The Invisible Censor Part 3

A little later there will be more leaves than blossoms, the men coming from work giving a duller tone. But one is permitted to believe for this period that Fifth Avenue has a personality, parti-colored, decorative, flashing, frivolous, composed of many styles and many types. The working world intersects it rudely at Forty-second Street, but scarcely infiltrates it. A qualification distinguishes those who turn up and down the Avenue. It is not leisure that distinguishes them, or money, but their sense that there is romance in the appearance of money and leisure. Many of the white gloves are cotton. Many of the gloves are not white. But it is May-time, the afternoon, Fifth Avenue. One may pretend the world is gay.

They seem chaotic and impulsive, these crowds on Fifth Avenue. They move as by personal will. But dawn and sunset, morning and evening, common attractions govern them. There is a rhythm in these human tides.

V

For eighty years Henri Fabre watched the insects. He stayed with his friend the spider the round of the clock. Time, that reveals the spider, is also eloquent of man in his city. Time is the scene-shifter and the detective. Some day we should pitch a metropolitan observatory at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street,-some day, if we can find the time.

AS AN ALIEN FEELS

Twenty-five years ago I knew but dimly that the United States existed.

My first dream of it came, as well as I remember, from the strange gay flag that blew above a circus tent on the Fair Green. It was a Wild West Show, and for years I a.s.sociated America with the intoxication of the circus and, for no reason, with the tang of oranges. "Two a penny, two a penny, large penny oranges! Buy away an' ate away, large penny oranges!"

They were oranges from Seville then, but the odor of them and the fumes of circus excitement gave me a first gay ribald sense of the United States.

The next allied sense was gathered from a scallawag uncle. He had sought his fortune in America-sought it, as I infer now, on the rear end of a horse-car. When he came home he was full of odd and delicious oaths.

"Gosh h.e.l.l hang it" was his chief touch of American culture. He was a "Yank" in local parlance, a frequently drunken Yank. His fine drooping mustache too often drooped with porter. Once, a boy of nine, I steadied him home under the October stars and absorbed a long alcoholic reverie on the Horseshoe Falls. As we slept together that night in the rat-pattering loft, and as he absently appropriated all the horse-blanket, I had plenty of chance to shiver over the wonderments of the Horseshoe Falls.

This, with an instilled idea that America and America alone could offer "work," foreshadowed the American landscape. It is the bald hope of work that finally magnetizes us. .h.i.ther. But every dream and every loyalty was with the unhappy land from which I came.

For many months the music of New York harbor spoke only of home. Every outgoing steamer that opened its throat made me homesick. America was New York, and New York was down town, and down town was a vortex of new duties. There I learned the bewildering foreign tongue of earning a living, and the art of eating at Childs'. At night the hall-bedroom near Broadway, and the resourceless promenade up and down Broadway for amus.e.m.e.nt. The only women to say "dear," the women who say it on the street.

In Chicago, not in New York, I found the United States. The word "settlement" gave me my first puzzled intimation that there was somewhere a clew to this grim struggle down town. I had looked for it in boarding-houses. I had looked for it in stenographic night-schools. I had sought it in the blotchy Sunday newspaper, in Coney Island, in long jaunts up the Palisades. I had looked for it among the street-walkers, the first to proffer intimacy. And of course, not being clever enough, I had overlooked it. But in Chicago, as I say, I came on it at home.

America dawned for me in a social settlement. It dawned for me as a civilization and a faith. In all my first experiences of my employers I got not one glimpse of American civilization. Theirs was the language of smartness, alertness, brightness, success, efficiency, and I tried to learn it, but it was a difficult and alien tongue. Some of them were lawyers, but they were interested in penmanship and ability to clean ink-bottles. Some of them were business men, but they were interested in ability to typewrite and to keep the petty cash. It was not their fault.

Ours was not an affair of the heart. But if it had not been for the social settlement, I should still be an alien to the bone.

Till I knew a social settlement the American flag was still a flag on a circus-tent, a gay flag but cheap. The cheapness of the United States was the message of quick-lunch and the boarding-house, of vaudeville and Coney Island and the Sunday newspaper, of the promenade on Broadway. In the social settlement I came on something entirely different. Here on the ash-heap of Chicago was a blossom of something besides success. The house was saturated in the perfume of the stockyards, to make it sweet.

A trolley-line ran by its bedroom windows, to make it musical. It was thronged with Jews and Greeks and Italians and soulful visitors, to make it restful. It was inhabited by high-strung residents, to make it easy.

