Introducing the American Spirit Part 11

It was an exhilarating experience to shake the hand and look into the face of a woman who had defied the monied interests of her state, who had jeopardized her comforts and her position, even her life, to loosen the hold of graft from the schools of the state.

It was inspiring to hear from a mild mannered, unaggressive looking man how he had helped wipe out brothels and evil dance halls, broken up the connivance of the police with the criminal element and put through a positive program of rational, clean amus.e.m.e.nts for the people.

We visited a business plant, the architecture and equipment of which are as unique as are its owner's business methods. We were told the story (not by himself) of how a brave and good man, single handed, struggled against bosses, political cliques and large financial interests in league with them, and all but freed the city from its most dangerously decent foes.

We were shown hills which the citizens had faith enough to remove and the hollows into which they had cast them; a raging river which they meant to control, and ugly, sickening slums which were doomed to go, and that none too soon; the old things which were to become new, and crooked things which were to be made straight.

Thirty-three years before the Herr Director had heard stories of vanishing buffaloes and the last struggles with the Indians. He had met scouts, hunters and soldiers. This was a new type of fighters, much less picturesque, but fit successors to those valiant pioneers. I rescued my guests from a visit to the stock-yards (why any one should care to show off stock-yards I do not know), and the committee released its hold upon us so that we might make our toilettes for the reception which preceded the banquet.

If there is anything more conducive to creating a barrier to real human contact than a reception, I have not seen it, unless it be a reception with orchestral accompaniment; this was such an one, and its chief function seemed to be to drown conversation.

The ladies of our party were happy because this was one of the few occasions on our trip when they could wear evening gowns.

The Frau Directorin was astonished beyond measure when she heard that some of the women on the reception committee of this club were mothers (to a limited degree, it is true), that they had, at the most, two servants, and that some of them had none; that they were interested in Literary Clubs and civic affairs, served on school boards and church committees, and were doing various other things to help the Creator manage His universe.

The German woman, who has adhered to the program marked out for her by the Emperor, the "three K's," "_Kuche, Kirche und Kinder_" stands aghast at the strenuous lives many of our women lead. The Frau Directorin, who has servants for the kitchen and the children, upon whom the third K, the Church, lays no burden in the way of missionary meetings, fairs and suppers, who does not have to reduce her flesh to be in the fashion, and whose social position is determined by her husband's station in life, may well wear an unruffled smile and keep an unfurrowed brow.

At the banquet, the waiters and the orchestra vied with each other in noise making, and it was a relief when, with the bringing of the black coffee, they all disappeared, and the toast-master rose and began unbottling his stock of stories. Nowhere in the world is there such a thirst for stories as in America, and a group of men after a banquet has an unlimited capacity for absorbing and enjoying them.

There were four scheduled speakers and a few who expected to be called upon unexpectedly, among them the Herr Director; a Glee Club was to sing before, between and after the speeches; so the toast-master did not stop telling stories any too soon.

The first speaker of the evening was a woman who well deserved the cheers which greeted her appearance. Her address on Workmen's Compensation was so clear, so aptly put, so well reasoned through and so within the limit of time a.s.signed her, that when she finished, the enthusiastic Herr Director shouted: "Bravo! bravo!" loud enough to be heard above the less euphonious sound of hand clapping, in which form of applause the American audience indulges.

The address was an eloquent but unemotional plea for fair play for the working man, an arraignment of present practices, cruelly sickening in detail, and frightful as a revelation of the att.i.tude of large industrial interests towards labor. It showed the fair-mindedness of the men there, that they listened so approvingly, in spite of the fact that a large number of them was in similar relationship to labor, and that the proposed law for which she pleaded would be against their own interests.

After the lady's address, the Glee Club sang and then the United States Senator was introduced. I have forgotten his subject, but that does not matter, for it had no relation to what he said. It was the kind of address which could be delivered with equal propriety at a Grangers'

picnic or a political meeting.

There were two things which the senator did not know: First, that his audience had outgrown that particular kind of address, and second, when to stop. When his final finally was finally spoken, the Glee Club sang again, after which the Herr Director was called upon to speak. He was listened to most attentively as he told how German cities are built, governed, provisioned and lighted.

