From Dublin to Chicago: Some Notes on a Tour in America

by George A. Birmingham

Chicago is generous as well as strong. There is no note of petty jealousy in its judgment of other cities. Memphis belongs to the South and is very different from the cities of the East and the middle West. It is easily conceivable that Chicago might be a little contemptuous of Memphis, just as Belfast is more than a little contemptuous of Dublin. But Chicago displays a fine spirit. I was assured, more than once, when I was in Chicago, that Memphis is a good business city, and I suppose that no higher praise could be given than that. I never met a Belfast man who would say as much for Dublin. But, of course, Chicago is not in this matter so highly tried as Belfast is. Memphis does not assume an air of social superiority to Chicago as Dublin does to Belfast. It is not therefore so very hard for Chicago to be generous in her judgment.

Perhaps "generous" is the wrong word to use; "just" would be better. No generosity is required, because Memphis really is one of those places in which business is efficiently done. Timber, I understand, is one of the things in which Memphis deals. Cotton is another. I do not know which of the two is a greater source of trade, but cotton is the more impressive to the stranger. The place is full of cotton. Mule carts drag great bales of it to and from railway stations. Sternwheel steamers full of it ply up and down the Mississippi. I shall never again take out a pocket handkerchief—I use the cheaper, not the linen or silken handkerchief—without looking to see if there is a little piece of white fluff sticking on my sleeve. When I next visit one of the vast whirling mills of Lancashire I shall think of a large quiet room in Memphis full of tables on which are laid little bundles of cotton, each bearing a neat ticket with mysterious numbers and letters written on it. As I watch the operatives tending the huge machines which spin their endless threads, I shall think of the men who handle the samples of the cotton crop in that Memphis office. They take the stuff between their fingers and thumbs and slowly pull it apart, looking attentively at the fine fibers which stretch and separate as the gentle pull is completed. By some exquisite sensitiveness of touch and some subtle skill of glance they can tell to within an eighth of an inch how long these fibers are. And on the length of the fiber depends to a great extent the value of the crop of the particular plantation from which that sample comes. Outside the windows of the room is the Mississippi,—a broad, sluggish, gray river when I saw it; where the deeply laden steamers splash their way from riverside plantations to Memphis and then down to New Orleans, where much of the cotton is shipped to Europe.

Beyond the room where the cotton is graded is an office, a sunlit pleasant place with comfortable writing desks and a case full of various books. You might fancy yourself in the private room of some cultivated lawyer in an English country town, if it were not that in a corner of that office there stands one of those machines which, with an infinite amount of fussy ticking, disgorge a steady stream of ribbon stamped with figures. In New York and Liverpool men are shouting furiously at each other across the floors of Cotton Exchanges. Prices are made, raised, lowered by their shouts. Transactions involving huge sums of money are settled by a gesture or two and a shouted number. A hand thrust forward, palm outward, sells what twenty panting steamers carry to the Memphis quays. A nod and a swiftly penciled note buys on the assurance that the men with the sensitive fingers have rightly judged the exact length of a fiber, impalpable to most of us. All the time the shouting and the gestures are going on thousands of miles away this machine, with detached and unexcited indifference, is stamping a record of the frenzied bidding, there in the sunlit Memphis office. Chicago is no more than just when it says that Memphis is a city where business is done.

