respect for the opposite sex is nourished in him, a respect which European boys achieve only by any number of detours. The talents developed in American boys mostly wither away in Europe. By the simplest means, American learn the sense of the word equality. Where else would equality begin than in the equal treatment of both sexes?
We were shown all sorts of fine exercises that day. Before we left the abovementioned school, the director rang the fire alarm by attacking the bell three times at specific intervals. A little piano stood in front of us in the hallway. The first human to arrive according to plan was a young teacher, who quickly sat down at the piano and began playing one of John Phillip Sousa’s lively marches. The whole building came to life. Two small boys and two tall girls stormed down the stairs and stood on the middle of the last step. These were the school officers, selected functionaries from each class. (They supervise the concerns within the class, but also in the auditorium, the library and the playground. Each school represents a small republic, with a student president, a court of justice and political affiliations, and all the positions are named after political positions in the city and Washington.)
From upstairs all the classes appear, led by the teachers; they march in rows in time to the lively Sousa march; we look at the clock. In scarcely three minutes, all 540 children are safe and sound in the courtyard downstairs. –
Dance, gymnastics and group exercises of all sorts take up a lot of space in American education. Because there’s no such thing as compulsory military service here, the class is not a preschool of military discipline, but instead a proper method of making the body supple for future competition.
In one of the largest trade schools in Chicago, after we walked through the various shops, the work stations for carpenters, machinists and electricians, we sit in a classroom where sixteen to twenty-year-old students go through the finer points of American conditioning. The teacher talked to them in a wonderful, dreamlike, free and stimulating conversation. When the telephone rang (in the classroom!), the student sitting next to the receiver immediately hallos into the appartus, and we and everyone else in the class hears it: the foreigners of honorable distinction are summoned to a large general meeting downstairs in the auditorium.
We meet Miss Kellogg in front of the door. All of the classes in the building have been interrupted. The teachers stand up from their desks, the conveyor belts in the shops stand still. Led by Miss Kellogg and the principal of the school, we walk into the auditorium, where the gallery is full to bursting. We are greeted by numbing applause and walk through the 1500 students up to the stage, where chairs are waiting for us. The director introduces us to the students. More applause. We come from Berlin, the capital of the mighty German empire. Applause. (Thank you, thank you in the name of the Lord Mayors!) Then we are allowed to sit back down. The elected cheerleaders step into place. Both of the young people are true athletes. They take off their jackets so they can move around more freely. Legs apart, they stand and swing their arms with great windmill motions in their upper body. While in swing, they shove both arms down towards the ground. The College-Yell rings out, the Indian yell of the school is shouted in time as the athletes lead everyone on with gestures. 1500 young throats yell:
“Rah! Rah! Rah! — Reh! Reh!” –
Then the name of the school. —
Then a whistle to go silent. —
From hereon the school song starts playing, a hymn whose text consists entirely of the name of the school. Because the school is named after its founder and the name of the founder, in German, is approximately Friedrich Wilhelm Schulze, the hymn isn’t really all that rousing.
And now the baseball champions, the football champions, the lightweights, the bantamweights and heavyweights walk one at a time up the ramp. They speak to the crowd about the hopes of their teams and themselves for the next competition. About why they win and how they practice to make up for their losses. More applause rewards these explanations. At our side, the principal beams for pleasure and pride. Miss Kellogg’s lovely and good-natured face beams for pleasure and pride.
Clapping accompanies us back down the rows. We say goodbye to the students, the principal, the professors, our kind guide. — We stand outside on the street, my friend and I, and we look around:
“Theatrics!” my friend says. “Did you see the time? This little demonstration lasted from three o’clock until seven minutes before four! Fifty-three minutes of a schoolday are spent in games.” ——
And what if it is? Their lungs get some work with their Rah Rah Rah. In-between work and more work, they get an hour’s worth of spoken sport. They have given their friendship, in their own way, to two complete strangers. They didn’t put on a play, they were just sharing their joy. Where is it written, that the lesson is more important than the break between classes? That the conveyor belt outranks the baseball field? That strong, young cosmoplitans between sixteen and twenty years old should hold the lightweight champion in lesser importance than the Consitution and all the statements of the universe from Galileo to Ostwald?
Without a doubt, in America you learn fewer things than in Europe. But there’s something else I know. When it comes to all those schoolboy’s thoughts of suicide which are so common in Europe, I never heard a word of it in America.
Rufus: Chapter Two
For about a month or so after Rufus had showed up unexpectedly in front of Tom’s apartment, neither Tom nor Melinda nor William heard from him. It would’ve bothered them more, but they really didn’t want to care. Whenever the phone rang, Melinda panicked a little, and when the person on the other end wasn’t Rufus, she felt relieved, but then, after hanging up and thinking in the silence by herself, she slowly felt sorry about everything she’d been feeling. She avoided telling William about it, but instead, she’d call up her son and ask if he’d talked to Rufus lately. Tom would tell her no and she would say that was good, then she wouldn’t say anything and would wait for Tom to continue the conversation. There were enough things to worry about.
Still, she couldn’t help but be surprised when she picked up the phone one day and a dour voice asked her if she knew how to contact Rufus Cunningham. Melinda asked who this was and immediately the voice changed. It stayed just a little bit purposeful and businesslike, but now it wanted Melinda to be its friend. “I’m sorry, I should’ve started with that. My name is Tyler Ehrenreich. I’m Rufus’ supervisor at Sicherheit Solutions. I’ve been trying to contact him the last couple of days, but I’m not getting any response, not from his phone or email. He listed you as his emergency contact. I’m sorry, I should’ve asked, you’re Melinda Davis, is that correct?”
She told him it was.
“And you’re his . . .”
“I’m his ex-wife.”
“Oh . . . okay . . . I was just wondering if you knew any other way to contact him, or if you’ve talked to him recently.” First, Melinda explained that she hadn’t talked to Rufus in at least a month, and then she asked Tyler why he wanted to contact Rufus in the first place. As far as Melinda knew, Rufus had quit, or maybe he’d been fired and was too afraid to admit it.
“He tried to quit,” Tyler said, “but I wouldn’t let him. He was just feeling down at the time. He’d been working on a new project . . . building a new database from the top down for a client, but you don’t want to . . . and it just wasn’t working. We didn’t give him enough resources or people or the rights sorts of people, and everybody knew it. The client got mad, we had to move him off the project to make them happy. What I’m saying is, it didn’t matter who was on the project, but someone had to go. I told Rufus right away that no one thought any worse of him for it. He couldn’t have done any more than he’d already done.
“All of a sudden, a week later, Rufus bursts into my office and starts talking about his soul. Stuff like . . . he doesn’t know what he’s done with his life, he needs to get out, he needs to be himself, he sounded like he’d drunk a lot of coffee. He kept on telling me he wanted to resign, but I told him right back that he was being rash. I told him he should take a month’s leave. We couldn’t afford to pay him for it, but his job would be waiting for him. He muttered something about quitting and walked out.
“It’s been a month . . . I was afraid he wouldn’t come back. We’re really just a bunch of young guys here. Someone like him could really help us out. If you could . . . I’m sorry . . . if you could just put us in contact somehow . . . I’m kinda worried . . . and we can’t keep that job open forever, yknow.”
Melinda explained again that, as far as she knew, Rufus was not coming back. Then she took down Tyler’s name, work phone number, cell phone number, work email, home email, and IM address. She promised that, whenever she met Rufus again, she would make sure to let him know that he was wanted.
“Thanks a lot. I don’t like leaving a guy behind. Especially a guy like Rufus. All he needs is something positive, yknow.”
Melinda agreed, then hung up. The conversation bothered her. After all the decades since they had been divorced, Rufus still listed her as his emergency contact. It made her sad for him.
From: rufusc <rufusc345@g——.com>
Subject: Hi
To: “Thomas Davis” <tdavis2@m——.edu>
Date: February 11, 2—, 2:43 PM
Hey Tom. How have you been? I havent been in my apartment for awhile and I dont if anyone’s tried to call me. Do you know? Ive been travelling, not very far not yet. I havent tried it in awhile and I need to get my legs. But its real good to try things I think I want to do and find out if I really want to do them. Im working at a computer in a library right now. I dont have a lot of time. There are things to do. Let me know how youre doing.
