In Quest of El Dorado

by Stephen Graham

5

But of course it is not the four hundred of New York who are New York, but, as O. Henry briefly and brilliantly suggested in his book of stories, it is the four million—and no upper four thousand or upper forty thousand can be America.

Indeed, in many vital matters, the forty thousand have been thwarted by the hundred million. The forty thousand did not want Prohibition and they were not eager for the enfranchisement of women. The forty thousand at least professed themselves in favor of the Versailles Treaty and ready to help Europe to peace. The "representative" American in Europe nearly always treats Prohibition as a joke, or blames it on the women's vote, and as regards our European tangle is all optimism and happy encouragement.

English celebrities visiting America are usually entertained by one of the forty thousand who make a display of liquor, warming the vitals of our said celebrities who come back to England with an idea of a new drunken America.

You would not think that America was a pious, God-fearing country with some millions of people leading sober and righteous lives and yearning for the establishment of the Kingdom. The moral passion of the American masses is kept out of sight as if it were something pitiful or disgraceful. The forty thousand would not care to see America defined as—the nation which voted itself dry. It would rather define America as—the nation which built the Panama Canal. There is in a way a conflict between the claims of moral achievement and material achievement. Thus again in some minds America is the nation which won the war, but in many more she is the nation which fed starving Europe. To many she is the nation of Roosevelt, but to many more she is the nation of Abraham Lincoln.

Still to-day, the moral passion of America identifies America, and it is a pity that the world outside, and even part of America herself, should be deceived by the noisy Jazz band exterior by which America seems to choose to signalize herself to the world.

To what extent America has been "cleaned up" has never been divulged to the outside world. The forty thousand are ashamed of it. The others do not travel much and have little means of comparison. It is not only that drunkenness has been eliminated, but vices of other kinds.

"What an extraordinary moral city, compared with Paris or London!" was Wilfrid Ewart's surprised remark to me. And he had been walking Broadway at midnight without remarking a single fille de joie. And in order to make a test of the alleged "wetness" of America, Vachel Lindsay and I made a tour of the old barrooms of New York. The poet was for several years a Y. M. C. A. worker, and he had a round of barrooms, visiting them all regularly, and distributing literature relating to activities other than the consumption of beer. We made a remarkable pilgrimage together.

By every reckoning New York and Chicago are the richest fields for the "boot-legger" that America holds. If you can prove that these are relatively free of liquor you can be sure that the rest of America is very free. What did we find?

In one old bar, one bartender, four or five loungers with pots, and in the back a solitary foreign woman resting her bare arms on a sodden table, waiting for a customer. Every one regarded us suspiciously and nervously. Another bar had been converted into a restaurant; there was a lookout man at the door, and he worked a STOP-GO indicator in the restaurant. When the indicator turned to STOP the customers put their drinks under the table; when it returned to GO they brought it out again. That seemed to us a pretty flagrant case of "wetness." But as Vachel remarked to me—even there all the objectionable aspects of the saloon have been removed. No one objects on moral grounds to people having wine with their meals. It is the filth, the vice, the point of view of the barroom, that America fought and these can never come back.

Five or six large saloons had been converted into shops; sometimes one saloon into three shops, leased for considerable spaces of time and quite lost to drinking. Those bars which remained, shut or selling root beer, seemed to be holding on to valuable sites in the hope that after all there might be a reversal of the Prohibition Law.

But, as Lindsay pointed out, Prohibition is now part of the Constitution; it was adopted by many States prior to 1917, it has been enacted separately by all the States as well as by the Federal Government, and to go back on it it would have to be voted out by a majority of the States of the Union once more—which is unthinkable.

Wilfrid Ewart made many jests at the expense of the Statue of Liberty. All new-come Englishmen do. How can it be a "sweet land of liberty when one's liberty to have a drink is taken away?" is a favorite query.

The true answer to that question is that America, like England, is governed by majority opinions. The majority of American citizens wanted the abolition of the saloon, and they got it.

As regards the advantage of it, I saw New York in 1913 and can compare its huge gin-palaces of that time, the swarms of unfortunate girls going in and out, the police exploitation of them, the night court for women on Sixth Avenue, with cleaned-up New York in 1922. The advantage seems inestimable.

As regards the reality of Prohibition, I will say this—Even near the Mexican Border, after a forty-mile ride in the snow, when one would give a good deal for a stiff drink, not a rancher but was a teetotaler.

The little cities of America are now totally devoid of public vice. The prisons of Kansas are empty. In the large cities the police are notably impoverished. It is no use the foreign tourist going to the police and saying, "Show me the vice of your city." There is nothing to show. Go a round of the ice cream parlors. Yonder in a small den loving couples are eating hot tamales. On a corner a youth is surreptitiously lighting a cigarette. The nation is on a high level of morality, and this is reflected in the physique of its children. With all this, I ought perhaps to make a warning—there is almost no religion. Moral fervor stands instead of religion. The note of wonder, of awe, of divine praise, is almost entirely absent.

The upper forty thousand, as I have said, take little heed of this. They believe that they control the springs of action and can make the hundred million do what they want them to do. The party system in politics with no other choice but that of Republican or Democrat seems to facilitate their influence. "Cleaning up" is a passion of the hundred million; very well, it can be harnessed to the designs of the forty thousand. Let them "clean up" Cuba, "clean up" the Central American Republics, "clean up" Mexico.