Part 12

I went to bed early, the night of the election, expecting to be aroused by the ringing of bells, the blowing of whistles, for there was to be a celebration. When I awakened with a start it was broad daylight. Had I slept through the celebration? A sense of doom hung over me; I dressed hurriedly, went down to get the paper. Wallace Delamater was defeated. Promptly the Delamater bank closed and, one after another, four banks of the town followed. There was a heavy run on the one remaining, the one where I had my little deposit. The panic in the town was desperate; everything was going. I don’t think I have ever been more ashamed of anything in my life connected with money than I was when I took my bank book and went to my bank to ask for my deposit. It was all the money I had in the world—times were bad. But I have always continued to be a little ashamed that I yielded to the panic, the more because my bank didn’t fail!

No, the security men flattered themselves they had achieved was never certain. Moreover, my security was costing more in certain precious things than I was willing to pay. Take the matter of making something professionally sound, useful, justifiable, out of myself, which is the only one of these “precious things” that I am talking about! I could do no more towards it where I was. To begin with, I at last knew what I wanted to do. It was no longer to seek truth with a microscope. My early absorption in rocks and plants had veered to as intense an interest in human beings. I was feeling the same passion to understand men and women, the same eagerness to collect and to classify information about them. I find the proofs of this slow and unconscious change of allegiance in an accumulation of tattered notebooks tucked away for years, forgotten and only brought out after I had set myself this curious task of tracing the road I have traveled through my eighty years, trying to find out why I did this thing and not that, getting acquainted with my own working life.

I seem to have begun to enter observations on human beings soon after I had settled down to learn how to put a magazine together in an orderly fashion. I applied the same method that I had used for so many years in collecting and classifying natural objects which excited my curiosity. Take leaves, on which I was always keen. I started out in high school to collect them from all the flora in my territory, classifying them by shapes, veins, stalks, color. Rarely do I take up a family book of those early years that there do not fall out from between the pages leaves of one thing or another that I had pressed to help me carry on my scheme of classification. I suspect that I did not get much beyond a glib naming of parts.

Something analogous happened when I recognized that men and women were as well worth notes as leaves, that there was a science of society as well as of botany.

What had happened was undoubtedly that the tumults, the challenges of my day had finally penetrated my aloofness, and that I was feeling more and more the need of taking a part in them. The decade I spent in Poland and on The Chautauquan had a background not so unlike that of the present decade. At its beginning we were only fifteen years from a civil war which had left behind not only a vast devastated region with the problem of its reconstruction, but the problem of a newly freed people. It had left bitterness which in intensity and endurance no war but a civil war ever leaves. We had had our inflation, a devastating boom followed by seven years of depression, outbreaks of all the various forms of radical philosophy the world then knew. Youth talks glibly of communism today as if it had just appeared in the country; but Marxian Communists transferred the headquarters of the International to New York City in the seventies. More conspicuous than the Communists were the Anarchists. Every city in the United States had its little group, preaching and every now and then practicing direct action. Indeed, they were a factor in all the violent labor disturbances of the period.

In 1879 prosperity had come back with a whoop, and, as she usually does after a long absence, had quickly exhausted herself by fantastic economic excesses. By the time I undertook to annotate the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle’s readings the country had begun to suffer again from its wanton speculation and reckless overbuilding of railroads. Factories and mines and mills shut down; and when work stopped disorder began, particularly on the railroads of the Southwest, the awful massacre of Chinese in Wyoming—more awful, the Haymarket riot in Chicago followed as it was by the execution of four men, all counselors of violence to be sure, but no one of them found guilty either of making or of throwing the bomb.

The eighties dripped with blood, and men struggled to get at causes, to find corrections, to humanize and socialize the country; for then as now there were those who dreamed of a good world although at times it seemed to them to be going mad.

The Chautauquan interested itself in all of this turbulent and confused life. Indeed, it rapidly became my particular editorial concern. We noted and discussed practically every item of the social program which has been so steadily developing in the last fifty years, the items which have crystallized into the Square Deal, the New Freedom, the New Deal.

The present argument for high wages, we made in the eighties. We called it “the new economic coefficient in our industrial life.” “It is the well-paid workman,” said The Chautauquan, “who is a relatively large consumer. We are built upon a foundation of which this well-paid workman is an important part.”