Rufus
Tom didn’t want to respond. Reading the email made his stomach heavy. Tom was at a stage now where he could say, mostly with confidence, that what he wanted in life was to be well and to do well. Rufus, as far as Tom was concerned, had never been well as a person. He remembered back when Rufus would come over for dinner, before Tom had gone off to college. The man had been sad in unsettling ways, and he ate with a scrupulous joy, as if Rufus’ only other meals consisted of microwaved ravioli and cups of applesauce. He wouldn’t say much, but he would smile a lot and recite boring anecdotes he had probably picked up from public television, like how Bob Dylan’s performance style had been influenced by Gorgeous George. At which point Rufus would begin speaking to Tom with an unbearable condescension. “Do you know who Gorgeous George was, Tom?” Rufus began a full-scale explanation of what happened when pro wrestling found television. “It’s hard to underestimate television when it comes to our nation’s understanding of entertainment.” Which somehow brought everything back to Dylan. “You do know who Bob Dylan is, right, Tom?”
“I know,” Tom said to the email. Rufus was not what Tom wanted to be. Tom knew that he couldn’t afford to be interrupted right now, not by the likes of Rufus. But he wanted to do well, and he knew that for the sake of a family friend and for the sake of his mother he would have to respond somehow.
Everything’s quiet over here. Hope you’re doing well.
Tom.
A week later, he called his mother just to see how things were going. Dad was doing all right. The investment firm was treating him well. Mom was doing okay. They weren’t selling as many houses as before, but she wasn’t doing the selling anymore and didn’t have to worry about commission. They talked amiably about the paperwork he was putting together for graduation and about whether or not he had found a new girlfriend. Melinda nagged him gently and sarcastically. “You should get over her,” she said.
“I am over her,” Tom answered, acting irritated so she wouldn’t know he was irritated. “I’m just busy.” Out of nowhere, as if she had been waiting to say it, she asked him if Rufus had contacted him. When he paused and said yes, she asked him what Rufus had said.
“It was an email. Something about traveling.”
“His boss had been looking for him.”
“I thought he was fired.”
“I don’t know . . . but he’s not home and I can’t find him.”
“He’s bouncing around . . . he emailed me from a library.”
“Did you say anything back?”
“Nothing much.”
“. . . Could you?”
Tom agreed and sent a message apologizing for his last email. He had been busy, he said. But if Rufus ever needed to talk, Spring Break started on March 8. He would have time then. “A couple of people are asking about you,” he wrote. “They want to know what you’re up to.” He sent the message and hoped that he wouldn’t get a response. He had plans for Spring Break, but once he sent the message and couldn’t take it back, all he could see was Rufus, standing at his door and smelling like an uncertain future. Unless, in the end, nothing happened, there was no way it could end well.
Remarks on Hull House and the South Park
Remarks on Hull House and the South Park
p. 321-327
As I’ve said in previous chapters, when it comes to those institutions who set out to improve the situation of the poor in our modern economic system, I find that their efforts turn out to be ephemeral, if not downright weakening and damaging. If all we’re doing is trimming the branches of the modern order and propping it up with a little philanthropy, then all our efforts are ephemeral and weakening. We should only allow ourselves to attack the roots.
Here, in this city, whose enormous growth illuminates the production and payment of labor today, in this burning, hysterical city, some of these above-mentioned institutions have developed, exemplary places which put to shame all similar institutions.
Hull House, the world-renowned settlement in the poor area of Chicago, survives mainly through the towering personality of its founder, Jane Addams. This woman means more for the idea of the place than for any actual result, which is typically achieved through the financial backing of rich Americans. In a later chapter, I’d like to remark on the Mogwab (an Indian word, which translates into European as something like pompous ass or snob), the great friend of capitalist humanity. It is only really through Miss Addam’s personality that Hull House is justified, in the same way that in the east William R. George justifies Freeville. And both enterprises are supported by a stream of money from Rockefeller, McCormick and Armour. I think of Miss Addams of Hull House and Daddy George of Freeville as Band-Aids on the blasted, festering wound of modern business.
Hull House pursues two goals. One: to convince intelligent, sensible people, those who consider the people around them, to contribute. Two: to help the poor into acceptable, well-lit, warm rooms where they can forget their lives for a few hours.
A segment of Hull House accommodates the students, while another accommodates a variety of buildings around Hull House where the poor can exercise, sleep, eat, play music, dance, attend the theater and engage in social functions.
A colorful map hangs in the reception hall of Hull House, describing the layout of the neighborhood home for home, colored according to nationality. The map shows that, in one of the nearby tenements, Greeks, Bohemians, Swedes, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Italians, and Jews from both Russia and Asia Minor live together. The map is updated quite often. The tenements in a kilometer radius around Hull House have been cleaned recently right down to the center, but all the same, each of these nationalities, who all belong to the great international brotherhood of Misérables, get out as soon as possible in search of healthier areas, if they’re able. The colorful map then gets to add another color.
In the afternoon, we were guests in the afternoon and brought to a pretty theater. A Masque of the Seasons was performed. The program consisted of cute dances, speeches and group singing, all performed by children in the music school and surrounding houses. Greek, Italian, Jewish and Irish children sang, jumped and hopped. It was nice to see. The rich and well-endowed gentlemen who supported Hull House sat in the auditorium and clapped. Then, in a pretty, artistic, furnished dining hall we took our evening meal with the students, intellectuals and the teachers of the Hull House School — Miss Addams was unfortunately in New York — and after dinner some kind ladies accompanied us over to the areas with the dance halls, gyms and clubhouses.
My friend and I, we looked meaningfully up the steps into the courtyard as our kind female guides went ahead of us. The section we were leaving and the section we were going to, through which we wandered as if through a museum or art gallery . . . something loose hung these sections together. You had to cross a cold courtyard to get from wing to wing, and the atmosphere in both of the wings was utterly, completely different . . . Hull House climbed into the air before our eyes and exploded like a soap bubble –
To live among the poor (in a separate area, comfortably furnished); to study their living conditions (for a year, maybe two or three, and then to set yourself up as a social worker on Lake Shore Drive or Michigan Avenue); to live in the tenements with the poorest of them, to make it through their ten-hour work days, to live on the food you can buy with that sort of income (after eight weeks you’ll even go to the cafeterias in the evening to eat). To do such things!
Jane Addams, after all, is one of the great women of America, belonging to the same gender as Frances Willard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan B. Anthony . . . and when you read her writings, you fall under the same fascination as the rest of the Hull House Students. Her qualifications and actions prove her to be a principled woman standing alone, seeking and finding a family and a circle of influence, a sincere revolutionary soul and person of nobility in the midst of our sorrowful present day. You can feel the magnetic strength such a soul has on various do-gooders and amateur philanthropists. She takes their individual impulses and bends them to her will.
I had a considerably stronger impression of the parks. One night, the friendly superintendent took us in his car, and we made the rounds through the public gardens and field houses south of the windigen Stadt.
God stood by me as we crossed through the smells, wastes, unlit or half-lit alleys, the wooden houses and bordellos until we came across the first green oasis. But all was forgotten at the oasis.
The South Park relies somewhat on private means but is owned, built and maintained chiefly through city taxes. It stretches from Michigan Avenue (Grant Park) to Lake Calumet (Park 17). There are about 24 of them and they cover an area of 2500 acres. Some of the larger ones are filled with museums, botanic gardens, golf courses and yacht harbors. More importantly, however, are the smaller ones, which are set aside for the overpopulated slums around the slaughterhouses, the suburban factories and the Negro settlements. The area of these smaller parks varies between 7 1/2 and 23 acres.
The friendly superintendent shows us three of the small parks. Pretty Italian pergolas are set up in front of the field houses. Behind these are large cement swimming pools embedded into the ground. Surrounding it, in the park itself, you’ll find open-air sanctuaries for babies, sunbathing areas for women, paths through the grass to stroll around on and sand mounds for building castles. On a small stage, Jews rehearse the drama: Esther, a Purim Play; a Lithuanian club next to it dances in a circle; in a shower room you can admire young Greek workers, who cool off after a basketball game and are preparing to go home.
A little worried, we asked our guide: “What rules do you have to follow to get in here? What kind of papers, passes, tickets, tax papers, birth certificates or business permits do you have to show before they let you in?”
Why! Nothing at all! our astonished American answered.
“But still, you do have to pay something to use the library, the shower rooms, the soap, the gymnasium, the equipment?”
“Not a cent. Everything you see here is free to the people of Chicago and stands at their disposal unencumbered. Everyone is welcome. You can speak whatever language you want. The poorest of us can get those flea-ridden rags off their bodies. You can come whenever you want. You don’t need to show us any papers, you don’t have to write down your name, neither your right name nor a fake one. Everyone is welcome. We live in a democratic country here.”
