This is but one item of a planning for the future of this city which thinks not merely of its beautifying and of the pleasure of its people in their leisure, but of all conditions which affect the health, convenience, education, and general welfare of the whole district—that region once called the "black country," of which Pittsburgh was the "dingy capital"— one of the regions where the French were pioneers.
I have spoken of this as the "taking thought" of a democratic community. More accurately, a body of one hundred volunteer citizens, disposing themselves in fourteen different committees (including those on rapid transit, industrial accidents, city housing, and public hygiene), have undertaken all this labor of constructive planning at their own expense (based upon a series of investigations made by endowed researchers), but with the hope of creating a public opinion favorable to their plans, which look to the establishment by the democratic community of "such living and working conditions as may set a standard for other American industrial centres." [Footnote: Olmsted, F. L., "Pittsburgh, Main Thoroughfares and the Down-Town District." Pittsburgh Civic Commission, 1910. Survey, February 4, 1911, 25:740-4.]
No such thorough and systematic study of existing city conditions has been made anywhere else in America. It is quite as scientific as the scholarly studies of buried cities, only immensely more complex and difficult. Knowing itself and possessed of an unconquerable spirit, it seems likely now that Pittsburgh will win back the beautiful site which Céloron remarked when he passed down La Belle Rivière—a site which even "Florence might covet"—and will make it a city that will deserve to keep always the other part of the name of the sower of the leaden plates—Bienville.
A pillar of cloud stands over the city by day and a pillar of fire by night. They have together shown the way out of the wilderness. It now remains to be seen whether the highest things of men's longing will have realization, in giving that "dynamic individualism" a social ideal with distinct, practicable working plans.
Pittsburgh stands on the edge of the valley of the new democracy. It has put its plates along every path. There is hardly a village of any size from the Alleghanies to the Rockies that it has not laid some claim to by its strips of steel. There is hardly a stream of any size that it has not claimed by a bridge. It has, indeed, the spirit of Céloron, in other body, still planting monuments of France's renewal of possession, wherever the steel rails and girders and plates from the Pittsburgh mills have been carried. And Pittsburgh is but one of the renewed cities which encompass the eastern half of the valley where once stretched the chain of French forts futile in defense but powerful in prophecy.
When we see the American city, even through the eyes of Walt Whitman, that poet of democracy, it seems a desperate hope that is left her: "Are there, indeed, men here in the city," he asks, "worthy the name? Are there athletes? Are there perfect women to match the generous material luxuriance? Is there a pervading atmosphere of beautiful manners? Are there crops of fine youths and majestic old persons? Are there arts worthy freedom and a rich people? Is there a great moral and religious civilization—the only justification of a great material one? Confess that to severe eyes, using the moral microscope upon humanity, a sort of dry and flat Sahara appears, these cities crowded with petty grotesques, malformations, phantoms, playing meaningless antics. Confess that everywhere, in shop, street, church, theatre, barroom, official chair, are pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity—everywhere the youth puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely ripe—everywhere an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed, chignon'd, muddy complexions, bad blood, the capacity for good motherhood decreasing or deceas'd, shallow notions of beauty, with a range of manners, or rather lack of manners (considering the advantages enjoy'd) probably the meanest to be seen in the world." [Footnote: "Democratic Vistas," in his "Complete Works," pp. 205, 206.]
But it is no such desperate hope that the cities we have seen spring from French fort and portage keep in their hearts. It is not even a confession that one would have to make to-day in the American cities which Whitman had in mind in his gloomy, foreboding vision. I have seen on the streets of one of the Whitman cities [Footnote: New York City.] those same grotesques, malformations, and meaningless antics, that flippancy and vulgarity and cunning, that foppishness and premature ripeness, that painted, bad-complexioned, bad-mannered, shallow-beautied humanity; but touching, as I have had opportunity to touch, three of the great agencies of its aspirations—its philanthropies, its literature, and its schools—I know that no body of five million people, whether huddled in tenements or scattered over plain and mountain and along rivers and seas, has with more serious or sacrificing purpose aspired, though constantly disturbed in its prayers, its operations, by people of every tongue, nearly a million strong, who are emptied at her port every year from Europe and Asia, besides the hundreds of thousands who come up from the country. There are public schools, for example, in certain parts of that city where there is not a child of American parentage. There is one, in particular, which I visit frequently and which I call the "oasis" in the desert of humanity (Walt Whitman's Sahara), where two or three thousand children are gathered, literally from the plains of Russia, the valleys of Italy, and other parts of Europe—for these were their ancestral homes, though they come immediately from the swarming streets and dimly lighted, ill-smelling tenements of New York—and there, aspiring under the hopeful teaching of the city, I have heard them, boys and girls together, sing, with all the joy and cleanliness of shepherd children, of a leading in green pastures and by still waters.
But to come back to the cities in the valley of Nouvelle France, there is no note of else than hope there. Mistakes, disappointments, crudities, infidelities? Yes, but the mistakes, disappointments, crudities, failures of youth—youth of strong passions and love of play but of a masterful will that a generous nature has so much encouraged and aided as to obscure its limitations.
A few rods from the Carnegie Library and Museum of Art and Concert Hall in Pittsburgh is a baseball field, where a million people or more come in the course of the season to see trained men play an out-of-door game (and if it chanced that the President of the United States were visiting the city, he might be seen there accompanied by his secretary of state or the president of a great university). In Chicago I found the whole city, young and old, united in its interest in the results of the "game" of the day before or the prospects of the next. When games are played for the great championship pennant the city virtually takes a holiday.
But that is the spirit of youth in those overgrown, awkward cities that are only now beginning to be self-conscious and seriously purposeful in doing more than the things conventionally and for the most part selfishly done by cities generally. In the conjugation of their busy, noisy life they do not often use the past tense, never the past-perfect, and they have had for the most part little concern as to the future, except the rise in real-estate values and the retaining of markets. When in Pittsburgh I asked a prominent man, of French ancestry, why the people did not keep from the destroying hand of private enterprise the site of old Fort Duquesne (the fecund plot from which the great city had grown), and he said it was all they could do to keep the little blockhouse that remained of Fort Pitt, filling a space a few yards square. What claim has the past as against the needs of industry in the present? That was the attitude of that grimy individualism born in "barefoot square" or in "slab alley," in the land of smoke and flame and "rusty rivers."