There were at least four speeches beside my own, and it was long past midnight when the Glee Club sang its last glee, and the club adjourned to meet again the next month, when it would receive other more or less distinguished guests, eat a six course dinner and listen to half a dozen speakers, each one of them eager to right the wrongs of this universe.

When the Herr Director had said good-bye to the hundred or more people who told him how much they enjoyed his address, he retired in a most happy mood. I found him chuckling as he untied his cravat.

"It was lovely, perfectly lovely," he said; "but what children they are."

"Yes," I replied, "they are children; and, like children, are eager to learn."

XI

_The American Spirit Among the Mormons_

Both the Herr Director and his wife had a strange desire to see the Mormons. They explained it by saying that besides the Indians whom they had as yet not seen, and the Negroes whom they had seen everywhere, they always thought of the Mormons as most American, that is most unlike other people.

The Rocky Mountains, as I had expected, did not impress them. From the car window they seemed more like elevated plains, with here and there a restless chain of hills in the distance.

"As restless as the American people," quoth the Herr Director. "Your plains and your mountains seem to be fighting with each other."

I hoped that the plains would win the fight and pointed out another, more visible struggle--that of man with the desert. I admitted that the Rocky Mountains which he had thus far seen were uninteresting from the scenic standpoint, especially as compared with the beauty of the Alps, those snow-capped mountains with meadows to the timber line, their picturesque villages and herders' huts all as trim and neat and finished as the carving one buys in Interlaken or Luzerne.

From the human standpoint, the Rockies are infinitely more interesting, for there the elemental struggle is still going on. A giant race is taming tumultuous rivers, and forcing their waters through flumes and tunnels into mighty reservoirs on the mountainsides and in the valleys.

No indolent, unaspiring, uninventive, docile people could survive in the Rockies.

In common with many Americans, my guests believed that this matter of irrigation is as easy as turning water from a faucet into a basin; and that all a man has to do is to drop his seed into the ground and watch it grow. I showed them farms, desolate and forbidding, which men had to level or lift, ditch and plow and harrow; a back-breaking, often a heart-breaking task. In such an environment they built shacks which only accentuated the loneliness--where women lived and children were born, where hopes were cherished and G.o.d was worshipped.

It was an Old Testament environment, the wilderness. Compared with these pioneers the Israelites had an easy task. They sent spies into the Promised Land where they found and from which they brought back grapes and pomegranates; but to stay in the wilderness, to drive back the drought inch by inch, to kill coyotes and rattlesnakes one by one, to contend with claim jumpers, real estate agents, water right privileges and unscrupulous lawyers, and then raise grapes and pomegranates, families, churches, schools and colleges--that seems to me the greater and more heroic task. And it was done by men with the courage of soldiers and the vision of prophets, who turned that land of drought, alkali and sage-brush into one "flowing with milk and honey." Because in a certain portion of that desert those who were the pioneers and performed those tasks were Mormons, takes nothing from the glory of the achievement.

As we neared Salt Lake City the Frau Directorin looked into every house, eager to detect the numerous wives whom she expected to see surrounding one man; while the Herr Director marvelled at the beauty of the vast Salt Lake valley which, with its poplars and mountains and its intensively cultivated farms, reminded him of Lombardy, that beautiful stretch of country along the railway from Milan to Boulogna.

Salt Lake City is sufficiently different from other cities we had seen to arouse interest; but as in Rome the Vatican overshadows everything else, so here the Temple and the Tabernacle hold one's attention, and work upon one's imagination.

We had scarcely put ourselves to rights in our rooms at the Hotel Utah, as pretentious and comfortable as any in the country, before we were out on the streets, looking for Mormons. There is a fairly defined type and I thought I knew it, for I have lectured before Mormon audiences; but out upon the busy city streets it was quite impossible for me to gratify the curiosity of the Frau Directorin by pointing them out to her. I did tell her that a third of the population was non-Mormon and she looked curiously at two out of every three persons we met without, however, being able to say definitely that she had seen a real, live specimen.

Not wishing to join the crowd of tourists who were taken in relays through the Tabernacle and other buildings open to the curious among the Gentiles, we walked through the park, and stopping before the monument to Joseph Smith I took the opportunity to enlighten my guests upon the history of that singular personality, and the church of which he was the founder.