These words, these phrases, in Chicago . . . And yet, everything we’ve seen, this moment out here in the free and open almost seems to complement the frightening reality around these oases, as if all of it were somehow reconciled with Chicago, the most terrifying city in the modern world!
Rufus
Rufus
by Conrad Phillips
In an apartment complex, whose name not even the residents can remember, there lived the sort of man who was always rattling off the strange customs of foreign lands. He loved telling coworkers and family members random facts he had found in books, blogs, and the backs of restaurant menus. “If you ever have a conversation with a European, he will always stand too close to you,” he explained. “It’s so cramped there. They’re used to it.” When he was done explaining, the coworker or family member would ask him if he’d ever been to Europe, and the man would say bluntly that in fact he had not and that he really wasn’t the traveling type. He would then go on to explain that the Chicago-style hot dog had been the amalgamation of the culinary habits of early 20th century immigrants.
The man’s name was Rufus. He was in his early fifties, had been divorced once, was appreciated at his workplace, and was relatively happy. On weekdays, he tended to eat one to two meals a day. He could never tolerate breakfast, but was a tremendous fan of soup. At lunchtime, he frequented the sandwich shops and delis around his workplace, and in the evening, if he felt so inclined, he would open up one of the cans he had bought from the local supermarket. His favorites were minestrone, goulash, chili, chicken noodle, and vegetable, so long as it wasn’t too creamy, but above all things he loved potato soup served with an unreasonable amount of bread. On the weekends, it was hard to predict when exactly he would begin to eat, because he never followed much of a pattern and often found himself in taverns. If you have ever seen a man sitting by himself at the end of the bar, quietly sipping a beer or mixed drink and staring intently at local sports on a nearby television set, you might have been watching Rufus and you should’ve said hello. You will not see him there anymore.
Sometimes, on the weekends, he ate dinner with his ex-wife Melinda, her son Thomas, and her second husband William, but when Thomas left for college, Rufus stopped inviting himself over. When he wanted a special treat, Rufus looked through newspapers, picked out a good restaurant review, and invited himself there instead, feeling somewhat excited by the long waits and the bustle of a popular venue. He felt warm inside after eating different food in a different place, but for the most part his body had gotten used to the same meals five times a week. His metabolism knew exactly how to process it. Combined with the mild exercise regimen he had managed to keep up for a number of decades, his diet had made Rufus a thin man, wiry and almost muscular. Rufus had much to be proud of. He had his health, he had his job, he had people who could say they cared about him. He had something resembling a life, and he was happy.
Which made it all the more disconcerting when Rufus began stopping in front of local churches and gazing at the crucifixes perched on top. Whenever he read the newspaper, he found himself poring over the various murder stories which made up the bulk of local events. At work, where he operated as an efficient and respected project manager, he consistently resisted the urge to call his colleagues cocksuckers and to steal their pencils for no apparent reason. Worst of all, from the very beginning Rufus knew he was having a problem and he thought about it. He stayed up late at night and watched commercials for trade schools, all of them telling him to do something with his life. He bought self-help books whenever a title caught his attention, and although he never read the books all the way through, he knew what they were telling him to do. He had to follow his inclinations, to take his strongest attributes until what he wanted to do and what he could do were one and the same. He needed to bring into action the soul of himself.
He thought about his family members, who tolerated him. He thought about Melinda, who humored him. He thought about William, who humored his Melinda, and he thought about Thomas, whom Rufus wanted to think of as a son but couldn’t. Wasn’t Rufus a man, and weren’t men meant to look up at the sky and wonder? Shouldn’t he set out in search of his deep, world-encompassing desires? There were only so many times he could tell himself that at least he had his job, and life was not meant to be spent stealing other people’s pencils. Even with all the years he had spent keeping himself in shape, all he had now in his body was an ultimately unwise investment. He should stop worrying and start living. He should start listening to the deepest, most inward parts of himself. He should follow his soul, which, so far as he knew, could never lead him wrong.
So he went to the supermarket one day in January and bought a bottle of liquor for himself, something Rufus hadn’t done in decades. He got himself roaring drunk, showed up late to work, and quit his job as gallantly as he knew how, by explaining to his immediate supervisor that he respected his employer and his colleagues, but that he needed to find something important right now. A job couldn’t hold him back right now. Rufus went home, continued to drink, and lay on the floor in a daze. There were so many people to call and so many places to go, so many things to collect and so much pent-up energy to use. Rufus had spent most of his life waiting for something to happen to him, but now he decided that he would be the thing he was waiting for. Nothing could stop a man resolutely venturing into the world on behalf of his deepest self.
There were so many things to do.
“I’m . . . I changed, Melinda. I can’t say it just right, but it happened. I didn’t have any say in it.” Melinda didn’t know what to say. Rufus had been talking to her for the past half hour. Nothing that he said was very clear. His voice was slurred and he couldn’t put together a complete thought, but Melinda knew him and knew that somewhere in there Rufus had something to say. She sat in her living room, put the phone to her ear, and tried to get her ex-husband to come to the point. Now and then, William walked in, looked at Melinda, looked at the phone, and walked out. The third time William walked in, Melinda made a gesture at him to let him know she’d hang up soon, the kind of gesture no one but William or maybe Rufus would understand, and when she came back to Rufus, she found that he’d completely changed the subject.
“How’s Tom?” he asked. “I haven’t talked to him for awhile.”
“He’s doing okay . . . He’s excited about graduating.”
“It’s his last year?”
“Yeah.”
“What did he settle on?”
“Accounting . . . Or some sort of accounting and technology thing. Financing Internet startups? Designing accounting software. Running accounting software for big businesses. I’m not sure. A friend of his told him there was money in it.”
“Sounds like a good field. He’s a smart kid. He’ll do good. I know he will. Is he still at the same place? That apartment?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been meaning to call him. Same cell number?”
“Yeah.”
“I haven’t talked to him in awhile.” William stepped into the room one more time. Melinda put her hand over the receiver as she explained that Rufus sounded like he was wrapping up. As she started listening to the phone again, Rufus explained for the third time that he had been meaning to talk to Tom for awhile now. Then, for no reason Melinda could figure out, Rufus apologized for taking up so much of her time and hung up without saying much of a goodbye.
“What was that about?” William asked.
“I think he quit his job,” Melinda said. “Or was fired.”
They wondered what Rufus was going to do and how long his money would last him. Five days later, Melinda received a call from Thomas.
“Mom?” Thomas said.
“Son?”
“Rufus stopped by.” There was a sound of fear and worry to his voice.
“That’s a four-hour drive.”
“He seemed kinda drunk. Is everything okay?”
“I don’t know. The last time he called here he was asking about you.”
“He wouldn’t stop talking about his soul.”
Melinda couldn’t decide yet if her ex-husband was the sort of person who could be a problem. But if he was a problem, William would probably be able to handle it. “What did he want?”
“I think he wanted to go on a road trip with me.”
“. . . What did you say?”
“I have school. I’m almost done. I can’t afford this kind of . . . stuff. What’s going on with him right now? Some kind of crisis or something?”
“I don’t know. He might’ve lost his job.”
“He told me he quit his job.”
“Yeah, Tom, but . . .” Melinda didn’t really know if there was a difference between Rufus quitting his job and Rufus getting fired. “He’s going through some things.” She paused. “I don’t know exactly what it is, but there are things. Did you agree to go with him?”
“What?”
“On the road trip.”
“No . . . God no . . . I told him I have school to take care of. I’m graduating. I might have a job lined up. Do you know how hard it is to get a job? If I took off now just because he’s going through things . . .”
“No, I know, I know, you did the right thing . . . Could you promise me something, Tom?”
“What?”
“I know you’re busy, and I know you wouldn’t want to be hanging out with him, but I am a little worried about Rufus.”
“I’m not –”
“I’m not asking you to go out of your way, and it’s probably the kind of thing that’s gonna blow over in a couple of weeks, but . . . do you have any plans for spring break?”
“Maybe . . . Some of the guys were thinking of going to Mexico.”
“Oh, that sounds nice . . . Where?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“Oh . . . well I don’t want to get in your way, but if you’re available, and if Rufus is still . . . and even if he isn’t, it might be nice if you just, paid him a visit on your break. Checked in on him. He likes you, Tom.”
“I know.”
“Would you think about it?”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Thank you. It means a lot to me, Tom.”
“. . . I know.”