As for hours and conditions, we were ardent supporters of the eight-hour day, organized labor’s chief aim in the eighties, and we were for contracts between labor and capital, each being held responsible for his side of the bargain. We were for education, arbitration, legislation, the program of the Knights of Labor rather than the program of force which the growing American Federation of Labor was adopting. We discussed interminably the growing problem of the slums, were particularly strong for cooperative housing, laundries and bakeshops; we supported the popular Town and Country Club, seeking to keep a healthy balance between the two; we were advocates of temperance but shied at prohibition—largely, I think, because it had become a political issue, and we did not like to see our idealists going into politics, as Bellamy and Henry George and the leaders of many causes were doing.

That is, in the decade of the eighties we were discussing and thinking about the same fundamentals that we are today.

My realization of the stress of the period began at home. Titusville and all the Oil Region of Pennsylvania were struggling to loosen the hold of the mighty monopoly which, since its first attack on the business in 1872, had grown in power and extent until it owned and controlled over 90 per cent of the oil industry outside of the production of the raw crude. The region was divided into two hostile camps—the Independent Producers and Refiners, and the Standard Oil Company. Their maneuvers and strategy kept town and country in a constant state of excitement, of suspicion, of hope, and of despair.

There was a steady weakening of independent ranks both by the men worn out or ruined by the struggle, and those who saw peace and security for themselves only in settling and gave up the fight.

In those days I looked with more contempt on the man who had gone over to the Standard than on the one who had been in jail. I felt pity for the latter man, but none for the deserters from the ranks of the fighting independents. Those were the days when the freeing of transportation, the privilege which had more to do with the making of the monopoly than anything else, more even than the great ability of its management, was the aim of all reformers. For years the Independents had worked for an interstate commerce law which would make rate discrimination a crime. To me such a law had come to have a kind of sanctity. It was the new freedom, and when it was passed in 1887 I felt an uplift such as nothing in public life, unless I except Mr. Cleveland’s tariff message of the year before, had ever given me.

But it was not the economic feature of the struggle in the Oil Region which deeply disturbed or interested me. It was what it was doing to people themselves, to the people I knew, to my father and mother and their friends. It was the divided town, the suspicion and greed and bitterness and defeats and surrenders. Here was a product meant to be a blessing to men—so I believed; and it was proving a curse to the very ones who had discovered it, developed it.

I began to fill pages with notes of things seen and heard, and finally I decided I should write a novel about it. Very secretly indeed, I went at it, assembling a cast, outlining a plot, writing two or three chapters. Poor stuff. Luckily I soon found out I was beyond my depth and gave it up.

From my notebooks I judge that I abandoned my novel the more readily because I had conceived what I called “a more fundamental research”! This was nothing less than a Science of Society to be illustrated by my own observations on men and women. Looking over it now, I see that the framework came from reading the voluminous discussions of the nature of society then flooding the public. I took my framework where I found it, but I filled it in with observations, gathered on all sides, of people I knew, heard about, particularly read about in the newspaper.

But this ambitious work soon met the same fate as the novel. It broke off at the end of the third chapter because I had concluded I could not construct society as it was until I knew more about woman. I suspected she had played a larger part in shaping society than she realized or perhaps was willing to admit. I was questioning the argument that this is entirely a man-made world. I had found too many woman-made parts in it to accept the characterization at its face value. My science of society would not be honest, I concluded, if the only part woman was allowed to play in it was that of doormat, toy, and tool. I was troubled, too, by the argument that women must be given suffrage if society was to be improved. Man had made a mess of the world, I was told; woman must take his tools and straighten things up. I did not feel the confidence of my courageous friends. “Why should we expect them to do better with the vote than men have done?” I asked. “Because they are women,” I was told. But they were human beings, like men, and they were human beings with no experience of the tools they wanted to use; and I had enough sense of the past to believe that experience counted, and that it would be wise for all men and women to consult it when they tried new ventures.

There had been women in public life in the past. What had they done? I had to satisfy myself before I went further with my science of society or joined the suffragists. It was humiliating not to be able to make up my mind quickly about the matter, as most of the women I knew did. What was the matter with me, I asked myself, that I could not be quickly sure? Why must I persist in the slow, tiresome practice of knowing more about things before I had an opinion? Suppose everybody did that. What chance for intuition, vision, emotion, action?

