Touching the matter of their manners... A woman writer I know very well once went to a boxing-match in San Francisco. Women are forbidden to attend such events, so that a special permission had to be obtained for her. She was warned beforehand that the audience might manifest its disapproval in terms both audible and uncomplimentary. She entered the arena in considerable trepidation of spirit. It was an important match—for the lightweight championship of the world. She occupied a ring-side box where, it is likely, everybody saw her. There were ten thousand men in the arena and she was the only woman. But in all the two hours she sat there, she was not once made conscious, by a word or glance in her direction, that anybody had noticed her presence. That I think is a perfect example of perfect mob-manners.
Perhaps that instinct, not only for fair but for chivalrous play, which also characterizes the Native Son, comes from pioneer days. Certainly it is deepened by a very active interest in all kinds of sports. I draw my two examples of this from the boxing world. This is a story that Sam Berger tells about Andrew Gallagher.
It happened in that period when both men were amateur lightweights and Mr. Gallagher was champion of the Pacific Coast. Mr. Berger challenged Mr. Gallagher and defeated him. The margin of victory was so narrow, however, that Mr. Gallagher felt justified in as asking for another match, and got it.
This time Mr. Berger's victory was complete. In a letter, Mr. Berger said, "A woman cannot possibly understand what being a champion means to a man. It isn't so much the championship itself but it's the slap on the shoulder and the whispered comment as you pass, 'There goes our champion!' that counts. Looking back at it from the thirties, it isn't so important; but in the twenties it means a lot. My dressing room was near Gallagher's, so that, although he didn't know this, I could not help overhearing much that was said there. After we got back to our rooms, I heard some friend of Gallagher's refer to me as 'a damn Jew'. What was my delight at Gallagher's magnanimity to hear him answer, 'Why do you call him a damn Jew? He is a very fine fellow and a better boxer than me, the best day I ever saw.'"
That incident seems to me typical of the Native Son; and the long unbroken friendship that grew out of it, equally so.
A few years ago an interview with Willie Ritchie appeared in a New York paper. He had just boxed Johnny Dundee, defeating him. In passing I may state that Mr. Ritchie was, during that winter, taking an agricultural course at Columbia College, and that this is quite typical of the kind of professional athlete California turns out. You would have expected that in a long two-column interview, Mr. Ritchie would have devoted much of the space to himself, his record, his future plans. Not at all. It was all about Johnnie Dundee, for whom personally he seems to have an affectionate friendship and for whose work a rueful and decidedly humorous appreciation. He analyzed with great sapience the psychological effect on the audience of Mr. Dundee's ring-system of perpetual motion. He described with great delight a punch that Mr. Dundee had landed on the very top of his head. In fact Mr. Dundee's publicity manager could do no better than to use parts of this interview for advertising purposes.
I began that last paragraph with the phrase, "A few years ago". But since that time a whole era seems to have passed—that heart-breaking era of the Great War. And now the Native Son has entered into and emerged from a new and terrible game. He has needed—and I doubt not displayed—all that he has of strength, natural and developed; of keenness and coolness; of bravery and fortitude; of capacity to endure and yet josh on.
Perhaps after all, though, the best example of the Native Son's fairness was his enfranchisement of the Native Daughter and the way in which he did it. Sometime, when the stories of all the suffrage fights are told, we shall get the personal experiences of the women who worked in that whirlwind campaign. It will make interesting reading; for it is both dramatic and picturesque. And it will redound forever and ever and ever to the glory of the Native Son.
The Native Son—in the truest sense of the romantic—is a romantic figure. He could scarcely avoid being that, for he comes from the most romantic State in the Union and, if from San Francisco, the most romantic city in our modern world. It is, I believe, mainly his sense of romance that drives him into the organization which he himself has called the Native Sons of the Golden West; an adventurous instinct that has come down to us from mediaeval times, urging men to form into congenial company for offence and defence, and to offer personality the opportunity for picturesque masquerade.
That romantic background not only explains the Native Son but the long line of extraordinary fiction, with California for a background, which California has produced. California though is the despair of fiction writers. It offers so many epochs; such a mixture of nationalities; so many and such violently contrasted atmospheres, that it is difficult to make it credible. The gold rush... the pioneers... the Vigilantes ... the Sand Lot days... San Francisco before the fire... the period of reconstruction. As for the drama lying submerged everywhere in the labor movement... the novelists have not even begun to mine below the surface. To the fiction-writer, the real, everyday life is so dramatic that the temptation is to substitute for invention the literal records of some literary moving-picture machine.