The Driver Read online

  I come back to what the Cleveland man said. Why are people hungry in a land of surplus food? Why is labor idle? Labor applied to materials is the source of all wealth. There is no lack of materials. The desire for wealth is without limit. Why are men unemployed instead of acting on their unfinished environment to improve it?

  And now, though I had thought my way around a circle, I began to glimpse some understanding of what was taking place in a manner nominally so preposterous. People had tormented themselves with these questions until they were weary, callous and bitterly ironic. The country was in the toils of an invisible monster that devoured its heart and wasted its substance. The name of this monster was Hard Times. The problem of unemployment was chronic, desperate and apparently hopeless. The cause of it was unknown. People were sick of thinking and talking about something for which there was no help. They had either to despair or laugh. Then came Coxey, fanatic, mountebank or rare comedian,—so solemn in his egregious pretensions that no one knew which,—and they laughed. It might become serious. Mass psychology was in a highly inflammable condition. There was always that thought in reserve to tinge the laughter with foreboding. But if there came a conflagration, then perhaps the questions would be unexpectedly answered; nobody cared much what else happened.

  Cincinnati turned over with a frightful snort and was suddenly quiet. I prayed that he might be dead and went to sleep.

  The next morning the New York Herald man took me aside.

  “I’ve been recalled from this assignment to go to Europe,” he said. “I’m waiting for a man to relieve me. He will pick us up some time to-day.”

  I said I was sorry; and I was, for we were made to each other’s liking.

  “I don’t care for the man who is relieving me,” he continued. “Besides, he isn’t competent to do what I’m about to ask you to undertake in my place.”

  “Anything I can,” I said.

  “You are from the west,” he continued, “and therefore you’re not likely to know how jumpy the Wall Street people are about what’s going on. They are afraid of this Coxey movement,—of what it may lead to. They want to know a lot about it,—more than they can get from the newspaper stories. I’ve been sending a confidential letter on it daily to Valentine... you know,... John J., president of the Great Midwestern Railroad. He wants the tale unvarnished, and what you think of it, and what others think of it. He particularly wants to know in the fullest way how the Coxeyites are received along the way, for therein is disclosed the state of public feeling. Well, I wish you to take this commission off my hands. It pays fifty a week for the life of the circus. I’ll see him in New York, tell him who you are and why I left it for you to do. Then when the thing is over you can run up to New York from Washington and get your money.”

  I hesitated.

  “It’s Wall Street money,” I said.

  “It’s railroad money,” he replied. “That may be all the same thing. But there’s no difficulty, really. It’s quite all right for anyone to do this. What’s wanted is the truth. Put in your own opinions of Wall Street if you like. Indeed, do that. Wall Street people are not as you think they are. Valentine is a particularly good sort and honest in his point of view. I vouch for the whole thing.”

  So I took it; and thereafter posted to John J. Valentine, 130 Broadway, room 607, personal, a daily confidential report on the march of the Commonwealers.

  I would not say that the fact of having a retainer in railroad money changed my point of view. It did somewhat affect my sense of values and my curiosity was extended.

  For the purpose of the Valentine reports I made an intensive personal study of the Commonwealers. I asked them why they were doing it. Some took it as a sporting adventure, with no thought of the consequences, and enjoyed the mob spirit. Some were tramps who for the first time in their lives found begging respectable. But a great majority of them were earnest, wistful men, fairly aching with convictions, without being able to say what it was they had a conviction of, or what was wrong with the world. Their notions were incoherent. Nobody seemed very sanguine about the Coxey plan; nobody understood it, in fact; yet something would have to be done; people couldn’t live without work.

  Unemployment was the basic grievance. I took a group of twenty, all skilled workmen, sixteen of them married, and found that for each of them the average number of wage earning days in a year had been twelve. They blamed the money power in Wall Street. When they were asked how the money power could profit by their unemployment, what motive it could have in creating hard times, they took refuge in meaningless phrases. Most of them believed in peaceable measures. Only three or four harbored destructive thoughts.

  The manner of the Army’s reception by farmers, villagers and townspeople was variable and hard at first to understand. Generally there was plenty of plain food. Sometimes it was provided in a generous, sympathetic spirit; then again it would be forthcoming as a bid for immunity, the givers at heart being fearful and hostile. The Army was much maligned by rumor as a body of tramps obtaining sustenance by blackmail. It wasn’t true. There was no theft, very little disorder, no taking without leave, even when the stomach gnawed.

  One learned to anticipate the character of reception by the look of the place. In poor, dilapidated communities there was always a hearty welcome with what food the people could spare, cheerfully bestowed; the better and more prosperous the community the worse for the Commonwealers.

  I spoke of this to some of the more thoughtful men. They had noted the fact and made nothing of it. Then I spoke of it to one of the tramps, who knew the technique of begging; he said:

  “Sure. Anybody’d know that. D’jew ever get anything at a big house? The poor give. We ought to stick to the poor towns.”

  In those industrial communities where class distinctions had arisen,—that is to say, where poverty and affluence were separately self-conscious, the police invariably were disagreeable and the poor were enthusiastic over the Commonwealers. At Allegheny, where the steel mill workers had long suffered from unemployment, the Army received a large white silk banner, lettered:

  “Laws for Americans. More money. Less misery.”

