The house stood in the upper corner of a park of fifty or sixty acres of woodland—not over-cleared—and open by winding paths down the hillside to the lake. Every turn, every rock had its name usually celebrating some Wagnerian scene, and as you passed Mr. Schurz would roll out the appropriate song. There never was a more lovable or youthful man of seventy than Carl Schurz.
The completion of the Life of Lincoln did not end my interest in the man. He had come to mean more to me as a human being than anybody I had studied. I never doubted his motives, and he never bored me. Still, whenever I have the opportunity I pick him up. The greatest regret of my professional life is that I shall not live to write another life of him. There is so much of him I never touched.
10
REDISCOVERING MY COUNTRY
The four years I put in on “The Life of Abraham Lincoln” did more than provide me with a continuing interest. They aroused my flagging sense that I had a country, that its problems were my problems. This sense had been strong in my years on The Chautauquan, but the period following had dimmed it. Now I was beginning to ask myself why we had gone the way we had since the Civil War. Was there not enough of suffering and of nobility in that calamity to quiet the greed and ambitions of men, to soften their hates, to arouse in them the will to follow Lincoln’s last counsels—“With malice toward none; with charity for all ... let us ... do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” But greed and hate and indifference to the sufferings and rights of others had been rampant since the war. Did war as a method of righting wrongs so loosen the controls which man in times of peace establishes over himself that he is incapable of exercising the charity, the peaceful adjustments for which Lincoln called? Was there always after war an unescapable crop of corruption, of thirst to punish and humiliate and exploit the conquered? Must men go back where they had started, go back with controls weakened and burdened with a load of new and unexpected problems? True, this war had ended slavery as a recognized institution, given the black man legal freedom, but how about opportunity, discipline for freedom? And then again was a war necessary to destroy slavery? Was it not already doomed? Lincoln thought so. Doomed because it was showing itself unsound economically as well as because it outraged man’s sense of justice and humanity. And how about the effect of this war on democracy? Were the problems it loosed less threatening to democratic ideals than slavery had been? Were they not possibly a more subtle form of slavery, more dangerous because less obvious?
A nice box of problems to tease me as I worked on Lincoln’s life and out of the corner of the eye watched what was going on in the country. The number of things in America I was beginning to want to find out about was certainly dimming the things in France I had wanted to find out about. Unquestionably these new interests were helping to wean me from the plan on which I had settled. The process was painful. More than once I told myself that the sacrifice of my ambitions, of my love for Paris, for my friends there, was too much to ask of myself. I could never replace those interests and associations; but I was replacing them and suffering as I realized what was happening, revolting that nothing in my life seemed to last, to be carried through. By nature I was faithful. To give my time to new friends, neglect old ones in spite of never forgetting them, as I never did, was disloyal. I was beginning to repeat dolefully as well as more and more cynically, “Tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe.”
Washington was helping in my weaning. The city as I knew it in the 1890’s is lost in the Washington of the 1930’s. The pivots on which it swings, the Capitol, the White House, were there then to be sure. So was the Washington Monument; but they stood by themselves, the near-by flanking unpretentious, often squalid. Today they are almost lost in the piles of marble heaped about them to accommodate the ambitions and creations of the last frantic twenty years. The town has stretched unbelievably to the northwest. Where once I knew wide lawns, wooded tracts, pleasant walks, are now acres upon acres of apartment houses and hotels. They have engulfed the delightful Woodley Lane where my friends the Hubbards lived in summer, and they have changed no less the quarter in which their fine town house stood—Connecticut Avenue where it merges into Dupont Circle. Great houses were only just beginning then to find their way into the Circle. George Westinghouse had built there, so had Mrs. Leiter of Chicago. Old Washingtonians sniffed at their houses and their ways, laughed at Mrs. Leiter’s “spinal staircase” as she was said to call it, and professed disgust at Mrs. Westinghouse’s “reported” white velvet tablecloths. They resented the invasion of rich women attracted by the social possibilities of a diplomatic circle, of rich men attracted by the field for lobbying furnished by a Congressional circle.
But of this side of Washington I saw nothing. My social life was shaped largely by the continued kindness of Mr. and Mrs. Hubbard. I had become almost one of the family, was freely invited to meet their friends. Their circle was wide, including diplomats and statesmen and eminent visitors, though its core was the large group of distinguished scientists which made up the working forces of the Smithsonian Institution, the Agriculture Department, the Geological Survey, the Bureau of Mines, the Observatory. An important group they were, and nobody in town appreciated them more or took more pains to show his appreciation than Mr. Hubbard. Naturally the center of this group was Alexander Graham Bell, married to the Hubbards’ daughter, Mabel.
The Bells lived across the Avenue from the Hubbards, and I soon had the good fortune to be welcomed there—a great privilege, for both Mr. and Mrs. Bell were rare persons. Mrs. Bell’s story is well known, but it was only in seeing her with her husband and daughters that one could realize what a fine intellect and what an unspoiled and courageous character she had. She had been deaf and dumb from infancy, and Mr. Hubbard had determined to open life to her. Among the teachers of speech he brought to her was a young man then at Boston University—Alexander Graham Bell. Under his tutelage she made rapid strides, and the two young people learned to love one another. At that time Mr. Bell was giving his nights to trying to “make iron talk.” I once heard Mr. Hubbard say that when he found Mr. Bell had made iron talk he told him he must develop his telephone to a practical point or he could not have Mabel. Probably no other argument would have persuaded Alexander Graham Bell, for he was the type of inventor whose interest flags when he has solved his problem. Let somebody else take care of the development. He would be off on a new voyage of discovery.
At the time I came into the circle Mr. Bell was, I think, the handsomest and certainly the most striking figure in Washington. It was amusing to hear people discussing who was the handsomest man in town. There were various candidates—General Miles, General Greely, Colonel John Foster; but while I conceded they all had their points no one of them had the distinction of Alexander Graham Bell, and no one of them certainly had the gay boyish appetite for what he found good in life. He was more like Massa Henry Watterson in that than anybody else I have ever known, though the activities and interests of the two were utterly different.
Mr. Bell’s plan of living was modeled to suit himself. Often he slept through the day when interruptions naturally came and the telephone most often rang! If restless at night he played the piano. Mrs. Bell could not hear, and the rest of the family, being young and devoted, were never disturbed. He was up and began his day around four to six. Often there were guests for dinner, for everybody of note the world over who came to Washington wanted to meet him. On Wednesdays after dinner there usually gathered a group of scientists and public men to talk things over. Mr. Bell was something to see at these dinners and gatherings, the finest social impresario I ever saw in action, so welcoming, appreciative, eager, receptive. I thought then I had never seen anybody so generous about what others were doing. He loved to draw out great stories of adventure and discovery and would silence all talkers when once such narrating was started. Partly this was because of Mrs. Bell, his intense desire that she enjoy everything that was going on; and she did, thanks to the intelligent devotion of her daughters, Elsie and Marian, the first now the wife of Gilbert Grosvenor, one of the founders and the present editor of the National Geographic Magazine, the second the wife of David Fairchild, botanist and explorer, the organizer in the Agriculture Department of the work now known as the Division of Foreign Plant Exploration and Introduction—two men to whom the public owes big debts for services.