It was late at night by now and cold. Rufus drove back to the city down a two-lane stretch of highway surrounded by little more than flat, white snow. He thought he liked these long, open roads, but now it was just depressing. A water-bottle half-filled with vodka rattled in his cup holder. Two more filled bottles rolled around in the trunk, and an empty one was probably still lying somewhere on the university campus. He didn’t know why he had filled up so many, and maybe he was too drunk to drive. It wasn’t all that hard to drive straight, so long as Rufus focused on the dotted yellow line, but if Rufus suddenly came across a situation where he had to make a decision, where he had to brake or turn suddenly, he didn’t know what he was capable of. A nausea had been swelling up within him for the last hour, a result of the fact that he hadn’t had anything to eat since talking to Tom. He wasn’t far enough along to want to vomit, but the feeling in his stomach was just good enough to make him feel sorry for himself.
All at once a self-loathing panic settled in. It hit him in the middle of his chest, so that the only way Rufus could breathe was by wheezing in and out. It was finally all too much and he had to pull over, but he had to be careful about it because with all the snow it was hard to tell where the side of the road fell into a ditch. To be safe, Rufus didn’t pull all the way over. The tires on the driver’s side were still on the road, but at this time of night it probably didn’t matter. Rufus tried to regain his composure, and when he couldn’t do that behind the wheel, he stepped out of the car and paced back and forth.
It was cold and windless. Rufus’s mouth, like a sputtering exhaust pipe, shot out bursts of frozen air violently and irregularly. Rufus waited for the cold to slow him down. Above him, patches of stars hung between the clouds, but he didn’t bother to look. After a few minutes and a brief period of coughing, his body decided it couldn’t afford to panic in this weather. His breathing settled while his shoulders and arms curled around his torso for warmth. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and his ears began to hurt. For about a minute or so, Rufus was knocked back into a foggy sobriety. He started thinking again with his common sense, that is to say, he thought with his fear.
He had known up to this point, in a technical sense, that he had quit his job, and he had also known exactly how long his savings would last him if he kept on acting like this, which wasn’t quite long enough, but it hadn’t dawned on him until now that he valued his job not only for the money, but also for the sense of security it gave him, and it hadn’t dawned on him until now that he might want to live a little longer than his current savings would allow him. He didn’t know why he wanted to live so long, but all that mattered was that he wanted to. Maybe he’d thought that having someone like Tom at his side would give him back that sense of security, and Tom was a smart kid and maybe if they were together the money would’ve taken care of itself. It couldn’t happen now. Tom was a smart kid and had done the right thing. Maybe Rufus should follow his example. He stood in the middle of the road and bent down to get a good look at the reflectors on either side of the yellow lines. He’d never taken a good look at them before. It was quiet out here and dark.
Then, for a few seconds, everything was bright lights and noise. A car had been approaching Rufus at sixty miles an hour for the last minute or so. The driver had seen the car that was almost parked on the side of the road and had moved into the middle of the road to be on the safe side, riding directly on top of the yellow line. It hadn’t occurred to the driver that someone would be crouching in the middle of the highway, so he didn’t see Rufus until the last possible moment, braking and swerving to the right into the narrow gap between Rufus and his car. Rufus leaped randomly, not knowing what was happening and narrowly missing the driver’s side mirror as it rushed past. The two cars scraped together briefly before the driver regained control and found himself back in the proper lane. The driver slowed his car down to a crawl, knowing that he had made some kind of contact with the lunatic’s vehicle and that they probably had to exchange insurance information. But it was late at night and there was no telling what kind of trouble he could get into, so the car sped off into the night.
“Fuck you!” Rufus shouted for no particular reason. The car had already disappeared. “I have my rights! Fuck you!” He didn’t feel the cold anymore. His adrenaline took over and he didn’t even have to think anymore. It was time to go home, and because Rufus knew that this temporary rush wouldn’t last very long, he took advantage of it, got back in his car, and drove. There were still a least a couple of hours to go.
The guy had banged up Rufus’s car somehow. It wasn’t handling the same, and all the way home, Rufus’s left headlight blinked erratically. Rufus never stopped, but only stared ahead at the road in a state of mild hypnosis. He was convinced after the first hour that the headlight was sending him a message in a code he didn’t understand. After the second hour, as he pulled up to his apartment, he was pretty sure he had figured out what the message was, even if he couldn’t quite say it aloud.
The Warehouse above the Train Station
The Warehouse above the Train Station
p. 318-321
There is one thing you can’t forget when observing American big business. The well-adjusted person of the future will be absorbed into the requirements of the Speed Boss. There will be no wages, there will be no competition, only an incessantly reasonable cooperation, a single mass of workers operating underneath the dome of Business. Our well-adjusted person of the future is heading towards just such an assimilation.
You have no choice but to stand reverent and astonished in front of these powerful companies, which organize themselves so much according to the laws of nature, that they become in themselves a microcosm of the highest functionality. Not even Plato, Fourier, or Napoleon could have imagined an organization more perfectly.
I am filled with this sort of astonishment when I think of the warehouse of Sears, Roebuck & Co. in Chicago. I want to describe my visit to this perfectly designed operation, which is one of the most exemplary organizations in modern America.
Five giant buildings, a city in itself, stand in one of the northwest suburbs of Chicago surrounded and framed by enclosed gardens, fountains, clubhouses, and lodgings for employees.
Sears Roebuck operates only in the United States, not in Canada and not in South America. It has no branches, no representatives, no traveling salesmen. It doesn’t accept credit, but only does business in cash. They never come into contact with their customers, and everything is carried out by mail.
In the strong business period from September to May, it employs 9,000 to 9,500 people. In the slack periods, about 7,500. Right now, at the end of November, they are preparing a catalog that should incite the public’s casual lust sometime after Christmas. The newspapers report that Sears Roebuck maintains the largest postage orders in the state for a private company: five million five-cent stamps for this one catalog, which they call a flier. These fliers are sent out twice a year, after Christmas and in the middle of July. The large catalog comes once a year and contains everything a person could want, with the exception of living creatures, vegetables, and fruit. (You can order from Sears Roebuck, among other things, an entire single-family home. All you have to give are the measurements and the number of rooms, and a wagon brings you the entire place, down to the last nail. All you need is a place to put it together.) They even stick sewing patterns into the catalog. I once went to the room where machines cut these patterns down to the stitch all year round. These “cut samples” cost Sears Roebuck one hundred thousand dollars a year.
The division of labor, that is, the arrangement of office rooms, storerooms, and the shutes, the polished slides which stretch for kilometers and shoot the items down to the warehouse on the first floor, is the most elementary that I have ever seen.
In the morning, at nine o’clock, the company, on average, receives 35,000 orders through the mail. Most of them contain mixed orders, orders with about five to ten items, amounting to an average of nine dollars total. (There is no minimum order.) Since every item has a price in the catalog, and Sears Roebuck does not take credit, the money is enclosed with the order. (This means fewer money orders from American Express and fewer checks from banks.)
By four o’clock in the afternoon, all of these orders are filled, and fifty to sixty wagons shoot out to the train station on the first floor, so that all the crates and parcels packed upstairs are sent out to the country in all directions. –
The offices are filled with the sound of metal. Rattling capsules, filled with letters, invoices, and freight notices, fly through copper tubes over the heads of nine thousand male and female clerks who sit in front of machines as they prepare letters, bills, and orders. This network of tubing comes to a total length of eighteen English miles.
An army of young women sits in an auditorium and is given nothing else to do but to place colored stamps on the incoming letters. Each stamp represents a different train line. Since, in the U.S., the railroads are privately owned, freight regulations vary widely from area to area, and a lot of the most complicated work takes place in this auditorium.
But even outside this auditorium, what a terrifying sort of work! Young ladies stick a hundred thousand stamps to a hundred thousand envelopes for the catalogs. The thin sheets fly like fan blades under their fingers. At the printing press, where the parts of the catalog are attached, the workers have to use all of their senses, nerves, and brains to make sure that the yellow sheets sit on top of the blue ones and not underneath. Your feelings well up within you when you walk by a few tables and realize that the only reason people are sitting here is because the company hasn’t yet found machines that can do this sort of work. And yet, these humiliated creatures are luckier than those who have lost their income because the company has managed to find the right machines.
Just think how far we’ve come to get to this wonderful sort of organization, as if we were a bee colony, or a termite hill or an ant hill. Imagine how far away we are from those primitive times, when we followed our impulses, and now we thinking creatures do nothing but obey the strange commands of other human creatures. Think of our evolution, our strong souls and ideas withering away underneath this brilliant organization that has triumphed over the human brain and brought it into action.
