VIII
Doubleday, Page and Company declined The Metropolis. They said it wasn’t a novel at all and urged me to take a year to rewrite it. I had further sessions with Walter H. Page and observed that amiable gentleman again believing what other people told him. The bright young men in his business office were certain that New York society wasn’t as bad as I portrayed it; when I told them what I knew, I observed a certain chill. I attributed it to the fact that their magazine, the World’s Work, was edited and published in New York, and its revenue came from the advertising of banks and trust companies that I exposed in my book. It was one thing to tell about graft in Chicago, a thousand miles away, and another to tell about it in one’s own financial family. Doubleday, Page had made a fortune out of The Jungle and used it to become rich and reactionary. I bade them a sad farewell.
The American Magazine, then owned and run by reformers, read the manuscript and agreed to feature parts of it as a serial. I left the book manuscript with Moffat, Yard and Company, and went out to join my wife at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. I stayed there for three weeks or so and tried their cure. I listened to Dr. W. K. Kellogg set forth the horrors of a carnivorous diet, and as a result I tried vegetarianism for the next three years. I felt better while I was taking treatments at the “San,” so I thought I had solved my problem of how to overwork with impunity.
Michael Williams, one of our Helicon Hall colonists, now out of a job, came out to the “San” to write it up for some magazine, and he and I saw a great deal of each other at this time. Mike was a Canadian of Welsh descent who had had a hard life, beginning as porter in a big department store, and contracting both tuberculosis and the drink habit. He had cured himself of the latter and was trying to cure himself of the former by Battle Creek methods. Incidentally, he was an ardent socialist, and a writer of no little talent; I thought he would serve the cause and was glad to help him. We devised a brilliant scheme for a vacation and a book combined; we would get a couple of covered wagons and take our two families across the continent on a tour, living the outdoor life and seeing America close at hand. A “literary caravan” we would call it, “Utopia on the Trek.” The American Magazine fell violently for the idea and promised to make a serial out of our adventures.
But that was a summer plan, and it was now November. We decided to take our families to Bermuda for the winter, and there write a book about our health experiences. Moffat, Yard were very keen about The Metropolis and its prospects; I, remembering the advice of my newspaper friend that I should “learn to charge,” extracted an advance of five thousand dollars on royalty account. So the path of life stretched rosy before Mike and me. We would have a two-family utopia amid the coral reefs of Bermuda; I would pay the bills, and Mike would repay me out of his future earnings. “It will be a debt of honor,” he said, proudly, and repeated it every now and then.
We went to New York, the first stage of our journey, just in the wake of a great event. Wall Street had been in the midst of a frenzy of speculation, but “somebody asked for a dollar,” and there was the panic of 1907. I have told in The Brass Check the peculiar circumstances under which I came to get the inside story of this event. Suffice it here to say that I had the biggest news story ever sprung in America, certainly at any rate in my time. I was able not merely to charge but to prove that the elder Morgan had deliberately brought on that panic as a means of putting the independent trust companies out of business. The American Magazine editors wanted the story and signed a contract for it, but in the course of two or three weeks they got cold feet and begged me to let them off, which I did.