Modern business seems to me the most wonderful and romantic thing that the world has ever seen. A doctor in London takes a knife and cuts a bit out of a man's side. By doing that he acquires, if he chooses to exercise it, the right to levy a perpetual tax on the earnings of a railway somewhere in the Argentine Republic. No traveler on that railway knows of his existence. None of the engine drivers, porters, guards or clerks who work the railway have ever heard of that doctor or of the man whose side was cut. But of the fruit of their labors some portion will go to that doctor and to his children after him if he chooses, with the money his victim pays him, to buy part of the stock of that railway company. An obscure writer, living perhaps in some remote corner of Wales, tells a story which catches the fancy of the ladies who subscribe to Mudie's library. He is able, because he has written feelingly of Evangelina's first kiss, to take to himself and assure to his heirs some part of the steel which sweating toilers make in Pittsburgh, or, if that please him better, he can levy a toll upon the gold dug from a mine in South Africa. What do the Pittsburgh steel workers know or care about him or Evangelina or the ladies who thrill over her caress? Why should they give up part of the fruit of their toil because an imaginary man is said to have kissed a girl who never existed? It is very difficult to explain it, but all society, all nations, peoples and languages agree that they must. The whole force of humanity, combined for this purpose only, agrees that the doctor, because of his knife, which has very likely killed its victim, and the novelist because of his silly simpering heroine, shall have an indefeasible right to tax for their own private benefit almost any industry in the whole wide world. This is an unimaginable romance. So is all business; but Memphis brought home the strangeness of it to me most compellingly.

Here is a dainty lady, furclad, scented, pacing with delicate steps across the floor of one of our huge shops. In front of her, not less exquisitely dressed, a handsome man bows low with the courtesy of a great lord of other days:

"Lingerie, madam, this way if you please. The second turning to the left. This way, madam. Miss Jones, if you please. Madam wishes to see——"

And madam, with her insolent eyes, deigns to survey some frothy piles of frilly garments, touches, appraises the material, peers at the stitches of the hems, plucks at inserted strips of lace.

Here are broad acres of black, caked earth and all across them are rows and rows of stunted bushes, like gooseberry bushes, but thinner and much darker. On all their prickly branches hang little tufts of white fluff—cotton. Among the bushes go men, women and children, black, negroes every one of them, dressed in bright yellow, bright blue and flaming red. From their shoulders hang long sacks which trail on the ground behind them. They steadily pick, pick, pick the fluffs of cotton out of the opened pods, and push each little bit into a sack. There you have the beginning of all, the ending of part of this wonderful substance which clothes, so they tell us, nine-tenths of the men and women in the world who wear clothes. What is in between the dainty English lady and the negro in Tennessee?

The plantation owner drives his mule along winding tracks through the fields where the bushes are and watches. He is a man harassed by the unsolvable negro problem, in constant dread of insect pests, oppressed by economic difficulties. Men in mills nearby comb the thick seeds from the raw cotton, press it tight and bind it into huge bales. Men grade and sort the samples of it. Men shout at each other in great marts, buy and sell cotton yet unsorted, unpicked, ungrown; and the record of their doings is flashed across continents and oceans. Ships laden down to the limit of safety plunge through great seas with tired men on their bridges guiding them. In Lancashire, in Russia, in Austria, huge factories set their engines working and their wheels go whirling round. Men and women sweat at the machines. In Derry and a thousand other places women in gaunt bare rooms with sewing machines, or in quiet chambers of French convents with needles in their hands, are working at long strips of cotton fabric. In shops women again, officered by men, are selling countless different stuffs made out of this same cotton fluff.

And the whole complex organization, the last achieved result of man's age-long struggle for civilization, works on the perilous verge of breaking down. The fine lady at the one end of it may buy what she cannot pay for and disturb the delicately balanced calculations of the shopkeeper. Some well-intentioned Government somewhere may insist that the women who sew shall have fire and a share of the sunlight, things which cost money. Inspectors come, with pains and penalties ready in their pockets, and it seems possible that they will dislocate the whole machine. Labor, painfully organized, suddenly claims a larger share of the profits which are flowing in. The wheels of all the factories stop whirling. Their stopping affects every one through the whole length of the tremendous chain, alters the manner of life in the tiniest of the negroes' huts. A sanguine broker may speculate disastrously and the long chain of the organization quivers through its entire length and threatens breaking. A ship owner raises rates, the servants of a railway company go on strike. Some one makes a blunder in estimating the size of a future crop. Negroes prove less satisfactory than usual as workers. The possibilities of a breakdown somewhere are almost uncountable. Yet somehow the thing works. It is a wonderful accomplishment of man that it should work and break down as seldom as it does; but the dread of breakdown is present everywhere.