XXXII. THE STAR OF SPRINGFIELD
Next day, tramping to Flat Top Mountain, we talked of Springfield and Abraham Lincoln. We were in stately forests, and the ancient mould under the feet silenced our steps. We walked slowly, and stopped to pick the big black huckleberries, paused to climb over stricken trees, paused to eat the raspberries from the undergrowth of raspberry bushes.
“I’d like you to think of Lincoln as a poor man,” said Vachel, “an eccentric—laughed at, sneered at a great deal, entirely underestimated, a man who was a mystic, who believed in dreams and presentiments and told many dreams to his Cabinet with great gravity. Politicians want to see in him a conventional great man now, but in his life-time he was called eccentric. He was as much laughed at as Johnny Appleseed. But if a man is called eccentric in this country, or much laughed at, you’ll often find he was a mystic or a genius of some kind.”
One of Vachel’s alternative ideas for a tramp was to do a Springfield star, making the city our centre to radiate outward, or, could I say, walk radiantly outward, in one direction, then in another, all round the compass. “As you went to Bethlehem with the Russian pilgrims so you could pilgrimage to our Bethlehem,” said he, “see our star.”
People from all parts of the world come to Springfield to see the Lincoln home, to visit Salem and the grave of Anne Rutledge, to salute Lincoln’s grave. They do so, not because they are told to do so, or because there are organised tours, but because the heart moves them to it.
But there are also many people in America ready to turn their backs on the simple Abe Lincoln of Springfield. He is too rough for them, too untidy, too raw. They would fain think of him as a man of aplomb, a man of a well-established family, one of the governing class. Lincoln’s son Robert is president of the Pullman Car Company, and they would see the father in the son and surmise a family well-lined, well-wadded, well-upholstered. In that class you can get to power, and be carried there, and sleep on the way. Belong to that class and all is yours!
But the real Abe Lincoln gives the lie to this. It offends some people to the heart to think that Lincoln’s father lived in a three-ways-round log-cabin with the fourth side not built in, that young Abraham was a barge-man, what we call in England a bargee, and came down the Sangamon River in a flat-bottomed boat with a cargo and got stuck on the dam at Salem and accepted a job there, and slept in a sort of loft over a ramshackle tavern, men one side of a plank, women the other, and that he rose out of the very depths of American life.
“What Lincoln did, any boy in the United States can aspire to do,” cried Vachel as we sat on a log together and looked at the shadow and shine of the myriad-fold population of trees. “We’ve no governing class. We’ve only got a class that thinks it is the governing class, but it is the most barren in the community. Lincoln’s life shows the real truth. Any one who feels he has it in him can rise to the Presidency of the United States.”
I promised to make the pilgrimage to the Lincoln shrines when our tramp should be over and we returned to Springfield. Then Vachel was fired by his pet fancies about his native city. He would have it all painted white, like the Chicago World’s Fair. “White harmonises all sizes and shapes of houses and all types of architectural design. And it has an effect on the mind. It suggests the ideal. If the city were all painted white, then people would try to live up to its appearance. Then also it would stand out among all cities of America. The very fact of its painting itself white would go into every newspaper in the United States, it would be known in all English-speaking lands and would direct world-attention to the shrine of Abraham Lincoln,” said he.
It seemed to me a practical idea, and I bade him preach it still. He’d find valuable allies in the paint merchants and painters of Springfield anyway. If America could go “dry” one need not despair of Springfield painting itself white. “In America all things are possible,” as a German street-song says.
He returned once more to his story of the ten who died for the flag of Springfield—the new flag of the city. “I’ve always felt,” said he, “that there could be found at least ten men among the unlikely fellows who loaf around our town square ready to give their lives for Springfield. If ever there came a time when Springfield was in danger or its flag likely to be dishonoured, I know it is from the tramps and wasters that something would come. At least, from the people we don’t know.”
“If only I could write that idea as Edgar Allan Poe wrote ‘King Pest,’” said the poet, “then I’d tell the truth and shame the Devil.”
“Yet Springfield was once disgraced by a most unholy race-riot,” my companion went on. “It was in 1908, the centenary of Lincoln’s birth, and I felt it as a terrible disgrace. The negro victims were entirely innocent. It was a shocking affair.”
We had by this time lifted ourselves high out of the gloomy valleys and had attained to a rarer atmosphere and a clearer world, where the forest lay below like a book that has been read and above it rose the eternal hills lifting their mighty granite shoulders to the sky. We saw in retrospect many of the mountains we had climbed. “Going-to-the-Sun” and “Heaven’s Peak” were remote but grandiose on the horizon. We were on a much-exposed ridge of Flat Top Mountain, and we camped in a wintry spot beside a natural table of rock. On the rock we spread our supper; on the ground our blankets. The wind blew the flaps of our blankets, it blew away the flaming embers of the bonfire which we made, and it ignited the grass, and when we had put the fire out on one side it broke out on the other, and yet there was not enough of a fire to warm us. Night came on, and we sought new fuel. Vachel hobbled beside me and discoursed in a preoccupied way about Springfield and its race-riot.
