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 classes 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 passers-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 class. 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 platitude 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 Canal 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 space 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 space, and yet not produce too close a homogeneity, too protein an intellectual and æsthetic 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 passed 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 Condé Nast for the undermining of the taste of shopgirls. The job of the purchasing consumer was steadily simplified. Youth of both sexes 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 space between people’s heads and the roof of the car could be used on express trains for hanging up passengers, 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-analyzing 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 class. The hygienic riots resulted in a miserable set-back to the compulsory psycho-analysis of all criminals, but the bloody assassination 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 Œdipus 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. Though I hate to confess it, I was a little amazed when I found that the old penology was just as historical in 1991 as the methodology of the Spanish Inquisition. Scientific men did possess models of prisons like Sing Sing and Trenton and Atlanta and Leavenworth, and the tiny advances in the latter prisons were thought amusing. But the deformity of the human minds and the social systems that permitted such prisons as ours was a matter for acute discussion and analysis everywhere, even in casual unspecialized groups. This general intelligence made it clear to me that social hygiene was never understood up to the middle of the twentieth century. The very name, after all, was appropriated by men afraid to specify the sex diseases they were then cleaning up. Puritanism, serviceable as it was in its time, had kept men from obtaining and examining the evidence necessary to right conclusions about conduct. “Think,” said one delightful youth to me, on my first day in 1991, “think of not knowing the first facts as to the physiological laws of continence. Think of starting out after general physical well-being by the preposterous road of universal military service. Think of electing Congressmen in the old days without applying even the Binet test to them. Why, to-day we know nothing about ‘the pursuit of happiness,’ fair as that object is, and yet we should no more stand for such indiscriminateness than we’d allow a day to go by without swimming.”

The youth, I should specify, was a female youth, what we call a girl. I had nothing to say to her. But my mind shot back to 1919, to which I was so soon to return, and I thought of a millionaire’s device I had once seen in Chicago. Deep in the basement of a great factory building there was a small electric-lighted cell, and in this bare cell there was a gymnastic framework, perhaps four feet high, on which was strapped an ordinary leather saddle. In front of the saddle there rose two thin steel sticks, and out of them came thin leather reins. By means of a clever arrangement of springs down below that responded to an electric current, the whole mechanism was able to move up and down and backward and forward in short stabby jerks that were supposed to stir up your gizzard in practically the same way as the motion of a horse. This was, in fact, a synthetic horse, bearing the same æsthetic relation to a real horse that a phonograph song does to a real song that is poured out, so to speak, in the sun. And here, in the bald basement cell with its two barred basement windows (closed), the constipated millionaires take their turns, whenever they can bear it, going through the canned motions of a ride, staring with bored eyes at the blind tiled wall in front of them. So far, in 1919, had the worship of Hygeia carried the helot-captains of industry. And from that basement, from that heathen symbol of perverted exercise, men had returned to a primary acceptance of the human body and a primary law that its necessities be everywhere observed. Not such a great accomplishment, I thought, in seventy years. And yet it gave to mankind the leg-up they had to have for the happiness they long for.

CHICAGO[1]

A good deal of nonsense is talked about the personality of towns. What most people enjoy about a town is familiarity, not personality, and they can give no penetrating account of their affection. “What is the finest town in the world?” the New York reporters recently asked a young recruit, eager for him to eulogize New York. “Why,” he answered, “San Malo, France. I was born there.” That is the usual reason, perhaps the best reason, why a person likes any place on earth. The clew is autobiographical.

But towns do have personality. Contrast London and New York, or Portland and Norfolk, or Madison and St. Augustine. Chicago certainly has a personality, and it would be obscurantism of the most modern kind to pretend that there was no “soul” in Chicago either to like or to dislike. People who have never lived in Chicago are usually content with disliking it, and those who have seen it superficially, or smelled it in passing when the stockyard factories were making glue, can seldom understand why Chicagoans love it. Official visitors, of course, profess to admire it, with the eagerness of anxious missionaries seeking to make good with cannibals. But except for men who knew Bursley or Belfast, and slipped into Chicago as into old slippers—men like Arnold Bennett and George Bermingham—there are few outsiders who really feel at home. Stevenson passed through it on his immigrant journey across the plains, pondering that one who had so promptly subscribed a sixpence to restore the city after the fire should be compelled to pay for his own ham and eggs. He thought Chicago great but gloomy. Kipling shrank from it like a sensitive plant. It horrified him. H. G. Wells thought it amazing, but chiefly amazing as a lapse from civilization. All of these leave little doubt how Chicago first hits the eye. It is, in fact, dirty, unruly and mean. It has size without spaciousness, opportunity without imaginativeness, action without climax, wealth without distinction. A sympathetic artist finds picturesqueness in it, though far from gracious where most characteristic; but for the most part it is shoddy, dingy and vulgar, making more noise downtown than a boiler works, and raining smuts all day as a symbolic reproach from heaven. It is not for its beaux yeux that the outsider begins to love the town.

But a great town is like the elephant of the fable; one must see it altogether before one can define it; one can believe almost anything monstrous from a partial view. Time, in the case of Chicago, is supremely necessary—about three years as a minimum. Then its goodness passeth all pre-matrimonial understanding; its essence is disclosed.