  Here there were several collisions between, on one side, the Commonwealers and their welcomers, and, on the other, the police. At some towns the Army was not permitted to stop at all. At others it was officially received with music, speeches and rejoicings.

  As these incidents became repetitious they ceased to be news, yet they were more important, merely by reason of recurring, than the bizarre happenings within the Army which as newspaper correspondents we were obliged competitively to emphasize, as, for example, the quarrel between Browne and the bandmaster, the mutiny led by Smith the Great Unknown, the development of the reincarnation myth and the increasing distaste for it among the disciples.

  The size of the Army fluctuated with the state of the weather. Crossing the Blue Mountains by the icy Cumberland road in a snow storm was an act of fortitude almost heroic. Confidence in the leaders declined. Browne came to be treated with mild contempt. The line,—“Christ and Coxey,”—which had been painted on the commissariat wagon was almost too much. There was grumbling in the ranks. Everybody was discouraged when the expectation of great numbers had finally to be abandoned. Never did the roll exceed five hundred men, not even after the memorable junction in Maryland with Christopher Columbus Jones, forty-eight men and a bull dog, from Philadelphia.

  Yet there was a cohesive principle somewhere, Nearly all of those who started from Massillon stuck to the very end. What held them together? Possibly, a vague, herd sense of moving against something and a dogged reaction to ridicule. This feeling of againstness is sometimes stronger to unite men, especially unhappy men, than a feeling of forness. The thing they were against was formless in their minds. It could not be visualized or perceived by the imagination, like the figure of the horrible Turk in possession of the Holy Sepulchre. Therefore it was a foredoomed crusade.

  The climax was pitiably futi
le.

  Two self-mongering reincarnations of Christ, both fresh and clean, having nighted in decent hotels, led four hundred draggle-tail men into Washington and up Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol grounds, enormous humiliated crowds looking on. Browne dismounted and leaped over the low stone wall. Coxey tried to make a speech. Both were good-naturedly arrested for trespassing on the public grass and violating a police ordinance. The leaderless men wandered back to a camp site that had been mercifully loaned. For a time they dully subsisted upon charity, ceased altogether to be news, and gradually vanished away.

  iv

  Though the Army of the Commonweal of Christ was dead, and Coxey himself was now a pusillanimous figure, Coxeyism survived in a formidable manner. The term was current in newspaper language; and the country seemed to be full of those forms of social insubordination which it was meant to signify. In the west rudely organized bands, some of them armed, and strong enough to overwhelm the police of the cities through which they passed, were running amuck. They bore no petition in boots; they were impatient and headlong. One of their pastimes was train stealing. They would seize a railroad train, overpower the crew and oblige themselves to outlaw transportation; and the railroad people, fearful of accidents, would clear the way to let them through. It was very exciting for men who had nothing else to do, and rather terrifying to the forces of law and order.

  Public opinion was distracted and outraged.

  Some said, “Put down Coxeyism. Put it down with a strong hand. To treat it tenderly is to encourage lawlessness.”

  Others said, “You may be able to put down Coxeyism by force, but you will sometime have to answer the questions it has raised. Better now than later.”

  There was a great swell of radical thought in the country. The Populist party, representing a blind sense of revolt, had elected four men to the Senate and eleven to the House of Representatives. Many newspapers and magazines were aligned with the agitators, all asking the same questions:

  Why hunger in a land of plenty?

  Why unemployment?

  Why was the economic machine making this frightful noise?

  The Federal and state governments were afraid to act effectively against Coxeyism because too many people sympathized with it, secretly or openly. It was partly a state of nerves. Writers in the popular periodicals and in some of the solemn reviews laid it on red. In Coxey’s march they saw an historic parallel. In almost the same way five hundred volunteers, knowing how to die, had marched from Marseilles to Paris with questions that could not be answered, and gave the French Revolution a hymn that shook the world. Human distress was first page news. The New York World gave away a million loaves of bread and whooped up its circulation. The New York Herald solicited donations of clothing which it distributed in large quantities to the ragged.

  On the train from Washington to New York I found men continually wrangling in fierce heat about money, tariff and Coxeyism. I was surprised to hear Wall Street attacked by well dressed, apparently prosperous men, in the very phrases with which the Coxeyites had filled my ears. Nobody by any chance ever stood in defense of Wall Street, but there were those who denounced the Coxeyites and Populists intemperately. Everybody denounced something; nobody was for anything. National morale was in a very low state.

  In the smoking compartment two men, behaving as old acquaintances, quarreled interminably and with so much dialectical skill that an audience gathered to listen in respectful silence. One was a neat, clerical-looking person whose anxieties were unrelieved by any glimpse of humor or fancy. The other was carelessly dressed, spilt cigar ashes over his clothes unawares, and had a way of putting out his tongue and laughing at himself dryly if the argument went momentarily against him or when he had adroitly delivered himself from a tight place. He was the elder of the two. He was saying:

  “Because men are out of work they do not lose their rights as citizens to petition Congress in any peaceable manner. Your low tariff is the cause of unemployment. There is the evidence,—those cold smoke stacks.”