This is the “blessing” of peacetime, when commerce is allowed to expand.
Wherever I go in the city, I can still hear the metallic clang of Sears Roebuck in my ears. Above the smell of blood and glue, above the coal dust and the fog of Lake Michigan, this metal clang hovers like the harmony of the spheres, as dreary and cold as the modern world and its civilization, the most grim enemy of the human race. –
The Cat in the Piano Factory
The Cat in the Piano Factory
p. 303-318
Writers who visit America frown upon visiting the Chicago slaughterhouses. The excellent H.G. Wells refused to watch as innocent animals were driven into herds and pushed to their deaths. Other minds, of a lesser caliber, have followed Wells’s example. I suspect that the reason for their restraint isn’t so much any sympathy with the animals as it is the extraordinary and definitive description of the “packing houses” laid out in Upton Sinclair’s masterpiece The Jungle. I myself don’t understand why you shouldn’t see the beef and pork cut up at ten o’clock which will be served to you at eleven o’clock for lunch in the form of fillets and pork chops. It seems to me, that what’s more important than the fate of the animals being chopped up is the fate of the people who chop them up. For that reason, I took a look for myself into Armour’s slaughterhouses.
A month later, I met Sinclair in New York and talked to him about his book. The Jungle, a work which you cannot praise highly enough and which you can hold up above the tide of contemporary endeavors, is the work of a socialist. He has uncovered the evils of this system for the world to consider. For him, there was more to explain to the world than the pitiful conditions in which these slaughterhouse workers live. He also explained the economic connections which have ruined these people — not to mention the meat, which is prepared here for consumption under the most cockeyed hygenic conditions. When I was alone with him, Sinclair talked about the effect of his book on the American public: “I wanted to hit them in the heart, I hitted them in the stomach!” So now, in the dark, moldy, stench-filled corridor, where the poor, pale young ladies pack cuts of meat into metal tins from seven in the morning until seven at night, a hand-washer sits there imposingly for the sake of the visitors who bustle around her. A sign reads that the cuts of meat are packed into tins by fingers which are washed daily, and there the hand-washer sits in the corridor. Her polished nails glow in the shine of the lightbulbs. She sits there bored to death, a showpiece in the middle of the stench, and as the others work feverishly around her, she reads a well-worn novel. Possibly The Jungle.
Otherwise, everything remains just as it was. Around the colossal fortresses of the slaughterhouses, open wooden stalls stretch on for miles, where the cows, sheep, and pigs await their destiny. Now and again, a door opens and animals stream out, driven through canals and sheds that open up before them, a labyrinth of paths and angled streets that lead to a covered gangway onto a Bridge of Sighs, at whose end the bleating, squealing, and mooing throngs gradually descend to their sharp deaths.
Over there is the round wheel of wood, on which the struggling pigs turn as they hang from their hind feet. A thickset fellow stands in front of the wheel with a sharpened spear. The wheel turns the pig’s stomach at just the right height, so that the fellow can do the pig in with his first short cut from up to down. At this point the struggling victim realizes exactly what’s going on. It forces out a fearful squeal like a hurt child, then sprays the fellow with a thin, hot, red jet into his face. Then it is conveyed by a chain over the hands of the murderer and is transferred to the next butcher, who executes an equally short, elegant, and systematic incision. A hundred incisions later the animal has been prepared according to all the rules of the art. It is blanched, de-haired, broken into its parts, brought into the cooler, and any trace of its days on earth has been erased. It has now taken its final form as human nourishment.
And the wheel turns and the thickset fellow makes his first cut. For thirty years he stands there and makes his first cut surely and confidently, the same way a bank director sets his signature on a document. He earns a lot of money, sixty cents an hour, and is as much a representative figure of modern American as Dowie, Rockefeller, and Roosevelt. He has kept up this pace thirty years long — 25 animals a minute, that makes 1500 an hour, equaling 15,000 for a ten-hour workday. For thirty years he has remained at his post, standing in the rush of America. Millions of pigs have been brought to his spear, right where the people’s carnivore instincts want them. Do I hate this man for his job, for his calm, unconscious, raw naturalness? Do I hate a man who buys the well-being of his family with death throes, thin red streams, and frightened squeals? Not a chance! I admire him for his strength and his speed.
After all, do you think he enjoys being a Not-Person, a Not-Animal, a Not-Thing, some product of Bosch’s hell? He is a standard and measure of human strength, a record-breaker in the sort of efficiency that got him his career in the first place. That is what he is.
He’s an enemy, not of the pigs, but of his coworkers. This is our fellow from Bosch’s hell. It’s his efficiency that makes him his coworkers’ enemy, the same efficiency that keeps up the pace. From the very beginning, it’s a law here that his efficiency is the enemy of anything less efficient. But in this country, a country that has made a religion out of efficiency, a religion whose temple has been raised up next to democracy and has a stronger following, in modern America this law has a small addition, a tiny supplement, which is precisely this: Efficiency is the enemy of efficiency. –
For years, a man named Frederick Taylor worked as an engineer for Bethlehem Steel, which belonged to the Carnegie. On his way from the casters to the office and back, he would stay awhile, standing on top and watching how the coarse lumps of irons, lying around in the open, were loaded onto carts.
A small German, whom he pitifully names Schmidt in his book (“Scientific Management” by F. Taylor, I believe published by Macmillan), steered his way into Taylor’s attention. This small German was a strong lad, who on a daily basis was able to load about 12 1/2 tons of “pig-iron” onto the carts. He did this work for a daily wage of $1.15. Taylor watched the lad and asked his supervisor about the small German’s private life. Schmidt was father to a family and had bought with his wages a small piece of land just outside the city, where, for an hour before he left for work and an hour after he came home in the evening, he built a little house for him and his family to live in.
“This Schmidt is a thief!” Taylor said. “Those two hours of work he does on his house are proof that he has stolen two hours from Bethlehem Steel, a company which has clearly bought his strength for $1.15 a day.”
Taylor got Schmidt to come over and asked him, if he wouldn’t perhaps like to earn $1.85? Schmidt said yes to this strange question, but couldn’t keep from asking Taylor what would be asked of him in return. Taylor called for the supervisor and took the supervisor and Schmidt into the yard to the iron clumps, where he began to show the both of them a number of specific movements and methods.
According to Taylor’s wishes, Schmidt imitated these movements and worked at the same pace as Taylor: One — two — three, then sat down to rest when Taylor ordered, “Now rest,” . . . Schmidt started earning $1.85 a day and was now loading forty-seven and a half tons per day (as opposed to the twelve and a half which he’d performed up to that time) . . . For his multiplied efforts, Schmidt earned one and a half times as much as before. Naturally, he couldn’t continue building his little house, because he was too tired in the evening and too groggy in the morning. However, Taylor’s system was born, the system of “scientific exploitation of human strength in the service of industry”, the system of “speeding up”, or, as I like to call it, the boosting of the straining and consumption of human energy to the furthest boundaries of natural ability.
Others have used this system in different industries, such as Gilbreth with the bricklayers. The American bricklayers don’t lift bricks with both hands anymore, but instead with the right hand, while with the left they put the spatula in the mortar. This way, a brick house will be built at a pace of 350 bricks per hour, instead of the previous pace of 120 bricks per hour.
A new type of overseer (or maybe they’ve been prefigured by Pharoah and the Emperor Carcella) has entered the American workforce. Before the birth of Taylor’s system, the overseer had the duty to make sure the work was done correctly and on time. But the new overseer, the Speed Boss, sets the pace and the number of units which need to be delivered. He is the man who gets on in life by making sure his people are constantly breaking records without cease.
What are the consequences of this murderous pace for the worker and the industry? First of all, efficiency eliminates inefficiency. That goes without saying. But then efficiency eliminates itself. And then, of course, this way of doing things greatly increases the amount of product that the factory needs to lock up, and the factory is going to need to lock it up for a longer time because they don’t know what to do with their piled up, stacked up product. America produces three times as much as it consumes, and the exports can’t keep up with this overproduction. (Keep in mind that Schmidt of Bethlehem Steel is an immediate cause of the Chinese Revolution. If the steel industry had controlled its lust for exporting into the Middle Kingdom, Mr. Sun Jat Sen would have never climbed onto Wall Street and into world history!)
The worker takes time off part of the year, living on his meager savings, if he has any, and finds that his own efficiency has been turned against him.