My notebooks show that I began my plodding by making out a list of women who seemed to offer food for reflection. The group that excited me most were the women of the French Revolution. I made little studies of several, wrote little pieces about them, and these little pieces I submitted to the editor of The Chautauquan; he published several of them—a study of Madame de Staël, of Marie Antoinette, of Madame Roland. But soon I became heartily ashamed of my sketches, written as they were from so meager an equipment. I felt this particularly about Madame Roland. I made up my mind that I was going to know more about this woman, that she probably would teach me what sort of contribution might be expected from a woman in public life.

That meant research. How was I to carry it on? Whatever studying I did depended on my ability to support myself while doing it; whatever studying I did while on The Chautauquan must be turned into something available for the magazine. My time and strength belonged to it. Obviously, I could not do sufficient research and continue my position; it was as impossible as it had been to act as preceptress of the Poland Union Seminary and at the same time carry on my study with the microscope. Where was I to carry on this research? There was but one place—Paris. And how was I to finance myself in Paris—a strange country and a strange tongue—long enough to write a book? I did not consider the possibility of getting a regular job: I did not want one. I wanted freedom, and I had an idea that there was no freedom in belonging to things, no freedom in security. It took time to convince myself that I dared go on my own. But finally I succeeded.

Coming to a decision has a loosening, tonic effect on a mind which has been floundering in uncertainty. Liberated, it rushes gaily, hopefully, to the charting of a new course. I had no sooner resolved to strike out on my own than my mind was bubbling with plans. I forgot that I was thirty-three years old and, according to the code of my time and my society, too old for new ventures; I forgot that outside of my very limited experience on The Chautauquan I knew nothing of the writing and publishing world, had literally no acquaintance among editors; I forgot that I was afraid of people, believed them all so much greater and more important than they often turned out to be that it cost me nervous chills to venture with a request into a stranger’s presence.

Dismissing all these real handicaps, I plunged gaily into planning for a career in journalism, self-directed, free-lance journalism. Surely I could find subjects enough in Paris to write about, subjects that would interest American newspapers. We were in the thick of a great agitation over the condition and the conduct of American cities. The Chautauquan had touched it occasionally. How did Paris keep house? I planned a syndicate of my own which would answer all questions. Out of my newspaper work might not articles grow for magazines? I thought so, and books, beginning of course with my study of Madame Roland. So long as I told nobody about my plans, they worked beautifully, carried me upward and onward into a new and happier, more profitable, more satisfying world. But when I announced my decision, laid out what I proposed to do, all the glow and confidence went out of me, all the weaknesses in my venture came again to the top. There were friends who said none too politely: “Remember you are past thirty. Women don’t make new places for themselves after thirty.” There were friends who resented my decision as a reflection on themselves. A woman whose friendship I valued said bluntly: “You are one of us. Aren’t we good enough for you?” My act was treason in her eyes. The whole force of the respectable circles to which I belonged, that respectable circle which knew as I did not the value of security won, the slender chance of replacing it if lost or abandoned, was against me and so out of friendliness.

When I told my editor-in-chief I was leaving, going to Paris to study, he was shocked. “How will you support yourself?” he asked, really anxious, knowing that I must depend on my own efforts.

“By writing,” I said.

“You’re not a writer,” he said. “You’ll starve.”

He had touched the weakest point in my venture: I was not a writer, and I knew it. I knew I never should be one in the high sense which I then and still more now give to that word. I had neither the endowment nor the passion nor the ambition to be a writer. I was rather a student, wanting to understand things quite regardless of how I could use that understanding if I reached it. There was much selfishness in my wanting to know for the sake of knowing, much of a dead scholar in me; and that dead scholar has always hung, more or less a weight, about my neck.

But if I was not a writer I had certain qualifications for the practice of the modest kind of journalism on which I had decided. I counted no little on my habit of planning in advance what I was going to do, and I had a strong conviction that a plan of my own was worth more than any plan which was made for me. Again, if I could not write, I did have a certain sense of what mattered in a subject and a strong conviction that it was my sense of what mattered, and not somebody else’s, that would give my work freshness and strength if it was to have any.