“I’m with you all the way about the Negroes, Stephen,” said he, as we struggled to upraise an embedded sapling which the snows had tumbled over in the spring. “If you write about the Negro again, say I’m with you, I subscribe to it. I’ll go the limit with you.”
We raised the entangled, difficult, fallen tree up on to the star-radii of its roots, and looked down the wild slope to where our fire was burning and blowing. It was dark up there where we were, and the fire below gleamed in the darkness. We rolled the sapling down to the fire and on to it, and stamped out the flames in the grass, and then returned into the darkness for another sapling.
“You know how I felt in Springfield when that riot occurred,” said Vachel. “I visited all the leading Negroes and most of the leading white men. I bombarded the newspapers with letters. And I don’t know that it did any good. You couldn’t be sure that another onslaught on the coloured people wouldn’t occur to-morrow.”
As we talked we sought and collected withered branches, wind-riven arms of the pines. Some we had to pull out of the earth, others we could not pull out.
“I believe the only way to stop lynching would be to break into a lynching crowd and make them either lynch you instead of the Negro or lynch you for interfering. When they realised what they had done their hearts would be touched, their consciences would be shocked,” said Vachel.
We had unwieldy faggots in our arms and so walked closely together down the hill, supporting one another’s wood.
“It is expedient that one man should die for the people once more,” said the poet.
We made up a good fire; we boiled a pot of coffee and fried a heap of beans and stewed a cup of apricots and cut the bread and untied the sugar-bag and exposed the dried raisins, of which we had a capacious little sack-full and wrapped ourselves round and sat by the fire and fed and talked—
“Springfield was just about to attract the attention of the world in a special way, as the shrine of Lincoln, when that riot broke out,” said Vachel. “Large schemes had been approved for the improvement of the city. All promised well. Then suddenly this race-riot broke out, and Springfield was the subject of cartoons all over the United States. The finger of scorn was pointed at Lincoln’s city. Springfield is still trying to live it down.”
I confessed it was difficult to think of Springfield as an American Bethlehem after it had been the scene of a race-riot. That was indeed a smudge on its fair name. Quiet little Bethlehem in Palestine has at least kept clear of that. Still even Bethlehem could not help it if some ugly human doings occurred there.
It was curious that the race-riot sprang from the “poor Whites,” and yet from the same poor Whites Vachel was ready to find ten who would die for the Flag.
I told my thought then, and that was, that the poor white population, heroic as it was, would not be deterred by the self-sacrifice of one of their number for the sake of the Blacks. This very year an English clergyman was stripped and beaten almost to death by a gang of Whites in Florida, just because he asked a congregation for fair play for the Negro. And nothing happened to the gang. No prosecutions followed. Lynch is powerful when law is weak.
“The social conscience is dull,” said the poet sadly. “The Negro question is the one which has most plagued America, and most people have given it up and decided not to fret their brains any more about it. You see, we even fought a war for it once, and we’re always quarrelling about it. A news paragraph about a man being burned by a mob will not even catch the notice of the newspaper reader. It either does not stir his imagination, or he refuses to think about it.”
“But it brings America into disrespect in Europe. It takes away from the force of her moral example,” said I.
Lindsay knew that. We discussed then the daring appeal of Governor Dorsey of Georgia to the people of that State to mend their ways. We discussed South Africa and then India.
And then we went for more wood, and the stars shone out above us, peerless in their righteousness, rolling along deliberately as ever on their fixed ways. “How brightly they shine on us,” said I. “We should be as they. If they erred and strayed from their ways as we do, what a mad universe ’twould be.”
“And one of them,” said the poet, “is the star of Bethlehem, the star that rested over Bethlehem and then rested over Springfield for a while.”
“Up here in the mountains we see the stars, but down there in the forests and dark valleys it is not so easy,” said I.
We talked of Springfield by the firelight till one of us fell asleep. One picture remains in my mind, and that is of a Hindu who sought out Vachel Lindsay after he had been to Abraham Lincoln’s home. “Show me now the home of the poet who lives among you,” said the Hindu.
A Hindu came to Springfield,
He saw the home of Lincoln,
He saw the court of Lincoln,
He saw the streets he trod.
“Now show me,” quoth the Hindu,
Show me your poet Lindsay,
Show me your prophet Lindsay,
Who sings to-day to God.
The guide to Fifth Street therefore led
And showed the house where Lindsay fed.
And the Hindu much rejoiced and said:
“I know that Springfield is not dead.”
GOOD-DAY MR PRESIDENT