  He pointed to them. We were passing through Wilmington.

  “The importation of cheap foreign goods has shut our factories up. You retort by calling the unemployed tramps.”

  “It was the high Republican tariff that made the people soft and helpless,” said the other. “For years you taught them that good times resulted not from industry and self-reliance but from laws,—that prosperity was created by law. Now you reap the fruit. You put money into the pockets of the manufacturers by high tariffs. The people know this. Now they say, ‘Fill our pockets, too.’ It’s quite consistent. But it’s Socialism. That’s what all this Coxeyism is,—a filthy eruption of Socialism, and the Republican party is responsible.”

  “You forget to tell what has become of the jobs,” the other said. “All they want is work to do. Where is the work?”

  “These Coxeyites,” the other retorted, “are a lot of strolling beggars. They refuse work. They enjoy marching through the country in mobs, living without work, doing in groups what as individuals they would not dare to do for fear of police and dogs. And the Republican party encourages them in this criminality because it needs a high tariff argument.”

  At this point an impulse injected me into the discussion.

  “You are wrong about the Coxeyites,” I said. “At least as to those from Massillon. I marched with them all the way. A few were tramps. There were no criminals. A great majority of them were men willing to work and honestly unemployed.”

  Both of them stared at me, and I went on for a long time, not knowing how to stop and wishing I hadn’t begun. The younger man heard me through with a bored air and turned away. But the other asked me some questions and thanked me for my information.

  The episode closed suddenly. We were running into the Jersey City railroad terminal, on the west bank of the Hudson River, and all fellow-traveler contacts began to break up without ceremony in the commotion of arrival. I saw no more of the disputants and forgot them entirely in the thrill of approaching New York for the first time.

  It was early evening. Slowly I made headway up the platform against the tide of New Jersey commuters returning from work. With a scuffling roar of feet, and no vocal sound whatever, they came racing through the terminal in one buffalo mass, then divided into hasty streams, flowed along the platforms and boarded the westbound trains, strangely at ease with extraordinary burdens, such as reels of hose, boxes of tomato plants, rakes, scythes, hand cultivators, bags of bulbs, carpentering tools and bits of lumber.

  Beating my way up the current, wondering how so many people came, by what means they could be delivered in such numbers continuously, I came presently into view of the cataract. Great double-decked ferryboats, packed to the rails with self-loading and unloading cargoes, were arriving two or three at a time and berthing in slips which lay side by side in a long row, like horse stalls.

  We, the eastbound passengers from the Washington train, gathered at one of the empty slips. Through the gates I saw a patch of water. Suddenly a stealthy mass up-heaved, hesitated, then made up its mind and came head on with terrific momentum. At the breathless moment the engines were reversed, there was a gnashing of waters, and the boat came fast with a soft bump. The gates burst open and the people decanted themselves with a headlong rush. We stood tight against the wall to let them pass. As the tail of the spill filed by we were sent aboard, the gates banged to behind us, and the boat was off toward the other shore for another load. This was before the unromantic convenience of Hudson River tunnels.

  I stood on the bow to have my first look at New York.

  One’s inner sense does not perceive the thing in the moment of experience, but films it, to be afterward developed in fluid recollection. I see it now in memory as I only felt it then.

  A wide mile of opal water, pulsatile, thrilling to itself in a languorous ancient way. And so indifferent! Indifference was its immemorial character. I watched the things that walked upon it—four-eyed, double-e
nded ferryboats with no fore or aft, like those monsters of the myth that never turned around; tugs like mighty Percherons, dragging sledges in a string; a loitering hyena, marked dynamite, much to be avoided; behemoths of the deep, helpless in this thoroughfare, led by hawsers from the nose; sorefooted scows with one pole rigs, and dressy, high-heeled pleasure craft. The river was as unregardful of all these tooting, hooting, hissing improvisations as of the natural fish, the creaking gulls, or those swift and ceaseless patterns woven of the light which seem to play upon its surface and are not really there.

  Beyond was that to which all this hubbub appertained. The city!... Sudden epic!... Man’s forethought of escape... his refuge... his selfoverwhelming integration. Anything may happen in a city. Career is there, success is there, failure, anguish, horror, women, hell, and heaven. One has the sense of moral fibres loosening. Lust of conquest stirs. The spirit of adventure flames. A city is a tilting field. Unknown, self-named, anyone may enter, cast his challenge where he will, and take the consequences. The penalties are worse than fatal. The rewards are what you will.

  “New York!” I said.

  It stood against the eastern sky, a pure illusion, a rhythmic mass without weight or substance, in the haze of a May-day evening. The shadows of twilight were rising like a mist. Everything of average height already was submerged. Some of the very tall buildings still had the light above, and their upper windows were a-gleam with reflections of the sunset.

  Seething city!... So full of life transacting potently, and yet so still! A thin gray shell, a fragile show, a profile raised in time and space, a challenge to the elements. They take their time about it.... Lovely city!... Ugly city!... Never was there one so big and young and hopeful all at once.