But this system, this low-down bastard of a system blooms into new variations, conquers factories far and wide across America, one factory after the other, soon stretching its arm over us, coming after our people, our food, our homeland, everywhere . . .
A further consequence of this exploitation is — at least for the time being — the uniquely American institution of the Age Line, the age limit.
For a worker over forty, it is very difficult in America to find a position at a factory or business. But it’s also very difficult to keep a job once you turn forty. On Monday morning at six o’clock, five hundred young men stand in front of the factory door, on which hangs the plaque:
“We don’t employ people over forty!”
The boss has the choice of the strongest and the youngest. –
In New York I was shown workers who dyed their hair. These workers, before they go to their jobs, grease their temples with shoe polish, as part of their daily routine, in order to bring the red out in their skin. Others pay ten dollars a month for “drugs”, as they say, for arsenic mixtures to artificially stimulate the activities of the heart during working hours.
In Chicago, I read a newspaper article with the headline: “What can a forty-year-old worker do who has just lost his job?” Answer: He can, for example, become an usher for a movie theater.
(How the organized trade unions, who have gathered together the best and most efficient workers, put up with this tyranny, I don’t know. I only know that the large companies don’t like hiring organized workers. But in the entire country the “unions” stand in a not unjustified disrepute. More on this later.)
Today I tore up the remains of my references, which I’ve kept in my suitcase the entire trip and which have taken me to all sorts of great business people, factory owners, and Chicago millionaires. At least sixteen times, I have carried on in the same conversation with business people, factory owners, and millionaires. After five minutes, the person sitting across from me begins to grumble about the “labor unions”, after ten we discuss charitable organizations, and when the person across from me stands up to run to the window and show me the skyscrapers on the other side of the street, attempting to prove to me the wonderful growth of his homeland, then I know that the time is coming to take my overcoat from the hanger. What comes next are four new letters of introduction to business people, factory owners, and millionaires, all of which disguise this pious wish: To hell with you, European. –
What happens to the old, the cast-off, the dismissed, who after forty years still haven’t collected enough for a nest egg?
With luck the American worker dies young. — With luck. — Unfortunately America leads in the percentage of suicides, the mentally ill, and crimes of desperation. Madhouses and prisons spring up everywhere and can barely hold their contents. — In industrial cities I have been begged for money after sunset in a way I’ve only seen in Rome and Naples. — Anyone who wants to see a picture of the most hopeless and degraded of human creatures might like to go to the shelters in Kansas City, to South Clark Street in Chicago, to the much-praised Mills Hotel on New York’s East Side. He might like to see for one hour a night the “bread-line” in front of the doors of one of the large foodhouses, the Salvation Army, where two to three thousand sturdy men wait silently and patiently. He might like to see the hungry, the unemployed, the beggars in the night . . .
He might also want to inquire about the “left-behind”, the vagabonds who have set off for the enticing Wild West, their last paycheck in their pockets, never to be seen again.
One of the most difficult problems in America is that of the Landstreicher, the tramp. The wandering Jewish population makes up a frighteningly high percentage of these “jacks-of-all-trades”. The poor Jewish workers, who have already reached the ends of their ropes, beaten before the battle, grown anemic from the pogroms at home, immigrate to the land of freedom and just can’t keep up with the speed.
The man has a choice between suicide, exhaustion, insanity, and crime. He chooses the life of a tramp. Usually in-between 37 and 40, he leaves his wife and children sans adieu, becoming a “bum” and disappearing into the West or the South.
Americans are kind-hearted. They don’t like seeing someone starve to death. The poor don’t hurt the poor. Only the rich hurt the poor. Carnegie himself, the great philanthropist and peacemaker, proves on closer inspection to be the most malicious and most merciless slave driver. In his Pittsburgh Steel Company there is still a 24-hour-shift, the notorious “double lunch”. The intellectuals of America have tried a revolt, running their heads up against the walls of Pittsburgh and winding up with bumps on their heads. If only there wasn’t this business of trading energy and strength for money and food, the poor and rich could return, so they say, to their mutual Inner Being.
What sorts of risks are run by the poor Jewish bum, or the bums of other religions? Even worse than if he were in his tenement, he can’t really go out in the open with the people of the wide wilderness. Even if he’s managed to smash through to the Pacific, he has still only become a Great Beggar or something similar. And if he hasn’t, he sees death always as a comfort, where a mild supervisor beckons in the distance.
You might want to ask the charitable societies about the ones he’s left behind. What about his wife and children? With their need and the way they’ve been abandoned, some society or another will certainly be compelled to help them, almost as if the bum himself had bequeathed it to them. Does the man even think about his wife and children?
Without singling out any of the factories I’ve seen, I have to say that I wasn’t prepared for so many unhygienic, deadly, and criminally neglected “businesses”.
In these places, the transmission belts rush around without any guard rails, boiling mixtures spray about in the open, fuming substances are rubbed on shoe leather without anyone using masks, a thousand violations stand out here and there, and a part of you revolts against all of it. The fact that I came out of these places with my skin intact is solely due to my guardian angel, who has accompanied me faithfully on this entire trip, and I offer him my deep felt thanks.
This democratic country never seems to have heard of accident insurance, old-age pensions, health insurance, or other similarly civilized things. Next to the fairly intact beggars, the mutilated of all categories are embarrassingly conspicuous. Rabelais couldn’t dream up people any more grotesque than these creatures who meet their shameful fates in the bustle of American factories. You can see them in the streets, in bars, and at the controls of elevators.
But it’s not just the bodily mutilation which draws your full sympathy. It is far more aggravating to see what the modern methods of production have done to these working people’s souls. –
The wheel that takes the bright-eyed pigs to the thickset fellows in the Armour Works is set into motion at the instructions of the Speed Boss, and if today it’s turned at a speed of 25 animals a minute, he turns up the speed tomorrow to 30 animals a minute.
If the miserable wretches upstairs in the packing hall wrap 15,000 tin boxes in paper — their hands move at such a pace you can barely see their fingers — then all it takes is a nasty look from the supervisor and tomorrow, by closing time, they will have wrapped 16,000 boxes, and then 17,000, and so on.
Downstairs, on the slaughterhouse floor, the butchers stand in a row. The steaming bodies are brought before them, hanging from chains, still bleeding or having already gone through the soap bath. Each butcher has his own specific motion to carry out. One cuts the upper part of the tail with a short, sharp knife. The next detaches the tail from the spine with a slice. The next tears the intestines out of the animal’s stomach. The next throws them on a cart, which is moved mechanically away from him. The next takes the liver out of the cart of entrails, and so on.
Each one of these men, from seven in the morning until seven at night, has the same small but important task to perform. He must take care to be good at it, because the chain doesn’t know how to stop. Tell me how he can do it, wiping the sweat from his forehead, wiping the blood spraying from the cadaver. He chews tobacco. That is his only break, his release. Why should it matter to him where he spits his tobacco juice or where he blows his nose?
In front of him the animal rides past on an endless chain. Behind him sits the supervisor. All it takes is a single animal passing him by untouched, and the butcher is finished, thoroughly finished.
Work it out for yourself. How long does it take before a person, a creature with so many wonderful mechanisms of the heart, the nervous system, and the astonishing musculature of the heart, with the joints, hands, and fingers, how long does it take for this person performing the exact same movements over and over, before each mechanism, each mystery dies out, so that it can he barely make it through the dark night into the despairing morning.?
3700 people sit in the lovely, shiny rooms of the famous clock factory in Elgin, each of whom has a minuscule task to see to. 2500 clocks are put together there each day. That makes 211 clocks per hour. So imagine what greets you when, thirsty for knowledge, you march by the workers’ tables. Had Dante had such encounters in the pools of the damned? And yet most of them are happy with their jobs. In front of them, the machine they have to serve hisses and thunders and beats. Hair-thin needles drill hair-thin holes into small copper plates. One millimeter too far, and the needle goes right into their flesh and their fingernails, and in that moment all their money disappears.
In many of these factories, warehouses, and so on, many brochures about baseball, tennis, and football teams were handed to me. They discussed what these factory teams did during the free hours after work.
I’ve also seen the “Whisky-Line” on the borders of the slaughterhouses and the city, where the worker pours himself an “eye-opener” in the morning before going to work. It keeps his stomach quiet and holds him over until the midday break. In the evening, though, he drains his happy hour drink to wash down the disgust and desperation of the day’s work, the ten hours that have poisoned his soul.