Evidently my remarks were overheard, and before I realized it I was in a discussion of Mormon doctrines with a woman, a zealous defender of her faith, whose religious zeal shone out of her face, which was homely enough to need this adornment to save it from repulsive ugliness.

Of course she believed implicitly in the Book of Mormon, the plates of which were found, and translated from a language which the best informed philologists have never known to exist; in a G.o.d who has body, parts and pa.s.sions, in spirits which fill Heaven, and clamor to be born onto the Earth, in the baptism for the dead, and in that strange doctrine, that no woman can be saved without being sealed to a man, upon which the practice of polygamy rested.

The Herr Director did not quite understand, and I had to explain each of these dogmas as well as I could, and then the Frau Directorin, not understanding anything, begged to be told about the one thing in which she was primarily interested, their belief in regard to marriage. I asked the lady to explain this doctrine of the Mormons, to which she replied that they are not Mormons, but Latter Day Saints. She was indeed a saint, for she was not offended by our curiosity, nor the lack of seriousness with which we were discussing the subject.

She addressed the Frau Directorin: "You are married to your husband."

The Frau Directorin understood and nodded comprehendingly; "but," the saint continued, "you are married to him only for time."

"No, no, not for a time, not for a time!" the Frau Directorin cried, clinging to her husband, who had jokingly threatened that when they reached Utah he would improve the occasion and double his blessings.

"You could not be married to him any other way unless you are sealed according to our rites; we alone marry for eternity."

"Oh!" said the facetious Herr Director, "you believe in eternal punishment." When I translated that to the Frau Directorin she slapped him playfully.

He asked our guide how many wives he could marry if he became a Latter Day Saint and she said there would be no limit to the wives he could have sealed to him; but according to the latest ruling of the church and in conformity with the laws of the United States, only one to live with here upon the earth; so he decided to "bear the ills he had," and not "fly to others that he knew not of."

The saint could not have expected her teaching to take root in soil so shallow, but she determined to sow a few more seeds, and showed us the interior of the Tabernacle with its "largest organ in the world and its perfect acoustics." The Frau Directorin tried her charming voice and sang, much to the delight of the saint, who confessed to three consuming pa.s.sions. She loved to sing better than to eat, next in order came dancing, which seems to be a specialty among Mormons, and evidently does not interfere with their piety, and third, that of saving feminine souls from destruction, on account of their unmarried state. To satisfy this last pa.s.sion she has had ten thousand of her female ancestors married to well-known Mormons. To accomplish this, she had her genealogical tree traced back to prehistoric times, and had spent her fortune upon that pious extravagance. She told us that she was a plural wife, and living with her husband merely in the celestial relationship: but she believed polygamy to be in harmony with the will of G.o.d, and that the women as a whole favor it.

As we returned to our hotel, the Frau Directorin amused herself by asking each child she met: "How much brothers and sisters you are?" I was profoundly thankful she did not stop the men to ask them about the number of their wives.

Having promised her that I would introduce her to a real, live Mormon who as yet had only one wife, she could hardly wait until dinner, to which I had invited my Mormon acquaintance. He proved to be a very normal sort of man whose face betrayed his European peasant ancestry, his father and mother having emigrated from Switzerland, lured across by the promise of land, and an all but perfect Zion. They had pa.s.sed through every hardship of the early persecutions, and the march across the plains and mountains. He himself had grown up in the martyrs' faith, which remained unshaken until he was sent to college.

Although his teachers were Mormons they could not explain away all the inconsistencies of Mormon history and belief; doubts a.s.sailed him, and when in due course he became a missionary and it fell to his lot to go to Europe, instead of making converts, he became one. The six years abroad were spent in the study of history, and, applying the methods to his own church and its Book of Mormon, he began to doubt, and is a doubter still. Yet so strong were the ties that bound him that he did not formally sever his connection with the church, and unless he is ejected from that communion he will doubtless remain within its fold.

He belongs to an increasingly large group of young Mormons who, while they themselves have lost faith in the church and its doctrines, believe that they must remain loyal to those whose belief is still unshaken, help them to discard the crudest elements of their doctrine and so gradually democratize the whole inst.i.tution.

The growth of the church has been checked and the accession of foreign converts has almost ceased, due to the prohibition of polygamy which was a lure to the evil minded, and due also to the fact that immigration is not being encouraged.