I am the captain of my soul.”
The chiefest of many reasons why tenement-dwellers appeared happily content during the war were: First, those who had sons, brothers, husbands, uncles, sweethearts, or cousins to the remotest degree in the service felt that they were doing their duty, a proud duty, to their country; second, workers were receiving a living wage, a vast majority living decently for the first time in their lives; third, they believed, they sincerely believed, that they were helping to “make the world safe for democracy.”
They were convinced that the United States had entered the war, taken their sons across the Atlantic “that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” They believed it as they believed in God, as they believed in their own existence.
The older ones, those who had come to the country as immigrants, believed that America had actually become the wonderful Promised Land of their dreams. For hadn’t they lived to see their own sons march down Fifth Avenue shoulder to shoulder with the sons of money kings? Didn’t their daughters, on coming home nights, tell of the daughter of yet another money king working in the same room, actually taking orders from her?
They had lived to see the stigma taken off work. A human soul was a human soul, regardless of the “guinea’s stamp.”
Once the war was won they believed that condition would continue—that the sons and daughters of the rich and powerful would continue to work shoulder to shoulder with their own. They believed that the downfall of German imperialism meant an end to human cootyism in the United States—a government of the people, by the people, for the people.
How many times did I see the light that never was on sea or land shining in the eyes of a tenement mother as she told me of her son sleeping under the poppies in France.
“It ain’t as if he didn’t have to go some time. We all has to,” she would tell me, with swimming eyes as her work-gnarled fingers twisted her gingham apron. “He couldn’t have gone a better way—for his country. He said that ’imself, when he was leavin’. ‘Mother,’ he says to me the last time he was home from camp, ‘mother, I wants you to promise that you won’t grieve none if—if I goes West. We all has to go some time, and a fellow couldn’t go a better way than for his country. I wants you to promise me, mother.’”
I believe two of the happiest persons I ever met were an old Jew and his wife. Going through a tenement, a decently kept house, I was directed by the janitor to a flat, second floor front, east, as containing the only dog in her house without a license. A tousle-haired woman with a dirty face and grouch opened the door.
“Naw, I ain’t got no dog,” she said, and she tried to shut the door in my face. Being warned by the janitor I had put the toe of my shoe in.