But it was the first place in all America where there came to me a sense of the intention of democracy, the first place where I found a flame by which the melting-pot melts. I heard queer words about it. The men, I learned, were mollycoddles, and the women were s.e.xually unemployed. The ruling cla.s.s spoke of "unsettlement workers" with animosity, the socialists of a mealy-mouthed compromise. Yet in that strange haven of clear humanitarian faith I discovered what I suppose I had been seeking-the knowledge that America had a soul.

How one discovers these things it is hard to put honestly. It is like trying to recall the first fair wind of spring. But I know that slowly and unconsciously the atmosphere of the settlement thawed out the asperity of alienism. There were Americans of many kinds in residence, from Illinois, from Michigan, from New York, English-Americans, Russian-Americans, Austrian-Americans, German-Americans, men who had gone to Princeton and Harvard, women spiritually lavendered in Bryn Mawr. The place bristled with hyphens. But the Americanism was of a kind that opened to the least pressure from without, and never shall I forget the way these residents with their "North Side" friends had managed so graciously to domesticate the annual festival of my own nationality.

That, strange though it may seem, is the more real sort of Americanization Day.

From Walt Whitman, eventually, the naturalizing alien breathes in American air, but I doubt if I should have ever known the meaning of Walt Whitman had I not lived in that initiating home. It was easy in later years to see new meanings in the American flag, to stand with Ethiopia Saluting the Colors, but it was in the settlement I found the sources from which it was dyed. For there, to my amazement, one was not expected to believe that man's proper place is on a Procrustean bed of profiteering. A different tradition of America lived there, one in which the earlier faiths had come through, in which the way to heaven was not necessarily up a skysc.r.a.per. In New England, later, I found many ideas of which the settlement was symptomatic, but as I imbibed them they were "America" for me.

What it means to come at last into possession of Lincoln, whose spirit is so precious to the social settlement, is probably unintelligible to Lincoln's normal inheritors. To understand this, however, is to understand the birth of a loyalty. In the countries from which we come there have been men of such humane ideals, but they have almost without exception been men beyond the pale. The heroes of the peoples of Europe have not been the governors of Europe. They have been the spokesmen of the governed. But here among America's governors and statesmen was a simple authenticator of humane ideals. To inherit him becomes for the European not an abandonment of old loyalties, but a summary of them in a new. In the microcosm of the settlement perhaps Lincolnism is too simple. Many of one's promptest acquiescences are revised as one meets and eats with the ruling cla.s.s later on. But the salt of this American soil is Lincoln. When one finds that, one is naturalized.

It is curious how the progress of naturalization becomes revealed to one. I still recollect with a thrill the first time I attended a national political convention and listened to the roll-call of the States. "Alabama! Arizona! Arkansas!" Empty names for many years, at last they were filled with one clear concept, the concept of the democratic experiment. "As I have walk'd in Alabama my morning walk"-the living appeal to each state by name recalled Whitman's generous amusing scope. "Far breath'd land! Arctic braced! Mexican breez'd! The diverse!

The compact! The Pennsylvanian! The Virginian! The double Carolinian!"

The orotund roll-call was not intended to evoke Whitman. It was intended, as it happened, to evoke votes for Taft and Sherman. But even these men were parts of the democratic experiment. And the vastly peopled hall answered for Walt Whitman, as the empurpled Penrose did not answer. It was they who were the leaves of our gra.s.s.

In Whitman, as William James has shown, there is an arrant mysticism which his own Democratic Vistas exposed in cold light. Yet into this credulity as to the virtue and possibilities of the people an alien is likely to enter if his first intimacy with America came in the aliens'

creche. A settlement is a creche for the step-children of Europe, and it is hard not to credit America at large with some of the impulses which make the settlement. Such, at any rate, is the tendency I experienced myself.

With this tendency, what of loyalty to the United States? I think of Lincoln and his effected mysticism by Union, union for the experiment, and I feel alive within me a complete identification with this land. The keenest realization of the nation reached me, as I recall, the first time I saw the capitol in Washington. Quite unsuspecting I strolled up the hill from the station, just about midnight, the streets gleaming after a warm shower. The plaza in front of the capitol was deserted. A few high sentinel lamps threw a lonely light down the wet steps and scantily illumined the pillars. Darkness veiled the dome. Standing apart completely by myself, I felt as never before the union of which this strength and simplicity was the symbol. The quietude of the night, the scent of April pervading it, gave to the lonely building a dignity such as I had seldom felt before. It seemed to me to stand for a fine and achieved determination, for a purpose maintained, for a quiet faith in the peoples and states that lay away behind it to far horizons. Lincoln, I thought, had perhaps looked from those steps on such a night in April, and felt the same promise of spring.

SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

One should not be ashamed to acknowledge the pursuit of the secret of life. That secret, however, is shockingly elusive. It is quite visible to me, somewhere in s.p.a.ce. Like a ball swung before a kitten, it taunts my eye. Like a kitten I cannot help making a lunge after it. But tied to the ball there seems to be a mischievous invisible string. My eye fixes the secret of life but it escapes my paw.

During the Russo-j.a.panese War I thought I had it. It involved a great deal of stern discipline. Physically it meant giving up meat, Boston garters and cigarettes. It seemed largely composed of rice, hot baths followed by rolling in the snow and jiu jitsu. The art of jiu jitsu hinted at the very secret itself. Here was the crude West seeking to slug its way to mastery while the commonest j.a.panese had only to lay hold of life by the little finger to reduce it to squealing submission.

The sinister power of jiu jitsu haunted me. Unless the West could learn it we were putty in j.a.panese hands. It was the acme of effortless subtlety. A people with such an art, combined with enn.o.bling vegetarianism, must necessarily be a superior people. I privately believed that the j.a.panese had employed it in sinking the Russian fleet.

Thomas Alva Edison displaced jiu jitsu in my soul and supplanted it with a colossal contempt for sleep. An insincere contempt for food I already protested. No nation could hope to take the field that subsisted on heavy foods-such unclean things as sausages and beer. The secret of world mastery was a diet of rice. "We all eat too much" became a fixed conviction. But Mr. Edison forced a greater conviction-we all sleep too much as well. This thought had first come to me from Arnold Bennett.

Sleep was a matter of habit, of bad habit. We sleep ourselves stupid.

Who could not afford to lose a minute's sleep? Reduce sleep by a minute a day-who would miss it? And in 500 days you would have got down to the cla.s.sical forty winks. Mr. Edison did not merely preach this gospel. He modestly indicated his own career to ill.u.s.trate its successful practicability. To cut down sleep and cut down food was the only way to function like a superman.

Once started on this question of habits I spent a life of increasing turmoil. From Plato I heard the word moderation, but from William Blake I learned that "the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." From Benjamin Franklin I gathered the importance of good habits, but William James gleefully told me to avoid all habits, even good ones. And then came Scientific Management.

The concept of scientific management practically wrecked my life. I discovered that there was a right way of doing everything and that I was doing everything wrongly. It was no new idea to me that we were all astray about the simplest things. We did not know how to breathe properly. We did not know how to sit properly. We did not know how to walk properly. We wore a hard hat: it was making us bald. We wore pointed shoes: it was unfair to our little toe. But scientific management did not dawdle over such details. It nonchalantly pointed out that "waste motions" were the chief characteristic of our lives.

One of the most fantastic persons in the world is the public official who, before he can write a postal order or a tax receipt, has to make preliminary curls of penmanship in the air. Observed by the scientific eye, we are much more fantastic ourselves. If our effective motions could be registered on a visual target, our record would be found to resemble that of savages who use ammunition without a sight on their guns. If we think that the ordinary soldier's marksmanship is wasteful, we may well look to ourselves. Our life is peppered with motions that fly wide and wild. It begins on awaking. We stretch our arms-waste motion! We ought to utilize that gesture for polishing our shoes. We rub our eyes-more foolishness. We should rub our eyes on Sunday for the rest of the week. But it is in processes like shaving that scientific management is really needed. Men flatter themselves that they shave with the minimum of gesture. They believe that they complete the operation under five minutes. But, excusing their inaccuracy, do they know that under the inspection of the scientific manager their performance would look as jagged as their razorblade under the microscope? The day will probably arrive when a superman will shave with one superb motion, as delightful to the soul as the uncoiling of an orange-skin in one long unbroken peel.

In reading the newspaper a man most betrays the haphazard, unscrutinized conduct of his morn. We pick up our paper without any suspicion that we are about to commit intellectual felony. We do not know that the news editor is in a conspiracy to play on our minds. If men gyrate too much physically, they certainly are just as anarchistic when they start to look over the news. It is not so much that they begin the day with devouring the details of a murder or lull themselves with some excuse for not reading a British note on the blockade. It is the fact that they are led by a ring running through their instincts to obey the particular editors they read.