Mr. H. C. Chatfield-Taylor has qualified, so far as time is concerned, to speak of Chicago, and I think it would be churlish not to agree that from the standpoint of the old settler he has done his city proud. All old Chicagoans will recognize at once why Mr. Taylor should go back to the beginning, and they will be delighted at the clarity with which the early history is expounded, as well as the era before the Civil War. They will also understand and rejoice over the repetition of grand old names—Gordon S. Hubbard, John Kinzie, Mark Beaubien, Uranus H. Crosby, Sherman of the Sherman hotel, General Hart L. Stewart and Long John Wentworth. In every town in the world there is, of course, a Long John or a Big Bill, but Chicagoans will savor this reference to their own familiar, and will delight in the snug feeling that they too “knew Chicago when.” Mr. Taylor is also dear to his townsmen when he harks back to days before the Fire. In those days the West-siders were a little superior because they had the Episcopal Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, and the church-going folk could hear the “fast young men” speeding trotting horses past the church doors. Such performances seemed fairly worldly, but later did not Mr. Taylor himself drive his high-steppers to the races at Washington Park, and did he not woo the heart of the city where gilded youth cherished a “nod of recognition from Potter Palmer, John B. Drake, or John A. Rice.” The dinners of antelope steak and roast buffalo at the Grand Pacific recall a Chicago antedating the World’s Fair that left strong traces into the twentieth century, a Chicago that is commemorated with grace and kindliness in the fair pages of this book.

But this is not enough. If Mr. Taylor’s heart lingers among the “marble-fronts” of his youth, this is not peculiarly Chicagoan. Such fond reminiscence is the common nature of man. And a better basis for loving Chicago must be offered than the evidence that one teethed on it, battered darling that it is. Mr. Taylor’s better explanation, as I read it, is extremely significant. He identifies himself fully and eagerly with the New Englanders who made the town. Bounty-jumpers and squatters and speculators, war widows and politicians and anarchists and aliens—all these go into his perspective, as do the emergencies of the Fire and the splendors of the Fair. But the marrow of his pride in Chicago is his community with its origins in “men, like myself, of New England blood, whose fathers felled our forests and tilled our prairie land.” Since the time he was born, he tells us, more than two million people have been added to the population of Chicago. Only a fifth of the Great West Side are now American-born, and the Lake Shore Drive was still a cemetery when Mr. Taylor was a boy on that dignified West Side. This links Mr. Taylor closely to the beginning of things. Hence he likes to insist in his kindly spirit that Chicago’s puritan “aristocracy” is the source of Chicago altruism, that “the society of Chicago [is] more puritanical than that of any great city in the world,” and that “back of Chicago’s strenuousness and vim stands the spirit of her founders holding her in leash, the tenets of the Pilgrim Fathers being still a potent factor in her life.... She possesses a New England conscience to leaven her diverse character and make her truly—the pulse of America.”

Every bird takes what he finds to build his own spiritual nest. Personally, I love Chicago, ugly and wild and rude, but I prefer to see it as an impuritan. Its sprawling hideousness, indeed, has always seemed a direct result of the private-minded policy that distinguished Chicago’s big little men. The triumvirate that Mr. Taylor mentions had no statesmanship in them. One was an admirable huckster, another an inflexible paternalist, the third a fine old philistine who carved a destiny in ham. But these men gave themselves and their city to business enterprise in its ugliest manifestation. The city of course has its remissions, its loveliness, but the incidental brutality of that enterprise is a main characteristic of the city, a characteristic barely suggested by Mr. Taylor, not clearly imagined by Mr. Hornby in his graceful drawings, so beautifully reproduced.

One would like, as a corrective to Mr. Taylor’s pleasant picture, some leaves from Upton Sinclair’s Jungle, Jack London’s Iron Heel, Frank Norris’s Pit, H. K. Webster’s Great Adventure, the fiction of Edith Wyatt and Henry Fuller and Robert Herrick and Will Paine and Weber Linn and Sherwood Anderson, the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg, the prose of Jane Addams. No one who looked at the City Council ten years ago, for example, can forget the brutality of that institution of collective life.

They called the old-time aldermen the “gray wolves.” They looked like wolves, cold-eyed, grizzled, evil. They preyed on the city South side, West side, North side, making the shaky tenements and black brothels and sprawling immigrant-filled industries pay tribute in twenty ways. One night, curious to see Chicago at its worst, four of us went to a place that was glibly described as “the wickedest place in the world.” It was a saloon under the West side elevated, and a room back of the saloon. At first it seemed merely dirty and meager, with its runty negro at the raucous piano. But at last the regular customers collected; the sots, the dead-beats, the human wreckage of both sexes, the woman of a fat pallor, the woman without a nose.... They surrounded us, piled against us, clawed us. And that, in its way, is Chicago, Stead’s Satanic vision of it revealed.

But the other side of that hideousness in Chicago is the thing one loves it for, the large freedom from caste and cant which is so much an essential of democracy, the cordiality which comes with fraternity, the access to men and life of all kinds. Chicago is a scrimmage but also an adventure, a frank and passionate creator struggling with hucksters and hogsters, a blundering friend to genius among the assassins of genius, a frontier against the Europe that meant an established order, an order of succession and a weary bread-line. In Chicago, for all its philistinism, there is the condition of hope that is half the spiritual battle, whatever stockades the puritans try to build. It is that that makes one lament the silence in Mr. Taylor’s pleasant book. But the puritanical tradition requires silence. Polite and refined, self-centered and private-minded, attached to property and content within limitations, it made visible Chicago what it is.

[1]Chicago, by H. C. Chatfield-Taylor. Illustrations by Lester G. Hornby. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.