My lecture agent, Mr. Lee Keedick, enjoyed those “Sinn Fein tea parties,” as they were called, with such enormous gusto, that there were some friendly souls who suggested that he had incited them for publicity purposes! But he missed the best, or the worst. In Chicago, on St. Patrick’s Eve, I was three-quarters of an hour before I could utter a single sentence. It was what the press called next morning a “near riot” and there were some Irish-American soldiers there, in uniform, who fought like tigers before they were ejected by the police.
For the first time in my life I had a police bodyguard wherever I went in Chicago. Two detectives insisted on driving in my taxicab, and they were both Irishmen, but, as one explained in a friendly manner, “It’s not your life we’re troubling about, Boss. It’s our reputation!”
Boston, from Mr. Keedick’s point of view, was a disappointment. A great row was expected there, being the stronghold of the Sinn Fein cause, and when I appeared, behind the stage, there was a large force of police stripped for action. The police inspector came to my dressing room, and demanded permission to precede me on the stage and announce to the audience that if there was any demonstration he would put his men on to them. I refused to give that permission. It seemed to me the wrong kind of introduction for an Englishman to an American audience. As a matter of fact, they behaved like lambs, in the best tradition of Boston, and I was quite disconcerted by their silence, having become used to the other kind of thing which I found exhilarating.
Stranger things happen to an English lecturer in the United States than in any other country. At least they happened to me. I shall never forget, for instance, how in the middle of a speech to the City Club of New York, I was thrust into a taxicab, hurried off to the 44th Street theater, received with a tremendous explosion (a flashlight photo!) in the dressing room of Al Jolson, the funny man, thrust into the middle of a harem scene (scores of beautiful maidens) and told to make a speech on behalf of wounded soldiers while the audience raffled for an original letter from Lloyd George to the American nation.
Surprised by my rapid transmigration from the City Club, and by my presence in an Oriental harem, very hot, rather flustered, and not knowing what to do with my hands, I kept screwing up a bit of paper which had been given to me at the wings, and by the time I had finished my three-minutes’ speech it was a bit of wet, mushy pulp. When I left the stage, a white-faced man in the wings who had been making frantic signs to me, informed me coldly that I had utterly destroyed Lloyd George’s letter to the American nation which had just been raffled for many hundreds of dollars.... After that I went back to finish my speech at the City Club.
XXVI
When I first visited the United States in 1919, the whole nation was seething with a conflict of opinion between pro-Wilsonites and anti-Wilsonites.
It was not a mere academic controversy which people could discuss hotly but without passion. It divided families. It caused quarrels among lifelong friends. The mere mention of the name of Wilson spoilt the amenities of any dinner party and transformed it into a political meeting.