Viewing myself as a human machine, I cannot understand how the human race has survived. Even conceding that I was normal, it is so much the worse for normality. I simply belong to a monstrous breed. There is not one important layman's practice that we have organized with regard to discipline and efficiency. If bricklayers waste motions in laying bricks, how about the motions wasted in lifting one's hat and the circ.u.mvolutions in putting links in one's cuffs? How about the impulsive child who wastes motions so recklessly in giving his mother a hug? The discovery seemed chilly that everything could be scientifically managed, everything could be perfected if one took up an alt.i.tudinous position at the center of one's life. But a fear of being chilly is a mark of inferiority. It ill becomes a human machine.

Yearning to live scrupulously on twenty-four hours a day, with vague longings to eat very little and sleep very little and master jiu jitsu and breathe deep and chew hard and practice Mueller exercises and give up tobacco and coffee and hug my mother scientifically and save waste motions in putting on my shirt, I happened to come across two European thinkers, a physician and a metaphysician. Paralleling Shakespeare's knowledge of dead languages by my own knowledge of live ones, I could not read these masters in the original to determine whether they blended like oil and vinegar or fought like water and oil. But in the eagerness of philosophic poverty I grasped just two delightful words from them, "instinct" and "repression." The metaphysician's secret of life, apparently, was to drop using one's so-called intelligence so frantically, to become more like those marvels of instinct, the hyena and the whale. The physician merely seemed to put the Ten Commandments in their place. To tell the truth, his detection of "repression" gave me no tangible promise. I exculpate the doctor. But the evolutionist turned my thoughts away from the early worries of discipline. This is the latest ball in the air that the kitten is chasing, with no suspicion of any tantalizing invisible string.

THE NEXT NEW YORK

You'd get awfully tired if I told you everything about my visit to New York in A. D. 1991. Some things are too complicated even to refer to, many things I've already forgotten, and a number of things I didn't understand. But as I had to return to my work as prison doctor in 1919 after a week of 1991 I grasped a few top impressions that may interest you. I hope I can give them to you straight.

The people on the street took my eye the minute I arrived in town. They looked so pleasing and they wore such stunning clothes. You know that at present, with the long indoor working day and the mixture of embalmed and storage and badly cooked food, the number of pasty-faced and emaciated men and women is very high. I exempt the hearty sweating cla.s.ses like the structural iron workers and teamsters and porters and even policemen. You could recruit a fine-looking club from the building trades. But stand any afternoon on Fifth Avenue and size up the condition of the pa.s.sers-by. You see shopgirls in thin cotton who are under-weight, under-slept, miserably nourished and devitalized. You see pimply waiters and stooping clerks. You see weary, fish-eyed mothers who look as if every day was washing day. Scores of sagging middle-aged people go by, who ought to be taken to a clinic. A little earlier in the afternoon it's almost impossible to share the sidewalk with the squat factory hands who overflow at the lunch hour. They're hard to kill, these poor fellows, but they're a puny, stinking, stunted, ill-favored horde. But the greater cleanliness of the people later on, and their better clothes, doesn't put them in a very different cla.s.s. You hear a good deal about the queens you see, but, really, the city streets of New York in 1919, streaming with people who have dun clothes to match dun faces, make you wonder what's the use.

These people in 1991 were good to look at! The three-hour working day had a lot to do with it, of course, and the basic economic changes. But what leads me first to speak of appearances is the huge responsibility that had gone to hygienists. I mean educational and administrative. In 1991, I found, people were really acting on the theory that you can't have civilization without sound bodies. The idea itself was as old as an old joke, a plat.i.tude in the mouth of every pill-vender. But the city was working on it as if it were a pivotal truth, and this meant a total revision of ordinary conduct.

Building the Panama Ca.n.a.l was a simple little job compared to making New York hygienic. Thirty years must have been spent in getting the folks to realize that no man and woman had any hygienic excuse for breeding children within the city limits. It was sixty years, I was told, before it was official that a city child was an illegitimate child. At first mothers kicked hard when the illegitimates were confiscated, but in the end they came to see justice in the human version of the slogan, "an acre and a cow." It got rid of the good old city-bred medical formula that the best way to handle pregnancy is to handle it as a pathological condition. Of course this prohibition movement made all sorts of people mad. A bunch of Gold Coast women held out for a long time on the score of personal liberty. Women had private city babies where the inspectors couldn't get at them. You know, just like private whisky. But in the end the prohibitionists won, and it had an enormous effect on cleaning up Manhattan. It cut out all but the detached and the transient residents, and with the breathing s.p.a.ce rules, these were far less than you'd suppose. Even with the great area of garden-roofs, the fixed residents were not much more than 100,000.