I am interested in experiencing what the worker does with his free time. What effect does all this drudgery have on him in his off-hours? During these hours, the worries of these workers’ souls are, it seems to me, a far more important problem than any baseball team.
The meticulousness of the industrial work brings the worker ever closer to the level of the lifeless machine, a precise and automatically functioning collection of parts.
The monotonous rhythm of the same gestures and the same noises deadens the intelligence, the instinct for independent action and the impulse towards differentiation, awareness, and synthesis. The functions of the cerebellum cease, and the fullest creation of nature sinks further to the level of animals.
In the technical schools of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan sit people who want to give the machine the last degree of perfection, so that they can push their fellow human beings further down into deepest slavery.
Just this day the dean of the engineering faculty at the University of Cincinatti, Dr. Hermann Schneider, held a lecture for the clubs of business people in Chicago. He talked chiefly about the preservation of that valuable characteristic, the quintessence of industry: the need for stimulation. It should be said, that he dealt less with the soul of the worker than with the soul of speed.
Some women friends from New York have told me about some experiments of this nature, such as the reading of a popular novel in a cigarette factory or some innocent singing among seamstresses. But the experiment which Dr. Schneider reported is so picturesque I have named the entire chapter after it. –
In a piano factory in Ohio, the young ladies employed to make some of the more trivial parts just couldn’t take it anymore. The poor things were pale, tired, and apathetic. Finally, they would just stay away in order to not go crazy from the monotony of it all.
The boss of that particular unit thought of everything he could, trying out pretty decorations in the workrooms and comfortable armchairs, but nothing helped. The young ladies abandoned their posts, held up their unit, and hampered the surrounding units and the entire factory. Finally, the boss came up with the winning idea. He bought himself a nice, large, maltese cat and brought it to the ladies one morning. The cat was immediately the mascot of the department. Every lady brought her something. One would bring a treat, another a little ribbon, yet another a bell.
The cat’s basket was the central point for all the motherly instincts of these ladies, who had never played with a doll and who weren’t allowed to care for children, but who instead were forced to work, to work without restraint and without hope, endlessly . . .
“The employment of the inborn sympathy of women for the cat has raised work performance in this department by about ten percent,” said Dean Schneider. “The overseer’s good idea was used in other departments under his supervision. When using this and other similar stimulants, everything worked out for the best.”
Chicago has made me sick. In this city, I have stared the bloody disgrace of modern civilization in the face. I have seen it and became acquainted with it. Should I leave? Where would I go? Would I escape from hell? How could I? The modern world is hell.
Chicago: An Impression
Chicago: An Impression
p. 293-302
What demon has possessed me? Have I eaten poison? Do I have a fever? Is it because I’ve just crossed west to east over the Mississippi? It’s nothing like that. I’ve just arrived in Chicago, the most terrifying city in the world.
I don’t want to try to give a picture of this city, not even a little map of its discomforts. Only a couple of sounds, smells, sights, a little smoke and restlessness from its atmosphere should leave enough of an imprint on the paper.
Right now it brings me to the wild chicagua onions for which the city is named — they grew in bunches, where now the world-famous warehouses, the world-famous slaughterhouses, the world-famous grain exchange and the world-famous red light districts stand — they bring tears to the eyes. At nine in the morning, as I walk the streets, a cyclone of people rushing around me violate my eyes and ears. They have all the jerky movements of the people in cinematic recordings. My guidebook is seven years old and useless. I push myself forward and turn through the revolving door of a stationary store, where I ask the clerk, one of those pale young men who are already dead tired by the early morning, how a person might find the sights worth seeing in this city.
“There’s nothing worth seeing here,” the tired clerk says. “There’s only business here.”
A low noise rests over the city, a rumbling coming from over or under the earth, a pulsing which sounds like somebody endlessly beating a carpet. Coal dust goes up one nostril, the scent of boiling glue goes up the other. This paste rests on the surface of your brain and behold, the Chicagoan’s consciousness is born.
The people here pursue their business like they’re all desperately running away from each other. Two nuns run by me on Van Buren Street. They run in and out of doors collecting money. Their faces are buried deep in their dirt-colored habits; their faces, which should hold their joy, are strained and distorted from running after money in the streets.
But I will keep myself from making the mistake of confusing all of America for Chicago, whose pace seems to be bred out of a lack of air and cramped conditions.
So far as I can tell, this city, this rapid city, “the windy town”, diese windige Stadt is really more of a caricature of America. At barely seventy years old, it is the second largest city on the continent, in which there live more Germans than in Hamburg, more Swedes than in Stockholm, more Jews than in Palestine. It has undergone the sort of development which frightens and astonishes the rest of the Union. All of America gazes in terror at this city, and the city shouts back, “Just wait, in a few years I’ll be #1 here, and then, in a few years more, #1 in the world.” In three directions it shoots out into the corn fields. In spite of traveling straight ahead on a tram line for half a day, I could not reach its borders. Like the newest of its skyscrapers, this empire of individuals rises quickly to a dizzying height. As it sweeps through the fields, making endless suburbs out of wood and dirt, it spreads the misery and poverty of its people disturbingly far and wide. It produces the irrational splendor and mad power of houses and businesses built like palaces. And it also produces the desperation of darkened souls in factories and tenements. It produces a constant back and forth, a tension, an eternal multiplication of houses and people. It produces a dance of greed, extravagance, burning, belittling, crime, pity, psalm singing, manslaughter, uglification, and shame — But on the graves of four martyrs in the Waldheim Cemetery lay fresh flowers! –
Hopefully it’s not always like this here, in this first week of November 1911, when I arrive in Chicago. But year in, year out, it’s always the same pace, so I really don’t hesitate to say that Chicago is Hell.
In the best area of the city, I wake up in the morning after my arrival. It’s still early, barely five, and there’s an explosion. I leap out to the window and look out at the hotel courtyard, trying to see if anyone has jumped off the roof. Two days later I wake up to the same explosion, but now I stay in bed. By now I know it’s not a suicide, no glorious repetition of the Haymarket Riots, but instead it’s just a neighborhood morning greeting, a small bomb laid before the door of a business competitor.
After the first frost, the newspaper reports seven murders and three attempted rapes on the outskirts of town. The papers are full of poisons, the unexplained sudden falling deaths of influential people, and shootings on busy streets in the middle of the day. (Everyone knows that while in other cities you can have a man murdered starting at upwards of two hundred dollars, you can get one in Chicago for eight.)
In the courts, the state’s attorneys skirmish with the magnates of the meat industry. They’ve tried to break the Sherman Law, so that they can corner the market in meat and tighten their stranglehold on consumers. The courts are full of young lawyers. They come here from all directions to learn how the famous attorney springs his accusation on the hogbutchers. But when a tiny loophole shows up between two letters of the law, the whole prosecution slips away. By now everything has already been done to render the accusation invalid. (The magnates will tell you that the matter has already been decided by the high courts in Washington.)
There have been raids around Armour Square on the institutions of the bordello industry. A couple of streets to the east, Jim O’Leary, the king of gamblers, has tried to render gambling dens bombproof with steel-armored doors. All three industries, meat, bordello, and gambling, have held up all well-meaning attempts at reform. The newspapers don’t mince words. They report about the city in detail: about the politicians, who are in the service of the meat interest, about the police, who are in the service of the bordello interest, and about the orderlies, who have calmly drawn Jim’s odds on their blackboards. (Will there be two days in January with a temperature under zero degrees Fahrenheit or not? Five to one.) Like in nearly every large city, a new mayor takes a stance against corruption in every aspect of public life. I can still hear the reformist and political nicknames buzzing in my ear: Hinky-Dink, Bathhouse John, and others. For the first time on my entire trip, I keep a revolver in my back pocket at all times. As easily as you’ll find a thief or murderer waiting in the small alleys of this city, you’ll also find a policeman or orderly in the corner of a bar.
An old man with a white Vandyke beard sits next to me upstairs in the gallery of the grain exchange in the Board of Trade Building. He’s stretched out his hand, covered in brownish-yellow hair, and explains to me the sights below. He names the names of the howling dervishes who stand around “the Pit” where the golden grain plunges into the world and flutters out to the deceived masses on the wings of imaginary finance.
There are three other pits in this auditorium: the corn pit, the oat pit, and the pork pit. But the wildest howling and the most desperate crowding happens around the wheat pit.
In-between the pits for the wheat and corn brokers, inspectors stand on a high, commanding bridge, carrying long sheets of paper which are the logbooks of the exchange. Gleaming metal capsules shoot over to them on thin steel threads from the hundred telegraph machines at the end of the auditorium. From the chalkboards, where the names of the harvest districts of America are written out, a constant cracking sounds out over the raging voices. On the other side of the hall, the wheat receipts trickle from hundreds of paper sacks into wooden bowls underneath them.
The old man next to me owns four thousand acres of land in Nebraska and is taking a trip to the east, where his children study. So far this year he’s satisfied that the hyenas of “the Pit” have torn neither him nor his children to pieces. A weasel-like, tiny Jew stands on the lower steps of the pit and stares blinking at the roaring jaws around him. This is the same man who for two weeks attempted an “operation” in wheat and failed miserably. He was stopped short, that is, three million bushels sit on his accounts in the grain elevators of Chicago, Madison, and St. Louis, from where he attempts to sell them to millers at an enormous loss.
Pleasant Gretna, the quiet nighttime walkways of Altona up in Manitoba! The gleaming metal capsules shoot here and there and link together the fates of men who don’t even know each other, strange fates . . .
A raging cry shoots up from the howling kennels, where three downward steps lead into a breathing pool. Hundreds of hands stretch up as if in oath. People run into the pit from all corners of the auditorium, arms and elbows swinging as if ready to fight. The inspector bends an ear down from the bridge, then writes a figure onto the paper. A flash shoots from the bridge to the telegraph machines. A hundred thousand tickers tick at one and the same time, hair is mussed up on a hundred thousand heads, and tonight they will be sleepless in a hundred thousand beds, exhausted men poring over the numbers until the dawn of day.
My neighbor takes leave of me smiling. His hairy hand goes barely into my own as we say goodbye to each other with a good handshake.
Downstairs, the roars, the gesticulations, and the witchery continue around the pit. The raised hands now become clenched fists. Everyone showers the next with threats. The good, warm fists of agriculture. Manly, broad, quiet fists calloused like the crust of the earth! –
In the shadow of the corridors leading to the steps, a dark, tall woman sits on a bench. Under her wide-brimmed hat, the veil is pushed away from her face, which is pale and has lovely, grand, and simple features. She can’t be older than 35. She looks straight ahead and not at the passersby. She wears a heavy black fur. Her hands, in black gloves, rest on her lap. She holds a small pencil and a crumpled piece of paper. Whenever the howls from the auditorium penetrate her dark corner, the woman, without looking, mechanically scribbles a drawing or a figure on the paper. What is she writing? What is she listening for?
Two weeks later, I make my way again to the exchange at noon and run into the gallery, where I see the woman sitting in the same place. Pale, she stares ahead into nothing. Her hands, which seem lifeless, hold the pencil and the piece of paper . . .
But downstairs, in front of the house, it looks like St. Mark’s Square in Venice. Thousands of white pigeons flutter around smoke-blackened crates. The seeds scattered from sacks don’t stay on the pavement very long. Many of the howling dervishes, who above all things want to snatch the last piece of grain from their colleagues, stick a handful into their pockets before leaving “the Pit”.
In this fleeting sketch I should say a little something about holy Sunday, when the rabid, feverish city pretends to rest from its work. It’s nothing like the European notion of a restful Sunday, but you do see fewer people on the streets than in large European cities. The people never allow themselves to swing over from Sunday to Monday without losing their speed and poise in the transition, but instead they are prepared at all times to rush in at full speed.
Especially in America, a 24-hour day is a long time. Since the law forbids making business with men on Sunday, the American makes business with his conscience on Sunday and revises his contract with his beloved God, which contract must remain binding seven days long for both parties. –
On a Sunday in Chicago, God has a different name and a different face every five steps. On elegant Michigan Avenue, Chicago’s Via del Corso spread out against the shore, you can see seventy-five different worldviews lined up in a row. Everyone runs in a different door, behind each of which stands an auditorium with hundreds of chairs. By ten o’clock, every spot in these auditoriums are taken. Everyone will hold up their God or their conscience or the figments of their imagination, beginning with songs and Bible passages and ending with the ringing of bells. Lying in-between is an extraordinary collection of declarations, religious insanities, Indian mysticism, more or less the business tricks and quackery of the conscience which the world endures and participates in on a Sunday morning in November. Later, I plan to write a chapter on the church in America, but here I’d like to give a report on the final moments of the strongest religious movement America has experienced.
The prophet Elijah, Elijah the Restorer of the New Zion, is dead. In life he went by the name John Alexander Dowie and was one of the greatest business geniuses of the new America. Two hours north of Chicago lies Zion City, the town that was pronounced to become the New Zion. The New Zion with the Holy Tabernacle of Belief in the middle of town, a colossal administrative building erected behind it for the exploitation of human stupidity, and a central office for the dollars of the converted believers of the human race.
Neither the tabernacle nor the buildings behind it were ever built. All that remains of Zion City is the name and a thriving lace factory, Dowies’ only successful venture.
In a rented church in Chicago, there is a last desperate attempt to bring together a handful of Zion’s faithful. The “Overseer of the Christian Catholic Church of Zion over the World” has sat down after his speech. Now one of the faithful stands up and asks for an explanation about some of the unfulfilled promises of the Prophet, namely his flesh rising from the dead and undergoing a transformation. Five years have gone by and he still hasn’t transformed. The questioner has sat for a night at the grave of the Prophet and even put his ear on the stone. No noise. Nothing.
The “Overseer” stands up and announces that the promise is to be interpreted as follows: Christ would appear simultaneously with the Prophet in the City of Zion. Since, however, with the secularization of Zion, asphalt has been laid over the earth of Shiloah, the last hope has faded. Christ’s pierced foot would never rest on the asphalt of a new era . . .
The next Sunday, the 26th of November, the New Zion lay waiting for death. The widow of the Prophet, Mrs. Jane Dowie, a small well-dressed lady who looks like a housekeeper or fortune teller, preaches in a meager little rented room in the Loop District. The thing begins with about twenty diminished old women and small men, who sing along to the songs shivering and trembling.
Then the widow speaks. She has her husband’s robes on, the same ones the Prophet wore for seven years in Madison Square Garden, New York City, as he spoke in front of thirty thousand people. Her speech isn’t Do This and Don’t Do That, but instead a lecture on smatterings of the Bible, some reminiscences of her husband, whom she alternately calls “the Prophet” and “my husband”, and a blunt scolding of those successful widows, whose rooms next to Vanity Fair maintain an extensive clientele. — The widow she refers to is Mrs. Baker Eddie, the proprietress of the faith healers, the Christian Scientists.
“My soul is in need, but Christ takes away my want. I wouldn’t deceive anyone for the world, a world made of lies and deception, a world that grows rich through falsehoods. I know that I can trust my God, but this room costs ten dollars, and if you know a cheaper one, just tell me the address. We will now pray for strength and power, and then comes the small collection. Remember, the room costs ten dollars, a poor weak women such as myself really can’t afford it.”
During the closing psalms, the widow of the Prophet pounds her right hand in rhythm, while with her left she counts the gold in the little basket that the usher of the “New Zion” has stood on the altar next to her.
In dark crowds, excited and hysterical, the Americans stream out of their seventy-five churches along Michigan Avenue. At home, they’ll become afraid of their descent into nothingness, carried along by their galloping speed. It takes effort not to stumble over the unemployed, who are loitering and begging every ten steps on even the most elegant avenues of the city. Miserable and hollow-eyed, they stand there and beg in crowds, and that sort of thing is only customary in Italy, the land of the blue-golden sun and godly laziness.
Pictures from Amerika
A German named Arthur Holitscher wrote a travelogue of America and Canada in the early 20th century. The main reason people know about it is because Franz Kafka used it as a source for his first novel, but it’s a neat book in its own right. You can find it on Google Books. The only problem for us is that there isn’t any English translation of it out there that we can find, so the Editor decided (out of the good of his heart) to translate at least some of his favorite sections using his very limited knowledge of the German language. Below are some pictures, which give you an idea of what the book will be like. The Editor is currently working on the translations.
Page 47: Ten stories . . . fifty . . . a hundred!
Page 118: Uncle Sam taps the Canadian Maple.
Page 119: The bull is the US, Canada is the calf. An incendiary placard from the Conservatives.
Page 201: An authentic cowboy.
Page 211: The tepee and its inhabitants.
Page 312: A tramp on his way.
Page 326: Chicago: People live here!
Page 367: A pastoral scene from Oklahama [sic].