This demobilization wasn't special to New York. In other places there were much more rigid "units." Hygiene, nothing else, decided the unit size of cities in 1991. The old sprawling haphazard heterogeneous city gave place to the "modern" unit, permanent residences within the city never being open to families that had children under fourteen. For the heads of such families, however, the transportation problem was beautifully solved. Every unit city came to be so constructed that within half an hour of the "fresh air and exercise" homes, men and women could reach factories and warehouses in one direction, and offices and courts and banks and exchanges in another. This was after they realized the high cost of noise and dirt. The noiseless, dirtless, swift, freight train took the place of most trucks, and of course the remaining trucks shot up and down the non-pedestrian sanitary alleys. Another thing that interested me was the plexus of all the things that are to be exhibited.

This involved a great problem for New York before factories were deported and the moving "H. G. Wells" sidewalks introduced. How to economize time and s.p.a.ce, and yet not produce too close a h.o.m.ogeneity, too protein an intellectual and aesthetic and social diet, became a fascinating question. But the devotion of Blackwell's Island to summer and winter art and music, with all the other islands utilized for permanent exhibitions gave the city directors a certain leeway. The islands were made charming. I was quite struck over there, I think, on a new island in Flushing Bay, by the guild-managed shows of clothing, where you sat and watched the exhibits traveling on an endless belt, that stopped when you wanted it to-the kind that art exhibitions adopted for certain purposes. You see, the old department stores had pa.s.sed away as utterly as the delivery horse and display advertising and the non-preventive physician. And the old game of "seasons" and fashions was abandoned soon after the celebrated trial of Conde Nast for the undermining of the taste of shopgirls. The job of the purchasing consumer was steadily simplified. Youth of both s.e.xes learned fairly early in life what they could and what they couldn't do personally in the use of color. No one thought of copying another's color or design in dress any more than of copying another's oculist prescription. And with the guild consultants always ready to help out the troubled buyer, the business of shopping for clothes became as exciting and intelligent as the pastime of visiting a private exhibition. In this way, backed up by the guilds, a daring employment of color became generally favored. But a big item in this programme was the refusal of the guilds to prescribe any costumes for people who needed medical care first. It was useless, the guilds said, to decorate a mud-pie. And the hygienists agreed.

So you got back always to the doctrine of a sound body. In the hygienic riots of 1936 some horrible lynchings took place. An expert from the Chicago stockyards was then running the New York subways. He devised the upper-berth system by which the s.p.a.ce between people's heads and the roof of the car could be used on express trains for hanging up pa.s.sengers, like slabs of bacon. It was only after a few thousand citizens had failed to respond to the pulmotor which was kept at every station to revive weaklings, that the divine right of human beings to decent transportation became a real public issue. The hygienists made the great popular mistake of trying to save the stockyards man. They knew he had a sick soul. They believed that by psycho-a.n.a.lyzing him and showing he had always wanted to skin cats alive, they could put the traction question on a higher plane. Unfortunately the Hearst of that era took up the issue on the so-called popular side. He denounced the hygienists as heartless experts and showed how science was really a conspiracy in favor of the ruling cla.s.s. The hygienic riots resulted in a miserable set-back to the compulsory psycho-a.n.a.lysis of all criminals, but the b.l.o.o.d.y a.s.sa.s.sination of the leading hygienist of the day brought about a reaction, and within thirty years no judge was allowed to serve who wasn't an expert in psychic work and hygiene. This decision was greatly aided by the publication of a brochure revealing the relation of criminal verdicts to the established neuroses of city magistrates. The promise that this work would be extended and published as a supplement to the Federal Reporter went a long way toward converting the Bar. The old pretensions of the Bar went rapidly to pieces when political use was made of important psychological and physiological facts. The hygienists spoke of "the mighty stream of morbid compulsion broadening down to more morbid compulsion." By 1950 no man with an dipus complex could even get on the Real Estate ticket, and the utter collapse of militarism came about with the magnificently scientific biographies of all the prominent armament advocates in the evil era.

I had a surprise coming for me in the total disappearance of prisons.